Countering genocide rap, Turkey says Armenians killed many Turks

Agence France Presse — English
April 18, 2005 Monday 10:57 AM GMT

ANKARA April 18 — In a fresh step in a propaganda war against claims
that the Armenians suffered genocide under the Ottoman Empire,
Turkey’s state archive has issued a list of massacres of Turks by
Armenians between 1910 and 1922 in which over half a million people
are said to have been killed.

The release on Sunday of the list, with a total of 523,955 alleged
victims, came as part of increasing Turkish efforts to counter pressure
on the government to address the genocide allegations.

Armenians are preparing to mark the 90th anniversary on April 24 of
the start of the controversial 1915-1917 events.

Turkey categorically denies the allegations and says that hundreds of
thousands of people perished on both sides in what was civil strife
during World War I when the Armenians took up arms for independence
in eastern Anatolia and sided with Russian troops invading the
crumbling empire.

The director of the Turkish state archive, Yusuf Sarinay, said a 1915
Ottoman decision to deport the Armenians from the region, which marked
the beginning of the mass killings, was a defensive measure against
an insurgency that had already claimed many Turkish lives.

“The Armenians committed systematic massacres in certain regions in
order to become the majority there,” Sarinay was quoted as saying by
the mass-market Hurriyet newspaper on Monday.

Ankara fears that the 90th anniversary of the start of the alleged
genocide could fuel anti-Turkish sentiment in international public
opinion and cloud the country’s image at a time when it is bidding
for membership in the European Union.

Some EU politicans are pressing Turkey to address the genocide claims
in what Ankara sees a politically-motivated campaign to impede its
EU membership bid.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week proposed to Armenian
President Robert Kocharian the creation of a joint commission to
study the genocide allegations as a first step towards normalizing
ties between the two estranged neighbors.

Ankara has also declared its archives open to all historians.

The killings have already been acknowledged as genocide by a number
of countries, including France, Canada and Switzerland.