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The Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide (also known as the Armenian Holocaust or the Armenian Massacre) is a term which refers to the forced mass evacuation and related deaths of hundreds of thousands or over a million Armenians, during the government of Young Turks from 1915 to 1917 in Ottoman Empire. Several facts in connection with the event are a matter of ongoing dispute between parts of the international community and Turkey. Although it is generally agreed that events said to comprise what is termed the Armenian Genocide did occur, the Turkish government rejects that it was genocide, on the alleged basis that the deaths among the Armenians, were not a result of a state-sponsored plan of mass extermination, but from the result of inter-ethnic strife, disease and famine during the turmoil of World War I.

Despite this thesis, most Armenian, Western, and an increasing number of Turkish scholars believe that the massacres were a case of genocide. For example, most Western sources point to the sheer scale of the death toll. The event is also said to be the second-most studied case of genocide, and often draws comparison with the Holocaust. A growing list of countries, as discussed below, have officially recognized and accepted its authenticity as Genocide.

The situation of the Armenians in Anatolia

Main article: Ottoman Armenian Population

In 1914, before World War I, there were an estimated two million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the vast majority of whom were of the Armenian Apostolic faith, with a small number of the Armenian Catholic and Protestant faiths. While the Armenian population in Eastern Anatolia (also called Western Armenia) was large and clustered, there were large numbers of Armenians in the western part of the Ottoman Empire. Many lived in the capital city of Istanbul.

Until the late 19th century, the Armenians were referred to as millet-i sadika (loyal nation) by the Ottomans. This meant that they were living in harmony with other ethnic groups and without any major conflict with the central authority. However the Christian Armenians were subject to Islamic dhimmi laws, which gave them fewer legal rights than Muslim fellow citizens. The Tanzimat gave more rights to the minorities in the middle of the 19th century. However, the long ruling Sultan Hamid suspended the constitution early in his reign and ruled as he saw fit. Despite pressure on the Sultan by the major European countries to treat the Christian minorities more gently, abuses only increased.

The single event that started the chain is most likely the Russian victory over the Ottoman Empire in the War of 1877-78. At the end of this war the Russians took control over a large part of Armenian territory (including the cities of Kars and Batumi). The Russians claimed they were the supporters of Christians within the Ottoman Empire and now they were clearly militarily superior to the Ottomans. Over the next 15 years the Armenians began to feel that perhaps they might one day be free from the weakening rule of the Ottoman government.

A minor Armenian unrest in Bitlis Province was supressed with brutality in 1894. Armenian communities were then attacked for the next three years with no apparent direction from the government but equally without much protection offered either. See the Hamidian massacres for more details. According to most estimates, 80,000 to 300,000 Armenians were killed between 1894 and 1897.

Before the war

Just five years before World War I, the Ottoman Empire came under the control of the Young Turks. The old Sultan Hamid was deposed and his timid younger brother Mehmed V was installed as a figurehead ruler. At first some Armenian political organizations supported the Young Turks, in hopes that there would be a significant change for the better. Some Armenians were elected to the newly restored Ottoman Parliament, and some remained in the parliament throughout the war.

In 1914, the Ottoman government passed a new law to support the war effort that required all adult males - up to the age of forty-five - to either be recruited in the Ottoman army or to pay special fees in order to be excluded from service. As a result of this law, most able-bodied men left their homes, leaving only the women, children, and elderly in the Armenian communities. Most of the Armenian recruits were later executed or forced into hard labor work gangs. In the cities of Marash and Zeytoon, Armenian men were conscripted regardless of whether they paid the military tax or not.

In the context of War in Eastern Ottoman

Main article: Caucasus Campaign

While it is believed by many that the Armenian genocide was conducted following the declaration of war on late October 1914, according to some sources, on February 1914, during a Turkish-German meeting, a proposition to evacuate the Ottoman Armenians was already put on table. Other pre-war anti-Armenian measures are reported. Donald Bloxham writes for example that in the summer of 1914, Armenian settlements on the Ottoman borders were plundered by Ottoman forces, while Johannes Lepsius in his collection of German records includes reports of excess against the Armenian population in late December 1914, soon after the war began.

The Ottoman Empire entered into World War I on October 29, 1914. The Ottoman army, under their war minister Enver Pasha, soon attacked the Russian forces around the city of Kars, in what was then Russian territory. Early in 1915 the Turkish army was utterly defeated (at the Battle of Sarikamis) with massive loss of life. The Russian forces under General Yudenich counter-attacked into Turkish territory, where the Armenian and Muslim communities were interleaved. Taking advantage of common religion and the recent discomfort of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire, Russia promoted Armenian nationalism (there were also many Russian-Armenians in the Russian army). At the same time, some Armenians had begun advocating an independent state.

On March 2, the Armenians of Dörtyol were evacuated by Ottoman authorities. With Russian forces approaching Lake Van, the regional administrator ordered the execution of five Armenian leaders and a revolt resulted in Van on April 20, against the Turks and in favor of the Russians (this according to Turkish sources). On the other hand, it is said that the governor of Van, Jevdet, under the pretext of preventing an Armenian rebellion, justified the attack on the the town by the Ottoman army. Nogales for example, reported a plan set by Jevdet to kill every Armenian male in Van. The Russians finally captured Van in late May of 1915. In August the Russian army left and the Turks re-occupied Van. Then in September the Russians forced the Turks out of Van for the second time. By the end of the war, the town of Van was empty and in ruins.

Genocide

Enver Pasha's response to his crushing defeat at the Battle of Sarikamis was, in part, to blame the Armenians. He ordered that all Armenian recruits in the Ottoman forces be disarmed, demobilized and assigned to labor camps. Most of the Armenian recruits were either executed or turned into road laborers - few survived.

On April 24 1915 (few days after the beginning of the troubles in Van), the Young Turk government arrested several hundred - or, according to Turkish records, over two thousand - Armenian intellectuals. It is believed that most of these were soon executed. This was quickly followed - May 25 1915 - by orders from Talat Pasha (Minister of the Interior) for the forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands - possibly over a million - Armenians from across all of Anatolia (except parts of the western coast) to Mesopotamia and what is today Syria. Many went to the Syrian town of Dayr az Zawr and the surrounding desert. The fact that the Turkish government ordered the evacuation of ethnic Armenians at this time is not in dispute. It is claimed, based on a good deal of anecdotal evidence, that the Ottoman government did not provide any facilities to care for the Armenians during their evacuation, nor when they arrived. Some records suggest that the Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians as a matter of course not only allowed others to rob, kill, and rape the Armenians, but often participated in these activities themselves. In any event, the forseeable consequence of the government's decision to move the Armenians was a significant number of deaths.

File:Armeniangenocide starvedchildren.JPG
Starved Armenian children

The Ottoman government ordered the evacuation or deportation of many Armenians living in Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia. In the city of Edessa (modern Şanlıurfa) the local Armenian population, worried about their fate, revolted (early 1916) against the Ottoman government and took control of the old city. Ottoman forces attacked the city and bombarded it with artillery but the Armenians held out. The German General who was in command of the closest Ottoman army, Baron von der Goltz arrived and negotiated a deal with the Armenians. In exchange for an Armenian surrender and disarmament, the Ottoman government agreed not to deport them. However, the Ottoman government broke the terms of the agreement and did deport the Armenians.

It is believed that over a million were deported. The word "deportation" could be considered as misleading (and some would prefer the word "relocation", as the former means banishment outside a country's borders; it is said that Japanese-Americans, for example, were not "deported" during World War II). Many historians believe that the evacuations were, in practice, a method of mass execution which led to the deaths of many of the Armenian population by forcing them to march endlessly through desert, without food or water or enough protection from local Kurdish or Turkish bandits, and that the members of the special organization were charged to escort the convoys (which meant their destruction).

The Camps

File:Armeniangenocide1.jpg
Armenians burned

It is believed that twenty-five major concentration camps (Dayr az-Zawr, Ra's Al Gul, Bonzanti, Mamoura, Intili, Islahiye, Radjo, Katma, Karlik, Azaz, Akhterim, Mounboudji, Bab, Tefridje, Lale, Meskene, Sebil, Dipsi, Abouharar, Hamam, Sebka, Marat, Souvar, Hama, Homs and Kahdem) existed, under the command of Şükrü Kaya, one of the right hands of Talat Pasha. The majority of the camps were situated near the Iraqi and Syrian frontiers, and some were only temporary transit camps. Others are said to have been used only as temporary mass burial zones—such as Radjo, Katma, and Azaz—that were closed in Fall 1915. Some authors also maintain that the camps Lale, Tefridje, Dipsi, Del-El, and Ra's al-'Ain were built specifically for those who had a life expectancy of a few days. Like in the cases of the Jewish KAPOs in the concentration camps, the majority of the guards inside the camps were Armenians.

Even though nearly all the camps, including all the major ones, were open air, the rest of the mass killings in other minor camps, was not limited to direct killigs; but also to mass burning, poisoning and drowning.

The Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa)

File:Turkish-genocide-killed-more-than-one-and-a-half-million-Armenians.jpg
Armenians killed during the Armenian genocide

While there was an official 'special organization' founded in December 1911 by the Ottoman government, a second organization that participated in what led to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community was founded by the lttihad ve Terraki. This organization technically appeared in July 1914 and was supposed to differ from the one already existing in one important point; mostly according to the military court, it was meant to be a "government in a government" (needing no orders to act).

Later in 1914, the Ottoman government decided to influence the direction the special organization was to take by releasing criminals from central prisons to be the central elements of this newly formed special organization. According to the Mazhar commissions attached to the tribunal as soon as November 1914, 124 criminals were released from Pimian prison. Many other releases followed; in Ankara a few months later, 49 criminals were released from its central prison. Little by little from the end of 1914 to the beginning of 1915, hundreds, then thousands of prisoners were freed to form the members of this organization. Later, they were charged to escort the convoys of Armenian deportees. Vehib, commander of the Ottoman third army, called those members of the special organization, the “butchers of the human specy.”

The organization was led by the Central Committee Members Doctor Nazim, Behaeddin Sakir, Atif Riza, and former Director of Public Security Aziz Bey. The headquarters of Behaeddin Sakir were in Erzurum, from where he directed the forces of the Eastern vilayets. Aziz, Atif and Nazim Beys operated in Istanbul, and their decisions were approved and implemented by Cevat Bey, the Military Governor of Istanbul.

According to the same commissions and other records, the criminals were chosen by a process of selection. They had to be ruthless butchers to be selected as a member of the special organization. The Mazhar commission, during the military court, has provided some lists of those criminals. In one instance, of 65 criminals released, 50 were in prison for murder. Such a disproportionate ratio between those condemned for murder; and others imprisoned for minor crimes is reported to have been generalized. This selection process of criminals was, according to some researchers in the field of comparative genocide studies, who specialize in the Armenian cases, clearly indicative of the government's intention to commit mass murder of its Armenian population. Also, according to records, physicians participated in the process of selection; health professionals were appointed by the war ministry to determine whether the selected convicts would be fit to apply the degree of savagery of killing that was required.

Military Trials, Istanbul, 1919

Many of those responsible for the genocide were sentenced to death in absentia, after having escaped trial in 1918. It is believed that the accused succeeded in destroying the majority of the documents that could be used as evidence against them before they escaped. Admiral Calthorpe, the British High Commissioner, described the destruction of documents: “Just before the Armistice, officials had been going to the archives department at night and making clean sweep of most of the documents.” Aydemir, S.S., on the other hand, writes in his "Makedonyadan Ortaasyaya Enver Pasa.": “Before the flight of the top Ittihadist leaders, Talat Pasa stopped by at the waterfront residence of one of his friends on the shore of Arnavudköy, depositing there suitcase of documents. It is said that the documents were burned in the basement's furnace. Indeed ... the documents and other papers of Ittihad's Central Committee are nowhere to be found.” The martial court established the will of the Ittheadists to eliminate the Armenians physically, via its special organization. The Court Martial, Istanbul, 1919: "The Court Martial taking into consideration the above-named crimes declares, unanimously, the culpability as principle factors of these crimes the fugitives Talat Pasha, former Grand Vizir, Enver Efendi, former War Minister, struck off the register of the Imperial Army, Cemal Efendi, former Navy Minister, struck off too from the Imperial Army, and Dr. Nazim Efendi, former Minister of Education, members of the General Council of the Union & Progress, representing the moral person of that party;... the Court Martial pronounces, in accordance with said stipulations of the Law the death penalty against Talat, Enver, Cemal, and Dr. Nazim."

The Position of Turkish authorities

File:Armeniangenocide starved.JPG
Starved Armenian mother and child

Further information: Denial of Armenian genocide

Turkey does not accept that the deaths of 1915 were the result of a state intention to eliminate the Armenian people. Turkey holds the position that the deaths were the result of the turmoils of World War I and that the Ottoman Empire fought against Russian backed Armenian militia. There is also disagreement over the number of casualties, Turkey states that according to demographic studies there were fewer than 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, suggesting figures of over a million Armenian deaths to be over inflated. Turkey believes the number of deaths to be ranging from 200,000 to 600,000 which it considers to be lower than the number of Muslims who perished between 1912-22.

More recently, lower figures of Armenian casualties were presented by Yusuf Halacoglu, the director of the Turkish history foundation. In his said calculations, he estimates that a total of 56,000 Armenians perished during the period due to war conditions, and less than 10 thousand were actually killed. In his other research, he maintains that over 500,000 Turks were killed by Armenians. While the Turkish government now publicizes those figures of Turks allegedly being killed by Armenians, still the other research of Halacoglu, which claims that lesser than 10 thousand Armenians were killed is still absent from the Turkish foreign affairs publications.

Turkey also criticizes similarities with the Holocaust, stating that unlike the Armenians, the Jewish population of Germany and Europe did not agitate for separation. Genocide scholars answer to those claims, that Holocaust revisionists also claim that the Jews agitated to destroy Germany by allying with the Soviet Union to bring Bolshevism into Germany, which according to them would mean the annihilation of the German people.

Those who support the genocide theses state that Turkey is denying its past and accuse it of suppressing international attempts to recognize a genocide. To support their positions, they point to the fact that mention of an Armenian genocide almost anywhere in the world was met with rebukes from Turkish Ambassadors, while mention of it in Turkey itself led to the possibility of prosecution.

In March, 2005,Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan invited Turkish, Armenian and international historians to form a Commission to establish the events of 1915. The offer was accepted by Armenia but with a condition of having first good relations with the Turkish state.

Relations between Turkey and Armenia remain frozen. Turkey has closed its land borders with Armenia, citing Armenian control of Nagorno-Karabagh. Armenia has repeatedly declared that it is ready for relations and an open border without preconditions, however Turkey claims that opening its borders would show support for the occupation of Nagorno-Karabagh.

Stance taken by Turkish intellectuals

Opposition to the genocide thesis

Further information: Denial of Armenian genocide

Almost all Turkish intellectuals, scientists and historians accept that many Armenians died during the conflict, but they do not necessarily classify these events as genocide. Some academics point to the disputed number of mostly Kurdish casualties killed by Armenians during the period, and argue that Armenians were ordered to relocate to save the victimized Kurds and Turks.

Support for the genocide thesis

Some Turkish intellectuals support the genocide thesis despite opposition from Turkish nationalists; these include Ragip Zarakolu, Ali Ertem, Taner Akçam and Halil Berktay.

The reasons why some Turkish intellectuals accept theses of genocide are threefold.

First, they cite the fact that the organization members were criminals, and that those criminals were specifically sent to escort the Armenians. This is regarded as sufficient evidence of the government's criminal intent. Second, the fact that Armenians living outside the war zone were also removed, contradicts the thesis of military necessity put forward by the Ottoman government. Thirdly, it is argued that the thesis of simple relocation is flawed, due to the government's lack of dispositions which a “resettlement” would require. This lack of dispositions has been emphasized as evidence of the government's intent to eliminate the displaced Armenians. Dr. Taner Akçam, a Turkish specialist, writes on this point:

“The fact that neither at the start of the deportations, nor en route, and nor at the locations, which were declared to be their initial halting places, were there any single arrangement required for the organization of a people's migration, is sufficient proof of the existence of this plan of annihilation.”

These Turkish intellectuals believe that 800,000 or more Armenians lost their lives during the events (Orhan Pamuk counting a million Armenians and 30 000 Kurds). Others put the number between 300,000 and 600,000.

Orhan Pamuk

During a February 2005 interview with Das Magazin, Orhan Pamuk, a famous Turkish novelist, made statements implicating Turkey in massacres against Armenians and persecution of the Kurds, declaring: "Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it". Subjected to a hate campaign, he left Turkey, before returning in 2005 in order to defend his right to freedom of speech: "What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo. But we have to be able to talk about the past" . The Turkish government then brought criminal charges against him. On January 23, 2006, however, the charges of "insulting Turkishness" were dropped, a move welcomed by the EU - that they had been brought at all was still a matter of contention for European politicians.

International stances

See also: Post Armenian Genocide timeline

There is a general agreement among Western historians that the Armenian Genocide did happen. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (the major body of scholars who study genocide in North America and Europe), for instance, formally recognize the event and consider it to be undeniable. Some consider denial to be a form of hate speech or/and historical revisionism.

However, this academic recognition has not always been followed by governments and media. Many governments, including the United States, the United Kingdom and, ironically, Israel, do not officially use the word genocide to describe these events, due in part to their strong political and commercial ties with Turkey (such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline), although some individual government officials have used the term. Many newspapers for a long time would not use the word genocide without disclaimers such as "alleged" and many continue to do so. A number of those policies have now been reversed so that even casting doubt on the term is against editorial policy, as is the case with the New York Times.

In recent years, parliaments of a number of countries with citizens of Armenian descent, have officially recognized the event as genocide. Two recent examples are France and Switzerland. In Switzerland, Turkish historian Yusuf Halacoglu has faced charges of violation of Swiss laws against holocaust denial as a result of a speech he made in Winterthur in 2004. Turkish entry talks with the European Union were met with a number of calls to consider the event as genocide, though it was eventually not a specific stipulation.

Countries officially recognizing the Armenian genocide include Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Uruguay, Vatican City and Venezuela.

International bodies that recognize the Armenian genocide include the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, the European Parliamentary Assembly, and the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, the International Center for Transitional Justice, based on a report prepared for TARC, the Association of Genocide Scholars, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the World Council of Churches, the Turkish Human Rights Organization, the League for Human Rights , the Parliament of Kurdistan in Exile (an unofficial organisation with no parliamentary powers), and the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal.

The majority of US states recognize the Armenian Genocide, but there is no federal (country-wide) recognition.

The Canadian House of Commons voted to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. The federal government, in opposing the motion, did not express a position on whether the genocide took place.

Casualties, 1914 to 1923

Main article: Ottoman Armenian casualties

While there is no clear consensus as to how many Armenians lost their lives during what is called the Armenian genocide and what followed, there seems to be a consensus among Western scholars, with the exception of few dissident and Turkish national historians, as to the period between 1914 to 1923, over a million Armenians might have perished. The recent tendency seems to be, either presenting 1.2 million as a figure or even 1.5 million, while more moderately, "over a million" is presented, as the Turkish historian Fikret Adanir estimates, but this estimate excludes what followed 1917.

There were more than 900 thousand Armenians who had been recorded as refugees from Ottoman Empire and surviving WWI. What is called "estimates" above are based on a CLAIMED number of 2.5 million Ottoman Armenians being alive before WWI. After subtracting remaining (about) 1 million Armenians from the CLAIMED number of 2.5 Million Ottoman Armenians we are left with "1.5 million Armenians were killed". Turkey has never denied a large number of its Armenian population lost their lives, from all kinds of reasons including famine and murder. But, Turkey also dares to say, so did Turks and Kurds.

An excellent source on Ottoman Armenians, going through official Ottoman population records is a book by American historian Prof. Justin McCarthy, titled "Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire," New York, New York University Press, 1983. A summary can be found in (http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/yayinlar/yayin1/4-McCarty(65-85).pdf)

WWI ended in 1919, for Ottomans, when they surrendered. As you notice, the title of this section reads "1914 to 1923". Why 1923? Because the Armenian propagandists would love to extend their claimed sufferings until the foundation date of modern Turkish Republic (1923). This should be another example on how far the Armenian side can go by "playing with numbers."

Memorial

Genocide memorial at the Tsitsernakaberd hill, Yerevan

The idea for the memorial came in 1965, at the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the genocide. Two years later the memorial (by architects Kalashian and Mkrtchyan) was completed at the Tsitsernakaberd hill above the Hrazdan gorge in Yerevan. The 44 metre stele symbolizes the national rebirth of Armenians. 12 slabs are positioned in a circle, representing 12 lost provinces in present day Turkey. In the centre of the circle, in depth of 1.5 metres, there is an eternal flame. Along the park at the memorial there is a 100 metre wall with names of towns and villages where massacres are known to have taken place. In 1995 a small underground circular museum was opened at the other end of the park where one can learn basic information about the events in 1915. Some photos taken by German photographers (Turkish allies during World War I) including photos taken by Armin Wegner and some publications about the genocide are also displayed. Near the museum is a spot where foreign statesmen plant trees in memory of the genocide. Each April 24th (Armenian Genocide Commemoration Holiday) hundreds of thousands of people walk to the genocide monument and lay flowers (usually red carnations or tulips) around the eternal flame. Armenians around the world mark the genocide in different ways, and many memorials have been built in Armenian Diaspora communities.

The Armenian Genocide In Popular Culture

The well-known metal band System of a Down, four musicians all of Armenian descent but living in California, wrote the song "P.L.U.C.K." (Politically Lying Unholy Cowardly Killers) about this genocide in their eponymous debut album. The booklet reads: "System Of A Down would like to dedicate this song to the memory of the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide, perpetrated by the Turkish Government in 1915." Other songs, including Holy Mountains from their new album, Hypnotize, are also sometimes believed to be about the Armenian genocide.

The Armenian Genocide is also a popular theme in Armenian works of literature, and is a major theme of Atom Egoyan's film Ararat (2002).

See also

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Notes

  1. More exactly, 2345, See: Kamuran Gürun, Ermeni Dosyasi, TTK Basimevi, Ankara, 1983 p. 210
  2. See, for example, Huseyin Chelik, The 1915 Armenian Revolt in Van: Eyewitness Testimony, in The Armenians in the Late Ottoman Period, The Turkish Historical Society For The Council Of Culture, Arts And Publications Of The Grand National Assembly Of Turkey, Ankara, 2001, pp. 87-108
  3. Ussher, Clarence D. and Grace Knapp, An American Physician in Turkey; A Narrative of Adventures in Peace and in War. Boston and New York City: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1917. More particularly the chapters, XVII, XVIII and XIX (which is titled FUN FOR JEVDET BEY.)
  4. Rafael de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent Published in London, 1926, end of chapter V and VI.
  5. See, for example, Le Siècle des camps by Joël Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot, JC Lattes, 2000. Also, Ahmed Djémal pacha et le sort des déportés arméniens de Syrie-Palestine by Raymond H. Kévorkian, in Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah, Zürich: Chronos, 2002. by Hans-Lukas KIESER et Dominik J. SCHALLER (dir.), and from the same author: L’extermination des déportés arméniens ottomans dans les camps de concentration de Syrie-Mésopotamie (1915-1916), la deuxième phase du génocide, in Revue d’Histoire arménienne contemporaine II (1998). Concentration camps map, in, J.M. Winter, professor at Yale, America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915, Cambridge University Press (January, 2004).
  6. Ibid.
  7. Ibid.
  8. Ibid.
  9. Ibid.
  10. Eitan Belkind was a Nili member, who infiltrated the Ottoman army as an official. He was assigned to the headquarters of Camal Pasha. He claims to have witnessed the burning of 5000 Armenians, quoted in Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide. New Brunswick, N.J., 2000, pp. 181, 183. Lt. Hasan Maruf, of the Ottoman army, describes how a population of a village were taken all together, and then burned. See, British Foreign Office 371/2781/264888, Appendices B., p. 6). Also, the Commander of the Third Army, Vehib's 12 pages affidavit, which was dated December 5, 1918, presented in the Trabzon trial series (March 29, 1919) included in the Key Indictment(published in Takvimi Vekayi, No. 3540, May 5, 1919), report such a mass burning of the population of an entire village near Mus. S. S. McClure write in his work, Obstacles to Peace, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917. pp. 400-401, that in Bitlis, Mus and Sassoun, The shortest method for disposing of the women and children concentrated in tile various camps was to burn them. And also that, Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these scenes were horrified and maddened at the remembering the sight. They told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh permeated the air for many days after. The Germans, Ottoman allies, also witnessed the way Armenians were burned according to the Israeli historian, Bat Ye’or, who writes: The Germans, allies of the Turks in the First World War, … saw how civil populations were shut up in churches and burned, or gathered en masse in camps, tortured to death, and reduced to ashes,… (See: B. Ye'or, The Dhimmi. The Jews and Christians under Islam, Trans. from the French by D. Maisel P. Fenton and D. Liftman, Cranbury, N.J.: Frairleigh Dickinson University, 1985. p. 95)
  11. During the Trabzon trial series, of the Martial court (from the sittings between March 26 and Mat 17, 1919), the Trabzons Health Services Inspector Dr. Ziya Fuad wrote in a report that Dr. Saib, caused the death of children with the injection of morphine, the information was allegedly provided by two physicians (Drs. Ragib and Vehib), both Dr. Saib colleagues at Trabzons Red Crescent hospital, where those atrocities were said to have been committed. (See: Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Turkish Military Tribunal’s Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series, Genocide Study Project, H. F. Guggenheim Foundation, published in The Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 1997). Dr. Ziya Fuad, and Dr. Adnan, public health services director of Trabzon, submitted affidavits, reporting a cases, in which, two school buildings were used to organize children and then sent them on the mezzanine, to kill them with a toxic gas equipment. This case was presented during the Session 3, p.m., 1 April 1919, also published in the Constantinople newspaper Renaissance, 27 April 1919 (for more information, see: Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of Ottoman Armenians, in The Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 2 (1986): 169-192). The Turkish surgeon, Dr. Haydar Cemal wrote in Türkce Istanbul, No. 45, 23 December 1918, also published in Renaissance, 26 December 1918, that on the order of the Chief Sanitation Office of the IIIrd Army in January 1916, when the spread of typhus was an acute problem, innocent Armenians slated for deportation at Erzican were inoculated with the blood of typhoid fever patients without rendering that blood ‘inactive’. Jeremy Hugh Baron writes : Individual doctors were directly involved in the massacres, having poisoned infants, killed children and issued false certificates of death from natural causes. Nazim's brother-in-law Dr. Tevfik Rushdu, Inspector-General of Health Services, organized the disposal of Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over six months; he became foreign secretary from 1925 to 1938. (See: Jeremy Hugh Baron, Genocidal Doctors, publish in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, November, 1999, 92, pp.590-593). The psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, writes in a parenthesis when introducing the crimes of NAZI doctors in his book Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, (1986) p. xii: (Perhaps Turkish doctors, in their participation in the genocide against the Armenians, come closest, as I shall later suggest).
  12. Oscar S. Heizer, the American consul at Trabzon, reports: This plan did not suit Nail Bey .... Many of the children were loaded into boats and taken out to sea and thrown overboard. (See: U.S. National Archives. R.G. 59. 867. 4016/411. April 11, 1919 report.) The Italian consul of Trabzon in 1915, Giacomo Gorrini, writes: I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea. (See: Toronto Globe, August 26, 1915) Hoffman Philip, the American Charge at Constantinople chargé d'affairs, writes: Boat loads sent from Zor down the river arrived at Ana, one thirty miles away, with three fifths of passengers missing. (Cipher telegram, July 12, 1916. U.S. National Archives, R.G. 59.867.48/356.) The Trabzon trials reported Armenians having been drown in the Black Sea. (Takvimi Vekdyi, No. 3616, August 6, 1919, p. 2.)

References

  • Akcam, Taner, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide, Zed Books, 2004
  • Akcam, Taner, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Metropolitan Books, 2006
  • . ISBN 0060198400. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |Author= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Publisher= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Title= ignored (|title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Year= ignored (|year= suggested) (help)
  • Bartov, Omer, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity, Oxford Univ. Press, 2000
  • Dadrian, Vahakn, N., The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, Berghahn Books, 1995
  • Dündar, Fuat, Ittihat ve Terakki'nin Müslümanlari Iskan Politikasi (1913-18), Iletisim, 2001
  • Fisk, Robert, The First Holocaust. In The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East; (October 2005) London. Fourth Estate, pp.388-436. ISBN 184115007X
  • Gust, Wolfgang, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern, Zu Klampen, 2005
  • Lepsius, Johannes, Deutschland und Armenien 1914-1918, Sammlung diplomatischer Aktenstücke, Donat & Temmen Verlag, 1986
  • Lewy, Guenter, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2005 (NEW PUBLICATION)
  • . ISBN 0878500944. {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help); Unknown parameter |Author= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Publisher= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Title= ignored (|title= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |Year= ignored (|year= suggested) (help)
  • Melson, Robert, Revolution and Genocide. On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, The University of Chicago Press, 1996
  • Power, Samantha, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, Harper 2003
  • Wallimann, Isidor (ed.): Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, Syracuse Univ. Press, 2000
  • "The Armenian Genocide: A Bibliography". University of Michigan, Dearborn: Armenian Research Center. March 18. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)
  • "The Armenian Genocide: A Supplemental Bibliography, 1993-1996". University of Michigan, Dearborn: Armenian Research Center. March 18. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= and |year= / |date= mismatch (help)

Websites supporting the genocide theses

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Websites opposing the genocide theses

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Independent Studies

Mutual Perceptions Research (Armenia/Turkey) (*.doc file) "The Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV) and the Armenian Sociological Association (HASA) have organized a Mutual Perceptions Research Project. Each group is carrying out sociological research to identify key issues of cultural understanding between the neighboring countries, including the perception of Turks by Armenians and of Armenians by Turks. The study focuses on the perceptions of the majority populations in each country. The combined results will constitute study findings. Representatives from each team met in Yerevan and fieldwork was undertaken in both countries. The results of the research were presented at an international seminar jointly organized by TESEV and HASA in Tbilisi, Georgia."
Full report (*.pdf file) Armenian and Turkish versions of the report are also available on the above mentioned website.
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