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

by Unknown

With the participation of Turkey in the present war and the need of every possible man for military service, a detachment of Turkish soldiers was sent against the town, with orders to force the young Armenians to accept military service. The latter instead attacked the Turkish soldiers, killed some 300 of them and, with the additional arms thus secured, prepared for a determined resistance. An overwhelming Turkish force, however, was sent against the town; it fell, and then the Turks carried out in the extremest degree their newly devised system of deportation and dispersion.

Twenty thousand Turks from Thrace were taken to Zeitoun and established in the houses that for generations had belonged to the Armenian families. The latter were then scattered to the four winds of the Empire.

I talked with eye-witnesses who, coming to Constantinople from the interior, had seen this miserable population being dispersed and deported. They were being herded across the country by soldiers in groups ranging from 50 to several hundred. Old men who were unable to maintain the fast pace set by the mounted soldiers were beaten till they fell dead in their tracks. Children who were likewise too tender to stand the terrible strain dropped out by the wayside, while the mothers were driven relentlessly on with no hopes of ever again being able to find their little ones. Other mothers with babies in arms, unable to see the latter die under their very eyes, unable to give them the nourishment necessary to sustain life, and unable to bear the agony of leaving them by the wayside to an unknown fate, dropped them in wells as they passed, thus ending the sufferings of the little ones and having at least the consolation of knowing their fate.

The bulk of this miserable population from Zeitoun, that was able to withstand this herding across the desert interior of Asiatic Turkey, was planted largely in two places. One portion was established in a marshy region which, up to the present time, had never been habitable on account of the deadly malaria; the other portion was sent down in the direction of the Persian Gulf, to a locality so deadly that the poor victims prayed to be sent to the malarial marshes instead. Their prayers were in vain.

As in the system of deportation carried out in all other portions of the Empire, scores if not hundreds of these families from Zeitoun were separated and transplanted in such a manner as practically to preclude all possibility of their ever being reunited again.

In defence of these terrible measures which have been taken, the Turks at Constantinople declare that no one but the Armenians themselves is to blame. They state that when the present attack began on the Dardanelles, the Armenians were notified that if they took advantage of the moment when the Turks were concentrating every energy for the maintenance of the Empire, to rise in rebellion, they would be dealt with without quarter. This warning, however, the Armenians failed to heed. They not only rose in rebellion, occupying a number of important towns, including Van, but extended important help to the Russians in the latter’s campaign in the Caucasus. As all these Armenians are Ottoman subjects, they have to be dealt with according to the stringent Turkish laws on such subjects.

While the Turks freely admit that this revolt of the Armenians was and is confined to those living near the Russian border, the authorities at Constantinople declare that at the present moment, when the very existence of the Empire is at stake from the attacks of outside enemies, it is quite out of the question for them to search out among the 2,000,000 Armenians of the Turkish Empire the comparatively few guilty ones and punish them alone. They declare that they have no choice except to ensure their safety against all the Armenians. By punishing all, they are certain to strike down the guilty ones and to prevent any more uprisings among the others.

While this is the Turkish side of the situation, there is also another side which I shall give on the authority of men who have passed practically their entire lives in Turkey and whose names, if I dared mention them, would be recognised in both Europe and America as competent authority. According to these men, the decision has gone out from the Young Turk Party that the Armenian population of Turkey must be set back fifty years. This has been decided upon as necessary in order to ensure the supremacy of the Turkish race in the Ottoman Empire, which is one of the basic principles of the Young Turk Party. The situation, I am told, is absolutely analogous to that which preceded the Armenian massacres under Abd-ul-Hamid. So far, however, the Young Turks have confined themselves to the new system of deportation, dispersion and separation of families.

To the Armenian population in general that is affected at the present moment by the carrying out of these orders, I have found but one exception. This is the Armenian population of Constantinople, which numbers about 70,000. There Ambassador Morgenthau assumed a sort of unofficial protectorate and guarantee for the Armenians, with the result that up to the present moment less than 300 of them have been molested.

So terrible have been the sufferings of the Armenians during the past three months that at the moment I left Constantinople, in order to be able to write this story, there had begun a reversal of feeling towards them even amongst the Turks themselves. The latter declared that the orders, which had been issued solely as a necessary safeguard for the Empire against the Armenians, had been carried out by the local authorities, especially in the districts far from Constantinople, with a degree of severity that had never been intended. Talaat Bey, Minister of the Interior, had even begun to permit a few dozen of the men, whose loyalty to the Turkish Government was beyond question, to return to their homes.