Armenian genocide denial: Difference between revisions
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==Causes== |
==Causes== |
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[[File:Talaat Pasha grave.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|[[Talaat Pasha]], the architect of the genocide, was buried in 1943 at the [[Monument of Liberty, Istanbul]] as a national hero.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Kieser |first1=Hans-Lukas |author1-link=Hans-Lukas Kieser |title=[[Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide]] |date=2018 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-1-4008-8963-1 |page=419 |language=en}}</ref>]] |
[[File:Talaat Pasha grave.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|[[Talaat Pasha]], the architect of the genocide, was buried in 1943 at the [[Monument of Liberty, Istanbul]] as a national hero.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Kieser |first1=Hans-Lukas |author1-link=Hans-Lukas Kieser |title=[[Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide]] |date=2018 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-1-4008-8963-1 |page=419 |language=en}}</ref>]] |
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Continuity between the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey was significant, and Kemal's [[Republican People's Party (Turkey)|Republican People's Party]] has been described as the successor of the Committee of Union and Progress that carried out the genocide.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Üngör |first1=Uğur Ümit |author1-link=Uğur Ümit Üngör |title=Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Rethinking Young Turk ‘Social Engineering’ |journal=European Journal of Turkish Studies. Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey |date=2008 |issue=7 |doi=10.4000/ejts.2583 |url=https://journals.openedition.org/ejts/2583#ftn1 |language=en |issn=1773-0546|quote=In this article I will follow Zürcher’s use of the term ‘Young Turk era’ to bundle together the Committee of Union and Progress [Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti] and its descendant the Republican People’s Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi], which ruled the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic in the period 1913-1950.}}<br>{{harvnb|Avedian|2012|p=806.{{nbsp}}|ps="The research done by scholars such as Zürcher and Akçam indicates that the Nationalist movement can be traced back to the early period of World War I. The research shows that Unionists not only dominated the Nationalist movement, but were its initiators. The movement was rather a contingency plan, designed by the CUP in the event of defeat in the war..."}}<br>{{harvnb|Zürcher|2011|p=308|ps=. "In ideological terms there is thus a great deal of continuity between the periods of 1912–1918 and 1918–1923. This should come as no surprise... the cadres of the national resistance movement almost without exception consisted of former Unionists, who had been shaped by their shared experience of the previous decade."}}</ref> Many leading members of Kemal's Turkish nationalist movement had been perpetrators of the genocide, or enriched themselves from it, creating an incentive for silence.<ref>{{harvnb|Avedian|2012|p=806|ps=. "In the official Turkish version, the nationalist movement broke with the defeated and flawed past, based its power on the basic popular roots movement, initiated and directed by Mustafa Kemal, earning him the title Atatürk, ‘Father of Turks’. As has been pointed out by researchers such as Donald Bloxham, E.J. Zürcher, and Taner Akçam, the reality was different. The nationalist movement was rather initiated, nourished, and supported by Unionists leaders, many of whom were fugitives from the law, wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as individuals who had unlawfully enriched themselves on confiscated properties."}}<br>{{harvnb|Dixon|2010|p=468|ps=. "Many contemporary scholars emphasise that this official narrative [on the Armenian Genocide] is largely shaped by continuities and constraints inherited from the founding of the Republic (e.g. Akc¸am 2004; Go¨c¸ek, forthcoming). In particular, they highlight the striking continuities among political elites from the Young Turk through the Republican periods, the concentrated interests of a small group of business and political elites whose wealth can be traced back to confiscated Armenian assets, and the homogenising and Turkifying nature of Turkish national identity."}}<br>{{harvnb|Cheterian|2015|p=155}}; {{harvnb|Baer|2020|p=83}}.</ref> The troops under the new republic conducted massacres of Armenian survivors in [[Cilicia]] and killed around 200,000 Armenians during the Turkish occupation of the Caucasus; thus, historian [[Rouben Paul Adalian]] has argued that "Mustafa Kemal completed what Talaat and Enver had started in 1915".<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|last1=Adalian |first1=Rouben Paul |author1-link=Rouben Paul Adalian |title=Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal |url=https://www.armenian-genocide.org/kemal.html |editor-last=Charny |editor-first=Israel W.|encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Genocide: A-H |date=1999 |publisher=ABC-CLIO |isbn=978-0-87436-928-1 |language=en}}</ref>{{sfn|Avedian|2012|p=818|ps=. "Unlike the World War I massacres, the new killings did not stop at Turkish borders and soon reached even beyond, engulfing the Armenians in Caucasus and the Republic of Armenia. Approximately 200,000 Armenians were killed during the Turkish occupation of Caucasus... The ‘War of Independence’ was not against the occupying Allies – a myth invented by Kemalists – but rather a campaign to rid Turkey of remaining non-Turkish elements."}} |
Continuity between the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey was significant, and Kemal's [[Republican People's Party (Turkey)|Republican People's Party]] has been described as the successor of the Committee of Union and Progress that carried out the genocide.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Üngör |first1=Uğur Ümit |author1-link=Uğur Ümit Üngör |title=Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Rethinking Young Turk ‘Social Engineering’ |journal=European Journal of Turkish Studies. Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey |date=2008 |issue=7 |doi=10.4000/ejts.2583 |url=https://journals.openedition.org/ejts/2583#ftn1 |language=en |issn=1773-0546|quote=In this article I will follow Zürcher’s use of the term ‘Young Turk era’ to bundle together the Committee of Union and Progress [Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti] and its descendant the Republican People’s Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi], which ruled the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic in the period 1913-1950.}}<br>{{harvnb|Avedian|2012|p=806.{{nbsp}}|ps="The research done by scholars such as Zürcher and Akçam indicates that the Nationalist movement can be traced back to the early period of World War I. The research shows that Unionists not only dominated the Nationalist movement, but were its initiators. The movement was rather a contingency plan, designed by the CUP in the event of defeat in the war..."}}<br>{{harvnb|Zürcher|2011|p=308|ps=. "In ideological terms there is thus a great deal of continuity between the periods of 1912–1918 and 1918–1923. This should come as no surprise... the cadres of the national resistance movement almost without exception consisted of former Unionists, who had been shaped by their shared experience of the previous decade."}}</ref> Many leading members of Kemal's Turkish nationalist movement had been perpetrators of the genocide, or enriched themselves from it, creating an incentive for silence.<ref>{{harvnb|Avedian|2012|p=806|ps=. "In the official Turkish version, the nationalist movement broke with the defeated and flawed past, based its power on the basic popular roots movement, initiated and directed by Mustafa Kemal, earning him the title Atatürk, ‘Father of Turks’. As has been pointed out by researchers such as Donald Bloxham, E.J. Zürcher, and Taner Akçam, the reality was different. The nationalist movement was rather initiated, nourished, and supported by Unionists leaders, many of whom were fugitives from the law, wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as individuals who had unlawfully enriched themselves on confiscated properties."}}<br>{{harvnb|Dixon|2010|p=468|ps=. "Many contemporary scholars emphasise that this official narrative [on the Armenian Genocide] is largely shaped by continuities and constraints inherited from the founding of the Republic (e.g. Akc¸am 2004; Go¨c¸ek, forthcoming). In particular, they highlight the striking continuities among political elites from the Young Turk through the Republican periods, the concentrated interests of a small group of business and political elites whose wealth can be traced back to confiscated Armenian assets, and the homogenising and Turkifying nature of Turkish national identity."}}<br>{{harvnb|Cheterian|2015|p=155}}; {{harvnb|Baer|2020|p=83}}.</ref> The troops under the new republic conducted massacres of Armenian survivors in [[Cilicia]] and killed around 200,000 Armenians during the Turkish occupation of the Caucasus; thus, historian [[Rouben Paul Adalian]] has argued that "Mustafa Kemal completed what Talaat and [[Enver Pasha|Enver]] had started in 1915".<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|last1=Adalian |first1=Rouben Paul |author1-link=Rouben Paul Adalian |title=Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal |url=https://www.armenian-genocide.org/kemal.html |editor-last=Charny |editor-first=Israel W.|encyclopedia=Encyclopedia of Genocide: A-H |date=1999 |publisher=ABC-CLIO |isbn=978-0-87436-928-1 |language=en}}</ref>{{sfn|Avedian|2012|p=818|ps=. "Unlike the World War I massacres, the new killings did not stop at Turkish borders and soon reached even beyond, engulfing the Armenians in Caucasus and the Republic of Armenia. Approximately 200,000 Armenians were killed during the Turkish occupation of Caucasus... The ‘War of Independence’ was not against the occupying Allies – a myth invented by Kemalists – but rather a campaign to rid Turkey of remaining non-Turkish elements."}} |
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Historian [[Erik-Jan Zürcher]] argues that "a serious attempt to distance the republic from the genocide could have destabilized the ruling coalition on which the state depended for its stability".{{sfn|Zürcher|2011|p=316|ps=. "Many of the people in central positions of power (Şükrü Kaya, Kazım Özalp, Abdülhalik Renda, Kılıç Ali) had been personally involved in the massacres, but besides that, the ruling elite as a whole depended on a coalition with provincial notables, landlords, and tribal chiefs, who had profited immensely from the departure of the Armenians and the Greeks. It was what Fatma Müge Göçek has called an unspoken “devil’s bargain.” A serious attempt to distance the republic from the genocide could have destabilized the ruling coalition on which the state depended for its stability."}} From the founding of the republic, the genocide has been viewed as a necessity and ''[[raison d'état]]''.{{sfn|Aybak|2016|p=14}} Its main perpetrator, Talat Pasha, was hailed as a [[national hero]] and given a posthumous [[state funeral]]. Those convicted and executed for war crimes, such as {{ill|Mehmet Kemal|de|Mehmed Kemâl|tr}} and [[Behramzade Nusret]], were proclaimed "national" and "glorious" martyrs, with schools and neighborhoods were named after them.{{sfn|Avedian|2012|p=816}} |
Historian [[Erik-Jan Zürcher]] argues that "a serious attempt to distance the republic from the genocide could have destabilized the ruling coalition on which the state depended for its stability".{{sfn|Zürcher|2011|p=316|ps=. "Many of the people in central positions of power (Şükrü Kaya, Kazım Özalp, Abdülhalik Renda, Kılıç Ali) had been personally involved in the massacres, but besides that, the ruling elite as a whole depended on a coalition with provincial notables, landlords, and tribal chiefs, who had profited immensely from the departure of the Armenians and the Greeks. It was what Fatma Müge Göçek has called an unspoken “devil’s bargain.” A serious attempt to distance the republic from the genocide could have destabilized the ruling coalition on which the state depended for its stability."}} From the founding of the republic, the genocide has been viewed as a necessity and ''[[raison d'état]]''.{{sfn|Aybak|2016|p=14}} Its main perpetrator, Talat Pasha, was hailed as a [[national hero]] and given a posthumous [[state funeral]]. Those convicted and executed for war crimes, such as {{ill|Mehmet Kemal|de|Mehmed Kemâl|tr}} and [[Behramzade Nusret]], were proclaimed "national" and "glorious" martyrs, with schools and neighborhoods were named after them.{{sfn|Avedian|2012|p=816}} |
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One important factor in explaining denial is [[Sèvres Syndrome]], a narrative that portrays Turkey as besieged by implacable enemies, which would be undermined if it were admitted that Armenians were not enemies seeking the destruction of Turkey, but the victims of state-sponsored murder.{{sfn|Bilali|2013|p=29}}{{sfn|Dixon|2010b|p=106|ps=. "One observer of Turkish politics (Jenkins 2001, p. 16) writes that 'Turks are taught, and most believe, that their country is under continual external and internal threat, both from other countries plotting to divide or acquire Turkish territory and from internal forces seeking to change the constitutional status quo. The result is often a virtual siege mentality, riddled with impossibly intricate conspiracy theories' This element of Turkish nationalism would be undermined if it were admitted that Armenians were not enemies attempting to kill Turks and destroy the Turkish nation, but were instead victims of aggressive state policies. Moreover, admitting that Armenians were victims of state policies of ethnic cleansing might also reveal that the supposed enemies and threats to the Turkish nation are largely imagined or created by Turkish officials."}} Despite the unlikelihood that recognition would lead to any territorial changes, many Turkish officials believe that Armenians want to annex eastern Turkey or demand other [[Armenian Genocide reparations|reparations]].{{sfn|Dixon|2010b|p=107}}{{sfn|Avedian|2012|p=799|ps=. "The denialist strategy of the Turkish Republic is twofold: (1) by dwelling on the issue of recognition of the events as genocide, it prevents the evolution of the issue in order for one better to understand its dynamics other than just the historical evidence itself; and (2) it avoids any possible liability charges and subsequent claims for indemnity and reparations, both financial and territorial."}} Another factor is that acknowledging the genocide would call into question Turkey's founding myths.{{sfn|Dixon|2010b|p=107}} Akçam states that "It’s not easy for a nation to call its founding fathers murderers and thieves".<ref name="Arango">{{cite news |last1=Arango |first1=Tim |title=A Century After Armenian Genocide, Turkey’s Denial Only Deepens |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/world/europe/turkeys-century-of-denial-about-an-armenian-genocide.html |access-date=15 December 2020 |work=The New York Times |date=16 April 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150416141644/http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/world/europe/turkeys-century-of-denial-about-an-armenian-genocide.html|archive-date=16 April 2015|url-status=live}}</ref> Admitting that Turkey's leadership has been lying to its citizens for a century, and the military's role in carrying out and profiting from the genocide, could also undermine their prestige.{{sfn|Dixon|2010b|pp=107–108}} |
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Turkish historian [[Doğan Gürpınar]] states that the Armenian Genocide has evoked such intense reactions because: |
Turkish historian [[Doğan Gürpınar]] states that the Armenian Genocide has evoked such intense reactions because: |
Revision as of 11:14, 2 January 2021
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/75/Refugees_at_the_Taurus_Pass.jpg/240px-Refugees_at_the_Taurus_Pass.jpg)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/A_protest_against_Armenian_genocide_claims_in_Istanbul_1.jpg/240px-A_protest_against_Armenian_genocide_claims_in_Istanbul_1.jpg)
Armenian Genocide denial is the claim that the Ottoman Armenians were not victims of a genocide, orchestrated by the Ottoman government, during World War I, as documented in a large body of evidence and affirmed by the vast majority of scholars.[3][4] Denial was an integral part of the killings, carried out under the guise of resettlement. In the aftermath of the genocide, incriminating documents were systematically destroyed.
Deniers claim that the events of the genocide did not occur or represent them as something else, such as a civil war. They argue that the relocation of Armenians was a legitimate response to a real or perceived Armenian uprising and the high death toll resulted from "bad luck, bad planning, bad weather, bad local officials, and bad Kurds" rather than a deliberate state policy of extermination.[5] At an extreme, deniers claim that Armenians committed genocide against Turks, rather than vice versa. The techniques of denial, as well as its aim—to rehabilitate the perpetrators—have often been compared to Holocaust denial.
As of 2020[update], only the governments of Turkey and Azerbaijan deny the genocide. Genocide denial is a major aspect of Turkey's foreign policy dating back to the 1920s, leading many other countries, such as the United States until October 2019, to avoid officially recognizing the genocide. Turkey has spent millions of dollars on Washington lobbying, and has threatened other countries, to prevent recognition of the genocide. The century-long effort by the Turkish state to deny the genocide sets it apart from other cases of genocide in history.[6]
The denial of the genocide has profound consequences both for Armenians and in Turkey, and is hypothesized to contribute to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as well as ongoing violence against Kurds and political opponents in Turkey.
Background
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Ambassador_Morgenthau%27s_Story_p314.jpg/240px-Ambassador_Morgenthau%27s_Story_p314.jpg)
When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely 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.
Beginning in mid-1914, scattered massacres of Armenians began, accelerating after the Ottoman entry into World War I later that year, on the side of the Central Powers.[8] The starting date of the genocide is conventionally marked on 24 April 1915, the day that thousands of Armenian intellectuals were arrested in Constantinople. Systematic deportation of Armenians then began, given a cover of legitimacy by the 27 May deportation law. The deportation convoys, consisting mostly of women, children, and the elderly, were subject to massacres and drowning while the rest were left to die of starvation or disease.[9] The deportation was ordered by the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (Young Turks), especially Talat Pasha, who was well aware that he was sending the Armenians to their deaths.[10]
Historians estimate that 1.5 to 2 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, of which 800,000 to 1.2 million were deported during the genocide. In 1916, a wave of massacres targeted the surviving Armenians in Syria; by the end of the year, only 200,000 deported Armenians were still alive.[11] Around 1 million Armenians died in the genocide, about half the prewar population. Another group, an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 women and children, were integrated into Muslim families through such methods as forced marriage, adoption, and conversion.[12][13] Property belonging to the Armenians who were deported or murdered was redistributed by the state.[14]
The genocide is extensively documented, in both the Ottoman archives and those collected by foreign diplomats—including the Ottoman allies Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary—as well as eyewitness reports by Armenian survivors and Western missionaries, and the records of the Turkish courts-martial of 1919–1920.[3] Talat Pasha kept his own statistical record, which revealed a massive discrepancy between the number of Armenians deported in 1915 and those surviving in 1917.[15]
Origins
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Photo_of_massacre_victims_in_Turkey.jpg/220px-Photo_of_massacre_victims_in_Turkey.jpg)
Denial was an integral part of the killings, perpetrated under the guise of resettlement.[17][18] Denial emerged due to the Ottoman desire to maintain American neutrality in the war (until 1917) and German financial and military support. In addition, there was no popular demand for the genocide.[19]
In May 1915, Russia, Britain, and France sent a diplomatic communiqué to the Sublime Porte condemning the Ottoman massacres of Armenians and threatening to "hold personally responsible for those crimes all members of the Ottoman government, as well as those of its agents who will be found implicated in similar massacres".[8] The Ottoman government replied,
- Denying that massacres of Armenians had occurred[20]
- Claiming that Armenians colluded with the enemy[20]
- Alleging Armenian massacres of Muslims[20]
- Arguing that national sovereignty justified Ottoman policies towards Armenians[20]
- Making counter-accusations of Allied war crimes[21]
In early 1916, the Ottoman government published a two-volume work titled The Armenian Aspirations and Revolutionary Movements, which rejected the charge that the Ottoman government tried to exterminate the Armenian people.[22][23] At the time, little credence was paid to such statements.[24] Nevertheless, the themes of genocide denial that originated during the war were later recycled in later denial of the genocide by Turkey.[25][24]
In 1919, Mustafa Kemal, the leader of the Turkish nationalist movement, defended the Ottoman government's policies towards Christians:
Whatever has befallen the non-Muslim elements living in our country, is the result of the policies of separatism they pursued in a savage manner, when they allowed themselves to be made tools of foreign intrigues and abused their privileges. There are probably many reasons and excuses for the undesired events that have taken place in Turkey. And I want definitely to say that these events are on a level far removed from the many forms of oppression which are committed in the states of Europe without any excuse.[26][27]
Causes
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Talaat_Pasha_grave.jpg/180px-Talaat_Pasha_grave.jpg)
Continuity between the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey was significant, and Kemal's Republican People's Party has been described as the successor of the Committee of Union and Progress that carried out the genocide.[29] Many leading members of Kemal's Turkish nationalist movement had been perpetrators of the genocide, or enriched themselves from it, creating an incentive for silence.[30] The troops under the new republic conducted massacres of Armenian survivors in Cilicia and killed around 200,000 Armenians during the Turkish occupation of the Caucasus; thus, historian Rouben Paul Adalian has argued that "Mustafa Kemal completed what Talaat and Enver had started in 1915".[31][32]
Historian Erik-Jan Zürcher argues that "a serious attempt to distance the republic from the genocide could have destabilized the ruling coalition on which the state depended for its stability".[33] From the founding of the republic, the genocide has been viewed as a necessity and raison d'état.[34] Its main perpetrator, Talat Pasha, was hailed as a national hero and given a posthumous state funeral. Those convicted and executed for war crimes, such as Mehmet Kemal and Behramzade Nusret, were proclaimed "national" and "glorious" martyrs, with schools and neighborhoods were named after them.[35]
One important factor in explaining denial is Sèvres Syndrome, a narrative that portrays Turkey as besieged by implacable enemies, which would be undermined if it were admitted that Armenians were not enemies seeking the destruction of Turkey, but the victims of state-sponsored murder.[36][37] Despite the unlikelihood that recognition would lead to any territorial changes, many Turkish officials believe that Armenians want to annex eastern Turkey or demand other reparations.[38][39] Another factor is that acknowledging the genocide would call into question Turkey's founding myths.[38] Akçam states that "It’s not easy for a nation to call its founding fathers murderers and thieves".[40] Admitting that Turkey's leadership has been lying to its citizens for a century, and the military's role in carrying out and profiting from the genocide, could also undermine their prestige.[41]
Turkish historian Doğan Gürpınar states that the Armenian Genocide has evoked such intense reactions because:
...the official narrative on the Armenian massacres constituted one of the principal pillars of the regime of truth of the Turkish state. Culpability for these massacres would incur enormous moral liability; tarnish the self-styled claim to national innocence, benevolence and self-reputation of the Turkish state and the Turkish people; and blemish the course of Turkish history. Apparently, this would also be tantamount to casting doubt on the credibility of the foundational axioms of Kemalism and the Turkish nation-state.[42]
Terminology
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/The_Massacre_of_a_Nation_%28cropped%29.png/290px-The_Massacre_of_a_Nation_%28cropped%29.png)
Contemporary observers used unambiguous terminology to describe the genocide, including Völkermord—the German word for genocide—"the murder of a nation", "race extermination" and so forth.[43] The English word "genocide" was coined by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1943 from the Greek words "genos" and "ktonos" which means race killing. In a 1949 CBS interview with Quincy Howe, Lemkin explained, "I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action."[44]
Although most international law scholars agree that the 1948 Genocide Convention, which established the prohibition of genocide in international law, is not retroactive,[45][46] the events of the Armenian Genocide otherwise meet the legal definition of genocide.[47][48] David Gutman states that "Few if any scholars, however, reject the use of 'genocide' to characterize the fate of Ottoman Armenians during World War I solely" because they consider it anachronistic.[49] Many Turkish intellectuals have been reluctant to use the term genocide because, according to Akçam, "by qualifying it a genocide you become a member of a collective associated to a crime, not any crime but to the ultimate crime".[50]
The Turkish government uses expressions such as "so-called Armenian genocide", "Armenian Question", or "Armenian Tragedy", often characterizing the charge of genocide as "Armenian allegations"[51][52] or "Armenian lies".[53] However, in 2006, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered government officials to say "the events of 1915" instead of "so-called Armenian genocide".[54] Erdoğan, as well as some Turkish intellectuals, have distinguished between "good" Armenians (those who live in Turkey and Armenia) who do not discuss the genocide and "bad" ones (primarily the Armenian diaspora) who insist on recognition.[55][56]
In Turkey
Destruction and concealment of evidence
By an edict of the Ottoman government, foreigners were banned from taking photographs of Armenian refugees or the corpses that accumulated on the side of the roads on which death marches were carried out. Those who disobeyed were threatened with arrest.[1] Strictly enforced censorship laws prevented Armenian survivors from publishing memoirs in Turkey, or "any publication at odds with the general policies of the state".[57][58]
After the 1918 armistice, incriminating documents in the Ottoman archives were systematically destroyed.[59][60][61] However, this destruction was incomplete, and according to Akçam, sufficient evidence can be found in the archives to prove the genocide as well as the responsibility of the CUP and Special Organization in the killing.[59][62] Recognizing that some archival documents would support its position, in 1985, the Turkish government announced that the archives relevant to the "Armenian question" would be opened; cataloguing of the archives was complete by 1989.[63] In practice, not all the archives were opened, and access was only granted to scholars known to share the government's view of the past.[60][64][65] Access was further liberalized in the twenty-first century, but as of 2012, some key archives remain closed to scholars.[66]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/Geographical_distribution_of_placenames_of_Armenian_origin.svg/260px-Geographical_distribution_of_placenames_of_Armenian_origin.svg.png)
Talat Pasha had decreed that "everything must be done to abolish even the word 'Armenia' in Turkey".[67] In the postwar Turkish republic, Armenian cultural heritage has been subject to systematic destruction as an attempt to eradicate any traces of the Armenian presence.[68][67][69] On 5 January 1916, Enver Pasha ordered all place names of Greek, Armenian, or Bulgarian origin to be changed to Turkish names, a policy which was fully implemented in the later republic.[70][71] Mass graves of genocide victims have also been destroyed, although many still exist.[72]
Turkish historiography
During the genocide itself and the postwar trials, a literature emerged in which the occurrence of massacres against Armenians was not in doubt. With the rise of Turkish nationalism, later reports increasingly view the persecution of Armenians as necessary and justified.[73] In Kemal's 1927 speech, which was the foundation of Kemalist historiography, the foundation of Turkey was dated to 1919, thus excising the genocide from history.[74] For decades, Turkish historiography ignored the "Armenian question". One of the early exceptions was the genocide perpetrator Esat Uras, who wrote The Armenians in History and the Armenian Question in 1950. Uras' book, probably published in response to post-World War II Soviet territorial claims, was a novel synthesis of prior arguments deployed by the CUP during the war, and represented the bridge between wartime denial and the "official narrative" on the genocide developed in the 1970s and 1980s.[75][76]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7f/Trends_in_official_and_quasi-official_publications_on_the_Armenian_question%2C_1950%E2%80%932005.jpg/370px-Trends_in_official_and_quasi-official_publications_on_the_Armenian_question%2C_1950%E2%80%932005.jpg)
In the 1980s, following Armenian efforts for recognition and a wave of assassinations by Armenian militants, Turkey began to present an official narrative of the "Armenian question", which it framed as an issue of contemporary terrorism rather than historical genocide. Retired diplomats were recruited to write denialist works, completed without regard to professional methodology or ethical standards, generally based on cherry-picking from the archives to find information favorable to Turks and unfavorable to Armenians.[77][78][79] The Council of Higher Education, set up in 1981 by the Turkish military junta, has been instrumental in cementing "an alternative, 'national' scholarship with its own reference system".[80][63] Besides academic research, the first university course on the "Armenian question" was taught by Türkkaya Ataöv in 1983.[63]
Around 1990, Taner Akçam, working in Germany, was the first Turkish historian to acknowledge and study the genocide.[81] In 2005, the first academic conference to challenge conventional views on the genocide in Turkey was held at Bilgi University, after having been cancelled due to a campaign of intimidation. This event occurred during Turkey's bid for European Union membership and was cited as evidence of Turkey's openness.[82] The conference represented the first major challenge to Turkey's founding myths in the public sphere; acknowledgement of the genocide among Turkish historians could no longer be dismissed as a fringe view.[83]
Education
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/56/IgdirGenocideMuseum.jpg/220px-IgdirGenocideMuseum.jpg)
Turkish schools, regardless of whether they are public or private, are required to teach history based on the textbooks approved by the Ministry of Education.[84] The state uses its monopoly to promote its opinion of Armenians and to increase support for the official denialist position.[85] For decades, these textbooks omitted any mention of Armenians as part of Ottoman history.[86][87] Since the 1980s, textbooks discuss the "events of 1915", but deflect the blame from the Ottoman government to other actors, especially imperialist powers who allegedly manipulated the Armenians to achieve their nefarious goals of undermining the empire, and the Armenians themselves, for allegedly committing treason and presenting a threat to the empire. Some textbooks admit that deportations occur and Armenians died, but present this action as necessary and justified. Most recently, textbooks have accused Armenians of perpetrating genocide against Turkish Muslims.[87][88][63]
Teachers are instructed to tell seventh-year students:
State to your students that the Russians also made some Armenians revolt on this front and murder many of our civilian citizens. Explain that the Ottoman State took certain measures following these developments, and in May 1915 implemented the ‘Tehcir Kanunu’ [Displacement Law] regarding the migration and settlement of Armenians in the battleground. Explain that care was taken to ensure that the land in which the Armenians who had to migrate were to settle was fertile, that police stations were established for their security and that measures were taken to ensure they could practice their previous jobs and professions.[89]
Society
The genocide was for decades a taboo subject in Turkish society.[90] Besides the Turkish state, Turkish intellectuals and civil society have also participated in denial.[91] According to Gürpınar, many Turks regard "the ‘Armenian allegations’ as mere slander and an offence to the dignity of the Turkish nation".[92] Noting that many people in eastern Turkey have passed down "vivid memories" of the genocide, genocide scholar Uğur Ümit Üngör states that "there is a clash between official state memory and popular social memory: the Turkish government is denying a genocide that its own population remembers".[93] Turkish fiction that deals with the genocide typically denies it, and according to Özlem Belçim Galip, "institutionalizes literature as a tool for nationalist discourses".[94]
Laws against "insulting Turkishness" have been used to prosecute those who acknowledge the genocide. These convictions are justified on the basis that freedom of expression "can be limited in accordance with aims such as the protection of national security, of public order, of public security".[95] Since the 2007 assassination of Hrant Dink, an increasing number of Turks are acknowledging the genocide and challenging denial.[96] In 2016, when Germany recognized the genocide, angry reactions came from all major parties except the Peoples' Democratic Party and many pro- and anti-government media and civil society organizations.[97]
In 2013, a study concluded that 65% of Turks agree with the official view that Armenian deaths occurred as a result of a "inter-communal warfare" and 10% blamed Armenians for causing violence.[98] A 2014 survey found that only 9% of Turkish citizens though that their government should recognize the genocide.[99]
Foreign relations of Turkey
At the Lausanne Conference of 1922–1923, Turkish representatives repeated the version of Armenian history that had been developed during the war.[100] The resulting Treaty of Lausanne annulled the previous Treaty of Sevrès which had mandated the prosecution of Ottoman war criminals and the restoration of property to Christian survivors. Instead, Lausanne contained a secret annex granting impunity to all perpetrators.[101][102] Turkey's laws seizing "abandoned" property left behind by deported Armenians were nevertheless in violation of the Treaty of Lausanne.[101]
Turkish efforts to project its genocide denial overseas date to the 1920s,[103][104] or, alternately, to the genocide itself.[105][106] According to sociologist Levon Chorbajian, Turkey's "modus operandi remains consistent throughout and seeks maximalist positions, offers no compromise though sometimes hints at it, and employs intimidation and threats".[107] Turkey's response to the Armenian issue was fairly ad-hoc and reactive until the 1980 Turkish military coup, when it developed more institutionalized ways of countering genocide claims. In 1981, the foreign ministry established a dedicated office (İAGM) specifically for the purpose of promoting Turkey's view of the "Armenian question".[108]
Motivated by the antisemitic idea of a global Jewish conspiracy, the Turkish foreign ministry has recruited Turkish Jews to participate in denialist efforts. Turkish Jewish leaders helped defeat resolutions recognizing the Armenian genocide and avoid mention of the genocide in academic conferences and Holocaust museums.[109] Turkish embassies report on any conference that mentions the Armenian Genocide and in most cases Turkish lobbyists obtained concessions, either enclosing the word "genocide" in quotation marks or else including speakers that represent the Turkish state's view.[110]
Historian Vahagn Avedian emphasizes the role that other countries play in enabling Turkey's denial by refusing to recognize the genocide.[111] Israeli historian Yair Auron states, "There is at least one cynical lesson from this: for a 'good' price, a nation can purchase a revision of its own history, even the history of an act as terrible as genocide."[112]
Germany
During the war, German newspapers repeated the Ottoman government's denial of committing any atrocities and stories of alleged Armenian treachery.[113] Historian Margaret L. Anderson states that Germany lied to itself throughout the genocide about the nature of what its ally was doing.[114] Genocide denial in Germany mostly ended after the assassination of Talat Pasha in Berlin by Armenian student Soghomon Tehlirian in 1921; the trial of Tehlirian revealed so much evidence that formerly denialist newspapers accepted the fact of the genocide, including the perpetrators' intent. German nationalists instead began to portray the genocide as justified.[115]
United States
Historian Donald Bloxham states that "In a very real sense, 'genocide denial' was accepted and furthered by the US government before the term genocide had even been coined."[116] In interwar Turkey, prominent American diplomats such as Mark L. Bristol and Joseph Grew endorsed the Turkish nationalist view that viewed the genocide as a war against the forces of imperialism.[117] In 1922, before receiving the Chester concession, Colby Chester argued that Christians of Anatolia were not massacred; his writing exhibited many of the themes of later genocide denial.[118][119] In the 1930s, the Turkish embassy scuttled a planned film adaptation of Franz Werfel's popular novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by the American company MGM, threatening a boycott of American films. Attempts to revive the film in the 1950s and 1960s were also shot down by Turkish embassies with the support of the United States State Department. In 1953, United States diplomat Arthur Richards expressed hope "that the book would never be made into a play or a movie because the Turkish people are particularly sensitive to this period of their history and are trying desperately to cover it up".[116][120]
In more recent years, Turkey has spent millions of dollars lobbying Washington against the recognition of the genocide.[121] In 2007, an effort for the federal government to recognize the resolution failed due to Turkish pressure. Opponents of the bill stated that a genocide had taken place, but argued against formal recognition to prioritize relations with Turkey.[122] In 2019, the United States Congress formally recognized the genocide.[123]
United Kingdom
In 2001, the United Kingdom initially refused to invite Armenian Genocide survivors to an official commemorative event of the first Holocaust Memorial Day, which included survivors of several genocides, but later relented.[124]
Israel
According to historians Rıfat Bali and Marc David Baer, "the single most important factor in successfully concluding the process of normalization between Israel and Turkey" was Armenian Genocide denial.[125]
The 1982 International Conference on Holocaust and Genocide, which took place in Tel Aviv, included six presentations on the Armenian Genocide. Turkey threatened that if the conference was held, the lives of Jews fleeing Iran and Syria through Israel would be in jeopardy. As a result, the Israeli Foreign Ministry joined the ultimately unsuccessful effort to cancel the conference.[126]
In April 2001, foreign minister Shimon Peres was quoted in a Turkish newspaper as stating, "We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through, but not a genocide."[127][128] According to Charny and Auron, this statement "entered into the range of actual denial of the Armenian Genocide, comparable to the denial of the Holocaust".[129] However, scholar Eldad Ben Aharon states that Peres simply made explicit what had been Israel's policy since 1948.[128]
Israel–Turkey relations deteriorated in the late 2010s, but Israel's relations with Azerbaijan are close and the Azerbaijan–Israel International Association has lobbied against recognition of the genocide.[130]
Armenia
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Monument_to_Humanity_by_Mehmet_Aksoy_in_Kars%2C_Turkey_%28cropped%29.jpg/170px-Monument_to_Humanity_by_Mehmet_Aksoy_in_Kars%2C_Turkey_%28cropped%29.jpg)
The Turkish authorities have put forth certain conditions before attempting to reconcile with Armenia. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 following the First Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan. The borders have remained closed because the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute has not been settled to this day.[132] Although Armenia was willing to normalize relations without preconditions, Turkey demanded that the Armenian side abandon all support for the recognition efforts of the Armenian diaspora.[133]
In 2005 Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan invited Turkish, Armenian and international historians to form a commission to reevaluate the events of 1915 by using archives in Turkey, Armenia and other countries. The idea of a historical commission met stiff resistance from the Armenian diaspora. Many Armenians viewed it as "an attempt to re-legislate an issue that had already been decided".[134] There have been two major attempts at Turkish-Armenian reconciliation, both of which failed partly due to the controversy over the Armenian Genocide. In both cases, namely the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission (2000–2004) and the Zurich Protocols (2009), the mediators did their best to sideline the issue of the genocide; however, this proved impossible.[135] Armenian diaspora groups opposed both initiatives, feeling like their history was being sold for political advantage.[136] According to Avedian, reconciliation cannot occur without some common narrative and therefore is unlikely as long as the official denialist policy continues.[137]
Azerbaijan
Since the beginning of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Azerbaijan, a Turkic country, has adopted Turkey's genocide denial and worked to promote it internationally.[138][139] Many Armenians saw a connection between the genocide and later anti-Armenian violence such as the 1988 Sumagit pogrom. However, the connection between the Karabakh conflict and the Armenian Genocide is mostly made by Azerbaijani elites.[140] Azerbaijani nationalists accused Armenians of staging the Sumagit pogrom and other anti-Armenian pogroms, similar to the Turkish discourse on the Armenian Genocide.[141] According to Azerbaijan, genocide has been "repeatedly committed against the Azerbaijani people", citing events such as the Treaty of Gulistan (1813), the Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828), Baku Commune, January 1990 deployment of Soviet troops to Baku, and especially the 1992 Khojali massacre. However, Armenians never suffered any mistreatment, let alone a genocide.[142] Azerbaijan sees any country that recognizes the genocide as an enemy and has even threatened sanctions.[143] Vicken Cheterian has argued that the "unresolved historic legacy of the 1915 genocide" helped cause the Karabakh conflict and prevent its resolution, while "the ultimate crime itself continues to serve simultaneously as a model and as a threat, as well as a source of existential fear".[140]
Denialism in academia
Until the twenty-first century, Ottoman and Turkish studies marginalized the killings of Armenians, which many portrayed as a wartime measure justified by emergency and avoided discussing in depth. These fields have long enjoyed close institutional links with the Turkish state.[144] The ethics of academics' decision to deny the Armenian genocide have been questioned.[145][146][147] According to Marc David Baer, the most prominent Jewish scholars of the Ottoman Empire, including Stanford Shaw and Bernard Lewis, rejected the Armenian Genocide in favor of presenting a narrative of "tolerant Turks, grateful and loyal Jews, and anti-Semitic Armenian and Greek traitors, a narrative that has simultaneously served to deny the very possibility of an Armenian genocide".[148]
Beginning in the 1980s, the Turkish government has funded research institutes that deny the genocide.[149] Their methodology has been compared to the tactics of the tobacco industry or global warming denial; funding biased research, creating a smokescreen of doubt, and thereby manufacturing a controversy.[150][151] According to David B. MacDonald, the minority of scholars who deny the genocide "hardly demonstrate the existence of a genuine academic dispute".[152] Denial of the genocide has shaped scholarship, for example spurring many authors to focus on countering denial arguments.[153][154][155]
"Lewis Affair"
On 19 May 1985, The New York Times and The Washington Post ran an advertisement in which a group of 69 American historians, including the prominent historian Bernard Lewis, who called on Congress not to adopt the resolution on the Armenian Genocide.[156][157][158] Heath Lowry, director of the Institute of Turkish Studies (funded by the Turkish government), helped secure the signatures of the academics and the advertisement was paid for by the Committee of the Turkish Associations.[157][159] For his efforts, Lowry received the Foundation for the Promotion and Recognition of Turkey Prize. Over the next decade, Turkey funded six chairs of Ottoman and Turkish studies to counter recognition of the genocide; one of these went to Lowry.[160]
The Armenian Assembly of America found that many or most of the 69 academics benefited directly or indirectly from Turkish government research grants, and a majority were not specialists on the historical period during which the genocide occurred.[161][162] In 2000, former Turkish ambassador to the United States Şükrü Elekdağ admitted that the statement had become useless because none of the original signatories besides Justin McCarthy would agree to sign another, similar declaration.[163][164]
Since 2000
More recent academic denialism in the United States has focused on the theme of an alleged Armenian uprising, which is said to justify the persecution of Armenians as a legitimate counterinsurgency.[165] In 2009, the University of Utah opened its "Turkish Studies Project", funded by Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) and led by M. Hakan Yavuz, with Elekdağ on the advisory board.[166][167] Professor Keith David Watenpaugh charges the program with "promoting the falsification of history through its grants and political advocacy... the University of Utah has provided an institutional home to genocide denial."[168] University of Utah Press has published a number of books denying the genocide.[165][166] The series began with Guenter Lewy's The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey (2006), which had been rejected by eleven publishers and, according to Marc Mamigonian, became "one of the key texts of modern denial".[169][170] TCA has also provided financial support to several authors including McCarthy, Michael Gunter, Yücel Güçlü, and Edward J. Erickson for writing books that deny the Armenian Genocide.[166] According to Richard G. Hovannisian, of recent deniers in academia, "Almost all are citizens of the Turkish state or have lived and served in the Turkish Republic. The Turkish authors are all past or present officials of the Turkish foreign ministry."[171]
Academic integrity
In 1990, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton received a letter from Nüzhet Kandemir , Turkish ambassador to the United States, questioning his inclusion of references to the Armenian Genocide in one of his books. The ambassador inadvertently included a draft of a letter from Lowry advising the ambassador on how to prevent mention of the Armenian Genocide in scholarly works. Lowry was later named to the Atatürk chair of Ottoman Studies at Princeton University, which had been endowed with a $750,000 grant from the Republic of Turkey. Lowry's actions were described as "subversion of scholarship"[145] and "further proof of the Institute of Turkish Studies’ and scholars’ collusion with Turkish state interests".[172] Lowry later apologized for writing the letter, saying that he "goofed".[173]
In 2006, Ottomanist historian Donald Quataert—one of the 69 signatories of the 1985 statement to the United States Congress[174]—published a review Donald Bloxham's book The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Quataert stated that he used the word genocide because "to do otherwise... runs the risk of suggesting denial of the massive and systematic atrocities" and that "what happened to the Armenians readily satisfies the U.N. definition of genocide".[175] The review has been cited as challenging the field's habitual neglect of the Armenian Genocide.[174][176][177] Weeks later, Quataert resigned from the position of the chairman of the board of directors of the Institute of Turkish Studies. Quataert stated that Turkish officials threatened that if he did not retract the classification of genocide or resign, the institute's funding would be withdrawn. Several members of the board resigned and both the Middle East Studies Association and Turkish Studies Association criticized the violation of Quataert's academic freedom.[178][176][174]
In a lecture he delivered in June 2011, Akçam stated that he was told by a Turkish foreign ministry official that the Turkish government was offering money to academics in the United States for denial of the genocide, noting the coincidence between what his source said and American historian Michael M. Gunter's book Armenian History and the Question of Genocide. He also stated that the four individuals who praised Gunter's book "are well known for their denialist position and works".[179] Hovannisian believes that books denying the genocide are published because of flaws in peer review leading to "a strong linkage among several mutually sympathetic reviewers" without submitting the books to academics who would point out errors.[180]
Academic consensus
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8a/The_Great_Game_of_Genocide.jpg/220px-The_Great_Game_of_Genocide.jpg)
Since 2000, several scholars have stated that accumulating evidence and scholarship makes it increasingly difficult to sustain the position that there was no Armenian Genocide. An increasing number of Turkish historians are acknowledging and studying the genocide. Akçam stated that since the 2010s, the Turkish government position is summarily dismissed in the academy.[4] In 2006, international law scholar William Schabas wrote that expanding interpretations of the Genocide Convention further undermine the arguments of those who deny that the Armenians were victims of a genocide.[182]
Denial of the Armenian Genocide is frequently compared to Holocaust denial because of similar tactics of misrepresenting evidence, false equivalence, claiming that atrocities were invented by war propaganda and that powerful lobbies manufacture genocide allegations for their own profit, subsuming the specific and one-sided killings of genocide into war deaths, and blaming genocide victims for provoking their own suffering. Both forms of negationism share the goal of rehabilitating the ideologies which brought genocide about.[183][184] Holocaust denial, however, is not supported by a powerful state apparatus, meaning that it is less developed and less respectable.[185][186][146]
Academic organizations of genocide scholars such as International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, and Institute for the Study of Genocide accept the genocide as a historical fact.[187][188][189] The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal in 1984 and the International Center for Transitional Justice in 2002 (commissioned by the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission) conducted investigations into whether the Armenian Genocide met the legal definition set forth in the Genocide Convention, both concluding that it did.[190][191]
On 9 June 2000, in a statement published in The New York Times, 126 scholars, including Nobel Prize-winner Elie Wiesel, historian Yehuda Bauer, and sociologist Irving Horowitz, signed a document "affirming that the World War I Armenian genocide is an incontestable historical fact and accordingly urge the governments of Western democracies to likewise recognize it as such".[192] In a 2005 open letter to Erdogan, IAGS emphasized that "to deny [the Armenian Genocide's] factual and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history".[193]
Examination of claims
Deniers claim that the events of the genocide did not occur or represent them as something else, such as a civil war.[194][195] Many denialist works share much of the facts about events with non-denialist histories, but differ in their interpretation and emphases.[196] Historian Ronald Grigor Suny summarizes the main denialist argument as "There was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it."[197][198] At the extreme end of denialist claims is that it is not Turks who committed genocide against Armenians but vice versa, as articulated by the Iğdır Genocide Memorial and Museum. This theory relies on an exaggeration of revenge killings committed during the Russian occupation of eastern Anatolia, decontextualized from the genocide of 1915.[199]
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/Van2.jpg/130px-Van2.jpg)
Civil war theory
One major claims is that there was a "civil war" or generalized Armenian uprising planned by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaks) in collusion with Russia. In reality, there was Armenian resistance—primarily the uprisings in Shabin Karahisar, Musa Dagh, Urfa, and Van—but these were localized, desperate, and mostly unsuccessful attempts at self-defense against imminent anti-Armenian measures. The books that make this argument often rely on the arguments published by genocide perpetrator Esat Uras.[201][202] Another frequently cited source is a 1923 pamphlet Hovhannes Kachaznuni, which criticizes Dashnak actions, written to obtain Soviet permission to return to Soviet Armenia; this source is frequently misrepresented by deniers.[203][204][205] Neither Ottoman archives nor other sources support the hypothesis of a general Armenian uprising, as admitted by one of the proponents of this theory, Edward Erickson.[206][195]
Justification for anti-Armenian persecution
Denialist works portray Armenians in negative terms as a terrorist and secessionist fifth column;[207][208] in other words, they were to blame for their own suffering, and thus the attacks against them cannot be considered genocidal.[209][210] Historian Lerna Ekmekçioğlu states that the perception of Armenian disloyalty is often justified by pointing at postwar support for an Armenian state in eastern Anatolia. However, these demands came into being after the genocide.[208] Related claims include alleged mass defections of Ottoman Armenians to the Russian Army. Such defections did occur on a limited scale but the Armenian regiments in the Russian army were composed mostly of Russian Armenians.[211][212][213] According to this logic, the deportations of Armenian civilians was a justified and proportionate response to Armenian treachery, either real or as perceived by the Ottoman authorities.[206][214][215]
Proponents cite the doctrine of military necessity and attribute collective guilt of all Armenians for the military resistance of some, despite the fact that the law of war criminalizes the deliberate killing of civilians.[216][217][218] German consul Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter stated that the "measures cannot be justified on military grounds, because there is no reason to expect an uprising by the local Armenians, and the deportees are old men, women, and children".[219] Historians including Akçam and Hilmar Kaiser have emphasized that the deportations were only possible behind the front lines and away from any active uprising; Armenians in the war zone were massacred rather than being deported.[220][195]
Non-intentionality of the genocide
Under the Genocide Convention, genocide requires "intent to destroy"; deniers of the genocide argue that this criterion has not been proven.[221] According to this theory, the Ottoman government ordered the "relocation" of Armenians but did not intend for them to die;[222] Armenian deaths resulted from "bad judgment, bad luck, bad planning, bad weather, bad local officials, and bad Kurds", as Marc Mamigonian put it.[5] False claims made along these lines include that the Ottoman rulers took actions to safeguard Armenian lives and property during their deportation, and prosecuted 1,397 people for harming Armenians during the genocide.[223][224]
This position disregards the significant body of direct evidence proving the Ottoman government's intent to destroy the Armenians as such.[225][226] Subjecting the persecuted group to conditions incompatible with life is part of the crime of genocide,[227] and the Ottoman rulers knew that death would result from sending Armenians to the desert around Deir-ez-Zor.[10] In addition, international courts have ruled that genocidal intent can also be proven with circumstantial evidence, especially "the scale of atrocities committed, their general nature, in a region or a country, or furthermore, the fact of deliberately and systematically targeting victims on account of their membership of a particular group, while excluding the members of other groups".[228][229] Based on this jurisprudence, the genocidal intent in the Armenian case can be proven from the actual fate of the Ottoman Armenians.[230][229]
Minimization of Armenian deaths
According to some deniers the number of Armenians killed was only 300,000 or even less, perhaps no more than 100,000.[231][232] The numbers of Armenian victims are minimized to diminish the guilt of the perpetrators or even absolve them entirely, by allowing the Armenian Genocide to be normalized as an ordinary outcome of wartime conditions, rather than a systematic extermination.[233] Historian Donald Bloxham sees this as "part of the project of fraudulently minimizing the number of Armenians who had ever lived in the Ottoman empire, thereby undermining Armenian claims for autonomy or independence".[234]
Allegedly excluded groups
Some of the writers who reject genocidal intent, including Yusuf Halaçoğlu and Lewy, claim that certain groups of Armenians were spared deportation, including Catholic and Protestant Armenians as well as the families of Armenian soldiers serving in the Ottoman Army. The latter claim is false; the vast majority of families of soldiers were deported, especially after the Armenian soldiers themselves were killed.[235] In the former case, the Ottoman authorities did issue orders to spare Catholic and Protestant Armenians, to appease German demands, but such orders were quickly rescinded with explicit orders to deport every Armenian regardless of confession.[236]
Another claim is that the Armenian communities of Smyrna and Constantinople were spared from deportation, which according to proponents would prove that there was no systematic effort to exterminate the Armenians. Documentation confirms the deportation of Armenians from both areas. Irregular deportation from Constantinople, beginning with the deportation of Armenian intellectuals on 24 April 1915, occurred throughout the remainder of the war, but German pressure prevented the total deportation of the community, as planned by the Young Turks.[237][238] Deportation from Smyrna was halted after German general Otto Liman von Sanders threatened to use force to block additional deportations.[239][238]
Veracity of evidence
Because of the systematic destruction of evidence in the Ottoman archives, documents there are unlikely to provide a "smoking gun" to prove the genocide. Deniers then demand a "smoking gun" to prove that the genocide happened, question the veracity of the evidence that has survived, and discount Armenian and foreign witnesses to the genocide.[240][241][184] For example, in the 1990s Lowry argued that Ambassador Morgenthau's Story was an unreliable source, although much of the information in the book is corroborated by diplomatic cables and Morgenthau's access to the Young Turk leadership has been documented elsewhere.[242]
Talat Pasha telegrams
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bd/Bahaeddin_%C5%9Eakir_telegram_4_July_1915.png/220px-Bahaeddin_%C5%9Eakir_telegram_4_July_1915.png)
The Talat Pasha telegrams, originally published in 1919 as part of The Memoirs of Naim Bey, provide concrete evidence that the genocide of Armenians was implemented as a state policy. Şinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca argued in their 1983 book The Talât Pasha "telegrams": historical fact or Armenian fiction? that Naim Bey did not exist, and his memoir and the telegrams were forgeries by the Armenian journalist Aram Andonian. According to Akçam, their claims "were some of the most important cornerstones of denying the events of 1915" and "the book became one of the most important instruments for the anti-Armenian hate discourse".[244] Since it was difficult to prove the authenticity of the documents, many scholars avoided citing them.[245]
In 2017, Akçam found the original of two of the original telegrams; one, from Bahaeddin Şakir on 4 July 1915, stated "Have Armenians who were deported from there been eliminated? Have those harmful elements who were distanced [from there] through deportation been liquidated or simply deported?"[243][246] In 2018, Akçam published a book, Killing Orders, that debunked the arguments of Orel and Yuca as well as corroborated the information in the telegrams.[247] Akçam stated that, if the telegrams were indeed forgeries, the Turkish government could easily prove it by publishing the encryption keys. That it did not was further evidence of their authenticity.[245]
Alleged Turkish or Muslim innate tolerance
Another major argument deployed to counter the Armenian Genocide is that the claim that the Ottoman Empire represented "500 years of friendship" between Jews and Muslims. The actual degree of friendship is exaggerated, Turkish antisemitism is elided, and the history is used to justify Armenian Genocide denial, according to the argument that Turkish benevolence towards Jews means that they could not have committed genocide against Christians.[248] This argument perhaps originated during the genocide, when Talat Pasha asked Henry Morgenthau Sr., the United States ambassador, why he would care about Armenians given that Ottoman Jews were treated well.[249] Additionally, Turkey has presented itself as a rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust, without acknowledging that thousands of Jews were deported to extermination camps because their Turkish citizenship was not acknowledged. It is claimed that if Turkey saved Jews from genocide, it could not have committed genocide against Armenians.[250] During a visit to Sudan in 2006, Erdoğan denied that there had been a Darfur genocide because "a Muslim cannot commit genocide".[251]
Legality
According to former ICTY judge Flavia Lattanzi, the present Turkish government's "den[ial of] past Ottoman and Turkish authorities' wrongdoings is a new violation of international law".[252] Agostina Latino, another law scholar, writes that Turkey's denial violates the right to truth and right to memory of the victim community.[253]
Some European countries have adopted laws to criminalize denial of the genocide.[254] Criminal prosecution of genocide denial is controversial, being claimed by opponents to erode freedom of speech. Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was repeatedly prosecuted for "insulting Turkishness"; before his assassination, he opposed laws against Armenian genocide denial because of his belief that such laws would entrench polarized positions on the issue and hinder reconciliation.[255]
France
In 1993, American historian Bernard Lewis gave several interviews in the French press in which he argued that there was no Armenian Genocide because the Armenians brought their fate upon themselves.[256][257] Criminal proceedings were brought by a state prosecutor under the Gayssot Law, but failed as the court determined that the law did not apply to events prior to World War II.[258] In a 1995 civil proceeding brought by three Armenian Genocide survivors, a French court censured his remarks under Article 1382 of the Civil Code and fined him one franc, as well as ordering the publication of the judgment at Lewis' cost in Le Monde. The court ruled that while Lewis has the right to his views, their expression harmed a third party and that "it is only by hiding elements which go against his thesis that the defendant was able to state that there was no 'serious proof' of the Armenian Genocide".[259][260][261]
In the 2000s, France passed multiple laws to criminalize Armenian Genocide denial, but they were all struck down in court as unconstitutional.[262]
Perinçek v. Switzerland
In March 2007, Turkish ultranationalist politician Doğu Perinçek, a member of the Talat Pasha Committee, named after the main perpetrator of the genocide,[263][264][265] was found guilty of racial discrimination by a Swiss district court in Lausanne for denying the Armenian Genocide.[266] Perinçek appealed; in December, the Swiss Federal Court confirmed his sentence. The verdict was overturned by the European Court of Human Rights in Perinçek v. Switzerland on freedom of speech grounds. Although the court did not rule on whether the events of 1915 constituted genocide, several concurring and dissenting opinions recognized the reality of the Armenian genocide as a historical fact.[267]
Since the ECtHR has ruled that member states may criminalize Holocaust denial, the verdict has been widely criticized for creating a double standard between the Holocaust and other genocides, along with failure to acknowledge anti-Armenianism as a motivation for genocide denial.[264][268] Perinçek and the Talat Pasha Committee misrepresented the verdict to claim that they "put an end to the genocide lie".[269]
Consequences
When recognizing the Armenian Genocide in April 2015, Pope Francis added, "concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it".[270] David Tolbert, president of the ICTJ, emphasized that "The consequences of denial are deep and lasting, not only for the descendants of the Armenians, but also for Turkey itself, in large and small ways. Putting perpetrators of genocide in the Turkish pantheon of national heroes has its price."[271] Vicken Cheterian states that genocide denial "pollutes the political culture of entire societies, where violence and threats become part of a political exercise degrading basic rights and democratic practice".[272]
For Armenians
According to an article in Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, "[d]enial prevents healing of the wounds inflicted by genocide, and constitutes an attack on the collective identity and national cultural continuity of the victimized people".[273] Göçek argues that the lack of closure due to ongoing Turkish denial has left the descendants of Armenian victims in an "awkward, unsatisfactory state of incompletion".[274] The activities of Armenian terrorist groups in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia and Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, was caused partly by the failure of peaceful efforts to elicit Turkish acknowledgement of the genocide.[275][276] Historian Thomas de Waal argues that "For many individual Armenians, and for Diaspora Armenians collectively, the problem is that the unresolved legacy of the Genocide is a prison, and it is the Turks, and not they themselves, who have the key to release them."[277]
For Turks
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cc/%C5%9E%C4%B1rnak_%C3%A7at%C4%B1%C5%9Fmas%C4%B1_%C3%A7ocuk_cenaze_t%C3%B6reni.jpg/220px-%C5%9E%C4%B1rnak_%C3%A7at%C4%B1%C5%9Fmas%C4%B1_%C3%A7ocuk_cenaze_t%C3%B6reni.jpg)
Denial of the genocide has had profound effects on Turkish society, and has contributed to continuing violence against Kurds and political opposition.[278][271][279] Akçam states: "If a society, if a state, doesn’t acknowledge its wrongdoing in the past, this means there is a potential there, always, that it can do it again."[280] Cheterian argues that:
By censoring the Armenian Genocide, its impact, traces and consequences do not simply disappear. It continues in various forms: the repression of Armenian and other Christian minorities and their destruction as organised communities within Turkey; anti-Kurdish violence; and the aggressive stance taken towards the Armenians by Azerbaijan.[281]
Most of all, according to Cheterian, there is a continuity between deep state organs such as the Special Organization set up to carry out the genocide, and the deep state which continues to operate in Turkey (e.g. Ergenekon) outside of political or legal accountability.[282]
For the world at large
According to Cheterian, the consequences of denial extend beyond the community of victims and perpetrators:
A state, instead of protecting its citizens, deported them to the desert, stole their belongings, kidnapped their children. Now, after 100 years, our global political institutions still cannot call this crime by its name. For 100 years we lived in that village where the serial killer was acclaimed as role model. A world that has failed to bring justice for a genocide committed 100 years ago is a world that lacks the courage or the moral righteousness to address the wrongdoings of our own times.[283]
Historian Stefan Ihrig has argued that impunity for the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide, as well as silence or justification from bystanders of the crime, emboldened the perpetrators of the Holocaust.[284]
References
Citations
- ^ a b Akçam 2018, p. 157.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, pp. 202–203.
- ^ a b Evidence for the killings:
- Dadrian 2003, pp. 270–271. "Despite their certain value, one may discount in this respect the vast corpus of official documents assembled in the depositories of the state archives of those countries that comprise the camp of Turkey’s World War I enemies, i.e. Great Britain, France, and Russia and, after April 1917, the United States. These documents may be attempted to be dismissed by the deniers as wartime enemy propaganda. By the same token, eyewitness account of Armenian survivors of the mass murder may be deprecated by them as products of victim bias or of victim embellishments. But what have the deniers to say about the amplitude of documents with which are replete the state archives of Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary... World War I allies of the Ottoman Turks? Armenian genocide literature is suffused with a large body of such documents that are not only reliable but are explicit about the premeditated and centrally organized nature of the mass murder in question."
- Auron 2003, p. 255. "... there is no doubt of the proof, based on numerous and varied sources from the period, that the comprehensive mass extermination of the civilian population in various regions of Turkey (and certainly not just in the battle zones) was carried out on the order of Turkish authorities in Constantinople... the historical sources create an unequivocal and unshakable picture of genocide."
- Chorbajian 2016, p. 168. "There are many sources of documentation including Ambassador Morgenthau's Story; reports by US consular officials; US, British, German, and Ottoman archival materials; records of the post-First World War trials of Ottoman leaders and genocide perpetrators; thousands of survivor accounts; eyewitness accounts by Western missionaries; extensive media coverage; and many reputable later generation historical studies."
- Gürpınar 2016, p. 234. "Contrary to the ‘selected naivety’ of the first part of the ‘Turkish thesis’, here, a ‘deliberate ignorance’ is essential. Armenian ‘counter-evidence’ such as highly comprehensive and also poignant consular reports and dispatches are to be omitted and dismissed as sheer propaganda without responding to the question of why the diplomats falsified the truth."
- ^ a b Academic consensus:
- Bloxham, Donald (2003). "Determinants of the Armenian Genocide". Looking Backward, Moving Forward. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-78699-4.
Despite growing scholarly consensus on the fact of the Armenian Genocide, widespread divergence of opinion remains on the circumstances in which it developed.
- MacDonald 2008, p. 122. "Most American Holocaust and genocide scholars have also joined forces to condemn denialism [of the Armenian Genocide]."
- Suny 2009, p. 935. "Overwhelmingly, since 2000, publications by non-Armenian academic historians, political scientists, and sociologists... have seen 1915 as one of the classic cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide. And, even more significantly, they have been joined by a number of scholars in Turkey or of Turkish ancestry..."
- Bilali 2013, p. 17. "Scholars of Armenian origin (e.g., Dadrian, 2003; Hovannisian, 1997), most international scholars (Bloxham, 2005; Melson, 1992; Nazer, 1968), and a few Turkish historians (e.g., Akçam, 2006) claim that about a million Armenians... perished as a result of direct and unprovoked massacres by the Turkish military which intended to exterminate the Armenians of the Ottoman empire... [and] refer to the massacres in 1915 as the first genocide of the century..."
- Gutman 2015, p. 177. "Recent developments including the publication of several studies in the Turkish language, however, suggest that such efforts to cast doubt on the genocidal dimensions of the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians are becoming increasingly untenable".
- Mamigonian 2015, p. 62. "The body of documentation of and critical scholarship on the Armenian Genocide that has grown over the past several decades has rendered traditional strategies of silencing and denial increasingly untenable."
- Hovannisian 2015, p. 244. "The vast majority of genocide scholars and their organizations worldwide are steadfast not only in their recognition of the Armenian Genocide but also in calling upon others, including the Turkish government, to acknowledge the historical reality and help pave the way toward eventual conciliation."
- Suny 2015, pp. 373–374. "One hundred years after the Young Turk government decided to deport and massacre hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Assyrians, the controversies over the Genocide still rage, but the balance has shifted dramatically and conclusively toward the view that the Ottoman government conceived, initiated, and implemented deliberate acts of ethnic cleansing and mass murder targeted at specific ethnoreligious communities."
- Laycock, Jo (2016). "The great catastrophe". Patterns of Prejudice. 50 (3): 311–313. doi:10.1080/0031322X.2016.1195548. S2CID 147933878.
important developments in the historical research on the genocide over the last fifteen years... have left no room for doubt that the treatment of the Ottoman Armenians constituted genocide according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide
- "Taner Akçam: Türkiye'nin, soykırım konusunda her bakımdan izole olduğunu söyleyebiliriz". CivilNet (in Turkish). 9 July 2020. Retrieved 19 December 2020.
Artık Türkiye'nin tezlerini ne akademik dünyada ne de siyasi düzeyde ciddiye alan kaldı. Bundan 5-10 yıl önce, akademik dünyada "konunun iki taraf var ve bu iki taraf farklı görüşlere sahip, o halde taraflara eşit mesafede durmalı ve görüşlerine saygı göstermeliyiz" gibi bir fikir taraftar bulabiliyordu. Ama artık böyle düşünen hemen hemen kalmadı. Akademilerde, Türk Hükümetinin tezleri sıradan inkârcı bir görüş muamelesi görüyor ve ciddiye alınmıyor. Siyasi düzeyde de benzeri bir gelişme yaşandı. Türkiye en önemli kalesini, Amerikan Kongresini kaybetti. Batı'da Ermeni soykırımını kabul etmeyen ülke kalmadı gibi. Hatta İslam ülkeleri de soykırımı kabul etmeye başladılar.
- Bloxham, Donald (2003). "Determinants of the Armenian Genocide". Looking Backward, Moving Forward. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-78699-4.
- ^ a b Hovannisian 2015, p. 231.
- ^ Distinctiveness of Turkish denial efforts:
- "First, there are the organized attempts to cover up the record of past atrocities. The nearest successful example in the modern era is the 80 years of official denial by successive Turkish governments of the 1915–17 genocide against the Armenians in which some 1.5 million people lost their lives. This denial has been sustained by deliberate propaganda, lying and coverups, forging documents, suppression of archives, and bribing scholars. The West, especially the United States, has colluded..."—Stanley Cohen, 1995, quoted in Dadrian 2003, p. 269
- MacDonald 2008, p. 115. "few atrocities are as perniciously and as systematically denied as the Armenian genocide"
- Avedian 2013, p. 79. "Nonetheless, if there is one aspect which makes the Armenian case to stand out, if not unique, is its denial. The Armenian genocide is by far the case which is systematically and officially denied by a state, namely the Republic of Turkey, while numerous states could be called accessory to this denial by refusing to officially recognize the Armenian genocide, e.g. USA, UK, Israel and Sweden. Thus, the denial is one of the main characteristics of the Armenian genocide, affecting its various aspects."
- Bilali 2013, p. 17. "Probably, the best-known case of denial is the Turkish refutation that the mass killings of Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century amount to genocide."
- Ryan, Stephen (2014). "The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire . By Taner Akçam. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii, 483. $39.50.)". The Historian. 76 (1): 160–161. doi:10.1111/hisn.12030_48.
All cases of mass murder involve some form of disavowal, but the case of the Armenians in Anatolia in 1915 has given rise to the best-known example of genocide denial.
- Suny 2015, p. xvii. "the Armenian Genocide more than most other mass killings has been the victim of deliberate, sustained falsification"
- Baker 2015, p. 197. "The Armenian Genocide stands out, perhaps, not so much for its scale or particular brutality—though these were certainly sizable—but for the Turkish republic’s long-standing denial of its occurrence, or scale, or the intentions of those behind it. This denial is all the more peculiar in that a large body of evidence has been available since at least 1919..."
- Akçam 2018, p. 3. "If every case of genocide can be understood as possessing its own unique character, then the Armenian case is unique among genocides in the long-standing efforts to deny its historicity, and to thereby hide the truths surrounding it."
- ^ de Waal 2015, pp. 43–44.
- ^ a b Chorbajian 2016, p. 170.
- ^ Dadrian 2003, p. 274.
- ^ a b Suny 2009, p. 945. "A newly minted doctor of history, Fuat Dündar, showed with his careful reading of Ottoman archival documents how the deportations had been organized and carried out by the Turkish authorities, and—most shocking of all—that Minister of the Interior Talat, the chief initiator, had been aware that sending people to the Syrian desert outpost of Der Zor meant certain death."
Dadrian 2003, p. 275. "First of all, how did the Young Turk authorities expect to resettle in the deserts of Mesopotamia hundreds of thousands of dislocated people without securing the slightest accommodation or other amenities affording the barest conditions of subsistence for human beings? As diplomat after diplomat from allied Germany and Austria (as well as American Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau) repeatedly averred, by dispatching the victim population to these deserts the Turks were dispatching them to death and ruination. Even the Chief of Staff of the Ottoman Fourth Army in control of these areas in his memoirs debunked and ridiculed the pretense of “relocation.” As he stated, “there was neither preparation, nor organization to shelter the hundreds of thousands of the deportees.”" - ^ Morris, Benny; Ze’evi, Dror (2019). The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924. Harvard University Press. p. 486. ISBN 978-0-674-91645-6.
- ^ Ekmekçioğlu 2016, p. 4.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 289–290, 331.
- ^ Dixon 2010b, pp. 105–106.
- ^ de Waal 2015, pp. 51–52. "Analyzing the notebooks, Ara Sarafian notes the massive and chilling discrepancy between Talat’s record of the number of Armenians “re-located” in 1915 and the far smaller number still alive two years later."
- ^ Dundar, Fuat (2010). Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question (1878-1918). Routledge. p. 132. ISBN 978-1-351-52503-9.
- ^ Akçam 2018, p. 3. "... the denial of the Armenian Genocide began not in the wake of the massacres but was an intrinsic part of the plan itself. The deporting of the Armenians from their homeland to the Syrian deserts and their elimination, both on the route and at their final destinations, were performed under the guise of a decision to resettle them."
- ^ Avedian 2013, p. 79. "Denial is the first act when the perpetrator refutes the very nature of the planned measures, explaining the steps as justified and legitimate actions to cope with the identified problem. The denial then lives on during the different stages of the genocide and is invoked continuously by the perpetrator whenever its actions are criticized or labeled as atrocities and unlawful. At the end, once the practical stages have had their course, all that remains and thrives is the denial."
- ^ Akçam 2018, p. 3. "The Ottomans depended on German military and financial support, and wanted that the Americans should be kept as a neutral power; they could not ignore these two powers and felt compelled to justify their actions. Denial and deception were important ways to ease the American and German pressure. The lack of an ideological mass-movement to provide popular support within Ottoman society for a genocidal policy seems to be another reason."
- ^ a b c d Chorbajian 2016, p. 171.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, pp. 171–172.
- ^ Göçek 2015, p. 248.
- ^ Varnava, Andrekos (2016). "Book Review: Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009". Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal. 10 (1). doi:10.5038/1911-9933.10.1.1403. ISSN 1911-0359.
Göçek makes only a passing reference (p. 248) to the first official publications denying any attempt to exterminate the Armenians, two volumes, titled The Armenian Aspirations and Revolutionary Movements, and published by the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior at the start of 1916. A close analysis of this publication (the language and images) is pivotal to understanding that denial is part of the processes of genocide—denial does not merely manifest itself afterwards, although it can take on different legitimising discourses, as these change (as with this case) over time.
- ^ a b Hovannisian 2015, p. 229.
- ^ Kuyumjian, Aram (2011). "The Armenian Genocide : International Legal and Political Avenues for Turkey's Responsibility". Revue de droit. Université de Sherbrooke. 41 (2): 247–305. doi:10.17118/11143/10302.
The Interior Ministry instituted the firm denial of these crimes as policy at the very moment the massacres were taking place (when the government had already systematically and intentionally planned the exterminations) and this policy was perpetuated by subsequent Turkish governments by masking the massacres with the same groundless and illogical motives.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 79.
- ^ Zürcher 2011, p. 312. "All the classic elements in the defense of violent aggression are here: they asked for it, it was not really so bad and anyway, others have done the same and worse."
- ^ Kieser, Hans-Lukas (2018). Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton University Press. p. 419. ISBN 978-1-4008-8963-1.
- ^ Üngör, Uğur Ümit (2008). "Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Rethinking Young Turk 'Social Engineering'". European Journal of Turkish Studies. Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey (7). doi:10.4000/ejts.2583. ISSN 1773-0546.
In this article I will follow Zürcher's use of the term 'Young Turk era' to bundle together the Committee of Union and Progress [Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti] and its descendant the Republican People's Party [Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi], which ruled the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic in the period 1913-1950.
Avedian 2012, p. 806. "The research done by scholars such as Zürcher and Akçam indicates that the Nationalist movement can be traced back to the early period of World War I. The research shows that Unionists not only dominated the Nationalist movement, but were its initiators. The movement was rather a contingency plan, designed by the CUP in the event of defeat in the war..."
Zürcher 2011, p. 308. "In ideological terms there is thus a great deal of continuity between the periods of 1912–1918 and 1918–1923. This should come as no surprise... the cadres of the national resistance movement almost without exception consisted of former Unionists, who had been shaped by their shared experience of the previous decade." - ^ Avedian 2012, p. 806. "In the official Turkish version, the nationalist movement broke with the defeated and flawed past, based its power on the basic popular roots movement, initiated and directed by Mustafa Kemal, earning him the title Atatürk, ‘Father of Turks’. As has been pointed out by researchers such as Donald Bloxham, E.J. Zürcher, and Taner Akçam, the reality was different. The nationalist movement was rather initiated, nourished, and supported by Unionists leaders, many of whom were fugitives from the law, wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as individuals who had unlawfully enriched themselves on confiscated properties."
Dixon 2010, p. 468. "Many contemporary scholars emphasise that this official narrative [on the Armenian Genocide] is largely shaped by continuities and constraints inherited from the founding of the Republic (e.g. Akc¸am 2004; Go¨c¸ek, forthcoming). In particular, they highlight the striking continuities among political elites from the Young Turk through the Republican periods, the concentrated interests of a small group of business and political elites whose wealth can be traced back to confiscated Armenian assets, and the homogenising and Turkifying nature of Turkish national identity."
Cheterian 2015, p. 155; Baer 2020, p. 83. - ^ Adalian, Rouben Paul (1999). "Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal". In Charny, Israel W. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Genocide: A-H. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-0-87436-928-1.
- ^ Avedian 2012, p. 818. "Unlike the World War I massacres, the new killings did not stop at Turkish borders and soon reached even beyond, engulfing the Armenians in Caucasus and the Republic of Armenia. Approximately 200,000 Armenians were killed during the Turkish occupation of Caucasus... The ‘War of Independence’ was not against the occupying Allies – a myth invented by Kemalists – but rather a campaign to rid Turkey of remaining non-Turkish elements."
- ^ Zürcher 2011, p. 316. "Many of the people in central positions of power (Şükrü Kaya, Kazım Özalp, Abdülhalik Renda, Kılıç Ali) had been personally involved in the massacres, but besides that, the ruling elite as a whole depended on a coalition with provincial notables, landlords, and tribal chiefs, who had profited immensely from the departure of the Armenians and the Greeks. It was what Fatma Müge Göçek has called an unspoken “devil’s bargain.” A serious attempt to distance the republic from the genocide could have destabilized the ruling coalition on which the state depended for its stability."
- ^ Aybak 2016, p. 14.
- ^ Avedian 2012, p. 816.
- ^ Bilali 2013, p. 29.
- ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 106. "One observer of Turkish politics (Jenkins 2001, p. 16) writes that 'Turks are taught, and most believe, that their country is under continual external and internal threat, both from other countries plotting to divide or acquire Turkish territory and from internal forces seeking to change the constitutional status quo. The result is often a virtual siege mentality, riddled with impossibly intricate conspiracy theories' This element of Turkish nationalism would be undermined if it were admitted that Armenians were not enemies attempting to kill Turks and destroy the Turkish nation, but were instead victims of aggressive state policies. Moreover, admitting that Armenians were victims of state policies of ethnic cleansing might also reveal that the supposed enemies and threats to the Turkish nation are largely imagined or created by Turkish officials."
- ^ a b Dixon 2010b, p. 107.
- ^ Avedian 2012, p. 799. "The denialist strategy of the Turkish Republic is twofold: (1) by dwelling on the issue of recognition of the events as genocide, it prevents the evolution of the issue in order for one better to understand its dynamics other than just the historical evidence itself; and (2) it avoids any possible liability charges and subsequent claims for indemnity and reparations, both financial and territorial."
- ^ Arango, Tim (16 April 2015). "A Century After Armenian Genocide, Turkey's Denial Only Deepens". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 16 April 2015. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
- ^ Dixon 2010b, pp. 107–108.
- ^ Gürpınar 2013, p. 420.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, pp. 9, 55.
- ^ "A PBS Documentary Makes Its Case for the Armenian Genocide, With or Without a Debate". The New York Times. 2006. Archived from the original on 17 April 2014. Retrieved 1 November 2011.
- ^ de Waal 2015, pp. 257–258.
- ^ Baker 2015, p. 211.
- ^ Robertson 2016, p. 73. "Put another way – if these same events occurred today, there can be no doubt that prosecutions before the ICC of Talaat and other CUP officials for genocide, for persecution and for other crimes against humanity would succeed. Turkey would be held responsible for genocide and for persecution by the ICJ and would be required to make reparation."
- ^ Lattanzi 2018, pp. 27–28, 96–97. "Apart from the question of the evocation of a strange standard of evidence—unequivocal! (in any case, it is indeed unequivocal!)—,specific clear decisions were taken by the Turkish rulers to eliminate the Ottoman Armenian community. At any rate, even if documentation on such decisions were not available—what is not the case—, following the criteria set up by international criminal tribunals and ICJ concerning the intent of destroying a substantial part of a community protected by the Genocide Convention, this specific subjective element can be inferred from other elements, as shown in Sect. 3.2. All these elements are in fact present in the Metz Yeghern case: the nature of the wrongful acts committed; their massive, systematic and simultaneous occurrence in the concerned territory; the specificity of “deportations”, intentionally aimed to avoiding the return of Armenians in their century-old homeland; the appropriation of the Armenians’ properties and the destruction of Armenian cultural and religious buildings etc., from which it clearly results that a return was excluded."
- ^ Gutman 2015, p. 169.
- ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 142. "The first, and recurrent, problem Akçam faced concerned the use of the term ‘genocide’ in his work, and it took some time before he was able to bring himself to describe the events of 1915 in this way. He was far from alone in his hesitancy to do so— numerous Turkish intellectuals have gone through much soul-searching when confronting the deportations and massacres, as much of this history has been pushed to the margins of public and intellectual discussion, and many have consequently been reluctant to describe the fate of the Armenians as ‘genocide’ (or soykirim in Turkish)."
- ^ Simone, Pierluigi. "Is the Denial of the "Armenian Genocide" an Obstacle to Turkey's Accession to the EU?". The Armenian Massacres of 1915–1916 a Hundred Years Later: Open Questions and Tentative Answers in International Law. Springer International Publishing. pp. 275–297 [277]. ISBN 978-3-319-78169-3.
- ^ Gürpınar 2016, pp. 217–218. "‘Sözde soykırım’ (so-called genocide/alleged genocide), the peculiar idiom to reluctantly refer to 1915 but outright reject it had been invented/introduced in the early 1980s, like a code word, by the national security establishment in the public utterances of this rising denialist culture."
- ^ "Prof. Taner Akçam receives 'Heroes of Justice and Truth' award during Armenian Genocide Centennial commemoration". Clark Now. 28 May 2015. Retrieved 20 November 2020.
The Turkish government persists in its long-standing refusal to call the killings genocide, denying the claims as "Armenian lies."
- ^ de Waal 2015, p. 181.
- ^ Galip 2020, p. 117. "In subsequent years, his [Erdoğan's] denialist discourse has become harsher, as he has adopted a more aggressive and threatening tone aiming to divide the ‘good’ Armenians (who he also refers to as “our Armenians”) who do not talk about the genocide from the ‘bad’ Armenians (referring to diaspora Armenians) who are accused of bringing up the accusations of genocide against Turks."
- ^ Mamigonian, Marc (10 May 2010). "Mamigonian: 'Divide et Impera': The Turkish-Armenian Protocols". The Armenian Weekly. Retrieved 19 December 2020.
- ^ Demirdjian 2018, p. 13. "Post-war Turkish legislation, such as the 1931 Press Law, forbade the publication of memoirs of Armenian survivors."
- ^ Zürcher 2011, p. 316. "In 1936 Kemalist Turkey had one of the most draconian press laws in existence, which even prohibited “any publication at odds with the general policies of the state.” Censorship was strictly enforced, so we can assume that the above statement was published with the implicit agreement of the government.".
- ^ a b Akçam, Taner (2006). "The Ottoman Documents and the Genocidal Policies of the Committee for Union and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki) toward the Armenians in 1915". Genocide Studies and Prevention. 1 (2): 127–148. doi:10.3138/7087-4340-5H2X-7544.
- ^ a b Dadrian, Vahakn (1992). "Ottoman Archives and Denial of the Armenian Genocide". In Hovannisian, Richard G. (ed.). The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 280–310. ISBN 978-0-312-04847-1.
- ^ de Waal 2015, p. 54. "For what it is worth, it is probably naïve to expect that there would be such a “smoking gun.” There may or may not have been such an incriminating document, but it is unlikely that it survived the several spring cleanings carried out in the Ottoman archives of material on the Armenian issue, first performed in 1918 and repeated on subsequent occasions. Whether out of official indifference to the Ottoman past or a deliberate intent to suppress it, in the Republican era truckloads of thousands of archival documents were simply handed over to a paper-making enterprise to be pulped."
- ^ Akçam, Taner (2007) [1999]. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Macmillan. p. 5. ISBN 978-0-8050-8665-2.
While we are missing a significant portion of these papers, what remains in the Ottoman archives and in court records is sufficient to show that the CUP Central Committee and the Special Organization is set up to carry out its plan, did deliberately attempt to destroy the Armenian population.
- ^ a b c d Dixon 2010, p. 473.
- ^ Tonoyan, A. H. (2014). "The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire". Journal of Church and State. 56 (1): 168–169. doi:10.1093/jcs/cst120.
For the past several decades various Turkish governments have touted that the Ottoman archives are open to researchers willing to study the period in question. Yet the Turkish government's rhetoric has not always matched the reality, and countless foreign scholars were either barred from working with the archives or obstructed in the process.
- ^ Dixon 2010, pp. 473–474. "Notably, only some of the relevant archives were opened at the time, and those who were granted permission to research the Armenian question in the archives were primarily scholars whom Turkish authorities knew would not challenge the official narrative."
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. 9. "Among the various groups of documents listed above, those relating to the trials in the Istanbul Court-Martial and the Commission to Investigate (Wartime) Crimes, which was established in November 1918, have disappeared without a trace, and there is no solid information as to their possible fate. In light of the fact that Istanbul came under the control of the Ankara government after November 1922, it is not unreasonable to suppose that all documents and files belonging to the city’s Martial Law Command (Sıkıyönetim Komutanlığı) would have been transferred to the offices of the Turkish General Staff (Genelkurmay Başkanlığı). But again, there is no information whether or not these documents are now to be found in the General Staff’s Directorate for Military History and Strategic Studies (Genelkurmay Askeri Tarih ve Stratejik Etüt ve Denetleme Başkanlığı, or ATASE). Due to the tight restrictions that have been put in place, the ATASE archives are as good as closed to most civilian or foreign researchers."
- ^ a b Chorbajian 2016, p. 173.
- ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 65.
- ^ Hovanissian, Anush (1999). "Turkey: a Cultural Genocide". Studies in Comparative Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 147–154. ISBN 978-1-349-27348-5.
- ^ Cheterian 2015, pp. 64–65.
- ^ MacDonald 2008, p. 121. "Another strategy was to remove historical references to Armenians in Turkish publications, including Armenian city and town names, the names of churches and other public buildings, and monuments. In such a way, 'Armenians [could] be made to vanish from their homeland'."
- ^ Üngör 2014, pp. 165–166.
- ^ Göçek 2011, pp. 45–46. "First, none of these works, originally penned around the time of the events of 1915, question the occurrence of the Armenian “massacres” (“genocide” did not yet exist as a term)... The later ones, increasingly imbued with protonationalist sentiments, view the committed crimes as a duty necessary for the establishment and preservation of a Turkish fatherland."
- ^ Göçek 2011, pp. 43–44. "This text sets the basic parameters of the Turkish official historiography on the Armenian ethnic cleansing of 1915. Focus on what was said and unsaid is therefore essential. It is evident that the text commences the birth of the Turkish nation with 1919, removing in the process the demise of the Armenians in 1915 through state violence to the realm of Republican prehistory. Hence at the point of the Turkish Republic’s inception, the “Armenian problem” has already been temporally removed to the Ottoman past... Those who are forgotten, silenced, excluded from the collective myth of the Turkish Republic correspond exactly to the three social groups of Armenians, Kurds, and Greeks, who comprise the official past and present minorities in Turkey. Indeed, the collective violence committed against the minorities at the inception and during the Republican era has been totally eliminated from the Turkish collective myth."
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 63. "Nearly coinciding with the publication of Thomas’s work was what, in many ways, stands as the ur-text of Turkish denialist “scholarship”: Esat Uras’s Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni Meselesi. Uras, born Ahmed Essad, was an important figure in the CUP administration and was heavily involved in the planning and execution of the Armenian Genocide as a high official in the “directorate for public security.” Uras’s book established fundamental tropes of denialist scholarship that have remained in place for decades."
- ^ Gürpınar 2016, pp. 219–220. "Uras’ authoritative work on Armenian political and military activities in the late Ottoman Empire and the ‘deportation of 1915’ became the reference work that established the main contours and premises of the emerging denialist corpus in the 1980s. Uras (1882–1957) was formerly a district governor in the late Ottoman civil administration. He was involved in the 1915 Armenian massacres/genocide as a desk worker in the intelligence bureau of the police...It seems safe to conclude that Uras established his outline based on the Unionists’ original narrative, perceptions and apologetics against Allied charges and came up with a new and comprehensive synthesis. This narrative will also constitute the backbone of the post-1973 historiography, Uras being the intermediary connecting two historical eras and two different modes of denialism."
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. 116–117. "As a result, beginning in 1980, 'denial was institutionalized and professionalized: a special agency . . . was founded within the Foreign Ministry to coordinate all issues' related to the Armenian genocide. The main strategy was to 'frame the "Armenian question" as a problem of contemporary terrorism rather than an outcome of Turkey’s genocidal past.' It was mainly retired Turkish diplomats who went into action, without any professional historical training or concern for professional standards, let alone an understanding of the ethics regarding the reading, use, and citation of historical documents."
- ^ Bayraktar 2015, p. 802. "Prior to the turn of the millennium—though particularly in the 1970s and 1980s—remembrance of the 1915 genocide occurred almost exclusively as a reaction to external triggers in the form of political pressure. The memory politics of diaspora Armenians (whether militant attacks on Turkish state representatives or political mobilization for recognition of the genocide, particularly in the United States) and international genocide recognition debates not only raised awareness about the genocide worldwide but also made it impossible for Turkey to avoid the topic."
- ^ Göçek 2011, p. 44. "... the Turkish state had to resort to commissioning a number of retired diplomats to renarrate what had happened in the past in accordance with the dominant official Turkish historiography. These mostly amateur historians selectively picked the documentation that bolstered their narrative from the Ottoman state archives. They only employed the material that valorized the Turks and damned the Armenians, leaving aside what did not support their argument. This emerging official Turkish historiography on the “alleged” Armenian Genocide was based on the selective use of past documentation that in turn drew and built on preceding layers of denial."
- ^ Gürpınar 2013, pp. 423. "The institutionalization of YÖK (Council of Higher Education), established by the military junta in 1981, was also functional in the maintenance of the ideological compliance of the universities in following an official and dictated line. The parochialism of YÖK was also influential in the development of an alternative and ‘national’ scholarship with its own reference system, but complying with the ideological thrust of the military junta."
- ^ de Waal 2015, p. 182; Suny 2009, p. 938; Cheterian 2015, pp. 140–141; Gürpınar 2013, p. 419. "Taner Akçam was the first Turkish scholar who had studied and problematized the 1915 Armenian massacres and its moral burden on Turkey. His interest in the subject emerged during his political exile in Germany in the 1980s thanks to his leftist background, but simultaneous with his alienation from organized left and Marxism. Thus, Taner Akçam is the earliest example of the leftist generation giving birth to revisionist and critical Turkish historical scholarship."
- ^ Suny 2009, p. 942; Bayraktar 2015, pp. 804–805; Bayraktar 2016, p. 206; Gürpınar 2013, pp. 419–420.
- ^ Gürpınar 2013, pp. 419–420.
- ^ Ekmekçioğlu 2016, p. xii.
- ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 105.
- ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 64. "The ruling Turkish elite subsequently chose to erase any trace of the Armenians from Turkish history. In the period between 1945 and the 1980s, school textbooks in Turkey made no mention of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or the deportation of 1915. The Armenians had simply ceased to exist.".
- ^ a b Gürpınar 2016, p. 234. "The Armenians were conspicuous by their absence in the school curriculum for decades. Their historical existence in Anatolia was deliberately dismissed... This deliberate omission ceased abruptly in the mid-1980s when a new sub-chapter was introduced tellingly entitled ‘Armenian problem’... This sub-chapter depicted the ‘Armenian problem’ as an exploit and machination of Great Powers (i.e. Britain and Russia) who exploited Armenians as instruments to destabilize the Ottoman Empire and impose their mischievous plots."
Dixon 2010b, p. 104. "In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Turkish high school students did not learn anything about Armenians' existence in the Ottoman Empire or about their deportation during World War I (WWI). Starting in the 1980s, however, high school history textbooks taught Turkish students that Armenians rose up and violently attacked the Ottoman government and innocent fellow citizens prior to and during WWI, and that the government forcibly relocated Armenians in order to protect and preserve the Turkish nation. A decade later, Turkish high school students were told that Armenians were traitors and propagandists who had tried to take advantage of the weakness of the Ottoman Empire and had 'stabbed Turks in the baclk. And more recently, high school history textbooks in Turkey described the 'Turkish-Armenian War' that took place between Turks and Armenians following the end of World War 1,160 and mentioned that recent research and excavations have documented the fact that Armenians committed genocide against Turks." - ^ Bilali 2013, pp. 19–20. "The interpretations of this period of history in Turkish textbooks include accounts that may be interpreted as psychological justifications or excuses to deflect responsibility: (a) blaming Armenians for treason or for attacking Turkish–Muslim populations; (b) claiming that violent acts were in self-defense (protection from territorial loss and/or protection of the Turkish population that was being targeted by Armenian banditry); (c) shifting responsibility to external factors and third parties (claiming that Armenian deaths were a result of hardship); (d) claiming benevolent motivations behind the deportations (stopping the inter-communal warfare). These interpretations exemplify how moral disengagement mechanisms operate at the level of collective narratives. Three targets of attribution can be readily identified: the in-group (i.e., denial of responsibility), the out-group (i.e., blaming the victim), and situational factors (i.e., blaming third parties or circumstances)."
- ^ Aybak 2016, p. 13. "This officially distributed educational material reconstructs the history in line with the denial policies of the government portraying the Armenians as backstabbers and betrayers, who are portrayed as a threat to the sovereignty and identity of modern Turkey. The demonization of the Armenians in Turkish education is a prevailing occurrence that is underwritten by the government to reinforce the denial discourse."
- ^ Bilali 2013, p. 19.
- ^ Erbal 2012, p. 52. "the Turkish state has not been the only enforcer of the taboo surrounding the issue of the Armenian Genocide. Turkish civil society and the academic and intellectual establishment within that civil society have also been either actively in denial or in some cases in service of a denialist state agenda or standing passively silent – another form of denial – for over 90 years."
- ^ Gürpınar 2016, p. 217.
- ^ Üngör 2014, p. 147.
- ^ Galip, Özlem Belçim (2019). "The Armenian genocide and Armenian identity in modern Turkish novels". Turkish Studies. 20 (1): 92–119. doi:10.1080/14683849.2018.1439383.
On the other hand nationalists, either republican or Islamic-Turkish, tend to write fiction in a form which institutionalizes literature as a tool for nationalist discourses. This explains why the selected novels focusing on the massacres/genocide tend to comply with the official discourse and denial of the genocide. But it is worth mentioning that the authors in this group generally (in the prologue or back page of the novel) insert the claim that the events narrated are true or based on archives, but these are never specified, let alone referenced.
- ^ Akçam 2010, pp. 173–174.
- ^ Galip 2020, p. 103.
- ^ Galip 2020, p. 87. "The AKP government, a considerable number of Turkish groups, the opposition party in the Turkish parliament, institutions and both pro-government and anti-government Turkish media waged a war against [Cem] Özdemir and the German parliament expressing Islamic superiority, denial, hatred of Armenians and excusing the Armenian massacres by accusing Armenians of collaborating with Russia during the First World War. The reaction of the main opposition party, CHP (Republican People’s Party), was no different from that of the ruling party."
- ^ Bilali 2013, pp. 25, 28. "Indeed, the majority of the sample (75%) did not construe the events as an instance of one-sided in-group perpetration. Rather, they either endorsed the “inter-communal warfare” interpretation promoted by the Turkish official narrative (65%), or they viewed Armenians as the perpetrators of violence (10% of the sample)."
- ^ "Only 9 percent of Turks say Armenian killings genocide: poll". The Daily Star. AFP. 13 January 2015. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 172.
- ^ a b Avedian 2012, pp. 812–813.
- ^ Scharf, Michael (1996). "The Letter of the Law: The Scope of the International Legal Obligation to Prosecute Human Rights Crimes". Law and Contemporary Problems. 59 (4): 41–61. doi:10.2307/1192189. ISSN 0023-9186. JSTOR 1192189.
Initially, the Allied Powers sought the prosecution of those responsible for the massacres. The Treaty of Sevres, which was signed on August 10, 1920, would have required the Turkish Government to hand over those responsible to the Allied Powers for trial... The Treaty of Sevres was, however, not ratified and did not come into force. It was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, which not only did not contain provisions respecting the punishment of war crimes, but was accompanied by a 'Declaration of Amnesty' of all offenses committed between 1914 and 1922."
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 62.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 174. "It is also in the interwar period that we encounter what is now the common practice of recruiting Westerners to participate in Armenian Genocide denial."
- ^ Bloxham 2006, p. 29. "For just as Turkish sensitivity about the events of 1915–1916 developed almost simultaneously to the destruction of the Armenians, so too did external accommodation of that sensitivity, and, as we shall see, no one was more accommodating to Ankara than the USA."
- ^ Ihrig 2016, pp. 163–164.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 178.
- ^ Dixon 2010, pp. 470–471.
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. 21, 145. "The turn to Jews as lobbyists on Turkey’s behalf was based not only on the old myth of Turkish-Jewish friendship, but also on the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews control world governments, finance, and media. The Turkish Jewish community leadership, especially Jak Kamhi and Bensiyon Pinto, regularly boasts that it has acted as a special interest group working hand in hand with Turkish presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers successfully lobbying foreign Jews to influence their governments to side with Turkey by defeating resolutions to recognize the Armenian genocide, silencing mention of it at international academic conferences, and hindering its commemoration in Holocaust museums."
- ^ Bayraktar 2016, p. 200. "This group of Foreign Ministry-trained experts (such as Pulat Tacar, Ömer Engin Lütem and Gündüz Aktan) were active well into the 2000s. Turkish embassies reported back to Ankara the location of any public events or academic conferences in the country and intervened in the proceedings – be it with regard to the title of the event, the composition of the panels, or by articulating concerns about the authenticity of historical documents. These interventions would almost always lead to the changing of event titles (by either censuring the term ‘genocide’ or softening it by using quotation marks or other means to appease Turkish official concerns) or including participants who represented Turkey’s official stance."
- ^ Avedian 2013, p. 80. "Nonetheless, the Turkish denial could hardly be feasible had it not been for the direct or indirect cooperation of the world community, e.g. by it refusal to openly recognize and condemn the genocide. This concession manifests itself most evidently when the governments such as those in USA, UK or Sweden refuse to officially label the events as genocide."
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 131.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, p. 185. "Though it is true that the full extent of what was happening in Anatolia was not conveyed in the press, even the most naive reader must have realized that something of note had happened to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, something that went beyond pogroms and mob violence. The German press and the Ottoman government had protested too much. The myriad justifications and denials must have made it clear that the Entente allegations were serious indeed."
- ^ Anderson, Margaret Lavinia (2011). "Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians?". In Suny, Ronald Grigor; Göçek, Fatma Müge; Naimark, Norman M. (eds.). A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. Oxford University Press. p. 211. ISBN 978-0-19-979276-4.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, p. 293. "... it is one of the interesting aspects of the German genocide debate that “intent” to annihilate all Armenians was regularly accepted and was perceived as established beyond doubt, even by many of those who defended the actions of war time Young Turk leaders. The Talât Pasha trial had established genocide as fact for the German newspapers all across the spectrum... what happened next on the nationalist end of the spectrum is perhaps even more important: while the mood and the overwhelming evidence were such that genocide could no longer be denied, many nationalist papers now both accepted the charge of genocide against the Turks and justified it at the very same time."
- ^ a b Bloxham 2006, p. 44.
- ^ Bloxham 2006, p. 41.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 175.
- ^ Bloxham 2006, p. 42. "Overall, the complex of information and misinformation disseminated at this time contained most of the elements of later denial of the Armenian genocide: the minimizing of Armenian deaths, the denial of Ottoman intent to kill, the blaming of the victims and/or the Europeans, and the focus on Muslim casualties."
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, pp. 177–178.
- ^ "Armenia-Turkey dispute over genocide label sets off lobbying frenzy Archived 20 August 2017 at the Wayback Machine". The Washington Post. 3 March 2010.
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 66.
- ^ Ben Aharon 2019, p. 345.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 125.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 145.
- ^ Ben Aharon 2015, pp. 646–647.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 124.
- ^ a b Ben Aharon 2015, p. 638.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 128.
- ^ Ben Aharon 2019, pp. 366–367, 369.
- ^ Özbek, Egemen (2018). "The Destruction of the Monument to Humanity: Historical Conflict and Monumentalization". International Public History. 1 (2). doi:10.1515/iph-2018-0011.
- ^ Rainsford, Sarah (22 June 2006). "Fears of Turkey's 'invisible' Armenians". BBC News. Archived from the original on 25 January 2007. Retrieved 8 January 2007.
- ^ Cheterian 2018, p. 892. "The ANM was ready to put aside the past in order to build normal relations with neighbouring Turkey. Turkey, however, was not ready to forget the 1915 genocide and its consequences: the continuous Armenian diaspora struggle for recognition and reparation. It insisted that Yerevan must surrender politically on this issue, by withholding any diplomatic support for the ‘recognition campaigns’ abroad before normal diplomatic relations could be established or the border opened."
- ^ de Waal 2015, p. 210.
- ^ Avedian 2018, p. 211.
- ^ de Waal 2015, pp. 212, 229–230.
- ^ Avedian 2018, p. 104.
- ^ Ben Aharon 2019, pp. 346–347. "Importantly, the territorial conflict between the Azeris and the Armenians over control of Nagorno-Karabakh, triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union, turned Azerbaijan into a stakeholder in the discourse on the Armenian genocide, and it led an extensive international campaign against recognition."
- ^ Cheterian 2018, p. 886. "The essay argues that it is not possible to understand the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan without integrating the discourse of genocide denial produced in Turkey and adopted by Azerbaijan."
- ^ a b Cheterian 2018, p. 887.
- ^ Cheterian 2018, pp. 893–894. "This discourse continues to dominate the official Azerbaijani stance to this day. Similar to the Ottoman period, when pogroms and massacres were carried out as reprisals for demands by minority groups for reform and political equality between religious communities, the pogroms in Sumgait were a reaction to political mobilisation; in both cases the victims were accused of having ‘staged’ the pogroms themselves, and therefore bearing responsibility for the violence. Just as in the case of the Young Turks, Buniatov turned the identities of victim and perpetrator upside down. Moreover, by citing the diaspora-based ‘Dashnaks’ he suggested a strong link between the Karabakh conflict, the Sumgait pogrom and the unrecognised genocide of 1915."
- ^ Cheterian 2018, pp. 895–896. "Yet while this official discourse proclaims Azerbaijanis as victims of genocide, it denies that Armenians have been the victims of any mistreatment whatsoever."
- ^ Cheterian 2018, pp. 898–899. "...the Azerbaijani elites’ belief that the Armenian aggression of the 1980s and 1990s is a continuation of ‘1915’. As Armenians could not fight a stronger Turkey, they instead attacked the more vulnerable Azerbaijan. From the perspective of the Azerbaijani elite, countries that recognise the genocide of the Armenians are enemies of Azerbaijan. By recognising 1915 as a crime against humanity, they are seen not as defenders of universal human values; instead, they are depicted as partisans taking sides in the Karabakh conflict in favour of the Armenians."
- ^ Sources:
- Akçam 2012, p. xxv. "Most historians of the late Ottoman period have elided the internal deportations, expulsions, massacres, and genocide that took place during the demise of the empire. These events have been “nonexistent” in their works... It was as if ignoring mass deportations and annihilation were an academic virtue and noble act. The resultant damage to scholarship has not been limited to the failure to illuminate this period of history. By refusing to investigate mass annihilations, traditional Ottoman historians have failed to confront the mentality of those who perpetrate these convulsively destructive episodes."
- Eissenstat 2014, p. 24. "The monumental nature of this shift is highlighted by the field’s changing relationship to Turkish state policy. While questions about ties to the U.S. security interests have been less contentious in Turkish Studies than for many subfields of Middle East Studies, the field’s relationship with the Turkish state has been the focus of considerable controversy. Major scholars in the field, figures like Bernard Lewis or Stanford Shaw, identified closely not only with Turkey, but with the Kemalist project itself and specialists in Turkish Studies not infrequently supported Turkish public diplomacy efforts [including Armenian genocide denial]."
- Quataert 2006, pp. 249–250, 258. "Ottomanists (like me) have long surrendered academic study of this vital topic to those unable or unwilling to use the Ottoman archives and other Ottoman-language sources, failing to take their rightful responsibility to perform the proper research. Oddly, Ottomanists fall into a camp of either silence or denial—both of which are forms of complicity."
- Gutman 2015, pp. 167–168
- ^ a b Smith, Roger W.; Markusen, Eric; Lifton, Robert Jay (1995). "Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 9 (1): 1–22. doi:10.1093/hgs/9.1.1. S2CID 145527068.
- ^ a b Erbal 2015, pp. 783–784. "The worst damage... [is] in Ottoman and Turkish studies. Blind historically to the late Ottoman genocides, the field is also one where genocide denial has become normalized as a discourse and thus has been the source for pervasive moral ambiguity among scholars... denialist speech is nearly always seen as lesser than outright racism, despite the fact that some tenets of denialism, such as dehumanization, callousness, neglect, downplaying the extent of criminality and/or power asymmetry, not accepting the subaltern’s sources as legitimate, or downplaying the historical connection of institutional and elite racism in contemporary Turkey to the original sin, are from the toolbox of racism. Unlike the Holocaust, it was and is acceptable to deny the Armenian Genocide..."
- ^ "Marc David Baer, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (New Texts Out Now)". Jadaliyya. 9 November 2020. Retrieved 17 December 2020.
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. viii, 2, 145–146.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 47. "Since the 1980s, the Turkish government has supported the establishment of "institutes" affiliated with respected universities, whose apparent purpose is to further research on Turkish history and culture, but which also tend to act in ways that further denial."
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 208. "Armenian genocide denialists operate like tobacco industry lobbyists and global warming skeptics. They “labor to construct denialism as a legitimate intellectual position within a historical debate”; fund biased research while supposedly striving for objectivity; and work with public relations firms to sow doubt, create a new reality, and erect a “permanent smokescreen of controversy.”"
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, pp. 63–64.
- ^ MacDonald 2008, p. 241.
- ^ Gutman 2015, pp. 169, 180. "Until recently, much of the literature on the Armenian genocide was shaped by a broader effort to confront the Turkish Republic’s refusal to recognize the destruction of Ottoman Armenians during World War I as genocide."
- ^ Avedian 2013, p. 79. "Since that, the denial has come to dictate the rules of the research and its focus... This rule has almost entirely steered the research of the Armenian genocide: proving that the events of the WWI in the Ottoman Empire were indeed genocide. An overwhelming portion of scholarly efforts have been in the search of ever more convincing proof or additional facts to the heap of growing evidence which in turn have efficiently frozen the development of the research...
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. 264.
- ^ Eissenstat 2014, pp. 24–25.
- ^ a b Ternon, Yves (1999). Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide. Wayne State University Press. pp. 237–248. ISBN 9780814327777.
The "Lewis Affair" began in the United States on May 19, 1985, with the publication, both in the New York Times and in the Washington Post, of an advertisement addressed to members of the House of Representatives. The statement was signed by sixty-nine academics in Turkish studies and sponsored by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations. Among the signatories was the name of Bernard Lewis, the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern History at Princeton University.
- ^ Auron 2003, pp. 226–227. "The rationalization of the Armenian Genocide began to take root in Western academic circles in the 1980s, and was further strengthened by the hiring of Bernard Lewis at Princeton University. Lewis is one of the most prominent specialists on the Middle East — some would say the most distinguished historian of the Middle East. Lewis' stature provided a lofty cover for the Turkish national agenda of obfuscating academic research on the Armenian Genocide... In 1985 he signed a petition to the U.S. Congress protesting the plan to make April 24, the day on which the Armenians commemorate the victims of the Genocide, a national American-Armenian memorial day, mentioning man's inhumanity to man. Lewis' signature was the most significant of sixty-nine signatures published. A two-page spread appeared simultaneously in the New York Times and Washington Post, financed by the Committee of the Turkish Associations."
- ^ Hovannisian, Richard G. (1999). Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide. Wayne State University Press. p. 224. ISBN 9780814327777.
The Institute of Turkish Studies and its director. Heath Lowry, were instrumental in securing the signature of sixty-nine academics in Turkish studies, many of whom had been awarded grants by the institute, for an open letter published as an advertisement in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and read more than once into the Congressional Record.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 130. "Lowry crafted the petition, for which he received the Foundation for the Promotion and Recognition of Turkey Prize the following year. As part of its aim to hinder recognition of the Armenian genocide, Turkey proceeded over the course of a decade to establish six chairs in Ottoman and Turkish history throughout the United States: at Princeton, Harvard, Indiana, Chicago, Portland State, and Georgetown. One of them went to Lowry; when he was given Princeton’s chair in 1996, it became the center of the Turkish government’s denialist activities in the United States."
- ^ Stern, Kenneth Saul. Holocaust Denial. American Jewish Committee. pp. 86–87. ISBN 978-0-87495-102-8.
- ^ Charny, Israel (17 July 2001). "The Psychological Satisfaction of Denials of the Holocaust or Other Genocides by Non-Extremists or Bigots, and Even by Known Scholars". IDEA. 6 (1). Archived from the original on 24 December 2007.
The [Armenian Assembly of America] revealed first of all that a majority of the scholars were not specialists in the subject matter of the period of the genocide, and more importantly that a very large number of the signators were recipients of grants from Turkish government sources. Speros Vryonis (1993) has since reviewed the data and has similarly concluded that a considerable number of the signators, and their institutions, were direct recipients of research funds from Turkey.
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 67. "Turkey used the “69 scholars statement” for years in order to assert the existence of a scholarly debate and as a tool in its efforts to prevent any further measures to recognize the genocide in the United States. But it, too, eventually exhausted its usefulness; and by the year 2000, Elekdağ would complain that “unfortunately this document cannot be used effectively now. Many of the people who signed it are now hesitant or afraid to come out and declare their continuing support for it. . . . With the exception of Justin McCarthy none of them is prepared to sign a similar communique today.” The statement still appears, for example, on the website of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, however."
- ^ Lou Ann Matossian. Politics, scholarship, and the Armenian Genocide Archived 15 July 2014 at the Wayback Machine. Armenian Reporter. 19 July 2008
- ^ a b Suny 2015, p. 375. "In the past ten years a more sophisticated neo-denialism has emerged, which elaborates the argument that the Armenians were involved in insurrectionary activity that necessitated a counterinsurgency response from the Young Turk government. A number of authors have worked with Professor M. Hakan Yavuz and published works with the University of Utah Press. While there are differences in emphasis and interpretation among their works, these writers are to a large degree sympathetic to the defensive attitudes of Turkish government and military officials, favor evidence and accounts exculpatory of the Young Turk policies, and emphatically reject the notion of genocidal intention."
- ^ a b c Hovannisian 2015, p. 234.
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 67.
- ^ "The Case Against Legitimizing Genocide Deniers: Scholars Speak Up". The Armenian Weekly. 7 June 2013. Retrieved 13 December 2020.
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 232.
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 68.
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 243.
- ^ Erbal 2015, p. 785.
- ^ Honan, William H. (22 May 1996). "Princeton Is Accused of Fronting For the Turkish Government". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ a b c Erbal 2015, p. 784. "Twenty-one years after he and sixty-eight other scholars, the majority of whom had no involvement in genocide studies, signed the infamous letter... Quataert spoke out. For this he paid the price by being forced to leave his position as chair of the board of the Institute of Turkish Studies. Board members Marcy Patton, Kemal Sılay, Resat Kasaba, and Birol Yesilada resigned, and Fatma Muge Gocek said she would resign. The Middle East Studies Association’s Academic Freedom Committee also intervened by sending a letter to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and others. However, these three actions took issue not with the normalized denial of the Armenian Genocide in the field at the time, but with the violation of Quataert’s academic freedom."
- ^ Quataert 2006, pp. 251–252.
- ^ a b Gutman 2015, p. 168. "Quataert’s bold criticism of the field’s inability to confront one of the most important chapters in the 623-year-long history of the Ottoman Empire, the genocidal annihilation of the Armenian populations of eastern Anatolia, was not without consequence. Shortly after its publication, Quataert resigned as chairman of the Institute of Turkish Studies after the Turkish government threatened to revoke the Institute’s funding if he did not retract his use of the word genocide."
- ^ Eissenstat 2014, p. 25.
- ^ Eissenstat 2014, pp. 25–26. "According to Quataert, in the wake of the review, the Turkish government began to pressure him and the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS), where he served as chairman of its Board of Directors at the time. He resigned, he said, because “[it] was clear to me that there was a genuine danger that the funding would be withdrawn by these powerful elements in Ankara and all the good I have seen would vanish, and money that young scholars need to learn language and travel would dry up” (Turkish government officials, as well as then Director of ITS, David Cuthell, deny that any pressure was put on Quataert). Several members of the ITS board resigned in protest and both the Turkish Studies Association and the Middle East Studies Association voiced their concern."
- ^ Sassounian, Harut. "Prof. Akcam Reveals Turkish Plan to Pay Scholars to Deny the Armenian Genocide Archived 18 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine." Asbarez. 12 July 2011. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 244.
- ^ Bloxham 2005, p. ix.
- ^ Schabas, William A. (2006). "The "Odious Scourge": Evolving Interpretations of the Crime of Genocide". Genocide Studies and Prevention. 1 (2): 93–106 [98]. doi:10.3138/N485-G825-6747-MT40.
- ^ Bloxham 2005, p. 208. "Denial of the Armenian genocide is often compared with denial of the Holocaust. Many of the techniques are the same: spurious equivalencies of the genocides with other episodes and types of human and wartime suffering in order to undermine evidence of state intent and phenomenological specificity; wilful misinterpretation of evidence; labelling the killings as wartime propaganda; minimization of the death tolls; and even blaming the victims for provocation and treachery. Some of the ends are also identical, namely the validation or rehabilitation of the guiding genocidal ideology—whether Turkish nationalism or Nazi racism—by erasure of its most notorious crimes."
- ^ a b MacDonald 2008, p. 133. "Hovannisian has highlighted eight points common to both Holocaust and Armenian-genocide deniers. This includes blaming genocide claims on wartime propaganda, blaming the target groups as ‘very real security threats’, denying any intent to annihilate, submerging the group’s losses within the general carnage of war, reducing the group’s losses, alleging that the ‘myth’ of genocide was created merely to profit the group, alleging Communist or Soviet involvement in any ‘myth’, and, finally, alleging that powerful lobbying interests are at work to prevent the denier’s ‘truth’ from coming forth. Both denier groups work hard to discount survivor testimony, while pushing the view that the victims actually provoked attacks against themselves."
- ^ Bloxham 2005, p. 211. "Denial is the one area in which the scholarship of the Armenian genocide is more developed than that of the Holocaust. It is more sophisticated and has much more academic respectability, aided by widespread ignorance of the events of1915–16. Unlike the extreme right-wing fringe that almost alone propagates Holocaust denial with any seriousness, Armenian genocide denial is backed by the full force of a Turkish state machinery that has pumped substantial funding into public-relations firms and American university endowments to provide a slick and superficially plausible defence of its position.It has also had longer to develop, and was incubated in much more favourable circumstances than Holocaust denial."
- ^ MacDonald 2008, p. 133. "Unsurprisingly, denial is often compared. While Holocaust deniers are a lunatic fringe, Armenian-genocide deniers have the backing of Turkey and the tacit acquiescence of Israel."
- ^ International Association of Genocide Scholars (1 October 2006). "An Open Letter Concerning Historians Who Deny the Armenian Genocide". Retrieved 15 December 2020.
- ^ MacDonald 2008, p. 135.
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 244. "The vast majority of genocide scholars and their organizations worldwide are steadfast not only in their recognition of the Armenian Genocide but also in calling upon others, including the Turkish government, to acknowledge the historical reality and help pave the way toward eventual conciliation."
- ^ Simm, Gabrielle (2016). "The Paris Peoples' Tribunal and the Istanbul Trials: Archives of the Armenian Genocide". Leiden Journal of International Law. 29 (1): 245–268. doi:10.1017/S0922156515000734.
- ^ "The Applicability of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to Events which Occurred During the Early Twentieth Century". International Center for Transitional Justice. 2002. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
- ^ "Statement by 126 Holocaust Scholars, Holders of Academic Chairs, and Directors of Holocaust Research and Studies Centers". Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute. 9 June 2000. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
- ^ A Letter from The International Association of Genocide Scholars, 13 June 2005
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 244. "This essay follows the general usage of the term denial to mean assertions that an event understood as genocide (typically founded on extensive analysis of evidence by reputable experts) is in fact not genocide, whether by representing the events as something else or claiming that the core events in question did not occur at all."
- ^ a b c Akçam 2012, p. 228. "The following discussion will also address such unfounded appraisals as, “the events of 1915 were in fact a civil war between the Armenians and Turks.” Not a single top secret document at the highest levels of the state makes the slightest allusion to a civil war or “intercommunal warfare.” On the contrary, Ottoman documents show that Armenian areas were evacuated under tight government control."
- ^ Suny 2015, p. xii. "Although the literature produced by historians who favor the 'Armenian' view and those who support the 'Turkish' version actually agrees on many of the basic facts, for decades various authors have emphasized different elements and in general either avoided explanations of the causes of the events or implied an explanation even while not systematically or explicitly elaborating one."
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. xii–xiii. "The Turkish state and those few historians who reject the notion of genocide have argued that the tragedy was the result of a reasonable and understandable response of a government to a rebellious and seditious population in time of war and mortal danger to the state’s survival... There was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it. They were rebellious, seditious subjects who presented a danger to the empire and got what they deserved. Relative peace and harmony had existed in the Ottoman Empire between the state and its religious minorities until outside agitators, usually from the Russian Empire, aroused the nationalist and separatist passions of the Armenians. Still—the denialists claim—despite the existential threat posed by the Armenians and their Russian allies to the survival of the empire, there was no intention or effort by the Young Turk regime to eliminate the Armenians as a people."
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 167. "Denial of the Armenian Genocide, therefore, consists of a two-pronged complementary, yet also contradictory, argument we can call 'They Brought It on Themselves and It Never Happened'."
- ^
- Marchand, Laure; Perrier, Guillaume; Blythe, Debbie (2015). Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide. McGill-Queen's Press. pp. 111–112. ISBN 978-0-7735-9720-4.
The Iğdır genocide monument is the ultimate caricature of the Turkish government's policy of denying the 1915 genocide by rewriting history and transforming victims into guilty parties.
- Hovannisian 2001, p. 803. "... the unbending attitude of the Ankara government, in 1995 of a multi-volume work of the prime ministry's state archives titled Armenian Atrocities in the Caucasus and Anatolia According to Archival Documents. The purpose of the publication is not only to reiterate all previous denials but also to demonstrate that it was in fact the Turkish people who were the victims of a genocide perpetrated by the Armenians."
- Cheterian 2015, pp. 65–66. "Some of the proponents of this official narrative have even gone so far as to claim that the Armenians were the real aggressors, and that Muslim losses were greater than those of the Armenians."
- Gürpınar 2016, p. 234. "Maintaining that ‘the best defence is a good offence’, the new strategy involved accusing Armenians in response for perpetrating genocide against the Turks. The violence committed by the Armenian committees under the Russian occupation of Eastern Anatolia and massacring of tens of thousands of Muslims (Turks and Kurds) in revenge killings in 1916–17 was extravagantly displayed, magnified and decontextualized. The state television regularly screened the unearthing of ‘mass graves’ of Muslim bodies killed and buried by Armenian militants by the excavations conducted by the universities in Van and Erzurum, the two universities within the area where mass killings perpetrated by Armenian militants took place."
- Marchand, Laure; Perrier, Guillaume; Blythe, Debbie (2015). Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide. McGill-Queen's Press. pp. 111–112. ISBN 978-0-7735-9720-4.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, p. 109.
- ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 208. "Deniers claim the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) fomented a rebellion, but they elide the fact that Turkey’s ruling party tried to recruit the ARF to form a fifth column behind Russian lines... These authors ignore multiple sources describing the interparty negotiations but base their positions on a book by Esat Uras, a perpetrator of the genocide, which created the template for denial."
- ^ Dadrian 2003, p. 276. "An integral part of this argument of civil war is the assertion of “Armenian rebellion” for which purpose the four major Armenian uprisings, Shabin Karahisar (June 6–July 4, 1915), Musa Dagh (July 30–September 1915), Urfa (September 29–October 23, 1915), and especially that of Van in the April 20–May 17, 1915 period, are cited as proof positive. Yet, without exception these uprisings were improvised last-ditch attempts to ward off imminent deportation and destruction. Without exception they were all local, very limited, and above all, highly defensive initiatives; as such they were ultimately doomed to failure."
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 240.
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. 419–420.
- ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 218. "As concerns Katchaznouni’s speech, it is actually presented as a smoking gun by a number of denialist authors because not only do they finally have an Armenian source, but also one that was written by an ARF leader and former prime minister of the Republic of Armenia (July 1918–August 1919)... it is important to compare the actual text of Katchaznouni’s speech with inferences claimed to be based on it. In some cases, the English translation of the speech is quoted accurately and at length, but with conclusions drawn from it that are not supported by the text."
- ^ a b Hovannisian 2015, pp. 242–243. "Pointing to a number of sequential Armenian uprisings in 1915, [Erickson] concedes, “It is true, to date, no historian has been able to produce authentic evidence of a coordinated Armenian master plan for revolution. However, what is perceived as real is real in its effect.” In a blatant example of double standards, the author, who cannot discover trustworthy evidence of the reality of a genocide about which many thousands of documents and accounts exist, is quite willing to embrace and defend the Young Turk government’s “perceived” reality of an organized empire-wide Armenian insurgency."
- ^ Akçam, Taner (2013). "Let the arguments begin!". Journal of Genocide Research. 15 (4): 496. doi:10.1080/14623528.2013.856095.
- ^ a b Ekmekçioğlu 2016, p. 7. "Even though the putative mass Armenian “betrayal” happened after the Young Turks acted on their plan to eradicate Armenianness, Turkish nationalist narratives have used Armenians’ “collaboration with the enemy” and secessionist agenda during the postwar occupation years as a justification for the 1915 “deportations,” something that had happened before the occupation years. This way of thinking about Armenians as a fifth column continues to dominate Turkish popular national consciousness."
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 72. "Thus, each author offers excuses for the actions of the CUP leadership while shifting partial blame onto the victims themselves and, in the process, creates a new criterion for the victims of genocide: the need to be “wholly innocent.” At the same time, they reinforce the existence of an open debate over basic issues that are regarded as settled in a scholarly literature to which they barely refer."
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, pp. 243–244. "Armenian propaganda, they contend, has for decades held the attention of the Western world, but in fact, the Armenians were not innocent victims and much of what befell them was of their own making and that of Russia and the European powers that manipulated them."
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 241. "Based on these and some secondary sources, Erickson reasserts a well-worn scapegoating of Armenians for the failures of the Ottoman army by maintaining that there were Armenian insurgents by the thousands who harassed and hampered supply lines and communications and departed en masse for Russian territory in order to join the enemy armies."
- ^ Dadrian 2003, p. 277. "It is also a fact that several thousands of Armenians from all over the world, including several hundred former Ottoman subjects, rushed to the Caucasus to enroll in the ranks of the Russian Caucasus army to fight against the Turks; the majority of them were, however, Russian subjects."
- ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 217. "As to McCarthy’s assertion that Katchaznouni confirms that the ARF planned to have Ottoman Armenians form guerilla bands and have Armenian soldiers desert the Ottoman army and join the Russians, a plain text reading of both the English translation and the original Armenian edition clearly shows that Katchaznouni makes no reference at all to Ottoman Armenians doing or not doing their duty as Ottoman citizens... The latter claim is flatly contradicted by many sources showing that the four volunteer regiments formed were composed primarily of Russian Armenians."
- ^ Suny 2009, p. 941. "What appears in the sources to have been the Turks’ panic and paranoia at an imagined danger from their Armenian subjects has metastasized in the hands of apologists into justification for state-ordered murder."
- ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 209. "One of the key arguments made by genocide deniers is that the deportations, and whatever “unfortunate excesses” occurred during them, were not part of a plan of extermination but rather a response to an Armenian rebellion in the eastern provinces in collaboration with Russia."
- ^ Hull, Isabel V. (2004). "The Armenian genocide". Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-4258-2.
- ^ Moses, A. Dirk (2013). "Genocide vs security: a false opposition". Journal of Genocide Research. 15 (4): 463–509. doi:10.1080/14623528.2013.856095.
This is a telling slip; Lewy is talking about 'the Armenians' as if the defenceless women and children who comprised the deportation columns were vicariously responsible for Armenian rebels in other parts of the country. The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking. It fails to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, on which international humanitarian law has been insisting for over a hundred years now.
- ^ Robertson, Geoffrey (2015). An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians?. Biteback Publishing. p. 117. ISBN 978-1-84954-822-9.
'Necessity' in war can never justify the deliberate killing of civilians: if they are suspected of treason or loyalty to the enemy they may be detained or interned, or prosecuted, but not sent on marches from which they are expected not to return.
- ^ Barder, Alexander D. (2017). "Race War and the Global Imperial Order: The Armenian Genocide of 1915". Australian Journal of Politics & History. 63 (3): 382–393 [391]. doi:10.1111/ajph.12370.
- ^ Kaiser, Hilmar (2010). "Genocide at the Twilight of the Ottoman Empire". In Bloxham, Donald; Moses, A. Dirk (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford University Press. p. 383. ISBN 978-0-19-923211-6.
The Armenian deportations were not the result of an Armenian rebellion. On the contrary, Armenians were deported when no danger of outside interference existed. Thus Armenians near front lines were often slaughtered on the spot and not deported. The deportations were not a security measure against rebellions but depended on their absence.
- ^ Lattanzi 2018, pp. 58–59.
- ^ Hovannisian 2001, pp. 801–802.
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 238.
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. 373.
- ^ Lattanzi 2018, pp. 61–65. "We could confine ourselves to the reported words and to the above-mentioned decisions taken by the Ottoman rulers in order to conclude that the intent of the Ottoman State to destroy the Armenian community as such is largely proven pursuant to the standard of proof applied by ICJ, ICTY and ICTR in the genocide cases."
- ^ Robertson 2016, pp. 71–72. "The US ambassador, Henry Morgenthau quotes Interior Minister Talaat Pasha declaring ‘We have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians; there are none left in Bitlis, Van and Erzurum. The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish with them. If we don’t, they will plan their revenge.’ In a modern war crimes trial, the ambassador’s testimony would be relied upon as evidence of an admission by Talaat to the specific intention necessary for his guilt of genocide."
- ^ Hovannisian 2001, p. 802. "Gürün conveniently ignores one of the five specific acts that constitute the crime of genocide according to the United Nations Convention: 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.'"
- ^ Lattanzi 2018, pp. 65–66.
- ^ a b Robertson 2016, p. 72. "Genocidal intent may be inferred from the very scale or proportion of the casualties – ‘their massive and/or systematic nature, or their atrocity’. To kill, for example, 600,000 of an ethnic group of 1.1 million... is on any view so disproportionate as to permit an inference of genocidal intent, as well as the systematic nature of the arrests and deportations across most of Anatolia, and the extreme cruelty of the massacres and the starvation and the untreated diseases, and the laws requiring expropriation of Armenian property."
- ^ Lattanzi 2018, p. 67. "From the evidence of direct killings of other civilians, such as women, children and elders, as well as the evidence of their massive deaths on account of the horrendous conditions of life to which they were submitted can clearly be inferred the intent to destroy the entire Armenian community inhabiting the Empire. Indeed, the fact that few Armenians survived deportations thanks only to some courageous and compassionate individuals and some relief organizations proves that deportations were not meant to be relocations or expulsions. They consisted in marches towards the desert without hope for return, without hope for a new life. The return of Armenians to their homeland was not envisaged at all. Rather, not only their physical, but also their "objective" existence in Ottoman villages and cities needed to be erased. Deportations equalized to death sentences."
- ^ Hovannisian 2001, pp. 803–804.
- ^ Latino 2018, p. 221.
- ^ Hovannisian 2001, p. 803.
- ^ Bloxham 2005, pp. 208–209.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 374–375.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 376–377.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 399–400.
- ^ a b Dadrian 2003, p. 275.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 407, 409.
- ^ Akçam 2018, p. 11. "On one hand, there are successive Turkish governments that have destroyed any and all evidence that would show the events of 1915 to have been a systematic program of annihilation; this has included all of the case files from the post-war trials of the Unionists (1919–1921), all of the Talat Pasha telegrams and other incriminating documents, as well as any trace of their ultimate fate. On the other hand, there is the chorus of historians who reiterate the line that, in the absence of solid, reliable documentary evidence—in other words, 'smoking guns' from the Ottoman archives or elsewhere—proving otherwise, there can be no objective claim of a government-sponsored genocide against the Armenians... A final brushstroke is needed to complete the picture of denial: to discredit the accounts of the genocide given by Armenian survivors and classify them as 'unreliable sources'."
- ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 67. "In this vein, they question the authenticity of certain documents used in arguments to support the genocide thesis, and initiate personal attacks on the authors for being Armenian, or simply for reflecting a biased, Armenian point of view."
- ^ de Waal 2015, pp. 44–45. "The evidence the ambassador’s memoir gives is so damning that in 1990—at the height of the propaganda battles over genocide resolutions in the United States—Heath Lowry, then head of the Institute of the Turkish Studies in Washington, published a book alleging that Morgenthau was a biased witness who had exaggerated his level of access to Talat and Enver."
- ^ a b Akçam 2018, pp. 17–18.
- ^ "Akcam: The Authenticity of the Naim Efendi Memoirs and Talat Pasha Telegrams". The Armenian Weekly. 11 October 2016. Retrieved 26 November 2020.
- ^ a b Akçam 2018, pp. 248–249.
- ^ "Recently Discovered Telegram Reveals Evidence For Armenian Genocide". NPR.org. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ Melson, Robert F (2020). "Killing Orders: Talat Pasha's Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide Taner Akçam". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 34 (1): 124–126. doi:10.1093/hgs/dcaa014.
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. 1–2, 183–185.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 76.
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. 207–208.
- ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 208. "Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had visited Darfur in 2006 and had tried to absolve his fellow genocide denier—and, implicitly, his own country—by claiming that according to what was written in the Qur’an, 'a Muslim cannot commit genocide.'"
- ^ Lattanzi 2018, p. 100.
- ^ Latino 2018, pp. 210, 221.
- ^ "Holocaust & Genocide Education | Armenia". University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts. Archived from the original on 23 April 2019. Retrieved 22 October 2019.
- ^ Ertür 2019, pp. 2–3.
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. 140–141.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 228.
- ^ Auron 2003, pp. 228–229.
- ^ "Paris, France, Court of First Instance". www.armenian-genocide.org. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 141.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 230.
- ^ Kebranian, Nanor (2020). "Genocide, History, and the Law: Legal Performativity and Recognition of the Armenian Genocide in France and Germany". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 34 (2): 253–273. doi:10.1093/hgs/dcaa027.
- ^ Ertür 2019, pp. 5–6.
- ^ a b Belavusau, Uladzislau (13 February 2014). "Armenian Genocide v. Holocaust in Strasbourg: Trivialisation in Comparison". Verfassungsblog. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
The Court creates a speculative distinction between the Holocaust and other 20th-century atrocities. There are three fundamental fallacies in this approach, which undermine judgement and provoke the stigmatization of Armenian communities worldwide.
Belavusau, Uladzislau (5 November 2015). "Perinçek v. Switzerland: Between Freedom of Speech and Collective Dignity". Verfassungsblog. Retrieved 14 December 2020.Perinçek is an active member of Talat Pasha Committee, an organization that is concerned with a rehabilitation of the central military criminal, responsible for the massacres of Armenians, Mehmet Talat Pasha (1874-1921). It remains enigmatic how an admirer of Talat Pasha may be less anti-Armenian than a neo-Nazi fan of Heinrich Himmler being less anti-Semitic?
- ^ Demirdjian 2018, pp. 22–23. "Perincek’s activities spread across a wider spectrum, including his membership in the Talat Pasha Committee, an organization considered as xenophobic and racist by the European Parliament, and established for the purpose of refuting the Armenian genocide."
- ^ "Turk guilty over genocide remarks". BBC News. 9 March 2007. Archived from the original on 3 February 2015. Retrieved 4 February 2015.
- ^ Belavusau, Uladzislau (2016). "Perinçek v. Switzerland (Eur. Ct. H.R.)". International Legal Materials. 55 (4): 627–719. doi:10.5305/intelegamate.55.4.0627. ISSN 0020-7829.
- ^ Double standards and other criticism:
- de Broux, Pierre-Olivier; Staes, Dorothea (2018). "History Watch by the European Court of Human Rights". The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 101–119 [104]. ISBN 978-1-349-95306-6.
- Della Morte, Gabriele (31 May 2016). "When is a criminal prohibition of genocide denial justified? The Perinçek Case and the risk of a double standard". QIL QDI. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
[I]f the Grand Chamber Judgement sees merit in putting some distance between the terms, 'denial' and 'opinion', the need to refer continuously to the difference between the Shoah and the Medz Yeghern gives the impression that only the former is truly protected under the European Convention of Human Rights. This was implicitly affirmed by the Strasbourg Judges...
- Leotta, Carmelo Domenico (2018). "Criminalizing the Denial of 1915–1916 Armenian Massacres and the European Court of Human Rights: Perinçek v Switzerland". The Armenian Massacres of 1915–1916 a Hundred Years Later: Open Questions and Tentative Answers in International Law. Springer International Publishing. pp. 251–271. ISBN 978-3-319-78169-3.
In conclusion, if the Grand Chamber had really balanced the freedom of expression with the Armenian group's right of identity and dignity and not merely with the risk of diffusion of violence and hatred, the affirmation contained in the judgment—according to which the Holocaust denial 'must invariably be seen as connoting an antidemocratic ideology and anti-Semitism'—it would appear to be gravely discriminatory because it would imply that, in a democratic society, some groups are more valuable than others.
- Nashalian, Shant N. (2018). "A Critique of Perincek v. Switzerland: Incorporating an International and Historical Context Is the More Prudent Approach to Genocide Denial Cases" (PDF). Southwestern Journal of International Law. 24: 147.
[Perinçek] seemingly intended to further spread the Turkish program of denial and suppression throughout the world, thus perpetuating the Young Turks' and Atatürk's destructive and repressive ideology still present in Turkey today.
- Garibian, Sévane (2018). "Über den Bruch des Konsenses: Der Fall Perinçek, der armenische Völkermord und internationales Strafrecht". Der Genozid an den ArmenierInnen: Beiträge zur wissenschaftlichen Aufarbeitung eines historischen Verbrechens gegen die Menschlichkeit (in German). Springer Fachmedien. pp. 167–187. ISBN 978-3-658-20453-2.
Das Argument des „fehlenden Konsenses" bezüglich des armenischen Völkermordes verstößt gegen den Geist der Europäischen Menschenrechtkonvention (1950), die als Folge der Verwüstungen des Zweiten Weltkriegs entworfen wurde: Es markiert einen Sieg für die Ideologie der Völkermordleugnung.
- ^ Ertür 2019, p. 8. "The fact that Perinçek’s case went all the way to the ECtHR Grand Chamber was a significant political victory for the so-called Talât Pasha Committee: this successful legal provocation entailed the ECtHR’s spectacular instrumentalisation in denialism in the centenary of the Armenian genocide. The high profile of the case allowed Perinçek and his allies to claim in their media campaign that this would be the case that decides whether or not there was a genocide. The campaign was effective: the ECtHR Grand Chamber hearing was widely covered in the Turkish media as the trial that would put an end to the so-called ‘hundred year-old genocide lie’... Perinçek and his party celebrated the judgment claiming in bold PR campaigns, ‘We put an end to the genocide lie’."
- ^ Yardley, Jim; Arsu, Sebnem (12 April 2015). "Pope Calls Killings of Armenians 'Genocide,' Provoking Turkish Anger". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
- ^ a b Tolbert, David (24 April 2015). "The Armenian Genocide: 100 Years of Denial". International Center for Transitional Justice. Retrieved 17 December 2020.
- ^ Cheterian 2018, p. 899.
- ^ Mangassarian, Selina L. (2016). "100 Years of Trauma: the Armenian Genocide and Intergenerational Cultural Trauma". Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma. 25 (4): 371–381. doi:10.1080/10926771.2015.1121191.
- ^ Göçek 2015, p. 477. "When I completed the first draft of this book, I consciously decided not to write a conclusion because the denial of the Turkish state and society of the collective violence committed against the Armenians continues on in Turkey today. I wanted to capture that awkward, unsatisfactory state of incompletion that the lack of closure produces and has produced for almost a century for the Armenian victims and their descendants."
- ^ Cheterian 2015, pp. 127–128.
- ^ Avedian 2018, p. 110.
- ^ de Waal 2015, p. 4.
- ^ Avedian 2018, p. 48.
- ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 477–478.
- ^ "Genocide Denied". Facing History and Ourselves. Retrieved 26 December 2020.
- ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 311.
- ^ Cheterian 2015, pp. 305–306.
- ^ Cheterian, Vicken (24 April 2015). "Armenians, Turks and a century of genocide: a village where a serial killer is hailed as a hero". The Irish Times. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, pp. 353–354. "First, Hitler’s alleged words at the Obersalzberg—about who “still talked” about the Armenians—might not come from a watertight source, but the statement still accurately sums up one of the major lessons the Armenian Genocide must have held for the Nazis: it must have taught them that such incredible crimes could go unpunished under the cover of war, even if one lost that war. That one could “get away” with genocide must have been a great inspiration indeed... the lack of a robust response by Christian Germany must have seemed especially significant to Hitler— for if this was its reaction to the extermination of Christian people, who would speak out against killing Jews?"
Sources
Books
- Akçam, Taner (2012). The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-15333-9.
- Akçam, Taner (2018). Killing Orders: Talat Pasha's Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-69787-1.
- Auron, Yair (2003). The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7658-0834-9.
- Avedian, Vahagn (2018). Knowledge and Acknowledgement in the Politics of Memory of the Armenian Genocide. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-84515-4.
- Baer, Marc D. (2020). Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-04542-3.
- Bloxham, Donald (2005). The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-922688-7.
- Cheterian, Vicken (2015). Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide. Hurst. ISBN 978-1-84904-458-5.
- de Waal, Thomas (2015). Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-935069-8.
- Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna (2016). Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-9706-1.
- Galip, Özlem Belçim (2020). New Social Movements and the Armenian Question in Turkey: Civil Society vs. the State. Springer International Publishing. ISBN 978-3-030-59400-8.
- Göçek, Fatma Müge (2015). Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789-2009. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-933420-9.
- Ihrig, Stefan (2016). Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-50479-0.
- MacDonald, David B. (2008). Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-08572-9.
- Suny, Ronald Grigor (2015). "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-6558-1.
Chapters
- Akçam, Taner (2010). "Facing History: Denial and the Turkish National Security Concept". Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-48434-3.
- Bayraktar, Seyhan (2016). "The Politics of Denial and Recognition: Turkey, Armenia and the EU". The Armenian Genocide Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 197–211. ISBN 978-1-137-56163-3.
- Chorbajian, Levon (2016). "'They Brought It on Themselves and It Never Happened': Denial to 1939". The Armenian Genocide Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 167–182. ISBN 978-1-137-56163-3.
- Erbal, Ayda (2012). "Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias:: Revisiting the "Apology" of Turkish Intellectuals". Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory. Transcript Verlag. pp. 51–94. ISBN 978-3-8376-1931-7.
- Göçek, Fatma Müge (2011). "Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on 1915". In Suny, Ronald Grigor; Göçek, Fatma Müge; Naimark, Norman M. (eds.). A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. Oxford University Press. pp. 42–52. ISBN 978-0-19-979276-4.
- Hovannisian, Richard G. (2001). "Denial: The Armenian Genocide as a Prototype". Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 796–812. ISBN 978-1-349-66019-3.
- Latino, Agostina (2018). "The Armenian Massacres and the Price of Memory: Impossible to Forget, Forbidden to Remember". The Armenian Massacres of 1915–1916 a Hundred Years Later: Open Questions and Tentative Answers in International Law. Springer International Publishing. pp. 195–236. ISBN 978-3-319-78169-3.
- Lattanzi, Flavia (2018). "The Armenian Massacres as the Murder of a Nation?". The Armenian Massacres of 1915–1916 a Hundred Years Later: Open Questions and Tentative Answers in International Law. Springer International Publishing. pp. 27–104. ISBN 978-3-319-78169-3.
- Robertson, Geoffrey (2016). "Armenia and the G-word: The Law and the Politics". The Armenian Genocide Legacy. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 69–83. ISBN 978-1-137-56163-3.
- Zürcher, Erik Jan (2011). "Renewal and Silence: Postwar Unionist and Kemalist Rhetoric on the Armenian Genocide". In Suny, Ronald Grigor; Göçek, Fatma Müge; Naimark, Norman M. (eds.). A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire. Oxford University Press. pp. 306–316. ISBN 978-0-19-979276-4.
Journal articles
- Avedian, Vahagn (2012). "State Identity, Continuity, and Responsibility: The Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide". European Journal of International Law. 23 (3): 797–820. doi:10.1093/ejil/chs056.
- Avedian, Vahagn (2013). "Recognition, Responsibility and Reconciliation: The Trinity of the Armenian Genocide". Europa Ethnica. 70 (3/4): 77–86. ISSN 0014-2492.
- Aybak, Tunç (2016). "Geopolitics of Denial: Turkish State's 'Armenian Problem'". Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. 18 (2): 125–144. doi:10.1080/19448953.2016.1141582.
- Baker, Mark R. (2015). "The Armenian Genocide and its denial: a review of recent scholarship". New Perspectives on Turkey. 53: 197–212. doi:10.1017/npt.2015.23.
- Bayraktar, Seyhan (2015). "The Grammar of Denial: State, Society, and Turkish–Armenian Relations". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 47 (4): 801–806. doi:10.1017/S0020743815001014.
- Ben Aharon, Eldad (2015). "A Unique Denial: Israel's Foreign Policy and the Armenian Genocide". British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. 42 (4): 638–654. doi:10.1080/13530194.2015.1043514.
- Ben Aharon, Eldad (2019). "Recognition of the Armenian Genocide after its Centenary: A Comparative Analysis of Changing Parliamentary Positions". Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. 13 (3): 339–352. doi:10.1080/23739770.2019.1737911.
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- Bloxham, Donald (2006). "The roots of American genocide denial: Near eastern geopolitics and the interwar Armenian question". Journal of Genocide Research. 8 (1): 27–49. doi:10.1080/14623520600552843.
- Cheterian, Vicken (2018). "The Uses and Abuses of History: Genocide and the Making of the Karabakh Conflict". Europe-Asia Studies. 70 (6): 884–903. doi:10.1080/09668136.2018.1489634.
- Dadrian, Vahakn N. (2003). "The signal facts surrounding the Armenian genocide and the Turkish denial syndrome". Journal of Genocide Research. 5 (2): 269–279. doi:10.1080/14623520305671.
- Demirdjian, Alexis (2018). "A Moving Defence: The Turkish State and the Armenian Genocide". Journal of International Criminal Justice. 16 (3): 501–526. doi:10.1093/jicj/mqy035.
- Dixon, Jennifer M. (2010). "Defending the Nation? Maintaining Turkey's Narrative of the Armenian Genocide". South European Society and Politics. 15 (3): 467–485. doi:10.1080/13608746.2010.513605.
- Dixon, Jennifer M. (2010b). "Education and National Narratives: Changing Representations of the Armenian Genocide in History Textbooks in Turkey". International Journal for Education Law and Policy. 2010 Special Issue: 103–126.
- Eissenstat, Howard (2014). "Children of Özal: The New Face of Turkish Studies". Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. 1 (1): 23–35. doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.1.1-2.23. ISSN 2376-0702.
- Erbal, Ayda (2015). "The Armenian Genocide, AKA the Elephant in the Room". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 47 (4): 783–790. doi:10.1017/S0020743815000987.
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ignored (help) - Gürpınar, Doğan (2013). "Historical Revisionism vs. Conspiracy Theories: Transformations of Turkish Historical Scholarship and Conspiracy Theories as a Constitutive Element in Transforming Turkish Nationalism". Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. 15 (4): 412–433. doi:10.1080/19448953.2013.844588.
- Gürpınar, Doğan (2016). "The manufacturing of denial: the making of the Turkish 'official thesis' on the Armenian Genocide between 1974 and 1990". Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. 18 (3): 217–240. doi:10.1080/19448953.2016.1176397.
- Gutman, David (2015). "Ottoman Historiography and the End of the Genocide Taboo: Writing the Armenian Genocide into Late Ottoman History". Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. 2 (1): 167. doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.2.1.167.
- Hovannisian, Richard G. (2015). "Denial of the Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later: The New Practitioners and Their Trade". Genocide Studies International. 9 (2): 228–247. doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04.
- Kaligian, Dikran (2014). "Anatomy of Denial: Manipulating Sources and Manufacturing a Rebellion". Genocide Studies International. 8 (2): 208–223. doi:10.3138/gsi.8.2.06.
- Mamigonian, Marc A. (2015). "Academic Denial of the Armenian Genocide in American Scholarship: Denialism as Manufactured Controversy". Genocide Studies International. 9 (1): 61–82. doi:10.3138/gsi.9.1.04.
- Quataert, Donald (2006). "The Massacres of Ottoman Armenians and the Writing of Ottoman History". The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 37 (2): 249–259. doi:10.1162/jinh.2006.37.2.249. ISSN 0022-1953. JSTOR 4139548. S2CID 145622783.
- Suny, Ronald Grigor (2009). "Truth in Telling: Reconciling Realities in the Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians". The American Historical Review. 114 (4): 930–946. doi:10.1086/ahr.114.4.930.
- Üngör, Uğur Ümit (2014). "Lost in commemoration: the Armenian genocide in memory and identity". Patterns of Prejudice. 48 (2): 147–166. doi:10.1080/0031322X.2014.902210.
Further reading
- Turan, Ömer; Öztan, Güven Gürkan (2018). Devlet aklı ve 1915: Türkiye'de "Ermeni Meselesi" anlatısının inşası [Raison d'état and 1915: Turkey's "Armenian Question" and the construction of narratives] (in Turkish). İletişim Yayınları. ISBN 978-975-05-2349-6.
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ignored (help) - Selected Bibliography on Denial of the Armenian Genocide, Zoryan Institute, 2001.