!ßÈÀ face="Verdana" size="2">In order to take part in a series of meetings on the Armenian question I took a two-week trip to the United States together with Ambassador Ömer Lütem, director of the Research Institute for Crimes against Humanity. Our aim was to meet with small groups of Turks living in the United States who are well educated, fluent in English and interested in the Armenian question. We wanted to give them seminars on the 1915-1916 incidents, distribute CDs to them containing documented information on the issue and try to ensure that they would be able to defend their views on their own. We had already made similar trips to a number of European countries.

Gündüz Aktan
  In order to take part in a series of meetings on the Armenian question I took a two-week trip to the United States together with Ambassador Ömer Lütem, director of the Research Institute for Crimes against Humanity (?KSAREN). Our aim was to meet with small groups of Turks living in the United States who are well educated, fluent in English and interested in the Armenian question. We wanted to give them seminars on the 1915-1916 incidents, distribute CDs to them containing documented information on the issue and try to ensure that they would be able to defend their views on their own. We had already made similar trips to a number of European countries.

  We were happy to see that a Turkish diaspora is now emerging in America, as is the case in Europe. Turks who, in the past, failed to come together despite all the efforts made by Turkish diplomatic missions abroad, are now burying their differences and joining hands.

  Due to the fact that they had lived as subjects of an “empire” in the past, Turks failed to develop the kind of minority psychology that would have enabled them to wage a struggle to defend their rights when they found themselves living outside the borders of the Turkish Republic. They were in the habit of expecting the state to do everything. By now they have become disappointed with the state and are now putting up a struggle themselves. One feels proud to see those self-confident Turks living abroad who have successful careers and who do not hesitate to speak up when required.

  This development has been due partly to the way the Turks have been pushed and pulled incessantly by the EU in general and by the Armenians and to some extent by the Greek-Greek Cypriot duo in particular. Add to that the denigrating attitude the racists in European countries take against the Turks. The Turkish people living in Turkey who had been unselfishly pleasing towards the foreigners in general and the Westerners in particular owing to their good intentions or their naiveté are now sobering up to the realities and the Turks living abroad are rising, being swept up by the same nationalistic wave. In a way, the giant is waking up.

  The Armenians tried to prevent us from arranging meetings at U.S. universities. Despite their efforts we gave lectures at Columbia University and the University of Chicago as well as in Congress and held a closed meeting at Georgetown University. The Armenians who put pressure and issued threats, on the other hand, prevented the meeting we were to hold at the University of Southern California. Earlier they had prevented expression of the Turkish side's views at a program to be aired by American PBS television. (Greetings to our “intellectuals” who defend freedom of expression in Turkey!)

  Whenever they have failed in their attempts to block these meetings, the Armenians have tried to prevent Americans and fellow Armenians from attending. When these efforts did not work they took the path of ensuring that handpicked Armenians who could argue with us would attend the lecture at the University of Chicago and take part in a luncheon meeting at the World Affairs Council.

  On these occasions it became clear why the Armenians avoid meeting with us, calling us “denyers”: The Armenian theses are even weaker than they are sometimes believed to be. They become greatly upset when they are confronted with documented evidence of the population figures attesting to the size of the Armenian population in 1914 and at the end of the war. Under the circumstances, they cannot insist that 1.5 million Armenians were killed. Similarly, they can hardly deny that they had been a “political group” that aimed to ethnically cleanse the Turks in a sizable part of eastern Anatolia and waged a war with the aim of setting up their own independent state there. It is no secret that “political groups” are not among the groups protected under the U.N. Convention on Genocide. They cannot object when we point out that the transfer of population in 1915 was not the only reason or the most important reason for the deaths, that there were other factors that took a far greater toll: inter-ethnic clashes, regular warfare, epidemics and the way the civilians kept fleeing from one place to another as the armies advanced in the battle zone. They find it hard to respond, especially when it is pointed out that the Armenians massacred half a million Anatolian and Azeri Turks in the insurgencies and as they retreated with the Russian army.

  The only thing they do is to refer to the archives of foreign countries, claiming that missionaries and people like Morgenthau cannot have lied. We asked them then why they were wary of taking their cause to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In what seemed to be a pre-arranged way of behaving, they all acted as if they did not hear the question. This issue, which we have kept referring to in our articles in Turkey, is the Achilles heel of the Armenian cause. Those Americans who had been convinced that an Armenian genocide had occurred were appalled to see the way the Armenians were afraid of taking this issue to court.

  The main problem seems to be those Armenian youths who have been convinced by others that during the transfer of population the Armenians had been subjected to the kind of cruel behavior one could only “see” during fits of hallucination.