The UK’s answer to the 1915 Genocide

While many historians cite Foreign Office archives, no systematic study of British archives has been undertaken in light of recent scholarship on the topic. Therefore, the aim of this page is to collect and publish authenticated source materials related to the British Office archives.

In 1919, Britain accused the Ottoman Empire of committing a “crime against humanity,” a label that was adopted by the international community. This action established a precedent for intervening in the affairs of other states on humanitarian grounds, based on legal and moral considerations.

Lloyd George, who was the Prime Minister at the time, did not mince his words when recalling his opinion on the matter:

By these atrocities, almost unparalleled in the black record of Turkish rule, the Armenian population was reduced in numbers by well over one million … If we succeeded in defeating this inhuman empire, one essential condition of the peace we should impose was the redemption of the Armenian valleys forever from the bloody misrule with which they had been stained by the infamies of the Turk. [1]Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference (Yale University Press, 1939), Vol 2, pp 811–12

Winston Churchill, himself no mean historian, saw it:

In 1915 the Turkish government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor … whole districts were blotted out in one administrative holocaust … there is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. [2]Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (Thornton Butter-worth, 1929) p 405.

The Hamidian Massacres and Britain

Back in the autumn of 1894, when the Armenian massacres began, the political condition in Britain was volatile. Gladstone had retired from the premiership in March, and Lord Rosebery succeeded him. During this time, reports of massacres in the village of Sassoun reached Britain. The Sassoun massacres marked the beginning of a multi-year campaign of government-sanctioned violence directed against Armenians living in eastern Anatolia and Constantinople. At the same time, Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s (1876–1909) policy of arming irregular regiments of Kurdish fighters to handle the situation raised tensions that periodically exploded into conflict between the inhabitants of multi-ethnic and religious towns. No one expected the brutality and extent to which these clashes would reach their pinnacle in the mid-1890s. By the end of 1896, systematic pogroms had claimed the lives of 30,000 Armenians in a series of atrocities known as the Hamidian massacres. The Hamidian massacres occurred on a larger scale than earlier bloodshed that had initiated outside intervention and provoked widespread public outrage and condemnation of Ottoman “barbarity” across Europe. British bipartisan support for the Armenians encouraged Conservative Lord Salisbury, who replaced Rosebery as prime minister in June 1895, to seek support from other European countries in order to force the sultan to bring an end to the massacres. However, by the mid-1890s, the climate of European geopolitics had shifted, and no power was willing to risk continental stability or their own interests to intervene on behalf of the Armenians. To Salisbury’s exasperation, the only collective response that the European powers could agree upon was an ineffective naval demonstration in 1895. In this instance, the media played a crucial role in spreading awareness of what was happening to the Armenians and raising money during the Armenian crisis. One journalist in the mid-1890s labeled it as a crime of historic proportions. Such grievance also characterized the understanding of the killing of an estimated 30,000 Armenians in 1909 in the town of Adana. [3](The red rugs of Tarsus : a woman's record of the Armenian massacre of 1909 : Gibbons, Helen Davenport (Brown), Mrs., 1882- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive, 2022) page [ix] .

The view

The Sultan first denied the fact of the massacres, then decorated with exceptional e´clat the Mufti of Moush” who had been responsible for the Moush village massacres. In turn, this observer continued, he dismissed one commander “who had protested against the massacres. [4]“The Present Government in Turkey,” Edinburgh Magazine, July 1897, 21.

of the Sultan and the massacres committed in his name influenced public opinion not only in Britain but also in the United States, with its growing population of diaspora Armenians. Media coverage sparked a massive fundraising and public awareness campaign over the plight of the Armenians that gave added weight to the British campaign against the massacres. Helen Davenport Brown, while living in Turkey, witnessed the Adana Massacre of 1909 and gave birth to the first of her four children while trying to help Armenian refugees. Later, she wrote about her experiences in Turkey in her first book, The Red Rugs of Tarsus, published in 1917.

The British ethnographer William Ramsay who was fond of the Turks —travelled widely in Asia Minor for a decade — described what it meant to be an infidel (Kafir/Gâvur/Gâvour):

Turkish rule . . . meant unutterable contempt. . . . The Armenians (and the Greeks) were dogs and pigs . . . to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he wiped the mud from his feet. Conceive the inevitable result of centuries of slavery, of subjection to insult and scorn, centuries in which nothing that belonged to the Armenian, neither his property, his house, his life, his person, nor his family, was sacred or safe from violence—capricious, unprovoked violence— to resist which by violence meant death. [5]William M. Ramsay, Impressions of Turkey During Twelve Years Wanderings (New York: 1897), 206–7

By 1896, numerous different Blue Books on the condition of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had been published in Britain. These official documents contained thousands of pages of reports. The chronicled accounts of evidence of massacres were submitted first to Parliament and later distributed to the public by the media. The documented reports primarily came from the eyewitness reports of British consuls stationed in regions where the massacres took place and were accompanied by statements from the British Ambassador to Constantinople, who reported on meetings with the Sultan and his functionaries to the Foreign Office. These reports also included statements by Ottoman officials that blamed Armenians for the massacres.

For instance, in his account, the British consul Henry Barnham, who oversaw Aintab and Birecik in Aleppo Province, made it clear how extreme the killing of Armenians was. He described how the violence was inspired by Islamic fanaticism and a jihad mentality, which resulted in brutal massacres and widespread destruction of Armenian homes and communities:

The butchers and the tanners, with sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, armed with clubs and cleavers, cut down the Christians, with cries of “Allahu Akbar!” broke down the doors of the houses with pickaxes and levers, or scaled the walls with ladders. Then when mid-day came they knelt down and said their prayers, and then jumped up and resumed the dreadful work, carrying it on far into the night. Whenever they were unable to break down the doors they fired the houses with petroleum, and the fact that at the end of November petroleum was almost unpurchasable in Aleppo suggests that enormous quantities were bought up and sent north for this purpose [6]Ernest Edmondson Ramsaur (1970). The Young Turks; prelude to the revolution of 1908. New York, Russell & Russell.

Despite the effectiveness of the British Blue Books in documenting the events of the Hamidian massacres, the media continued to report on the situation and publish accounts from the region, highlighting the scale of the atrocities. The only sustainable assistance during this time was provided by British philanthropists through charitable work. Meanwhile, the British media continued to denounce the massacres as a crime of historic proportions, with one journalist in the mid-1890s using this label.

In 1908, the Young Turk government came to power in a bloodless revolution. However, it soon became clear to the Armenians that the Young Turks were a nationalist movement of Muslim Turks with little regard for the non-Muslim communities of the empire. The plan to eliminate the Armenians was set in motion with the Adana massacres of 1909, which were facilitated by the Young Turks’ commitment to fostering a new Turkish nationalism, a growing military culture, and complex clandestine operations. According to a British Embassy Memorandum, “‘Young’ and old Turks alike are genuinely afraid of the Armenians.”

The Adana Massacre is known as the second series of large-scale massacres of Armenians to break out in the Ottoman Empire. The atrocities committed in the province of Adana in April 1909 caused so many grievances in the British media when the news broke out of the killing of an estimated 30,000 Armenians in the town of Adana. Although the suffering in Adana solicited a more muted response, it still resonated with the atrocities of the 1890s in the public arena. Major Doughty-Wylie’s (The British consul at Mersina) reports [7]Cypher Telegram from Captain Doughty-Wylie, Adana, April 17, 1909, FO to his seniors documented the massacres in excruciating detail. At times, these writings read more like despairing letters, moving from the mode of the official report to exhausted eye-witness testimony.

[Note]: In his book Z. Duckett Ferriman’s on the 1909 killings whose original cover bore the title “The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust at Adana in Asia Minor” listed victims’ names, dates, details of individual murders, statistics of orphans, widows, villages destroyed, photographs, and the identity of the militias – like the Turkish authorities in 1915 and like the Nazis, the 1909 killers used “special units” for killing and rape – and the mass violation of women.

In fact, The New York Times had referred to “Another Armenian Holocaust”

The 1915 Crime Against Humanity

The British Empire led the Allied invasion of the Ottoman Empire with the landing at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. A day before this invasion April 24, 1915 , WWI and the Armenian Genocide converged together when the news of the beginning of the massacre of the Armenian population started spreading. [8]Norman Stone , The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (New York: Scribner, 1975), and Steel and Hart, Defeat at Gallipoli. A notable exception is Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans (New York: Basic … Continue reading

At the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles, Britain demanded the indictment of the Turkish leaders responsible for the Armenian massacres and submitted a list of those who deserved most blame, especially Interior Minister Talaat and War Minister Enver, ‘who certainly ought to be hanged’. A Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War was appointed in 1919, and it urged the prosecution of the Turkish leaders for war crimes perpetrated against their own citizens on their own sovereign territory because these were an example of ‘primitive barbarism’ and executed by a ‘terrorist system’. In the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies reserved the right to bring war criminals suspects to trial and Article 230 of the Treaty of Sèvres, which followed on 10 August 1920, declared in respect of the Armenian sufferings:

A Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War was appointed in 1919, and it urged the prosecution of the Turkish leaders for war crimes perpetrated against their own citizens on their own sovereign territory because these were an example of ‘primitive barbarism’ and executed by a ‘terrorist system’.

In the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies reserved the right to bring war criminals suspects to trial and Article 230 of the Treaty of Sèvres, which followed on 10 August 1920, declared in respect of the Armenian sufferings.

The Constantinople Trials

The British were in a position to force the Ottoman Empire to establish a tribunal to prosecute its leaders for committing crimes against Armenians and for their brutal treatment of prisoners of war. The latter was prompted by British soldiers’ return with horror stories of the torture and cruelty they experienced in Turkish prisons. By this time, pro-Armenia organizations had been active since the 1890s when Gladstone and Bryce made powerful statements. In 1915, the influential British Armenia Committee added new momentum to the older committees of the 1890s. Arnold Toynbee, Aneurin Williams, Noel Buxton, and Arthur G. Symonds joined the elder statesmen (Gladstone and Lord Bryce) in the Armenia movement. The Allies’ crucial statement, warning Turkey about crimes against Armenia, was made in May 1915 when the phrase “crimes against humanity” was coined.[9]Crimes against humanity: Historical evolution and contemporary application. Cambridge University Press. Page 88

By the end the WWI, and after Turkish capitulation and British occupation, a new Sultan and a parliament (under Young Turk) were formed where liberal party members who had opposed Sultan Hamid were now ready to speak out about the Armenian massacres in terms that would have them prosecuted in Turkey today. Mustapha Arif, the new Minister of the Interior, said, ‘Unfortunately, those who were our leaders during the war have applied the law of deportation in a manner that would rival the most bloodthirsty bandits. They decided to exterminate the Armenians, and they were exterminated.’ The new President of the Senate decaled that the mass killing of Armenians had been ‘officially’ approved.

[Note]: For the newly formed Ottoman government agreeing to prosecute previous Ottoman officials for war crimes seems hard to believe. Such a move clearly incriminated the wartime government as a perpetrator of atrocities against the Armenians. This willingness to accept culpability for the killings did not last long and today cannot be found in any official history of the war in Turkey. Had Mustapha Arif said these words today he would be prosecuted under Article 301 [10]https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur44/003/2006/en/ of the penal code for “insulting Turkishness”.

The court convicted Kemal Bey and his police chief of ‘crimes against humanity and civilisation’ because they “were premeditatedly, with intent, murdered, after the men had had their hands tied behind their backs … Nor did they make any attempt to prevent further killings … Moslem supreme justice considers these events as murder, pillage, robbery and crimes of enormous magnitude“. Talaat, Enver and Cemal were tried in absentia.

[Note]: The real issue with the Constantinople trials is that the transcript has mysteriously vanished, together with much of the prosecution evidence gathered by the two inquiries.

In mid-1919, agitated by the indecisiveness of the Constantinople trials and troubled that rising nationalism would soon put an end to them, Britain, jointly with other nations, seized sixty-eight prisoners who were awaiting trial. Most of the prisoners were suspected of involvement in the Armenian massacres and were shipped to a military prison in Malta, which was then under British colonial rule. For the next two years, they were held indefinitely. The UK government sought the support of its allies to set up an international court to try them for the mass murder of the Armenians, but to no avail, despite opposition from the US.

However, the Young Turk used the trial as a cunning mechanism to gain an advantage at Versailles. The trials lingered and eventually got delayed, eventually releasing the rest of the indictees. Afterward, the nationalist movement formed under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk stepped in and closed the tribunal down. It was during this time that Turkey came so close to facing its past in addressing its own guilt for crimes against humanity that would today count as convictions for genocide.

It is worth noting that the British Empire provided the blueprint for how the international community responded to charges of “crimes against humanity” against the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, more recent UK governments’ description of these events as no more than a ‘tragedy’ would have astonished the British leaders of that government in 1915 and during the post-war peace conferences.

In 1999, the UK government’s Foreign Office had decided that because Turkey was ‘neuralgic’ on the subject, the country was too commercially and politically important to upset by speaking out the truth. As one note to the Foreign Secretary put it, regarding the government’s equivocal position: ‘HMG is open to criticism in terms of the ethical dimension. But given the importance of our relations (political, strategic and commercial) with Turkey … the current line is the only feasible option‘ [11]Memorandum from the FCO Eastern Department to Minister Joyce Quin and others, 12 April 1999, Subject title: House of Lords un-starred question 14 April: Baroness Cox, Armenian Genocide.

By this time, Britain was recognized as the Middle East’s primary watchdog of minority interests. Humanitarian, civic, church, and missionary organizations attested that the Armenian massacres constituted what Bryce [12]Viscount Bryce. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. had labelled a premeditated, politically motivated offence. International channels recognized it today as state-sponsored terror against a people marked as an internal enemy. While the Ottoman government claimed that Armenians had conspired against the empire during the war, which justified the slaughter, it could produce little evidence to support these claims.

The British Empire spearheaded war crimes prosecutions after the war. At this time, the US role was more passive, taking an arms-length approach to engaging the Ottoman Empire. Britain took the opportunity to marginalize France, its ally in the Mediterranean, and set the terms of the postwar settlement. “Practically, the whole of the forces employed against Turkey were British forces,” the Prime Minister Lloyd George told his cabinet the week before negotiations began at Mudros. The PM claimed to have committed half a million troops to support the effort and felt justified in determining the Allied course of action with Turkey.

Ultimately, attempts to bring Turkish war criminals to justice for The Armenian Genocide were entangled with imperial politics and complex power balances.. Postwar reactions to and the subsequent politicization of the Armenian question were part of an imperial framework that eventually undermined attempts to prosecute perpetrators of these war crimes.

[to be continued]