Armenian genocide denial
Armenian genocide denial is the claim that the
Borrowing arguments used by the CUP to justify its actions, denial of the Armenian genocide rests on the assumption that the "relocation" of Armenians was a legitimate state action in response to a real or perceived Armenian uprising that threatened the existence of the empire during wartime. Deniers assert the CUP intended to resettle Armenians rather than kill them. They claim the death toll is exaggerated or attribute the deaths to other factors, such as a purported civil war, disease, bad weather, rogue local officials, or bands of Kurds and outlaws. Historian Ronald Grigor Suny summarizes the main argument as "there was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it".[4]
One of the most important reasons for this denial is that the genocide enabled the establishment of a Turkish nation-state. Recognition would contradict Turkey's
Background
The presence of
The
Armenian genocide
During the Ottoman
In mid-April, after Ottoman leaders had decided to commit genocide,
Historians estimate that 1.5 to 2 million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, of whom 800,000 to 1.2 million were deported during the genocide. In 1916, a wave of massacres targeted the surviving Armenians in Syria; by the end of the year, only 200,000 were still alive.[41] An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 women and children were integrated into Muslim families through such methods as forced marriage, adoption and conversion.[42][43] The state confiscated and redistributed property belonging to murdered or deported Armenians.[44][45] During the Russian occupation of eastern Anatolia, Russian and Armenian forces massacred as many as 60,000 Muslims. Making a false equivalence between these killings and the genocide is a central argument of denial.[46][47]
The genocide is documented extensively in
Origins
Ottoman Empire
In May 1915, Russia, Britain, and France sent a
In early 1916, the Ottoman government published a two-volume work titled The Armenian Aspirations and Revolutionary Movements, denying it had tried to exterminate the Armenian people.[57] At the time, little credence was given to such statements internationally,[58] but some Muslims, previously ashamed by crimes against Armenians, changed their mind in response to propaganda about atrocities allegedly committed by Armenians.[59] The themes of genocide denial that originated during the war were later recycled in Turkey's denial of the genocide.[52][58]
Turkish nationalist movement
The Armenian genocide itself played a key role in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the Turkish republic.
Following the genocide, many survivors sought an Armenian state in eastern Anatolia; warfare between Turkish nationalists and Armenians was fierce, atrocities being committed on both sides. Later political demands and Armenian killings of Muslims have often been used to retroactively justify the 1915 genocide.
The Ottoman government in Constantinople
In Turkey
Causes
Historian
One factor in explaining denial is Sèvres syndrome, a popular belief that Turkey is besieged by implacable enemies.[90][91] Despite the unlikelihood that recognition would lead to any territorial changes, many Turkish officials believe that genocide recognition is part of a plot to partition Turkey or extract other reparations.[92][93][94] Acknowledgement of the genocide is perceived by the state as a threat to Turkey's national security, and Turks who do so are seen as traitors.[95][96] During his fieldwork in an Anatolian village in the 1980s, anthropologist Sam Kaplan found that "a visceral fear of Armenians returning ... and reclaiming their lands still gripped local imagination".[97]
Destruction and concealment of evidence
An edict of the Ottoman government banned foreigners from taking photographs of Armenian refugees or the corpses that accumulated on the sides of the roads on which death marches were carried out. Violators were threatened with arrest.
Turkish historiography
In Mustafa Kemal's 1927 Nutuk speech, which was the foundation of Kemalist historiography, the tactics of silence and denial are employed to deal with violence against Armenians. As in his other speeches, he presents Turks as innocent of any wrongdoing and as victims of horrific Armenian atrocities.[112][113][114] For decades, Turkish historiography ignored the Armenian genocide. One of the early exceptions was the genocide perpetrator Esat Uras, who published The Armenians in History and the Armenian Question in 1950. Uras's book, probably written in response to post–World War II Soviet territorial claims, was a novel synthesis of earlier arguments deployed by the CUP during the war, and linked wartime denial with the "official narrative" on the genocide developed in the 1980s.[115][116]
In the 1980s, following Armenian efforts for recognition of the genocide and a
Around 1990, Taner Akçam, working in Germany, was the first Turkish historian to acknowledge and study the genocide.[124] During the 1990s, private universities began to be established in Turkey, enabling challenges to state-sponsored views.[125] In 2005, academics at three Turkish universities organized an academic conference dealing with the genocide. Scheduled to be held in May 2005, the conference was suspended following a campaign of intimidation, but eventually held in September.[126][127][128] The conference represented the first major challenge to Turkey's founding myths in the public discourse of the country[128] and resulted in the creation of an alternative, non-denialist historiography by elite academics in Istanbul and Ankara, in parallel to an ongoing denialist historiography.[129][130] Turkish academics who accept and study the genocide as fact have been subjected to death threats and prosecution for insulting Turkishness.[131][132] Western scholars generally ignore the Turkish denialist historiography because they consider its methods unscholarly—especially the selective use of sources.[133][134]
Education
Turkish schools, public or private, are required to use history textbooks approved by the
Society
For decades, the genocide was a taboo subject in Turkish society.
Most Turks support the state's policies with regard to genocide denial. Some admit that massacres occurred but regard them as justified responses to Armenian treachery.[155][156] Many still consider Armenians to be a fifth column.[68] According to Halil Karaveli, "the word [genocide] incites strong, emotional reactions among Turks from all walks of society and of every ideological inclination".[157] Turkish–Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was outspoken in his advocacy for facing historical truths to achieve a better society and reconciliation between ethnic groups. He was prosecuted for insulting Turkishness and was assassinated in 2007 by a Turkish ultranationalist.[158][159] In 2013, a study sampling Turkish university students in the United States found that 65% agreed with the official view that Armenian deaths occurred as a result of "inter-communal warfare" and that another 10% blamed Armenians for causing the violence.[160] A 2014 survey found that only 9% of Turkish citizens thought their government should recognize the genocide.[7][8] Many believe that such an acknowledgement is imposed by Armenians and foreign powers with no benefit to Turkey.[161] Many Kurds, who themselves have suffered political repression in Turkey, have recognized and condemned the genocide.[162][163]
Politics
The Islamic conservative
Foreign relations of Turkey
Turkish efforts to project its genocide denial overseas date to the 1920s,[174][175] or, alternately, to the genocide itself.[176][177] Turkey's century-long effort to deny the Armenian genocide sets this genocide apart from others in history. According to genocide scholar Roger W. Smith, "In no other instance has a government gone to such extreme lengths to deny that a massive genocide took place."[6] Central to Turkey's ability to deny the genocide and counter its recognition is the country's strategic position in the Middle East, Cold War alliance with the West, and membership of NATO.[178][179] Historians have described the role of other countries in enabling Turkey's genocide denial as a form of collusion.[180][181][182]
At the
According to sociologist
Germany
From 1915 to 1918, Germany and the Ottoman Empire undertook "joint propaganda efforts of denial."
In March 2006, Turkish nationalist groups organized two rallies in Berlin intended to commemorate "the murder of Talat Pasha" and protest "the lie of genocide." German politicians criticized the march, and turnout was low.[200] When the Bundestag voted to recognize the Armenian genocide in 2016, Turkish media harshly criticized the resolution and eleven deputies of Turkish origin received police protection because of death threats.[201] Germany's large Turkish community has been cited as a reason why the government hesitated,[202] and Turkish organizations lobbied against the resolution and organized demonstrations.[203]
United States
Historian
Turkey began political lobbying around 1975.[210] Şükrü Elekdağ, Turkish ambassador to the United States from 1979 to 1989, worked aggressively to counter the trend of Armenian genocide recognition by courting academics, business interests, and Jewish groups.[211] Committee members of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reported Elekdağ told them that the safety of Jews in Turkey was not guaranteed if the museum covered the Armenian genocide.[212] Under his tenure, the Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS) was set up, funded by $3 million from Turkey, and the country spent $1 million annually on public relations.[211] In 2000, Elekdağ complained ITS had "lost its function and its effectiveness."[210] Turkey threatened to cut off the United States' access to key air bases in Turkey, were it to recognize the genocide.[178] In 2007, a Congressional resolution for genocide recognition failed because of Turkish pressure. Opponents of the bill said a genocide had taken place, but argued against formal recognition to preserve good relations with Turkey.[213] Each year since 1994, the United States president has issued a commemorative message on 24 April. Turkey has sometimes made concessions to keep the president from using the word "genocide".[191][214] In 2019, both houses of Congress passed resolutions formally recognizing the genocide.[179][215] On 24 April 2021, the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, President Joe Biden referred to the events as "genocide" in a statement released by the White House.[216]
United Kingdom
Human rights lawyer
Israel
According to historians
In April 2001, a Turkish newspaper quoted foreign minister Shimon Peres as saying, "We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through, but not a genocide."[221][222] According to Charny and Auron, this statement crossed the line into active denial of the Armenian genocide.[223] Scholar Eldad Ben Aharon considers that Peres simply made explicit what had been Israel's policy since 1948.[222] Israel–Turkey relations deteriorated in the late 2010s, but Israel's relations with Azerbaijan are close and the Azerbaijan–Israel International Association has lobbied against recognition of the genocide.[224]
Denialism in academia
Until the twenty-first century,
Beginning in the 1980s, the Turkish government has funded research institutes to prevent recognition of the genocide.
More recent academic denialism in the United States has focused on an alleged Armenian uprising, said to justify the persecution of Armenians as a legitimate counterinsurgency.[241] In 2009, the University of Utah opened its "Turkish Studies Project", funded by the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) and led by M. Hakan Yavuz, with Elekdağ on the advisory board.[242][234] The University of Utah Press has published several books denying the genocide,[241][242] beginning with Guenter Lewy's The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey (2006). Lewy's book had been rejected by eleven publishers and, according to Marc Mamigonian, became "one of the key texts of modern denial".[243][244] TCA has also provided financial support to several authors including McCarthy, Michael Gunter, Yücel Güçlü, and Edward J. Erickson for writing books that deny the Armenian genocide.[242] According to Richard G. Hovannisian, of recent deniers in academia, almost all have connections to Turkey and those with Turkish citizenship have all worked for the Turkish foreign ministry.[245]
Academic integrity controversies
Many scholars consider it unethical for academics to deny the Armenian genocide.[227][246] Beyond that, there have been several controversies about academic integrity relating to denial of the genocide. In 1990, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton received a letter from Nüzhet Kandemir , Turkish ambassador to the United States, questioning references to the Armenian genocide in one of Lifton's books. The ambassador inadvertently included a draft of a letter from Lowry advising the ambassador on how to prevent mention of the Armenian genocide in scholarly works. Lowry was later named Atatürk Professor of Ottoman Studies at Princeton University, which the Turkish government had endowed with a $750,000 grant. His actions were described as "subversion of scholarship";[247] he later said it was a mistake to have written the letter.[248]
In 2006, Ottomanist historian
In a lecture he delivered in June 2011, Akçam stated that a Turkish foreign ministry official told him that the Turkish government was offering money to academics in the United States for denial of the genocide, noting the coincidence between what his source said and Gunter's book Armenian History and the Question of Genocide.[255] Hovannisian believes that books denying the genocide are published because of flaws in peer review leading to "a strong linkage among several mutually sympathetic reviewers" without submitting the books to academics who would point out errors.[256]
Examination of claims
The official Turkish view is based on the belief that the Armenian genocide was a legitimate state action and therefore cannot be challenged on legal or moral grounds.[257] Publications from this point of view share many of the basic facts with non-denialist histories, but differ in their interpretation and emphases.[258] In line with the CUP's justification of its actions, denialist works portray Armenians as an existential threat to the empire in a time of war, while rejecting the CUP's intent to exterminate the Armenian people. Historian Ronald Grigor Suny summarizes the main denialist argument as, "There was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it."[4][259]
Denialist works portray Armenians as terrorists and secessionists,
Other arguments include:
- That there was a "civil war" or generalized Armenian uprising planned by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) in collusion with Russia.[273][274] Neither Ottoman archives nor other sources support this hypothesis, as admitted by one proponent of this theory, Edward Erickson.[263][275][276]
- That the number of Armenians who died was 300,000 or fewer, perhaps no more than 100,000.[277] Bloxham sees this as part of a more general theme of deliberately understating the Armenian presence in the Ottoman Empire to undermine any demands for autonomy or independence.[278]
- That certain groups of Armenians were spared, which proponents argue proves there was no systematic effort to exterminate the Armenian people.[279] Some have falsely claimed that Catholic and Protestant Armenians and the families of Armenian soldiers serving in the Ottoman Army were not deported.[280] The survival of the Armenians of Smyrna and Constantinople—planned by the CUP but only partially carried out because of German pressure—is also cited to deny that the CUP leadership had genocidal intent.[281][282]
- False assertions that the Ottoman rulers took actions to safeguard Armenian lives and property during their deportation, and prosecuted 1,397 people for harming Armenians during the genocide.[283][284]
- That many of the sources cited by historians of the genocide are unreliable or forged, including the accounts of Armenian survivors and Western diplomatsPrime Ministerial Ottoman Archive is considered the only reliable source.[289]
- The assertion that Turks are incapable of committing genocide, an argument often supported by exaggerated claims of Ottoman and Turkish benevolence towards Jews.[290] At an official ceremony to commemorate the Holocaust in 2014, Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu claimed that, in contrast to Christian Europe, "There is no trace of genocide in our history."[291] During a visit to Sudan in 2006, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan denied there had been a Darfur genocide because "a Muslim cannot commit genocide".[292][293]
- That claims of genocide stem from a prejudiced, anti-Turkish or Orientalist worldview.[242]
- At the extreme end of denialist claims is that it is not Turks who committed genocide against Armenians but vice versa, as articulated by the Iğdır Genocide Memorial and Museum.[1]
Denial of the Armenian genocide is compared frequently to
Legality
According to former International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judge Flavia Lattanzi, the present Turkish government's "denial of past Ottoman and Turkish authorities' wrongdoings is a new violation of international law".[295]
Some European countries have adopted laws to criminalize denial of the genocide;
In March 2007, a Swiss court found
Consequences
Kieser, Göçek, and Cheterian state that ongoing denial prevents Turkey from achieving a full democracy including
Denial has also affected Armenians, particularly those who live in Turkey. Historian Talin Suciyan states that the Armenian genocide and its denial "led to a series of other policies that perpetuated the process by liquidating their properties, silencing and marginalising the survivors, and normalising all forms of violence against them".[318] According to an article in the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, "[d]enial prevents healing of the wounds inflicted by genocide, and constitutes an attack on the collective identity and national cultural continuity of the victimized people".[319] Göçek argues "the lack of acknowledgement literally prevents the wounds opened by past violence to ever heal".[320] The activities of Armenian militant groups in the 1970s and 1980s, like the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia and the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, was caused partly by the failure of peaceful efforts to elicit Turkish acknowledgement of the genocide.[321][322] Some historians, such as Stefan Ihrig, have argued that impunity for the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, as well as silence or justification from bystanders of the crime, emboldened the perpetrators of the Holocaust.[323][202]
International relations
Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993, following the First Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Turkic-speaking Azerbaijan. The closed border harms the economies of Armenia and eastern Turkey.[191][325] Although Armenia was willing to normalize relations without preconditions, Turkey demanded that the Armenian side abandon all support for the recognition efforts of the Armenian diaspora.[326] There have been two major attempts at Turkish-Armenian reconciliation—the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission (2000–2004) and the Zurich Protocols (2009)—both of which failed partly because of the controversy over the Armenian genocide. In both cases, the mediators did their best to sideline historical disputes, which proved impossible.[327] Armenian diaspora groups opposed both initiatives and especially a historical commission to investigate what they considered established facts.[328] Bloxham asserts that since "denial has always been accompanied by rhetoric of Armenian treachery, aggression, criminality, and territorial ambition, it actually enunciates an ongoing if latent threat of Turkish 'revenge'."[329]
Since the beginning of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Azerbaijan has adopted Turkey's genocide denial and worked to promote it internationally.[330][331] The Armenian genocide is also widely denied by Azerbaijani civil society.[332] Many Armenians saw a connection between the genocide and later anti-Armenian violence like the 1988 Sumgait pogrom, though the connection between the Karabakh conflict and the Armenian genocide is mostly made by Azerbaijani elites.[333] Azerbaijani nationalists accused Armenians of staging the Sumgait pogrom and other anti-Armenian pogroms, similar to the Turkish discourse on the Armenian genocide.[334]
Azerbaijan state propaganda claims that the Armenians have perpetrated a genocide against
References
Citations
- ^ a b
- Marchand, Laure; Perrier, Guillaume (2015). Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide. ISBN 978-0-7735-9720-4.
The Iğdır genocide monument is the ultimate caricature of the Turkish government's policy of denying the 1915 genocide by rewriting history and transforming victims into guilty parties.
- Hovannisian 2001, p. 803. "... the unbending attitude of the Ankara government, in 1995 of a multi-volume work of the prime ministry's state archives titled Armenian Atrocities in the Caucasus and Anatolia According to Archival Documents. The purpose of the publication is not only to reiterate all previous denials but also to demonstrate that it was in fact the Turkish people who were the victims of a genocide perpetrated by the Armenians."
- Cheterian 2015, pp. 65–66. "Some of the proponents of this official narrative have even gone so far as to claim that the Armenians were the real aggressors, and that Muslim losses were greater than those of the Armenians."
- Gürpınar 2016, p. 234. "Maintaining that 'the best defence is a good offence', the new strategy involved accusing Armenians in response for perpetrating genocide against the Turks. The violence committed by the Armenian committees under the Russian occupation of Eastern Anatolia and massacring of tens of thousands of Muslims (Turks and Kurds) in revenge killings in 1916–17 was extravagantly displayed, magnified and decontextualized."
- Marchand, Laure; Perrier, Guillaume (2015). Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide.
- ^ a b c Dadrian 2003, pp. 270–271; Chorbajian 2016, p. 168;
- Ihrig 2016, pp. 10–11. "While some have gone to great lengths to 'prove" that similar American reports are not credible, especially the memoirs of American ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr., and allege that, of course, the Entente countries produced only war propaganda, nothing of the sort can be said about the German sources... After all, they were already afraid of the very negative repercussions these events would have for Germany during and after the war. What reason could they possibly have had to forge such potentially self-incriminating reports, almost on a daily basis, for months?"
- Gürpınar 2016, p. 234. "Contrary to the 'selected naivety' of the first part of the 'Turkish thesis', here, a 'deliberate ignorance' is essential. Armenian 'counter-evidence' such as highly comprehensive and also poignant consular reports and dispatches are to be omitted and dismissed as sheer propaganda without responding to the question of why the diplomats falsified the truth."
- Cheterian 2018a, p. 189. "As the deportations and the massacres were taking place, representatives of global powers, diplomats, scholars, and eyewitnesses were also documenting them, and all parties knew that those events were organized by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) with the aim to exterminate Ottoman Armenians..."
- ^ a b Academic consensus:
- ISBN 978-0-203-78699-4.
Despite growing scholarly consensus on the fact of the Armenian Genocide...
- Suny 2009, p. 935. "Overwhelmingly, since 2000, publications by non-Armenian academic historians, political scientists, and sociologists... have seen 1915 as one of the classic cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide. And, even more significantly, they have been joined by a number of scholars in Turkey or of Turkish ancestry..."
- Göçek 2015, p. 1. "The Western scholarly community is almost in full agreement that what happened to the forcefully deported Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 was genocide..."
- Smith 2015, p. 5. "Virtually all American scholars recognize the [Armenian] genocide..."
- Laycock, Jo (2016). "The Great Catastrophe". .
... important developments in the historical research on the genocide over the last fifteen years... have left no room for doubt that the treatment of the Ottoman Armenians constituted genocide according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
- Kasbarian, Sossie; .
... the denialist position has been largely discredited in the international academy. Recent scholarship has overwhelmingly validated the Armenian Genocide...
- "Taner Akçam: Türkiye'nin, soykırım konusunda her bakımdan izole olduğunu söyleyebiliriz". CivilNet (in Turkish). 9 July 2020. Archived from the originalon 16 January 2021. Retrieved 19 December 2020.
- ^ a b Suny 2015, pp. xii–xiii. "The Turkish state and those few historians who reject the notion of genocide have argued that the tragedy was the result of a reasonable and understandable response of a government to a rebellious and seditious population in time of war and mortal danger to the state's survival... There was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it. They were rebellious, seditious subjects who presented a danger to the empire and got what they deserved... Still—the denialists claim—despite the existential threat posed by the Armenians and their Russian allies to the survival of the empire, there was no intention or effort by the Young Turk regime to eliminate the Armenians as a people."
- ^ a b c Foundational violence:
- Bloxham 2005, p. 111. "The Armenian genocide provided the emblematic and central violence of Ottoman Turkey's transition into a modernizing nation state. The genocide and accompanying expropriations were intrinsic to the development of the Turkish Republic in the form in which it appeared in 1924."
- Kévorkian 2011, p. 810. "This chapter of the history treated here [the trials] clearly illustrates the incapacity of the great majority to consider these acts punishable crimes; it confronts us with a self-justifying discourse that persists in our own day, a kind of denial of the "original sin," the act that gave birth to the Turkish nation, regenerated and re-centered in a purified space."
- Göçek 2015, p. 19. "... what makes 1915–17 genocidal both then and since is, I argue, closely connected to its being a foundational violence in the constitution of the Turkish republic... the independence of Turkey emerged in direct opposition to the possible independence of Armenia; such coeval origins eliminated the possibility of acknowledging the past violence that had taken place only a couple years earlier on the one hand, and instead nurtured the tendency to systemically remove traces of Armenian existence on the other."
- Suny 2015, pp. 349, 365. "The Armenian Genocide was a central event in the last stages of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the foundational crime that along with the ethnic cleansing and population exchanges of the Anatolian Greeks made possible the formation of an ethnonational Turkish republic... The connection between ethnic cleansing or genocide and the legitimacy of the national state underlies the desperate efforts to deny or distort the history of the nation and the state's genesis."
- ISBN 978-0-85772-744-2.
We are of the firm opinion, strengthened by the contributions in this volume, that the single most important reason for this inability to accept culpability is the centrality of the Armenian massacres for the formation of the Turkish nation-state. The deeper collective psychology within which this sentiment rests assumes that any move toward acknowledging culpability will put the very foundations of the Turkish nation-state at risk and will lead to its steady demise.
- Chorbajian 2016, p. 169. "As this applies to the Armenians, their physical extermination, violent assimilation, and erasure from memory represent a significant continuity in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. The planning and implementation of the Armenian Genocide as an act of commission (1915–22) and omission (1923–present) constitute the final act of the Ottoman Empire and the start of a process of Turkification that defines the Turkish Republic a century later."
- ^ a b Distinctiveness of Turkish denial efforts:
- Smith, Roger W. (2006). "The Significance of the Armenian Genocide after Ninety Years". Genocide Studies and Prevention. 1 (2): i–iv. .
The Armenian Genocide, in fact, illuminates with special clarity the dangers inherent in the political manipulation of truth through distortion, denial, intimidation, and economic blackmail. In no other instance has a government gone to such extreme lengths to deny that a massive genocide took place.
- Avedian 2013, p. 79. "Nonetheless, if there is one aspect which makes the Armenian case to stand out, if not unique, is its denial. The Armenian genocide is by far the case which is systematically and officially denied by a state..."
- Akçam 2018, pp. 2–3. "Turkish denialism in regard to the events of the First World War is perhaps the most successful example of how the well-organized, deliberate, and systematic spreading of falsehoods can play an important role in the field of public debate... If every case of genocide can be understood as possessing its own unique character, then the Armenian case is unique among genocides in the long-standing efforts to deny its historicity, and to thereby hide the truths surrounding it."
- ISBN 978-1-4408-6468-1.
Uniquely, the entire apparatus of a nation-state has been put to work to amend, ameliorate, deflect, defuse, deny, equivocate, justify, obfuscate, or simply omit the events. No other nation in history has so aggressively sought the suppression of a slice of its history, threatening everything from breaking off diplomatic or trade relations, to closure of air bases, to removal of entries on the subject in international encyclopedias.
- Smith, Roger W. (2006). "The Significance of the Armenian Genocide after Ninety Years". Genocide Studies and Prevention. 1 (2): i–iv. .
- ^ a b Demirel & Eriksson 2020, p. 11.
- ^ a b "Only 9 Percent of Turks say Armenian Killings Genocide: Poll". The Daily Star. AFP. 13 January 2015. Archived from the original on 12 November 2020. Retrieved 31 December 2020.
- ISBN 978-1-56859-136-0.
- ISBN 978-0-253-20773-9.
- ^ Suny 2015, p. xiv.
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. 26–27, 43–44.
- ^ Suny 2015, p. 105.
- ^ Kévorkian 2011, pp. 11, 71.
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. 129, 170–171.
- ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 204, 206.
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. 127–129, 133, 170–171.
- ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 62, 150.
- ^ .
Turkish nationalists were following the pattern that was firmly established after the Hamidian massacres, though new research might take the chronology of unpunished crimes and denial further back to the first half of the nineteenth century. In each and every case of violence against the non-Muslims, the first reaction of the state – even though the regime changed, along with the involved actors – was denial.
- ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 246–247.
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. 154–155, 189.
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. 184–185.
- ^ Kévorkian 2011, p. 137.
- ^ Suny 2015, p. 185.
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. 223–224.
- ^ Suny 2015, p. 218.
- ^ a b Suny 2015, pp. 243–244.
- ^ Dadrian 2003, p. 277.
- ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 217.
- ^ Suny 2015, p. 236.
- ^ Kieser 2018, p. 225.
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. 244–245. "Any incident of Armenian resistance, any discovery of a cache of arms, was transformed into a vision of a coordinated widespread Armenian insurrection... Deportations ostensibly taken for military reasons rapidly radicalized monstrously into an opportunity to rid Anatolia once and for all of those peoples perceived to be an imminent existential threat to the future of the empire."
- ^ Akçam 2018, p. 158.
- .
Most scholars placed the possible date(s) for a final decision at the end of March (or beginning of April).
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. 256–257.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, p. 109.
- ^ Dadrian 2003, p. 274.
- ISBN 978-0-19-923211-6.
The Armenian deportations were not the result of an Armenian rebellion. On the contrary, Armenians were deported when no danger of outside interference existed. Thus Armenians near front lines were often slaughtered on the spot and not deported. The deportations were not a security measure against rebellions but depended on their absence.
- ^ Suny 2009, p. 945. "A newly minted doctor of history, Fuat Dündar, showed with his careful reading of Ottoman archival documents how the deportations had been organized and carried out by the Turkish authorities, and—most shocking of all—that Minister of the Interior Talat, the chief initiator, had been aware that sending people to the Syrian desert outpost of Der Zor meant certain death."
Dadrian 2003, p. 275. "As diplomat after diplomat from allied Germany and Austria (as well as American Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau) repeatedly averred, by dispatching the victim population to these deserts the Turks were dispatching them to death and ruination. Even the Chief of Staff of the Ottoman Fourth Army in control of these areas in his memoirs debunked and ridiculed the pretense of 'relocation.'" - ^ Dadrian & Akçam 2011, p. 18.
- ISBN 978-0-674-91645-6.
- ^ Ekmekçioğlu 2016, p. 4.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 289–290, 331.
- ^ Dixon 2010b, pp. 105–106.
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. 341. "On the basis of existing Interior Ministry Papers from the period, it can confidently be asserted that the goal of the CUP was not the resettlement of Anatolia's Armenian population and their just compensation for the property and possessions that they were forced to leave behind. Rather, the confiscation and subsequent use of Armenian property clearly demonstrated that Unionist government policy was intended to completely deprive the Armenians of all possibility of continued existence."
- ^ Göçek 2015, p. 250. "This false equation of the Armenian violence with the Turkish one whitewashed the disparity between two sufferings, conveniently overlooking two factors. The two sufferings were much different in scale; the violence the Muslims suffered in the east led to the deaths of at most 60,000 Muslims, yet the collective violence the CUP perpetrated led to the deaths of at least 800,000 Armenians."
- ^ Avedian 2012, p. 814 fn. 102.
- ^ de Waal 2015, pp. 51–52.
- ^ Cheterian 2018a, pp. 189–190.
- ^ Definitions of denial:
- Hovannisian 2015, p. 244. "This essay follows the general usage of the term denial to mean assertions that an event understood as genocide (typically founded on extensive analysis of evidence by reputable experts) is in fact not genocide, whether by representing the events as something else or claiming that the core events in question did not occur at all."
- Smith 2015, p. 6. "In many ways, the Turkish arguments have remained the same: denial of the facts, of responsibility, of the significance of what took place, and that the term genocide applies ... the goal of denial is to create a new reality (denial as construction) with both "sides" engaged in an unending debate in which a consensus will never arrive and for which there will be a need for unending research to establish the facts."
- Göçek 2015, p. 13. "The denial ultimately includes and excludes certain elements to create a semblance of the truth; indeed, this quality of "half-truth" makes denial rigorous. The half-truth highlights the elements that favor the interests of the perpetrators while silencing, dismissing, or subverting those factors that undermine perpetrator interests by revealing clues leading to the inherent collective violence."
- Ihrig 2016, p. 12. "Denialism here denotes an approach that rejects the charge of genocide (against the Young Turks), mostly by denying intent and minimizing the extent of the atrocities."
- ^ Göçek 2015, p. 63. "... even though their intent all along had been destruction, [the Young Turks] presented it to the public as Armenian "migration" to safe places. This constituted the most egregious Young Turk denial."
Hovannisian 2015, p. 229. "It may be inaccurate to say that denial is the last phase of genocide, as has been posited by Israel Charny and others, including this writer himself, for denial has been present from the very outset, even as the process was initiated and carried forward toward the desired end."
Akçam 2018, p. 3. "... the denial of the Armenian Genocide began not in the wake of the massacres but was an intrinsic part of the plan itself. The deporting of the Armenians from their homeland to the Syrian deserts and their elimination, both on the route and at their final destinations, were performed under the guise of a decision to resettle them."
Cheterian 2018a, p. 195. "Ottoman Turks exterminated their victims in secret. They pretended to displace them from warzones for their own safety, and great care was taken to communicate orders of massacres in secretive, coded messages. Oblivion begins there, an intrinsic part of the crime itself."
Bloxham 2005, p. 111; Avedian 2013, p. 79. - ^ a b Mamigonian 2015, pp. 61–62. "Denial of the Armenian Genocide began concurrently with and was a part of the Committee of Union and Progress's (CUP) execution of it. As the Ottoman Armenian population was massacred and deported, the Ottoman leadership constructed a narrative that, subjected to occasional revisions and refinements, remains in place today..."
- ^ Akçam 2018, p. 3.
- ISBN 978-1-351-52503-9.
- ^ a b Chorbajian 2016, p. 170.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, pp. 171–172.
- ISSN 1911-0359.
- ^ a b Hovannisian 2015, p. 229.
- ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 248–249.
- ^ a b Kévorkian 2011, p. 810.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 361–362.
- ^ Avedian 2012, p. 813.
- ISSN 1773-0546.
- ^ Zürcher 2011, p. 308. "In ideological terms there is thus a great deal of continuity between the periods of 1912–1918 and 1918–1923. This should come as no surprise... the cadres of the national resistance movement almost without exception consisted of former Unionists, who had been shaped by their shared experience of the previous decade."
- ^ a b Zürcher 2011, p. 316. "Many of the people in central positions of power (Şükrü Kaya, Kazım Özalp, Abdülhalik Renda, Kılıç Ali) had been personally involved in the massacres, but besides that, the ruling elite as a whole depended on a coalition with provincial notables, landlords, and tribal chiefs, who had profited immensely from the departure of the Armenians and the Greeks. It was what Fatma Müge Göçek has called an unspoken "devil's bargain." A serious attempt to distance the republic from the genocide could have destabilized the ruling coalition on which the state depended for its stability."
- ^ Avedian 2012, p. 806; Cheterian 2015, p. 155; Baer 2020, p. 83; Dixon 2010a, p. 468. "Many contemporary scholars emphasise that this official narrative [on the Armenian Genocide] is largely shaped by continuities and constraints inherited from the founding of the Republic. In particular, they highlight the striking continuities among political elites from the Young Turk through the Republican periods, the concentrated interests of a small group of business and political elites whose wealth can be traced back to confiscated Armenian assets, and the homogenising and Turkifying nature of Turkish national identity."
- ^ Kieser 2018, pp. 385–386.
- ^ a b Ekmekçioğlu 2016, p. 7. "Even though the putative mass Armenian "betrayal" happened after the Young Turks acted on their plan to eradicate Armenianness, Turkish nationalist narratives have used Armenians' 'collaboration with the enemy' and secessionist agenda during the postwar occupation years as a justification for the 1915 'deportations'."
- ^ Ulgen 2010, pp. 376–377.
- ^ Suny 2015, pp. 340–341.
- ^ Bloxham 2005, pp. 101–102.
- ISBN 978-0-87436-928-1.
- ^ Avedian 2012, p. 818.
- ^ Kieser 2018, pp. 319–320.
- ^ Kévorkian 2011, pp. 810–811.
- ^ Göçek 2011, pp. 45–46. "First, none of these works, originally penned around the time of the events of 1915, question the occurrence of the Armenian "massacres" ("genocide" did not yet exist as a term)... The later ones, increasingly imbued with protonationalist sentiments, view the committed crimes as a duty necessary for the establishment and preservation of a Turkish fatherland."
- ^ a b Avedian 2012, p. 816.
- ^ Ulgen 2010, pp. 378–380.
- ^ Ulgen 2010, p. 371.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 79.
- ^ Zürcher 2011, p. 312.
- ^ Kieser 2018, p. 419.
- ^ Göçek 2015, p. 267.
- ^ Aybak 2016, p. 14.
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. xi.
- doi:10.1353/his.2016.0046., p. 816. "Talaat and Cemal, both sentenced to the death in absentia for their key involvement in the Armenian massacres and war crimes, were given posthumous state burials in Turkey, and were elevated to the rank of national heroes."
The foundation of the Turkish republic and the CUP's genocide perpetrators are to this day commemorated with pride. Mosques, schools and kindergartens, boulevards and public squares in Turkey continue to bear the name of high ranking perpetrators.
Kieser 2018, p. xii. "[Talat Pasha's] legacy is present in powerful patterns of government and political thought, as well as in the name of many streets, schools, and mosques dedicated to him in and outside Turkey... In the eyes of his admirers in Turkey today, and throughout the twentieth century, he was a great statesman, skillful revolutionary, and farsighted founding father..."
Avedian 2012 - ^ Kévorkian 2011, p. 811.
- ^ Arango, Tim (16 April 2015). "A Century After Armenian Genocide, Turkey's Denial Only Deepens". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 16 April 2015. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
- ^ Gürpınar 2013, p. 420. "...the official narrative on the Armenian massacres constituted one of the principal pillars of the regime of truth of the Turkish state. Culpability for these massacres would incur enormous moral liability; tarnish the self-styled claim to national innocence, benevolence and self-reputation of the Turkish state and the Turkish people; and blemish the course of Turkish history. Apparently, this would also be tantamount to casting doubt on the credibility of the foundational axioms of Kemalism and the Turkish nation-state."
- ^ Bilali 2013, p. 29.
- ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 106.
- ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 107.
- ^ a b Akçam 2012, p. xii.
- ^ Avedian 2012, p. 799.
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. xi. "'National security' not only explained and justified the traumatic events of the past but would also support the construction of genocide denial in the future. Thereafter, an open and frank discussion of history would be perceived as a subversive act aimed at partitioning the state. Well into the new millennium, Turkish citizens who demanded an honest historical accounting were still being treated as national security risks, branded as traitors to the homeland or dupes of hostile foreign powers, and targeted with threats."
- ^ Gürpınar 2016, pp. 224–225.
- ISBN 978-1-5017-3025-2.
- ^ Akçam 2018, p. 157.
- ^ Demirdjian 2018, p. 13.
- ^ Zürcher 2011, p. 316.
- ^ a b Chorbajian 2016, p. 173.
- ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 65.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 54–55; Cheterian 2015, pp. 64–65; Chorbajian 2016, p. 174; MacDonald 2008, p. 121.
- ^ Üngör 2014, pp. 165–166.
- ^ de Waal 2015, p. 54.
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. 6.
- ^ Akçam 2018, p. 8.
- ^ a b c d Dixon 2010a, p. 473.
- ^ Cheterian 2018a, p. 205.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 259.
- ^ Dixon 2010a, pp. 473–474.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 82.
- ^ Göçek 2011, pp. 43–44.
- ^ Ulgen 2010, pp. 384–386, 390.
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 63.
- ^ Gürpınar 2016, pp. 219–220.
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. 116–117.
- ^ Göçek 2011, p. 44.
- ^ Bayraktar 2015, p. 802.
- ^ Gürpınar 2013, p. 423.
- ^ Galip 2020, p. 153.
- ^ Gürpınar 2013, p. 421.
- ^ Göçek 2015, p. 293.
- ^ de Waal 2015, p. 182; Suny 2009, p. 938; Cheterian 2015, pp. 140–141; Gürpınar 2013, p. 419.
- ^ Göçek 2015, p. 468.
- ^ Suny 2009, p. 942.
- ^ Bayraktar 2015, pp. 804–805.
- ^ a b Gürpınar 2013, pp. 419–420.
- ^ Gürpınar 2013, pp. 420, 422, 424.
- ^ Erbal 2015, pp. 786–787.
- ^ de Waal 2015, p. 182.
- ^ Freely, Maureen (23 October 2005). "'I Stand by My Words. And Even More, I Stand by My Right to Say Them...'". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 January 2021.
- ^ Göçek 2015, p. 2. "Because of this partial use of sources, the Western scholarly community finds the ensuing Turkish official discourse unscientific, propagandistic, and rhetorical and therefore does not address or engage it."
- ^ Erbal 2015, p. 786.
- ^ Ekmekçioğlu 2016, p. xii.
- ^ a b Göçek 2015, pp. 63–64.
- ISSN 2147-0626.
- ^ Some private schools and to a lesser extent some state schools also use alternative textbooks which are not approved by Ministry of Education.[137]
- ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 105.
- ^ Aybak 2016, p. 13. "This officially distributed educational material reconstructs the history in line with the denial policies of the government portraying the Armenians as backstabbers and betrayers, who are portrayed as a threat to the sovereignty and identity of modern Turkey. The demonization of the Armenians in Turkish education is a prevailing occurrence that is underwritten by the government to reinforce the denial discourse."
- ^ Galip 2020, p. 186. "Additionally, for instance, the racism and language of hatred in officially approved school textbooks is very intense. These books still show Armenians as the enemies, so it would be necessary for these books to be amended..."
- ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 64.
- ^ a b Gürpınar 2016, p. 234.
- ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 104.
- ^ Dixon 2010b, pp. 104, 116–117.
- ^ Bilali 2013, pp. 19–20.
- ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 115.
- ^ Bilali 2013, p. 19.
- ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 4, 10.
- ^ Erbal 2012, p. 52. "Turkish civil society and the academic and intellectual establishment within that civil society have also been either actively in denial or in some cases in service of a denialist state agenda or standing passively silent – another form of denial – for over 90 years."
- .
- ^ Üngör 2014, p. 147.
- ^ Galip 2020, p. 95.
- ^ Erbal 2015, p. 785.
- ^ Demirel & Eriksson 2020, p. 9. "Turkish people['s]... narratives were based on the idea that Armenians were the perpetrators and that the Turks were the 'real' victims... the dominant Turkish response is a rejection of genocide allegations. The massacres, when admitted, are justified by the Turkish narrative of an alleged Armenian betrayal and the slaughter of Turks by Armenians. Losses during the exile are excused via a narrative of disease, and the attacks of rogue gangs."
- ^ Göçek 2015, p. 1.
- ISBN 978-0-7453-3756-2.
- .
- .
- ^ Bilali 2013, pp. 25, 28.
- ^ Göçek 2015, p. 477.
- ^ Cheterian 2015, pp. 273–275.
- ^ Galip 2020, pp. 162–163.
- ^ Galip 2020, p. 60.
- ^ Cheterian 2018a, pp. 203–204.
- ^ Gürpınar 2013, pp. 425–426. "Official state policy remains stringently denialist even though slight twists such as the incorporation/introduction of some rhetorical innovations and the development of a new, more relaxed language that emphasizes the sufferings of 'both sides' have been introduced, thereby trivializing Armenian suffering."
- .
... unlike the CHP, some AKP sympathizers blamed the Unionist mentality for what had happened in 1915 to the Ottoman Armenians by labeling it as an inhumane incident or a crime against humanity; but similar to the CHP, they were hesitant to recognize 'this relocation' as genocide. This was presented as the third way between genocide denialism and genocide recognition. Davutoğlu labeled it as 'the common grief approach' that focused on the cumulative sufferings of the Ottoman peoples during World War I...
- ^ Galip 2020, pp. 60–61, 84.
- ^ Galip 2020, pp. 87, 163.
- ^ Mouradian, Khatchig (2019). "Mouradian on Dixon, 'Dark Pasts: Changing the State's Story in Turkey and Japan'". H-Net. Retrieved 3 January 2021.
- ^ Akçam 2008, p. 121. "...the Turkish state... posits that the situation under review here does not warrant the use of the term 'crime'; even though there were some deaths, a state has the right to resort to such an operation."
- ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 305.
- ^ Koc, Cagan (24 April 2019). "Erdogan Says Deporting Armenians Was 'Appropriate' at the Time". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 6 April 2021.
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 62.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 174.
- ^ a b Bloxham 2005, p. 208.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, pp. 163–164.
- ^ a b c Smith 2015, p. 6.
- ^ a b Ben Aharon 2019, p. 345.
- ^ Avedian 2013, p. 80.
- ^ Bloxham 2005, p. 207.
- ^ Cheterian 2018a, p. 207.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 172.
- ^ Avedian 2012, pp. 812–813.
- JSTOR 1192189.
- ^ Dixon 2010a, pp. 470–471.
- ^ Dixon 2010a, pp. 477–478.
- ^ CivilNet (in Turkish). 9 July 2020. Archived from the originalon 16 January 2021. Retrieved 2 January 2021.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 178.
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. 21, 145. "The turn to Jews as lobbyists on Turkey's behalf was based not only on the old myth of Turkish–Jewish friendship, but also on the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews control world governments, finance, and media."
- ^ a b c Göçek 2015, p. 2.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, pp. 277–279.
- ^ Kieser 2018, p. 21.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, p. 185.
- ^ Anderson 2011, p. 206.
- ^ Anderson 2011, pp. 206–207.
- ^ Anderson 2011, p. 210.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, pp. 150–151.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, p. 293. "... while the mood and the overwhelming evidence were such that genocide could no longer be denied, many nationalist papers now both accepted the charge of genocide against the Turks and justified it at the very same time."
- ISBN 978-3-319-65027-2.
- ^ Galip 2020, pp. 97, 163. "The AKP government, a considerable number of Turkish groups, the opposition party in the Turkish parliament, institutions and both pro-government and anti-government Turkish media waged a war against [Cem] Özdemir and the German parliament expressing Islamic superiority, denial, hatred of Armenians and excusing the Armenian massacres by accusing Armenians of collaborating with Russia during the First World War."
- ^ a b Ben Aharon 2019, p. 343.
- tagesspiegel(in German). Retrieved 22 March 2021.
- ^ a b Bloxham 2006, p. 44.
- ^ a b Suciyan 2015, p. 85.
- ^ Bloxham 2006, p. 41.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 175.
- ^ Bloxham 2006, p. 42.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, pp. 177–178.
- ^ a b c Mamigonian, Marc (2 May 2013). "Scholarship, Manufacturing Doubt, and Genocide Denial". The Armenian Weekly. Retrieved 4 January 2021.
- ^ a b Dixon 2010a, p. 474.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 124. "President Jimmy Carter's Jewish aide, Stuart Eizenstat, reported that Turkish ambassador Şükrü Elekdağ (in office 1979–1989) told him that although Turkey had treated its Jews well for centuries and had taken in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, if the Armenian genocide were included in the new museum, 'Turkey could no longer guarantee the safety of the Jews in Turkey'." Elekdağ was also reported making a similar comment to another member of the Holocaust Memorial Museum Committee."
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 66.
- ^ "U.S. Presidential Statements". Armenian National Institute. Retrieved 22 March 2021.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 296.
- ^ "Statement by President Joe Biden on Armenian Remembrance Day". The White House. 24 April 2021. Retrieved 24 April 2021.
- ^ Robertson 2016, pp. 75–76, 81.
- ^ Robertson 2016, p. 77.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 145.
- ^ Ben Aharon 2015, pp. 646–648. "From Charny's testimony and Arazi's statements in document 404, it is clear that the lives of Iranian and Syrian Jews were at stake; the Turkish Foreign Ministry did not hesitate to use this sensitive situation to exert pressure on Israel."
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 124.
- ^ a b Ben Aharon 2015, p. 638.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 128.
- ^ Ben Aharon 2019, pp. 366–367, 369.
- ^ Eissenstat 2014, p. 24; Quataert 2006, pp. 249–250, 258; Gutman 2015, pp. 167–168; Akçam 2012, p. xxv; Cheterian 2018a, p. 199.
- ^ .
- ^ a b "Marc David Baer, Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (New Texts Out Now)". Jadaliyya. 9 November 2020. Retrieved 17 December 2020.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 208.
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, pp. 63–64.
- ^ Auron 2003, pp. 9–10.
- ^ MacDonald 2008, p. 241.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 129.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 47.
- ^ a b c Mamigonian 2015, p. 67.
- ^ Eissenstat 2014, pp. 24–25.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. xi.
- ^ a b Auron 2003, pp. 226–227.
- ISBN 978-0814327777.
- ISSN 0019-1272. Archived from the originalon 24 December 2007.
- ^ a b Baer 2020, p. 130.
- ^ a b Suny 2015, p. 375.
- ^ a b c d Hovannisian 2015, p. 234.
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 232.
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 68.
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 243.
- ISBN 978-1-78533-326-2.
- ^ Smith et al. 1995, p. 2, passim.
- ^ Honan, William H. (22 May 1996). "Princeton Is Accused of Fronting For the Turkish Government". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ a b c Erbal 2015, p. 784. "Quataert spoke out. For this he paid the price by being forced to leave his position as chair of the board of the Institute of Turkish Studies."
- ^ Quataert 2006, pp. 251–252.
- ^ Quataert 2006, p. 250.
- ^ a b Gutman 2015, p. 168. "Shortly after its publication, Quataert resigned as chairman of the Institute of Turkish Studies after the Turkish government threatened to revoke the Institute's funding if he did not retract his use of the word genocide."
- ^ Eissenstat 2014, p. 25.
- ^ Eissenstat 2014, pp. 25–26.
- ^ Sassounian, Harut (12 July 2011). "Prof. Akcam Reveals Turkish Plan to Pay Scholars to Deny the Armenian Genocide". Asbarez. Archived from the original on 18 July 2011. Retrieved 27 July 2011.
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 244.
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. 451. "What must be understood is that the thesis known in Turkey as the 'official version'... takes as its starting point the assumption that the events of 1915 were derived from governmental actions that were, in essence, within the bounds of what are considered normal and legal actions for a state entity and cannot therefore be explained through a recourse to criminality or criminal law. According to this assumption, under certain conditions a government or a state can resort to actions such as 'forcible deportation,' even if they result in the deaths of its own citizens, and there are no moral or legal grounds upon which such actions can be faulted."
- ^ Suny 2015, p. xii.
- ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 167. "Denial of the Armenian Genocide, therefore, consists of a two-pronged complementary, yet also contradictory, argument we can call 'They Brought It on Themselves and It Never Happened'."
- .
- ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 72. "Thus, each author offers excuses for the actions of the CUP leadership while shifting partial blame onto the victims themselves and, in the process, creates a new criterion for the victims of genocide: the need to be 'wholly innocent'."
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, pp. 243–244.
- ^ a b Hovannisian 2015, pp. 242–243. "Pointing to a number of sequential Armenian uprisings in 1915, [Erickson] concedes, 'It is true, to date, no historian has been able to produce authentic evidence of a coordinated Armenian master plan for revolution'."
- ^ Suny 2009, p. 941. "What appears in the sources to have been the Turks' panic and paranoia at an imagined danger from their Armenian subjects has metastasized in the hands of apologists into justification for state-ordered murder."
- ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 209. "One of the key arguments made by genocide deniers is that the deportations, and whatever 'unfortunate excesses' occurred during them, were not part of a plan of extermination but rather a response to an Armenian rebellion in the eastern provinces in collaboration with Russia."
- .
This is a telling slip; Lewy is talking about 'the Armenians' as if the defenceless women and children who comprised the deportation columns were vicariously responsible for Armenian rebels in other parts of the country. The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking. It fails to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, on which international humanitarian law has been insisting for over a hundred years now.
- ISBN 978-1-84954-822-9.
'Necessity' in war can never justify the deliberate killing of civilians: if they are suspected of treason or loyalty to the enemy they may be detained or interned, or prosecuted, but not sent on marches from which they are expected not to return.
- ^ Hovannisian 2001, p. 801.
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 231.
- ^ Akçam 2008, pp. 128–131.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 410–423.
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. 417.
- ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 208. "Deniers claim the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) fomented a rebellion, but they elide the fact that Turkey's ruling party tried to recruit the ARF to form a fifth column behind Russian lines... [They] base their positions on a book by Esat Uras, a perpetrator of the genocide, which created the template for denial."
- Urfa(September 29–October 23, 1915), and especially that of Van in the April 20–May 17, 1915 period, are cited as proof positive. Yet, without exception these uprisings were improvised last-ditch attempts to ward off imminent deportation and destruction. Without exception they were all local, very limited, and above all, highly defensive initiatives; as such they were ultimately doomed to failure."
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. 228. "The following discussion will also address such unfounded appraisals as, 'the events of 1915 were in fact a civil war between the Armenians and Turks.' Not a single top secret document at the highest levels of the state makes the slightest allusion to a civil war or 'intercommunal warfare'. On the contrary, Ottoman documents show that Armenian areas were evacuated under tight government control."
- ^ Kieser 2018, p. 237. "Sources from observers on the ground, as well as published Ottoman army sources from the provinces during spring 1915, do not support the claim of a general uprising."
- ^ Hovannisian 2001, pp. 803–804.
- ^ Bloxham 2005, pp. 208–209.
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. 399.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 374–377.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 399–400, 407, 409.
- ^ Dadrian 2003, p. 275.
- ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 238.
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. 373.
- ^ Akçam 2018, p. 11. "On one hand, there are successive Turkish governments that have destroyed any and all evidence that would show the events of 1915 to have been a systematic program of annihilation; this has included all of the case files from the post-war trials of the Unionists (1919–1921)... On the other hand, there is the chorus of historians who reiterate the line that, in the absence of solid, reliable documentary evidence—in other words, 'smoking guns' from the Ottoman archives or elsewhere—proving otherwise, there can be no objective claim of a government-sponsored genocide against the Armenians..."
- ^ Akçam 2008, pp. 113, 126–128.
- ^ Demirdjian 2018, pp. 10–11.
- ^ Lattanzi 2018, pp. 88–89.
- ^ Akçam 2012, p. xxii.
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. 1–2, 183–185, 293.
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. 1, 207–208.
- ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 208.
- ISSN 1303-5754.
- ^ MacDonald 2008, p. 133.
- ^ Lattanzi 2018, p. 100.
- ^ "Holocaust & Genocide Education | Armenia". University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts. Archived from the original on 23 April 2019. Retrieved 22 October 2019.
- ^ Ertür 2019, pp. 2–3.
- ^ Baer 2020, pp. 140–141.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 228.
- ^ Auron 2003, pp. 228–229.
- ^ "Paris, France, Court of First Instance". Armenian National Institute. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
- ^ Baer 2020, p. 141.
- ^ Auron 2003, p. 230.
- ^ Ertür 2019, pp. 5–6.
- ^ . Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ Demirdjian 2018, pp. 22–23. "Perincek's activities spread across a wider spectrum, including his membership in the Talat Pasha Committee, an organization considered as xenophobic and racist by the European Parliament, and established for the purpose of refuting the Armenian genocide."
- ^ a b "Perinçek v. Switzerland". Global Freedom of Expression. Columbia University. Retrieved 25 February 2022.
- Swissinfo(in German). 19 December 2007. Retrieved 25 February 2022.
- ^ .
- ISBN 978-1-349-95306-6.
- ISSN 2284-2969. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
- ^ Ertür 2019, p. 8. "The high profile of the case allowed Perinçek and his allies to claim in their media campaign that this would be the case that decides whether or not there was a genocide. The campaign was effective: the ECtHR Grand Chamber hearing was widely covered in the Turkish media as the trial that would put an end to the so-called 'hundred year-old genocide lie'... Perinçek and his party celebrated the judgment claiming in bold PR campaigns, 'We put an end to the genocide lie'."
- ^ Kieser 2018, p. 294; Göçek 2015, p. 463; Cheterian 2015, pp. 176, 312; Avedian 2018, p. 48.
- ^ Akçam 2012, pp. xxvi–xxvii.
- ^ "Genocide Denied". Facing History and Ourselves. Retrieved 26 December 2020.
- ^ Cheterian 2018b, p. 899.
- ^ Yardley, Jim; Arsu, Sebnem (12 April 2015). "Pope Calls Killings of Armenians 'Genocide,' Provoking Turkish Anger". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
- ^ Suciyan 2015, p. 16.
- .
- ISSN 2376-0702.
- ^ Cheterian 2015, pp. 127–128.
- ^ Avedian 2018, p. 110.
- ^ Ihrig 2016, pp. 353–354. "First, Hitler's alleged words at the Obersalzberg—about who "still talked" about the Armenians—might not come from a watertight source, but the statement still accurately sums up one of the major lessons the Armenian genocide must have held for the Nazis: it must have taught them that such incredible crimes could go unpunished under the cover of war, even if one lost that war. That one could "get away" with genocide must have been a great inspiration indeed... the lack of a robust response by Christian Germany must have seemed especially significant to Hitler—for if this was its reaction to the extermination of Christian people, who would speak out against killing Jews?"
- .
- .
- ^ Cheterian 2018b, p. 892. "The ANM was ready to put aside the past in order to build normal relations with neighboring Turkey. Turkey, however, was not ready to forget the 1915 genocide and its consequences: the continuous Armenian diaspora struggle for recognition and reparation. It insisted that Yerevan must surrender politically on this issue, by withholding any diplomatic support for the 'recognition campaigns' abroad before normal diplomatic relations could be established or the border opened."
- ^ Avedian 2018, p. 211.
- ^ de Waal 2015, pp. 212, 229–230.
- ^ Bloxham 2005, p. 234.
- ^ Ben Aharon 2019, pp. 346–347. "Importantly, the territorial conflict between the Azeris and the Armenians over control of Nagorno-Karabakh, triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union, turned Azerbaijan into a stakeholder in the discourse on the Armenian genocide, and it led an extensive international campaign against recognition."
- ^ Cheterian 2018b, p. 886. "... it is not possible to understand the ongoing conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan without integrating the discourse of genocide denial produced in Turkey and adopted by Azerbaijan'.
- ^ a b Sanjian, Ara (24 April 2008). "Armenia and Genocide: the Growing Engagement of Azerbaijan" (PDF). The Armenian Weekly. pp. 28–33.
- ^ a b Cheterian 2018b, p. 887.
- ^ Cheterian 2018b, pp. 893–894.
- ^ Cheterian 2018b, pp. 895–896.
- ^ Finkel 2010, pp. 57–58.
- ^ Finkel 2010, pp. 59–60.
- ^ Cheterian 2018b, pp. 898–899. "...the Azerbaijani elites' belief that the Armenian aggression of the 1980s and 1990s is a continuation of '1915'. As Armenians could not fight a stronger Turkey, they instead attacked the more vulnerable Azerbaijan. From the perspective of the Azerbaijani elite, countries that recognise the genocide of the Armenians are enemies of Azerbaijan."
Sources
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Chapters
- ISBN 978-0-19-979276-4.
- Cheterian, Vicken (2018a). "Censorship, Indifference, Oblivion: the Armenian Genocide and Its Denial". Truth, Silence, and Violence in Emerging States. Histories of the Unspoken. Routledge. pp. 188–214. ISBN 978-1-351-14112-3.
- ISBN 978-1-137-56163-3.
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- Göçek, Fatma Müge (2011). "Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on 1915". In Suny, Ronald Grigor; Göçek, Fatma Müge; Naimark, Norman M. (eds.). ISBN 978-0-19-979276-4.
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Journal articles
- Akçam, Taner (2008). "Guenter Lewy's The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey". .
- Avedian, Vahagn (2012). "State Identity, Continuity, and Responsibility: The Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide". .
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- Aybak, Tunç (2016). "Geopolitics of Denial: Turkish State's 'Armenian Problem'" (PDF). Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. 18 (2): 125–144. doi:10.1080/19448953.2016.1141582. Archived from the original(PDF) on 20 July 2021. Retrieved 21 January 2021.
- Bayraktar, Seyhan (2015). "The Grammar of Denial: State, Society, and Turkish–Armenian Relations". .
- Ben Aharon, Eldad (2015). "A Unique Denial: Israel's Foreign Policy and the Armenian Genocide". .
- Ben Aharon, Eldad (2019). "Recognition of the Armenian Genocide after its Centenary: A Comparative Analysis of Changing Parliamentary Positions". hdl:1887/92270.
- Bilali, Rezarta (2013). "National Narrative and Social Psychological Influences in Turks' Denial of the Mass Killings of Armenians as Genocide: Understanding Denial". .
- Bloxham, Donald (2006). "The Roots of American Genocide Denial: Near Eastern Geopolitics and the Interwar Armenian Question". .
- Cheterian, Vicken (2018b). "The Uses and Abuses of History: Genocide and the Making of the Karabakh Conflict". .
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- Dixon, Jennifer M. (2010b). "Education and National Narratives: Changing Representations of the Armenian Genocide in History Textbooks in Turkey". International Journal for Education Law and Policy. 2010 Special Issue: 103–126. Archived from the original on 4 March 2021. Retrieved 2 January 2021.
- Eissenstat, Howard (2014). "Children of Özal: The New Face of Turkish Studies". ISSN 2376-0702.
- Erbal, Ayda (2015). "The Armenian Genocide, AKA the Elephant in the Room". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 47 (4): 783–790. .
- Ertür, Başak (2019). "Law of Denial" (PDF). .
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- Gürpınar, Doğan (2016). "The Manufacturing of Denial: the Making of the Turkish 'Official Thesis' on the Armenian Genocide Between 1974 and 1990". Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. 18 (3): 217–240. .
- Gutman, David (2015). "Ottoman Historiography and the End of the Genocide Taboo: Writing the Armenian Genocide into Late Ottoman History". Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. 2 (1): 167. .
- Hovannisian, Richard G. (2015). "Denial of the Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later: The New Practitioners and Their Trade". Genocide Studies International. 9 (2): 228–247. .
- Kaligian, Dikran (2014). "Anatomy of Denial: Manipulating Sources and Manufacturing a Rebellion". Genocide Studies International. 8 (2): 208–223. .
- Mamigonian, Marc A. (2015). "Academic Denial of the Armenian Genocide in American Scholarship: Denialism as Manufactured Controversy". Genocide Studies International. 9 (1): 61–82. .
- JSTOR 4139548.
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- Smith, Roger W. (2015). "Introduction: The Ottoman Genocides of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks". Genocide Studies International. 9 (1): 1–9. .
- Suny, Ronald Grigor (2009). "Truth in Telling: Reconciling Realities in the Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians". .
- Ulgen, Fatma (2010). "Reading Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on the Armenian Genocide of 1915". PMID 20857578.
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Further reading
- Seckinelgin, Hakan (2024). The Armenian Genocide and Turkey: Public Memory and Institutionalized Denial. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-0-7556-5363-8.
- Turan, Ömer; Öztan, Güven Gürkan (2018). Devlet aklı ve 1915: Türkiye'de "Ermeni Meselesi" anlatısının inşası [Raison d'État and 1915: Turkey's "Armenian Question" and the Construction of Narratives] (in Turkish). İletişim Yayınları. ISBN 978-975-05-2349-6.