Robert Fisk speaks about the Armenian Genocide by the Turks

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The Turkish government still officially denies the Armenian genocide. The Germans have apologised 1,000 times to the Jews; the US has apologised to native Americans for their 19th-century ethnic cleansing; the Australians to the Aborigines, the British to the Irish, the Ukrainians to the Poles for their mass rape, pillage and massacres under German occupation after 1941. What is it with the Turks?

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Some semi-official Turkish narratives now claim, in effect, that the Armenians actually carried out genocidal attacks on the Turks. Neo-Nazis and their scholarly enablers say that "the Jews" manufactured tall tales of the Holocaust in order to extort money and other concessions from postwar Germany. Neo-Confederates like Doug Wilson, a far-right pastor in Moscow, Idaho, tell their listeners with a straight face that the Civil War was nothing less than a defense of righteous Christian civilization and that blacks really didn't mind slavery. These lies all serve current agendas — to demonize and minimize the historical claims of Armenians, Jews, and African Americans.

- Mark Potok, the editor of Intelligence Report

When it comes to the historical reality of the Armenian genocide, there is no “Armenian” or “Turkish” side of the “question,” any more than there is a “Jewish” or a “German” side of the historical reality of the Holocaust: There is a scientific side, and an unscientific side acknowledgment or denial. In the case of the denial of the Armenian genocide, it is even founded on a massive effort of falsification, distortion, cleansing of archives, and direct threats initiated or supported by the Turkish state, making any “dialogue” with Turkish deniers highly problematic.

-historians Torben Jorgensen and Matthias Bjornlund ("Danish Department for Holocaust and Genocide Studies")

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Quotes about the Armenian Genocide:

TALAT PASHA
In a conversation with Dr. Mordtmann of the German Embassy in June 1915

"Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate (grundlich aufzaumen) its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention. What on earth do you want? The question is settled. There are no more Armenians."

CEMAL PASHA
Minister of the Interior of Turkey publicly declared on March 15 that on the basis of computations undertaken by Ministry Experts:

"800,000 Armenian deportees were actually killed...by holding the guilty accountable the government is intent on cleansing the bloody past."

MUSTAFA ARIF
Minister of Interior stated on 13 December 1918:

"Surely a few Armenians aided and abetted our enemy, and a few Armenian Deputies committed crimes against the Turkish nation... it is incumbent upon a government to pursue the guilty ones. Unfortunately, our wartime leaders, imbued with a spirit of brigandage, carried out the law of deportation in a manner that could surpass the proclivities of the most bloodthirsty bandits. They decided to exterminate the Armenians, and they did exterminate them."


HENRY MORGENTHAU, SR.
U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, 1919:
"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact. . . I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."

COUNT WOLFF-METTERNICH
German Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire July 10, 1916, cable to the German Chancellor:

"In its attempt to carry out its purpose to resolve the Armenian question by the destruction of the Armenian race, the Turkish government has refused to be deterred neither by our representations, nor by those of the American Embassy, nor by the delegate of the Pope, nor by the threats of the Allied Powers, nor in deference to the public opinion of the West representing one-half of the world."

JIMMY CARTER
May 16, 1978, White House ceremony:

"It is generally not known in the world that, in the years preceding 1916, there was a concerted effort made to eliminate all the Armenian people, probably one of the greatest tragedies that ever befell any group. And there weren't any Nuremberg trials."

RONALD REAGAN
April 22, 1981, proclamation:

"Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it, . . . the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten."

PRIME MINISTER OF GREAT BRITAIN (1940-45, 1951-55)

"In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor." "There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons."

MUSTAFA "ATATURK" KEMAL

Founder of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923 and revered throughout Turkey, in an interview published on August 1, 1926 in The Los Angeles Examiner, talking about former Young Turks in his country:
"These left-overs from the former Young Turk Party, who should have been made to account for the millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse, from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule."

PROF. COLIN TATZ, DIRECTOR, CENTRE FOR COMPARATIVE GENOCIDE STUDIES

The Turkish denial [of the Armenian Genocide] is probably the foremost example of historical perversion. With a mix of academic sophistication and diplomatic thuggery -- of which we at Macquarie University have been targets -- the Turks have put both memory and history into reverse gear.

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Armenian Genocide of 1915: An Overview
By JOHN KIFNER
The New York Times

On the eve of World War I, there were two million Armenians in the declining Ottoman Empire. By 1922, there were fewer than 400,000. The others — some 1.5 million — were killed in what historians consider a genocide.

As David Fromkin put it in his widely praised history of World War I and its aftermath, “A Peace to End All Peace”: “Rape and beating were commonplace. Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed .”

The man who invented the word “genocide”— Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin — was moved to investigate the attempt to eliminate an entire people by accounts of the massacres of Armenians. He did not, however, coin the word until 1943, applying it to Nazi Germany and the Jews in a book published a year later, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.”

But to Turks, what happened in 1915 was, at most, just one more messy piece of a very messy war that spelled the end of a once-powerful empire. They reject the conclusions of historians and the term genocide, saying there was no premeditation in the deaths, no systematic attempt to destroy a people. Indeed, in Turkey today it remains a crime — “insulting Turkishness” — to even raise the issue of what happened to the Armenians.

In the United States, a powerful Armenian community centered in Los Angeles has been pressing for years for Congress to condemn the Armenian genocide. Turkey, which cut military ties to France over a similar action, has reacted with angry threats. A bill to that effect nearly passed in the fall of 2007, gaining a majority of co-sponsors and passing a committee vote. But the Bush administration, noting that Turkey is a critical ally — more than 70 per cent of the military air supplies for Iraq go through the Incirlik airbase there — pressed for the bill to be withdrawn, and it was.

The roots of the genocide lie in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The empire’s ruler was also the caliph, or leader of the Islamic community. Minority religious communities, like the Christian Armenians, were allowed to maintain their religious, social and legal structures, but were often subject to extra taxes or other measures.

Concentrated largely in eastern Anatolia, many of them merchants and industrialists, Armenians, historians say, appeared markedly better off in many ways than their Turkish neighbors, largely small peasants or ill-paid government functionaries and soldiers.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the once far-flung Ottoman empire was crumbling at the edges, beset by revolts among Christian subjects to the north — vast swaths of territory were lost in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 — and the subject of coffee house grumbling among Arab nationalist intellectuals in Damascus and elsewhere.

The Young Turk movement of ambitious, discontented junior army officers seized power in 1908, determined to modernize, strengthen and “Turkify” the empire. They were led by what became an all-powerful triumvirate sometimes referred to as the Three Pashas.

In March of 1914, the Young Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany. They attacked to the east, hoping to capture the city of Baku in what would be a disastrous campaign against Russian forces in the Caucuses. They were soundly defeated at the battle of Sarikemish.

Armenians in the area were blamed for siding with the Russians and the Young Turks began a campaign to portray the Armenians as a kind of fifth column, a threat to the state. Indeed, there were Armenian nationalists who acted as guerrillas and cooperated with the Russians. They briefly seized the city of Van in the spring of 1915.

Armenians mark the date April 24, 1915, when several hundred Armenian intellectuals were rounded up, arrested and later executed as the start of the Armenian genocide and it is generally said to have extended to 1917. However, there were also massacres of Armenians in 1894, 1895, 1896, 1909, and a reprise between 1920 and 1923.

The University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies has compiled figures by province and district that show there were 2,133,190 Armenians in the empire in 1914 and only about 387,800 by 1922.

Writing at the time of the early series of massacres, The New York Times suggested there was already a “policy of extermination directed against the Christians of Asia Minor.”

The Young Turks, who called themselves the Committee of Unity and Progress, launched a set of measures against the Armenians, including a law authorizing the military and government to deport anyone they “sensed” was a security threat.

A later law allowed the confiscation of abandoned Armenian property. Armenians were ordered to turn in any weapons that they owned to the authorities. Those in the army were disarmed and transferred into labor battalions where they were either killed or worked to death.

There were executions into mass graves, and death marches of men, women and children across the Syrian desert to concentration camps with many dying along the way of exhaustion, exposure and starvation.

Much of this was quite well documented at the time by Western diplomats, missionaries and others, creating widespread wartime outrage against the Turks in the West. Although its ally, Germany, was silent at the time, in later years documents have surfaced from ranking German diplomats and military officers expressing horror at what was going on.

Some historians, however, while acknowledging the widespread deaths, say what happened does not technically fit the definition of genocide largely because they do not feel there is evidence that it was well-planned in advance.

The New York Times covered the issue extensively — 145 articles in 1915 alone by one count — with headlines like “Appeal to Turkey to Stop Massacres.” The Times described the actions against the Armenians as “systematic,” “authorized, and “organized by the government.”

The American ambassador, Henry Morganthau Sr., was also outspoken. In his memoirs, the ambassador would write: “When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.”

Following the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the Three Pashas fled to Germany, where they were given protection. But the Armenian underground formed a group called Operation Nemesis to hunt them down. On March 15, 1921, one of the pashas was shot dead on a street in Berlin in broad daylight in front of witnesses. The gunman pled temporary insanity brought on by the mass killings and a jury took only a little over an hour to acquit him. It was the defense evidence at this trial that drew the interest of Mr. Lemkin, the coiner of “genocide.”
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/timestopi...ngenocide.html

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International Association of Genocide Scholars

In 1997 the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution unanimously recognizing the Ottoman massacres of Armenians as genocide.

That this assembly of the Association of Genocide Scholars in its conference held in Montreal, June 11–13, 1997, reaffirms that the mass murder of over a million Armenians in Turkey in 1915 is a case of genocide which conforms to the statutes of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It further condemns the denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government and its official and unofficial agents and supporters.

— Among the prominent scholars who supported the resolution were: Roger W. Smith (College of William & Mary; President of AGS); Israel Charny (Hebrew University, Jerusalem); Helen Fein (Past President AGS); Frank Chalk (Concordia University, Montreal); Ben Kiernan (Yale University); Anthony Oberschall (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill); Mark Levene (Warwick University, UK); Rhoda Howard (McMaster University, Canada), Michael Freeman (Essex University, UK), Gunnar Heinsohn (Bremen University, Germany)

The IAGS has recognized the 1915 genocide in three different resolutions, the latest (October 5, 2007) extending the recognition to also include the Assyrians, Syrians, and Anatolian and Pontic Greeks among the affected minorities:
WHEREAS the denial of genocide is widely recognised as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides;

WHEREAS the Ottoman genocide against minority populations during and following the First World War is usually depicted as a genocide against Armenians alone, with little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire;

BE IT RESOLVED that it is the conviction of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Association calls upon the government of Turkey to acknowledge the genocides against these populations, to issue a formal apology, and to take prompt and meaningful steps toward restitution.[21]
The IAGS has repeatedly asserted that the Ottoman massacres of Armenians as genocide. For example, on March 7, 2009, in an open letter to President Obama, Gregory Stanton, President IAGS stated "we urge you to 'refer to the mass slaughter of Armenians as genocide in your commemorative statement,' as you urged President George W. Bush to do in a letter dated March 18, 2005".

In February 2002 an independent legal opinion commissioned by the International Center for Transitional Justice, concluded that the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915–1918 "include[d] all of the elements of the crime of genocide as defined in the [Genocide] Convention, and legal scholars as well as historians, politicians, journalists and other people would be justified in continuing to so describe them".[23]From page 2 of the report:
This memorandum was drafted by independent legal counsel based on a request made to the International Center for Transitional Justice ("ICTJ"), on the basis of the Memorandum of Understanding ("MoU") entered into by The Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission ("TARC") on July 12, 2002 and presentations by members of TARC on September 10, 2002.

From page 18, D. Conclusion:

... Because the other three elements identified above have been definitively established, the Events, viewed collectively, can thus be said to include all of the elements of the crime of genocide as defined in the Convention, and legal scholars as well as historians, politicians, journalists and other people would be justified in continuing to so describe them.

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One of the cornerstones of a genocide is the very justification of actions which might otherwise incite hatred and opposition of their own group/population. The Nazis did this by blaming the Jews for being enemy of the state, in league with the Communists and to be "human disease". The parallel with the Armenian genocide is striking: the Armenians were accused then (as now in the denial campaign) to be in cahoots with the enemy. When the Armenians dared to ask for independence it constituted a threat to the Turkish nation and Anatolia, the core of the Turks' "homeland".

In fact, the leaders of the Union and Prorgess first tried to ensure themselves of Armenian cooperation and asked them to start an armed uprising in Eastern Armenia and Transcaucasia. In return, they were promised autonomy for Eastern Armenia and the neighboring regions of Western Armenia after the war. Dashnak-party leadership (the most significant Armenian political party of those days) rejected the proposal during its congress in August 1914, held in Erzurum, and replied that in the possibility of war between Turkey and Russia, the Armenians were obliged to fight for their respective countries. Just as Winston Churchill recalls, it was a case of "Armenians preferring war with brother-killing on two fronts above the Turk's proposal of treason against the Russians."

But even if there were a few battalions that fought on the Russian side, could their existence in the Caucasian front hardly in any way justify the Turkish government's genocide against the entire Armenian population. It suffices to recall that at the same time, there was a Czechoslovak battalion in the Russian Army at the Austrian front. But the Austro-Hungarian government never thought of the idea of eradicating the Czechoslovak people within their empire. Likewise, the Russian goverment always knew about the existence of a Polish battalion, led by future Marshal Pilsoleski, where a number of Poles from Russia fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army against Russia, but even here this did not result in Russia starting a genocide of all Poles in Poland under Russian rule. But why go so far away? From the very beginning of World War I, Turkey formed a Georgian unit for its war against Russia, but the Turks do not seem to be willing to acknowledge this unit, nor the Russians have carried out a genocide in Georgia because of this well-known fact.

The U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, provided one of the most gut-wrenching descriptions of "The Murder of a Nation" in a report to his superiors, published after the war (the U.S. was at the time neutral in the conflict). He summarized the first strategy as follows:

"Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people," Morgenthau summarized. "I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."
http://www.gendercide.org/case_armenia.html

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Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in 1944, was the earliest proponent of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. He invoked the Armenian case as a definitive example of genocide in the 20th century. So did the United Nations War Crimes Commission in 1948. On September 10, 1984, a U.S. House Resolution resolved that “April 24, 1985, is hereby designated as `National Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man', and the President of the United States is authorized and requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe such day as a day of remembrance for all the victims of genocide, especially the one and one-half million people of Armenian ancestry.”

The following year, a United Nations report entitled “Study of the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” concluded that the Nazi Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews perished, “has unfortunately not been the only case of genocide in the 20th century. Among other examples which can be cited as qualifying are . . . the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915-1916.”

On 24 April 1915, Turkish troops rounded up and killed hundreds of Armenian intellectuals. Weeks later, three million Armenians were marched from their homes – the majority towards Syria and modern-day Iraq – via an estimated 25 concentration camps.

In 1915, The New York Times reported that “the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles… It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people.” Winston Churchill would later call the forced exodus an “administrative holocaust”.

"Armenians of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province. The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one mass grave at Hurgada in present-day Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people – their teeth were perfect."

"German soldiers sent to Turkey to reorganise the Ottoman army also witnessed these atrocities. Armin Wegner, an especially courageous German second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, took a series of photographs of dead and dying Armenian women and children. Other German officers regarded the genocide with more sinister interest. Some of these men, as Armenian scholar Vahakn Dadrian discovered, turn up 26 years later as more senior officers conducting the mass killing of Jews in German-occupied Russia."
http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/b...nian-genocide/

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This website is an interactive academic tool for CEA-UNH course: International Human Rights: Universal Principles in World Politics

One of the most graphic documentaries on the genocide of the Holocaust that graphically walked the viewer through a story line of victims.

Genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group

The graphic nature of genocide has been seen from the African American, Armenian, and Jewish culture. There are other areas that still encourage such harsh treatments, but the documentary mainly focuses on the harsh living conditions, gas chambers, and seperation of families during the time of the Holocaust.



Many historical events are shunned from record books, and the Armenian genocide is one that many people try to erase some say it was one of the first known genocides. To this day many people try not to acknowledge that it happened.

"The starting date of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, depriving them of food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of the Armenian genocide."

The documentary takes the history of the genocide back in a time where such words were not even used to describe the event. The Turks still stand by the term being used in a very extreme manner.
http://cea-unh-human-rights.blogspot.com

[Kuvayi_Milliye]

-Turcophobe Robert Fisk defending his masters, the Armenians again.

http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2...defending.html

-Robert Fisk, a pathological liar? Is the incorrigible Armenian bootlicker at it again?

http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2...l-liar-is.html

[Kuvayi_Milliye]

Ambassor Morgenthau's Story is fake. Here is the story of the book which Armenians show as one of the main source of their so-called genocide allegations.

Usa's ambassador to Istanbul Mr Henry Morgenthau Sr. came to Istanbul in 1913, he left in 1916 and he only spent 780 days in Istanbul. He didnt get 10 km out of Istanbul during this 780 days. He never went to the East.The most distant location he had been to was Belgrade Forest, he had been to Greece and Palestine by ship and returned by the same way. He never witnessed to any of the incidents Armenians claim. He only wrote what he heard from others.The author is not even himself.Morgenthau's translator at the embassy, Arshag Schimavonian and his assistant Hagop Andonian went to Usa with him during his return.

When the need for Usa to join to World War I which started in Europe between European countries appeared, Morgenthau told Us President Wilson that he can write a book which blames Germans and Ottoman Empire and got the approval for writing the book. The majority of the book is about what Arshag Schimavonian and his assistant Hagop Andonian told. They didnt see any of the things they claimed in real life either but they heard from others, some of them they used their imaginations about. The author is not even Morgenthau himself, its Pulitzer award owner Mr Burton J. Hendrick. Hendrick wrote Arshag and Hagop's stories and notes to Morgenthau's diary like he heard them from a voice recorder with an effective literature methodology and he made up the so-called "Ambassord Morgenthau's Story" book. Mr Hendrick received 15.000 us dollars for the book which equals to over 1 million dollars today.

-Preposterous Paradoxes of Ambassador Morgenthau, A Factual Story About Politics, Propaganda and Distortions.

http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2...paradoxes.html