Turkish Documents

March 4, 2007
The New York Times
Book Review

To the Editor:

Christopher de Bellaigue ended his review of Antonia Arslan’s “Skylark Farm” (Feb. 4) here, with a dig at Arslan’s “iffy” grasp of history, noting “the lack of a universally authenticated document implicating the Ottoman leadership in a plan to kill the Armenians,” which lack “is a central part of the Turks’ argument that the massacres were not a premeditated genocide but a tragic and unintended consequence of war.”

Hundreds of documents from the Ottoman archives and the post-World War I trials of former Ottoman officials attest that under cover of war, the Ottoman leadership organized and executed the annihilation of the Armenian citizens of the empire. Corroborating the Turkish sources are thousands of documents from American, German, Austrian and other archives, as well as countless testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors.

In “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility,” a work of scholarship that draws primarily on Turkish sources, Taner Akcam concludes that: “Taken in their entirety, these sources leave us in no doubt that the scale of the operations would have been impossible without planning at the political center. ... Under the terms of the U.N. definition, and in light of all the documentary evidence, we cannot but call the acts against the Armenians genocide.”

De Bellaigue has the right and obligation to critique Arslan’s novel on its literary merits. It is deeply regrettable that he used this platform to misrepresent the level of knowledge about and documentation of the Armenian genocide.

Marc A. Mamigonian

Belmont, Mass.

The writer is director of programs and publications for the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.