Allied declaration on the Armenian massacres

On 24 May 1915 the governments of France, Great Britain and Russia issued a joint declaration on the killing of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. In it they announced that all members of the Ottoman government and those of their agents who had taken part in the massacres would be held personally responsible for these crimes. The text was published in Paris, and that same day it was reprinted by, among others, The New York Times under the headline “Allies to punish Turks who murder”. The declaration is regarded as the first official diplomatic document in which the concept of crimes against humanity appeared.

The text of the declaration

The declaration was short. According to the text transmitted by the US State Department, it stated that “for about a month the Kurd and Turkish population of Armenia has been massacring Armenians with the connivance and often assistance of Ottoman authorities”. It listed the places where massacres had taken place in mid-April: Erzurum, Bitlis, Muş, Sasun, Zeytun, several smaller localities and the whole of Cilicia. It added that the inhabitants of about a hundred villages near Van had been murdered, that in the city itself the Kurds were besieging the Armenian quarter, and that in Constantinople the Ottoman government was ill-treating the innocent Armenian population. In the capital, arrests of Armenian leaders, which had begun on the evening of 24 April, were then under way.

The most important part was the conclusion: “In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres”. The Entente had no diplomatic relations with Constantinople, so the warning was to reach the Ottoman authorities through the Americans. The State Department forwarded it to its embassy in Constantinople on 29 May.

From “Christianity” to “humanity”

The initiative came from Russia. Reports of the massacres were reaching Petrograd from the border region, and according to some studies the authorities were also moved to act by appeals from the Armenian Catholicos at Etchmiadzin. The Foreign Minister, Sergey Sazonov, proposed to London and Paris a joint condemnation of the crimes. His draft, circulated in the first half of May, spoke of Turkey’s crimes “against Christianity and civilisation”.

The British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, and his French counterpart, Théophile Delcassé, did not want such wording. They feared that a religious tone would confirm Ottoman propaganda, which presented the war as a struggle of Islam against Christianity, and would be badly received by the Muslim subjects of both colonial empires. The reference to Christianity was therefore replaced by the word “humanity”.

Significance

The change of a single word proved momentous. Lawyers and historians regard the declaration of 24 May 1915 as the first official international use of the concept of crimes against humanity. The wording was new in diplomacy, although the law of war had earlier known references to the “laws of humanity”. The declaration also introduced the principle of the personal responsibility of a state’s leaders for crimes against their own citizens. After the war it was invoked when the victors demanded the punishment of those responsible, and in 1945 the concept of crimes against humanity entered the charter of the Nuremberg tribunal.

The warning made no impression on the rulers in Constantinople. A few days later the Ottoman authorities issued a temporary deportation law, which gave a semblance of legality to the expulsions carried out since the beginning of April. By the summer they had engulfed almost the entire Armenian population of Anatolia. The declaration did not stop the Armenian genocide, and the promise to punish the guilty was fulfilled only to a small extent.