User:Yerevantsi/sandbox/Anti-Armenianism in Turkey

Anti-Armenianism in Turkey

http://asbarez.com/95688/turks-view-armenians-greeks-jews-negatively/

http://panarmenian.net/m/eng/news/156923

http://news.am/eng/news/160542.html

Public sentiment










of the Armenians from Anatolia in 1915. The Armenians were accused of collaborating with the Russians against the Ottomans despite the fact that they were called the millet-i sad{ka (the most loyal subjects) of the Empire. It was a prerequisite for homogenisation in the name of modernisation that both internal and external conditions served to justify their policies under the rhetoric of state security and interests. The question that automatically comes to mind concerns the reason for the change in the perception of the Armenians from being loyal millet to being subjected to the policies of elimination by the Young Turks, as will be dealt with in the second part of this article."}}
 * {{sfn|Göl|2005|p=130|ps=: "The CUP government’s reaction to the loss of the Balkan territories was a formulation of drastic policies that combined their enlightened authoritarianism with ‘chauvinist nationalism’. The CUP leadership was the first group to implement policies of ‘homogenisation and Turkification’ which were reinforced by the conditions of World War I (Rae 2002: 151–3). The first implementation of the CUP regime’s goal of creating a homogeneous nation was the elimination
 * {{sfn|Göl|2005|p=130|ps=: "The CUP government’s reaction to the loss of the Balkan territories was a formulation of drastic policies that combined their enlightened authoritarianism with ‘chauvinist nationalism’. The CUP leadership was the first group to implement policies of ‘homogenisation and Turkification’ which were reinforced by the conditions of World War I (Rae 2002: 151–3). The first implementation of the CUP regime’s goal of creating a homogeneous nation was the elimination

Afterwards, Soviet control was established in Armenia on 2 December 1920. Interestingly enough, the last act of the outgoing independent Armenian government in Erivan was to sign the Treaty of Alexandropol (Gu¨mru¨ ) with the Turks on 3 December 1920, which recognised the eastern boundaries of the newly emerging Turkish state.6 It was not a historical coincidence that Turkish nationalists decided to put pressure on the independent Erivan government as the first foreign authority to recognise the sovereignty of the Ankara government. The treaty ranks as the first official agreement undertaken by the Ankara government with a foreign state. Turkish scholars have neglected the role of the treaty in their analyses of Turkish nationalism and nation-state building since it was never ratified. Despite the fact that the treaty did not have any legislative power it still played an important role in Turkish nation-state building for the following reasons: First, the Armenians were chosen as the first ‘other’ state which had to recognise the authority of the new Ankara government. The Treaty of Alexandropol indicated the willingness of the Turks to recognise the political existence of the Armenians as the ‘other’ as long as they did not have any territorial claims in Anatolia. It was a deliberate act that the Ankara government signed the treaty on behalf of the ‘Turkish’ GNA and defined, for the first time, the political identity of the Ankara government in terms of the territorial delineation of Turkey. Second, the treaty demarcated the Armenian–Turkish border in accordance with the principles of the Turkish National Pact of 1920. The Ankara government regained all the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire which had been lost to Russia after the war of 1877–78. The border was later finalised by the Treaty of Kars between Turkey and the Transcaucasian Soviet republics under the supervision of Moscow in 1921, and this border between the modern Turkish and Armenian states remains today (AMDP Vol. 1 Doc. 97: 571–9; PRO: Archival Research).7 Third, the victory against the Armenians created ardent nationalist feelings among the Turks arising from the impression that the nationalists had the necessary political will and material capabilities to fight against the foreign invaders. In foreign affairs, both the Bolsheviks and the Allies changed their policies towards the Ankara government after its victory over the Armenians.

The Lausanne settlement was the zenith of Turkish nationalism in international relations since there was no word of a united independent Armenia as designated in the Treaty of Se` vres. The legacy of the Ottoman past and the Allied plans for Anatolia in the 1920s led to the ‘Se`vres syndrome’ which represented the misperception and distrust of the Western intentions towards Turkey, which made the Turks very sensitive about the protection of their territorial integrity and national identity.

The first official newspaper of the Ottoman Empire, Le Moniteur Ottoman, in 1832 had a section in Armenian language (Go¨ c¸ek 2002: 42). Hayastan (the homeland of the Armenians), the Armenian newspaper in Istanbul, was an influential channel in setting the ideological parameters of Armenian nationalism, which called for the Armenian nation to wake up and follow the examples of other enlightened nations in the 1840s (Libaridian 1983: 76). In addition, the Armenians had another advantage that Anatolian Turkish peasants did not have: many Ottoman Armenians were prosperous enough to send their children to Europe for religious and secular education. Armenian students in St Petersburg and Moscow produced and distributed brochures about the success of the Greek and Bulgarian revolutions to gain political independence from the Ottomans. The spread of these ideas bore fruit and Armenian revolutionary discourse and activity spread between the 1860s and 1890s (Nalbandian 1963: 140–1). These internal developments were interwoven with the pressures from European powers on the Empire’s modernisation and the liberal policies of the Tanzimat era, as explained earlier.