31. Andrew Mango, Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1999), p. 451.

CHAPTER 10: AFTERMATH AND ATATURK

1. Also see chapter 9, p. 240, n. 8 re: the Prometheus Pact.

2. Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), pp. 119–20.

3. See Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy, pp. 274, 275; also John A. DeNovo, American Interests and Policies in the Middle East: 1900–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), pp. 160, 161.

4. Colby Chester, “Turkey Reinterpreted,” Current History 16 (April–September 1922): 344.

5. The following narrative is from Anthony Slide’s introduction to his book Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997), pp. 1–18.

6. Aurora Mardiganian, Ravished Armenia: The Story of Aurora Mardiganian, the Christian Girl Who Lived Through the Great Massacres (New York: Kingfield Press, 1919).

7. See Edward Minasian, “The Forty Years of Musa Dagh: The Film That Was Denied,” Journal of Armenian Studies 3, nos. 1–2 (1986–87): 63–73.

8. Pressure on media companies and the United States government continues to this day. In 1988, three weeks before Ted Bogosian’s documentary An Armenian Journey was to be broadcast on PBS stations across the United States, Turkey began a concerted campaign to block the broadcast by lobbying the State Department and pressuring local PBS stations. As a result, some stations did not air the program. Some of the few that did received death and bomb threats (for example, WGBH in Boston and KCET in Los Angeles).

9. By 1910, the most significant armaments were the “fast battleship” and the “super-dreadnought.” “Super-dreadnought” battleships, weighing over twenty thousand tons, were the atomic bomb of their day, the ultimate weapon. Each ship was very expensive to produce but seemed worth the expenditure because a super-dreadnought anchored in the harbor of any major city would ensure control of that city. Super-dreadnoughts, as opposed to conventional coal-fueled battleships, could not run without oil. Even for conventional warships, oil packed more energy per ton. Thus an oil-burning ship had a “40 per cent larger radius of action.” Oil-fueled ships also had greater speed. Oil was much more easily moved and stored than coal and, even more important, was more easily injected into the engines. Half as many human stokers were necessary for smooth operation. The ship could be refueled “with the greatest of ease” at sea. Finally, oil didn’t smoke like coal when it burned, maintaining invisibility of the ship on the horizon. See Anton Mohr, The Oil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926), p. 114.

10. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918 (New York: Free Press, 2005), pp. 74–76.

11. Churchill quoted in Stephen Kinzer, Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future (New York: Times Books, 2010), p. 26.

12. See “Memoirs of Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian with Particular Relation to the Origins and Foundation of the Iraq Petroleum Company Limited,” testimony before the U.S. Congress, 1945, National Archives, Washington, DC. Also see Edwin Black, British Petroleum and the Redline Agreement: The West’s Secret Pact to Get Mideast Oil (Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2011).

13. The Turkish Petroleum Company, which would later morph into the Iraq Petroleum Company, was substantially owned by the National Bank of Turkey. The National Bank of Turkey featured a board of directors in 1908 composed of both high-ranking CUP members and Armenians. This board would include the Armenian Egyptian Nubar Pasha and a “Mr. Essyan” as well as Said Halim and Djemal Pasha. See Marian Kent, Moguls and Mandarins: Oil, Imperialism and the Middle East in British Foreign Policy, 1900–1940 (1993; New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 90 n. 8.

14. See Ralph Hewins, Mr. Five Per Cent: The Story of Calouste Gulbenkian (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1958), appendix, p. 259. Gulbenkian’s wife, Nvart, was related to Nubar.

15. Edwin Black, British Petroleum and the Red Line Agreement: The West’s Secret Pact to Get Mideast Oil (Oshkosh, WI: Dialog, 2011), p. 153. See also my discussion in chapter 6 implicating Curzon in a contract on Enver Pasha’s life.

16. See Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003).

17. As quoted in an essay by Joshua Binus on the Oregon Historical Society website: http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/historical_records/dspDocument.cfm?doc_ID=c5f74925-d75d-54f1-e441ea279f7a9402.

18. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 240.

19. Early in his career as leader of the new Republic of Turkey, Kemal did publicly denounce the genocide, calling it a “scandal” and a “lowly act.” See Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akcam, Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).

20. The Foundations Law of 1935 and other laws pertaining to taxes, ownership of property, and inheritance are complex and barely investigated aspects of the Ottoman/Turkish institutional structure. “Foundations” were a significant part of that structure. The idea was that certain facets of social life, such as bathhouses, charitable institutions, soup kitchens, and the like, as well as religious buildings, should not belong to anyone in particular. They belonged to God. And so these and other material manifestations of charitable endeavors, from parks and public fountains to mosques, were established by foundations. Royalty would finance foundations to build and preserve the buildings and other elements. Foundations could include contributions from earned income (for instance, a bazaar), which could be used to perpetuate the foundation. The foundations were created under the auspices of the sultan in his role as caliph. They were created at his pleasure. Since millets also had churches and other charitable elements, millets also needed foundations.

     When the republic was created by Kemal Ataturk, the issue of foundations had to be addressed for at least two reasons. First of all, Ataturk’s was a secular state, and so the state controlled religious activity. Thus the state had to control the foundations that held the religious equities. In this way, the power of Islam could be checked. Second, minority religions could be suppressed by laws that addressed the foundations. Also, some foundations were barely solvent, so other foundations traditionally could be created to aid them. But the Foundations Law of 1935 forbade one foundation from aiding another. See “2012 Declaration: The Seized Properties of Armenian Foundations in Istanbul,” published by the Hrant Dink Foundation, Istanbul, for a more complete look at the subject.

21. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 209.

22. M. Sukru Hanioglu, Ataturk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 164.

23. Esra Ozyurek, ed., The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), p. 42.

24. Visiting a pottery shop while touring in Turkey, I mentioned to the gracious owner that my family originally came from Turkey and that they were Armenian. He nodded and said with a smile, “Many Armenians lived here once. They all went away.”

25. “Insulting Turkishness” (Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code) became a punishable crime in Turkey in 2006. Authors Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak have faced prison time for their mention of the Armenian genocide in their writing.