Biographies of Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire

In August 1915, the paths of Ali Cenani, an Ottoman deputy, Ahmet Faik, the former deputy governor of Baghdad, and Mehmet Yasin, a military dispatch officer, crossed in a particular town, Aintab, modern-day Gaziantep — situated on the boundaries of Cilicia (today known as the southern part of Anatolia) and Syria, near both the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Alexandretta. But what was the common thread that brought these three men from different social, political, economic, and family backgrounds together, educated in various schools in Aintab? This lecture tries to answer this question. It aims to recover the story of three actors from Aintab and hereby reveal the perpetrators and their active involvement in the destruction of Armenians at the local level. This lecture seeks to shed light on such perpetrators by analyzing simple, objective features of their backgrounds and careers. It hopes to do this by examining a different dimension of the Armenian genocide, highlighting the human element—the actors, their motives, and their actions—which ultimately bore responsibility for the catastrophic loss of life. I will focus on the life stories of three genocide perpetrators: (i) Ali Cenani (1872-1934), a parliamentary deputy; (ii) Ahmed Faik Erner (1879-1967), a district governor; (iii) Mehmet Yasin Sani Kutluğ (1889-1973): a military dispatcher. The lecture illuminates their pivotal roles as organizers, provocateurs, cheerleaders, and role models and the ways they were able to influence both their superiors and subordinates to carry out these atrocities. Through social network analysis and transcending anonymous group portraits, the talk provides a micro-historical portrait of individual perpetrators that offers broader insights into the overall actions of the Committee of Union and Progress. Focusing on the relationship between the micro level of perpetrator motivation and the macro level normative discourse, it presents an in-depth explanation for the perpetration of genocide.

Dr. Alp Yenen (Leiden University) will offer a commentary after the lecture. The event will be moderated by Hakan Karpuzcu (Princeton University).

About the speakers

Ümit Kurt is an assistant professor of History and and an affiliatein the Centre for the Study of Violence, University of Newcastle, New South Wales. He is currently a visiting fellow at Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. He is a historian of the modern Middle East with a research focus on intercommunal violence, forced displacement, and economic dispossession. He received his PhD in History from Clark University, Worcester, MA, in 2016. He has held postdoctoral positions at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, and the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and was a visiting Assistant Professor in the Armenian Studies Program at California State University, Fresno. His first book, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Harvard University Press, 2021), won the Dr Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies. 

Alp Yenen is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. Dr. Yenen works primarily on the political history of modern Turkey and the Middle East. He is specialized on the turn of the 20th century, First World War, Interwar period, and the Cold War period. He also comments and consults on contemporary politics in Turkey.

Hakan Karpuzcu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He received his MA in History from Sabanci University, Turkey. He is a historian of Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. His research interests include modern state, secularism, Islamic law and family in the late Ottoman Empire and the early republic of Turkey.