Why Reuven Rivlin was finally right on the Armenian

issue
December 22, 2014,

Maxime Gauin Maxime Gauin has a master in History from Paris-I-Sorbonne University. He is currently a PhD candidate at
the Middle East Technical University department and a researcher at the Center for Eurasian Studies (both are located in
Ankara). He has published articles in peer-review journals (including the European Journal of International Law) as well as
in Turkish newspapers (for instance Hrriyet Daily News, Cumhuriyet and Daily Sabah).
Contrary to his engagement preceding his elections as President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin stopped to support the Armenian
genocide accusation. There are indeed strong foreign policy reasons for such a changeand some of the most important
ones were exposed in the op-ed I co-wrote in Haaretz with Dr. Alexander Murinson. Regardless, even as far as history is
concerned, this change is welcome.
First of all, stressing only the suffering and losses of Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire in the name of ethics is
basically wrong. During the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and their aftermath (1914), around 1,450,000 civilians died among
the Turks and other Muslims of the territories conquered by Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria: they were killed or died, fleeing
the massacres. More than 400,000 others were expelled (see, especially, Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile. The Ethnic
Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922, Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995). And such sufferings did not end in 1914.
Indeed, the Armenian nationalists, both in their guerilla groups (see below) and their volunteers units for the Russian,
French and Greek armies committed a lot of war crimes. For example, the two official investigators appointed by the U.S.
government in eastern Anatolia in 1919, Emory Niles and Arthur Sutherland concluded in their report: first Armenians
massacred Turks on a large scale with many refinements of cruelty, and second the Armenians are responsible for most of
the destruction done to towns and villages. The French government suppressed in 1920 the Armenian Legion, established
in 1916, because of its numerous crimes against the Turkish civilians in the part of Turkey occupied by France after the First
World War (from the end of 1918 to winter 1921/22). The purges of 1919 were not sufficient: the Legion as such had to be
fired.
In July 1922, Elzar Guiffray, the elected representative of the French community in Izmir, estimated that the Greek forces,
including Armenian volunteers units, had killed more than 150,000 Turkish civilians since their landing in Anatolia, on May
15, 1919 (Archives du ministre des Affaires trangres, La Courneuve, microfilm P 1380). The last stage of the GreekTurkish war (August-September 1922) was the worst, and once again, Armenian volunteers units actively participated to
arsons and massacres. This is proved not only by Ottoman documents, but also by Western witnesses, such as Lord SaintDavids, U.S. relief worker Mark O. Prentiss or French engineer C. Toureille (Toureilles report is in the same microfilm of
the French archives than Guiffrays one).
Regarding now the fate of the Ottoman Armenians during the forced relocation of 1915-16, it is safe to notice that the
alleged direct evidence for the genocide label is falsifications. For example, the documents published in 1920 by Aram
Andonian, an openly racist Armenian activist, are proved to be forgeries: the paper, the numbers, the cipher codes, the
signatures, the grammar and the content itself are not the work of Ottoman civil servants, but the fabrication of a clumsy
falsifier; even the originals were never showed and are supposed to be lost. Correspondingly, Canadian historian Gwynne
Dyer demonstrated more than forty years ago that the Ten Command, an unsigned, undated text attributed to the Ottoman
leadership, is apocryphal. Regarding the most used falsification for Jewish audiences, namely the quote attributed to Hitler
(after all, who remembers the Armenians?), it will be sufficient to say the Nuremberg tribunal rejected its authenticity and
that, anyway, in this speech, Hitler spoke about the Poles, not about the Jews.
Another kind of falsification is the inversion of the sense of authentic documents. For instance, a telegram sent by the
minister of Interior, Talat, to the governor of Ankara, on August 29, 1915, is presented as the best proof of a genocidal
intent. In fact, this telegram proves exactly the opposite: The transfer of Armenians, which is desired to be carried out in an

orderly and prudent manner, should henceforth never be left to the individuals having fanatical feelings of enmity and the
perpetrators should be send in front of military courts (Hikmet zdemir et Yusuf Sarnay, Turkish-Armenian Conflict
Documents, Ankara: TBMM, 2007, p. 235).
Indeed, from February to May 1916 only, as a result of the work of the investigative commissions established at the
initiative of the minister of Interior, Talat, 67 Muslims were sentenced to death, 524 to jail, 68 to hard labor or imprisonment
in a fort, because of their crimes against relocated Armeniansand this is only the part of the repression. Who could
imagine Hitler ordering to hang the commander of Auschwitz and the governor of Poland in 1943?
There is another series of trials, that took place in Istanbul during the years 1919 and 1920, namely during the occupation of
this city by the Ententes forces. The British government had put on power in Istanbul a puppet government, made of people
who hated the Committee Union and progress (CUP), the party who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1918. This
puppet cabinet ordered the indictment of several former CUP leaders, depriving them of the right to be assisted by a lawyer
during the investigation, of the right of cross-examination during the hearings and even, from April to October 1920, of the
right to hire a lawyer. After the fall of this cabinet, the right to appeal was given back, and most of the sentences pronounced
from April to October 1920 were cancelled, in January 1921 (see Ferudun Ata, gal stanbulunda Tehcir Yarglamalar,
Ankara, TTK, 2005; and Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, Salt Lake City: University of Utah
Press, 2005).
If there was no genocidal intention, why did the CUP government forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands Armenians from
Anatolia to the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire? Because the Armenian nationalist organizations, who fought the
Turks since the end of 19th Century, organized uprisings, threatening the vital roads of communication of the Ottoman army.
Since the big units were this time on the battlefield, the only remaining way to crush the rebellions was to expel the civilian
Armenians who helped the insurgents, willingly or by force. It was definitely proved by Dr. Edward J. Erickson in his book
Ottomans and Armenians. A Study in Counter-Insurgency, New York-London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.
The historical reality is sufficient sad. It does not need selective indignation, simplifications and falsifications.