Bedir, this is about the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians and not the Mountainous Karabagh conflict. If you can’t even distinguish between the two events than I doubt any Armenians would want to live (even as an autonomous province) within increasingly Armenophobe Azerbaijan.

1) “It always did”. Huh? Azerbaijan was born in 1918, and Armenians held Karabakh at the time that the British were around then. Armenians have been there for 3,000 years – just look at all the old maps. When did y’all arrive again?

2) Russian: “leave Karabakh within the boundaries of Azerbaijan”. So your #2 best reason Azerbaijan get Karabakh back is because Soviet Russia said so at one point?!?! Wow. And what if your buddies in Russia now say that “leave Azerbaijan within the boundaries of Armenia”? Following your logic, you should be fine with that.

Don’t worry about the Turkish education system, it is not failing you. It’s just that the truth keeps seeping through the cracks in Turkish society, partly due to this “internet” thing. Sorry, but you’re in a losing battle, closed societies are opening up everywhere, and blind nationalism is failing…

Have a nice day!
Raffi

Allegations of Armenian genocide are racist and dishonest history. They are racist because they imply that Turkish or Muslim dead are not important, only Armenian or Christian dead are.

This racist approach ignores the immense Muslim (mostly Turkish) suffering: about 3 million dead during the WWI; 524,000 Muslims at the hands of Armenian nationalists. By ignoring the suffering of one side completely, any war may be made to look like a genocide.

And the allegations of Armenian genocide are dishonest because they deliberately dismiss “The Six T’s” of the Turkish-Armenian conflict:

1) Tumult (as in many violent Armenian armed uprisings between 1882 and 1920)

2) Terrorism (by Armenian nationalists and militias from 1882-1920 perpetrated on non-combatant Muslim civilians, mostly women and children, and elderly men)

3) Treason (Armenians joining the invading enemy armies and killing their Muslim neighbors and other fellow citizens, including the Ottoman-Jews)

4) Territorial demands (where Armenians were a minority, not a majority)

5) Turkish suffering and losses (i.e. those caused only by the Armenian nationalists)

6) TERESET (Temporary Resettlement) triggered by the first five T’s above and amply documented as such; not to be equated to the Armenian misrepresentations as genocide.)

Armenians, thus, effectively put an end to their millennium of relatively peaceful and harmonious co-habitation in Anatolia with Muslims by killing their Muslim/Turkish neighbors and openly joining the invading enemy. Western diplomats and Christian missionaries were behind all of the “6 T’s” listed above.

Excluding responsible opposing views in covering any controversial issue is a form of censorship which violates the notion of freedom of speech. Decent people everywhere have a responsibility to ensure that the public is given a fair chance to hear all sides of a controversial piece of history such as the Turkish-Armenian conflict. “Partisan accounts” of history should not be promoted as “settled history” . We must all strive to “teach the children well.” Fairness, honesty, and truth are all that I ask.

Turks and Armenians—and other Muslims and Christians— enjoyed a reasonably harmonious co-habitation in Anatolia for a millennium (that’s a thousand years!) under that “crescent” that the you seem to subtly belittle.

Turks liked and trusted the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire so much that Turks called the Armenians “Millet-i Sadika” (the loyal nation.) Armenians enjoyed high standards of living in the Ottoman Empire mostly engaging in trade, construction, arts, and more, while Muslims did most of the heavy lifting of the empire such as agriculture, soldiery, administration. (It is interesting to note that some Armenian propagandists use this as a proof of inequity, however, when the Armenians were given the right to soldiery after 1908, the Armenians invented ways to get out of that civic duty (see the letter by Armenians sent to the Lausanne Conference in 1923 asking for the right to be free from soldiery to be bestowed upon the Armenian community.)

The above picture, i.e. with all its shortcomings and/or defects, was still the nearest thing to perfection, given the state of humanity through the middle ages around the world, especially in Europe with wars, conquests, colonization, slavery, mass killings, mass deportations, crusaders, inquisitions, holocausts, pogroms, and more. Compared to all this mayhem in Europe in the last millennium, the Ottoman Empire with its unique “ millet system”, was so peaceful and orderly that it could be considered “the USA of Europe” at the time. Armenians were one of the major beneficiaries of this centuries-long stability.

All that started changing for the Turkish-Armenian relations after 1878 Berlin Peace Conference. Russia started claiming special protector’s right over the Ottoman-Armenian community with an keen eye towards capturing Istanbul and the straits (Bosporus & Dardanelles) to extend the Russian imperial reach into warm waters of the Mediterranean. Britain and France were not exactly innocent bystanders as they were eyeing other parts of the Ottoman Empire for themselves.

The U.S. Protestant missionaries, headquartered in Boston, with their many educational and medical facilities dotting Anatolia used as convenient cover for their missionary activities, focused their attention on the Armenian community once they realized that proselytization of Muslims, Jews, or Greeks were nearly impossible. The Boston missionaries started dividing and polarizing not only the communities of the Ottoman Empire but also the Ottoman-Armenian community itself. The missionary sermons were incendiary, pitting Armenians against Turks, Muslims against Christians, and even Protestants against the Gregorians and Catholic. Thus, these religious men abused the traditional hospitality of Turks by organizing a hate-filled resistance among the Armenians against the Turkish rule, causing untold miseries on all sides… These men of god, thus, caused much spilling of innocent blood in the name of god. In that sense, the Protestant missionaries may well be considered the guiltiest party of them all, followed by Tsarist Russia, Imperial Britain, Colonialist France, and Western media (The New York Times, for example, topping the list in biased coverage by publishing 145 anti-Turkish articles in 1915 alone with an incredible “ZERO” Turkish rebuttals allowed!)

The Armenians started creating revolutionary organizations: “Ermenakan” in Van, Turkey (1882), “Hunchack” in Geneva, Switzerland (1887), Dashnaksutiun in Tbilisi, Georgia (1890) and many others of many sizes and locations. Almost without exception, they were all bent on armed resistance against the Turkish rule. The Armenians used propaganda, agitation, terror, rebellions, and supreme treason, in that order, from 1882 to 1915, when finally some of the Armenians (not all) were sent on a Tereset (Temporary Resettlement).

Tereset was a justified military measure because the Armenian bands would conduct violent raids on the unprotected Muslim villages, frustrate the Ottoman military supply lines, and even harass the rear of the Ottoman Army during a time of war. No country (including the U.S. , the European countries, and others) would tolerate this kind of wide open rebellion, pandemic treason, and omnipresent terror to be put into action by any community, large or small, at a time of war the least of all.

The Armenian bands would launch their bomb and gun attacks during the night and then hide in ordinary homes during the day, turning Armenian women and children to little more than human shields for their murderous and treasonous acts. Those who cry out today “Why did the Turks force some helpless Armenian women and children to move?” should re-phrase their questions and first ask the nationalist Armenian leaders “Why did you use the non-combatant Armenian women and children as your cover before and human shields after your dastardly acts of terror against the Muslims?”

Frustrated by the persistently biased coverage of the Turkish-Armenian civil war during WWI and the ensuing censorship of Turkish views in the Western media and even in some Armenian-run Turkish media, I have coined a new term back in 2003—my humble gift to the English language (and its companion term in Turkish: “AHLAKKIRIM”) as a thoughtful and long overdue supplement to Rafael Lemkin’s much abused definition of genocide: “ethocide”.

A brief definition of ethocide is “extermination of ethics by systematic and malicious mass-deception in exchange for political, economical, social, religious, and other favors and benefits.”

The civil war that had been raging up to 1915 and the Tereset it inevitably resulted in was no genocide, but what the Armenians and their sympathizers did in misrepresenting it ever since is clearly ethocide.

I urge . therefore, an end to the ethocidal coverage of the Turkish-Armenian conflict, as in Taraf newspaper and other such biased media.

Ergun KIRLIKOVALI
Son of Turkish survivors from both maternal and paternal sides

Irvine, California, USA
5 September 2008

I have no doubt that you are either lost due to the lack of education or brainwashed by Armenian diaspora, unless you want to become next Orhan Pamuk to win a prize. It is very sad that the lack of good education in Turkey concerning Armenian attrocities against all Turks generate people like you who shamelessly say “hepimiz ermeniyiz” and so on. I can’t believe that while some Turks are becoming desperate to reconcile with Armenians, Armenians keep teaching hatred to their children. Regarding Karabakh, again, this is another proof that you became a target of Armenian propoganda. How can Karabakh be given to Azerbaijan if it has always been historic part of Azerbaijan. If you look at Soviet archive documents, the ones that Armenian tried very hard to destroy, the documents use the following: “ostavit Karabakh v sostave Azerbaidjana.” This means in Russian: “leave Karabakh within the boundaries of Azerbaijan” This decision was issued in response to Armenians’ ongoing claim against Karabakh, which wasn’t successful that time.

Bedir Memmedli, Board Director
U.S. Azeris Network
Washington, DC, USA
http://www.usazeris.org