GENOCIDE DENIERS
Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Ed, DC
Oct 16 2007
In the buildup to last week’s vote by a House of Representatives
committee officially calling for U.S. foreign policy to recognize
that a genocide of Armenians took place during World War I, at the
behest of the "Young Turk" government of the Ottoman Empire, a flurry
of advertising in American newspapers appeared from Turkey.
The ads discouraged the vote by House members, and called instead
for historians to figure out what happened in 1915. The ads quoted
such figures as Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, as saying:
"These historical circumstances require a very detailed and sober
look from historians." And State Department officials made similar
statements, saying as the vote was about to take place: "We think
that the determination of whether the events that happened to ethnic
Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire should be a matter for
historical inquiry."
Turkey’s government also has been quick to point American scholars
(there are only a handful, but Turkey knows them all) who back its
view that what’s needed with regard to 1915 is not to call it genocide,
but to figure out what to call it, and what actually took place.
Normally, you might expect historians to welcome the interest
of governments in convening scholars to explore questions of
scholarship. But in this case, scholars who study the period say that
the leaders of Turkey and the United States – along with that handful
of scholars – are engaged in a profoundly anti-historical mission:
trying to pretend that the Armenian genocide remains a matter of
debate instead of being a long settled question. Much of the public
discussion of the Congressional resolution has focused on geopolitics:
If the full House passes the resolution, will Turkey end its help
for U.S. military activities in Iraq?
But there are also some questions about the role of history and
historians in the debate. To those scholars of the period who accept
the widely held view that a genocide did take place, it’s a matter
of some frustration that top government officials suggest that these
matters are open for debate and that this effort is wrapped around
a value espoused by most historians: free and open debate.
"Ultimately this is politics, not scholarship," said Simon Payaslian,
who holds an endowed chair in Armenian history and literature at
Boston University. Turkey’s strategy, which for the first 60-70 years
after the mass slaughter was to pretend that it didn’t take place,
"has become far more sophisticated than before" and is explicitly
appealing to academic values, he said.
"They have focused on the idea of objectivity, the idea of ‘on the
one hand and the other hand,’ " he said. "That’s very attractive on
campuses to say that you should hear both sides of the story." While
Payaslian is quick to add that he doesn’t favor censoring anyone or
firing anyone for their views, he believes that it is irresponsible to
pretend that the history of the period is uncertain. And he thinks it
is important to expose "the collaboration between the Turkish Embassy
and scholars cooperating to promote this denialist argument."
To many scholars, an added irony is that all of these calls for
debating whether a genocide took place are coming at a time when
emerging new scholarship on the period – based on unprecedented
access to Ottoman archives – provides even more solid evidence of the
intent of the Turkish authorities to slaughter the Armenians. This
new scholarship is seen as the ultimate smoking gun as it is based
on the records of those who committed the genocide – which counters
the arguments of Turkey over the years that the genocide view relies
too much on the views of Armenian survivors.
Even further, some of the most significant new scholarship is being
done by scholars who are Turkish, not Armenian, directly refuting the
claim by some denial scholars that only Armenian professors believe
a genocide took place. In some cases, these scholars have faced death
threats as well as indictments by prosecutors in Turkey.
Those who question genocide, however, say that what is taking place in
American history departments is a form of political correctness. "There
is no debate and that’s the real problem. We’re stuck and the
reality is that we need a debate," said David C. Cuthell, executive
director of the Institute for Turkish Studies, a center created by
Turkey’s government to award grants and fellowships to scholars in
the United States. (The center is housed at Georgetown University,
but run independently.) The action in Congress is designed "to stifle
debate," Cuthell said, and so is anti-history. "There are reasonable
doubts in terms of whether this is a genocide," he said.
The term "genocide" was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a
Jewish-Polish lawyer who was seeking to distinguish what Hitler was
doing to the Jews from the sadly routine displacement and killing of
civilians in wartime. He spoke of "a coordinated plan of different
actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the
life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups
themselves." Others have defined the term in different ways, but common
elements are generally an intentional attack on a specific group.
While the term was created before 1915 and with the Holocaust in
mind, scholars of genocide (many of them focused on the Holocaust)
have broadly endorsed applying the term to what happened to Armenians
in 1915, and many refer to that tragedy as the first genocide of the
20th century. When in 2005 Turkey started talking about the idea of
convening historians to study whether a genocide took place, the
International Association of Genocide Scholars issued a letter in
which it said that the "overwhelming opinion" of hundreds of experts
on genocide from countries around the world was that a genocide had
taken place.
Specifically it referred to a consensus around this view: "On April
24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the
Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens –
an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians
were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and
forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into
permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its
homeland of 2,500 years."
Turkey has put forward a number of arguments in recent years, since
admitting that something terrible did happen to many Armenians. Among
the explanations offered by the government and its supporters are that
many people died, but not as many as the scholars say; that Armenians
share responsibility for a civil war in which civilians were killed
on both sides; and that the chaos of World War I and not any specific
action by government authorities led to the mass deaths and exiles.
Beyond those arguments, many raise political arguments that don’t
attempt to deny that a genocide took place, but say that given
Turkey’s sensitivities it isn’t wise to talk about it as such. This
was essentially the argument given by some House members last week who
voted against the resolution, saying that they didn’t want to risk
anything that could affect U.S. troops. Similarly, while Holocaust
experts, many of them Jewish, have overwhelmingly backed the view that
Armenians suffered a genocide, some supporters of Israel have not
wanted to offend Turkey, a rare Middle Eastern nation to maintain
decent relations with the Israel and a country that still has a
significant Jewish population.
Dissenters or Deniers?
Probably the most prominent scholar in the United States to question
that genocide took place is Bernard Lewis, an emeritus professor at
Princeton University, whose work on the Middle East has made him a
favorite of the Bush administration and neoconservative thinkers. In
one of his early works, Lewis referred to the "terrible holocaust"
that the Armenians faced in 1915, but he stopped using that language
and was quoted questioning the use of the term "genocide." Lewis did
not respond to messages seeking comment for this article. The Armenian
National Committee of Ame ide denier" and an "academic mercenary."
The two scholars who are most active on promoting the view that no
genocide took place are Justin McCarthy, distinguished university
scholar at the University of Louisville, and Guenter Lewy, a professor
emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst. Both of them are cited favorably by the Turkish embassy and
McCarthy serves on the board of the Institute of Turkish Studies.
McCarthy said in an interview that he is a historical demographer and
that he came to his views through "the dull study of numbers." He said
that he was studying population trends in the Ottoman Empire during
World War I and that while he believes that about 600,000 Armenians
lost their lives, far more Muslims died. "There’s simply no question,"
he said, that Armenians killed many of them.
The term genocide may mean something when talking about Hitler,
McCarthy said, "where you have something unique in human history." But
he said it was "pretty meaningless" to use about the Armenians. He
said that he believes that between the Russians, the Turks and the
Armenians, everyone was killing everyone, just as is the case in many
wars. He said that to call what happened to the Armenians genocide
would be the equivalent of calling what happened to the South during
the U.S. Civil War genocide.
So why do so many historians see what happened differently? McCarthy
said the scholarship that has been produced to show genocide has been
biased. "If you look at who these historians are, they are Armenians
and they are advancing a national agenda," he said. Cuthell of the
Institute for Turkish Studies said that it goes beyond that: Because
the Armenians who were killed or exiled were Christians (as are many
of their descendants now in the United States), and those accused of
the genocide were Muslims, the United States is more sympathetic to
the Armenians.
Lewy said that before he started to study the issue, he too believed
that a genocide had taken place. He said that intellectuals and
journalist "simply echo the Armenian position," which he said is
wrong. He said that there is the "obvious fact" that large numbers
of Armenians were killed and he blamed some of the skepticism of
Turkey’s view (and his) on the fact that Turkey for so long denied
that anything had taken place, and so lost credibility.
In 2005, the University of Utah Press published a book by Lewy
that sums up his position, Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey:
A Disputed Genocide. Lewy’s argument, he said in an interview, "is
that the key issue is intent" and that there is "no evidence" that
the Young Turks sought the attacks on the Armenians. "In my view,
there were mass killings, but no intent." Lewy’s argument can also
be found in this article in The Middle East Forum, as can letters to
the editor taking issue with his scholarship.
The Evidence for Genocide Many scholars who believe that there was
a genocide say that Lewy ignored or dismissed massive amounts of
evidence, not only in accounts from Armenians, but from foreign
diplomats who observed what was going on – evidence about the
marshaling of resources and organizing of groups to attack the
Armenians and kick them out of their homes, and the very fact of who
was in control of the government at the time.
Rouben Adalian, director of the Armenian National Institute, called the
Lewy book part of an "insidious way to influence Western scholarship
and to create confusion." He said it was "pretty outrageous" that
the Utah press published the book, which he called "one of the
more poisonous products" to come from "those trying to dispute the
genocide."
John Herbert, director of the University of Utah Press, is new in
his job there and said he wasn’t familiar with the discussions that
took place when Lewy submitted his book. But he said that "we want
to encourage the debate and we’ve done that."
Notably, other presses passed on the book. Lewy said he was turned
down 11 times, at least 4 of them from university presses, before he
found Utah. While critics say that shows the flaws in th book, Lewy
said it was evidence of bias. "The issue was clearly the substance
of my position," he said.
Of course the problem with the "encouraging the debate" argument is
that so many experts in the field say that the debate over genocide is
settled, and that credible arguments against the idea of a genocide
just don’t much exist. The problem, many say, is that the evidence
the Turks say doesn’t exist does exist, so people have moved on.
Andras Riedlmayer, a librarian of Ottoman history at Harvard University
and co-editor of the H-TURK e-mail list about Turkish history, said
that in the ’80s, he could remember scholarly meetings "at which
panels on this issue turned into shouting matches. One doesn’t see
that any more." At this point, he said, the Turkish government’s view
"is very much the minority view" among scholars worldwide.
What’s happening now, he said, outside of those trying to deny what
took place, "isn’t that the discussion has diminished, but that the
discussion is more mature." He said that there is more research going
on about how and why the killings took place, and the historical
context of the time. He also said that he thought there would be
more research in the works on one of "the great undiscussed issues
of why successive Turkish governments over recent decades have found
it worthwhile to invest so much political capital and energy into
promoting that historical narrative," in which it had been "fudging"
what really happened.
Among the scholars attracting the most attention for work on the
genocide is Taner Akcam, a historian from Turkey who has been a
professor at the University of Minnesota since 2001, when officials
in Turkey stepped up criticism of his work. Akcam has faced death
threats and has had legal charges brought against him in Turkey
(since dropped) for his work, which directly focuses on the question
of the culpability of Young Turk leaders in planning and executing
the genocide. (Akcam’s Web site has details about his research and the
Turkish campaigns against him.) Opposition to his work from Turkey has
been particularly intense since the publication last year of A Shameful
Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.
In an interview, Akcam said that his next book – planned for 2008 –
may be "a turning point" in research on the genocide. He is finishing a
book on what took place in 1915 based only on documents he has reviewed
in Ottoman archives – no testimony from survivors, no documents from
third parties. The documents, only some of which he has written about
already, are so conclusive on the questions Turkey pretends are in
dispute, he said, that the genocide should be impossible to deny.
To those like Lewy who have written books saying that there is no
evidence, "I laugh at them," Akcam said, because the documents he
has already released rebut them, and the new book will do so even
more. "There is no scholarly debate on this topic," he said.
The difficulty, he said, is doing the scholarship. In the archives
in Turkey, he said, the staff are extremely professional and helpful,
even knowing his views and his work. But he said that he has received
numerous death threats and does not feel safe in Turkey for more than
a few days, and even then must keep a low profile. As to legal risks,
he said that laws on the books that make it illegal to question
the Turkish state on certain matters, are inconsistently enforced,
so while he has faced legal harassment, he generally felt that
everything would work out in the end. But Akcam is well known, has
dual German-Turkish citizenship, and a job at an American university,
and he said those are advantages others do not have.
He plans to publish his next book first in Turkey, in Turkish, and
then to translate it for an American audience.
Another scholar from Turkey working on the Armenian genocide is Fatma
Muge Gocek, an associate professor of sociology at the University of
Michigan. Until she came to Princeton to earn her Ph.D., Gocek said
that she didn’t know about the Armenian genocide. For that matter,
she said she ducation Turkey has to offer."
Learning the full history was painful, she said, and started for her
when Armenians she met at Princeton talked to her about it and she
was shocked and angry. Upon reading the sorts of materials she never
saw in Turkey, the evidence was clear, she said.
Gocek’s books to date have been about the Westernization of the Ottoman
Empire, but she said she came to the view that she needed to deal with
the genocide in her next book. "I have worked on how the Ottoman Empire
negotiated modernity," she said, and the killings of 1915 are part of
"the dark side of modernity."
So the book she is writing now is a sociological analysis of how
Turkish officials at the time justified to themselves what they were
doing. She is basing her book on the writings these officials made
themselves in which they frame the issue as one of "the survival
of the Turks or of the Armenians" to justify their actions. While
Gocek will be focusing on the self-justification, she said that the
diaries and memoirs she is citing also show that the Turkish leaders
knew exactly what they were doing, and that this wasn’t just a case
of chaos and civil war getting out of hand.
Gocek said she was aware of the harassment faced by Akcam and others
from Turkey who have stated in public that a genocide took place. But
she said scholars must go where their research leads them. "That is
why one decides to become an academic – you want to search certain
questions. If you do not want to, and you are not willing to, you
should go do something else."
07/10/16/genocide
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
