1988_05 Hye Sharzhoom Newspaper May 1988

              Page 6
Hye Sharzhoom
May 1988
Not only Armenians suffered in Ottoman
In a letter of April 21 Berge Bulbulian
attacked Lanny Larson's review of
Theodore Boghosian's TV documentary
"An Armenian Journey."
Although Mr. Larson had been
generally favorable to Mr. Boghosian's
work and urged his readers to watch it
Mr. Bulbulian found his review
offensive because in one sentence he had
questioned whether the program might
not have been too one-sided in its claim
of an Ottoman "genocide" of "over a-
million Armenians" in 1915. Mr.
Bulbulian was also incensed by the
comments of Justin McCarthy, who was
identified in the documentary as a
representative of an Institute of Turkish
Studies. Mr. McCarthy was shown
disparaging the validity of certain pieces
of evidence for the "genocide."
Regardless of the understandably
sensitive nature of this subject for Mr.
Bulbulian, the remarks that he made
deserve further comment
Justin McCarthy was presented on the
program in such a way as to leave the
viewer with die impression that he was
a spokesman for and paid propagandist
of the present Turkish government
Unmentioned was the fact that Professor
McCarthy, a member of the Department
of History at the University of
Louisville, is probably this country's
leading authority on the demography of
the late Ottoman Empire.
In his book "Muslims and Minorities:
The Population of Ottoman Anatolia
and the End of the Empire," Professor
McCarthy presents a thorough and
detailed study of the population statistics
of Anatolia in the late Ottoman period,
comparing them with die census records
of the Republic of Turkey in the 1920s
and '30s. He limits the area under this
examination to the present-day borders
of Anatolia, or "Asiatic" Turkey.
Professor McCarthy utilized both the
national censuses of the Ottoman and
Turkish governments from 1876 to
1935 and provincial salnames, or local
censuses, taken more irrafcilarly. He
examines the censuses carefully for
internal inconsistencies that could
indicate deliberate falsification or
evidence of tampering. He claims to
have found little such evidence that
would be statistically significant for
Anatolia as a whole. He pointed out
repeatedly, however, that the Ottoman
administration was weaker in eastern
Anatolia than in western or central
Anatolia and undercounting of both
Moslems and Christians was likely
greater there.
He also examined the population data
offered by the Greek and Armenian
patriarchates to the allied powers after
World War I. Subjecting them to the
same analysis as the Ottoman and
Turkish data, he found numerous
examples of internal inconsistencies.
The patriarchal figures were a mixture of
informal guesswork, all in rounded
numbers, the propaganda designed to
serve the political ends of elements in
the Greek and Armenian communities at
the post-World War I peace conferences.
For example, in none of the provinces
of northeastern Anatolia, including Van,
do any of the Ottoman censuses or
salnames record a majority of
Armenians before Worid War I. In every
province of Anatolia, including the
northeastern ones, Moslems appear to
have been consistendy in the majority.
Even      adjusting      for      suspected
undercounting of Christians, the percentage of Armenians in the province of
Van, where they were most concentrated,
stood in 1912 at 40 percent of the
whole. Moslems constituted almost all
of the remaining 60 percent
In separate chapters on the Greek and
Armenian populations of Anatolia,
McCarthy finds the Anatolian Greeks to
have suffered over 300,000 deaths and to
have had nearly 1 million refugees from
Anatolia between 1914 and 1923, whde
Armenians, McCarthy figures, lost at
least 568,000 dead, and almost 900,000
left Anatolia as refugees. Approximately
400,000 Anatolian Armenians sought
refuge in what was becoming Soviet
Armenia; 275,000 settled in various
successor states to the Ottoman Empire
in the Middle East; 70,000 were resettled
in Constantinople and European Turkey,
and 30,000 each went to France and to
the United States.
Neither Professor McCarthy nor
anyone else denies that the Armenian
people in Anatolia suffered great horrors
in 1915. He is well aware that large
numbers of Armenians died of
exhaustion or were shot on long forced
marches, and that hundreds of Armenian
officers in the Ottoman army on the
Russian front were executed in 1915
when segments of the Armenian
population of eastern Anatolia rose up
against their own government and tried
to stab it in the back while the Ottoman
troops were fighting invading Russian
forces.
Moreover, both he and the Turkish
government acknowledge that many
Armenians were shot in front of their
children. No one denies that yet greater
numbers of Armenians died of starvation
and disease as the infrastructure of
society collapsed in eastern Anatolia
under die impact of the Russian
invasion and gruesome civil war.
What is denied by the present Turkish
government is that there was a deliberate
national policy of genocide, or that the
killing and deaths in eastern Anatolia
were exclusively a problem for the
Armenians. Professor McCarthy, while
finding over 300,000 Greek deaths and
nearly 600,000 Armenian deaths, also
found in Anatolia during the same
period, 1914-1923, almost 2.5 million
Moslem deaths. The Moslem population
of Van, for example, according to the
1922 census was not much more than
one-third of what it had been in 1912. If
these statistics are even only partially
accurate, they raise significant questions.
What had happended to all of those
Moslems? How many of them left for
other provinces? How many of those
who remained had died of disease and
starvation? How many of them were
killed by Armenians?
In Mr. Boghosian's film, as in most
Armenian work on this subject that I am
aware of, there is not the slightest hint
that the Turks and Kurds of eastern
Anatolia died too, or that perhaps many
of them were killed by Armenians
during this period That is what in effect
is being denied by the living today. Any
ghasdy war can be made to look like a
massacre if only the dead on one side are
counted.
David N. Jones
Professor of History, CSUF, Fresno
Professor says Armenian genocide is
documented fact
I am writing this letter in response to
the letter May 2 from a professor of
history at CSUF. The contents were
offensive to the Armenian community
of Fresno in particular and to Armenians
in general, considering that on April 24
the Armenian genocide of 1915 was
commemorated. Fresno was graced with
the presence of Gov. George
Deukmejian, who was the keynote
speaker, and whose remarks accurately
reflect Armenian concerns. The governor
said, "But the memory of our past will
forever survive the many who died. No
one can rewrite world history...Today's
Turkish government cannot live a lie
forever. Its stubborn refusal ever to
admit that the massacre happended under
the Ottoman Empire mocks justice and
wounds the conscience of an entire
world..."
To clarify an earlier letter to the
editor, die chairman of the Institute of
Turkish Studies is Sukru Elekdag,
Turkish ambassador to die United
States, and the institute has as one of its
honorary fellows Stanford Shaw,
professor of history at UCLA
[McCarthy is a historian associated with
the Institute]. The institute itself was
funded by a $3 million grant by the
Republic of Turkey (as an example of
American tax dollars used against
American citizens). It is indeed surprising that a professor of history at
CSUF would be so ignorant of the
history of the Armenian genocide. The
plan of the Turkish government was to
eliminate the Armenian population of
the Ottoman Empire and thus to fulfill
the dreams of a pan-Turkish state which
would stretch from Constantinople to
the Mongolian steppes. The Republic of
Turkey, which was created in 1923, is a
successor and inheritor of these
nationalistic and racist goals.
. There is hardly anything admirable in
the work of Justin McCarthy, especially
as it relates to Armenians. He uses his
work indirectly to engage scholars in a
numbers game and to deflect scholars
from their true task-to study the causes
of the genocide and to examine the
effects of the genocide on survivors.
I feel it is my duty to at least point
out the more obvious errors and illogical
statements of his work and to educate
the professor of history at CSUF. In the
work, which the CSUF professor of
history quoted from and which he
suggests is a scholarly treatment of the
demography of the Ottoman Empire,
one is struck by the tide, which
indicates the dissimulation and
revisionism and distortion which
McCarthy utilizes in his attempt to
discredit the Armenian genocide.
The tide begins, "Muslims and
Minorities..." this is a misnomer to
begin with, because McCarthy will try
to compare the population figures of
total Muslims versus Armenians-
ignoring the fact that there was no such
thing as a Muslim majority, considering
the Kurds and other Muslim groups-to
show that Armenians were a minority in
their homeland. In actuality die
Armenians were still a plurality in the
six Armenian vilayets as compared with
Turks, Kurds, and other groups-even
after centuries of massacres, overtaxation, depredations, and the financial
disorder engendered at the hands of the
Turks.
The letter cites McCarthy's estimate
that 600,000 Armenians or 40 percent of
the Armenian population died. The
professor is quoted as saying, "Those
regions of Anatolia with a high
proportion of Christian inhabitants were
very likely to have died." But why did
40 percent of the Armenians die and
only 18 percent of the Muslims?
Perhaps what he has neglected to state
is that die genocide and deportations
were executed by the Ottoman army and
utegulars armed with the purpose of
destroying Armenians.
What he fails to state is that there was
no civil war but rather a one-sided
massacre by armed men of unarmed
women, children, and old men. He fails
to state that Turks were looting
Armenian homes from 1915-1923, and
that the genocide continued under the
Republic of Turkey. Later he says,
"While Christian-Muslim warfare was,
with foreign invasions, at the root of
Anatolian mortality, it is an enor to
speak of Greek deaths, Muslim deaths,
or Armenian deaths as if each somehow
has a separate existence." In fact they
were separate because die Turkish
government was responsible for the
Armenian and Greek massacres. In fact
McCarthy repeats the Turkish govern-
mcmt line on this issue.
McCarthy states, "Of the one and a
half million Armenians who had lived in
Anatolia before World War I, only about
70,000 remained in the Turkish
Republic in 1923...A people who had
lived in eastern Anatolia since before
recorded history were simply gone."
How easily the history of the world is
dismissed-they were simply gone! Did
not any of them want to stay where they
had lived for over 3,000 years? What an
obnoxious conclusion by McCarthy!
The genocide is a documented fact. It
is not only Armenians but the world
which was a witness to the honors of
the genocide of 1915. One only has to
read the history of the United States in
the period of 1915-1923 to know that
the United States was well informed of
the progress of the genocide by our
ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgen
thau, who sent regular reports of the
massacres to a deaf world.
When will professors of history such
as McCarthy and the one at CSUF stop
apologizing for the Turkish government
and instead see to it that the Turkish
governmemt takes responsibility for its
actions?
I would like to conclude with a quote
by a sociologist at the State University
of New York at Genesee, Vahakn N.
Dadrian, who said recendy in an interview: "There is a sustained consensus
among the Armenians of the world that
the Worid War I genocide is not only a
historical fact unassailable by any new
scholarship or any devices purporting to
be hitherto untapped archives and
primary sources, but a disaster as well
that brought the Armenian nation to the
brink of extinction. The Turkish
government will be honoring herself,
her people and her scholars by granting
recognition to this fact and by refraining
from blindly and hopelessly defending
the regime which that republic
supplanted more than six decades ago
after publicly discrediting it I not only
share this view but am more than ever
firmly convinced that the magnitude and
the allied documentation of the crime is
such as to defy the plausability of any
credible argument denying that crime."
Let the revisionists of history be
aware of this.
Barlow DerMugrdechian,
' Acting Director, Armenian Studies
Program, CSUF