Anatolia news agency, Turkey
Oct 14 2005
Turkey’s NATO envoy says accusations of genocide “baseless political
argument”
Ankara, 14 October: Vahit Erdem, President of Turkish delegation to
NATO Parliamentary Assembly (NATO PNA), sent a letter to Simon Lunn,
secretary-general of NATO PNA, regarding the speech of Prof Dr Halil
Berktay during the seminar in Yerevan.
In his letter Erdem said: “I would have preferred that an objective
historian were also invited to the seminar along with a person who is
known as the supporter of the Armenian claims. If you had contacted
me, a participant who would have created a more balanced atmosphere
would have been found.”
“I would like to put forward that the problems about the Ottoman
Armenians go back to 1877-78 Ottoman-Russian War and reached its peak
during World War I in 1915, with Armenian rebellions and massacres,”
he noted.
Erdem said: “Armenians revolted against the Ottoman Empire and
massacred the local Muslim people, believing some countries’ promises
that they would be able to establish an Armenian state in eastern
Anatolian region. The story behind the 1915 events is being ignored
by one-sided evaluations. The Ottoman state took the necessary
precautions against rebellious Armenians which would have been taken
by every other state. The relocation of the Armenians was one these
measures.”
“Armenians were deported to Syria, which was Ottoman territory during
that time. If there had been a secret extermination plan as Halil
Berktay claims, nobody would have arrived in Syria. However, the
majority of the Armenians reached their destination. The deported
Armenians were the ancestors of today’s hundreds of thousands
Diaspora Armenians,” he added.
Erdem stated: “There is no scientific evidence that the 1915 events
meet the criteria of the crime of genocide as defined in the UN
Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
“All of the experts on Turco-Armenian history know that there is no
document that proves Armenian accusations that the Ottoman State used
World War I as a pretext for planning and executing ‘genocide’,” he
added.
Erdem concluded his letter: “It is well-known that there was no
racial, religious or cultural hatreds in the Ottoman Empire.
Therefore, the accusation of genocide is being used as baseless
political argument against Turkey.”