Armenia’s Ambassador to Canada, Armen Yeganian, mixes half-truths with fiction, omits inconvenient facts, distorts others, and throws in some fabrications for good measure, and voilà, you have concocted the perfect genocide! (“Facts on Armenian Genocide”, Toronto Star, Mar 11 2013.)
Proof, you ask? Well, look at the conclusion by a bunch of guys who call themselves International Center for Transitional Justice, impressive name for an Armenian invention. So, quick, get the rope!
“But I am not convinced” you say and ask for more proof. They go, well, check out the statements of the “Genocide Scholars”, another invention by the notoriously anti-Turkish Zoryan Institute designed to lend credibility to a bunch of retired mostly “non-historian” groupies.
You still want more proof? Well, look at these photos they go and they show you a bunch of mud-like black and white photos where you can hardly notice some tents or a unidentified line of people walking, all claimed to be Armenians, of course. That must be genocide then, right?
You say you have more photos like that on the Turkish side showing the tragedy of slaughtered or marching Muslims, expelled at gun point from the Caucaus and the Balkans from 1912 to 1922. Those photos show people in distress, not genocide. Besides, the photos showing Muslim suffering is mostly censored in the West (see www.ethocide.com for a taste of it) in order to make Armenian claims stick out and, well, stick…
Then the Armenians go on to tell you that more than two dozen states and many international organizations recognized the Armenian claims as genocide. You take a good look at that list and do a little research of your own and what do you see? Vocal Armenian minorities relentlessly pestering their politicians for the recognition of their wild claims as genocide. Case in point, Uruguay. Uruguay? That is an expert on the Turkish-Armenian conflict of 1915? Then it dawns on you: could all this be the work of Armenian immigrant in Uruguay who are claimed to be dead today by their brethren?
The Armenian lobby tells you that uncivilized Turks descended upon civilized Armenians to take the Armenian lands away from the Armenians, totally forgetting that Romans, Persians, Byzantians, Arabs, Russians, and others conquered and ruled over Eastern Anatolia long before Turks. In fact, Turks took those areas from Byzantians, not Armenians. To throw a monkey wrench into all this, small contingents of local Armenians ans mini war-lords actually fought on the side of Turks to break free from the yoke of Byzantium. (Ah, history is so inconvenient at times, isn’t it?)
Then they fast forward to 1915 claiming Turks sent Armenian packing, 1.5 million of them to be exact, and ask you: where are those Armenians now? See, it is genocide, no matter how you slice it.
You go, well, let’s see now:
- 500,000 made it to Syria;
- 400,000 to Armenia,
- about 100,000 to the US, Europe and other places,
-
which leaves about 300,000 unaccounted for
according to the 1914 Census figures of the Ottoman Empire. This number is corroborated by many cross-calculations of a myriad of international scholars and demographers. Most of these 300,000 died of wartime conditions (starvation, epidemics, terrain, climate, etc.) and only a very small fraction of them actually died as a result bullets or massacres, the latter group of victims known name by name by the Turkish Historical Society .
Does all of the above mean that there were no massacres or tragedies suffered by Armenians? No, it does not mean that at all. It means there were plenty of misery and tragedy to go around, devastating all sides, Christian and Muslims alike. It is unfair and inhuman to pick with tweezers only the Armenian suffering from the lot in order to be able to justify calling it genocide.
Then you remind that Turks and Armenians lived in harmonious co-habitation in Anatolia for a millennium and Turks called Armenians “milleti sadika”, the loyal nation. You tell them that Armenians prospered and enjoyed higher living standards than most Muslims which is why some Armenians stayed loyal to the Ottoman Empire to the end while others rebelled out of pure greed and prejudice.
All this changed when Armenian nationalists resorted to wide scale terrorism, supreme treason, and countless revolts over a period of several decades, in pursuit of the first apartheid of the 20th Century: establishing Greater Armenia on Turkish soil where Armenians accounted for only 15-20 percent of the population. Good thing the Armenian nationalists did not succeed, because if they did, the resulting state would not live long. Either by bullets or ballots, the Armenian minority would lose in the end and the Muslim majority would create and rename a new state.
When the Armenians (supposing for a minute that they are a monolithic community) lose all arguments, then they throw in as a last result the Turkish novelist, Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk. See, they go, the most well-known Turk says so, too. So it must be genocide! Oh, how can anyone dispute his highness, Orhan, the great legal scholar and pre-eminent historian?
Orhan is a dreamer and a writer, not a historian or legal scholar. His unfortunate statements showed nothing more than his ignorance on the Turkish Armenian conflict. If Orhan knew the meaning of my last name, he would be ashamed to utter those falsehoods about his own people and country. Orhan should not have sold his pen for an award, Nobel or not. I say this with all honesty and sincerity. I should know because Orhan is my classmate. We shared the same class room for four years during highschool. Never once did Orhan wonder about the Muslim, mostly Turkish, suffering that surrounded him, because he was basically a spoiled kid form a rich Istanbul family. Need I say more? He became a convenient tool for the Turcophobes and Islamophobes everywhere, but especially for the Armenian lobby. As big a catch as that other Turkish turncoat, Akcam, who kept from the public for years that he was on the Armenian payroll–Zoryan Institute and Cafesjian Foundation, to be exact. In such a case, a messenger unfortunatelt becomes as important as the message itslef, because it shows “motive”.
You remind them about VAT (Viennese Armenian Turkish) Platform in an Austrian university where Turkish and Armenians scholars agreed to exchange 100 best documents that would support their respective positions, then in the second phase six months later, they would exchange another set of 80 documents in repsonse to the first 100 documents. Then the process would be locked down to inclusion of more documents and facts would be reconstructed from these 180 documents from each side towards an agreement. You know what happened? Fasten your seat belts for this one: Armenians left the table after the first set of 100 documents were exchanged, basically yelling “Liar, liar, your pants are on fire!” So much for Armenian “proofs”.
You might be wondering what were those 100 documents. There is a book on that that you can buy and read for your self. It suffices to say that the Armenians were “scholarly obliterated”. Not only Turks produced primary sources using first hand information (government archives that could be cross checked and verified) but also used archives of five countries: Ottoman Empire, France, England, the United Sates, and Austria. Armenians basically reproduced the internal communiactions of the foreign ministry of the Austrian-Hungary Habsburg Empire. Moreover, the Armenian documents did not prove anything even closely resembling genocide. In fact some could–and one was used–by the Turkish side, too, to disprove genocide claims. Imagina that!
For me, it was a rude awakening: I was shocked to see the Armenian hands this weak! I knew Armenians fabricated a lot (Talat telegrams, Ataturk photo and statement, piles of skulls, etc.) but never in my wildest dreams did I think that Armenian narrative was this baseless. No wonder the Armenian side run away in panic from the VAT platform, just like they did in 1920 from the approaching Turkish armies of General Karabekir.
This might explain why Armenians use media and politics, as well as Zoryan concocted “scholars”, to battle Turkish superiority in archival documents and facts.
This may also explain that while the Turkish archives are fully open and studied by scholars of 100 countries in the past quarter of century, Armenian archives in Erivan, Etchmiadzin, Antioch, Jerusalem, Beirut, Venice (Mekhitarists) and ARF documents in Boston, Glendale, and Paris are still off limits today to scholars and researchers. One wonders what are Armenians hiding there? I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the “x files” and unresolved crimes involving murders, bombings, assassinations, and more may be elucidated by the blood stains on those Armenian terror documents. So don’t hold your breath for Armenians’ opening their archives anytime soon.
Last but not least, a word of caution to fair-minded peace-lovers: the charge of genocide cannot be decided by diplomats, politicians, journalists, clergy, activists, screamers, or even historians. There is one and only one address clearly pointed by the United Nations 1948 Convention on Prevention and Punishment of Genocide: The International Court of Justice in Den Haag. And ICJ can only decide on a genocide verdict if the “intent” to destroy a people is proven after “due process”.
Ah, international law, so inconvenient at times, isn’t it?
Sincerely Yours,
Ergun KIRLIKOVALI
President, ATAA
The Assembly of Turkish American Associations
The son of Turkish survivor of Armenian atrocities in Bulgaria
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