I will have to thank Kamil, Turks and their well paid propagandists in the West, such as Justin McCarthy, Heath Lowry and Bernard Lewis for being such mediocre negiationists and making it easy to refute them.
For some reason, Turks, such ostriches, think that if they deny facts, facts will disappear.
Kamil/EricFeigl>And the Moslem Victims?
In the entire, very extensive literature published by the Armenian and pro-Armenian side concerning the tragic events, of World War I, one searches in vain for a single word of sorrow for the many the innocent Moslems who lost their lives during and after the Armenian uprising.
Siamanto> Let us not forget that Turkey was at war. Unfortunately, there has been no massive, systematic Armenian uprisings; only limited and isolated events. In Europe, masses have fought/were fighting against oppression. Personally, I think that Armenians had the right to fight for their rights, considering that
1- They were on their own lands and
2- Their rights as humans were abused.
Unfortunately, they did not. The behavior of the Turks with the Christian population was no different than the behavior of "rape gangs" with female tourists, British or not. (Let's keep in mind that 19 century Turks were far more barbarian than modern time "polished" Turks.)
For instance, according to Ottoman law, A MUSLIM NOMAD HAD THE RIGHT TO CLAIM THE LANDS OF A CHRISTIAN, IF HE DECIDED TO SETTLE ON THOSE LANDS. As simple as that!
There were many other anti-Christian laws. Some still exist (despite the fact that, 2 months ago, they have introduced some changes in order to please the EU. But, the procedural difficulties make the changes ineffective. By the way, they have used, even recently, such laws in order to confiscate land and property.)
It is also worth mentioning the following discussion from the Zorian Instate:
The Allegation of "Inter-Communal Clashes"
This description denotes the idea of a kind of civil war supposedly resulting from the relative collapse of the authority of the central government. It implies that the Armenians, an impotent defenseless minority, were able to engage in armed conflict with the omnipotent and dominant Turks and the other Muslims ruling over them. The patent fallacy of such an allegation can be recognized by considering the following facts. On August 3, 1914, i.e. three months before Turkey precipitated the war with Russia, all able-bodied Armenian men in the 20-45 age categories, and later in sequences those in the 18-20 and 45-60 categories, were conscripted in the Ottoman army. What was left behind in the Armenian community was a mass of frightened, if not terrorized, old men, women and children still haunted by the memories of the cycle of the massacres that were committed in the decades preceding World War I. The question poses itself: how could these wretched people be in a position to contemplate, let alone mount, armed clashes against a population identified with and supported by a mighty empire, the Ottoman Empire? The might of that Empire was manifested in its ability to wage for four years a relentless multi-front war in alliance with two other mighty empires, the German (Hohenzollern), and the Austro- Hungarian (Hapsburg). According to Vice Marshall Pomiankowski, Austro-Hungary's military plenipotentiary, who throughout the war was attached to Ottoman General Headquarters, the Young Turk regime first liquidated the able-bodied Armenian men "in order to render defenseless the rest of the population" which, according to him, paved the ground for "their annihilation."2
The Redundancy of the Argument of Armenian Rebelliousness
The four instances of uprising were not only isolated, local, and disconnected incidents but, above all, they were improvised, last-ditch acts of desperation to resist imminent deportation and thereby avert annihilation. Being strictly defensive undertakings, practically all of the insurgents involved perished in the course of the operations regular Turkish army units launched against them to suppress the insurgency. By sheer chance and fortuitous circumstance only the insurgents of the Van uprising managed to survive when at last they were liberated by the advance units of the Russian Caucasus Army, which overwhelmed the surrounding Turkish defense positions and captured the city of Van. The term "chance" calls for emphasis, for but for the timely arrival of the Russian military units, the insurgents of Van were likewise doomed, given the inevitable depletion of their meager resources of defense, including ammunition and weapons, and the mounting casualties they were sustaining. A delay of two or three days in the arrival of the Russians would surely have sealed the fate of the desperate defenders. The following testimony of Vice Marshal Pomiankowski, mentioned above, succinctly encapsulates this plight of the Armenians. He characterized the Van uprising as "an act of despair" because the Armenians "recognized that the general butchery had begun in the environs of Van and that they would be the next victims."3 A similar judgment was expressed by Metternich, German ambassador to Turkey, and a Venezuelan military officer of Spanish extraction who was in charge of the artillery battery relentlessly bombarding and reducing the Armenian defense positions in Van. His eyewitness testimony has extraordinary value because, as he put it, he was "the only Christian who witnessed the Armenian massacres and the deportations in an official capacity...."4
The Charge of Armenian Treachery
Reference is made to "the Ottoman Armenians' violent political alliance with the Russian forces." One is prompted to ask, "what alliance" and "by which Ottoman Armenians?" In the annals of violent behavior inflicted upon defenseless human groups by tyrants, apologists have often taken refuge behind such utterly senseless generalizations. It is a matter of historical record that the leaders of the major Armenian political party, the Dashnaktzoutiun, as early as August 1914, publicly declared their allegiance to the Ottoman state and vowed as citizens of the state to fight for the defense of the country should the government, against all advice, decide to intervene in the war. It is likewise a historical fact that the religious head of Turkey's Armenian community, the Patriarch, through an encyclical, enjoined all the Armenian faithful in the provinces as well as the Ottoman capital to obey the governmental officials everywhere and loyally discharge their duties as Ottoman subjects. Nor can one dismiss the ancillary fact that the leaders of the above-cited Armenian political party did all they could to stop the Armenian volunteer movement that was gaining momentum in the adjoining Russian Trans-Caucasus, but failed. Still, the fact remains that the bulk of these volunteers eager to fight against the Turks in the ranks of the Russian army were either Russian subjects or citizens of various countries in Europe and North America. In any event, how could the presence of some Ottoman subjects, past and present, among these volunteers in any way justify the resort to the sweeping indictment of "Ottoman Armenians?" By the same token, why is the fact being ignored that thousands and thousands more Azeris and Kurds were likewise fighting against the Turks in the ranks of the Russian army? The same may be said about thousands of Jews from Russia and Europe who in 1915 served in the columns of the British Expeditionary Force at the Dardanelles and again in 1918 in the army of British General Allenby at the Palestine front. Does it not follow that there were other abiding and strategic considerations, than the participation of contingents of Armenian soldiers on the side of the Russians in the war against Turkey, in the genocidal selection and targeting of the Armenians?
Against this backdrop, the assertion that the anti-Armenian measures were but limited to the eastern theaters of war, and as such were strictly regional in thrust and scope, is simply astounding. It is belied by the grim realities of the Armenian genocide, whose sweeping compass engulfed Armenian population clusters in all corners of the vast Ottoman Empire. As one high-ranking wartime Turkish counter-intelligence officer in his post-war memoirs movingly lamented, "among those Armenians who were atrociously wasted, despite the fact that they were most innocent, guiltless, and who had committed no crime whatsoever, were the Armenians of Bursa, Ankara, Eskiehir, and Konya."5 These involved regions and provinces that were far removed from the war zones!
(From
http://www.zoryan.org/Table_Of_Contents/genocide_docs_keydistortions.htm)
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Kamil/Feigl> According to the reliable research findings of Professor Justin McCarthy, approximately 600,000 Armenian lost their lives as a result of uprisings, war, epidemics, relocation, flight, and starvation. At the same time, the same factors caused the deaths of two and a half million people on the Moslem side in the same regions. Most of these people were Turks.
Siamanto>
1- First of all, please allow me to remind that Justin McCarthy is a well-known recipient of grants and other funding from the Ankara-sponsored Institute for Turkish Studies.
McCarthy claims that the Armenian Genocide is/was "British Propaganda."
(See
http://www.armenianreality.com/armenian_terror/mccarthy.htm
www.armenianreality.com is an anti-Armenian propaganda site.)
It is noteworthy that American Ambassador's account is considered as American propaganda and the British "Blue Book" as an American propaganda, etc.
Apparently, the lack of pro-Turkish accounts indicates that the Allies of the Ottoman Empire were of utmost honesty. They were as "honest" as Turks were/are!!!
2- If both sides have suffered equally, then how come:
2.1- After the war, there was no trace of the Christian population of that entire region; while the Muslim population have grown in numbers?
2.2- Why there are no accounts that massive numbers of Muslims have been victims of uprisings and suffering from epidemics by the Allies of the Ottoman Empire?
(It is true that Muslims have been relocated, they came from other regions to occupy Christian lands.)
Also, from the Zorian Institute:
The Utter Fiction of the Claim of "Relocation"
The U.S. Congress is invited to lend credence to the transparently incredible assertion that the deported Armenian population was being merely exiled to the deserts of Mesopotamia where they were being "relocated." The brutal and utter cynicism of this assertion is exceeded only by the insolence with which the intelligence of the Congressmen, for that matter the intelligence of any thinking person, is thereby being insulted. Responding to this official claim at the time, Lewis Einstein, the Special Agent of the U.S. State Department at the American Embassy in Istanbul, mocked this brand of "official euphemism...the grim humor of paternal solicitude which usually covers the most barbarous massacres in Turkey...an armed policy of deportation, and the implied sequel of extermination."6 Another U.S. official, Leslie Davis, wartime American consul at Harput, in his report to the State Department described how huge clusters of Armenian deportee convoys on their way to Mesopotamia were rerouted to Harput "only to be butchered in this province...the Slaughterhouse Province."7 The candid testimony of a Turkish general with military jurisdiction over the Mesopotamia regions in question is even more telling in this respect. In his post-war memoirs he emphatically declared that "there was neither preparation, nor organization to shelter the hundreds of thousands of the deportees."8
"Disloyal Ottoman Armenians killed 1.1 million Muslims and 100,000 Jews"
The recklessness of this statement is matched by the sordidness attending it. More important, it reveals and punctuates the ineptness with which the picture of 100,000 entirely invented Jews is injected into the controversy. The attempt to play on Jewish sensitivities already exacerbated by the impact of memories of the Holocaust and thereby to coopt the Jews in the ongoing game of denialism is as transparent as it is lurid. Even by official Ottoman statistics, this falsehood emerges as absurd as one may be able to imagine. Moreover, the figure represents a magnitude that would have provoked reaction and intense inquiry a long time ago. Nor is there any reference to any record or credible source on this matter in the entire literature respecting the whole episode at issue here. Indeed, as far as official Ottoman statistics are concerned, in the areas in which, according to Turkish claims, the Armenians committed atrocities in the course of "inter-communal clashes," the number of Jewish residents did not exceed 4,000. The question begs itself: where did this charge and the associated figure come from and how?
The figure of "1.1 million Muslims" killed roughly corresponds to the total number of the Ottoman Armenian population as presented by several Turkish sources. Like so many other, similar assertions, this too borders on the fantastic, as expounded earlier in the section "The Allegation of 'Inter-Communal Clashes.'" As the French essayist Montaigne once observed:
no one is exempt from talking nonsense;
the misfortune is to do it solemnly.
- Essays v. III, i.
On the Number of Armenian Victims
Without providing specifics, the Memorandum states that "the number of Armenians claimed to have perished has tripled over the last 80 years." Far from such being the case, however, that number more or less remains constant as far as credible sources are concerned. In March 1919 the then Ottoman Interior Minister relying on statistical data which the staff of the ministry had been compiling during the previous two months, publicly declared that "during the wartime deportations some 800,000 Armenians were killed."9 Excluded from this figure are the Armenian conscripts who, in the wake of their conscription, were liquidated in stages by fellow Turkish soldiers, and countless children, young girls, and brides who were forcibly Islamised and absorbed into the mainstream of the Turkish national entity. If one discounts French and British sources, identified as they were with the enemy camp, the available German and Austro-Hungarian sources involving civilian and military officials of all ranks, and serving as wartime allies of Turkey, supply much more inclusive figures. According to these sources, the number of victims of the Armenian genocide ranges between 1.2 and 1.5 million.10
(From
http://www.zoryan.org/Table_Of_Contents/genocide_docs_keydistortions.htm)
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Kamil/Feigl> It has only been recently, since the appalling assassinations of Turkish diplomats around the world, that the Turkish government has begun to pity more attention to the records of the atrocities perpetrated by Armenian fanatics.
Siamanto> Again, why there are no accounts that massive numbers of Muslims have been victims of uprisings and suffering from epidemics by the Allies of the Ottoman Empire?
I guess, all were suddenly discovered in the 1970-ies!
Let us listen to Christopher Walker, a British Historian, addressing the British Parliament:
"Today Turkey spends millions of dollars on denying, in Turkey and in the United States, that the Ottoman Turkish authorities in 1915 executed a genocide on the Armenian people in Anatolia, even though all foreign eye-witnesses at that time concur in agreeing that genocidal acts everywhere took place.
What is particularly disturbing today is the use of scholarship by Turkey as an extension of foreign policy. It is no exaggeration to say that in this regard Turkey today resembles the old Soviet Union. There, if you declared that the Polish officers in Katyn Forest had been killed by Soviets rather than by Nazis, you ran a risk. Intellect was not free. The same occurs in Turkey today as regards the Armenians, Armenian history, and particularly the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The standards that Turkey observes concerning intellectual freedom and the impartial search for truth are very far from those expected from a European state. Turkey is more controlling of its own history today than a number of third-world dictatorships, and the fact that some European professors, lecturers and others are inclined to support the Turkish government viewpoint does not alter this fact."
(From
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200102/cmselect/cmfaff/606/606ap21.htm)
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Kamil/Feigl> As always in these cases, Armenians, or authors who sympathize with the Armenians, overlook the fact that the tragedy was largely brought on by the ruthless fanaticism of Armenian agitators who saw their people as "de facto belligerents". That is how the leader of the "Armenian Delegation", Boghos Nubar, expresses it in his letter of December 3, 1918 to the French foreign minister, Stephen Pichon.
Siamanto> Turks, as well as the professional they hire, seem to have an addiction to distortions. In fact, they have 1- Taken Boghos Nubar's words out of context
2- Distorted the meaning of "belligerent" as used in the text
A person who fights for his/her rights is of course a fanatic, just like those women who fight for their rights are called "whores and prostitutes."
Boghos Nubar was trying to convince the Allies who have won the war to include the Armenian Delegation in the Peace Conference as a legitimate party.
The following is an excerpt of a letter of Boghos Nubar sent to the Times of London in 1919:
Adding our losses in the field to the greater losses through massacres and deportations, we find that over a million out of a total Armenian population of four million and a half have lost their lives in and through the war. Armenia's tribute to death is thus undoubtedly heavier in proportion than that of any other belligerent nation. For the Armenians have been belligerents de facto, since they indignantly refused to side with Turkey.
...
In virtue of all these considerations the Armenian National Delegation asked that the Armenian nation should be recognized as a belligerent. Had the recognition been granted, we should now have been admitted, ipso facto, to the Conference, to which even transatlantic States have found access, though having merely broken off diplomatic relations with Germany, without the least sacrifice on their part.
From
http://www.turkishforum.com/armenian/letter_boghos_nubar.html
www.turkishforum.com is anti-Armenian propaganda site.
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Kamil/Feigl> The truth can occasionally be found by reading between the lines, as in Christopher Walker's book Armenia-The Survival of a Nation. On page 247, he writes of the bitter fighting between Turks and Armenians and its horrible consequences for the civilian population: "Atrocity and counter-atrocity by Turk and Armenian alike had brought tilt, situation to flash point, particularly at Erzinjdan. Wherever file truth about the atrocity stories lay (and it seems probable that the Armenians, seeking to avenge the genocide, were killing Turks without compunction)..."
Siamanto> I don't have access to the book, so I will refrain from commenting. In any case, chances are it is another attempt to distort facts and/or arguments.
Again, I will ask the reader to read to the recent memorandum addressed to the British Parliament:
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200102/cmselect/cmfaff/606/606ap21.htm
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The remaining of the article is about the Malta trials or subjects that I have already addressed in this/previous reply:
Regards,
Siamanto.
