Turkey, Then and Now

"In the mass burning of Armenian orphans, plain sadistic fiendishness was mostly at work. After eliminating the rest of the Armenian population, these remnants had become a nuisance to the perpetrators. In several regards it was deemed most economical to end their misery by torching them en masse. In four provinces, Diyarbakir, Harput, Bitlis, and Aleppo, this method was applied with special ferocity."

"That which took place around beautiful Lake Goeljuk in the summer of 1915 is almost inconceivable. Thousands and thousands of Armenians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butchered on its shores and barbarously mutilated."

"An Armenian boy, adopted by a Turkish family in Mezre, Harput province, related a graphic description of rapes committed regularly by a Turkish man with the full knowledge of his wife in that household. The other modality involves rape before murder. In Ankara province, near the village of Bash Ayash, two rapist-killers — a brigand, Deli Hasan, and a gendarme, Ibrahim — raped twelve boys, aged 12-14, and subsequently killed them. Those who did not die instantly were tortured to death while crying 'Mummy, Mummy'.
"A female survivor from Giresun relates how in Agn (Egin), Harput province, some 500 Armenian orphans collected from all parts of that province were poisoned through the arrangement of the local pharmacist and physician."

"I do not believe that there has ever been a massacre in the history of the world so general and thorough as that which is now being perpetrated in this region, or that a more fiendish, diabolical scheme has ever been conceived in the mind of man."
U.S. Consul Leslie A Davis, Harput, Turkey, 1915 

Historical documentation that validates the occurrence of the Armenian genocide at the orders of the-then Ottoman Turkish government. No Turkish government since that era has ever admitted that what occurred was a deliberate, institutionalized program of genocidal intention. Denial of the deliberate nature of the crime, and the numbers affected has always represented the official Turkish line of defence.

It was wartime, and the Turkish administration of the Ottoman Empire viewed the Armenians as representing a traitorous element within Turkish society. The hundreds of thousands of Armenians who were deprived of their homes and prodded forward on forced marches were simply casualties of the era, a time marked by the chaos of wartime conditions when civilians everywhere became collateral victims, unavoidable in the fog of war, goes the Turkish explanation.



Any country that sympathized with the horror that struck Armenian Turks and recognizes the event as the first genocidal event of the emerging 20th Century has infuriated Turkey which rained down on them the verbal blows of enmity and spite. Those nations that intended to remain in Turkey's favour, even though they knew the truth of the situation, simply empathized with the Armenians, but failed to commit to censuring Turkey for its obvious lack of ownership of the barbaric event.

Turkey's apologists and philosophical allies are wasting no time in making an effort to influence the incoming Republican President, to maintain the fiction that the Armenian genocide simply never took place. The fear by Turkey and its supporters is that the new administration of Donald Trump would be led by Turkey's 'enemies' to have the U.S. Congress declare its censure of Turkey for its lack of remorse over the Armenian genocide.

A set of proposals has been presented to the incoming administration, with the title of "U.S. Policy on Turkey". Turkey is, after all, a member of NATO, despite that its President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken to accusing the United States of perfidy in refusing to turn over self-exiled Turkish cleric Methullah Gulen, a rival of Erdogan's who accuses him of being behind the July 2015 attempted military coup to unseat the Justice and Development Party and President Erdogan.

That Turkey is a member of NATO, a collective Western defence establishment that President-Elect Trump characterizes as a body that has outlived its purpose, may signal that a President Trump would have little sympathy in the kind of diplomacy of 'see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil' of a co-member of NATO, and feel compelled to shrug off the overture to "guarantee" that the U.S. Congress would not acknowledge the Armenian genocide.


"The United States can quietly guarantee Turkey that the Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress will not pass. This has always been critical in the relationship, and most Turks care deeply about the issue", is the wording in part of the paper presented by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and authored by former U.S. ambassador to Ankara James F. Jeffrey and Turkish scholar Dr. Soner Cagaptay.

The Turkey that castigates the United States as being responsible for all the intractable problems Turkey now faces with Syria, with the Islamic State, with Turkish and Syrian Kurds, may not strike a note of sympathy in this administration, and why should it? Turkey's military has been attacking its own Kurdish civilian population, it has targeted Syrian Kurds opposed to Syria's Bashar al-Assad who has slaughtered a half-million Syrian Sunnis.

And the threats posed by Erdogan toward Europe, destabilizing it further with the prospect of releasing additional Syrian refugees in Turkish refugee camps, to once again inundate Europe unless Turkey's demands of blackmail funding, visa-free access and EU membership come its way, is all unlikely to endear and obligate the new administration to this bullying, dysfunctional government of Turkey's.

History haunts Turkey, deservedly: 
"In the provinces of Sivas, Harput, Trabzon, Erzurum, Diyarbekir, as well as the independent sanjaks of Urfa and Maras the genocide was earned out in part through deportations and in part through massacres... In all of these operations children were part of the general population targeted for wholesale destruction. In many instances they were also subjected to separate and differential forms of mass murder."
Professor Vahakn Dadrian, expert on the Armenian Genocide, "Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case"

1915 Aghet : The Armenian Genocide