Speaker describes children’s fate during the Armenian genocide
By Patrick Gordon, Daily Editorial Board
The Tufts Daily, MA
Oct 12 2004
Glendale – Dr. Hilmar Kaiser explored a new facet of the disputed
Armenian genocide in a lecture last Thursday that discussed how young
Armenian children were able to escape death, though usually at the
expense of parting with their parents.
“Armenian children had a strong chance of survival” during the period
of the starvation, abuse and loss of more than a million Armenians
that took place in the early 20th century, said Kaiser, a German
scholar of the genocide.
Kaiser described the genocide’s devastating nature on Turkey’s wider
Armenian population using authentic and often graphic photos of
the genocide.
Armenian girls and boys younger than age 13 were often spared,
however, because the Turkish government felt it was “possible for
Armenian children to be assimilated into Turkish culture,” Kaiser said.
Marriage into a Turkish family would save girls, especially younger
girls, from a more disastrous fate in the genocide’s death marches
across the Anatolia region.
“A saving grace for Armenian girls is the Turkish social structure,”
Kaiser said. “An Armenian woman who married a Turkish man automatically
became Turkish by association.”
The Turkish government also provided funds specifically to “feed
the Armenian children,” because they were also useful laborers,
Kaiser said.
For this reason, there also “was a clear pattern for survival of boys”
because they were needed to “work as shepherds, camel herders and
farmhands,” Kaiser said.
Armenian children were spared because of their importance in Turkey’s
textile industry as well. Their small hands could reach into the
spokes of the spinning machines to retrieve bits of unprocessed
cotton, making them “essential to the industry. Without them, the
textile industry surely would have collapsed,” Kaiser said.
But hundreds of thousands of older Armenians were removed from their
villages and provinces within Turkish territories, supposedly to be
“relocated” to distant and isolated pockets of the empire such as Azur.
Instead, the Armenians were subject to a “systematic exposure to
starvation, dehydration and contagious diseases,” Kaiser said.
The Turkish government still denies to this day that there was a
genocide, claiming that Armenian populations were simply removed from a
“war zones.”
But some Armenian children, though they were able to avoid the death
marches and forced relocations, were exposed to another extreme
hardship: prostitution.
Kaiser said that “there was rampant child prostitution and rape along
Turkey’s railroads during this period. Children eight years old and
even younger were prostituted in these regions.”
The origins of the genocide lie partly in the surging fear within
Ottoman Turkey that its Armenian population had sided with the Russian
forces during World War I.
The immediate genocidal period lasted from about April 1915 until
Sept. 1916, according to Kaiser. It began with the executions of
hundreds of Armenian leaders who had been fooled into gathering
in Istanbul.
Although Kaiser said that conflicting data and statistics make it
difficult to determine precisely how many Armenians were murdered
during the genocide, “the Armenian population could have suffered
about 1.5 million losses.”
Kaiser defined a “loss” not simply as a death, but rather as a
functioning member of the Armenian community who, for whatever reason,
could no longer rejoin it after the genocide.
“How many people were ravaged by disease and made infertile? How
many were reduced to insanity by the death marches? How many Armenian
women were married into Turkish families?” Kaiser said.
And though Kaiser stressed that the genocide was rapidly planned and
carried out by the Turkish government, he said that “there was no
long-term conspiracy to kill Armenians.”
Rather, “it occurred when the Turks had every reason to believe that
their last hour had come [as a result of World War I].”
“[It was more] the Turks saying ‘we’ll take care of the Armenians
before we go down ourselves,'” Kaiser said.
Kaiser was invited to speak by the Tufts Armenian Club. About 30 people
attended the discussion, which took place Thursday night in Eaton Hall.