What was behind the ethnic cleansing of Armenians?

In 1915, the Ottoman state, in the midst of World War I, took the fateful decision of deporting all Armenians in Anatolia to eastern Syria. An entire people was forced to migrate overnight, and many of them, perhaps a million people, perished on the road due to starvation, disease and massacres by locals. There is no doubt this enormous tragedy deserves remembrance and empathy today — and we Turks must be much more considerate about it than we have been over the past century.

The proper term to use in defining the fate of Ottoman Armenians has been a matter of controversy. Armenians themselves and many others in the West use the G word: genocide. Most Turks, in return, only use the much more innocent term “tehcir,” or deportation. Personally, I take a middle ground and opt for the term “ethnic cleansing.” (The difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide is that the former is about cleansing a geographical area from a group of people, whereas the latter is about the very extermination of that people. As a comparison, note that the Ottoman government only pushed Armenians out of Anatolia, whereas the Nazis searched for Jews everywhere in order to exterminate them one by one.)

A perhaps more important question, however, is why did this catastrophe happen? In the West, sometimes religion is perceived to be the underlying problem, as “Muslim Turks” are pitted against “Christian Armenians.” Yet this perception disregards the very fact that, before 1915, the same Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians coexisted for centuries under the banner of the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious entity, where faith communities constituted “nations.” Muslims were the “ruling nation,” whereas Christians and Jews were “protected” nations, in line with the status Islamic law gives to “the People of Book.” That is why Armenians, like Greeks or Jews, lived and flourished in the Ottoman Empire for centuries with some autonomy and certain rights. They were not allowed to become soldiers or public servants, which were jobs reserved only for Muslims, hence they excelled in artisanship. (No wonder some of the most beautiful mosques and palaces in Istanbul were built by Armenian architects from the famous Balyan family.) Moreover, in the Reform Era of the mid-19th century, the Ottoman state gave all non-Muslims the status of equal citizenship. That is why in final decades of the empire, Armenians began to take public jobs, becoming ambassadors, ministers or parliamentarians.