The Atrocities That Shaped the Modern Middle East

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0:31Hello, and welcome to The David Fromm Show. I'm David Fromm, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Simon Sebag Montefiore, the acclaimed British historian and author of the new book, The Cauldron, The Making of the Modern Middle East. The book discussion at the end of the show will feature The Hidden Hand by Warren Kinsella, subtitled The Information War and the Rise of Anti-Semitic Propaganda. But before either the dialogue with Simon Sebag Montefiore or the book discussion of The Hidden Hand, some opening thoughts on themes that will run all their way through today's program.

1:08Simon Sebag's book, The Cauldron, describes the transformation of the Middle East from its existence under the Ottoman Empire a century and a half ago to the region of today divided among many nations. And yet, while the map of the Middle East is much more tangled than it was when the Ottomans ruled almost everything from Tunisia to Iraq, although parts of it were under foreign influence, British and French colonial rule, Italian colonial rule. A simple map, but with a complex reality. Simon Seabag describes how one after another, different language groups, different religious groups, different groups with different histories were pushed into exile or eliminated altogether.

1:47I want to showcase just one of those acts of elimination to drive home what it is that we are talking about when we talk about the making of the modern Middle East. In August 2014, fighters of the Islamic terror group ISIS attacked the Yazidi minority in northwest Iraq. The Yazidis are a very ancient people who follow a pre-Islamic religion. There are about 600 ,000 of them living in northwest Iraq in August 2014. ISIS murdered some 3 ,000 to 5 ,000 of them, mostly men and older women, captured 6 ,800 women and girls and turned them into sexual slaves for ISIS fighters, and spared the lives of some of the very young boys in order to recruit them and brainwash them as child soldiers fighting for ISIS.

2:32Religious and cultural sites belonging to Yazidi people were systematically destroyed, and civilian infrastructure, especially water supplies, wrecked. 400 ,000 of the 600 ,000 Yazidi were driven into exile, and few of those people have ever returned to their homes. Now, this was a true genocide. ISIS was very explicit. Their goal was to eliminate Yazidi people because ISIS hated their religious traditions. ISIS condemned the non-Islamic Yazidi as devil worshipers, and thought that because of their non-Islamic views, they should cease to exist as a people and even as human beings. The story was a temporary big deal.

3:12People in the West were aware of the Yazidi genocide, and some of the Yazidi were given refuge, especially in Europe. But as time has passed, the story has faded from memory. It is no longer of much interest. You certainly don't see the big marches in Western countries by progressive people or other kinds of people that you've seen in, for example, the war that Hamas started in October of 2023. The Yazidi story doesn't seem to matter. And I think the reason why we have a hard time holding onto it is because a lot of people who study the Middle East, especially the progressive-minded, have a kind of vision of how the Middle East should be.

3:48It's a vision in which Arab nationalism and Islamic identity are seen as progressive in the most literal sense, the trend of the future. And everything else is seen as kind of backward-looking. It shouldn't be there. And so as Christian populations were either eliminated by force or driven into exile, as Simon and I will discuss, there were massacres of the Syrian Christian population in Iraq. Much of the Christian population of Egypt has been driven into exile. The Armenians were the victims of two waves of genocide in Ottoman Empire, one in the 1890s and again in the 1910s. The Kurds were subjected to murderous attack by Saddam Hussein's Iraq and by the Iranian regime too.

4:28And of course, there is a story of the Jews who inhabited ancient communities in places like Alexandria and Baghdad, communities that existed before the coming of either the Arabs or of Islam to the region. And after 1945, those communities, or after 1941 in the Iraqi case, those communities were murdered, massacred, plundered, driven into exile, ceased to exist, ingathered into the state of Israel, where the Jews who formerly lived all through the Ottoman Empire found refuge in one place. This great system of simplification was at every turn marked by atrocity, attempted genocide, the refusal of difference within the context of the Middle East.

5:07we don't seem to find that so troubling because we have an implicit idea of who should be on top and who should not be on top. And this implicit understanding, I think, adds some context to why false accusations against Israel and the Jews have gained so much hearing. Because in a way, the Jews and the state of Israel stand out as the great exception to the trend of the Middle East. This is the one place, the one place where a people that were a minority people under the old Ottoman Empire have built a successful state that is able to be self-sufficient. And that exception to the trend everywhere else in the Middle East is seen by many as a kind of denial of the logic of history, which calls for the whole region to become all one thing under one language, or two, Turkish and Arabic, under one faith, Islam, everyone else driven to the wall.

5:52We're going to talk a little bit about this in the program, how this happened, and we're going to try to talk about it from an historical point of view, to understand it. It is, I think, a trend to be condemned, but first before condemning, it is a trend to be understood. And understand why the state of Israel looms so large in our imagination. We have to pay some attention to the things that loom strangely small, like the story of the Yazidi. So horrible, so forgotten. Why? And now, my dialogue with Simon C. Bagmat of Fiore. But first, a quick break.

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7:45Simon Sebag-Modifiore is a British historian of Russia and the Middle East, whose books have been published in more than 40 languages. His nonfiction, he has written fiction too, his nonfiction includes Catherine the Great and Potemkin, Stalin, the Court of the Red Czar, and also Young Stalin, as well as the internationally best-selling Jerusalem and the history of the Romanovs, 1613 to 1918. He received his PhD from Cambridge and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London. His new book is The Cauldron, The Making of the modern Middle East, a history of the region from the last years of the Ottoman Sultanate to the present day.

8:23Simon, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Fromm Show. Lovely to be with you, David. So first, congratulations on the astonishing acclaim for The Cauldron, and thank you for making time in what has been obviously an exhausting media tour. You've been everywhere, so I'm so honored you would join. Thank you, and thanks for having me on this. I've always wanted to do this, so here we are, finally. that The Cauldron is this thrilling narrative history of the Middle East from approximately the year 1900 under the Ottoman Empire to the present day with characters that are presented very vividly, many anecdotes, many quotations from the literature of the region.

8:58The book is a tremendous linguistic achievement, and it's an exciting read. It's also one that can be read not necessarily from beginning to end, but you can start from the middle and work outwards if you prefer because it's addressed regionally. But I want to test a thesis on you. So this is a narrative history. It's a story and a thrilling story, but you're not an argumentative historian. Your own ideas are sort of present in the background, but are not in the foreground. I want to try assess what I think you're telling us. Let me lay out what I think is your thesis, and then you can tell me whether I have it right or whether I have it wrong.

9:33May I go ahead? Please do. Okay, so if we start in the year 1900, let's start a little before. Let's start 10 years before that. Most of what is now the Middle East is ruled by the Ottoman Empire. So what is now Turkey, parts of Southern Europe, what is now Iraq, what is now Syria, what is now Lebanon, what is now Israel in the West Bank. Egypt is theoretically part of the Ottoman Empire, although not practically. Tunisia is theoretically part of the Ottoman Empire, not practically. Libya too. and across this vast array of space. There are dominant groups, especially the Ottoman, Turkish-speaking Sunni Muslims, but there are many, many minority groups in many, many cities.

10:13And it's not an egalitarian society. It's not a just society. And it's not a progressive society. It's kind of backward-looking. But still, if you're a Greek in Smyrna, if you're a Greek in the city of Alexandria in Egypt, if you are an Armenian in one of the cities of the empire, if you're a Jew in Baghdad, if you're a Yazidi peasant and a Syrian Christian, there's a way forward for you both as a people and for you as individuals. And suddenly that begins to change. And you'll know why I'm dating this back to 1890 rather than 1900 with a process that unfolds over the next decades of brutal simplification.

10:50That's the cauldron, the great melting. Brutal simplification. Minorities are massacred or driven into exile. And the two big dominant groups, Turkish-speaking people and Arabic-speaking people, assert greater and greater control and intolerance over the region as driving everyone else out. And that is what the cauldron is. So, do I have it right? That's one part of it. One part of it is an increasingly tightening nationalistic control that does ultimately lead to what is in fact the biggest kind of slow ethnic cleansing purge of the last 125 years, which is the destruction of and the vanishing of the Christians of the Middle East.

11:35That is one of the parts of what you're referring to here. One is a sort of tightening of a nationalistic control. And the other one is a driving out of anyone who doesn't fit into that. And the Christian population, it's such an extraordinary thing. In 630 AD, the Middle East was basically a sort of 90 % Christian just before the Arab conquests. And then over the next sort of thousand years, 25 % remained Christian. And so in 1900, the time you're talking about, or 1890, still 25 % of the Middle East is Christian. And jump ahead to today, and that population has virtually vanished. It's something like 4 % now.

12:29Well, let's start with one of those populations, which underwent a brutal process of murder. This is not an abstract historical process. I'm speaking, of course, of the Armenians, and that's why I backdated to 1890, not 1900, because the attacks on Armenians begin in the 1890s. Tell us the story of the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire and why they are so brutally treated. The Armenians had lived since time immemorial, since ancient times in this region. They didn't have a single homeland. They were spread across the Ottoman Empire. But before the Ottoman Empire, in the early modern period or the Middle Ages, there had been Armenian kingdoms in eastern Anatolia.

13:11And of course, in ancient times, there had been full Armenian kingdoms in that region and Armenian kingdoms had been buffer zones between the Persian and all Parthian and the Roman empires. They had been among the first people to convert from paganism to Christianity, and they never converted to Islam. And in the Ottoman Empire, they remained a powerful community, a self-governing community that was recognized as Christian, provided they paid, like all other non-Muslim communities, the jizaya, the tax for people of the book. And their community was like the Greek community, which was another large community within the Ottoman Empire, also recognized.

14:01But there were spasms of violence against them whenever economics or war or famine or there was a crisis in which one would blame the other within one's community. But jump forward to the late 19th century. For many centuries, you put this very well in your introduction, David, but for many centuries, these minorities had been allowed to govern themselves, but they didn't have equal rights to the ruling Ottoman Turkish Sunni Muslims. But that changed beginning in the 1830s and intensifying in the 1850s with Tanzimat that made all Ottoman citizens equal, whether they were Christian, Greek, Armenian, Jewish.

14:47Tanzimat means reform, is that right? It means reform. And the idea of reform was not necessary to turn the Ottoman Empire into a liberal democracy, but to make it more powerful, to exploit its peoples, to make the empire stronger. But in fact, what it did in part was, in part, it liberated these minorities and enabled them to own land, to expand their businesses, to become wealthy. And many dynasties emerged in trade and so on that were Armenian and Greek overwhelmingly. And that caused immense jealousy amongst the Muslim population that had been the ruling class for all this time, the ruling caste for all these centuries.

15:29And it also discombobulated the empire. And this policy only went on for about 20 years. In 1877, 1879, a new sultan attacked by Russia, fighting for the existence of his dynasty and his empire, came back, abolished the new parliament that had been part of the climax of these Tanzimat reforms, and unleashed a new idea of Islamic empire, Islamic Ottomanism, in which the senior peoples were now the Muslims. And the Sultan rebranded himself as Sultan Caliph of the empire. And at that point... Sultan means powerholder, Caliph means religious leader. Yeah, it meant the successor to the prophet. And at this point, Abdul Hamid II, a fascinating character, started to promote a new concept in the empire where he played off different different minorities against other minorities to promote essentially the Islamic nature of the state, of the empire.

16:37And this involved using, for example, Kurds who were son of second-class Muslim citizens to attack Armenians who were third-class Ottoman citizens, in effect. And this unleashed all sorts of notorious massacres, the Bulgarian massacres, they were also known as the Hamidian massacres after Hamid himself, the Sultan. And at the same time, something else was happening, which was the excuse for this, which was that nationalism had arrived amongst these peoples. And just as the Turks started to embrace nationalism, the Arabs started to embrace nationalism, the Serbs and all the Christian peoples of Europe started to embrace it.

17:20So did the Armenians. And some Armenians now started to say, like, we want a state too. Everyone else has one. Where can we have one. And they naturally found a backer in the Ottoman Empire's main enemy, which was the Russian Empire, which was Orthodox Christian Empire of the Romanovs. And so now, when they looked at the Ottomans, they started to think, not only are these people Christian Ottomans, they're actually Christian Russian agents who are holding a dagger right at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. And it was made worse because though the Armenians were mainly concentrated in the eastern part of what is now Turkey, they actually were speckled around the whole empire.

18:04There were Armenians in Jerusalem, there were Armenians in Constantinople, the capital, and all over the empire. And therefore, they began to see them very like how Germans began to see Jews between the wars. And there hangs a tale, of course. So by the time we reach World War I, I'm jumping ahead here a bit, if I'm allowed. And by the time we reach World War I and the Ottoman Empire enters the war against the Allies on the side of Germany, of course, Russia is on the side of the Allies and against the Ottoman Empire and is, of course, backing the Armenians. And the Ottoman regime at this point has changed from the Ottomanism autocracy of Abdul Hamid II to the ultra neo-fascist, almost proto-Nazi eugenist nationalism of the Young Turks, who were led by the three Pashas, who were the kind of triumvirate that ruled the Ottoman Empire during the war.

19:08They believed that war would be a cleansing experience for the Ottoman Empire. They attacked the Armenian communities. In the 1890s, there were Ottoman riots against Armenians in the cities. During the war, there's a murderous rampage against the Armenians who are not in the cities. What is the total death toll among Armenians between 1895 and 1918? It's about 2 million. About 2 million. During World War I, it's 1.1 million is the usually accepted number, which is colossal. And it's a large part of the Armenian nation. And it's such a decisive moment because it's because of this genocide. And by the way, this wasn't the only genocide.

19:56They also killed 300 ,000 Maronite Christians in Lebanon. They also killed over 400 ,000 Pontic Greeks who were on the Black Sea coast and in Ionia. They also killed several hundred thousand Assyrian Christians who lived on the borders of what is now Turkey and Iraq. And so this was a deliberate purge. There is evidence, there are directives, there are orders from Talat Pasha and the other leaders to either massacre these people, men, women, and children, or to drive them out into the desert to starve. And it's really the first modern genocide. And it's a modern genocide, unlike what Stalin will do to his subject peoples, where he's trying to break economic resistance.

20:47That's right. This is ethnic elimination by a near, it's maybe not a fully modern state, the Ottoman state. It's obviously not as efficient as Germany and not as efficient as Stalin's Russia, but it is the deliberate elimination of categories of ethnicity in order to simplify the state, to make the state more powerful. That's right. And also to destroy the bacteria within, to destroy the traitors within. And so it's decisive in various ways. One is that it ensures that the Armenian nation exists really more in diaspora than it does in formerly Armenian territories. It led the Western powers to back Armenian nationhood as well.

21:28And Armenian forces fought on the side of the Russians in the wars that followed. And in the wars that followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire, they fought against the new Turkish state to try and win an Armenian state which was designated to exist in what is now Eastern Turkey. And its big backer was President Woodrow Wilson of America, who promised to govern a mandate, an American mandate for the Armenians. And just quite a thought. Of course, this never happened. And in fact, what happened was, as David will know better than I, Wilson went back to America and failed to get any of these obligations through Congress or membership of the League of Nations that he'd created and so on.

22:15But what happened in the former Ottoman Empire was that a new Turkish nationalist maestro arose, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who became Ataturk, the master of the father of Turks, who founded a new Turkish nation, who founded a Turkish Republic and crushed the Armenians in eastern Turkey. So they never got the Republic. And then drove out the Greeks from western Turkey. And then switched around and drove out the Greeks from western Turkey. And that's also a fascinating part of the story. I'm going to pause you there because there's an element here that is going to, I think, come as a pause or something to a lot of modern readers.

23:01If you have studied Middle Eastern studies at an American university or even more European or British university, you're introduced to the Middle East as a kind of inert mass. Nothing happens there unless a Western power makes it happen. And anything that happens there is a reaction to something that a Western power does. But as you're telling, at the beginning of the cycle of purging, elimination, ethnic cleansing, genocide, it's a spontaneous local phenomenon. It is something driven by the Ottoman Turkish government and their successor, the Young Turk government, which is defining itself in new ways, against its subject peoples in an effort to have stronger control over its territory.

23:41It's not a reaction to Western neocolonialism or Western imperialism. This is something they wanted to do for their own reasons and acted on their own volition. Yeah, this is Ottoman Turkish imperialism. This is Ottoman Turkish genocidal massacre of their own subjects for their own purposes. And it's a sort of proto-Nazi ideology with social Darwinism, eugenicism, and ultranationalism. And this comes from within the Middle East itself. Though, of course, they're highly influenced, as are all the peoples of the region, by nationalism, the new drug of nationalism that seems to offer the solution to all things.

24:23Let me hit another pause button here because I wanted to pause before we got to out of Turk because the First World War ends with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It's carved up. It loses most of its remaining European territories, and many of its holdings are then divided up into new Arab countries that either have outright Sunni majorities or else have Sunni elites as is the case in Iraq. Most people in Iraq are not Sunni, but there's an Arab Sunni elite, and there are then other groups. And what we now call Turkey is also a successor state. It's carved out of the Ottoman Empire too, and it's defined as a national state with Turkish as its language.

24:59It changes the name of its capital city from the Greek Constantinople, the kind of Greek Istanbul, which is also Greek, I understand, but it sounds more Turkish even though it's Greek in origin. Okay. So we have these now new states and the Arab states and the new Turkish national state, they begin eliminating their minorities one by one by one. That's correct. And so, you know, in Turkey, for example, what happens, the new Turkish state is really defined on what we would now call in progressive parlance, an ethno-religious basis, in the sense that Turks were Ottoman subjects who spoke Turkish, lived in what was regarded the Turkish heartland and were Muslim.

25:47People who were Christian could not be Turkish. So what we see today, it started with Ataturk's version of Turkishness, but his was secular and this is religious. So that's exactly right. They drove out the Armenians who had challenged them and tried to carve out a state in the East. And then they turned on the Greeks. And the Greeks, it was slightly a different story because the Greeks had been promised a sort of new Byzantine empire in what is now Western Turkey. And the reason why they claimed that was because there were huge Greek Orthodox populations in Western Turkey that we would now call, used to be called Ionia, that had been there for thousands of years, literally since the Trojan Wars.

26:30And they lived in cities like Smyrna, the great Greek city of Smyrna. And so now Greek armies arrived, backed by the British and the French. And this was an example of European interference in the region. They arrived to protect their own ancient local Greek populations, but also to increase their kingdom, the Greek kingdom, the Greek state. And there they encountered Ataturk and his new Turkish army. And what ensued was a brutal nation-building war, ethnic purging, population swaps, brutal, huge battles of regular armies. The armies in this were huge. They were 150 ,000 strong each in these major battles with artillery, of course, and everything.

27:23So they were real World War I battles, but this is in 1922. And the Turks won these battles. And they then drove out massacring and driving and deporting the Greek populations of what is now Western Turkey. And in 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne, which involved Britain and Greece, the populations were swapped. So all the Muslims went to Turkey, all the Christians were expelled. That sounds so antiseptic. It's not that just antiseptic because there were huge massacres. It's murder, it's pillage, it's people standing on docks, it's cities on fire. Yeah, it's people jumping into docks and drowning, it's burning cities, and at the heart of it is the Inferno of Smyrna, which is one of the most apocalyptic urban demolitions of all time.

28:13And this creation of the Turkish nation is so important because it explains what we're seeing now in the rise of Turkey as a regional power. And it explains both the militaristic Turkish nationalism. It explains also the aspiration for much more influence, the grievance that they were diminished inside these borders agreed into 1923, and the wish to expand and re-energize the Ottoman idea. And that is what we're seeing now with President Erdogan. Let me take you now to the Arabic-speaking countries, mostly Sunni, that are carved out of the Ottoman Empire. Now, Egypt was notionally part of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century.