Armenian Genocide corroborated

[Ashot]

INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF GENOCIDE SCHOLARS

 

President

Israel Charny (Israel)

 

First Vice-President

Gregory H. Stanton (USA)

 

Second Vice-President

Linda Melvern (UK)

 

Secretary-Treasurer

Steven Jacobs (USA)

 

June 13, 2005

 

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan

TC Easbakanlik

Bakanlikir

Ankara, Turkey

FAX: 90 312 417 0476

 

 

Dear Prime Minister Erdogan:

 

We are writing you this open letter in response to your call for an “impartial study by historians” concerning the fate of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

 

We represent the major body of scholars who study genocide in North America and Europe. We are concerned that in calling for an impartial study of the Armenian Genocide you may not be fully aware of the extent of the scholarly and intellectual record on the Armenian Genocide and how this event conforms to the definition of the United Nations Genocide Convention. We want to underscore that it is not just Armenians who are affirming the Armenian Genocide but it is the overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide: hundreds of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments, and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of decades. The scholarly evidence reveals the following:

 

On April 24, 1915, under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.

 

The Armenian Genocide was the most well-known human rights issue of its time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the United States and Europe. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by thousands of official records of the United States and nations around the world including Turkey’s wartime allies Germany, Austria and Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of missionaries and diplomats, by the testimony of survivors, and by decades of historical scholarship.

 

The Armenian Genocide is corroborated by the international scholarly, legal, and human rights community:

 

1) Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he meant by genocide.

 

2) The killings of the Armenians is genocide as defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

 

3) In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, unanimously passed a formal resolution affirming the Armenian Genocide.

 

4) 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the “incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide” and urging western democracies to acknowledge it.

 

5) The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have affirmed the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide.

 

6) Leading texts in the international law of genocide such as William A. Schabas’s Genocide in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2000) cite the Armenian Genocide as a precursor to the Holocaust and as a precedent for the law on crimes against humanity.

 

We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide—how and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history.

 

We would also note that scholars who advise your government and who are affiliated in other ways with your state-controlled institutions are not impartial. Such so-called “scholars” work to serve the agenda of historical and moral obfuscation when they advise you and the Turkish Parliament on how to deny the Armenian Genocide. In preventing a conference on the Armenian Genocide from taking place at Bogacizi University in Istanbul on May 25, your government revealed its aversion to academic and intellectual freedom—a fundamental condition of democratic society.

 

We believe that it is clearly in the interest of the Turkish people and their future as a proud and equal participants in international, democratic discourse to acknowledge the responsibility of a previous government for the genocide of the Armenian people, just as the German government and people have done in the case of the Holocaust.

 

International Association of Genocide Scholars

[Ashot]

The architects of the Armenian Genocide followed by their sentence: Part 1

 

Mehmed Talat *****

 

Mehmed Talat was born in 1874 in Edirne province. A member of the Young Turks, he became member for Edirne of the Ottoman Parliament after the 1908 revolution then, in July 1909 was appointed Minister of the Interior. He became Minister of the Postal Service and then, in 1912, Secretary General of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). He became once again Minister of the Interior in 1913. Together with Ismail Enver ***** and Ahmed Djemal ***** (cf “related cases”), he was part of the triumvirate which ruled the Ottoman Empire up until the end of the First World War in 1918.

 

In 1917, Talat ***** was appointed Grand Vizier (Prime Minister)

 

He was considered to be one of those principally responsible for the massacre of the Armenians between 1915 and 1917.

 

The massacre of the Armenians by the Turks during the First World War is considered to be the first genocide of the 20th century. It began on 24 April 1915 in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, with the assassination of 600 renowned Armenians by order of the Government.

 

By the end of the summer of 1915, two thirds of the Turkish-Armenians, amounting to around 1.2 million people had perished under generally appalling conditions.

 

Turkish nationalists had seized power a few years earlier in Istanbul. After the entry of their country into the Great War, the Russians invaded Anatolia. The Turks, being forced to retreat were infuriated and multiplied the violent attacks against the Turkish-Armenians, who were guilty, in their eyes, of being favourably disposed towards the Christian invaders.

 

The town of Van rose up and proclaimed an autonomous Armenian government. The nationalists seized on this as a pretext to accomplish their aim of total elimination of the Armenians. The Interior Minister, Talat ***** ordained the assassination of the Armenians in Istanbul followed by the Armenians in the army. Following on this, it was the turn of the various Armenian communities to the east of the country.

 

The following is the text of a telegram from the Interior Minister: “The Government has decided to destroy all of the Armenians living in Turkey. An end must be put to their existence, no matter what criminal measures be taken to do so. No account should be taken of age or gender. Scruples of conscience have no place here”.

 

The Armenians were promptly put to death by the army or assembled in long convoys and deported to the south, under the hot summer’s sun without food or water, with only death awaiting them at the end of the journey… (text taken from the site www.herodote.net).

 

In November 1918, Talat ***** fled to Germany on board the Lorelei, accompanied by Enver ***** and Djemal *****.

 

On 2 November 1918, at the very same moment that Talat ***** was fleeing from Istanbul Members of Parliament were debating a motion to take up proceedings against Talat ***** and six other leaders who were on the run. Amongst the charges being brought were those related to the massacres of the Armenians. More precisely, the Ministers implicated were accused of having created “gangs of thugs, whose threats to life, infringement of property rights and slurs on personal honour, rendered these same Ministers guilty of complicity in the resultant tragic crimes”.

 

After the dissolution of parliament by the Sultan on 21 December 1918, the jurisdiction to try the Ministers in question was set up as a Court Martial. By imperial decree the statutes of a new Court Martial were pronounced on 8 March 1919. It was this court which was to judge the accused who had fled into exile.

 

To this end, the court ordered the seven top leaders of the Young Turk regime, including Talat *****, to appear before the court within ten days, failing which they would be judged in absentia.

 

With regard to the charges being pressed, these were widened little by little to include, notably “the massacre and destruction of the Armenians”. The accusation was, in effect, that the Ottoman leaders had formulated a vast plan with this as its final goal.

 

The Court issued its verdict on 5 July 1919. The accused were found guilty of orchestrating Turkey’s entry into the First World War and of having committed massacres against the Armenians.

 

Talat ***** was sentenced to death in absentia.

 

Having gone into hiding under the name of Ali Salieh, Talat ***** was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian, one of the avengers belonging to the Operation Nemesis.

[Ashot]

The architects of the Armenian Genocide followed by their sentence: Part 2

 

Ismail Enver *****

 

On 2 November 1918, at the very same moment that Enver ***** was fleeing from Istanbul Members of Parliament were debating a motion to take up proceedings against Enver ***** and six other leaders who were on the run. Amongst the charges being brought were those related to the massacres of the Armenians. More precisely, the Ministers implicated were accused of having created “gangs of thugs, whose threats to life, infringement of property rights and slurs on personal honour, rendered these same Ministers guilty of complicity in the resultant tragic crimes”.

 

After the dissolution of parliament by the Sultan on 21 December 1918, the jurisdiction to try the Ministers in question was set up as a Court Martial. By imperial decree the statutes of a new Court Martial were pronounced on 8 March 1919. It was this court which was to judge the accused who had fled into exile.

 

To this end, the court ordered the seven top leaders of the Young Turk regime, including Enver *****, to appear before the court within ten days, failing which they would be judged in absentia.

 

With regard to the charges being pressed, these were widened little by little to include, notably “the massacre and destruction of the Armenians”. The accusation was, in effect, that the Ottoman leaders had formulated a vast plan with this as its final goal.

 

The Court issued its verdict on 5 July 1919. The accused were found guilty of orchestrating Turkey’s entry into the First World War and of having committed massacres against the Armenians.

 

Enver ***** was sentenced to death in absentia.

 

After fleeing into exile in Germany, Enver ***** made contact with German army officers in order to continue the war in Central Asia against the United Kingdom. He joined the Basmachi revolt in Central Asia in 1921. He was killed in action by the Red Army on August 4,1922 in Tajikistan.

 

It is in the context of the Armenian Genocide that the term “crimes against humanity” was employed for the first time.

 

On 23 May 1915, Great Britain, France and Russia conjointly addressed a warning to the Young Turk Government in the following terms:

 

“For approximately one month the Kurdish and Turkish populations of Armenia, in connivance with, and often with the help of the Ottoman authorities, have been massacring Armenians. Such massacres took place around mid-April in Erzerum, Tertchan, Eguine, Bitlis, Mouch, Sassoun, Zeitoun and in all of Cilicia. The inhabitants of about one hundred villages around Van have been murdered and the Armenian quarter has been besieged by the Kurds. At the same time, in Constantinople, the Ottoman government has been meting out severe punishment on a helpless Armenian population. In view of such new crimes against humanity and civilisation on the part of Turkey, the Allied Governments proclaim publicly to the, Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible, all the members of the Ottoman Government for the aforementioned crimes as well as any of their collaborators who are found to be implicated in such massacres.” (source: Havas Agency)

Edited April 9, 2008 by Ashot