The Betrayed:(Armenian Genocide Documentary)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7833166317264817428
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
The Armenian Genocide: Prof Vahakn Dadrian's Lecture at Harvard
Vahakn Dadrian, Ph.D.
Harvard University
April 24, 2001
I would like to discuss the significance of the Armenian Genocide in the light of Turkish denials. The Armenian Genocide has many significant characteristics, such as, that they were victimized in their own ancestral territories, that religion was a powerful instrument in inciting the masses, even though the perpetrators, the arch perpetrators, were themselves mostly either atheistic or agnostic.
The Armenian Genocide is also significant by the fact that there was massive, popular participation in the atrocities. It was also significant by the fact that, to quote Ambassador Morganthau, "to save shell and powder," the perpetrators deliberately used blunt instruments, thereby protracting the agony of dying of the victims. This should never be lost of sight, in terms of the very significant nature of the Armenian Genocide: protracted agonies in dying, because of the decision of the perpetrators to avoid bullets and use instead blunt instruments.
And then, of course, the major feature of the Armenian Genocide, which deserves focal attention: the persistent denial of what Toynbee called "this gigantic crime that devastated the Near East in 1915." This denial imparts to the Armenian Genocide extraordinary significance, not only for the Armenians themselves but also in terms of subsequent perpetrators that appeared on the horizon since World War I.
Because the denial is a function of impunity, people who escape punishment become defiant, become very bold in terms of rationalizing the crime, and most importantly, they embolden, by way of political contagion, other potential perpetrators. Therefore, the denial of the Armenian Genocide requires special attention as it terribly encumbers the problem of documentation. Deniers are wont to withhold evidence; deniers are wont to destroy evidence. Therefore, a scholar of the Armenian Genocide has to be by necessity not only a scholar but also a detective.
Holocaust scholars are besieged - saturated - with overwhelming evidence because of the German, Teutonic passion for recordkeeping. That condition is totally absent in the case of the Armenian Genocide. Specifically, the denial syndrome has three major elements: the denial of the crime, the denial of the victim, and even the denial of third parties to pass or to render a judgment on it.
Therefore, let me briefly outline the specific elements of denial, because, before a crime of such magnitude as the Armenian Genocide can be documented, you have to confront and overcome the specific elements of the denial. The Turks - past and present - deny that the Armenians were subjected to massacres, but rather they were subjected to deportation. Number two, the point is made that not all Armenians of the Ottoman Empire but only a segment of the Armenian population, specifically in the war zones in the eastern provinces, were subjected to deportation. Number three, the Armenians provoked the authorities to take drastic, draconian measures that ended in tragedy, but that the provocation came from the Armenian side.
Then there is the argument that if atrocities took place, they were reciprocal. Armenians killed Turks; Turks killed Armenians. And finally, I think the most overwhelming aspect of Turkish denial that deserves specifically confrontation and debunking is the argument of "civil war." Because of brevity of time, I cannot deal with all the specifics of this denial. But I will focus very briefly on the argument of "civil war," because it is persistent and paramount. Even today, during dinner, one of the Armenian students in the business school at Harvard was telling me that a Turkish student, as fresh as recently, told her that the Armenian Genocide is not reality because what happened was simply a "civil war."
So this argument is being broadcast throughout the world by Turkish agents, by the Turkish ambassadors, by the Turkish consuls, and some very gullible third parties that are not informed about the case have absorbed this argument of "civil war."
By any definition, "civil war" means the collapse of central authority, and the subsequent onset of a vacuum. As a result, factions begin to fight one another in the absence of central authority. Let's examine whether this was the case in World War I affecting the Ottoman Empire. Let me briefly describe what the authorities did before the Genocide was enacted. First and foremost, this is one of the basic conditions of the Armenian Genocide: Several months before embarking upon the Armenian Genocide, the Young Turk Ottoman authorities dissolved the Ottoman parliament. Talaat Pasha in his subsequent post-war memoirs indicates that he didn't want any argumentation or discussion in his own parliament as some humanitarian Turks might have objected; he wanted total freedom and control. And this is an exact replica of what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust. Before the Holocaust was initiated, the Reichstag was destroyed and the entire authority was transferred to the executive branch of the government.
Secondly, the Turks declared martial law. You know what martial law is: total control of movement, censorship, isolating provinces from one another, total control of communication, and the threat of swift and severe military punishment. And then, of course, the secret service was mobilized.
In other words, the Ottoman authorities not only were in full control, but they also had concentrated power in their hands to run the affairs of the Ottoman Empire. But I think that the most significant feature of the futility of the argument of "civil war" is this fact: On August 2, 1914, three days before World War I broke out, the Ottoman authorities declared general mobilization, as a result of which all Armenians, citizens of Turkey, in the age category of 20 to 45, were conscripted into the Ottoman army.
You can imagine the agony, the petrified feelings of the remaining Armenian population, which consisted of old men, children, and women - very much aware of the fresh massacres of 1909 in Adana and still remembering the harrowing massacres of 1894-96. There was terror in the population, and to think that this collection of old men, women, and children would even dare to think to confront the Ottoman army, to confront fully armed Muslims throughout the empire. Where is going to come the logistics? Where is going to come the weaponry? Where is going to come the command and control system of this terror-stricken population whose main concern was how to survive the war?
The frivolity of the argument of "civil war" is exceeded only by its absurdity. And even today, some enlightened Turkish historians are advising their colleagues not to use this argument, because not only is it absurd, it undermines the Turkish position. Any application of simple logic will demolish this argument.
Let me now point out that, if denial is persistent, if denial is truculent, what is to be done to overcome the problem in terms of documentation. Any documentation has to be adjusted to the specifics of the problem at hand. I submit to you that the documentation of the Armenian Genocide in the light of this persistent denial requires specific methodology. It cannot be simple documentation. It has to be documentation of a special kind that overwhelms the deniers.
And I call this, in my definition, "compelling evidence." Not simple evidence but compelling evidence is needed.
What are the specific elements of compelling evidence? There are four of them. Number one: The evidence has to be reliable. By this I mean that the source has to be more or less unimpeachable. For instance, to illustrate the point: American Consul Leslie Davis from Kharpert is graphically describing the atrocities in Kharpert province; he had taken a Turk to be a guide to him, and it was this Moslem Turk who showed all the spots, all the sites of atrocities while providing graphic details. To me, this is reliable. I would be skeptical if his guide and informant were an Armenian. But here is authentic Turkish evidence supplied to an American consul. That I consider adequately reliable.
The second element in my definition of compelling evidence is what I call "explicitness." Was it deportation? Or was it the destruction of the deportee population? My research suggests categorically that the deportation was a cover to enact the intended goal of deportation, which was the destruction of the deportee population.
The third element in my definition of compelling evidence is "incontestability." I think incontestability applies largely to official documents, and I will briefly explain to you German, Austrian, official Turkish documents which attach extraordinary significance to the evidence in terms of incontestability.
And finally, in my definition of compelling evidence, the fourth element is "verifiability." If I make a point and suggest a reference, a document, anybody should be able to go to the source of that document, verify its existence and its content. That is called verifiability. Therefore, the overcoming of the Turkish denial requires compelling evidence in terms of these four elements I just described.
So the question arises, given the present conditions, what are the avenues by which compelling evidence can be located, secured, and obtained? I use a methodology for this purpose, which I call the "exclusion/inclusion polarity."
In other words, I exclude from my research all evidence, all data that may be one way or another associated with the enemies of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. By this definition, I avoid if I can, documents emanating from British archives, from French archives, and from Russian archives. All these three countries were enemies of the Ottoman Empire. Not that they are devoid of any value. On the contrary - specifically British archives - are full of authentic documentation, but because they are emanating from the enemies of the Ottoman Empire, they invite doubt and they entitle the Turks to inject an element of doubt, saying that this can be enemy propaganda.
The same applies, to some extent, to what I call "Armenian survivor accounts." Here again, some Armenian survivor accounts, specifically in the period of 1920s, 30s, and 40s have powerful material of documentation that is firsthand, fresh in the aftermath of the Genocide. Not these recent surveys of 80-, 90-year-old Armenians, whose memories are dim, who tend to mix reality with fantasy, embellish, become hostage to selective memory, et cetera.
None of these conditions are present in this massive volume of Armenian survivor accounts that is still awaiting exploration by way of translation and analysis. Some day, when there is a vibrant and viable Armenian republic with a resource-rich academy, young Armenian scholars will focus more on this data and less on the survivor accounts of the last two decades. So, I exclude from my research Armenian survivor accounts as well - again, not that I am intent on diminishing their value, but to deny the deniers the argument that this is "victim bias." It is true, more often than not, victims are prone to bias. This is a universal condition.
So what is left after this exclusionary procedure; What can I include, to produce compelling evidence? I have two classes of documentation which, I believe, meet this condition. One of them is the archives of the allies of Ottoman Empire during World War I: Imperial Germany and Imperial Austria-Hungary. I have been to the German archives in Bonn 18 times in the last 20 years, and I have hundreds and hundreds of German documents, detailing graphically, day in and day out, the atrocities taking place in the interior of Turkey during World War I, produced by German officials: consuls, vice consuls, military officers, et cetera. And the same with Austria-Hungary.
It is inconceivable that a military and political ally, during the war, would try, would venture to discredit another ally. It is inconceivable. On the contrary, German and Austrian officials went out of their way - for a long time after the Genocide was initiated - to protect the reputation of Turkey. They expressed doubts concerning the truth about massacres, until it dawned on them by massive evidence, beginning in June and July, that this was not an ordinary initiative of massive deportation.
And when you read the German documents again and again, the single word used by ambassador after ambassador is the German word Ausrottung, which means purely and plainly "extermination."
But most importantly, why I think that German and Austrian documents are more than compelling evidence is this fact: They were not intended for public consumption. They were wartime reports meant to be used by the superiors of these officers for what is called "in-house use," internal use.
This fact immensely amplifies the significance of the authenticity of these documents, which were not meant for public consumption: Subordinate officers informing their superiors about the facts, which was their assigned duty to do, namely, to report as to what is transpiring in their districts.
The second class of categories I use are authentic Turkish documents. Here is a paradox: On the one hand I am saying that Turks are denying that they are withholding documents, they have destroyed documents, which are true. How can you then explain the existence of valid Turkish-Ottoman documents? Well, the fact is that no matter how meticulous you are, no matter how careful you are, for a crime of such gigantic dimensions as the Armenian Genocide was, it is practically impossible to destroy every bit of evidence. Almost invariably, some documents survive. And these are the documents I propose and I do use in my research.
What kind of documents are they? There are three such sub-classes of surviving Ottoman documents. Number one, that has been discussed briefly previously by Professor Bardakjian, the documents of the Turkish military tribunal. When Turkey at the end of October 1918 laid prostrate and asked for a suspension of hostilities, the victorious allies - France, Britain, and Italy - stipulated, among others, a condition to postwar Turkish authorities.
They said, "Unless you prosecute and punish the authors of Armenian deportations and massacres, the conditions of the impending peace will be very severe and harsh." In part, to accommodate the victorious allies, successive postwar Turkish governments established court martials in Istanbul, Turkey.
Attached to these court martials was an inquiry commission, which was invested with extraordinary powers of subpoena, arrest, et cetera. So this was called the Mazhar Inquiry Commission. For about seven weeks, Mazhar Inquiry Commission secured from many provinces of Ottoman Turkey authentic, official Ottoman documents.
From Ankara province alone, they acquired 42 documents, which mainly involved correspondence between two military commanders. One of them, Colonel Recayi, was the acting commander of the Fifth Army Corps stationed in Ankara, and the other, Colonel Sahabeddin, the acting commander of the 15th division in Kayseri. The correspondence mainly involved regular accounts of the process of liquidation of the province's Armenians.
I give you an example: The military commander of Bogazliyan, a district in Ankara province, sends a cipher telegram to his superior in Ankara, Colonel Recayi. He says, "Today we dispatched so many Armenians to their destination." In Turkish, Müretteblerine Sevk. Colonel Recayi, pretending not to understand, wires back saying, "What do you mean, 'dispatched to their destination?'" The answer comes within an hour: "They were killed off" (Katledildiler).
And so, the court martial secured dozens of such documents from Ankara province alone, and they were introduced in the court-martial proceedings.
Now, people like Justin McCarthy and some other people are trying to diminish and disparage the court-martials, calling them "kangaroo courts." Why are they not kangaroo courts? For the simple reason, mainly, that the Ottoman prosecutors went out of their way to disregard Armenian survivor testimony so as to render their verdicts as solid as possible.
The bulk of oral testimonies was discounted for this reason. That is what happened in Nuremberg as well. As in Nuremberg, so in Istanbul, not all but most verdicts were predicated not upon witness testimony but upon official and authenticated documents of wartime provenance.
Why are they, and how are they, authenticated? By a stipulation of the court martial, before a document was introduced in the court martial as an exhibit, Ottoman Interior Ministry officials were asked to authenticate them. And after doing so, on top of the documents it was stamped, "It conforms to the original" (Aslina Muafikdir).
So, here is your court martial. All wartime documents that have nothing to do with postwar politics, as implied by people like Justin McCarthy. This is then the military tribunal's evidence.
The second category of Turkish official documents involves parliamentary debates. For about seven weeks - October, November, December 1918 - in both chambers of the Ottoman parliament - the senate and the lower house - debates took place about Armenian deportation and massacres. Several deputies came to confess, to confess the crime of massacres against the Armenians.
And I give you three examples of how shattering they are, in the face of all those who still persist in denying the Armenian Genocide. These are official declarations in the postwar Ottoman parliament by Ottoman deputies and Ottoman senators. On October 19, 1918, on the first day of the opening of the Ottoman senate, the president of the Ottoman senate, Ahmed Riza, a former Young Turk leader himself, made this declaration. He said, "We Turks savagely killed off the Armenians." He used the Turkish word vahsiyane. This is the president of the Ottoman senate, not only admitting the killing of the Armenians, but using the adjective "fiendish, savage."
Two days later, a veteran and retired general of the Ottoman army, challenged him, saying "How do you dare to mention only the Turkish atrocities but ignoring Armenian atrocities against the Turks?"
Ahmed Riza gave an answer, which is a clue to the character of the Armenian Genocide as a historical fact. He said, "Yes, we knew the Armenians out of vendetta killed some Turks. They were people who noticed their parents had vanished and they were vindictive and they killed. But the Armenians were not killed en masse by individual Turks; they were killed wholesale by the official policy of the central government of the Ottoman empire."
He used the Turkish word resmi, which means "official." In other words, the Armenians were obliterated by the decision of central authorities. This is a very significant fact. On November 21, 1918, in the same senate, the most remarkable revelation was made by another senator, Resid Akif. This man was an Ottoman statesman, and on that day he made this declaration. He said, "I was a member of the first postwar Ottoman government, and one day in my office, I came across two types of documents. One was the official order of the interior ministry, Talaat, ordering the deportation of the Armenians, in which - and the Turks are using these secret telegrams now - in which Talaat is telling his subordinates, "Protect the Armenian deportee convoys. Give them olives and bread." Et cetera, et cetera.
But parallel to this, an informal order goes out from Constantinople, issued not by any government agency but what sociologists call "informal authority," namely the Central Committee of the Ittihad party, i.e. CUP. He says "The order was simple. As soon as the Armenian convoys leave their villages and towns and cities, proceed with the execution of the mission," and Akif Pasha says the mission was for these criminals to attack the convoys and massacre the population. This is the testimony of Akif Pasha, a high-ranking and distinguished Ottoman statesman.
And finally, let me give you one more example of official Turkish testimony in the parliament. On December 11, 1918, the deputy of the province of Trabzon, Hafiz Mehmed, a lawyer by profession, made this declaration. He said, "I, Hafiz Mehmed, I personally saw with my own eyes in the port city of Ordu on the Black Sea, how one night Armenian women and children were being brought and loaded into barges, taken off to the high seas, drowned there at night, and then the barges would come back empty."
Massive drowning operations took place in the various port cities of that Black Sea littoral, and here is a Turkish deputy admitting it in the Ottoman parliament. These are the parliamentary debates. Then of course comes the Fifth Inquiry Commission, Besinci Sube Tahkikat Komisyonu, which is very significant because the parliament wanted a legislative investigation, independent from the judiciary, whose venue was the Turkish court martial. So they created their own inquiry commission, as a result of which all members of the two wartime cabinets were brought in and investigated through official hearings.
During these hearings, remarkable admissions were made. One of them belonged to Said Halim Pasha, the wartime grand vizier, which corresponds to the position of prime minister. He said, "The Turkish government, my cabinet, we gave orders for deportation only, but the order for deportation was transformed into operations of killing which we never agreed upon."
Said Halim Pasha, the prime minister of Turkey, declaring that the order of deportation was transformed into an order of killing by dubious organizations, and he mentioned the Special Organization, Teskilati Mahsusa. And then the wartime minister of justice, Ibrahim, made an equally remarkable revelation. He said, "I was pressured by war minister Enver to release from the prisons of the Ottoman Empire criminals for patriotic duty."
He said, "I advised him that Ottoman constitution, Ottoman law, prohibits convicts from being employed as soldiers. I was pressured, and a substantial number of them were released" (mühim bin yeküna balig). They were used for massacre duty against the Armenians. All these are but samples of the litany of other confessions made during these hearings. So there it is, a corpus of documentary evidence culled from the transcripts of court martials, parliamentary debates, inquiry commission; and above all, authenticated Turkish documents.
Briefly, about the German documents, every German ambassador - there were four of them: Wangenheim, Hohenlohe, Metternich, and Bernstorff - all of them regularly informed Berlin that the Christian minority in Ottoman empire, under the guise of deportation, is being exterminated under the most fiendish conditions.
Dozens and dozens of such documents emanating from German ambassadors are now deposited in the German archives. And the same with Austrian archives. Now, having these two classes of documents - German and Austrian on the one hand, Turkish on the other hand - this ensemble I consider eminently qualifying for my criterion of compelling evidence. On the basis of this, I would like to reconstruct very briefly the Armenian Genocide, because, as a rule, perpetrators will not volunteer to provide blueprints as to how they proceeded. We have to reconstruct on the basis of acquired evidence that is, as I said, compelling.
On the basis of that, there are four determinants of the Armenian Genocide requiring special attention for research and study. Number one: Premeditation. Number two: Genocidal intent. Number three: Organization of the genocide. Number four: Execution of the genocide.
Let me briefly describe this. Premeditation. In all systems of criminal justice, the most severe penalties are reserved for premeditated crimes. Because there is prior deliberation, therefore the person should be aware of the consequences. There is significant evidence that the Armenian Genocide was NOT - and I emphasize the word - an aberration of World War I.
Even Benjamin Whitaker, the British member of the United Nations Subcommission on Human Rights, in acknowledging the Armenian Genocide on behalf of that subcommission, in order to placate the Turks, to assuage Turkish pride, said, "Oh, the Turks lost their control, it was wartime condition." In other words, the Genocide was a crime of passion. I am afraid Benjamin Whitaker is quite wrong. There is ample evidence that the Armenian Genocide was a premeditated crime, and I would like to adduce here, very briefly, some documentary evidence.
Vice marshal Pomiankowski, the Austrian military attaché attached to the Ottoman headquarters throughout World War I - and he was on duty in Turkey for ten years, i.e., from 1908 to 1918 - says that during his duty in the Ottoman headquarters, he was told several times by Turkish officers and intellectuals that many of these very same people considered previous sultans being very deficient in their treatment of the Christian and nonMuslim minorities, telling him that these sultans should have forced these nonMuslim entities to embrace Islam, and failing to do so, they should have exterminated them.
They told him, there is now a precious opportunity to rectify the mistakes of past sultans and therefore, Pomiankowski concluded: The annihilative treatment of the Armenians during the war was in fact a function of this recognition of the mistakes of past sultans, and that the Armenians and Greeks either should be forced to embrace Islam or be destroyed.
I think the most devastating document about premeditation comes from the German colonel Stange. He was the only high-ranking German officer who was in charge of a special organization detachment. Most of his charges were convicts released from the prisons. On August 23, 1915, Colonel Stange prepared a lengthy report: 16 legal-sized pages of which I have a total copy, in original German.
He says that he regrets to inform him - he is referring to Marshal Liman von Sanders, the head of the German Military Mission to Turkey - that "the Turkish government is misleading our government in Berlin in terms of the case of the Armenians." And in that lengthy document, Stange explicitly declares that the decision to eradicate the Armenians during the war was made a long time before the outbreak of the war. In his original German language. "Einen lang gehegten Plan": This is exactly what he says in German.
Then of course, the most devastating evidence of premeditation comes from Turkish court martial proceedings. In the key indictment of the Turkish military tribunal, which is produced in the legal journal of the Ottoman parliament, Takvim-i Vekyi, number 3540, page 8, this is what is said in the key indictment: "There is evidence that one of the architects of the Armenian Genocide, Doctor Nazim, had warned the governor of Aleppo, Jelal, to the effect that the anti-Armenian measures were not the result of impulsive decision-making but the product of "profound and long deliberations" (ariz ve amik düsünülerek). In response, Governor Jelal told the Ottoman authorities, "I can deport the Armenians but I cannot have them massacred! I cannot soil my hands in the blood of innocent people." He was relieved of his post and assigned to Konya province, where, as he continued to protect the Armenians, he lasted but a few months. And finally, in the several verdicts of the Turkish Military Tribunal - namely Yozgad, Trabzon, Erzincan - the Arabic word of premeditation is expressly used, i.e., ta'ammüden. In the Bayburt verdict, the court again declared that the destruction of the Armenians was the result of a prior deliberation.
When we come to Austrian documents, German documents, you see again and again that they say that the treatment of the Armenians during the war was meant to be the "final solution of the Armenian question." In about eight months, the most prominent academic journal in the world, which is the journal for Turkologists, Ottomanists, and other specialists of the Middle East, International Journal of Middle East Studies, will publish a major article of mine in which I will document and explain all these matters. Indeed, German and Austrian documents again and again say that the destruction of Armenians had very little to do with the behavior of Armenians during the war, that it was intended to finally solve once and for all the lingering and for the Turks troublesome Armenian question by in fact liquidating the Armenians.
Now, regarding genocidal intent. In the definition of the United Nations, in order for mass murder to qualify for a genocide, there has to be an intent to destroy in part or in whole the victim population. Genocidal intent is explained again and again by practically all the verdicts of the Ottoman military courts. Especially the Yozgad verdict declared that the deportation was a guise to destroy the deportee population, adding that "there can be no doubt and hesitation about this" (Süphe ve tereddüt birakmadigindan). In brief, genocidal intent is explicit in Turkish, German, Austrian-Hungarian documents.
Organization of the genocide, the third element. Here again, the Ottoman court martial had a specific class of trial series reserved not for government officials but functionaries of the Young Turk Ittihad party. This in a sense is unprecedented in the annals of legal justice, that no governmental officials but people with what sociologists call informal authority, namely party functionaries, are being tried in terms of unofficial adjuncts to the government, dominating that government. This problem of informal authority in genocide is the least appreciated and hence the most neglected aspect of it.
And then finally, the execution of the Armenian Genocide. I think here you see an event which is unparalleled in the annals of human history. The two major perpetrators - the architects of the Armenian Genocide, Doctor Nazim and Doctor Sakir - in their consultations with their colleagues in the Central Committee, repeatedly declared in so many words that "Sultan Abdul Hamid did an unfinished job; we cannot be satisfied with partial results, therefore in order to be complete, drastic, and definitive about the destruction of the Armenians, we need criminals. We have to be merciless with women and children."
And therefore they persuaded their colleagues to release from the prisons of the Ottoman empire the most bloodthirsty criminals. For this class of criminals some authors used the word kanli katil. What did they do? They sent to every prison teams consisting of three members: a member of the department of war, a member of the interior department, and, most significant, the third member was a physician, whose job it was to select the most savage-looking criminals for merciless behavior in massacre. So they went from prison to prison, these teams, and selected convicts from the various prisons of the Ottoman Empire.
And in this respect, I like to make a reference to a very powerful court martial document that was mentioned before, and this is the written testimony of Ottoman Third Army Commander-in-Chief Vehib Pasha. When the Genocide was all but finished in the eastern provinces at the end of 1915, the Turkish High Command appointed General Vehib commander of the Third Army. His predecessor, General Mahmud Kamil, was installed there by the pressure of the three architects of the Genocide: Doctors Nazim, Sakir, and CUP's high priest, Ziya Gökalp. War Minister Enver, in February 1915, had originally appointed General Vehib to the Third Army who thus became supplanted.
Why is the Third Army so important? Because the jurisdiction of the Third Army embraced the six major "Armenian provinces:" Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, Diyarbekir, Sivas, and Kharpert. And Trabzon was attached to that army jurisdiction.
General Mahmud Kamil, who completely shared the ideology of these three men, did a thorough job. Totally identified with these three men, he supervised the destruction of all the Armenian male population and the subsequent deportation of the remaining Armenians in the six provinces. He then retired and as Undersecretary in the war ministry came to Istanbul in February 1916. And the court martial asked Vehib to prepare an affidavit as to what he saw as commander of the Third Army. On December 5, 1918, Vehib prepared a 12-page affidavit, a copy of which I have. In that affidavit, he says that "When I came to my post in Erzincan, I saw that the Armenian population had vanished, no trace of the Armenians in the entire region. I immediately suspected that a major crime had been committed, but being a military officer I could not investigate out of curiosity. I was waiting for an opportunity, and that opportunity came." What happened in 1916 was this. The Baghdad Railway construction managers needed additional workers. They asked Vehib to transfer from Sivas to Adana 2,500 Armenian labor battalion soldiers who were still alive. So he issued an order for their transfer, and within 48 hours these 2,500 Armenian soldiers vanished. There were inquiries, and Vehib said "I sent them," so he made an investigation and he established that the governor of Sivas, Muammer, had given oral orders to the gendarmerie commander in charge of these 2,500 Armenians to liquidate them. It developed that under the most fiendish ways, these 2,500 disarmed labor battalion Armenian soldiers had their hands tied with axes, swords, et cetera, brutally massacred, and some of them thrown off the rocks into abysses had just disappeared.
So Vehib said that here was an opportunity to investigate. He established a court martial and hanged the two major perpetrators of the massacre of these 2,500 Armenians. In his affidavit, General Vehib gives detailed description of how the Armenian Genocide took place. He says that Dr. Sakir, one of the main architects of the Armenian Genocide, went from province to province with a private automobile and gave verbal orders to people. Vehib then describes the release from the prisons of the most brutal, fiendish criminals. (Ipten ve kazikdan kurtulmus yaranini.) That's the original language he uses. And then, he describes a scene of atrocity that epitomizes the quintessence of the Armenian Genocide.
He said that he went to Mus in Bitlis province, and he went to Tchurig, a small Armenian village five kilometers north of Mus. And here he describes what he saw: "In all the wooden houses of that village, Armenian women and children were crowded and burned alive." And he says, "I saw their charred remains." And then he uses this language at the end of his affidavit. He said, "In the history of Islam, you cannot find any parallel to such fiendishness and savagery." This is a Turkish army commander, an Ittihadist himself, who is speaking up. And then he finishes his affidavit, saying, "Divine justice may be be delayed, but it cannot be forfeited." (Adaleti Allahiyede imhal var ihmal yoktur.) To conclude, what do we learn from all this? I think the single most characteristic of the Armenian Genocide, especially in comparison with the Holocaust - and I think here you see a conspicuous striking parallel, a convergence - is this: Not the regular organs of the Ottoman state, but the secret party organization of the Young Turk Ittihadist Party was in charge of the Armenian Genocide, from beginning to the end: Conception, premeditation, decision, organization, implementation - they are all done primarily, if not exclusively, by the trusted officials of the Young Turk Ittihad Party, just like the Nazis in Germany, in World War II.
You know, the Third Reich was divided into Gaus, provinces, and high-ranking party representatives, the so-called Gauleiters were in charge. Likewise, the top Nazi National Security Agency, the Reich's Sichereitshauptamt - RSHA in brief - was the main instrument of the Holocaust, together with the SS and the Gestapo. All of these outfits were run by party fanatics. A similar set-up functioned in the organization of the Armenian Genocide. Here we see the functionaries of the party at work. They had three categories: Responsible secretaries, delegates, and third, inspectors, in rank order.
And here I give you an example of how these party people overwhelmed and overruled the regular governmental officials in the state system of the Ottoman Empire. In Trabzon, when the decree of deportation was proclaimed, the Greek archbishop and some Armenians bribed the governor of that province with the understanding that pregnant women, children, old men would be temporarily exempt from deportation. Governor-General Cemal Azmi was acquiescent. However, as soon as the representative of the Young Turk party, Yenibahçeli Nail, learned of this decision of the governor, he instantly vetoed the decision of the government and said all Armenians without exception are subject to deportation.
The same thing happened in Erzurum. Governor-General Tahsin was a relatively benevolent man. He wanted to exclude sick people, pregnant people. The delegate of Erzurum region, Filibeli Hilmi, upon learning of this arrangement, immediately vetoed it and all Armenians were subjected to deportation.
In other words, I like to impress upon you that in order to grasp the essentials of the Armenian Genocide, we have to shift our focus from the state to the operations of a highly organized secretive party machinery.
Holocaust scholars - even some Armenian scholars - continue to say that Genocide is a state crime. I submit to you that on the basis of the facts of the Armenian experience and my research on the Holocaust, I would say that Genocide is not so much a state crime but primarily a crime of a conspiratorial, political, monolithic party that manages to eliminate all of the opposition, that succeeds in gaining total control of the organs of the state, imposes upon that state its regular secretive party agenda, subverts the functions of the state in the process, and finally it criminalizes the state.
Indeed, genocide is the result of the criminalization of the state by a highly conspiratorial, secretive, political, monolithic party. And if you really want to understand the Armenian Genocide, relegate the study of the Ottoman state as a subject matter subsidiary to the study of the Young Turk Ittihad party and concentrate on its covert agendas dealing with the Empire's nonMuslim nationalities.
And finally, having had my training in mathematics and sociology, I am always concerned about this: What major conclusion can be drawn? People say that it was acute hostility, it was Turkish nationalism and fanaticism, et cetera. True but not in and of themselves. In my judgment, as in the case of the Holocaust, Genocide beyond these factors emerges here as a means to an end. It is, therefore, functional. A heterogeneous society, Turkey, the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, is transformed by violent, lethal means into a more or less homogenous society.
The slogans "Deutschland Judenrein" (Germany free of Jews) and "Turkey for the Turks" are emblematic of these goal-directed genocides. Therefore, my conclusion is that ultimately genocide is a method of restructuring a social system through organized ethnic cleansing. Thank you.
http://ermeni.org/english/vdadrian_harvard.htm
Harvard University
April 24, 2001
I would like to discuss the significance of the Armenian Genocide in the light of Turkish denials. The Armenian Genocide has many significant characteristics, such as, that they were victimized in their own ancestral territories, that religion was a powerful instrument in inciting the masses, even though the perpetrators, the arch perpetrators, were themselves mostly either atheistic or agnostic.
The Armenian Genocide is also significant by the fact that there was massive, popular participation in the atrocities. It was also significant by the fact that, to quote Ambassador Morganthau, "to save shell and powder," the perpetrators deliberately used blunt instruments, thereby protracting the agony of dying of the victims. This should never be lost of sight, in terms of the very significant nature of the Armenian Genocide: protracted agonies in dying, because of the decision of the perpetrators to avoid bullets and use instead blunt instruments.
And then, of course, the major feature of the Armenian Genocide, which deserves focal attention: the persistent denial of what Toynbee called "this gigantic crime that devastated the Near East in 1915." This denial imparts to the Armenian Genocide extraordinary significance, not only for the Armenians themselves but also in terms of subsequent perpetrators that appeared on the horizon since World War I.
Because the denial is a function of impunity, people who escape punishment become defiant, become very bold in terms of rationalizing the crime, and most importantly, they embolden, by way of political contagion, other potential perpetrators. Therefore, the denial of the Armenian Genocide requires special attention as it terribly encumbers the problem of documentation. Deniers are wont to withhold evidence; deniers are wont to destroy evidence. Therefore, a scholar of the Armenian Genocide has to be by necessity not only a scholar but also a detective.
Holocaust scholars are besieged - saturated - with overwhelming evidence because of the German, Teutonic passion for recordkeeping. That condition is totally absent in the case of the Armenian Genocide. Specifically, the denial syndrome has three major elements: the denial of the crime, the denial of the victim, and even the denial of third parties to pass or to render a judgment on it.
Therefore, let me briefly outline the specific elements of denial, because, before a crime of such magnitude as the Armenian Genocide can be documented, you have to confront and overcome the specific elements of the denial. The Turks - past and present - deny that the Armenians were subjected to massacres, but rather they were subjected to deportation. Number two, the point is made that not all Armenians of the Ottoman Empire but only a segment of the Armenian population, specifically in the war zones in the eastern provinces, were subjected to deportation. Number three, the Armenians provoked the authorities to take drastic, draconian measures that ended in tragedy, but that the provocation came from the Armenian side.
Then there is the argument that if atrocities took place, they were reciprocal. Armenians killed Turks; Turks killed Armenians. And finally, I think the most overwhelming aspect of Turkish denial that deserves specifically confrontation and debunking is the argument of "civil war." Because of brevity of time, I cannot deal with all the specifics of this denial. But I will focus very briefly on the argument of "civil war," because it is persistent and paramount. Even today, during dinner, one of the Armenian students in the business school at Harvard was telling me that a Turkish student, as fresh as recently, told her that the Armenian Genocide is not reality because what happened was simply a "civil war."
So this argument is being broadcast throughout the world by Turkish agents, by the Turkish ambassadors, by the Turkish consuls, and some very gullible third parties that are not informed about the case have absorbed this argument of "civil war."
By any definition, "civil war" means the collapse of central authority, and the subsequent onset of a vacuum. As a result, factions begin to fight one another in the absence of central authority. Let's examine whether this was the case in World War I affecting the Ottoman Empire. Let me briefly describe what the authorities did before the Genocide was enacted. First and foremost, this is one of the basic conditions of the Armenian Genocide: Several months before embarking upon the Armenian Genocide, the Young Turk Ottoman authorities dissolved the Ottoman parliament. Talaat Pasha in his subsequent post-war memoirs indicates that he didn't want any argumentation or discussion in his own parliament as some humanitarian Turks might have objected; he wanted total freedom and control. And this is an exact replica of what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust. Before the Holocaust was initiated, the Reichstag was destroyed and the entire authority was transferred to the executive branch of the government.
Secondly, the Turks declared martial law. You know what martial law is: total control of movement, censorship, isolating provinces from one another, total control of communication, and the threat of swift and severe military punishment. And then, of course, the secret service was mobilized.
In other words, the Ottoman authorities not only were in full control, but they also had concentrated power in their hands to run the affairs of the Ottoman Empire. But I think that the most significant feature of the futility of the argument of "civil war" is this fact: On August 2, 1914, three days before World War I broke out, the Ottoman authorities declared general mobilization, as a result of which all Armenians, citizens of Turkey, in the age category of 20 to 45, were conscripted into the Ottoman army.
You can imagine the agony, the petrified feelings of the remaining Armenian population, which consisted of old men, children, and women - very much aware of the fresh massacres of 1909 in Adana and still remembering the harrowing massacres of 1894-96. There was terror in the population, and to think that this collection of old men, women, and children would even dare to think to confront the Ottoman army, to confront fully armed Muslims throughout the empire. Where is going to come the logistics? Where is going to come the weaponry? Where is going to come the command and control system of this terror-stricken population whose main concern was how to survive the war?
The frivolity of the argument of "civil war" is exceeded only by its absurdity. And even today, some enlightened Turkish historians are advising their colleagues not to use this argument, because not only is it absurd, it undermines the Turkish position. Any application of simple logic will demolish this argument.
Let me now point out that, if denial is persistent, if denial is truculent, what is to be done to overcome the problem in terms of documentation. Any documentation has to be adjusted to the specifics of the problem at hand. I submit to you that the documentation of the Armenian Genocide in the light of this persistent denial requires specific methodology. It cannot be simple documentation. It has to be documentation of a special kind that overwhelms the deniers.
And I call this, in my definition, "compelling evidence." Not simple evidence but compelling evidence is needed.
What are the specific elements of compelling evidence? There are four of them. Number one: The evidence has to be reliable. By this I mean that the source has to be more or less unimpeachable. For instance, to illustrate the point: American Consul Leslie Davis from Kharpert is graphically describing the atrocities in Kharpert province; he had taken a Turk to be a guide to him, and it was this Moslem Turk who showed all the spots, all the sites of atrocities while providing graphic details. To me, this is reliable. I would be skeptical if his guide and informant were an Armenian. But here is authentic Turkish evidence supplied to an American consul. That I consider adequately reliable.
The second element in my definition of compelling evidence is what I call "explicitness." Was it deportation? Or was it the destruction of the deportee population? My research suggests categorically that the deportation was a cover to enact the intended goal of deportation, which was the destruction of the deportee population.
The third element in my definition of compelling evidence is "incontestability." I think incontestability applies largely to official documents, and I will briefly explain to you German, Austrian, official Turkish documents which attach extraordinary significance to the evidence in terms of incontestability.
And finally, in my definition of compelling evidence, the fourth element is "verifiability." If I make a point and suggest a reference, a document, anybody should be able to go to the source of that document, verify its existence and its content. That is called verifiability. Therefore, the overcoming of the Turkish denial requires compelling evidence in terms of these four elements I just described.
So the question arises, given the present conditions, what are the avenues by which compelling evidence can be located, secured, and obtained? I use a methodology for this purpose, which I call the "exclusion/inclusion polarity."
In other words, I exclude from my research all evidence, all data that may be one way or another associated with the enemies of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. By this definition, I avoid if I can, documents emanating from British archives, from French archives, and from Russian archives. All these three countries were enemies of the Ottoman Empire. Not that they are devoid of any value. On the contrary - specifically British archives - are full of authentic documentation, but because they are emanating from the enemies of the Ottoman Empire, they invite doubt and they entitle the Turks to inject an element of doubt, saying that this can be enemy propaganda.
The same applies, to some extent, to what I call "Armenian survivor accounts." Here again, some Armenian survivor accounts, specifically in the period of 1920s, 30s, and 40s have powerful material of documentation that is firsthand, fresh in the aftermath of the Genocide. Not these recent surveys of 80-, 90-year-old Armenians, whose memories are dim, who tend to mix reality with fantasy, embellish, become hostage to selective memory, et cetera.
None of these conditions are present in this massive volume of Armenian survivor accounts that is still awaiting exploration by way of translation and analysis. Some day, when there is a vibrant and viable Armenian republic with a resource-rich academy, young Armenian scholars will focus more on this data and less on the survivor accounts of the last two decades. So, I exclude from my research Armenian survivor accounts as well - again, not that I am intent on diminishing their value, but to deny the deniers the argument that this is "victim bias." It is true, more often than not, victims are prone to bias. This is a universal condition.
So what is left after this exclusionary procedure; What can I include, to produce compelling evidence? I have two classes of documentation which, I believe, meet this condition. One of them is the archives of the allies of Ottoman Empire during World War I: Imperial Germany and Imperial Austria-Hungary. I have been to the German archives in Bonn 18 times in the last 20 years, and I have hundreds and hundreds of German documents, detailing graphically, day in and day out, the atrocities taking place in the interior of Turkey during World War I, produced by German officials: consuls, vice consuls, military officers, et cetera. And the same with Austria-Hungary.
It is inconceivable that a military and political ally, during the war, would try, would venture to discredit another ally. It is inconceivable. On the contrary, German and Austrian officials went out of their way - for a long time after the Genocide was initiated - to protect the reputation of Turkey. They expressed doubts concerning the truth about massacres, until it dawned on them by massive evidence, beginning in June and July, that this was not an ordinary initiative of massive deportation.
And when you read the German documents again and again, the single word used by ambassador after ambassador is the German word Ausrottung, which means purely and plainly "extermination."
But most importantly, why I think that German and Austrian documents are more than compelling evidence is this fact: They were not intended for public consumption. They were wartime reports meant to be used by the superiors of these officers for what is called "in-house use," internal use.
This fact immensely amplifies the significance of the authenticity of these documents, which were not meant for public consumption: Subordinate officers informing their superiors about the facts, which was their assigned duty to do, namely, to report as to what is transpiring in their districts.
The second class of categories I use are authentic Turkish documents. Here is a paradox: On the one hand I am saying that Turks are denying that they are withholding documents, they have destroyed documents, which are true. How can you then explain the existence of valid Turkish-Ottoman documents? Well, the fact is that no matter how meticulous you are, no matter how careful you are, for a crime of such gigantic dimensions as the Armenian Genocide was, it is practically impossible to destroy every bit of evidence. Almost invariably, some documents survive. And these are the documents I propose and I do use in my research.
What kind of documents are they? There are three such sub-classes of surviving Ottoman documents. Number one, that has been discussed briefly previously by Professor Bardakjian, the documents of the Turkish military tribunal. When Turkey at the end of October 1918 laid prostrate and asked for a suspension of hostilities, the victorious allies - France, Britain, and Italy - stipulated, among others, a condition to postwar Turkish authorities.
They said, "Unless you prosecute and punish the authors of Armenian deportations and massacres, the conditions of the impending peace will be very severe and harsh." In part, to accommodate the victorious allies, successive postwar Turkish governments established court martials in Istanbul, Turkey.
Attached to these court martials was an inquiry commission, which was invested with extraordinary powers of subpoena, arrest, et cetera. So this was called the Mazhar Inquiry Commission. For about seven weeks, Mazhar Inquiry Commission secured from many provinces of Ottoman Turkey authentic, official Ottoman documents.
From Ankara province alone, they acquired 42 documents, which mainly involved correspondence between two military commanders. One of them, Colonel Recayi, was the acting commander of the Fifth Army Corps stationed in Ankara, and the other, Colonel Sahabeddin, the acting commander of the 15th division in Kayseri. The correspondence mainly involved regular accounts of the process of liquidation of the province's Armenians.
I give you an example: The military commander of Bogazliyan, a district in Ankara province, sends a cipher telegram to his superior in Ankara, Colonel Recayi. He says, "Today we dispatched so many Armenians to their destination." In Turkish, Müretteblerine Sevk. Colonel Recayi, pretending not to understand, wires back saying, "What do you mean, 'dispatched to their destination?'" The answer comes within an hour: "They were killed off" (Katledildiler).
And so, the court martial secured dozens of such documents from Ankara province alone, and they were introduced in the court-martial proceedings.
Now, people like Justin McCarthy and some other people are trying to diminish and disparage the court-martials, calling them "kangaroo courts." Why are they not kangaroo courts? For the simple reason, mainly, that the Ottoman prosecutors went out of their way to disregard Armenian survivor testimony so as to render their verdicts as solid as possible.
The bulk of oral testimonies was discounted for this reason. That is what happened in Nuremberg as well. As in Nuremberg, so in Istanbul, not all but most verdicts were predicated not upon witness testimony but upon official and authenticated documents of wartime provenance.
Why are they, and how are they, authenticated? By a stipulation of the court martial, before a document was introduced in the court martial as an exhibit, Ottoman Interior Ministry officials were asked to authenticate them. And after doing so, on top of the documents it was stamped, "It conforms to the original" (Aslina Muafikdir).
So, here is your court martial. All wartime documents that have nothing to do with postwar politics, as implied by people like Justin McCarthy. This is then the military tribunal's evidence.
The second category of Turkish official documents involves parliamentary debates. For about seven weeks - October, November, December 1918 - in both chambers of the Ottoman parliament - the senate and the lower house - debates took place about Armenian deportation and massacres. Several deputies came to confess, to confess the crime of massacres against the Armenians.
And I give you three examples of how shattering they are, in the face of all those who still persist in denying the Armenian Genocide. These are official declarations in the postwar Ottoman parliament by Ottoman deputies and Ottoman senators. On October 19, 1918, on the first day of the opening of the Ottoman senate, the president of the Ottoman senate, Ahmed Riza, a former Young Turk leader himself, made this declaration. He said, "We Turks savagely killed off the Armenians." He used the Turkish word vahsiyane. This is the president of the Ottoman senate, not only admitting the killing of the Armenians, but using the adjective "fiendish, savage."
Two days later, a veteran and retired general of the Ottoman army, challenged him, saying "How do you dare to mention only the Turkish atrocities but ignoring Armenian atrocities against the Turks?"
Ahmed Riza gave an answer, which is a clue to the character of the Armenian Genocide as a historical fact. He said, "Yes, we knew the Armenians out of vendetta killed some Turks. They were people who noticed their parents had vanished and they were vindictive and they killed. But the Armenians were not killed en masse by individual Turks; they were killed wholesale by the official policy of the central government of the Ottoman empire."
He used the Turkish word resmi, which means "official." In other words, the Armenians were obliterated by the decision of central authorities. This is a very significant fact. On November 21, 1918, in the same senate, the most remarkable revelation was made by another senator, Resid Akif. This man was an Ottoman statesman, and on that day he made this declaration. He said, "I was a member of the first postwar Ottoman government, and one day in my office, I came across two types of documents. One was the official order of the interior ministry, Talaat, ordering the deportation of the Armenians, in which - and the Turks are using these secret telegrams now - in which Talaat is telling his subordinates, "Protect the Armenian deportee convoys. Give them olives and bread." Et cetera, et cetera.
But parallel to this, an informal order goes out from Constantinople, issued not by any government agency but what sociologists call "informal authority," namely the Central Committee of the Ittihad party, i.e. CUP. He says "The order was simple. As soon as the Armenian convoys leave their villages and towns and cities, proceed with the execution of the mission," and Akif Pasha says the mission was for these criminals to attack the convoys and massacre the population. This is the testimony of Akif Pasha, a high-ranking and distinguished Ottoman statesman.
And finally, let me give you one more example of official Turkish testimony in the parliament. On December 11, 1918, the deputy of the province of Trabzon, Hafiz Mehmed, a lawyer by profession, made this declaration. He said, "I, Hafiz Mehmed, I personally saw with my own eyes in the port city of Ordu on the Black Sea, how one night Armenian women and children were being brought and loaded into barges, taken off to the high seas, drowned there at night, and then the barges would come back empty."
Massive drowning operations took place in the various port cities of that Black Sea littoral, and here is a Turkish deputy admitting it in the Ottoman parliament. These are the parliamentary debates. Then of course comes the Fifth Inquiry Commission, Besinci Sube Tahkikat Komisyonu, which is very significant because the parliament wanted a legislative investigation, independent from the judiciary, whose venue was the Turkish court martial. So they created their own inquiry commission, as a result of which all members of the two wartime cabinets were brought in and investigated through official hearings.
During these hearings, remarkable admissions were made. One of them belonged to Said Halim Pasha, the wartime grand vizier, which corresponds to the position of prime minister. He said, "The Turkish government, my cabinet, we gave orders for deportation only, but the order for deportation was transformed into operations of killing which we never agreed upon."
Said Halim Pasha, the prime minister of Turkey, declaring that the order of deportation was transformed into an order of killing by dubious organizations, and he mentioned the Special Organization, Teskilati Mahsusa. And then the wartime minister of justice, Ibrahim, made an equally remarkable revelation. He said, "I was pressured by war minister Enver to release from the prisons of the Ottoman Empire criminals for patriotic duty."
He said, "I advised him that Ottoman constitution, Ottoman law, prohibits convicts from being employed as soldiers. I was pressured, and a substantial number of them were released" (mühim bin yeküna balig). They were used for massacre duty against the Armenians. All these are but samples of the litany of other confessions made during these hearings. So there it is, a corpus of documentary evidence culled from the transcripts of court martials, parliamentary debates, inquiry commission; and above all, authenticated Turkish documents.
Briefly, about the German documents, every German ambassador - there were four of them: Wangenheim, Hohenlohe, Metternich, and Bernstorff - all of them regularly informed Berlin that the Christian minority in Ottoman empire, under the guise of deportation, is being exterminated under the most fiendish conditions.
Dozens and dozens of such documents emanating from German ambassadors are now deposited in the German archives. And the same with Austrian archives. Now, having these two classes of documents - German and Austrian on the one hand, Turkish on the other hand - this ensemble I consider eminently qualifying for my criterion of compelling evidence. On the basis of this, I would like to reconstruct very briefly the Armenian Genocide, because, as a rule, perpetrators will not volunteer to provide blueprints as to how they proceeded. We have to reconstruct on the basis of acquired evidence that is, as I said, compelling.
On the basis of that, there are four determinants of the Armenian Genocide requiring special attention for research and study. Number one: Premeditation. Number two: Genocidal intent. Number three: Organization of the genocide. Number four: Execution of the genocide.
Let me briefly describe this. Premeditation. In all systems of criminal justice, the most severe penalties are reserved for premeditated crimes. Because there is prior deliberation, therefore the person should be aware of the consequences. There is significant evidence that the Armenian Genocide was NOT - and I emphasize the word - an aberration of World War I.
Even Benjamin Whitaker, the British member of the United Nations Subcommission on Human Rights, in acknowledging the Armenian Genocide on behalf of that subcommission, in order to placate the Turks, to assuage Turkish pride, said, "Oh, the Turks lost their control, it was wartime condition." In other words, the Genocide was a crime of passion. I am afraid Benjamin Whitaker is quite wrong. There is ample evidence that the Armenian Genocide was a premeditated crime, and I would like to adduce here, very briefly, some documentary evidence.
Vice marshal Pomiankowski, the Austrian military attaché attached to the Ottoman headquarters throughout World War I - and he was on duty in Turkey for ten years, i.e., from 1908 to 1918 - says that during his duty in the Ottoman headquarters, he was told several times by Turkish officers and intellectuals that many of these very same people considered previous sultans being very deficient in their treatment of the Christian and nonMuslim minorities, telling him that these sultans should have forced these nonMuslim entities to embrace Islam, and failing to do so, they should have exterminated them.
They told him, there is now a precious opportunity to rectify the mistakes of past sultans and therefore, Pomiankowski concluded: The annihilative treatment of the Armenians during the war was in fact a function of this recognition of the mistakes of past sultans, and that the Armenians and Greeks either should be forced to embrace Islam or be destroyed.
I think the most devastating document about premeditation comes from the German colonel Stange. He was the only high-ranking German officer who was in charge of a special organization detachment. Most of his charges were convicts released from the prisons. On August 23, 1915, Colonel Stange prepared a lengthy report: 16 legal-sized pages of which I have a total copy, in original German.
He says that he regrets to inform him - he is referring to Marshal Liman von Sanders, the head of the German Military Mission to Turkey - that "the Turkish government is misleading our government in Berlin in terms of the case of the Armenians." And in that lengthy document, Stange explicitly declares that the decision to eradicate the Armenians during the war was made a long time before the outbreak of the war. In his original German language. "Einen lang gehegten Plan": This is exactly what he says in German.
Then of course, the most devastating evidence of premeditation comes from Turkish court martial proceedings. In the key indictment of the Turkish military tribunal, which is produced in the legal journal of the Ottoman parliament, Takvim-i Vekyi, number 3540, page 8, this is what is said in the key indictment: "There is evidence that one of the architects of the Armenian Genocide, Doctor Nazim, had warned the governor of Aleppo, Jelal, to the effect that the anti-Armenian measures were not the result of impulsive decision-making but the product of "profound and long deliberations" (ariz ve amik düsünülerek). In response, Governor Jelal told the Ottoman authorities, "I can deport the Armenians but I cannot have them massacred! I cannot soil my hands in the blood of innocent people." He was relieved of his post and assigned to Konya province, where, as he continued to protect the Armenians, he lasted but a few months. And finally, in the several verdicts of the Turkish Military Tribunal - namely Yozgad, Trabzon, Erzincan - the Arabic word of premeditation is expressly used, i.e., ta'ammüden. In the Bayburt verdict, the court again declared that the destruction of the Armenians was the result of a prior deliberation.
When we come to Austrian documents, German documents, you see again and again that they say that the treatment of the Armenians during the war was meant to be the "final solution of the Armenian question." In about eight months, the most prominent academic journal in the world, which is the journal for Turkologists, Ottomanists, and other specialists of the Middle East, International Journal of Middle East Studies, will publish a major article of mine in which I will document and explain all these matters. Indeed, German and Austrian documents again and again say that the destruction of Armenians had very little to do with the behavior of Armenians during the war, that it was intended to finally solve once and for all the lingering and for the Turks troublesome Armenian question by in fact liquidating the Armenians.
Now, regarding genocidal intent. In the definition of the United Nations, in order for mass murder to qualify for a genocide, there has to be an intent to destroy in part or in whole the victim population. Genocidal intent is explained again and again by practically all the verdicts of the Ottoman military courts. Especially the Yozgad verdict declared that the deportation was a guise to destroy the deportee population, adding that "there can be no doubt and hesitation about this" (Süphe ve tereddüt birakmadigindan). In brief, genocidal intent is explicit in Turkish, German, Austrian-Hungarian documents.
Organization of the genocide, the third element. Here again, the Ottoman court martial had a specific class of trial series reserved not for government officials but functionaries of the Young Turk Ittihad party. This in a sense is unprecedented in the annals of legal justice, that no governmental officials but people with what sociologists call informal authority, namely party functionaries, are being tried in terms of unofficial adjuncts to the government, dominating that government. This problem of informal authority in genocide is the least appreciated and hence the most neglected aspect of it.
And then finally, the execution of the Armenian Genocide. I think here you see an event which is unparalleled in the annals of human history. The two major perpetrators - the architects of the Armenian Genocide, Doctor Nazim and Doctor Sakir - in their consultations with their colleagues in the Central Committee, repeatedly declared in so many words that "Sultan Abdul Hamid did an unfinished job; we cannot be satisfied with partial results, therefore in order to be complete, drastic, and definitive about the destruction of the Armenians, we need criminals. We have to be merciless with women and children."
And therefore they persuaded their colleagues to release from the prisons of the Ottoman empire the most bloodthirsty criminals. For this class of criminals some authors used the word kanli katil. What did they do? They sent to every prison teams consisting of three members: a member of the department of war, a member of the interior department, and, most significant, the third member was a physician, whose job it was to select the most savage-looking criminals for merciless behavior in massacre. So they went from prison to prison, these teams, and selected convicts from the various prisons of the Ottoman Empire.
And in this respect, I like to make a reference to a very powerful court martial document that was mentioned before, and this is the written testimony of Ottoman Third Army Commander-in-Chief Vehib Pasha. When the Genocide was all but finished in the eastern provinces at the end of 1915, the Turkish High Command appointed General Vehib commander of the Third Army. His predecessor, General Mahmud Kamil, was installed there by the pressure of the three architects of the Genocide: Doctors Nazim, Sakir, and CUP's high priest, Ziya Gökalp. War Minister Enver, in February 1915, had originally appointed General Vehib to the Third Army who thus became supplanted.
Why is the Third Army so important? Because the jurisdiction of the Third Army embraced the six major "Armenian provinces:" Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, Diyarbekir, Sivas, and Kharpert. And Trabzon was attached to that army jurisdiction.
General Mahmud Kamil, who completely shared the ideology of these three men, did a thorough job. Totally identified with these three men, he supervised the destruction of all the Armenian male population and the subsequent deportation of the remaining Armenians in the six provinces. He then retired and as Undersecretary in the war ministry came to Istanbul in February 1916. And the court martial asked Vehib to prepare an affidavit as to what he saw as commander of the Third Army. On December 5, 1918, Vehib prepared a 12-page affidavit, a copy of which I have. In that affidavit, he says that "When I came to my post in Erzincan, I saw that the Armenian population had vanished, no trace of the Armenians in the entire region. I immediately suspected that a major crime had been committed, but being a military officer I could not investigate out of curiosity. I was waiting for an opportunity, and that opportunity came." What happened in 1916 was this. The Baghdad Railway construction managers needed additional workers. They asked Vehib to transfer from Sivas to Adana 2,500 Armenian labor battalion soldiers who were still alive. So he issued an order for their transfer, and within 48 hours these 2,500 Armenian soldiers vanished. There were inquiries, and Vehib said "I sent them," so he made an investigation and he established that the governor of Sivas, Muammer, had given oral orders to the gendarmerie commander in charge of these 2,500 Armenians to liquidate them. It developed that under the most fiendish ways, these 2,500 disarmed labor battalion Armenian soldiers had their hands tied with axes, swords, et cetera, brutally massacred, and some of them thrown off the rocks into abysses had just disappeared.
So Vehib said that here was an opportunity to investigate. He established a court martial and hanged the two major perpetrators of the massacre of these 2,500 Armenians. In his affidavit, General Vehib gives detailed description of how the Armenian Genocide took place. He says that Dr. Sakir, one of the main architects of the Armenian Genocide, went from province to province with a private automobile and gave verbal orders to people. Vehib then describes the release from the prisons of the most brutal, fiendish criminals. (Ipten ve kazikdan kurtulmus yaranini.) That's the original language he uses. And then, he describes a scene of atrocity that epitomizes the quintessence of the Armenian Genocide.
He said that he went to Mus in Bitlis province, and he went to Tchurig, a small Armenian village five kilometers north of Mus. And here he describes what he saw: "In all the wooden houses of that village, Armenian women and children were crowded and burned alive." And he says, "I saw their charred remains." And then he uses this language at the end of his affidavit. He said, "In the history of Islam, you cannot find any parallel to such fiendishness and savagery." This is a Turkish army commander, an Ittihadist himself, who is speaking up. And then he finishes his affidavit, saying, "Divine justice may be be delayed, but it cannot be forfeited." (Adaleti Allahiyede imhal var ihmal yoktur.) To conclude, what do we learn from all this? I think the single most characteristic of the Armenian Genocide, especially in comparison with the Holocaust - and I think here you see a conspicuous striking parallel, a convergence - is this: Not the regular organs of the Ottoman state, but the secret party organization of the Young Turk Ittihadist Party was in charge of the Armenian Genocide, from beginning to the end: Conception, premeditation, decision, organization, implementation - they are all done primarily, if not exclusively, by the trusted officials of the Young Turk Ittihad Party, just like the Nazis in Germany, in World War II.
You know, the Third Reich was divided into Gaus, provinces, and high-ranking party representatives, the so-called Gauleiters were in charge. Likewise, the top Nazi National Security Agency, the Reich's Sichereitshauptamt - RSHA in brief - was the main instrument of the Holocaust, together with the SS and the Gestapo. All of these outfits were run by party fanatics. A similar set-up functioned in the organization of the Armenian Genocide. Here we see the functionaries of the party at work. They had three categories: Responsible secretaries, delegates, and third, inspectors, in rank order.
And here I give you an example of how these party people overwhelmed and overruled the regular governmental officials in the state system of the Ottoman Empire. In Trabzon, when the decree of deportation was proclaimed, the Greek archbishop and some Armenians bribed the governor of that province with the understanding that pregnant women, children, old men would be temporarily exempt from deportation. Governor-General Cemal Azmi was acquiescent. However, as soon as the representative of the Young Turk party, Yenibahçeli Nail, learned of this decision of the governor, he instantly vetoed the decision of the government and said all Armenians without exception are subject to deportation.
The same thing happened in Erzurum. Governor-General Tahsin was a relatively benevolent man. He wanted to exclude sick people, pregnant people. The delegate of Erzurum region, Filibeli Hilmi, upon learning of this arrangement, immediately vetoed it and all Armenians were subjected to deportation.
In other words, I like to impress upon you that in order to grasp the essentials of the Armenian Genocide, we have to shift our focus from the state to the operations of a highly organized secretive party machinery.
Holocaust scholars - even some Armenian scholars - continue to say that Genocide is a state crime. I submit to you that on the basis of the facts of the Armenian experience and my research on the Holocaust, I would say that Genocide is not so much a state crime but primarily a crime of a conspiratorial, political, monolithic party that manages to eliminate all of the opposition, that succeeds in gaining total control of the organs of the state, imposes upon that state its regular secretive party agenda, subverts the functions of the state in the process, and finally it criminalizes the state.
Indeed, genocide is the result of the criminalization of the state by a highly conspiratorial, secretive, political, monolithic party. And if you really want to understand the Armenian Genocide, relegate the study of the Ottoman state as a subject matter subsidiary to the study of the Young Turk Ittihad party and concentrate on its covert agendas dealing with the Empire's nonMuslim nationalities.
And finally, having had my training in mathematics and sociology, I am always concerned about this: What major conclusion can be drawn? People say that it was acute hostility, it was Turkish nationalism and fanaticism, et cetera. True but not in and of themselves. In my judgment, as in the case of the Holocaust, Genocide beyond these factors emerges here as a means to an end. It is, therefore, functional. A heterogeneous society, Turkey, the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, is transformed by violent, lethal means into a more or less homogenous society.
The slogans "Deutschland Judenrein" (Germany free of Jews) and "Turkey for the Turks" are emblematic of these goal-directed genocides. Therefore, my conclusion is that ultimately genocide is a method of restructuring a social system through organized ethnic cleansing. Thank you.
http://ermeni.org/english/vdadrian_harvard.htm
Armenian Genocide Survivor and Eyewitness Accounts
YouTube: Survivor talks
YouTube: Rev. Vartan Hartunian
YouTube: Richard Parseghian
YouTube: Sam Kadorian
YouTube: Hagop Assadourian
YouTube: Alice Muggerditchian
YouTube: Vartan Hartunian 1
Dr. Martin Niepage's Eyewitness Account
Dr. Floyd O. Smith's Eyewitness Account
Stories Submitted to www.cilicia.com
Hripsime & Simon Cihanyan's Story
Hilda's (Der-Haroutunian and Dermenjian) Family Story
Anne Smith's Family Story
Pamela Douglas' Family Story
Katherine Magarian's Story
Kalashian and Der Kazarian Story
Joan McClendon's Family Story
Madeleine Prochazka's Family Story
Antranik Baloian's Story
Elizabeth Sweeney's Family Story
Paula Teclaw's Family Story
Newsday Article - Genocide Survivor Accounts
Soghomon Tehlirian
Noyemzar Alexanian's Story
Excerpts from Survivors, an excellent book based on eyewitness accounts.
External links
http://ermeni.org/turkce/vkayutyunner.php?tp=ea&lng=eng
Retrieved from "http://www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Armenian_Genocide_Survivor_and_Eyewitness_Accounts"
YouTube: Rev. Vartan Hartunian
YouTube: Richard Parseghian
YouTube: Sam Kadorian
YouTube: Hagop Assadourian
YouTube: Alice Muggerditchian
YouTube: Vartan Hartunian 1
Dr. Martin Niepage's Eyewitness Account
Dr. Floyd O. Smith's Eyewitness Account
Stories Submitted to www.cilicia.com
Hripsime & Simon Cihanyan's Story
Hilda's (Der-Haroutunian and Dermenjian) Family Story
Anne Smith's Family Story
Pamela Douglas' Family Story
Katherine Magarian's Story
Kalashian and Der Kazarian Story
Joan McClendon's Family Story
Madeleine Prochazka's Family Story
Antranik Baloian's Story
Elizabeth Sweeney's Family Story
Paula Teclaw's Family Story
Newsday Article - Genocide Survivor Accounts
Soghomon Tehlirian
Noyemzar Alexanian's Story
Excerpts from Survivors, an excellent book based on eyewitness accounts.
External links
http://ermeni.org/turkce/vkayutyunner.php?tp=ea&lng=eng
Retrieved from "http://www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Armenian_Genocide_Survivor_and_Eyewitness_Accounts"
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Telegrams of Death
Telegrams of Death
Followings are translations of four telegrams proving the complicity of the Turkish government in the planning and execution of the Armenian genocide:
To the Government of Aleppo,
Although the extermination of the Armenian element, which has for centuries been desirous of destroying the sure foundation of our Empire, and has now taken the form of a real danger, had been decided upon earlier than this, circumstances did not permit us to carry out this sacred intention. Now that an obstacles are removed, and the time has come for redeemingour fatherland from this dangerous element, it is urgently recommended that you should not be moved to feelings of pity on seeing their miserable plight; but, by putting an end to them all, try with all your might to obliterate the very name 'Armenia' from Turkey. See of it that those to whom you entrust the carrying out of this purpose are patriotic and reliable men.
Minister of the Interior
TALAAT
To the Government of Aleppo,
September 9, 1915 - All rights of the Armenians to live and work on Turkish soil have been completely cancelled, and with regard to this the Government takes all responsibility on itself, and has commanded that even babes in the cradle are not to be spared. The results of carrying out this order have been seen in some provinces. In spite of this, for reasons unknown to us, exceptional measures are taken with 'certain people', and those people instead of being sent straight to the place of exile are left in Aleppo, whereby the Government is involved in an additional difficulty. Without listening to any of their reasoning, remove them -women or children, whatever they may be, even if they are incapable of moving; and do not let the people protect them, because, through their ignorance, they place material gains higher than patriotic feelings, and cannot appreciate the great policy of the Government in insisting upon this. Because instead of the indirect measures of extermination used in other places -such as severity, haste (in carrying out the deportations), difficulties of traveling and misery -direct measures can safely be used there, so work heartily.
General Orders have been communicated from the War Office to all the Commanders of the Army that they are not to interfere in the work of deportation.Tell the officials that are to be appointed for that purpose that they must work to put into execution our real intent, without being afraid of responsibility. Please send cipher reports of the results of your activities every week.
Minister of the Interior
TALAAT
To the General Committee for settling the deportees
January 10, 1916 - Enquiries having been made, it is understood that hardly ten percent of the Armenians subjected to the general deportation have reached the places destined for them; the rest have died from natural causes, such as hunger and sickness. We inform you that we are working to bring about the same result with regard to those who are still alive, by using severe measures.
ABDULLAHAD NOURI
To the Government of Aleppo,
January 15, 1916. - We hear that certain orphanages which have been opened receive also the children of the Armenians. Whether this is done through ignorance of our real purpose, or through contempt of it, the Government will regard the feeding of such children or any attempt to prolong their lives as an act entirely opposed to its purpose, since it considers the survival of these children as detrimental. I recommend that such children shall not be received into the orphanages, and no attempts are to be made to establish special orphanages for them.
Minister of the Interior
TALAAT
http://www.24april1915.com/eng/documents.html
Monday, April 28, 2008
Holland Doc: Het land van onze grootouders
Dutch Documentary about Armenian Genocide
http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=6920144&md5=aa531e6c91e6b1d71635321cbe4f058a
Languages:Dutch,English,Turkish
Subtitles:Dutch
P.S.Copy and paste the link onto your browser and wait for some seconds.
http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=6920144&md5=aa531e6c91e6b1d71635321cbe4f058a
Languages:Dutch,English,Turkish
Subtitles:Dutch
P.S.Copy and paste the link onto your browser and wait for some seconds.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Let’s Talk About Armenian Genocide
Let’s Talk About Armenian Genocide
From the desk of James McConalogue on Sat, 2006-10-07 15:41
Why is it that Turkey is still unable to recognise the atrocities committed against the Armenians? Furthermore, why is it that the EU is entirely antagonistic towards the idea of Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, recognising their genocidal past? Last July, I reported to The Brussels Journal on the unjust suppression of the freedom of expression in Turkey. The most high-profile case pertained to the trial of Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk in December 2005 after the author had claimed in a Swiss newspaper that 30,000 Kurds and one million Ottoman Armenians were killed in Turkey yet nobody in the Turkish population would dare talk about it. The trial was dismissed by the Turkish Ministry of Justice at the beginning of 2006.
Two previous reports had also scrutinised the legal proceedings against the novelist, Elif Shafak. Shafak, author of Bastard of Istanbul, faced charges of “insulting Turkishness” under the primitive legislation. Subsequent to an earlier dismissal, the seventh High Criminal Court revived the charges made by Kemal Kerincsiz’s nationalist jurist group, ‘The Unity of Jurists.’ Fortunately, in the final week of September, Shafak was immediately acquitted although it is difficult to determine whether the acquittal arose because of EU pressure (threatening Turkish membership) or because the text truly did not “insult Turkishness” according to Turkey’s dated legislation.
The suppression of free expression has occurred for authors such as Shafak and others like her, precisely because of the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, prohibiting “insulting Turkishness”. The legislation was passed in 2005 as a measure of harmonizing Turkish law with Copenhagen criteria of the European Union.
Interesting in both the cases of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak is how these novelists came to represent such a gigantic insult to Turkishness. Both novelists had referred to their mass killing – or genocide – of Armenians during the Ottoman Empire. It is those references to the Armenian genocide that led charges to be made by Kemal Kerincsiz’s Unity of Jurists. The Turkish government still denies the conceptual definition of the Armenian genocide.
However, the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide has now become a central issue for the Turkish government. It is so important that the EU Commission spokesperson, Krisztina Nagy, commented after the acquittal of Shafak trial that Article 301 “continues to pose a significant threat to freedom of expression in Turkey and all those who express a non-violent opinion.” Accordingly, EU member-states have considered reform of Article 301 as important as the Cyprus issue, tackling minority rights and social violence, in order for the EU to properly consider Turkish accession.
However, has the EU’s request for reform of Article 301 missed the point? After all, the Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, has already hinted at an acceptance to change the legislation. Should the EU, instead, as a condition of EU entry demand that the Turkish government acknowledge the Armenian genocide? In both the cases of Pamuk and Shafak – and eighty or so other authors – many of the legal proceedings against Turkish writers have arisen as a result of references to the Armenian genocide. That is the real obstacle for the Turkish government and frankly, its revisionist approach to the nation’s history is not at all suited to a future of diplomacy. It is essentially denying a holocaustal error of its past. Furthermore, all other national governments across the globe (other than Turkey) have classified the Armenian events that occurred between 1915 and 1917 as genocide. International authorities recognise the event as the Armenian genocide, a direct set of policies that led to the persecution and death of 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians. It cannot be named something else. It cannot be ignored. Neither can it be understood from the Turkish historical perspective as a ‘civil war.’
That is why I paid strong attention to the French President, Jacques Chirac’s words on 30 September. In a visit to Yerevan, the French President declared to news agencies: “Should Turkey recognize the genocide of Armenia to join the EU? […] I believe so. Each country grows by acknowledging the dramas and errors of its past. […] Can one say that Germany which has deeply acknowledged the holocaust, has as a result lost credit? It has grown.”
It is certain that Chirac’s desire to enforce the acceptance of the mass-killings as genocide amongst other EU accession conditions has not been aligned with that of other European nations. Other EU member-states seem to be fairly relaxed in letting Turkey off the hook on the genocide issue. The last MEP interim report on Turkey’s EU accession removed the request for an acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide. More worryingly, the MEPs removed the condition of EU accession out of fears that Turkish nationalists would be incited into aggression against this.
It is never a good sign that a major political sanction should be removed from a country simply out of fear of reprisals. Yet, that is exactly what has happened. In brief, Europeans have decided not to ask the Turkish to recognise the Armenian genocide simply because it is scared that the Turks might actually bite. And, if the Turks do bite? Well that can only be a result of a troubled national Turkish culture – largely unable to confront significant genocidal errors – and not because Europe has asked the wrong question. There are rumours that the French will continue to push the ‘genocide recognition rule’ as a condition of EU entry, but if they are alone on that effort, then there is very little that can be done to ensure it will be among the requisites for EU entry. It might also be thought that Chirac could not afford to push the condition too far, since it may bring substantial damage to Franco-Turk relations before Turkey has even begun to attempt its progress towards European harmonization. Whether the European harmonization process is a good and worthwhile path for either Turkey or Europe will always remain unclear.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1476
From the desk of James McConalogue on Sat, 2006-10-07 15:41
Why is it that Turkey is still unable to recognise the atrocities committed against the Armenians? Furthermore, why is it that the EU is entirely antagonistic towards the idea of Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country, recognising their genocidal past? Last July, I reported to The Brussels Journal on the unjust suppression of the freedom of expression in Turkey. The most high-profile case pertained to the trial of Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk in December 2005 after the author had claimed in a Swiss newspaper that 30,000 Kurds and one million Ottoman Armenians were killed in Turkey yet nobody in the Turkish population would dare talk about it. The trial was dismissed by the Turkish Ministry of Justice at the beginning of 2006.
Two previous reports had also scrutinised the legal proceedings against the novelist, Elif Shafak. Shafak, author of Bastard of Istanbul, faced charges of “insulting Turkishness” under the primitive legislation. Subsequent to an earlier dismissal, the seventh High Criminal Court revived the charges made by Kemal Kerincsiz’s nationalist jurist group, ‘The Unity of Jurists.’ Fortunately, in the final week of September, Shafak was immediately acquitted although it is difficult to determine whether the acquittal arose because of EU pressure (threatening Turkish membership) or because the text truly did not “insult Turkishness” according to Turkey’s dated legislation.
The suppression of free expression has occurred for authors such as Shafak and others like her, precisely because of the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, prohibiting “insulting Turkishness”. The legislation was passed in 2005 as a measure of harmonizing Turkish law with Copenhagen criteria of the European Union.
Interesting in both the cases of Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak is how these novelists came to represent such a gigantic insult to Turkishness. Both novelists had referred to their mass killing – or genocide – of Armenians during the Ottoman Empire. It is those references to the Armenian genocide that led charges to be made by Kemal Kerincsiz’s Unity of Jurists. The Turkish government still denies the conceptual definition of the Armenian genocide.
However, the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide has now become a central issue for the Turkish government. It is so important that the EU Commission spokesperson, Krisztina Nagy, commented after the acquittal of Shafak trial that Article 301 “continues to pose a significant threat to freedom of expression in Turkey and all those who express a non-violent opinion.” Accordingly, EU member-states have considered reform of Article 301 as important as the Cyprus issue, tackling minority rights and social violence, in order for the EU to properly consider Turkish accession.
However, has the EU’s request for reform of Article 301 missed the point? After all, the Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, has already hinted at an acceptance to change the legislation. Should the EU, instead, as a condition of EU entry demand that the Turkish government acknowledge the Armenian genocide? In both the cases of Pamuk and Shafak – and eighty or so other authors – many of the legal proceedings against Turkish writers have arisen as a result of references to the Armenian genocide. That is the real obstacle for the Turkish government and frankly, its revisionist approach to the nation’s history is not at all suited to a future of diplomacy. It is essentially denying a holocaustal error of its past. Furthermore, all other national governments across the globe (other than Turkey) have classified the Armenian events that occurred between 1915 and 1917 as genocide. International authorities recognise the event as the Armenian genocide, a direct set of policies that led to the persecution and death of 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians. It cannot be named something else. It cannot be ignored. Neither can it be understood from the Turkish historical perspective as a ‘civil war.’
That is why I paid strong attention to the French President, Jacques Chirac’s words on 30 September. In a visit to Yerevan, the French President declared to news agencies: “Should Turkey recognize the genocide of Armenia to join the EU? […] I believe so. Each country grows by acknowledging the dramas and errors of its past. […] Can one say that Germany which has deeply acknowledged the holocaust, has as a result lost credit? It has grown.”
It is certain that Chirac’s desire to enforce the acceptance of the mass-killings as genocide amongst other EU accession conditions has not been aligned with that of other European nations. Other EU member-states seem to be fairly relaxed in letting Turkey off the hook on the genocide issue. The last MEP interim report on Turkey’s EU accession removed the request for an acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide. More worryingly, the MEPs removed the condition of EU accession out of fears that Turkish nationalists would be incited into aggression against this.
It is never a good sign that a major political sanction should be removed from a country simply out of fear of reprisals. Yet, that is exactly what has happened. In brief, Europeans have decided not to ask the Turkish to recognise the Armenian genocide simply because it is scared that the Turks might actually bite. And, if the Turks do bite? Well that can only be a result of a troubled national Turkish culture – largely unable to confront significant genocidal errors – and not because Europe has asked the wrong question. There are rumours that the French will continue to push the ‘genocide recognition rule’ as a condition of EU entry, but if they are alone on that effort, then there is very little that can be done to ensure it will be among the requisites for EU entry. It might also be thought that Chirac could not afford to push the condition too far, since it may bring substantial damage to Franco-Turk relations before Turkey has even begun to attempt its progress towards European harmonization. Whether the European harmonization process is a good and worthwhile path for either Turkey or Europe will always remain unclear.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1476
Ambassador Morgenthau Excerpts
Ambassador Morgenthau Excerpts
The Central Government now announced its intention of gathering the two million or more Armenians living in the several sections of the empire and transporting them to this desolate and inhospitable region [the Syrian desert]… The real purpose of the deportation was robbery and destruction; it really represented a new method of massacre. When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.
All through the spring and summer of 1915 the deportations took place. Scarcely a single Armenian, whatever his education or wealth, or whatever the social class to which he belonged, was exempted from the order…
Scarcely had the former possessors left the village, when Mohammedan mohadjirs - immigrants from other parts of Turkey - would be moved into the Armenian quarters. Similarly all their valuables… [were] then parceled out among the Turks.
Before the caravans were started, it became the regular practice to separate the young men from the families, tie them together in groups of four, lead them to the outskirts, and shoot them. Public hangings without trial - the only offense being that the victims were Armenians - were taking place constantly. The [soldiers] showed a particular desire to annihilate the educated and the influential… I was constantly receiving reports... [of Armenian men marched to a] secluded valley, a mob of Turkish peasants fell upon them with clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws.
A guard of [soldiers] accompanied each convoy… From thousands of Armenian cities and villages these despairing caravans now set forth; they filled all the roads leading southward… When the caravans first started, the individuals bore some resemblance to human beings; in a few hours, however, the dust of the road plastered their faces and clothes, the mud caked their lower members, and the slowly advancing mobs, frequently bent with fatigue and crazed by the brutality of their "protectors," resembled some new and strange animal species. Yet for the better part of six months, from April to October 1915, practically all the highways in Asia Minor were crowded with these unearthly bands of exiles. They could be seen winding in and out of every valley and climbing up the sides of nearly every mountain - moving on and on… every road led to death. Village after village and town after town was evacuated of its Armenian population… about 1,200,000 people started on this journey to the Syrian desert.
Detachments of [soldiers] would go ahead, notifying the Kurdish tribes that their victims were approaching, and Turkish peasants were also informed that their long-waited opportunity had arrived. The Government even opened the prisons and set free the convicts… Thus every caravan had a continuous battle for existence… Turkish roughs would fall upon the women, leaving them sometimes dead from their experiences or sometimes ravingly insane.
And thus, as the exiles moved, they left behind them another caravan - that of dead and unburied bodies, of old men and of women dying in the last stages of typhus, dysentery, and cholera, of little children lying on their backs and setting up their last piteous wails for food and water.
The most terrible scenes took place at the rivers, especially the Euphrates. Sometimes, when crossing this stream, the gendarmes would push the women into the water, shooting all who attempted to save themselves by swimming. Frequently the women themselves would save their honor by jumping into the river, their children in their arms… In a loop of the river near Erzinghan… the thousands of dead bodies created such a barrage that the Euphrates changed its course for about a hundred yards.
At another place, where there were wells, some women threw themselves into them… [and] were drowned and, in spite of that, the rest of the people drank from that well, the dead bodies still remaining there and polluting the water.
In one particular death march… On the seventieth day a few creatures reached Aleppo. Out of the consigned convoy of 18,000 souls just 150 women and children reached the destination. A few of the rest… were still living as captives of the Kurds and Truks; all the rest were dead.
I have no means told the most terrible details…
Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people. I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.
http://www.teachgenocide.org/background/ambassador.htm
The Central Government now announced its intention of gathering the two million or more Armenians living in the several sections of the empire and transporting them to this desolate and inhospitable region [the Syrian desert]… The real purpose of the deportation was robbery and destruction; it really represented a new method of massacre. When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.
All through the spring and summer of 1915 the deportations took place. Scarcely a single Armenian, whatever his education or wealth, or whatever the social class to which he belonged, was exempted from the order…
Scarcely had the former possessors left the village, when Mohammedan mohadjirs - immigrants from other parts of Turkey - would be moved into the Armenian quarters. Similarly all their valuables… [were] then parceled out among the Turks.
Before the caravans were started, it became the regular practice to separate the young men from the families, tie them together in groups of four, lead them to the outskirts, and shoot them. Public hangings without trial - the only offense being that the victims were Armenians - were taking place constantly. The [soldiers] showed a particular desire to annihilate the educated and the influential… I was constantly receiving reports... [of Armenian men marched to a] secluded valley, a mob of Turkish peasants fell upon them with clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws.
A guard of [soldiers] accompanied each convoy… From thousands of Armenian cities and villages these despairing caravans now set forth; they filled all the roads leading southward… When the caravans first started, the individuals bore some resemblance to human beings; in a few hours, however, the dust of the road plastered their faces and clothes, the mud caked their lower members, and the slowly advancing mobs, frequently bent with fatigue and crazed by the brutality of their "protectors," resembled some new and strange animal species. Yet for the better part of six months, from April to October 1915, practically all the highways in Asia Minor were crowded with these unearthly bands of exiles. They could be seen winding in and out of every valley and climbing up the sides of nearly every mountain - moving on and on… every road led to death. Village after village and town after town was evacuated of its Armenian population… about 1,200,000 people started on this journey to the Syrian desert.
Detachments of [soldiers] would go ahead, notifying the Kurdish tribes that their victims were approaching, and Turkish peasants were also informed that their long-waited opportunity had arrived. The Government even opened the prisons and set free the convicts… Thus every caravan had a continuous battle for existence… Turkish roughs would fall upon the women, leaving them sometimes dead from their experiences or sometimes ravingly insane.
And thus, as the exiles moved, they left behind them another caravan - that of dead and unburied bodies, of old men and of women dying in the last stages of typhus, dysentery, and cholera, of little children lying on their backs and setting up their last piteous wails for food and water.
The most terrible scenes took place at the rivers, especially the Euphrates. Sometimes, when crossing this stream, the gendarmes would push the women into the water, shooting all who attempted to save themselves by swimming. Frequently the women themselves would save their honor by jumping into the river, their children in their arms… In a loop of the river near Erzinghan… the thousands of dead bodies created such a barrage that the Euphrates changed its course for about a hundred yards.
At another place, where there were wells, some women threw themselves into them… [and] were drowned and, in spite of that, the rest of the people drank from that well, the dead bodies still remaining there and polluting the water.
In one particular death march… On the seventieth day a few creatures reached Aleppo. Out of the consigned convoy of 18,000 souls just 150 women and children reached the destination. A few of the rest… were still living as captives of the Kurds and Truks; all the rest were dead.
I have no means told the most terrible details…
Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people. I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.
http://www.teachgenocide.org/background/ambassador.htm
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