71 replies to this topic

[MJ]

Another reference is

The Early history of Indo-European Languages, Thomas V. Gamkrelidze, V.V. Ivanov, Scientific America, March 1990, P.110
http://www.geocities...ronicle120.html

[MJ]

For Timucin:

2. The Use of Rising Armenian National Awareness as an Excuse for Liquidation


The international efforts of the European Powers may in fact have caused Armenians more harm than good. By raising consciousness and hope of the oppressed people within Turkey, without concurrently enhancing their power, international actors created a situation in which the Ottomans had both the incentive and the excuse for the final resolution of the “Armenian problem.” Encouraged by the promises of the Treaty of Berlin, the Armenians experienced a new sense of national consciousness, which in turn engendered rising expectations. Sporadic displays of assertiveness began to erode their tradition of passively enduring the abuse endemic to the Ottoman system. Additionally, émigré Armenian individuals formed committees in the capitals of Europe to protest these abuses and to push for the implementation of promised reforms. As the Ottoman regime resisted these agitations and refused to execute the reforms, in any meaningful way, Armenian revolutionary cells emerged within and without the Empire and prepared for combat.

In a report to Paris entitled Expose historique de la question armenianne , long-term French Ambassador Paul Cambon traced the genesis of the “Armenian question” to this period. He wrote:

A high ranking Turkish official told me, “the Armenian question does not exist but we shall create it.”…Up until 1881 the idea of Armenian independence was non-existent. The masses simply yearned for reforms, dreaming only of normal administration under Ottoman rule… The inaction of the Porte served the vitiate the good will of Armenians. The reforms have not been carried out. The exactions of the officials remained scandalous and justice was not improved… from one end the Empire to the other, there is rampant corruption of officials, denial of justice and insecurity of life… The Armenian diaspora began denouncing the administrative misdeeds, and in the process managed to transform the condition of simple administrative ineptness into one of racial persecution. It called to the attention of Europe the violations by the Turks of the Treaty of Berlin and thereby summoned up the image of Armenian autonomy in the minds of the Armenian population. France did not respond to the Armenian overtures but the England and Gladstone did: The Armenian revolutionary movement took off from England[100]… as if it were not enough to provoke Armenian discontent, the Turks were glad to amplify it by the manner in which they handled it. In maintaining that Armenians were conspiring, the Armenians ended up engaging in conspiracy; in maintaining that there was no Armenia, the Armenians ended up conjuring the reality of her existence…. The harsh punishment of conspirators, the maintenance in Armenia of veritable regime of terror, arrests, murders, rapes, all this shows that Turkey is taking pleasure in precipitating events [in relation to] an inoffensive population. In reality the Armenian Question is nothing but an expression of antagonism between England and Russia…. Where does Armenia begin, and where does it end?[101]


Later in the report Cambon prophetically questioned the reasonableness of transporting Armenians to Mesopotamia, a solution the Ottoman government was reportedly contemplating[note that this passage is written by Cambon in 1884 – MJ]. Mesopotamia would later serve as the valley of the Armenian Genocide.

From Vahakn Dadrian's "Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I. Armenian Case and its Contemporary Legal Ramifications" published in Yale Journal of International Law, v. 14, no. 2, 1989, pp. 251-52.

[100] In an exchange with his German colleague Saurma, Russian Ambassador Nelildof commented that the Armenians were frustrated not only by the lack of any tengible results from European intervention, but also by the ensuring massacres. 10 Die Grosse Politik Der Europaischen Kabinete 1871-1914, supra note 83, Doc. No. 2426, at 69. Seee also supra note 90.
[101] 11 Documents Diplomatiques, supra note 83, Dec. No. 50 (Feb. 20, 1894) at 71-74 (1947); see also Livre Jaune. Affairs Armeniens. Projets de reformes dans l’Empire Ottoman 1893-1897. Doc. No. 6, at 10-13 (1897).


P.S. I appologize for my earlier typo of the data 1984 instead of 1884. Now it is fixed.

[ November 12, 2001: Message edited by: MJ ]

[bellthecat]

A couple of years ago I bought a book (in Van of all places!) by Pars Tuglaci titled "Ermeni Edebiyatindan Seckiler" It contains a biography of lots of (mostly) Turkish/Ottoman Armenian writers and poets, plus extracts of their works. It was published in 1992.

Steve

[MJ]

Ali,

I am not done yet with the references given yesterday.

Another starting point for getting familiarized with Armenian Arts would be its most traditional expression – the Armenian Miniature. Some of it may be found at /cgi-bin/forum/ultim...ic&f=5&t=000094 .

Also check http://www.itgateway...co/fullpage.htm for some sources of Armenian Miniatures.

In general, you can see a lot of exhibitions of Armenian Art at http://www.gallery.am./

I will try to find some writings on the subject, later.
/cgi-bin/forum/ultim...ic&f=5&t=000093 would be a good starting point for getting familiarized with the Armenian Architecture.

The follwoing site may be a good starting point (also for many Armenians ) for getting familiarized with the Armenian Music: /cgi-bin/forum/ultim...ic&f=6&t=000113

To be continued.

[ September 05, 2001: Message edited by: MJ ]

[aurguplu]

dear mj,

i must admit that i honestly did not know about the thing that cambon wrote, and had never read in anywhere either in books or online until now. if it can be proven to be authentic, it must be translated into turkish and published here.

i cannot fail to note the parallel between this and what the army has been doing with the kurdish question.

regards,

ali suat

[aurguplu]

dear mj,

i checked some of the sites you suggested. they are fine. thanks a lot.

regards,

ali suat

[MJ]

Dear Ali,


I have no knowledge, at least at this time, of other sources confirming the authenticity of Combon's report. However, knowing Dadrian, I am rather convinced that his references on the source of the information are rather accurate and diligent. After all, the material is published in one of the [if not the] most reputable professional journals on International Law.

There is an Armenian expression in the domain of national grotesque describing the [similar] phenomenon referenced above in the material: “Ktits brnats man adzel,” which roughly translates as “to walk one around while holding him from his nostrils.” The unprofessionalism , loud-mouthedness and the adventurism of the Armenian Revolutionaries has found its way even into the Armenian Satirical literature of the time – in the writings of Hagob Baronian (I am a graduate of the High School in Yerevan named after him ) and Yervand Odian.

If pressed hard, I can contact Dadrian and ask for help.

[elovna]

This should be interesting for all nationalities: the Dutch documentary 'a wall of silence', about a Turkish and an Armenian historian (Taner Akcam and Vahakn N. Dadrian) researching the Armenian Genocide and carefully starting a dialogue together.

In Turkish: http://www.omroep.nl...muur/tvturk.htm
English: http://www.omroep.nl.../W_O_S/home.htm
Dutch: http://www.omroep.nl...O_S/artikel.htm

The articles (English): http://www.omroep.nl...W_O_S/lijst.htm

[timucin]

Dear Ali,

To be honest, I was not expecting a barrage of Armenian Genocide 101. Considering that you are a professional historian, I was expecting something more sophisticated than what I already know and heard many times so far. Perhaps, you have the idea that I have just recently encountered the subject, and therefore, you thought not to be so harsh on me by starting from the ABC of the Armenian Genocide and the subject of genocide in general. Well, I thank you for being so considerate.

To start with, I am not denying the Armenian Genocide, although I find quite many theoretical difficulties, especially approaching from anthropological and psychological levels, in maintaining and believing in some of the positions on some key concepts. For example, what is genocide? Is it complete annihilation of a culture, a people, a language or all of these things? The funny thing about this subject is that neither the Jews nor the Armenians were completely annihilated as opposed to some other groups who were. If a group is completely eradicated from the face of the earth then there can be nobody to say that there was a genocide. So, we need not so complete genocides in order to have genocides. There were some groups, for example, some American Indian nations, or to some extent, at least one Circassian nation, who were erased from the face of the earth to the point that there is nobody today even to bring up their cases. But, I will skip discussing this subject right now, and instead concentrate on some of the points in your post.

The outcome of the events in Anatolia at the end of the Great War was definitely genocidal, whether or not there was such an intention. Here I agree with you, and this has always been my starting point in analyzing the Armenian Genocide. Because of the genocidal character of the outcome, I use the term genocide.

I am not obsessed with the subject of proof at all. The people who know me from my previous many discussions on this subject can tell that I have almost never discussed documents to prove if there was genocide. Since I start from the outcome, I actually do not need any documents to prove my case. To me, what is important is that regardless of what various personalities may have intended the outcome was the annihilation or removal of enough number of Armenians from the locality they perceived as their homeland to the point that the result was the eventual lack of effective population for Armenians to be able to reproduce themselves both culturally and physically in this particular locality as Armenians. This I call genocide or a genocidal outcome, if not a true genocide by definition. Therefore, I do not need documentary proof to show that there was a genocidal attempt against the Armenian nation.

On the other hand, documentary proof is needed, if our intention is to figure out who the responsible party for this genocidal outcome was. It is even more needed, if the intention is to find a guilty people, an ethnic group for the crime. So, these genocide discussions are in some ways not altogether about proving there was genocide of the Armenian nation, but about proving that a particular nation, the Turkish nation, which at the time of the crime did not even exist as a mature nation in the modern sense, but as a religious group, was responsible for this crime. And, the assumption is that by receiving their apology, the Armenian nation will be magically get themselves out from the trauma brought by the memory of the genocide, or rather, by the secondarily produced and reproduced memory of the original event. Is this going to be reliving in different terms or coming to terms with what happened? The trauma that we are supposedly be dealing with may not even be the continuation of the original trauma in some cases, but the creation of a secondary one through interactions with the existing justificatory discourses with the original trauma. At any rate, the claim Taner Akcam makes that the Turkish nation is sick may actually be that we have two sick nations, and coming to terms with the genocide may end up curing, although in a limited fashion, both nations.
An apology issue is actually not a very easy one, when there are good number of extremely nationalistic bunches on both sides. An apology may prove very effective and beneficiary for personalities like, I do not know, MJ, Winston, you, some others, and I, but there are also many others who may take the whole issue of the apology in many different ways. As we all know, after the Germans were made to accept their so-called crime for the Great War, more than 40 million people died. And, when we look at the increasing numbers of racial violence especially in the Northern European countries, including Germany, the issue of apology becomes even more important and difficult to deal with. There is the issue of working this apology business into a new cultural discourse or meta-narrative. This can be done in many ways. In the above case of Germans, it was done in one particular way that ended up costing the lives of millions of people. On the other hand, The ideology of communism, through its brotherhood of peoples and cultures, chose not to get into this subject, other than repressing the old late medieval and early modernist meta-narratives, and now we have people killing each other both in Balkans and Caucasus. For example, when I apologized my almost five-year-old daughter just yesterday for something that was my fault, her reply was ‘apology is not enough’. Yes, it is not enough; it is simply not going to create wonders by itself.

I am running out of time, so I have to cut this short.

Another point: when you start reading Dadrian, you are going to be disappointed with your claim that , “refer to the killings of 1915 as the armenian genocide, and not, for instance, the killings by sultan abdulhamid ii in the 1890s? atrocious though they were, the killings of abdulhamid were designed to "reprimand, chastise" (tedip etmek) the armenians, and not to exterminate them.” For example, Dadrian tells us that “First of all, the Abdulhamid-era massacres were the first Ottoman attempt in modern times to launch, on a massive scale, exterminatory massacres against a non-Muslim subject nationality” (Armenian Forum – Summer 1998 – Armenians, Turks and the End of the Ottoman Empire, by R.G. Suny). If you can get your hands on this source I would definitely recommend it, especially since it also includes perspectives by some Turkish historians. At any rate, you will have to read all of Dadrian’s works, since his ideas evolved in time as well. And, you will see that he is not really about separating these two sets of massacres qualitatively, and his ideas do count very much among the Armenians.

When I said that everyone in Turkey accepts that Armenians were killed in great numbers, I was simply trying to say what I said, none of the stuff you posted. They of course do not accept that it was a genocide. Only the very educated ones accept is partially true, as there are very educated ones on the other side who do not accept it. By the way, this ‘educated’ thing is kind of funny, since the Armenians were killed, namely the designs to get rid of them, which led to their being killed, were done, by the very educated lot at that time. Genocide is a crime that belongs to not so-called primitive cultures, but to the so-called educated and civilized cultures.

There is also the topic of the Muslims who were removed forcibly from various places in the Empire at the end of the Ottoman Empire. You go by those last names maraslian, sivaslian, demircian in presenting your case, but is not this a bit weak argument, since there are also a lot of last names in Turkey showing us that the carriers of these last names came from localities outside the present day Turkey such as ‘koprulu’, serezli, selanikli. What about this? Should we declare this a genocide, too? By the same token, we can also say that there were many Muslims living in outside of Anatolia in numbers that were in millions, but today they are in thousands. Was this a genocide, too? By the way, when one is comparing numbers about a particular genocide, one should use the numbers before and after the genocide. You are using numbers before the Armenian genocide and the ones that are from our time. Are we to assume by this that the Armenian Genocide lasted until, let us say, 1980s?

I will have to stop here, as I have to go to work now. It is very likely that I will continue, but in case I may not I would like to clarify that I am not denying there was a genocide, although it might be denied if we really want to get technical about the definition. I have posed a few questions here in order to present some different dimensions of the whole thing.

By the way, the numbers are important in genocide discussions and definitions. If you kill 10,000 people out of a population of 1 billion, it is not a genocide. But, if you kill 150 people out of a population of 200, it is a genocide.

t.

[ September 05, 2001: Message edited by: timucin ]

[MJ]

Timucin,

Since the previous material is directed to Ali, I will not go through its details, but rather address a couple of points made, while apologizing to Ali for jumping ahead of him.


1. to address your question of what is “Genocide,” I would simply refer you to the following site: /cgi-bin/forum/ultim...c&f=10&t=000040 . Modern Turkey is signatory of this document, therefore, there is no ambiguity in the understanding of what means Genocide. The phenomenon characterized within the perimeters if this document is exactly what we are referring to. However, when you are raising issues on the subject of the meaning of the Genocide, I get an impression that you are interested in it from an epistemological point of view. That’s not what we are interested in. I think we can leave the epistemology of the perseption of the Genocide to the academicians, historians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and the bunch. Our interest in the matter is purely political.

2. we precisely know who is guilty for the Genocide – the effective government of Ottoman Turkey. And since the Republic of Turkey is the judicial hair of the ottoman Turkey (hardly one may want to deny this), the Modern Turkey bears the responsibility of it by heritage. The issue is what’s the remedy.

3. About two nations beink sick: I am not going to claim whether Turkish nation is sick or not. But our nation is wounded, not sick. It is deeply wounded, and it needs to have its wounds healed.

4. I, personally, couldn’t care less about the words expressing apology. In my view, the important thing is the acknowledgment and the remedy. Indeed the words of apology are not enough.

5. Dardian’s views, as the viewes of any normal person, not on a God-defined mission on the earth, have changed and evolved. Mine have done so, too (I am not trying to put myself on the same scale with Dadrian. ). Haven’t your views changed on whatever subjects, when you have studied them better? The killings of the era of Sultan Hamid, while not constituting Genocide on their own, have been the prelude of the Genocide, the intent of which has already existed in the minds of high ranking Turkish officials concerned about Europe’s activism on the Anatolian stage. Those killings have been sort of reconnaissance with the purpose of measuring Europe’s pulse. When talking on the subject of the Genocide of Armenians, we refer to the period 1915-1923.

5. The numbers don’t matter when defining a crime as Genocide. The intend does. The numbers matter in defining to what degree has the Genocide succeeded. I remember reading in 1988 (I think) about a Brazilian court sentencing some of their citizens for committing Genocide while killing four Indians/natives. Many nations, including the US, I think, have Genocide defined as crime in their Criminal Law.

[aurguplu]

Dear Timuçin,

Here is my reply:

“To be honest, I was not expecting a barrage of Armenian Genocide 101. Considering that you are a professional historian, I was expecting something more sophisticated than what I already know and heard many times so far. Perhaps, you have the idea that I have just recently encountered the subject, and therefore, you thought not to be so harsh on me by starting from the ABC of the Armenian Genocide and the subject of genocide in general. Well, I thank you for being so considerate. “

I am not a professional historian. I am somebody who studied the region’s history at university, learned Arabic and Ottoman (I speak the standard western languages as well), and came back to Turkey aspiring to be a professional historical linguist (not historian), only to see my career truncated by yök and the stifling academic environment in Turkey. I have never lost my ability to read the original documents and also to read – and read through – historical narratives, so I would perhaps better qualify as an amateur historian, or better still, a competent layman (since I haven’t produced anything of note in the domain since I left academia).

I had started with an ABC account of the Armenian Genocide since 1) it is in the ABCs that the most extreme forms of denial on the Turkish side and analysing the event out of its context on the Armenian side differ, and 2) I did not know the level of your previous exposure to the subject, so I started from scratch, and 3) I find it easier to develop a subject from scratch to a conclusion, since I can follow my own narrative better this way and do not lose track of my argument (I fear that I have not been particularly successful in that in my postings, though).

“To start with, I am not denying the Armenian Genocide, although I find quite many theoretical difficulties, especially approaching from anthropological and psychological levels, in maintaining and believing in some of the positions on some key concepts. For example, what is genocide? Is it complete annihilation of a culture, a people, a language or all of these things? “

Genocide is a crime clearly defined under international law. It basically refers to the deliberate destruction of a racial, ethnic, religious, social, or political group of people IN WHOLE OR IN PART simply because of what they are. The destruction may take the form of 1) deliberate direct killing, 2) imposing conditions upon members of the group that would bring about their deaths (for instance, if you cram 500 people into a train which would normally take 200, and then make them cross a desert with no food or water and sanitation for weeks on end, and if people die because of that (they would), that would also be a genocide, and no-one would care to look for written proof to show whether it was intended or not. Such actions are ordered by statesmen, and no statesman is silly enough not to realise that such conditions would bring about death on a massive scale), 3) preventing reproduction (the Chinese are conducting above-ground nuclear tests in Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan) to make sure that the Uighur Turks are not getting viable offspring so that they basically die out, 4) removing children from the community and giving them to other groups to be raised as members of that group, 5) preventing and/or dissolving marriages within the group and forcing women to marry outside the group. I may have missed one or two things, but that is basically it.

Now it is clear that thus defined the term “genocide” describes any course of action which prevents a group of human beings as decribed above to preserve their lives and identity as that group. It is also clear by the above definition that by this definition human history is little more than a series of genocides, and they go back to the dawn of time. As pointed out above, it is at least as old as the Old Testament.

Now the word “genocide” is new (it was created by Rafael Lemkin after wwii to describe the Holocast) but the crime is as old as humanity itself: if you read the Old Testament, most of the things the old guys did (and Jews of all people) clearly fit the current definitions of Genocide. In fact, even though the term “genocide” is a recent coinage (from the greek genos (people) and Latin cidere (to kill)), the terms “holocaust” (Greek), or “shoah” (Hebrew) or katliam (Turkish) describe the same phenomenon (katliam is an Ottoman coinage of two Arabic words, “katl” (killing) and ‘aam (people, public, general) with a Persian izafet construct: katl-i-am: killing of the people). So one may argue that the concept of genocide is an old one, even if the term in vogue now is new.

“The funny thing about this subject is that neither the Jews nor the Armenians were completely annihilated as opposed to some other groups who were. If a group is completely eradicated from the face of the earth then there can be nobody to say that there was a genocide. So, we need not so complete genocides in order to have genocides. There were some groups, for example, some American Indian nations, or to some extent, at least one Circassian nation, who were erased from the face of the earth to the point that there is nobody today even to bring up their cases.“

I am sorry Timuçin but this is not true. No offence intended, but that shows that you are not aware of the specialised literature on these people. I am not an expert on either the Circassians and the American Indians or other groups, but I know that what happened to the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines is commonly described as “genocide” in most of the concerned literature. The reason why we hear less of them is that we have already been so imbued by loads of movies like Soldier Blue, Dances With Wolves, 1492 etc., progressivist movements, documentaries, that it is now common knowledge that what happened to the American Indians best fit the definition “genocide”. The reason why we don’t hear of the Genocide of the Australian Aborigines is that 1) Australia is so far away and is not a very major player in world affairs, 2) there is no Aborigine Diaspora outside Australia to speak of, let alone an influential one to blow their own trumpet (both the Greek and Armenian Diasporas were and are very, very powerful in American and Soviet business and politics (Dukakis, Deukmejian, Mikoyan, Andropov etc.) in general and Hollywood in particular 3) the Greeks and Armenians are amongst the earliest Christians (the New Testament was written in Greek, and the first nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion were the Armenians) and we are Muslims: now the centres of power in the world are the USA (Christian), Europe (Christian), Russia (Christian), Japan and China. Of the five centres three are Christian and they rule the world and control all major information channels. It would be naïve to expect that we as Muslims would get the same hearing for our various sufferings.

All the same, every organisation other than perhaps the states (Australia, USA and the former colonial powers) do recognise these as genocides. Mind you, specialist literature on Caucasian affairs also does. But it doesn’t get heard as much as there is not a significant Circassian Diaspora (other than in Turkey or Jordan) that is in a position to blow its own trumpet. Also, it is my impression that we Turks (this includes all other ethnicities who now consider themselves Turks in nationality) find it beneath our dignity to talk about past sufferings. In fact, the fact that the Government has adopted a line like “if Turks carried out an Armenian Genocide, the Armenians did likewise” puts most Turks to shame, not because of whether or not it happened, but according to our culture, which I am sure you know as well as I do, if you think you are wronged, you go and right it yourself and don’t whine about it to third parties. It may be good character, but it doesn’t work in international politics. International politics is all about getting what you want through a mixture of whining, pleading for help, offering bribes, threatening if you can, etc. it is a complex process that we have not yet grasped as a nation.

“But, I will skip discussing this subject right now, and instead concentrate on some of the points in your post. The outcome of the events in Anatolia at the end of the Great War was definitely genocidal, whether or not there was such an intention. Here I agree with you, and this has always been my starting point in analyzing the Armenian Genocide. Because of the genocidal character of the outcome, I use the term genocide. “

That is the main point. Good for you. This is the thorn in the flesh.

“I am not obsessed with the subject of proof at all. The people who know me from my previous many discussions on this subject can tell that I have almost never discussed documents to prove if there was genocide. Since I start from the outcome, I actually do not need any documents to prove my case. To me, what is important is that regardless of what various personalities may have intended the outcome was the annihilation or removal of enough number of Armenians from the locality they perceived as their homeland to the point that the result was the eventual lack of effective population for Armenians to be able to reproduce themselves both culturally and physically in this particular locality as Armenians. This I call genocide or a genocidal outcome, if not a true genocide by definition. Therefore, I do not need documentary proof to show that there was a genocidal attempt against the Armenian nation.”

I understand we are in complete agreement here.

“On the other hand, documentary proof is needed, if our intention is to figure out who the responsible party for this genocidal outcome was.”

I agree that we need documentary proof to CONCLUSIVELY demonstrate the responsibility of specific individuals, but there is a substantial amount of CIRCUMSTANTIAL and COMPELLING evidence that point to Talat, Enver, Bahaeddin Şakir, and Dr. Nazım, to name a few. I cannot conceive what evidence would exonerate them.

“It is even more needed, if the intention is to find a guilty people, an ethnic group for the crime.“

I would be wary of accusing an ethnic group for a genocide. To me, there is an ominous parallel between killing an ethnic group in whole or in part (men, women and children) and accusing an ethnic group in whole or in part (men, women and children) of a crime, ANY crime. It is a criminal form of stereotyping.

“So, these genocide discussions are in some ways not altogether about proving there was genocide of the Armenian nation, but about proving that a particular nation, the Turkish nation, which at the time of the crime did not even exist as a mature nation in the modern sense, but as a religious group, was responsible for this crime.”

I agree and disagree at the same time. I disagree because 2) I know for a fact (not only from historical studies but also from family memory) that a genocide of the Armenians did indeed take place, and that at least Talat was responsible for it, and 2) if I were an Armenian genocide survivor or descendant of one, I would devote a very substantial part of my energy to raise awareness of the issue. I agree because 1) the Great Powers, who had vested interests in the demise of the Ottoman Empire, first had to establish a “moral cause” to campaign against the Turks. I did my military service as a 2nd Lieutenant (Asteğmen), and one of the first things that we were thought about warfare was that you first have to establish a moral cause to mobilize the people 1) to die, 2) to kill for it. If there isn’t one, you have to create one. I strongly suspect that this last did play a major role in the events that culminated in the genocide. You find the same principle in Sun Tzu’s Classic, “The Art of War”, too.

“And, the assumption is that by receiving their apology, the Armenian nation will be magically get themselves out from the trauma brought by the memory of the genocide, or rather, by the secondarily produced and reproduced memory of the original event. Is this going to be reliving in different terms or coming to terms with what happened?

If this is the assumption it is a naïve one. The recognition, condemnation, repentance and apology will not undo what is done. But it will at least relieve the pain of the survivors which our government doesn’t even recognise as based on facts. They maintain it is a figment of their imagination. It will remove the thorn in the flesh, but then of course you have to treat the wound, and whatever you do, some scar will remain. It is a bit like this: I see human relations like a vase. A vase has two functions: to hold water and the flowers (the functional one), and also to be beautiful (the aesthetic one). Now Turkish-Armenian relations have slim (not zero) chances of being beautiful again, at least in the foreseeable future, but they have a high chance of holding water if both sides act intelligently.

“The trauma that we are supposedly be dealing with may not even be the continuation of the original trauma in some cases, but the creation of a secondary one through interactions with the existing justificatory discourses with the original trauma.”

I personally agree, but the Armenian audience in the forum would be in a better position to reply to that.

At any rate, the claim Taner Akcam makes that the Turkish nation is sick may actually be that we have two sick nations, and coming to terms with the genocide may end up curing, although in a limited fashion, both nations.”

I agree. This is why I am on this forum.

An apology issue is actually not a very easy one, when there are good number of extremely nationalistic bunches on both sides. An apology may prove very effective and beneficiary for personalities like, I do not know, MJ, Winston, you, some others, and I, but there are also many others who may take the whole issue of the apology in many different ways.

“As we all know, after the Germans were made to accept their so-called crime for the Great War, more than 40 million people died.”

It was Stalin who did it, and even the Soviets later condemned him. His crimes were the result of a pathological personality, a nation with no tradition of, and aspiration to, democracy and human rights, worldwide paranoia, an economic-philosophical doctrine that was completely out of touch with reality, and an utter lack of respect for human life in general (Russians and Georgians suffered no less under Stalin than the rest of the Soviet Union).

“And, when we look at the increasing numbers of racial violence especially in the Northern European countries, including Germany, the issue of apology becomes even more important and difficult to deal with. There is the issue of working this apology business into a new cultural discourse or meta-narrative. This can be done in many ways.”

Europe has an unfortunate tradition of racism that is almost as old as the European identity itself; but the recent upsurge has more to do with the abuse of welfare by immigrants with no historic ties to Europe than with the endemic racism in Europe in my opinion. Note that the West Germans are only slightly more symphathetic to East Germans, whom they perceive as working less and getting more out of the welfare system.

“In the above case of Germans, it was done in one particular way that ended up costing the lives of millions of people.”

I lost it here. How did the German apology end up costing millions of lives, or did I get you wrong?

“On the other hand, The ideology of communism, through its brotherhood of peoples and cultures, chose not to get into this subject, other than repressing the old late medieval and early modernist meta-narratives, and now we have people killing each other both in Balkans and Caucasus.”

Never mind the ideology, but the Communists did horrible things in their countries on ethnic grounds. Millions of ethnic Turks (Tatars, Kazakh, Kirgiz, Uzbek etc.) were deported from their ancestral homelands ostensibly on the grounds that they sided, or would have sided if the opportunity were given, with the Germans in WWII, and are only now allowed to return, and only in a few cases, with no compensation or whatever. Also, Communism did not solve the age-old conflicts in the areas concerned. It only put them in a deep-freeze. When it thawed, they resurfaced.

“For example, when I apologized my almost five-year-old daughter just yesterday for something that was my fault, her reply was ‘apology is not enough’. Yes, it is not enough; it is simply not going to create wonders by itself.”

I agree. But we are not dealing with five year olds here (even tough some of their numbers sometimes act as if they were). In this hindsight, I think that the best thing that happened in the last ten years is the coming into being of an independent Republic of Armenia. That Republic will eventually realise that it has an image to live up to, responsibility toward its own citizens, neighbours that it has to learn to live with, and opportunities if he does so. You need responsibilities to mature. If Armenia and Turkey were run by competent businessmen who could put first things first, both countries would be so much better off and not pose a threat to anybody.

“Another point: when you start reading Dadrian, you are going to be disappointed with your claim that , “refer to the killings of 1915 as the armenian genocide, and not, for instance, the killings by sultan abdulhamid ii in the 1890s? atrocious though they were, the killings of abdulhamid were designed to "reprimand, chastise" (tedip etmek) the armenians, and not to exterminate them.” For example, Dadrian tells us that “First of all, the Abdulhamid-era massacres were the first Ottoman attempt in modern times to launch, on a massive scale, exterminatory massacres against a non-Muslim subject nationality” (Armenian Forum – Summer 1998 – Armenians, Turks and the End of the Ottoman Empire, by R.G. Suny). If you can get your hands on this source I would definitely recommend it, especially since it also includes perspectives by some Turkish historians. At any rate, you will have to read all of Dadrian’s works, since his ideas evolved in time as well. And, you will see that he is not really about separating these two sets of massacres qualitatively, and his ideas do count very much among the Armenians.”

I have not ret read Dadrian, so I am not in a position to reply. I find his understanding of the events as you quote them a bit far-fetched and forced. Sultan Abdulhamid II and the CUP leaders had almost nothing in common in terms of political outlook and aims. But I repeat, I have not read the book, and this particular suject is far too complex to be done with with a summary analysis.

But allow me to point out here that I am impressed with the quality you put forth your arguments with, and also especially the fact that you cared to read the other side’s version from their own publications. Very few Turks do that. If our numbers increase, we may make a difference in our society in term of understanding the basic fact that you cannot have sound opinions without sound knowledge.

“When I said that everyone in Turkey accepts that Armenians were killed in great numbers, I was simply trying to say what I said, none of the stuff you posted.”

Sorry, then. I did not mean to put words into your or anyone else’s mouth.

“They of course do not accept that it was a genocide.“

Why “of course”? Is it natural not to accept something that is a fact?

“Only the very educated ones accept is partially true, as there are very educated ones on the other side who do not accept it.”

I had also heard that some Armenians do not accept the Armenian Genocide as a Genocide, but do not know any more of this than that. Could some Armenian members of the forum inform us more on this, please?

“By the way, this ‘educated’ thing is kind of funny, since the Armenians were killed, namely the designs to get rid of them, which led to their being killed, were done, by the very educated lot at that time. Genocide is a crime that belongs to not so-called primitive cultures, but to the so-called educated and civilized cultures.”

This I largely agree with.

“There is also the topic of the Muslims who were removed forcibly from various places in the Empire at the end of the Ottoman Empire. You go by those last names maraslian, sivaslian, demircian in presenting your case, but is not this a bit weak argument, since there are also a lot of last names in Turkey showing us that the carriers of these last names came from localities outside the present day Turkey such as ‘koprulu’, serezli, selanikli. What about this? Should we declare this a genocide, too?

By the same token, we can also say that there were many Muslims living in outside of Anatolia in numbers that were in millions, but today they are in thousands. Was this a genocide, too?”

This is at least partly the result of the Population Exchanges between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s, and partly, yes, what I would call Genocide. They are not called so by anyone except for a few specialists (not all of whom are Turks o Turcophiles), simply because 1) Turks have such a bad press themselves (the Kurds, Armenians etc.), and 2) believe it or not, the scholars who try to expose them and bring them to world attention get not tangible support whatsoever from Turkey. Such things require a very large army of competent scholars equipped with ample resources and a constant flow of cash. Now a Turkish professor in a state university gets paid about 800 USD a month, he cannot lead an existence worthy of his status let alone buy books, and when I was a Lecturer at the Istanbul University Faculty of Letters back in 1992-1993, the Faculty Library had not had a regular budget to make acquisitions since 1974! And Turkish Studies chairs abroad are only now being assisted by Turkey, and that largely to produce glossy coffee table books or engage in the dogfight against the Greeks and Armenians. This is no way to defend your position in the international arena. If you don’t blow your own trumpet, no-one else is going to do it for you.

By the way, when one is comparing numbers about a particular genocide, one should use the numbers before and after the genocide. You are using numbers before the Armenian genocide and the ones that are from our time. Are we to assume by this that the Armenian Genocide lasted until, let us say, 1980s?

“… I would like to clarify that I am not denying there was a genocide, although it might be denied if we really want to get technical about the definition. I have posed a few questions here in order to present some different dimensions of the whole thing.”

If you are not denying there was a genocide, then we are in agreement. As for getting really technical about the definition, you can deny anything when you get technical enough about definitions. Also, no two genocides (or no two things, for that matter) are the same: the point is that they have enough things in common that allow them to be grouped together and enough differences from other events that allow them to be set apart from them. But your questions were provocative, stimulating and beneficial (for me, at least). Thank you.

“By the way, the numbers are important in genocide discussions and definitions. If you kill 10,000 people out of a population of 1 billion, it is not a genocide. But, if you kill 150 people out of a population of 200, it is a genocide.”

I disagree, and it also doesn’t agree with the accepted definition of the term genocide. If you kill a single person because he is an Armenian, then your action is directed against the whole Armenian nation, and that is attempted genocide. If you kill someone because he is Ahmet, Mehmet, Agop, Artin or whatever, then this is homicide. The difference between a Homicide and a Genocide is, as far as I shall understand, that a homicide attacks one or several specific individuals because of traits specific to them, and it doesn’t attempt to extend it to an entire group of people who share the same social characteristics. Genocide, on the other hand, attempts to wipe out a group who all share certain social characteristics (race, ethnic group, language, religion, etc). Therefore, numbers are not the defining characteristic of a genocide.

[elovna]

Article II of the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide states the following:

"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group as such:

(a) killing members of the group;
(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
© deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

[MJ]

Dear Ali,

I would like to the best of my understanding (which is perhaps not the best) to address some of the issues/questions and a couple of technicalities. It is agreed that the term “genocide” has been contemplated by Lamkin precisely in describe the Armenian massacres of 1915-1923. Lamkin has come up with the term before the occurrence of the Jewish Holocaust, if I remember correctly. Obviously, the readiness of the international community to accept such a term, and moreover, to come up with an international Resolution under the auspices of UN is itself indicative that there were not one or two Genocides in the history of world, but the their number was so compelling that they felt necessity to separate a special legal category in the international law. Genocide have taken place all over the history of the mankind. But it is not our fault that others have not survived at all to pursue condemnation of it, or the world civilization at the time has not been on the level of adequate preparedness to condemn those genocides of the time, or if other groups have not been able to put forward adequate social and political organizations to pursue its condemnation. We don’t maintain that the Armenian Genocide is the only genocide in the world history, or necessarily the most brutal. It is just something that concerns us directly. We just hope that the human civilization is mature enough now to address the issue of the Armenian Genocide, and hopefully to put end to all genocides. As so, our genocide is not an issue of mere historic justice (there are so many injustices in history, even only in the Armenian history, that it would be naïve to expect to see them addressed). The Armenian Genocide is a matter of continuing reality in some ways. But I disagree that Muslims have no chance of receiving adequate attention if they are able to raise adequate awareness. As a matter of fact, the Greek atrocities towards the Muslims/Turks are recognized. I thik you have adequately explained in your passages why the world doesn’t concentrate on the sufferings of Turks – your culture is based on “eye for eye” principle, i.e. if somebody has committed an ill towards “you,” “you” don’t wine about it, and resolve the issue “yourself.” It is not indeed the case with us in principle. We are a different culture. As much as in other contexts I claim that Armenians are far from being Christians, nevertheless the “eye for eye” is not widely accepted in our culture. Not necessarily because we are powerless (because we reject that principle, by in large, even in our personal lives), but because we follow to another motto, which has unfortunately not evolved yet to the level of “love your enemy,” but we are somewhere in the middle.
I also think that our pursuit of the condemnation of the Genocide is not about the responsibility of individuals who may or may not be alive even, at this time. Most of the more responsible individuals have already been brought to justice one or another way – either the Turkish courts have executed them for their crimes of massacres, or the Armenian avengers of the time have executed them (taalat, for example). So, for us the issue of individual responsibility is a non-issue. The issue is the state .
The more balanced and common sense Armenians don’t consider the Turkish nation as the guilty party of the Genocide though, certainly, you would find some in and out of this forum which may claim it. Most of the Genocide survivors accounts (including my own grandparents) attest to the fact that many Turks have saved or have tried to save Armenian lives. Most of the direct survivors of the Genocide, I suspect, have not hated the Turkish nation – including my grandparents, who have suffered in unimaginable ways in the result of the Genocide. The declarations of many of our day Armenians along the lines of holding the entire Turkish nation responsible for the Genocide are resulted from few things – the denial of the Turkish, nation by in large, that the Armenian Genocide has been committed by the Ottoman Turkey, and moreover, the accusations that to the contrary, Armenians have committed genocide against the Turks. The psychological trauma that the new Armenian generation is experiencing in the result of this stance of the Turkish nation, at least the appearance of it is the primary reason for such outbursts, which I cannot justify no matter what. I also would go as far as to claim that hating someone for being Turk is a borderline Genocidal behavior – the only missing thing is the opportunity to massacre them in such case. So I would urge the haters of the Turks or any other nationalities as an a priori feeling to evaluate their own emotions, first.
And I wouldn’t worry about the chance of the Armenian-Turkish relations being beautiful. First, they have never been beautiful, even way before the Genocide, and the Armenian-Russian relations are not beautiful either – neither historically nor in our days, as much as one may be tempted to think.
I, personally, find difficult to address Timucin’s following argument:
The trauma that we are supposedly be dealing with may not even be the continuation of the original trauma in some cases, but the creation of a secondary one through interactions with the existing justificatory discourses with the original trauma.
I don’t quite follow him. It may be interpreted in multiple ways. Therefore, I would hold until further clarifications.
I also agree that in many ways, Europeans are the most racist unity in the history of the world – not necessarily historically, but they remain so even today.
I would also like to add that the atrocities of the Communists in USSR were not directed at any specific ethnic or national groups. Any ethnic/national group of the former USSR would claim that the most terrible atrocities were committed against them, because “Stalin hated them.”
I think we have some in this forum who behave like five years-olds, but fortunately, the Armenian nation has been wise enough collectively to bring together mature group of people to deal with the issue beyond the rhetoric. And you are right that the best thing that has happened to Armenia in the last decade is the independent Republic. Until than, even our own tragedy didn’t belong to us – it belonged to the Kremlin and to the various Secret Services of the world, who used the Armenian tragedy as a tool for exerting pressure on Turkey. However, the fact remains that the Republic of Armenia has proposed through multiple channels and venues to start a constructive dialog with the Republic of Turkey, without being a hostage to the history, and it has always been denied by the Turkish side, making the subject contingent to Armenia’s relations with third countries, and dropping the “allegations of the Genocide.”

I couldn’t quite understand the alleged statement of Dadrian linking Sultan Hamid to CPU. As much as I know, he has not written anything of the kind. The argument that he has contemplated was that the massacres of Armenian committed by Sultan Hamid were the preludes of the Armenian Genocide, and the idea of the elimination of the Armenian minority of Ottoman Turkey was already in the agenda of Ottoman Turkey. The only missing thing was the opportunity, which was provided by the WWI.
I am also not aware of any Armenians who deny the Armenian Genocide. Where does such information come from? The Istanbul Armenians?
I also would like to add that the emergence of Dkmadjian or Mikoyan in American or Soviet political elit has had nothing to do with Armenian Diaspora or Armenia. Dokmadjian was an American of Armenian origin, and if in his conduct there was an element of Armenian Agenda, he would’ve had zero chance to reach the heights he has reached. As to Mikoyan, the history of Armenia has only few such traitors, who have sacrificed the interests of the Armenian nation to the ideology of the World Revolution. As to Andropov, I couldn’t follow what does he have to do with Armenians.

[MJ]

Ali,

Another site emphasizing the underlying concepts of Armenian Architecture is the following:
/cgi-bin/forum/ultim...c&f=17&t=000007 .

[elovna]

I have a Question:

Is there an international Law, containing follow up rules for 'officially recognised genocide' that consequently will lead to compensation for the victims and the returning of land and goods by the guilty party?

[MJ]

Nope. Just vague delarations on retributions, without specifying the character of retributions or defining mechanisms for its enforcement. Definitely nothing about the lands. At least in our case, the association of the lands claim with the genocide is absurd.

[ September 06, 2001: Message edited by: MJ ]

[aurguplu]

“I would like to the best of my understanding (which is perhaps not the best) to address some of the issues/questions and a couple of technicalities. It is agreed that the term “genocide” has been contemplated by Lamkin precisely in describe the Armenian massacres of 1915-1923. Lamkin has come up with the term before the occurrence of the Jewish Holocaust, if I remember correctly. Obviously, the readiness of the international community to accept such a term, and moreover, to come up with an international Resolution under the auspices of UN is itself indicative that there were not one or two Genocides in the history of world, but the their number was so compelling that they felt necessity to separate a special legal category in the international law.”

I take your word for it. I haven’t read the original documentation behind Lemkin’s coinage.

“Genocide have taken place all over the history of the mankind. But it is not our fault that others have not survived at all to pursue condemnation of it, or the world civilization at the time has not been on the level of adequate preparedness to condemn those genocides of the time, or if other groups have not been able to put forward adequate social and political organizations to pursue its condemnation.”

I agree.

“We don’t maintain that the Armenian Genocide is the only genocide in the world history, or necessarily the most brutal. It is just something that concerns us directly. We just hope that the human civilization is mature enough now to address the issue of the Armenian Genocide, and hopefully to put end to all genocides. As so, our genocide is not an issue of mere historic justice (there are so many injustices in history, even only in the Armenian history, that it would be naïve to expect to see them addressed). The Armenian Genocide is a matter of continuing reality in some ways.”

I agree.

“But I disagree that Muslims have no chance of receiving adequate attention if they are able to raise adequate awareness. As a matter of fact, the Greek atrocities towards the Muslims/Turks are recognized. I thik you have adequately explained in your passages why the world doesn’t concentrate on the sufferings of Turks – your culture is based on “eye for eye” principle, i.e. if somebody has committed an ill towards “you,” “you” don’t wine about it, and resolve the issue “yourself.” It is not indeed the case with us in principle. We are a different culture. As much as in other contexts I claim that Armenians are far from being Christians, nevertheless the “eye for eye” is not widely accepted in our culture. Not necessarily because we are powerless (because we reject that principle, by in large, even in our personal lives), but because we follow to another motto, which has unfortunately not evolved yet to the level of “love your enemy,” but we are somewhere in the middle.”

By what I had said about fixing your problems youself and not whining about them, I did not mean an “eye to eye” culture, which is not part of our “high” culture. What I wanted to say rather was that if you are wronged, the most reliable person to right this wrong is you, because you are going to take your own problem more seriously than anyone else. Other people are simply not going to be half as interested in it unless and until it suits them. This is not a desirable state of affairs, nor is it (in my opinion) one that would lead humanity to further heights, but it is the bleak reality. Look at the way the international community handles the issue: everyone who knows about the issue knows that the armenians have been murdered. But if millions of dollars of deals, stability in the middle east and the oil flow are at stake, your interests dictate that the genocide issue must be put aside as long as you need the ally in question. This may make us puke as human beings, but that’s the way states function. So in sum, what I have said was not “if he kills you, kill him back”, but rather “if you are seeking justice, first rely on yourself and not others, as others by nature are not going to care as much as you do.”.

Re “love your enemy”, it is not as strange to our culture as most outsiders think, although our version is “win him over”, a more factual and result-producing approach in my opinion. We have formed one of the most extensive and long-lived Empires of World History, and you can create a state by shedding blood (in fact almost all states that I know of are formed that way) but you cannot keep it in your hands by simply shedding blood. As we say in Turkish, you cannot destroy a state with picks and shovels but with cruelty.

Also (a fact little known by most Turks themselves) one of the major contributions of the Ottomans to Islamic Legal System was the compilation of Kanunnames (Legislations) that were to function alongside the Sharia, to which every Muslim State had to pay lip service, at least. You know that the Sharia is very much a “an eye for an eye” lawcode, though not quite so much as Old Testament Law. Now the Kanunnames, I think originally compiled by Suleiman The Magnificent, though in existence before him, changed a good deal of the “tit for tat” into money fines and lighter physical punishment. Did you know that there is not a single recorded case known in the entire Ottoman history of a thief’s hand being cut off according to the Sharia? The Sharia orders this very clearly. Now the Ottomans would pass the Sharia verdict, then forge a link to the Kanunname, and convert the punishment to bastinado and/or money fines, imprisonment, and forced labour to serve the wronged party. This spirit is to be found throughout Ottoman legislation, and it is – at least to me – not indicative of a “an eye for an eye” mentality.

“I also think that our pursuit of the condemnation of the Genocide is not about the responsibility of individuals who may or may not be alive even, at this time. Most of the more responsible individuals have already been brought to justice one or another way – either the Turkish courts have executed them for their crimes of massacres, or the Armenian avengers of the time have executed them (taalat, for example). So, for us the issue of individual responsibility is a non-issue. The issue is the state .”

I am relieved to hear that.

“The more balanced and common sense Armenians don’t consider the Turkish nation as the guilty party of the Genocide though, certainly, you would find some in and out of this forum which may claim it.”

I know – I had met Genocide survivors and they were of the same mentality (of course I wasn’t a Turk who denied the thing).

“Most of the Genocide survivors accounts (including my own grandparents) attest to the fact that many Turks have saved or have tried to save Armenian lives.”

Not a few also died with the Armenians while trying to save them.

"The declarations of many of our day Armenians along the lines of holding the entire Turkish nation responsible for the Genocide are resulted from few things – the denial of the Turkish, nation by in large, that the Armenian Genocide has been committed by the Ottoman Turkey, and moreover, the accusations that to the contrary, Armenians have committed genocide against the Turks."

You would be surprised at how many people deep down their throats actually accept the genocide in Turkey, but cannot come up with it for a variety of reasons at least two of which are fear of persecution and sense of guilt and disgust with their grandparents and the “heroes” they were taught to worship at school. I know of a number of personal encounters between Armenians and Turks, and if the Armenian is diplomatic enough, the acceptance and condemnation of genocide tends to roll off the tongue quite soon. Don’t forget that most Turks were until very recently more afraid – with good reason – of their own state than the entire Armenian Nation put together.

Regarding accusations of the Armenian Genocide of the Turks. While I do agree that the Armenians could not logically be engaged in such a thing, because first of all they did not have a state (it is states that mastermind genocides, not common people), let us face it: in the last decades of the 19th Century, you would not be hard put to find a sizeable group of Armenian intellectuals who would rather see the Turks dead as a nation, and worst of all, take part in reaching that end. This of course does not extend to the population at large, and therefore the Turkish position of “they killed us, we killed them back” is baseless. But there were such people.

Also, if we take the view that even killing a single person on the grounds of his ethnicity constitutes an attempt at Genocide, then there are quite a few Armenians who do not come out that clean, aren’t there? The same yardstick must be used to measure evil. My criminal is not better than your criminal, and yours not better than mine.

"The psychological trauma that the new Armenian generation is experiencing in the result of this stance of the Turkish nation, at least the appearance of it is the primary reason for such outbursts, which I cannot justify no matter what. I also would go as far as to claim that hating someone for being Turk is a borderline Genocidal behavior – the only missing thing is the opportunity to massacre them in such case. So I would urge the haters of the Turks or any other nationalities as an a priori feeling to evaluate their own emotions, first."

I completely agree. But as I said, if you meet individual, informed, open minded Turks in an environment where they do not feel the fear of the state or the sense of being “cornered by the enemy”, they come out with it quite easily. The worst mistake that can be done is assuming that Turks would accept and repent only under pressure. Under pressure Turks simply turn into oysters that shut tight and keep that way for a long time. Look at me, for instance: my grandfather had told me what a mistake it was to have done the things we had done to the Armenians (without mentioning the word “genocide” and to have said that the issue was resolved for the next fifty years (implying, but not naming, Talat). He said “it is coming out now”. This was in 1980, if I remember correctly, a year before he passed away. This was my first exposure to a different interpretation of the events at the tender age of 14. The second was when my grandmother had related the story of my dad’s wet nurse (who was an Armenian lady) “whose two sons were gone in the killing”. She used the word “kıyım”, the folk word for mass killings, and not “soykırım” the official word for genocide, which is a literal translation, and has political overtones. So there was a “kıyım” in which people had died, contrary to the official version (at that time – military government – the state was denying the whole thing, even the killings themselves). Later on, in the west, I was exposed to other material of course, and made up my own mind on the subject. For me, to accept the thing was a matter of personal integrity and humanity before all else. At no time have I been subjected to any pressure by an Armenian or anyone else to be made to accept it. Indeed, I recall a few instances where the subject was brought up in a political debate in an international environment, where I immediately felt in the trenches, and, although not denying the killings, resorted to justifying them by saying that it was a tit for tat. You see, people will do anything when they feel cornered, and the first thing you have to do in resolving such conflicts is to ease both parties, especially the one who is going to “foot the bill” so to speak. Otherwise you risk losing them.

"And I wouldn’t worry about the chance of the Armenian-Turkish relations being beautiful. First, they have never been beautiful, even way before the Genocide, and the Armenian-Russian relations are not beautiful either – neither historically nor in our days, as much as one may be tempted to think."

I mildly disagree. There was a lot of common culture between the common people of Anatolia. The Ottoman State, of course, is another matter, but their relations with Turks were hardly any better.

"I, personally, find difficult to address Timucin’s following argument:
The trauma that we are supposedly be dealing with may not even be the continuation of the original trauma in some cases, but the creation of a secondary one through interactions with the existing justificatory discourses with the original trauma.
I don’t quite follow him. It may be interpreted in multiple ways. Therefore, I would hold until further clarifications."

I think what he means is this: the survivors were the ones directly affected by the disaster, and they were suffering from the very real loss of their loved ones: people, places, and a lifestyle which they knew and loved, whereas the latter generations, not having a direct experience of the disaster, were being traumatised by the constant keeping alive of the memories that their parents and grandparents, and not they themselves, had. And the issue turned into a blood feud.

If this is what Timuçin is implying, then it leads to a “get over it” stance, which I cannot accept morally. If we want the Armenians to stop persisting in bringing out the issue today, then we have to stop persisting in our denial. But I do agree – if this is what he means – that it has become a blood feud, and nothing good comes out of blood feuds.

"I would also like to add that the atrocities of the Communists in USSR were not directed at any specific ethnic or national groups. Any ethnic/national group of the former USSR would claim that the most terrible atrocities were committed against them, because “Stalin hated them.”"

I think I had said what you say here.

"I think we have some in this forum who behave like five years-olds, but fortunately, the Armenian nation has been wise enough collectively to bring together mature group of people to deal with the issue beyond the rhetoric."

I hope they shall prevail.

"And you are right that the best thing that has happened to Armenia in the last decade is the independent Republic. Until than, even our own tragedy didn’t belong to us – it belonged to the Kremlin and to the various Secret Services of the world, who used the Armenian tragedy as a tool for exerting pressure on Turkey."

I hadn’t meant that the best thing that has happened TO ARMENIA in the last decade is the independent Republic. I had meant the best thing that has happened TO THE REGION IN GENERAL AND TURKEY IN PARTICULAR in the last decade is the independent Armenian Republic. You may find this strange, but this issue is now a state issue, and can only be finally put to rest if the two parties put it to rest at state level – for this there must be a n Armenian State. You see, until the independence of the Armenian Republic, the issue was between the Turkish state and various western states, the Diaspora, and terrorist groups. Now the various western states kept bringing it up to further their interests, the Diaspora – at least partly – used it to keep Armenian identity alive in a sea of odars (how is my latest Armenian word? The others are vart, turchun, kam, hach, tun avor es, tun hay es, es tacik em, ksi ksirembur), and the terrorist groups, well you don’t expect a state to bow to a bunch of terrorists, do you? The problem is that the Turkish Republic is a state, and has a constant responsibility toward Turkish citizens. It can only enter into a meaningful dialogue with the Armenian state, which also has the same responsibility toward Armenian citizens. And they are the only two bodies that can solve this issue definitively and prevent it from being a toy in the hands of third countries. That is why the best thing that happened as far as at least this issue is concerned is the emergence of the Armenian Republic.

"However, the fact remains that the Republic of Armenia has proposed through multiple channels and venues to start a constructive dialog with the Republic of Turkey, without being a hostage to the history, and it has always been denied by the Turkish side, making the subject contingent to Armenia’s relations with third countries, and dropping the “allegations of the Genocide.”"

Now here the “third country” is Azerbaijan, and let me be clear on this, both Turks and Azeris see themselves (at least officially) as one nation, two states. The Turkish government has got himself engaged in the Nagorno-Karabagh issue probably even more than Azerbaijan is engaged now, and they cannot get out of it (especially with the Grey Wolves in the coalition government). Moreover, Turkey has lost a good decade after Ozal in continuous bickering in political life because of low-caliber politicians, another legacy of the 1980 coup. We don’t have statesmen today, we have politicians. As far as “dropping the allegations of Genocide” are concerned, as I had said earlier, the government has first to prepare the public opinion, only then can it move toward accepting “the open secret that everyone knows about”. Again, please refer on my previous postings regarding the development of the Kurdish issue.

"I couldn’t quite understand the alleged statement of Dadrian linking Sultan Hamid to CPU. As much as I know, he has not written anything of the kind. The argument that he has contemplated was that the massacres of Armenian committed by Sultan Hamid were the preludes of the Armenian Genocide, and the idea of the elimination of the Armenian minority of Ottoman Turkey was already in the agenda of Ottoman Turkey. The only missing thing was the opportunity, which was provided by the WWI."

To me it seems a bit too much like a conspiracy plot. I may be wrong, of course. I doubt that Sultan Abdulhamid really planned to liquidate all the Armenians, since he was not a nationalist (he made life hell for them).

"I am also not aware of any Armenians who deny the Armenian Genocide. Where does such information come from? The Istanbul Armenians?"

No, my source for this was a Turkish historian appearing on TV who had said that an Armenian historian had written something to the effect that “the Ottoman State had used its sovereign right to figt an enemy within and to protect its territorial integrity”. I hadn’t noted the Armenian historian’s name, but as far as I recall he was a Soviet Armenian historian. I am not building anything on this, unless and until I read the said historian.

I also would like to add that the emergence of Dkmadjian or Mikoyan in American or Soviet political elit has had nothing to do with Armenian Diaspora or Armenia. Dokmadjian was an American of Armenian origin, and if in his conduct there was an element of Armenian Agenda, he would’ve had zero chance to reach the heights he has reached. As to Mikoyan, the history of Armenia has only few such traitors, who have sacrificed the interests of the Armenian nation to the ideology of the World Revolution. As to Andropov, I couldn’t follow what does he have to do with Armenians.

You may be right, anyway, you are better able to judge the Armenian Diaspora then I am. I thought Andropov was originally Andropian (it was in Turkish newspapers at that time with a big fuss about it).

[aurguplu]

i keep encountering problems with this editing and quoting business. the "dear mj" at the beginning is not there, i tried to put your paragraphs into inverted commas and blacken them, but they came out as above. and also, i have no idea where that smilie came from next to the word "genocide" (unless my keyboard has a weird sense of humour of its own).

apologies to all readers.

by the way, thanks for the references which i have checked and found useful.

gotta leave now, it's nine twenty p.m. over here.

regards,

ali suat

[aurguplu]

i had forgotten to answer the below paragraph by timuçin:

"By the way, when one is comparing numbers about a particular genocide, one should use the numbers before and after the genocide. You are using numbers before the Armenian genocide and the ones that are from our time. Are we to assume by this that the Armenian Genocide lasted until, let us say, 1980s?"

no timuçin, there has been a misunderstanding here. what i had said was that there were some 1,295,000 armenians in turkey prior to the genocide according to official sources, and some 200,000-300,000 in 1927, when the first census of the republic was taken. and today, there are some 50,000 if i am not mistaken, though the armenians themselves quote any figure between 40,000-85,000.

what this means that about a million armenians who were there prior to the world war were not there anymore only twelve years later. and about half of them are known to have made it to third countries (again i found this figure to vary substantially from one armenian source to the other, and would appreciate an armenian here to shed some light on it: how many armenians are known to have survived the genocide?)

i do not for a moment assume that the armenian genocide lasted until 1980, but let's face it, the property tax (varlık vergisi) of the wwii era, the 6-7 September 1955 events and the latter tensions in the 70s due to cyprus did make life very difficult for non-muslims in turkey. but that's another issue that probably belongs to another heading, not here.

regards,

[MJ]

By what I had said about fixing your problems youself and not whining about them, I did not mean an “eye to eye” culture, which is not part of our “high” culture. What I wanted to say rather was that if you are wronged, the most reliable person to right this wrong is you, because you are going to take your own problem more seriously than anyone else. Other people are simply not going to be half as interested in it unless and until it suits them. This is not a desirable state of affairs, nor is it (in my opinion) one that would lead humanity to further heights, but it is the bleak reality. Look at the way the international community handles the issue: everyone who knows about the issue knows that the armenians have been murdered. But if millions of dollars of deals, stability in the middle east and the oil flow are at stake, your interests dictate that the genocide issue must be put aside as long as you need the ally in question. This may make us puke as human beings, but that’s the way states function. So in sum, what I have said was not “if he kills you, kill him back”, but rather “if you are seeking justice, first rely on yourself and not others, as others by nature are not going to care as much as you do.”

No question about it. Unfortunately, our existence as legal entity with the corresponding privileges has only 10 years of history. But seems that we are making progress, lately.

Regarding accusations of the Armenian Genocide of the Turks. While I do agree that the Armenians could not logically be engaged in such a thing, because first of all they did not have a state (it is states that mastermind genocides, not common people), let us face it: in the last decades of the 19th Century, you would not be hard put to find a sizeable group of Armenian intellectuals who would rather see the Turks dead as a nation, and worst of all, take part in reaching that end. This of course does not extend to the population at large, and therefore the Turkish position of “they killed us, we killed them back” is baseless. But there were such people.
Also, if we take the view that even killing a single person on the grounds of his ethnicity constitutes an attempt at Genocide, then there are quite a few Armenians who do not come out that clean, aren’t there? The same yardstick must be used to measure evil. My criminal is not better than your criminal, and yours not better than mine.
Yes, you are right. There might’ve been such Armenian individuals, and there still may be. But the thought of committing crime doesn’t constitute crime itself. However, most of us are very resentful of the terror, avenge, etc. There is no place in my book of Armenian people for such.

I completely agree. But as I said, if you meet individual, informed, open minded Turks in an environment where they do not feel the fear of the state or the sense of being “cornered by the enemy”, they come out with it quite easily. The worst mistake that can be done is assuming that Turks would accept and repent only under pressure. Under pressure Turks simply turn into oysters that shut tight and keep that way for a long time. Look at me, for instance: my grandfather had told me what a mistake it was to have done the things we had done to the Armenians (without mentioning the word “genocide” and to have said that the issue was resolved for the next fifty years (implying, but not naming, Talat). He said “it is coming out now”. This was in 1980, if I remember correctly, a year before he passed away. This was my first exposure to a different interpretation of the events at the tender age of 14. The second was when my grandmother had related the story of my dad’s wet nurse (who was an Armenian lady) “whose two sons were gone in the killing”. She used the word “kıyım”, the folk word for mass killings, and not “soykırım” the official word for genocide, which is a literal translation, and has political overtones. So there was a “kıyım” in which people had died, contrary to the official version (at that time – military government – the state was denying the whole thing, even the killings themselves). Later on, in the west, I was exposed to other material of course, and made up my own mind on the subject. For me, to accept the thing was a matter of personal integrity and humanity before all else. At no time have I been subjected to any pressure by an Armenian or anyone else to be made to accept it. Indeed, I recall a few instances where the subject was brought up in a political debate in an international environment, where I immediately felt in the trenches, and, although not denying the killings, resorted to justifying them by saying that it was a tit for tat. You see, people will do anything when they feel cornered, and the first thing you have to do in resolving such conflicts is to ease both parties, especially the one who is going to “foot the bill” so to speak. Otherwise you risk losing them.
I am in full agreement with you, again.

"And I wouldn’t worry about the chance of the Armenian-Turkish relations being beautiful. First, they have never been beautiful, even way before the Genocide, and the Armenian-Russian relations are not beautiful either – neither historically nor in our days, as much as one may be tempted to think.-MJ”
I mildly disagree. There was a lot of common culture between the common people of Anatolia. The Ottoman State, of course, is another matter, but their relations with Turks were hardly any better. – Ali
I think there cannot be “beautiful relationship” between the oppressed and the oppressor, regardless of the cultural similarities – even inside one nation. Obviously, I am not talking here about the relationship of an individual Turk and an individual Armenian as two human beings.
I think what he means is this: the survivors were the ones directly affected by the disaster, and they were suffering from the very real loss of their loved ones: people, places, and a lifestyle which they knew and loved, whereas the latter generations, not having a direct experience of the disaster, were being traumatised by the constant keeping alive of the memories that their parents and grandparents, and not they themselves, had. And the issue turned into a blood feud.
If this is what Timuçin is implying, then it leads to a “get over it” stance, which I cannot accept morally. If we want the Armenians to stop persisting in bringing out the issue today, then we have to stop persisting in our denial. But I do agree – if this is what he means – that it has become a blood feud, and nothing good comes out of blood feuds.
I see it now. But the issue of the Genocide is not just an issue of memories for the current generation. It is also an issue of being uprooted, becoming a perpetual emigrant, suffering the economical consequences of being chopped off of one’s roots, being denied justice, etc, and seeing similar policies practiced by the Republic of Turkey in our days, though on a different level. The latest is a whole different topic, perhaps. As to the blood feuds – I am in full agreement with you again. I think even the Caecilians don’t practice it currently.
I hadn’t meant that the best thing that has happened TO ARMENIA in the last decade is the independent Republic. I had meant the best thing that has happened TO THE REGION IN GENERAL AND TURKEY IN PARTICULAR in the last decade is the independent Armenian Republic. You may find this strange, but this issue is now a state issue, and can only be finally put to rest if the two parties put it to rest at state level – for this there must be a n Armenian State. You see, until the independence of the Armenian Republic, the issue was between the Turkish state and various western states, the Diaspora, and terrorist groups. Now the various western states kept bringing it up to further their interests, the Diaspora – at least partly – used it to keep Armenian identity alive in a sea of odars (how is my latest Armenian word? The others are vart, turchun, kam, hach, tun avor es, tun hay es, es tacik em, ksi ksirembur), and the terrorist groups, well you don’t expect a state to bow to a bunch of terrorists, do you? The problem is that the Turkish Republic is a state, and has a constant responsibility toward Turkish citizens. It can only enter into a meaningful dialogue with the Armenian state, which also has the same responsibility toward Armenian citizens. And they are the only two bodies that can solve this issue definitively and prevent it from being a toy in the hands of third countries. That is why the best thing that happened as far as at least this issue is concerned is the emergence of the Armenian Republic.

Probably you are right. I can see that your Armenian is improving. Is it indicative of real encounters? Especially the last one. But the pity is that with the emergence of the Republic of Armenia, Turkey has stepped in the opposite direction of your expectations in the arena of resolving the issues – it has refused to establish diplomatic relations, has subjected Armenia to transportation and other blockade, and so on.

Now here the “third country” is Azerbaijan, and let me be clear on this, both Turks and Azeris see themselves (at least officially) as one nation, two states. The Turkish government has got himself engaged in the Nagorno-Karabagh issue probably even more than Azerbaijan is engaged now, and they cannot get out of it (especially with the Grey Wolves in the coalition government). Moreover, Turkey has lost a good decade after Ozal in continuous bickering in political life because of low-caliber politicians, another legacy of the 1980 coup. We don’t have statesmen today, we have politicians. As far as “dropping the allegations of Genocide” are concerned, as I had said earlier, the government has first to prepare the public opinion, only then can it move toward accepting “the open secret that everyone knows about”. Again, please refer on my previous postings regarding the development of the Kurdish issue.

I understand it. But other than the political expediency, there is not much validity in such unity. Azeris are not Turks, at least in the pure sense of the word. It is my understanding that the only internal rational of Turkish activism in the Karabagh issue is in “keeping Armenians busy on the Azeri dimension,” since if that issue is resolved/over, they “will enter the Armeno-Turkish dimension.”

I couldn’t quite understand the alleged statement of Dadrian linking Sultan Hamid to CPU. As much as I know, he has not written anything of the kind. The argument that he has contemplated was that the massacres of Armenian committed by Sultan Hamid were the preludes of the Armenian Genocide, and the idea of the elimination of the Armenian minority of Ottoman Turkey was already in the agenda of Ottoman Turkey. The only missing thing was the opportunity, which was provided by the WWI."
To me it seems a bit too much like a conspiracy plot. I may be wrong, of course. I doubt that Sultan Abdulhamid really planned to liquidate all the Armenians, since he was not a nationalist (he made life hell for them).
This is a serious topic, I think and requires separate discussion. Let’s revisit it later.
No, my source for this was a Turkish historian appearing on TV who had said that an Armenian historian had written something to the effect that “the Ottoman State had used its sovereign right to figt an enemy within and to protect its territorial integrity”. I hadn’t noted the Armenian historian’s name, but as far as I recall he was a Soviet Armenian historian. I am not building anything on this, unless and until I read the said historian.

Don’t know anything about it.
I thought Andropov was originally Andropian.
It seems like the Armenian paranoia of making up Armenians from all celebrities and famous historic personages has infected Turks, too.