Saturday, 9 May 1998
Hürriyet
CNN corrected its fault:
Armenian thesis refuted
The American channel CNN which broadcasted a one-sided ‘program of Armenian genocide’ in April based entirely on Armenian assertions, broadcasted a new interview yesterday particularly because of the great reaction of Hürriyet.
Justin McCarthy, a professor of history in the University of Louisville, said on an interview with the CNN TV that the number of the Armenians died on Turkish territories during the World War I is exaggerated on a large scale.
‘The Armenians were living in different regions of Turkey. Following the World War I the Armenians stated that 600 thousand Armenians had died. From that time on, they have increased this number gradually’ said Professor McCarthy, in reply to the CNN correspondent who mentioned that approximately 2 million Armenians living in Turkey had died in 1915.
‘There are great differences of opinion among specialized scientists on what had happened in that period. We have to know who had written it. Most of the experts were neither Armenian nor Turkish. There had been large losses of life on both sides. Unfortunately, the researchers who had written for that encyclopedia were not impartial scientists. This subject has been deliberately distorted for a long time’ replied the American history professor when the correspondent asked his view on what was written in ‘The Encyclopedia Britannica which states that the Ottomans dragged 1.750.000 Turkish Armenians into a real genocide by compelling them to live in places where it was impossible to live.’
The correspondent said, ‘I am stupefied since I am not a historian as you are. Turkey considers her genocide to be a side effect of the World War I. Whereas the Western journalists, Christian missionaries and the US Ambassador to Turkey at that time gathered evidences relating to the massacres. Even the military advisors of Germany, an ally of Turkey at that time, conveyed these information to Berlin. What do you say about that?’ Professor McCarthy replied as follows:
‘There happened real savageries on both sides. Whereas only the ones perpetrated against the Armenians have been reported. The ones executed against Muslims have not been recited. The Christian missionaries reported that Armenians had been killed in the city of Van. However, the Armenians who captured Van killed every woman, man and child. This fact has not been reported. What you have mentioned are unreliable statistics. For example, some of the historians reporting the American Civil War, by providing the statistics of only the ones killed in the north, proclaimed that the southerners carried out a genocide. Thus only the half of reality has been reflected.’
The fact that CNN broadcasted a long program of ‘voyage guide’ reflecting the touristic beauties of Istanbul on the same day in addition to giving place to a researcher studying the events that took place during the World War I with a more neutral viewpoint, attracted the attention of the spectators.
Doðan ULUÇ / NEW YORK