From: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish,talk.politics.mideast,talk.politics.soviet,soc.culture.greek,soc.culture.europe,soc.history
Followup-To: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Sechrest's inability to digest scholarly sources and historical facts.
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 92 20:56:09 EST
Reply-To: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Distribution: world

In article <1992Dec16.053250.21891@zip.eecs.umich.edu> sechrest@dip.eecs.umich.edu (Stuart Sechrest) writes:

>>Couldn't let this joke go by. You obviously only listened to half of the
>>story, and then cut out when you didn't like it. How about Adana? How
>>about Haleb? How about Aydin? How about Konya? How about Trabzon? How
>>about the entire Muslim population of x-Soviet Armenia? How about...
>>
>>Source: Table 3.23.  
>>Source: Page 79 (The Other Provinces). 

>I am certainly willing to believe whatever you say, if you say it.

It is the "truth" here that counts.

>Unfortunately, I have to attempt to interpret your half-statements
>and may occassionally fall short of reading your mind.

You've just made a very sweeping generalization. I think you need
just a wee bit more evidence than this. Besides, in the proper 
context of events, this is intellectually and morally dishonest.

>In the above you say that I cut out when I didn't like your comments.
>Unfortunately, the lines which followed, which *you* cut out, were about 
>Adana and Trabzon, and x-Russian Armenia.  So please don't complain about 
>your own problems editing.

Is that not the crux of my argument? My complaint, and such it was, 
was directed at your habit of editing McCarthy's book in such a way as 
to leave you with straw man arguments to knock down. If your arguments
are really good and valid, then they can stand to be looked at in
the light of the complete statement to which you are replying. Don't
you think? 

>When you say ``Source: Table 3.23'' what do you mean?  What is the connection
>between the small Armenian populations and the huge numbers of Muslim deaths?
>Compare this information from Tables 3.23 and 7.10.

That's the whole point you invariably miss. 

"Since all the Moslems capable of bearing arms were in the Turkish Army,
 it was easy to organize a terrible massacre by the Armenians against
 defenseless people, because the Armenians were not only attacking the
 sides and rear of the Eastern Army paralyzed at the front by the 
 Russians, but were attacking the Moslem folk in the region as well."

>Province	Armenian Population 	Muslim deaths
>		in 1913			1912-1922

>Huedavendigar	69,134			160,612
>Aydin		25,231			333,230
>Ankara		63,605			104,823
>Konya		16,808			418,442
>Kastamonu	10,586			224,679
>Trabzon	41,211			 49,907

>It quite apparent that huge numbers of Muslims died in these provinces.

Tell it to "arromdian", "perlmanian", "kerenian", "hallamian" and 
"wieneramus" of ASALA/SDPA/ARF.

>It is apparent that there were small Armenian minorities in these 
>provinces.  Are you saying that the Armenian dictatorship is responsible
>for the death of, for example, 333,230 Muslims in Aydin?  I'm afraid I
>can't read your mind on this issue.

You don't get it, do you? Starting from late 1914, Armenians committed 
widespread massacres in Anatolia, because the arena was left to the 
Armenians. Almost every Turkish town and village from Aydin up to 
Azerbaidjan suffered large scale massacres and genocide by Armenians.

The Ottoman Army, liberating Trabzon, Bayburt, Erzincan, Erzurum, 
Kars and other regions from the Russians, saw that the cities and their 
villages had been destroyed and burnt, people slaughtered, massacred.
The massacres conducted by Armenians, which became a black stain for
humanity, shocked and disgusted even the Russian, British, German,
Austrian, French and American authorities.

Almost every Ottoman document is related to Armenian massacres and 
cruelties. The inhuman treatment, cruelties, atrocities, genocide by 
Armenian gangs perpetrated against innocent Moslem Turkish and Kurdish
people, are sufficiently reflected in historical documents. Even today
over seventy-five years later, the terrifying screams of the victims
of these cruelties can be heard.

>You might consider answering the question of where the 2.5 million Turks and
>Kurds you say were murdered by the Armenian dictatorship lived.  So far
>we have seen the plausibility of a number of deaths in excess of a million in 
>the eastern provinces of Anatolia.  

Why do you keep ignoring the Armenian genocide of the Muslims in the
remaining vilayets of Ottoman Empire? Tell us who slaughtered the Muslims
of Haleb, Hudavendigar, Aydin, Ankara, Konya, Kastamonu, Trabzon, Adana,...?

Source: Quoted by General Hamelin in a letter to the High Commissioner,
February 2, 1919, in the official history, "Les Armees Francaises au Levant,"
vol. 1, p. 122.

 "They [Armenians] burned and destroyed many Turkish villages as punitive
  measures in their advance and practically all Turkish villages in their
  retreat from Marash."

Source: John Dewey, "The Turkish Tragedy", The New Republic, Volume 40, 
November 12, 1928, pp. 268-269.

 "that they [Armenians] boasted of having raised an army of one hundred 
  and fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at 
  least a hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population."

>We have the remaining task of getting you 
>to say where you believe the other 1.5 million lived, in particular how many 
>of these lived in x-Russian Armenia.  A simple answer would be helpful.

Are you suffering from a severe case of myopia? See above. And, of course...

Source: Hovannisian, Richard G.: Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918.
University of California Press (Berkeley and Los Angeles), 1967, p. 13.

"The addition of the Kars and Batum oblasts to the Empire increased the
 area of Transcaucasia to over 130,000 square miles. The estimated population
 of the entire region in 1886 was 4,700,000, of whom 940,000 (20 percent) were
 Armenian, 1,200,000 (25 percent) Georgian, and 2,220,000 (45 percent) Moslem.
 Of the latter group, 1,140,000 were Tatars. Paradoxically, barely one-third
 of Transcaucasia's Armenians lived in the Erevan guberniia, where the 
 Christians constituted a majority in only three of the seven uezds. Erevan
 uezd, the administrative center of the province, had only 44,000 Armenians
 as compared to 68,000 Moslems. By the time of the Russian Census of 1897,
 however, the Armenians had established a scant majority, 53 percent, in the
 guberniia; it had risen by 1916 to 60 percent, or 670,000 of the 1,120,000
 inhabitants. This impressive change in the province's ethnic character 
 notwithstanding, there was, on the eve of the creation of the Armenian 
 Republic, a solid block of 370,000 Tartars who continued to dominate the 
 southern districts, from the outskirts of Ereven to the border of Persia." 
 (See also Map 1. Historic Armenia and Map 4. Administrative subdivisions of 
 Transcaucasia).

In 1920, '0' percent Turk. 

"We closed the roads and mountain passes that might serve as 
 ways of escape for the Tartars and then proceeded in the work 
 of extermination. Our troops surrounded village after village. 
 Little resistance was offered. Our artillery knocked the huts 
 into heaps of stone and dust and when the villages became untenable 
 and inhabitants fled from them into fields, bullets and bayonets 
 completed the work. Some of the Tartars escaped of course. They 
 found refuge in the mountains or succeeded in crossing the border 
 into Turkey. The rest were killed. And so it is that the whole 
 length of the borderland of Russian Armenia from Nakhitchevan to 
 Akhalkalaki from the hot plains of Ararat to the cold mountain 
 plateau of the North were dotted with mute mournful ruins of 
 Tartar villages. They are quiet now, those villages, except for 
 howling of wolves and jackals that visit them to paw over the 
 scattered bones of the dead." 

                             Ohanus Appressian
                            "Men Are Like That"
                                   p. 202.

                  (to be continued...)

Serdar Argic

                     'This war quickly developed into one of extermination. 
                      We closed the roads and mountain passes that might 
                      serve as ways of escape for the Tartars [Turks] and 
                      then proceeded in the work of extermination.'
                                                       (Ohanus Appressian)

Organization: Doctoral student, Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA