Thank you very much inviting me here. It is a pleasure for me to be with you and share my book Shameful Act!

Let me begin with the words of Celal, Governor of Konya, a city in central Anatolia.

“I was like a man standing by a river without any means of rescue. But instead of water, the river flowed with blood and thousands of innocent children, blameless old men, helpless women and strong young people all on their way to destruction. Those I could seize with my hands I saved; the others, I assume, floated downstream, never to return. ”

In 1915, under cover of the First World War, about a million Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire were subjected to genocide.

* * *

National memory is highly selective. Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Iraq, Syria—indeed, all the countries established on Ottoman soil—remember their histories as a series of expulsions and massacres inflicted on them by “others. ” Turkey, likewise, remembers massacres of Muslims by Armenians, Greeks, Bulgarians and other ethnic groups.

As a rule, all communities, whether national, religious, or cultural, tend to remember the sufferings they have endured. They do not remember the wrongs they themselves have inflicted. Turkey does not remember the suffering that Muslims inflicted on Christians, in particular the Armenian genocide.

In all my writing my aim is to break with this tradition. My writings are a call to the people of Turkey to consider the suffering inflicted in their name.

The reason for this call is not only the scale of the Armenian genocide, which was in no way comparable to the individual acts of revenge carried out against Muslims.

It is also because all studies of large-scale atrocities teach us one core principle:

To prevent the recurrence of similar events, people must first consider their own responsibility, discuss it, debate it, and recognize it. Without such honest consideration, there remains the high probability of such acts being repeated, since every group is inherently capable of violence; when the right conditions arise this potential can easily become reality, and on the slightest of pretexts. There are no exceptions.

* * *

When Europe received the news of the Armenian massacres, England, France, and Russia issued a joint declaration, dated May 24, 1915. The declaration read:

“In view of these crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible [for] these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres. ”

This is how the phrase “crimes against humanity ” entered international law.

The Allied Powers had promised to bring the perpetrators to justice. After the Allies’ victory in World War I—and the death of some one million Armenians—it soon became clear that this would be no easy task.

Many of those who had committed the genocide went underground, where they took leading roles in the Turkish national movement against Allied occupation.

Meanwhile, the Allies themselves had competing political interests in the region.
Finally, and most important, there was no precedent within international law to prosecute “crimes against humanity. ”
Nevertheless, three attempts were made to try and punish the guilty.

The first was a series of courts-martial set up by the Ottoman government in Istanbul. These military courts, which began their pretrial interrogations in November 1918, began hearing cases in February of the following year and continued until 1922. The records of these trials include indictments, telegrams, eyewitness accounts, and other testimony primarily from senior officers and military officers, all of which helped to document and establish responsibility for the Armenian genocide.

The second attempt was initiated by the Allied Powers at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, with the ultimate goal of prosecuting crimes against humanity in an international court. This effort was derailed partly by Allied conflicts of interest, and partly by the fact that no international law applied to crimes perpetrated by a state against its own people. Although the Treaty of Sèvres provided for the prosecution of war criminals under international law, those provisions were not enforced because the Turkish National Movement repudiated the Sèvres treaty.

Great Britain made the final attempt to bring the war criminals to justice. This effort failed because the evidence in the American and British archives was insufficient to convict specific individuals—even though ample evidence against individuals did exist in the Ottoman archives.

* * *

In 1948, after the Holocaust, the United Nations first defined genocide as a crime under international law. The most crucial element in this definition is the intent to destroy a people, as such.

Therefore, the heated controversy about Turkish responsibility boils down to one basic question: Is there evidence of intent and central planning on the part of the Ottoman authorities for the total or partial destruction of the Armenians as a people?

The official Turkish position is that the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians was a tragic but unintended by-product of the war. This argument rests on the claim that there is no reliable evidence of a deliberate policy of systematic killing.

According to the official view, the only source of reliable evidence is the Prime Ministerial Archive in Istanbul. Foreign archives—American, British, German, and Austrian—as well as the domestic proceedings of the Istanbul courts-martial, are dismissed as politically motivated distortions of the events.

In my books and publications I demonstrate, for the first time, that all these sources are consistent with each other. The Prime Ministerial Archive, the foreign archives, and the Istanbul courts-martial all tell the same story, but from different perspectives.

They confirm that the ruling Union and Progress Party (also known as the Young Turks), did deliberately attempt to destroy the Armenian population. As Interior Minister Talaat Pasha told to German Consol Mordtmann, “what we are talking about is the elimination of the Armenians. ”

It’s important to note that the decision for genocide did not originate in the Ottoman government, because the bureaucracy contained pockets of resistance against the ruling Union and Progress party. Instead, the sources indicate that the Union and Progress Central Committee, most likely at the end of March 1915, decided to remove Armenians from their homes to be killed.

This genocidal plan, later adopted as government policy, was intended to guarantee the territorial integrity of the empire and to eliminate the related and long-standing Armenian question once and for all. As Talât Pasha wrote to the Prime Minister on 26 May 1915: “necessary preparations have been discussed and taken for the complete and fundamental elimination of this concern, which occupies an important place in the exalted state’s list of vital issues. ”

Not only did the Union and Progress party intend to destroy the Armenians as a people, the Armenian genocide was also not an isolated aberration.

I began by saying that the Armenian genocide is best understood within a broader historical context, the breakup of the empire and the response of the Ottoman-Turkish authorities. Following their shocking defeat in the 1912–13 Balkan War, when the Ottomans lost more than 60 percent of their European territory, the authorities came to believe that it was impossible to live side-by-side with the empire’s remaining Christian population, or even worse, that the Ottoman Christians posed a threat to the empire’s very survival.

Therefore, the Ottoman-Turkish authorities adopted a policy of homogenizing the population of Anatolia, the territorial heart of the empire.

This policy had two main components: first, to assimilate non-Turkish Muslims by dispersing them among the Turkish majority; second, to expel non-Muslim people from Anatolia. While the Armenians and Assyrians were targeted for annihilation, the Greeks were also driven out. As a result, one-third of Anatolia’s 17 million people was either relocated or killed.

* * *

I am often asked why modern Turkey continues to deny the Armenian Genocide. Why do we Turks feel as though “lightning strikes our bones ” whenever the topic is mentioned?

There are several reasons for this, and I would like to elaborate on one of them here. In Turkey, both the Genocide and its denial are framed in terms of national security. The Unionists, the Nationalists, and today’s denialists have all believed they were saving the Turkish fatherland from partition by the West. Any move towards facing the past, any attempt to open a discussion of historic wrongs, has been denounced as a covert move in a master plan to partition the country. This tangle of past and present into a tight knot of self-defensiveness has its roots in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.

From late Ottoman times to the present, there has been a continuous tension between the state’s concern for secure borders and society’s need to come to terms with abuses of human rights.

This tension has also given rise to divergent and mutually exclusive historical accounts. Dominating one side are the foundational works by Ottomanists and Turkish historians. On the other are the historical narratives of the minority groups.

Until recently, the dominant narrative has been the story of the partition of the Empire among the Great Powers, which ended with the Empire’s total collapse and disintegration. The fear of national obliteration loomed large during this period.

The Ottomanists and Turkish historians scarcely mention the Christian peoples of the Empire, neither as actors in Ottoman social and political life, still less as the victims of massacres and other gross violations of human rights. Instead, especially in Turkish historiography, the Christian communities are painted as the seditious agents of the imperialist Great Powers, continually intriguing against the state.

The ethnic and religious minorities, for their part, center themselves within a narrative of persecutions and massacres. The overall theme of this history is the community’s maturation and national emergence, thanks in part to the benevolent intervention of the Great Powers. When we compare these two histories, we see that the Great Powers inspired existential dread among the dominant Ottoman Turks and the hope of national salvation for the suppressed minorities.

In this light, controversies about the Armenian Genocide can be understood, in part, as the deployment of two, apparently contradictory, historical narratives against one another. Whenever the proponents of acknowledgment bring up a history of human-rights abuses, they are confronted with an opposing narrative, that of the decline and breakup of the Ottoman Empire.

However we should know that these two narratives are not contradictory at all. They are two sides of the same coin, complementary perspectives on a single course of human events. Both must be sufficiently understood and appreciated in order to grasp the ambiguities and contradictions of Ottoman and Turkish history.

There have been certain moments in that history where national security and human rights became inseparably intertwined. One such moment came immediately after the First World War, from 1918 to 1923.

According to the general understanding in Turkey, this period is characterized as 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 Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds, who wanted to establish their own nation-states by partitioning Anatolia with the help of the British, French and Italians.

The Treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920, essentially decided to partition in favor of the non-Turkish nationalities. For the Turks, therefore, Sèvres remains a black mark. The Ottoman leaders who signed the agreement were sentenced to death as traitors by the nationalist movement in Anatolia.

For the other nationalities, although Sèvres did not fully reflect their demands for territory, the treaty represents 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. For the Turks, Lausanne stands as a milestone and validation of their continued national existence. Inversely, the other nationalities see this treaty as a great historical injustice.

Even though contradictory assessments of Sèvres and Lausanne exist, the underlying logic is the same. Both sides regard the immediate postwar era as a period of struggle for territory. Should the Ottoman state retain its integrity and independence? Should new states be permitted to arise on the Empire’s former lands? If so, how should the borders of these new states be defined? Which party is entitled to claim which territories?

However, as I showed in A Shameful Act, territorial conflicts are not the whole story. There is another history of Sèvres and Lausanne, a human rights history, which concerned the atrocities perpetrated by the Ottoman government against its Christian population during World War I.

From this perspective, the questions are: What can be done about the wartime crimes against the Armenians? How should the perpetrators be punished?

Conceptualizing history along the axis of human rights and punishing “the Turks, ” as described in that period, opens an entirely neglected dimension: namely, the connection between the Armenian genocide and the establishment of the Turkish Republic.

The victorious Allies agreed that “the Turks ” had organized the massacres of other peoples, above all the Armenians. Thus, it was necessary to punish “the Turks ” in order to rescue the minority groups from Turkish domination and prevent further massacres.

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. The second was to limit “the Turks ” to a state that would be as small and as weak as possible.

A telegram sent to the Paris Peace Conference on April 3, 1919 by the Assistant High Commissioner of Istanbul makes this policy very clear: “In order to punish all of those persons who are guilty of the Armenian horrors, it is necessary to punish the Turks as a group. Therefore, I propose that the punishment be given on a national level through the partitioning up of the last Turkish Empire, and on a personal level by trying those high officials who are on the list in my possession, and in a manner that would serve as an example for their successors. ”

What was the attitude of the emerging Turkish National Movement towards this question?,

In October 1919, the Nationalists declared: “Ittihadism – (Party of Union and Progress) or any hint of its reawakening is politically very damaging… It is judicially and politically necessary to punish those who committed crimes in connection with the deportation. ”

Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), the founder of the Turkish Republic, wrote in a letter that punishment should not remain only on paper but be meted out as a demonstration to friends and foes. In a monumental speech of 1927, Kemal argued that it would be improper for the Unionists or others who had taken part in the deportations and the massacres to participate in the coming national elections.

Neither Kemal nor the other founders of the Turkish Republic denied the obvious fact of the Armenian massacres. They were quite willing to accept individual punishment of the perpetrators as the price to be paid for an independent Turkey with secure, internationally recognized borders.

Where they disagreed with the Allies was in the scope and extent of retributive justice. The Turkish Nationalists felt that punishment should be limited to the wartime leadership of the Union and Progress Party and the government officials who had committed the crimes. They were vehemently opposed to the partition of Anatolia. When the Nationalists realized that their support for the punishment of war criminals would not prevent the partition, their attitude towards the trials changed.

The turning point came in April 1920, when it became clear that the Treaty of Sèvres would punish “the Turks ” by eliminating Ottoman sovereignty. The Extraordinary Court-Martial in Istanbul, which up to then had been trying war criminals, expanded its scope. The nationalist leaders, Mustafa Kemal foremost among them, were tried in absentia and sentenced to death.

The war crimes trials were repudiated because the territory issue could not be separated from that of retributive justice against the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide.

This history has been erased from the national consciousness of the Turks. They have no idea that Mustafa Kemal condemned the wartime deportation and massacres of Armenians and called for the punishment of the perpetrators. By rescuing this important fact from oblivion, A Shameful Act challenges Turkish historiography to re-evaluate Turkey’s founding father.

When the Allies prioritized their colonial interests ahead of human rights, this also contributed to the national forgetting of the human rights dimension of the immediate post-war period, 1918-1923. Restoring a human rights perspective to Turkish history reveals two important issues.

First, Mustafa Kemal’s condemnation of the Armenian massacres is diametrically opposed to the current official Turkish policy of denial. Kemal’s viewpoint during the difficult war years, although it might not go far enough from today’s perspective, could be a positive starting point for a resolution. To become a truly democratic member of the society of nations, Turkey must confront this “dark chapter ” of its history, this “shameful act, ” as Mustafa Kemal called the Armenian genocide in a speech to the Turkish Parliament on April 24, 1920.

Second, we need to rethink the Armenian-Turkish conflict. Until now, the problem has been perceived in terms of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and ethnic conflicts over territory. I suggest that we have to reposition the Armenian-Turkish conflict within the new paradigm of transitional justice, as a part of the effort to strengthen democracy and human rights within existing nation-states.

This can be done only if we patiently disentangle the question of human rights from the question of territory. The question of territory should be considered as resolved and both parties should acknowledge their respective boundaries. The question of human rights remains unresolved and must be reopened.

This view is unacceptable in Turkey and the very term “genocide ” has become contested—sacred to Armenians, taboo to Turks. Both sides attach supreme importance to the word “genocide. ” Let me be clear. According to the U.N. definition, what happened in 1915 can only be called a genocide. But please allow me, as an outsider and a dissident, to raise another argument. In fact, the G-word is a distraction, a complete red herring. The real issue lies elsewhere. Let me explain: The word “genocide ” denotes a crime under international law. When you argue about whether this word applies in specific cases, you are presupposing that a crime was committed. You compare this type of crime with other types of crimes and decide which label to apply: genocide, crime against humanity, or war crime.
In Turkey we have not yet arrived at this point. The conflict is not about which label to apply. There is no presupposition that what happened in 1915 was ANY type of crime.

Turkish denial maintains that the state had the right to relocate its own people. If some of the deportees perished, that was a tragedy, not a crime. Therefore, no moral or legal condemnation is necessary.
What we are missing in Turkey is the moral dimension. Only after we establish that a crime was committed can we discuss what type of crime it was.

In conclusion, the fundamental issue is not the definition of a term, but the condemnation of an act.

In the town of Urfa there was a Muslim Turk, Haji Halil, and his Christian Armenian business partner, Mr. Sarkissian. On a terrible day in 1915 came the government orders: “The Armenians are to be deported. Whoever hides an Armenian is to be hanged in front of his own house, which will then be burned. ” In defiance of these orders, Haji Halil hid the Sarkissian family, seven people in all, in his attic, taking care of them, feeding them and even burying one of them when she passed away. A grandson of this family became my good friend, Greg Sarkissian.

When Greg told this story I was deeply moved and vowed to preserve the legacy of this righteous man, Haji Halil. His actions show us the importance of moral engagement, of firm commitment to respect 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. Haji Halil teaches us how Turks and Armenians should deal with this dark past, not only as Armenians or Turks, but also beyond these ethnic identities, as human beings who respect one another. My book was written with his spirit.