August 26, 2007
Congress Must Recognize the Armenian Genocide
By Andrew G. Bostom
Summary
A combination of official diplomatic correspondence, and private memoirs -- most notably the diaries of Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, an extended report by American consul Leslie Davis in Harput, Turkey, from 1915 to 1917, and the recently published United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917 -- provides lucid, often repellently detailed historical accounting of what the U.S. government knew regarding the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian genocide. These materials are perhaps the most salient examples of the evidence, as per the language of HR:/ SR:106, "documented in the United States record," which support the formal U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide as proposed in the Congressional resolutions.
The wartime reports from German and Austro-Hungarian officials, Turkey's World War I allies, as well as earlier British diplomatic reports dating back to 1890, confirm the independent U.S. evidence that the origins and evolution of the genocide had little to do with World War I "Armenian provocations." Contemporary accounts by European diplomats written from 1890 through the of World War I era, also demonstrate that these genocidal massacres were perpetrated in the context of a formal jihad waged against the Armenians because they sought the equal rights promised to them, but never granted, under various failed schemes to reform the discriminatory system of Ottoman Islamic Law ("Shari'a"). A widely disseminated 1915 Ottoman Fatwa entitled "Aljihad"(brought to the U.S. Consuls attention in Cairo), for example, clearly sanctioned religiously motivated jihad violence. Historian Johannes Lepsius' eyewitness accounts from Turkey documented the results of such invocations of jihad:
"559 villages whose surviving inhabitants were converted to Islam with fire and sword; 568 churches thoroughly pillaged, destroyed and razed to the ground; of 282 Christian churches transformed into mosques; of 21 Protestant preachers and 170 Armenian priests who were, after enduring unspeakable tortures, murdered on their refusal to accept Islam." Lepsius concluded with this rhetorical question: "Is this a religious persecution or is it not?"
And in his eloquent Wednesday 8/22/07 column "No Room to Deny Genocide" the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby emphasized the nexus between the jihad genocide of the Armenians, the contemporary depredations of jihad, and the dangers of denial:
"And at a time when jihadist violence from Darfur to Ground Zero has spilled so much innocent blood, dissimulation about the jihad of 1915 [emphasis added] can only aid our enemies."
Moreover the various "strategic rationales" and arguments put forth to oppose formal U.S. recognition (as in HR:/SR:106) of the Armenian genocide -- the U.S.-Turkish alliance, the Turkish-Israeli alliance, the vulnerability of Turkey's vestigial Jewish minority -- appear wanting and hackneyed in light of burgeoning evidence which undermines their basic credibility.
But most importantly, there is a compelling moral imperative to pass these resolutions which transcends the dubious geopolitical considerations used to rationalize and sustain Turkey's ongoing campaign of genocide denial. Professor Deborah Lipstadt, the renowned Holocaust scholar, and author of Denying the Holocaust, and History on Trial (which recounts her crushing defeat of Nazi-sympathizer David Irving's "libel' suit"), in conjunction with twelve other leading genocide scholars, elucidated the corrosive immorality of genocide denial in this 1996 statement:
Denial of genocide -- whether that of the Turks against the Armenians or the Nazis against the Jews -- is not an act of historical reinterpretation. Rather, it sows confusion by appearing to be engaged in a genuine scholarly effort. Those who deny genocide always dismiss the abundance of documents and testimony as contrived or coerced, or as forgeries and falsehoods. Free speech does not guarantee the deniers the right to be treated as the 'other' side of a legitimate debate when there is no credible other side"; nor does it guarantee the deniers space in the classroom or curriculum, or in any other forum. Genocide denial is an insidious form of intellectual and moral degradation...
Introduction
Senate: and House: Resolutions 106 both call upon the President,
...to ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record [emphasis added] relating to the Armenian Genocide.
The diaries of Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, in conjunction with the extended report by American consul Leslie Davis in Harput (remote eastern), Turkey, from 1915 to 1917, and the recently published United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917 -- the latter consisting of memos filed on a daily basis, informing the U.S. Secretary of State and President
Woodrow Wilson of the efforts to rescue as many Armenians as possible (and including the obstacles confronting the rescuers' efforts) -- are perhaps the most salient examples of the evidence, as per the language of HR/SR 106, "documented in the United States record." This combination of official diplomatic correspondence, and private memoirs, provides a lucid, often repellently detailed historical accounting of what the U.S. government knew regarding the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian genocide.
American Witnesses to the Armenian Genocide: Observations from U.S. Diplomats, 1915-1917
Ambassador Morgenthau, wrote a letter to his son on June 19, 1915, as the massacres of the Armenians reached a murderous crescendo,
The ruin and devastation that is being wrought here is heart-rending. The government is using its present opportunity while all other countries are at war, to obliterate the Armenian race...
His despair was intensified by feelings of impotence as a diplomat for a neutral nation, made all the more distressing by his sympathetic understanding of such mass persecution as a Jew:
...and the worst of it is that it is impossible to stop it. The United States as a neutral power has no right to interfere in their internal affairs, and as I receive report after report of the inhuman treatment that the Armenians are receiving, it makes me feel most sad. Their lot seems to be very much the same as that of the Jews in Russia, and belonging to a persecuted race myself, I have all the more sympathy with them.
Morgenthau reiterated his overall assessment that a frank genocide, in modern parlance, was taking place, both in his diary, and a plethora of memos submitted to the U.S. Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. He stated, for example, that the
...persecution of Armenians is assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate a systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary efforts, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other, accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them.
Aleppo (Syria) Consul, J.B. Jackson wrote to Ambassador Morgenthau on September 29, 1915 confirming the genocidal organization and scale of the unfolding tragedy:
The deportation of Armenians from their homes by the Turkish Government has continued with a persistence and perfection of plan...32,751...[arrived in Aleppo] by rail from interior stations...In addition thereto it is estimated that at least 100,000 others have arrived afoot. And such a condition as these unfortunates are in, especially those coming afoot, many having left their homes before Easter, deprived of all their worldly possessions without money and all sparsely clad and some naked from the treatment by their escorts and the despoiling depopulation en route. It is extremely rare to find a family intact that has come any considerable distance, invariably all having lost members from disease and fatigue, young girls and boys carried off by hostile tribesmen, and about all the men having been separated from the families and suffered fates that had best be left unmentioned, many being done away with in atrocious manners before the eyes of their relatives and friends. So severe has been the treatment that careful estimates place the number of survivors at only 15% of these originally deported. On this basis the number of those surviving even this far being less than 150,000 up to September 21, there seems to have been about 1,000,000 persons lost up to this date. [emphasis added]
There have been persistent reports of the selection of great numbers of the most prominent men from nearly every city, town and village, of their removal to outside places and their final disappearance by means of which we are not positively informed but which the imagination can more or less accurately establish, as months have passed and no news has come of their existence. The heinous treatment of thoroughly exhausted women and children in the open streets of Aleppo by the armed escorts, who relentlessly beat and kicked their helpless charges along when illness and fatigue prevented further effort, is evidence of what must have happened along the roads of the interior further removed from civilization.
The exhausted condition of the victims is further proven by the death of a hundred or more daily of those arriving in this city. Travelers report having seen the numberless corpses along the roadside in the adjacent territory, or bodies in all sorts of positions where the victims fell in the last gasps of typhoid, fever and other diseases, and of the dogs fighting over the bodies of children. Many are the harrowing tales related by the survivors, but time and space prevent the recital thereof.
And Harput Consul Davis contrasted the idyllic beauty of the Lake Goeljuk region, with the gruesome atrocities committed against the Armenians there, under the aegis of the Turks:
Few localities could be better suited to the fiendish purposes of the Turks in their plan to exterminate the Armenian population than this peaceful lake in the interior of Asiatic Turkey, with its precipitous banks and pocket-like valleys, surrounded by villages of savage Kurds and far removed from the sight of civilized man. This, perhaps, was the reason why so many exiles from distant vilayets [provinces] were brought in safety [from afar]...and then massacred in the "Slaughterhouse Vilayet" of Turkey. That which took place around beautiful Lake Goeljuk in the summer of 1915 is almost inconceivable. Thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered on its shores and barbarously mutilated.
Some of the bodies had been burned...probably in the search for gold. We estimated that in the course of our ride around the lake, and actually within the space of 24-hours, we had seen the remains of not less than 10,000 Armenians who had been killed around Lake Goeljuk. This, of course, is approximate, as some of them were only the bones of those who had perished several months before, from which the flesh had entirely disappeared, while in other cases the corpses were so fresh that they were swollen up and the odor from them showed that they had been killed only a few days before. I am sure, however, that there are more, rather than less, than that number; and it is probable that the remains which we saw were only a small portion of the total number in that vicinity. In fact, on my subsequent rides in the direction of Lake Goeljuk I nearly always discovered skeletons and bones in great numbers in the new places that I visited...
A True Genocide
Was the horrific fate of the Ottoman Empire's Armenian minority, at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, in particular, during World War I, due to "civil war", or genocide ? A seminal analysis by Professor Vahakn Dadrian, the most accomplished historian of this tragedy, published in 2002, validates the conclusion that the Ottoman Turks committed a centrally organized mass murder, i.e., a genocide, against their Armenian population. Relying upon a vast array of quintessential, primary source documents from the World War I allies of the Ottoman Empire, Germany and Austria-Hungary, Dadrian obviated the intractable disputes surrounding the reliability and authenticity of both Ottoman Turkish, and Armenian documents. He elucidated the truly unique nature of this documentary German and Austro-Hungarian evidence:
During the war, Germany and Austria-Hungary disposed over a vast network of ambassadorial, consular, military, and commercial representatives throughout the Ottoman Empire. Not only did they have access to high-ranking Ottoman officials and power-wielding decision-makers who were in a position to report to their superiors as locus in quo observers on many aspects of the wartime treatment of Ottoman Armenians. They supplemented their reports with as much detail as they could garner from trusted informers and paid agents, many of whom were Muslims, both civilians and military...
Moreover, the documents analyzed possessed another critical attribute: they included confidential correspondence prepared and sent to Berlin and Vienna, which were meant for wartime use only. This confidentiality, Dadrian notes, enabled German or Austro-Hungarian officials to openly question the contentions of their wartime Ottoman allies, when ascertaining and conveying facts truthfully to their superiors in Europe. Dadrian cites the compelling example of the November 16, 1915 report to the German chancellor, by Aleppo Consul Rossler. Rossler states,
I do not intend to frame my reports in such a way that I may be favoring one or the other party. Rather, I consider it my duty to present to you the description of things which have occurred in my district and which I consider to be the truth.
Rossler was reacting specifically to the official Ottoman allegation that the Armenians had begun to massacre the Turkish population in the Turkish sections of Urfa, a city within his district, after reportedly capturing them. He dismissed the charge, unequivocally, with a single word: "invented'".
Amassed painstakingly by Dadrian, the primary source evidence from these German and Austro-Hungarian officials -- reluctant witnesses -- leads to this inescapable conclusion: the anti-Armenian measures, despite a multitude of attempts at cover-up and outright denial, were meticulously planned by the Ottoman authorities, and were designed to destroy wholesale, the victim population. Dadrian further validates this assessment with remarkable testimony before the Mazhar Inquiry Commission, a Nuremberg-like tribunal, which conducted a preliminary investigation in the post-war period to determine the criminal liability of the wartime Ottoman authorities regarding the Armenian deportations and massacres. The December 15, 1918 deposition by General Mehmed Vehip, commander-in-chief of the Ottoman Third Army, and ardent CUP (Committee of Union and Progress, i.e., the "Ittihadists", or "Young Turks") member, included this summary statement:
The murder and annihilation of the Armenians and the plunder and expropriation of their possessions were the result of the decisions made by the CUP...These atrocities occurred under a program that was determined upon and involved a definite case of willfulness. They occurred because they were ordered, approved, and pursued first by the CUP's [provincial] delegates and central boards, and second by governmental chiefs who had...pushed aside their conscience, and had become the tools of the wishes and desires of the Ittihadist society.
Dadrian's own compelling assessment of this primary source evidence is summarized as follows:
Through the episodic interventions of the European Powers, the historically evolving and intensifying Turko-Armenian conflict had become a source of anger and frustration for the Ottoman rulers and elites driven by a xenophobic nationalism. A monolithic political party that had managed to eliminate all opposition and had gained control of the Ottoman state apparatus efficiently took advantage of the opportunities provided by World War I. It purged by violent and lethal means the bulk of the Armenian population from the territories of the empire. By any standard definition, this was an act of genocide.
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