ARMENIAN - Erevangala500

Professor Justin McCarthy o f the University o f Louisville
on the results o f his research:
"There has been quite a bit o f misinformation that has
been told about Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Specifically
about the number o f Armenians who lived in the
Ottoman Empire and what happened to the Armenians.
On this map here, we have an area that is historically
called Armenia - whether or not there were very many
Armenians living there or whether Armenians ruled it at
any one time. In this area, which stretches from the Russian
border all the way down to the Mediterranean, there
were - at the time o f the end o f the Ottoman Empire
around the year 1912 or 1915 - six provinces, called
vilayets. In these provinces, there were many Armenians,
but in none o f these provinces was more than a third o f
the population Armenian, and in most cases it was quite a
bit less than a third.
In fact, if at the beginning o f the First World War you took
the entire Armenian population o f the world and you put
it all in this area that has been called Armenia, the Muslim
population would still have outnumbered the Armenians.
O f course they were not there, and that meant that the
Muslims outnumbered the Armenians by approximately
6 : 1.
Now at the beginning o f the First World War, the Ottomans
decided that they would move a number o f Armenians
who they believed to be a threat from the areas in
which they lived to other areas in the South. Many more
Armenians than were ever moved in any forced migration.
however, fled with the Russian armies to the north,
and in the World War you have a period o f tremendous
death. There was cholera, typhus ... in fact, there were
three years in which no crops were on the ground. And so
the people who lived in the area simply starved to death -
if they did not die o f disease and if they did not die o f outright
murder. By outright murder, I mean the murder that
came when the Russian army invaded this territory. They
came right down to the city o f Van, which was being held
by the Armenian revolutionaries against their own government.
When the Russian armies came in, many groups
of Russians and large numbers o f Armenian irregulars
massacred large numbers o f Muslims.
There was back and forth fighting that went on for the
next three years and quite a bit o f killing o f Armenians by
Muslims and Muslims by Armenians. When each o f the
armies retreated, their own people, the people who identified
with them and were tied to them, left with them. So
when the Russians retreated, the Armenians retreated
with them. When the Muslim, Ottoman armies retreated,
the Muslims - Turks especially - left with them.
Through the whole o f Anatolia, in the whole region
which extends from the Aegean and the Mediterranean all
the way up to the Black Sea and the Caucasus, you had
approximately 600.000 dead Armenians. In the same
region, you had 2.5 million dead Muslims, most o f them
Turks.
Professor Justin McCarthy has devoted a great deal o f his
work to studying the population statistics o f the Ottoman
Empire. He is the author of the book Muslims and Minorities - The
Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire, in which
he proves scientifically that the Armenian minority in the
Ottoman Empire did not have a majority in any vilayet - not
even in the city o f Van itself, where they were most strongly
represented. Muslims and Minorities was published by New
York University Press in 1983.
Even in just this area (Annenia), you had more than a
million dead Muslims - Turks - well, some were other
peoples, but the majority were Turks, which meant that in
this area called Armenia there were hundreds o f thousands
more dead Muslims than there were Armenians.
Now, this area has been portrayed as an area in which
Armenians were slaughtered. To a certain extent that is
true, but to be historically accurate, we also have to call it
an area where Muslims were slaughtered - in fact, many
more Muslims. And we have to view this time period
around World War I, before and a little bit after World
War I, as a period o f great inhumanity - o f massacres, o f
deaths that touched all people - not simply Armenians,
not simply Turks. Unless it is viewed as a human problem
instead o f a sectarian problem - instead o f a problem o f
just the Armenians - we will never understand what really
went on at the time."
Graphic representation o f the Anatolian provinces showing the
population breakdown in 1912. From: Muslims and Minorities
- The Populatin of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire. New
York University Press, 1983.
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