217) Census Sense

This entire Armenian genocide claim is as bogus as a three-dollar bill and (they) know it!

Judge Sam Weems

On this page, we will examine numbers regarding [1] The Armenians, and (just for the heck of it, at bottom) [2] The Turks.

The various sources calculating the number of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire shortly before the time of the "Genocide":

M. Zarchesi, French Consul at Van: 1,300,000;

Francis de Pressence (1895): 1,200,000;

Torumnekize (1900): 1,300,000;

Lynch (1901): 1,158,484;

Ottoman census (1905): 1,294,851;

British Blue Book (1912): 1,056,000;

L.D.Conterson (1913): 1,400,000;

French Yellow Book: 1,475,000;

Armenian Patriarch Ormanian: (*)1,579,000;

Lepsius: 1,600,000

From Sam Weems' book, "ARMENIA: Secrets of a "Christian" Terrorist State." Looks like the Ottoman census is a good, reliable median figure. ("Lepsius" was a vicar and President of the German-Armenian society, with no sympathy for Turks; Patriarch Malachia Ormanian's figure is from the early 20th century, shortly before the war.) If around 1,300,000 Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, it would be a little difficult to have "exterminated" 1,500,000 of them. This is the figure most often quoted by Armenians, regarding the victims of the "Genocide"... but it's not that uncommon to come across figures of two million, three million.... sometimes even "four millions."

The Motion Picture Committee chairman admitted in so many words that this 1919 film, the stage version of which was produced by the Near East Relief, was a propaganda effort; the more people that could be told the sob story, the more money that could be bilked from teary-eyed, fellow Christian Americans. Thus the unethical exaggeration of the casualty figures... sadly coming from religious missionaries.

FURTHER FIGURES:

Ludovic de Constenson (who gives the 1913 Ottoman-Armenian population as 1,400,000 from chart above:1,150,000 Asiatic + 250,000 European), also calculated 1,550,000 Russia-Armenians and 3,100,000 as the world-wide figure.

Vital Cuinet...................................... 1,475,000 (Among foreign sources, Cuinet researched the Ottoman population [on behalf of the Debt Commission, taking twelve years] more than anyone. The French recognized these figures as official enough to use them for their Yellow Book. Cuinet's research was primarily based on information from local churches, which tended to exaggerate, and these statistics were from before the 1894 revolts, after which hundreds of thousands of Armenians emigrated. The above figure is for Asian Turkey.)

Sari, the Frenchman......................... 1,475,011 (Taken, it appears, from Cuinet's French Yellow book figures.)

Clair Price........................... 1,000,000? or 1,500,000

Alexander Powell..................................... 1,500,000 (3,000,000 world, 1,000,000 Russia)

Lynch ....................................1,325,246 (The six provinces: 387,746; rest of Asian Turkey: 751,500; European Turkey: 186,000; the 1901 figure in chart above might allude to the 1,058,000 from nine provinces, as Lynch footnoted on p. 10 of his book. Perhaps next to Cuinet, Lynch carried on the most detailed study.)

NINE VILAYETS
[Add roughly 200,000 to get complete figure]:

Arminius VÃ¡mbÃ©ry (1896)........................... 1.13 million
Selonoy, early 20th century ........................... 726,750
British consul Major Henry Trotter......................780,750
Zelenof, early 20th century........................... 921,000
Jakmen, early 20th century............................. 1.33 million

Britannica Almanac / Yearbook, 1917.............. 1,056,000

The latter offers the same figure as the one for the 1912 British Blue Book, in the table above. Also from that table, there is an asterisk (*) for the Ormanian reference; it most likely alludes to the source: URAS, Esat: Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni Meselesi / Armenians and Armenian Matter in History, Istanbul, 1987. This work is also the source for Cuinet, who based his numbers from the information provided by Armenian churches. Sari, and the above table's Lepsius. Thanks to "Armenian Claims and Realities," Dr. HÃ¼samettin Yildirim, Ankara, 2001.

Larousse (1898; from the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907)..

..... 1,548,000 Christians in Asia Minor (& 7,179,000 Moslems)

The 1920 Paris edition of Population Armenienne is reported to have attributed to the Armenian Patriarchate the figure of 1.02 million Ottoman-Armenians in 1912 (which bears research, as patriarchs had a way of claiming astronomical numbers; like the Patriarch at the time of the Berlin Conference, who expected the world to swallow a whopping 3 million. He later "revised" to 1,780,000. The greater the number, the better with which to persuade European imperialists to give them free land.

FROM AN "HONEST" MEMBER OF THE PATRIARCHATE

Cuinet wrote: "An Armenian clerical writer (Vahan Vardapet in an Armenian newspaper published in Constantinople, the Djeridei Sharkieh, dated 3/15 December 1886), who appears not to err on the side of exaggeration, has placed the entire Gregorian population, that is the great bulk of his countrymen in Turkey, at 1,263,900 souls. It is reasonable to suppose that the Armenian subjects of the Sultan number upwards of one and a half millions."

Cuinet based his research on church records, and Vardapet's figure, while probably still exaggerated in typical Patriarch style, at least didn't fly off the page, as with the Armenian Patriarch's claim of 3 million a few years earlier (later revised to a still exaggerated 1.78 million.) Late 19th century figures are not irrelevant, as hundreds of thousands of Armenians emigrated after the mid-1890s revolts, and more continued doing so with the reforms of 1908. Given the difference of this balance, the population statistics of the late 19th century was fairly in line with the Ottoman-Armenian population just before the outbreak of the war.

In the interest of accuracy, Some of these figures do not take into account the entirety of the Ottoman Empire. Not all can be accepted at face value, without additional research.

Boghos Nubar Pasha stated that 280,000 Armenians remained in the Ottoman Empire after the war, while some 700,000 emigrated elsewhere. This statement indicates that some 980,000 Armenians survived the war, which is in keeping with the statement of a recent anti-Turkish Armenian proclamation (where a million Ottoman-Armenian survivors were claimed; the very same number, as you will read below, was also the contention of the Armenian Patriarch in 1921). If we subtract this "million" figure from the estimated Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire before the war, we can begin to get an idea of the true numbers of the Armenian dead.

The Istanbul Armenian Patriarch gave (to the British, in 1921) the figure of Armenians still remaining inside Ottoman borders, before the Sevres Agreement, as 625,000* (as opposed to Nubar). In a 1918 letter to French Minister Gout, Nubar might have similarly undercounted with his claim of 140,000 Armenians in Iran & Syria/Mesopotamia. (See below.) Richard Hovannisian concluded there were 500,000 Armenian refugees in Transcaucasia. ("The Republic of Armenia - I," pg.126) Add them up: 1,265,000 Armenian survivors. Subtract from a pre-war population of about 1.5 million. (Hovannisian's figure differs from the League of Nations Emigrants' Committee** report, calculating 400,000-420,000 for Transcaucasia/Russia. But Prof. Hovannisian is known as a "renowned" Armenian scholar; the above are all from Armenian sources. For those who fancy Hovannisian, his figures for refugees in the other regions also differ from Nubar's, pushing the number of survivors higher up by a further 135,000: [" The Ebb and Flow of the Armenian Minority in the Arab Middle East," Middle East Journal, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Winter 1974), p. 20]:

Syria 100,000
Lebanon 50,000
Jordan 10,000
Egypt 40,000
Iraq ... 25,000
Iran 50,000

Let's keep in mind the Hovannisian figures may not tell us exactly when these people were where they were, as opposed to 1921's Patriarch and 1918's Nubar.)

*[F.O. Hc. 1/8008, XC/A-018055, p. 651]
**[F.O. 371/6556/E.2730/800/44]

According to Sir Charles Wilson, the total Armenian population of the nine provinces was only 925,000.

C.F. Dixon-Johnson, British author, paraphrased from his 1916 book, "The Armenians."

The total population of Armenians living in Anatolia was only 761,000. (The Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were mainly concentrated in Anatolia; some 200,000 Armenians lived in Ottoman Europe, and 9,000 lived in the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire.)

Arnold Toynbee, paraphrased, from his 1915 book, "Nationality and the War." (After being positioned in the Propaganda Department of the British Ministry of Defense in 1916, the figure Toynbee gave in his Blue Book was 1.5 million... DOUBLE.)

Ravenstein also arrived at 760,000, for the Armenians in Asian Turkey.

Holdwater: In addition, the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica calculated 1.5 million Armenians each in the Ottoman Empire and Russia. (On another page, the figure is 1.1 million.)

(1953 Britannica edition: 2,500,550. The writer: an Armenian.)

If the pre-war Ottoman-Armenian population was actually closer to one million than one-and-a-half million, and we employ the subtraction method above, perhaps the absurdly low conclusion of Armenian casualties that Le Figaro came up with (15,000, as stated below) might not be far from the truth.

THE OTTOMAN CENSUS

This 1880 Ottoman census had the Armenians in the Six Vilayets at 781,800.

A Jew, Fethi Franco, ran the General Management of Statistics in the Ottoman State between 1892-1897; the 1893 Ottoman census had the Armenian population at 1,001,465.

The Ottoman census of 1906 had the Armenians at 1,120,748. An Armenian, Migirdic Shabanyan (or Shinabyan), was in charge of the Ottoman census bureau shortly before, from 1897 to 1903. From 1903-1908, an American (a Mr. Robert) ran the joint.

The 1914 Census had the Armenian population at 1,221,850; between 1908-1914 a Turk was in charge (Mehmet Behic Bey)... but the figure obviously could not have been falsified, based on previous years' counts, all run by non-Turks.

Contrary to how some Armenians feel, every step the Ottomans took was not geared toward the Armenians. Consequently, if the Ottomans went through the trouble and expense of conducting a census, the purpose was not to tell the world the empire had fewer Armenians than the reality. One can apply a margin of error in case there was an undercount (for reasons of tax evasion, for example), but any possible undercount could not have been intentional; it would have defeated the purpose of taking the census in the first place. This margin of error certainly should not exceed more than a couple of hundred thousand.

To understand the background of the Ottoman census according to Kamuran Gurun's "The Armenian File," [click here].

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Richard G. Hovannisian wrote in 'Armenia on the Road to Independence,' 1967, p. 13:

"The addition of the Kars and Batum oblasts to the
Empire increased the area of Transcaucasia to over
130,000 square miles. The estimated population of the
entire region in 1886 was 4,700,000, of whom 940,000
(20 percent) were Armenian, 1,200,000 (25 percent)
Georgian, and 2,220,000 (45 percent) Moslem. Of the
latter group, 1,140,000 were Tatars. Paradoxically,
barely one-third of Transcaucasia's Armenians lived in
the Erevan guberniia, where the Christians constituted
a majority in only three of the seven uezds."

Holdwater: Even if this figure of 940,000 Armenians did not account for every single Armenian in the Ottoman Empire, the concentration of Armenians lived in this region... so even Prof. Hovannisian is mostly in agreement with the late 19th century estimates, above. So can anyone answer where he got off reaching "genocide" casualty figures of upwards of 1 million and over in later books, such as The Republic of Armenia, when even Armenians agree one million of their numbers had survived.

Note also what is Armenia today didn't have an Armenian majority as late as 1886. Wonder what happened to all the Turks living there?

Prof. Hovannisian appears to have been more objective in 1967, which might account for why this work of his is rarely cited in Armenian resources. In this work, Richard Hovannisian reports the Armenian population before 1914 was less than 2 million but more than 1.5 million. (p. 9) He provides a U.S. archival source testifying the Armenians themselves had settled on 1.6 million at the Peace Conference (bearing in mind the words "at least" were added... which sounds to me like the figure couldn't have been much more than 1.6 million, otherwise the Armenians would have said "1.7 million")

He is in agreement with fellow Armenophile Christopher Walker who states before WWI there were between 1,500,000-2,000,000 Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. ("Armenia - Survival of a Nation," 1981, p. 230)

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On the other hand, Venezuelan adventurer Rafael Nogales opined there were 2.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Even the Armenian Patriarch didn't go that high (2.1 million), according to Toynbee's 1916 "Treatment of Armenians" propaganda. (Pasdermadjian, the son of the ethnic cleansing rebel and Ottoman Bank terrorist Garo, also went with the Patriarch's 2.1 million, further claiming a 4.1 million population, 1.7 million from Russia.)

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Georges de maleville, a French attorney who wrote "The Armenian tragedy of 1915" (La Tragedie Armenienne de 1915, Publications Fernand Lanore, Paris, 1988, pages 82-83), stated:

"Figures put forward by the Armenians increase moreover constantly from one year to the next, very widely until it exceeded the total of the Armenian population living in the Ottoman Empire in 1914 ! The truth is more moderate, and moreover itâ€™s sinister enough. By basing itself on the official statistics of the Ottoman population in 1914, established by a service organized and managed at the time by an American, whose work was by no means disputed before examining the facts, we end at a figure of 300 000 victims. Still the latter includes (we have already indicated it) the â€™missingâ€™, that is, the Armenians that have taken refuge in the area of Van taking a stand with the Russians and withdrew with them to later settle down in soviet Armenia. The figure missing 300 000 corresponds moreover exactly to that declared, exactly on December 11th, 1918, by the leader of the Armenian delegation in a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [Archives of French Foreign affairs, Levant, 1918-1929, Armenia V.M.2, fo.47]"

OTTOMAN-ARMENIAN SURVIVORS IN 1917: 1,700,000???

Place

Syria	++++++++++	++++++++++	++++++++++	1,200,000
Asia Minor	+++++++	+++	500,000
Caucasus	+ ++++	350,000
Persia	++	90,000

Total						2,140,000

	400,000	800,000	1,200,000	1,600,000	2,000,000	2,400,000

The above chart was prepared by the Near East Relief (the forerunner to today's Near East Foundation, at neareast.org) in an Oct.-Dec.2003 exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, showing Armenian refugees in 1917 (entitled ''Destitute Persons - 1917'').

The Near East Relief counted 2,140,000 surviving Armenians within the Empire and surrounding regions in 1917, and we can presume (with the Ottoman-Armenians relocated into Syria numbering 1,200,000â€¦ added to 500,000 Armenians still in Anatolia) that the Near East Relief calculated 1,700,000 Armenian SURVIVORS in 1917. That would mean (-100,000) Armenians died, if we take the upper end of the unbiased population estimate range, presented above. Then again, of course, the Near East Relief claimed "four millions" Armenians perished, based on the poster above of the 1919 film production, RAVISHED ARMENIA, that they had a hand in. Which means the pre-war Ottoman-Armenian population, counting over 400,000 the League of Nations had calculated as moving into Russia (in a separate study), must have been over six million people. Lord, those missionaries sure knew how to count.

I contacted the NEF to try and see how these figures were arrived at, and they expressed regret that they could not "reconstruct who prepared this particular chart. All the material does belong to our tremendous archives and a research in this matter would be unsuccessful."

(Thanks to Yuksel Oktay for making a record of this chart.)

Excerpts from Sam Weems' book, ARMENIA

Many scholars and authors throughout the Western world are in agreement that rarely, in the pages of history, have facts been so deliberately altered to deceive and create an untrue picture.

The Armenians have told tall tales over and over again to create public opinion within the Christian world that they are a martyred state for the cause of Jesus Christ. The Armenians have enjoyed capitalizing on Christian prejudice, fear, and hatred of anything that was not Christian.

The greatest tall tale being told by Armenians today is that more than 1.5 million of their forefathers were massacred by Turks in 1915 in what they claim was the first genocide of the twentieth century. These Armenians are coming up with more Armenians murdered than there were Armenians in Anatolia.

The Reverend Doctor Cyrus Hamlin was the first president of the American missionary college in Istanbul (Robert College). He states a propaganda bureau was established in London in the 1870s which had, for its objective, the foreign spreading of news that made the Turks and Muslims look bad. He wrote that this ongoing attack on the Turks of this â€œone-sided and unreliable informationâ€� about any people would, "after a long period of unchallenged time, would create hostility and hatred that would not be easily overcome.â€� Dr. Hamlin went on to add, â€œWhenever I pick up a paper of western news I pray O Lord, endow me with a suitable sense of unbeliefâ€�

There can be no question but that from the beginning of the Armenian nationalist movement started in the 1800s. The early period was founded on the use of terrorism and violence. Not only did the Armenian Church not speak out as a voice of nonviolence and peace â€” it actively took part in and condoned the campaigns of terror.

Professor Stanford Shaw's appraisal:

"Armenians claim that as many as 2 million were massacred, but no counts of the dead were ever taken, and the actual total can only be inferred. These claims are based on the supposition that the prewar Armenian population of the Empire was 2.5 million. According to the Ottoman census of 1914, however, it was at most 1.3 million. Half of these people lived in the areas affected by the deportation, but ... it appears that about 400,000 people were actually transported in 1915-16. In addition, some 700,000 Armenians fled to the Caucasus, western Europe and the United States. As 100,000 remained in Turkey after the war, one can conclude that about 300,000 died if one accepts the Ottoman census reports, or 1.3 million if the Armenian figures are utilized.â€�

Source: The New York Times editorial, "The Sorrows of Armenia," April 4,1985; appraisal from Stanford J. Shaw & Ezel Kural Shaw.

Below, from the authors' History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. II, pp. 314-7

The Entente propaganda mills and Armenian nationalists claimed that over a million Armenians were massacred during the war. But this was based on the assumption that the prewar Armenian population numbered about 2.5 million. The total number of Armenians in the empire before the war in fact came to at most 1,300,000 according to the Ottoman census. About half of these were resident in the affected areas, but, with the city dwellers allowed to remain, the number actually transported came to no more than 400,000, including some terrorists and agitators from the cities rounded up soon after the war began. In addition, approximately one-half million Armenians subsequently fled into the Caucasus and elsewhere during the remainder of the war. Since about 100,000 Armenians lived in the empire afterward, and about 150,000 to 200,000 immigrated to western Europe and the United States, one can assume that about 200,000 perished as a result not only of the transportation but also of the same conditions of famine, disease, and war action that carried away some 2 million Muslims (Turks and Kurds) at the same time. Careful examination of the secret records of the Ottoman cabinet at the time reveals no evidence that any of the CUP leaders, or anyone else in the central government, ordered massacres. To the contrary, orders were to the provincial forces to prevent all kinds of raids and communal disturbances that might cause loss of life.

A Turkish Web Site

Today, the Armenian propaganda claims that during the incidents they call genocide, 1,5 million Armenian people have lost their lives.

Armenians claimed that during the incidents, 600,000 Armenians died, then the figure they claimed amounted to around 800 thousand. This figure was continuously increased and reached 1,5 million. One should not be surprised at the continuation of this auction, and that the figure of casualties will be increased by the Armenian circles to two and even three million tomorrow and in the days to come.

Unfortunately, also some means of publication which are famous for their seriousness are attending this auction. For example, the recorded figure for the Armenian casualties was 600,000 in the 1918 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, while it was specified as 1,5 million in the 1968 edition of such.

What is the true Armenian loss? It is for sure that the figure cannot be firmly determined. However, there is a basic data which may be taken as a basis: the Armenian population in the Ottoman State in that period.

Varying figures are being given about the Armenian population in the Ottoman state. As it may be estimated, the figures declared or put forward, through the use of these sources as bases by the Armenian sources are higher.

It is possible to show the information on the population of Ottoman Armenians in such a table:

1. According to Marcel Leart (the Armenian, Krikor Zohrap) using the Armenian Patriarch's figures	2,560,000
2. According to Armenian historian Basmacıyan	2,380,000
3. According to the Armenian delegation which participated in the Paris Peace Conference	2,250,000
4. According to Armenian historian Kevork Aslan	1,800,000
5. According to the French Yellow Book	1,555,000
6. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica	1,500,000
7. According to Ludovic de Constenton	1,400,000
8. According to H.F.B. Lynch	1,345,000
9. According to Revue de Paris	1,300,000
10. According to the Ottoman statistics	1,295,000
11. According to the English Yearbook	1,056,000

Holdwater: Kevork Aslan's figure breaks down into: 920,000, Anatolia, 180,000 Cilicia, and 700,000 all other Ottoman regions. From his 1914 book printed in Istanbul, Ermenistan ve Ermeniler/Armenia and Armenians. "Armenian Claims and Realities" has the Basmaciyan figure at 100,000 less: 2,280,000

Putting aside all the figures of Armenian origin which are evidently exaggerated, the figures of western origin vary between 1,056,000 and 1,555,000, and the mean value, being 1,300,000, is almost the same as that in the Ottoman statistics based on the actual census. For this reason, we may state that the Ottoman Armenian population is 1,300,000.

The first conclusion to be reached by this table is now that the total Armenian population is 1,300,000, it is impossible that 1,5 million Armenians (could) have died. That means this claim of the Armenian propaganda has nothing to do with the reality.

Then what is the true Armenian loss, on average?

Talat Pasha stated at the last meeting of the Union and Progress Party that the estimated figure for the Armenian loss is 300,000.
The French religious man, Monseigneur Touchet stated at a conference that he delivered at Oeuvre d'Orient in February 1916 that the presumed figure was 500,000 for the Armenian casualties, however, it may have been exaggerated.

Toynbee shows the Armenian loss as 600,000. There exists the same figure in the 1918 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It was also this figure that the Armenians put forward firstly.

Bogos Nubar, the Chairman of the Armenian delegation who participated in the Paris Peace Conference, stated that there were still 280,000 Armenians then in Turkey, and 700,000 migrated to other countries. If the calculation of Bogos Nubar is true, as the total number of the Armenian population is 1,300,000, the Armenian loss is about 300,000. When it is taken into account the figure for the Armenians who have not been subject to deportation, immigrated prior to and during the war, and reached their destination at the end of the deportation process, the same conclusion is drawn about the loss.

Furthermore, one must remember that the figure for the loss includes those who have died during the guerilla operation or by taking side with the enemy.

While concluding this issue, one must be reminded of Turkish losses which are neither taken into account nor thought to be touched on by the Armenian propaganda and some Western sources.

In any case, Turkish losses are much higher than those of the Armenians. If we are to believe in the account of Bogos Nubar, the population gap in the Eastern Anatolia is 1,400,000.

As it is seen, neither a systematic genocide nor the death of 1,5 million Armenians is likely. Such a claim would mean nothing more than a deviation from the historical facts and an exploitation of death.

The previous information is from armenianreality.com, a wonderful site which contains many other verifiable facts and figures. Forget the potentially biased Turkish source... if facts can be verified, isn't that all that matters? Why are they often overlooked by the Western media, politicians and scholars? What forces are at work here... THINK about it!

Professor Justin McCarthy

We now know from reliable statistics that slightly less than 600,000 Anatolian Armenians died in the wars of 1912-1922...

From The Anatolian Armenians, 1984

Professor Justin McCarthy's sophisticated demographic study examines all data given for the Armenian population by all sources, globally and province by province, and he arrives at the conclusion that there were 1,465,000 Armenians in Anatolia in 1912. Ten years later 881,000 Armenian survivors could be traced, and Professor McCarthy concludes that some 584,000 Armenians must have died from all causes in the intervening period. This is still, of course an enormous figure, but Professor McCarthy computes that in the same years the demographic loss among Anatolian Muslims amounted to 4,000,000 people. Professor McCarthy comments: "To mention the sufferings of one group and avoid those of another gives a false picture of what was a human, not simply an ethnic disaster." Moreover Professor McCarthy finds that "In the East, the areas of Muslim deaths and Armenian deaths were almost perfectly correlated." This leads him to the conclusion: "Both Muslims and Christians were killers; both Muslims and Christians were killed."

Source: unknown

Addendum:

From "The Population of the Ottoman Armenians," a chapter from a Justin McCarthy book, let us clarify Professor McCarthy's findings.

The 1,465,000 Armenians in 1912 are only from Anatolia. There were more Armenians. The total is 1,698,301, from the table above... and it includes 28,000 Armenians from an area that became part of Syria (although the table above shows roughly 9,000 "Arab" Armenians), and the Armenians from Istanbul and Ottoman Europe.

McCarthy estimates 881,000 Armenians were left alive from the 1,465,000 figure, which roughly coincides with the Armenians' claims of one million Armenian survivors. The Armenian loss is calculated as 584,000, or 41%. "Most of these were victims of the war fought between the Muslims and Armenians between 1915-1920, directly or indirectly through starvation and disease. To put the Armenian loss into perspective, it should be noted that the Muslims of the war zone suffered equally horrific loss: The Muslim population of the Van province decreased by 62%, that of Bitlis by 42%, that of Erzurum by 31%. Not coincidentally, these were the provinces of greatest conflict between Ottoman and Russian armies and Muslim and Armenians civilians."

To get a better idea of how these Armenians lost their lives:

"The largest group of Armenian refugees were those who fled to the Southern Caucasus. These were not deported to Syria or Iraq. They fled north in three waves: The Russian Army invaded eastern Anatolia in May of 1915, relieving the Armenians of Van, who had seized the city from the Ottomans. When the Russian Army was temporarily forced to retreat from Anatolia, the Armenians of the region the Russians had conquered accompanied them. The Russians returned in 1916, conquering most of eastern Anatolia, and many Armenians returned to their homes. In 1918, the Ottomans advanced, and Armenians departed for the Southern Caucasus once again. Many of these returned after the Ottomans surrendered to the Allies in October of 1918, but they left once again when Turkish Republican forces retook the region in 1920. The 400,000 refugees in the USSR in Table Five (not shown here) were the survivors of a much larger group. Contemporary accounts indicate that the refugees starved to death in great numbers, even being forced to resort to cannibalism. Well in excess of 500,000 must have gone north. In addition, many, perhaps most, of the Armenians who went to Europe and the Americas were never deported. Those who fled to Iran were likewise not deported. It can thus be seen that most Anatolian Armenians were not deported, although their fate as refugees was misery and death."

A "RELIABLE" ARMENIAN COUNT

Professor McCarthy later goes on to provide an Appendix showing Armenian Patriarchate Statistics, drawn from the Armenian Archives and published by Raymond Kevorkian and Paul Paboudjian in 1992. According to this source, the Armenian Patriarch collected this data from Armenian bishops throughout the Ottoman Empire in 1913. The professor concludes that while there were some exaggerations, comparison to Ottoman data does not show great differences. The total from this source is 1,914,620.

THREE ANTI-TURKS WEIGH IN

Winston Churchill

They accused the Armenians of the Turkish eastern districts of having acted as spies and agents on behalf of Russia, and of having assailed the Turkish lines of communication. These charges were probably true; but true or false, they provoked a vengeance which was also in accord with deliberate policy. In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor. Three or four hundred thousand men, women, and children escaped into Russian territory and others into Persia or Mesopotamia (Holdwater note: more or less in accordance with Dr. McCarthy's findings, above: "The 400,000 refugees in the USSR"); but the clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be. It is supposed that about one and a quarter millions of Armenians were involved, of whom more than half perished.

Therefore, according to Churchill, "more than" from half of one million (500,000) to half of 1,250,000 (625,000) perished... roughly in accordance with the high end of 600,000 dead.

The Armenian people emerged from the Great War scattered, extirpated in many districts, and reduced through massacre, losses of war and enforce deportations adopted as an easy system of killing, by at least a third. Out of a community of about two and a half millions, three-quarters of a million men, women, and children had perished. But surely this was the end.

Since the worldwide population of Armenians was three million, I hope that's what Churchill was referring to with "a community of about two and a half millions." (If he believed that was the number of Ottoman-Armenians, he was reading too much of his country's war propaganda.) Regardless, Winston Churchill settled on a maximum figure of 750,000, for the Armenian mortality.

The above is from his 1929 book, The World Crisis, vol. 5, "The Aftermath" (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).

Shame on Winston Churchill for repeating the abominable claims of Wellington House as late as 1929 (e.g., "There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons."), when his own nation could not find the evidence to convict the Turks in the Malta Tribunal. Old Turcophobes don't die, and in Churchill's case, he didn't even fade away.

Gen. James Harbord's Estimate of Armenian Losses

Gen. James Harbord wasn't always anti-Turkish... just most of the time. He relied almost solely on information given him by the Armenians of the period. After the Armenians lobbied him in 1919, Harbord concluded:

"The massacres of 1915-16 totaled some 600,000 of whom not less than 500,000 came from within the borders of this new proposed state. Probably an equal number were deported from the same area."

The general naively accepted the total casualties from all causes combined to have been derived from "massacres." The "new proposed state" would be "bounded on the north by the Black Sea, Georgia and Azerbaijan, and extends in a south easterly direction to include the cities of Alexandretta and Mesina on the Mediterranean." 66th Congress 2nd session Doc. No. 281. Sam Weems, "Armenia -- Secrets of a 'Christian' Terrorist State"

After the war it was the Armenians' own contention that 600,000 was their mortality. In time this figure would double... and go even beyond.

Dr. William Walker Rockwell's Estimate of Armenian Losses

In his article "The Total of Armenian and Syrian Dead" Dr. William Walker Rockwell (Professor in Union Theological Seminary and Member of American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief) attempted to analyze the number of Armenians casualties (published in The New York Times Current History Magazine, Volume IX, October December, 1916, 1916, p. 337).

In his biased report, Dr. Rockwell wrote:

A common estimate of the morality has been 50 per cent. of the total Armenian population; in other words, that from 800,000 to 1,000,000 have perished. In May, when I tabulated in the "Fifth Bulletin of the Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief" what we then knew, it seemed probable that the number of survivors was under 1,150,000. The total Armenian losses to that date would then be between 450,000 and 850,000 according as we estimate the population before the war at 1,600,000 or at 2,000,000. In view, however, of the frightful starvation since reported in the Deir-el-Zor region and elsewhere, it is quite possible that by this time the losses have reached 50 per cent.

Holdwater adds: So while nearly half a year earlier, the Armenian dead was calculated to be between 450,000 and 850,000, and now it was up to from 800,000 to a cool million.

How many Armenians have died in massacres? During the siege of Van the Turks are said to have slaughtered 55,000 Armenians in the surrounding country. That is the report brought back by the Americans who were in Van during the siege; one of them told me that the Russian authorities forbade people after that to eat fish drawn from the great inland lake Van, because of the multitude of the floating corpses of massacre victims.

Holdwater adds: Now we can see how inaccurate and prejudiced his information was. If the fish were contaminated, that resulted from the corpses of mostly Kurds. (Insult to injury... murder others, then claim their corpses as your own.) Most who got slaughtered in Van were the Turks/Muslims, at the hands of the Armenians. (As British writer C.F. Dixon-Johnson reported took place in 1915, and as the equally-at-first-prejudiced Americans Niles and Sutherland found out, during a later period... among many other sources.) After Dr. Rockwell cites "horror (after) horror," he states:

How many Armenians are left? In May, 1916, the best figures were as follows:

Aleppo, Zor, Damascus, and southward	486,000
Constantinople & Smyrna, natives not deported, about	150,000
Armenians in other parts of Turkey, perhaps.	300,000
Refugees in the Russian Caucasus	182,800
In districts of Turkey occupied by Russia	12,100
In Salmas, Persia, (some refugees from Turkey)	9,000

Total living Armenians..........................................1,139,900 m

Holdwater adds: This does not take into account all the Armenians who had emigrated to Western Europe, America and other nations in the previous few years... since the most reliable census figures were taken.

If the accurate "mean" figure of total Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was 1,300,000 (that is, should the argument of all the different census information provided earlier makes sense to you), and if the "total living Armenians" were around 1,000,000 (let's not say 1,139,900, since the doctor goes on to report: "hundreds are dying daily; that mothers are throwing babies into the Euphrates in despair... (Holy Bejeebers!) Therefore we may lop off another hundred thousand or two as the terrible toll," then 1,300,000 minus 1,000,000 equals... 300,000 Armenian dead.

As Sam Weems put it... "Rarely, in the pages of history, have facts been so deliberately altered to deceive and create an untrue picture."

This 300,000 figure comes up again and again when common sense is applied to the COLD, HARD FACTS. Anyone who figures more than double this figure... 600,000... Armenians having perished is not being objective.

Holdwater believes the number of dead Armenians was shy of 600,000, because he trusts Professor Justin McCarthy most of all. (Professor McCarthy sheds some light on who this William Rockwell was... William Rockwell was a minister, and a Chief Missionary Propagandist of the American Committee! Now the knuckleheaded story about the mothers throwing babies makes a LOT more sense..!) Of course, as much as Holdwater has settled on less than 600,000, the argument for half that number is pretty persuasive, when you take a look at this:
Three Different Computations Used to Arrive at the 300,000 Figure

During the struggle for independence, the French evacuated Marash. and 5,000 Armenians left Marash with the French. The date was 10 February 1920. The journey lasted until 14 February. The result: 200 dead, among which 7 officers, and commander Marty; 300 wounded were brought back; 11 wounded were abandoned in Marash; 150 evacuated had their legs frozen; 2-3,000 Armenians died during the retreat.

Did the French massacre these Armenians?

So begins the thought-provoking and logical excerpt written by Kamuran GÃ¼rÃ¼n in his excellent book, "The Armenian File â€” The Myth of Innocence Exposed." Could the figure for the Armenian dead actually have been 300,000? It's hard to argue with these facts; click on this link to read further.

-------

In the link above, there is reference to what the Armenian Patriarch gave as the survivors' statistic to the British in 1921 (amounting to over a million), but here's some other information that came my way, from an early 2000 letter written by Professor Salahi Sonyel to the Armenian owned British newspaper, The Independent, and yet another anti-Turkish article written by "mad dog" reporter Robert 'Tsk-Tsk' Fisk: "At the time The Armenian population of the Ottoman state numbered 1,294,851. In February 1921 the Armenian Patriarch of Istanbul told missionary Caleb F. Gates, The American president of Robert College in Istanbul, that 944,000 Ottoman Armenians were 'still alive.' "

Subtract this nearly one million figure from a pre-existing Armenian population of nearly 1,300,000, and what do you get?

This is not an estimation of the number of Armenians living in the empire, but the number who died from the relocations.

From the Los Angeles Herald Examiner's January 31, 1982 article, â€œDeath in Westwoodâ€�... written by Russell Warren House:

"In 1977, the French newspaper Le Figaro, prompted by Armenian outrages in France, investigated their background and came up with a figure of 15,000 Armenians dead from shootings, sickness and deprivation on the march."

And this from the Armenian butt-kissing French.

Little did Le Figaro of 1923 know that Le Figaro of 1977 would attempt to answer their cartoonist's own question

HOW MANY WERE RELOCATED AND HOW MANY WERE ACTUALLY MASSACRED?

In a similar ballpark of Le Figaro's claim of 15,000 is a study conducted by Yusuf HalaÃ§oglu entitled "Realities Behind the Relocation," estimating 50,000 who died on the march, from massacres, famine and disease. Boghos Nubar Pasha gave the breakdown of Armenians dispersed to various areas after the "deportation" (in a 1918 report he sent to Monsieur Gout, the representative of the French Foreign Ministry; copy of letter is below) as follows:

Caucasus: 250,000

Iran: 40,000

Syria-Palestine: 80,000

Mosul-Baghdad: 20,000

The above figures form a total of 390,000, but the Armenian Delegation Chief argued that the number of the deportees actually ran into 600-700,000 that excluded the exiles dispersed in the deserts. [from: Archives des Affaires Etrangeres de France, Serie Levant, 1918-1928, Sous Serie Armenie, Vol. 2, folio 47)] However, since the Ottomans did not control Caucasia or Iran and no Armenians could have been sent to those areas, the 290,000 from Caucasia and Iran that Boghos Nubar accounts for must have left on their own accord. If one then subtracts 290,000 from the "600-700,000" deportee number given by the Armenian representative, one arrives at the 400,000-plus total Dr. HalaÃ§oglu provides, using authentic data taken from the government or police archives of the time.

The exact figure given by the Turkish professor is 422,758 resettled Armenians, with 42,766 who remained behind in the eastern and central Anatolian provinces.

This is somewhat in accordance with the 500,000 alive and well Armenians that Toynbee reported in his propagandistic "Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire," and Morgenthau recorded in his private diary after a meeting with an Armenian representative (adding that the "Armenians at Zor were fairly well satisfied... already settled down to business and are earning their livings.")

More importantly, this figure is in line with what the Armenians claimed, when they lobbied General Harbord in 1919; the general concluded: "Probably (500,000) were deported..." (See above.)

The final estimated sum in Ottoman documents regarding Armenians who died during the relocation as a result of bandit attacks is 9,000 - 10,000. Some starved to death on the road, and another 25-30,000 are believed to have succumbed to such diseases as typhoid or dysentery, raising the number of casualties to some 50,000.

The professor writes: "...(I)t is believed that some Armenians marked for deportation had been smuggled out of the country and taken to Russia, Western Europe and the United States . In the documents there are records that about 50,000 of the Armenians under arms had defected to the Russian Army and 50,000 others were trained in the U.S. Army for the past three or four years to fight the Turks. A letter sent by an Armenian living in the United States to Murad Muradyan, a lawyer in MamuretÃ¼laziz, contains such information." (Holdwater is not sure about the "50,000 trained in the U.S. Army" statement.)

This is the Armenian Delegation President's letter to M. Gout, Foreign Affairs Minister of France:
Paris, le 11 dÃ©cembre 1918

Mon Cher Ministre,

Ainsi que vous m'en avez exprimÃ© le dÃ©sir, j'ai l'honneur de vous donner ci-dessous une Ã©valuation approximative que nous avons des dÃ©portÃ©s et rÃ©fugiÃ©s de Turquie, qui sont dans un complet dÃ©nuement et ont besoin d'Ãªtre secourus d'urgence.

Il s'en trouve environ 250.000 au Caucase
40.000 en Perse
80.000 en Syrie-Palestine
20.000 a Mossoul-Bagdad

Total 390.000

Le nombre total des dÃ©portÃ©s a Ã©tÃ© Ã©valuÃ© de 6 a 700.000 Ã¢mes. Les chiffres que je vous donne ne sont donc que ceux des rescapÃ©s se trouvant actuellement en territoire conquis par les troupes alliÃ©es. Quant au reste des dÃ©portÃ©s dissÃ©minÃ©s encore dans les dÃ©serts nous n'avons jusqu'ici aucun renseignement Ã leur sujet.

Veuillez agrÃ©er, Mon Cher Ministre, l'assurance de ma haute considÃ©ration et de mes sentiments dÃ©vouÃ©s.

(SignÃ©) BOGHOS NUBAR

ANOTHER (ARMENIAN?) SOURCE ON REFUGEES:

Noradungian Gabrial presented the following data to the subordinate commission of the Lausanne Conference:

345,000 to the Caucasus
140,000 to Syria
120,000 to Greece and the Aegean Islands
40,000 to Bulgaria
50,000 to Iran

...for a total of 695.000 Armenians having left Anatolia.

Hatisov (a later Armenian President) in a message to HÃ¼seyin Rauf: "There are 400.000 Armenians in the Caucasus, who escaped from the Ottoman State." (Akdes, Nimel Kurat, Turkey and Russia, Ankara, 1990, p.471)

Prof. Hovannisian's figures, as presented above, for comparison:

Syria 100,000
Lebanon 50,000
Jordan 10,000
Egypt 40,000
Iraq ... 25,000
Iran 50,000

SUPPLEMENTING POST WAR ARMENIAN FIGURES:

The number of Armenians, from K.GURUN's"The Armenian File," pg. 218:

1927 census, Turkey: 123,602
1931 census, France:   35,000
Canadian Reports :         1,244
USA :                          34,136
Greece :                      42,200
Bulgaria :                     15,000
Cyprus :                        2,500
Syria :                       100,000
Lebanon :                    50,000
Jordan :                       10,000
Egypt :                        40,000
Iraq :                            25,000
Iran :                            50,000
Russia :                      420,000 ===> Updated up to 500,000 by Hovannisian*
                               +________
                                  948,682 **

*"The chaotic situation in Armenia was intensified by the presence
of approximately 500,000 refugees, nearly 350,000 of whom were
crammed into the Erevan guberniia." "The Republic of Armenia - I," pg.126

After adding this new difference of 80,000 (500,000-420,000) to 948,682, the result becomes:

1,028,682

** Armenians from European countries such as England also need to be added

TALAT PASHA (and Halil Berktay)

In April 2005, a "genocide" series was featured on hurriyetim.com.tr, where folks from both sides of the equation were interviewed, including Armenian-Turkish genocide advocates and turncoats Halil Berktay and Taner Akcam. No historian was credited as far as I could figure, but there was talk about what Talat recorded in a private notebook (described as with a dark cover, or what some have come to call the "Black Book.") I'm getting the feeling "Turkish scholars" (that is, the ones who don't belong to the genocide club, like the Taner Akcam variety) who are getting into this "genocide" arena are looking at things as if they're new discoveries, even though the information probably has been around for a while. At any rate, this information was not meant for public release, so we have to conclude Talat... if Talat was the writer... believed in the accuracy. Here's what the Ottoman leader said, according to the site's Apr. 27 page:

In 1914, there were 1,256,403 Ottoman-Armenians. (1,187,818 Gregorians and 63,967 Catholics.)

Talat made the note that in case there were inaccuracies, the number could be up to 1.5 million. Very reasonable of him..!

In later years, he also recorded the number of relocated Armenians as: 924,158. In addition, the number of Turks who were (and here we can use the word accurately) deported from Russian conquered Ottoman lands is given as 702,905.

In his interview, Halil Berktay said:

There were 1.5 million pre-war Ottoman-Armenians.

As for deaths, he brings up the "educated" 1 million guess of novelist Orhan Pamuk. Berktay believes, maybe 600,000, maybe 800,000, maybe a million.

Prof. Berktay forgets that the Armenians concede one million survived.

Armenian Reactions to the Numbers

A Turk posted similar census figures within a thread entitled "Did Armenian Casualities Amount To 1.5 Million?" in an Armenian forum (Hyeforum). As of March 2004, what did the Armenian rank and file have to say?

There were only a couple of serious responses. One ("Fadix") cited a Turkish professor (Secil AkgÃ¼n) who is reported to have said in a Turkish newspaper interview (HÃ¼rriyet, April 27, 1987):

â€œThe Ottomans do not have a definite number. That is, we have in our hands contradictory numbers regarding the Armenian population within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. I would think that Basmaciyan gives the most accurate number. This is to be between two and three million.â€�

I would think what we are trying to get at here is the consensus of impartial opinions. If there are a dozen "impartial" estimates that are under 1.6 million, and if there is one that exceeds that figure... why would any real truth-seeker choose to consider only the one that stands from the crowd? (Unless that one in particular offers irrefutable evidence that would be simply overwhelming; Holdwater has written to this professor to understand why the professor was so convinced, but as yet the professor has not written back.)

ADDENDUM: I tried contacting Prof. AkgÃ¼n once more, and she replied, mentioning she never received my first e-mail. She wondered whether Basmaciyan's figure represented the worldwide Armenian population. In other words, the professor was NOT referring to the pre-war Ottoman-Armenian population, after all. She wrote that she wanted to check the original HÃ¼rriyet interview, and promised to get back to me.

Another, "Phantom," gave credence to what post war Ottoman Interior Minister (Cemal) is reported to have said: "during the wartime deportations some 800,000 Armenians were killed." (Alemdar, a Turkish newspaper, March 15, 1919.) Most would not treat seriously what officials of a beaten puppet government would have had to say â€” especially when conquerors were occupying the capitol. At the last CUP meeting, the last independent Ottoman government, Talat Pasha offered 300,000 as the number.

That was it for the historical defense. Some tried logic, such as "Setrak": "...numbers aren't important at all. It's the intention of killing someone that is at the core of things. Even one loss of human life is one too many."

Setrak doesn't mention the hundreds of thousands of Turks/Muslims intentionally killed by the Armenians, but he does further elaborate:

"Numerically these events may not be 'equal' but the singularity of the event namely the killing of a group of people has equal worth. If the Turks had the intention to exterminate all of us but managed to kill only a few hundred people that wouldn't that also classify as a genocide?"

Then the question begging to be asked comes into play: what would have prevented the Turks from killing all the Armenians, if extermination was the real intention?

There were a couple of others who hypocritically went with a similar tactic, where suddenly the numbers made no difference whatsoever; "Take all the numbers of the victims and find the average and for your sake devide the result by 5. It still does not deny the fact of the genocide."

Talk about denialism!

One Armeni-Lemming dismisses the figures, saying something to the effect that these figures have been encountered by Armenians before ... but they are invalid because they appear in Turkish government sites. In other words, we all know the Turkish government is a liar, and anything that appears in a Turkish government site must be rejected out of hand.

Convenient.

Has this intellectual stopped to think whether the figures were created by the Turkish government, or whether they originated from distinct sources? For example, if Patriarchate member Vahan Vardapet estimated 1,263,900 as the bulk of Ottoman-Armenians in the 19th century, and the Armenian Patriarch Ormanian estimated some 1,579,000 in the 20th century, of what relevance is defaming the character of the party who chooses to cite such information? (That's the typical Armenian tactic; throw off the emphasis on the facts by concentrating on the smear campaign.)

That was it for the common sense. Generally, the nicer Armenians on board did not want to consider the validity of the numbers at all. "Armat" wrote: "I am not going to defend the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide with you. There is no other side. Denialists do not have an equivalent side to debate on this matter meaning your garbage belongs in the garbage basket."

However, the majority of the intellectuals had their own way of dealing with this matter; let's provide you with a small sampling, so you can get the general idea:

I asked you before to go and sniff rears in your turkish web sites or forums We dont like you or your likes of stinky turks here

Can someone trow this insect out of our house, or shall I smash it myself?

The best turk is the dead turk!

So if a Jew and a Turk are lovers and have a child, would that child be a "Jurk"?

As to (Turkish) Taffy- The stupidest form of candy! What is so great about it?

Brave barbaric nomadic sub-human turks cannot qualify for the human race!

THE OLD ARMENIAN "DUCK AND DODGE," AS PRACTICED BY RICHARD HOVANNISIAN, IN A 1983 PBS-TV DEBATE; WHEN THE "PROPAGANDIST PROFESSOR" RESIDES OVER A MONOLOGUE, "1.5 MILLION" ATTAINS THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE; WHEN CAUGHT IN A WORRISOME DIALOGUE, SUDDENLY THE NUMBERS DON'T MATTER:

When asked if the 1.5 million figure is accurate for the number of Armenians killed, Hovannisian said that numbers were not important. He said, "a whole nation died." He asserted that Armenians were moved and lost their way of life in their homeland forever.

Moderator Ungar then turned to Justin McCarthy, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, and asked if he agreed. McCarthy expressed his concern about the way Armenians present the facts. He argued that numbers were important, stating that over 2 million Moslems lost their lives in the conflict. He said what happened was a people problem in which everyone suffered, especially the peasants who really did not want to fight in the war on either side. McCarthy said he was interested in verifiable facts and that he knew of no evidence to show there was a deliberate policy to wipe out the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. He added, "any historian who says he knows the truth is not true to his profession." According to McCarthy, 600,000 Armenians perished due to starvation, cholera, typhoid, typhus, and outright murder, all of which also took the lives of 2 million Moslems.

----------------------------------

Peter Balakian sounded comfortable with "more than a million" Armenians having died, which (to my ear) implies just a bit over, and not exceeding 1.1 million. He pointed to "more than a million" in his "The Burning Tigris," and he signed his name to a 1998 commemoration, claiming "More than a million Armenians were exterminated..."

But when it suits his purpose, the number goes up and up. The August 1, 2003 Kirkus review for Tigris wrote:

"Balakian estimates that between 1.2 and 1.3 million Armenians were killed in the years between 1915 and 1922, though some historians put the figure at 1.5 million"

Peter Balakian, quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 4, 2004):

"About 1.5 million Armenians died during the 20th century's first modern episode of race extermination, and another million were permanently exiled from their homeland of 2,500 years."

That must have been intensive research on Mr. Balakian's part, to have shot up a good several hundred thousand in less than one year. Too bad he couldn't have made the sensational discovery in time for his book.

----------------------------------

The old Armenian "Duck and Dodge" appears to be practiced across the board. In his "What Every Armenian Should Know," Dr. Dennis R. Papazian wrote (Q. 16):

The Turks play with numbers in a grotesque way. They argue that only 600,000 Armenians were killed not 1.5 million. Would this change the basic truth that a genocidal massacre occurred in 1915? ... Does it really make the Turks better if they succeeded in killing only 600,000 Armenians and not 1.5 million? In any case, it was genocide.

In this very same paper, Dr. Papazian actually claimed a figure of three million "exterminated" Armenians a few questions earlier, while voicing his outrage about the grotesquery of playing with numbers. On one hand, the Armenians love to gain the maximum sympathy value by exaggerating their numbers as much as they can get away with. When cornered to come up with actual proof of their fairy tale figures, they then take the moral high road by harrumphing that numbers do not matter. Sigh!

HOW MANY TURKS DIED?

I don't have that much information on Turkish casualties. Obviously, the accent is always on the poor Armenians, and the Turks' lives simply were not that important. However, assuming Turks are no less human than Armenians, then perhaps it would be fair to briefly look at the other side of the equation.

A figure I keep hearing is from 2.5 million to 3 million Turks perished. (Stanford Shaw says 2 million, above.) Let's take the median of these figures. (Justin McCarthy says 2.5 million... so I'm comfortable with that.) Some Turks are quick to claim all of these 2.5 million died at the hands of Armenians... I think out of frustration that the Turks have been so slandered all these years (and since there is definite proof that Armenians acted bloodthirstily), and figuring it's about time the Armenians got their comeuppance or a taste of their own medicine, these people aren't thinking very clearly... because the 2.5 million figure applies to death from all causes, including war losses, famine, and disease. Just like the "600,000" Armenians who died did not die from direct massacres... contrary to what the Armenians and their supporters would have us believe. (In their case, they would like us to believe at LEAST 1,500,000 Armenians died directly from massacres.)

Unfortunately, since all the information that is readily available singles out the Armenians' tragedy, I really haven't made an effort to take a better look at the details behind the Turkish losses. Here is the best I've been able to come up with.

Kurdish Casualties in the Hundred Thousands

When the Russian armies invaded Turkey after the Sarikamish disaster of 1914, their columns were preceded by battalions of irregular Armenian volunteers, both from the Caucasus and from Turkey. One of these was commanded by a certain Andranik, a bloodthirsty adventurer.

These Armenian volunteers, in order to avenge their compatriots who had been massacred by the Kurds, committed all kinds of excesses, more than 600,000 Kurds being killed between 1915 and 1916 in the eastern vilayets of Turkey.

Hassan Arfa, from the anti-Turkish book, The Kurds (1968, pp 25-6).

------------------------------

A British colonel reported that the Armenians â€œmassacred between 300,000 and 400,000 Kurdish Muslims in the Van and Bitlis districts.â€�

(FO 371/6265/E23: Report by Colonel Stokes on the situation in Armenia, 24.2.1920; Samuel Weems, â€œArmenia â€” Secrets of a â€˜Christianâ€™ Terrorist State,â€� 2002.)

------------------------------

"There are only 1500 Turks left in Van, the rest having been exterminated."

The Gotchnag, Armenian newspaper published in the United States, May 24th, 1915 issue; Cuinet figured 250 000 Moslems in Van in 1892. (French "Yellow Book" ) (Holdwater: this Internet quote needs to be verified. The date is wrong; the closest issues for the weekly are from May 22 and May 29.)

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"It is important however to underline that the Armenian communities are not the only ones to have been ground down by the plague of the war. In the spring of 1915, the tsarist army moved to the region of the lake of Van, dragging behind it battalions of volunteers composed of Caucasus and Turkish Armenians. (...) For each of the provinces which suffered from the Russian occupation and from the Armenian militias acts of vengeance, an important demographic deficit appears in the statistics of the post-war years â€” adding up to several hundred thousands of souls due largely to the massacres committed by the enemy."

"Histoire de l'Empire Ottoman (History of the Ottoman Empire)", supervised by Robert Mantran, Editions Fayard, Paris, 1989, page 624

------------------------------

150,000 Muslims massacred by Armenians was reported in the October 9, 1915 issue of Germania.

------------------------------

"They [Armenians] burned and destroyed many Turkish villages as punitive measures in their advance and practically all Turkish villages in their retreat..."

General Hamelin in a letter to the High Commissioner, February 2, 1919, "Les Armees Francaises au Levant," vol. 1, p. 122.

"...that they [Armenians] boasted of having raised an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men to fight a civil war, and that they burned at least a hundred Turkish villages and exterminated their population."

Source: John Dewey, "The Turkish Tragedy", The New Republic, November 12, 1928

Here is What Sounds Like a Reliable Figure

We have to consult the four-volume â€œArsiv Belgelerine Gore Kafkasyaâ€™da ve Anadoluâ€™da Ermeni Mezalimi" (Armenian Savagery in Caucasus and Anatolia according to Archival Documents) published by the Ottoman Archives Department
Directorate to get the most correct information on this issue. These documents prove that the Armenians killed a total of 517,955 Turks during the 1914-1921 period. Letâ€™s mention within this context the fact that the Armenian activists have always minimized the losses suffered by the Turkish people in order to support their thesis that the Ottoman Armenians were killed on purpose and in accordance with a plan.

From Amb. SÃ¼krÃ¼ Elekdag's Dr. Halil Berktay comes up short on â€œevents of 1915,â€� Milliyet

Unbelievable. Constructing this web site has taken a good several months, and I now ran into my notes regarding the documentation of Turks massacred by Armenians in the Turkish web site, ermenisorunu.gen.tr (direct link below). At the time, I took out the calculator and cursorily tallied the figures... having no idea about the amount Ambassador Elekdag used, from the source above. (When I noticed it, that figure sounded so... disturbingly exact.)

The results of my calculator showed exactly the same figure: 517,955. (I'm more impressed that my quick addition with no double-checking wound up with this confirming result.)

(2005 Turkish research summarizes 120,000 as being polished off in 1915, and the rest in 1916-1918, winding up with a higher result, 530,000. An additional 500,000 died from famine and disease.)

Here are the details:
THE LIST OF MASSACRES BY ARMENIANS OF TURKS IN ANATOLIA AND CAUCASIA, 1914-1921

(Here is another source, with the tally at 518,105.)

According to this site's page, the final tally could have wound up to be even greater, as there are a number of categories in the period 1906-1922 that are unaccounted for.

This means, if the total figure of Armenian dead (300,000-600,000) came not only from massacres but from all causes combined, and if over one-fifth of the total figure of Turks dead (2.5 million) resulted directly at the hands of Armenians (that is, 518,000-600,000), that means more Turks were murdered by Armenians than Armenians were murdered by Turks. The great injustice is, we never hear about the Turks/Muslims who were targeted by Armenians in their bloody campaign of systematic extermination... the REAL genocide.

In fairness to the Armenians, let us not forget the Russian army might have lent a hand in some of this ethnic cleansing of Muslims, since they were getting pretty expert at the Turk-extermination business, by then. However, unlike earlier times, the Russians had reasons to keep the Muslims alive. Massacres seem to almost entirely have been committed at the hands of Armenian bands before and during the years the Russians entered the picture, and in the years following (after late 1917, or so), the Armenians really went to town in what amounted to the true genocide of this conflict.

I have raised the point elsewhere on this site that one reason against the Armenian "Genocide" is that the Turks' lack of technology would have prevented them from being the successful exterminators the Armenians claim. Would not the same have applied to the Armenians, who also had no Xylon-B or incinerators to expedite their killings? For the answer, let's keep in mind the gendarmes assigned during the relocations were very few in number... sometimes as few as two... since every Turk was needed at the various desperate fronts. The Armenians, on the other hand, had many thousands of guerillas/soldiers at their disposal, as Armenian leader Boghos Nubar admitted. When they entered a defenseless village, in their mad bloodlust, they only had a single purpose: wipe the neighborhood clean of all Turks/Muslims, down to every single child... violently, and without utilizing the slow, indirect murder methods the Turks are often accused of, such as forced starvation. The numbers could add up significantly, in the period of even a few months... as witnessed in Rwanda, where a weapon of choice was the simple machete.

The Turks were willing to forgive and forget... this is why they rarely bothered to defend themselves these many years, against the juggernaut of anti-Turkish propaganda.... in the spirit of moving on, and in exercising the mature decision of stressing brotherhood and love. However, once the nutty Armenian terrorists began murdering folks right and left during the 1970s and 1980s, they opened a huge Pandora's Box... Turks figured, hey. We had better start telling what really happened. As a result, many ignorant Turks who were kept in the dark about the Armenians' crimes now have an excellent idea of the true nature of events. (Yet, no Turk will blame the beastliness of the Armenians' forefathers on Armenians today... that was then, and this is now... in contrast to the hatred inbred in most Armenians, feeding their raison d'etre, the perpetuation of their beloved genocide.com.)

What does all this mean? One day... one day.... people over the world will come to recognize what they have been told by the Armenians and their endless apologists has been a big lie. This will be a long process, since undoing the Turks' horrible reputation (as Cyrus Hamlin put it so beautifully, above) will take a lot of effort... but one day, it will happen. And when it does, general history will recognize the Armenians as having been the true "Nazis." The Armenians couldn't let well enough alone, and one day they will come face to face with this monumental irony.

tallarmeniantale.com/census.htm

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Armenian Genocide Resource Center

14.7.05

217) Census Sense

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