Aid For Armenians Blocked By Turkey

[Gavur]

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AID FOR ARMENIANS BLOCKED BY TURKEY

Attempts to Send Food to Refugees Frustrated, Says the American Committee


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PUTS VICTIMS AT 1,000,000


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Careful Survey Shows 55,000 Persons Killed in the Vilayet of Van Alone

November 1, 1915

The American Committee on Armenian atrocities, among the members of which are Cardinal Gibbons, Cleveland H. Dodge, Bishop David H. Greer, Oscar S. Straus, Professor Samuel T. Dutton, Charles R. Crane, and many other prominent citizens, issued a statement yesterday in which it was said that authentic reports from Turkey proved that the war of extermination being waged by the Turks against the Armenians was so terrible that when all the facts were known the world would realize that what had been done was "the greatest, most pathetic, and most arbitrary tragedy in history."

A chance to furnish food to the Armenians, ordered deported to distant parts of the empire were blocked by the Turkish authorities, the committee said, the Turkish officials stating that "they wished nothing to be done that would prolong their lives. "

In the statement the committee makes public its report received a few days ago from an official representative of one of the neutral powers, who, reporting on conditions in of one of these Armenian camps, says:

"I have visited their encampment and a more pitiable site cannot be imagine. They are, almost without exception, ragged, hungry and sick. This is not surprising in view of the fact that they have been on the road for nearly two months, with no change of clothing, no chance to bathe, no shelter and little to eat. I watched them one time when their food was brought. Wild animals could not be worse. They rushed upon the guards who carried the food and the guards beat them back with clubs hitting hard enough to kill sometimes. To watch them one could hardly believe these people to be human beings. As one walks through the camp, mothers offer their children and beg you to take them. In fact, the Turks have been taking their choice of these children and girls for slaves or worse. There are very few men among them, as most of the men were killed on the road. Women and children were also killed. The entire movement seems to be the most thoroughly organized and effective massacre this country has ever seen."

"They all agree," adds the committee, referring to the reports, "as to the method of procedure, the thoroughness and cruelty of the destructive work, and the confessed purpose of the plan to wipe out the Armenian nation. The fact that the central government at Constantinople refuses to permit Armenians to leave the country is a further evidence of their purpose of extermination.

"The Turks do not deny the atrocities, but claim they are a military measure to protect them against a possible attack of a race that is disloyal.

"It is impossible to estimate how many have already perished. A careful survey in the Van Vilayet gathered the names of 55,000 persons who had been killed. Others were able to escape by flight to Persia or Russia. An eyewitness who has recently made an extended journey across Asia minor saw over 50,000 poor, dazed, helpless, starving refugees camped by the roadside in a region almost desert, with no provision for their food supply. Probably it is not an overestimate to say that 1,000,000 of the possible 2,000,000 Armenians in Turkey at the beginning of the war are either dead or in Moslem harems, or forced to profess Mohammedanism, or are on their sad journey to the desert and death."

The committee says it has cabled the $106,000 to Ambassador Morgenthau, at Constantinople, of which $100,000 was for relief of Armenians in Turkey, and the remainder for Armenians who had escaped into Egypt. The office of the committee, of which Mr. Crane is treasurer, is at 70 Fifth Avenue.

[Gavur]

Report Turks Shot Women And Children

Report Turks Shot Women And Children-nyt19150804
From Armeniapedia.org

REPORT TURKS SHOT WOMEN AND CHILDREN

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Nine Thousand Armenians Massacred and Thrown Into Tigris, Socialist Committee Hears.

PARIS, Aug. 3. - B. Varazdate, a member of the Executive Committee of the Armenian Social Democratic Party, writing to L'Humanite, the Socialist Daily, says that the committee has received word to the effect that Turks, after massacring all the males of the population in the region of Bitlis, Turkish Armenia, assembled 9,000 women and children and drove them to the banks of the Tigris, where they shot them and threw the bodies into the river.

These advices have not been substantiated by any other source.

The Armenian population of Cilicia, in the Turkish Vilayet of Adana, also has been subjected to persecutions, according to the reports of the committee. Moer than 40,000 persons already are dead and it is feared that the Armenians at Moush and Diarbekr, in Kurdestan, also have been massacred.

Twenty members of the Armenian Social Democratic Party, M. Varsadate says, have been publicly hanged in Constantinople after being charged with wishing to found an Independent Armenia.

[AnnFrankenstein]

And some people want to reconciliate with them savages who are no different today than they were back then as we saw for ourselves in 1988.

[Gavur]

March 9, 1915 • Turkish Order to Murder Armenians at Aleppo.

by the Staff or associates of Christian History Institute.
© Copyright 1999-2005. All rights reserved.

Orphaned Armenian boy photographed tagging along behind "exiled" Armenians.
Under cover of the First World War, the brutal Ottoman Turks determined to solve the "Armenian Question" once for all. Ancient Armenia was the first nation in the world to embrace Christianity. The Armenians lived and suffered in Asia Minor long before the rise of the Turks. Their descendants were prosperous traders, craftsmen and shopkeepers. In 1895 the Turks massacred many Armenians. Now, in 1915, claiming that this Christian race was a danger to their national unity, and egged on by Germany, the Turks decided to do away with them all. Since Armenians were not allowed to own firearms (Muslims were), they were unable, except in rare instances, to defend themselves.

Although the Turks are Muslim, ethnic cleansing and greed more than religion seem to have been the main motives for the horrors that followed. However, there was no Islamic outcry or stop the massacres. A few Muslim governors who refused to kill the helpless Christians were dismissed and replaced by cruel and greedy "patriots."

Armenians were "deported" into "exile"--the desert. Usually the men were butchered outright and the women and children were herded back and forth until they dropped from thirst and exhaustion; or the women and children were given over to be killed and plundered by neighboring Arabs and Kurds. Pretty Armenian girls were raped openly in the streets--even in front of foreign visitors--or sold as slaves or concubines into homes where they were forced to convert to Islam. Police and soldiers amused themselves by torturing helpless Armenians.

On this day, March 9, 1915, Interior Minister Talaat issued the following directive to the city of Aleppo, where Turks had spared lives in return for bribes: "All rights of the Armenians to live and work on Turkish soil have been completely cancelled, and with regard to this the Government takes all responsibility on itself, and has commanded that even babes in the cradle are not to be spared. The results of carrying out this order have been seen in some provinces. In spite of this, for reasons unknown to us, exceptional measures are being taken with 'Certain People,' [Armenians who bought their lives] and those people instead of being sent straight to the place of exile [the desert] are left in Aleppo, whereby the Government is involved in an additional difficulty. [people left alive who still have to be gotten rid of somehow] Without listening to any of their [Armenian] reasoning, remove them thence--women or children, whatever they may be, even if they are incapable of moving; and do not let the people [Turks] protect them, because, through their ignorance, they place material gains [bribes] higher than patriotic feelings, and cannot appreciate the great policy of the Government in insisting upon this. Because instead of the indirect measures of extermination used in other places--such as severity, haste (in carrying out the deportations), difficulties of travelling and misery--direct measures [outright killing] can safely be used there, [Aleppo] so work heartily."

After assuring Aleppo authorities that the army would not interfere, Talaat closed, "Tell the officials that are to be appointed for that purpose that they must work to put into execution our real intent, without being afraid of responsibility. Please send cipher reports of the results [death counts] of your activities every week. Minister of the Interior, Talaat."

Talaat's vicious plan succeeded. Dr. Martin Niepage, a German teacher in Aleppo, tried to stop the massacre, but saw thousands driven into deportation and hundreds herded behind barbed wire where they died of starvation and thirst. Altogether, one and a half million Armenians--a number equivalent to the population of Philadelphia--were killed all across Turkey, despite the pleas of the pope, the European allies and the United States.

Resources
Azadian, Libarid and Donoyan, Armen. The Armenian Massacre. (Glendale, California: Navasart, 1987).
Niepage, Martin. The Horrors of Aleppo. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1917).
Olasky, Marvin. "Prove Hitler Wrong; Remember Ottoman Turkey's slaughter of Armenian Christians." World (October 23, 2004).
Toynbee, Arnold J. Arminian Atrocities; the murder of a nation. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915).

[Gavur]

Wellesley woman imprisoned in Armenian genocide

Buckley: Wellesley woman imprisoned in Armenian genocide
By James J. Buckley / Local Columnist
Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Modern-day Turkey's efforts to join the European Union (EU) is being opposed by humanitarians throughout the world. They repeatedly cite the genocide perpetrated by the Turks between 1915 and 1923 as sufficient reason to deny Turkey membership.

The Turks claim nothing out of the ordinary happened to Armenians during those years. However, the events surrounding the capture of a young Wellesley woman clearly shows that something quite out of the ordinary was indeed occurring in that part of the world in 1920.

Some historians have suggested that if the world had reacted negatively toward Turkey's actions in Armenia in 1915, Hitler would not have concluded he could get away with the genocide of Jews during World War II. And in fact Hitler did cite the lack of any worldwide efforts against Turkey in the years 1915-1923 as proof that he could get away with exterminating Jews without any significant backlash.

All this implies that nations such as the U.S. did nothing for the Armenians during those years. But such an implication is not completely valid. The U.S. took a number of steps to help -- one of those steps involved Miss Marion Peabody of Arlington Road, Wellesley Hills.

The Near East Relief (NER) was organized with congressional approval and with the ardent support of President Woodrow Wilson. Its job was to coordinate all relief efforts and fundraising activities throughout the U.S. in order to save "the starving Armenians." In time, millions were raised and filtered through the U.S. Embassy in Constantinople that in turn handed the funds over to missionaries who delivered the money and goods to Armenians.

Needless to say, the Turks were not happy with this arrangement, even though it was abundantly clear that the U.S. was making every effort to help the Armenians without antagonizing the Turkish government. But the Turks wanted no aid to reach the Armenians who were unwilling subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

Some Turks set out to make life as miserable as possible for the missionaries and NER workers who were charged with distributing the funds and goods. As a result, in 1920, 20 workers associated with the NER and working in the Black Sea port of Samsoun were detained by a group calling themselves Turkish Nationalists.
The press at that time had virtually none of the abundance of resources available to it today. But even so, the news media of that time was somehow able to uncover this incident and highlight it in their news reports. This forced the NER to confirm that the workers were being detained, but it stressed that they were in no danger.

But subsequently it was learned that two weeks before the Samsoun incident, five other workers, including Colonel Coombs and Marion Peabody, had been captured by the Turks. If the leaders of NER had kept the earlier incident secret because they did not want to alarm the families of the detainees and the American people in general, they must have been dismayed when their secrecy had the opposite affect.

If detaining the 20 Americans had been an isolated incident, the American people might have not become alarmed. But when they discovered that another group of Americans had been detained two weeks before, Americans saw a pattern of behavior by the Turks that was interpreted as a definite threat against their countrymen. Suddenly Colonel Coombs and, to a lesser extent Marion Peabody, became celebrities whose ominous situation became the topic of discussion throughout the nation.

In order to quell the fears of the American people, the NER decided that Charles Vickery, secretary of the NER, should personally travel to Samsoun and other locations where NER personnel were in order to determine firsthand what was happening to Colonel Coombs, Marion Peabody and the other detainees.

Fortunately for the workers, even though the leaders of the Turkish government stubbornly refused to admit any genocidal action against the Armenians, they nevertheless began to realize that detaining Americans was causing the American press to spotlight their activities in Armenia. Since their policy was to keep their persecution of Armenians as quiet as possible, they reluctantly decided to release the Americans. As a result, Vickery was able to announce upon his return to the U.S. that the NER workers were being released and that they had not been harmed.

When Marion Peabody's brother Harry learned that Marion was no longer in custody and was on her way back to the U.S., he and his wife journeyed to New York City to await her arrival and bring her back to the safety of her home in Wellesley Hills.
James J. Buckley may be reached at [email protected].

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/columnists/view.bg?articleid=112091&format=&page=1