Prof. Dadrian Lectures on Legal Aspects of the Armenian Genocide in South America

Toronto, Canada—There has been significant activity regarding Armenian Genocide recognition in South America lately. This has involved governmental agencies, human rights organizations, parliamentarians, journalists, lawyers and university students.

As late as November 19, 2007, deputies from Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay—all members of the South American Parliamentarians’ coalition known as MERCOSUR—adopted a resolution recognizing and condemning the Armenian Genocide at a meeting held in Montevideo. MERCOSUR, established in 1986, is the largest intergovernmental organisation in South America. The Senate of Chile also recognized and condemned the Armenian Genocide in June, 2007.

In this vein, a major international conference, “The Armenian Genocide: History and Present Day,” was held in Montevideo at the same time. Organized by the Uruguay Armenia Cultural Association (ASCUA), the Political Science Institute (UDELAR), and the Human Rights Program (CLAEH), the conference was co-sponsored by the University of Montevideo, the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Ministry of Tourism, the Press Association of Uruguay, the Municipality of Montevideo, Amnesty International-Uruguay Section, and the Embassy of the Republic of Armenia. Zoryan participated by sending its Director of Genocide Research, Prof. Vahakan N. Dadrian to speak at this and another conference in Buenos Aires.

Similarly, another conference was organized in Buenos Aires by the Luisa Hairabedian Foundation, which is a group dedicated to the preservation of universal human rights, with a special interest in the Armenian Genocide. The three Masters of Ceremonies were all alumni of the university program run by the International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (A Division of the Zoryan Institute), held annually in Toronto in partnership with the University of Minnesota. This event was attended by university and middle school students, lawyers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and a large number of members of the Armenian community in Argentina.

Owing to the interest in the Armenian Genocide, and particularly its legal aspects, Prof. Vahakn N. Dadrian, Director of Research at the Zoryan Institute, shed light on these subjects. His work was particularly interesting to The Luisa Hairabedian Foundation, which is currently engaged in a unique legal procedure in Argentine law regarding a “truth trial” on the Armenian Genocide. Instituted as a method to uncover the truth about the human rights abuses of Argentina’s recent past, especially the “Forced Disappearances,” truth trials do not require the prosecution of a defendant. The Federal Court has accepted the case and sanctioned the initiation of legal proceedings. The lawyers involved are assembling materials, including a mass of authentic and verifiable official documents, for which they are receiving assistance from Prof. Dadrian and the Zoryan Institute.

Prof. Dadrian’s presentation in Montevideo was on the conflict between the near-universal recognition of the Armenian Genocide and its persistent denial by past and present Turkish officials.  His analysis, summarised below, suggests that Turkish denial will not cease because of foreign pressure on the Turkish government, but rather only by pressure from the Turkish population itself, who, as part of their democratic movement, will require the state to recognise its own falsifications of history and remove its limitations on the freedom of speech and conscience.

Prof. Dadrian outlined the specific components of the denial syndrome and explained its underlying motives and reasons. He highlighted the enormous problems modern Turkey would face should its leaders decide to recognize the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide. At the very least, any government daring to do so could hardly expect to survive. The risks for Turkey of recognizing the Armenian Genocide transcend the economic issues of reparations and land claims. Given the critical role some of the founders of the modern Republic of Turkey played in the organization of the Genocide, such revelations bear directly upon the very genesis of the republic and hence the issue of the current regime’s integrity. The launching and sustaining of the blockade against Armenia and the total absence of diplomatic ties are conditions that accentuate these pitfalls. Under these tense circumstances, Armenia will remain at grave risk—with or without Russian protection.

Notwithstanding, the historicity of the Genocide, argued Dr. Dadrian, is beyond any legitimate dispute. This fact is attested by the series of criminal trials the post-war Turkish Military Tribunal instituted in the 1919-21 period. The Key Indictment that charged the leaders of the Ottoman government, as well as top young Turk Ittihadist leaders with the crime of a centrally organized mass murder against the Armenians, incorporates dozens of secret documents, and many cipher telegrams, ordering the destruction of the deportee convoys. What is so extraordinary about this line of legal documentation is the fact that the prosecution and the Chief Judges of the Military Tribunal employed a two-track procedure to ensure the validity of the documentation. First, the documents were carefully examined by competent officials of the Ministries of Justice and the Interior, who marked their authenticity with a stamp. Second, before taking the witness stand, the high ranking party officials and Cabinet Ministers were asked to inspect the documents bearing their signatures and verify their authenticity. This two-tier procedure of authentication of key wartime documents served to ensure ironclad utilization of prima-facie official evidence. This is exactly the same procedure adopted at Nuremberg, where Nazi criminals were tried and convicted some two dozen years later.

The rapid ascendancy of the Kemalist insurgent movement in the end served to jettison, however, the completion of the courts martial and to even effectively help invalidate many of the verdicts and sentences renditions. Nevertheless, the massive legal documentation of the wartime crime of genocide against the Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire is on record and is indelibly ensconced in the serial Annexes of Takvim-i Vekâyi, the official gazette of the Ottoman Parliament— despite the resolute effort of Turkish authorities to collect and remove them from circulation and access.

The next day, Dadrian delivered a public lecture on the topic of “The Significance of the Ottoman-Turkish Official Documents Dealing with the Armenian Genocide.” The final plenary session featured the Deputy Foreign Minister of Uruguay who delivered a paper discussing the global ramification of genocide today, in which she made reference to the devastating consequences attached to the impunity that characterizes the present status of the World War I Armenian Genocide.

In Buenos Aires, Dadrian spoke on “The Armenian Genocide and International Criminal Law.” This lecture argued the linkage between the World War I Armenian Genocide core issue of “crimes against humanity,” which term the Allies for the first time formally and officially introduced when denouncing that act of genocide, and the Nuremberg doctrine. This central issue of intent and governmental complicity was an integral component in the conception and organization of the crime.

The Argentinean publisher, Imago Mundi, will come out in April with a Spanish translation of Dadrian’s classic book, The History of the Armenian Genocide, which is already available in French, Greek, Italian, and Russian. Prof. Dadrian and Prof. Taner Akçam, renowned Turkish Sociologist and Historian, are publishing the results of their collaborative archival research on the only official record of the military tribunals prosecuting the Armenian Genocide, found in the Takvim-i Vekâyi, in Turkish. The work contains translation of the original trial documents and argues many of the points Prof. Dadrian presented in his South American lectures.