Letter to Editor of the TLS in Response to the Review of The Burning Tigris by TLS (published in TLS)
by Peter Balakian - Author of The Burning Tigris, Colgate University
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Sir, – Andrew Mango's review of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide (September 17) misrepresents my book and uses a review as an occasion to launch a falsification of the history of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire. It would seem that a reviewer's first obligation is to explain to the reader what a book is about. Instead, Mr Mango puts forth a view of the Armenian Genocide that is similar to the kind of propaganda the Turkish government has been issuing for decades. Mango claims that my book is not a work of historical research. Yet I make use of a wide range of US State Department documents, British Foreign Office records, German and Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office records, and numerous eyewitness accounts from diplomats, relief workers, missionaries, and survivors. I also use a variety of Turkish sources (in translation) and in particular the Ottoman Parliamentary Gazette, in which many high-ranking Ottoman officials confessed to their crimes of government-planned race extermination. These sources constitute some of the more than 1,100 footnotes in a twenty-eight-chapter book with an extensive bibliography.
Because Mango has refused to inform the reader what my book is about, let me briefly note that I have written a history of the Armenian Massacres of the 1890s and the Armenian Genocide of 1915; and half of my book explores how and why the movement to save the Armenian people from annihilation at the hands of the Ottoman government became the first international human rights movement in the US. I also write about some of the major British figures – James Bryce, Lady Henry Somerset, Bertrand Russell, and Prime Ministers Gladstone and David Lloyd George – who spoke out against the Turkish massacres of the Armenians.
Mr Mango spends most of the space allotted to a review of my book trying to give the reader a version of candy-coated, consensus Ottoman history of a kind practised by many Ottoman historians of his generation (Mango was born in 1926, in Istanbul). Such history isreminiscent of the kind apologists for American slavery wrote in the early part of the last century. He portrays the Armenians as a happy, prosperous minority that was in the end ungrateful to the magnanimity of their Ottoman rulers. Such a view reveals how little serious social history Ottoman historians of Mango's generation have done and how little scholarship such historians have undertaken on the minority cultures of the Ottoman Empire. The fact that Bernard Lewis, for example, allots two paragraphs to the fate of the Armenian people in 1915 in his The Emergence of Modern Turkey tells one something about how much research he had done on the subject and how much importance he accords it.
Mango also refuses to acknowledge my presentation of how meticulously the Young Turk government (the Committee of Union and Progress) in 1915 implemented the empire-wide deportation and massacre of the Armenian people – a defenceless, minority population designated as "Christian infidels" under Ottoman law. It was done through high-level bureaucratic planning, emergency executive legislation, the mobilization of killing squads that included some 30,000 convicts released from prisons, and an ingenious use of technology (the railway system and the telegraph). Although dozens of scholars have noted that the Armenian Genocide was a precursor to the Holocaust, Mr Mango claims there is no relationship between these two genocides. He might start by reading what the Holocaust scholars Yehuda Bauer, Sir Martin Gilbert, Deborah Dwork, Robert Jan van Pelt, Yair Auron, Israel Charney and others have written about the Armenian Genocide, and he might want to read Robert Melson's Revolution and Genocide: On the origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. The good news is that a new generation of Turkish scholars, among them Taner Akçam, whose work I have used in my book, have also begun to write honestly and with proper sources about the Armenian Genocide.
Andrew Mango claims that my book is campaigning in some kind of nationalist way to get Western governments to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. Yet if he had read it carefully he would know that, except for reporting the facts of Turkey's contemporary campaign to silence the history of the Armenian Genocide in a few pages of my epilogue and a couple of paragraphs of my preface, I have written a straight history that deals with the period 1894–1922. As a scholar who has worked in the fields of peace studies and human rights as well as in literary and cultural studies, I have no identification with nationalisms. Rather, in blaming the Armenians for their fate and blaming the Armenian Genocide on everything from Russian nationalism to the migration of Muslim refugees into eastern Turkey, Mango reveals his own nationalist viewpoints.
Lastly, Mr Mango scoffs at the idea of perpetrators and scholars denying genocide. But scholars who write about genocide agree that denial is the final stage of genocide because it seeks to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators. The International Association of Genocide Scholars agrees that the Armenian case conforms to every aspect of the United Nations definition of genocide and that more than a million Armenians perished at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government. Andrew Mango might also recall that Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who coined the word and concept "genocide", did so in large part on the basis of what had happened to the Armenians in 1915.