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UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS LAW SCHOOL PUBLISHES A NEW STUDY BY DADRIAN
http://massispost.com/?p=4070
August 24th, 2011
Minneapolis-The latest issue of the Journal of Law and Public Policy
(vol.5, no.1) contains a new study, in which Prof. Vahakn Dadrian,
the Zoryan Institute's Director of Genocide Research, analyzes the
Armenian Genocide in a new context. Titled, "The Armenian Genocide:
A Review of its Historical, Political, and Legal Aspects," the
article deals with the historical and political underpinnings of the
criminality of the Armenian Genocide.
This extensive article, some 60-pages long, including 118 footnotes,
is based on official Ottoman-Turkish sources, including several
issues of Takvim-i Vekâyi, the legal organ of the Ottoman Parliament,
which documented the post-World War I Military Tribunals prosecuting
the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. Thus, Dadrian anchors
his documentary analysis on prima facie evidentiary material. That
material is reinforced by a wealth of corroborative material from the
official archives of Imperial Germany and Imperial Austria-Hungary,
Turkey's political and military wartime allies. Dadrian also draws
on the work of several contemporary Turkish authors.
"Dadrian's extraordinary command of the languages and the sources
make him unsurpassed in his ability to reconstruct and analyze the
fundamental historical, political and legal issues related to the
study of the Armenian Genocide," remarked K.M. Greg Sarkissian,
President of the Zoryan Institute.
A brief review of the pre-genocidal era explores the historical pattern
of impunity with which the whole gamut of decision-makers, organizers,
and actual perpetrators of the series of massacres were rewarded. These
were inflicted upon the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire in
the periods of 1894-96, 1903-1904, and in 1909 in Adana. The paramount
fact of impunity served to underscore the role of the factor of victim
vulnerability as a major determinant in genocidal decision making. In
fact, as Dadrian points out, it served to embolden the decision makers
and implementers of the ensuing World War I genocide.
Another crucial factor in the unfolding of the wartime scheme of
genocide was the devastating set of circumstances attending the
crushing military defeats the Ottomans suffered in the 1912 First
Balkan War. The anguish, misery, and most particularly the brutality
of the victorious Christian armies of the Balkan peninsula inflicted
upon the destitute Muslim masses trying to escape proved to be a major
detriment in targeting later the vulnerable Armenian population of
the Ottoman Empire through spasms of delayed revenge. Indeed, a large
part of the perpetrator groups involved in the World War I Armenian
cataclysm were dispossesed, bitter, and hateful Muslim refugees of
the previous Balkan war.
The Armenian Genocide is depicted in this study as a direct consequence
of the adoption of a radical ideology, the main architects and
implementers of which were the leadership cadres of these massive
clusters of Balkan refugees.
Among the range of factors facilitating the actual enactment of the
Genocide is the factor of opportunity. Given the complex nature of
the crime of genocide, the author maintains that optimal success
in the organization of the crime requires optimal opportunism. Not
only the leeways and resources of the perpetrator are to be the least
restrained, but, equally important, the vulnerability of the targeted
victim is to be at a fairly high level. Wars, especially global wars,
tend in this respect to afford almost maximal opportunities. Wartime
exigencies tend, as a rule, to not only maximize the vulnerability
of the victim group that is constrained through its minority status,
but at the same time complicate and often constrain the problem of
outside intervention in favour of the targeted victim.
Wars are especially suitable avenues of opportunism on account of the
rise to instrumental prominence of the military cadres of a potential
perpetrator camp. Through them, violence is not only concentrated among
experts, but even more important, such violence has per tradition,
the sanction of quasi-legitimacy, if not full legitimacy, in the
application of lethal violence against targets defined by legitimate
authority as "internal foes." It is a notable fact that the two
major genocides of the last century, the Armenian and the Jewish,
were consummated during two global wars.
One of the most outstanding features of the Armenian Genocide involves
its economic dimensions, through which a massive transfer of wealth,
from the victim to the perpetrator, took place. In this sense, the
genocide emerges here doubly functional. The physical elimination
of the victim population ends up yielding the emergence of a new
source of wealth, and with it new cadres of wealthy classes in the
perpetrator camp. In the section on Expropriation & Confiscation
of Goods and Assets, the author documents and analyzes with ample
source-material the specifics of this lethal operation of transfer
of wealth from the victim to the perpetrator.
The entire essay instructively ends with an evocation of the
paramountcy of law as a regulator of human conduct, and as such as a
humanizing ingredient of civil life. It invokes Aristotle's dictum
that: "When separated from law and justice, man is the worst of
all animals."
http://massispost.com/?p=4070
August 24th, 2011
Minneapolis-The latest issue of the Journal of Law and Public Policy
(vol.5, no.1) contains a new study, in which Prof. Vahakn Dadrian,
the Zoryan Institute's Director of Genocide Research, analyzes the
Armenian Genocide in a new context. Titled, "The Armenian Genocide:
A Review of its Historical, Political, and Legal Aspects," the
article deals with the historical and political underpinnings of the
criminality of the Armenian Genocide.
This extensive article, some 60-pages long, including 118 footnotes,
is based on official Ottoman-Turkish sources, including several
issues of Takvim-i Vekâyi, the legal organ of the Ottoman Parliament,
which documented the post-World War I Military Tribunals prosecuting
the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. Thus, Dadrian anchors
his documentary analysis on prima facie evidentiary material. That
material is reinforced by a wealth of corroborative material from the
official archives of Imperial Germany and Imperial Austria-Hungary,
Turkey's political and military wartime allies. Dadrian also draws
on the work of several contemporary Turkish authors.
"Dadrian's extraordinary command of the languages and the sources
make him unsurpassed in his ability to reconstruct and analyze the
fundamental historical, political and legal issues related to the
study of the Armenian Genocide," remarked K.M. Greg Sarkissian,
President of the Zoryan Institute.
A brief review of the pre-genocidal era explores the historical pattern
of impunity with which the whole gamut of decision-makers, organizers,
and actual perpetrators of the series of massacres were rewarded. These
were inflicted upon the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire in
the periods of 1894-96, 1903-1904, and in 1909 in Adana. The paramount
fact of impunity served to underscore the role of the factor of victim
vulnerability as a major determinant in genocidal decision making. In
fact, as Dadrian points out, it served to embolden the decision makers
and implementers of the ensuing World War I genocide.
Another crucial factor in the unfolding of the wartime scheme of
genocide was the devastating set of circumstances attending the
crushing military defeats the Ottomans suffered in the 1912 First
Balkan War. The anguish, misery, and most particularly the brutality
of the victorious Christian armies of the Balkan peninsula inflicted
upon the destitute Muslim masses trying to escape proved to be a major
detriment in targeting later the vulnerable Armenian population of
the Ottoman Empire through spasms of delayed revenge. Indeed, a large
part of the perpetrator groups involved in the World War I Armenian
cataclysm were dispossesed, bitter, and hateful Muslim refugees of
the previous Balkan war.
The Armenian Genocide is depicted in this study as a direct consequence
of the adoption of a radical ideology, the main architects and
implementers of which were the leadership cadres of these massive
clusters of Balkan refugees.
Among the range of factors facilitating the actual enactment of the
Genocide is the factor of opportunity. Given the complex nature of
the crime of genocide, the author maintains that optimal success
in the organization of the crime requires optimal opportunism. Not
only the leeways and resources of the perpetrator are to be the least
restrained, but, equally important, the vulnerability of the targeted
victim is to be at a fairly high level. Wars, especially global wars,
tend in this respect to afford almost maximal opportunities. Wartime
exigencies tend, as a rule, to not only maximize the vulnerability
of the victim group that is constrained through its minority status,
but at the same time complicate and often constrain the problem of
outside intervention in favour of the targeted victim.
Wars are especially suitable avenues of opportunism on account of the
rise to instrumental prominence of the military cadres of a potential
perpetrator camp. Through them, violence is not only concentrated among
experts, but even more important, such violence has per tradition,
the sanction of quasi-legitimacy, if not full legitimacy, in the
application of lethal violence against targets defined by legitimate
authority as "internal foes." It is a notable fact that the two
major genocides of the last century, the Armenian and the Jewish,
were consummated during two global wars.
One of the most outstanding features of the Armenian Genocide involves
its economic dimensions, through which a massive transfer of wealth,
from the victim to the perpetrator, took place. In this sense, the
genocide emerges here doubly functional. The physical elimination
of the victim population ends up yielding the emergence of a new
source of wealth, and with it new cadres of wealthy classes in the
perpetrator camp. In the section on Expropriation & Confiscation
of Goods and Assets, the author documents and analyzes with ample
source-material the specifics of this lethal operation of transfer
of wealth from the victim to the perpetrator.
The entire essay instructively ends with an evocation of the
paramountcy of law as a regulator of human conduct, and as such as a
humanizing ingredient of civil life. It invokes Aristotle's dictum
that: "When separated from law and justice, man is the worst of
all animals."