Exile, Not Genocide

The TTK issued the results of the study it conducted using documents in the U.S., England, Germany, Ottoman archives, and missionary documents. The results of the two year study have been published in a book entitled, ‘Exile and Emigration’.

The Armenian population before and after 1925, the year the genocide allegedly occurred, was calculated by a review of documents in English, American, German and Ottoman archives. It was stressed in the study that there were nearly 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman State in 1914 according to historical documents of Western scientists and that this figure was 1.479 million in 1918 according to American researcher David Magie. The book with German photos of emigrating Armenians on the cover, included the results of the study conducted by Hikmet Ozdemir, Kemal Cicek, Omer Turan, Ramazan Calik and TTK President Prof. Yusuf Halacoglu.

The following opinions were given in the conclusion part of the study:

In this study, comparing the Armenian populations before 1914 and after World War I disproved the allegation that 1.5 million Armenians were killed.

The Ottoman Empire exiled Armenians living particularly in the East and Central Anatolia to Syria and Northern Iraq regions belonging to the Ottomans at the time. During this exile, a certain number of Armenian people died due to disease and inconvenient conditions. However, this loss never amounted to the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians and it did not even reach thousands. Thus, documents that indicate the Armenian population in the whole of Anatolia were just that. The number of exiled Armenians was nearly 500,000 and most of the exiled ones returned to their old places after 1918.