Thank you for that very kind introduction. It is a pleasure to share with you my new book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Using this occasion I also want to thank everybody who made the publication of this book possible, especially Metropolitan Books and my editor Riva Hocherman who winnowed the entire text as if it were a field of wheat and gave it new shape, and the Zoryan Institute for their contribution in the translating and editing of the book.
The book recounts the history of different attempts to put on trial and punish those who were responsible for the deportation and killing of Armenians during the war years. The first initiative took place during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the Allied Powers tried to create a legal corpus for the trial of crimes against humanity for prosecution in an international court. This initiative failed totally. A second attempt was initiated by Great Britain which took some of the suspects into custody in order to establish its own courts to try the suspects. This attempt failed also. The third attempt was successful – despite their deficiencies the Ottoman Military Tribunal in Istanbul was able to document and establish responsibility for the genocide, and imposed sentences on some minor officials. These trails in Istanbul were extraordinary in a lot of respects especially in the indictments, telegrams, eyewitness accounts, and other testimonies produced during the trials and the investigations and interrogations leading up to them.
The book is not only the history of these trials, which are almost unknown here and in Turkey, but is also an attempt to reconstruct the history of the destruction of Armenian society in the Ottoman Empire, based on military court records. Additionally, I also extensively used other Ottoman sources such as the records of the Basbakanlik Arsivi Priministerial Archive in Istanbul, newspapers of the period, Ottoman and Turkish Republic parliamentary minutes and a multitude of memoirs. My objective was to weave together Ottoman-Turkish sources with western materials.
I argue that what remains in the Ottoman archives and in court records is sufficient to show that the CUP central committee, and the Special Organization it set up to carry out its plan, did deliberately attempt to destroy the Armenian population. As you know the official Turkish position rests on the claim that the Ottoman sources contain no evidence showing a deliberate policy of systematic killing. They further claim that Ottoman sources are infallible and the American, British, German, and Austrian documents as unreliable. On the other hand there is a widely accepted understanding in the West that only the western archives are reliable and the Ottoman archives can not be trusted and are unreliable because they were fabricated to cover up the genocide. The common logic underlying both of these arguments is that both sets of documents are mutually exclusive; these documents contain irreconcilable differences. By bringing Ottoman and western sources together I hope to show that the widely accepted view that Western and Ottoman sources are mutually exclusive and contradict each other, is wrong. The archival evidence taken its entirety leaves no doubt that the scale of the operations would have been impossible without planning at the political center.
This study first took shape as my Ph.D. dissertation at the Hannover University, Germany, about ten years ago. In 1999, a revised and expanded version was published in Turkey under the title: Human Rights and the Armenian Question. The book you have in hand incorporates a great deal of new research and several additional chapters and topics. I was looking for answers to the following questions: What happened to the wealth and property that the Armenians left behind? What happened in the Caucasus after the war? What is known about Armenian acts of revenge? And so forth. In other words, A Shameful Act, although based in part on my Turkish book, covers many additional aspects of the Genocide and its aftermath which were not adequately covered in the Turkish book.
A Shameful Act is dedicated to the memory of a Muslim Turk, Haji Khalil, who saved the family of my good friend Greg Sarkissian during the Genocide. Haji Khalil and Greg’s grandfather were business partners in the city of Urfa when the government orders came. Whoever hides an Armenian is to be hanged in front of his own house, and then the house will be burned. In defiance of this order, Haji Khalil hid the Sarkissian family in his attic, eight people in all, taking care of them, feeding them and burying one them when she passed away.
Greg told this story at a conference in Armenia in 1995, ending with these inspiring words:
I want to extend my hand to the people of Turkey, to ask them to remember that though at one time their state was led by mass murderers, they also had their Haji Khalils, and that it would honor the memory of the latter to acknowledge the overwhelming truth of the Genocide, to express regrets, so that the healing process may begin between our two peoples.
The next day, April 24, I went to the Armenian cathedral at Etchmiadzin to attend a memorial service for the victims of the Armenian Genocide. Greg approached me, took my hand, and invited me to light a candle in memory of his family, as he would light a candle in memory of Haji Khalil. I was deeply moved. Together we vowed to preserve the legacy of this righteous man.
I’m telling you this story not because I want to repeat this stale “bad man – god man” argument, which I feel is an oversimplification or Hollywoodization of historic events. I don’t also mean to be overly sentimental. I share this story with you in order to illustrate a basic problem in the study of massive human rights violations, including genocide. What is the ethical dimension of this type of research? Is non-partisanship the same as moral neutrality? One is challenged to balance engagement and objectivity, to understand acts which seem incomprehensible, and to explain horrific events.
We tend to declare violent acts such as Genocide or mass killings as “inhuman” because of their savage character and because of our moral contempt. We usually consign them to the realm of demon. We place between ourselves and the action/actors a sort of wall of morality. This wall of morality might help to assuage our consciences, but it is wrong in lot of respects. This revulsion can discourage us from trying to understand the underlying motives of the individuals who have performed them. This approach causes people to remain stuck in the pattern of blaming and finger pointing.
The opposite way of putting a distance between ourselves and horrific events is that we think that we have to develop a objective language which excludes morality. We assume that in order to approach the phenomenon with objectivity we have to transcend our moralizing. This terminology is described by some scholars as a “vocabulary of inhumanity” and is said to be “Objective and ‘cold bureaucratic language.” This makes it possible to place the necessary distance between ourselves and an event but it can not provide a sense of moral outrage which I think extremely important. This approach can also be used to excuse and justify actions. For this reason it always remains insufficient for the adoption of a moral stance. What is important here is the balance of constructing a language that also manages to contain a moral stance.
How can we marshal the strength to withstand the horror and attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible? How we can put a distance between ourselves and the event so that we can understand and analyze but we can give space for our moral outrage. This difficult question in social sciences is described as the balance between engagement and dissociation.
The legacy of Haji Khalil teaches the answer for this question—and this is my approach to the Armenian Genocide—that we can be objective and dissociate ourselves only to the extent that we are also morally engaged. So, the path of disassociation lies directly through engagement with moral standard. This means we have to have a very strong engaged position respecting human life and dignity and to oppose any sort of violence which targets a group of people because of their race, ethnicity, belief, or religion. Without this clear commitment and engagement on behalf of humanity, without this moral standard, we cannot be objective in analyzing mass crimes.
Even though at some points in A Shameful Act you will encounter analytic language that may strike you as cold or distanced, I wrote this book with the spirit of Haci Halil and for the legacy of this man. I also firmly believe that Haci Halil’s legacy can also teach us how Turks and Armenians should deal with this dark past. Not only as Armenian or Turks but beyond their ethnic identities as human beings who are respect each other.
My basic thesis is that a paradigm change in Turkish-Armenian conflict needs to occur. I argue that until now, the Turkish-Armenian problem has been perceived within the old paradigm which produced these conflicts, namely, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the clash of different ethnic or national groups. These conflicts can be blamed on the desire of each ethnic or national group to define its territories and determine its own boundaries, which resulted in ethnic cleansing within these boundaries. My suggestion is that a new conceptualization is necessary, and that the conflict should be placed within the new paradigm of transitional justice, as a part of the democratization effort within the existing nation-states. The conflict should not be regarded as merely a dispute between two parties over territories and boundaries, but rather as a human rights issue between them both. Both nations should deal with their pasts as a part of their democratization process and try to redefine themselves and their perception of the other’s identity.
Within this frame my book should be understood as another reading of our history. The central thesis of this book is that we can read the Ottoman-Turkish history not only as a history of demise and partition as we were taught in Turkey but also as a history of continuous violation of what in today’s terminology is referred to as human rights, so much so, that the Ottoman state was unable to prevent its own collapse.
What does it mean to have a paradigm change and to reserve an important place to Human Rights in this history? First: There is a core principle that all studies of mass atrocities teach us and this is the basic underlying logic of my book: In order to prevent the recurrence of such events as mass crimes, people must first consider their own responsibility, discuss it, debate it, and recognize it.
What I mean is very simple. The Armenian Genocide was one of the products of the process of the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of many new nation-states within the imperial border. It is inevitable if one ethnic or national group wants to establish a nation-state, it should expel or cleanse other ethnic groups from the area that it claims for itself. The result is massacres, expulsions, and, in the case of Armenians, the genocide. Great suffering was experienced during the fall of the Ottoman Empire and we also know that this suffering formed a crucial component of each newly emerged nation’s collective memory. As a general rule, the ethnic national groups tend to memorialize not the wrongs they have inflicted but those they have endured. Turkish national historiography is no different. You can only read of the massacres of Moslems by Armenians, Greeks, Bulgarians, and other national groups. My book is a call to break with this tradition. It is a call to the people of Turkey, and of course to others, to consider the suffering inflicted in their name on others. So in my book I basically dealt with the question of Turkish responsibility in the Armenian Genocide, its origin, and its meaning today.
The second meaning of this paradigm change is that it is critical to merge the two faces of this story into one. Two significant features of Turkey’s transition from empire to republic exist. One is the partition of the empire among the Great Powers and the resulting total collapse of the empire. On the other hand is the persecution and massacre of different ethnic groups. These two faces have developed as two opposing and totally different historiographies. For example, according to an opinion poll (July 2004), 66% of Turks still believe that Western countries want to carve Turkey up as was done with the Ottoman Empire. Fifty-four percent think that the reforms required by the EU are those similar to the Treaty of Sevres which dismembered the Ottoman Empire in 1919. There is no room for acceptance of the persecutions, massacres, and expulsion of ethnic and religious minorities in this mindset. On the other side, the demise of the Empire is viewed as positive, and their history revolves around each group as it was maturing and becoming a nation. The existence of these two conflicting accounts, which are actually two sides of the same coin, caused a huge stumbling block to the development of an adequate history of the period critical to understanding the genocide in its historical significance.
The third meaning of this paradigm change relates to how we should incorporate the Armenian genocide within the Turkish history and can help solve the mystery of Turkish denial.
In this connection, I will summarize one of the main arguments of my book: The prevailing understanding of the period of 1918-23 and the resulting Sevres and Lausanne Agreements can be characterized as a war between different national groups over land and borders. The general understanding in Turkey is that this was a war between the Turks, who desired after World War I to preserve their sole remaining territory as a legitimate successor of the Ottoman Empire, and the other nationalities, who wished to divide up this territory among themselves. Turks basically just wanted to preserve the lands and borders defined by the 1918 Mondros Armistice which ended the war. In contrast to this, the other nationalities, such as the Armenians, Greeks and Kurds, wanted to establish, with British support, their own national states and to partition Anatolia through an understanding with the British, French and Italians.
The Treaty of Sèvres signed in August 1920 essentially decided to partition in favor of the non-Turkish nationalities. So, for Turks, Sèvres remains a black mark. For the other nationalities, although Sèvres did not fully reflect their demands for territory, they saw it as an unprecedented historical opportunity to resolve the issue in their favor. A similar positive attitude can be seen on the Turkish side in regard to the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) which guaranteed Turkish dominance in Anatolia, and therefore, for the Turks, it stands as a milestone and validation of their continued national existence. Inversely, the other nationalities see it as a great historical injustice.
Even though contradictory assessments of Sèvres and Lausanne exist, the underlying logic is the same, and revolves around the questions which party has the right to own certain territories and who was justified in claiming those territories. But this was not the main element that determined subsequent historical developments. In short, there is an alternative, little-known history of Sèvres and Lausanne. You can read this history in my book.
The other aspect which in large measure determined the course of events in those years was the atrocities perpetrated by the Ottoman government against its Christian population during World War I. This was the dimension that today would be termed as “human rights.” The prevailing mood among the victorious Entente powers at that time was that “the Turks” organized the massacres of other peoples, above all the Armenians. Thus, it was necessary to punish “the Turks” in order to rescue the other peoples (Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, etc.) from Turkish domination. Punishing “the Turks” had to be done in two phases. The first was done by individually trying the members of the Ottoman government and other officials, who were held to be responsible for the crimes. The second was to limit “the Turks” to a state that would be as small and as weak as possible, so that these atrocities would not be repeated.
I am not arguing here that the Great Power’s desire to carve Anatolia into parts basically derived from their human right concerns or that they never had colonial or imperialist interests, just the opposite, but the “human rights” aspect was how they packaged their colonial desires.
Conceptualizing history along the axis of human rights and punishing “the Turks,” as it was described in that period, opens the door to exploring an entirely neglected dimension, which, up to now, has been missing in accounts of the history of the period, namely, the connection between the Armenian Genocide and the establishment of the Turkish Republic.
In order to understand the events of the time I would remind you that, in Turkey at that time, we had two different governments or two different political centers. One was Istanbul which was still the capital of Ottoman Empire and housed the Ottoman Government. Simultaneously, there existed a nationalistic movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal which was based in Ankara, today’s capital city of Turkey.
A major policy of both governments was how they should deal with past atrocities, although this is not known in Turkey today. As I show in my book, both governments acknowledged the massacres against the Armenians and also knew of the desire of the allied forces to punish the perpetrator. They both shared the allied opinion and were in favor of retributive justice. The main question, however, was what the dimension of the punishment would be. Ankara and Istanbul thought punishment should be limited to the leaders of Ittihat ve Terakki and the members of government who committed these crimes. These trials were termed “just and necessary.” Both governments were vehemently opposed to dividing Anatolia as punishment for past crimes. My main thesis in the book is: if the allied forces had succeeded in differentiating between the issues of national borders or sovereignty and the punishment of the perpetrators of genocide, we would be talking about quite a different history. The arrangements made on the division of Anatolia were one of the most important obstacles on this point. The primary concern of the allied forces was dividing Anatolia according to their own interests, not punishing the crimes against humanity, which would have required recognizing the sovereignty of the Ottomans.
Mustafa Kemal, the founder of today’s Turkey, openly condemned and distanced himself from the wartime deportation and killings of Armenians. He openly criticized the Union and Progress Party and its expansionist policies, known as Pan-Turanism and Pan-Islamism. In a conversation with General Harbord (September 21, 1919), the head of the American delegation sent to the Middle East for the purpose of investigating the possibility of a Mandate for Armenia, Kemal said “We believe in the detrimental nature of ‘Turanism’” (Turanizmin zararlarina inaniyoruz). In another memorandum he characterized Turanism as “a dangerous concept.”
The Ankara and Istanbul governments signed a protocol in October of 1919 calling for an election of the Ottoman Parliament according to the constitution. Five protocols were signed. In the first protocol it is declared: “1. Ittihadism – (Party of Union and Progress) or any hint of its reawakening is politically very damaging… 4. It is judicially and politically necessary to punish those who committed crimes in connection with the deportation.” In the third Protocol both parties agreed that members of “Ittihat”, who are wanted in connection with the genocide, should not participate in the elections.
The reason for this attitude is given in the following way: “it would be improper for individuals who are connected to the evil deeds of the Unionists, or persons who have been sullied by the nefarious acts of the deportation and massacre or other wicked actions that are contrary to the true interests of the nation” to participate in the elections.
His attitude can be summarized by these words he spoke to Parliament on April 24, 1920, where he called the atrocities a “shameful act” which inspired the title of my book. I’m not arguing that he was a human rights activist or an altruist. He was a nationalist and a politician, and thought that he had to pay this price in order to gain sovereignty. He stated, in a letter, that the punishment “should not stay only on paper. . . but should be carried out, since this would successfully impress the foreign elements.”
In short, it was accepted that crimes were committed during the war, but the trials concerning these crimes would be limited to the executives of Ittihat and members of the government and be conducted according to the national legal system. A punishment in the form of dividing Anatolia was firmly rejected. The central points for such an attitude were the expected results desired at the Peace Talks following such trials and the need to protect the national borders.
You can find more example in my book on the subject of attitude of Turkish Government towards Union and Progress party and the Armenian killing and massacres. The interesting question here is how it turned? How it changed? Why beginning with being in favor of retributive justice but ending with first supporting the prisoners held by British in the custody and the today’s denial? This is a question which I can only refer to my book where I listed some reasons for that.
One of the main reason why Armenian genocide convene to oblivion and so the half of the history of the Turkish state building process was subjected to amnesia, if we can formulate in general theoretical terms, this was the incompatibility of two basic norms namely principal of “nation state sovereignty” and the principal of the “human rights”. On the one hand there were the governments of Istanbul and Ankara seeing themselves as the continuation of the Ottoman Empire. After the Mondros Ceasefire of 1918 they principally wanted to continue the sovereignty of the Ottoman State in the areas not under occupation and they declared the national borders along the ceasefire lines. They believed that this pragmatic approach, drawing the boundaries of the national territory to exactly fit the contours of the ceasefire, would enable them to salvage the remnants of the Ottoman Empire as a sovereign state. On the other hand there had been crimes committed during the war years. The Turkish side preferred to look at the trial as a “problem of national jurisdiction” and they want to know their national sovereignty not injured, fully recognized and the punishment should not be in form of partition of the remnants of the Ottoman state among great powers and its subject people. The allied forces just the opposite desired (implemented) the punishment of crimes against humanity in the form of the division of Anatolia. The Turkish state building process shaped within the tension between the right of national sovereignty and justice for crimes against humanity. With time, the idea of the occupation and division of Anatolia became indistinguishable from the idea of trial for those accused of genocide.
The actors of that time did not succeed in separating these two elements (it is another question, whether or not they really wanted to). The intention of the allied forces to partition Anatolia among themselves led them to a certain reluctance on the point of trying those responsible for the genocide. This raises the question of what kind of result would have been achieved, if the allied forces had concentrated on trying the persons guilty of genocide and respected the wish of the „Turks“ for their national borders and made the acceptance of sovereignty contingent on the trials of those responsible for the genocide?
It might be argued that if the occupation of Anatolia, in particular by Greece, and the plans for partition had not existed different results might have been achieved in bringing perpetrators of “crimes against humanity” to justice. In that case we would be talking about a totally different history in and of Turkey. This is not only a hypothetical speculation. There are many hints that it might have been possible, from both the Turkish side and the Allied forces.
There were circles among the Allied States that advocated a different policy on the sovereignty of the Ottoman State. Or rather one should say that different opinions were voiced at different times. You can find enough information in my book on this eventually different policy towards Turkey especially based on recognizing its sovereign rights. I can give here one quotation: On 23 November 1919 the High Commissioner Admiral Sir J. de Robeck stated in his report: “The Turks had to be punished, but… for the English interests this punishment should not have taken the form of dividing the provinces, most of which are predominantly Ottoman.” What I am saying is that. With regards to punishment, the emphasis was laid on the partition and not the trial of the parties responsible for genocide. These two issues (partition of territory and the prosecution of those responsible for genocide) were linked. My argument is that, if the allied forces had followed a different policy regarding Ottoman sovereignty the outcome would have been different.
At the beginning the Turkish side showed tendencies that support my thesis. The new emerging Turkish state believed that taking action against the parties responsible for genocide would improve the chances of achieving positive results during the Paris Peace Talks. There was a prevailing belief that the Allied states would change their position on the question of the Ottoman Empire and Istanbul remaining in “Turkish hands” only if the guilty were punished. But this didn’t happen.
The turning point in the attitude on “trials against war and genocide criminals” came when the provisions of the Sevres Agreement became clear. The allied forces understood punishment mainly as the lifting of the right of sovereignty from the Ottoman State. For this reason the leaders of the new Turkish state who were actually fighting for a continuation of the Ottoman State on the territory that remained were quickly accused and included in the trials of war and genocide criminals continuing in Istanbul.
When the provisions of the Sevres Agreement started to be shaped in April 1920, Mustafa Kemal and his friends were sentenced to death in absentia by the Military Court Nr. 1, which was primarily responsible for trying war criminals. Istanbul was occupied in order to fulfill the conditions of the treaty and the attitude of the nationalist movement on the prosecution of war and genocide criminals changed in principle. The letter, Mustafa Kemal wrote on 12 August 1920 addressed to Istanbul, is of particular importance concerning this change of attitude.
The Sevres Treaty had been accepted and accordingly those responsible for crimes of genocide and war had to be retried. The letter dealt with the executions in Istanbul and was intended to be forwarded to the English Headquarters. The letter said: „The Ottoman Government… continues to hang the children of the country for allegations of deportation and massacres, though these executions no longer have a meaning.” Executions could only be carried out, if “they are meaningful”, is what the lines are saying. Meaningless executions should be stopped.
The trials of the war criminals were only partially realized because it became impossible to separate the issue of partitioning of Anatolia from the retributive justice against the perpetrators, but this history has been erased from the national consciousness of the Turks. For their part, I argue the victorious powers’, putting their colonial interests in front of the human rights concerns and advocating of the partition of [Anatolia] at any price contributed the national ‘forgetting’ of the human rights dimension of the immediate post-war period 1919-1922.
I’ve tried to show that if the Western forces had taken the nationalist demands concerning the borders seriously and had asked for trials in cases of “crimes against humanity” in return we might be talking about a very different history today. The nationalist movement was mainly shaped by the linkage between these two issues. The dimension of human rights was doomed to be forgotten. This is the main reason that in modern Turkey this aspect of history has been consigned to oblivion.
There is an additional factor which I called continuity factor or the dilemma of making heroes into villains. This factor further strengthened the need to avoid facing history making it almost impossible to do so. If a community has to recognize that an important number of its founding fathers, instead of being heroes, have been perpetrators, who violated the cultural premises of their own identity, reference to the past is indeed traumatic. The community can cope with the fundamental contradiction between identity claims and recognition only by a collective schizophrenia, by denial, by decoupling or withdrawal. This is exactly what is happening in Turkey. The continuation of the ruling elite from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic ensured that there would be a strong relationship between the Armenian Genocide and the foundation of modern Turkey. There is a three-fold connection. First, after losing the war in 1918, the Turkish nationalist movement in Anatolia was organized almost by the same party which organized the Genocide. Even before the war, this party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), had already drafted plans for resistance in case of military defeat. Immediately after the armistice, the CUP established the first defense and resistance organizations in Anatolia. One of these organizations, the Karakol, was established by the direct order of CUP leaders Talaat and Enver. The Karakol’s primary mission was to organize the resistance, while also providing an underground escape route for CUP members who were wanted for war crimes. The second important connection is a natural outcome of the first. A not unimportant number of the initial organizers of the national movement had themselves directly participated in the Genocide. The third connection between the Republic and the Genocide was the emergence in Anatolia of a class of wealthy men who had profited directly from the Genocide. This social group was the standard-bearer for the nationalist movement in certain regions.
It is very clear that there is a huge contradiction within Turkish identity; society would be devastated if one called those whom they regarded as “great saviors” and “people who created a nation from nothing,” as “murderers and thieves.” The Armenian Genocide has to be regarded as the traumatic reference for Turkish National Identity after 1923. It must seem so much simpler to completely deny the Genocide than to seize the initiative and face the destruction of a closely-held self-image of the Republic and Turkish national identity.
ATTACHMENTS
DEMOGRAPHIC POLICY
Before the First World War, the CUP formulated a policy which they began to execute in the Aegean region against the Greeks and during the war years expanded to include the Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syrians, and especially the Armenians, which eventually became genocidal. The main goal of this policy was, in their own words, “liquidating the concentrations of non-Turkish population that had accumulated at strategic points, and which were susceptible to negative foreign influences.”1 The origin of this plan (or plans), which I call “the homogenization of Anatolia,” can be traced to the conclusion of the Balkan Wars.
It is helpful to think of this plan to create a new state comprised primarily of Turks as having two main goals. The first aim of the plan was to remove all non-Moslems, regarded as a serious threat to the state from Anatolia. The second aim was to make changes in the structure of the population, so that non-Turkish Moslems could more easily be assimilated into the greater body of society.
These policies which were put into force during the period 1913-1917 resulted in a complete change in the ethnic makeup of Anatolia.2 The estimated 17.5 million people who lived in Anatolia at the time were so uprooted that at the end of this period, at least one-third of them had either been re-settled somewhere else, deported or annihilated.
[T]he relocations were based on a demographic principle that limited Armenians to 5 to 10 percent of the population in any given region. (174–5)…this was not in fact a cover-up strategy, but rather a calculated policy applied not only to Armenians, but Arabs, Kurds, Albanians, Bosnians and others….Some telegrams say that in regions where Armenians constituted less than 5 or 10 percent of the population, no relocation was necessary. In each region, the government kept continual track of population percentages…In regions to which Armenians were deported, they were not to exceed 10 percent of the population….In the Zor region, the Armenian population exceeded 10 percent, and the Interior Ministry sent telegrams to the governors of Adana, Erzurum, Bitlis, and Aleppo drawing their attention to the fact. This explains the 1916 massacres in those areas and why Zor was the center. This also shows that the deportations were hardly [a] matter of relocation. The issue was Armenian population density. (175)
PROPERTIES:
The Ottoman authorities’ genocidal intent becomes very clear if we look at the issue of Armenian property. In support of the position that there was no intent to annihilate the Armenians, official reports quote at length the various provisional laws, regulations, and orders issued in the context of the deportations, claiming that Armenian property was taken under the control of the state and the owners compensated. (184)…Yet despite the dozens of documents outlining the use of Armenian property, there is not a single piece of evidence showing that any compensation was actually paid to any deportee….There is also no evidence that any parcel of land was given to the deportees at their final destination, nor any goods….Hundreds of Ottoman documents have been made available, but not a single one to confirm the official Turkish position of compensation for Armenian losses. (186)
On the contrary, we have examples of documents that clearly illustrate the systematic ways in which the money and property were put to other uses….First, they were given to Muslims in the region to create a Muslim bourgeoisie….Second,…property was given to Muslim immigrants who resettled in Armenian villages….Third, Armenian assets were used to offset military expenses during the war….Fourth, Armenian property was even used to fund the owners’ deportation….Fifth, some buildings in better condition were used for governmental purposes, such as prisons….Thus, there was no tolerance for private looting: the goal was high-level looting. (187)
Property
The Ottoman authorities’ genocidal intent becomes very clear if we look at the issue of Armenian property. In support of the position that there was no intent to annihilate the Armenians, official reports quote at length the various provisional laws, regulations, and orders issued in the context of the deportations, claiming that Armenian property was taken under the control of the state and the owners compensated. (184) Yet despite the dozens of documents outlining the use of Armenian property, there is not a single piece of evidence showing that any compensation was actually paid to any deportee.There is also no evidence that any parcel of land was given to the deportees at their final destination, nor any goods.Hundreds of Ottoman documents have been made available, but not a single one to confirm the official Turkish position of compensation for Armenian losses. (186)
On the contrary, we have examples of documents that clearly illustrate the systematic ways in which the money and property were put to other uses….First, they were given to Muslims in the region to create a Muslim bourgeoisie….Second,…property was given to Muslim immigrants who resettled in Armenian villages….Third, Armenian assets were used to offset military expenses during the war….Fourth, Armenian property was even used to fund the owners’ deportation….Fifth, some buildings in better condition were used for governmental purposes, such as prisons….Thus, there was no tolerance for private looting: the goal was high-level looting. (187)
Second meaning of this paradigm change is that we can overcome the existence different historiographies which seems contradict to each other. Indeed, one of the most significant features of Turkey’s transition from Empire to Republic involved the intertwining of two historical facts. On the one hand, there is the story of the partition of the Empire among the Great Powers, which ended with the total collapse and disintegration of the Empire. On the other hand, there is the story of persecutions, massacres and, especially in case of the Armenians, the annihilation of different ethnic and religious groups. If you read today the basic works on the Ottoman Empire you can hardly find works that adequately deal with these both aspects of the same history. Most Ottomanists and Turkish historians tend to write the whole history as one of partition and demise of the empire. You can hardly find adequate references to the Christians of the Empire, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians etc. as a social, political part of life of the Empire nor mentioning of gross human rights violations such as massacres on different ethnic-religious group.
The mirror of this image in the popular perception is that Turkey is still today facing with the problem of partition. According to a July 2005 opinion poll, 66% of the Turks still believe that ‘Western countries want to disintegrate Turkey like they disintegrated the Ottoman Empire in the past’ and 54% think that ‘the reforms required by the EU are similar to those required by the Treaty of Sevres which dismembered [the] Ottoman Empire in 1919. The Christian minorities of the Empire and Republic show in this popular conception only as parties who support the subversive activities of the West.
On the other side, the members of different ethnic religious groups write the history putting themselves in the center and history revolves around their own maturing process and being a nation. This historiography full of massacres and pains inflicted to them by the ruling Ottoman regime and positive intervention of Great Powers on behalf of these minority groups.
These two different features of history have been developed as two different and conflicting accounts in spite of the fact that it is two sides of the same coin, it is the same history. The existence of two contradictory, two totally incompatible history writings shows us the necessity of developing a certain perspective that incorporates both into one. In this way the massacres and genocide can be understood and appreciated in their full historical significance.
One of the central Another important center of gravity of my book is the relation between new emerged Turkish national movement in Anatolia under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal and its attitude towards the Armenian Genocide. You will again, I hope, be astonished for the amount of new documents presented in this book which give so detailed information on the Turkish national movement’s attitude towards the genocide and on the aftermath of the events. And you will again find the confirmation that the world can not be explained with black and white collars and indeed the truth or as some says the evil lies in the details.
You will follow up throughout my book the development of the attitude of Turkish national movement where at the beginning they try to put a very clear distinction between themselves and murderer and openly condemn the mass killing of Armenian people and favored the retributive justice against the perpetrator. You will follow in the book, how in the course of the events they changed their policy and the which different factors affected this policy change. At the end you will understand the strong interrelationship between Armenian Genocide and emergence of the Republic of Turkey, what is at the stake in the political [one word here please] today. This connection is one of the reasons why we new Republic came to depend on denial—or at least distancing from—.
1 Celal Bayar’s Ben de Yazdım, vol. 5 (Istanbul: Baha Matbaası, 1967), p. 1573.
2 The aim of this article is not to deal with the general population policy of that time. For this aspect of the problem see: Fuat Dündar,. op. cit.