To the Editor:

I must express my delight at reading Guenter Lewy's balanced treatment of the Turkish-Armenian conflict ("Revisiting the Armenian Genocide," Fall 2005) in the pages of the Middle East Quarterly. I have the utmost admiration and respect for the honesty and truthfulness displayed in the article.

Ergun Kirlikovali

I am one of the eight children of a much ignored and dismissed Balkan-Turkish genocide victim. My father, as a one year-old baby, somehow escaped the horrors of the Balkan wars (1911-13) but without any parents, relations, or even neighbors or acquaintances. All vanished from the face of this earth without a trace. To this day, we don't know where my father's family is buried although we suspect somewhere near the village of Kirlikova, which today sits in northern Greece. In 1912, he was thrown along with thousands of other orphaned Turkish babies into one of the last trains departing from Selanik (Thessaloniki today) to the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. The Ottoman state cared for him until 1923 when the newly-established Turkish republic took over. He graduated from the University of Istanbul in 1939 and served as a forestry engineer for thirty-four years before passing away in 1973.

There are millions of Turks today who have similar stories. Those Turkish refugees who survived massacres in the Balkans, the Aegean Islands, the Crimea, the Caucasus, and elsewhere met another cycle of Christian violence in Anatolia at the hands of Greeks in the West and Armenians in the East. Our stories have not been told because of endless Armenian propaganda, which, since 1915, has saturated the West. My pain was never shared. My tears went unnoticed. Lewy's essay stirred such deep emotions in me, and a sense of fairness emanating from it soothed my even deeper wound.

Ergun Kirlikovali
Santa Ana, California

To the Editor:

The scholarship behind Guenter Lewy's article, "Revisiting the Armenian Genocide" (Fall 2005), was unimpressive. He is wrong to state that "many historians … in the West" deny the Armenian genocide. Quite the contrary, very few do.

Nicolas Tavitian

Professor Lewy's methodology is weak. He reduces evidence concerning the genocide to documents regarding the 1919-20 trials, the "Special Organization," and to the Memoirs of Naim Bey. The evidence of genocide, however, is far more extensive. The genocide was carried out in its most intensive phase for over a year in full view of Turks, Armenians, Kurds, as well as foreign missionaries, diplomats, and military officials. Archives, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, and newspaper reports all show a systematic and deliberate elimination of the Armenian population.

Lewy limits his argument to what he says did not happen. He does not address what did occur. If the killings were simply the actions of "Kurdish tribesmen and corrupt policemen," then these rogue elements eradicated a population from the Ottoman Empire that had weathered 2,500 years of conquests and invasions. Genocides usually fail. There are Jews in Germany today, and Tutsis in Rwanda. But, Istanbul aside, there are no Armenians in Turkey. What happened, if not genocide?

The question of the Armenian genocide remains a serious issue for Turkey's relations with both Europeans and Americans. Western nations hold a cooler and more open approach to history, in which recognition of past crimes is a necessary step toward friendly and cooperative relations. Turkey has not reached a stage where it is willing to recognize its past atrocities. This is why Turkey's denial of the Armenian genocide threatens to become a major impediment to Turkey's accession into the European Union.

Nicolas Tavitian
Director of European Programs
Armenian General Benevolent Union

 

Mr. Kirlikovali is correct that the tribulations of Turkish refugees from the Balkan wars and other armed conflicts of the pre-World War I era have not received the attention and condemnation they deserve. The West has been preoccupied with the horrors of the Armenian story, and the suffering of Turks has often been ignored. The same holds true for the wartime famines that took a heavy toll of life among both Turks and Armenians. This double standard in recognizing human misery must be repudiated for the sake of historical truth and to help descendants of these victims live with their pain.

In response to Mr. Tavitian: yes, a large number of Western students of Ottoman history reject the appropriateness of the genocide label for the tragic fate of the Armenian community in Ottoman Turkey. This list includes distinguished scholars such as Roderic Davison, J.C. Hurewitz, Bernard Lewis, and Andrew Mango. Ignoring this formidable array of learned opinion, most Armenians and their supporters among so-called genocide scholars assert with superb arrogance that the Armenian genocide is an incontrovertible historical fact, similar to the Jewish Holocaust, which would be denied only by lackeys of the Turkish government. One pro-Armenian author, Henry C. Theriault, has even suggested that denial of the Armenian genocide represents hate speech and, therefore, should be illegal in the United States.

In a short article, it is impossible to put forth all of the evidence that contradicts the notion of a premeditated plan of annihilation. I do so in my book on the Armenian massacres,[9] on which my essay is based. The reports of American, German, and Austrian consular officials as well as the accounts of Western missionaries, who were on the spot in Anatolia, confirm the occurrence of large-scale killings but do not implicate the "Special Organization" or any other agency of the central government. Mr. Tavitian's allegation of "a systematic and deliberate elimination of the Armenian population" is further undercut by the exemption of the large Armenian communities of Istanbul, Izmir, and Aleppo from deportation. These exemptions are analogous to Hitler exempting the Jews of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Cologne from the final solution.

I welcome Mr. Dadrian's close reading of my article, which indeed caught a few minor factual errors. However, regarding the points of substance, Dadrian again displays his skill in the use of selective evidence. For example, the alleged thirty-one telegrams of Talât Pasha contained in the Naim-Andonian volume, some of which order the killing of all Armenians, are rejected as crude forgeries not only by Turkish historians but also by almost all Western students of Ottoman history. Hilmar Kaiser, cited by Dadrian and the one exception to this rule, did say documents from the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior "confirm to some degree" two telegrams, but he concluded that "further research on the ‘Naim-Andonian' documents is necessary."

If Dadrian wants to consider the verdict of the Turkish courts-martial as proof of the guilt of the Young Turk regime in the premeditated murder of Ottoman Armenians, he is, of course, free to do so. However, his readers should know that the evidence relied upon by the military tribunals—"confessions, witness and expert testimony, official records, discovery, judicial notice, searches and seizure"—is of doubtful reliability. Among other shortfalls in due process, it was never subject to cross-examination. More importantly, this evidence does not actually exist. Wherever the blame for this situation is to be placed, the fact is that all of the original documentation of the trials is lost, and we have nothing but copies of some documents in the gazette of the Ottoman government and the press. It is doubtful that the Nuremberg trials would ever have attained their significance in documenting Nazi crimes had only unauthenticated copies of documents existed.

I know of no authentic sources that prove Stange's service as a commander of a Special Organization unit engaged in the massacre of Armenians. It is in Dadrian's gloss and not in the original documents that Stange confirms the transfer of brigands employed in guerilla war to mass murder duties, and it is Dadrian, not Stange, who equates the "scum" involved in massacre with released convicts and enrolls them into the ranks of the Special Organization. Similarly, the leading Special Organization official, Esref Kusçubasi, after his capture indeed bragged about his exploits in secret operations, but it is only through the shrewd juxtaposition of words taken from different parts of the book in question and Dadrian's insertions that this account becomes an acknowledgment of involvement with the Armenian deportations.

Hilmar Kaiser, on whom Dadrian relies for his defense, has drawn attention to "misleading quotations" and the "selective use of sources" in Dadrian's work, and he has concluded that "serious scholars should be cautioned against accepting all of Dadrian's statements at face value."[10] I concur in this judgment.