Garabet's Blog

IS A LONG OVERDUE CONTROVERSY  FINALLY SETTLED?

ACCORDING TO DR. HILMAR KAISER:

ARAM ANDONIAN'S INFAMOUS NAIM BEY'S REAL IDENTITY IS NOW CONSIDERED REVEALED

Interview conducted by: Prof. Garabet K Moumdjian

Armenian Genocide historian Dr. Hilmar Kaiser has set himself as an authority of the Armenian Genocide during the past decade. The bulk of his research is conducted in primary archival material. As of 2005, Kaiser is meticulously conducting research at the Directorate of Ottoman Archives [Türk Cumhuriyyeti: Başbakanlık Devlet (Osmanli) Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğüü] in Istanbul (This interviewer also has been conducting research there since 2005), Turkey, which is now open to historians worldwide, after a 10 year hiatus. When he emailed me regarding his findings about the identity of the infamous Naim Bey, I was more than compelled to conduct this interview with him. Naim Bey was the source of the telegrams that presented proof of the intentional genocidal policies of the Young Turk government and especially that of Talaat Pasha, then Minister of Interior of the Ottoman Empire. Andonian, a journalist and himself a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, published his famous "Naim Bey's Memoirs"[1] in 1920. Since the 1980's The Turkish side has devoted much time and effort to undermine the authenticity of Naim Bey's telegrams. Moreover, Turkish scholars have gone as far as to proclaim that Naim Bey himself is nothing more than a fictitious character and perhaps a figment of Andonian's imagination.

Let's start with the quintessential question: Who was Naim Bey?

According to Aram Andonian, Naim Bey was an Ottoman official who had been involved in the Armenian deportations from Aleppo to Der Zor. After the war, he supplied confidential information and a series of documents and renditions of documents to Aram Andonian. The information and the materials were later published by Andonian together with a part of his own memoirs in 1920.

And who was Aram Andonian?

Aram Andonian was a well-known journalist in Constantinople. On April 24, 1915, he was arrested together with other Armenian intellectuals, politicians, clergy, businessmen, and Armenians who had been taken due to a confusion of names. Luckily for Andonian, he belonged to the group that was detained at Tchankiri. This group had better chances of survival than those at Ayash, who were almost all killed. Andonian escaped from deportation and spent time in hiding in Aleppo. He was one of the first Armenians to secure evidence on the genocide. His papers are kept at the Nubarian library in Paris and are of supreme importance for research on the Armenian Genocide.

Why is the identity of Naim Bey so important?

Evidently it is critical to identify all officials that were involved in the Armenian Genocide, particularly those who were responsible for the execution of the deportations. This holds truer for Naim Bey as he was Aram Andonian's informant and the data provided by him stands today at the core of an important debate.

What is this debate about?

For decades, Naim's information and the documents he supplied were seen as the principle proof for the Armenian Genocide. In 1983, Turkish authors published a book doubting the veracity of the documents and Naim Bey's existence.[2]

What were their arguments?

The two authors brought forward a number of technical aspects. For instance, they claimed that Talaat's signature on the documents were fake. And, indeed, the signatures were not Talaat's. But this fact was misunderstood by many. After all, the materials carrying Talaat's "signature" were supposedly telegrams received by officials in Aleppo. They were not faxes or letters, so it was impossible to have Talaat's original signature on the papers. The authors also compared the style of central authority documents with the work of provincial scribes.

Was all criticism answered?

Not really. The two authors rightly pointed out that we do not have access to any of the originals. They were either lost or misplaced. This fact severely limits the value of the material for historians. I, for my own part, use Aram Andonian's own memoirs in my work but do not engage the documents. The Turkish authors also claimed that Naim Bey never existed as they had not found a personnel file for him.

Did you find Naim Bey's file?

No. The two Turkish authors seem to have thought that Naim must have been an official of the central authorities. But recent research in the Ottoman archives showed that many, if not most, of the Ottoman officials working around Aleppo and along the Euphrates had been locally hired, even as part-timers, and they were temporary employed for the deportation work. I did not find a personnel file. We have hardly any evidence from the Ottoman provincial authorities at all. In other words, we depend on incidents were local evidence made its way into the files of the central authorities. In the case of Naim we were lucky that such a case exists.

Then, who was Naim Bey?

Naim Bey was a relatively young man in 1916. He was 25 or 26 years old, born in Silifke. In 1916, he worked in Meskene as a deportation official responsible for the dispatch of Armenians to Der Zor. At the time a scandal erupted. Some Armenians had succeeded in bribing officials and managed to escape with the latter's help to Aleppo or avoid further deportation towards Der Zor. The authorities in Aleppo got wind of the affair and ordered an inquiry. Naim Bey managed to keep out of trouble but we know from Aram Andonian that he had taken bribes as well.

What is the importance of this discovery?

The new Ottoman documentation confirms the information Andonian gave to a surprising high degree. This adds considerably to Andonian's credibility even though we still have no originals of the materials supplied by Naim Bey. Moreover, the new evidence confirms that the deportation officials were locally hired. Equally important is to show that the Turkish writers' information is flawed and their research is not the last word on the topic. With the identification of Naim Bey an important stone missing from the mosaic has been uncovered and must be put back in place.

Do you expect to find the original documents any time soon?

The identification of Naim happened some 25 years after the publication of the Turkish book. This alone shows you how slow progress is. However, it happened 17 years after the start in the Ottoman archives and only three years after the archives became available again, following a 10 year interruption. You, Mr. Moumdjian, have been at the archives and have conducted research there. You know how time consuming the process is. We are able to get only 25 documents per day after ordering them a day in advance. It's a tedious process that has to be done anyways.

Are you hopeful to find the documents in the future?

Today, the Andonian material is not as important for historians as it had been decades ago. The documentation obtained from the Ottoman and other archives has replaced Andonian's publication in current debates. Certainly, Andonian's material could be a ‘smoking gun' if proven to be true. But that is not the focus of current research. The Armenian Genocide is not validated or understood through a single or a few documents. The crime was highly complex and we need to process large volumes of evidence from a variety of sources. This takes time and is a slow process given the lack of available funding. The identification of Naim Bey is an important step in the right direction but it won't be the last important new finding. It strongly underlines the importance of Ottoman documentation and work in Turkish archives.

Lastly, since you identified Naim Bey, can we at least know his real name? Did Aram Andonian use a pseudonym in order to keep his real identity a secret?

Garabet, I know why you ask that question? I will elucidate Naim Bey's identity issue through a special lecture with document presentation on my next visit to the Los Angeles area. But for now let me answer by this: It gets even better than you think. Andonian's Naim Bey's name is NAIM BEY.

Interviewr's Note:

The following footnotes are extracted from online sources to explain a couple of points that were very briefly mentioned in the interview and needed some clarification. The first is from "Wikipedia," while the second is from the web-site of the "Assembly of American Turkish Associations."

Endnotes:

[1] The Memoirs of Naim Bey: Turkish Official Documents Relating to the Deportation and the Massacres of Armenians also known as "Talaat Pasha Telegrams" written by Aram Andonian and published in London by Hodder & Stoughton, in 1920, originally in English, and later in a French version. This was the first book publication by Aram Andonian. The book lists several documents, the telegrams, which are purported to constitute evidence that the Armenian Genocide was formally implemented as Ottoman Empire policy. [Wikipedia]

[2]  The Andonian "Documents" Attributed to Talaat Pasha are Forgeries! By Prof. Dr. Türkkaya Ataöv: A most recent (1983) publication by the Turkish Historical Society and written by Sinasi Orel and Süreyya Yuca, as a scholarly evaluation of the so-called "Talaat Pasha telegrams" is most important for the proper assessment of the "Armenian issue". This momentous book of unusually competent erudition critically examines all of the documents produced in the English and French editions of the Aram Andonian book, which hitherto served as the basis of many arguments of some Armenians and like-minded foreign writers. This impressive new Turkish volume sheds light on a most important aspect of the topic in question. No commentator can now stand on solid grounds without reading it and giving it due attention. I do not think that previous arguments, set forth by a group of Armenian publicists for the last sixty-three years, can be repeated. One judges it as a moral obligation to inform all concerned that it will no longer be possible to continue appraising the "Talaat Pasha telegrams" in the same manner that they have been assessed before, without first seeing weighty evidence offered in this volume of 344 pages. Without going into minute but nevertheless meaningful details, I may summarize the evidence as pointing to the assertion that the Andonian "documents" are fake. The "documents", first printed as early as 1920, have been utilized by certain circles as "proof" of deep Ottoman Government involvement in the loss of life of Armenians in 1915. Aram Andonian was a hitherto-unknown Armenian who allegedly received those manuscripts (including the assumed orders of Talaat Pasha) from a minor Ottoman official called Naim Bey, working in the Rehabilitation Office in Aleppo, Syria. The work based on them was published in Paris, London and Boston. The recent Turkish publication treats each and every so-called "document" painstakingly in terms of both form and content and offers the suggestion that they are counterfeit. The fabrication of fraudulent documents is not uncommon in history. The falsity of "Hitler diaries" was lately proven within a matter of weeks. The so called "Zinoviev telegram"-- that had created a public stir in England in the early 1920's-- is now accepted as a forgery. [http://www.ataa.org/reference/andonian-ataov.html]

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Here is how the online incyclopaedia WIKIPEDIA describes the Howks vs. Doves game. By the way, it is also known as the chicken game and involves other new Political science theories that I mention below. Follow this link:

Chicken (game)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Jump to: navigation, search For other uses, see Chicken (disambiguation).

Chicken and the Hawk-dove game are two influential game theory models of escalation. The principle of these games are that while it is preferable not to yield to the opponent, if neither player yields, then outcome is the worst possible one for both players. Mathematically, the two games are identical,^[1] "Chicken", is most prevalent in the political science and economics literatures, while the "Hawk-Dove game" is most commonly used in the biological literature.

Both Chicken and Hawk-Dove are anti-coordination games, games in which it is mutually beneficial for the players to play different strategies. It is the opposite of a coordination game, where playing the same strategy Pareto dominates playing different strategies. The underlying concept is that players use a shared resource. In coordination games, sharing the resource creates a benefit for all: the resource is non-rivalrous, and the shared usage creates positive externalities. In anti-coordination games the resource is rivalrous but non-excludable and sharing comes at a cost (or negative externality).

Contents [hide] 1 Chicken 1.1 Chicken and the prisoner's dilemma 2 Hawk-Dove game 2.1 Hawk-Dove game variants 2.2 Strategy Polymorphism vs Strategy mixing in the Hawk-Dove game 3 Symmetry breaking 3.1 Correlated equilibrium and Chicken 3.2 Uncorrelated asymmetries and solutions to the Hawk Dove game 4 Best response mapping 5 Replicator dynamics 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

 

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In modern political Science game theories have evolved in order to facilitate solutions to problems. Hence there is the prisoner's game, the prisoner's dillema, etc... There is also this Hawks vs. Doves game, which is very centric to our political problems today. "Howks" always win, while "Doves" retreat. In order to understand the theory behind this game I would urge my visitors to check the following URL:

http://www.holycross.edu/departments/biology/kprestwi/behavior/ESS/HvD_intro.html#strategies

I hope you enjoy this theoretical retreat and start thinking about ways to pacify the hamkish politics of our era.

G. Moumdjian 

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Why Hawks Win

By Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Renshon Page 1 of 1

January/February 2007

Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. A look at why the tough guys win more than they should. Elizabeth Glassanos/FOREIGN POLICYShould Hawks Win? Matthew Continetti of the conservative Weekly Standard and Matthew Yglesias of the liberal American Prospect square off in an FP web exclusive debate. Kahneman and Renshon respond to the debate here.National leaders get all sorts of advice in times of tension and conflict. But often the competing counsel can be broken down into two basic categories. On one side are the hawks: They tend to favor coercive action, are more willing to use military force, and are more likely to doubt the value of offering concessions. When they look at adversaries overseas, they often see unremittingly hostile regimes who only understand the language of force. On the other side are the doves, skeptical about the usefulness of force and more inclined to contemplate political solutions. Where hawks see little in their adversaries but hostility, doves often point to subtle openings for dialogue. As the hawks and doves thrust and parry, one hopes that the decision makers will hear their arguments on the merits and weigh them judiciously before choosing a course of action. Don't count on it. Modern psychology suggests that policymakers come to the debate predisposed to believe their hawkish advisors more than the doves. There are numerous reasons for the burden of persuasion that doves carry, and some of them have nothing to do with politics or strategy. In fact, a bias in favor of hawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fabric of the human mind. Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics. For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example. In fact, when we constructed a list of the biases uncovered in 40 years of psychological research, we were startled by what we found: All the biases in our list favor hawks. These psychological impulses-only a few of which we discuss here-incline national leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive them, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations. In short, these biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end. None of this means that hawks are always wrong. One need only recall the debates between British hawks and doves before World War II to remember that doves can easily find themselves on the wrong side of history. More generally, there are some strong arguments for deliberately instituting a hawkish bias. It is perfectly reasonable, for example, to demand far more than a 50-50 chance of being right before we accept the promises of a dangerous adversary. The biases that we have examined, however, operate over and beyond such rules of prudence and are not the product of thoughtful consideration. Our conclusion is not that hawkish advisors are necessarily wrong, only that they are likely to be more persuasive than they deserve to be. VISION PROBLEMS Several well-known laboratory demonstrations have examined the way people assess their adversary's intelligence, willingness to negotiate, and hostility, as well as the way they view their own position. The results are sobering. Even when people are aware of the context and possible constraints on another party's behavior, they often do not factor it in when assessing the other side's motives. Yet, people still assume that outside observers grasp the constraints on their own behavior. With armies on high alert, it's an instinct that leaders can ill afford to ignore. Imagine, for example, that you have been placed in a room and asked to watch a series of student speeches on the policies of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. You've been told in advance that the students were assigned the task of either attacking or supporting Chávez and had no choice in the matter. Now, suppose that you are then asked to assess the political leanings of these students. Shrewd observers, of course, would factor in the context and adjust their assessments accordingly. A student who gave an enthusiastic pro-Chávez speech was merely doing what she was told, not revealing anything about her true attitudes. In fact, many experiments suggest that people would overwhelmingly rate the pro-Chávez speakers as more leftist. Even when alerted to context that should affect their judgment, people tend to ignore it. Instead, they attribute the behavior they see to the person's nature, character, or persistent motives. This bias is so robust and common that social psychologists have given it a lofty title: They call it the fundamental attribution error. The effect of this failure in conflict situations can be pernicious. A policymaker or diplomat involved in a tense exchange with a foreign government is likely to observe a great deal of hostile behavior by that country's representatives. Some of that behavior may indeed be the result of deep hostility. But some of it is simply a response to the current situation as it is perceived by the other side. What is ironic is that individuals who attribute others' behavior to deep hostility are quite likely to explain away their own behavior as a result of being "pushed into a corner" by an adversary. The tendency of both sides of a dispute to view themselves as reacting to the other's provocative behavior is a familiar feature of marital quarrels, and it is found as well in international conflicts. During the run-up to World War I, the leaders of every one of the nations that would soon be at war perceived themselves as significantly less hostile than their adversaries. If people are often poorly equipped to explain the behavior of their adversaries, they are also bad at understanding how they appear to others. This bias can manifest itself at critical stages in international crises, when signals are rarely as clear as diplomats and generals believe them to be. Consider the Korean War, just one example of how misperception and a failure to appreciate an adversary's assessment of intentions can lead to hawkish outcomes. In October 1950, as coalition forces were moving rapidly up the Korean Peninsula, policymakers in Washington were debating how far to advance and attempting to predict China's response. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson was convinced that "no possible shred of evidence could have existed in the minds of the Chinese Communists about the non-threatening intentions of the forces of the United Nations." Because U.S. leaders knew that their intentions toward China were not hostile, they assumed that the Chinese knew this as well. Washington was, therefore, incapable of interpreting the Chinese intervention as a reaction to a threat. Instead, the Americans interpreted the Chinese reaction as an expression of fundamental hostility toward the United States. Some historians now believe that Chinese leaders may in fact have seen advancing Allied forces as a threat to their regime. CARELESSLY OPTIMISTIC Excessive optimism is one of the most significant biases that psychologists have identified. Psychological research has shown that a large majority of people believe themselves to be smarter, more attractive, and more talented than average, and they commonly overestimate their future success. People are also prone to an "illusion of control": They consistently exaggerate the amount of control they have over outcomes that are important to them-even when the outcomes are in fact random or determined by other forces. It is not difficult to see that this error may have led American policymakers astray as they laid the groundwork for the ongoing war in Iraq. Indeed, the optimistic bias and the illusion of control are particularly rampant in the run-up to conflict. A hawk's preference for military action over diplomatic measures is often built upon the assumption that victory will come easily and swiftly. Predictions that the Iraq war would be a "cakewalk," offered up by some supporters of that conflict, are just the latest in a long string of bad hawkish predictions. After all, Washington elites treated the first major battle of the Civil War as a social outing, so sure were they that federal troops would rout rebel forces. General Noel de Castelnau, chief of staff for the French Army at the outset of World War I, declared, "Give me 700,000 men and I will conquer Europe." In fact, almost every decision maker involved in what would become the most destructive war in history up to that point predicted not only victory for his side, but a relatively quick and easy victory. These delusions and exaggerations cannot be explained away as a product of incomplete or incorrect information. Optimistic generals will be found, usually on both sides, before the beginning of every military conflict. If optimism is the order of the day when it comes to assessing one's own chances in armed conflict, however, gloom usually prevails when evaluating another side's concessions. Psychologically, we are receptive not only to hawks' arguments for war but also to their case against negotiated solutions. The intuition that something is worth less simply because the other side has offered it is referred to in academic circles as "reactive devaluation." The very fact that a concession is offered by somebody perceived as hostile undermines the content of the proposal. What was said matters less than who said it. And so, for example, American policymakers would likely look very skeptically on any concessions made by the regime in Tehran. Some of that skepticism could be the rational product of past experience, but some of it may also result from unconscious-and not necessarily rational-devaluation. Evidence suggests that this bias is a significant stumbling block in negotiations between adversaries. In one experiment, Israeli Jews evaluated an actual Israeli-authored peace plan less favorably when it was attributed to the Palestinians than when it was attributed to their own government. Pro-Israel Americans saw a hypothetical peace proposal as biased in favor of Palestinians when authorship was attributed to Palestinians, but as "evenhanded" when they were told it was authored by Israelis. DOUBLE OR NOTHING It is apparent that hawks often have the upper hand as decision makers wrestle with questions of war and peace. And those advantages do not disappear as soon as the first bullets have flown. As the strategic calculus shifts to territory won or lost and casualties suffered, a new idiosyncrasy in human decision making appears: our deep-seated aversion to cutting our losses. Imagine, for example, the choice between: Option A: A sure loss of $890 Option B: A 90 percent chance to lose $1,000 and a 10 percent chance to lose nothing. In this situation, a large majority of decision makers will prefer the gamble in Option B, even though the other choice is statistically superior. People prefer to avoid a certain loss in favor of a potential loss, even if they risk losing significantly more. When things are going badly in a conflict, the aversion to cutting one's losses, often compounded by wishful thinking, is likely to dominate the calculus of the losing side. This brew of psychological factors tends to cause conflicts to endure long beyond the point where a reasonable observer would see the outcome as a near certainty. Many other factors pull in the same direction, notably the fact that for the leaders who have led their nation to the brink of defeat, the consequences of giving up will usually not be worse if the conflict is prolonged, even if they are worse for the citizens they lead. U.S. policymakers faced this dilemma at many points in Vietnam and today in Iraq. To withdraw now is to accept a sure loss, and that option is deeply unattractive. The option of hanging on will therefore be relatively attractive, even if the chances of success are small and the cost of delaying failure is high. Hawks, of course, can cite many moments in recent history when adversaries actually were unremittingly hostile and when force produced the desired result or should have been applied much earlier. The clear evidence of a psychological bias in favor of aggressive outcomes cannot decide the perennial debates between the hawks and the doves. It won't point the international community in a clear direction on Iran or North Korea. But understanding the biases that most of us harbor can at least help ensure that the hawks don't win more arguments than they should. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate in economics and Eugene Higgins professor of psychology and professor of public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Jonathan Renshon is a doctoral student in the Department of Government at Harvard University and author of Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Prevention (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2006).

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