Yet Another Genocide Resolution Proposal at the US Senate

Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution (S.RES.399 IS) was introduced in Senate on 19 March 2012. The resolution starts reading “Calling upon the President to ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record relating to the Armenian Genocide, and for other purposes.”

One wonders if United States is so sensitive about ethnic cleansing why they close their eyes to the ethnic cleansing exerted on Turks in Eastern Anatolia, Balkans and other lands of the Ottoman Empire which were no longer safe for Turks and Russian Empire from mid 1800's to 1918. The fact that one third of muslim population of Erzurum Province was subject to ethnic clreansing has been recorded by an American scholar, Dr. Justin McCarthy. Russian archives and memoirs of Russian officers such as Lieutenant Colonel Tverdohlebov reflect the dimension of atrocities exerted on Turks by Armenians in the East. The number of affected muslim population is over 2 million. Here is a quotation from Dr. McCarthy summarizing the situation in Bulgaria for instance:

“The Russians had a free hand to attack Turkey, declaring war on April 24, 1877. The cycle of massacre and countermassacre in the Balkans had begun with attacks on Muslims in Bosnia and Bulgaria then escalated in attacks on Bulgarians. With the advent of Russian invaders it was once again the turn of the Muslims to suffer. Their mortality was much worse than anything seen before. European consuls reported the slaughter of Turks all over Bulgaria as the Russians advanced. Although Russian regular soldiers sometimes took part in the murder and pillage, those who most persecuted the Turks were Bulgarians and Cossacks. European reporters also attested to the attacks on the Turks (although these reports were not seen in American newspapers, which preferred the British Liberal press).⁷ The stories of atrocities against the Turks were fully as horrible as those that had been told of atrocities against the Bulgarians and were on a much greater scale. As a result of the Russian invasion 288,000 Muslims of Bulgaria (19 percent), mainly Turks, died and 515,000 were exiled, never to return. More than half the Muslims had been either killed or forced from Bulgaria.”

McCarthy, Justin. Utah Series in Turkish and Islamic Studies : Turk in America : The Creation of an Enduring Prejudice http://site.ebrary.com/id/10509228  (Accessed : 26.03.2012)

and a quotation from a book review:

The Ottoman Empire was dismembered by the imperialist ambitions of the European powers in the Middie East, chiefly Britain and France, although the plans of Russia, Prussia (then Germany), Italy, and Greece played no small part as well. Moreover, European imperialism not only acted on its own behalf to the detriment of the Ottoman Empire but encouraged and sustained the nationalist goals of Balkan Christians, Armenians, and Arabs, with negative results for all involved except perhaps the powers themselves. These results McCarthy identifies according to the level of human suffering provoked by nationalist struggles that began roughly with Russian support of Serbia in the 1790s and continued until the establishment of the mandatory regimes after World War I.

Singer , Amy. “Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire. London: Arnold Publishers, 2001 Pp.234. ISBN 0-340-70657-0(Book).” Mediterranean Historical Review, June 1 2004 Vol. 19 Issue 1, p. 100History reference center http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=413ed16d-e018-4d53-bc20-391aef619e88%40sessionmgr114&vid=1&hid=105 (accessed: 256.03.2012)

May I suggest that the US Senate takes all ethnic cleansings through out history under coverage of this resolution rather than handling non-existent Armenian genocide. If an inevitable relocation as a result of the upsurge of a minority who want to rule the majority changing the demographic structure of the region through ethnic cleansing is to be called genocide, the term needs to be redefined.

Iskenderun Martyrs Memorial photo courtesy of Mehmet Fatih Göden.


Armenian Holocaust:My Story blog by Selma Aslan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Gayriticari-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.