A small stream flowing into the Dudan cave in Turkey. It was here that
the Armenian residents of a local village are said to have been thrown, after
being led there by Ottoman gendarmes and local Kurdish paramilitary personnel. CreditBryan Denton for The New York Times
For more than a century, Turkey has denied any role in organizing the
killing of Armenians in what historians have long accepted as a genocide that
started in 1915, as World War I spread across continents. The Turkish narrative
of denial has hinged on the argument that the original documents from postwar
military tribunals that convicted the genocide’s planners were nowhere to be
found.
Now, Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at
Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied the genocide for decades by piecing together documents from
around the world to establish state
complicity in the
killings, says he has unearthed an original telegram from the trials, in an
archive held by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
“Until recently, the smoking gun was
missing,” Mr. Akcam said. “This is the smoking gun.” He called his find “an
earthquake in our field,” and said he hoped it would remove “the last brick in
the denialist wall.”
The story begins in 1915 in an office in
the Turkish city of Erzurum, when a high-level official of the Ottoman Empire
punched out a telegram in secret code to a colleague in the field, asking for
details about the deportations and killings of Armenians in eastern Anatolia,
the easternmost part of contemporary Turkey.
Later, a deciphered copy of the telegram
helped convict the official, Behaeddin Shakir, for planning what scholars have
long acknowledged and Turkey has long denied: the organized killing of up to
1.5 million Armenians by the leaders of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, an
atrocity widely recognized as the 20th century’s first genocide.
And then, just like that, most of the
original documents and sworn testimony from the trials vanished, leaving
researchers to rely mostly on summaries from the official Ottoman newspaper.
Mr. Akcam said he had little hope that
his new finding would immediately change things, given Turkey’s ossified policy
of denial and especially at a time of political turmoil when its president,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has turned more nationalist.
But Mr. Akcam’s life’s work has been to
puncture, fact by fact, document by document, the denials of Turkey.
“My firm belief as a Turk is that
democracy and human rights in Turkey can only be established by facing history
and acknowledging historic wrongdoings,” he said.
The gutted and abandoned interior of an Armenian monastery, north of
Diyarbakir, Turkey, which, according to locals, is now used to house livestock. CreditBryan Denton for The New York Times
He broadened his point to argue that much
of the chaos gripping the Middle East today was a result of mistrust between
communities over historical wrongdoings that no one is willing to confront.
“The past is not the past in the Middle
East,” he said. “This is the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the
Middle East.”
Eric
D. Weitz, a history professor at
the City College of New York and an expert on the Armenian genocide, called Mr.
Akcam “the Sherlock Holmes of Armenian genocide.”
“He has piled clue upon clue upon clue,”
Professor Weitz added.
Exactly where the telegram was all these
years, and how Mr. Akcam found it, is a story in itself. With Turkish
nationalists about to seize the country in 1922, the Armenian leadership in
Istanbul shipped 24 boxes of court records to England for safekeeping.
The records were kept there by a bishop,
then taken to France and, later, to Jerusalem. They have remained there since
the 1930s, part of a huge archive that has mostly been inaccessible to
scholars, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Mr. Akcam said he had tried
for years to gain access to the archive, with no luck.
Instead, he found a photographic record
of the Jerusalem archive in New York, held by the nephew of a Armenian monk,
now dead, who was a survivor of the genocide.
While researching the genocide in Cairo
in the 1940s, the monk, Krikor Guerguerian, met a former Ottoman judge who had
presided over the postwar trials. The judge told him that many of the boxes of
case files had wound up in Jerusalem, so Mr. Guerguerian went there and took
pictures of everything.Bottom of Form
The telegram was written under Ottoman
letterhead and coded in Arabic lettering; four-digit numbers denoted words.
When Mr. Akcam compared it with the known Ottoman Interior Ministry codes from
the time, found in an official archive in Istanbul, he found a match, raising
the likelihood that many other telegrams used in the postwar trials could one
day be verified in the same way.
For historians, the court cases were one
piece of a mountain of evidence that emerged over the years — including reports
in several languages from diplomats, missionaries and journalists who witnessed
the events as they happened — that established the historical fact of the
killings and qualified them as a genocide.
Turkey has long resisted the word
genocide, saying that the suffering of the Armenians had occurred during the
chaos of a world war in which Turkish Muslims faced hardship, too.
Tripods used for hanging people during the Armenian genocide that
started in 1915. CreditCulture Club/Getty Images
Turkey also claimed that the Armenians
were traitors, and had been planning to join with Russia, then an enemy of the
Ottoman Empire.
That position is deeply entwined in
Turkish culture — it is standard in school curriculums — and polling has shown
that a majority of Turks share the government’s position.
“My approach is that as much proof as you
put in front of denialists, denialists will remain denialists,” said Bedross
Der Matossian, a historian at
the University of Nebraska and the author of “Shattered
Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire.”
The genocide is commemorated each year on
April 24, the day in 1915 that a group of Armenian notables from Istanbul were
rounded up and deported.
It was the start of the enormous killing
operation, which involved forced marches into the Syrian desert, summary
executions and rapes.
Two years ago, Pope Francis referred to the killings as a genocide and faced a storm of criticism from
within Turkey. Many countries, including France, Germany and Greece, have
recognized the genocide, each time provoking diplomatic showdowns with Turkey.
The United States has not referred to the
episode as genocide, out of concerns for alienating Turkey, a NATO ally and a
partner in fighting terrorism in the Middle East. Barack Obama used the term
when he was a candidate for president, but he refrained from doing so while in
office.
This year, dozens of congressional
leaders have signed a letter urging President Trump to recognize the genocide.
But that is unlikely, especially after
Mr. Trump recently congratulated Mr. Erdogan for winning expanded powers in a referendum that critics say was
marred by fraud.
Mr. Shakir, the Ottoman official who
wrote the incriminating telegram discovered by Mr. Akcam, had fled the country
by the time the military tribunal convicted him and sentenced him to death in
absentia.
A few years later, he was gunned down in
the streets of Berlin by two Armenian assassins described in an article by The New York Times as “slim, undersized, swarthy men
lurking in a doorway.”
