Truth in telling: Reconciling realities in the genocide of the ottoman armenians

American Historical Review

Volumn 114, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 930-946

  Suny, Ronald Grigor ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 73349089307     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.114.4.930     Document Type: Review

References (48)

1. Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?ex=1255665600en= 890a96189e162076ei=5090.
2. White House Press Briefing with Ari Fleischer, June 17, 2003.
3. This argument has been called "the provocation thesis" by political scientist Robert Melson.
4. See Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago, 1992);
5. and Melson, "A Theoretical Enquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 1894-1896," Comparative Studies in Society and History 24, no. 3 (1982):481-509.
6. Uppercase "Genocide" will be used in this article to refer to the Armenian Genocide of 1915, while lowercase "genocide" refers to the phenomenon more generally. This usage is consistent with the now conventional employment of "Holocaust" with a capital "H" to refer to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis.
7. Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, R. I., 1995);
8. Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict (New Brunswick, N. J., 1999);
9. and Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (New York, 2003).
10. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, 2 vols., vol. 1: The Central Lands (New York, 1982);
11. Aron Rodrigue, "Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire: Interview by Nancy Reynolds," Stanford Humanities Review 5, no. 1 (1995):85.
12. Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-1918 (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).
13. M. Şükrü Hanioǧlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York, 1995). Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who knew the leaders of the Young Turks personally, believed that violence was inscribed in Islam, but he characterized Minister of the Interior Tâlât, one of the key architects of the Genocide, as uninspired by Islam or any religion. "I hate all priests, rabbis, and hodjas," Tâlât told Morgenthau.
14. Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (1918; repr., Detroit, 2003), 14.
15. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1968), 356.
16. Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire (New York, 1983);
17. McCarthy, Turks and Armenians: A Manual on the Armenian Question (Washington, D. C., 1989);
18. Heath W. Lowry, The Story behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Istanbul, 1990);
19. Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Cambridge, 1977);
20. and Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City, 2005).
21. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford, 2005);
22. David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, N. J., 2006);
23. Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller, eds., Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah/The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah (Zurich, 2002);
24. Hans-Lukas Kieser, ed., Turkey beyond Nationalism: Towards Post-National Identities (London, 2006);
25. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge, 2005);
26. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2001);
27. Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, N. Y., 2004).
28. Many of these works are still in preparation, but among the first to appear were Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide (London, 2004);
29. Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York, 2006);
30. Fuat Dündar, İttihat ve Terakki'nin Müslümanlari İskan Politikasi [The Muslims' Resettlement Policy of the Committee of Union and Progress (1913-1918)] (Istanbul, 2001);
31. Dündar, "L'ingenierie ethnique du Comité Union et Progrès et la turcisation de l'Anatolie (1913-1918)" (Thèse de Doctorat en Histoire, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2006);
32. Fatma Müge Göçek, "Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on the Armenian Deportations and Massacres of 1915," in
33. Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer, and Y. Hakan Erdem, eds., Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century (Seattle, 2006), 101-127.
34. Paul Kubichek is now a professor of political science at Oakland University.
35. The graduate student who first suggested the project was Kenneth Church; the other faculty member involved in organizing the initial workshop was Stefanie Platz. They were subsequently joined in the organization of the workshops by Taner Akçam, Elazar Barkan, Paul Boghossian, Selim Deringil, Stephen Feinstein, Jirair Libaridian, and Eric Weitz.
36. Michael Mann, Norman Naimark, and I are among those who have argued for contingency and the distinctiveness of the Genocide. Ronald Grigor Suny, "Empire and Nation: Armenians, Turks, and the End of the Ottoman Empire," Armenian Forum 1, no. 2 (1998):17-51;
37. critical responses by Vahakn N. Dadrian, Engin Deniz Akarli, and Selim Deringil, with a reply by Suny, 131-136. A similar argument had been made earlier by Yves Ternon in a series of works: Les Arméniens: Histoire d'un génocide (Paris, 1977);
38. La Cause arménienne (Paris, 1983);
39. with Gérard Chalian, The Armenians from Genocide to Resistance, trans.
40. Tony Berrett (London, 1983) and Le génocide des Arméniens, 1915-1917 (Paris, 1984);
41. and his own Enquête sur la négation d'un génocide (Marseilles, 1989).
42. For a review of these debates, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd ed. (London, 1993), 80-107;
43. and Geoff Eley's introductory essay to his edited volume The "Goldhagen Effect": History, Memory, Nazism-Facing the German Past (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2000), 1-31.
44. On TARC, with which WATS has sometimes been confused or deliberately conflated
45. see David L. Phillips, Unsilencing the Past: Track Two Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation (New York, 2005).
46. "'A Special Organization Killed Armenians': An Interview with Halil Berktay," Radikal (Istanbul), June 30, 2000, interviewed by Nese Duzel, translated by Marc David Baer.
47. The account of the Istanbul conference comes from a report authored by Fatma Müge Göçek and circulated through the WATS e-mail list.
48. A useful discussion of the distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide can be found in Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 2-5.