Intercommunal war erupted when the Ottoman Empire entered World War I. Armenian revolutionaries, many trained in Russia, attempted to seize main Ottoman cities in Eastern Anatolia. They took the city of Van and held it until Russia invaders arrived, killing all but a few of the Muslims of the city and surrounding villages. In the countryside, Muslim tribesmen killed the Armenians who fell into their hands. Armenian and Kurdish bands killed throughout the East, and massacre was the rule of the time. Russian and Ottoman regular troops were less murderous, but they too gave little quarter to those viewed as the enemy. Some of the worst civilian deaths of Turks and Armenians came at the end of the war. The killing went on until 1920. Many more died of starvation and disease than from bullets.
The results were among the worst seen in warfare. More than forty per cent of the Anatolian Armenians died; similar mortality was the fate of the Muslims of the war zone. In the province of Van, for example, 60% of the Muslims were lost by war’s end.
During the war, each side engaged in de facto deportations of the other. When the Russians and Armenians triumphed, all the Muslims were exiled, as were all the Armenians when the Ottomans triumphed. The Ottoman government also organized an official deportation of Armenians in areas under their control. None of these deportations was wholly justified by wartime necessity, but the deportations were not acts of one-sided genocide on the part of either Turks or Armenians.
It is the Muslim actions against Armenians that have been called genocide, an accusation that is primarily based on counting only the Armenian dead, not the Muslim dead. I do not believe the Ottoman government ever intended a genocide of Armenians. In my opinion, these accusations by western nations were propagated and exploited at this time and under the prevailing environment which are biased against the Muslims in general are nothing more than racial and religious bigotry. Shekhar Guptas of Indian world can not remain behind, after all it tends to soothe their ingrained core feelings about Muslims and their presence in Hindustan.
