The
Forgotten Holocaust
By Robert Fisk
29 August, 2007
The
Independent
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?"
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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