972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from population records
A long-hidden Ottoman era document from the empire’s Interior Ministry reveals that the number of Armenian Ottomans in what is now Turkey dropped by almost one million people between 1915 and 1916. The document is further evidence of the scope of the massacres and ethnic cleansing carried out by Ottoman authorities and Kurdish militias against the Armenian population during the First World War and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. But since figures from the document were published by a Turkish author in a book earlier this year, most Turkish media have ignored it. “Nothing,” said the book’s author Murat Bardakci. “My numbers are too high for ordinary people. Maybe people aren’t ready to talk about it yet.”