Death and Exile is the history of the deportation and death of millions of Muslims in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from areas that have remained centers of conflict -the Balkans, the Middle East, and what was the Soviet Union- and shows how these ethnic and religious conflicts developed.
The history of the expansion of the Russian Empire and creation of new nations in the Balkans has traditionally been told from the standpoint of the Christian nations that were carved from the Ottoman Empire. Death and Exile tells the story from the position of the Turks and other Muslims who suffered death and exile as a result of imperialism, nationalism, and ethnic conflict.
Death and Exile radically changes our view of the history of the peoples of the Middle East and the Balkans. It presents a new framework for understanding conflicts that continue today.
Justin McCarthy, Professor of History at the University of Louisville, is a historian and demographer who has written extensively on the people of the Balkans and the Middle East. Among his previous works are: The Arab World, Turkey, and the Balkans (1982); Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of Empire ( 1983); and The Population of Palestine: Population History and S'tatistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (1990).
Much of the history of the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus cannot properly be understood without consideration of the Muslim refugees and the Muslim dead. This is particularly true of the history of nationalism and imperialism. The contemporary map of the Balkans and the southern Caucasus displays countries with fairly homogenous populations, countries that were created in the wars and revolutions that separated them from the Ottoman Empire. Their ethnic and religious unity was accomplished through the expulsion of their Muslim population. In other words, the new states were founded on the sufl~ering of their departed inhabitants. Similarly, Russian imperialism, still too often portrayed as the "civilizing" march of European culture, brought with it the deaths of millions of Circassians, Abhazians, Laz, and Turks. Nationalism and imperialism appear in a much worse light when their victims take the stage.
The Muslim loss is an important part of the history of the Turks. It was they who most felt the consequences of nationalism and imperialism. At a time when the Ottoman Empire was struggling to reform itself and survive as a modern state, it was first forced to drain its limited resources to defend its people from slaughter by its enemies, then to try to care for the refugees who streamed into the empire when those enemies triumphed. After the Ottoman Empire was destroyed in World War I, the Turks of what today is Turkey faced the same problems -invasion, refugees, and mortality. The Turks survived, but their nation was greatly affected by the events of the past century. The new Turkish Republic was a nation of immigrants whose citizens came from Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Like the Ottoman Empire before it, Turkey faced all the difficulties of integrating an immigrant population and coping with massive wartime destruction while it was trying to modernize and survive. The challenges of that struggle shaped the character of the Turkish Republic.
Despite the historical importance of Muslim losses, it is not to be found in textbooks. Textbooks and histories that describe massacres of Bulgarians, Armenians, and Greeks have not mentioned corresponding massacres of Turks. The exile and mortality of the Muslims is not known. This goes against modern practice in other areas of history. It has rightly become unthinkable today to write of American expansion without consideration of the brutality shown to Native Americans. The carnage of the Thirty Years' War must be a part of any history of religious change in Europe. Historians cannot write ofimperialism without mention ofslaughter ofAfricans in the Congo or of Chinese in the Opium Wars. Yet, in the West, the history of the suffering of the Balkan, Caucasian, and Anatolian Muslims has never been written or understood. The history of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia has been written without mention of one of its main protagonists, the Muslim population.
The "traditional" view of the history of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia is less than complete, if not misleading, because the histories of the Ottoman minority groups are taken out of context. A major part of that context is the suffering of Muslims, which took place in the same regions and at the same time as the sufferings of Christians, and often transcended them. The few who have attempted to alter the traditional view have been derided as "revisionists " as if revision were an academic sin and contextual historical accuracy irrelevant. In fact, revising one-sided history and changing deficient traditional wisdom is the business of the historian, and in few areas of history is revision so needed as in the history of the Ottoman peoples. The history that results from the process of revision is an unsettling one, for it tells the story of Turks as victims, and this is not the role in which they are usually cast. It does not present the traditional image of the Turk as victimizer, never victim, that has continued in the histories of America and Europe long after it should have been discarded with other artifacts of nineteenth-century racism.