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October 19, 2007

Turkey's Islamists Deny Armenian Genocide (3 of 3)

This article by Adrian Morgan (Giraldus Cambrensis of Western Resistance) appeared today in Family Security Matters and is reproduced with their permission.

Turkey And The Armenian Genocide - Uncomfortable Truths That Must Be Faced

Rise of The Young Turks

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 (pictured), 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.

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.

Adrian Morgan

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Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at October 19, 2007 7:17 AM

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