Eren Keskin: We Are All Guilty!
By Eren Keskin // Posted on October 20, 2009 in Eren Keskin // 75 Comments // 
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Eren Keskin is vice-president of the Turkish Human Rights Association (İHD) and former president of its Istanbul branch. In 2005, she was awarded the Esslingen-based Theodor Haecker Prize for Civic Courage and Political Integrity. This is her first column for the Armenian Weekly.
On the day that I am writing this, the protocols for “normalizing the relations” between Turkey and Armenia has been signed.
It is always the “governments” who decide what is “normal”!
Same thing today. The “world sovereigns” have determined how the relationship between Armenia and Turkey are to be “normalized.”
In my view, the only thing that should be normal is accepting the fact of the genocide, with all its consequences, and apologizing to the Armenian nation.
I realized very early on that we live in an “identity graveyard.” My uncle, the twin brother of my father, had decided to marry an Armenian woman. They were very much in love. The marriage just had to happen. But my grandfather, a retired governer, agreed on one condition: Jozefin would be a “Muslim” and her name would be changed to Hulya.
Even though I was very young, I could not wrap my mind around this: How could it happen? How could one’s right “to be oneself” be taken away like that?
They did get married. But nobody in my family called my aunt Hulya. She always remained as our dear Jozefin.
In my best childhood, there is always an aunt Jozefin, or an aunt Antuanet, or a cousin Alex or Arthur.
When I was a child, I always believed that Armenians were the nicest people in the world.
Once when I was 14, we went to Kilyos beach (in Istanbul) as a large family group. The son of my father’s aunt said, “Let’s go for a swim, I will tell you something.” We walked and walked and walked…
When nobody else was around, he said, “We are Kurds, don’t forget that. They [the family] might deny this fact, but we are Kurds.”
I was stunned, and a little pleased. But that this fact was “so scary that it had to be kept a secret” put me in a strange state of mind.
Who, and with what right, could decide that his own identity was to be kept a “secret”?
After that day, I started reading the “unofficial history.” I tried to read anything I could find on the Armenians and the Kurds.
When I was 16, aunt Jozefin and I went to Sedef Island. We were sitting at the beach when I asked her, “Aunt, your family suffered a lot during the genocide years, didn’t they?”
My aunt looked around and said, “Let’s go for a swim.” At that moment I remembered Kilyos.
We swam farther and farther and farther away from the land…
When we were sure that nobody could hear us, my aunt told me what they had gone through.
From then on, I believed that a big crime had been committed on this land—and that the mentality that had committed it was not left in the past at all.
In my later personal history, I thought, worked, and spoke about this as much as I could.
In 2005, there was a conference in Istanbul. The intellectuals who organized this conference, known as “the Armenian Conference,” wrote in the call for papers: “The orders that led to the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of people, and the death and murder of many of them in and after 1915 were, after all, given and executed by a government of the Ottoman Empire (which is not identical to the present Turkish Republic).”
I think that the crucial difference in mentality lies in the parantheses above. I believe that the ideology of the perpatrators of the Armenian Genocide, the Committee of Union and Progress, and its special organization Teskilat-i Mahsusa, are the “founding ideology” of the Turkish Republic.
For years I have been arguing that the main problem in Turkey is militarism; that the “red lines” and thereby the fear it creates in society leads to totalitarianism; that miltarism is the biggest obstacle to the de-militarization of “internal and external” politics; and that the legislative, executive, and judicial institutions are wholly under the influence and coercion of militarism. I, and a few other people who agree on this, have been under constant pressure because of our thoughts.
But life itself confirms us!
Just when the “normalization of the relationships” between Turkey and Armenia was being discussed, the Turkish High Court made a decision that showed how difficult it was to change things: It ruled that anybody who “suffered mentally” because of what writer Orhan Pamuk had said in an interview—namely, that “we killed 1.5 million Armenians”—could sue Pamuk for pain and suffering. That ruling revealed once again the real stance of the Turkish Republic—that it is dependent on militarism.
Being a democrat and being a realist requires, instead, to call the Turkish Republic to recognize the crime of genocide and pay reparations for the damages Armenians suffered.
Of course, that is a difficult and scary stance.
Benda says, “Real intellectuals have to risk being burned at the stake, sent to exile, crucified. That’s why there aren’t many of them. Above all, they have to always be critical of status quo.”
Edward Said describes the intellectual as one who “tries to create crises, not to resolve them”.
Yes, there are so many who are trying to resolve the crisis, to normalize it… But others choose to “not let the crimes and the criminals be forgotten.”
That’s what we are doing.
- It’s been 94 years!
- Those who believe in the lies,
- Those who don’t question the lies,
- Those who remain silent even if they don’t believe in the lies,
- Those, by their silence, approve of the lies,
We are all guilty…
And we owe thousands, millions of apologies…
“At the end of the day, the only leg the provocation thesis can even hope to stand on is the Rebellion at Van, which has not been studied in all it complexities by any serious historian and happened later in 1915 when Armenians already saw the writing on the wall.”
Nothing can be further from truth I am afraid. There is a whole scholarly book, written solely and specifically on this topic, placing everything and all the complexities in proper context. It is well referenced, professional, quantitative and necessarily factual.
I would even bet you know this book and the author rather well..
Systematic attacks by Russia for centuries in its push to warmer seas, the century old ethnic cleansing and demographic engineering in the Caucuses, large chunks of the most important parts of the Ottoman empire recently fallen under the Russian boots with Muslim populations ruthlessly cleansed from Balkans, numerous Armenian groups actively and boldly seeking a Greater Armenia (demand still made right here on these pages!), and enjoying open economic, political and moral support of the West and Russians was I think cause enough for Ottomans to worry about their very own existence.
Armenians to this day do not seem to understand the signficance of the Russian collaboration and support for their cause and what this meant to the Turk at the dawn of the 20th century. There is a reason why other non-Muslim “minoritiy” efforts for independence did not draw the same visceral reaction.
If you’re referencing Justin McCarthy’s sad effort, I’m sorry, but that’s not scholarly. He is widely discredited in academic circles. There’s a reason he could only get that book published by a lower-tier academic press- and even then he had to get it done by Hakan Yavuz, who is also held in ill-repute by most Turkish scholars.
Bedros Efendi,
Documented truths are still truths irrespective of the credibility of the author to this or that interest group. I said scholarly and referenced and factual. Not an opinion piece.
One needs to be specific about which alleged facts in such a book for example can not be backed up with recroded and witnessed realities. Otherwise this wholsale badmouthing of an author or a book seems more like an emotional response rather than based on a concern for truth.
It would have been a bit more credible if you had mentioned the book before you made the statement that no such study exists, rather then after I pointed it out.
It would have been even more credible if you had actually displayed the same concern for scholarly quality and credibility of the various Armenian propaganda and proven forgeries paraded under the guise of historical research. Or is that a nationalistic impulse of mine to expect it?
You must be aware of the difficulties in publishing any such work that contradicts the Armenian national myths. You may also be aware that many such books and historical menuscripts and documents have been disappearing from the world libraries and archives, US in particular.
Note also that I have and can use only Western and Armenian sources to make any point I need to make on this subject.
At some point though you have to agree that you find the need to explain away way too many things.
Thank you!
There is a whole scholarly book
ONE whole scholarly book? If you wish to compare facts, you’d better do it within the ENTIRE body of genocide scholarship on this subject. I suggest you familiarize yourself with the International Association of Genocide Scholars and check worldwide body of scholarship against your one book
Murat,
You still fail to answer the main question of the logic of genocide related to the ideology of the CUP posed by Bedros Effendi. The efforts to substantiate the mass killings of these minorities through the small scale peasant “revolts” deviates from the overarching intent of the government. Based on the above regressions, you’ve made it a habit to avoid the causal links of such ideologies to the actions and chain of events that would fulfill them.
Moreover, your references are less than compelling to say the least. Like McCarthy, it seems you’ve reached that wall of inevitable clarity, and your attempts to escape it have been futile.
Like you’ve said so often, facts are facts and myths are myths. You yourself have come to know the facts, and continue to regard them as myths for whatever intensive purposes that suit you. But denying the suffering and victimization of so many will not bring your family members back, as it will not bring back mine and the countless others that suffered. That being said, May they ALL rest in some semblance of peace.
Kayseri,
(I have family there, Talas actually, best manti ever! )
I am not avoiding anything, but what exactly is this “racial” motive, and what evidence? I suspect this possible explanation of CUP policies and “cause” has come about becasue of the artifical Holocaust parallels that so many have tried to construct. That is what is overreaching.
As you know, Ottomans did not have a culture or history of racial prejudice, not at the leveles it was practiced in the West. CUP itself had Armenian, Jewish and Kurdish members. Even in 1915, there were many Armenians at various levels in local governments who were given immuinity from tehcir if I am not mistaken. Ottoman parliament had many non-Muslim and Armenian members. Where is the Turkish Mein Kampf, where is the Turkish Hitler, the brown shirts, the Nazis, racist manifestos, etc.?
Why look for alternate and far-fetched motives when there are real and practical ones and CUP leaders were themselves clear about it? Armenians were trying to create a Greater Armenia on ethnically purified lands on the remains of the Empire. This was not some racially or religiously motivated paranoia. These plans were in motion as far back as Berlin Treaty. The aims and goals of various Armenian organizations were well published. Patriarch himself was rather clear about it and their collaboration and joint action with Russians were no secret. The weakness of the Ottoman rule enabled people to plot against it openly.
The privilaged minority class created, the way the Christians in the empire were ruthlessly manipulated by the colonial powers of course gave way to much resentment, but that was not a cause, on the contrary an effect and it was hardly a racially or philosophically motivated hate.
The memory of this exploitation and how it was used to break apart the country still remains in the institutional memory of the state and the people and has made it very difficult in dealing with minority issues even in modern times.
It is amusing that you refer to armed Armenian revolts as “a few harmless peasant” disturbances, but when it comes to the Armenians killed in these “insignificant” events, Armenians cite hundreds of thousands… what is wrong with this picture? Do I need to post here the picture of the Russian general receiving the key to the city of Van from the leader of the Armenian insurgency there?
Fall of major vilayets, Kars (much earlier and filled with Russian Armenians after the Muslims were pushed out), Van, Erzurum, Bitlis and Mush were not some paranoidal hallucinations, they were real and very very bloody. Armenians were fielding regular trops fighting their own country.
Do we really need to look for motives under the bed?
If provocation was a defense to genocide, then Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia would not be genocide. moreover, those who rely on provocation to defend killing unarmed civilians forget that it was the state which began the organized murderof Armenan civilians long before 1914-1915:, 1894-1896 Hamidian massacres, and Adana, over 330,000 killed in all. Armenians had the right to arm themselves despite the death penalty for owning weapons.
If indeed provocation is a defense to murdering on ethnic grounds, then the Armenians who alegedly killed Moslems in 1918 were provoked by what their relatives had been subjected to. Its a two way street.
jda,
You see, without even trying hard, you can come up with excuses and justifications for violence. Armenians were not a country under attack. Ottomans were trying to hold on to their country. Their own. As you point out, there were numerous Armenian armed revolts since 1880s, when Ottomans were percieved to be too weak to defend themselves. This, at a time when colonial powers were exctracting more and more privilages for the “minorities”. So this was hardly about freedoms etc.. either.
I do not mean that this would justify wholesale physical elminiation of a nation, and in fact this did not happen. You are proof of that. There was no such policy, or decision or intent. A civil war in the middle of WWI, in a disintigrating empire had to be messy. For all involved. Armenian leaders took a huge gamble and lost.
In his manifesto, Hovhannes Katchaznouni, First Prime Minister of the Independent Armenian Republic, a pillar of Dashnagtzoutiun said the following at the party congress in 1923, while taking stock of what had happened to Armenians:
At the beginning of the Fall of 1914 when Turkey had not yet entered the war but bad already been making preparations, Armenian revolutionary bands began to be formed in Transcaucasia with great enthusiasm and, especially, with much uproar. Contrary to the decision taken during their general meeting at Erzeroum only a few weeks before, the A.R.F. had active participation in the formation of the bands and their future military action against Turkey….It would be useless to argue today whether our bands of volunteers should have entered the field or not. Historical events have their irrefutable logic. In the Fall of 1914 Armenian volunteer bands organized themselves and fought against the Turks because they could not refrain themselves from organizing and refrain themselves from fighting. This was in an inevitable result of a psychology on which the Armenian people had nourished itself during an entire generation: that mentality should have found its expression, and did so….The Winter of 1914 and the Spring of 1915 were the periods of greatest enthusiasm and hope for all the Armenians in the Caucasus, including, of course, the Dashnagtzoutiun. We had no doubt the war would end with the complete victory of the Allies; Turkey would be defeated and dismembered, and its Armenian population would at last be liberated…
We had embraced Russia whole-heartedly without any compunction. Without any positive basis of fact we believed that the Tzarist government would grant us a more-or-less broad self-government in the Caucasus and in the Armenian vilayets liberated from Turkey as a reward for our loyalty, our efforts and assistance…
The proof is, however — and this is essential — that the struggle begun decades ago against the Turkish government brought about the deportation or extermination of the Armenian people in Turkey and the desolation of Turkish Armenia. This was the terrible fact!
He knew what he was talking about. He did not mince words, was not afraid to look into the mirror. You will not find too many references to him or to his speech. Maybe the comision has a few things to teach many Armenians after all.
To Murat:
Your Quote:
Ottomans were trying to hold on to their country. Their own.
Unquote
Simply put, Armenia was an occupied country by the ottomans & like all the rest of countries occupied by the ottomans, Armenians were craving for their independence & their own free country.There was an Armenia much before than you killers came from the east.Still there is an Armenian republic which the kurds do not have.Very soon, the 15-20 million kurds in turkey will have their own independent republic.You were not successfull in assimilating them & you could not supress their aspirations for a free independent Kurdistan…INSHALLAH VERY SOON!
Your Quote
I do not mean that this would justify wholesale physical elminiation of a nation, and in fact this did not happen. You are proof of that. There was no such policy, or decision or intent.
Unquote
You would persecuted in case you uttered these words in France & hopefully very soon throughout the world.You are insulting my innocent massacred & butchered & unburried forefathers by your own forefathers.NONE OF THE ABOVE COMMENTATORS INSULTED YOUR SUPPOSEDLY KILLED FAMILY MEMBERS IN CRETE… & on the contrary they shared your ‘supposedly pain’…. this is the difference between a lowly turk like you & of honourable TURKS who have publicly apologised for the GENOCIDE committed by their forefathers & simple Armenians like us.
Your Quote:
The proof is, however — and this is essential — that the struggle begun decades ago against the Turkish government brought about the deportation or extermination of the Armenian people in Turkey and the desolation of Turkish Armenia. This was the terrible fact!
Unquote
Since you are quoting Katchazouni & saying that he did not mince his words then YOU SHOULD ACCEPT WHAT HE SAID WHICH IS: “brought about the deportation or extermination of the Armenian people in turkey and the desolation of turkish Armenia”.DEPORTATION & EXTERMINATION BY WHO MR. MURAT????
You see people like you are either brainwashed, or on the payroll of turkish government or have an Armenian ancestor/blood & they want to hide it…
DON’T BE AFRAID TO LOOK INTO THE MIRROR MR. MURAT.Are you a real turk???
Vartan, you seem to be beyond reach and reason. Hate does that. I wish you well.
Murat, in psychoanalysis your case is so common.
Murat.
You are a servant of the 1915-1923 murderers and the Genocidal lies they told. But you do a poor job at it.
But I write not as an Armenian, but instead as the grandson of a harmless innnocent woman killed in a Nazi concentration camp, a Jew, because the racist and ahistoric lies you tell are and were the template for Hitler, Goebbels and Rosenthal, not just Talat, Nazim and Sakir. To me, anyone who denies and defends murder is the same.
You make up concessions I have not made.
First, nowhere does my post contain any concession that Armenians engaged in uprisings starting in the 1880′s or at any other time. I did say that Armenians, like any oppressed group, had a right to self-defense, indeed the right of Armenians to defend themselves was far greater than any justification that existed for the American revolution.
But as any actual student of the Armenian Genocide knows, the Ottoman government imposed the death penalty on any Armenian who had the temerity to own a weapon or to defend his family. Searching for weapons was often a pretext under which Gendarmes invaded homes and took the men away, in 1914-1915, before the formal deportations began.
Your claim that my existence negates Genocide is truly moronic. If I was Armenian, my life would only mean that my family escaped the Genocide, perhaps in the 1894-1896 period of Hamidian massacres [300,000 dead], or the Adana massacre when another 30,000 souls were extinguished, or by fleeing the Genocide itself. Did you even know that hundreds of thousands of Armenians lived in Iran, France, Russia, and the United States before 1915?
You obviously do not know much detail about how Armenians survived; they were often warned or hidden by a brave Turkish neighbor, by a co-worker, or a passerby who decided that saving the innocent trumped insane orders to murder. Jews often received the same warnings, as well. But I could just as easily be the great grandson of an Armenian girl pressed into domestic and sexual slavery by a Turk or Kurd, who made her escape years later. Or perhaps I am the descendant of someone who bribed a Gendarme.
If your analysis was correct, there would be no Jews who escaped Germany, or the East, no Darfurians or Bosnians alive today.
Provocation is not a defense to the subsequrent murder of uninvolved, unarmed civilians. If you doubt this, research what Lemkin, who coined the word “Genocide”, thought about the Armenian case. You will find that he coined the word specifically to give a name to what had happened to the Armenians and the Jews of Europe.
I also commend to you the recently translated memoir of Bishop Balakian. Or perhaps the memoir of the Venezuelan officer Rafael deNogales will interest you. He was an abject hater of Armenians, but he recounts how his Army unit participated under orders in the murder of unarmed convoys of Armenian civilians, and how the Governor of Diyarbekir confided in him Talat’s oral orders to kill all the Armenians. This latter source is footnoted in Niall Ferguson’s recent work.
The central fact which no non-Turkish historian contradicts is that almost all of the Armeinans who perished were unarmed civilians under guard, who were killed by their captors or other state actors. Even if these women and children had been armed insurrectionists, their subsequent torture and murder at the behest of the state was not spontaneous, and was not the product of mutual combat. You are smart enough to grasp the point, are you not?
But people who continue the culture of Genocide and the lies which propelled it, such as yourself, always pretend the facts are otherwise.
Throughout Anatolia – and not merely in the war zone – the patterns of killings was largely the same. Famous Ottomanist Donald Quataert, who once was an Agnostic, came to assert the AG thesis because his inspection of Archival records showed the pattern to be the same, whether it was on the outskirts of Istanbul, or in the far East. You may recall his famous description of threats he received from the Turkish Ambassador if he did not recant his opinion. So much for Turkey’s interest in free speech and academic freedom. Turkey is so bold as to try to censor Americans.
Let’s start with the able-bodied men. Virtually all were conscripted into unarmed labor battalions where they were worked to death by their Turkish officers, or were simply killled outright by their fellow soldiers. Those who were not, were usually killed immediately upon the commencement of the deportations, leaving the womern, children and elderly defenseless. Despite all the talk of open Turkish archives, no military archives are open to review this issue. What better proof of Genocide is there than this?
The elderly tended to die on the way, as did the majority of the women and children by murder and intentional deprivation. There are hundreds of accounts of dead Armenian civilians on the roads, and in open fields and rivers, dead in groups, often with their bodies mutilated. These were not stragglers who died of weakness. Women without noses and breasts, children impaled and lit afire. There are hundreds of non-Armenian sources which faithfully chronicle the inhuman extermination of this race; the killers preferred a blade, the blunt end of a rifle or stave. And those who made it to Syria were killed there by the many scores of thousands.
Torture and degradation were the order of the day. Every day.
What you need to come to grips with is the obscenity of the civil war thesis you parrot. Even Armenian Genocide agnostics like Guenter Lewy call your thesis a “travesty of history which no historian with a conscience could advance”, citing Turkish scholar Selim Deringil on this score. [See also the work of Baskin Oran, Fatma Gocek, Taner Akcam, Yektan Turkyilmaz, Fikret Adanir, Engin Akarli, and Umit Ungor if you can stand only to read the work of Turkish scholars].
Your spirit and rhetoric are the same as that which killed my grandmother in 1945, long before the Turkish school system spat you out. Just as the Nazis blamed Jews for a host of non-existent ills, people like you dehumanize Armenians into an abstraction worthy of death. In fact, denialists and Nazis often use the same terms: “backstabbers” “terrorists” “murderers” ”vermin”.
Read this:
http://www.doughtystreet.co.uk/
I had been absent on this line for a while and now reading what ALIPASA and MURAT have put in ,nay uttrered,I wish to remind all Armenians that these like are what in spanish -in Spain-were called “cabeza de Turco” meaning Hast ghafa,in turkish Armenian a melange of both languages.HARD headed ,pretty much like their government executives-diplomats-.Why don´t they try to understand that the Armenians since the 1800´s were under the harsh rule,nay yolk and “Yataghan” of first the “Red Sultan” Abdul Hamid and later the young turks-that supposedly were revolutionaries and alas our ARF thought they were sincere and joined up with them,People like Krikor Zohrab an Ottoman Parliament MP was the first one to be taken in…believing that the turks, young turks meant really what they proclaimed. Now all that aside,plus the ones never mentioned above above that dear Professor Vahakn Dadrian dug up in the old Ottoman Empire archives, that of the “Turkish Military tribunal” that jundged and condemned the authors of the Armenian(then) massacres,now after Rafael Lemkin´s coining the word “geno-cide” , proved a couple dozen times and confirmed as such,these old style old mentality effendis are trying hard to cover up and opine the contrary.
It is a futile discussion as the spanish (see above) knew it-that-some here don´t know that is where the phrase comes from…that Spain destroyed the Ottoman navy in “La Batalla Del Lepanto” in the Mediterranean some 400 yrs ago…and since then they dubbed that “cabeza de Turco” since the Ottomans knowing full well that they were no match to the spanish armada -even so-tried to carry on…
Whether during the 1908 Adana killings, prior to that the 1896 Erzeroum one ,300,000 innocent Armemnians slaughtered ,then the real Mc Coy, the Eviction and put on Death March- my uncle and grandfather amongst these-then again all Armenian populated villages plundered and people raped killed ,burnt to death in churches ,monasteries destroyed…they have the nerve to come up and say YOU ARMENIANS STABBED US ON THE BACK”.The few very very few resistance instances,such as the Zeytoun and Sassoun and Van´s pale when compared to premeditated mass killings they conducted amongst their loyal”raya” Ermenis…God these people still think Like the Hitlerians that they are a Master race-could be- that they could get away with it..true for a while they have been until the 1965-the year that completed the 50th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide,rising from ashes,like the Pheonix, when a million in Yerevan and throughout the Armenian Diaspora countries like one soul stood up and shouted “our lands our lands..”Do they know any history other than their one ?fed by their ugly turkish diplomats historians and the like?Have they read about a spanish princess-later, to declare herself as “Izabel La Catolica, Reina de España”? she was the person that united the spanish princes,secretly meeting with all and getting the people of Spain well armed -(unlike the Armenian fedayees smuggling in a dozen a time Mosin rifles from across Ottoman border into Western Armenia-)THEN PUSHED , NAY THREW the 600 year old Khaliphate (north African moors)rule …O U T ..Armenians indeed like the spaniards had ALL THE RIGHT TO UNITE WITH THE RUSSIANS, the allies and fight alongside to rid themselves of the occupiers…
Do you kid Murat or Alipasa? pretending you don´t know all that?
If our angry young men after being completely disappointed by our political parties´pleas falling on deaf ears of the UN and the like resorted to “correctional acts of violence” not terrorism,blind terrorism.There certainly is a difference, the French Media and intellectuals have proven the distinction between latter from Freedom fighting such acts.But these young knew when to stop when the Nagornyi Karabagh war broke up they joined forces there to liberate the Armenian Artsakh from harsh Azeri rule…
Please go learn your lessons well ,history cannot be twisted and changed.Khojali? eh, it ws proved by some Azeri leaders(themselves) that it was mistakenly carried out by their own Omon cheteh´s… like your old ones come to mind.Ali pasa declares that Turkey will not give land to Armenians..land that is presently MOSTLY POPULATED B Y people that they falsely-called mountain turks,until Mme Mitrterand,wife of ex French President started a campaign and won. That at long last great Turkey admitted that they were/ are k u r d s ..16 or million of them.I would ask Ali p.and Murat to go try to remove these from their millenia old lands-yes they exsited there alongside the Armenians , peacefully, until the twissted Ottoman turkish mind- set, set them up against us promising them…
And now that they have tasted great turkish rule..they have repented and are beginning like some turks to admit what horrible crime they have committed and begin to voice their repentence and ask for forgiveness..
Why go far..only a half dozen yrs ago no such word as “ermeni” could be heard on turkish radio t.v.etc., or in their press…now after Orhan Pamuk and all above mentioned few semi-intellectuals ádmittance,plus of cours >Hrant Dink¨´s´ murder when all of a sudden(EU entry enticing the gov. authorities )allowed that half true half false–WE ARE ALL ARMENIANs-slogan being aired…
Ermenis? eh a word that was tabou for over 70 yrs..come come ALi ,Murat,give us more of your turkish “massals” at least these will replace Nesreddin Khoja´s …original ones..
If you do actually wish to come to an understanding with Armenians ,you ought to learn more about what transpired during the 1800´s and then 1915-23.Your Mustafa Kemal pasa ,supposedly a democrat,actually carried on the half finished work of the Talaat´s and Enver´s.This latter few know was put to death on horseback by a Red Army Armenian officer when Enver was in or near Central Asia,1921,having crossed via Azerbejan.
Armenians will survive the worst, this is a proven fact.But I doubt it if your Empire ,reduced to republic of Turkey and with surrounding Arab,Persian,Kurdish, Armenian , Bulgarina Greek and then some people ,not so well disposed towards it,will stay on.Witness the other Empires that have crumbled.Ali pasa talks of “Russia will not be there to help Armenians ,up above…to that effect,why on earth does he think that? is it because he is afraid that might happen? in case of war…’ no one wants war.But Armenian young whether in Homeland -as regular army soldiers or those in Diaspora crave to defend the Homeland once again if need be.No we do not condone war or attrocities,like you wish to convey,but we know how to defend ourselves..
I trust you will have some second thoughts when writing to Armenians dropping hints such as the last one by Ali pasa..we get what you utter quite well.Dont give us bellicose rhetoric,we are not afraid .Pull yourselves together consider the other alternative-this is MY LST WISH THAT ALL TURKISH PEOPLE WILL SOMEHOW COME TO REALIZE WHAT THEIR ANCESTORS DID WAS A VERY BAD CRIMINAL ACT AND BEG FORGIVENESS.ARMENIANS CAN FORGIVE,YES…BUT NEVER FORGET!!!EVEN AFTER REPARATIONS.
G.P
TO JDA RE GEOFFREY ROBERTSON QC’S OPINION:
MILLION THANKS! SUCH A VALUABLE STUDY & EVERYBODY SHOULD READ & KEEP IT.
why do Armenians not want a commission to search for facts and look at the archieves.If a genocide happened it will be proven.My grandfathers village was actually an armenian village which was bought from the former owners like in 18xx by my grandgrand…parents.And there are also Armenians in parts of my family too and a couple of Turks but my father and mother are alevi-kurds.My grandmother once told me that people speculated on Armenians killing Turkish villages that led angry Turks killing Armenians randomly which caused a retaliation by Armenians from other close villages.Some also say that Kurds and Turks were so angry at the time because Armenians were not fighting on the side with Kurds and Turks against the invasion troops so it led into so much hate against each other.it caused like a civil war which the Ottoman government looked away.I understand Armenians feelings but they should support searching of the archieves and files with professional people then the truth will come.But i know that the Turkish government will never ever give any land without a war.Armenians should know that Turks are very patriotic about land.Even if the government says they did and apologize for it they will never agree on giving land because they know that millions of people would go ballistic about it and literally arm themselves and head for that place.(i’m %1000 sure about this because i live in Turkey.land is sacred for Turks.they would die for a meter square of land that even cowturds wouldn’t want to stay)Let there be less hate and more love guys.Hate brings more wars we don’t need that anymore
“kurdish guy” is an obvious Turkish nationalist. A real Kurd would know about Dersim 1938 in which Armenians and Kurds were killed in their thousands by troops under Ataturk’s control, among other things.
Easy for the killers’ descendants to preach a peace devoid of justice.
Stephen says:
“If Armenians killed any Turks, it was revenge for what the Turks did to the Armenian People.”
I am sorry to say, but if Ottoman relocated Armenians from their villages, it was the revenge for what Armenians did to Turks by cooperating with Soviet Russia. I don’t know whether it is written in your history books or not, but there were numerous Armenian rebellions between 1890-1916. When Ottoman fell into the WW1, Armenians support Soviet Russia !
The problem is that Armenians approach the issue with merely the Armenian sight and exclude Turkey to resolve problems with it. This is not helpful, if you really wanna do it. As someone said above, even if US president recognizes the “genocide”, Turkey will never change its attitude on this issue, as long as Armenia expect some things by policy. It would just get US-Turkey relations worse, nothing more. That’s why no US president recognizes the “genocide” for years and years. Wake up, they use you for your votes.
Gokhan,
If you are going to teach history to Armenians or anyone else, try first to learn some.
1. The USSR did not exist at the outset of WWI in 1914, or when the CUP triumverate attempted to get some quick advantage over Russia by declaring war upon it on October 29, 1914, when the OE assisted the Germans in a naval engagement against Russia. Russia had a right of self defense, and it declared war on the OE for its acts the next month.
The OE brought the hell of the war down on herself, because CUP tried to get the quick advantage by seeking to help herself to the Russian-controlled Caucasus, an effort which of course failed completely at the cost of 80,000 Turkish [and quite a few Armenian,Greek and Assyrian] lives. Yet, lunatic Turkish nationalists worship the nationalist leaders who brought this calamity onto their Army. Been to Talaat’s mauseleum lately? If you want to know why millions of Turks died in the war, it was because the Ottoman leaders led them into it. Ask any German. They can explain it to you. Your government never will.
2. Over a million Armenians were subjects of the Czar at the time war commenced. They served in his Army. They had no duty of loyalty to the Ottoman state, which, by the way had been conducting Genocidal pogroms and massacres for the last 30 years against their kinsmen. Whether you like or dislike it, the Russians were a formidable foe, superior to the Ottomans, but even if his Troops committed atrocities, and even if some of these were committed by advance Armenian elements, that does not justify the state slaughter of unarmed Ottoman Armenian men, women and children both in the war zone and many hundreds of miles west of it.
3. Your “civil war” thesis has been repudiated by historians everywhere, including Guenter Lewy, who is considered pro-Turkish. In his 2006 book, he quotes Turkish historian Selim Deringil with approval. Deringil wrote that claiming Armenians died in a civil war is a “travesty of history which no historian with a conscience” could accept. In fact, there are more Turkish scholars who affirm the Genocide than non Turkish scholars who deny it: Deringil, Fikret Adanir, Engin Akarli, Taner Akcam, Halil Berktay, Baskin Oran, Ahmet Ihnsel, Fatma Gocek, Yektan Turkyilmaz, and Umit Ungor for starters.
4. Your schools gave you the government line. Try reading for yourself.
Thank you Dear Eren..thank you for your courage and your dedication for the truth…
I tried to go over all the comments but they were like cycling within a very tiny radius.
Firstly, I condemn the author for selecting the easy way to gain attraction, to be appreciated by others. She does this by “so called humanity feelings”. However, if you leave the truths beside a corner and speak with your emotions, then you wouldn’t be realistic and just draw imaginary lines.
There are some resources like McCarty’s one but if it does not support one’s argument, you easily say that: Ok. This is out of reality, just a paper!. I’ll give you two references that I expect you to believe in, otherwise there is no way for you to consider the truths, but your policy of holding something wrong firmly will continue forever and people will see no result of the contradictory between Turks and Armenians.
15 years ago, Armenian diaspora authoritirities used to claim that the number of Armenians death during the exile process was 1.5 million. Today, in 24 of April, they have started to change the word as “up to 1.5 million”. The reason is quite reasonable. When you look at the archives of the Istanbul Patriarchate of the Armenians, the number of Armenians (prbabably exaggrated due to the idea of eatablishment of Great Armenia) was 2.6 million. Moreover, according to the report of the Britannia, Istanbul Ambassador populaition report (US Archives, Nara 867.4016/816, January 10, 1923; Near East Relief Society’s document number of Armenians in the world at 1921), the number of Ottoman Armenians were 1.383 million. Therefore, during the 6 year period, the maximum number of death Armenians was 1.2 million. (If you noticed, I haven’t used any Ottoman document) If you consider that the number of people that was killled only by typhus was 300,000 in the South-Anatolian, then you cannaot say that “Turks murdered 1.5 million Armenian”..
Let’s give up just talking and talking and agitation and reveal any documents if you have..
Best reagards.
Ugur,
The definition of Genocide does not depend upon the number. Please do add into the total those killed in the 1890′s. on 1909. in 1913, in 1915-1923, and in 1938. The number actually exceeds 2.5M. Or exclude the killing of Bosnians at Srebrenice.
Ugur – I think it’s utterly cynical of you to call annihilation of a race “the exile process.” Can’t you Turks have courage to call things by their names? What “exile process”? If Armenians were “exiled” why none of them returned to their homes? Do you think that sunny Syrian desert of Deyr Zor where Armenians were “exiled” and were burned alive in caves by Turkish soldiers or died of starvation in hundreds of thousands, was a friendly habitat for your “exile process”? What’s the need of bringing up figures to the fact that’s been accepted as the first genocide of the 20th century? Different sources give us different figures of Armenians living in Ottoman empire. On average, however, most historians, demographers, and genocide scholars agree that the number of Armenians was up to 2 mln, some even say up to 2.5 mln people. Your anti-Armenian prime-minister put the number of remaining Armenians living mainly in Constantinople as 60-70,000. Where are the rest of the millions of them, Ugur? Don’t give me “the exile process” crap, if you chose to reply.
Jda,
Of course, for this case, talking about the number of death people due to tpyhus, fever, starvation or so on during the complicated times is ridiculous but if the Armenian side still insist on the so called number 1.5 million, then it has to be refuted. I do not care about who said what on the number, yet what I only consider as truths are documents and archives. Accepting this fact will provide both sides one more step toward the solution.
Best regards,