The Great War for Civilisation (66 page)

What Mayreni was describing was no isolated war crime. It was a routine. At the Kemakh Gorge, Kurds and troops of the Turkish 86th Cavalry Brigade butchered more than 20,000 women and children. At Bitlis, the Turks drowned more than 900 women in the Tigris River. So great was the slaughter near the town of Erzinjan that the thousands of corpses in the Euphrates formed a barrage that forced the river to change course for a hundred metres.

The American ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, himself a Jew, described what happened next in a telegram to the U.S. State Department:

Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place.

Mayreni Kaloustian, along with her mother Khatoun, her sisters Megad, Dilabar, Heriko and Arzoun and her two youngest brothers Drjivan and Feryad, set off on the death march from Mush the day after the men were murdered at the river.

First we travelled in carts hauled by bulls. Then we had to walk for so many weeks. There were thousands of us. We begged food and water. It was hot. We walked from the spring and we did not stop until St. Jacob's Day, in December. I was only twelve and one day I lost my mother. I did not see her again. We went to Sivas. Then the Russians came, the army of the Tsar, and they reached Mush and blew up the bridge where my father was killed. We tried to go back to Mush but the Russians were defeated. Then my brothers and sisters and I all caught cholera. They died except for Arzoun and myself. I lost her, too. I was taken to an orphanage. You can never know what our life was like. The Turks let the bandits do what they wanted. The Kurds were allowed to kidnap the beautiful girls. I remember they took them away on horses, slung over the saddles. They took children. The Turks made us pay for water.

It is now largely forgotten that the Turks encouraged one of their Muslim ethnic groups to join them in this slaughter. Thus tens of thousands of Armenians were massacred—amid scenes of rape and mass pillage—by the Kurds, the very people upon whom Saddam Hussein would attempt genocide just over sixty years later. On the banks of the Habur River not far from Margada, Armenian women were sold to Kurds and Arab Muslims. Survivors related that the men paid 20 piastres for virgins but only 5 piastres for children or women who had already been raped. The older women, many of them carrying babies, were driven into the river to drown.

In 1992, 160 kilometres south of Margada, in a hamlet of clay huts 30 kilometres from the Iraqi frontier—so close that in 1991 the Syrian villagers could watch Saddam's Scud missiles trailing fire as they were launched into the night skies above their homes—I found old Serpouhi Papazian, survivor of the Armenian genocide, widow of an Arab Muslim who rescued her at Deir es-Zour. A stick-like woman of enormous energy, with bright eyes and no teeth, she thought she was a hundred years old—she was in fact ninety-two—but there could be no doubting her story.

I come from Takirda, twelve hours by horse from Istanbul. I was fifteen at the time. The Turks drove us from our home and all my family were put on a filthy ship that brought us from Konya to the coast and then we went to Aleppo—my mother Renouhi and my father Tatios, my aunt Azzaz and my sisters Hartoui and Yeva. They beat us and starved us. At Aleppo, my mother and Auntie Azzaz died of sickness. They made us walk all the way to Deir es-Zour in the summer heat. We were kept in a camp there by the Turks. Every day, the Turks came and took thousands of Armenians from there to the north. My father heard terrible stories of families being murdered together so he tattooed our initials in the Armenian alphabet on our wrists so that we could find each other later.

Tattooed identities. The grim parallels with another genocide did not occur to old Serpouhi Papazian. She was rescued by an Arab boy and, like so many of the Armenian women who sought refuge with non-Turkish Muslims, she converted to Islam. Only later did she hear what happened to the rest of her family.

The Turks sent them all north into the desert. They tied them together with many other people. My father and my sisters were tied together, Yeva and Hartoui by their wrists. Then they took them to a hill at a place called Margada where there were many bodies. They threw them into the mud of the river and shot one of them—I don't know which—and so they all drowned there together.

Ten years after the Armenian Holocaust, Serpouhi returned to the hill at Margada to try to find the remains of her father and sisters. “All I found in 1925 were heaps of bones and skulls,” she said. “They had been eaten by wild animals and dogs. I don't even know why you bother to come here with your notebook and take down what I say.” And Boghos Dakessian, in a bleak moment among the place of skulls on Margada hill, said much the same thing. One of the skulls he was holding collapsed into dust in his hands. “Don't say ‘pity them,' ” he told us. “It is over for them. It is finished.” Serpouhi remembered the river running beside the hill—but Isabel Ellsen and I had at first found no trace of bones along the banks of the Habur River. It was only when we climbed the hill above the main road to Deir es-Zour— almost 2 kilometres from the water—to survey the landscape, that we made out, faintly below us, the banks of a long-dried-up river. The Habur had changed its course over the previous seventy-five years and had moved more than a kilometre eastward. That is when Isobel found the skulls. We were standing on the hill where Yeva and Hartoui were murdered with their father. And it occurred to me that, just as the Euphrates had changed course after its waters became clogged with bodies, so here too the Habur's waters might have become choked with human remains and moved to the east. Somewhere in the soft clay of Margada, the bodies of Yeva and Hartoui lie to this day.

But the Armenian killing fields are spread wide over the Syrian desert. Eighty kilometres to the north, east of the village of Shedadi, lies another little Auschwitz, a cave into which Turkish troops drove thousands of Armenian men during the deportations. Boghos Dakessian and I found it quite easily in the middle of what is now a Syrian oilfield. Part of the cave has long since collapsed, but it was still possible to crawl into the mouth of the rock and worm our way with the aid of a cigarette lighter into its ominous interior. It stretched for over a kilometre underground. “They killed about five thousand of our people here,” Dakessian said with a statistician's annoyance at such imprecision. “They stuffed them in the cave and then started a bonfire here at the mouth and filled the cave with smoke. They were asphyxiated. They all coughed till they died.”

It took several seconds before the historical meaning of all this became apparent. Up here, in the cold, dry desert, the Turks turned this crack in the earth's crust into the twentieth century's first gas chamber. The principles of technological genocide began here in the Syrian desert, at the tiny mouth of this innocent cave, in a natural chamber in the rock.

There are other parallels. Enver Pasha, the Turkish war minister,
⁷¹
told Morgenthau that the Armenians were being sent to “new quarters,” just as the Nazis later claimed that the Jews of Europe were being sent east for “resettlement.” Armenian churches were burned like the synagogues of Nazi Europe. The Armenians died on what the Turks called “caravans” or “convoys,” just as the Jews of Europe were sent on “transports” to the death camps. In southern Turkey, the Turks did sometimes use railway cattle wagons to herd Armenian men to their mass graves. The Kurds played the same role of executioners for the Turks that Lithuanians and Ukrainians and Croatians would later assume for the Nazis. The Turks even formed a “Special Organisation”—Teshkilat-i Makhsusiye—to carry out exterminations, an Ottoman predecessor to Hitler's Einsatzgruppen, the German “Special Action Groups.”

Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people's persecution every bit as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the railway routes to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Dachau and the other Nazi camps. The Armenians in Sivas were driven to Malatya, from Malatya to Aleppo; or from Mush to Diyarbekir to Ras al-Ain or—via Mardin—to Mosul and Kirkuk. It is a flow chart of suffering, some of the “convoys” of humiliation and grief driven 150 kilometres south from Marash to Aleppo, then another 300 kilometres east to Deir es-Zour and then north—back in the direction of Turkey for another 150 kilometres up the Habur River and past the hill of Margada. Armenians were deported from the Black Sea coast and from European Turkey to the Syrian desert, some of them moved all the way south to Palestine.

What was at once apparent about this ethnic atrocity was not just its scale— perhaps two hundred thousand Armenians had been slaughtered two decades earlier—but the systematic nature of the Holocaust. A policy of race murder had been devised in wartime by senior statesmen who controlled, as one historian phrased it, the “machinery of violence, both formal and informal.” Like the Jews of Europe, many Armenians were highly educated; they were lawyers, civil servants, businessmen, journalists. Unlike the Jewish Holocaust, however, the world knew of the Turkish genocide almost as soon as it began. Viscount James Bryce and the young Arnold Toynbee were commissioned to prepare a report for the British government in 1915, and their work,
The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
1915–1916
—700 pages of eyewitness accounts of the massacres—was to become not only a formative history of the slaughter but the first serious attempt to deal with crimes against humanity. Much of the testimony came from American missionaries in Turkey—the “non-governmental organisations” of the era—and from Italian, Danish, Swedish, Greek, U.S. and German diplomats and records.
⁷²

U.S. diplomats were among the first to record the Armenian Holocaust—and among the bravest eyewitnesses—and their accounts in State Department archives remain among the most unimpeachable testimonies of the Armenians' fate. Leslie Davis, the thirty-eight-year-old former lawyer who was American consul in Harput, has left us a terrifying account of his own horseback journeys through the dead lands of Armenia. Around Lake Goeljuk and in the space of just twenty-four hours, he saw “the remains of not less than ten thousand Armenians.” He found corpses piled on rocks at the foot of cliffs, corpses in the water and in the sand, corpses filling up huge ravines; “nearly all the women lay flat on their backs and showed signs of barbarous mutilation by bayonets of the gendarmes . . .” On one of his excursions, Davis came across a dying Armenian woman. When she was offered bread, she “cried out that she wanted to die.” An Armenian college teacher called Donabed Lulejian who was rescued by Davis passed through a village littered with the bodies of men, women and children, and wrote an essay of pain and dignity—a “benediction,” in the words of the Armenian historian Peter Balakian:

At least a handful of earth for these slain bodies, for these whitened bones! A handful of earth, at least, for these unclaimed dead . . .

We dislike to fancy the bodies of our dear ones worm-ridden; their eyes, their lovely eyes, filled with worms; their cheeks, their kiss-deserving cheeks, mildewed; their pomegranate-like lips food for reptiles.

But here they are in the mountains, unburied and forlorn, attacked by worms and scorpions, the eyes bare, the faces horrible amid a loathsome stench, like the odour of the slaughter-house . . .

There are women with breasts uncovered and limbs bare. A handful of earth to shield their honour! . . . Give, God, the handful of earth requested of Thee.

Germans, too, bore witness to the massacres because officers of the Kaiser's army had been seconded to Turkey to help reorganise the Ottoman military. Armin Wegner, a German nurse and a second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, disobeyed orders by taking hundreds of photographs of Armenian victims in the camps at Ras al-Ain, Rakka, Aleppo and Deir es-Zour. Today these fearful pictures of the dead and dying comprise the core of witness images. The Germans were also involved in building Turkey's railway system and saw with their own eyes the first use of cattle trucks for human deportation, men packed ninety to a wagon—the same average the Germans achieved in their transports to the Nazi death camps—on the Anatolian and Baghdad railways. Franz Gunther, a Deutsche Bank representative in Constantinople—the bank was financing the Turkish railway projects—sent a photograph of a deportation train to one of his directors as an example of the Ottoman government's “bestial cruelty.”

Across the world—and especially in the United States—newspapers gave immense prominence to the genocide. From the start,
The New York Times
distinguished itself with near daily coverage of the slaughter, rape, dispossession and extermination of the Armenians. Its first reports appeared in the paper in November 1914. “Erzerum fanatics slay Christians,” ran a headline on 29 November. Ambassador Morgenthau's representations to the Turkish government were published on 28 April 1915, under the words “Appeal to Turkey to stop massacres.” By 4 October,
The New York Times
was headlining “Tell of Horrors done in Armenia” above a long dispatch containing details of atrocities, of torture, deportations and child-killing. On 7 October the paper's headline ran “800,000 Armenians counted destroyed . . . 10,000 drowned at once.” Morgenthau's memoranda and Bryce's speeches to the House of Lords were given huge coverage.
The Nation
carried a series of powerful editorials, calling upon Berlin—the United States still being a neutral in the war—to stop the killings by its Turkish ally. Narratives of the mass murders were still being published in
The New York Times
in June 1919, almost eight months after the war ended; “Armenian girls tell of massacres,” read the paper's headline on 1 June. Even in the Canadian city of Halifax, the local paper carried almost weekly reports on the genocide. A volume containing dispatches on the destruction of the Armenians which appeared in the
Halifax Herald
runs to 352 pages.