By Eric Vandenbroeck

Previously, Turkey had used its leverage as a US Nato ally to stifle recognition of the Armenian genocide and has threatened consequences for bilateral relations.

On its fourth try, the Senate has approved a resolution that recognizes the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a century ago as genocide.

The resolution had been blocked three times at the request of the White House but won unanimous approval on Thursday 12 Dec..

In the United States, a large Armenian community centered in Los Angeles has been pressing for years for Congress to condemn the Armenian genocide. Turkey, which cut military ties to France over a similar action, has reacted with angry threats. A bill to that effect nearly passed in the fall of 2007, gaining a majority of co-sponsors and passing a committee vote. But the Bush administration, noting that Turkey is a critical ally, more than 70 percent of the military air supplies for Iraq go through the Incirlik airbase there, pressed for the bill to be withdrawn, and it was.

Over many years, because of the fear of alienating Turkey, diplomats have been told to avoid mentioning the well-documented genocide. In 2005, when John Evans, the American ambassador to Armenia, said that “the Armenian genocide was the first genocide of the 20th century,” he was recalled and forced into early retirement. Stating the truth was seen as an act of insubordination.

The current passage of the legislation, which is nonbinding, asserts that it is U.S. policy to commemorate as genocide the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923. The Ottoman Empire was centered in present-day Turkey.

Activist groups cheered the vote as long overdue. “The president ran out of people he could turn to enforce Erdogan’s veto,” said Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America. Turkey’s decades-long opposition to the resolution was “the longest-lasting veto over U.S. foreign policy” by a foreign power in American history, Hamparian said.

For years, Turkey had successfully deployed an army of high-priced lobbyists to stop the measure. Ankara spent more than $6 million to press its agenda in Washington in 2018, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog group.

Turkey has condemned the move and said it has put the relationship between the two nations at risk.

Legislatures in Germany, France and other European countries have also recognized the massacre of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 as genocide.

 

So what really happened?

In 1908, a new government came to power in Turkey. A group of reformers who called themselves the “Young Turks” overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid and established a more modern constitutional government.

At first, the Armenians were hopeful that they would have an equal place in this new state, but they soon learned that what the nationalistic Young Turks wanted most of all was to “Turkify” the empire. According to this way of thinking, non-Turks, and especially Christian non-Turks were a grave threat to the new state.

On the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians in the declining Ottoman Empire. By 1922, there were fewer than 400,000. The others some 1.5 million.

The evidence in the Ottoman archives is augmented by the documents found in Germany and Austria, which give ample confirmation that we are looking at a centrally planned operation of annihilation. See for example Talat Pasha (minister of the interior): "What we are dealing with here is the annihilation of the Armenians." ¹

That time government in the form of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) founded a special organization that participated in what led to the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community. This organization adopted its name in 1913 and functioned like a Special Forces outfit.

During the Armenian genocide, there was a great deal of collaboration between the Special Organization and the Central Committee as well as the local organizations of the CUP. In the 1919 trial of Unionist leaders, many documents and several defendants testified to the fact that the Special Organization worked hand in hand with the CUP, even as it was officially tied to the War Ministry.

The genocide unfolded in three episodes: first, the massacre of perhaps 200,000 Ottoman Armenians that took place between 1894 and 1896; then the much larger deportation and slaughter of Armenians that began in 1915 and has been widely recognized as genocide; and third, as mentioned underneath, the destruction or deportation of the remaining Christians (mostly Greeks) during and after the conflict of 1919-22, which Turks call their War of Independence. The fate of Assyrian Christians, of whom 250,000 or more may have perished.

The first episode unfolded in an Ottoman Empire that was at once modernizing and crumbling, while in chronic rivalry with the Russians. The second took place when the Turks were at war with three Christian powers (Britain, France, and Russia) and were concerned about being overrun from west and east. During the third, Greek expeditionary forces had occupied the port of Izmir, with approval from their Western allies, and then marched inland.

Under scrutiny, during the US Senate hearings, there is little doubt that the death marches that began in April 1915 were centrally coordinated.

The facts of the Ottoman campaign have long been established. At the time of the slaughter, which began in 1915, the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, cabled Washington that a “campaign of race extermination” was underway, while the American consul in Aleppo, in what is now Syria, described a “carefully planned scheme to thoroughly extinguish the Armenian race.”

But there have been arguments over how long in advance they were planned, and whether it was always intended that most victims would die.

Ankara argues that the Armenian death toll was much lower than reported and that people on both sides died as a result of wartime unrest.

Historians have contested those assumptions by documenting how Ottoman soldiers committed massacres and forced marches that formed part of the Ottoman Empire's mass deportation of Armenians were instead designed to kill them during the journey.

Based on current evidence the Ottoman inner circle began planning deadly mass deportations soon after a Russian victory in January 1915. However, Ottoman policy was also shaped and hardened by the battle of Van, in which Russians and Armenians fought successfully, starting in April 1915.

Also Turkey's allies conceded that the Turkish government had sought to exterminate the country's Armenian population. For example the Austrian charge d'affaires Karl Graf von und zu Trauttmansdorff Weinsberg, said that  the mass of evidence, not only from Armenian sources but from bankers, German officers, consuls, and other witnesses, led him to conclude in late September that the Turks, carried out the "extermination of the Armenian race.²

Max Scheubner- Richter, the German vice consul reported to the German Foreign Office that "there will be no Armenians left in Turkey after the war."³

Recounting the fate of several thousand missing Armenian soldiers, Leslie Davis, the American consul at Harput and Mezreh, wrote that "it finally appeared that all of them were shot by the gendarmes who accompanied them."⁴

The American missionary physician Clarence Ussher, a resident of Van for several years, described a tense city ready to explode amidst rumors of massacres and reports of murders of disarmed Armenian· soldiers. Even in Ussher's presence, Djevdet Bey gave orders to destroy a nearby community. It was small wonder, then, that when Bey demanded four thousand Armenian men, Armenians "felt certain he intended to put the four thousand to death." On April 19, according to Ussher, Turkish units stationed in villages around Van received the order that "the Armenians must be exterminated."⁵

By the fall of 1915 the physical evidence of slaughter marked the landscape. Roads and rivers were filled with dead bodies. For weeks corpses, many tied back to back, floated down the Euphrates River into what is now northern Syria. The Euphrates briefly cleared, then corpses reappeared, if anything in still larger numbers. This time the dead were "chiefly women and children." Travelers on the roads of eastern Turkey also saw the dead everywhere. A journey outside Harput in November revealed hands and feet sticking out of the ground, and decomposing bodies: the missionary Mary Riggs wrote, "The Land was polluted."⁶

But as mentioned at the start Turkey continues to deny it happened and stopped anybody searching any of the archives in Turkey. Therefore it might be at its place here to explain how relevant research nevertheless advanced.

 

How the research came about, the revealing bibliography

The man who invented the word “genocide”, Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin, was moved to investigate the attempt to eliminate an entire people by accounts of the massacres of Armenians. He did not, however, coin the word until 1943, applying it to Nazi Germany and the Jews in a book published a year later, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.”

Interest in the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and genocide as a field of study, however, more generally began to emerge in the 1960s and subsequent decades.

“Holocaust consciousness” moved from primarily a Jewish concern into the broader public with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Hannah Arendt’s controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and the growing connection made between the tragedy in Europe and the survival of the state of Israel. The very term “holocaust,” which earlier had been applied (by David Lloyd-George, for example) to the  Armenian massacres, now was nearly exclusively (and with a capital “H”) used for the Nazi killing of the Jews.⁷ With the fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian deportations in 1965, commemorations were held around the world, none more striking than the demonstrations in Erevan that demanded “mer hogher” (our lands) and led, first, to the removal of the local Communist party secretary and, later, to the building of an official monument to the Genocide at Tsiternakaberd.⁸ Armenian  “genocide consciousness” fed on the persistent and ever more aggressive denial by the Turkish government and sponsored spokesmen, including some with academic credentials, that the  Young Turk government had ordered the deportations and massacres in an attempt to exterminate one of the peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Actions of Armenian terrorists from 1973 into the early 1980s brought the issue to public attention, but scholarship lagged far behind the agitated public consciousness. Out of the political and historiographical struggles of the 1970s came the first serious work by historians in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. Richard G. Hovannisian’s 1978 bibliography of sources on The Armenian Holocaust demonstrated both the availability of primary sources for anyone who cared to learn about 1915 as well as the thinness, indeed absence, of academic historical research on the topic.⁹ In those years one had to turn to the French physician Yves Ternon, who moved from his studies of Nazi medical atrocities to the genocide.¹⁰ As a small number of Armenian scholars, notably Richard  Hovannisian, Vahakn Dadrian, and Levon Marashlian, as well as a few non-Armenians like Robert Jay Lifton, Leo Kuper, Ternon, and Tessa Hofmann, began to write about an Armenian genocide, a defense of the Turks by Heath Lowry, Stanford Shaw, and Justin McCarthy led to clashes over such fundamental questions as the number of victims, the role and responsibility of the Committee of Union and  Progress, and whether 1915 should be considered an asymmetrical civil war or intentional, state-directed extermination of a designated people, that is, genocide. 

At the same time, several Holocaust scholars, seeking to preserve the “uniqueness” of the Jewish exterminations, rejected the suggestion of equivalence between the Armenian and Jewish genocides. As the historian Peter Novick reports, “Lucy Dawidowicz (quite falsely) accused the Armenians of ‘turn[ing] the subject into a vulgar contest about who suffered more.’ She added that while Turks had ‘a rational reason’ for killing Armenians, the Germans had no rational reason for killing Jews.”¹¹ 

Armenians were upset at the reduction of the Armenian presence in Washington’s United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and by the Israeli government’s attempt to close down an international genocide conference in Tel Aviv in 1982 after the Turkish government protested the discussion of the Armenian case. 

Prominent American Jews, including Elie Wiesel, Alan Dershowitz, and Arthur  Hertzberg, withdrew from the conference, but the organizer, Israel W. Charny, went ahead with the meeting.¹² Several American Armenian scholars, however, refused to attend as well, in protest over the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that was taking place as the conference held its sessions. As one state after another officially recognized 1915 as a genocide, the United States and Israel soon became the two most notable exceptions, along with Turkey. Activists in Europe and North America organized a series of campaigns to pressure the holdout states toward genocide recognition. 

Two years after the crisis over the Tel Aviv conference, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, a civil society organization founded four years earlier (1979) by the Italian senator Lelio Basso, held a “trial” examining the Armenian massacres to determine if it constituted genocide. Meeting in Paris from April 13 to 16, 1984, the jury heard the accounts of scholars, among them Hovannisian, Jirair Libaridian, Christopher Walker, Hofmann, Ternon, and Dickran Kouymjian, and examined the arguments of the Turkish government and its supporters. In its verdict the Tribunal determined that the “extermination of the Armenian population groups through deportation and massacre constitutes a crime of genocide…. [T]he Young Turk government is guilty of this genocide, about the acts perpetrated between 1915  and 1917; the Armenian genocide is also an ‘international crime’ for which the Turkish state must assume responsibility, without using the pretext of any discontinuity  in the existence of the state to elude that responsibility.”¹³ By the late 1980s, at long last, the first academic severe scholarship in the West on the fate of the Armenians began to appear in essays, collected volumes, and comparative studies. A new field of genocide studies legitimized serious attention to an event that had been all but erased from historians’ memory.¹⁴ Still, much of the energy spent in these debates centered on whether genocide had taken place. 

Even as new works appeared, the Turkish official state denial had set the boundaries of the discussion to the neglect of important issues of interpretation and explanation. Much of the early literature did not deal explicitly with questions of causation. A critical intervention by the political scientist Robert Melson labeled the denialist viewpoint appropriately the provocation thesis, that is, outside agitators provoked the Armenians within the Ottoman Empire and upset the relative harmony between peoples that had existed for many centuries. The Ottoman government’s response to the Armenian rebellion was measured and justified, in this view, and therefore it was the Armenians who brought on their destruction.¹⁵ 

As a form of explanation, the provocation thesis remained on the political-ideological level and made no effort to probe the negative features of the Ottoman social and political order. No discussion was offered to explain why the overwhelming majority of Armenians acquiesced to Turkish rule and did not participate in the rebellion. Nor was any explanation besides greed and ambition given to explain Armenian resistance. Like other conservative views of social discontent and revolution, arguments such as those put forth by Western historians from William L. Langer to Stanford Shaw and Turkish apologists like the former Foreign Ministry official Salahi R. Sonyel, repressed peoples had no right to resistance.¹⁶

Scholarship on the late Ottoman Empire and the fate of the Armenians burgeoned in the 1990s and 2000s. Historians of the Ottoman Empire often treated the imperial history as one primarily of the Muslims, mainly Turks, but in time a broader, multinational history began to emerge that integrated the stories of the non-Muslims into the tapestry of the empire.¹⁷ A pioneer in the study of the Armenian Genocide, the historical sociologist Vahakn N. Dadrian, made a major, if a controversial, contribution to the knowledge of 1915 in his synthetic volume, The History of the Armenian Genocide, arguing that the Genocide resulted from religious conflict and a Turkish culture of violence.¹⁸ The beautifully written popular history of poet memoirist Peter Balakian reproduced in evocative detail the horrors of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians, though his narrative only hinted at a causal argument and did not attempt a sustained explanation of why the genocide occurred.¹⁹ Bernard Lewis made the classical statement explaining the Genocide as the result of conflicting nationalisms.²⁰ The argument from nationalism has dominated much of the subsequent historiography on the Genocide. In an anthology edited by Hovannisian, Robert Melson, R. Hrair Dekmejian, Hovannisian, and  Leo Kuper explain the Genocide as largely the result of Turkish nationalist ideology and the political ambitions of the İttihadist leaders.²¹ An essential (regrettably unpublished) contribution to the local study of the Genocide was written by  Stephan H. Astourian, the author of significant articles on the causes, development,  and aftermath of 1915.²² Exceptional work, indispensable to establish the truth about the often-obscured events of 1915, was carried out by two giants among researchers and analysts, Raymond Kévorkian and Wolfgang Gust, who collected the relevant documents that laid the indisputable foundation of facts of genocide.²³ 

Perhaps most extraordinary of all, beginning with the former Turkish activist  Taner Akçam, a few scholars of Turkish and Kurdish origin explored the blank  spots of their history.²⁴ Even while writing under the restraints imposed by the denialist state, scholars in Turkey and of Turkish, Kurdish, and Armenian origins used the available access to the archives and elevated the writing on the tragedies of the late Ottoman Empire to new levels of professional authority.²⁵ The formation  of the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship (WATS) brought together for  the first time Turkish, Armenian, and other historians, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists in a joint discussion of 1915, its causes and  aftermath.²⁶ Once the static produced by denial was reduced, scholars were able to focus on the relevant but contested questions of why and when genocide occurred and who initiated it. Comparison with other genocides yielded important insights.²⁷ Among the principal volumes on the Armenian Genocide that benefited from engagement with an intimate acquaintance with Holocaust literature are works by the British historian Donald Bloxham.²⁸ Taking an international and comparative approach, Bloxham centers responsibility for genocide on choices made by state leaders, which were shaped by “perpetrator ideology,” “the most important element in genocide,” and seeks to explain not only mass killing but also the continued denial of it. Turkish nationalism, which he sees as “the ideology of the  CUP,” “alone could translate its agenda into mass expropriation and murder of  Christians.”²⁹ His analysis employs the notion of “cumulative radicalization,” first used by the German historian Hans Mommsen to analyze the Holocaust. In a grand comparative study of ethnic cleansing and modern mass killing, the historical sociologist Michael Mann suggests a combination of ideological, economic, military, and political power as essential ingredients in mass violence.³⁰

When, for example, an immanent ideology that reinforces already-formed social identities combines with a transcendent ideology that seeks to move beyond the existing social organization, this toxic mix of ideological power increases the likelihood of violence. Both interstate warfare and the overlapping of ethnicity with economic inequality increase the possibility of civil and ethnic conflict. Turning to the Armenian Genocide, Mann rejects the view that Turkish governments had a consistent, long-term genocidal intent. Like Bloxham, he emphasizes the radicalization of Turkish policies from the “exemplary repression” of Abdülhamid II through the encouragement and then forced application of Turkification, on to deportation (ethnic cleansing) and finally organized mass killing, genocide.

One hundred years after the Young Turk government decided to deport and massacre hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Assyrians the controversies over the Genocide still rage, but the balance has shifted dramatically and conclusively toward the view that the Ottoman government conceived, initiated, and implemented deliberate acts of ethnic cleansing and mass murder targeted at specific ethnoreligious communities. Although a handful of “scholars” continue to reject the argument that genocide occurred or to rationalize the actions of the Ottomans as a necessary, indeed understandable, policy directed at national security, new generations of researchers continue to establish what happened and why. 

Neo-denialist accounts occasionally appear, but step by agonizing step more accurate accounts and plausible explanations are being generated by the present generation of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and their emerging graduate students.

A recent book by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, focused on how from 1894 to 1924, also between 1.5 million and 2.5 million Ottoman Christians perished. As a result, the Christian share of Anatolia’s population fell from 20 percent to 2 percent.³¹

Sifting the evidence, Morris and Ze’evi write that the Ottoman inner circle began planning deadly mass deportations soon after a Russian victory in January 1915. However, Ottoman policy was also shaped and hardened by the battle of Van, in which Russians and Armenians fought successfully, starting in April 1915.

Morris and Ze’evi conclude that despite the swing from Sultan Abdulhamid II’s autocracy to republicanism after 1918, Turkey’s exterminatory patterns persisted, as did the rallying cry of (domestic) jihad until the early 1920s. Thus, the killing of about two million Christians purposefully served to Islamize and Turkify Asia Minor, making it by the early 1920s an almost purely Turkish-Muslim national home and nation-state.

A day after US lawmakers passed the resolution Turkey's Foreign Ministry summoned the US ambassador to Ankara stating that:

"We condemn and reject this decision of the US Senate," Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay tweeted on today.

There was also a reaction from a Kurdish commander: This decision will stop Turkey from committing massacres against the Kurdish people and stop its invasion of Rojava,” said SDF commander Mazloum Abdi in a tweet, using the Kurdish name for the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.

Legislatures in Germany, France, and other European countries have also recognized the massacre of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 as genocide.

The man who invented the word “genocide”, Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin, was moved to investigate the attempt to eliminate an entire people by accounts of the massacres of Armenians. He did not, however, coin the word until 1943, applying it to Nazi Germany and the Jews in a book published a year later, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.”

 

1. German Foreign Office, Political Archive, PA-AA/Bo. Kons./B. 191, Report of Consul Mordtmann, dated 30 June 1915. Dr. Mordtmann knew Turkish well.

2. Armenian Genocide Documentation, vol. 2, 1989, pp. 208, 243.

3. Political Archive, PA-AA/Bo. KonstB. 170, Report by Consul Scheubner-Richter, Erzurum, dated 28 July 1915

4. Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917, 1989, p. 61.

5. Clarence Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey, 1917, pp. 237, 239, 244; Donald Bloxham, "The Beginning of the Armenian Catastrophe: Comparative and Contextual Considerations," in Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoa, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller, 2002, p. 118.

6. Turkish Atrocities: Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915-1917 (Armenian Genocide Documentation Series) by Ara Sarafian and James L. Barton, 1998, pp. 33,18; and Wolfgang Gust, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern 1915/16, 2005, p. 353.

7. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), pp. 128–142. “Holocaust” had been used by The New York Times in the 1890s for the Hamidian massacres of the Armenians, as well as the Adana massacres of 1910. Duckett Z. Ferriman, The Young Turks and the Truth About the Holocaust at Adana in Asia Minor, During April 1909 (London, 1913).

8. The only historical journal dealing with Armenians available in English in The 1940s and 1950s were The Armenian Review, founded in 1948 by the Dashnak party. Early articles in the journal that dealt with the Genocide included those by H. Saro (1948), Onnig Mekhtarian (1949), Vahan Minakhorian (1955), Navasard Deyrmenjian (1961), Vahe A. Sarafian (1959), Ruben Der Minassian (1964), James H. Tashjian (1957, 1962), and H. Kazarian (Haikazun Ghazarian) (1965).

9. Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian Holocaust: A Bibliography Relating to the Deportations, Massacres, and Dispersion of the Armenian People, 1915–1923 (Cambridge, MA: National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, 1978).

10. Yves Ternon, Les Arméniens: Histoire d’un génocide (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1977); La cause arménienne (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1983); with Gérard Chalian,The Armenians From Genocide to Resistance, trans. Tony Berrett (London: Zed, 1983) and Le génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Complexe, 1984); his own Enquête sur la négation d’un genocide (Marseilles: Éditions Parathèses, 1989); and Mardin 1915: anatomie pathologique d’une destruction (Paris: Centre d’Histoire Arménienne Contemporaine, 2002).

11. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, p. 192.

12. Israel W. Charny and Shamai Davidson (eds.), The Book of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide: Book One: The Conference Program and Crisis (Tel Aviv: Institute on the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, 1983).

13. A Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide, The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (London: Zed, 1985) P. 227.

14. The work of Leo Kuper (1908–1994) was particularly important in defining the field of comparative genocide studies: Genocide: Its Political Use in the 20th Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), and The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Among the essential works of the late 1980s and early 1990s were Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1986); idem, The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992); and Melson, Revolution, and Genocide.

15. Melson, “A Theoretical Enquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1986.”

16. See, for example, Shaw and Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. II, pp. 315–316; and Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism: vol. I, p. 160. On a particular passage by Langer, Norman Ravitch notes that Langer’s “labeling of the Armenian movement as national-socialist can hardly be considered a slip of the pen.” “The Armenian Catastrophe: Of History, Murder & Sin,” Encounter 57, 6 (December 1981): 76, n. 16.

17. Excellent examples include Sarkissian, History of the Armenian Question to 1885; Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire; Braude and Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire; and Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition and Preparation for a Revolution.

18. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide; see also his Warrant for Genocide.

19. Balakian, The Burning Tigris. See the review by Belinda Cooper, The New York Times Book Review, October 19, 2003.

20. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Over time Lewis hardened his position. In 2007 he was quoted in an article opposing U.S. recognition of the Genocide in the conservative Washington Times: “[T]he point that was being made was that the massacre of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was the same as what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany and that is a downright falsehood. What happened to the Armenians was the result of a massive Armenian armed rebellion against the Turks, which began even before war broke out, and continued on a larger scale.” Bruce Fein (identified as “resident scholar with the Turkish Coalition of America), “Armenian Crime Amnesia?” The Washington Times, October 16, 2007.

21. Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. For the ongoing development of Genocide scholarship, see Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide, and Hovannisian (ed.), Remembrance and Denial.

22. Astourian, “Testing World Systems Theory, Cilicia (1830s–1890s).”

23. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide; Gust (ed.), The Armenian Genocide.

24. Akçam, Armenien und der Völkermord, From Empire to Republic, A Shameful Act, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity, and with Dadrian, Judgment at Istanbul.

25. See, for example, Fuad Dündar, İttihat ve Terakki’nin Müslümları İskan Politikası (1913–1918) (Istanbul: ĺletşim, 2001); his dissertation, “L’Ingénierie ethnique du régime jeune-turc” (Paris: EHESS, 2006); and idem, Crime of Numbers. Using hundreds of Turkish memoirs to establish the undeniability of the Genocide, the historical sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek produced Denial of Violence.

26. On the process and results of WATS, see Suny, Göçek, and Naimark (eds.), A Question of Genocide, and Suny, “Truth in Telling.”

27. Explicit comparisons between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust inform two important collections: Bartov and Mack (eds.), In God’s Name, and Kieser and Schaller (eds.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah.

28. Donald Bloxham, “The Armenian Genocide of 1915–16: Cumulative Radicalisation and the Development of a Destruction Policy,” Past and Present, 181 (November 2003): 141–191; idem, The Great Game of Genocide; and idem, Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2008).

29. Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, p. 19.

30. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy.

31. The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924, 2019.

 

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