The Armenian Genocide and Turkey's Attempt to Deny It

From 1915 to 1917 the Young Turk regime in the Ottoman Empire carried out a systematic, premeditated, centrally-planned genocide against the Armenian people. One of the documents authenticated by Turkish authorities in 1919 is a telegram sent in June 1915 by Dr. Sakir, one of the leaders of the secret organization that carried out the planning and implementation of the genocide.

He asks the provincial party official who is responsible for carrying out the deportations and massacres of Armenians within his district: "Are the Armenians, who are being dispatched from there, being liquidated? Are those harmful persons whom you inform us you are exiling and banishing, being exterminated, or are they being merely dispatched and exiled? Answer explicitly...." [3]

The evidence of intent is backed also by the outcome of the actions against the Armenians: it is inconceivable that over a million persons could have died due to even a badly flawed effort at resettlement. Moreover, the pattern of destruction was repeated over and over in different parts of Turkey, many of them far from any war zone; such repetition could only have come from a central design. Further, the reward structure was geared toward destruction of the Christian minority: provincial governors and officials who refused to carry out orders to annihilate the Armenians were summarily replaced. [4]

Armenian men were drafted into the army, set to work as pack animals, and subsequently killed. Leaders were arrested and executed. Then the deportations of women, children, and the elderly into the deserts of Syria and Iraq began. The American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, immediately recognized that the forced marches into the desert, and the atrocities that accompanied them, were a new form of massacre. "When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were simply giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact." [5]

The ambassadors of Germany and Austria, representatives of governments allied with Turkey, also quickly realized what was taking place. As early as July 1915, the German ambassador reported to Berlin: "Turks began deportations from areas now not threatened by invasion. This fact and the manner in which the relocation is being carried out demonstrate that the government is really pursuing the aim of destroying the Armenian race in Turkey." And by January 1917 his successor reported: "The policy of extermination has been largely achieved; the current leaders of Turkey fully subscribe to this policy." [6]

More than one million Armenians perished as the result of execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and physical abuse. A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly 3,000 years lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the first large scale genocide of the twentieth century. At the beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000.

Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical reality of the Armenian genocide_eyewitness accounts, official archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the testimony of survivors [7], denial of the Armenian genocide by successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present. [8]

The basic argument of denial has remained the same, it never happened, Turkey is not responsible, the term "genocide" does not apply. The tactics of denial, however, have shifted over the years. [9] In the period immediately after World War I the tactic was to find scapegoats to blame for what was said to be only a security measure that had gone awry due to unscrupulous officials, Kurds, and common criminals. This was followed by an attempt to avoid the whole issue, with silence, diplomatic efforts, and political pressure used where possible. In the 1930s, for example, Turkey pressured the U.S. State Department into preventing MGM Studios from producing a film based on Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a book that depicted aspects of the genocide in a district located west of Antioch on the Mediterranean Sea, far from the Russian front. [10]

In the 1960s, prompted by the worldwide commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide, efforts were made to influence journalists, teachers, and public officials by telling "the other side of the story." Foreign scholars were encouraged to revise the record of genocide, presenting an account largely blaming the Armenians or, in another version, wartime conditions which claimed the lives of more Turks than Armenians. [11] Thereafter, Turkey tried to prohibit any mention of the genocide in a United Nations report and was successful in its pressure on the Reagan and Bush administrations in defeating Congressional resolutions that would have designated April 24 as a national day of remembrance of the Armenian genocide. [12] The Turkish government has also attempted to exclude any mention of the genocide from American textbooks. Stronger efforts still have been made to prevent any discussion of the 1915 genocide being formally included in the social studies curriculum as part of Holocaust and genocide studies. [13]

There have also been attempts by the Turkish government to disrupt academic conferences and public discussions of the genocide. A notable example was the attempt by Turkish officials to force cancellation of a conference in Tel Aviv in 1982 if the Armenian genocide were to be discussed, demands backed up with threats to the safety of Jews in Turkey. [14] The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council reported similar threats over plans to include references to the Armenian genocide within the interpretive framework of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. [15] At the same time, Turkey has sought to make an absolute distinction between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, defining the latter as "alleged" or "so-called." The documents we have, however, show that, in private, such labeling drops off (a point to which we shall return and discuss in detail).

Finally, in the 1980s the Turkish government supported the establishment of "institutes", whose apparent purpose was to further research on Turkish history and culture. At least one also was used to further denial of Turkish genocide and otherwise improve Turkey's image in the West. To our knowledge, the memorandum and letters that we reproduce in full provide the first direct evidence of the close relationship between the Turkish government and one such institute. Before turning to that evidence, we shall provide background information on the origin, funding, stated purposes, and tax status of the institute from which that evidence comes.

Sources:
3. Vahakn N. Dadrian, "A Textual Analysis of the Key Indictment of the Turkish Military Tribunal Investigating the Armenian Genocide," Armenian Review, 44:1 (Spring 1991), pp. 26-27.

4. 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, 23:4 (November 1991), p. 560.

5. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page: 1918), p. 309.

6. Dadrian, "The Documentation," p. 568.

7. Here we can cite only a few of the many works that document the Armenian genocide. Among the contemporary accounts, see: Leslie Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917 (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, Publisher, 1989); Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page; 1918); and Arnold J. Toynbee, ed., The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916). The Armenian Genocide in the U.S. Archives, 1915-1918 (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyok-Healey Inc., 1990) provides 37,000 pages of documentation in microfiche. For recent studies, see three articles by Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Secret Young-Turk Ittihadist Conference and the Decision for the World War I Genocide of the Armenians," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 7:2 (Fall 1993), pp. 173-201; "The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal," International Journal of Middle East Studies, 23:4 (November 1991), pp. 549-576; and "Documentation of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish Sources," in Israel W. Charny, ed., Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review (London: Mansell Publishing; New York: Facts on File, 1991), Vol. 2, Ch. 4; Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, "'Images that Horrify and Indict': Pictorial Documents on the Persecution and Extermination of the Armenians from 1877 to 1922," Armenian Review, 45:1-2 (Spring/Summer 1992), pp. 53-184; Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For an extensive bibliography on the Armenian genocide, see Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian Holocaust: A Bibliography Relating to the Deportations, Massacres, and Dispersion of the Armenian People, 1915-1923 (Cambridge, MA: Armenian Heritage Press, 1980). On the availability of survivor testimony in the form of oral history, see Miller and Miller, pp. 212-213. Most of the oral histories are in Armenian and have not been translated; on the other hand, many survivor memoirs exist in English: among the more detailed are Abraham H. Hartunian, Neither to Laugh nor to Weep: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968) and Ephraim K. Jernazian, Judgment Unto Truth: Witnessing the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1990).

8. There is a substantial literature on denial of the Armenian genocide. See, Rouben Adalian, "The Armenian Genocide: Revisionism and Denial," in Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann, eds., Genocide in Our Time: An Annotated Bibliography with Analytical Introductions (Ann Arbor, MI: Pierian Press, 1992), Ch. 5; Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, "What Genocide? What Holocaust? News from Turkey, 1915 1923: A Case Study," in Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, Ch. 5; Richard G. Hovannisian, "The Armenian Genocide and Patterns of Denial," in Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, Ch. 6; Clive Foss, "The Turkish View of Armenian History: A Vanishing Nation," in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), Ch. 11; Vahakn N. Dadrian, "Ottoman Archives and Denial of the Armenian Genocide," in Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide, Ch. 12; Vigen Guroian, "The Politics and Morality of Genocide," in Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide, Ch. 13; and the following articles by Roger W. Smith, "Genocide and Denial: The Armenian Case and Its Implications," Armenian Review, 42:1 (Spring 1989), pp. 1-38; "Denial of the Armenian Genocide," in Charny, ed., Genocide, Vol. 2, Ch. 3; and "The Armenian Genocide: Memory, Polities, and the Future," in Hovannisian, ed., Armenian Genocide, Ch. 1. See also the wide-ranging discussion by Israel W. Charny, "The Psychology of Denial of Known Genocides," in Charny, ed., Genocide, Vol. 2, Ch. 1.

9. See, for example, Hovannisian, "The Armenian Genocide and Patterns of Denial," in Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, pp. 115 131; and Roger W. Smith, "Genocide and Denial," pp. 15-20.

10. Edward Minasian, "Musa Dagh: The Film That Was Denied,"Journal of Armenian Studies, 11:2 (Fall/Winter 1985 86), pp. 63-73; Hovannisian, "Patterns of Denial," pp. 120-21.

11. Hovannisian, "Patterns of Denial," pp. 113-14, 124-27, 129 30.

12. Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 219-20; Smith, "Genocide and Denial," pp. 22-23.

13. Leo Kuper, "Problems in Education on Genocide," Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide, 14, (Feb. 1988), Special Supplement, p. 1.

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