The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian examines in great detail the massacres of over a million Armenians by the Turkish government during the late 19th century and during World War I. With over 1,100 footnotes to the work, Balakian leaves no stone unturned in this monumental work which focuses on a little-known area of Armenian, Turkish, and American history.
The story starts with the first massacres of Armenians in the late 19th century, and the first instances of organized killings by groups of Turks. As Christians, the Armenians (and to a lesser extent, Greeks and other Christian ethnic groups) were treated the the ruling Muslim Turks as second class citizens, at best, and expendable, at worst. This was in contrast to the fact that Armenians made up a large part of the intellectual and economic life of Turkey in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With the first of the massacres, however, the stage was set for future atrocities against the Armenians.
The rise of the “Young Turks” as leaders of the government was the point at which the plan to eliminate the non-Muslim groups was accelerated. The Young Turks, who came to power in 1908 under a guise of standing up for the rights of all the groups living in the country at the time, furthered the destructive path of their predecessor: Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The expectations of the Armenians for the brighter future promised by the Young Turk government, however, were met only with prejudice, hatred, and violence from the new rulers, who initiated a plan to eliminate the Armenians entirely.
With Turkey’s involvement in World War I, on the side of Germany, the government saw its opportunity to begin the systematic genocide of the Armenians. On one occurrence, April 24, 1915, in Constantinople, the Turks rounded up the intellectual and artistic leaders of the Armenians and proceeded to eliminate the vast majority of them. This scene, and many more horrifying ones, were played out across Turkey. Men and boys were burned alive, shot, stabbed, drowned, starved, and deported. Women endured the same fates as the men, along with various forms of sexual torture committed by the Turks. The trail of burned villages and dead Armenians extended across the entirety of Turkey.
Balakian cites sources as diverse as official government documents, correspondence from ambassadors, consuls, diplomats, and other witnesses to the events. The same descriptions of massacre and torture are played out over and over again in different regions of Turkey and are seen by numerous representatives of foreign governments and aid institutions.
The Turks culminate their activities in a nationwide deportation of the Armenians, who are forced to march from the homes hundreds of miles away into the desert, given no food or water, with intermittent killings and rape committed along the way. As can be expected, few Armenians survive the mass deportation.
By the end of the war, between one million and 1.5 million Armenians meet their fate at the hands of the Turkish government’s genocide, effectively wiping out two-thirds of the Armenian population of Turkey. If not for the philanthropic and activist involvement of important American organizations who provided aid to the Armenians, the number of dead may have been even more catastrophic. Such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Red Cross provided aid during the initial massacres and during the wide-scale genocide of World War I.
Balakian goes on to further examine the response of the world to the Armenian genocide from the end of the war until the present day. Unfortunately, the genocide has been pushed into the background of 20th century genocides, with Turkey actively denying the entire mess as Armenian propaganda, and America failing the Armenians both after the war, and even now, refusing to invoke the anger of Turkey by acknowledging the genocide. In fact, the US will not officially support using the word “genocide” to describe the systematic elimination of over one million people, in contrast to numerous other countries who have accepted the massacres as a genocide.
America’s giving in to Turkish influence is, of course, based on the lack of power exercised by the new Armenian nation, and the strategic location of Turkey. With two-thirds of its population destroyed, the Armenians were given their own country far from their original homes in Turkey, and were forced to accept the aid of the U.S.S.R. in order to gain protection against further attacks by Turkey after the war. Even with their current freedom, their military power and natural resources do not compare with those of the more influential Turkey.
And even now, America protects its military, economic, and political interests in Turkey, by its active complicity in the downgrading of what happened in the late 19th and early 20 centuries, culminating in the century’s first genocide. In this case, unfortunately, the winners have decided what history speaks for Armenia. And oil, as it has almost since its discovery and widespread use, runs thicker than the blood of millions of people.
With his book The Burning Tigris, Peter Balakian has given a definitive account of the Armenian Genocide and America’s successes and failures in aiding the remaining Armenians. Thoroughly sourced, well written, and accurately descriptive, this book brings to the light one of the darkest, most horrifying occurrences of the 20th century.
The Twentieth Century's First Genocide: A Review of The Burning Tigris
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