142. ALEPPO: MESSAGE DATED 17th FEBRUARY, 1916, FROM FRÄULEIN O.; PUBLISHED IN THE GERMAN JOURNAL “SONNENAUFGANG,” APRIL, 1916.
I want to beg our friends at home not to grow weary of making intercession for the members of the Armenian nation who are in exile here. If there is no visible prospect of a change for the better, a few months more will see the end of them all. They are succumbing in thousands to famine, pestilence and the inclemency of the weather. The exiles at Hama, Homs and in the neighbourhood of Damascus are comparatively better of. They are left where they are, and can look about for means of subsistence. But further East, along the Euphrates, they are driven from place to place, plundered and maltreated. Many of our friends are dead.
XIX.
VILAYET OF DAMASCUS AND SANDJAK OF
DER-EL-ZOR.
Aleppo was not intended to be the final destination of the Armenian exiles. A certain number of the earlier arrivals were sent to the swampy, malarious districts a short distance to the south and south-east of the city, but by far the greater number were forwarded at least several days’ journey further afield.
Aleppo lies on the inner edge of a great desert amphitheatre, which is buttressed by the Lebanon, the Taurus and the mountains of Kurdistan, and slopes very gradually south-eastward towards the alluvial lowlands at the head of the Persian Gulf, while southward it passes insensibly into the high desert lands of the Arabian Peninsula. This region presents a sharp climatic contrast to the tablelands of Anatolia and Armenia, which are the native country of the Armenian race. Climatically and geographically, Armenia and Anatolia are an integral part of Europe, while Syria and Mesopotamia are the outer fringe of Arabia, and akin, like it, to the Sahara region of North Africa. The frontier between the two climates is formed by the southward escarpment of the Taurus, and the transition between them is abrupt.
The ostensible motive for deporting the Armenians to this country was to remove them from the neighbourhood of the frontiers and from the coast and to plant them among a compact Moslem population of alien (Arabic) speech, where they would find themselves in political isolation as well as in a decisive numerical minority. The actual result was to subject people accustomed to a temperate climate to a climate of a Saharan character, and this under the worst conceivable conditions for such a change of environment—when the victims were destitute of food, clothing and shelter, and physically exhausted by months of travelling on foot over the roughest of roads.
The two chief places selected by the Ottoman Government as destinations for the exiles were Damascus, which lies due south of Aleppo, and is close, like Aleppo itself, to the inner rim of the amphitheatre, and Der-el-Zor, which lies considerably further inwards—six days’ journey by carriage from Aleppo down the course of the Euphrates, where the river cuts through the desert between the mountains of Armenia and the alluvium of the Gulf. Some batches had been sent a further day’s journey still, to Mayadin (Doc. [141], while there are even rumours of their presence (Docs. [11] and [121]) within forty-eight hours’ journey of Baghdad.
The condition of these exiles after their arrival is made sufficiently plain in the documents included in this section. Doc. [145] shows that by the 12th July there were already large numbers of Cilicians bivouacked at Der-el-Zor, while it appears from Doc. [143] that they did not begin to arrive at Damascus until the 12th August, 1915.
143. DAMASCUS: REPORT FROM A FOREIGN RESIDENT AT DAMASCUS, DATED 20th SEPTEMBER, BUT CONTAINING INFORMATION UP TO THE 3rd OCTOBER, 1915; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND SYRIAN RELIEF.
Since the 12th August, 1915, convoys of Armenian exiles, consisting of from a few hundred to as many as two thousand individuals, have been marched through this city at varying intervals, averaging about two to three or more convoys per week.