CONCLUSIONS

All sections of this book relate to one or the other aspect of relations between the Turks and the Armenians especially in the late Ottoman period. The contributors are among those well known for their learning and previous published researches on this issue. Many more studies are needed to explore the interactions of these two communities in the various phases of their long histories. To allow interpretations diverging from deficient traditional views is not necessarily "revisionism" but a requirement of academic accuracy. In fact, revising one-sided history can only help bring the Turkish and the Armenian communities closer and open new prospects for mutual understanding. Further research is required for a fuller comprehension of all events stripped from day-to-day politics and propaganda. 
This volume includes sections not specifically devoted to a discussion of "genocide". Many of the present contributors, who focus on the events of 1915, share, however, the view that the circumstances then cannot be set forth, even with a flight of fancy, as genocide. This term is applicable to very few occurrences throughout history, such as the Nazi policy towards the Jews of Europe, with which none of the Ottoman minorities can be compared in any way. Especially for the Jews, the Ottomans offered a haven against Christian persecution over the centuries. Further, no part of the long and peaceful relations between Turks and Armenians may be described as a deliberate and systematic policy of one group to eliminate another one. A wealth of historical and legal evidence referred to in some chapters of this book substantiates the revolt of large sections of Armenians during World War I, and the Muslim blood shed by them, armed and financed, during the troublesome decades of a declining empire, principally by Tsarist Russia and other foreign powers. 
While one of the chapters stresses the centuries-old but not widely remembered, friendship and interaction of the two peoples, no less than five others remind the readers of the still little-known fact, albeit confirmed by foreign as well as first-hand Turkish material, of Armenian massacres of Turks, Kurds, and other Muslims before and after 1915. One article is totally devoted to the Armenian armed uprising in Van province on the eastern borders of Turkey, precisely to a series of bloody acts perpetrated by Armenians. It was this Russian-provoked conduct that preceded the Ottoman decision to resettle the insurgents, together with their supporters, and even actual and potential sympathizers, in the southern portions of the country. 
The official archives of many states, not only those of the Ottomans, and the confessions of Armenian writers who have boasted in many published works, be they memoirs of leading commanders, their own chronicles of war, and Armenian analyses of events, prove far beyond doubt that Armenians formed battalions with heavy guns and used them against Muslim civilians and the soldiers of their own state in time of war. No objective historian can fail to admit, in the face of irrefutable documentation, that undisguised cooperation with the adversary on the battle-field and the sanguinary insurgency that accompanied it actually caused the relocation, and not vice versa. 
One of the chapters presents a quantitative analysis, which reduces both the often much-exaggerated Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the loss of lives down to more realistic proportions. Many contributors argue that the role of the general conditions of war in the Armenian and Turkish deaths ought not be minimized. Several contributors remind the reader that the only tribunals which tried and convicted the criminals who attacked, robbed and killed some of the Armenians moved for resettlement to areas remote from the war zones were no other than Ottoman courts set up after the war. It is also clear that the number of Armenians who died, though very regrettable, was much less than claimed by some writers unfamiliar with events and reliable statistics. Some chapters demonstrate how many Armenians, supported by foreign governments, not only near the Caucasus, but also in the south close to Syria, inflicted brutal behaviour against the Turks. Their savagery and slaughter, at times, infuriated some Russian and French officers, who initially seemed to uphold Armenian claims but who later felt that their military honour had been undermined. This book, which offers a second set of views based on reliable evidence, demonstrates that the special circumstances of events before and after 1915 are far from warranting a description of genocide, and especially bear no resemblance to the Nazi treatment of the peaceful and loyal Jewish minority in Germany and elsewhere in occupied Europe.

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