Uğur Ümit Üngör

When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder: The Processive Nature of Genocide

In the rapidly developing historiography of the Armenian Genocide, the processive character of pre-genocidal persecutions has received less attention than the genocidal process itself. This article treats the persecution of Ottoman Armenians as a cumulative process leading up to a mass-murder campaign in the summer of 1915. It addresses the evolution of CUP policy toward the Armenians through the prism of escalating persecution and the relationship between center and periphery. In order to illustrate the concrete implementation of this process, the province of Diyarbekir will serve as an example to clarify the history of the persecutions.

Lost in commemoration: the Armenian genocide in memory and identity

ABSTRACT It is a commonplace in Genocide Studies to say that ‘Turkey denies the Armenian genocide’. The Turkish states official policy towards the Armenian genocide was and is indeed characterized by misrepresentation, mystification and manipulation. But when one gauges what place the Armenian genocide occupies in the social memory of Turkish society, even after nearly a century, a different picture emerges. Even though most direct eyewitnesses to the crime have passed away, oral history interviews yield important insights. Elderly Turks and Kurds in Eastern Turkey often hold vivid memories from family members or fellow villagers who witnessed or participated in the genocide. This article is based on interviews conducted with (grand)children of eyewitnesses to the Armenian genocide. The research suggests there is a clash between official state memory and popular social memory: the Turkish government is denying a genocide that its own population remembers.

Orphans, Converts, and Prostitutes: Social Consequences of War and Persecution in the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1923

Considerable research has been conducted on the relationship between the First World War and the persecutions of Ottoman Armenians. So far, little is known about the aftermath of the catastrophe, in particular the fate of the survivors, mostly women and children who continued to live as best as they could on the fringes of society. This article addresses this hiatus and discusses the experience of Armenian survivors. It analyses the impact of the war and the genocide on Armenian women and children during and after the war. It examines how the violence generated innumerable orphans, and how these orphans became a battleground between Turkish and Armenian political elites. It reviews how the Young Turk regime dealt with the unforeseen phenomenon of Armenians converting to Islam to circumvent deportation orders, and focuses on the government’s orders and decrees issued to confront this issue. Finally it briefly canvasses the hitherto neglected problem of prostitution by Armenian women as a strategy for survival during the war.

Confiscation and Violence : A Comparison of Ottoman and Russian Economic Persecution in World War I

Economic Nationalism, Confiscation, and Genocide: A Comparisation of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I This article analyses the development of the Ottoman and Russian governments’ economic persecution of the Armenians and Jews during World War I. It will chart how this policy moved from boycott to discrimination, into confiscation and outright plunder, resulting in economic ruination for the victims. It identifies the main currents and developments of this ruthless policy and how it affected Armenian and Jewish communities. So far there exists no comparative treatment of the expropriation of Ottoman Armenians and Russian Jews during World War I. This article aims to fill that gap by looking at the confiscation process through a combination of approaches, focussing on the development of the legal process, explaining the ideology of economic nationalism, and concretely demonstrating the policy on the ground.

Studying Mass Violence: Pitfalls, Problems, and Promises

This article examines some of the main pitfalls, problems, and promises of genocide research. It argues that genocide is a viable academic concept if protected from moral, legal, political, and emotional constraints. It should be approached in a dispassionate, amoral, non-juridical, and apolitical way. The article further discusses a model for understanding genocide that identifies three levels of analysis: the interstate pressures of the global state system and the influence of crises and war; the intrastate context of radical ideology, state power, and the dynamic of the genocidal process; and the micro-level conditions that enable the involvement of individual actors in violence.

Mass Violence against Civilians during the Balkan Wars

On 17 October 1912, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Out-powered, demoralized, unprepared and poorly equipped, the Ottoman army fought fourteen battles and lost them all, except for one. After the cessation of hostilities, the Empire was heavily truncated for good. The lands wrested from the Ottomans became the object of bitter contestation between Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria. Each of these nations formulated their own nationalist claims on the newly ‘available’ territory. Although there were clear distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, as the skirmishes unfolded into total warfare none of the armies respected this distinction and defenceless civilians were assaulted too: Muslims under Bulgarian and Greek rule, and Christians under Ottoman rule. Victims and contemporary journalists accused the Balkan armies in particular of systematic maltreatment of civilian populations, but atrocities were committed by all sides in the conflict. Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek and Ottoman forces committed mutual acts of violence including large-scale destruction and arson of villages, beatings and torture, forced conversions and indiscriminate mass killing of enemy non-combatants. This chapter will discuss these atrocities and their consequences, in order to address the overarching question: how did civilians experience the mass violence committed against them during the Balkan Wars? This chapter aims to answer this question by discussing the impact of the Balkan Wars on Ottoman Muslims. It will examine the persecution and expulsion of Ottoman Muslims in the Balkans by Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian forces, and sketch their ordeal as they were expelled to the rump Ottoman state. The chapter will examine how their experiences as refugees influenced them and Ottoman political culture. In November 1912, the Bulgarian advance pushed the Ottoman army back to the trenches of Catalca, 30 kilometres west of Istanbul. There, the onslaught was stopped and the imperial capital remained uncaptured. Warfare continued as two other important Ottoman cities were captured: the old imperial capital of Edirne [Adrianople] was besieged and taken by the Bulgarian army, and on 9 November 1912 the Ottoman garrison surrendered the cradle of the Young Turks, Salonica, to the Greek army.

Team America: Genocide Prevention?

Introduction Genocide can be defined as a complex process of systematic persecution and annihilation of a group of people by a government. In the twentieth century, approximately 40 to 60 million defenseless people became victims of deliberate genocidal policies. The twenty-first century did not begin much better, with genocidal episodes going on in Darfur and the Congo. We can speak of genocide when individuals are persecuted and murdered merely on the basis of their presumed or imputed membership in a group rather than on their individual characteristics or participation in certain acts. Although it makes little sense to define genocide by a specific number of victims affected by it, we can state that a genocidal process always concerns a society at large and that genocide destroys a significant and often critical part of the affected community. It can be argued that genocidal processes are particularly malicious and destructive because they are directed against all members of a group, most often against innocent and defenseless people who are persecuted and killed regardless of their behaviour. Genocide always denotes a colossal and brutal collective criminality. For this reason, genocide has been studied as a modern phenomenon that is distinct from other forms of mass violence. After Raphael Lemkin died in 1959, the term seemed to be a dead letter. But in the 1970s historians and social scientists rediscovered the concept and published the first academic work on genocide. Since then, the number of publications has grown and today genocide studies, with journals and research institutes in North America and Europe, is a respectable intellectual specialism.1 Three questions are central in this research field. First, what are the causes of a genocidal process? Or, put another way, how does the systematic destruction of a group of people begin? Second, how does a genocidal process develop? There are strong indications that, when such a process has been put in motion, it develops its own dynamic. How does that process evolve from the individual to the collective level? Finally, it is important to investigate the consequences of genocide. How are perpetrators, victims, and third parties affected by genocide? How do they process, if at all, the traumatic events? In the growing, interdisciplinary field of genocide studies much useful research has been conducted into the evolution of separate genocides such as the destruction of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the Holocaust, and the genocides in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, Rwanda in 1994, and Bosnia during the Yugoslav civil wars. A significant amount of knowledge about certain aspects of genocide exists as well. Both separate and comparative research has been conducted, for instance, on the turn of a fairly ‘‘normal’’ civil society into a persecutory one, the motives of the ordinary people who are involved in mass murders, the power and effect of charismatic leaders, and aspects of violence as they relate to gender. From time to time, publications appear trying to understand the causes of genocide in

A roundtable on Max Bergholz’s Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community

Since 2015, our journal’s publisher, Taylor and Francis, has sponsored the Canadian Association of Slavists’ Taylor and Francis Book Prize. It is awarded annually for the best academic book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies published in the previous calendar year by a Canadian author (citizen or permanent resident). The winner of the 2017 prize, to be awarded at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Slavists at the University of Regina in May, is Max Bergholz of Concordia University (Montreal, QC) for his book, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016). To mark Professor Bergholz’s achievement and to further the discussion of his important work, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes invited three international scholars who work in the fields of Yugoslav history or the history of genocide and mass violence to comment on the book. Following interventions from Veljko Vujačić, Uğur Ümit Üngör, and Melissa Bokovoy, Professor Bergholz offers a response.

Genocide:New Perspectives on its Causes, Courses and Consequences

The twentieth century has been called, not inaccurately, a century of genocide. And the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen little change, with genocidal violence in Darfur, Congo, Sri Lanka, and Syria. Why is genocide so widespread, and so difficult to stop, across societies that differ so much culturally, technologically, and politically? Thats the question that this collection addresses, gathering a stellar roster of contributors to offer a range of perspectives from different disciplines to attempt to understand the pervasiveness of genocidal violence. Challenging outdated beliefs and conventions that continue to influence our understanding, Genocide constitutes a major contribution to the scholarship on mass violence.

Genocide and Property

In this chapter I discuss the relationship between genocide and property transfer. In the growing interdisciplinary field of genocide studies much useful research has been conducted into the evolution of separate genocides such as the destruction of Ottoman Armenians in 1915, the Holocaust in Europe, the Great Terror in the USSR and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Much is also known on specific aspects of genocidal processes. For example, there is both separate and comparative research on the turn from a more or less ‘normal’ civic society to a genocidal society, the motives of the ordinary killers, the power and operation of charismatic leaders, the gender-related aspects of violence and, indeed, the dispossession of the victims. In all genocides the possessions of the victims, both individually and as a group, play a role in the initiation, development and aftermath phases of the destruction.1