ABSTRACT
“Saving the Empire, Killing Its Subjects” explores collective violence and forced population displacement as the essential precondition in the formation of demographically homogeneous nation-states. While populated by a heterogeneous mix of both Muslim (Arabs, Kurds, Turks etc.) and non-Muslim populations (Armenians, Syriacs, Yezidis etc.) until the early 20th century, policies of systematic persecution and, ultimately, genocide against the empire’s Armenian and Syriac populations turned the region into an almost exclusively Muslim-populated geography. Based on a thorough reading of archive material as well as secondary sources, this chapter seeks to capture the complex interaction of different motives: ranging from questions of German-Ottoman war interests and personal vengeance among high-ranking members of the Young Turkish regime (both within ittihad ve terraki and teşkilat-i mahsusa) to questions of socio-economic opportunism and religious fanaticism in the Kurdish-populated periphery. Not as a singular act of unprecedented “Turkish barbarity” but instead seen in the wider context of preceding acts of mass expulsion and massacre, it establishes a dialogue between the Armenian genocide (1915) and previous acts of mass expulsion and massacre committed by Tsarist Russia against a mix of indigenous Muslim populations of the Northern Caucasus (1864–1867) known as the Circassians. While recognizing a distinct difference in terms of scope and systematization, this chapter argues that in both cases an increasingly degenerating political environment triggered a fatal process of dehumanization and immoral rationalization in which populations were divided up based on their linguistic and religious markers into loyal and disloyal collectives.
