DOCUMENTING A ‘SHAMEFUL ACT’: TURKISH EMIGRE HISTORIAN WRITES ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Holger Herwig, Freelance
The Gazette (Montreal)
February 10, 2007 Saturday
Final Edition
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
By Taner Akcam
Metropolitan Books, 483 pages, $40
"What we are dealing with here," Ottoman Minister of the Interior Talat
Pasha stated in June 1915, "is the annihilation of the Armenians."
His colleague Cemal Pasha set the number of Armenians slaughtered
at 800,000; other estimates run as low as 200,000 or as high as 1
million. Mustafa Kemal, father of modern Turkey, accepted Cemal’s
figure for what he termed a "shameful act" carried out by a small
clique in the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).
Of the original Ottoman Armenian population of 2 million, between
200,000 and 600,000 survived. Ankara today acknowledges that between
300,000 and 600,000 non-Muslims died in 1915, but insists that this
was a "justifiable" act of state necessity. Its refusal to acknowledge
the genocide is a major stain on its bid to enter the European Union.
Taner Akcam, an eminent Turkish emigre historian who today teaches
at the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of
Minnesota, has spent years putting the story of the Armenian genocide
together. It has not been easy. The CUP Central Committee and the
notorious Special Organization it established to carry out its policy
systematically purged the records to hide their roles in the genocide;
numerous records of trials of perpetrators of the "massacre" have
either been destroyed or scattered; and a general amnesty issued as
part of the Treaty of Lausanne (1922-23) effectively covered up any
follow-up trials in the 1920s. By then, Kemal’s central objective
was Turkish independence rather than justice for past acts.
Still, Akcam has put together a convincing case of central,
state-planned genocide on the basis of thousands of records that
escaped the official censors: eyewitness accounts from European
doctors, nurses and missionaries; diplomatic reports from neutral and
allied ambassadors, consuls and military officers; and some surviving
trial records.
Three attempts were made to bring those responsible to justice.
First, the Ottoman government set up a series of special courts-martial
to try the guilty in order to obtain more lenient terms at the Paris
Peace Conference. Second, under Articles 226 to 230 of the Treaty of
Sevres (1920), the Allied Powers tried to establish a legal corpus for
"crimes against humanity" and to seek prosecution in an international
court. And third, Britain took many of the suspects under custody
and removed them to Malta for trial.
This, too, failed, largely because Kemal threatened to execute one
British prisoner of war for every CUP official hanged.
The author rejects the standard view that the Armenian genocide was
an "isolated aberration." Instead, he places it within the context of
the turbulent years following the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. Stunned not
only by its unexpected military defeat, but also by the loss of 60 per
cent of its European territory, the Ottoman government set out under a
program of official "Pan-Turkism" or "Pan-Turanism" to "homogenize" the
population of Anatolia – and, in the words of War Minister Enver Pasha,
to extend it "from the Adriatic Sea to the waters of India." This
was done by dispersing and relocating non-Turkish Muslims like Kurds
and Arabs, and by expelling some 2 million non-Muslim, non-Turkish
peoples like Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks from the region.
Especially the Armenians, the "world’s oldest Christian people," were
"resettled" in what are today the Syrian and Iraqi deserts. En route,
hundreds of thousands were starved, beaten, shot and drowned, mainly
by the CUP’s Special Organization, but also by the Ottoman Third Army,
its irregular Kurdish Hamidiye cavalry, jailed convicts and the Muslim
refugees only recently forced out of European Turkey. The Armenians’
wealth was confiscated and their property destroyed or parcelled
out to create a new Muslim bourgeoisie. American, Austrian, German
and Scandinavian diplomats reported the genocide; none of their
governments took action to stop it.
The book is not a one-sided tale of Ottoman blood lust. Akcam also
chronicles the slaughter and dispossession of the Muslim populations
in the Empire’s Christian areas, the forced Muslim migrations after
the Crimean War (1854-56) and the banditry of the Armenian volunteers
who in 1914-15 joined Russian forces in the Caucasus and committed
countless atrocities against Muslims.
But what made the Armenian genocide so particularly appalling is not
only its scale, but also the fact that it was sponsored by a central
state government. And that its planners and practitioners used the
cold terminology – "total extirpation," "complete annihilation,"
"racial homogeneity" – of a later genocide. Interestingly, Max von
Scheubner-Richter as German vice-consul at Erzerum in 1915 reported the
Ottoman policy of "annihilation" of the Armenians to his government;
as a Nazi ideologue, he died at Adolf Hitler’s side during the infamous
"Beer Hall putsch" of November 1923.
Genocide has no borders.
Taner Akcam speaks Friday at 5 p.m. at Chancellor Day Hall of McGill
University, 3644 Peel St. Holger H. Herwig is a professor of history
at the University of Calgary.
GRAPHIC: Photo: METROPOLITAN BOOKS; Taner Akcam describes the Armenian
genocide as state-planned, he also chronicles atrocities against
Muslims. ;
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
