Turkey Calls U.N. Report on WWI Armenian Deaths ‘Unfair, Unjust’

Turkey said Monday that a U.N.-commissioned report was “unfair and unjust” in describing the killing of what the report said were at least one million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I as an act of genocide.

Ercuement Yavuzalp, Turkish ambassador to the U.N. offices in Geneva, told a U.N. human rights panel that the Ottoman authorities had acted legitimately to suppress an armed rebellion by Armenians cooperating with Turkey’s enemies during the war.

Turkey, which fought on the German side, accused the Armenians of aiding invading Russian troops. Turkey was the center of the huge Ottoman Empire that had covered much of Central Asia, the Balkans and North Africa. It was broken up after the war.

Yavuzalp said that although there were “uncontrollable brutalities and excesses,” the Turkish actions against Armenians were not a premeditated and organized attempt to wipe out the Armenian population and therefore could not be labeled as genocide.

“The accusation of a premeditated and organized intention to destroy Armenians is not only unfair and unjust, but it is also absolutely impossible to sustain by any objective analysis of historical realities,” he said.

Prepared by British Expert

The report was prepared for the panel by Ben Whitaker, a British independent human rights expert. It dealt mainly with an analysis of the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and recommendations for future policy.

The killing of Armenians was briefly mentioned in the 59-page report, dated July 2, and distributed before the opening of the Aug. 5-30 session of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities.

The report listed “the Ottoman massacre of Armenians in 1915-16” as one of nine examples of genocide this century. It said, “At least one million, and possibly well over half the Armenian population, are reliably estimated to have been killed or death-marched.”

Turkish officials have said that 300,000 Armenians perished in the turmoil of deportations and local reprisals. Some historians have estimated 600,000 dead.

Encourage Terrorists

Yavuzalp said the panel’s endorsement of the report in its present form would encourage Armenian terrorist groups that have attacked Turkish targets and killed more than 50 Turkish diplomats, members of their families and others.