NG-Blog-1 FREEDOM of Opinion and Expression versus Ethical Responsibility to convey TRUTH!

Recently a court case opened by an individual (Dr. Perincek) against Switzerland for his “not accepting the accusation of genocide, which was converted into penal laws in Switzerland and France,” the verdict of the European Court of Human Rights given in his favor, was later objected by respective state. The session of the “Grand Chamber” of ECHR and televised defenses of world reputed lawyers has created serious controversies. Despite approval of the first verdict by the Grand Chamber and it becoming definite, there are many publications, papers, articles, interviews etc. paradoxical to this verdict of the highest authority.

Freedom of Opinion and Expression as a fundamental Human Right is undisputable. However some “state’s, persons’, faiths etc.” enforcing “penal codes” for not accepting “their interpretation of the matter” is totally nonsense and “crime by making a personal opinion a public guilt, by legislatures”. According to some holy books, there is an afterlife, a holy ghost, Gods and disciples, angels (with no sex), infernos painted by artists, messengers, sins, punishment or rewards to martyrs by sex in heaven… etc. etc. There are “billions” of people that go to their temples, perform their preferences of choice which is an “absolute human freedom and right”. If we remember the early seventeenth century the thirty years blood baths wars between Catholics and Protestants, burning of witches heavy penalties and tortures by inquisitions, the present generations are lucky for having escaped the penalties executed by humans as if they were authorized representatives or executioners of the “unseen, unproven God and the religious myths written about creation, Adam and Eve etc.” dating back only to 6.000 BC. Almost half of “some Christians” still believe in reincarnation and an afterlife, which luckily after five centuries is no longer a “punishable crime”. Yet disbelievers are despised as “atheists or infidel, etc.” When we have such a “world example involving more than half of the population of the globe” free to say or do whatever they wish about “the afterlife and punishments written by order of God in holy books”, civilized and modern country such as France or Switzerland, have laws that are copied or implanted in other modernizing countries. But some politicians can pass laws for political benefits etc. and the persons who does not endorse political judgments (genocide)” can be penalized when doing so, they knowingly abuse European Court Of Justice’s (Case T-346/03) < 19. It suffices to point out that the 1987 resolution is a document containing declarations of a purely political nature, which may be amended by the Parliament at any time. It cannot therefore have binding legal consequences for its author nor, a fortiori, for the other defendant institutions.>

Next, let us see how U.N. defined this important “human right”. [T]he Special Rapporteur expresses again his view, and emphasizes, that everyone has the right to seek, receive and impart information and that this imposes a positive obligation on States to ensure access to information, particularly with regard to information held by Government in all types of storage and retrieval systems - including film, microfiche, electronic capacities, video and photographs - subject only to such restrictions as referred to in article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Vii…

Freedom of information should be guaranteed as a legal and enforceable right permitting every individual to obtain records and information held by the executive, the legislative and the judicial arms of the state, as well as any government owned corporation and any other body carrying out public functions. >

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Now, here is the trick or chance “of the upper hand party” which is supposed to provide information to the human, entitled to receive such public knowledge freely. Can you see any word or a punitive measure in the above description if the “strong party provides wrong information to the public?”

In other words, “the party which supplies information voluntarily or under liability, is totally free to say-write whatever serves their purpose, regardless of the consequences and damage done to the public. Remember the drawings and sketches to convince the public that Saddam Hussein is a threat, has all these forbidden weapons to destroy the world, but Uncle Sam is the “God sent savior of the humankind and hence is authorized to action war” toppling the existing government and bearing no ethical responsibility for death of close to a million people mostly civilian, who lost their homes, lives and future because “bombs were dropped and ammunition used, for which the US citizen paid to enrich the arms industry”. This “immunity or freedom to lie, or give distorted knowledge on purpose or absence of serious intelligence” has created an ABSOLUTE FREEDOM FOR AUTHORITIES to say or write wrong information by even authorizing unprofessional to write or comment on matters they did not see and are unaware of their own incompetence or ignorance! This would be similar to a “doctor in engineering” performing a surgery of a MD, or medics’ commenting on the sky scrapers’ techniques. As a recent example, do you think that the Catholic Pope, the Armenian Patriarch and Protestant Priest President Gauck, are knowledgeable on “never proven genocide fantasy” or they were bestowed with God’s authority to make a declaration on history (based on some paper drafted to them) as if it was memorized from three different bibles. Sadder is the fact that these holinesses (?) did not respect at all the new verdict of the Higher Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights or the 2003 resolution of the European Court of Justice. Who are we to believe and trust? Does the authority belong to the international judicial court or the “Trinity of three different churches” which pray in different rituals and languages?” But they are “unified” on the genocide fantasy probably in the same context of reincarnation and rewards/punishments in afterlife.

A very new addition to the priests, judges, politicians, scholars, poets, writers etc. is the “National Geography” magazine with some seven million subscribers and tenfold of “well educated readers”. It is no secret that this magazine was founded by Protestant Churches as the scientific illumination and was never paradoxical to the “American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions” which sent well educated teachers and medical doctors too many underdeveloped countries, to bring them the light of Christ. Most of these missionaries were also reporters of news to the local USA Embassy or Consulates where available and also to their head office and N.G. which knew them all. Therefore, the function of Nat. Geo. in WW-1 and 2 as source is much more dependable compared to newspapers, “all of which were served (WW-1) news by cable from London and by “Reuters only.”

Nat. Geo. had written a nice 8 page “geographic article in March 2004” on Armenia, which was printed in all world prints, except the NG printed and published in Turkish in Turkey (by the joint venture “National Geographic” Turkey). The article on Armenia, in the last two pages had turned into “politics and unproven hearsay history”. NG is so strong that no one dared in Turkey to report this “unethical duplicity in international editing”. Turkish press, large banks and companies giving ads to NG had “played the three monkeys”, and very few had cancelled their subscription in Turkey.

Now after 11 years in January 2015 and 12 years in April 2016, again there are two articles with trip coverage inside Turkey, but without a word of geography or the special flora of the steppe areas or anything “other than the Armenian old historic city Ani relics”, grand ma tales of a Kurdish guide and

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absolute ignorance of WW-1 history firstly from old NG magazines (several) or USA official Reports or Armenian books, official memorandums and treaties or irrefutable documents. Further detailed “article and corresponding documented replies” are written in response to the writer and editor of NG who irresponsibly published worldwide these two articles by “self-made history writers” who are not even aware of the past articles, photographs and observations of their own writers who lived those days. This essay is written as an addition to other complaints of individuals for the abuse of “good intended international principles” by the super powers, be Politicians, Writers, Magazines, Books and even Churches… They “all lecture ethics and morals” but leisurely employ and exploit their “upper hand status” without the least of sorrow or apology. They stand behind the “charlatans who live in luxury by the proceeds they earn indirectly from the circulation of such proven deceits. Below find “live examples” of such “proven deceits” by “credible institutions”: (Case 1)

Left poster shows Ataturk, as a “Sadist with Face of a Denialist and Liar”.

UCLA UIniversity Teachers ( Dr. Vahram Shemasian, Ardashes Kasakhian and Dr. L. Marashlian openly advertised. (Most likely they are all Professors by now)

Organizers are “Alpha Epsilon Omega Fraternity Club, Genocide Committee” . Most likely this poster of shameless lying was prepared by young American Armenians! Conference date: April 24, 2005 University Hall. Reminder – Jewish Prof. Stanford J. Shaw was teaching Turkish Studies at UCLA. His house was bombed and set on fire. Under threat of life he had to resign and move to Bilkent - Ankara.

(2) Oxford Univ. Press (p.147) “The Great Game of Genocide” - Donald Bloxham,: < A Turkish Official taunting starving Armenians with bread > (Prof. Jeremy Salt of Bilkent University got suspicious of the photo and took it to a photo lab which discovered that this has been doctored from three other photographs and made a soup. Oxford University accepted this falsehood and “said that it can happen”!No apologies!

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LIVE EXAMPLES: (Part 1) “GEOGRAPHY or HYPOCRISY?” ( http://outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.com/2015/01/23/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-genocide/)

January 23, 2015, by Paul Salopek. < What We Talk About When We Talk About Genocide

“It was a—how do you call it in English?—a genocide? Yes? It was a genocide,” says Murat Yazar. “My grandmother told my mother about it.” My walking guide and I are wandering through Ani.

What is Ani? It is the ruin of a vanished world in modern Turkey: the remote and beautiful site of a forgotten civilization—the 1,100-year-old capital of a once powerful empire. Relics of this Silk Road city lie scattered across the sky-hammered mesas of far northeastern Anatolia. Broken cathedrals. Rotting ramparts that defend nothing from nothing. Empty boulevards that go nowhere. We roam this colossal diorama of stillness, of eerie silence, Murat and I, as if painted into a Dali dreamscape. We are talking about the disappearance of Armenians from the region.

The NG correspondent instead of giving a little background of the “steppe greenery and altitude of Kars region cattle raising, farming, Russian style buildings or the rare “snowdrop flower” of this region which an average geographic article would inform the reader, he seems to be obsessed with “genocide” and the ruins of the old “Ani city” . He mentions nothing else and takes a direct dive into history – genocide/Ani/Armenians based on hearsay. “Genocide” is a very serious crime which can only be asserted with the verdict of an authorized international tribunal, conforming Art.6 of the UN Resolution. In the absence of such judicial verdict, it is only an assertion and definitely does not meet the respect and confidence entrusted in the neutrality and accuracy of the N.G. Surely this serious subject can not be based and reported from the point of “grand-ma-sayings” of a Kurdish street guide and a extremely limited knowledge. Otherwise he would have also referred to the much butchery between Kurds and Armenians. The city of Ani was damaged due to several earthquakes in the past thousand years. The mosque built after conquest of the city in 1100s is likewise damaged. Let us see what N.G itself reported about Ani hundred years ago:

NG Oct. 1915 p.343 :< The city of Ani did not last long. It fell into the hands of the Byzantines and was destroyed not long after. Its fate is sadly symbolic of the fate of Armenian homes from that time to our own.>

In 1914, about two million Armenians lived in what is today Turkey. They were a Christian minority under Muslim rule. Their history reached back thousands of years. By 1922, just 400,000 remained.

According to joint French-Armenian Land distribution report March 1, 1914, total Armenian population living in the Ottoman Empire was around 1.3 million and less than 600.000 lived in the eastern 6-vilayets. Armenian Delegation’s report at Lausanne 1923 Conference gives this number as 760.000, US Senate Resolution of 22.4.1922 says 1.414.000. Another US State Dept. document s of November 1922 gives the number as 817.370 refugees from Turkey. This writer should have indicated his scholarly source, and not just the guide’s mother!

What happened to more than 1.5 million people? Most were killed, historians say. They were targeted for extermination. They were marched into waterless deserts at bayonet point. They were slaughtered.

The writer gives no source for his figures, not even considers the physical possibility of killing 1.5 million in 150 days, marching on foot and rail. This means killing 10.000 souls a day; Hitler with several camps and facilities could not kill more than 3-4.000 a day. To shoot you need 100 tons of bullets which the army did not have. To bury them you would need a labor force of not less than 6.000 men to dig every day stadium size graves which have never been found. Those (several) unearthed of smaller sizes are the remains of Turks. Written order of the 3rd Army Commander reads “Don’t use harsh language to group people and protect their belongings”. Regarding waterless deserts, Morgenthau wrote in his diary (Sept.25, 1915) the visit of the Protestant Armenian (Vekil) Bishop who was sent to Der Zor, on the shores of Euphrates. Protestants and Catholics were exempted in mid August 1915 and those who wanted could return back to their homes. Morgenthau was surprised when he was told that they reached the destination without any incidents and they had already settled down for business. He was asking “winter expense money”.

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“My grandmother said they locked all the Armenians near the Euphrates River into some houses,” Murat tells me. “Then they took them out at night and pushed them into the river. They drowned them.”

This seems to suggest that the grandmother of the guide had eye witnessed 1.5 million being pushed into river and drowned! Let us read what Swedish Major H. Pravitz wrote in “Nya Tagliligt Allehanda, 28.4.1917” <Situation of the Armenians by someone who was with them>. Pravitz was passing the area on horseback with his friend, en route to Persia where he was to reform the Persian gendarmes. He wrote (also in his 1918 book in Swedish) "I sure got to view misery, but planned cruelties? Absolutely nothing! The Armenians despite their Christianity are not any of God’s best children…My travel companion Dr. Schacht and I traveled along the river and saw nothing". Who are we to believe; a high ranking neutral officer crossing the area on horseback for several days, eye witnessing the shortage of food and hardships, or the grandmother story not even knowing whether she had ever seen the Euphrates?

It was eight months into World War I. Europe had begun to cannibalize it. The multicultural Ottoman Empire was dying in terrible spasms. The Ottoman Turkish majority—whipped up by nationalist leaders and enraged by the mass deportations and massacres carried out by former Christian subjects against fellow Muslims in the crumbling fringes of the state—wreaked revenge on their ancient neighbors: minority Assyrians and Greeks, but mostly Armenians. They accused the Armenians of being infidels. Of disloyalty. Of siding with the empire’s encroaching foes (the Russians and colonial Europeans). The knife hand in this enormous crime? Local Kurds. Kurds shot and hacked Armenians to death en masse. Kurdish gangs tore into refugee columns of starving Armenian women and children. Kurdish villagers seized Armenian property—abandoned farms, flocks, and homes.

Again we have no sources for these accusations. But we have some NG and other reporting/documents regarding these charges: according to NG Oct.1915: p.348: There is little, if any, racial antagonism between Armenians and Turks. Had religion and politics ever came to antagonize them, they could live together in essential harmony.

In “Why Armenia should be Free”, GarekinPastermadjian, Boston 1918   wrote:   p.10 “…purpose of the writer in writing this booklet, is to make great American people realize that Armenians are not anemic and in-aggressive people with no fighting blood in their veins; that the Armenians have not been butchered like sheep but on the contrary, have fought most bravely and resisted most stubbornly the savage attacks of the Turks, whenever they had an opportunity

p.19 :“The Armenian reservists, about 160.000 in the number gladly responded to the call, for the simple reason that they were to fight the arch enemy of their historic race! Besides regular soldiers, nearly 20.000 volunteers expressed their readiness to take up arms against the Turks”.

p.21 “Opposite Sarikamish, where a battle was waged for three days and nights, the Turks suffered a loss of 30.000 men, mostly due to the cold weather than to the Russian arms... This was invaluable service rendered to the Russian army by the fourth battalion of the Armenian volunteers under the command of matchless Keri. Six hundred Armenian veterans fell in the Barduz Pass, and at such a high price saved 60.000 Russians from being taken prisoners by the Turks.”

p.22 “…Andranik strongly enforced the trenches, repulsed the attacks of Khalil Bey for three days continuously until the Russians with the newly arrived forces from the Caucasus, were able to put to the fight of the army of Khalil Bey. Thirty-six hundred Turkish soldiers lay dead before the Armenian trenches in the course of those three days.” (For photo: taken in April 1915, of Armenian soldiers, next to captured Turkish guns inside Van fortress please view the book at given link).

.p.28 “…those few battalions of Armenian volunteers in 1914 and 1915, rendered to the Russians invaluable services, twice saving the right and left wings of the Russian army from an unavoidable catastrophe.

“Armenian Memorandum given to the Paris Conference” on Feb. 26, 1919, Signed (B. Nubar & A.Aharonian): p.6 “Armenian volunteers fought on all the fronts. In France, in the Foreign Legion, by their bravery they covered themselves with glory. Scarcely one-tenth of their original number now survives. They fought in Syria and in Palestine, in the Legion of the Orient under French command, where they hurried in response to the call of the National Delegation… In the Caucasus, where over 150.000 Armenian men who served in the Russian army on all the fronts, an army of 50.000 men and thousands

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of volunteers fought throughout under the supreme command of General Nazarbekian… In addition thereto, by their resistance against the Turks until the conclusion of the armistice, they forced the Turks to send troops from Palestine to the Armenian front, and thus contributed indirectly to the victory of the Allied Army in Syria.”

Now, about the “spasms of the Ottomans on Christian subjects”, let us go back to p.539 of the book entitled “Constantinople” Boston 1900 by Edwin A. Grosvenor who was a teacher of History, Greek and Latin languages at Robert College which was founded in1863. The person, who made Nat. Geo. from small beginnings to what is today, is Edwin Grosvenor’s son Gilbert H. Grosvenor, who had married Graham Bell’s daughter. Gilbert’s first editing job was his father’s two volume book he had compiled in nearly twenty years. Glibert managed NG for more than half a century until 1954. Hence, these verbatim quotes should be as valuable as Bible for NG’s present editors. (NG‘s unforgotten photographer Maynard O. Williams, was a teacher in Beirut, he has several articles on the region in the 1920s and much later when the Republic changed from Arabic letters to Latin letters… He is buried in Istanbul)

"The sultans have shown as much solitude for the preservation of Sancta Sophia (used as mosque then)as did their predecessors the emperors…But the most important (restoration)of all was that accomplished by Sultan Abdul-Mejid. This occupied then two years, involved an expenditures of over 1.500.000 dollars and was performed in the most satisfactory manner by the Italian architects the Fossatis." (The restoration was ended in 1849. Cost equals more than $ 1.1 billion o today. Surely these observations point to the true face of Muslim-Christian relations of that period. Also see blogs http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a73_1348050425 & http://www.istanbullite.com/capsinenglish8594/turkishhelptoirish.html http://www.thepenmagazine.net/the-great-irish-famine-and-the-ottoman-humanitarian-aid-to-ireland/ showing the writer’s prejudice about Christians http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/201501/an.irish.tale.of.hunger.and.the.sultan.htm

We have been walking through the dim echoes of this calamity, Murat and I, all the way across Anatolia. We seek shade in derelict houses of Armenians—homes overgrown with trees, with weeds. We pass sturdy churches converted to mosques. We skirt walnut orchards planted long ago by the victims. Murat broods about this. He is a Kurd. I see him grappling with history, with a legacy he cannot imagine, with the haunted landscape. “Once, I apologized to an Armenian man in Istanbul,” he tells me. “I told him I was sorry for what my ancestors did.” And how did the man react? “What could he say?” Murat says, shrugging. “He said, ‘Thank you.

Need no comment! Tea house talk amidst serious historical accusations without evidence but enough to blame and provoke!

We stand in a cold wind. A big sign at the entrance to the archaeological ruins of Ani describe its long story. The text states that the ancient and sprawling metropolis flowered under Bagratian kings. The Bagratians were Armenian. Nowhere is the word “Armenian” written.

So what about Bagratian Kings? Why not Sumerian, Hittites, and 12.000 BC historical monuments in Anatolia! Why should Armenian vassals receive priority amongst thousands of much greater civilization? Yerevan’s population, until 1820 was two thirds Muslim. Can the writer refer to but “one family or monumental relics of mosques, baths, bridges etc.” with the name “Turkish?”

It has been dangerous for many years in Turkey to describe what occurred in 1915 as a genocide. Turkish judges have deemed this term provocative, incendiary, insulting, a taboo. Turkish writers and journalists who deploy those three syllables can face charges of slander against the Turkish state. One has been assassinated by ultra-nationalists.

The writer and/or respectable N.G. reporter is responsible for lying, slandering, distorting facts and legalities and abusing the freedom of press and the confidence built over a century. This is a street talk, unless it is supported by an authoritative court verdict! U.N. has accepted only the Jewish Holocaust (depending on Nuremberg tribunal verdict) and the Rwanda genocide again based on court verdict. National Geographic had a similar article back in March 2004, and the (Armenian) Associate editor had to resign some months later. Gentlemen; sorry but you do not know your own old magazines; you are not competent or authorized to “write history” and your readers do not welcome mistakes! We are debating a century old history [which is not related to today’s conditions]. (Gentlemen, how can you get carried away so much with illogical arguments, unless you are completely bigoted?)

There is an official version of events. It goes like this: The Armenians suffered, this is undeniably true. Yet they were just one of many ethnic groups who felt the heavy blows of the imploding Ottoman Empire. Their destruction was neither extreme nor

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systematic. It was a war. And violence coursed both ways: Armenians perished, but so did Turks, at the hands of rebellious Armenian mobs. Yet this narrow reading of history has begun to show some cracks. In April, Turkey’s then prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, became the first Turkish leader to express formal condolences to the descendants of Turkey’s Armenians, who today live scattered across the globe. He spoke, carefully, of the two peoples’ “shared pain.”

Since the historical competence of the writer suits the Dunning Kruger syndrome, of course he cannot remember that the speech of Mr. Erdogan (Turkish PM) in 2005 at Munich, in the front of the Armenian Foreign Minister stands valid. The expression of condolence was an unnecessary gesture: See: http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2008/02/2344-video-turkish-pms-response-to.html. For irrefutable evidence please see the League of Nations Official Gazette dated 21.9.1929 Copied in the second article!! As you have not studied the subject even this much, please do not jeopardized the trust of the reader of NG of many generations! http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2010/06/3099-if-armenians-fight-with-us-against.html )

“We fought the Armenians, and many died,” says Saleh Emre, the white-haired mayor of Kas Kale village. “I think this was wrong. They belonged here.” Emre pauses. He sweeps a gnarled hand over the houses of his tiny community. “This land used to be owned by an Armenian trader. My father’s uncles bought it cheap.” He allows this detail to sink in. Then he ticks off the names of nearby Turkish towns that once were dominated by Armenians: Van, Patnos, Agri. No Armenians live there now. He stops short of using the word genocide. The old man peers east across rolling sunlit plains, across brass-colored pastures, across grassy paradise blighted by memory, toward the nearby country where some survivors fled. “I would like visit to Armenia,” Emre says. “Armenians were our neighbors.”

These lines could have resulted in empathy and compassion if we were reading a tourist guide but not history lessons for the uninformed.

The scene: a church courtyard in Diyarbakir, the cultural capital of Turkey’s Kurds.

Sourp Giragos is the largest Armenian church in the Middle East. It is newly renovated, mostly with donations from the remnant Armenian community in Istanbul. It is a monument to hope, to reconciliation, one of a few such gestures taking root in the Kurdish zones of Anatolia in a hundred years. (In a distant town called Bitlis, the Kurdish mayor has named a street after William Saroyan, the Armenian-American writer.) People bustle about under a massive bell tower. They are sweeping fallen leaves. Serving coffee at outdoor tables. Chatting. Some light candles. A few are Muslim. Most are Armenian Orthodox Christians. Aram Khatchigian, a caretaker, has been both.

The Church was renovated by the state, rich Armenians may have assisted. Can anyone please show a Turkish relic in Armenia?

Until I was 15, I believed I was a Muslim, a Kurd,” Khatchigian says. “After that, I started to feel a change in my heart.”

He explains how he excavated his hidden past. How he learned that his grandfather, a boy of 12, and his grandfather’s younger sister, a girl of 9, were actually Armenian—the only ones in their immediate family to survive the killing fields around Diyarbakir, where a“pungent smell of decaying corpses” filled the air. The boy and girl hid under a bush until a Muslim Kurdish farmer took them in, saving their lives, caring for them as his own children, giving them his name. They converted to Islam. “All Armenians still living did this,” Khatchigian says. “They would be killed otherwise.” Then a man stalks up to our table. He has been listening. “Do you recognize the genocide?” he demands. He looks into my eyes. I am conducting an interview, I tell him. “I don’t care,” he says. “Do you or don’t you recognize the genocide?”

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I, as a very long established reader of National Geographic, take these lines of absolute bias and misjudgment and/or a visible shortage of respect for the reader’s intelligence. If this had been writing about grandmother stories and travel trip guides that would be fine. But when the reporter makes historical accusations in a magazine with 7 million subscribers, he cannot address them as if in a tea house on a trip!

For some Armenians, this consuming question has become everything—the lynchpin of a national struggle, almost of a modern identity: Turkey and the world must finally acknowledge that a true genocide, legally defined, unfolded in Anatolia. Vast amounts of energy and money are poured into this lobbying campaign by millions of Armenians in the diaspora. (At least 21 countries now officially accept the Armenian genocide as fact. The United States and Israel, valuing diplomatic ties with Turkey, aren’t among them.)

Armenian-American author Meline Toumani describes the suffocating effect of this bitter political debate on her life: “To some Armenians, recognition means reparations from Turkey: to the true zealots, land; to the slightly more pragmatic, money. To most, it simply means the official usage of the word genocide. To me, it came to mean that I could no longer stand to attend any Armenian gathering, because it seemed that whether it was a poetry reading, a concert, or even a sporting match, it was always, ultimately, about the genocide.” At the church in Diyarbakir the stranger sits down at our table. He repeats his question again. And again. Khatchigian stares down at his shoes, embarrassed. I lay down my pen. We wait.

Those who have to contribute to ANCA or ASSEMBLY for solidarity and unending hopes of the Treasure Island, are free to do so…But if they had read the terms of the Gumru Treaty (there are two more later treaties of settlement) they could see that the “Paradise and Treasure Island is in dreams only”… Facts show the opposite as below:

Peace Treaty of Gumru on December 2, 1920; three articles of the treaty reads: (7) Referring to immigrants under art. 6, after the approval of this treaty and day of exchange of documents, those who do not return within the one year grace period, will not be permitted to take advantage of the agreement conditions, nor their complaints of ownership rights will be considered.

(8) The Government of the Turkish Grand Assembly is entitled to ask indemnity for the soldiers held under arms for two years for the fight with Armenia. However in consideration of judicial principles agree to waive this request. Furthermore, the parties acquit each other for the losses and expenses incurred, in relation of changes which happened in the rights of ownership.

(11) In reference to the Muslim population living in the lands of the Armenian Republic and in relation to the protection of their rights and progress in cultural and religious freedom, it is agreed that “Muftis” will be elected directly by the Muslim community, and that the employment of the Head Mufti will have to be approved by the Ministry of Religious Affair of the Great National Assembly government. The Armenians living in Turkey and Muslims living in Armenia will enjoy equal rights like all other citizens. [Note: Is there but even one Muslim family or any of their real estate left in Armenia?]

A giant red Turkish flag flutters above the archaeological site at Ani. The city’s ancient ruins toe the ledge of a canyon. On the other side, within easy walking distance, lies the small Republic of Armenia. Nobody ever crosses. The border between the two nations has been shut for years by mutual suspicion and hostility. Ani is a dead end.

We strike out, Murat and I, heading due north. We tug our brave cargo mule across sodden winter fields around Kars, a Turkish city that in the 1890s was 85 percent Armenian. Murat asks its startled residents if any Armenians yet remain. A Turkish citizen, and a minority Kurd wrestling with his own questions of cultural endurance, Murat always asks. I watch him plod head, interrogating the past for answers. A lanky man, wistful, questing. With a camera slung over his parka. Black Anatolian mud cakes under his boots. I can only shake my head in wonder. Killers or victims, there are no chosen people. There are simply people, the dead. And what you do with your pain tells the world who you are.

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The writer has made a nostalgic touristic trip and adorned it with some “historical wrong or deficient” information without a line of factual documents and not even applying logic! As regards to the city of Kars which was under occupation for a long period, according to Encyclopedia Britannica in 1887 there were 93.300 Muslims versus 37.000 Armenians. But due to the Russian-Armenian atrocities Muslims took refuge to Anatolia and the Armenians population in 1897 had increased to 73.000. Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were a minority of about 18.5% only. In no province or city they were ever the majority, except may be in Kars which was depopulated by Muslims. Did the writer mean that “Kars belonged to Armenians” just because they were temporarily settled by Russians? Prejudice without logic or explanation - not acceptable!

LIVE EXAMPLES: (Part 2) “GEOGRAPHY or FOOL’S HISTORY?” http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/04/armenia-massacre-turkey-kurds-history/ April 01, 2016 by Paul Salopek Century Later, Slaughter Still Haunts Turkey and Armenia

< One million Armenians—some say more, some say less—were killed a century ago in the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey. > N.G is supposed to be basically a “GEOGRAPHIC” magazine, definitely not political and may be cautiously historical! N.G. is also published in Turkish in Turkey. I remember that back in March 2004, when their associate editor Mr. Ohanian had to resign after a similar nice eight page article which was published in “all other countries” except Turkey, where the pages were substituted may be with flowers or some insects. This “shameful duplicity” was brought to the attention of NG Turkey and Washington. I and some friends terminated our tens of year’s subscription

because of NG’s direct involvement in a fabricated myth. This is s o far has to be treated as a worldwide LIE. unless someone applies to UN’s office and procures a court verdict “criminalizing someone” (since the crime is personal). [Below is excerpted from March 2004 NG:]

Mount Ararat lies outside the contemporary Armenian Republic, beyond the closed frontiers of a hostile Turkey. Ararat is our pride and our frustration. Our history; the unfulfilled dreams that drive us!

Most are descendants of the greatest catastrophe in their people's history; the WWI era massacres were in the Ottoman Empire that the murderous 20th century's first major experience of genocide. Ostensibly, provoked by a militant surge of the Armenian nationalism against the repressive Ottoman Government and despite the fact that tens of thousands of Armenians were loyally serving in the Ottoman Army In 1913 the empire had an Armenian population of about millions. Estimates of the dead in what is now Turkey range from 600.000 to 1.5 million. Except for a short after WW1, no Turkish government has ever acknowledged that a systematic slaughter of Armenians occurred.

I do not remember my answer to NG's Istanbul and Washington offices at that time, but the Turkish Embassy was also interested in this slander and sometime later Ambassador's letter was posted as explanation or apology. This same “hearsay assessment” was repeated in the above answered January 23, 2015 copy of N.G. Let me prove again with irrefutable document the grave mistake NG is repeating after twelve years, being unaware of their past issues and what their reporters had written at that time. Below is a photograph dated October 1915, five month after relocations was put in action. So, how many Armenians were living in Turkey in 1915? Does NG belie their 1915 photo and clarification? Who killed whom and why will be documented below;.

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A stone cenotaph in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, commemorates this tragic event: the Medz Yeghern, or “great catastrophe,” of the Armenian people. Each spring—on April 24, when the pogroms started—many thousands of pilgrims climb an urban hill to this shrine. They file past an eternal flame, the symbol of undying memory, to lay a small mountain of cut flowers. Just 60 miles to the northwest, and a few hundred yards across the Turkish border, lie the ruins of an older and perhaps more fitting monument to the bitterness of the Armenian experience: Ani.

I have seen Ani, it is the ruins of an old city not more than one square kilometer, which has been abandoned for close to a thousand years because of destructions by earthquakes. The mosque Turks built after conquering the city in the twelve century also stands damaged. There are HUNDREDS of other historical sites from times of Hittites, Troy, Greeks or Romans and the most recent are the huge temples still being uncovered at “Gobekli tepe” N.G. (June 2011 by Charles C. Mann - Photograph by Vincent J. Musi) in which this place was said to be built in 11.600 BC, more than eleven thousand years before Ani, built at the times of the Crusaders! The reason of the “great tragedy” inflicted by the Revolutionaries will be documented below. Let me copy a few lines from the news clips of the “Reno Evening Gazette” Nov.14, 1915: http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2008/10/2625-america-and-armenians-reno-evening.htm l (See full article)

<Having imposed a committee of well meaning but admittedly prejudiced American Missionaries, the same agencies that have been engaging in reporting Armenian outrages which never had been committed are now trying to mislead Christian charity in America and Switzerland into furnishing funds for the relief of the supposed victims of the unspeakable Turk. It would not matter, so far as the country at large is concerned, but unfortunately there is danger that a self-sufficient person like President Wilson will accept these stories of atrocities as truth, with no further evidence than the statements of Armenians who are directly interested in raising money for the support of themselves. Professional beggars who have bled their own countrymen for years are now trying to induce kindly Americans to support them, not caring whether United States would or should not be embroiled with Turkey and through Turkey with Germany. Ambassador Morgenthau appears to have fallen a ready victim to the smooth rascals that, by apocryphal tales of outrages, have procured contributions from their Armenian countrymen abroad and in this country and have lived in luxury on the proceeds for the last 30 years >

What is Ani? Ani was the medieval capital of a powerful, ethnically Armenian kingdom centered in eastern Anatolia—the sprawling Asiatic peninsula that today makes up most of Turkey—and straddling the northern branches of the Silk Road. It was a rich metropolis that hummed with 100,000 souls. Its bazaars overflowed with furs, with spices, with precious metals. A high wall of pale stone protected it. Renowned as the “city of 1,001 churches,” Ani rivaled the glory of Constantinople.

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It represented the flowering of Armenian culture. Today it crumbles atop a remote, sun-hammered plateau—a scattering of broken cathedrals and empty streets amid yellow grasses, a desolate and windblown ruin. I have walked to it. I am walking across the world. I am retracing, on foot, the pathways of the first ancestors who abandoned Africa to wander the world. I have seen no place on my journey more beautiful or sadder than Ani. “They don’t even mention the Armenians,” marvels Murat Yazar, my Kurdish walking guide. And it is true: On the Turkish government placards erected for tourists, the builders of Ani go unnamed. This is intentional. There are no Armenians left in Ani. Not even in official histories. So just as Tsitsernakaberd hill in Yerevan calls to remember, Ani is a monument to forgetting.

. When the NG correspondent relies on history provided by a local Kurdish guide and his comments with the exaggerations or palavers (even NG admitted in an article) it is possible to build (?) 1001 churches and settle 100.000 people in an area of one square kilometer, one side being the steep gorge of the Araxes River. As regards “placard”, surely the Turks will put in when Armenians put a placard on Erivan that it was “REVAN”, capital of the Hannate Muslims until it was taken by the Russians in early 1800s.

Last year the Armenian Apostolic Church, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, made saints of all the victims of the genocide of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire, the sprawling and multiethnic state that gave rise to modern Turkey. A veiled woman attends the canonization ceremony in Ejmiatsin, Armenia. On April 24, 2015, the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of a mass slaughter that many historians label the first genocide of the modern era, crowds join a torchlight procession through the Armenian capital of Yerevan to honor the dead. During the annual commemoration, part somber memorial and part nationalist rally, the grieving can turn overtly political—participants sometimes burn Turkish flags

Using RELIGION and CLERGY in dramatizing factual history by inserting, candles, flags, priests etc… is an old and all time used propaganda tool.http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2011/03/3239-can-armenian-issue-be-solved.html A French Historian, M. Gauin, had commented: < December 25, 1933: Archbishop Leon Tourian is assassinated by Dashnaks in his church in New York. The majority of US newspapers, even The New York Times, describe Dashnak party as a gang of terrorists, funded by Nazi and Fascist regimes. > Not much has changed!

US citizens’ (Armenian) application to California Congress: Note “Priest in the Rear and School boys with Armenian flag” to dramatize, victimize and nationalize!

One of the oldest and most intractable political disputes in the world—a toxic standoff that has locked Armenia and Turkey in acrimony, in enmity, in nationalist extremism for generations—can be reduced to the endless parsing of three syllables: genocide. This word is freighted with alternative meanings, with shadings, with controversy. It is codified by the United Nations as one of the worst of crimes: the attempt to obliterate entire peoples or ethnic, racial, or religious groups. And yet when does it apply? How many must be slaughtered? How to weigh action versus intent? By what ghastly accounting?

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The writer’s consistent ignorance and absence of editing truth, obligates the repetition of this section from the above https://www.oas.org/dil/1948_Convention_on_the_Prevention_and_Punishment_of_the_Crime_of_Genocide.pdf Article 6. Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction. Who cares how many countries out of over 180 voted in favor to please Armenian lobbies, who are in the industry of continuously collecting, distributing money for over a century milked from richer Armenians (out of Turkey) with palavers of restitution, museums, monuments, supporting politicians a good portion embezzled by few leaders. Is crime and punishment hereditary: who is the criminal person? Why don’t you apply to: http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/ can’t you understand this much of written rules of the UN which all countries must obey? Who is immune or exempt?

AN OFFICIAL GAZETTE or “ghastly accounts “?

p.35: … We know, however, so much to be a fact that the Armenians in the new State are carrying on operations in view of exterminating the Mussulman element in obedience to orders from the Armenian corps commander. We have had copies of their orders under our eyes. That the Armenians of Erivan are following a policy of extermination against the Mussulman and this wave of sanguinary savagery has spread right up to our frontier is also established by the fact of the presence within our borders of numerous Mussulman fleeing from death on the other side….

********* Excerpts: from: Justin Mc Carthy “The Report of Niles and Sutherland” TTK, 1990, p.1809-1853: http://louisville.edu/a-s/history/turks/Niles_and_Sutherland.pdf (U.S. Naional Archives Ref. 184.021/175) Constantinople, Aug. 16, 1919 ….but the unanimity of the testimony of alt witnesses, the apparent eagerness with which they told of wrongs done them, their evident hatred of Armenians, and, strongest of all, the material evidence on the ground itself, have convinced us as of the general truth of the facts, first, that Armenians massacred Musulmans on a large scale with many refinements of cruelty, and second that Armenians are responsible for most of the

destruction done to towns and village…

“genocide” was coined for the Jewish holocaust in 1948

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after Nuremberg court; it cannot ve applied retroactive. But, if you want to see accomplices of Nazis’ for gnocide ”

below Armenian Legion documents are self- explanatory.” General Dro Drastamat Kanajan

The “devoted” historians apparently were not aware that there were 22.000 Armenian Legion soldiers (4.800 of them SS) in the Nazi army under command of General (Butcher) Dro Drastamat Kanajian, who had fought against Turks, then, escaped to Europe and later became Hitler’s counsel because he knew Russians and their tactics. On the left, the Nazi Armenian Paper “HAYASTAN” (Feb.1945) gives Hitler’s message of German victory (even when the war was lost, still urging Armenians to fight).

The Armenian version of events: The year is 1915. World War I is nine months old. Europe is herding its young into the fires. The vast and multicultural Ottoman Empire—the world’s most powerful Muslim polity—has allied itself with Germany. A large Christian Armenian minority, once as peaceful and trusted as to be labeled by the sultans as the millet-i sadıka, or loyal nation, is wrongfully accused of rebellion, of siding with the Russian enemy. Some Ottoman leaders decide to resolve this “Armenian problem” through extermination and deportation. Soldiers and local Kurdish militias shoot Armenian men. There are mass rapes of women. Armenian villages and city neighborhoods are looted, appropriated. The dead clog the rivers and wells. Cities stink of rot. The survivors—ragged columns of women and children—straggle at bayonet point into the waterless deserts of neighboring Syria. (Today just three million Armenians live in Armenia; eight to ten million are scattered in diaspora.) The Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire drops from about two million to fewer than 500,000. Most historians call this subtraction the modern world’s first true genocide.

The population lie is contradicted by NG and other sources. Here two out of hundreds of the “loyal millet” photos.

“I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this,” wrote Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the U.S. ambassador to Constantinople at the time. “The great massacres and persecutions of the past

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seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.”

My book on Morgenthau’s works is open on internet for download or counter comments, free book:: http://armenians-1915.blogspot.com/2015/10/3574-Preposterous.Paradoxes.of.Ambassador. Morgenthau.A.Factual.Story.About.Politics.Propaganda.Distortions.by.Sukru.Aya.html I have read the books and the works as well as Morgenthau’s diary thoroughly when proving his paradoxes for a book he had ordered to Burton Hendricks for ghost writing. These were based on fabricated narratives of the two secretaries; Hagop Andonian and Arshag Schimavonianwhom he had taken together to USA. Morgenthau, when in Istanbul ((in some 280 days out of the 760 days he was stationed) was solely interested in Jewish matters and philanthropy. I have not come across him visiting any of the Catholic, Gregorian, Orthodox churches all within five-ten minutes to the embassy, nor Sancta Sophia or the Archeological Museum behind the Government’s Building, which he visited many times. I do not remember this (not sourced) statement either, nor when and where he said these words. He did not go out of Istanbul, not even to the Asiatic side, other than a forty days trip (March 22 to May 1,1914) with Lord Bryce to Greece, Egypt, Palestine, and Beirut and back to Istanbul on the Embassy’s gun boat “Scorpion” just two months before WW-1 started.

Turkish authorities categorically deny this account. Their version of the “so-called genocide” goes like this: It is a time of supreme madness in history, a time of civil war. Armenians suffer, it is true. But so do many other groups trapped inside the Ottoman Empire as it splinters during the Great War: ethnic Greeks, Syriac Christians, Yazidis, Jews—even the Turks themselves. Blood flows in all directions. There is no systematic extermination plan. And the Armenian death tolls are exaggerated, fewer than 600,000. Moreover, many Armenians are in fact traitors: Thousands join the armed ranks of invading coreligionists, the imperial Russian Army.

Challenging this official view still carries risks in Turkey. Though prosecutions have eased, Turkish judges deem the term “genocide” provocative, incendiary, insulting to the nation. When speaking of the Armenian calamity, even such luminaries as Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner, have faced charges of denigrating Turkishness or the Turkish state.

Orhan Pamuk has absolutely no knowledge nor any authority to comment on this part of history. Upon uttering these words and he received a Nobel Prize with the huge force of the Armenian diaspora and thanks to (now professor) Maureen Freely who did the proof-reading or re-writing of his books. Pamuk’s fame is upheld by Armenians and outside of Turkey only! I am here citing US – Armenian – International and irrefutable documents. No need for about a million categorized documents in the Turkish archives. We know that the Armenians don’t dare to open their Boston and other archives. Just because they are soaked with blood instead of ink! This is the reason they boast and use their very strong influence over the world press, as well known as N.G. with seven million subscribers and may be tenfold reader. These prints do not prove any facts, other than the sorrowful truth that some writers and editors seem to choose and allowed to foul their own reputed magazine. They must be mindful and careful when publishing complete nonsense and distortions on a subject they have not read and even contradicting their own thousands of pages or records.

It is our hope and belief,” then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared in a carefully worded speech in 2014, “that the peoples of an ancient and unique geography, who share similar customs and manners, will be able to talk to each other about the past with maturity and to remember together their losses in a decent manner.” What is the special power of this word “genocide”?

The same was written in the January 23, 2015 article, and answered above. Please see video in there, to LEARN!

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The Armenian diaspora has spent decades funding lobbying campaigns to urge the governments of the world to deploy this term when describing what occurred under the Ottomans.

Sure, the by-laws of the Dashnak Parties call as the first condition “collection of money for the cause or ......”.The money was collected from rich Armenians mostly in Russia. Those who went to the police or refused to pay were punished by “angel Gabriel who makes no Sin”! Everything seems to be about money? All this information is in books, newspapers and UN declarations. This may take you not less than ten years to read, learn and become a defender of truth and not a dupe, as the Reno Evening Gazette 14 Nov. 1915 had wrote: " If this country, therefore, does not want to appear foolish before the whole world, it will refuse to be duped by impossible tales and will let the Armenians severely alone. "

In Diyarbakır, a Kurdish city in eastern Turkey, I am conducting an interview at a newly reopened Armenian church—a small, fragile gesture of Turkish-Armenian conciliation—when a man strides up to me. “Do you recognize the genocide?” he demands. He is Armenian. He is agitated. He peers into my eyes. I am startled. I’m working, I tell him.

“I don’t care,” he says. “Do you or don’t you recognize the genocide?”

I put down my pen. He repeats his question, over and over. He is telling me: I am not a ghost.

Last word: I trust that the readers will excuse my not answering such empty remarks when debating historical facts/events which must be supported by IRREFUTABLE DOCUMENTS and a judicial VERDICT PROCURED FROM THE AUTHORIZED COURT… All the rest cannot be taken seriously.

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