The Memoirs of Naim Bey

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The Memoirs of Naim Bey
First French edition cover
Original titleThe Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians
CountryEngland, United Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SubjectHistory
PublisherHodder & Stoughton
Publication date
1920
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages84

The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, containing the Talat Pasha telegrams, is a book published by historian and journalist

Ottoman Empire
policy.

The first edition in English had an introduction by

Viscount Gladstone
.

Contents

According to Andonian, the documents were collected by an Ottoman official called

Ottoman Turkish
.

The overall picture emerging from these narrations points to a network of the extermination for most of the deportees.[3] It overwhelmingly confirms the fact of what British historian Arnold J. Toynbee (LSE, University of London) called "this gigantic crime that devastated the Near East".[3][4]

One day the following order came from the Minister of the Interior:

Although the extermination of the Armenians had been decided upon earlier than this, circumstances did not permit us to carry out this sacred intention. Now that all obstacles are removed, it is urgently recommended that you should not be moved for feelings of pity on seeing their miserable plight. But by putting an end to them all, try with all your might for obliterate the very name ’Armenia’ from Turkey.[5]

A new and awful order arrived from the Ministry of the Interior. The Government commanded that the life and honour of the Armenians should be destroyed. They no longer had any right to live.[5]

Authenticity

Bahaeddin Şakir telegram of 4 July 1915: "Have Armenians who were deported from there been eliminated? Have those harmful elements who were distanced [from there] through deportation been liquidated or simply deported?"[6] The original was found by Taner Akçam in 2017.[6][7]

In 1983, the

calumny directed against Turkey"), and that the documents contained within The Memoirs of Naim Bey were forgeries that had been, for more than 60 years, used as the basis for those charges of genocide and massacre.[8]

The French historian Yves Ternon who convened at the 1984 Permanent Peoples' Tribunal contends that these telegrams however, "were authenticated by experts…[but] they were sent back to Andonian in London and lost."[9]

Historian

Vahakn N. Dadrian argued in 1986 that the points brought forth by Turkish historians are misleading and countered the discrepancies they raised.[10]

Scottish historian

Vahakn N. Dadrian
, in 1986, verified the documents as authentic telegrams send out by [...] Talat Pasha". He adds:

"These flaws involve miscounting, misdating, misconversion of dates from old to new style, and careless editing, despite the availability of manifold resources, including staff assistance provided by the Turkish Historical Society—which in the chaos of the armistice were neither available nor affordable by either Naim or Andonian. Besides being incidental rather than central, such problems are endemic to the cumbersome nature of the material itself. The argument of falsification has been found to be untenable, since the few instances on which the argument is predicated merely involve irregularities. Irregularity is not coterminous, however, with forgery. Forgery presupposes skill, caution, and above all a measure of sophistication geared to avoiding mistakes. The presence and easy detection of such defects in the material under review mitigate against that charge. Indeed, no forger of any value would have produced material so incomplete and so flawed with glaring imperfections; these could have been easily avoided by anyone disposed to forge. Furthermore, a government apparatus known for its chronically erratic methods of transactions cannot be held exempt from such irregularities. Moreover, one is dealing here with highly secret transactions in the midst of a consuming “Great War,” initiated and directed by a political party that relied on diversions and camouflage for the pursuit of its secret designs; irregularity is an integral part of such a mentality."[10]

Historians

Margaret Lavinia Anderson wrote in 2019 that Dadrian's rebuttal to the charges of forgery "remains convincing".[12]

Turkish historian Taner Akçam mentions similarities between the telegrams published by Andonian to extant Ottoman documents.[13] In a book published in 2016, named “The Naim Efendi Memoirs and Talat Pasha Telegrams”, he states that the memoir and the telegrams are real. Akçam states that throughout his research he has discovered some serious new information and documents supporting his claim. Akçam summarizes them as following:

  • There was, in fact, an Ottoman officer named Naim Efendi. The original Ottoman documents that prove this exist, and some of them are published in Akçam's book.
  • There is a memoir that belongs to Naim Efendi. The microfiche copies of it, which he wrote in Ottoman in his own handwriting, are currently in Akçam’s possession. In his book he presents these pages as they are.
  • The memoir is genuine and the information it provides is correct. It is possible to find documents in the Ottoman archives referring to the same events and people as the memoir does.
  • Turkish historians Şinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca stated that the use of lined paper in a telegram indicates that the document is a fake, because, according to them, the Ottoman bureaucracy did not use lined paper. Akçam presents evidence that during this particular time period the Ottoman bureaucracy did use lined paper and there are many documents in the Ottoman archives that show that the Internal Ministry’s numerous agencies were ordering lined paper.
  • The telegrams that Naim Efendi sold to Andonian consist of two and three-digit codes. Orel and Yuca claim that during the war years the Ottoman government only used coding techniques that consisted of four and five-digit codes. Thus, they said, the telegrams were fake. Akçam presents evidence that during the war years the Ottoman government used numerical codes consisting of various different digit groupings to send orders via telegram. The texts he has discovered in the Ottoman archives used a series of two, three, four, and five-digit codes.[14]

Revisionism

anti-Armenian hate discourse".[15] Akçam wrote a book, Killing Orders, in order to debunk the claims of Orel and Yuca and prove that the telegrams were authentic. In 2017, Akçam was able to access one of the original telegrams, archived in Jerusalem, which inquired about Armenian liquidation and elimination.[16]

Guenter Lewy, a political scientist and genocide denier, also states that the telegrams form the "centerpiece" of "the case against the Turks", that the authenticity of the Naim-Andonian documents "will only be resolved through the discovery and publication of relevant Ottoman documents", and calls Orel and Yuca's work a "painstaking analysis of these documents" that makes "any use of them in a serious scholarly work unacceptable".[17] About this position David B. MacDonald wrote that Lewy is content to rely on the work of "Turkish deniers Şinasi Orel and Sureyya Yuca": "Lewy's conception of shaky pillars echoes the work of Holocaust deniers, who also see Holocaust history resting on pillars... This is a dangerous proposition, because it assumes from the start that genocide scholarship rests on lies which can easily be disproved once a deeper examination of the historical 'truth' is undertaken".[18]

Other opinions include Dutch professor

Strasbourg University) who stated in one of his books that "the authenticity of the alleged telegrams of Ottoman government, ordering the destruction of Armenians is today seriously contested",[23] Norman Stone (Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey), who calls the Naim-Andonian book "a forgery";[24] and by Gilles Veinstein, professor of Ottoman and Turkish history at Collège de France, who considers the documents as "nothing but fakes".[25]

Editions

Note: Although the Armenian edition was published after the other two versions, historian Vahakn Dadrian states that the Armenian text constitutes the original that Aram Andonian wrote back in 1919. Taking into account the delay in its publication helps to explain some "errors" identified by some Turkish authors in dating the documents.[1]

See also

References

  1. ^
    S2CID 154901860
    .
  2. ^ Permanent Peoples' Tribunal. A Crime of silence: the Armenian genocide. London: Zed Books, 1985
  3. ^ a b Dadrian, Vahakn. The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 18, No.3, August 1986, p.1
  4. Viscount Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce, with a Preface by Viscount Bryce. The Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation. Hodder & Stoughton
    and His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1916, Miscellaneous No. 31. p.653.
  5. ^ a b The Most Fearful Genocide in the History of the Human Race by Edmond Kowalewski, Page 5
  6. ^ a b Akçam 2018, pp. 17–18.
  7. ^ "Recently Discovered Telegram Reveals Evidence For Armenian Genocide". NPR.org. Retrieved 14 December 2020.
  8. ^ Şinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca, "The Talat Pasha Telegrams: Historical Fact or Armenian Fiction", Nicosia, 1986. [1]
  9. ^ Permanent Peoples' Tribunal. ''A Crime of silence, 1985
  10. ^ a b Dadrian, Vahakn. The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 18, No.3, August 1986, p. 550
  11. ISBN 1-59420-100-5
    .
  12. ISBN 978-1-78831-241-7
    .
  13. ISBN 978-0691159560
    .
  14. The Armenian Weekly
    , October 11, 2016.
  15. ^ "Akcam: The Authenticity of the Naim Efendi Memoirs and Talat Pasha Telegrams". The Armenian Weekly. 11 October 2016. Retrieved 26 November 2020.
  16. ^ Arango, Tim (22 April 2017). "'Sherlock Holmes of Armenian Genocide' Uncovers Lost Evidence". The New York Times. United States. Retrieved 24 April 2017.
    "Recently Discovered Telegram Reveals Evidence For Armenian Genocide". All things Considered. United States: National Public Radio. 24 April 2017. Retrieved 24 April 2017.
    Mandell, Ariane (23 April 2017). "Lost Evidence of Armenian Genocide Discovered in Jerusalem Archive". The Jerusalem Post. Israel. Retrieved 24 April 2017.
  17. ^ Guenter Lewy The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, University of Utah Press 2005, pp. 65-73
  18. ISBN 978-0-415-43061-6
    .
  19. ISBN 1-85043-399-2
    . The Armenian side has tried to demonstrate this involvement, but some of the documents it has produced (the so-called Andonian papers) have been shown to be forgeries.
  20. ISBN 1-85043-399-2
    . From the eyewitness reports not only of German, Austrian, American and Swiss missionaries but also of German and Austrian officers and diplomats who were in constant touch with Ottoman authorities, from the evidence given to the postwar Ottoman tribunal investigating the massacres, and even, to a certain extent, the memoirs of Unionist Officers and administrators, we have to conclude that even if the Ottoman government was not involved in genocide, an inner circle of the CUP, under the direction of Talat, wanted to solve the eastern question by the extermination of the Armenians and it used relocation as a clock for that policy."
  21. ^ From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East, London, Phoenix Paperbacks, 2005, p. 480.
  22. ^ Andrew Mango Turks and Kurds, in Middle Eastern Studies 30 (1994), p. 985
  23. ^ "La mort d'un empire (1908-1923)", in Robert Mantran (ed), Histoire de l'Empire ottoman, Paris: Fayard Publishers, 1989, p. 624
  24. Times Literary Supplement, nº 5298, October 15, 2004; "What’s this ‘genocide’ to do with Congress?", The Spectator, October 21, 2007. Archived February 12, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  25. ^ "Trois questions sur un massacre", L'Histoire, April 1995.

Bibliography

External links
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