The Memoirs of Naim Bey
The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, also known as the "Talat Pasha telegrams", is a book written by historian and journalist Aram Andonian in 1919. Originally redacted in Armenian, it was popularized worldwide through the English edition published by Hodder & Stoughton of London. It includes several documents that constitute evidence that the Armenian Genocide was formally implemented as Ottoman Empire policy.
The first edition in English had an introduction by Viscount Gladstone.
Contents
According to Andonian, the documents were collected by an Ottoman official called Naim Bey, who was working in the Refugees Office in Aleppo, and handed by him to Andonian. Each note bears the signature of Mehmed Talaat Pasha, the Minister of Interior and later Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. The contents of these telegrams "clearly states his intention to exterminate all Armenians, outlines the extermination plan, offers a guarantee of immunity for officials, calls for tighter censorship and draws special attention to the children in Armenian orphanages." The telegrams remain in coded form and are written in Ottoman Turkish.The overall picture emerging from these narrations points to a network of the extermination for most of the deportees. It overwhelmingly confirms the fact of what British historian Arnold J. Toynbee called "this gigantic crime that devastated the Near East".
Authenticity
In 1983, the Turkish Historical Association published a now discredited work titled "Ermenilerce Talat Pasa’ya Atfedilen Telgraflarin Gercek Yüzü" by Şinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca. In the introduction to "The Talat Pasha Telegrams: Historical Fact or Armenian Fiction", its English-language edition published in 1985, Orel and Yuca wrote that the term "genocide" and the term "massacres" were being wrongly applied to characterize the Armenian Genocide, and that the documents contained within The Memoirs of Naim Bey were forgeries that had been, for more than 60 years, used as the basis for those charges of genocide and massacre.The French historian Yves Ternon who convened at the 1984 Permanent Peoples' Tribunal contends that these telegrams however, "were authenticated by experts… they were sent back to Andonian in London and lost."
Historian Vahakn N. Dadrian argued in 1986 that the points brought forth by Turkish historians are misleading and countered the discrepancies they raised.
Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard University, senior research fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, and senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Richard Albrecht among others also point to the fact that the court did not question the authenticity of the telegrams in 1921–which, however, were not introduced as evidence in court–and that the British had also intercepted numerous telegrams which directly "incriminated exchanges between Talaat and other Turkish officials", and that "one of the leading scientific experts, Vahakn N. Dadrian, in 1986, verified the documents as authentic telegrams send out by Talat Pasha". He adds:
Turkish historian Taner Akçam mentions similarities between the telegrams published by Andonian to extant Ottoman documents. In a book published in 2016, named “The Naim Efendi Memoirs and Talat Pasha Telegrams”, he states that the memoir and the telegrams are real. Akçam states that throughout his research he has discovered some serious new information and documents supporting his claim. Akçam summarizes them as following:
- There was, in fact, an Ottoman officer named Naim Efendi. The original Ottoman documents that prove this exist, and some of them are published in Akçam's book.
- There is a memoir that belongs to Naim Efendi. The microfiche copies of it, which he wrote in Ottoman in his own handwriting, are currently in Akçam’s possession. In his book he presents these pages as they are.
- The memoir is genuine and the information it provides is correct. It is possible to find documents in the Ottoman archives referring to the same events and people as the memoir does.
- Turkish historians Şinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca stated that the use of lined paper in a telegram indicates that the document is a fake, because, according to them, the Ottoman bureaucracy did not use lined paper. Akçam presents evidence that during this particular time period the Ottoman bureaucracy did use lined paper and there are lots of documents in the Ottoman archives that show that the Internal Ministry’s numerous agencies were ordering lined paper.
- The telegrams that Naim Efendi sold to Andonian consist of two and three-digit codes. Orel and Yuca claim that during the war years the Ottoman government only used coding techniques that consisted of four and five-digit codes. Thus, they said, the telegrams were fake. Akçam presents evidence that during the war years the Ottoman government used numerical codes consisting of various different digit groupings to send orders via telegram. The texts he has discovered in the Ottoman archives used a series of two, three, four, and five-digit codes.
Revisionism
Other opinions include Dutch professor Erik-Jan Zürcher ; Zürcher does however point to many other corroborating documents supporting the Andonian Telegrams assertion of core involvement and premeditation of the killing by the central CUP members. Scholars who share revisionist opinions about the Andonian documents include Bernard Lewis, who classifies the "Talat Pasha telegrams" among the "celebrated historical fabrications", on the same level than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Andrew Mango who speaks of "telegrams dubiously attributed to the Ottoman wartime Minister of the Interior, Talat Pasha", Paul Dumont who stated in one of his books that "the authenticity of the alleged telegrams of Ottoman government, ordering the destruction of Armenians is today seriously contested", Norman Stone, who calls the Naim-Andonian book "a forgery"; and by Gilles Veinstein, professor of Ottoman and Turkish history at Collège de France, who considers the documents as "nothing but fakes".
Dr. Israel Charny, a Genocide scholar and executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem wrote that Bernard Lewis' "seemingly scholarly concern... of Armenians constituting a threat to the Turks as a rebellious force who together with the Russians threatened the Ottoman Empire, and the insistence that only a policy of deportations was executed, barely conceal the fact that the organized deportations constituted systematic mass murder". Charny compares the "logical structures" employed by Lewis in his denial of the genocide to those employed by Ernst Nolte in his Holocaust negationism.
Editions
- The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, compiled by Aram Andonian, Hodder and Stoughton, London, ca. 1920
- Documents sur les massacres arméniens, Paris, 1920
- Մեծ Ոճիրը, Armenian language edition, Hairenik, Boston, 1921