ece
Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust
The killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First
World War remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious episodes of the
20th century. Robert Fisk visits Yerevan, and unearths hitherto unpublished
images of the first modern genocide
Published: 28 August 2007
The photographs, never before published, capture the horrors of the first
Holocaust of the 20th century. They show a frightened people on the move –
men, women and children, some with animals, others on foot, walking over
open ground outside the city of Erzerum in 1915, at the beginning of their
death march. We know that none of the Armenians sent from Erzerum – in what
is today north-eastern Turkey – survived. Most of the men were shot, the
children – including, no doubt, the young boy or girl with a headscarf in
the close-up photograph – died of starvation or disease. The young women
were almost all raped, the older women beaten to death, the sick and babies
left by the road to die.
The unique photographs are a stunning witness to one of the most terrible
events of our times. Their poor quality – the failure of the camera to cope
with the swirl and movement of the Armenian deportees in the close-up
picture, the fingerprint on the top of the second – lend them an undeniable
authenticity. They come from the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which
was in 1915 providing finance for the maintenance and extension of the
Turkish railway system. One incredible photograph – so far published in only
two specialist magazines, in Germany and in modern-day Armenia – actually
shows dozens of doomed Armenians, including children, crammed into cattle
trucks for their deportation. The Turks stuffed 90 Armenians into each of
these wagons – the same average the Nazis achieved in their transports to
the death camps of Eastern Europe during the Jewish Holocaust.
Hayk Demoyan, director of the grey-stone Museum of the Armenian Genocide in
the foothills just outside Yerevan, the capital of present-day Armenia,
stares at the photographs on his computer screen in bleak silence. A
university lecturer in modern Turkish history, he is one of the most dynamic
Armenian genocide researchers inside the remains of Armenia, which is all
that was left after the Turkish slaughter; it suffered a further 70 years of
terror as part of the Soviet Union. "Yes, you can have these pictures, he
says. "We are still discovering more. The Germans took photographs and these
pictures even survived the Second World War. Today, we want our museum to be
a place of collective memory, a memorisation of trauma. Our museum is for
Turks as well as Armenians. This is also [the Turks’] history."
The story of the last century’s first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used
this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of
six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey
to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany’s
persecution of the Jews idle ones. Turkey’s reign of terror against the
Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks
spoke publicly of the need to "resettle" their Armenian population – as the
Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe – the true intentions of
Enver Pasha’s Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite
clear. On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document
exists) Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction
to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands
of Armenians in his city. "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." These words are almost identical to those
used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.
Taner Akcam, a prominent – and extremely brave – Turkish scholar who has
visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to
authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from
his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives 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". This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi
Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to
the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva
that they were being well cared for and well fed.
Ottoman Turkey’s attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in the
Middle East – the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu,
became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from
paganism in AD301 – is a history of almost unrelieved horror at the hands of
Turkish policemen and soldiers, and Kurdish tribesmen.
In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting Turkey’s
Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several historians –
including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed venture at
Gallipoli – have asked whether the Turkish victory there did not give them
the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians of Asia Minor, a people
of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood, with what Churchill called
"merciless fury". Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people’s
persecution and deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of
Europe that show the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians
of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then
to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province. The men would be executed by firing
squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages, the women and children
then driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or
gang-rape. In one mass grave I myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in
present-day Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young
people – their teeth were perfect. I even found a 100-year-old Armenian
woman who had escaped the slaughter there and identified the hillside for
me.
Hayk Demoyan sits in his air-conditioned museum office, his computer purring
softly on the desk, and talks of the need to memorialise this huge
suffering. "You can see it in the writing of each survivor," he says. "When
visitors come here from the diaspora – from America and Europe, Lebanon and
Syria, people whose parents or grandparents died in our genocide – our staff
feel with these people. They see these people become very upset, there are
tears and some get a bit crazy after seeing the exhibition. This can be very
difficult for us, psychologically. The stance of the current Turkish
government [in denying the genocide] is proving they are proud of what their
ancestors did. They are saying they are pleased with what the Ottomans did.
Yet today, we are hearing that a lot of places in the world are like
goldmines of archive materials to continue our work – even here in Yerevan.
Every day, we are coming across new photographs or documents."
The pictures Demoyan gives to The Independent were taken by employees of
Deutsche Bank in 1915 to send to their head office in Berlin as proof of
their claims that the Turks were massacring their Armenian population. They
can be found in the Deutsche Bank Historical Institute – Oriental Section
(the photograph of the Armenian deportees across the desert published in The
Independent today, for example, is registered photo number 1704 and the 1915
caption reads: "Deportation Camp near Erzerum.")
A German engineer in Kharput sent back a now-famous photogaph of Armenian
men being led to their execution by armed Turkish police officers. The
banking officials were appalled that the Ottoman Turks were using – in
effect – German money to send Armenians to their death by rail. The new
transportation system was supposed to be used for military purposes, not for
genocide.
German soldiers sent to Turkey to reorganise the Ottoman army also witnessed
these atrocities. Armin Wegner, an especially courageous German second
lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, took a series of
photographs of dead and dying Armenian women and children. Other German
officers regarded the genocide with more sinister interest. Some of these
men, as Armenian scholar Vahakn Dadrian discovered, turn up 26 years later
as more senior officers conducting the mass killing of Jews in
German-occupied Russia.
Computers have transformed the research of institutions like the Yerevan
museum. Poorly funded scholarship has been replaced by a treasure-house of
information that Demoyan is going to publish in scholarly magazines. "We
have information that some Germans who were in Armenia in 1915 started
selling genocide pictures for personal collections when they returned
home… In Russia, a man from St Petersburg also informed us that he had
seen handwritten memoirs from 1940 in which the writer spoke of Russian
photographs of Armenian bodies in Van and Marash in 1915 and 1916." Russian
Tsarist troops marched into the eastern Turkish city of Van and briefly
liberated its doomed Armenian inhabitants. Then the Russians retreated after
apparently taking these pictures of dead Armenians in outlying villages.
Stalin also did his bit to erase the memory of the massacres. The Armenian
Tashnag party, so prominent in Armenian politics in the Ottoman empire, was
banned by the Soviets. "In the 1930s," Demoyan says, "everyone destroyed
handwritten memoirs of the genocide, photographs, land deeds – otherwise
they could have been associated by the Soviet secret police with Tashnag
material." He shakes his head at this immeasurable loss. "But now we are
finding new material in France and new pictures taken by humanitarian
workers of the time. We know there were two or three documentary films from
1915, one shot approvingly by a Kurdish leader to show how the Turks "dealt"
with Armenians. There is huge new material in Norway of the deportations in
Mush from a Norwegian missionary who was there in 1915."
There is, too, a need to archive memoirs and books that were published in
the aftermath of the genocide but discarded or forgotten in the decades that
followed. In 1929, for example, a small-circulation book was published in
Boston entitled From Dardanelles to Palestine by Captain Sarkis Torossian.
The author was a highly decorated officer in the Turkish army who fought
with distinction and was wounded at Gallipoli. He went on to fight the
Allies in Palestine but was appalled to find thousands of dying Armenian
refugees in the deserts of northern Syria. In passages of great pain, he
discovers his sister living in rags and tells how his fiancée Jemileh died
in his arms. "I raised Jemileh in my arms, the pain and terror in her eyes
melted until they were bright as stars again, stars in an oriental night…
and so she died, as a dream passing." Torossian changed sides, fought with
the Arabs, and even briefly met Lawrence of Arabia – who did not impress
him.
"The day following my entry into Damascus, the remainder of the Arab army
entered along with their loads and behind them on a camel came one they
called… the paymaster. This camel rider I learned was Captain Lawrence…
Captain Lawrence to my knowledge did nothing to foment the Arab revolution,
nor did he play any part in the Arab military tactics. When first I heard of
him he was a paymaster, nothing more. And so he was to Prince Emir Abdulah
(sic), brother of King Feisal, whom I knew. I do not write in disparagement.
I write as a fighting man. Some must fight and others pay." Bitterness, it
seems, runs deep. Torossian eventually re-entered Ottoman Turkey as an
Armenian officer with the French army of occupation in the Cilicia region.
But Kemalist guerrillas attacked the French, who then, Torossian suspects,
gave weapons and ammunition to the Turks to allow the French army safe
passage out of Cilicia. Betrayed, Torossian fled to relatives in America.
There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians appear to
care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day Armenia.
Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian, actually told me
that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does not think of the
genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an Armenian friend is that 70
years of Stalinism and official Soviet silence on the genocide deleted the
historical memory in eastern Armenia – the present-day state of Armenia.
Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia – in what is
now Turkey – lost their families and lands and still seek acknowledgement
and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians did not lose their
lands. Demoyan disputes all this.
"The fundamental problem, I think, is that in the diaspora many don’t want
to recognise our statehood," he says. "We are surrounded by two countries –
Turkey and Azerbaijan – and we have to take our security into account; but
not to the extent of damaging memory. Here we must be accurate. I have
changed things in this museum. There were inappropriate things, comments
about ‘hot-bloodied’people, all the old clichés about Turks – they have now
gone. The diaspora want to be the holders of our memories – but 60 per cent
of the citizens of the Armenian state are "repatriates" – Armenians
originally from the diaspora, people whose grandparents originally came from
western Armenia. And remember that Turkish forces swept though part of
Armenia after the 1915 genocide – right through Yerevan on their way to
Baku. According to Soviet documentation in 1920, 200,000 Armenians died in
this part of Armenia, 180,000 of them between 1918 and 1920." Indeed, there
were further mass executions by the Turks in what is now the Armenian state.
At Ghumri – near the centre of the devastating earthquake that preceded
final liberation from the Soviet Union – there is a place known as the
"Gorge of Slaughter", where in 1918 a whole village was massacred.
But I sensed some political problems up at the Yerevan museum –
international as well as internal. While many Armenians acknowledge that
their countrymen did commit individual revenge atrocities – around Van, for
example – at the time of the genocide, a heavy burden of more modern
responsibility lies with those who fought for Armenia against the Azeris in
Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. This mountainous region east of the
Armenian state saw fierce and sometimes cruel fighting in which Armenians
massacred Turkish Azeri villagers. The Independent was one of the newspapers
that exposed this.
Yet when I arrive at the massive genocide memorial next to the museum, I
find the graves of five "heroes" of the Karabakh war. Here lies, for
instance, Musher "Vosht" Mikhoyan, who was killed in 1991, and the remains
of Samuel "Samo" Kevorkian, who died in action in 1992. However upright
these warriors may have been, should those involved in the ghastly war in
Kharabakh be associated with the integrity and truth of 1915? Do they not
demean the history of Armenia’s greatest suffering? Or were they – as I
suspect – intended to suggest that the Karabakh war, which Armenia won, was
revenge for the 1915 genocide? It’s as if the Israelis placed the graves of
the 1948 Irgun fighters – responsible for the massacres of Palestinians at
Deir Yassin and other Arab villages – outside the Jewish Holocaust memorial
at Yad Vashem near Jerusalem.
Officials later explain to me that these Kharabakh grave-sites were
established at a moment of great emotion after the war and that today –
while they might be inappropriate – it is difficult to ask the families of
"Vosht" and "Samo" and the others to remove them to a more suitable
location. Once buried, it is difficult to dig up the dead. Similarly, among
the memorials left in a small park by visiting statesmen and politicians,
there is a distinct difference in tone. Arab leaders have placed plaques in
memory of the "genocide". Less courageous American congressman – who do not
want to offend their Turkish allies – have placed plaques stating merely
that they "planted this tree". The pro-American Lebanese Prime Minister
Rafiq Hariri left his own memorial less than a year before he was
assassinated in 2005. "Tree of Peace," it says. Which rather misses the
point.
And yet it is the work of archivists that will continue to establish the
truth. In Yerevan you can now buy excellent witness testimonies of the
genocide by Westerners who were present during the Armenian Holocaust. One
of them is by Tacy Atkinson, an American missionary who witnessed the
deportation of her Armenian friends from the town of Kharput. On 16 July
1915, she recorded in her secret diary how "a boy has arrived in Mezreh in a
bad state nervously. As I understand it he was with a crowd of women and
children from some village… who joined our prisoners who went out June
23… The boy says that in the gorge this side of Bakir Maden the men and
women were all shot and the leading men had their heads cut off
afterwards… He escaped… and came here. His own mother was stripped and
robbed and then shot… He says the valley smells so awful that one can
hardly pass by now."
For fear the Turkish authorities might discover her diaries, Atkinson
sometimes omitted events. In 1924 – when her diary, enclosed in a sealed
trunk, at last returned to the United States, she wrote about a trip made to
Kharput by her fellow missionaries. "The story of this trip I did not dare
write," she scribbled in the margin. "They saw about 10,000 bodies."
Anatomy of a massacre: How the genocide unfolded
By Simon Usborne
An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and 1917, either at the
hands of Turkish forces or of starvation. Exact figures are unknown, but
each larger blob – at the site of a concentration camp or massacre –
potentially represents the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
The trail of extermination, and dispute about exactly what happened,
stretches back more than 90 years to the opening months of the First World
War, when some of the Armenian minority in the east of the beleaguered
Ottoman Empire enraged the ruling Young Turks coalition by siding with
Russia.
On 24 April 1915, Turkish troops rounded up and killed hundreds of Armenian
intellectuals. Weeks later, three million Armenians were marched from their
homes – the majority towards Syria and modern-day Iraq – via an estimated 25
concentration camps.
In 1915, The New York Times reported that "the roads and the Euphrates are
strewn with corpses of exiles… It is a plan to exterminate the whole
Armenian people." Winston Churchill would later call the forced exodus an
"administrative holocaust".
Yet Turkey, while acknowledging that many Armenians died, disputes the 1.5
million toll and insists that the acts of 1915-17 did not constitute what is
now termed genocide – defined by the UN as a state-sponsored attempt to
"destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious
group". Instead, Ankara claims the deaths were part of the wider war, and
that massacres were committed by both sides.
Several countries have formally recognised genocide against the Armenians
(and, in the case of France, outlawed its denial), but it remains illegal in
Turkey to call for recognition. As recently as last year, the Turkish
foreign ministry dismissed genocide allegations as "unfounded".
One authority on extermination who did recognise the Armenian genocide was
Adolf Hitler. In a 1939 speech, in which he ordered the killing,
"mercilessly and without compassion", of Polish men, women and children, he
concluded: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the
Armenians?"
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2901136.