Armenian genocide

[Krajisnik]

Turks are sick people

[DarkSecret]

Turks are sick people

Some of you islamist Turk-haters some of you racist Turk-haters. You Bosniaks are really interesting...

[Tsubasa]

*** "In the beginning of fall 1914, when Turkey had not yet entered the war but was preparing to, Armenian volunteer groups began to be organized with great desire and pomp in Trans-Caucasia. In spite of the decision taken a few weeks before at the General Committee in Erzurum, the Dashnagtzoutiun actively helped the organization of the fore-mentioned groups and especially arming them against Turkey.
There is no point in asking today whether our volunteers should have been in the foreground. Historical events have a logic of their own. In the fall of 1914, Armenian volunteer groups were formed and fought against the Turks. The opposite could not have happened, because for approximately 20 years, the Armenian community was fed a certain and inevitable psychology. This state of mind had to manifest itself and it happened."

* it was a mistake to establish the volunteer units
* they were unconditionally allied with russia
* they massacred the muslim turk population
* the aim of armenian terrorist acts was winning the western public opinion
* british occupation aroused hopes of the dashnaks
* they were provoked by imperial sea to sea land demand
* they did not take turkey's power into consideration
* they should have used a peaceful language towards the turks but they (dashnaks) rejected the turks who suggested to negotiate with them and they preferred launching a war

We overestimated the ability of the Armenian people, its political and military power, and overestimated the extent and importance of the services our people rendered to the Russians. And by overestimating our very modest worth and merit we were naturally exaggerating our hopes and expectations.

(The 1923 Manifesto of Hovhannes Katchaznouni, Armenia's First Prime Minister, from the book, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation -Dashnak- has nothing to do anymore, published in 1955, Published by the Armenian Information Service)

why do you deny your own prime minister armenians?

[Tsubasa]

*** On April 24, 2009, Armenian Remembrance Day President Barack Obama issued a statement "remembering the 1.5 million Armenian deaths in the final days of the Ottoman Empire." The President stumbled.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and the number of Armenians who are claimed by Armenians and their echo chambers to have died in an alleged World War I genocide. Almost a century later, the number of deaths they assert oscillates between 1.5-2 million. But the best contemporary estimates by Armenians or their sympathizers were 300,000-750,000 (compared with 2.4 million Ottoman Muslim deaths in Anatolia). Further, not a single one of those deaths necessarily falls within the definition of genocide in the authoritative Genocide Convention of 1948. It requires proof that the accused was responsible for the physical destruction of a group in whole or in substantial part specifically because of their race, nationality, religion, or ethnicity. A political or military motivation for a death falls outside the definition.

Immediately after the war, when events and memories were fresh, Armenians had no incentive to concoct high casualty figures or genocidal motivations for their deaths. Their objective was statehood. Armenians were encouraged by the self-determination concept in President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, (while conveniently forgetting that they were a minority in Eastern Anatolia where they hoped to found a new nation). Armenian leaders pointed to their military contribution to defeating the Ottomans and population figures that would sustain an Armenian nation.
Boghus Nubar, then Head of the Armenian Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference (1919), wrote to the French Foreign Minister Stephen Pichon: "The Armenians have been, since the beginning of the war, de facto belligerents, as you yourself have acknowledged, since they have fought alongside the Allies on all fronts, enduring heavy sacrifices and great suffering for the sake of their unshakable attachment to the cause of the Entente...." Nubar had earlier written to the Foreign Minister on October 29, 1918, that Armenians had earned their independence: "We have fought for it. We have poured out our blood for it without stint. Our people played a gallant part in the armies that won the victory."

When their quest for statehood shipwrecked on the Treaty of Lausanne and annexation by the Soviet Union in 1921, Armenians revised their soundtrack to endorse a contrived genocide thesis. It seeks a "pound of flesh" from the Republic of Turkey in the form of recognition, reparations, and boundary changes. To make their case more convincing, Armenians hiked the number of deaths. They also altered their story line from having died as belligerents against the Turks to having perished like unarmed helpless lambs.
Vahan Vardapet, an Armenian cleric, estimated a prewar Ottoman Armenian population of 1.26 million. At the Peace Conference, Armenian leader Nubar stated that 280,000 remained in the Empire and 700,000 had emigrated elsewhere. Accepting those Armenian figures, the number of dead would be 280,000. George Montgomery of the Armenia-American Society estimated a prewar Armenian population of 1.4-1.6 million, and a casualty figure of 500,000 or less. Armenian Van Cardashian, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1919, placed the number of Armenian dead at 750,000, i.e., a prewar population of 1.5 million and a post-war figure of 750,000.

After statehood was lost, Armenians turned to their genocide playbook which exploited Christian bigotries and contempt for Ottoman Muslims. They remembered earlier successful anti-Ottoman propaganda. United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the war, Henry Morganthau, was openly racist and devoted to propaganda. On November 26, 1917, Morgenthau confessed in a letter to President Wilson that he intended to write a book vilifying Turks and Germans to, "win a victory for the war policy of the government." In his biography, "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story," Morgenthau betrays his racist hatred toward Turks ("humanity and civilization never for a moment enters their mind") and unconditional admiration for Armenians ("They are so superior to the Turks intellectually and morally.").

British Prime Minister Gladstone's histrionic figure of 60,000 Bulgarian Christians slaughtered in 1876 captured the imagination of the west. The true figure later provided by a British Ambassador was 3,500--including Turks who were first slain by the Christians.

From 280,000-750,000, Armenians initially raised their death count to 800,000 to test the credibility waters. It passed muster with uninformed politicians easily influenced by campaign contributions and voting clout. Armenians then jumped the number to 1.5 million, and then 1.8 million by Armenian historian Kevork Aslan. For the last decades, an Armenian majority seems to have settled on the 1.5 million death plateau which still exceeds their contemporary estimates by 200 to 500 percent.

They are now testing the waters at 2.5-3 million killed as their chances for a congressional genocide resolution recede. It speaks volumes that champions of the inflated death figures have no explanation for why Armenians on the scene would have erred. Think of the absurdity of discarding the current death count of Afghan civilians in the United States-Afghan war in favor of a number deduced in the year 2109!
Armenians have a genuine tale of woe. It largely overlaps with the tale of tragedy and suffering that can be told by Ottoman Muslims during the war years: 2.4 million deaths in Anatolia, ethnic cleansing, starvation, malnutrition, untreated epidemics, and traumatic privations of war under a decrepit and collapsing Empire.

Unskewed historical truth is the antechamber of Turkish-Armenian reconciliation. That is why the Government of Turkey has proposed an international commission of impartial and independent experts with access to all relevant archives to determine the number and characterization of World War I deaths. Armenians are balking because they are skeptical of their own figures and accusations.

(Bruce Fein, Former US President Ronald Reagen's Advisor

[Armenian Bishop]

It's better to use the link, to go directly to the news article, with some interesting photographic evidence.

http://www.armenianweekly.com/2014/07/01/mass-graves/

Armenian Mass Graves Revisited: A Photo-Essay
Armenian Weekly News Article, By Alexandra Avakian, July 1, 2014. A Special Report for the Armenian Weekly April 2014 magazine.

It began in Yerevan, while I was photographing the National Geographic story on Armenia that was published in 2005.

“Sandra, there are a lotta bones still out there in the desert in Syria. You have to see it, jan!” When Hirair Hovnanian told me this in 2004, I could not stop thinking about it.

I knew about the Armenian Genocide, of course, but as a third generation Armenian American (on my father’s side), my grandparents didn’t want us to think about these terrible things.

They wanted us to be truly American, free of the sorrows of the old country, like many Americans who have fled starvation, war, genocide, dictatorship, and economic insecurity from all over the world.

I decided to go to Syria on the 90th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and find those bones. I secured a grant from the Hirair and Anna Hovnanian Foundation, which specializes in furthering education and culture, and that was enough for me to pull off my mission.

I was hoping the photos I brought back would—besides being evidence—encourage the Armenian church in Syria to try and buy the Armenian mass grave land of Ras al-Ain from the Syrian Waqf (Islamic Trust), in order to protect it from total destruction. The erasure and/or denial of physical remains and documented history is a continuation and final act in genocide.

I had to plan with the utmost care. In 2005, it was dangerous to go poking around the subject of the Armenian Genocide in Bashar al Assad’s Syria. Turkish investment in the country was roaring along. I was warned by a high-level Armenian church official and a Syrian diplomat: Do not tell anybody what you are doing.

The cleric said, “Be careful. You are too late—under Hafez al Assad it would have been ok.”

The high-ranking Syrian diplomat who gave me my visa said, “Go, go and do your job. My family always spoke of what happened to the Armenians. But you must never tell anyone what you are doing. Simply say you are there to photograph Armenian culture. Do not check in with the authorities.”

Syria has a proud record of having helped the Armenian refugees during and after the genocide. Syrian Armenians have thrived and their culture was embraced in Syria. Syrians know well what happened to the Armenians in 1915, on their land, a part of the Ottoman Empire back then.

But the genocide sites at the time of my 2005 trip were being compromised: A waterworks project complete with bulldozers was atop the Marghedah grave; Shadadeh was closed off as it is in an oil field. The mass grave at Ras al-Ain was being demolished by farmers.

Ras al-Ain, Syria. (Photo by Alexandra Avakian)Ras al-Ain, Syria. (Photo by Alexandra Avakian)
So it was a distinguished Armenian-American couple, a top Syrian diplomat, two Armenian Genocide scholars (one in Washington, one in Syria), an Armenian driver, and a local church member who helped to make these pictures happen. (Names withheld to protect sources.)

Unlike forensic archaeologist Dr. Roxana Fellini’s experience in 2007 (read her article here), which was a crucial part of an official archaeological dig approved by the Syrian authorities in Ras al-Ain/Tell Fakhariyah, in 2005 mine was not—and it got spooky. And the last thing I wanted was to put anyone in danger.

In Aleppo, Der Zor, and Margadeh, there were a lot of other people around. How could a woman in a church with a camera be a threat?

But as we took off in a battered old car north along Rt. 7, where there are mass gravesites along the old path of the Khaibur River, we took even greater care.

In Ras al-Ain, we stayed in the back room of an Armenian home as people started coming by to see who I was. “She is a Canadian Armenian looking for family roots,” the head of the family told them.

I photographed the mass graves at Tell Fakhariyah at the edge of Ras al-Ain when the coast was clear. I had to work quickly.

Government agents began to question anybody I visited after we left, even an old Kurdish grandmother who had an Armenian Genocide survivor father. One of her grandsons carried an Armenian first name.

At the time I photographed the Ras al-Ain site, the mass grave area was rented to local farmers by the Syrian Wakf (Islamic Trust), adjacent to a Muslim graveyard.

The people in this region of Syria would not eat the produce grown on the mass grave and had to sell it far afield.

The farmers crushed skulls and tossed bones aside every time they worked the land. There was no protection for this neglected and holy place. An Armenian church member tried his best to keep track of the goings-on at the mass grave. He had been beaten there several times.

The sight of so many bones in Syria going unprotected: so sad. There were little children’s molars. The bones there were mostly of women and children, as most healthy males were already killed.

After we returned to Aleppo, we shopped in the souk and photographed a genocide memorial, but I made plans to fly immediately to Paris from Aleppo—and not through Damascus, as originally planned. I got my pictures out and they remain an important document of the Armenian Genocide, especially the under-documented sight of Ras al-Ain/Tell Fakhariyah.

In 2010, I was in Syria again for an unrelated cultural story.

At that time I heard from a trusted source that Syria had given its original official, contemporaneous documents on the genocide to Turkey. The Turks maintained that since Syria was under Ottoman control in 1915, that the documents belonged to Turkey.

Syria and Turkey are on bad terms at the moment due to their respective positions on the civil war.

During this war, the town of Shaddadeh and its oil field containing an Armenian mass grave have been taken over by Al Nusra Front, Islamic rebels.

The Memorial Church in Der Zor has been blasted and nearly destroyed, and the Armenian Syrians have suffered along with their Syrian countrymen, in Aleppo and elsewhere in the country.

Ras al-Ain and the area around it has changed hands numerous times—in fierce battles between the Syrian-Kurdish rebels, the radical Islamist forces, the split Free Syrian Army. It’s a traditionally Kurdish region, and Kurdish forces are reportedly in control of Ras al-Ain now.

Dr. Fellini received good news that Tell Fakhariyah is being safely guarded, and that there is no damage to the dig site. I hope she will be able to finish her amazing work there in the future.

But what of the future for the human beings in Syria who cannot get out, when one force dislodges another on a regular basis?

It happened again in March: in the historically Armenian town of Kessab, when Al-Nusra Front forced Armenians to flee.

What of the other Armenian Genocide sites that are in regions like Der Zor and Margadeh? Is this key physical evidence of the Armenian Genocide—the Syrian mass graves—further eroding now?

For more information, please visit: www.alexandraavakian.com.

[Armenian Bishop]