Changing history part II
By Mehmet Basoglu
Published: 4/20/2005
Daily Targum , Rutgers College, NJ
April 20 2005
The Rutgers University Armenian Club hung up its genocide commemoration
banner Thursday in front of Brower Commons on the College Avenue
campus. The club organized its annual commemoration Saturday afternoon,
which marked the upcoming 90th anniversary of Armenian rebel arrests
by the Ottoman government. These activities coincide with the Armenian
Diaspora’s efforts to push their commonly accepted allegations to a
global scale as The Republic of Turkey moves into its accession phase
with the European Union.
Historians and scholars who have explored this issue have been bullied
by the Armenian Diaspora into either keeping silent on the matter or
accepting the Armenian version of events. The most radical example of
this trend took place on October 4, 1977 when UCLA history Professor
Stanford Shaw’s house was bombed by extremists after he refused to
accept the Armenian community’s accounts of World War 1.
Most notably, Princeton University Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern
studies Bernard Lewis, who has advised the U.S. State Department in
the past on issues concerning the Middle East, was sued by Armenian
civic organizations in France after expressing his views during an
interview with French newspaper Le Monde on November 16, 1993.
Lewis stated, “There was an Armenian problem for the Turks created
by the advance of the Russians … there was a population with an
anti-Turkish sentiment in the Ottoman Empire who sought independence
.. overtly sympathized with the Russians advancing from the Caucasus.
.. and the Turks had trouble to maintain order under the prevailing.
war conditions. For the Turks it was necessary to take the punitive and
preventive measure against a hostile population in a region threatened
by foreign invasion … No one has any doubt that terrible events took
place; the Armenians, as well as the Turks suffered and perished in
equal measure.”
It is hard to overlook the historical data that refutes Armenian
claims.
At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was effectually
controlled by the Allied Powers. British, French, Italian and Greek
forces occupied present-day Turkey and the remains of the Ottoman
Empire, including present day Iraq. During this period, Allied Forces
rounded up 144 Ottoman officials and conducted war crimes tribunals
on the island of Malta. Like the Nuremberg trials that followed World
War II, the Malta tribunals tried leaders of enemy forces based on
research findings. After three years of investigation, all of the
Ottoman officers tried by their enemy counterparts were released due
to a lack of evidence.
This is especially striking given the deep-rooted cultural mistrust of
the Muslim empire by European leaders. European states had been waiting
for the downfall of the Ottoman Empire for centuries while eyeing its
land as potential colonial possessions during World War I. The late
scholar Edward Said pointed at this widespread European attitude in
his scholarly work “Orientalism” when he noted, “Until the end of the
seventeenth century the ‘Ottoman peril'” lurked alongside Europe to
represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger,
and in time European civilization incorporated that peril and its
lore, its great events, figures, virtues, and vices, as something
woven into the fabric of life.”
Despite these cultural biases, Allied Forces justly tried Ottoman
officials and gave authority to the rule of law.
According to Armenian-American newspaper Asbarez, the Turkish
government has opened its state archives and called upon Armenian and
Turkish historians to work together. The Armenian government openly
rejected this call, claiming that the work of historians is done on
this issue.
The Armenian Diaspora’s unwillingness to cooperate with Turkish
entities on this matter is a result of the organizations that lead
the community. The Dashnaksutiun Party (also known as the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation) was founded in 1890. In the Armenian
Revolutionary Movement, Armenian researcher Louise Nalbandian
chronicles the mission of the Dashnak Party established in a general
congress in 1892. According to Nalbandian, the congress declared aims,
which included, “To organize fighting bands … To use every means to
arm the people … To stimulate fighting and to terrorize government
officials, informers, traitors, usurers and every kind of exploiter
… To expose government establishments to looting and destruction.”
The Dashnaks, along with the Marxist leaning Hunchak Party, fought
against the Ottoman state well before World War I. Ottoman Muslim
communities in Eastern Anatolia comprised mostly of Turks, Kurds and
Circassians saw the brunt of Armenian terrorist activity in the late
19th and early 20th century. Turkish state archives document 523,955
civilian casualties committed by Dashnak and Hunchak separatists’
violent acts during this period, including a 1920 assault on Nakhchivan
(present-day Azerbaijan) that resulted in 64,408 deaths.
Turkish and Kurdish bandits savagely retaliated in many instances to
the attacks on their communities, in many cases killing thousands of
innocent civilians. On April 24, 1915, Ottoman authorities issued
arrests on the leaders and organizers of the Armenian revolts,
who they held responsible for intercommunal warfare between Muslims
and Armenians in Eastern Anatolia. It was still very difficult to
distinguish between normal Armenian civilians and terrorist elements,
so the Ottoman government relocated Armenian civilians in Eastern
Anatolia to the Western parts of the empire. Warfare between Dashnak
separatists and the Ottomans continued to rage well past the end of
World War I, until 1922, one year before the foundation of the modern
Turkish republic.
The very same organizations that orchestrated these acts form the
foundations of the Diaspora. The Armenian National Committee of
America, which is the second richest ethnic lobby in America after
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was founded by and is
still controlled by Dashnak Party leaders, as is Armenian-American
news outlet Asbarez.
According to most sources, 1.5 million Armenians resided in Eastern
Anatolia before the conflicts. Turkish sources claim about 300,000
Armenians perished during this time period while Armenians claim
genocide with numbers that would equal the complete decimation of the
Ottoman Armenian population. Armenian claims don’t fit the statistics,
since over 1 million Armenian Americans reside in the United States
today with another million in Europe and Canada combined, as well
as 6 percent of Lebanon, all descending from the Eastern Anatolian
Armenian refugee population.
The affluence of the Armenian community has created the strain in
this debate. Groups like ANCA pump millions of dollars around the
world into anti-Turkish lobbying in order to fulfill a revolutionary
national destiny.
The wealth and prosperity of the Armenian community can be attributed
to their merchant class status in the Ottoman Empire. One example of
this is the continuing success of the Zildjian drum and percussion
company. According to a December article in the Economist, Zildjian
is the oldest running corporation in America. It was founded in 1623
in Istanbul and moved its headquarters to Massachusetts in 1929.
Armenians and Turks co-existed in peace for nearly one thousand
years until ethnic nationalism emerged as an ideology in the crumbling
Ottoman Empire of the late 19th century. Today, generations of Armenian
Americans are raised to believe in an alleged genocide, which is based
on the slanted accounts of the British Blue Book that functioned as
war-time propaganda. True progress will never be made on this issue
until the Armenian Diaspora examines the roots of their own identity.
Mehmet Basoglu is a Rutgers College senior majoring in political
science, Middle Eastern studies and journalism. His column,
“Westernized Easterner,” appears on alternate Wednesdays. He welcomes
comments at [email protected].