294 DESTINY DISRUPTED
pogroms and ethnic cleansing. (The United Nations defines "ethnic
cleansing" as the attempt to enforce ethnic homogeneity in a given terri-
tory by driving out or killing unwanted groups, often by committing
atrocities that frighten them in into fleeing.)
Outside ofTurkey, however, few scholars doubt that in 1915 something
much worse than ethnic cleansing took place, reprehensible as that alone
would have been. The Deportation Act was the beginning of an organized
attempt by Talaat Pasha, and perhaps Enver Pasha, and possibly other
nameless leaders in the anonymous secret core of the CUP, to exterminate
the Armenians, as a people-not just &om Asia Minor or Turkish-designated
areas but from the very Earth. Those who were being "relocated" were ac-
tually force-marched and brutalized to death; it was, in short, attempted
genocide (defined by the United Nations as any attempt to erase a targeted
ethnic group not just from a given area but altogether). The exact toll re-
mains a matter of dispute but it exceeded a million. Talaat Pasha presided
over this horror as minister of the Interior and then prime minister of
Ottoman Turkey, a post he held until the end ofWorld War I.
Turkish revisionist historian Taner Aks:am quotes a doctor affiliated
with the CUP at the time of the massacres explaining that, "Your nation-
ality comes before everything else .... The Armenians of the East were so
excited against us that if they remained in their land, not a single Turk,
not a single Muslim could stay alive .... Thus, I told myself: oh, Dr.
Rechid, there are only two options. Either they will cleanse the Turks or
they will be cleansed by the Turks. I could not remain undecided between
these two alternatives. My Turkishness overcame my condition as a doc-
tor. I told myself: 'instead of being exterminated by them, we should ex-
terminate them."'^8
But the CUP had thoroughly miscalculated. For one thing, the war
did not end quickly. Instead of one big blast of offensive destruction, the
western-European theater ground down to a bizarre defensive struggle be-
tween armies of millions, lined up for hundreds of miles, in trenches sep-
arated by desolate killing fields that were littered with explosives and
barbed wire. Battles kept breaking out along these lines, and sometimes
they killed tens of thousands in the course of a few hours but the territory
won or lost in these battles was often measurable in mere inches. This was
the European theater.