Armenian genocide denial

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Denial of the Armenian genocide
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Photograph of the Iğdır Genocide Memorial and Museum in Turkey
The Iğdır Genocide Memorial and Museum promotes the view that Armenians committed genocide against Turks, rather than vice versa.[1]

Armenian genocide denial is the claim that the

Republic of Azerbaijan
, as of 1991.

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

violence against Kurds in Turkey. A 2014 poll of 1500 people conducted by EDAM, a Turkish think-tank, found that 9 percent of Turkish citizens recognize the genocide.[7][8]

Background

See also: Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
A photograph of the now-destroyed Arakelots Monastery showing a stone wall and the tops of several buildings behind it.
Arakelots Monastery, built in the 4th century, looted in 1915, later destroyed[9]

The presence of

forced conversions to Islam and increasing land seizures, which led a handful to join revolutionary parties such as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF, also known as Dashnaktsutyun).[13] In the mid-1890s, state-sponsored Hamidian massacres killed at least 100,000 Armenians, and in 1909, the authorities failed to prevent the Adana massacre, which resulted in the death of some 17,000 Armenians.[14][15][16] The Ottoman authorities denied any responsibility for these massacres, accusing Western powers of meddling and Armenians of provocation, while presenting Muslims as the main victims and failing to punish the perpetrators.[17][18][19] These same tropes of denial would be employed later to deny the Armenian genocide.[19][20]

The

Russian Armenians to intervene on the Ottoman side. The ARF declined, instead declaring that Armenians should fight for the countries in which they were citizens.[25] In October 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers.[26]

Armenian genocide

Main article: Armenian genocide
map showing locations where Armenians were killed, deportation routes, and transit centers, as well as locations of Armenian resistance
Map of the Armenian genocide in 1915

During the Ottoman

Armenian resistance were taken as evidence of a general insurrection.[32]

Bodies of dozens of Armenians in a field
The corpses of Armenians beside a road, a common sight along deportation routes[33]

In mid-April, after Ottoman leaders had decided to commit genocide,

Armenian Question."[40]

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

his own statistical record, which revealed a massive discrepancy between the number of Armenians deported in 1915 and those surviving in 1917.[48][49] The vast majority of non-Turkish scholars accept the genocide as a historical fact, and an increasing number of Turkish historians are also acknowledging and studying the genocide.[3]

Origins

Ottoman Empire

German financial and military support.[53]

Photograph of dead people
In the 1916 book The Armenian Aspirations and Revolutionary Movements, many photographs claimed to depict Armenian atrocities against Muslims, such as this one, were published.[54]

In May 1915, Russia, Britain, and France sent a

Ottoman government condemning the Ottoman "crimes against humanity" and threatening to hold accountable any Ottoman officials who were responsible.[55] The Ottoman government denied that massacres of Armenians had occurred, and said that Armenians colluded with the enemy, while asserting that national sovereignty allowed them to take measures against the Armenians. It also alleged that Armenians had massacred Muslims and accused the Allies of committing war crimes.[56]

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.

Turkish nationalist movement depended on support from those who had perpetrated the genocide or enriched themselves from it, creating an incentive for silence.[65][66] Denial and minimization of wartime atrocities was crucial to the formation of a Turkish nationalist consensus.[67]

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.

Mustafa Kemal [the leader of the Turkish nationalist movement] completed what Talaat and Enver had started in 1915."[72][73][74]

The Ottoman government in Constantinople

held courts-martial of a handful of perpetrators in 1919 to appease Western powers. Even so, the evidence was sabotaged, and many perpetrators were encouraged to escape to the interior. The reality of state-sponsored mass killing was not denied, but many circles of society considered it necessary and justified.[75][76] As a British Foreign Office report stated, "not one Turk in a thousand can conceive that there might be a Turk who deserves to be hanged for the killing of Christians."[77] Kemal repeatedly accused Armenians of plotting the extermination of Muslims in Anatolia.[78] He contrasted the "murderous Armenians" to Turks, portrayed as a completely innocent and oppressed nation.[79] In 1919, Kemal defended the Ottoman government's policies towards Christians, saying "Whatever has befallen the non-Muslim elements living in our country, is the result of the policies of separatism they pursued in a savage manner, when they allowed themselves to be made tools of foreign intrigues and abused their privileges."[80][81]

In Turkey

Causes

Talat Pasha, the architect of the genocide, was buried in 1943 at the Monument of Liberty, Istanbul, as a national hero.[82][83]

Historian

Mehmet Kemal and Behramzade Nusret, were proclaimed national and glorious martyrs and their families were rewarded by the state with confiscated Armenian properties.[77][87] Turkish historian Taner Akçam states that, "It's not easy for a nation to call its founding fathers murderers and thieves."[88] Kieser and other historians argue 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."[5] Turkish historian Doğan Gürpınar says that acknowledging the genocide would bring into question the foundational assumptions of the Turkish nation-state.[89]

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.

Mass graves of genocide victims have also been destroyed, although many still exist.[104] After the 1918 armistice, incriminating documents in the Ottoman archives were systematically destroyed.[105] The records of the postwar courts-martial in Constantinople have also disappeared.[106][107] Recognizing that some archival documents supported its position, the Turkish government announced that the archives relevant to the "Armenian question" would be opened in 1985.[108] According to Turkish historian Halil Berktay, diplomat Nuri Birgi [tr] conducted a second purge of the archives at this time.[109] The archives were officially opened in 1989,[108] but in practice, some archives remained sealed, and access to other archives was restricted to scholars sympathetic to the official Turkish narrative.[110][111]

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]

Graph showing the bibliographies on the Armenian question created by Turkish governmental institutions and think tanks in five-year increments from 1950 to 2005
Number of official or quasi-official publications on the "Armenian question"

In the 1980s, following Armenian efforts for recognition of the genocide and a

Turkish military junta, and has been instrumental in cementing "an alternative, 'national' scholarship with its own reference system", according to Gürpınar.[120][108] Besides academic research, Türkkaya Ataöv taught the first university course on the "Armenian question" in 1983.[108] By the twenty-first century, the Turkish Historical Society, known for publications upholding the official position of the Turkish government, had as one of its main functions the countering of genocide claims.[121][122][123]

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

Ministry of Education.[135][136][138] The state uses this monopoly to increase support for the official denialist position,[136][139] vilifying Armenians and presenting them as enemies.[140][141] For decades, these textbooks did not mention Armenians as part of Ottoman history.[142][143][144] Since the 1980s, textbooks discuss the "events of 1915", but deflect the blame from the Ottoman government to other actors. They accuse imperialist powers of manipulating the Armenians to undermine the empire, and allege that the Armenians committed treason or presented a threat. Some textbooks admit that deportations occurred and Armenians died, but present this action as necessary and justified. Since 2005, textbooks have accused Armenians of perpetrating genocide against Turkish Muslims.[143][145][146] In 2003, students in each grade level were instructed to write essays refuting the genocide.[147]

Society

Photograph of people walking on a street protesting against Armenian claims of genocide
A protest against Armenian genocide recognition on the 100th anniversary on İstiklal Avenue, Istanbul

For decades, the genocide was a taboo subject in Turkish society.

Alevis.[55][153][154]

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

2016 failed coup, the AKP government became increasingly authoritarian; political repression and censorship has made it more difficult to discuss controversial topics such as the Armenian genocide.[168] As of 2020, all major political parties in Turkey, except the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), as well as many pro- and anti-government media and civil society organizations, support denial. Both government and opposition parties have strongly opposed genocide recognition in other countries.[169] No Turkish government has admitted what happened to the Armenians was a crime, let alone a genocide.[170][171][172] On 24 April 2019, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tweeted, "The relocation of the Armenian gangs and their supporters ... was the most reasonable action that could be taken in such a period".[173]

Foreign relations of Turkey

See also: Armenian genocide recognition

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

Committee to Coordinate the Struggle with the Baseless Genocide Claims (ASİMKK). The Institute for Armenian Research, a think tank which focuses exclusively on the Armenian issue, was created in 2001 following the French Parliament's recognition of the genocide.[187] ASİMKK disbanded after the 2017 Turkish constitutional referendum.[188]

According to sociologist

Holocaust museums.[190] As of 2015, Turkey spends millions of dollars each year lobbying against the genocide's recognition.[191] Akçam stated in 2020 that Turkey has definitively lost the information war over the Armenian genocide on both the academic and diplomatic fronts, its official narrative being treated like ordinary denialism.[188]

Germany

See also: Germany and the Armenian genocide
"A Tribute for Talaat Pasha" by German general Fritz Bronsart von Schellendorf, published in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on 24 July 1921[192]

From 1915 to 1918, Germany and the Ottoman Empire undertook "joint propaganda efforts of denial."

assassination of Talat Pasha, so much evidence was revealed that denial became untenable. German nationalists instead portrayed what they acknowledged as the intentional extermination of the Armenian people as justified.[199]

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

Main article: United States recognition of the Armenian genocide

Historian

MGM, threatening a boycott of American films. Turkish embassies, with the support of the US State Department, shot down attempts to revive the film in the 1950s and 1960s.[204][209]

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

Steven Pound, a representative of the FCO said the United Kingdom did not recognize the genocide because "the evidence is not sufficiently unequivocal".[218]

Israel

See also: Israel–Turkey relations and Azerbaijan–Israel relations

According to historians

Israeli Foreign Ministry joined the ultimately unsuccessful effort to cancel the conference.[220]

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,

global warming denial: funding of biased research, creating a smokescreen of doubt, and thereby manufacturing a controversy[228][229][230] where there is no genuine academic dispute.[231]

Beginning in the 1980s, the Turkish government has funded research institutes to prevent recognition of the genocide.

Heath Lowry, director of the Institute of Turkish Studies, helped secure the signatures; for his efforts, Lowry received the Foundation for the Promotion and Recognition of Turkey Prize.[240][237] Over the next decade, Turkey funded six chairs of Ottoman and Turkish studies to counter recognition of the genocide; Lowry was appointed to one of the chairs.[240] According to historian Keith David Watenpaugh, the resolution had "a terrible and lasting influence on the rising generation of scholars."[226] In 2000, Elekdağ admitted the statement had become useless because none of the original signatories besides Justin McCarthy would agree to sign another, similar declaration.[234]

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 [tr], 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

Turkish Studies Association criticized the violation of Quataert's academic freedom.[249][252][254]

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

See also: Genocide justification

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,

collective guilt to all Armenians for the military resistance of some, despite the fact that the law of war criminalizes the deliberate killing of civilians.[266][267] Deaths are blamed on factors beyond the control of the Ottoman authorities, such as weather, disease, or rogue local officials.[268][269] The role of the Special Organization is denied[270][271] and massacres are instead blamed on Kurds,[60] "brigands", and "armed gangs" that supposedly operated outside the control of the central government.[272]

Other arguments include:

Denial of the Armenian genocide is compared frequently to

war propaganda and that powerful lobbies manufacture genocide allegations for their own profit, subsuming one-sided systematic extermination into war deaths, and shifting blame from the perpetrators to the victims of genocide. Both forms of negationism share the goal of rehabilitating the ideologies which brought genocide about.[176][294]

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;

Civil Code and fined him one franc, and ordering the publication of the judgment at Lewis' cost in Le Monde. The court ruled that while Lewis has the right to his views, their expression harmed a third party and that "it is only by hiding elements which go against his thesis that the defendant was able to state there was no 'serious proof' of the Armenian Genocide".[301][302][303]

In March 2007, a Swiss court found

anti-Armenianism as a motivation for genocide denial.[305][310][311] Although the court did not rule on whether the events of 1915 constituted genocide, several separate opinions recognized the genocide as a historical fact.[309] Perinçek misrepresented the verdict by saying, "We put an end to the genocide lie."[312]

Consequences

Şırnak clashes
, 2015

Kieser, Göçek, and Cheterian state that ongoing denial prevents Turkey from achieving a full democracy including

mass violence.[314] Until the Turkish state acknowledges genocide, he argues, "there is a potential there, always, that it can do it again".[315] Vicken Cheterian says that genocide denial "pollutes the political culture of entire societies, where violence and threats become part of a political exercise degrading basic rights and democratic practice".[316] When recognizing the Armenian genocide in April 2015, Pope Francis added, "concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it".[317]

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

See also: Armenia–Turkey relations and Armenia–Azerbaijan relations
Kars, Turkey. Intended to commemorate all war victims, it was erected without input from the Armenian community.[324]

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

Khojali massacre. According to this propaganda, Armenians committed "the real genocide" and are accused of killing or deporting as many as 2 million Azeris throughout this period.[332][335][336] Following Azerbaijan, Turkey and the Turkish diaspora have lobbied for recognition of the Khojali massacre as a genocide to downplay the Armenian genocide.[337] Azerbaijan sees any country that recognizes the Armenian genocide as an enemy and has even threatened sanctions.[338] Cheterian argues that the "unresolved historic legacy of the 1915 genocide" helped cause the Karabakh conflict and prevent its resolution, while "the ultimate crime itself continues to serve simultaneously as a model and as a threat, as well as a source of existential fear".[333]

References

Citations

  1. ^ 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."
  2. ^ 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..."
  3. ^ a b Academic consensus:
  4. ^ 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."
  5. ^ a b c Foundational violence:
  6. ^ a b Distinctiveness of Turkish denial efforts:
  7. ^ a b Demirel & Eriksson 2020, p. 11.
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ISBN 978-1-56859-136-0
    .
  10. ISBN 978-0-253-20773-9
    .
  11. ^ Suny 2015, p. xiv.
  12. ^ Suny 2015, pp. 26–27, 43–44.
  13. ^ Suny 2015, p. 105.
  14. ^ Kévorkian 2011, pp. 11, 71.
  15. ^ Suny 2015, pp. 129, 170–171.
  16. ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 204, 206.
  17. ^ Suny 2015, pp. 127–129, 133, 170–171.
  18. ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 62, 150.
  19. ^
    doi:10.1080/14623528.2019.1613816
    . 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.
  20. ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 246–247.
  21. ^ Suny 2015, pp. 154–155, 189.
  22. ^ Suny 2015, pp. 184–185.
  23. ^ Kévorkian 2011, p. 137.
  24. ^ Suny 2015, p. 185.
  25. ^ Suny 2015, pp. 223–224.
  26. ^ Suny 2015, p. 218.
  27. ^ a b Suny 2015, pp. 243–244.
  28. ^ Dadrian 2003, p. 277.
  29. ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 217.
  30. ^ Suny 2015, p. 236.
  31. ^ Kieser 2018, p. 225.
  32. ^ 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."
  33. ^ Akçam 2018, p. 158.
  34. doi:10.1080/14623528.2019.1630893
    . Most scholars placed the possible date(s) for a final decision at the end of March (or beginning of April).
  35. ^ Suny 2015, pp. 256–257.
  36. ^ Ihrig 2016, p. 109.
  37. ^ Dadrian 2003, p. 274.
  38. 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.
  39. ^ 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.'"
  40. ^ Dadrian & Akçam 2011, p. 18.
  41. ISBN 978-0-674-91645-6
    .
  42. ^ Ekmekçioğlu 2016, p. 4.
  43. ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 289–290, 331.
  44. ^ Dixon 2010b, pp. 105–106.
  45. ^ 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."
  46. ^ 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."
  47. ^ Avedian 2012, p. 814 fn. 102.
  48. ^ de Waal 2015, pp. 51–52.
  49. ^ Cheterian 2018a, pp. 189–190.
  50. ^ 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."
  51. ^ 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.
  52. ^ 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..."
  53. ^ Akçam 2018, p. 3.
  54. ISBN 978-1-351-52503-9
    .
  55. ^ a b Chorbajian 2016, p. 170.
  56. ^ Chorbajian 2016, pp. 171–172.
  57. ISSN 1911-0359
    .
  58. ^ a b Hovannisian 2015, p. 229.
  59. ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 248–249.
  60. ^ a b Kévorkian 2011, p. 810.
  61. ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 361–362.
  62. ^ Avedian 2012, p. 813.
  63. ISSN 1773-0546
    .
  64. ^ 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."
  65. ^ 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."
  66. ^ 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."
  67. ^ Kieser 2018, pp. 385–386.
  68. ^ 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'."
  69. ^ Ulgen 2010, pp. 376–377.
  70. ^ Suny 2015, pp. 340–341.
  71. ^ Bloxham 2005, pp. 101–102.
  72. ISBN 978-0-87436-928-1
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  73. ^ Avedian 2012, p. 818.
  74. ^ Kieser 2018, pp. 319–320.
  75. ^ Kévorkian 2011, pp. 810–811.
  76. ^ 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."
  77. ^ a b Avedian 2012, p. 816.
  78. ^ Ulgen 2010, pp. 378–380.
  79. ^ Ulgen 2010, p. 371.
  80. ^ Baer 2020, p. 79.
  81. ^ Zürcher 2011, p. 312.
  82. ^ Kieser 2018, p. 419.
  83. ^ Göçek 2015, p. 267.
  84. ^ Aybak 2016, p. 14.
  85. ^ Akçam 2012, p. xi.
  86. doi:10.1353/his.2016.0046. 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
    , 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."
  87. ^ Kévorkian 2011, p. 811.
  88. ^ 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.
  89. ^ 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."
  90. ^ Bilali 2013, p. 29.
  91. ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 106.
  92. ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 107.
  93. ^ a b Akçam 2012, p. xii.
  94. ^ Avedian 2012, p. 799.
  95. ^ 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."
  96. ^ Gürpınar 2016, pp. 224–225.
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  98. ^ Akçam 2018, p. 157.
  99. ^ Demirdjian 2018, p. 13.
  100. ^ Zürcher 2011, p. 316.
  101. ^ a b Chorbajian 2016, p. 173.
  102. ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 65.
  103. ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 54–55; Cheterian 2015, pp. 64–65; Chorbajian 2016, p. 174; MacDonald 2008, p. 121.
  104. ^ Üngör 2014, pp. 165–166.
  105. ^ de Waal 2015, p. 54.
  106. ^ Akçam 2012, p. 6.
  107. ^ Akçam 2018, p. 8.
  108. ^ a b c d Dixon 2010a, p. 473.
  109. ^ Cheterian 2018a, p. 205.
  110. ^ Auron 2003, p. 259.
  111. ^ Dixon 2010a, pp. 473–474.
  112. ^ Baer 2020, p. 82.
  113. ^ Göçek 2011, pp. 43–44.
  114. ^ Ulgen 2010, pp. 384–386, 390.
  115. ^ Mamigonian 2015, p. 63.
  116. ^ Gürpınar 2016, pp. 219–220.
  117. ^ Baer 2020, pp. 116–117.
  118. ^ Göçek 2011, p. 44.
  119. ^ Bayraktar 2015, p. 802.
  120. ^ Gürpınar 2013, p. 423.
  121. ^ Galip 2020, p. 153.
  122. ^ Gürpınar 2013, p. 421.
  123. ^ Göçek 2015, p. 293.
  124. ^ de Waal 2015, p. 182; Suny 2009, p. 938; Cheterian 2015, pp. 140–141; Gürpınar 2013, p. 419.
  125. ^ Göçek 2015, p. 468.
  126. ^ Suny 2009, p. 942.
  127. ^ Bayraktar 2015, pp. 804–805.
  128. ^ a b Gürpınar 2013, pp. 419–420.
  129. ^ Gürpınar 2013, pp. 420, 422, 424.
  130. ^ Erbal 2015, pp. 786–787.
  131. ^ de Waal 2015, p. 182.
  132. ^ 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.
  133. ^ 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."
  134. ^ Erbal 2015, p. 786.
  135. ^ Ekmekçioğlu 2016, p. xii.
  136. ^ a b Göçek 2015, pp. 63–64.
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  139. ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 105.
  140. ^ 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."
  141. ^ 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..."
  142. ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 64.
  143. ^ a b Gürpınar 2016, p. 234.
  144. ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 104.
  145. ^ Dixon 2010b, pp. 104, 116–117.
  146. ^ Bilali 2013, pp. 19–20.
  147. ^ Dixon 2010b, p. 115.
  148. ^ Bilali 2013, p. 19.
  149. ^ Göçek 2015, pp. 4, 10.
  150. ^ 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."
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  152. ^ Üngör 2014, p. 147.
  153. ^ Galip 2020, p. 95.
  154. ^ Erbal 2015, p. 785.
  155. ^ 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."
  156. ^ Göçek 2015, p. 1.
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  158. doi:10.1080/02691728.2020.1839593
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  161. ^ Göçek 2015, p. 477.
  162. ^ Cheterian 2015, pp. 273–275.
  163. ^ Galip 2020, pp. 162–163.
  164. ^ Galip 2020, p. 60.
  165. ^ Cheterian 2018a, pp. 203–204.
  166. ^ 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."
  167. doi:10.1080/14683849.2017.1408414
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  169. ^ Galip 2020, pp. 87, 163.
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  171. ^ 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."
  172. ^ Cheterian 2015, p. 305.
  173. ^ Koc, Cagan (24 April 2019). "Erdogan Says Deporting Armenians Was 'Appropriate' at the Time". Bloomberg.com. Retrieved 6 April 2021.
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  178. ^ a b c Smith 2015, p. 6.
  179. ^ a b Ben Aharon 2019, p. 345.
  180. ^ Avedian 2013, p. 80.
  181. ^ Bloxham 2005, p. 207.
  182. ^ Cheterian 2018a, p. 207.
  183. ^ Chorbajian 2016, p. 172.
  184. ^ Avedian 2012, pp. 812–813.
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  187. ^ Dixon 2010a, pp. 477–478.
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  190. ^ 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."
  191. ^ a b c Göçek 2015, p. 2.
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  193. ^ Kieser 2018, p. 21.
  194. ^ Ihrig 2016, p. 185.
  195. ^ Anderson 2011, p. 206.
  196. ^ Anderson 2011, pp. 206–207.
  197. ^ Anderson 2011, p. 210.
  198. ^ Ihrig 2016, pp. 150–151.
  199. ^ 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."
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  222. ^ a b Ben Aharon 2015, p. 638.
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  251. ^ Quataert 2006, p. 250.
  252. ^ 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."
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  257. ^ 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."
  258. ^ Suny 2015, p. xii.
  259. ^ 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'."
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  261. ^ 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'."
  262. ^ Hovannisian 2015, pp. 243–244.
  263. ^ 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'."
  264. ^ 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."
  265. ^ 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."
  266. doi:10.1080/14623528.2013.856095
    . 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.
  267. 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.
  268. ^ Hovannisian 2001, p. 801.
  269. ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 231.
  270. ^ Akçam 2008, pp. 128–131.
  271. ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 410–423.
  272. ^ Akçam 2012, p. 417.
  273. ^ 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."
  274. 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."
  275. ^ 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."
  276. ^ 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."
  277. ^ Hovannisian 2001, pp. 803–804.
  278. ^ Bloxham 2005, pp. 208–209.
  279. ^ Akçam 2012, p. 399.
  280. ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 374–377.
  281. ^ Akçam 2012, pp. 399–400, 407, 409.
  282. ^ Dadrian 2003, p. 275.
  283. ^ Hovannisian 2015, p. 238.
  284. ^ Akçam 2012, p. 373.
  285. ^ 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..."
  286. ^ Akçam 2008, pp. 113, 126–128.
  287. ^ Demirdjian 2018, pp. 10–11.
  288. ^ Lattanzi 2018, pp. 88–89.
  289. ^ Akçam 2012, p. xxii.
  290. ^ Baer 2020, pp. 1–2, 183–185, 293.
  291. ^ Baer 2020, pp. 1, 207–208.
  292. ^ Kaligian 2014, p. 208.
  293. ISSN 1303-5754
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  294. ^ MacDonald 2008, p. 133.
  295. ^ Lattanzi 2018, p. 100.
  296. ^ "Holocaust & Genocide Education | Armenia". University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts. Archived from the original on 23 April 2019. Retrieved 22 October 2019.
  297. ^ Ertür 2019, pp. 2–3.
  298. ^ Baer 2020, pp. 140–141.
  299. ^ Auron 2003, p. 228.
  300. ^ Auron 2003, pp. 228–229.
  301. ^ "Paris, France, Court of First Instance". Armenian National Institute. Retrieved 25 February 2021.
  302. ^ Baer 2020, p. 141.
  303. ^ Auron 2003, p. 230.
  304. ^ Ertür 2019, pp. 5–6.
  305. ^
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    . Retrieved 14 December 2020.
  306. ^ 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."
  307. ^ a b "Perinçek v. Switzerland". Global Freedom of Expression. Columbia University. Retrieved 25 February 2022.
  308. Swissinfo
    (in German). 19 December 2007. Retrieved 25 February 2022.
  309. ^
    JSTOR 10.5305/intelegamate.55.4.0627
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  310. ISBN 978-1-349-95306-6
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  311. ISSN 2284-2969
    . Retrieved 14 December 2020.
  312. ^ 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'."
  313. ^ Kieser 2018, p. 294; Göçek 2015, p. 463; Cheterian 2015, pp. 176, 312; Avedian 2018, p. 48.
  314. ^ Akçam 2012, pp. xxvi–xxvii.
  315. ^ "Genocide Denied". Facing History and Ourselves. Retrieved 26 December 2020.
  316. ^ Cheterian 2018b, p. 899.
  317. ^ Yardley, Jim; Arsu, Sebnem (12 April 2015). "Pope Calls Killings of Armenians 'Genocide,' Provoking Turkish Anger". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
  318. ^ Suciyan 2015, p. 16.
  319. doi:10.1080/10926771.2015.1121191
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  320. ISSN 2376-0702
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  321. ^ Cheterian 2015, pp. 127–128.
  322. ^ Avedian 2018, p. 110.
  323. ^ 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?"
  324. doi:10.1515/iph-2018-0011
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  325. doi:10.1080/08865655.2016.1226927
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  326. ^ 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."
  327. ^ Avedian 2018, p. 211.
  328. ^ de Waal 2015, pp. 212, 229–230.
  329. ^ Bloxham 2005, p. 234.
  330. ^ 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."
  331. ^ 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'.
  332. ^ a b Sanjian, Ara (24 April 2008). "Armenia and Genocide: the Growing Engagement of Azerbaijan" (PDF). The Armenian Weekly. pp. 28–33.
  333. ^ a b Cheterian 2018b, p. 887.
  334. ^ Cheterian 2018b, pp. 893–894.
  335. ^ Cheterian 2018b, pp. 895–896.
  336. ^ Finkel 2010, pp. 57–58.
  337. ^ Finkel 2010, pp. 59–60.
  338. ^ 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."

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