[the]

We must not be too happy about Mr. Bush’s statements, told Oymen. "We know for sure that 513,000 Turks were butchered by Armenians. Don’t we have a right to ask for sympathy for the murdered Turks?"

"If you are going to mention these incidents and express grief for the Armenians who lost their lives in those incidents, it is our right to expect a word of sympathy for more than half million Turks in the same incidents."

All right, his story is a bit scrambled. It’s now up to 513,000 Turks in 1915–17, rather than 500,000 Turks 1912-22. But it’s all there. In the archives.

We are also assured by a spokesman of the Turkish Ministry of Justice that Turkey has had enough of this genocide nonsense. Quite enough. On April 25, 2005, TurkishPress.com posted this story.

Turkish Minister of Justice and Government Spokesman Cemil Cicek has indicated that, after many years of leaving the issue of so-called genocide to historians, it is now high time for Turkey to start disproving all allegations in various countries.

High time, indeed! Those historians, tied as they are to misleading primary source documents, simply cannot be trusted. They do not pay sufficient attention to primary source documents of official Turkish assurances for 90 years that nothing was happening or had happened, preferring instead to cite unreliable eyewitness accounts of what did happen. Armenian political influence is behind this.

Cicek noted that Armenians influenced the parliaments of the countries in which they are powerful and succeeded in obtaining parliament decisions in their favor in 15 countries.

Ah, yes: the well-known Armenian International Network, which dominates parliaments around the world.

As Turks, we wished that, instead of turning incidents of the past into a topic of hatred and anger, they should be brought to daylight by the historians with an approach looking at the future. . . .

Based on our archives and confidence in our history and culture, we can say that no genocide took place.

THE BLUE BOOK

What has stuck in the craw of the Turkish government for almost 90 years is an official report issued by the British government, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916. If you don’t think governments stick by their official versions of history, consider this April 22, 2005 story in London’s Financial Times.

Turkey challenges genocide ‘fraud’

By Vincent Boland in Ankara

Published: April 22 2005

The Turkish parliament was yesterday preparing to ask the UK to repudiate a historical document that is considered to form the basis of the claim that Armenians were victims of genocide by Ottoman Turks during the first world war.

The initiative comes on the eve of Sunday’s 90th anniversary commemorations among Armenians of what they regard as the start of the massacre of up to 1.5m people.

The move is likely to exacerbate the bitter dispute between Turks and Armenians. Supporters of the Armenian cause, particularly in France, are lobbying for the European Union to delay the start of Turkey’s accession talks for EU membership until Turkey acknowledges a "systematic extermination" in 1915.

Turkish MPs completed and signed a letter to both houses of the UK parliament arguing that the document was "a fraud based on fabrications, half truths and biased reports and perceptions" of what happened and "a masterpiece of propaganda and tool of deception".

The document, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-1916, was written by the British historian Arnold Toynbee and included in a publication known as the Blue Book, by Viscount Bryce, a British diplomat. It was an official Westminster document, which is why the Turkish parliament wants the House of Commons and House of Lords to act.

Turkey rejects the charge of genocide. It insists that the true death toll among Armenians was about 600,000 and that many died from the effects of civil war, starvation and deportation. It says the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Turks at the time are overlooked.

The letter, which was made available yesterday by the Turkish parliament in the original Turkish and in English translation, will be sent to London imminently.

The letter says British propaganda in the first world war aimed to portray the destruction of the Ottoman Empire as a key aim of the war, to "render British colonialism in Anatolia and Mesopotamia palatable", and to encourage the US to join the Allied side. The Ottoman Empire collapsed into many nations after the war. Its Anatolian heartland is now Turkey.

The British embassy in Ankara declined to comment on the letter. Some Turkish historians say the document has stood the test of time; others say Mr Toynbee later distanced himself from its findings, which were based on eyewitness accounts.

The official UK position is that the massacres were "an appalling tragedy" but that the evidence is not "sufficiently unequivocal" to categorise them as genocide under the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide.

Viscount James Bryce was a master historian. His book, The American Commonwealth (1888), is still read by American historians as a primary source document regarding educated English opinion about America. He served as Ambassador to the United States from 1907–13.

The name Arnold Toynbee may ring a bell. By the 1950s, he was one of the most prominent historians on earth. His 12-volume study (1934–61) of 26 civilizations is unprecedented in its breadth. The Treatment of Armenians was his first major publication.

Why some Armenian organization has not bought a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro 7 and scanned in the full volume, with the documents, remains a mystery to me. The book is in the public domain: pre-1923. But Toynbee’s summary is online. This section, which appears in Part VI, "The Deportations of 1915: Procedure," is enlightening. Read it carefully. It is the crucial aspect of the entire genocide. The government confiscated their guns.

A decree went forth that all Armenians should be disarmed The Armenians in the Army were drafted out of the fighting ranks, re-formed into special labour battalions, and set to work at throwing up fortifications and constructing roads. The disarming of the civil population was left to the local authorities, and in every administrative centre a reign of terror began. The authorities demanded the production of a definite number of arms. Those who could not produce them were tortured, often in fiendish ways; those who procured them for surrender, by purchase from their Moslem neighbours or by other means, were imprisoned for conspiracy against the Government. Few of these were young men, for most of the young had been called up to serve; they were elderly men, men of substance and leaders of the Armenian community, and it became apparent that the inquisition for arms was being used as a cloak to deprive the community of its natural heads. Similar measures had preceded the massacres of 1895–6, and a sense of foreboding spread through the Armenian people. "One night in winter" writes a foreign witness of these events," the Government sent officers round the city to all Armenian houses, knocking up the families and demanding that all weapons should be given up. This action was the death-knell to many hearts."

I own a copy of The Treatment of Armenians. Or, rather, my wife does. In it, there are two accounts of events in Van, which is where the Turks say a revolt broke out, thereby justifying the forced relocation. These reports were written by Y. K. Rushdooni (as it is spelled in The Treatment of Armenians), my wife’s grandfather. They are extremely detailed: street by street activities. Some might think they are just too detailed. Not so.