216) - QUOTES -Various Western Thoughts on the Turks

- QUOTES -Various Western Thoughts on the Turks

Amazing how so much can be said in the space of just a few words...

"Turks, Tartars, even Persians constituted the infidel powers which neighboured and threatened European Christiandom. The word "Turk" was mainly used in two ways, as a generic name for an Islamic State with its own characteristic institutions of Government and military; and as a description of behaviour or character — the Turks 'being of nature cruel and heartless'(...) The idea of cruelty was probably produced by the Turks' distant foreignness combined with an absence from their lives of comprehensible Christian ethics, but more importantly by their military threat."

Simon Shephard, regarding the image of the Turk during the Renaissance period, in association with negative connotations such as cruelty, religious fanaticism, espionage, dirtiness, drug addiction etc.; Marlowe and The Politics Of Elizabethan Theatre, (Sussex, The Harvester Press, 1986) p.142


Typically biased editorial cartoon depicting the Armenian "Genocide" from the period; the sword won't
do without the blood spillage, of course.


" All Turkish children also should be killed as they form a danger to the Armenian nation"

Hamparsum Boyaciyan, nicknamed "Murad," a former Ottoman parliamentarian who led Armenian guerilla forces, ravaging Turkish villages behind the lines, 1914. Cited from Mikael Varandian, "History of the Dashnaktsutiun." (According to some Internet sources; this book is alternately known as "History of the A.R.Federation" [Paris,1932 and Cairo,1950]. The New York Public Library has three books by this author, stated to have lived from 1874-1934, all 1917 and earlier [including "L'Arménie et la Question Arménienne," noted as "Delegation propaganda authenticated by the Armenian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919"])


"I killed Muslims by every means possible. Yet it is sometimes a pity to waste bullets for this. The best way is to gather all of these dogs and throw them into wells and then fill the wells with big and heavy stones. as I did. I gathered all of the women, men and children, threw big stones down on top of them. They must never live on this earth."

A. Lalayan, Revolutsionniy Vostok (Revolutionary East) No: 2-3, Moscow, 1936.


"We have never denied the Armenian crime of genocide inflicted upon 2.5 million Muslim people between 1914 and 1920."

Agop Zahoryan, 'Voices of Agonies', London; Reprint 1954, p. 91. (Holdwater: Really? Most Armenians hate to admit giving the Turks more than a nosebleed, to protect the Armenians' sacred Myth of Innocence, and claims for exclusive victimhood. There is a possibility this quote may be an inaccurate one; a verification would be welcomed.)


"When we arrived at Zeve, the village couldn't be passed through because of its stench. It was as if the bones in our noses would fall off... There were bodies everywhere. We saw a weird scene on the threshold of one house: they had filled the house with Muslims and burned it, and so many people had been burnt that the fat that had oozed from under the threshold had turned back into the trench in front of the door. That is, it was as if the river of fat had risen and later receded. The fat was still fresh. The entire village had been destroyed and was in this situation. I saw this with my own eyes, and I'll never forget it. We heard that they did the same thing to the Muslims on Carpanak Island. The Armenians told me about the latter; I did not see it for myself.�

Haci Osman Gemicioglu, an Armenian-Turk (having converted to Islam) who eyewitnessed the 1915 Zeve massacre; as told to Huseyin Celik, during interviews conducted in the late 1970s-early 80s.



"It is in our blood to hate the Turks. However, we hate Bulgarians and Greeks also. The Jews like Turks, but they hate Arabs. The Arabs, in their turn, are not in favour with the Turks. And the level of hatred is rising."

Narek Mesropian, Golos Armenii, a Russian-language newspaper in Armenia, in an August 5, 1997 article reflecting the tension between the Armenian and Jewish communities.


"Only 1,500 Turks remain in Van"

The Gochnag, an Armenian newspaper published in the United States, May 24,1915 ... in a proud report documenting the slaughter of the Turkish citizenry of Van. (Holdwater: this Internet quote needs to be verified. The date is wrong; the closest issues for the weekly are from May 22 and May 29.)


"Thousands of Armenians from all over the world, flocked to the standards of such famous fighters as Antranik, Kery, Dro, etc. The Armenian volunteer regiments rendered valuable service to the Russian Army in the years of
1914-15-16."

Kapriel Serope Papazian, Patriotism Perverted, Boston Baker Press, 1934, pg. 38


"I have it from absolute first-hand information that the Armenians in the Caucasus attacked Tartar (Muslim) villages that are utterly defenseless and bombarded these villages with artillery and they murder the inhabitants, pillage the village and often burn the village."

Admiral Mark Bristol, Bristol Papers, General Correspondence: Container #32: Bristol to Bradley Letter of September 14, 1920.

"The Moslems who did not succeed in escaping [the city] were put to death..."

Grace H. Knapp, The Tragedy of Bitlis, Fleming H. Revell Co., New York (1919) , page 146.

"We closed the roads and mountain passes that might serve as ways of escape for the Tartars (Turks), and then proceeded in the work of extermination. Our troops surrounded village after village. Little resistance was offered. Our artillery knocked the huts into heaps of stones and dust, and when the villages became untenable and the inhabitants fled from them into the fields, bullets and bayonets completed the work."

Ohanus Appressian, describing incidents in 1919; Memoirs of an Armenian officer, Men are Like That, 1926.

"This three-day massacre by Armenians is recorded in history as the 'March Events' and thousands of Muslims, old people, women and children lost their lives."

F. Kazemzadeh, The Struggle for Transcaucasia (New York, 1951), p. 69. (This excerpt refers not to Armenian atrocities against Ottoman Turks, but to "Tartar" (derogatory for "Tatar") Turks, when Armenia attacked Azerbaijan in 1918. Regarding this period of March 30 to April 1 1918, Vladimir Lenin said that commissar S. Shaumyan, the chief architect of the massacres throughout Azerbaijan, “turned Baku into an Armenian operated henhouse [slaughterhouse].� According to Justin McCarthy's “Death and Exile," "Between 8,000 and 12,000 Muslims were killed in Baku alone.…�)


“As the Armenians found support among the Reds (who regarded the Tartars as a counter-revolutionary elements) the fighting soon became a massacre of the Tartar population�

W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, “Caucasian Battlefields�, Cambridge University Press, 1953, p. 481


"Many massacres were committed by the Armenians until our army arrived in Erzurum... (after General Odesilitze left) 2,127 Muslim bodies were buried in Erzurum's center. These are entirely men. There are ax, bayonet and bullet wounds on the dead bodies. Lungs of the bodies were removed and sharp stakes were struck in the eyes. There are other bodies around the city."

Official telegram of the Third Royal Army Command, addressed to the Supreme Command, March 19, 1918; ATASE Archive of General Staff, Archive No: 4-36-71. D. 231. G.2. K. 2820. Dos.A-69, Fih.3.

"The Armenians did exterminate the entire Muslim population of Russian Armenia as Muslims were considered inferior to the Armenians by the prominent leaders of the Dashnaks."

Mikael Kaprilian, Armenian revolutionary leader, in Yerevan, 1919.


"In Soviet Armenia today there no longer exists a single Turkish soul."

Sahak Melkonian, Preserving the Armenian Purity, 1920


"Since all the able Moslem men were in the army, it was easy for the Armenians to begin a horrible slaughter of the defenseless Moslem inhabitants in the area. They ... simply cleaned out the Moslem inhabitants in those areas. They performed gruesome deeds, of which I, as an eye witness honestly say that they were much worse than what Turks have been accused of as an Armenian atrocity."

General Bronsart von Schellendorf , "A Witness for Talat Pasha," Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, July 24, 1921


"The reason of the contradiction between Turks and Armenians is the continuous cruelty by Armenian nationalists in return for Turkish and Azeri nations' humanism, care and patriotism."

Leon Z. Surmelian, Armenian-American writer, in his book, "I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen," with an introduction by William Saroyan; New York, E.P. Dutton & co., 1945 (The above quote is probably inexact.)


"There are 400.000 Armenians in the Caucasus, who escaped from the Ottoman State."

Hatisov, a later Armenian President, who had joined the Trabzon Conference (14 March-14 April 1918), in a message to Hüseyin Rauf. (Richard Hovannisian later updated this figure to 500,000.) In addition to other non-Ottoman lands many thousands of Armenians had found refuge in (e.g., Iran, Greece), it becomes plain to see all the Armenian men could not have been murdered in one magical stroke, as Armenian propaganda tells us. (Akdes, Nimel Kurat, Turkey and Russia, Ankara, 1990, p.471)


"For too many years Armenian mothers had lulled their children to sleep with songs whose theme was Turkish fierceness and savagery."

Ohanus Appressian, lending testimony to how innocent Armenian children are subjected to the brutality of racism by their parents; their "Love NOT Thy Neighbor" churches are also known to join in this hatred bandwagon. Men Are Like That, 1926.



"... It's better that I be a dog or a cat, than a Turkish barbarian..."

Edna Petrosyan, a SIX YEAR OLD Californian girl who recites hateful poems on the insistence of her mother. It is easy to see how this cycle of hate-perpetuation feeds the "Armenian Genocide" obsession for most Armenians. The Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1990


"Who wants to defend Turks?"

Pauline Kael, "When The Lights Go Down," 1980, p.499


"The Armenians snap, or rather they eat, the hands that feed them"

Henry Morganthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in private to American officials, in response to reports concerning Armenian Cannibalism. (Source unconfirmed)


"...In the early part of 1915, therefore, every Turkish city contained thousands of Armenians who had been trained as soldiers and who were supplied with rifles, pistols, and other weapons of defense. The operations at Van once more disclosed that these men could use their weapons to good advantage..."

Henry Morganthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, New York (1918), page 301


"I have really found it impossible to sit down and dictate a letter quietly. So I have instructed (Hagop) Andonian to take my diary and copy it with some elaborations of his own. Of course this relieves me of all responsibility for any error."

Henry Morganthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (Lowry, 1990; Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, New York, Letters; Box 7 May 11, 1915; Box 1 2 September 1, 1915; Box 8 July 13, 1915)


"It is to be hoped that the future historian will not give too much heed to the drivel one finds in the books of diplomatist-authors."

George A. Schreiner, American War/Political Correspondent, "The Craft Sinister: A Diplomatico-Political History of the Great War and its Causes, (G. Albert Gayer, New York, 1920)"; Schreiner criticized Ambassador Morgenthau in a letter, aware of the Ambassador's fabrications in "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story."


"True friendship among Armenians is a rare thing indeed..." — "...Hatred and envy: they seem to come naturally to us..."

Ara Baliozian, Armenian writer; (Source)


"Every Armenian has another Armenian whom he considers his mortal enemy."

"An Armenian's worst enemies are not odars but Armenians." ("Odars" : foreigners)

"Our perpetual enemy — the enemy that will eventually destroy us — is not the Turk but our own complacent superficiality."

"What kind of people are we?... Instead of reason, blind instinct. Instead of common sense, fanaticism."

". . . Our past is filled with countless instances of betrayal and treachery.. ."

Various Armenian writers, quoted by Ara Baliozian (Source)



"...When Turkey had not yet entered the war...Armenian volunteer groups began to be organized with great zeal and pomp in Trans Caucasia. In spite of the decision taken a few weeks before at the General Committee in Erzurum, the Dashnagtzoutune actively helped the organization of the aforementioned groups, and especially arming them, against Turkey. In the Fall of 1914, Armenian volunteer groups were formed and fought against the Turks..."

Hovhannes Katchaznouni, First Prime Minister of the Independent Armenian Republic, The Manifesto of Hovhannes Katchaznouni, 1923. (The Armenian Revolutionary Federation Has Nothing to Do Any More, New York, Armenian Information Service, 1955, p. 5.) "Practically all of the (volunteers were) Turkish Armenians," The New York Times reported, in 1915.


[One of the main aspects of Armenian] "national psychology... [is] to seek external causes for [Armenian ] misfortune."..."One might think we found a spiritual consolation in the conviction that the Russians behaved villainously towards us."

Hovhannes Katchaznouni, First Prime Minister of the Independent Armenian Republic, The Manifesto of Hovhannes Katchaznouni,1923, Page 8. (Holdwater: After the Russians, it would be the turn of the French, the Americans, the British, the Georgians, the Azerbaijanis — the whole world.)


"...Kachaznuni's government... like the wolf, eats the calf because such is its nature. That government could not live in peace and was obsessed with battling one or another of its neighbors, for like the wolf, it had to devour everything. Should not the Armenians have realized that, in view of their hostile relations with the Muslims, they must at least cling to the friendship of (Christian) Georgia? But instead they had now burned this bridge as well..."

Premier Noizhordonia of Georgia, three days after Armenia attempted a land grab attempt via a surprise and unprovoked attack on its neighbor, on December 14, 1918; as reported by Professor Richard Hovannisian in his book, The Republic of Armenia, Vol. 1. Armenia would be more successful in its land grab attempt against neighbor Azerbaijan some seventy years later... in the manner of another "Pearl Harbor"-like sneak and cowardly attack, with huge monetary backing from the Russians and Americans.


"Would you trust the Ku Klux Klan to provide reliable accounts of black behavior in the United States?"

Bruce Fein, adjunct scholar and general counsel of ATAA, from "Differences Are Overwhelming"; commenting on the validity of Henry Morgenthau's racist testimony, equally applicable to all the many virulent reports from people of the period who clearly stated Turks were an inferior race.



"The Turkish race was... from the first black day they entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity... as far as their dominion reached, civilisation vanished from view."

William Gladstone, British Prime Minister, "The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East," 1876



"The Turks are a human cancer, a creeping agony in the flesh of the lands they misgovern, rotting every fiber of life. I am glad that the Turk is to be called to a final account (referring to the impending Greek invasion of Asia Minor ) for his long record of infamy against humanity."

David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, getting ready to annihilate the last remnants of the dying Ottoman Empire.



"The centuries rarely produce a genius. Look at this bad luck of ours, that great genius of our era was granted to the Turkish nation."

David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, after his nation's plans to wipe Turkey off the face of the earth ran into a snag.



"Now I am the Only Greek Left."

David Lloyd George, upon hearing the news that King Constantine was exiled by the Greek government for siding with the Germans; in 1921, Lloyd George encouraged the king, allowing the king to conclude that he was as great as Alexander The Great, and thus a direct descendant of Hercules.


"I am informed, on good authority, that Russia is already commencing her usual intrigues among the Armenians of Asiatic Turkey. Russian agents are being sent into the provinces inhabited by them with the object of stirring up discontent against the rule and authority of the Porte. A Russian party is being formed in the capital amongst the Armenians, which already includes some leading and influential members of that community."

Sir Henry Layard, British Ambassador, in a July 14, 1878 message to British Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury (British Foreign Office 424/72, pages 160-161, No 211)



"The aim of the Armenian revolutionaries is to stir disturbances, to get the Ottomans to react to violence, and thus get the foreign powers to intervene."

Sir Philip Currie, the British Ambassador in Istanbul, 28 March 1894 (British Blue Book, Nr.6 1894, p.57? Or p. 87).


"The aims of the revolutionary committees are to stir up general discontent and to get the Turkish government and people to react with violence, thus attracting the attention of the foreign powers to the imagined sufferings of the Armenian people, and getting them to act to correct the situation."

Graves, the British Consul in Erzurum, reporting to the British Ambassador in Istanbul, on January 28, 1895. British Blue Book, Nr. 6 (1894), pp. 222-223


"The Dashnaks and Hunchaks have terrorized their own countrymen, they have stirred up the Muslim people with their thefts and insanities, and have paralyzed all efforts made to carry out reforms; all the events that have taken place in Anatolia are the responsibility of the crimes committed by the Armenian revolutionary committees."

Williams, The British vice-consul, writing from Van. (March 4, 1896, British Blue Book, Nr. 8 1896, p.108.)


"Those who in England are loudest in their sympathy with the aspirations of a(n Armenian) people ‘rightly struggling to be free’ can hardly have realized the atrocious methods of terrorism and blackmail by which a handful of desperados, as careful of their own safety as they are reckless of the lives of others, have too successfully coerced their unwilling compatriots into complicity with an utterly hopeless conspiracy."

Lord Warkworth, after paying a visit to Van. ( William Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism.)

"Our policy is to maintain our gratefulness to Russia, but at the same time induce Britain to help our cause. Our well-being is possible only in an independent Armenia. Do not be surprised at the word, for our motto is this: 'an Armenia ruled by Armenians'."

Nerses Varjabedian, Armenian Patriarch, writing in 1878 to Karakin (Garegin) Papazian, the head of the Armenian Committee in Manchester, England; while Armenians began to approach the Tsar for eventual Armenian independence, and of attempting to bring Britain into the picture. (Ermeniler ve 1915 Tehcir Olayi/Armenians and the 1915 Resettlement Episode, Prof. Azmi Süslü,1990, p.45)


"The purpose of the Armenian movement has been, from the beginning, to organize as far as possible a long drawn-out fight against the Ottoman tyranny, to create in the country a continuous revolutionary state, always having before our eyes the intervention of the third factor...the European factor"

Mikael Varandian, History of the A.R.Federation (Paris,1932 and Cairo,1950), p.3

"Armenians had people organized under the Turkish flag" (in Bitlis and Van, eastern Anatolia)

Dashnak report prepared in 1910 by M. Warandian for submission to the organization's convention in Copenhagen's Socialist International; from the archives (No. B.579238) of the Socialist International in Vandervelde, and mentioned in an article written by Orhan Kologlu in the April 2005 issue of the Turkish magazine, "Populer Tarih" (Popular History)... confirming that Armenian preparations for revolt were in the works years before the outbreak of W.W.I.


“The Armenian issue, which aims at meeting the economic interests of the capitalist world rather than bearing in mind the veritable interests of the Armenians themselves was best resolved with the Kars Agreement. The friendly ties between two industrious people coexisting peacefully for centuries have been satisfactorily established anew.�

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, 1.3.1922, Inaugural Speech of the 3rd Year of Session of the Turkish Grand National Assembly



"In fact we have an organization extraordinarily widespread in the United States. . . . It should be noticed that no attack has been made upon us in any quarter of the United States, and that in the eyes of the American people the quiet and subterranean nature of our work has the appearance of a purely private patriotism and enterprise."

Sir Gilbert Parker in a letter to the British Foreign Office. By 1917, the Canadian managing Wellington House's U.S.A. branch had a list of 170,000 to send anti-German and anti-Turkish propaganda to the Who's Who of American society, targeting "every editor and molder of public opinion."


"Armenians lived as local notables. They had no feeling of national unity. There were no political bonds or ties among them. Their only attachments were to the neighbouring notables. Thus whatever national feelings they had were local."

Kevork Aslan, Armenian historian, L'Armenie et les Armeniens, Istanbul, 1914 (Holdwater: No wonder they had no loyalty...)


"The Armenians change their position relating to Rome and the Persian Empire, sometimes supporting one and sometimes the other ... they are a strange people"

Tacitus, Roman historian; his Annalum Liber


"Wholly opportunistic, Dashnag politics have been variously pro-Nazi, pro-Russia, pro-Soviet Armenia, pro-Arab, pro-Jewish, as well as anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, anti-Communist, and anti-Soviet — whichever was expedient."

John Roy Carlson (Arthur Derounian), author, Cairo to Damascus Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1951, p. 438. Holdwater: Some sites have substituted "The Armenians" for "Dashnag politics." Not all Armenians support the Dashnaks (Carlson was a true Armenian patriot for disliking these scoundrels, who brought such misery to so many), but because the Dashnak terrorist method has been to silence all opposing voices, that works out to be a fair substitution, in my view. Those who are silent, comply.


".... Should the Armenians ever get the upper hand in Anatolia, their government would be much more corrupt than the actual administration. It was corroborated by the Armenians themselves..."

Fred Burnaby, "On Horseback Through Asia Minor" (Holdwater: while it sounds like the author could be talking about current Armenia, the book detailed an 1876 journey to see whether the Sultan's armies were capable of resisting yet another Russian thrust. Burnaby was reputed to be the strongest man in the British Army.)


"The Turks and Armenians got on excellently together... The Russians restricted the Armenian Church, schools and language; the Turks on the contrary were perfectly tolerant and liberal as to all such matters. They did not care how the Armenians prayed, taught and talked... The Armenians were thorough Orientals and appreciated Turkish ideas and habits... (They) were quite content to live among the Turks.... The balance of wealth certainly remained with the Christians. The Turks treated them with good-humoured confidence..."

Sir Charles Eliot, author, "Turkey in Europe" (London, E. Arnold, 1900); regarding the years preceding the Turkish-Russian War of 1877-78.


(The religious toleration of the Ottoman Government) "was complete" (and the state) "never in any way interfered with what the Christians did or taught in the schools or the churches.... it was impossible to desire more absolute liberty of worship or teaching."

Gratan Geary, "Through Asiatic Turkey" (London, M.S. and R. Sampson, 1878)


"(Armenian) prosperity grew until, by the middle of the 19th century, they became one of the richest communities of the Ottoman empire, prominent not only in trade and professions, but also in the service of state."

Dr. Andrew Mango, March 15, 2001 speech at the Society for the Promotion of Democratic Principles, in Istanbul


"Armenians are so pleased with their lives that this is impossible."

French Ambassador in Istanbul, in response to Napoleon Bonaparte's query to induce rebellion among the Ottoman Empire's Catholic Armenians and take a kind of revenge for the Akka defeat.



"The rights and interests of the Greeks in Turkey could not be better protected by any other power but the Turks"

Politis, foreign minister in the Greek government led by Prime Minister Venizelos


"The great Turk is governing in peace twenty nations from different religions. Turks have taught the Christians how to be moderate in peace and gentle in victory"

Voltaire



"Correct behavior"

Marechal Franchet d'Esperay, a French commander of the allied occupation army, referring to the Turkish people and military authorities. From the preface of Commander Larcher's "The Turkish War within the First World War."


"We have studied the Turkish peasant -- i.e. the mass of the Turkish people —- and got to know him as unconditionally one of the bravest and most moral representatives of the European peasantry"


Karl Marx. speaking for himself and Engels, "Karl Marx: His Life and Thought," David McLellan, 1973, pp. 438-439


"[The Turks] are the most honest and moral of the Orientals."

Elder Tanner, Mormon missionary, "Who Can be So Polite and Courteous As a Turk," Millenial Star, June 22, 1886). The Mormon missionaries were not as bigoted as Protestant and Catholic ones.


"The Protestant missionaries distributed in large numbers to various places in Turkey made propaganda in favour of England and stirred the Armenians to desire autonomy under British protection"

Horen Ashikian, The Armenian Patriarch, in "History of Armenia." (Mr. Ashikian was probably quoted, and was not the writer of this book, of which there were several... by process of elimination, the book was probably either the 1936 one written by V.C. Vahan, or one by Vahan Kurjian, in 1958. Hovhannes, the Fifth Catholicos of the Armenians, also wrote a book by the same name in 1912.)


"(Turkish Sultan) Meliksah's heart is full of affection and goodwill for Christians, he has treated the sons of Jesus Christ very well, and he has given the Armenian people peace, affluence and happiness"

Mathias of Edessa, Armenian historian, Chronicles, Nr. 129


"The Armenians of Byzantium have welcomed the Seljuk conquest with lengthy celebrations in the streets and thanksgiving to God for having rescued them from long years of Byzantine oppression. Seljuk Turks gave protection to the Armenian Church, which the Byzantines had been trying to destroy. They abolished the oppressive taxes which the Byzantines had imposed on the Armenian Churches, monasteries and priests, and in fact exempted such religious institutions from all taxes. The Armenian community was left free to conduct its internal affairs in its own way, including religious activities and education, and there never was any time at which Armenians or other non-Muslims were compelled to convert to Islam. The Armenian spiritual leaders in fact went to the Seljuk Sultan Melikshah to thank him for his protection."

Stephanos Taronetsi ASOGHIK, Armenian historian
who recorded his impressions on the arrival of Seljuk Turks to
Anatolia around 1071, probably from his renowned Universal History.


"How well the Seljuk Turks treated the
Armenians is shown by the fact that some Armenian noble families like the Tashrik family accepted Islam on their own free will and joined the Turks in fighting Byzantium."

Mathias of Edessa, Armenian historian, probably in his Chronicles, Nr. 129; after the death of Sultan Kilic Arslan, the same Armenian historian also wrote, "Kilic Arslan's death has driven Christians into mourning since he was a charitable person of high caliber and character."


"There is no crime without evidence. A genocide cannot be written about in the absence of factual proof."

Henry R. Huttenbach, professor and genocide scholar, "Bosnia's Killing Fields: The Memory war," The Genocide Forum, 1996, No. 9

"Historical questions should be left to historians"

Mesrob II, Armenian Patriarch, 2001.


"The Dashnak revolutionary society is working to stir up a situation in which Muslims and Armenians will attack each other, and thus pave the way for Russian intervention "


General Mayewski, Russian Consul General in Bitlis and Van, December 1912; source: Kara Schemsi, Turcs et Armeniens devant l'Histoire, Geneve, Imprimerie Nationale, 1919, p. 11


(By inciting massacres, Armenians) "wanted to assure European intervention"

Mikayel Varandian, Dashnak ideologue, History of the Dashnagtzoutune, Paris, 1932, p. 302


"(The Ottoman State) has used its right to defend its existence against Armenian organisations that had fomented and incited disorders and rebellions at the instigaion of the Russians by relying on Russian arms."

Leo (Arakel Babakhanian), Armenian historian, Turkahai Heghopokhutian Kaghaparapanoutiunu (The Ideology of the Revolution of Turkish Armenian), published in Armenian,1934, Paris)


"The outcry and clamor of Armenians and Turks have been persecuting Armenians are nothing but lies. The Turkish government has done nothing evil to Armenians. Perhaps Armenians have planned a revolution taking advantage of the indifference of the government, have armed bands and sent them to mountains, as for the Turks, perhaps they have been trying only to pursue them and put down the uprisings."

Austrian Consul in a report submitted to his government, Nikerled Krayblis, Rusya'nin fiark Siyaseti ve Vilayet-i fiarkiyye Mes'elesi [Eastern Policy of Russia and the question of the Eastern Provinces], translated by Habil Adem, Istanbul, 1932, p. 178


"The truth is that the party (Dashnak Committee) was ruled by an oligarchy, for whom the particular interests of the party came before the interests of the people and nation. They (the Dashnaks) made collections among the bourgeois and the great merchants. At the end, when these means were exhausted, they resorted to terrorism, after the teachings of the Russian revolutionaries that the end justifies the means."

Dr. Jean Loris-Melikoff, La Revolution Russe et les Nouvelles Republiques Transcaucasiennes, Paris, 1920, p. 81


"Czarist Russia at no time wanted to assure Armenian autonomy. For this reason, one must consider the Armenians who were working for Armenian autonomy as no more than agents of the Czar to attach Eastern Anatolia to Russia"

Borian, Armenian writer; probably B.A. Boryan, author of Armeniya Mejdunarodnaya Diplomatiya; SSSR. Cast 11, Moskva, 1929

(The Armenian revolutionary committees considered that) "The most opportune time to institute the general rebellion for carrying out the immediate objectives was when Turkey was engaged in war"

Louise Nalbandian, Armenian Revolutionary Movement, University of California Press, 1963


"As soon as the Russians have crossed the borders and the Ottoman armies have started to retreat, you should revolt everywhere. The Ottoman armies thus will be placed between two fires. On the other hand, the Armenians in the Ottoman army should desert their units with their weapons and unite with the Russians"

Dashnak committee order to the Armenians preparing to revolt within the Ottoman Empire




"The entire Armenian Nation will join forces — moral and material, and waving the sword of Revolution, will enter this World conflict ... as comrades in arms of the Triple Entente, and particularly Russia. They will cooperate with the Allies, making full use of all political and revolutionary means for the final victory of Armenia, Cilicia, Caucasus, Azerbayjan. ... [H]eroes who will sacrifice their lives for the great cause of Armenia.... Armenians proud to shed their blood for the cause of Armenia...."

Hunchak Armenian [Revolutionary] Gazette, in a call to arms just prior to the formal declaration of war against Germany and the Ottoman Empire, November 1914 issue, Paris.


"The Armenians have taken their place on the side of the Entente states without showing any hesitation whatsoever; they have placed all their forces at the disposition of Russia; and they also are forming volunteer battalions."

Horizon, the Dashnak Society's official organ, as soon as Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire


"The Hunchak Committee will use all means to assist the Entente states, devoting all its forces to the struggle to assure victory in Armenia, Cilicia, the Caucasus and Azerbaijan as the ally of the Entente states, and in particular of Russia."

Hunchak Committee instructions to its organizations in Ottoman territory; Aspirations et Agissements Revolutionnaires des Comites Armeniens avant et apres la Proclamation de la Constitution Ottomane, Istanbul, 1917, pp. 151-153


"The volunteer Armenian regiments in the Caucasus should prepare themselves for battle, serve as advance units for the Russian armies to help them capture the key positions in the districts where the Armenians live, and advance into Anatolia, joining the Armenian units already there."

Papazyan, the Armenian representative in the Ottoman Parliament for Van, in a published proclamation; he would soon turn out to be a leading guerilla fighter against the Ottomans



“The long-anticipated day of deliverance for the Turkish
Armenians is at hand and the Armenians are prepared for any sacrifice made necessary by the performance of their manifest duty.�

An Ottoman-Armenian newspaper, probably one of the two published in Van ("Van Kartali" or "Araratli"), as quoted in The New York Times article, ARMENIANS FIGHTING TURKS ("Besieging Van—Others operating in Turkish Army's Rear,") November 7, 1914



"...These gangs were advancing by plundering and pillaging (nehib ve garet) the properties/goods (emvalini) of the Moslem villages they passed through and massacred and destroyed even babies in cradles...."

Ottoman Royal Army report describing the actions of 10,000 Armenian committee men (acc'd to the Armenian Catholicos V. the Kevork, B.A. Boryan, Armeniya Mejdunarodnaya Diplomatiya; SSSR. Cast 11, Moskva, 1929, p. 363) regarding the uprising started in "Shitak Country" on April 17, 1915, followed by further riots by Armenians in the entire province of Van, culminating in the Russians' entry of Van on May 19th, causing some 30,000 Turks to flee with heavy losses.

"As it is known, the Russian government gave 242,900 rubles at the beginning of the war for the initial cost of arming and preparing the Turkish Armenians and to start riots within the country during the war. Our volunteer units were obliged to break the chains of the Turkish Army by cutting through, causing anarchy in Turkey and joining the rioters from behind together with those fighting inside the enemy lines if possible and to provide the propagation of the Russian Armies to get hold of Turkish Armenia."

Dashnak Party Military Minister, Armenian National Congress meeting in Tbilisi, February 1915; B.A. Boryan, Armeniya Mejdunarodnaya Diplomatiya; SSSR. Cast 11, Moskva, 1929, p. 360.

“As soon as the Armenian volunteer units commanded by Antranik approach Van, the Dashnak fighters in the area will take to the mountains and unfurl the flag of revolt. The plans for the rebellion will be implemented in April 1915. The Catholicos has informed us that 10,000 armed fighters are ready to join the action.�

Dashnak decision, end of February 1915 Armenian National Congress held in Tiblis. [The Armenians in History and the Armenian Question; Esat Uras, Documentary Publications, Istanbul (1988); p.853]

"From all countries Armenians are hurrying to enter the ranks of the glorious Russian Army, with their blood to serve the victory of Russian arms... Let the Russian flag wave freely over the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. Let, with Your will, great Majesty, the peoples remaining under the Turkish yoke receive freedom. Let the Armenian people of Turkey who have suffered for the faith of Christ receive resurrection for a new free life under the protection of Russia."

Samson Harutunian, president of the Armenian National Bureau in Tiflis, in response to Czar Nicholas II's visit to the Caucasus, to make final plans for cooperation with the Armenians against the Ottomans. (Source; also cited in p. 45 of Prof. Hovannisian's "Armenia on the Road to Independence" as having appeared in the Nov. 30, '14 issue of Hairenik Taregirk, V, Boston 1947, p. 126))

"As demonstrated by the innumerable declarations, provocative pamphlets, weapons, ammunition, explosives, & c., found in areas inhabited by Armenians, the rebellion was prepared for a long time, organized, strengthened and financed by Russia. Information was received on time in Istanbul about an Armenian assassination attempt directed at high ranking state officials and officers."

General Bronsart v. Schellendorf , Chief of Staff to the Ottoman Commander-in-Chief, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, July 24, 1921

"When war broke out the Armenians of these regions [the Eastern provinces] made secret contact with the Russian authorities in the Caucasus, and an underground network was created which enabled recruits to be gotten from these Turkish provinces for the Russian Army.�

Philips Price, A History of Turkey, 1956, p. 91

"In return for Russia's forcing the Ottomans to make reforms for the Armenians, all the Russian Armenians would support the Russian war effort without conditions."

The Catholicos of Echmiadzin assures the Russian General Governor of the Caucasus, Vranzof Dashkof; source: Tchalkouchian, Gr., Le Livre Rouge, Paris, 1919


"The liberation of the Armenians in Anatolia would lead to the establishment of an autonomous Armenia separated from Turkish suzerainty and that this Armenia could be made possible with the protection of Russia."

Czar Nicholas, to the Catholicos of Echmiadzin, who was received by the Russian emperor at Tiflis. Tchalkouchian, Gr., Le Livre Rouge, Paris, 1919


"The Armenians greeted the Russians with ringing bells and with their priests dressed in their ceremonial robes. In this war, too, the Armenian people took their place beside the Russians... The war broke out and volunteers came from everywhere, from Armenia in Eastern Anatolia, from Egypt under Turkish rule, from the non-Russian areas of Rumania; all these people who were Ottoman subjects, familiar with Anatolia, gathered together and put themselves at the service of the Russian Empire.�


Tchalkouchian, in a May 24, 1916 speech addressed to the Armenian Congress in St. Petersburg [The Armenians in History and the Armenian Question; Esat Uras; Documentary Publications, Istanbul (1988); p.854.]


"Armenians do not have the right to live in Erzurum."

First order of the Russian General Commandment during the Russian occupation of Erzurum in 1916. B.A. Boryan, Armeniya Mejdunarodnaya Diplomatiya; SSSR. Cast 11, Moskva, 1929, p. 356.


"...The solution to grant independence to the Armenians would not be suitable since the Armenians living in Armenia never had formed the majority whereas they only formed one fourth of the existing population until now. Under these conditions, the granting of Armenian independence would cause unjustness like the administering of a majority by a minority, and the best feasible solution would be the equal administering of various ethnic groups through the rearrangement of the region taken from Turkey so that these groups never fall into a conflict; they should be granted freedom regarding educational and religious rights along with the free use of their language, thus causing the people to respect the Government and the clearance of all kinds of internal and external incitements and bringing the necessary vital conditions for the local people once present during the Turkish administration...."

Sazonar, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, in his project letter to Prince Nicolai Nicolayevich, the Caucasian General Governor, June 27, 1916; Razdel Aziatskoy Turtsii Po Sekretnim Dokumentom Bivshego Ministerstva Inostrannih Del. Sostovitel: E.A. Adamov, Moskva, 1924. Document No: CXL., p. 207-210. From "Armenian Claims and Realities," Dr. Hüsamettin Yildirim, Ankara, 2001.

"The Armenians of Turkey no longer think of separating from the Ottoman Empire. Their problems no longer are even the concern of relations between the Armenian Republic and the Ottomans. Relations between the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Republic are excellent, and they must remain that way in the future. All Armenian political parties feel the same way. Continuation of this good neighbourly spirit is one of the principal points of the program recently announced by the Armenian Government, of which I am Foreign Minister."

Hadisian, Foreign Minister of the Armenian Republic, upon the signing of the Batum Treaty on June 4, 1918 with the Ottoman Government. (Only seven days after the Armenian Republic in Erivan was established.) This treaty was described as involving the Armenians' full disavowal of all claims on the territory or people of the Ottoman Empire including its Armenians and the lands claimed by Armenian nationalists; Feigl, Erich, A Myth of Terror, 1991, pg. 85


"Russia's policy of hostility toward Turkey emboldened the Armenians of the Caucasus; that is why the Caucasus Armenians were involved in clashes between two friendly races. Thank goodness that this situation did not last too long. Following the Russian Revolution, the Armenians of the Caucasus understood that their security could be achieved only by having good relations with Turkey, and they stretched out their hands to Turkey. Turkey also wanted to forget the events of the past, and grasped the out-stretched hand in friendship. We agree that the Armenian Question has been resolved and left to history. The mutual feelings of suspicion and enmity created by foreign agents have been eliminated."

Hairenik (Horizon), the Dashnak organ, on June 28, 1918; Kara Schemsi, Turcs et Armeniens devant l'Histoire, Geneve, Imprimerie Nationale, 1919, p. 31-32. (Holdwater: those Dashnaks sure have a short memory!)


"The Turks and Armenians lived in peace side by side for centuries; that the Turks suffered as much as the Armenians at the time of the deportations; that only 20 % of the Turkish villagers who went to war would be able to return to their homes; that at the start of World War I and before the Armenians never had anything approaching a majority of the population in the territories called Armenia; they would not have a majority even if all the deported Armenians were returned; and the claims that returning Armenians would be in danger were not justified."


General James G. Harbord, in a report to Congress after touring through Anatolia during September and October; Kara Schemsi, Turcs et Armeniens devant l'Histoire, Geneve, Imprimerie Nationale, 1919, p. 31-32


"The Turks had no deliberate policy of genocide at any stage, only the removal of Armenians from the front line with Russia, where they were collaborating with the Ottoman Empire's enemies and were thus a threat to its security."

P. F. Peters, Former Australian Ambassador to Turkey
The Australian, June 9th, 1994


"...(W)e, the Armenians, do not need facts to comprehend that there was a genocide against the Armenian nation."

John Kossakian, Editorial Director of the Armenian Newspaper Asbarez; in a May 04, 2001 letter, exchanging views with the Turkish site, ermenisorunu.gen.tr. All the proof that's necessary is the hearsay of Armenian oral history, the kind that can't be backed up... as Mr. Kossakian goes on to demonstrate.

"The Armenians are the former inhabitants of today's Switzerland"

Ruppen Courian, Armenian author of Promartyrs de la Civilization (1964, p. 27); (Even Armenians cannot agree on the origins of their "ancient homeland.")


"Majesty, I would like to ask you not to allow the location of Armenians in the central Russian regions. Because they are such filthy and shameless clans, they would soon shout throughout the world and claim those lands as their 'ancient motherland'."

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Griboyedov, Russian diplomat and playwright who organized the transmigration of Armenians from Iran, as Russian minister to Iran in the early 19th century; in a letter to the Czar. As a result, Armenians were located not in Central Russia, but in the Caucasus... thereby also craftily sowing discontent between the peoples of the Caucasus, who had maintained strong relations since ancient times.


"To lessen the credit of Armenians is to weaken the anti-Turkish action. It was difficult to eradicate the conviction that the Turk is a noble being always in trouble. This situation will revive this conviction and will harm the prestige not only of Armenians, but of Zionists and Arabs as well.

The treatment of Armenians by the Turks is the biggest asset of his Majesty’s Government, to solve the Turkish problem in a radical manner, and to have it accepted by the public."

Arnold Toynbee, as editor of The Bryce Report, the Blue Book of the British (F.O. 371/3404/162647, p. 2), in a memorandum dated 26 September 1919; when the British propaganda services were alarmed about newspaper accounts mentioning the treachery of the Armenians.

“I was being employed by His Majesty’s Government to compile all available documents on the present treatment of the Armenians by the Turkish Government in a 'Blue Book,' which was duly published and distributed as war-propaganda!�

Arnold Joseph Toynbee, "The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: a Study in the Contact of Civilizations," Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1922, p. 50.

"...There is a systematic plan of destruction of Turkish villages and extinction of the Moslem population. This plan is being carried out by Greek and Armenian bands, which appear to operate under Greek instructions and sometimes even with the assistance of detachments of regular troops."

Arnold Toynbee, "The Western Question in Greece and Turkey," p. 284; quoting the commission of the allies for the incidents of Yalova and Gemlik. This was the "reformed" Toynbee, in his later years.


“The Ottoman institution came perhaps as near as anything in real life could to realizing the ideal of Plato’s Republic.�

Arnold Toynbee, suddenly pro-Turk British historian.

"...The economic situation was so dismal that not only many
Armenians, but thousands of Turkish soldiers as well died of the lack of food supplies, disease, and other consequences of poor organization in the Turkish government. In my division alone, after the battle of Gallipoli, thousands died of malnutrition."

General Liman von Sanders, as witness for the defense, in the trial of Tehlirian, assassin of Talat Pasha



"...The domestic situation was deplorable: all over Turkey
thousands of the populace were daily dying of starvation; practically all able-bodied men had been taken into the army, so that only a few were left to till the fields; the criminal requisitions had almost destroyed all business; the treasury was in a more exhausted state than normally, for the closing of the Dardanelles and the blockading of the Mediterranean ports had stopped all imports and customs dues..."

Henry Morganthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire; from his ghostwritten book, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. Holdwater: Thousands dying daily? Gee. If true, do you suppose at least a few of the Armenian casualties could have resulted from the very same conditions all Ottoman citizens were suffering from?


"...About a million families were left without breadwinners, all of them in a condition of extreme destitution. The Turkish Government paid its soldiers 25 cents a month, and gave the families a separation allowance of $1.20 a month. As a result thousands were dying from lack of food and many more were enfeebled by malnutrition; I believe that the empire has lost a quarter of its Turkish population since the war started."

Henry Morganthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, elaborating further upon conditions that affected Turk and Armenian alike; from his ghostwritten book, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.

"I cannot say what the role of Talaat was as concerns the issuing of orders. As far as I know the principal order pertaining to the deportation of the Armenians was given on May 20, 1915. In any event it was the result of a decision of the Young Turk committee and it had the unanimous approval of the ministers. The implementation of the orders was left to the Valis, the lower echelon officials, and especially the horrible police force. In any event, I consider it my duty to state that, in the five years I was in Turkey, I never saw an order signed by Talaat against the Armenians and neither can I testify whether or not such an order was ever issued."

General Liman von Sanders, as witness for the defense, in the trial of Tehlirian, assassin of Talat Pasha. (It's interesting to note that since the Germans were, for all intents and purposes, behind the workings of the Ottoman war machine, how is it possible that the main German commander would not have come across any government-sponsored genocidal order? If a government decides to commit genocide, they would have to let local officials know about such a policy... otherwise, how could the genocide be carried out?)


"…Armenian gangs had extensively destroyed Esindscian (Erzincan) and extirpated the volk (people) living in the villages nearby…"

Bussche, a German diplomat, February 28, 1918, from the German Consulate in Sivas (R 22346, "File 190" and "Turkey41," archives of central building of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of German Empire.)

"It is only fair to acknowledge that, judged from a humane point of view, the methods of warfare pursued by the Turks are vastly superior to those which have disgraced their German masters."

Lord Kitchener, Official Report on Gallipoli as Minister of War, August 9, 1915


"Ottoman Armenians were completely free in the Ottoman Empire and the Turks were the Armenians' only shelter against Russia guaranteeing their traditions, religion, culture and language in comparison to Russian oppression under the Czars."

Vartanian, Armenian historian, "History of the Armenian Movement"


"Few Europeans realized that the Turkish Ottoman Sultan
Suleiman was the head of the most democratic government of their time."

Harold Lamb, American historian and novelist, noted for his biographies of Genghis Khan, Alexander, and Hannibal



"The tolerance shown to foreign beliefs and hostile faiths by the Ottoman law and Ottoman officials which enabled them to establish their own religious institutions and to shape their own education was such that the thousand year old liberty reigning in France in the field of sects and beliefs, dating from the times of the ancient Gaul, could not be compared with it."


Talcot Williams, Turkey, A World Problem of Today, New York, 1922, p. 194


"In the interest of truth I will also affirm that you saw little of the cruelty you fasten upon the Turks. Besides that you have killed more Armenians than ever lived in the districts of the uprising. The fate of those people was sad enough without having to be exaggerated as you have done."

"Apart from that he (Enver Pasha) was in no respect what you picture him. Of course, if we are to take it for granted that we of the West are saints, then the Turk is any good. You will agree with me, no doubt, that the Turks count among the few gentlemen still in existence.... Ultimately truth will prevail."

George A. Schreiner, distinguished war and political correspondent having served in Turkey from February through the end of 1915, in a no-holds-barred, extremely critical December 11,1918 letter to ex-Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, regarding the latter's unethically falsified, ghostwritten book (Ambassador Morgenthau's Story)



"The Osmanli (Ottoman) has yet to be heard." (The English have) "heard stories ad nauseam of massacres, of pillages, of the ravishing of women, but none of these stories have been corroborated by a single European eyewitness."

Captain Charles Boswell Norman, "The Armenians Unmasked" (1895)



"...In the absence of unequivocal evidence that the Ottoman administration took a specific decision to eliminate the Armenians under their control at that time, British governments have not recognized those events as indications of genocide... Nor do we believe it is the business of governments of today to review events of over 80 years ago, with a view to pronouncing on them..."

Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, Foreign Office spokesperson, on April 14, 1999; the PA News from London... reporting on yet another Armenian bid to get the British Government to recognize its "genocide."



"The Turkish government felt that pressing the Turkish case against Armenians and others would rekindle old hatreds and invite war, so the Turks said nothing of their grievances. This was the right decision for the time. The unfortunate result was that no one spoke for the Turks"

Justin McCarthy, Professor, University of Louisville, testifying at the Congressional Hearing on H. Res. 398 in 2000.


"Whether or not hindsight and modern morality tell us that the deportations were a mistake, no one can seriously doubt the Ottoman government had reason to distrust many of the Armenians of Anatolia. Because of the assistance given by the Armenians to invading Russian armies in 1828, 1854, and 1877, the Ottomans decided they could not trust the Armenians, much as the United States, with much less justification, decided they could not trust the Americans of Japanese ancestry in World War II."

Justin McCarthy, Professor, University of Louisville, "Armenian Terrorism: History as Poison and Antidote."


"Any comparison between the Ottomans and the Nazis is ludicrous, as is the use of the word genocide to describe the actions of the Turks. What passed between the Armenians and the Turks was not genocide; it was war"

"If any people were the victims of genocide, it was the Crimean Tatars, victims in their own homeland of a planned extermination begun by Catherine the Great and ended by Joseph Stalin."

Justin McCarthy, Professor, University of Louisville, "Armenian Terrorism History as Poison and Antidote."

"The Armenians were retreating before the Ottoman Army. They were in danger. Yet they stopped whenever they could to kill the innocent Muslims of Erzurum, despite the risk to their own safety. This kind of hatred and madness cannot be explained. It is often falsely claimed that the Turks committed a genocide of the Armenians. Yet this was the real genocide, a genocide of the Turks."

Justin McCarthy, Professor, University of Louisville, "The Destruction of Ottoman Erzurum by Armenians," 2002



"Neither political nor legal or material claims against present-day Turkey can be derived from the recognition of this historical event as an act of genocide."

European Parliament, 1987 resolution


"...The two parties forego their rights to ask for damages because of the changes which took place as a result of the general war."

Armenia and Turkey, Article 8 of the Treaty of Gumru/Alexandropol, wherein Dashnags agreed in "closing the doors FOREVER to reparations," in the words of Arto Derounian (John Roy Carlson)


"...The Turk obeys the dictates of his religion, the Christian does not; the Turk does not drink, the Christian gets drunk; the Turk is honest; the Christian is a liar and a cheat; his religion is so overgrown with the rank weeds of superstition that it no longer serves to guide his mind."


Lord Curzon with his lady and the tiger, in India

Lord Robert Curzon, Armenia: a Year at Erzeroom, and on the Frontiers of Russia, Turkey and Persia, London (John Murray), 1854; Curzon, somewhat of an adventurer during his youth, lived among the Armenians for a year in the 1850s, and found little to admire... " typical of dozens of other 19th century travelers of many nationalities," opines Paul Henze


"I have yet to meet a foreigner living in this part of the world and unbiased by politics, religion or pecuniary benefits from condemning the Turks, who has not most empathically stated that of all the races represented in the population of the old Turkish Empire, the Turks by far are the best people."

E. Alexander Powell, American journalist and author,"The Struggle for Power in Moslem Asia," 1923.>


"One may recognize fully the agreeable and attractive personal qualities of the Turks that commonly make them the best liked, probably, of all the peoples of the Empire, and that almost unconsciously turn most foreigners who stay long in the country into pro-Turks."

King-Crane Commission report


"Their loyalty, their unblemished honesty, their
endless hospitality, their religious tolerance, their moral elegance, and natural tact do give affectionate deposition for the Turks in front of the tribunal of humanity."

"To speak about the Armenian race, is for me, more painful
than one would believe, because their unfortunate 'incidents' render me almost scared."

Pierre Loti, French writer and traveler



"Nearly everyone who touches upon the kernel of the nation learns to respect and love Turks, to humiliate Greeks, to hate and despise Armenians... Everywhere justifies the proverb, that the Greek defrauds 2 Jews, but the Armenian defrauds 2 Greeks. Certainly, if you have been defrauded in Anatolia, so you had a business with an Armenian"

"When I had business with Turks, I didn't need a written document, because his vow was enough. When I had business with Greeks, I was in need to sign the written document, because it is important for them. But when I had business with Armenians, I didn't sign any documents, because even the written document can't provide a barrier for their mendacity and intrigue"

German traveler, from the book "Outlines of Anatolia," p..6, p.188-191


Turkey "is known only for its mistakes and its brutalities."

"The Turks I saw in Lawrence of Arabia and Midnight Express were (...) like cartoon caricatures compared to the people I had known and lived among for three of the happiest years of my life."

Mary Lee Settle, writer and traveler; Turkish Reflections: A Biography Of A Place (New York, Prentice Hall Press, 1991)


“If the reader entertains any delusions about a fine civilization, either Persian, Roman, Hellenic, or Egyptian, being submerged by this flood (the advance of Islam), the sooner he dismisses such ideas the better. Islam prevailed because it was the best social and political order the times could offer.�

H. G. Wells, famed British writer


"The Turk is the brother of the Armenian and they know it."

William Saroyan, Antranik of Armenia, From "Inhale and Exhale," 1935; the "they" refers to forces... likely the great powers... that beg the question Saroyan goes on to ask: Why do they want them to kill one another? What good does it do anybody?


“America should feed the half million Turks whose hinterland was willfully demolished by the retreating Greeks, instead of aiding the Greeks and Armenians who are sitting around waiting for America to give them their next meal. The stories of Turk atrocities circulated among American churches are a mess of lies. I believe that the Greeks and not the Turks are barbarians.�

Colonel William Haskell, the American Red Cross; returning from a tour of investigation in the Near East. Source: The Turkish Myth, 1923. Here is what the colonel thought of the Armenians, according to Dr. Richard Hovannisian.

"(This) one-sided and unreliable information (about any people will) after a long period of unchallenged time, would create hostility and hatred that would not be easily overcome.�

Cyrus Hamlin, co-founder of the American missionary college in Istanbul (Robert College), opining on anti-Turkish propaganda.



"(The Turk never deigns to explain his own case while) the pro-Armenians always manage to hold the field, appalling the public by incessant reiteration and exaggeration as to the number of victims, and apparently valuing to its full extent the wisdom of the old Eastern proverb give a lie twenty-four hours start, and it will take a hundred years to overtake it."

C.F. Dixon-Johnson, British author of the 1916 book, "The Armenians."


"Paradoxical as it might seem, the Turks were the only Christians in the Balkans."

A "celebrated correspondent," on his return "from the seat of the last Balkan war," paraphrased by C.F. Dixon-Johnson, British author of the above 1916 book.


“These Huntchagist bands, organized all over the empire, will watch their opportunities to kill Turks and Kurds, set fire to their villages and then make their escape into the mountains. The enraged Moslems will then rise and fall upon the defenseless Armenians and slaughter them with such barbarities that Russia will enter in the name of humanity and Christian civilization and take possession.�

"A very intelligent Armenian gentleman," quoted by Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, in an 1897 American magazine article... where the reverend appealed to missionaries to denounce "the abominations" of Armenian terror; his near-lone voice of sanity among the Christian flock was ignored.


"I do ... believe the Armenians ... especially should not be allowed to govern other people; and certainly, if any of the other races here in this part of the country are under the Armenians, they are going to be submitted to oppression and outrage."

Rear Admiral Marc L. Bristol, in his March 28, 1921 letter to Dr. James L. Barton. (Given modern Armenia's abominable treatment of minorities, Admiral Bristol was right on the money.)

"The Armenian, the Jew or the African should not damage their development with a continual conditioning of hate; neither should spurious guilt be vented upon others. These negative preoccupations and obsessions are obstructing our evolution.�

Robert John (Hovhanes), Armenian historian; The Reporter, "America's Leading Armenian Newspaper," August 2, 1984


"Demonizing others lays foundation for a dark cycle of hatred"

George W. Bush, United States President, in a 2002 message to Armenian-Americans, during April 24 (the commemoration of the Armenian "Genocide"), where he also reminded his Armenian citizens that "Transcending this venomous pattern requires painful introspection about the past and wise determination to forge for a new future based on truth and reconciliation.."



"[T]o curse at Muslims and especially at Turks, to talk much about the Armenian Genocide, and to remind others constantly of the brutality of the Turks are all regarded as expressions of patriotism. Among the leaders of the past we consider those who curse Turks and killed Turks to be the most patriotic. Our most recent heroes are those who assassinated Turkish diplomats in European cities... [this] is the dominant mentality."


Rafael Ishkhanian, "The Law of Excluding the Third Force," in Gerard Libaridian's Armenia at the Crossroads; Democracy and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era, 1991, p. 10. The activist, publicist and "ancient historian" also claims that Armenians "were the aborigines of the Armenian plateau who have been living there continuously since the fourth millennium B.C. at the latest."


"I heard, in Oxford English, more stories of Armenians murdering Turks when the czarist troops fled north... Then they spoke of the hell that would break loose if Versailles were to put, as threatened, the six 'Armenian' vilayets of Turkey under the control of Erevan. Muslims under Christian rule? His lips smacked in irony under the droopy
red moustache. That's bloodshed — just Smyrna over again on a bigger scale."

Robert Dunn, American officer in Eastern Turkey, 1919; upon hearing a conversation between British officers. 'World Alive, A Personal Story,' Crown Publishers, New York (1952), pg. 309 or 358. The British lieutenant-colonel, Toby Rawlinson, would later get arrested by Atatürk


"Armenians... cannot expect this country (Great Britain) — or any other one — to choose any area in Turkey, to chase away from there all other races, to increase the Armenian population there under the shadow of British bayonets, and to thus organize a national Armenian existence there with exorbitant taxes to be extracted from the British people. Even the thought of it cannot go beyond being a raw fancy."

Lord Curzon, British statesman, PRO, FO. 800/151, 6.xii.1921


"British promises to Armenians were exactly like their promises to Arabs in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia; they were made with the purpose of encouraging the war efforts of the Armenians, to influence neutral states in favor of England and to excite the separatist tendencies in ethnic minorities under the rule of these neutral states so as to make their enemy, the Ottoman Empire, collapse from the inside."

A. H Arslanian, British Wartime Pledges, 1917-1918: The Armenian Case, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 13, 1978 (page 522)


"The Armenians were very well treated for hundreds of years by the Turks, until Russia, in the first place, started using them as pawns for purely political purposes; they exploited them as Christians, solely as pawns."

Lieutenant Colonel T. Williams (Labour Party M.P.), Parliamentary Debates (Commons), London 25.ii.1924, vol. 170


"(The Armenian) community constitutes the very life of Turkey, for the Turks, long accustomed to rule rather than serve, have relinquished to them all branches of industry. Hence the Armenians are the bankers, merchants, mechanics, and traders of all sorts in Turkey.
Besides, there exists a congeniality and community of interest between them and the Musulmans ... (Pashas to peasants owe) them ... so that without them the Osmanlis could not survive a single day.

H. Oscanyan, Armenian author, The Sultan and his People, 1857, p. 353?. For exact wording, please click link.


"I believe that it won’t be a mistake to consider this Third Period, that is the Tanzimat, to be the golden age of Armenians. During this period, which we regard as the most bountiful and favourable one of all, Armenians advanced in every field and could reach higher positions by showing themselves and earning confidence and trust of the Government."


Y.G. Cark, Armenian priest, Türk Devleti Hizmetinde Ermeniler, 1453-1953. [Armenians in the service of the Turkish State,1453 –
1953], Istanbul, 1953, p. 44.

"Our world is plagued with what I'd like to call 'International Terrorism.' Let us not forget that this type of terrorism can only be eradicated with the mutual determination and the complete cooperation of all the governments of the Western world."


Kenan Evren, President of the Turkish Republic, 1981; it would take a generation before the Americans got the idea

"...In some towns containing ten Armenian houses and thirty Turkish houses, it was reported that 40,000 people were killed, about 10,000 women were taken to the harem, and thousands of children left destitute; and the city university destroyed, and the bishop killed. It is a well-known fact that even in the last war the native Christians, despite the Turkish cautions, armed themselves and fought on the side of the Allies. In these conflicts, they were not idle, but they were well supplied with artillery, machine guns and inflicted heavy losses on their enemies…"

George M. Lamsa, a missionary known for his research on Christianity, "The Secret of the Near East," The Ideal Press, Philadelphia (1923), page 133


(Regarding the 'evidence' against the Malta Tribunal deportees): "...Very few were available, that Armenian Patriarchate at Istanbul had been the principal channel through which information had been obtained, and that none of allied, associated and neutral Governments had been asked to supply evidence..."

Sir H. Rumbold, His Majesty's High Commissioner at Istanbul as the head of the occupying powers, in a report to London

"The Armenians were pleasantly accepted in London. The Gladstone Cabinet invited the unpleased ones, classified them, put them in order and promised to support them. Henceforth, the propaganda committee was established in London which was going to be the source of inspiration."

Paul Cambon, French ambassador in Istanbul, probably reporting to the Quai d'Orsay in 1894, "Yellow Book," (1893-1897)


"The culpability of Armenians leaves no doubt."

Philippe de Zara, Mustapha Kemal, Dictateur (Paris, 1936)



"And the unarmed Armenian villagers were forced to help the armed rebels at the cost of their blood."

"If Turks were (thieves) and (brigands) like (Europeans claim, the) Armenians (would not) have had their prosperous lives, which continued until 1896"

General Mayewsky, Ambassador to Erzurum and Van, commenting on massacres by Armenians in the late 19th Century, translated from the Russian language, "The Statistic of Van and Bitlis Provinces," Ottoman Military Printing Office (1914)

"They (the revolutionaries) were also not letting those Armenians who would not help them live. For example, there was a mayor here. If I'm not mistaken, his name was Kapamaciyan, and they had his son kill him because he was not very supportive of them."

Mehmet Resit Efendi, Turkish survivor of the 1915 Armenian Revolt in Van. The unbiased Moslem majority of the city elected Bedros Kapamaciyan as mayor. He was a rich Armenian, and never left an Armenian without work or a trade. However, because he did not totally support the Armenians (for example, he fined an Armenian shopkeeper), the Dashnak leader in Van, Aram Pasha, ordered the mayor's own son to murder the mayor... and the son complied, pumping five bullets into Mayor Kapamaciyan. More may be read here. From a book by Ergünöz Akcora, unofficially translated as "The Testimony of Survivors from Van and Surroundings on the Armenian Uprising," 1990, p. 151 ADDENDUM: More on Mayor Kapamaciyan


"May God curse that Aram Pasha. He was the one who deceived us, saying that he would establish a state for us. Instead, he set fire to us. We have never forgotten the humanity we saw from the Turks. While those had won the world for us, while they treated us with benevolence, we kicked them. It was because of this that God visited calamity on us. We were scattered everywhere."

Mehmet Resit Efendi, after embracing an Armenian tradesman originally from Van, later located in Mosul (Iraq), and longing for his homeland; one of the thousands of relocated Armenians who reached their destinations, unmolested. (Boghos Nubar claimed 360,000 such Armenians reached their destinations.) From the Akcora book above, p. 153.


"I would like to stress especially that, in the raids made by the Kurds and the Turks, as a reaction to the rebellion movements in the several regions of Anatolia at those times, the amount of material losses were extremely small compared to the wealth pillaged by the Hinchaks in the robberies in Istanbul. The percentage would not total even to one percent. The committeemen robbed the Istanbul Armenians... pitilessly. They put several wealthy persons into a penniless situation."

Pantikyan, Armenian famed for playing a great role in the armistice, as told to M. Sifir; Banoglu, Niyazi Ahmet, Gündüz Printing House, Ankara, 1976, p. 24-25 (Holdwater: However, some parties seriously involved in massacring made a point of making off with cash and material goods.)



"...During this brief three year period (1904-1906), there were two Armenian victims assassinated by Armenian terrorists for every one non-Armenian. This hitherto almost totally neglected fact deserves our attention, for it was not a phenomenon limited to 1904-1906, but rather one which still exists today. Its purpose, then as now, was nothing more or less than intimidation. The conscious attempt to frighten the overwhelming majority of peaceful Armenians into silence as regards the activities of the terrorists."

Heath W. Lowry, Professor, “Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Armenian Terrorism: Threads of Continuity,� 1984; referring to a 1983 source by Dr. Gerard Libaridian



"It is absolutely clear that the Armenians of Van started the insurrection behind the Ottoman lines already in February 1915, waiting for the Russian offensive. Before the Russians had reached Van they had already extinguished the whole Muslim (Turks and Kurds alike) population of Van with all the neighboring villages. Meanwhile there is also archeological evidence of these mass-murders, as countless mass-graves with Muslim victims have been spotted, excavated and identified...Thanks God, the triumph of the Armenians was documented by themselves. Photographs and reports were sent to the Entente-magazines."

Erich Feigl, professor, author, "The Myth of Terror."




"Armenian-origin intellectuals and journalists have become viciously intolerant of non-Armenian-origin colleagues who do not accept their biases and who venture to question Armenian statistics or try to examine ... historical records according to recognized standards of objectivity and respect for methodology."

Paul Henze, “The Roots of Armenian Violence: How Far Back Do They Extend?,"1984


"Sly, pliant, persevering, seldom if ever conscientious, they (Armenians) monopolise all transactions in business, and speedily become the bankers and tyrants of the place. Still it must not be concluded from this that there are no honourable exceptions among those whose intelligence and energy have conferred signal benefits upon the country..."

Baron Max von Thielmann, Journey in the Caucasus, Persia and Turkey in Asia, London (John Murray), 1875, Vol. I, p. 41


"In an Asian city, during the 1896 massacres, the French Consul, who had sheltered as many Armenians as possible at the Consulate under the French standard, came up to his terrace to see what was going on in the neighborhood, when two bullets came from behind him, whistling in his ears; turning, he realized in a flash, an Armenian who had been aiming at him from a window of a neighboring house. Apprehended and questioned, the sly aggressor answered: "I did that so that the Turks would be accused, and with the hope that after the murder of the Consul, the French would rise against them."

Pierre Loti, Les Massacres d'Arménie (The Massacres of Armenia)


"... Poor devils, no one seems to want them anywhere, and yet despite all they have gone through, I did not see a thin one amongst a good many thousand I saw, and most looked cheery too. The massacres seem to have been a good deal exaggerated ... I don't know what there is about the Armenians, but no one, not even the missionaries, seems to have a good word to say about them...."

Lt. General Sir W. N. Congreve to General Sir Henry Wilson, Cairo, 19 October 1919; regarding Armenians flooding Cilicia, under the aegis of the French. Source, under "A British Observer"


"The hatred, malice and all uncharitableness, characterizing the different native (Christian) sects in their inter-relations could not be easily exaggerated ; and I am sorry to say that in the opinion of men who have had ample opportunity of judging from personal observation, there is only too much foundation for the bad opinion which each of those sects entertain of the other. 'When a Mohammedan gives me his word,' said a gentleman who had a long experience of the country, 'whether he be a Turk or a Kurd, I can always rely on it. I have never been what is called ' done ' by a Mussulman, although I have had transactions of all kinds with Moslems for years ; but when a native Christian tells me anything, I have cause instinctively to ask myself where the deception lies — in what direction I am going to be tricked. There are exceptions, of course; but if anyone has many dealings with Mussulmans and native Christians in these parts, he will soon learn that the one may be depended on, and the other will almost to a certainty deceive and cheat you if you give him a chance'."

Gratan Geary, "Through Asiatic Turkey" (London, M.S. and R. Sampson, 1878)


“As an Armenian, I never condone terrorism, but there must be a reason behind this. Maybe the terrorism will work. It worked for the Jews. They have Israel.“

Kevork Donabedian, the editor of The Armenian Weekly, an ethnic newspaper published in the United States, as quoted in the November 18, 1980 issue of The Christian Science Monitor. (Yet another Armenian dishonorably playing both sides of the fence.)


"In choosing sides, we go against the Turks. Images of murderous sultans wielding thick-ended sabers remain."

Colman McCarthy, Armenian Terror Tactics, July 31, 1983, The Washington Post


"The Turk has been and is the most misrepresented person in the world. I know some of the falsehoods which have been and are being circulated in America. They amaze me."

Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, "Turkey Reinterpreted," The New York Times Current History, 1922



"As a matter of cold, indisputable fact, there is more religious freedom in Turkey than in any other country in the world, more than has ever been recorded in history. "

Arthur Tremaine Chester, "Angora and the Turks," The New York Times Current History, Feb.1923


"Condemnation without hearing both sides is unjust and un-American"

Arthur Tremaine Chester, above Feb.1923 article



"I could see that [the Armenians'] well-known disloyalty to the Ottoman Government and the fact that the territory which they inhabited was within the zone of military operations constituted grounds more or less justifiable for compelling them to depart their homes."

Robert Lansing, United States Secretary of State, November 1916




The Ottoman state "has used its right to defend its existence against Armenian organisations that had fomented and incited disorders and rebellions at the instigation of the Russians by relying on Russian arms."

Leo (Arakel Babakhanian), Armenian historian, The Turkish Armenian Revolution (published in Armenian,1934, Paris)



"History teaches us that man learns nothing from history."

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in reply to genocide zealots' argument that genocides must be recognized in order not to be repeated. Surely the Armenians have not learned from their history of "ethnic cleansing"; after slaughtering 518,000 Ottoman Muslims and Jews during WWI and after, and conducting similar campaigns against their Azeri neighbors, modern Armenia felt no compunction in attacking and expulsing large numbers of defenseless Azeri civilians in 1992.



"The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth."

Jean de la Bruyère




"The few who have attempted to alter the traditional view have been derided as 'revisionists' as if revision were an academic sin and contextual historical accuracy irrelevant. In fact, revising one-sided history and changing deficient traditional wisdom is the business of the historian, and in few areas of history is revision so needed as in the history of the Ottoman peoples. The history that results from the process of revision is an unsettling one, for it tells the story of Turks as victims, and this is not the role in which they are usually cast. It does not present the traditional image of the Turk as victimizer, never victim, that has continued in the histories of America and Europe long after it should have been discarded with other artifacts of nineteenth-century racism."

Booknews, Inc. Review, "Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922," June 1, 1996


"To punish all persons guilty of Armenian atrocities would necessitate wholesale execution of Turks and I therefore suggest punishment should rather take the form of, nationally, dismemberment of the late Turkish Empire and, individually, in trial of high officials such as those on my lists whose fate will serve as an example."

British Deputy High Commissioner Webb, in an April 3, 1919 cipher telegram to the Peace Conference in Paris. Holdwater: How convenient. The Allies (that is, self-seeking imperialist powers) were planning the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire well before World War I, and during wartime they were colluding through secret treaties; making it seem like there was a genocide would certainly justify their land-grab scheme. Fortunately, the British had the honor to not find the high officials guilty at the Malta Tribunal (for lack of evidence) and their land grab scheme (for Asia Minor, anyway) was foiled by the Turks themselves.



"It seems almost a pity to upset the good old myth of Turkish viciousness and terribleness, but in the interest of accuracy I find myself constrained to do so, although it makes me feel a bit like one who is compelled to tell a child that Jack the Giant Killer really found no monstrous men to slay.

In due course of time the deportees, entirely unmassacred and fat and prosperous, returned (if they wished so to do), and an English prisoner of war who was in one of the vacated towns after it had been repopulated told me that he found it filled with these astonishing living ghosts."

Colby M. Chester, Rear Admiral, United States Navy; "Turkey Reinterpreted," The New York Times Current History, March 1922




"The Genocide has been the single most fundamental issue defining the Armenians' identity in this century. Its importance for Armenia and the Diaspora cannot be understated."

Vartan Oskanian, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Republic of Armenia, May 1999; in a testimonial for the The Zoryan Institute for Contemporary Armenian Research and Documentation, est. 1982. (Holdwater: We know! We know! It's your life's blood...)

"...We know the whole history of these massacres to some extent. It is only towards the Armenians that the Turk is said to be so intolerant; there are other parts of the world where he [the Turk] deals with Christian people, and where he deals with the Jewish community... Moreover, the Armenians themselves lived under the Turkish rule for centuries and never complained. Therefore, we earnestly appeal to you, to the whole Christian world of Europe and America, that if the Turk is to be punished on the assumption that he is a tyrant, and that his rule is a blasting tyranny then the evidence should be of such character that it should be absolutely above suspicion."

Muhammad Ali, leading a delegation of Indian Muslims at the Peace Conference, March 1919, to Lloyd George. While the British were determined to wipe the defeated Ottoman Empire off the surface of the earth, such initiatives slowly compelled the British to uphold the principles of law and justice, when they embarked on the Malta Tribunal, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt there was no Armenian "Genocide."



"The Queen’s Government, taking into account the best interest of Holland, deems it unsuitable and unnecessary to participate in such an inquiry."

Dutch embassy, March 17, 1919, in response to a request for a neutral sizing up of the Armenian "Genocide." Four countries were asked, and none wished to take the opportunity to prove once and for all the Turks were guilty as charged. A May 6, 1919 French-written document, in the Archives of the Foreign Ministry, stated: "Two lawyers each from the countries of Denmark (April 19, 1919), Spain (March 17, 1919), Sweden (April 19, 1919) and Holland (March 17, 1919) were requested to participate in the international committee to be formed to investigate if any injustices were made during the relocation. The delegates of the investigation committee were to visit provinces in Anatolia to make inquiries to establish any injustice that took place and to solve the matter by lawful means. However, this venture was not realized, as the concerned nations refused to send delegates (at the requested time)."


“Few Americans who mourn, and justly, the miseries of the Armenians, are aware that till the rise of nationalistic ambitions, beginning with the 'seventies, the Armenians were the favored portion of the population of Turkey, or that in the Great War, they traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian invader; that they boasted of having raised an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least a hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population.�

“...It is at least time that Americans ceased to be deceived by propaganda…�

John Dewey, American professor, The Turkish Tragedy, The New Republic, November 12, 1928


(The Turks whose honor and the dignity you have been pummeling and mauling lo these many years, were) "...far better men and far abler rulers than the wretched tyrants whom they suppressed....the Turks were in advance, not of their Christian subjects alone, but of the greater part of Christian Europe."

Edson L. Clark (1827-1913), British anthropologist and historian, from his "Nations of the World" Series,1900, N.Y. (pp. 84,87.)



"We, the non-Armenian population of Glendale, are not obligated to recognize the genocide.''

Californian resident, quoted in "Tolerance is a two-way street," Albert Hoffmanan, 'Glendale in the Times Community
Newspapers,' July 3rd, (2002). Californians are beginning to have enough of the huge chunk of obsessive Armenian-Americans among them pushing their fake genocide down everyone's throats. The truth of the words spoken applies to everywhere else in the world, and not just Glendale.

"(The) United Nations has not approved or endorsed a
report labeling the Armenian experience as Genocide."

Farhan Haq, U.N. spokesman, October 5th, 2000


"The meaning of genocide is the planned destruction of a religious and ethnic group, as far as it is known to me, there is no evidence for that in the case of the Armenians. The deniers of Holocaust have a purpose: to prolong Nazism and to return to Nazi legislation. Nobody wants the 'Young Turks' back, and nobody wants to have back the Ottoman Law..."

Bernard Lewis, Professor, "There Was No Genocide," an interview by Dalia Karpel, Ha'aretz daily, Jerusalem, January 23, 1998



"...After hostilities had actually commenced, the Deputy to the Assembly for Erzerum, Garo Pasdermadjian, passed over with almost all the Armenian troops and officers of the Third Army to the Russians; to return with them soon after, burning hamlets and mercilessly putting to the knife all of the peaceful Mussulman villagers that fell into their hands."

Rafael de Nogales, Venezuelan adventurer, on Armenian atrocities victimizing Turks of Erzerum, "Four Years Beneath the Crescent" (translated from Spanish by Muna Lee from the original Spanish version: "Quatro Anos Bajo La Media Luna"), Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, London, 1926, page 45




“I long for a 'Sun Country.' There should be no nights in this country and the people should not know what the concept of darkness means. Is it possible to find 'The Sun Country' on earth? The existence of the Turks who do not interfere with the freedom of thought and conscience makes me believe that — at least tomorrow — such a country will exist, since there is a nation, which does not imprison or chain love for the truth…Why should a 'Sun Country' be a reality tomorrow, a country where only the truth, justice and freedom reigns?�


Tommaso Campanella (1568-1659), Renaissance philosopher, writer and child prodigy, in a passage from his well-known 1602 work ‘Civitas Solis’ (City of the Sun)


"When those of Armenians resident in the aforementioned towns and villages who have to be moved are transferred to their places of settlement and are on the road, their comfort must be assured and their lives and property protected; after their arrival their food should be paid for out of Refugees' Appropriations until they are definitively settled in their new homes. Property and land should be distributed to them in accordance with their previous financial situation as well as current needs; and for those among them needing further help, the government should build houses, provide cultivators and artisans with seed, tools, and equipment."

"This order is entirely intended against the extension of the Armenian Revolutionary Committees; therefore do not execute it in such a manner that might cause the mutual massacre of Muslims and Armenians."

Key Ottoman Decree, putting the Armenian "Deportations" into motion



"The Ottoman government prosecuted more than one thousand soldiers and civilians for disobedience. Further, approximately 200,000 Ottoman Armenians who were relocated to Syria lived without menace through the remainder of the war."

Bruce Fein, Attorney and Adjunct Scholar of ATAA, "An Armenian and Muslim Tragedy? Yes! Genocide? No!"


"Enver Pasha was later associated with the dream of reuniting all the Turkish-speaking peoples and domains of Asia, and certainly the idea was familiar to him in 1914 —
intellectually it was in the air — but, as of then, it did not enter into his plans. A small man, much addicted to theatrical gestures and to large programs that began with the prefix "pan-," Enver was also supposed to harbor pan-lslamlc ambitions. His treatment of Arab fellow-Moslems shows that this, too, was a slogan that he did not translate into policy."
David Fromkin, responding to the familiarly ridiculous pro-Armenian allegations of "Pan-Turanism" and/or "Pan-Islamism" (Taner Akcam likes both), to establish the much needed motive for mass-murder. "A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East," Avon Books, New York, 1989


"The Bush administration acted toward Turkey like the stereotypical rogue from a 1950s B-Movie. First we told Turkey what we wanted. When she balked, we got a little rough. When even that didn’t do the trick, we pulled out our wallet, saying in essence, “Fine, how much do you want?� When even cash failed, we told her to get out of the car and walk home."

Josh Marshall, editor, Talkingpointsmemo.com, March 26, 2003; in regards to Turkey's reluctance to whole-heartedly join in on the Iraqi War.



"It must be admitted that it is political interest which has caused us (the nations of the Balkans) to describe the Turks as cruel Asiatic tyrants, unameanable to European civilisation. An impartial history would show that the Turks are rather Europeans than Asiatics and that they are not cruel tyrants, but a nation that loves justice and freedom, and that possesses virtues and qualities deserving of recognition and respect."

Chedo Myatovich, Serbian plenipontentiary minister to London and Istanbul in the early part of the 20th century, reportedly made the above statement in 1913.



"Today's ethnic cleansing policies by the Serbian dictatorship against Croatians and Muslims of Yugoslavia, as well as the Soviet Republic of Armenia's against the Muslim population of neighboring Azerbaijan, are really no different in their aspirations than the genocide perpetrated by the Armenian Government 78 years ago against the Turkish and Kurdish Muslims and Sephardic Jews living in these lands."

Cebbar Leygara, Kurdish Leader, October 13, 1992




"He committed murder — in German there is the word 'Rufmord,' which means the murder of one´s reputation — by defaming the name of the Turkish nation, the killing of one's reputation. Sometimes 'Rufmord' is worse than real murder. It leads easily to further crimes, in our case against Turkey and Turks."

Erich Feigl, Professor, "The Myth of Terror." Commenting on Franz Werfel, author of "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh," book with a tremendous worldwide impact, and one that was accepted as a true story... even though Werfel irresponsibly relied on bogus sources.


"Therefore, we have to take care, as soon as possible, to concentrate such forces in Bulgaria as is necessary to make Turkey politically docile or to break Turkey's resistance by force."

Adolf Hitler in his Weisungen for die Kriegsführung, 1941 and at the peak of his power at a time when Turkey was totally surrounded by Nazis and collaborators. Dokumente des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht, Militärarchiv Freiburg/Breisgau


Turkey's desperate position during World War II: Turkey was totally surrounded by Hitler and his vassals. Source: Erich Feigl, The Myth of Error. Turkey helped neighbor Greece and saved Jews during these desperate times... while Armenians lent a hand to Der Fuehrer during his campaign for The Final Solution.


“Jewish people must always recall the Ottoman Empire with gratitude who, at one of Judaism’s darkest hours, flung open its door widely and kept them open."

Cecil Roth, historian

"It should be our moral obligation to defend Turkey"

Dr. J. E. Botton, Jewish-American originally from Turkey, speaking for all Jews, in memory of the Turkish nation's being one of the very, very few friends of the Jews throughout history; in a letter to Forward, early 2001




"Pass through the gateways of this book, turn to the way of God, study its tales, read and see that God, in His wisdom and understanding, rendered this Turkish nation great.... The Turks is the rod of His wrath, the staff of His anger, and by means of Him He takes His vengeance of the gentle nations and tongues and states whose time has come."

Eliyahu Kapsali,16th century Jewish historian, writing in Crete, attributing the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and its conquest by the Ottomans directly to the Byzantine persecution of the Jews; Source: Prof. Stanford Shaw


“It is actually an understatement that there was no anti-Semitism in Turkey. In fact, there was a pro-Semitism. Ottoman governments treated their Jewish subjects with a special consideration and compassion as one of their own, as one of the most loyal and devoted subjects of the empire:�

Haim Nahum, last Grand Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire, (1924)


"We have first hand information and evidence of Armenian
atrocities against our people (Jews). Members of our family
witnessed the murder of 148 members of our family near Erzurum, Turkey, by Armenian neighbors, bent on destroying anything and anybody remotely Jewish and/or Muslim... Armenians were in league with Hitler in the last war, on his promise to grant themselves government if, in return, the Armenians would help exterminate Jews. Armenians were also hearty proponents of the anti-Semitic acts in league with the Russian Communists."


Elihu Ben Levi, Vacaville, California, letter, San Francisco Chronicle (December 11, 1983). [Armenian guerillas rounded up and massacred Jews in the area of Hakkari; in Trabzon and vicinity they massacred thousands of Greeks. The idea behind these atrocities was to secure an Armenian majority. (Kara Schemsi, Tures et Arméniens devant l'Histoire, Gèneve, Imprimerie Nationale, 1919, p. 49, 41). Jews were attacked everywhere; the Commander of Gendarmerie Regiment at Van recorded: "Some three hundred Jews trying to escape from Akaridan
were captured at the village of Sil and cut into pieces. Then (the Armenians) stacked the corpses." (Aspirations and revolutionary movements of the Armenian parties,. pp. 298-309) ]



"...As I became more knowledgeable and could compare cultures and countries around the globe with the passing of age and experience, we became much more appreciative of the benevolence of the Turkish people who harbored the Jewish people through incredibly barbaric times in the annals of European history. In retrospect of what we know of European history today, we owe Turkish people a great debt of gratitude for saving the lives of thousands of Jews."


Israel Hanukoglu, professor , College of Judea and Samaria
Ariel, Israel; from his Story of Turkish Jews


From the People the Armenians Look to, for "Genocidal Comparison"


"We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide."

Shimon Peres, Nobel prize-winning Israeli Foreign Minister, as quoted in the April 10 2001 edition of the Turkish Daily News... where he further remarked claims of an Armenian Genocide are "meaningless."



"The Armenians want to benefit from both worlds. On the one hand, they speak with pride of their struggle against the Ottoman despotism, while on the other hand, they compare their tragedy to the Jewish Holocaust. I do not accept this. I do not say that the Armenians did not suffer terribly. But I find enough cause for me to contain their attempts to use the Armenian massacres to diminish the worth of the Jewish Holocaust and to relate to it instead as an ethnic dispute."

Dalia Karpel, from her article "There Was No Genocide," relating to her interview with History Professor Bernard Lewis, published in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, January 23, 1998.



"If 1.5 million Armenian lost their lives during that war, they died as soldiers, fighting a war of their own choosing against the Ottoman Empire which had treated them decently and benignly. They were the duped victims of the Russians, of the Allies, and of their own Armenian leaders. A few thousand Armenians may have lost their lives during their relocation, caused by their own subversion."

Rabbi Albert Amateau, Sephardic Jewish leader in the United States, in his sworn testimony to persuade Congress to not implement yet another Armenian "Genocide" resolution... this time brought by Senator Robert Dole, in 1990. As a young student in the Ottoman Empire, Amateau got first-hand exposure to the young Armenians who revealed their plans of betrayal to him... believing Amateau was a Christian Frenchman.


(Sort of) Equal Jewish Time



"The massacre, which was carried out by the Turks against the Armenians in 1915 and 1916, was one of the most horrible acts to occur in modern times...The Jewish ambassador of America to Turkey in those days, Henry Morgenthau, described the massacre as 'The greatest crime in modern history'...The person who was most shocked and shocked many people was the Prague-born Jewish author, Franz Werfel, with his masterpiece The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.... The book was translated into Hebrew in 1934, and influenced many young people in Eretz Israel including me."



Yossi Sarid, Minister of Education of Israel (April 24, 2000); he added that the Armenian genocide would now be included in the country's school curriculum and that he would do everything possible to make sure Israeli children learned the subject thoroughly.

He planned to put "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" on reading lists for Israeli schoolchildren, and would also add the mass killings of Arabs, Albanians, Bosnians, Gypsies and Rwandans into the curriculum dealing with genocide.

The Israeli daily "Ha'aretz" praised Sarid's comments for displaying what it called "wisdom and sensitivity," and accused its government for submitting to "the pressure exerted by Turkey, and stated such behavior serves to "erode its moral right to demand that the world make sure that the Jewish Holocaust is never forgotten."



Holdwater says: Good lord! If Israel's Education chief is stupid enough to cite such invalid sources as Henry Morgenthau (dumbly implying Morgenthau's "Jewish" identity must have made him credible) and a book whose author (Jewish as well; reason why he deserved such trust, I guess) had been duped, then woe be it to Israel that such an incompetent has been selected to direct the nation's education policies.

No doubt "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" (Its author, Franz Werfel, was "The person who was most shocked"?) was written with such impact, the book made an indelible stamp on this man's closed mind... to an extent where Mr. Sarid could not consider any other possibility.

Notice Yossi Sarid appears to have no idea about the leviathan ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Turks, when he considers adding others' suffering to his new genocide curriculum. Interesting that "mass killings of Arabs" will also be added.... hmmmm. I wonder who these killers of Arabs will turn out to be.

As for Ha'aretz, it's sad enough for a Jewish individual to be ignorant (especially when that individual happens to be... A MINISTER OF EDUCATION!), but when Israel's most influential newspaper editorializes in such a manner, a special blow is delivered to reducing the significance of the Holocaust... by comparing it to a genocide that never took place. Perhaps Ha'aretz should subscribe to "The Jewish Times"? Appearing in that much more open-minded and better informed newspaper, on June 21, 1990:

"An appropriate analogy with the Jewish Holocaust might be the systematic extermination of the entire Muslim population of the independent republic of Armenia which consisted of at least 30-40 percent of the population of that republic. The memoirs of an Armenian army officer who participated in and eye-witnessed these atrocities was published in the U.S. in 1926 with the title 'Men Are Like That.' Other references abound."

(A more current news item from May of 2003 described Mr. Sarid as a "liberal lawmaker," so he may no longer be in charge of educating Israeli children... which bodes much better for the nation's future.)



FALSE QUOTES



(Holdwater: There are sometimes Turks who can be unethical, too; this makes me furious, because there is no need to falsify anything. Quotes mistakenly presented as accurate on this page that have been verified as untrue will be featured here. My apologies to those who have taken these at face value, as I have before learning better and "revising" my views.)



“In history it happened to the Muslims in Russian Armenia and Eastern Anatolia 2.5 million Muslims were killed by the Armenians in the worst possible way imaginable. It is sickening to think that the human race is capable of such actions, but there is no denying the fact that the Armenian genocide of 2.5 million Muslims happened. The Armenian General Dro, the’ butcher’ was the architect of this Armenian genocide of Muslims, 1914-1920.�

Arto Derounian (as "John Roy Carlson"), Armenian Affairs magazine – Winter issue, 1949-50, page 19, footnote. (Derounian's first name was "Avedis," and "Arthur" is the name he usually used; the author's "Under Cover" was a best seller in 1944.)


A Loving Opinion from an "Unprejudiced Man"


"The turk is so absolutely without a moral sense, so unutterably bestial in his consideration of woman, so unthinkably vile and filthy in his personal habits, and so hopelessly degraded in his relations with his fellow man that the depth of his infamy is past all human credence. The turk is not a human being. I do not call him a beast, because not one of God's dumb creatures could sink so low. The turk is a devil without a tail. And the educated, polished turk — the official who affects a knowledge of the French language and a veneering of Parisian manners —
is the most unspeakable fiend of all. In proof that this assertion is based on incontestable truth I challenge denial from any unprejudiced man who has known the turk thoroughly well for a quarter of a century."

William W. Howard, 1896, from an Armenian Web Site


IN CLOSING:


“One should be blind to history not to understand the Turks.

The dignified silence of the Turks against the mounting unjustified attacks and mean slanders can only be explained by their pity for the blind.

…How beautifully this attitude of theirs answers the undignified calumnies.�

Pierre Loti, French writer and traveller, “Fantome d’Orient� (1928)



************************************


Various Western Thoughts on the Turks


Some revealing passages from Western minds, a little lengthier than the ones included in the Quotes page. Many of the beginning ones are from Kamuran Gürün's excellently researched "The Armenian File — The Myth of Innocence Exposed."


Sir Edwin Pears

Under such circumstances the revolt of a handful of Armenians had not a chance of success and was therefore unjustifiable. As a friend to the Armenians, revolt seemed to me purely mischievous. Some of the extremists declared that while they recognised that hundreds of innocent persons suffered from each of these attempts, they could provoke a big massacre which would bring in foreign intervention. Such intervention was useless so long as Russia was hostile. Lord Salisbury had publicly declared that as he could not get a fleet over the Taurus mountains he did not see how England could help the Armenians, much as she sympathised with them.

Forty Years in Constantinople, Heritage (London, 1915), p. 155

Sir Mark Sykes


As for the tactics of the revolutionaries, anything more fiendish one could not imagine — the assassination of Moslems in order to bring about the punishment of innocent men, the midnight extortion of money from villages which have just paid their taxes by day, the murder of persons who refuse to contribute to their collection-boxes, are only some of the crimes of which Moslems, Catholics, and Gregorians accuse them with no uncertain voice... the Armenian revolutionaries prefer to plunder their co-religionists to giving battle to their enemies; the anarchists of Constantinople throw bombs with the intention of provoking a massacre of their fellow-countrymen.

If the object of English philanthropists and the roving brigands (who are the active agents of revolution) is to subject the bulk of the Eastern provinces to the tender mercies of an Armenian oligarchy, then I cannot entirely condemn the fanatic outbreaks of the Moslems or the repressive measures of the Turkish government. On the other hand, if the object of the Armenians is to secure equality before the law, and the maintenance of security and peace in the countries partly inhabited by Armenians, then I can only say that their methods are not those calculated to achieve success.

The Caliph’s Last Heritage (London, 1915)

------------

From the same book (pp. 409 and 416-18), Sykes' observations on Armenian young men: (They inspired) "a feeling of distrust, and their bearing is compounded of a peculiar covert insolence and a strange suggestion of suspicion and craft.. .The keynote of town Armenian's character is a profound distrust of his own coreligionists and neighbors."

"The Armenians will willingly harbor
revolutionaries, arrange for their entertainment and the furthering of their ends. The pride of race brings about many singularities and prompts the Armenians to prey on missionaries, Jesuits, consuls and European traveler with rapacity and ingratitude. The poor Armenians will demand assistance in a loud tone, yet will seldom give thanks for a donation. Abuse of Consular officers and missionaries is only a part of the stock-in-trade of the extra-Armenian press."

"That the Armenians are doomed to be forever unhappy as a nation, seems to me unavoidable, for one-half of their miseries arises not from the stupid, rangy, ill-managed despotism under which they live, but from their own dealings with each other. In a time of famine at Van, Armenian merchants tried to corner the valuable grain; the Armenians Revolutionaries prefer to plunder their coreligionists to giving battle to their enemies; the anarchists of Constantinople threw bombs with the intention of provoking a massacre of their fellow countrymen. The Armenian villagers are divided against themselves; the revolutionary societies are leagued against one another, the priests connive at the murder of a bishop; the church is divided at its very foundation."

"Never were a people so fully prepared for the hand of a tyrant; never were a people so easy to be preyed upon by revolutionary societies; never was there a people so difficult to lead or to reform. That these characteristics are the result of Muslim oppression I do not for one moment believe."


Sir Mark Sykes was recruited by Wellington House to write a fabricated report, attacking the good image of the Turks. he complied with "The Clean-fighting Turk, a Spurious Claim."

Rafael de Nogales

After hostilities had actually commenced, the Deputy to the Assembly for Erzurum, Garo Pasdermichan*, passed over with almost all the Armenian troops and officers of the Third Army to the Russians; to return with them soon after, burning hamlets and mercilessly putting to the knife all of the peaceful Mussulman villagers that fell into their hands. These bloody excesses had as their necessary corollary the immediate disarmament by the Ottoman authorities of the gendarmes and other Armenian soldiers who still remained in the army (probably because they had been unable to escape) and the utilization of their labour in the construction of highways and in carrying provisions back and forth across the mountains. The altogether unjustifiable desertion of the Armenian troops, united to the outrages they committed afterwards, on their return, in the sectors of BashKaleh, Serail, and Bayacet, did not fail to alarm the Turks and rouse their fear lest the rest of the Armenian population in the frontier provinces of Van and Erzurum revolt likewise, and attack them with the sword. This indeed is precisely what happened a few weeks after my coming, when the Armenians of the vilayet of Van rose en masse against our expeditionary army in Persia; thus giving rise to bloody and terrible occurrences which, under the circumstances, might have been foreseen.

Four Years Beneath the Crescent, 1926, p. 45



*The terrorist Armen Garo (Karekin Pasdermadjian) was one of the leaders of the 1896 raid on the Ottoman Bank, whose life was spared by the sultan... allowed years later by the tolerant Turks to become a part of government.


Rafael de Nogales

Rafael de Nogales was a Venezuelan adventurer and American cattle thief who fought with the Turks for four years; in his book, he also says some damning things about the Turks, which is why it may be found for sale by the Armenians' Gomidas Institute.



Philippe de Zara


After having accomplished the minimum of their duty as Ottoman citizens, the Armenians began to encourage the activities of the enemy. Their ambiguous attitude had certainly little to do with loyalty. But which Westerner would have the right to accuse them, when a tradition taught by Europe made the insubordination of the Sultan’s Christian subjects the most sacred of obligations? An insubordination which was often sanctioned by granting autonomy, if not sovereignty. Nevertheless, how can anyone deny that, in the opinion of the Turks, according to the law of all the states, the conduct of the Armenians, facilitating during the war the task of the adversary, can be recognized as anything but a crime of high treason?. . . The committees, divided among themselves for internal issues, were often in agreement to facilitate the advance of Russian armies: they were attempting to obstruct the retreat of Turkish troops, to stop the convoys of provisions, to form bands of francs-tireurs. Mass desertions took place in the Eastern provinces: Armenians thus formed many troops officered by Russian officers. Here and there local revolts occurred. The leaders were setting the examples: two Armenian deputies fled to Russia. A literature of hatred was recalled: ‘Let the Turkish mothers cry. . . . Let’s make the Turk taste a little grief.’ The culpability of Armenians leaves no doubt.



Mustapha Kemal, Dictateur (Paris, 1936), pp. 159-60
E. Alexander Powell


The Turks are not, like their coreligionists, the Arabs, by nature a fanatical people. As a matter of fact, the history of the Ottoman Empire is less marred by religious intolerance and by massacres due to religious hatreds than the history of European states from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. It is well to remember that when the Crusaders were butchering their Moslem prisoners in Palestine, when the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition were in full swing, when Cromwell’s troopers were massacring the Catholics of Ireland, when Protestants in France were being exterminated by order of the French king, when Jews were being subjected to countless persecutions and barbarities in every European country, Moslems, Christians and Jews were dwelling side by side, in perfect amity, in Asia Minor.

The Struggle for Power in Moslem Asia (N.Y., 1925) p. 120
Ernest Jackh

Who but the infidel Turk opened up a Turkish haven, in the Middle Ages, to the Jewish refugees of Christian Spain and Italy? Ottoman sultans, Selim and Suleiman, early in the sixteenth century, invited them to Constantinople and to Salonika. They offered the Jews the first Zionist colonization in Palestine, around
Lake Tiberias, and on Cyprus.

The Rising Crescent, (N.Y., 1944) p. 37

Felix Valyi


An important testimony to the toleration of Moslem rule is the fact that persecuted Christian and other sects took refuge in Mohammedan lands, to enjoy there the undisturbed exercise of their several cults. Persecuted Spanish Jews at the end of the fifteenth century took refuge in Turkey in great numbers. The Calvinists of Hungary and Transylvania and the Unitarians of the latter country long preferred to submit to the Turks rather than to fall into the hands of the fanatical House of Habsburg. The Protestants of Silesia in the seventeenth century looked with longing eyes towards Turkey, and would gladly have purchased religious freedom at the price of submission to Moslem rule. The Cossacks, who belonged to the ‘Old Believers’ and were persecuted by the Russian State Church
In 1736, found in Turkey the toleration which their Christian brethren denied them.

Revolutions in Islam (London, 1925) pp. 48-9
Migirdic Agop

The Turkish Armenian does not know what a revolution is. He fears a revolution like death. But if there is something he is more afraid of, it is the revolutionary Armenian, the unreasoning revolutionary Armenians without a conscience who dragged him from misery to misery for several years with the thought of doing a good deed for him.

The Turkish Armenian have to confess that this enemy of their own kind has been everywhere and has done its work everywhere. It also had many followers in Russia, England and Turkey. Because it is known as a social truth that divisive movements and propaganda among groups in a society influence the masses very deeply. When these witless wretches came up with the idea of establishing a large state with the Armenians in Caucasia and Turkey, the God-fearing Armenians with good conscience who were aware of where the best interests of the nation lay, were overcome with sadness: 'An independent state, which will also include within its borders some of the Turkish provinces, is that it? This would be the destruction of Armenians' they said.

This was the truth.! It was impossible for any Armenian with a little bit of discernment not to see it. Because these people were thinking that they could change the bed of a large river with eight or ten pieces of stone.

This large river had opened its real bed by flowing for centuries on a strong surface. To change this direction was to tear Armenian interests from the tranquil flow of the river, to push them to draught-ridden lands and to strangle them there for ever. Those feeble minded persons failed to see that the foreigners who supported their revolution and evil deeds and championed their causes in their newspapers did not undertake such action for the love of Armenians. The aim, and the sole aim of these so-called protective powers was to cause the shedding of blood in regions which they earmarked for their hegemony and to take over these regions with the pretext of cleaning the blood.

History is still recording what imperialism is capable of doing in places it sets its eyes on. But it was impossible to make the public-spirited revolutionaries comprehend this. The anarchists and propagandists among them who could be useful neither to themselves nor to their communities in any other way were receiving salaries. They were also receiving what they conceived to be pledges. Overwhelmed under these condition, they believed there was Turkish oppression, and they also made their compatriots believe in their lies.

The last quarter of a century of Turkey's history is filled with some Armenian events. Although these events were supposedly aimed at some goals harmful to Turkey, in fact they were only the oppression of Armenians by Armenians. If the causes and reasons for each event are analyzed one by one and if the events are analyzed meticulously, the only conclusion that will be arrived at is the one we have stated in the previous sentence; the oppression of Armenians by Armenians.

The Turkish Armenians, Istanbul 1922

A New York newspaper correspondent's excerpt from the 1895 booklet, The Armenian Troubles and Where The Responsibility Lies


"The Armenian Troubles and Where The Responsibility Lies is the title of a booklet by a correspondent of a New York newspaper, who apparently reproduced in 1895 in pamphlet form, the five letters he had written in and sent from Istanbul. Believing that the whole atmosphere on the Sassoon events of 1894 has been 'polluted with falsehood and exaggerations', he states that the disturbances were ' brought about by the Armenian revolutionary committees'... The author quotes the AP correspondent who says that the Armenian conspirators murdered the Rev. Edward Riggs and two other American missionaries and fastened the blame on the Turks."

"As to the story that Armenian women, who, rather than 'suffer dishonor at the hands of (their) Turkish persecutors', threw themselves in to an abyss until the ravine was filled with corpses, the American correspondent says that 'the horrible narrative is a reproduction, with additions and embellishments to suit the occasion, of an old tale in poetry by Mrs. Hemans years ago, under the title of 'The Suliote Mother'. He writes : 'Provocation and intimidation seem to be the plan of the Armenian revolutionists'."



Prof. Turkkaya Ataov, in An Armenian Source (1895) On The Armenian Question, Sistem Ofset, Ankara (1986)
Major E. W. C. Noel, British Army


"As a result of these months touring through the area occupied and devastated by the Russian Army and the Christian army of revenge accompanying them, during the spring and summer of 1916, I have no hesitation in saying that the the Turks would be able to make out as good a case against their enemies as that presented against the Turks. According to the almost universal testimony of the local inhabitants and eyewitnesses, Russians acting on the instigation and advice of Armenians who accompanied them murdered and butchered indiscriminately any Muslim member of the civil population who fell into their hands. A traveler through the Rowanduz and Nell districts would find widespread wholesale evidence of outrageous crimes are committed by Christians on Muslims."



Sam Weems, "Armenia — Secrets of a 'Christian' Terrorist State," 2002, pg. 36; footnote: Borian II, pg. 82
Sir Alfred Rawlinson



"In those Moslem villages in the plain below which had been searched for arms by the Armenians everything had been taken under the cloak of such search, and not only had many Moslems been killed by the Armenian Army, but horrible tortures had been inflicted in the endeavour to obtain information as to where valuables had been hidden, of which the Armenians were aware of the existence, although they had been unable to find them." (p. 178)


"Armenian troops have pillaged and destroyed all the Moslem villages in the plain. Caravans of refugees were in the meanwhile constantly arriving from the plain, from which the whole Moslem population was fleeing with as much of their personal property as they could transport, seeking to obtain security and protection." (p. 177)

"The arrival of this British brigade was followed by the announcement that Kars Province had been allotted by the Supreme Council of the Allies to the Armenians, and that announcement having been made, the British troops were then completely withdrawn, and Armenian occupation commenced. Hence all the trouble; for the Armenians at once commenced the wholesale robbery and persecution of the Muslem population on the pretext that it was necessary forcibly to deprive them of their arms.
In the portion of the province which lies in the plains they were able to carry out their purpose, and the manner in which this was done will be referred to in due course." (p. 175)


"The Armenians from the plain were attacking the Kurdish people with artillery, with a large force in support." (p. 181)



"Adventures in the Near East, 1918-22" by Sir Alfred Rawlinson, Jonathan Cape, 30 Bedford Square, London, 1934 (First published 1923) (287 pages); Dodd, Meade & Co., 1925

Holdwater: Sir Alfred Rawlinson is also referred to as "Toby" Rawlinson, for reasons I'm not sure about. The lieutenant-colonel was sent to Eastern Turkey with his fellow men to observe the disarmament of the Ottoman armies. He was arrested under the order of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as a reprisal for taking several prominent Ottomans on Malta hostage by British occupiers.

Robert Dunn

'The most of the Muslims slaughtered by the Armenians are inside houses. Come you and look.' 'No, dammit! My stomach isn't—' We were under those trees by the mosque, in an open space. 'I don't believe you,' I said, but followed to a nail-studded door. The man pushed it ajar, then spurred away, leaving me to check on the corpse. I thought I should, this charge was so constant, so gritted my teeth and went inside.

The place was cool but reeked of sodden ashes, and was dark
at first, for its stone walls had only window slits. Rags strewed the mud floor around an iron tripod over embers that vented their smoke through roof beams black with soot. All looked bare and empty, but in an inner room flies buzzed. As the door swung shut behind me I saw they came from a man's body lying face up, naked but for its grimy turban. He was about fifty years old by what was left of his face - a rifle butt had bashed an eye. The one left slanted, as with Tartars rather than with Kurds. Any uniform once on him was gone, so I'd no proof which he was, and quickly went out, gagging at the mess of his slashed genitals. (p. 361)

'How many Muslim people lived there?'
'Oh, about eight hundred.' He yawned.
'Did you see any Muslim officers?'
'No, sir. I was in at dawn. All were Tartar civilians in mufti.'

The lieutenant dozed off, then I, but in the small hours a voice woke me — Dro's. He stood in the starlight bawling out an officer. Anyone keelhauled so long and furiously I'd never heard. Then abruptly Dro broke into laughter, quick and simple as child's. Both were a cover for his sense of guilt, I thought, or hoped. For somehow, despite my boast of irreligion, Christian Armenian massacring 'infidels' was more horrible than the reverse would have been.

From daybreak on, Armenian villagers poured in from miles around. The Armenian women plundered happily, chattering like ravens as they picked over the carcass of Djul. They hauled out every hovel's chattels, the last scrap of food or cloth, and staggered away, packing pots, saddlebags, looms, even spinning-wheels.

'Thank you for a lot, Dro,' I said to him back in camp. 'But now I
must leave.' We shook hands, the captain said 'A bientot, mon camarade.' And for hours the old Molokan scout and I plodded north across parching plains. Like Lot's wife I looked back once to see smoke bathing all, doubtless in a sack of other Moslem villages by the Armenian Army up to the line of snow that was Iran.' (p. 363)

At morning tea, Dro and his officers spread out a map of this whole high region called the Karabakh. Deep in tactics, Armenians spoke Russian, but I got their contempt for Allied 'neutral' zones and their distrust of promises made by tribal chiefs. A campaign shaped; more raids on Moslem villages. (p. 354)

"It will be three hours to take," Dro told me. We'd close in on
three sides. "The men on foot will not shoot, but use only the bayonets," Merrimanov said, jabbing a rifle in dumbshow.
"That is for morale," Dro put in. "We must keep the Moslems in
terror." "Soldiers or civilians?" I asked. "There is no difference," said Dro. "All are armed, in uniform or not."
"But the women and children?"
"Will fly with the others as best they may." (p. 358)


The ridges circled a wide expanse, its floors still. Hundreds of feet down, the fog held, solid as cotton flock. 'Djul lies under that,' said Dro, pointing. 'Our men also attack Muslims from the other sides.'

Then, 'Whee-ee!' — his whistle lined up all at the rock edge.
Bayonets clicked upon carbines. Over plunged Archo, his black haunches rippling; then followed the staff, the horde - nose to tail, bellies taking the spur. Armenia in action seemed more like a pageant than war, even though I heard our Utica brass roar.

As I watched from the height, it took ages for Djul to show clear. A tsing of machine-gun fire took over from the thumping batteries; cattle lowed, dogs barked, invisible, while I ate a hunk of cheese and drank from a snow puddle. Mist at last folded upward as men shouted, at first heard faintly. Then came a shrill wailing.

Now among the cloud-streaks rose darker wisps — smoke. Red glimmered about house walls of stone or wattle, into dry weeds on roofs. A mosque stood in clump of trees, thick and green. Through crooked alleys on fire, horsemen were galloping after figures both mounted and on foot.

'Tartarski!' shouted the Armenian gunner by me. Others pantomimed them in escape over the rocks, while one twisted a bronze shell-nose, loaded, and yanked breech-cord, firing again and again. Shots wasted, I thought, when by afternoon I looked in vain for fallen branch or Muslim body. But these shots and the white bursts of shrapnel in the gullies drowned the women's cries.

At length all shooting petered out. I got on my horse and rode down toward Djul. It burned still but little flame showed now. The way was steep and tough, through dense scrub. Finally on flatter ground I came out suddenly, through alders, on smoldering houses. Across trampled wheat my brothers-in-arms were leading off animals, several calves and a lamb. (p. 360)

Armenian corpses came next, the first a pretty Muslim child with straight black hair, large eyes. She looked about twelve years old. She lay in some stubble where meal lay scattered from the sack she'd been toting. The bayonet had gone through her back, I judged, for blood around was scant. Between the breasts one clot, too small for a bullet wound, crusted her homespun dress.

The next was a Muslim boy of ten or less, in rawhide jacket and
knee-pants. He lay face down in the path by several huts. One arm reached out to the pewter bowl he'd carried, now upset upon its dough. Steel had jabbed just below his neck, into the spine.

There were Muslim grownups, too, I saw as I led the sorrel around. Djul was empty of the living till I looked up to see beside me Dro's German-speaking colonel. He said all Muslims who had not escaped were dead. (p. 361)

More stories of Armenian murdering Muslims when the czarist troops fled north. My Armenian hosts told me of their duty here: to keep tabs on brigands, Muslim troop shifts, hidden arms, spies — Christian, Red or Tartar — coming in from Transcaucasus. Then they spoke of the hell that would break loose if Versailles were to put, as threatened, the Muslim vilayets of Turkey under the control of Erevan.


A conversation with Rawlinson (see above entry):


. . . Next I was drinking Scotch with British `I' officers in Erzurum, in what had been an American mission school for girls. Now it housed Colonel Toby Rawlinson from Donsterville's hush-hush army. They put me up and I heard, in Oxford English, more stories of Armenians murdering Turks when the czarist troops fled north. My hosts told me of their duty here: to keep tab on brigands, Turkish troop shifts, hidden arms, spies — Christian, Red or Tartar — coming in from Transcaucasus. Then they spoke of the hell that would break loose if Versailles were to put, as threatened, the six `Armenian' vilayets of Turkey under the control of Erevan.

`We sit on the edge of a volcano, Dunn,' said Rawlinson.

`So you want us to take a mandate over it all,' I said, `as buffer to your Iraq.'

`America'd never be so mad. I've been in America. Your people are too damned level-headed.'

`If the President's behind it-

`An Armenia without Armenians! Turks under Christian rule?' His lips smacked in irony under the droopy red moustache. `That's bloodshed — just Smyrna over again on a bigger scale. If you touch that business you're bigger fools than I've ever taken you for.' (p. 358)



World Alive, A Personal Story, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York (1952).

U.S. Naval officer Lieutenant Robert Steed Dunn was the Intelligence officer of Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, the American High Commissioner in the region and also a de facto American Ambassador in Turkey. Between 1919-1921, Lieutenant Dunn travelled extensively with Dro and his army in the region, and both made several contacts with the Russian Bolsheviks, the Turkish and the Armenian National forces.

David G. Hogarth


The Armenian, for all his ineffaceable nationalism, his passion for plotting and his fanatical intolerance, would be a negligible thorn in the Ottoman side did he stand alone. The Porte knows very well that while Armenian Christians are Gregorian, Catholic and Protestant, each sect bitterly intolerant of the others and moreover while commerce and usury are all in Armenian hands, it can divide and rule secure; but behind the Armenian secret societies (and there are few Armenians who have not committed technical treason by becoming members of such societies at some point of their lives) it sees the Kurd, and behind the Kurd the Russian; or looking west, it espies through the ceaseless sporadic propaganda of the agitators Exeter Hall and Armenian Committees. The Turk begins to repress because we sympathize and we sympathize because he represses and so the vicious circle revolves. Does he habitually, however, do more than repress? Does he, as administrator oppress? So far we have heard one version only, one part to this suit, with its stories of outrage and echoing through them a long cry for national independence. The mouth of the accused has been shut hitherto by fatalism, by custom, by the gulf of misunderstanding which is fixed between the Christian and the Moslem.

In my own experience of western Armenia, extending more or less over four years up to 1894, I have seen no signs of a Reign of Terror. Life in Christian villages has not shown itself outwardly to me as being very different from life in the villages of Islam, nor the trade and property of Armenians in towns to be less secure than those of Moslems. There was tension, there was friction, there was a condition of mutual suspicion as to which Armenians have said to me again and again "If only the patriots would leave us to trade and to till!". The Turk rules by right of five hundred years' possession, and before his day the Byzantine, the Persian, the Parthian, the Roman preceded each other as overlords of Greater Armenia back to the misty days of the first Tigranes. The Turk claims certain rights in this matter - the right to safeguard his own existence, the right to smoke out such hornets' nests as Zeitun, which has annihilated for centuries past the trade of Eastern Taurus, the right to remain dominant by all means not outrageous.

A Wandering Scholar in the Levant, New York, p. 147 (1896)

Alexandre Millerand


I am surprised that London should possess information which no one here is aware of and is unable to document. As a result, it has been impossible until now to determine exactly that Armenians have been massacred in any area. There is much talk about it but no one was able to give me certain and exact information. In particular the Armenian losses in Marash appear to be absolutely false. Apparently, the Armenians took part in the struggle of our troops in this city and had casualties like all the fighters. A serious study of the figures shows that these Armenian casualties do not exceed 1000.

Archives des Affaires Etrangeres de France, Vol 9, Folio 3; Millerand was the Minister of War of his nation until 1915, becoming President in 1920.
General Vladimir Mayewski


"In 1895 and 1896 the Armenian revolutionary committees created such suspicion between the Armenians and the native population that it became impossible to implement any sort of reform in these districts. The Armenian priests paid no attention to religious education, but instead concentrated on spreading nationalist ideas, which were affixed to the walls of monasteries, and in place of performing their religious duties they concentrated on stirring Christian enmity against Muslims. The revolts that took place in many provinces of Turkey during 1895 and 1896 were caused neither by any great poverty among the Armenian villages nor because of Muslim attacks against them. In fact these villagers were considerably richer and more prosperous than their neighbors. Rather, the Armenian revolts came from three causes:
1. Their increasing maturity in political subjects;
2.The spread of ideas of nationality, liberation, and independence within the Armenian community;
3. Support of these ideas by the western governments, and their encouragement through the efforts of the Armenian priests."



General Mayewski was the Russian Consul-General in Bitlis and Van; from Statistique des Provinces de Van et de Bitlis, pp. 11-13, Petersburg, 1916

A.L. Macfie



P.183: And in the Eastern provinces, in Kars, Ardahan and Batum, recently evacuated by the Russians, Armenian bands committed to the creation of a greater Armenia were advancing, taking revenge on the Turks for the massacres of Armenians they had perpetrated in the First World War.

P.24: Normally 3 years followed by 6 years in the active army reserve and 9 years in the reserve. Some 25 years. (Referring to the military duty expected of Ottomans.)

P.132: The humiliation inflicted on the Ottoman Third Army at Sarikamish, combined with the expectations of further Russian advances and fears regarding Armenian treachery, led in 1915 to one of the greatest tragedies of the First World War, the deportation and massacre of more than a half million Armenian inhabitants of the eastern provinces. The precise motivation of the Ottoman government in ordering the deportations and instigating the massacres to which they gave rise remains in doubt; but this much is clear. In the early months of the war Armenian groups belonging to Dashnaksutiun and Henchak, based in Tiflis and other towns in the area, organized Armenian volunteer units which it was hoped would assist the Russians in their conquest of the eastern provinces and liberate the Armenian inhabitants of the area. At the same time Armenians living in Zeytun, a town in southeastern Anatolia, who had refused to be conscripted into the Ottoman army, organized corps of volunteers designed to disrupt Ottoman lines of communication, while Armenians living abroad approached the Entente Powers, with offers to raise a force of some 20 000 men, capable, if properly armed and equipped by the Entente Powers, of instigating an insurrection in Cilicia and securing control of Iskenderun, a strategic port on the Syrian coast. Then in April 1915 the Armenian inhabitants of Van rose in revolt, with the result that Ottoman forces stationed in the area, convinced that they were facing a widespread Armenian uprising, began an indiscriminate massacre of Armenians; and in May, following a second Armenian uprising in Zeytun, the Porte passed a series of deportation laws authorizing the removal of the Armenian population from the strategic areas and their resettlement in the Euphrates valley and other areas to the south of the province of Diarbekir. In the ensuing implementation of the deportation laws, carried by Ottoman gendermarie units, convicts released from the prison for the purpose, Kurdish tribesmen and according to some accounts, units belonging to the special organization, robbery, rape and murder occurred on an extensive scale.

Few of the Armenian columns arrived at their destination; and
even those that did were frequently exposed to further starvation and massacre. Turkish historians argue that the deportations instituted in 1915, in the midst of the Gallipoli campaign, which threatened the very survival of the empire were the inevitable consequence of Armenian treachery and rebellion. As for the unfortunate consequence of the policy of deportation, entirely unplanned and unintended, those were merely the outcome of the sickness and exhaustion suffered by the deportees on their long marches, of the attacks launched by marauding gangs of Kurds and other irresponsible elements, beyond government control, and the poverty and deprivation suffered by all inhabitants of the area, Turk as well as Armenian, in that period. Documentary evidence would appear to support the Turkish view.


"The End of the Ottoman Empire 1908-1923", Longman
Ltd. (Thanks to Sukru S. Aya)
Jason Goodwin


P.311: ....and in 1875 the empire was forced to declare
bankruptcy.

P.312: Abdulhamid ordered Mithat Pasha from the country. The
vaunted constitution produced an assembly, seventy-one Muslim deputies, forty-four Christians and four Jews.

P.315: No longer the complacent rulers of the flock, the Ottomans were baffled and afraid when the people rose in nationalist revolt.
Massacre became the stock response to threat; the authorities made little effort to check the atrocities; and frenzied blood-lust of the Turks in retreat is still a delicate subject. Excesses were committed by all sides; the arrival of Protestant missionaries, singing ' Onward Christian Soldiers' among the once quiet Armenians alarmed the Ottomans into thinking that the process which had turned their Bulgarian, Greek or Serbian reaya(?) against them was about to be repeated.

P.318: It brought Gallipoli, that stubborn defense of Turkish soil against the allies in which 100.000 died and which created, curiously two resonant justificatory myths of nationhood; for Australians tend to date the crystallization of a national consciousness from the death trap into which the British imbroglio let them, while the Turks fought for their homeland, and were ably let by Mustafa Kemal.

P.325: In the last years of the empire, a French firm offered half a million francs to turn 150.000 street dogs in Istanbul into gloves. The Sultan — very hard pressed for cash — nobly refused. The dogs were locked up in an old tramp steamer and transported, howling and fighting to a waterless island (Hayirsizada) where they were turned loose.

"Lords of the Horizons" Jason Goodwin, Henry Holt Co, NY, ISBN
0-8050-4081-1 (Thanks to Sukru S. Aya)



Erik J. Zurcher



P.119-120-121: This military fiasco left Eastern Anatolia open to a Russian advance which duly materialized when the weather improved. It also marked the beginning of the suppression of the Ottoman Armenians, still a controversial issue 75 years later. The Armenian community formed an important part of the population of the eastern Anatolian provinces, although in no province did they constitute a majority or even plurality. Estimates of the total number of Armenians in the empire vary, but a number of around 1.500.000, some 10% of the population of Ottoman Anatolia, is probably a reasonable estimate. After the troubles of 1896, the situation in the east had normalized to some extent, but relations between the local Armenians and Muslims, especially the Kurds,
remained tense and there were frequent clashes. In May 1913, a
representative of Dashnakzutioun had demanded the establishment of a foreign gendarmerie to protect the Armenians in Eastern Anatolia. The CUP government had approached the British about this matter and the latter had discussed it with the French and the establishment of two inspectorates with far-reaching powers in eastern Anatolia and a Norwegian and a
Dutch inspector were appointed in May. The outbreak of war prevented the scheme from being put into operation. At the outbreak of the war, Armenian nationalists saw in a Russian victory their chance to achieve the establishment of an Armenian state in Eastern Anatolia. Russian propaganda encouraged these aspirations. A few thousand Armenians joined the Russian army; there were Armenian desertions from the Ottoman army and guerrilla activity behind the Ottoman lines. Confronted with this situation, the Ottoman cabinet, on the initiative of the Interior
Minister, Talat Pasha decided to relocate the entire population of the war zone to Zor in the heart of the Syrian desert. This relocation (tehcir) was carried through 1915-16 and it resulted in the death of enormous numbers of Armenians. So much is undisputed historical fact. The controversies rage on three points. The first is the military necessity of the operation. Turkish historians and their supporters point the treasonable activities of many Armenians during the war and to difficulty of knowing which Armenians would remain loyal and which would side with Russians. The other side — correctly — pointed out that the deportations were not limited to the war zone but took place all over the empire. In western Anatolia and Istanbul deportation of whole communities were exceptional, but members of the Armenian elite were persecuted. The second controversy is over numbers: Turkish historians have put the number of deaths as low as 200.000 while the Armenians have sometimes claimed
ten times as many. The third and most important controversy concerns intent, and whether genocide was committed. The Turkish side and its supporters claim the situation in eastern Anatolia was one of the inter-communal warfare, in which Armenian bands (supported by the Russian army) and Kurdish tribes (supported by Turkish gendarmes) struggled for control. They also recognize that the Armenians sent to Syria were subjected to vicious attacks by the local Muslim population (especially Kurds) but they attribute this to lack of control on the part of the Ottoman government rather than to its policies. They point out that the official records of the Ottoman government do not, as far as is known, contain any documents which demonstrate government involvement in the killings. The Armenian side has tried to demonstrate this involvement but some of the documents it has produced (the so-called Andonian
papers) have been shown to be forgeries. Many of the British and American publications on this issue from the time of the First World War which purport to prove government involvement also bear a heavy stamp of wartime propaganda. On the other hand, the same cannot be said of wartime German sources who also report government involvement.


"TURKEY a Modern History" I.B. Tauris Publishers, London (Thanks to Sukru S. Aya) Leslie E. Davis


(Sukru S. Aya, who excerpted the following, offered the note: This book is composed from a report by Leslie E. Davis , prepared at the request of Ambassador Morgethau and it basically tells the mistreatment of Armenians only. It is so biased, that there is not even a single line about the Armenian revolt in Van, next to Harput. The report was converted into a book which was read and approved by Richard Hovannisian, and printed by a Greek Company to hurt the Turkish image. Nevertheless, I have sorted out some of the sentences which escaped censoring.)



P.12: It is not that I am in any way a champion of the Armenian
race. It is not a race one can admire or among whom I should chose to live. But whatever the faults of the Armenian people may be and however conclusive may be the proof that some of them have been involved in a revolutionary plot, the punishment inflicted upon these people is so severe, the tragedy is so terrible.

P.15 : In the spring of 1915, local Armenian leaders in Harput, including several professors at the missionaries' Euphrates College, were arrested and many tortured to death. At the end of June because of their alleged seditious activities, all Armenians were ordered by the central government to prepare for "relocation." Missionaries, too, became targets. Several were arrested and deported.

P.15: U.S. trade with the Ottoman Empire began in 1792 when an
appropriately named ship, the Grand Turk, called at the port of Smyrna (Izmir) to buy figs and carpets. By 1800 American merchants were pressing for diplomatic relations, but the Sultan considered United States so insiginificant he refused to entertain the idea.

P.16: American missionaries rapidly outnumbered merchants in the
Ottoman Empire. The first representatives of the Congregational
American Board of Commissionaires for Foreign Mission arrived in Smyrna in 1819 with boundless optimism. When they learned that conversion from Islam to another religion was a crime punishable by death in a country in which the head of the state was also the Moslem spiritual leader, they focused their efforts on the Greek, Armenian and other Christian minorities. Idealistic Americans invested $ 40 million (in 1915 dollars) in schools, hospitals and churches by the outbreak of World War I. Operating with charters from the Ottoman government, these institutions by
1914 employed more than 450 Americans and 4500 Ottoman nationals of various ethnic origins.

P.17: Historically, the Armenian genocide had its roots in the
creation of the millet (non-Muslim ethnic) system after the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople. By institutionalizing the status of religious minorities, the Greeks, Armenians and Jews as beings whose rights in society were only recognized through a system outside the structural mainstream, were doomed to classification as inferiors. The Greek and Armenian millets were headed by archbishops designated by the Sultan to be patriarchs of their communities.

P.37:There was never any commercial work of importance in this
consular district even in normal times.

P.38: Since the beginning of the war even bread is almost
unobtainable.

P.39: Since 1876 the American Board has maintained a college
there, which was at first called "Armenia College", but the name of which was afterwards changed to "Euphrates College" where most of the teachers and students were Armenians.

P.45: After the entry of Turkey in the war, the French monks left
the country, but were subjected to many annoyances before they went. Soon afterwards all the French monks left. Their buildings are used as a Turkish hospitals.

P.46: Typhus was very bad that winter, especially among the
soldiers... As many as 75-80 of them died on same days.

P.48: About this time it was rumored that bombs and guns had been found in the possession of certain persons who were thought to be members of Armenian revolutionary societies conspiring against the Turkish Government.

P.55: After it was announced that the Armenians were to be
deported they flocked to the Consulate in large numbers, many of them claiming American citizenship who had never seen there before and about whom nothing was known.

P.58: It was known that the roads were dangerous, even though the
government had promised to provide a sufficient escort for all who
left. They were filled with "chetes" who were turned loose to rob and
pillage.

P.59: Most of the business of the region was in their (the Armenians' — HW) hands. 95% of the deposits in the banks belonged to them.

P.96: All the business of that region had been carried on by Armenians; all the work of missionaries had been among Armenians.. Many had been kept by friendly Turks in their houses; some had been deported and had returned.

P.104: The fact that I was giving out relief soon became known to
every one and frequently the Turkish policemen themselves brought
Armenians there for me to help. Surviving Armenians in all the villages left and came to Harput and Mamouretul Aziz to live in order to get help. Many came from the Palu region also, as the headquarters of the Turkish Army of the Caucasus was established there early in 1916 and the entire civil population, Turkish as well Armenian, were sent away. This increase in the number of destitute Armenians who were dependent upon charity added greatly to our problems.

P.105: Some Armenian women who were married to Turks, or were living with them as their mistresses, came with other people on Tuesdays to seek aid. Occasionally, the Turks even escorted them and waited on the street.

P.108: In the summer of 1916 all the Armenians who had been
hiding in the Dersim, succeeded in escaping to Russia and others from Harput to Dersim in the hope of getting away.

P.109: .Most of them succeeded in getting away safely. In spite
of the risks, the opportunity for these Armenians to save themselves
in this way was so good that it seemed advisable for as many to try to go to get away.

P.118: Thousands of Mohammedan muhadjirs passed through
Mamouretul Aziz after the advance of the Russian in winter of 1915-16. They came from Turkish provinces which the Russians occupied, fleeing before them and wandering from place to place. Many of them settled for a time in the villages from which the Armenians had been driven out. The Government has completed the destruction of most of them by tearing out timbers of the houses for fire-wood, as no other fuel was obtainable in that region during the past two years and the houses which consisted principally of mud and straw, then crumbled to pieces.

P.123: Notwithstanding the courtesy shown us, we were closely
guarded all the way from Harput to Constantinople by the gendarmes whom the Vali (Governor) had furnished, ostensibly for our protection but partially, without doubt, to prevent us from observing things too carefully on the way. These gendarmes, of whom there were at all times from one to four, were almost without exception polite and obliging.

P.168: I certainly have no desire to pose as a champion of the
Armenian race or to defend any Armenian revolutionists. After the
expulsion of the greater part of the Armenian population during the first two or three weeks of July, subsequent deportations have naturally been on a smaller scale and have occurred at longer intervals.

P.169: I should estimate that at least three-fourths of the
Armenians in this region have now gone. A few are now getting the benefits of the order exempting Catholics and Protestants from deportation, but most of these were sent away before the order was received.

P.170: Many people, mostly women, have been kept in the Turkish
houses, especially in the villages that were partly Turkish and partly Armenian. The purely Armenian villages have been pretty thoroughly cleaned out, but hundreds of women have found shelter with their Turkish neighbors in the villages containing both races.

P.172: On the whole, the Americans here have had comparatively
little trouble during the past two months and have been able to do some good.

P.177: Word has recently been received from a few individuals
who have reached Aleppo. It is noted that they are all women. Apparently no man arrived there.

P.181: During the last two months quite a number of Armenian
soldiers have been brought back in groups of two or three hundred from Erzurum. They have arrived in a most pitiable state due to their exposure on the way at this season of the year and in the privations they had suffered.

P.183: One of the disappointments in the present terrible
situation and one of the saddest commentaries on American missionary work among the Armenians is their lack of religious and moral principles and the general baseness of the race. During all that has happened during the past year I have not heard of a single act of heroism or of self-sacrifice and the noble acts, if any, have been very few. On the contrary mothers have given their daughters to the lowest and vilest Turks to save their own lives; to change their religion is a matter of little importance to most of the people; lying and trickery and inordinate love of money are besetting sins of almost all, even while they stand in the very shadow of death. From every point of view the race is one that cannot be admired although it is one to be pitied.

P.195: (from Turkish proclamation.)

At Harput, despite the repeated affirmations of the Armenians and
oftheir bishop who protested loyalty to the Government, and declared that they did not stockpile any arms, more than 5.000 rifles and revolvers and as many muskets, close to three hundred bombs, forty kilos of fuses for bombs and two hundred packages of dynamite were found, more than it would take to blow up the entire province. Among the effects of the bishop of Arapkir one found, amongst bombs and arms, two complete dervish outfits and accessories. In January and February 1915, many Moslem sick and injured who were returning to their homes from the front, were
pitilessly massacred in Armenian villages through which they passed. Before and after our entry into the war with Russia, the Armenians who made it their duty to aid Russian army against Turkey, had already formed battalions which were directed against Van and the Persian border. Many of these battalions were formed out of Armenians who escaped from the province of Mamuretul Aziz, or who, originally from this province, were abroad.

"The Slaughterhouse Province - An American Diplomat's Report on
the Armenian Genocide,1915-1917," edited by Susan K. Blair; Aristide D. Caratzas, New York

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