The Disgrace Of Modern Turkish History
Alistair_Sim
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. . . . I am confident that the
whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as
this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost
insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in
1915."
HENRY I MORGENTHAU,
American Ambassador at Constantinople from 1913 to 1916.
U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau's Story, 1919.
The destruction of the Armenian race in 1915 involved certain
difficulties that had not impeded the operations of the Turks in the
massacres of 1895 and other years. In these earlier periods the
Armenian men had possessed little power or means of resistance. In
those days Armenians had not been permitted to have military training,
to serve in the Turkish army, or to possess arms. As I have already
said, these discriminations were withdrawn when the revolutionists
obtained the upper hand in 1908. Not only were the Christians now
permitted to bear arms, but the authorities, in the full flush of
their
enthusiasm for freedom and equality, encouraged them to do so. In the
early part of 1915, therefore, every Turkish city contained thousands
of Armenians who had been trained as soldiers and who were supplied
with rifles, pistols, and other weapons of defense. The operations at
Van once more disclosed that these men could use their weapons to good
advantage. It was thus apparent that an Armenian massacre this time
would generally assume more the character of warfare than those
wholesale butcheries of defenseless men and women which the Turks had
always found so congenial. If this plan of murdering a race were to
succeed, two preliminary steps would therefore have to be taken: it
would be necessary to render all Armenian soldiers powerless and to
deprive of their arms the Armenians in every city and town. Before
Armenia could be slaughtered, Armenia must be made defenseless.
In the early part of 1915, the Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army
were reduced to a new status. Up to that time most of them had been
combatants, but now they were all stripped of their arms and
transformed into workmen. Instead of serving their country as
artillerymen and cavalrymen, these former soldiers now discovered that
they had been transformed into road labourers and pack animals. Army
supplies of all kinds were loaded on their backs, and, stumbling under
the burdens and driven by the whips and bayonets of the Turks, they
were forced to drag their weary bodies into the mountains of the
Caucasus. Sometimes they would have to plough their way, burdened in
this fashion, almost waist high through snow. They had to spend
practically all their time in the open, sleeping on the bare ground---
whenever the ceaseless prodding of their taskmasters gave them an
occasional opportunity to sleep. They were given only scraps of food;
if they fell sick they were left where they had dropped, their Turkish
oppressors perhaps stopping long enough to rob them of all their
possessions---even of their clothes. If any stragglers succeeded in
reaching their destinations, they were not infrequently massacred. In
many instances Armenian soldiers were disposed of in even more summary
fashion, for it now became almost the general practice to shoot them
in
cold blood. In almost all cases the procedure was the same. Here and
there squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups
of four, and then marched out to a secluded spot a short distance from
the village. Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air, and
the Turkish soldiers who had acted as the escort would sullenly return
to camp. Those sent to bury the bodies would find them almost
invariably stark naked, for, as usual, the Turks had stolen all their
clothes. In cases that came to my attention, the murderers had added a
refinement to their victims' sufferings by compelling them to dig
their
graves before being shot.
Let me relate a single episode which is contained in one of the
reports
of our consuls and which now forms part of the records of the American
State Department. Early in July, 2,000 Armenian "amélés"---such is the
Turkish word for soldiers who have been reduced to workmen---were sent
from Harpoot to build roads. The Armenians in that town understood
what
this meant and pleaded with the Governor for mercy. But this official
insisted that the men were not to be harmed, and he even called upon
the German missionary, Mr. Ehemann, to quiet the panic, giving that
gentleman his word of honour that the ex-soldiers would be protected.
Mr. Ehemann believed the Governor and assuaged the popular fear. Yet
practically every man of these 2,000 was massacred, and his body
thrown
into a cave. A few escaped, and it was from these that news of the
massacre reached the world. A few days afterward another 2,000
soldiers
were sent to Diarbekir. The only purpose of sending these men out in
the open country was that they might be massacred. In order that they
might have no strength to resist or to escape by flight, these poor
creatures were systematically starved. Government agents went ahead on
the road, notifying the Kurds that the caravan was approaching and
ordering them to do their congenial duty. Not only did the Kurdish
tribesmen pour down from the mountains upon this starved and weakened
regiment, but the Kurdish women came with butcher's knives in order
that they might gain that merit in Allah's eyes that comes from
killing
a Christian. These massacres were not isolated happenings; I could
detail many more episodes just as horrible as the one related above;
throughout the Turkish Empire a systematic attempt was made to kill
all
able-bodied men, not only for the purpose of removing all males who
might propagate a new generation of Armenians, but for the purpose of
rendering the weaker part of the population an easy prey.
Dreadful as were these massacres of unarmed soldiers, they were mercy
and justice themselves when compared with the treatment which was now
visited upon those Armenians who were suspected of concealing arms.
Naturally the Christians became alarmed when placards were posted in
the villages and cities ordering everybody to bring their arms to
headquarters. Although this order applied to all citizens, the
Armenians well understood what the result would be, should they be
left
defenseless while their Moslem neighbours were permitted to retain
their arms. In many cases, however, the persecuted people patiently
obeyed the command; and then the Turkish officials almost joyfully
seized their rifles as evidence that a "revolution" was being planned
and threw their victims into prison on a charge of treason. Thousands
failed to deliver arms simply because they had none to deliver, while
an even greater number tenaciously refused to give them up, not
because
they were plotting an uprising, but because they proposed to defend
their own lives and their women's honour against the outrages which
they knew were being planned. The punishment inflicted upon these
recalcitrants forms one of the most hideous chapters of modern
history.
Most of us believe that torture has long ceased to be an
administrative
and judicial measure, yet I do not believe that the darkest ages ever
presented scenes more horrible than those which now took place all
over
Turkey. Nothing was sacred to the Turkish gendarmes; under the plea of
searching for hidden arms, they ransacked churches, treated the altars
and sacred utensils with the utmost indignity, and even held mock
ceremonies in imitation of the Christian sacraments. They would beat
the priests into insensibility, under the pretense that they were the
centres of sedition. When they could discover no weapons in the
churches, they would sometimes arm the bishops and priests with guns,
pistols, and swords, then try them before courts-martial for
possessing
weapons against the law, and march them in this condition through the
streets, merely to arouse the fanatical wrath of the mobs. The
gendarmes treated women with the same cruelty and indecency as the
men.
There are cases on record in which women accused of concealing weapons
were stripped naked and whipped with branches freshly cut from trees,
and these beatings were even inflicted on women who were with child.
Violations so commonly accompanied these searches that Armenian women
and girls, on the approach of the gendarmes, would flee to the woods,
the hills, or to mountain eaves.
As a preliminary to the searches everywhere, the strong men of the
villages and towns were arrested and taken to prison. Their tormentors
here would exercise the most diabolical ingenuity in their attempt to
make their victims declare themselves to be "revolutionists" and to
tell the hiding places of their arms. A common practice was to place
the prisoner in a room, with two Turks stationed at each end and each
side. The examination would then begin with the bastinado. This is a
form of torture not uncommon in the Orient; it consists of beating the
soles of the feet with a thin rod. At first the pain is not marked;
but
as the process goes slowly on, it develops into the most terrible
agony, the feet swell and burst, and not infrequently, after being
submitted to this treatment, they have to be amputated. The gendarmes
would bastinado their Armenian victim until he fainted; they would
then
revive him by sprinkling water on his face and begin again. If this
did
not succeed in bringing their victim to terms, they had numerous other
methods of persuasion. They would pull out his eyebrows and beard
almost hair by hair; they would extract his finger nails and toe
nails;
they would apply red-hot irons to his breast, tear off his flesh with
red-hot pincers, and then pour boiled butter into the wounds. In some
cases the gendarmes would nail hands and feet to pieces of wood---
evidently in imitation of the Crucifixion, and then, while the
sufferer
writhed in his agony, they would cry: " Now let your Christ come and
help you!
These cruelties---and many others which I forbear to describe---were
usually inflicted in the night time. Turks would be stationed around
the prisons, beating drums and blowing whistles, so that the screams
of
the sufferers would not reach the villagers.
In thousands of cases the Armenians endured these agonies and refused
to surrender their arms simply because they had none to surrender.
However, they could not persuade their tormentors that this was the
case. It therefore became customary, when news was received that the
searchers were approaching, for Armenians to purchase arms from their
Turkish neighbours so that they might be able to give them up and
escape these frightful punishments.
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 an
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 throughout
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.
Yet these happenings did not constitute what the newspapers of the
time
commonly referred to as the Armenian atrocities; they were merely the
preparatory steps in the destruction of the race. The Young Turks
displayed greater ingenuity than their predecessor, Abdul Hamid. The
injunction of the deposed Sultan was merely "to kill, kill", whereas
the Turkish democracy hit upon an entirely new plan. Instead of
massacring outright the Armenian race, they now decided to deport it.
In the south and southeastern section of the Ottoman Empire lie the
Syrian desert and the Mesopotamian valley. Though part of this area
was
once the scene of a flourishing civilization, for the last five
centuries it has suffered the blight that becomes the lot of any
country that is subjected to Turkish rule; and it is now a dreary,
desolate waste, without cities and towns or life of any kind,
populated
only by a few wild and fanatical Bedouin tribes. Only the most
industrious labour, expended through many years, could transform this
desert into the abiding place of any considerable population. The
Central Government now announced its intention of gathering the two
million or more Armenians living in the several sections of the empire
and transporting them to this desolate and inhospitable region. Had
they undertaken such a deportation in good faith it would have
represented the height of cruelty and injustice. As a matter of fact,
the Turks never had the slightest idea of reestablishing the Armenians
in this new country. They knew that the great majority would never
reach their destination and that those who did would either die of
thirst and starvation, or be murdered by the wild Mohammedan desert
tribes. 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.
All through the spring and summer of 1915 the deportations took place.
Of the larger cities, Constantinople, Smyrna, and Aleppo were spared;
practically all other places where a single Armenian family lived now
became the scenes of these unspeakable tragedies. Scarcely a single
Armenian, whatever his education or wealth, or whatever the social
class to which he belonged, was exempted from the order. In some
villages placards were posted ordering the whole Armenian population
to
present itself in a public place at an appointed time-usually a day or
two ahead, and in other places the town crier would go through the
streets delivering the order vocally. In still others not the
slightest
warning was given. The gendarmes would appear before an Armenian.
house
and order all the inmates to follow them. They would take women
engaged
in their domestic tasks without giving them the chance to change their
clothes. The police fell upon them just as the eruption of Vesuvius
fell upon Pompeii; women were taken from the washtubs, children were
snatched out of bed, the bread was left half baked in the oven, the
family meal was abandoned partly eaten, the children were taken from
the schoolroom, leaving their books open at the daily task, and the
men
were forced to abandon their ploughs in the fields and their cattle on
the mountain side. Even women who had just given birth to children
would be forced to leave their beds and join the panic-stricken
throng,
their sleeping babies in their arms. Such things as they hurriedly
snatched up---a shawl, a blanket, perhaps a few scraps of food---were
all that they could take of their household belongings. To their
frantic questions " Where are we going? " the gendarmes would
vouchsafe
only one reply: "To the interior."
In some cases the refugees were given a few hours, in exceptional
instances a few days, to dispose of their property and household
effects. But the proceeding, of course, amounted simply to robbery.
They could sell only to Turks, and since both buyers and sellers knew
that they had only a day or two to market the accumulations of a
lifetime, the prices obtained represented a small fraction of their
value. Sewing machines would bring one or two dollars---a cow would go
for a dollar, a houseful of furniture would be sold for a pittance. In
many cases Armenians were prohibited from selling or Turks from buying
even at these ridiculous prices; under pretense that the Government
intended to sell their effects to pay the creditors whom they would
inevitably leave behind, their household furniture would be placed in
stores or heaped up in public places, where it was usually pillaged by
Turkish men and women. The government officials would also inform the
Armenians that, since their deportation was only temporary, the
intention being to bring them back after the war was over, they would
not be permitted to sell their houses. Scarcely had the former
possessors left the village, when Mohammedan mohadjirs---immigrants
from other parts of Turkey---would be moved into the Armenian
quarters.
Similarly all their valuables---money, rings, watches, and
jewellery---
would be taken to the police stations for "safe keeping, pending their
return, and then parcelled out among the Turks. Yet these robberies
gave the refugees little anguish, for far more terrible and agonizing
scenes were taking place under their eyes. The systematic
extermination
of the men continued; such males as the persecutions which I have
already described had left were now violently dealt with. Before the
caravans were started, it became the regular practice to separate the
young men from the families, tie them together in groups of four, lead
them to the outskirts, and shoot them. Public hangings without
trial---
the only offense being that the victims were Armenians---were taking
place constantly. The gendarmes showed a particular desire to
annihilate the educated and the influential. From American consuls and
missionaries I was constantly receiving reports of such executions,
and
many of the events which they described will never fade from my
memory.
At Angora all Armenian men from fifteen to seventy were arrested,
bound
together in groups of four, and sent on the road in the direction of
Caesarea. When they had travelled five or six hours and had reached a
secluded valley, a mob of Turkish peasants fell upon them with clubs,
hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws. Such instruments not only
caused more agonizing deaths than guns and pistols, but, as the Turks
themselves boasted, they were more economical, since they did not
involve the waste of powder and shell. In this way they exterminated
the whole male population of Angora, including all its men of wealth
and breeding, and their bodies, horribly mutilated, were left in the
valley, where they were devoured by wild beasts. After completing this
destruction, the peasants and gendarmes gathered in the local tavern,
comparing notes and boasting of the number of "'giaours" that each had
slain. In Trebizond the men were placed in boats and sent out on the
Black Sea; gendarmes would follow them in boats, shoot them down, and
throw their bodies into the water.
When the signal was given for the caravans to move, therefore, they
almost invariably consisted of women, children, and old men. Any one
who could possibly have protected them from the fate that awaited them
had been destroyed. Not infrequently the prefect of the city, as the
mass started on its way, would wish them a derisive "pleasant
journey."
Before the caravan moved the women were sometimes offered the
alternative of becoming Mohammedans. Even though they accepted the new
faith, which few of them did, their earthly troubles did not end. The
converts were compelled to surrender their children to a so-
called "Moslem Orphanage," with the agreement that they should be
trained as devout followers of the Prophet, They themselves must then
show the sincerity of their conversion by abandoning their Christian
husbands and marrying Moslems. If no good Mohammedan offered himself
as
a husband, then the new convert was deported, however strongly she
might protest her devotion to Islam.
At first the Government showed some inclination to protect these
departing throngs. The officers usually divided them into convoys, in
some cases numbering several hundred, in others several thousand. The
civil authorities occasionally furnished ox-carts which carried such
household furniture as the exiles had succeeded in scrambling
together.
A guard of gendarmerie accompanied each convoy, ostensibly to guide
and
protect it. Women, scantily clad, carrying babies in their arms or on
their backs, marched side by side with old men hobbling along with
canes. Children would run along, evidently regarding the procedure, in
the early stages, as some new lark. A more prosperous member would
perhaps have a horse or a donkey, occasionally a farmer had rescued a
cow or a sheep, which would trudge along at his side, and the usual
assortment of family pets---dogs, cats, and birds---became parts of
the
variegated procession. From thousands of Armenian cities and villages
these despairing caravans now set forth; they filled all the roads
leading southward; everywhere, as they moved on, they raised a huge
dust, and abandoned débris, chairs, blankets, bedclothes, household
utensils, and other impedimenta, marked the course of the processions.
When the caravans first started, the individuals bore some resemblance
to human beings; in a few hours, however, the dust of the road
plastered their faces and clothes, the mud caked their lower members,
and the slowly advancing mobs, frequently bent with fatigue and crazed
by the brutality of their "protectors," resembled some new .and
strange
animal species. Yet for the better part of six months, from April to
October, 1915, practically all the highways in Asia Minor were crowded
with these unearthly bands of exiles. They could be seen winding in
and
out of every valley and climbing up the sides of nearly every
mountain--
-moving on and on, they scarcely knew whither, except that every road
led to death. Village after village and town after town was evacuated
of its Armenian population, under the distressing circumstances
already
detailed. In these six months, as far as can be ascertained, about
1,200,000 people started on this journey to the Syrian desert.
"Pray for us," they would say as they left their homes---the homes in
which their ancestors had lived for 2,500 years. "We shall not see you
in this world again, but sometime we shall meet. Pray for us!"
The Armenians had hardly left their native villages when the
persecutions began. The roads over which they travelled were little
more than donkey paths; and what had started a few hours before as an
orderly procession soon became a dishevelled and scrambling mob. Women
were separated from their children and husbands from their wives. The
old people soon lost contact with their families and became exhausted
and footsore. The Turkish drivers of the ox-carts, after extorting the
last coin from their charges, would suddenly dump them and their
belongings into the road, turn around, and return to the village for
other victims. Thus in a short time practically everybody, young and
old, was compelled to travel on foot. The gendarmes whom the
Government
had sent, supposedly to protect the exiles, in a very few hours became
their tormentors. They followed their charges with fixed bayonets,
prodding any one who showed any tendency to slacken the pace. Those
who
attempted to stop for rest, or who fell exhausted on the road, were
compelled, with the utmost brutality, to rejoin the moving throng.
They
even prodded pregnant women with bayonets; if one,. as frequently
happened, gave birth along the road, she was immediately forced to get
up and rejoin the marchers. The whole course of the journey became a
perpetual struggle with the Moslem inhabitants. Detachments of
gendarmes would go ahead, notifying the Kurdish tribes that their
victims were approaching, and Turkish peasants were also informed that
their long-waited opportunity had arrived. The Government even opened
the prisons and set free the convicts, on the understanding that they
should behave like good Moslems to the approaching Armenians. Thus
every caravan had a continuous battle for existence with several
classes of enemies---their accompanying gendarmes, the Turkish
peasants
and villagers, the Kurdish tribes and bands of Chétés or brigands. And
we must always keep in mind that the men who might have defended these
wayfarers had nearly all been killed or forced into the army as
workmen, and that the exiles themselves had been systematically
deprived of all weapons before the journey began.
When the victims had travelled a few hours from their starting place,
the Kurds would sweep down from their mountain homes. Rushing up to
the
young girls, they would lift their veils and carry the pretty ones off
to the hills. They would steal such children as pleased their fancy
and
mercilessly rob all the rest of the throng. If the exiles had started
with any money or food, their assailants would appropriate it, thus
leaving them a hopeless prey to starvation. They would steal their
clothing, and sometimes even leave both men and women in a state of
complete nudity. All the time that they were committing these
depradations the Kurds would freely massacre, and the screams of women
and old men would add to the general horror. Such as escaped these
attacks in the open would find new terrors awaiting them in the Moslem
villages. Here the Turkish roughs would fall upon the women, leaving
them sometimes dead from their experiences or sometimes ravingly
insane. After spending a night in a hideous encampment of this kind,
the exiles, or such as had survived, would start again the next
morning. The ferocity of the gendarmes apparently increased as the
journey lengthened, for they seemed almost to resent the fact that
part
of their charges continued to live. Frequently any one who dropped on
the road was bayoneted on the spot. The Armenians began to die by
hundreds from hunger and thirst. Even when they came to rivers, the
gendarmes, merely to torment them, would sometimes not let them drink.
The hot sun of the desert burned their scantily clothed bodies, and
their bare feet, treading the hot sand of the desert, became so sore
that thousands fell and died or were killed where they lay. Thus, in a
few days, what had been a procession of normal human beings became a
stumbling horde of dust-covered skeletons, ravenously looking for
scraps of food, eating any offal that came their way, crazed by the
hideous sights that filled every hour of their existence, sick with
all
the diseases that accompany such hardships and privations, but still
prodded on and on by the whips and clubs and bayonets of their
executioners.
And thus, as the exiles moved, they left behind them another
caravan---
that of dead and unburied bodies, of old men and of women dying in the
last stages of typhus, dysentery, and cholera, of little children
lying
on their backs and setting up their last piteous wails for food and
water. There were women who held up their babies to strangers, begging
them to take them and save them from their tormentors, and failing
this, they would throw them into wells or leave them behind bushes.,
that at least they might die undisturbed. Behind was left a small army
of girls who had been sold as slaves---frequently for a medjidie, or
about eighty cents---and who, after serving the brutal purposes of
their purchasers, were forced to lead lives of prostitution. A string
of encampments, filled by the sick and the dying, mingled with the
unburied or half-buried bodies of the dead, marked the course of the
advancing throngs. Flocks of vultures followed them in the air, and
ravenous dogs, fighting one another for the bodies of the dead,
constantly pursued them. The most terrible scenes took place at the
rivers, especially the Euphrates. Sometimes, when crossing this
stream,
the gendarmes would push the women into the water, shooting all who
attempted to save themselves by swimming. Frequently the women
themselves would save their honour by jumping into the river, their
children in their arms.
"In the last week in June," I quote from a consular report, "several
parties of Erzeroum Armenians were deported on successive days and
most
of them massacred on the way, either by shooting or drowning. One,
Madame Zarouhi, an elderly lady of means, who was thrown into the
Euphrates, saved herself by clinging to a boulder in the river. She
succeeded in approaching the bank and returned to Erzeroum. to hide
herself in a Turkish friend's house. She told Prince Argoutinsky, the
representative of the 'All-Russian Urban Union' in Erzeroum, that she
shuddered to recall how hundreds of children were bayoneted by the
Turks and thrown into the Euphrates, and how men and women were
stripped naked, tied together in hundreds, shot, and then hurled into
the river. In a loop of the river near Erzinghan, she said, the
thousands of dead bodies created such a barrage that the Euphrates
changed its course for about a hundred yards."
It is absurd for the Turkish Government to assert that it ever
seriously intended to "deport the Armenians to new homes"; the
treatment which was given the convoys clearly shows that extermination
was the real purpose of Enver and Talaat. How many exiled to the south
under these revolting conditions ever reached their destinations? The
experiences of a single caravan show how completely this plan of
deportation developed into one of annihilation. The details in
question
were furnished me directly by the American Consul at Aleppo, and are
now on file in the State Department at Washington. On the first of
June
a convoy of three thousand Armenians, mostly women, girls, and
children, left Harpoot. Following the usual custom the Government
provided them an escort of seventy gendarmes, under the command of a
Turkish leader, a Bey. In accordance with the common experience these
gendarmes proved to be not their protectors, but their tormentors and
their executioners. Hardly had they got well started on the road when
Bey took 400 liras from the caravan, on the plea that he was keeping
it
safely until their arrival at Malatia; no sooner had he robbed them of
the only thing that might have provided them with food than he ran
away, leaving them all to the tender mercies of the gendarmes.
All the way to Ras-ul-Ain, the first station on the Bagdad line, the
existence of these wretched travellers was one prolonged horror. The
gendarmes went ahead, informing the half-savage tribes of the
mountains
that several thousand Armenian women and girls were approaching. The
Arabs and Kurds began to carry off the girls, the mountaineers fell
upon them repeatedly, violating and killing the women, and the
gendarmes themselves joined in the orgy. One by one the few men who
accompanied the convoy were killed. The women had succeeded in
secreting money from their persecutors, keeping it in their mouths and
hair; with this they would buy horses, only to have them repeatedly
stolen by the Kurdish tribesmen. Finally the gendarmes, having robbed
and beaten and violated and killed their charges for thirteen days,
abandoned them altogether. Two days afterward the Kurds went through
the party and rounded up all the males who still remained alive. They
found about 150, their ages varying from 15 to 90 years, and these,
they promptly took away and butchered to the last man. But that same
day another convoy from Sivas joined---this one from Harpoot,
increasing the numbers of the whole caravan to 18,000 people.
Another Kurdish Bey now took command, and to him, as to all men placed
in the same position, the opportunity was regarded merely as one for
pillage, outrage, and murder. This chieftain summoned all his
followers
from the mountains and invited them to work their complete will upon
this great mass of Armenians. Day after day and night after night the
prettiest girls were carried away; sometimes they returned in a
pitiable condition that told the full story of their sufferings. Any
stragglers, those who were so old and infirm and sick that they could
not keep up with the marchers, were promptly killed. Whenever they
reached a Turkish village all the local vagabonds were permitted to
prey upon the Armenian girls. When the diminishing band reached the
Euphrates they saw the bodies of 200 men floating upon the surface. By
this time they had all been so repeatedly robbed that they had
practically nothing left except a few ragged clothes, and even these
the Kurds now took; and the larger part of the convoy marched for five
days almost completely naked under the scorching desert sun. For
another five days they did not have a morsel of bread or a drop of
water. "Hundreds fell dead on the way," the report reads, "their
tongues were turned to charcoal., and when, at the end of five days,
they reached a fountain, the whole convoy naturally rushed toward it.
But here the policemen barred the way and forebade them to take a
single drop of water. Their purpose was to sell it at from one to
three
liras a cup and sometimes they actually withheld the water after
getting the money. At another place, where there were wells, some
women
threw themselves into them, as there was no rope or pail to draw up
the
water. These women were drowned and, in spite of that, the rest of the
people drank from that well, the dead bodies still remaining there and
polluting the water. Sometimes, when the wells were shallow and the
women could go down into them and come out again, the other people
would rush to lick or suck their wet, dirty clothes, in the effort to
quench their thirst. When they passed an Arab village in their naked
condition the Arabs pitied them and gave them old pieces of cloth to
cover themselves with. Some of the exiles who still had money bought
some clothes; but some still remained who travelled thus naked all the
way to the city of Aleppo. The poor women could hardly walk for shame;
they all walked bent double.
On the seventieth day a few creatures reached Aleppo. Out of the
combined convoy of 18,000 souls just 150 women and children reached
their destination. A few of the rest, the most attractive, were still
living as captives of the Kurds and Turks; all the rest were dead.
My only reason for relating such dreadful things as this is that,
without the details, the English-speaking public cannot understand
precisely what this nation is which we call Turkey. I have by no means
told the most terrible details, for a complete narration of the
sadistic orgies of which these Armenian men and women were the victims
can never be printed in an American publication . Whatever crimes the
most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever
refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination
can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people. I
am
confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such
horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the
past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of
the
Armenian race in 1915. The slaughter of the Albigenses in the early
part of the thirteenth century has always been regarded as one of the
most pitiful events in history. In these outbursts of fanaticism about
60,000 people were killed. In the massacre of St. Bartholomew about
30,000 human beings lost their lives. The Sicilian Vespers, which has
always figured as one of the most fiendish outbursts of this kind,
caused the destruction of 8,000. Volumes have been written about the
Spanish Inquisition under Torquemada, yet in the eighteen years of his
administration only a little more than 8,000 heretics were done to
death. Perhaps the one event in history that most resembles the
Armenian deportations was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by
Ferdinand and Isabella. According to Prescott 160,000 were uprooted
from their homes and scattered broadcast over Africa and Europe. Yet
all these previous persecutions seem almost trivial when we compare
them with the sufferings of the Armenians, in which at least 600,000
people were destroyed and perhaps as many as 1,000,000. And these
earlier massacres, when we compare them with the spirit that directed
the Armenian atrocities, have one feature that we can almost describe
as an excuse: they were the product of religious fanaticism and most
of
the men and women who instigated them sincerely believed that they
were
devoutly serving their Maker. Undoubtedly religious fanaticism was
an 'Impelling motive with the Turkish and Kurdish rabble who slew
Armenians as a service to Allah, but the men who really conceived the
crime had no such motive. Practically all of them were atheists, with
no more respect for Mohammedanism than for Christianity, and with them
the one motive was cold-blooded, calculating state policy.
The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have
suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of
the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could
also
tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians.
Indeed the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea. I
have already described how, in the few months preceding the European
War, the Ottoman Government began deporting its Greek subjects along
the coast of Asia Minor. These outrages aroused little interest in
Europe or the United States, yet in the space of three or four months
more than 100,000 Greeks were taken from their age-long homes in the
Mediterranean littoral and removed to the Greek Islands and the
interior. For the larger part these were bona-fide deportations; that
is, the Greek inhabitants were actually removed to new places and were
not subjected to wholesale massacre. it was probably for the reason
that the civilized world did not protest against these deportations
that the Turks afterward decided to apply the same methods on a larger
scale not only to the Greeks but to the Armenians, Syrians,
Nestorians,
and others of its subject peoples. In fact, Bedri Bey, the Prefect of
Police at Constantinople, himself told one of my secretaries that the
Turks had expelled the Greeks so successfully that they had decided to
apply the same method to all the other races in the empire.
The martyrdom of the Greeks, therefore, comprised two periods: that
antedating the war, and that which began in the early part of 1915.
The
first affected chiefly the Greeks on the seacoast of Asia Minor. The
second affected those living in Thrace and in the territories
surrounding the Sea of Marmora, the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, and
the
coast of the Black Sea. These latter, to the extent of several hundred
thousand, were sent to the interior of Asia Minor. The Turks adopted
almost identically the same procedure against the Greeks as that which
they had adopted against the Armenians. They began by incorporating
the
Greeks into the Ottoman army and then transforming them into labour
battalions, using them to build roads in the Caucasus and other scenes
of action. These Greek soldiers, just like the Armenians, died by
thousands from cold, hunger, and other privations. The same house-to-
house searches for hidden weapons took place in the Greek villages,
and
Greek men and women were beaten and tortured just as were their fellow
Armenians. The Greeks had to submit to the same forced requisitions,
which amounted in their case, as in the case of the Armenians, merely
to plundering on a wholesale scale. The Turks attempted to force the
Greek subjects to become Mohammedans; Greek girls, just like Armenian
girls, were stolen and taken to Turkish harems and Greek boys were
kidnapped and placed in Moslem households. The Greeks, just like the
Armenians, were accused of disloyalty to the Ottoman Government; the
Turks accused them of furnishing supplies to the English submarines in
the Marmora and also of acting as spies. The Turks also declared that
the Greeks were not loyal to the Ottoman Government, and that they
also
looked forward to the day when the Greeks inside of Turkey would
become
part of Greece. These latter charges were unquestionably true; that
the
Greeks, after suffering for five centuries the most unspeakable
outrages at the hands of the Turks, should look longingly to the day
when their territory should be part of the fatherland, was to be
expected. The Turks, as in the case of the Armenians, seized upon this
as an excuse for a violent onslaught on the whole race. Everywhere the
Greeks were gathered in groups and, under the so-called protection of
Turkish gendarmes, they were transported, the larger part on foot,
into
the interior. Just how many were scattered in this fashion is not
definitely known, the estimates varying anywhere from 200,000 up to
1,000,000. These caravans suffered great privations, but they were not
submitted to general massacre as were the Armenians, and this is
probably the reason why the outside world has not heard so much about
them. The Turks showed them this greater consideration not from any
motive of pity. The Greeks, unlike the Armenians, had a government
which was vitally interested in their welfare. At this time there was
a
general apprehension among the Teutonic Allies that Greece would enter
the war on the side of the Entente, and a wholesale massacre of Greeks
in Asia Minor would unquestionably have produced such a state of mind
in Greece that its pro-German king would have been unable longer to
keep his country out of the war. It was only a matter of state policy,
therefore, that saved these Greek subjects of Turkey from all the
horrors that befell the Armenians. But their sufferings are still
terrible, and constitute another chapter in the long story of crimes
for which civilization will hold the Turk responsible.
rafinn
any articles about your old colonies in africa, the terrible situation
of these people or their sufferings from hunger due to your actions in
the past... it must be interesting to imitate a hypocrite; but let me
give you hint... you must be much better then this!