In 1453, Constantinople fell, heralding the beginning of history Ottoman Empire(previously the Ottoman state), which was destined to become the author of one of the most terrible atrocities in human history.
1915 - symbol of human cruelty
Throughout the history of the Ottoman Empire, Armenians lived in the east of the country, considering this land their home and historical homeland. However, the Muslim state treated them differently.
Being both a national and religious minority, Armenians were perceived as “second-class citizens.” Not only were their rights not protected, but the authorities themselves contributed in every possible way to the oppression of the Armenian population. The situation worsened sharply after the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878.
The defeated empire did not come to terms with the conditions dictated to it, turning all its anger towards the Christians living on its territory. It is no coincidence that Muslims expelled from the Caucasus and the Balkan countries were settled next to them. The close proximity of people of different religions and cultures often led to serious conflicts.
Raids on Christian villages became commonplace. The authorities simply watched. The outbreak of protests by Armenians became another reason for mass arrests and murders. But this was just the beginning. Approaching 1915 which became a symbol of human cruelty and indifference, a year painted with a scarlet helmet of blood of millions of innocent victims.
Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire
April 24, 1915- this date has become a symbol of the Great Tribulation, grief over lost lives and ruined destinies. On this day, an entire people was beheaded, striving only for a peaceful life in the land of their ancestors.
It was on this day that the arrests of the most prominent political and public figures of the Armenian elite began in Constantinople (Istanbul). Politicians, writers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, musicians were arrested - everyone who could lead the people, become their leader on the path to resistance.
By the end of May, more than 800 of the most influential Armenians were completely isolated from society and few of them returned alive. Then it was the turn of the civilians. Raids on Armenian settlements became more frequent and merciless. Women, old people, children - the sword in the hands of the embittered “punishers” incited by the authorities did not spare anyone. And there was even no one to protect their home, because the men were drafted to serve in the army of a country that only wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible. The surviving people were gathered into groups and, under the pretext of protection from enemy invasions, “resettled.”
How many people were left on the road, and how many of them, driven by sword and whip across the endless and barren expanses of Der Zor, reached their destination where slow death awaited them? They have no account. The scale of the operation planned by the authorities to exterminate an entire people under the guise of war was truly enormous.
Armenian genocide was preparing even before the war, and its beginning became a lever for launching the merciless “death machine.”
Back in February 1914, a boycott of Armenian enterprises began, followed by collection of property “for the army” and demobilization. In January 1915, the Turkish army was defeated in the battle of Sarykamysh and retreated. Rumors began to spread that the success of the Russian army was greatly facilitated by the voluntary assistance of the Armenians.
The retreating army brought down its wrath on local Christians: Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks. Raids on settlements, massacres and deportations continued until the end of the First World War, but in fact, the genocide continued after the surrender of Turkey and the overthrow of the Young Turks.
The new government condemned the actions of the previous one, and the main organizers of the crimes were put on trial. But even those sentenced to death, many of them escaped punishment by escaping from a country where, in fact, they did not want to condemn them. All investigations into crimes committed under the cover of hostilities pursued only one goal: to reassure the world community, which, despite the attempts of the Turkish authorities to hide the true state of affairs in the country, already knew what actually happened.
Largely thanks to the courage of ambassadors and public figures of European countries, the world learned about the greatest atrocity of the early 20th century. The progressive public demanded punishment for the criminals.
But the true punishment came from the victims themselves. In October 1919, on the initiative of Dashnaktsutyun party activist Shaan Natali, a decision was made to organize the punitive operation “Nemesis”. As part of this operation, Taleat Pasha, Jemal Pasha, Said Halim and others who fled from justice criminals.
But the operation itself became a symbol of retribution. Soghomon Tehlirian, who lost his entire family during the genocide, on March 15, 1921, in the Charlottenburg region, shot and killed the man who took away his house and relatives Taleat Pasha. And right in the courtroom, Tehliryan was acquitted. The world did not recognize the guilt of the man who avenged the crippled fate of an entire people.
Genocide of 1915- everlasting memory !
But, despite numerous condemnations, the world is still not ready to completely free itself from the shackles and let into its home all the bitterness of one of greatest atrocities in the history of mankind.
Countries such as France, Belgium, Argentina, Russia, Uruguay recognized and condemned the Armenian genocide on the territory of the Ottoman Empire. But one of the most important players in the world political arena, the United States, continues to avoid such an important topic, speculating on it to influence modern Turkey (for now Armenian genocide only a few states recognized).
And, most importantly, the fact of genocide is denied by the Turkish state itself, the legal successor of the Ottoman Empire. But the facts cannot be changed, history cannot be rewritten, and the 1,500,000 voices of innocent victims will never be silenced. Sooner or later, the world will bow to history, because despite Hitler’s words that marked the beginning of the Holocaust (“And who now remembers the destruction of the Armenians”), in fact, “nothing is forgotten, no one is forgotten.”
Every year on April 24, Armenians will rise to the heights of Tsitsernakaberd, bringing with them fresh flowers in tribute to the victims of the “great crime” and will burn Eternal flame torches in the hands of the new generation.
To clarify the essence of the Armenian question and the concept of “Armenian genocide,” we will cite a number of excerpts from the book of the famous French historian Georges de Maleville “The Armenian Tragedy of 1915,” published in Russian by the Baku publishing house “Elm” in 1990, and try to comment on it.
In Chapter I, “Historical Frame of Events,” he writes: “ geographically great Armenia constitutes a territory with undefined borders, the approximate center of which was Mount Ararat (5,165 m) and which was limited by three large lakes of the Caucasus: Sevan (Geycha) - from the northeast, Lake Van - from the southwest and Lake Urmia in the Iranian Azerbaijan - from the southeast. It is impossible to more accurately determine the borders of Armenia in the past due to the lack of reliable data. As you know, today there is an Armenian core in the central Caucasus - the Armenian SSR, 90% of the population of which, according to Soviet statistics, are Armenians. But it was not always so. The "six Armenian provinces" of Ottoman Turkey (Erzurum, Van, Bitlis, Diyarbakir, Elaziz and Sivas) were populated by large numbers of Armenians before 1914, who, however, did not constitute a majority by any means. Today, Armenians no longer live in Anatolia, and it is their disappearance that is blamed on the Turkish state". However, as Georges de Maleville writes on page 19, “ from 1632 the border was changed as a result of the Russian invasion of the Caucasus. It became clear that the Russian political plans consisted of annexing the Black Sea coast. In 1774, the Treaty of Kuchuk-Keynar confirmed the loss of dominance over the Crimea by the Ottomans. On the eastern shore of the Black Sea, according to the 1812 treaty concluded in Bucharest, Abkhazia and Georgia, annexed, however, since 1801, went to Russia. The war with Persia, which began in 1801, ended in 1828 with the transfer to Russia of all Persian territories north of the Araks, namely the Erivan Khanate. According to the Treaty of Turkmenchay, signed in March, Russia had a common border with Turkey, and, having pushed aside Persia, it gained dominance over part of the territory of Armenia(which has never existed there in history - author's note).
A month later, in April 1828, Loris-Melikov's army, which had come to end the Armenian campaign, occupied Turkish Anatolia as part of the operations of the fifth Russo-Turkish War and laid siege for the first time in front of the fortress at Kareya. It was during these events that for the first time the Armenian population of Turkey came out in support of the Russian army, which consisted of volunteers recruited in Erivan, driven to fanaticism by the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin and called upon to terrorize the Muslim population, raising the Armenian population of Turkey to revolt. The same scenario played out calmly for ninety years every time the Russian army made another breakthrough in the same territory, with the only nuance that over time Russian propaganda improved its methods, and, starting from the moment when the “Armenian question” became object of constant excitement, the Russian army was confident that it could count on Turkish territory and its rear Turkish army, i.e., with the assistance of gangs of armed rebels who, in anticipation of a breakthrough by the Russian army, will wear down the Turkish army and try to destroy it from the rear. After this there were also Russian-Turkish wars in 1833 and 1877. 36 years passed before the next conflict, which began with the declaration of war on November 1, 1914. However, the long period of time was by no means peaceful for Turkish Anatolia. Beginning in 1880, for the first time in its history, Turkish Armenia experienced revolts, banditry and bloody riots, which the Ottoman power tried to stop without much success. The riots followed a chronology that was not random: riots arose systematically, and the suppression of them, necessary to establish order, aroused persistent hatred in response.
Throughout the entire territory between Erzincay and Erzurum in the north and Diyarbakir and Van in the south, sedition has been carried out for more than twenty years with all the consequences that can flow from it, in a region remote from the center and difficult to govern". According to Russian sources, weapons flowed here like a river from Russia.
“On November 1, 1914, Turkey was forced to enter the war,” continues Georges de Maleville. In the spring of 1915, the Turkish government decided to resettle the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia to Syria and the mountainous part of Mesopotamia, which was then Turkish territory. They prove to us that they were allegedly talking about a beating, a measure of disguised destruction. We will try to analyze whether this is true or not. But before these events are presented and studied, it is necessary to consider the disposition of forces along the front line during the war. At the beginning of 1915, the Russians, without the knowledge of the Turks, made a maneuver and, bypassing Ararat, descended to the south along the Persian border. It was then that the rebellion of the Armenians inhabiting Van broke out, which entailed the first significant deportation of the Armenian population during the war. This should be discussed in more detail.
A telegram from Governor Wang dated March 20, 1915 reports an armed uprising and clarifies: “ We believe there are more than 2000 rebels. We are trying to suppress this uprising". The efforts were, however, in vain, since on March 23 the same governor reports that the rebellion was spreading to nearby villages. A month later the situation became desperate. This is what the governor telegraphed on April 24: “ 4,000 rebels gathered in the region. The rebels cut off roads, attack nearby villages and subjugate them. Currently, many women and children are left without hearth and home. Shouldn't these women and children (Muslims) be transported to the western provinces?“Unfortunately, they couldn’t do this then, and here are the consequences.
« The Russian Caucasian Army begins an offensive in the direction of Van, - American historian Stanford J. Shaw tells us. (Shaw S.J. vol. 2, p. 316). — This army includes a large number of Armenian volunteers. Setting out from Yerevan on April 28, ... they reached Van on May 14, organized and carried out a massacre of the local Muslim population. Over the next two days, an Armenian state was established in Van under the protection of the Russians, and it seemed that it would be able to hold out after the disappearance of representatives of the Muslim population, killed or put to flight«.
« The Armenian population of the city of Van before these tragic events was only 33,789 people, i.e., only 42% of the total population". (Shaw S.J. p. 316). The number of Muslims was 46,661 people, of which, apparently, the Armenians killed about 36,000 people, which is an act of genocide (author's note). This gives an idea of the scale of the beatings carried out on the unarmed population (Muslim men were at the front) with the simple goal of making room. There was nothing random or unexpected in these actions. This is what another historian, Valiy, writes: “ In April 1915, Armenian revolutionaries captured the city of Van and established an Armenian headquarters there under the command of Aram and Varelu(two leaders of the revolutionary Dashnak party). the 6th of May(possibly according to the old calendar) they opened the city to the Russian army after clearing the area of all Muslims... Among the most famous Armenian leaders (in Van) was the former member of the Turkish parliament Pasdermadjian, known as Garro. He led the Armenian volunteers when clashes began between the Turks and Russians". (Felix Valyi “Revolutions in islam”, Londres, 1925, p. 253).
On May 18, 1915, the tsar, moreover, expressed “ gratitude to the Armenian population of Van for their dedication"(Gyuryun, p. 261), and Aram Manukyan was appointed Russian governor. The show goes on to describe the events that followed.
« Thousands of Armenian residents of Mush, as well as other important centers in the eastern regions of Turkey, began to flock to the new Armenian state, and among them were columns of escaped prisoners... In mid-June, at least 250,000 Armenians were concentrated in the area of the city of Van... However, in early July Ottoman units pushed back the Russian army. The retreating army was accompanied by thousands of Armenians: they were fleeing punishment for the murders that the stillborn state allowed"(Shaw S.J., p. 316).
The Armenian author Khovanesyan, who is furiously hostile towards the Turks, writes: “ The panic was indescribable. After a month of resistance to the governor, after the liberation of the city, after the establishment of the Armenian government, everything was lost. More than 200,000 refugees fled with the retreating Russian army to Transcaucasia, losing the best they had and falling into endless traps set by the Kurds”(Hovannisian, “Road to independence”, p. 53, cite par Shaue).
We dwelled in such detail on the events in Van because, unfortunately, they are a sad example. First, it clearly shows the extent to which armed uprisings in regions with significant Armenian minorities were common and dangerous for the Ottoman troops who fought against the Russians. Here we are quite obviously and clearly talking about betrayal in the face of the enemy. This behavior of the Armenians, by the way, today is systematically obscured by authors who are favorable to their claims - all this is simply denied: the truth interferes with them.
On the other hand, official telegrams from the Turks confirm the opinion of all objective authors that the Armenian leaders systematically suppressed the Muslim majority of the local population in order to be able to seize the territory (i.e., they simply slaughtered all the children, women, old people - author's note) . We have already spoken about this and repeat it again: nowhere in the Ottoman Empire did the Armenian population, which settled voluntarily, constitute even a slight majority that could allow the creation of an autonomous Armenian region. Under these conditions, the Armenian revolutionaries had no choice but to transform the minority into a majority by exterminating the Muslim population to succeed in their policy. They resorted to this procedure every time they had a free hand, moreover, with the support of the Russians themselves, finally, and this is the main element in our evidence, when trying to calculate the number of Armenians allegedly destroyed by the Turks, an honest observer in no way must equate the number of missing persons with the number of victims; Throughout the war, the insane hope of achieving the establishment of an Armenian autonomous state under the auspices of the Russians became an obsession for the Armenian population of Turkey. Khovanesyan, an Armenian author, tells us about this: “ The reckless armed rebellion in Van brought to him 200,000 Armenians from all over eastern Anatolia, who then fled from there, overcoming 3000-meter mountains, to then return to Erzurum and again escape from there with other Armenians, and so on.". It is inevitable that a population that has experienced such severe suffering at the height of war will lose significant numbers. However, justice does not allow the Turks to be blamed for these human losses, which occurred solely as a result of the circumstances of the war and the insane propaganda that for decades poisoned the Turkish Armenians and made them believe that they would be able to create an independent state through rebellion or murder, while they were everywhere minority". Let's return to the history of the battles.
The Turkish breakthrough proved short-lived, and in August the Turks were forced to cede Van to the Russians again. Until the end of 1915, the Eastern Front was established along the Van-Agri-Khorasan line. But in February 1916, the Russians launched a powerful offensive in two directions: one around Lake Van on the southern side and further to Bitlis and Mushu, the second from Kars to Erzurum, which was taken on February 16. Here, too, the Russians were accompanied by irregular columns of Armenians, determined to crush everything in their path.
Shaw writes: " What followed was the worst massacre of the entire war: more than a million Muslim peasants were forced to flee. Thousands of them were cut to pieces as they tried to escape with the Ottoman army retreating to Erzincan"(Shaw S. Pzh, p. 323).
One can only marvel at the magnitude of this figure: it gives an idea of the reputation for cruelty that the Armenian auxiliary groups acquired and which they maintained through constant terror (the Russian army, of course, was not involved here).
On April 18, the Russians took Trabzon, in July - Erzincan, even Sivas was under threat. However, the Russian offensive in the south around Lake Van was repulsed. In the autumn of 1916, the front was in the shape of a semicircle, which included Trabzon and Erzincan in Russian territory and reached Bitlis in the south. The front remained this way until the spring of 1918.
Of course, the Armenian revolutionary organizations believed that the Russian victory was assured, and imagined, “ that their dream would be realized, especially since the newly occupied territories included the port of Trabzon. A huge number of Armenians - refugees from Van, as well as emigrants from Russian Armenia - flocked to the Erzurum area. Throughout 1917, the Russian army was paralyzed by the St. Petersburg revolution. On December 18, 1917, the Bolsheviks signed a truce with the Ottoman government in Erzincan, and this was followed by the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty on March 3, 1918, which announced the return of Turkey eastern territories, taken from her in 1878. The Russians returned Kara and Ardahan, and “Armenia” was thus reduced to its natural densely populated territory - Russian Armenia, which Armenian gangs created in 1905-1907. as a result of the massacre of Azerbaijanis(however, it should be noted that here the Armenians did not constitute the majority at that time, until the end of the forties of the twentieth century - author's note).
But the Armenians did not agree that way. Starting on January 13, 1918, they began to acquire weapons from the Bolsheviks, who were recalling their units from the front.(TsGAAR, D-T, No. 13). Then, on February 10, 1918, together with the Georgians and Azerbaijanis, they formed a single socialist republic of Transcaucasia with Menshevik tendencies, which rejected in advance the terms of the treaty that were to be accepted in Brest-Litovsk. Finally, taking advantage of the decision of the Russian army, non-combatant Armenian units organized a systematic massacre of the Muslim population in Erzincan and Erzurum, accompanied by indescribable horrors, which were then told by indignant Russian officers" (Khleboc, journal de guerre du 2-e regiment d`artillerie, cite par Durun, p. 272).
The goal was still the same: to make room in order to ensure that Armenian immigrants had an exclusive right to territory in the eyes of international public opinion. Shaw states that the Turkish population of the five provinces of Trabzon, Erzincan, Erzurum, Van and Bitlis, which numbered 3,300,000 in 1914, became 600,000 refugees after the war (ibid., p. 325).
On June 4, 1918, the Caucasian republics signed a treaty with Turkey that confirmed the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Agreement and recognized the 1877 borders, thus allowing Turkish troops to bypass Armenia from the south and recapture Baku from the British, which they did on September 14, 1918. The Mudros Agreement of October 30, 1918 found Turkish troops in Baku. In the subsequent period of disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians tried to take advantage of the retreat of the Turkish troops: on April 19, 1919, they again occupied Kars (Georgians - Ardahan). This means that the front line was again pushed west almost along the 1878 border. From there, for eighteen months, the Armenians carried out countless raids on the outskirts of the territories they occupied, namely in the northwest direction towards the Black Sea and Trabzon (Gürün, 295 - 318), which refers to the memoirs of General Kazim Karzbekir and two witnesses - Rawlinson (English ) and Robert Dana (American).
And, naturally, they again tried to increase the Armenian population of Kars, and did this using well-known methods, that is, through total terror and murder. Fate decreed otherwise. Thanks to Mustafa Kemal, Turkey regained its strength, and on September 28, 1920, General Kazim Karabekir launched an offensive against the Armenians. On October 30 he took Kars, and on November 7 - Alexandropol (Gyumri). For the third time in 5 years of war, a huge mass of Armenians fled before the offensive of the Turkish army, thus expressing in their own way their refusal to submit to the Turkish government.
This is how the story of the migration of the Armenian population on the Eastern Front ends. However, this population could never actually be taken into account in the statistics of the notorious “beatings” committed by the Turks against the Armenians. All that is known about him is that the survivors, their number is very unclear, after terrible ordeals reached Soviet Armenia. But how many of these unfortunates were there whom human and criminally absurd propaganda sent at the height of the war to the line of fire in order to build there a chimerical state by exterminating the indigenous local population?
However, in order to more clearly imagine what happened in 1915, let us return to the events that unfolded around the Armenians in the pre-war period, that is, before the outbreak of the First World War of 1914-1918.
The one who worked to promote and use the Armenians for their own purposes is quite eloquently stated in the letter of the Tsar’s governor in the Caucasus, Vorontsov-Dashkov, which we present below.
On October 10, 1912, the governor of Nicholas II in the Caucasus, I.K. Vorontsov-Dashkov, wrote to the Emperor of the Russian Empire: “ Your Majesty knows that in the entire history of our relations with Turkey in the Caucasus, right up to the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878, which ended with the annexation of the present-day Batumi and Kars regions to our territory, Russian policy has incessantly since Peter the Great been based on a friendly attitude towards the Armenians, who paid us for this during the hostilities by actively helping the troops. With the annexation of the so-called Armenian region, in which Etchmiadzin, the cradle of Armenian-Gregorianism, was located, to our possessions. Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich spent a lot of effort to create the Patriarch of Etchmiadzin as a trustee of the Turkish and Persian Armenians, rightly believing thereby to achieve useful to Russia influence among the Christian population of Asia Minor, through which the path of our ancestral offensive movement to the southern seas ran. By patronizing the Armenians, we acquired loyal allies who always provided us with great services... It was carried out consistently and steadily for almost a century and a half"("Red Archive", No. 1 (26). M., pp. 118-120).
So, the policy of using Armenians in the fight against Turks and Azerbaijanis by Russia began from the time of Peter 1 and has been going on for about 250 years. By the hands of Armenians, who, in the apt expression of the prosecutor of the Etchmiadzin Synod. A.Frenkel, "civilization has only scratched the surface"Russia is implementing the behests of Peter I. " And quietly reduce these infidels so that they don’t know it". Yes, history, which no matter how much you hush up or distort, has preserved the true state of affairs in the Caucasus of the so-called Armenian region, in which Etchmiadzin (Uch muAdzin - Three Churches) and Iravan, i.e. Yerevan, are located. By the way, the flag of the Iravan Khanate is in Baku, in the museum.
In 1828, on February 10, according to the Treaty of Turkmenchay, the Nakhchivan and Iravan khanates became part of the Russian Empire. The Khanate of Iran offered heroic resistance to the Russian hordes for 23 years. Armenians also fought as part of the Russian troops. In 1825, the population of the Iravan Khanate consisted of Muslim Azerbaijanis (more than 95%) and Kurds. In 1828, Russia, having spent enormous material resources, resettled 120 thousand Armenians within the defeated Iravan Khanate.
And from 1829 to 1918, about 300 thousand more Armenians were settled there, and even after that, Armenians in the Erivan, Etchmiadzin provinces and other areas of the so-called Russian Armenia did not constitute the majority of the population anywhere. Their National composition nowhere exceeded 30-40% of the total local population in 1917. Thus, the table of the population of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, compiled according to the “Caucasian calendar for 1917”, shows that in the part of the Erivan province, which is part of Azerbaijan, there were 129,586 Muslims and 80,530 Armenians, which was 61% and 38, respectively. %. And in the document presented to the Chairman of the Paris Peace Conference - a note of protest. The Azerbaijani peace delegation dated August 16/19, 1919 regarding the recognition of the independence of the Azerbaijan Republic (abbreviated - author’s note) states: “ Being deprived of the opportunity to obtain regular and private relations with its capital - the city of Baku, the Azerbaijani peace delegation only learned from recent official reports about the sad fate to which the Karsk region, Nakhchivan, Sharuro-Daralagez, Surmalinsky districts and part of the Erivan district of the Erivan province were subjected - annexation , with the exception of the Ardagan district, to the Kars region forcibly to the territory of the Armenian Republic. All these lands were occupied by Turkish troops, who remained in them until the armistice was concluded. After the departure of the latter: the regions of Kars and Batumi, together with the Akhalikh and Akhalkalaki districts of the Tiflis province, formed an independent republic of the South-Western Caucasus, headed by a provisional government in the city of Kars.
This provisional government was formed by the parliament convened at the same time. Despite such a clearly expressed will of the population of these regions, the neighboring republics, in violation of the principle of free self-determination of peoples, made a number of attempts and forcibly seized part of the Republic of the South-West Caucasus and eventually ensured that the Kars parliament and government were dissolved by decree of General Thomson, and the members government arrested and sent to Batumi. At the same time, the dissolution and arrests were motivated by the fact that the Kars parliament and government seemed to have a hostile orientation, which, by the way, the Allied Command was incorrectly informed by the parties interested in this region. After this, the Kars region, under the guise of settling refugees, was occupied by Armenian and Georgian troops, and the occupation of the region was accompanied by armed clashes. Deeply sympathizing with the cause of the resettlement of refugees in their places, the Azerbaijani Minister of Foreign Affairs, in his protest on April 30 of this year, wrote to the Commander of the Allied Forces that this placement should take place with the assistance of British troops, and not Armenian military forces, seeking not so much to settle refugees in their places, but to forcibly seize and secure this area for themselves.
The Republic of Azerbaijan cannot and should not be indifferent to such a fate of the Kars region as a simple spectator. It should not be forgotten that it was in the Kars region, which relatively recently belonged to Turkey (until 1877), that the relations of Armenians towards Muslims always left much to be desired. During the last war, these relations greatly worsened due to the events of December 1914, when Turkish troops temporarily occupied the Ardagan district, the city of Ardagan and part of the Karsky district; After the retreat of the Turks, Russian troops began to destroy the Muslim population, putting everything to fire and sword. And in these bloody events that befell the innocent Muslim population, local Armenians expressed a clearly hostile attitude and in some places, as was the case, for example, even in the cities of Kars and Ardahan, they not only incited the Cossacks against the Muslims, but also slaughtered the latter mercilessly. All these circumstances cannot, of course, speak of a calm life together Muslims of Karsoy region under the control of Armenian authorities.
Realizing this, the Muslim population of the region itself, through deputations and with the help of written requests, has recently repeatedly addressed the Azerbaijani government with a statement that it cannot and will not be able to submit to the power of the Armenians, and therefore asks for the annexation of the region to the territory of the Azerbaijan Republic. Even less can the Republic of Azerbaijan reconcile itself with the transfer of control of the Nakhichevan, Sharuro-Daralagez, Surmalin districts and part of the Erivan district to the government of Armenia...
She finds that by transferring control of an integral part of the territory of Azerbaijan, there was a clear violation of the undoubted right of the Azerbaijan Republic to the districts: Nakhichevan, Sharuro-Daralagez, Surmalinsky and part of the Erivan district. This act creates a source of constant misunderstandings and even clashes between the local Muslim population and the Armenian Republic.
The named areas are inhabited by Muslim Azerbaijanis, who are one people, one nationality with the indigenous population of Azerbaijan, completely homogeneous not only in faith, but also in ethnic composition, language, customs and way of life.
It is enough to take the ratio of Muslims and Armenians to resolve the issue of ownership of these lands in favor of Azerbaijan. Thus, not only more than half are Muslim Azerbaijanis, but they are a significant majority in all districts, especially in the Sharur-Daralagez district - 72.3%.” In relation to the Erivan district, figures relating to the population of the entire district are taken. But that part of this district that is transferred to the administration of the Armenian government and which consists of the Vedi-Basar and Millistan districts contains about 90% of the Muslim population.
This is precisely the part of the Erivan district that suffered most from the Armenian military units under different names- “Vants”, “Sassouns”, who, like the gangs of Andronicus, slaughtered the Muslim population, not sparing the elderly and children, burned entire villages, subjected villages to fire from cannons and an armored train, dishonored Muslim women, ripped open the bellies of the dead, gouged out the eyes, and sometimes they burned corpses, they robbed the population and generally committed unheard-of atrocities. By the way, in the Vedi-Basar region an outrageous fact took place when the same Armenian detachments in the villages of Karakhach, Kadyshu, Karabaglar, Agasibekdy, Dekhnaz slaughtered all the men, and then took prisoner several hundred beautiful married women and girls, who were handed over to the Armenian “warriors”. The latter kept these unfortunate victims of Armenian atrocities with them for a long time, despite the fact that after the protest of the Azerbaijani government, even the Armenian parliament intervened in the matter” (TsGAOR Az. SSR, f, 894. from 10, d. 104, l. 1-3) .
The information available in the note of protest from the Azerbaijan Republic they quoted, presented to the Chairman of the Paris Peace Conference, eloquently testifies that the Armenians never had a homeland in Armenia (Russian), since they did not constitute the majority anywhere. This document testifies that in Batumi, Akhalsalaki, Akhaltsikhe, Kars, Nakhichevan, Etchmiadzin, Yerevan, etc., Muslim Azerbaijanis have always lived, and in the majority.
Contrary to common sense, the Armenian Republic was created in 1918 in the territories that had belonged to Azerbaijanis for centuries, by the will of England.
England thereby solved a double problem: “it created a buffer Christian state between Turkey and Russia and cut off Turkey from the entire Turkic world (and in 1922, by the will of the leadership of the USSR, Zangezur was taken from Azerbaijan and transferred to Armenia. Thus, Turkey finally lost direct land access to the Turkic world, which stretches in a wide strip from the Balkans to the Korean Peninsula. What motivated England and the Entente to make the decision to create an Armenian state from scratch, apparently, anti-Turkism and anti-Islamism! to the middle of Europe and organically combined the interests of both Muslim and Christian peoples subject to it. It was not without reason that for the first time in world practice, the Ottoman Empire created the institution of “Ombudsman” - a defender of the rights of humanity, regardless of the religious, national and property affiliation of the subjects of the empire, which was effective. protected the entire population from the arbitrariness of the bureaucratic apparatus of power.
Excerpt from a book THE GREAT LIE ABOUT “GREAT ARMENIA” Tahir Mobile oglu. Baku "Araz" -2009 pp.58-69
If the Law does not apply and the state does not fulfill its duties, then the duty of citizens is to take the administration of justice into their own hands.
Ch. Lynch
The trial of V. Kaloev, who killed an air traffic controller in Switzerland, due to whose negligence Kaloev’s family died, once again raised the eternal legal question: does an ordinary citizen have the right to revenge against known criminals?
We will not touch upon the purely legal side of this problem. Let us just remember how, without any international tribunals or trials, justice overtook the organizers of the first genocide in the 20th century.
1915 was not only the second year of the First World War. 90 years ago, the genocide of an entire people occurred. The so-called Young Turks who ruled the Ottoman Empire organized a brutal massacre of Armenians living under Turkish rule, aiming at their complete destruction.
Let us remember that at the beginning of the twentieth century, Armenians did not have their own statehood for several centuries and were a divided people. The eastern part of historical Armenia became part of Russia in 1828, which became the salvation of the Armenians as a nation. In the Russian Empire, Armenians were able to freely develop their culture and achieved economic prosperity. Many Russian Armenians have made a brilliant career, giving Russia many military leaders, administrators, economic leaders, artists, and scientists. In both the Russian Empire and the USSR, Armenians were very well represented in the political, economic and cultural elite. (However, you cannot erase the words from the song. Many revolutionaries also emerged from among the Armenians, and at the end of the Soviet era, it was the Armenian movement in Karabakh that became the bomb that blew up the USSR).
But Russian eastern Armenia constituted only 1/10 of the territory of historical Armenia. Most of the Armenian lands are still part of Turkey. 90 years ago, most of the Armenian people lived there. But now there are no Armenians in these lands. For many years, the Turks worked very creatively to clear these lands of indigenous inhabitants. Armenian pogroms occurred repeatedly over a number of centuries. Only in 1894-96. At least 200 thousand Armenians were killed by the Turks. Fleeing from Turkish captivity, hundreds of thousands of Armenians fled to Russia. It is interesting that in 1828, only 107 thousand people lived on the lands of eastern Armenia annexed to Russia. But by 1914, there were already 2 million Armenians in the Russian Empire. It is clear that the main thing in such rapid growth was the mass immigration of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire. However, despite the departure to Russia and other countries, the assimilation of some Armenians who converted to Islam and turned into “Turks”, as well as the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in periodic pogroms, by the beginning of the First World War over 4.5 million lived in Turkish Western Armenia Armenians
The situation of the Turkish Armenians especially worsened when the Young Turks seized power in the Ottoman Empire. They called themselves that not because of their youth, but because among them there really were enough “new Turks” from among those who converted to Islam from a variety of ethnic and religious groups. There were especially many crypto-Jews among the Young Turks. The Young Turks were led by three military men: Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Dzhemal Pasha. The Young Turk party was called “Ittihad ve Terraki” (“Unity and Progress”), and the official ideology of the party was pan-Turkism, or the “Great Turan” theory, which proclaimed the need to unite all Turkic tribes in one empire from Bosnia to Altai.
The Armenians aroused special hatred among the Young Turks because the western Armenia inhabited by them separated purely Turkish regions from Azerbaijan and the places of settlement of other Turkic tribes. In addition, enterprising Armenian merchants, even under Turkish oppression, managed to take possession of a significant part of the finances of the Ottoman Empire. And, what was most important for the Young Turks, the Armenians were always distinguished by their pro-Russian sympathies and the Young Turks rightly feared a general uprising in Western Armenia.
And so, in the conditions of the outbreak of war, on April 24, 1915, on the orders of the Young Turk triumvirate, Turkish regular troops, police, gangs of marauders and Muslim fanatics began a grandiose massacre of Armenians throughout the Ottoman Empire. Within a few months, up to 2.5 million Armenians died, a few managed to escape, the bulk of the survivors were thrown into concentration camps in the Arabian deserts, where most of them died from hunger and epidemics. Several hundred thousand Armenians were saved by the offensive of the Russian army on the Caucasian front, launched by the command specifically for the purpose of saving Christians. However, after 1915 there were no Armenians left in the former Western Armenia.
Soon, Eastern Armenia also suffered severe trials. After the revolution, the Russian Empire collapsed. In Azerbaijan, the pan-Turkists from the Musavat party who seized power immediately began the massacre of Armenians. The Georgian Mensheviks did the same. Turkish troops continued to finish off the Armenians not only at home, but also began an offensive in eastern Armenia, continuing to develop their plan of genocide. In a small patch of Eastern Armenia, famine and disease were raging, killing a third of the population, but the Armenians managed to defeat the Turks, Azerbaijanis and Georgians. In November 1920, eastern Armenia was occupied by the Red Army almost without resistance, and the Armenian Soviet Republic was created.
Total for 1915-1920 half of all Armenians died, Western Armenia was left without an indigenous population, in Soviet Armenia a third of all men were war invalids, over a million Armenian refugees were scattered throughout the world.
The Armenian refugees were split into many parties, but all Armenians were united in the fact that the Young Turk leaders must be destroyed. But not a single government in the world was going to help the Armenians. The USSR, where many Armenians were part of the party and state leadership of the country, in the 20s. had close friendly ties with Turkey. The Entente countries were busy dividing the Ottoman Empire, and they had no time for any Armenians. The “world progressive community” was just as corrupt then as it is today. The genocide of the Armenian people was not noticed by her. Subsequently, Hitler, preparing genocide against other peoples, cynically but rightly remarked: “Who knows about the Armenians these days?”
But even in such conditions, the Armenians decided to carry out justice. Shagen Natalie (it was a pseudonym in honor of the woman he loved) and Grigory Merchanov took up the task of carrying out revenge. A list of the organizers and main perpetrators of the genocide was compiled. Started preparatory work: stalking, collecting information, obtaining weapons. And then came the swift and just judgment:
- Talaat Pasha was shot in Berlin on March 16, 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian (by the way, the jury completely acquitted him);
- Enver Pasha was killed in 1922 in Turkestan by the red commander Akop Melkumov;
- Dzhemal Pasha was killed in Tiflis on June 25, 1922, the avengers were Stepan Tsakhikyan and Petros Ter-Poghosyan;
- Beibut Khan Jevanshin (Minister of Internal Affairs of Musavatist Azerbaijan) was killed on June 18, 1921 in Constantinople by Misak Torlakyan;
- Said Halim Pasha (former Prime Minister of Turkey) was assassinated in Berlin on December 5, 1921 by Arshavir Shirokyan;
- Shekir Bey (former head of the special commission for organizing the massacre of Armenians) was killed on April 17, 1922 by Aram Erkyan.
The “black list” of perpetrators of the genocide also included several Armenian traitors. All of them were killed by their relatives (brothers, fathers, nephews). This was done on purpose so as not to cause blood feud among the Armenians themselves.
In just three years, all the organizers of the genocide were executed. Along the way, several thousand more lower-ranking participants in the massacre were eliminated. No one escaped from retribution!
This is how the poor emigrants who survived the massacre, lost their homeland, divided into dozens of parties, took on the role of judges and administered justice. This is the historical example history gives us.
Sergey Viktorovich Lebedev, Doctor of Philosophy, Professor (St. Petersburg)
On August 26, 1896, a group of heavily armed Armenians seized the Ottoman Bank building, took European staff hostage and, threatening to blow up the bank, demanded that the Turkish government carry out promised political reforms. However, in response, the Turkish authorities ordered attacks on the Armenians. Over the course of two days, with the apparent connivance of the authorities, the Turks massacred or beat to death more than 6,000 Armenians.
The exact number of victims of the massacre of 1894-1896 is impossible to calculate. Even before the end of the violent actions, the Lutheran missionary Johannes Lepsius, who was in Turkey at that time, using German and other sources, collected the following statistics: killed - 88,243 people, devastated - 546,000 people, plundered cities and villages - 2,493, villages converted to Islam - 456, churches and monasteries desecrated - 649, churches turned into mosques - 328. Estimating total number killed, Kinross gives a figure of 50-100 thousand, Bloxham - 80-100 thousand, Hovhannisyan - about 100 thousand, Adalyan and Totten - from 100 to 300 thousand, Dadryan - 250-300 thousand, Suni - 300 thousand people.
But the date April 24, 1915 occupies a special place in the history of the Armenian genocide. During World War I, Armenians fought on the side of the Turks. But when the Turkish troops suffered a brutal defeat near Sarykamysh, the Armenians were blamed for everything.
The Armenians in the army were disarmed. At first, the authorities gathered healthy men in Turkish cities, declaring that the government, which was friendly towards them, was preparing to resettle the Armenians to new homes, based on military necessity. Many law-abiding Armenians loyal to Turkey, having received calls from the police, came themselves.
The collected men were imprisoned and then taken out of the city into deserted areas and destroyed using firearms and bladed weapons. Then the elderly, women and children gathered and were also informed that they had to be resettled. They were driven in columns under the escort of gendarmes. Those who could not walk were killed; no exceptions were made even for pregnant women. The gendarmes chose the longest routes possible or forced people to go back along the same route, but drove people around until the majority died of thirst or hunger.
Muslims were warned about death penalty for the protection of Armenians. Women and children from Ordu were loaded onto barges under the pretext of transporting them to Samsun, and then taken out to sea and thrown overboard.
During the 1919 tribunal, the chief of police of Trebizond testified that he had sent young Armenian women to Istanbul as a gift from the regional governor to Ittihat leaders. Armenian girls from the Red Crescent Hospital were abused, where the governor of Trebizond raped them and kept them as personal concubines.
The destruction of the Armenian population was accompanied by a campaign to destroy the Armenian cultural heritage. Armenian monuments and churches were blown up, cemeteries were plowed open into fields where corn and wheat were sown, Armenian quarters of cities were destroyed or occupied by the Turkish and Kurdish population and renamed
A telegram from US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau to the State Department (dated July 16, 1915) describes the extermination of the Armenians as a “campaign of racial extermination.”
Armenians near a fallen horse.
According to Johannes Lepsius, about 1 million Armenians were killed; in 1919, Lepsius revised his estimate to 1,100,000. According to him, only during the Ottoman invasion of Transcaucasia in 1918, from 50 to 100 thousand Armenians were killed. Ernst Sommer of the German Relief Union estimated the number of deportees at 1,400,000 and the number of survivors at 250,000.
If this is not genocide, then what is genocide?
The Armenian people did not bow their heads until the very end and fought for their views, their freedom and their independence. The resistance of the Armenians is evidenced by the battles that took place in Musa Dag, where the Armenians held the defense for more than fifty days; defense of the cities of Van and Mush. The Armenians held out in these cities until the Russian army appeared on the territory of the cities.
The Armenians took revenge even after the end of all hostilities. They created an operation to destroy the Ottoman rulers, who decided to exterminate the innocent people. So in 1921 and 1922, three pashas who decided on genocide were shot dead by Armenian soldiers and patriots.
It is not surprising that Germany recognized the Armenian genocide (despite Turkey’s hysteria). Russia also recognized him.
Putin at the memorial complex for those killed in the genocide.
Some historians distinguish two periods in the history of genocide. If at the first stage (1878-1914) the task was to retain the territory of the enslaved people and organize a mass exodus, then in 1915-1922 the destruction of the ethnic and political Armenian clan, which was hindering the implementation of the pan-Turkism program, was put at the forefront. Before the First World War, the destruction of the Armenian national group was carried out in the form of a system of widespread individual murders combined with periodic massacres of Armenians in certain areas where they constituted an absolute majority (the massacre in Sasun, murders throughout the empire in the fall and winter of 1895, the massacre in Istanbul in Van area).
The original number of people who lived in this territory is a controversial issue, since a significant part of the archives was destroyed. It is known that in the mid-19th century in the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslims made up about 56% of the population.
According to the Armenian Patriarchate, in 1878, three million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. In 1914, the Armenian Patriarchate of Turkey estimated the number of Armenians in the country at 1,845,450. The Armenian population decreased by more than a million due to massacres in 1894-1896, the flight of Armenians from Turkey and forced conversion to Islam.
The Young Turks, who came to power after the 1908 revolution, continued their policy of brutally suppressing the national liberation movement. In ideology, the old doctrine of Ottomanism was replaced by no less rigid concepts of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism. A campaign of forced Turkification of the population was launched, and non-Turkish organizations were banned.
In April 1909, the Cilician Massacre occurred, a massacre of Armenians in the vilayets of Adana and Allepo. About 30 thousand people became victims of the massacre, among whom were not only Armenians, but also Greeks, Syrians and Chaldeans. In general, during these years the Young Turks prepared the ground for a complete solution to the “Armenian question”.
In February 1915, at a special meeting of the government, the Young Turk ideologist Dr. Nazim Bey outlined a plan for the complete and widespread destruction of the Armenian people: “It is necessary to completely exterminate the Armenian nation, without leaving a single living Armenian on our land. Even the word “Armenian” itself must be erased from memory..."
On April 24, 1915, on the day now celebrated as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Armenian Genocide, mass arrests of the Armenian intellectual, religious, economic and political elite began in Constantinople, which led to the complete destruction of an entire galaxy of prominent figures of Armenian culture. More than 800 representatives of the Armenian intelligentsia were arrested and subsequently killed, including writers Grigor Zohrab, Daniel Varuzhan, Siamanto, Ruben Sevak. Unable to bear the death of his friends, the great composer Komitas lost his mind.
In May-June 1915, massacres and deportations of Armenians began in Western Armenia.
The general and systematic campaign against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire consisted of the expulsion of Armenians into the desert and subsequent executions, death by bands of marauders or from hunger or thirst. Armenians were subjected to deportations from almost all the main centers of the empire.
On June 21, 1915, during the final act of deportation, its main inspirer, Interior Minister Talaat Pasha, ordered the expulsion of “all Armenians without exception” living in the ten provinces of the eastern region of the Ottoman Empire, with the exception of those who were considered useful to the state. Under this new directive, deportations were carried out according to the "ten percent principle", according to which Armenians were not to exceed 10% of the Muslims in the region.
The process of expulsion and extermination of Turkish Armenians culminated in a series of military campaigns in 1920 against refugees who had returned to Cilicia, and in the Smyrna (modern-day Izmir) massacre in September 1922, when troops under the command of Mustafa Kemal massacred the Armenian quarter in Smyrna and then, under pressure from the Western powers, the survivors were allowed to evacuate. With the destruction of the Armenians of Smyrna, the last surviving compact community, the Armenian population of Turkey practically ceased to exist in their historical homeland. The surviving refugees scattered around the world, forming diasporas in several dozen countries.
Modern estimates of the number of victims of the genocide vary from 200 thousand (some Turkish sources) to more than 2 million Armenians. Most historians estimate the number of victims to be between 1 and 1.5 million. Over 800 thousand became refugees.
It is difficult to determine the exact number of victims and survivors, since since 1915, fleeing murders and pogroms, many Armenian families changed their religion (according to some sources - from 250 thousand to 300 thousand people).
For many years now, Armenians around the world have been trying to ensure that the international community officially and unconditionally recognizes the fact of genocide. The first special decree recognizing and condemning the terrible tragedy of 1915 was adopted by the Parliament of Uruguay (April 20, 1965). Laws, regulations and decisions on the Armenian genocide were subsequently adopted by the European Parliament, the State Duma of Russia, the parliaments of other countries, in particular Cyprus, Argentina, Canada, Greece, Lebanon, Belgium, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, Venezuela, Lithuania, Chile, Bolivia, as well as the Vatican.
The Armenian genocide was recognized by over 40 American states, the Australian state of New South Wales, the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario (the city of Toronto inclusive), the Swiss cantons of Geneva and Vaud, Wales (Great Britain), about 40 Italian communes, dozens of international and national organizations, including including the World Council of Churches, the League for Human Rights, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanities, and the Union of Jewish Communities of America.
On April 14, 1995, the State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted a statement “On condemnation of the genocide of the Armenian people in 1915-1922.”
The US government exterminated 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, but refuses to call it genocide.
The Armenian community in the United States has long ago accepted a resolution by Congress recognizing the fact of genocide of the Armenian people.
Attempts to pass this legislative initiative were made in Congress more than once, but they were never successful.
The issue of recognition of genocide in the normalization of relations between Armenia and Turkey.
Armenia and Turkey have not yet established diplomatic relations, and the Armenian-Turkish border has been closed since 1993 on the initiative of official Ankara.
Turkey traditionally rejects accusations of the Armenian genocide, arguing that both Armenians and Turks were victims of the 1915 tragedy, and reacts extremely painfully to the process of international recognition of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.
In 1965, a monument to the victims of the genocide was erected on the territory of the Catholicosate in Etchmiadzin. In 1967, the construction of a memorial complex was completed on the Tsitsernakaberd hill (Swallow Fortress) in Yerevan. In 1995, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute was built near the memorial complex.
The words “I remember and demand” were chosen as the motto of Armenians around the world for the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, and the forget-me-not was chosen as the symbol. This flower in all languages has a symbolic meaning - to remember, not to forget and to remind. The flower's cup graphically depicts the memorial in Tsitserkaberd with its 12 pylons. This symbol will be actively used throughout 2015.
The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources