[BRIEF NOTE] How Many Armenians Died?

[rfmcdonald]

Yesterday, an article by Carl Bialik--the Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy--appeared, examining the question of how many Armenians actually were killed in the genocide of the First World War era. Between competing claims about the accuracy of Ottoman and church statistics and the question of which dead should be included--should victims of starvation and disease be included?--there's a lot to wonder about, though the evidence seems to suggest a death toll in the range of one million. Bialik ends his article with an observation about the importance of figures.

Some advocates and scholars I contacted for this article said pinning down exact numbers isn't necessary. Dennis R. Papazian writes on the Web site of the Armenian Research Center at University of Michigan-Dearborn, where he serves as director: "Does it really make the actions of Turkey better if they succeeded in killing only 600,000 Armenians and not 1.5 million? . . . In any case, it was genocide."

Are death tolls from today's conflicts bound to be disputed a century hence? It's a question worth asking in light of the continued Armenian controversy. Les Roberts, a research associate at Johns Hopkins University who has worked on counting the dead in Congo, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, painted a dismaying picture of current efforts. In an e-mail from Afghanistan, he mentioned two key challenges. First, "No one can agree on how to define the death toll from a conflict, just the deaths from intentional violence or all those that died because the violence occurred." (The Armenian numbers include both.) And, secondly, "No one is charged or expected to count the deaths from conflict. The [International Committee of the Red Cross] avoids the topic so that they can work with all sides. The press is bad at it. The public health crowd is very adverse to being killed so they rarely estimate deaths until conflicts are over."

But Columbia's Dr. Garfield was more hopeful, saying that methods have improved markedly; researchers, for instance, survey refugees in camps during ongoing conflicts about mortality among friends and neighbors. "I am optimistic about our ability to provide people with a better base," Dr. Garfield says. "It makes it harder to lie."