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claim that the paper on which these documents were written
came from the French school in Aleppo, he answers that there
was a paper shortage (leading the Ottoman governor to ask a
French headmaster if he could use some of his school-paper?
Not very likely). The Naim-Andonian documents have inciden-
tally never been tested in a court. The British refused to use
them and a German court subsequently waved them aside.
They have since disappeared – not what you would have
expected had they been at all that is the sum total of the
evidence as to „genocide‟. Otherwise you are left with what
English courts call „circumstantial evidence‟ – i.e. a witness
testifying that another witness said something to someone.
Such evidence does not count. In the past three years Armenian
historians have apparently been going round archives ın two
dozen countries to find out what they contain – the Danish
archives for instance. What they contain is what we knew
already – that an awful lot of Armenians were killed or died in
the course of a wartime deportation from many parts of
Anatolia. Did the Ottoman government intend to exterminate
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the race, or was it just a deportation that went horribly wrong?
As to this, the experts are divided. A deportation gone
wrong is the verdict of many of the best qualified historians –
Bernard Lewis, Heath Lowry, Justin McCarthy, and Yusuf
Halacoglu. Other historians who know the old script and the
background believe that it was a premeditated campaign of
extermination, and some of these historians are Turkish (Mete
Tuncay and Selim Deringil, unless I am taking their names in
vain). There is a Turkish historian, Taner Akcam, whose book,
based on the war-crimes trials set up in the early period of the
British occupation, is obviously scholarly and who accepts the
genocide thesis (though he does stress that the process cannot
be compared with what happened in Nazi Germany to the
Jews). In view of these divisions among scholars it is simply
scandalous that the French or any other parliament should
decree what the answer is. But it is worse, because the
Armenian Diaspora can be extremely vindictive. For instance,
Gilles Veinstein, as a reward for his quite dispassionate article,
faced a campaign of vilification. He had become a candidate
for the College de France, which elects the very best scholars
in the country to give seminars. The historians very much wel-
comed this: he is an extremely serious scholar. But the Ar-
menian Diaspora organized a campaign against him, especially
among the mathematicians for some reason. One of them, a
Professor Thom, was told that, on the whole, the French
historians supported Veinstein and did not like the genocide
thesis.
His answer: „they are all Ottomanists,‟ as if that some-
how disqualified them. The fact is that the Armenian Diaspora
has never taken this affair to a proper court of law. Instead,
they try to silence men such as Veinstein. There was an extra-
ordinary episode in American publishing two years ago. A very
well-known historian, Gunther Lewy, who was a professor at
the University of Massachusetts and author of several books
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still in print on modern German history, wrote a book on the
Armenian massacres on the basis of German documents. The
book is valuable because it shows how Dadrian twisted the
German evidence. He offered it to his usual publisher, Oxford
University Press (New York branch). A report was commis-
sioned from one Papazian – not exactly a celebrity – who iden-
tified what he claimed were tremendous inaccuracies: they turn
out either not to be inaccuracies, or just little slips of the kind
anyone might make. On that basis Lewy‟s manuscript was
refused on the grounds that he had taken up „Turkish denialist
discourse‟. He found another publisher, the University of Utah
Press. And lo and behold the senior Armenian historian in the
USA, Richard Hovannisian (University of California) wrote in
protest to the President of that University to complain about the
publication. Be it said, incidentally, that the last two volumes
of Hovannisian‟s History of Independent Armenia are a well-
written and fair-minded account – in some ways, even a classic
of historical writing (the earlier two volumes are not of the
same class).
Now, there is something very wrong here. If you believe
that you are right, and then you will let evidence speak for
itself and if you face opposition you will simply expect to win
the argument one way or the other. Attempts to silence oppo-
sition, to boycott lectures by, say, Justin McCarthy, to bully or
manipulate foreign politicians – all of that surely argues that
the Armenians themselves know their case is very far from
being overwhelming. In any case it does nothing whatsoever
for Armenia. If you go to eastern Turkey and Kars, look across
the border at Armenia. It is very poor, and will continue so if
there is no commerce with Turkey. The only obvious industry
is the issue of visas for Moscow or the USSR (or for that
matter Turkey, where up to 100,000 ex-Soviet Armenians live).
The place obviously lives off Diaspora money (and the spread
of American fast-food places now means curiously enough that
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