Azernews.Az

ANKARA – A Turkish scientist has said Russian archives show that the Turks did not commit mass killings of Armenians in 1915, but to the contrary, faced genocide at the hands of Armenian armed groups.

Mehmet Perinchek said on a visit to Baku Thursday that he had found plenty of documents, including reports by Russian military officers, which prove that groups of Armenian volunteers that were part of the Czarist Russian army massacred Muslims in Turkey and the South Caucasus region, including Nagorno Karabakh, an Azerbaijani region currently under Armenian occupation.

According to historians, from 1915 to 1923, Armenians had begun an uprising, taking up arms against Turkey, and assisted Russia in WWI. To counter these actions, the Ottoman Empire decided to resettle the Armenians. However, they claim that up to 1.5 million of their predecessors suffered "genocide" in the process. Turkey dismisses the allegations and has repeatedly offered to research the events through a joint commission of historians.

Perinchek said he had collected papers containing 286 pages documenting then rulings of Russian military courts on the atrocities perpetrated by Armenian armed units against the Turks.

"True, Czarist Russia was arming the Armenians during the war with Ottoman Turkey, but Russian generals and leaders were appalled by the massacres they had committed," he said.

Perinchek said the documents he discovered indicate that the Ottoman government had made everything possible to protect the Armenian population.

"The documents I found prove that the Armenians who lived in other countries moved to Turkey due to these very favorable conditions," the scholar said.

Perinchek said he was ready to submit the papers to Armenia at any international forum.

The Turkish scholar is the author of the book titled "The Armenian issue in 120 documents of the Russian state archives", which has been published in Russia.