666) Connecting The Dots On The “alleged" Armenian Genocide

What was presented here is in no way a comprehensive list, but perhaps only an introductory tool. You will find enough information here, however, to create your starting point from where you can launch your own research to deepen your knowledge on the Turkish-Armenian conflict.

This effort on my part was necessary because the information presented on this issue in the American media and academia are, unfortunately, almost without exception, tainted by pro-Armenian and anti-Turkish bias. This kind of lopsided, biased, and unfair coverage of a controversial issue is the reason why the term ethocide was coined. No other issue, present or past, has been covered with this much bias, bigotry, and blatant discrimination.

So much so, that although Turkish suffering, by any measure, was much wider, deeper, and more intense than the Armenian suffering, it is simply not possible to find a single word on the Turkish suffering, while AFATH penned books fill most library shelves.

So much so, that the amply documented Armenian treason is news to some academicians -- such as those AFATH-owned-but-independently-operated genocide scholars. Most AFATH scholars ignore or downplay the rock solid facts that the Ottoman-Armenians, during WWI, have

- schemed and agitated against their government;
- attacked, tortured, and killed their Muslim neighbors and fellow Ottoman-citizens;
- terrorized Eastern Anatolia;
- staged armed rebellions;
- willingly engaged in fifth column activities behind Ottoman lines;
- joined the invading enemy armies; committed acts of treason;
- committed unspeakable hate crimes against the Ottoman-Muslims in Eastern Anatolia while wearing the Russian uniforms;
- committed unspeakable hate crimes against the Ottoman-Muslims in Southern Anatolia while wearing the French uniforms;
- not only slaughtered Ottoman-Muslim, but also Ottoman-Jews;
- and much more.

- Turks were forced to exercise their right to defend their homeland in May 1915 (not April 24 as the AFATH crowds erroneously claim) by removing most of the treasonous Ottoman-Armenians (not all of them) out of the theater of war and to temporarily resettle them in other parts of the Ottoman Empire where the Ottoman-Armenians could pose little or no risk to the Ottoman war effort. This is a classic military measure during a time of war, exercised by even the U.S. and France during WWII and almost ay country throughout known history. It is perhaps because of those measures that I am able to write these lines and most of my readers are able to read them today. It is perhaps because of those measures that there is a Republic of Turkey today.

Opposing those wartime military measures 90 years later boils down to showing bigoted and unjustified hostility to Turkey and Turks today. One simply can not pretend to be a friend of Turkey and Turks while subscribing to the AFATH views on the AAG. Let’s all be clear on that common denomination.

The AFATH spoke up, embellished, and distorted history for 90 years; Turks have chosen the higher road of forgive and forget. But the dignified silence of the Turks during a time of nation-building, guided by Ataturk’s immortal words “Peace at home, peace in the world”, was deliberately misinterpreted by the AFATH crowds as “admission of guilt”. It is our turn to speak now. We must speak, for the next 90 years if that’s what it takes, to make our case, present our worse suffering and bigger losses, and remind the world of the despicable Ottoman-Armenian treason and violent rebellions, to level the field. Until that day, there can be no real peace between Turkey and Armenia.

The Armenians sowed hatred for 90 years and they are now harvesting hostility. Turks, on the other hand, invested heavily into “Peace at home and peace in the world” for 90 years, only to find out that anti-Turkish bias and bigotry, shamelessly cultivated in the West, can not be easily overcome by strict adherence to a tradition of peace. Unfortunately, the Armenian terrorism and aggression, it seems, paid handsome dividends. I would give anything to be convinced otherwise.

Let me be crystal clear: While El Kaida terrorism is rightfully punished, Armenian terrorism is rewarded. This kind of “my-terrorist-is-better-than-your-terrorist” approach is the wrong message to send to rogue nations like Armenia, which consequently, sees no reason to stop their brutal occupation of parts of neighboring Azerbaijan. The Armenians got away with murder, again, while treating the world to a bogus genocide lullaby. It is up to us now to wake the world up from this meaningless slumber.

The information presented in this column levels the playing field to a degree. I will continue to enrich this “databank” with new series documenting Armenian myths, distortions, and lies, as well as exposing some of those Turkish turncoats -- mostly former leftist revolutionaries and even convicted terrorists of the 1970s, as well as their supporters and sympathizers -- who treat the AAG as a new way to avenge their lost battles against the Republic of Turkey. By the time I am finished, this will be one of the more comprehensive databanks on the Turkish-Armenian civil war.

It is still up to the reader to make the best use of this databank. How does one go about using this information to refute the omni-present AAG? To help my readers answer this question, I am presenting below a TV interview conducted by Channel One TV in 2001 which is important from several aspects:

- It lists the five most basic questions TV reporters love to ask on camera.
- It gives a synopsis of the Turkish views while answering those questions
- It lists some scholarly sources as references for more research-minded people
- It brings “the other side of the story” out into the open in an easy-to-follow, chat-format
- It shows the typical bias in the media, as only 10 seconds of this 75 minute interview was broadcast, while close to ten minutes were allocated to same, old, well-known AFATH views.

Because of all these reasons, this interview seems to be an ideal introduction, a necessary first step, for anyone who is new to the subject and who wishes to get a balanced view of the Turkish-Armenian conflict. It ties together all of the past articles nicely in one compact package.

Use it!
Peace,
Ergun Kirlikovali

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Legend:
AAG = The alleged Armenian genocide
AFATH = Armenian Falsifiers and Turk Haters
Ethocide = Extermination of ethics via pre-meditated and malicious mass deception for political, economic, social, and/or moral benefits
WWI = The World War One
WWII = The World War Two
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THE “ALLEGED" ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Channel One Interview Conducted on April 11, 2001
Anchorman: Derrick SHORE ; Participant : Ergun KIRLIKOVALI
Duration: 1hour 15 min ; Aired only 10 seconds

QUESTION 1:
1.5 MILLION ARMENIANS WERE KILLED IN THE GENOCIDE THAT TOOK PLACE BETWEEN 1915 AND 1923. WHAT IS YOUR RESPONSE TO THAT?

Answer 1: I object to the use of the term genocide. It was a civil war within a world war, where all sides party to the conflict suffered terribly. For every Armenian who died or was killed, 4 Muslims, mostly Turks, died or were killed. Same area, same time, same wartime conditions.

Armenian lobby today would like you to ignore the Turkish suffering, and solely focus on Armenian suffering. I ask you, aren’t Turks human, too? Don’t their dead count? Wouldn’t ignoring Turkish dead and grieving only for the Armenian dead be selective morality, even racism?

I find such discrimination, based on racial, ethnic, or religious reasons to be unfair, unethical, and un-American. Look what a prominent scholar, a history professor at UCLA, Stanford J. Shaw, says in his book History Of The Ottoman Empire And modern Turkey , Cambridge University Press (1977), Volume II, page 315, and I quote:

“…Armenians again flooded the czarist armies, and the czar returned to St. Petersburg confident that the day finally had come for him to reach Istanbul.

Hostilities were opened by Russians, who pushed across the border on November 1, 1914, though the Ottomans stopped them and pushed them back a few days later….A subsequent Russian counter offensive in January caused the Ottoman army to scatter…and the way was prepared for a new Russian push into eastern Anatolia , to be accompanied by an open Armenian revolt against the sultan.

…Armenian leaders in Russia now declared their open support of the enemy and there seemed no other alternative. It would be impossible to determine which of the Armenians would remain loyal and which would follow the appeals of their leaders. As soon as the spring came, then, in mid-May 1915 orders were issued to evacuate the entire Armenian population from the provinces of Van, Bitlis, and Erzurum, to get them away from all areas where they might undermine the Ottoman campaigns against Russia or against the British in Egypt, with arrangements made to settle them in towns and camps in the Mosul area of Northern Iraq. In addition, Armenians residing in the countryside (but not in the cities) of the Cilician districts as well as those of north Syria were to be sent to central Syria for the same reason. Specific instructions were issued for the army to protect the Armenians against nomadic attacks and to provide them with sufficient food and other supplies to meet their needs during the march and after they were settled. Warnings were sent to the Ottoman military commanders to make certain that neither the Kurds nor any other Muslims used the situation to gain vengeance for the long years of Armenian terrorism. The Armenians were to be protected and cared for until they returned to their homes after the war…”

And if you think this prominent history professor is alone in his research findings and/or conclusions, think again. Because 69 other colleagues of Professor Shaw’s , i.e. historians, scholars, and other experts on this issue, representing top American universities and colleges in this field, have signed a statement addressed to congress and published it in New York Times and Washington Post on May 19, 1985, supporting the findings I quote above. I will not list all of the names who signed this declaration, but I will read the declaration, if you don’t mind, since these historians are really the ones who should be doing this interview, not me:

“…To the members of the u.s. house of representatives : The undersigned American academicians who specialize in Turkish, Ottoman and Middle Eastern Studies are concerned that the current language embodied in House Joint Resolution 192 is misleading and/or inaccurate in several respects. .. Specifically, while fully supporting the concept of a "National Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man," we respectfully take exception to that portion of the text which singles out for special recognition: ". . . the one and one half million people of Armenian ancestry who were victims of genocide perpetrated in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 . . .."

Our reservations focus on the use of the words ‘Turkey' and ‘genocide’ and may be summarized as follows:

From the fourteenth century until 1922, the area currently known as Turkey, or more correctly, the Republic of Turkey, was part of the territory encompassing the multinational, multi-religious state known as the Ottoman Empire. It is wrong to equate the Ottoman Empire with the Republic of Turkey in the same way that it is wrong to equate the Hapsburg Empire with the Republic of Austria. The Ottoman Empire, which was brought to an end in 1922, by the successful conclusion of the Turkish Revolution which established the present day Republic of Turkey in 1923, incorporated lands and people which today account for more than twenty-five distinct countries in Southeastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, only one of which is the Republic of Turkey. The Republic of Turkey bears no responsibility for any events which occurred in Ottoman times, yet by naming 'Turkey' in the Resolution, its authors have implicitly labeled it as guilty of ‘genocide’ it charges transpired between 1915 and 1923;

As for the charge of ‘genocide,’ no signatory of this statement wishes to minimize the scope of Armenian suffering. We are likewise cognizant that it cannot be viewed as separate from the suffering experienced by the Muslim inhabitants of the region. The weight of evidence so far uncovered points in the direct of serious inter communal warfare (perpetrated by Muslim and Christian irregular forces), complicated by disease, famine, suffering and massacres in Anatolia and adjoining areas during the First World War. Indeed, throughout the years in question, the region was the scene of more or less continuous warfare, not unlike the tragedy which has gone on in Lebanon for the past decade. The resulting death toll among both Muslim and Christian communities of the region was immense. But much more remains to be discovered before historians will be able to sort out precisely responsibility between warring and innocent, and to identify the causes for the events which resulted in the death or removal of large numbers of the eastern Anatolian population, Christian and Muslim alike. Statesmen and politicians make history, and scholars write it. For this process to work scholars must be given access to the written records of the statesmen and politicians of the past. To date, the relevant archives in the Soviet Union, Syria, Bulgaria and Turkey all remain, for the most part, closed to dispassionate historians. Until they become available, the history of the Ottoman Empire in the period encompassed by H.J. Res. 192 (1915-1923) cannot be adequately known. We believe that the proper position for the United States Congress to take on this and related issues is to encourage full and open access to all historical archives and not to make charges on historical events before they are fully understood. Such charges as those contained H.J. Res. 192 would inevitably reflect unjustly upon the people of Turkey and perhaps set back irreparably progress historians are just now beginning to achieve in understanding these tragic events.

As the above comments illustrate, the history of the Ottoman-Armenians is much debated among scholars, many of whom do not agree with the historical assumptions embodied in the wording of H.J. Res. 192. By passing the resolution Congress will be attempting to determine by legislation which side of the historical question is correct. Such a resolution, based on historically questionable assumptions, can only damage the cause of honest historical inquiry, and damage the credibility of the American legislative process…”

As you can see, prominent historians, scholars, and researchers reject your characterization of “genocide” when referring to the Turkish-Armenian conflict during WWI.

I also object to the numbers. Since exact numbers of casualties is simply impossible to get, given the manual nature of documentation, copying, or recording and the wartime conditions, best estimates based on review and cross comparison of documents, are all we can rely on.

The Armenian casualties range from 300,000 (Gurun) to 600,000 (McCarthy), while Muslim losses, mostly Turkish, are about 3 million. No matter whose numbers and estimates one uses, though, this horribly tragic ratio of 4 Turkish losses to every Armenian loss seems to be consistent and that’s where our frustration and anger focus: how come no one mentions Turkish dead? Another source of objection to the alleged 1.5 million Armenian loss, is the fact that the entire Armenian population was about 1.3 million at the time (estimates ranging from 1 million to 1.5 million; Armenian estimates, most unreliable, always double triple these numbers).

How can anyone kill more than there is? Also, if you look at Armenian loss numbers, they seem to increase by years: up to 600,000 in 1920s, a million in 1960s and 1.5million in 1980s. Even Encyclopedia of Britannica gives the Armenian dead as 600,000 in 1918 but 1.5 million in 1968. Do Armenian dead multiply? Or are they manipulating numbers to make history fit their claims of genocide?

Even one dead is too many, I agree. But if one wishes to grieve one side’s losses and completely ignore the other side’s losses, worse yet, if one piggy-backs on this racist behavior an unfair claim of genocide leveled against one of the warring factions, then the whole thing is out of order… Is it not fair, is it not the American way, to consider both sides of a claim before rushing to judgment?

Where is due process here? Where is the Turkish side of the story?

Look how Boghos Nubar, in a letter to the Times of London, published on January 30, 1919, begs the allies at Paris conference at the end of World War I as follows, urging the allies to reward the Armenians for their service:

“…The Armenians have been, since the beginning of the war, de facto belligerents - since they fought alongside the Allies on all fronts - in Palestine and Syria, where the Armenian volunteers, recruited by the Armenian National Delegation at the request of the French government, made up more than half of the French contingent. In the Caucasus, where, without mentioning the 150,000 Armenians in the Imperial Russian Army, more than 40,000 of their volunteers offered resistance to the Turkish Armies."

What genocide are you talking about? This is war… Plain, simple…and ugly… As all wars are…

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QUESTION 2:
WE ARE COMING HERE FROM THE USC WHERE WE SAW MANY DOCUMENTS, PHOTOS, ETC. ON THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE. WHAT ABOUT THEM? DO YOU HAVE SIMILAR DOCUMENTS, TOO? IF YOU DO, WHERE ARE THEY?

Answer 2 : Yes, we do have documents, photos, maps, books, oral history tapes, and whatever else is used in documenting history and you can find them in Turkey, in government archives, university libraries, museums, and other such depositories.

If the Turkish side didn’t present them to the world public opinion with great fanfare and drama, like the Armenians did over the last 80+ years, that is because Turks made a conscious decisions not to dwell on the negatives of the past wars during a time of nation building. Turks chose to forgive and forget.

I have a 9 year old son who has never yet heard from me the word Armenian. I don’t want my son to be a fanatic and a radical, like some Armenian terrorist. Los Angeles Times newspaper is awash with news of Armenian kids, as young as 7, 8, 9 years old, reciting hateful poems for candy money from their fathers, where they say awful things like

“I will grow up and butcher all the Turks…” You don’t have to take my word for this, just look at the press reports… This is why we were subjected to a violent campaign of international terrorism for 30 years since 1970s, mainly by brain-washed young Armenian terrorists, under the guidance and enthusiastic support of older Armenians.

More than 70 Turkish diplomats, their families, and innocent bystanders were killed, hundreds were wounded by Armenian terrorists. I have a complete list of Armenian terrorist acts here, see, page after page… Here, you will see assassinations, bombings, bomb threats, intimidations, harassment, and many other forms of terrorism.

Did you know, for example, 3 Turkish diplomats were murdered in cold blood by Armenian fanatics just here in California in the last 30 years? You ask for document, here is a document… You can find more in the LAPD and FBI records, I am sure.

The only difference between the documents the Turkish government and academic sources have in Turkey and what the Armenians show you as documents is that the Turkish documents are genuine, but the Armenian documents are mostly distorted, exaggerated, or outright fake.

Armenians will show you Talat Pasha telegrams, proven to be fake, and I will show you in a minute, the reports exposing this fakery.

An infamous quote, purported to be made by Hitler… fake! It was shown by renown historian Heath Lowry to be embellished version of a Hitler speech. The two sources that were actually used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials do not contain anything about the Armenians. The “doctored” version, which was rejected by the American prosecutor, did have that quotation. I will give you references on this also, in a minute.

Armenians must have also shown you letters and reports by the American ambassador Morgenthau, but not the letters by a succeeding American, ambassador Bristol, who refuted the writings of Morgenthau.

Did you know, for example, that Morgenthau’s reports were forwarded to Washington DC from Istanbul, but actually were generated mostly by Armenian Revolutionary Federation and/or anti-Muslim missionaries, and further embellished by Armenian assistants of the ambassador?

Did you know, that Morgetnhau’s writings were little more than wartime propaganda, designed to drum up support for American entry into the WWI?

Did you know that Morgenthau’s exaggerated reports of absolute horror and mass killings were not admitted into evidence by the British court in Malta after the war?

I ask you, if they were so correct. so genuine, so reliable, so irrefutable, then how come they were simply rejected by the British prosecutors? That is because even an ally knows where hype, hatred, and propaganda stops, and where truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth enters…

Werfel’s heart wrenching story, his book called 40 Days At Musa Dagh about courageous Armenian uprising and tragic end,… fake! Werfel heard these stories from a friend: an Armenian bishop in Vienna and never questioned the Bishop’s account. Years later, when he found out “the Truth” – that only 500 Armenians were captured after 40 days of siege, and the 50,000 Armenians escaped via another route at the back of the mountain, to Mediterranean and then transported by British and French warships to Alexandria, Egypt, under British rule then… So all the “dead Armenians” miraculously “surfaced in Egypt!

Surprised? Not me… If you knew the Armenian history of subterfuge, fakery, fabrication, misrepresentation, and outright lies, like we Turkish-Americans and Turks do, you would not be surprised at all.

I can list dozens, even hundreds of fake Armenian documents. Do you now understand why Armenian allegations of genocide was never accepted as the truth by the world international body?

…………….

Summary of Answer to Question 2: Yes we do have document and genuine ones at that. Our documents are not like the Armenian fakeries. The reason we have not displayed them in the past 80+ years is because we didn’t want to raise new generations with feelings of hatred and vengeance at a time of nation rebuilding. Turks chose the high road of “forgive and forget”. But that doesn’t mean we can not speak up when our rights are trampled on or when we are subjected to injustice by anti-Turkish lobbies.

References:

Orel, Sinasi & Yuca, Sureyya, The Talat Pasha Telegrams - Historical Fact or Armenian Fiction, K. Rustem & Brother, Lefkosa (Nicosia), Northern Cyprus (1986). Synopsis: To date, there is no evidence that the Ottoman State had a policy of extermination of the Armenians. Ottoman statesmen who were imprisoned in Malta after WWI for alleged crimes against Armenians were all released due to lack of evidence. Faked telegrams attributed to the Young Turk government have since been thoroughly exposed as forgeries . Even the British did not use these in their persecution of Ottoman statesmen.

Heath W. Lowry, The U.S. Congress and Adolf Hitler on the Armenians, Political Communiation and Persuasion, Volume 3/2 (1985); pages 111-139; (See Archives below)

Stanford J. Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey’s Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry From Nazi Persecution, New York University Press, New York (1993): Synopsis by an unknown source: “… The Jews have gone through a genocide another example of which is very difficult to find. Moreover, apart from the extraordinarily good relations between the Jews and the Turks since the Middle Ages, Turkey’s role in helping European Jews during the Holocaust has been largely ignored. As Professor Shaw notes, the world does not realize the extent to which Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire which preceded it, over the centuries served as major places of refuge for people suffering from persecution, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Turkey was a haven, not only for those who escaped the Inquisition, but also hundreds of well-known intellectuals during 1930s and thousands of other less well known persons were rescued…”

George Abel Schreiner, An American war correspondent , The Craft Sinister (1920)

Heath W. Lowry, Professor of History, Princeton University, The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, The Isis Press, Istanbul (1990). Synopsis: The anti-Turkish claims advanced in Ambassador Morgenthau's book have been shown to be exaggerations of wartime propaganda by both the American WWI war correspondent George Abel Schreiner and by Professor Heath W. Lowry of Princeton University. Ambassador Morgenthau's book was also a key source for three influential wartime anti-Turkish books: the publications by Lord Bryce, the German Pastor Dr. Johannes Lepsius and young Arnold J. Toynbee. The so-called Blue Book was an important British wartime propaganda publication. (See archives below)

Albert Amateau, Notarized Statement, “Franz Werfel’s Confessions & Armenian Betrayal”, Federation of Turkish American Societies, Inc., New York (1992); (See archives below)

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QUESTION 3:
WE ALSO TALKED TO THE ARMENIAN SURVIVORS WHO TOLD US TERRIBLE STORIES ABOUT THE GENOCIDE. DO YOU HAVE SURVIVORS, TOO, WHO WE CAN INTERVIEW?

Answer 3 : Yes, we do have survivors and examples of oral history can be found at Turkish websites. They may not be as many as Armenians’ because Armenians and Greeks have done a better job of killing their victims.

I , unfortunately, can not bring the dead victims of Armenian and Greek excesses. I am saying this with a heavy heart, because you are looking at a product of Turkish Genocide in the Balkans, which everyone is curiously silent about. Just look at my last name: KIRLIKOVALI. The whole Balkan tragedy is packed there… It means "a person from KIRLIK-OVA" in Turkish. KIRLIK-OVA is the name of a little village near today’s Thessaloniki in Greece (Selanik, under Turkish rule). (See Archives below for the rest of this answer)

References:

Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile, The Darwin, Princeton Press (1995), “..Much of the history of Anatolia, the Caucasus, the Balkans and southern Russia cannot be understood without a proper assessment of the Muslim dead and Muslim refugees…”

Bilal Simsir, Rumeli’den Turk Gocleri (Immigration From The Balkans), Turk Tarih Kurumu (Turkish Institute Of History), Ankara, (1968), (In Turkish)

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QUESTION 4:
WE HAVE SEEN MANY MISSIONARY REPORTS DATING BACK TO THOSE DAYS. WERE THEY ALL LYING?

Answer 4 : No, some of them actually had their hearts in the right place. Here is one example:

Lamsa, George M., a missionary well known for his research on Christianity, The Secret of the Near East, The Ideal Press, Philadelphia (1923), page 133, clarified the difference between reality and propaganda as follows:

"…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…"

As you can see, Armenian fabrications were exposed, but never found their ways to newspaper columns. Only anti-Turkish exaggerations, biased stories found quick spots in newspapers and journals across the US. The more anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish the missionary reports were, the more popular the stories got.

None of their reports mentioned the suffering endured by Turks and other Muslims, as if they did not exit. Half the story was missing in their reports. Would you rely on a report or testimony where half the story is missing?

Look what E. Alexander Powell, An American, says in his book, The Struggle for Power in Moslem Asia, The Century Co., New York & London (1923), pages 32-33,

“…Now I can readily understand and make allowance for the public's errors and misconceptions, for it has had, after all, no means of knowing that it has been systematically deceived, but I can find no excuse for those newspapers which, clinging to a policy of vilifying the Turk, failed to rectify the anti-Turkish charges printed in their columns even when it had been proved to the satisfaction of most fair-minded persons that they were unjustified…A case in point was the burning of Smyrna in September, 1922. There was scarcely a newspaper of importance in the United States that did not editorially lay that outrage at the door of the Turks, without waiting to hear the Turkish version, yet, after it had been attested by American, English, and French eye-witnesses, and by a French commission of inquiry, that the city had been deliberately fired by the Greeks and Armenians in order to prevent it falling into Turkish hands, how many newspapers had the courage to admit that they had done the Turks a grave injustice?…"

So if the claim was anti-Turkish, then you read about it in every newspaper, in every journal, but if the claim was refuted, then the newspaper or journals simply did not print them. So much for truth in reporting in those days…

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QUESTION 5:
THERE WAS ALSO COURT MARTIAL WHERE MANY WERE FOUND GUILTY. DOESN’T THAT PROVE THAT THE TURKS WERE GUILTY?

Answer 5 : Yes, but those courts held by an Ottoman government under occupation, whose leaders would do anything to appease the occupiers. Some charges were arbitrary, others were exaggerated; defendants were not given proper chance to present their case; dubious documents and witnesses were introduced; due process was not followed. The term “kangaroo court” more properly describes these proceeding. So much so, that the British whisked the top government officials to exile in Malta, where they awaited their court proceeding, because the British simply didn’t trust this “Kangaroo Court”. Though the British had full access to the Ottoman documents and plenty of time, they produced no documents that could be used at a court of law to convict Ottoman officials. So, after 2 years of detention at Malta, all the Ottoman top government officials were let go. The Malta Tribunal was over before it could start; case closed. Here is another example of Armenian bias. They will tell you about Kangaroo courts of occupied Istanbul, but they fail to remind you a proper court proceedings that took place at Malta at about the same time. Talk about bias and bigotry… Here is a good example, don’t you think?

Dr. Tuncer Kuzay, a Turkish-American intellectual, summarized this fact eloquently in a press release in April 12, 1999:

“… The Armenians have been feverishly trying to attach a charge of genocide on the Turks for the past 84 years or so. In the relentless pursuit of it, they have declared April 24 as the date of commemoration of this ‘alleged genocide’ . The British were the closest party to these events from 1915 to 1922 because they were the principal occupying power of the Ottoman Empire and its capital, Istanbul, and the Ottoman archives etc. As such, the British led an international war crimes tribunal on the island of Malta against 144 high Ottoman officials who were charged with war crimes against the Armenians. Subsequently 56 out of the 144 alleged criminals were deported to the Island of Malta to stand a trial. After a wide scale frantic search of all the archival material in the British and the US possession they concluded:

Sir H. Rumbold, His Majesty's High Commissioner at Istanbul as the head of the occupying powers, wrote in forwarding to London the ‘evidence’ against the deportees that ‘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’. He admitted that ‘under these circumstances the Prosecution will find itself under grave disadvantage’, but he added, ‘he hoped that the American Government could supply a large amount of documentary information’. (Foreign Office document 371/6500/E. 3557).

In failing to find any legally acceptable evidence against the deportees in the hands of the occupying powers, Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary at the time, informed Sir A. Geddes, the British Ambassador at Washington, that there was a ‘considerable difficulty’ in establishing proof of guilty against the Turkish detainees at Malta and requested him ‘to ascertain if United States Government are in possession of any evidence that could be of value for purpose of prosecution’. (Foreign Office document 371/6502/E. 5845).

On July 13 1921, the British Embassy in Washington returned the following reply: ‘I regret to inform Your Lordship that there was nothing therein which could be used as evidence against the Turks who are being detained for trial at Malta. Having regard to this stipulation and the fact that the reports in the possession of the Department of State do not appear in any case to contain evidence against these Turks which would be useful even for the purpose of corroborating information already in possession of His Majesty's Government, I fear that nothing is to be hoped from addressing any further inquiries to the United States Government in this matter'. (Foreign Office document 71/6504/E.8519. R.C. Craige , British Embassy in Washington to Lord Curzon, No. 722, of July 13, 1921.) Subsequently all the Ottoman detainees were dismissed of charges and exchanged for the British prisoners in Turkey. And there were no war crimes charges, let alone a charge of a "genocide" of the Armenians.

In 1999, the Armenians appealed to the British Government to recognize the alleged Armenian genocide to which the British Government replied. On April 14, 1999 the PA News from London reported: "A bid to get the British Government to recognize as genocide the deportation and massacre and slaughter of thousands of Armenians by the Ottoman government of Turkey in 1915, was rejected by ministers in the Lords tonight". Foreign Office spokesman, Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, said "the British Government had condemned the massacres at the time. But 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. The events of 1915-16 remain a painful issue in relation to two states with which we enjoy excellent relations".

There is one more episode to this saga. The British Government's position on the "Armenian genocide" allegations has been expressed once again in a written response by Baroness Scotland of Asthal to a question on February 7, 2001 at the House of Lords as follows : "Lord Biffen asked Her Majesty's Government: Whether they will list the factors which have dissuaded them from acknowledging as genocide the Armenian massacre in 1915. "

Baroness Scotland of Asthal wrote back:

".The Government, in line with previous British Governments, have judged the evidence not to be sufficiently unequivocal to persuade us that these events should be categorised as genocide as defined by the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, a convention which was drafted in response to the Holocaust and is not retrospective in application. The interpretation of events in Eastern Anatolia in 1915-16 is still the subject of genuine debate amongst historians."

As one can clearly see, even the British, whose recanted and obsolete wartime propaganda during WWI (i.e. the so called "Blue Book") upon which the Armenians have been basing their baseless allegations, flatly refuse to support Armenian allegations.

How many refutations does it take to make the case that “genocide” allegations can not be supported by hard, historical, reliable, court-acceptable evidence. How come Morgenthau’s reports, so damning to the Turks, were rejected by the British prosecutors in Malta? How come the alleged Hitler’s quote was rejected by American prosecutors in Nuremberg? How come all the missionary reports, Armenian church reports were not enough the convict Turks for 86 years? Becaes, my friend, they were fake, fake, fake, and fake again…

The plain truth is Armenians used propaganda, agitation, armed violence, rebellion, betrayal, exaggerations, fabrications, and lies, between 1890 and 1915, and international terrorism between 1922 and 2001, but none helped them achieve what they really wanted: an expanded “Greater Armenia” for Armenians, mostly carved out of Turkish lands… Turks won the war then… Armenians simply can not accept this simple truth and put it behind them… As a result, they attacked Azerbaijan in 1989, and captured by force 20% of sovereign Azerbaijani soil. More than 1.5 million Azerbaijani non-combatants are forced out of their homes at gunpoint by Armenian aggressors… Those forgotten refugees are now spending their 9th freezing winter in leaky tents with little food or medicine, with no end in sight to Armenian demands and atrocities… US humanitarian help is stopped by the manipulation of the US Congress by the Armenian lobby. Here we are, discussing Armenian allegations after 86 years, while 1.5 million people are suffering for real in Caucasus.

(End of interview)

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Mr. Yuksel Oktay, a Turkish-American intellectual whose contributions to the better understanding of the Turkish-Armenian conflict is enormous, also wrote to Channel One and answered those same five questions as follows.

Mr. Derrick Shore
Channel One Anchorman

I read a transcript of your interview conducted on April 11, 2001 with Ergun Kirlikovali, a resident of California. As a concerned Turkish-American, I would like to respond to your questions as well, which you can use in your broadcast, if you so choose.

QUESTION 1: 1.5 MILLION ARMENIANS WERE KILLED IN THE GENOCIDE THAT TOOK PLACE BETWEEN 1915 AND 1923. WHAT IS YOUR RESPONSE TO THAT?
First, the entire statement is false. There was neither genocide, nor 1.5 million Armenians were killed. These are false and exaturated claims being perpetuated by some Armenians, which is refuted even by the existence of the Armenian Turks still living in Turkey today.

Second, the conflict between the Armenians and the Turks started well before 1915 and continued through 1920. To tie these dates to 1923, the date of the founding of the Republic of Turkey, is nonsense.

Turks were fighting along the four fronts of the Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans to the Caucasus, during the First World War, not only against the British, the French, and the Russians, but also the Ottoman-Armenians who rebelled against their own government and joined the invading enemy forces. These are presented in detail in many books, some of which are listed in the attached two page brochure, which also gives a brief summary of the events, and the number of Turks killed as over 2.5 million.

QUESTION 2. WE ARE COMING HERE FROM USC WHERE WE SAW MANY DOCUMENTS, PHOTOS ETC. ON THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE. WHAT ABOUT THEM? DO YOU HAVE SIMILAR DOCUMENTS TOO?
It is true that the Armenians and their sympathizers (due to same religion) have produced an enormous number of books, publications, etc.. However some of these include totally false or fake documents, such as "Talat Pasa Telegrams" and "Quotations from Hitler". If you read one of William Saroyan's books contained at the Saroyan Center at the Stanford University at Palo Alto, you can see that the "enemy of the Armenians was not the Turks, it was the Russians". On the other hand, there are only a few books that tell the truth, such as the books by Kamuran Gurun and Justin McCarthy. If all countries, including the Armenians, would open their national archives, like Turkey did, the real truth would emerge.

QUESTION 3. WE ALSO TALKED TO THE ARMENIAN SURVIVORS WHO TOLD US TERRIBLE STORIES ABOUT THE GENOCIDE. DO YOU HAVE SURVIVORS, TOO, WHO WE CAN INTERVIEW?
The Armenians did not relocate the Turks from their villages or towns, they massacred them and buried them in unmarked mass graves, and some of which are being unearthed even now. The mass killings of Turks by the Armenians in the eastern provinces, from Sivas to Erzincan to Agri, especially as the Russian army evacuated and Armenian irregulars took over their places, are well documented. For example, please see books by the famous American educator John Dewey, who tells about these events. And, as Ergun Kirlikovali has mentioned, there are Turkish eyewitnesses also, but they choose not to speak about evil things, though some were interviewed by the Turkish TV recently. The stories of unspeakable Armenian atrocities they tell are not easy to listen to or comprehend, let alone tell.

QUESTION 4. WE HAVE SEEN MANY MISSIONARY REPORTS DATING BACK TO THOSE DAYS. WERE THEY ALL LYING?
This is a subject, which can not be answered in a few sentences. I myself went to American high school in Talas and Tarsus, in Anatolia (Turkish heartland), which were initially serving only non-Muslim minorities in Turkey, especially Armenians. Some books state that some missionaries provided false information on the Armenian deaths while totally ignoring the killings of Turks by Armenians.

QUESTION 5: THERE WAS ALSO COURT MARTIAL WHERE MANY WERE FOUND GUILTY. DOESN’T THAT PROVE THAT THE TURKS WERE GUILTY?
No, they were mock trials conducted by a puppet government in order to appease the occupying allied forces. There was no “due process”; people got convicted on the word of the Armenian avenger, without evidence. When the British tried to convict the Turkish leaders later in Malta (1919-1921), they could not find any evidence that could be “presented at a court of law” and, consequently, the massacre charges were dropped and the Turks were let go.

Finally, I am glad that this subject, "Armenian Issue", probably best described as the "Armenian Tragedy", which was brought about by themselves, after living with the Turks and other nationalities peacefully under the Ottoman rule for close to 700 years, is being discussed openly. I hope you will have a chance, and the courage, also to ask the supporters of the Armenian issue on what their ancestors did to the Turks.

Best regards.
Yuksel Oktay, Istanbul, Turkey, April 23, 2001

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The following letter of protest was sent to the Channel One anchorman and his assistant Cathy, for only allowing a few seconds out of a 75 minute interview, while the Armenian speakers and guests were givine more than 10 minutes. Is this fair? Is this balanced? Is this ethical? Is this American? You be the judge.

SUBJECT: MY DISAPPOINTMENT WITH YOUR BIASED COVERAGE OF THE "ALLEGED" GENOCIDE
DATE: WEDNESDAY, 25 APR 2001 (E-MAILED AT 21:25:05 )

Dear Cathy & Derrick:
I must say I am deeply disappointed with your incredibly biased coverage of the “alleged" genocide. We have discussed this matter for an hour and a quarter, but you aired only 10 seconds of it. You devoted 98 % to Armenian point of view, but only gave 2% to its rebuttal. Do you really believe this is fair? Do you feel this is ethical?

When I was notified of your request for an interview, I was also warned me that such interviews are mainly for façade and that there is a real possibility that they will not use any part of the interview or use only a minute fraction of the other side of the story as a token. Since your approach seemed genuine, like that of an independently minded and fair journalist seeking the truth, and not like that of a partisan or a lobbyist, I decided to go ahead with your interview.

You showed extensive footage from a Hovanissian, but never mentioned the fact that the "alleged" Armenian Genocide was refuted by 69 top historians, several of whom were his contemporaries and colleagues, who decided to characterize these events as "inter communal warfare fought by Muslim & Christian irregular forces". I showed you the documents. Apparently, this one Armenian historian, Hovannissian, was more important or credible in your mind, than 69 historians, representing universities like UCLA, Princeton, Harvard, and others. It appears your mind was made up before you set foot at my company for the interview.

Then you showed a couple of survivors, but failed to mention the fact that I am a product of Turkish Genocide of the Balkans, like each and every living Turk is a product of genocides that took place in the Balkans, Southern Russia, the Caucasus, Iraq, Syria, and the Aegean Islands. Especially victims of Armenian atrocities in Eastern Anatolia could not be interviewed by you, because, unlike the survivors you talked to, the Turkish victims were annihilated and dead people can’t talk… Ottoman-Turks and Muslims were killed by the Ottoman-Armenians in the East and the Ottoman-Greeks in the West, while Caucasus-Turks and Muslims were killed by Russians and Russian-Armenians.

All told, there were 4 times as many Turkish victims as there were Armenian victims, but even this ratio didn’t seem to bother you one bit. The selective morality, displayed in this case, is shameful. This is what racial discrimination is all about. Whether on religious, moral, racial, ethnic, or other grounds, you have discriminated against the Americans of Turkish origin. Last time I looked, discrimination of any kind was illegal in this country.

I think it would go a long ways towards reducing our anguish, disappointment, and frustration, as well as this strong sense of being duped, if you could post our rebuttal to the allegations made by your many Armenian guests in your show.

Below, I am providing a brief rebuttal to the allegations your Armenian guests leveled, unopposed, thanks to your biased editing. I wish to see this posted within the next few days, in all fairness, with no more "editing" or counter-rebuttal by Armenians.

Sincerely,
Ergun KIRLIKOVALI
Attachment: Rebuttal To The Armenian Allegations Aired On April 24, 2001

(Writer’s epilogue: No Turkish-American rebuttal was aired or posted in the Channel One website in the year 2001 or since. Here is a typical example of bias in the American media. Does any reader need any more evidence to conclude that what is described above is bigotry? )

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© Ergun KIRLIKOVALI
ergun@turkla.com

This article is kindly permitted by Mr Ergun KIRLIKOVALI
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