The following letter to Boston Globe by Ambassador Mehmet N. Ezen, Consul General of Turkey in New York, in response to the article, "US Should Press Turkey on Terrorism" by T. Karakostas was published in the print version of the newspaper on April 1, 2002.
Flawed view of Turkey's History
It does not take to be an expert in international relations to see at first glance the biased and historically flawed nature of the March 25 oped article "US should press Turkey on terrorism".
Allegations in the article are devoid of historical accuracy and full of gross distortions of historical facts. Ataturk did wage a war-one of independence-not against the Greek and Armenian minorities in Turkey, but against Greece, whose army had occupied Western Turkey with a view to annexing it to Greece.
Likewise, Turkish intervention in Cyprus was necessitated by a coup attempt by the Greek Cypriots to annex Cyprus to Greece with an ethnic cleansing campaign aimed at the Turkish Cypriot community. As such, the intervention was materialized with the motive of self-defense and based on the provisions of the Agreement of Guarantee that were signed by Turkey, Great Britain and Greece in Zurich in 1960 as part of an arrangement that led to the foundation of Cyprus as a federal state.
What has been referred to as the so-called Armenian genocide in the article was in fact a deportation of the Armenians away from the war zone, where they had collaborated with the invading Russian troops and perpetrated acts of violence against the Turkish villages in Southeastern Turkey during the World War I. Both sides suffered losses during the intercommunal warfare, which were worsened by the contagious diseases prevalent at the time and the scarcity of food and medicine. Unfortunate as these losses were, they can not be called a genocide.
MEHMET N. EZEN
Turkish Consul General
New York