Six on History: Turkey's Armenian Genocide
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1) Armenian Genocide, PBS Documentary, 19 min.
One Armenian woman was discovered on a train by soldiers, but refused to be separated from her companions. She was removed from the carriage and ‘married to the legionnaire who had rescued her’
The Arabs lost Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, the Jews did not get all of Palestine, and the soldiers of the Armenian Legion – having helped to liberate Palestine – were abandoned amid the ashes of their own burnt cities.
Among the indigenous peoples of the Middle East, they were the most traduced of all, since they recovered not a square inch of their land. To be a loser doesn’t get you much purchase in the history books. To be a loser twice over turns you into a curio. Thus the story of the Armenian Legion has until now been largely untold and unremembered.
RecommendedAnd Armenian Legionnaires: Sacrifice and Betrayal in World War I, Susan Paul Pattie’s first and original account of the fury, heartbreak and suffering of its soldiers – women as well as men in that most misogynistic of 20th century wars – is not for the faint-hearted. There are Armenian troops, armed and in uniform, desperately searching the Constantinople-bound Turkish refugee trains for Armenian girls who had been raped and kidnapped by the Ottomans who had butchered their families. “Too late,” young women told their would-be rescuers. They preferred to stay with their new Turkish husbands, or at least refused to be separated from their half-Armenian and half-Turkish children.
One Armenian woman, travelling by rail with a Turkish family, was discovered by soldiers of the Armenian Legion, her chest “adorned with gold”, and refused to be separated from her companions. She was taken from the carriage at the next station and “married to the legionnaire who had rescued her”. Sarkis Najarian “saw a rich Turkish family travelling [on the train between Adana and Mersin] with a pretty girl whom he thought must be Armenian”. He managed to separate her from the family and sent her to an orphanage. There had been many forced conversions of Armenian women although we rarely hear the women’s account of these “rescues”.
Najarian’s own sister Yeghsabet, when he discovered her, was already engaged and refused to leave her fiance, fearing for her life and offering Najarian money to go away. When he found her later, “she was married to a rich [Arab] Bedouin, tattooed – and happy”. There is a photograph of a young and beautiful Yeghsabet in a veil. “I have Armenian blood,” she would later tell her brother, “but I was raised a Muslim. When I hear the call to prayer, I have to do my prayers until the end of my life.”
RecommendedMany of the men in the original legion had been signed up by the French in Egypt where they had settled with their families after a French warship rescued them in 1915 from the famous 40-day siege by the Turks at Musa Dagh. Others came from Europe, even from America, men who spoke French and American English as well as Armenian, anxious to fight for their still nonexistent nation after the horror and humiliation of the Turkish genocide of a million-and-a-half of their own Armenian people. By July 1918, the French had registered 58 Armenian officers, 4,360 soldiers – including 288 French Armenians – and two artillery gun crews with 37mm artillery. But while Susan Pattie, a scholar of Armenian history at University College, clearly sympathises with her heroes, there is an ugly undertow of revenge in their desire to fight for the Allies.
Fighting in Palestine at the 1918 Battle of Megiddo – the original Armageddon, which the Armenians call Arara – they received an official commendation for gallantry from General Edmund Allenby. But Hovannes Garabedian was to recall how he and his Armenian comrades found the Turkish trenches filled with their dead and dying enemies. “The ones who were not totally dead proved to be the most unfortunate,” he said. “The memory of yesterday’s genocide ... was so fresh in our minds, the thirst for revenge was so profound in the hearts of the Armenian legionnaires, the wounded Turks found no mercy. They were finished in their trenches.”
As the Armenian soldiers advanced with French and British troops back into the Cilician/Armenian fields and mountains from which they and their families had been driven by the Turkish genociders three years earlier, there was violence and murder. And with the rise of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s nationalist uprising against the Allies, the French found their Armenian Legion an embarrassment rather than a trusted auxiliary. Surviving Armenian families who had trekked back in hope to their cremated homes in Marash found themselves dispossessed of their lands again, massacred once more in their thousands, joining retreating Armenian soldiers in the French withdrawal, many dying, frozen and starving, in their second exodus from Turkish Armenia in five years.
The Armenians, in their pride and revenge, could not, perhaps, be expected to understand how soon their road to Golgotha would have to be retrodden. Did they not recognise their grim future when the Armenians were refused participation at the Versailles peace conference in 1919? Should they not have been included as joint Allied victors over the German-Austro-Hungarian-Ottoman alliance in the First World War? Attacked by bandits, demobilised Turkish soldiers, hunger and thirst, the retreating soldiers of “liberation” found themselves asking another question of all those who suffer refugeedom. How come some Armenian families had remained in their villages during the genocide? What deals had they struck with their Turkish oppressors? Why were Armenian girl refugees found with Bedouin tattoos on their faces, marks which were surgically removed by their “rescuers”.
Shame, like defeat, was a feeling rarely uttered but much felt. There are, remarkably, documentary photographs of the Adana battle, of men digging trenches and Armenian soldiers slogging across the hillsides of Marash. With the subtlety of all great powers, the Allies spoke not of betrayal. They called it “the Marash Affair”.
The rump nation Armenia which emerged to the east – quickly engorged by the Soviets and today a brave but often corrupt state – was of little interest to the men of the disbanded Armenian legion. The survivors returned to refugee families in Lebanon – at least one became a Beirut policeman – or to homes in France or in America where they often flourished and sometimes met for picnics, holding old flags and remembering false promises from powerful nations and creating little Armenias in their countries of exile. Lieutenant John Shishmanian even received a personal post-war letter from General Allenby.
“I am sorry, if the gallant conduct of the Armenians was not sufficiently recognised,” the great man – now high commissioner in Egypt – wrote from Cairo just after Christmas in 1919. “I know they fought nobly, and I am proud to have had them under my command.” The Battle of Arara – Megiddo or Armageddon to us – left its 23 Armenian dead in the desert, their bones later gathered and transshipped to the Armenian St James church in Jerusalem. The ashes of Viscount Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe were buried in Westminster Abbey."
"Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has stated that Ankara "entirely rejects" the US declaration. He also stressed that Bien’s statement undermines the mutual "trust and friendship" between Turkey and the US and that it has caused "a deep wound". Cavusoglu accused Washington of "distorting historical facts" and that this will "never be accepted by the people of Turkey."
RELATED:
Biden's recognition of the Armenian genocide was timed to coincide with the 106th anniversary of the day when Armenians commemorate the victims of the actions of the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Some historians say that systematic deportations, starvation, and massacres carried out by the Ottoman Empire in areas inhabited mostly by Armenians left around 1.5 million of them dead. ..."
"In the final annihilation of the Armenians, an American missionary spoke of “minds obsessed with Muslim fanaticism seven times heated”. Turks, he wrote, had “become drunk with blood and rapine, and plunder and power, and he will be a different man from what he was before the atrocities”. Benny Morris thinks it was more to do with a mixture of modern nationalism and the decline of “Islamic polity”.
I discussed all this with him. Is it possible for a people to be so inured to cruelty that they changed, that their acts of sadism could alter their humanity? Religions drive people to excessive violence, he said again, and then repeated this as “excessive sadism”. Morris agreed that the Romans were cruel, but they were pagans. “In terms of religion, the Romans were amateurs. Abrahamic religions drive people to excess.” Jews had avoided this. Palestinians will disagree.
There is certainly a frightening geographical scope to the killings. Many thousands of horrors were perpetrated in Mosul, Raqqa, Manbij and Deir ez-Zor, names grimly familiar from the Isis torments of 2014 onwards.
Why, one keeps asking, didn’t the Christians leave after 1924? But of course, they had been urged to return to settle in Cilicia and in Mesopotamia and Syria by the French and British – who left; and thus the Christian descendants waited for the next generational bloodletting.
The Turks were not the only killers, and Kurds also killed the Christians for the Turks, as Ukrainians killed the Jews for the Nazi Germans. At one point in Morris’s text, a group of Circassians plait a rope 25 yards long from the hair of young women they have killed, and send it as a present to their commander.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk gets pretty well trashed in this volume. “There are accounts of him saying in 1922 that, ‘Our aim is to get rid of the Christians’ – he said this in a number of conversations,” Morris contends. “He gave orders, and men in his later government were responsible.” But if this 30-year history of blood was fuelled by “Muslim fanaticism”, there are “good Turks” in the book. In the first massacres, government officials arrested Essad Bey, an “honest, impartial and tolerant” judge who tried to help the Christians. There is a heroic Turkish doctor who throws out his sick Turkish soldiers from a hospital and replaces them with Armenian refugees. Missionary Tacy Atkinson hoped to meet the doctor one day “in the Kingdom of Heaven”. There are others. It’s true that the Greek Christians have fewer historians than the Armenians. Tens of thousands of Greeks were transported to Greece in return for an equal number of Muslims – official agreements kept the massacres a trifle smaller – but Morris and Zeevi give too little attention to the awe in which the Nazis held Ataturk’s people."
Armenia’s Second Chance
Armenia regained its independence some 71 years later when the Soviet Union fell apart. The Soviet collapse coincided with the outbreak of a war for the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region. Soviet authorities had initially assigned the territory to Azerbaijan as a nominally autonomous region. In the final years of the Soviet Union, the ethnic Armenians of Karabakh moved to have the territory reassigned to Soviet Armenia. The conflict grew violent and evolved into a war. Backed by the Republic of Armenia, the Armenian Karabakhis eventually prevailed. The ceasefire of 1994 marked their triumph.
The Armenian victory was enormous. Karabakhis had consolidated control not only over Karabakh but also over seven adjoining Azerbaijani provinces, or 13.6 percent of Azerbaijan’s total territory. The psychological dimension of the conquest was no less consequential. Armenians draw little distinction between Azerbaijani Turks and Anatolian Turks. Many accordingly saw the victory over Azerbaijan as a redeeming win at the end of a century marked by calamities. Once at an academic conference of Turks and Armenians that I attended in 2005, a non-academic observer from the Republic of Armenia who was bemused at the proceedings stood up and exclaimed, “We Eastern Armenians are so different from you Western Armenians! You always see yourselves as victims! But we know ourselves as conquerors!”
Yet, no matter how great Armenia’s victory in 1994 was, it could not be decisive. They had won the battle for Karabakh, but they lacked the means to compel Azerbaijan, a country nearly three times larger in territory and population, to concede all that they wanted. Moreover, their victory violated the principle of territorial integrity, a pillar of the international order. Azerbaijan thus had four U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for the unconditional withdrawal of occupying Armenian forces from the seven Azerbaijani provinces. Absent Azerbaijan’s consent, Armenia could never legitimize its gains in the international arena. This led to a bizarre predicament whereby Yerevan declined to recognize the Republic of Artsakh as a state, even as it supported Artsakh in all imaginable ways and called on others to recognize Artsakh’s sovereignty. A conclusive solution to the Karabakh conflict would require the Armenians to agree to some form of compromise. Ultimately, they proved unwilling to do that.
To facilitate a negotiated solution to the war, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe created the so-called “Minsk Group” co-chaired by Russia, France, and the United States to host peace talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan. As the victor in possession of both Karabakh and seven surrounding provinces, Armenia had tremendous leverage, and in the Minsk Group it had a relatively favorable environment. Armenia’s strategy was simple: As a recent report from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe put it, “maintain the status quo while stalling until the international community and Azerbaijan recognized Nagornyy [sic] Karabakh’s independence.”
Time, however, was one factor not in Armenia’s favor. As a small landlocked country largely bereft of natural resources and with outlets only through Georgia and Iran, Armenia’s prospects for economic growth were limited. Further crippling Armenia’s economy has been its dependency on Russia for security, a reliance dictated by Yerevan’s uncompromising stance on Karabakh. Yerevan is a formal treaty ally with Moscow, hosts Russian military bases, and has Russian troops guarding its borders with Turkey and Iran. That security dependence, however, has carried with it a parallel energy and economic dependence that has constrained Armenia’s development. An anemic economy has caused as much as one-third of Armenia’s population to leave the country in search of employment abroad, further undermining the country’s long-term prospects.
