Guenter Lewy

The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey. A Disputed Genocide.

The University of Utah Press, 2005

331 pp+biblio+index+3 maps

Guenter Lewy has taken on an enduring controversy, Armenian-Turkish relations and, specifically, how to characterize what the Turkish government did to the Armenian people during the First World War. His aim is to promote reconciliation by splitting the differences, which means arguing that this was not a genocide.

In the 14 chapters of the book Lewy presents the historical settings; the “two rival” historiographies, “Armenian” and “Turkish;” he offers a reconstruction of “what we know and what we do not know;” and pronounces his definitive answer. An Epilogue urges Armenians and Turks to apologize to each other, since both sides did some killing.

May be the time had come to take a look back and crystallize the state of knowledge and points of difference. Unfortunately this is not that book. Such an undertaking requires better knowledge of primary sources, a more judicious review of secondary sources, and a distance from political considerations.

His main claim to being an impartial observer is that he is neither of Turkish or Armenian origin. We thought the time for such bases of objectivity had passed. His characterization of those scholars who think this was a genocide as “supporters of the Armenian cause” shows a disdain of the scholarship of others on whose work he is relying and of historical knowledge itself. It is also symptomatic of his essentially racist approach toward Armenians and sometimes Turks.

What this controversy does not need are the tactics characteristic of a clever defense lawyer who is trying to get off his client, so to speak, on technicalities. His methodology is based on the manipulation of facts and the episodic selection from the massive evidence that belies his main argument.

A few examples will suffice. Lewy dismisses the Ottoman courts martial of officials responsible for the government’s policies since those charged with crimes did not receive a fair trial by American standards: the judges acted as prosecutors. Yet Ottoman justice was based on the French system within which, until now, judges do act like prosecutors. A second reason he dismisses the courts martial evidence—that were based on unchallenged verbatim reports-- for the plan to annihilate the Armenian people is that the original documents of the proceedings have disappeared. Lewy then dismisses by a slight of hand the testimony of survivors. His knowledge of extant material, as in other areas, is scant and sporadic. He is not aware of the extensive collections other than the one mentions. He dismisses those he is aware of as inadmissible in his court because memory is faulty and can be distorted. Levy ignores many hundreds of reports of German, American and other ambassadors and consuls that testify to the massive and planned character of the tragedy and selects one case where a German consul decided to investigate reports of corpses of Armenians outside the city. Accompanied by an American consul, he visits the site and finds only one corpse, implying that the other reports could not be trusted.

Lewy does not deal with the cumulative impact of extant sources and research. Even an American jury would have looked suspiciously at a defense that has to minimize, dispute, distort, dismiss and ignore so much evidence. To conclude that what happened was not genocide is to believe that there was a huge conspiracy among thousands of survivors, foreign diplomats, including those allied with the Ottoman Empire or neutral in the war, missionaries and other eye witnesses to create mutually supportive evidence on events that unfolded over two intense years in full public view implemented by a dictatorial government at war in control of the territory where the crime occurred. One would also have to believe these leaders did not know what was happening in the country or did not know the consequences of their actions. The memoirs of these CUP leaders and others who were in contact with them during those years make it clear that these leaders knew exactly what they were doing.

One may excuse a non-specialist for the numerous errors in this volume related to the historical record, some of which are listed at http://meforum.org/article/748. But it is difficult to understand mistakes that relate to recent times. Turkey, for example, could not have broken off diplomatic relations with Armenia after the latter’s independence, as the author asserts, since Turkey had none to break off; Armenia was part of the USSR. While considered in isolation such errors may not count for much, for a work that claims to resolve this issue the cumulative impact is a volume with shoddy and careless scholarship.

It is unfortunate that a respected historian decided to find a “quick-fix” to a controversy through the equivalent of plea bargain or as if he was haggling in a bazaar. History can be challenged, analyzed, understood but not negotiated.

To contribute to this debate a social scientist will need to transcend a number of biases by asking better questions than have been asked, by developing new perspectives within which new and old sources make more sense and come closer to a common history. For that, one needs to have scholarly integrity and keep aside essentially political aims—such as reconciliation at any cost. Lewy seems to be aware of the Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship initiated in 2000, but seems not to have grasped the principles underlying its work. It brings together scholars of Armenian, Turkish and other origin who, above all, are patient and modest, respect each other’sintellectual integrity, and face the evidence.

The underlying problem with this volume is that its author does not recognize that by now the conflict is no longer between two histories. Rather, it is between, on the one hand, an emerging consensus among Armenian, Turkish and Western scholars that government policy toward Armenians was genocide or genocidal and, on the other, the position taken by the Turkish government that it was neither. Historians who insist otherwise are the ones with a “cause.”

Gerard Libaridian

Department of History

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor