A Critique on Dr. Ernesto Verdeja's article titled as " On Genocide: Five Contributing Factors"

Dr. Ernesto Verdeja (everdeja@wesleyan.edu) at Wesleyan University, wrote an article titled as "On Genocide: Five Contributing Factors" in 2002. In his paper, he defines genocide as a modern-day plague of human agents causing and suffering in the name of utopic ideology. He draws his framework aroud five contributing factors on Genocide; segmented society, rapid social change, exclusivist political ideology, state-backed mass murders and international disorder. On the other hand, he issues other complementary elemets into the main structure of his hypothesis: Scale and duration of Genocide action. In addition to this, he subsidized the structure of his article putting such cases including Armenian allegations into another section inside. Whilst the article was conducted fine defining the concept of Genocide and the scope on its roots, he fails on his academic principles by rejecting academician's objective interpretations on such a research. Moreover, the biggest problem in his case is his desire to rely on artificial data and to judge on a nation's history, as prejudice sparks him to advocate allegations.

Technical matters, particularly, inside the Armenian case prevails around tripartiate claims. First claim is that "In 1915, the Ottoman government carried out the first major genocide of the twentieth century". This claim has an irrelevant reference with no fact, pointing out another historical event of time. Indeed, articles approved by International Science Index must be based on strong facts and investigation. Second claim stems from the "idea" of Ottoman Policy caused deaths of nearly 1.5 Million Armenians through a combination of Large-scale massacres and even larger scale deportations to the Syrian Desert. Unsurprisingly, second claim is not also convincing as well as the first assertion. However, he insists on the figure of 1.5 Million is the standart citation among scholars in this field. In fact, there is still vehement debate among international scholars and colleagues on the number mentioned above is either backed by substantial historical research and investigation or a reflection of historical aspersion. Finally, the last claim is that "the antagonism between Turks and Armenians was rooted earlier than 17th century". Moreover, the claim is backed by another articulation of that "Armanians had been the first in Anatolia to adopt and practice the Cristianity". In essence, it is very difficult to tie up religious difference with antagonism as Cristian statesmen had been ranked high level at Sultan's palace and as church had been free to adopt its ruling according to Cristianity. In fact today the antagonism between Turks and Armenians was not rooted earlier than 17th century but the end of 19th century as Russians attempt to region.

Sincerely, I invite Dr Vardeja to Turkey to investigate on Ottoman archieves and also invite him in shortest time to check his article and correct the mistakes and apologize for what he insisted earlier...

by Ümit HACIOĞLU