HURRIYET- Columnist Okay Eksi writes on the message US President George W. Bush issued on April 24 commemorating the Armenians who died during World War I. A summary of his column is as follows:
As discussions continued as to whether US President Bush would label the incidents during World War I a ‘genocide,’ he issued a message showing that he didn’t define them that way. We’re not talking about the word ‘massacre.’ I don’t know if the word ‘annihilation’ used last year was less strong, but from the point of view of international law, the important word is ‘genocide.’ In line with a resolution the US Congress adopted, the president has to issue a message every year on April 24 and commemorate the Armenians who died while they were being deported to Syria, which at that time was another province of the Ottoman Empire. For years the Armenian lobby has been pressuring Washington to say that Turks committed ‘genocide.’ And if they manage to get this done, they are then hoping to get compensation from Turkey. What interests us are the facts. The allegations are due to the decision taken by the government to relocate Armenians by force to another part of the Empire as a result of the Armenian uprisings against the state in various locales, their raiding, burning and destroying villages, massacring many civilians, and enrolling in the Russian and later French armies to fight against the Ottoman Empire they were a part of. In fact renowned historian and Middle East expert Professor Bernard Lewis spoke with former Pakistani Ambassador and journalist Akbar Ahmed earlier this year, and he said the following: “The point that the massacre of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was the same as what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany is a downright falsehood. What happened to the Armenians was the result of a massive Armenian armed rebellion against the Turks, which began even before the war broke out, and continued on a larger scale. Great numbers of Armenians, including members of the armed forces, deserted, crossed the frontier and joined the Russian forces invading Turkey. There was guerilla warfare all over Anatolia. And it is what we nowadays call the National Movement of Armenians Against Turkey. The Turks certainly resorted to very ferocious methods in repelling it. There is clear evidence of a decision by the Turkish government to deport the Armenian population from the sensitive areas... not including the Arab provinces which were then still part of the Ottoman Empire. There is no evidence of a decision to massacre. On the contrary, there is considerable evidence of an attempt to prevent it, which were not very successful. Yes, there were tremendous massacres, the numbers are very uncertain but a million may well be likely. The massacres were carried out by irregulars, by local villagers responding to what has been done to them. But to make this a parallel with the holocaust in Germany, you would have to assume the Jews of Germany had been engaged in an armed rebellion against the German state, collaborating with the allies against Germany... This seems to me a rather absurd parallel.
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION