Updated
version.
After
the comical ‘sofa-gate’ incident in the EU, President Biden is posed
to be the first US President who dares to use the G-word in reference to
the systematic annihilation of Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire between
1915 to 1917. According to estimates, approximately 1.5 million Armenians died
during the genocide, either in massacres and in killings, or from
ill-treatment, abuse, and starvation. The Armenian diaspora marks 24 April as
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, a reference Turkey has consistently denied.
Presidents
Barack Obama and Donald Trump, among others, did not use the word to avoid
angering Turkey. Ankara is a longtime U.S. ally and a NATO member. President
Ronald Reagan was the last American leader to refer to genocide in a 1981
proclamation but backtracked under pressure from Turkey. And before Turkey
joined Nato, the “this is not our business”
argument was used.
There
is some indication that many in the Armenian diaspora have not forgotten
Obama’s failure to deliver on his 2008 campaign pledge to recognise
the Armenian genocide and are hoping that Biden won’t follow in the former
president’s footsteps.
Internally,
within the Obama administration, there had been disappointment when he failed
to recognise the genocide, with Samantha Power, who
had served as United Nations ambassador under Obama and and
deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes both publicly expressing their
unhappiness with the president’s decision.
At
that time, observers had speculated that Obama’s failure to deliver on his
campaign pledge had been rooted in concerns about straining the US’s
relationship with Turkey, whose cooperation it had required on Washington
D.C.’s military and diplomatic interests in the Middle East, specifically in
Afghanistan, Iran and Syria.
Triggering
outrage, foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu threatened that the recognition by
Biden of the mass killings of Armenians will seriously undermine the relationship
between the two countries, including that a scheduled phone call between Biden
and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has now been delayed until further
notice.
Over
many years, because of the fear of alienating Turkey, diplomats have been told to
avoid mentioning the well-documented genocide. In 2005, when John Evans, the
American ambassador to Armenia, said that “the Armenian genocide was the
first genocide of the 20th century,” he was recalled and forced into early
retirement. Stating the truth was seen as an act of insubordination.
For
years, Turkey had successfully deployed an army of high-priced lobbyists to
stop the measure. Ankara spent more than $6 million to press its agenda in Washington
in 2018, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a
campaign finance watchdog group.
The
man who invented the word “genocide”, was Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish
jurist who was born in 1900 on a small farm near the Polish town of Wolkowysk. Lemkin's memoirs cite early exposure to the
history of Ottoman attacks against Armenians which moved him in 1933 to
investigate the attempt to eliminate an entire people by accounts of the
massacres of Armenians.
Legislatures
in Germany, France and other European countries have however already recognized
the massacre of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 as genocide.
While
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had
shared a relatively friendly relationship with former US president Donald
Trump, ties between the US and Turkey have been strained over a range of issues
that include Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 defense systems,
foreign policy differences with regard to Syria, human rights and other
intersecting legal issues. Although Turkey had been sanctioned by the US
government under the Trump administration for its purchase of the Russian
defense systems, the former US president had not questioned Erdoğan’s human rights records, which had helped
reduce conflict between the two leaders.
In
retaliation for recognizing the Armenian Genocide, a
New York Times report suggests that Turkey might to try to “stymie or delay
specific policies to aggravate the Biden administration, particularly in Syria,
where Turkey’s tenuous cease-fire with Russia has allowed for already-narrowing
humanitarian access, and in the Black Sea, to which American warships must
first pass through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles on support missions to
Ukraine.”
More
specifically, according to the New York Times report, Turkey could also slow
non-NATO operations at Incirlik Air Base that
American forces use as a base and a station for equipment in the region. The
report indicates that Turkey could engage in provocation that would result in
new sanctions against the country or the re-imposition of the ones that had
been suspended. For instance, Turkey could initiate military action against
Kurdish fighters allied with US forces in northeast Syria.
Also,
more than three months into his presidency, Biden is yet to speak to Erdoğan. Observers say that it is not clear when
relations between the two leaders will improve. Last year during the
campaigning for the 2020 US elections, in an interview with The New York Times,
Biden had called Erdoğan an “autocrat”, which
had drawn criticism from Turkey.
What
happened?
In a
recent (April 2021) book Ümit Kurt writes that; Many
males, including youth, were executed outright, while the rest, men, women,
children, and the elderly, were deported to barren lands in Iraq and Syria.
Those deported were subjected to every manner of misery, kidnapping, rape,
torture, murder, and death from exposure, starvation, and thirst.(1)
Kurt
who among others focuses also on the economic aspects details how Turkish
officials deported the Armenians for various reasons, and while deporting them
promised that the government would look after their properties and give them
their equivalent values in the new places where they would be resettled. All
the promulgated laws and regulations repeated that the Armenians were the true
owners of their properties and that the state undertook their administration
only in the name of the owners. However, the entire legal system was based on
deception and fiction of caring for Armenian wealth and assets. In reality,
these laws and regulations were used to eliminate both the material and
physical existence of the Armenians in Anatolia. The same practice continued in
the Republican era. The Armenians’ right to the properties they left behind was
repeated in the international treaties signed during this period. Turkey
promised to give back properties to owners who as of 6 August 1924 were at
their properties. Afterward, Turkey’s borders were fortified, and not even one
Armenian was able to enter the country.
The
Armenians not allowed back were declared to be fugitive and missing, and the
process of confiscation of their properties continued. Furthermore, as all this
occurred in the Ottoman and Republican periods, it was not and could not be
said that the Armenians had no rights to their properties. Legislation held
that the Armenians possessed rights to their properties, if properties could
not be returned, their equivalent values were supposed to be paid, but that
same legislation was used simultaneously to prevent restitution. The goal was
to completely remove the Armenian presence in Anatolia. What was occurring was
a legal operation of theft. The use of the legal system was both an attempt to
deny and legitimate the Armenian genocide under the cover of legality. The law
was used to provide a legitimation of what was an act of power and destruction.
How
did it happen
In
1908, a new government came to power in Turkey. A group of reformers who called
themselves the “Young Turks” overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid and established a
more modern constitutional government.
At
first, the Armenians were hopeful that they would have an equal place in this
new state, but they soon learned that what the nationalistic Young Turks wanted
most of all was to “Turkify” the empire. According to this way of thinking,
non-Turks, and especially Christian non-Turks were a grave threat to the new
state.
On
the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians in the declining
Ottoman Empire. By 1922, there were fewer than 400,000. The others some 1.5
million.
The
evidence in the Ottoman archives is augmented by the documents found in Germany
and Austria, which give ample confirmation that we are looking at a centrally
planned operation of annihilation. See for example Talat Pasha (minister of the
interior): "What we are dealing with here is the annihilation of the
Armenians."(2)
That
time government in the form of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) founded
a special organization that participated in what led to the destruction of the
Ottoman Armenian community. This organization adopted its name in 1913 and
functioned like a Special Forces outfit.
During
the Armenian genocide, there was a great deal of collaboration between the
Special Organization and the Central Committee as well as the local
organizations of the CUP. In the 1919 trial of Unionist leaders, many documents
and several defendants testified to the fact that the Special Organization worked
hand in hand with the CUP, even as it was officially tied to the War Ministry.
The
genocide unfolded in three episodes: first, the massacre of perhaps 200,000
Ottoman Armenians that took place between 1894 and 1896; then the much larger
deportation and slaughter of Armenians that began in 1915 and has been widely
recognized as genocide; and third, as mentioned underneath, the destruction or
deportation of the remaining Christians (mostly Greeks) during and after the
conflict of 1919-22, which Turks call their War of
Independence. The fate of Assyrian
Christians, of whom 250,000 or more may have perished.
The
first episode unfolded in an Ottoman Empire that was at once modernizing and
crumbling, while in chronic rivalry with the Russians. The second took place
when the Turks were at war with three Christian powers (Britain, France, and
Russia) and were concerned about being overrun from west and east. During the
third, Greek expeditionary forces had occupied the port of Izmir, with approval
from their Western allies, and then marched inland.
Under
scrutiny, during the US Senate hearings, there is little doubt that the
death marches that began in April 1915 were centrally coordinated.
The
facts of the Ottoman campaign have long been established. At the time of the
slaughter, which began in 1915, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire,
Henry Morgenthau, cabled Washington that a “campaign of race extermination” was
underway, while the American consul in Aleppo, in what is now Syria, described
a “carefully planned scheme to thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race.”
But
there have been arguments over how long in advance they were planned, and
whether it was always intended that most victims would die.
Ankara
argues that the Armenian death toll was much lower than reported and that
people on both sides died as a result of wartime unrest.
Historians
have contested those assumptions by documenting how Ottoman
soldiers committed massacres and forced
marches that formed part of the Ottoman Empire's mass deportation of Armenians
were instead designed to kill them during the journey.
Based
on current evidence the Ottoman inner circle began planning deadly mass deportations
soon after a Russian victory in January 1915. However, Ottoman policy was also
shaped and hardened by the battle of Van, in which Russians and Armenians
fought successfully, starting in April 1915.
Also
Turkey's allies conceded that the Turkish government had sought to exterminate
the country's Armenian population. For example the Austrian charge d'affaires Karl Graf von und zu Trauttmansdorff Weinsberg, said that the mass of evidence, not only from Armenian
sources but from bankers, German officers, consuls, and other witnesses, led
him to conclude in late September that the Turks, carried out the
"extermination of the Armenian race.(3)
Max Scheubner- Richter, the German vice consul reported to the
German Foreign Office that "there will be no Armenians left in Turkey
after the war."(4)
Recounting
the fate of several thousand missing Armenian soldiers, Leslie Davis, the
American consul at Harput and Mezreh,
wrote that "it finally appeared that all of them were shot by the
gendarmes who accompanied them."(5)
The
American missionary physician Clarence Ussher, a resident of Van for several
years, described a tense city ready to explode amidst rumors of massacres and
reports of murders of disarmed Armenian· soldiers. Even in Ussher's presence, Djevdet Bey gave orders to destroy a nearby community. It
was small wonder, then, that when Bey demanded four thousand Armenian men,
Armenians "felt certain he intended to put the four thousand to
death." On April 19, according to Ussher, Turkish units stationed in
villages around Van received the order that "the Armenians must be
exterminated."(6)
By
the fall of 1915 the physical evidence of slaughter marked the landscape. Roads
and rivers were filled with dead bodies. For weeks corpses, many tied back to
back, floated down the Euphrates River into what is now northern Syria. The
Euphrates briefly cleared, then corpses reappeared, if anything in still larger
numbers. This time the dead were "chiefly women and children."
Travelers on the roads of eastern Turkey also saw the dead everywhere. A
journey outside Harput in November revealed hands and
feet sticking out of the ground, and decomposing bodies: the missionary Mary
Riggs wrote, "The Land was polluted."(7)
But
as mentioned at the start Turkey continues to deny it happened and stopped
anybody searching any of the archives in Turkey. Therefore it might be at its
place here to explain how relevant research nevertheless advanced.
How
the research came about, the revealing bibliography
The
man who invented the word “genocide”, Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish
origin, was moved to investigate the attempt to eliminate an entire people by
accounts of the massacres of Armenians. He did not, however, coin the word
until 1943, applying it to Nazi Germany and the Jews in a book published a year
later, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.”
Interest
in the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and genocide as a field of study,
however, more generally began to emerge in the 1960s and subsequent decades.
“Holocaust
consciousness” moved from primarily a Jewish concern into the broader public
with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Hannah Arendt’s controversial
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and the growing connection made between the
tragedy in Europe and the survival of the state of Israel. The very term
“holocaust,” which earlier had been applied (by David Lloyd-George, for
example) to the Armenian massacres, now
was nearly exclusively (and with a capital “H”) used for the Nazi killing of
the Jews.(8) With the fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian deportations in
1965, commemorations were held around the world, none more striking than the
demonstrations in Erevan that demanded “mer hogher” (our lands) and led, first, to the removal of the
local Communist party secretary and, later, to the building of an official
monument to the Genocide at Tsiternakaberd.(9)
Armenian “genocide consciousness” fed on
the persistent and ever more aggressive denial by the Turkish government and
sponsored spokesmen, including some with academic credentials, that the Young Turk government had ordered the
deportations and massacres in an attempt to exterminate one of the peoples of
the Ottoman Empire. Actions of Armenian terrorists from 1973 into the early
1980s brought the issue to public attention, but scholarship lagged far behind
the agitated public consciousness. Out of the political and historiographical
struggles of the 1970s came the first serious work by historians in the late
1970s and through the 1980s. Richard G. Hovannisian’s
1978 bibliography of sources on The Armenian Holocaust demonstrated both the
availability of primary sources for anyone who cared to learn about 1915 as
well as the thinness, indeed absence, of academic historical research on the
topic.(10) In those years one had to turn to the French physician Yves Ternon, who moved from his studies of Nazi medical
atrocities to the genocide.(11) As a small number of Armenian scholars, notably
Richard Hovannisian, Vahakn
Dadrian, and Levon Marashlian, as well as a few non-Armenians like Robert Jay Lifton, Leo Kuper, Ternon, and Tessa Hofmann, began to write about an Armenian
genocide, a defense of the Turks by Heath Lowry, Stanford Shaw, and Justin
McCarthy led to clashes over such fundamental questions as the number of
victims, the role and responsibility of the Committee of Union and Progress, and whether 1915 should be
considered an asymmetrical civil war or intentional, state-directed
extermination of a designated people, that is, genocide.
At
the same time, several Holocaust scholars, seeking to preserve the “uniqueness”
of the Jewish exterminations, rejected the suggestion of equivalence between
the Armenian and Jewish genocides. As the historian Peter Novick reports, “Lucy
Dawidowicz (quite falsely) accused the Armenians of
‘turn[ing] the subject into a vulgar contest about
who suffered more.’ She added that while Turks had ‘a rational reason’ for
killing Armenians, the Germans had no rational reason for killing
Jews.”(12)
Armenians
were upset at the reduction of the Armenian presence in Washington’s United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum and by the Israeli government’s attempt to
close down an international genocide conference in Tel Aviv in 1982 after the
Turkish government protested the discussion of the Armenian case.
Prominent
American Jews, including Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, and Arthur Hertzberg, withdrew from the conference, but
the organizer, Israel W. Charny, went ahead with the meeting.(13) Several
American Armenian scholars, however, refused to attend as well, in protest over
the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that was taking place as the conference held
its sessions. As one state after another officially recognized 1915 as a
genocide, the United States and Israel soon became the two most notable
exceptions, along with Turkey. Activists in Europe and North America organized
a series of campaigns to pressure the holdout states toward genocide
recognition.
Two
years after the crisis over the Tel Aviv conference, the Permanent Peoples’
Tribunal, a civil society organization founded four years earlier (1979) by the
Italian senator Lelio Basso, held a “trial” examining
the Armenian massacres to determine if it constituted genocide. Meeting in
Paris from April 13 to 16, 1984, the jury heard the accounts of scholars, among
them Hovannisian, Jirair Libaridian,
Christopher Walker, Hofmann, Ternon, and Dickran Kouymjian, and examined
the arguments of the Turkish government and its supporters. In its verdict the
Tribunal determined that the “extermination of the Armenian population groups
through deportation and massacre constitutes a crime of genocide…. [T]he Young
Turk government is guilty of this genocide, about the acts perpetrated between
1915 and 1917; the Armenian genocide is
also an ‘international crime’ for which the Turkish state must assume
responsibility, without using the pretext of any discontinuity in the existence of the state to elude that
responsibility.”(14) By the late 1980s, at long last, the first academic severe
scholarship in the West on the fate of the Armenians began to appear in essays,
collected volumes, and comparative studies. A new field of genocide studies
legitimized serious attention to an event that had been all but erased from
historians’ memory.(15) Still, much of the energy spent in these debates
centered on whether genocide had taken place.
Even
as new works appeared, the Turkish official state denial had set the boundaries
of the discussion to the neglect of important issues of interpretation and
explanation. Much of the early literature did not deal explicitly with
questions of causation. A critical intervention by the political scientist
Robert Melson labeled the denialist viewpoint
appropriately the provocation thesis, that is, outside agitators provoked the
Armenians within the Ottoman Empire and upset the relative harmony between
peoples that had existed for many centuries. The Ottoman government’s response
to the Armenian rebellion was measured and justified, in this view, and
therefore it was the Armenians who brought on their destruction.(16)
As a
form of explanation, the provocation thesis remained on the
political-ideological level and made no effort to probe the negative features
of the Ottoman social and political order. No discussion was offered to explain
why the overwhelming majority of Armenians acquiesced to Turkish rule and did
not participate in the rebellion. Nor was any explanation besides greed and
ambition given to explain Armenian resistance. Like other conservative views of
social discontent and revolution, arguments such as those put forth by Western
historians from William L. Langer to Stanford Shaw and Turkish apologists like
the former Foreign Ministry official Salahi R. Sonyel,
repressed peoples had no right to resistance.(17)
Scholarship
on the late Ottoman Empire and the fate of the Armenians burgeoned in the 1990s
and 2000s. Historians of the Ottoman Empire often treated the imperial history
as one primarily of the Muslims, mainly Turks, but in time a broader,
multinational history began to emerge that integrated the stories of the
non-Muslims into the tapestry of the empire.(18) A pioneer in the study of the
Armenian Genocide, the historical sociologist Vahakn
N. Dadrian, made a major, if a controversial,
contribution to the knowledge of 1915 in his synthetic volume, The History of
the Armenian Genocide, arguing that the Genocide resulted from religious
conflict and a Turkish culture of violence.(19) The beautifully written popular
history of poet memoirist Peter Balakian reproduced
in evocative detail the horrors of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians,
though his narrative only hinted at a causal argument and did not attempt a
sustained explanation of why the genocide occurred.(20) Bernard Lewis made the
classical statement explaining the Genocide as the result of conflicting
nationalisms.(21) The argument from nationalism has dominated much of the
subsequent historiography on the Genocide. In an anthology edited by
Hovannisian, Robert Melson, R. Hrair
Dekmejian, Hovannisian, and Leo Kuper explain
the Genocide as largely the result of Turkish nationalist ideology and the
political ambitions of the İttihadist
leaders.(22) An essential (regrettably unpublished) contribution to the local
study of the Genocide was written by
Stephan H. Astourian, the author of
significant articles on the causes, development, and aftermath of 1915.(23) Exceptional work,
indispensable to establish the truth about the often-obscured events of 1915,
was carried out by two giants among researchers and analysts, Raymond Kévorkian and Wolfgang Gust, who collected the relevant
documents that laid the indisputable foundation of facts of genocide.(24)
Perhaps
most extraordinary of all, beginning with the former Turkish activist Taner Akçam, a few scholars of
Turkish and Kurdish origin explored the blank
spots of their history.(25) Even while writing under the restraints
imposed by the denialist state, scholars in Turkey and of Turkish, Kurdish, and
Armenian origins used the available access to the archives and elevated the
writing on the tragedies of the late Ottoman Empire to new levels of
professional authority.(26) The formation
of the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship (WATS) brought together
for the first time Turkish, Armenian,
and other historians, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists
in a joint discussion of 1915, its causes and
aftermath.(27) Once the static produced by denial was reduced, scholars
were able to focus on the relevant but contested questions of why and when
genocide occurred and who initiated it. Comparison with other genocides yielded
important insights.(28) Among the principal volumes on the Armenian Genocide
that benefited from engagement with an intimate acquaintance with Holocaust
literature are works by the British historian Donald Bloxham.(29) Taking an
international and comparative approach, Bloxham centers responsibility for
genocide on choices made by state leaders, which were shaped by “perpetrator
ideology,” “the most important element in genocide,” and seeks to explain not
only mass killing but also the continued denial of it. Turkish nationalism,
which he sees as “the ideology of the
CUP,” “alone could translate its agenda into mass expropriation and
murder of Christians.”(30) His analysis
employs the notion of “cumulative radicalization,” first used by the German
historian Hans Mommsen to analyze the Holocaust. In a grand comparative study
of ethnic cleansing and modern mass killing, the historical sociologist Michael
Mann suggests a combination of ideological, economic, military, and political
power as essential ingredients in mass violence.(31)
When,
for example, an immanent ideology that reinforces already-formed social
identities combines with a transcendent ideology that seeks to move beyond the
existing social organization, this toxic mix of ideological power increases the
likelihood of violence. Both interstate warfare and the overlapping of
ethnicity with economic inequality increase the possibility of civil and ethnic
conflict. Turning to the Armenian Genocide, Mann rejects the view that Turkish
governments had a consistent, long-term genocidal intent. Like Bloxham, he
emphasizes the radicalization of Turkish policies from the “exemplary
repression” of Abdülhamid II through the
encouragement and then forced application of Turkification, on to deportation
(ethnic cleansing) and finally organized mass killing, genocide.
One
hundred years after the Young Turk government decided to deport and massacre
hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Assyrians the controversies over the
Genocide still rage, but the balance has shifted dramatically and conclusively
toward the view that the Ottoman government conceived, initiated, and
implemented deliberate acts of ethnic cleansing and mass murder targeted at specific
ethnoreligious communities. Although a handful of “scholars” continue to reject
the argument that genocide occurred or to rationalize the actions of the
Ottomans as a necessary, indeed understandable, policy directed at national
security, new generations of researchers continue to establish what happened
and why.
Neo-denialist
accounts occasionally appear, but step by agonizing step more accurate accounts
and plausible explanations are being generated by the present generation of
historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and their
emerging graduate students.
A
recent book by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, focused on how from 1894 to 1924, also between 1.5
million and 2.5 million Ottoman Christians perished. As a result, the Christian
share of Anatolia’s population fell from 20 percent to 2 percent.(32)
Sifting
the evidence, Morris and Ze’evi write that the
Ottoman inner circle began planning deadly mass deportations soon after a
Russian victory in January 1915. However, Ottoman policy was also shaped and
hardened by the battle of Van, in which Russians and Armenians fought
successfully, starting in April 1915.
Morris
and Ze’evi conclude that despite the swing from
Sultan Abdulhamid II’s autocracy to republicanism
after 1918, Turkey’s exterminatory patterns persisted, as did the rallying cry
of (domestic) jihad until the early 1920s. Thus, the killing of about two
million Christians purposefully served to Islamize and Turkify Asia Minor,
making it by the early 1920s an almost purely Turkish-Muslim national home and
nation-state.
A day
after US lawmakers passed the resolution Turkey's Foreign Ministry summoned the
US ambassador to Ankara stating that:
"We
condemn and reject this decision of the US Senate," Turkish Vice President
Fuat Oktay tweeted on
today.
There
was also a reaction from a Kurdish commander: This decision will stop Turkey
from committing massacres against the Kurdish people and stop its invasion of
Rojava,” said SDF commander Mazloum Abdi in a tweet,
using the Kurdish name for the Autonomous Administration of North and East
Syria.
Legislatures
in Germany, France, and other European countries have also recognized
the massacre of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 as genocide.
1. Ümit Kurt, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of
Genocide in an Ottoman Province, 2021, p.1.
2.
German Foreign Office, Political Archive, PA-AA/Bo. Kons./B.
191, Report of Consul Mordtmann, dated 30 June 1915.
Dr. Mordtmann knew Turkish well.
3.
Armenian Genocide Documentation, vol. 2, 1989, pp. 208, 243.
4.
Political Archive, PA-AA/Bo. KonstB. 170, Report by
Consul Scheubner-Richter, Erzurum, dated 28 July 1915
5.
Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on
the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917, 1989, p. 61.
6.
Clarence Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, 1917, pp. 237, 239, 244;
Donald Bloxham, "The Beginning of the Armenian Catastrophe: Comparative
and Contextual Considerations," in Der Völkermord
an den Armeniern und die Shoa,
ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller, 2002,
p. 118.
7.
Turkish Atrocities: Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of
Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915-1917 (Armenian Genocide
Documentation Series) by Ara Sarafian and James L. Barton, 1998, pp. 33,18; and
Wolfgang Gust, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16, 2005, p. 353.
8.
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999),
pp. 128–142. “Holocaust” had been used by The New York Times in the 1890s for
the Hamidian massacres of the Armenians, as well as
the Adana massacres of 1910. Duckett Z. Ferriman, The
Young Turks and the Truth About the Holocaust at Adana in Asia Minor, During
April 1909 (London, 1913).
9.
The only historical journal dealing with Armenians available in English in The
1940s and 1950s were The Armenian Review, founded in 1948 by the Dashnak party. Early articles in the journal that dealt
with the Genocide included those by H. Saro (1948), Onnig Mekhtarian (1949), Vahan Minakhorian (1955), Navasard Deyrmenjian (1961), Vahe A. Sarafian (1959), Ruben Der Minassian
(1964), James H. Tashjian (1957, 1962), and H. Kazarian (Haikazun Ghazarian) (1965).
10.
Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian Holocaust: A Bibliography Relating to the
Deportations, Massacres, and Dispersion of the Armenian People, 1915–1923 (Cambridge,
MA: National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, 1978).
11.
Yves Ternon, Les Arméniens: Histoire d’un génocide (Paris: Éditions de Seuil,
1977); La cause arménienne (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1983); with Gérard
Chalian,The Armenians From Genocide to Resistance, trans. Tony Berrett (London:
Zed, 1983) and Le génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Complexe, 1984); his own
Enquęte sur la négation d’un genocide (Marseilles: Éditions Parathčses, 1989);
and Mardin 1915: anatomie pathologique d’une destruction (Paris: Centre
d’Histoire Arménienne Contemporaine, 2002).
12.
Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 192.
13.
Israel W. Charny and Shamai Davidson (eds.), The Book
of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide: Book One: The
Conference Program and Crisis (Tel Aviv: Institute on the International
Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, 1983).
14. A
Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide, The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal
(London: Zed, 1985) P. 227.
15.
The work of Leo Kuper (1908–1994) was particularly
important in defining the field of comparative genocide studies: Genocide: Its
Political Use in the 20th Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981),
and The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
Among the essential works of the late 1980s and early 1990s were Hovannisian
(ed.), The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
1986); idem, The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1992); and Melson, Revolution, and
Genocide.
16. Melson, “A Theoretical Enquiry into the Armenian Massacres
of 1894–1986.”
17. See,
for example, Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey,
vol. II, pp. 315–316; and Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism: vol. I, p. 160.
On a particular passage by Langer, Norman Ravitch notes that Langer’s “labeling
of the Armenian movement as national-socialist can hardly be considered a slip
of the pen.” “The Armenian Catastrophe: Of History, Murder & Sin,”
Encounter 57, 6 (December 1981): 76, n. 16.
18.
Excellent examples include Sarkissian, History of the Armenian Question to 1885;
Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire; Braude and
Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire; and Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition and Preparation for
a Revolution.
19. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide; see also his
Warrant for Genocide.
20. Balakian, The Burning Tigris. See the review by Belinda
Cooper, The New York Times Book Review, October 19, 2003.
21.
Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Over time Lewis hardened his position.
In 2007 he was quoted in an article opposing U.S. recognition of the Genocide
in the conservative Washington Times: “[T]he point that was being made was that
the massacre of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was the same as what
happened to Jews in Nazi Germany and that is a downright falsehood. What
happened to the Armenians was the result of a massive Armenian armed rebellion
against the Turks, which began even before war broke out, and continued on a
larger scale.” Bruce Fein (identified as “resident scholar with the Turkish
Coalition of America), “Armenian Crime Amnesia?” The Washington Times, October
16, 2007.
22.
Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. For the ongoing
development of Genocide scholarship, see Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian
Genocide, and Hovannisian (ed.), Remembrance and Denial.
23. Astourian, “Testing World Systems Theory, Cilicia
(1830s–1890s).”
24. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide; Gust (ed.), The Armenian
Genocide.
25. Akçam, Armenien und der Völkermord, From Empire to Republic, A Shameful Act, The
Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, and with Dadrian,
Judgment at Istanbul.
26.
See, for example, Fuad Dündar, İttihat ve Terakki’nin Müslümları İskan Politikası (1913–1918) (Istanbul: ĺletşim,
2001); his dissertation, “L’Ingénierie ethnique du régime jeune-turc”
(Paris: EHESS, 2006); and idem, Crime of Numbers. Using hundreds of Turkish
memoirs to establish the undeniability of the Genocide, the historical
sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek
produced Denial of Violence.
27.
On the process and results of WATS, see Suny, Göçek, and Naimark (eds.), A Question of Genocide, and Suny, “Truth in Telling.”
28.
Explicit comparisons between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust inform two
important collections: Bartov and Mack (eds.), In
God’s Name, and Kieser and Schaller (eds.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und
die Shoah.
29.
Donald Bloxham, “The Armenian Genocide of 1915–16: Cumulative Radicalisation and the Development of a Destruction
Policy,” Past and Present, 181 (November 2003): 141–191; idem, The Great Game
of Genocide; and idem, Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe
(London: Valentine Mitchell, 2008).
30.
Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, p. 19.
31.
Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy.
32.
The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities,
1894-1924, 2019.
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