The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire / Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon

by Unknown

118. SMYRNA—ALEPPO—DAMASCUS—ALEPPO—SMYRNA: ITINERARY OF A FOREIGN TRAVELLER IN ASIATIC TURKEY; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.

I left here (Smyrna) on the 16th September, 1915, for Aleppo. I first saw the Armenians at Afiun Kara Hissar, where there was a big encampment of people—probably 10,000—who had come down from the Black Sea. They were encamped in tents made of material of all descriptions, and their condition was deplorable.

The next place where I saw them was at Konia, also a large encampment. There I saw the first brutality. I saw a woman with her baby separated from her husband. He was put on our train, while she was forcibly held back and prevented from getting on to the train. At the next place, where there were said to be about 50,000, their condition was terrible. They were camped on both sides of the railway track, extending fully half a mile on either side. Here they had two wells from which they could get water, one of which was a very long way from the encampment, the other at the railway station platform. At daybreak the Armenians came in crowds—women and children and old men—to the well to get water. They fought among themselves for a place at the well, and the gendarmes, to keep them in order, flogged several people. I saw women and children repeatedly struck with the whips and sticks in the hands of the gendarmes. Later, I had occasion to pass through the camp on the way to the town of Osmania, and had an opportunity to see the condition of the people there. They were living in tents, like those above described, and their condition was miserable. The site of the encampment had been used several times over by different convoys of Armenians, and no attempt at sanitation had been made, either by the Turks or by the Armenians themselves, with the result that the ground was in a deplorable condition and the stench in the early morning beyond description. At Osmania they were selling their possessions in order to obtain money to buy food. One old man begged me to buy his silver snuff-box for a piastre, in order that he might be able to buy some bread.

From Osmania I travelled by carriage to Radjou, and passed thousands of Armenians en route to Aleppo. They were travelling in ox-carts, on horseback, on donkey-back and on foot—the majority of them children, women and old men. I spoke to several of these people, some of whom had been educated in the American Mission Schools. They told me that they had travelled for two months. They were without money and food, and several expressed their wish that they might die rather than go on and endure the sufferings that they were undergoing. The people on the road were carrying with them practically all their household possessions, and those who had no carts or animals were carrying their goods on their backs. It was not unusual to see a woman with a big pack wrapped up in a mattress and a little child of a few months old on the top of the pack. They were mostly bare-headed, and their faces were swollen from the sun and exposure. Many had no shoes on, and some had their feet wrapped in old pieces of rag which they had torn from their clothing. At Entilli there was an encampment of about 10,000, and at Kotmo a large encampment of 150,000. At this place, adjacent to their encampment, were Turkish troops, who exacted “bakshish” from them before they would let them go on the road to Aleppo. Many who had no money had had to stay in this camp since their arrival there about two months before. I spoke with several Armenians here, and they told me the same stories of brutal treatment and robbery at the hands of the gendarmes in charge as I had heard all along the road. They had to go at least half-a-mile for water from this encampment, and the condition of the camp was filthy. From Kotmo on to Aleppo I witnessed the worst sights of the whole journey. Here the people began to give out in the intense heat and dearth of water, and I passed several who were prostrate—actually dying of thirst. One woman, whom I assisted, was in a deplorable condition, unconscious from thirst and exhaustion; and further on I saw two young girls who had become so exhausted that they had fallen on the road, and lay with their already swollen faces exposed to the sun. The road for a great distance was being repaired and paved with cracked stone; on one side of the road was a footpath, but many of the Armenians were so dazed from fatigue and exposure that they did not see this footpath, and were walking—and many of them bare-footed—on this cracked stone, with their feet bleeding as a result of it. The destination of all these Armenians is Aleppo. Here they are kept crowded together in all available vacant houses, hans, Armenian churches, courtyards and open plots. Their condition in Aleppo is beyond description. I personally visited several of the places where they were kept and found them starving and dying by the hundred every day. In one vacant house which I visited I saw women, children and men all in the same room, lying on the floor, so close together that it was impossible to walk between them. Here they had been for months, such of them as had survived, and the condition of the floor was filthy. Many were lying in their own excrement!

The British Consulate was filled with these exiles, and from this place the dead were removed almost every hour. Coffin-makers throughout the city were working late into the night making rough boxes for the dead whose relatives or friends could afford to give them decent burial. Most of the dead were simply thrown into two-wheeled carts, which made a daily round to all the places where the Armenians were confined. These carts were open at first, but afterwards covers were made for them. An Armenian physician whom I know, and who is treating hundreds of these suffering Armenians who have become ill through exposure on the journey and through hunger and thirst, told me that there are hundreds dying daily in Aleppo from starvation and as a result of the brutal treatment and exposure that they have undergone on the journey from their native places. Many of these suffering Armenians refuse alms, saying that the little money so obtained will only prolong their sufferings and that they prefer to die. From Aleppo those who are able to pay are sent by train to Damascus; those who have no money are sent by road to the interior, towards Der-el-Zor. In Damascus I found conditions practically the same as in Aleppo, and hundreds are dying every day. From Damascus they are sent still further south into the Hauran, where their fate is unknown. Several Turks whom I interviewed told me that the motive of this exile was to exterminate the race, and in no instance did I see any Moslem giving alms to Armenians, it being considered a criminal offence for anyone to aid them.

I remained in Damascus and Aleppo about a month, leaving for Smyrna on the 26th October. All along the road I met thousands of these unfortunate exiles still coming into Aleppo. The sights I witnessed on this return journey were more pitiful than those I had seen on my outward journey to Aleppo. There seems to be no end to the convoy which moves over the mountain range from Bozanti south. Throughout the day, from sunrise to sunset, the road as far as one can see is crowded with these exiles. Just outside Tarsus I saw a dead woman lying by the roadside, and further on I passed two more dead women, one of whom was being carried from the roadside to be buried by two gendarmes. Her legs and arms were so emaciated that the bones were nearly through her flesh, and her face was swollen and purple from exposure. Further on I saw two gendarmes carrying a dead child between them away from the road to where they had dug a grave. Many of these soldiers and gendarmes who follow the convoy carry spades, and as soon as an Armenian dies they take the corpse away from the roadside and bury it.

The open spaces round the hans en route are used as camping-places for the Armenians, and the ground is littered with refuse and human excrement, the stench from which is unbearable. I saw many people who had been in good circumstances forced to lie in this filth. Their clothes were rags and many had no shoes. The mornings were cold and many were dying from exposure. There are very few young men in these convoys; the majority are women and children, accompanied by a few old men over fifty years of age. At Bairamoglu I talked with a woman who had become demented from the sufferings she had undergone. She told me that her husband and father had both been killed before her eyes and that she had been forced for three days to walk without rest. She had with her two little children, and all had been without bread for a day. I gave her some money, which she told me would probably be taken from her before the day was over.

Turks and Kurds meet these caravans as they pass through the country and sell them food at exorbitant prices. I saw a small boy about seven years old riding on a donkey with his baby brother in his arms. They were all that was left of his family. Many of these people go for days without bread, and they become emaciated beyond description. I saw several fall from starvation, and only at certain places along this road is there any water. Many die of thirst. Some of the Armenians who can afford it hire carriages. These are paid for in advance, and the prices charged are exorbitant. At many places, like Bozanti, for example, where there is an encampment of Turkish soldiers, there is not enough bread for these Armenians, and only two hours from Bozanti I met a woman who was crying for bread. She told me that she had been in Bozanti for two days and was unable to obtain anything to eat except what travellers like myself had given her. Many of the beasts of burden belonging to the Armenians die of starvation. It is not an unusual sight to see an Armenian removing a pack from the dead animal and setting it on his own shoulders. Many Armenians told me that, although they are allowed to rest at night, they get no sleep because of the pangs of hunger and cold. These people march all the day through at a shuffling gait, and for hours do not speak to one another. At one place where I stopped on the road for lunch I was surrounded by a crowd of little children, all crying for bread. Many of these little tots are obliged to walk barefoot along the road, and many of them carry a little pack on their backs. They are all emaciated, their clothes are in rags and their hair in a filthy condition. The filth has bred millions of flies, and I saw several babies’ faces and eyes covered with these insects, their mothers being too exhausted to brush them away. Disease has broken out in several places along the road, and in Aleppo several cases of typhus fever among the Armenians were reported when I left.

Many families have been separated, the men being sent in one direction and the women and children in another. I saw one woman who was with child, lying in the middle of the road crying, and over her stood a gendarme, threatening her if she did not get up and walk. Many children are born on the way, and most of these die, as their mothers have no nourishment for them.

None of these people have any idea where they are going or why they are being exiled. They journey day after day along the road, with the hope that they may somewhere reach a place where they may be allowed to rest, and I saw several old men carrying on their backs the tools of their trade, probably with the hope that they may some day settle down somewhere. The road over the Taurus Mountains is, in places, most difficult, and often the crude conveyances, drawn by buffaloes, oxen and milch cows, are unable to take the grades, and are abandoned and overturned by the gendarmes into the ravine below; the animals are turned loose. I saw several carts, piled high with baggage and with a number of Armenians on the top of that, break down and throw their occupants on to the road. One of the drivers, who was a Turk and who had collected his fare in advance from the people he was driving, considered it a huge joke when one woman broke her leg from such a fall.

There seems to be no cessation of the streams of these Armenians pouring down from the north, from Angora and the region round the Black Sea. Their condition grows worse every day. The sights that I saw on my return journey were worse than those on my outward journey, and now that the cold weather and winter rains are setting in, deaths are more numerous. The roads in some places are almost impassable.

XV.
CILICIA (VILAYET OF ADANA AND SANDJAK OF
MARASH).

Cilicia occupies the south-eastern corner of Anatolia, overlooking the Gulf of Iskanderoun (Alexandretta), and falls into two sharply contrasted regions—the fertile, malarious coastal plain of Adana, traversed by a section of the Baghdad Railway, and the hill-country inland to the north-east of it, where the lines of Taurus are broken by the upper courses of the Sarus and Pyramus (Sihoun and Djihoun) and spread out fanwise into a maze of high valleys and mountain blocks.

Until the spring of 1915, Cilicia was one of the chief centres of the Armenian race in Turkey, and there was no region, with the possible exception of Van, which they succeeded in making and keeping so thoroughly their own. The Armenian Dispersion in north-eastern Anatolia and the suburban districts round the coasts of Marmora, numerous and wealthy and influential though it was, still constituted no more than an urban class, and even in the towns was usually in a minority. The Cilician highlands, on the other hand, were sown thick with Armenian peasant communities—small but prosperous hill towns and villages, of which the most important were Hadjin and Zeitoun in the north, but which stretched in an unbroken chain from the Taurus to the southern spurs of the Amanus, until, at Dört Yöl, they touched the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean.

The Cilician Armenians were mainly shepherds and husbandmen, but they were also one of the most civilised and progressive sections of the Armenian race. Schools, both Armenian and American, had been established in the mountains, and the mountaineers were in close contact with Adana, Tarsus, Mersina and the other ports and cities of the Adana plain, where commerce and industry were almost entirely in the hands of the Armenian element—an element constantly reinforced from the reservoir of Armenian population in the highlands.

The Cilician Armenians seemed destined to play an important part in the future development of the Ottoman Empire. Their country was of peculiar strategical and commercial importance, for it was to be traversed by the main artery of the Empire, the Baghdad Railway, in the most vital section of its course, where it has to negotiate two mountain-barriers and approach most nearly to the Mediterranean coast. And meanwhile the Armenian population itself was here steadily increasing in numbers, while in almost every other part of Turkey it had been receding under the continuous repression to which it had been subjected since 1878. This increase was the more remarkable because Cilicia had been especially visited by the last outbreak of massacre, which occurred in 1909.

All this, however, only rendered the Cilician Armenians more obnoxious in the Ottoman Government’s eyes, and the war gave it the opportunity it coveted for rooting them out. A universal deportation of all the Armenians in the Empire may or may not have been contemplated before the breach between the Turks and Armenians at Van, in the middle of April, 1915; but, as far as Cilicia is concerned, there is no doubt whatever that the scheme was devised and put in train before any of the events at Van occurred. Fighting began at Van on the 20th April; the first Armenians had been deported from Zeitoun on the 8th April, twelve days before, and by the 19th a convoy of them had already arrived in Syria (Doc. [138]. The Cilician deportations, at any rate, must therefore have been planned at least as early as March, and probably earlier still.

And there is one special feature about the execution of the scheme in Cilicia which makes it evident that it was carried out deliberately and thought out far ahead. Immediately the Armenians were evicted from their villages, their houses were assigned to Moslem refugees. We have occasional evidence of the same practice, during June, in the Vilayets of Erzeroum and Trebizond; but in these cases the Moslem intruders, where we can trace their origin, generally prove to have been Turks or Kurds from the adjoining districts on the east, who had just evacuated their own homes in consequence of the first Russian occupation of Van. Their installation in Armenian houses was apparently extempore and conceivably only provisional. On the other hand, the “mouhadjirs” brought by the Ottoman Government to Zeitoun, Hadjin and the other towns and villages of the Cilician highlands, were all of them Moslem refugees from Europe—from the Roumelian Vilayets ceded by Turkey in 1913, as a result of the Balkan War. They had been on the Government’s hands for over two years, and during all that time they had remained stranded in Thrace or along the Aegean littoral. But now they had been transported from these western fringes of the Empire to the other extremity of the Anatolian Railway, and by the 8th April, 1915, they were in readiness to occupy the homes of the Armenians in Cilicia immediately their rightful owners had started on their road to exile. This is clear proof that, at any rate in Cilicia, the deportation was not only planned systematically, but planned a long time in advance.

Its execution began at Zeitoun in April, and was extended to all the highland villages in the course of May and June. In the cities of the plain and the coast, on the other hand, it did not become drastic till the first week in September—a tacit avowal that the official pleas of Armenian disloyalty and strategical necessity were a pretext hardly intended to be taken seriously even by their authors.

The Zeitounlis were deported in two directions—half of them to Sultania (see Documents 123 and 125) in the Anatolian Desert, and half to the Mesopotamian Sandjak of Der-el-Zor (see Document 145). The exiles at Sultania were subsequently removed to Der-el-Zor to join the rest, and the later convoys seem all to have taken the south-eastward road. The deportation was conducted by the gendarmerie with the same brutality as elsewhere, but the Cilician country is free of nomadic Kurds, so that there was here less wholesale massacre on the way. On the last stages of their journey to Zor the exiles were harassed by the Arab nomads of the steppe, but these are a milder race than their Kurdish neighbours. The chief alleviation of the Cilicians’ fate was their geographical position. The distance they had to traverse was comparatively short, and they only began to die in large numbers after reaching their destination.