SWEDEN WAS INFORMED OF EXTERMINATION OF ARMENIANS IN 1915 BUT PREFERRED NOT TO INTERVENE
PanARMENIAN.Net
21.04.2008 16:11 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ A recently conducted study at the Uppsala University
has revealed highly interesting information in the Swedish Archives,
which once again confirm the researchers’ view of the events
in the Ottoman Turkey during the First World War: the Christian
minorities, the Armenians in particular, were subjected to genocide,
reports.
The survey conducted by Vahagn Avedian, Editor of Armenica.org
and Master Degree Student at Uppsala University, covers the period
between 1915 and 1923 and includes, among others, reports which the
Swedish Ambassador, Cosswa Anckarsvard, and the Swedish Military
Attache, Einar af Wirsen, both stationed in Constantinople, sent
to the Foreign Department (found in the National Archive) and the
General Staff Headquarters (found in the War Archive) in Stockholm,
respectively. In total, about eighty documents were found with
direct relevance to the so-called Armenian Question, of which some
are over-explicit in their message: the Turkish Government conducted
a systematic extermination of the Armenian Nation.
On July 6, 1915, Ambassador Anckarsvard, writing to the Swedish
Foreign Minister, Knut Wallenberg, concludes: "Mr. Minister, The
persecutions of the Armenians have reached hair-raising proportions
and all points to the fact that the Young Turks want to seize the
opportunity, since due to different reasons there are no effective
external pressure to be feared, to once and for all put an end to the
Armenian question. The means for this are quite simple and consist
of the extermination [utrotandet] of the Armenian nation."
Major Wirsen’s reports to the General Staff concur with Anckarsvard’s
analysis. In 1942 Wirsen published his memoirs, entitled "Memories from
Peace and War", reflecting upon his time as Swedish Military Attache
in the Balkans and Turkey. In a chapter entitled "The Murder of a
Nation", Wirsen renders his observations of the Armenian massacres:
"Officially, these [deportations] had the goal to move the entire
Armenian population to the steppe regions of Northern Mesopotamia
and Syria, but in reality they aimed to exterminate [utrota] the
Armenians, whereby the pure Turkish element in Asia Minor would
achieve a dominating position."
The mentioned quotations are a fraction of the information presented
in the study. In addition to the mentioned archives of the Foreign
Ministry and the General Staff, the reports from the Swedish
missionaries and the Swedish newspapers were also included in the
study and concur with the same view.
Presently, Sweden, as all other states, chose to secure its national
interests rather than standing out from the rest by advocating
Armenia’s right and the question of punishing the perpetrators of
the Armenian Genocide. The present-day Swedish Government does not
seem to be willing to become involved in the question either. Just
last fall, the Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, during an interpellation
in the Swedish Parliament, refrained from officially recognizing the
1915 genocide, partly by referring to "the need of additional research
about what really transpired in the Ottoman Empire."