Revised version of the message of May 22nd, sent to 230 The Bundestag Members, this time sent to all Members. Revision is
based on the response I have received from the Greens for which I am thankful.
Sehr
geehrte(r) Frau/Herr Parlamentarier,
The
bill for the recognition of the alleged genocides in the Ottoman Turkey is to
be voted on June 2, 2016 in the Bundestag. It is thought that the German
historians, renowned scholars worldwide,
including someTurkish scholars characterize the 1915 tragic events as
genocide, a consensus has been reached in the Bundestag, parliamentarians can
pass resolutions on events they consider as genocide, and it is time to pass
such a resolution.
You
have a vote to give on June 2nd, 2016 which I hope you desire to use
knowledgeably and fairly with a clear conscience, believing in what you are
doing.
It
has turned into a schema in minds that “it is a known fact that 1 to 1.5
million Armenians have been made to march to the deserts of Syria and killed”
since it has been repeated so many times for more than 100 years. Is this
really the case?
In
1914 the Armenian population within the Ottoman Empire was perhaps slightly
above 1.5 million altogether since Encyclopedia Britannica records the figure
of 1.5 million in 1910. Near East Relief statistical data available in the US
Archives, show that more than 817.873 Ottoman Armenians were settled in several
countries after the relocation. Josef Marquart from Switzerland, estimates the
number of Armenians who remained behind at 350-450.000 (Die Entstehung und
Wiederherstellung der armenischen Nation, Berlin 1920, s.79). Perhaps you will
find these figures rather puzzling and will want to explore the issue a little
more in depth. Please spare a few minutes to have a look through the points
below before you vote.
• Atatürk said: “After making allowance for
the enormous exaggerations always made by those who accuse their enemies, the
transfer of Armenians reduces itself to this – The Armenian Dashnak Committee,
then in the service of the Tsar, had caused the Armenian population behind our
troops to revolt when the Russian Army began its great 1915 offensive against
us. “Obliged to retreat before the superior numbers and material of the enemy,
we found ourselves constantly between two fires. Our convoys of supplies and
wounded were pitilessly massacred, roads and bridges destroyed behind us and
terror reigned the Turkish country-side. The bands, which committed these
crimes and which included in their ranks Armenians able to bear arms, were
supplied with arms, munitions and provisions in Armenian villages where, thanks
to the immunities accorded in the capitulation’s, certain foreign powers had
succeeded during peacetime in establishing enormous stocks for this purpose”
(Public Ledger, March 27, 1921).
• Armenian hero Armen Garo (ei. Karekin
Pastermajian, Ottoman Member of Parliament)’s several booklets available in the
Internet Archive can be regarded confessions which affirm what Atatürk said.
The demand for independence by 20 % at the expense of 80 % was possible at that
time as the Ottoman Empire was expected to collapse any moment and as Greece
had got over Thessaloniki, birth place of Atatürk, at such a ratio with the
support of Europe. (https://archive.org/search.php?query=armen%20garo)
• The recordings of “1915 in Armenian
Documents”, a documentary produced in Turkey and sent to Germany to be screened
have been recently confiscated by the German customs officials and thus
unfortunately censored in your country. Serkan Koç, The Director of the film is
still fighting with this intervention to freedom of expression and thought. If
“an honest appraisal of history is the most important basis for reconciliation”
as stated in the draft bill shouldn’t Germany allow all views to be expressed?
• Genocide is an international crime which
can be determined by an international criminal court on the basis of the
prescribed legal criteria. Even ECHR did not attempt “to determine whether the
massacres and mass deportations suffered by the Armenian people at the hands of
the Ottoman Empire from 1915 onwards could be characterised as genocide within
the meaning of that term under international law; unlike the international
criminal courts [saying that], it had no authority to make legally binding
pronouncements on this point.” (ECHR 325 (2015) 15.10.2015) It is worthwhile to
remember that ECHR decisions are binding. Is it appropriate for a
parliamentarian whose duty is to make law using a legal term informally meaning
any mass killing and take arbitrary decisions based on opinion?
• With the above mentioned Final Decision,
the ECHR Grand Chamber also indicated that Armenian case is quite different
from the Holocaust which is a legally proven case of genocide.
• Genocide allegers assert that Lemkin
referred to the Armenian case when he coined the term genocide. However
Buenos’s thorough studies in Lemkin Archives has revealed that ”in his personal
correspondences and archives, Lemkin used the concept of genocide in a very
broad sense and even categorized the atrocities committed by the Greeks against
the Muslims as genocide.” UN Convention does not refer to the Armenian case and
numerous times the UN has declined to accept a report that characterized the
Armenian case as genocide and the UN spokespersons reiterated that the UN does
not consider the case as genocide.
(http://www.mfa.gov.tr/statement-by-farhan-haq_-n-october-5_-2000_.en.mfa)
• The British convened the Malta Tribunal to
try Ottoman officials for crimes against Armenians in 1919. All of the accused
were acquitted. (Gürkan, U.(2015). The Malta Tribunals, RAS, 31, ss.181-204.
http://avim.org.tr/images/uploads/Yayin/ras-31.pdf)
• Over 2.5 million Muslims died during the
same period from similar causes. Have you ever heard of a genocide where more
perpetrators die than victims? British scholar Jeremy Salt says "What is
never mentioned in the standard narrative is that probably between two and 2.5
million Ottoman Muslim civilians died in this war from the same range of
causes. They are the ghosts never talked about because the news correspondents,
consuls and missionaries were only interested in the suffering of Christians.
The Muslims have disappeared from history as if they never existed" (Salt,
J. (2013). Armenians and Syria 1915 and 2013.
http://avim.org.tr/Blog/ARMENIANS-AND-SYRIA-1915-AND-2013-1).
• Another scholar, Sachar says, “All through
those years of war no nation's, not even the Armenians' blood was shed as much
as Turks.” (Sachar, Howard Morley. The Emergence of the Middle East, 1914-1924.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. p. 453)
• Erickson, who has evaluated the events from
a military point of view stressed that "the Ottoman reaction was
escalatory and responsive rather than premeditated and pre-planned. In this
context the Ottoman relocation decision becomes more understandable as a
military solution to a military problem. While political and ideological
imperatives perhaps drove the decision equally, if not harder, these do not
negate the fact that the Armenians were a great military danger."
(Erickson, Edward J. Armenians and Ottoman Military Policy, 1915. War In
History 2008 15: 141. http://wih.sagepub.com/content/15/2/141.)
• The allegers assert that the genocide was
committed through Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, the Ottoman secret service. Philip
Stoddard and Gwynne Dyer’s works have shown irrelevance of this assertion
(Lewy, G. Revisiting the Armenian Genocide. Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2005,
pp. 3-12. http://www.meforum.org/748/revisiting-the-armenian-genocide)
• The French Ambassador to the US Gerard
Araud says “Regarding the 1915 tragic events as a genocide is an opinion but
not a fact”. (US cable channel MSNBC, May 2015. (https://www.facebook.com/factcheckarmenia/videos/793189514063566/)
• When the story is started from the night of
April 24, 1915, isolated from the context,
and decorated with assumptions and opinions, the tragic events can be
presented as a genocide as it has happened largely in the Western academic
world with the exception of some eminent scholars such as J. Stanford Shaw
whose house was bombed and Bernard Lewis, and some others who stood against
being labelled as “denialists” courageously, over the last century. However, the story actually goes back to
1774, and one finds it difficult to characterize the tragic events as genocide
when all the facts and factors are brought together with a hollistic approach.
I can offer more insight to those interested. I will suffice with suggesting a
few sources for those who can spare time to read. General Bronsart v.
Schellendorf ‘s article concerning evidence for Talaat Pasha (Deutsche
Allgemeine Zeitung No.342, 24.07.1921),
The Armenians Official Report dated 11 December 1915, written by General
Bolkhovitinov, the Chief of Staff of the Caucasian Army. "Armenia and the
Armenians," The Presbyterian, Dec.22, pp.824-825, Dec.29, pp.
841-842,1893, Jan. 5, 1894 pp. 10-12. Patriotism Perverted by
K. S. Papazian. Boston: Baikar Press, 1934.
• Perhaps US Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester’s
following words may make you ponder what kind of a pre-planned annihilation
exercise we are talking about: “Those from the mountains were taken into
Mesopotamia, where the climate is as benign as in Florida and California,
whither New York millionaires journey every year for health and recreation. All
this was done at great expense of money and effort, and the general outside
report was that all, or at least many, had been murdered. It seems almost a
pity to upset the good old myth of Turkish viciousness and terribleness, but in
the interest of accuracy, I find myself constrained to do so, although it makes
me feel a bit like one who is compelled to tell a child that Jack the Giant
Killer really found no monstrous men to slay” (Turkey Reinterpreted, New York
Times Current History, Sept. 1922, XVI, 6, p. 945 of 939-949).
Respecting
the Armenian sufferings caused by the relocation and resettlement, which was
actually from one province of the Empire to the other, not abroad, is a
humanitarian issue. Turkish authorities have several times expressed that they
are sorry for what civilians have been through during the war, though nobody
has expressed sympathy with our sufferings and what we have been through
yet. My grandaunt was raped and killed
together with her husband and baby son by the Armenian Dashnaq chetes, being
stabbed in bed at a night raid. I feel sorry for their sufferings and expect
genocide allegers and their supporters to feel sorry for our sufferings
equally.
A
genuine desire in the facilitation of reconciliation should have encompassed
call to Armenia to withdraw from occupied Azeri lands so that one million Azeri
refugees can go back home in Nagorno-Karabagh, recognition of Hocali massacre
and paying respect to the victims, an invitation to Armenia to stop their
demands of reparations and land since all was settled at the time and
literature cover how they were all settled.
No
country can be expected to admit having committed a very serious crime without
any evidence. This is a legal issue, not political. A consensus might have been
reached in the Bundestag, but is it worth passing a resolution based on
opinion, which is legally invalid at the expense of losing a friend and hurting
3 million Turkish Germans excluding a small bunch of so called leftists who
have no patriotic feelings and inexplicably support groups who hate Turkey and
Turks? The Bundestag members surely must be weighting pros and cons. Inserting
a topic to the textbooks, presenting an
opinion as if it is a fact and offering young brains a distorted history and
thus offending 500.000 Turkish German school children, many of whom probably
have relatives lost because of Armenian and Greek atrocities and killings in
Eastern and Western Anatolia or due to warfare.
I
haven’t lost my faith and hope that common sense will overcome on the day of
voting for the friendship of all peoples, in these days as another ethnic group
has been tried to be exploited to play a similar game of 100 years ago. But
this time people did not let to be played on, instead left the terrorists to
their own without roots and reason to fight except being an instrument in the
power game. Their supporters are better review their positions. We say “this
country is ours, we are one”. Nobody should play on a group within us, and
attempt to exploit historical events to put pressure on us. I suggest Tal
Buenos’s very interesting article titled
“The Cyclicality of the Genocide Accusation” in AVİM Conference Book No: 15, 2015
Prospects for Turkish-Armenian Relations, p.76-89 (http://tinyurl.com/jkrff5u)
in this respect.
I
have been dealing with this topic over the last five years as an independent
researcher and please do not hesitate to ask if you have any questions.
I
hope you join the debate and vote judging the issue evenhandedly.
Respectfully
yours,
Selma
Aslan
Independent
Researcher on WWI Caucasian Front &
Relative
of a victim of atrocities and massacres perpetrated by Armenians upon Eastern
Anatolian Muslims
in
early 20th century with the intention of ethnic cleansing
NB. I am sorry for
sending this message at the last moment, but its writing coincided with my radioactive
iodine (RAI) therapy for thyroid cancer, and took longer than anticipated.
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