The Ottoman Empire Governed the Region in
Question During All Relevant Periods. Thus, Armenian
American Accusations Against the Republic of Turkey
Cannot Hold.

 Armenian American accusations denounce the "Turkish" Ottoman Empire or, simply, "Turkey" or "The Turks." These words are misleading. At the time of the events referred to by Armenian Americans, the Ottoman Empire was in power. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923 in response to, and in revolt against, the Ottoman Empire and thus bears no responsibility for the suffering caused by its predecessor. To ascribe blame in such a manner would violate long-held traditions of American fairness. Moreover, the Ottoman Empire incorporated lands and peoples which today account for more than 30 distinct countries in Southeastern Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East, only one of which is the Republic of Turkey.

• While the Sufferings of Armenians Ought Not to be Minimized, They Must Not be Viewed Separate From the Misery Experienced by the Muslim Inhabitants of the Region.

 

We now know from reliable statistics that slightly less than 600,000 Anatolian Armenians died in the during the war period of 1912-22. By no means is 600,000 a small number. The Armenians suffered a terrible mortality. But when considering the numbers of dead Armenians, one must also consider the number of dead Muslims. The statistics tell us that more than 2.5 million Anatolian Muslims, among them ethnic Turks, Kurds, and Arabs died as well.

The numbers do not tell us the exact manner of death of the citizens of Anatolia, whether Armenian or Muslim. Intercommunal violence, forced migration of both Muslims and Armenians disease, and, starvation are listed in the documents of the time as causes of death. The Anatolian mortality was not simply deaths of soldiers in wartime, but deaths of men, women, and children, Armenian and Muslim alike, who were caught up in international war between Russians and Ottomans and intercommunal war between Armenians and Muslims.

We know from both documentary evidence and statistics tha intercommunal warfare between Christians and Muslims was a major cause of death. The province of Sivas, for example, was not in the war zone, having never been reached by the Russian army. Yet, 180,000 of the Muslims of Sivas died. The deaths of innocent Muslims by secessionist Armenians has been documented even by Armenian sources.

Nevertheless, Armenian Americans continue to ignore the deaths of non-Christians during World War I or by Armenian assassins more recently. They would have one believe that the sole victims of the horrendous deprivations and inhumanities brought about by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and World War I were Christian. Yet statistics of mortality show that Armenians suffered greatly, but not that they suffered alone. The statistics indicate that the years 1912-22 were a horrible time for humanity, not simply for Armenians.

 Armenian Americans purport that the wartime propaganda of the enemies of the Ottoman Empire constitutes objective evidence; to the contrary, as stated by historian David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (Avon Press, 1989): "Russian and French official accounts of what they were doing in the Middle East at that time were, not unnaturally, works of propaganda; British official accounts — and even the later memoirs of the officials concerned — were untruthful too. British officials who played a major role in the making of these decisions provided a version of events that was, at best, edited and, at worst, fictitious."

American sources from the period are likewise tainted. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who is frequently quoted by Armenian Americans, visited the Ottoman Empire with political, not humanitarian aims. His correspondence with President Wilson reveals his intent was to uncover or manufacture news which would goad the U.S. into joining the war. Given that motive, Henry Morgenthau sought to vilify the Ottoman Empire, an enemy of the Triple Entente. Moreover, Henry Morgenthau's research and reporting relied in large part on Armenians; his primary aide, translator and confidant in Istanbul and Anatolia was an Armenian, Arshag Schmavonian, his secretary was also an Armenian, Hagop Andonian. Morgenthau openly professed that the Turks were an inferior race and had "inferior blood." That an objective account did not emerge is not surprising.

General James G. Harbord, head of the U.S. Government's investigative Commission sent to Anatolia in the Fall of 1919, also is cited frequently by Armenian American sources. Yet his deliberate suppression of evidence showing Armenian crimes and atrocities against Muslims, as documented in the U.S. Archives, are carefully omitted by Armenian Americans.

• Though Tragic, The Armenian Deaths Do Not Constitute Genocide.

The totality of evidence thus far uncovered by historians tells a grim story of serious inter-communal conflict, perpetrated by both Christian and Muslim irregular forces, complicated by disease, famine, and many other of war's privations. The evidence does not, however, describe a genocide. Armenian Americans ignore the dire circumstances that precipitated the enactment of a measure as drastic as the mass relocation which resulted in the majority of Armenian civilian deaths.

  B. Evidence and Logic Controvert the Allegation of even Genocide.

1. Armenian Americans cannot boast about how their ancestors committed mass treason to fight alongside the Russians against the Ottoman government and simultaneously claim to be innocent victims of a relocation policy which went awry. No logic can reconcile these two positions which Armenian Americans openly promote. Eminent historian Bernard Lewis, speaking to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, recently expanded on this notion: "The Armenians want to benefit from both worlds. On the one hand, they speak with pride of their struggle against Ottoman despotism, while on the other hand, they compare their tragedy to the Jewish Holocaust. I do not accept this. I do not say that the Armenians did not suffer terribly. But I find enough cause for me to contain their attempts to use the Armenian massacres to diminish the worth of the Jewish Holocaust and to relate to it instead as an ethnic dispute."

2. None of the relocation orders, whether public or secret, which have been reviewed by historians to date, orders murder. Instead, they order Ottoman officials to protect relocated Armenians.

3. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians survived the relocation.

4. It was in the regions where Ottoman control was weakest that columns of Armenian relocatees suffered most.

The stories of the time give many examples of columns of hundreds of Armenians guarded by perhaps two government guards. When the columns were attacked by Kurdish tribesmen or bandits, Armenians were robbed and killed. It must be remembered that these tribes were those who had themselves which suffered greatly at the hands of Armenians and Russians.

5. Only the Muslim actions against Armenians have been called genocide. This accusation is primarily based on counting only the Armenian dead, not the Muslim dead.

While Ottoman weakness should be condemned, so should the corresponding weakness of the Russians and the Armenians themselves. They failed to protect the Turks and Kurds who fell under their control. For example, in provinces such as Van, where intercommunal fighting was fiercest, Muslims who could not escape from Armenian bands were killed. The Ottoman central government had ordered the Van governor to send gendarmes, rural policemen, to guard columns of Armenian deportees. He responded that because most of his forces were at the front fighting the Russian Army and its Armenian irregulars, he was left with only 40 gendarmes at his disposal and they were protecting Muslim villages against Armenian attacks.

The Russians expelled from the Caucasus more than 1.3 million Muslims from 1827 to 1878. During World War I. virtually the entire Muslim population of southeast and far eastern Anatolia either became refugees or died. Like the relocation of Armenians, this too produced great mortality. Such should also be recorded when the evils of wartime relocations are examined.

6. Large Armenian populations, such as those of Istanbul and other major cities, remained throughout the war. These were areas where Ottoman power was greatest and genocide would have been easiest to carry out. To decide whether genocide was intended, it is instructive to compare this to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. The Jews of Berlin were killed, their synagogues defiled. The Armenians of Istanbul lived through the war, their churches open.

  Two Tribunals Addressed Numerous Charges Against Ottoman Officials. No Evidence of Crimes That Would Constitute Genocide Could Be Found.

A. Spurious Ottoman Courts, Established to Satisfy the Post-World War I Occupation Forces, Tried and Convicted Over One-Thousand Individuals for Various War Crimes.

The post-World War I Ottoman Government was an unelected government, completely dependent upon the victorious Allied Powers who then occupied the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. This government indeed attempted to try its political enemies. Ersatz courts were formed, bringing sweeping charges including, "outrages to Armenians." With almost no presentation of evidence, the courts found nearly every defendant guilty as charged. 1,376 individuals were sentenced to varying degrees of punishment for offenses ranging from violations of military order such as leaving a post without permission to failing to properly carry out the order under which the Ottoman Armenians of eastern Anatolia were relocated. No charges of crimes against humanity were raised or sustained. According to trial transcripts, the convictions were mainly political retribution, aimed at those who brought the Ottoman Empire into such a disastrous war. Sixty-two officials were sentenced to death and executed. Six officials, members of the Union and Progress Party, were tried in absentia and four were sentenced to death. Because these courts were hardly impartial and provided little could be considered "due process," their convictions should hardly stand as proof of war crimes.

This does not mean that no Ottoman Muslims committed crimes against Ottoman Armenians or that no Ottoman Armenians committed crimes against Ottoman Muslims. But one must acknowledge that the Ottoman government brought to trial over 1,400 individuals for crimes against Armenians and executed some that were guilty of high crimes, while on the other hand, neither the Armenian state nor Armenian guerrilla groups ever charged or tried their criminals of the era whose ghastly deeds are well documented. The mere impanelment of such courts, despite their deficiencies, begs the question why a government intent on eliminating an ethnic group would prosecute, convict, and hang its own officials for harming members of that ethnic group.

 

(Holdwater, note: the numbers above are suspect. It's possible the author confused with the 1,397 Turks who were strictly tried for crimes against the Armenians during the war, according to K. Gurun's "The Armenian File." Similarly, the 62 executions need to be verified; I couldn't find reference to this number in Gurun's work. Peter Balakian claims in his "Burning Tigris" that only three were executed during the 1919 kangaroo courts, which seems an underestimation, since Damad Ferid Pasha's puppet administration was out for blood. During the war, at least twenty were executed for crimes against Armenians.)

B. Dissatisfied With the Questionable Standards of the Spurious Ottoman Post-War Courts, the British Convened the Malta Tribunals. No Evidence of Crimes That Would Genocide Could Be Found.

The Peace Treaty of Sevres, which was imposed upon the Ottoman Government, contained among its penalty clauses the requirement that the Ottoman government hand over to the Allied Powers those persons accused of "massacres," and to recognize the competence of Allied tribunals to try alleged Ottoman offenders. In this light, beginning, in May, 1919, the Sultan's figurehead government undertook to furnish to the Allies "all documents and information of every kind" which would be considered necessary to ensure the full knowledge of the alleged incriminating acts. Eventually, without serious investigation, 144 high Ottoman officials were arrested and deported for trial to the island of Malta. The principal sources of information about the accused relied upon by the British High Commission at Istanbul were local Armenians and the Armenian Patriarchate itself. Among the deportees were the Ottoman Grand Vizier, Speaker of Parliament, Chief of General Staff, State Ministers, Army Commanders, Sheik-ul-Islam, Deputies, Generals, Colonels, Governors, University Professors, Editors, and well-known Journalists. The British accused them of three categories of alleged offenses: (i) failure to comply with Armistice terms, (ii) ill-treatment of British prisoners of war, and (iii) outrages to Armenians in Turkey and Transcaucasia. Fifty-six of the deportees were eventually selected for prosecution.

While the deportees were interned on Malta, the British appointed an Armenian scholar, Mr. Haig Khazarian, to conduct a thorough examination of documentary evidence in the Ottoman, British, and United States Archives to substantiate the charges. There was no issue of access to the Ottoman records as the British and French occupied and controlled Istanbul at the time. Khazarian's corps of investigators revealed an utter lack of evidence demonstrating that Ottoman officials either sanctioned or encouraged the killings.

At the conclusion of the investigation, the British Procurator General determined that it was "improbable that the charges would be capable of proof in a court of law," exonerated and released all 144 detainees — after two years and four months of detention without trial. Thus, the charges were exhaustively probed, investigated, and studied with the Allies agreeing that the charges could not hold. No compensation was ever paid to the detainees.

C. Despite the Verdicts of the Spurious Ottoman Courts and the Findings of the Malta Tribunals, Armenian Terrorists Have Engaged in a Vigilante War Which Continues Today.

Talaat, Enver and Jemal, the alleged organizers of massacres of Armenians were among the six officials tried in absentia, primarily of political crimes, and sentenced to death. In 1921, a secret Armenian network, named Nemesis, took the law into its own hands and hunted down and assassinated Talaat Pasha and Jemal Pasha. Nemesis also murdered several other officials whom the tribunal did not convict, among them, Sait Halim, Bahaettin Shakir, and Jemal Azmi. Following in Nemesis' footsteps, during the 1970's and 1980's, the Armenian terrorist groups, ASALA and JCAG, committed over 200 armed attacks, killing 70 innocent people, including 31 Turkish diplomats, and seriously wounding over 520 people in a campaign of blood revenge in Western Europe, Turkey, and the United States. Most recently, Mourad Topalian, Chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America, was recently tried and convicted in federal court in Ohio of terrorist crimes associated with a bombing in New York City aimed at killing Turkish diplomats.

 Armenian Americans make frequent reference to the archives of many nations while carefully avoiding calls for the examination of those archives. They know that no evidence of an "Armenian Genocide" has been found to date, as was the case in the Malta Tribunals. They also know that the national archives of several nations speak only of the deaths of Armenians because the recorders were only interested in the Armenians, while intentionally omitting reports of Muslim deaths. Take, for example, the 1915 Armenian revolt in Van: Armenian rebels took the Ottoman city of Van and held it against their own government — the Ottoman government — until the Russians could arrive. Armenian bands slaughtered those Muslims, mostly Kurds, who could not escape and massacred thousands in a field outside the city. At least 60,000 perished. Though the evidence for this is overwhelming, the official archives of several countries mention only dead Christians. The omission of Muslim suffering in World War I archives is largely due to wartime propaganda, but religious prejudice was also a significant factor.

American historians have already combed through the relevant U.S. archives which are composed largely of the reports of American missionaries and diplomats connected with them which reflect extreme anti-Muslim bigotry. By no small coincidence, the U.S. archives are nearly devoid of materials documenting attacks against Muslims. Reacting to the bias he found in reports from eastern Anatolia, Admiral Mark L. Bristol, U.S. High Commissioner in Turkey from l920 to 1926, in a March 1921 letter to Dr. James L. Barton of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions stated, "I see that reports are being freely circulated in the United States that the Turks massacred thousands of Armenians in the Caucasus. Such reports are repeated so many times it makes my blood boil. The Near East Relief have the reports from Yarrow and our own American people which show that such Armenian reports are absolutely false."

Still, Armenian Americans carefully avoid calls for the collection and examination of all records regarding the Armenian condition in the early 20th century. Such would include Ottoman records describing the activities of Armenian rebels and the Russian invaders whom they supported, Persian records, Russian, Syrian records, and, most importantly, the unedited records of the Armenian Revolutionary Groups. Only those who fear the truth would limit the scope of the investigation and call that which has yet to be proven a genocide.

A. Armenian Americans Ignore Crucial Distinctions Between the Holocaust and the Armenian Experience

 

1. Jews did not demand the dismemberment of the nations in which they had lived.

By contrast, the Ottoman Armenians openly agitated for a separate state in lands in which they were numerically inferior. The Hunchak and Dashnak revolutionary organizations which survive to this day were formed expressly to agitate against the Ottoman Empire.

2. Jews did not kill their fellow citizens in the nations in which they had lived.

By contrast, the Ottoman Armenians committed massacres against local Muslims with whom they had lived peacefully prior to World War I.

3. Jews did not openly join the ranks of their countries' enemies during the course of World War II.

By contrast, during World War I, Ottoman Armenians openly and with pride committed mass treason, took up arms with Russians, traveled to Russia for training, and sported Russian uniforms. Others, non-uniformed irregulars, operated against the Ottoman government from behind the lines.

4. By solemn tribunal at Nuremberg the guilt of the perpetrators of the Holocaust was proven and sentences were carried out in accordance with agreed-upon procedures.

By contrast, the Malta Tribunals, which were convened by and composed of the World War I victors, exonerated those alleged to have been responsible for the maladministration of the relocation policies. Regardless, Armenian terrorists hunted down and assassinated several former Ottoman officials they believed to have been responsible, and successor groups continue to engage in anti-Turkish terrorism.

5. None of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were punished by the Germans during the war; to the contrary, those who carried out The Final Solution were commended by their leaders.

By contrast, the Ottoman government pursued, arrested, tried, and convicted numerous of its own officials and soldiers who had erred in carrying out the Armenian relocation orders.

6. Jews have never worked to persecute Armenians.

By contrast, Armenians actively joined the Nazi regime and aided Hitler in carrying out The Final Solution. Open Armenian-Nazi collaboration is evident in the activities of the 812th Armenian Battalion of [Nazi] Wehrmacht, commanded by Drastamar Kanayan (a.k.a. "Dro"), and its successor, the Armenian Legion. Anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi propaganda was published widely in the Armenian-language Hairenik daily and the weekly journal, Armenian.

Bibliography

 

The following texts provide a view of events quite different from that portrayed by Armenian Americans.

Armenian Atrocities and Terrorism ed. by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (Assembly of Turkish American Associations, Washington, DC 1997);

Death and Exile: the Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 by Justin McCarthy (Darwin Press, Princeton, NJ 1995);

Muslims and Minorities, The Population of the Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire by Justin McCarthy (New York University Press, New York, 1983).

Pursuing the Just Cause of Their People by Michael Gunter (Greenwood Press, New York 1986);

The Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence Exposed by Kamuran Gürun (K. Rustem & Bro. and Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., London 1985);

The Armenian Question 1914-1923 by Mim Kemal Oke (K. Rustem & Bro. London 1988);

The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story by Heath W. Lowry (Isis Press, Istanbul 1990);

The Talat Pasha Telegrams: Historical Fact or Armenian Fiction by Sinasi Orel and Sureyya Yuca (K. Rustem & Bro., London 1986);

The U.S. Congress and Adolf Hitler on the Armenians, by Heath W. Lowry (Vol. 3, no. 2, Political Communication and Persuasion, 1985); and

Proceedings of Symposium on Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey (1912-1926), Bogazici University Publications, Istanbul, 1984.

 

 

©2000 The Assembly of Turkish American Associations

Printed October 1, 2000, The Turkish Times