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Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2003 16:13:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Erdal Sener, PhD ** Turkish Forum **" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: TURKISH FORUM NETWORK- WORLD PARLEMENTS AND PRESS: ;
Subject: ** TRUTH BEHIND THE ALLEGED ARMENIAN GENOCIDE (fwd)
TRUTH BEHIND THE ALLEGED ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
H.E. Altay Cengizer
It is a fact that after nearly 700 years of peaceful coexistence
throughout which the Turkish and Armenian communities enriched each other
culturally, socially, economically and otherwise, all the while enjoying
exemplary mutual respect - http://www.turkishforum.com/armenian/ - for the
want of which we today have to witness ethnic cleansing and carnage in
various parts of the world - the two communities saw their relationship
fall apart at the turn of the last century at the instigation of the
imperialist Powers of the time.
There are hundreds of scholarly works describing the ill-fated designs of
the imperialist Powers of the time on the already debilitated Ottoman
Empire. http://www.eraren.org/eng/boorev/book_review_osmanliermbuyukdevdipkurbani.htm
I would like to refer to I. V. Bestuzhev's article entitled "Russian
Foreign Policy, February-June 1914", which appeared in 1914: The coming of
the First World War, edited by Walter Laqueur and George Mosse: " The move
towards a rapprochement with Turkey after the Balkan Wars turned out to be
highly unpopular in Russian bourgeois-landlord circles, which were now
coming out in favor of a final division of the Ottoman Empire. With this
object in view, an entire system of measures was Turkey. It contemplated
the formation of an autonomous Armenia under Russian protection as the
most powerful means of exerting pressure. "
Eventually, thousands of armed Armenians did in fact spearhead a massive
Russian invasion of eastern Anatolia, faithfully fulfilling the promise
given to Tsar Nicholas II by the President of the Armenian national Bureau
on 5 November 1914 in Tbilisi: " From all countries Armenians are hurrying
to enter the ranks of the glorious Russian army, with their blood to serve
the victory of the Russian arms." http://www.turkses.com/issues/ermeni/telegraph.htm
The Armenian rebellion began in late 1914. More than 15,000 Anatolian
Armenians who went to the Russian South Caucasus for training returned to
join the local rebels. Telegraph lines were cut; roads through strategic
mountain passes were seized; hundreds of Ottoman officials were attacked,
particularly recruiting officers, throughout the east; outlying villages
were assaulted. In the service of the Tsarist armies, they seized the city
of Van in March 1915from a weak Ottoman garrison and proceeded to kill
60000 Turks. http://www.turkses.com/issues/ermeni/An_armenian_Massacre.htm
Boghos Nubar, one of the foremost leaders of the Armenians was telling the
truth in his letter to The Times of London, published on 30 January 1919,
begging the allies at the Paris Conference to recognize the"service"of the
Armenians. http://www.turkishforum.com/armenian/letter_boghos_nubar.html
The Armenians have been, since the beginning of the war, de facto
belligerents, since they fought alongside the Allies on all fronts, in
Palestine and Syria, where the Armenian volunteers recruited by the
Armenian National Delegation at the request of the French Government, made
up more than 40,000 of their volunteers offered resistance to the Turkish
armies."
It is no secret that on the second day of August 1914, the long-running
sense of malaise in Europe came to a head and open and secret alliances
designed to preserve or to overturn the balance of power in Europe came
into operation, starting the massacre of the peoples of Europe. The
Ottoman Empire, during the years preceding the outbreak of the First World
War, did not take part in the alliance system that wrecked Europe. To be
precise, it was the Ottoman Empire itself, which was regarded as easy prey
within the wider imperialist designs and aspirations of the major Powers.
The Empire was not among the six ranking European Powers of the time, and
it had been under attack since July 1911.
At the time, nations living within the fold of the multi-ethnic empires,
including the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy and the Russian Empire,
generally sought to better their lot, as nationalism was the fashion of
the day. However, the Armenian nationalistic movement was captured by its
war-mongering elements ready to start armed rebellion and employ terrorist
tactics. http://www.zum.de/psm/div/osman/mowat27.php3
Power vying for the territories of the Ottoman Empire indeed found a
willing collaborator in the ultra Nationalist Armenian leadership, which,
at such a historic juncture, forsook the true and lasting interests of
their people, threw all the peoples of eastern Anatolia into imminent
danger knowingly risking widespread communal violence in their haste to
carve out an independent Armenia.
http://www.turkishforum.com/armenian/p157-160.lager1.html
One should ask to what extent the Armenian leadership of the time bloodied
its hands by totally disregarding the dangers inherent in fomenting
violence and revolution at a time of war and became responsible for the
tragedy that befell the peoples of Anatolia, including those on whose they
pretended to speak. Clearly, the actions of the Armenian revels
exacerbated the growing division and mutual fear between the Turks and
Armenians of the Ottoman East. After all, outright terror was the chosen
weapon of Armenian rebels, and the lands they coveted were overwhelmingly
Turkish and Muslim in population.
http://www.turkses.com/issues/ermeni/documents_of_the_massacres_by_armenians_index.htm
The Armenian falsifiers today commemorate 24 April 1915 as an august date
in the history of their struggle, conveniently forgetting that the Allied
fleet had arrived at the head of the Gallipolis peninsula only three days
before, on 21 April 1915, http://www.gallipoli-association.org/ presenting
a tremendous threat to the country whose citizens of Armenian origin, at
the ranks of Foreign Minister, ambassadors, and thousand of accomplished
people in all walks of life, along with the peasantry, were leading an
uncomplicated life until the call to arms and rebellion wrecked stability.
As a matter of fact, the Armenian falsifiers conveniently disregard so
many facts essential to a humane, spirited, forward-looking and
constructive understanding of the tragic events which took place within
the gold of a dying and partly occupied country, that as a result, only
hatred and rage, unfortunately, govern their general attitude towards the
Turks.
In an article that appeared in the New York Review of Books on 8 April
1999, the eminent writer Ian Buruma highlighted some controversial aspects
of the focus on identity through victimization in contemporary society.
Buruma does not negate the memory of suffering, but he questions "when a
culture, ethnic, religious or national community bases its communal
identity almost entirely on the sentimental solidarity of remembered
victim hood, on the way lies historical myopia and, in extreme
circumstances, even vendetta". The problem, as Buruma sees it, is that
this "sense of victimization impedes understanding among people; it cannot
result in mutual understanding".
It is because of this predicament that the falsifiers would not see that
the Armenians who lived on cities where Ottoman control remained intact in
western Anatolia were deported nor molested; that when Tsarist armies
attacked and occupied eastern Anatolia, more than a million Turks and
Muslims had to fleas refugees and ere attacked on the roads by Armenian
bands; that there was a collapse of authority in eastern Anatolia in the
wake of the Tsarist assaults; that killings and massacres were done
mutually.
The Armenian falsifiers would rather prefer to claim that if any single
Turk was killed during these tragic times, then that was strictly
self-defense, that no civilian Turks were murdered, raped or pillaged
whereas even the Tsarist officers were horrified to see the frenzy of
massacring defenseless Turks perpetrated by armed Armenian gangs and
paramilitaries in the most vicious manner.
http://www.turkishforum.com/armenian/revolutionary_quotes.html
The Armenian falsifiers would reject the description of the above-cited
tragic events as civil war and inter-communal violence, because they would
like us to ignore the Turkish suffering, solely focus on Armenian
suffering.
As one of the most respected scholars on the history of the Middle East,
Professor Bernard Lewis, wrote for Ha'aretz on 23 January 1998:
"The Armenians want to benefit from both worlds. On the one hand, they
speak with pride of their struggle against Ottoman despotism, while on the
other hand, they compare their tragedy with the Jewish Holocaust."
Even one dead is too many, Turkish or Armenian! But it was a civil war
within a world war, where all sides party to the conflict suffered
terribly. In the same area, at the time, an under the same conditions,
nearly 3 million Turks and other Muslims perished due to killings,
starvation and epidemics.
http://www.turkses.com/issues/ermeni/documents_of_the_massacres_by_armenians.htm
In bringing forth the question of guilt for this all-encompassing human
disaster, fabrications of documents have been taken as truth and authentic
documents have been ignored as a result of nationalistic Armenian
activism. http://www.turkishforum.com/armenian/10q/q7.html
Unsubstantiated assertions and wartime propaganda have been accepted.
Whereas the brief of wartime propaganda have been accepted, whereas the
brief wartime propagandists was simply to make the enemies look as bad as
possible, and make themselves and their friends look as good as could be.
This is why the Armenian falsifiers still use the tainted and one-sided
documents distributed by the wartime British propaganda machine prepared
by the War Propaganda Bureau stationed throughout the war years at
Wellington House in London.
Likewise, historians who attempted to find out the truth have been called
" Genocide deniers ". A climate has been created in which historians fear
to examine history because of feared personal results. Politicians have
decided that they can legislate history, even though they know little or
nothing of that history. Slogans have replaced historical judgment.
The Armenian falsifiers are yet to produce a single authentic Ottoman
Government dispatch ordering the killing of Armenians. The alleged "
genocide of 1,5 million Armenians " should have left countless pieces of
evidence that would have saved the Armenian falsifiers from relying upon
wartime propaganda, one-sided stories of Christians Armenians and not the
Muslim Turks, as well as depending solely upon the truly heart-breaking
stories of the survivors. It would help them immensely to hear the Turkish
side of this argument instead of calling for honoring some of the dead and
not all of the dead.
http://www.turkishforum.com/armenian/history_as_poison_and_antidote.html
The Permanent Representative of Armenia challenges us that we are " not in
a position to disprove with the help of historical data the irrefutable
fact of the Genocide ". I would take this statement as the normal outcome
of their particular worldview. If the facts do not fit their theories, the
falsifier nationalists would ignore them and look for other ways to make
their case. If relying on wartime propaganda and totally ignoring the
massacres of the Turks at the hands of the Armenian armed bands proves
inadequate at the end of the day to convince those who rightfully demand
robust historical data, evidence and analysis, then the falsifiers would
say, as is the case for the Permanent Representative of Armenia, that "
Ankara attempts to revive the medieval practice of blaming for the
violence the very victims of the violence, in the hope that the endless
repetition of the lie will make it true ". After all, in the pursuit of
radical nationalist agendas, there are no limits set for committing
intellectual crimes.
Turkey has never blamed thousands of innocent Armenian individuals, women
and children who perished in that era for finding themselves unaided and
at peril because of a radical politics in which they did not take part.
But we do blame the so-called nationalist revolutionaries who have
fomented war, sided by invading enemy armies, killed innocent people
because of their race and religion, thus beginning the action in the full
knowledge that they were thereby achieving their objective of creating two
warring sides. The majority of the Armenians had no wish for war, but they
had been driven into it by their senseless, revolutionary, radical and
nationalist leadership acting hand in hand with armed bands.
We do blame those who refuse to this day to see the Turkish suffering;
propagate that the Turks were and are evil personified; fail to take
honorably their part of the onus; refuse even to glance at documents which
do not fit their world view, and which do not promote their own political
ends.
I can further, in the words of the Permanent Representative of Armenia, "
Deliberately falsify and juggle with historical and political realities ".
The British were the closest party to these events, because they were the
principal occupying Power of the Ottoman Empire and its capital, Istanbul.
They had full control of the Ottoman Empire and its capital, Istanbul.
They had full control of the Ottoman Archives. As such, the British led an
in-depth investigation against 144 highly placed Ottoman officials
including Ministers, who were charged with war crimes against the
Armenians. Subsequently, 56 out of the 144 accused were deported to the
island of Malta to stand trial. After a wide-scale and frantic search of
all the archival material, Sir Horace Rumbold, the British High
Commissioner in Istanbul, wrote to London that the " evidence against
circumstances, the prosecution finds itself under grave disadvantage". But
he added, "He hoped that the American Government could supply a large
amount of documentary information ". (FO/3716500/E/3557)
In failing to find any legally acceptable evidence against the deportees,
Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary at the time, informed Geddes,
the British Ambassador at Washington, that there was " considerable
difficulty " in establishing proof of guilt against the Turkish detainees
at Malta, and requested him " to ascertain if the United States Government
is in possession of any evidence that could be of value for the purpose of
prosecution". (FO/371/6502/E.5845)
On 13 July 1921, the British Embassy at the Washington gave the following
reply:
"I regret to inform Your Lordship that there was nothing therein which
could be used as evidence against the Turks who are being detained for
trial at Malta. Having regard to this stipulation and the fact that the
reports in the possession of the Department of State do not appear on a
any case to contain evidence against these Turks which would be useful for
the purposes of corroborating information already in possession of His
Majesty's Government, I fear that nothing is to be hoped from addressing
any further inquiries in this matter". (FO/371/6504/E.8519)
Subsequently, all charges against the Ottoman detainees were dismissed.
More recently, on 14 April 1999, Foreign Office spokesperson Baroness
Ramsay of Cartvale said the following:
"The British Government had condemned the massacres at the time. But in
the absence of unequivocal evidence that the Ottoman Administration took a
specific decision to eliminate the Armenians under their control at that
time, British Governments have not recognized those events as indications
of genocide. Nor do we believe it is the business of Governments of today
to review events of over 80 years ago, with a view to pronouncing them."
Furthermore, acting on behalf of the British Government, Baroness Scotland
of Asthal said the following in a written response on 7 February 2001:
" The Government, in line with previous British Governments, have judged
the evidence not to be sufficiently unequivocal to persuade us that these
events should be categorized as genocide as defined by the 1948 United
Nations Convention on Genocide, a Convention which was drafted in response
to the Holocaust and is not retrospective in application. The
interpretation of events in eastern Anatolia in 1915-1916 is still the
subject of genuine debate among historians."
So much for " the process of achieving international recognition of the
Genocide of Armenians which has appreciably gained momentum " according to
the Permanent Representative of Armenia. One should ask why a handful of
30-plus deputies out of nearly 600 parliamentarians were present when the
French Parliament voted on the so-called Genocide Resolution. The
Permanent Representative of Armenia should keep in mind the future when
the realities of a terrible war in which millions on all sides died will
no longer be ignored, and when a very different picture will emerge as
politics are avoided and the standard procedures of historical analysis
are applied to this question. It will be seen then that there is a vast
difference between history written to defend one-sided nationalist
convictions and what true historical analysis should be.
Indeed, in presenting the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of
Genocide for ratification, the Secretary-General of the United Nations
emphasized that genocide is a crime of "specific intent", requiring
conclusive proof.
I hope that the above information contributes to the correct perception of
the First World era events in eastern Anatolia.
Altay Gengizer
Additional Referance:
http://www.turkishforum.com/armenian/
http://www.zum.de/psm/div/tuerkei/primaer.php3
http://www.turkishforum.com/armenian/armenian_summary.html
http://www.eraren.org/eng/boorev/book_review_osmdonerm.htm
http://www.eraren.org/eng/boorev/book_review_secretofcristian.htm
Annex to the letter dated 29 June 2001 from the Permanent Representative
of Turkey to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General
{Original: English}
Turkishforum added the letter web references, selected from various
Sources, with the intent of enhancing the understanding of readers.
This letter will be web posted to " Sozde Ermeni Soykirimi" section of
http://www.turkishforum.com/mesajpanosu/messages/board-topics.html In
which you will find more solid references and letters explaining the
Armenian Falsifications of History in detail.
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