"What Happened in 1915: Genocide or Fate?
Armenian Issue
Thursday , 23 November 2006
Class Notes, November 2006, JTW
Turkish researchers argue that most of the Armenians died during the First World War years due to the bad war conditions. According to the Turkish sources most of the Ottoman Armenians died in famine, bad weather conditions and epidemic diseases. The Ottoman documents and modern Turkish exports accept that many Armenians were killed in communal clashes. Kurds and Circassians in particular attacked the Armenian villages in order to get valuables. Mostly the Kurdish tribes also organized counter attacks against the Armenian civilians to take revenge. However most of the loses were due to the bad war circumstances. The Armenian historians generally do not accept ‘bad war circumstances’ and they argue that “epidemic diseases cannot remove hundred and thousands of Armenian people. They tend to believe in that Turks massacred all the Armenian population. However the scholarly articles prove the reverse. For instance researcher Ellen Marie Lust-Okar describe the circumstances the Armenians faced when they arrived in Syria, one of the Ottoman provinces at that time:"
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