Ամբաստանագիր-տեղեկագիրներ
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Date
1995
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Abstract
In the previous pages we presented five reports which have been kept unpublished in the archives of the Bibliotheque Nubar of the Armenian General Benevolent Union Paris chapter. They all bear BNU — Archive Andonian, Liasse 7 general title, though with different numbers.
We believe that those presented here are not the only ones in these archives and which directly bear on the Armenian Holocaust of 1915-1916.
There are others as well; moreover, there should be additional reports too, which, to our great distress, have been lost for sure. We hope that the day will dawn when those vanished (we know that their number was 32) and those which remain unpublished and deposited at the Nubar archives will be put in circulation by publishing them both in the original and translated languages, because of the fact that, though much is written on the Armenian massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman, Young-Turk and the Republican forces and population in 1915-1923, they will shed some new light on the events occurred and bring some new depth and meaning to the accounts herein given.
The archival material presented here includes
1. A report on the massacres and deportations of the province of Sivas
(in Armenian);
2. A report on the Armenian deportees of the province of Adrianople
(in Armenian);
3. A report on the massacres of the province of Bitlis (in Armenian):
4. A report on the deportations and massacres of the Armenians of Erzerum (in French);
5. An eyewitness report on the massacres near Lijk, the nearby lake of Kharput (in French).
Of the reports presented here the first three have collective authorship, that of Erzerum.bears the name of Mr. Alphonse Arakelian, and the last is a foreigner, a certain Mr. B. Padova. All the reports are compiled in Aleppo, 1919, except the last, that of B. Padova, which lacks the men-lion of both place and date.
The first four of the archival material presented here follow almost the same procedure; all of them first give a geographic make-up of the province and its regions, cities, towns and villages with the pre-1915 and post-1918 numbers of population; then follows a general and in broad line, the presentation of various events and anti-Armenian Turkish activities in the province which, taken all together, at last culminated in the general massacres; these are usually followed by a list of the perpetrators of the massacres. Sometimes sites of massacres are pinpointed with the size, form and characteristics of the massacres. The last, but not the least, each report carries a general list of the territorial, economic, agricultural, industrial, religious and monastic property and antiquities losses besides the wealth deposited at the banks and insurances and deeds, all calculated in terms of Turkish gold pounds. To make things more comprehensible each report is divided into clear cut chapters enumerating the facts of the particular section.
At the end of each report one finds not only the date and the place where it was compiled but also a number of signatures, sometimes up to 90 of them, ratifying the content of the report.
To make things clearer and more comprehensible, we had added at the end a number of notes, explanations and even translation of certain Turkish-Ottoman words and terms which were vague in the pre-1915-1918 period. Moreover these notes include the source informations thus helping historians and specialists of the Armenian Holocaust where and how to find the respective document.
The last two documents are somehow different from the first three; that of Erzerum has a number of original footnotes on which we have made certain additions. Those notes belonging to the author Arakelian are given in French, ours in Armenian. The fifth document, that of Padova, falls under a different category of documents, and, hence, we have declined of bringing too much annotation to its content. In fact, the document is self-explanatory and nothing is needed to make it clearer. Yet we are sorry that in no case we were able to identify the identity of Mr. Arakelian and Mr. Padova though we had certain guesses. But these latter have no value as scientific evidence.
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Վարդան, Լ., «Ամբաստանագիր-տեղեկագիրներ», «Հայկազեան հայագիտական հանդէս», 1995, Պէյրութ, էջ 497-564