Mouradian: Meeting with Turkish President Gul: Dispatches from Turkey (Part III)

Dashnaks have become extremely arrogant. They always demand something! They have become so complacent with their propaganda BS that they are actually starting to believe it themselves. This piec show how cordial and respectful Turks are.

Dear Ani,

I couldn’t agree with you more.  Regardless that anyone can speak his or her mind and should be allowed to do so in a democratic paper and environment; however there’s a limit to everything, when the posts from a particular individual becomes redundant, inconstructive, generalizations without also mentioning at least the good as well as not the good of any people or organization; or at least by trying to educate himself towards it, and finally the destructiveness of the posts from that same individual,  what may happen is the spirit of the other commentators will be put down and the intelligent ones may decide to abstain from coming here and commenting altogether.  Perhaps the unintelligent and the destructive poster’s wish is just that.  So yes on this note, I most certainly agree with you.

“This piec show how cordial and respectful Turks are.”
Robert, Turks are cruel, brutal, and domineering men.
See: Webster’s Encyclopedic Unbridged Dictionary of the English Language. ISBN: 0-517-11864-5

How pathetic!  Gul says he knows what happens and yet still lies.  If this is not a picture of hypocrisy and evil then I don’t know what is.

Dear Janine,

I understand your point. However, I have a couple of points to make.

Population exchanges (or as you call them deportations)  were not exactly escorted trips. There were a lot of violent killings and massacres there as well. Thousands of Greeks (I don’t  have exact numbers but I believe it is as high as 200, 000) lost their lives in the process.

In addition, I  believe what Gul was referring to is the expulsion of Turks subsequent to the Balkan War of 1912 and not the Greek population exchange which happened in 1923. Large number of Turks did die of hunger during and after their expulsion, in additon to massacres in the Balkans. There were thousands of hungry and homeless  Balkan Turks in the streets of Istanbul. This site made the Turks feel totally humiliated. Some of these Balkan Turks were then settled in the houses of Armenians soon after their rightful owners were sent on to the death marches.

I agree with your previous e-mail. As one wise man once said denial is the final stage of genocide. So the Armenian Genocide still continues. I commend  Mr. Mouradian courage for his comments to the President. I am looking forward to read his detailed articles when he gets back.

To Mehmet: I normally refrain from responding to a Turk. What can a civilized Armenian, or Greek, or Assyrian, whose culture, arts, entrepreneurial mastery, and rich history are world-renowned for millennia, try to say to a representative of nomadic Seljuk tribes that appeared in the Armenian Highlands from the steppes of Central Asia only in 11th century, spreading fire and sword over indigenous peoples inhabiting the land for millennia? A representative whose modern republic was founded only in the 20th century on blood and bones of many civilized nations? What can I say to a brainwashed Turk, whose controversial Article 301 in the Penal Code makes it illegal to insult Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity, or Turkish government institutions? Prominent French writer Victor Hugo has described the influence of the Turks in the following lines: “Les Turcs ont passé a tout est ruine et deuil.” (The Turks have traversed there, all is ruin and mourning.) Fellow Muslim Arabs used to describe the Turks the following way I one of their songs:
Three things naught but evil work–
The locust the vermin, and the Turk.
 
How can I talk to a representative of a nation whose ‘civilized’ grandparents burnt and buried Armenians alive, raped virgins in front of their families, stripped Christian pastors in front of their parishioners, organized death marches to the Syrian deserts, burnt people in caves, drowned them in Euphrates river and the Black Sea, and deported the people en masse? And when the natural outrage against these heinous crimes comes out of the Armenian descendents of these victims, a Turk dares to call us ‘racists.’ Moreover, he takes an offense when all civilized nations in the world call them bloodthirsty based on their knowledge on what indescribable tortures Turks performed on Armenians and others. He invited us to have a ‘sensible history knowledge’… Us, Armenians, who are known on ancient maps from the 2nd millennium B.C., like that of Ptolemy, in the records of great historians, travelers, geographers, warriors like Alexander the Great, and philosophers like Xenofonte. Whose own works in these disciplines now adorn leading libraries in Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the U.S. He dares to charachterize national-liberation movements and uprisings of the indigenous Balkan peoples and Armenians in Western Armenia, who were enslaved by the Ottomans for hundreds of years, as ‘population exchanges,’ ‘Turco-Russian war migrations,’ or ‘Balkan wars migrations.’ I just learnt from a Turk that liberating a nation from a Turkic yoke is considered ‘shameless.’ Wow!
 
As for Muslim people of the Caucasus, they are just extensions of Seljuk-Turk invasions, some of whom had settled in the region. Where are these Muslims now? Simple. In a ‘nation’ that’s been created only in the 20th century and stole its name from a historical province in Iran – in Azerbaijan. As for Yerevan, the name of which (to add to your ‘sensible history knowledge’) derives from Erebuni, a city of Armenian state of Urartu, the ruins of which are still preserved in the vicinity of Yerevan. As for Muslims residing in Yerevan, they once, indeed, were above 50% of the population for a couple of decades in the 19th century, but our sensible history knowledge suggests that these provinces were guberbniyas (provinces) of the Russian Empire, and Yerevan (called Erivan,and never ‘Revan’, at the time) was just a provincial city, just like Kars was a city in another Russian province of Kars, now occupied by the Turks. Our sensible history knowledge also suggests that the mainland of Armenians historically were in the Western Armenia (which Turks now call ‘Eastern Anatolia’), and only a smaller part – current Republic of Armenia and Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh) and a province in Georgia – constituted an Eastern Armenia.
 
One last thing. The world knows what Turks have done to Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Babylonians, Arabs, and Kurds, and not the other way around. Massive undeniable historical evidence exists in the leading international repositories, archives, and witness accounts. And sooner or later, the Turks will be punished for their crimes against humanity. If you believe in God, you should know that crimes against fellow human beings never go unpunished.

Hei Mehmet
First of all you should learn to pronounce names correctly. The capital of Armenia is not Revan, but Yerevan, the old Erebouni of the Urartian empire. Armenians were there since 3000 years and there was never a moajority Muslim population in Yerevan. Perhaps at some point when foreign invaders like your ancesters, who came from Central Asia some 600 years ago and settled in the conquered lands, the demography of the land changed to some extent, but at no point in history was there a “majority of Muslim population in Yerevan” (!!!). Not that I am against Muslims, but this is one of the many lies that Pan-Turkists spread in order to justify their cruelties to Armenians and other nations. 
By the way, do you know what your own surname means? It means: “invader”. Armenians aren not “shamelessly” blaming the invaders for their barbarities. It is those invaders who shamelessly continue to deny the facts and by their own action make themselves objects of ridicule in the eyes of other nations. 
Get out of our ancestral lands invader.
Sevan

It is NOT the job of Armenians to “reform” Turkey, as desirable as that may be.  We are not their psychiatrists or their nannies.
 
Genocide denial is not just the simple negation of an act; it is much more the consequent continuation of the very act itself.  Genocide should not only physically destroy a community; it should likewise dictate the prerogative of interpretation in regard to history, culture, territory and memory; as the victims, Armenians never existed.
 
The Turkish have not only murdered humans, destroyed an ancient culture and civilization, and rewritten history, Turkey continues to legitimize the act as well as the racist ideology that led to the act.  This includes the legitimization of any and all stereotyping of the Armenian people as a dangerous enemy, as a deadly bogeyman in the closet.
 
Denial is the final step in the completion of a mass extermination – and the first step towards the next genocide.