NAASR’s Mardigian Library Receives Rare Guerguerian Archives

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research has received one of the most significant archives of documents relating to the Armenian Genocide—the archive collected by the late Fr. Krikor Guerguerian—for research and study in NAASR’s Mardigian Library. These materials are considered “priceless” by noted scholar Prof. Taner Akçam, who relied on them heavily for his book “Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide” (Palgrave, 2018). Akçam holds the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Among the important items in the Guerguerian archive are photographic copies of numerous official Ottoman telegrams which were used in the 1919-20 Military Tribunals but had since vanished, including one from Behaeddin Shakir, one of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), inquiring about details from the field on the deportations and killings of Armenians. Akçam considers this document as a clear expression of the CUP leadership’s genocidal intentions. The archive also contains photographic images of the now lost “Memoir of Naim Bey” published by Aram Andonian around 1920.

‘Sherlock Holmes of Armenian Genocide’ Uncovers Lost Evidence

Tim Arango

 

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.

The Authenticity of the Naim Efendi Memoirs and Talat Pasha Telegrams

Below is the English translation of an interview conducted by Turkey’s Agos Newspaper with Professor Taner Akcam on the authenticity of long disputed Armenian Genocide documents—the memoir of Naim Bey and the Talat Pasha telegrams. Akcam is the Robert Aram, Marianne Kaloosdian, and Stephen and Marion Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University.

Agos: A new work of yours, named The Naim Efendi Memoirs and Talat Pasha Telegrams has been published. Could you briefly tell us what your book is about?

Taner Akcam: As the title indicates, the book is about the memoirs of an Ottoman officer by the name of Naim Efendi and the Talat Pasha telegrams, which ordered the killing Armenians.

Agos: Aren’t these part of the so-called “Talat Pasha fake telegrams” claimed to be fabricated by the Armenians?

T.A.: Yes, these are the memoirs of Naim Efendi and the telegrams he gave to [Aram] Andonian, which everyone regards as fake or, if they find them legitimate, do not speak up about it.

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.

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.

Islamized Armenians in Turkey Represent Age-Long Assimilation Policy

The Islamization of Armenians in Turkey is the product of a long-term and systematic political strategy of assimilating and Turkifying the Armenian community, according to documents from the late Ottoman era, said Taner Akçam, a Turkish-German historian and sociologist, at the Conference on Islamized Armenians held in Istanbul over the weekend, Today’s Zaman reports.

Taner Akcam Awarded MESA’s Prestigious Hourani Book Prize

Historian Taner Akcam has recently received the Middle East Studies Association’s (MESA) 2013 Hourani Book Prize for The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Akcam is the Robert Aram, Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marion Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University.

"Armenian Review" Appoints New Assistant Editor, Publishes Recent Issue

The Spring-Summer 2013 issue of the "Armenian Review" was published earlier this month. The most recent issue includes articles ranging from historic textual analysis to current political issues.

The Armenian Hero Turkey Would Prefer to Forget

Robert Fisk
 

Think Captain Torossian.  Confronted by the chilling hundredth anniversary of the genocide of one and a half million Armenian men, women and children at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915, Turkey’s government is planning to swamp memories of the Armenian massacres with ceremonies commemorating the Turkish victory over the Allies at the battle of Gallipoli in the same year. Already, loyalist academics have done their best to ignore the presence of thousands of Arab troops among the 1915 Turkish armies at Gallipoli -- and are now even branding an Armenian Turkish artillery officer who was decorated for his bravery at Gallipoli as a liar who fabricated his own biography.

Taner Akcam: "La negacion del genocidio es una industria"

Guillaume Perrier

Traducción de Eduardo Karsaclián

El siguiente reportaje al historiador Taner Akcam, actualmente titular de la cátedra de Genocidio Armenio en la Universidad Clark de Worcester (Massachussetts) y autor de numerosos libros sobre el tema, apareció en la edición del 7 de enero del diario francés "Le Monde".

¿Qué piensa usted de la iniciativa francesa y de la proposición de ley para la penalización de la negación de los genocidios en general y del Genocidio Armenio en particular? 

Como lo dice la expresión, la mala publicidad no existe. Incluso si a corto plazo la ley francesa ha sido recibida de manera muy negativa en Turquía, creo que a largo plazo los efectos serán positivos. Dentro de sus propias fronteras, Turquía puede tratar y continuar prohibiendo y manoseando la verdad, pero internacionalmente habrá recordatorios continuos (como esta ley francesa) de un problema que Turquía debe confrontar y, en definitiva, resolver.

European Court of Human Rights: Turkey Cannot Criminalize Genocide Recognition

The European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled on October 25, 2011 that the recognition of the Armenian Genocide cannot be criminalized in Turkey. The verdict stemmed from a case brought to the court by noted scholar Taner Akcam.

In the case Taner Akcam vs. Turkey, the court ruled that Turkey’s ongoing criminal prosecution of scholarship on the Armenian Genocide issue constituted a violation of Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights.