Abstract
The above quote, taken from a letter written 6 August 1915 by F. H. Leslie, US missionary in the Ottoman city of Urfa, to US Consul Jesse B. Jackson in Aleppo, encapsulates much of what was the Armenian genocide – the killing of 1–1.5 million Ottoman Armenians during World War I – including the fundamental gendered aspect of this event. But when it comes to massive extermination campaigns like the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide, gendered aspects have usually been downplayed in scholarly works. This is perhaps understandable considering the all-encompassing nature of what has rightly been called the total genocides of the past century.2 The Armenian genocide was the almost completely successful attempt by the Young Turk dictatorship (also known as the Committee of Union and Progress, CUP) at ‘cleansing’ from Anatolian soil not only the approximately 2 million Ottoman Armenians, but also other mainly Christian nationalities like the Ottoman Greeks and Assyrians, and it was usually secured through a number of methods of direct and indirect killings: massacres, drownings, death marches under the guise of relocations, imposed starvation and diseases, etc.3
All tell the same story and bear the same scars: their men were all killed on the first days’ march from their cities, after which the women and girls were constantly robbed of their money, bedding, clothing, and beaten, criminally abused and abducted along the way. Their guards forced them to pay even for drinking from the springs along the way and were their worst abusers but also allowed the baser element in every village through which they passed to abduct the girls and women and abuse them. We were not only told these things but the same things occurred right here in our own city before our very eyes and openly on the streets.1
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Notes
A. Sarafian, comp., United States Official Documents on the Armenian Genocide 1915–1917 (Princeton and London, 2004), p. 199.
M. Levene, ‘Creating a Modern “Zone of Genocide”: The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, XII, no. 3 (Winter 1998), 395;
R. F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago, 1992);
A. Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the 20th Century (New York, 1995).
C. P. Scherrer, ‘Comparing Total Genocide in the 20th Century: A 22-Point Comparison’, Paper Prepared for the Workshop on Comparative Research on Genocide and Mass Murder, Hiroshima (March 2004), adds the Cambodian genocide 1975–1979 to the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide in his category of ‘total genocides’.
Recent monographs on the Armenian genocide include: T. Akcam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York, 2006);
T. Akcam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London and New York, 2004);
D. Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005);
V. N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide – Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Oxford, 1997).
On the Assyrian and Armenian genocides: D. Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War I (New Jersey, 2006).
R.W. Smith, ‘Women and Genocide: Notes on an Unwritten History’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, VIII, no. 3 (Winter 1994), 315–334;
D. E. Miller and L. T. Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Los Angeles, 1993), p. 94;
C. Card, ‘Genocide and Social Death’, in C. Card and A. T. Marsoobian, eds, Genocide’s Aftermath: Responsibility and Repair (Malden, MA, 2007), pp. 10–11.
For a notable exception: K. Derderian, ‘Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender-Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, XIX, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 1–25.
On the concept of ‘gendercide’, A. Jones, ed., Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville, 2004).
See, e.g., J. Hagan, Justice in the Balkans: Prosecuting War Crimes in the Hague Tribunal (Chicago and London, 2003), pp. 85–88.
A. Jones, ‘Gendercide and Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, II, no. 2 (June 2000), 185, 193. Online version: www.gendercide.org/gendercide_and_genocide_2.html.
See, e.g., the testimonies of Sevart Mikaelian and Khanum Palutian (Palootzian), Rigsarkivet [Danish National Archives], Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere [Women Missionary Workers, hereafter: KMA], 10.360, no. 15, ‘Armenier-Missionen, Diverse Skildringer vedr. Arminierne [sic] 1906–1927’; V. M. Garougian, Destiny of the Dzidzernag (Princeton and London, 2005), pp. 205, 292–293, n. 22. For a man to disguise himself as a woman was made easier by the fact that it was common for Armenian peasant women to have veiled faces.
R. Hukanovic, The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia (London, 1998), pp. 35, 75–76;
See, e.g., R. Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (London, 2004), p. 430;
Ø. Kyrø, Godmorgen, Rwanda – er I begyndt at arbejde (Copenhagen, 2004), pp. 116–117.
G. Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of the Second World War in the Pacific (London, 2007 [1994]), p. 363.
J. Horne and A. Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven and London, 2001), e.g., pp. 34, 185–187, 232–234.
H. H. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia: Personal Experiences in Harpoot, 1915–1917 (Ann Arbor, 1997), pp. 57–58.
Quoted in J. Bryce and A. Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916, Uncensored Edition, ed. by A. Sarafian (Princeton, NJ, 2000 [1916]), p. 67. See also Miller and Miller, 1993, p. 85; Sarafian, comp., 2004, p. 158; C. D. Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey: A Narrative of Adventures in Peace and War (Boston and New York, 1917), pp. 238, 283.
Quoted from a contemporary Russian-Armenian newspaper article, in E. G. Danielyan, The Armenian Genocide of 1894–1922 and the Accountability of the Turkish State (Yerevan, 2005), p. 32.
On the massacre and mutilations of Christians in the Urmia region, see also Gaunt, 2006, pp. 81–120. On mutilations of Armenian women and men in and around Bitlis and Diarbekir witnessed by Myrtle O. Shane and Floyd O. Smith, J. L. Barton, comp., Turkish Atrocities: Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915–1917 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998), pp. 9, 12, 92–93.
For an example of male genital mutilation during the Armenian genocide, see also H. L. Larsen, Fra Blodets og Taarernes Land i Europa. En Orientrejse 1922 (1922), p. 40.
On the emasculation and dismemberment of male corpses, see also A. Ter Minassian, ‘Van 1915’, in R. G. Hovannisian, ed., Armenian Van/Vaspurakan (Costa Mesa, CA, 2000), p. 218.
For comparable examples of rape, mutilations (e.g., the cutting off of ears and noses), and the use of young sex slaves in Wehrmacht officers’ brothels on the Eastern front during WWII, K. C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA and London, 2004), pp. 114–115, 217, 222, 302.
On mutilations of Muslims during the 1912 Balkan War, see, e.g., S. Cagaptay, Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey (London and New York, 2006), p. 7.
See, e.g., W. Gust, ed., Der Völkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16: Dokumente aus dem Politischen Archiv des deutschen Auswärtigen Amts (Springe, 2005), p. 181;
H. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (Detroit, MI, 2003 [1918]), p. 209.
Some Armenian soldiers were (temporarily) left alive to fight for the Ottoman Empire while their families were being massacred or deported: e.g., Larsen, 1922, pp. 32–33, 55; E. J. Zürcher, ‘Ottoman Labour Battalions in World War I’, in H.-L. Kieser and D. J. Schaller, eds, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah/The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah (Zürich, 2002), p. 192; Sarafian, comp., 2004, pp. 27–28, 249, 255.
L. Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (London, 1981), p. 111;
M. Niepage, Radslerne i Aleppo. Sete af et Tysk Øjenvidne (London, 1917), pp. 3–4; Sarafian, comp., 2004, p. 51.
According to Bastendorff, a German engineer working at the Baghdad railway, Sükrü Bey, the director of the Directorate, was an actual racist in the modern, biological sense who believed that the end result of the anti-Armenian policies ‘had to be the extermination of the Armenian race. It is the eternal battle between Muslims and Armenians, which is now being fought to the end. The weakest must disappear’. In Gust, ed., 2005, p. 421. For a similar view expressed by a German diplomat, see Morgenthau, 2003, p. 257. For a contemporary official Turkish view of the deportations and of the ‘Armenian Question’ in general, see, e.g., A. Djemal Pascha, Erinnerungen eines Türkischen Staatsmannes (München, 1922), pp. 313ff.
On the generally strongly patriarchal social organization of the Ottoman Armenians, especially in rural areas, S. H. Villa and M. K. Matossian, Armenian Village Life Before 1914 (Detroit, 1982), e.g., pp. 24, 26–27, 71–72.
See, e.g., Miller and Miller, 1993, p. 78; A. Ohandjanian, 1915: Irrefutable Evidence. The Austrian Documents on the Armenian Genocide (Yerevan, 2004), e.g., pp. 95, 103.
It is estimated that an average of no more than 20–25 percent of deportees reached the Arabian provinces alive: R. P. Adalian, ‘The Armenian Genocide’, in S. Totten, W. S. Parsons, and I. W. Charny, eds, Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York and London, 1997), p. 43;
Å. M. Benedictsen, Armenien – Et folks Liv og Kamp gennem to Aartusinder (Copenhagen, 1925), p. 254.
German eyewitness Niepage estimated that 90 percent of deportees were killed before reaching Aleppo from Anatolia: Niepage, 1917, p. 5. Deportees from Western Anatolia had a higher rate of survival as they were generally not massacred en route and were often transported by train. This was only a slightly less inhumane way of ‘relocation’ than the death marches: Armenians had to pay to be cramped in cattle carts, with little or no food and water, and, once in the desert, they usually met the same fate as other Armenians: H. Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor: Death, Suvival, and Humanitarian Resistance in Aleppo, 1915–1917 (Princeton and London, 2002), pp. 9–13.
See also Y. Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick and London, 2003), pp. 177–178.
See, e.g., V. N. Dadrian, ‘The Turkish Military Tribunal’s Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, XI, no. 1 (Spring 1997), 35, 41;
A. Sarafian and E. Avebury, eds, British Parliamentary Debates on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1918 (Princeton and London, 2003), Appendix III, p. 91.
See, e.g., Dadrian, HGS, 1997, 33; P. Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York, 2003), p. 272; H. Stürmer, Two War Years in Constantinople: Sketches of German and Young Turkish Ethics and Politics, annot., rev., and intr. by H. Kaiser (London, 2004 [1917]), pp. 41ff;
R. Kloian, comp., The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts From the American Press: 1915–1922 (Richmond, CA, 2005).
Rigsarkivet [Danish National Archives], Udenrigsministeriets Arkiver [Archives of the Foreign Ministry, hereafter: UM], 139. D. 1., ‘Tyrkiet – Indre Forhold’, Pk. 1, til 31 December 1916, nr. CXIII, 4/9 1915 (20/9). On Wandel, Denmark, and the Armenian genocide, see M. Bjørnlund, ‘“When the Cannons Talk, the Diplomats Must Be Silent”: A Danish Diplomat in Constantinople During the Armenian Genocide’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, I, no. 2 (Fall 2006), 197–223.
M. Jacobsen, Maria Jacobsen’s Diary 1907–1919, Kharput – Turkey (Antelias, 1979), pp. 210–211.
A facsimile of the original, handwritten Danish-language diaries is included in this volume. For an English translation: M. Jacobsen, Diaries of a Danish Missionary: Harpoot, 1907–1919 (Princeton and London, 2001).
There are numerous testimonies re. Muslims as protectors and re. the death penalty for such acts: e.g., A. Lange, Et Blad af Armeniens Historie: K.M.A. 1910–1920 (Copenhagen, 1920), p. 51.
V. Svazlian, The Armenian Genocide and Historical Memory (Yerevan, 2004), p. 58. See also Riggs, 1997, p. 140.
The same method of marching deportees back and forth or in circles as a method of mass killing was also used against Ottoman Greeks by Kemalists in the early 1920s: Telegram no. 201, British High Commissioner Sir H. Rumbold to the British Government, 10 May 1922, quoted in H. Tsirkinidis, At last we Uprooted Them …: The Genocide of the Greeks of Pontos, Thrace and Asia Minor through the French Archives (Thessaloniki, 1999), pp. 241–242.
H. Kaiser, ed. and intr., Eberhard Count Wolffskeel Von Reichenberg, Zeitoun, Mousa Dagh, Ourfa: Letters on the Armenian Genocide (Princeton and London, 2004 [2nd. edn]), p. ix.
See, e.g., V. N. Dadrian, ‘The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of Ottoman Armenians’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, I, no. 2 (1986), 175, 185, n. 15.
Khanum Palutian’s [Palootzian] testimony, KMA, 10.360, Pk. 15, ‘Armenier-Missionen, Diverse Skildringer vedr. Arminierne [sic] 1906–1927’. See also 1920 testimony given by Palaidzu Captanian under oath at the office of the British High Commission in Constantinople, quoted in G. S. Graber, Caravans to Oblivion: The Armenian Genocide, 1915 (New York, 1996), pp. 102–104.
H. Kaiser, ‘“A Scene from the Inferno.” The Armenians of Erzerum and the Genocide, 1915–1916’, in Kieser and Schaller, eds, 2002, p. 129
L. A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917 (New York, 1989), pp. 79–87.
T. Atkinson, ‘The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple Alliance’: Harpoot Diaries, 1908–1917 (Princeton, NJ, 2000), p. 88. On a related note, Governor Faik at Merzifun (Marsovan) told Greek professor Xenidhis, when confronted with the reality of the deportation and literal butchery of Armenians in the area, that he and the commandant of the gendarmes were only following orders: Dadrian, 1986, 180.
See, e.g., Lt. Col. D. Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston, New York, and London, 1996), pp. 209–210.
J. Hatzfeld, Into the Quick of Life. The Rwandan Genocide: The Survivors Speak (London, 2005), p. 72.
See also T. Longman, ‘Placing Genocide in Context: Research Priorities for the Rwandan Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, VI, no. 1 (March 2004), 35.
On brutalization of Nazi perpetrators, T. Jørgensen, Stiftelsen – Bødlerne fra Aktion Reinhardt (2003), pp. 124–127.
E. H. Jones, The Road to En-Dor (London, 1973 [1920]), p. 83;
quoted in R. Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (London, New York, Toronto, Sydney, 2006 [2005]), p. 403.
On the Yozgad massacres, see also Vahram Dadrian, To the Desert: Pages from My Diary (Princeton and London, 2003), p. 23; Gust, ed., 2005, pp. 323, 455.
For discussions of ‘ordinary men’ as perpetrators, C. R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1998 [1992]), passim;
M. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 26–30. For a conceptual discussion of the Armenian genocide, ibid., pp. 111–179.
See, e.g., A. J. Kirakossian, ed., The Armenian Massacres 1894–1896: U.S. Media Testimony (Detroit, 2004).
See, e.g., N. Saupp, Das Deutsche Reich und die Armenische Frage 1878–1914 (Koln, 1990), pp. 167ff.
N. M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), p. 23. See also Balakian, 2003, p. 157: ‘As the concept of Armenian massacre was hammered deeper and deeper into the social psychology of Turkish society, the Armenian Question was inculcated as an issue that could only be solved by unmitigated state-sponsored and state-sanctioned violence.’
See, e.g., Jacobsen, 1979, p. 229; Garougian, 2005, pp. 205, 243; Riggs, 1997, p. 125; C. A. Krethlow, ‘Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz und der Genozid an den Armeniern 1915–1916’, Sozial. Geschichte, XXI, no. 3 (2006), 64.
Quoted in A. Sarafian, ‘The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide’, in O. Bartov and P. Mack, eds, In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford, 2001), p. 214.
See also Miller and Miller, 1993, p. 174; R. A. Parmalee, A Pioneer in the Euphrates Valley (Princeton and London, 2002), p. 24.
Jacobsen, 1979, p. 270. Another Danish missionary in Harput, Karen Marie Petersen, describes the deportees in a similar way: E. Bockelund, En Tjenergerning blandt Martyrfolket. Kvindelige Missions Arbejdere 1900–1930 (1932), pp. 36–37. See also Atkinson, 2000, pp. 40, 53; Riggs, 1997, pp. 146–147; Barton, comp., 1998, p. 68.
Sarafian, in Bartov and Mack, eds, 2001, p. 215; Kaiser, in Kieser and Schaller, eds, 2002, p. 166; Riggs, 1997, pp. 148–149; Barton, comp., 1998, p. 42. It is possible that the doctors also checked if the girls were virgins as the price could then be four times higher than the price of a raped girl: Benedictsen, 1925, p. 254. According to Villa and Matossian, 1982, p. 73, Turks valued Armenian virgins rather than non-virgins, so one reason that prepubescent Armenian girls sometimes married was to protect them from violation: ‘Generally speaking, the more physically or politically insecure the villagers felt, the younger the age for marriage’. On an incident in 1922 where a deported Greek girl in Harput married a Greek man to avoid abduction, Garougian, 2005, p. 200. On the connections between rape, abductions, looting, and forcible conversions of Armenians before and during WWI, J. J. Reid, ‘Total War, the Annihilation Ethic, and the Armenian Genocide, 1870–1918’, in R. G. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (Hampshire and New York, 1992), p. 39ff.
V. N. Dadrian, ‘The Armenian Genocide: An Interpretation’, in J. Winter, ed., America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 83–84.
Armenian survivors at the Yozgat Tribunal in 1919 testified that ‘[w]ith very few exceptions, young Armenian females were […] the victims of rape, often serial rape’: A. Höss, ‘The Trial of Perpetrators by the Turkish Military Tribunals: The Case of Yozgat’, in Hovannisian, ed., 1992, p. 217. At a similar post-war tribunal at Kayseri (Cesarea), leading local officials were charged with rape and serial rape: V. N. Dadrian, ‘The Agency of “Triggering Mechanisms” as a Factor in the Organization of the Genocide Against the Armenians of Kayseri District’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, I, no. 2 (Fall 2006), 120–121.
See, e.g., Kaiser, 2002, pp. 91–92, n. 102; Derderian, 2005, 7–8; E. Mugerditchian, I Tyrkernes Kloer: En Beretning om en Armenisk Families Flugt (London, 1918), p. 20;
D. E. Miller and L. T. Miller, ‘Women and Children of the Armenian Genocide’, in Hovannisian, ed., 1992, p. 160. There are also reports that Armenian boys were distributed for sexual abuse: J. Künzler, Im Lande des Blutes und der Tränen. Erlebnisse in Mesopotamien Während des Weltkrieges (Berlin-Potsdam, 1921), pp. 77, 87. See also V. N. Dadrian, ‘Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case’, on http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/cragsite/Children.htm.
H. Arendt, Essays in Understanding – 1930–1954 (New York, 1994), p. 304.
S. Zizek and C. Hanlon, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political. An interview with Slavoj Zizek’, New Literary History, XXXII, 1 (2001), 19.
Quoted in B. Diken and C. B. Laustsen, Becoming Abject: Rape As a Weapon of War (Aalborg, 2004), p. 19.
On mass violence and sexual abuse as ‘carnival’, see also W. W. Hagen, ‘The Moral Economy of Popular Violence: The Pogrom in Lwów, November 1918’, in R. Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca and London, 2005), p. 125ff.
Quoted in A. Nassibian, Britain and the Armenian Question 1915–1923 (London, Sydney, and New York, 1985), p. 72. For a poetical treatment of the ‘carnivalistic’ atmosphere that could characterize the killings of Armenians in the empire, Siamanto (A. Yarjanian), Bloody News from My Friend, trans. P. Balakian and N. Yaghlian (Detroit, 1996). This collection of poetry, originally published in 1911, was directly inspired by the massacre of some 20,000 Armenians in and around the Cilician town of Adana in 1909. An excerpt from the poem ‘Grief’, p. 38, reads: ‘… what a mob, what dances, what joy / and what feasts everywhere …./Our red shrouds are victory flags./ The bones of our pure brothers are flutes … / with them others are making strange music.’ Siamanto was one of the Armenian intellectuals killed 24 April 1915.
In Sarafian, comp., 2004, p 199. See also G. H. Knapp, The Tragedy of Bitlis (London, 2002 [1919]), pp. 42ff.; Ter Minassian, ‘Van 1915’, in Hovannisian, ed., 2000, p. 218.
Quoted in Bryce and Toynbee, 2000, p. 121. For a description of a comparable incident during the Armenian genocide, Fisk, 2006, pp. 391–392. For a similar occurence during the Bosnian genocide, A. Stiglmayer, ‘The Rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, in A. Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Lincoln and London, 1994), p. 82. For similar occurences during the German WWI-occupation of Belgium and parts of France, Horne and Kramer, 2001, pp. 196–204.
See, e.g., Bryce and Toynbee, 2000, p. 356; D. Jensen, Et Hjemløst Folk: Spredte Trak fra min Rejse i Orienten (1929), p. 37.
A. Nesaule, A Woman in Amber (New York, 1995), p. 26.
L. Warner and J. Sandilands, Women beyond the Wire (1997), p. 95;
N. Lillelund, En Brutal Bagage: Barndom i en japansk fangelejr (Copenhagen, 2004), p. 60.
See, e.g., despatch from Jackson, Aleppo, 8 June 1915, in Sarafian, comp., 2004, p. 60; statement by Merrill, Marash, ibid., pp. 68–69; statement by US Consul General at Beirut, Hollis, ibid., p. 118; letter from Dr Shepard, Aintab, 20 June 1915, in Bryce and Toynbee, 2000, p. 482; Report by Hunecke, July 1915, in Sarafian and Avebury, eds, 2003, p. 67; Miller and Miller, 1993, p. 102; Kaiser, 2002, p. 25; Gust, ed., 2005, p. 255; Atkinson, 2000, p. 47; El-Ghusein, 1917, p. 14; L. Einstein, Inside Constantinople (London, 1917), p. 126.
A. Jones, ‘Gender and Genocide in Rwanda’, in Jones, ed., 2004, pp. 118–119; C. A. MacKinnon, ‘Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide’, in Stiglmayer, ed., 1994, p. 80; R. Seifert, ‘War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis’, ibid., p. 65; G. Grandin, ‘History, Motive, Law, Intent: Combining Historical and Legal Methods in Understanding Guatemala’s 1981–1983 Genocide’, in R. Gellately and B. Kiernan, eds, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, (Cambridge, 2003), p. 350;
J. Nevins, A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor (Ithaca and London, 2005), p. 109.
On pregnant Jewish women being shot in the belly ‘for fun’: E. Klee, W. Dressen, and V. Riess, eds, ‘The Good Old Days’: The Holocaust As Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (1991 [1988]), p. 179. Some may claim that such acts are myths or symbols, but there seem to be too many confirmed occurences during war and genocide to dismiss the phenomenon as fabrication, although some occurrences may be categorized as such. On the fabrication of ‘atrocity myths’, Horne and Kramer, 2001, pp. 196–225.
Derderian, 2005, 9; Kaiser, in Kieser and Schaller, eds, 2002, p. 162; R. G. Hovannisian, ‘Bitter-Sweet Memories: The Last Generation of Ottoman Armenians’, in R. G. Hovannisian, ed., Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick and London, 2003), p. 120;
Bryce and Toynbee, 2000, p. 319; M. D. Peterson, ‘Starving Armenians’: America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1930 and after (Charlottesville and London, 2004), p. 55.
H. Fein, ‘Genocide and Gender: The Uses of Women and Group Destiny’, Journal of Genocide Research, I, no. 1 (March 1999), 45.
Quoted in D. G. Dutton et al., ‘Extreme Mass Homicide: From Military Massacre to Genocide’, Aggression and Violent Behaviour, X (2005), 443.
See, e.g., Svazlian, 2004, p. 84; Miller and Miller, 1993, pp. 80, 96, 103–105; Gust, ed., 2005, p. 281; B. Nercessian, I Walked through the Valley of Death (New York, 2003), p. 25;
Atkinson, 2000, p. 40; Knapp, 2002, p. 47; Riggs, 1997, pp. 136–137; K. Meyer, Armenien und die Schweiz (Bern, 1974), p. 96; Ussher, 1917, p. 312. Collective suicide to avoid sexual abuse also occurred in Eastern Germany in WWII when whole female populations of villages threw themselves in rivers to avoid being raped by Russian soldiers: Gellately and Kiernan, ‘Introduction’, in Gellately and Kiernan, eds, 2003, p. 14.
Re. resistance to genocide as a broader concept than, say, taking up arms, see C. Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London and New York, 2003), p. 24, who quotes Yehuda Bauer for stating that resistance to Nazi decrees during the Holocaust was ‘any group action consciously taken in opposition’ to such decrees.
On the subject of the existence from the early modern period of the discourses of suicide as ‘sinful’, as ‘a medical condition’ (‘the product of an unsound mind’), and as ‘heroic’, respectively, and of what is described as the post-WWI decriminalization of acts of suicide, R. M. Brown, The Art of Suicide (London, 2001), e.g., pp. 13–14, 147.
For a discussion of collective Armenian victimhood and attempts at redressing this, R. Panossian, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars (London, 2006), pp. 236ff.
Miller and Miller, 1993, pp. 11–13. It must be noted that in such instances where there seems to be no physical violence involved in the abduction of a woman, it is in my opinion still an act of gender-specific violence, and intercourse during forced marriages and/or slavery are still acts of rape. The Trial Chamber at The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda used what I believe is a sensible definition of rape as ‘a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive’, and sexual violence, including rape, as ‘any act of a sexual nature which is committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive’. Quoted in N. Pillay, ‘Sexual Violence in Times of Conflict: The Jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’, in S. Chesterman, ed., Civilians in War (London, 2001), p. 173.
For a further discussion of rape as genocide, C. Eboe-Osuji, ‘Rape as Genocide: Some Questions Arising’, Journal of Genocide Research, IX, no. 2 (2007), 251–273. For an illustrative description of life as an Armenian woman in a forced marriage, testimony of Digin Versjin, KMA, 10.360, Pk. 15, ‘Armenier-Missionen, Diverse Skildringer vedr. Arminierne [sic] 1906–1927’. The fate of Digin (‘Lady’, ‘Mrs’) Versjin (here spelled ‘Vergene’) is also mentioned in Atkinson, 2000, p. 72.
See, e.g., B. A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca and London, 2004), pp. 40–43; Dutton et al., 2005, 470.
Mark Levene, ‘Introduction’, in M. Levene and P. Roberts, eds, The Massacre in History (New York and Oxford, 1999), p. 17.
See, e.g., Fein, 1999, 43–44; Horne and Kramer, 2001, pp. 199–200; D. Baro, ‘Children Witnessing Atrocities against Parents or Caregivers, a Human Rights Perspective’, Torture – Journal on Rehabilitation of Torture Victims and Prevention of Torture, XVI, no. 3 (2006), 194–196;
K. Weis and S. Weis, ‘Victimology and the Justification of Rape’, in I. Drapkin and E. Viano, eds, Victimology: A New Focus. Vol. V. Exploiters and Exploited: The Dynamics of Victimization (Lexington, Toronto, and London, 1975), p. 14.
See discussion in R. F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (New York, 2001), chapter 7.
H. Katsuichi, The Nanjing Massacre (2000), passim. The arrest of a group of Armenian women in Bitlis was described as ‘a sport’ by an American eyewitness: Barton, comp., 1998, p. 11. On killing as ‘sport’ during the Holocaust, see, e.g., Browning, 1998, pp. 101, 134.
O. A. Rygaard, Mellem Tyrker og Kurder. En Dansk Ingeniørs Oplevelser i Lilleasien (1935), p. 165.
For a description of a similar occurrence in the course of the destruction of Assyrian and Armenian populations in Persia’s Urmia region in 1915, Gaunt, 2006, p. 113. For a description of a similar occurrence during the 1894–1896 massacres of Armenians, Balakian, 2003, p. 65. On killings of Armenians as ‘a sport’, see also Einstein, 1917, p. 231. On the massacre of Armenians in Sarki Karahissar (Shabin Karahissar), Nercessian, 2003, pp. 8–13; New York Times, 18 August 1915. For a description of what appears to be ritualized mass killings of Muslim Arabs by Ottoman regular cavalry, including the sexualized mutilation and killing of a pregnant woman, T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1983), p. 652,
quoted in J. J. Reid, ‘The Concept of War and Genocidal Impulses in the Ottoman Empire, 1821–1918’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, IV, no. 2 (1989), 187.
On the rape of Armenian and Jewish women by Ottoman forces in Ottoman Palestine: H. V. F. Winstone, The Illicit Adventure: The Story of Political and Military Intelligence in the Middle East from 1898 to 1926 (London, 1982), p. 234.
See, e.g., N. J. Mitchell, Agents of Atrocity: Leaders, Followers, and the Violation of Human Rights in Civil War (2004), pp. 9–10, 48–50.
See also E. K. Jernazian, Judgment unto Truth: Witnessing the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick and London, 1990), p. 65.
Diken and Laustsen, 2004, pp. 1, 5. For an introduction to the ICTR judgment of Jean-Paul Akayesu, mayor of a Rwandan commune, who was convicted of counts relating to rape and sexual violence as genocide, A. Stiglmayer, ‘Sexual Violence: Systematic Rape’, in R. Gutman and D. Rieff, eds, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (New York and London, 1999), p. 327.
On the relations between expansionism and genocide – the attempts by genocidal regimes to purify a territory rather than, or combined with, purifying a ‘race’: B. Kiernan, ‘Twentieth-Century Genocides: Underlying Ideological Themes from Armenia to East Timor’, in Gellately and Kiernan, eds, 2003, pp. 33–37. On the ‘purification’ of Anatolia, M. Bjørnlund, ‘The 1914 Cleansing of Aegean Greeks As a Case of Violent Turkification’, Journal of Genocide Research, X, 1 (2008), 41–58; Stürmer, 2000, pp. 48, 93;
H. Kaiser, ‘The Ottoman Government and the End of the Ottoman Social Formation, 1915–1917’ (2001), http://www.hist.net/kieser/aghet/Essays/EssayKaiser.html;
N. Seker, ‘Demographic Engineering in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Armenians’, Middle Eastern Studies, XLIII, no. 3 (May 2007), 463.
Seifert, in Stiglmayer, ed., 1994, p. 59; J. Hagan, Justice in the Balkans: Prosecuting War Crimes in the Hague Tribunal (Chicago, 2003), p. 186;
A. Gram, Blandt Armeniske Flygtninge i Grakenland. Med Erindringer af den tidligere Armeniermissionar Margrethe Jepsen (1953), p. 18; Industrimissionens Blad, I, no. 4 (December 1922), 49.
H. V. F. Winstone, Gertrude Bell (London, 2004), pp. 276–277, quoted in Fisk, 2006, p. 402. On the large-scale massacre and abuse of Armenians at Ras-el-Ain, see also testimony of an Armenian woman deported from Bitlis with her family, in Jensen, 1929, p. 37; Auron, 2003, p. 182.
Sarafian, in Bartov and Mack, eds, 2001, p. 210. On the number of assimilations, see also E. G. Danielyan, The Armenian Genocide of 1894–1922 and the Accountability of the Turkish State (Yerevan, 2005), p. 27.
Kaiser, 2002, p. 1. See also Morgenthau, 2003, pp. 200–201; Tachjian and Kévorkian, 2006, 5; Derderian, 2005, 2; A. Baum et al., ‘Review of Mass Homicides of Intelligentsia As a Marker for Genocide’, The Forensic Examiner, XVI, no. 3 (Fall 2007), 34–41.
On the continuation of the policy of forced assimilation of Armenian and Greek women in the early 1920s during Kemalist rule, see, e.g., H. J. Psomiades, ‘The American Near East Relief (NER) and the Megali Catastrophe in 1922’, Journal of Modern Hellenism, XIX–XX (Winter 2002–2003), 135–150.
Kaiser, in Kieser and Schaller, eds, 2002, p. 151. See also Derderian, 2005, 4; T. Hofmann, ed., Der Völkermord an den Armeniern vor Gericht: Der Prozess Talaat Pascha (Göttingen and Wien, 1985 [1921]), pp. 133–136;
Riggs, 1997, p. 97; U. Ü. Üngör, ‘Center and Periphery in the Armenian Genocide: The Case of Diyarbekir Province’, in H.-L. Kieser and E. Plozza, eds, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern, die Türkei und Europa/The Armenian Genocide, Turkey and Europe (Zurich, 2006), p. 80.
On (proto-)racist prejudice, Turkish and Western, against Armenians, W. Gust, ‘Die Verdrängung des Völkermords an den Armeniern – ein Signal für die Shoah’, in Kieser and Schaller, eds, 2002, pp. 463–480; S. H. Astourian, ‘Modern Turkish Identity and the Armenian Genocide: From Prejudice to Racist Nationalism’, in R. G. Hovannisian, ed., Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide (Detroit, 1998), pp. 23–50;
Bjørnlund, ‘Karen Jeppe, Aage Meyer Benedictsen …’, 2007; M. L. Anderson, ‘“Down in Turkey, Far Away”: Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany’, Journal of Modern History, LXXIX (2007), 80–111;
C. E. Bechhofer, In Denikin’s Russia and the Caucasus, 1919–1920 (1992 [1921]), pp. 257ff.
Gust, ed., 2005, p. 227. For comparisons between anti-Armenianism and anti-Semitism, see also Raphael Lemkin, quoted in D. J. Schaller, ‘“La question arménienne n’existe plus”: Der Völkermord an den Armeniern während des Ersten Weltkriegs und seine Darstellung in der Historiographie’, in Fritz Bauer Institut, ed., Völkermord und Kriegsverbrechen in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt and New York, 2004), p. 113;
S. H. Astourian, ‘Genocidal Process: Reflections on the Armeno-Turkish Polarization’, in Hovannisian, ed., 1992, p. 59. US diplomatic minister at Copenhagen during WWI, Maurice Francis Egan, stated that his Turkish colleagues looked upon Armenians as ‘deadly parasites’, and he compared their views on Armenians with the way Russian noblemen viewed ‘inferior Jews’: M. F. Egan, Ten Years Near the German Frontier: A Retrospect and a Warning (New York, 1919), p. 312. On one of these diplomats in Copenhagen during WWI, Djevad Bey, and, e.g., his insistence on a ‘Turkey for the Turks’, see Bjørnlund, ‘“When the Cannons …”’, 2006, 205.
See, e.g., R. Bonney, Jihad: From Qur’an to bin Laden (Hampshire and New York, 2004), pp. 150–153.
Gust, ed., 2005, p. 291. Re. the CUP principle of ‘Turkey for the Turks’, see also O. L. von Sanders, Funf Jahre Türkei (Berlin, 1920), p. 200.
On the Nazi race laws, etc., see I. Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship (London, 1993 [3rd edn]), pp. 92–93; Fein, 1999, 52–53.
Despite the race laws, many Jewish women were still subjected to rape, sexual humiliation, slavery, and mutilation during the Holocaust: e.g., A. L. Gold, Fiet’s Vase and Other Stories of Survival, Europe 1939–1945 (New York, 2003), p. 108;
M. Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York, 1987), p. 301;
E. Schloss, Eva’s Story (New York, 1990), pp. 76–77; Browning, 1998, pp. 152–153.
Svazlian, 2004, p. 81. See also Miller and Miller, 1993, pp. 71, 108, 183; Adalian, in Totten, Parsons, Charny, eds, 1997, p. 72; Garougian, 2005, p. 215; B. Morley, Marsovan 1915: The Diaries of Bertha B. Morley (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), pp. 16, 23;
A. I. Elkus, The Memoirs of Abram Elkus: Lawyer, Ambassador, Statesman (Princeton and London, 2004), p. 68.
Gust, ed., 2005, p. 260. On the massacres at the Kemakh Gorge, south of Erzinjan on the Euphrates, see, e.g., S. Payaslian, ‘The Death of Armenian Karin/Erzerum’, in R. G. Hovannisian, ed., Armenian Karin/Erzerum (Costa Mesa, Ca., 2003), pp. 353–355; I. K. Hassiotis, ‘The Armenian Genocide and the Greeks: Response and Records (1915–23)’, in Hovannisian, ed., 1992, pp. 146–147.
Morgenthau, 2003, pp. 200–201. On Islamization and ‘mingling of blood’ (here called ‘amalgamating races’) as means of forced assimilation and Turkification of Ottoman Greeks, as well as on sexual abuse of Armenian women, see H. Morgenthau, United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913–1916 (Princeton and London, 2004), p. 275. On the Islamization and sexual abuse of Armenian women, see also ibid., e.g., p. 322.
H. Marcher, Oplevelser Derovrefra (1919), p. 16.
M. Sells, ‘Kosovo Mythology and the Bosnian Genocide’, in Bartov and Mack, 2001, pp. 182–83, 189. See also Hukanovic, 1998, p. 31; L. Jones, Then They Started Shooting: Growing up in Wartime Bosnia (2004), e.g., pp. 46–47, 75–77.
J. Svanenskjold and U. Fugl, eds, K.M.A.s Arbejde gennem Femogtyve Aar, 1900–1925 (Copenhagen, 1925), pp. 42–43.
Sarafian, in Bartov and Mack, eds, 2001, pp. 212–214; Miller and Miller, 1993, p. 110; Jacobsen, 1979, pp. 235–236; H. M. Chitjian, A Hair’s Breadth from Death (London and Reading, 2003), pp. 100–101.
N. Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London, 2007), p. 1.
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Bjørnlund, M. (2009). ‘A Fate Worse Than Dying’: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide. In: Herzog, D. (eds) Brutality and Desire. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234291_2
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