Tweet
THE TURKISH GENOCIDE OF ASSYRIANS AND ARMENIANS
By Prof. Ove Bring
Translated from Swedish by Munir Gultekin.
Assyrian International News Agency
May 15 2007
Editor's note: the following speech was delivered to the Swedish
Parliament on January 1, 2007.
(AINA) -- In March 2003 the Swedish organisation "Levande historia"
arranged a seminar in the town of Uppsala with the theme "The genocide
on Armenians and other Christian groups in 1915". I attended in my
capacity as a legal expert on international law, but the two most
important contributions were presented by two historians, Klas-Goran
Karlsson from the university of Lund, and David Gaunt from the
university college of Sodertorn. They both confirmed that genocide,
in a general sense, had taken place in the then Ottoman empire during
the First World War.
The strange thing with this seminar in Uppsala was that Turkey's
embassy in Stockholm had sent a historian from Ankara to give a
contrasting picture to the picture they suspected the seminar would
confirm. The discussion between the historians reached a complete
deadlock and the event was commented on later by Turkey's largest
newspaper, describing Swedish scientists with derisive words of abuse.
This controversy should never have taken place from a purely historical
point of view because the scientific research done on this issue is
relatively clear.
There are very many witnesses from 1915: missionaries who were there
in the Christian areas; consuls from western countries who reported
back to their embassies about what happened; German military attaches
who reported in the same way; and the American ambassador Morgenthau in
Constantinople who gave reports about his contacts with the government
of the Young Turks, especially about a conversation with Turkish war
minister Enver Pasha, in which the minister assured that what took
place was ordered by the government.
A document was published already in 1916 entitled The Treatment
of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916 by James Bryce,
British expert in political science, and Arnold Toynbee, a
historian. Bryce had previously been ambassador to the USA and had
led an investigative commission during WWI about alleged war crimes
in occupied Belgium. Toynbee was in the beginning of his career as
a world famous historian.
Johannes Lepsius, a German missionary in Anatolia, was given a task
by the authorities in Berlin during the same period of time. He
was ordered to compile German diplomatic correspondence concerning
Armenia. The documentation of Lepsius was published in 1919 in
Potsdam. A number of scientific works published in modern times have
completed the picture. Prof. David Gaunt published his book Massacres,
Resistance, Protectors 2006. It covers the fate of all the Christian
groups of eastern Anatolia during WWI.
It all started in Constantinople on 24th April 1915 when several
hundred leading Armenian intellectuals were arrested, deported and
murdered. It was assumed that their Orthodox belief made them friends
of the Russians and thus a security risk. Orders followed demanding
cities and villages in the east to be emptied on their Christian
population. The Armenians were to be removed southwards and death
marches and massacres followed. The camps they were removed to in the
Syrian desert were not any new settlements; they were an end station
of starvation, assault and misery.
The western allies issued a proclamation on 24th May 1915 in which
they described what was going on as a"crime against humanity
and civilisation", announcing court proceedings against guilty
individuals after the war. No such court proceedings, apart from a
few exceptions, ever took place, but the expression "crime against
humanity" was coined.
According to The United Nations Convention on Genocide ratified
in 1948, the affected population must constitute an ethnically or
religiously definable group in order for the term genocide to be
applied to them. This criterion is fulfilled retroactively in the
case of the Assyrians and Armenians.
It also requires an intention from the perpetuators to annihilate
the group entirely or partly. This criteria of intention is the most
difficult to prove. Yet I advocate that the research of history has
been able to prove since long time ago such an underlying political
purpose: to clear the Ottoman Empire from foreign elements and build
a homogenous Muslim state.
The order of the regime of the Young Turks from April 1915 to
clear cities and villages from Armenian elements is documented. The
following order, on how to handle the people who are driven together
and deported, is lost, probably destroyed in an early stage. But the
certainty of the existence of such a brutal order, in practise an order
for partial annihilation, is made clear from a later order by Talat
Pasha, Minister of Interior, to the governor in Diyarbekir. It is made
clear in a telegram from Constantinople from 12th July 1915 that the
regime needs to put itself in a more positive light because of the
international protests. Talat Pasha issues directives saying that
the killings which are lacking in discrimination against Christian
groups (in general) must stop, i.e. the special treatment issued for
the Armenians must not befall the Assyrians. This was the meaning
of the telegram; the genocide committed against the Armenians was
acknowledged, but it was not to spread to other Christian groups.
The Swedish word for genocide, folkmord, has been used by Hjalmar
Branting (a famous Swedish prime minister) during an Armenia-meeting
on 27th March 1917. He said:
"We are not talking about minor assaults but about an organized and
systematic genocide (folkmord), worse than we have ever witnessed in
Europe. It has been about annihilating the population of the entire
area, drive the survivors out in the desert with the expectation that
they will not endure but that their bones will whiten in the desert
sand. This genocide is unparalleled among all appalling acts of the
war. Our hearts have ached when we have read about it."
(Socialdemokraten, the official publication of the Swedish Social
Democratic Party, 28th March 1917).
There was no juridical term for these events during WWI, but the term
used by the allies "crime against humanity" was to gain political
validity through the regulations of the Nuremberg trials in 1945.
What a Swedish government, minister, parliament or parliamentarian
committee could say about the Armenian and Assyrian tragedy is
that it is about massacres that were described as a crime against
humanity in 1915 and which could today, from a juridical point of
view, be described as genocide. The current Turkish republic has no
juridical responsibility for these events as it is a successor state
of the Ottoman Empire, but today's Turkey has a democratic identity to
guard and it has a responsibility to make sure that freedom of speech
is functioning. To be able to freely debate the past and sometimes
take a moral responsibility for the damage inflicted on others is a
feature of civil democratic societies.
An investigation was launched in 1997 in Sweden to find out about our
trade revenue from Germany during the Second World War. A report named
"The Nazi gold and the Bank of Sweden" (SOU 1998:96) established that
gold ingots had been received from looted occupied countries and we
had even possibly received gold taken from teeth from the death camps
in the east. Sweden then gave around 40 million kronor to the Jewish
centre in Stockholm as a form of moral compensation.
Swiss banks had enriched themselves in a corresponding way during the
war. As the years passed the banks even incorporated the bank accounts
of murdered Jews with their own funds. A storm of protests in the USA
in 1998 led the Swiss banks to form a solidarity fund to be used for
compensation of survivors. A court in New York announced later that one
of the banks would pay compensation amounting to 1.25 billion dollars.
There are more examples of how a debate in democratic states has led
to compensation. The money itself cannot compensate for lost lives,
but the willingness to pay compensation marks guilt and responsibility
and a will for reconciliation. The fact that one is recognized
as a victim, as an object of a historical and massive injustice,
gives a confirmation of ones identity from the perspective of the
affected group.
It is obvious that an open discussion in Turkey about the events
of 1915-1918, without any obstacles from article 301 of the Turkish
penal code, would benefit Turkey's application for EU membership.
Our politicians are eager to claim that the Assyrian and Armenian
genocides are an issue for the historians. But the same thing is not
claimed about the Holocaust. The fact that the events of 1940-45
are an issue for politicians and diplomats was recently confirmed
by the United Nations General Assembly when it adopted a resolution
condemning all denials of the Holocaust. But Seyfo, the year of the
sword as it is called by Assyrians (1915), is considered immature
for political judgements. I like to uphold that the historians
have done their job and they have done it well when it comes to the
genocides of 1915-18. They cannot point to documents from any Turkish
equivalence to the Wannsee-conference, but they have collected enough
material to show there was a deliberate intention to commit what we
today call genocide. One cannot ask scientists to agree totally;
they have not agreed totally regarding the Holocaust either. But
the stage of knowledge about the Assyrian and Armenian genocides is
not insufficient to the degree that allows timid politicians to hide
behind arguments of claimed indistinctness.
With this said, I do not claim that now is the right occasion to
mediate historical truths on the international stage. It might not be
the correct time. But it is concurrently time for our politicians to
inform themselves about the factual matter and handle it in a moral
manner. What we today call genocide did really take place in the
eastern part of the Ottoman Empire year in 1915 and even the years
that followed. Furthermore, the affected were different Christian
groups -- Armenians and Assyrians. It is time for our politicians to
acknowledge that serious historians have confirmed this historical
writing and that there is no reason to question their conclusion.
Prof. Ove Bring is one of Sweden's foremost legal experts on
international law. He is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration
in The Hague and a member of the International Law Delegation of the
Swedish Foreign Office. This speech was delivered by him during the
conference on the Assyrian genocide in the Swedish parliament on 30th
January 2007.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
By Prof. Ove Bring
Translated from Swedish by Munir Gultekin.
Assyrian International News Agency
May 15 2007
Editor's note: the following speech was delivered to the Swedish
Parliament on January 1, 2007.
(AINA) -- In March 2003 the Swedish organisation "Levande historia"
arranged a seminar in the town of Uppsala with the theme "The genocide
on Armenians and other Christian groups in 1915". I attended in my
capacity as a legal expert on international law, but the two most
important contributions were presented by two historians, Klas-Goran
Karlsson from the university of Lund, and David Gaunt from the
university college of Sodertorn. They both confirmed that genocide,
in a general sense, had taken place in the then Ottoman empire during
the First World War.
The strange thing with this seminar in Uppsala was that Turkey's
embassy in Stockholm had sent a historian from Ankara to give a
contrasting picture to the picture they suspected the seminar would
confirm. The discussion between the historians reached a complete
deadlock and the event was commented on later by Turkey's largest
newspaper, describing Swedish scientists with derisive words of abuse.
This controversy should never have taken place from a purely historical
point of view because the scientific research done on this issue is
relatively clear.
There are very many witnesses from 1915: missionaries who were there
in the Christian areas; consuls from western countries who reported
back to their embassies about what happened; German military attaches
who reported in the same way; and the American ambassador Morgenthau in
Constantinople who gave reports about his contacts with the government
of the Young Turks, especially about a conversation with Turkish war
minister Enver Pasha, in which the minister assured that what took
place was ordered by the government.
A document was published already in 1916 entitled The Treatment
of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916 by James Bryce,
British expert in political science, and Arnold Toynbee, a
historian. Bryce had previously been ambassador to the USA and had
led an investigative commission during WWI about alleged war crimes
in occupied Belgium. Toynbee was in the beginning of his career as
a world famous historian.
Johannes Lepsius, a German missionary in Anatolia, was given a task
by the authorities in Berlin during the same period of time. He
was ordered to compile German diplomatic correspondence concerning
Armenia. The documentation of Lepsius was published in 1919 in
Potsdam. A number of scientific works published in modern times have
completed the picture. Prof. David Gaunt published his book Massacres,
Resistance, Protectors 2006. It covers the fate of all the Christian
groups of eastern Anatolia during WWI.
It all started in Constantinople on 24th April 1915 when several
hundred leading Armenian intellectuals were arrested, deported and
murdered. It was assumed that their Orthodox belief made them friends
of the Russians and thus a security risk. Orders followed demanding
cities and villages in the east to be emptied on their Christian
population. The Armenians were to be removed southwards and death
marches and massacres followed. The camps they were removed to in the
Syrian desert were not any new settlements; they were an end station
of starvation, assault and misery.
The western allies issued a proclamation on 24th May 1915 in which
they described what was going on as a"crime against humanity
and civilisation", announcing court proceedings against guilty
individuals after the war. No such court proceedings, apart from a
few exceptions, ever took place, but the expression "crime against
humanity" was coined.
According to The United Nations Convention on Genocide ratified
in 1948, the affected population must constitute an ethnically or
religiously definable group in order for the term genocide to be
applied to them. This criterion is fulfilled retroactively in the
case of the Assyrians and Armenians.
It also requires an intention from the perpetuators to annihilate
the group entirely or partly. This criteria of intention is the most
difficult to prove. Yet I advocate that the research of history has
been able to prove since long time ago such an underlying political
purpose: to clear the Ottoman Empire from foreign elements and build
a homogenous Muslim state.
The order of the regime of the Young Turks from April 1915 to
clear cities and villages from Armenian elements is documented. The
following order, on how to handle the people who are driven together
and deported, is lost, probably destroyed in an early stage. But the
certainty of the existence of such a brutal order, in practise an order
for partial annihilation, is made clear from a later order by Talat
Pasha, Minister of Interior, to the governor in Diyarbekir. It is made
clear in a telegram from Constantinople from 12th July 1915 that the
regime needs to put itself in a more positive light because of the
international protests. Talat Pasha issues directives saying that
the killings which are lacking in discrimination against Christian
groups (in general) must stop, i.e. the special treatment issued for
the Armenians must not befall the Assyrians. This was the meaning
of the telegram; the genocide committed against the Armenians was
acknowledged, but it was not to spread to other Christian groups.
The Swedish word for genocide, folkmord, has been used by Hjalmar
Branting (a famous Swedish prime minister) during an Armenia-meeting
on 27th March 1917. He said:
"We are not talking about minor assaults but about an organized and
systematic genocide (folkmord), worse than we have ever witnessed in
Europe. It has been about annihilating the population of the entire
area, drive the survivors out in the desert with the expectation that
they will not endure but that their bones will whiten in the desert
sand. This genocide is unparalleled among all appalling acts of the
war. Our hearts have ached when we have read about it."
(Socialdemokraten, the official publication of the Swedish Social
Democratic Party, 28th March 1917).
There was no juridical term for these events during WWI, but the term
used by the allies "crime against humanity" was to gain political
validity through the regulations of the Nuremberg trials in 1945.
What a Swedish government, minister, parliament or parliamentarian
committee could say about the Armenian and Assyrian tragedy is
that it is about massacres that were described as a crime against
humanity in 1915 and which could today, from a juridical point of
view, be described as genocide. The current Turkish republic has no
juridical responsibility for these events as it is a successor state
of the Ottoman Empire, but today's Turkey has a democratic identity to
guard and it has a responsibility to make sure that freedom of speech
is functioning. To be able to freely debate the past and sometimes
take a moral responsibility for the damage inflicted on others is a
feature of civil democratic societies.
An investigation was launched in 1997 in Sweden to find out about our
trade revenue from Germany during the Second World War. A report named
"The Nazi gold and the Bank of Sweden" (SOU 1998:96) established that
gold ingots had been received from looted occupied countries and we
had even possibly received gold taken from teeth from the death camps
in the east. Sweden then gave around 40 million kronor to the Jewish
centre in Stockholm as a form of moral compensation.
Swiss banks had enriched themselves in a corresponding way during the
war. As the years passed the banks even incorporated the bank accounts
of murdered Jews with their own funds. A storm of protests in the USA
in 1998 led the Swiss banks to form a solidarity fund to be used for
compensation of survivors. A court in New York announced later that one
of the banks would pay compensation amounting to 1.25 billion dollars.
There are more examples of how a debate in democratic states has led
to compensation. The money itself cannot compensate for lost lives,
but the willingness to pay compensation marks guilt and responsibility
and a will for reconciliation. The fact that one is recognized
as a victim, as an object of a historical and massive injustice,
gives a confirmation of ones identity from the perspective of the
affected group.
It is obvious that an open discussion in Turkey about the events
of 1915-1918, without any obstacles from article 301 of the Turkish
penal code, would benefit Turkey's application for EU membership.
Our politicians are eager to claim that the Assyrian and Armenian
genocides are an issue for the historians. But the same thing is not
claimed about the Holocaust. The fact that the events of 1940-45
are an issue for politicians and diplomats was recently confirmed
by the United Nations General Assembly when it adopted a resolution
condemning all denials of the Holocaust. But Seyfo, the year of the
sword as it is called by Assyrians (1915), is considered immature
for political judgements. I like to uphold that the historians
have done their job and they have done it well when it comes to the
genocides of 1915-18. They cannot point to documents from any Turkish
equivalence to the Wannsee-conference, but they have collected enough
material to show there was a deliberate intention to commit what we
today call genocide. One cannot ask scientists to agree totally;
they have not agreed totally regarding the Holocaust either. But
the stage of knowledge about the Assyrian and Armenian genocides is
not insufficient to the degree that allows timid politicians to hide
behind arguments of claimed indistinctness.
With this said, I do not claim that now is the right occasion to
mediate historical truths on the international stage. It might not be
the correct time. But it is concurrently time for our politicians to
inform themselves about the factual matter and handle it in a moral
manner. What we today call genocide did really take place in the
eastern part of the Ottoman Empire year in 1915 and even the years
that followed. Furthermore, the affected were different Christian
groups -- Armenians and Assyrians. It is time for our politicians to
acknowledge that serious historians have confirmed this historical
writing and that there is no reason to question their conclusion.
Prof. Ove Bring is one of Sweden's foremost legal experts on
international law. He is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration
in The Hague and a member of the International Law Delegation of the
Swedish Foreign Office. This speech was delivered by him during the
conference on the Assyrian genocide in the Swedish parliament on 30th
January 2007.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress