Reuters Genocide letter to editor 2000s
Dear Editor, your factbox on the Armenian Genocide is not even labeled as a genocide factbox, simply massacres. As the New York Times and many other publications state, the massacres are widely believed by scholars to constitute genocide. So the title is technically wrong in the sense that you wouldn't call a murder simply "assault".
The actual "fact" box then goes on to blame nationalism on Armenians outside of the Ottoman Empire. Why? Nationalism was a worldwide phenomena then, Greece and other Balkan countries had fought for their independence from the Ottoman Empire due to their nationalism. It had nothing to do with Armenians in "the US, Geneva, Tbilisi", etc. It was a homegrown force, which was certainly magnified by the treatment of Armenians by their Ottoman overlords.
The massacres of the 1890s are widely believed to have killed hundreds of thousands, not "30,000". Perhaps you left off a zero?
Then, you go on to mention that some Armenians helped the Russian invasion, and link that to the extermination of the Armenians. You do not seem to know that the extermination plan was already in place and being carried out. What the Armenians did was not important. The motivation of the Turks was not, as you said, to get them away from assisting the Russian invaders, it was simply to get rid of the "Armenian Question" once and for all, linking (in true nationalist style) the Turks of Anatolia with those of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan in a new nation, without the Armenian thorn in the middle of their state. It was a Pan-Turkic ideology, and something your writers need to know about.
You mention that "thousands were marched... through the desert". Again, the wording you use implies much less happened than actually happened. Hundreds of thousands were marched TO the desert. That was the destination. There was no housing nor food nor any kind of supplies for those who survived the starvation and massacres along the way. Only more massacres and starvation awaited them. The intent - the death of all of them - was quite clear, both to those being murdered, and to ALL of the western observers at the time, who simply called it an "extermination", again and again. The word genocide did not exist yet, but the man who termed it, certainly called the Armenian case a genocide.
And finally, your inclusion of "Turkey's view" is akin to including the Neo-NAZI view when summarizing the Holocaust. An insult to both the victims, and all your readers.
You can and must do much better than this. Please, have a real researcher write this "Fact box" for you. You certainly can't be afraid of Turkey's wrath, so there is no explanation at all for this sloppy and incorrect underreporting of events.
Raffi Kojian
Yerevan, Armenia
Grandchild of the Armenian Genocide
The above letter was submitted to Reuters in the early/mid 2000s in response to a terrible revisionist description of the genocide. This was the submission form URL at the time. Deat now. http://reuters-en.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/reuters_en.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php?p_sid=mDhB4TNi&p_lva=&p_li=&p_accessibility=&p_redirect=&p_page=1&p_cv=&p_cats=&p_hidden_prods=&p_new_search=1&p_prod_lvl1=&p_pv=2.565&p_prods=19%2C565&prod_lvl1=19&prod_lvl2=565