The Guilty One is Talat Pasha
by MEHMET KAMIS

ZAMAN, Turkey
May 5 2005

Yeghisapet Kesabian is 105 years old. He lives in Lebanon; one of the
last eyewitnesses of the expulsion. She is fluent in Turkish. During
the expulsion of 1915, he came from Hatay to Syria, which then belonged
to the Ottoman Empire.

During the journey, he says, they went through great hardships;
they walked for days and the soldiers protected them from attacks. A
year after settling in the Bekaa Vallley, Kesabian and his relatives
returned to his hometown, Samandag. He married and dwelled there for
23 years. When Hatay was included in Turkey in 1939, he returned to
Lebanon upon French ecouragement.

In the last issue of Aksiyon weekly news magazine, the “Other
Armenians” dosier penned by Hasim Soylemez and photograohed by
Selahattin Sevi will make you change your point of view a great deal.
In the middle of Beirut, the story of 100,000 Armenians who speak
Turkish, follow Turkey step by step, and continue Turkish traditions
and customs they learned while they lived in Anatolia will shock you.
The Armenian neighborhood in Beirut is a place where every single
person from the age of seven to seventy knows Turkish, eats kebap,
admires the footballer Hakan Sukur, listens to Turkish singer Ibrahim
Tatlises, roots for Turkish football teams, and watches Turkish
television on cable network.

The early 1900s were indeed unfortunate years in the Ottoman Empire.
Nationalist movements instigated by the great powers along with World
War I, which was made worse for us by simple-minded administrators
looking for adventures, cornered the Ottomans and meanwhile
encouraged Armenian nationalists in Russia. Eastern Anatolia was in
chaos. Tashnak gangs incited by Russia spread fear. These stories
are all known. There was a problem in the air; however, the solution
of this problem was nonesense. A group led by Talat Pasha decided to
expel all the Armenians living in Eastern Anatolia to the south and
apply the decision regardless of the consequences.

Talat Pasha is the man who, though formerly a postman, came to power
through deposing Sultan Abdulhamit, and then carried the empire into
World War I and caused the disintegration of it into pieces. Talat
Pasha is the one who perpetrated illegal actions to force all the
Armenians including the elderly and children out instead of punishing
the Tashnak gangs to solve the chaos in the East. Following the
Ottoman defeat in the war he fled to Germany.

Described as pro-Sabetay in the book “Efendi” by Soner Yalcin,
Talat Pasha caused all the trouble for us but was not satisfied with
this, today even some years after his death, his memoirs survive,
exaggrating his deeds and causing us more trouble. While according
to even the most exaggrated statements of some historians, the number
of expelled Armenians was no more than 500,000, Talat Pasha’s memoir
gives the figure 924,000. This was another goal of Talat Pasha’s.

What happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina is still fresh in our memories.
Exactly 110,000 Bosnians were massacred before the eyes of history
and the world. Without counting women and children, thousands of
people were martyred. Then what happened? Serbians just happened
to kill Bosnians and then by calling Milosevich a a war criminal,
they are trying him at The Hague. What will be his punishment? It is
totally symbolic. Milosevich was tried but all Serbia was exonerated.
The West gets away with clearing itself of any wrongdoing by blaming
a few for each of its historic embarrassments.

The Armenian expulsion is not the problem of the Ottomans or the
Turks. It is the problem of Talat Pasha and his close circle. A
problem that should have been solved at that time but became the
problem of all Turks and Turkey. The followers of Talat Pasha have
succeeded in making the entire state and nation guilty. The Republic
of Turkey should have solved this matter then by questioning Talat
Pasha and the supporters of the Tashnaks.

Turks and Armenians who lived together for a millenium left deep
wounds on each other. They fail to heal even though they want to.