Rebuttal to ZAMAN article by Cengiz Aktar:

“DEEP DINKISTS” ARE DISTORTING HISTORY

TO MAKE GENOCIDE CHARGES STICK

Jewish holocaust is a court-proven fact; Armenian Genocide, a discredited political

claim. Holocaust is supported by a competent tribunal, Nuremberg; where is the

Armenians’ Nuremberg?

To call 1915 a genocide would be to equate much-discredited Armenian narrative

to factual Jewish experience. It would be an insult to the silent memory of six

million Jews who were killed just for being Jews. Whereas Armenians resorted to

terrorism (1862-1922, Nalbandian) revolts (1877-1920, McCarthy) and treason

(1914-1922, Pope) and caused 515,000 Turks and other Muslims to meet their

tragic ends at the hands of Armenian revolutionaries. Jews did not commit any of

those heinous acts in 1930s or 1940s. So how can any fair person treat the two

events similarly? The UN, the US, the UK, Australia, Israel, Sweden and many

other countries reject the use of the term genocide to describe the Turkish-

The landmark decision of the highest court in Europe, the European Court of

Human Rights (ECHR) dated Dec 17, 2013 on Perincek vs Switzerland also

supports this position. Convicting Switzerland for violating Turks’ rights to free

speech and expression, ECHR verdict was based on solid facts and reasoning.

ECHR correctly stated that “[t]he existence of a ‘genocide’, which was a precisely

defined legal concept, was not easy to prove… (ECHR) doubted that there could

be a general consensus… given that historical research was, by definition, open to

discussion and a matter of debate, without necessarily giving rise to final

conclusions or to the assertion of objective and absolute truths”.

Thus, the ECHR created a legal precedent of inadmissibility of any comparison

between the court-proven Jewish Holocaust and the discredited Armenian political

claims, as the latter lacks what the former clearly has: concrete historical facts,

clear legal basis, and existence of the “acts had been found by an international

court to be clearly established”.

If one needs further proof of the fallacy of the Armenian Genocide, one can simply

look at this photo at http://www.ethocide.com/ which refutes the entire Armenian

narrative. Do these people in the photo look like “poor, starving, unarmed, helpless

Armenians? Taken in 1906—nine years before 1915–it depicts cadets in full

uniform at an Armenian Military Academy in Bulgaria, arrogantly brandishing

their Russian-made MOSIN rifles. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation used

these weapons since 1893 in Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, and the Balkans,

murdering Muslim, mostly Turkish, civilians—including my grandparents and

exterminating the Turkish population of the village of KIRLIKOVA (hence my last

name.) My father, as a one-year-old baby, was the sole survivor under conditions

Let the historical facts speak for themselves:

1914 “…Armenian nationalist movement had blossomed since the turn of the

(20th) century, armed and encouraged by the Russian, 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 an slaughtered an estimated

120,000 non-Armenians while the TURKISH ARMY was preoccupied with

mobilization and the CAUCASIAN FRONT OFFENSIVE TOWARD

Source: The Macmillan Dictionary of The First World War, Stephen Pope &

Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, Macmillan Reference Books, London, 1997, ISBN 0 333

68909 7 (and 2003, ISBN 0 85052 979-4,) page 34.

1917 “…For fourteen days, I followed the Euphrates; it is completely out of the

question that I during this time would not have seen at least some of the Armenian

corpses, that according to Mrs. Stjernstedt’s statements, should have drifted along

the river en masse at that time. A travel companion of mine, Dr. Schacht, was also

travelling along the river. He also had nothing to tell when we later met in

Baghdad… …In summary, I think that Mrs. Stjernstedt, somewhat uncritically, has

accepted the hair-raising stories from more or less biased sources, which formed

the basis for her lecture…”

Source: H.J. Pravitz, A Swedish officer, Nya Dagligt Allehanda, 23 April, 1917

issue (A Swedish Newspaper published from 1859 to 1944)

1923 “…In some towns containing ten Armenian houses and thirty Turkish houses,

it was reported that 40,000 people were killed, about 10,000 women were taken to

the harem, and thousands of children left destitute; and the city university

destroyed, and the bishop killed. It is a well- known fact that even in the last war

the native Christians, despite the Turkish cautions, armed themselves and fought

on the side of the Allies. In these conflicts, they were not idle, but they were well

supplied with artillery, machine guns and inflicted heavy losses on their

Source: Lamsa, George M., a missionary well known for his research on

Christianity, The Secret of the Near East, The Ideal Press, Philadelphia 1923, p 133

1928 “…Few Americans who mourn, and justly, the miseries of the Armenians, are

aware that till the rise of nationalistic ambitions, beginning with the ‘seventies, the

Armenians were the favored portion of the population of Turkey, or that in the

Great War, they traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian invader; that

they boasted of having raised an Army of one hundred and fifty thousand men to

fight a civil war, and that they burned at least a hundred Turkish villages and

exterminated their population…”

Source: John Dewey, The New Republic, 12 November 1928

1976 “… The deafening drumbeat of the propaganda, and the sheer lack of

sophistication in argument which comes from preaching decade after decade to a

convinced and emotionally committed audience, are the major handicaps of

Armenian historiography of the (Armenian) diaspora today…”

Source: Dr. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based independent journalist, 1976

1988 “…In all the countries, under all the regimes, the staff of the armies in the

field evacuate towards the back, the populations which live in the zone of fights

and can bother the movement of the troops, especially if these populations are

hostile. Public opinion does not find anything to criticize to these measures,

obviously painful, but necessary. During winter of 1939-1940, the radical –

socialist French government evacuated and transported in the Southwest of

France, notably in the Dordogne, the entire population of the Alsatian villages

situated in the valley of the Rhine, to the east of the Maginot line. This German-

speaking population, and even sometimes germanophil, bothered the French army.

It stayed in the South, far from the evacuated homes and sometimes destroyed until

1945….And nobody, in France, cried out for inhumanity…”

Source: Georges de Maleville, lawyer and a specialist on the Armenian question,

La Tragédie Arménienne de 1915, (The Armenian tragedy of 1915), Editions F.

Sorlot-F. Lanore, Paris, 1988, p 61-63

2005 “…From 1911 to 1923, the Ottoman Empire and the people of Turkey

participated in five long, hard, and destructive wars. These were the Tripolitanian

War / Trablusgarb Harbi / Türk Italyan Harbı (1911-1912), the two Balkan Wars

(1912-1913), World War I (1914-1918), and the Turkish War of National

Liberation (1918-1923). To most Turkish people who lived through that era, these

wars were really only one, the Seferberlik, or period of mobilization, which went

on continuously throughout these years.

During these wars, the entire infrastructure of life in the Ottoman Empire

was destroyed. Fields were left barren and uncultivated; roads and railroad lines

were destroyed and their equipment wrecked; harbors and quays were blown up by

repeated bombing, and many of the people living nearby were killed; Istanbul and

the other great cities of the empire were partially destroyed by bombing,

bombarding and great fires. The entire nation, thus, was for all practical purposes

destroyed. One of the greatest miracles of Atatürk’s leadership during and after

the Turkish War of National Liberation was the manner in which he was able to

raise the Turkish people from this wreckage and lead them to revive and

reconstruct what became the Turkish Republic.

In the midst of all this destruction, no fewer than 30 percent, one third, of all

the people who lived in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the war died. In the war

zones, Macedonia and Thrace, western Anatolia, northeastern Turkey and

southeastern Turkey, that percentage was as high as sixty or even seventy percent,

much higher than any other country that was involved in these wars. No-one was

counting, so it is very difficult to give actual figures, but perhaps no fewer than

four million people died in the lands of the Ottoman Empire during these wars, and

these were people of all races and religions, all ethnic origins, they were Muslims,

Jews and Christians, they were Turks and Armenians, Arabs and Greeks, and

Source: From “The Ottoman Holocaust”; a lecture delivered by Stanford J.

Shaw (1930-2006, Professor of Modern Ottoman History, Bilkent University,

Ankara, Turkey; Professor of Turkish History, University of California, Los

Angeles,) to the First International Symposium on Armenian Claims and The

Reality of Azerbaijan, sponsored by the Atatürk Research Center, 5 May 2005,

Ankara, Turkey, 1990

What we need is honest research, reasoned debate, and civilized dialogue, not

name-calling, deceptions, and partisan monologues that lead to more polarization.

Ergun KIRLIKOVALI

 Son of Turkish survivors from both paternal and maternal sides of

atrocities committed by Armenian cadets and Balkan Ottoman-

Christians (www.ethocide.com )

 His father was the sole survivor, as a one-year-old baby, of the

massacres of October 1912

tellers/ and was cared for by the Bebek Orphanage in Istanbul

WAL_History_Forging_Turkish_Identity )

 His mother was one of the few survivors of her family subjected to

massacres in 1912, Skopje, who migrated to Anatolia and grew up in

 The untold story of pain and suffering of his parents and masses of

other faceless, nameless Turkish victims of Ottoman-Christian

militias, especially of Armenians in the East and Greeks in the West,

during 1911-1923 is the single most powerful driving force behind his

modest efforts “to tell the other side of the story.”

Key words:  Armenian, genocide, cengiz Aktar, Ergun Kirlikovali,

Hrant dink, Tereset, Ethocide, mosin, Kirlikova, Sarishaban, Drama,

Kavala, Doksat, Doxat, dinkist, deep dinkist, derin dinkciler, ECHR,

perincek, Turkey, Anatolia, first world war