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FATE OF ARMENIAN CHILDREN IN THE GENOCIDE OF 1915
* You wrote: “If you accept that many Armenian children were adopted by the Turkish families and many Armenian women were married with the Turkish people you should have realized that the Turkish people cannot be racist.”
- Although I had used the word “absorbed” rather than “adopted,” that doesn’t mean there were no adopting incidents. As Armenians can not forget the criminal atrocities that were perpetrated against them, Armenians also can’t forget the righteous and kind Turks and Kurds and Arabs who spared their lives, challenging the “Governmental Orders” and threats of not hiding any Armenian within their households. Many Turks, Kurds and Arabs had saved lives of their Armenians neighbors and friends, or even strangers, an act of kindness that no Armenian will forget. You are right. The Turkish “People” are not racists, but the Ittihadist government was. Chanting the slogan, “ for the Turks,” they decided to get rid of the largest Christian minority who was refusing to be “Turkified” to fulfill their “Pan-Turkic Empire” dream.
But, all of the kidnapped, sold and adopted Armenians were raised as Turks after some nominal rituals of conversion to Islam, including circumcisions and name changes, thus, lost their identity and absorbed into the mainstream of Turkish society. I don’t think that it is needed to point out here that they were not willingly converted into Turks and Muslims, for they were helpless children.
The Ittihadist government needed to do a complete job in extermination of all Armenians, without sparing anyone’s life. Those who miraculously survived this genocide always remember the soldiers shouting to each other: “Kill them, kill them all, so no one will come to take their revenge in the future”. Accordingly, the Ittihad leaders decided to rely on “bloodthirsty murderers” (kanli katil) as instruments of massacre. Thousands of felons and repeat criminals were selected and released from the various prisons of the Ottoman Empire for massacre duty; they were to show no compassion or mercy for women, children or the infirm.
One would be mistaken if he thought that all Armenian children’s lives were spared during the genocide, because for a sane human being, it is too heinous to kill an innocent harmless child. But children killings and torture was, in fact, another chapter of this massive crime against my ancestors.
For example, in his account, Signor Gorrini, the Italian Consul-General at Trabzon, in a detailed report called attention to the fact that: “The children [were] torn away from their families… placed by hundreds on board ship in nothing but their shirts, and then capsized and drowned in the Black Sea and the river Degirmendere- these are my ineffaceable memoirs of Trabzon memoirs which still, at a month’s distance, torment my soul and almost drive me frantic….”
More confirmation to that testimony came from Turkish officials themselves. The most poignant testimony on drowning operations was provided by the Turkish deputy of Trabzon province, Hafiz Mehmet, who by profession was a lawyer. In a postwar speech, in December 11, 1919, in the Chamber of Deputies of the Ottoman Parliament, he revealed that he personally saw how, one day, Armenian women and children were loaded onto barges at the port city of Ordu in Trabzon province and drowned in the high seas. He then stated that the local people were lamenting with the words, "God will punish us for what we did." At the 15th sitting of the Trabzon trial series 1919, Turkish Ordu merchant Hüseyin, appearing as a witness, confirmed this very operation of drowning. In its Verdict, the Tribunal with emphasis referred to these operations of mass drownings targeting as they especially did "male and female infants" (zükur ve inas cocuklari) with the help of "repeat criminals" (cerayimi mükerrere).
During the proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal in Spring 1919, some two dozen Turks, including physicians, military officers, governmental officials, and merchants, in the course of twenty sittings, testified orally and in writing to the methods used to dispose of children. [6]
Two Turkish MDs, Dr. Ziya Fuad, Inspector of Health Services, and Dr. Adnan, the city's Health Services Director, testified based on evidence gathered from local Turkish physicians that Dr. Ali Saib, Director of Public Health of Trabzon province, systematically poisoned Armenian infants brought to the city's Red Crescent Hospital and ordered the drowning at the nearby Black Sea of those who resisted taking his “medicine.” Another method Dr. Saib applied in a house full of Armenian infants was “the steam bath.” Through the installation there of an army “etüv” contraption, babies were exposed to suffocating hot steam and thereby instantly killed. Father Laurent, the French Capucin Father Superior in Trabzon , testified through an interpreter that he personally saw the corpses of the dead poisoned children being squeezed into large, deep baskets on the hospital grounds, like animals from a slaughterhouse, and then dumped into the nearby sea.
That same Red Crescent Hospital had been reduced to a pleasure dome, where the province's governor-general, Cemal Azmi, was keeping fifteen young girls[7], to be used for frequent sex orgies. This fact had prompted Customs Inspector Nedim to denounce the governor. [8] and Turkish Lieutenant Hasan Maruf to expose the additional fact that “After committing the worst outrages the government officials involved had these young girls killed.” In a separate study, a young Armenian who had befriended the governor's son in Berlin , where the governor had taken refuge right after the war to escape prosecution in , provided additional data on this episode of lethal debaucheries. During one of his boastful narrations about this debauchery, Governor Azmi told the following to the young Armenian, whom he believed to be a Turk as the latter had by then assumed a complete Muslim Turkish identity, including the Turkish name Mehmet Ali, a thorough study of the Kuran, and circumcision: “Among the most pretty Armenian girls, 10-13 years old, I selected a number of them and handed them over to my son [who was then 14 years old] as a gift; the others I had drowned in the sea.” [9]
The sexual abuse during the Armenian Genocide was not limited to young Armenian females. A Swiss pharmacist who throughout the war remained in Urfa and traveled extensively in the area asserts that widespread homosexual rape occurred both in connection with genocidal killings and in Turkish homes where young Armenian boys were kept as adoptees. As he reported, “Turkish officers, especially, inflicted unbelievable and unspeakable acts of bartering upon Armenian girls, but nobody can imagine the magnitude of crimes of unnatural sex inflicted upon hundreds, yes thousands, of Armenian boys.” He also stated that “long after the killings had stopped, rapes, acts of deflowering virgins and other forms of sexual violations, especially of young boys, continued.” [10]
Other examples of abusing and torturing children involved rape before murder. In Ankara province, near the village of Bash-Ayash , two rapist-killers - a brigand, Deli Hasan, and a gendarme, Ibrahim - raped twelve boys, aged 12-14, and subsequently killed them. Those who were not dead at once were tortured to death while crying "Mummy, Mummy." [11]
The German M.D. H. Stoffels, staff physician, reported to the Austrian consul in Trabzon that on his way to Mosul he came across in Mush (and Siirt in the same province) “a large number of formerly Armenian localities, where in the churches and houses he saw charred and decomposed corpses of women and children” (verkohlte und verweste Frauen- und Kinderleichen). [12]
Need I say more about the fate of the innocent Armenian children and young girls whose only crime was being Armenian…?!
Allow me here to share my own grandfather’s experience, he was 10 years old in 1915, he lost both of his parents and his 6 sisters who were killed during the deportation, he was “kidnapped” and “sold” four time, from one family to another. Through out that time my grandfather’s name was changed to “Hussein” and he was forbade to speak Armenian or even to think of declaring his Armenian origin in front of anyone. For two years, he lived as a slave to the last family that had bought him. Two dry pieces of bread were his only food for the entire day. He looked after the man’s sheep from early morning until dark. For months, he planned his escape. He ate one piece of bread and sold the other one. He finally managed to save enough money to buy a train ticket and escape to an Arab country. Then through a humanitarian organization, he managed to find his older brother after years of separation. This child, who grew to be my grandfather, couldn’t get over the pain of orphanhood and suffered for the rest of his life from the mistreatment that he had endured as a youngster. I remember seeing him crying whenever he remembered those childhood days, until the last days of his almost 8 decades of life. With physical and spiritual scars my grandfather survived, and he formed a new Armenian family. If he hadn’t manage to escape that Turkish family, I might have been a Turk today, as well as my 6 other siblings and cousins, and for generations to come!!
In his article titled “Would you wish to be an Armenian in 1915?” [13] Ahmet Altan wrote:
“No one is denying that Armenians were murdered, right? It may be 300,000, or 500,000, or 1.5 million. I don't know which number is the truth…. What I do know is the existence of the death and pain beyond these numbers…Those numbers cannot describe the murdered babies, women, the elderly, the teenage boys and girls….”
He continues: “When I see the shadow of this bloody event on the present world, I see a greater injustice done to the Armenians. Our crime today is not to allow the present Armenians even to grieve for their cruelly killed relatives and parents. Which Armenian living in today can openly grieve and commemorate a murdered grandmother, grandfather or uncle? I have nothing in common with the terrible sin of the past Ittihadists, but the sin of not allowing grief for the dead belongs to all of us today… Even in those terrifying times there were Turks who risked their lives trying to rescue Armenian children. We are the children of these rescuers, as well as the children of the murderers. Instead of justifying and arguing on behalf of the murderers, why don't we praise and defend the rescuers' compassion, honesty, and courage?”
Encouraging the Turks to follow the steps of their righteous grandparents who rescued the Armenians he wrote: “There are no more victims left to be rescued today…I still believe there is something yet to be rescued from all these meaningless and pitiless arguments, and that something is called ‘humanity.’”
Regards, Maral Der Ohanesian
Notes:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Nazim Hikmet, Poems, in Eastern literary Armenian, translated by Gevork Emin, Yerevan :
Haypethrat , 1986, p. 112. Revised from the original Turkish by K.I.Pilikian.
[2] German Bundestag Printed matter 15/5689 15th electoral period June 15, 2005
[3] Saddik El-Demluji, “Emaret Behdean” , Mosul 1952, p. 80-86.
[4] Kemal M. Ahmed “ Kurdistan in The Years Of The First World War” 2nd ed. 1984, p. 83
[5] The Boston Globe, “Turkish endowment gifts to colleges spur debate over study of Armenian massacre” Nov 24, 1995 - 21:51 EST. http://users.ids.net/~gregan/globe.html .
[6] Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Turkish Military Tribunal's Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series," Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 1997), pp. 39-42 on The Trabzon Series.
[7] Turkish Military Tribunals, Court-Martial 10th sitting, April 12, 1919.
[8] Ibid. 16th sitting.
[9] Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal," International Journal of Middle East Studies. Vol. 23, No. 4 (November 1991), p. 574, note 55; Arshavir Sheeragian, Gudagun Err Nahadegneroun (The Testament of the Martyrs). Beirut , 1965, pp. 262-263.
[10] Jacob Künzler, Im Lande des Blutes und der Tränen. Erlebnisse in Mesopotamien Während des Weltkrieges “In the Land of Blood and Tears. Experiences in Mesopotamia During the World War”. Berlin-Potsdam, 1921, pp. 77, 87. In the new edition, edited by Hans- Lukas Kieser, Zurich , 1999, pp. 99, 108-109.
[11] Haigashen Darekirk (Haigashen Annual). Vol. 1, 1922, p. 328. The names of four of the victims are listed in this source.
[12] Austrian Foreign Ministry Archives. 12 Türkei/380, folio 909, May 26, 1917
[13] Ahmet Altan “Soykirim... 1915 yilinda bir Ermeni olmak ister miydiniz?” Gazetem, 9 Mayis 2005, http://www.gazetem.net/ahmetaltan.asp.
JTW, 10 November 2005
FATE OF ARMENIAN CHILDREN IN THE GENOCIDE OF 1915
* You wrote: “If you accept that many Armenian children were adopted by the Turkish families and many Armenian women were married with the Turkish people you should have realized that the Turkish people cannot be racist.”
- Although I had used the word “absorbed” rather than “adopted,” that doesn’t mean there were no adopting incidents. As Armenians can not forget the criminal atrocities that were perpetrated against them, Armenians also can’t forget the righteous and kind Turks and Kurds and Arabs who spared their lives, challenging the “Governmental Orders” and threats of not hiding any Armenian within their households. Many Turks, Kurds and Arabs had saved lives of their Armenians neighbors and friends, or even strangers, an act of kindness that no Armenian will forget. You are right. The Turkish “People” are not racists, but the Ittihadist government was. Chanting the slogan, “ for the Turks,” they decided to get rid of the largest Christian minority who was refusing to be “Turkified” to fulfill their “Pan-Turkic Empire” dream.
But, all of the kidnapped, sold and adopted Armenians were raised as Turks after some nominal rituals of conversion to Islam, including circumcisions and name changes, thus, lost their identity and absorbed into the mainstream of Turkish society. I don’t think that it is needed to point out here that they were not willingly converted into Turks and Muslims, for they were helpless children.
The Ittihadist government needed to do a complete job in extermination of all Armenians, without sparing anyone’s life. Those who miraculously survived this genocide always remember the soldiers shouting to each other: “Kill them, kill them all, so no one will come to take their revenge in the future”. Accordingly, the Ittihad leaders decided to rely on “bloodthirsty murderers” (kanli katil) as instruments of massacre. Thousands of felons and repeat criminals were selected and released from the various prisons of the Ottoman Empire for massacre duty; they were to show no compassion or mercy for women, children or the infirm.
One would be mistaken if he thought that all Armenian children’s lives were spared during the genocide, because for a sane human being, it is too heinous to kill an innocent harmless child. But children killings and torture was, in fact, another chapter of this massive crime against my ancestors.
For example, in his account, Signor Gorrini, the Italian Consul-General at Trabzon, in a detailed report called attention to the fact that: “The children [were] torn away from their families… placed by hundreds on board ship in nothing but their shirts, and then capsized and drowned in the Black Sea and the river Degirmendere- these are my ineffaceable memoirs of Trabzon memoirs which still, at a month’s distance, torment my soul and almost drive me frantic….”
More confirmation to that testimony came from Turkish officials themselves. The most poignant testimony on drowning operations was provided by the Turkish deputy of Trabzon province, Hafiz Mehmet, who by profession was a lawyer. In a postwar speech, in December 11, 1919, in the Chamber of Deputies of the Ottoman Parliament, he revealed that he personally saw how, one day, Armenian women and children were loaded onto barges at the port city of Ordu in Trabzon province and drowned in the high seas. He then stated that the local people were lamenting with the words, "God will punish us for what we did." At the 15th sitting of the Trabzon trial series 1919, Turkish Ordu merchant Hüseyin, appearing as a witness, confirmed this very operation of drowning. In its Verdict, the Tribunal with emphasis referred to these operations of mass drownings targeting as they especially did "male and female infants" (zükur ve inas cocuklari) with the help of "repeat criminals" (cerayimi mükerrere).
During the proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal in Spring 1919, some two dozen Turks, including physicians, military officers, governmental officials, and merchants, in the course of twenty sittings, testified orally and in writing to the methods used to dispose of children. [6]
Two Turkish MDs, Dr. Ziya Fuad, Inspector of Health Services, and Dr. Adnan, the city's Health Services Director, testified based on evidence gathered from local Turkish physicians that Dr. Ali Saib, Director of Public Health of Trabzon province, systematically poisoned Armenian infants brought to the city's Red Crescent Hospital and ordered the drowning at the nearby Black Sea of those who resisted taking his “medicine.” Another method Dr. Saib applied in a house full of Armenian infants was “the steam bath.” Through the installation there of an army “etüv” contraption, babies were exposed to suffocating hot steam and thereby instantly killed. Father Laurent, the French Capucin Father Superior in Trabzon , testified through an interpreter that he personally saw the corpses of the dead poisoned children being squeezed into large, deep baskets on the hospital grounds, like animals from a slaughterhouse, and then dumped into the nearby sea.
That same Red Crescent Hospital had been reduced to a pleasure dome, where the province's governor-general, Cemal Azmi, was keeping fifteen young girls[7], to be used for frequent sex orgies. This fact had prompted Customs Inspector Nedim to denounce the governor. [8] and Turkish Lieutenant Hasan Maruf to expose the additional fact that “After committing the worst outrages the government officials involved had these young girls killed.” In a separate study, a young Armenian who had befriended the governor's son in Berlin , where the governor had taken refuge right after the war to escape prosecution in , provided additional data on this episode of lethal debaucheries. During one of his boastful narrations about this debauchery, Governor Azmi told the following to the young Armenian, whom he believed to be a Turk as the latter had by then assumed a complete Muslim Turkish identity, including the Turkish name Mehmet Ali, a thorough study of the Kuran, and circumcision: “Among the most pretty Armenian girls, 10-13 years old, I selected a number of them and handed them over to my son [who was then 14 years old] as a gift; the others I had drowned in the sea.” [9]
The sexual abuse during the Armenian Genocide was not limited to young Armenian females. A Swiss pharmacist who throughout the war remained in Urfa and traveled extensively in the area asserts that widespread homosexual rape occurred both in connection with genocidal killings and in Turkish homes where young Armenian boys were kept as adoptees. As he reported, “Turkish officers, especially, inflicted unbelievable and unspeakable acts of bartering upon Armenian girls, but nobody can imagine the magnitude of crimes of unnatural sex inflicted upon hundreds, yes thousands, of Armenian boys.” He also stated that “long after the killings had stopped, rapes, acts of deflowering virgins and other forms of sexual violations, especially of young boys, continued.” [10]
Other examples of abusing and torturing children involved rape before murder. In Ankara province, near the village of Bash-Ayash , two rapist-killers - a brigand, Deli Hasan, and a gendarme, Ibrahim - raped twelve boys, aged 12-14, and subsequently killed them. Those who were not dead at once were tortured to death while crying "Mummy, Mummy." [11]
The German M.D. H. Stoffels, staff physician, reported to the Austrian consul in Trabzon that on his way to Mosul he came across in Mush (and Siirt in the same province) “a large number of formerly Armenian localities, where in the churches and houses he saw charred and decomposed corpses of women and children” (verkohlte und verweste Frauen- und Kinderleichen). [12]
Need I say more about the fate of the innocent Armenian children and young girls whose only crime was being Armenian…?!
Allow me here to share my own grandfather’s experience, he was 10 years old in 1915, he lost both of his parents and his 6 sisters who were killed during the deportation, he was “kidnapped” and “sold” four time, from one family to another. Through out that time my grandfather’s name was changed to “Hussein” and he was forbade to speak Armenian or even to think of declaring his Armenian origin in front of anyone. For two years, he lived as a slave to the last family that had bought him. Two dry pieces of bread were his only food for the entire day. He looked after the man’s sheep from early morning until dark. For months, he planned his escape. He ate one piece of bread and sold the other one. He finally managed to save enough money to buy a train ticket and escape to an Arab country. Then through a humanitarian organization, he managed to find his older brother after years of separation. This child, who grew to be my grandfather, couldn’t get over the pain of orphanhood and suffered for the rest of his life from the mistreatment that he had endured as a youngster. I remember seeing him crying whenever he remembered those childhood days, until the last days of his almost 8 decades of life. With physical and spiritual scars my grandfather survived, and he formed a new Armenian family. If he hadn’t manage to escape that Turkish family, I might have been a Turk today, as well as my 6 other siblings and cousins, and for generations to come!!
In his article titled “Would you wish to be an Armenian in 1915?” [13] Ahmet Altan wrote:
“No one is denying that Armenians were murdered, right? It may be 300,000, or 500,000, or 1.5 million. I don't know which number is the truth…. What I do know is the existence of the death and pain beyond these numbers…Those numbers cannot describe the murdered babies, women, the elderly, the teenage boys and girls….”
He continues: “When I see the shadow of this bloody event on the present world, I see a greater injustice done to the Armenians. Our crime today is not to allow the present Armenians even to grieve for their cruelly killed relatives and parents. Which Armenian living in today can openly grieve and commemorate a murdered grandmother, grandfather or uncle? I have nothing in common with the terrible sin of the past Ittihadists, but the sin of not allowing grief for the dead belongs to all of us today… Even in those terrifying times there were Turks who risked their lives trying to rescue Armenian children. We are the children of these rescuers, as well as the children of the murderers. Instead of justifying and arguing on behalf of the murderers, why don't we praise and defend the rescuers' compassion, honesty, and courage?”
Encouraging the Turks to follow the steps of their righteous grandparents who rescued the Armenians he wrote: “There are no more victims left to be rescued today…I still believe there is something yet to be rescued from all these meaningless and pitiless arguments, and that something is called ‘humanity.’”
Regards, Maral Der Ohanesian
Notes:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Nazim Hikmet, Poems, in Eastern literary Armenian, translated by Gevork Emin, Yerevan :
Haypethrat , 1986, p. 112. Revised from the original Turkish by K.I.Pilikian.
[2] German Bundestag Printed matter 15/5689 15th electoral period June 15, 2005
[3] Saddik El-Demluji, “Emaret Behdean” , Mosul 1952, p. 80-86.
[4] Kemal M. Ahmed “ Kurdistan in The Years Of The First World War” 2nd ed. 1984, p. 83
[5] The Boston Globe, “Turkish endowment gifts to colleges spur debate over study of Armenian massacre” Nov 24, 1995 - 21:51 EST. http://users.ids.net/~gregan/globe.html .
[6] Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Turkish Military Tribunal's Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series," Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 1997), pp. 39-42 on The Trabzon Series.
[7] Turkish Military Tribunals, Court-Martial 10th sitting, April 12, 1919.
[8] Ibid. 16th sitting.
[9] Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunal," International Journal of Middle East Studies. Vol. 23, No. 4 (November 1991), p. 574, note 55; Arshavir Sheeragian, Gudagun Err Nahadegneroun (The Testament of the Martyrs). Beirut , 1965, pp. 262-263.
[10] Jacob Künzler, Im Lande des Blutes und der Tränen. Erlebnisse in Mesopotamien Während des Weltkrieges “In the Land of Blood and Tears. Experiences in Mesopotamia During the World War”. Berlin-Potsdam, 1921, pp. 77, 87. In the new edition, edited by Hans- Lukas Kieser, Zurich , 1999, pp. 99, 108-109.
[11] Haigashen Darekirk (Haigashen Annual). Vol. 1, 1922, p. 328. The names of four of the victims are listed in this source.
[12] Austrian Foreign Ministry Archives. 12 Türkei/380, folio 909, May 26, 1917
[13] Ahmet Altan “Soykirim... 1915 yilinda bir Ermeni olmak ister miydiniz?” Gazetem, 9 Mayis 2005, http://www.gazetem.net/ahmetaltan.asp.
JTW, 10 November 2005
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