PanARMENIAN.Net

Private record of one of Armenian Genocide instigators made public
14.03.2009 20:16 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ A handwritten black book that belonged to Mehmet
Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman minister of interior in 1915, was published
in facsimile form in the end of 2008. It is probably the single most
important document ever uncovered describing the destruction of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915`17. The Black Book draws on
Ottoman sources no longer available to answer many questions about
what those sources showed.

Looking through the Sifre Kalemi or cipher telegram collection at the
Prime Ministry Archives in Istanbul some years ago, I was struck by
the number of telegrams in 1915 from Talaat Pasha ordering the
deportation of individual communities, inquiring about the state of
convoys, and giving instructions for further deportations. What
emerged was a picture of a ruler obsessed with the progress of his
signature program. Much of the responses to Talaat’s inquiries were
not available. What the Black Book does is to summarize the data he
collected. Ottoman archives

Turkish state intellectuals in recent years have insisted that the
1915 deportations of Ottoman Armenians were not part of a genocidal
exercise, but an orderly population transfer and resettlement. They
have insisted that Ottoman archives in Turkey today support their
contention. Yet, between them, they have only managed to cite an
amalgam of official deportation and resettlement regulations, certain
reports related to deportations, and no substantial account of what
actually happened to deportees.

Indeed, no historian working in Turkish archives has managed to
present a coherent picture of the deportation and resettlement of
Armenians from any region in the Ottoman Empire based on Ottoman
records. This is because Ottoman records do not support the official
Turkish thesis on the Armenian Genocide.

While there is broad agreement between Turkish archives and other
sources that thousands of Armenians were removed from their homes in
1915, there is no solid account of what happened to these deportees in
Ottoman records. However, foreign archives, such as the consular
records of the United States, give a better qualitative assessment of
actual developments than the available Ottoman documentation.

This absence of Ottoman records could seem perplexing, because
according to Ottoman regulations, Ottoman officials had to keep
detailed records of the deportation of Armenians, as well as an
inventory of their properties, as well as details of the final
settlement of the people concerned. The total absence of such
registers in Turkish archives today is therefore remarkable.

The recent facsimile publication of Talaat Pasha’s Black Book may well
answer many questions with the authority of Ottoman records. At 77
pages, the book includes a substantial section on the deportation of
Armenians in 1915`17. The book and its content were never disclosed in
Talaat’s lifetime, including in his posthumous memoirs published in
1921. After his assassination in 1921, the book was kept by his widow
and given to the Turkish historian Murat Bardakçi in
1982. Mr. Bardakçi made parts of the booklet public in
Hürriyet newspaper in 2005. The full account was not published
until the end of 2008.

The significance of the Black Book lies in the authority of the owner,
the fact that its content was drawn from Ottoman administrative
records no longer available to historians in Turkey, and the actual
data that it gives about the deportation of Armenians. Neither the
book nor the data it yields bear clear dates, though
Mr. Bardakçi thinks that the figures refer to 1915`1916 `
though I think that could be the end of 1916 or even the beginning of
1917.

The data presented in this book can be considered to be a view of the
Armenian Genocide from the perspective of the state. This state
perspective still needs to be evaluated critically, which I am doing
in a separate study. The purpose of this article is to introduce the
core data that informed Talaat Pasha about the actual state of
Armenians.

The statistics regarding the destruction of Armenians in the Black
Book are enumerated in four categories covering 29 regions (vilayets
and sanjaks) of the Ottoman Empire.