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The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the
Caucasus, by Vahakn Dadrian. 452 pages, bibliography, appendix, index. Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1997. 3rd revised edition. $39.95 (Cloth) ISBN 1-57181-016-1
Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of the Turko-Armenian Conflict, by Vahakn Dadrian. 214 pages, bibliography, appendix, index. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 1999. $34.95 (Cloth) ISBN 1-56000-389-8
Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian. 328 pages, bibliography, index. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998. $27.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-8143-2777-X
Under the guise of World War I, the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the Committee of Union and Progress, also known as the Young Turks, initiated a premeditated campaign of extermination against its Armenian minority. By 1923, the Armenians, who had lived in their ancestral homeland for millennia, had been eliminated and Ottoman Armenia was a wasteland. Since these events transpired, a concerted campaign of distortion and denial had been aimed at relegating this tragedy to oblivion. With the end of the Cold War and the decreasing importance of subordinating history to ideological imperatives, the study of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 has entered a qualitative and quantitative new stage. No longer confined to a mere footnote in history, the Armenian Genocide is now a major focus of scholarly research connected to broader themes such as universal human rights, humanitarian intervention and limits to state sovereignty. The three books under review here make a major contribution towards bringing the discussion of the Armenian Genocide into the academic mainstream.
In Remembrance and Denial, Hovannisian has gathered essays by some of the leading specialists on various aspects of the genocide to engage in a wide-ranging exploration of the historical, political, literary, social, and economic consequences not only of the genocide itself but also of its ongoing denial. I would like to mention some of the salient points from this work which stand out in this reviewer’s mind. Four of the chapters attempt to understand genocide denial and the forces motivating it. Especially noteworthy is the chapter authored by Roger Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton, entitled “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide” and originally printed in
Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The authors detail an instance in which one of them received a letter from the Turkish Ambassador in Washington criticizing his mention of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Inadvertently enclosed with the letter was the draft of a memorandum to the Ambassador composed by an American scholar, in which he advises the Ambassador on methods by which those who write about the genocide can be discredited. This example of the misuse of academic freedom to promote denial of historical reality is a chilling reminder of the possible dangers faced by those trying to research the Armenian Genocide and draw historical lessons from it.
Despite such attempts at denying the genocide and discrediting those who engage in the study of it, there is an increasing awareness of the importance of the Armenian Genocide and its impact on the European scene of the 1930s and 1940s. In August 1939, twenty-four years after the destruction of the Armenians, Hitler asked rhetorically in a speech devoted to his impending invasion of Poland, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” He perhaps would have been surprised to discover that certain groups of Jews in Europe and Palestine were aware of the fate of the Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman government. According to the Israeli scholar Yair Auron’s chapter in
Remembrance and Denial, this awareness was largely the result of the novel,
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, written by the Viennese Jewish author Franz Werfel in 1933 in German and translated into Hebrew in 1934. It was soon consigned to the flames as were many other works deemed inappropriate by Nazi ideologues. In the Jewish ghettoes of Nazi-occupied Europe, groups of resistance fighters gained inspiration from reading the epic story of a small group of Armenians, who instead of submitting to massacre, retreated to a mountain stronghold and fought off Ottoman soldiers and irregulars until rescued by a French warship. According to Auron the example of Musa Dagh, with its emphasis on resistance, was more important to the Jewish resistance fighters than the symbolism of Masada, the
locus classicus of Jewish martyrdom.
Another link between the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide is discussed in Dadrian’s extensively researched
The History of the Armenian Genocide. In November 1923, Adolf Hitler staged a coup attempt in Munich known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Marching at the Nazi leader’s side, his arm linked with Hitler’s, was Dr. Max Erwin von Scheubner Richter. He was killed during the coup attempt and his death was considered a serious loss by the Nazi leadership. During World War I, Scheubner Richter was the German Vice Consul in Erzerum, a large Armenian-inhabited city near the Ottoman frontier with the Russian Empire in the Caucasus, and later led a joint Turkish-German guerilla force against the Russians. He was an eyewitness to the genocide and reported his findings in numerous cables and telegrams to his superiors in Constantinople and Berlin. There is little doubt that he discussed what he saw with Hitler. Dadrian’s
The History of the Armenian Genocide and Warrant for Genocide are the results of decades of research in numerous archives. Using materials in German, French, English, Armenian, Ottoman, and modern Turkish, Dadrian has not only compiled the facts of the Armenian Genocide but has also pioneered the analysis of the events leading up to and including the destruction of the Armenians. The wealth of information contained in these volumes cannot possibly be adequately discussed here. Despite this limitation of space, it is possible to give the reader a sense of Dadrian’s research and finding by specifically focusing on two aspects.
Dadrian’s work is significant on two interrelated levels. Firstly, in The History of the Armenian
Genocide, he thoroughly documents the course of events, which culminated in the genocide, by utilizing not only Ottoman and Turkish sources, but also those from allied countries such as Germany and Austria-Hungary, as well as neutral countries like the US. Secondly, in both of his books under review here, he goes one step beyond the recitation of facts by engaging in a wide-ranging analysis in order to understand the underlying causes of the Armenian Genocide. He marshals considerable evidence to show how the development of the Turko-Armenian conflict escalated to the point of genocide. Dadrian points out the importance of the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of displaced and destitute Balkan and Caucasian Muslims in Turkish Armenia in the mid- and late-nineteenth century and the demographic consequences of such a move by the Ottoman authorities. The delicate balance between the settled Armenians and the nomadic and semi-nomadic Kurds was shattered by the influx of such vast numbers of refugees. Furthermore it exacerbated already tense relations between the Christian Armenians and their Muslim neighbors. This usually neglected aspect of the Armenian Genocide is discussed within the domestic and international context of the Eastern Question and its corollary, the Armenian Question. Dadrian makes another important contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of the Ottoman decision to destroy its Armenian subjects by discussing the importance of the Balkan Wars, which preceded World War I. He sees Turkish military defeats in these wars as having a profound effect upon the Young Turk leadership, which was trying to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire in the face of numerous centrifugal forces.
Dadrian convincingly shows the premeditated nature of this crime against humanity, by allowing the sources to speak for themselves.
In The History of the Armenian Genocide, Dadrian concludes that :
“Perhaps the most daunting lesson of the history of the Armenian genocide is the grim evidence of consistency with which the victimization of the Armenians has proven unpreventable but also has proven impervious to punishment. One is faced here with the persistence of the dismal reality of impunity perversely functioning as a negative reward benefiting the camp of the perpetrators, past and present, and rendering the latter as remorseless as ever…The core problems of genocide transcend considerations of the fate of individual victim groups, or the peculiarities of a particular perpetrator-victim relationship. The mitigation, if not the elimination, of these problems devolves upon the further development of international law, the prime matrix of all human rights, including the rights of potential victim groups (pp. 422-23).”
In his Warrant for Genocide, Dadrian identifies three interconnected and inseparable factors in the evolution of the Armenian-Turkish conflict, namely, theocracy, power relations, and demography. According to Dadrian, theocracy not only set the stage for the emergence of the Armenian-Turkish conflict by imposing a fixed system of inequities that favored the Muslims, but also predetermined the outcome of all statistical computations through a system in which all the Muslims were lumped together as a single, unified population category (p. 183). This seemed to heighten definition of Armenians as “outsiders.”
The three books under consideration here, the products of extensive and painstaking research in a variety of languages, are essential reading for those seeking to understand man’s inhumanity to man in general and the Armenian genocide in particular. In an era of heightened awareness of human rights, the indifference to the fate of the Armenians on the part of the Great Powers should be a lesson that we all take to heart.
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