Journal of Turkish Weekly
May 5 2012
Clearing Some Misconceptions About the Armenian Issue
by Maxime Gauin, JTW Columnist
Saturday, 5 May 2012
The Armenian question comes onto the agenda every year, at the end of
April of course, and also during crises like that of the recent
liberticidal bill in France’the bill which was eventually suppressed
by the Constitutional Council in the name of freedom of speech. In
looking for a better approach, it is important to avoid confusion,
some of which this article analyzes.
At first, the trials of 1919-1920 are supposed to have firmly
established the `criminal designs’ of the Committee of Union and
Progress (CUP) government vis-Ã-vis the Armenian population. The
Entente libérale (Hürriyet ve İtilaf or Liberal Union), which was
recreated by the instigations of the British Embassy in
1910-1911thanks to Greek and British money, came back to power in 1919
during the occupation of Ä°stanbul due to British pressure, and was
even infiltrated by the British intelligence service, according to the
French officers in Turkey. The party was an archenemy of the CUP and
wanted to reject all the possible blame on the CUP’s leaders, both due
to personal hatred and because of an illusory hope to obtain a better
peace treaty for the Ottomans. For the trial of the ministers, even
Oskan Mardikian, a former minister (CUP) of post and telegraph, was
indicted.
The Liberal Union sent the former CUP ministers in front of a martial
court. It was legally wrong, since the Constitution of 1876, suspended
in 1878 and restored in 1908 by the Young Turk Revolution, ordered
that members of the government be judged for committed acts only by a
special tribunal, the High Court. An unconstitutional procedure was
chosen by the Liberal Union to sue former CUP ministers and their
ex-collaborators, because according to the military justice of that
time, the indicted persons were not allowed to be assisted by a lawyer
during the investigation and did not have the right of
cross-examination during the trial. Even in the Moscow trials
organized by Lenin’s regime in 1922, or more recently in Guantanamo,
the right of cross-examination was allowed to the defendants. After a
short interruption, Damat Ferit PaÅ?a, installed as Grand Vizier by the
British, came back to power in Ä°stanbul in April 1920. One of the
first decisions of Damat Ferit was to ban the CUP defendants from
hiring a lawyer, removing any right of defense.
After the forced resignation of Damat Ferit (October 1920), the right
to appeal the decisions was eventually accorded to those whom
sentences had been given after April 23, 1920. All the persons who had
this right appealed, and all were acquitted of all (or most) charges
by the appeal court. The others’ trials were ended in practice on
March 28, 1922 by the last Ottoman government, which after an
administrative investigation acknowledged many shortcomings in the
conduct of these trials. Nemrut Mustafa PaÅ?a, president of one of the
main first instance courts, was himself sentenced for corruption in
December 1920, a few weeks after having given a severe and
controversial verdict.
All the original material of these tribunals’proceedings and
`documents”is lost, despite Ä°stanbul having been retaken without a
fight by the Kemalists, which left all the necessary time for Armenian
and Greek activists to save, if needed, the material. All what remains
are partial accounts in the Ä°stanbul newspapers of 1919-1920, and
these accounts contradict each other on some important points. Better
translations would at least slightly improve the trust which can be
placed in this material. For example, Taner Akçam changed the sense of
the verdict for the case of the Bayburt events. The verdict mentions
an order, coming from Erzurum, of a general expulsion of the Armenians
of the region; Mr. Akçam asserts that there was an order coming from
Ä°stanbul for the annihilation of the Armenians, changing `not to leave
any Armenian’ into `not to leave any Armenian alive.’
Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akçam took similar liberties with the
little basis upon which they allege that the Special Organization (SO)
was involved in the Armenian relocation and the killings of some of
the relocated Armenians. The record does not substantiate these
accusations, quite the contrary, as demonstrated by Guenter Lewy,
Edward J. Erickson and Erman Å?ahin. In particular, the archives
(reports, mission orders) of the most frequently accused unit of the
SO definitely demonstrate that this unit was on the Caucasian front,
instead of relocations paths, during the years 1915 and 1916.
In addition to these general errors of appreciation regarding the
`evidence’ for the `genocide’ allegation, there are some
misconceptions which are more specific to Turkey. Some Islamic
conservatives apparently consider the Armenian issue a tool to take
revenge against the secularists, considering that the Young Turks
paved the way for Turkey’s secularization. Needless to say, it is
ethically wrong to misuse history for political purposes. But such
reasoning forgets the fundamentally anti-Muslim stance of the
mainstream of those advocating the `Armenian genocide’ allegation. The
Anglo-Saxon, Armenian and Greek propaganda of WWI largely stressed
`Muslim fanaticism’ as the main cause of the `extermination’ of the
Ottoman Armenians. More recently, Vahakn N. Dadrian presented Islam as
the main cause of the `Armenian genocide.’ Even in Taner Akçam’s work,
there are some traces of such an absurd thesis.
Another kind of shortcoming is to believe that the strident reactions
from the Armenian diaspora, and from Armenia itself, are the
expression of suffering and that a certain `recognition’ (the spectrum
of hypothesis for such a `recognition’ is rather large) is the main
solution to the Armenian issue. In fact, most of the virulent Armenian
speeches come from old extremistorganizations’namely the revolutionary
parties created at the end of 19th century’which hated the Turks
before 1915 and will continue to hate them, whatever their position
may be. The mere existence of such organizations, and thus the
material interest of their leadership, depends on the pursuit of the
Armenian-Turkish conflict.
On the opposite side of Turkey’s politics, the most common error is to
label the events of 1915 a `civil war.’The bloody Armenian
insurrections of Van, Zeytun, Urfa and some other cities, followed by
a harsh repression, can be called `civil war’ events, but the whole
Turko-Armenian tragedy cannot be reduced to that. Nor can the
relocated, mostly unarmed (or disarmed) Armenians deceased due to
various reasons (assassinations, famine, epidemics) or the unarmed
Muslim civilians killed by Armenian volunteers during the Russian
retreat of 1917-1918 be appropriately called victims of a civil war.
In conclusion, the Armenian question must be understood in its
complexity, which means improving both the level of knowledge of
Turkish opinion and Western opinion. In both cases, the translations
and diffusion of scholarly work are crucial.
*Maxime Gauin is a researcher at the International Strategic Research
Organization (USAK) and a Ph.D. candidate at the Middle East Technical
University Department of History.
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