Metsamor

The concept of the nation-state, born with the French Revolution, resulted in the end of Ottoman administration across the entire Balkan and Greek geography, followed by the massacre and deportation of Turks and Muslims who had lived in the region for over 500 years. Since these nations had been under Ottoman rule for more than five centuries, it never occurred to anyone that the roots of the Turks living in these regions would be eradicated. However, the mentality that has persisted since the Crusades is built upon the complete cleansing of Turks and Muslims from Europe and the Anatolian peninsula.

Because anti-Turkish sentiment has turned into a sort of prerequisite for acceptance into academia among Western scholars, it is very difficult to find a historian who tells history as it is, let alone one who is pro-Turkish. One such person is Prof. Justin McCarthy, a history professor at the University of Louisville. McCarthy, whose areas of expertise are the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and the Middle East, attended a conference in July 1997 as a guest of the Haliç Rotary Club, and that same week, Ahmet Taner Kışlalı carried the statements made at the conference to his column in Cumhuriyet Newspaper.

According to Prof. McCarthy, Turks did not massacre Christians during the collapse of the Empire. Contrary to popular belief, it was the Christians who massacred Turks and Muslims. Turks in Greece, Albania, Romania, and Bulgaria were destroyed in masses. Today, only a negligible number of Turks remain in these places, and the Turkish population has been reduced to zero across all of Greece, Romania, Bosnia, Albania, Serbia, and the Greek islands. Approximately 9% of the Turkish-Muslim population in Eastern Anatolia was killed by Armenians. Between 1800 and 1922, Greeks had 950 thousand refugees and 320 thousand deaths, Armenians had 910 thousand refugees and 580 thousand deaths, while Turks had 5 million refugees and 5.5 million deaths.

After the 1856 Reform Edict, the idea of a large Armenian State that would also include the northeast of Turkey began to flourish. Armenian uprisings began in Sasun (Diyarbakır) in 1894 and in Van in 1895. The armed struggles of Armenians and Kurds also took place during this process. From the perspective of the Armenians, there is no difference between a Turk and a Kurd. The Hamidiye Regiments that suppressed the uprisings were already composed of Kurds.

During the First World War, the Ottoman Armenian subjects worked in favor of enemy states. The rebellion became widespread. Because fronts were opened in many parts of the Empire, the Ottoman State could not protect its Muslim subjects who were left unarmed and without men, and it could not cope with the Russian-backed Armenian gangs. The city of Van fell. One of those who caused the Allies to open the Gallipoli front to support Tsarist Russia, their biggest arms supplier, was Boghos Nubar Pasha, the President of the Armenian National Assembly of the Ottoman State, which was founded in 1863. Armenian statesmen understandably foresaw that Turks would be cleansed from Anatolia just as they had been from the Balkans. There was no minority in the country that did not think this way. This is a natural and historical consequence of weakness and defeat.

In the spring of 1915, it was decided to relocate Armenians to regions where Arabs lived in order to prevent a civil war. Armenians living scattered in cities and villages were forced into mandatory migration under war conditions. It was ordered that civilians move from Anatolia to Syria and Lebanon during the period when the Sarikamish disaster occurred and the Ottoman Army was in a miserable state. While traveling, they were subjected to attacks and looting by Turks, Zazas, Kurds, and Arabs in turn. In some regions, organized massacres were carried out against Armenians. Some Armenians converted to Islam. As a result, both societies committed all kinds of evil against each other.

Sufficient documents have reached the present day regarding these events from Russian, Turkish, French, British, and American archives. There is no common point between what happened in Anatolia and the ethnic cleansing applied to Turks in the Balkans, Greece, and Crimea. The Ottoman State did not even have the capacity to commit the alleged crime of genocide. The genocide claim is an imperialist lie. Beneath the West's refusal to forget this event and its legal definition of Armenian losses as genocide lies an ugly truth and an imperial intention. The crime of the Turks is that they Turkified Anatolia by removing a Christian community from it. Because Anatolian lands were completely Turkified after the victory of the War of Independence and the 1924 Turkish-Greek Population Exchange, a similar genocide lie is also told for the Pontic Greeks. (You can read my article titled 'Transformation' for Armenian population areas before the deportation)

In 2009, the Zurich Protocols were signed between the two countries. According to this, the 1921 Treaty of Kars would be recognized, the borders closed in 1993 would be reopened, and a commission of historians would decide on the genocide lie. In fact, because Nagorno-Karabakh was under Armenian occupation at that time, it caused us to have serious problems with Azerbaijan. For the agreement to enter into force, it was subject to the approval of the Armenian Constitutional Court as required by the Armenian Constitution, and upon the Constitutional Court's refusal to grant approval, the entire process resulted negatively, just as the diaspora wanted.

Last year, I learned that a friend of mine, a Diyarbakır Armenian, had three relatives working at the Presidency of Religious Affairs, and that despite their conversion to Islam, their kinship relations continued in some way. Last month, during my visit to Beirut, I met an elderly Armenian couple from Kayseri. I saw that even though they were born in Lebanon decades after the deportation, they had learned Turkish from their mothers, meaning they had always carried the desire and belief to return within them.

As the fixtures of this geography, we do not have to accept the imperial fate written 150 years ago. Since the Armenian diaspora, which is powerful in France and the USA, has no connection left with the realities of our geography, the duty that falls to our generation is to be persistent in the Zurich Protocols, to ensure a lasting peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia, to create a secure and uninterrupted land border with the Turkic World, and to put our backs against the wall.

The fact that Turkish-Armenian relations remained stuck in 1915 and turned into a blood feud has caused losses for the Turkish, Azeri, and Armenian states and nations for 110 years. The Nagorno-Karabakh issue has been resolved. The evolution of Armenia, which geographically cuts off our connection with the Turkic world, into an ally state, as it was in the 1000 years before 1915, would benefit all three nations greatly. The Armenian Diaspora would also benefit from this trade, energy, and security network to the extent that it supports it. Did the European states that instilled the poison of enmity in us not massacre each other regularly for centuries?

The Metsamor Nuclear Power Plant, located 17 km from Iğdır and 30 km from Yerevan, was designed in the 1960s and opened in 1977. After Chernobyl, the Soviets shut it down in a hurry in 1988. However, the embargo imposed by Turkey and Azerbaijan as a result of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War put Armenia into an energy crisis, and the plant was reopened in 1995. It is the first and only plant in the world to be reopened after being shut down. It is a second-generation reactor. That is, it lacks an external containment structure made of concrete reinforced with prestressed steel cables that would prevent radiation from escaping into the atmosphere in the event of an accident. It also does not meet the Soviet Nuclear Specifications in terms of distance to residential areas and fault lines, and the potential earthquake intensity. There are fault lines around the plant, which was built on the furthest edge of the Turkish border to prioritize the Soviets' energy needs rather than safety and to minimize damage in case of an accident, that could create tremors up to 8-9 in magnitude. It is thought that at least 20 million people would be affected in the event of an accident. However, this is likely a very superficial calculation. If an accident occurs, a nuclear genocide will take place where nationality, religion, and language do not matter. It is impossible to predict which directions the nuclear clouds will travel, that is, to calculate the potential damage. The mass wave of migration to the West is another matter. In other words, reaching an agreement is as much a humanitarian and conscientious responsibility of all three nations as it is in the interest of all three states. I hope we leave behind nations that are loyal to each other as they were in the past, in abundance and prosperity, instead of a nuclear wasteland for future generations.