1869) NYT, 1915: The Ottomans Had No Gendarmes To Fight Armenian Traitors

The Ottomans had no enough soldier, police or gendarmes to fight the Armenian militants during the First World War as almost all healthy men were at the war against the occupiers. The Armenian nationalist militants saw the war as an
opportunity and attacked the Turkish civilians and government buildings. . .

The Ottoman official documents clearly named the rioter Armenians as 'traitors'. The Ottoman Interior Ministry made all possible effords to keep the Armenians outside of the war theatre, yet it had no power to do so. The New York Times report titled 'Turkish Statesman Says Government Has No Gendarmes in Interior' dated to 25 October 1915 vividly shows the fact:

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"BERLIN, Oct.24, (via London.)--The Constantinople correspondent of the Tageblatt, Emil Ludwig, sends the story of an interview which he had with Halil Bey, President of the Turkish Chamber of Deputies, regarding the Armenians. Halil Bey is quoted as follows:

"They are traitors. You have in mind certain excesses and blunders, but, believe me, the Government is not responsible for them, and regrets them as sincerely as anybody. But we have no more gendarmes in the interior. Everybody is under arms as a soldier. Thus it comes to pass that we have not everywhere been able to restrain the rage of the Mohammedans against these traitors to their country. The Government itself will only keep the Armenians so far from the theatre of war that they cannot conspire with the enemy."

Halil Bey pointed out, says the correspondent, that the Armenians went over to the Russians by thousands when the latter made an inroad to Van, and asked: "Will you defend such things?"
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Imagined a minority: they hepl the occupiers, they attack the rest of the population of the country, they kill their country's soldiers, they occupy the cities, they rape the neigbouring women, they dream of a separate state etc. Which state can allow such a minority? The Ottomans did allow actually, yet the wisdom of the ultra-nationalist Armenians was lower than their uncontrollable desire. They dreamed of more and more. They could not stop anywhere. They reached their aim at the end and they established an independent Armenian state, yet they could not protect their first republic because they wanted more territory and they wanted more war. Thus they lost a state and a home. Now some of the Armenians speak about more territories. Apart from the occupied Azeri territories, they name Turkey's east as 'Western Armenia', and they name some parts of Georgia 'lost Armenian territories'. It means that Armenians got no lesson from the first disaster.

13 August 2007
View by Nilgun Gulcan
Journal of Turkish Weekly(JTW)