30/5/2008 - Professor Justin McCarthy of the University of Louisville on the

Excerpts from the book:A Myth of Terror
Armenian Extremism:Its Causes and Its Historical Context
An Illustrated Expose by Eric Feigl

There has been quite a bit of misinformation that has been told about Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Specifically about the number of 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 of the end of the Ottoman Empire around the year 1912 or 1915 - six provinces, called vilayets. In these provinces, there were many Armenians, but in none of these provinces was more than a third of the population Armenian, and in most cases it was quite a bit less than a third.

In fact, if at the beginning of the First World War you took the entire Armenian population of the world and you put it all in this area that has been called Armenia, the Muslim population would still have outnumbered the Armenians. Of course they were not there, and that meant that the Muslims Outnumbered the Armenians by approximately 6:1.

Now at the beginning of the First World War, the Ottomans decided that they Would move a number of 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 of 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 of disease and if they did not die of 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 of 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 of Armenian irregulars massacred large numbers of Muslims.

There was back and forth fighting that went on for the next three years and quite a bit of killing of Armenians by Muslims and Muslims by Armenians.

When each of 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 of 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 of them Turks.

Even in just this area (Armenia), 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 of 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 1, before and a little bit after World War 1, as a period of great inhumanity - of massacres, of deaths that touched all people - not simply Armenians, not simply Turks. Unless it is viewed as a human problem instead of a sectarian problem - instead of a problem of just the Armenians - we will never understand what really went on at the time."