MARCH2007

Interesting Notes on International Law origins..............

HISTORY: where did these chapters come from - does anybody know?

Chapter 6
Manipulative Diplomacy
Supplanting the Ideals of
Humanitarian Intervention

The European interventions historically hinged upon a modicum of consensus among the Great Powers. Until the 1878 Berlin Treaty, the unified pressure of England and Russia, the dominant Powers in the Concert of Europe, could induce, if not compel, Turkey to submit to some degree of
intervention by the Powers. ¹ However, this line of cooperation was not exclusive of rivalries on many other levels; nor were these interventions purely "humanitarian." ² But the Treaty of Berlin ushered in a period of increasingly acute distrust between Russia and England, thus ensuring the gradual collapse of the Concert of Europe. The necessity of cooperation among the Powers, and the ever-present suspicion of ulterior motives, are limitations inherent in the principle of multilateral intervention, whether humanitarian or not.

The Armenian Question as a Pawn in British Party Politics. The Sway of a Moral Dilemma

These limitations became distinct liabilities for the Armenians, as Euro-pean concern for Turkey's implementation of Article 61 of the Berlin Treaty lessened and eventually evaporated in the face of the Anglo-Russian rivalry and mutual suspicion. The rivalries found expression in the British challenge to the provisions of Article 16 of the San Stefano Treaty, in which Russia had acquired the right to continue to occupy the eastern provinces of Turkey, which they had conquered through the 1877-1878Russo-Turkish War, until Turkey had carried out the reforms it had promised. Considering the presence of Russian troops in that region a threat to British colonial interests in India, Disraeli went through the motions of preliminary mobilization to signal to Russia his intent to wage war, if necessary, to force Russian withdrawal. This British part due to the Cyprus Convention signed on June 4, 1878, i.e., just before the convening of the Berlin Congress, by England and Turkey. Article 1 of that Convention committed England to pursue the matter of Armenian reforms ("the Sultan promises to England to introduce necessary reforms....................

Chapter 7
The Impotence of Discordant Diplomacy: The Disconnective Vulnerabilities of the Armenians
Factors Handicapping the Armenian Quest for Relief

I ndeed, there was no problem for securing the means needed for the creation of an Armenian movement of insurrection as suggested by the Armenian Patriarch (ch. 4, n. 13) but plenty of problems in terms of its outcome. This is the area by which the Eastern and Armenian Questions
differ from one another. It reflects the difference between the experience of ultimate national redemption at the end of a series of national disasters on the one hand, and a series of incremental disasters in the absence of a redemptive end result on the other. In trying to explain this difference in the fates of the Balkan nationalities and the Armenians, the following considerations deserve attention.

The Armenians' failure to achieve the goal of national emancipation attained by other non-Muslim nationalities under Ottoman rule was a direct result of their lack of tutelage and active sponsorship by any of the European Powers. The Slavic nationalities -- the Serbs, the Bulgars, and the Montenegrins -- enjoyed Russian guardianship because of their ties of racial and ethnic kinship. Religious ties through the Eastern Orthodox Church account for the Russian guardianship of the Greeks and the Rumanians of Wallachia. The French, for their part, virtually rescued the Catholic Maronites of Lebanon by invading Lebanon and compelling the Turks to give the Maronites limited autonomy. The Armenians, however, did not enjoy sufficient religious or ethnic bonds with any European power to warrant similar treatment --

Chapter 8
The Era of the
Abdul Hamit Massacres

The European drive to force reforms and the Turkish resistance to legal- political change set the stage for an internal Turkish response to the esca- lation of the Turko-Armenian conflict. In this clash, the disjunctiveness of public law and customary law described above deteriorated into a sharp conflict between the two legal domains. Taking the series of enacted reforms seriously, the Armenians pressed for their actual implementation as a matter of legal entitlement. The Turks, however, relied on their com- mon law claims of traditional superordination. The result was that a new emphasis was placed on superordination, the dynamics of which were such as to bring into acute relief the forces of oppression implicit in such superordination. In response to Armenian clamors for equality and other ancillary rights, the dominant group set out to exercise its institutional- ized power by applying that power as force. Massacres are, however, by-products of the application of a level of force that has crossed the thresholds of oppression and entered into the fulcrum of repression. The crossing of such thresholds are, as a rule, contingent upon the onset of
acute crises in the relationships between the superordinate and subordinate parties. The eruption of such a contest is often symptomatic of the undercurrent operation of latent tensions pressing for outlets or vehicles to surface and to exert themselves. In the context of violent international conflicts, this social psychological mechanism is described as a precipitating factor. ..........................

A Note on the Limitations of International Law Relative to
the Problem of Impunity

Although the Armenian massacres preceding World War I were significant in many respects, they underscored two especially important facts. First, the massacres were not subjected to the test of criminal proceedings, either nationally or internationally; the resulting impunity accorded the perpetrators became a form of negative reward. Second, no deterrence materialized in anticipation of the genocide of 1915. Current international law on genocide revolves around these twin principles of prevention and punishment. The examination of the special case of the Armenian Genocide, in which both of these principles failed to operate, brings into question the adequacy of international law and the efficacy of international efforts to deter genocide.

The classification of genocide as a crime under international law in the U.N. Convention Against Genocide poses a number of difficulties in current international jurisprudence, where the principle of state sovereignty remains powerful. While a variety of new principles, doctrines, conventions, and
covenants have emerged in the post-Nuremberg period and provided some help in this area, these difficulties remain substantial. Specifically, some of the obstacles to countering genocide under international law include: a) The fact that international law has been largely confined to the level of declaratory principles. As Cardozo explained: "International law...has at times...a twilight existence during which it is hardly distinguishable from morality or justice..................................

Chapter 14
The Implementation
of the Genocide

A lleging treasonable acts, separatism, and other assorted acts by the Armenians as a national minority, the Ottoman authorities ordered, for national security reasons, the wholesale deportation of the Armenian population of the empire's eastern and southeastern provinces. This act resulted from a concerted drive by the military authorities, in collusion with the Central Committee of the Ittihad party, to divest Anatolia of its Armenian population under cover of the war. The drive was linked to a protracted deliberative process in which were involved the highest organs of the party, the military, and Interior ministry, and national security authorities. In a major, top secret conference a concrete blueprint was hammered out to serve as a general guideline for the benefit of officials and their party overseers in the interior who were charged with the execution of the genocide scheme. The conference was attended by five top decision makers and power-wielders of Turkey, namely, Talât, the two physician-politicians Sakir and Nazim, national security chief Canbolat, and the head of Department II (Intelligence) at the Ottoman General Headquarters, Colonel Seyfi. ¹ The scheme was subsequently extended to virtually all of the empire's Armenian population, including such far away cities as Bursa, Eskisehir, Konya, and the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. ²

The disguising of this order, ostensibly a wartime emergency measure of relocation, served to mask the planned execution of the Armenian population. The vast majority of the deportees perished through a variety of direct and indirect atrocities perpetrated during the deportations. As Winston Churchill wrote, In 1915 the Turkish government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous
general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor

The Revival of the Armenian Question and the New
Turko-German Partnership

T he Turkish impulse to consider the Armenians as an "internal foe" was only in part a reflection of the state of exigencies of the war animating that impulse. More critical in this respect was the political fallout of the revival of the Armenian Question in the period interposed between the first Balkan War and World War I. Furthermore, there was a new line-up among the Powers marking the re-emergence of Russia as the advocate of the Armenian cause which issued from that revival; it was supported in this new role, albeit passively, by England and France. The new alignment was this time free from the cryptic acts of sabotage Russia, and to a lesser degree France, were wont to indulge in during the turbulent era of Abdul Hamit, thereby frustrating England's effort to force the Sultan to carry out the reforms in the provinces.

That legacy of shielding Turkey from the presumed inroads of alien reforms, portending an encroachment on Turkish sovereignty, was borne by Emperor William II's Germany which for some time had been cultivating a new and invigorated partnership with the Young Turk regime. In
this new shift of alignments, the Turko-German common objective was to place constraints on Russian designs of reform which were suspected to be Russian imperial designs in disguise. The man entrusted with this task was Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim, the German Ambassador to Turkey. In the unending chain of ironies, characteristic of the vicissitudes and frailties of diplomacy, Russia was now being administered the same dose of frustration it had administered to England in the 1894-96 period, especially when Salisbury was in office several times during that period.

Allied Attempts
at Retributive Justice

A s World War I ended, the Allies focused attention on the task of punishment for the war crimes committed against the Armenians. At first, the Allies attempted to apply principles of international law to the perpetrators of the massacres. The initial impulse to seek justice, however, faded in the months after the war and eventually gave way to political expediency. The Turkish government's attempts to bring its own nationals to justice also faltered. The rise of nationalism, and the Turkish populace's increasingly defiant attitude toward the Allies, weakened the government's resolve in its quest for justice. This weakened resolve and the Allies' own waning interest hampered the efforts of prosecution.

When Turkey signed the Armistice on October 30, 1918, it lay at the mercy of the European Allies. Having declared war against Turkey only in April 1917, the United States did not at that time maintain a belligerent status toward Turkey, and could, therefore, not participate in the issuance of the May 24 declaration by the Entente Powers. Churchill described Turkey as being "under the spell of defeat, and of deserved defeat." ¹ Similarly, British Foreign Minister Curzon denounced Turkey as "a culprit awaiting sentence." ² Andrew Ryan, a dragoman and a political-
legal officer at the British High Commission in the Ottoman capital, describes the wariness of the Turks in the earlier part of the Armistice, "so wary that many would have welcomed a (peace) settlement on any terms." ³ Turkey's "culpability," in Allied eyes, involved mainly war crimes and crimes against her own citizens. The Allies, pursuant to their warning on May 24, 1915, initiated criminal proceedings against Turkish officials suspected of complicity in the Armenian massacres.

Chapter 21

The Saliency
of Some of the Determinants
of the Armenian Genocide

T his study essentially focused on the historical, political, and legal aspects of the Armenian genocide to emphasize the convergence and interplay in the incidence of that genocide of a complex web of factors. As a result, the study acquired a degree of comprehensiveness which does not allow a brief and meaningful recapitulation; the very organization of the study does not lend itself to it. Nevertheless, it is worth trying to distill from it a few observations and thoughts to serve as possible connecting links to other studies focusing on other genocides. Such links are essential for venturing into the domain of comparative studies with a view to elaborating certain generalizations that transcend the limitations intrinsic to single-case studies and illuminate the universal features of genocide. Rather than delving into the overall comparative aspects of the
Armenian Genocide, however, this segment of the study will basically be confined to the depiction of those problems which revolve around the issues of prevention and punishment of genocide.

Throughout this study the Armenian genocide has been examined in the context of the Turko-Armenian conflict. Religious cleavages, despite official and other Turkish assertions to the contrary, were crucial in the origin and growth of that conflict. Claims of proverbial Ottoman liberality regarding the coexistence in the empire of a host of religious systems and creeds among the various ethnic groups of the empire are belied by the thin veil of tolerance with which the non-Muslim subjects and their religious institutions were treated. One may even speak of the disdain, if not the contempt, that multitudes of Turks felt towards them, the raia gâvurs, the "infidel" non-Muslim subjects. No society is free from stresses and strains arising from myriad conditions of interpersonal and intergroup conflicts. In the history of nationality conflicts of the Ottoman Empire, the slightest incident of such a conflict was more often than not a suitable opportunity....................