The Financial Times: butchery reached demonic levels in Diyarbakir

PanARMENIAN.Net - In Shattering Empires, The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires 1908-1918, the book author Michael Reynolds gives an impressively clear and highly original account of the complex events in the Russian and Ottoman empires over the decade between the Young Turk revolution of 1908 and the end of the first world war. He keeps his focus on eastern Anatolia and Russia’s southern borderlands, where before 1914 a constant flow of revolutionaries, terrorists, spies, merchants, students, bandits, smugglers, army deserters, pilgrims and nomads moved back and forth between the empires. In these regions a combustible mix of Armenians, Assyrians, Caucasian Turks, Circassians, Cossacks, Greeks, Kurds and Tatars lived in intermingled communities, The Financial Times says in Decline and Fall article.

"Once the empires were at war, the temptation for policymakers in St Petersburg and Istanbul to destabilise the enemy by stirring up each other’s minorities proved irresistible. Russia sensed an opportunity to bring about the Ottoman Empire’s final dismemberment; the Ottomans, having lost more than one-third of their territory and one-fifth of their population in the Libyan and Balkan wars of 1911 to 1913, concluded that a much more aggressive approach was required to save their state.

The war caused intercommunal tensions in the borderlands to boil over as both Russian and Ottoman forces committed atrocities against civilian populations. The most notorious example was the Ottoman deportations and massacres of Armenians in 1915, an operation that Reynolds, in his book’s finest chapter, describes with judicious attention to the immediate military context and the broader historical background.

In some locations such as Diyarbakir province, he writes, “the butchery reached demonic levels”. Reynolds says the most authoritative study of the statistical data indicates that a minimum of 664,000 Armenians died, or about 45 per cent of prewar Anatolia’s Armenian population, but he qualifies this by observing that some scholars calculate the death toll at up to 1m," the article says.