Quote:we all know the military has too much power in turkey interfering in state affairs to keep Kemal's legacy in order.
Turkish Army's first duty is to preserve and to defend Turkish Independence and the Turkish Republic forever. The army must be powerful because of our strategic and historical status. When our Ancestors pushed back the intruders, a generation was destroyed. The unfortunate part: some countries' soldiers came to fight with us but they didnot know why they would fight against us. A lot of stories we have about this issue.
Quote:Turkey has problems with Greece, Cyprus and Armenia (genocide recognition?). Put Israel into that mix too, they are also neighbors (remember the Switzerland incident with Erdogan?). And about greece busting up, you know in greece they say the opposite i imagine (that turkey is aggressive). sending fighters to fly over greek airspace on a daily basis is not exactly friendly, but i can very well imagine that these are sent by military and with no political order.
Many years ago, our Ancestors had a big empire which was located on three continents. Current Greek, Rum and Armenian people are our citizens long years. So they hate us now. If Ottomans(1299-1922) had wanted to make pressure, they could have made it easily. But they did not! Armenians are the best friends of Ottomans and they took critical duties in Ottomans' Palace. But they were deceived by Russia and England. They made big slaughters in Anatolia. I will take back this part but let me clarify you:
It was claimed that genocide was carried out by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923. We know that V. Dadrian and many other leading Armenian historians have claimed the loss of the Armenian life during World War I due to the actions of the Ottoman Empire was 1.5 million. Before we comment on these exaggerated figures, we must emphasize that the Ottoman Empire had exited the stage of history in 1923. This fact indicates that the Armenian lobby is directly targeting the Republic of Turkey and aims to keep Turkey from avoiding punishment for the refusal to acknowledge its heritage. As for the figures, we may state with certainty that the claimed number of Armenian victims is an exaggeration. First of all, many independent researchers have estimated that the Armenian population in 1914 ranged between 1.400000 and 1.700000. The claim that 1.5 million Armenians were killed is also a myth. This myth originated from the report of Leslie Davis, the US consul at Harput. He wrote on July 24, 1915 -- the 44th day after the order for deportation -- that âIt is impossible to say how many Armenians have been killed, but it is estimated that the number is not far from a millionâ (NARA 867.4016/269). Even Dadrian vouches for 1 million survivors and estimates the number of Armenian victims at 1.1 million. During the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Armenian leader, Bogos Nubar Pasha, spoke about the deportation of 600-700,000 Armenians. In addition, the Patriarchate calculated in 1919 that the total number of Armenians living in Anatolia was 644,000. A document released by the League of Nations stated the number of Armenians in 1922 who originated from Turkey was 817,873 and states that âthe total given does not include the able-bodied Armeniansâ who still lived in Turkey. Last but not least, in a memorandum sent to English and French embassies by the Patriarchate in 1919, it claimed that â200,000 Armenians were buried alive or were drowned in Van Lake, the Fırat River and the Black Sea between 1914 and 1918.â (Report presented to the Preliminary Peace Conference by the Commission for the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on the Enforcement of Penalties, March 29, 1919). These figures clearly demonstrate that the Armenian historians have exaggerated the figures about the number of Armenian victims during the war.
Also I must say, the countries blame us: Russia was carrying out pogroms on the Jews in their country, and England had already deported citizens of German origin to concentration camps. These are historical truths. So?
More, all studies dealing with the implementation of relocation have so far indicated that by the relocation of the Armenians the Ottomans tried to prevent a full scale rebellion behind their army lines which had already started in the centers such as Erzurum, Zeytun and Bitlis just before the entry of the Ottoman Empire into WWI. It is known that when the Ottoman military declared mobilisation in August 1914, most members of ARF and other Armenian political parties fled and joined the Russians, as was decided in the secret committee meetings. Even Karekin Pastermadjian, an Armenian deputy in the Ottoman Parliament and also a member of Dashnak party, had joined one of these units to lead the Armenian voluntary forces. According to the Russian historians, there were 23 Ottoman-Armenian units in the Russian army at the very beginning of the war, making roughly 11,500 soldiers. Plus there were 40,000 Armenian armed volunteers only in the Caucasian region fighting for the Russians. There were also Armenian volunteer units scattered all over Turkey. The number of these fugitives and/or collaborators within the Ottoman Empire will never be fully known. Bogos Nubar Pasha in one of his letters to the Foreign Ministry of France stated that they were fighting on the side of the Allied forces against the Ottoman Empire with almost 200,000 Armenian soldiers. In view of these figures, it can be seen how correct Arnold Toynbee was, when he wrote that Ottoman Armenians became the âfifth columnâ of the Russians in occupied territories of the Ottoman Empire. This so-called âfifth columnâ was obviously accountable for the massacres of 124,000 Muslims between August 1914 and March 1916. This very fact also justifies the necessity of removing Armenians behind army lines.
The law of relocation was only limited to the areas of strategic importance for the military, and secondly, the law also left out a reasonable amount of the Armenian population from relocation. Indeed, Ottoman government of the time had defined many exemption categories for the Armenians. According to the documents released by the Directorate of Turkish Archives, the following groups were not to be transferred:
-Protestant and Catholic Armenians,
(At the beginning they were totally exempted from relocation, but in time, due to changing circumstances some groups of Catholics and Protestants had to be sent away. However there were no mass transfers among them.)
-Armenians living in the cities of Istanbul, Edirne, Aydın, Bursa, İzmir, Antalya, Kütahya, Kastamonu and many other western towns,
-Armenian soldiers and their families,
-Officers and those in the medical corps of the Ottoman army and their families,
-Officers employed in the branches of the Ottoman Bank at Istanbul and the provinces,
-Employees in the Régie and Public Debt establishments,
-Employees of the foreign consulates,
-Officers of the post office,
-Teachers of the Armenian and Missionary schools and their families,
-The sick, the blinds and other disabled people etc.
Turkey has officially invited interested parties to set up an historical commission to examine the events of 1915 and 1916. A similar offer was made in 1919 by the Ottoman Government to Holland, Spain and Sweden. None, then, had given a positive response.
Furthermore, Armenian Diaspora established terrorists groups like ASALA which killed 42 Turkish diplomats and citizens around the World in a total of 110 terrorist attacks between 1973 and 1984. The same groups have still been putting pressure upon academicians who dare to write anything against the Armenian claims. For instance, Bernard Lewis, a distinguished scholar of the history of Middle East was sued by the Armenians for writing his research results in a correct manner from a scholarly perspective and Prof. Stanford J. Shawâs house was bombed by the Armenian terrorists. Despite all these misconducts of Armenians, it is to be hoped that Turkey and Armenia will one day seat around the table, and reassess the events of 1915 and 1916. Of course, the realisation of this process shall be dependent upon Armenia and her giving up its historic claims on Turkey and building peaceful relations with its neighbours.
Our history cannot evaluated with few info.
This topic is too deep and I start to use dictionary. My answers will go on another post.