Category: Main Issues

Fallout from the US “Genocide” Vote

[ 10 Mar 2010 14:44 ]
By Alexander Jackson, Caucasian Review of International Affairs exclusively for APA

The tangled relationship between history and politics was underlined last week when the US House Foreign Affairs Committee narrowly voted to label the 1915 massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as ‘genocide’ (BBC, March 5). In principle the resolution now moves to the floor of the House for a full vote.

In practice, this is unlikely to happen. The Obama Administration stayed oddly quiet in the run-up to the committee vote, until, at the last minute, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acted. She called on committee chairman Howard Berman to acknowledge that a vote would damage US-Turkish ties and undermine efforts at reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia. The US government is now moving to block the resolution coming before the full House (RFE/RL, March 5).

However, its opposition has been weak, and certainly less vociferous than that of George Bush in 2007, when a similar resolution was passed. The current Administration’s last-minute scramble looks like a foreign-policy miscalculation rather than a deliberate omission, although the reaction in Turkey is nonetheless furious.

If the resolution stays out of the House, then Turkey is likely to limit its immediate response to angry protests and denunciations. However, the longer term implications are harder to gauge, and potentially serious. Suat Kiniklioglu, a representative of Turkey’s ruling AKP, made it clear that the implications of a full vote would be serious: “Everything from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Iraq to the Middle East process would be affected. There would be major disruption to the relationship between Turkey and the US” (Guardian, March 5).

The most commonly voiced danger is that Ankara would deny the US access to the Incirlik air base, a vital logistical hub for supplying Afghanistan and an essential part of any plan to withdraw from Iraq. Turkey might also withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. Either of these may be too harsh and too obvious a measure, but both will become more viable options if the relationship deteriorates further. The main danger is more subtle. Turkish cooperation on vital issues would be much harder to come by. In particular, securing Ankara’s assistance to pressure Iran over its nuclear programme would be extremely difficult.

The damage may already have been done. The perception that Washington does not value Turkey’s strategic leverage has been underlined by the vote, even if the White House now fights to stop it going to the House. In a politically charged atmosphere such as Turkey, the actions of the US legislature are likely to be conflated with the opinions of the executive.

In this respect the remarks of committee chairman Berman come across as flippant and dismissive. He stated that Turkey is “a vital and, in most respects, a loyal ally of the United States”, which could easily be construed as a patronising chastisement (House Foreign Affairs Committee, March 4). More significantly, he brushed aside Turkish criticism by arguing that “Turkey values its relations with the United States at least as much as we value our relations with Turkey.” In other words, you need us too much to respond to this.

Such attitudes will hardly reduce the existing strains on the Turkish-American alliance. Recent events will intensify Ankara’s strategic shift towards Russia (notwithstanding the fact that Russia’s State Duma too has officially recognised 1915 events as genocide). Any policies or geopolitical shifts which seem to oppose ‘American imperialism’ will be loudly welcomed on the Turkish streets, a fact which will not be lost on the populist AKP.

In fact, although the Turkish government asserts otherwise, this growing tide of nationalist anger could do serious damage to the protocols which would formalise the rapprochement with Armenia. The AKP holds the parliamentary majority necessary to ratify the protocols, but was unwilling to push the matter too hard even before the US committee vote. In the aftermath of the resolution, nationalist anger will only intensify, forcing the AKP to expend even more political capital on ratification.

It may be unwilling to do so, and prefer to view the current clamour as a justification to block ratification, blaming the issue on Armenia and its powerful diaspora in the US. Reassuringly, it seems the AKP, hoping that a full House vote on the resolution will be blocked, is unlikely to resort to such measures at the moment, although the rapprochement has certainly been damaged by the vote – as Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu observed bluntly, “Further intervention by third parties will render this normalization impossible” (Sundays Zaman, March 7). Turkey undertook the rapprochement out of its own national interest, not to please Washington, but the vote looks like a clumsy attempt to lean on Ankara.

That is the crux of the matter. Mr Berman insists that the resolution is simply historical. But Washington must understand that this vote is construed – in Ankara and across Turkey – as undue, poorly-timed pressure on the normalisation process between Turkey and Armenia. After all, Turks may reasonably ask, why now?

The Obama Administration is likely to salvage the matter for now by keeping the vote out of the House. But its lacklustre response to the issue will not win America many friends in Turkey, which has been decidedly underwhelmed by the US in recent years. Simply assuming that Turkey needs America, or taking it for granted, is short-sighted. The consequences of the current crisis may not be visible for some time, but they could be serious.

March 10, 2010
Committee vote may have given Turkey a leg up

By Tülin Daloglu 03/10/10 at 12:00 AM

Has Congress considered any measure as often over the last four decades as the “Armenian Genocide” resolution? Again and again the bill has returned to Capitol Hill, only to fail each time. The House Foreign Affairs Committee has debated the bill at least four times since 2000, and it has become increasingly clear that each committee member believes that what happened to the Armenians during World War I was indeed a “genocide.” Yet despite that seemingly unanimous position, the resolution passed last week on a 23-22 vote. When it was considered in 2007, the committee passed it by six votes. Given how the gap has closed, the measure doesn’t stand a chance to get a floor vote this time.

This is indeed a positive development for Turkey, even though Turks are deeply offended that the vote took place at all. They’re sick and tired of the House having this debate, and many would love to see Congress promise never to discuss it again. Of course, that will never happen. Surely, Armenians don’t relish this endless conversation either, but clearly many feel morally obliged to carry on the fight for their loved ones. While I feel strongly that it’s a mistake for Congress to legislate this conflicted bit of history, I fully respect the hard work of the Armenians to keep the issue alive.

That said, it is important for Turkey not to overplay its hand. Ankara recalled its ambassador to Washington, Namik Tan, soon after the bill passed the committee. I am not even sure as to whether that was the right decision. But Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is adamant that Ambassador Tan will not be returning to the U.S. until “there is a clear development on this issue.” It’s fair to speculate that Turkey likes to get assurances from President Obama that he will not use the term “Armenian Genocide” in this year’s April 24 statement. While doing that, Erdogan rebuked Berman without fully understanding why he gave extra time for the committee members to finish voting. On Tuesday, he said, “you will call the U.S. an advanced democracy; do every thing that a progressive democracy can not tolerate. This is not the right thing. Yet this is what they do.”

But for now at least, the resolution is dead. No one in Congress wants to assume the economic and national security risks of a full House vote. They wished Turkey to deal with this issue as plain historical fact and get over with it long time ago. But it isn’t that simple for Turkey, whose citizens remain convinced that accepting the label of “genocide” will touch off a generation of reparations claims. More importantly, many Turks believe that during World War I the Ottomans criminally neglected their own population as well, and that the Armenians were hardly the only ones to suffer. Because of that widespread suffering, they reason, the atrocities that Armenians faced could not be considered a “genocide.” Refusing to acknowledge a Turkish side of the story now only serves to add to the tragedy rather than remedy it.

Both Turks and Armenians want to reconcile, but they seem to be in it for the wrong reasons. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Armenian Foreign Minister Eduard Nalbandian signed two protocols five months ago in an attempt to normalize their relationship, with strong U.S. support. But House Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.) was correct when he said last week that “[T]here is a (strong) likelihood that these protocols will not be ratified (by the respective parliaments) in the near future because the Turkish Prime Minister said he won’t put those into effect until the Nagorno-Karabagh issue is resolved.”

Turkish leaders will not admit it, but they have begun the process of de-linking the Nagorno-Karabagh issue from the Turkey-Armenia normalization process. The Turkish government misjudged the situation, and did not take into account the influence of Azerbaijan. For Turks, “[m]aking a rapprochement was a play toward the U.S. and Congress (to get rid of the genocide resolutions),” said Thomas Goltz, a political science scholar at Montana State University. “What got sacrificed was the special relationship with Azerbaijan. It was a huge blow.”

However, Suat Kiniklioglu, the head of the U.S.-Turkey inter-parliamentary friendship caucus, says that such an argument does not hold up. “It writes openly in the protocols that the ‘regional conflicts will be resolved by peaceful means,’” he said. “We’re not talking about the Middle East. This evidently refers to the Karabagkh issue.” But the Armenians could argue that it means Azerbaijan should not use military force against them, and they worry about what will happen as they watch Azerbaijan increase its defense budget.

In fact, “Armenians are not trying to normalize their relationship with Turkey for the sake of normalization,” Kiniklioglu told me. They are “trying to position themselves in a more advantageous place on the Karabagh issue after opening the borders with Turkey.” Turkey is trying to gain sympathy within the international community and find a new way to fight the genocide claims. Why shouldn’t the Armenians do the same thing with their own issues? If not naïve, Turkish leadership failed to understand why the Armenians were interested in signing the protocols. Afterall, Turkey closed its border with Armenia after a massive attack on Karabagh.

Berman was right. Turkey’s parliament will not pass the protocols any time soon, and they will surely blame him and his colleagues in Congress for that failure. In the end, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s vote gave Turkey a bigger victory than it could have realized.

Based in Washington, D.C., Tulin Daloglu is a correspondent for Turkey’s HABERTÜRK. In the 2002 general election, she ran for a seat in Parliament as a member of the New Turkey Party. Her e-mail is [email protected]

March 10, 2010
Britain has ‘no financial interest’ in Armenia

Great Britain will not recognize the ‘Armenian genocide’ in the near future.

Turkey is an important economic, political and strategic partner for Great Britain and as long as this continues, the issue of the Armenian genocide will not be on the agenda of the British parliament or government, the former British ambassador to Armenia, David Miller, said on 9 March, according to Aykakan zhamanak newspaper.

Miller was speaking at the screening of a film about the Armenian genocide at the London School of Economics.

‘Armenia is not Azerbaijan with which Britain has financial interests. Armenia is not Georgia which is of great strategic importance. Armenia is interesting for Britain only in terms of the prevention of war in the region,’ Miller said.

News-Armenia

March 10, 2010
Georgian Human Rights Groups Meet Western Diplomats

Civil Georgia, Tbilisi / 10 Mar.2010

Georgian human rights and advocacy groups met with British, French and U.S. ambassadors in Tbilisi on March 10 to convey their concerns regarding recent cases of, as they put it, targeting human rights groups and activists.

Representatives from Human Rights Centre (HRC), Georgian Young Lawyers Association (GYLA) and Multinational Georgia, an umbrella organization for dozens of NGOs working on ethnic and religious minority issues, participated in the meeting held in the office of HRC.

“There have been cases of direct or indirect pressure on activists and human rights groups and we wanted to inform ambassadors about these cases,” Ucha Nanuashvili, head of Human Rights Centre, said.

He said, among other issues, the case of Arnold Stepanian, founder of Multinational Georgia and representative of Armenian community in Georgia, was raised during the meeting.

Some Georgian media outlets alleged recently Stepanian was working for the Russian intelligence. Posts made by anonymous users on several Russian internet discussion forums were cited as source of information.

One of such reports was aired recently by Tbilisi-based Real TV, a station going out in Tbilisi through cable. Its 9-minute long report on the issue opens with footage from a meeting of leaders of Alliance for Georgia (Irakli Alasania, Davit Usupashvili, Davit Gamkrelidze and Sozar Subari) with representatives of Armenian community, also attended by Arnold Stepanian; the footage is accompanied by voiceover saying: “Irakli Alasania, Davit Usupashvili, Davit Gamkrelidze and Sozar Subari are sitting alongside with a presumed special agent of Russia’s Federal Security Service Arnold Stepanian.”

In general targeting opposition politicians has become a hallmark of Real TV; but the way how the station does it has become a source of criticism from many journalist and media experts saying that the station’s reports are often mudslinging.

After the meeting in HRC office, French Ambassador Eric Fournier told a reporter from Real TV: “Your channel has specifically targeted some members of the opposition to make a very cynical portrait of them and it has been considered as concern by many of us.”

John Bass, the U.S. ambassador, said the meeting aimed at getting “first-hand impression, first-hand assessment” about the human rights landscape in Georgia.

“It’s part of our broad interaction with wide range of organizations so that we can assess human rights situation as part of our broad commitment to help Georgia to realize its goals of membership in Euro-Atlantic community,” Bass said.

Denis Keefe, the British ambassador, said work of human rights groups was “fundamental to Georgia’s democratic development.”

“We have good cooperation with number of these NGOs… and we have very useful and serious discussion,” Keefe said.

Ucha Nanuashvili of HRC said that another case raised with the diplomats was related to a long-time investigative journalist Vakhtang Komakhidze, who has requested asylum in Switzerland, citing pressure from the authorities.

On February 26 eighteen human rights and advocacy groups released a joint statement expressing concern over, as they put it, smear campaign against them.

“Information campaign against human rights organizations has intensified since December 2009. Those media outlets, which are either controlled by or have links with the authorities, have reported biased stories one after another, where some human rights groups were portrayed as the country’s enemies working against public interests,” a joint statement by 18 non-governmental organizations.

March 10, 2010
The Meds Yeghern and Turkish Intellectuals

PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo No. 86
Breaking the Nation’s Taboo

The Meds Yeghern and Turkish Intellectuals

PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo No. 86

Nona Shahnazarian
Center for Pontic and Caucasian Studies, Kuban Social and Economic Institute (Krasnodar) September 2009 (Dr Nona Shahnazarian is an anthropologist at Kuban University and a researcher at the Center for Pontic and Caucasus Studies, Krasnodar, Russian Federation (shahnon @ mail.ru).)

An Apology Action
On December 12, 2008, a group of Turkish intellectuals launched an internet campaign to apologize for the World War I-era slaughter of Armenians in Turkey. Significantly, the “apology campaign” did not employ the highly disputed term “genocide” (soykırım), opting instead for a Turkish translation of the term commonly used in the Armenian language, the “Great Catastrophe” (Meds Yeghern or, in Turkish, Büyük Felaket). Signatories to the apology declared:

My conscience does not accept the insensitivity [shown in] the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.

By July 26, 2009, more than 30,000 members of the Turkish public had signed the online apology. As journalist Suzan Fraser noted, the apology campaign appeared to be “a sign that many in Turkey are ready to break a long-held taboo against acknowledging Turkish culpability for the deaths.” At the same time, many in Turkey criticized the campaign; a group of nearly 60 retired diplomats called it “unfair, wrong, and unfavorable to [Turkey’s] national interests.”

In Turkish intellectual circles and society as a whole, a fierce intellectual struggle has begun, and a schism is now developing with regard to the treatment of the Armenian genocide. The predominant group, which corresponds to the political right wing, uses the Turkish term “deportation” (tehcir), a publicly acceptable concept, for the
1915 events.

Representing this view, the Turkish Historical Society insists on a particular account of the events. First, there were ethnic cleansings during World War I, in which 450,000 Armenians perished, largely as a result of illness contracted during the deportation. Second, these victims were not shot in an organized manner, nor did they all die at once. Third, the persecution was not centrally coordinated, refuting allegations that it was a policy organized and executed by the Turkish government. Finally, killings took place on both the Turkish and Armenian sides, and, therefore, cannot be considered genocide. By comparing Turkish social realities in 1915-23 with the practices of the Third Reich, Turkish historians have concluded that the two tragedies simply do not represent the same phenomenon.

Perhaps as a sign that a post-national narrative of Turkey’s history is developing, a group of Turkish scholars have come to represent another branch of critically thinking Turkish intellectuals–the so-called “critical left wing.” One of the pioneers of critical discourse is Taner Akçam, the first Turkish historian to openly study the Armenian genocide. In Akçam’s view, according to Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker, “the key to understanding the Turks’ refusal to discuss [the events] of 1915” is the linkage between those events and Turkey’s formative nation-building process from 1920 to 1923. Kolbert explains that the Armenian genocide was:

a campaign of ethnic cleansing [that] changed the demographics of eastern Anatolia….For the Turks to acknowledge the genocide would thus mean admitting that their country was founded by war criminals and that its existence depended on their crimes. This, in Akçam’s words, ‘would call into question the state’s very identity.’

“What the World Knows and Turkey Does Not”
In 2005, three Turkish universities cosponsored a conference entitled “Ottoman Armenians during the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy.” The conference, which was open only to Turkish scholars, was the first in Turkey to address the issue of the Armenian genocide. Ninety years after the tragic events of 1915, the participants, Turkey’s own academics and intellectuals, were ready “to collectively raise their voices [which] differ from…the official [state version of history], and put forth their own contributions.”

The conference, however, was postponed due to government pressure. As Suzan Fraser noted, the postponement may have been an indication that Turkey was not yet “ready to tolerate dissenting voices on sensitive subjects.” It might also have been considered a blow “to Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union, which is pressuring the country to adopt greater freedoms.” The conference was criticized by Turkish officials such as then-Justice Minister Cemil Cicek, who said it “went against government efforts to counter [the] Armenian campaign to have the killings recognized as genocide.” He went as far as to call the organizers of the conference “traitors” and the conference itself a “stab in the back to the Turkish nation” in a session of the Turkish parliament.

Though the conference was ultimately held at a private university amid rowdy protests, it prompted the creation of Article 301, which made it illegal to denigrate Turkey, “Turkishness,” or Turkish state institutions. Author Orhan Pamuk was charged under this new law after a February 2005 interview with a Swiss newspaper in which he said, “30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” The target of a hate campaign, Pamuk temporarily left Turkey, although the charges were subsequently dropped. Many Turks believe Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 for political reasons.

Pamuk was only one of some 60 writers and publishers to face such charges in 2005. Another Turkish author, Elif Safak, ran into trouble after a character in her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, declared that her grandparents had “lost all their relatives at the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but she herself had been brainwashed to deny the genocide.” As Kolbert writes, the charges were eventually dropped after Safak successfully argued that a “statement by a fictional person could not be used to prosecute a real one.”

Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union have increased the attention of external observers to problems of ethnic minorities’
rights, cultural diversity, political Islam, and freedom of expression in Turkey. The charges against Pamuk elicited an international reaction and led many to question Turkey’s readiness to join the EU.
Camiel Eurlings, one of five members of the European Parliament who observed Pamuk’s trial, remarked:

Freedom of expression is one of the fundamental rights Turkey has to respect. This is essential for Turkey’s accession to the EU. The cases as filed against Orhan Pamuk, Hrant Dink, [and] Ragip Zarakolu [among others] are not in line with the European Convention on Human Rights and could have a negative effect on Turkey’s accession process.

That said, EU membership no longer holds the same appeal in Turkish society as it once did. According to the Journal of Turkish Weekly, just 52 percent of Turks support EU membership. For many Turks that oppose membership, especially among nationalist, conservative/traditionalist, and political Islamist circles, denying the Armenian genocide serves an eminently practical political purpose
– helping prevent Turkey from ever becoming a serious candidate for EU membership.

The January 2007 assassination by an ultranationalist Turkish youth of Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink, a vocal advocate of Turkish-Armenian dialogue, proved a turning point in the freedom of expression in Turkey. At his funeral, tens of thousands of mourners marched through Istanbul to condemn the assassination, chanting, “We are all Armenians” and “We are all Hrant Dink.” A series of workshops were launched by Sabanci University in 2008 and 2009 in memory of Dink. After his murder, criticism of Article 301 increased substantially, leading to parliamentary proposals for its repeal.

The end of the taboo against discussion of the Armenian tragedy has led to unprecedented turbulence in Turkish society and an avalanche of admissions that many contemporary Turks are actually closely related to Armenians. Many more have admitted that their great-grandmothers were Armenians who secretly married Turkish or Kurdish men and converted to Islam after 1915. This subject has lent extreme gender sensitivity to the discourse about the genocide. Confessions have poured out in autobiographical novels recounting the lives and confessions of grandmothers and great-grandmothers.

An Armenian Response
Marginalization and isolation, largely products of the post-Soviet transition, have contributed to a continuously growing identity of victimization in Armenia. Among Armenians, a fierce debate rages about the legitimacy of Turkey’s preconditions for reconciliation. After a year of pronouncements anticipating an improvement in Armenian-Turkish relations, some Armenian analysts believed that the two countries’
efforts at so-called “soccer diplomacy” had “stalled.” This seemed especially true, according to an analyst for the EurasiaNet website, after Ankara “expressed its intent to link the reopening of its border with Armenia [to] a comprehensive solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.” Yerevan, for its part, has asserted, as a reporter for ArmeniaNow put it, that “Armenian-Turkish rapprochement must take place without preconditions and should not be linked [to] either the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict” or the campaign for genocide recognition.

In this context, the reaction to the Turkish “apology” initiative in Armenia, Nagorno-Karabagh, and the diaspora has been ambivalent. On the one hand, Armenians of all classes and social strata have recognized and are grateful for what they have been waiting 90 years to receive; on the other hand, Armenians continue to feel vulnerable thanks to the “preconditions” Turkish politicians have established for opening the Armenian-Turkish border.

The Armenian intellectual critique of the apology campaign has been articulated the best by Laurent Leylekian, executive director of the European Armenian Federation (Armenian National Committee of Europe), in a May 2009 speech published in the Armenian Reporter. Critiquing both Turkish intellectuals and Kemalism as a social phenomenon, Leylekian notes a wide range of anti-Kemalist intellectuals in Turkey, some of whom “oppose the Turkish state system” while others “simply want to improve its image.” Regardless of where they stand, Leylekian says that most of these Turkish intellectuals share the political priorities of the ruling AK Party: support for Turkey’s European Union membership; support for institutional reforms (democracy and the rule of law); and respect for human rights and minorities.

At the same time, Leylekian observes that even Turkish intellectuals critical of Kemalism still share “the national goal of getting rid of unwelcome questions or at least their political significance.” They approach the Armenian genocide less as a “political crime in need of an international legal response” than as something that should be dealt with “solely within the Turkish nation and in a way that will be painless for [it].”

Leylekian outlines five methods Turkish intellectuals employ for this purpose. He calls these methods a discourse of humiliation and strategies of containment, formal empathy, rejecting of extremes, and deprivation. A discourse of humiliation “plays upon the Europeans’
guilty conscience toward the Muslim world” and implies that the focus on genocide recognition is a convenient cover for the West’s shabby treatment of Turkey. The strategy of containment seeks to frame the issue of genocide solely within the confines of academic discourse.
Strategies of formal empathy and the rejection of extremes seek to establish that Armenians and Turks all suffered together and that all manifestations of extremism should be rejected equally. Finally, the strategy of deprivation seeks to keep Armenians themselves out of the Turkish debate about genocide. Leylekian concludes by saying that he really sees only two preconditions to dialogue: recognition of the genocide, “not only as a historical fact but also as a political problem today,” and the “acceptance of the political, legal, and moral responsibility of the present Turkish state” as the successor to the one responsible for the genocide.

In the end, unfortunately, the discourse among nationalist circles in Turkey and Armenia is essentialist and one-dimensional. For Turks and Armenians both, the Armenian genocide ( “catastrophe” or “tragedy”) is directly connected to fundamental questions of collective identity. In Turkey, this fact combines with complex processes involving a desperate battle between the ruling Islamists, who are eager to join Europe and attempting to overcome their problems with neighboring countries, and the military-patriotic establishment. For Armenians, the Karabagh war and its consequences of isolation and dependence represent a kind of continuation to genocide, a perception which is reaffirmed by Turkey’s biased defense of Azerbaijani interests in the reconciliation process. Whatever victory Armenians have obtained in Karabagh represents a resolution to this victimization complex, making Turkish preconditions to normalization appear nonsensical and pushing Armenians to be suspicious of the apology movement altogether. In the end, symbolic values and traumatic memories continue to exert a pull on both state policy and social relations.

PONARS Eurasia publications are funded through the International Program of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

(c) PONARS Eurasia 2009

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Nona Shahnazaryan

Nona Shahnazaryan is Associate Researcher at Center for Pontic and Caucasian Studies (Krasnodar, Russia, from 1999 to present) and Lecturer, Kuban State University (from 2002 – 2005), Kuban Socio-Economic Institute in Krasnodar (from 2006 to present). She received her Candidate s Degree in Social Anthropology from the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, (17 May 2005) and has conducted fieldwork in Russia, USA, Armenia, Georgia, and Nagorno-Karabagh through grants from Memorial (Historical and Human Right organization, Moscow; 2003, 2004), the Soros Foundation (1999), and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2004), The Carnegie Fund (2006), Fulbright (2006-2007).

Her recent articles on the Caucasus include, “The Virtual Widows of Migrant Husbands in War-Torn Mountainous Karabagh,” in: Generations, Kinship and Care. Gendered Provisions of Social Security in Central Eastern Europe. Ed: H. Haukanes and F. Pine, Volume No.17. University of Bergen. Center for Women?s and Gender Research. 2005; with Artyom Kosmarski, “Krasnodar, Karabakh, Moscow: Reflections on a Post-Soviet Anthropologist at Home/ in the Field”. Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 16 (2007), pp. 161-169. Los Angeles; “Gender Scenarios of Ethnic Conflicts: Narratives of the Karabakh War”. Ab Imperio. Studies of New Imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space. 1/2007. Moscow; “Femina Sovietica: Survival in Caucasian Way”. Vestnik Evrazii, 4, ed. S. Panarin. Moscow, 2006; and La situation linguistique des Arméniens du Haut-Karabagh : l’emprunt lexical comme création intralinguistique // Revue du Monde Armenien Moderne et Contemporain, 6/2001, Paris, Societe des Etudes Armeniennes. P. 51-73.

March 10, 2010
The Armenian Genocide Resolution is a Farce all Around”

Ermeni Tasarisi Elestirisi

ABD Temsilciler Meclisi Dis Iliskiler komitesinde Ermeni iddialarini iceren karar tasarisinin 04 Mart 2010 persembe gunu yapilan oylamada bir oy farkla kabul edilmesi ile baglantili olarak, yabanci medyada cok sayida yorum ve kose yazisi yayinlandi. Asagida, Henry Barkey’in Washington Post’ta yer alan makalesine yanit olarak bir fransiz arastirmaci Maxime Gauin’in okuyucu mektubunu aktariyorum. Gauin, bu yazisinda, jenosid iddiasinin neden temelsiz bir suclama oldugunu ozlu bicimde acikliyor.
Pulat Tacar [[email protected]]

Turkish Forum danisma kurulu Uyesi,

Buyukelci (e),

UNESCO Türkiye Milli Komisyonu Başkan Vekili

MAXIME GAUIN’IN HENRY BARKEY’IN

WASHINGTON POST’TA CIKAN MAKALESINE

GONDERDIGI OKUYUCU MEKTUBU

“Mister Barkey,

Your article “The Armenian Genocide Resolution is a Farce all Around” https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/02/AR2010030202375.html?waporef=obinsite) is an interesting and iconoclast analysis; unfortunately, among the pertinent remarks, there is this big error:

“To be clear, the overwhelming historical evidence demonstrates that what took place in 1915 was genocide.”

1. Many respectable historians criticize the “genocide” label, including Roderic H. Davison, Gwynne Dyer, Edward J. Erickson, Michael M. Gunter, Paul B. Henze, J. C. Hurewitz, Yitzchak Kerem, Bernard Lewis, Guenter Lewy, Heath Lowry, Justin McCarthy, Andrew Mango, Robert Mantran, Jeremy Salt, Stanford J. Shaw, Norman Stone, Gilles Veinstein and Robert F. Zeidner.

2. There is simply no evidence of a genocide intent.

— Gwynne Dyer demonstrated as early as 1973 that Mevlanzade Rifat’s book is a crude falsification, and even Yves Ternon, strongly favorable to Armenian nationalists, considers this work as more than dubtious.

— The “Andonian documents” were proved to be forgeries, more than twenty-five years ago: Christopher Walker, who believed in 1980 to the authenticity of “Andonian documents” suppressed almost all references to this material in the second edition of his book (Armenia. The Survival of a Nation, London, Routledge, 1990), then wrote in an article that “doubt must remain until and unless the documents or similar ones themselves resurface and are published in a critical edition” (“World War I and the Armenian Genocide”, in Richard G. Hovannisian, [ed.], The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Time, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1997, p. 247). Absolutely no effort in this sense was made since 1997: it is perhaps the best evidence that Andonian material is nothing but a forgery.

— The “Ten Commandments” are a another forgery. As early as 1973 Gwynne Dyer demonstrated that the authenticity is highly questionable. More recently, even the strongly pro-Armenian historian Donald Bloxham noticed (“Donald Bloxham replies”, History Today, July 2005, Vol. 55, Issue 7) : “Most serious historians accept that this document is dubious at best, and probably a fake. It was the subject of controversy some twenty years before Dadrian rediscovered it for publication in 1993. The document’s donor originally offered it for sale to the British authorities in February 1919, a time when numerous fraudulent documents were in circulation.”

The late Stanford J. Shaw, former professor of Turkish history at Harvard, University of California-Los Angeles and Bilkent noticed: “The British and French authorities to who they had been handed pointed out that they were at complete variance with Ottoman style and vocabulary and were obvious forgeries, as a result never using them in courts of law” (From Empire to Republic. The Turkish War of National Liberation. 1918-1923, Ankara, 2000, tome I, p. 316). Similarly, British historian Jeremy Salt, considers that the text is “certainly a fake” ).

— Ambassador Morgenthau’s story, which was not considered as a reliable source by actual American specialists like George Abel Schreiner and Horace C. Peterson, is refuted even by the personal archives of Morgenthau himself. See Ralph Elliot Cook, The United States and the Armenian Question, 1894-1924, Ph.D. dissertation, Flertcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1957, p. 129; Heath Lowry, The Story Behind “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story”, Istanbul, The Isis Press, 1990 (available online: http://www.eraren.org/index.php?Lisan=en&Page=YayinIcerik&SayiNo=19) and Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 2005, pp. 140-142.

— The Special Organization was accused by Arthur Beylerian, V. Dadrian and Taner Akçam to be a key of “racial extermination”, but only in using falsified quotations and in neglecting the archival material of this organization, as demonstrated by Guenter Lewy and Edward J. Erickson: https://www.meforum.org/748/revisiting-the-armenian-genocide https://www.meforum.org/991/armenian-massacres-new-records-undercut-old-blame

— The Turkish martial-courts of 1919-1920 violated all the basic rights of defense, and all their original material is lost, as explained by Guenter Lewy in his article and his mentioned before. See also Ferudun Ata, İşgal İstanbul’unda Tehcir Yargılamaları (“The Istanbul Trials of Relocation”), Ankara, TTK, 2005.

3. It is not true that Western sources support mostly the “genocide” allegations.

US journalist George Abel Schreiner, who traveled extensively in Anatolia, wrote that “Turkish ineptness, more than intentional brutality, was responsible for the hardships the Armenian subjected to” (The Craft Sinister: A Diplomatic History of the Great War and Its Causes, New York, G. Albert, 1920, pp. 124-125).

Swedish journalist G. H. Pravitz published an account of his trip in Eastern Anatolia then in Arab provinces, in his newspaper Nya Dagligt Allehanda, April 23, 1917. He concluded that there was no campaign of extermination and that all the allegations of massacres which he checked were false (http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/swedish-eyewitness.htm).

Heinrich Bergfeld, German consul in Trebizond, who served eight years in Turkey and spoke Turkish, checked rumors of “massacre” in his region, together with the US consul Oscar Heizer, on July 17, 1915: they concluded that the rumors were baseless; in other occasions, Bergfeld denounced crimes against other convoys of displaced Armenian, who indeed occurred this time (Guenter Lewy, op. cit., pp. 145-146).

William Peet, the American head of international Armenian relief effort in Istanbul, recalled that Talat Pasha “gave prompt attention to my requests, frequently greeting me as I called upon him in his office with the introductory remark: ‘We are partners, what can I do for you today?’” (Louise Jenison Peet, No Less Honor: The Biography of William Wheelock Peet, Chattanooga, E. A. Andrews, 1939, p. 170).

H. Philips, diplomat serving in US embassy of Istanbul, sent on September 1^st, 1916, a report concluding that atrocities were committed by local officials, without orders from central government (Guenter Lewy, op. cit., p. 231).

Otto Liman von Sanders, chief of German military mission in Ottoman Empire, and not exactly a Turkophile, explained that “In the execution of expulsions many of the terrible and damnable cases of ruthlessness may unquestionably be ascribed to the minor official whose personal hatred and rapacity gave the measures ordered from above enhancement of harshness that was not intended [by Ottoman government]” (Five Years in Turkey, Annapolis, U.S. Naval Institute, 1927, p. 157; translated from German by Carl Reichmann).

The report of General Harbord, approved by US Senate in 1920, does not mention any “extermination campaign” but war crimes from both sides (see the full text online: . The report of Emory Niles and Arthur Sutherland supports the same conclusion, with more details ).

Moreover, the compilation of German documents published by Johannes Lepsius in 1919 was proved to be not only selective, but also full of dishonest ellipses and even containing pure and simple manipulations of texts, as a systematic comparison between the originals of German archives and the published version demonstrates (Cem Özgönül, Der Mythos Eines Völkermordes, Cologne, Önel Verlag, 2005).

4. The “genocide recognitions” forget the crimes committed by Armenian nationalists.

— The crimes committed against the Armenian population herself.

Armenian Revolutionary Federation and Hunchakian Party killed many decent Armenians, who were loyal to Ottoman Empire, or at least, denounced the methods of gangsters used by revolutionary committees, including the Armenian chief of Ottoman police in Bitlis, assassinated in 1898, and the mayor of Van Bedros Kapamajian, assassinated in 1912 (see, among others: Kapriel S. Papazian, Patriotism Perverted, Boston, Baikar Press, 1934, pp. 13-18 and pp. 68-73; Justin McCarthy, “The Armenian Uprising and the Ottomans”, Review of Armenian Studies, 7-8, 2005).

The Armenian revolutionary committees claimed their responsibility in the massacres of Armenians of WWI, explaining that they organized insurrections and recruitment of volunteers for Russian an French army in guessing perfectly the tragic consequence (Gareguine Pasdermadjian, Why Armenia Should Be Free, Boston, Hairenik Press, 1918, p. 43; Aram Turabian, Les Volontaires arméniens sous les drapeaux français, Marseille, Imprimerie nouvelle, 1917, pp. 41-42).

— Then, the great massacres of Muslim and Jewish civilians.

Haig Shiroyan, an Ottoman Armenian who became an US citizens, wrote in his Memories: “The Russian victorious armies, reinforced by Armenian volunteers, had slaughtered every Turk they could find, destroyed every house they penetrated” (Smiling Through the Tears, New York, 1954, p. 186). Niles and Sutherland, in their report mentioned before, noticed: “Armenians massacred Musulmans on a large scale with many refinements of cruelties” and that “Armenians are responsible for most of the destruction done to towns and villages”.

Ottoman archives are full of first-hand accounts about atrocities committed by Armenian volunteers, including burning of babies, cutting of women’s breast, etc.; many documents were translated into Western languages: https://louisville.edu/a-s/history/turks/Documents2.pdf https://louisville.edu/a-s/history/turks/turcs_et_armeniens.pdf Archeological excavations, carried out in Eastern Anatolia thanks to documents and very old survivors, discovered several thousands of skeletons, from 1986 to 2003, identified thanks to specific clothes, small Korans, bullets, and, for the last mass graves, thanks to DNA tests.

— Finally, the Armenian terrorism which supported the “recognition movement” — and was supported by ARF, Hunchak and some personalities of Ramkavar/AGBU. Armenian terrorists killed at least 70 persons, wounded more than 500, and perpetrating 160 attacks by explosives.

One of the Armenian terrorist groups was simply a branch of ARF (Francis P. Hyland, Armenian Terrorism: the Past, the Present, the Prospects, Boulder-San Francisco-Oxford, Westview Press, 1991, pp. 61-62; Gaïdz Minassian, Guerre et terrorisme arméniens, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2002, pp. 28-37 and 106-109; Yves Ternon, La Cause arménienne, Paris, Le Seuil, 1983, pp. 218-224). ARF of Californian and elsewhere celebrates the racist murderer Hampig Sassounian, sentenced to life by Californian justice, currently in a Californian jail (among many other examples: www.asbarez.com/45716/sassounian-thanks-community-for-continued-support/ www.asbarez.com/46446/more-than-70-000-raised-for-hampig-sassounian-defense-effort/ www.fra-france.com/print_article.php?id=56).

Mourad Topalian, one of the most active Armenian American lobbyists, former president of Armenian National Committee of America, was sentenced in 2001 to 37 months of jail for illegal storing of war weapons and explosives, linked to a terrorist organization. Vicken Hovsepian, principal leader of ARF in USA, was sentenced in 1984 to six years of jail for participation to an attempt of bombing.

Who recalled the terrorist past activities of these peoples during the debate about “genocide” resolution?

In hoping to read more balanced accounts of WWI and Armenian terrorism in your articles,

Regards,

Maxime Gauin,

Paris”

March 10, 2010