House Committee on International Relations Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights September 14, 2000

Testimony of Justin McCarthy, Professor of Middle Eastern History and Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, The University of Louisville

In Turkey today there are millions of men and women who remember their parents and grandparents accounts of the terrible events of World War I. Their stories tell  of murders, rapes, and forced exile from their homes. Turks do not dwell on these things, but they remember. When asked, they tell their family histories in sorrow and anger. The stories are so similar to those told by Armenians that only the names of the victims separate them. Like the Armenians, the Turks and other Muslims suffered horribly in one of the most perilous times in human history. Like the Armenians. Turks were killed by their enemies in their case the enemies were often Armenians. Like the Armenians, the Turks suffered forced migrations in which great numbers died. Like the Armenians, the Turks died from disease and starvation. In the wartime period, Turks and other Muslims lost nearly 3 million souls. Like the Armenians, they have not forgotten their losses. Turks tell their children stories of those times. Like the Armenians, they dwell on the suffering of their own. Turkish scholars and the Turkish government have began to recognize and to deplore the suffering of both sides, but it is naturally the sufferings of their own people that are most remembered.

I have come here to oppose a House resolution that the suffering of the Turks, a resolution that declares that mutual inhumanity in an inter-communal war was genocide. I am naturally troubled by the inaccurate assertions in the resolution. Yet I am most troubled that the United States Congress might promulgate a version of history that attacks one of our allies without affording those allies a change to tell their own side of history. Turks will not receive this resolution well, nor should they. Those who remember the past suffering of their own people cannot be expected to accept unjust attacks on their forefathers, not even when the attacks come from those whom the Turks have rightly considered to be their best friends in the world.

The historical assertions in House Resolution 398 are more than questionable. Within the resolution is a long list of accusations, quotes, and justifications-carefully selected and with no mention of opposing positions. This is the equivalent of a trial in which the judge hears only the prosecution, and then issues a verdict.

House Resolution 398 quotes from General Harbord, without mentioning that General Harbord has been proven to have lied and to have suppressed evidence from his own staff that demonstrated that Armenians had engaged in mass murder of Turks and Kurds. The Resolution selectively recalls one American Ambassador of the war period, Morgenthau, who agreed with the Armenian Cause, but makes no mention of the American ambassador, Bristol, who disagreed with that cause. Morgenthau’s political motivations, racist views, and patent inventions of events go unmentioned.

Adolf Hitler’s supposed views on Armenian history are quoted, as if the Nazis needed to learn from Middle Eastern history before they could put their evil plans info effect. Whether Adolf Hitler ever said those words has been fiercely debated. Scholars have examined German archives and reports of eye-witnesses and newspaper reporters from the time. Some scholars believe the quote was the product of the imagination of a reporter for the Associated Press. Others believe it was simply omitted from the official record. Such disagreements are only truly resolved by study and academic debate. Yet House Resolution 398 declares with confidence that Hitler said it.

The statement that 2.000.000 Armenians were deported, 1.5 million were killed, and 500.000 were survivors is a bizarre increase of both the number of Armenians and the number of deaths. Immediately after the war, Armenian representatives estimated that approximately 600.000 Anatolian Armenians had died a number with which I agree. Now the figure seems to have risen to 1.5 million dead-slightly more than the entire Armenian population of Anatolia. Contemporary figures from the League of Nations and those of Armenian scholars (not figures from Turks) indicate that nearly 900.000 Armenians survived the war, not the 500.000 stated in the resolution. Which leaves the question, where did these figures come from? They are not the result of historical inquiry.

Turkish courts-martial that convicted members of the Committee of Union and Progress Government of the Ottoman Empire are reported, but not described. Had they been portrayed in any detail, the character of the tribunals would have been apparent. They were quisling courts, convened by an uncollected government under the watchful eyes of the British and other Allies. The accused could not defend themselves at these mock courts. The resolution does not mention that the courts also found the government guilty of all sorts of preposterous crimes, everything the courts could invent that would discredit the previous government and please the Allies. The resolution does not relate that the British themselves admitted that they could find no evidence that the Ottoman government was guilty of planned extermination of the Armenians, although they tried very hard to do so. The British at the time were in control of İstanbul. Archives and government records were in their hands. Yet they could not find the evidence. Facts such as this are essential to an understanding of the Armenian-Turkish conflict; they are omitted from House Resolution 398.

The resolution states that the national archives of Turkey contain records of these courts-martial, which is true. What is not stated is that these same archives also contain voluminous evidence of Armenian actions against the Muslims. This evidence would call into question the entire basis of House Resolution 398. It also not included in the resolution.

Statements of the Allied governments in 1915 are included, bur no mention is made of the fact that those Allies were at the time at war with the Ottoman Empire. It is well known that Allied propaganda bureaus deliberately fostered a damning image of the Turks to counter effective anti-Russian propaganda from the Central Powers. At the time, Russian persecution of the Jews was much publicized in America. The Allies needed something to counter it in American mind, something to blame on the Central Powers. They selected the Armenian Horrors, and did their job of propaganda very well. Documents invented by the British Propaganda Bureau during World War I are still being reprinted today as if hey were true.

There can be no question that the concept of an Armenian Genocide has been widely accepted. The various statements of political leaders listed in the resolution demonstrate this. This is partly due to the fact that in Europe and the United States there were very few Turks. No one was there to defend the memory of the Turks, and there was no incentive for Americans or Western Europeans to delve deeper into the subject. Religious and ethnic prejudice played their part. Indeed, anyone who did advance arguments against the conventional wisdom risked vilification and loss of position.  It must also be said that America was remarkably lacking in scholars who studied the Ottoman Empire at all. Not until well into our lifetimes was this situation corrected. It was when scholars began to study Ottoman history from Ottoman sources that they began to question the Armenian Genocide.

The Turkish themselves bear responsibility for not opposing those who distorted their history. After the terrible wars of 1912 to 1922, Turkey was largely in ruins. One-fourth of the population was dead. Cities had been destroyed, farm animals killed, trees and crops burned with no seed to replace them. Yet there were some who called for the wars to go on. Lands that had been Turkish were still in the hands of enemies. Revenge lived in the minds of those who had lost all in the wars. It these sentiments were to rule the new Turkish Republic, more deaths would have resulted. The government of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk therefore set a policy of ignoring past losses and making peace with old enemies. The Turkish government felt that pressing the Turkish case against Armenians and others would rekindle old hatreds and invite war, so the Turks said nothing of their grievances. This was the right decision for the time. The unfortunate result was that no one spoke for the Turks.

Not until Armenian terrorists began to kill Turkish diplomats did the Turks change their policy. They opened their archives and began to publish documents of the wartime period. These became a part of a scholarly reexamination that will continue for many years.

Do I expect that the Sub-Committee and the Congress will accept my word on historical events? No. Nor should they accept the word of others. Such matters should be considered by historians who Marshall Facts, analyze sources, and engage in scholarly debate-historians who do not only put forth one side of the argument. Congress, with limited time to consider the pressing problems of our country, cannot be expected to read all the literature, then come to conclusions on historical events. Yet, in fairness, that is exactly what must be done before historical judgements are made.

Finally, it must be asked why the Foreign Service of the United States should be instructed to teach this one version of history. Why this particular example of man’s inhumanity to man? Why pick one example that is debated by scholars, instead of the many examples of inhumanity that are agreed by all? Why not the Irish potato famine, the murder and starvation of Ukrainians by Stalin, the Serbian death camps in Bosnia? Incredibly, I understand that no House resolution has been passed requiring Foreign Service instruction on the Holocaust! What are the Turks to think, but that they are being singled out for condemnation, unjustly censured for something they believe they did not do, when those whose guilt is agreed upon by all go unmentioned, unblamed?

If the Foreign Service of the United States is to be instructed in man’s inhumanity to man, would it not be better to instruct in all of the many examples of inhumanity? If this were to be done, justice would demand that the curricula include not only the sufferings of the Armenians, but also the sufferings of the Turks.