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Note: this article contains numerous links to supplemental material,
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Exclusive: Why Does a Close U.S. Ally Deny Its Genocide? (Part Three
of Three)
Author: Adrian Morgan
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: October 19, 2007
In the final installment of a three-part series, FSM Contributing
Editor Adrian Morgan details the horrors of Armenian genocide
perpetrated by Turkey nearly a century ago. What is the best way for
the U.S. to handle it? And will Turkey's continued denial of this
travesty hurt them more than it hurts us? (Warning: the pictures
contained herein are extremely graphic.)
Why Does a Close U.S. Ally Deny Its Genocide?
(Part Three of Three)
Rise of the Young Turks
Sultan Abdul-Hamid II ruled in an autocratic fashion, fearful of the
breakup of his empire. He employed a secret police force, and
rebellious Kurds were drafted as irregulars into the Hamidian Cavalry.
These had been involved in the massacres of Armenians in the 1890s.
While Abdul-Hamid isolated himself with astrologers and favorites in
his palace, the Yildiz Koshku, a nationalist movement, started to grow
amongst the intelligentsia and the military. Influenced by Western
political ideals, these individuals became known by the name they used
in a revolution waged against Abdul-Hamid in 1908 - the Young Turks.
These individuals emerged in the 1890s but operated in secret, out of
fear of the spies of the palace secret police. Many of the Young Turks
joined the nationalist group the Committee of Union and Progress
(Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti or CUP). This was formed in 1889 at the
Royal Medical Academy at Constantinople by Abdullah Cevdet and four
others. In February 1907, the Sultan's hated chief of secret police,
Fehmi Pasha (Fehim Pasha), was forced into exile at the request of
Germany, after he illegally impounded a Hamburg-bound ship.
As one of the Sultan's three cabinet members, the loss of Pasha
weakened the autocracy of Abdul-Hamid. Pasha manipulated the Sultan
with fake bomb plots which were blamed on Armenians. Even after his
exile, he was suspected of engineering a fatal bomb attack against a
former Armenian ally, Andon Keutchoglu.
In July 1908, the Young Turks staged a revolution against Abdul-Hamid
II. Two prominent CUP members led the uprisings amongst the military -
Niazi Bey led a revolt at Resna in Macedonia, closely followed by
Enver Bey in Salonica, Greece. They issued a proclamation that
demanded Abdul-Hamid restore the constitution he rejected in 1878. The
Sultan agreed, and in December the Turkish parliament met. Some time
after the July 1908 revolution, Fehmi Pasha was torn into pieces by a
mob in Bursa, northwestern Turkey.
The Sultan (who was also Caliph) did not approve of a parliament
making decisions, and with the help of the ulemas (senior clerics), he
tried to mount a counter-revolution on April 13, 1909 (March 31st in
the Gregorian calendar) in Constantinople. Forces loyal to the Sultan
marched on Constantinople, but were defeated. The Sultan's
counter-revolution was swiftly crushed, and Abdul-Hamid was forced to
abdicate and go into exile in Salonica. His brother Reshad immediately
succeeded him as Mehmed V. At least 250 counter-revolutionaries were
tried and executed.
For Armenians, the 1908 Young Turk revolution promised them full
citizenship and a role in the voting process, and many supported it.
As explained by Yeghiazar Karapetian, a survivor of the 1915 genocide:
"The Hurriyet (Liberty) offered freedom to all the political
prisoners, after which the Armenians, Turks and Kurds would have equal
rights. Everywhere cries of joy were heard. The law of Hurriyet put an
end to the humiliation, beating, blasphemy, robbery, plunder and
contempt of the Armenians. Anyone involved in a similar behavior would
be subject to the severest punishment; he would even be liable to be
sent to the gallows. The two nations were put in a state of complete
reliance. The Armenians would have the right of free voting, were
allowed to elect and propose their delegate. This was a new
renaissance in the life of the Western Armenians. The new parliament
in its first session issued a series of laws, among them the military
service of the Armenians in the Ottoman army."
The Armenians' hopes were never fulfilled, as there had always been
nationalist factions within the Young Turk movement that saw Armenians
as enemies of "Turkishness." In 1896, many Muslims arrested after the
Constantinople massacres that accompanied the Ottoman Bank siege were
claimed by the Ottoman authorities to be Young Turk members.
At the time of Abdul-Hamid's counter-revolution, resentment among his
followers in the army boiled over in Circassia, southeastern Turkey,
and Armenians would become the victims. 30,000 Armenians were said to
have been killed. Attacks took place in Adana and Tarsus (Tarshish) on
the Mediterranean coast. On April 14th, Professor Herbert Adams
Gibbons, a mission teacher in Tarsus, was in Adana when the massacres
began. His wife Helen stated shortly after:
"Conditions both in Tarsus and in Adana were indescribable. I saw
troops that had come apparently to protect kill and apply the torch.
There were some 4,000 refugees that came into the mission inclosure
(sic)."
Later, she would write of the massacres in a book, The Red Rugs of
Tarsus. She would record (pages 115-116) incendiary shells being fired
at Armenian houses in Tarsus:
"By opening our shutters cautiously we could hear the cruel hiss of
the flames and smell kerosene in the smoke. Then the rending and
crashing of the floors made a deafening noise, and the sparks began to
alight on our property.
This is the regular order of things, -- kill, loot, burn. The Armenian
quarter is the most substantial part of the city. Most of the people
store cotton on the ground floor, and this, together with liberal
applications of kerosene, served to make a holocaust. Now at
evening-time we realize our own imminent danger."
In April 1912, an election saw the CUP gain power, but a military
defeat in a conflict with Italy saw its popularity wane. In July, a
coalition called the "Liberal Union" replaced the CUP. On January 23,
1913, a coup d'état was mounted. Three leading CUP individuals -
Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Çemal - appointed themselves the
heads of the Ottoman Empire, adopting the title "Pasha."
Deportations and Massacres
The new leadership decided to consolidate Turkey as a "Turkish" entity
with its base in Anatolia. In October 1912, the Balkan state of
Montenegro, followed by Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, declared war on
the Ottoman Empire. Turkey's planned strategy in this Balkan War
failed, and all of the Empire's territories west of Catalca (less than
20 miles from Constantinople) were lost. Muslim refugees from the
Balkans poured into Turkey.
The policies of enforcing Turkishness began with deportations. In
early 1914, Mahmut Celal, the secretary of the CUP in Smyrna (Izmir),
was told by Mehmet Talaat Pasha to make the West coast regions
entirely "Turkish." 200,000 Greek Orthodox were forced out by
paramilitary vigilantes, settling in the Aegean islands. In May 1914,
a treaty was signed with Greece, legitimizing "repatriations" from
both countries.
The presence of the Armenians was seen by the triumvirate,
particularly by interior minister Mehmet Talaat, as an impediment to
their plans to "Turkify" the nation of Turkey. Armenians were thought
to be allied more to Russia than to Turkey. After August 1914, Turkey
entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, and Russia was now officially the "enemy." At the outbreak of
World War I, many young Armenian males were drafted into the army,
though few were trusted with weapons.
Beginning in the spring of 1915, the deportations of Armenian
villagers began. Their ultimate destination was to be the deserts of
northern Syria. No transportation was provided by officials. The trek
out of Turkey, which involved a journey of hundreds of miles, was made
by most refugees on foot. Before being rounded up, many massacres took
place in these villages. In Constantinople, Armenian intellectual
leaders were hanged.
The personal accounts of survivors of these forced marches are
heartbreaking, especially as most of these survivors had been children
when they were uprooted. Poignantly, many express nostalgia for rustic
lives on farms and orchards before witnessing horrors of massacres,
and forced deportations. Aghvani was six years old when she was
expelled from a neighbor's house where she, her siblings and mother
had sought sanctuary in Bitlis:
"We came out; the corpses of the killed Armenians were everywhere;
they had massacred all the Armenians. Those who were still alive, were
driven we didn't know where. On the road there was confusion and
uproar. The Turkish gendarmes drew us forward with bayonets. At night
they came and took away the young women and girls. One day they took
away my mother, too, and then they brought her back. It was good that
my father was not alive and didn't see himself dishonored."
Shogher Abraham Tonoyan was born in 1901 in Vardensis village in Mush.
In August 1915:
"The Turkish askyars (policemen) brought Chechen brigands from
Daghestan to massacre us. They came to our village and robbed
everything. They took away our sheep, oxen and properties. Those who
were good-looking were taken away. My aunt's young son, who was
staying with me, was also taken away, together with all the males in
the town. They gathered the young and the elderly in the stables of
the Avzut village, set fire and burned them alive. Those cattle-sheds
were as large as those of our collective farms. They shut people in
the stables of Malkhas Mardo, they piled up stacks of hay round them,
poured kerosene and set on fire. Sixty members of our great family
were burned in those stables. I do not wish my enemy to see the days I
have seen, lao! Only I and my brother were saved. From the beginning,
they took away the young pretty brides and girls to turkize them and
also they pulled away the male infants from their mothers' arms to
make them policemen in the future. The stable was filled with smoke
and fire, people started to cough and to choke. Mothers forgot about
their children, lao! It was a real Sodom and Gomorrah. People ran, on
fire, to and fro, struck against the walls, trod upon the infants and
children who had fallen on the ground. ...What I have seen with my
eyes, lao! I don't wish the wolves of the mountain to see! They say
that, at these distressing scenes, the Turkish mullah hung himself.
During that turmoil the greatest part of the people choked and
perished. The roof of the stable collapsed and fell upon the dead. I
wish I and my little brother had been burned down in that stable and
had not seen how sixty souls were burned down alive. I wish I had not
seen the cruel and ungodly acts of those irreligious people. The
Armenians of the neighboring villages of Vardenis, Meshakhshen,
Aghbenis, Avzut, Khevner and others were burnt in the same manner in
their stables."
The account of Souren Sargsian (born in 1902), is rich in detail. He
described how the total eclipse of the sun on August 21, 1914 (Julian
calendar) was seen as a portent of doom. Ismail Enver Pasha (pictured)
minister of war, visited his village of Sebastia in December 1914.
Horse races took place in the leader's honor, and Armenian villagers
brought him salt. Enver Pasha spoke of Armenians fighting for their
Ottoman fatherland, but months later when the Pasha returned "he had a
very angry appearance; he was looking at the people with fury and
didn't speak to the people next to him."
In late April 1915, Sargsian's mother was gang-raped by Turkish
gendarmes, and then his sister, as his family had given shelter to an
Armenian politician. Soon, all the fit adult men in the village were
slaughtered on the orders of the Ottomans, leaving only a few old men.
Orders came for deportation, but before they left, the soldiers
promised that if they were given gold, they would bring back prisoners
from the town.
"A gendarme, a huge notebook in his hand, was supposedly writing down
the name of the prisoner, his address, his age and so on. In a few
hours the saddle-bag was almost filled with money. In the evening they
put he saddle-bag on a horse and went away. The following day they
brought a group of men about 20-30 people, surrounded with 10
gendarmes. They brought also the well-known rich man in town,
Khelkhlik. He was very fat and was seated on a big, white donkey. The
people ran forward, expecting to find their relatives. The gendarmes
drew them back and told them to form a circle. In the center of the
circle, the chief of the gendarmes fired at Khelkhlik behind his ear.
The man fell down bleeding severely, grunting and shuddering. The
gendarmes laughed whole-heartedly, and the people were silent,
horror-stricken. Then they brought forward the others, every five-six
men hugging each other and they fired at them, then they struck them
on the head with clubs until they lay dead, then they threw them into
the torrent and went away."
His descriptions of the journey, passing rivers filled with the
bloated bodies of women, stripped naked and decomposing under the July
sun, the raids by Kurds, rapes, bayonetings and decapitations, are
gruesome, but they illustrate clearly how dehumanizing the deportation
process was.
In Aleppo in Syria, the Ottoman prefect was said to be alarmed at what
to do with the numbers of tattered refugees arriving. It is recorded
that on September 15, 1915, one of the three ruling "Pashas," Mehmet
Talaat (pictured), sent the Aleppo prefect the chilling message: "You
have already been informed that the government... has decided to
destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their
existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may
be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any
scruples of conscience."
The sending of this, and other similar telegrams, was later denied by
Mehmet Talaat. The primary source for these telegrams is a work called
"Memoirs of Naim Bey," written by Aram Andonian and published in 1920.
There is some doubt as to the authenticity of these purported
telegrams. It has been argued by some that once the "smoking gun" of
these telegrams is removed, claims of "genocide" cannot be made about
what happened to the Armenians. This is not true. The definition of
genocide as laid out by the United Nations in 1948 is "to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
Purgings of an entire ethnic group from a nation are de facto
genocidal. Dr Tessa Hofmann of the Free University of Berlin stated
that in modern Turkey, only 72,000 Armenian citizens remain, with 95%
of these living in Istanbul. When one considers that before World War
I there were 2.5 to 3 million Armenians, many of whom lived in the
southeast of Turkey, where Kurds are now the largest "minority," the
terms of 1948's description are fulfilled. The Hamidian massacres of
1894 to 1909 were mostly carried out on the orders of the
Sultan/Caliphate and his officials. The massacres of the First World
War were carried out on the orders of local officials allied to the
CUP, and when Kurds slaughtered and robbed the caravans traveling to
Aleppo, little was done to protect the Armenians.
Official Reactions
According to a British government report, which was published in 1915
by Lord James Bryce while the genocide was still taking place, the
Turkish government directly ordered at least one 1915 massacre:
"Orders came from Constantinople that all the Armenian Christians in
Trebizond (Trabzon) were to be killed. Many of the Moslems tried to
save their Christian neighbors, and offered them shelter in their
houses, but the Turkish authorities were implacable.
Obeying the orders which they had received, they hunted out all the
Christians, gathered them together, and drove a great crowd of them
down the streets of Trebizond, past the fortress, to the edge of the
sea. There they were all put on board sailing boats, carried out some
distance on the Black Sea, and there thrown overboard and drowned.
Nearly the whole Armenian population of from 8,000 to 10,000 were
destroyed - some in this way, some by slaughter, some by being sent to
death elsewhere. After that, any other story becomes credible; and I
am sorry to say that all the stories that I have received contain
similar elements of horror, intensified in some cases by stories of
shocking torture."
A German account was written by Dr. Martin Niepage who was in Aleppo
in September 1915. He later visited sites such as Adana where
massacres and deportations had taken place. He stated: "The object of
the deportations is the extermination of the whole Armenian nation.
This purpose is also proved by the fact that the Turkish Government
declines all assistance from Missionaries, Sisters of Mercy and
European residents in the country, and systematically tries to stop
their work."
Niepage wrote:
"What we saw with our own eyes here in Aleppo was really only the last
scene in the great tragedy of the extermination of the Armenians. It
was only a minute fraction of the horrible drama that was being played
out simultaneously in all the other provinces of Turkey. Many more
appalling things were reported by the engineers of the Baghdad
Railway, when they came back from their work on the section under
construction, or by German travelers (sic) who met the convoys of
exiles on their journeys. Many of these gentlemen had seen such
appalling sights that they could eat nothing for days.
One of them, Herr Greif, of Aleppo, reported corpses of violated women
lying about naked in heaps on the railway embankment at Tell-Abiad and
Ras-el-Ain. Another, Herr Spiecker, of Aleppo, had seen Turks tie
Armenian men together, fire several volleys of small shot with
fowling-pieces into the human mass, and go off laughing while their
victims slowly perished in frightful convulsions.
Other men had their hands tied behind their back and were rolled down
steep cliffs. Women were standing below, who slashed those who had
rolled down with knives until they were dead. A Protestant pastor who,
two years before, had given a very warm welcome to my colleague,
Doctor Graeter; when he was passing through his village, had his
finger nails torn out."
Turkey's German allies who were aware of the fate of Armenian
deportees were advised to stay silent. One man who disobeyed such
orders was German second-lieutenant in the Sanitary Corps, Armin T.
Wegner, (1886 - 1978). Wegner was stationed in the Ottoman Empire in
April 1915. He took photographs, including photographs taken in the
Syrian deportation camps, where refugees were suffering from sickness
and starvation. In 1916, Wegner was transferred to Constantinople. He
brought with him his (and others') photographic plates, which were
later used as evidence of the atrocities against Armenians.
Henry Morgenthau was U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between
1913 and 1916. He was in no doubt that several officials in the
Turkish government intended the Armenian deportations as
"exterminations". He wrote:
"One day I was discussing these proceedings with a responsible Turkish
official, who was describing the tortures inflicted. He made no secret
of the fact that the Government had instigated them, and, like all
Turks of the official classes, he enthusiastically approved this
treatment of the detested race. This official told me that all these
details were matters of nightly discussion at the headquarters of the
Union and Progress Committee. Each new method of inflicting pain was
hailed as a splendid discovery, and the regular attendants were
constantly ransacking their brains in the effort to devise some new
torment. He told me that they even delved into the records of the
Spanish Inquisition and other historic institutions of torture and
adopted all the suggestions found there. He did not tell me who
carried off the prize in this gruesome competition, but common
reputation through Armenia gave a preeminent infamy to Djevdet Bey,
the Vali of Van, whose activities in that section I have already
described. All through this country Djevdet was generally known as the
"horseshoer of Bashkale" for this connoisseur in torture had invented
what was perhaps the masterpiece of all - that of nailing horseshoes
to the feet of his Armenian victims...."
"....The real purpose of the deportation was robbery and destruction;
it really represented a new method of massacre. When the Turkish
authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely
giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well,
and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt
to conceal the fact."
In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State, Morgenthau wrote on July
15, 1915: "Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is
increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that
a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of
reprisal against rebellion."
Winston Churchill spoke of the Armenian genocide in the U.K.
parliament: "In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly
carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians
in Asia Minor... There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was
planned and executed for political reasons."
It is a shame that in the United States, Republicans and Democrats
have become divided over the nature of the genocide, to the point that
Republicans wish to flatter Turkey by arguing over the semantics of
the terms "massacre" and "genocide." Turkey is at fault here, from its
deliberate denial of uncomfortable facts.
The three CUP leaders - Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Cemal -
along with several minor officials were tried in Turkey. The trials of
the three Young Turk "Pashas" took place in absentia. The three
"Pashas" died without receiving judicial punishment for their crimes.
At the end of the First World War, Ismail Enver had fled to Germany on
a boat, accompanied by Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Cemal. On July 5, 1919
the three were found guilty of taking Turkey into World War I, and of
committing massacres against Armenians. They were sentenced to death.
Ismail Enver died fighting the Soviets in Tajikistan on August 4,
1922. Mehmet Talaat was gunned down by an Armenian, Soghomon
Tehlirian, in Berlin in 1921. Ahmed Çemal was shot dead in Tiblisi on
July 21, 1922 by two Armenians, Stepan Dzaghiguian and Bedros
Der-Boghossian. Talaat's and Çemal's assassins belonged to the group
called Operation Nemesis.
Most historians accept the events that began in 1915 as "genocide." In
Turkey, one brave historian examined Ottoman documentary evidence from
the time, and concluded that there was an Armenian genocide. This
historian, Taner Akcam, was jailed for publishing his findings, under
Article 301 of the Turkish penal Code - "insulting Turkishness." A
recent interview with him can be found here. During his researches,
Akcam found that "individual Turkish officers often wrote 'doubles' of
their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same
time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient
protection and food for the Armenians during their 'resettlement'."
Occasionally the remains of victims of the Armenian genocide become
uncovered. In Xirabebaba in southeastern Turkey on October 17, 2006,
some Kurds were digging a grave when they uncovered a cache of
skeletal remains in a cave. About 300 individuals were found. It was
assumed that these were the 150 Armenian and 120 Syriac males from the
adjacent town of Dara (Oguz) who were slaughtered on June 14, 1915.
The news was published in a Kurdish newspaper, but Turkish army
officials arrived and told the villagers to cover the entrance to the
cave, and claimed that stories that the bodies were Armenian were
"lies." Local police demanded to know who had leaked the discovery to
the press.
Turkey refuses to accept that the Armenian Genocide took place, and
expects its allies to collude with its campaigns of lies and
disinformation. Perhaps the House of Congress is not the best place to
discuss aspects of history, but denying history to placate a petulant
ally is undignified. Turkey still wants to join the European Union,
even though this institution has already ruled that the Armenian
Genocide did take place. The protestations and blackmailing from
Turkey's Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and its
president Abdullah Gül should be ignored, or responded to in kind. If
Turkey threatens U.S. interests because the U.S. does not officially
follow its false propaganda, Turkey should realize that it has far
more to lose from a breakdown of relations with its principal NATO
ally.
# #
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Adrian Morgan is a
British based writer and artist who has written for Western Resistance
since its inception. He also writes for Spero News. He has previously
contributed to various publications, including the Guardian and New
Scientist and is a former Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society.
read full author bio here
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Note: this article contains numerous links to supplemental material,
as well as photographs.
Exclusive: Why Does a Close U.S. Ally Deny Its Genocide? (Part Three
of Three)
Author: Adrian Morgan
Source: The Family Security Foundation, Inc.
Date: October 19, 2007
In the final installment of a three-part series, FSM Contributing
Editor Adrian Morgan details the horrors of Armenian genocide
perpetrated by Turkey nearly a century ago. What is the best way for
the U.S. to handle it? And will Turkey's continued denial of this
travesty hurt them more than it hurts us? (Warning: the pictures
contained herein are extremely graphic.)
Why Does a Close U.S. Ally Deny Its Genocide?
(Part Three of Three)
Rise of the Young Turks
Sultan Abdul-Hamid II ruled in an autocratic fashion, fearful of the
breakup of his empire. He employed a secret police force, and
rebellious Kurds were drafted as irregulars into the Hamidian Cavalry.
These had been involved in the massacres of Armenians in the 1890s.
While Abdul-Hamid isolated himself with astrologers and favorites in
his palace, the Yildiz Koshku, a nationalist movement, started to grow
amongst the intelligentsia and the military. Influenced by Western
political ideals, these individuals became known by the name they used
in a revolution waged against Abdul-Hamid in 1908 - the Young Turks.
These individuals emerged in the 1890s but operated in secret, out of
fear of the spies of the palace secret police. Many of the Young Turks
joined the nationalist group the Committee of Union and Progress
(Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti or CUP). This was formed in 1889 at the
Royal Medical Academy at Constantinople by Abdullah Cevdet and four
others. In February 1907, the Sultan's hated chief of secret police,
Fehmi Pasha (Fehim Pasha), was forced into exile at the request of
Germany, after he illegally impounded a Hamburg-bound ship.
As one of the Sultan's three cabinet members, the loss of Pasha
weakened the autocracy of Abdul-Hamid. Pasha manipulated the Sultan
with fake bomb plots which were blamed on Armenians. Even after his
exile, he was suspected of engineering a fatal bomb attack against a
former Armenian ally, Andon Keutchoglu.
In July 1908, the Young Turks staged a revolution against Abdul-Hamid
II. Two prominent CUP members led the uprisings amongst the military -
Niazi Bey led a revolt at Resna in Macedonia, closely followed by
Enver Bey in Salonica, Greece. They issued a proclamation that
demanded Abdul-Hamid restore the constitution he rejected in 1878. The
Sultan agreed, and in December the Turkish parliament met. Some time
after the July 1908 revolution, Fehmi Pasha was torn into pieces by a
mob in Bursa, northwestern Turkey.
The Sultan (who was also Caliph) did not approve of a parliament
making decisions, and with the help of the ulemas (senior clerics), he
tried to mount a counter-revolution on April 13, 1909 (March 31st in
the Gregorian calendar) in Constantinople. Forces loyal to the Sultan
marched on Constantinople, but were defeated. The Sultan's
counter-revolution was swiftly crushed, and Abdul-Hamid was forced to
abdicate and go into exile in Salonica. His brother Reshad immediately
succeeded him as Mehmed V. At least 250 counter-revolutionaries were
tried and executed.
For Armenians, the 1908 Young Turk revolution promised them full
citizenship and a role in the voting process, and many supported it.
As explained by Yeghiazar Karapetian, a survivor of the 1915 genocide:
"The Hurriyet (Liberty) offered freedom to all the political
prisoners, after which the Armenians, Turks and Kurds would have equal
rights. Everywhere cries of joy were heard. The law of Hurriyet put an
end to the humiliation, beating, blasphemy, robbery, plunder and
contempt of the Armenians. Anyone involved in a similar behavior would
be subject to the severest punishment; he would even be liable to be
sent to the gallows. The two nations were put in a state of complete
reliance. The Armenians would have the right of free voting, were
allowed to elect and propose their delegate. This was a new
renaissance in the life of the Western Armenians. The new parliament
in its first session issued a series of laws, among them the military
service of the Armenians in the Ottoman army."
The Armenians' hopes were never fulfilled, as there had always been
nationalist factions within the Young Turk movement that saw Armenians
as enemies of "Turkishness." In 1896, many Muslims arrested after the
Constantinople massacres that accompanied the Ottoman Bank siege were
claimed by the Ottoman authorities to be Young Turk members.
At the time of Abdul-Hamid's counter-revolution, resentment among his
followers in the army boiled over in Circassia, southeastern Turkey,
and Armenians would become the victims. 30,000 Armenians were said to
have been killed. Attacks took place in Adana and Tarsus (Tarshish) on
the Mediterranean coast. On April 14th, Professor Herbert Adams
Gibbons, a mission teacher in Tarsus, was in Adana when the massacres
began. His wife Helen stated shortly after:
"Conditions both in Tarsus and in Adana were indescribable. I saw
troops that had come apparently to protect kill and apply the torch.
There were some 4,000 refugees that came into the mission inclosure
(sic)."
Later, she would write of the massacres in a book, The Red Rugs of
Tarsus. She would record (pages 115-116) incendiary shells being fired
at Armenian houses in Tarsus:
"By opening our shutters cautiously we could hear the cruel hiss of
the flames and smell kerosene in the smoke. Then the rending and
crashing of the floors made a deafening noise, and the sparks began to
alight on our property.
This is the regular order of things, -- kill, loot, burn. The Armenian
quarter is the most substantial part of the city. Most of the people
store cotton on the ground floor, and this, together with liberal
applications of kerosene, served to make a holocaust. Now at
evening-time we realize our own imminent danger."
In April 1912, an election saw the CUP gain power, but a military
defeat in a conflict with Italy saw its popularity wane. In July, a
coalition called the "Liberal Union" replaced the CUP. On January 23,
1913, a coup d'état was mounted. Three leading CUP individuals -
Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Çemal - appointed themselves the
heads of the Ottoman Empire, adopting the title "Pasha."
Deportations and Massacres
The new leadership decided to consolidate Turkey as a "Turkish" entity
with its base in Anatolia. In October 1912, the Balkan state of
Montenegro, followed by Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, declared war on
the Ottoman Empire. Turkey's planned strategy in this Balkan War
failed, and all of the Empire's territories west of Catalca (less than
20 miles from Constantinople) were lost. Muslim refugees from the
Balkans poured into Turkey.
The policies of enforcing Turkishness began with deportations. In
early 1914, Mahmut Celal, the secretary of the CUP in Smyrna (Izmir),
was told by Mehmet Talaat Pasha to make the West coast regions
entirely "Turkish." 200,000 Greek Orthodox were forced out by
paramilitary vigilantes, settling in the Aegean islands. In May 1914,
a treaty was signed with Greece, legitimizing "repatriations" from
both countries.
The presence of the Armenians was seen by the triumvirate,
particularly by interior minister Mehmet Talaat, as an impediment to
their plans to "Turkify" the nation of Turkey. Armenians were thought
to be allied more to Russia than to Turkey. After August 1914, Turkey
entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, and Russia was now officially the "enemy." At the outbreak of
World War I, many young Armenian males were drafted into the army,
though few were trusted with weapons.
Beginning in the spring of 1915, the deportations of Armenian
villagers began. Their ultimate destination was to be the deserts of
northern Syria. No transportation was provided by officials. The trek
out of Turkey, which involved a journey of hundreds of miles, was made
by most refugees on foot. Before being rounded up, many massacres took
place in these villages. In Constantinople, Armenian intellectual
leaders were hanged.
The personal accounts of survivors of these forced marches are
heartbreaking, especially as most of these survivors had been children
when they were uprooted. Poignantly, many express nostalgia for rustic
lives on farms and orchards before witnessing horrors of massacres,
and forced deportations. Aghvani was six years old when she was
expelled from a neighbor's house where she, her siblings and mother
had sought sanctuary in Bitlis:
"We came out; the corpses of the killed Armenians were everywhere;
they had massacred all the Armenians. Those who were still alive, were
driven we didn't know where. On the road there was confusion and
uproar. The Turkish gendarmes drew us forward with bayonets. At night
they came and took away the young women and girls. One day they took
away my mother, too, and then they brought her back. It was good that
my father was not alive and didn't see himself dishonored."
Shogher Abraham Tonoyan was born in 1901 in Vardensis village in Mush.
In August 1915:
"The Turkish askyars (policemen) brought Chechen brigands from
Daghestan to massacre us. They came to our village and robbed
everything. They took away our sheep, oxen and properties. Those who
were good-looking were taken away. My aunt's young son, who was
staying with me, was also taken away, together with all the males in
the town. They gathered the young and the elderly in the stables of
the Avzut village, set fire and burned them alive. Those cattle-sheds
were as large as those of our collective farms. They shut people in
the stables of Malkhas Mardo, they piled up stacks of hay round them,
poured kerosene and set on fire. Sixty members of our great family
were burned in those stables. I do not wish my enemy to see the days I
have seen, lao! Only I and my brother were saved. From the beginning,
they took away the young pretty brides and girls to turkize them and
also they pulled away the male infants from their mothers' arms to
make them policemen in the future. The stable was filled with smoke
and fire, people started to cough and to choke. Mothers forgot about
their children, lao! It was a real Sodom and Gomorrah. People ran, on
fire, to and fro, struck against the walls, trod upon the infants and
children who had fallen on the ground. ...What I have seen with my
eyes, lao! I don't wish the wolves of the mountain to see! They say
that, at these distressing scenes, the Turkish mullah hung himself.
During that turmoil the greatest part of the people choked and
perished. The roof of the stable collapsed and fell upon the dead. I
wish I and my little brother had been burned down in that stable and
had not seen how sixty souls were burned down alive. I wish I had not
seen the cruel and ungodly acts of those irreligious people. The
Armenians of the neighboring villages of Vardenis, Meshakhshen,
Aghbenis, Avzut, Khevner and others were burnt in the same manner in
their stables."
The account of Souren Sargsian (born in 1902), is rich in detail. He
described how the total eclipse of the sun on August 21, 1914 (Julian
calendar) was seen as a portent of doom. Ismail Enver Pasha (pictured)
minister of war, visited his village of Sebastia in December 1914.
Horse races took place in the leader's honor, and Armenian villagers
brought him salt. Enver Pasha spoke of Armenians fighting for their
Ottoman fatherland, but months later when the Pasha returned "he had a
very angry appearance; he was looking at the people with fury and
didn't speak to the people next to him."
In late April 1915, Sargsian's mother was gang-raped by Turkish
gendarmes, and then his sister, as his family had given shelter to an
Armenian politician. Soon, all the fit adult men in the village were
slaughtered on the orders of the Ottomans, leaving only a few old men.
Orders came for deportation, but before they left, the soldiers
promised that if they were given gold, they would bring back prisoners
from the town.
"A gendarme, a huge notebook in his hand, was supposedly writing down
the name of the prisoner, his address, his age and so on. In a few
hours the saddle-bag was almost filled with money. In the evening they
put he saddle-bag on a horse and went away. The following day they
brought a group of men about 20-30 people, surrounded with 10
gendarmes. They brought also the well-known rich man in town,
Khelkhlik. He was very fat and was seated on a big, white donkey. The
people ran forward, expecting to find their relatives. The gendarmes
drew them back and told them to form a circle. In the center of the
circle, the chief of the gendarmes fired at Khelkhlik behind his ear.
The man fell down bleeding severely, grunting and shuddering. The
gendarmes laughed whole-heartedly, and the people were silent,
horror-stricken. Then they brought forward the others, every five-six
men hugging each other and they fired at them, then they struck them
on the head with clubs until they lay dead, then they threw them into
the torrent and went away."
His descriptions of the journey, passing rivers filled with the
bloated bodies of women, stripped naked and decomposing under the July
sun, the raids by Kurds, rapes, bayonetings and decapitations, are
gruesome, but they illustrate clearly how dehumanizing the deportation
process was.
In Aleppo in Syria, the Ottoman prefect was said to be alarmed at what
to do with the numbers of tattered refugees arriving. It is recorded
that on September 15, 1915, one of the three ruling "Pashas," Mehmet
Talaat (pictured), sent the Aleppo prefect the chilling message: "You
have already been informed that the government... has decided to
destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey... Their
existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may
be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any
scruples of conscience."
The sending of this, and other similar telegrams, was later denied by
Mehmet Talaat. The primary source for these telegrams is a work called
"Memoirs of Naim Bey," written by Aram Andonian and published in 1920.
There is some doubt as to the authenticity of these purported
telegrams. It has been argued by some that once the "smoking gun" of
these telegrams is removed, claims of "genocide" cannot be made about
what happened to the Armenians. This is not true. The definition of
genocide as laid out by the United Nations in 1948 is "to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
Purgings of an entire ethnic group from a nation are de facto
genocidal. Dr Tessa Hofmann of the Free University of Berlin stated
that in modern Turkey, only 72,000 Armenian citizens remain, with 95%
of these living in Istanbul. When one considers that before World War
I there were 2.5 to 3 million Armenians, many of whom lived in the
southeast of Turkey, where Kurds are now the largest "minority," the
terms of 1948's description are fulfilled. The Hamidian massacres of
1894 to 1909 were mostly carried out on the orders of the
Sultan/Caliphate and his officials. The massacres of the First World
War were carried out on the orders of local officials allied to the
CUP, and when Kurds slaughtered and robbed the caravans traveling to
Aleppo, little was done to protect the Armenians.
Official Reactions
According to a British government report, which was published in 1915
by Lord James Bryce while the genocide was still taking place, the
Turkish government directly ordered at least one 1915 massacre:
"Orders came from Constantinople that all the Armenian Christians in
Trebizond (Trabzon) were to be killed. Many of the Moslems tried to
save their Christian neighbors, and offered them shelter in their
houses, but the Turkish authorities were implacable.
Obeying the orders which they had received, they hunted out all the
Christians, gathered them together, and drove a great crowd of them
down the streets of Trebizond, past the fortress, to the edge of the
sea. There they were all put on board sailing boats, carried out some
distance on the Black Sea, and there thrown overboard and drowned.
Nearly the whole Armenian population of from 8,000 to 10,000 were
destroyed - some in this way, some by slaughter, some by being sent to
death elsewhere. After that, any other story becomes credible; and I
am sorry to say that all the stories that I have received contain
similar elements of horror, intensified in some cases by stories of
shocking torture."
A German account was written by Dr. Martin Niepage who was in Aleppo
in September 1915. He later visited sites such as Adana where
massacres and deportations had taken place. He stated: "The object of
the deportations is the extermination of the whole Armenian nation.
This purpose is also proved by the fact that the Turkish Government
declines all assistance from Missionaries, Sisters of Mercy and
European residents in the country, and systematically tries to stop
their work."
Niepage wrote:
"What we saw with our own eyes here in Aleppo was really only the last
scene in the great tragedy of the extermination of the Armenians. It
was only a minute fraction of the horrible drama that was being played
out simultaneously in all the other provinces of Turkey. Many more
appalling things were reported by the engineers of the Baghdad
Railway, when they came back from their work on the section under
construction, or by German travelers (sic) who met the convoys of
exiles on their journeys. Many of these gentlemen had seen such
appalling sights that they could eat nothing for days.
One of them, Herr Greif, of Aleppo, reported corpses of violated women
lying about naked in heaps on the railway embankment at Tell-Abiad and
Ras-el-Ain. Another, Herr Spiecker, of Aleppo, had seen Turks tie
Armenian men together, fire several volleys of small shot with
fowling-pieces into the human mass, and go off laughing while their
victims slowly perished in frightful convulsions.
Other men had their hands tied behind their back and were rolled down
steep cliffs. Women were standing below, who slashed those who had
rolled down with knives until they were dead. A Protestant pastor who,
two years before, had given a very warm welcome to my colleague,
Doctor Graeter; when he was passing through his village, had his
finger nails torn out."
Turkey's German allies who were aware of the fate of Armenian
deportees were advised to stay silent. One man who disobeyed such
orders was German second-lieutenant in the Sanitary Corps, Armin T.
Wegner, (1886 - 1978). Wegner was stationed in the Ottoman Empire in
April 1915. He took photographs, including photographs taken in the
Syrian deportation camps, where refugees were suffering from sickness
and starvation. In 1916, Wegner was transferred to Constantinople. He
brought with him his (and others') photographic plates, which were
later used as evidence of the atrocities against Armenians.
Henry Morgenthau was U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between
1913 and 1916. He was in no doubt that several officials in the
Turkish government intended the Armenian deportations as
"exterminations". He wrote:
"One day I was discussing these proceedings with a responsible Turkish
official, who was describing the tortures inflicted. He made no secret
of the fact that the Government had instigated them, and, like all
Turks of the official classes, he enthusiastically approved this
treatment of the detested race. This official told me that all these
details were matters of nightly discussion at the headquarters of the
Union and Progress Committee. Each new method of inflicting pain was
hailed as a splendid discovery, and the regular attendants were
constantly ransacking their brains in the effort to devise some new
torment. He told me that they even delved into the records of the
Spanish Inquisition and other historic institutions of torture and
adopted all the suggestions found there. He did not tell me who
carried off the prize in this gruesome competition, but common
reputation through Armenia gave a preeminent infamy to Djevdet Bey,
the Vali of Van, whose activities in that section I have already
described. All through this country Djevdet was generally known as the
"horseshoer of Bashkale" for this connoisseur in torture had invented
what was perhaps the masterpiece of all - that of nailing horseshoes
to the feet of his Armenian victims...."
"....The real purpose of the deportation was robbery and destruction;
it really represented a new method of massacre. When the Turkish
authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely
giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well,
and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt
to conceal the fact."
In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State, Morgenthau wrote on July
15, 1915: "Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is
increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that
a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of
reprisal against rebellion."
Winston Churchill spoke of the Armenian genocide in the U.K.
parliament: "In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly
carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians
in Asia Minor... There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was
planned and executed for political reasons."
It is a shame that in the United States, Republicans and Democrats
have become divided over the nature of the genocide, to the point that
Republicans wish to flatter Turkey by arguing over the semantics of
the terms "massacre" and "genocide." Turkey is at fault here, from its
deliberate denial of uncomfortable facts.
The three CUP leaders - Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Cemal -
along with several minor officials were tried in Turkey. The trials of
the three Young Turk "Pashas" took place in absentia. The three
"Pashas" died without receiving judicial punishment for their crimes.
At the end of the First World War, Ismail Enver had fled to Germany on
a boat, accompanied by Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Cemal. On July 5, 1919
the three were found guilty of taking Turkey into World War I, and of
committing massacres against Armenians. They were sentenced to death.
Ismail Enver died fighting the Soviets in Tajikistan on August 4,
1922. Mehmet Talaat was gunned down by an Armenian, Soghomon
Tehlirian, in Berlin in 1921. Ahmed Çemal was shot dead in Tiblisi on
July 21, 1922 by two Armenians, Stepan Dzaghiguian and Bedros
Der-Boghossian. Talaat's and Çemal's assassins belonged to the group
called Operation Nemesis.
Most historians accept the events that began in 1915 as "genocide." In
Turkey, one brave historian examined Ottoman documentary evidence from
the time, and concluded that there was an Armenian genocide. This
historian, Taner Akcam, was jailed for publishing his findings, under
Article 301 of the Turkish penal Code - "insulting Turkishness." A
recent interview with him can be found here. During his researches,
Akcam found that "individual Turkish officers often wrote 'doubles' of
their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same
time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient
protection and food for the Armenians during their 'resettlement'."
Occasionally the remains of victims of the Armenian genocide become
uncovered. In Xirabebaba in southeastern Turkey on October 17, 2006,
some Kurds were digging a grave when they uncovered a cache of
skeletal remains in a cave. About 300 individuals were found. It was
assumed that these were the 150 Armenian and 120 Syriac males from the
adjacent town of Dara (Oguz) who were slaughtered on June 14, 1915.
The news was published in a Kurdish newspaper, but Turkish army
officials arrived and told the villagers to cover the entrance to the
cave, and claimed that stories that the bodies were Armenian were
"lies." Local police demanded to know who had leaked the discovery to
the press.
Turkey refuses to accept that the Armenian Genocide took place, and
expects its allies to collude with its campaigns of lies and
disinformation. Perhaps the House of Congress is not the best place to
discuss aspects of history, but denying history to placate a petulant
ally is undignified. Turkey still wants to join the European Union,
even though this institution has already ruled that the Armenian
Genocide did take place. The protestations and blackmailing from
Turkey's Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and its
president Abdullah Gül should be ignored, or responded to in kind. If
Turkey threatens U.S. interests because the U.S. does not officially
follow its false propaganda, Turkey should realize that it has far
more to lose from a breakdown of relations with its principal NATO
ally.
# #
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Adrian Morgan is a
British based writer and artist who has written for Western Resistance
since its inception. He also writes for Spero News. He has previously
contributed to various publications, including the Guardian and New
Scientist and is a former Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society.
read full author bio here
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress