The withdrawal of the French and Armenians from Cilicia

As the Turkish nationalist forces replaced the French there was in fact no organized persecution, no general Turkish retaliation, as reported by the American naval detachment patrolling in the area, which was closely monitoring the situation:

"The destroyer stationed at Mersina reports that the Turks have that area well in hand and that the lives of Christians are in no danger.…The destroyers dispatched to Batoum and Novorossisk report that they were cordially received...."

The waves of mistrust were in any case far too deep, however, for these assurances to have any significant effect. Even if some Armenians believed the promises, they hated the Turks so much that they did not want to live under Turkish rule even if they were protected. The panic therefore continued, stimulated more by fear than fact, as reported by the Chief of the American Mediterranean fleet cruising in the area at the time, Admiral Niblack:

"The withdrawal of the French from Cilicia, in accordance with the Franco-Turkish pact recently signed at Angora, has resulted in a partial evacuation of Christians from Cilicia. Many of the Christians had been closely affiliated with the French even to the extent of bearing arms against the Turks, and they therefore feared some terrible form of punishment from the Turks. In connection with this disturbance, and for the protection of American interests, Read Admiral Bristol has maintained a destroyer at Mersina. His advice to American and other Christian populations in Cilicia appears to have been to remain where they were until the Turks gave some causes to justify their evacuation. He seems to have sized up the situation very accurately, as nothing of consequence has occurred. The evacuation seems to have been based on fear rather than fact."
...
As the French evacuation began by road via the ports of Mersin and Iskenderun starting on 4 November, the flight to Syria accelerated, consisting mostly of Armenians ... About 30,000 Armenians, Greeks and other Christians left the Adana district in November and December. Most went by ships that came to pick them up at Mersin and by trains that went to Aleppo. By the end of December, French troops remained only in Mersin along with approximately 10,000 refugees and at Dörtyol, where 7,000 refugees still were gathered. All were evacuated from these two cities as well as from Kilis (7 December), Adana (20 December), Osmaniye (24 December), Antep (25 December), Tarsus (27 December), Mersin (3 January 1922), Dörtyol (4 January), and Adana (4 January), thus completing the evacuation in little less than three months from the time the Treaty of Ankara was signed. According to French sources, between 1 November 1921 and 4 January 1922, approximately 54,000 Christians left Cilicia, of whom 31,000 settled in French-mandated Syria and Lebanon, and the remainder scattered to British protection in Palestine and Egypt and throughout the Mediterranean area.  By the end of 1923, the total number of Armenians who had left Cilicia are said to have numbered some 175,000, almost all those who had lived there before the war together with those who had emigrated from central Anatolia during 1919 and 1920. On his return to Paris in late January 1922, General Gouraud reported to a special session held at the Sorbonne that 

"...overall the evacuation of Cilicia took place in perfect order, without violence, and without a single person being killed or even wounded". 

(Sorbonne Conference held in Paris on 26 January 1922. Quoted in Gourad, op. cit., p. 112.)

Turkish forces and government officials entered the evacuated cities and towns amidst joyful popular demonstrations celebrating their liberation from the oppressive French occupation, not only in Cilicia, but throughout the entire country. One of their first acts was to declare invalid all property transfers which had been forced on local Turks and Jews by the French occupation authorities who had turned hundreds of houses and arms thus surrendered over to Armenians and Frenchmen at prices far below their market values.

Thus were the immediate effects of the French and Armenian occupation of south-eastern Anatolia alleviated, though for Turkish and Jewish families who had lost everything, this was small consolation indeed. It would take years of insistence by M. Kemal that the people of the new Turkish Republic that emerged from the war should avoid continued hatreds resulting from past atrocities inflicted on them and their ancestors and seek friendship with all the people of the world, including those who had attacked them so viciously during and after World War I, that the Turks attempted to live in friendship with the other peoples of the area, though in many cases the Christian nationalists in particular, nurtured as they were by hatred and religious bigotry, left the Turks puzzled, unable to understand why their overtures of friendship had been briskly rejected while at the same time France as well as Greece have made no effort to pay to Turkey the billions of dollars they owe it for the terrible material and moral damage that their occupation troops inflicted on the country, uncalled-for damage, far beyond any sort of authorization they had been given by the Mondros Armistice Agreement or the Paris Peace Conference.

Source: Professor Stanford J. Shaw, THE ARMENIAN LEGION AND ITS DESTRUCTION OF THE ARMENIAN COMMUNITY OF CILICIA (an elaboration and extension of various sections regarding the Armenian Legion in his study, From Empire to Republic: The Turkish War of National Liberation, 1918-1923, 5 vols., Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2000).

History Repeating Itself: Azeri Massacres by Armenians

Media Coverage of the Azeri Massacres by Armenians

The Ethnic Cleansing of Azeris in Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and the Occupied Azerbaijan Territories

Newsweek, November 29, 1993
Armenians occupy a quarter of Azerbaijan's territory, and they've displaced almost a million Azerbaijani civilians. Friends of Armenia's powerful lobby in Washington, including the U.S. Government are suddenly a bit aghast. 'What we see now is a systematic destruction of every village in their way' says a senior state department official. It's vandalism...

The Guardian, 2 September 1993
NOWHERE TO HIDE FOR AZERI REFUGEES: Armenia is pushing a new wave of displaced people towards Iran. Jonathan RUGMAN in Kanliq, south-west Azerbaijan, reports - On the main road south through Kubatli province, thousands of men, women and children are packed into trucks at an Azeri checkpoint waiting for permission to leave. Helicopters shuttle in and out with the wounded, while a group of women sit wailing at the roadside, tearing at their bloodstained faces with their fingernails in a frenzy of grief.

A new exodus of refugees is under way towards Azerbaijan's border with Iran as Armenia forces continue ignoring United Nations demands that they stop their offensive.

This week the UNHCR began distributing 4,000 tents and 50,000 blankets to those displaced in the recent hostilities. The organisation said about 250,000 Azeris have been displaced so far this year and about 1 million since the massacre began in 1988.

Newsweek, 16 March 1992
THE FACE OF A MASSACRE : By Pascal Privat with Steve Le Vine in Moscow. Azerbaijan was a charnel house again last week: a place of mourning refugees and dozens of mangled corpses dragged to a makeshift morgue behind the mosque. They were ordinary Azerbaijani men, women and children of Khojaly, a small village in war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh overrun by Armenian forces on Feb. 25-26. Many were killed at close range while trying to flee; some had their faces mutilated, others were scalped. While the victims' families mourned.

The New York Times, March 3, 1992
MASSACRE BY ARMENIANS: Agdam, Azerbaijan, March 2 (Reuters) - Fresh evidence emerged today of a massacre of civilians by Armenian militants in Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave of Azerbaijan.

Scalping Reported - Azerbaijani officials and journalists who flew briefly to the region by helicopter brought back three dead children with the back of their heads blown off. They said shooting by Armenians has prevented them from retrieving more bodies.

"Women and children have been scalped," said Assad Faradshev, an aide to Nagorno-Karabakh's Azerbaijani Governor. "When we began to pick up bodies, they began firing at us."

The Azerbaijani militia chief in Agdam, Rashid Mamedov, said: "The bodies are lying there like flocks of sheep. Even the fascists did nothing like this."

Truckloads of Bodies -Near Agdam on the outskirts of Nagorno-Karabakh, a Reuters photographer, Frederique Lengaigne, said she had seen two trucks filled with Azerbaijani bodies.

"In the first one I counted 35, and it looked as though there were as many in the second," she said. "Some had their head cut off, and many had been burned. They were all men, and a few had been wearing khaki uniforms."

The Sunday Times, 1 March 1992
ARMENIAN SOLDIERS MASSACRE HUNDREDS OF FLEEING FAMILIES: By Thomas Goltz, Agdam, Azerbaijan - Survivors reported that Armenian soldiers shot and bayoneted more than 450 Azeris, many of them women and children. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were missing and feared dead.

The attackers killed most of the soldiers and volunteers defending the women and children. They then turned their guns on the terrified refugees. The few survivors later described what happened: 'That's when the real slaughter began,' said Azer Hajiev, one of three soldiers to survive. 'The Armenians just shot and shot. And then they came in and started carving up people with their bayonets and knives.'

'They were shooting, shooting, shooting,' echoed Rasia Aslanova, who arrived in Agdam with other women and children who made their way through Armenian lines. She said her husband, Kayun, and a son-in-law were massacred in front of her. Her daughter was still missing.

One boy who arrived in Agdam had an ear sliced off.

The survivors said 2000 others, some of whom had fled separately, were still missing in the gruelling terrain; many could perish from their wounds or the cold.

By late yesterday, 479 deaths had been registered at the morgue in Agdam's morgue, and 29 bodies had been buried in the cemetery. Of the seven corpses I saw awaiting burial, two were children and three were women, one shot through the chest at point blank range.

Agdam hospital was a scene of carnage and terror. Doctors said they had 140 patients who escaped slaughter, most with bullet injuries or deep stab wounds.

Nor were they safe in Agdam. On friday night rockets fell on the city which has a population of 150,000, destroying several buildings and killing one person.

The Times, 2 March 1992
CORPSES LITTER HILLS IN KARABAKH
(ANATOL LIEVEN COMES UNDER FIRE WHILE FLYING TO INVESTIGATE THE MASS KILLINGS OF REFUGEES BY ARMENIAN TROOPS): As we swooped low over the snow-covered hills of Nagorno-Karabagh we saw the scattered corpses. Apparently, the refugees had been shot down as they ran. An Azerbaijani film of the places we flew over, shown to journalists afterwards, showed DOZENS OF CORPSES lying in various parts of the hills.

The Azerbaijanis claim that AS MANY AS 1000 have died in a MASS KILLING of AZERBAIJANIS fleeing from the town of Khodjaly, seized by Armenians last week. A further 4,000 are believed to be wounded, frozen to death or missing.

The civilian helicopter's job was to land in the mountains and pick up bodies at sites of the mass killings.

The civilian helicopter picked up four corpses, and it was during this and a previous mission that an Azerbaijani cameraman filmed the several dozen bodies on the hillsides.

Back at the airfield in Agdam, we took a look at the bodies the civilian helicopter had picked up. Two old men a small girl were covered with blood, their limbs contorted by the cold and rigor mortis. They had been shot.

TIME, 16 March 1992
M A S S A C R E I N K H O J A L Y: By Jill SMOLOWE -Reported by Yuri ZARAKHOVICH/Moscow - While the details are argued, this much is plain: something grim and unconscionable happened in the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly two weeks ago. So far, some 200 dead Azerbaijanis, many of them mutilated, have been transported out of the town tucked inside the Armenian-dominated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh for burial in neighboring Azerbaijan. The total number of deaths - the Azerbaijanis claim 1,324 civilians have been slaughtered, most of them women and children - is unknown.

Videotapes circulated by the Azerbaijanis include images of defaced civilians, some of them scalped, others shot in the head.

BBC1 Morning News, 3 March 1992
BBC reporter was live on line and he claimed that he saw more than 100 bodies of Azeri men, women and children as well as a baby who are shot dead from their heads from a very short distance.

BBC1 Morning News, 3 March 1992
Very disturbing picture has shown that many civilian corpses who were picked up from mountain. Reporter said he, cameraman and Western Journalists have seen more than 100 corpses, who are men, women, children, massacred by Armenians. They have been shot dead from their heads as close as 1 meter. Picture also has shown nearly ten bodies (mainly women and children) are shot dead from their heads. Azerbaijan claimed that more than 1000 civilians massacred by Armenian forces.

Channel 4 News, 2 March 1992
2 French journalists have seen 32 corpses of men, women and children in civilian clothes. Many of them shot dead from their heads as close as less than 1 meter.

Report from Karabakpress - A merciless massacre of the civilian population of the small Azeri town of Khojali (Population 6000) in Karabagh, Azerbaijan, is reported to have taken place on the night of February 28 bythe Soviet Armenian Army. Close to 1000 people are reported to have been massacred. Elderly and children were not spared. Many were badly beaten and shot at close range. A sense of rage and helplessness has overwhelmed the Azeri population in face of the well armed and equipped Armenian Army. The neighboring Azeri city of Aghdam outside of the Karabagh region has come under heavy Armenian artillery shelling. City hospital was hit and two pregnant women as well as a new born infant were killed. Azerbaijan is appealing to the international community to condemn such barbaric and ruthless attacks on its population and its sovereignty.

Boston Sunday Globe, 21 November 1993
By Jon Auerbach Globe Correspondent - CHAKHARLI, Azerbaijan -- The truckloads of scared and lost children, the sobbing mothers, the stench of sickness and the sea of blank faces in this mud-covered refugee camp obscure the deeper issue of why tens of thousands of Azeris have fled here.

What we see now is a systematic destruction of every village in their way, said one senior US official. It's one of the most disgusting things we've seen.

It's vandalism, the US official said. The idea that there is an aggressive intent in a sound conclusion.

The United Nations estimates that there are more than 1 million refugees in Azerbaijan, roughly one seventh of the former Soviet republic's entire population. Thousands who fled to neighboring Iran are being slowly repatriated to refugee camps already bursting at the seams. But because of the Karabakh Armenians' policy of burning villages, relief organizations say there is no hope that the Azeris could return home anytime soon.

At Chakharli, about 10 miles from Iran, more than 10,000 refugees are crammed into a makeshift tent city. Aziz Azizova, 33, arrived in the Iranian run camp about three weeks ago, after she and her five children were forced to flee their home in the village of Buik-Merjan.

I left my village with nothing, not even my shoes,she said. You see how our children are living? Some of them are living right in the mud.

Azizova, like thousands of others, escaped by fleeing across the Arax River into neighboring Iran. The UN estimates that around 300 Azeris,mainly women and children, drowned in the river's currents.

One of the people who did make it across was Samaz Mamedova, a 40-year-old accountant. Sitting with friends in tent No. 566 on a recent day, Mamedova explained how the Armenians seized her village in less than a half hour, forcing the entire population toward the river in a chaotic scramble for survival.

The Times, 3 March 1992
MASSACRE UNCOVERED: By ANATOL LIEVEN - More than sixty bodies, including those of women and children, have been spotted on hillsides in Nagorno-Karabakh, confirming claims that Armenian troops massacred Azeri refugees. Hundreds are missing.

Scattered amid the withered grass and bushes along a small valley and across the hillside beyond are the bodies of last Wednesday's massacre by Armenian forces of Azerbaijani refugees.

In all, 31 bodies could be counted at the scene. At least another 31 have been taken into Agdam over the past five days. These figures do not include civilians reported killed when the Armenians stormed the Azerbaijani town of Khodjaly on Tuesday night. The figures also do not include other as yet undiscovered bodies

Zahid Jabarov, a survivor of the massacre, said he saw up to 200 people shot down at the point we visited, and refugees who came by different routes have also told of being shot at repeatedly and of leaving a trail of bodies along their path. Around the bodies we saw were scattered possessions, clothing and personnel documents. The bodies themselves have been preserved by the bitter cold which killed others as they hid in the hills and forest after the massacre. All are the bodies of ordinary people, dressed in the poor, ugly clothing of workers.

Of the 31 we saw, only one policeman and two apparent national volunteers were wearing uniform. All the rest were civilians, including eight women and three small children. Two groups, apparently families, had fallen together, the children cradled in the women's arms.

Several of them, including one small girl, had terrible head injuries: only her face was left. Survivors have told how they saw Armenians shooting them point blank as they lay on the ground.

The Age, Melbourne, 6 March 1992
By Helen WOMACK - Agdam, Azerbaijan, Thursday - The exact number of victims is still unclear, but there can be little doubt that Azeri civilians were massacred by Armenian Army in the snowy mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh last week.

Refugees from the enclave town of Khojaly, sheltering in the Azeri border town of Agdam, give largely consistent accounts of how Armenians attacked their homes on the night of 25 February, chased those who fled and shot them in the surrounding forests. Yesterday, I saw 75 freshly dug graves in one cemetery in addition to four mutilated corpses we were shown in the mosque when we arrived in Agdam late on Tuesday. I also saw women and children with bullet wounds in a makeshift hospital in a string of railway carriages.

Khojaly, an Azeri settlement in the enclave mostly populated by Armenians, had a population of about 6000. Mr. Rashid Mamedov Commander of Police in Agdam, said only about 500 escaped to his town. So where are the rest? Some might have taken prisoner, he said, or fled. Many bodies were still lying in the mountains because the Azeris were short of helicopters to retrieve them. He believed more than 1000 had perished, some of cold in temperatures as low as minus 10 degrees.

When Azeris saw the Armenians with a convoy of armored personnel carriers, they realised they could not hope to defend themselves, and fled into the forests. In the small hours, the massacre started.

Mr. Nasiru, who believes his wife and two children were taken prisoner, repeated what many other refugees have said - that troops of the former Soviet army helped the Armenians to attack Khojaly. It is not my opinion, I saw it with my own eyes.

The Washington Post, 28 February 1992
Nagorno-Karabagh Victims Buried in Azerbaijani Town:"Refugees claim hundreds died in Armenian Attack...Of seven bodies seen here today, two were children and three were women, one shot through the chest at what appeared to be close range. Another 120 refugees being treated at Agdam's hospital include many with multiple stab wounds."

The New York Times, 6 March 1992
A Final Goodbye in Azerbaijan: [Photo by Associated Press]: "At a cemetery in Agdam, Azerbaijan, family members and friends grieved during the burial of victims massacred by the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabagh. Chingiz Iskandarov, right, hugged the coffin containing the remains of his brother, one of the victims. A copy of Koran lay atop the coffin."

The Washington Post, 6 March 1992
Final Embrace - [Photo by Associated Press]: "Chingiz Iskenderov, right, weeps over coffin holding the remains of his brother as other relatives grieve at an Azarbaijani cemetery yesterday amid burial of victims killed by Armenians in Nagorno-Karabagh."

The Washington Times, 2 March 1992
Armenian Raid Leaves Azeris Dead or Fleeing: "...about 1,000 of Khojaly's 10,000 people were massacred by the Armenian Army in Tuesdays attack. Azerbaijani television showed truckloads of corpses being evacuated from the Khocaly area."

The Independent, 29 February 1992
By Helen Womack - "Elif Kaban, a Reuter correspondent in Agdam, reported that after a massacre on Wednesday, Azeris were burying scores of people who died when Armenians overran the town of Khojaly, the second-biggest Azeri settlement in the area. 'The world is turning its back on what's happening here. We are dying and you are just watching,one mourner shouted at a group of journalists."

The Washington Times, 3 March 1992
Massacre Reports Horrify Azerbaijan: "Azeri officials who returned from the scene to this town about nine miles away brought back three dead children, the backs of their heads blown off...'Women and children had been scalped,' said Assad Faradzev, an aide to Karabagh's Azeri governor. Azeri television showed pictures of one truckload of bodies brought to the Azeri town of Agdam, some with their faces apparently scratched with knives or their eyes gouged out."

The Washington Post, 3 March 1992
Killings Rife in Nagorno-Karabagh: "Journalists in the area reported seeing dozens of corpses, including one of the civilians, and Azerbaijani officials said Armenians began shooting at them when they sought to recover the bodies."

The Times (London), 3 March 1992
Bodies Mark Site of Karabagh Massacre: "A local truce was enforced to allow the Azerbaijanis to collect their dead and any refugees still hiding in the hills and forest. All are the bodies of ordinary people, dressed in the poor, ugly clothing of workers...All the rest were civilians, including eight women and three small children. Two groups, apparently families, had fallen together, the children cradled in the women's arms. Several of them, including one small girl, had terrible head injuries: only her face was left. Survivors have told how they saw Armenians shooting them point blank as they lay on the ground."

The Sunday Times, 8 March 1992
Thomas Goltz, the first to report the massacre by Armenian soldiers, reports from Agdam. Khojaly used to be a barren Azeri town, with empty shops and treeless dirt roads. Yet it was still home to thousands of Azeri people who, in happier times, tended fields and flocks of geese. Last week it was wiped off the map.

As sickening reports trickled in to the Azerbaijani border town of Agdam, and the bodies piled up in the morgues, there was little doubt that Khojaly and the stark foothills and gullies around it had been the site of the most terrible massacre since the Soviet Union broke apart.

I was the last Westerner to visit Khojaly. That was in January and people were predicting their fate with grim resignation. Zumrut Ezoya, a mother of four on board the helicopter that ferried us into the town, called her community "sitting ducks, ready to get shot". She and her family were among the victims of the massacre by the Armenians on February 26.

"The Armenians have taken all the outlying villages, one by one, and the government does nothing." Balakisi Sakikov, 55, a father of five, said. "Next they will drive us out or kill us all," said Dilbar, his wife. The couple, their three sons and three daughters were killed in the massacre, as were many other people I had spoken to.

"It was close to the Armenian lines we knew we would have to cross. There was a road, and the first units of the column ran across then all hell broke loose. Bullets were raining down from all sides. we had just entered their trap."

The Azeri defenders picked off one by one. Survivors say that Armenian forces then began a pitiless slaughter, firing at anything moved in the gullies. A video taken by an Azeri cameraman, wailing and crying as he filmed body after body, showed a grizzly trail of death leading towards higher, forested ground where the villagers had sought refuge from the Armenians.

"The Armenians just shot and shot and shot," said Omar Veyselov, lying in hospital in Agdam with sharapnel wounds. "I saw my wife and daughter fall right by me."

People wandered through the hospital corridors looking for news of the loved ones. Some vented their fury on foreigners: " Where is my daughter,where is my son ?" wailed a mother. "Raped. Butchered. Lost."

The Independent, London, 12 June 1992
Painful Search: The gruesome extent of February's killings of Azeris by Armenians in the town of Hojali is at last emerging in Azerbaijan - about 600 men, women and children dead.

The State Prosecutor, Aydin Rasulov, the cheif investigator of a 15-man team looking into what Azerbaijan calls the "Hojali Massacre", said his figure of 600 people dead was a minimum on preliminary findings. A similar estimate was given by Elman Memmedov, the mayor of Hojali. An even higher one was printed in the Baku newspaper Ordu in May - 479 dead people named and more than 200 bodies reported unidentified. This figure of nearly 700 dead is quoted as official by Leila Yunusova, the new spokeswoman of the Azeri Ministry of Defence.

FranCois Zen Ruffinen, head of delegation of the International Red Cross in Baku, said the Muslim imam of the nearby city of Agdam had reported a figure of 580 bodies received at his mosque from Hojali, most of them civilians. "We did not count the bodies. But the figure seems reasonable. It is no fantasy," Mr Zen Ruffinen said. "We have some idea since we gave the body bags and products to wash the dead."

Mr Rasulov endeavours to give an unemotional estimate of the number of dead in the massacre. "Don't get worked up. It will take several months to get a final figure," the 43-year-old lawyer said at his small office.

Mr Rasulov knows about these things. It took him two years to reach a firm conclusion that 131 people were killed and 714 wounded when Soviet troops and tanks crushed a nationalist uprising in Baku in January 1990.

Officially, 184 people have so far been certified as dead, being the number of people that could be medically examined by the republic's forensic department. "This is just a small percentage of the dead," said Rafiq Youssifov, the republic's chief forensic scientist. "They were the only bodies brought to us. Remember the chaos and the fact that we are Muslims and have to wash and bury our dead within 24 hours."

Of these 184 people, 51 were women, and 13 were children under 14 years old. Gunshots killed 151 people, shrapnel killed 20 and axes or blunt instruments killed 10. Exposure in the highland snows killed the last three. Thirty-three people showed signs of deliberate mutilation, including ears, noses, breasts or penises cut off and eyes gouged out, according to Professor Youssifov's report. Those 184 bodies examined were less than a third of those believed to have been killed, Mr Rasulov said.

"There were too many bodies of dead and wounded on the ground to count properly: 470-500 in Hojali, 650-700 people by the stream and the road and 85-100 visible around Nakhchivanik village," Mr Manafov wrote in a statement countersigned by the helicopter pilot.

"People waved up to us for help. We saw three dead children and one two-year-old alive by one dead woman. The live one was pulling at her arm for the mother to get up. We tried to land but Armenians started a barrage against our helicopter and we had to return."

There has been no consolidation of the lists and figures in circulation because of the political upheavals of the last few months and the fact that nobody knows exactly who was in Hojali at the time - many inhabitants were displaced from other villages taken over by Armenian forces.

The Independent, London, 12 June 1992
Photographs: Liu Heung / AP Frederique Lengaigne / Reuter - Aref Sadikov sat quietly in the shade of a cafe-bar on the Caspian Sea esplanade of Baku and showed a line of stitches in his trousers, torn by an Armenian bullet as he fled the town of Hojali just over three months ago, writes Hugh Pope.

"I'm still wearing the same clothes, I don't have any others," the 51-year-old carpenter said, beginning his account of the Hojali disaster. "I was wounded in five places, but I am lucky to be alive."

Mr Sadikov and his wife were short of food, without electricity for more than a month, and cut off from helicopter flights for 12 days. They sensed the Armenian noose was tightening around the 2,000 to 3,000 people left in the straggling Azeri town on the edge of Karabakh.

"At about 11pm a bombardment started such as we had never heard before, eight or nine kinds of weapons, artillery, heavy machine-guns, the lot," Mr Sadikov said.

Soon neighbours were pouring down the street from the direction of the attack. Some huddled in shelters but others started fleeing the town, down a hill, through a stream and through the snow into a forest on the other side.

To escape, the townspeople had to reach the Azeri town of Agdam about 15 miles away. They thought they were going to make it, until at about dawn they reached a bottleneck between the two Azeri villages of Nakhchivanik and Saderak.

"None of my group was hurt up to then ... Then we were spotted by a car on the road, and the Armenian outposts started opening fire," Mr Sadikov said. Mr Sadikov said only 10 people from his group of 80 made it through, including his wife and militiaman son. Seven of his immediate relations died, including his 67-year-old elder brother.

"I only had time to reach down and cover his face with his hat," he said, pulling his own big flat Turkish cap over his eyes. "We have never got any of the bodies back."

The first groups were lucky to have the benefit of covering fire. One hero of the evacuation, Alif Hajief, was shot dead as he struggled to change a magazine while covering the third group's crossing, Mr Sadikov said.

Another hero, Elman Memmedov, the mayor of Hojali, said he and several others spent the whole day of 26 February in the bushy hillside, surrounded by dead bodies as they tried to keep three Armenian armoured personnel carriers at bay.

As the survivors staggered the last mile into Agdam, there was little comfort in a town from which most of the population was soon to flee.

"The night after we reached the town there was a big Armenian rocket attack. Some people just kept going," Mr Sadikov said. "I had to get to the hospital for treatment. I was in a bad way. They even found a bullet in my sock."

Victims of massacre: An Azeri woman mourns her son, killed in the Hojali massacre in February (left). Nurses struggle in primitive conditions (centre) to save a wounded man in a makeshift operating theatre set up in a train carriage. Grief-stricken relatives in the town of Agdam (right) weep over the coffin of another of the massacre victims. Calculating the final death toll has been complicated because Muslims bury their dead within 24 hours.

Newsweek, 29 November 1993
For the past seven months Armenian troops and tanks have swept across Azerbaijan -- a land grab exceeded only by what the Serbs have accomplished in Bosnia in the past year...Last month they pushed south all the way to the Iranian border, driving more than 60,000 Azerbaijani civilians across the Araks river into Iran -- and looting and torching vacant villages in their wake.

Men Are Like That

Source: "Men Are Like That" by Leonard Ramsden Hartill. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis (1926). (Memoirs of an Armenian officer who observed the Armenian genocide of the Muslims)

p. 20:

"Our men armed themselves, gathered together and advanced on the Tartar section of the village. There were no lights in the houses and the doors were barred, for the Tartars suspected what was to happen and were in great fear. Our men hammered on the doors, but got no response; whereupon they smashed in the doors and began a carnage that continued until the last Tartar was slain. Throughout the hideous night, I cowered at home in terror, unable to shut my ears to the piercing screams of the helpless victims and the loud shouts of our men. By morning the work was finished."

p. 132:

"The main body of our troops in Northern Armenia was stationed at Karaklis, a town situated on the railroad about sixty versts from Alexandropol. It is the third largest town in Russian Armenia. On the approach of the Turks toward Alexandropol we fell back to Karaklis, there joining with our main force. In this movement we took with us three thousand Turkish soldiers who had been captured by the Russians and left on our hands when the Russians abandoned the struggle. During our retreat to Karaklis two thousand of these poor devils were cruelly put to death. I was sickened by the brutality displayed, but could not make any effective protest. Some, mercifully, were shot. Many of them were burned to death. The method employed was to put a quantity of straw into a hut, and then after crowding the hut with Turks, set fire to the straw."

p. 202:

"This war quickly developed into one of extermination. Horrible things happened, things that words can neither describe nor make you understand. The memory of scenes I witnessed and of incidents in which I participated still makes me feel sick. But war is always horrible, for it liberates all the fear and hate and deviltry that are in men...We now proceeded to solve the Tartar problem in Armenia. We closed the roads and mountain passes that might serve as ways of escape for the Tartars, and then proceeded in the work of extermination. Our troops surrounded village after village. Little resistance was offered. Our artillery knocked the huts into heaps of stones and dust, and when the villages became untenable and the inhabitants fled from them into the fields, bullets and bayonets completed the work. Some of the Tartars escaped, of course. They found refuge in the mountains, or succeeded in crossing the border into Turkey. The rest were killed. And so it is that the whole length of the border-land of Russian Armenia from Nakhitchevan to Akhalkalaki, from the hot plains of Ararat to the cold mountain plateaus of the north, is dotted with the mute mournful ruins of Tartar villages. They are quiet now, those villages, except for the howling of wolves and jackals that visit them to paw over the scattered bones of the dead."

p. 203:

"A soldier succeeded in driving his bayonet through the Tartar. I saw the point of the weapon emerge through his back. ...Another soldier seized a rock and pounded the Tartar's head with it. The Tartar ceased to struggle and lay still. The Armenian who had bayoneted him sprang to his feet, wrested the weapon from the Tartar's body, and, raising it to his lips, licked it clean of blood, exclaiming in Russian, 'Slodkey! Slodkey!' (Sweet.)

One evening I passed through what had been a Tartar village. Among the ruins a fire was burning. I went to the fire and saw seated about it a group of soldiers. Among them were two Tartar girls, mere children. The girls were crouched on the ground, crying softly with suppressed sobs. Lying scattered over the ground were broken household utensils and other furnishings of Tartar peasant homes. There were also bodies of the dead.

I was late in the matter of the girls, but I did what I could for them. I spoke to them in their own tongue and assured them that they had nothing more to fear. When they understood that I intended them no harm and sought only to help them, they gave way to their grief and wailed piteously. They were in terror of the soldiers and would not be comforted as long they were near. I took the girls along with me, leaving the soldiers in an ugly mood; for they considered that I was depriving them of what had become a recognized prerequisite of victory. A verst or two further on I came to another village that had met with the same fate as the first. As it was now dark, I decided to spend the night there. I shared the food that I had with the two girls, found them a shelter and another for myself. I was soon asleep. In the night I was awakened by the persistent crying of a child. I arose and went to investigate. A full moon enabled me to make my way about and revealed to me all the wreck and litter of the tragedy that had been enacted. Guided by the child’s crying, I entered the yard of a house, which I judged from its appearance must have been the home of a Turkish family. There in a corner of the yard I found a woman dead. Her throat had been cut. Lying on her breast was a small child, a girl about a year old." 

"The Armenians in Baku, supported by the English, seized that great oil city and massacred twenty-five thousand of the Tartar population."

p. 218:

"Russian troops did terrible things in the Turkish villages. The world knows the fate of the Armenians in Turkey. We Armenians did not spare the Tartars. It is all a circle of hatred and revenge, an endless chain plunging ever farther into the depths and bringing forth the worst there is in human nature. If persisted in, the slaughtering of prisoners, the looting, and the rape and massacre of the helpless become commonplace actions expected and accepted as a matter of course. Men are like that."

For more complete quotes, see:

http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/men-are-like-that.htm
http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/armenian-slayers.htm

"...the documented massacre of Turkish or Tartar citizens in the republic of Armenia in 1919 .. I have no justification for it, I strongly condemn it.." Prof. Gerard Libaridian (in his debate with Dr. Kerim C. Kevenk, Sponsored by University of Pittsburgh at Jonstown Social Sciences Division October 21, 1982)

Source: http://www.tallarmeniantale.com/debate82.htm

Thought-Provoking Statements by Ara Baliozian

What we see again and again is that generations of Armenians have been brainwashed with stories of "genocide" and raised to hate the Turks. The resulting prejudice, hatred and racism are immense. The following words by Ara Baliozian (an Armenian author, translator, and critic) are instructive:

There is a type of mediocrity who will sell his soul to see his name in print. This is well known to our editors who operate on the assumption that the views of these mediocrities are representative of the majority. The truth of the matter is, these charlatans don’t write what they really think and feel but what will have a better chance to be printed. If anti-Turkish venom and pro-Armenian crapola have a better chance than objective, impartial, and critical assessments, they will produce venom and crapola. As a result, what we see in our weeklies is not a multiplicity of views but a uniformity of predictable and unreadable nonsense. I know what I am saying because I was there once; that’s when I was popular with our editors and my things appeared everywhere.

Ara Baliozian, June 22, 2007

(The following quotes can be found in the world wide web:)

My Armenian readers hate me when I write about Turks not as Turks but as human beings. A smart Armenian knows instinctively that honesty and truth are not appreciated by the average Armenian reader. He also knows that objectivity has no cash value. He treats Armenians as angels and Turks as devils. He may know better but he also knows there are limits to what a man in his position can say publicly.
Some of my critics not only read everything I write but they also feel compelled to share their wisdom. They seem to be unaware of the fact that I find disagreement, even insults, more stimulating than silence. * PLAGIARIZING A CLICHÉ

Our revolutionaries challenged the might of the Ottoman Empire, true, but they did so not as self-reliant thinkers but as double dupes of the Great Powers and of their own megalomania. I say this because I refuse to spend the rest of my life adapting myself to their propaganda line and the lies of chauvinist charlatans who have adapted themselves into thinking they are our betters but who may well be our worst.

Chekhov tells us hatred unites people more effectively than any other sentiment. Our leaders keep promoting hatred of the Turks because they think if they stop doing that we may scatter away, get lost in the crowd, and they may end up with no one to lead.

What if by rationalizing our hatred of Turks we also rationalize our intolerance of fellow Armenians? What if our hatred pollutes our relations with our fellow men? What if Gandhi was right when he said, "Hatred harms the hater more than those he hates"?

There seems to be an unspoken theory among us that says, you can tell how good an Armenian is by how much he hates Turks.

The problem with hatred is that it is no solution. Rather it is a problem that causes other problems. An Armenian who hates Turks will also hate a fellow Armenian who does not share his hatred.

Hatred and envy: they seem to come naturally to us...

And if you were to ask me: "What about you? Don't you hate anybody?" My answer would be, "Of course I do! I was born and raised as an Armenian."

Here are some extracts from an interview:

You have written and thought about our culture for years. What is your general opinion regarding our culture? . . .

[Ara Baliozian:] This is my answer. Since I refuse to reproduce Armenian propaganda, I have become an undesirable, a dreaded 'non-person', a traitor.

Your works were published in scores of Armenian periodicals. Why did they turn against you?

[Ara Baliozian:] Because I began to think independently, in opposition to the propaganda path they held dear.

They hate you in Armenia. Is it that you are extremely anti-Armenian and pro-Turkish, or are we, here in Armenia, so intolerant?

[Ara Baliozian:] I am a supporter of justice. As ottomanized and sovietized Armenians, we have a tendency to be intolerant.

What, in your opinion, are the views that have made you enemies?

[Ara Baliozian:] Probably because I have exposed the insincerity and incompetence of our leaders.

How does it feel to be forsaken in the fatherland?

[Ara Baliozian:] It just an ordinary experience; like any other. At different times all Armenian writers have been wrongly accused of various crimes that they never committed.

It appears that there are certain themes that are off-limits in Armenia. Perhaps in the same way as the Orhan Pamuk incident in Turkey.

[Ara Baliozian:] The Turks are way ahead of us. Just the fact that they've had a Nobel Prize winner attests to this.

Note: Ara Baliozian (born December 10, 1936, Athens, Greece) is an Armenian author, translator, and critic.

The two myths in Cyprus

Source: Statement made by Mr. Evangelos Yannopoulus - the Greek Minister of Maritime Affairs, ELEFTHEROTIPIA, July 4, 1988:

"The two myths in Cyprus must be exposed as lies. The first myth is the case of missing persons and the second is the myth of the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey. The Greek Cypriots presented as missing persons were actually the victims who were killed during the Sampson Coup. As regards the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey, it was the Greek military that staged the coup and toppled Makarios at a time when he was an internationally recognized President of Cyprus. How is it possible to topple Makarios and start slaughtering the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots and impose a mad man like Sampson to head the Cyprus Government and yet expect no reaction from Turkey?"

The following is also relevant:

MAKARIOS ADDRESSING THE U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL

UNITED NATIONS
SECURITY COUNCIL Official Records

1780th Meeting: 19 JULY 1974
New York

18.
...It is clearly an invasion from outside, inflagrant violation of the independence and sovereignty of the Republic of Cyprus. The so-called coup was the work of the Greek officers staffing and commanding the National Guard.

19.
... the Greek officers serving with the National guard.... recruited many members of the terrorist organization EOKA-B.

21.
The coup caused much bloodshed and took a great toll of human lives... It was an invasion which violated the independence and sovereignty of the Republic. And the invasion is continuing so long as there are Greek officers in Cyprus.

25.
It may be said that it was the Cyprus Government which invited the Greek officers to staff the National Guard. I regret to say that it was a mistake on my part...

32. As I have already stated, the events in Cyprus do not constitute an internal matter of the Greeks of Cyprus. The Turks of Cyprus are also affected. The coup of the Greek junta is an invasion, and from its consequences the whole people of Cyprus suffers, both Greeks and Turks.

Ottoman Turks According to Foreigners

The following observations by Westerners were written in French by Ahmet Cevat:

"If Turks had behaved like Christians to use force to convert to Islam the nations which they brought under their power, to which no one could have opposed, today there would be no Eastern problem. But Turks did not do so. They obeyed the word of the Koran to permit everybody "to worship in their own way" centuries before Frederick the Great pronounced his famous dictum. Thus, in an age when the Christian Europe itself shed Christian blood and when people in Europe enjoyed inflicting inhuman tortures upon those whose beliefs differed from theirs, the Ottoman Empire became the sole country where the inquisition did not exist, where deaths at the stake were unheard of and where accusations of witchcraft were not made. And the barbarian (!) Turkey was the only country where the Jews persecuted and chased away everywhere by the Christians, could find asylum. These facts demonstrate that Muslim countries provided spiritually far better living conditions than Christian countries."[1]

"The Turks, who are a conquering nation, did not Turkify the nations that came under their rule; instead, they respected their religions and traditions. It was a stroke of luck for Romania to live under Turkish rule instead of Russian or Austrian rule. Because otherwise there would not have been a Romanian nation today" (Popescu Ciocanel).

"Turks rule over people under their administration only externally, without interfering with their internal structures. On account of this, the autonomy of minorities in Turkey is better and more complete than any in the most advanced European countries."[2]

"...human beings hate each other on account of religious differences. This flaw is older than Islam and Christianity. But there has never been any examples of this adjuration in Turkey because Turks never oppress anybody on account of his religion. If enmity on the basis of religion had been such a case of simple contempt among us too, or if it did not keep translating itself into action, many nations in our Europe would probably have considered themselves happy!" (A. de Mortraye).[3]

"Turkey never became a scene for religious terror or for the cruelty of the inquisition. On the contrary, it served as an asylum for the unfortunate victims of Christian fanaticism. If you look into history, you will see that in the fifteenth century thousands of Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal found such a good asylum in Turkey that their descendants have been living there very calmly all through these approximately three hundred years, and are only forced to defend themselves in some countries against the cruelty of Christians, especially that of the Orthodoxes. No Jew is able to appear in public during Easter celebrations in Athens, even today. In Turkey, however, if the Israelites are insulted by the Greek and Armenian communities, local courts immediately take them under their protection."

"In that vast and calm country of the sultan, all religions and nations are living together peacefully. Although the mosque is superior to the church and the synagogue, it does not replace them. Because of this, the Catholic sect is more free in Istanbul and Smyrna compared with Paris and Lyon. In addition to the fact that no law in Turkey prohibits the open-air ceremonies of this sect, neither does any law imprison its cross in the church. While the dead are being taken to the graves, a long line of priests bear processional candles and chant Catholic hymns. When all the priests in all the churches in the Galata and Beyoglu districts go into the streets and form clerical processions during the Eucharist celebrations, chanting hymns and bearing their crosses and religious banners, a detachment of soldiers escorts them which forces even the Turks to stand in respect around the group of priests." (A. Ubicini).[4]

[1] Ah. Djevat, Les Turcs d'aprés les auteurs célébres-Divers témoignages et opinions (Yabancılara Göre Eski Türkler), 3rd ed. (Istanbul, 1978), pp. 70-71.
[2] Ibid., p.91.
[3] Ibid., pp. 214-215.
[4] Ibid., pp. 215-216.

Armenian Atrocities in Eastern Anatolia

Source: Stanford J. Shaw, on Armenian collaboration with invading Russian armies in 1914, "History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Volume II: Reform, Revolution & Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975)." (London, Cambridge University Press 1977). pp. 315-316:

"With the Russian invasion of eastern Anatolia in 1914 at the beginning of World War I, the degree of Armenian collaboration with the Ottoman's enemy increased drastically. Ottoman supply lines were cut by guerilla attacks, Armenian revolutionaries armed Armenian civil populations, who in turn massacred the Muslim population of the province of Van in anticipation of expected arrival of the invading Russian armies... In April 1915 Dashnaks from Russian Armenia organized a revolt in the city of Van, whose 33,789 Armenians comprised 42.3 percent of the population, closest to an Armenian majority of any city in the Empire... Leaving Erivan on April 28, 1915, Armenian volunteers reached Van on May 14 and organized and carried out a general slaughter of the local Muslim population during the next two days while the small Ottoman garrison had to retreat to the southern side of the lake."

Source: Hassan Arfa, "The Kurds," (London, 1968), pp. 25-26:

"When the Russian armies invaded Turkey after the Sarikamish disaster of 1914, their columns were preceded by battalions of irregular Armenian volunteers, both from the Caucasus and from Turkey. One of these was commanded by a certain Andranik, a blood-thirsty adventurer.. These Armenian volunteers committed all kinds of excesses, more than six hundred thousand Kurds being killed between 1915 and 1916 in the eastern vilayets of Turkey."

Source: Justin McCarthy and Carolyn McCarthy, Turks and Armenians, Washington DC, 1989:

Page 49:

"Armenian revolutionaries had secreted arms in the City of Van and surrounding villages. Throughout April 1915, Armenian rebels infiltrated the city, which was policed only by small detachments of security forces. Clashes with Ottoman police in the city began on April 13. By April 20, the rebels had begun to fire on police stations, other government buildings, and Muslim houses. The security forces were defeated and forced to withdraw from the city in the first part of May. During and immediately after the Armenian takeover the Muslims who could not escape the city were killed, as were the Muslim inhabitants of surrounding villages which came under Armenian control. In one incident, Muslims from villages to the North of Van were herded into the village of Zeve, where all but a few of the approximately 3000 Muslim villagers were killed. Similar incidents took place throughout the region. In Van itself, the entire Muslim quarter of the city was destroyed. No Muslims were left alive in the city. Refugees were set upon the roads by Armenian guerrillas, who killed untold numbers."

Page 50:

"The terror of Van was repeated in other cities as the Russians and Armenians advanced. In Bitlis and other cities Muslim men, women, and children were hunted down and murdered in the streets. Villagers fled before the advancing armies to be massacred on the roads by Armenian guerrilla units."

Source: Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922, The Darwin Press, 2nd Printing, 1996, pp. 186-187:

"Armenian plans to take eastern cities were brought into force once the war began. For the sake of understanding the chronology of massacre and counter massacre in the region, it should be understood that these and other revolutionary activities took place well before any orders for deportation of Armenians were given. The revolts or attacks on Ottoman forces in Van, Zeytun, Muş, Reşadiye, Gevaş, and other cities and towns all began before the Ottoman order of deportation  (26 May 1915). By May of 1915, eastern Anatolia was already in the midst of a civil war."

Source: John Dewey, "The Turkish Tragedy", The New Republic, Volume 40, November 12, 1928, pp. 268-269:

"Few Americans who mourn... the miseries of the Armenians, are aware that till the rise of nationalistic ambitions, beginning with the 'seventies, the Armenians were the favored portion of the population of Turkey, or that in the Great War, they traitorously turned Turkish cities over to the Russian invader; that they boasted of having raised an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least a hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population."

Source: Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922, The Darwin Press, 2nd Printing, 1996, pp. 196-197:

"The worst Armenian massacres of Muslims and destruction of Muslim villages took place in two periods at the beginning and end of the First World War. The first period began with the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war and the beginnings of organized Armenian rebellion against the Ottomans. It ended with the Russian conquest of eastern Anatolia in 1916. The second period began as the Russian army dissolved or retreated from eastern Anatolia and ended with the defeat of the Armenian armed forces who had taken the Russians' place in the field. For the middle period of the war, the years of Russian occupation of eastern Anatolia, from the middle of 1916 to the middle of 1917, there is very little evidence of any kind. No Ottoman investigation committees such as the ones that investigated the early atrocities were present to record the events of the Russian occupation. Scattered reports indicate that major massacres of Muslims took place, particularly in Van and Bitlis vilâyets [75]. From the large number of Muslim refugees, it is obvious that conditions were awful, but not as bad as they would become after the Russian army collapsed in 1917. The Russian Revolution brought with it the wholesale desertion of Russian soldiers on the Anatolian front. Enlisted men and some officers simply left their units and walked home, stealing their sustenance (and anything else that was available) from villages as they passed. Russian authority in eastern Anatolia was replaced by the authority of Armenian soldiers and Armenian bands, at first nominally under the control of the Transcaucasian Federation, then as troops of the Armenian Republic. The area they ruled in Anatolia stretched from Erzincan in the east to the Persian border and north to Trabzon and the border of Russian Armenia. Muslim villagers suffered from the depredations of the deserting Russian soldiers, but they suffered far worse from the Armenians who were left in charge. After the Russians departed, nothing held the Armenians in check. The events of the first period of the short Armenian rule were of a type seen all too often in that time -- murder of unarmed Muslim villagers, kidnapping of villagers, who were never seen again, destruction of Muslim markets, neighborhoods, and villages, and ubiquitous plundering and rape."

[75] A postwar British source stated that Armenians "massacred between three and four hundred thousand Kurdish people in the Van and Bitlis Districts," mostly the work of  Armenians in the Russian Army ("Interview of Col. Wooley of the British Army, 12 September 1919," in U.S. 184.021/265). On atrocities against Muslims in the Erzurum Vilayeti during the Russian occupation, see Vehip to Acting Supreme Commander, 21 March 1916, Belgeler III, no. 169.

Other relevant quotes from the web:

Source: General Bronsart wrote as follows in an article in the July 24, 1921 issue of the newspaper "Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung:"

"As demonstrated by the innumerable declarations, provocative pamphlets, weapons, ammunition, explosives, etc., found in areas inhabited by the Armenians, the rebellion had been prepared over a long time, organized, strengthened and financed by Russia. Since all the Moslems capable of bearing arms were in the Turkish Army, it was easy to organize a terrible massacre by the Armenians against defenseless people, because the Armenians were not only attacking the sides and rear of the Eastern Army paralyzed at the front by the Russians, but were attacking the Moslem folk in the region as well. The Armenian atrocities which I have witnessed were far worse than the so-called Turkish brutality."

Source: Prof. Justin Mc Carthy, "The Anatolian Armanians 1912-1922", 1984.

"To understand the end of the Armenian presence in Anatolia one must remember that the Armenian disaster came in time of war -- World War I and the Turkish War of Independence.The numbers used by demographers are of limited use in describing war. They will not tell us who fired the first shot, nor label those responsible for the bloodshed.They only count the dead.We now know from reliable statistics that slightly less than 600,000 Anatolian Armenians died in the wars of 1912-22, not 1.5 or 2 million, as is often claimed. Not that 600,000 is a small number. The Armenians suffered a terrible mortality. But when considering the number of dead Armenians, one must also consider the numbers of dead Muslims. The statistics tell us that ...in the Six Vilayets, the Armenian homeland, more than one million Muslims died. These Muslims, no less than the Armenians, suffered a terrible mortality."

The Armenian Problem: Events Before 1915

The Armenians broke away from the Byzantine church in 451,150 years after they accepted Christianity, leading to long centuries of Armenian-Byzantine clashes which went on until the Turks settled in Anatolia starting in the late 11th century, with the Byzantines working to wipe out the Armenians and eliminate the Armenian principalities in order to maintain Greek Orthodoxy throughout their dominions. Contemporary Armenian historians report in great detail how the Byzantines deported Armenians as well as using them against enemy forces in the vanguard of the Byzantine armies. As a result of this, when the Seljuk Turks started flooding into Anatolia starting in the late 11th century, they did not encounter any Armenian principalities; the only force remaining to resist them was that of Byzantium. The Seljuk ruler Alparslan captured the lands of the Armenian Principality of Ani in 1064, but it had previously been brought to an end by the Byzantine in 1045, nineteen years earlier, with Greeks being brought in to replace the Armenians who had been deported.

Contemporary Armenian historians interpret this Turkish conquest of Anatolia to have constituted their liberation from the long centuries of Byzantine misrule and oppression. The Armenian historian Asoghik thus reports that "Because of the Armenians' enmity toward Byzantium, they welcomed the Turkish entry into Anatolia and even helped them." The Armenian historian Mathias of Edessa likewise relates that the Armenians rejoiced and celebrated publicly when the Turks conquered his city, Edessa (today's Urfa).

When eastern Anatolia was conquered by Fatih Mehmet II and Yavuz Sultan Selim I, it was taken from the White Sheep Turkomans and from the Safavids of Iran, who had occupied it after the Byzantines had retired; while Yavuz Selim took Cilicia from the Mamluks. In no case, therefore, did the Ottoman Turks conquer or occupy an existing Armenian state or principality. In every case, these Armenians had previously been conquered by peoples other than the Turks.

Source: ARMENIAN CLAIMS AND HISTORICAL FACTS QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS, Center for Strategic Research, Ankara, 2007

https://www.1915.gov.tr/images/uploads/documents/Ermeni_ingilizce_Soru_CevapKitapcigi.pdf


Prof. McCarthy:

"Under the Seljuk Turks and later the Ottomans, the Armenians lived as a Christian religious group whose separate existence was guaranteed by the rules of Islam. Armenian dedication to their religion, their geographic situation in Eastern Anatolia, and Ottoman religious toleration guaranteed their continuation as a people." (p.7)

"The claim of Armenian nationalists to a homeland in Eastern Anatolia would be considerably bolstered if there had been an Armenian majority, or even an Armenian plurality, in the East. Such was not the case." (p. 9)

"By the 1700s, there was no large area in which Armenians made up enough of the population to be the majority in an Armenian state. No province of the Ottoman, Persian, or Russian Empires had enough Armenians to make up an Armenia. For example, even much later, in the late 1800s, after Armenians migrated and concentrated their population, in no province of the Ottoman Empire was more than one-third of the population Armenian. The majority were in fact Muslims -Turks, Kurds, and many other ethnic groups who identified themselves primarily by religion, as Muslims, just as Armenians identified themselves religiously as Armenians." (p. 11)

"The rebellions of 1894-6 have often been cited as "Armenian Massacres," or the slaughter of innocent Armenians by Turks. Leaving aside the fact that such judgements  ignore the murder of Turks and Kurds, there is a matter of common sense to consider. Because some wish to never admit that Armenians had a part in the creation of their own history of suffering, they are forced to ignore all Armenian actions against Turks. This leaves them with some difficult explanations. Why would the Turks, who had lived in relative peace with the Armenians for centuries, suddenly start to attack them? Is it just an incredible coincidence that the trouble in the East began as soon as Armenian revolutionaries began to organize there?  Apologists for the Armenian Cause have resorted to the Devil Theory of History to explain what they allege were Turkish actions - a dormant evil tendency in the Turks awakened, stimulated by evil politicians. Such explanations can only seem believable if at least half the facts are ignored and one is willing to accept the absurdities of the Devil Theory. The antidote to this type of history is common sense."

Source: Justin McCarthy and Carolyn McCarthy, Turks and Armenians, Washington DC, 1989.

"In life, questions outnumber answers. Case in point: If they (The Turks) are bloodthirsty savages, why did they wait for 600 years to slaughter us?" 

Ara Baliozian (Armenian author, translator, and critic).

On Scholars/Historians Bullied by Armenian Nationalists

"Nationalist apologists first decide that the Turks are guilty, then look for evidence that will show they are correct. They are like a man in a closed room fighting against a stronger enemy. As the enemy advances the man picks up a book, a lamp, an ashtray, a chair-whatever he can find- and throws it in the vain hope of stopping the enemy's advance. But the enemy continues on. Eventually the man runs out of things to throw, and he is beaten. The enemy of the nationalist apologists is the truth.

They have thrown false telegrams, spurious statistics, sham courts, and anything else they could find, but the truth has advanced.

Some tactics have been all too successful in reducing the number of scholars who study the Armenian Question. When the fabrications and distortions failed, there were outright threats. When the historians could not be convinced, the next best thing was to silence them. One professor's house was bombed. Other's were threatened with similar violence.

Campaigns were organized to silence historians. One professor was mercilessly attacked in the press because he advised the Turkish ambassador on responding to questions about the Ottoman Armenians. It is worth nothing that no one questioned the probity of the American Armenian scholar who became the chief advisor of the president of the Armenian Republic or doubted the veracity of the American Armenian professor whose son became the Armenian Foreign Minister. No one questioned the objectivity of these scholars or attacked them, nor should they. The only proper question is, "What is the truth?" No matter who pays the bills, no matter the nationality of the author, no matter if he writes to ambassadors, no matter his religion, his voting record, his credit status, or his personal life, his views on history should be closely analyzed and, if true, accepted. The only question is the truth.

Such attacks have had their intended effect. Fewer and fewer historians are willing to write on this history. A very senior and respected scholar of Ottoman history, Bernand Lewis was brought to court in France for his denial of the Armenian genocide. After a long and successful career. Professor Lewis could afford to confront those who accused him. He also could afford to hire the lawyers who defended him. Could a junior scholar afford to do the same? Could someone who depended on university rectors, who worry about funding, afford to take up such a dangerous topic? Could someone without Professor Lewis's financial resources afford the lawyers who defended both his free speech and his good name?

I myself was the target of a campaign, instigated by an Armenian newspaper, that attempted to have me fired from my university. Letters and telephone calls from all over the United States come to the president of my university, demanding my dismissal because I denied the "Armenian Genocide". We have the tenure system in the United States, a system that guarantees that senior professors cannot be fired for what they teach and write, and my university president defended my rights. But a younger professor might understandably be afraid to write on Armenians if he knew he faced the sort of ordeal that has been faced by others.

To me, the worst of all is being accused of being the kind of politicized nationalist scholar I so detest. False reasons are invented to explain why I say what I say. My mother is a Turk, my wife is a Turk, I am paid large sums by the Turkish Government. None of these things is true, but it would not affect my writings one bit if they were. The way to challenge a scholar's work is to read his writings and respond to them with your scholarship, not to attack his character.

When, despite the best efforts of the nationalist apologists, some still speak out against the distortion of history, the final answer is political: Politicians are enlisted to rewrite history. Parliaments are enlisted to convince their people that there was a genocide. In America, the Armenian nationalists lobby a Congress which refuses to even consider an apology for slavery to demand an apology from Turks for something the Turks did not do. In France, the Armenian nationalists lobby a Parliament which will not address the horrors perpetrated by the French in Algeria, which they know well took place, to declare there were horrors in Turkey, about which they know almost nothing. The people of many nations are then told that the genocide must have taken place, because their representatives have recognized it.

The Turks are accused of Genocide, but what does that appalling word mean? The most quoted definition is that of the United Nations: actions "committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such." Raphael Lemkin, who invented the word genocide, included cultural, social, economic, and political destruction of groups as genocide. Leo Kuper included as genocide attacks on sub-groups that are not ethnic, such as economic classes, collective groups, and various social categories. By these standards, Turks were indeed guilty of genocide. So were Armenians, Russians, Greeks, Americans, British, and almost every people that has ever existed. In World War I in Anatolia there were many such "genocides". So many groups attacked other groups that the use of the word genocide is meaningless."

Source: Presentation by Prof. Justin McCarthy at the Seminar on Turkish-Armenian Relations organized by the Democratic Principles Association on March 15, 2001

Genocides in Southeastern Europe

Source: Professor Stanford J. Shaw, 'The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,' New York University Press, New York (1991).

Page 187:

"...the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire which had been going on for a century was disastrous for Ottoman Jewry. This was the age of nationalism among the Christian subjects of the Sultan, starting with the Greek Revolution early in the nineteenth century, which, based on the Megali Idea, or Great Idea, sought to add to Greek kingdom Istanbul and large portions of Anatolia, union of which with Greece was felt to be the 'dream and hope of all'. The success of the Greek national movement, provided more in fact by the intervention of the Great Powers than by the efforts of the Greeks themselves, stimulated similar uprisings among the other subjects in Southeastern Europe who had long been oppressed, not so much by the Ottomans but, rather, by the Greek religious hierarchy which dominated the Orthodox millet, leading first to pressure for religious independence, granted to the Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate in 1870, to the Serbian Church in 1879, and to the Rumanian Church in 1885, with subsequent aspirations for, and achievement of, political independence following..."

 Page 188:

 "...They [new nationalist leaders] were greatly assisted in their campaigns against the Ottomans both by the diplomatic and consular representatives of the major Powers of Europe and also by Christian missionaries, who emphasized feelings of Christian superiority and hatred for Muslims and Jews which fortified the religious as well as ethnic bases of their pursuit of independence.

Christian nationalism, based as much on religious as on ethnic identity, soon resurrected the medieval bigotries which had devastated both Jews and Muslims and consequently had driven them together in the past. Vicious anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic movements developed, involving large-scale persecutions and massacres carried out by invading armies, by the independent states that resulted, also by Christian subjects who remained within the Empire, particularly because of Jewish and Muslim support for Ottoman integrity in fear of their fate in the emergent nationalist states of Southeastern Europe. The results were explosive and damaging.

The invading armies of Russia and Austria as well as the revolting nationalists and, later, successfully established independent Christian states, committed systematic genocide against Jews and Muslims throughout the nineteenth century, despite Great Power admonitions to the contrary in the treaties of Paris (1858) and Berlin (1878),..."

Page 188:

"...As the peoples of Southeastern Europe achieved their independence, their Muslim and Jewish minorities were systematically persecuted and massacred, and those who survived were driven beyond the ever- shrinking boundaries of the retreating Ottoman Empire in a kind of slaughter which had not been seen since the dispersal of the Jews from Palestine centuries earlier.

This sort of genocide had begun as long before as the late sixteenth century, with the Rumanian Principalities taking the lead, as united Rumania did subsequently during the later years of the nineteenth century. In 1579 the ruler of Moldovia, Peter the Lame, banished its Jews because of their competition with its Christian merchants. When Prince Micheal the Brave revolted against the Ottomans in the Rumanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1593, he ordered the massacre of all the Jews as well as Turks in Bucharest."

Page 204:

"Greeks and Armenians agitated widely to prevent Jews from constructing new synagogues when needed in the Empire. The best example of this came with Greek opposition to the construction of a new Jewish synagogue at Haydarpasa in 1899. Sultan Abdul Hamid II allowed the synagogue to be built, and assured its opening despite Greek protests by sending a contingent of soldiers from the nearby Selimiye barracks, leading the congregation to adopt the name Hemdat Israel synagogue, choosing the name not only because of its meaning, 'the mercy of Israel', but also because the word Hemdat was close to the name of their benefactor, Sultan Abdul-Hamid [43]. Macedonia was a living hell for Muslims and Jews alike, with terrorist bands organized by Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian and even Rumanian nationalists slaughtering all those who failed to share their national passions [44].

Avram Galante, who lived for many years among the Greeks on the island of Rhodes, where the Jewish community was numerous, but still a substantial minority compared to the Greeks and Muslims, relates how he tried desperately to secure assistance from the Greek religious authorities to end the pogroms, securing Patriarchal encyclicals in 1873, 1874, 1884 and 1898, but with only limited success as they felt pressure from their flocks to go along with the attacks, or at least not to object, while the lower priests actively encouraged the attacks against the Jews, not only on the part of their followers but also by Muslims [45]. Efforts of the Grand Rabbi and individual Jews within the Empire to stop these pogroms were supported by leading European Jewish bankers such as Moses Montefiore and Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-96), principal builder of the Orient railroad between Vienna, Istanbul and the East, who as founder of the Jewish Colonization Association was the first Jewish philanthropist to help Jews resettle in the Holy Land, and by the AIU, whose educational efforts were also liberally subsidised by the Hirsch. Such interventions usually succeeded in getting the culprits imprisoned, but little could be done to remedy the damage done to Ottoman Jews during the course of the repeated attacks, and only the constant efforts at protection by the Ottoman government prevented things from becoming even worse as time went on."

[43] Guleryuz, 'Turkiye Yahudileri Tarihi: 19.Yuzyil sona ererken (2)', Salom, 19 November 1986.

[44] Robert Mantran, 'La structure sociale de la communaute juive de Salonqiue a la fin du dix-neuvieme siecle', RH no.534 (1980), 388; D. Levi, Ecole des Garcons, Rodosto, to AIU, 6 May 1920 (AIU Archives I C 33) describes a typical Greek blood libel incident at Gallipoli in 1920.

[45] Galante, Istanbul, 134-135. El Tiempo, 28 May 1920; Galante, Documents V, 181-96; Galante, Nouveau Recueil de Nouveaux Documents Inedits concernant l'Historie des Juifs de Turquie (Istanbul, 1952), reprinted in Galante, Turquie VI, 324.

Extermination of the entire Muslim population of Armenia

The following article was published in "The Jewish Times", June 21, 1990.

By Rachel A. Bortnick:

...the late Cecil Roth, eminent Jewish historian, who states in 'A Short History of the Jewish People' (London, 1969), p. 279:

"The Jewish people must always recall the Turkish Empire with gratitude because, at one of the darkest hours of history, when no alternative place of refuge was open and there seemed no chance of succor, it flung open its doors widely and generously for the reception of the fugitives, and kept them open."

'The fugitives' are the Jews who were banished from Spain in 1492 and those who fled the terrors of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in the following years. Turkey's 'open-door' policy to Jews in distress continued throughout the following centuries where many found refuge from Russian pogroms and the European Holocaust. In fact, just recently, Selahattin Ulkumen, Turkish Consul in Rhodes during World War II, was named a 'Righteous Gentile' by Yad Vashem in Jarusalem for risking his life to save 42 Jews from deportation in 1942.

I can only comment on a few of the many fallacious statements in the article, beginning with Hitler's 'Who now remembers the Armenians?' which has been proven to be one manufactured after the war. By using it as a fact, he uses Hitler as his ally in accusing the Turks of genocide.

Respected historians, experts in Ottoman history at prominent American universities, are termed 'pseudo-historians' and deemed to be in the same category as the few lunatics who deny the Jewish Holocaust. A few years ago, 69 of these academics publicly denounced the term 'genocide' to refer to the massive deaths of Armenians during their rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in 1914-1915. They find that complicated era of intercommunal fighting and massacres within a world war analogous to the situation in Lebanon today.

A more appropriate analogy with the Jewish Holocaust might be the systematic extermination of the entire Muslim population of the independent republic of Armenia (which lasted from 1918 to 1920), which consisted of at least 30-40 percent of the population of that republic. The memoirs of an Armenian army officer who participated in and eye-witnessed these atrocities was published in the U.S. in 1926 with the title 'Men Are Like That.' Other references abound.

As human beings, we must feel deep sympathy for all the victims of massacres and starvation in Ottoman Turkey, Armenians and Turks. We should also feel sorrow for the Turkish diplomats and bystanders who were murdered by Armenian terrorists in recent years 'in revenge for the genocide.'

As Jews, we must be forever grateful to the Turks for the refuge they gave to our Spanish ancestors and for Turkish tolerance which has allowed Jewish - especially Sephardic - life to continue and flourish in Turkey for the last 500 years. 1992, the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Spanish Jews to the Ottoman Empire, will be celebrated in Turkey, Israel, the U.S. and other countries. It will be a year when 'Turks and Jews will remember together.'

Greek Atrocities in Izmir, Aydin, Bergama, Manisa, Tire...

Source: Professor Stanford J. Shaw, 'The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,' New York University Press, New York (1991).

Page 239:

"While the Greek and Armenian community leaders in Istanbul and Paris pressured the Allies to drive the Turks out of Istanbul and much of Anatolia, the Empire's Jewish leaders, remembering very well the persecution their people had suffered as Ottoman territories had come under the rule of independent Christian states, not only refused to join their delegations but actively pressured the Allies to allow the Turks to remain in areas where they consisted a majority of the population, thus incurring further the wrath of the Christian leaders. In Thrace and Southwestern Anatolia also the invading Greek army, which was attempting to provide the Paris Peace Conference with a fait accompli in the territories it wished to retain, armed the Christian minorities and encouraged them to attack Muslims, with the Jews suffering as well because of their support for the Turks during the war [89], and with the once-flourishing Jewish community of Salonica in particular being permanently displaced by Greek refugees from Anatolia settled there after the Greek army evacuated Anatolia.

The Greek army that occupied much of southeastern Anatolia starting in May 1919 slaughtered thousands of Jews and Muslims in the course of its attack, not only during its initial landings at Izmir, but also in the interior during the subsequent two years, and particularly during its final retreat to Izmir, when it ravaged and burned Bursa and other towns and villages along the way. Albert Nabon, Principal of the AIU [Alliance Israelite Universelle] Boy's School in Izmir, reported to the Alliance on 6 July 1919:

'The city was put on fire and sacked, the people dispoiled of all they possessed. There is no food, putting the entire population on general, and our co-religionists in particular, in danger of suffering greatly from these privations'

going on to describe how most Jews, not only from Izmir but also from Greek attacks at Aydin, Bergama and Manisa, took refuge in his school, where they were suffering from overcrowding, lack of food, and medicine. [90]."

Page 240:

"Jewish notables, like the Muslims, were beaten and executed, many Jewish homes and shops were ravaged and burned, and hundreds of Jews were deported to almost certain death in the countryside. As the Greek army retreated in panic late in the war, moreover, it burned the Jewish and Muslim quarters of Izmit, Manisa and Bergama, destroying synagogues, yeshivas and hospitals as well as homes and businesses while killing hundreds and forcing the remainder of the non-Christian population to flee in panic, ...[95]"

[89] Edgar Morin, Vidal et les siens (Paris, Seuil, 1989), 67-93. A dossier of reports on Greek atrocities against people and officials in the Izmir area is in BA [Basbakanlik Arsivi=Prime Minister's Archives], Adliye Tezkere 246/2740, 18 September 1920; see also Ottoman Council of Ministers Minutes/MVM vol.213 no.457, 24 November 1334/1918; vol. 215, no. 249, 28 May 1335/1919; vol.216 no.263, 1 June 1335/1919, describing Greek soldiers driving the settled population out of Bergama and Izmir; vol.216, no.269, 1 June 1335/1919, describing the displacement of Jews and Muslims at the Dardanalles/Canakkale by Greek settlers from the Aegean islands; vol. 216, no.288, 9 June 1919, regarding Ayvalik; vol.216 no.380, 21 June 1919, describing Greek and Allied attacks on the local populations in Thrace and at Izmir, Diyarbekir and Bayezid; vol.216 no.323, 26 June 1919; vol. 216 no.337, 15 July 1919; vol. 216 no.339, 15 July 1919; and particularly vol.216 no.343, 16 July 1919, regarding Greek atrocities in Aydin province; vol.217 no.573, 29 November 1919, and vol.221 no.127, 30 April 1921, and no.239, 4 August 1921, on Greek atrocities in Thrace; vol.218 no.9, 11 January 1920 on resettlement of Greeks from America in Anatolia; also BEO, 343329; Greek atrocities in Southwestern Anatolia and Thrace were condemned by an international investigation commission headed by American High Commissioner in Istanbul, Admiral Mark Bristol, leading the Allies to abondon further support for the Greek invasion. See Ottoman Council of Ministers Minutes, vol.217 no.481, 16 October 1919. Also Hayyim Cohen, Jews of the Middle East, 18.
[90] Similar reports came from Nabon to the AIU on 2 July 1919 (no.23/915), 9 July 1919 (no.26/927), 12 July 1919 (no.27/932) and 14 July 1919 (no. 28/933). In Nabon's report of 17 July 1919 (no.30/935), he stated that the Greeks at Aydin had burned 200 Jewish houses and 13 shops, had dispoiled all the local Jews of their money and property, and had strangled two Jews as well as driving the remainder to seek refuge in the local AIU school: 'At Aydin, Manisa, Tire and everywhere else, our Jews live in an atmosphere of suspicion by the Greek inhabitants' who suspect that they favor the Turks. On 23 July 1920 Nabon reported that all the Jews had left Izmir, the synagogue had not been burned, but the Greeks had taken all its valuables as well as the property of local Jews, and the streets were full of bodies.
[95] Univers Israelite, 2 September 1921, p.467-48, quoted in Guleryuz; see also Galante, Anatolie II (1939), 70-100; and 'Manissa', EJ XI, 878-79.

Source: 'Greek Atrocities in the Vilayet of Smyrna (May to July 1919), Inedited Documents and Evidence of English and French Officers,' Published by The Permanent Bureau of the Turkish Congress at Lausanne, Lausanne, Imprimerie Petter, Giesser & Held, Caroline, 5 (1919).

pages 82-83:

1. The train going from Denizli to Smyrna was stopped at Ephesus and the 90 Turkish travellers, men and women who were in it ordered to descend. And there in the open street, under the eyes of their husbands, fathers and brothers, the women without distinction of age were violated, and then all the travellers were massacred. Amongst the latter the Lieutenant Salih Effendi, a native of Tripoli, and a captain whose name is not known, and to whom the Hellenic authorities had given safe conduct, were killed with specially atrocious tortures.

2. Before the battle, the wife of the lawyer Enver Bey coming from her garden was maltreated by Greek soldiers, she was even stript of her garments and her servant Assie was violated.

3. The two tax gatherers Mustapha and Ali Effendi were killed in the following manner: Their arms were bound behind their backs with wire and their heads were battered and burst open with blows from the butt end of a gun.

4. During the firing of the town, eleven children, six little girls and five boys, fleeing from the flames, were stopped by Greek soldiers in the Ramazan Pacha quarter, and thrown into a burning Jewish house near bridge, where they were burnt alive. This fact is confirmed on oath by the retired commandant Hussein Hussni Effendi who saw it.

5. The clock-maker Ahmed Effendi and his son Sadi were arrested and dragged out of their shop. The son had his eyes put out and was then killed in the court of the Greek Church, but Ahmed Effendi has been no more heard of.

6. At the market, during the fire, two unknown people were wounded by bayonets, then bound together, thrown into the fire and burnt alive.

The Greeks killed also many Jews. These are the names of some:

Moussa Malki, shoemaker killed
Bohor Levy, tailor killed
Bohor Israel, cobbler killed
Isaac Calvo, shoemaker killed
David Aroguete killed
Moussa Lerosse killed
Gioia Katan killed
Meryem Malki killed
Soultan Gharib killed
Isaac Sabah wounded
Moche Fahmi wounded
David Sabah wounded
Moise Bensignor killed
Sarah Bendi killed
Jacob Jaffe wounded
Aslan Halegna wounded....

pages 40-41:

VIOLATED MOSQUES

All the mosques and religious institutions of Manissa, numbering about 150, have been violated by the Greek army, their doors were forced in and their floors torn up, their carpets stolen or soiled, their windows broken and their inside walls defaced. The worst damaged mosques of the town are the following:

Servili mesdjid
Tchatal djami
Kenzi djami
Mouradie
Ak mesdjid
Ayvaz Pacha djami
The convents Kenzi, and Kabak Hadje
Gune Djami
Dilchikar
Dere mesdjid
Nifli Zade
Hodjdja-djlar
The school of Theology Sinan and the cemetery Thchatal Kabristan,
are violated, defiled and deteriorated.

page 53:

VILLAGES DESTROYED

The following villages of Bergamo, one of the richest and most prosperous regions in the world, are completely burned and destroyed by the Greek hordes:

Kirikly
Kalarga
Djame-Keuy
Eminly
Mouhadjir
Baba-Keuy
Hamzaly
Korkally
Eyry-Keuy
Yenidje
Kizil-Tchoukour
Kodja-Oba
Merkez-Kozak
Aladjalar
Achaghi-Kiriklar
Rechadiye
Tepeleni
Chakran
Eyri-Gueul
Boz-Keuy
Djoumali
Tchenguelly.