"...
But a Prior of the Franciscan monks, a simple old priest, who
undoubtedly stood on the side of the Christians, shook his head, when I
started to curse the Turks. "You are mistaken", he said, "the Turks are
not the only ones to blame. Yes, someone who comes from Europe and who
wishes to judge Asia with a European understanding will [undoubtedly]
condemn the crime of the extermination of this people. But it is not the
entire truth that you have seen and heard. You ought to look upon these
things through Asian eyes and have understanding for the fact that here
two peoples have been going to battle with a hatred and bitterness that
are centuries old. One has two mentalities here, the Turkish and the
Armenian and both mentalities were saying that one of them had to go
down. Everything was arraigned against them and they were made to suffer
defeat. But are you convinced of it that the Armenians, under the same
cir***stances, would not have done or in fact did exactly the same!? I
have my re****ts from missions, sent forth by my order in Beyazit, Van,
Erzurum, Erzincan; from the re****ts I know that in 1915 when the war
with Russia started, it was the Armenians who, behind the Turkish Army,
were fanning the revolution and who were depopulating Turkish villages
and settlements and razed them to the ground. The subsequent events that
happened in Turkey afterwards were only the consequences of this first
hostile attitude of the Armenians. I admit that horrible things have
happened and that never before so much blood was spilt. But the
Armenians were not [exactly] innocent in how this bloodbath came about.
And when the Turks went further than they had to, then the blame for
that does not solely lie with the Turks, but with the mentality of Asia,
where the hatred for a people runs deeper than with the European peoples
and where war assumes beastly shapes."
Just look at Trabzon, for instance. You have seen the burned down
Armenian quarters, but did you also see the burned down Turkish
quarters? Did you happen to pay attention to the graves of the Turkish
population that were still fresh? No! You can see that when the
Armenians found themselves in the same position as the Turks, when they
advanced victoriously under the protection of the Russian Army, the same
spectacle occurred as in the year of 1915, but that time it was the
Turks who got it in the neck. Wherever the Armenians found a Turk he was
mercilessly hacked down, wherever they saw a Turkish Mosque it was
plundered and set on fire. Turkish quarters went up in smoke and flames
just like the Armenian quarters. You are presently about to travel round
the country and you will still be able to follow in the footsteps of
war: Bayburt, Erzincan, Erzurum, and Kars. You will still see smoldering
heaps of rubble; you will still smell blood and corpses, but it so
happens that these were Turkish corpses."
The Franciscan Father only told the truth. For months I traveled all
across Armenia and Kurdistan and I found confirmation of what people had
been telling me. After the withdrawal of the Russian Army, which
followed after the Russian peace, the troops of the so-called Armenian
Army, took over the military operations in the occupied Turkish areas.
During the Russian occupation the Russians protected the lives and
properties of the Turks. What happened after the withdrawal of the
Russians is heart rendering. The smallest Turkish settlements were
killed down to the last man by the gangs of the Generals Adronits and
Murat and Churches were destroyed down to the very last stone.
Back then the Armenian expectations were still highly strung. Their
plans reached far, encompassed the entire Turkish Empire. And they were
hoping that they could settle the score with the old hereditary enemy,
down to the last man, the last woman, the last child. I have seen ruins
in Erzincan where hundreds of bodies of strangled Turks lay amidst the
rubble. I have had light shone down wells that were full of bodies. I
have seen with my own eyes that graves were opened in which the bodies
of men and women were thrown haphazardly across one another, hundreds of
them. Who did this? Those victorious Armenians.
...."
http://mvdg.wordpress.com/2007/11/13/armenian-atrocities-against-muslim-turks-part-ii/
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