Exclusive: Why Does a Close U.S. Ally Deny Its Genocide? (Part Two of Three)


Author: Adrian Morgan

Date Published: 2007-10-15


 

Predominately Muslim Turkey insists that their genocide of Christian Armenians not be identified as such. Why? And why is America’s reaction split along party lines? FSM Contributing Editor Adrian Morgan continues to disclose the answers in the second installment of this riveting account. 

Why Does a Close U.S. Ally Deny Its Genocide?

(Part Two of Three)

 

By Adrian Morgan

 

The Atrocities of August 1894

 

"A number of able-bodied young Armenians were captured, bound, covered with brushwood and burned alive. A number of Armenians, variously estimated, but less than a hundred, surrendered themselves and pled for mercy. Many of them were shot down on the spot and the remainder were dispatched with sword and bayonet."

 

"A lot of women, variously estimated from 60 to 160 in number, were shut up in a church, and the soldiers were 'let loose' among them. Many of them were outraged to death and the remainder dispatched with sword and bayonet. A lot of young women were collected as spoils of war, Two stories are told. 1. That they were carried off to the harems of their Moslem captors. 2. That they were offered Islam and the harems of their Moslem captors; refusing, they were slaughtered. Children were placed in a row, one behind another, and a bullet fired down the line, apparently to see how many could be dispatched with one bullet. Infants and small children were piled one on the other and their heads struck off. Houses were surrounded by soldiers, set on fire, and the inmates forced back into the flames at the point of the bayonet as they tried to escape."

 

 "In another village fifty choice women were set aside and urged to change their faith and become hanums in Turkish harems, but they indignantly refused to deny Christ, preferring the fate of their fathers and husbands. People were crowded into houses which were then set on fire. In one instance a little boy ran out of the flames, but was caught on a bayonet and thrown back"

 

The above are accounts of massacres of Armenian villagers. These took place in the district of Sassoun (Sassun) in southeastern Anatolia near Lake Van, in August 1894. They had taken place following false rumors of an uprising which developed in the spring. The Sassoun massacres were duplicated in the neighboring districts of Bitlis and Mush.

 

In March 1895 an inquiry committee was held in London, with details reported in the Daily Telegraph newspaper. An Armenian priest and his son were ordered to sign a document, claiming that the massacre at Sassoun had been carried out only by Kurds, and clearing the Turkish authorities of all blame. When they refused, heated iron triangles were placed around their necks. The pair was too ill to testify before the committee.

 

Kurds had been involved in the Sassoun massacre, but the strategy was concocted and put into effect by Turkish soldiers. In adjacent Mush district, "a witness hiding in the oak scrub saw soldiers gouge out the eyes of two priests, who in horrible agony implored their tormentors to kill them. But the soldiers compelled them to dance while screaming in pain, and presently bayoneted them."

 

An account of the Bitlis massacre, published in 1895, stated (page 63):

 

"As soon as the Pasha of Bitlis sent word to Constantinople that the Armenians were in revolt, without waiting for proof, the Turkish troops were sent to the scene with orders to suppress the revolt - orders which they knew they must interpret as meaning the extermination of whole villages if they would please the Sultan. After wholesale butchery, Zeki Pasha reported that, 'not finding any rebellion, we cleared the country so that none should occur in the future.' This stroke of policy was afterward praised in the Court as an act of patriotism."

 

The massacres of 1894 would be repeated, becoming more ferocious and claiming the lives of more people, over the next two years.

 

The Ottomans

 

The regions within Turkey's current borders have seen various cultures and civilizations arise and become replaced by others. The "Turks" are only the latest of a long line of invaders who moved into the region. 9,000 years ago Neolithic farming peoples at Çatal Hüyük formed a complex community. Almost 3,000 years ago Assyrians entered the region, and the Hittites developed a civilization in Anatolia until around 900 BC. Later, Medes (probable ancestors of the Kurds), Persians, Phrygians, Lydians, Armenians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines flourished in the region.

 

The Turkish-speaking people (Western Turks) arrived in Anatolia in large numbers in the 11th  century AD, and their consolidation of power would hasten the end of the Byzantine Empire based at Constantinople. The language of the Western Turks gradually replaced the indigenous Indo-European languages of the region. The nomadic Turkic peoples originated in the Altai mountain regions in Central Asia, but from the 5th century AD onwards they had engaged in mass migrations. Turkic peoples are found in China (Uighirs) and and Siberia (Yakut). The Western Turks founded the Ottoman dynasty at the Western end of (modern) Turkey. From 1299 until its demise in 1924, this dynasty was known as the Ottoman Empire.

 

In 301 AD, Armenia had been the first nation in the world to officially adopt Christianity. As a distinct culture with an Indo-European language, Armenia had thrived in the mountains of Asia Minor from the 6th century BC. In the 16th century, Armenia lost its independence and was swallowed up by the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman aims were expansionist and warlike, and hostile to independent Christian nations. Sultan Bayezid I, nicknamed Yilderim or "Lightning," who ruled from 1389 to 1402, famously promised to feed his horse from the altar of St. Peter’s in Rome.

 

At its height in 1683, the Ottoman Empire controlled territories stretching to the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea in the East, the land surrounding the Red Sea (including Mecca and Medina and Yemen) in the south, and the North African coast as far as Algeria in the West. In the north, it controlled the Crimea and all the land westwards nearly as far as Vienna. An attempt to invade Vienna itself was defeated by John Sobieski, king of Poland, on September 12, 1683. With more conflicts Hungary was freed from Ottoman rule, confirmed in the treaty of Karlowitz in 1699.

 

In the latter half of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was a diminished force. European imperialism had broken its hold on territories in North Africa, and European regions had declared their independence. Under Sultan Mahmud II (ruled 1808 – 1839), reforms and attempts to socially and economically modernize the Empire had been made, but these did not stem the decline. Greece successfully fought for and achieved independence in 1829, with its territorial borders formalized in a treaty in 1832. Several Balkan regions declared their independence in 1875, and on April 24, 1877, Alexander II of Russia declared war on Turkey.

 

Abdul-Hamid II and the Hamidian Massacres

 

 

In 1876, 34-year-old Abdul-Hamid II became the Sultan. Soon after taking power, he issued the first Imperial constitution on December 23, 1876. This constitution had been originally drafted by the grand vizier, Midhat Pasha. It allowed equal judicial rights for all citizens, and initiated a two-house parliament. Abdul-Hamid preferred to rule as a despot and when the Russo-Turkish war started he dismissed Pasha in February 1877, and in 1878 he abolished the constitution.

 

The Russian conflict ended with Turkey acknowledging defeat. As a result, on March 3, 1878 the Empire officially lost the territories of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania in the Treaty of San Stefano. Bosnia-Herzegovina was granted autonomy and Bulgaria was placed under Russian protection under this treaty. The Treaty of Berlin, signed on July 13, 1878 by the Turks, Russians and European powers, lessened the Turks' financial debt to the victors and saw Bosnia-Herzegovina given to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

 

Immediately before Abdul-Hamid's reign, the Armenians had lived peaceably under Ottoman rule. As Christians, they were second-class citizens and had to pay the "jizya" tax, but they were not regarded as subject to persecutions. In 1856 an edict called the Hatti Humayoun, issued by Sultan Abdul Medjid in 1856, guaranteed Christians rights never seen before under the Ottomans. Armenians wanted to be granted more freedoms under the Treaty of Berlin, which saw Batum (modern Armenia and parts of Georgia) ceded to Russia. Article 61 of the treaty guaranteed Armenians protection from attacks by Kurds and Circassians (who lived in the south-east of Turkey). Article 62 of the treaty demanded that people of all religions could work and travel freely throughout Turkey.

 

With these conditions not fulfilled, a radical group known as the Huntchagists emerged among the various Armenian populations, who lived in scattered locations in Turkey, with its apparent headquarters in Athens. In 1893 a U.S. missionary condemned this revolutionary movement. Cyrus Hamlin quoted an Armenian who said of their motives (p. 242): "These Huntchagist bands, organized all over the empire, will watch their opportunities to kill Turks and Kurds, set fire to their villages and then make their escape into the mountains. The enraged Moslems will then rise and fall upon the defenseless Armenians and slaughter them with such barbarities that Russia will enter in the name of humanity and Christian civilization and take possession." The Huntchagists aimed to attack U.S. Protestant missionary centers in central Turkey.

 

The American missionaries were allowed in central Turkey since 1844, and they were to prove reliable witnesses to the deteriorating situation in Turkey, and also the first massacres of Armenians. The Huntchagist movement disintegrated after 1896, but Hamlin's testimony was cited in a letter to the New York Times of August 23, 1895. This letter tried to discredit the genuine massacre which took place at Sassoun, even though Hamlin had specifically blamed the Ottoman government for carrying out the Sassoun atrocities.

 

In 1896, Reverend Edwin Munsell Bliss published a book called Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities. He acknowledged the destructive elements of the Huntchagists, (page 336) and later noted that some revolutionaries, whether Huntchagists or not, sought to draw attention to their aims of a separate state. On January 5, 1893, placards were erected in Marsovan and Yuzgat, and indiscriminate arrests followed. Disturbances ensued in Yuzgat, Gemerek, Cesarea, and elsewhere, and the Turkish authorities reacted punitively, rounding up and torturing suspects. The polarization of communities had begun in earnest.

 

Rumors of a Hutchagist presence led to the Sassoun massacre, the first of the major atrocities against Armenian villagers. An investigative report into these massacres claimed (page 14) that Armenian Christians were being subjected to forcible conversions to Islam. In January, 1896 the local Ottoman authorities in Kharpout and Diarbekir told "converted" villagers that they should not admit to being Muslim if questioned. Conversions were happening in the provinces in Siras, Kharpout, Diarbekir, Betlis and Van. Priests and pastors lived in hiding, lest they be attacked for interfering with the forcible conversion of villagers. In 28 villages in the district of Kharpout, there had been no Christian worship since November of 1895.

 

"Another indirect method of destroying the Christian communities in the provinces lay in the systematic debauching of Christian women as though to destroy their self-respect and undermine their religious ethic. At Tamzara in the district of Shaska Kara Hussar, in the province of Livas, all the men were killed in the massacres early in November, of a prosperous Armenian population of fifteen hundred only about three hundred starving, half naked women and children remained. Trustworthy information said that the most horrible feature of their situation was that passing Mohammedan soldiery or civilian travelers attacked them and outraged them in their homes without hesitation or restraint."

 

 

On October 1, 1895 200 Armenians tried to make a protest in Constantinople, and were ordered by police to disperse. Panic broke out, and fearing an uprising, mosques encouraged reprisals. The following night, at least 70 Armenians were killed in the capital. At Trebizond (Trabzon) on the Black Sea coast in the east, a local Pasha was attacked, and soldiers were sent on regular foot patrols around the city. On October 8th, these soldiers began shooting Armenian men, and shops were looted. On October 30, 1895 at Erzerum, soldiers and Turkish civilians had started firing at Armenians. After attacks that lasted two days, many of the bodies were mutilated and stripped. One man's forearms had been cut off, his upper arms and chest skinned. A British consul wrote that 1,200 people had been killed, and 512 wounded. The bodies were buried en masse in trenches (pictured above).

 

On November 11, 1895 the village of Husenik near the eastern city of Harput was attacked by soldiers, some of whom dressed as Kurds. 200 Armenian villagers were killed. These marched on the city where around 100 Armenians were killed. Shortly after, the city of Arabkir was attacked, with 2,000 Armenians killed. Attacks also took place on numerous small villages. In many of these villages the women were carried off. At the town of Diarbekir, 2,000 were killed, at Chunkush 680 Armenians were slaughtered.

 

British missionary Helen B. Harris  wrote on April 24, 1896 from the American College in Aintab: "There were about 300 killed here, November 16, 1895, and numbers mutilated, hands and right arms cut off, and eyes gouged out, to render the poor people helpless. Dr. Fuller says when they first got among these, the day after, the massacre, it was awful hearing them crying for death to end their sufferings." On November 18, 1895, a massacre of thousands took place at Marash. On December 28th, another massacre of Armenians took place at Urfa with at least 3,000 lives lost.

 

There were more massacres at that time, and in many cases Armenian men were forced to convert or die. In Birejik in January 1896, about 96 men converted to Islam, and an equal number were killed. When one elderly man refused to convert to Islam, live coals were placed on his body. As he lay in pain, a Bible was held over him, and his tormentors asked him to read the passages of salvation that he had trusted in.

 

In the summer of 1896 one event took place which would instigate a catastrophic crackdown on the Armenian population of Turkey. The main office of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople was raided by a group of 26 Armenian revolutionaries on August 26th. Nine members of the group were killed in the initial raid, including their leader Babgien Siuni, and guards were shot. The remaining raiders, members of the Dashtun party, took 140 bank workers hostage.

 

The raiders intended to draw international attention to the plight of Armenians in Turkey, but before the situation came to a resolution, recriminations against Armenians began, with 7,000 people killed by angry Turkish citizenry in Constantinople. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Maghakia Ormanian, excommunicated the bank raiders, but this did not quell general Turkish anger at the Armenian communities.

 

The massacres at the end of the 19th century, which were carried out with the connivance and approval of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, are collectively known as the Hamidian massacres. In 1896, Abdul-Hamid was chastened by international condemnations, and his orders to attack and forcibly convert Armenians stopped. The attacks lessened, but only for a while. Soon, another campaign of massacres would take place. This campaign was instigated not by Abdul-Hamid but by a new breed of Turkish political activists, who would go on to commit the genocide of 1915. These activists were known as the Young Turks.

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FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Adrian Morgan is a British based writer and artist who has written for Western Resistance since its inception. He also writes for Spero News. 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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