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Revisiting
the Armenian Genocide by Guenter Lewy The debate over what happened to Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire during World War I remains acrimonious ninety years after
it began. Armenians say they were the victims of the first genocide of the
twentieth century. Most Turks say Armenians died during intercommunal
fighting and during a wartime relocation necessitated by security concerns
because the Armenians sympathized with and many fought on the side of the
enemy. For genocide scholars, the claims of the Armenians have become
incontrovertible historical fact. But many historians, both in Turkey and the
West, have questioned the appropriateness of the genocide label.[1] The ramifications of the dispute are
wide-reaching. The Armenians, encouraged by strong support in France, insist
on a Turkish confession and apology as a prerequisite for Turkey's admission
into the European Union. Ankara's relations with Yerevan remain frozen
because of the dispute. Across the West, Armenian activists try politically
to predetermine the historical debate by demanding various parliaments pass
resolutions recognizing the Armenian genocide. The key issue in this controversy is not the
extent of Armenian suffering; both sides agree that several hundred thousand
Christians perished during the deportation of the Armenians from Anatolia to
the Syrian desert and elsewhere in 1915-16.[2]
With little notice, the Ottoman government forced men, women, and children
from their homes. Many died of starvation or disease during a harrowing trek
over mountains and through deserts. Others were murdered. Historians do not dispute these events although
they may squabble over numbers and circumstances. Rather the key question in
the debate concerns premeditation. Did the Young Turk regime organize the
massacres that took place in 1916? Most of those who maintain that Armenian deaths were
premeditated and so constitute genocide base their argument on three pillars:
the actions of Turkish military courts of 1919-20,
which convicted officials of the Young Turk government of organizing
massacres of Armenians, the role of the so-called "Special
Organization" accused of carrying out the massacres, and the Memoirs
of Naim Bey[3]
which contain alleged telegrams of Interior Minister Talât Pasha conveying
the orders for the destruction of the Armenians. Yet when these events and
the sources describing them are subjected to careful examination, they
provide at most a shaky foundation from which to claim, let alone conclude,
that the deaths of Armenians were premeditated. The Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919-20
Following the Ottoman Empire's defeat in World
War I, a new government formed and accused its predecessor Young Turk regime
of serious crimes. These accusations led to the court-martialing of the
leadership of the Committee on Union and Progress, the party that had seized
and held power since 1908, and other selected former officials. The charges
included subversion of the constitution, wartime profiteering, and the
massacres of both Greeks and Armenians.[4] By all accounts, the chief reason for convening
military tribunals was pressure from victorious Allied states, which insisted
on retributions for the Armenian massacres. The Turks also hoped that by
foisting blame on a few members of the Committee on Union and Progress, they
might exculpate the rest of the Turkish nation and, thereby, receive more
lenient treatment at the Paris peace conference.[5] The most famous trial took place in Istanbul,
but it was not the first. At least six regional courts
convened in provincial cities where massacres had occurred, but due to
inadequate documentation, the total number of courts is not known.[6]
The first recorded tribunal began on February 5, The main trial began in Istanbul on April 28,
1919. Among the twelve defendants were members of the Committee on Union and
Progress leadership and former ministers. Seven key figures, including Talât Pasha, minister of interior; Enver Pasha, minister
of war; and Cemal Pasha, governor of Aleppo, had fled, and therefore, were
tried in absentia. "Embedded in the indictment," writes Vahakn N.
Dadrian, the best-known defender of the Armenian position, were
"forty-two authenticated documents substantiating the charges therein,
many bearing dates, identification of senders of the cipher telegrams and
letters, and names of recipients."[8]
Among these documents is the written deposition of General Vehib Pasha,
commander of the Turkish Third Army, who testified that "the murder and
extermination of the Armenians and the plunder and robbery of their property
is the result of decisions made by the central committee of Ittihad ve
Terakki [Committee on Union and Progress]."[9]
The indictment quoted another document in which a high-ranking deportation
official, Abdulahad Nuri, relates how Talât Pasha
told him that "the purpose of the deportation was destruction."[10]
On July 22, the court-martial found several defendants guilty of subverting
constitutionalism by force and found them responsible for massacres. Talât, Enver, Cemal, and Nazim Bey, a high Committee on
Union and Progress official, were sentenced in absentia to death while others
received lengthy prison sentences.[11] Despite widespread hatred of the discredited
Young Turk regime, the Turkish public was lukewarm to the trials of the
Committee on Union and Progress leadership. On April 4,
1919, Lewis Heck, the U.S. high commissioner in Istanbul, reported that
"it is popularly believed that many of [the trials] are made from
motives of personal vengeance or at the instigation of the Entente
authorities, especially the British."[12]
Opposition to the trials increased after the Greek army occupied Smyrna
(Izmir) on May 15, which led to an outburst of patriotic and nationalistic
feeling. Under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a
highly decorated Turkish officer, a nationalist movement emerged that would
eventually overthrow the sultan's government in Istanbul. From the beginning,
the Kemalists criticized the sultan for his abject surrender to the Allies,
and they increasingly expressed the fear that the trials were part of a plan
to partition the Ottoman Empire. On August 11, 1920, the Kemalist government
in Ankara ordered a stop to all court-martial proceedings; the resignation of
the last Ottoman cabinet on October 17, 1920, marked the end of the trials.[13] Armenian writers have praised the contribution
of the military tribunals for their elucidation of historical truth, but such
broad conclusions are problematic given both the procedures of the trials and
questions over the reliability of their findings. The tribunals lacked the
basic requirements of due process. Few authors familiar with Ottoman jurisprudence
have a positive assessment, all the more so with regard to military courts.
The Ottoman penal code did not acknowledge the right of cross-examination,
and the role of the judge was far more important than in the Anglo-American
tradition. The judge weighed the probative value of all evidence submitted
during the preparatory phase and during the trial, and he questioned the
accused.[14]
At the 1919-20 trials, the presiding officer acted
more like a prosecutor than an impartial judge. Ottoman
rules of procedure also barred defense counsel access to pretrial
investigatory files and from accompanying their clients to pretrial
interrogations.[15]
On May 6, 1919, at the third session of the main trial, defense counsel
challenged the court's repeated references to the indictment as proven fact,
but the court rejected the objection.[16]
Throughout the trials, the court heard no witnesses, and the verdict rested
entirely on documents and testimony never subject to cross-examination. Heck
expressed disapproval that the defendants in the Yozgat court were tried on
the basis of "anonymous court material."[17] Probably the most serious problem affecting the
probative value of the 1919-20 military court
proceedings is the loss of all their documentation. What is known of the
sworn testimony and depositions is limited to that related secondhand in
selected supplements of the official gazette of the Ottoman government, Takvim-i
Vekayi, and press reports. What is not known is the accuracy of the
transcription and whether the newspapers reprinted all or only part of texts
entered as evidence. According to Dadrian,
"before being introduced as accusatory exhibits, each and every official
document was authenticated by the competent staff personnel of the Interior
Ministry who thereafter affixed on the top part of the document: ‘it
conforms to the original.'"[18]
However, few historians would take period officials at their word without
verification. The historical weight
of the Nuremberg trials, for example, rests upon the sheer mass of original
documentation. The historical significance of the Nuremberg verdicts would be
undercut had the record of the trials been lost or not subject to outside
review. In the absence of complete original documents,
historians examining the Armenian question have relied only on selected
excerpts and quotations. For example, Dadrian related how the deposition of
General Vehib Pasha, commander of the Turkish Third Army, described Behaeddin
Şakir, one of the top Committee on Union and Progress leaders, as the man who
"procured and engaged in the command zone of the Third Army, the butchers
of human beings … He
organized gallows birds as well as gendarmes and policemen with blood on
their hand and blood in their eyes."[19]
Parts of this deposition were included in the indictment of the main trial
and in the verdict of the Harput trial,[20]
but an indictment is not proof of guilt. The context of the quoted
remarks has been lost. While the entire text of the deposition was allegedly
read into the record of the Trabizond trial on March 29, 1919, the
proceedings of this trial are not preserved in any source; only the verdict
is reprinted in the official gazette. Contemporary Turkish authors dismiss the
military tribunals of 1919-20 as tools of Allied
retribution.[21]
At the time, the victorious Allies considered them a travesty of justice. The
trials, British high commissioner S.A.G. Calthorpe wrote to London, are
"proving to be a farce and injurious to our own prestige and to that of
the Turkish government."[22]
In the view of Commissioner John de Robeck, the tribunal was such a failure
"that its findings cannot be held of any account at all."[23]
When the British government considered holding trials of alleged Ottoman war
criminals in Malta, it declined to use any evidence developed by the 1919-20 Ottoman tribunals. The Role of the Teşkilat-i Mahsusa
Several of the courts-martial held in 1919-20 made references to the destructive role of a unit
called Teşkilat-i Mahsusa (Special Organization). Many proponents of the
Armenian cause accept this accusation. Dadrian described the members of this
unit as the main instrument used by the Committee on Union and Progress to
carry out its plan to exterminate the Armenians. "Their mission was to
deploy in remote areas of Turkey's interior and to ambush and destroy convoys
of Armenian deportees,"[24]
he wrote. The Special Organization's "principal duty was the execution
of the Armenian genocide."[25] The Special Organization, which developed
between 1903 and 1907, only adopted its name in 1913. Under the direction of
Enver Pasha and the command of many talented officers, the Special
Organization functioned like a special forces outfit. Philip Stoddard, the
author of the only full scholarly study of the group, called it "a
significant unionist vehicle for dealing with both Arab separatism and
Western imperialism." At its peak, it enrolled about 30,000 men. During
World War I, the Ottoman command used it for special military operations in
the Caucasus, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. In 1915, for example, Special
Organization units seized key oases along the Ottoman line of advance against
the Suez Canal. The regime also used the Special Organization to suppress
"subversion" and "possible collaboration" with the
external enemy. However, according to Stoddard, this activity targeted
primarily indigenous nationalists in Syria and Lebanon. The Special
Organization, he maintained, played no role in the Armenian deportations.[26] Yet, the main tribunal's indictment accused the
Special Organization of carrying out "criminal operations and
activities" against the Armenians. According to Dadrian: The Ittihadist [Unionist] leaders redeployed the
brigand units for use on the home front internally, namely against the
Armenians. Through a comprehensive sweep of the major cities, towns, and
villages, containing large clusters of Armenian populations, the Special
Organization units, with their commanding officers more or less intact, set
to work to carry out Ittihad's blueprint of annihilation. [27] Turkish as well as German civilian and military
sources, Dadrian maintained, confirm this information, including the
employment of convicts in Special Organization death squads. But Dadrian's
references do not always prove his claims. While the
Ottoman government released convicts during World War I in order to increase
its manpower pool for military service, there is no evidence beyond the
indictment of the main trial for the assertion that the Special Organization,
with large numbers of convicts enrolled in its ranks, took the lead role in
the massacres. Nor was the presence of convicts abnormal. Use of
convicts for military duty in wartime had precedent including use by U.S. and
British armies. During World War I, U.S. courts released almost 8,000 men
convicted of serious offenses on condition of their induction into military
service.[28] Many of the allegations linking the Special
Organization to massacres are based not directly on documents but rather on
the sometimes questionable assumptions of those reading them. Dadrian has
been among the most prominent scholars making assertions for which the
original sources do not allow. He described a link between the Special
Organization and the Armenian massacres, but Stange, the German officer who
wrote the document in question, never actually mentioned the Special
Organization but instead referred to "scum."[29]
Nor is there any indication that Stange had any role in the Special
Organization, as Dadrian asserted.[30]
In view of the tension between Ottoman and German secret services, it would
be an unlikely assignment.[31]
More likely was that the German Foreign Ministry files were accurate when
they described Stange as commanding a detachment of 2,000-3,000
mostly Georgian irregulars who had volunteered to fight the Russians.[32]
Another German officer related that the Stange detachment included Armenians,[33]
surely a curious fact in the case of a unit said to have been part of an
apparatus for the implementation of the Armenian genocide. The question of
who carried out the killings of the Armenian deportees is difficult to resolve
conclusively. While it may be politically expedient to blame the Special
Organization, more likely, the perpetrators were Kurdish tribesmen and
corrupt policemen out for booty.[34] Dadrian has taken similar liberties with a
Turkish source that deals with the leading Special Organization official,
Eşref Kuşçubasi. At the outbreak of World War I, Eşref was director of
Special Organization operations in Arabia, the Sinai, and North Africa.
Captured while on a mission to Yemen in early 1917, the British military sent
him to Malta where he remained until 1920. British officers interrogated
Eşref, but he denied any involvement with the Armenian massacres. He died in
1964 at the age of 91.[35]
Dadrian has argued that Eşref admitted participating in the massacres in an
interview with the Turkish author Cemal Kutay.[36]
Closer inspection, though, reveals Eşref made no such admission. The
assertion was instead constructed by selective ellipses and inaccurate
paraphrasing.[37]
Likewise, despite claims to the contrary, while the indictment of the 1919
court-martial linked the Special Organization to the Armenian massacres,
neither the trial's proceedings nor its verdict support the claim. Rather,
defendants described the Special Organization's role in covert operations
behind Russian lines.[38]
Gwynne Dyer, one of the few Western scholars to have done
research in the Ottoman military archives, has characterized as
"gossip" the assertion that the Special Organization was complicit
in the Armenian massacres.[39]
The archive of the Turkish General Staff is said to contain ciphered
telegrams to the Special Organization,[40]
but these documents have not been subject to scholarly inquiry. Until new
documents emerge, a link between the Special
Organization and the Armenian massacres is nothing but uncorroborated
assertion. The Memoirs of Naim Bey
The third pillar upon which the charge of
Armenian genocide rests is Aram Andonian's Memoirs of Naim Bey. Aram
Andonian was an Armenian, employed as a military censor at the time of
mobilization in 1914. After his April 1915 arrest and deportation from
Istanbul, he made his way to Aleppo where he obtained a permit for temporary
residence. After the British liberation of the city in October 1918, Andonian
collected the testimonies of Armenian men, women, and children who had
survived the deportations. As he relates the story, he also made contact with
a Turkish official named Naim Bey, who had been the chief secretary of the
deportations committee of Aleppo. Naim Bey handed over to Andonian his
memoirs, which contained a large number of official documents, telegrams, and
decrees, which, he stated, had passed through his hands during his term of
office. Andonian translated these memoirs into Armenian. After some delay,
they were published in Armenian, French, and English editions.[41] The documents reproduced in Naim Bey's memoirs
are the most damning evidence put forward to support the claim of genocide.
Particularly incriminating are the telegrams of the wartime interior
minister. If authentic, they provide proof that Talât
Pasha gave explicit orders to kill all Turkish Armenians—men, women,
and children. One telegram dated September 16, 1915, notes that the Committee
on Union and Progress had decided to destroy completely all the Armenians
living in Turkey. Those who oppose this order and decision cannot remain on
the official staff of the empire. An end must be put to their [the
Armenians'] existence, however criminal the measure taken may be, and no
regard must be paid to either age or sex nor to conscientious scruples.[42] The utter ruthlessness of Talât
Pasha is a recurring theme in The Memoirs. Such a demonization,
though, represents an important change from the way many Armenians regarded Talât before 1915. On December 20, 1913, for example,
British embassy official Louis Mallet reported the Armenians had confidence
in Talât Pasha, "but fear that they may not always have to deal with a
minister of the interior as well disposed as the present occupant of that
post."[43]
Similarly, the German missionary Liparit described Talât as a man "who
over the last six years has acquired the reputation of a sincere adherent of
Turkish-Armenian friendship."[44]
Even the American head of the international Armenian relief effort in
Istanbul recalled that Talât Pasha always "gave prompt attention to my
requests, frequently greeting me as I called upon him in his office with the
introductory remark: ‘We are partners; what can I do for you
today?'"[45]
Talât Pasha may have turned into a vicious fiend, but the opinions of his
contemporaries do not support this characterization. There are many doubts as to the authenticity of
the documents reproduced in Naim Bey's memoirs. Several Armenian scholars
suggest that a German court authenticated five of the Talât
Pasha telegrams during the 1921 trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, who assassinated
Talât Pasha in Berlin on March 15, 1921.[46]
However the stenographic record of the trial, published in 1921, shows that
defense counsel von Gordon withdrew his motion to introduce the five
telegrams into evidence before their authenticity could be verified.[47] Two Turkish authors, Şinasi
Orel and Süreyya Yuca, who undertook a detailed examination of the
authenticity of the documents in the Andonian volume, suggest that the
Armenians may have "purposely destroyed the ‘originals,' in order
to avoid the chance that one day the spuriousness of the ‘documents'
would be revealed."[48]
Orel and Yuca argue that discrepancies between authentic Turkish documents
and those reproduced in the Naim-Andonian book suggest the latter to be
"crude forgeries."[49]
In addition, the two authors could find no reference to Naim Bey in the
official registers and cast doubt on his very existence. When The Memoirs were published in 1920,
Armenian activists described its author as an honest individual driven to
make amends for his misdeeds. But according to a letter composed by Andonian
in 1937, Naim Bey was addicted to alcohol and gambling, and the documents he
provided were bought for money. To have "unveiled the truth about
him," Andonian wrote, "would have served no purpose."[50]
More likely, it would have undercut the very effectiveness of The Memoirs.
Nobody would have believed the word of an alcoholic and gambler who might
have manufactured the documents to obtain money. The documents contained in The Memoirs of
Naim Bey depict both the Young Turk leadership and the general
Turkish public as ruthless and evil villains. These
materials were to influence public opinion in the United States and Western
Europe and to provide the Armenians lobbying at the Paris peace conference
with ammunition to support their calls for independence.[51]
That is why the Armenian National Union, formed under the leadership of the
veteran Armenian statesman Boghos Nubar Pasha, purchased the documents and
entrusted Andonian with bringing them to Europe. While telegrams from
the Naim-Andonian book were included in a dispatch sent to London in March
1921[52]
and also in the dossiers of the Malta detainees, the British government never
made use of these telegrams. The law officers of the crown apparently
regarded the Naim-Andonian book as another of the many forgeries that were
flooding Istanbul at the time. Turkish authors are not alone in their
assessment that the Naim-Andonian documents are fakes. Dutch historian Erik
Zürcher, writing in 1997, argued that the Andonian materials "have been
shown to be forgeries."[53]
British historian Andrew Mango speaks of "telegrams dubiously attributed
to the Ottoman wartime minister of the interior, Talât
Pasha."[54]
It is ironic that lobbyists and policymakers seek to base a determination of
genocide upon documents most historians and scholars dismiss at worst as
forgeries and at best as unverifiable and problematic. Conclusion
The three pillars of the Armenian claim to classify
World War I deaths as genocide fail to substantiate the charge that the Young
Turk regime intentionally organized the massacres. Other alleged evidence for
a premeditated plan of annihilation fares no better. Whether to apply the genocide label to the events
that occurred almost one hundred years ago in the Ottoman Empire may be of
minor consequence to many historians, but it remains of great political
relevance. Both Armenian partisans and Turkish nationalists have staked
claims and made their case by simplifying a complex historical reality and by
ignoring crucial evidence that might yield a more nuanced picture.
Professional scholars have based their positions on previous works, often
unaware that these represented a bastardized interpretation of the original
sources. With the political stakes high, both sides have sought to silence
opponents and stymie a full debate. In one famous example,
in Guenter Lewy is professor emeritus of political science, University
of Massachusetts, and the author of The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman
Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (University of Utah Press, 2005). [1] For example, see Kamuran Gürün, The
Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence Exposed (Nicosia and London: K.
Rustem and Brother and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), pp. 214-5
(the Turkish edition of this book, Ermeni Dosyasi, was published by
Türk Kurumu Basimevi, Ankara, 1983); Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of
Modern Turkey, 3rd rev. ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 356. |
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