New Publications by Vahakn Dadrian on the Armenian Genocide in the U.S.A., England and Japan

Toronto, Canada - During the last several weeks a number of studies produced by Zoryan Institute's Director of Genocide Research, Prof. Vahakn Dadrian, have appeared.

New Paperback Editions
Berghahn Books of New York and Oxford, has just come out with a sixth printing of History of the Armenian Genocide, this time in a revised edition, and also in softcover. Noteworthy in this new edition is a new chapter inserted as an Epilogue, along with its twenty-eight endnotes. In a compact style, Prof. Dadrian explores in this new chapter two critical aspects of the Armenian Genocide that were not fully accounted for in the main body of the text. One of them refers to ongoing Turkish arguments regarding the incidence and scope of Armenian atrocities perpetrated against unarmed Turkish civilian populations. Confronting this argument head-on, Dadrian, relying mainly upon the official documents of Imperial Germany and Imperial Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire's staunch allies in World War I, and even those of the U.S.A., which was neutral until April 1917, demonstrates two cardinal facts which serve to reduce to irrelevance the Turkish arguments. To the extent that Armenian atrocities took place, they were acts of vendetta by individual Armenians, mostly volunteers in the Russian Caucasus Army, who went literally berserk after seeing the vast desolation of their native villages and the ghastly evidence of the massacres attending that desolation. In other words, these atrocities were committed in response to and in relation for the preceding acts of genocide. Secondly, as attested to some by Ottoman documents and Austro-Hungarian and American official testimony, these acts of vengeance claimed no more than 5,000-6,000 victims and bore no relationship to the comprehensive mass murder that the Ottoman central government organized and carried out against its Armenian population.

The other issue covered in this new chapter deals with the cardinal role in the conception, decision making, organization, and implementation of the Armenian Genocide by Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, the physician-politician who exerted a decisive influence in the councils of the Central Committee of the Young Turk Ittihad party, along with his cohort, Dr. Nazim. Through meticulous research, Dadrian has established the fact that the last massacre of World War I that took place in Baku on September 15-17, 1918, and to which some 20,000 Armenians fell victim, was masterminded by none other than the same, notorious Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, who, by special arrangement, had accompanied the invading Turkish Army of Islam, and acting as temporary Police Chief of Baku, had organized that last bloodbath of World War I. Through his research of old and new Turkish sources, Prof. Dadrian ascertained that already in the years 1906-1908, Dr. Shakir, through a number of secret letters, had promised his followers in Baku that the time would surely come when Ittihad, at the peak of its power, would know how to settle scores with the Armenians. In the same chapter, Dadrian exposes the duplicity through which not only the Ittihadist, but subsequently the Kemalist leaders tried to lull the Armenians by way of two-track cipher traffic into an illusory peace. On November 8, 1920, the fledgling Ankara government, in a top-secret cipher, ordered Kemalist general Karabekir to prepare for "the political and material destruction of Armenia," meaning the newly established Republic of Armenia, to whose Foreign office the same authority in Ankara, i.e. Foreign Minister Ahmet Muhtar, on the same day had conveyed in a new spirit of friendship his assurances of wanting to help the new Armenia recover economically.

Another of Prof. Dadrian's books, Warrant For Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict, published by Transaction Publishers of New Brunswick,NJ and London, has recently also appeared in its 4th edition in a softcover format.

New Journal Articles
 The current issue of Hakirah: A Journal of Jewish and Ethnic Studies, has an article by Prof. Dadrian titled, "Party Allegiance as a Determinant in the Turkish Military's Involvement in the World War I Armenian Genocide," vol. 1 (2003): 57-67. The article describes the involvement of Turkish military officers in the organization of the Armenian Genocide by analyzing their association and ideological identification with the Young Turk Ittihad party. Of special significance here are the roles of Colonel Seyfi, the head of the Intelligence Department in the Ottoman General Headquarters, i.e. Department II, and General Mahmud Kamil, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ottoman Third Army, whose military jurisdiction encompassed the largest concentration of Ottoman Armenians, involving the provinces of Sivas, Trabzon, Harpput, Diyarbekir, Erzurum, Bitlis and Van. He too was an ardent Ittihadist and a close cohort of Drs. Shakir and Nazim, the arch organizers of the Armenians Genocide.

The journal Hiroshima Research, Vol. 6, No. 2 (December 2003), published by the Peace Institute of Hiroshima University of Japan, covers Prof. Dadrian's essay on the comparative aspects of three major genocides of the twentieth century, namely, the Armenian, the Jewish and the Rwandan genocides. In doing so, the journal describes Prof. Dadrian as "a founder of comparative genocide research" and characterizes his essay as "a masterpiece." Prof. Dadrian had been invited for a week by Hiroshima University in March of last year to deliver that paper to an international gathering of genocide scholars.