The Memoirs of Naim Bey

The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians (bahasa Indonesia: Memoar Naim Bey: Dokumen Resmi Turki Terkait Deportasi dan Pembantaian Orang Armenia), berisi telegram Talat Pasha, adalah sebuah buku yang dipublikasi oleh penulis dan jurnalis Aram Andonian di tahun 1919. Awalnya disunting dalam bahasa Armenia, Buku tersebut dipopulerkan ke seluruh dunia melalui edisi bahasa Inggris yang dipublikasikan oleh Hodder & Stoughton di London. Buku tersebut memuat beberapa dokumen (telegram) yang menjelaskan bukti konkrit bahwa genosida armenia resmi diimplementasikan sebagai kebijakan dari Kesultanan Utsmaniyah.

The Memoirs of Naim Bey

Sampul edisi pertama Bahasa Prancis
Judul asli	The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians
Negara	Inggris, Britania Raya
Bahasa	Inggris
Subjek	Sejarah
Penerbit	Hodder & Stoughton
Tanggal terbit	1920
Jenis media	Cetak (sampul keras)
Halaman	84

Edisi pertama dalam bahasa Inggris memuat pembuka oleh Viscount Gladstone.

Isi

Menurut Andonian, dokumen-dokumen tersebut dikumpulkan oleh seorang pejabat Ottoman bernama Naim Bey, yang bekerja di Kantor Pengungsi di Aleppo, dan diserahkan olehnya kepada Andonian. Setiap dokumen mempunyai tanda tangan Mehmed Talaat Pasha, menteri dalam negeri yang kemudian menjadi Wazir Agung Kesultanan Utsmaniyah. Isi telegram tersebut "dengan jelas menyatakan niatnya untuk memusnahkan semua orang Armenia, menguraikan rencana pemusnahan, menawarkan jaminan kekebalan bagi para pejabat, menyerukan sensor yang lebih ketat dan memberikan perhatian khusus kepada anak-anak di panti asuhan Armenia." Telegram dibiarkan dalam bentuk kode dan ditulis dalam bahasa Turki Utsmaniyah.

Gambaran keseluruhan yang muncul dari narasi-narasi ini menunjukkan adanya jaringan pemusnahan terhadap sebagian besar orang yang dideportasi. Hal ini sangat menegaskan fakta yang dikemukakan oleh sejarawan Inggris Arnold J. Toynbee (LSE, University of London) disebut sebagai "kejahatan besar yang menghancurkan Timur Dekat".

Suatu hari perintah berikut datang dari Menteri Dalam Negeri:

Meskipun pemusnahan orang-orang Armenia telah diputuskan sebelumnya, keadaan tidak memungkinkan kami untuk melaksanakan niat suci ini. Sekarang semua hambatan telah dihilangkan, sangat disarankan agar Anda tidak tergerak oleh perasaan kasihan melihat penderitaan mereka yang menyedihkan. Namun dengan mengakhiri semuanya, cobalah sekuat tenaga untuk menghapuskan nama ’Armenia’ dari Turki..

Perintah baru dan mengerikan datang dari Kementerian Dalam Negeri. Pemerintah memerintahkan agar kehidupan dan kehormatan orang Armenia dihancurkan. Mereka tidak lagi mempunyai hak untuk hidup.

Keaslian

Telegram Bahaeddin Şakir pada 4 Juli 1915: "Apakah orang-orang Armenia yang dideportasi dari sana sudah dimusnahkan? Apakah unsur-unsur berbahaya yang dijauhkan [dari sana] melalui deportasi telah dilikuidasi atau dideportasi begitu saja?" Versi asli ditemukan oleh Taner Akçam di tahun 2017.

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 (which its authors describe as an Armenian "claim" and a "calumny directed against Turkey"), 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…[but] 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:

"These flaws involve miscounting, misdating, misconversion of dates from old to new style, and careless editing, despite the availability of manifold resources, including staff assistance provided by the Turkish Historical Society—which in the chaos of the armistice were neither available nor affordable by either Naim or Andonian. Besides being incidental rather than central, such problems are endemic to the cumbersome nature of the material itself. The argument of falsification has been found to be untenable, since the few instances on which the argument is predicated merely involve irregularities. Irregularity is not coterminous, however, with forgery. Forgery presupposes skill, caution, and above all a measure of sophistication geared to avoiding mistakes. The presence and easy detection of such defects in the material under review mitigate against that charge. Indeed, no forger of any value would have produced material so incomplete and so flawed with glaring imperfections; these could have been easily avoided by anyone disposed to forge. Furthermore, a government apparatus known for its chronically erratic methods of transactions cannot be held exempt from such irregularities. Moreover, one is dealing here with highly secret transactions in the midst of a consuming “Great War,” initiated and directed by a political party that relied on diversions and camouflage for the pursuit of its secret designs; irregularity is an integral part of such a mentality."

Historians Hans-Lukas Kieser and Margaret Lavinia Anderson wrote in 2019 that Dadrian's rebuttal to the charges of forgery "remains convincing".

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 many 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

Şinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca claimed in their 1983 book The Talât Pasha "telegrams": historical fact or Armenian fiction? that Naim Bey did not exist, and his memoir and the telegrams were forgeries. According to Turkish historian Taner Akçam, their claims "were some of the most important cornerstones of denying the events of 1915" and "the book became one of the most important instruments for the anti-Armenian hate discourse". Akçam wrote a book, Killing Orders, in order to debunk the claims of Orel and Yuca and prove that the telegrams were authentic. In 2017, Akçam was able to access one of the original telegrams, archived in Jerusalem, which inquired about Armenian liquidation and elimination.

Guenter Lewy, a political scientist and genocide denier, also states that the telegrams form the "centerpiece" of "the case against the Turks", that the authenticity of the Naim-Andonian documents "will only be resolved through the discovery and publication of relevant Ottoman documents", and calls Orel and Yuca's work a "painstaking analysis of these documents" that makes "any use of them in a serious scholarly work unacceptable". About this position David B. MacDonald wrote that Lewy is content to rely on the work of "Turkish deniers Şinasi Orel and Sureyya Yuca": "Lewy's conception of shaky pillars echoes the work of Holocaust deniers, who also see Holocaust history resting on pillars... This is a dangerous proposition, because it assumes from the start that genocide scholarship rests on lies which can easily be disproved once a deeper examination of the historical 'truth' is undertaken".

Other opinions include Dutch professor Erik-Jan Zürcher (professor of Turkish studies at Leiden University) ; 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 (Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and Genocide denier), 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 (a biographer of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) who speaks of "telegrams dubiously attributed to the Ottoman wartime Minister of the Interior, Talat Pasha", Paul Dumont (Professor of Turkish studies at Strasbourg University) 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 (Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey), 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".

Edisi

• The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians, dikumpulkan oleh Aram Andonian, Hodder and Stoughton, London, sekitar 1920
• Documents sur les massacres arméniens, Paris, 1920 (terjemahan tidak lengkap oleh M. S. David-Beg)
• Մեծ Ոճիրը (Kejahatan besar), edisi bahasa Armenia, Hairenik, Boston, 1921

Note: Meskipun edisi Armenia diterbitkan setelah dua versi lainnya, sejarahwan Vahakn Dadrian menyatakan bahwa teks berbahasa Armenia merupakan teks asli yang ditulis Aram Andonian pada tahun 1919. Mempertimbangkan penundaan penerbitannya membantu menjelaskan beberapa "kesalahan" yang diidentifikasi oleh beberapa penulis Turki dalam menentukan tanggal dokumen tersebut.

Lihat juga

• Saksi dan kesaksian genosida Armenia
• Johannes Lepsius

Bibliografi

• Dadrian, Vahakn N. (August 1986). "The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide". International Journal of Middle East Studies. Cambridge University Press. 18 (3): 311–360. doi:10.1017/S0020743800030506. 
• Ferguson, Niall (2006). The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. New York: Penguin Press. hlm. 179. ISBN 1-59420-100-5. 
• Lewy, Guenter (2005). The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. 
• Ternon, Yves (1989). Enquête sur la négation d'un génocide [analysis by Yves Ternon stating the telegrams are probably authentic]. Marseille: éditions parenthèses. ISBN 2-86364-052-6. 
• Mouradian, Claire (January 2015). "Le télégramme, outil de génocide : le cas arménien". Revue d'histoire de la Shoah (dalam bahasa Prancis). hlm. 507–535. 
• Akçam, Taner (2018). Killing Orders: Talat Pasha's Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide (dalam bahasa Inggris). Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-69787-1. 

Pranala luar

• Enquête sur la négation d'un génocide. An analysis of the Andonian telegrams (dalam bahasa Prancis)
• Primary Documents: Talaat Pasha's Alleged Official Orders Regarding the Armenian Massacres, March 1915-January 1916 - Translated versions of these telegrams
• Guest Contributor (2016-10-11). "Akçam: The Authenticity of the Naim Efendi Memoirs and Talat Pasha Telegrams". Armenian Weekly.