How Turkey Destroyed or Disposed of Its Historical Archives and Documents

For several decades, the Turkish government and its propagandists have been announcing that the state documents, particularly the Ottoman archives, are fully open and available to any researcher from around the world.

What Turkish officials and their supporters do not say is that many documents of the Ottoman archives have been removed, destroyed, sold, or otherwise disposed of. In addition, some of the most sensitive archives are still closed to outsiders.

Last month, Turkish journalist Uzay Bulut wrote a revealing article, “Turkey Uncensored: A History of Censorship and Bans,” published on the Philos Project website, regarding the status of Turkish archives and documents going back several centuries. Bulut is free to expose such secrets because she no longer lives in Turkey; she is currently based in Washington D.C.

In Turkey today, Wikipedia’s website is blocked by governmental order because Wikipedia refused to delete articles revealing that the Turkish authorities are supporting the Islamic State terrorists. Furthermore, 127,000 websites and 95,000 individual Web pages are blocked by Turkey, according to Bulut.

This modern-day banning of thousands of websites is the continuation of Ottoman Sultan Bayazid II’s decree of 1485 A.D. imposing the death penalty on anyone printing books in Turkish or Arabic. The ban remained for more than two centuries, Bulut reported. “That prohibition is widely cited by historians as one of the major reasons for the intellectual and scientific collapse of Islam at the dawn of the industrial revolution.”

The Turkish Republic, during the rule of its founder Kemal Ataturk as of 1923, continued the tradition of censorship by banning “at least 130 newspapers, magazines and books, according to Mustafa Yilmaz and Yasmin Doganer’s book, Censor During the Republican era (1923-1973).” Turkey’s second Prime Minister (1950-1960), Adnan Menderes, banned 161 publications, according to Bulut.

Returning to archival censorship, Bulut quoted Turkish-Jewish historian Rifat Bali, who “explained the history of disposed or destroyed state archives in his 2014 book, The Story of Destruction of Plundering: Printed or Written words, Dead Letters, Archives Thrown Out (or Sold) for Scrap.… The archives of many political parties, the Senate, and several other governmental or nongovernmental institutions in Turkey are either closed to public use or no longer exist.” According to Bali, “the archives of the political parties closed down during the September 12, 1980 coup d’état were sent to SEKA (Cellulose and Paper Factories) as scrap paper.”

The Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) archive is the most important one because it is the party of the founding years of the Republic. As Bali wrote: “Some say it [the archive] was burnt. Some say it was thrown away on September 12. Some say no, it hasn’t been thrown away; it is here. So it is a mystery today. A large part of the archive is nonexistent.”

In addition, Bali reported that “the archives of the presidency, the National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and the Ministry of the Interior are closed.” Interestingly, Bali noted the strange story of how “confidential documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were found at a scrap dealer in Ankara in 1998. For the ministry had sold 15 steel safes to a scrap dealer. It was then understood that the ministry sold the safes because of a lack of space at the ministry without even looking what was inside them.”

Bali also reported in his book several other examples of the destruction of important documents:

“Many of the Turkish Institute of History’s documents—including a letter by Ataturk—have been thrown away.”
“All minutes of the proceedings of the Senate that was established with the 1961 constitution and remained active until the September 12, 1980 coup d’état were sent to the Cellulose and Paper Factories (SEKA).”
“When the state-funded Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) moved to a new building in 1965, its authorities said that ‘old documents do not fit a new building’ and sent some of the documents of the archives to SEKA.”
“When a shortage of paper emerged at SEKA in 1980s, state institutions were called on to send their old papers to the factory. Many archives at institutional level were thus gone.”
As recently as 2013, Turkish National Library’s old books in Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac were sold by the ton, “as there were no librarians who could read in those languages.”

As an investigative journalist, Bulut concluded: “With so much information withheld from the Turkish public, state propaganda has created masses who blindly follow whatever state authorities—who have lost their moral compass and never object or speak out even when they see brutal violations of human rights, who do not respect differing opinions or the right to dissent, and who promote an extremely inaccurate version of history—have to say.”

The next time Turkish government propagandists write “our archives are open,” you can send them a copy of this article, the revelations of which from distinguished Turkish journalist Bulut will shut them up!

Originally published on 2017-10-03

About the author: Harut Sassounian is the publisher of The California Courier, a weekly newspaper based in Glendale, Calif. He is the president of the United Armenian Fund, a coalition of the seven largest Armenian-American organizations. He has been decorated by the president and prime minister of the Republic of Armenia, and the heads of the Armenian Apostolic and Catholic churches. He is also the recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

Source: The Armenian Weekly

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

READ MORE!

US Declares Hegemony over Asia

Never has US intentions in Asia been so obvious. Attempts to portray America’s role in the region as constructive or necessary have been ongoing since the end of World War II, however, recently, with Asia able to begin determining its own destiny for itself, the tone from Washington has become increasingly curt and direct.US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s remarks during the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore were all but a proclamation of US hegemony over Asia – a region of the planet quite literally an ocean away from Washington.In Reuters’ article, “U.S. flexes muscles as Asia worries about South China ...

Remember Pearl Harbor: Provoking Japan, Provoking North Korea

On December 7, 1941 the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was attacked by Japanese forces. President Roosevelt, in his well known Infamy speech delivered on December 8, claimed the attack was “unprovoked” and, on this basis, asked for and received a declaration of war from the U.S. Congress. But the evidence suggests the attack was not unprovoked. On the contrary, it was carefully and systematically provoked in order to manipulate the U.S. population into joining WWII. This provocation game, spectacularly successful in 1941, is currently being played with North Korea. The stakes are high.Many good people are reluctant to look critically ...

The 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide: An Ideology, Course and Consequences

A massive destruction of the Ottoman (Orthodox Christian) Armenian population in 1915−1916 is probably the greatest atrocity committed during the WWI and for sure a first 20th century case of the genocide as up to 1.500.000 ethnic Armenians were executed by the Ottoman authorities and their collaborators (the Kurds). As a consequence, the survivors are scattered across the globe. Today it is already a century old event, but the issue of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide is undoubtedly still alive and divisive political issue firstly between the Armenians and the Turks[1] but also and among the western “liberal democracies” on the ...

Rape and War: Bosnian Muslim Rapes at the Celebici Camp

War President of Bosnia-Herzegovina Alija Izetbegovic - author of jihadist "Islamic Declaration" in 1970 One of the most outrageous and heinous hoaxes and Hitlerian Big Lies perpetrated by the US and Western media during the Bosnian civil war of 1992-1995 was that Bosnian Serbs had used rape as an “instrument of war”. In order to discredit the Bosnian Serbs, they were accused of committing mass rapes against Bosnian Muslim women, in “rape camps” and “rape motels”. Even the United Nations commander in Bosnia, Canadian Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, a veteran of eight UN peacekeeping missions, was accused of committing rapes against Bosnian ...

The Origin of Jihadism

The origin of jihadism is prohibited from being reported truthfully — this truth is prohibited by all of the Establishment ‘press,’ including almost all ‘alternative news’ sites — in the West, because it challenges all of the “sensitive” buttons (all of the bigotries, to put the matter in plain terms); and, though this fact (the Establishment’s bigotries, and its hypocrisy to preserve and protect their bigotries even while condemning those of other people) will prevent almost all of the news-media that I send this to from publishing it, nothing prevents me from writing it; so, here it is (in whatever ...

The Pan-Slavism and Tsarist Russia’s Balkan policy

The Balkan Peninsula together with the region of South-East Europe historically has been one of the most important focal points of the Russian foreign policy, cultural influences and attempts to spread an ideology of the Orthodox solidarity and the Slavic reciprocity.[1] These ideas are common to almost all trends of the Russian public life in the past and today. After Russia lost the Great Crimean War of 1853–1856 she intensified its cultural influence in the region of the South-East Europe for the purposes of beating the Habsburg (the Roman-Catholic) rivalry and to spread an idea of the Pan-Slavism in this part ...

Fall of the Arab Spring: From Revolution to Destruction

From Libya and Egypt to Syria and Yemen, the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region is undergoing unprecedented tumult and chaos. To understand the current breakdown of states and society, examining the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 that laid the groundwork for this ongoing regional anarchy is indispensable. Global Research brings to the attention of its readers the newly released book by Christopher L. Brennan. Fall of the Arab Spring: From Revolution to Destruction (available here), propounds an incisive and timely analysis. The book views this widespread Arab upheaval, not as authentic grass roots movements for democracy, but as a US-engineered destabilization. Below are ...

Neoconservatives, Machiavelli and “The Prince”

Tyrants and despots have never required justification for their actions. In the 17th century, as political philosophers began to reject the classic Catholic doctrines of politics and ethics, The Prince was viewed as more relevant: truths are more important than ideals. It is probably not an accident that The Prince has been misinterpreted for 300 years. Taken literally, there is no better justification for tyranny, whether political or economic, than the universal misinterpretation of The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. This small pamphlet, written in 1513–1514, addressed to the new Medici prince, if taken literally, outlines the best practices to attain and ...

On the Centenary of the Greek Genocide

Hannibal Travis, "On The Centenary of The Greek Genocide", AHIF Policy Journal, American Hellenic Institute Foundation, Inc., Vol. 8, Spring 2017, pp. 14 Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest. Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement! Donate to Support Us We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact & Imperialist Propaganda

"If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible…”Harry S. Truman, 33rd POTUS, 1941Since the end of the Second World War, the bourgeois historiography has tried to distort various incidents in order to vilify Socialism and the USSR. One of these incidents- which has been a “banner” of imperialism’s apologists and other anticommunists- is the so-called “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact“* which was signed in 1939. In it’s unscientific, unhistorical effort to equate Communism with Nazism, the bourgeois propaganda presents ...

North Macedonia Is Being Used by NATO to Target Serbia and Russia

The North Macedonian House of Representatives unanimously approved on Monday for their country to accept the NATO Accession Protocol, taking the former Yugoslav Republic a step closer towards accession into NATO which is expected to be completed and finalized in the spring. North Macedonia’s rapid accession into NATO is only possible because of the Prespa Agreement signed between Athens and Skopje in June 2018, bringing an end to the name dispute between the two countries that emerged in 1991 with the breakup of Yugoslavia.The Prespa Agreement, named after a lake that traverses the borders of Greece, North Macedonia and Albania, defined ...

Will Washington Kill Us All?

Did you know that Washington keeps 450 nuclear ICBMs on “hair-trigger alert”? Washington thinks that this makes us “safe.” The reasoning, if it can be called reason, is that by being able to launch in a few minutes, no one will try to attack the US with nuclear weapons. US missiles are able to get on their way before the enemy’s missiles can reach the US to destroy ours. If this makes you feel safe, you need to read Eric Schlosser’s book, Command and Control. The trouble with hair-triggers is that they make mistaken, accidental, and unauthorized launch more likely. Schlosser provides ...

Final solution of Serbian Question in Jasenovac

The “Serb Question” and its “Final Solution” in Euro-Croatia

On September 10th, 2015 a City Council of Croatia’s capital Zagreb decided to promote a war criminal General Ante Gotovina to “honorable citizen of the City of Zagreb” for his “contribution to the defending of Croatia’s independence and territorial integrity”. The General, however, as a Commander-in-Chief of Croatia’s army, is directly responsible for a brutal ethnic cleansing and war crimes committed by Croatia’s army, police forces and state authorities over the Serbs during the SS-punishment-style military-police operation “Storm” (Oluja) in August 1995 when around 3000 ethnic Serbs in the Krajina region were killed and 250.000 expelled from their homes. That ...

Ethnic Intolerance Against Christians in Kosovostan

Recent episodes of ethnic intolerance against the Serbian minority exacerbate conditions in a country which is increasingly an “Islamic island” in the heart of Europe. Kosovo is once again the centre of attention in Orthodox Church circles. In addition to new instances of intolerance against the ethnic Serbian minority, recent actions taken by Russian Patriarch Kirill and Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), abbot of the Moscow monastery of Sretensky Stavropegic, have drawn attention. Violence against Orthodox Serbs is growing: unsurprisingly, some of them speak openly of cultural genocide. Approximately one hundred and fifteen churches were destroyed or severely damaged during the Albanian attacks, and ...

Neoliberalism and The Globalization of War. America’s Hegemonic Project

The world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.America’s hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms ...

Albanian Highlanders and Kosovo

South-East Serbia's province of Kosovo-Metochia (KosMet) is an autochthonous Slavic, in particular Serb, land. Now, the focal question became how this province became “disputed land”, and, in particular, what it has to do with ethnic-Albanians? In the following text, this issue is going to be considered in more details, from the geographical, (pre)historic, anthropologic, religious, and political points of view. We start with the geography, in particular, the physical geography of West Balkans.Kosovo Liberation Army, August 1998, Klechka village, KosMetThe region of Dinaric Alps It is known that physical and mental structures of a particular population are determined by many ...

How Yugoslavia was Created: The 1917 Corfu Declaration

The Consequences of WWI and the YugoslavsThe end of WWI in November 1918 as a consequence of the military collapse of the Central Powers and the following series of peace treaties of Versailles on June 28th, 1919 between the Allies and Germany, of St Germain on September 10th, 1919 with Austria, of Neuilly on November 27th, 1919 with Bulgaria, and finally of Trianon on June 4th, 1920 with Hungary, produced major border changes in Central, South-East, and East Europe as the continent saw the emergence of several of new states and the enlargement of others fortunate enough to be on ...

While God Blesses America, Prometheus Protects Syria, Russia and North Korea

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” — Seneca “When the CIA goes to church, it doesn’t go to pray.” — South American aphorism Let’s be clear. Syria is invading nobody. North Korea is attacking damn all. And Russia is threatening zilch. But on the eve of the apocalypse these nations are the ones being stoned. The sanctimonious are having a field day crucifying the leaders of these countries and stomping all over the humanity of their peoples. In a godless universe the tormentors of Syria, Russia and North Korea are behaving as if ...

Terrorist al-Nusra Front is blamed for massacre and abduction of Syrian civilians.

The U.S., Not Russia, Arms Jihadists Worldwide

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford “For Russia, the war in Afghanistan is a domestic issue, with a direct impact on the drug trade and terrorist attacks on Russian cities”. If the United States were not a superpower, it would be the joke of the planet, a nation whose government tells the most outrageous and ridiculous lies -- and may actually believe them -- and whose corporate media report those lies as gospel truth. The latest whopper comes from the mouth of James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, who claims the Russians are providing weapons ...

Kosovo is Serbia

March 24 [2020] will mark the 21st anniversary of NATO’s occupation of Serbia’s Kosovo province, and so we reaffirm: Kosovo is Serbia. Serbia does not and will not ever recognize Kosovo’s claims of sovereignty. We call on NATO to end its occupation of Kosovo.NATO’s occupation of Kosovo and its increasing militarization of the province is a threat to the world’s common security. Albanian occupation authorities continue their assault on human rights and fundamental freedoms, brutally silencing critics in civil society and the media, and curtailing religious freedom. Hundreds of individuals from Kosovo, including members of the Serb community, have been ...