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STATE OF DENIAL - TURKEY SPENDS MILLIONS TO COVER UP ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By David Holthouse
Intelligence Report
Summer 2008
Early this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to require all
public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new
course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications." It
includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which more than a
million Armenians perished in a methodical and premeditated scheme
of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of Turkey during and just
after World War I.
The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter
Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of
Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in
the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian
community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a
badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully
plotted genocide.
Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American
scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by
hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of
Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide -- a network
so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical
truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers
and even its president to reverse long-held po licy positions.
Lewy makes similar revisionist claims in his 2005 book The Armenian
Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide and in frequent
lectures at university campuses across the country. Speaking at Harvard
University in March 2007, he chalked up the ghastly Armenian death toll
to "bungling misrule," and stressed that "it is important to bear in
mind the enormous difference between ineptness, even ineptness that
had tragic consequences" and deliberate mass murder.
"Armenians call the calamitous events of 1915-1916 in the Ottoman
Empire the first genocide of the twentieth century," he said. "Most
Turks refer to this episode as war time relocation made necessary by
the treasonous conduct of the Armenian minority. The debate on what
actually happened has been going on for almost 100 years and shows
no signs of resolution."
But it's not only Armenians calling the slaughter a genocide, and
there is no real debate about its essential details, according to
the vast majority of credible historians. Although Lewy's brand of
genocide denial is subtler than that of Holocaust deniers who declare
there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, it's no less an attempt to
rewrite history.
"The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide -- hundreds
of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments,
and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of
decades -- is consistent ," the International Association of Genocide
Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government.
"The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915,
under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman
Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens -- an
unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians
were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and
forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into
permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its
homeland of 2,500 years."
Double Killing Despite this clear consensus of experts, Turkey exerts
political leverage and spends millions of dollars in the United States
to obfuscate the Armenian genocide, with alarming success even at
the highest levels of government. Lobbyists on the Turkish payroll
stymied a Congressional resolution commemorating the genocide last
fall by convincing lawmakers to reverse their stated positions. Even
President Bush flip-flopped.
Revisionist historians who conjure doubt about the Armenian genocide
and are paid by the Turkish government provided the politicians
with the intellectual cover they needed to claim they were refusing
to dictate history rather than caving in to a foreign government's
present-day interests.
"This all happened a long time ago, and I don't know if we can know
whether it was a massacre or a genocide or what," said U.S. Rep. John
Murtha (D-Penn.) after changing his vote.
"The last thing Congress should be doing is deciding the history of
an empire [the Ottoman empire] that doesn't even exist any more,"
said President Bush.
But experts in genocide saw things quite differently.
"Denial is the final stage of genocide," says Gregory Stanton,
president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "It
is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically
and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of
their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing
to Armenians around the world."
Last year, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter
condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel
laureates including Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and
political activist.
Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to cover
up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it strives to kill
the memory of the original atrocities.
He was hardly the first. As long ago as 1943, law professor Raphael
Lemkin, who would later serve as an advisor to Nuremburg chief counsel
Robert Jackson, coined the term "genocide" with the Armenians in mind.
Stanton, a former U.S. State Department official who drafted the United
Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, spoke this April at a Uni ted States
Capitol ceremony honoring victims of the Armenian genocide -- a
ceremony held four months after the bill to commemorate the slaughter
was shot down.
"The U.S. government should not be party to efforts to kill the
memory of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide
of the Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan for
the Holocaust," Stanton said before an audience that included three
survivors of the Armenian genocide and more than 100 representatives
and senators.
Infiltrating the Academy Efforts to kill the memory of the Armenian
genocide began while carrion birds were still picking over corpses in
their desert boneyards, with Turkey issuing a first official statement
assuring the world at large that no atrocities had occurred. Turkey's
primary strategy for denying the Armenian genocide since then has
shifted from blanket denial to disputing the death toll to blaming
the massacres on Kurdish bandits and a few rogue officials to claiming
the Armenians who died were enemy combatants in a civil war.
Turkey began intervening in the U.S. on behalf of denying the
genocide in the 1930s, when Turkish leaders convinced the U.S. State
Department to prevent MGM studios from making a movie based on the
book The Forty Days of the Musa Dagh because it depicted aspects of
the Armenian genocide.
In 1982, the government of Turkey donated $3 million to create th
e Institute for Turkish Studies, a nonprofit organization housed
at Georgetown University that pushes a pro-Turkey agenda, including
denial of the Armenian genocide. Three years later, in 1985, Turkey
bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Washington
Post and The Washington Times to publish a letter questioning the
Armenian genocide that was signed by 69 American scholars. All 69 had
received funding that year from the Institute for Turkish Studies or
another of Turkey's surrogates like the Ankara Chamber of Commerce,
a quasi-governmental agency in Turkey's capital city.
The Institute for Turkish Studies has since received sizable donations
from American defense contractors that sell arms to Turkey, including
General Dynamics and Westinghouse. Turkey continues to provide an
annual subsidy to support the institute. In 2006, the most recent year
for which tax records are available, the institute awarded $85,000
in grants to scholars. Its chairman is the current Turkish ambassador
to the U.S., Nabi Sensoy.
The first unassailable evidence of the extent of the Armenian genocide
denial industry's reach in academic circles arrived in 1990 in an
envelope addressed to Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychology and
psychiatry at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and
John Jay College. It contained a letter signed by Nuzhet Kandemir, who
was then Turkey's ambassador to the United States, protesting Lifton's
inclusion of several passing references to the Armenian genocide
in his prize-winning book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide.
"It is particularly disturbing to see a major scholar on the
holocaust, a tragedy whose enormity and barbarity must never be
forgotten, so careless in his references to a field outside his own
area of expertise," Kandemir wrote. "To compare a tragic civil war
perpetrated by misguided Armenian nationalists, and the human suffering
it wrought on both Muslim and Christian populations, with the horrors
of a premeditated attempt to systematically eradicate a people is,
to anyone familiar with the history in question, simply ludicrous."
There was nothing out of the ordinary about Kandemir's
letter. Academics who write about the Armenian genocide were then
and still are routinely castigated by Turkish authorities.
What Lifton found intriguing, however, was a second letter in
the envelope, which the Turkish ambassador had included quite by
accident. It was a memo to Kandemir from Near East historian Heath
Lowry, in which Lowry provided Kandemir with a point-by-point cheat
sheet on how to attack Lifton's book, which Lowry chummily referred
to as "our problem."
Lowry at the time was the founding director of the Institute for
Turkish Studies. He resigned that position in 1996 when he was selected
from a field of 20 candidates to fill the Ataturk Chair of Turkish
Studie s at Princeton University, a new position in the Near Eastern
Studies department that was created with a $750,000 matching grant
from the government of Turkey.
Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, Lowry had never held a
full-time teaching position and had not published a single work of
scholarship through a major publishing house. As a result of that and
of what The Boston Globe described in 1995 as his work as "a long-time
lobbyist for the Turkish government," his appointment sparked a
firestorm of controversy. A protest group called Princeton Alumni for
Credibility published a petition decrying Lowry's appointment that
was signed by more than 80 leading scholars and writers, including
Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Cornel West, Joyce Carol Oates and many
historians and experts in genocide.
Peter Balakian, the director of Colgate University's Center for the
Study of Ethics and World Societies and the author of The Burning
Tigris: the Armenian Genocide and America's Response, called Lowry
"a propagandist for a foreign government."
Speaking at a 2005 symposium at Princeton commemorating the 90th
anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Balakian posed a rhetorical
question: "Would a university want someone who worked with a neo-Nazi
group to cover up the Holocaust on their faculty?"
The relationship of Turkey to U.S. scholars promoting Armenian
genocide denial is similar to that of the oil industry to fringe
climatologists w ho dispute the reality of global warming. The cause
and effect relationship is murky. It's impossible to know for sure
if they're making the claims to get the money or getting the money
because they make the claims. And many of those who receive money from
the Institute of Turkish Studies do little or nothing to support the
government's version of what happened to its Armenian minority.
But a number of them certainly seem to, including Justin A. McCarthy,
a professor of history at the University of Louisville. McCarthy claims
that death tolls attributed to what he calls "this imaginary Turkish
plan" are grossly exaggerated and resulted from justifiable wartime
self-defense actions triggered by traitorous Armenians conspiring
with Turkey's enemies.
McCarthy also points out that Armenians massacred Turks on at least
one occasion before the "so-called Armenian genocide." In other words,
they had it coming. "The question of who started the conflicts is
important, both historically and morally important," McCarthy declared
in a 2005 speech before the Turkish Grand National Assembly. "In more
than 100 years of warfare, Turks and Armenians killed each other. The
question of who began the killing must be understood, because it is
seldom justifiable to be the aggressor, but is always justifiable to
defend yourself."
He continued: "If those who defend themselves go beyond defense and
exact revenge, as always happens in war, they shoul d be identified
and criticized. But those who should be most blamed are those who
began the wars, those who committed the first evil deeds, and those
who caused the bloodshed. Those who began the conflict were the
Armenian nationalists, the Armenian revolutionaries. The guilt is on
their heads."
Enforcing the Turkish View
In France and Switzerland, it's a crime to deny the Armenian
genocide. In Turkey, it's a crime to affirm it.
Enacted in 2005, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code makes it
illegal for any citizen or resident of Turkey to give credence to
the Armenian genocide.
Numerous journalists and scholars have been prosecuted for "denigrating
Turkishness" under that statute, beginning with Nobel laureate Orhan
Pamuk, who was charged for stating, "A million Armenians were killed
in these lands." Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink was
prosecuted three times for criticizing the Turkish government's
longstanding policy of denying the Armenian genocide.
Where the law failed to silence Dink, bullets succeeded. He was gunned
down in front of his central Istanbul office last January by a Turkish
ultranationalist. Footage and photos later surfaced of the assassin
celebrating in front of a Turkish flag with grinning policemen.
Dink's friend and ideological ally Taner Akcam, a distinguished
Turkish historian and sociologist on the faculty of the University
of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, attended
Dink's funeral in Turkey, despite the considerable risk to his
own life. Akcam, a leading international authority on the Armenian
genocide, was marked for death by Turkish ultranationalists following
the November 2006 publication of his book, A Shameful Act: the Armenian
Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. The book is a
definitive history based in large part on official documents from
Turkish government archives.
"It would be better for world peace and truth if sewer germs like you
were taken off the planet," went one of the dozens of anonymous threats
Akcam continues to receive in Minnesota. "Pray that the devil takes you
away soon because otherwise you'll be living a hell on earth. ... Who
am I? You're going to find out, Taner, you're going to find out."
Turkish ultranationalists have, in effect, targeted many other people
who, like Akcam, affirm the genocide. Several of their websites
include home addresses, phone numbers and photos of these scholars.
Genocide deniers often disrupt Akcam's lectures. In November 2006,
a gang of Turkish ultranationalists attacked him at a book signing
at City University of New York.
"Denial of the Armenian genocide has developed over the decades
to become a complex and far-reaching machine that rivals the Nazi
Germany propaganda ministry," says Akcam. "This machine runs on
academic dishonesty, fabricated information, political pressu re,
intimidation and threats, all funded or supported, directly or
indirectly, by the Turkish state. It has become a huge industry."
Convincing Congress
Academia is one of two major American fronts in Turkey's campaign to
kill the memory of the Armenian genocide. The other is Congress.
As the only Muslim-dominated country in a troubled region to call
the U.S.
and Israel its allies, Turkey wields significant political influence
that it uses to prevent the U.S. from joining 22 other nations in
officially recognizing the Armenian genocide as a historical fact.
In 1989, the U.S. State Department released archived eyewitness
accounts that, according to State Department officials, showed
that "thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and
helpless women and children, were butchered." That same year, a bill
commemorating the genocide was introduced in the U.S. Senate. But
Turkey responded by blocking U.S. Navy ships from entering
strategically important Turkish waters and by declaring a ban on
all U.S. military training operations on Turkish territory. The bill
quickly evaporated.
Last September, the matter came up again. The U.S. House Foreign
Relations Committee approved and moved to bring to the floor of
Congress a nonbinding resolution condemning the mass murder of
Armenians by Ottoman Turks, placing the death toll at 1.5 million,
and labeling the killing a "genocide."
This time, Turkey responded by=2 0recalling its ambassador to the
United States and forecasting dire repercussions. "In the case
that Armenian allegations are accepted, there will be problems in
the relations between the two countries," warned Turkish President
Abdullah Gul.
"Yesterday, some in Congress wanted to play hardball," said Egmen
Bagis, foreign policy advisor to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. "I can assure you, Turkey knows how to play hardball."
The next day, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack apologized
to Turkey on behalf of the United States by issuing a statement
expressing "regret" for the committee's actions, which, he cautioned,
"may do grave harm to U.S.-Turkish relations and to U.S. interests
in Europe and the Middle East."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates added his opposition to the resolution
and pointed out that 70% of the air cargo sent to U.S. forces in
Iraq and 30% of the fuel consumed by those forces is delivered via
Turkey. President Bush, perhaps forgetting his campaign promise in
2000 to push for official recognition of the Armenian genocide if
elected president, also came out against the resolution.
While Turkish officials made threats, lobbyists paid by Turkey
delivered money to congressmen in the form of campaign and political
action committee donations. Louisiana representative Bobby Jindal
(a Republican who's now Louisiana's governor) and Mississippi
representative Roger Wicker (now a Republican senator representing
that state) both dropped their sponsorship of the resolution and began
speaking against it -- but only after receiving around $20,000 each
from former congressmen Bob Livingston, a Republican, and Richard
Gephardt, a Democrat, who now work for lobbying firms contracted by
Turkey to oppose any recognition of the Armenian genocide.
In 2000, while still in office, Gephardt had declared that he was
"committed to obtaining official U.S. government recognition of the
Armenian genocide."
In 2003, he co-sponsored a resolution placing "the Armenian genocide"
in the company of the World War II Holocaust and mass deaths in
Cambodia and Rwanda that was voted down after a Turkish lobbying
blitzkrieg.
Since leaving office and accepting a $1.2 million-a-year contract to
lobby for Turkey, the former House majority leader has experienced
a profound change of heart. "Alienating Turkey through the passage
of the resolution could undermine our efforts to promote stability
in the theater of [Middle East] operations, if not exacerbate the
situation further," he wrote in an E-mail to the International Herald
Tribune. Last fall, as part of his efforts to help torpedo the symbolic
Armenian genocide resolution, Gephardt escorted Turkish Ambassador
Nabi Sensoy to meetings with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and
other Democratic leaders.
Bob Livingston, whose firm has been paid more than $12 million by
the Turkish government since 1999, also pitc hed in. As part of the
lobbying effort last fall that U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.),
one of the sponsors of the resolution, called "the most intense I've
ever seen," Livingston shepherded Turkish dignitaries from office to
office on Capitol Hill.
As another part of that campaign, the government of Turkey took
out full-page advertisements in major American newspapers calling
upon the members of Congress to "support efforts to examine history,
not legislate it." The ads featured a testimonial from Secretary of
State Condoleeza Rice -- "These historical circumstances require a
very detailed and sober look from historians" -- that implied that
historians have yet to seriously study the Armenian genocide.
More than 100 stated backers of the resolution withdrew their support,
and H.R. 106 never made it to the floor for a full vote.
The government of Turkey has since continued to call for a "historian's
commission" of scholars to "study the facts of what happened in
1915-1923."
The proposed committee is marketed as a high-minded quest for truth
and reconciliation, a long overdue arbitration of disputed history,
and a chance to finally give equal weight to both sides of the story.
But as the saying goes, a lie isn't the other side of any story. It's
just a lie.
"When it comes to the historical reality of the Armenian genocide,
there is no 'Armenian' or 'Turkish' side of the question, any more
t han there is a 'Jewish' or 'German' side of the historical reality
of the Holocaust," writes Torben Jorgensen, of the Danish Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies. "There is a scientific side and an
unscientific side -- acknowledgement or denial."
By David Holthouse
Intelligence Report
Summer 2008
Early this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to require all
public high school students in Canada's largest city to complete a new
course titled "Genocide: Historical and Contemporary Implications." It
includes a unit on the Armenian genocide, in which more than a
million Armenians perished in a methodical and premeditated scheme
of annihilation orchestrated by the rulers of Turkey during and just
after World War I.
The school board members each soon received a letter from Guenter
Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of
Massachusetts, rebuking them for classifying the Armenian genocide in
the same category as the Holocaust. "The tragic fate of the Armenian
community during World War I," Lewy wrote, is best understood as "a
badly mismanaged war-time security measure," rather than a carefully
plotted genocide.
Lewy is one of the most active members of a network of American
scholars, influence peddlers and website operators, financed by
hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the government of
Turkey, who promote the denial of the Armenian genocide -- a network
so influential that it was able last fall to defy both historical
truth and enormous political pressure to convince America's lawmakers
and even its president to reverse long-held po licy positions.
Lewy makes similar revisionist claims in his 2005 book The Armenian
Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide and in frequent
lectures at university campuses across the country. Speaking at Harvard
University in March 2007, he chalked up the ghastly Armenian death toll
to "bungling misrule," and stressed that "it is important to bear in
mind the enormous difference between ineptness, even ineptness that
had tragic consequences" and deliberate mass murder.
"Armenians call the calamitous events of 1915-1916 in the Ottoman
Empire the first genocide of the twentieth century," he said. "Most
Turks refer to this episode as war time relocation made necessary by
the treasonous conduct of the Armenian minority. The debate on what
actually happened has been going on for almost 100 years and shows
no signs of resolution."
But it's not only Armenians calling the slaughter a genocide, and
there is no real debate about its essential details, according to
the vast majority of credible historians. Although Lewy's brand of
genocide denial is subtler than that of Holocaust deniers who declare
there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, it's no less an attempt to
rewrite history.
"The overwhelming opinion of scholars who study genocide -- hundreds
of independent scholars, who have no affiliations with governments,
and whose work spans many countries and nationalities and the course of
decades -- is consistent ," the International Association of Genocide
Scholars stated in a 2005 letter to the Turkish government.
"The scholarly evidence reveals the following: On April 24, 1915,
under cover of World War I, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman
Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens -- an
unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million Armenians
were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and
forced death marches. The rest of the Armenian population fled into
permanent exile. Thus an ancient civilization was expunged from its
homeland of 2,500 years."
Double Killing Despite this clear consensus of experts, Turkey exerts
political leverage and spends millions of dollars in the United States
to obfuscate the Armenian genocide, with alarming success even at
the highest levels of government. Lobbyists on the Turkish payroll
stymied a Congressional resolution commemorating the genocide last
fall by convincing lawmakers to reverse their stated positions. Even
President Bush flip-flopped.
Revisionist historians who conjure doubt about the Armenian genocide
and are paid by the Turkish government provided the politicians
with the intellectual cover they needed to claim they were refusing
to dictate history rather than caving in to a foreign government's
present-day interests.
"This all happened a long time ago, and I don't know if we can know
whether it was a massacre or a genocide or what," said U.S. Rep. John
Murtha (D-Penn.) after changing his vote.
"The last thing Congress should be doing is deciding the history of
an empire [the Ottoman empire] that doesn't even exist any more,"
said President Bush.
But experts in genocide saw things quite differently.
"Denial is the final stage of genocide," says Gregory Stanton,
president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. "It
is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically
and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of
their relatives. That is what the Turkish government today is doing
to Armenians around the world."
Last year, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter
condemning Armenian genocide denial that was signed by 53 Nobel
laureates including Wiesel, the famous Holocaust survivor and
political activist.
Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey's 90-year-old campaign to cover
up the Armenian genocide a double killing, since it strives to kill
the memory of the original atrocities.
He was hardly the first. As long ago as 1943, law professor Raphael
Lemkin, who would later serve as an advisor to Nuremburg chief counsel
Robert Jackson, coined the term "genocide" with the Armenians in mind.
Stanton, a former U.S. State Department official who drafted the United
Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, spoke this April at a Uni ted States
Capitol ceremony honoring victims of the Armenian genocide -- a
ceremony held four months after the bill to commemorate the slaughter
was shot down.
"The U.S. government should not be party to efforts to kill the
memory of a historical fact as profound and important as the genocide
of the Armenians, which Hitler used as an example in his plan for
the Holocaust," Stanton said before an audience that included three
survivors of the Armenian genocide and more than 100 representatives
and senators.
Infiltrating the Academy Efforts to kill the memory of the Armenian
genocide began while carrion birds were still picking over corpses in
their desert boneyards, with Turkey issuing a first official statement
assuring the world at large that no atrocities had occurred. Turkey's
primary strategy for denying the Armenian genocide since then has
shifted from blanket denial to disputing the death toll to blaming
the massacres on Kurdish bandits and a few rogue officials to claiming
the Armenians who died were enemy combatants in a civil war.
Turkey began intervening in the U.S. on behalf of denying the
genocide in the 1930s, when Turkish leaders convinced the U.S. State
Department to prevent MGM studios from making a movie based on the
book The Forty Days of the Musa Dagh because it depicted aspects of
the Armenian genocide.
In 1982, the government of Turkey donated $3 million to create th
e Institute for Turkish Studies, a nonprofit organization housed
at Georgetown University that pushes a pro-Turkey agenda, including
denial of the Armenian genocide. Three years later, in 1985, Turkey
bought full-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Washington
Post and The Washington Times to publish a letter questioning the
Armenian genocide that was signed by 69 American scholars. All 69 had
received funding that year from the Institute for Turkish Studies or
another of Turkey's surrogates like the Ankara Chamber of Commerce,
a quasi-governmental agency in Turkey's capital city.
The Institute for Turkish Studies has since received sizable donations
from American defense contractors that sell arms to Turkey, including
General Dynamics and Westinghouse. Turkey continues to provide an
annual subsidy to support the institute. In 2006, the most recent year
for which tax records are available, the institute awarded $85,000
in grants to scholars. Its chairman is the current Turkish ambassador
to the U.S., Nabi Sensoy.
The first unassailable evidence of the extent of the Armenian genocide
denial industry's reach in academic circles arrived in 1990 in an
envelope addressed to Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychology and
psychiatry at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and
John Jay College. It contained a letter signed by Nuzhet Kandemir, who
was then Turkey's ambassador to the United States, protesting Lifton's
inclusion of several passing references to the Armenian genocide
in his prize-winning book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the
Psychology of Genocide.
"It is particularly disturbing to see a major scholar on the
holocaust, a tragedy whose enormity and barbarity must never be
forgotten, so careless in his references to a field outside his own
area of expertise," Kandemir wrote. "To compare a tragic civil war
perpetrated by misguided Armenian nationalists, and the human suffering
it wrought on both Muslim and Christian populations, with the horrors
of a premeditated attempt to systematically eradicate a people is,
to anyone familiar with the history in question, simply ludicrous."
There was nothing out of the ordinary about Kandemir's
letter. Academics who write about the Armenian genocide were then
and still are routinely castigated by Turkish authorities.
What Lifton found intriguing, however, was a second letter in
the envelope, which the Turkish ambassador had included quite by
accident. It was a memo to Kandemir from Near East historian Heath
Lowry, in which Lowry provided Kandemir with a point-by-point cheat
sheet on how to attack Lifton's book, which Lowry chummily referred
to as "our problem."
Lowry at the time was the founding director of the Institute for
Turkish Studies. He resigned that position in 1996 when he was selected
from a field of 20 candidates to fill the Ataturk Chair of Turkish
Studie s at Princeton University, a new position in the Near Eastern
Studies department that was created with a $750,000 matching grant
from the government of Turkey.
Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, Lowry had never held a
full-time teaching position and had not published a single work of
scholarship through a major publishing house. As a result of that and
of what The Boston Globe described in 1995 as his work as "a long-time
lobbyist for the Turkish government," his appointment sparked a
firestorm of controversy. A protest group called Princeton Alumni for
Credibility published a petition decrying Lowry's appointment that
was signed by more than 80 leading scholars and writers, including
Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Cornel West, Joyce Carol Oates and many
historians and experts in genocide.
Peter Balakian, the director of Colgate University's Center for the
Study of Ethics and World Societies and the author of The Burning
Tigris: the Armenian Genocide and America's Response, called Lowry
"a propagandist for a foreign government."
Speaking at a 2005 symposium at Princeton commemorating the 90th
anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Balakian posed a rhetorical
question: "Would a university want someone who worked with a neo-Nazi
group to cover up the Holocaust on their faculty?"
The relationship of Turkey to U.S. scholars promoting Armenian
genocide denial is similar to that of the oil industry to fringe
climatologists w ho dispute the reality of global warming. The cause
and effect relationship is murky. It's impossible to know for sure
if they're making the claims to get the money or getting the money
because they make the claims. And many of those who receive money from
the Institute of Turkish Studies do little or nothing to support the
government's version of what happened to its Armenian minority.
But a number of them certainly seem to, including Justin A. McCarthy,
a professor of history at the University of Louisville. McCarthy claims
that death tolls attributed to what he calls "this imaginary Turkish
plan" are grossly exaggerated and resulted from justifiable wartime
self-defense actions triggered by traitorous Armenians conspiring
with Turkey's enemies.
McCarthy also points out that Armenians massacred Turks on at least
one occasion before the "so-called Armenian genocide." In other words,
they had it coming. "The question of who started the conflicts is
important, both historically and morally important," McCarthy declared
in a 2005 speech before the Turkish Grand National Assembly. "In more
than 100 years of warfare, Turks and Armenians killed each other. The
question of who began the killing must be understood, because it is
seldom justifiable to be the aggressor, but is always justifiable to
defend yourself."
He continued: "If those who defend themselves go beyond defense and
exact revenge, as always happens in war, they shoul d be identified
and criticized. But those who should be most blamed are those who
began the wars, those who committed the first evil deeds, and those
who caused the bloodshed. Those who began the conflict were the
Armenian nationalists, the Armenian revolutionaries. The guilt is on
their heads."
Enforcing the Turkish View
In France and Switzerland, it's a crime to deny the Armenian
genocide. In Turkey, it's a crime to affirm it.
Enacted in 2005, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code makes it
illegal for any citizen or resident of Turkey to give credence to
the Armenian genocide.
Numerous journalists and scholars have been prosecuted for "denigrating
Turkishness" under that statute, beginning with Nobel laureate Orhan
Pamuk, who was charged for stating, "A million Armenians were killed
in these lands." Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor Hrant Dink was
prosecuted three times for criticizing the Turkish government's
longstanding policy of denying the Armenian genocide.
Where the law failed to silence Dink, bullets succeeded. He was gunned
down in front of his central Istanbul office last January by a Turkish
ultranationalist. Footage and photos later surfaced of the assassin
celebrating in front of a Turkish flag with grinning policemen.
Dink's friend and ideological ally Taner Akcam, a distinguished
Turkish historian and sociologist on the faculty of the University
of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, attended
Dink's funeral in Turkey, despite the considerable risk to his
own life. Akcam, a leading international authority on the Armenian
genocide, was marked for death by Turkish ultranationalists following
the November 2006 publication of his book, A Shameful Act: the Armenian
Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. The book is a
definitive history based in large part on official documents from
Turkish government archives.
"It would be better for world peace and truth if sewer germs like you
were taken off the planet," went one of the dozens of anonymous threats
Akcam continues to receive in Minnesota. "Pray that the devil takes you
away soon because otherwise you'll be living a hell on earth. ... Who
am I? You're going to find out, Taner, you're going to find out."
Turkish ultranationalists have, in effect, targeted many other people
who, like Akcam, affirm the genocide. Several of their websites
include home addresses, phone numbers and photos of these scholars.
Genocide deniers often disrupt Akcam's lectures. In November 2006,
a gang of Turkish ultranationalists attacked him at a book signing
at City University of New York.
"Denial of the Armenian genocide has developed over the decades
to become a complex and far-reaching machine that rivals the Nazi
Germany propaganda ministry," says Akcam. "This machine runs on
academic dishonesty, fabricated information, political pressu re,
intimidation and threats, all funded or supported, directly or
indirectly, by the Turkish state. It has become a huge industry."
Convincing Congress
Academia is one of two major American fronts in Turkey's campaign to
kill the memory of the Armenian genocide. The other is Congress.
As the only Muslim-dominated country in a troubled region to call
the U.S.
and Israel its allies, Turkey wields significant political influence
that it uses to prevent the U.S. from joining 22 other nations in
officially recognizing the Armenian genocide as a historical fact.
In 1989, the U.S. State Department released archived eyewitness
accounts that, according to State Department officials, showed
that "thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and
helpless women and children, were butchered." That same year, a bill
commemorating the genocide was introduced in the U.S. Senate. But
Turkey responded by blocking U.S. Navy ships from entering
strategically important Turkish waters and by declaring a ban on
all U.S. military training operations on Turkish territory. The bill
quickly evaporated.
Last September, the matter came up again. The U.S. House Foreign
Relations Committee approved and moved to bring to the floor of
Congress a nonbinding resolution condemning the mass murder of
Armenians by Ottoman Turks, placing the death toll at 1.5 million,
and labeling the killing a "genocide."
This time, Turkey responded by=2 0recalling its ambassador to the
United States and forecasting dire repercussions. "In the case
that Armenian allegations are accepted, there will be problems in
the relations between the two countries," warned Turkish President
Abdullah Gul.
"Yesterday, some in Congress wanted to play hardball," said Egmen
Bagis, foreign policy advisor to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan. "I can assure you, Turkey knows how to play hardball."
The next day, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack apologized
to Turkey on behalf of the United States by issuing a statement
expressing "regret" for the committee's actions, which, he cautioned,
"may do grave harm to U.S.-Turkish relations and to U.S. interests
in Europe and the Middle East."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates added his opposition to the resolution
and pointed out that 70% of the air cargo sent to U.S. forces in
Iraq and 30% of the fuel consumed by those forces is delivered via
Turkey. President Bush, perhaps forgetting his campaign promise in
2000 to push for official recognition of the Armenian genocide if
elected president, also came out against the resolution.
While Turkish officials made threats, lobbyists paid by Turkey
delivered money to congressmen in the form of campaign and political
action committee donations. Louisiana representative Bobby Jindal
(a Republican who's now Louisiana's governor) and Mississippi
representative Roger Wicker (now a Republican senator representing
that state) both dropped their sponsorship of the resolution and began
speaking against it -- but only after receiving around $20,000 each
from former congressmen Bob Livingston, a Republican, and Richard
Gephardt, a Democrat, who now work for lobbying firms contracted by
Turkey to oppose any recognition of the Armenian genocide.
In 2000, while still in office, Gephardt had declared that he was
"committed to obtaining official U.S. government recognition of the
Armenian genocide."
In 2003, he co-sponsored a resolution placing "the Armenian genocide"
in the company of the World War II Holocaust and mass deaths in
Cambodia and Rwanda that was voted down after a Turkish lobbying
blitzkrieg.
Since leaving office and accepting a $1.2 million-a-year contract to
lobby for Turkey, the former House majority leader has experienced
a profound change of heart. "Alienating Turkey through the passage
of the resolution could undermine our efforts to promote stability
in the theater of [Middle East] operations, if not exacerbate the
situation further," he wrote in an E-mail to the International Herald
Tribune. Last fall, as part of his efforts to help torpedo the symbolic
Armenian genocide resolution, Gephardt escorted Turkish Ambassador
Nabi Sensoy to meetings with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and
other Democratic leaders.
Bob Livingston, whose firm has been paid more than $12 million by
the Turkish government since 1999, also pitc hed in. As part of the
lobbying effort last fall that U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.),
one of the sponsors of the resolution, called "the most intense I've
ever seen," Livingston shepherded Turkish dignitaries from office to
office on Capitol Hill.
As another part of that campaign, the government of Turkey took
out full-page advertisements in major American newspapers calling
upon the members of Congress to "support efforts to examine history,
not legislate it." The ads featured a testimonial from Secretary of
State Condoleeza Rice -- "These historical circumstances require a
very detailed and sober look from historians" -- that implied that
historians have yet to seriously study the Armenian genocide.
More than 100 stated backers of the resolution withdrew their support,
and H.R. 106 never made it to the floor for a full vote.
The government of Turkey has since continued to call for a "historian's
commission" of scholars to "study the facts of what happened in
1915-1923."
The proposed committee is marketed as a high-minded quest for truth
and reconciliation, a long overdue arbitration of disputed history,
and a chance to finally give equal weight to both sides of the story.
But as the saying goes, a lie isn't the other side of any story. It's
just a lie.
"When it comes to the historical reality of the Armenian genocide,
there is no 'Armenian' or 'Turkish' side of the question, any more
t han there is a 'Jewish' or 'German' side of the historical reality
of the Holocaust," writes Torben Jorgensen, of the Danish Center for
Holocaust and Genocide Studies. "There is a scientific side and an
unscientific side -- acknowledgement or denial."