ROBERT FISK: THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST
The Independent/UK
Published: 28 August 2007
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hitherto unpublished images of the first modern genocide.
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
appea r 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?"
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