From Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Special Issue on The Armenian Genocide in Official Turkish Records, Collected essays by Vahakn N. Dadrian, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer 1994, Reprinted with corrections, Spring 1995), i-ii.

Foreword

Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice, Princeton University

Slowly, yet with increasing authoritativeness, the reality of the Turkish genocide perpetrated against the Armenian people has come to be accepted as established, incontrovertible historical fact. Such a process of moral pedagogy has overcome formidable obstacles, especially the well-orchestrated, shameful, as yet ongoing campaign by the Turkish Government to impose silence by promoting a variety of coopting devices, by disseminating various falsifications of the historical record, and through cajolery and intimidation. Let us be clear. This campaign that has been conducted by Turkish authorities is not a matter of psychological denial in which unpleasant aspects of a personal or collective past are unwittingly suppressed to avoid acknowledging a humiliating past, although such denial clearly is part of the armor of self-respect that continues to be relied upon by many well-meaning Turkish citizens to avoid confronting both their past and their government. The official campaign is far more sinister. It is a major, proactive deliberate government effort to use every possible instrument of persuasion at its disposal to keep the truth about the Armenian genocide from general acknowledgement, especially by elites in the United States and Western Europe.

In such a setting honest, courageous scholarship is a precious resource in the struggle of a victimized people to preserve the integrity of its past, and lift the events about the confusing cross-currents of propaganda and partisan historiography, but even here difficulties abound. The long arm of the Turkish state has enlisted, directly and indirectly, some prominent academic spokespersons (both Turks and non-Turks) who have outrageously muddied the waters of truth by obscuring and distorting the story of Armenian genocide in the 1915-18 period.

Dedicated Armenian scholars, above all Vahakn Dadrian and Richard Hovannisian, have in recent years published widely under respected auspices and have reconstructed the contested past on the basis of abundant and reliable documentation. At last the balance of informed understanding and perception, despite the persistence of controversy and the heavy fog of Turkish propaganda, is moving toward an unequivocal acceptance of the full horror of the Armenian experience of genocide. Such an assessment is further confirmed by important studies by non-Armenian scholars (for, Robert Melson, "Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust," University of Chicago, 1992). The extent to which all recent general studies of genocide as a political phenomenon take for granted the Dadrian/Hovannisian version of the Armenian experience is notable and encouraging. Turkish accounts are either disregarded as shoddy propaganda or dismissed as inept or disingenuous scholarship.

Despite a big and expensive effort, the Turkish coverup has basically failed, yet so long as the Ankara Government and its academic apologists maintain the historic lie there is further work to be done. Indeed, the struggle to redress the truth of the past is far from over, especially given Turkey's geopolitical leverage arising from its valued membership in NATO and Turkey's importance to the West as business partner and regional ally on an array of sensitive Middle Eastern issues. For this reason, it is of the utmost importance to maintain the scholarly pressure. Professor Dadrian does just this by assembling this collection of material and writings that are centered around Turkish official documentary sources that were associated especially with the 1918-1920 period, that is, close to the time when the events of massacre were occurring and prior to a Turkish closing of ranks behind their campaign of denial. These documents vindicate the Armenian version of victimization, and show how fiendishly deliberate and systematic the actual processes of extermination was intended to be by the Young Turk (Ittihad) regime. No person of integrity can responsibly confront the contents of this Special Issue on the Armenian genocide without coming to closure on the historic truth of the principal Armenian allegations.

Of course, the main significance of this work is to reconstruct the past, assuage the wounded memories of survivors and their heirs, and build pressure to induce Turkey to acknowledge its responsibilities to the Armenian people. Yet, there is a wider significance as well. The scourge of genocide has been visited on a series of peoples in recent decades, and even the Armenians have reexperienced the reality of atrocity in relation to the unresolved fight over the future of Nagorno-Karabagh region in the former Soviet state of Azerbaijan. What remains sadly evident, as was the case after World War I, is the low priority that leading governments attach to stopping genocide unless their strategic interests are centrally engaged. It was notable how quickly the European powers dropped their end-of-the-war demands for Turkish redress of Armenian grievances, as embodied in the Treaty of Sevres, as soon as Turkish nationalism carried the day under Ataturk.

Redressing grievances against an abused people almost by itself shapes foreign policy initiatives. Whether the focus is Cambodia, Bosnia, or Rwanda the primacy of geopolitics is evident, reaffirming the Bismarckian cynical disregard of the abuse of the Armenian people during the latter stages of the Ottoman Empire. In a more integrated world, joined by markets, E-mail, and CNNification, only the pressures of an aroused and informed public opinion might someday make opposition to genocide a priority of governments and an imperative warranting UN legitimacy.

In such an hypothetical setting, the timeliness as well as the scholarly importance of this collection of materials is almost too self-evident to mention. The import of that scholarship is further accented by the fact that two highly prestigious institutions, the National Science Foundation and the Harry Fink Guggenheim Foundation, have each twice supported Professor Dadrian with rather generous grants to enable him to carry out his comprehensive research. These awards, competitive as they are, do not only carry a recognition of his scholarly merits but, equally important, carry a recognition of the importance of the subject matter of genocide in general and the Armenian genocide in particular. One can only hope that Professor Dadrian's heroic efforts will be rewarded by a wide and receptive readership, which will mount some new pressures on Turkish leaders to come forth and finally begin to cope with the awful truth of this dark shadow of criminality that has been cast across their own historical claims of national self- esteem and dignity, and kept in being to a certain extent, but only as a result of continuing crimes of coverup and fabrication.