Every year around April both Armenian and Turkish communities relive the same set of events. As April 24, the day of commemoration for Armenians, comes and goes, the struggle to legitimize the Armenian genocide claim gets another boost by the Armenian diaspora. Some parliament of some country will pass an Armenian bill as if it were an authority on matters of history, and somewhere in Armenia a Turkish flag is burned. It's a vicious cycle for those who endure the same play every year.
As a lot of you may be aware, Armenians claim that Ottoman Turks systematically killed approximately 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians during and just after World War I. The claim is a highly controversial one, and it is largely disputed by experts on Ottoman history such as Bernard Lewis, Guenter Lewy and Edward J. Erickson. Nonetheless, facts do not always get in the way of opinions and quite often the Armenian issue is likened to the Jewish Holocaust.
One of the most direct connections that is made to the Jewish Holocaust is a quote from Adolf Hitler's speech that he made in 1939 before the invasion of Poland: "Who, after all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians." The document that contains this quote is often portrayed as if it were presented to the Nuremberg trials as evidence that Hitler was inspired by the Ottomans to kill Jews. There exists one small problem with this argument, however, and that is the fact that the prosecution did not submit the document that contains this text as evidence because it lacked proof of authenticity. The document was first published in 1942 by Louis Lochner in his book titled "What About Germany?" Conveniently, the source was an unnamed informant and the original document was never found. On top of that, neither of the two documents of the same speech that were presented at the Nuremberg trial as evidence had any reference to Armenians.
Another largely unnoticed point is the Ottoman courts−martial of 1915−16. They were held during World War I by the Ottoman government to investigate and punish those that took advantage of the wartime conditions of Armenians as well as those that committed atrocities against them. Out of the 1,673 individuals that were accused, dozens were hanged and hundreds were imprisoned. So, to make an accurate comparison to the Jewish Holocaust, it would be necessary to assume that Hitler commissioned a committee to investigate Schutzstaffel officers' crimes against Jews and that a number of them were either hanged or imprisoned — something which clearly never occurred.
There is yet another courts−martial that was held in 1919−20. The tribunals, the main trial of which took place in Istanbul, were held due to pressure from the Allied forces and were quick to turn into scapegoat trials. None of the documents presented as evidence were allowed to be cross−examined by the defense nor was the right to present evidence given to the defendant. Moreover, no official record exists of these trials and the only written source of information on them comes from a number of reports printed on the official gazette of the Ottoman government, Takvim−i Vekayi. It was under these conditions that documents like Aram Andonian's "Memoirs of Naim Bey" gained importance. The document contains a series of telegraphs allegedly sent by the Ottoman Minister of the Interior Mehmed Talat Pasha in which he orders the extermination of Armenians. These telegraphs were supposedly obtained by Andonian from an individual called Naim Bey, and it was the only concrete evidence suggesting that the Ottoman government ordered the extermination of Armenians.
The problem with this document is that pretty much everything was wrong with it: Signatures and reference numbers did not match with the official records, and even the dates were wrong due to differences in the European and the Ottoman calendars. Imagine if the Nuremberg Trials had been based on a number of forgeries and hearsay instead of thousands and thousands of original, authentic German documents that left no doubt about the final verdict. When this same document was presented to the British government in March 1921, it was simply dismissed as another forgery coming from Istanbul. It was in this environment of "good quality" that the British wanted to conduct their own trials, the Malta tribunals.
When the Armenians are reminded of the Malta tribunals, many claim that it was never a tribunal. Around May 1919, the British started to arrest and send Turkish officers to the island of Malta. By mid−1920 there would be over 100 Turkish officers there, of whom 44 were in custody due to alleged crimes against Armenians and other Christians. Armenians are absolutely right about their claim: There was never a trial. The British appointed an Armenian called Haig Khazarian to investigate British and Ottoman archives, which were easily accessible as Istanbul was under complete British occupation by March 16, 1920. Later on British Foreign Secretary Lord George Curzon contacted British Ambassador Sir Auckland Gedes in Washington, D.C., to request that he search U.S. archives for any kind of evidence. Months of archive searching yielded no results.
The tribunal never happened as Armenians claim it did not for the simple fact that there was no evidence to make a legal case against any of the detainees in Malta. On July 13, 1921, the ambassador in Washington replied to the British foreign secretary stating: "I regret to inform Your Lordship that there was nothing therein which could be used as evidence against the Turks who are being ‘detained for trial at Malta.'" By September 1921, after two years as captives, most of the Turkish prisoners were exchanged for British prisoners held by the Turks.
This op−ed clearly does not address every single aspect of the comparison between the Armenian issue and the Jewish Holocaust as raised by some Armenians. Bernard Lewis, at a National Press Club conference in 2002, takes notice of other factors that completes this analysis:
"But to make this, a parallel with the Holocaust in Germany, you would have to assume the Jews of Germany had been engaged in an armed rebellion against the German state, collaborating with the allies against Germany. That in the deportation order the cities of Hamburg and Berlin were exempted, persons in the employment of state were exempted, and the deportation only applied to the Jews of Germany proper, so that when they got to Poland they were welcomed and sheltered by the Polish Jews. This seems to me a rather absurd parallel."
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