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by Guenter Lewy
Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2005
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, 1919, in Yozgat, the province which includes Ankara, charging three Turkish
officials, including the governor of the district, with mass murder and plunder of
Armenian deportees. On April 8, the tribunal found two defendants guilty, and referred the
third to a different court. Two days after they passed the verdict, local authorities
hanged Mehmet Kemal, former kaymakam (governor) of Boğazliyan and Yozgat. A
large demonstration organized by Committee on Union and Progress elements followed his
funeral. The British high commissioner in Turkey reported popular perception "regard[ed]
executions as necessary concessions to entente rather than as punishment justly meted out
to criminals."[7]
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 1995 a French
court partially upheld a civil complaint brought by an Armenian group against
eminent historian Bernard Lewis because they objected to a letter he had published
in Le Monde on January 1, 1994, in which he had questioned the existence of a
plan of extermination on the part of the Ottoman government.[55] Turkish leaders have applied diplomatic pressure and
threats; the Armenian government has accused those who do not acknowledge that the
massacres constituted genocide of being deniers who seek to appease the Turkish
government. Some Turkish and Armenian historians have suggested recently that it is
time to "step back from the was-it-genocide-or-not dialogue of the deaf, which
only leads to mutual recrimination" and instead concentrate on empirically
grounded historical research that seeks a common pool of firm knowledge.[56] Time will tell whether it will be
possible to rescue history from nationalists who have plundered history to serve
their own political ends.
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).
(Holdwater: Amazon is a source to pick up this great book.)
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[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.
[2] Turkish authors such as Gürün speak of
300,000 Armenian deaths. The estimates of most Western scholars are far higher.
[3] Aram Andonian, comp., The Memoirs of Naim
Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportations and Massacres of Armenians
(Newtown Square, Pa.: Armenian Historical Society, 1965, reprint of London, 1920 ed).
[4] Taner Akçam, Armenien und der
Völkermord: Die Istanbuler Prozesse und die türkische Nationalbewegung (Hamburg:
Hamburger Edition, 1996), p. 185.
[5] Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Documentation of
the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military
Tribunal," International Journal of Middle East Studies 23(1991): 554; idem,
"The Turkish Military Tribunal's Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide:
Four Major Court-Martial Series," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 11(1997): 31.
[6] Akçam, Armenien und der Völkermord,
p. 148.
[7] Calthorpe to Foreign Office, Apr. 17, 1919,
Foreign Office, 371/4173/61185, p. 279.
[8] Dadrian, "The Turkish Military
Tribunal's Prosecution," p. 45.
[9] Akçam, Armenien und der Völkermord,
p. 204. For the entire indictment, see pp. 192-207.
[10] Dadrian, "World War I Armenian
Massacres," p. 558.
[11] The verdict is reproduced in Akçam, Armenien
und der Völkermord, pp. 353-64.
[12] U.S. National Archives, RG 59, 867.00/868
(M 353, roll 7, fr. 448).
[13] Akçam, Armenien und der Völkermord,
pp. 114-9.
[14] Yilmaz Altug, trans., The Turkish Code
of Criminal Procedure (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1962), art. 232.
[15] Vahakn N. Dadrian, "Genocide as a
Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Case and Its Contemporary Legal
Ramifications," Yale Journal of Law, 14 (1989): 297, n. 286.
[16] Taner Akçam, ed., "The Proceedings
of the Turkish Military Tribunal as Published in Takvim-i Vekayi," part 1, 3rd
sess., pp. 24, 27. This mimeographed edition of the trial proceedings represents a German
translation used by Taner Akçam and deposited by him at the Armenian Research Center of the
University of Michigan-Dearborn.
[17] Heck to State Department, Feb. 7, 1919,
U.S. National Archives, RG 59, 867.00/81 (M 820, roll 536, fr. 440).
[18] Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Key Elements in
the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Case Study of Distortion and Falsification
(Cambridge, Mass.: Zoryan Institute, 1999), p. 27.
[19] Quoted in Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The
Armenian Genocide and the Pitfalls of a ‘Balanced' Analysis: A Response to Ronald Grigor
Suny," Armenian Forum, Summer 1998, p. 89; Akçam, Armenien und der
Völkermord, p. 204.
[20] For the text of the indictment, see
Akçam, Armenien und der Völkermord, pp. 192-207; for the verdict of the Harput
trial, see Haigaz K. Kazarian, "The Genocide of Kharpert's Armenians: A Turkish
Judicial Document and Cipher Telegrams Pertaining to Kharpert," Armenian Review,
Spring 1966, pp. 18-9.
[21] See, for example, Gürün, The Armenian
File, p. 232.
[22] Calthorpe to Foreign Secretary, Aug. 1,
1919, Foreign Office, 371/4174/118377.
[23] De Robeck to London, Sept. 21, 1919,
Foreign Office, 371/4174/136069.
[24] Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the
Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia and to the Caucasus
(Providence: Berghahn, 1995), pp. 236-7.
[25] Ibid., p. 237; Vahakn N. Dadrian,
"The Role of the Special Organization in the Armenian Genocide during the First World
War," in Panikos Panati, ed., Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings
in Europe, North America, and Australia during the Two World Wars (Oxford: Berg, 1993),
p. 51.
[26] Philip H. Stoddard, "The Ottoman
Government and the Arabs, 1911 to 1918: A Study of the Teskilat-i Mahsusa," unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1963, pp. 1-2, 52-8.
[27] Dadrian, "The Role of the Special
Organization," p. 56.
[28] Second Report of the Provost Marshal to
the Secretary of War on the Operations of the Selective Service System to December 20, 1918
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 149.
[29] Stange to the German military mission,
Istanbul, Aug. 23, 1915, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Botschaft
Konstantinopel/170 (Fiche 7254); Johannes Lepsius, ed., Deutschland und Armenien,
1914-1918: Sammlung diplomatischer Aktenstücke (Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919), pp.
138-42. A reprint of this collection was published by Donat und Temmen, Bremen, in 1986.
[30] Vahakn N. Dadrian, "Documentation of
the Armenian Genocide in German and Austrian Sources," in Israel W. Charny, ed., The
Widening Circle of Genocide: A Critical Bibliographical Review, vol. 3 (New Brunswick:
Transaction, 1994), p. 110.
[31] Walter Nicolai, The German Secret
Service, George Renwick, trans. (London: Stanley Paul, 1924), p. 138; Hans Werner
Neulen, Adler und Halbmond: Das deutsch-türkische Bündnis 1914-1918
(Frankfurt/Main: Ullstein, 1994), pp. 166-7; Ulrich Trumpener, "Suez, Baku, Gallipoli:
The Military Dimensions of the German-Ottoman Coalition," in Keith Neilson and Ray
Prete, eds., Coalition Warfare: An Uneasy Accord (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 1983), p. 40.
[32] Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes,
Weltkrieg, no. 11d, vol. 9 (R 21016), p. 31; Felix Guse, Die Kaukasusfront im Weltkrieg:
Bis zum Frieden von Brest (Leipzig: Koehler und Amelang, 1940), p. 38; Edward J.
Erikson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), pp. 54-5. On the role of the Georgian volunteers
see, William E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars
on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828-1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953),
pp. 274-5.
[33] Paul Leverkuehn, Posten auf ewiger
Wache: Aus dem abenteuerlichen Leben des Max von Scheubner-Richter (Essen: Essener
Verlagsanstalt, 1938), p. 33.
[34] See, for example, Henry H. Riggs, Days
of Tragedy in Armenia: Personal Experiences in Harpot, 1915-1917 (Ann Arbor: Gomidas
Institute, 1997), pp. 127-8.
[35] Philip H. Stoddard in the prologue to Eşref
Kuşçubasi, The Turkish Battle of Khaybar, Philip H. Stoddard and H. Basri
Danisman, trans. and eds. (Istanbul: Arba Yayinlari, 1999), pp. 21-32.
[36] Vahakn N. Dadrian, "Ottoman Archives
and Denial of the Armenian Genocide," in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian
Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), pp. 300-1.
[37] Cemal Kutay, Birinci Dünya Harbinde Teşkilat-i
Mahsusa Ve Hayber'de Türk Cengi (Istanbul: Tarih Yayinlari, 1962), pp. 18, 36, 78.
[38] Akçam, "The Proceedings of the
Turkish Military Tribunal," part 1, especially 5th and 6th
session of the main trial.
[39] Gwynne Dyer, "Letter to the
Editor," Middle Eastern Studies, 9 (1973): 379.
[40] Edward J. Erickson, "The Turkish
Official Military Histories of the First World War: A Bibliographical Essay," Middle
Eastern Studies, 39 (2003): 198, n. 7.
[41] Şinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca, The
Talât Pasha "Telegrams": Historical Fact or Armenian Fiction (Nicosia,
Cyprus: K. Rustem, 1986), pp. 2-4.
[42] Andonian, The Memoirs of Naim Bey,
p. 64.
[43] Louis Mallet to Foreign Office, Foreign
Office, 371/1773/58131.
[44] Report of December 1914, Politisches
Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Botschaft Konstantinopel /168 (Fiche 7243).
[45] Louise Jenison Peet, No Less Honor: The
Biography of William Wheelock Peet (Chattanooga: E.A. Andrews, 1939), p. 170.
[46] Gerard Chaliand and Yves Ternon, The
Armenians: From Genocide to Resistance, Tony Berrett, trans. (London: Zed Press, 1983),
p. 93; Mary Mangigian Tarzian, The Armenian Minority Problem, 1914-1934: A Nation's
Struggle for Security (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), p. 65; Jean-Marie Carzou, Un
génocide exemplaire: Arménie 1915 (Paris: Falmmanion, 1975), p. 248.
[47] Tessa Hofmann, ed., Der Völkermord an
den Armeniern: Der Prozess Talaat Pasha (Berlin: Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker,
1985, reprint of Berlin, 1921 ed.), p. 69.
[48] Orel and Yuca, The Talât Pasha
"Telegrams," p. 23.
[49] Ibid., p. 145.
[50] Aram Andonian to Mary Terzian, in Comité
de Défense de la Cause Arménienne, Justicier du Génocide Arménien: Le Procès de
Tehlirian (Paris: Editions Diasporas, 1981). Translation in Orel and Yuca, The Talât
Pasha "Telegrams," p. 9.
[51] Andonian, The Memoirs of Naim Bey,
p. 225.
[52] Embassy to Foreign Office (Mar. 1921),
Foreign Office, 371/6500/E3557, pp. 2, 6-8.
[53] Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern
History (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), p. 121.
[54] Andrew Mango, "Turks and Kurds,"
Middle Eastern Studies, 30 (1994): 985.
[55] Yves Ternon, "Freedom and
Responsibility of the Historian: The ‘Lewis Affair,'" in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed.,
Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1999), pp. 243-6.
[56] Selim Deringil, "In Search of a Way
Forward: A Response to Ronald Grigor Suny," Armenian Forum, Summer 1998, pp.
69-71; Ronald Grigor Suny, "Reply to My Critics," Armenian Forum, Summer
1998, p. 136.
Vahakn Dadrian Objects
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Dadrian predictably hated what was
above, as his cherished work was picked to pieces. He went after Lewy with both
barrels. How well did the prosecuting "renowned scholar" do?
Vahakn Dadrian Objects to Guenter Lewy
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