Armenian Genocide

I was delighted to read Daniels’ column. It hit the nail on the head. The Turkish-Armenian issue is a complicated tragedy that needs to be sorted out by scholarly research and study, not by popular votes of politicians in Congress.

The term “genocide” was coined later and immediately adopted by the Armenian propagandists as part of a permanent public relations campaign designed to deliberately misrepresent the tragic events of 1915-1923. The devilish idea of “taking an uprising that went sour and packaging and marketing it as genocide” never really caught on in the academic world of facts and figures, which is why more than 69 historians released a signed statement to the U.S. Congress 5 years ago, disputing the Armenian allegations of genocide.

In a related development, the Turkish government recently completed classification of Ottoman documents and opened them to use by researchers. This access to “the other side of the story” was welcomed by more than 50 historians, who applied for and were given access to those “unique documents” in order to shed light on this complicated tragedy which cost the lives of many Armenians and Turks.

Eastern Anatolia during World War I was much worse than today’s Lebanon, where various feuds within a wider civil war within a world war were taking place simultaneously and were complicated by disease, famine, tough winters, “rocky mountain-like” terrain, and shortage of social services. All of this took its heavy toll on all the people of the area, Turk or Armenian or others. Wartime tragedy? Yes. Genocide? No.

ERGUN KIRLIKOVALI

President, Turkish-Armenian

Historical Society

Santa Ana