The Study of the Armenian Crisis of the late Ottoman Empire, or, “Seizing the Document by the Throat”

Abstract

For a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century, venturing into the Armenian crisis is like venturing into a minefield. It is fraught with dangers, the least of which is to be labeled a traitor by one's countrymen, and the worst of which is to be accused of being a “denialist” by one's Armenian colleagues. Even “balanced” analysis seems to have become politically incorrect of late, at least in some circles. The basic problem in the Armenian-Turkish polemic is that the sides do not actually address each other. They seize upon various capsule phrases, clichés and assumed political positions to heap opprobrium and abuse upon one another, to the point where we are confronted by something resembling a blood-feud. Thus Richard Hovanissian's obsession is to have the “Turkish side” admit, in a great ceremony of mea culpa, the claim of Genocide. On the other hand, Turkish historians and their like-minded foreign colleagues, at best, do contortionist acts to show that what happened to the Armenian people in 1915 does not fit the UN definition of genocide, which was fashioned after the Second World War to account for the Jewish Holocaust.