May 2, 2002

Dadrian Speaks on Turkey's Genocide Denial

San Francisco, April 26, 2002 -  At the invitation of the Bay Area Armenian National Committee, approximately 100 people packed Vaspouragan Hall to hear scholar Vahakn Dadrian speak on the elements of Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide and the indisputable archival evidence that exists to combat it.

"For me, the most significant aspect of the Armenian Genocide is the impunity accorded to the perpetrator," said Dadrian, who said that Turkey denies the victims, denies the crime, and denies the possibility that third parties get involved in the study.  He enumerated five points of Turkey's denialist claims:

1. There was only an order to deport the Armenians, not exterminate them;
2. The deportations were limited to the war zones, not across the whole Ottoman Empire;
3. Armenians provoked it;
4. If massacres took place, it was beyond the control of the authorities;
5. If massacres took place, they were mutual, committed by both Turks and Armenians.

Additionally, Turks have begun to use the "numbers game," said Dadrian, claiming that 2.5 million Turks were lost in the war, even though the claim is "... utterly untenable - taking two disparate categories and comparing them - Armenian losses being the centrally ordered mass murder of a population, and Turkish losses being the result of war against Britain, Imperial Russia, and France."

Addressing the Turkish claim that Armenians were victims of a civil war, Dadrian called it "... full of frivolity, exceeded only by absurdity." He explained that Turkey began the conscription of Armenian men into the army within hours of signing its treaty with Germany in August, 1914, leaving only a terrified Armenian population of women, children, and the elderly, which could not even consider mounting a confrontation against a fully mobilized army. Talaat Pasha, Minister of the Interior and Young Turk Party leader, had dissolved the parliament and declared martial law, allowing for people to be arrested at will, regions to be cut off from each other, and for total control of the press, communications and debate.

Dadrian said the main problem in refuting Turkish revisionism is accumulating documentation that is reliable (the source being of high quality); explicit; incontestable (of an official character); and verifiable (allowing anyone to confirm its validity).  In order to avoid Turkish claims of bias, Dadrian said he prefers to exclude from his evidence all documents emanating from wartime enemies of the Ottomans, even though the archives of Britain, France and Russia are replete with documentation on the Armenian Genocide.

Although survivor accounts are important, Dadrian said he refrains from using them in refuting Turkish denials, because they can be termed "victim bias" by the Turks.  Nevertheless, the Armenian Genocide survivor accounts of the 1920's, 30's and 40's are especially good documentation, said Dadrian, who hoped that researchers would re-discover these journals, as they are much more useful than the later interviews of the 1970's, 80's, and 90's, at which time survivors' memories were not as fresh.

Dadrian described the valuable evidence within the archives of Turkey's wartime allies, Imperial Germany and Austria.  He said that although the German ambassador initially protected and shielded the Turks, saying the massacres were exaggerated and carried out for security purposes, the German embassy was later overwhelmed with accounts from consuls and vice counsels from the towns of Mersin, Adana, Trebizon, and Erzeroum, saying "We are witnessing the massive annihilation of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire."  When one consul admonished Talaat Pasha to stop the killing, Talaat had him removed from his post.  When the consul's successor took over, he wrote to his embassy, "The destruction of the Armenian population is all but completed."  The last German ambassador during the war said that Talaat had confided in him that his aim was the destruction of the Armenians.  Dadrian said the German word for "extermination," was used repeatedly in these documents.      

Similarly, the Austrian ambassador to Turkey complained to his government in Vienna on numerous occasions that "We are witnessing the destruction of the Armenians, an ancient Christian nation."

Although the Turkish government has purged its archives of much of the evidence of the Armenian Genocide, Dadrian said "Given the magnitude of the crime, it is impossible to make every trace of evidence disappear."  He said it was important to use the surviving Ottoman archival documents to refute the denial.  He described three types of surviving Turkish documents:

1.  Documents emanating from the post-war Turkish military tribunals   
Dadrian explained that the victorious allies of WWI stipulated that unless Turkey prosecuted the authors of the massacres, the terms of their treaty would be much more severe.  When the tribunal was established, 49 documents were gathered, consisting of wartime communications between military commanders about the success of their massacres of the Armenians.  The Ottoman authorities conducting the tribunal stamped each document with the confirmation, "conforms to the original."

2.  Transcripts of parliamentary debates
According to Dadrian, the upper and lower houses of the Ottoman parliament had extraordinary debates about the massacres, during which remarkable confessions were made.  For example, on the opening day of parliament in November, 1918, the head of the Senate is quoted as saying, "We killed off in a fiendish way the Armenian population."  During a debate on November 21, 1918, one retired general said it was important to also remember the Turkish victims of Armenians.  Another parliamentarian responded that those were the results of individual acts by Armenians, whereas the Armenian victims were the result of official policy by the central government."

In yet another part of the transcript for November 21, 1918, a statesman recounts receiving two documents in his office:  one, an official order from the Interior Ministry for the deportation of the Armenians, and another, an order by the Central Committee of the Ittihad Party (the informal central authority, superseding the official government) saying, "As soon as Armenian convoys leave their towns and are a sufficient distance away, proceed with the execution of your mission..."  a thinly veiled euphemism for the annihilation of the Armenians, often carried out by newly released criminal convicts.

Dadrian described the confession of a member of the Chamber of Deputies on December 11, 1918, who described witnessing the dispatch (on the orders of a military general) of a ship full of Armenian women and children from a port on the Black Sea.  The witness said all the passengers were drowned and the vessel soon returned to the port empty.

Using all these forms of documentation, Dadrian proposed "reconstructing" the Armenian Genocide.  He said there were four main determinants: 

1.  Premeditation - Dadrian said, "The Turkish archival material amply implicates premeditation," additionally citing entries in the Turkish Military Tribunal's official organ, and the official memoirs of German and Austrian officials relating conversions with Turkish officials about their plans;

2.  Genocidal intent - Dadrian cited the tribunal's verdict regarding the events in Yozgat.  The court said, "The intention of the deportations was the destruction of the population. There can be no doubt about it."  Dadrian also told the story of the Turkish army commander, Vehib Pasha, who admitted that on arrival at his post, there were suspiciously no Armenians to be found in the provinces. When he complied with an order to find 2,000 Armenians to build a railway in the Spring of 1916, the Armenians never arrived at the construction site.  He found and hanged the perpetrator, and upon discovering the massacre was carried out on the order of the governor of Sivas, he attempted to arrest the governor.  This prompted Talaat Pasha to remove Vehib Pasha from his post.  In his December 5, 1918 court affidavit, Vehib Pasha wrote, "To sum up, the massacre and annihilation of the Armenian population and the plunder and robbery of their possessions was an order from the Young Turks.  All took place under the sponsorship of the government."  Dadrian noted that the Turkish word for "premeditation, or prior intent" was used in the affidavit;

3.  Organization - Dadrian briefly described the various functionaries assigned to carrying out the genocide plan.  These men, given the purposefully vague titles of "Responsible Secretary," "Delegate," and "Inspector" were sent to all the central locations of the massacres and led the killings, superseding the authority of the local governors who would be inclined to exempt certain individuals from the deportations;

4.  Execution - "The execution of the plan for the Armenian Genocide presents a picture which is unparalleled in the annals of human history," said Dadrian, who described three methods of destruction:

a.  The use of blunt instruments like axes, saws (which U.S. Ambassador Morganthau wrote was meant to save money on gunpowder), making dying a protracted agony;

b.  Death by drowning, in the tributaries of the Euphrates River and the Black Sea.  Morganthau's description of the drowning deaths he saw in Erzinga, at the Euphrates, saying there was such an accumulation of corpses, that the river changed its course for 100 meters;

c. Death by burning, the main method of genocide in Moush, where about 100,000 people were killed,  and Bitlis.  Turks crowded wooden houses and stables with Armenian women and children, and torched them.  Turkish commander Vehib Pasha described seeing piles of charred bodies in stables, saying, "It's hard to find in the history of Islam such brutality.  Divine justice may be delayed but not forfeited."

"What do we learn?" asked Dadrian at the conclusion of his lecture.  "When perpetrators escape retribution, the victims are seen as fair game.  Impunity allows the perpetrator to justify the crime and emboldens them to act again," said Dadrian, saying he believed the Armenian Genocide was the result of impunity for the 1894-96 massacres and the 1909 Adana massacres which followed.  He said impunity also encourages the perpetrators to commit similar crimes against others, citing Turkish actions against the Kurds and former Turkish Prime Minister Demirel's repeated warnings to the Kurds to "Remember the Armenians..."

Dadrian said clear comparisons can be made with the holocaust of the Jews, in that the two genocides were conceived, organized, and carried out by a conspiratorial political party, which gained control over the state, subverted the functions of the state, and criminalized the state.  He said he believed many Holocaust scholars are committing a serious error by refusing to draw comparisons, because it is in through these comparisons that more general lessons can be learned.  Both the Turks and the Germans wanted to create a homogenous system. The Germans wanted Germany for the Germans, free from Jews, and Turks wanted Turkey free from Armenians. For these perpetrators, genocide was an instrument for social engineering.

After his lecture, Dadrian answered a range of questions.  On why Turkey does not acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, he said there is a strong stigma attached to it, especially since Turkey sees itself a a paragon of culture;  it is more and more difficult to accept responsibility after decades of denial; and because there may be legal consequences, since Turkey is the successor regime to the Ottoman Empire.

On the question of the lack of a specific order for the enactment of the Armenian Genocide, Dadrian said it's ridiculous to expect criminals to create and keep such a record, adding that there is similarly no such record of an order for the Jewish Holocaust, yet that does not lessen the legitimacy of the event.

Asked about the short-lived Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission, Dadrian said, "I consider it a diversion and deflection by the Turks."  Remembering an occasion when he was approached by Turkish businessmen regarding the establishment of a Turkish Chair at Princeton University, he said that the Turks expected them to "drink together, eat together, and forget the past..."   To a captivated audience, Dadrian said, "We will never forget!".