THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY: THE TRUTH BEHIND THE ARMENIAN CRISIS OF 1915
By Rachel Salomon

Since 1915, Armenian activists have deceived many people into believing that
there was unquestionably a genocide that occurred against them within the
former Ottoman Empire. However, history demonstrates that there is another
side to what happened in Anatolia during the First World War, a view that
has been expounded upon by prominent historians such as Professor Bernard
Lewis of Princeton University and Professor Stanford Shaw of the University
of California. According to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention of the
Crime of Genocide, there must be a clear intent to destroy an entire nation,
race, ethnicity, or religion in order to be classified as genocide
("Convention on the Prevention"). Going by this internationally recognized
definition, the Armenian case is not genocide, for there is no proof that
the Ottoman Turks intended to annihilate the Armenian people.

Genocide is not a word that should be tossed around lightly. It is true that
there have been genocides, such as the Jewish Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia,
Kosovo, Cambodia, and East Timor, which have occurred throughout the 20th
century. Some cases of genocide, like that of the Sudan, are going on as we
speak. In each of these cases, the goal of annihilation of an entire group
of people has been on the agenda of the ruling government. For this reason,
they are genocides and should be classified as such.

However, other cases, such as that of the Armenians, are unfortunate
tragedies that have taken place in times of extremely brutal wars, but they
are not genocides because the intent of the annihilation of an entire people
has been lacking from the situation. All suffering that occurred during the
First World War should be recognized, but it would be criminal to belittle
the suffering that occurs during actual genocides by equating the natural
consequences from an exceedingly bloody war with the unique crime of
genocide. As Professor Bernard Lewis once said, "My loyalties are to the
truth." Throughout this entire essay, my goal is not to deny an indisputable
genocide, but to demonstrate that an unfortunate incident has been labeled
unjustly as genocide to the depreciation of incidents that the United
Nations defines as actual genocides.

Americans and Europeans have heard many lies about Turkey from powerful
Armenian lobbyist organizations. For instance, some Armenians allege that
over 1.5 million Armenians died in Eastern Anatolia. However, Turkish
demographic statistics taken prior to World War One prove that fewer than
1.5 million Armenians lived throughout the entire Ottoman Empire, which
included all of Anatolia, significant parts of Europe, North Africa, the
Caucasus, and the Middle East ("Turkey"). Even the Armenian delegation at
the Paris Peace Conference in 1920 noted the large portions of Armenians who
survived the war. In sum, 280,000 Armenians remained in Anatolia, while
700,000 had immigrated to other countries. If 1.5 million Armenians had been
slaughtered by Turks, given the demographics, there would not have been a
single Armenian who survived the war.

It is true that many Armenians were killed: "Historian and demographer, Dr.
Justin McCarthy of the University of Louisville, calculates the actual
losses as slightly less than 600,000. This figure agrees with those provided
by the British historian Arnold Toynbee, by most early editions of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, and approximates the number given by Monseigneur
Touchet, a French missionary" ("Turkey"). All of these deaths are tragic and
should be recognized in the history books. However, it is also important to
remember that many Turkish, Russian, French, British, German, Canadian, and
American citizens also died during the exact same time period. It was a
brutal era in human history with many peoples from many nations dying.
Armenians were not unique in this aspect.

Nevertheless, in order to gain statehood from land carved out of the former
Ottoman Empire, Armenian activists needed to prove that the crime of
genocide had occurred so that they would have foreign support. Given their
unfriendly relations with their neighbors, they needed powerful allies in
order to become a state. Once Armenia became a state, they knew that they
would need foreign aid to survive. Armenian activists knew that foreign
powers would not support them unless they could provide evidence that a
Christian people had been sought after for extermination. In order to prove
an Armenian Genocide, they found it necessary to commit outright
intellectual fraud. Without this fabricated support, there is no proof that
such a genocide took place.

The infamous Talat Pasha Telegrams, which have been used as pivotal
supporting evidence for all Armenian arguments against Turks, were an
invention. The originals of the papers copied by the Armenian author Aram
Andonian were never seen by the British War Office. When the British Foreign
Office enquired about them to General Allenby, it was discovered that these
documents were not found by the British during their occupation of Istanbul,
but were produced by an unidentified Armenian political organization in
Paris (Delen). However, without the originals, it is still quite evident
that the Talat Pasha documents were a scam. When Andonian dated a memo in
his book, he claimed that Mustafa Abdulhalik Bey was the Governor of Aleppo,
while the actual Governor of Aleppo on the date noted was Bekir Sami Bey.
Andonian lacks the proper knowledge of the Rumi calendar (the lunar calendar
of the Ottoman Empire) that would be necessary in order to create a
believable forgery of an Ottoman document (Delen).

The Armenian lobbyists often distribute a photograph of human skulls with
their publications, claiming that this was an example of Turkish savagery.
In reality, this supposed photograph was a painting entitled "The Apotheosis
of War" that was created in 1872 by the Russian master Vassili Vereshchagin.
This painting was made forty-three years before the alleged genocide and can
be seen today in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow (Delen).

Armenian political activists have been notorious for playing off of the
emotions of the Jewish Holocaust, so that people will associate Jewish
suffering with the supposed Armenian Genocide. Many advocates of the
Armenian cause refer to a quote by Hitler that states, "Who, after all,
speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?" By referring to this
quote, Turks are deceptively portrayed as Nazis; an unfair tactic given that
there is no proof that Hitler ever made such a statement. Exhibit US-28, as
the Armenians called it, was never presented by the prosecution as evidence
at the Nuremberg Trials. William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich, states that this record was "embellished by persons who
were not present at the meeting at Berghof," where Hitler supposedly made
the above statement on Armenia (Delen). Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon
Peres stated on behalf of the Jewish people, "We reject attempts to create a
similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing
similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went
through but not a genocide."

After all, the Jewish people were law-abiding citizens who were murdered
ruthlessly throughout German-Occupied Europe. There was a clear intent on
the part of the Nazis to annihilate the entire Jewish people. To the
contrary, only in Eastern Anatolia, where Armenians were rioting and the
Ottoman Empire was losing ground, did relocations and abuses against
Armenians occur. The Ottoman Empire did not seek the massacre of all
Armenians as one of its priorities. If they had such a goal, they would have
attacked Armenians in Ottoman strongholds, such as Istanbul and Izmir, just
as much as they did in Eastern Anatolia. The Nazis sought to exterminate all
Jews, resulting in Jewish deaths occurring throughout the entire Nazis
Empire without discrimination. To the contrary of the Ottoman situation,
Jews were most safe in places such as the South of France, where the Nazis
had the least amount of authority.

Clearly, the world has some serious misconceptions about what happened in
the Ottoman Empire during World War One, for the truth is that the majority
of Turks had a desire to live in peace within their own land. Turkey had no
desire to randomly slaughter their neighbors. When Turks invaded a country,
they did not force the population to convert to Islam or impose their
culture on the natives. Tolerance was Ottoman policy. It is a fact that both
Christians and Jews prospered as merchants, bankers, doctors, philosophers,
educators, religious figures and even as politicians in the former Ottoman
Empire.

The Armenians significantly contributed to ruining the peace and stability
that once existed within the lands of the former Ottoman Empire. They were
the ones that destroyed their once favored minority status by slaughtering
their Turkish neighbors. The Armenian political factions were the ones who
massacred the entire Muslim population in the province of Van in 1914, in
anticipation of the arrival of invading Russian forces (Shaw 314). In
Turkey, I learned from a former Turkish naval officer that during the First
World War, while the men were away fighting in the war, the Armenians would
go into Turkish villages and kill all of the women and children in cold
blood. It was Armenian policy to kill as many Turks as possible, just so
that they could claim a majority in enough of the land to have an
independent state. As Stanford Shaw wrote in his book, History of the
Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey,

Knowing their numbers would never justify their territorial ambitions,
Armenians looked to Russia and Europe for the fulfillment of their aims.
Armenian treachery in this regard culminated at the beginning of the First
World War with the decision of the revolutionary organizations to refuse to
serve their state, the Ottoman Empire, and to assist instead other invading
Russian armies. Their hope was their participating in the Russian success
would be rewarded with an independent Armenian state carved out of the
Ottoman territories. Armenian political leaders, army officers, and common
soldiers began deserting in droves. (314)

This policy resulted in a Turkish assault on Armenian villages in Eastern
Anatolia, the collapse of an empire, and an Armenian republic that was part
of the Soviet Union; it did not give Armenians the independence that they
desired until the Soviet Union collapsed.

What happened to the Armenians is sad, but they really have no one to blame
for their causalities but themselves: "Their violent political aims, not
their race, ethnicity, or religion, rendered them subject to relocation"
("Turkey"). This is not genocide, but rather an example of a weak state
fighting for its self-defense against invading forces who were siding with
once favored minority groups inside of the country. Both Turks and Armenians
suffered immensely from such internal strife. "The conditions that obtained
in Eastern Turkey were hospitable neither for Turks, nor for other people
living in the region. Poverty, cold, epidemics were claiming lives"
(Tashan). The world should look at what happened in 1915 as a heartbreaking
example of what can happen to a country in the midst of war, not as
Armenians suffering as the direct result of a genocide orchestrated by
Turks.

Work Cited

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Art.
2.

Delen, Demir. "Armenian Forgeries and Falsifications." Assembly of Turkish
American Associations. 12 March 2005. < http://www.ataa.org/
ataa/ref/arm2_fcta.html >

Lewis, Prof. Bernard. Interview. Dalia Karpel. Haaretz Daily, Jerusalem. 23
Jan. 1998.

Peres, Shimon. "Quote by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres." Turkish
Daily News. 11 April 2001. 12 March 2005.
<http://www.ataa.org/ataa/ref/peres.html&...

Shaw, Prof. Stanford. "History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey."
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 29 October 1976.

Tashan, Seyfi. "Armenian Question and the Western Powers." Turkish Daily
News. April 2002. 12 March 2005.
<http://www.theturkishtimes.com/archive/0...

Turkey. Embassy of the Republic of Turkey. Armenian Allegations of Genocide:
The Issues and the Facts. 24 April 2002. 12 March 2005.
<http://www.turkishembassy.org/government...