{"id":19684,"date":"2017-04-22T20:36:44","date_gmt":"2017-04-22T20:36:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/?p=19684"},"modified":"2017-04-22T20:37:15","modified_gmt":"2017-04-22T20:37:15","slug":"sherlock-holmes-of-armenian-genocide-uncovers-lost-evidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/?p=19684","title":{"rendered":"Sherlock Holmes of Armenian Genocide\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7 Uncovers Lost Evidence"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/span> Credit<\/span> Bryan Denton for The New York Times <\/span><\/h5>\n
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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\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s planners were nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n

Now, Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied the genocide for decades<\/a> by piecing together documents from around the world to establish state complicity<\/a> in the killings, says he has unearthed an original telegram from the trials, in an archive held by the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.<\/p>\n

\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093Until recently, the smoking gun was missing,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d Mr. Akcam said. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093This is the smoking gun.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d He called his find \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093an earthquake in our field,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d and said he hoped it would remove \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093the last brick in the denialist wall.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s first genocide.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

Mr. Akcam said he had little hope that his new finding would immediately change things, given Turkey\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s ossified policy of denial and especially at a time of political turmoil when its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has turned more nationalist.<\/p>\n

But Mr. Akcam\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s life\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s work has been to puncture, fact by fact, document by document, the denials of Turkey.<\/p>\n

\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093My firm belief as a Turk is that democracy and human rights in Turkey can only be established by facing history and acknowledging historic wrongdoings,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d he said.<\/p>\n

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The gutted and abandoned interior of an Armenian monastery, north of Diyarbakir, Turkey, which, according to locals, is now used to house livestock.<\/span> Credit<\/span> Bryan Denton for The New York Times <\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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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.<\/p>\n

\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093The past is not the past in the Middle East,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d he said. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093This is the biggest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/p>\n

Eric D. Weitz, a history professor<\/a> at the City College of New York and an expert on the Armenian genocide, called Mr. Akcam \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093the Sherlock Holmes of Armenian genocide.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/p>\n

\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093He has piled clue upon clue upon clue,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d Professor Weitz added.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For historians, the court cases were one piece of a mountain of evidence that emerged over the years \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009d including reports in several languages from diplomats, missionaries and journalists who witnessed the events as they happened \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009d that established the historical fact of the killings and qualified them as a genocide.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Tripods used for hanging people during the Armenian genocide that started in 1915.<\/span> Credit<\/span> Culture Club\/Getty Images <\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Turkey also claimed that the Armenians were traitors, and had been planning to join with Russia, then an enemy of the Ottoman Empire.<\/p>\n

That position is deeply entwined in Turkish culture \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009d it is standard in school curriculums \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009d and polling has shown that a majority of Turks share the government\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s position.<\/p>\n

\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093My approach is that as much proof as you put in front of denialists, denialists will remain denialists,\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d said Bedross Der Matossian, a historian<\/a> at the University of Nebraska and the author of \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/a><\/p>\n

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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.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

It was the start of the enormous killing operation, which involved forced marches into the Syrian desert, summary executions and rapes.<\/p>\n

Two years ago, Pope Francis referred to the killings as a genocide<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

This year, dozens of congressional leaders have signed a letter urging President Trump to recognize the genocide.<\/p>\n

But that is unlikely, especially after Mr. Trump recently congratulated Mr. Erdogan for winning expanded powers<\/a> in a referendum that critics say was marred by fraud.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> as \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093slim, undersized, swarthy men lurking in a doorway.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/p>\n

nytimes.com<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19686,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19684"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}