Reanimation of Treaty of Sevres

Dander wrote:

Blaming this that or the other does not remove the responsibility of annihilating an entire nation. I repeat; Turks did not have the guardianship of the empire, they simply made it their duty.

Blaming?

I only point out the historical truth.

If a certain group kills people belonging to another certain ethnic or religious groups over a long period in time (such as 1783-1922), then those prosecuted could eventually kill some of the perpetrators (those who are also responsible for exterminating hundreds of millions all around the world) and even prosecute the sympathizers of those perpetrators. That is some impact (or bad side effect) of the genocidal policies, not the act of genocide. Of course, Western/European nations are free to interpret the history as they wish together with their Armenian allies. Over time, history could be written or reinterpreted in line with the rise of new ideologies, civilizations and cultures taking over the ones in decline.

Dander wrote:

Blaming this that or the other does not remove the responsibility of annihilating an entire nation. I repeat; Turks did not have the guardianship of the empire, they simply made it their duty.

By the way, if the Ottoman intention was to exterminate, then there would not have been so many Armenian deportees all around the world. After all, even Greece received more than 100.000 Armenians, Russia received no less than 500.000, and in France, Canada, Argentine, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Bulgaria, Iraq, Syria, there would not have been significant Armenian populations emigrated from Anatolia.

In other words there will always be an excuse for the mankind to kill each other, because there will always be someone defending the reason.

Dander wrote:

In other words there will always be an excuse for the mankind to kill each other, because there will always be someone defending the reason.

As long as some genocidal cultures disguise behind some "counterfeit norms" and "hollow concepts", there will be consequences for the mankind.

Volga Bolgar wrote:

Denier? Do you think you are an expert on how one should name a certain event? Genocide is an act of aggression concluded despite no real evidence of threat from the victims.
they talk about.

You have interesting information about the Khanate of Crimea.But your synthesis on the Armenian Genocide is opus foolery.1) Whenever citizens of a nation are murdered in mass by the same nation that provided them with a citizenship this is illegal and Genocidal ,2) blaming the acts of citizens of the Russian empire on Ottoman citizens, this is hocus pocus.To me it appears that you are a learned man who uses his knowledge to throw dust in our eyes No Way Magey!!

Dander wrote:

In other words there will always be an excuse for the mankind to kill each other, because there will always be someone defending the reason.

Not every nation is like armenian.I don't think Norway has an eye on Finland's soil!Even they had,they would not try to achieve that by slandering.

vatchakan wrote:

<quoted text>You have interesting information about the Khanate of Crimea.But your synthesis on the Armenian Genocide is opus foolery.1) Whenever citizens of a nation are murdered in mass by the same nation that provided them with a citizenship this is illegal and Genocidal ,2) blaming the acts of citizens of the Russian empire on Ottoman citizens, this is hocus pocus.To me it appears that you are a learned man who uses his knowledge to throw dust in our eyes No Way Magey!!

In early 1915, there were some 150.000 Armenians conscripted in the Russian Army, and there were some 50.000 Armenian militias who were active in the Ottoman controlled territories. What kind of citizens do deploy some 50.000 units (out of 1.5-1.75 million) against their own state? Why would they delay their own army's operations until the arrival of the enemy's reinforcement? Why would they revolt against their own state when the enemies deploy troops in Galipoli? You could fool your self, but you can not fool the ones who read the subject carefully. If there was no Bolshevik Revolution, then there would not have been any Turks or Kurds in "Eastern Anatolia" today, and we both know that this is not some speculation.

Volga Bolgar wrote:

<quoted text>
In early 1915, there were some 150.000 Armenians conscripted in the Russian Army, and there were some 50.000 Armenian militias who were active in the Ottoman controlled territories. What kind of citizens do deploy some 50.000 units (out of 1.5-1.75 million) against their own state? Why would they delay their own army's operations until the arrival of the enemy's reinforcement? Why would they revolt against their own state when the enemies deploy troops in Galipoli? You could fool your self, but you can not fool the ones who read the subject carefully. If there was no Bolshevik Revolution, then there would not have been any Turks or Kurds in "Eastern Anatolia" today, and we both know that this is not some speculation.

This is like blaming Kurds for the behavior of PPK

As I write this I am listening to the story (Zor yollar) of Adigya on the TRT FM radio in disbelief. I think you-Bolgar-should drop your head in shame and dishonour for openly lying about and trying to distort the history. Once people start lying, there is no limit to what else they can do and that is what is so scary about the future.
Why would a state run programme tell a completely different story to yours? Are they scared of Russia or you are desperate to come up with all sorts of stories to justify a wrong doing you are actually ashamed of admitting.

vatchakan wrote:

<quoted text>This is like blaming Kurds for the behavior of PPK

Why did you think that I blamed anybody?

Dander wrote:

As I write this I am listening to the story (Zor yollar) of Adigya on the TRT FM radio in disbelief. I think you-Bolgar-should drop your head in shame and dishonour for openly lying about and trying to distort the history. Once people start lying, there is no limit to what else they can do and that is what is so scary about the future.
Why would a state run programme tell a completely different story to yours? Are they scared of Russia or you are desperate to come up with all sorts of stories to justify a wrong doing you are actually ashamed of admitting.

I have no idea about what you talk about, but the way that you talk is nothing that could be appreciated.

PS: I do not say anything to you like "liar" just because I do not agree with your ideas.

Armenian historians who are Russian citizens noted the following in relation to the Circassian Issue:

Historian Sulujiyen:“We wouldn’t abandon our cause just because Mountaineers are not surrendering. Half of them needed to be crashed in order to take their weapons. Many tribes were totally annihilated during the bloody war. In addition, many mothers were killing their kids in order not to give them to us.”

Historian Zaharyan:“Circassians do not like us. We exiled them from their free meadowlands. We destroyed their houses and many tribes were totally destructed.”

Let us also recall what Tolstoy recalled what happened to the Circassians:

Earl Lev Tolstoy:“To enter the villages in the darkness became our usual thing. Russian soldiers were entering the houses one by one under the darkness of the night. This and following scenes were such horror scenes that none of the reporters were courageous enough to report them.”

http://www.circassianworld.com/reports.html

General Rostislav Fadeev:

A fundamental difference exists between the eastern and western Caucasus in that the Circassians, owing to their position along the coast, could never be firmly consolidated into Russia as long as they remained in their homeland [...] The reeducation of a people is a centuries-long process, but in the pacification of the Caucasus the time had come for us, perhaps for the last time, perhaps only for a brief time, to complete one of the most vital tasks in Russian history.

According to Fadeev, the needs of the Russian State superseded any humanitarian concerns and necessitated the elimination of the Circassians.

http://faculty.oxy.edu/richmond/defeat_and_de...

Paul B. Henze has raised perhaps the most significant aspect of the deportation of the Circassians, Abazins and Ubykhs:

The great exodus was the first of the violent mass transfers of population which this part of the world has suffered in modern times. Two generations later, tragedy began to overwhelm the Armenians of Eastern Anatolia. Millions of Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Kurds, and Nestorians were uprooted and hundreds of thousands died, at least during the commotion of the First World War and its aftermath. None of these ethnic disasters is entirely unrelated to the others.[33]

If one considers, as Henze proposes, that Russian actions in the 1860s set the precedent for future ethnic cleansings, then in terms of its ultimate consequences the deportation of the Circassians, Abazins and Ubykhs, officially sanctioned by Alexander II, was a unique crime against humanity, regardless of what term one wishes to attach to it.

http://faculty.oxy.edu/richmond/defeat_and_de...

Today the Russian province of Erivan is the main part of the Armenian Republic but in the 1820s Turkish Muslims made up the majority of its population. The Armenian population whose descendants would live in the Armenian Republic were in the 1820s scattered over the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. In 1826, the Russians began a great forced exchange of population that was to create an Armenia in Erivan and cause great suffering to both the Turks and Armenians.

http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/ottoman/bal...

The ongoing exchange of population changed the demographic picture of the East and caused great hardship and hatred on both sides. If blame were to be assigned to anyone it would be to the Russian imperialists, but the hatred that developed was between the Muslims and the Armenians. By the end of the nineteenth century sides had been drawn... As the Russians advanced both Turks and Armenians were gradually drawn into the conflict that had its bloody conclusion in the First World War.(pp.334,5)

According to Kemal H. Karpat, "Ottoman population 1830-1914" (Madison 1985), "Beginning in 1862, and continuing through the first decade of the twentieth century, more than 3 million people of Caucasian stock, often referred collectively as Cerkes (Circassians), were forced by the Russians to leave their ancestral lands..." (p. 27)

Salaheddin Bey mentioned, in 1867, a total of 1.008.000 refugees from the Caucasus and Crimea, of whom 595.000 were initially settled in the Balkans.(p. 27) Half a million followed by 1879, and another half a million until 1914.(p. 69) Most of them were Circassians, although there were Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and other Muslim people among them. Hundreds of thousands Circassians perished on their way.

Neumann’s estimate of 1.5 million Circassians corresponds to 1/30 ethnic Russians, or 1/3 Czechs, or 3/4 Slovaks.(p. 66) According to Neumann, there were over two million Armenians in the world.(p. 69) Now, according to the Soviet census of 1989, the number of Russians has increased to 145 millions, whereof 1/30 would be almost five millions. There are 10 million Czechs and 5 million Slovaks, which would lead us to assume that there should be over 3 million Circassians. Armenia alone has a population of over 3 million Armenians, despite of the past ordeals; 2 million Armenians live elsewhere. The number of Czechs, Slovaks, and Armenians has more than doubled in 150 years, while the number of Russians has tripled; but where are the missing millions of Circassians?

d; but where are the missing millions of Circassians?

"The Encyclopaedia Britannica", 11th edition (Cambridge 1911), divided the Armenian population equally between Russia and Turkey (little over a million in each empire), and numbered 216.950 Circassians (including Abkhaz etc.) in Russia. Again we must conclude, that about 1.5 million Circassians had been massacred or deported. This disaster exceeded both absolutely and proportionally whatever fell upon Armenians in 1915. Was it intentional? Yes. Was it ideological? Yes. The conquest and Christian colonization of the Middle East was expected not only by Germans, but by most Europeans during the 19th century, and the expulsion of Muslims from Europe was considered a historical necessity. Russia had practicized massacres and mass deportations in the Crimea and Caucasus, and "ethnically cleansed" Circassia specially in 1862-1864. During that period, Panslavists like Mikhail Katkov provided the Russian public with nationalistic excuses for what had started as imperial ambition ("Third Rome") and strategic interests ("Access to sea").

A vicious cycle was created and increased the stakes at both frontiers: the Caucasus, and the Balkans. Circassian refugees settled in the Balkans were provoked to commit the "Bulgarian atrocities", that inspired some of the Armenian revolutionaries. After the Balkan Wars, Muslim refugees were roaming in Anatolia, thus spreading terror, and hostility. This was exploited by Russia, at the cost of many innocent Armenians. The massacres of 1915 were a tip of the iceberg - the part best visible for Europeans, who had been actively seeking and expecting horror news to justify anti-Muslim prejudice, and to prevent interventions on behalf of Turkey, as had happened in the Crimean War of the 1850s.

Was it a genocide? That depends on the definition. Rather than of separate, selectively researched genocides, we should speak of a general genocidal tendency that affected many - both Muslim and Christian - people on a wide scene between 1856 and 1956, continuing in post-Soviet Russia until today.

http://users.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/issue2/circa...

The first genocidal act took place within days of the declaration of Crimea's annexation by Tsarina Catherine II. At the end of April 1783, several thousand Crimean Tatar intellectuals, military officers and clergy were rounded up in Karasubazar and killed. The whole early 1800s marked a period of genocide and ethnic cleansing targeting the Crimean Tatars and aiming at wiping out their culture, intellectual heritage as well as physical presence from the Crimean Peninsula.[2] Following the Crimean War (1853-1856), by the summer of 1860, the flight of Tatars from the terror in Crimea had turned the once flourishing peninsula into a "torched earth" landscape.[3]

What happened first to the Crimean Tatars, stroke next the Circassians in the 1860s. An unprecedented genocide and wave of terror aimed at emptying the whole Caucasus from Circassians. Russia started a mass expulsion in Circassia in 1860, with catastrophic consequences. Unlike the Tatars, who chose the exile and fled from the dar al-harb, the Circassians put up armed resistance, fortified their capital, Sochi, and made appeals to Turkey and the West to gain recognition for independent Circassia. After having forcibly halted the exodus of Crimean Tatars, in 1862, Russia launched terror campaign, massacres and targeted famine against Circassians, and by May 1864, the Circassian resistance movement had been crushed. In 1865, Russia spread the terror campaign against Chechens. By the 1880s, more than three million Circassians (up to 90 % of the population) as well as hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Abkhazians, Georgian Muslims and other Caucasians had been forced to emigrate to Turkey in the proportionally most massive ethnic cleansing of the time. The number of those directly killed has not been properly investigated. Suddenly, as in the case of the Crimean Tatars, Russia stopped the persecution of the remaining populations, and crushed the voluntary emigration movements by deporting the organizers to Siberia. This coincided with the launch of yet another campaign -–the pogroms and expulsions of Jews.[4]

The careful timing, planning and systematic organization of the ethnic cleansings and genocide against Crimean Tatars, Caucasian Muslims and Jews indicate that imperial Russia, even during the reigns of some monarchs, who have been considered as "more enlightened", did not follow a random strategy in Russia's southward expansion – the policy that Catherine II and her favorite Grigory Potyomkin had designed in order to "gain Constantinople and Jerusalem". Also regarding the history of the time, the systematic use of ethnic cleansing, pogroms and genocide as a means of imperial expansion and colonization marked the beginning of a novel and sinister trend in imperial politics. What was launched by Russia's brosok na yug, with their first victims being the Crimean Tatars and Circassians, was continued against the Jews, and the fashion was soon exported both west – targeting Jews across Europe since the 1870s – and south – leading to the atrocities against Armenians in the 1910s.

http://users.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/2004/terrori...

The Radio programme I am talking about gives the actual account of the Adygea story saying that they themselves decided to emigrate on mass and the remaining ones faced no problems from the Russians. The only enforcement from the Russians was to re settle them on the plains rather than the mountainous terrain they used to live. Theu chose to fight against the decision behind the leadership of one of Samil's leuthenants althoug most of them were not muslims. Upon facing defeat they chose to emigrate to Ottoman land by their free will. This through Adigea mouth not from Russian.
Yet you drew a picture of an imaginary "PERFECT GENOCIDE" scenario and in comparison declared The Armenian Genocide as A deserved consequence of what Russians and Other Western imperialists had been doing for so long on Muslims and other indigeneous peoples of the world.
Was it a miracle that TRT choose to air the very topic today when I was trying to dive into the available historical info to check out the source of your stories?
We are somewhat used to the abusive and denialist behaviour from majority of the Turks, but your brilliant comparative scientific! explanation and consequent discreditation of your story by a TRT programme was too muc to mask my emotion which came out clearely in my reply.
Sorry for calling you a lier, may be i should have called you a persion of hypervivid imagination.
Regards

Tragedy overwhelmed the Circassians, as it had the inhabitants of the central and eastern Caucasus. The fate of the Circassians comes much closer to constituting mass genocide because their lands had long been coveted by the Russians for settlement. The regions inhabited by Chechens, Ingush and the peoples of Dagestan were less appealing for settlers from Russia and Ukraine, though these peoples were also eventually subjected to colonization by Slavs. Consequently, though hundreds of thousands of people from these regions also fled to the Ottoman Empire, Russia pursued a straightforward policy of ethnic cleansing in Circassia. During the years 1985-1890 well over a million Circassians were forced to depart, often under extremely onerous circumstances. Others were forced to move to less desirable lands than those they originally occupied. Perhaps 150,000 Circassians remained in their original territories. At least half a million are estimated to have reached the Ottoman Empire, but that many more perished of starvation and disease. Modern Americans and Europeans have difficulty understanding how different conditions were then from what they are today. There were no international organizations that concerned themselves with refugees. There were no international sources of assistance for countries receiving them. Ottoman authorities welcomed the Circassians but their resources were extremely limited. The most they could do was to send them to parts of Anatolia and Arab areas to the south where there was room for them to settle. There was little knowledge of these events in the outer world. There was almost no journalistic reporting of the plight of the Circassians and other Caucasians. British consular officers in Trabzon continued a tradition of following Caucasian developments. Their reports are a primary source of information on the fate of these people,[13] but in recent years more material from Ottoman archives and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, recollections and documents from Caucasians themselves, have shed further light on these tragic happenings.

The excellent presentations of Prof. Kemal Karpat during the conference provide a great deal of insight into the fate of Circassians in the Ottoman Empire. His and other researches are continuing. Since the collapse of Soviet communism, Circassians who inhabit the three "autonomous" territories in the North Caucasus that were established for them in the early Soviet period have generated a revival. The perhaps 150,000 Circassians who remained in Russia after the expulsions had increased to 572,168 by the time of the 1989 Soviet census. Of these, 69% were Kabardans. 124,941 Adygei and 52,536 Cherkess were counted in this census, not all living within the boundaries of their designated regions. There has no doubt been an increase in numbers during the past, almost three, decades though current estimates are controversial for there has been emigration but only small numbers of Circassians from outside Russia have been allowed to return.

http://www.circassianworld.com/Circassians_He...

Circassians had (and have) a common language, a keen sense of history and shared traditions. Though they were deeply attached to the territories they occupied, they did not develop a strong state or a broad governmental system. They nevertheless regarded themselves as a nation. Russian pressure against them reinforced their sense of nationality. It grew stronger as they suffered reverses and, finally, defeat. A major portion of Circassians moved to the Ottoman Empire, where they maintained their identity. They have continued to maintain their identity in Ottoman successor states. As many as 10% of the present population of the Turkish Republic may have Circassian ancestry, though the language has been almost completely lost. In post-Ottoman Middle Eastern states Circassians have maintained their identity and sometimes their language and have come to occupy special niches in the societies of these states: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel. In the Soviet Union remaining Circassians were allocated three different territories. These have continued to exist as republics of the Russian Federation. There is a strong desire among them to unify. The collapse of the Soviet Union has resulted in restoration of relations between Circassians still living in their ancestral territories and their compatriots in the world outside. Thus, the Circassian nation has survived and continues to exist both within the boundaries of Russia and abroad, most notably as a component of the Turkish Republic. Are Circassians a nation? The answer is yes!

Have they been the victims of genocide? Their fate after defeat by the armies of the Tsarist Empire in 1864 was clearly attempted genocide. Russian actions against the Circassians and other Caucasians in the four final decades of the 19th century generated waves of violence among ethnic groups which continued into the 20th century and spread throughout the region to the south of the Caucasus. Imperial Russia's divide-and-rule approach to other peoples, setting them against each other, resulted in tragic consequences for Armenians, Kurds, Greeks, Syriac and Nestorian Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities--Christian and Muslim alike--throughout the region. The policies and actions of the Soviet Union exacerbated these effects.

Circassians have retained their sense of nationhood and identity in spite of the vicissitudes they have endured. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century they face an opportunity to restore their nationhood, in part in their ancestral lands but perhaps more importantly in the wider world where they are, in effect, a diaspora nation.

http://www.circassianworld.com/Circassians_He...