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Maj. Gen. James G. Harbord presented a report to the US secretary of State Lansing in 1920 regarding his 1919 trip to Armenia under the following direction: (exerpts form the report to follow with my bolds)
"It is desired that you investigate and report on political, military, geographical, administrative, economic, and other considerations involved in possible American interests and responsibilities in that region."
"The mission traversed Asia Minor for its entire length and the Trans-caucasus from north to south and east to west. All of the Vilayets of Turkish Armenia were visited except Van and Bitlis, which were inaccessible in the time..."
"The mission spent 30 days in Asia Minor and Transcaucasia, and interviewed at length representatives of every Government exercising sovereignty in that region, as well as individual Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Tartars, Georgians, Russians, Persians, Jews, Arabs, British, and French, including Americans for some time domiciled in the country."
"(Armenians) carried on trades, conducted commerce, and designed and constructed palaces. Nevertheless as a race they were forbidden military service, taxed to poverty, their property confiscated at pleasure, and their women forced into the harems of the conqueror. Such slavery leaves some inevitable and unlovable traces upon the character, but in the main the Armenian preserved his religion, his language, and his racial purity, persecution bringing cohesion."
"The foregoing (ommited for brevity) inadequately sketches the story of the wrongs of Armenia down to our own times. From 1876 it is a story of massacre and of broken and violated guaranties."
"...there have been organized official massacres of the Armenians ordered every few years since Abdul Hamid ascended the throne. In 1895, 100,000 perished. At Van in 1908, and at Adana and elsewhere in Cilicia in 1909, over 30,000 were murdered. The last and greatest of these tragedies was in 1915. Conservative estimates place the number of Armenians in Asiatic Turkey in 1914 over 1,500,000, though some make it higher. Massacres and deportations were organized in the spring of 1915 under definite system, the soldiers going from town to town. The official reports of the Turkish Government show 1,100,000 as having been deported. Young men were first summoned to the government building in each village and then marched out and killed. The women, the old men, and children were, after a few days, deported to what Talaat Pasha called “ agricultural colonies,” from the high, cool, breeze-swept plateau of Armenia to the malarial flats of the Euphrates and the burning sands of Syria and Arabia. The dead from this wholesale attempt on the race are variously estimated from 500,000 to more than a million, the usual figure being about 800,000.
Driven on foot under a fierce summer sun, robbed of their clothing and such petty articles as they carried, prodded by bayonet if they lagged; starvation, typhus, and dysentery left thousands dead by the trail side. The ration was a pound of bread every alternate day, which many did not receive, and later a small daily sprinkling of meal on the palm of the outstretched hand was the only food. Many perished from thirst or were killed as they attempted to slake thirst at the crossing of running streams. Numbers were murdered by savage Kurds, against whom the Turkish soldiery afforded no protection. Little girls of 9 or 10 were sold to Kurdish brigands for a few piastres, and women were promiscuously violated."
"Of the female refugees among some 75,000 repatriated from Syria and Mesopotamia, we were informed at Aleppo that 40 per cent are infected with venereal disease from the lives to which they have been forced. The women of this race were free from such diseases before the deportation. Mutilation, violation, torture, and death have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages."
"We estimate that there are probably 270,000 Armenians to-day in Turkish Armenia. Some 75,000 have been repatriated from the Syrian and Mesopotamian side...There are in the Transcaucasus probably 300,000 refugees from Turkish Armenia, and some thousands more in other lands, for they have drifted to all parts of the Near East. The orphanages seen throughout Turkey and Russian Armenia testify to the loss of life among adults."
"On the route traveled by the mission fully 50,000 orphans are to-day receiving Government or other organized care. We estimate a total of perhaps half a million refugee Armenians..."
"Generally they wear the rags they have worn for four years. Eighty per cent of them suffer from malaria, 10 per cent from venereal troubles, and practically all from diseases that flourish on the frontiers of starvation. There are also the diseases that accompany filth, loathsome skin troubles, and great numbers of sore eyes, the latter especially among the children."
"On the Turkish side of the border where Armenians have returned they...find things in ruins...Things are little if any better with the peasant Turks in the same region. ... Villages are in ruins, some having been destroyed when the Armenians fled or were deported; some during the Russian advance; some on the retreat of the Armenian irregulars and Russians after the fall of the Empire. Not over 20 per cent of the Turkish peasants who went to war have returned. The absence of men between the ages of 20 and 35 is very noticeable. Six hundred thousand Turkish soldiers died of typhus alone, it is stated, and insufficient hospital service and absolute poverty of supply greatly swelled the death lists.
...No crops have been raised for several years and the land ordinarily cultivated has gone to weeds. Scarcely a village or city exists which is not largely in ruins. The country is practically treeless."
"...the Turk and the Armenian when left without official instigation have hitherto been able to live together in peace. Their existence side by side on the same soil for five centuries unmistakably indicates their interdependence and mutual interest. The aged Vali of Erzerum, a man old in years and in official experience, informed us that in his youth, before massacres began under Abdul Hamid, the Turk and the Armenian lived in peace and confidence...Testimony is universal that the massacres have always been ordered from Constantinople. Some Turkish officials were pointed out to us by American missionaries as having refused to carry out the 1915 order for deportation. That order is universally attributed to the Committee of Union and Progress, of which Enver Bey, Talaat Bey, and Djemal Pasha were the leaders."
"The events at Smyrna have undoubtedly cheapened every Christian life in Turkey, the landing of the Greeks there being looked upon by the Turks as deliberate violation by the Allies of the terms of their armistice and the probable forerunner of further unwarranted aggression. The moral responsibility for present unrest throughout Turkey is very heavy on foreign powers.
Meantime, the Armenian, unarmed at the time of the deportations and massacres, a brave soldier by thousands in the armies of Russia, France, and America during the war, is still unarmed in a land where every man but himself carries a rifle."
"...the Turkish Grand Vizier, Damad Ferid Pasha, in which he admitted for the Turkish Government of the unhappy region under consideration, the commission of “misdeeds which are such as to make the conscience of mankind shudder with horror forever,” and that “Asia Minor is to-day nothing but a vast heap of ruins.” "
"there has been no case found...in which the establishment of Turkish rule in any country has not been followed by a diminution of prosperity in that country (or) in which the withdrawal of Turkish rule has not been followed by material prosperity and a rise in culture. Never...has the Turk done other than destroy wherever he has conquered. Never has he shown that he is able to develop in peace what he has gained in war. ...as far as the Armenians are concerned, the Turk has had his day and that further uncontrolled opportunity will be denied him." (unfortunatly not to be..)
"...Georgia is Christian and its Iberian population are in the majority; Azarbaijan is Tartar and Moslem; Armenia is made up of the former provinces that composed Russian Armenia, less the part that went to Azarbaijan in the split, and the majority of its people are the blood brothers of the Armenians of Turkey in Asia. These republics have been recognized by none of the powers except Turkey. The Armenian Republic seeks...a union with the Turkish Armenians and the creation of an Armenian state to include Russian Armenia and the six Turkish Vilayets (Van, Bitlis, Diarbekir, Kharput, Sivas, Erzerum) and Cilicia, to be governed by a mandatory of the great powers during a transition state of a term of years in which Armenians of the dispersion may return to their homes..."
"Georgia does not hesitate to embargo freight against Armenia, and from her position of vantage simply censors the railroad traffic to that unfortunate country. Azarbaijan controls the fuel supply and combines with Georgia against Armenia, which alone of the three has nothing by which to
exert leverage. ...An example of the power of Georgia over Armenia is that the latter is not permitted to import either arms or ammunition, though under almost constant menace from its neighbors."
"Azarbaijan has no educated class capable of well administering a government; Georgia is threatened by bolshevism; Armenia is in ruins, and partial starvation."
"For generations these peoples have looked to Constantinople as the seat of authority. The most intelligent and ambitious Armenians have sought the capital as a career. The patriarch of the Armenian Church in Constantinople... is in reality the political head of the Armenian people by his location in Constantinople. ...the Armenians reaching before the war the number of 150,000, with business connections...to distant corners of the entire country."
"The Armenian Patriarch, the head of the Armenian Protestants, and others at Constantinople...volunteered the belief that...to bring Armenia under the same system of administration as that of the Turks would defeat the object of the development of Armenian ideals, “because by assuring the individual rights of a people the national rights and ideals of the same people can not necessarily be assured”
"The aim of the Nationalist...as stated by Mustapha Kemal Pasha, its head, is the preservation of the territorial integrity of the Empire under a mandatory of a single disinterested power, preferably America. The mission, while at Sivas, had a conference with the chiefs of this party, which held a congress at Erzerum in July and one at Sivas in September. This movement has been the cause of much apprehension on the part of those interested in the fate of the Armenians, to whose safety it has been supposed to portend danger.
In a statement given out on October 15, Mustapha Kemal said:
The Nationalist Party recognized the necessity of the aid of an impartial foreign country. It is our aim to secure the development of Turkey as she stood at the armistice. We have no expansionist plans, but it is our conviction that Turkey can be made a rich and prosperous country if she can get a good government. Our Government has become weakened through foreign interference and intrigues. After all our experience we are sure that America is the only country able to help us. We guarantee no new Turkish violences against the Armenians will take place.""
The events of the Greek occupation of Smyrna and the uneasiness produced by the activities and propaganda of certain European powers have so stirred the Turkish people...that the mission fears that an announcement from Paris at this time of an intention to carve from Turkey a State of Armenia, unless preceded by a strong military occupation of the whole Empire, might be the signal for massacres of Christians in every part of the country. There is no wisdom in now incorporating Turkish territory in a separate Armenia, no matter what the aspirations of the Armenians."
"...to carve an independent Armenia from the Ottoman Empire there is something to be said on the part of the Turk; namely, that his people even when all the refugees shall have returned to their homes, will be in the majority in the region contemplated for a reconstituted Armenia—and they were in the majority before the deportations took place—even though due, as it may be, to the gerrymandering of provincial boundaries and the partial extermination of a people."
"The Armenian is not guiltless of blood himself; his memory is long and reprisals are due, and will doubtless be made if opportunity offers. Racially allied to the wild Aryan Kurd he is cordially hated by the latter.
...the capacity of the Armenian to govern himself is something to be tested under supervision. With that still in doubt the possibility of an Armenian minority being given authority over a Moslem majority against whom its hearts are filled with rancor for centuries of tyranny, may well justify apprehension. There are very many who believe that the best elements of the Armenian race have perished. It is believed that with the reestablishment of order in their native country many of those who have emigrated to other countries will return. That, however, can only come with time, and even then it is doubted if many of the wealthy and influential Armenians long domiciled in happier lands will return to their somewhat primitive ancient home, even though such absentees have raised their voices most loudly for an autonomous Armenia."
"...Against such combination of authority and postponement of delimitation of boundaries is to be weighed the unchangeable belief of many that the Turk at the end of his tutelage will still be the Turk, bloodthirsty, unregenerate, and revengeful, and that it is unthinkable that Armenia shall ever again form part of a country which may be governed by him; that the sufferings of centuries should now be terminated by definite and permanent separation of Armenia from Turkey"
"The conclusion of the American military mission to Armenia is that the remedy for the existing conditions in Armenia and the Transcaucasus is a mandatory control to be exercised by a single-great power."
(skipped 2 sections with costs and administrative concerns of a proposed mandate)
"Very alarming reports had been received from Transcaucasia for several months...as to organized attacks by the Turkish Army impending along the old international border between Turkey and Russia" (ominous that...)
"It is desired that you investigate and report on political, military, geographical, administrative, economic, and other considerations involved in possible American interests and responsibilities in that region."
"The mission traversed Asia Minor for its entire length and the Trans-caucasus from north to south and east to west. All of the Vilayets of Turkish Armenia were visited except Van and Bitlis, which were inaccessible in the time..."
"The mission spent 30 days in Asia Minor and Transcaucasia, and interviewed at length representatives of every Government exercising sovereignty in that region, as well as individual Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Tartars, Georgians, Russians, Persians, Jews, Arabs, British, and French, including Americans for some time domiciled in the country."
"(Armenians) carried on trades, conducted commerce, and designed and constructed palaces. Nevertheless as a race they were forbidden military service, taxed to poverty, their property confiscated at pleasure, and their women forced into the harems of the conqueror. Such slavery leaves some inevitable and unlovable traces upon the character, but in the main the Armenian preserved his religion, his language, and his racial purity, persecution bringing cohesion."
"The foregoing (ommited for brevity) inadequately sketches the story of the wrongs of Armenia down to our own times. From 1876 it is a story of massacre and of broken and violated guaranties."
"...there have been organized official massacres of the Armenians ordered every few years since Abdul Hamid ascended the throne. In 1895, 100,000 perished. At Van in 1908, and at Adana and elsewhere in Cilicia in 1909, over 30,000 were murdered. The last and greatest of these tragedies was in 1915. Conservative estimates place the number of Armenians in Asiatic Turkey in 1914 over 1,500,000, though some make it higher. Massacres and deportations were organized in the spring of 1915 under definite system, the soldiers going from town to town. The official reports of the Turkish Government show 1,100,000 as having been deported. Young men were first summoned to the government building in each village and then marched out and killed. The women, the old men, and children were, after a few days, deported to what Talaat Pasha called “ agricultural colonies,” from the high, cool, breeze-swept plateau of Armenia to the malarial flats of the Euphrates and the burning sands of Syria and Arabia. The dead from this wholesale attempt on the race are variously estimated from 500,000 to more than a million, the usual figure being about 800,000.
Driven on foot under a fierce summer sun, robbed of their clothing and such petty articles as they carried, prodded by bayonet if they lagged; starvation, typhus, and dysentery left thousands dead by the trail side. The ration was a pound of bread every alternate day, which many did not receive, and later a small daily sprinkling of meal on the palm of the outstretched hand was the only food. Many perished from thirst or were killed as they attempted to slake thirst at the crossing of running streams. Numbers were murdered by savage Kurds, against whom the Turkish soldiery afforded no protection. Little girls of 9 or 10 were sold to Kurdish brigands for a few piastres, and women were promiscuously violated."
"Of the female refugees among some 75,000 repatriated from Syria and Mesopotamia, we were informed at Aleppo that 40 per cent are infected with venereal disease from the lives to which they have been forced. The women of this race were free from such diseases before the deportation. Mutilation, violation, torture, and death have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages."
"We estimate that there are probably 270,000 Armenians to-day in Turkish Armenia. Some 75,000 have been repatriated from the Syrian and Mesopotamian side...There are in the Transcaucasus probably 300,000 refugees from Turkish Armenia, and some thousands more in other lands, for they have drifted to all parts of the Near East. The orphanages seen throughout Turkey and Russian Armenia testify to the loss of life among adults."
"On the route traveled by the mission fully 50,000 orphans are to-day receiving Government or other organized care. We estimate a total of perhaps half a million refugee Armenians..."
"Generally they wear the rags they have worn for four years. Eighty per cent of them suffer from malaria, 10 per cent from venereal troubles, and practically all from diseases that flourish on the frontiers of starvation. There are also the diseases that accompany filth, loathsome skin troubles, and great numbers of sore eyes, the latter especially among the children."
"On the Turkish side of the border where Armenians have returned they...find things in ruins...Things are little if any better with the peasant Turks in the same region. ... Villages are in ruins, some having been destroyed when the Armenians fled or were deported; some during the Russian advance; some on the retreat of the Armenian irregulars and Russians after the fall of the Empire. Not over 20 per cent of the Turkish peasants who went to war have returned. The absence of men between the ages of 20 and 35 is very noticeable. Six hundred thousand Turkish soldiers died of typhus alone, it is stated, and insufficient hospital service and absolute poverty of supply greatly swelled the death lists.
...No crops have been raised for several years and the land ordinarily cultivated has gone to weeds. Scarcely a village or city exists which is not largely in ruins. The country is practically treeless."
"...the Turk and the Armenian when left without official instigation have hitherto been able to live together in peace. Their existence side by side on the same soil for five centuries unmistakably indicates their interdependence and mutual interest. The aged Vali of Erzerum, a man old in years and in official experience, informed us that in his youth, before massacres began under Abdul Hamid, the Turk and the Armenian lived in peace and confidence...Testimony is universal that the massacres have always been ordered from Constantinople. Some Turkish officials were pointed out to us by American missionaries as having refused to carry out the 1915 order for deportation. That order is universally attributed to the Committee of Union and Progress, of which Enver Bey, Talaat Bey, and Djemal Pasha were the leaders."
"The events at Smyrna have undoubtedly cheapened every Christian life in Turkey, the landing of the Greeks there being looked upon by the Turks as deliberate violation by the Allies of the terms of their armistice and the probable forerunner of further unwarranted aggression. The moral responsibility for present unrest throughout Turkey is very heavy on foreign powers.
Meantime, the Armenian, unarmed at the time of the deportations and massacres, a brave soldier by thousands in the armies of Russia, France, and America during the war, is still unarmed in a land where every man but himself carries a rifle."
"...the Turkish Grand Vizier, Damad Ferid Pasha, in which he admitted for the Turkish Government of the unhappy region under consideration, the commission of “misdeeds which are such as to make the conscience of mankind shudder with horror forever,” and that “Asia Minor is to-day nothing but a vast heap of ruins.” "
"there has been no case found...in which the establishment of Turkish rule in any country has not been followed by a diminution of prosperity in that country (or) in which the withdrawal of Turkish rule has not been followed by material prosperity and a rise in culture. Never...has the Turk done other than destroy wherever he has conquered. Never has he shown that he is able to develop in peace what he has gained in war. ...as far as the Armenians are concerned, the Turk has had his day and that further uncontrolled opportunity will be denied him." (unfortunatly not to be..)
"...Georgia is Christian and its Iberian population are in the majority; Azarbaijan is Tartar and Moslem; Armenia is made up of the former provinces that composed Russian Armenia, less the part that went to Azarbaijan in the split, and the majority of its people are the blood brothers of the Armenians of Turkey in Asia. These republics have been recognized by none of the powers except Turkey. The Armenian Republic seeks...a union with the Turkish Armenians and the creation of an Armenian state to include Russian Armenia and the six Turkish Vilayets (Van, Bitlis, Diarbekir, Kharput, Sivas, Erzerum) and Cilicia, to be governed by a mandatory of the great powers during a transition state of a term of years in which Armenians of the dispersion may return to their homes..."
"Georgia does not hesitate to embargo freight against Armenia, and from her position of vantage simply censors the railroad traffic to that unfortunate country. Azarbaijan controls the fuel supply and combines with Georgia against Armenia, which alone of the three has nothing by which to
exert leverage. ...An example of the power of Georgia over Armenia is that the latter is not permitted to import either arms or ammunition, though under almost constant menace from its neighbors."
"Azarbaijan has no educated class capable of well administering a government; Georgia is threatened by bolshevism; Armenia is in ruins, and partial starvation."
"For generations these peoples have looked to Constantinople as the seat of authority. The most intelligent and ambitious Armenians have sought the capital as a career. The patriarch of the Armenian Church in Constantinople... is in reality the political head of the Armenian people by his location in Constantinople. ...the Armenians reaching before the war the number of 150,000, with business connections...to distant corners of the entire country."
"The Armenian Patriarch, the head of the Armenian Protestants, and others at Constantinople...volunteered the belief that...to bring Armenia under the same system of administration as that of the Turks would defeat the object of the development of Armenian ideals, “because by assuring the individual rights of a people the national rights and ideals of the same people can not necessarily be assured”
"The aim of the Nationalist...as stated by Mustapha Kemal Pasha, its head, is the preservation of the territorial integrity of the Empire under a mandatory of a single disinterested power, preferably America. The mission, while at Sivas, had a conference with the chiefs of this party, which held a congress at Erzerum in July and one at Sivas in September. This movement has been the cause of much apprehension on the part of those interested in the fate of the Armenians, to whose safety it has been supposed to portend danger.
In a statement given out on October 15, Mustapha Kemal said:
The Nationalist Party recognized the necessity of the aid of an impartial foreign country. It is our aim to secure the development of Turkey as she stood at the armistice. We have no expansionist plans, but it is our conviction that Turkey can be made a rich and prosperous country if she can get a good government. Our Government has become weakened through foreign interference and intrigues. After all our experience we are sure that America is the only country able to help us. We guarantee no new Turkish violences against the Armenians will take place.""
The events of the Greek occupation of Smyrna and the uneasiness produced by the activities and propaganda of certain European powers have so stirred the Turkish people...that the mission fears that an announcement from Paris at this time of an intention to carve from Turkey a State of Armenia, unless preceded by a strong military occupation of the whole Empire, might be the signal for massacres of Christians in every part of the country. There is no wisdom in now incorporating Turkish territory in a separate Armenia, no matter what the aspirations of the Armenians."
"...to carve an independent Armenia from the Ottoman Empire there is something to be said on the part of the Turk; namely, that his people even when all the refugees shall have returned to their homes, will be in the majority in the region contemplated for a reconstituted Armenia—and they were in the majority before the deportations took place—even though due, as it may be, to the gerrymandering of provincial boundaries and the partial extermination of a people."
"The Armenian is not guiltless of blood himself; his memory is long and reprisals are due, and will doubtless be made if opportunity offers. Racially allied to the wild Aryan Kurd he is cordially hated by the latter.
...the capacity of the Armenian to govern himself is something to be tested under supervision. With that still in doubt the possibility of an Armenian minority being given authority over a Moslem majority against whom its hearts are filled with rancor for centuries of tyranny, may well justify apprehension. There are very many who believe that the best elements of the Armenian race have perished. It is believed that with the reestablishment of order in their native country many of those who have emigrated to other countries will return. That, however, can only come with time, and even then it is doubted if many of the wealthy and influential Armenians long domiciled in happier lands will return to their somewhat primitive ancient home, even though such absentees have raised their voices most loudly for an autonomous Armenia."
"...Against such combination of authority and postponement of delimitation of boundaries is to be weighed the unchangeable belief of many that the Turk at the end of his tutelage will still be the Turk, bloodthirsty, unregenerate, and revengeful, and that it is unthinkable that Armenia shall ever again form part of a country which may be governed by him; that the sufferings of centuries should now be terminated by definite and permanent separation of Armenia from Turkey"
"The conclusion of the American military mission to Armenia is that the remedy for the existing conditions in Armenia and the Transcaucasus is a mandatory control to be exercised by a single-great power."
(skipped 2 sections with costs and administrative concerns of a proposed mandate)
"Very alarming reports had been received from Transcaucasia for several months...as to organized attacks by the Turkish Army impending along the old international border between Turkey and Russia" (ominous that...)
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