Assyrian International News Agency
June 6 2008
US Politicians, Scholars Helping Turkey Cover Up WWI Genocide
By David Holthouse
Early this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to require
all public high school students in Canada’s largest city to complete a
new course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary
Implications." It includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which
more than a million Armenians perished in a methodical and
premeditated scheme of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of
Turkey during and just after World War I.
The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter
Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of
Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in
the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian
community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a
badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully
plotted genocide.
Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American
scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by
hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of
Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide — a network
so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical
truth and enormous political pressure to convince America’s lawmakers
and even its president to reverse long-held policy positions.
Lewy makes similar revisionist claims in his 2005 book The Armenian
Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide and in frequent
lectures at university campuses across the country. Speaking at
Harvard University in March 2007, he chalked up the ghastly Armenian
death toll to "bungling misrule," and stressed that "it is important
to bear in mind the enormous difference between ineptness, even
ineptness that had tragic consequences" and deliberate mass murder.
"Armenians call the calamitous events of 1915-1916 in the Ottoman
Empire the first genocide of the twentieth century," he said. "Most
Turks refer to this episode as war time relocation made necessary by
the treasonous conduct of the Armenian minority. The debate on what
actually happened has been going on for almost 100 years and shows no
signs of resolution."
But it’s not only Armenians calling the slaughter a genocide, and
there is no real debate about its essential details, according to the
vast majority of credible historians. Although Lewy’s brand of
genocide denial is subtler than that of Holocaust deniers who declare
there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, it’s no less an attempt to
rewrite history.
"The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide — hundreds
of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments,
and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course
of decades — is consistent," the International Association of
Genocide Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government.
"The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915,
under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman
Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens — an
unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians
were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and
forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into
permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its
homeland of 2,500 years." Double Killing
Despite this clear consensus of experts, Turkey exerts political
leverage and spends millions of dollars in the United States to
obfuscate the Armenian genocide, with alarming success even at the
highest levels of government. Lobbyists on the Turkish payroll stymied
a Congressional resolution commemorating the genocide last fall by
convincing lawmakers to reverse their stated positions. Even President
Bush flip-flopped.
Revisionist historians who conjure doubt about the Armenian genocide
and are paid by the Turkish government provided the politicians with
the intellectual cover they needed to claim they were refusing to
dictate history rather than caving in to a foreign government’s
present-day interests.
"This all happened a long time ago, and I don’t know if we can know
whether it was a massacre or a genocide or what," said U.S. Rep. John
Murtha (D-Penn.) after changing his vote.
"The last thing Congress should be doing is deciding the history of an
empire [the Ottoman empire] that doesn’t even exist any more," said
President Bush.
But experts in genocide saw things quite differently.
"Denial is the final stage of genocide," says Gregory Stanton,
president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "It
is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically
and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of
their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing to
Armenians around the world."
Last year, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter
condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel
laureates including Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and
political activist. Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey’s 90-year-old
campaign to cover up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it
strives to kill the memory of the original atrocities.
He was hardly the first. As long ago as 1943, law professor Raphael
Lemkin, who would later serve as an advisor to Nuremburg chief counsel
Robert Jackson, coined the term "genocide" with the Armenians in mind.
Stanton, a former U.S. State Department official who drafted the
United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, spoke this April at a
United States Capitol ceremony honoring victims of the Armenian
genocide — a ceremony held four months after the bill to commemorate
the slaughter was shot down.
"The U.S. government should not be party to efforts to kill the memory
of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide of the
Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan for the
Holocaust," Stanton said before an audience that included three
survivors of the Armenian genocide and more than 100 representatives
and senators.
Infiltrating the Academy
Efforts to kill the memory of the Armenian genocide began while
carrion birds were still picking over corpses in their desert
boneyards, with Turkey issuing a first official statement assuring the
world at large that no atrocities had occurred. Turkey’s primary
strategy for denying the Armenian genocide since then has shifted from
blanket denial to disputing the death toll to blaming the massacres on
Kurdish bandits and a few rogue officials to claiming the Armenians
who died were enemy combatants in a civil war.
Turkey began intervening in the U.S. on behalf of denying the genocide
in the 1930s, when Turkish leaders convinced the U.S. State Department
to prevent MGM studios from making a movie based on the book The Forty
Days of the Musa Dagh because it depicted aspects of the Armenian
genocide.
In 1982, the government of Turkey donated $3 million to create the
Institute for Turkish Studies, a nonprofit organization housed at
Georgetown University that pushes a pro-Turkey agenda, including
denial of the Armenian genocide. Three years later, in 1985, Turkey
bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Washington
Post and The Washington Times to publish a letter questioning the
Armenian genocide that was signed by 69 American scholars. All 69 had
received funding that year from the Institute for Turkish Studies or
another of Turkey’s surrogates like the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, a
quasi-governmental agency in Turkey’s capital city.
The Institute for Turkish Studies has since received sizable donations
from American defense contractors that sell arms to Turkey, including
General Dynamics and Westinghouse. Turkey continues to provide an
annual subsidy to support the institute. In 2006, the most recent year
for which tax records are available, the institute awarded $85,000 in
grants to scholars. Its chairman is the current Turkish ambassador to
the U.S., Nabi Sensoy.
The first unassailable evidence of the extent of the Armenian genocide
denial industry’s reach in academic circles arrived in 1990 in an
envelope addressed to Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychology and
psychiatry at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and
John Jay College. It contained a letter signed by Nuzhet Kandemir, who
was then Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, protesting Lifton’s
inclusion of several passing references to the Armenian genocide in
his prize-winning book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide. "It is particularly disturbing to see a major
scholar on the holocaust, a tragedy whose enormity and barbarity must
never be forgotten, so careless in his references to a field outside
his own area of expertise," Kandemir wrote. "To compare a tragic civil
war perpetrated by misguided Armenian nationalists, and the human
suffering it wrought on both Muslim and Christian populations, with
the horrors of a premeditated attempt to systematically eradicate a
people is, to anyone familiar with the history in question, simply
ludicrous."
There was nothing out of the ordinary about Kandemir’s letter.
Academics who write about the Armenian genocide were then and still
are routinely castigated by Turkish authorities.
What Lifton found intriguing, however, was a second letter in the
envelope, which the Turkish ambassador had included quite by
accident. It was a memo to Kandemir from Near East historian Heath
Lowry, in which Lowry provided Kandemir with a point-by-point cheat
sheet on how to attack Lifton’s book, which Lowry chummily referred to
as "our problem."
Lowry at the time was the founding director of the Institute for
Turkish Studies. He resigned that position in 1996 when he was
selected from a field of 20 candidates to fill the Ataturk Chair of
Turkish Studies at Princeton University, a new position in the Near
Eastern Studies department that was created with a $750,000 matching
grant from the government of Turkey.
Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, Lowry had never held a
full-time teaching position and had not published a single work of
scholarship through a major publishing house. As a result of that and
of what The Boston Globe described in 1995 as his work as "a long-time
lobbyist for the Turkish government," his appointment sparked a
firestorm of controversy. A protest group called Princeton Alumni for
Credibility published a petition decrying Lowry’s appointment that was
signed by more than 80 leading scholars and writers, including Kurt
Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Cornel West, Joyce Carol Oates and many
historians and experts in genocide.
Peter Balakian, the director of Colgate University’s Center for the
Study of Ethics and World Societies and the author of The Burning
Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, called Lowry "a
propagandist for a foreign government."
Speaking at a 2005 symposium at Princeton commemorating the 90th
anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Balakian posed a rhetorical
question: "Would a university want someone who worked with a neo-Nazi
group to cover up the Holocaust on their faculty?"
The relationship of Turkey to U.S. scholars promoting Armenian
genocide denial is similar to that of the oil industry to fringe
climatologists who dispute the reality of global warming. The cause
and effect relationship is murky. It’s impossible to know for sure if
they’re making the claims to get the money or getting the money
because they make the claims. And many of those who receive money from
the Institute of Turkish Studies do little or nothing to support the
government’s version of what happened to its Armenian minority.
But a number of them certainly seem to, including Justin A. McCarthy,
a professor of history at the University of Louisville. McCarthy
claims that death tolls attributed to what he calls "this imaginary
Turkish plan" are grossly exaggerated and resulted from justifiable
wartime self-defense actions triggered by traitorous Armenians
conspiring with Turkey’s enemies.
McCarthy also points out that Armenians massacred Turks on at least
one occasion before the "so-called Armenian genocide." In other words,
they had it coming. "The question of who started the conflicts is
important, both historically and morally important," McCarthy declared
in a 2005 speech before the Turkish Grand National Assembly. "In more
than 100 years of warfare, Turks and Armenians killed each other. The
question of who began the killing must be understood, because it is
seldom justifiable to be the aggressor, but is always justifiable to
defend yourself."
He continued: "If those who defend themselves go beyond defense and
exact revenge, as always happens in war, they should be identified and
criticized. But those who should be most blamed are those who began
the wars, those who committed the first evil deeds, and those who
caused the bloodshed. Those who began the conflict were the Armenian
nationalists, the Armenian revolutionaries. The guilt is on their
heads."
Enforcing the Turkish View
In France and Switzerland, it’s a crime to deny the Armenian
genocide. In Turkey, it’s a crime to affirm it.
Enacted in 2005, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code makes it
illegal for any citizen or resident of Turkey to give credence to the
Armenian genocide. Numerous journalists and scholars have been
prosecuted for "denigrating Turkishness" under that statute, beginning
with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, who was charged for stating, "A
million Armenians were killed in these lands." Turkish-Armenian
newspaper editor Hrant Dink was prosecuted three times for criticizing
the Turkish government’s longstanding policy of denying the Armenian
genocide.
Where the law failed to silence Dink, bullets succeeded. He was gunned
down in front of his central Istanbul office last January by a Turkish
ultranationalist. Footage and photos later surfaced of the assassin
celebrating in front of a Turkish flag with grinning policemen.
Dink’s friend and ideological ally Taner Akam, a distinguished Turkish
historian and sociologist on the faculty of the University of
Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, attended Dink’s
funeral in Turkey, despite the considerable risk to his own
life. Akam, a leading international authority on the Armenian
genocide, was marked for death by Turkish ultranationalists following
the November 2006 publication of his book, A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and The Question of Turkish Responsibility. The book
is a definitive history based in large part on official documents from
Turkish government archives.
"It would be better for world peace and truth if sewer germs like you
were taken off the planet," went one of the dozens of anonymous
threats Akam continues to receive in Minnesota. "Pray that the devil
takes you away soon because otherwise you’ll be living a hell on
earth. Who am I? You’re going to find out, Taner, you’re going to find
out."
Turkish ultranationalists have, in effect, targeted many other people
who, like Akam, affirm the genocide. Several of their websites include
home addresses, phone numbers and photos of these scholars.
Genocide deniers often disrupt Akam’s lectures. In November 2006, a
gang of Turkish ultranationalists attacked him at a book signing at
City University of New York.
"Denial of the Armenian genocide has developed over the decades to
become a complex and far-reaching machine that rivals the Nazi Germany
propaganda ministry," says Akam. "This machine runs on academic
dishonesty, fabricated information, political pressure, intimidation
and threats, all funded or supported, directly or indirectly, by the
Turkish state. It has become a huge industry." Convincing Congress
Academia is one of two major American fronts in Turkey’s campaign to
kill the memory of the Armenian genocide. The other is Congress.
As the only Muslim-dominated country in a troubled region to call the
U.S. and Israel its allies, Turkey wields significant political
influence that it uses to prevent the U.S. from joining 22 other
nations in officially recognizing the Armenian genocide as a
historical fact.
In 1989, the U.S. State Department released archived eyewitness
accounts that, according to State Department officials, showed that
"thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless
women and children, were butchered." That same year, a bill
commemorating the genocide was introduced in the U.S. Senate. But
Turkey responded by blocking U.S. Navy ships from entering
strategically important Turkish waters and by declaring a ban on all
U.S. military training operations on Turkish territory. The bill
quickly evaporated.
Last September, the matter came up again. The U.S. House Foreign
Relations Committee voted to bring a nonbinding resolution to the
floor of Congress condemning the mass murder of Armenians by Ottoman
Turks, placing the death toll at 1.5 million, and labeling the killing
a "genocide."
This time, Turkey responded by recalling its ambassador to the United
States and forecasting dire repercussions. "In the case that Armenian
allegations are accepted, there will be problems in the relations
between the two countries," warned Turkish President Abdullah Gul.
"Yesterday, some in Congress wanted to play hardball," said Egmen
Bagis, foreign policy advisor to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. "I can assure you, Turkey knows how to play hardball."
The next day, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack apologized to
Turkey on behalf of the United States by issuing a statement
expressing "regret" for the committee’s actions, which, he cautioned,
"may do grave harm to U.S.-Turkish relations and to U.S. interests in
Europe and the Middle East."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates added his opposition to the resolution
and pointed out that 70% of the air cargo sent to U.S. forces in Iraq
and 30% of the fuel consumed by those forces is delivered via
Turkey. President Bush, perhaps forgetting his campaign promise in
2000 to push for official recognition of the Armenian genocide if
elected president, also came out against the resolution.
While Turkish officials made threats, lobbyists paid by Turkey
delivered money to congressmen in the form of campaign and political
action committee donations. Louisiana representative Bobby Jindal (a
Republican who’s now Louisiana’s governor) and Mississippi
representative Roger Wicker (now a Republican senator representing
that state) both dropped their sponsorship of the resolution and began
speaking against it — but only after receiving around $20,000 each
from former congressmen Bob Livingston, a Republican, and Richard
Gephardt, a Democrat, who now work for lobbying firms contracted by
Turkey to oppose any recognition of the Armenian genocide.
In 2000, while still in office, Gephardt had declared that he was
"committed to obtaining official U.S. government recognition of the
Armenian genocide." In 2003, he co-sponsored a resolution placing "the
Armenian genocide" in the company of the World War II Holocaust and
mass deaths in Cambodia and Rwanda that was voted down after a Turkish
lobbying blitzkrieg.
Since leaving office and accepting a $1.2 million-a-year contract to
lobby for Turkey, the former House majority leader has experienced a
profound change of heart. "Alienating Turkey through the passage of
the resolution could undermine our efforts to promote stability in the
theater of [Middle East] operations, if not exacerbate the situation
further," he wrote in an E-mail to the International Herald
Tribune. Last fall, as part of his efforts to help torpedo the
symbolic Armenian genocide resolution, Gephardt escorted Turkish
Ambassador Nabi Sensoy to meetings with Speaker of the House Nancy
Pelosi and other Democratic leaders.
Bob Livingston, whose firm has been paid more than $12 million by the
Turkish government since 1999, also pitched in. As part of the
lobbying effort last fall that U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one
of the sponsors of the resolution, called "the most intense I’ve ever
seen," Livingston shepherded Turkish dignitaries from office to office
on Capitol Hill.
As another part of that campaign, the government of Turkey took out
full-page advertisements in major American newspapers calling upon the
members of Congress to "support efforts to examine history, not
legislate it." The ads featured a testimonial from Secretary of State
Condoleeza Rice — "These historical circumstances require a very
detailed and sober look from historians" — that implied that
historians have yet to seriously study the Armenian genocide.
More than 100 supporters of the resolution reversed their positions,
and H.R. 106 was voted down.
The government of Turkey has since continued to call for a
"historian’s commission" of scholars to "study the facts of what
happened in 1915-1923." The proposed committee is marketed as a
high-minded quest for truth and reconciliation, a long overdue
arbitration of disputed history, and a chance to finally give equal
weight to both sides of the story.
But as the saying goes, a lie isn’t the other side of any story. It’s
just a lie.
"When it comes to the historical reality of the Armenian genocide,
there is no ‘Armenian’ or ‘Turkish’ side of the question, any more
than there is a ‘Jewish’ or ‘German’ side of the historical reality of
the Holocaust," writes Torben Jorgensen, of the Danish Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies. "There is a scientific side and an
unscientific side — acknowledgement or denial."
By David Holthouse
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