Michelle Tusan Maps Armenian Genocide With Innovative Technology

Tusan frequently referred to the British occupation of Baghdad in 1917 as a turning point in the refugee crisis. From 1915 to 1917, Armenians were internal refugees; after 1917, the Allies set up a humanitarian aid network that worked to undo the genocide ongoing under the Ottomans. Areas where deportees had ended up came under the military occupation of the Allies and rather than bringing refugees to the West or to other parts of the Middle East, they were working to get the refugees home, ostensibly while looking to occupy the parts of the Empire where those homes were located.

As a cultural historian, Tusan says she “looks for patterns.” In the case of the Armenian Genocide and this mapping project, she wanted to focus on individuals. Much of the important work of delineating the political causes of the Genocide, the orders given by Ottoman officials, the chronology, and so on, has been done. Tusan’s current project aims to focus more on the human side: how people experienced the Genocide. By reading survivor memoirs, which in some cases have not been taken as seriously by scholars previously, Tusan is seeing the facts on the ground of what happened in real time during the atrocities. But she needed “a new model to pin down the human aspect of the Genocide.” As she formulated it, “quantitative data allows me to ask qualitative questions.” That’s where “deep maps” and the technology of ArcGIS comes in.

Armenian Genocide Left Few Traces

With the help of deep maps, Tusan is able to compare and contrast the journeys of multiple survivors at the same time. Most people who have studied the Armenian Genocide have seen the famous maps with large red dots — the larger the dot, the more deaths which took place in that location. Tusan’s map project is like that map but with extra dimensions and with the stories of an increasing list of individuals.

Deportation routes, amount of time spent in internal exile, how, when, and where survivors move all matter, says Tusan. It is time to show the data relating to the many personal stories that have been written down and collected over the years, and “expand the story as far as I can,” she stated. Therefore, the basic concept of the project is to plot onto a map the route and stopping places of every individual whose story is used.

Concentration camps were formed in the desert in location like the infamous Deir-ez-Zor. But many of these sites were converted into humanitarian refugee camps after the British conquered Baghdad and went on to occupy other parts of the Middle East. This led to a very important observation by Tusan: the Armenian Genocide left few traces. That is to say, although the Armenian people left an enormous amount of heritage in Turkey (despite the government’s continued destruction of churches), the actual genocidal apparatus left few traces; there are no gas chambers such as students of the Holocaust can view in modern-day Auschwitz, for example. The only things left are mass graves, which, as Tusan pointed out, the Turkish government today will explain away as the casualties of war or civil unrest. This brings greater importance to Tusan’s project of bringing to light the geographic realities of the Armenian Genocide.

A World That Did Not Want Them To Exist

Tusan displayed several maps, showing for example generalized deportation routes. Collating information from 34 survivor memoirs, several routes were used throughout the period and these were displayed in a stylized manner so as to make clear how many of the sources used each route. Tusan also showed her audience maps depicting where survivors ended up and their routes leaving Anatolia.

Thirty four is a low number of sources when talking about the Armenian Genocide, of course, but Tusan stressed that this project is just beginning and not only does she plan to add many more accounts, but intimated that collaboration with other academics was possible and desirable, in order to expand the project to include as many survivors as possible.

The deep maps concept allows for the computer program to create multiple different map images with one, some, or all of the source information; it is a concept most are aware of from everyday use of Google Maps and similar applications, but which has not fully been applied to historical research.

Eyewitnesses and aid workers also have stories that could be added to the project. They are “participants” in this historical event as well, said Tusan. After the 1917 occupation of Baghdad, aid was easier to access. For her as a World War I historian, this aspect is particularly interesting.

Tusan also showed maps that depicted the journeys of subgroups of survivors, such as all women or all single men. Gender and life status differences seemed to play a role in the survivors’ fates; for example women tended to have a long journey while single men seem to have moved around a great deal. Tusan noted that political exiles often ended up settling in locations where communities developed, yet some of these locations were “unexpected” as refugee destinations, Tusan hypothesized that political exiles sparked community formation in such places.

Tusan noted that many survivors actually did try to go back to their homes in Anatolia, some under the protection of the French occupation of Cilicia. After 1923 as the Republic of Turkey came into existence, some victims remained “in a world that didn’t want them to exist.” There was an attempt to adopt survivors into Muslim families, which was one way to make them disappear. But because their presence disrupted the social order, the Turkish government eventually resorted to an edict of expulsion in 1930. Turkey tried to form itself into a homogenous ethno-state, relabeling the Kurds as “Mountain Turks,” and so on.

Tusan’s conclusion was that “genocide is the experience of a people,” and so it is the individual experiences of survivors that she highlights, while keeping a historian’s objective attitude.