Ha’aretz, Israel
April 17 2005

Waiting for the denial to end

By Dalia Shehori

How long will Turkey continue to deny the Armenian genocide, and why
is Israel helping it?

Next week marks the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in
Turkey. On April 24, 1915, some 300 Armenian leaders – authors,
intellectuals and professionals – were arrested in Constantinople,
deported and eventually exterminated. On that day, 5,000 more
Armenians were murdered in the capital of the Ottoman empire. In the
following years, 1.5 million of the 2.5 million Armenians living in
Turkey were liquidated.

Although the Turkish prime minister acknowledged recently the need to
reexamine the issue, Turkey’s official stand has not changed. It
persists in stating that there was no genocide.

The denial angers the Armenians. Not only is it not true, they argue,
but it does not enable them to grieve for the extermination of their
people. As long as the Turks deny it, the Armenians say, we must
devote all our resources to convince the world that genocide did take
place in the years 1915-1918, and the Ottoman Empire and its heir,
the Turkish government, bear the blame.

Every year, as April 24 approaches, the Turkish government tensely
checks various parliaments in the world for resolutions recognizing
the Armenian genocide. If such a decision is made, Turkey exerts
steamroller pressure on the adopting state to change it.

Two years ago a member of the Armenian community in Israel, Naomi
Nalbandian, was chosen to light a torch on Mount Herzl on Memorial
Day as the representative of the rehabilitation ward of Hadassah
Hospital on Mount Scopus. She was forced – following the Turkish
government’s insistent demand to the Foreign Ministry – to change the
text she intended to read at the ceremony. Instead of “third
generation of survivors of the Armenian holocaust, which took place
in 1915” in the original text, Nalbandian presented herself as
“daughter of the long-suffering Armenian nation.” Incidentally, the
use of the word “holocaust” in the Armenian context raises objections
in another quarter – Yad Vashem and other Jewish organizations object
to it, wishing to preserve the Holocaust as a unique term to mark the
Nazi liquidation of the Jews.

Expulsion and murder

The Turks’ denial of the genocide is the focal point of a study day
entitled “Genocide in the 20th century – 90 years to the Armenian
genocide,” held at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute 10 days ago with
the participation of Israeli and Armenian historians. One of the
participants was Dr. Ara Sarafian, head of the Gomidas Institute in
London, which promotes and disseminates research, scholarship and
analysis of the modern Armenian experience. Sarafian brought books
published last year at the institute’s initiative about the Armenian
genocide, including “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” based on the
diaries of Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to Turkey from
1913-1916. Another book was the memoirs of Abram I. Elkus, who
succeeded Morgenthau in the years 1916 and 1917.

“Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” was first published in 1918, but
Sarafian says, “We find ourselves having to prove that the genocide
took place, so we published again a series of documents and memoirs.
Quoting archival material is not enough. The denial will persist.
Therefore it is necessary to publish memoirs, diaries, letters and
documents systematically.”

Sarafian preferred to focus on American documents because they are in
English and accessible to all. The United States was not involved in
World War II until April 1917; consequently Americans – consuls,
missionaries and citizens – were present at various places where
Armenians were murdered and briefed the State Department regularly.
At the end of 1915 they served as the only authorized source of
information in the Western world on the Armenian genocide.

Sarafian cites, for example, the reports of American consul Leslie
Davis on the gathering, deportation and extermination of Armenians –
men, women and children – in the Harput area in central Turkey. He
says these deportations were systematic. “The state officials had a
list of names. They would read out your name, put you in a caravan
and deport you. Then came the reports about the murder of these
people. Consul Davis personally investigated a few places where the
murder was committed and reported to the State Department … he
described the valleys where the deportees were taken and murdered. He
talks of thousands of people and says things like: `I knew there were
several caravans in a certain valley, because the corpses were in
various stages of rot.'”

Sarafian says that although all the murder victims’ personal effects
had been taken from them before their murder, Davis knew they were
Armenian because their personal papers were found at the murder site.

Ambassador Morgenthau “was the first person to notice that what
happened at Harput was happening in other places throughout the
empire…if you read his diaries after April 1915, you will see that
the word `Armenian’ becomes the most commonly used noun. He was
obsessive about this issue. As he related in a private letter to his
son, Henry Morgenthau Jr., `Ottoman Armenians were like the people of
Israel in captivity, though they did not have a Moses to lead them
out of their predicament.’ This is very moving. There is a place in
our heart for Morgenthau as a righteous non-Armenian, who did much to
save Armenians.”

Morgenthau also wrote his son that the Turkish government was using
the fact that there was a state of war to wipe out the Armenian
people.

Together with the diaries of the American diplomats, Sarafian says
there is no substitute for the testimonies of Armenian survivors
“because they were there, they were the victims, and they are very
articulate.”

These testimonies are written in Armenian, and it is necessary to
publish at least some of them in English to answer the skeptics who
ask how Morgenthau could have known what was happening, if he was
based in Constantinople. We must publish everything possible, says
Sarafian, for “if we give the Turks a chance to get away not merely
with the slaughter but with the denial – it would serve as a
precedent for future denials … it’s very troubling that a state
with a population of 60 million refuses to confront history and make
the required concession to solve this issue once and for all.”

Israel is still denying

Professor Yair Auon of the Open University, author of the recently
published “The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide,”
expressed disappointment that Israel, as a state that represents the
Holocaust survivors and is supposed to be more sensitive than other
countries to the suffering of other nations, does not recognize the
Armenian genocide.

“Israel’s approach to other nations’ genocide, and especially the
Armenian genocide, harms our struggle to make the Holocaust part of
the collective memory of human society. While we help Turkey deny the
genocide – and Israel has regrettably become Turkey’s staunchest aide
in its denial policy – we are in fact desecrating the Holocaust’s
memory,” he says.

Auron and Yona Weitz, a Hebrew University anthropologist, quoted
Shimon Peres’ statements about the Armenian genocide. In 2001, when
he was foreign minister, Peres told Turkish Daily News that, “It is a
tragedy what the Armenians went through, but not a genocide.” Auron
said Peres’ position reflects Israel’s official stand today as well.
He added that the Education Ministry has been saying since 1994 that
the Armenian genocide would be taught in schools “this year or next
year” but in the schoolbooks it is referred to as a “tragedy,”
“pogroms,” “slaughter” – and not a genocide. Even university students
hardly know anything about the Armenian genocide.

Auron spoke of Yossi Sarid’s abortive effort to legitimize the
Armenian genocide when he was education minister. Five years ago, on
the 85th anniversary of the genocide, Sarid was invited to speak in
the Armenian church in the Old City. Sarid affirmed the genocide and
concluded his statement with a promise to include the Armenian
genocide in Israel’s secondary school history curriculum. But Ehud
Barak’s government hastened to express reservations about his
statement and explain to the Turks that Sarid was merely expressing
his own opinion.

Auron also criticized Israeli academia, noting that senior members of
it deny that a genocide took place and even doubt the reliability of
Morgenthau’s diaries. “They use the Turkish denial literature as
though it were the only literature dealing with the Armenian
genocide, and on that basis they claim there is no evidence that
Morgenthau’s diaries are not forged,” he said.

One of the Armenian genocide’s prominent deniers is Islam researcher
Professor Bernard Lewis. Lewis says the Armenians suffered terrible
massacres, but these were not committed as a result of a deliberate,
preconceived decision of the Ottoman government. In an interview with
the American Web site Book TV, Lewis said about three years ago:
“What happened to the Armenians was the result of a massive Armenian
armed rebellion against the Turks, which began even before war broke
out, and continued on a larger scale. Great numbers of Armenians,
including members of the armed forces, deserted, crossed the frontier
and joined the Russian forces invading Turkey. Armenian rebels
actually seized the city of Van and held it for a while, intending to
hand it over to the invaders. There was guerrilla warfare all over
Anatolia.”

He says there is proof that the Turkish government planned to deport
the Armenians from the sensitive areas but “no evidence of a decision
to massacre.” On the contrary, there is evidence of an unsuccessful
attempt to prevent it. He says appalling massacres were committed by
irregular soldiers and local villagers, who were reacting to what had
been done to them. Claiming that the numbers of Armenian dead are
uncertain, he acknowledged that 1 million deaths were likely.

Historian Dr. Claude Mutafian of the University of Paris said Turkey
is not willing to recognize the Armenian genocide because it was
based on ethnic cleansing, not only of the Armenians, but also of
other groups. Therefore it has been trying to rewrite history since
Ataturk’s days and claim that only Turks have lived in Turkey since
the beginning of time. Today Turkey is fighting for this more
intensely than ever because it wants to join the European Union, “and
this provides us with a new weapon to force the Turks to accept
history the way it was.”