InternationalTalaat Pasha’s Black Book documents his campaign of race extermination, 1915–17
by Ara Sarafian
Published: Friday March 13, 2009
The proportion of the Armenian population deported and missing in 1917 according to Interior Minister Talaat Pasha’s Black Book is shown in black. For a larger map, click here. [Adobe Acrobat Reader required. © 2009 Ara Sarafian
"[Talaat stated that]... they had already disposed of three quarters of them [Armenians], that there were none left in Bitlis, Van, Erzeroum, and that the hatred was so intense now that they have to finish it. . . . He said they would take care of the Armenians at Zor and elsewhere but they did not want them in Anatolia. I told him three times that they were making a serious mistake and would regret it. He said, ‘We know we have made mistakes, but we never regret.'"
—8 August 1915 diary entry of conversations between Talaat Pasha and U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913–1916, comp., ed., and intro. Ara Sarafian (Princeton and London: Gomidas Institute, 2004)
[For maps and table accompanying this article, please click here. Adobe Acrobat Reader required.]
A handwritten black book that belonged to Mehmet Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman minister of interior in 1915, was published in facsimile form in the end of 2008. It is probably the single most important document ever uncovered describing the destruction of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915–17. The Black Book draws on Ottoman sources no longer available to answer many questions about what those sources showed.
Looking through the Sifre Kalemi or cipher telegram collection at the Prime Ministry Archives in Istanbul some years ago, I was struck by the number of telegrams in 1915 from Talaat Pasha ordering the deportation of individual communities, inquiring about the state of convoys, and giving instructions for further deportations. What emerged was a picture of a ruler obsessed with the progress of his signature program. Much of the responses to Talaat's inquiries were not available. What the Black Book does is to summarize the data he collected.
Ottoman archives
Turkish state intellectuals in recent years have insisted that the 1915 deportations of Ottoman Armenians were not part of a genocidal exercise, but an orderly population transfer and resettlement. They have insisted that Ottoman archives in Turkey today support their contention. Yet, between them, they have only managed to cite an amalgam of official deportation and resettlement regulations, certain reports related to deportations, and no substantial account of what actually happened to deportees.
Indeed, no historian working in Turkish archives has managed to present a coherent picture of the deportation and resettlement of Armenians from any region in the Ottoman Empire based on Ottoman records. This is because Ottoman records do not support the official Turkish thesis on the Armenian Genocide.
While there is broad agreement between Turkish archives and other sources that thousands of Armenians were removed from their homes in 1915, there is no solid account of what happened to these deportees in Ottoman records. However, foreign archives, such as the consular records of the United States, give a better qualitative assessment of actual developments than the available Ottoman documentation.
This absence of Ottoman records could seem perplexing, because according to Ottoman regulations, Ottoman officials had to keep detailed records of the deportation of Armenians, as well as an inventory of their properties, as well as details of the final settlement of the people concerned. The total absence of such registers in Turkish archives today is therefore remarkable.
A handwritten book
The recent facsimile publication of Talaat Pasha's Black Book may well answer many questions with the authority of Ottoman records. At 77 pages, the book includes a substantial section on the deportation of Armenians in 1915–17. The book and its content were never disclosed in Talaat's lifetime, including in his posthumous memoirs published in 1921. After his assassination in 1921, the book was kept by his widow and given to the Turkish historian Murat Bardakçi in 1982. Mr. Bardakçi made parts of the booklet public in Hürriyet newspaper in 2005. The full account was not published until the end of 2008.
The significance of the Black Book lies in the authority of the owner, the fact that its content was drawn from Ottoman administrative records no longer available to historians in Turkey, and the actual data that it gives about the deportation of Armenians. Neither the book nor the data it yields bear clear dates, though Mr. Bardakçi thinks that the figures refer to 1915–1916 – though I think that could be the end of 1916 or even the beginning of 1917.
The state perspective
The data presented in this book can be considered to be a view of the Armenian Genocide from the perspective of the state. This state perspective still needs to be evaluated critically, which I am doing in a separate study. The purpose of this article is to introduce the core data that informed Talaat Pasha about the actual state of Armenians.
The statistics regarding the destruction of Armenians in the Black Book are enumerated in four categories covering 29 regions (vilayets and sanjaks) of the Ottoman Empire.
These statistics are supposed to reflect:
• The Armenian population in each region in 1914
• Armenians who were not deported (presumably 1915–16)
• Armenians who were deported and living elsewhere (1917)
• Armenians who were originally from outside the province they were living in (1917)
From these statistics, we can also have an idea of the number of Armenians who were deported but not accounted for in 1917. Some of these missing Armenians undoubtedly fled the Ottoman Empire, such as those in the province of Van (where there was fierce resistance) or parts of Erzurum (which fell under Russian occupation after the Ottoman offensive collapsed in the east). However, very few Armenians were able to flee in such a manner, and for our discussion today, we will assume that the vast majority of the "missing Armenians" in 1917 were killed or died during deportations.
