Remembering genocide.(The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response)(Book Review)

The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, by Peter Balakian (HarperCollins, 496 pp., $26.95)

THE fate of the Armenian people has been as cruel as any. Between 1890 and 1915, in a series of increasingly bloody convulsions, the Ottoman Turks came close to exterminating the Armenians then in their empire. The Turks resorted to every brutality, including death marches and deportation, at the same time robbing their victims of everything. A few hundred thousand Armenians survived in exile, but somewhere in the order of 1.5 million were murdered. This attempted genocide introduced the 20th century of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.

At first glance, the atrocity seems to exemplify the cautionary wisdom that man is a wolf to man, as the Romans were the first to say. More profoundly, the novel ideology of nationalism was sweeping in from Europe to disrupt the settled life of the Ottoman Empire, and call into question the identity of all its peoples. The empire had long been pluralist, in its unique manner. Muslims were of course supreme, and the ruling sultan spoke for them. But minorities had their own communal structures to safeguard ethnic identity and religious faith. Christian though they were, the Armenians had been particularly successful under this ramshackle system, proud to be known as "the loyal community," industrious and prospering.

Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Romanians were among the other Christian communities accustomed to Ottoman pluralism. These peoples all had an original country they could think of as their own. An unusual coalition in the West of nationalist agitators, romantics, and Christian missionaries incited them to rebel against the Ottomans. Successive wars of liberation gave them their independence.

Armenians joined the queue of would-be nations late in the day. Scattered throughout Turkey, they had no territory there that they could call their own. Half the nation or more lived in historic Armenia, on the far side of the Russian border as subjects of the czar. Imitating the European model, Armenian intellectuals formed secret societies, and they were willing to practice terror in pursuit of their national aims. The reigning sultan, Abdul Hamid, was limited but crafty. To him, the Armenians were Christian wreckers and agents of foreign powers, and he was determined to stop them by whatever means he could and preserve the dwindling empire. Overthrowing the sultan in 1909, the Young Turks explosively combined old-style Muslim fanaticism and new-style nationalism.

Peter Balakian gives a thoroughly researched and sober account of the atrocities as they unfolded. The Armenians were of course directly the victims of the Turks and in particular the Kurds among whom they had lived closely. Indirectly, however, they were victims of their own intellectuals. How were law-abiding and loyal people of their sort to defend themselves against those passionately working to turn them into the fodder of a nationalist and revolutionary cause? Acts of terrorism by a small number of Armenians enraged the Turks; then, early in World War I, a volunteer division of Armenians in Russian uniform invaded Turkey outright. The Young Turks reacted with a fatal and indefensible step, the final solution of genocide. In the death throes of the Ottoman Empire, Armenian nationalism had proved suicidal.

Throughout the years of this festering crisis, liberals of all sorts, from England's Gladstone and Lord Bryce to America's Julia Ward Howe and Clara Barton, had taken up the Armenian cause. Balakian gives a particularly valuable and absorbing account of this early example of lobbying for human rights. For the first time the phrase "crimes against ...