0010) Armenian Leader Boghos Nubar Pasha's Open Letter

Boghos Nubar Pasha, in a January 30, 1919 (pg. 6) letter to The Times of London lends evidence on Armenian military support for the allies during the First World War; Mr. Nubar's words should make anyone think twice before they conclude the Armenians were innocent victims. .

Boghos Nubar's Letter

The name of Armenia is not on the list of the nations admitted to the Peace Conference. Our sorrow and our disappointment are deep beyond expression. Armenians naturally expected their demand for admission to the Conference to be conceded, after all they had done for the common cause. The unspeakable sufferings and the dreadful losses that have befallen the Armenians by reason of their faithfulness to the allies are now fully known. But I must emphasize the fact, unhappily known to few, that ever since the beginning of the war the Armenians fought by the side of the Allies on all fronts. Adding our losses in the field to the greater losses through massacres and deportations, we find that over a million out of a total Armenian population of four million and a half have lost their lives in and through the war. Armenia’s tribute to death is thus undoubtedly heavier in proportion than that of any other belligerent nation. For the Armenians have been belligerents de facto, since they indignantly refused to side with Turkey. Our volunteers fought in the French ‘Legion Etrangere’ and covered themselves with glory. In the Legion d’Orient they numbered over 5,000, and made up more than half the French contingent in Syria and Palestine, which took part in the decisive victory of General Allenby.
In the Caucasus, without mentioning the 150,000 Armenians in the Russian armies, about 50,000 Armenian volunteers under Andranik, Nazarbekoff, and others not only fought for four years for the cause of the Entente, but after the breakdown of Russia they were the only forces in the Caucasus to resist the advance of the Turks, whom they held in check until the armistice was signed



(Boghos Nubar Pasha sent a similar letter to the French Foreign Minister, Stephen Pichon, below this page.)

Those 50,000 "Armenian volunteers" were non-Russian (otherwise we would have to assume they would have joined their army or were drafted into the Russian army), and they had to come from somewhere. I wonder where?

Boghos Nubar claimed one million survived, along
with the Patriarch and other Armenian sources,
which means 300,000 to not more than 600,000
Armenians died, if you do the math. In his letter, he
falsely claims "over a million" Armenians died, out
of an imagined population of four and a half million.
(Ohhhhh... so three and a half million Ottoman
Armenians survived, despite Boghos' having
claimed elsewhere that only a million survived?
SOME "annihilation," a word many these days
love to use, to sum up the tall genocide tale.)


Regarding the "four and a half million" Armenians living presumably in the Ottoman Empire, I guess even Bogus... I mean, Boghos was not exempt from the apparently genetic characteristic of Armenians to... ehhhh... "exaggerate." (It would have been in the Armenians' interest to make the Allies believe there were plenty of Armenians to fill up those Turkish lands... that they were hoping the Allies would hand over as a "Greater Armenia." See "More on Boghos Nubar," below.) Throughout this site, I've been citing three million as the worldwide total of Armenians before World War I (which I picked up from an Armenian site, and concluded must not have been too off the mark... although why I would conclude anything from an Armenian site would be true is another story), and the number of Armenians living within the Ottoman Empire was less than half that number (1.0 to 1.5 million), according to over half a dozen neutral sources.


DID YOU KNOW..?


Lloyd George, he of "The Turks are a human cancer" fame, himself described (in his book) Boghos Nubar's explanations as "fairy tales"? (George further remarked that Avetis Aharonian, the other leader of the two Armenian delegations sent to the Peace Conference, "was as contradictory and confused as Bogos Pasha."; see one example of his confusion.)




Armenian commander VARTAN (S. Mehrabian) with a few of his men






Who was Boghos Nubar Pasha? Born 1851 in Istanbul (and died 1930 in Paris), he was one of two Armenian delegations sent to the Paris Peace Conference.

From the web site of the Armenian Embassy in Canada:

At the start of the twentieth century the Egyptian Armenians found a new leader, Boghos Nubar, the son of Nubar Pasha. Boghos had studied agriculture and engineering in Switzerland and France. Upon his return, he had served as the director of the Egyptian railways and had supervised the irrigation plan for the Sudan. He had become a banker and corporate officer in a number of companies and, like his father, was granted the title of pasha. The massacres of the Armenians in 1895-1896 in Turkey and especially the Armeno-Azeri clashes in Transcaucasia, beginning in 1905, had a sobering effect on the Armenian middle class of Egypt. Liberals and disenchanted socialists felt that there was a need for a world-wide Armenian philanthropic organization. On Easter day (April 15), 1906, ten Armenian professionals met at Boghos Nubar's mansion in Cairo and drafted the by-laws of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU).

Holdwater says: AGBU's current budget is twenty seven million dollars. (What they said in April 2003, anyway.) That's a lot of dough to perpetuate the myth of the "Genocide"... and it's only one of many well-financed Armenian organizations.


The big reunion of AGBU's administrative members, at Boghos Nubar's home in
Paris, 1925. Front row, left to right: unknown, K. Sinabian, B.Nubar, D. Kélékian,
M. Babadjanian and A. Djévahirdjian. Back row: M. Hékimian, Z. Nubar, S.
Svadjian, L. Gumushgerdan, D. Gamsaragan, L. Pachalian. Holdwater never
realized his lousy high school French would come in handy, in making sense
of all the many Armenian-French web sites.


From an Egyptian site, extolling the landmarks of Cairo:

Also not far from the new Victoria College was another famous landmark, the Ramleh Casino. This fin-de-siecle monument constructed in 1886-7 was imagined and conceived by Boghos Nubar Pasha, son of the Armenian statesman-administrator Nubar Nubarian. Having studied at the école Central in Paris, Boghos was infatuated with the famous casinos and seaside resorts dotting the Franco-Belgian coast between the fashionable towns of Deauville and Ostende. The result was Ramleh-Les-Bains's majestic San Stefano Hotel & Casino.


Bugsy Siegel




Holdwater says: Could it be possible the hero of mobster "Bugsy" Siegel was "Boghos" Nubar? Perhaps opening up a gambling casino in or near a desert was not that novel an idea....





From the article, "Bulgarian Democracy and the Armenian Connection," in The Turkish Times:

As the allied armies started landing in late November 1918, the French army first took the port of Iskenderun and moved to Cilicia, a region that included the cities of Mersin, Adana, Maras, and Gazi Antep. The French army, having returned from World War I, was decimated, and a nebulous adventure in the Middle East was not a national priority in France. For the Cilician operation a special unit containing mostly Algerians and Armenians was established in the Island of Cyprus under the command of General Louis Romieu. It was named "Armenian Legion" similar in the make up of the French Legion d' Orient.

The Cyprus operation originally started in 1914 by the British to mobilize their colonial armies for the Gallipoli campaign, but later changed hands in 1916 with the arrival of French forces to establish the Armenian Legion. For the Cilician operation, most of the recruits came from the Armenian lobby organized by the son of the former Prime Minister of Egypt, Boghos Nubar Pasha.

(...)

Financial resources for arms and operational expenses, including salaries for the Armenian Legion, came largely from popular subscription campaigns, mounted throughout the war in the United States and Great Britain, nominally, intended to feed "starving Armenians."



Holdwater: Hmmmm.... it looks like some teary-eyed Americans wishing to feed their suffering Christian brethren might have been bilked.

It appears the above was based on Prof. Stanford Shaw sheds light in his "The Armenian Legion and Its Destruction of the Armenian Community in Cilicia" chapter from the book, "The Armenians in the Late Ottoman Period." You can read some more here. Prof. Shaw further illuminates:

Cypriot Greeks contributed substantially to the Legion, providing food, clothing and logistical support for the soldiers while they were in training. Large numbers of young Armenians came to Cyprus to join the Legion, mostly as a result of recruitment campaigns organized by the son of the former Prime Minister of Egypt, Boghos Nubar Pasha, who stirred them with romantic tales of establishing an Armenian empire stretching from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean while at the same time, gaining revenge against Turks and other Muslims. Armenian soldiers who had served in the Ottoman army during the war and had been captured by the British and imprisoned in concentration camps in Cyprus also were separated from their Turkish colleagues and enrolled in the Legion. As time went on, the initial force of Armenian refugees was enlarged by the transfer to it of Armenian soldiers in the British and French garrisons on the island and in Egypt as well as Armenians captured by General Edmund Allenby's army that was advancing from the Sinai Peninsula through Syria during most of 1917... The Armenian Legion therefore remained on Cyprus until the armistice was signed. In the end it was brought to Turkey, not by the British, but as part of the French army sent to occupy Syria and south-eastern Anatolia as a result of the Armistice imposed on the Ottomans at Mondros in late October 1918.

Holdwater: Little did Boghos Nubar predict that his manipulation tactics would play a major role in the out-of-control Armenians' making sure to end the Armenians' presence in the "Cilicia" region.


Lining up to join the French Armenian Legion.
Sacre Bleu! Below, Armenians from that legion.




IRONIC BOGHOS BIT

For a fellow who worked so hard against the Turks, it's interesting the Turks had thought highly enough of Nubar to have offered him a position in the Ottoman government in 1914. Boghos turned the opportunity down because he felt his Turkish wasn't up to it. No wonder Nubar did not get much into the "genocide," in his letter at top... whomever heard of a government bent on exterminating a people that were actually invited to be representing that very government?

Source: Taner Akcam, Türk Ulusal Kimligi ve Ermeni Sorunu ("Turkish National Identity and the Armenian Question"), Istanbul 1992, p. 151

Interestingly, the above offer came after the official CUP organ, Tasvir i Evkiar, labeled Nubar as a traitor, since he was urging reform in the Western capitals. [Near East, V (July 4, 1913), 239.]








More on Boghos Nubar

Excerpts from the book: A Myth of Terror
An Illustrated Expose by Eric Feigl
Armenian Extremism: Its Causes and Its Historical Context
(From www.ataa.org)

Communist-Bolshevist Russia would long remain an unknown entity, (No one could have guessed that its politics would differ in absolutely no way from those of the Czars; the Armenians suspected this least of all!) So after the collapse of the Czardom, everything that had been promised to the Czars in the Sykes-Picot Agreement was now promised to the Armenians. It was thus reasonable to expect them to distinguish themselves a little bit more in the fight against the Ottoman Empire!

Lloyd George, in his well-known flowery style, described Armenia as a land "soaked with the blood of innocents". Little did he know that he was telling the truth but that the blood was mostly that of Moslems, who in fact had many more dead to mourn than the "Christian" Armenians. Lloyd George was just as much a hypocrite as Wilson and Clemenceau. They had all picked out a "romantic" victim and then dropped her by the wayside as soon as she ceased to be useful.

When the "peace conference" — which was actually nothing but a dictate-preparation conference — began meeting in Paris in January of 1919, it appeared as if the Armenian extremists' hour had arrived. The Armenians sent two delegations to the "peace conference". One was led by the professional emigrant Boghos Nubar, who had been working towards the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire for many years. The other was from the Republic of Armenia (the existence of which had only been made possible by the Turks after the Treaty of Baku on May 28, 1918).

The two delegations immediately began "auctioning" — outbidding each other in demands for territory and underbidding each other in rational arguments. They were apparently confusing politics with a carpet bazaar, where the important criteria are the pattern, the number of square meters, and the age of the desired item. Their demands became so excessive that even such inveterate carpet-lovers as the Allied rulers lost interest in making a real offer. After all, it did not have to be an Armenian carpet. Those of the Turks were much older, more valuable, and more reliable.


Memories of Nubar Pasha


After the Armenian delegation led by Boghos Nubar started things off by demanding an Armenia in eastern Anatolia, the joint delegation (the group led by Avetis Aharonian from the Republic of Armenia had in the meantime merged with Nubar) worked its way up to territorial claims stretching from the Black Sea, with Trabzon as a harbor, all the way to Cilicia.

The Armenian population of this "Greater Armenia" would not even have accounted for a fifth of the total population of the region - and that is based on the figures from 1914! Moreover, even if back then in 1914 the entire Armenian population of the world had gathered in eastern Anatolia, there still would not have been an Armenian majority in the region.

But so what? In the nineteenth century, the various Armenian churches had wrestled over who was the "most Armenian." Later, the Dashnaks and Hunchaks both wanted to carry off the palm in the fight to be the best terrorists. And now, the delegation from the Republic of Armenia and the one from the Armenian diaspora were outbidding each other in the same way. As mentioned above, their "common memorandum" claimed not only the "six vilayets" of Van, Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Karput, Sivas, and Erzurum (in which the Armenians had never in history had a majority), it also laid claim to Trabzon, Karabagh (where virtually no Armenians had ever lived), Sansegur, and large parts of Georgia, as well as Cilicia.

At the same time, the reputation of the Armenians as a nation of peace-loving victims who had been defenselessly and helplessly murdered (or rather exterminated) by the bloodthirsty Ottomans was shaken. The reason: The young, autonomous Armenian Republic could not think of anything better to do than start a whole series of wars of conquest.

The president of the "Armenian National Delegation" sums up, in a letter (Here it is)
to French Foreign Minister Stephen Pichon, why the Ottomans, who were fighting on five fronts at the same time and were also confronted with internal Armenian rebellions, had to defend themselves by moving the Armenian population out of the endangered areas:




Monsieur le Ministre,

I have the honor, in the name of the Armenian National Delegation, of submitting to Your Excellency the following declaration, at the same time reminding him:

That the Armenians have been, since the beginning of the war, "de facto belligerents," as you yourself have acknowledged, since they have fought alongside the Allies on all fronts, enduring heavy sacrifices and great suffering for the sake of their unshakeable attachment to the cause of the Entente:

In France, through their volunteers, who started joining the Foreign Legion in the first days and covered themselves with glory under the French flag;

In Palestine and Syria, where the Armenian volunteers, recruited by the National Delegation at the request of the government of the Republic itself, made up more than half of the French contingent and played a large role in the victory of General Allenby, as he himself and his French chiefs have officially declared;

In the Caucasus, where, without mentioning the 150,000 Armenians in the Imperial Russian Army, more than 40,000 of their volunteers contributed to the liberation of a portion of the Armenian vilayets, and where, under the command of their leaders, Antranik and Nazerbekoff, they, alone among the peoples of the Caucasus, offered resistance to the Turkish armies, from the beginning of the Bolshevist withdrawal right up to the signing of an armistice."

(The letter bears the date on which it was received in the French Foreign Office - December 3, 1918). In this manner, Boghos Nubar explained that the Armenians had waged constant war with the Ottoman Empire from November 1, 1914 right up to the signing of the Armistice of Mudros on October 30, 1918 and had thus been, in his eyes, "de facto belligerents."



Holdwater says: In the space of two months, from the writing of this letter to the writing of The Times of London letter, the number of those volunteers shot up from 40,000 to 50,000. How did the Armenians ever attain their favored positions within the Ottoman Empire as administrators, when they can never get their numbers straight?

How Bogus was Boghos?




As can been seen, the French did not conceive of establishing an Armenia in Cilicia, but were planning to border with an Armenia which would be established in the east (that is in regions which were once relinquished to Russia), and to exert their influence in that area. In 1920, when the Armenians claimed that they were promised an Armenia in Cilicia, referring to Bogos Nubar Pasha, the French openly accused Bogos Nubar of lying. Let us look at the following letter sent by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the President of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the French Senate on 28 December 1920:


. . . You have asked me whether in 1916, or since that date, the French Government had engaged itself in regard to Armenia, to constitute an autonomous Cilicia.


. . . I have the honour of informing you that no engagement of this nature ever took place.


. . . Bogos Pasha claims that M. Geroges Picot assured him in London that France had engaged herself to give, after the victory of the Allies, autonomy to Cilicia under her protection.


This so called engagement was apparently the counterpart of the recruiting of the Armenian legion, which had been formed at the suggestion of M. Georges Picot, to help to drive the Turks from Cilicia.


To strengthen his claim, Bogos Pasha cites a telegram he sent to his son in Cairo, through the mediation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in order to take the necessary measure for the establishment of the Armenian legion. He adds that, Commander Romieu, charged with this formation, confirmed to the Armenian notables the agreement reached in London, and read them a letter written by M. Briand, who was then the President of the Council, in which he declared that he was in agreement with the national Armenian delegation.


M. Georges Picot has never informed the Ministry of the discussion he had with Bogos Pasha in London:' As a matter of fact, he had no authority which would permit him to engage the French Government.


The telegram sent by Bogos Pasha to his son only states `the official assurance that the national aspirations of the Armenians be satisfied when the Allies are victorious'. The department would not have sent this telegram if it had concerned Cilicia. Cilicia was not mentioned in this telegram. The sentence which is quoted could only refer to the establishment of an Armenian state within the limits determined by the Powers. This is exactly what was done by the Treaty of Sèvres.


There is no evidence in the Archives of the Foreign Affairs indicating that M. Briand wrote a letter to Commander Romieu.


There is no document of any kind which confirms the claim made by Bogos Nubar Pasha that M. Georges Picot assured him that `France would create an autonomous Armenia, after she conquers Cilicia, within the limits of the 1916 agreement'. . . .


This letter continues by proving that Bogos Nubar Pasha made unfounded claims. We have included this letter here, in order to indicate to what extent Bogos Nubar Pasha, who took upon himself the right to speak on behalf of Armenia, can be trusted.



From Kamuran Gürün's "The Armenian File"; extra insight into this period regarding French and Armenian actions in Cilicia may be found here.


Other authors have reached different conclusions on the matter:

"In the course of Franco-British negotiations for amendments to the Sykes-Picot Agreement at the French embassy in London during October 1916, Nubar proposed to recruit Armenians on a worldwide scale to fight the Turks under French officers, provided that these troops should become the nucleus of defense for an autonomous Cilicia under French protection after the war. Georges-Picot agreed, if only verbally, and thus incurred for France a political obligation beyond the Sykes-Picot Agreement to establish herself in Cilicia. Paris sealed the pact on 28 January with the creation of the Détachement francais de Palestine-Syrie. This unit was a brigade, formed under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Philipin de Piépape..."

From "The Tricolor Over the Taurus," p. 15.



The fact that Georges-Picot agreed "verbally" would be a difficult matter to prove, wouldn't it? No source is offered in the footnotes. Probably the "word" of Boghos Nubar was good enough for the book's author.


More on Bogus Boghos



"...The Armenian delegation demanded independence for Cilicia. To this, the French delegate replied, in the name of France, that since a special form of administration had not been stipulated for Cilicia by the Treaty of Sèvres, it would be difficult to bestow sovereignty on this country. Nevertheless, the French government would do its best to protect the Armenian minority. Upon this, Bogos Nubar indicated that the Armenians in Cilicia were not a minority but a majority."

"The Armenians in History and the Armenian Question," Esat Uras, 1988, p. 965


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