Get over it, this ain't no 1915 it's 2001

[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/human/tv/muur/tvturk.htm

English: http://www.omroep.nl/human/tv/muur/W_O_S/home.htm

Dutch: http://www.omroep.nl/human/tv/muur/W_O_S/artikel.htm

 

The articles (English): http://www.omroep.nl/human/tv/muur/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;

( 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.

[baboyan]

let the Turks admit what they did then we might think of becoming friends,but until then turks stink

[timucin]

Martin,

 

Everything is questionable, and must be questioned before taken in intellectually. I guess this has been my motto all my life, since the day I read about the French Revolution when I was I think eleven or twelve. It doesn’t matter anymore whether French Revolution was really about this principle or whether they succeeded. To me this has been one of the most important principles in my life, causing me to resist quiet many ‘we’s (Snif, sniff, I am touched; where is my handkerchief, tears are rolling down my eyes).

 

I have heard ‘Let the academicians deal with these issues’ quite many times. Personally, I do not understand why you even made this statement, since if you did not know or want to say anything about the subject you could simply choose not to make any comment at all. But, you chose to make a comment and you chose to make this particular comment in the name of some not very clear ‘we’. Though this ‘we’ may amount to nothing, it still somehow points out to a deep down desire or satisfaction to be part of a particular ‘we’. Anyway, just a point to keep in mind, and to remember it, when we are perhaps back to the topic of being members of our respective sick nations, which you euphemized yours as being ‘deeply wounded’. What happens to a collective consciousness, to a collectively created and shared psychological substratum, when deeply wounded, would certainly make an interesting subject, especially if this substratum has still not gotten its chance to work out and/or through this wound…The answer is simple: it stays not healthy, unhealthy, disorderly, sick, ill, and yes, very wounded.

 

What I may say about these subjects is actually not so much important from the perspective of my own personal interests, other than receiving a personal intellectual satisfaction of some sort: a plaque here or an interview there – perhaps a move of my own. I mean simple stuff. In fact, I thought I had made this clear by saying that I was going to skip this subject. The real beneficiary in the discussions of these issues is really are those who are actively pursuing political and long-term cultural ideals as you and perhaps the ‘we’. For if there is any weakness in this area that could not resist to a few questions then I would think that it would make sense to explore this weakness in order to remedy it before it is found by others. Closing the channels of communication to certain ideas/questions, and especially hiding behind overused and not-so-smart excuses such as ‘let us leave it to the academicians’ will only worsen this weakness. The efforts to ban or fine anti-genocidal or anti-holocaustal statements, discussions or theories in certain countries are already well known, and one can wonder how far these clearly undemocratic practices will go. After all, if the concept of genocide is a secure concept then there should be no reason to be afraid. But of course, I forgot, these are in the name of the truth. What was it?

 

Certainly, one may answer me back by saying that I am one among many and many believers. Perhaps, but then, there were a very few who questioned the Bible, the Quran, and God.

…

 

The modern era, and the societies that came with it, is build upon the idea of the public engagement in discussions of all sorts. This was at least the spirit of the early modern era. It is nice to have experts, but the main idea in the modern societies is that the public must get involved in discussions so the preservation of what arrives at the end of these discussions will be very much permanent and/or much more stable. Take the public away, remove it from certain discussions, do this in the name of the idea that some discussions are well beyond the capacities of the public, or are not needed by it, and then there will be other occasions from which the public will be excluded in time, and soon will come the end of democracy. Democracy is not about some rights on some paper. It is a practice by the public, before it is of and for the public. And, this practice starts from and with very small examples.

 

What is the power of the public? It is a simple numbers game. Academicians are humans too, and like most humans they are as easily susceptible to certain conditions I would call, because I cannot come up with a better term, social diseases such as fundamentalism, racism, extreme nationalism, conservatism (the last one is somewhat questionable). The public is not the smartest, in fact, I hate its average-ness (perhaps deep down I am one of those conceded jerks who thinks who is the gift to humankind, who knows), but the fact remains that they also represent the best means for ensuring long term stability by getting rid of some of serious problems right from the beginning. The accumulation of knowledge in certain hands must constantly be checked, and one effective method, at least one we have been able to come up with so far, is public discussions. If ten people discuss a subject they may reach an agreement on a bad idea, but if a million people argue about a subject, the chances are extremely little that the bad idea that may control small numbers easily will control everyone, that is, if they are allowed for public discussions freely, without restrictions. This is kind of elementary knowledge, since Mill presented it in detail in the 19th century, but perhaps there is need once more to bring it up.

 

You may perhaps find it advantageous for yourself or your ‘we’ that certain discussions are left to the academicians. I see the same kind of tendency on the Turkish side. And honestly, if I agree with your argument then I will also have to agree with the Turkish proposal that the discussion of the Armenian Genocide must be left to the historians. Furthermore, there should actually be no discussions on this subject, since we definitely have academicians, professionals and experts in the field of politics, too, and we should let them discuss for us. But, it is most ironic that we can refer to the Genocide definition of the Genocide Convention, make use of it in our arguments (somehow we do not need academics to do these), but when it comes to questioning the concepts found in this definition, especially when even a simple glance at this definition will be enough to show that anything can be classified as genocide according to this definition, and therefore something may be wrong with the definition itself, then we have to start looking for academicians, scholars, and people of that sort.

 

Before I quit, and I think I should since this is not the actual topic, I must remind a couple things. First of all, not every academic is an intellectual –there is actually a scary specialization and market-ization in the world of academia, and for that reason we should think twice about leaving everything to its ‘able’ hands. Moreover, not every intellectual needs to come from the academic world, either. We need intellectuals rather than academics, although we need them both.

 

The second thing is that I am a novice (an apprentice) academic, though not a Dadrian, and from what I understand, Ali also is, or was. So, I guess, in line with your argument, at least Ali and I are allowed to have such discussions, and you should probably just listen to it. The listening will of course also include those times when we would say something not so much in your interest, but something tells me that when you are not so comfortable with what the academics are saying you will definitely ignore your initial proposal that ‘we should leave certain things to the academia’. Otherwise, we would not have this forum and this particular discussion.

 

I strongly believe that genocide discussions are not only about some recognition or compensation. They represent a door, a sort of door that may open new possibilities and dimensions for us humans, and as far as the perspective is this, it belongs not only to the Armenians but also actually to the entirety of the humankind. After all, before Armenians died in 1915, humans of all sorts died. The reasons of it in all dimensions of knowledge and experience needs to be discussed without restrictions, and more importantly the ways of making these discussions both accessible to and participatory by the immediate public must be found and insisted upon. You may certainly go through with the short term and more restricted agenda of a nationalistic, as opposed to humanistic, as in covering all the humans, recognition. However, the solution is not there in my opinion, and this is what I have been arguing for all along.

 

Damn it, another long post, and I was trying to make it a short one too.

 

I will come back to other points as much as I can. I think I got myself in trouble, since I certainly was not expecting so much material to read.

 

t.

[timucin]

Dear Ali,

 

First, I would like to start with some manners. Don’t worry nothing is wrong with your manners, but mine. I forgot to greet you, to say a simple hello. Well, by profession I am a sailor, and hence some bad manners. Anyway, I am pleased to meet you.

 

It looks like we do not have too many disagreements here, except with a few points.

 

(1) I did not try to say that the sufferings of the other groups were not recognized. However, these recognitions were actually done in relation with some other goals and agendas. By the way, I am aware of quite a few studies in this area. It is a very interesting topic, and it is not necessarily connected to fixing old crimes. There is also the issue of the creation of new identities and histories, and when looked closely, one will see that the genocide discussions, the so-called fixing up old crimes, coincide with the emergence of identity politics, which roughly correspond to the 80s. And, even in this limited fashion, the justice is still not done as much as one would expect it. As soon as these western nation-states get their acts together, and form new histories and identities, my guess is that we will not hear of genocide arguments anymore. In fact, if the Turkish State even agrees to a token of recognition, the whole thing will go down. But of course, if Turkish State denies it long enough the whole thing may again go down anyway, since unfortunately nobody today has the power to coerce Turkey into a recognition it does not want. And, when even the Armenian Patriarch cannot show the bravery the Armenian cause requires from him, perhaps for very good reasons, what is the Armenian cause to accomplish? Yes, the Armenian side says that the Patriarch in Turkey is under coercion, unable to talk freely. Now, let’s pause here for a second. If I was the Patriarch and felt deeply about this issue, I would not hesitate for a minute to talk even if it was to cost my life. In 70s and 80s, quite many Turkish scholars and intellectuals did not hesitate to talk about the State even though good numbers of them were gunned down, but they did not give up. So, this argument does not make sense, and the Patriarch is probably able to see certain things better than the majority of us: the fact that the Armenians and other third class countries like ours and like Armenia may be for another treat as they were before by the greater powers. .

 

I am not trying to establish another conspiracy theory here, but simply trying to point out some other parameters that were in existence 80 years ago and they still are. Although Dadrian makes use of this topic quiet a lot I think he does not go all the way with it. He is probably thinking deep down that this is the only chance the Armenians have. I think the opposite. I am afraid the whole thing will be thrown outside the window in a few years, and actually, I do not want this. I want to go all the way with this and expose those other parameters and perhaps start dialogues that will lead to better cultural configurations.

 

(2) Not every group needs to show the same reaction in case of massacres and genocides. One of the solutions is forgetting what happened and getting on with the business. Some groups go for this solution. However, even among the Caucasians and some Balkan descendants started, just recently, feelings of getting even with those guilty ones about what happened to their ancestors. I in fact have such ancestors, but personally, I feel nothing. Then again, good part of these newly emergent political attitudes has more to do with the spread of neo-nationalistic feelings almost everywhere. We are in another nationalistic phase. This forgetting of old wounds by these Muslims was also greatly helped by their chance to work their traumas and sufferings through Armenians and Greeks inhabitants of Anatolia by simply killing and stealing from them. A very strong and responsible government was needed at the time, but it was nowhere to be found. People who were mostly the migrants from Balkans and other areas the Muslims were kicked out were running the state. The Ottomans had no means of dealing with the problem. In 1860s, within a few years, 1 200 000 landed in Eastern Black sea harbors of Trabzon, Samsun and others. One account talks about 80 000 hungry, homeless and sick people in Trabzon who destroyed most of the trees and fields to find something to burn so they would keep warm, something to eat so they would stay alive, so they would feed their kids. The ones who could get out of this winter had to struggle with Malaria. Finally, they were put in the carts, not trains, sent to various places in Anatolia, where they found plenty of people they could clash with.

 

I am only talking here about the Circassians. Since some of those survivors I am here today, the topic is of personal interest for me. But, the exodus from Balkans was not much different either, and it did not happen only in 1923. It started more like around 1820s, and continued until the end of the Second World War. Now imagine how would the Ottoman State be able to deal with these numbers that would create nightmares even today for most governments. Try to land 1.2 million of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles or San Diego, or in Amsterdam, or in Oslo, in a few years.

 

I am not trying to justify anything by the way. I am not trying to say that these people had every right to kill and steal from the Christians of Anatolia. Not at all. But, without a strong government, and especially with a nationalistic one, one that had its own leaders traumatized from the events, the things were bound to get bloody and they did. There was no United Nations to send in to go between extremely polarized groups.

 

I read once this account in a book by a Serbian historian in which this particular scholar quotes an Ottoman ***** telling a European statesman that he would not advise messing up the balance in Balkans, since nobody would be able to fix it for a hundred years. It has been nearly 120 or years, the problems in Balkans are still not fixed. One may go on blaming everything on the Ottomans, or see things in a larger context, while not getting apologetic or justificatory on anything, to have a healthier analysis and consequently solution to the present day problems.

 

(3) At any rate, there are at least two dimensions to every genocide problem in my opinion. One is the experiential/ psychological dimension and the other one is what I would call the discursive/logical dimension. Both dimensions need their own type of solutions. The discursive/logical solution is never sufficient to deal with the psychological dimension, since, because of the nature of the genocidal acts, we are actually dealing with the non-logical side of humans. Someone kills my daughter in the most brutal way, let us say, my logic will simply stop functioning there. Being unable to produce an emotional counter-response to the situation, I will most likely revert to discursive/logical ways and create justificatory or vigilante style discourses or anything of the sort. I do not really have a ready-made solution for this kind of psychological situation, and so far the scholars I went through did not either. In fact, there is really no full recovery from a trauma, the original kind. However, the generations following the original one do have a choice and ways to deal with these discourses or create their own ones. I am perhaps not making sense here, but the main point I am trying to convey here is that there are two dimensions to this subject. What I see is that the demand is for psychological healing, but the method is a discursive/logical type. In the area of psychological healing, I see, in crude terms, in not so sophisticated terms, two options: you may kill or you may meet. An apology or recognition of the institutional and very general form, the one between states, I believe, will not bring the desired psychological effect, although it may, if done carefully, prepare the groundwork for the latter option of meeting.

 

(4) There is also the issue of the Turkish State that needs to be resolved, and in this, in blaming the Turkish State for its denial of the Genocide, I am very much with most people. However, the subject in this area is not so easy to deal with either. And realistically, without a movement of any kind, which certainly does not exist in Turkey anymore, I do not see how feasible such a subject of going against the Turkish State is. It is hardly more than attacking windmills.

 

Well, I am too tired to get into this subject, but if you are interested Ali, and perhaps you too Martin, I have written quite a bit on this subject of the Turkish State in my own forum. In fact, I would like to invite you Ali, although it is nothing like this one, and perhaps even boring in some ways – definitely a slow moving forum. I am not inviting you Martin, because I suspect you already know. In case you do not, you are more than welcomed.

 

My forum is http://network54.com/Forum/129843

 

t.

[timucin]

quote

 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.

 

 

Dear Martin,

 

I gave you the reference. It comes from the 1998 summer issue (no 2) of Armenian Forum. I am sure you know this journal by Vincent Lima, Ara Sarafian and other Armenian scholars. This was the issue about that ‘exchange’ between the Turkish and Armenian scholars of R.G. Suny, E.D. Akarli, S. Deringil, and V.N. Dadrian.

 

I do not think I linked Sultan Hamid to the CUP in my post, but if you are interested in such a link you should probably refer to Dadrian’s ‘The Armenian Genocide and the Pitfalls of a “Balanced” Analysis’, written in reply to Suny in the same source I just mentioned and from which I took the previous quote, and read on page 76 the section titled ‘The Consultative Relationship Between Abdulhamid and Ittihad’. I believe you will find enough information about such a link. I wish I could write the whole thing here, but I am too lazy. Unfortunately, I cannot mail the only copy I have either. However, there is nothing alleged about this statement. If you need the address of the journal it is the following:

 

The Gomidas Institute, PO Box 208, Princeton, New Jersey 08542-0208.

 

Ph: 609-883-9222.

 

t.

[MJ]

Dear Timucin,

 

 

There are few things in every aspect of life, which are not questionable even before subjecting it to intellectual analysis. Such are the mutual feelings in my family, for example. But the correct formulation of “questionability” requires specification of “questionable for whom.” We (not ‘we’, btw) have no questions about the slaughter of our ancestors, the organized and systematic character of those slaughters, and we build our allegations of genocide on a very specific premise, contrary to your intellectual speculations.

 

The premise of your arguments sounds like we know what the genocide is, it already exists as a well defined category in our consciousness or in our intellectual strata, and we have to carefully and intellectually analyze to understand whether what is alleged to be Genocide of Armenians according to the well known now UN Resolution does indeed qualify as so or not, and if the term Genocide itself is adequately defined there. I think this is where our (not ‘our') primary discourse may originate from.

 

The Genocide as political category is defined in this document for the first time. So this is exactly the definition of the Genocide, and this is what we are referring to, and this is the starting point of our (not ‘our’ legal premise. It is a document signed by, perhaps, the absolute majority of the states, including Turkey. Therefore, it is the starting point of our legalistic discussions. We are not trying to analyze here neither the epistemology of our understanding of the term Genocide, nor the psychology or the psyche of the perpetrator or the victim. We are not even trying to deny that there may have or may have not been a context to it. First, we are trying to constitute the fact of the Armenian Genocide, press charges and ask Turkey, “How do you plead?” Then, there may be a long deliberation of both sides depending on how Turkey pleads. In any case, as in any judicial process, first, the alleging party is filing a complain, then the allegedly guilty party pleads guilty or not. Only when it comes to the stage of conviction, the jury considers all the circumstances of the crime, including those of mitigating character. However, it is well known judicial/parliamentary tactics to filibuster the process through endless maneuverings and argumentations, which dilute the essence of the issue. For example, I suspect those of us who think and declare even over the Internet that time is working for Turkey, and against Armenians, therefore there is no reason at this time for Turkey to make concessions to Armenians, might be tempted to exercise such tactics through endless and, by the way, academically not well laid out speculations, when at the end of the long material it is not even clear what was being said. And because it is not clear, then we would need to go to another round of such speculations, then another, and another – all this in the name of the academic integrity of the process, and the desire not to arrive to incorrect and unfair convictions. But I suspect time is not working neither for Turkey nor for Armenians, therefore, I rush to get to the point.

 

I suspect that long after Turkey’s acceptance of the Armenian Genocide, and the closing of its political dimension, the academicians, the psychologists and psychiatrists will continue speculating and publishing materials on the subject. I have no other expectations, knowing academia very well and having spent more time, and to a further extend (with all due respect) than you have done so far. Therefore, first, I don’t find myself in the position to be silent “when two academicians talk” and, second, I always try to see clarity in whatever is being discussed, even if it is being done for the sake of purely academic studies. Just for further clarity, I have left/hated academia and refused to pursue further my academic career because I found it to be a sick establishment, publishing papers for the sake of the mere number of them - and as a rule papers of zero content - but long ones. Spending days or more studying their work, eventually you come to an understanding that, with the exception of few in each discipline, they publish garbage, and their intent is not to make the complicated thing clearer and better understood for the rest of the world, but quite the opposite - to make even the simple things look more complicated, and build their careers publishing scores of papers - less clear better it is, and “earning” reputation of distinguished scholars. I also found, that with the exception of few, any self-respecting academician leaves academia sooner or later, finding that he/she can, first, do some more useful work in the private sector, he can make a better living and have more dignified lifestyle, and will have a more fulfilling life in general. If you would need further tips on academic endeavors and machinations, feel free to send me a private message, and I would gladly volunteer. This paragraph of mine may sound off the topic from the onset, but I think with some effort we can find some relevance to our discussion.

 

I am not in favor of banning the anti-genocide or anti-holocaust statements, any more or any less than banning racial, anti-Turkish, homophobic, anti-humanistic, etc, statements. But with the same token, I am not in favor of filibustering in the name of academic and other freedoms.

 

If the Armenian Genocide was about just recognition or compensation, believe me, I wouldn’t care to interject myself into the middle of it. On such level I wouldn’t care if Turkey would recognize it or not – it is the problem of the Turkish people and the problem of the evolution of the Turkish society. On a personal level I don’t care about compensation, even though enormous wealth has been expropriated/stolen from my paternal family. I have not a single document to prove it, nor would be able to point to the location of our family property. The only reason I am interjecting myself into the middle of this controversy is the continuing character of it. Think about it. Since Turkey has not recognized/realized and adequately assessed its past crimes, it remains too susceptible to commit new ones (btw, first of all against its own people), and its current policies leave not too much ambiguity in ones mind that given proper circumstances, it may commit them again.

 

Indeed the Armenian Genocide is not an Armenian property. In fact, it is more of a Turkish property. Our entire argument is about Turkey claiming its ownership. One may discuss it as long as one wants, and teach in schools about it and elsewhere – from the very early stages of the development of the personality. For this reason perhaps, some Armenians in America are pretty active in the direction of adding the Genocide teaching, in particular as it pertains to Armenians, in school curriculums. If the fact of my resentment towards the continuing genocidal policies of modern Turkey sound to you nationalistic rather than humanistic, and our attempts to have our urgent issues addressed rather than to dilute our resources (especially given the motivations of some of our opponents) in addressing the global issue on the level of the future of the humanity sounds to you nationalistic, I just would respectfully ask you to spend more time and effort on reassessing things.

 

About Dadrian and Suny… I don’t subscribe Armenian Forum, though am familiar with their Web site and the materials there. My only point of current contact with the Armenian world is the Hye Forum. However, due to the family friendship existed between my and Ron’s families, I know him very well – better than Dadrian. I have not read the publication you refer me to, but from personal discussions I am familiar with the points of both scholars. Thereofre, there is no need to mail the publication to me. It would suffice if you just could clearly state your own argument.

 

[ September 07, 2001: Message edited by: MJ ]

[MJ]

LOL... Meant to address it to Timucin.

[aurguplu]

dear mj,

 

i thought you were "martin", since i read some postings that were addressed to your arguments that were addressed to "martin" - or did i get it wrong?

 

i would like to reply to the above posting, but have confused the identities, and don't know anymore who's who.

 

i would be grateful if you could clarify.

regards,

 

ali suat

[MJ]

Dear Ali,

 

Indeed it was confusing.

 

Sorry, I meant to address it to Timucin, as indicated above. My name indeed is Martin.

 

P.S. I had pasted Timucin's text in MS Word page, and was typing my text on it, and didn't notice to delete his address to me on the top, preserving it in my text. Now it is fixed.

 

[ September 07, 2001: Message edited by: MJ ]

[aurguplu]

dear martin,

 

(now that the name issue is clarified). i almost fully agree with what you say re academics. they are necessary, though, at least in certain fields. i have observed that the really good (and useful) academics tend to devote themselves fully to their work, and publish relatively little, buttheir publications tend to stand the test of time. this is especially true of "hard" subjects such as the exact sciences and - may i add - languages (not literature, though). i have always found it a bit difficult to accept that subjects such as "political science" or "semiotics" could be counted amongst the "serious" academic subjects in the first place, since 1) they - as far as i can see - are difficult to reduce to numbers or other EXACT definitions, hence a degree of ambiguity is built in, and 2) most people whom i met who were in these fields ended to have an agenda, an axe to grind, so to speak, and were using their academic credentials to twist the "truth" - whatever that is - as they willed.

 

history is a different matter. as a branch of the humanities, it has so far eluded most attempts at reducing it to numbers, but this is perhaps the case because the further back you get, the less numerical data you can have. i also think that historians would become a good deal more accurate and enlightened if they knew more about the rudiments of economics, and perhaps of the exact sciences.

 

the problem with most academicians engaged in the humanities is that the stuff they produce has little or no market value - few people are interested in it, even fewer read it, and even fewer understand it. this also results in the fact that few people check the quality of the stuff they produce. i know from my own field of historical linguistics that much of the stuff produced until very recently had very poor methodology, the holes in which could be picked up by any layman with a decent general background in the subject.

 

may i also add that in my field - and also in near eastern history - most of the most competent historians and linguists of earlier times were not academically trained, but government agents, amateurs with a lot of money from their parents, dilettantes, and in a few cases, people originally from a completely different academic background, such as doctors or biologists. i think that although academia as a profession has a good many merits to it, it also has paved the way to the production of quite a lot of mediocre and substandard stuff by mediocre and substandard minds. academia has, unfortunately, become the refuge of many people who cannot face "real life" outside their ivory tower.

 

but it is still a worthwhile experience if you happen to be in the right field in the right place at the right time. pity i wasn't.

 

regards,

 

ali suat

[MJ]

Dear Ali,

 

No arguments, again. I am not the Khrushchev type to send a bulldozer to demolish the academia (did you know that he has allegedly ordered a bulldozer to be sent to demolish the Russian House of Artists, as allegedly a cradle of homosexuals. )

I have always been around some tremendous academic authorities, and I owe them a lot. I have been in the right places, but at the wrong time, though.

One of the things that attracts me in Dadrian is his training and degree in Mathematics and Philosophy.