gunduz-aktan-kitap-soyledikleri-ve-yazdiklari

SÖYLEDİKLERİ VE YAZDIKLARI
these were foiled as fakes, they continued to use them as
propaganda material.
Nevertheless, after some time, the failure to find any official
documents, which could corroborate the intent to destroy’, pushed
the pro-Armenian circles to adopt a new strategy. Obviously, what
mattered was to achieve pre-determined results. They started
claiming that 1,5 million Armenians had died during the
‘deportation’. Such an unduly high figure was being cited beside its
propaganda effect, to prove indirectly the presence of the intent to
destroy by way of deporting and thus to prove that genocide had
been committed. For that reason, the pre-transfer Armenian
population had to be revised upwards. One falsification led to
another. History was being distorted to make it coincide with the
requirements of the law.
From the Turkish standpoint, Armenian engagement in political
and armed struggle for the sake of independence suffices to refute
the thesis that members of the group were killed because they were
affiliated with that group, and to prove that relocation was not
genocide. However, systematic and massive killing of a civilian
population, even with political aims, may constitute a crime
against humanity. Furthermore, the Armenian genocide claim is
now being based on Paragraph (e) of Article 2 of the Convention,
namely “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part”.
This claim is presented along the following lines: Since the
Ottomans were wary of openly destroying the Armenians, they
used the ‘deportation’ as an opportunity to impose on the
Armenians the kind of living conditions that would cause them to
perish. Through an ‘omission’ of their duty to protect the
Armenians from attacks during the ‘deportation’, to ensure safe
transportation, no less than to provide food, medicine, medical
treatment and shelter, they accelerated the deaths. The Armenian
authors accused the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, the Ottoman intelligence
services, of having actually organized the massacres committed by
the criminals released from prisons. These are the claims. It must
not be forgotten that along with acts such as murder which has a
direct impact, causing deaths deliberately through omission, can
also be considered genocide. Therefore, it is important to focus on
whether the deaths resulted in the course of relocation from an
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