Armenieninfo.net

Matthias Bjørnlund

All tell the same story and bear the same scars: their men were all killed on the first days’ march from their cities, after which the women and girls were constantly robbed of their money, bedding, clothing, and beaten, criminally abused and abducted along the way. Their guards forced them to pay even for drinking from the springs along the way and were their worst abusers but also allowed the baser element in every village through which they passed to abduct the girls and women and abuse them. We were not only told these things but the same things occurred right here in our own city before our very eyes and openly on the streets.1

Introduction

 The above quote, taken from a letter written 6 August 1915 by F. H. Leslie, US missionary in the Ottoman city of Urfa, to US Consul Jesse B. Jackson in Aleppo, encapsulates much of what was the Armenian genocide – the killing of 1–1.5 million Ottoman Armenians during World War I – including the fundamental gendered aspect of this event. But when it comes to massive extermination campaigns like the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan genocide, gendered aspects have usually been downplayed in scholarly works. This is perhaps understandable considering the all-encompassing nature of what has rightly been called the total genocides of the past century.2 The Armenian genocide was the almost completely successful attempt by the Young Turk dictatorship (also known as the Committee of Union and Progress, CUP) at ‘cleansing’ from Anatolian soil not only the approximately 2 million Ottoman Armenians, but also other mainly Christian nationalities like the Ottoman Greeks and Assyrians, and it was usually secured through a number of methods of direct and indirect killings: massacres, drownings, death marches under the guise of relocations, imposed starvation and diseases, etc.3

So, when the ultimate goal of the perpetrators is to secure the disappearance of an entire group – men, women, and children – subjects like sexual abuse, or whether or to what extent factors like gender or age played a role in selecting the victims, may seem of secondary importance. Nevertheless, history shows that males and females have often been affected by genocide in quite different ways, whether as victims or as perpetrators, and focusing on aspects such as gender is important if one seeks to fully understand the modes, motives, dynamics, and consequences of genocide and other mass crimes.4 This study attempts to examine gendered aspects of the Armenian genocide, in particular the ways Ottoman Armenian females were targeted for physical destruction, sexual abuse, slavery, and/or forced assimilation. As the particular fate of the Armenian females in this period has been analyzed in only a few scholarly works,5 and because this fate is today little known by non-Armenians and non-specialists in the field of genocide studies, the aim is also to help create a larger basis for further discussion of this event, as well as for comparison of gendered aspects of the Armenian genocide with similar aspects of similar historical events; that is, to tentatively bring this material into a wider context of sexual violence during war and genocide.

Gender and the Armenian genocide: An overview

Organized, gender-selective mass killing – sometimes termed gendercide – is a common feature of war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and has in such situations of conflict primarily targeted men through history, especially younger ‘battle-age’ men.6 These mass killings have either been seen as a goal in itself – the destruction of real or imagined opposition and/or reproductive powers and group coherence, a recent case in point being the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys7 – or as a more or less distinctivepart of a more thorough genocidal design – what Adam Jones calls ‘root-and-branch extermination’.8 The latter applies to the Armenian genocide, which was executed as what one might call two sequential, relatively distinct, but interconnected gendercides within the framework of a larger exterminatory campaign. Thus, the first victims of the Armenian genocide were almost exclusively men: the approximately 200,000 Armenian soldiers fighting in the Ottoman army who, from the beginning of 1915, were disarmed and massacred or worked to death in large numbers, followed by politicians, religious leaders, and other members of the Armenian elite who were arrested, deported, often tortured, and killed from the spring of that same year. They, in turn, were followed by those of the remaining men and older boys who had not managed to hide or escape and were massacred as a prelude to, or in the early stages of, the deportations – the death marches. Some men and older boys managed to stay alive for at least a period of time on these marches through bribery or by disguising themselves as women.9

There could be important similarities between the ways male and female Armenian victims were treated, especially near the Caucasian frontline where massacres tended to be total and thus less genderselective. And, as during the Bosnian genocide,10 the Rwandan genocide, 11 the Japanese occupation of South-East Asia during WWII,12 and at times during the 1914 German invasion of Belgium and France,13 both males and females were from early on often subjected to sexually charged mutilations as part of what seems to be humiliating or dehumanizing rituals connected to the actual killings, perhaps aimed at showing the omnipotence of the perpetrators and the impotence of the victims. In late May 1915, an American missionary in Harput, Henry H. Riggs, encountered the bodies of two almost naked elderly Armenian men, noting that they . . . were laid in such a position as to expose their persons to the ridicule of passers by, and on the abdomen of each was cast a large stone. They had evidently been murdered there at the noon hour and then the brutal guards had stopped to leave behind them the signs not only of violence but of mockery and insult.14

According to a German source, [f]or a whole month [during the summer of 1915, MB] corpses were observed floating down the River Euphrates nearly every day, often in batches of from two to six corpses bound together. The male corpses are in many cases hideously mutilated (sexual organs cut off, and so on), the female corpses are ripped open.15 Armenian refugees from Ottoman-occupied parts of Persia reported in early 1915 that [t]he 750 Armenians that have reached Salmast from Urmia are completely stripped, the women, abducted. In Dilman there is also the same amount of murdered Armenians, whose martyrdom was carried out in the most horrific manner. They cut off the feet of living people with saws, they cut their wrists in the same way, they cut noses, cheeks, and lips off with scissors. They burned those parts of the body which are most sensitive. Both the elderly and the young were killed by frightful tortures, without regard to gender. We saw the traces of boundless brutality, glowing skewers were run through the genitals of both women and men, and they were put to death this way.16