By: Hambersom Aghbashian
Murat Gökhan Bardakçı (born 1955) is a Turkish journalist working on Ottoman history and Turkish music history. He is also a columnist in Habertürk newspaper. Bardakçı was trained in Turkish classical music in tanbur and singing at first, with his primary interests directed more towards theory and musical history later. He published several researches on musical history . With the start of a journalistic career in Hürriyet, he expanded the scope of his writings on Ottoman and general Islamic history, with marked emphasis on the 19th and the early-20th centuries. Two of his books on the end of the Ottoman dynasty, “Son Osmanlılar” (The Last Ottomans) and Şahbaba, a biography of Mehmed VI Vahideddin, became best-sellers . Murat Bardakçı is the editor of Talat Pasha’s Black Book *.The 1915-1916 resettlements cited in Talaat Pasha’s Black Book of 702,905 Turks from regions under threat of occupation by Russian forces and of 924,158 Armenians in accordance with 27 May 1915 Tehcir Law are qualified as exposing the genocide. (1)

The proportion of the Armenian population deported and missing in 1917 according to Interior Minister Talaat Pasha’s Black Book is shown in black. (2)

” The New York Times ” correspondence Sabrina Tavernise , wrote on March 8, 2009 from Istanbul , “According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916. The documents, given to Mr. Bardakci by Talaat’s widow, Hayriye, before she died in 1983, include lists of population figures. Before 1915, 1,256,000 Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, according to the documents. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later, Mr. Bardakci said.” (3)

According to ” http://www.gomidas.org/campaigns , ” A number of Turkish commentators criticized Bardakci’s analysis of Talaat’s statistics, but they were not in a position to take their criticism further. Meanwhile, official Turkish historians attacked Bardakci and played down Talaat’s statistics on Armenians as unimportant. Moreover it mentioned that “Talaat Pasha’s Report on the Armenian Genocide poses a serious challenge to deniers of the Armenian Genocide. The document was found in Talaat’s private papers, and the authenticity of its content can be established with Ottoman records in Turkish archives today. This report puts the number of Ottoman Armenians in 1914 at over 1,500,000 people. This figure is significantly more than the number of Ottoman Armenians claimed by official Turkish historians. The report also finds over one million of these Armenians missing by 1917. “(4)

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*Talat Pasha’s Black Book (printed as “Talat Paşa’nın Evrak-ı Metrukesi”) refers to the handwritten notes printed in a personal notebook form by the Ottoman Minister of Interior on the relocations of both Turkish-Muslim and Armenian Ottoman citizens during World War I. It is disclosed in 2005 by the Turkish journalist Murat Bardakçı. The book was handed over to him by Talat Pasha’s widow, Hayriye Talat Bafralı. Along with a batch of other documents comprising letters he had sent her and telegrammes exchanged between Committee of Union and Progress members. In April 2006, Bardakçı re-edited the black book in full, adding parts that were missing in the first publication with the name “Talat Paşa’nın Evrak-ı Metrukesi”.

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1- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murat_Bardak%C3%A7%C4%B1

2- http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2009-03-13-talaat-pasha-s-black-book-document

3- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/europe/09turkey.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

4-http://www.gomidas.org/campaigns

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