TALAAT’S BLACK BOOK DOCUMENTS HIS CAMPAIGN OF RACE
Ara Sarafian
Azg
April 23 2009
Armenia
Extermination in 1915-17
"Talaat stated that they had already disposed of three quarters
of them [Armenians], that there were none left in Bitlis, Van,
Erzeroum, and that the hatred was so intense now that they have to
finish it. . . . He said they would take care of the Armenians at
Zor and elsewhere but they did not want them in Anatolia. I told
him three times that they were making a serious mistake and would
regret it. He said, "We know we have made mistakes, but we never
regret."" August 1915 diary entry of conversations between Talaat Pasha
and U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, United States Diplomacy on the
Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913-1916, comp., ed.,
and intro. Ara Sarafian (Princeton and London: Gomidas Institute, 2004)
A handwritten black book that belonged to Mehmet Talaat Pasha, the
Ottoman minister of interior in 1915, was published in facsimile form
in the end of 2008. It is probably the single most important document
ever uncovered describing the destruction of Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire in 1915-17. The Black Book draws on Ottoman sources no longer
available to answer many questions about what those sources showed.
Looking through the Sifre Kalemi or cipher telegram collection at
the Prime Ministry Archives in Istanbul some years ago, I was struck
by the number of telegrams in 1915 from Talaat Pasha ordering the
deportation of individual communities, inquiring about the state
of convoys, and giving instructions for further deportations. What
emerged was a picture of a ruler obsessed with the progress of his
signature program. Much of the responses to Talaat’s inquiries were
not available. What the Black Book does is to summarize the data
he collected.
Ottoman archives
Turkish state intellectuals in recent years have insisted that the
1915 deportations of Ottoman Armenians were not part of a genocidal
exercise, but an orderly population transfer and resettlement. They
have insisted that Ottoman archives in Turkey today support their
contention. Yet, between them, they have only managed to cite an
amalgam of official deportation and resettlement regulations, certain
reports related to deportations, and no substantial account of what
actually happened to deportees.
Indeed, no historian working in Turkish archives has managed to present
a coherent picture of the deportation and resettlement of Armenians
from any region in the Ottoman Empire based on Ottoman records. This
is because Ottoman records do not support the official Turkish thesis
on the Armenian Genocide.
While there is broad agreement between Turkish archives and other
sources that thousands of Armenians were removed from their homes in
1915, there is no solid account of what happened to these deportees
in Ottoman records. However, foreign archives, such as the consular
records of the United States, give a better qualitative assessment
of actual developments than the available Ottoman documentation.
This absence of Ottoman records could seem perplexing, because
according to Ottoman regulations, Ottoman officials had to keep
detailed records of the deportation of Armenians, as well as an
inventory of their properties, as well as details of the final
settlement of the people concerned. The total absence of such registers
in Turkish archives today is therefore remarkable.
A handwritten book
The recent facsimile publication of Talaat Pashas Black Book may well
answer many of questions with the authority of Ottoman records. At 77
pages, the book includes a substantial section on the deportation of
Armenians in 1915-17. The book and its content were never disclosed
in Talaat’s lifetime, including in his posthumous memoirs published in
1921. After his assassination in 1921, the book was kept by his widow
and given to the Turkish historian Murat Bardakci in 1982. Mr. Bardakc
made parts of the booklet public in Hurriyet newspaper in 2005. The
full account was not published until the end of 2008.
The significance of the Black Book lies in the authority of the owner,
the fact that its content was drawn from Ottoman administrative
records no longer available to historians in Turkey, and the actual
data that it gives about the deportation of Armenians. Neither the
book nor the data it yields bear clear dates, though Mr. Bardakc
thinks that the figures refer to 1915-1916 though I think that could
be the end of 1916 or even the beginning of 1917.
The state perspective
The data presented in this book can be considered to be a view of
the Armenian Genocide from the perspective of the state. This state
perspective still needs to be evaluated critically, which I am doing in
a separate study. The purpose of this article is to introduce the core
data that informed Talaat Pasha about the actual state of Armenians.
The statistics regarding the destruction of Armenians in the Black
Book are enumerated in four categories covering for 29 regions
(vilayets and sanjaks) of the Ottoman Empire.
These statistics are supposed to reflect: The Armenian population
in each region in 1914 Armenians who were not deported (presumably
1915-16) Armenians who were deported and living elsewhere (1917)
Armenians who were originally from outside the province they were
living in (1917)
>From these statistics, we can also have an idea of the number of
Armenians who were deported but not accounted for in 1917. Some of
these missing Armenians undoubtedly fled the Ottoman Empire, such
as those in the province of Van (where there was fierce resistance)
or parts of Erzurum (which fell under Russian occupation after the
Ottoman offensive collapsed in the east). However, very few Armenians
were able to flee in such a manner, and for our discussion today,
we will assume that the vast majority of the missing Armenians in
1917 were killed or died during deportations.
Questions answered
The figures from Talaat Pasha’s Black Book are invaluable because they
answer some fundamental questions about the Armenian Genocide. Two
such questions concern the nature of the actual deportations of 1915,
and the specific fate of those deportees as they were pushed into the
deserts of Der Zor, one of the main areas identified for resettlement.
Talaat Pasha’s information contradicts the official Turkish thesis
that deportations were an orderly affair governed by Ottoman laws and
regulations, or that deportees were actually successfully settled in
Der Zor. Interestingly, Talaat’s Black Book also shows the number of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to have been were much higher than
supposed by official figures.
Talaat Pasha’s figures confirm that most Ottoman Armenians outside
Constantinople were indeed deported, and most of these deportees had
disappeared by 1917. On average, 90 percent of provincial Armenians
were deported, and 90 percent of those deported were killed. The number
of people who went missing was over 95 percent for such provinces as
Trabzon, Erzurum, Urfa, Diyarbekir, Mamuret-ul-Aziz, and Sivas. These
figures clearly show that deportations were tantamount to a death
sentence, and they give credence to United States consular reports that
said as much, especially for those deported from the eastern provinces.
The Der Zor massacres of 1916
The data at hand also tells us about the scale of the Der Zor massacres
of 1916. There is general agreement that hundreds of thousands
of deportees were sent into this desert region in 191516, the main
resettlement zone according to Ottoman decrees. Ottoman sources yield
little information on what happened to these deportees. Survivor
accounts and sources outside Turkey (such as those in United States
archives) attest to the fact that deportees in the Der Zor region
mostly wasted away.
By 1917, even those Armenians who had been able to settle in this
area, mainly because of the efforts of the provincial governor Ali
Suad Bey, were taken away and massacred after a new governor, one of
Talaat Pasha’s henchmen, was sent. Deniers of the Armenian Genocide
who do not have adequate records from Turkish archives cite United
States records to argue that up to 300,000 people were sent into
this area omitting the fact that practically none of them survived
to 1917. Talaat Pasha’s records show 6,778 Armenians in this province
in 1917.
Population totals
The Black Book also gives interesting insights into the number of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire circa 1914. While these figures are
still smaller than some statistics cited outside Turkey, Talaat
Pasha’s dataset contradict the figures cited by deniers of the
Armenian Genocide, who minimize the number of Ottoman Armenians as
part of their strategy.
The Black Book cites official figures from the 1914 Ottoman population
survey, with a note explaining that this figure, like the figures for
Armenians registered in 1917, should be increased by a factor of 30
percent to account for undercounting.
The note thus increases the main Apostolic (or Gregorian) Armenian
community from 1,187,818 to 1,500,000 people before deportations. The
note also mentions the figure for Catholic Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire as 63,967 (which could also be revised upward to 83,157). There
is no figure given for Protestant Armenians. These figures bring the
number of Ottoman Armenians, based on official figures, close to
1,700,000 people. According to these figures, the total number of
Armenians who were missing in 1917 was around 1,000,000 people. If
one discounts those who might have fled to Russia, the number of
missing Armenians was still in the region of 800,000 to 900,000 people.
Talaat Pasha’s Black Book gives us invaluable insights into the type of
bureaucratic control Ottoman officials wielded over Armenians and the
type of information they gathered as a matter of course. The existence
of such information in Talaat Pasha’s Black Book again raises the
question of what happened to the archival trail that underpinned
his data. The Black Book also provides actual details about the
apparent destruction of Armenians in 191516, and it dismisses the
official Turkish assertion that deportations were an orderly affair
in moving and resettling people between 1915 and 1916. Indeed, the
image painted by the Black Book validates the more impressionistic or
passing accounts of atrocities against Armenians reported throughout
the Ottoman Empire by foreign observers and survivors between 1915
and 1916.
Ara Sarafian is an archival historian specializing in late Ottoman and
modern Armenian history. He is the director of the Gomidas Institute,
London. This article is a summary of a broader project on "Talaat
Pasha’s Black Book and the Armenian Genocide".