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By its very nature historiography can neither be expected to be complete in every respect, nor be free from any number of other shortcomings. This truism is even more pertinent to the study of such a subject matter as the Armenian genocide the historical reality of which for one reason or another is presently being degraded to the level of dubiousness. The principal vehicles used hereby are the publications of a rather small group of authors purporting to be detached and disinterested investigators. Upon closer scrutiny, however, these very same authors reveal themselves as committed partisans boldly pushing certain denialist agendas that are subtly and skillfully woven into texture of their discourses. Hence the denial is attempted indirectly rather than directly; the historical reality of the World War I Armenian genocide is called into question by casting doubt on the appropriateness of the use of the label “genocide.”
When by recourse to a variety of techniques he is decrying as unwarranted the use of such a label with respect to the Armenian case, Professor Lewy is thereby providing a measure of confirmation in this respect. In the process he also is betraying his very limited familiarity with the subject. His article is replete with factual errors, misinterpretations that are accented by some outright falsehoods. On top of all this, he further betrays lack of an adequate level of knowledge of Turkish, not to speak of extinct Ottoman Turkish, on both of which he is significantly relying as primary source medium. One is prompted to wonder as to the origin and nature of the outside help he may have received.
What follows firstly is -- given exigent space limitations -– some samples only of the type of errors mentioned above:
The Yozgat trial series were not conducted in Yozgat but in Istanbul; Kemal was Kaymakam of Bogazliyan county only but not of Yozgat district of which he subsequently became an interim mutassarif by way of transfer and promotion; Cemal Pasha was not the governor of Aleppo, but the commander-in-chief of Ottoman’s IVth Army deployed in Lebanon and Syria (all these on p. 2); Dr. Liparit Nasariantz was not a German missionary (p. 5) but an Armenian political activist who later became a member of the Armenian National Council, an émigré political outfit. Moreover, Lewy’s claim that “there is no indication that German colonel Stange had any role in the Special Organization” is flatly contradicted by several authentic sources. Foremost among these is Dr. Ernst Kwiatkowski, Austria-Hungaria’s Consul at Trabzon, the port city where the Special Organization had its center for logistics. In one of his several reports to Vienna he revealed that “convicts were also enrolled” in Stange’s detachment which actually was the 8th Regiment of the 10th Army corps of the Ottoman III Army operating in the eastern province of Turkey. [1] Even more compelling is the disclosure of a Turkish officer who not only participated in Stange’s military operations, but kept a record of them in his notebook. According to him “Stange was in charge of the Special Organization Regiment that was named ‘Teshkilati Mahsusa Alayi’ ” and that it encompassed the notorious killer bands of two noted chieftains, Topal Osman and Deli Halit, who played a paramount role in the implementation phases of the Armenian genocide. That regiment consisted of eleven battalions (tabur) and was thereafter called the Lazistan Detachment (Lazistan Mufrezesi). [2] Unable to strictly control the secret and covert operations of these contingents of this Detachment, Stange at the end blasted them in his “secret” report to his German superiors in which he expressed his contempt of these “chettes” by calling them “scums.” [3]
According to professor Lewy, the Armenian claim of genocide is predicated upon the “the pillars,” namely, (1) the Turkish Courts- Martial of 1919-20, (2) the role of the Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa), and (3) the memoirs of Naim Bey (p. 6). This highly inaccurate description again is reflective of his seemingly limited familiarity with the literature involved. [4] Notwithstanding, they call for scrutiny to “set the record straight.”
Of these, the one involving a lengthy discussion, based on his claim that they are “forgeries,” covers the Naim-Andonian documents. That claim is mainly, if not exclusively, based upon a book produced by two Turkish authors who, following an extensive examination, maintained that the documents are forgeries. Even though at the end of his discussion he finds it expedient to hedge somewhat by allowing that these documents are “at best unverifiable and problematic,” the bulk of Lewy’s arguments with emphasis focus, however, on the forgery angle. Yet, as far as it is known, the two non-Turkish scholars cited by him for support of his claim did not themselves conduct any comparable research, including Zürcher who was content to state that the documents “have been shown to be forgeries.” But on the other end of the spectrum, a German author having very recently uncovered a number of authentic Ottoman documents from the Interior Ministry Section of Turkish state archives, established that these documents
confirm to some degree the contents of two other telegrams ascribed to Talaat in Andonian’s book. Thus the dating of telegrams nos. 840 and 860 as January 1916 appears to be correct…[The two Turkish authors] Sinasi Orel and Süreyya Yüce who have agued that Andonian forged his material, did not consider the source under scrutiny here. Thus their thesis is to be put into question and further research [on this matter] is necessary. [5]
Equally significant in this regard is the fact that Lewy is either unaware or he chose to ignore completely the existence of a very extensive analysis of the validity of these documents which I undertook and which in its entirety was published in the peer reviewed official journal of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. [6] In the light of all this, Lewy’s standards of research are cast in stark relief, especially with respect to his conclusion that “most historians and scholars dismiss ‘these documents’” (p. 5). When dismissing another “pillar” mentioned above, he criticizes the Ottoman criminal justice system as having subverted the basic principles of such justice. Evidently he is unaware of the fact that the Ottoman Penal Code and the Ottoman Code of Criminal Procedure were compendiums essentially modeled after their French counterparts. The entire system is inquisitorial. The judges take the lead in getting the facts in the pre-trial investigative stage as well as in the subsequent actual trial, whereas in the Anglo-Saxon common-law system, called adversarial, lawyers develop the facts thereby consigning the judges to a neutral role. Accordingly, the pre-trial investigation and the preparation of prosecution are conducted in privacy, namely, in secrecy. Defense counsels are denied access to the resulting files and the right to accompany the accused in these pre-trial examinations. Even though in the law of evidence the principle of the “intimate,” i.e., “a deep seated conviction” was adopted in the Ottoman Code of Criminal Procedure whereby the judge freely accords credence to the best of his conscience, for proof of guilt, however, he depends on concrete evidence, as well as defense’s counter-arguments. The composite ingredients of such evidence involve confession, witness testimony, the writings and records of officials, evidence secured through discovery, judicial notice, searches and seizures, and expert testimony (Articles 232 and 233). In all the trial series by and large those conditions obtained, especially with respect to massive testimony provided by dozens of Turkish and Muslim witnesses. [7] Furthermore, contrary to Lewy’s declaration that its text, along with the text of other proceedings, is “not preserved in any source” (p. 3), the fact is that the text of General Vehib’s deposition was not only read into the record in its entirety at the second sitting of the Trabzon trial series (March 19, 1919), but that entire text was published also in several newspapers of the period. [8]
Lewy further complains that the indictment “is not proof of guilt” (p. 3), whereas in the present case it legally served as a major source of evidence-in-chief, unlike in the case of all the other subsidiary indictments. Articles 130, 214 and especially 222, section, 1 and 2, of the Ottoman Criminal Code of Procedures spell out this function of the indictment. [9] The forty two pieces of authenticated documents attached to the key indictment comprised twelve cipher telegrams, three memos, two “communications,” ten signed (and three unsigned) statements obtained by the prosecution in the course of pre-trial interrogations, three depositions, two letters, and “several” other documents relative to the role of the “Special Organization.”
Lewy’s references to three Western High Commissioners, serving in Istanbul following its occupation by the victorious Allies in 1919, as supporting material for his thesis are such as to beg the question. It may be true for example, that U.S. High Commissioner Lewis Heck was critical of some of the procedural aspects of the trials in question. But it is also true that on several occasions he unequivocally recognized and denounced “the great crime” as when he declared, “The great majority of the Turkish officials in the interior either actively participated in, or at least condoned the massacres of the Armenians.” On another occasion he reinforced his view by stating that “…the vast majority of the Turkish race heartily approved” of these massacres. [10] As to the other two, in this case, British High Commissioners, viz., Vice Admiral Sir S.A. Gough Calthorpe and Admiral Sir J. de Robeck, their disapproval and derogation of these trials was, as I have in detail explained elsewhere, [11] primarily derived from their belief that in prosecuting the authors of the massacres the Military Tribunal was lax and inept, and hence the trials were “a farce” and “a failure,” to the detriment of the Armenians, the victims. Nor was Malta, a mere temporary detention center, in any way intended to serve as a venue for any kind of “trials” (p. 3).
Apparently determined to by all means discredit and invalidate the findings of this Tribunal, Lewy proceeds to dispute the method of authenticating the official documents used in the trials -- in complete disregard of the fact that almost all of these officials of the Interior Ministry in charge of verifying these documents were holdovers of the defunct and banished Young Turk Ittihadist Party, i.e., the CUP. In other words the residual partisans of the organization, whose top leaders were being prosecuted for a capital crime, are being accused of assisting the prosecution by way of accommodative dishonesty-because, as Lewy puts it, they are “period officials” (p. 3). What is the definition of the term “stretching an argument”?
Lewy rightly deplores “the loss of all their [i.e., the military courts’] documentation” (p. 3). The fact, however, that this loss remarkably coincides with the seizure of Istanbul by the Kemalist forces in 1922 when the huge archive of the Turkish Military Tribunal vanished without a trace, raises an abiding question:
Did the documents disappear by themselves, or having been collared and despoiled by interested parties, mainly the new masters of Turkey, they met the fate of a “loss”? [12]
His discussion of the Special Organization is no less marked by a plethora of errors and questionable assertions. They were briefly touched on in notes 1 and 2. Unfortunately, Lewy’s sources and data are wanting in some critical respects. The Turkish Military Tribunal through documents attached to the main indictment on four occasions, noted on pp. 4 and 5, of that indictment, reveals the close and very intimate links between the Special Organization and the top leaders of the Ittihad party, CUP, who are characterized as the organization’s central authority. On pp. 6 and 7, there are specific details about the wide-spread massacres the brigands of that organization have committed against the Armenians; on pp. 5, 6, and 7, there are further details as to how these perpetrators were released from the empire’s prisons and deployed in the provinces for massacre duty. Still on pp. 5 and 7, there are six specifications as to how two army commanders and the military governor of the Ottoman Capital, Istanbul, combined their resources to streamline these lethal operations of the Special Organization with the help of Dr. B. Chakir, one of the chief architects of the wartime genocide. [13] These disclosures independently and decades later are largely corroborated by the two most competent Turkish authors and authorities on the subject. [14]
Lewy’s bold contention that “there is no evidence beyond the indictment of the main trial that the Special Organization, with large number of convicts enrolled in its ranks, took the lead role in the massacres,” (p. 4) is flatly contradicted by first-hand Turkish evidence. A prominent editor and close associate of Atatürk in his memoirs reveals that when he at the start of World War I applied for reserve-officer training under a special program initiated by Dr. Nazim, another architect of the Armenian genocide, the latter ended up shocking the young volunteer when revealing that the task did involve commanding para-military units which consisted of ex-convicts, the so-called ”chettes.” Indeed Jevad, the military commander of the Ottoman capital, in the course of the second sitting of the Cabinet Ministers trial (May 4, 1919) testified that Dr. Nazim was in charge of recruiting volunteers (gönüllüs) for operations that were “non-military.” (askerlik haricinde) (T.V. 3543, p. 27). The young applicant wrote that he was repulsed by the idea of such an “army of massacrers” (Katiller Ordusu). [15] In a subsequent article in his newspaper, he went so far as to suggest that the massacres against the Armenians could well be characterized as “genocide,” using exactly this composite Latin-Greek term. [16] Another reserve officer with duties in the Department II, Intelligence, Ottoman General Headquarters, at the start of World War I, and subsequently with duties as deportation official, in a book published in the wake of that war with great compassion lamented the nightmare of the Armenian genocide. In doing so, he singled out the brigands, the “chettes” of the Special Organization who, he said “committed the greatest crimes,” (en buyuk cinayetteri) during that genocide. [17] Still another Turkish publicist and author of several volumes, referring to the same “chettes” of the Special Organization, testified that these criminal bands “directly pursued the goal of extermination” by attacking and destroying countless Armenian deportation convoys. [18] In another book he stated that these deportations “…meant the extermination of the Armenian minority in Turkey.” [19]
continued...
When by recourse to a variety of techniques he is decrying as unwarranted the use of such a label with respect to the Armenian case, Professor Lewy is thereby providing a measure of confirmation in this respect. In the process he also is betraying his very limited familiarity with the subject. His article is replete with factual errors, misinterpretations that are accented by some outright falsehoods. On top of all this, he further betrays lack of an adequate level of knowledge of Turkish, not to speak of extinct Ottoman Turkish, on both of which he is significantly relying as primary source medium. One is prompted to wonder as to the origin and nature of the outside help he may have received.
What follows firstly is -- given exigent space limitations -– some samples only of the type of errors mentioned above:
The Yozgat trial series were not conducted in Yozgat but in Istanbul; Kemal was Kaymakam of Bogazliyan county only but not of Yozgat district of which he subsequently became an interim mutassarif by way of transfer and promotion; Cemal Pasha was not the governor of Aleppo, but the commander-in-chief of Ottoman’s IVth Army deployed in Lebanon and Syria (all these on p. 2); Dr. Liparit Nasariantz was not a German missionary (p. 5) but an Armenian political activist who later became a member of the Armenian National Council, an émigré political outfit. Moreover, Lewy’s claim that “there is no indication that German colonel Stange had any role in the Special Organization” is flatly contradicted by several authentic sources. Foremost among these is Dr. Ernst Kwiatkowski, Austria-Hungaria’s Consul at Trabzon, the port city where the Special Organization had its center for logistics. In one of his several reports to Vienna he revealed that “convicts were also enrolled” in Stange’s detachment which actually was the 8th Regiment of the 10th Army corps of the Ottoman III Army operating in the eastern province of Turkey. [1] Even more compelling is the disclosure of a Turkish officer who not only participated in Stange’s military operations, but kept a record of them in his notebook. According to him “Stange was in charge of the Special Organization Regiment that was named ‘Teshkilati Mahsusa Alayi’ ” and that it encompassed the notorious killer bands of two noted chieftains, Topal Osman and Deli Halit, who played a paramount role in the implementation phases of the Armenian genocide. That regiment consisted of eleven battalions (tabur) and was thereafter called the Lazistan Detachment (Lazistan Mufrezesi). [2] Unable to strictly control the secret and covert operations of these contingents of this Detachment, Stange at the end blasted them in his “secret” report to his German superiors in which he expressed his contempt of these “chettes” by calling them “scums.” [3]
According to professor Lewy, the Armenian claim of genocide is predicated upon the “the pillars,” namely, (1) the Turkish Courts- Martial of 1919-20, (2) the role of the Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa), and (3) the memoirs of Naim Bey (p. 6). This highly inaccurate description again is reflective of his seemingly limited familiarity with the literature involved. [4] Notwithstanding, they call for scrutiny to “set the record straight.”
Of these, the one involving a lengthy discussion, based on his claim that they are “forgeries,” covers the Naim-Andonian documents. That claim is mainly, if not exclusively, based upon a book produced by two Turkish authors who, following an extensive examination, maintained that the documents are forgeries. Even though at the end of his discussion he finds it expedient to hedge somewhat by allowing that these documents are “at best unverifiable and problematic,” the bulk of Lewy’s arguments with emphasis focus, however, on the forgery angle. Yet, as far as it is known, the two non-Turkish scholars cited by him for support of his claim did not themselves conduct any comparable research, including Zürcher who was content to state that the documents “have been shown to be forgeries.” But on the other end of the spectrum, a German author having very recently uncovered a number of authentic Ottoman documents from the Interior Ministry Section of Turkish state archives, established that these documents
confirm to some degree the contents of two other telegrams ascribed to Talaat in Andonian’s book. Thus the dating of telegrams nos. 840 and 860 as January 1916 appears to be correct…[The two Turkish authors] Sinasi Orel and Süreyya Yüce who have agued that Andonian forged his material, did not consider the source under scrutiny here. Thus their thesis is to be put into question and further research [on this matter] is necessary. [5]
Equally significant in this regard is the fact that Lewy is either unaware or he chose to ignore completely the existence of a very extensive analysis of the validity of these documents which I undertook and which in its entirety was published in the peer reviewed official journal of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. [6] In the light of all this, Lewy’s standards of research are cast in stark relief, especially with respect to his conclusion that “most historians and scholars dismiss ‘these documents’” (p. 5). When dismissing another “pillar” mentioned above, he criticizes the Ottoman criminal justice system as having subverted the basic principles of such justice. Evidently he is unaware of the fact that the Ottoman Penal Code and the Ottoman Code of Criminal Procedure were compendiums essentially modeled after their French counterparts. The entire system is inquisitorial. The judges take the lead in getting the facts in the pre-trial investigative stage as well as in the subsequent actual trial, whereas in the Anglo-Saxon common-law system, called adversarial, lawyers develop the facts thereby consigning the judges to a neutral role. Accordingly, the pre-trial investigation and the preparation of prosecution are conducted in privacy, namely, in secrecy. Defense counsels are denied access to the resulting files and the right to accompany the accused in these pre-trial examinations. Even though in the law of evidence the principle of the “intimate,” i.e., “a deep seated conviction” was adopted in the Ottoman Code of Criminal Procedure whereby the judge freely accords credence to the best of his conscience, for proof of guilt, however, he depends on concrete evidence, as well as defense’s counter-arguments. The composite ingredients of such evidence involve confession, witness testimony, the writings and records of officials, evidence secured through discovery, judicial notice, searches and seizures, and expert testimony (Articles 232 and 233). In all the trial series by and large those conditions obtained, especially with respect to massive testimony provided by dozens of Turkish and Muslim witnesses. [7] Furthermore, contrary to Lewy’s declaration that its text, along with the text of other proceedings, is “not preserved in any source” (p. 3), the fact is that the text of General Vehib’s deposition was not only read into the record in its entirety at the second sitting of the Trabzon trial series (March 19, 1919), but that entire text was published also in several newspapers of the period. [8]
Lewy further complains that the indictment “is not proof of guilt” (p. 3), whereas in the present case it legally served as a major source of evidence-in-chief, unlike in the case of all the other subsidiary indictments. Articles 130, 214 and especially 222, section, 1 and 2, of the Ottoman Criminal Code of Procedures spell out this function of the indictment. [9] The forty two pieces of authenticated documents attached to the key indictment comprised twelve cipher telegrams, three memos, two “communications,” ten signed (and three unsigned) statements obtained by the prosecution in the course of pre-trial interrogations, three depositions, two letters, and “several” other documents relative to the role of the “Special Organization.”
Lewy’s references to three Western High Commissioners, serving in Istanbul following its occupation by the victorious Allies in 1919, as supporting material for his thesis are such as to beg the question. It may be true for example, that U.S. High Commissioner Lewis Heck was critical of some of the procedural aspects of the trials in question. But it is also true that on several occasions he unequivocally recognized and denounced “the great crime” as when he declared, “The great majority of the Turkish officials in the interior either actively participated in, or at least condoned the massacres of the Armenians.” On another occasion he reinforced his view by stating that “…the vast majority of the Turkish race heartily approved” of these massacres. [10] As to the other two, in this case, British High Commissioners, viz., Vice Admiral Sir S.A. Gough Calthorpe and Admiral Sir J. de Robeck, their disapproval and derogation of these trials was, as I have in detail explained elsewhere, [11] primarily derived from their belief that in prosecuting the authors of the massacres the Military Tribunal was lax and inept, and hence the trials were “a farce” and “a failure,” to the detriment of the Armenians, the victims. Nor was Malta, a mere temporary detention center, in any way intended to serve as a venue for any kind of “trials” (p. 3).
Apparently determined to by all means discredit and invalidate the findings of this Tribunal, Lewy proceeds to dispute the method of authenticating the official documents used in the trials -- in complete disregard of the fact that almost all of these officials of the Interior Ministry in charge of verifying these documents were holdovers of the defunct and banished Young Turk Ittihadist Party, i.e., the CUP. In other words the residual partisans of the organization, whose top leaders were being prosecuted for a capital crime, are being accused of assisting the prosecution by way of accommodative dishonesty-because, as Lewy puts it, they are “period officials” (p. 3). What is the definition of the term “stretching an argument”?
Lewy rightly deplores “the loss of all their [i.e., the military courts’] documentation” (p. 3). The fact, however, that this loss remarkably coincides with the seizure of Istanbul by the Kemalist forces in 1922 when the huge archive of the Turkish Military Tribunal vanished without a trace, raises an abiding question:
Did the documents disappear by themselves, or having been collared and despoiled by interested parties, mainly the new masters of Turkey, they met the fate of a “loss”? [12]
His discussion of the Special Organization is no less marked by a plethora of errors and questionable assertions. They were briefly touched on in notes 1 and 2. Unfortunately, Lewy’s sources and data are wanting in some critical respects. The Turkish Military Tribunal through documents attached to the main indictment on four occasions, noted on pp. 4 and 5, of that indictment, reveals the close and very intimate links between the Special Organization and the top leaders of the Ittihad party, CUP, who are characterized as the organization’s central authority. On pp. 6 and 7, there are specific details about the wide-spread massacres the brigands of that organization have committed against the Armenians; on pp. 5, 6, and 7, there are further details as to how these perpetrators were released from the empire’s prisons and deployed in the provinces for massacre duty. Still on pp. 5 and 7, there are six specifications as to how two army commanders and the military governor of the Ottoman Capital, Istanbul, combined their resources to streamline these lethal operations of the Special Organization with the help of Dr. B. Chakir, one of the chief architects of the wartime genocide. [13] These disclosures independently and decades later are largely corroborated by the two most competent Turkish authors and authorities on the subject. [14]
Lewy’s bold contention that “there is no evidence beyond the indictment of the main trial that the Special Organization, with large number of convicts enrolled in its ranks, took the lead role in the massacres,” (p. 4) is flatly contradicted by first-hand Turkish evidence. A prominent editor and close associate of Atatürk in his memoirs reveals that when he at the start of World War I applied for reserve-officer training under a special program initiated by Dr. Nazim, another architect of the Armenian genocide, the latter ended up shocking the young volunteer when revealing that the task did involve commanding para-military units which consisted of ex-convicts, the so-called ”chettes.” Indeed Jevad, the military commander of the Ottoman capital, in the course of the second sitting of the Cabinet Ministers trial (May 4, 1919) testified that Dr. Nazim was in charge of recruiting volunteers (gönüllüs) for operations that were “non-military.” (askerlik haricinde) (T.V. 3543, p. 27). The young applicant wrote that he was repulsed by the idea of such an “army of massacrers” (Katiller Ordusu). [15] In a subsequent article in his newspaper, he went so far as to suggest that the massacres against the Armenians could well be characterized as “genocide,” using exactly this composite Latin-Greek term. [16] Another reserve officer with duties in the Department II, Intelligence, Ottoman General Headquarters, at the start of World War I, and subsequently with duties as deportation official, in a book published in the wake of that war with great compassion lamented the nightmare of the Armenian genocide. In doing so, he singled out the brigands, the “chettes” of the Special Organization who, he said “committed the greatest crimes,” (en buyuk cinayetteri) during that genocide. [17] Still another Turkish publicist and author of several volumes, referring to the same “chettes” of the Special Organization, testified that these criminal bands “directly pursued the goal of extermination” by attacking and destroying countless Armenian deportation convoys. [18] In another book he stated that these deportations “…meant the extermination of the Armenian minority in Turkey.” [19]
continued...
Incase some of you missed what he's responding to Heeere's.. Lewy
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