Armenians raided thousands of Kurdish and Turkish villages whose men were at the front. They killed hundreds of thousands of people. They carried out armed actions in our provincial centers. In the city of Van, they did not leave a single Muslim alive. They struck our Third Army from behind. They committed all manner of atrocities that I cannot set down here.
Our government, on the advice of our ally Germany, deported the Armenians of Anatolia to our more prosperous Arab provinces in order to remove them from the war zone. There were significant losses during the deportation (forced migration). Thousands of Ottoman archival documents have been published on this subject.
What else could be expected? These were the days when we were fighting three of the world’s greatest powers and waging a life-or-death struggle at Gallipoli. Responding to and halting these outrages was our legitimate right of self-defense. Ziya Gökalp, a leading authority on the matter, defined the deportation using the concept of mukatele (mutual killing). This, indeed, is the truth: in other words, they killed us, and we killed them.
(From his newspaper column published on April 21, 2011.)
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