Publications

One of the Institute’s most groundbreaking achievements to date is supporting the editing, translation, and publication, in addition to financial sponsorship, of the book, “The Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915-1916.”

Wolfgang Gust, through his tireless efforts, painstakingly collected, restored, and published documents from the German Foreign Office Archive with the assistance of his wife, Ingrid Gust.

This extensive selection contains some 218 telegrams, letters and reports from German consular officials in the Ottoman Empire to the Foreign Office in Berlin describing the unfolding genocide of the Armenians.

The material is unimpeachable by those who would deny the Armenian Genocide, as it is from Turkey’s own wartime ally. It provides researchers with a deeper understanding of the actions and the motives of the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide.

The German edition of the book played a major role in the German Parliament’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide on June 2, 2016. In fact, the Co-Chair of the Green Alliance Party, Cem Ozdemir, stated in a recent visit to the Institute in 2017:

“Wolfgang Gust’s work and that of the Zoryan Institute was very crucial, because it was the first time that we saw the documents of the German Foreign Ministry, and these documents are probably the best saved archive in the world on the Armenian Genocide.”

The Institute’s staff assisted with the publishing of the book in German (2005) and Turkish (2012) and the translation, editing and publication of the book in English (2014).

This book provides vital background information and is a prime source of legal evidence and authentic Turkish eyewitness testimony of the intent and the crime of genocide against the Armenians. After a long and painstaking effort, the authors, one an Armenian, the other a Turk, generally recognized as the foremost experts on the Armenian Genocide, have prepared a new, authoritative translation and detailed analysis of the Takvim-i Vekâyi, the official Ottoman Government record of the Turkish Military Tribunals concerning the crimes committed against the Armenians during World War I. The authors have compiled the documentation of the trial proceedings for the first time in English and situated them within their historical and legal context. These documents show that Wartime Cabinet ministers, Young Turk party leaders, and a number of others inculpated in these crimes were court-martialed by the Turkish Military Tribunals in the years immediately following World War I. Most were found guilty and received sentences ranging from prison with hard labor to death. In remarkable contrast to Nuremberg, the Turkish Military Tribunals were conducted solely on the basis of existing Ottoman domestic penal codes. This substitution of a national for an international criminal court stands in history as a unique initiative of national self-condemnation. This compilation is significantly enhanced by an extensive analysis of the historical background, political nature and legal implications of the criminal prosecution of the twentieth century’s first state-sponsored crime of genocide.

The pogroms against Armenians in February 1988 in Sumgait blocked a political solution to the peaceful demands of the Armenians for self-determination. They brought death to a community and ran people out of their homes. They showed the helplessness or unwillingness of a powerful government to protect its people.

In The Sumgait Tragedy, forty-five eyewitnesses and victims of the attacks tell what they saw and suffered. The accounts, based on tape-recorded interviews, also make clear what the Armenians did not see: a serious, effective effort by authorities to fulfill the first duty of any government – to protect its citizens. Why were warnings that violence was ready to flare up not heeded? Why did measures taken to halt the attacks come too late? How accurate is the Soviet description of the events as the violence of a small group of hooligans?

Such questions go beyond the fate of the victims of the Sumgait pogroms. They raise doubts about the motives of the current Soviet government and about its ability to meet the rightful demands of its peoples. As Yelena Bonner writes, “…our regime fears unsanctioned popular movements more than anything else… the government’s lack of understanding and its inability to cope provided time for the dark forces to plan what happened in Sumgait.”

The first major territorial struggle in the late Soviet period involved Nagorno-Karabagh, an Armenian inhabited territory that had been assigned to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic in the early 1920s. Armenian protests calling for reunification with Armenia in 1988 led to Azerbaijani pogroms against Armenians and later to armed conflict that claimed over twenty thousand lives. The struggle remains unresolved. A distinguished group of historians and social scientists analyze the Karabagh struggle in this unique volume that covers one of the world’s strategic, oil-rich regions.

A striking feature of the Karabagh conflict is the failure of the many OSCE, UN, and regional power mediation efforts to find a solution to the crisis. One of the major contributions of this volume is to provide a cogent analysis of these failures, which have to do with the inability to satisfy the legitimate security needs of the parties to the conflict, and, especially, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabagh.

This book provides an exposé of the treatment of the Jewish community in Turkey from 1950 to the present, their fight against anti-Semitism, the struggle for their constitutional rights, and the attitude of the Turkish state and society towards these problems.

In 2013, Zoryan launched the English translation of this seminal text. Turkish journalist, Ayse Gunaysu, described the book as:

“groundbreaking…a first-hand account that unmistakably illustrates how the Turkish establishment blackmailed the leaders of the Jewish community – and through them Jewish organizations in the United States. This was to secure their support of the Turkish position against the Armenians’ campaign for genocide recognition, indicating that if the Jewish lobby failed to prevent Armenian initiatives abroad – Turkey might not be able to guarantee the security of Turkish Jews...”

Israeli historian, Dr. Yair Auron, raises theoretical, philosophical, and moral questions about concepts of genocide and the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. After a brief historical introduction, Auron discusses the reaction to the Genocide within the Yishuv in terms of practical assistance for and identification with the Armenians.

The Jewish position was unquestionably difficult during the period of the First World War; Palestine was under Ottoman control, and Germany, a Turkish ally, was looked to by some Zionists as a potential source of support. Consequently, the official Yishuv reaction was muted and largely self-interested: there was no condemnation in journals, internal protocols, or letters.

Auron does record instances of Jewish support, however: the Nili group, an underground intelligence organization, actively sought to aid the Armenian victims; Chaim Weizman and Nahum Sokolov publicly condemned the killings; and other Zionist writers and journalists expressed outraged identification with the Armenians and tried to arouse the conscience of the world. In attempting to analyze and interpret these disparate reactions, Auron maintains a fair-minded balance in assessing claims of altruism and self-interest, expressed in universal, not only Jewish, terms.

This book seeks both to examine the passive Israeli attitude towards the Armenian Genocide, and to explore active Israeli manures to undermine attempts at safeguarding the memory of the Armenian victims of the Turkish persecution.

The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ottoman Greek Genocide: Essays on Asia Minor, Pontos, and Eastern Thrace, 1913-1923 edited by George N. Shirinian, Executive Director of the Zoryan Institute, is a compilation of innovative papers given by distinguished scholars at two academic conferences organized by the Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center in Chicago.

Many of the world’s leading authorities in history, sociology, political science and psychology shed new light on the major genocides of the 20th century in this book from Macmillan Press of London. The volume covers the genocides of the Armenians, Bosnians, Gypsies, Jews, Rwandans, and Ukrainians, and also topics of genocide denial and prevention. Many of the world’s leading authorities in history, sociology, political science and psychology shed new light on the major genocides of the 20th century in this book from Macmillan Press of London. The volume covers the genocides of the Armenians, Bosnians, Gypsies, Jews, Rwandans, and Ukrainians, and also topics of genocide denial and prevention.

Chorbajian is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Zoryan Institute. “These fourteen papers originated in a conference held in Yerevan in April 1995, which the Zoryan Institute co-sponsored with the Republic of Armenia’s National Commission on the 80th Anniversary Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. The authors have had a chance to revise and update their papers and now present them to the scholarly world.”

The Armenian Genocide in Official Turkish Records: Collected Essays by Vahakn N. Dadrian. A Special Issue of The Journal of Political and Military Sociology. Vol. 22, no. 1 (Summer 1994).
In the 1970s Prof. Vahakn Dadrian helped to create the field of the comparative study of genocide, bringing to his work an interdisciplinary perspective that joined sociology, history, and law, enriched further by his ability to drawn upon half a dozen languages. The archival work that he has done on three continents is the basis for the studies that appear in this special issue, studies that focus on documentation of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish sources and in those of Turkey’s World War I allies, Germany and Austria. The latter confirm that the Genocide took place, that it was centrally planned, and that a prominent motive for Turkey’s entry into the war was the cover war could provide for a final solution to the Armenian Question. Most of the documents are Turkish, and these too bear out the premeditated and intentional destruction of the Armenians. But the Turkish materials also allow Prof. Dadrian to describe in great detail, and with new insight, the organization and implementation of the Genocide. Almost all of the materials were uncovered by Prof. Dadrian and first made public by him. Most of the documents included in the article, “The Complicity of the Party, the Government, and the Military” are published here for the first time.
The contents of this special issue are as follows:
Foreword by Richard Falk
Introduction by Roger Smith
Articles by Vahakn Dadrian:
• A Review of the Main Features of the Genocide
• The Complicity of the Party, the Government, and the Military: Select Parliamentary and Judicial Documents
• The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal
• A Textual Analysis of the Key Indictment of the Turkish Military Tribunal Investigating the Armenian Genocide
• The Secret Young Turk Ittihadist Conference and the Decision for the World War I Genocide of the Armenians

The book contains the printed text of a lecture by noted genocide specialist Prof. Vahakn Dadrian given at Harvard. It incorporates an introduction by Prof. James Russell of Harvard University, a brief biography of Prof. Dadrian, and an extensive, up-to-date bibliography of the noted scholar’s writings. The lecture, titled “The Armenian Genocide and the Principle of Compelling Evidence,” was delivered before a packed audience of some 500 people, including faculty and students of Harvard University at a commemoration of the 86th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

In the lecture, Dadrian begins by explaining the key points of the denial by the perpetrator camp and the need of an appropriate methodology suited to counter and overwhelm this culture of persistent denial. In Dadrian’s definition, this is called the methodology of “compelling evidence,” that revolves around the principles of reliability, explicitness, incontestability, verifiability. Dadrian then proceeds to reconstruct the Armenian Genocide in terms of its four major components: premeditation, genocidal intention, the organization of the genocide, and the implementation of the genocide.

The Zoryan Institute is also offering as part of this package Dadrian’s most recent article, which appeared earlier this year in The International Journal of Middle East Studies. Titled “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians as Documented by the Officials of the Ottoman Empire’s World War I Allies: Germany and Austro-Hungary,” this major article is the product of some two dozen trips to such archival centers as Bonn, Potsdam, Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany, and Vienna, Austria over the last twenty years. Supported and corroborated by 115 endnotes, it is the result of extensive research and is one of the most definitive analyses exposing the premeditated genocide of the Armenians. It should further be noted that this journal, published by Cambridge University Press, is the official organ of the Middle East Studies Association, to which dozens of Turkish historians, and experts on the Middle East, Ottoman Empire, as well as modern Turkey belong.

Born in Garin (Erzerum), the heartland of historic Armenia, young Yervant Kouyoumjian lived through the horrors of the deportations and massacres of Armenians under Ottoman rules during the First World War.  John Yervant witnessed the disintegration of his family and people as the deportations led him from Erzerum to Erzingan, Egin, Arapgir, and Malatia on their way to the slaughter houses in Northern Syria.  Young Yervant was able to escape death with his mother and reach Aleppo.  From there he went to Istanbul, then to the newly established Republic of Armenia, to Greece, Sicily, France and, finally, to America.

Yervant Kouyoumjian, who later used his father’s name and is also known as John Yervant, narrates here the story of his survival, apprenticeship in various trades, and successes as a performer and restauranteur.

Currently retired and living in Washington, D.C., John Yervant Kouyoumjian recorded his memoirs in the 1960s.  The current volume is based on the transcriptions of those tapes and additional information obtained during interviews in 1985 and 1986 with the author.  The style remains conversational and unpretentious; it communicates the experience of the survivor with immediacy and a sense of humor.

Out of Darkness is the story of Ramela Der Pilibosian Martin who was born in Malatia, Western or Ottoman Armenia, just before the Genocide of 1915-1917.  Her father had died before she was born.  After the disappearance of her brother and the deportation of her grandfather by the Turks, Ramela Martin and her mother were forced to join the death marches, but not before her mother arranged to leave Ramela’s older sister with a Turkish family.  Escaping from the death marches, the women tried to return to their home but her mother died on the way, leaving Ramela alone.  She was eventually rescued by the Near East Relief and placed in an orphanage.  From the interior of Anatolia, Ramela Martin, together with other orphans, was moved to Aleppo, Beirut, Istanbul, and finally a refugee camp in Corinth, Greece.

Ramela Martin’s description of the camp is graphic and moving, as is her account of the development of her interest in the profession of nursing which she pursued at the American Women’s Hospital’s Training School in Kokinia, Greece.  Having established contact with relatives, Ramela Martin left Greece to Havana where she secured a visa to immigrate to the United States.

Ramela Martin tells her story of dislocation, immigration, struggle, and survival with passion and courage.  In the end, there emerges the portrait of a woman wounded by history but capable of endurance and wholeness.

Ramela Martin trained as a nurse at the American Women’s Hospital in Kokinia, Greece.  After immigrating to the United States, she took the Connecticut State Board examination for nurses and received her R.N.  She continued practicing and teaching her profession for twenty-seven years.  In 1968, she traveled to Soviet Armenia where she was reunited with the sister whom she had lost during the Genocide.  She retired in 1975, and in 1979 she and her husband, Jim Martin, moved to Florida where she now resides.