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"DEATH AND EXILE: THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF OTTOMAN MUSLIMS"
by JUSTIN McCARTHY, 1821-1922, Princeton NJ, The Darwin Press 1995
In the 1860s, the conquering Russians forcibly ba
nished the Muslim Circassians from their ancestral
home in the Caucasus and shipped them to the Ot
toman Black Sea ports where they died in great
numbers of smallpox, typ
hus and scurvy. The French representa
tive at the Istanbul International
Board of Health in a report to his minister in Paris called this mass migration “one of the biggest
calamities of this century” and estimated that of
the 300,000 refugees who sought shelter in the
Ottoman lands in the final months of 1863, two-thirds had died by the end of 1864.1 The official
historiographer of the Ottoman Empire, writing some
thirty years after these events dismissed the
plight of the refugees in a single sentence lo
st under an innocuous heading ‘Some miscellaneous
matters’ (Baz_ mevadd-i müteferrika)2. This diffid
ence on the part of Ottoman historiography may
account for the fact that one of the most harrowin
g stories of human distress and misery—the story
of the deportation and death of millions of Muslims
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as
the Ottoman Empire receded and lost territories and populations to Russia and newly-founded
Christian states in the Balkans—has remained la
rgely unrecorded. The events on Chios are more
widely known than the plight of the Turks thanks
to poets like Victor Hugo
and only a handful of
specialists are aware that thousands of Turks were massacred in cold blood in April 1821 in the
Morea (the Peloponnese) when the Greek revolt
started and that Turkish women were taken as
slaves by rich Greek families in Mi
ssolonghi (where Lord Byron died).
Dr. Justin McCarthy, Professor of History at the Univer
sity of Louisville in the USA and a specialist of
late Ottoman historical demography sets out to put
the record straight.3 But he is careful to point
out that though his present research concentrates
on the history of Muslim mortality and forced
migration, “the horrors and sufferings catalogued he
re took place in wars in which all suffered” but
yet “a corrective is needed to the traditional one-
sided view”4 of the Christians as sufferers and the
Turks as perpetrators of massacres.
Starting with the Greek War of Independence in
1821 and finishing with the Turco-Greek War of
1920-22, this book is a gloomy chronicle of mise
ry which can be best summarised by a table which
appears in the book (p. 339) listing the mortality
and migration of Muslims in various wars which
took place in that 100-year span. The book covers
the Turco-Russian war of 1828-29, the expulsion
of the Nogay Tatars from the Crimea in the late 18
50s, that of the Circassian tribes from the
Caucasus in 1863-65, the Turco-Russian war of 1877-78, the Balkan Wars in 1912-13, World War One
and the Turco-Greek war of 1920-1922. Over five mi
llion people were killed and another five million
were uprooted and forced to migrate. The author
relied mainly on Western consular reports, eye
witness accounts by foreign observers on the spot
and secondary sources; he was unable to tap the
resources of the Ottoman Archives but it is unlikely
that these would reveal much that is new. A few
books—two of them making extensive use of Turkish archival sources—published after Dr. McCarthy
had completed his own research only confirm his
findings.5 The files of the Refugee Commission
(Muhacirin Komisyonu) set up to help relocate re
fugees after the Turco-Russian War would afford an
interesting insight into Ottoman administrative policies on what was essentially a humanitarian
issue. The resettlement of the Caucasian refugees in
the late 1860s is the subject of much ongoing research.
However what is sorely missing—and this is not expected to be found in a book on historical
demography—is a portrait of the main actor of this
story: the refugee. Going through the extensive
bibliography listed by Dr. McCarthy, I failed to
identify a single record written by a refugee
depicting his ordeals. To my knowledge there is
only one such account, written by the mufti of
Zagra (Stara Zagora), Bulgaria, who gives graphic descriptions of the flight of the Muslim community
of this small town facing the advance of the Russian army during the 1877 War.6 This is in contrast
to the considerable literature produced by Christians who underwent similar predicaments and
loudly publicised their plight. Their Muslim
counterparts were more resilient and passed on scarcely
no record of their misery and we are
left to make use of accounts written
by consular officials, foreign newspapermen and observers to reconstruct their fate in
the face of ethnic cleansing and massacre.
http://sam.gov.tr/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/SinanKuneralp.pdf
In his book, Professor McCarthy found no evidence of the alleged Armenian massacre, but was surprised to find that the real victims of the massacres were Muslims..by JUSTIN McCARTHY, 1821-1922, Princeton NJ, The Darwin Press 1995
In the 1860s, the conquering Russians forcibly ba
nished the Muslim Circassians from their ancestral
home in the Caucasus and shipped them to the Ot
toman Black Sea ports where they died in great
numbers of smallpox, typ
hus and scurvy. The French representa
tive at the Istanbul International
Board of Health in a report to his minister in Paris called this mass migration “one of the biggest
calamities of this century” and estimated that of
the 300,000 refugees who sought shelter in the
Ottoman lands in the final months of 1863, two-thirds had died by the end of 1864.1 The official
historiographer of the Ottoman Empire, writing some
thirty years after these events dismissed the
plight of the refugees in a single sentence lo
st under an innocuous heading ‘Some miscellaneous
matters’ (Baz_ mevadd-i müteferrika)2. This diffid
ence on the part of Ottoman historiography may
account for the fact that one of the most harrowin
g stories of human distress and misery—the story
of the deportation and death of millions of Muslims
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as
the Ottoman Empire receded and lost territories and populations to Russia and newly-founded
Christian states in the Balkans—has remained la
rgely unrecorded. The events on Chios are more
widely known than the plight of the Turks thanks
to poets like Victor Hugo
and only a handful of
specialists are aware that thousands of Turks were massacred in cold blood in April 1821 in the
Morea (the Peloponnese) when the Greek revolt
started and that Turkish women were taken as
slaves by rich Greek families in Mi
ssolonghi (where Lord Byron died).
Dr. Justin McCarthy, Professor of History at the Univer
sity of Louisville in the USA and a specialist of
late Ottoman historical demography sets out to put
the record straight.3 But he is careful to point
out that though his present research concentrates
on the history of Muslim mortality and forced
migration, “the horrors and sufferings catalogued he
re took place in wars in which all suffered” but
yet “a corrective is needed to the traditional one-
sided view”4 of the Christians as sufferers and the
Turks as perpetrators of massacres.
Starting with the Greek War of Independence in
1821 and finishing with the Turco-Greek War of
1920-22, this book is a gloomy chronicle of mise
ry which can be best summarised by a table which
appears in the book (p. 339) listing the mortality
and migration of Muslims in various wars which
took place in that 100-year span. The book covers
the Turco-Russian war of 1828-29, the expulsion
of the Nogay Tatars from the Crimea in the late 18
50s, that of the Circassian tribes from the
Caucasus in 1863-65, the Turco-Russian war of 1877-78, the Balkan Wars in 1912-13, World War One
and the Turco-Greek war of 1920-1922. Over five mi
llion people were killed and another five million
were uprooted and forced to migrate. The author
relied mainly on Western consular reports, eye
witness accounts by foreign observers on the spot
and secondary sources; he was unable to tap the
resources of the Ottoman Archives but it is unlikely
that these would reveal much that is new. A few
books—two of them making extensive use of Turkish archival sources—published after Dr. McCarthy
had completed his own research only confirm his
findings.5 The files of the Refugee Commission
(Muhacirin Komisyonu) set up to help relocate re
fugees after the Turco-Russian War would afford an
interesting insight into Ottoman administrative policies on what was essentially a humanitarian
issue. The resettlement of the Caucasian refugees in
the late 1860s is the subject of much ongoing research.
However what is sorely missing—and this is not expected to be found in a book on historical
demography—is a portrait of the main actor of this
story: the refugee. Going through the extensive
bibliography listed by Dr. McCarthy, I failed to
identify a single record written by a refugee
depicting his ordeals. To my knowledge there is
only one such account, written by the mufti of
Zagra (Stara Zagora), Bulgaria, who gives graphic descriptions of the flight of the Muslim community
of this small town facing the advance of the Russian army during the 1877 War.6 This is in contrast
to the considerable literature produced by Christians who underwent similar predicaments and
loudly publicised their plight. Their Muslim
counterparts were more resilient and passed on scarcely
no record of their misery and we are
left to make use of accounts written
by consular officials, foreign newspapermen and observers to reconstruct their fate in
the face of ethnic cleansing and massacre.
http://sam.gov.tr/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/SinanKuneralp.pdf
The sources of the book varied between official documents of the British, French and American governments and other sources of books and reports published by European authors. The author also proved what he said in his research of eyewitness accounts in documented reports of horrific massacres, in which large numbers of Muslims were killed, their women raped and their villages burned by Russian, Armenian, Bulgarian, Greek and Romanian forces against the Ottoman Muslim population.
The reality of the tragic historical events began with the inciting of Russia to the Armenians living on its borders with the Ottoman lands by all means, providing them with money and weapons and training them to fight, and form armed terrorist organizations, then known as the Khunjak and Tashnak groups ... As a natural reaction, The Muslims were armed to avenge their deaths and displaced the Armenians. Armenian convoys were attacked and looted by Kurdish militias in retaliation for the killing of a large number of Kurds by Armenian militiamen. The Kurds were not the only vengeful. There were other Ottoman Turks who took revenge against the Armenians who participated in the attack on their convoys. Their motive was to take revenge on the rebel gangs, which were considered treacherous by all, and in support of the Russian enemy.
McCarthy said in his book, "When the Ottomans retreated in 1915 against the advance of the Russian army, they left their civilian institutions bare of protection; Armenian militias used bombs to blow up government buildings and killed unarmed Muslims in areas they controlled". The Russians burned the government buildings and attacked the police stations, and when the governor of the city could not control the security there, he announced his resignation from his post, so the Armenians continued the massacres against the Muslims. "In this incident, the Russian Czar issued a statement thanking the Armenians for their sacrifices And facilitating the control of the Russians on the state .. !!
Thus we can conclude that these events in the villages and cities of eastern Anatolia - is the reason for the Ottoman government's decision to deport the Armenians from their lands to Syria's Aleppo, Urfa, Deir al-Zour, and the surrounding areas.
The book revealed the massacres committed by the Armenians against Muslims during the First World War from 1914 to 1918 in the provinces of (Wan) and (Betles) in eastern Anatolia ... This is not comparable to what the researchers found about the decline in the Muslim population in many regions that which belonged to the Ottoman Empire at that time, such as Erzurum, Diyarbakir, Mamoura al-Aziz, Siwas, Aleppo and the Sultanate of Trabzon (1912 AD to 1922), where more than 62% of the Muslims of the province of Wan were exterminated. The same fate was achieved by 42% of the Muslims of Butlis, and 31% of the Muslims of Erzurum .. !! And more than 60% of the Muslims of the Caucasus .. !! In the provinces of western Anatolia, such as Aydin, Khadendkar, Beja and Hameed, the Allies expelled the Turkish refugees from the Balkans where they were staying, gave their property to the Greeks and left them homeless after their theft.
This is not to exaggerate what the researchers have learned that what happened to the Muslims in the Caucasus, Anatolia and the Balkans was one of the biggest and ugliest systematic genocidal racist crimes. Only the Zionist crimes against the Palestinian people, the crimes of Hitlerite Nazism in Europe and Communism in the Soviet Union are comparable.
All I want from my writing of this article is to reveal the extent of falsification of the history of Muslims and to address the deliberate disregard for the massacres committed against Muslims, This went so far as it came to consider their self-defence of themselves and revenge for their murder as an unforgivable crime. The political positions of the regimes may vary from time to time, but history must remain constant and not change all the time and it should not be changed. It must remain as a reflection of the facts, regardless of political whims and desires. It is incumbent on us to preserve the Islamic history of the Ottoman Empire without falsification because it does not concern a particular country and people, but it touches many of the Islamic countries and peoples that were part of the Ottoman state at that time. These Islamic peoples were subjected to many brutal and savage massacres that can never be ignored or forgotten under any circumstance.
http://www.ahram.org.eg/NewsPrint/398302.aspx
