ALEKSANDER MANASYAN
Corresponding member of the NAS RA
manasyan-a22@mail.ru

SUMMARY

In Russian – https://crossroadorg.info/manasyan_2015/

Full text in Armenian – https://crossroadorg.info/hy/manasyan_2015_hy/

The Genocide of the Armenians (Yeghern) has become open for discussion quite recently following a long period of suppression.Many hidden pages of this evil deed are awaiting discovery, with many facts screaming for their proper evaluation.Let us reveal some of those. The original thesis in our analysis is the widely spread formula «The Genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 – 1923» and its deviation from the actual and political content of the crime. In contravention to all evidence, the crime perpetrated is geographically associated with the Ottoman Empire only, Although it is well known that the program of wiping out the Armenian Nation was implemented outside both the Empire and Turkey, in the North-West regions of Iran,in Nakhijevanand in Eastern Transcaucasia. Further on, the formula is not adequately correlated with temporal dimensions of the Genocide (Yeghern). April 24 1915 as the day of detention and an atrocious slaughter of hundreds of the Armenian elite in Istanbul was not the start of the Armenocide, as represented in this formula.1915 has been pointed out as the year of the most atrocious actions by the Turks, the year of Big Genocide (Mets Yeghern). Massacres of the Armenians had started well before that. However, the fundamental principle ofthe Turkish politics can hardly be distortedby such a reckless or willful indication of 1915 as the year of launching the Genocide, or 1923, the year of the Ottoman Empire’s demise from history, as a temporal limitation of the crime.The attempts to delete the misdeed from the world history, the embezzlement of the victims’ property,the demolition of relics of Armenian culture, compulsory islamization or assimilation of survivors, the attempt to stifle Republic of Armenia and Artsakh using a blockade being an extension of the Ottoman policies practiced up to date by Turkish Republic, the state established by the political forces of that country having partaken in the Genocide.

Circumvention of those facts in the years of prohibition on the subject could have been explained. For decades, the Western allies of Turkey kept trying to exonerate it from the guilt for the misdeed by overlaying it upon the Ottoman Empire sunk into oblivion. Similar evidence had also been ignored by the Bolshevik Moscowthat perceived Turkey and Azerbaijan as springboards for exporting the red revolution to the East. In the 60s of the 20th century, When the interdiction upon this subject was removed, Moscow did not prevent circulation of the formula «The Genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 – 1923» while strictly watching lest there be references for massacres of Armenians in Nakhijevan and Eastern Transcaucasias, which could contradict the ideology on the «Leninist friendship among the nations of the USSR». However today many countries adjust relations with Turkey on condition of Genocide recognition thus showing the Genocide in Western Armenia, Nakhijevan and Eastern Transcaucasia to be the links of one and the same crime.One hangman – one victim.This cannot be hushed up,all the more so that the Turkey-initiated Armenian mass murders far beyond the Turkish territorycould have become principal arguments in denouncing Ankara’sapostasy. Here is why. The main thesis among the Turkish Genocidedenial arguments is as if The Armenians were deported through their disloyalty to the Empire at war. The assaults on the caravans of different deported gangs were not genocide, according to Ankara. The mass murders of Armenians in Nakhijevan and in Eastern Transcaucasia denounce the same blatant lies. In 1918 Armenians were slaughtered far beyond the Turkish borders by regular Turkish troops, rather than by gangs.They were not subjects of Ottoman Empire or Turkey, to be disloyal or threatening in any way. They were killed on their own lands by the only reason of being Armenian.

The behavior of the Turks (rather than of the Turkic people) in International relations has been inherited from their ancestry, from the Oguz and Seljuk nomadic tribes, which ignored the means of capturing the lands of local tribes other than by demolition oftheir settlements and extermination of population with the unanimous participation of the entire tribe – men and women, young and old. The archaic instincts of the total intolerance to aliens have grown into deliberate genocidal behavior of the Turkish society, both the authorities and the mob simultaneously.
The genuine perpetrator of the Armenian Genocide was the mass of Turks  retaining the authoritative controls within the Ottoman Empire and in Turkey, the mass that up to date continues to reproduce itself in all strata – from the political elite and officials of the middle-level administrative bodies down to the lay Turk.

In today’s Ankara and Bakuit is this mass,rather than the one countering it and ready to repent interlayer of dissidentswill determine the state-supported policy denying the deed. The genocidal nature of Turkey’s political culturehas also been popping up while creating the states havingsimilar cultural codes – Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus–through genocide of the Greeks, and the Azerbaijani Republic – through genocide of Nakhijevan and Eastern Transcaucasia.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Near-Eastern processes has been evidently affected by the Turkish political culture.
The first state created after that project was the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic. Reformatting the states titled «Azerbaijan» left unchanged the genocidal character of the local Turks carried by them through the fact of belonging to that culture.

Moscow, playing hostage to formation of the new Azerbaijani nation, failed to notice that the Turks of the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, using the cover of a fictional name Azerbaijan, pursue the policy of crowding out the Armenians. In the 70s it had resulted in a nearly complete de-Armenization of Nakhijevan, taking the form of bloody massacres and violence against the Armenians all over the Republic since 1988. Targeted by the policy of genocide were not only the Armenians, but also the indigenous peoples confessing Islam. Dodging the mandatory Azerbaijanization (Turkization), they retreated into a sort of national underground, harboring today the majority of the Lezgins, the Talishes, and the Tats. The erstwhile multicolored ethnic map of the Republic has practically become onecolored. The slogan «One nation – two states put forward by President Haydar Aliev has shown that the nationality of the felon is the same, both in Ankara and Baku. As far back as in May 1915, Russia, France and Great Britain issued a joint communique describing the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians as new crimes against humanity and civilization» and agreed to sanction the Turkish government for the misdeed. That, however, was not to be.

Disregarding the risk of spreading the bacilli of genocide, the winning powers decided to use Turkey against the Soviet Russia, throwing into the closet in Lausanne in 1923 their own adopted Treaty of Sevres, providing the rehabilitation of the Armenian statehood on a part of the historic Armenia. Moreover, the West has in the recent decades become a partaker of the Turkey-designed policy of taboo on the subject to oust the perpetrated evil out o history.

The Bolshevik Moscow either, did not fall behind in encouraging the felon. Within a few years following the Big Genocide, hoping to attract Turkey «in the struggle against the International capitalism», Russia awarded it with Kars, Ardagan, Surmalu, and the Holy Mount Ararat. Then followed new concessions. At the demand of the revolutionary Turkey it annexed Nakhijevan and Nagorno Karabakh from the Soviet Armenia enclosing it within the confines of the Soviet Azerbaijan. It seems that after WWII, Turkey deserved punishment as an ally of Germany. However, at this stage of the political games between the West and the Soviet Union, the Armenian lands were abandoned to Turkey. The collapse of the USSR afforded the West to display the principled approach in the practice of eliminating the genocide from International relations, condemnation and punishment of governments and states guilty of similar crimesIt seems that the deArmenized Nakhijevan, the Sumgaits following one another and the massacres created by the authorities of Baku and the «Popular Front of Azerbaijan leave no doubt that those actions should be classified as genocide. The West, providing support to Artsakh-Karabakh rebelling against the genocidal Azerbaijan in 1991, when the collapse of the USSRreached a point of no return,the Republic of Azerbaijan was recognized within the boundaries of the former AzSSR with the territories of Nakhijevan and Nagorno Karabakh not belonging to it. In this way the West granted permission to the Azerbaijani Republic to start a «just» war for capturing its unpossessed territories.

The exhonoration of the aggression was to be an inapplicable principle of territorial integrity, having become in this case a cover-up for arbitrary behavior and genocide.Baku was pardoned allegedly against the oil that the West could have easily obtained from Azerbaijan if put up on the rails of democracy, whereby the root peoples of Eastern Transcaucasia would have been released from the national underground.

The Genocide of the Armenians has a feature that has to be identified conceptually, namely, the situation whereby the nation has been annihilated in its historic homeland. This feature of the Armenian Genocide is reflected in the notion of Eghern, indicating annihilation of the people in its homeland. The time has come to introduce this notion into a wide circulation and to secure its use in the International documents.