Vahakn Dadrian

Biography

Vahakn Norair Dadrian was born in 1926 in Turkey, to a family that lost many members during the Armenian Genocide. Dadrian first studied mathematics at the University of Berlin, after which he decided to switch to a completely different field, and studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, and later, international law at the University of Zürich. He completed his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago.

He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree for his research in the field of Armenian Genocide Studies by the Armenian National Academy of Sciences, and later, in 1998, he was made a member of the Academy and honored by the President of Armenia, the republic's highest cultural award, the Khorenatzi medal. In 1999, Dadrian was awarded on behalf of the Holy See of Cilicia the Mesrob Mashdots Medal. The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation sponsored him as director of a large Genocide study project, which culminated with the publication of articles, mainly in the Holocaust and Genocide studies magazines. He was the keynote speaker at the centennial of the John Marshall Law School and delivered a lecture to the British House of Commons in 1995. He also received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

In 1970–1991 Dadrian was a professor of sociology at State University of New York-College at Geneseo.

In 1991, Dadrian was dismissed from State University College at Geneseo for sexual harassment after a female student had complained he had kissed her on the lips. In 1981, a college arbitrator had found him guilty of four charges of sexual harassment, but had allowed him to return to work because the arbitrator believed they were "singular events that would not happen again."

Currently Dadrian is the director of Genocide Research at Zoryan Institute.

Academic research

The particularity of Dadrian's research is that by mastering many languages, including German, English, French, Turkish, Ottoman Turkish, and Armenian, he has researched archives of different countries, and extensively studied materials in various languages in a way that very few, if anyone has done before him. One of Dadrian's major researches is the volume titled The History of the Armenian Genocide which had seven printings and appeared in numerous languages. In this book Dadrian described the background, initiation and unfolding of the genocide, and placed it within a conceptual framework of genocide theory. Roger W. Smith praised it as a "rare work, over 20 years in the making, that is at once fascinating to read, comprehensive in scope, and unsurpassed in the documentation of the events it describes." According to William Schabas, the president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, "Dadrian’s historical research on the Armenian Genocide is informed by a rich grasp of the legal issues", and "his contribution both to historical and legal scholarship is enormous."

A specialist on the Armenian Genocide of 1915-23, his many contributions to the investigation of that event, through multilingual original research in a number of archival collections throughout the world, has stamped him as one of foremost thinkers on the nature of the Armenian Genocide and how it was carried out. Paul R. Bartrop and Steven L. Jacobs, Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide, p. 79

Dadrian's latest project is the translation of the Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919-20 from Ottoman Turkish to English.

According to David Bruce MacDonald, Dadrian is a "towering figure in the field of Armenian genocide history". Taner Akcam writes that by employing Justin McCarthy's own method of calculating population figures and classifying individuals, Vahakn Dadrian has shown the ridiculousness of the claim that "the events of 1915 were in fact a civil war between the Armenians and Turks". German Swiss scholar Hans-Lukas Kieser writes that the documents related to fifteen Turkish ministers published by V. Dadrian show best the ministers' conception of their responsibility in the "abuses" committed against Ottoman Armenians.

Criticism

One of the main critics of Dadrian is Guenter Lewy, who was criticized for the denial of Armenian Genocide by many scholars. In a response to critics equating Lewy's position on the Armenian genocide "with that of the Holocaust-denier David Irving", he accuses Dadrian of being "guilty of willful mistranslations, selective quotations, and other serious violations of scholarly ethics." In his book, Guenter Lewy mentions, among others, V. N. Dadrian's defense of the authenticity of the book published by Mevlanzade Rifat, and of the "Ten Commandments", V. N. Dadrian's allegations against Turkish sociologist Ziya Gökalp, the use of Jean Naslian's Memoirs praising of Turkish court-martial of 1919–1920, and misleading references to writings of Esref Kuscubasi Bey and German General Felix Guse. Similarly, Malcolm E. Yapp, professor emeritus at London University, estimates that V. Dadrian's method "is not that of an historian trying to find out what happened and why but that of a lawyer assembling the case for the prosecution in an adversarial system"; Mary Schaeffer Conroy, professor of Russian history at Colorado University, Denver, criticizes V. N. Dadrian's inaccuracies, selective use of sources and failure to use Turkish archives, then concludes: "This book is more a work of journalism than solid history and is not recommended". Ara Sarafian also explained:

Our understanding of the Armenian Genocide has been influenced by partisan scholarship because a number of academic institutions and political parties in Armenian communities, such as in the United States or Great Britain, have nurtured a prosecutorial approach to the subject. Consequently, some important elements of the events of 1915 have been distorted. The main thrust of the prosecutorial approach has been the assertion that the genocide of Armenians was executed with the thoroughness of the Nazi Holocaust, and that all Turks and Kurds were involved in the genocidal process. This approach is best exemplified by Vahakn Dadrian's The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus.

The Armenian Genocide is not the same as the Holocaust. The Young Turks did not have the apparatus to carry out a genocide on par with the Holocaust. It is also a fact that many Ottoman officials, including governors, sub-governors, military personnel, police chiefs, and gendarmes saved thousands of Armenians during the Genocide. Most Armenians from the province of Adana, for example, were not killed. This very basic fact is elided in the works of prominent Armenian historians. There are other examples too. The "Holocaust model" of the Armenian Genocide is fundamentally flawed.

Hilmar Kaiser said that "serious scholars should be cautioned against accepting all of Dadrian's statements at face value", because of his frequent "misleading quotations" and the "selective use of sources". Donald Bloxham expresses a similar view: the accusations leveled by V. Dadrian "are often simply unfounded"; especially, "the idea of a German role in the formation of genocidal policy [...] has no basis in the available documentation"; and if V. Dadrian supports the authenticity of the so-called "Ten Commandments", on the other hand, "Most serious historians accept that this document is dubious at best, and probably a fake. It was the subject of controversy some twenty years before Dadrian rediscovered it for publication in 1993. The document's donor originally offered it for sale to the British authorities in February 1919, a time when numerous fraudulent documents were in circulation. Reference to this supposed 'smoking gun' is tellingly absent in the best recent scholarship on the development of the genocide by the likes of Hans-Lukas Kieser, Hilmar Kaiser, Taner Akcam, Halil Berktay and Ronald Suny."

Another kind of critique is based on the absence of reference, in V. N. Dadrian's publications, to the Russian policy vis-à-vis the Armenians during the First World War. Sean McMeekin argued that "it is far more distortion of the truth to tell the story of the Armenian tragedy of 1915 without reference (or with only passing reference) to Russia. It is aking to writing about, say, 'the bloodbath in Budapest' during the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956 without reference to the Soviet Union." Sean McMeekin gives V. N. Dadrian as an example of this "distortion of the truth."

Awards

Awards granted to Vahakn Dadrian include: