OVERRIDING HISTORY WITH SPIN

Choke the information space with pixels so there is no room left for history. This is Armenia's virtual world, in which real historical facts are perceived as a virus. Consequently, attempts to develop its own anti-virus lead to even more ludicrous results, like "Armenicum", the once much-touted anti-virus drug to treat AIDS.

Armenian leader Serzh Sargsyan's appearance on the Russian Channel One TV programme "Pozner" once again clearly demonstrated the inability of the Armenian authorities to provide an appropriate response to contemporary and historical realities. And I am not just talking about the Armenians' position on the events of 1915 in Ottoman Turkey, but also their general approach to world processes and regional politics.

Incidentally, in his rhetoric Sargsyan reaffirmed the main conclusion drawn by the world from two essentially directly opposed events that took place on one and the same day - 24 April 1915: the centenary of the victory at Canakkale [Gallipoli] and the centenary of the so-called "genocide of the Armenians". On the day when Turkey, as a sign of peace and concord, brought together past foes to pay homage to the memory of those who fell in the First World War on both sides of the front, Armenia organized a doleful show in Yerevan, fostering hatred and implanting vengeance.

"Any crime, if it is not solved, if it is not punished, is an incentive for future crimes.  And the best warning, and the most powerful element of preventing what might happen in the future, is to recognize those crimes which happened in the past," Sargsyan went on in his interview to the Russian TV channel.

Consider this! Here speaks a man who in the not so distant past confessed to the slaughter of the peaceful Azerbaijani population. "Before Xocali the Azerbaijanis thought they could mess around with us; they thought that the Armenians were incapable of raising their hands to the civilian population. We were able to break this stereotype," says Sargsyan, as quoted by the British journalist Thomas de Waal, author of "Black Garden".

Today, by calling for Turkey to be punished for an unproven accusation, the Armenian leader not only forgets his own unpunished crimes, but without realizing it, admits that the case of the "genocide of the Armenians" has still not been solved in 2015.

But who can solve a "case" 100 years old if not the historians?! By all accounts, Yerevan believes in myths rather than history. Otherwise, Sargsyan would not have rejected Ankara's proposal for a scientific study of what actually happened in 1915. Sargsyan is well aware that the historical documents will destroy his theory about the "genocide of 1915" like a house of cards, because this theory is based not on historical documents, but on works of fiction.

The Armenian leader based his reluctance to trust scholars with a study of the events of 1915 on the unique claim that such a joint commission would yield nothing because the Turkish and Armenian scholars would be influenced by their authorities. Here it is hard to disagree with the wise conclusion of Turkey's Minister for EU Affairs, Volkan Bozkir, that these words are recognition of the dependence of Armenian historiography on the political situation. In Turkey, he said, as in any other civilized country, scholars carry out their work independently.

Sargsyan's admission was in tune with the words of the representative of not just Turkey, but another civilized country - the USA, and one of Armenian origin - Robert Hewsen. "In Yerevan thy tried to convince me - even somewhat intolerantly - that we in the West should not bother about trying to conduct research and it would be better to work with Armenia if we just want to republish in other languages that which has been produced by the Armenian Academy of Sciences," Hewsen recalled.

Generally speaking, Armenian historiography is in deep conflict with science in the countries of the region and the whole world, and those who hold the different views of foreign scholars of Armenian origin in Armenia are promptly, as in 1937, listed among "enemies of the people".

One still remembers the frenzied harassment organized by the Armenians against the director of the Institute of Asian and African Countries (ISAA) at Lomonosov University, the historian Mikhail Meyer, who in June 2013, on the Russian Kultura TV channel, exposed the farce of the "genocide of the Armenians". Recently, in an exclusive interview to the Interfax agency, Meyer again stressed that the Armenians are avoiding a serious scientific study of the question.

"There is a huge cartload of Turkish documents, and yet Dashnaktsutyun still hides its own documents and does not publish them. I have seen the Turkish documents, and everything there is clear. But Dashnaktsutyun's documents are hidden in some American archives and they don't want to publish them," Meyer said.

He believes that history can only be practised on the basis of documents, and when there are no documents, speculation on the subject of history begins. The result is that genocide has turned into speculation around history, the historian noted.

"The documents must be presented - cards on the table. A hundred years have passed. What is there to hide? Show us the documents and we, the historians, will decide what actually happened. But if one side publishes documents and the other doesn't, one is inclined toward one of the sides, and that is wrong," Meyer noted.

Thus, the Russian patriarch of Turkish studies clearly defined the situation in which the Armenian authorities continue to delude the Armenian and the world public, preventing their own and foreign scholars from having access to their archives and trying to persuade the world to believe in the "genocide" merely on the basis of their verbal assertions. 

Meyer, with a sense of diplomacy typical of scholars, asks the question: "If the Armenians have documents proving that the events of 1915 were genocide, why are they hiding them? I am asking directly: Does anybody actually have any doubt that major campaigners like the Armenians would hide information favourable to them if it existed? If they had in their hands any evidence, they would certainly immediately circulate it across the world and would flood the Internet with it.

According to Meyer, "Dashnaktsutyun's documents are hidden in some American archives, and Turkey's Minister for EU Affairs, Volkan Bozkir, said specifically that these documents are in Boston, and meanwhile Armenia opposes the publication of these archives.

As we can see, there are two sides in this conflict. One of them - Turkey - states there was no genocide and is prepared to offer its archives to study the question; the other - Armenia - is trying to tell the whole world that there was some kind of "genocide of the Armenians", but at the same time it denies both local and foreign scholars access to its archives and does not allow a joint commission of historians to be set up.

One's attention is drawn to another statement by Sargsyan, which he made in a recent interview to the Euronews TV channel. "At the end of the day, what new things might the historians discover? How many people were killed? And is there much difference if one and a half million were killed or 1,449,000?" he said.

Of course, in both instances the figures he gives about the number of deaths among the Armenians in the events of 1915 are extremely inflated. But even if they reflected the truth, one cannot help but be struck by the flippancy of the Armenian president in which he allows a discrepancy of over 50,000 dead Armenians. Especially when you think that all the countries who took part in the First World War at that time have established the numbers of their dead compatriots virtually to the last man. It seems that Sargsyan is the only president who has absolutely no interest in precise figures about the number of his dead compatriots, the circumstances of their deportation and many other things besides. But that's not surprising. Whether its tens of thousands more or tens of thousands less, it's still a contrived figure, as is the whole story of the "genocide of the Armenians" in the Ottoman Empire.

That is why the Armenians are afraid of taking part in historical debates on this subject. On top of that, broad sections of the world community in those days were aware of the atrocities of the Armenian hordes against the Turkic Muslim population in Turkey and the Caucasus.

This is what the then vice-consul of Russia in Van and Erzerum, Vladimir Mayevskiy, wrote to the Foreign Ministry of tsarist Russia: "The know-ledge I have of the facts about the clash between the Armenians and Muslims in various towns in Turkey leads me to believe that the bloody deeds were carried out by the Armenians themselves everywhere." He also pointed out that Armenia's claims that they were wrongfully killed are nothing more than a collection of calculated mythical essays. And in 1915 Mayevskiy wrote a secret account entitled "Armenian-Tatar unrest in the Caucasus as one phase of the Armenian question." In this work he explains the causes of the Armenian-Muslim clashes in the Caucasus in 1905 and the role of the Armenian nationalists who provoked the slaughter, and discloses new facts about the atrocities of the Armenians in the eastern part of Turkey in 1915.

But what arguments and evidence do the Armenians produce in response? The testimonies of mostly dubious witnesses, who, it was revealed, were either not in fact witnesses to the events they described, or exaggerated Armenia's losses and concealed Turkey's. Strikingly, there are no archive documents that prove an order was given by the Ottoman Turkey authorities about the systematic annihilation of the Armenian population.  

All we have are "the letters of Talaat-pasha" [Talat pasa], concocted by one Aram Andonyan in the 1920s, which allegedly contain an order to kill the Armenians. And in practice these letters turned out to be a crude falsification. And since then everyone who wishes to prove the fact of the "genocide" of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turkey authorities has made reference to this falsification by Andonyan.

The fact that there was no unequivocal annihilation of the Armenians in 1915 has also been confirmed by other scholars, including those of Armenian origin. For example, doctor of history and corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sergey Arutyunov, told Voice of America in April 2011: "Officially speaking, this was not an order to exterminate. The order was officially to send the whole Armenian contingent to Mesopotamia, far away from the theatre of war."

In this context, the comment by the Armenian president that a study of the archives, including Armenian, is an affront to the Armenians sounds very amusing! At the same time, in his interview with Pozner, Sargsyan actually proposes a deal - if Ankara acknowledges the "genocide", then the Armenians will make no territorial or other claims against Turkey. However, straight after this he adds: "And what happens next can be the subject of negotiations." However, after signing the ill-starred Zurich protocols of 2009 Ankara has first-hand knowledge of how the Armenian authorities can "keep their word".

Overall in his interview with Pozner Sargsyan stood out for his "ready wit". For example, when asked about the reasons for Armenia's monoethnicity, he replied: "I found the answer to this question myself: because tsarist Russia was confident of the loyalty of the Armenians towards the Emperor. So there was no need to settle Armenia with other ethnic groups to be strongholds for the Russian army."

As in the case with the "genocide", on this question Sargsyan also relies not on historical documents, but on his own reasoning. It wouldn't go amiss to remind the Armenian leader about a letter by the Russian poet and diplomat A.S. Griboyedov, who was immediately involved in the resettlement of the Armenians. Writing to the Caucasian commander Count Paskevich he said: "…a large number of newly-arrived Armenians are to be sent to Araks…they have begged leave to remain in those places where they were temporarily settled the first time…"

Griboyedov also wrote: "The Armenians have been mostly settled on the lands of Muslim landowners.  More of this could have been done in the summer. The landlords, Muslims, were mostly in camps and there were few cases of their communicating with people of other religions…The migrants are cramped for space and are jostling with the Muslims who, naturally, are grumbling." 

Tsarist Russia tried to stop the displacement of the Muslim population and to preserve the medieval monuments of Azerbaijani architecture, including Yerevan, which for many centuries was the centre of the Azerbaijani Erivan Khanate. From correspondence in 1903-1914 between the Imperial Moscow Archaeological Society, on the one hand, and the Caucasian vicariate, the Erivan governor and the head of Erivan's Engineering District on the other, the whole picture of the pitiful state of the Erivan Palace and its buildings becomes evident.

However, the opposition and even blatant sabotage of the Erivan authorities prevented the khan's palace being restored. Notwithstanding the fact that the Russian Emperor Nicholas II was personally acquainted with photographs of the Erivan Palace and issued an instruction for it to be restored, no work on this was carried out. And in the 1920s-1930s, immediately after the creation of Soviet Armenia, the Armenian leaders began the total displacement of the Azerbaijani and other non-Armenian populations. By the beginning of 1990 the Azerbaijani population had been completely banished and ancient architectural monuments destroyed. At that time almost the whole Russian population had been banished from Armenia.

So here you have real genocide, when in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries the whole non-Armenian population is banished from Armenia, and then architectural and spiritual heritage reminding one of Azerbaijan's past are destroyed and Armenized. And Serzh Sargsyan tries to heap the responsibility for all this on tsarist Russia and then the USSR. 

In recent times, Azerbaijan has more than once raised before the world's public the question that Armenia, as a result of ethnic cleansing, has become the most mono-ethnic country in the world. Incidentally, the [Russian] deputy speaker Vladimir Zhirinovskiy spoke about this recently in a speech in the State Duma, in which he noted that mono-ethnic Armenia had banished almost all non-Armenians, including virtually the whole Russian population, and so cannot be a "fraternal" country to Russia.

All these are facts, backed up by documents and recorded by history. And the louder they are voiced, the more Armenia tries to override history with spin based on myths and fraud.