Wall Street Journal
May 15 2005
Killings From 90 Years Ago Haunt Turkey in its EU Bid
By CARL BIALIK
May 16, 2005
The Ottoman empire’s deportation and mass killing of Armenians 90
years ago has become a tense issue for modern-day Turkey, which is
being pressured by the European Union and some of its member nations
to acknowledge the actions as genocide and open up its archives. And
questionable numbers are a central part of the controversy.
Armenia argues that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were massacred.
But Turkey says the number of dead was no more than 600,000 and
possibly far fewer, and says the killings were justified as the
product of armed conflicts that swept the region at the time.
Scholars disagree on the number, and politics have obstructed honest
statistical debate.
Some background: In the final years of the Ottoman empire — which
stretched from modern-day Turkey to much of Europe, northern Africa
and the Middle East for more than 600 years — a Turkish nationalist
government led mass deportations and killings of Armenians. The
violence lasted from 1915 until the early 1920s. Modern-day Turkey
says the targeted Armenians, an ethnic minority present throughout
the empire, had conspired with Russians in military operations
against the empire, and that Armenians’ revolutionary actions against
the state spurred the mass deportations. Neither Turkey nor Armenia
existed as nations during the violence, yet many Turks and Armenians
line up today to defend their ethnic groups’ historical records.
Immigration, trade issues and Turkey’s Muslim majority — which would
be unique in the EU — all are playing a large role in the run up to
negotiations over membership, scheduled to begin in October. Against
this backdrop, Turkey’s historical dispute with Armenia has emerged
as a potential stumbling block to membership. Heiki Talvitie, the
EU’s special representative to the South Caucasus, said recently at a
press conference that Turkey’s membership chances hinged in part on
its relations with Armenia, according to Agence France Presse.
Currently the countries have no diplomatic relations, and a major
reason is the dispute over whether the Ottomans committed genocide.
In the past decade, national legislatures of several EU members,
including France, Italy and the Netherlands, have called the killings
genocide. The U.S. and Turkey have not.
Disputed death tolls often follow genocide, according to Richard
Garfield, a professor of nursing at Columbia University who has
extensively studied mass killings. “The politicization of mortality
data means that controversy and wide variations in estimates is the
norm,” Dr. Garfield says. He has worked in Liberia, Yugoslavia and
Haiti, helping to improve death counts from modern-day conflicts.
Of course, I can’t conclusively determine how many Armenians died.
But I’ll explain how scholars arrived at their estimates and why
counting the dead is such a complex business.
Even in a political vacuum, counting the dead from nearly a century
ago would be difficult. The killers had no reason to tally their
victims, nor were international organizations in place to monitor the
killing. So researchers have employed a brute tool: subtraction. They
compare the number of Armenians before World War I with the number of
survivors, who were spread across many surrounding countries. The
difference in population becomes the number of victims. Of course,
that doesn’t account for newborns. It also includes deaths from
disease and starvation, and while those deaths may be related to the
killings, it’s debatable whether they should be included in the
overall count. “There really isn’t the information to make an
evidence-based consensus about how many people died,” Dr. Garfield
says.
As I noted in a previous column, even today in some parts of the
world population counts are unreliable. All the more so, then, in
rural areas of the Ottoman empire. Before the killings there were two
parallel efforts to count the living — one by the Ottomans, and one
by the Armenian church — but there are suggestions both groups’
motivations may have affected their accuracy (more on that in a
moment). So researchers trying to arrive at a death count adjust the
population numbers, and those adjustments can have a big impact on
end results. For example, count more prewar Armenians, and you’ll get
a higher death toll.
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Tuluy Tanc, minister counselor of the Turkish embassy in Washington,
cited death counts to me as low as 8,000 to 9,000, based on records
Ottomans kept. But those doing the killing are hardly credible
sources for a death toll. Mr. Tanc said he wouldn’t insist on any
particular set of numbers, saying his government has also recognized
estimates up to 600,000. “There are many, many different sources,” he
says. The embassy’s Web site cites figures between 500,000 and
600,000.
Justin McCarthy, a professor at the University of Louisville, arrived
at a count of 600,000 dead by using official Ottoman population
registrations. He adjusted for an assumed undercounting of women and
children, a common problem in unsophisticated population counts, and
arrived at a prewar population of 1.5 million for Armenians living in
the eastern part of the Ottoman empire, known as Anatolia. Then he
counted 900,000 survivors, based on official data from Russia and
other countries where they settled. Dr. McCarthy published his
findings in 1983; they were double many earlier estimates.
In 1991, Levon Marashlian, a professor of history at Glendale
Community College in Glendale, Calif., published a critique accusing
Dr. McCarthy of undercounting. Among his arguments: Armenians were
likely undercounted because they hid from officials during the
conflict. “If you hide, you’re not taxed, you’re not conscripted,”
Dr. Marashlian told me. And he says the Ottomans had their own
reasons to undercount: “The Ottoman government had the motivation to
show as few Armenians as possible, because the Europeans were
pressuring Ottomans to institute reforms.” He cites contemporary
accounts that indicate the Ottomans were suppressing the numbers. Dr.
Marashlian thus adjusts Dr. McCarthy’s prewar estimates higher, and
notes that the new results are closer to the Armenian church’s own
numbers. He concludes there were two million Armenians before the
war, and he counts only 800,000 survivors, yielding an estimated
total of 1.2 million dead.
Dr. McCarthy, in turn, says the Ottomans’ adult male records were
accurate, and disputes the Armenian church’s numbers.
“The Ottomans in general were good counters,” says Columbia’s Dr.
Garfield, but he adds that the Ottomans’ population figures — 1.5
million for the eastern part of the empire, after Dr. McCarthy’s
adjustments — are suspect because a harbinger of genocide is the
undercounting of the targeted group. “It’s a step toward their
nonpersonhood,” he says.
George Aghjayan, an actuary who sits on the eastern region board of
the Armenian National Committee of America, has also studied Dr.
McCarthy’s numbers in detail. He sent me a lengthy critique by
e-mail. Among his arguments: Many Armenian men traveled outside the
empire for work, which would contribute to undercounting of prewar
adult males; and that Dr. McCarthy’s technique for estimating
Armenian survivors who ended up in Russia could lead to overcounting.
The bottom line, according to Mr. Aghjayan: By undercounting prewar
Armenians and overcounting survivors, Dr. McCarthy would undercount
the dead.
An estimate of 1.5 million deaths has become the standard number in
op-ed articles and news accounts of Armenian versions. That’s the
number on the Armenian National Institute’s Web site. Rouben Adalian,
director of the institute, concedes the number is an estimate that
includes additional Armenian deaths related to the fallout of the
original killings. He says he is confident that an estimate of more
than one million “is very secure.”
In the academic ideal, researchers could come together at conferences
and meetings and work toward a consensus figure. But there is too
much venom in the air. Armenian advocacy groups and some scientists I
spoke to labeled Dr. McCarthy a Turkish apologist. He, in turn,
speaks dismissively of some of his critics. “It’s hard to say this is
scholarly debate,” he told me. “It’s two sides presenting their
position and not talking to each other.” Meanwhile, Armenian scholars
charge the Turkish government with limiting access to the Ottoman
archives to some favored researchers, preventing new information from
emerging and possibly helping to clarify the debate.
“I think 100 years from now, our debate about Armenian events will
not be that different than it is today, because we have limited,
conflicting information,” Dr. Garfield says.
Some advocates and scholars I contacted for this article said pinning
down exact numbers isn’t necessary. Dennis R. Papazian writes on the
Web site of the Armenian Research Center at University of
Michigan-Dearborn, where he serves as director: “Does it really make
the actions of Turkey better if they succeeded in killing only
600,000 Armenians and not 1.5 million? …In any case, it was
genocide.”
Are death tolls from today’s conflicts bound to be disputed a century
hence? It’s a question worth asking in light of the continued
Armenian controversy. Les Roberts, a research associate at Johns
Hopkins University who has worked on counting the dead in Congo,
Rwanda and Sierra Leone, painted a dismaying picture of current
efforts. In an e-mail from Afghanistan, he mentioned two key
challenges. First, “No one can agree on how to define the death toll
from a conflict, just the deaths from intentional violence or all
those that died because the violence occurred.” (The Armenian numbers
include both.) And, secondly, “No one is charged or expected to count
the deaths from conflict. The [International Committee of the Red
Cross] avoids the topic so that they can work with all sides. The
press is bad at it. The public health crowd is very adverse to being
killed so they rarely estimate deaths until conflicts are over.”
But Columbia’s Dr. Garfield was more hopeful, saying that methods
have improved markedly; researchers, for instance, survey refugees in
camps during ongoing conflicts about mortality among friends and
neighbors. “I am optimistic about our ability to provide people with
a better base,” Dr. Garfield says. “It makes it harder to lie.”
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