History
Anatomy of a crime: The Turkish Historical Society's manipulation of archival documents
Abstract
The Turkish Historical Society (Türk Tarih Kurumu, THS) recently published a “landmark” book, Ermeniler: Sürgün ve Göç (The Armenians: Expulsion and Migration) (Ankara, 2004), by Hikmet Özdemir, Kemal Çiçek, Ömer Turan, Ramazan Çalık and Yusuf Halaçoğlu. In the preface, historian Yusuf Halaçoğlu, the president of the THS, makes the following claim:
“[T]he various documents which we have presented in the book, belonging to various countries, possess the quality of entirely refuting the claims put forward by the Armenians until today” (p vii).
In fact, the book presents no new evidence to refute “claims” of genocide. Rather, by disputing the Armenian population figures before and after the deportation, the authors contend that most of the Armenians survived, and therefore, no systematic massacre could have occurred.
