Azeri Press Agency, Azerbaijan
Oct 20 2006
Armenian Question
[COMMENTARY]
by Norman Stone
“The Armenian ‘genocide’ is an imperialist plot.” So said Dogu
Perincek, in Marxist mode, and he chose to say it in Switzerland.
Switzerland passed a law threatening prison for anyone ‘denying’ that
there had been a genocide of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915, and Mr.
Perincek was interrogated by the police.
There have been similar events in other countries and now we have the
French parliament passing a law that is harsher than the Swiss one –
a year’s prison and a heavy fine. This is a ridiculous and contemptible
business – bad history and worse politics. It is also financially very
grubby indeed. We all know how the American legal system can work:
lawyers will agree to work for nothing, in return for a share of the
profits at the end of a court case. Court cases are very expensive
and it can simply be easier for banks or firms or hospitals to agree
to make a payment without any confession of liability, just because
fighting the case would be absurdly expensive, and the outcome –
given how the American jury system works – unpredictable. A burglar,
crawling over a householder’s glass roof, fell through it, was
badly wounded, and took the householder to court: result, a million
dollars in damages. Class actions by Armenian Diaspora descendants in
California shook down the Deutsche Bank over claims dating back to 1915
and collected 17,000,000 dollars; then they attempted the same with
a French insurance company. We can be entirely certain that if Turkey
ever ‘recognizes the genocide’ then the financial claims will follow.
But if Turkey refuses to admit it, she is in fact on perfectly good
ground. The very first thing to be said is that the business of
‘genocide’ has never been proved. The evidence for it is at best
indirect and when the British were in occupation of Istanbul they never
found any direct evidence or proof at all. They kept some hundred or
so prominent Turks in captivity on Malta, hoping to find some sort
of evidence against them, and failed. They asked the Americans if
they knew anything and were told, no. The result is that the alleged
‘genocide’ has never been subjected to a properly-constituted court
of law. The British released their Turks (meanly refusing to pay for
their journeys back home from Malta).
There is a counter-claim to the effect that this happened because
the Nationalist Turks were holding British officers hostage but the
fact is that the Law Officers simply said that they did not have the
evidence to try their captives.
Diaspora Armenians claim that ‘historians’ accept the genocide case.
There is some preposterous organization called ‘association of genocide
scholars’ which does indeed endorse the Diaspora line, but who are
they and what qualifications do they have? Knowing about Rwanda or
Bosnia or even Auschwitz does not qualify them to discuss Anatolia
in 1915, and the Ottoman specialists are by no means convinced of the
‘genocide’. There is in fact an ‘A’ team of distinguished historians
who do not accept the Diaspora line at all.
In France, Gilles Veinstein, historian of Salonica and a formidable
scholar, reviewed the evidence in a famous article of 1993 in
L’Histoire. Back then the Armenian Diaspora were also jumping up and
down about something or other, and Veinstein summed up the arguments
for and against, in an admirably fair-minded way. The fact is that
there is no proof of ‘genocide’, in the sense that no document ever
appeared, indicating that the Armenians were to be exterminated.
There is forged evidence. In 1920 some documents were handed to the
British by a journalist called Andonian. She claimed that he had
been given them by an Ottoman official called Naim. The documents
have been published as a book (in English and French) and if you
take them at face value they are devastating: here is Talaat Pasha
as minister of the Interior telling the governors to exterminate the
Armenians, not to forget to exterminate the children in orphanages,
but to keep it all secret. But the documents are very obviously a
forgery – elementary mistakes as regards dates and signatures. At
the time, in 1920, the new Armenian Republic was collapsing. Kazim
Karabekir was advancing on Kars (which fell almost without resistance)
and the Turkish Nationalists were co-operating with Moscow (in effect
there was a bargain: Turkey would abandon Azerbaijan and Russia would
abandon Anatolian Armenia). The Armenians were desperate to get the
British to intervene and save them, by landing troops at Trabzon.
However, the British (and still more the French) had had enough of
the problems of Asia Minor and were in the main content to settle
with the new Turkey. Andonian’s documents belong in that context. The
chief Armenian ‘genocidist,’ V.Dadrian, still passionately defends
the authenticity of these documents but the attempt does not do much
credit to his scholarship: for instance, to the claim that the paper
on which these documents were written came from the French school
in Aleppo, he answers that there was a paper shortage (leading the
Ottoman governor to ask a French headmaster if he could use some of
his school-paper? Not very likely). The Naim-Andonian documents have
incidentally never been tested in a court. The British refused to
use them and a German court subsequently waved them aside. They have
since disappeared – not what you would have expected had they been at
all that is the sum total of the evidence as to ‘genocide’. Otherwise
you are left with what English courts call ‘circumstantial evidence’
– i.e. a witness testifying that another witness said something
to someone. Such evidence does not count. In the past three years
Armenian historians have apparently been going round archives ýn two
dozen countries to find out what they contain – the Danish archives
for instance. What they contain is what we knew already – that an
awful lot of Armenians were killed or died in the course of a wartime
deportation from many parts of Anatolia. Did the Ottoman government
intend to exterminate the race, or was it just a deportation that
went horribly wrong?
As to this, the experts are divided. A deportation gone wrong is the
verdict of many of the best qualified historians – Bernard Lewis, Heath
Lowry, Justin McCarthy, Yusuf Halacoglu. Other historians who know
the old script and the background believe that it was a premeditated
campaign of extermination, and some of these historians are Turkish
(Mete Tuncay and Selim Deringil, unless I am taking their names in
vain). There is a Turkish historian, Taner Akcam, whose book, based
on the war-crimes trials set up in the early period of the British
occupation, is obviously scholarly and who accepts the genocide thesis
(though he does stress that the process cannot be compared with what
happened in Nazi Germany to the Jews). In view of these divisions
among scholars it is simply scandalous that the French or any other
parliament should decree what the answer is. But it is worse, because
the Armenian Diaspora can be extremely vindictive. For instance,
Gilles Veinstein, as a reward for his quite dispassionate article,
faced a campaign of vilification. He had become a candidate for the
College de France, which elects the very best scholars in the country
to give seminars. The historians very much welcomed this: he is an
extremely serious scholar. But the Armenian Diaspora organized a
campaign against him, especially among the mathematicians for some
reason. One of them, a Professor Thom, was told that, on the whole,
the French historians supported Veinstein and did not like the
genocide thesis. His answer: ‘they are all Ottomanists,’ as if that
somehow disqualified them. The fact is that the Armenian Diaspora
have never taken this affair to a proper court of law. Instead,
they try to silence men such as Veinstein.
There was an extraordinary episode in American publishing two years
ago. A very well-known historian, Gunther Lewy, who was a professor at
the University of Massachusetts and author of several books still in
print on modern German history, wrote a book on the Armenian massacres
on the basis of German documents. The book is valuable because it
shows how Dadrian twisted the German evidence. He offered it to his
usual publisher, Oxford University Press (New York branch).
A report was commissioned from one Papazian – not exactly a celebrity –
who identified what he claimed were tremendous inaccuracies: they turn
out either not to be inaccuracies, or just little slips of the kind
anyone might make. On that basis Lewy’s manuscript was refused on the
grounds that he had taken up ‘Turkish denialist discourse’. He found
another publisher, the University of Utah Press. And lo and behold the
senior Armenian historian in the USA, Richard Hovannisian (University
of California) wrote in protest to the President of that University
to complain about the publication. Be it said, incidentally, that the
last two volumes of Hovannisian’s History of Independent Armenia are a
well-written and fair-minded account – in some ways, even a classic of
historical writing (the earlier two volumes are not of the same class).
Now, there is something very wrong here. If you believe that you are
right, and then you will let evidence speak for itself, and if you
face opposition you will simply expect to win the argument one way or
the other. Attempts to silence opposition, to boycott lectures by,
say, Justin McCarthy, to bully or manipulate foreign politicians –
all of that surely argues that the Armenians themselves know their
case is very far from being overwhelming. In any case it does nothing
whatsoever for Armenia. If you go to eastern Turkey and Kars, look
across the border at Armenia. It is very poor, and will continue so
if there is no commerce with Turkey. The only obvious industry is the
issue of visas for Moscow or the USSR (or for that matter Turkey,
where up to 100,000 ex-Soviet Armenians live). The place obviously
lives off Diaspora money (and the spread of American fast-food places
now means curiously enough that the inhabitants are becoming obese
in the manner of some Americans). In Soviet times Armenia had a
population approaching three million. Then came independence and the
war over Karabagh. The population dwindles and declines every year
and is now not much above 1,500,000 – of all absurdities, in other
words, independence has caused the Armenians to lose twice as many as
vanished in the supposed ‘genocide’ of 1915. There is in other words
a sickness at the heart of this whole frankly preposterous affair.
What should Turkey do? If the French law does pass then Turks must
be prepared to act, otherwise they risk being landed with enormous
bills for compensation. It will take organization. I would volunteer,
myself, to provoke some trouble in France: it would be very easy
indeed for me to give a public lecture and just to point out what is
wrong about the whole thesis of the ‘Armenian genocide’ – I might even
just read out Veinstein’s article (or another important one by the
then leading German general, Bronsart von Schellendorf). The French
government probably would be mad enough to put me in prison for a
while (this was done to a well-respected French historian of slavery,
whose crime had been to point out that many Africans were involved in
the slave trade and that some slaves volunteered for transportation
because it saved them from cannibalism). But someone has to make a
stand against the ridiculous misuse of parliamentary power and the
instructing of historians what they must say about an event nearly a
century old in a country two thousand kilometers away with a language
that very few people can now read.
–Boundary_(ID_EHHjt4Us3ORsGdHJfo7toA)–