The Memoirs of Naim Bey

The Memoirs of Naim Bey

File:The Memoirs of Naim Bey.png
Author	Aram Andonian
Original title	The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians
Country	England, United Kingdom
Language	English
Subject	History
Publisher	Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date	1920
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	84

The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, also known as the "Talat Pasha telegrams", is a book written by historian and journalist Aram Andonian in 1919. Originally redacted in Armenian, it was popularized worldwide through the English edition published by Hodder & Stoughtons of London. It includes several documents (telegrams) that constitute as evidence that the Armenian Genocide was formally implemented as Ottoman Empire policy.

The first edition in English had an introduction by The Viscount Gladstone.

Contents

The documents were collected by an Ottoman official called Naim Bey, who was working in the Refugees Office in Aleppo, and handed by him to Andonian. Each note bears the signature of Mehmed Talaat Pasha, the Minister of Interior and later Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. The contents of these telegrams "clearly states his intention to exterminate all Armenians, outlines the extermination plan, offers a guarantee of immunity for officials, calls for tighter censorship and draws special attention to the children in Armenian orphanages." The telegrams remain in coded form and are written in Ottoman Turkish.

The overall picture emerging from these narrations points to a network of the extermination for most of the deportees. It overwhelmingly confirms the fact of what British historian Arnold J. Toynbee (LSE, University of London) called "this gigantic crime that devastated the Near East".

One day the following order came from the Minister of the Interior:

Although the extermination of the Armenians had been decided upon earlier than this, circumstances did not permit us to carry out this sacred intention. Now that all obstacles are removed, it is urgently recommended that you should not be moved for feelings of pity on seeing their miserable plight. But by putting an end to them all, try with all your might for obliterate the very name ’Armenia’ from Turkey.

A new and awful order arrived from the Ministry of the Interior. The Government commanded that the life and honour of the Armenians should be destroyed. They no longer had any right to live.

Authenticity

Turkish historian Taner Akçam mentions similarities between the telegrams published by Andonian to extant Ottoman documents.

Historian Vahakn N. Dadrian, born in Turkey and raised in the US, has argued in 1986 that the points brought forth by Turkish historians are misleading and has countered the discrepancies they have raised.

Famous Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University, Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Richard Albrecht among others also point to the fact that the court did not question the authenticity of the telegrams in 1921–which, however, were not introduced as evidence in court–and that the British had also intercepted numerous telegrams which directly "incriminated exchanges between Talaat and other Turkish officials", and that "one of the leading scientific experts, Vahakn N. Dadrian, in 1986, verified the documents as authentic telegrams send out by [...] Talat Pasha". He adds:

"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. Besides being incidental rather than central, such problems are endemic to the cumbersome nature of the material itself. The argument of falsification has been found to be untenable, since the few instances on which the argument is predicated merely involve irregularities. Irregularity is not coterminous, however, with forgery. Forgery presupposes skill, caution, and above all a measure of sophistication geared to avoiding mistakes. The presence and easy detection of such defects in the material under review mitigate against that charge. Indeed, 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. Furthermore, a government apparatus known for its chronically erratic methods of transactions cannot be held exempt from such irregularities. Moreover, one is dealing here with highly secret transactions in the midst of a consuming “Great War,” initiated and directed by a political party that relied on diversions and camouflage for the pursuit of its secret designs; irregularity is an integral part of such a mentality."

The French historian Yves Ternon who convened at the 1984 Permanent Peoples' Tribunal contends that these telegrams however, "were authenticated by experts…[but] they were sent back to Andonian in London and lost."

Aram Andonian acknowledged that his book was used for propaganda purposes by other nations. In a letter sent on July 26, 1937, mentioning the criticism of former German consul in Aleppo Walter Rössler, who wrote "I believe that the author is not capable of being objective; be is carried away by his passion" towards the Germans involved, but had affirmed that "those documents described as being originals may very well have been genuine" in the same letter. Andonian confirmed his then-mental state by saying "my book was not a historical one, but rather aiming at propaganda. Naturally, my books could not have been spared the errors characteristic of publication of this nature [...] I would also like to point out that the Armenian Bureau in London, and the National Armenian Delegation in Paris, behaved somewhat cavalierly with my manuscript, for the needs of the cause they were defending."

British historian Christopher J. Walker, who worked in the Sotheby's Department of Historical and Literary Manuscripts, has argued in his book called the World War I and the Armenian Genocide published in 1997, that "doubts must remain until and unless the documents or similar ones themselves resurface and are published in a critical edition". Austrian scholar Wolfdieter Bihl has called them "controversial".

Revisionism

Guenter Lewy, a political scientist and Genocide denier, writes that "the demonization of Talat Pasha in Andonian's work, it should be noted, represents an important change from the way in which many Armenians regarded Talat Pasha character before 1915", and that "the controversy over the authenticity of the Naim-Andonian documents will only be resolved through the discovery and publication of relevant Ottoman documents, and this may never come to pass". Lewy argues that "until then Orel and Yuca's painstaking analysis of these documents has raised enough questions about their genuineness as to make any use of them in a serious scholarly work unacceptable". According to David B. MacDonald, Lewy is content to rely on the work of "Turkish deniers Sinasi Orel and Sureyya Yuca": "Lewy's conception of shaky pillars echoes the work of Holocaust deniers, who also see Holocaust history resting on pillars... This is a dangerous proposition, because it assumes from the start that genocide scholarship rests on lies which can easily be disproved once a deeper examination of the historical 'truth' is undertaken".

Other opinions include Dutch professor Erik-Jan Zürcher; Zürcher does however point to many other corroborating documents supporting the Andonian Telegrams assertion of core involvement and premeditation of the killing by the central CUP members. Scholars who share revisionist opinions about the Andonian documents include Bernard Lewis (Princeton University), who classifies the "Talat Pasha telegrams" among the "celebrated historical fabrications", on the same level than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Andrew Mango (a biographer of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk) who speaks of "telegrams dubiously attributed to the Ottoman wartime Minister of the Interior, Talat Pasha", Paul Dumont (Professor of Turkish studies at Strasbourg University) who stated in one of his books that "the authenticity of the alleged telegrams of Ottoman government, ordering the destruction of Armenians is today seriously contested", Norman Stone (Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey), who calls the Naim-Andonian book "a forgery"; and by Gilles Veinstein, professor of Ottoman and Turkish history at Collège de France, who considers the documents as "nothing but fakes".

Dr. Israel Charny, a Genocide scholar and Executive Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem wrote that Bernard Lewis' "seemingly scholarly concern ... of Armenians constituting a threat to the Turks as a rebellious force who together with the Russians threatened the Ottoman Empire, and the insistence that only a policy of deportations was executed, barely conceal the fact that the organized deportations constituted systematic mass murder". Charny compares the "logical structures" employed by Lewis in his denial of the genocide to those employed by Ernst Nolte in his Holocaust negationism.

Editions

• The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, compiled by Aram Andonian, Hodder and Stoughton, London, ca. 1920
• Documents sur les massacres arméniens, Paris, 1920 (incomplete translation by M. S. David-Beg)
• Մեծ Ոճիրը (The Great Crime), Armenian language edition, Hairenik, Boston, 1921

Note: Although the Armenian edition was published after the other two versions, Turkish historian Vahakn Dadrian states that the Armenian text constitutes the original that Aram Andonian wrote back in 1919. Taking into account the delay in its publication helps to explain some "errors" identified by some Turkish authors in dating the documents.

See also

• Witnesses and testimonies of the Armenian Genocide
• Johannes Lepsius

External links

• Enquête sur la négation d'un génocide. An analysis of the Andonian telegrams (French)
• Primary Documents: Talaat Pasha's Alleged Official Orders Regarding the Armenian Massacres, March 1915-January 1916
• Translated versions of these telegrams