By Erkan Esmer, Ph.D., Prof. Engineer
Armenians prospered greatly under the protection of Ottoman Turks. They were dubbed as the “Loyal Tribe” by the Ottoman Sultans. The Ottomans were late in accepting the Industrial Revolution. They preferred to stay as soldiers, farmers, and bureaucrats as was fashionable at the feudal era. They left the services, trade, banking, and industrial production to their Christian subjects (Greeks and armenians) who were a small segment of the population in Anatolia (Asia Minor). This made them very wealthy and powerful. Russian General Maievski’s 1890 map is presented in Figure 1 in the ensuing page, clearly shows that they were a small minority. Of course, the Russians naturally would inflate the Greek and armenian populations within the empire, because they had invented the so called “Eastern Problem”. They under the pretext of protection of Christian Ottoman citizens, vied for conquest of Ottoman lands.
When Russians attacked the Ottomans in 1877, they along with concurrence of European powers established Principality of Bulgaria. They advised the armenians that they could establish their own country in Eastern Anatolia. I doubt that they would ever allow them to have their own country. They had no intensions to do so, but wanted to use the armenians. Czarist Russia along with the help of American missionaries armed the armenians all over Anatolia. These terrorist forces were stationed all over the Turkish mainland. {Fig. 2-15} These above mentioned facts are confirmed by August 23, 1895 New York Times article. They were united under the command of armenian terrorist groups Dashnaks and Hunchaks. The armenians’ barbaric atrocities and heinous crimes upon the Moslems were unspeakable. {Fig. 16-29} These massacres naturally angered the authorities and Moslem population who defended themselves. They knew that this would bring the wrath of European powers (super powers of the era), because Europeans wanted to dismember the Ottoman Empire for its fertile land, valuable mineral and oil resources (Iraq, Saudi Oil Fields). They finally achieved this goal at the end of World War I.
During World War I, all of Turkish and Moslem young men were not home, but were fighting for their homeland in many different fronts. Only Women, children, and old Men lived in Ottoman Anatolian provinces, then. All of them were unarmed!!! Many of the armenians who were inducted into Ottoman forces, ran away with their weapons. The armenian cowards butchered these unarmed civilians. They acted as scouts/vanguards for the Russian forces. They ambushed Ottoman forces, cut down the telegraph lines, which caused a lot of havoc at the time. The Ottoman government had to relocate them from the war zone to provinces where there were no fighting with the means available to them at the time. {Fig. 30-33}. Many armenians migrated to other countries such as USA, France, and England, enhancing their lives tremendously. Since this barbaric tribe of armenians left the corpses of Moslems rot in open air, since they drowned them in wells, or threw the corpses in creeks or rivers, this caused a severe cholera epidemic which took many lives, including their own. Even though armenians and Russians massacred about 2,500,000 Moslems, where as, armenian losses were between 36,000 and 125,000, this is the so-called “ARMENIAN GENOCIDE”.
“Photographs are from Turkish Armed Forces archives or my own post card collection”
