The Property Law and the Spoliation of Ottoman Armenians

The genocide perpetrated against the Ottoman Armenians obviously had several dimensions: in addition to the physical destruction of the population, it included the appropriation of all collective and individual assets, in other words the systematic spoliation of a historical group for the benefit of a state or of private individuals. Beyond the extreme violence perpetrated to accomplish these criminal aims, the later management of such spoils remains a legal headache that will take generations and a panoply of laws to digest. This aspect of the Armenian Genocide is all the more important since for more than a century it has perpetuated a material memory of the Armenian presence through houses, schools, churches, and so on, which have survived or still survive. In certain respects, spoliation constitutes a central element of the immoral development of individual and collective actors observed in Turkey. Moreover, it was clearly one of the acts favoring the material construction of the modern Turkish state. It is even today one of the reasons for the denial organized by the Turkish state and shared by a large part of Turkish society. It is this issue that this chapter will examine over time, while also drawing up a corpus of the official laws adopted to carry out the program of spoliation of Armenians.