Like in every era in the history, pains and tragedies were experienced during the years of the great war. Armenians were not the only people affected by them. The greatest massacres targeting Muslims in the Balkans and in Caucasia happened in the same period.
Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdoğan made the remarks while inaugurating an exhibition on World War I in the Ottoman Archive Facility in Istanbul on March 19.
Erdogan said that while Turkey marks the year 2015 as the 100th anniversary of its glorious struggle and triumph, others intend to make the year as the hostility against Turkey.
“The purpose of this campaign against Turkey is to treat our country as an enemy instead of keeping alive Armenians’ sorrow,” Erdogan said on Thursday in Istanbul. Not just Armenians were affected by the war but hundreds of Muslims also, he added.
Turkish president called on Armenians to study archives pertaining to WW1 era to uncover what actually happened between Ottoman government and its Armenian citizens: “O Armenian diaspora, O Armenian administration, our archives are here. We have hundreds of thousands of documents, over a million documents. How many documents do you have? Bring your documents, and we task the historians, our historians, political scientists, even archeologists and lawyers, let`s seek the truth here,” he said, adding that “anti-Turkey campaigns carried out by paying money and forming lobbies will not earn you anything.”
“Our calls are not answered because the aim is not to explore the facts. We have nothing we cannot account for,” he said. “Instead, if we examine what our nation had to go through over the past 100-150 years, we would find far more [suffering] than what the Armenians allegedly went through,” he said.
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