SCHOLARS

Kurdish Nationalism and the New Iraqi Government”, Middle Eastern Affairs, X, 1959, pp. 24-31.
Britain and the Launching of Armenian Question”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, VII, 1976, pp. 465-483.
Allies and Turkish Intelligence Activities during the War of Independence”, in International Symposium on Atatürk (Ankara, 21-23 September 1987). Proceedings, Ankara, TTK, 1994, pp. 673-685.
Mustafa Kemal Pasha’s Cooperation with Non-Turkish Muslim Nationalists during the Turkish War of Independence”, in Proceedigs of the International Symposium (Ankara, 10-12 November 1988) Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Atatürk’s Immortality, Ankara, ODTÜ Basim Işliği, 1991, pp. 53-64.
The Tricolor over the Taurus, New York, Peter Lang, 1996; second edition, Ankara, Turkish Historical Society, 2005.

Source: The Tricolor over the Taurus, Ankara, Turkish Historical Society, 2005

"Thus, the massacres of Armenians throughout the Ottoman Empire, during the years 1894-1896, 1909 and 1915-1916, had deep social and political roots quite apart from the alleged savagery of Turks and Kurds long decried by Armenian apologists and Western missionaries and relief workers. It is most unfortunate for unbiased researchers of the Armenian Question that the great bulk of vast literature available in this filed comes from pens of such authors, almost all of it bent on an ethnocentric course to demonstrate the supposed superiority of Christian Armenian culture of the ‘unspeakable’ Muslim Turk. Most of these writers pursue this scholastic aberration with much breat beating for the questionable innocence of Ottoman Armenians in the matter of disloyalty to the Ottoman state throughout the Russo-Turkish conflicts of 1877-78 and 1914-17, rather than address the issued as a clash of nationalistic movements.

Worse yet, Armenian scholars have consistently dwelled on Turkish massacres of their compatriots in all their grisly details without so much as a word on the equally savage measures taken by the Armenians of the Transaucasus and eastern Anatolia against local Turkic populace from 1905 to 1920. Indeed, when questioned on such episodes, they even dismiss them as Turkish propaganda. Yet the evidence for accepting this fact is overwhelming. This not to excuse the massacre of Armenians as mere quid pro quo but to point up such violence as an evil endemic to Middle Eastern society in general. The long, lurid chain of massacres throughout the Levant since World War I, illustrates the point, not to mention the ‘ethnic cleansing’ now in progress in the Balkans and Transcaucasia.

More significant perhaps is the considerable body of evidence which indicates that Armenian revolutionists deliberately fomented massacres of their compatriots in Turkey for the purposes of turning them all against the Porte and of invoking intervention by the great powers. On the other hand, it was thaks to prompt action by local Turkish authorities, so oftend maligned for incompetence, corruption and faith by Western travelers and diplomats, that Cilicia proper and Elazig-Harput were spared from slaughter during the massacres of 1894-1896. During the episode of April 1909, Mersin and areas outside Cilicia proper were similarly spared, with the one notable exception of Latakia on the northern Syrian coast." Pp. 43-45

"This is not to deny, however, that a very substantial portion of Ottoman Armenians, most of them probably innocent victims of the acts of few thousand revolutionaries, perished as a result of the deportations. On the other hand, the figure of 1,500,000 deaths, so often cited by Armenian apologists, appears grossly exaggerated in the light of Ottoman census data and the numbers of survivors recorded in many sources." P.48

"For the French in Cilicia, the first item of business in restoring order obviously lay in bringing the Armenian Legion to heel. Having quickly suppressed the insurrection of the Fourth [Armenian] Battalion at Iskenderun, French officers moved promptly to drum all habitual miscreants out of their service. They completely disbanded the particularly unruly Fourth Battalion, distributing several hundred men not implicated in the mutiny of Frebruary [1919] among the three remaining battalions. The latter, in turn, were deployed in major towns along the railway, such as Mersin, Tarsus, and Adana, where they could be held in check by larger British formations. Meanwhile, 400 legionnaires of doubtful reputation were formed into an unarmed labor company and packed off to Port Said under close guard by Algerian colonial infantry. This marked the end of mass terrorism by the [Armenian] legion in Cilicia until British forces departed in the fall of 1919." Pp.82-83

"Indeed, an extraordinary campaign of violence by Armenian individuals and small groups against Turks of all classes developed with steadily increasing fury throughout the region during the summer of 1919." P.105

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