Le point de vue de Edward J. Erickson est d’autant plus intéressant qu’il vient d’un expert militaire, officier et historien. Il met en évidence que les actions militaires des insurgés arméniens étaient stratégiques. Ce sont les arméniens de l’Est qui étaient actifs, les seuls à avoir été relocalisés parce qu’ils représentaient un menace pour la sécurité nationale, alors qu’à l’Ouest ils n’ont pas été déportés

Ottomans and Armenians - A Study in Counterinsurgency by Edward J. Erickson (review)

Michael M. Gunter The Middle East Journal / Middle East Institute
Volume 68, Number 4, Autumn 2014 - pp. 655-657
Here is a brief excerpt of the content :

Edward J. Erickson, Professor of Military History at the Command and Staff College, Marine Corps University and a retired United States Army lieutenant colonel, has written an illuminating study of the connection between military necessity and population transfer concerning the Armenian question during World War I. As a combat [End Page 655] veteran and practitioner of war, Erickson brings to the debate valid insights often lacking from armchair intellectuals and academics. Furthermore, Ottomans and Armenians is mostly based on Turkish documents and articles often ignored or simply unavailable in this hoary debate, although at times Erickson juxtaposes them against pro-Armenian articles to illustrate the opposing points of view. This is a military history of late Ottoman counterinsurgency campaigns. Its basic thesis is that the Ottoman decision to relocate Armenians in 1915 was a purely military course of action related to national security that sat within a context of a 25-year period of persistent empire-wide insurgency and counterinsurgency.

The author traces the long history of Armenian revolutionary committees [gomidehs] dating from the latter part of the 19th century and the Ottoman counterinsurgency responses. The outbreak of World War I brought the situation to a head, and was “largely a result of the machinations of the allied powers, which encouraged and supported the eastern Anatolian Armenian revolutionary committees to commit acts of terrorism and minor insurrections in early 1915” (p. 221). Erickson argues that “these small and localized, but widespread, acts of Armenian violence appeared to metathesize [metastasize] during a major Armenian insurrection at Van in April 1915, which drove the Ottoman government into the belief that the Armenian insurrection was an imminent and existential threat to Ottoman national security” (p. 221).

Erickson writes : “The lines of communications supporting those Ottoman fronts ran directly through the rear areas of the Ottoman armies in eastern Anatolia that were heavily populated by Armenian communities and, by extension, by the heavily armed Armenian revolutionary committees” (pp. 161–62). The Ottoman armies at the fronts in Caucasia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine were not self-sufficient in supplies, and therefore were dependent on the roads and railroads leading from the west. Erickson observes that, “The Armenian revolutionary committees began to attack and cut these lines of communications in the spring of 1915 and to the Ottomans presented an acute danger” (p. 162).

The Ottoman response was to relocate the Armenian population, which was giving support to the invading Russian enemy in the eastern provinces, and “was based on the same rationale that the Americans, British, and Spanish used to remove insurgent populations in the Philippines, the Boer Republics, and Cuba” (p. 191). Such actions “became a template for the destruction of guerrillas and insurgents in the twentieth century” (p. 187) and were employed later by the British in Malaya in the 1950s, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam.

In the appendix, Erickson reviews the five extant historical theses of why the Armenians were relocated, presenting his in context. He also poses a number of provocative and unanswered historical questions about these events. Although the primitive state of Ottoman resources led to what might be termed criminal deaths due to neglect, starvation, and just plain murder, Erickson questions the Armenian genocidal thesis because these “horrific events were an unintended consequence of government policies and military strategies designed to end a threat to national security from ‘enemies within’” (p. 219). Furthermore, he asks “how do we explain the fact that so many Ottoman Armenian citizens were not relocated ? In particular, why were as many as 350,000 Armenians in the western reaches of the Ottoman Empire left in their homes ? If the goal was extermination, why weren’t the western Armenians relocated as well” (pp. 227–228) ? The most obvious reason is that the Armenians not living in the east where they were deemed a threat to the Ottoman supply lines were simply left in place. In addition, “why were the relocations halted at all, especially after...

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/556644/pdf

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_J._Erickson