My requiem for Armenians

Exactly a century ago, a dark episode began in the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Around 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were arrested in Istanbul and deported to Anatolia, never to return. The real catastrophe began a month later. The Union and Progress government, the Young Turk Party that took over the empire with a military coup in 1913, passed an Expulsion Law, giving itself the authority to deport anyone deemed a threat to national security.

Armenians were the real target. Soon, in almost every city and town in eastern Anatolia, they were forced out of their homes and destined to the far and arid Syria. In some places, they were transported by trains, but most were forced to march for hundreds of kilometers, often without food and water. Many perished on the road, out of famine, dehydration and disease. (The photos showing these victims, especially starving children and babies, are painful for anyone with a conscious.) In other cases, there were massacres committed by the locals, driven either by hatred or the lust to confiscate the victim's properties.

In total, at least 600,000 Armenians, and probably more, perished in 1915, in one of history's most tragic ethnic cleansings. I, as a Muslim Turk, feel only pain and remorse for those tortured souls. 

Yet, the same memory also leads me to ask why this great catastrophe took place, and how my nation created it. A combination of fear and nationalism was the driving force. In 1915, the Ottomans were at war on three deadly fronts (with the British and the French at Gallipoli and the Middle East, and with Russia in the east), and Armenians were increasingly seen as in league with the enemy. The Ottoman elite, and especially the Balkan-originated Young Turks, had seen how the...