A devastating document is met with silence in Turkey
For Turkey, the number should have been a bombshell.
According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916.
In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians can bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a book in January, the number - and its Ottoman source - has gone virtually unmentioned. Newspapers hardly wrote about it. Television shows have not discussed it.
"Nothing," said Murat Bardakci, the Turkish author and columnist who compiled the book.
The silence can mean only one thing, he said: "My numbers are too high for ordinary people. Maybe people aren't ready to talk about it yet."
For generations, most Turks knew nothing of the details of the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1918, when more than a million Armenians were killed as the Ottoman Turk government purged the population.
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916.
In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians can bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a book in January, the number - and its Ottoman source - has gone virtually unmentioned. Newspapers hardly wrote about it. Television shows have not discussed it.
"Nothing," said Murat Bardakci, the Turkish author and columnist who compiled the book.
The silence can mean only one thing, he said: "My numbers are too high for ordinary people. Maybe people aren't ready to talk about it yet."
For generations, most Turks knew nothing of the details of the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1918, when more than a million Armenians were killed as the Ottoman Turk government purged the population.