A caveat: it is yet to be determined whether Vahakn Dadrian can be capable of embarrassment, so outlandish has his scholarly methodology proven, where the man is a poster boy for the Dashnaks’ “end justifies the means” style of operation. The unscrupulous propagandist has been cited even by fellow genocide scholars, such as Donald Bloxham and Hilmar Kaiser, for his lack of ethics (the latter has pointed to Dadrian’s “misleading quotations” and the “selective use of sources”). Scholar of integrity Prof. Malcolm Yapp has summed up Dadrian’s ways “not that of an historian trying to find out what happened and why but of a lawyer assembling the case for the prosecution in an adversarial system.”
Yet even Vahakn Dadrian, who knows no shame, willing to throw in the ring the most tainted and dirtiest “evidence” that he can get his hands on (frequently after manipulating the evidence, as he has done with selective quotes of Halil Pasha), just so the Turks can emerge as the worst race on earth, has scraped the bottom of the barrel with his insistence that the Andonian-Naim forgeries (commonly known as the “Talat Pasha telegrams”) are almost certainly “true documents,” after all.
What we have termed as the “Armenian AND? Anthem,” the tendency of Armenian scholars and their faithful flock to be unmindful of ethics when it comes to affirming their beloved genocide was, in fact, influenced precisely by a dip in these Andonian waters. As Prof. Erich Feigl noted, in his wonderful “A Myth of Terror,” after Prof. Gerard Libaridian kept insisting that the Andonian papers were genuine:
Finally I had to say, "But Doctor Libaridian, you know as well as I that these 'Andonian papers' are forgeries!" I will never forget Dr. Libaridian answer or his facial expression as he replied simply and briefly to my reproach:
"And?"
… and I will never forget that answer. It was not even cold; it was casual, matter-of-fact reply to one who has long since found other strategies but does not even bother to clean house, since he knows that the old dirt can be swept under the rug of history and — who knows? — maybe someday it will come in handy again to help obscure the truth.
It is significant that most Armenian propagandists have come to realize the Andonian propaganda has been universally recognized as the obvious forgeries that they are, and now stay away from them. Only the most zealous acolytes within the flock still point to these papers (one still finds the reproduction of these telegrams in many Armenian web sites, without providing the source), with the occasional “scholar” still pointing to these papers’ veracity, as Peter Balakian sneaked in to his “The Burning Tigris.” Balakian profusely thanked Dadrian in the book, referring to V.D. as “the foremost scholar of the Armenian genocide.”
Vahakn Dadrian is the one “scholar” who has attempted to validate Andonian’s dirty work. ("The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide," International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Aug. 1986, pp. 311-60.) Instead of distancing himself from his loudest performance of the “Armenian AND? Anthem,” Dadrian has added to his shame by confirming his “weasel work” some twenty years later (as he did in letters to the Times Literary Supplement, his anti-Guenter Lewy article in “Jihad Watch,” and a clash with Lewy in the letters column of The Middle East Quarterly.)
Prosecutor Dadrian’s style is as such: he has relentlessly uncovered any and every piece of dirt that affirms his genocide. In a Turk-biased world, there is no shortage of such material. With his knowledge of German and Turkish, he has added to his arsenal hard-to-corroborate sources from these two languages, often distorting the context or the quotations, content that hardly anyone — in particular, the mostly sleepy and in-their-own-worlds Turks — will be looking over his shoulder. Over the years, Dadrian has amassed an encyclopedia of such gobbledygook, and in his papers, he utilizes a deadly scattershot approach, bombarding the reader with so much of his taradiddle, the reader gets shell-shocked. Already biased Westerners, mindlessly in acceptance of the genocide myth, are not going to stop and consider the worth of the “evidence.” There is so much of it, and Dadrian is recognized as such a “renowned scholar,” instant conclusions are formed.
TAT commentator Nick, the Brit with Grit, elaborated on the phenomenon in a guestbook entry, dated 11/7/99:
...So many people get these views with "their mother's milk" so to speak. Logic or history does not enter into it. Much of it derives from propaganda that no one — including the Turks — has bothered to correct... If the huge Muslim diaspora from the Balkans and the Caucasus in the last century and the early part of this century had gone to N. America instead of to Turkey the picture would be vastly different today! Armenians and Greeks in the diaspora have made the image of the "Terrible Turk" a central part of their ethnic identity. It has become an article of faith the consequence of which has been a reverse scholarship — belief first, inquiry second. Of course, we all know, in principle, that if you want to research something you have to look into the facts and then produce an opinion afterwards. You can't "back engineer" history the way you can a piece of technology because history is organic.
Vahakn Dadrian
Vahakn N. Dadrian.
And this is Vahakn Dadrian’s slimy style, ladies and gentlemen. The master propagandist has made a career of "back engineering" history, often utilizing gross and tainted sources. His “cluster bombing” technique makes sure that his targets will get hit with some of the flak. His hope is to throw smoke screens, in an effort to confuse and detract the unwary, or to further confirm the views of the already prejudiced. (It may be said such is the style of all Dashnak Armenian propagandist “historians.” Only Vahakn Dadrian is the master of them all.)
Dadrian’s weasely ways are in reality an effort to deter people from the big picture, and the real history; Prof. Bernard Lewis summed it up:
What happened to the Armenians was the result of a massive Armenian armed rebellion against the Turks, which began even before war broke out, and continued on a larger scale... There is clear evidence of a decision by the Turkish Government, to deport the Armenian population from the sensitive areas. Which meant naturally the whole of Anatolia... There is no evidence of a decision to massacre. On the contrary, there is considerable evidence of attempt to prevent it, which were not very successful.
For this study, I will be referring to Chapters IV & V of “Investigation into the Negation of a Genocide” (1989), written by Yves Ternon. This Dadrian cheerleader made great use of the Dadrian article being analyzed here, and although Ternon’s facts differed significantly at times, Ternon concluded Dadrian was “brilliant.”
Let us now dissect Dadrian’s Andonian-validating effort from 1986.
The reader must bear in mind that such a dissection would be all the more thorough were Dadrian’s carefully compiled sources available. Unfortunately, the handful of contra-genocide scholars — so many have been frightened away from this debate by the genocide industry’s below-the-belt ad hominem attacks — have generally not made an effort to evaluate Dadrian’s slippery claims. The only “word” I frequently have on the details boils down to the word of Dadrian himself. Luckily, most of the time, Dadrian’s “word” speaks for itself. This dissection would be all the more effective if the sources were at hand, to see exactly how Dadrian has taken matters out of context, as he has proven to do so many times. That is the job for a professional scholar who does research for a living. In the years ahead, I predict Dadrian’s claims will be effectively demolished, as genuine historians begin to awaken, and find their courage and commitment to historical duty, to separate fact from fiction.
Before we get down to the nitty-gritty Dadrian excels at, let us keep in mind the BIG PICTURE.
Andonian did not work alone. (“The Armenian File”’s Kamuran Gurun has speculated: “It may be that the person known as Naim Bey is the person who was paid to arrange the forged documents.”) Although the forgery work was most likely Andonian’s alone, he was evidently part of a propaganda network, with the wherewithal to simultaneously publish the Naim work. The book was a coordinated effort, published in 1920 in Paris, London and (evidently in 1921) Boston (in French, English and Armenian, respectively), the first two just in time to influence the Allies further, during the Peace Conference proceedings.
The German kangaroo court trying Soghoman Tehlirian, Talat’s assassin, rejected the Andonian documents. Most importantly, the British, searching far and wide for evidence to convict the (up to 144) Ottomans held in Malta, also rejected them.
Governor Mustafa Abdülhalik, whose signature is supposed to appear on several documents, happened to be one of these Malta detainees. He could have been quickly convicted by the British, if the British determined Andonian’s work to be authentic. Abdülhalik was ultimately freed. Another Ottoman official whose signature appears on the Andonian documents, Abdulahad Nuri, was not even sent to Malta.
Andonian himself admitted, in a 1937 letter to an Armenian woman in Switzerland, that his work was meant as propaganda. (Yves Ternon referred to this, but excused Andonian as follows: “the author acknowledges it naively”..!)
Now these are the big truths. Only a determined propagandist such as Vahakn Dadrian will do his best to sow the seeds of confusion, in an immoral attempt to legitimize what serious scholars have already accepted as obvious forgeries.
I will try not to address every single assertion of Dadrian’s, as I normally prefer to do. I will try and highlight only his more obvious nonsense, because getting mired in Dadrian’s quicksand is already an exercise in frustration. (He is like a Hydra; shoot down a pathetic Dadrian argument, he will sprout two new pathetic arguments in its place.) Dadrian will also branch off into non-Andonian territory, which I’m going to attempt to avoid.
After the Dadrian analysis, we will summarize why practically everyone, except Dadrian, has rightly rejected the Andonian forgeries for the crock that they are. Aside from the sometimes confusing technicalities involved, toward the end of this study I'm going to provide some much needed logic (below) regarding why "The Memoirs of Naim Bey" is such an obvious fake... including reasons I have never seen elsewhere.
Let us interject first with a rundown of this Andonian inanity, as presented by Prof. Erich Feigl in "The Myth of Terror" (pp. 84-86):
Prof. Erich Feigl Looks at Aram Andonian
Aram Andonian claims to have met an Ottoman official by the name of Naim Bey in Aleppo, after the entry of the British. This official supposedly passed the papers with the death orders to Andonian. Without going any further into the serious differences between the French and English editions of those "Documents Officiels", it must be said that after having studied both editions it is no longer clear whether these are supposed to be the memoirs of Naim Bey or of Aram Andonian.
In the text of the English edition, there are altogether forty-eight "official Ottoman documents" scattered through the book. These are attributed to the following persons and institutions:
Person/Organization Number of documents
Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha 30
Director of the settlement Commission of Aleppo, Abdülahad Nuri Bey 8
Governor of Aleppo, Abdülhalik Bey 3
Committee of Union and Progress 2
Minister of War Enver Pasha 1
Ministry of the Interior 1
Governor of the region Deirs es Zor, Zeki Bey 1
Governor of the region Antep, Ahmet Bey 1
Unknown 1
Not at all these "documents" are complete. Sometimes the date is missing, sometimes the serial number, occasionally both. All in all, exactly half are lacking in some way.
The originals of the papers copied by Andonian were never seen. Photographs of fourteen "documents" appear in his books. When asked for the originals, he claimed they were lost. Not a single one of the documents reproduced by Andonian can be found today. They were probably destroyed to make it more difficult to prove that they were forgeries. Andonian made so many mistakes in preparing the papers, however, that is possible to prove with absolute certainty that they were forgeries, even without the originals.
Wrong dates.
The simplest, absolutely irrefutable proof of the forgery involves Andonian's incorrect use of calendar information. To give just one example, Andonian has the governor of Aleppo signing documents at a time when he had not yet been named to the post and was still living in Istanbul.
Naturally, for his forgeries Andonian used the Rumi calendar, which was in use in the Ottoman Empire at the time. The Rumi (Roman) calendar of the Ottomans was a special variation on the common Islamic calendar, which takes the Hegira (Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina in 622 A.D.) as a starting point. Because it used lunar years, it was only necessary to subtract 584 years to convert from the Gregorian to the Rumi year. 1987 A.D., for example would be 1403 on the Rumi calendar. There is another trick, however. In addition to the 584 years, one has also has to figure in a difference of thirteen days. Moreover, the Rumi calendar began on March 1. That meant that the last two months of the Rumi calendar (January and February) were already the first months of the Christian calendar.
The correct date — according to the Christian calendar — for these last two months of the Rumi calendar is obtained by adding 584 plus one year. An example: January 5 of the year 1331 (Rumi) corresponds to January 18, 1916 (1331+584+1 and 13 days).
That, however, is still not all the tricks. As mentioned above, the Ottoman year always began on March 1. In February 1917, the difference of thirteen days between the Rumi and Gregorian calendars was eliminated in order to facilitate conversion. The difference of 584 years remained unchanged, however. Thus, February 16, 1332 (February 1917) suddenly became March 1, 1333 (March 1, 1917 A.D.). At the same time, the year 1333 (1917) was made into a year with only ten months, running from March 1 to December 31.
January 1, 1334 thus became January 1, 1918 A.D. (Note:the Turkish republic adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1925, so that the Rumi year 1341 became 1925 A.D.) These calendar technicalities may seem very complicated and uninteresting. They are, however, of tremendous importance in connection with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and the forgeries of Aram Andonian, which at first fooled Franz Werfel.
In considering the dating (and the sequential numbering) of the "Andonian papers" and the authentic documents, one must also keep in mind that numbering of the incoming and outgoing documents always began with March 1 (1333 Rumi=1917 A.D.) and continued sequentially through February 28 ( the last day of the Rumi year). It was then "New Year's" once again on March 1.
In forging the most important of his "documents", which he called Number 1, Aram Andonian already committed a serious error. Here is the text of the most important part of this "document":
Document No.1
"In the name of god, the Compassionate, the Merciful, To the delegate at Adana, Jemal Bey.
February 18, 1331 (March 2, 1916). (Note: This is the date which appears on Andonian's original Turkish 'document'. See below for discrepancies in the French and English ecitions.)
The only force in Turkey that is able to frustrate the political life of the Ittihad and Terakki (Committee of Union and Progress) is the Armenians. From news which has frequently been received lately from Cairo, we learnt that the Dashnaktstuin is preparing a decisive attack against the Jemiet."
After a short transition, the alleged "Document No. 1" comes to the following conclusion:
"The Jemiet has decided to save the fatherland from the ambition of this cursed race, and to take on its own patriotic shoulders the stain which will blacken Ottoman history.
The Jemiet, unable to forget all old scores and past bitterness, full of hope for the future, has decided to annihilate all Armenians living in Turkey, without leaving a single one alive, and it has given the Government a wide scope with regard to this. Of course the Government will give the necessary injunctions about the necessary massacres to the Governors..."
After some further details, the "document" ends with an unreadable signature.
For the sake of completeness, it should also be mentioned that this key letter in Andonian's of documents is dated February 18, 1331 (February 18, 1915) in the original French version of his book, but bears the date February 8, 1331 (March 25, 1915) in the English version. The original Turkish text, however, clearly bears the date February 18, 1331. Let us recall: according to the rules of calendar conversion, February 18, 1331 corresponds to March 2, 1916. (1919 was a leap year, so February had 29 days). It does not correspond to February 18, 1915, as in the French translation, nor to March 25, 1915, as in the English translation. In other words, Aram Andonian should have written 1330 instead of 1331 if he wanted to forge the correct date. A letter written on March 2, 1916 can hardly have brought about events that are supposed to have occurred nine months earlier!
Anyone who thinks that this might have just been an accident, a mistake on the official's part, will be set straight by "Document No. 2" in Andonian's collection. The second letter in his collection should naturally have been dated March 25 1332 (April 7, 1916), but in fact bears the date March 25, 1331. It is quite clear that the forger simply knew too little about the Ottoman calendar and overlooked these tricky details in converting.
The Turkish Historians Sinasi Orel and Sürreya Yuca published an extensive scientific work in 1983 concerning the forgeries of Aram Andonian. They follow up on all the details (there are hundreds) of the unsuccessful forgeries. These range from dates and counterfeit signatures to transmogrified greetings such as "Bismillahs", which no Moslem would ever have dared to write.
A particularly insidious section of the forged Andonian papers deals with the "broadening of the massacre" — in particular to include children. This section is brilliantly done from a psychological standpoint. One "document" of this type reads as follows:
Document No. 4
Deciphered copy of a ciphered telegram of the Ministry of the Interior
No. 502, September 3, 1331 (September 16, 1915)
"We recommend that the operations which have ordered you to make shall be first carried out on the men of the said people (the Armenians), and that you shall subject the women and children to them also. Appoint reliable officials for this.
The Minister of the Interior, Talaat
Note:
To Abdülhalad Nuri Bey, September 5. Have you met with the commandant of the gendarmerie?
The governor, Mustafa Abdulhalik
Aside from the fact that the governor's signature is clearly (and crudely) forged, Andonian was sloppy and let another blunder slip through in composing the telegram. No "Governor Mustafa Abdülhalik" could possibly have had anything to do with an administrative act in Aleppo on September 3 or September 5. The governor of Aleppo at that time was Bekir Sami Bey. Mustafa Abdülhalik was still in Istanbul at the beginning of September. He took office in Aleppo on October 10, 1915.
There is indeed a telegram from September 3, 1331 in the Ottoman archives addressed to the governor of Aleppo, Bekir Sami Bey. At any rate , it bears the serial number 78 and not Andonian's fantasy number 502.
Holdwater: Unfortunately, I was not able to get hold of the original 1920 English edition, but the 1964 reprint, put out by AHRA, The Armenian Historical Research Association. There are many discrepancies. Assuming they were provided in the original 1920 edition, the Rumi years (from the 1300s) had been done away with. "Document No. 2" which followed the March 25, 1915 (February 18, 1915 in the French version) dated "Document No. 1," does not bear the March-April dates Prof. Feigl pointed to in the original work he must have examined, but instead is dated Nov. 18, 1915. (The body of this letter, now dated Nov. 18, confirms that it is a follow-up to "Document No. 1": "As announced in our dispatch dated February 8...", referencing, Feb. 8, 1331, the equivalent of "March 25, 1915," the date "Document No. 1" was identified by. The problem: "Document No. 2" [March-April] was intended to be a fairly quick follow-up to "Document No. 1" [Feb. March], sent about a month later. Yet, in the English version, this follow-up was sent nearly a year later, on Nov. 18, 1915.)
Furthermore, "Document No. 4," with the code number 502, is dated Sept. 3, 1915 in the reprint (pp. 54-55), and not Sept. 16, as in the original. Importantly they omitted the following "Note" from Mustafa Abdulhalik. Dadrian will be addressing this one, so it is critical. Leave it to extremist Armenians to make a forgery out of a forgery.
In addition, Prof. Feigl tells us "no Moslem would ever have dared to write" the greeting, "Bismillah," but there appears to be disagreement in the other analyses.
In his introduction, Dadrian provides the set-up with how the “process of deportation ... became a process of destruction. The provinces in the interior of Turkey with heavy concentrations of Armenians were thus completely denuded of their indigenous population.”
By 1916, Dadrian himself has written that “the genocide had all but run its course”... a weird assertion in itself, if the idea was the destruction of the Armenians. (The Nazis’ “Final Solution” chugged away until the final bitter hours of WWII, as we were reminded of in the film, SCHINDLER’S LIST.) Armenophile bigot Consul J. B. Jackson prepared a report for boss Morgenthau on Feb. 8, 1916 contending that 486,000 represented “the statistics of Armenian immigrants, according to best information,” not too far from Boghos Nubar’s numbers of 600-700,000, as presented in a Dec. 11, 1918 letter to French Minister Gout. In March of 1916, Morgenthau — confirming Dadrian's "run its course" conclusion — was quoted by Vahan Cardashian, in a letter to Lord Bryce, as stating the Ottoman government's attitude toward Armenians was “passive”; and that the “Armenians were found in good numbers in almost all the interior cities of Turkey.” [The Armenian Review, Winter 1957, p. 107.] Already Dadrian is starting off with a big lie, stating that the “interior of Turkey” had been “completely denuded of their indigenous population.” Particularly since the Armenian Patriarch himself vouched for 644,900 remaining Armenians in 1921. (The pre-war population was some 1.5 million. The fact that nearly half was sticking around three years after the war is hardly a “complete denuding.” Hundreds of thousands of Armenians had left for other lands, on their own accord, by this time. And we won’t touch that other dubious assertion, regarding whether Armenians were truly the “indigenous population.”)
It is significant that of the "telegrams" attributed to Talat Pasha in this work, one is numbered 819 and dated March, 7, 1332 (or March 20, 1916). No such telegram was sent from the Ministry of Interior to the Governorship of Aleppo on that day, so we already know it is a fake. More tellingly, this “extermination order” is said to have been written in 1916, the year Vahakn Dadrian himself is on record for establishing, in Sept. 2004, that “the genocide had all but run its course”!
(The above info about "819" comes from Prof. Ataöv's round-up of the Sinasi Orel and Sureyya Yuca research; which I will refer to often, as I have not read the Orel-Yuca work. I could find no such numbered or dated telegram in the 1964 reprint, which appears to have — that is, I did not have the luxury to peruse it at length — featured 19 Talat telegrams, and not the 20 Prof. Feigl counted. It's possible this particular telegram might have been reproduced, but under a different date. The 1964 reprint appears to be a real sham.)
Dadrian next tells us his genocide “was attested to by multitudes of Armenian survivors; by ... missionaries; and by European and American consuls,” along with “Austrian and German officers.” Every one of the non-Armenians among these parties (with the exception of some missionaries, who contributed to the creation of stories) accepted second-hand testimony, because of their deep, ingrained prejudices against the Turks, regarded as a less-than-human species. Hearsay is not admissible for the truth-seeker, especially when derived from biased sources.
Dadrian points to the lack of real evidence, writing, “Such a preponderance of testimony is deficient, however, in one major respect... it does not inform specifically on the underlying mechanisms of these administrative measures.”
“In brief, there has been a paucity of specific documentation on the involvement of key power-wielders and the hierarchy of subordinate agents. That paucity was somewhat mitigated by the 1919-1920 Turkish Court Martial proceedings,” Dadrian eagerly tells us, since the findings of these kangaroo courts, conducted without due process and under enemy occupation, are his “bread and butter.” He tells us these are to be relied upon because the “competent” lackey officials of the puppet Ottoman administration “had authenticated them with the standard notation: ‘It conforms to the original.’" (When it serves his purposes, the Turks are as scrupulous as can be. When it does not, Dadrian has been known to provide the idea that the Turks were unreliable, lying scoundrels. For example, in Dadrian’s smear attack on Dr. Erickson, Dadrian set the stage for Turkish dishonesty with, “[M]embers of the German Military Mission to Turkey almost uniformly complained during and after the war, about the indolence and laxness with which the former went about preparing maps, compiling statistics, and, above all, preparing reports.”)
“Yet it was apparent that these were but the scattered fragments of a large volume of secret records that, according to Turkish testimony, were hastily whisked away and eventually destroyed.” He does not footnote what this “Turkish testimony” is. Here, he must be referring to how these records were destroyed after the nationalists had won and Turkey was independent again. The British had “whisked” into the defeated Ottoman Empire immediately after the Armistice of Oct. 30, 1918, quickly took over the Ottoman archives, and appointed an Armenian (Haig Khazarian) in charge... in the hopes of finding evidence for the 1919-21 Malta Tribunal process. There was no time to destroy anything then. If the Kemal administration destroyed the records of the 1919-20 Ottoman trials, there would have been no reason to do so “hastily.” The Turks were in control of their nation once more, and they had all the time in the world to dispose of these records, if dispose of them they did. (There is no evidence regarding the fate of these records.) The reason why the Turks might have felt there was no reason to keep these records was because the 1919-20 kangaroo courts were a travesty of justice; even the British felt the same way, when they dismissed the findings of these courts for their own Malta Tribunal.
And now we are getting into the meat of why Dadrian has prepared this classic example of the “Armenian AND? Anthem”:
This being the case, the Naim-Andonian documents, if authentic, assume extraordinary import for two main reasons. First, they are intrinsically valuable as primary sources on state secrets involving a major state crime. Second, by declaring these documents as forgeries, a host of Turkish scholars, supported and sponsored by the Turkish Historical Society, currently are mounting a large-scale campaign to challenge that contention of crime.[2]
Let’s take a moment to examine what Dadrian has provided in his “Footnote 2.” Look at what he is doing: he is strongly implying that Turkish scholars must be lying through their teeth, since everyone knows Turkish scholars are incapable of independent thought (unless supported by the Armenian network, such as in the case of Taner Akcam, or for other opportunistic reasons), and must work toward the contentions of their “totalitarian” state. Already Dadrian is planting doubt in readers’ minds that whatever the Turkish scholars have come up with cannot be trusted. This way he is detracting from the message, and concentrating on the messenger, which is Dadrian’s classic Dashnak style.
Dadrian singles out Türkkaya Ataöv’s “The Andonian Documents Attributed to Talat Pasha Are Forgeries,” based on Sinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca’s 1983 study. He also fires away at Kamuran Gürün’s “The Armenian File.” Copies of Ataöv’s work were made available in several languages and distributed to “universities, foreign offices, and, above all, key echelons of the media” (I can’t believe this was such an all-encompassing campaign as Dadrian is making it sound. “The Turkish government” could not have deterred from its typically passive and clueless state to such an extent. If they did, it must have been a great exception, and phooey on them for failing to continue on that tract.) Dadrian whines that this report made an impression on members of 1985’s U.N. Sub-Commission on Human Rights, when the Armenians had their man, Benjamin Whitaker, in place to push this genocide hoax.
Dadrian actually goes on to mislead by reporting that “Whitaker finally prevailed,” as the “Sub-Commission on August 29, 1985, voted to ‘take note’ of the Whitaker report. For what it is worth, an international body thus for the first time has registered its recognition of the historical fact of the Armenian genocide involving as victims ‘at least one million, and possibly well over half of the Armenian population.’"
Hoo-boy. Leave it to Dadrian’s pathetic attempts to deceive, as usual. The fact of the matter is, the Whitaker Report was politely refused and not transmitted to the Commission on Human Rights. The Sub-Commission’s “vote of 14 to 1, with 4 abstentions, on August 19, 1985,” as Dadrian sneakily tells us, referred to an adoption of Resolution 1985/9, and not the Whitaker Report. The Sub-Commission refused to receive the Report, deleting the word "receives" from the draft resolution. It merely took "note" of the study, as Dadrian singled out with his famously selective evidence, trying to pull the wool over our eyes. The Sub-Commission actually refused to praise the Whitaker Report by deleting the words "the quality of." (By 16 votes to none, with 4 abstentions!) It even added statements to the resolution, in order to emphasize the controversy on the Report, "Noting that divergent views w{ere ex}pressed about the content and proposals of the report..." They also added the following: "...Other participants felt that the Special Rapporteur should have dealt exclusively with the problem of preventing future genocides without referring to past events which were difficult or impossible to inves{tigate"} (para. 41). Various participants argued that the Armenian issue was not adequately documented and that "certain evidence had been forged" (para. 42). (Read: “What Really Happened in Geneva”)
Therefore, if Ataöv’s report made a difference with the U.N. body’s awareness of the real truth, that was to be lauded. Instead, Dadrian is making it seem like the lying Turks pulled a fast one. (We can well understand how upset this episode must have made him. Usually, the Armenian propagandists are accustomed to having their propaganda sail through, without opposition. The propaganda about the U.N. having accepted the mythological Armenian genocide was so prevalent, U.N. Spokesman Farhan Haq issued a declaration in late 2000 saying it simply isn't so. Juan Mendez, Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide to the Secretary General of the United Nations, confirmed this non-acceptance in a June 4-7, 2005 Florida Atlantic University genocide conference. But Mendez is a member of the genocide club, and to provide an example of why Dadrian is so spoiled with having his views automatically accepted, in the knowledge that his genocide industy’s tentacles reach far and wide: in March 2006, Mendez was likely instrumental in seeing to it that U.N. grounds were used in order to carry a commemoration of both the Armenian and Rwandan genocides. Dadrian was one of the speakers, and the event was monitored by a biased New York Times journalist. Ataöv pulled a surprise visit, rebuked the journalist for “choosing sides” [she did all she could to shut Ataöv up], and a circus resulted, with the Armenians in the audience yelping cries of pain. The Rwandan representative — hopefully having recognized the travesty his mission was sucked into, like a latter day Franz Werfel — later apologized to Ataöv, but the one to apologize should have been Juan Mendez, for putting his own prejudices before his responsibilities toward the U.N. organization, and for abusing his authority in making this conference possible, as it appears. [Mendez used to be president of the ICTJ; this body of lawyers recognized the Armenian myth, utilizing Armenian propaganda sources near-exclusively.])
Dadrian continues: “Consequently, this study will be limited to the task of probing, assessing, and, if possible, authenticating a set of documents the critical import of which is matched by the intensity with which their legitimacy is currently being contested.” That is precisely his purpose. He can’t authenticate them, but he will do his best to cast doubt on the facts that indicate they are forgeries.
“These documents depict the involvement of the organs of the Ottoman state apparatus and the role of the Ittihad Party in controlling that apparatus. The effort is therefore largely a historiographical one. Its central thrust is an attempt at exposing the fallacies rampantly in evidence in a new trend of revisionism bent on rewriting history relative to the World War I destruction of Ottoman Armenians. it is hoped that once the record is set straight, scholarship in this area will be kept free from the inroads of political expediency and partisanship.”
Doesn’t it make you sick? This professional partisan trying to make it appear as though he is above “political expediency and partisanship.”
Under “THE MAKE-UP OF THE MATERIAL,” Dadrian informs the material as consisting “mainly of 52 pieces purporting to be documents of which all but 2, which are letters, are decoded cipher telegrams.” (Prof. Feigl's count from above was 48 telegrams, referring to the English edition, so we have a difference of two. If I counted correctly, the 1964 reprint featured 45.) We are told “the English title referring to Naim's memoirs is a clear misnomer,” given that “a significant part of the material consists of Naim Sefa's annotations explaining and enlarging upon individual ciphers.” In addition, “Aram Andonian's own supplementary comments are interspersed in the main text, along with a whole series of footnotes and editorial opinions.”
So Dadrian himself is providing a reason that the material is a joke; whose idea, after all, was it to call this book “The Memoirs of Naim Bey”? If the propagandists misinformed with the title itself, what else could they have misinformed with? As Ataöv informs us (in “The Andonian Documents Attributed to Talat Pasha Are Forgeries”):
Andonian's work in English (84 pp.) includes 48 and in French (168 pp.) 50 such "documents". It is difficult to ascertain which portions of the book are part of Naim Bey's "memoirs" and which are Andonian's own composition, for several pages in the English edition, presented as Naim Bey's reminiscences, appear as Andonian's writing.
If Andonian decided to allow his “own supplementary comments” to be “interspersed in the main text,” and we can’t distinguish the propagandist’s words from those of the supposed Turkish official, the work clearly is without honest intention. In the 1964 reprint, there is no mention of "Naim Sefa" (is that the full name for Naim Bey? At first, I figured Naim Sefa was someone different, since Dadrian pointed to Naim Sefa’s “annotations” as the chief reason why the book’s title is a misnomer. But if they are the same person, the book’s title would be less of a misnomer) and Andonian is presented as the "translator" (even though Dadrian will inform us Andonian did not know English). If the work is called "The Memoirs of Naim Bey," and if Naim Bey is allowed to speak in the first person (examples will be provided later), and also if Naim Sefa is the same person as Naim Bey, then there is no "misnomer." The people behind this book intentionally attempted to represent Naim Bey as the primary voice behind this presentation. (Even though the first person voice is constantly interrupted with a voice that is clearly not Naim Bey's. What might more accurately be said is that the whole book is a misnomer. But that would not be an accurate usage of the word; better words would be misrepresentation... misdeed... miscreant.)
“Two letters from Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, the head of the Special Organization... are of paramount significance. They provide an ideological framework for the anti-Armenian measures to be initiated.”
Hold up. Isn’t Dadrian’s purpose, as he related in his introduction, to try and determine whether the work is “authentic”? But he is already coming from the position that the work has been authenticated. (The Armenian who posted this material at Hyeforum, someone who calls himself “QueBeceR,” has prefaced his post with, “Some have even tried to discredit [Dadrian], on the basis that he ‘claims’ ‘forgeries’ to be authentic.” The proof of Dadrian’s position lies with his own writing. Dadrian makes no bones about where he stands, in his letter to The Middle East Quarterly and the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) a generation later. Dadrian clearly wants to make us believe Andonian’s work is on the level, while this silly Dadrian disciple tries to present the notion that Dadrian is impartial, in typical Dadrian-style deception..!)
Dadrian must have dripped much saliva as he provides details on these phony telegrams, including the one that is widely published in genocide sites, Talat’s order to “show no mercy for women and children or the infirm and sick.” (One of these telegrams is featured in Dadrian pal Stephen Feinstein’s reprehensible CHGS site as “evidence.” Feinstein was Dadrian’s co-writer, in a letter to the TLS, ganging up on Prof. Norman Stone. Since Dadrian is supposedly so uncertain about the Andonian work, as “QueBeceR” assures us, you’d think he’d get Feinstein on the phone and tell him to either remove the suspicious telegram, or include a disclaimer.)
Among the gruesome details, Dadrian informs us Abdulahad Nuri “echoes” the above Talat extermination directive (No. 35), and further describes “the process of destruction through extermination” in two ciphers (Nos. 29 and 42). No. 51 from Nuri, described as “Deputy Director of Deportation,” reassures “the executioners of the deportees that they will not be held accountable.”
The stupidity of these telegrams becomes all the more apparent as they are completely contradictory to genuine Ottoman orders, or to historical realities. We know, for example, that Armenian orphans were cared for in droves, and survived. (The 1964 reprint is filled with photographs of Armenian orphans.) Yet Andonian concocted “a set of five telegrams from Talat ordering the disposal of Armenian orphans,” as Dadrian informs us. Now, how difficult would it have been to have exterminated defenseless orphans? Not one orphan could have survived, if this were a real order. Yet Dadrian is trying to make it seem as though it were.
From the 1964 reprint: "Halide Hamum, accompanied by converted Armenian orphans." Below: "Halide Hanum (sitting), a Turkish authoress, a most active worker at the conversion of Armenians orphans to Islam. An Armenian girl (standing) is being allured into harem life." The Chairman of AHRA, M. G. Sevag, wrote in the book's foreword, after referring to the Turks' "inhuman practices" and "demonic crimes, the case of Halide Edib Hanum is a loathsome example." An excerpt from a propaganda work is cited: "It was Halide Hanum, a graduate of the American College for girls at Constantinople, and Kemal's minister of education... who directed the tearing apart of thousands of children from their (Armenian) parents to be forced into Turkish homes, and the seizure of thousands of young women to be turned over to the Turkish army for immoral purposes."
(If these children were "orphans," how could they have had "parents" to be torn away from?)
How could Armenian propagandists be so absolutely bereft of morals? They actually made a villain of Halide Edip, a humanitarian to an extent that even Vahakn Dadrian has pointed to her for supposedly refusing to shake Bahaeddin Shakir's hand. We have no idea who these other girls in the photographs are, but we do know there were over 2.5 million Muslim deaths that produced many, many Turkish orphans, and we also know this vile book uses whatever photo and description that serve their disgusting purpose, as will become clearer below. Edip was active during the years of struggle after W.W.I, when desperate Turks had other things on their minds besides "harems"; here's a look at what lay behind this conversion/slavery propaganda, along with a heartbreaking account from Halide Edip, regarding what was going on in these post war orphanages.
Back to Abdulahad Nuri; he is clearly one of the stars of the show:
“In compliance with these instructions, A. Nuri in two ciphers reassures Talat; he informs Talat in one of the impending dispatch of 400 orphans from an orphanage (No. 13), and explains in the other that by marching off these children amidst the rigors of the winter, ‘their eternal peace’ will be ensured (No. 37).”
Now get this excursion into fantasyland: Naim appealed to A. Nuri to relax the “stringency of the measures” as “the public health consequences of the relentless mass murder would sooner or later strike the entire population of the region, leaving only ghosts in its wake.” Nuri’s reply: "My boy, we will be destroying this way two harmful elements at once. Aren't those who will be dying off along with the Armenians the Arabs? Is it bad? The paths of Turkey's future will thereby open up." ("Naim Bey" added his comment here that he "shuddered" at the man's evilness. Brother.)
So now we have an idea of how complicit Abdulahad Nuri was with the “Final Solution,” in the hands of Aram Andonian. Remember, Andonian’s work was released in London, in 1920, smack-dab in the middle of the desperate efforts of the British, hoping to find legitimate evidence in their Malta Tribunal process. Can anyone imagine for one moment that the British... the British, who were underhanded enough to come up with the Sèvres Treaty, signifying the death of the Turkish nation... would not have made good use of this material, had they not ultimately (and to their great credit) determined that their Malta evidence had better be genuine? Yet Abdulahad Nuri was not even arrested by the British. A work determined to be an obvious forgery back in 1920 is still being analyzed in the early 21st century, because of unscrupulous and deceptive practices of propagandists like Dadrian. It’s truly an unbelievable situation.
It’s also interesting that Naim, "entirely unimportant,” according to Andonian himself (as he privately revealed; in the book, the impression of Naim is otherwise), would have had the ear of such a big shot as Abdulahad Nuri. In Andonian’s 1937 letter, Naim would also be described as highly immoral. That is not in keeping with Naim serving as a voice of conscience to Nuri. (But Andonian hoped to present the image of Naim as a humanitarian, in the book itself. For example, in the book and in a letter of June 10, 1921 to the Berlin court, Andonian states that Naim Bey turned down all suggestions of payment. Yet in the July 26, 1937 letter to Mary Terzian, Andonian declares that the Armenians paid for every document that they got from Naim Bey. As Prof. Ataöv surmised: “It may be that a realistic description would create suspicion on the very authenticity of the ‘memoirs’ and ‘documents.’ Andonian was not trying to protect Naim Bey, but preserve the acceptability of his ‘documents.’"
In his section describing “THE LIABILITIES OF THE MATERIAL,” Dadrian will try to excuse some of the obvious flaws. Why was there such a difference in the different language editions?
“The material was assembled in the turmoil and chaos of the armistice, with extreme secrecy and without the benefit of legal advice. It received a shabby treatment in its English translation, its editing, printing, and custodial safe-keeping. The resulting damage is considerable but not irreparable, as described below.[5]”
“Not irreparable”? Do you get the same feeling, that Dadrian is not looking at these materials in exactly an objective fashion, but has a goal in mind?
In footnote [5], Dadrian dismisses German Consul at Aleppo Walter Rössler’s criticism by pointing to three little loving words in Rössler’s 1921 letter, "as simple errors." Dadrian neglects to add, with his famous preference for selective quotes, that Rössler was biased, a chum of the Armenian-batty Johannes Lepsius. Moreover, as Ataöv reported, “[E]ven Dr. Rössler said that although the ‘documents,’ within the general contents of the book... (gave) the ‘impression’ of being authentic, it was very difficult to say the same for the individual telegrams, not knowing how the authenticity of such documents might be established and realizing that the author is under the spell of his emotions and not objective. Even Andonian himself admitted, in his letter of July 26, 1937, that Dr. Rössler found his book devoid of objectivity.” Dadrian also points to criticism laid out by Krieger, but does not elaborate. (Krieger had access to Andonian's Unpublished Essays and Papers from Paris’ Boghos Nubar Library, and authored a work entitled, “Aram Andonianee.”)
Dadrian also tells us that because of Andonian’s “penchant for propaganda,” (!) the documents were rushed to London, “with a view to influencing public opinion and Allied diplomats...”
“A valuable opportunity was thus lost for submitting the documents to Ottoman authorities for possible authentication. The Ministries of Justice, Interior and Defense were in the process of setting up a Military Tribunal to try the authors of the wartime massacres, and were in search of pertinent documents.”
This Dadrian is one fine piece of work, isn’t he? Take my word for it: If Andonian felt there would be a chance in Hell that these documents would go through in the 1919-20 Ottoman kangaroo courts, you had better believe he would have made time for it. Especially in the knowledge that the puppet Turks were in a frenzy to convict, without regard for real evidence. Andonian’s problem was that he did not have the originals. That is, he must have had the originals, but he did not dare produce them, because they were his forged originals. He could not afford a scientific scrutiny, for obvious reasons; better to claim that he had “lost” the originals, as he did. (Can the reader imagine such valuable documents to have been “lost”? In Footnote [6], we’re informed Andonian induced Naim in 1918 to finally send the originals.)
As far as the Ottoman kangaroo courts were concerned, eager to provide Armenian prosecuting lawyers as friends of the courts (with an Entente gun pointed to the Turks’ heads; as Dadrian himself instructed us, the Allies said, ‘Unless you prosecute and punish the authors of Armenian deportations and massacres, the conditions of the impending peace will be very severe and harsh.’), they probably would have looked the other way as Andonian presented his phony evidence. Why didn’t Andonian do so? It was obviously too late. The kangaroo trials were winding down by early 1920, not long after Andonian was putting the finishing touches on his dirty work. (Reference is made to the Yozgat governor's execution within the book, so the book was being prepared as the 1919 trials were hitting their stride. Ternon writes Andonian finished by June of 1919, yet the production was enough of an ongoing process for Viscount Gladstone to have been asked for his Dec. 24, 1919 dated hateful introduction, as the year of the book’s publication was near.) Besides, the impact of Andonian’s dirty work would have had greater impact in the court of world opinion than in some backwater Ottoman court. This is the same strategy Armenian propagandists have preferred in recent years, hoping to legislate their history through genocide resolutions, rather than through legitimate channels.
Like Father, Like Son
As Henry Morgenthaus II and III followed in their Turcophobic [grand]pappy's footsteps, Herbert Gladstone could be counted on to spread the ignorance and anti-Turkish hatred well established by William Gladstone. (Although Junior, to his credit, added a few words about all Turks not being bad.) The intro's close:
"If there is anything in the modern conception of duty and justice, the treaty that has yet to come must rescue once and for all the survivors of this Christian nation from the unutterable misdoings of the 'Sublime Porte.'"
Under a section entitled “Technical Flaws,” Dadrian apologizes for poor Andonian, a genocide “survivor,” because he had to rush the work, sacrificing “coherence and integration. The documents do not blend well with the interpretative texts of either Naim or Andonian, nor do they follow a systematic order.” The English version is a mere "summary," we are told. (Isn’t that silly? Since at least two of the three versions of the work were simultaneously published, what would it have taken to do a flat out translation? Ternon tells us, by the way, that it was the Armenian group in Manchester, England, where Andonian traveled to hand over the goods, that made the deal with Andonian. It’s peculiar, then, that the French version would have been stressed.) In Footnote [6], we’re told Andonian did not know English and could neither control typographical errors nor oversee the body of the translation. He complained to Terzian that his manuscript was treated "cavalierly," and in the process "they went a little too far."
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but if I had my hands on such explosive material, I would have made damned sure to get it out the proper way. All Andonian would have needed to do was approach some wealthy Armenians to back his project, to allow him to personally control the proceedings from A to Z. The fact that he would have chosen to work with the mysterious “they” (the Armenian National Union) already indicates the truth in his confession to Terzian, that his work “was not a historical one, but rather one aiming at propaganda." With that statement alone, no genuine scholar can take these suspicious documents seriously.
Dadrian also apologizes for the errors in date conversion, concerning the difference between the rumi (Julian) and the miladi (Gregorian) calendars, one of the most powerful evidences in the work of Sinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca. Dadrian attributes these to... hold on to your seats, folks... “typographical and editorial errors.” He further elaborates, “It is abundantly evident that the production of the three volumes, including proofreading, was undertaken with incomprehensible laxity.”
(Proofreading was not always the issue; Orel and Yuca, in their scholarly work of 334 pages, paid primary attention to the photocopies of these documents that were printed in the books. Moreover, if the 1964 reprint serves as an indication, there's barely a word out of place, and the spelling is near-perfect. In fact, the only typos that hit my eye were from the non-Andonian sections, written in 1964, as the caption to an "Armin Wegner" photo, coming up.)
Dadrian attempts to set the record straight with “The Problematic Case of Two Documents: A Clarification and an Explanation.” He goes into a convoluted description, and as the reader’s eyes are about to glaze over, we get the gist that the reason why one letter is 1916 when it should have been 1915 (you see, Andonian tried to prove premeditation, but he slipped up by writing 1916, as Prof. Feigl clarified above) may be explained by looking at another telegram’s reproduction. Dadrian claims that the letter with the wrong date is referred to in this second telegram, and it provides the correct year, 1915. Since few are Ottoman specialists, Dadrian expects his “word” to be taken, although it’s hard to imagine such a detail would have escaped the meticulous scrutiny of Orel and Yuca. Is this first letter actually pointed to in the second letter? I would hope genuine scholars would have gotten on the ball regarding the matter, but unfortunately, most Turkish scholars are in their own little worlds, allowing Dadrian to get away with his form of murder. As Hilmar Kaiser has warned us, "serious scholars should be cautioned against accepting all of Dadrian's statements at face value."
So how does Dadrian explain the error? He points to an error Shakir had made in another letter, writing the Ottoman version of the year, 1906, in one paragraph, but wrote the correct year, 1907, before his signature. Is this true? If it is true, were both years actually the same reference? We cannot be certain until the document is examined by a reputable party, since we are dealing with the unscrupulous Vahakn Dadrian, known to make any statement in order to detract and confuse. At any rate, even if it is true, Dadrian is telling us Shakir has a history of writing incorrect dates, and therefore the Andonian document probably was also Shakir’s fault. At this point, the reader must ask him or herself, how often do we make a practice of writing the wrong year, when we date our letters? Sure, we’ve all done it. But as a “practice”? Especially in an official letter? By the manner in which Dadrian expects us to swallow his bizarre explanations, it is a pity we don’t all belong in the same jaw-opening snake species.
(Let's also keep in mind that just because Dadrian has theorized "Document No. 1" was authored by Behaeddin Shakir — Dadrian pointed to the letters "BEHA" that miraculously escaped the attention of Orel and Yuca — it does not mean Shakir was the author. That is one weird way to sign a letter. Does Vahakn Dadrian sign his letters with VAHA? Moreover, how did Shakir sign his real letters? Since Dadrian tells us that he had access to a Shakir letter from 1907, was that letter also signed BEHA? Something tells me Dadrian would have trumpeted that detail, if such were the case.)
(If Shakir curiously had chosen the first four letters of his first name as a signature, I wonder how Dadrian would explain the fact that in Turkish, the name of "Behaeddin" would be BAHAttin?)
Mustafa Abdülhalik Bey forged by Aram Andonian
Mustafa Abdülhalik Bey signs documents when he wasn't
even on the job yet. (Caption by Feigl, "The Myth of Terror.")
But Dadrian isn’t done yet. There is another major dating discrepancy he must attempt to discredit. The Governor of Aleppo was Bekir Sami Bey. He was replaced by Mustafa Abdülhalik on “September 27, 1331,” or (in our language) October 10, 1915. Yet Andonian had Abdülhalik at his post, appending a note to a Talat letter dated “September 3, 1331,” before taking office.
Dadrian: “Abdülhalik never wrote the word for September but just ‘5,’ simply indicating the day of the month.” (Reader: this is "Document No. 4" that Prof. Feigl pointed to, above, coded 502 and dated Sept. 3, 1331 or Sept. 16, 1915. The 1964 reprint presented this as Sept. 3, 1915, and omitted Abdülhalik's Note at bottom. Doc. 4 starts out with Talat's extermination order, and after Talat's name, there is a "Note," like a "P.S.," to Nuri from Abdülhalik, indicating Abdülhalik either appended this note while still in Istanbul — since he did not yet begin his job in Aleppo — or scribbled his note at the bottom of Talat's telegram, after receiving Talat's telegram while Abdülhalik was somehow in Aleppo. )
As opposed to Orel and Yuca’s analysis, Dadrian claims the letter in question is not September 3, 1331 but September 3, 1915:
Perhaps the most problematic piece in the Naim-Andonian cipher telegrams is Talat's September 3, 1915 (No. 3), the facsimile of which is reproduced in all three versions. It contains some notes from Mustafa Abdülhalik, to whom it is directed. As records show, the latter took up his post in Aleppo as governor in the last week of September (old style) and presumably couldn't have transacted official business at that post some three weeks earlier. Should this presumption hold, the cipher becomes highly suspect. But closer scrutiny reveals that his signature appended to his note doesn't specify the month at all but rather the day on which the note was entered. Instead of the year and the month, the customary symbol minh is written, literally meaning "from it," and roughly translating "same." Thus, when entering his instruction, Abdülhalik never wrote the word for September but just "5," simply indicating the day of the month.
==========================
Here is the telegram, as translated by Orel and Yuca:
To Abdülhalad Nuri Bey, September 5. Have you met with the commandant of the gendarmerie?
The governor, Mustafa Abdulhalik
Dadrian tells us the telegram was written as such:
To Abdülhalad Nuri Bey, 5. Have you met with the commandant of the gendarmerie?
The governor, Mustafa Abdulhalik
Dear reader, would it ever occur to you to write a date in such a confusing manner?
==========================
Frankly, I do not believe Orel and Yuca would have simply “created” a date for Mustafa Abdülhalik, if the date was not there. Dadrian is telling us Mustafa Abdülhalik did not specify the month or the year, but simply the day, which Dadrian says was “5.” According to Ataöv’s synopsis of Orel and Yuca, the day should be “3.”
In case you’re not thoroughly confused yet, allow Vahakn Dadrian — with his immediately following paragraph to the above, reproduced below — to drive you to your doom; please keep in mind unlike what he tells us directly below, Abdülhalik took office in Aleppo on Oct. 10, 1915 and not "toward the end of September 1915" or "October 5": (In the preceding paragraph, Dadrian did specify, "the last week of September [old style]," which would make the date Sept. 27, 1331. As you see below, he then misleads us in "1915" terms. If we are speaking in 1915 terms, once again, Abdülhalik took office on Oct. 10, 1915.)
“If Abdülhalik in fact began to serve actively toward the end of September 1915, either the cipher was sent to him prematurely or was intentionally ‘on hold,’ in which case the indication ‘5’ may have been referring to October 5. The only other possibility to consider is a clerical mistake of dating, either by the official in charge of decoding or by the Aleppo Telegraph Bureau receiving and relaying such cipher telegraphs. This line of reasoning assumes that no agency, not to speak of an improvised provincial agency, can be held free from such errors to which Ottoman officialdom has been particularly susceptible.[10] Nor can Talat himself be held exempt from misdating. The biographer of Enver provides a salient example of such misdating...”
Yes, we must consider all possibilities, save for the obvious: Aram Andonian was a liar in the same Dashnak tradition that Vahakn Dadrian holds dear to whatever passes for his heart.
Ladies and gentlemen, Dadrian’s pathetic smoke-screen explanations fail to take one very important point into consideration. Andonian not only goofed with the dates, but also with the cipher numbers. Andonian had no idea what they were, so he was forced to make them up. Ataöv explains, in the Turkish-produced documentary, "Sari Gelin":
============
Prof. Turkkaya Ataov
Turkkaya Ataov
"They would never send something handwritten, from the capital city Istanbul to Aleppo; they would send a code. For example, 125. 364; and then 441, etcetera. Aram Andonian and his friends knew that the Ottoman Empire used codes for correspondence during wartime. However, they did not know what the codes really were. They made up the codes. We have the codebooks of the time. Two digit figures like 22, 41, that they made up, were never used. So the fraud starts with the codes."
As an example: One of the telegrams features the code of 1181, a number that suspiciously appears in neither the French or English "texts." This is the particularly notorious Talat telegram that the government had "decided to destroy completely all the Armenians living in Turkey... an end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex nor to conscientious scruples," in other words, a made-to-order "confession." The Turkish and the English "texts" bear September 16, 1915 as the date while the French version is dated September 15, 1915. (As Ataöv explains, "On that day, a telegram was indeed sent, but it was numbered 84, not 1181, and its subject was the postponement of the transfers of the Armenians working on the railroads.")
Now, Andonian uses a date of Sept. 3, 1915 for the Talat telegram with the code of 502 (p. 54, 1964 reprint) and a date of Sept. 29, 1915 for another with the code of 537 (p. 55). But for the Sept. 15 or 16 one, the one that is in the middle of these other two Talat telegrams, the code is an incongruous 1181. "Andonian's cipher system again fails to correspond with the system," Ataöv sensibly concludes.
In Dadrian’s WEIGHING AND COMING TO GRIPS WITH TURKISH CHALLENGES, get prepared for some serious mumbo jumbo regarding:
1. In discussing Abdulahad Nuri's cipher (No. 26), or rather the printed facsimile of its text, the authors contend that no Ottoman governmental office would deign to use "such a species of paper" (türden bir kagit); they find that paper "resembling . . . paper used for calligraphy lessons in French schools."
2. In disputing Naim's access to ciphers, they maintain, "It is utterly improbable that such highly secret documents would have been kept for three years without being destroyed."
3. Referring to the February 18 and March 25 letters, they argue that the texts betray ignorance of the Ottoman language and that "no Turk, then or now," would commit such errors of grammar and syntax.
4. They indicate irregularities in the use of cryptographie numbers found in some of the ciphers, explaining that code keys were frequently changed during the war, according to General Staff archive data.
5. Having juxtaposed Abdülhalik's signatures with two other documents, which the authors claim bear "the real signature" of the governor, they conclude that the signatures, and hence the documents (Nos. 11 and 19), are "false."
For [1], Dadrian informs us there was an “acute shortage of paper in wartime Turkey.” He dug up a reference by an Ottoman official (Ahmed Resit [Rey], Gördüklerim-Yaptiklarim [1890-1922], 1945) who wrote in his memoirs that Talat used "ordinary paper" one time when he recommended the official’s dismissal to the Grand Vezir. Well then, that must prove it! Prof. Norman Stone was equally impressed: “Dadrian had a wonderful time trying to salvage the documents, and I vastly admired the prestidigitation involved — for instance, if the paper was of the type used in French schools, and not of the type used in government offices, this can be explained by the paper shortage, he says. But if he cannot convince his major ally, who knows the Ottoman documents, well, there we are.”
The major ally (actually, Dadrian's protégé): Taner Akcam. ('There are important grounds for considering these documents fake'; "Turkish National Identity and the Armenian Question," Istanbul 1992, note 8, p.119.) [ADDENDUM, 5-07: Genocideland's "village idiot," Akcam, has reversed himself as the good propagandistic soldier he must be.]
Of course, in case this example doesn’t do the trick, Dadrian “proves” his contention with the following: “Moreover, in order to fashion the three makeshift notebooks he supplied to Andonian in three installments (November 6, 10, and 14, 1918), Naim had to use what scraps of paper he could scrounge, which he then tied together with a string.” That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, Dadrian is actually calling to his witness stand Naim Bey himself, in a case where the very existence of the man is in question..! And as a side note, how can we equate the quality of paper used by someone "entirely unimportant," for private purposes (relaying information to Andonian) with an official communique by A. Nuri?
2. These utterly secret and sensitive documents must have survived because Aleppo was “not considered in danger.” Brother! If such branches were lax about keeping secret documents, then the debate of the Armenian “genocide” would have long been over, since there would be a whole slew of such documents, instead of “zero” (save for Andonian’s forgeries). Dadrian continues with his desperation: one moment Aleppo was perfectly safe, and in the next moment, there was “panicky relinquishment of Aleppo, which was about to be stormed by British-led forces. There was neither anticipation nor enough time to destroy records.” (Aleppo fell to the British.) Dadrian supports his own panicky conclusion by calling on his witness stand Rössler himself, who opined Naim could have been in possession of the documents because “the Turks [in Aleppo] never catalogued and attached their documents." As if Rössler would have been in a position to know..!
Note what Dadrian is getting at, above. The British had taken Aleppo so suddenly in October 1918, the documents must have survived in order for Naim Bey to have gotten his hands on them. After reminding us that Naim Bey had been dismissed from office in early 1916, roughly the time when Andonian first met Naim Bey, Ataöv asked: “How can that be if he (Naim Bey) was dismissed long ago or how can he later 'steal' them, especially when the same Andonian argues that the Ottoman Government ‘did away with all the documents pertaining to the Armenian massacre’? Following Andonian's logic, while all documents pertaining to this issue were destroyed, a dismissed junior bureaucrat enters a government office and steals highly secret ‘documents’!” (But there is a much greater germ-carrying fly in this ointment, as we'll get into when we wind up our study; it has to do with the irrelevance of Naim Bey. The British would have discovered these documents themselves.)
3. Dadrian states: “handwriting, as compared with standardized printing, is intrinsically irregular in any language,” and pooh-poohs Andonian’s having given away his identity by lacking the knowledge of writing the religious formula “besmele.” (“The Historical Society authors single out, for example, the case of a dot for the consonant b that is off its mark by one-fiftieth to one-sixtieth of an inch to conclude” a non-Muslim’s being off the mark.) Yet Dadrian opines the two examples presented as handwritten, authentic besmele formulas are a lot more suspect than the one Andonian provided. Vahakn Dadrian began his working career first as a mathematician, then a sociologist, soon after a "genocide scholar," and now a handwriting analyst. Is there no end to Dadrian's talents?
Ataöv addresses the “besmele” issue: “[T]he first ‘document’ misses the long letter of ‘sin’ and the dot for the ‘b’ ought to be on the right, not in the middle. Both signs are bigger than usual, and the sign depicting ‘Allah’ is falsely written. It is of course not unusual for an Armenian, who is Christian, to write out such a clumsy besmele, not having written it before.” Orel and Yuca must have been fools to have provided two examples that are even more false than what Andonian provided, if Dadrian is to be believed.
Dadrian also takes issue with Turks making errors, providing examples of how difficult Ottoman Turkish could be. One is the Yozgat court martial correcting a sentence in an official document because of "very ineptly used Turkish." A Turkish historian even singles out Talat for his rotten Turkish. This reminds me of how Relief Worker Albert Mackenzie, in the New York Times, tried to discredit Admiral Chester’s notion of "In Turkey every man by law and by religion must adequately support and treat with kindness and faithful respect whomsoever he may marry, and, moreover, this he does"; Mackenzie pointed to an example of a Turkish creep once encountered, who treated his wife like dirt. Of course there are going to be exceptions to every rule. When Orel and Yuca wrote "no Turk, then or now," would commit such errors, they obviously were speaking figuratively. The point they were making was that errors would be rare, and the fact that Andonian tripped up, while not in itself conclusive evidence of forgeries, is a strong indication that these were not written by an in-the-know Turk.
To get the idea, Dadrian fan "QueBeceR" makes the kinds of mistakes in his English no native speaker would make, even though there are plenty of native speakers whose English is imperfect. But a proficient native speaker can often successfully distinguish between the errors of a fellow native speaker and the errors of a foreigner.
4. I was wondering how Dadrian would try and discredit the “codes” matter. Here is his best shot: “The matter of changing code keys is related to a regular, structured communication System, not necessarily applicable to the ad hoc improvisations surrounding the deportations and massacres. These improvisations were not enacted by the General Staff, the author's reference point, but by the Interior Ministry, its subsidiary agencies, and the Special Organization.” He provides a “chronic confusion in the archives of the Ottoman General Staff” reference by Stoddard, the one Western scholar who conducted a study of the Special Organization (Dadrian’s “Ottoman SS”! The only trouble is, Stoddard concluded the S.O. had nothing to do with Armenians, but now Stoddard must be pointed to as credible). Do you think Dadrian made a good effort here, grasping for his straws? Nobody really can pretend to know the internal workings of the CUP administration, and suddenly Dadrian has hopped aboard his time machine, telling us exactly what the situation was.
(What we are being told is that the Ottoman Turks’ methods were haphazard and unreliable. But if the Turks were that inept, they could not have managed to maintain their empire for over half a millennium. The code books have survived, and scholars may determine what the codes were. The reason to have created codes in the first place was to place a necessary safeguard during dangerous wartime, with spies afoot. These codes were not created for fun; as a rule, they had to have been followed. Is it true this rule was broken sometimes, as all rules have a tendency to be broken? Probably. Does that mean the baby must be thrown out with the bath water? No.)
5. As to the comparison of Abdülhalik's signatures, Dadrian concedes “This is the most serious issue raised thus far,” and distances himself by exclaiming, “the matter can hardly be settled on the basis of inspecting printed pages that consist of reproductions, and in some cases, of consecutive reproductions. The determination of whether there are substantial differences in the two versions of the signature in question is a much more complicated task than that performed by these critics; one may even dispute the existence of any important differences.” Uh-oh! V. D. is close to getting himself in hot water. If we can’t use reproductions to determine the validity of a claim, we might as well dismiss all of Andonian’s work right now, since Andonian suspiciously could not provide the originals. (He said he “lost” them.)
Isn’t Dadrian a hoot? He will truly claim anything and everything, in order to cast doubt. The man has no shame, whatsoever. He winds up this section by asserting that because this issue was so important, “the Armenian National Union at Aleppo and Andonian employed more than one method to probe and verify the authenticity of Abdülhalik's signatures.” This is like saying, in order to guarantee the safety of the chickens in the henhouse, the fox swore on a stack of Bibles.
Under OTHER MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS, Dadrian attacks "the expression of doubt by all three authors on the very existence of Naim." Ataöv spells it out:
"Did Naim Bey, the hero of the 'documents', exist? Search of the Prime Minister's Archives in Istanbul, among the Yrade-i Seniye (order) files and the Official Gazette gives no evidence of the appointment of a man by that name to the Rehabilitation Office in Aleppo. However, one can locate in the same archives some of the names that Andonian mentions. It is quite possible that Naim Bey never lived. If he has, he must have been a very minor official, for Andonian also states that he was "entirely unimportant". But how can such an unimportant person have access to such significant and top secret material?
Dadrian tries to dismantle the contention that there is no record of Naim by stressing how "entirely unimportant" Naim was: "Naim was a provincial, local appointee, engaged by an ad hoc branch of the Deportation Office at Aleppo." The place to look would not be the "records of the Interior Ministry at Istanbul," Dadrian authoritatively tells us (as though he had full knowledge of the system), but the records of the Aleppo office, in addition to the tobacco company where Naim Bey used to work, if such records were kept. Dadrian ignores, however, the fact that other names mentioned by Andonian can be found in these archives. So what the issue really boils down to is, how "entirely unimportant" was Naim? (A small fry, like a clerk, might have been passed up being recorded, but a worker of greater substance may not have been.)
Here is what Andonian, or whomever is filling in for Andonian, reports in his "Translator's Note": "The Turk, by name of Naim Bey is the late chief secretary of the Deportations Committee of Aleppo." It's surreal to point to passages in this phony book as though they are reliable, but as long as we are playing this game, there you have it. Naim was the "chief" secretary, with enough importance to consult with his boss, Nuri, along with Eyoub Bey, "superintendent of the deportees," as well as the gendarmerie chief.
In his footnote 22, Dadrian also tries to dispatch with Naim's having been let go from his position over two years prior, only to go back in and get the documents. Dadrian says, why, Naim may not have been let go at all. "Having relied on the French translation, it is conceivable that they gave a one-sided interpretation to the French word révoquer, which in addition to 'dismiss,' has the meaning of 'recall.'" Sorry, V. D.! Our own word in English stemming from "révoquer" is TO REVOKE, which means to void, or cancel. The only valid translation: "Employment terminated." (How would one "recall" an employee stationed in one single headquarters, anyway? Is Dadrian suggesting Naim was “recalled” in the same way Dadrian was suspended from his job at the University of Geneseo, while his case — which ultimately led to Dadrian’s dismissal — was being considered? If that’s the case, the French word for “suspension" (which also happens to be “suspension"), would have been used. Or was Naim Bey “recalled” by General Motors, and sent to the factory for repairs?) Dadrian supports the notion that Naim was still on the job because "Naim discloses in his annotations that he not only returned to his post after the Meskene recall but was entrusted with a new mission for Sivas." Yet everyone knows whomever came up with those "annotations" was anyone BUT Naim, a fellow very likely existing nowhere but in Andonian's clever mind. (When it serves Dadrian’s purposes, suddenly it’s Naim doing the disclosing. This is the kind of vile book where any dishonest claim can be made, as long as the “genocide” is affirmed... a book right up Dadrian’s alley.)
Dadrian then enters one of his favorite realms, pointing out the errors of his opponents: "As indicated above, the Andonian volume in Armenian and its translations in French and English are replete with errors of dates, date conversion, and typography. Focusing on these errors, the Turkish authors degraded the volumes to a point of dismissing them. Yet their own volume, published only very recently, is teeming with identical errors." As Dadrian provides examples, perhaps with the knowledge that he can claim practically anything and get away with it (as he has done often enough in the past; nobody has made a point of looking over his shoulder), what is his point? Is he trying to tell us all errors must be accepted equally? Ironically, in the next issue of The International Journal of Middle East Studies, (Vol. 18, No. 4, Nov., 1986, p. 550), Dadrian posted two dozen corrections of his own, for this very article. Because even a "renowned scholar" as Dadrian can make errors, should that mean a work like "The Memoirs of Naim Bey," a propaganda work from top to bottom, should be ignored for its errors and accepted as credible?
Next up: “THE CREDIBILITY CONSTRAINTS OF NAIM AND ANDONIAN”
“Naim was tested on several occasions regarding his veracity and reliability. Despite his chronic need for money, and despite the prevalence of extortion by Turkish officials in charge of deportation measures, he reportedly passed up several opportunities to extort money from Armenians desperately at the mercy of his goodwill. As Andonian observed, ‘In comparison with those rogues Naim was a Saint. ... I cannot forget the fact that throughout my protracted dealings with him he never lied. We benefited from the kindly features of his complex character without being victimized by his vices.’ It is worth noting that this judgment was not included in Andonian's volume but in a private, confidential letter he wrote a quarter-century later as if wanting to bare his soul and clarify an important matter.”
Is this “confession” from the 1937 letter to Mary Terzian? (Let’s see... 1920 + “a quarter century” = 1945. No footnote has been provided; either this is another letter, or Dadrian the Mathematician has lost his touch.) Guenter Lewy cited the 1937 letter when he wrote:
But according to a letter composed by Andonian in 1937, Naim Bey was addicted to alcohol and gambling, and the documents he provided were bought for money. To have "unveiled the truth about him," Andonian wrote, "would have served no purpose." More likely, it would have undercut the very effectiveness of The Memoirs. Nobody would have believed the word of an alcoholic and gambler who might have manufactured the documents to obtain money.
Ataöv cites this letter as well, when pointing to Andonian having declared “that the Armenians paid for every ‘document’ that they got from him — who is now described as an alcoholic, a gambler, a lover of money and entirely immoral. If the latter description is true, then why did Andonian wait for seventeen years to give a correct account? It may be that a realistic description would create suspicion on the very authenticity of the ‘memoirs’ and ‘documents.’ Andonian was not trying to protect Naim Bey, but preserve the acceptability of his ‘documents’.”
Kamuran Gurun quoted from this letter, appearing in a book entitled Justicier du génocide arménien, le procès de Tehlirian. Editions Diasporas, Collection Documents, published in 1981 by the Dashnak organization, Comité de Défense de la Cause Arménienne. (Cited below as well, in our update for Yves Ternon.) Here are Andonian’s own words, regarding Naim Bey: “. . . He was addicted to alcohol and gambling, and it was indeed these shortcomings of his which led him to treachery. The truth of the matter is that everything he gave us as documents, we bought from him in return for money. . . . Naim Bey is an entirely dissolute creature.”
Vahakn Dadrian: busted once again, as the unethical scholar he is, employing his “misleading quotations” and the “selective use of sources.” Dadrian admits to have read this 1937 letter, yet insists on presenting the propagandistic image Andonian provided in the book, that Naim Bey was a saint. Note, for example, that Dadrian does not touch upon the fact that the Armenians paid Naim Bey off, as they would with other Turks such as Dadrian’s protégé, Taner Akcam (at least indirectly), years later; in the book and the 1921 letter to the Berlin court, the liar Andonian stressed that these documents were provided free of charge.
(Incidentally, regarding Dadrian’s line about “the prevalence of extortion by Turkish officials in charge of deportation measures,” on p. 13 of the 1964 reprint: “Abdullahad Nouri Bey never took bribes.” But before anyone gets a heart attack from the shock of an Ottoman official being painted in this book as falling short of Freddy Kruger, here is how Nuri was quoted, by way of explanation: “Of course I like bribes, but I am afraid to accept them. I am afraid that in the place of the money which enters into my pocket an Armenian — even if it is only one Armenian — will escape.”)
Now the next Dadrian contention is of the variety that would make the truth-seeker shoot the contents of his or her stomach even farther than Linda Blair managed in THE EXORCIST. He is actually trying to get away with the notion that the Armenian National Union conducted extensive tests to “probe the reliability of Naim.” We should not even dignify that incredibly dishonest assertion with a response.
But just for fun: “One involved a comparison of the set of ciphers that Naim earlier had copied down with the set of their originals, which Naim unexpectedly was required to deliver in the wake of the subsequent total Turkish defeat. The comparison held: The contents of the two sets did square with each other.” That was one of the tests. So Dadrian is implying every single original was delivered, and compared to the copies Naim had provided earlier, which Naim had copied from the originals. Now note how Vahakn Dadrian is busted, once again. According to the 1964 reprint, Naim only kept some originals, “perhaps fearing future responsibility.” (The slimy Andonian was a Dadrian-style speculator in his own right.) But we get the idea that most of the documents (the rest had to be the majority, because Naim only kept “some” of the originals) Naim Bey provided for Andonian were “written from memory,” and the “most important ones” were “photographed.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the mysterious Naim Bey actually made use of his trusty camera, a common household item in every Ottoman's possession, and then he managed to take his rolls of film to the corner Fotomat, and have them developed.
Can you believe Dadrian is trying to get away with the notion that every single original of what Dadrian counted as 50 telegrams was delivered? So many originals... and every single one “lost.” Remarkable, is it not?
Andonian's credibility, Dadrian further instructs us, was determined by Orel and Yuca, regarding faithfulness in translation. (Since Andonian forged these originals, the whole idea for Andonian was to faithfully translate them.) “Like Naim, he scrupulously avoided filling such gaps as four missing signatures, nine missing dates, and 27 missing registry numbers.” Ohhhh, boy.
This reminds me of how the leader of the 1974 Cyprus coup, Nicos Sampson, would — in earlier days — kill his victims and then show up minutes later, the first reporter on the scene... benefiting from the “scoop” he created! So here we have the liar Andonian forging these papers, making sure to exclude elements to cover his tracks and/or because spotlessness would have aroused suspicion, and when he scrupulously translates his own dirty work, Vahakn Dadrian is giving his fellow Dashnak high marks.
“In light of the high level of emotion gripping Andonian, the crippled survivor of 4 years of pain and agony, such fidelity bespeaks of discipline and self-restraint, if not integrity.”
There is truly no stopping Vahakn Dadrian. Andonian broke his leg. Unless his leg did not heal properly (this “genocide victim” was carted off to an Ottoman hospital, and his “executioners” put Andonian’s leg in a cast), I don't see why Andonian would have been a “cripple.” This is the typically greasy Dashnak way to extract sympathy... the poor, innocent Christian Armenian, “martyred” at the hand of the brutal Turks. More on this critical point in this page’s wrap-up.
Dadrian next indulges in his customarily deceptive cherry-picking style of evidence, singling out a phrase of Consul Rössler’s, who spoke of "the impression of credibility." Isn’t that the goal of any worthy forger, to give "the impression of credibility”? But Dadrian covers his own tracks here, telling us we should not take Rössler's report as a “categorical endorsement.” Of course; as Andonian himself admitted, as we discussed above, Rössler was mostly critical of this work. Prosecutor Dadrian, always interested in supporting his partisanship, prefers to give one side of the story, as usual.
Dadrian further informs us Rössler could not have endorsed Andonian even if he wanted to, because “He was forbidden by the German Foreign Office to testify ‘in a political sense’ in the trial of Tehlirian, who had assassinated Talat in Berlin, and Rössler's testimony, along with that of a host of other German witnesses, was eventually dispensed with.”
“He was then induced to prepare his above-mentioned evaluation in a confidential report to Johannes Lepsius.” (“Induced”? “Confidential”?)
(Armenophile Yves Ternon tells us, using “Justicier” as a source, the lawyers were concerned about the credibility of Andonian’s telegrams and “secured the collaboration” of Lepsius to “request” Rössler — whom Ternon actually describes as an “eyewitness of the massacres”! — to size up the value of the telegrams in an April 25, 1921 report, which was then distributed to members of the tribunal. Once the court decided not to pursue establishing the guilt of Talat — since this legal farce had turned into a trial of Talat, instead of Talat’s murderer — “The hearing of the other witnesses of defense was then annulled.” So the order of business here, quite the opposite of Dadrian’s usual misrepresentation, was that Rössler was set to testify. Instead of being rejected as a witness and then writing his report, it was his report that — if we are to believe this story — led to his rejection as a witness. But in contrast to what both Dadrian and Ternon are claiming, it seems Rössler was "on standby," and his courtroom services were not made use of... not because he was "politically forbidden" or because of Rössler's evaluation of the telegrams. Once the Andonian telegrams were rejected, the court moved on. Political witnesses for the defense, those having no bearing on the murder case, were already heard on June 2, 1921. These propagandists included Bishop Balakian — a "man of God" who swore, under oath, that he had seen one of these fake Talat Pasha telegrams with his "own eyes" — and Lepsius himself.)
Truly, what can we say about Vahakn Dadrian, the Master of Deceit? He is actually trying to make it sound as though the cursory two-day murder trial of Tehlirian, the deadly Nemesis hit man whom Dadrian refers to as an innocent “student,” the trial that only introduced witnesses for the defense (save for Talat’s wife)... a fact that riled Gen. Lt. Bronsart von Schellendorf to the point of penning his own article in order to (as he put it) "help truth find its rightful place" ... did not allow politics to dictate the proceedings, and was not the shameful kangaroo court that it was.
In Dadrian’s footnote, we are told: “Ataöv credits Gollnick, the Procuror-General at the trial, with a definitive statement declaring the documents as ‘false’; this attribution itself is false because Gollnick never made such a statement. The issue involved the 5 original Talat ciphers that were not introduced and therefore could not be tested; Gollnick merely raised the possibility of falseness out of a general skepticism (Ataöv, The Andonian Documents, p. 9). The same misrepresentation is indulged in by the two Turkish authors, who inserted the word ‘fake’ (düzmece) when quoting the German Procuror-General: Orel and Yuca, Ermenilerce, p. 19.”
Gollnick was playing more than the role of a skeptic... nobody is sold on the validity of Andonian, then or now, other than desperate propagandists. If Gollnick “raised the possibility of falseness,” and if Orel and Yuca used the word “fake” to convey this reality, I do not see how that would serve as a “misrepresentation.”
However, I can’t comment conclusively on the context of what Orel and Yuca had written, because I have not read the work, and all I have — as usual — is the “word” of Vahakn Dadrian, notorious for taking words out of context.
On the other hand, both the Ataöv-Andonian article and the Tehlirian trial transcript, the latter originating from an Armenian web site, have been featured on TAT, so we can check the truth of Dadrian’s claim. You just read it; Dadrian charged Ataöv with being a liar: “Ataöv credits (the prosecutor) with a definitive statement declaring the documents as ‘false’; this attribution itself is false.”
Here is what the prosecutor said:
...[T]he testimony presented here does not identify Talaat as personally and morally responsible for the killings. The various documents that they wished to call to our attention do not convince me otherwise. As District Attorney, I know, for example, that exactly the same sort of documents appeared during our period of revolutionary upheavals, bearing the signatures of prominent persons. After the war, as they later insisted, it was shown that the signatures had been forged.
The D.A. is telling us that he is “not convince{d}” by the Andonian papers, because documents “exactly” like the Andonian papers were proven to be “forged.” What could be clearer? The D.A. saw through the phoniness of Andonian’s work, and is telling us in no uncertain terms that Andonian’s work must be forgeries.
Here is what Ataöv wrote:
[T]he Prosecutor said that the use of false documents cannot mislead him and that he know{s} how so-called documents carrying the signatures of high dignitaries were later proven to be fabrications.
There is certainly a liar regarding this matter, but the liar is not Ataöv.
For point of information, as part of Footnote 29:
“Andonian declared that, except for the February 18 Shakir letter and some other original ciphers, a few of which were sent back to the Armenian Patriarchate at Istanbul in connection with A. Nuri's moribund trial, he left the Naim documents with the Berlin Court that had compiled a Tehlirian file, and that for some years his subsequent efforts to reclaim them from Berlin proved unsuccessful (Justicier, p. 233). This author on May 10, 1979, wrote a letter to the Justice Ministry of the German Federal Republic inquiring about the possibility of locating the Tehlirian file from the archives of the Moabit Criminal Court and of retrieving the documents for purposes of examination. In a response on May 29, 1979, the Berlin plenipotentiary of Justice informed me that the matter was referred to Berlin District Attorney Krause, who in turn declared, in a letter of June 15, 1979, that the file and the documents "no longer exist; they have been destroyed."
We can only be sure of one thing: anyone who would take the word of the Dashnak Andonian should look into the “smart pills” section of the nearest health store. It is not feasible that Andonian would have provided the “valuable” originals in the first place, and leave his forged work open to scrutiny. (From the trial transcript, Defense Attorney Von Gordon: "The witness Andonian can testify to the authenticity of these telegrams." That is all that was needed in this pretension of a trial, Andonian’s “word,” had the telegrams been allowed to be introduced. They were most likely photocopies.) What is more relevant are the originals Andonian possessed, including “Document No. 1” that Dadrian tells us was prepared by Shakir. (Because, again, “BEHA” was later found to be on the document, Dadrian says, standing for the first four letters of Shakir’s Americanized first name.) "A few" were supposedly passed on to the Istanbul Patriarchate “in connection with A. Nuri's moribund trial.” It seems to me, then, that Dadrian should contact the Istanbul Patriarchate to try and retrieve these (especially since Ternon, using “Justicier” as a source, wrote “all the originals” in the hands of the British Armenians were forwarded to the Patiarchate at Andonian’s request, not just a few), but what is most important is... what happened to the originals Andonian had on hand? Why is he on record for claiming he had “lost” them?
(While Dadrian is trying to present the picture that the five measly originals — there were also seventeen copies — sent to Berlin represented the lion’s share of what was left, Ternon wrote that Andonian still had “in his possession the originals of the telegrams no. 3, 7, 8, 10, 17, 18, 24 and 32.” Ternon’s source: Dadrian, himself. Ternon also wrote that according to Krieger, 26 of the 52 “Memoirs” documents had been preserved by Andonian. So it doesn’t appear that Andonian had “lost” these documents, after all! Andonian served as Boghos Nubar’s secretary, and remained as chief librarian of Nubar’s foundation until Andonian’s death in 1951. Andonian “deposited in this library the documents he had,” but when Dadrian checked in 1979, they were gone, Dadrian figuring they had all vamoosed to Soviet Armenia..! It sure can be one heck of an exercise to try and make sense of the contradictory claims of unscrupulous Dashnaks and their supporters.)
In pre-Reagan 1979, the Soviet Union was a viable force, and passing documents through the Iron Curtain would have been very difficult, even if we get past the lack of motive. (Soviet Armenians were not genocide-obsessed.) Prof. Feigl, in his study above, provided the best logical reason: "They were probably destroyed to make it more difficult to prove that they were forgeries."
ADDENDUM, 9-06: It's possible Dadrian's theory could have been true. The Turkish documentary, "Sari Gelin," presented a copy of one of these documents on display in Yerevan's Genocide Museum (where the production team had travelled to.)
IRONY
Here we are, still arguing over the merits of obvious forgeries, simply because Armenians and their supporters are powerful, obsessed and so highly unscrupulous. Meanwhile, other examples of "annihilation efforts" of various degrees that are a matter of clear historical record don't raise an eyebrow. The genocide industry is so dishonest and hypocritical.
A surgeon in the U.S. Army, Major John Vance Lauderdale, summed up his nation's general policy against its indigeneous people well: "... Every redskin must be killed from off the face of the plains before we can be free from their molestation. They are of no earthly good and the sooner they are swept from the land the better for civilization." (1866)
Here we are, still discussing whether Talat Pasha was behind these obviously phony Andonian-concocted orders. What about a time when a nation's leader was on record for doing basically what Talat is being accused of?
John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1831 that the forced removal of the entire Cherokee Nation from their ancestral homes in the South Eastern United States was illegal, unconstitutional and against treaties made.
President Andrew Jackson, who is said to have owed his life to the Cherokee at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, and who was sworn as chief executive to enforce the laws of his nation, replied:
"John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can."
A soldier wrote: "I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west....On the morning of November the 17th we encountered a terrific sleet and snow storm with freezing temperatures and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on March the 26th 1839, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire. And I have known as many as twenty-two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold and exposure..." (Private John G. Burnett Captain Abraham McClellan's Company, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade, Mounted Infantry Cherokee Indian Removal 1838-39.)
Of the 4,000 Cherokee children, women and men who were driven like cattle to Oklahoma, overseen by General Winfield Scott at the direction of President Andrew Jackson, few survived. Now remember, fellow Americans were generally fat and jolly while this was happening, unlike the Turks. Despite what we keep getting told was the "exclusive victimhood" of the Armenians, the bulk of over 2.5 million other Ottomans died of the same reasons, famine and disease, that claimed the lives of most Armenians. Moreover, the Cherokees presented no harm to the USA. The Armenians had traitorusly allied themselves with forces bent on the extinction of the Ottoman Empire.
The fate of the Cherokees was not isolated; ninety other tribes were removed from their homes to Indian Territory, now Kansas and Oklahoma, suffering similar atrocities; to be called a redskin was, essentially, a sentence of death.
$20 Andrew Jackson .
Today, we are still besmirching the names of Ottoman Turks who were never proven guilty by factual evidence. What has convicted them in the world of public opinion have been hearsay, and immoral forgeries that those like Dadrian and Ternon would still like you to believe were "true." Meanwhile, U.S. President ANDREW JACKSON, whose breaking of the law is a clear matter of record, is honored on every twenty dollar U.S. bill. American "Human rights" champions such as Peter Balakian, Samantha Power, and Andrew Goldberg only sucker the world with profitable causes dear to their hearts, and don't say anything about Andrew Jackson, or the many historical examples of those who have committed crimes against humanity.
Dr. Donna Akers, U. of Nebraska
ADDENDUM, 12-07: With the above writing, I behaved no better than the usual genocide scholar, relying on an agenda-ridden source supporting the point-of-view I wished to make. Yet keeping matters in perspective, Jackson was also a great American, and a remarkable man in his own right. Of course, he was still a "criminal" as far as Indian treatment, yet he did not deviate from usual U.S. policy; he just went farther. (Certain tribes fought with Jackson hoping U.S. treaties would be honored, and Jackson double-crossed them, big-time.) Interestingly, he did adopt an Indian boy earlier in life (after leading a militia unit that slaughtered the boy's parents and tribe). It was also rumored Jackson's mother bred a hatred of Indians in her son, given Indian killings of Jackson family members during frontier life (bringing to mind how Arnold Toynbee's mother had instilled similar feelings of Turk savagery in her son; of course, Toynbee family members had never come into contact with Turks). In a History Channel biography on Jackson's life, Prof. Donna Akers related "oral history" on how her great-great-great grandmother was forced to walk 500 miles on the "Trail of Tears" with her four children, leading to the death of three when a tree fell on them. Further, tribes were led to "concentration camps," and many died before beginning the journey from east to west, as provisions were inadequate. (Numbers provided in the program: of an 80,000 total, 10,000 lost their lives.) At least the Cherokee, the last tribe that was forced to leave, made the journey in shackles. (For the Armenian parallel, let's bear in mind the Indian Removal Act of 1831 that wrongly nullified previous treaties was permanent, whereas the Armenian relocation law of 1915 was temporary, enacted as a measure against Armenian wartime disloyalty.) Akers believed Jackson "hated" Indians, and added that to most native people Jackson is regarded as the "equivalent of Hitler"; some even refuse to use twenty dollar bills. Andrew Burstein, author of a Jackson biography, remarked it is easy for us to attack Jackson for his lack of humanity, as he should have known better. Yet, we don't live in their world, he reasonably added; "Jackson's world was a very brutal world." Indeed, matters of "genocide" are seldom black and white.
Next, we have THE WEIGHT OF MULTIFACETED EVIDENCE FAVORING THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE MATERIAL, where Dadrian lengthily unloads his endless weasel facts to attempt to justify Andonian’s forgeries. I’m going to skip this section, as much as I prefer leaving no Dadrian stone unturned... as I’d rather concentrate on the specifics of the Andonian material. Mainly, Dadrian has dipped into his bread and butter here, the 1919-20 Ottoman kangaroo courts. Yet, I can’t resist pointing out a few highlights:
“In his memoirs the American ambassador at Istanbul reveals another feature of Talat's covert and informal methods of transacting party and/or governmental business that is not mentioned anywhere else.”
Isn’t that interesting? Dadrian told us the “Memoirs of Naim Bey” was a misnomer, because Andonian’s hand (as well as the hand of “Naim Sefa”) was in the book. Yet, we know that “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” was ghostwritten by Burton Hendrick, partly utilizing letters that Morgenthau had allowed some to be corrupted by having his Armenian secretary (another Andonian) write them, and other sources that deviated from the originals, as Prof. Heath Lowry brilliantly uncovered. While we can see Dadrian has used the word "memoirs" to describe Morgenthau's book, I don’t see Dadrian invalidating Morgenthau’s “Story” as a “misnomer.” (Perhaps because “memoirs” did not serve as the word in the title, and the word “story” is a perfect description.)
“Nazim prefigures as the elusive and invisible mastermind of the crimes involved. The February 18 letter (No. 1) reveals his visions and ambitions for Turkey...” Yet, Dadrian had established the author of this letter as Shakir, a portion of which has been reproduced by Prof. Feigl, above. In the English version, this letter was dated March 25, 1915 (1964 reprint, pp. 49-51), and there is no mention of Nazim. It's bad enough that Dadrian has theorized this letter as written by Shakir (on the basis of "BEHA"), and does not explain why Nazim has been implicated as the "elusive and invisible" author. What self-respecting "renowned scholar" would form such a conclusion strictly on speculation, and present it as though a fact?
Dadrian: “As this material was being assembled for the Court Martial, the Special Correspondent of the Morning Post reported to his paper in London that ‘Dr. Nazim prides himself on having committed a million murders’ against the Armenians.[41] In commenting on Nazim's role in the extermination of the Armenians, the Times of London, in its August 28, 1926, issue wrote, ‘As soon as the Great War broke out Nazim and his allies bombarded Talat Pasha with anti-Armenian propaganda . . . and by 1916 half the Armenian community was dead . . . .’”
Dadrian is actually referring to bigoted British newspapers for his “evidence.” That comes as no surprise for the “renowned scholar.” The first one derives from a December 5, 1918 report, where the “Special Correspondent” opines Nazim confessed to having committed a million murders. Whew! How did that one escape the attention of the Guinness Book of World Records? (Let’s see... 1915 to 1918 equals roughly 1,000 days. That means Nazim would have had to murder 1,000 Armenians per day.) Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the kind of “evidence” the anti-Turkish world has swallowed so readily, in its acceptance of this mythological genocide.
And is that true, given the Turcophobic London Times’ 1926 report, that half of the Armenians were dead by 1916? The Armenian Patriarch, using his propagandistic pre-war figure of 2.1 million, figured in December 1918: 1,260,000 alive and 840,000 dead. As silly as these figures are, even the Patriarch did not vouch for half. The real pre-war figure was 1.5 million (The pre-Wellington House Arnold Toynbee contended in 1915’s “Nationality and the War” only one-half — 761,000 — as a total, for eastern Anatolia and Istanbul — 600,000 + 161,000, respectively, comprising most of the Ottoman-Armenian population), and the Armenian Patriarch vouched for 644,900 Armenians still within what was left of the empire in 1921. In addition, there were hundreds of thousands who had left on their own accord to other non-Ottoman controlled regions, among which were 50,000 to Iran and 500,000 to Transcaucasia, by Hovannisian’s count. In actuality, 30-40% of Armenians had died, and most by famine, disease and other non-murder methods that similarly caused the mortality of the bulk of over 2.5 million other Ottomans.
In his "Shakir" section, Dadrian hopes to confirm the above with "another cipher of which the [1919-20 Ottoman kangaroo] Court held a photocopy, Sakir asks the Ittihad Responsible Secretary of Harput, 'Are your area's deported Armenians being liquidated? [tasfiye olunuyor mul]; are they being destroyed? [imha ediliyor mul]; or are they being merely deported and exiled? [sevk ve izammi] Clarify this point, my brother'" This one has been covered in an early and more crudely written TAT page. (And we can tell from the absurdity of the above — there is no real difference between "liquidated" and "destroyed," once again demonstrating Dadrian's lack of ethics for distorting the original meaning — the complete translation had a significantly different connotation: "Are the Armenians, who are being dispatched from there, being liquidated? Are those harmful persons whom you inform us you are exiling and banishing, being exterminated, or are they being merely dispatched and exiled? Answer explicitly...." What Dadrian sneakily omitted was the critical "green" part of the line above, where the Harput secretary had already informed Shakir that the Armenians were being "exiled and banished"; in addition, this in itself has evidently been deceptively translated, since the Armenians were being resettled within the country, and not exiled or banished outside the country.) The contents, whom Dadrian adds helped to secure Shakir's death sentence, were based on a suspicious "photocopy," and was published in the puppet Ottoman administration's official gazette, hardly the kind of avenue that can substitute for true evidence. (Remember, the dishonest new Damad Ferid administration that would go on to sign the treaty signifying the death sentence for their nation were anxious to find culprits for various reasons; the findings of these unlawful courts were rejected even by the British themselves.)
But the wording of this exchange, even if true, constitutes no proof of extermination. The reason is, we are asked to believe the extermination order had already been in force. Therefore, there would have been no reason for Shakir to have wondered about whether the Armenians were being "merely deported and exiled." (Note the word "merely" carries an entirely different meaning in the "complete" translation.) There were times local officials took matters into their own hands, going against the real government orders (Talat had issued several orders threatening to punish those who were hurting Armenians), and the idea behind this one is much more logically a check on whether the Armenians were being relocated as ordered and not massacred, instead of a "how dare you relocate these Armenians instead of massacring them." Otherwise, if the idea was really to massacre instead of relocate, there is no way Consul Jackson could have prepared his early 1916 report to Morgenthau, concluding 486,000 Armenians had been relocated. That number would have been closer to "zero," since nearly all the Armenians would have been massacred.
“A Turkish author who claims to have worked as a secretary in Hamid's palace before being exiled to Diyarbekir and Harput, and who was the director of a Turkish high school at Aleppo during the war, wrote, ‘My feeble pen is impotent to describe the Der Zor massacres which are unprecedented in human history and are not likely to be replicated in the future.’ Referring specifically to Abdulahad Nuri and Eyub, he added, ‘the mere mention of their names used to produce terror among the people.’” (Source: Mustafa Nedim, Hai Yegernu. Eem Vugayoutiounnerus [The Armenian Genocide. My testimony], trans. by A. S. Shaldjia, Cairo, 1925, pp. 90, 100.)
Why was this fellow “exiled”? And how could this 1925 publication have utilized the word “genocide,” before the word was invented? Where did this account appear in order for A. S. Shaldjia to have translated it... or was “Mustafa Nedim” another “Naim Bey”? It has become a custom for Armenian propagandists to make up reports as well as the Turkish names posing as their authors. What a pity indifferent Turkish scholars have let Dadrian get away with this kind of murder over the years. All of these “Turkish sources” of the tricky Vahakn Dadrian need to be scrutinized.
Let’s cut through Dadrian’s lard and get to the next section: ABDÜLHALIK'S RELEASE FROM MALTA AND THE CLAIMS OF HIS INNOCENCE.
Dadrian has unabashedly poured on what Hilmar Kaiser has termed Dadrian’s "misleading quotations" and "selective use of sources,” and just all-around breach of scholarly lack of ethics here. One gets numb, witnessing the levels he allows himself to sink to.
Here is Dadrian’s set-up:
“The authors Orel, Yuca, and Ataöv go so far as to insist that, unable to ‘find any proof whatsoever’ (hiç bir delil), the British in vain turned to the U.S. State Department for help. The three authors then feel justified to conclude, ‘The matter was thus closed and all Malta internees were freed.’ Orel and Yuca further argue that, had the British believed that Abdülhalik's subordinate A. Nuri was the type of ‘monster’ the Armenians portrayed, he too would have been exiled to Malta upon his arrest by the British in September 1920."
Let’s say off the bat that the British were truly “unable to ‘find any proof whatsoever’”; what they found instead, as the British Embassy put it in its critical July 13, 1921 report that Dadrian has slimily made sure to avoid, was plenty of — again, these are the words of the British Embassy — “personal opinions.” Personal Opinions is another way of describing “hearsay.” Hearsay is not admissible in a court of law, and thus no genuine evidence could be found whatsoever ... repeat: “whatsoever” ... to convict Abdülhalik or any of the other Malta prisoners.
Dadrian focuses on A. Nuri first, telling us he was slated to be a part of the Ottoman kangaroo courts in Istanbul, because the witnesses were there. There was a central Istanbul trial in April, 1919 that Andonian referred to in his book, the one where Yozgat’s Governor Mehmet Kemal got hanged on April 10. I believe there were two other Istanbul trials, and they were similarly held in 1919. (Very few trials were held in 1920, and these few were initiated early in that year.)
Dadrian says: “The trial was in fact initiated and was near completion, but a threat from Ankara and the advent of a new, pro-Kemalist cabinet at Istanbul, opposed to prosecuting officials on charges of massacres against Armenians, served to quash entirely the criminal proceedings.”
In his Footnote 86, Dadrian claims Nuri, "trembling and sobbing before the judge" as described by Dr. Nakashian, instrumental for Nuri's arrest and prosecution, was “on the verge of being condemned to death on the gallows, but his brother, Yusuf Kemal Tengirsek (then Economics Minister in M. Kemal's Ankara government and eight months later Foreign Minister, replacing Bekir Sami) reportedly sent the Armenian Bishop of Kastamonu to Istanbul with an ultimatum: Should Nuri be convicted, the brother would see to it that the 2,000-3,000 Armenian survivors in his area were massacred in retaliation.” The main source is the biased Krieger, Aram Andonianee, pp. 234-35. (As point of interest, Ternon writes Nuri never bothered to hide, and “Nakachian” had requested Patriarch Zaven to forward the originals of the documents. Andonian wrote at once to the Armenian Bureau of London, and all the originals they had were subsequently sent to the Patriarchate; after the trial was aborted, all the originals reverted back to the Patriarchate.)
1) The most relevant issue is not Nuri’s treatment by the puppet, occupied Ottomans; the issue is, why did the British not ship Nuri out to Malta, if Andonian’s material was convincing? Dadrian has failed to address why the British ignored Nuri. But since we are on the subject, let’s analyze the rest of Dadrian’s “Nuri” assertions.
2) This Ottoman trial would have needed to take place in 1920, if Kemal’s Ankara government was already set up, and Yusuf Kemal Tengirsek went on to replace Bekir Sami eight months later. (Bekir Sami was forced to resign soon after mid-March of 1921, for botching a Malta deal; eight months prior would roughly place this trial at July of 1920. My Armenian-provided information tells me the last two trials were winding down in this month, the judgment for one delivered on July 20 [Urfa], and the other on July 27 [Erzincan].) My Armenian source purports to be comprehensive [and that does not mean it’s totally reliable, of course; their sources were a mixture of Dadrian-1996, Raymond Kevorkian-2003 and a 1988 publication from Yerevan] and I see most of the trials took place in 1919, there were none in 1920 for Istanbul, and there’s no mention of Nuri. This timeline needs to be verified; unfortunately, Dadrian did not provide a date for this trial of Nuri. If the only source of this trial is the propaganda of Krieger, we must strongly hesitate before staking our beliefs. Dadrian tells us Tengirsek learned of A. Nuri's trial through a letter sent by his brother, as mentioned in Tengirsek’s memoirs, “Vatan Hizmetinde,” p. 182. But we already know we can’t trust Dadrian, as he misled us so awfully regarding Halil Pasha’s memoirs, among other examples. Maybe there was mention of a letter here, but what was that letter about?
3) Dadrian also tells us, “The Bishop's intervention is also briefly mentioned in the memoirs of the Armenian Patriarch.” This “brief mention” may be worthwhile if it specifies this threat by Tengirsek to kill off 2,000-3,000 Armenians. Even if it’s verified, we still can’t trust it, because the Armenian Patriarch Zaven was a master of propaganda. (One of the reasons why the British became dispirited in the Malta process is because over time, they came to realize how misleading Zaven and his sources were; Zaven was the primary channel of information for the British.) But we can already determine this threat was likely not verified by Zaven, because Dadrian covered his tracks with the use of the word, “reportedly.”
4) Ultimately, however, the way we know all of this boils down to the love-starved object of any cow in heat is that Ataturk, despite what Armenian propaganda tells us, would not have permitted any Armenian massacres. (Why, that would have contradicted Ataturk’s stance on the phony 1926 interview Armenian propagandists love to point to.) Even if Ataturk was of the mind to be genocidal, does anyone believe he could have spared the time and the resources during these desperate hours when he was attempting to save his nation from multiple invaders, with a ragtag army? (And simply because his non-military "Economics Minister" made a request to murder 2,000-3,000 people? Truly, the stupidity of Armenian propaganda is simply astounding. But the tragedy is, as pro-Armenian propagandists know so well, prejudiced Westerners actually accept these utterly absurd claims.)
Dadrian begins his next exercise in deceit with, “The disposition of Abdülhalik's case had very little to do with his guilt or innocence.”
To demonstrate the evidence against Abdülhalik was lacking, Ataöv wrote: “The Governor of Aleppo... was exiled to Malta by Britain on June 7, 1920; his exile number was 2800. The British searched the Ottoman archives, used the Armenian Church reports, resorted to witness accounts and finally applied to the Government of the United States requesting the latter to provide them with evidence.” Dadrian tells us Abdülhalik was first slated to be released as part of a "package deal" on March 16, 1921. (This pertains to the aforementioned Bekir Sami botch-up; he was not supposed to agree to anything less than an “all for all” negotiation, the Turks giving up their British POWs in return.) So Abdülhalik remained a Malta prisoner until the very end.
Dadrian pumps up the value of the “Armenian genocide evidence” in the U.S. Archives, and tells us “Britain's U.S. Ambassador (Geddes) never stated that he could find no evidence of massacres in U.S. State Department files.” He quotes Geddes as acknowledging "a large number of documents concerning Armenian deportations and massacres," pointing out the importance of finding specific evidence of “persons implicated.”
But as Ataöv stated, this is the entire point. Was there, or was there not, factual evidence to implicate Abdülhalik? This is exactly what the British were seeking; not the broad gestures of an endless array of ignorant bigots opining that there were massacres of innocent Christians, but real and factual proof that Abdülhalik and the other accused parties were guilty. The British searched everywhere to find the proof of this guilt; going to Washington’s archives was the last resort.
(A quick digression. As you read this section, ladies and gentlemen, please ask yourselves: Does Dadrian sound like he is accepting the fact that the British were looking for evidence to convict Abdülhalik and, by extension, the rest of the Malta prisoners? So please make a note of this; Dadrian is on record for admitting Abdülhalik’s detention in Malta was aimed at putting him on trial. This is important, because in order to discredit Malta, Dadrian shamefully prefers to offer statements to the tune of: “Malta was not a venue for criminal trials but a temporary detention center.” Oh, that Dadrian!)
Dadrian points to Geddes’ premature June 1, 1921 report to try and pull the wool over our eyes; here is how Dadrian worded it:
“Geddes... had in fact confirmed the existence in Washington, D.C., ‘of a large number of documents concerning Armenian deportations and massacres.’ But he found it necessary to point to the difference between documents on ‘crimes’ and documents on ‘persons implicated’ in order to underscore the difficulties of securing evidence on personal guilt.”
Kamuran Gurun provided the actual wording (“The Armenian File”):
I have made several enquiries of the State Department and today I am informed that while they are in possession of a large number of documents concerning Armenian deportations and massacres, these refer rather to events connected with the perpetration of crimes than to persons implicated.
Gives a whole different connotation, doesn’t it? Geddes’ thrust is definitely not on the value of these documents, as Dadrian misrepresented. In addition, Geddes did not “confirm” the evidence, he was merely “informed,” as nobody from his embassy had even visited the State Department yet. In short, by June 1, Geddes only received hearsay for the hearsay!
If Prosecutor Dadrian were a truth-teller, he would have needed to focus on the British Embassy’s final report on July 13. (Penned by the Charges d’Affaires, R. C. Craigie.) This is the one pro-Armenian propagandists dread, the “I regret to inform Your Lordship” letter:
“[T]here was nothing therein which could be used as evidence against the Turks who are being detained for trial at Malta.” The reports mentioned only two of the Turkish officials in question, “and in these cases were confined to personal opinions of those officials on the part of the writer, no concrete facts being given which could constitute satisfactory incriminating evidence.” The embarrassed U.S. Department of State, knowing how ridiculous these propagandistic reports were, did not want any of it to be used in a real legal case, and the embassy report concluded, “Having regard to this stipulation and the fact that the reports in the possession of the Department of State do not appear in any case to contain evidence against these Turks which would be useful even for the purpose of corroborating information already in possession of His Majesty's Government, I fear that nothing is to be hoped from addressing any further enquiries to the United States Government in this matter."
The propagandist Vahakn Dadrian is busted once again. Remember, he promised us that “Britain's U.S. Ambassador (Geddes) never stated that he could find no evidence of massacres in U.S. State Department files.” The above certainly sounds like an overall condemnation of the value of the “evidence.” The Brits concluded it was all hearsay. Hearsay is not evidence.
Dadrian points to a July 1919 report by Harry Lamb, spelling out the problems, including the inaccessibility of Turkish official records (which makes no sense, as the British occupied Istanbul at war’s end and took over the Ottoman archives immediately, appointing an Armenian in charge. Certain records have been found to be removed, and are now in the British archives, as Salahi Sonyel pointed out with a document he had found, No. 9518 E. 5523 in File No. 371, regarding the original text of a secret order made by Talat Pasha concerning the relocation of the Armenians. Not incidentally, the British memo on this one pointed out, “. . . the last article of the order states that one must refrain from measures which might cause massacre' [371/4241/170751].), along with the gripe that the other Allies were not fully doing their part.
A more objective researcher would point to the following Harry Lamb communication as far more relevant:
"None of the (Malta) deportees was arrested on any evidence in the legal sense... The whole case of these deportees is not satisfactory.... There are no dossiers in any legal sense. In many cases we have statements by Armenians of differing values. In some cases... we have nothing but what is a common report and an extract from a printed pamphlet. It is safe to say that a great majority of the 'dossiers', as they now stand, will be marked 'No Case' by a practical lawyer..." (FO 371/6500/E. 3554; the wording is a combination of two sources, and does not conform perfectly to the original.)
So we can see the British had no real evidence. But like a tick, once Dadrian grabs hold, he must continue to suck on one's blood; he tells us:
As to the claim that the British let Abdülhalik go because they could find "no proof whatsoever" against him, there are facts to dispute that claim.
1. When the British were transferring eight new detainees to Malta, six of them were described by High Commissioner Admiral de Robeck as implicated in "massacres of Armenians": one of them was Abdülhalik.
(Dated July 15, 1920. Yes, of course the British officials believed the arrested Turks were implicated. The problem was, as the British discovered to their frustration, the “evidence” they relied on was false. Is this belief in implication supposed to represent proof?)
2. In a report of September 19, 1919, Andrew Ryan... called this group (which included Abdülhalik) "all the very worst of criminals."
(Ryan was a notorious anti-Turkish intriguer, described later by Major J. Douglas Henry during his late 1921 interview with General Rafet Pasha as “the most hated man in Turkey... .an intriguer of a kind who did not scruple to employ traitors and turncoats for his purposes.” Ryan was the kind of bigoted creep who would figuratively shoot first and ask questions later. [He also made an appearance in the Halide Edip excerpt pointed to earlier.] This is the kind of tainted source only a confirmed propagandist would turn to.)
3. The British kept reducing the number of detainees they wanted to keep as hard-core criminals to be brought to the bar of justice. They came down to four governors (including Abdülhalik) "whom we propose to retain to the last [because] they are gravely implicated in the crime of massacre" of the Armenians.
(See the answer to Number 1. Is this what passes in Dadrian’s mind for “proof,” that is, the personal opinions of bigots? That, of course, was a rhetorical question.)
4. Eager to free two British officers, Rawlinson and Campbell, from Turkish custody, the War Office implored Foreign Secretary Curzon to show "magnanimity" toward Abdülhalik, as one of the four being held back.
(Again, this is not proof. Besides: Given Dadrian’s penchant to misrepresent, we don’t know the context of this source. The propagandists’ claim to try and discredit Malta is that the British were only interested in getting their POWs back, which is a lie, as the British were still trying to compile the evidence for massacres as late as July 1921, evident from the Washington embassy’s efforts. In point of fact, rather than the British POWs being the hostages propagandists prefer to claim, the British archives reveal that at the end stage of the game, with no evidence to be found, it was the Malta prisoners who were being thought of as “hostages” instead. Whatever the context of this communication was, it is illogical to assume Abdülhalik should be singled out. If the War Office was truly concerned about the safety of these two British POWs, they would have implored Curzon to be magnanimous toward all of the Malta prisoners, not just one or four. The number of Malta prisoners, 144 at its height, finally released on October 25, 1921 numbered a still significant 59.)
Dadrian keeps bombarding with his weasel facts, however, turning to the biased Consul Rössler, pal of Lepsius, who offered his personal opinion that Abdülhalik is “inexorably working to achieve the extermination of the Armenians."
An Armenian civil inspector who was spared for his "adulation of the Turks" held a meeting with Abdülhalik when the latter was Governor of Bitlis and when the massacres were just being launched. Abdülhalik told the inspector, "Now is the time to settle scores" (Simdi intikam zamani dir), when intimating his intent to liquidate the Armenian Deputy Vramian, for whose release the inspector had interceded.
“Zaven Arkyepiscopos, Badriarkagan” is the source; a British archival report number is also cited. The phrase, "Now is the time to settle scores,” if accurate, does not prove “extermination.” And here we thought, based on Andonian’s telegrams, that not a single Armenian was to be spared... yet this Armenian civil inspector was spared for... his "adulation of the Turks"? How funny is that? (Dadrian’s own wealthy family, as Dadrian told us, “largely survived the genocide, because my father was very popular among the Turks.” The Dadrian family experience itself is exposing Andonian as a forger!)
An American nurse in the service of the Turkish military, who was conversant in Turkish, related the following statement made to her by the Governor: "All this suffering through sickness and war has come upon the Moslems as a just punishment from a righteous God, because of what we have done to the Armenians. Some of them deserve punishment, but we went too far, and now God is punishing us."
Nurse Grisell McLaren’s account has been taken from the missionary Grace Knapp’s The Tragedy of Bitlis (1919), which means McLaren likely had no business in the alien land of the Orient if she were not also a missionary, and missionary testimony is anything but reliable. Many missionaries, as indicated from their prayers, had a license from God to break the Ninth Commandment, as long as Turks kept getting vilified. Why Abdülhalik would have offered a “mea culpa” to an American missionary boggles the mind, and the giveaway to this story’s phoniness is that the Moslems were “suffering through sickness and war” well before “April 24.” (The Moslems had suffered their own catastrophe during the Balkan wars, when the Armenians weren’t part of the picture. As far as World War I, to give the idea that Moslem suffering did not magically begin after the “genocide,” Consul Leslie Davis had written in “The Slaughterhouse Province”: “Since the beginning of the war even bread is almost unobtainable” [p. 38], and “Typhus was very bad that winter [of 1914-15], especially among the soldiers... As many as 75-80 of them died on same days.” [p. 46].)
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It is only appropriate that a book of forgeries would feature so many photographs of dubious origin. Many are the unsubstantiated ones typically found in Armenian web sites. An ironic one here is what has come to be known as a ubiquitous one from Armin Wegner's collection, at left. The 1964 reprint has featured Wegner's 1919 open letter to Pres. Woodrow Wilson in the back of the book, so you'd think they would know the photographs of Wegner. Yet the Wegner photo is attributed to "a Vienese [sic] officer in Turkey, 1916." Other photos are credited to Germans, but an Austrian gets the credit for the Wegner one. But how do we really know this photo was one of Wegner's, in the first place? The fact is, we really don't know.
But what is true "poetic justice," in Andonian's book of forgeries, is a "photo" (at top right) of a mountain of skulls featuring the caption, "17. A Mound of Skulls of the murdered and starved Armenians in Der-el-zor gathered from the desert at the end of World War I." Of course, this is that other forgery, utilizing the painting by the Russian artist, Vassili Vereshchagin (1842-1904) called "The Apotheosis of War," from 1872 (or 1871) created forty-three years before the "genocide." Click Here for Pic Ironically, one of the primary genocide-busting facts is that none of the endless wealthy Armenian organizations from around the world has ever financed an excavation to unearth the skeletons of the "1.5 million" Armenian victims.
(For point of information, Dadrian writes that Abdülhalik was Talat's brother-in-law, served as governor of Izmir upon his release from Malta, and “had a meteoric rise in the government, consecutively becoming Minister of Finance, Education, and War.”)
(Dadrian goes hogwild in Footnote 96, informing us that according to Armenians, the Bitlis “victims, estimated at 70,000-80,000, were mostly burned alive in large haylofts and stables. This is how the Armenian Catholic Bishop of Trabzon describes one instance of burning. ‘Having gathered together 1000 little children, Governor Mustafa Abdülhalik led them to a place called Tashod where he had them burnt to death in the presence of notables and Turkish crowds, at the same time shouting at the top of his voice, “It is necessary to erase once and for all the Armenian name in these provinces for the security of Turkey.” The children were afterwards thrown into ditches prepared beforehand for them especially; the moans of those not yet completely consumed could be heard for days’” [Les Mémoires de Msgr. Jean Naslian, Vienna, 1955.] One wonders, of course, as we are confronted with yet another Armenian “memoir” that is supposed to represent “fact,” what a Trabzon bishop was doing in Bitlis, and did he have a front row seat? Once again, Dadrian resorts to perennial favorites Vehip Pasha (British prisoner) and Rafael de Nogales (confused Christian), and once again doesn’t utter a peep about the contra-genocide references of these two. Other than the snicker-producing Dadrian contention that the majority of up to 80,000 people were killed in “haylofts and stables,” here was an interesting line: “The noted scholar Bernard Lewis, presumably in recognition of this practice of burning alive, saw fit to describe the Armenian experience as ‘the terrible holocaust of 1916, when a million and a half Armenians perished.’" [The Emergence of Modem Turkey, 1961.] This was before Lewis had “turned,” after having read Gurun’s “The Armenian File,” as Dadrian has claimed elsewhere. Never since has Dadrian probably referred to Lewis as a “noted scholar.”)
(Of course, with the term, “snicker-producing,” I did not mean the burning alive of people should not be taken seriously; I’m referring to the absurdity of the claim that the majority would have been killed in such a fashion, as if there would have been sufficient stables [where people would be locked in: I don't understand how great numbers would have been killed in "haylofts"], along with those typically high and uncorroborated numbers. Armenians were burned alive, and that’s no laughing matter. No less a tragedy were the Turks/Muslims burned alive by Armenians, and slaughtered in otherwise hideous ways, and it is revolting that those like Dadrian and his racist genocide industry never acknowledge these other examples of great crime and suffering.)
Dadrian tells us: Abdülhalik was let go on October 25, 1921 for two reasons. First, M. Kemal refused to honor Foreign Minister Bekir Sami's March 16, 1921 London Agreement. The second article of the Agreement excluded from the exchange Abdülhalik and several other Ittihadists implicated in Armenian massacres, as well as eight others accused of mistreating British prisoners during the war. Yusuf Kemal (Tengirsek), A. Nuri's brother, replaced Sami as Foreign Minister and pressed for an "all for all" exchange. Second, the 16 Ittihadists excluded from the exchange and slated for trial before an International Tribunal had collectively fled from Malta on September 6, 1921, following an initial, partial exchange. This group included, among others, two army commanders, four governors, one district commissioner, one deputy, and Sükrü Kaya. This group was preceded in its escape by two additional candidates for trial, one of them being Van Governor Cevdet.[99]
Footnote 99 for the last point elaborates that “In announcing this escape the British Foreign Office noted that the first two ‘have broken parole,’ and with the subsequent escape of the 16, the Office wondered out loud 'how little Turkish sense of honor can be relied on.'" That kind of talk is music to the ears of Turk-lambasters like Dadrian, but in reality there is no end to British observance of Turkish honor. (For example, C. F. Dixon-Johnson summed up in 1916: “In the present war we have the overwhelming and convincing testimony of all ranks, from Lord Kitchener downwards, that. the Turks have fought gallantly and cleanly, and have treated our wounded and prisoners with kindness and humanity.”) Whomever thought so unkindly ought to have reminded himself, where was British honor in arresting up to 144 mostly innocent men, taking some two years out of their lives, on the basis of no evidence? (Why, we also know from the classic war prison movie, THE GREAT ESCAPE, that it is the duty of a prisoner to try and escape.)
(The above is only a smaller example of British honor at a low. What about the terms of the original Armistice in Oct. 30, 1918, when the British had promised to basically lay off the Ottoman Empire?)
The "all for all" exchange was finally agreed upon on October 23, 1921. The remaining 53 Turks, divided into categories of A and B, were released on November 1, 1921.
Dadrian’s source for the above is Bilal Simsir, Malta Sürgünleri (Istanbul, 1976), pp. 451-60, but the prisoners were actually released on Oct. 25, and Simsir wrote the Turks arrived at Inebolu on October 31st, 1921. The number Simsir provided was 59, not 53. (Dadrian added two dozen corrections for his article, but none of these were included.)
Dadrian last reports on “The resulting British sense of shame and guilt,” compiling a bunch of “what have we done?” examples, ending with the racist crowd favorite, “one British prisoner is worth a shipload of Turks, and so the exchange was excused." There goes Dadrian’s selective usage of “evidence” again. Sure, there were plenty of brainwashed Britons who had been bombarded by “Terrible Turk” propaganda, and it would be natural to find those who felt the Turks to be "notorious exterminators," as well as less-than-human. But these are again the personal opinions of some, and a reading of the British archives on the matter reveals other British officials having come to learn what a travesty they had perpetrated, basing their beliefs on vicious Armenian propaganda. The Acting Military Attache to Istanbul’s British High Commissioner, for example, was better in tune with some of the realities.
In his CONCLUSION, Dadrian sets his nose in the air and informs us that “This study has established that the material under review is flawed with respect to technicalities. These, however, are matters that are rather extrinsic to the test of falsification. The recent efforts of a number of Turkish authors to invalidate the Naim-Andonian material by focusing on these flaws have been examined and found to be equally and similarly deficient.”
Of course, that is ridiculous. Dadrian grasped for his pathetic straws throughout, in his customary efforts to throw smoke, and create confusion. He did not put a dent on the masterful and the very scholarly work of Orel and Yuca. How do we know this, as the final test? No historian in his right mind goes near Andonian today, not even many hardcore Armenian propagandists. The Andonian forgeries are accepted as false today as they were in their day. The fact that the British did not go near them is the final proof... when the British had searched underneath every rock for over two years, in order to find the evidence to convict the accused Ottomans in Malta.
"No one knows if the so-called Andonian telegrams are legitimate. They have not been proven or disproven to any absolute degree. Their provenance is still under research. It is not necessary to doubt them, but then Armenian and world scholars have found much dependable material in the archives and elsewhere and no longer use them in their research publications. (Guenter) Lewy is way off base using very old material to rail against Armenian scholars. He is a gadfly, writing on too many topics without thorough research. He will be used for propaganda, refuted by scholars, and then fade away."
Prof. Dennis Papazian, in an exchange of ideas via e-mail among a small group of Turks and Armenians, late December 2005. While Papazian is a proud band member singing the "Armenian AND? Anthem," ("It is not necessary to doubt them," indeed!) what he is really saying is that the Andonian telegrams are now so discredited, only the worst pro-Armenians would still dare to tell us they would constitute actual evidence.
Vahakn Dadrian’s Greatest Embarrassment keeps getting dug in a deeper hole with absurd statements as this:
These flaws involve miscounting, misdating, misconversion of dates from old to new style, and careless editing, despite the availability of manifold resources, including staff assistance provided by the Turkish Historical Society — which in the chaos of the armistice were neither available nor affordable by either Naim or Andonian.
To quickly digress: the Turkish Historical Society has been made out to be a kind of James Bond-level SPECTRE organization of the “evil” Turkish government, but the reality (and I don’t know for certain; merely putting two and two together) is that this is a modest and underpaid operation, with no real staff and only a handful of professors (truly, if the “evil” Turkish government were hell-bent on gathering contra-genocide information, there would be a whole army of genocide scholars in Turkey, and exposés as this one on Dadrian and his ilk would be unnecessary... all of this work should have been done already); I doubt the situation was different during the days Orel and Yuca performed their research. Dadrian must be confusing the comparatively wobbly Turkish Historical Society with his own well-financed Zoryan Institute.
Getting back to Dadrian’s statement, however, listen to what he’s telling us: poor Andonian was no match for what Dadrian is presenting as the limitless resources of the Turkish Historical Society... but Dadrian is sinking low enough to include Naim, as Andonian's partner! That’s right, as though this fellow, if he actually existed, would have worked hand in hand with Andonian to prepare the material. Yet, if we are to believe the claims of the background information, as Andonian himself subsequently revealed in his 1937 letter, Naim was only the supplier of information. (And a paid one, at that.)
Dadrian boldly concludes, “The argument of falsification has been found to be untenable,” sealing the fact that Dadrian is making no pretense of wondering whether these documents are real. He is making no bones about telling us they are real. Dadrian continues, “no forger of any value would have produced material so incomplete and so flawed with glaring imperfections; these could have been easily avoided by anyone disposed to forge.”
Quite the contrary, the clever forger would make sure to present a work that is not immaculate, given that the source... or the world’s impression of the source (as Dadrian put it: “a government apparatus known for its chronically erratic methods of transactions”)... is expected to be imperfect. Beyond such reasoning, did not Dadrian argue throughout his paper that Andonian was rushed? The same factors causing Dadrian to apologize for Andonian’s sloppiness could also explain why Andonian neglected to completely dot and cross his i’s and t’s. Probably Andonian figured no one would seriously bother to analyze the alien style of Ottoman Turkish, since Turks never get a fair shake in the Western world, and the Dashnaks in charge were primarily concerned with having this propaganda influence the Peace Conference. After Armenia would get half of Turkey on the basis of these telegrams, what difference would it make if anyone paid a closer look, in future years?
But all of the above is speculation. Once again, Dadrian is attempting to throw his reader off track. He was unable to conclusively discredit the Orel-Yuca work, so now he must apply “logic.”
At this point of his paper, Dadrian will really aim below the belt. His aim: to show there were two sets of orders. He begins:
The recent publicity accorded to a set of Talat documents illustrates this point of diversion and camouflage. Talat is portrayed in them as a caring, responsible Interior Minister whose sole aim is claimed to be "the protection," "the safety," and "the relocation" of the deportees.
Prof. Guenter Lewy fills us in on Talat Pasha’s character:
The utter ruthlessness of Talât Pasha is a recurring theme in The Memoirs. Such a demonization, though, represents an important change from the way many Armenians regarded Talât before 1915. On December 20, 1913, for example, British embassy official Louis Mallet reported the Armenians had confidence in Talât Pasha, "but fear that they may not always have to deal with a minister of the interior as well disposed as the present occupant of that post."[43] Similarly, the German missionary Liparit described Talât as a man "who over the last six years has acquired the reputation of a sincere adherent of Turkish-Armenian friendship."[44] Even the American head of the international Armenian relief effort in Istanbul recalled that Talât Pasha always "gave prompt attention to my requests, frequently greeting me as I called upon him in his office with the introductory remark: ‘We are partners; what can I do for you today?'"[45] Talât Pasha may have turned into a vicious fiend, but the opinions of his contemporaries do not support this characterization.
(Note: Dadrian/Akcam have pointed out that Liparit was not a German missionary, but an Armenian.)
Even Ambassador Morgenthau, equally concerned with showing Talat and other Ottoman officials as evil fiends, revealed a very friendly relationship in his private papers, and largely indicated Talat as a good person. Justin McCarthy elaborated on this other famous example of words being put in Talat’s mouth:
One of the best examples of invented Ottoman admissions of guilt may be that concocted by the American ambassador Morgenthau. Morgenthau asked his readers to believe that Talat Pasa offhandedly told the ambassador of his plans to eradicate the Armenians. Applying common sense and some knowledge of diplomatic practice helps to evaluate these supposed indiscretions. Can anyone believe that the Ottoman interior minister would actually have done such a thing? He knew that America invariably supported the Armenians, and had always done so. If he felt the need to unburden his soul, who would be the last person to whom he would talk? The American ambassador. Yet to whom does he tell all? The American Ambassador! Talat Pasa was a practical politician. Like all politicians, he undoubtedly violated rules and made errors. But no one has ever alleged that Talat Pasa was an idiot. Perhaps Ambassador Morgenthau knew that the U.S. State Department would never believe his story, because he never reported it at the time to his masters, only writing it later in a popular book.
Yet Dadrian will say otherwise:
On its face value this countervailing evidence not only is convincing but in a sense belies the evidence supplied by Naim. The later evidence is punctured, however, by the following facts:
1. When Talat showed three of these documents to the Interim German Ambassador Ernst Hohenlohe-Langenburg, and indirectly to Austrian Ambassador Johann Margrave Pallavicini, he triggered a series of reactions among the Ambassadors and provincial consuls of Germany and Austria. These reactions, detailed in notes 37 and 38, depict Talat as "a double-dealer," prone to repeated deceptions.[102]
With notes 37 and 38, Dadrian has uncovered the personal opinions of three Austrian and German ambassadors, along with three consuls (including Rössler), not thinking highly of Talat’s integrity. One could also come up with plenty of examples where Churchill, Lloyd George and just about every other statesman and politician have been accused of double-dealing; as Prof. McCarthy put it above, “Like all politicians, he (Talat) undoubtedly violated rules and made errors.” One can also find Germans who thought highly of Talat Pasha, a famous one being von Schellendorf. There could well have been times when Dadrian’s witnesses thought positively of Talat (such as Ambassador Wangenheim), but we are all familiar with Dadrian’s deceptive selectivity, by now.
Frankly, the thrust of a man's worth ought not to be judged through the hearsay of incidental transgressions, the weeds in the forest, but through the BIG PICTURE, the forest itself. When the USA declared war on Germany, the USA became the nominal enemy of the Ottoman Empire as well. Years beforehand, the missionaries and the more recently arrived members of the Near East Relief could not have been more vicious toward the Turks. In spite of these realities, Talat Pasha promised Ambassador Elkus that he would let these Turk-hostile Christians stay and take care of the Armenians. Perhaps this was the only time in history that a combatant country had given permission to the citizens of another country fighting against its side to stay, feed, clothe, treat, educate and give moral support to the people which it was accused of exterminating. Turkish people, at this time, were starving to death (thousands dying daily from famine, as Morgenthau told us in his "Story" book), but Talat Pasha didn't even lay the condition that the Turks needed to be taken care of, as well. It is odd that this Turkish leader, who on March 9, 1915 had ordered even Armenians babies to be killed, as Dadrian tells us was the "true" case, would have become such an amazing humanitarian. (See Story of Near East Relief: 1915-1930, James L. Barton, MacMillan Co. 1930).
(By the way, do you know how Roger Smith rationalized the above, Dadrian-style, in an April 2005 genocide conference held at Fordham University? Smith said this could have been the Turks' way of preventing the Americans from declaring war on the Turks. If only Adolf Hitler, a great student of Ottoman Turco-Armenian affairs as we know from his one-line quote, had paid attention to this Ottoman trick, and allowed the American Red Cross to take care of the Jews in Auschwitz and Dachau.)
But the incredible footnote Dadrian offers is [102]:
“Talat's November 18 cipher clearly outlines these procedures of camouflage and deflection intended for the benefit of the American Consuls. He is instructing the deportation officials to be careful about the real intent of the deportations, to avoid attracting attention when carrying out that intent... and to ‘create the conviction among foreigners’ ... that the aim of ‘deportation" is nothing but ‘relocation.’"
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, in order to make his case, Vahakn Dadrian actually has the gall to present an Andonian forgery as evidence! Just when you think he can’t sink lower, deeper and deeper spirals Vahakn Dadrian, soon to emerge out of a hole in China.
Dadrian unleashes more of his dirt; a good several others who thought Talat was a rat, including Falih Rifki Atay, who is described as Talat’s secretary, deriding Talat for “Oriental ethics”; Dadrian sets up this example with the statement,
A vivid example of this double-dealing through a two-track System of communication is contained in the memoirs of Falih Rifki Atay.
Talat accommodated a favor-seeker with a letter of recommendation, and directed Atay to inform the recipient that the letter was to be disregarded. Dadrian makes sure to add that this was to be done “via a cipher telegram.” In case you are unsure where this is going, Dadrian seals the deal in his footnote 105, with an excerpt from that fishy “Turk,” Mustafa Nedim (Hai Yegernu. Eem Vugayoutiounnerus [The Armenian Genocide. My testimony], 1925), who wrote that Enver's and Talat's orders to the governors "were routinely countermanded through coded messages ... I know this too well." (These words are made to order from an Armenian propagandist.)
Dadrian is trying to negate the entire body of genuine Ottoman telegrams demonstrating how Armenian lives and property were intended to be safeguarded, by putting across the idea there were two sets of telegrams. In other words, during desperate wartime, without concern for the vast and dangerous confusion such a policy would cause, Talat and company would prepare “good” telegrams, only to cancel them with the secret “evil” ones.
And why would Talat and company do this? Dadrian offers no explanation, and wisely doesn’t dwell too much on this idea, because it is just so incredibly stupid. You see, the “good” telegrams were only known internally. Thus, the “good” telegrams could not have been written for propagandistic purposes. Therefore, the only logical reason why Talat and company would have bothered with this subterfuge would have been that... they were concerned about fooling future historians?
This is a perfect example of the wily Dadrian’s smoke and mirrors act. He is an expert in throwing whatever Turk-bashing theory he can come up with, all in an effort to detract and confuse. One wonders if he is simply immoral, or amoral... it is very difficult to determine whether this man knows the difference between right and wrong.
Dadrian is not through with throwing his mud, of course, but just before he winds it up, he boldly declares:
It may be concluded with a high degree of certainty that the two letters and the 50 decoded ciphers that constitute the Naim-Andonian material are true documents.
If Dadrian really believed the Naim-Andonian material were true, he would have made sure to enlist them in his arsenal of weasel facts along the years. I have not read all of V.D.’s works, but I don’t recall coming across a single instance (other than this one, demonstrating a lack of shyness) where Dadrian has pointed to an Andonian forgery as a reference. He knows very well these are fake, like everyone else knows they are fake, but he must do his best to cast doubt on their illegitimacy... because, as Prof. Feigl put it so beautifully, “...who knows? — maybe someday it will come in handy again to help obscure the truth.”
A "Common Sense" Look at the Andonian Fakery
Before closing, I’d like to put all the date, code and other technicalities aside and examine the Naim work from a common sense perspective.
The greatest reason why these telegrams are a farce is that the deadlier instructions simply were not followed. It might not be accurate to even call most of what was written “instructions.” What we have are statements of pure propaganda, designed to show Talat and Co. as agents of evil.
Take the one from March 9, 1915. Talat was made to write:
“All rights of the Armenians to live and work on Turkish soil have been completely cancelled, and with regard to this the Government takes all responsibility on itself, and has commanded that even babes in the cradle are not to be spared.”
It’s straight out of a comic book. How unbelievable that anyone of intelligence could consider this tripe could have actually been real. Yet that is what Dadrian has concluded; he wrote the above must have constituted a true document.
“Naim Bey” tells us in the book that the code phrase for Armenians was “Certain People,” and two sentences after the above, “Certain People” is used, but what is the point? The communication already had specified the “Armenians,” negating the need for a code phrase. It’s really quite stupid.
This is a long telegram, and after Talat orders that the “women and children” are not to be spared, here is a curious addition: Army commanders are ordered “not to interfere in the work of deportation.” (A footnote informs us Armenian artisans were separated by commanding officers for erection of military buildings, the deportation officials complained, and Talat Pasha ordered even that right to be taken from the military officers. How dare a single Armenian be left alive!)
“Naim Bey” later described the after effects, as such: “no hope of life” and “a graveyard.” “The officials in charge had been ordered not to abstain from any brutality which would cause death.”
Now let’s go for a reality check. If this order went out on March 9, why is the “genocide” celebrated on April 24, and not, say, March 10? What would have been the sense of the May 2 telegram that was the first genuine sign of the “genocide” (that is, relocation)?
As an additional point, if you take the time to click and read the May 2 telegram, are you really going to believe this May 2 one was not real, and written to fool future historians? (Enver is writing to Talat here. Enver would have never written this May 2 telegram, if Talat's message from March 9 was in effect.)
How could it be possible for any Armenian to have been living and working anywhere in the Ottoman Empire, after such a devastating order, as the March 9 one represents?
Henry Morgenthau wrote in the same month of this order:
There was no solidly established government in Turkey... A political committee, not exceeding forty members, headed by Talaat, Enver, and Djemal, controlled the Central Government, but their authority throughout the empire was exceedingly tenuous. As a matter of fact, the whole Ottoman state, on that eighteenth day of March, 1915, when the Allied fleet abandoned the attack, was on the brink of dissolution.
What that tells us is the March 9 telegram would have had no punch. Talat could write all the "kill the Armenians" orders he wanted, but no one would have listened. (Indeed, Morgenthau was not totally off the mark. Talat's "good" telegrams were ignored, at times, by local officials. The first time Talat called a halt to the "deportations" was August, 1915. Talat repeatedly had to keep sending "reminder" orders until 1916, because the locals had different ideas.)
This March 9 telegram can be picked apart from so many other angles. We really don’t need the technical points to prove what a joke this, and the other telegrams, are.
Now here is what Andonian wrote about Naim Bey:
As he had an ardent Turkish consciousness, he was apprehensive of giving, through his revelations, the coup-de-grâce to his race which would expiate all the crimes of which it had been guilty during the war, upon its defeat. More than my requests and insistence, it was the visit of Armenian women, who came by the dozen to tell me and to have me record the recollections of their sufferings and tortures, and which I communicated to him, which finally made Naim Bey talk.
And here is a passage attributed to Naim Bey; it is very typical:
I believe that the history of the Armenian deportations and massacres, which have rendered the name of Turk worthy of eternal malediction on the part of all humanity, has no parallel in any record of inhuman deeds which has been written until that day. In whatever corner of the wide territories of Turkey one may look, whatever dark ravine one may investigate, thousands of Armenians corpses and skeletons will be found, slaughtered and mutilated in the most cruel manner.
Even if Naim Bey did not have such “an ardent Turkish consciousness,” even if he wasn't wary of affixing such a “coup-de-grâce to his race,” I don’t care how guilty he might have been feeling, nobody would refer to his own kind in such an unforgiving manner. This would especially be the case if Naim Bey was the sort of patriot Andonian credited him as being. The over-the-top words above are no different than those derived from your typically hateful Armenian propagandist.
How else do we know the above statement is fishy? If Naim Bey was the “chief secretary” of Aleppo’s “Deportation Committee,” he would have been indoors all of the time. (That is, until early 1916, when the French account specified he was REVOKED.) Armenian propaganda requirements dictate that any and every claim must be believed, of course, but people of honor can’t automatically accept secondhand stories as the truth. There is no end to the number of accounts of Naim Bey’s, relating events Naim Bey could not possibly have personally witnessed, such as:
Old women took out bags of earth which they had brought with them from their distant homes — the earth which had been sanctified by all the martyrdom and bloodshed through which they had brought and kept it. Feeling that they were going to die, they distributed that earth amongst those who had none. They placed it in their bosoms, so that when they died in this strange land, they might at least close their eyes in the illusion that they were dying in the embrace of their native soil.
(Dadrian has stressed how “rushed” the English edition was — his exact words were that the Andonian work received “a shabby treatment in its English translation" — but if these passages from the 1964 version were not tampered with, we could see there was plenty of time to carefully compose words in the traditionally poetic Armenian style of sob storydom. There is nothing “shabby” about the usage of English in the Andonian book.)
Let us examine the further stupidities of this book. Paragraphs ago, we covered the March 9 communication of Talat Pasha’s, decreeing that no Armenian can live or work on Turkish soil (which would have included the Arab provinces, part of the Ottoman Empire at the time; that is, the “deserts” where we keep getting reminded the Armenians were marched off to), and that even the babies would not be spared. How else do we know what Renowned Scholar Dadrian concluded as “true” is anything but? We need look no further than the example of Aram Andonian himself.
Andonian was “exiled” on April 11, 1915, meaning he was working at his job as a military censor for a month after the March 9 “Final Solution” decree. Not only was he working, but he was working in a highly sensitive position of the military. We are told the reasons why he was arrested were because he innocently conveyed the news of the “murder of Sahag Vartabed,” a bishop, and of the “massacre at Skhert” to the Patriarchate. But those of us who know better are aware we need to look for our ten-foot poles before we go near what these propagandists tell us. As “the Armenians have been belligerents de facto, since they indignantly refused to side with Turkey,” as Andonian’s future boss Boghos Nubar himself has told us, and since the whole of the Ottoman-Armenian community was disloyal by this time (even Morgenthau confirmed it, in the March 1915 report mentioned earlier: “Among the subject races the spirit of revolt was rapidly spreading. The Greeks and the Armenians would also have welcomed an opportunity to strengthen the hands of the Allies”), how do we know the traitor Andonian was not sending tactical information to the British, or otherwise “working to strengthen the hands of the Allies”?
Andonian probably was at his job in Istanbul, right under the eyes of his “executioner,” Talat Pasha. How could Talat Pasha have permitted the 160,999 other Armenians to have kept working and living in Istanbul, after having issued his “Final Solution,” that none would be permitted to work or live?
(I’m using Toynbee’s count from the 1915 book mentioned earlier. Dadrian drummed up Toynbee as his witness in Footnote 1: “Toynbee, who was commissioned by the British Foreign Office to complete [The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16], stuck to his central conclusion that this crime constituted genocide. In a letter to the author he wrote, ‘My feelings and judgment are the same as they have always been. The genocide of the Armenians was a capital crime’ [December 6, 1973]. Toynbee, of course, denounced his “Treatment” work as propaganda after the war, most decisively on pg. 50 of 1922's “The Western Question in Greece and Turkey.” He was nowhere near the scene of the horror stories, like “Naim Bey,” and we can only speculate on the reasons as to why he stuck to his guns. Maybe he was “in denial” that he was responsible for so many lies during his Wellington House years, but most likely he was too diehard a Christian, and deep down couldn't accept the Turks were not the monsters he was raised to believe. Regardless, Toynbee’s “Treatment” work is not taken seriously by genuine historians. If Dadrian wishes to point to Toynbee as reliable, then Dadrian should also consider the pre-Wellington House Toynbee’s figure as little more than 761,000 as the total number of pre-war Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Then he will have to account for having agreed one million Armenians survived, which would put all his genocide work down the drain.)
Let’s take a closer look at Andonian’s experience as a “genocide victim.” You’ll recall Dadrian put Andonian in the “martyr” category, “the crippled survivor of 4 years of pain and agony,” implying that Andonian was crippled deliberately by the bestial Turks. But we have already covered Andonian had simply broken his leg. The Turks hospitalized him and put his leg in a cast. Unless his leg didn’t set properly, maybe Andonian walked with a slight limp, but we can see Dadrian at work again, going for the sympathy vote, with the word “cripple.”
So here we go with Andonian’s story, from his own book: after he was “dismissed” (like Naim Bey!) from his post and sent to a labor battalion, Andonian escaped. I guess he was recaptured again, as the next thing we’re told is that he was driven with others to Diarbekir, where Ottoman parliamentarians Zohrab, Vartkes and Dr. Daghavorian were “murdered en route.” This is when he broke his leg, and was sent to a hospital.
The irony of being sent to a hospital to get cared for, if the idea was to “murder” all of these people need not be mentioned.
Andonian then undergoes a series of escapes and re-arrests (you'd think the first time he was recaptured, he'd have been shot, yet Andonian constantly kept getting "forgiven"; why?), until he reached Aleppo, was arrested again, but was rescued by friends. Andonian got a “permit for temporary residence.” (Kind of like Taner Akcam, except in Akcam's case, his "visiting" rights go on and on.)
(By the way, why would Andonian have been granted this permit, if his fate was to work at a "labor battalion"? And how did these presumably Armenian friends have the pull to get the authorities to grant such a request? We were told no Armenians were permitted to live or work on Turkish soil.)
And there we have the tale of Aram Andonian, “genocide victim”; he must have been incredibly lucky that the Turks, sworn not to let any Armenian live or work on Turkish soil, and were even after the hides of babies, didn’t shoot him on sight. Kind of like the saga of Dadrian’s own family.
The 1964 reprint account differs from probably the French version, the one which I suppose the Turkish researchers got the information that Andonian met Naim for the first time in 1916, around the time Naim had lost his job.
Here we are told further that Andonian was “pursued by persecution” for two-and-one-half years, as he was living in hiding (if he received a “permit for temporary residence,” as we were told earlier, why would he have needed to live in hiding? Forget about the contradictions in the different versions of this book, there are even contradictions in the same book), in Aleppo, in Damascus and Beirout, and “sometimes in the Lebanon,” until the English entered Aleppo, "bringing liberty with them."
After the English came in, friends reminded Andonian of Naim Bey. Andonian wanted to see him because it seemed to Andonian that “he ought to know a great deal — everything, in fact.”
So according to this account, Andonian first met Naim Bey in 1918 or it could have even been 1919, as the dust logically needed to settle after a city's conquest. This is where we were told that the reason why Naim had material in his possession is because he kept some, “perhaps fearing future responsibility” (which impies he would have been an important enough official, and have definitely been recorded in the Ottoman books), one part he had written from memory, and photographed the most important ones.
Since the British entered Aleppo on October 26, 1918, and since it must have taken some time before Andonian arranged for a meeting with Naim Bey (Dadrian indicates above the meeting must have taken place immediately, as Naim offered notebooks to Andonian on November 6, 10 and 14; isn't that ridiculous? So Andonian was given the idea by friends, sought out Naim Bey, finally arranged a meeting, over the course of time had to win over the apprehensive Naim Bey and his "ardent Turkish consciousness," including interviews with dozens of women to soften Naim's heart as we were told earlier, and Naim prepared the first of his three notebooks for Aram only eleven days after the city fell), and since Ternon told us Andonian had finished at least his first draft of the book in June of 1919, then everything must have taken place at whirlwind speed.
The existence of Naim Bey becomes more and more suspect. And here is the key: Andonian refers to Naim Bey as the “late” chief secretary, in his "Translator's Note." That means Naim Bey had conveniently died before Andonian had finished writing his book. ("Late" in this context, could also mean "previous occupant of a post"; my first impression was that the word meant "dead," since the "Deportations Committee of Aleppo" was obsolete by the time of Andonian's writing, and it would have served no purpose to specify whether Naim Bey was a "former" title-holder, any more than the other characters in the cast have been described as "former" title-holders in their one-time jobs. Regardless, there is not a word of Naim Bey's post-1919 fate. He is a phantom, like Watergate's "Deep Throat" used to be. For all intents and purposes, Naim Bey was dead.)
Yves Ternon, contradicting Dadrian's assertion of “A valuable opportunity was thus lost for submitting the documents to Ottoman authorities for possible authentication,” tells us the Naim telegrams were submitted to the Ottoman kangaroo courts:
It is ... the same objective of propaganda which had led the Armenian National Office to withdraw these documents from the Turkish boards of inquiry (that) inspired their publication: a book would better influence the public opinion...
The documents would have needed to be submitted in order to be withdrawn (which also does not make sense, because once material is submitted to a bureaucratic government agency, it would not be easy to get the material back). If this were the case, then Naim would have been available to personally testify. Unless, of course, Naim was made to have conveniently died.
But it wasn’t only for the purposes of the Ottoman courts that it would have been convenient to make Naim Bey a dead man. For example, Dadrian informs us (as the rest of us attempt to stifle our laughter) that the Aleppo Armenians submitted these documents through a battery of tests in order to verify their authenticity. The best way to have verified their authenticity would have been to arrange for a meeting with Naim Bey himself. (Even if the European Armenians had to travel all the way to the Aleppo area, to do so.)
(This raises another question. It might be said Naim Bey only chose to donate his services in the shadows, like the "Mr. X"s of Lord Bryce's Blue Books. But "Naim Bey" is presented as his real name. In fact, Dadrian refers to a "Naim Sefa," which evidently was the full name of Naim Bey. Would not the book have otherwise stressed that Naim Bey was a pseudonym, in order to protect Naim Bey? So if the accounts of all those Armenian women melted Naim Bey's heart and persuaded him to give up the goods, and if Naim Bey wrote the first person sections of his "memoirs" in such an over-the-top Armenian style, Turk-demonizing way — indicating that he was disgusted with his own kind, "worthy of eternal malediction on the part of all humanity" — why would he not have gone all the way? Particularly when the atmosphere of the enemy-occupied puppet Ottoman period practically demanded that the previous administration be found culpable of Armenian massacres? Given the "facts," Naim Bey would have definitely at least met with the Armenians, and defended his "work.")
(Ternon told us, by the way, that Andonian travelled all the way to England to hand-deliver the documents. Is there any doubt that Andonian was just one of the components of the Armenian propaganda network? Ternon: “The ‘notable Armenians’ of Manchester — i.e. English persons in charge of the Armenian National Union — requested to use these sources [for the purpose of writing a book].” They must have made this “request” before Andonian trucked all the way to England. Is there any doubt that they were in league together, well before Andonian bought his ticket?)
You’ll remember from above that in his reply to the Turkish scholars that Naim could not have had access to utterly secret and sensitive documents, Dadrian assured us the documents must have survived because Aleppo was “not considered in danger.”
The obvious absurdity is that Naim Bey would have been irrelevant. If the British came in so suddenly that there was no time to destroy sensitive documents, the documents would have been in the hands of the British... as the first thing the British would have done when they took over an Ottoman government building was to have searched the building for sensitive documents. This raises a very important question: as the British searched so many government offices when they took over so many territories, and especially after the British had occupied Istanbul and had access to all the offices throughout the Ottoman Empire, how come the British could not come up with even one single damning document?
Forged Talat telegram, dated Jan. 15, 1916
How did Talat Pasha's signature get there? (And how
do we "laypeople" discern from the above
hieroglyphics what constitutes a signature? Other
telegrams in the book did not have that distinctive last
writing with the bold line, whereas another reproduced
Talat telegram — "No. 4,"dated Jan. 23, 1916 and
facing p. 62 — features the exact shape.
Another irregularity of these forgeries is that these were telegrams. We all know how that works: one end goes tappity tap tap on the telegraph machine (Talat owned his own set, as we learned in “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story”), and at the other end we get the dots and dashes that are then put into a readable format. We’ve seen this in movies, where the Western Union man delivers a typewritten telegram, and the recipient keeps reading all of the “STOP”s in between. Therefore: while Naim Bey might have been able to get hold of the handwritten messages originating from Aleppo, how did he get the handwritten copies of the messages coming into Aleppo? Sure, somebody (like, maybe, the office's "chief secretary." Hmmm!) had to transcribe the tappity-tap-taps to handwritten format... since “Ottoman typewriters” probably could not have existed. But how could these telegrams contain signatures… such as Talat Pasha’s signature? (An original was reproduced facing p. 61 of the 1964 reprint, a copy of which may be seen above: Talat’s “Jan. 15, 1916” telegram instructing that Armenian children in orphanages should basically be killed.) Unless the original messages were delivered by “Pony Express,” there is no way authors from Istanbul could have put their John Hancocks on these telegrams.
This is such an obvious and decisive irregularity, I don’t know why it has not been stressed before. The only one I am aware having pointed to this was Prof. Ataöv, in his “Sari Gelin” interview, where he stated (as covered above, beside his picture): "They would never send something handwritten, from the capital city Istanbul to Aleppo; they would send a code.”
Yves Ternon’s work regarding Andonian is the first Ternon work I have read, and I can’t help feeling more unimpressed about the French partisan than I knew I would be. As a full-fledged member of the “genocide club,” Ternon goes out of his way to validate Vahakn Dadrian’s awful work by calling it “brilliant.” Yet, so often, Ternon presents a telling which, in its details, differ significantly from Dadrian’s facts.
Let’s take a look at the conclusion of Ternon, and see if you find him any more of a "Tern on" than I didn't.
After Ternon "legitimizes" the usual unproven Armenian propagandistic notions such as a double set of orders and Dadrian’s Special Organization, Ternon concludes (after stressing it is only an "assumption") that the Andonian work must be “probable.” He then points out the “lies” of the “Turkish negation.”
Ternon assures us the Armenians’ infiltration by the (Entente) enemy and the Armenian revolt are “false.” Ternon must not have read the book of his nation’s own General M. Larcher, who observed that "the Armenian population in the zone of operations overtly exhibited a common cause with the Russians...some migrating to Transcaucasia... [and] frequently attacking Turkish convoys," further noting that "the loyalty of the Armenians recruited in the Turkish troops seemed doubtful." (La Guerre Turque dans la Guerre Mondiale, Paris, E. Chiron-Berger Levrault, 1926, pp. 395-396.)
Ternon also points out the other typical falsehoods of “Turkish propaganda,” which I’m resisting the temptation to show up, as this page has grown so large… one is, “the whole of the documents manufactured by Andonian (false).” How interesting that Ternon could call the manufacturing of these documents as “false,” when he earlier stressed that the Andonian work’s authenticity is only “probable.”
Ternon continues (this translation from the French is unofficial):
“The business of the Andonian documents makes it possible to thwart the trap however skillfully (dissimulated by) Turkish revisionism.” Ternon reminds us that just because it is difficult for Dadrian to have proven the “strictly legal identification of the Andonian materials,” it “does not cancel the value of these materials.” (“One does not lock up a mountain in a small box,” Ternon tells us.) Because the culprits from the Andonian work have been repeatedly described as committing “the same atrocities in identical or similar circumstances” (He points to a Dadrian source in his footnote, here), this “voluntary omission” by the historians of the Turkish Historical Society “discredits them definitively.”
Ones who point to propaganda to make their case are the ones who lose credibility. Monsieur Ternon has been able to get away with his bigoted conclusions because his support system in the Western world is similarly bigoted.
Update from Yves Ternon
The French-Armenian site, imprescriptible.fr, featuring the "Kill all Armenians" Talat Pasha forgery (which is dated Sept. 16, 1915 in the 1964 reprint, but they have it as Sept. 29, 1915) on its home page at the time of this wrting, tells us of a 1999 publication put out by the CDCA (Comité de Défense de la Cause Arménienne), entitled "Actualité du Génocide des Arméniens," with a préface by Jack Lang. Yves Ternon authored a piece translated as, "The quality of the proof In connection with the Andonian documents and the small sentence of Hitler," where he updated by one decade his opinion of Andonian. He basically confirms his belief in Andonian, and adds new details, sometimes at variance with what has already been claimed.
Ternon acknowledges the Andonian work is no longer presented as genocidal evidence by "historians," but "it is important to say why they are not admissible since they are probably authentic."
We have mainly Turkish scholars to blame, along with their foreign helpers. "These specialists in forgery, in search of (faults) in the granite of the obviousness," ruined the fun.
Aram Andonian is now a "journalist" (in the book: he was a "military censor") who is now a victim of "the raid of April 24" (in the book, he was "exiled" on April 11) and he "miraculously survived the deportation" (strong clues in the book tell us he was humanely treated). Those in league with Andonian are now clarified as having belonged to two groups, Nubar's French-based Armenian General Benevolent Union, and Aleppo's "Armenian National Union," a different group set up under the aegis of Catholicos Sahag [Dadrian, FN 26].
Yves Ternon
Freaky Frenchy: Yves Ternon.
Ternon testifies Andonian, at Nubar's behest, asked the Patriarchate to forward "a major part of the originals" (Ternon wrote "all" in his earlier work; Dadrian said "a few") for use in the Nouri trial. The lawsuit was aborted, and "the documents disappear." In contrast to his earlier work, Ternon now writes
Andonian "does not have any more but five originals" left," the ones destined for Berlin. "Krieger affirms to have found three books of memoirs given to Andonian by Naïm bey." (These must have been the Nov. 6-10-14 ones Dadrian told us were written on bad paper.) "A few years afterwards, when Dadrian wants to consult them, they are not there any more." (If the reader wishes to look into some discrepancies, see above.) In addition, differing from the sequence at this paragraph's beginning, Ternon had described the sequence in his earlier work as follows: The Armenian doctor who had Nuri arrested asked the Patriarchate for the originals, and Andonian, on behalf of the Patriarch, asked the British Armenians to send the originals to the Patriarch. which they did; after the trial was aborted, the originals — before disappearing — reverted to the Patriarch. See above,
Ternon then writes, "It is impossible (to determine whether) Naïm bey, Andonian or someone else, forged these parts." Pathetic.
Ternon then has the nerve to add, (reader, please keep in mind these translations are imperfect), "...[T]he majority of historians share the conviction that these telegrams were indeed exchanged to (implement) the methods of the Armenian genocide." What "majority of historians"?
What a horrible, non-scholarly partisan. Yves Ternon wraps up by predictably referring exclusively to Armenian propaganda, in a sad attempt to validate that other "forgery," Hitler's quote.
The real conclusion: the ones behind the preparation of Andonian’s forgeries had propaganda in mind, as even Andonian himself admitted. In the pursuit of their agenda, they produced a work that blackened the honor of a great people, a work that continues to deceive even today… thanks to the efforts of those such as Dadrian and Ternon. Ternon is probably just letting his Terrible Turk baggage run away with him. Dadrian must be suspected of knowing a lot more than he lets on.
The Andonian work is a work of evil. Those who either purposely or mindlessly support such a work of evil become the instruments of evil.
© Holdwater
The source site of this article gets revised often, as better
information comes along. For the most up-to-date version, and
the related photos, the reader may consider reviewing
the direct link as follows:
www.tallarmeniantale.com/dadrian-andonian.htm
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