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Talaat's Black Book documents campaign of race extermination in 1915

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  • Talaat's Black Book documents campaign of race extermination in 1915

    Armenian Reporter, 13 March 2009

    Full article with maps and data, see http://www.gomidas.org/


    Talaat's Black Book documents his campaign of race extermination in 1915-17


    "[Talaat stated that]. they had already disposed of three quarters of
    them [Armenians], that there were none left in Bitlis, Van, Erzeroum,
    and that the hatred was so intense now that they have to finish
    it. . . . He said they would take care of the Armenians at Zor and
    elsewhere but they did not want them in Anatolia. I told him three
    times that they were making a serious mistake and would regret it. He
    said, 'We know we have made mistakes, but we never regret.'"

    -8 August 1915 diary entry of conversations between Talaat Pasha and
    U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, United States Diplomacy on the
    Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913-1916, comp.,
    ed., and intro. Ara Sarafian (Princeton and London: Gomidas Institute,
    2004)

    by Ara Sarafian

    LONDON - A handwritten black book that belonged to Mehmet Talaat
    Pasha, the Ottoman minister of interior in 1915, was published in
    facsimile form in the end of 2008. It is probably the single most
    important document ever uncovered describing the destruction of
    Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-17. The Black Book draws on
    Ottoman sources no longer available to answer many questions about
    what those sources showed.

    Looking through the Sifre Kalemi or cipher telegram collection at the
    Prime Ministry Archives in Istanbul some years ago, I was struck by
    the number of telegrams in 1915 from Talaat Pasha ordering the
    deportation of individual communities, inquiring about the state of
    convoys, and giving instructions for further deportations. What
    emerged was a picture of a ruler obsessed with the progress of his
    signature program. Much of the responses to Talaat's inquiries were
    not available. What the Black Book does is to summarize the data he
    collected.

    Ottoman archives

    Turkish state intellectuals in recent years have insisted that the
    1915 deportations of Ottoman Armenians were not part of a genocidal
    exercise, but an orderly population transfer and resettlement. They
    have insisted that Ottoman archives in Turkey today support their
    contention. Yet, between them, they have only managed to cite an
    amalgam of official deportation and resettlement regulations, certain
    reports related to deportations, and no substantial account of what
    actually happened to deportees.

    Indeed, no historian working in Turkish archives has managed to
    present a coherent picture of the deportation and resettlement of
    Armenians from any region in the Ottoman Empire based on Ottoman
    records. This is because Ottoman records do not support the official
    Turkish thesis on the Armenian Genocide.

    While there is broad agreement between Turkish archives and other
    sources that thousands of Armenians were removed from their homes in
    1915, there is no solid account of what happened to these deportees in
    Ottoman records. However, foreign archives, such as the consular
    records of the United States, give a better qualitative assessment of
    actual developments than the available Ottoman documentation.

    This absence of Ottoman records could seem perplexing, because
    according to Ottoman regulations, Ottoman officials had to keep
    detailed records of the deportation of Armenians, as well as an
    inventory of their properties, as well as details of the final
    settlement of the people concerned. The total absence of such
    registers in Turkish archives today is therefore remarkable.

    A handwritten book

    The recent facsimile publication of Talaat Pasha's Black Book may well
    answer many of questions with the authority of Ottoman records. At 77
    pages, the book includes a substantial section on the deportation of
    Armenians in 1915-17. The book and its content were never disclosed in
    Talaat's lifetime, including in his posthumous memoirs published in
    1921. After his assassination in 1921, the book was kept by his widow
    and given to the Turkish historian Murat Bardakçi in
    1982. Mr. Bardakçý made parts of the booklet public in Hürriyet
    newspaper in 2005. The full account was not published until the end of
    2008.

    The significance of the Black Book lies in the authority of the owner,
    the fact that its content was drawn from Ottoman administrative
    records no longer available to historians in Turkey, and the actual
    data that it gives about the deportation of Armenians. Neither the
    book nor the data it yields bear clear dates, though Mr. Bardakçý
    thinks that the figures refer to 1915-1916 - though I think that could
    be the end of 1916 or even the beginning of 1917.

    The state perspective

    The data presented in this book can be considered to be a view of the
    Armenian Genocide from the perspective of the state. This state
    perspective still needs to be evaluated critically, which I am doing
    in a separate study. The purpose of this article is to introduce the
    core data that informed Talaat Pasha about the actual state of
    Armenians.

    The statistics regarding the destruction of Armenians in the Black
    Book are enumerated in four categories covering for 29 regions
    (vilayets and sanjaks) of the Ottoman Empire.

    These statistics are supposed to reflect:

    * The Armenian population in each region in 1914

    * Armenians who were not deported (presumably 1915-16)

    * Armenians who were deported and living elsewhere (1917)

    * Armenians who were originally from outside the province they were
    living in (1917)

    >From these statistics, we can also have an idea of the number of
    Armenians who were deported but not accounted for in 1917. Some of
    these missing Armenians undoubtedly fled the Ottoman Empire, such as
    those in the province of Van (where there was fierce resistance) or
    parts of Erzurum (which fell under Russian occupation after the
    Ottoman offensive collapsed in the east). However, very few Armenians
    were able to flee in such a manner, and for our discussion today, we
    will assume that the vast majority of the "missing Armenians" in 1917
    were killed or died during deportations.

    Questions answered

    The figures from Talaat Pasha's Black Book are invaluable because they
    answer some fundamental questions about the Armenian Genocide. Two
    such questions concern the nature of the actual deportations of 1915,
    and the specific fate of those deportees as they were pushed into the
    deserts of Der Zor, one of the main areas identified for resettlement.

    Talaat Pasha's information contradicts the official Turkish thesis
    that deportations were an orderly affair governed by Ottoman laws and
    regulations, or that deportees were actually successfully settled in
    Der Zor. Interestingly, Talaat's Black Book also shows the number of
    Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to have been were much higher than
    supposed by official figures.

    Talaat Pasha's figures confirm that most Ottoman Armenians outside
    Constantinople were indeed deported, and most of these deportees had
    disappeared by 1917. On average, 90 percent of provincial Armenians
    were deported, and 90 percent of those deported were killed. The
    number of people who went missing was over 95 percent for such
    provinces as Trabzon, Erzurum, Urfa, Diyarbekir, Mamuret-ul-Aziz, and
    Sivas. These figures clearly show that deportations were tantamount to
    a death sentence, and they give credence to United States consular
    reports that said as much, especially for those deported from the
    eastern provinces.

    The Der Zor massacres of 1916

    The data at hand also tells us about the scale of the Der Zor
    massacres of 1916. There is general agreement that hundreds of
    thousands of deportees were sent into this desert region in 1915-16,
    the main resettlement zone according to Ottoman decrees. Ottoman
    sources yield little information on what happened to these
    deportees. Survivor accounts and sources outside Turkey (such as those
    in United States archives) attest to the fact that deportees in the
    Der Zor region mostly wasted away.

    By 1917, even those Armenians who had been able to settle in this
    area, mainly because of the efforts of the provincial governor Ali
    Suad Bey, were taken away and massacred after a new governor, one of
    Talaat Pasha's henchmen, was sent. Deniers of the Armenian Genocide -
    who do not have adequate records from Turkish archives - cite United
    States records to argue that up to 300,000 people were sent into this
    area - omitting the fact that practically none of them survived to
    1917. Talaat Pasha's records show 6,778 Armenians in this province in
    1917.

    Population totals

    The Black Book also gives interesting insights into the number of
    Armenians in the Ottoman Empire circa 1914. While these figures are
    still smaller than some statistics cited outside Turkey, Talaat
    Pasha's dataset contradict the figures cited by deniers of the
    Armenian Genocide, who minimize the number of Ottoman Armenians as
    part of their strategy.

    The Black Book cites official figures from the 1914 Ottoman population
    survey, with a note explaining that this figure, like the figures for
    Armenians registered in 1917, should be increased by a factor of 30
    percent to account for undercounting.

    The note thus increases the main Apostolic (or Gregorian) Armenian
    community from 1,187,818 to 1,500,000 people before deportations. The
    note also mentions the figure for Catholic Armenians in the Ottoman
    Empire as 63,967 (which could also be revised upward to 83,157). There
    is no figure given for Protestant Armenians. These figures bring the
    number of Ottoman Armenians, based on official figures, close to
    1,700,000 people. According to these figures, the total number of
    Armenians who were missing in 1917 was around 1,000,000 people. If one
    discounts those who might have fled to Russia, the number of missing
    Armenians was still in the region of 800,000 to 900,000 people.

    Talaat Pasha's Black Book gives us invaluable insights into the type
    of bureaucratic control Ottoman officials wielded over Armenians and
    the type of information they gathered as a matter of course. The
    existence of such information in Talaat Pasha's Black Book again
    raises the question of what happened to the archival trail that
    underpinned his data. The Black Book also provides actual details
    about the apparent destruction of Armenians in 1915-16, and it
    dismisses the official Turkish assertion that deportations were an
    orderly affair in moving and resettling people between 1915 and
    1916. Indeed, the image painted by the Black Book validates the more
    impressionistic or passing accounts of atrocities against Armenians
    reported throughout the Ottoman Empire by foreign observers and
    survivors between 1915 and 1916.

    ###

    Ara Sarafian is an archival historian specializing in late Ottoman and
    modern Armenian history. He is the director of the Gomidas Institute,
    London. This article is a summary of a broader project on "Talaat
    Pasha's Black Book and the Armenian Genocide."
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