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Senior Fellow and Co-Chairman Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security, Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) Ph.D. in international relations from Columbia University.
Dr. Michael Radu is FPRI Senior Fellow and Co-Chairman of its Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security. He joined FPRI in 1983, and has since studied terrorist and insurgent groups worldwide. Various agencies of the U.S. and other governments have called upon his expertise, and news media around the world regularly use him as an expert source, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, and Associated Press. [info]
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Source: The Dangers of the Armenian Genocide Resolution, 2007
"Central to the issue is the definition of events during World War I in the Ottoman Empire. A few key facts are clear. One is that many hundreds of thousands (over a million, according to the Armenian lobby) Armenians in Eastern Anatolia died at that time, of exhaustion and famine as well as killed by Kurdish villagers and Ottoman soldiers. It is also a fact that the Armenian community and its leadership in Anatolia at the time took arms against the Ottomans, in open alliance with the latter’s traditional enemy, Russia. Invading Russian troops and Armenian irregulars, whose occupation of the city of Van was the immediate cause of the deportation of Armenians, also engaged in indiscriminate violence, albeit on a smaller scale, against the mostly Kurdish population of the area; and all that during a war in which the very fate of the Ottoman Empire was being decided.
Whether the Ottoman authorities were guilty of "genocide" in a legal sense is doubtful, since the term itself did not exist in international law until after World War II; in a moral sense, doubts could also be raised, since if "genocide" means intentional destruction of a specific group because of its nationality, religion, race, etc., the survival of the Armenian community of Istanbul, outside the conflict area, is hard to explain. But leaving all this aside, there is one reality that cannot be ignored. That is that whatever happened in 1915 happened under the Ottoman Empire, not under the Turkish Republic, established in 1923. Thus contemporary Turkey is no more responsible for the events of 1915 than Russia is for Stalin’s annexation of the Baltic states or the Federal Republic of Germany for the pre-1914 colonial abuses of the Wilhelmine Empire."
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