Armenian genocide

"When I returned to Aleppo in September 1915 … a new phase of Armenian massacres had begun which aimed at exterminating, root and branch, the intelligent, industrious, and progressive Armenian nation. . . . In dilapidated caravansaries (in Aleppo) I found quantities of dead (many corpses being half-decomposed) and others, still living among them, who were soon to breathe their last. . . . masses of half-starved people, the survivors of so-called 'deportation convoys.' I was told, to cover the extermination of the Armenian nation with a political cloak, military reasons were being put forward... After I had informed myself about the facts and had made enquiries on all sides, I came to the conclusion that all these accusations against the Armenians were, in fact, based on trifling provocations, which were taken as an excuse for slaughtering 10,000 innocents for one guilty person, for the most savage outrages against women and children, and for a campaign of starvation against the exiles which was intended to exterminate the whole nation. What we saw with our own eyes here in Aleppo was really only the last scene in the great tragedy of the extermination of the Armenians. It was only a minute fraction of the horrible drama that was being played out simultaneously in all the other provinces of Turkey. The German Consul from Mosul related, in my presence, at the German club at Aleppo that, in many places on the road from Mosul to Aleppo, he had seen children's hands lying hacked off in such numbers that one could have paved the road with them. The Consuls are of opinion that, so far, probably about one million Armenians have perished in the massacres of the last few months. Of this number, one must reckon that at least half are women and children who have either been murdered or have succumbed to starvation. The Arabs of the village declared that they had killed these Armenians by the Government's orders. A newspaper reporter was told by one of these gentlemen "Certainly we are now punishing many innocent people as well. But we have to guard ourselves even against those who may one day become guilty." On such grounds Turkish statesmen justify the wholesale slaughter of defenceless women and children. A German Catholic ecclesiastic reported that Enver Pasha declared, in the presence of Monsignore Dolci, the Papal Envoy at Constantinople, that he would not rest so long as a single Armenian remained alive. The object of the deportations is the extermination of the whole Armenian nation."

"After the massacres of Djarbekir, the tide of carnage and persecution rolled over the provinces of Adana and Northern Syria (Zeitun, Urfa, Marrash, etc) which were at the time crowded with deportees from Central and Northern Anatolia...The provinces of Van, Bitlis, Djarbekir... were the only ones which suffered massacres in the true sense of the word. In the remaining vilayets of the Empire persecution took the form of deportations, which effected almost the same results as the massacres. there can be no doubt that the massacres and deportations took place in accordance with a laid-out plan for which the responsibility lay with the retrograde party, headed by the Grand Vizier Talat Pasha and the civil authorities under his orders. They aimed to make an end first of the Armenians, then of the greeks and other Christians, Ottoman subjects, in the Empire. We glean ample verification for this from the masacres of Sairt, Djesiret, and the surrounding districts, during which perished no less then two hundred thousand Nestorian Christians, Syrio-Catholics, Jacobites, etc, who had no connection whatever with the Armenians, and who had always been the Sultan's loyal subjects. Officially we are forbidden to give the deportees any ration without a written order signed by the civil authorities of the province from which they came, along with other idiocies invented by Talat Pasha in order to kill the poor devils with starvation."

"I learned from them some extremely alarming details regarding the Armenian situation, which made me comprehend perfectly their fully justified fear as to the future fate of their small protégés. I caught sight of the military commander of the place dictating orders to his officers, while a group of kiatihs or secretaries deciphered an enormous heap of telegrams. That unaccustomed activity made me suspect that the storm was about to break. And I was not mistaken. Next morning, which was the twentieth of April, 1915, we stumbled, near El-Aghlat, upon mutilated Armenian corpses strewing the length of the road. One hour later we saw numerous gigantic columns of smoke surge up from the opposite shore of the lake, indicating the sites where the cities and hamlets of the provinces of Van were being devoured by flame. Then I understood. The die was cast. The Armenian "revolution" had begun...April 21. At dawn I was awakened by the noise of shots and volleys. The Armenians had attacked the town. Immediately I mounted my horse and, followed by some armed men, went to see what was happening. Judge of my amazement to discover that the aggressors had not been the Armenians, after ail, but the civil authorities themselves! Supported by the Kurds and the rabble of the vicinity, they were attacking and sacking the Armenian quarter..., I succeeded at last, without serious accident, in approaching the Beledie reis of the town, who was directing the orgy; whereupon I ordered him to stop the massacre. He astounded me by replying that he was doing nothing more than carry out an unequivocal order emanating from the Governor-General of the province … to exterminate all Armenian males of twelve years of age and over. I, as a soldier, could not prevent the execution of this decree, which was purely civil in character, however much I desired. So I ordered the gendarmes to retire, and waited until the hell was over. At the end of an hour and a half of butchery there remained of the Armenians of Adil-Javus only seven survivors... The civil authorities of the Sultan kill noiselessly and preferably by night, like vampires. Generally they choose as their victim's sepulchre deep lakes in which there are no indiscreet currents to bear the corpse to shore, or lonely mountain caves where dogs and jackals aid in erasing all traces of their crime. Among them I noticed some Kurds belonging to a group of several hundred which, on the following morning, was to help in killing off all the Armenians still in possession of some few positions and edifices around the town. Seeing that the enemy's fire was dwindling down, and unable to endure any longer the odor of scorched flesh from the Armenian corpses scattered among the smoking ruins of the church... Pursued by Kurdish bullets, which felled them by the dozen, the Armenians ran hither and thither like frightened rabbits; and not a few of them sat upon the ground, stupefied, awaiting death like sheep bound to the sacrificial altar, without making the slightest attempt to save themselves. Only a small group of young men kept defending themselves desperately, their backs to a wall, until, overcome at last by sheer exhaustion, they fell one after another under the cutlasses and bullets of the Kurds, who used the sword whenever possible in order to keep from wasting cartridges."

"Another issue that confronts all democracies as they move to the future is how we deal with the past. The United States is still working through some of our own darker periods in our history. Facing the Washington Monument that I spoke of is a memorial of Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed those who were enslaved even after Washington led our Revolution. Our country still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans. Human endeavor is by its nature imperfect. History is often tragic, but unresolved it can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past. And reckoning with the past can help us seize a better future. Now, I know there's strong views in this chamber about the terrible events of 1915. And while there's been a good deal of commentary about my views, it's really about how the Turkish and Armenian people deal with the past. And the best way forward for the Turkish and Armenian people is a process that works through the past in a way that is honest, open, and constructive."

"The Armenian population which is being expelled from its homeland is not only being subjected to the greatest misery but also to a total extermination (27 June 1915) — The manner in which the Armenian are being deported for resettlement purposes is tantamount to death a verdict for the affected people. (1 July 1915) — the time will come when Turkey will have to account for this policy of extermination (13 August 1915)."

"Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in Turkey. Almost no one dares speak but me, and the nationalists hate me for that."

"Pamuk has made groundless claims against the Turkish identity, the Turkish military and Turkey as a whole. He should be punished for violating Articles 159 and 312 of the Turkish penal code. He made a statement provoking the people to hatred and animosity through the media, which is defined as a crime in Article 312."

"The Van uprising certainly was an act of desperation. The local Armenians realized that general massacres against the Armenians had already started and they would be the next target. In the course of the summer 1915 the Turkish government with inexorable consequence brought its bloody task of extermination of an entire nation to an end...The gruesome destruction of the Armenian nation in Asia Minor by the Ittihadist government was an act which was barbaric and which to the highest degree outrages all human senses."

"The criminal gangs who were released from the prisons, after a week's training at the War Ministry's training grounds, were sent off to the Caucasian front as the brigands of the Special Organization, perpetrating the worst crimes against the Armenians … The Ittihadists intended to destroy the Armenians, and thereby to do away with the Question of the Eastern Provinces.... In order to justify this enormous crime [of the Armenian genocide] the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Istanbul. [It included such statements as:] the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul, kill off the Ittihadist leaders and will succeed in opening up the straits [to enable the Allied fleets to capture Istanbul]. These vile and malicious incitements [were such, however, that they] could persuade only people who were not even able to feel the pangs of their own hunger. … among those Armenians who were atrociously wasted, despite the fact that they were most innocent, guiltless, and who had committed no crime whatsoever, were the Armenians of Bursa, Ankara, Eskiehir, and Konya."

"I defended the Armenians who, even though they were completely innocent, were murdered simply because they were Armenians. The dictates of justice and the state's badge required such intervention."

"The partisans of Ittihad are unabashedly conceding that their ultimate aim [Endziel] is the total annihilation (ganzliche Ausrottung) of the Armenians of Turkey, adding, "After the war we no longer will have any Armenians in Turkey.""

"They [the Ittahadist leaders] have fabricated, for the benefit of Allied Powers, an alleged revolution stirred up by the Dashnak party. They have inflated the importance of isolated incidents and acts of self-defense by the Armenians and used it as an excuse to deport the bordering population. On the way. the Armenians have been murdered, on orders of the Committee, by gangs of Kurds and Turks and at times, even by gendarmes."

"The failure to do justice in the Armenian Genocide can be traced in important part to the overlapping, interlocking dynamics of economics, international law, and mass murder. The more predatory aspects of international law dovetailed well with the destructive social patterns of the Turkish killing. The law proved to be incapable of prosecuting genocide without drawing more "conventional" aspects of colonialism, national development, and international trade into the dock as crimes as well. The legal and economic precedents set in the wake of World War I had considerable impact on the course of the Holocaust during World War II, just as the more widely understood political precedents did. Hitler himself repeatedly raised the international community's failure to do justice in the wake of the Armenian Genocide to explain and justify his own racial theories, and the Germans' pattern of "learning through doing" genocide was similar in important respects to that of the Turks. While the two crimes were different in important respects, they both were led by ideologically driven, authoritarian political parties that had come to power in the midst of a deep social crisis. Both the Ittihad and the Nazis-each originally a marginal political party-managed to perpetrate genocide by enlisting the established institutions of conventional life-the national courts, commercial structures, scholarly community, and so on-in the tasks of mass persecution and eventually mass murder. In both cases, the ruling party achieved its genocidal aims in part by offering economic incentives for persecution, the most basic of which were the opportunity to share in the spoils of deported people and the ability to transfer the costs of economic crisis onto the shoulders of the despised group."

"The deportation and destruction of the Armenians was decided by the Young Turks Committee in Constantinople."

"Kill every Armenian man, woman, and child without concern."

"The Armenian Genocide is proven in all its components — among them intent. The converging evidence is well in excess of that generally judged abundant in establishing other historical truths. The genocide was a horrendous crime. The evidence is there — province by province, city by city, village by village, hamlet by hamlet, with its countless variations according to time and place yet all the same in the vast process of extermination — genocide. A deliberate plan, carefully organized and brutally executed. The deniers and rationalizers offend the dignity of the historian and of all humanity."

"It can no longer be denied that the Turks... have undertaken the extermination of the Armenians race and it appears that they have largely succeeded in it. With certain air of gleefulness Talaat recently told me that in Erzerum, for example, there should be remaining not a single Armenian... Turkey today is under a maniacal spell due to the realization that she carried out the extermination of the Armenian race with impunity."

"In fact most of the available evidence points to the conclusion that a systematic decimation of the Armenian population in the eastern provinces had already been decided on by the Ittihad ve Terakki regime, and that the troubles in Van and elsewhere merely served as a convenient excuse for getting a program of mass deportations and large-scale extermination."

"By February 1916, 1.5 million Armenians were destroyed … the first step toward the recovery of the economic predominance in Turkey … there was joy in the government circles that the long-desired opportunity finally presented itself..."

"Until recently, in fact at the beginning of this year, the Armenians were regarded as the most reliable element, indeed the only reliable people within the Christian elements in Turkey. One could read it in all the newspapers and the important Turkish dignitaries confirmed this on every occasion, which presented itself...Since March, an about-turn has taken place which is as general and consequent as if the Turks had never known up until now what dangerous people had been living within their midst."

"The Turks are vigorously carrying through their cruel intention, to exterminate the Armenian people,"

"It is evident that deportations of Armenians is not motivated by military considerations, the minister of the Interior Talaat Bey recently in a conversation with Dr. Mortsmann presently in the Imperial Service, declared openly that the Porte wants to profit from the World War for radically finishing their internal enemies – the Christians before the intervention of outside powers."

"The manner in which the matter of relocation is being handled demonstrate that the government is in fact pursuing the goal of annihialating the Armenian race in Turkey."

"The Turkish denial [of the Armenian Genocide] is probably the foremost example of historical perversion. With a mix of academic sophistication and diplomatic thuggery -- of which we at Macquarie University have been targets -- the Turks have put both memory and history into reverse gear.""

"[When asked what Turkish people think about the Armenian Genocide] — Sadly, young people in Turkey know nothing about the subject, All they know is nationalist things written in school textbooks. And because they lack that knowledge, they believe that the Armenians plot bad things against their country. … maybe future generations will address the subject in a more reasonable and calm manner."

"In 1982, I refuse to take part in a colloquium whose subject is close to my heart. Organized by two Israeli professors of psychiatry, this symposium on genocide, which I am to chair, is scheduled for early June in Tel Aviv. Everything is set. Scholars and historians from several continents have accepted our invitation, among them Armenians. After all, they have ideas on this subject which has touched them closely. How could one forget the massacre of their parents and grandparents at the hands of the Turkish army? At the last moment, we encounter a major hurdle. Under pressure from Turkey, the Israelis urge me to revoke our invitation to the Armenians. I refuse. It would be too humiliating. And to humiliate is to blaspheme. The pressure increases. I am given to understand that if a single Armenian participates in the conference, Israeli-Turkish relations will suffer. And that there would be consequences for Jews in certain Arab countries. Jewish emissaries from Istanbul confirm this to me with documents. No matter, I will not offend our Armenian guests. I resign as chairman... 'A human life weighs more than all the books written about human life.'"