ÇANAKKALE Commemoration Platform (ÇAP) held an online panel evaluating the historical evidence and looking at the use of the word “genocide” recently use by US president Joe Biden when talking about the Turkish War of Independence.
The event titled “Armenians from the Nation to the Present” included guest speaker Prof. Dr Alemdar Yalçın, moderator ÇAP chair Servet Hassan and member of the platform as well a member of the community from England as well as other online views from Turkey.
Examining the Byzantine, Seljuk, Ottoman period Armenians and today’s Armenian diaspora starting from the earliest periods of history Yalçın stated that the claims that there are 1.5 million Armenians in Anatolia “do not reflect the truth, and their numbers were low even when the Seljuks came to Anatolia” going onto say that “After the Celali Revolts, the Armenians in the East had already migrated to the Western provinces and their surroundings. Due to the activities of the missionaries, some Armenians in Anatolia went to France, America and Europe, and some of them settled in places emptied from the Muslim massacres carried out by the Russians in the Caucasus…”
Stating that the break between the two communities began during the Ottoman-Russian war of 1877-1878, known as the 93 war. He went on to stay that “Armenians claimed that they had been massacred and applied to the United States for an American mandate, but the US delegation headed by General Harbord revealed that the allegations that Armenians were massacred were not true. The delegation said, “We traveled the Turkish border from the Black Sea to the Iranian border, and we did not see anything to show that these claims are true.” In the report”