Akçam Says Turkish Archives Show Genocide Planning By Central Government

In return, hundreds of thousands of Muslims migrated to the Ottoman lands from Europe and were relocated in the Christian-majority Anatolia region, home of the Armenians.

Beginning in 1913, he said, the non-Muslim population of Anatolia was referred to as “tumors” that needed to be removed, and therefore the government embarked upon a “radical restructuring of Anatolia’s demographic character.”

In other words, the Christians, including the Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians, were removed and the non-Turkish Muslims were relocated and dispersed among the Turkish Muslims to take their place.

Akçam said the removal policy was first tried out on the Greek minority. The Ottoman government came to an agreement, albeit illegal by the standards of international law, with Romania, Bulgaria and Greece and enacted a population exchange in 1913.

The Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), he said, which was in charge, would draw up plans for such removals and exterminations nationally but would later present them as the spontaneous actions of local populations throughout the empire.

The demographic policy was then used on the Armenians, with the plan to reduce the Armenian population to a “governable number.” That number, he said, was deemed to be “5 to 10 percent” of the general population and no more than that. If they formed a bigger share, the Ottoman authorities suggested, they would be less easily governable. Thus, the officials conducted demographic surveys to find out the percentage of Armenians in various locales in Anatolia. For example, in the Kayseri Province, 49,947 Armenians were registered. Most were deported to Aleppo, Damascus and Mosul and the population was reduced to 5 percent. In the Eastern Provinces, the policy was “not a single Armenian was allowed to remain there.” The Armenians were deported to Der Zor and by the beginning of 1916, a second wave of the Genocide started, during which an additional 200,000 Armenians were killed in the Syrian provinces in order to maintain the numbers below 10 percent. The authorities, he said, never expected as many to survive the forced marches in the desert.

In a letter from Talaat to Cemal Pasha on October 7, 1916, he specified the need to rid Cilicia of Armenians, as they, he stressed, were so attached to the land and considered it a central part of their heritage.

The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity was published in April. Akçam, born in Ardahan, is the holder of the Robert Aram, Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marion Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University, Worcester.

Akçam used papers from the Interior Ministry, including various branches of its General Directorate and the Cypher Office. The role of the latter, he said, was “very important.” The office was established in 1913, with the “pure purpose of [encrypted] telegraphic communication between the central office and the provinces.”

The authorities encrypted the information, and believing they had developed a foolproof method, freely discussed their plans within the documents.

Other documents found by Akçam included a telegram from the Education Ministry to the Interior Ministry on June 26, 1915, regarding the fate of Armenian children — soon to be orphaned — who would need assimilation.

These documents are still intact, Akçam said, and anyone interested can freely access them.

He spoke about documents from the same archives dating to March 1, 1915, in which the authorities spelled out the Genocide policy.