382) The Real Genocide of the Armenian people

There was indeed a genocide of the Armenian people. As Sam Weems explains, from his "Armenia: Secrets of a 'Christian' Terrorist State"; using the history of Richard Hovannissian as a basis: The real Armenian genocide was caused by the Armenian peoples' "own dictator leaders."

Is this a fair assessment? Consider: The Armenian Republic was established in 1918, and there were problems of tremendous magnitude. Instead of attending to the much needed task of nation building and care of the many who who were suffering beyond belief, the fanatical leaders pursued their own direction of greed, immediately and opportunistically seeking others' lands. They attacked Georgia. They attacked Azerbaijan. They provoked Turkey and prepared for an attack (as Armenia's first prime minister, Hovhannes Katchaznoni outlined in his 1923 manifesto), at a time when warring should have been the last thing on their minds. Whatever resources that were to go to the people, the corrupt leaders evidently did what they could to line their own pockets. These are the factors that directly contributed to Hovannisian's conclusion: "In 1919, for each 1000 persons in Armenia there were 8.7 births and 204.2 deaths, a net loss of 195.5. It was verily . . . a land of death."





From Chapter Five (with material immediately preceding to be found here), Armenians Seek Free Handouts From the Christian World; the book referred to is Richard G. Hovannisian's The Republic of Armenia, Volume I, University of California.

The first winter was especially hard. The Armenian people suffered greatly. Hovannissian notes: "The chaotic situation in Armenia was intensified by the presence of approximately 500,000 refugees."(P126) This number is confirmed by reports of American and British officials as well as by relief workers.

Hovannissian continues: "These figures do not include the additional thousands who had found temporary sanctuary in Zangezura and Karabagh, Georgia, the North Caucasus and the steppe lands of Russia.”(P127) In addition, this number did not include the many thousands of Armenian refugees in the Arab world.

Again, the Armenian numbers do not add up. If 1 million Armenians were removed from the Ottoman combat zones -- if 500,000 went to Armenia, if there were additional many thousands of Armenian refugees in other places, if thousands of Armenian women were taken into Muslim households — just how can Armenians claim genocide of 1.5 million of their people? Based on Armenian history Professor Richard G. Hovannissian’s numbers, the alleged 1.5 million Armenian genocide just could not have happened.

The actual facts do prove the Armenian people suffered unimaginable horror; thanks to the selfish decisions made by their leaders in starting: a civil war in the Ottoman Empire; an attempt to start a civil war in Georgia; and an attempt to begin a civil war in Azerbaijan.



This was the true genocide of the Armenian people, that caused by their own dictator leaders.


Hovannissian reports the terror experienced by the Armenian people:

The winter of 1918-19 was one of the longest and most severe in the annals of Erevan. The homeless masses, lacking food, clothing, and medicine, passed hellish months in blizzard conditions. The starving people sometimes demonstrated or rioted for food, but these sporadic outbursts were to no avail. The state granaries were empty. Allied officials who came to Erevan brought hope that before too long provisions would begin to arrive from abroad. Until that time the nation must persevere. But soon even this hope faded. An American eyewitness, overwhelmed by the misery, wrote: ‘A terrible population. Unspeakably filthy and tatterdemalion throngs; shelterless, death-stricken throngs milling from place to place; children crying aloud; women sobbing in broken inarticulate lamentation; men utterly hopeless and reduced to staggering weakness, heedless of the tears rolling down their dirt-streaked faces. As a picture of the Armenians most in evidence in Armenia I can think of nothing better than this, unless I turn to other kinds of mobs: Large numbers here and there, wide-eyed, eager hands outstretched in wolfish supplication; teeth bared in a ghastly grin that had long since ceased to be a smile — an emaciated, skin-stretched grin, fixed and uncontrollable.

The pitiful multitude lay in the snow, in partially destrayed buildings, on doorsteps of churches, eventually too weak to protest or even to beg any longer They lived in the land of stalking death; waiting with sunken face and swollen belly for the touch of that angel. And death came, delivering from anguish thousands upon thousands of refugees and native inhabitants alike.

Many who withstood the exposure and famine succumbed to the ravaging diseases that infested the derelict masses. Typhus was the major killer striking in every district and at every age group, taking its largest toll among the children. The phenomenon of death came to be both expected and accepted. The insensible bodies were gathered from the streets by the hundreds each week and covered in mass graves, often without mourner or final rites... that year in the capital alone some 19,000 people contracted the disease and nearly 10,000 died from the three-headed monster-exposure, famine, pestilence. (P127-128)

This was the true genocide of the Armenian people, that caused by their own dictator leaders. It was the self-appointed Armenian leaders who began the rebellion from within the Ottoman Empire that led to these terrible and horrible conditions.

"The burden of several hundred thousand unsheltered and unemployed refugees was enough in itself to cause an economic maelstrom. Even during normal times the land under the actual jurisdiction of the Armenian government could not have supported so needy a population. The fertile soil of the Araxes valley and the once-cultivated fields of Turkish Armenia now under Muslim domination."(P 130)

Hovannissian would have the world believe the Muslims took this land away from the Armenians causing them to starve. The Muslim Turks had acquired these lands more than five hundred years before the Armenians attempted a rebellion. The Armenian Christians had lived in peace with their Muslim neighbors during this entire period of time. Now, a few Armenian warlords led a revolt in an attempt to overthrow the Ottoman government. The bottom line is these Armenian warlords failed and their people paid a terrible price, as did the Turks.



8.7 births and 204.2 deaths, a net loss of 195.5



Hovannissian published the following figures to show the terrible plight of Armenians: "In 1919, for each 1000 persons in Armenia there were 8.7 births and 204.2 deaths, a net loss of 195.5. It was verily a land of death."(P133) The Turks experienced an equally terrible time but Professor Hovannissian does not mention those losses at all. Rather, he uses the Christian Bible word "verily" (translated by Christians to mean "truly") to deceive Christians. This is yet another example of Hovannissian attempting to use Christian "code" words to gain support in the Christian world for the Armenian cause even if he only tells half the story as he does in this example. If he were a fair historian, he would have given the birth and death ratio for Muslims, as well as for his "Christian" Armenians. After all, Muslims are human beings also. Grieving for Christian suffering and ignoring Muslim suffering is not the Christian thing to do.

The new Armenia, which was established out of Russia, was based on a farm economy. There was very little industry of any kind. There was a wine works and home manufacture of furniture, textiles, implements, and handicrafts and that was all.

The drastic decrease in agricultural production, beginning during the war years, contributed heavily to the Armenian tragedy. A poor harvest in 1914 was followed by the conscription of farmhands by the thousands, the revolutionary upheavals and civil strife throughout the Russian empire, the Turkish invasion of Transcaucasia, and the influx of nearly a half million refugees created a situation that insured the Armenian failure to establish a nation.

The question Hovannissian does not ask is what would have happened to the Armenian people had their leaders not attempted a rebellion behind the Ottoman battle lines, thus causing young farmers to be drafted into Armenian military? There were other problems as well: "A soaring inflation resulted from these heavy losses. The assorted paper specie became nearly worthless as the price of food and essential items doubled and multiplied time and time again. Shrewd Armenian manipu­lators and speculators hoarded the remaining meager stocks, relinquishing small amounts of food to desperate people who paid with their last possessions and deeds of title. The government was faced with a catastrophe that it had not created but for which it was held accountable. It had little means to cope with problems, as neither legislation nor decree could deliver the starving masses."(Pl 33)

This is yet another example of a half-truth. The "paper specie" became nearly worthless: The Armenian government printed their paper money (specie) even though they had no gold, silver; nor anything else to guarantee their paper money was good. Is it any wonder; therefore, that it was worthless?

History has shown that when any government prints too much money with nothing to guarantee it, inflation is certain to follow, just as it did in Armenia. This is why "the price of food and essential items doubled and multiplied time and time again." This is another example of how Armenia’s, self-appointed dictator leaders failed their own people. Pipe dreams of establishing a "greater Armenia" at the expense of neighbors’ lives, lands, and resources, and with little more than lip service paid by the Christian world, duped by Armenian lies and misrepresentations, were bound to backfire and come back to haunt the back-stabbers.

The Armenian leaders knew "shrewd manipulators and speculators hoarded the remaining meager stocks, relinquishing small amounts of food to desperate people, who paid with their last possessions and deeds of title." Why didn’t the Armenian government treat this activity as a crime? Why didn’t they arrest the individuals who did such terrible things to their own people? This was a small country. It could not have been a secret who these individuals were. Were Armenian government officials a part of such profit-making operations?





Richard Hovannisian and Amb. John Evans

Professor Richard Hovannisian arranged for
genocide-friendly Amb. John Evans
to speak at UCLA in early 2005.
Evans later had to explain his
genocide opinion, and that of the
status of Karabakh.

Hovannissian states: "The government was faced with a catastrophe that it had not created but for which it was held accountable." This is hogwash! Clearly the Armenian dictator leaders had started the revolution that failed that led to the terrible conditions of their people. They printed money that was worthless and knew that when they printed it. This government looked the other way and allowed hoarding and profiteering. This so-called Armenia would have folded had it not been for one thing — the people of America came to their rescue. Hovannissian expressed it this way: "At that critical moment in the history of the Armenian people, the United States of America came to the rescue, giving life, awakening fresh hopes, and open­ing new horizons." (P133)

Americans came to rescue Armenia because Armenian-paid agents went to the United States, played the Christian versus Muslim race-ethnic card, and told stories about an imagined massacre to gain sympathy. Their scheme worked because these stories were not challenged by Muslims. There were no debating mechanism in place for Muslims to refute Armenian allegations. After all, Christian Armenians could not have lied, could they? The Armenian tall tales were bought by the Christian world hook, line, and sinker. Christian good will and good intentions were misused and abused by the Armenian paid agents.







Note how Prof. Hovannisian observes the rule of "exclusive victimhood" to a tee, and focuses strictly on Armenian suffering. While he does provide lip service to other deaths elsewhere in his book, his statement of "verily a land of death" overwhelmingly applied to the other peoples Armenia had ruled during 1918-1920. Check out these statistics from the pen of a Soviet-Armenian historian.

300,000 Ottoman-Armenians in Erivan;
some 150,000 already dead



The following has been excerpted from Arnold Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, 1922:

"There were also something like 300,000 Armenian refugees from the same atrocities in the territory of the Erivan Republic, who had been living there for five years in extreme destitution and with an appalling death-rate, but who were not enabled to return to their homes in Ottoman territory, even after the formal conclusion of peace between Angora and Erivan at the close of 1920."

That would make a total of some 450,000 Ottoman-Armenians who had hot-footed it away on their own accord (i.e., not having been among the resettled), given Hovannisian's own telling (Armenia On the Road to Independence, 1967) of some 150,000 having died of starvation while accompanying the Russian retreats, in earlier years. As far as the Armenians' not being "enabled" to return to their homes, perhaps the Armenians felt they could not return, given the awful crimes the Armenians had committed in Eastern Anatolia, as occupiers. (Or as Toynbee would later put it regarding Ottoman-Christians who had sided with the invading Greeks, in the event of a loss and after committing their own crimes, they would be "unwilling to risk another settlement of accounts with [the Turks].")Armenians were certainly permitted to return in provisions set by the Gumru and Lausanne Treaties.


© Holdwater
tallarmeniantale.com/real-genocide.htm