HISTORY VERSUS MYTHOLOGY

In recent years, the Armenian authorities and the leaders of the Armenian diaspora, especially in the USA and France, and in other European, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries, have made noticeable progress on the international recognition of the so-called "Armenian genocide". In October last year, the National Assembly of France adopted a bill that criminalized the denial of the "Armenian genocide". Like the denial of the Holocaust, the denial of the "Armenian genocide" leads to a fine of 45,000 euros and one year's imprisonment in France. On 10 October, the US Congress House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs adopted a resolution on the so-called "genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1918". The essence of the resolution is that it clearly calls on the United States to consider the fact of the "genocide" in its foreign policy.

What causes special concern here is not that the resolution has been put forward. There have been two attempts to pass this initiative in Congress before - in 2000 and 2005, but they were not crowned with success. It cannot be ruled out that the resolution will meet the same fate this time as well. The problem is that the myth of the "genocide" is getting more and more political and legislative support and a propaganda outcry in various countries of the world, which reflects the strengthening of the positions of the Armenian lobby worldwide. The reason is probably that the policy of ensuring the recognition of the "Armenian genocide" has become an important priority of Armenia's foreign policy and the Armenian diaspora. As a result, the pseudogenocide has already been recognized by 22 countries, including Uruguay - the first country to have recognized it in 1965. In the following years, it was officially recognized and condemned by many countries of Europe, Russia, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile and regional governments of Wales and Spain's Basque Provinces. Incidentally, 40 states have already recognized the "genocide of Armenians" in the United States itself.

Based on gross historical falsifications, the myth of the "genocide" is a slander about history and the Turkish people. It incites hatred for the Turkish people, provoking hostile actions and threatening its security. For us it is also important that this policy has long gone beyond the framework of Armenian-Turkish relations and directly affects the interests of Azerbaijani statehood. In this regard, it is the duty of any conscientious historian and responsible politician to expose the myth of the so-called "genocide".

1. Assessment of the 1915-1918 events

In order to find out in a clear and unbiased manner what really happened in Ottoman Turkey in 1915-1918 and why the Armenian falsification of history has taken on such a global and large-scale nature, we should address the opinion of American history science. It is competent and unlike Armenian and Azerbaijani, or Turkish and Russian science, it is neutral and impartial. Many American scholars and diplomats themselves witnessed the events of the early 20th century and left their witness accounts and memoirs about them. It is no accident that it was exactly in the USA where the first collective assessment of the myth of the "Armenian genocide" was given. On 19 May 1985, 69 authoritative American scholars and professors from major US universities specializing in Turkish history published in The Washington Post and The New York Times an open letter to US Congress which was trying to recognize "the Armenian genocide" in a legislative manner. They clearly gave the following assessment of those events.

Firstly, according to the authors of the letter, what happened in 1915-1923 was not genocide, but "serious inter-communal warfare (perpetrated by Muslim and Christian irregular forces), complicated by disease, famine, suffering and massacres in Anatolia and adjoining areas during the First World War."

Secondly, Armenian suffering "cannot be viewed as separate from the suffering experienced by the Muslim inhabitants of the region," the authors of the letter believe.

Thirdly, the scientists described the document in support of the pseudogenocide, which was lobbied in US Congress at the time, as "a resolution, based on historically questionable assumptions, which can only damage the cause of honest historical enquiry, and damage the credibility of the American legislative process."

Fourthly, without restricting themselves to such assessments, the 69 most authoritative US historians urged open access for dispassionate historians to the archives of all countries linked to those events and that period (former Soviet republics, Turkey, Bulgaria and Syria) and make accusations only after all events are clarified. "Until they become available the history of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1923 cannot be adequately known," the authors of the letter think.

2. The causes of the events

However, even this letter, any mention of which Armenian scientists and politicians are avoiding, despite all its clarity, is only a mild and diplomatically delicate form of denying any genocide "claims" of Armenian politicians. Some scientists, for example, the well-known American scientist Justin McCarthy, the author of authoritative scientific works on Turkey's history and population in the late 19th and early 20th century and a former volunteer who worked in Turkey; Professor J.C. Hurewitz from Columbia University; Professor Stanford Shaw from Californian University; Professor Bernard Lewis from Princeton University; and many other authors of the open letter gave clearer and more impartial assessments of these events in their individual works.

Describing the events of 1915 as a civil war inside the First World War and Russian-Turkish war, they pointed at the real roots of the conflict. For example, they pointed out that the Ottoman government was forced in 1915 to organize a mass resettlement of the Armenian population from the areas invaded by the Russian army (from six provinces of Eastern Anatolia), firstly, because the Armenian population openly supported Armenian khumbs (detachments of volunteers). From the moment they were set up in late 1914 (nine detachments of up to 9,000 people were set up by the middle of 1915) till the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in December 1917, they carried out hostilities against the legal authorities of Ottoman Turkey in order to create - with support from Tsarist Russia - an Armenian state in an area dominated by the Turkish population. Secondly, the purpose was to prevent the Armenian population from helping the invading Russian army and to avert bloodshed and confrontation between Armenian and Muslim civilians. This mass process was aggravated by disease and famine in Anatolia and in surrounding areas during WWI and led to numerous casualties. In his book "Armenian Terrorism: History as Poison and Antidote", McCarthy says that in April 1915 "Armenian revolutionary groups stepped their anti-Ottoman activities" and that "whether or not hindsight and modern morality tell us that the deportations were a mistake, no-one can seriously doubt that the Ottoman government had reason to distrust many of the Armenians of Anatolia. Because of the assistance given by the Armenians to invading Russian armies in 1828, and 1877, the Ottomans decided that they could not trust the Armenians."

3. The role of Anatolian Armenians in the 1915-1923 events

It is important to say that the almost unanimous assessment, common in Western scientific circles, of the link between the causes and consequences of the true goals of Armenian leaders and means of achieving them during the events of 1915-1923, is confirmed by the open confessions of the Armenian leaders themselves. The head of the Armenian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Boghos Nubar, openly wrote this to the editor of London's Times on 27 January 1919 in a letter (it was published on 30 January) in which he admitted this, leaving valuable proof of the Armenians' treacherous role in the events in Eastern Anatolia: "The unspeakable suffering and the dreadful losses that have befallen the Armenians by reason of their faithfulness to the Allies are now fully known... Ever since the beginning of the war the Armenians fought by the side of the Allies on all fronts... the Armenians have been belligerents de facto, since they indignantly refused to side with Turkey." What was the reason for the Armenians' "indignation" which turned into separatism and an armed revolt against their own government and their own country? The political objective of the Armenian revolt in the rear of the Turkish troops is clearly explained in the same letter from Boghos Nubar: "In virtue of all these considerations the Armenian National Delegation asked that the Armenian nation should be recognized as a belligerent... I wish strongly to urge that the Armenians, having of their own free will, cast their lot with the champions of right and justice, the victory of the Allies over their common enemies has secured to them a right to independence."

This goal is confirmed by a report sent by British diplomat Austen Layard from Istanbul to London 40 years before (18 March 1878). Reporting his conversation with the Armenian archbishop of Constantinople, Nerses, he pointed at the active support of the Armenian Church for the idea of an autonomous Armenian state and at the intesification among Armenians of the campaign in support of the overthrow of the rule and government of the Ottoman Empire. "These intrigues are very active and intensive, and to all appearances, the commotion among the Armenians is caused by these intrigues... Autonomy should end in annexation by Russia, which is clearly the patriatch's intention," the British diplomat warned.

The authoritatitve American historian John Joey, who witnessed those events, wrote the following in this connection in November 1928: "Few Americans who mourn the misfortune of the Armenians know that before the rise of the nationalistic ambitions, beginning from the '1870s', the Armenians were a privileged part of Turkey's population or that during the Great War (WWI), they trecherously surrendered Turkish cities to Russian invaders, that they boasted about creating an army of 150,000 people in order to start a civil war and that they set fire to at least 100 Turkish villages and exterminated their population."

The Armenians' betrayal was so obvious that not only scholars and diplomats, but also many other eyewitnesses of those events confirmed these facts in their reports. Arthur Chester, a businessman and representative of the United States Shipping Board in Istanbul, described the role the Armenians played in the Ottoman Empire (February 2003): "At the front the Armenians used blank cartridges and deserted in droves. This was bad enough, but the Armenians were not satisfied with this form of treachery. The provinces in the rear of the army had a large Armenian population, and these people, feeling that there was an excellent chance of the Russians defeating the Turks, decided to make it a certainty by rising up in the rear of the army and cutting it off from its base of supplies." Chester also pointed out that "the Armenians in Turkey have not only full representation (in the government - author's note) but special privileges not accorded by any other country." Touching on the causes of bloody warfare between the Armenians and the Turks, Chester, like most of other foreign eyewitnesses, said that "Armenian leaders intentionally instigated these massacres for the sole purpose of obtaining foreign sympathy and political aid."

Later, another American scholar, a professor of history and diplomacy from Harvard University, William Langer, also admitted in his book "The Diplomacy of Imperialism", published in New York in 1968, that during the events of 1915-1923 and long before them, "the direct aim of Armenian campaigners was to incite riots and provoke inhuman retaliation and intervention from foreign powers. For this reason, they operated in provinces where the Armenians were in the minority in order for repression to be more evident. One of the revolutionary Armenians said in 1890 that Hnchak (An Armenian party of organized terror - author's note) Armenian bands would watch their opportunity to kill Turks and Kurds, set fire to their villages and then make their escape into the mountains. The enraged Muslims will then rise, and fall upon the defenceless Armenians and slaughter them with such barbarity that Russia will enter in the name of humanity and Christian civilization and take possession."

In this context, it is worth mentioning a letter from the US high commissioner and ambassador in Istanbul (from 1919 to 1927), Admiral Mark Bristol. He said that the Armenian leaders "did everything in the world to keep the pot boiling by attacking Kurds, Turks and Tartars (Azerbaijanis - author's note); by committing outrages against the Muslims; by giving no representation whatever to the Molokans which are a large factor in the population of the Caucasus Armenia; by massacring the Muslims; and robbing and destroying their homes; and finally by starting an attack against the Turks which resulted in a counter attack by the Turks, and then the Armenians deserted and ran away and even would not stand and defend their women and children. The acts of the Armenian army at Kars absolutely disgusted our Americans," the author said in conclusion. The treacherous role of Armenians is also proved by numerous documents from the archives of the French Foreign Ministry, published by Armenian historian Arthur Beglaryan in the digest "Great Powers: The Ottoman Empire and Armenians in French Archives (1914-1918)".

And finally, it is worth mentioning the judgements of Professor P.N. Milyukov, the leader of the influential cadet party of the Russian Empire and future foreign minister in the provisional government (in 1917), which he made in his article "The Armenian Question and Russian Diplomacy" (1916). Stressing the Armenians' loyalty to Russia and even calling them a "small ally", Milyukov admits: "From the moment the war between Russia and Turkey became inevitable, Armenians both in Russia and Turkey did not hesitate to identify their policy once and for all - for Russia against Turkey... The Armenians demonstrated their allegiance to Russia not only in words, speeches and declarations, but also in deeds."

4. Figures

Figures are of special importance in Armenian peacekeeping. Armenians scientists and politicians have managed to increase the number of the so-called "victims" of the pseudogenocide to 1.5 million. "I first discovered that something was wrong with the accepted wisdom on the Armenians when I found that many more Anatolian Muslim had died than Armenians. That did not seem to be genocide," McCarthy writes in his book. The author draws the conclusion that Muslims suffered more as a result of all these events - war, massacre and deportation - including 400,000 Turks, mainly from Azerbaijan, who were evicted from the Caucasus by the authorities of Tsarist Russia during WWI. 870,000 Armenians who lived in the eastern provinces of Turkey were deported whereas the overall number of Armenians at the time came to about 1.3 million. "In Anatolia as a whole, 600,000 Armenians and 2.5 million Muslims had died. If this was genocide, it was a strange genocide indeed, one in which many more killers than victims perished," he said. We cannot but agree with the final conclusion of the American scholar: "Those who want to see Muslims as the organizers of the genocide oddly refuse to recognize Muslims as the victims of this genocide... This is a story of human suffering, but that is not the way the story has been told. Instead of the truth of a human disaster, a great myth has arisen, the myth of the Evil Turk and the Good Armenian... The false picture of Armenian genocide has become the only picture seen." We should add - it was the only one until scholars exposed the Armenian falsification of history which was used for a long time - and is still being used in some countries - as a fact just because it is repeated all the time.

The Armenian falsification is also exposed by another American historian, the professor of Californian University, Stanford Shaw, who says that fewer Armenians were killed. In his book "The History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey", which was published in 1979, he says that "the Entente propaganda mills and Armenian nationalists claimed that over a million Armenians were massacred during the war. But this was based on the assumption that the prewar Armenian population numbered about 2.5 million. The total number of Armenians in the empire before the war in fact came to at most 1,300,000. About half of these were resident in the affected areas, but the number actually transported… came to no more than 400,000." Then Shaw draws the conclusion that "about 200,000 perished as a result not only of the transportation but also of the same conditions of famine, disease, and war action that carried away some 2 million Muslims at the same time."

But perhaps, the memoirs of the eyewitness of those events, Admiral Mark Bristol, can be regarded as the most valuable and undeniable evidence. On 28 March 1921, he wrote in his letter to Washington regarding the consideration of the Armenian question at a US Senate meeting: "I see that reports are being freely circulated in the United States that the Turks massacred thousands of Armenians in the Caucasus. Such reports are repeated so many times it makes my blood boil... The circulation of such false reports in the United States, without refutation, is an outrage and is certainly doing the Armenians more harm than good." The return letter from James Barton, head of an organization helping the Middle East, found in the US Congress library, is also interesting. Dealing with Ottoman Armenians and being aware of their inclination towards exaggerations, he admitted in a letter on 6 May 1921 that the Armenian leaders "are constantly reporting atrocities which never occurred and giving endless misinformation with regard to the situation in Armenia and in Turkey."

5. Demographics and politics

In order to understand the strategic line of Armenian policy in Turkey, it is important to answer the question as to whether Armenians had grounds to claim autonomy within the territory where they launched their rebellious activities. Let's address McCarthy's book, which we quoted earlier, as the American scholars themselves regard him as the most authoritative expert in the Turkish population. "Despite the presence of "Armenia" on nineteenth century maps and the assertions of European politicians who had no way to know the truth, there was no Armenia in the Ottoman Empire," he thinks. According to McCarthy, "the area claimed as "Turkish Armenia" was commonly known as the Six Vilayets - Van, Bitlis, Mamuretulaziz, Diyarbakir, Sivas and Erzurum. In 1912, there were only 870,000 Armenians in the Six Vilayets. Armenians were less than one-fifth of the population of the Six Vilayets as a whole. In some provinces of the Six Vilayets, Muslims outnumbered Armenians 6 to 1… As many Armenians lived in the rest of the Ottoman Empire as in the Six Vilayets. However, even if all the Armenians of the Empire had come together to live in Eastern Anatolia, the Muslims would still have outnumbered them by more than two to one. The impossibility of building a modern state with such numbers is obvious."

In another book "Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (1912-1926)", which was published in 1984, McCarthy, having comprehensively studied statistics about the demographic situation, population density and migration flows of Armenians in Eastern Anatolia, says once again that "in the late 19th century and in the early 20 century, the Armenians were a fairly small minority in all provinces of the Ottoman Empire" and that "as a whole, Muslims outnumbered Armenians 4.5 to 1". He draws the conclusion that "proceeding from nations' right to self-determination, we cannot talk about Armenia's existence... Even if the Armenians of the whole world have come to live in 'the six provinces', the Muslims would still have outnumbered them."

Similar confessions on this issue were made in 1984 by the US Congress adviser on foreign affairs, Paul Henze, in his book "The Roots of Armenian Violence: How Far Back Do They Extend?". The author maintains that in the territories claimed by the Armenians, "they were outnumbered by Muslims in every one of the six eastern provinces traditionally called Armenian. In the city of Erzurum, which many nationalists regarded as their natural capital, Armenians were a distinct minority... An independent Armenia would inevitably contain only a minority of Armenians unless the Muslims were expelled."

The last thesis is the key to understanding the essence of Armenian terror and violence against the Muslims not only in the early 20th century in Turkey, but also throughout the 20th century in Azerbaijan. The correction of the demographic situation by exterminating and ousting Muslims from their land with the help of Russian bayonets in order to create an Armenian state - this is the true intention of the Armenian strategy and the reason for most of the regional conflicts. In other words, all this only confirms that the Armenian leaders made a pre-planned attempt to exterminate an ethnic group in order to form an Armenian state on the "liberated" territories. It is exactly this policy that is called "genocide". In 1918-1922, this policy, which failed in Turkey, was carried out much more "successfully" in Armenia itself where the Azerbaijani population was the majority in the early 20th century and in Azerbaijan which was "stripped" of its territory stage by stage in 1920-1994. 

On the whole, the events of 1915-1923 were an episode of a wider historical and political context as in the period 1820-1920, more than two million Caucasus Muslims and Turks, first of all Azerbaijanis, were deported to Turkey by force and their land was populated by Turkish and Persian Armenians during the Russian-Turkish and Russian-Persian wars and the colonialist policy of the Russian Empire. "The historical truth is that the expansion of the Russian Empire violated the traditional balance of peoples of the Caucasus and Eastern Anatolia," McCarthy writes in this regard. "All peoples suffered, but if we speak in the language of figures - the number of those killed and ousted, those who suffered most of all were Crimean and Caucasus Muslims."