3464) Response To Vahakn Dadrian’s Book Genocide As A Problem Of National & International Law . .

The World War I Armenian Case And Its Contemporary Legal Ramifications

Sener ÇELIK*
* Research Student at Turkish War Academy, Strategic Reseach Institute.

Vahakn N. Dadrian — a radical advocate of the so-called “Armenian genocide” — wrote this book with the assistance provided by the British London State Archives Bureau, the Israeli Jerusalem Armenian Patriarchate and the American National Science Foundation. A detailed review of this work illustrates that the study has a subjective approach that is contrary to scientific objectivity and that it espouses an aggressive style of writing that is incompatible with academic seriousness and, perhaps most importantly, that the evidences presented therein are products of a questionable accuracy.

The main claim of the book is based — as set forth in the introduction of the book — on the hypothesis that a total of over 1 million Armenians were murdered as a result of the “genocide” committed in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The author indicates that the allies defeated the Ottoman Turks at the end of the war, but that the ‘Kemalist regime’ provided a ‘favor’ towards them, thereby which the Western states relinquished investigating the claims of the so-called genocidal crime and preferred to establish good relations with the Turkish Repub-lic. It should primarily be noted that a real committed offense that ended with the deaths of 1 million people could not be ignored by Western powers just because their political interests required them to do so. This is not a reasonable assumption that can be proven. The claim that the so-called genocide had not been investi-gated because the Western world was concerned for the future establishment of long-term relations with Turkey does not comply with the natural flow of that period’s political events. Indeed, in this period, the allied forces’ strategy was to carve up the Ottoman Empire and to limit the power of the state that would be the successor of it. Therefore, it is simply not convincing to believe that the western world did not make use of such a significant advantage.

In the first part of his book, Dadrian tried to strengthen his . . .

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Direct Link To The Document

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Source: Bilge Strateji, Cilt 5, Sayi 8, Bahar 2013

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