!ßÈÀ face="Verdana" size="2">Turkish people were struggling to survive. Enemies -- those within the country as well as those abroad -- seemed determined to destroy Turks this time, having considered them subhuman. Toynbee says that the disintegration of an empire is the most 'painful' phenomenon in the human adventure called history. The Ottoman Empire was going through the final phase of that process

  We would not be able to understand the relocation of the Armenians if we isolated it from its historical context.

  At that time the Ottoman Empire was fighting its last war. Millions of Turks and Muslims had been massacred or driven out of their homes since 1821 as the empire lost one territory after another. Only two years before the Armenian relocation the empire had lost the Balkans and the 1.4 million subjects it had there, with 400,000 “migrants” taking refuge in Anatolia. Its forces were fighting with the armies of the British, French and Russian empires -- at Gallipoli and on the eastern and southern fronts.

  Since the non-Turkish groups of Ottoman subjects were trying to carve out from the realm the biggest piece of land possible, the second (1908) attempt to switch to constitutional monarchy too had failed. The economy was underdeveloped and its agricultural sector had collapsed as well when farmers had to join the army. Medical and health facilities were inadequate and epidemics of infectious diseases broke out in that climate. Law and order in the empire was disrupted. Brigands flourished in the mountains, especially those in eastern Anatolia.

  Turkish people were struggling to survive. Enemies -- those within the country as well as those abroad -- seemed determined to destroy Turks this time, having considered them subhuman. Toynbee says that the disintegration of an empire is the most “painful” phenomenon in the human adventure called history. The Ottoman Empire was going through the final phase of that process.

  Enver Pasha, the acting commander-in-chief, sent Interior Minister Talat Pasha the following written message on May 2, 1915: “Around Lake Van … the Armenians remain gathered and ready to continue with the uprising … I think that the Armenians should be driven out of these places to disperse the hotbeds of rebellion. According to the information supplied by the Third Army Command, the Russians drove into our borders, in a miserable state, as of April 20, 1915 the Muslims that had been living inside their borders. As a reprisal to that and, at the same time, to achieve the aim I've mentioned above, the Armenians should be, together with their families, either sent to Russia or … spread to various locations inside Anatolia. I am kindly asking for the selection of the suitable one of these two alternatives and for its implementation. If it is not going to be deemed inappropriate I would prefer the sending outside our borders of the rebels' families and the inhabitants of the region in whose place could then be settled the Muslim population coming from abroad.” (Prime Ministry's Ottoman Archives, DH.SRF, nr 52/282).

  Talat Pasha opted for the second alternative, that is, for sending the Armenians to some other parts of Anatolia (and later to north Syria which was also a part of the Ottoman realm). In other words, he never had the “intent to destroy a particular group.” He could have adopted the first alternative suggested by Enver Pasha and done to the Armenians what the Russians had done to the Muslim population of Russia. That would have been the kind of operation called ”ethnic cleansing” in our day, that is, the kind of operation Turks and Muslims in the Balkans and the Caucasus had already been subjected to. Roughly half of the Turks and Muslims driven out of the Balkans and the Caucasus had died as a result of the military operations of that kind. If Talat Pasha had opted for that alternative the Armenians too would have died in the same manner and no one would be able to demand an account for those deaths in our day. Talat's opting for a relocation, which is a much more regulated form of resettlement, reduced greatly the Armenian casualties. However, that choice, which could be humanitarian under the conditions existing at that time, was later presented to the world as a case of genocide by embellishing it with fictitious exaggerations.

  I am not writing all this in order to downplay the tragic aspects of the event. However, the Armenians oppose any attempt to call the relocation “tragic.” This is because what they understand from that word is "both sides suffering in a conflict with none of them admitting responsibility for what happened." They seek out the term “genocide” in order to shift the blame entirely onto us. For them, denying their responsibility for their historical follies is much more important than the tragic fate of those who died.

  For these reasons, their insistence on the “genocide” concept (despite the fact that application of that term to the 1915 events would go against historical realities and international law) constitutes the biggest obstacle to the recognition of this human tragedy. This particular generation of Armenians are doing their own dead the biggest injustice by selfishly refraining from facing their historical responsibility.

  This problem becomes all the more complicated due to those persons in Turkey who call themselves “intellectuals” and who identify their own personal traumas with the traumas of others and accept these as “historical facts.” These persons suffer from a loss of identity and from a resulting tendency to consider themselves guilty of everything. They present this as “intellectual integrity” though, in reality, loss of identity is a psychopathological state.