Debating the Armenian Massacres in the Last Ottoman Parliament, November – December 1918
aktar2004{at}ttnet.net.tr
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Abstract |
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The question ‘what happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915?’ is becoming more and more politically encumbered and is now polarized into two distinct and uncompromising discourses. At one end are those who argue that the deportations and massacres constituted a ‘genocide’, planned beforehand. At the other are those who try to explain the deportations of hundreds of thousands of people as ‘a simple administrative measure necessitated by the state of war’.
This article examines some key moments of debates on the issue in the Ottoman Parliament in the autumn of 1918, and describes their political and emotional context. The Deputies taking part had lived through the Armenian massacres, and none of them, Muslim or non-Muslim, denied that atrocities had happened. Nor at first were there legal impediments to discussions in press and Parliament. However, the demands of Armenian and Greek Deputies for more detailed debate and for punishment of those responsible were blocked by the Parliament, where Deputies aligned with the just-disbanded Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the party which had authorized the ‘relocations’, were in the majority.
Some of the views concerning the Armenian massacres put forward in official circles in Turkey today were also to be heard at the Ottoman Parliament. But protests by the Unionist Deputies (such as ‘Turks died, too’) on the one hand, and on the other, denunciation by Deputies of minority origin of those responsible for massacres and demands for their punishment, could all be expressed under the same roof. The Deputies of the Ottoman Parliament were able to engage in serious discussion of these important issues, unlike now.