The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-1916: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce (Gomidas Institute Books Series) - Hardcover

Bryce, James; Toynbee, Arnold Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1903656516 ISBN 13: 9781903656518

Publisher: Taderon Pr, 2005

Synopsis

This is a critical republication of the original 1916 British Parliamentary Blue Book on the Armenian Genocide. The original work has been introduced and annotated by Ara Sarafian with reference to United States archival records.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

In 1916 the British Parliament published a "Blue Book" that identified the events of 1915–16 as a systematic effort to exterminate the Armenian people. The Blue Book has been one of the most solid and influential sources on the Armenian Genocide. A critical, uncensored edition, edited and with an introduction by Ara Sarafian, has been published by the Gomidas Institute.Viscount James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee were commissioned to prepare the Blue Book, which is formally known as The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916. Toynbee carefully compiled and verified dozens of eyewitness accounts from different parts of the Ottoman Empire. These accounts provided the basis for Bryce’s brilliant thesis on the Genocide, published while the crime was still in progress.The book includes eyewitness accounts from United States consular and missionary sources, as well as the testimony of German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Greek, Kurdish, and Armenian witnesses.The original publication was full of blanks: the names of many people and places were obscured in order to safeguard sources still in the Ottoman Empire. The names remain obscured in facsimile editions that have been published over the years. Now Sarafian has restored the obscured names.In his introduction, Sarafian takes issue with the repeated assertions of Turkish nationalist authors, who claim that the Blue Book was a British propaganda fabrication. He demonstrates the intellectual pedigree of the work. He shows exactly how testimonies were collected, authenticated, and then used in the book.Generations of official historians of Turkey, such as Enver Zia Karal (Ankara University), Salahi Sonyel (British historian and public activist), Ismail Binark (Director of Ottoman archives, Ankara), Sinasi Orel (director of a much publicized project on declassifying documents on Ottoman Armenians), Kamuran Gurun (former diplomat), Mim Kemal Oke, Justin McCarthy, and others have cited the Blue Book and have insisted that it lacks credibility.Sarafian has located Toynbee’s original manuscript, Toynbee’s correspondence with his sources, and most of the original reports, which were copied and sent to London. They can still be found at the Public Record Office (Kew), Bodleian Library (Oxford), National Archives (Washington, D.C.), Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), and the Houghton Library (Cambridge, Mass.) He has established that the compilers were meticulous in their verification of sources.According to the Times Literary Supplement (London), "This work emerges from Ara Sarafian’s examination as documentation of a high order. . . . Sarafian convincingly rebuts the claims that there was any falsification, or that any of the documents was one-sided British propaganda." Lord Avebury of the British House of Lords has welcomed the publication of this critical edition of the Blue Book. Excoriating the present-day British government for refusing to recognize the Armenian Genocide, "ostensibly for a lack of evidence," Lord Avebury notes that "the British Foreign Office itself published such evidence as early as 1916. . . . Ara Sarafian should be commended for making a critical edition of The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire available to the public." Toynbee, who went on to be a major historian in his own right, was deeply moved by his research on the Genocide. In his 1967 memoir, Acquaintances, Toynbee wrote: "My study [of the Armenian Genocide] . . . left an impression on my mind that was not effaced by the still more cold-blooded genocide, on a far larger scale, that was committed during the Second World War by the Nazi."Any great crime—private or public, personal or impersonal—raises a question that transcends national limits; the question goes to the heart of human nature itself. My study of the genocide that had been committed in Turkey in 1915 brought home to me the reality of Original Sin," Toynbee concluded.The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916 complements the Gomidas Institute’s Armenian Genocide Documentation Series, which to date includes: United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917 (Ara Sarafian comp. and ed.); United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913-1916; Days of Tragedy in Armenia (Rev. Henry Riggs, Harpoot); "Turkish Atrocities" (twenty-one reports compiled by James Barton); Marsovan 1915 (the diary of Bertha Morley); and The German, the Turk and the Devil Made a Triple Alliance (the diary of Tacy Atkinson, Harpoot).

From the Back Cover:

"The British Government today refuses to recognise the Armenian Genocide of 1915. They say that there is insufficient evidence, and that it is not their responsibility to review the events of 80 years ago and pronounce on them. Yet the British Foreign Office itself published a great deal of evidence as early as 1916. Their refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide today is an affront to the brave witnesses whose testimony was carefully recorded, and the eminent scholars whose analysis is still valid today.

"Ara Sarafian should be commended for making a critical edition of 'The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire' available to the public. It may be seen as bad politics to exhume a million victims when the perpetrators' successors are on the threshold of the European Union, but it has been well said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." --Eric Avebury, House of Lords

"The collection and collation of the evidence from which the Blue Book ['The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire'] was compiled had occupied most of my working time for a number of months; and, after the Blue Book had been published, I could not dismiss its contents from my mind. I was not only haunted by the victims' sufferings and by the criminals' deeds; I was exercised by the question how it could be possible for human beings to do what those perpetrators of genocide had done.

"My study [of the Armenian Genocide]... left an impression on my mind that was not effaced by the still more cold-blooded genocide, on a far larger scale, that was committed during the Second World War by the Nazi.

"Any great crime--private or public, personal or impersonal--raises a question that transcends national limits; the question goes to the heart of human nature itself. My study of the genocide that had been committed in Turkey in 1915 brought home to me the reality of Original Sin." --Arnold J. Toynbee, "Acquaintances" (1967)

About this edition

• Publisher: Taderon Pr
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1903656516
• ISBN 13: 9781903656518
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 677