Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide - Bogosian Eric - Страница 65

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As these contracts became more and more valuable, and as the world realized the enormous extent of the Middle Eastern oil reserves (to this day, the oil in the Middle East represents about fifty percent of all known world reserves), Gulbenkian’s partners moved to renegotiate their arrangement with him. Their reasoning was simple: five percent of the value of the oil gushing from the sands would amount to billions of dollars and the net percentage going to Gulbenkian was too much money for one man. Gulbenkian refused to trim his percentage. So the national oil cartels, with the backing of their governments, declared Gulbenkian’s contracts null and void and walked away from their deal with him. Gulbenkian went to court. Afraid of losing their legal grip on the concessions, the parties entered protracted negotiations with Gulbenkian and eventually reached an agreement.

The Red Line Agreement bound its partners to a “self-denial clause” or non-compete agreement in which the major powers would share the petroleum resources of the Middle East. Calouste Gulbenkian claimed to have drawn the original red-line map.

In 1928 these contracts, in the form of the infamous “red line agreement” which Gulbenkian would later claim to have authored, created a zone in the Middle East in which the consortium could operate without interference. For decades no one but the partners (the national cartels) could extract oil from the region circumscribed by the red line. This region included all of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates. The British already had Persia (Iran) and Kuwait in their pocket.

The agreement was finalized just as the massive “Baba Gurgur” strike near Kirkuk in northern Iraq began to flow. The field had been known since ancient times for its eternal (natural gas) fires, but now it would become a key source of petroleum for the modern world. The Kirkuk fields would produce hundreds of millions of tons of oil, one of the many massive strikes that would follow in the years to come. By the time of his death in 1955, Gulbenkian’s fortune was estimated at between $280 million and $840 million, making him one of the richest men in the world. It’s interesting to note that the man who originally helped Gulbenkian make contacts with the Turkish elite was Nubar Pasha, Boghos Nubar’s father. Gulbenkian called Nubar Pasha “Uncle,” which says a lot about the networks that existed between the wealthiest Armenians and the highest-level Ottomans.¹³ The man who brokered Middle Eastern oil and the man best known as the epitome of dignified Armenian diplomacy were, for lack of a better term, cousins.¹⁴

It has often been argued that Armenia was “sold out” for oil. The loudest voice here belonged to Vahan Cardashian, who made it his personal crusade to let the world know how Standard Oil and the Harding administration had colluded to abandon the Armenian cause in their drive to acquire a foothold in the Middle East. And as it became more and more clear that Turkey was digging in its heels and would fight to keep its last territories (namely, eastern Asia Minor, what many Armenians call “western Armenia”), all parties understood implicitly that what was important was Iraq. To sum up, by 1923, the Armenians didn’t have anything that the West desired, but the Republic of Turkey did.

Iraq, particularly northern Iraq, home to hundreds of thousands of Kurds, was wild country. It was land that over the centuries had been ruled by Ottomans, Arabs, Mongols, and Persians. What made it so very valuable now was oil. Not that the British would ever admit that fact. Speaking in 1922, the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, couldn’t have made it more clear that Britain’s seizure of Mesopotamia/Iraq was not about oil: “I do not know how much oil there may be in the neighborhood of Mosul or whether it can be worked at a profit, or whether it may turn out after all to have been a fraud.”¹⁵ It is doubtful that Curzon was unaware of the value of northern Iraq.

Perhaps no direct connection can be made between the loss of the “Armenian mandate,” or the genocide itself, and the world’s appetite for oil and other mineral rights. But once the war was over, once the territories of the former Ottoman Empire were divvied up to everyone’s satisfaction, any lingering outrage and the impetus on the part of the West to defend and fight for Armenian rights simply evaporated. Now that the exploitation of Turkey was a fait accompli and access to oil (guaranteed by international agreements) enriched all the parties involved, the tragedy of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire became a footnote of history, one that many would work hard to erase altogether.

Governments were moving on, but the abandonment of the Armenians was felt far beyond the borders of Turkey. Only a few years after the war, Armenians and other “ethnics” from southern Europe found that the welcome mat so invitingly laid before America’s front door at the end of the nineteenth century had been suddenly whisked away. When there had been a crying need for factory workers, thousands upon thousands of immigrants were allowed to flow into the United States. Hundreds of thousands of “Mediterranean types” (Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews) had settled in the United States between the late 1800s and the end of World War I. Who were these people? Were they trustworthy? Or were they a corrupting influence? After the war, Americans began to lose their fondness for these swarthy immigrants who fried their food in olive oil and seasoned it with garlic.

The newcomers were “dirty.” They often had darker skin than most Americans of northern European descent, many of whom wrongly suspected that these “unclean” immigrants were the ones responsible for the devastating “Spanish flu” that killed tens of millions of people after the war. Perhaps worst of all, these immigrants were stealing scarce jobs away from “real” Americans struggling in the postwar recession. In the South, the Ku Klux Klan expanded its war on minorities to include persecution of the new arrivals. Though the Klan originated as a hate group focused on black Americans, it vigorously attacked Italians, Jews, and Catholics in the 1920s.

In response to a demand for action, Congress enacted immigration quotas, with some officials citing the pseudoscience of eugenics, which had risen in popularity in America, and which would eventually flourish in Nazi Germany. During the 1920s, impoverished Americans were sterilized so they could not transmit their defective genes to future generations.¹⁶

Were Armenians “white”? As absurd as this question sounds, it was widely discussed in the early twentieth century. Since Armenians came from lands east of the Bosphorus (the cartographical dividing line between Europe and Asia), they could have been considered “Asians.” But after World War I, the United States began to close off immigration from Asia, as a strict quota was set with the aim of limiting the flow of Chinese entering the country; so establishing the racial differentiation of Armenians from other Asians would help preserve their right to immigrate. Thus the story of how Armenian “whiteness” entered the annals of American jurisprudence in 1924 in a federal court in Seattle, in the case of United States v. Cartozian.

Tatos O. Cartozian had to defend his right to American citizenship in court to prevent his deportation, even though an earlier ruling in 1909 (In re Halladjian) had already found that “scientific evidence” proved that Armenians were white. Nevertheless, attorney John S. Coke argued, “It is the contention of the government that it makes no difference whether a man is a Caucasian or not or what the racial and language history of his people may be if the man on the street does not recognize him as white.”¹⁷ In other words, Armenians are not white because they don’t look white. The court supported the earlier ruling. The deciding factor seemed to be that Armenians practiced a “Western” religion, Christianity, and thus they were white. In this way, Christian identity came to help define race.¹⁸

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