Témoignages de rescapés et connaissance du génocide de 1915-1916

Abstract

Historians have overwhelmingly relied on official sources and foreign witnesses’ (diplomats, missionaries) accounts in reconstructing the history of the Armenian genocide. They have tended to distrust and neglect victims’ testimonies, even though some of them had been publicised in the midst of the First World War. This article provides an account of the three main corpuses of survivor testimony which were gathered during the immediate post-war years in Transcaucasia, Constantinople, as well as in Aleppo and Paris. Various Armenian organisations created such archival collections as a means of lending support to national political claims and interests in the context of the ensuing peace negotiations and anticipated trials. This article also examines the longstanding reluctance of historians to integrate victims’ testimonies into their analyses. Focusing on the collection of testimonies compiled by Aram Andonian, the authors call attention to the important contribution of these sources to the history of the Armenian genocide.

Keywords

• historiography
• testimonies
• genocide
• Armenian patriarchate of Constantinople
• Nubar Library
• Arshag Alboyadjian