Was there a captain with the name Torossian?

Orhan Kemal Cengiz

 

In my history lessons in middle school and high school, I never heard any foreigner's name in the Ottoman army when our teachers talked about the Battle of the Dardanelles.

I did not even register this battle in my mind as part of World War I. There was a Battle of the Dardanelles, which was led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and we fought a heroic war against enemies.

So many years later I was shocked to learn that not only was the Battle of the Dardanelles led by German military officers, but also almost the entire Ottoman General Staff was under their control.

Atatürk was a war hero, as it was said, but he just led a battle in this or that front of the Dardanelles Campaign.

Armenian genocide: To continue to deny the truth of this mass human cruelty is close to a criminal lie

Robert Fisk
 

At seven o’clock on Thursday evening, a group of very brave men and women will gather in Taksim Square, in the centre of Istanbul, to stage an unprecedented and moving commemoration. The men and women will be both Turkish and Armenian, and they will be gathering together to remember the 1.5 million Christian Armenian men, women and children slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks in the 1915 genocide. That Armenian Holocaust – the direct precursor of the Jewish Holocaust – began 100 years ago this Thursday, only half a mile from Taksim, when the government of the time rounded up hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and writers from their homes and prepared them for death and the annihilation of their people.

Gallipoli Centenary Marks Another Snub for Turkish Minorities

Sibel Hurtas

 

The Gallipoli observances were guided by anti-minority narratives and actions that were enflamed by comparisons between the Gallipoli centenary and the approaching 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, when he was the foreign minister in 2011, said: “We will inform the whole world about 2015. Contrary to what some claim and disparage, we will tell the world that this will not be the anniversary of a genocide but of honorable resistance of a nation at Gallipoli.”

The Armenian Hero Turkey Would Prefer to Forget

Robert Fisk
 

Think Captain Torossian.  Confronted by the chilling hundredth anniversary of the genocide of one and a half million Armenian men, women and children at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915, Turkey’s government is planning to swamp memories of the Armenian massacres with ceremonies commemorating the Turkish victory over the Allies at the battle of Gallipoli in the same year. Already, loyalist academics have done their best to ignore the presence of thousands of Arab troops among the 1915 Turkish armies at Gallipoli -- and are now even branding an Armenian Turkish artillery officer who was decorated for his bravery at Gallipoli as a liar who fabricated his own biography.