İlber Ortaylı on 1915: is he right?

A. Source. A TV interview with Prof. Dr. İlber Ortaylı, broadcast on 24 April 2021 — the day President Biden formally called the events of 1915 a genocide: Soykırım iddialarının arkasındaki gerçekler ne? — Prof. Dr. İlber Ortaylı anlatıyor. What follows summarises his argument, then checks it against the historical record.

This article was written by Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic), given the video's subtitles and this prompt:

its a video subtitle where mostly ilber ortayli talks. what do u think is he right? what is his points? what world thinks about it what does your data says about it?

Purpose of this piece

Paragraphs AL–AP came out of the later discussion and are placed here because they set the aim for everything below.

AL. Ortaylı's call in the video points toward open inquiry:

His admission of the tragedies and of the disorder in Boğazlıyan belongs to the same openness.

AM. But he does not say "whatever the result." In the video he states his conclusion first: it was not genocide, the numbers are baseless, Biden is ignorant, the Blue Book is propaganda. Research is then the means of making that case to the world; in his words, of standing "against the Armenian theses." The sources he recommends mostly defend the Turkish position: Esat Uras, Kamuran Gürün's Foreign Ministry booklet, the parliamentary volume edited by Gündüz Aktan, and Justin McCarthy. He does not point to serious work on the other side, such as Taner Akçam, Raymond Kévorkian, Ronald Suny or the German diplomatic records. He recommends Bardakçı but does not mention that the Talat Pasha notebook Bardakçı published weakens his own case.

AN. So his position is not "let everyone bring their sources and accept what follows." It is closer to "defend our thesis with better knowledge." The difference matters: the first is open-ended research, the second a better-equipped defence.

AO. This piece aims for the first. The sources are available:

Turkey itself proposed a joint historians' commission in 2005. Reading all of these without a verdict decided in advance, and then telling the public what they show, does not mean declaring the Turkish nation guilty (see AC).

AP. Ortaylı's call to research and to teach is valuable and right. The question this piece asks is whether his own conclusions survive that call when it is applied to every source, not only to those that support one side.

What Ortaylı argues

B. Wartime context. The Ottoman Empire entered WWI in late 1914 and was badly defeated at Sarıkamış in the winter of 1914–15. After that, the Armenians were deported (tehcir) as a military measure, with Enver Pasha deciding it. He says the German General Staff encouraged it, and the Ottoman chief of staff at the time was in fact a German officer, Bronsart von Schellendorf.

C. The deportations went differently in different places. He says they were fairly orderly in Çukurova but disorderly in Sivas and Boğazlıyan. In some places local people took revenge and looted, and old Muslim–Armenian conflicts flared up. He admits outright that "of course there were injustices, of course there were tragedies." His explanation is a poor wartime state with no roads or health system, which couldn't even move its own army properly.

D. "Genocide" means the Holocaust. He treats the word as tied to what the Nazis did to Jews and Roma. In his view, Western Europe applies it to the Turks to ease its own guilt.

E. Politics, not history. He says the casualty numbers people cite have no real basis, and that US politicians don't know the history. He thinks Biden did it to win over the Armenian lobby, partly to make up for the US staying silent during the 2020 Karabakh war. He adds that parliaments and presidents aren't courts and have no power to judge, though their statements can still sway European courts.

F. The British "Blue Book" was propaganda. This is the 1916 Bryce–Toynbee report, which Britain published to weaken Germany in the war.

G. Atatürk had nothing to do with it.

H. Turkey is to blame for not doing the work. He says Turkey needs real Armenian studies and scholars who read Armenian. It should translate and spread serious research instead of just making speeches every 24 April. He also warns firmly against the antisemitism he sees growing in Turkey since the 1940s. And he says Armenians are an essential part of "our civilization," so this shouldn't be treated as a fight.

Where he has a point

I. The wartime context is real. The Russian front, the Sarıkamış disaster, and Armenian volunteer units fighting with Russia (and the Van uprising) all happened. Many Muslim civilians in eastern Anatolia also died from war, hunger and disease. Serious historians include all of this.

J. He's legally right that parliaments aren't courts. The 1948 Genocide Convention doesn't apply retroactively, so no court can formally rule on 1915 under it. The European Court of Human Rights (Perinçek v. Switzerland, 2015) ruled that someone can't be criminally punished just for disputing the genocide label. Note that the court did not decide whether it was a genocide.

K. Biden's timing did have domestic political reasons. The Blue Book really was produced by British wartime propaganda. However, later researchers checked its documents against other sources, and most of them held up.

L. On G, the conclusion is right: Atatürk wasn't involved. In April 1915 he was commanding a division at Gallipoli.

M. His points in H, his admission of "tragedies" and his warning against antisemitism are sincere and to his credit. On those he goes further than the standard official line.

Where the evidence goes against him

N. The word "genocide" was coined partly because of the Armenians. Raphael Lemkin invented the term in 1944. He said openly that what happened to the Armenians was one of the cases that drove him to it, along with the Holocaust. So the claim in D is historically wrong.

O. The numbers are well documented, including by Ottoman sources. Ortaylı recommends Murat Bardakçı's book, and that book publishes Talat Pasha's own private notebook. It shows the Armenian population in the listed provinces falling from roughly 1.2–1.3 million in 1914 to under 300,000 by 1917. Most historians put the deaths at around 1 million, with estimates ranging from about 600,000 to 1.5 million. Even the Ottoman government's own figures don't support calling the numbers baseless (E).

P. Evidence of intent, not just bad logistics:

R. This isn't a view held only by "the West" or "lobbies." The International Association of Genocide Scholars and most historians of the period call it genocide. So do several Turkish historians, such as Taner Akçam, Fatma Müge Göçek and Halil Berktay. The German-Jewish link he raises in D also cuts the other way: Germany, which carries the Holocaust guilt, recognized the Armenian genocide in 2016.

What the world thinks

S. About 30-plus countries recognize it as genocide, including France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Russia, Brazil and the US (Congress in 2019, the president in 2021), plus the European Parliament. The UK, Israel and some others have avoided the word, mostly for diplomatic reasons. Turkey's official position is "tragic events of 1915" and "shared suffering," and it has proposed a joint historians' commission.

Verdict

T. Ortaylı is right about the context and right that Turkey needs real scholarship instead of slogans. He is also more candid than the official line when he admits the tragedies. But his central claims don't hold up against the documents, including the Ottoman and German ones. Those claims are that it was only a badly run relocation, that the numbers are baseless, and that "genocide" belongs to the Holocaust alone. The strongest evidence against him comes from the Ottoman government's own records and trials and from its wartime ally, not from Armenian or British sources. Taken as a whole, the evidence supports the mainstream verdict that the deportations were an organized destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, which fits the definition of genocide.

U. The argument in Turkey often comes down to the word "genocide" itself, while both sides agree that a very large number of Armenians died. Where they really disagree is whether the state intended it. On that, the evidence goes against the position Ortaylı defends.

Discussion

Follow-up questions raised after the article, answered in the same labelled style. The labels continue from U. The aim is to reach a neutral conclusion, so the questions are phrased from a third-person point of view.

1. Does calling it "genocide" mean the Turkish nation is guilty?

The objection: many Turks avoid the word because it seems to say "the Turks committed genocide," and they hold that the Turkish people did not.

V. No. Historians don't accuse the Turkish nation. They accuse the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) government that held power during the war: Talat, Enver and Cemal, and the organisers of the Special Organisation (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa) such as Bahaeddin Şakir and Dr. Nazım. The Holocaust offers a parallel. It was carried out by the Nazi regime, and today nobody holds every German, or the present German state, guilty of it.

W. There is concrete evidence for that distinction. Some Ottoman officials resisted the orders:

Many Turkish, Kurdish and Arab families also hid Armenians. Responsibility lies with a particular government and the people it organised, not with "the Turks."

2. Did Atatürk have any part in it?

X. No. In 1915 he was at Gallipoli. The Republic of Turkey he founded in 1923 is not the same state as the CUP government.

3. Did German officers give the orders?

Y. That is Ortaylı's claim, not the historians' consensus. Most historians see it this way:

Historians describe Germany's role as complicity and looking away, not as giving the orders. Germany acknowledged its own share in its 2016 resolution.

4. Was there conflict between Armenians and their neighbours everywhere?

Z. No. Tension was strongest in the eastern provinces (Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, Muş). There were land disputes between Armenians and Kurds there, the massacres of 1894–96, and the activity of Armenian revolutionary organisations. Most of the armed clashes happened there too. The best-known examples are the 1915 Van uprising and the Armenian volunteer units in the Russian army. Cilicia (Adana) had also seen a major massacre in 1909.

AA. Yet deportations were also carried out far from the front: in Bursa, İzmit, Adapazarı, Ankara, Eskişehir, Kayseri and inner Sivas, among others. In these places there was neither a front nor any serious Armenian uprising. The Catholic Armenians of Ankara, for example, were a loyal community with nothing to do with the war, and they were deported too. Most Armenians in Istanbul and İzmir were not deported, probably because foreign observers were present there.

5. Why isn't "a military security measure" a sufficient explanation?

AB. If the measure had been limited to the front zone and to places where there was an uprising, that explanation could hold. But the deportation was applied to nearly all Anatolian Armenians, regardless of local conditions. Add the separation and killing of men and the deaths in the Syrian desert, and the conclusion is that there was a centrally directed plan, beyond local conflicts.

6. Can both positions be held at once?

AC. Yes. "The Turkish nation did not commit genocide" and "the CUP government committed genocide against the Armenians in 1915" do not contradict each other. Holding both together is the most defensible historical position. It is also the distinction most Turkish historians who accept the genocide, such as Taner Akçam and Halil Berktay, make.

7. If the genocide is accepted, who are "the Armenians" making demands today?

AD. There is no single group. There are three whose demands differ noticeably: the state of Armenia, the Armenian diaspora spread around the world, and the Armenians of Turkey.

8. What do most Armenians want?

AE. Recognition and an apology. Most of the diaspora descends from those who fled in 1915, and 1915 sits at the centre of Armenian identity. To them, denial feels like a continuation of what happened. So the demand is first of all moral: that Turkey call what happened by its name and apologise. For many Armenians, money and land are secondary. What matters is official acknowledgement of what happened to their grandparents.

9. Do they want property returned or compensation?

AF. Some diaspora organisations do, with the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF, Dashnaktsutyun) at the forefront. Their demands:

Some cases have been brought:

10. Do they claim territory?

AG. Only a marginal faction. It wants the lands of eastern Anatolia it calls "Western Armenia," citing the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres or the borders Wilson drew. This has no legal basis: the eastern border was set by the 1921 Treaty of Kars. Even within the diaspora, this faction is a minority.

11. What is the position of the state of Armenia?

AH. This is Turkey's real concern, and it has changed a lot in recent years:

12. What do the Armenians of Turkey want?

AI. Their priorities have mostly been dialogue, safety, and the property of minority foundations. That was Hrant Dink's line: against both the diaspora's pressure politics and denial in Turkey, and for the two communities talking to each other. A 2011 decree returned some foundation properties.

13. What would recognition by Turkey mean legally?

AJ. The biggest fear in Turkey is "if we recognise it, compensation and territorial claims will follow." The legal reality:

14. In short

AK. What most Armenians want today is recognition and an apology. Some diaspora organisations add property and compensation claims. Territorial claims are marginal, and Armenia's current government has in effect given them up. Turkey's concern is understandable, but the legal consequences of recognition are much more limited than usually assumed.