Throughout history, gender-based survival options have existed during times of war and genocide. Women who were kidnapped during conflicts would often be absorbed in the dominant group (Seifert, 1994). They would be converted and forced into “marriage,” while the men would be killed. Patterson (1982) explains that it was easier to assimilate women into the community than men. During the Armenian Genocide, options for survival were also gender-based. In some instances, Armenian women and girls were allowed to convert to Islam and be saved from death. They could live as long as they became Muslim wives. However, few Armenian men were given the option to become Muslims and be rescued from death. In order to ensure their survival and that of their families, many Armenian women married Muslim men. In doing so, they demonstrated their resourcefulness by invalidating attempts to annihilate them. Genocide survivor testimonies from the UCLA Armenian Oral History Collection will be used to explain the responsibility women often felt to sacrifice themselves to save the lives of family members. One survivor recounts that his aunt married a Turk in order to protect her family members from the killings and the deportation. A male survivor exclaims emphatically that not a single Armenian male would have survived if Armenian women had not married Turks. While their gender provided more survival options for women, it also restricted their options for returning to the Armenian community later. In many instances, culturally defined notions of shame prevented women from leaving their Muslim husbands. Those who had married Muslim men had transgressed notions about women’s honor and purity, and therefore, these women would face rejection if they attempted to return to their Armenian communities. Not surprisingly, some Armenian women struggled with the decision to stay with their Muslims husbands or leave them. Survivors explain that many who stayed in the marriage did so because they feared being ostracized by the Armenian community upon their return. Others who remained with their Muslim husbands recognized that their children would be viewed as “bastards” (Morokvasic-Muller, 2004) by members of their Armenian community. In many instances, having children limited the options available to women, deterring them from leaving their Muslim husbands. This paper will highlight the role gender played during the Armenian Genocide in providing increased opportunities for survival for women, while later, restricting their options for returning to their Armenian community.

The Armenian Genocide of 1915 produced countless orphans, many of whom were incorporated into the dominant Muslim population. Eyewitness accounts describe children being given away, bartered, abducted, and kidnapped. Data for this paper will be drawn from 200 oral history testimonies of Armenian Genocide survivors, collected from 1970 to 1980s, to describe the process of absorption into Muslim households and the children’s experiences in these new homes. This paper will utilize eyewitness testimonies of children being separated from their families, the circumstances surrounding the traumatic events, the motivations of those who handed children to Muslims, and the responses of the children. It will provide answers to the following questions: How were the children separated from their loved ones? How did they react to this abrupt change? How do they describe their experiences in their Turkish/Kurdish/Arab homes? Finally, how did they respond to pressures to relinquish their Armenian and Christian identities? During the Genocide, many Armenian children suddenly found themselves in foreign homes. Survivors recount that children were entrusted to Turkish/Kurdish/Arab neighbors or strangers by their parents in the hopes of saving them from harm and ultimately, death. Some children were used as pawns and bartered for food, for a few pieces of bread, or to ensure the safety of their remaining family members. Some children were abandoned by mothers who could no longer care for them. Lastly, there were children who were abducted from the bosoms of their loving parents. According to survivor accounts, the responses of Armenian children who had been incorporated into Muslim households varied from submission and a desire to please their new families, to resistance and defiance. One Armenian girl explained to her sister that the love and nurturing she received from her Muslim family influenced her to remain with them and accept them as her family. Other survivors describe rejecting attempts at assimilation, and engaging in defiant assertions of their ethnic and religious identities. This paper will use Armenian Genocide survivor narratives to provide insight into the circumstances surrounding the incorporation of Armenian children into Muslim households. Their experiences during this process, the trauma of separation from loved ones and of forced assimilation into a foreign household and culture, and their reactions to their new environments will be explored.

Although scholars, politicians and activists have dedicated great attention to questions of human rights practices in Turkey, the history of the country’s human rights movement has received less attention. This paper examines the emergence of a human rights movement in the immediate postwar period that broadly coincided with the formation of the United Nations and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Genocide Convention in December 1948. This paper finds that Turkey’s early Cold War conceptualization of human rights continues to resonate in its contemporary approach to human rights. Within Turkey, two human rights groups, one official and the other private, vied for influence in the immediate postwar period. Global human rights discourse also added pressure to Turkey’s single-party government as the country transitioned to multiparty politics. At the same time, the launch of Turkey’s first human rights organizations coincided with staunch anticommunist measures. As outside Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Kurdish groups, as well as the Soviet Union, criticized Turkey’s treatment of minorities, the human rights movement was quickly overtaken by the fight against communism and criticism of minorities’ troubles was rendered mute. The Turkish leadership’s solution to the problem of how to bridge a postwar global discourse of human rights with its Cold War national security emphasis was to promote a new, version of nationalism that coincided with and supported the Truman Doctrine. Yet, this reformulation was tenuous at best. Rather than fostering a serious discussion about minority or human rights, Turkish officials reduced enduring problems in Turkey’s treatment of minorities to a component of Soviet territorial claims on Turkey. At the same time, Turkey’s governments continued to criticize human rights abuses against Turkic minorities under communism. This paper ultimately offers insight on the history of human rights in Turkey, Turkey’s treatment of minorities and its experience of the Cold War.

After the World War I, the Assyrians, who had previously lived in the mountainous Hakkari region of what is now eastern Turkey, relocated at British insistence to the Kurdish region of the new Kingdom of Iraq. During the war, the Assyrians had fought for the Entente against the Ottomans and suffered a genocidal reprisal as a result. Consequently, their position in Turkey was untenable once the war ended. Various conditions caused acrimony to develop among the Assyrians, the local Kurds, and the Iraqi state. That animosity eventually culminated in the Simele Massacre by the Iraqi army against Assyrian villagers in August 1933. The state used that event to build Iraqi national unity. This paper will show how actors of the nascent Iraqi state used ethnic cleansing as a tool for state-building. Iraqi state actors cast the Assyrians as agents of the British mandate and foreign enemies against which the Iraqis defined themselves. Rather than building an accusatorial case to prove ethnic cleansing, this paper seeks to understand the thinking and contingencies that caused state actors to become perpetrators of mass violence, and specifically how the state and the larger society used such violence to establish or reinforce their own burgeoning nationalist narrative. Sources include British and Iraqi perpetrators and observers. Iraqi government sources, including the king himself, viewed ethnic diversity as an impediment to national unity. The local press painted the perpetrators as defenders of the state against foreigners. British army officer R.L. Stafford described the general political climate leading to the massacre, as well as details of the aftermath, which included a triumphal return of the army to Mosul. Iraqi historian Khaldun S. Husry witnessed that triumph as a child and later relied on Stafford’s account to argue that Bakir Sidqi, head of the Iraqi army, had planned the massacre. While scholarship exists that treats the Simele Massacre from the perspective of the victims, there is a dearth of scholarly material examining it as a state-building exercise, possibly due to a reticence to examine ethnic cleansing from the perpetrators’ point of view. A few scholars, however, have touched on the subject, including Hursi and some who may be participating in this conference, whose work I consider as secondary sources, but there does not appear to be any scholarship focused on this massacre as an Iraqi state-building exercise.

In August 1933, Arab, Turkmen, and Kurdish Iraqi soldiers in northern Iraq carried out the massacre of Assyrian families in the village of Simele. This complicated moment underlined the volatility of the region as well as the central government’s difficult relationship with its diverse and underdeveloped periphery. Over the ensuing twelve years until the end of the British occupation and the beginning of large scale oil extraction in northern Iraq, attempts by Baghdad to create a nation-state that included the northern region ran into a number of obstacles, especially regarding many groups that remained outside of the ethno-religious lines of the Iraqi power center. This uneven development and incorporation would lead to a shaky and uncertain foundation for later Iraqi economic and national development after 1945. This paper will examine state policy regarding subaltern groups such as the Shammar Arabs, Yezidis, and Assyrians generated by British colonial authorities and their Iraqi counterparts between 1933 and 1945, the final year of the second British occupation. As the state attempted to modernize as well as define the spatial conceptualization of the nation, it encountered challenges among rural, nomadic, and other groups that remained outside of the urban milieu. Often, these groups would come into conflict with each other, which at times resulted in increasing degrees of state intervention. This paper argues that while the state apparatus made a number of varied attempts to incorporate these groups into the new nation-state, it was largely unsuccessful, leading to an uneven course of modernization into the postwar era. The British occupation after the 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War imposed a further layer on top of the state’s efforts, where British geopolitical interests came before Iraqi national ones. Many times, British officials would observe violence develop as a result of this failure of incorporation as horrified bystanders, while other times attempted to intervene with varying results. This paper utilizes documents compiled by the Baghdad High Commission, showing the interplay between officials in the capital, their concerns and anxieties about the periphery, and ways in which the periphery was able to influence policy. The state used policies such as conscription, border patrols, work camps, and collaboration with perceived local elites in order to reach its goals.