Sassounian: Who Won Akhtamar Propaganda War: Armenians or Turks?

The Spanish conquistadors were not equally brutal in the Americas. They were outsiders converting Native Americans and profiteering at the same time often in brutal ways, whereas Ottoman Armenians have been wiped out by their own government at the time represented by the CUP megalomaniacs.

But CUP is long gone. What prevents modern-day “tolerant” and “democratic” Turkish governments to admit the crime of their predecessors?

Karo – An apology will undoubtedly happen if/when the proper atmosphere is created wherein the apology can survive the test of time. Little by little, this is happening right now, as we speak. No one is suggesting that an apology should not happen, of course, it would be appropriate and is absolutely necessary, but the conditions must be right and to a degree, we need to be participants in helping to foster such conditions. We need to ask ourselves, once that does happen, then what?  Will Armenians be able to receive such an apology graciously? After so much noise making, can our compatriots calm down and shift their focus? Will they be open to commemorating the genocide with Turks, rather than encouraging an adversarial relationship forever?  Will they be able to replace demands with the same kind of tolerance they expect from the other side?  In the face of an official apology, will they be able to move on?

Karekin – Are you suggesting that it is the victims who should create the proper atmosphere for apology? This is unheard of. Many people asked but you never elaborated: HOW? If after 1915 until the present time ordinary Turks’ brains have been stuffed with historically distortive and Armenophobic schemes, how can we, the victims, being in a disproportional ratio in terms of population, “foster conditions” for their apology? Haven’t you come across comments posted here by the Turks? Sheer denialism, government propaganda elevated to the level of distortion of history that’s being taught at schools and universities. How do you change that? Or even if you miraculously can, how many more decades do you need for that? Don’t you think it’s the prerogative of their government, not us, to create an atmosphere for apology? You agree that “little by little this is happening right now,” but our demands for justice haven’t subsided, on the contrary, they’ve become stronger. Then why is it happening little by little as we speak? I’ll tell you why. Because it is exactly these demands that are being recognized as just by the increasing number of foreign governments, international organizations, professional organizations, advocacy groups, scholars, and Nobel Prize laureates, and the possibility of such players as the US, UK, and Israel to recognize the genocide that influence the Turks to make insignificant, essentially superficial, gestures. In other words, when Turks apologize they’ll do it not out of humanism, compassion, or remorse. They’ll do it out of inevitability imposed on them by the international community. Noone knows the Turks better than the Armenians. As for “once that apology does happen, then what?” I’m pretty sure it’ll be easier for Armenians to move on knowing that the murderer has repented. It’ll also relieve us from the victim complex from which almost all of us suffer.

Well, arx, and I wish that all Turks can think little bit deeper and understand the issue from aspects other than their denialist, distortionist government have been stuffing their brains for decades. I can understand why Armenians would have “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” after all we lost 1.5 million human beings, a million of others forcibly expelled from or fled their ancestral homeland, three-quarters of our lands now occupied, most of our cultural edifices desecrated, our properties stolen, our houses given to Balkan Turks and Kurds, our bank accounts and insurance indemnities appropriated, and the crime of genocide never admitted and apologized for. What “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” the Turks are having at the hands of Armenians? Please enlighten me. “When are we going to start our healing process,” you ask? Whenever your state admits the guilt for committing genocide and apologizes to Armenians.

Some people here need to learn the lessons of positive reinforcement. Let’s ask a few questions:  Do you have kids?  If you do, are they perfect, or have they broken a vase or dropped a bottle of milk, or do they have a mental or physical problem?  Have you tried demanding that they do this or that?  Have you chastised them on a daily basis for not being perfect or what you want them to be?  Have you threatened them?  Have you hit them?  Screamed at them? Demeaned them publicly?  Insulted them and their grandparents?  Have you attempted to cause them pain to get your demands met?  If you answered yes to any of these questions, I’d like to know if you were able to change your kid, or, did you meet some resistance?  Did your wife encourage you or did you do this alone?  The fact is that the more hurt you attempt to inflict the less likely it is that you will see positive change in the direction you want.  Sadly, if you don’t realize this fact with your own children, you will not be able to understand how to change the dynamic that currently exists between Armenians and Turks.  Then again, maybe some of us don’t really want to see a change take place…maybe, just maybe, the status quo is alot more comfortable than change.

Whether the victims were native Americans or native Anatolians, the result is the same….the conquerors conquered, established their empires, pllaged the land and vanquished the conquered. In both cases, the conqueror sat like an octopus on its victim.  the Americas, Spain eventually lost political control, but culturally their legacy remains in a big way: language, culture, religion, architecture.  The natives are still there, speaking the language of their conquerors.  In Turkey, the loss of empire resulted in Turkey for the Turks and a fascist regime determined to suppress any expression of ’non-Turkish’ culture.  I agree w/ Gaytzag that we gained alot w/ the Akhtamar badarak, in that a huge amount of publicity was brought to Armenian culture, architecture and history thru photos, interviews and the press. When the sun shines, you must make hay -  because if you wait, you may just get another rainy day.  

Zeynep – We’re not discussing here social relationships that may form between different ethnic and religious groups. Of course, there may be good neighborly relations between an individual Turk and an individual Armenian, or an individual Turkish family and an individual Greek family, as you described. But what does this have to do with the crime that the Ottoman Turkish government has committed against their own citizens of Armenian descent and with our demand for justice? The whole Armenian population and their ancestral lands in the Ottoman empire were wiped out from the face of the earth in what the increasing number of foreign governments, international organizations, scholars, and groups recognize as genocide, i.e. deliberate annihilation of a particular ethnic, national, racial, and religious group.
 
I re-read the article trying to locate where you saw any demeaning words addressed to the modern-day Turks. Sorry, but you’ll have to refer me to those parts in the text when it says that Turks are “not human.” But we’d for sure say that Turkey’s Ittihadist forefathers were not human. To exterminate in millions innocent women, children and the elders in the most barbarous forms is not human.
 
As a victim of the genocide by the Turks, I sympathize with the pain of Crimean Tatars. However, Crimean Tatars, as well as some other peoples in the former Soviet Union, were mostly forcibly deported from Crimea under the Stalin regime and relocated elsewhere, they were not exterminated and their case hardly fall under the definition of genocide as given by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Whereas Armenians were not only forcibly deported from their ancestral lands but regularly massacred en route. In contrast to the Tatars, Armenians’ deportations did not result in their relocation elsewhere. They resulted in near-total death for the most of them. Annihilation of the Armenians was a part of the government policy Ottomanization of the empire, not a part of Stalinist crazy nationality policy of relocating minorities or placing them under the jurisdiction of majority populations.
 
On an individual level, you may claim that you were “fortunate to grow up in Istanbul, in freedom.” After all, it’s your fellow Muslim country and you were not harassed in Turkey as all Christian minorities – Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians – were, none of them now exists in Turkey. On an individual level, you can be grateful to Turkey to accept your family and help you grow up. Just like us, we’re proud and grateful citizens of the United States, but we’re also proud Armenians. But in contrast to you, we’ve become a Diaspora scattered all over the world not by our own choice. Why wouldn’t we continue to live on the lands of our ancestors who inhabited them for 4000 years?
 
Please understand: Armenians don’t carry hatred towards modern-day ordinary Turks. We abhor Turkish governments that after 1915 deny the crime of their predecessor Ittihadist government that committed the crime of genocide and for 95 years had no courage to apologize to us. We’d like to move on, but how can you move on knowing that the murderer-state hasn’t repented? How can you build relationship with your neighbor next-door “with love and open heart” knowing that he continues to deny that he killed your mother, raped your sister, beheaded your brother, and slit off an unborn from his mother’s womb, just like Turks did to Armenians in 1915?
 
I also hope that one day we would go Constantinople and exchange kindness with Turks, one day after their government showed humanity to the Armenian nation by apologizing for the crime.
 
P.S. By the way, the capital of Armenia is Yerevan, a name derived from 5000 year-old Urartian Armenian city of Erebuni. It’s not “Yerivan.” Cheers.

By the way, though I would love to be able to respond to some of the comments and questions specifically, most such attempts, specific references etc. are routinely filtered out.  When 3 out of 4 are censored, then one tends to keep it short.  I suppose some facts are too harsh for many sensitive ears and eyes here.  In any case, suffice it to say, and as I had also mentioned many times before, I have never made any statement I could not back up with facts, you know the real ones.  In fact, and ironically, much of what I have presented is supported in Armenian propaganda sources themselves. 

Dear Karo,
Not only Armenian people saw genocide in their history, Turkish people had genocide in Greece, in Bulgaria, in Russia , if you visit Turkey, please ask the people where are they from originally, you will see. But nobody talk this kind of things in Turkey. This is past my friend, of course we will not forget it. But we must look the future. You can not built future with hate.
Regards

Murat,
 
The world does not revolve around Turks. In fact, Turks are relatively new nation from the historical perspective, a callous nomadic nation that secured its place in Asia Minor by means of waves of invasions and destruction brought upon indigenous nations from the steppes of Mongolia and Altay mountains. Knowing this you dare to advise us to “take a look at the map of Sevres and what was to be left for Turks if the story had ended some other way”? Well, how about the fact that there were never any Turks in sight on those lands before Seljuk and Mongol invasions? You occupied the lands of other peoples, enslaved them as millets in the Ottoman empire and now you’re worried about “what was to be left for Turks?” What a self-centered mentality! A total disregard for the historical rights of more sedentary, nobler, and more civilized ancient inhabitants of those lands. You only concern yourself with what might or might not happen to Muslims had the Treaty of Serves been materialized for indigenous peoples. What a narrow-minded, self-centered, self-aggrandizing mentality. You don’t bother asking yourself as to where those Muslims were at the times when such ancient nations as Assyrians, Greeks, and Armenians inhabited those lands, because your Turkish mental aptitude only allows you to focus on what’s yours not what could be a fairer scenario for all, doesn’t it? What an arrogance to say that had ancient people gotten their lands back it’d be “surely a fertile ground for WWIII.” What a striking acumen of a predicting capacity! How can a person that considers himself “civilized” be concerned with a hypothetical war but disregard a crime against humanity, such as genocide, that his nation has actually committed? “Ottomans paid a heavy price for their mistakes.” What an utterly cynical statement! Paid a heavy price like what? Lost three quarters of their ancestral lands in Mongolian steppes? Had 1.5 million innocent people slaughtered, mutilated, raped, burnt and buried alive, starved to death as a result of their government’s premeditated genocide? Had all their cultural heritage in the Altay mountains desecrated, transformed into churches, sheepfolds, or simply detonated? Had their houses, properties, bank accounts, valuables, insurance indemnities appropriated? What heavy price?
 
In the Ottoman Turkey Armenians were treated as a second class, a millet, constantly pillaged, massacred, abducted by the Turkish countrymen. With no rights, no representation, heavily and unjustly taxed. Nevertheless they managed to be trusted millet, fighting for Ottomans in the fronts more bravely than anyone else, even supporting the CUP initially in the hope that their rights will be respected. Nothing of the kind happened because Ottomans wanted to preserve superiority over their minorities. Just like other oppressed minorities: Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Montenegrins, Romanians, and Arabs, Armenians were no exception in their aspirations to throw off the loathed Ottoman yoke. However, they never organized, nor were they able or willing to organize, revolts aimed at overthrowing the government or mass murdering the Turks. A few revolutionaries tried to bring freedom and relief to their oppressed nation. Look at this from the Armenian perspective if you consider yourself a person with a wide worldview. Your nation is a genocide-perpetrator nation and your cheap tricks like using the term “crimes against humanity” in relation to the freedom-fighting activities of a few Armenian revolutionaries won’t change the reality. A few revolutionaries never organized extermination of your whole nation, forcible deportations, death marches, and wholesale starvation for women, children, and the elders. How cynical one should be to blame other nation for a never-committed crime, a crime that his own nation has committed!
 
Ottomans are history, but their crime against humanity was never recognized neither by them nor by all consecutive Turkish governments. On the contrary, the truth about the genocide of Armenians is hidden, distorted, misrepresented. That’s why we have cynical, heartless, and uncompassionate Turks like you on these pages. Armenians have nothing to be ashamed of our past to face it. Armenians didn’t slaughter your nation, starved them to death in millions. Armenians didn’t forcibly expel hundreds of thousands of Turks. Armenians didn’t steal their properties, convert their mosques into churches or just blow them up. We don’t deserve having a cynic like you on these pages advising us to face our 4000 year-long proud past. What a typically Turkish, cunning way of putting the blame on the victims in order to whitewash the barbarity of his own nation!

Ooh, wow! I guess we owe the Turks gratitude based on Murat’s predictions a la Nostradamus in that by wiping out millions of Armenians and other native Christian peoples of Asia Minor they saved the world from the World War III. I think we should also be indebted to Murat for making a prediction for us that civilized Christian Armenians would have acted in the same savage, barbarous ways as Ottoman Turks had they been given their ancestral lands in Asia Minor and just wipe the hell out all the Muslims living there. What an obtuse extrapolation of the self destructive mentality and behavior on the mentality and behavior of other, nobler peoples…

Murat,
 
Have decency, if you know what the notion stands for. What the Hell are you talking about? Do you mean to say that Ottoman Armenians, being largely peasant, impoverished, suppressed millet, barred from representation in legislatures, whose witness testimonies were disregarded in courts, who were prohibited to bear arms, could inflict similar destruction on Turks who made themselves a “superior” majority on the lands of other peoples? Who represented the government apparatus, Murat? Who possessed authority, law-enforcement, and military might in the Ottoman empire? Armenians or Turks? Doesn’t this fact already tell you which side was more capable of bringing destruction on the other? In which history book or a witness account have you come across a fact that Armenians planned and then executed a premeditated mass extermination of the Turks? Don’t make yourself the laughingstock of the whole community of nations. Were there interethnic, intercommunal clashes that resulted in the deaths of the Turks. Noone denies it. The life of Armenians, especially in the countryside was miserable, highly insecure. Throughout centuries they experienced non-stop pillages, abductions, murders, and thefts from the Turkish, Kurdish, and Circassian bands. So men organized the fedayi resistance  because constant appeals of the Armenian intelligentsia and social groups to the Sultans resulted in no protective action on their part. Do you have any idea that the term “fedayi” is not even Armenian. In Arabic fidaiyin means “self-sacrificers.” The term fedayee was first used by Armenians in the Ottoman empire who formed guerrilla organizations and armed bands in reaction to the unchecked murder of Armenians and the pillage of Armenian villages by criminals, tribal Kurdish forces, and Hamidian Turkish guards during the reign of Bloody Sultan Abdul Hamid II and afterwards. Most of the fedayee leaders were members of the Armenian national liberation movement. What would you expect Armenians to do in the face of constant pillages and massacres? Be silent, act like sheep, and calmly follow the maraudering Turkish guards to a slaughterhouse? Where does this unreserved hatred originate in you, Murat, when it comes to the simple truth that other peoples are human beings, too, and many of them might have invested much more into the human civilization in literature, arts, architecture, sciences, business, trade and commerce? Does this spite surface in you because you know you won’t be able to compete with others in these fields?
 
Yes, Murat, extermination of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was a barbaric act, a “shameful act,” as even you own Mustafa Kemal admitted. The whole civilized world knows Ottoman Turks as barbaric because one can go insane if he or she visualizes what fiendish tortures, suffering, indescribable   humiliation, and refined methods of death your forefathers have put to while exterminating Armenians. Are you able to embrace wider worldview and look at issues from both side, or you just don’t bother because no matter what, you think, you must defend Turks and Azeris because this is yours, right? Who’s right and who’s wrong doesn’t matter, the Hell with it. Your ethnic affinity and blood call are more important, right? Same with Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh). Don’t you even try to compare Turkish crime against humanity with the war over self-determination in Artsakh. Killings were on both sides simply because it was a full-scale war unleashed, by the way, by your beloved next-of-kins Azeris, nor Armenians. First, pogroms and massacres in Sumgait and Baku. Then ethnic cleansing in all Armenian villages surrounding Karabakh. And then constant shelling of towns and villages in Karabakh proper.
 
Regardless spite and intolerance that you spit on these pages, make no mistake: justice will be served. You may find unbelievable, but your government will apologize to Armenians for wiping out one of the most ancient civilizations inhabiting the Earth. Make no mistake.