Was Boris Johnson’s great grandfather an Ottoman traitor or a hero?

Orhan Kemal Cengiz

 

When conservative politician and former London mayor Boris Johnson became prime minister of the United Kingdom, a jubilant mood spread through the small Turkish village of Kalfat, where residents consider Johnson a “local son.” They are proud that distant relatives of the polarizing politician still live among them. Johnson’s great-great-grandfather Haci Ahmet Riza Efendi was born in Kalfat, and the house he lived in still stands.

‘The Sins of the Fathers’—The Cardinal Sin of Denial

Vartan Matiossian

The Sins of the Fathers: Turkish Denialism and the Armenian Genocide
By Siobhan Nash-Marshall
The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York (Jan. 1, 2018), 256 pp.
ISBN: 978-0824599164; Softcover, $24.95

Denial is not only the last stage of genocide but also the first. One need merely recall that the diplomatic representatives of the Ottoman Empire in Geneva and New York were denying the annihilation of Armenians in real-time, clinging to the arguments of negation and rationalization that the first denialist pamphlets would go on to compile as early as 1916-1917.

Roots Revealed: How a New Turkish Government Genealogy Database Exposes Citizens’ Armenian Ancestries

George Aghjayan

On Feb. 9, reports surfaced that over four million Turkish citizens had attempted to access the online government system (known as “e-Devlet”) seeking access to their family tree. Regardless of whether the figure is accurate, it is clear that the high volume of traffic to the website at first slowed and ultimately forced the shutdown of the system, which had only recently been opened.

The reason for the extraordinary interest in these family tree reports was the claim that they contained much more information than previously available—information dating back as the early 1800s in some cases. In addition, this was the first time such information was so easily accessible online from anywhere in the world. The internet soon filled with stories of Turkish citizens learning of Armenian and other ancestry they had not known about previously.

Turkish genealogy database fascinates, frightens Turks

 Fehim Tastekin

During the days when Turkey still hoped to join the European Union, its people were becoming willing to question their ethnic and religious ancestry. Since then, the country has reverted to a time when people were disgraced and denigrated, with the government’s blessings, as “crypto-Armenians."

Hrant Dink was the editor of the Armenian-language newspaper Agos in 2004 when he wrote that Sabiha Gokcen, the first female military pilot of the Turkish Republic, was of Armenian parentage. Because of this and other articles he penned, Dink found himself the subject of investigation by the Justice Ministry. He was assassinated in 2007 for reasons thought to be related to his strong support for Armenian causes.

Why is Turkey reviving an Ottoman sultan?

Mustafa Akyol

 

In Turkey, there has been an unmistakable revival of the image of Sultan Abdulhamid II. The powerful Ottoman monarch who ruled the empire single-handedly from 1876 to 1909 is praised with a flood of articles in the pro-government press, endless messages on social media and various conferences and panels. The speaker of the Turkish parliament, Ismail Kahraman, a confidant of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even hosted an “International Symposium on Sultan Abdulhamid II and His Era,” at the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul, a relic from the latter-day Ottoman Empire. The great sultan, Kahraman said, “is a mariner’s compass to give us direction and enlighten our future.”

Turkey's coup may have failed – but history shows that it won’t be long before another one succeeds

Robert Fisk

 

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had it coming. The Turkish army was never going to remain compliant while the man who would recreate the Ottoman Empire turned his neighbours into enemies and his country into a mockery of itself. But it would be a grave mistake to assume two things: that the putting down of a military coup is a momentary matter after which the Turkish army will remain obedient to its sultan; and to regard at least 161 deaths and more than 2,839 detained in isolation from the collapse of the nation-states of the Middle East.

In Search of the ARF’s 1908 Istanbul Headquarters

Varak Ketsemanian and Daniel Ohanian

 

Of the plethora of contexts from which the history of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) is inextricable, that of the late 19^th-/early 20^th -century Ottoman Empire is among the most important. As a prominent political party, the ARF came to the forefront of Ottoman politics particularly after the July 1908 Constitutional—or Young Turk—Revolution, in which it played an important role. While it had had underground cells, secret meeting places, and an organizational network in Istanbul (Constantinople) since its founding in 1890, it was the political liberty brought about by this revolution that allowed the ARF to operate openly in the imperial capital.¹

Was there a captain with the name Torossian?

Orhan Kemal Cengiz

 

In my history lessons in middle school and high school, I never heard any foreigner's name in the Ottoman army when our teachers talked about the Battle of the Dardanelles.

I did not even register this battle in my mind as part of World War I. There was a Battle of the Dardanelles, which was led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and we fought a heroic war against enemies.

So many years later I was shocked to learn that not only was the Battle of the Dardanelles led by German military officers, but also almost the entire Ottoman General Staff was under their control.

Atatürk was a war hero, as it was said, but he just led a battle in this or that front of the Dardanelles Campaign.

The Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Knowledge

Christine Philliou

 

In this centennial year since the Armenian Genocide, countless conferences, meetings, and commemorations are underway across the globe. While they have all been peaceful so far, they come at the end of a century of violence. I refer not just to the events of 1915–17, but also the waves of violence spurred by memory, recognition, and denial ever since. First came the killings, at the hands of individual Armenians, of two of the leading perpetrators of the violence, Talaat and Cemal Pashas in Berlin and Tiflis, respectively, in the 1920s. Then came the nearly 50 people, many of them Turkish diplomats, killed, and the hundreds more injured, across the globe by the Armenian organization ASALA in the 1970s to protest Turkey’s continuing refusal to recognize the genocide.

New Texts Out Now: Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Bedross Der Matossian (BDM): I have always been interested in the history of the late Ottoman period, in particular the era of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) and the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918). Most of the scholarship about the period in the past has been written from the perspective of the dominant ruling elite/political center. It is only in the past decade that we see new studies that provide a broader picture of the period by incorporating non-dominant groups. It is with this intention in mind that I decided to concentrate on examining one of the most important turning points in the beginning of the modern Middle East from the perspective of the non-dominant groups.

Much has been written on the causes and initial implementation of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. There is, however, a dearth of material that appropriately addresses its complexity and its impact on the worldview of the different non-dominant groups in the post-revolutionary period. Existing scholarship on the impact of the Young Turk Revolution on the Ottoman society is divided into two groups. One views the Revolution as a factor that led to the debilitation of interethnic relations leading to the rise of ethnic nationalism among the non-dominant groups, while the other romanticizes the period as the beginning of “civic nationalism” under the rubric of Ottomanism which was interrupted by World War I. I argue in the book that both approaches fail to adequately problematize the Revolution and demonstrate its complexities.

Eugene Rogan: "The Fall of the Ottomans – The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920"

Efraim Karsh

A century after the catastrophic blunder that led to the destruction of the then longest-surviving empire on earth, culpability is still ascribed to the European powers. Rather than view the Ottoman entry into the First World War on the losing side for what it was – a failed imperialist bid for territorial aggrandizement and reassertion of lost glory – the Muslim empire has been portrayed as the hapless victim of European machinations, driven into the world conflict by overbearing powers eager to expedite its demise and gobble up its lands.

The Role of Historians of Turkey in the Study of Armenian Genocide

Erik Jan Zürcher 

On the occasion of the centenary of the Armenian genocide someone like me, who sees himself as a historian of Turkey in the twentieth century, has to speak out.

In the first place, there are moral and ethical reasons why this is so.  Historians of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the twentieth century have a special responsibility, because we have been part of the fabric that maintained the silence for so long. We cannot allow a situation to continue such as I knew it when I was a student and a young university teacher in the nineteen seventies and eighties, when –in spite of the fact that outside our field the genocide had been an object of historical research for 50 years– we were barely aware of what had happened in 1915. Our textbooks only mentioned it as a footnote to history, if at all, and never defined it as a genocide. Our teachers never discussed it.

Stealing a page from Big Tobacco and climate-change deniers: How Armenian genocide denialists get away with it

Eric Bogosian

 

It would be a mistake to think of the Ottoman leaders who engineered the mass destruction of the Armenians during World War I as nothing more than bloodthirsty barbarians. To be sure, many of their proxies were intensely violent characters common to the frontier lands of Eastern Asia Minor. But the leaders of the Ottoman Empire, the key figures in the Committee for Union and Progress, specifically Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Doctor Behaeddin Shakir and associates such as Ziya Gokalp, were urbane Europeans. They saw the world through European eyes and understood very well European law. To be sure, the eradication of the Armenian people from their homelands was a massive and terrible bloodletting, but it was not the product of a breakdown of civilization. Instead it was, like the Holocaust that would follow only 25 years later, a centrally organized, criminal act planned and prosecuted by wily and callous political leaders.

Steve Jobs Took the Armenian Genocide Personally

Nina Strochlic

 

On Friday, wrists around the world will welcome the most anticipated gadget since the iPad came to our fingertips five years ago. The Apple Watch has stirred breathless speculation, imitation, and excitement long before its reveal last September. But the date chosen for its release has caused a too-bizarre-to-be-true historic collision that Apple’s founder would likely never have allowed to happen.

One hundred years after Steve Jobs’s adoptive family escaped the Armenian Genocide, the company he created is releasing its biggest new product on the centennial of a mass killing that left 1.5 million dead at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.

Armenia’s genocide: death and denial

David Gardner

‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide, by Ronald Grigor Suny, Princeton University Press, RRP£24.95 / RRP$35, 520 pages
Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide, by Thomas de Waal, Oxford University Press, RRP£20 / RRP$29.95, 312 pages
Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, by Karnig Panian, Stanford University Press, RRP$25, 216 pages
 

Pope Francis caused a diplomatic uproar in Turkey this week when he called the massacre of the Ottoman Armenians of Anatolia a century ago genocide. Even if the term had not been invented when most of the mass killings took place in 1915-16, and was to be legally defined only in the 1948 UN convention on genocide, he was stating a fact. Thoroughly an array of documented accounts over the past two decades, by Turks, Armenians and western historians, have placed the nature of those atrocities beyond the questioning of the modern Turkish republican narrative.

Are we the Serbs of Srebrenica?

Belgin Akaltan

 

I have been incubating this piece for a couple of years. I have been turning it from right to left, left to right, upside-down... I have started writing it many times and I did not like it just as many times and started again. This has been going on for a while but I have decided to go ahead, whatever the outcome is, whether I like it or not.
First thing, I always put on a playlist from my dear friend, writer, gourmet, radio programmer, academic and jazz-lover Güzin Yalın. I always do that when I have stopovers in writing or when I have stopovers in myself. If I am too lazy, too dumb, too excited, too inspired, too depressed, when ideas and phrases race in my mind, I play the songs she chose for her Mardin piece in particular. Güzin’s playlists have a magical effect on me.

Turkey’s Century of Denial About an Armenian Genocide

Tim Arango

CUNGUS (*), Turkey — The crumbling stone monastery, built into the hillside, stands as a forlorn monument to an awful past. So, too, does the decaying church on the other side of this mountain village. Farther out, a crevice is sliced into the earth, so deep that peering into it, one sees only blackness. Haunting for its history, it was there that a century ago, an untold number of Armenians were tossed to their deaths.

“They threw them in that hole, all the men,” said Vahit Sahin, 78, sitting at a cafe in the center of the village, reciting the stories that have passed through generations.

Armenian Genocide, a Century on

Vicken Cheterian

 

Geoffrey Robertson started his talk at the Responsibility 2015 conference in New York by telling the story of his great-uncle. William Robertson was an Australian soldier in the allied forces who in 1915 was sent to fight against the Ottoman army and, hardly twenty-four hours after disembarking at Gallipoli and joining his comrades in a charge on the cliff-top defences, was felled by a sniper or machine‐gunner.

Armenian Genocide - German Guilt?

Richard Fuchs

In the German Reichstag on September 29, 1916, the diplomat Gottlieb von Jagow had to give parliament an account of the terrible events in Turkey, then the Ottoman Empire.

It was about mass displacement and executions taking place in the eastern region of Anatolia. The German Empire was a colonial power there at the time and also an ally of the Ottoman government, which had previously initiated a mass persecution of Christian Armenians before the onset of World War I. "We did everything we could," stated Jagow in defense of Germany's passivity.

This silent acquiescence toward the mass murders has been the subject of the International Historians Congress in Berlin.

Society for Armenian Studies Hosts Conference on ‘Armenians in the Ottoman Empire’

Aram Arkun

 

The Society for Armenian Studies (SAS), a primarily American association of scholars and supporters of Armenology, is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. It held an international conference in Yerevan in October, and on November 21-22, it convened a conference in Washington, DC, called “Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th-20th Centuries.”