Once again, the "Armenian genocide" claims are discussed, this time because of a fictional movie. It must be emphasized:
Genocide is a legal concept, defined in 1948. In addition to the fact that the convention is not retroactive, R. Lemkin, regularly used by the Armenian side as a reference, had no role in the shaping of the concept, as his own definition of the word was extremely vague and large: inogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/WeissWendt.pdf (first page, last paragraph). There is no evidence for a specific place of the Armenian case in Lemkin's writings and theories: dailysabah.com/opinion/2014/09/11/many-genocides-of-raphael-lemkin
Moreover, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled:
“In any event, it is even doubtful that there could be a “general consensus”, in particular a scientific one, on events such as those that are in question here, given that historical research is by definition open to debate and discussion and hardly lends itself to definitive conclusions or objective and absolute truths (see, in this sense, judgment no. 235/2007 of the Spanish constitutional court, paragraphs 38-40 above). In this regard, the present case is clearly distinct from cases bearing on denial of the Holocaust crimes (see, for example, the case of Robert Faurisson v. France, brought by Committee on 8 November 1996, Communication no. 550/1993, Doc. CCPR/C/58/D/550/1993 (1996)). Firstly, the applicants in these cases had not only contested the simple legal description of a crime, but denied historic facts, sometimes very concrete ones, for example the existence of gas chambers. Secondly, the sentences for crimes committed by the Nazi regime, of which these persons deny the existence, had a clear legal basis, i.e. Article 6, paragraph c), of the Statutes of the International Military Tribunal (in Nuremberg), attached to the London Agreement of 8 August 1945 (paragraph 19 above). Thirdly, the historic facts called into question by the interested parties had been judged to be clearly established by an international jurisdiction.” hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-139276
And the Grand chamber has confirmed the decision.
So, keep calm, and prepare your arguments, this is a debate.
2) The claims that the Ottoman Armenians were persecuted by the Hamidian state (1876-1908) or the Young Turks (1908-1918) are completely baseless.
No community furnished more civil servants, proportionally to its population, to the Hamidian state than the Armenians, in eastern Anatolia (Mesrob K. Krikorian, Armenians in the Service of the Ottoman Empire, 1860-1908, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). In 1896, twenty years after Abdülhamit II arrived in power, 20% of the best paid civil servants in Istanbul were Armenians (Sidney Whitman, Turkish Memories, New York-London: Charles Schribner’s Sons/William Heinemann, 1914, p. 19), and, as late as 1905, 13% of the personel in the Ottoman ministry of Foreign Affairs were Armenians (Carter Vaughn Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 96).
In spite of its name in the West ("Young Turks"), the Committee Union and Progress (CUP) was not a Turkish nationalist party. One of the CUP leaders, Bedros Hallaçyan, was an Armenian. Hallaçyan was elected as a member of the Ottoman Parliament in 1908, reelected in 1912 and 1914. He served as minister from 1909 to 1912, then was promoted as a member of the CUP's central committee in 1913. In 1915, he was appointed as representative of the Empire at the International Court of Arbitration. He went back in 1916 to chair the committee in charge of rewriting the Ottoman code of commerce.
Similarly, Oskan Mardikian served as CUP minister of PTT from 1913 to 1914, Artin Bosgezenyan as CUP deputy of Aleppo from 1908 to the end of the First World War, Hrant Abro as legal advisor of the Ottoman ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1914 to 1918, Berç Keresteciyan as general manager of the Ottoman Bank from 1914 to 1927, and so on.
3) The relocations of 1915-1916 were decided as a counter-insurgency measure, as the Armenian revolutionists were a major threat for the Ottoman army. Indeed, having fought the Ottoman state for decades (rebellions in Zeytun in 1862, 1878, 1895-96, in Van in 1896, attack of the Ottoman Bank in 1896, plots to kill Abdülhamit and to destroy Izmir in 1905, assassination of the pro-CUP mayor of Van, Bedros Kapamaciyan, in 1912, etc.) they now helped the Russian invasion and did their best to pave the way for a Franco-British landing in Iskenderun or Mersin.
It is true that the majority of the Ottoman Armenians were not revolutionists, but this remark is irrelevant. Indeed, about 500,000 were not relocated at all, and if about 700,000 others were actually relocated, it was because the Ottoman army had no other choice. Indeed, most of the military units were fighting the Russian army in the Caucasus, or the British, the French and the ANZAC in the Dardanelles, or the British in Egypt and Kuweit. As a result, the only remaining method to suppress the insurrections was to relocate the Armenian civilians, who helped the insurgents, willingly or by force (it never make any difference, from a military point of view).
About the counter-insurgency issue and its background, see, among others:
a) This article by Edward J. Erickson, professor at the Marine Corps University, in "Middle East Critique" (Routledge): mfa.gov.tr/data/dispolitika/ermeniiddialari/edward-j_-erickson-the-armenian-relocations-and-ottoman-national-security_-military-necessity-of-excuse-for-genocide.pdf
b) Prof. Erickson's book on the same subject: palgrave.com/br/book/9781137362209
c) My own papers: academia.edu/24209649/Strategic_threats_and_hesitations_The_Operations_And_Projects_of_Landing_In_Cilicia_And_The_Ottoman_Armenians_1914-1917_ academia.edu/11011713/The_Missed_Occasion_Successes_of_the_Hamidian_Police_Against_the_Armenian_Revolutionaries_1905-1908
4) Turkey and the historians who reject the "Armenian genocide" label do not deny the existence of crimes perpetrated against Armenian civilians. But these crimes were punished, as much as the Ottoman government could: from February to May 1916 only, 67 Muslims were sentenced to death, 524 to jail and 68 to hard labor or imprisonment in forts (Yusuf Halaçoglu, The Story of 1915—What Happened to the Ottoman Armenians, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2008, pp. 82–87; Yusuf Sarınay, “The Relocation (Tehcir) of Armenians and the Trials of 1915–1916”, Middle East Critique, Vol. 3, No. 20, Fall 2011, pp. 299–315).
No mainstream political party in Turkey is proud of the Muslim war-time criminals. On the other hand, Armenian war criminals, such as Antranik, and even those who joined the Third Reich's forces, such as Dro and Nzhdeh, are official heroes of Armenia. They are also celebrated by the main organizations of the Armenian diaspora, particularly the Armenian Revolutionary Federation.
5) The 1915-16 relocations by the Ottoman army are not the only reason for the Ottoman Armenian losses (migration and deaths) during and after the WWI: academia.edu/11940511/The_Armenian_Forced_Relocation_Putting_an_End_to_Misleading_Simplifications (pp. 112-122).
6) The Turkish and Ottoman archives in Istanbul and Ankara are open, including to supporters of the "Armenian genocide" label, such as Ara Sarafian, Hilmar Kaiser, Taner Akçam or Garabet Krikor Moumdjian. The Armenian archives in Yerevan, Paris, Jerusalem, Toronto or Watertown (Massachusetts) are closed, including to the Armenian historians who are perceived as not sufficiently nationalist, such as Ara Sarafian.
Evo prvi komentar na Reddit-u. Ima jos materijala koliko ko hoce da bas nije sve tako kako se tvrdi.
ali strogo ako, a genocid je nepobitan 