"The Kingdom of Western Armenia"??

Armenians and Greeks have an awfully hard time in accepting the Sevres Treaty's stillborn status... and recognizing the legitimacy of the Lausanne Treaty. (I like the way the artist depicted Woodrow Wilson with a clenched fist, as if Sevres was ever enforced.)

This Armenian site illustrates perfectly what is on the mind of many Armenians (although hopefully not to the extreme level as this... but we all know better). Supposedly, most of Eastern Anatolia (what is now present-day Turkey) was once part of the ancient Armenian homeland. An ancient homeland that was comprised of scattered tribes and vassal-state kingdoms often at odds with one another, and rarely an actual sovereign nation before the 20th Century. So all this talk about the Armenian "Genocide" ... not withstanding the genuine rage many Armenians feel, since many accept at face value all the distortions they've been fed... leads to the possibility of reparations and land. (Never mind the Treaty of Leninakan (Gümrü) signed December 3, 1920 by the Armenians and Turks, which closed the book on past ills, foregoing the issue of reparations; Armenians have a way of going back on their word, like the fifty million dollar loan from America they reneged on, when they threw their lot in with the Soviets... while happily accepting the $100 million a year, on average, American "gift" their well-oiled lobby in America manages to get for them. For which America gets nothing in return... not even a few chunks of shish kebab.)

Once they firmly convince the West there has been a "Genocide," the Western nation Turkey (never fully accepted by the West, as French President Giscard D'Estaing honestly reminded everyone, not long ago... saying Turkey is not a part of Europe, even though the one-time "Sick Man of Europe" had been a part of Europe for only, what, six or seven centuries?) will be squeezed even more into a corner. With all the pressure, the Armenians hope Turkey will admit to a genocide, irrespective of the actual truth; then the stage will be set for the second cycle of putting on the squeeze, for free money and free land. This acquisition of new land will follow in the same manner as other land grabs by Armenia, with the removal of the "barbarian heathen hordes."

The example from above is fairly new, but the sentiments are certainly not. Below are opinions published in an Armenian ethnic newspaper back in 1985, complaining that the period's terror tactics are failing in having the desired effect, and therefore the faithful need be directed as to what the true crux of the issue really is:

In more recent times, the well respected National Geographic magazine in its June 1978 issue, published an article entitled "The Proud Armenians" which included a map of Turkey showing almost all of Eastern Anatolia as the "Armenian Homeland." The same magazine, unbelievably, in its August 1992 issue published an article entitled" Struggle of the Kurds" which included a map of Eastern Anatolia, showing virtually the same territory as "Kurdistan"! It is as if Turks never existed in Anatolia.

Ay Dogan, The Effect of the Image of the Turk
on the Armenian - Turkish Conflict

In Britain it takes 5 years to gain citizenship. Turks have been in Anatolia over 1000 — of course the rules of Absurdistan — sorry Armenia — say that you have to have a written lease agreement from God. Maybe you would like to post said document so that we can all read the small print. Then when the Turks have left you can argue with the Kurds over how much land you will sublet to them — squatters are really hard to get rid of these days!

NICK, Guestbook writer, 7/27/99

The Armenians the Greeks etc, in Asia Minor (it be became Turkey in the 20th century) did not come from afar lands and conquered, and tried to change the religion of the natives there. They were the natives, and the Turks from Turkestan, who joined the Arabs in conquering and expanding the Ottoman Empire, were always seen as the conquerors and the oppressors. The fact that they were forced to fight with the Ottoman armies, does not mean they submitted to their conquerors. They were freedom seekers in the eyes of their own people, and traitors to the Turks’ eyes.

Yes but isn't 1000 years long enough to be accepted as a local in Asia Minor? The Turks may be seen as settlers/foreigners/occupiers to some but they did grant the minorities under their rule the highest levels of religous and cultural freedoms found anywhere at their time. The Armenian Patriarchiate in Istanbul was formed by Mehmet the Conquerer who granted them autonomy. The Greek Patriarchiate in Istanbul was also given similar autonomy and both churches have still survived to this day. If the Turks had been so keen on changing the religions of their subjects, do you think that you yourself would have been a Christian. It is a well known fact that the Orthodox Greeks preferred to remain under Ottoman rule even during a brief period of Catholic Venetian rule in Morea. They actually pledged to the Sultan to return and liberate them from Catholic oppression. Treachery and freedom fighting are two different things. In WWI at the same time that Ottoman soldiers of all races were giving 250,000 lives to protect the Empire at Gallipoli, the Armenians, fooled by their Church and Russian promises for independence, were siding with Russian invading Armies in the East. When the country was invaded by Greek/British/Italian/French/Russian/Armenian Armies after the war, the Greek and Armenians (not all of them of course) were the first to greet them. It should, however, be noted that the 'Empire' had effectively gone bankrupt several decades before that time and life as an Ottoman citizen must have been very harsh as the State had very little control over its territories and the people were left at mercy of local officials. However, I believe that after hundreds of years of coexistence, we deserved much better than a stab in the back from the Greeks and Armenians.

The one to whom the response was directed to, described by another forum participant as "another passionate Turk hater, in sheep's clothing, however," also raised the following interesting issue:

Now the Jews in the Ottoman Empire did not have any land to claim as their own, except Palestine, and they were as strangers to these lands as the conquerors. Therefore siding with the strong party was to their advantage at the time. As their friends the Ottomans begun to be kicked out of the conquered lands, their friends the Jews, guilty by association, were not welcomed with open arms either.

Its not as simple as that. Some nations still possessed the notions of gratitude and loyalty at that time.

To support his argument, the Turkish writer presented the article from a Jewish organization, entitled Loyalty to the Ottoman Empire. Holdwater finds this issue particularly interesting, because a key Armenian contention is that the Armenians got "exterminated" because the Young Turks wanted to purify the nation, in their racist policy of "Turkey for the Turks." Then why was the remaining loyal "ethnic" citizenry, the Jews, also not subject to this extermination policy? Professor Hovannisian was caught off guard with this question, back in 1988.

Response to pkpjamestown from Turk2, forum , 05/04/2002

This is a huge, 'nother topic, and I'll leave that for others to discuss in detail. However, certain facts are clear.

1) Who wrote Armenian history?

Paul Henze tells us, in his THE ROOTS OF ARMENIAN VIOLENCE:

Armenian history is not easy to study. It is long, complex, sometimes obscure and often controversial. There are rich records to draw upon, but texts and traditions have not been as meticulously and critically examined by independent scholars as those of many other old nations. The history of Egypt, or Greece and Rome, for example, has been written primarily by people who are not directly descended from the ancient civilizations. Texts and inscriptions bearing on the history of these societies have been studied from all possible directions by scholars who have no emotional interest in using them as a basis for glorifying the distant past of the peoples involved—though some, of course, have done so. Armenian history has been studied and written almost entirely by Armenians.



2) Have Armenians had a tendency to... ehhh... "exaggerate" the facts?

If you've spent more than two minutes on this site, you already know the answer to that one.



3) Is it possible the Armenians, a wandering people, could not lay stake to the Anatolia region, after all?


Even Armenians cannot agree on the origins of their "ancient homeland." One striking example of this confusion among Armenians that I have encountered is the Armenian writer Ruppen Courian's claim (from Promartyrs de la Civilization, 1964, p. 27) of the following: "The Armenians are the former inhabitants of today's Switzerland"

Evidently, there are a good several theories as to where Armenians originated. These include the Biblical Noah, Urartu, Thracian-Phyrigian, Southern Caucasus and Turanian Theories. Some say the Armenians are cousins of the Albanians. Do the details of these theories clearly tell us the Armenians originated in Anatolia, and do they tell us Armenians have lived there for three to four thousand years, as they claim? I have not studied these details, so I cannot say. I have read the Armenians could not have existed in Anatolia before roughly 560 B.C.; since human history goes back thousands of years before that time, and since Anatolia is a particularly rich historic region, I would presume there were others living in Anatolia before the Armenians showed their faces.

It's also known that Russia had a vested interest in populating lands conquered from the Ottomans with Christians, who were thought to be more loyal than Muslims. (That's why five million Turks/Muslims were expelled from their lands in the century up to and including W.W.I, and another five-and-one-half-million were killed; "Death and Exile," Prof. Justin McCarthy.) The Armenians were scattered all about, and the Russians were deciding where to place them. Here is what Russian diplomat and playwright Aleksandr Sergeyevich Griboyedov, who organized the transmigration of Armenians from Iran, as Russian minister to Iran in the early 19th century; wrote in a letter to the Czar:

"Majesty, I would like to ask you not to allow the location of Armenians in the central Russian regions. Because they are such filthy and shameless clans, they would soon shout throughout the world and claim those lands as their 'ancient motherland'."

 

4) Do Armenian activists put these ideas forward only to support the claims that the Turks drove them out of their homeland?

Do elephants poop a little more than microscopically in the jungle?