Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation

By promising to bring a vote on the Armenian genocide to the floor of the US House of Representatives at this time, have Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership in Congress in fact hindered the broader project of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation?

The (possibly imminent) vote again raises the issue of the “who, what, where, and when” of official recognitions of historical injustices by foreign countries. As in 2005, the “what” (the act of recognition of the Armenian genocide by the US) is an important and welcome event, but the “who” (a state with its own unrecognized genocide against Native Americans, not to mention diminishing moral standing in the world), the “where” (Washington, DC rather than Ankara or Istanbul), and the “when” (October 2007, just as Turkey readies a deployment of troops against Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq) threaten to alienate Turkey, destabilize an already volatile region, and undermine the prospects of a honest, bilateral confrontation of the tragedies of 1915-17 and beyond.

What can we learn from these developments?

Commenting upon Franz Werfel’s 1933 historical novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh), which dramatized the Armenian uprising against Ottoman Turks on Musa Dagh (Mount Moses) in 1915, the writer Dov Kimchi remarked, “We Hebrew readers – for whom the problems which Werfel presents are our daily bread, the essence of our existence – read into his book on the Armenians our very own tragedy of the Jews." (1) A Central European Jew, Werfel seized on a lexical and historical affinity between Masada and Musa Dagh to help cultivate an empathic solidarity between Jews and Armenians, a powerful sense of fellow-feeling that would inspire, for example, fighters in the Jewish underground in Bialystok in 1943 to conceive of their ghetto as their “own Musa Dagh." (2)

Recent events are testing this solidarity in the Boston area. Last week, the town of Watertown, Massachusetts (Armenian-American population: 8,000) rescinded a two year-old resolution supporting the “No Place for Hate” campaign coordinated by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the U.S. advocacy group founded in 1913 to fight anti-Semitism and bigotry. The unanimous decision of the town council to break ties with the ADL over “No Place for Hate” – a campaign that mobilized local volunteers against area hate crimes, among other things – came soon after Watertown residents discovered that the ADL does not recognize the massacre of the Armenians during World War I as genocide. Indeed, while it mourns the events of 1915-18 as a profound tragedy, the ADL withholds the term "genocide" in reference to them. In the wake of Watertown’s decision, the regional director of the ADL, Andrew Tarsy, attempted to defend the ADL’s official line. But only days later, on August 16, he dramatically reversed his position, announcing that his regional office would break ranks with the ADL’s national leadership and call on it to change its policy. “I have been in conflict over this issue for several weeks,” Tarsy said in the Boston Globe. “I regret at this point any characterization of the genocide that I made publicly other than to call it a genocide. I think that kind of candor about history is absolutely fundamental.” This “candor” was swiftly punished by national ADL director Abraham Foxman, however, and Tarsy was fired the next day.

In response to the controversy, the national leadership of the ADL is publishing an open letter to the New England community in various periodicals this week. It can be accessed here. While it rightly calls on the Republic of Turkey to pursue reconciliation with the Armenian people, the letter wholly ignores the consensus among historians that the brutal acts perpetrated against the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey constitute the first genocide of the 20th century. Moreover, it gives no consideration to the effect of the ADL’s policy on the Armenian-American community today, coming off as preachy, defensive, even insensitive. Absent is any trace of the solidarity that Werfel, among many others, helped foster between Jews and Armenians after World War I. Perhaps most disconcerting, however, are the reasons that the letter outlines for the ADL policy - reasons that betray, quite explicitly, more of a concern for realpolitik than for historical justice. “Turkey is a key strategic ally and friend of the United States and a staunch friend of Israel,” it reads. “[In] the struggle between Islamic extremists and moderate Islam, Turkey is the most critical country in the world.” The message is clear: the ADL will avoid alienating Turkey no matter the cost in principle. Its ethics seem sadly captive to its politics.

Let us hope this changes soon. In the meantime, here is Levinas in reply: “It is […] attention to the suffering of the Other that, through the cruelties of our century […], can be affirmed as the very nexus of human subjectivity, to the point of being raised to the level of supreme ethical principle – the only one it is impossible to question – shaping the hopes and commanding the practical discipline of vast human groups.” (3)

*Update: As it turns out, a welcome change did come soon. On August 22, the national leadership of the ADL amended its policy and formally recognized the Armenian genocide. On August 27, Andrew Tarsy was rehired as ADL's New England director.

1. Qtd. in Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism & the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 294.

2. Ibid., 302.

3. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 94.

PRESS RELEASE Mass Grave Investigation in Mardin Province 23-24 April 2007

Between April 23-24, 2007, the Turkish Historical Society and the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation will initiate discussions about a possible investigation of a mass grave in the Mardin Province. The proposed investigation will seek to clarify conflicting claims about the origins of the mass grave through a forensic and historical investigation that will continue until the autumn of 2007 when a joint expert opinion will be issued.

Background: In October 2006 villagers in Kuru village of Nusaybin district, in southeastern Turkey’s Mardin province disclosed that they had found a mass grave in a cave near their village. Some local reporters published articles including photographs of the site stating that the grave contained remains of Armenians, and was similar to other grave sites from this era. The authorities of the Mardin province launched their own investigation and concluded that the remains were from Roman times. The new investigation by the Turkish Historical Society and the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation will seek to clarify these conflicting claims through a collaborative investigation.

This proposed joint investigation of the Mardin mass grave will be led by Professor Yusuf Halaço?lu, president of the Turkish Historical Society, and Professor David Gaunt of Södertörn University College in Sweden who is the project director for the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation at the Salzburg Seminar.

The initial meeting in Mardin on April 23-24, 2007 will include an inspection of the mass gravesite in Kuru village of Nusaybin district. The aim of this visit is to make a preliminary survey to establish whether the site is suitable for a future interdisciplinary investigation by forensic medical experts, archaeologists, physical anthropologists and historians. If such a determination is made, forensic experts will be engaged to assist the Turkish Historical Society and the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in their work.

For more information contact:

Professor Yusuf Halaço?lu, President, Turkish Historical Institute Email: bilgi@ttk.org.tr

Professor David Gaunt, Professor of History, Södertörn University College Email: david.gaunt@sh.se

the following is a report on David Gaunt attempt to investigate mass grave in Turkey. David Gaunt is Project Director for the IHJR.

Truth of mass grave eludes Swedish professor Friday, April 27, 2007

ONUR BURÇAK BELL? ISTANBUL - Turkish Daily News

An investigation to clarify conflicting claims about the origins of a mass grave found near the city of Mardin last year in Turkey's southeast ended in disappointment this week as historians traded accusations and a Swedish expert denounced the excavation as an “expensive picnic.”

The grave first came to light last October when villagers in the district of Nusayb?n reported that they had found a mass grave near the village of Kuru. Turkish historians insisted that the grave dated back to Roman times while some Westerners claimed it could be a mass burial site of Armenians, killed around 1915 in a series of massacres that remain the subject of red hot controversy today.

After the weekly news magazine Nokta published photos of the site and international news agencies picked up the story, Sweden's Soderton University demanded an investigation.

Refusing collaboration:

Professor David Gaunt of Soderton, accompanied by Yusuf Halaço?lu, the President of the Turkish Association of Historians (TTK), arrived at the burial site together last Tuesday, April 24. The date is a symbolic day for Armenians who commemorate “genocide” on that day, a characterization disputed by most Turkish and many international scholars.

On examining the grave, Gaunt refused to collaborate with the Turkish historians. It had been tampered with since it was first uncovered, making it impossible to conclusively establish its origins or the circumstances of the human remains.

“I have some photos of the grave, dating back to October, when it was first found,” Gaunt told the Turkish Daily News yesterday. “But the place I saw was totally different from the photos."If proving that the grave is not evidence of Armenian claims, it should have had serious protection, he said. However, it is “full of mud.”“My impression is that this grave is one in which no scientific research can be carried out. The grave has undergone numerous changes so it is unrecognizable," he said.

Soil sample conflict:

The Turkish Association's Halaço?lu, however, said in response that no bones were removed from the place and that the change was due to natural factors such as rain. Gaunt in turn rejected that explanation, saying if indeed scientific standards of protection were used “then it could not have been affected by rain or anything else."The aim of this visit was to make a preliminary survey to establish whether the site is suitable for interdisciplinary investigations in the future by forensic medical experts, archaeologists, physical anthropologists and historians. If such a decision was taken, forensic experts would be engaged to assist the Turkish Historical Society and the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in their work.Noting that Roman pantheons have their own entrance, which was closed in the grave, Halaço?lu emphasized that the grave represents a typical Roman burial site.

It could not be a site, in his view, of alleged Armenian victims at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. He also chastised Gaunt for flippancy, saying if he is sincere about investigating genocide claims, he should have taken soil samples that could prove the history of the bones. He also recalled that Turkey has made an official proposal to Armenia to set up a joint commission of historians to study such disputed events and all sides should conduct their work impartially.Such impartiality is now impossible, an angry Gaunt argued: “They gave me a shovel to dig and get some soil and some little bones, which were impossible to work on and reach any scientific conclusion. It is an archeological site. The process should continue slowly and gently,” he said “That was when I realized it was impossible to reach any scientific conclusion. Why should I get soil samples? What happened to those bones that are the real source for forensic research?"It could well be a Roman grave, he said, but the point was to examine the remains of 38 bodies there and that is now difficult if not impossible."Our intention was to understand how they got there, but I have heard that they were removed. I cannot accept the claim that mud filled the grave naturally," Gaunt explained.

Understanding the exact date:

David Gaunt also said it is scientifically impossible to understand the exact date from the bones. "It is not possible to say the exact date with scientific and chemical examinations. One can only merge the scientific outcomes with the stories of the local people. Then maybe one may have an answer close to reality.”

Sait Y?ld?z, a Syriac local of Mardin, said Halaço?lu accused him of manipulating reality and misinforming the media. Y?ld?z was at the site with Gaunt and Halaço?lu the first time they went into the grave. "I was carrying the photographs taken at that time," Y?ld?z said. "A villager came to me, looked at the photos and confirmed that the grave looked like this the first time he discovered it," he added, explaining that villager was the one who first found the grave and reported it to the authorities.

The Swedish professor expressed his disillusionment, describing what happened as “childish.”

“This is the most expensive picnic I have ever attended," concluded the professor.

Emre Çal??kan contributed to this story.

© 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc. www.turkishdailynews.com.tr

In the wake of the tragic murder of the Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, an outspoken (and long-persecuted) advocate of historical reconciliation between the Turkish and Armenian communities, a number of cities across Turkey witnessed a moving sight: thousands taking to the streets to decry Dink’s death, many with banners reading “Hepimiz ermeniyiz” or “We are all Armenians.” For a country in which Ataturk’s dictum “Ne mutlu Turkum diyene” (“Happy is he who calls himself a Turk”) appears virtually everywhere, even etched into massive hillsides in prominent Kurdish and Armenian areas in eastern Anatolia, this expression of solidarity constitutes a critical moment. Will Turkey’s leaders seize upon it and begin the hard work of facing up to the Armenian genocide and normalizing relations with the Armenian state? Or will criticism from abroad allow them to perpetuate the status quo by resorting to the defensive politics of national pride? All eyes are on the US Congress in this regard, some of whose members hope to bring to the floor by April 24 a resolution recognizing the mass slaughter of Armenians in WWI as genocide. Backers of the resolution include Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Later this month in the United States, Metropolitan Books will release a controversial new history of the Turkish mass deportation and slaughter of Armenians in 1915, Taner Akçam's A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. It is a substantial revision of his Insan Haklari ve Ermeni Sorunu (Human Rights and The Armenian Question), which was published in Ankara in 1999.

A recent New Yorker article about A Shameful Act by Elizabeth Kolbert offers more of an historical overview of the atrocities than a review of the book itself. Since Akçam's work promises to provoke much-needed discussion in Turkey, Armenia, and beyond, it may be useful (in advance of scholarly reviews) to outline a few of the opportunities and challenges it presents to the project of historical justice and reconciliation.

As he stated at a recent appearance in New York, Akçam hopes A Shameful Act will help effect a paradigm shift in Turkish-Armenian relations. He dedicates the book to the memory of Haji Halil, a Muslim Turk who, at great personal risk, hid an Armenian family in his home for over a year during the worst of the forced displacement and killing. In effect, he poses the figure of Haji Halil as a crack in the edifice of two opposing historical narratives, which I admittedly generalize here: an Armenian one that tends to see little grey between the black and white of perpetrator and victim, and a Turkish one that tends to see neither black nor white, only the red of a bloody war whose violence claimed the lives of Armenians and Turks alike. Haji Halil bravely hid Armenians and saved their lives, but he had to hide them, Akçam implies: they were targets of genocide. Akçam uses various archival sources, including the accounts of post-war military trials held in Turkey, to argue not only that the party of power during the war, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), intended to destroy Armenians and led an organized campaign to do so (pace Guenter Lewy), but also that many of the (heralded) leaders of modern Turkey believed that the republic "could only have been established by eliminating the Armenians and removing their demand for self-determination in Anatolia" (p.10).

"The memory of Haji Halil," Akçam writes, "reminds us that both people [sic], Turks and Armenians, have a different story on which they can build a future" (p. 13). He is right to focus the reader's attention on a figure of reconciliation in a work that appears destined, at first at least, to spark considerable controversy in Turkey -- and for a number of reasons tangential to the book's content. First, Akçam is a former leftist radical from Ardahan, Turkey who fled to Germany as a political refugee in 1976, and his past is being trumpeted by Turkish nationalists who accuse him of a strong bias against the Turkish state. Before he spoke in New York, for example, leaflets were distributed to the audience charging him with participation in terrorist "attacks against the United States" while a member of Dev-Yol (Devrimci Yol, or Revolutionary Path) in the 1970s. (His name was bracketed on the leaflet by the image of the hammer and sickle on one side and of a menacing skull on the other.) Second, A Shameful Act is partially underwritten by the Zoryan Institute, an organization founded in the 1970s by a group of Armenian emigres in the United States. Third, although originally written in Turkish, the book is being released in English for a Western audience first, fueling conspiracy theories among some Turks that the West is out to humiliate Turkey and undermine its prospects for EU accession.

(Also, while it is heavily footnoted, A Shameful Act contains some oversights in citation in a few sensitive places. We must take Akçam at his word, for example, that a man named Haji Halil existed in the first place, as there seems to be no written record of him or oral testimony about him referenced in the book. The quote from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk that gives the work its title, furthermore, is mentioned only in passing on page 12 and not contextualized at all. Where, when, and to whom did Atatürk characterize the atrocities perpetrated against the Armenians as a "shameful act"? The answer is unclear.*)

It seems to me that a preemptive disclosure of the circumstances of the book's origins will help A Shameful Act fulfill its potential to break important new ground and clear the way for a considerate discussion of its claims. If these circumstances are overlooked -- as in Kolbert's article, to a great degree -- then the opportunity Akçam's work presents may be lost amid bitter rhetoric about vendettas and conspiracies.

*11/17/06 This is incorrect: the context of Atatürk’s "shameful act" comment, first cited in the opening pages of the book, is indeed made clear in the eighth chapter on page 346. (Atatürk referred to the killings of Armenians as "shameful acts belonging to the past" before a closed session of his party on 24 April 1920.) Many thanks to Professor Akçam for alerting me to this important reference.

This evening, PBS stations will air an hour-long documentary: "The Armenian Genocide" written, directed and produced by Andrew Goldberg. Following the documentary, PBS scheduled a panel discussion with experts, including two who defend the Turkish government's claim that the genocide never occured. As described in today's NYTimes article: A PBS Documentary Makes Its Case for the Armenian Genocide, With or Without a Debate as a result of protests waged by Armenian groups and some members of US Congress, about one third of PBS affiliates will not air the panel discussion. Last month, Michael Getler, the PBS Ombudsman presented the reasoning behind the airing of a panel discussion and described the ensuing debate.

How can the revisiting of such events use history and historical facts in a way that promotes reconciliation rather than further division?