Ottoman History Podcast - The Economics of the Armenian Genocide in Aintab

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

with Ümit Kurt hosted by Sam Dolbee | What were the economic forces that drove the violence of the Armenian genocide? In this episode, historian Ümit Kurt speaks about his research on the role of property in the history of the dispossession and deportation of Aintab’s Armenian community. Despite archival silences, he reveals the central role of legal mechanisms and local propertied elites in these processes. In closing, he discusses the legacies of the “economics of genocide” into the present day, and how his research has been received.    « Click for More »

It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. Today's guest, Umit Kurt. I was in LA in 2015, so late Uncle Pagrat, he passed away recently. I used to call him Uncle. He wanted me to call him Uncle. His mother was born in Antep, and then they were saved by two Kurdish gendarmeries escorts, so they ended up in Aleppo, and then the family eventually ended up in Chile. In South America. Yes. So Uncle Pakrat insisted on me meeting his cousins in Glendale.

So we were there and they were very welcoming and then we started chatting in Turkish with an Eintab accent. His cousin, she said, you know, we have tons of documents in a basket. Do you want to see them? I said, okay. Wait, you said, okay, fine. Or you said, yes, of course I want to see this. Usually they brought title deeds.

I got so accustomed to it. And I thought maybe there will be another, you know, series, this list of a bunch of title deeds. That's why I wasn't that enthusiastic, actually. So she brought a huge box and then she just made it, just put it upside down and the whole grant was just covered by documents,

plethora of documents. So I was just trying to take a look at them, just going over not meticulously not cautiously not discreetly at all and then all of a sudden it was just you know blink of an eye i saw the name bang ottoman and it struck my attention right away i just pulled the document among the other you know piece papers. And then I saw a list of items. And then the more I got into details of the document, the more my eyes were growing, you know, just bigger and bigger. And are you alone in this room? Are you surrounded by all these family members?

I was surrounded by family members. People drinking tea. Exactly. Too much noise. People are drinking tea. Exactly. Too much noise. The document which I was looking for almost two and a half years in the Istanbul Prime Ministerial Archives, in the Nubarian Library, in Antalya, in Lebanon, in our main national archives,

in local libraries in Eintap and so forth. The document I was looking for was just standing in front of me. and so forth. The document I was looking for was just standing in front of me. Umit Kurt is a lecturer in the Center for Study of Violence and History Department at the University of Newcastle. His book, The Armenians of Ain Tub,

was published in 2021 with Harvard University Press. Oh, and that document he found in Glendale? It was a receipt of an auction of the household items of Sarkis Yakubyan upon his deportation in 1915. Here's Umit reading some of the items on that list. So Sarkis Yakubyan had a fes, too, you know this Ottoman hat. So it was sold to gendarmerie Alibey. Two vases with 30 kurush. Vessel, plate, yogurt container, nargile hat, small pot and vessel again, coffee mill,

water vessel, yellow tray, and pillows, child pillows. What can a receipt for the auction of a child's pilaf tell us about the economic violence of the genocide? Stay with us. What is Eintep like in the late 19th century? What are intercommunal relations like? To what extent should we be talking about distinct Armenian Muslim communities? Eintab had Muslim communities, Christian communities. The Christian communities basically refer to, first and foremost, Armenian.

Small number of Ottoman Jewsian small number of ottoman jews and small number of greek and some greeks from crete interestingly enough some jerseys kurdish communities turkoman tribes and arab tribes as well so they were settled both in the city center and the adjacent towns and the adjacent towns, and the villages especially. And the Armenians constitute the second major community of the whole city. And in comparison to eastern provinces or western Armenia, the neighborly relations or inter-communal relations were really peaceful, relatively speaking, for sure, at least until the 1880s and 1890s, you know, when the Armenian reform issue heightened in the international, also domestic levels, and the situation also got worse in Ain Top. You know, what was happening

in Istanbul found its reverberations and articulations in Ain Toptu, because the Hamidi massacres also took place in November 1895. But beforehand, I would say, without any reservation and hesitation, relationships were really good. There was no clear-cut segregation. People intermashed with one another. Of course, there were disagreements, there were debates, but at least we had enough political and public space to discuss these matters in a non-violent manner.

Armenians were economically, culturally, and educationally progressing so fast, flourishing so fast. And that created a kind of gap between the Muslim and the Christian communities, Armenians especially. And so many important occupations were exerted by Armenians, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers. In the local councils, Armenians were very active. In agricultural banks, for instance, they were like Armenian members and so forth. And also, especially the Armenian elites, the prominent members of the Eintab Armenian society, they had the co-fraternity with their counterparts in Europe and in the United States. And this co-fraternity was substantiate itself in commerce and trade. So that really created a great number of Armenian tradesmen,

Armenian businessmen, and the economic status of Armenians was really thriving. And that caused, in the first place, resentment among the Muslim communities. It reminded of them, it reminded of them you were behind okay and you can't keep the pace with them and that in certain political crisis moments this resentment transform itself into jealousy envy and in another critical political juncture or momentum, especially instability and the crisis when the state was in chaos and so forth, it found channels to express itself through violence. Right, and so in the book you talk about this in the 1890s, also in the post-1908 period, what this violence born of tension, born of inequality looks like.

We won't talk about that here. We'll let people look at the book for that. I wanted to shift forward at this point to 1915. I mean, most listeners will be familiar with the general contours of the deportations and massacres associated with the genocide. You tell this story, but throughout you emphasize the way that local actors within Eintop were implicated in the process. A lot of discussions of the genocide tend to focus on the question of who wrote the telegrams when, which is an approach that often has with it a top-down kind of conception of history.

How is what you're describing different than that? What makes Ain Tab different, the deportations and the mass atrocities which took place in other provinces, different deportations and the mass atrocities which took place in other provinces, especially Eastern Anatolia or Western Armenia, was that local elites, notables, Aintab gentry, I would say, they were much more enthusiastic, fervent, and zealot than the central actors. They were the ones who convinced Talat that these people also constitute security threat here. Okay. They are menace to us as well.

So you should deport them. Because Talat Pasha, who was the mastermind of not only genocide, that's quite well known. But I think he was the mastermind and brain of the whole deportation process, which was based on exact mathematics and statistics and the cold calculation. So vis-a-vis other provinces in Anatolia, Armenian deportation was carried out in Ain Tab quite late. So the first deportation convoy from Ain Tab was set out on August 1st, 1915. It was quite late. Because both in June and July, let alone May and April, Ayn Taw was not in the

deportation list of Talat Pasha. So, these Ayyans, the local elites, they were in economic competition with their Armenian counterparts, Armenian elites. And, by the way, they were like

brethren, neighbors. They knew each other pretty well. And some Muslim elites' children, for instance, they even sent their sons to Central Turkey College, for instance. Very few. And in the Central Turkey College, almost all students were Armenians and they were attending a school with Armenians.

On the eve of World War I, Almost all students were Armenians and they were attending a school with Armenians. On the eve of World War I, these economic and political elites, and most of them members of the Ayentap CUP club, they created the quote-unquote necessary atmosphere. They knitted knot by knot in the city, created this political climate for central actors in Istanbul to make a decision about the deportation. They fabricated news like Christians were raping Muslim women, Christians set fire to mosques. They fabricated all these mendacious news just to draw attention of the central actors or the central government to Ayintap. They did the same in marash they did the same in zaytun and kilis as well and especially the elites the gentry in kilis and ayin tab they were in collaboration these elites they even established committee and this committee was composed of prominent and leading figures of Aintab Muslim gentry.

And these people were making lists of Armenian well-off families. And they put each and every well-off families in the list to get deported in the first place from the city so that they would obtain their properties through auctions. And the state also bestowed some properties upon them down the road. In that sense, what makes Ayn Tap a distinctive case was the local elites play a pivotal role and more direct and active role to galvanize both social, political, public support for deportation, also convince the central government elites, CUP committee, you know, the key figures in the CUP committee, to include Aintab in the deportation list.

And it's in this context that Sarkis Yakubian was given the receipt for various pots, the nargile head, and the child's pillow that Umid saw in Glendale in 2015. pillow that Umid saw in Glendale in 2015. And it was key to Umid's unique emphasis on the genocide as an act of law as much as disorder. So everything was carried out, you know, in order. So they fulfill what the law required in that sense, okay? So Sarkis Jakobion received the list. And then, again, according to law, these properties will be sold out in auctions. And the revenue of the auctions was supposed to be deposited to his account. But it didn't happen, of course.

And so it was sold at auction before he was exactly exactly so and he was supposed to receive the revenue of this auction when he was in Aleppo or when he was I mean where he was resettled let's say quote unquote and we have barely any archival traces of this process? Not at all. That makes my book unique in that sense, you know, or original, if I would say. I spent like one and a half years to conduct my research

in Prime Minister Ottoman archives and Republican archives. The main documents I was looking for was the records of Abundant Property Commissions and Abundant Property Liquidation Commissions. So these commissions were established in more than 34 provinces in Asia Minor, in Anatolia. And this commission was composed of three members, three officers. The auction results and the records of these commissions had three copies, and also they had notebooks. And all these notebooks were kept by the Minister of Finance, by the head of these commissions, president of these commissions.

And one copy of all these records, notebooks, and everything was kept by the General Secretary of the Committee of Union and Progress. was kept by General Secretary of the Committee of Union and Progress. So, which means we are talking about more than 100 copies of only one Abundant Property Commission or Abundant Property Liquidation Commission. So, these documents, they are all available in the Ottoman archives. Over the course of one and a half year, each and every time when I was in the Ottoman archive, I asked this question to Fuat bay our fuat bay each and every time i asked fuat bay can i see the records or notebooks of abandoned property commissions he said they haven't been classified or cataloged yet he never said he never told it to me these documents didn't exist or what are you talking

about these documents didn't exist or we are not aware of them. We have no idea what you're talking about. And so he always said they haven't been cataloged. They haven't been classified yet. So it's impossible to be able to reach out this or they are inaccessible because if we acquire these documents, we can easily see how the state, Ottoman state, see how the state, Ottoman state, or the ruling government, CUP, used the properties of deported Armenians for what purposes, who were the holders of these properties, and you could also see the so-called legal aspect of all these plunder process, because there were plunder and looting in so many different provinces and districts as well. That was one thing. You know, there were open bazaars in many districts and many provinces. But there was also this administrative process, which was quintessential for me to indicate. One of the most striking details of many in the book to me was this bit about how at some point in 1916, four notables from Eintab are sent to Deir ez-Zor to inspect what is happening.

And the question is if the Armenians who were sent there are going to be able to come back. Do you know more about that trip? Is there detail about where they went, what they saw? The existence of this committee was first mentioned by Aramond Donjan in his file on Eintab, and Raymond Kevorkian, the North Bertha historian, he first mention and publish it in his monumental work. But I also look at numerous memoirs written by Armenian survivors, genocide survivors from Aintab, native Aintab seas. So I try to follow the traces of this trip, this commission. So these four members, they were quite well-known CUP members. They were well-known Muslim Aintab families. They were, by the way, very active during the Young Turk Revolution as well. They were the

proponents of liberty, fraternity, and justice. And they were proponents of the peace and calmness during the Adana massacres in April 1909, which didn't happen in Ayintap, for instance. There was the restraint of violence became the upper hand in the city. So these members were mentioned in Aramandonyan file on Ayintap, and they took a train. They got the permission from Cemal Pasha, actually Fahri Pasha, Cemal Pasha's camp date. They got the permission, they took a train,

and then especially these well-off Armenian families who ended up in Deir ez-Zor, they were Protestant Armenian families. And Protestant Armenians from Ain Top were deported in late 1915, let's say. What makes

this story also very distinctive is that these elites, Muslim elites, they know the information. They have the know-how to follow them, which the central government had no idea. They were deprived of that kind of information. So local elites in that sense were also helping them. So they ended up in Aleppo and they were received by Aleppo general secretary Cemal Bey and Cemal Bey took them all the way to their door from Aleppo and because they needed Cemal because they would have been exposed to you know some attacks from the Circassian or

Caucasian also Chetes on the brigand dates because these these bands or brigand they were not exerting violence towards only towards the Armenians also you know anyone so they were under protection of the central committee of CUP so as you have stated they just wanted to make sure that these Protestant families like Hrant Sulahyan, Sarkis Karachiyan, they were in destitute. It was almost unlikely for them to be able to return. And by the way, the district governor of Deir ez-Zor was just replaced with Salih Zeki, who was one of the extremists and the harsh district governor, Sal salih zeki and then they made sure that they won't be able to return and then they realized you can come back and start

auction processes plunder and looting were already taking place anyway plunder and looting were usually for ordinary Muslims, like small items, because you also need their manpower, their social support, and etc. But the big chunk of the properties, some valuable items, immobile properties, lands, pistachio trees, vineyards, they were like for the Eintracht gentry. This is how this process went through. One of the terms that you use and that I think is distinctive of your work is the economics of genocide. Could you talk about what you mean by that? In the field of genocide studies, Armenian genocide studies particularly, when we talk about genocide, we always focus on the physical violent aspect of it.

We look at the death toll, we look at the number of deaths. We look at the death toll, we look at the number of deaths, we look at the graphic violence, and of course, it is one of the indispensable defining characters of the notion of genocide, which was coined by Raphael Lemkin. Genocide could also be executed or carried out by the perpetrators

through economic ways, and even legal ways let's say bureaucratic ways administrative ways an economy was also you know economic violence actually goes hand in hand with these two processes as well therefore i just wanted to divert our conventional attention from physical violence aspect of genocide to economics. This scholarly propensity is quite rampant in the field of Holocaust, in other collective violence incidents like, you know, Rwandan genocide, and in Cambodia, Indonesia, and etc. But I think this economic violent aspect of Armenian genocide has been rather understudied so far. I intend to revisit also our understanding of the notion of genocide.

And I also wanted to show that genocide cannot be merely executed by sheer violence. So plunder, expropriation, each and every transaction of this abundant property liquidation commissions was violence. It was violence, symbolically, psychologically, and economically. It seems like that cross-class coalition of the elites and the lower classes. Exactly. Plunder is going hand-in-hand with large-scale expropriation of pistachio gro classes. Exactly. Plunder is going hand in hand with large-scale expropriation of pistachio.

Exactly. What you're saying is extremely important because in this work, I really wanted to show that the foundation of modern Turkish nation-state cannot be grasped without taking into account the notion of class. This is also tied to capital accumulation,

but the notion of class has been really eclipsed in late capital accumulation, but the notion of class has been really in eclipse in late Ottoman studies or in the studies of early republican period. So I wanted to also show that this economic classes in so many different provinces in Anatolia, they came into existence through the outcomes of this economic violence. So there's a map in the book of property in the former Armenian quarter of Antab. And then there's a list of each original owner

and each present day owner. That took me back to 10 years ago almost. I just want to say this is one of those things that I see in a book and I'm just stunned by. Because it's two pages. Only two pages. It's two pages. I was. Because it's two pages. Only two pages. It's two pages. I was allowed to print only two pages.

It's two pages. But how much work had to go into something as seemingly simple as this to map out whose building was whose and who owns it now? I wonder if you could talk about what you see when you see these images uh the process of putting this together absolutely um actually i owe a lot to local historian murat uchenna for making this list and drawing this this map and everything i just remember when we uh used to take a walk in the Armenian quarter of the city, where I could barely go now because I'm really afraid now.

And Murat, Avi and I used to take a long walk, try to pinpoint and locate every single place, house, coffee shop, church. We tried to also pinpoint who was the first owner, second owner, owner the whole trajectory you know and and the current owner as well first of all i exploited local sources a lot in order to come up with such such a map and local turkish sources in local libraries in Gaziantep and I use Armenian memoirs a lot because some survivors, Vero Brogner in Armenian genocide survivors

they ended up in Lebanon and Aleppo as you know Beirut, they used to pay Antep a visit in 50s and 60s and they wrote diaries and they jot down too many notes and then after 10 years they published them in the form of memoirs. I kind of used all of them thanks to Armenian National Library based in Yerevan and what I did was to as I said pinpoint each and every location and i came up with 456 places but my editor

she only let me let me publish like 46 or 50 of the items because of pagination issue and i uh i used autocad you know this very old computer program. So in this program, I took the Kevork Avedis Sarafyan's Ainzap map, which he drew in 1951 in his Batmucin Ain Tevihayot Hushamadian source. I took this map as a reference because it was quite convenient

and to the point and accurate and exact, I would say. So I used that map and I pinpointed the locations and I put each and every location into this map. Because in Kevorkavedi-Sarafyan's map, you could see the Armenian quarter, Muslim quarter, and also the Armenian graveyards and everything, cemeteries as well. So it was quite, that sense beneficial for me to use that map. And I pinpointed 456 locations, the whole trajectory of each and every location, which I came up with 456 first owner, second owner, third owner, and the current owner,

all the way leading up to present time. And this shows how the property in question has been changed hence over the course of time. I was going to ask you, given the fact that it's been two and a half years since this book was published, what the reception's been like. You also mentioned just now that you feel kind of scared to walk around.

Your reception in the city well in general i'm interested in it but i'm also interested in that specific point that you just you know i start working in this subject matter in 2010 and after four years i start publishing. Usually my publications center around the violent, physical violent aspect of this whole story. I wrote about how deportation took place, how massacres were carried out, who were the perpetrators. And of course I made publications in Turkish too. And I was already in the blacklist of the government, of the state. And also I was in a blacklist by the Antep Society as well. What impact do you think that had?

Like, how did that manifest? That did not manifest actually violently or negatively. I didn't receive any threat. I didn't receive any kind of warning or whatever. I used to go to our main quarter of the city, Kuwait until 2014 to even 2015. I used to go to Papirist Cafe where all my stories started

as I wrote in the foreword of the book. Owner of the Papirist Cafe, you know, he was like, oh, our our hyena is here so the traitor is here he was making fun of me because in his eyes or in their eyes i was harmless when i was riding on violin but when the book was out in may 2021 maybe i was stupid enough to give a couple of interviews in Turkish. And then they pick it up. And when I start writing and talking about economic aspect of all this story, plunder, expropriation, and also this list, I was giving names, I was giving locations, they were all definite, exact, you know, and real concrete people definite exact, you know, and then in real concrete people

Concrete, you know life stories when I start digging in this when I start writing about economics of violence or Economics of genocide for the first time over the course of 10 years of my research. I felt terrified because Once the book was out it was like after almost a year i paid my family a visit in untapped and a friend of mine was there he was american and he wanted to meet with me in papyrus cafe because he wanted to see there he knew my he knew my story i said man let's not go there let's let's let's meet up in a different place he insists and i happened to

accept it i wasn't intimidated i wasn't threatened or whatever but i i didn't feel comfortable i wasn't feeling comfortable anyway i stopped by there when i just set my foot into the place and the owner the same guy who was making fun of me mocking with me he gave me an attitude he gave me this look you know and this look made me feel man you are not wanted here actually as a historian it was quite an experience you know because all my stories started in this place because this place was never a location or space for me. You know, it was kind of an abstract entity which I loaded, I gave a lot of meanings. And also when I was in this particular place, because this place was important for me from different aspects as well,

I never felt I was intimidated or they didn't want me here. I always felt comfortable, okay? But in this instance, when I was there and when I received that kind of treatment and then I realized I came back to the story, you know, the whole story. I came back to this place where the whole story, you know, started for me over there. You know, I was just a young person and would-be historian. And I came back to the same place like a criminal. Like I really felt I did something wrong or I committed a crime. That was the feeling I had. It was like a

location of criminal for me not the place where my whole story started my own Armenian question has started it was no longer the place like that once the book was out I received a couple of emails from the sons or daughters of the current property owners in the city. Most of them, by the way, are living in the United States. I received just a couple of... I wouldn't say that it was threatening, but it was a nice email. So there were a lot of swears and, you know, I kind of ignored them. But I...

And in the email, it was so interesting. They were telling me with some bad words, we purchased this, we bought this place. It was the amount we gave. He or she, he didn't have to give me this information, okay? I'm not a titled officer or so, but it's like they were trying to prove that they were not stealing anything they were not thieves they are right they are right but that's not the point

i'm not accusing of them like stealing someone else property but the property you have or or your father or your grandfather have had that kind of history. That's Umit Kurt. His book, The Armenians of Eintab, The Economics of Genocide, is out now with Harvard University Press. Thank you so much. So finally we made it. And always I'm happy to do it with you. Thanks for the great questions. Thank you, Amit. Thanks for writing this book. Thank you.

Of course, as always, you can find more information, including a bibliography, on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. That's it for this episode. Until next time, take care.