U.S. DOCUMENT REVEALS TURKEY CONTINUED OTTOMAN EMPIRE’S ANTI-ARMENIAN POLICIES
By Harut Sassounian
AZG Armenian Daily
18/10/2008
Armenian Genocide
Those who want to shield today’s Turkey from responsibility for the
Armenian Genocide have sought to blame the Young Turk government of
the Ottoman Empire rather than the Republic of Turkey which was not
established until 1923.
One wonders then why Turkish officials, who have tried every trick
to deny the facts of the Armenian Genocide, have not taken the easy
way out by shifting the blame for the Genocide to the long defunct
Ottoman Empire.
A frequently advanced explanation is that Turks, as a proud people,
cannot accept that their ancestors committed the heinous crime of
seeking to eliminate an entire nation. Others have argued that should
the Republic of Turkey blame the Ottomans for the Armenian Genocide,
it could be held legally liable as the successor state to the Ottoman
Empire.
In recent years, however, it has become clear, particularly through the
painstaking research conducted by Turkish scholar Taner Akcam, that a
key reason why today’s Turkish officials are not prepared to face their
history honestly and blame their Ottoman ancestors is that the Republic
of Turkey is actually the continuation of the Ottoman state. Indeed,
many of the early leaders of the Turkish Republic had been high-ranking
Ottoman officials personally involved in the implementation of the
Armenian Genocide. Such an unbroken transition in leadership assured
the continuity of the Ottomans’ anti-Armenian policies.
In retrospect, it has become apparent that these genocidal policies
stretched over a half century, starting with Sultan Abdul Hamid’s
massacre of 300,000 Armenians in 1894-96, followed by the killings
of 30,000 Armenians in Adana by the Young Turk regime in 1909,
culminating in the Genocide of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915-23,
and the subsequent policies of forced Turkification and deportation
of tens of thousands of Armenians by the Republic of Turkey.
An important document from the U.S. archives, known until now to
a handful of scholars, was recently posted on an Armenian/Turkish
website. It provides incontestable evidence that Armenians continued
to be uprooted from their native lands and deported by the Republic
of Turkey well into the 1930’s for purely racial reasons.
The document in question is a "Strictly Confidential" cable dated
March 2, 1934, sent by U.S. Ambassador Robert P. Skinner from Ankara
to the Secretary of State in Washington, reporting the deportation
of 600 Armenians from "the interior of Anatolia to Istanbul."
The Ambassador wrote: "It is assumed by most of the deportees
that their expulsion from their homes in Anatolia is a part of the
Government’s program of making Anatolia a pure Turkish district. They
relate that the Turkish police, in towns and villages where Armenians
lived, attempted to instigate local Moslem people to drive the
Armenians away. … The Armenians were told that they had to leave
at once for Istanbul. They sold their possessions receiving for them
ruinous prices. I have been told that cattle worth several hundred
liras a head had been sold for as little as five liras a head. My
informant stated that the Armenians were permitted to sell their
property in order that no one of them could say that they were forced
to abandon it. However, the sale under these conditions amounted to
a practical abandonment." Sass
The Ambassador further reported: "The Armenians were obliged to
walk from their villages to the railways and then they were shipped
by train to Istanbul. … The real reason for the deportations is
unknown…. It is likely, though, that their removal is simply one step
in the government’s avowed policy of making Anatolia purely Turkish."
Top be sure, in the 1920’s and 30’s thousands of Armenian survivors
of the Genocide were forced out from their homes in Anatolia to other
locations in Turkey or neighboring countries. These racist policies
were followed in the 1940’s by Varlik Vergisi, the imposition of
exorbitant wealth taxes on Armenians, Greeks and Jews, and the 1955
Istanbul pogroms during which many Greeks and some Armenians and Jews
were killed and their properties destroyed.
This barbaric continuum of massacre, genocide and deportation
highlights the existence of a long-term stratagem implemented by
successive Turkish regimes from the 1890’s to recent times in order
to solve the Armenian Question with finality.
Consequently, the Republic of Turkey is legally responsible for its
own crimes as well as those committed by its Ottoman predecessors.