Mick Hartley

Mehmed Talat, or Talat Pasha, was one of the main architects of the Armenian Genocide. He was quoted as saying, "Kill every Armenian man, woman, and child without concern for anything". He was assassinated by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in 1920 as part of Operation Nemesis.

"The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha" has recently been published in Turkey by author Murat Bardakci:

For Turkey, the number should have been a bombshell.

According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916.

In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians can bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a book in January, the number – and its Ottoman source – has gone virtually unmentioned. Newspapers hardly wrote about it. Television shows have not discussed it.

"Nothing," said Murat Bardakci, the Turkish author and columnist who compiled the book.

The silence can mean only one thing, he said: "My numbers are too high for ordinary people. Maybe people aren't ready to talk about it yet."

For generations, most Turks knew nothing of the details of the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1918, when more than a million Armenians were killed as the Ottoman Turk government purged the population.

Turkey locked the ugliest parts of its past out of sight, Soviet-style, keeping any mention of the events out of schoolbooks and official narratives in an aggressive campaign of forgetting.

But in the past 10 years, as civil society has flourished here, some parts of Turkish society are now openly questioning the state's version of events. In December, a group of intellectuals circulated a petition that apologized for the denial of the massacres. Some 29,000 people have signed it.

With his book, "The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha," Bardakci (pronounced bard-AK-chuh) has become, rather unwillingly, part of this ferment. The book is a collection of documents and records that once belonged to Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary architect of the Armenian deportations.

The documents, given to Bardakci by Talat's widow, Hayriye, before she died in 1983, include lists of population figures. Before 1915, 1,256,000 Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, according to the documents. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later, Bardakci said.

To the untrained ear, it is simply a sad statistic. But anyone familiar with the issue knows the numbers are in fierce dispute.  […]

Hilmar Kaiser, a historian and expert on the Armenian genocide, said the records published in the book were conclusive proof from the Ottoman authority itself that it had pursued a calculated policy to eliminate the Armenians. "You have suddenly on one page confirmation of the numbers," he said. "It was like someone hit you over the head with a club."

Kaiser said the before-and-after figures amounted to "a death record."

"There is no other way of viewing this document," he said. "You can't just hide a million people."

Other scholars said that the number is a useful addition to the historical record but that it does not introduce a new version of events.

"This corroborates what we already knew," said Donald Bloxham, the author of "The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians."

The article, in the International Herald Tribune, is illustrated with this picture:

[Photo: Project SAVE] with the caption "Armenians en route to prison in 1915. Nearly a million disappeared from Ottoman records". It's a photograph I recognise from Peter Balakian's "The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide". It was taken by a German businessman out of his hotel window in the Anatolian town of Harput. And no, those wretched people were not heading for jail. They were told they were being deported. Their possessions were piled up in the town square for the rest of the population to share out, and they were marched out of town. From the well-documented evidence of observers such as US consul Leslie Davis of the numberless bodies slaughtered and left to rot out in the desert, it's clear that what their actual fate would shortly be.

So the Turkish denial continues, and works, even to the extent that the photographic evidence is interpreted in the least damning way. Murat Bardakci himself doesn't believe in a genocide: he thinks his figures just show how many Armenians were deported – though of course if he did present his book as evidence of genocide it would likely never have been published, and he'd be up for charges of insulting Turkishness.

And if you go to Amazon and check the reviews for books like "The Burning Tigris", or Donald Bloxham's "The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians", you'll find plenty of long pseudo-scholarly negative reviews from Turkish writers busily excoriating the "genocide industry".