The Memoirs of Naim Bey

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The Memoirs of Naim Bey
image:The Memoirs of Naim Bey.png
Author Aram Andonian
Original title The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians
Country England
Language English
Subject(s) History
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date 1920
Media type Print (Hardcover)
Pages 84 Pages (Hardcover)

The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians also known as "Talat Pasha telegrams" written by Aram Andonian and published in London with Hodder & Stoughton, in 1920, originally in English, and later in a French version. This was the first book publication by Aram Andonian. The book lists several documents, the telegrams, which are purported to constitute evidence that the Armenian Genocide was formally implemented as Ottoman Empire policy.

The first publication had an introduction by Viscount Gladstone.

Contents

[edit] Content

The documents are allegedly based from an Ottoman official called "Naim Bey", working in the Rehabilitation Office in Aleppo. Each note bears the signature of Mehmed Talat Pasha, the Ministry of the Interior and later Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. The contents of these telegrams "clearly states his intention to exterminate all Armenians, outlines the extermination plan, offers a guarantee of immunity for officials, calls for tighter censorship and draws special attention to the children in Armenian orphanages."[1]

These telegrams remain in coded form and are written in Ottoman Turkish.

The overall picture emerging from these narrations points to a network of the extermination of most the deportees.[2] Although it overwhelmingly confirms the fact of what Toynbee called "this gigantic crime that devastated the Near East".[2][3]

One day the following order came from the Minister of the Interior:

Although the extermination of the Armenians had been decided upon earlier than this, circumstances did not permit us to carry out this sacred intention. Now that all obstacles are removed, if is urgently recommended that you should not be moved for feelings of pity on seeing their miserable plight. but by putting an end to them all, try with all your might for obliteerate the very name ’Armenia’ from Turkey.[4]

A new and awful order arrived from the Ministry of the Interior. The Government commanded that the life and honour of the Armenians should be destroyed. They no longer had any right to live.[4]

[edit] Authenticity

The authenticity of these telegrams is disputed by Turkish scholars and others, who have asserted that Andonian's telegrams are forged, and have declared them to be wartime propaganda.

Şinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca have released their work The Talaât Pasha "telegrams" : Historical fact or Armenian fiction? in 1983. The conclusion of the problems with these documents is given by Orel/Yuca with the following results:

  • The signature of Mustafa Abdülhalik Bey (the governor of Aleppo) does not jibe with actual specimens of the governor's signature
  • There are date mistakes as result of lack of knowledge of the differences between the Ottoman and European calendar. These errors destroy the system of dates and reference numbers that were used by the draftsman of the documents for his documents
  • The dates and reference numbers that are found in the Ottoman ministry of the interior's registers of outgoing ciphered telegrams reveals that the reference numbers used on Andonian's documents bear no relationship to the actual reference numbers used on ciphered telegrams sent from Constantinople to Aleppo in the period in question
  • All but two documents are written on plain paper with none of the signs found on the official paper used by the Ottoman government during World War I
  • There are mistakes in grammar and languages that only a non-Turkish writer would make.[5]

Furthermore, Orel/Yuca could not find the name of Naim Bey neither in various official registers nor any reference to such a person. They conclude "it seems impossible to make a definite judgement on the question of whether or not Naim Bey was an actual person. If not a fictitious person created by Andonian, he clearly must have been a very low-ranking official, who could not have been in a position to have access to documents of a secret and sensitive nature.[6]

This opinion is shared by Dutch professor Erik-Jan Zürcher,[7] Zürcher does however point to many other corroborating documents supporting the Andonian Telegrams assertion of core involvement and premeditation of the killing by the central CUP members.[8] The opinion about the spuriousness of the Andonian documents is also shared by Michael M. Gunter who calls the documents "notorious forgeries"[9] and by Andrew Mango who speaks of "telegrams dubiously attributed to the Ottoman wartime Minister of the Interior, Talat Pasha".[10]

Other scholars have at least raised questions about the documents. Christopher J. Walker has argued in 1997 that "doubts must remain until and unless the documents or similar ones themselves resurface and are published in a critical edition".[11] Austrian scholar Wolfdieter Bihl has called them "controversial".[12] Guenter Lewy writes that "the controversy over the authenticity of the Naim-Andonian documents will only be resolved through the discovery and publication of relevant Ottoman documents, and this may never come to pass". Lewy argues that "until then Orel and Yuca's painstaking analysis of these documents has raised enough questions about their genuineness as to make any use of them in a serious scholarly work unacceptable".[13]

Armenian historian Vahakn N. Dadrian has argued in 1986 that the points brought forth by Turkish historians are misleading and has countered the discrepancies they have raised.[14] Others who support Dadrian's thesis also point to the fact that the court did not question the authenticity of the telegrams in 1921 when they were first introduced and that the British had also intercepted numerous telegrams which directly "incriminated exchanges between Talaat and other Turkish officials."[15]

Furthermore, the telegrams are facsimiles, not original copies. The French scholar, Yves Ternon who convened at the 1984 Permanent Peoples' Tribunal contends that these telegrams however, "were authenticated by experts…[but] they were sent back to Andonian in London and lost."[16]

[edit] Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian

Main article: Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian

The telegrams in "the Memoirs of Naim Bey" were also used in the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, who assassinated Talat Pasha in Berlin, Germany on March 14, 1921. Although not introduced as evidence in court,[17] their mention help acquit Tehlirian,[18] as an Ottoman Military Tribunal had sentenced Talat to death in absentia shortly after the end of the First World War. Tehlirian was found "not guilty" on grounds of temporary insanity.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. A Crime of silence: the Armenian genocide. London: Zed Books, 1985
  2. ^ a b The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide, by Vahakn N. Dadrian, p.1
  3. ^ Viscount Bryce, the Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16, Miscellaneous No. 31. p.653.
  4. ^ a b The Most Fearful Genocide in the History of the Human Race by Edmond Kowale Wski, Page 5
  5. ^ Şinasi Orel, Süreyya Yuca The Talaât Pasha "telegrams" : Historical fact or Armenian fiction?, Nikosia 1983, pp.143-144, 139; Guenter Lewy The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, University of Utah Press 2005, p. 68
  6. ^ Şinasi Orel, Süreyya Yuca The Talaât Pasha "telegrams" : Historical fact or Armenian fiction?, Nikosia 1983, pp.25-26
  7. ^ Zürcher, Erik-Jan (September 23, 2004). Turkey: A Modern History, Revised Edition (Hardcover), I. B. Tauris, 115–116. ISBN 1850433992. “The Armenian side has tried to demonstrate this involvement, but some of the documents it has produced (the so-called Andonian papers) have been shown to be forgeries.” 
  8. ^ Zürcher, Erik-Jan (September 23, 2004). Turkey: A Modern History, Revised Edition (Hardcover), I. B. Tauris, 115–116. ISBN 1850433992. “From the eyewitness reports not only of German, Austrian, American and Swiss missionaries but also of German and Austrian officers and diplomats who were in constant touch with Ottoman authorities, from the evidence given to the postwar Ottoman tribunal investigating the massacres, and even, to a certain extent, the memoirs of Unionist Officers and administrators, we have to conclude that even if the Ottoman government was not involved in genocide, an inner circle of the CUP, under the direction of Talat, wanted to solve the eastern question by the extermination of the Armenians and it used relocation as a clock for that policy."” 
  9. ^ Michael M. Gunter International Journal of Middle East Studies 21 (1989), p. 422
  10. ^ Andrew Mango Turks and Kurds, in Middle Eastern Studies 30 (1994), p. 985
  11. ^ Christopher Walker World War I and the Armenian Genocide, in The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, New York 1997, p. 247
  12. ^ Wolfdieter Bihl, preface to Artem Ohandjanian Armenien: Der verschwiegene Völkermord, Vienna 1989, p. 8
  13. ^ Guenter Lewy The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, University of Utah Press 2005, p. 73
  14. ^ Dadrian, Vahakn. The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide. International Journal of Middle East Studies Vol. 18, No.4, November 1986 p. 550
  15. ^ Ferguson, Niall. The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. New York: Penguin Press, 2006 p. 179 ISBN 1-5942-0100-5
  16. ^ Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. ''A Crime of silence, 1985
  17. ^ Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian—First Afternoon. Armeniapedia. Retrieved on 2007-02-04. “VON GORDON — In view of the position taken by the District Attorney and the effect it has had on the jurors, I would like to cancel my motion to have these telegrams read into the record. PRESIDING JUSTICE — I believe that takes care of this point.”
  18. ^ Albeit on grounds of temporary insanity due to the traumatic experience he had gone through during the Genocide. See Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. New York: Perennial, 2004 pp. 344-345

[edit] Editions

  • Documents sur les massacres arméniens, Paris 1920
  • The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, compiled by Aram Andonian, Hodder and Stoughton, London ca. 1920
  • Մեծ Ոճիրը [The Great Crime; Armenian original of The memoirs of Naim Bey], Hayrenik, Boston 1921

[edit] Literature

  • "The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide". By Dr. Vahakn N. Dadrian. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Cambridge University Press. Vol. 18. August 1986. No.3. (50 pp.)
  • Yves Ternon: Enquête sur la négation d'un génocide, éditions parenthèses, Marseille 1989 ISBN 2-86364-052-6 [analysis by Yves Ternon stating the telegrams are probably authentic]
  • The Talat Pasha Telegrams (analysis by Şinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca stating the telegrams are forgeries), Ankara 1983

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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