User:Gregoryb2000/Claims and Controversy Over Armenian Genocide

Claims and Controversy over the Armenian Genocide

The events of World War I in Ottoman Turkey have been the topic of many heated discussions. World War I, which lasted between 1914 and 1918, coincided with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and was followed by the Turkish Independence War in history. Historians are generally divided over the specificity and the magnitude of the events regarding the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in the first quarter of the twentieth century. . Some historians claim that Ottomans killed over a million Armenians in a premeditated deportation in the year 1915. Other historians, including Bernard Lewis and Guenter Lewy, cite that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died due to famine and civil war conditions, along with hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Turks. The Armenian question has indeed been more politicized than researched over the decades.

While Armenian lobbyists are pushing for an Armenian Resolution in the United States, what is interesting is that the Ottoman archives that contain documentation from the aforementioned period are yet to be broadly studied. For those who value data and research over conjecture, the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri (the Ottoman Archives Division of the Prime Minister's Office) in Istanbul fully opened its doors to scholars regardless of their nationality or subject of research in 1989.

Thus far, Armenians have refused to bring their genocide allegation before the International Court of Justice. In contrast to open Ottoman archives, significant Armenian and Russian archives were closed until recently.

European parliaments and American Congress seem to bring up the case of Armenian Genocide before Turkey year after year. According to renowned British historian and lecturer Norman Stone, Turkey’s refusal to admit “genocide” is a decision on good ground. Stone has studied the history of Central and Eastern Europe in depth, and wrote a book called Europe Transformed, 1878-1919. In the book he explains there are two major gaps in the case of an alleged Armenian genocide.

1.The fact is that the act of ‘genocide’ has never been proven. All evidence for it is indirect. When the British were in occupation of Istanbul in 1918, they found no direct evidence or proof of genocide.

2.The alleged ‘genocide’ has never been subjected to a properly-constituted court of law.

As stated by Stone, Diaspora Armenians claim that ‘historians’ accept the genocide case – the Diaspora line. Indeed, there is an organization called ‘Association of Genocide Scholars’ which does endorse the Diaspora line. However, there is not a single scholar who specializes in Ottoman history in this organization. On the contrary, Ottoman specialists are not convinced of the ‘genocide’. As well, there is a team of distinguished historians who do not accept the Diaspora line at all.

As Stone relates, In France, Gilles Veinstein, historian of Salonica and a noteworthy scholar, reviewed the evidence for the alleged Armenian genocide in a famous article of L’Histoire in 1993. Veinstein summarized the arguments, for and against, in a fair way. He came to the following conclusion.

The fact is that there is no proof of ‘genocide’, in the sense that an original document never appeared, indicating the Armenians were to be exterminated. There is forged evidence such as the documentation in which Talat Pasha, as minister of the Interior, supposedly ordered the governors to exterminate the Armenians, including the children in orphanages, in secrecy. Nevertheless, these documents are clearly a forgery as they contain elementary mistakes with regards to dates, signatures, and the kind of stationery used.

The fact is that the Armenian Diaspora have never taken this matter to a proper court of law. Instead, they have tried to silence well-known historians such as Veinstein, Gunther Lewy, and Stanford Shaw, who all disregard the Diaspora line as cited by Stone. Indeed, Brian Ardouny of the Armenian Assembly of America quoted in a videotaped interview for a documentary: "We don't need to prove the genocide historically, because it has already been accepted politically."(Ardouny cited by Fein).

Where the Controversy Lies

As there are claims that a large number of Armenians suffered under the Turkish military, there is also unanimous evidence of the massacre against civilian Ottoman Turks in villages of southern Anatolia, including Van, in the hands of Russian military and Armenian insurgents as stated by Sprayregen.

According to Fein, while the wealthy Armenian lobbyists press for a one-sided acknowledgment of humanitarian crimes in the congress, Armenians' crimes against Turks in southern Anatolia during the First World War -and thenceforth- have conveniently been forgotten. There is no mention of bloody Armenian revolts, guerilla attacks on Turkish villages, Armenian and Russian cooperation in the Turco-Russian wars, or the assassination of over 70 Turkish diplomats across the world. This makes the genocide claims biased.

As reported by Capt. Emory Niles and Arthur Sutherland, who were on an official 1919 U.S. mission to eastern Anatolia at the time, the entire region from Bitlis through Van to Bayezit in eastern and southeastern Turkey, fell to the occupation of Armenians once the Russian troops withdrew during the First World War (1914-1918).

“Muslim Turkish villages had been entirely destroyed by Armenian militia while the Turkish army advanced. “Armenians are accused of having committed murder, rape, arson and horrible atrocities of every description upon the Musulman (muslim) population. At first, we were most incredulous of these stories, but we finally came to believe them, since the testimony was absolutely unanimous and was corroborated by material evidence. For instance, the only quarters left at all intact in the cities of Bitlis and Van are Armenian quarters ... while the Musulman quarters were completely destroyed." (Niles and Sutherland as cited by Fein)

German ambassador Count Von Bernstorff’s letter to Miran Sevasly of Boston on September 28 1915 expressly states that, according to official reports received and transmitted by the German government to the government of the United States, the alleged atrocities committed by the Ottomans against the Armenians are “a pure invention”. This report from the German ambassador was published in the September 29 1915 issue of the New York Times under the title “Armenians Own Fault, the Bernstorff Now Says: They Brought Reprisals on Themselves by Trying to Stir Up Rebellion Against Turkey”. The German ambassador adds, “Reports of Turkish atrocities against Armenians are greatly exaggerated. In fact, Turks have been provoked by the Armenians in this case.” (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F07E3D71138E633A2575AC2A96F9C946496D6CF)

Data versus Conjecture

On March 23, 1920, in a letter addressed to President Woodrow Wilson, the Army intelligence officer and U.S. Delegate to the Paris Peace Conference Col. Charles Furlong stated how Turkish massacres of Armenians is given elaborate coverage in the media, yet little or nothing of the Armenian massacres of Turks is mentioned (Furlong cited by Fein). According to Furlong, the so-called Marash massacres [of Armenians] have not been verified. On the contrary, in the minds of many who are familiar with the situation, there is a grave question whether it was not the Turks who suffered at the hands of the Armenian and French armed contingents which were known to be occupying Marash and its vicinity at the time. (Furlong as cited by Fein – article accessible at the link below). (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/oct/16/armenian-crime-amnesia/)

The scholar and historian Justin McCarthy of the University of Louisville researched the demographic structure of the Ottoman Empire from the population statistics of the Ottoman government which have been open for study since beginning of the twentieth century. In his research paper, “Armenian Terrorism: History as Poison and Antidote”, McCarthy affirms that there is no factual basis for the much debated genocide claims of Armenians. He goes on further to state, after studying the demographic composition of the final decades of Ottoman Empire in depth, it is obvious that many more Turkish citizens than any other minority groups lost their lives in the first two decades of the twentieth century. As McCarthy found, in 1912, there were 870,000 Armenians in the eastern provinces Ottoman Empire according to the statistics. In other words, Armenians were less than one-fifth of the population of the eastern Anatolia. In some Anatolian provinces, Muslims outnumbered Armenians six to one.

History under the Microscope

As documented by Galien, since the mid 19th century, the great powers of Russia, France, and Great Britain had been debating among themselves how they could carve and colonize parts of the Ottoman Empire in a truly imperialistic manner. These nations concurred that the division of the empire could be accomplished easily with the support of Christians living under Ottoman rule. A Christian revolt would result in the Ottoman Empire becoming even weaker which would then justify a massive military offensive from the West.

As McCarthy relates, in 1828 and 1854, when the Russians invaded Eastern Anatolia, each time they took 100,000 Armenian sympathizers with them to the Caucasus, where the Armenians took the place of Caucasian Turks who were systematically displaced by the Tzar. (The province of Erivan, the present-day capital of Armenia, was 80% Muslim before 1828). Deporting Muslims such as Crimean Tatars, Circassians and Abkhazians, and replacing them with Slavs and Armenians in the Caucasus was part of a long-held Russian policy as stated by McCarthy. Russians imported Armenians into the southern Caucasus, and promised them an autonomous state in return for Armenian support against the Turks in the war.

General Count Tcherep-Spiridovitch, president of the Slavonic Society in 1900s, addressed the Armenians in New York in 1907 to form a committee to revolt against the Ottomans. He lectured the Armenians to reunite and rise against the common enemy along with Greeks, Macedonians, and Albanians of the Empire. He stated that Armenians could enlist the support of Americans by telling horror stories of Muslim Turkish cruelty against their white Christian brethren. He added this move would also be endorsed by the Russian tzar. Count Tcherep-Spriridovitch’s speech was published in an article in the New York Times in 1907. The article also mentions the Armenians committees’ subsequent decision to unite their fractions, and rise up in arms upon this call. This news report is in the news archives of the New York Times, and can be reached by clicking on the link below. (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C06E0DC133EE033A25753C2A9639C946697D6CF)

Armenians rose against the Ottoman government in the 19th Century. As cited by Galien in his paper “Westerners on the Armenian Strategy and Rebellion”, Western sources document that Armenians provoked the Turkish Muslims in order to get more Armenians to revolt, and eventually to get the Western powers to deal the final blow on their behalf. The British Consul Grave at Erzurum sent a message to the British Embassy at Istanbul on January 28, 1895, which read:

The purpose of Armenian revolutionaries is to compel the Ottoman Turkish government and Turkish nation to take action against themselves because of the general discontent they create themselves and so draw the attention of foreign powers to the imaginary sufferings of the Armenian people and convince them of the necessity to improve the situation. (Grave cited by Galien - document can be accessed at the link below. (http://www.turkishcoalition.org/media/galien_westerners_on_%20armenian_strategy_and_rebellion.pdf)

Armenians' Role in the Turco-Russian Wars

The war that broke out between the Turks and Russians in 1915 was the last in the series of the nineteenth century Turco-Russian Wars. Because of the backing given by the Armenians to invading Russian armies in 1828, 1854, and 1877, the Ottoman leaders reasoned they could no longer trust the Armenians. McCarthy describes the Ottoman deportation of Armenians in the following excerpt.

“A forced deportation of Armenians was begun. In areas in which Ottoman authority was weak and in war zones, Armenians suffered terribly. They were set upon by the Kurdish bandits and by corrupt Ottoman government officials. In areas to the south of Anatolia where Ottoman authority was strong, such incidents were few and the refugees arrived in Syria in relative safety (as attested by the Armenians themselves).”

Soner Yalcin, a Turkish journalist and historian, agrees with McCarthy in the sense that, when facts and factors are put in perspective, the history of events of 1915 in Asia Minor is far from being a one-sided tale of massacre and deportation. It is crucial that the events of history be studied and evaluated in the context and conditions of the time period.

Yalcin reasons that the deportation of Armenians was deemed necessary by the ruling Ottoman administration, the Committee of Union and Progress, because Armenians sided with the Russian army in the previous Turco-Russian Wars. The same view is also expressed by Barbara Lerner in an October 18 2007 National Review Online report titled “History Speaks: The Moral Case against the Armenian Genocide Resolution”. Lerner describes the 1915 Turco-Russian War on the eastern front of the Ottoman Empire as fierce since the Nationalist Armenian battalions, made up of Armenian volunteers, joined the war on the Russian side. Armenian units seized the Anatolian city of Van even before the Russians arrived, joining the Russians in capturing the towns of Bitlis, Mus, and many other Turkish towns and villages, all the while massacring Turks in those places. Subsequently, though, the Ottoman reinforcements recaptured those towns in a long series of battles that raged throughout eastern Anatolia in1915 (Lerner). McCarthy relates the events of the 1915 in detail as follows.

“At the back of the Ottoman army, Armenian revolutionaries seized and held the city of Van, displacing thousands of Muslims who became refugees. These were soon joined by 800,000 fellow Muslims, refugees from areas taken by the Russian army. By the time war ended, more than 400,000 Turks evicted from the Caucasus were added to the refugee numbers. The Muslim refugees were persecuted by Armenian revolutionaries and Armenian volunteers from the Caucasus. War, bandits, starvation, and disease killed Turks and Armenians indiscriminately. By the end of the Eastern Anatolian wars, 1.2 million Muslims from Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus had become refugees. More than one million of the Muslims of Eastern Anatolia had died, as had at least 130,000 Caucasian refugee Muslims. 870,000 of the Armenians of the Six Provinces (eastern Anatolia) had become refugees or had died. In Anatolia as a whole, 600,000 Armenians and 2.5 million Muslims had died. If this was genocide, it was a strange genocide indeed, one in which many more killers than victims perished.”

As seen in the excerpt above, McCarthy infers that 2.5 million Anatolian Muslims died in World War I and the Turkish War of Independence. McCarthy concludes, out of the 2.5 million, more than 1 million Turks died in the six provinces in eastern Anatolia alone, as Armenians, backed by Russia's invading armies, pursued to reclaim their historical homeland. The contemporaneous estimates put the number of Armenians who died during and after the war at between 150,000 and 600,000. This number has somehow been blown up to an incredulous 1, 5 million over the years even though the archives and statistics are open for compare and contrast. (http://www.turkishcoalition.org/terrorism_mccarthy.pdf)

A Brief Review and Critique of Akcam’s Book

Taner Akcam, a Turkish author and supporter of the Armenian genocide claim, penned a book called “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility”. In the book, Akcam asserts that the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling section in the Ottoman government during World War I, ordered the forced migration of the Ottoman Armenians which tragically ended in a great many Armenian casualties (Akcam, 2006). This book is often credited by Armenian Diaspora as proof of the large scale Turkish massacre of Armenians. The main problem with this presumption is that the claims in the book are strictly based on second hand evidence according to the author Erman Sahin. Sahin explains in his review of Akcam’s book the two major points that are amiss. (http://www.mepc.org/journal_vol17/1Sahin.asp)

While Akcam's book assumes that the Ottoman fractions in administration decided to execute genocide on Armenians, it falls short of naming the administrative documentation that legislated this decision. If there is such a document, it must be referenced. The main source of Akcam’s allegations seems to be the1919–1920 court-martial documents. However, it is well known that court trials, as well as the post war Ottoman governments, were controlled by the governing agents of the victorious Allies, the British and French, during the First World War (Sahin).

The book fails to address why the Ottoman administration, which established an alliance with Bulgarian Christians and made territorial concessions for peace during the World War I, would assume such a policy towards the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire.

Ottoman Empire and its people are known to be accepting of ethnic minorities overall. Monsieur de La Motraye, a traveler and writer has once said, “There is no country on earth where the exercise of all sorts of religions is more free and less subject to being troubled, than in Turkey” as cited by Dr. Philip Mansel. (http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/constantinople.htm) Furthermore, minorities, among them Armenians, had risen high in the Ottoman Foreign Service through the 1800s. For example, Avedis Aharonian was a high rank Ottoman official, and Gabriel Noradoungian served as the Ottoman Foreign Minister for six months between 1912-1913. As Mansel states, Artin Dadian Pasha was a prominent figure in the Armenian community appointed by the Sultan himself. He helped draw up the constitution of 1860, and in 1871-5 became president of the Armenian National Council. Armenian Atrocities in Eastern Anatolia (Cilicia) between 1918 and 1919

In November 1918 the Allied forces started to occupy the war-weary Turkish towns in Anatolia after the Mondros Armistice was signed. As Shaw states in his paper, “the Armenian legion and its destruction of the Armenian community in Cilicia”, when the French troops invaded the towns of Adana and Marash, Armenian villagers joined forces with the French in the vicinity. The occupying French army was a section made up of soldiers called the French Légion d’Orient also known as the Armenian Legion (Légion Arménienne), which comprised of Armenian legionnaires. The Armenian legion had been organized in 1916 under the command of French General Louis Romieu in Cyprus. Shaw’s paper, the Armenian legion and its destruction of the Armenian community in Cilicia, can be accessed at the link below. http://www.gtaag.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=208&Itemid=61

Since the Ottoman villages in Anatolia had been disarmed post-war due to the Mondros Armistice, the Turkish Muslim populations in those towns were not in a position to defend themselves. Shaw describes scenes where Turkish men were taunted and assaulted while the women were raped and homes were sacked in the towns of Toprakkale-Dörtyol, Mersin, Adana, Tarsus, Pozant› and Marash (the region that was called Cilicia) by the French/Armenian Legion. Numerous villages were burned to the ground. The French/Armenian Legion was supported by the local Armenians in its infliction of atrocities upon the Turkish Muslim population. A telegram sent by the Governor’s office of Marash states that on January 29, 1920 soldiers in French uniform, along with the local Armenians, opened machine gun fire on Turkish civilians from churches and set the town aflame. Following this incident, the local notables in Marash came together, and demanded that the Armenian soldiers dressed in French uniforms be discharged from the French army and the French army stop their massacres against the Turkish civilians. Thereafter, Mustafa Kemal, issued a proclamation on 12 November 1919 in the name of the Representative Committee for the Defense of National Rights In Anatolia and Rumelia, indicating the Allied occupation of Cilicia and Marash had violated the conditions of the Mondros Armistice.

In 1818, French High Commissioner in Syria, Georges Picot, urged Armenian nationalists to come and settle in the Cilicia region (Marash and its vicinity) and promised that the French army would support them in establishing an independent Armenian state. However, the timing of this movement coincided with the revolt and reorganization of the Turkish National Forces in the area. Eventually, the French army was so dishonored by the Armenian Legion ravaging Turkish villages that it discharged the Armenian units altogether.

Soldiers of the former Armenian Legion, however, banded in groups and continued their attacks on the Turkish villages in Adana, Mersin, and Marash. American High Commissioner Mark Bristol attested to it that based on the incoming reports the anarchy and massacre of civilians in Cilicia in the vicinity of Marash were due to the French treatment of the Turks as barbarous colonials, and it was a mistake for the French to arm and support the Armenians in the aftermath of the Mondros Armistice.

By 1919, the submissive Ottoman Sultan had lost its authority in Anatolia entirely as the uprising Turkish militia began to fight for Turkey’s independence. The French agreed to evacuate its forces from the Cilicia region upon the Treaty of Ankara signed between the Ankara Government and France in October 1921. Shaw maintains that Native Armenians in Cilicia were outraged by the French withdrawal, yet fearing a vengeful retaliation from the Turkish nationalists, most packed up and evacuated the region along with the French for lands as near as Syria and as far away as France, Great Britain, and the United States. This was quoted as “the Armenian Exodus from Cilicia” in a speech made by French Premier Aristide Briand in 1921.

The Armenian Influx to the United States

Turkey has been exporting produce to the United States since 1790s. As stated by Kantarci, the United States and Ottoman Turkey signed their first trade agreement on May 7, 1830 giving Turkey the most favored nation status in trades. The American traders interacted with the Armenian merchants to import the goods of eastern Anatolia of Ottoman Turkey into the United States. Between 1797 and 1811, Anatolia became a trade heaven for the United States. The trade business brought about a great source of profit and prosperity for Armenians who established a network of tradesmen and merchants all over Turkey. At the time, Turks of the Ottoman Empire were mandated to serve in the military for 5 years (or longer in time of war) which made it impossible for them to run businesses.

In 1810 “American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (ABCFM)” was founded in Boston. Also around that time, the Ottoman Armenians began to immigrate to the United States. According to Armenian author Mark Malhasian, the first ABCFM representatives arrived in Anatolia for missionary purposes in 1820. The ABCFM founded 624 schools and 436 prayer homes by 1893 as cited by Kantarci.

There were 1317 American missionaries stationed in Turkey who were instrumental in sending Armenian students to America to study theology. The group of young Armenians who volunteered to study in the States was fascinated by the new land of opportunity advertised by the missionaries. They often complained about the poverty and their status in Turkey, and thus were operative in raising anti-Turkish sentiments in America. As Galien quotes, Armenian clergymen were busy promulgating nationalism besides religious education. Nationalistic ideas, along with a chronic hatred of Christians towards Muslims were bred within the religious institutions. Later on, Armenians who were small business owners, as well as those who were merely agrarians joined the migrant flow to the States.

References

Akcam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Translated from Turkish by Paul Bessemer, 2006. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Armenians Own Fault, the Bernstorff Now Says: They Brought Reprisals on Themselves by Trying to Stir Up Rebellion Against Turkey. News article, The New York Times. September 29 1915. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F07E3D71138E633A2575AC2A96F9C946496D6CF

Cumhuriyet Archives (Ankara), Ankara Bakanlar Kurulu Kararname 1462, 8 March 1922: CA (Ankara) 1856, Adliye Kutu 4/ dosya 51/ no. 18.

Fein, Bruce. Armenian Genocide Measure is Misguided: Passing judgment on Turkey without all of the facts would be a travesty of justice. San Francisco Chronicle. October 21, 2007.

Fein, Bruce. Armenian Crime Amnesia, the Washington Times, October 2007. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/oct/16/armenian-crime-amnesia/

From Empire to Republic: The Turkish War of National Liberation, 1918-1923, 5 vols., Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2000.

Galiën, Michael van der. Westerners on the Armenian Strategy and Rebellion. November 20, 2007. http://www.turkishcoalition.org/media/galien_westerners_on_%20armenian_strategy_and_rebellion.pdf

Les Armées Françaises au Levant II, p. 408; du Véou, La Passion de la Cilicie, p. 302-355.

Mansel, Philip. Tall Armenian tale: the other side of the falsified genocide. Excerpted from the book Constantinople: City of the World's Desire 1453-1924. New York, 1996. As cited on the link: http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/constantinople.htm

McCarthy, Justin. Armenian Terrorism: History as Poison and Antidote, International Terrorism and the Drug Connection. Ankara: Ankara University Press. 1984. pp.85-94. http://www.turkishcoalition.org/terrorism_mccarthy.pdf

McCarthy, Justin. Death and Exile: the Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922, Princeton, New Jersey: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1995, pp. 202-204.

Ministère de la Défense (France), Etat Major de l’Armée du Terre, Service Historique, General du Hays, Les Armées françaises au Levant, Tome I: L’Occupation française en Syrie et en Cilicie sous le Commandement Britannique, novembre 1918-novembre 1919, Tome II: Le Temps des Combats 1920-1921 (Chateau de Vincennes, Paris), I, pp. 111-114.

Kantarci, Senol. “Ermeni Lobisi : ABD’de Ermeni Diasporasinin Olusmasi ve Lobi Faaliyetleri” The Formation and Activities of the Armenian Lobby in the United States. ERAREN, No 1, 2001, pp:139-171). Translated and Summarised by Fatma Sarikaya. 

Lerner, Barbara. History Speaks: The moral case against the Armenian Genocide resolution. National Review Online, October 18, 2007.

Pleads for Aid in War on Turkey. Gen. Spiridovitch Stirring up the Armenian Colony in New York: Organizing for a Revolt. The New York Times. May 20 1907. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C06E0DC133EE033A25753C2A9639C946697D6CF Sahin, Erman. Review Essay: A Scrutiny of Akcam’s Version of History and the Armenian Genocide. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 2, August 2008.

Shaw, Stanford. J The Armenian legion and its destruction of the Armenian community in Cilicia. http://www.armenian-history.com/books/Armenian_legion_Cilicia.pdf

Sprayregen, Joel, J. ADL and the Turks. Jerusalem Report, Chicago, November 2007.

Stone, Norman. There is No Armenian Genocide; Famous British Historian Says He is Ready to be Prisoned by France. JTW News. Saturday, 21 October 2006.

Yalcin, Soner. Ermeni soykırımı’nı Merkel nasıl yalanladı (How Merkel Turned Down the Armenian Genocide). Hurriyet.com website. Yazarlar. 4 April 2010. http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/yazarlar/14311115.asp?yazarid=218&gid=61