“The world has just commemorated the centenary of the genocide of Turkish non-Muslims. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, this crime began with the Hamidian massacres of 1894-95, which were ordered by Sultan Abdülhamid II, and continued on a huge scale with the massacres perpetrated between 1915 and 1923, planned by the young Turks. They continue today with the massacres of Deir ez-Zor and Kessab, organized by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. For 120 years, the Turkish power elite have been successively massacring non-Muslimns – to general indifference – in order to build a homogenous nation,” Thierry Meyssan writes in an article published by

According to the author, “the centenary of the genocide of Turkish non-Muslims prepared the stage for festival of hypocrisy.” “While certain states celebrated the memory of the victims in Yerevan, others showed themselves to be shameless.”

“President Erdoğan had the opportunity to confess to this very old story, of which he is in no way responsible. Had he done so, he could have made his country a normal state. But no! Instead he hung onto his lies, denying History and affirming that there had been “only”100,000 dead, and that they had been executed for their participation in terrorist activities,” the article reads.

“By draping itself in this absurdity, today’s Turkey is not only manifesting its support for the Hamidian massacres of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1894-95) – which caused between 80,000 and 300,000 victims – but especially for the crimes committed by the “Special Organization” of the Union and Progress Committee (UPC), starting from 1915 until the election of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as President of the Republic (1923), which caused between 1,200,000 and 1,500,000 deaths – and its ideological continuity with the ancient régime. And this is what we all noted with horror when, last year in 2014, we watched the Turkish army accompany the al-Nusra Front (in other words al-Qaïda in Syria) to Kessab for the purpose of chasing away the Armenian population. Or again, when the same Turkish army helped ISISto dynamite the Deir ez-Zor Memorial, which commemorated the 1916 extermination of more than 200,000 Armeniens in the camp that the Turks had built for them,” the author writes.

“Pan-Islamism, the project of Sultan Abdülhamid II and the Young Turks early in the 20th century, like the AKP today, aims to become the leader of the sunnite world, and in order to achieve this aim, it intends to create a homogenous sunnite state. This project required the extermination of the Christians (Armenians, Pontic Greeks, and Assyro-Chaldeans) and the Yezidis. They all died, exactly as ISIS is exterminating Christians and Yezidis today,” Thierry Meyssan continues.

According to him, the intervention of the Turkish army into Syrian territory, at Kessab and Deir ez-Zor, is coherent with this project, since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hopes to annex Northern Syria once NATO has overthrown President Bachar el-Assad.

Thierry Meyssan is a French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference.