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Chapter 5 the ARMENIAN GENOCIDE Chapter 5 THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: REVISIONISM AND DENIAL by Rouben Adalian In the unfolding process of genocide, denial is the The Turkish government has adopted three lines final stage. There was little doubt at the end of World of argument to convince the world that nothing War I that the Young Turk government had implement­ out of the ordinary happened to the Armenians ed measures which resulted in the decimation of the during the years 1915-1923. Three theses have Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire. Yet two been advanced: the denial thesis; the revisionist years later, the effort to rehabilitate the survivors was thesis; and the justification thesis. The three abandoned. Three years after that, the question of theses can in turn be divided among six responsibility was entirely forgotten. Since then, the categories of authors as follows: participants, government of Turkey has found it convenient to deny apologists, rationalizers, revisionists, that anything out of the ordinary happened to the disinformers, and distorters. In the years since Armenians. 1923 several factors have contributed to the The coverup of the Armenian genocide was not world's acquiescence in the Turkish program of the work of the Turkish government alone. The course denial and revisionism. First, Turkey became of political developments in the decades following respectable as the Turkish Republic under World War I furnished a favorable environment for Kemal Attaturk; second, Turkey joined the ignoring the consequences of genocide. The silence of United Nations as a charter member in 1945; the international community emboldened the Turkish and third, Turkey joined the North Atlantic government to make the denial of the Armenian Treaty Organization in 1952. genocide a state policy. Only the matter oflegitimizing the official view on the non-occurrence of the event remained. Post-War Unsettlement The rapid changes in government that took place after World War I, including the shift of power from Istanbul to Ankara and the emergence of new leaders, hopelessly complicated the effort for a serious delibera­ tion on the Armenian genocide. Defeated in war, the Young Turk cabinet resigned in 1918. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which led the Young Turk movement, disbanded. The administration of what The Armenian Genocide: Revisionism and Denial 85 THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: 1915-1923 AN INTRODUCTION by Rouben Adalian When in the Spring of 1915 the Young Turk government to improve their living conditions, which government issued orders for the mass deportation were characterized by maladministration and the of the Armenians from Armenia and Anatolia to absence of security. In some parts of the Ottoman Syria and Mesopotamia, the U.S. ambassador to state Armenians fared well; they were dominant in Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, realized that the edicts certain sectors of the economy such as commerce were only part of a larger scheme to destroy the and the specialized crafts. The combination of their Armenian people. In prior decades Armenians in the financial success and their political activism became Ottoman Empire had endured large-scale atrocities the source of an autocratic regime's obstinante and tens of thousands had fallen victim to the brutal refusal to consider reform, for reform and improve­ repression practiced by the Ottoman sultans. Yet, ment might have led to a measure of self-govern­ the sultans had had no policy that affected the totality ment. of the Armenian population throughout the empire. By 1923 when the modern-day Turkish Republic was The Young Turks founded, close to two million Armenians had van­ ished from a part of the world which they had No Jess opposed to the regime were the reform­ inhabited for thousands of years. The only exception minded Ottomans who organized the Committee for to this annihilation was a community that survived Union and Progress. This group, known as the in Constantinople. Young Turks, overthrew the Sultan. Their own nationalist plank, however, tended to emphasize once "The Murder of a Nation" again racial privilege for Turks and exclusion of the Armenians who clearly gained nothing in the change Morgenthau and Arnold Toynbee, then a young of government. On the contrary, as Germany encour­ scholar entrusted with the task of documenting the aged the war party to join in the impending conflict events of 1915 and 1916, described the forcible in 1914, the Armenians were caught in a vise. To removal of the Armenians from their homes and their the east where the Ottomans intended to advance lay expulsion to the desert as "the murder of a nation." the vast stretches of the Russian Empire. Because The Young Turk government carried out the deporta­ most of the Armenians lived on either side of the tions under conditions of extreme deprivation and border, inevitably their homes would be engulfed at a pace that induced death by starvation, dehydra­ in a battle area. Although loyal to their government, tion, and exhaustion. It also organized special units with thousands responding to the draft, the Armenian which conducted a thoroughgoing slaughter of population was not sympathetic to the cause of the civilians-men, women, and children. Called a war. resettlement plan, the deportations and massacres were nothing less than a gigantic scheme to deprive A Homogenous Turkish State the Armenians of their property, lives, and right to continued habitation in their ancestral homeland. Determined to use the opportunity of war and In the final analysis the genocide resulted in the alliance with Germany to restore the prestige of the theft of the contested homeland of the Armenians, the declining Ottoman state, the Young Turks moved for without Armenians there could be no Armenia. mercilessly against the Armenians whom they The possibility that the aspirations of this people accused of treason and sedition once the war began might lead to a claim to a separate national existence to go badly for them. Unable to create the envisioned had become anathema to the Young Turk party that empire that would include all of the Turkic peoples governed the Ottoman Empire during World War to the East, the Ottoman government devised a I. Their solution was to destroy both the people and method of purging the state of an ethno-religious their nationalist aspirations. minority whose existence stood at odds with the ideology of the extremist Young Turks. The decision Armenians as a Subject Minority to wage war against an unsuspecting civilian popula­ tion was but an incremental escalation of a succession The Armenians had lived as a subject minority of decisions taken illegally and secretly to bring in the Ottoman Empire for some 400 years. Influ­ about the entry of the Ottomans into World War I. enced by Western political thought in the nineteenth century, they began to organize and to petition the (continued on page 87) 86 GENOCIDE The genocide was the culmination of the policy to changes and public pressure ultimately voided the create a homogenous Turkish state. By the time all convictions of the perpetrators of the genocide. the fighting in the Middle East had ended and the Ottoman Empire had fallen, the Armenian presence * 5.D • had been erased from those areas that would consti­ Hovannisian, Richard G. The Armenian Holocaust: tute Kemal Ataturk' s Republic of Turkey. a Bibliography Relating to the Deportations, Massa­ cres, and Dispersion ofthe Armenian People, 1915- 1923. Rev. 3d ed. Cambridge, MA: Armenian ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY Heritage Press, 1980. ISBN 0-935411-05-4. The first part of this work is an inventory of • 5.A • the major archival holdings documenting the condi­ Adalian, Rouben, ed. The Armenian Genocide in the tion of the Armenians in the Middle East during U.S. Archives, 1915-1918. Alexandria, VA: Chad­ World War I. The countries with important reposito­ wyck-Healey Inc., 1991-92. Microfiche. ries include Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, U.S. archival holdings documenting the Arme­ Germany, the United States, and Armenia. The nian genocide are comprehensively reproduced on second part lists published works on Armenian microfiche in this microform production. Included genocide written by eyewitnesses, survivors, relief are 30,000 pages of evidence from the records of workers, diplomats, and scholars. Hovannisian the Department of State, the Commission to Negoti­ identifies some 400 works, mostly in English, ate Peace, the Office of National Intelligence, from French, and German. the papers of Ambassador Morgenthau and President Wilson, as well as from other agencies of the U.S. • 5.E • government which were involved in gathering Kloian, Richard D., ed. The Armenian Genocide: evidence on the Ottoman Empire during and after News Accounts From the American Press, 1915- World War I. The documents also show the extent 1922. 3d ed. Berkeley: ACC Books, 1985. LC 85- to which the U.S. government attempted to rescue 217742. the survivors through relief efforts. Despite the Ottoman government's efforts to censor the news, reports about the condition of the * 5.B • Armenian population reached the Western media. Dadrian, Vahakn N. "Documentation ofthe Armeni­ Kloian's collection includes a representative sample an Genocide in Turkish Sources," In: Israel W. of articles that appeared in the American periodical Charny, ed. Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic press, such as The New York Times, The Literary Review. V.2. New York: Facts on File, 1991. ISBN Digest, The Outlook, Missionary Review, and The 0-8160-1903-7. Independent. The 124 articles in The New York Despite their longstanding denial of the geno­ Times-with typical headlines reading "Wholesale cide, various authors, scholars, memoirists, and Massacres of Armenians by Turks" (29 July), and government officials of the late Ottoman era have "Turks Depopulate Towns of Armenia" (27 oblique! y or inadvertent! y revealed the Young Turks' August)-which appeared in 1915 alone meant that violent handling of the mass of the Armenian the American public was fully aware of the scale of population in the Ottoman state.
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