““The violence that began in 1915 killed perhaps half the Armenian Christians in the region. Although the accumulated stories of massacre numb after a while, some of the atrocities cry out particularly. One of the worst storm centers was the wilayet, or province, of Diyarbakir, under its brutal governor, Reşid Bey. Here, “men had horse shoes nailed to their feet; women were gang-raped.” One source placed the number of murdered Christians in this province alone at 570,000. In the summer of 1915, the New York Times reported that “the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people.” During the 1915–16 era, at least 1 million Armenians were displaced, and plausible estimates for those actually killed range from eight hundred thousand to 1 million. If the word genocide has any meaning whatever, it certainly applies to these events.34””
