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From 1915 to 1917 the Young Turk regime in the Ottoman Empire
carried out a systematic, premeditated, centrally planned genocide
against the Armenian people. One of the documents authenticated
by Turkish authorities in 1919 is a telegram sent in June 1915 by
Dr. Sakir, one of the leaders of the secret organization that
carried out the planning and implementation of the Genocide. He
asks the provincial party official who is responsible for carrying
out the deportations and massacres of Armenians within his
district: "Are the Armenians, who are being dispatched from there,
being liquidated? Are those harmful persons whom you inform us you
are exiling and banishing, being exterminated, or are they being
merely dispatched and exiled? Answer explicitly...."
The evidence of intent is
backed also by the outcome of the actions against the Armenians:
it is inconceivable that over a million persons could have died
due to even a badly flawed effort at resettlement. Moreover, the
pattern of destruction was repeated over and over in different
parts of Turkey, many of them far from any war zone; such
repetition could only have come from a central design. Further,
the reward structure was geared toward destruction of the
Christian minority: provincial governors and officials who refused
to carry out orders to annihilate the Armenians were summarily
replaced.
[Section
omitted: A summary of key events of the Armenian Genocide.]
More than one million Armenians perished as the result of
execution, starvation, disease, the harsh environment, and
physical abuse. A people who lived in eastern Turkey for nearly
3,000 years lost its homeland and was profoundly decimated in the
first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century. At the
beginning of 1915 there were some two million Armenians within
Turkey; today there are fewer than 60,000.
Despite the vast amount of evidence that points to the historical
reality of the Armenian Genocide, eyewitness accounts, official
archives, photographic evidence, the reports of diplomats, and the
testimony of survivors, denial of the Armenian Genocide by
successive regimes in Turkey has gone on from 1915 to the present.
The basic argument of denial has remained the same, it never
happened, Turkey is not responsible, the term "genocide" does not
apply. The tactics of denial, however, have shifted over the
years. In the period immediately after World War I the tactic was
to find scapegoats to blame for what was said to be only a
security measure that had gone awry due to unscrupulous officials,
Kurds, and common criminals. This was followed by an attempt to
avoid the whole issue, with silence, diplomatic efforts, and
political pressure used where possible. In the 1930s, for
example, Turkey pressured the U.S. State Department into
preventing MGM Studios from producing a film based on Franz
Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a book that depicted aspects
of the Genocide in a district located west of Antioch on the
Mediterranean Sea, far from the Russian front.
In the 1960s, prompted by the worldwide commemoration of the
fiftieth anniversary of the Genocide, efforts were made to
influence journalists, teachers, and public officials by telling
"the other side of the story." Foreign scholars were encouraged
to revise the record of genocide, presenting an account largely
blaming the Armenians or, in another version, wartime conditions
which claimed the lives of more Turks than Armenians. Thereafter,
Turkey tried to prohibit any mention of the Genocide in a United
Nations report and was successful in its pressure on the Reagan
and Bush administrations in defeating Congressional resolutions
that would have designated April 24 as a national day of
remembrance of the Armenian Genocide. The Turkish government has
also attempted to exclude any mention of the Genocide from
American textbooks. Stronger efforts still have been made to
prevent any discussion of the 1915 genocide being formally
included in the social studies curriculum as part of Holocaust and
genocide studies.
There have also been attempts by the Turkish government to disrupt
academic conferences and public discussions of the Genocide. A
notable example was the attempt by Turkish officials to force
cancellation of a conference in Tel Aviv in 1982 if the Armenian
Genocide were to be discussed, demands backed up with threats to
the safety of Jews in Turkey. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council
reported similar threats over plans to include references to the
Armenian Genocide within the interpretive framework of the
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. At the same time, Turkey
has sought to make an absolute distinction between the Holocaust
and the Armenian Genocide, defining the latter as "alleged" or
"so-called." The documents we have, however, show that, in
private, such labeling drops off.
Finally, in the 1980s the Turkish government supported the
establishment of "institutes", whose apparent purpose was to
further research on Turkish history and culture. At least one also
was used to further denial of Turkish genocide and otherwise
improve Turkey's image in the West. |
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