ASIA MINOR AND THE CAUCASUS AT THE CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATIONS: ARMENIAN-TURKISH QUESTION IN THE NEW AGE

Mikael AIRAPETIAN

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Mikael Airapetian, Chairman, Conservative Party of Armenia (Erevan, Armenia)

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Russians came to the Caucasus in the late 18th century and made it a more turbulent place—it has remained a very unstable region till our days. The Russian Empire exploited the factor of a common religion (Armenians adopted Christianity at the state level in 301) to turn the Armenians (who lost their statehood in 1045 and stopped thinking of themselves as a state) into the main carriers of its interests in the Middle East and set the Muslims against them. This policy continued during World War I and the postwar decade that ended in genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians’ national tragedy. Today, the same policies have led local peoples into an impasse.

Nearly all Armenian political thinkers were caught in the web of Russian imperial intrigues while those who warned about the danger of this course were branded as antipatriotic. This is still practiced.

Western Armenia called Eastern Anatolia by the Turks and Kurdistan by the Kurds was the place where the interests of the two empires—the Russian and the Ottoman—clashed. At all times it was a land of Armenians, a vitally important place for them, and their vital interests there met with the interests of Russia, Turkey, European states and other regional countries. The Armenian question surfaced at the talks with Sultan Abdul Hamid on the Palestinian Autonomy. The sultan naturally declined the idea yet was very much attracted by another one: a railway between Berlin and Baghdad because, according to the preliminary project, the adjacent areas had to be peopled with deported Armenians. Turkey could have agreed to this even if indirectly because it needed stability along its eastern borders, while Russia could have accepted the plan because it always needed access to warm seas. On top of this it had already had a plan of settling Cossacks on these lands. Europe also needed the railway for economic and geopolitical reasons. The plans were never completely realized yet the idea of deportation of Armenians struck root and was later successfully exploited by the Russian Empire.

In 1908, the Young Turks deposed the sultan; Armenian revolutionaries were also involved in the coup. The Young Turks were mainly supported by the non-Turkish elements of the empire while the Turks themselves secretly or even openly protested despite all sorts of pan-Turkic nationalist slogans brandished by the Young Turks. It was the mine that could destroy the empire from within with the help of ethnic minorities and the Young Turks’ domestic and foreign policies.

Turkey was a huge empire mainly British-oriented; in World War I it suddenly found itself on the side of doomed Germany. Armenians that for many centuries remained deprived of……………

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