TURKEY’S ISLAMISTS DENY ARMENIAN GENOCIDE (CONT)
By Adrian Morgan
Spero News
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Oct 21 2007
As one of the Sultan’s three cabinet members, the loss of Pasha
weakened the autocracy of Abdul-Hamid. Pasha had manipulated the
Sultan with fake bomb plots which were blamed on Armenians.
Sultan Abdul-Hamid II ruled in an autocratic fashion, fearful of
the break-up of his empire. He employed a secret police force, and
rebellious Kurds had been drafted as irregulars into the Hamidian
Cavalry. These had been involved in the massacres of Armenians in
the 1890s.
While Abdul-Hamid isolated himself with astrologers and favorites
in his palace, the Yildiz Koshku, a nationalist movement started
to grow amongst the intelligentsia and the military. Influenced by
Western political ideals, these individuals have become known by the
name they used in a revolution waged against Abdul-Hamid in 1908 –
the Young Turks.
These individuals had emerged in the 1890s, but had operated in
secret, out of fear of the spies of the palace secret police. Many
of the Young Turks had joined the nationalist group the Committee of
Union and Progress (Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti or CUP). This had
been formed in 1889 at the Royal Medical Academy at Constantinople
by Abdullah Cevdet and four others. In February 1907, the Sultan’s
hated chief of secret police, Fehmi Pasha (Fehim Pasha) had been
forced into exile at the request of Germany, after he had illegally
impounded a Hamburg-bound ship.
As one of the Sultan’s three cabinet members, the loss of Pasha
weakened the autocracy of Abdul-Hamid. Pasha had manipulated the Sultan
with fake bomb plots which were blamed on Armenians. Even after his
exile, he was suspected of engineering a fatal bomb attack against
a former Armenian ally, Andon Keutchoglu.
In July 1908, the Young Turks staged a revolution against Abdul-Hamid
II. Two prominent CUP members led the uprisings amongst the military
– Niazi Bey led a revolt at Resna in Macedonia, closely followed
by Enver Bey in Salonica, Greece. They issued a proclamation that
demanded Abdul-Hamid restore the constitution he had rejected in
1878. The Sultan agreed, and in December the Turkish parliament met.
At some time after the July 1908 revolution, Fehmi Pasha had been
torn pieces by a mob in Bursa, northwestern Turkey.
The Sultan (who was also Caliph) did not approve of a parliament
making decisions, and with the help of the ulemas (senior clerics),
he tried to mount a counter-revolution on April 13, 1909 (March 31
in the Gregorian calendar) in Constantinople. Forces loyal to the
Sultan marched on Constantinople, but were defeated. The Sultan’s
counter-revolution was swiftly crushed, and Abdul-Hamid was forced to
abdicate and go into exile in Salonica. His brother Reshad immediately
succeeded him as Mehmed V. At least 250 counter-revolutionaries were
tried and executed.
For Armenians, the 1908 Young Turk revolution promised them full
citizenship and a role in the voting process, and many supported it.
As explained by Yeghiazar Karapetian, a survivor of the 1915 genocide:
"The Hurriyet (Liberty) offered freedom to all the political
prisoners, after which the Armenians, Turks and Kurds would have
equal rights. Everywhere cries of joy were heard. The law of Hurriyet
put an end to the humiliation, beating, blasphemy, robbery, plunder
and contempt of the Armenians. Anyone involved in a similar behavior
would be subject to the severest punishment; he would even be liable
to be sent to the gallows. The two nations were put in a state of
complete reliance. The Armenians would have the right of free voting,
were allowed to elect and propose their delegate. This was a new
renaissance in the life of the Western Armenians. The new parliament
in its first session issued a series of laws, among them the military
service of the Armenians in the Ottoman army."
The Armenians’ hopes were never fulfilled, as there had always been
nationalist factions within the Young Turk movement that saw Armenians
as enemies of "Turkishness". In 1896, many Muslims arrested after the
Constantinople massacres that accompanied the Ottoman Bank siege were
claimed by the Ottoman authorities to be Young Turk members.
At the time of Abdul-Hamid’s counter-revolution, resentment among his
followers in the army boiled over in Circassia, southeastern Turkey,
and Armenians would become the victims. 30,000 Armenians were said to
have been killed. Attacks took place in Adana and Tarsus (Tarshish)
on the Mediterranean coast. On April 14, Professor Herbert Adams
Gibbons, a mission teacher, in Tarsus was in Adana when the massacres
began. His wife Helen stated shortly after: "Conditions both in Tarsus
and in Adana were indescribable. I saw troops that had come apparently
to protect kill and apply the torch. There were some 4,000 refugees
that came into the mission inclosure."
Later, she would write of the massacres in a book, The Red Rugs of
Tarsus. She would record (pages 115-116) incendiary shells being fired
at Armenian houses in Tarsus: "By opening our shutters cautiously
we could hear the cruel hiss of the flames and smell kerosene in the
smoke. Then the rending and crashing of the floors made a deafening
noise, and the sparks began to alight on our property.
This is the regular order of things, – kill, loot, burn. The
Armenian quarter is the most substantial part of the city. Most of
the people store cotton on the ground floor, and this, together with
liberal applications of kerosene, served to make a holocaust. Now at
evening-time we realize our own imminent danger."
In April 1912, an election saw the CUP gain power, but a military
defeat in a conflict with Italy saw its popularity wane. In July,
a coalition called the "Liberal Union" replaced the CUP. On January
23, 1913, a coup d’etat was mounted. Three leading CUP individuals –
Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Cemal – appointed themselves
the heads of the Ottoman Empire, adopting the title "Pasha".
Deportations And Massacres
The new leadership decided to consolidate Turkey as a "Turkish"
entity with its base in Anatolia. In October, 1912, the Balkan state
of Montenegro, followed by Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, had declared
war on the Ottoman Empire. Turkey’s planned strategy in this Balkan
War had failed, and all of the Empire’s territories west of Catalca
(less than 20 miles from Constantinople) had been lost. Muslim refugees
from the Balkans had poured into Turkey.
The policies of enforcing Turkishness began with deportations. In early
1914, Mahmut Celal, the secretary of the CUP in Smyrna (Izmir), was
told by Mehmet Talaat Pasha to make the West coast regions entirely
"Turkish". 200,000 Greek Orthodox were forced out by paramilitary
vigilantes, settling in the Aegean islands. In May 1914, a treaty was
signed with Greece, legitimizing "repatriations" from both countries.
The presence of the Armenians was seen by the triumvirate, particularly
by interior minister Mehmet Talaat, as an impediment to their plans to
"Turkify" the nation of Turkey. Armenians were thought to be allied
more to Russia than to Turkey. After August 1914, Turkey had entered
World War One on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
and Russia was now officially the "enemy".
At the outbreak of World War One, many young Armenian males had been
drafted into the army, though few were trusted with weapons.
Beginning in the spring of 1915, the deportations of Armenian villagers
began. Their ultimate destination was to be the deserts of northern
Syria. No transportation was provided by officials. The trek out of
Turkey which would involve a journey of hundreds of miles, was made by
most refugees on foot. Before being rounded up, many massacres took
place in these villages. In Constantinople, Armenian intellectual
leaders were hanged.
The personal accounts of survivors of these forced marches are
heart-breaking, especially as most of these had been children when
they were uprooted. Poignantly, many express nostalgia for rustic
lives on farms and orchards before witnessing horrors of massacres,
and forced deportations. Aghvani was six years old when she was
expelled from a neighbor’s house where she, her siblings and mother had
sought sanctuary in Bitlis: " We came out; the corpses of the killed
Armenians were everywhere; they had massacred all the Armenians. Those
who were still alive, were driven we didn’t know where. On the road
there was confusion and uproar. The Turkish gendarmes drew us forward
with bayonets. At night they came and took away the young women and
girls. One day they took away my mother, too, and then they brought
her back. It was good that my father was not alive and didn’t see
himself dishonored."
Shogher Abraham Tonoyan had been born in 1901 in Vardensis village
in Mush. In August 1915: "The Turkish askyars (policemen) brought
Chechen brigands from Daghestan to massacre us. They came to our
village and robbed everything. They took away our sheep, oxen
and properties. Those who were good-looking were taken away. My
aunt’s young son, who was staying with me, was also taken away,
together with all the males in the town. They gathered the young
and the elderly in the stables of the Avzut village, set fire and
burned them alive. Those cattle-sheds were as large as those of our
collective farms. They shut people in the stables of Malkhas Mardo,
they piled up stacks of hay round them, poured kerosene and set on
fire. Sixty members of our great family were burned in those stables. I
do not wish my enemy to see the days I have seen, lao! Only I and
my brother were saved. From the beginning, they took away the young
pretty brides and girls to turkize them and also they pulled away
the male infants from their mothers’ arms to make them policemen
in the future. The stable was filled with smoke and fire, people
started to cough and to choke. Mothers forgot about their children,
lao! It was a real Sodom and Gomorrah. People ran, on fire, to and
fro, struck against the walls, trod upon the infants and children
who had fallen on the ground. …What I have seen with my eyes,
lao! I don’t wish the wolves of the mountain to see! They say that,
at these distressing scenes, the Turkish mullah hung himself. During
that turmoil the greatest part of the people choked and perished. The
roof of the stable collapsed and fell upon the dead. I wish I and my
little brother had been burned down in that stable and had not seen
how sixty souls were burned down alive. I wish I had not seen the
cruel and ungodly acts of those irreligious people. The Armenians of
the neighboring villages of Vardenis, Meshakhshen, Aghbenis, Avzut,
Khevner and others were burnt in the same manner in their stables."
The account of Souren Sargsian (born 1902), is rich in detail. He
described how the total eclipse of the sun on August 21, 1914
(Julian calendar) was seen as a portent of doom. Ismail Enver Pasha
(pictured) minister of war, visited his village of Sebastia in
December 1914. Horse races took place in the leader’s honor, and
Armenian villagers brought him salt. Enver Pasha spoke of Armenians
fighting for their Ottoman fatherland, but months later when the
Pasha returned "he had a very angry appearance; he was looking at
the people with fury and didn’t speak to the people next to him."
In late April 1915, his mother was gang-raped by Turkish gendarmes,
and then his sister, as his family had given shelter to an Armenian
politician. Soon, all the fit adult men in the village were slaughtered
on the orders of the Ottomans, leaving only a few old men. Orders came
for deportation, but before they left, the soldiers promised that if
they were given gold, they would bring back prisoners from the town.
"A gendarme, a huge notebook in his hand, was supposedly writing down
the name of the prisoner, his address, his age and so on. In a few
hours the saddle-bag was almost filled with money. In the evening
they put he saddle-bag on a horse and went away. The following day
they brought a group of men about 20-30 people, surrounded with
10 gendarmes. They brought also the well-known rich man in town,
Khelkhlik. He was very fat and was seated on a big, white donkey. The
people ran forward, expecting to find their relatives. The gendarmes
drew them back and told them to form a circle. In the center of the
circle, the chief of the gendarmes fired at Khelkhlik behind his ear.
The man fell down bleeding severely, grunting and shuddering. The
gendarmes laughed whole-heartedly, and the people were silent,
horror-stricken. Then they brought forward the others, every five-six
men hugging each other and they fired at them, then they struck them
on the head with clubs until they lay dead, then they threw them into
the torrent and went away."
His descriptions of the journey, passing rivers filled with the bloated
bodies of women, stripped naked and decomposing under the July sun, the
raids by Kurds, rapes, bayonetings and decapitations, are gruesome, but
they illustrate clearly how dehumanizing the deportation process was.
In Aleppo in Syria, the Ottoman prefect was said to be alarmed at what
to do with the numbers of tattered refugees arriving. It is recorded
that on September 15, 1915, one of the three ruling "Pashas", Mehmet
Talaat, sent the Aleppo prefect the chilling message: "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."
The sending of this, and other similar telegrams, was later denied
by Mehmet Talaat. The primary source for these telegrams is a work
called Memoirs of Naim Bey, written by Aram Andonian and published in
1920. There is some doubt as to the authenticity of these purported
telegrams. It has been argued by some that once the "smoking gun" of
these telegrams is removed, claims of "genocide" cannot be made about
what happened to the Armenians. This is not true. The definition of
genocide as laid out by the United Nations in 1948 is "to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
Purgings of an entire ethnic group from a nation are de facto
genocidal. Dr Tessa Hofmann of the Free University of Berlin has
stated that in modern Turkey, only 72,000 Armenian citizens remain,
with 95% of these living in Istanbul. When one considers that before
World War One there were 2.5 to 3 million Armenians, many of whom
lived in the southeast of Turkey, where now Kurds are the largest
"minority", the terms of 1948’s description are fulfilled. The Hamidian
massacres of 1894 to 1909 were mostly carried out on the orders of the
Sultan/Caliphate and his officials. The massacres of the First World
War were carried out on the orders of local officials allied to the
CUP, and when Kurds slaughtered and robbed the caravans traveling to
Aleppo, little was done to protect the Armenians.
Official Reactions
According to a British government report, which was published in 1915
by Lord James Bryce, while the genocide was still taking place, the
Turkish government ordered at least one 1915 massacre: "Orders came
from Constantinople that all the Armenian Christians in Trebizond
(Trabzon) were to be killed. Many of the Moslems tried to save their
Christian neighbours, and offered them shelter in their houses,
but the Turkish authorities were implacable.
Obeying the orders which they had received, they hunted out all the
Christians, gathered them together, and drove a great crowd of them
down the streets of Trebizond, past the fortress, to the edge of the
sea. There they were all put on board sailing boats, carried out some
distance on the Black Sea, and there thrown overboard and drowned.
Nearly the whole Armenian population of from 8,000 to 10,000 were
destroyed – some in this way, some by slaughter, some by being sent to
death elsewhere. After that, any other story becomes credible; and
I am sorry to say that all the stories that I have received contain
similar elements of horror, intensified in some cases by stories of
shocking torture."
A German account was written by Dr Martin Niepage who was in Aleppo in
September 1915. He later visited sites such as Adana where massacres
and deportations had taken place. He stated: "The object of the
deportations is the extermination of the whole Armenian nation.
This purpose is also proved by the fact that the Turkish Government
declines all assistance from Missionaries, Sisters of Mercy and
European residents in the country, and systematically tries to stop
their work."
Niepage wrote: "What we saw with our own eyes here in Aleppo was
really only the last scene in the great tragedy of the extermination
of the Armenians. It was only a minute fraction of the horrible drama
that was being played out simultaneously in all the other provinces
of Turkey. Many more appalling things were reported by the engineers
of the Baghdad Railway, when they came back from their work on the
section under construction, or by German travellers who met the convoys
of exiles on their journeys. Many of these gentlemen had seen such
appalling sights that they could eat nothing for days.
One of them, Herr Greif, of Aleppo, reported corpses of violated women
lying about naked in heaps on the railway embankment at Tell-Abiad
and Ras-el-Ain. Another, Herr Spiecker, of Aleppo, had seen Turks
tie Armenian men together, fire several volleys of small shot with
fowling-pieces into the human mass, and go off laughing while their
victims slowly perished in frightful convulsions.
Other men had their hands tied behind their back and were rolled
down steep cliffs. Women were standing below, who slashed those
who had rolled down with knives until they were dead. A Protestant
pastor who, two years before, had given a very warm welcome to my
colleague, Doctor Graeter; when he was passing through his village,
had his finger nails torn out."
Turkey’s German allies who were aware of the fate of Armenian deportees
were advised to stay silent. One man who disobeyed such orders
was German second-lieutenant in the Sanitary Corps Armin T. Wegner,
(1886 – 1978). Wegner became stationed in the Ottoman Empire in April
1915. He took photographs, including photographs taken in the Syrian
deportation camps, where refugees were suffering from sickness and
starvation. In 1916, Wegner was transferred to Constantinople. He
brought with him his (and others’) photographic plates, which were
later used as evidence of the atrocities against Armenians.
Henry Morgenthau was US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1913
and 1916. He was in no doubt that several officials in the Turkish
government intended the Armenian deportations as "exterminations". He
wrote: "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 all 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 through 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…."
"….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."
In a letter to the US Secretary of State, Morgenthau wrote on July
15, 1915: "Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians
is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears
that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext
of reprisal against rebellion."
Winston Churchill spoke of the Armenian genocide in the UK parliament:
"In 1915 the Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out
the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia
Minor… There is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned
and executed for political reasons."
It is a shame that in the United States, Republicans and Democrats
have become divided over the nature of the genocide, to the point that
Republicans wish to flatter Turkey by arguing over the semantics of
the terms "massacre" and "genocide". Turkey is at fault here, from
its deliberate denial of uncomfortable facts.
The three CUP leaders – Ismail Enver, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Cemal –
along with several minor officials were tried in Turkey. The trials
of the three Young Turk "Pashas" took place in absentia. The three
"Pashas" died without receiving judicial punishment for their crimes.
At the end of the First World War, Ismail Enver had fled to Germany
on a boat, accompanied by Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Cemal. On July 5,
1919 the three were found guilty of taking Turkey into World War One,
and of committing massacres against Armenians. They were sentenced
to death.
Ismail Enver died fighting the Soviets in Tajikistan on August
4, 1922. Mehmet Talaat was gunned down by an Armenian, Soghomon
Tehlirian, in Berlin in 1921. Ahmed Cemal was shot dead in Tiblisi
on July 21, 1922 by two Armenians, Stepan Dzaghiguian and Bedros
Der-Boghossian. Talaat’s and Cemal’s assassins belonged to the group
called Operation Nemesis.
Most historians accept the events that began in 1915 as "genocide".
In Turkey, one brave historian has examined Ottoman documentary
evidence from the time, and has concluded that there was an Armenian
genocide. This historian, Taner Akcam, has been jailed for publishing
his findings, under Article 301 of the Turkish penal Code – "insulting
Turkishness". A recent interview with him can be found here. During
his researches, Akcam found 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’."
Occasionally the remains of victims of the Armenian genocide become
uncovered. In Xirabebaba in southeastern Turkey on October 17, 2006,
some Kurds were digging a grave when they uncovered a cache of skeletal
remains in a cave. About 300 individuals were found. It was assumed
that these were the 150 Armenian and 120 Syriac males from the adjacent
town of Dara (Oguz) who had been slaughtered on June 14, 1915.
The news was published in a Kurdish newspaper, but Turkish army
officials arrived and told the villagers to cover the entrance to the
cave, and claimed that stories that the bodies were Armenian were
"lies". Local police demanded to know who had leaked the discovery
to the press.
Turkey refuses to accept that the Armenian Genocide took place,
and expects its allies to collude with its campaigns of lies and
disinformation. Perhaps the House of Congress is not the best place to
discuss aspects of history, but denying history to placate a petulant
ally is undignified. Turkey still wants to join the European Union,
even though this institution has already ruled that the Armenian
Genocide did take place. The protestations and blackmailing from
Turkey’s Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and its president
Abdullah Gul should be ignored, or responded to in kind. If Turkey
threatens US interests because the US does not officially follow its
false propaganda, Turkey should realize that it has far more to lose
from a breakdown of relations with its principle NATO ally.
This article was also published at FamilySecurityMatters.org
Adrian Morgan is a British based writer and artist who has written for
Western Resistance since its inception. He has previously contributed
to various publications, including the Guardian and New Scientist
and is a former Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society.
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