I find it important to mirror this work here to help truth-seekers gain one more access the information which is denied them by aggressive Armenian falsifiers, their usually anti-Turkish sympathizers, and other thinly veiled Turk-haters. Hate-based-propaganda and intimidation should not be allowed to replace honest scholarship and reasoned debate. Nothing less than the freedom of speech of those who hold contra-genocide views are at stake. Tools most used to advance censorship of contra-genocide views are hearsay, forgeries, harassment, political resolutions, and concepts like “editorial freedom” and “consensus”, among others—please note that “The Wild West” town papers and lynch mobs of 19th Century had the last two concepts down path and hung anyone who was deemed worthy of hanging.) The key to resolving this controversy, therefore, is more knowledge as in more honest research, more truthful education, and more freedom to debate… not less.
Those scholars who take Armenian claims at face value today urgently need to ponder these simple questions, as honestly as they possible can:
1) HOW CAN ONE STUDY A REGION’S OR A COUNTRY’S HISTORY WITHOUT RESEARCHING THAT REGION’S/COUNTRY’S ARCHIVES?
Can one study Europe’s history, for instance, without using European archives?
Or America’s history without researching American records?
Or Russia’s past without using Russian documents?
Or Ottoman Empire’s past without using Ottoman archives?
Why were the Ottoman archives almost never used in most current Armenian arguments and claims?
Are language barriers, bureaucratic hurdles, cost, or other reasons convincing enough excuses in scholarly studies that span a over decades or even centuries?
Or is it instant gratification that these, so-called, genocide scholars who insist on ignoring Turkish archives really seek, not really the whole truth?
2) HOW CAN ONE UNDERSTAND A CONTROVERSY IF ONE CONFINES ONE’S VIEWS TO ONLY ONE SIDE?
Can you argue that only one side of say, the abortion issue, is absolutely correct, flawless, settled, and worthy of knowing, and that the other side should be totally ignored and even censored?
How about gun control? Can you say one side is it; the other side to be dismissed, ignored, and/or censored?
Or immigration?
Taxes?
Iraq War?
Gay rights?
Or many other such controversial issues?
Can one be restricted, or asked/forced to be confined, in education or research, to only one side of the debate and categorically dismiss forever the other side(s) ?
Can this discrimination and censorship ever be built into a state’s public education policy, as it is shamefully attempted by the Armenian falsifiers and Turk-haters in Massachusetts and California, vis-a-vis the 1915 Turkish-Armenian conflict ?
Is the freedom of speech (of Turkish-Americans,), enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, a disposable right or a privilege, that can be trample upon by the Armenian lobby and their racist and dishonest politician friends like Schiff, Radanovich, Menendez, et. al.? (Racist because they only recognize Armenian dead, but ignore Turkish dead , and dishonest because they dismiss the six T’s of the 1915 conflict.)
If I, as an individual with contra-genocide views, am slandered, intimidated, harassed, and even threatened for my views by some “opinion thugs” and often censored by “consensus mobs” and “hate-editors”, then is this not a blatant attack on and destruction of my constitutional right to freedom of speech?
Does consensus mean correct? (After all, lynch mobs always had a pretty good consensus, too.)
Does might make right?
3) WHY DO THOSE GENOCIDE SCHOLARS SELECTIVELY REACT TO HUMAN TRAGEDY?
Why do those genocide scholars— most if not all paid by the Armenian lobby and related institutions directly or indirectly— who love to get on their high horses and preach perfect morals to others, fail to scream murder in the face of that terrible human tragedy in Azerbaijan that victimized a million Azeri women and children in Karabagh and western Azerbaijan?
Is it because the perpetrator of this inhumanity is Armenia, their client state and the Armenian genocide industry, their paymasters?
4) If the study of genocide is designed to teach humans how to recognize, prevent, and fight back against new genocides, then why do these genocide scholars not take their client, Armenia and Armenians, to task about the genocide in Khodjaly on 19 February 1992? (Since a genocide verdict by a competent tribunal, required by the 1948 UN Convention, does not exist, yet, for consistency, I should call it man’s inhumanity to man and pogrom for now. The question is why did all the genocide study fail to stop Armenia from committing one between 1992-1994? Can you see the heart wrenching irony here?
***
Here then is what honest scholars (not genocide scholars) say about the fraudulent Armenian genocide:
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ELIZABETH-ANNE WHEAL
Elizabeth-Anne Wheal was a history scholar at Cambridge University.
Major Publications
* The Dictionary of the First World War, St. Martin’s Press, 1996
* The Dictionary of the Second World War, Pen and Sword, 2004
* The Green Book, London, Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 1991.
Relevant Publication
* Dictionary of the First World War,Pope, S. and Wheal, E. A. (2003). Barnsley; S. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Books
Source: Dictionary of the First World War,Pope, S. and Wheal, E. A. (2003). Barnsley; S. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Books.
“Armenian Massacres: Allied term describing the Turkish government’s wartime deportations of Armenians from their homelands in the northeast of the Ottoman Empire. Neutral estimates suggest that between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians were living in Turkey in 1914, with perhaps another million inside Russia. Unlike other large racial minorities within the Empire, including their traditional Kurd enemies, Ottoman Armenians had no officially recognized homeland, but most were scattered near the Russian Caucasian frontiers.
Despite these drawbacks a militant Armenian nationalist movement had blossomed since the turn of the century, armed and encouraged by the Russians, and several minor coups were repressed by the Young Turk government before 1914. Denied the right to a national congress in October 1914, moderate Armenian politicians fled to Bulgaria, but extreme nationalists crossed the border to form a rebel division with Russian equipment. It invaded in December and slaughtered an estimated 120,000 non-Armenians while the Turkish Army was preoccupied with mobilization and the Caucasian Front offensive towards Sarikamish.
The Turks began disarming Armenian civilians under Ottoman control after a force of 2,500 rebels took Van in April 1915 and proclaimed a provisional government. An Ottoman order in June required all civilian non-Muslims to take up support duties near the battlefronts, but exemptions spared Greeks and the Catholic Armenian business community in Constantinople, effectively restricting the order to Orthodox and Protestant Armenians, who were subject to a military enforcement operation until late 1916.
Deportees were often given only hours to prepare, and left without transport or protection on long journeys to infertile, ill-supplied resettlement regions. Many died from starvation or exposure; many more were killed en route by hostile tribesmen (usually Kurds), some of whom colluded with Ottoman officials in search of a ‘final solution’ to the Armenian question.
Released through Armenian contacts with the Western press, especially strong in the United States, news of the catastrophe prompted the Turkish regime – which never openly associated itself with excesses against Armenians – to blame general supply and transport shortages for an estimated 300,000 deaths. Allied propaganda claimed more than a million had died, but modern consensus puts the figure at around 600,000.
An uneasy peace was imposed on frontier Armenians by the occupying Russian Army from 1916, but rebel forces resumed control in late 1917, killing perhaps another 50,000 non-Armenians. Subsequent attempts to restore Turkish administration caused sporadic fighting in early 1918, until the Treaty of Batum (26 May 1918) between an exhausted Turkey and a new Armenian Republic brought a period of recovery. Thousands more civilians then died attempting long journeys back to their liberated homes.” P. 34
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BRIAN G. WILLIAMS
Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Central Asian History. University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Brian Glyn Williams is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and terrorism analyst at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C. He formerly lectured in Middle Eastern and Balkan History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and in Islamic Central Asian and Medieval Middle Eastern History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Major Publications
* The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation (2001)
* The Deportation and Ethnic Cleansing of the Crimean Tatars. In Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe: Edited by Steven Vardy and Hunt Tooley. NY; East European Monographs. 2003
* Turkey’s Al Qaeda Blowback, Terrorism Monitor, April 23, 2004 See a copy as . . . Appendix 9 . . . Turkey’s Al Qaeda Blowback, Terrorism Monitor . . .
Source: . . . [See Appendix 8] . . . Letter to the Toronto District School Board . . . , January 31, 2008
“Having published widely on the issue of genocide in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans, Caucasus and Middle East, I am also interested in learning how the Armenian genocide will be covered in your program. As someone who has spent considerable time probing the background, surrounding events, and results of this tragedy I find that this case of genocide has all too often been politicized by those who have their own nationalist agendas. I am, for example, dismayed when I encounter Turks who go against global opinion and shrilly argue that nothing happened to Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Such efforts to erase an internationally recognized slaughter of tens of thousands are as transparent as efforts by Serbs to reject their people’s well known slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. To deny the killing of the Armenians is to revise history and to fly in the face of global opinion.
I am equally dismayed when I encounter Armenians who provide a historically context-less version of history which overlooks the fact that their people were engaged in an armed uprising which aimed to ‘cleanse’ (i.e. slaughter) the Turks of eastern Anatolia from a planned ‘Greater Armenia.’ Such Armenian revisionists deliberately downplay their own people’s attacks on Turks which led to the Turkish authorities’ deadly over-reaction in 1915. Armenian nationalist historians also overlook the fact that the Ottoman Balkan provinces (the lands that would eventually become Serbia, Bosnia, Bulgaria and Romania) were ‘cleansed’ of their Turkish Muslim populations in the 19th century in a series of well-documented slaughters. This process–which was not labeled ‘ethnic cleansing’ until the Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s–cost tens of thousands of 19th century Ottoman Muslim their lives. Should your work overlook this crucial historical context it will come off as pro-Armenian propaganda and will have no historical balance.”
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GILLES VEINSTEIN
Professor, Turkish and Ottoman History, Collège de France.
Major Publications
* Government and Society in Ottoman, XVIe-XVIIIe centuries” (1994)
Related Publications
* Trois questions sur un massacre” (1994) L’Histoire, n°187, April 1995 (Three Questions about a Massacre, translated from the original French)
Source: Veinstein, L’Histoire, n°187, April 1995
“On June 1, 1915, the Ottoman government ordered the transfer of the Armenians of central and eastern Anatolia towards Syria, still a possession of the Ottomans at that time. It was during these transfer operations that an immense number of Armenians perished. This tragedy was the result of a multiplicity of events which proceeded in various places in 1915 and 1916, and in which the horror took very diverse forms. ”
“Suffering, malnutrition, poor hygiene, and epidemics caused a large part of the deaths (3), but it is necessary also to take account of massacres, which were crimes against humanity. These happened because of inter-communal settlements of accounts, and in these not only Turks, but also Kurds, were involved. The convoys were attacked and plundered, and some of the soldiers supposed to be supervising the operation were caught up in this. Besides, it is undeniable, in certain cases at least, that the crimes were perpetrated with the open or tacit co-operation of local authorities.”
“The reality of the massacres, and even their extent, are not questioned by anybody, including commentators in Turkey. The American demographer Justin McCarthy, for example, estimates that the whole of the Armenians of Anatolia did not exceed a million and a half people on the eve of the world-wide conflict, and that, taking into account the figure for survivors, approximately 600,000 Armenians perished in Anatolia in 1915; that is to say, about half of the community (4).”
“Secondly, there were also very many victims among the Moslems throughout the war, because of combat but also of actions conducted against them by Armenians, in a context of ethnic and national rivalry (5). If there are forgotten victims, it is they, and the Turks of today have the right to denounce the partiality of the Western opinion in this respect. Were they forgotten about because they were only Moslems?”
“It is true that official involvement is a precondition for us to apply to the Armenian tragedy the term, ‘genocide’, as used in 1944 and defined in the Nuremberg Trials and the U.N. convention of 1948. But we must admit that we do not so far have proof that the government was involved in this way. The documents produced by the Armenians, in which Talat Pasha, Minister of the Interior, and other official top Ottomans explicitly order the slaughter of men, women, and Armenian children, designated as the “Andonian documents,” after the name of their editor, were absolute forgeries, as historical research has shown (6).”
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MALCOLM YAPP
Professor Emeritus of the Modern History of Western Asia, University of London.
Malcolm Yapp is (1995) a professor Emeritus of the modern history of Western Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London.
Major Publications
* The making of the modern Near East, 1792-1923 (London; New York: Longman, 1987)
* The Near East since the First World War: a history to 1995 (London; New York: Longman, 1996)
* Political Identity in South Asia – edited by David Taylor and Malcolm Yapp (London: Curzon Press; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979, c1978)
* Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan, 1798-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
* War, Technology and Society in the Middle East – edited by V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp (London; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)
Relevant Publications
* The making of the modern Near East, 1792-1923 (London; New York: Longman, 1987)
* Review article: The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus by Vahakn N. Dadrian, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 395-397
Source: The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus by Vahakn N. Dadrian, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 395-397
“The question is: has Dadrian produced sufficient new evidence to turn the debate decisively in favour of the view that the massacres were planned by the Ottoman government with a view to the extinction of the Ottoman Armenians?
There was one major difference between eastern Asia Minor and most of the Balkans; in eastern Asia Minor the Armenians were a minority in a Muslim majority region. Moreover among the Armenians only a small minority wished for independence; it’s a weakness of this book that there is no adequate analysis of the very varied Armenian population of the Empire.
Considering the indiscriminate terrorism of the Hunchaks in Van in 1896 and the Dashnak raid on the Ottoman Bank in the same year he reframes his comments: “One may assume that the nature of revolutionary idealism is such that it creates its own norms and that in this sense terror is a means of making a statement for which other channels are long denied”
“It is not quite the sort of statement one expects from a writer so insistent on obedience to international law.
Although Dadrian produces many reports tending to suggest that members of the Ottoman government wanted to destroy the Armenian, he fails to find any document which constitutes a definite order for massacre.
Despite the numerous documents cited and the careful assembly of information about individuals and organizations, there is no decisive evidence to support Dadrian’s case.
The author’s approach is not that of an historian trying to find out what happened and why but of a lawyer assembling the case for the prosecution in an adversarial system. What he wants are admissions of guilt from the defendants, first Germany as the easier target and then Turkey . What is missing is any adequate recognition of the circumstances in which these events took place; the surge of Armenian nationalism, the ambitions of Russia , the fears of the Ottomans and the panic and indiscipline of war. The 1915 massacres took place when the Ottomans were being driven back by the Russians (supported by many Armenians) in the east and were being threatened by the operations in the Dardanelles in the west. Dadrian is so obsessed by his theory of the long plan that he too often overlooks the elements of the contingent.
To question whether Dadrian has made out his case and to suggest that he has given insufficient weight to the share of responsibility to be attributed to Armenian terrorists and to the flow of historical events is not, of course, to deny that Ottoman Armenians were murdered on a vast scale. It is indeed the dimensions of that tragedy which have led many to feel that the massacres must have been planned by government. But the scale of the horrors doesn’t necessarily point to genocide. Some mass murders of the twentieth century have indeed been the result of deliberate government action; some have been the result of panic, indifference, ignorance or a combination of circumstances. To which category the Armenian massacres belong is still unknown.” Pp. 395-397
Source: Yapp, M. E. (1987). The Making of the Modern Near East 1792–1923. New York: Longman.
During the Russo-Turkish War Armenian volunteers had fought with Russian troops and hopes of an independent Armenian state in eastern Asia Minor had been raised and disappointed. Hitherto the Armenians had been seen as a loyal Ottoman community. Henceforth they were regarded with suspicion by the Ottoman authorities and with a mixture of fear and hope by others. P.81
Nevertheless, Muslim Arab nationalism was a new phenomenon which complicated the Eastern Question, while Armenian nationalism, in itself a Christian movement of a familiar type, was nevertheless novel in that it had not appeared before 1878 and that it was a Christian movement in the Asian territories of the Ottoman empire, comparable in that respect to Maronite nationalism in the Lebanon, although distinguished from it by several features. Armenian nationalism was essentially a product of the work of Armenian radicals in the Russian empire and was imported into the Ottoman empire, notably during the 1877-8 Russo-Turkish War when bands of Armenians fought for Russia. Thereafter, Armenians were suspect in Ottoman eyes and as nationalist propaganda increased so the Ottomans responded with repression leading to the massacres of 1894-6 which shocked Europe and brought more pressure for reform in the Ottoman territories. P.87
The Armenians also looked to Russian support and many committed themselves to Russia during the invasion of 1828-9 so that when the Russian Armies retired some Armenian peasants from the Erzerum region accompanied them. The Russian successes, as indicated in Chapter 2, had a powerful effect in rousing Armenian expectations and in promoting Muslim hatred towards Christians in the region. The forces released were a significant factor in establishing the base for the greater unrest which overtook the region after 1878. By that time the scene was set for a major confrontation between Kurds and Armenians, a clash similar in kind but far greater in scope than the conflict in Lebanon between Druze and Maronite. P.127
The Armenian population was spread throughout Anatolia, as well as including a substantial part of the inhabitants of Istanbul. In every town there was an Armenian element and there were also areas where Armenians were settled in large numbers as cultivators. One such area was Cilicia in western Anatolia, but the largest single concentration was in the six eastern provinces of Erzerum, Van, Bitlis, Kharput, Diyarbakr and Sivas. Of the total Armenian population of Anatolia of about 1.5 million in 1914 rather more than 860,000 or about 58 percent, lived in the east. In none of the six provinces, however, did Armenians constitute a majority. P.197
To some extent Armenian nationalism was simply reactive. Paul Cambon, the French foreign minister, once commented that “the Armenians were told for so long that they were plotting that they finally plotted; they were told for so long that Armenia didn’t exist that they finally believed in its existence”. Apart from the suspicions of the Ottoman authorities the Armenians were subjected to attacks by Kurds. In the later nineteenth century the story of massacres unfolded; in 1877-8 massacres accompanied the Russian invasion; in 1890 there was the Erzerum affair; in 1894 that of Sasun in the south where Armenians worked as sharecroppers on Kurdish land. In 1895-6 major massacres took place and following the attempt by Armenian revolutionaries on the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul on 26 August 1896 there were massacres of Armenians in Istanbul. In April 1909 there was a massacre of Armenians in Adana in obscure circumstances but in some way linked with the anti-CUP coup in Istanbul in the same month. The Adana massacre may have destroyed Armenian hopes temporarily elevated by the 1908 revolution. P.199
The war and the call for a jihad undoubtedly led to an increased sense of Muslim solidarity and an antipathy to Christians who were believed to support the Entente. The Greeks, concentrated in Izmir, and protected by Rahmi Bey, escaped the worst effects of this animosity, but the Armenian population experienced the full force of Muslim resentment and suspicion caused by the disasters in eastern Asia Minor at the beginning of the war and the calls by Russian Armenians for Ottoman Armenians to join them in a struggle for freedom. Armenians were deported en masse from the eastern provinces and many (probably between a quarter and a half million) died, either from starvation and hardship or from massacre mainly at the hands of Kurdish tribesmen. No direct documentary evidence has ever come to light to show that the Armenian massacres of 1915 were the deliberate policy of the Ottoman government but local officials connived at the murders and took few steps to protect the Armenians. Possibly there was little the Istanbul government could have done to control events, but it is also possible that it believed that the Armenian presence in the eastern provinces was a constant threat to the integrity of the empire and was not sorry to see it removed. Pp.269-270
***
THIERRY ZARCONE
Director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research, Paris; expert of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE). Former visiting professor at Kyoto University (2005-2006).
Major Publications
* Mystiques, philosophes et francs-maçons en Islam, Paris, Maisonneuve, 1993.
* Secret et sociétés secrètes en Islam, Paris, L’Arche, 2003.
* La Turquie moderne et l’islam, Paris, Flammarion, 2004.
* La Turquie. De l’Empire Ottoman à la République d’Atatürk, Paris, Gallimard, 2005.
Relevant Publication
* La Turquie. De l’Empire Ottoman à la République d’Atatürk, Paris, Gallimard, 2005
Source: La Turquie. De l’Empire Ottoman à la République d’Atatürk, Paris, Gallimard, 2005
“The most dramatic episode of these years is the forced displacement of the Armenian population, from Eastern Anatolia to Mesopotamia, a decision of the triumvirate, to crush the Armenian support to the Russian invasion, and suppress the guerilla operations of the Armenian gangs on the Turkish territory. […] After the capture of Erzurum by the Russians in 1916, the Armenian militias commit massacres against the Muslim populations.” Pp. 42-43.
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ROBERT F. ZEIDNER
Ph.D. in Ottoman Military history. Universiy of Utah, Middle East Center.
Major Publications
* Kurdish Nationalism and the New Iraqi Government”, Middle Eastern Affairs, X, 1959, pp. 24-31.
* Britain and the Launching of Armenian Question”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, VII, 1976, pp. 465-483.
* Allies and Turkish Intelligence Activities during the War of Independence”, in International Symposium on Atatürk (Ankara, 21-23 September 1987). Proceedings, Ankara, TTK, 1994, pp. 673-685.
* Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s Cooperation with Non-Turkish Muslim Nationalists during the Turkish War of Independence”, in Proceedigs of the International Symposium (Ankara, 10-12 November 1988) Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Atatürk’s Immortality, Ankara, ODTÜ Basim Işliği, 1991, pp. 53-64.
* The Tricolor over the Taurus, New York, Peter Lang, 1996; second edition, Ankara, Turkish Historical Society, 2005.
Source: The Tricolor over the Taurus, Ankara, Turkish Historical Society, 2005
“Thus, the massacres of Armenians throughout the Ottoman Empire, during the years 1894-1896, 1909 and 1915-1916, had deep social and political roots quite apart from the alleged savagery of Turks and Kurds long decried by Armenian apologists and Western missionaries and relief workers. It is most unfortunate for unbiased researchers of the Armenian Question that the great bulk of vast literature available in this filed comes from pens of such authors, almost all of it bent on an ethnocentric course to demonstrate the supposed superiority of Christian Armenian culture of the ‘unspeakable’ Muslim Turk. Most of these writers pursue this scholastic aberration with much breast beating for the questionable innocence of Ottoman Armenians in the matter of disloyalty to the Ottoman state throughout the Russo-Turkish conflicts of 1877-78 and 1914-17, rather than address the issued as a clash of nationalistic movements.
Worse yet, Armenian scholars have consistently dwelled on Turkish massacres of their compatriots in all their grisly details without so much as a word on the equally savage measures taken by the Armenians of the Transaucasus and eastern Anatolia against local Turkic populace from 1905 to 1920. Indeed, when questioned on such episodes, they even dismiss them as Turkish propaganda. Yet the evidence for accepting this fact is overwhelming. This not to excuse the massacre of Armenians as mere quid pro quo but to point up such violence as an evil endemic to Middle Eastern society in general. The long, lurid chain of massacres throughout the Levant since World War I, illustrates the point, not to mention the ‘ethnic cleansing’ now in progress in the Balkans and Transcaucasia.
More significant perhaps is the considerable body of evidence which indicates that Armenian revolutionists deliberately fomented massacres of their compatriots in Turkey for the purposes of turning them all against the Porte and of invoking intervention by the great powers. On the other hand, it was thaks to prompt action by local Turkish authorities, so oftend maligned for incompetence, corruption and faith by Western travelers and diplomats, that Cilicia proper and Elazig-Harput were spared from slaughter during the massacres of 1894-1896. During the episode of April 1909, Mersin and areas outside Cilicia proper were similarly spared, with the one notable exception of Latakia on the northern Syrian coast.” Pp. 43-45
“This is not to deny, however, that a very substantial portion of Ottoman Armenians, most of them probably innocent victims of the acts of few thousand revolutionaries, perished as a result of the deportations. On the other hand, the figure of 1,500,000 deaths, so often cited by Armenian apologists, appears grossly exaggerated in the light of Ottoman census data and the numbers of survivors recorded in many sources.” P.48
“For the French in Cilicia, the first item of business in restoring order obviously lay in bringing the Armenian Legion to heel. Having quickly suppressed the insurrection of the Fourth [Armenian] Battalion at Iskenderun, French officers moved promptly to drum all habitual miscreants out of their service. They completely disbanded the particularly unruly Fourth Battalion, distributing several hundred men not implicated in the mutiny of Frebruary [1919] among the three remaining battalions. The latter, in turn, were deployed in major towns along the railway, such as Mersin, Tarsus, and Adana, where they could be held in check by larger British formations. Meanwhile, 400 legionnaires of doubtful reputation were formed into an unarmed labor company and packed off to Port Said under close guard by Algerian colonial infantry. This marked the end of mass terrorism by the [Armenian] legion in Cilicia until British forces departed in the fall of 1919.” Pp.82-83
“Indeed, an extraordinary campaign of violence by Armenian individuals and small groups against Turks of all classes developed with steadily increasing fury throughout the region during the summer of 1919.” P.105
Source: www.tc-america.org
*** .
APPENDIX 1
© Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Approved and proposed for signature and ratification or accession by General Assembly resolution 260 A (III) of 9 December 1948 entry into force 12 January 1951, in accordance with article XIII
Status of ratifications, reservations and declarations
The Contracting Parties,
Having considered the declaration made by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution 96 (I) dated 11 December 1946 that genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world,
Recognizing that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity, and
Being convinced that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required,
Hereby agree as hereinafter provided:
Article 1
The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Article 2
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Article 3
The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d ) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Article 4
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
Article 5
The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.
Article 6
Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.
Article 7
Genocide and the other acts enumerated in article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purpose of extradition.
The Contracting Parties pledge themselves in such cases to grant extradition in accordance with their laws and treaties in force.
Article 8
Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.
Article 9
Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfilment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.
Article 10
The present Convention, of which the Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish texts are equally authentic, shall bear the date of 9 December 1948.
Article 11
The present Convention shall be open until 31 December 1949 for signature on behalf of any Member of the United Nations and of any nonmember State to which an invitation to sign has been addressed by the General Assembly.
The present Convention shall be ratified, and the instruments of ratification shall be deposited with the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
After 1 January 1950, the present Convention may be acceded to on behalf of any Member of the United Nations and of any non-member State which has received an invitation as aforesaid. Instruments of accession shall be deposited with the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Article 12
Any Contracting Party may at any time, by notification addressed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, extend the application of the present Convention to all or any of the territories for the conduct of whose foreign relations that Contracting Party is responsible.
Article 13
On the day when the first twenty instruments of ratification or accession have been deposited, the Secretary-General shall draw up a process-verbal and transmit a copy thereof to each Member of the United Nations and to each of the non-member States contemplated in article 11.
The present Convention shall come into force on the ninetieth day following the date of deposit of the twentieth instrument of ratification or accession.
Any ratification or accession effected, subsequent to the latter date shall become effective on the ninetieth day following the deposit of the instrument of ratification or accession.
Article 14
The present Convention shall remain in effect for a period of ten years as from the date of its coming into force.
It shall thereafter remain in force for successive periods of five years for such Contracting Parties as have not denounced it at least six months before the expiration of the current period.
Denunciation shall be effected by a written notification addressed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Article 15
If, as a result of denunciations, the number of Parties to the present Convention should become less than sixteen, the Convention shall cease to be in force as from the date on which the last of these denunciations shall become effective.
Article 16
A request for the revision of the present Convention may be made at any time by any Contracting Party by means of a notification in writing addressed to the Secretary-General.
The General Assembly shall decide upon the steps, if any, to be taken in respect of such request.
Article 17
The Secretary-General of the United Nations shall notify all Members of the United Nations and the non-member States contemplated in article XI of the following:
(a) Signatures, ratifications and accessions received in accordance with article 11;
(b) Notifications received in accordance with article 12;
(c) The date upon which the present Convention comes into force in accordance with article 13;
(d) Denunciations received in accordance with article 14;
(e) The abrogation of the Convention in accordance with article 15;
(f) Notifications received in accordance with article 16.
Article 18
The original of the present Convention shall be deposited in the archives of the United Nations.
A certified copy of the Convention shall be transmitted to each Member of the United Nations and to each of the non-member States contemplated in article XI.
Article 19
The present Convention shall be registered by the Secretary-General of the United Nations on the date of its coming into force.
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APPENDIX 2
Armenian * Revolt
MANIFESTO
Fellow Armenians,
Today the Armenian cause is entering a new era. For centuries, Western Armenia has been enserfed and demanding freedom.
It was only yesterday that the Armenian begged with his head bowed for assistance from the western world. Today he is convinced that placing his hope on others is in vain, and he has vowed to protect his rights, his being, his honor and his family with his very own hands.
The Armenian people have for centuries lived under Turkish oppression. They have planted and tended for centuries, only to see the fruits of their labor ravished by their tyrant rulers. Throughout the centuries they have ruined Armenian sanctities, but the Armenian people have bared it all, bared it with patience, and have continued to flood their soil with their sweat… It was as if the Armenian people were willing to show the world that it is possible to bring about freedom through civilized means. Modern Europe promised to put an end to Turkish plunders in Armenia. However, year passed after year, and the situation of Armenians in Armenia not only did not improve, but also intensified and has since become so hellish and unbearable, that even this remarkably patient race is unable to continue its existence.
Patience has its limits however. The intolerable abuses finally awakened Armenians; today, they have vowed either to die or to be free. And as Erzurum and Constantinople stand boldly in complaint, Armenians no longer beg, but demand and demand with arms in hand… Today Europe sees in front of it a complete people, a complete race, which has begun to protect its human rights.
This race now understands that its power lies within itself. Yesterday’s helpless and patient Armenian is today a revolutionary.
The forbearer of this revolutionary ideology is the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, who hereby invites all Armenians to unite under a common flag. Although the Armenian Revolutionary Federation is newly becoming an organizational entity, its roots are old and experienced through the organizations, which merged in its creation. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation is going to work on uniting all forces, bringing together their centers. By setting as its goal the political and economic freedom of Western Armenia, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation has involved itself in the struggle initiated by the people themselves against the Turkish regime, vowing to fight until the very last drop of blood in the name of freedom. Let us all unite with the people, who have raised the flag of freedom. He who does not follow and turns away from the people is an enemy of the people. And in particular you, the youth, defenders of ideology always and everywhere, may you unite with your people.
And you, the elderly, may you support and inspire the youth with your wisdom and experience.
And you, the wealthy, may you open up your riches and support those who confront the enemy with an open chest.
And you, the Armenian woman, may you breed inspiration into this holy cause.
And you, the clergy, may you bless the soldier who fights for freedom.
There is no time to wait.
Let us unite, O’ Armenians and let us bravely advance the holy cause of achieving freedom.
“FEDERATION OF ARMENIAN REVOLUTIONARIES”