Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Nineteen

       "By the fall of 1920 the Kemalist army was acting on its committment to destroy Armenia, now a precarious, isolated country of genocide refugees ravaged by disease and famine.  Once again Armenia found itself in a situation beyond its control.  In the summer of 1920, the Soviets were pressing Armenia to join the Soviet Union, and war actually broke out between Armenia and the Soviet Union in July.  From the other side of the world--so it seemed--the West was urging Armenia not to join the Soviets, which in the end would cost Armenia even more territory.
       In this tense period a draft of a treaty between Soviet Russia and Kemalist Turkey remained unratified in Ankara because the Soviets now asked that some of Turkish Armenia be awarded to the present Armenian Republic.  The Soviets also asked that the peoples of Turkish Armenia (the term used by the Soviets) and Batum, eastern Thrace, and the regions inhabited jointly by Turks and Arabs should be given the right to decide their own fate.  Refugees living in Soviet Russia, and those who had been made homeless by war and massacre, were to be allowed to return to their homes and participate in a referendum.
       The Turkish response to the Soviet requests is revealing.  Kiazim Karabekir's answer is an early and quintessential statement of Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide.  He retorted:' In Turkey there has been neither an Armenia nor territory inhabited by Armenians. . . . Those [Armenians] living in Turkey committed murder and massacres, and have escaped to Iran, America, Europe, and some of them to Armenia.  How is it possible to call back these murderers and give them the right to vote?'  When Soviet foreign commissar Grigori Chicherin put the same proposal to the Turkish delegation in Moscow, he was told the same thing:  'No Armenian provinces have ever existed in Turkey.'  In this way, the Kemalists were continuing the work of the Young Turks in their effort to erase Armenia in fact and idea from the map it had inhabited."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, pgs.325-28.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Eighteen

         "By the fall of 1919, as the Kemalists were taking on the Greeks, Damad Ferid's government fell, and the Kemalists accrued more influence in government in Constantinople and throughout the country.  In the coming years there were three Greco-Turkish battles, and in September 1922 the Turks would burn Smyrna to the ground after killing tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians and expelling the Greeks and remaining Armenians from the city and the region.
        As Kemalist nationalism found its footing and assumed unofficial political leadership, the nationalist stance against Armenia became increasingly virulent.  Procrastination by the Entente in Paris gave the Turks the time they needed to invade Armenia.  But before that happened, politics at the peace conference and in the United States made Armenia's situation tenser and even more complex.  In April 1920 the Allies asked President Wilson to draw a boundary line for the western part of Armenia;  but in May the United States rejected a proposed American mandate for Armenia.
        And on August 10, 1920, the Allies brought Damad Ferid Pasha and his government to the conference table with a treaty they had been preparing for months.  Like the Greek occupation of Smyrna, the Treaty of Sevres came as an affront to the Turks and especially to the Kemalists.  Because the Ottoman Empire had been a multicultural empire comprising numerous ethnic groups, many of which were living on their historic lands, the Treaty of Sevres in some ways was aimed at decolonizing the empire.
        Section VI, articles 88-93, of the treaty dealt exclusively with Armenia:  1)Turkey was to recognize Armenia as a free and independent state;  2) the president of the United States would determine the boundary between Armenia and Turkey, a boundary that would pass through the provinces of Erzurum, Trebizond, Van, and Bitlis;  3)the boundary was to include an outlet for Armenia on the Black Sea;  4)Turkey must renounce any claim to the ceded land;  5)although Armenia had been crippled by massacre and deportation, the European powers were asking Armenia to assume financial obligations for the former Turkish territory that was awarded to it;  6)Armenia would agree to protect the interests of minorities in its new state.  The treaty was at least a fair settlement for Armenia, but by the time it was signed, the politics in Turkey and the military advances against Armenia had made it almost obsolete.  Now the Kemalists were determined to revoke the Treaty of Sevres with its awards of territory not only to Armenia, but to Kurdistan and Greece.
        The 'National Pact' the Kemalists had drawn up in 1919 demanded all of Turkish Armenia, including areas that had been in Russia (Kars and Ardahan) that were now part of the Armenian Republic.  The Armenians desperately clung to the promises of the Europeans at Versailles and in the Treaty of Sevres, but the tide was turning.  The Kemalists were solidifying Turkey, and no foreign power was willing to accept a mandate for Armenia, even though the Europeans were agreeing to ask the League of Nations to consider the idea.  In the West the commitment to Armenia, in the wake of postwar fatigue, was dying fast."   The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, pgs. 324-325. 

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Seventeen

       "Ravished Armenia was based on the survivor account of an Armenian girl, Arshalois (meaning 'morning light') Mardigian, who in the United States had changed her name to Aurora Mardiganian.  Aurora had arrived at Ellis Island in November 1917, a sixteen-year- old with one surviving brother, for whom she was searching in the United States.  In New York City she was taken in by an Armenian family who placed ads in the papers to help her search.  The advertisements caught the eye of several journalists at the New York Sun and the New York Tribune, who interviewed Aurora and published her story.
       When Harvey Gates, a twenty-four-year-old screenwriter who would become known for If I Had a Million(1932), The Werewolf of London(1935), and The Courageous Dr. Christian(1939)--read about Aurora, he was both deeply moved and saw a unique opportunity.  He and his wife, Eleanor, persuaded Nora Waln, Aurora's guardian, that the girl should abandon her plans to work in a dress factory and pursue a career in the movies.  They soon became Aurora's legal guardians and transcribed her story, which was published as Ravished Armenia in the United States in 1918 (and as Auction of Souls in England in 1919).  The book came with a preface and testimony by H.L. Gates, the president of Robert College in Constantinople, and Nora Waln, who verified the truth of Aurora's story.  While the book sold well, its more sensational venue would be the big screen.
       Ravished Armenia was an epic story and a first in film history, bringing genocide to the screen.  Aurora's story begins in April 1915 in the city of Tchmesh-Gedzak (Chemeshgadzak), a town just north of the twin cities of Harput and Mezre in what Leslie Davis had recently called 'the slaughterhouse province' of Harput.  From her comfortable, affluent home (her father was a banker), Aurora is arrested and then abducted by Turkish gendarmes and thrust into a ghoulish world of massacre and violence.  As she describes the death marches across Anatolia, Ravished Armenia depicts the story of what Ambassador Morgenthau had already called 'the murder of a nation.'
       Col. William N. Selig, a pioneering producer from the 1890's, bought the film rights to Aurora's story, and Oscar Apfel, who had recently directed The Squaw Man with Cecil B. DeMille, was signed on as director.  Irving Cummings and Anna Q. Nilsson, well-known movie actors of their day, were signed to leading roles.  Just as President Wilson was heading to Paris for the Peace Conference, Gates was bringing Aurora Mardignian to Los Angeles to act in her own story at $15 a week.  'They said $15 was a lot of money,' and 'I was naive,' Aurora said, looking back at her life.  At the Selig studios in Santa Monica, Ravished Armenia was made in less than a month, with death march scenes filmed on the beach near Santa Monica and Mt. Baldy standing in for Mt. Ararat.
       Aurora barely spoke English and knew nothing about the world of cinema.  On the set, when she saw actors in red fezzes, she fell into terror.  'I thought they were going to give me to the Turks to finish my life,' she said, breaking down in the middle of the scene.  It took Eleanor Gates's consoling and explanations to assure Aurora that the actors were not Turks but Americans playing their roles, and that they would not harm her.  Today we would call Aurora's response post-traumatic shock.
       Having experienced the deaths of her mother, father, brother, and sisters at the hands of the Turks, she was left alone to endure and witness torture, mass rapes, the crucifixion of women, the sale of women into slavery and harems, and the notorious 'game of swords' in which girls and women were thrown by the chetes and gendarmes from horses and impaled on swords that were set blade-up in the ground.  As film critic Anthony Slide put it, no matter how hard both the book and the film tried to portray the violence Aurora experienced and witnessed, they were both 'relatively sanitized versions of what [she] actually suffered and witnessed.'
       When Aurora saw Apfel's version of the Armenian women being crucified on large, well-constructed crosses with their long hair covering their nude bodies, she told the director, 'The Turks didn't make their crosses like that.  The Turks made little pointed crosses.  They took the clothes off the girls.  They made them bend down.  And after raping them, they made them sit on the pointed wood, through the vagina.  That's the way they killed--the Turks.  Americans have made it a more civilized way.  They can't show such terrible things.'  Aurora then told Apfel and the others how her pregnant aunt, who was trying to protect her two-year-old son, was killed.  'The Turks, they took a knife and cut open her abdomen.  They said, this is how we are going to end all you people.  They pulled out a fetus from her.  Put it on a stone.  They took the end of the gun that they had, which was heavy, and started to pound and pound and pound her baby.'"  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, pgs. 313-315.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Sixteen

       "As the evidence became overwhelming, Ambassador Morgenthau--in his quintessentially direct way--repeatedly confronted Talaat Pasha about his government's treatment of the Armenians.  'Why are you so interested in the Armenians?'  Talaat angrily asked Morgenthau.  'You are a Jew;  these people are Christians. . . .Why can't you let us do with these Christians as we please?'  Indignant, Morgenthau answered,
                    'You don't seem to realize that I am not here as a Jew
                     but as American Ambassador.  My country contains
                      something more than 97,000,000 Christians and
                      something less than 3,000,000 Jews.  So, at least
                      in my ambassadorial capacity, I am 97 per cent
                       Christian.  But after all, that is not the point.  I
                       do not appeal to you in the name of any race or any
                       religion, but merely as a human being. . . .The way
                       you are treating the Armenians . . . .puts you in the
                       class of backward, reactionary peoples.'
       'We treat the Americans all right,' Talaat answered.  'I don't see why you should complain.'
       'But Americans are outraged by your persecution of the Armenians.'
       'It is no use for you to argue,' Talaat answered on another occasion;  'we have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians;  there are none at all left in Bitlis, Van, and Erzerum.  The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish with them.  If we don't, they will plan their revenge.'  Morgenthau then tried to persuade Talaat by reminding him of the economic consequences of wiping out the Armenian population.  'These people are your business men.  They control many of your industries.  They are very large tax-payers.' 
       'We care nothing about the commercial loss,' replied Talaat.  'We have figured all that out and we know that it will not exceed five million pounds.'
       'You are making a terrible mistake,' Morgenthau answered, and repeated the statement three times.
        'Yes, we may make mistakes,' he replied, 'but'--and he firmly closed his lips and shook his head--'we never regret.'  Not long after, Talaat boasted to the ambassador, 'I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years!'"  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, pgs. 274-275.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Fifteen

       "As far west as Adrianople, in Thrace, in March 1916, Consular Agent Charles E. Allen described his view of the process of Turkification and general ethnic cleansing.  Once agein the Turks employed forced conversions to Islam and installed muhajirs in the homes of deported Armenians, but in this case the Greeks, who were the largest Christian population there, were the worst hit.  The authorities are working toward 'the Turkification of Thrace,' Allen wrote Morgenthau.  'They are simply expelling' the Greeks and seizing their property, and "installing" Muslims in their houses.  About half the Greek population of Thrace had already been deported back to Greece, and the few remaining Armenians had already been converted to Islam to avoid death, and would 'be required to intermarry with the Turks.'  Allen conjectured that 'this method of securing the disappearance of the Armenian race' might have been promoted by the Germans in order to prevent more killing, as 'the Turks would probably have preferred a quicker and more effective method.'
       Not far from Adrianople, in Ovajik, just west of Constantinople, ten-year-old Serouphi Tvoukdjian woke to find the town crier ordering all Armenian families to prepare to be deported in four days.  They were 'herded into side-entrance box cars,' taken by rail to Konia and Adana,  and then released and forcibly marched into the Syrian desert.  Farther west in the great port city of Smyrna, the American consul, George Horton, documented a similar Turkification frenzy in a report to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in February 1915.  'I have the honor to inform you,' he wrote, 'that lawless Turkish bands are appearing in increasing numbers in this district and are spreading a reign of terror among the Christians of all races.'  Horton closes his letter to Bryan with the refrain of a song Turkish students in Smyrna were singing:
                                            Revenge!  Revenge!  Revenge!
                                             Let us kill, let us cut to pieces,
                                             Let us swim in blood up to our knees,
                                             Revenge!  Revenge!  Revenge!
                                             Let us wipe the stain from our clothes.
       Farther south along the Mediterannean coast, in Adana Province, which still bore the scars of the 1909 massacre, Consul Edward Nathan reported the same pattern of massacre and deportation that was in motion in all other areas of Turkey.  Writing to Ambassador Morgenthau on July 26, 1915, Nathan informed him that 'deportation measures on a large scale' are to be carried out 'against Armenians in the cities of Adana, Tarsus and Mersina.'
       So rapid and massive was the deportation from Adana and its vilayet that in Katma, at the eastern edge of Cilicia, Shukru Aghzarian and some of the other surviving deportees 'found about 200,000 Armenian deportees living in tents without food or water.'  Hundreds were dying by the day, and to make this worse, the 'local Turks,' Aghzarian writes, 'threw offal into the wells' and 'often cut the ropes' on the water buckets.
       Nathan emphasized that the Ottoman government had sent a 'member of the Special Commission on Deportations. . . to superintend the matter.'  The deportees were forced to give all their real estate titles to the authorities, and the rest of their immovable wealth, he noted, was 'taken possession of by the Government.'  The entire region, Nathan explained, was being stripped of its 'best commercial element.'  Because the Armenians were the chief employees of foreign businesses such as the Singer Manufacturing Company, the German agricultural machine companies, and the various petroleum companies, the impact on the region would be disasterous."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, pgs.  269-71.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Fourteen

       "As Jackson struggled to rescue Armenians and as he watched their property and wealth being confiscated, Morgenthau was dealing with Talaat Pasha back in Constantinople.  He continued to try to reason with the minister of the interior, telling him that after the war he would have to meet with 'public opinion everywhere, especially in the United States.  Our people,' he said, 'will never forget these massacres. . . You are defying all ideas of justice.'  Not only was Talaat unreachable, but at one point, he changed the subject and made an astonishing request.  Knowing that many Armenians with American ties had life insurance policies with the New York Life Insurance Company and the Equitable Life of New York, Talaat said to the ambassador:  'I wish that you would get the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders.  They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money.  It of course all escheats to the State.  The government is the beneficiary now.  Will you do so?'  Outraged by this, Morgenthau lost his temper, told Talaat he would never get such a list from him, and stormed away.

       But even Bernau had not seen what Aurora Mardignian experienced north of Aleppo in Diyarbekir, where the killing squads played 'the game of swords' with Armenian girls.  Having planted their swords in the ground, blade up, in a row, at several-yard intervals, the men on horseback each grabbed a girl.  At the signal, given by a shout, they rode their horses at a controlled gallop, throwing the girl with the intent of killing her by impaling her on a sword.  'If the killer missed,' Mardignian writes, 'and the girl was only injured, she would be scooped up again until she was impaled on the protruding blade.  It was a game, a contest,'  the traumatized survivor wrote in her memoir, and after the girls were dead, the Turks forced the Jews of the city to gather up the bodies in oxcarts and throw them in the Tigris River.

       As he watched from his office day by day, {Consul Oscar} Heizer was shocked at what Jesse Jackson had referred to as the Ottoman government's 'gigantic plundering scheme.'  Again, to Morgenthau, he described how the Armenian houses in Trebizond were 'being emptied of furniture by the police one after the other.  The furniture, bedding and everything of value is being stored in large buildings about the city,' he reported.  Since there was no attempt at labeling or properly storing any of these objects, Heizer reported, the idea that the government had any plan to return anything to the Armenians was 'simply ridiculous.'  Like Henry Riggs, who described Turkish women plundering Armenian goods in Harput, Heizer also watched a 'crowd of Turkish women and children follow the police about like a lot of vultures and seize anything they can lay their hands on.'  As soon as the more valuable things were taken out of a house by the police, the women and children would rush in and take the rest, leaving every house stripped clean.  'I see this performance every day with my own eyes,' Heizer wrote the ambassador;  'I suppose it will take several weeks to empty all the houses and then the Armenian shops and stores will be cleared out.'  And the government's commission, which was supposed to be overseeing all this, had no intention of returning any of the goods to the Armenians.
       Leon Surmelian watched his family life and his comfortable home with its Parisian furnishings and carpets and piano disappear overnight.  The young boy also watched in despair as the Turks confiscated his father's pharmacy:  'We almost wept when we saw the shutters of our pharmacy drawn in broad daylight. . . . Poor father, they had taken his pharmacy away from him,'  and everywhere, 'the city was dead, the stores closed, the streets deserted.'  When Surmelian escaped from captivity a year or so later, he sneaked back to his family's house, only to discover that it had been picked clean of every item.  As he walked the empty rooms he was haunted by the absence of what had once been his childhood home.  'Even the linoleum had been stripped off the floor,' he exclaimed.  He soon dicovered that every Armenian house in the region had been plundered and walls and floors torn up in the search for hidden treasures."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian  pgs260-61, 262, 267.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade) Part Thirteen

     "{Leslie} Davis learned that because the Muslims considered 'the clothes taken from a dead body to be defiled,' all the Armenians were forced to strip before being killed, and Davis describes 'gaping bayonet wounds on most of the bodies.'  Because bullets were so precious, it was 'cheaper to kill with bayonets and knives.'  Davis was also shocked to find that, as he put it, 'nearly all of the women lay flat on their backs and showed signs of barbarous mutilation by bayonets of the gendarmes, these wounds having been inflicted in many cases probably after the women were dead.'  The bodies, they learned, were of Armenians who had been marched there from distant places.  In other parts of Turkey, the same methods of massacre by butchery were occuring because the Turks didn't want to waste ammunition.  In Ankara and its surroundings, only a couple of hundred miles east of Constantanople, the killing was done with 'axes, cleavers, shovels, and pitchforks,' Krikoris Balakian wrote.  It was like a slaughter-house;  Armenians were hacked to pieces, and the killing squads mixed with townspeople 'dashed infants on the rocks' before the eyes of their mothers.  The carnage around Ankara was so horrible that Talaat Pasha ordered more than forty thousand corpses to be quickly buried in mass graves, but the stench of death and the mounds of bodies overwhelmed the landscape.
       South of Harput, Davis and his companion left the lake, travelling through the village of Keghvenk, and again the stench of rotting corpses overwhelmed them.  'We could smell the dead bodies,' Davis wrote, but 'as it was getting late and we had already seen so many, we did not feel like going even that distance out of our way to see any more.'  But as they rode from Keghvenk back to Mezre, they saw thousands of corpses half buried, and later Davis learned that many of them were the men who had been imprisoned before the deportation.  Within ten miles of Mezre they saw the remains of Armenian camps where thousands had been held before they were massacred.  Arriving home at about nine o'clock in the evening, Davis wrote:  'I felt that I understood better than ever what the "deportation" of the Armenians really meant.  I felt also that I had not been wrong in speaking of Mamouret ul-Aziz. . . as the "Slaughter-house Vilayet" of Turkey.'
       A few weeks later Davis made another trip to Lake Goeeljuek.  This time he and Dr. Atkinson went by themselves.  Leaving at about three o'clock in the morning one day in late October, Davis was eager to see the other side of the lake and get a fuller picture of the area.  On the east side of the lake, they found many bodies of Armenians who had recently been killed, most likely the inhabitants of the village of Goeeljuek, which they found 'absolutely deserted, except for a few hungry cats which were prowling around among the ruins of the houses.'
       Again the scenes of death were everywhere.  In one of the most remote places along the lake, Davis and Atkinson saw hundreds of bodies piled on top of one another on the beach.  They lay 'within a space not more than two or three hundred feet in length and hardly a quarter that distance in width.'  It was at the outlet of a steep small ravine leading to the lake, and as they rode down the hill they were shocked at how people could be brought to such a place.  Then they saw that almost all of them were women and children who had been recently killed.  'We noticed bayonet wounds on many of them. . . . .One woman,' Davis observed, 'on the edge of the pile lay flat on her breast with the head of her little baby protruding from under her body.  All of the bodies were naked,' he went on, 'and many of them showed signs of the brutal mutilation which the gendarmes inflicted upon so many of the women and girls whom they killed.'
       In late July 1915, {Jesse} Jackson reported that as the temperature ran somewhere between 105 and 115 degrees, 'a group of more than 1,000 women and children from Harput was being conducted southward near Veren then turned over to a band of Kurdish chetes who abducted 'the best looking women, girls and children, killing those who put up the most resistance,'  and beat and stripped the rest of the women, Jackson went on, 'thereby forcing them to continue the rest of the journey in a nude condition.'  About three hundred of these women arrived in Aleppo days later 'entirely naked, their hair flowing in the air like wild beasts,' having traveled 'afoot in the burning sun.'  Some of these women came to the consulate, and Jackson recorded that their bodies were 'burned to the color of a green olive, the skin peeling off in great blotches, and many of them carrying gashes on the head and wounds on the body as a result of the terrible beatings.'
       These scenes kept passing before Jackson's eyes, and only weeks later he described what he called 'one of the most terrible sights ever seen in Aleppo,' the arrival of 'some 5,000 terribly emaciated, dirty, ragged and sick women and children, 3,000 on one day and 2,000 the following day.'  They were the only survivors, Jackson reported, of what he termed 'the thrifty and well to do Armenian population of the province of Sivas,'  where the Armenian population had been 'over 300,000 souls.'  They told Jackson that they had travelled about a thousand miles on foot since before Easter, and thousands of the women had been carried off into harems, or raped, robbed, and left naked.
       What Jackson saw was the remnant of women who survived the kind of sexual violence that Aurora Mardignian described in her survival narrative, Ravished Armenia.    Mardignian, from a wealthy banking family in Chemeshgezek, a town north of Harput, was one of thousands of young Armenian girls raped and thrown into harems.  Her descriptions of sexual violence confirm and go even beyond what Jackson saw and heard.  Having been in a house full of Armenian girls who were raped and then killed by Turkish soldiers, she escaped and before long found herself with about four hundred young men and women who agreed to convert to Islam to save their lives.  After they had converted, the gendarmes robbed them all, stripped the women and raped them in front of their husbands, who were tied up and forced to watch before they were killed.  Then, the surviving women were marched to Malatian, south of Mezre near the Euphrates.  Approaching the city of Malatia, they found the wells stuffed with the corpses of dead women, and as they entered the city, they saw sixteen girls crucified on wooden crosses, vultures eating their corpses.  'Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands,'  Mardiganian wrote, 'only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.'
       In Aleppo too, the city was becoming overwhelmed by corpses and famine-ravaged refugees.  By the fall a typhus epidemic had broken out in the city and the surrounding towns and villages, and the entire place resembled something from the Black Plague.  'The number that succumbed in the city was so great,' Jackson wrote, 'that the sanitary authorities could not cope with the situation, and the military authorities provided huge ox-carts into which the dead bodies were thrown, 10 to 12 in each cart, and the procession of 7 or 8 carts would proceed to the nearby cemetery with their gruesome loads of ghastly uncovered corpses, usually nude, with the heads, legs and arms dangling from the sides and ends of the open carts.'  At the cemetery,  the gendarmes dumped the bodies into trenches that had been dug for the purpose.  For months the procession of death carts passed in front of the consulate.  Several of Jackson's closest friends and members of the consular staff died in the epidemic, and, as he wrote, his own survival seemed 'almost a miracle.'
       Because of his strategic location on the line of the deportation marches, Jackson quickly became a receiving station for reports on the atrocities in the region, and he informed Morgenthau that reigns of terror had begun in Diyarbekir and Urfa, and that the gendarmerie was now 'searching the houses of the Armenians for weapons, and not finding any.'  In Urfa (the site of massacre and the burning of the cathedral in 1895-96), the gendarmes told the bishop of the city that unless weapons were produced, 'the entire Armenian population' of Urfa would suffer the fate of Zeitun, where everybody had been massacred or deported in early April.  What Jackson emphasized to Morgenthau was that 'the people here [Urfa] have always been loyal to the Government and have never resisted;  not even when they were butchered like sheep.  Why the local Government persists in persecuting a population that has always had a good record for loyalty is very strange.'
       In the terrible heat of August, writing again to Morgenthau (who was at his summer quarters on the Bosporus) , Jackson enclosed a letter he had just received form the Reverend F.H. Leslie.  In the chaos of the deportations and massacres in the Urfa region, Reverend Leslie had just been made the American consular agent for the entire district of Urfa.


               My dear Consul Jackson:
                 . . . For six weeks we have witnessed the most terrible cruelties inflicted
                 upon the thousands of Christian exiles who have been daily passing through
                 our city from the northern cities.  All tell the same story and bear the
                  same scars:  their men were all killed on the first days march from their
                   cities, after which the women and girls were constantly robbed of
                  their money, bedding, clothing, and beated, criminally abused and abduct-
                   ed. . . . Their guards forced them to pay even for drinking from the
                  springs along the way and were their worst abusers but also allowed the
                   baser element in every village through which they passed to abduct the
                    girls and women and abuse them.  We not only were told these things
                    but the same things occured right here in our own city before our very
                    eyes and openly on the streets.  The poor weak women and children died
                     by thousands along the roads and in the khan where they were confined
                     here.  There must be not less than five hundred abducted now in the
                     homes of the Moslems of this city and as many more have been sexually
                     abused and turned out on the streets again.
       Desperate and fearing total annihilation for the Armenians, Reverend Leslie begged Jackson to send him his own vice-consul, Samuel Edelman, to help.  'I cannot handle this work nor remain here much longer,' Leslie pleaded.  Not long after, the American pastor was imprisoned for aiding the Armenians.  Already mentally broken from what he had witnessed, he was now tortured in prison, and he committed suicide there.  Later Jackson was able to get Leslie's wife and child out of the country."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs. 245-46 and 253-55. 

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Twelve

       "Armenian homes, whether modest or affluent, were often furnished with art, artifacts, carpets, and European furniture;  and it was known by their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors that Armenians had their savings and often gold and valuable jewelry stored in their houses.  Armenians churches--and there were some 2,530 of them across Turkey--were not only places of worship but civic places where Armenian culture was collected and presented as part of the artistic and historic life of the community.  Like small museums, Armenian churches housed rare scriptures and books as well as paintings, frescoes, gold-and-jewel studded chandeliers, and other precious objects.  Of the desecration of Armenian churches, Morgenthau later wrote:
                    I do not believe that the darkest ages ever presented scenes more
                    horrible than those which now took place all over Turkey.  Nothing
                    was sacred to the Turkish gendarmes;  under the plea of searching
                    for hidden arms, they ransacked churches, treated the altars and sacred
                     utensils with the utmost indignity, and even held mock ceremonies in
                      imitation of the Christian sacraments.  They would beat the priests into

                      insensibility, under the pretense that they were the centres of sedition.
                      When they could discover no weapons in the churches, they would some
                       -times arm the bishops and priests with guns, pistols, and swords, then
                       try them before courts-martial for possessing weapons against the law,
                       and march them in this condition through the streets, merely to arouse
                       the fanatical wrath of the mobs.
       In 1915 the material wealth of Armenian culture was an open house for plunder.  As the local Turkish and Kurdish community began pillaging Armenian homes, Davis looked on in horror:
                     The scenes of that week were heartrending.  The people were
                     preparing to leave their homes and to abandon their houses, their
                      lands, their property of all kinds.  They were trying to dispose of their
                      furniture and household effects, their provisions and even much of their
                      clothing, as they would be able to carry but little with them.  They were
                       selling their possessions for whatever they could get.  The streets were
                       full of Turkish women, as well as men, who were seeking bargains on
                        this occasion, buying organs, sewing machines, furniture, rugs, and
                        other articles of value for almost nothing.  I know one woman who sold
                        a two hundred dollar organ to a Turkish neighbor for about five
                       dollars.  Sewing machines which had cost twenty-five dollars were sold
                        for fifty cents.  Valuable rugs were sold for less than a dollar.  Many
                        articles were given away, as their ownere were unable to sell them
                        and were obliged to leave them behind.  The scene reminded me of
                        vultures swooping down on their prey.  It was a veritable Turkish       
                         holiday and all the Turks went out in their gala attire to feast and to
                         make merry over the misfortunes of others.
       Henry Riggs was also astonished by what he saw.  In the public square, there were 'mountains of bedding, furniture and utensils. . . . sold at auction. . . .[for] one fifth of their value, and often far less.'  For many of the Muslims, it was 'the opportunity of a life time to get-rich-quick.'  Some Turks and Kurds attacked the homes of defenseless women, raping them and taking their possessions.  Some Turks, Riggs reported, especially those of 'the better class looked with genuine horror at the treatment accorded to the Armenians, and when it came to enriching themselves as a result of the sufferings of the poor victims, they would not do it.'  Such booty they believed was haram (forbidden), and would put a curse on them and their legacies.
       It became clear to Davis that the Temporary Law of Deportation and Confiscation and its new Emval-i Mertruke (abandoned goods) commission was a charade.  The commission was ostensibly set up to guard the property of the deported Armenians and, after supposedly paying out of it any debts of the owners, was to send the money to them in their new homes.  Most of the Armenians were killed, as was undoubtedly intended by the government, and as Davis put it, 'none who survived ever received any money from the Committee.'  As he tried to help Armenians claim their money, he realized that it was, as Consul Jackson later put it, 'a gigantic plundering scheme.'  After the commission had 'gotten possession of hundreds of thousands of dollars,'  Davis noted, 'it conveniently lost its books and explained that, as all the money received had been used up for expenses and there were no funds on hand, there was no necessity anyway of rendering any account!'  Deutsche Bank Director, Arthur von Gwinner, and the Ottoman parliamentary senator Ahmed Riza all reached similar conclusions.
        Armenian businessmen were forced to abandon their businesses, their shops, their merchandise, their lifetime accumulations.  Kerop Bedoukian watched in horror as the gendarmes took over his father's grocery store, and then 'systematically,'  he writes, 'the contents of the stores' everywhere were all being confiscated and 'loaded onto ox-drawn carts' and supposedly 'taken to government storage depots.'  Farther west in Ovajik, near Ismit, not far from Constantinople, Serpouhi Tavoukdijian also watched as the Turkish gendarmes took 'bolts of rich silks and cloth' from her father's store and then pillaged her brother Lazarus's toy store.  Antranig Vartanian, a fifteen-year-old boy whose family were livestock farmers on the Moush plain, described being forced by the Turkish gendarmes to go into a barn, where hundreds of Armenians had been burned alive, and take from the corpses jewelry and valuables.  'I saw the corpse of a woman propped up by some barn beams,' he recalled vividly.  'She had been strangled to death outside of the barn, and the remains of a beautiful embroidered apron were still on her body.  I saw gold bracelets and necklaces and other jewels on her body and I took them back to the gendarmes.'  The gendarmes were so delighted with the jewels that they spared Vartanian's life.
        Those who took their money with them were robbed of it immediately;  others left it in the bank, and others deposited money and valuables with German or American missionaries.  Realizing that the consulate was the safest place to leave money and valuables, still others deposited it with Leslie Davis, and his quarters soon became what he called 'a safe deposit vault' for the Armenians.  It was 'pathetic,' Davis recalled, 'to see the people bringing their money, their jewels, their valuable documents, and articles of all kinds to the Consulate and to the missionaries, asking us to keep them.'  With more than two hundred thousand dollars in gold hidden at the consulate, Davis worried about being raided by the Turkish authorities, and found it more than ironic that when the vali came over for evening tea and card games, the safe with the Armenian gold stood there in the same room.  By the fall of 1915 Davis was receiving orders from the vali demanding that he turn over to the government all the money and property the Armenians had been leaving in his care.  When he refused to comply, he found himself drawn deeper into the crisis.
       Davis was also horrified by the economic significance of killing off the Armenians;  as he put it:  'It was literally a case of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, for there would be no one left to till the soil and the authorities might have forseen the famine which actually did visit the land the following year.'  Davis noted that 'Nearly all the merchants, bankers, doctors, dentists, lawyers, teachers, carpenters, brick-layers, tile-makers, tinsmiths, bakers, tailors, shoe-makers, and other artisans so essential to the life of the people were Armenians. . . .By one stroke,'  Davis wrote, 'the country was to be set back a century.'  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs. 233-236

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Eleven

       "Dr. Boghosian described similar scenes.  His group of deportees was led out of the Chankiri prison, he recorded, on Assumption Sunday in August 1915.  Marched out of town, tied to each other by ropes, and joined with a group of several hundred more men, they were sent out into the 'bright moonlit night,' with three carts filled with 'spades, hoes, pick-axes, and shovels.'  Along the way more than two dozen of them were killed by the gendarmes, who bludgeoned them to death with their rifles.  They were spared for the moment when a Turkish captain redirected their caravan south to Kayseri.  Along that route more than 200 died of starvation and dysentary--familiar ways of dying in the extermination process.  Most of them would die in the coming months, but Dr. Boghosian, like Krikoris Balakian, was among the lucky survivors.

       What happened to these deported Armenian cultural leaders happened to Armenian intellectuals all over Turkey.  In this calculated way the CUP destroyed a vital part of Armenia's cultural infrastructure, and succeeded in practically silencing a whole generation of Armenian writers.  The death toll shows that at least eighty-two writers are known to have been murdered, in addition to the thousands of teachers and cultural and religious leaders.  It was an apocalypse for Armenian literature, which was in its own moment of a modernist flowering.  Daniel Varoujian, Siamanto (Adam Yarjanian), Krikor Zohrab, Levon Shant, Gomidas (Soghomon Soghomonian), and many others had taken Armenian poetry, fiction, drama, and music into a new era.  Fortunately many of the poems, novels, plays, and essays survived and are an important part of the Armenian literary tradition today.  But it may nevertheless be that the Young Turk government's extermination of Armenian intellectuals in 1915 was the most extensive episode of its kind in the twentieth century.  In many ways it became a paradigm for the silencing of writers by totalitarian governments in the ensuing decades of the century.  After April 24 it would be easier to carry out the genocide program, for many of the most gifted voices of resistance were gone.

       When Morgenthau first settled into his new post in Constantinople, he was alarmed by the recent accession to power of the CUP triumverate--Enver, Talaat, and Jemal.  Morgenthau called the new Committee of Union and Progress 'an irresponsible party, a kind of secret society' that ruled by 'intrigue, intimidation, and assassination.' 
       Then, as the Ottoman Empire joined Germany in World War I in November 1914, Morgenthau witnessed the Ottoman declaration of war that was issued simultaneously with a declaration of jihad had 'started passions' that would fuel the extermination program against the Armenians.  By the spring of 1915, Morgenthau began receiving detailed dispatches and telegrams about the deportations and massacres of the Armenians from his consular staff in the interior of Turkey.  Those reports would soon be heard around the world, and they would become essential to Morgenthau's new sense of conscience and responsibility. 

       In every city, town, and village a significant part of the Armenian population was financially stable, or even wealthy, and this caused great resentment and envy among their Muslim neighbors.  A disproportionate number of Armenians were successful in small business, trade, and commerce;  they were artisans, craftsmen, and farmers as well as teachers, clergy, and physicians.  Armenian culture was steeped in what later came to be called the Protestant work ethic.  With the coming of the missionaries, a new class of educated and intellectual Armenians had emerged as an academic elite throughout the empire.  By 1914, there were 1,996 schools and 451 monateries stretching from Constantinople to Van."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs215-16, 223-24, and 233.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Ten

        "Balakian described 'the terror of death' that hung in the air of the bus, especially as they passed the rocky coast where in previous decades the sultan's military police had thrown to their deaths hundreds of Armenian and Turkish intellectuals and political activists.  The group was then put on a steamship that normally held about 65 people, but was now loaded down with about 250 Armenians and dozens of military police--young soldiers, commisars, army spies, and police officials of various ranks.
        They sailed out on the rough waters of the Sea of Marmara and finally landed at Haydar Pasha's wharf, where they were marched out of the steamship in pairs to a huge embarkation station.  As the ornate process continued, the Armenian leaders were then taken to a special train, which was, as Balakian put it,'waiting and ready to take us all to the depths of Asia Minor, where,except for a few rare cases, we would all meet out deaths.  With the lights out,' Balakian wrote, ' the doors of the cars shut, and with police and police soldiers posted everywhere, the train started.  And so we began to move further and further away form the places of our lives, each of us leaving behind grieving and unprotected mothers, sisters, wives, children, possessions, wealth, and everything else.  We headed out to a region unnamed and unfamiliar.  To be buried forever.'
        Sometime past midnight an official on the train, who happened to be Armenian, whispered in Balakian's ear: 'Reverend Father, please write down the names of your arrested friends on this piece of paper and give it back to me.'  The man then 'slid a piece of paper and a pencil into my hand, and leaving the lamp by me, he went off to the busy policemen who were in charge of us. . . my heart was pounding and in haste I wrote, in the flickering dim light, the names I could remember, and slid the list back to the Armenian official.'  It was at this point that Balakian began to bear witness in a more formal way, and perhaps the writing down of the names was part of the process that led him to write his memoir.
        The train proceeded south along the coastline of the Sea of Marmara and by dawn they were passing through Nicomedia (Izmit) and Bardizag.  At dusk they came to the town of Eskishehir, where the Ankara and Konia railway lines separate, and then, after some delay and much apprehension among the prisoners, the train veered off toward Ankara.  Around midday on Tuesday they arrived at the Sinjan Koy railway station, near Ankara.  At the station Ibrahim, the chief of the central prison, who had been with them since Constantinople, stood up and began to read off the list of names:  'Silvio Ricci, Agnuni, Zartarian, Khazhag, Sharigian, Jihangiulian, Dr. Daghavarian, Sarkis Minasian,' the names were shouted out.  They were all progressive intellectuals, nonpolitical party people, conservatives, Balakian recalled, 'some seventy-five in all.  We were riveted on each name as it was called,' he wrote,' and then we kissed those who were leaving us.  In that instant, we began to weep, and as one person wept, others began to weep too, and we had this feeling that we were being separated from each other forever.'
         The first group was taken to Ayash, northwest of Ankara, while Balakian's group would be taken to Chankiri, to the northwest of Ankara.  In both places the men were imprisoned, tortured, and most of them killed in the subsequent few months in the desolate countryside of the region.  Balakian describes many of their deaths, among them the murders of the famous poet Daniel Varoujian and the novelist and Ottoman parliament membor Krikor Zohrab.  Varoujan and four colleagues had been with Balakian in prison in Chankiri, and on Thursday August 12, Jemal Oguz, the CUP responsible secretary, telegraphed the police guard office on the Chankiri-Kaylajek road, they were ambushed by four Kurdish chetes.  'The whole thing,' Balakian wrote, 'had been arranged in advance, and in secret.'
        The chetes then took the five Armenians to a nearby creek, undressed them, and folded up their clothing for themselves.  Then 'they began to stab them to death, slashing their arms and legs and genitals, and ripping apart their bodies.'  Only the thirty-three-year old Daniel Varoujian tried to defend himself, and this provoked the killers further;  they not only 'tore out his entrails, but dug out the eyes of this great Armenian poet.'  The killers then divided the pillage among themselves, taking more than 450 Ottoman gold pieces that were sewn into the clothing of Dr. Chillingerian and Onnig Maghazadijian.  They paid off the police, and after dividing up the belongings, left in the carriages.
         Balakian learned the details of the killings from one of the Turkish carriage drivers--the twenty-one-year-old son of the local bathhouse keeper--who returned to Chankiri depressed and shaken.  Sobbing as he spoke, he said to the Armenian priest, 'I don't want to be in this trade anymore.  I'm going to sell my horse and carriage and get out of this town.  I don't want this kind of profit.'  When the carriages returned to Chankiri without Varoujian and the others on Friday, the news of their murders spread terror among the deportees and the Armenian families of the town.  The interim governor, who had guaranteed that the men would reach Ankara safely, went immediately to Tuney (the town were they were killed) with the chief of police from Kastamouni and an investigative team.  There, they 'found the five dead men in unrecognizable condition in the creek.'"
The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs.213-215.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Nine

       "What happened on the night of April 24, 1915, in Constantinople was a seminal event in the Armenian Genocide, and it was part of a pattern that would be established all over Turkey as the genocide progressed.  In cities, towns, and villages everywhere, Armenian cultural leaders were arrested, tortured, and killed as quickly as possible.  Some who survived, like the distinguished composer and musicologist Gomidas Vartabed, went insane.  In the end thousands of Armenian cultural leaders were killed, and the core of Armenia's intellectual life was destroyed.  In Van, Dr. Ussher recorded the roundup and arrests of Armenian professors and cultural leaders in late April and May 1915, and in Harput, American consul Leslie Davis reported that in June and July, Armenian intellectuals and professors were among the first to be imprisoned and murdered.
       What happened in Constantinople was dramatic.  Since the mid-nineteenth century the capital had been home to the richest and most influential Armenian community in the empire, and the center of Armenian intellectual and cultural life.  This made it the obvious target for the CUP to begin its formal eradication of Armenian cultural leaders.  On the night of April 24 and into the following day, about 250 cultural leaders were seized in a first round of arrests, and in the coming weeks another several hundred from the city and its vicinity would be arrested.
       'On the night of Saturday, April 24, 1915, 'the priest Krikoris Balakian wrote, 'the Armenians in the capital were snoring in a calm sleep--exhausted from their Easter celebrations, there on the heights of Stambul near Hagia Sophia--while in the central police station a secret project was in motion.'  Weeks earlier SO member and Constantinople chief of police Petri had sent letters to all police officers containing the list of Armenians to be arrested--a list that had been compiled with the help of Armenian spies, most notably one Artin Mugerditchian.
        It wasn't until the next evening that the warden checked off their names and they were marched by a troop of military police to the administration office.  There they were searched, and the police confiscated 'everything from us--money, small insignificant pieces of paper, pocket knives, pencils, diaries, even our umbrellas and canes, and always they pretended that they would be returning them to us later.'  The military police then put them on buses in groups of twenty--with about a dozen soldiers in each bus--and a caravan of military buses, led by the general police chief in his own car, proceeded from Hagia Sophia Boulevard toward Sirkedji."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs. 211-212,213.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Eight

        "While Armenian reaction to the war was mixed, the overwhelming fact was that Armenians, empire-wide, were loyal to the Ottoman government.  Armenians had fought hard for Turkey in the recent Balkan war and now made pledges of loyalty throughout the empire--to such an extent that prayer vigils and victory services were held in Armenian churches.
       There was, of course, a small minority that openly opposed the Ottoman government.  Outside the empire, at their annual meeting in Romania, some members of the Hunchak Party in 1913 had voiced opposition to the Turkish war effort, resulting in the hanging of twenty Hunchak leaders in Constantinople in June 1915.  When Turkey entered the war, some Armenians living in the borderland region left Turkey to join an Armenian volunteer unit in Russia.  And one Armenian--the same Armen Garo of the 1896 Ottoman Bank incident--who was at the time an Armenian deputy from Erzurum in the Ottoman parliament, also joined a volunteer unit in Russia;  to top it off he even sent a photo of himself and a few of his friends as 'Armenian revolutionaries' to the Daily Graphic in London.
        This kind of naive romanticism enraged the Turks and was despised by many Armenian leaders as well.  The priest Krikoris Balakian, who would be arrested with about 250 Armenian leaders on April 24, denounced Garo and his friends as fools who didn't know what they were doing.  'This kind of foolish act further provoked the Turkish officials and the general public,' Balakian wrote, 'who already despised the Armenians--unarmed and confused as they were.'  In his memoir Armenian Golgotha, Balakian underscored that 'in these fateful days,' as he put it, 'there was no nationalistic Armenian policy or plan.'  While a few Armenians like Garo behaved irresponsibly, most didn't, and in the end 'the innocent Armenian population living inside the Turkish borders would pay with the price of their own blood.'
        As the first chapter of the war opened for the Ottoman Empire, Minister of War Enver Pasha decided to invade Russia.  Driven by his pan-Turkist zeal, he took control of the Ottoman Third Army in the winter of 1914 with a plan to take the Russian military outpost of Sarikamish, near Kars, and then push through the Caucusus to Baku, where he hoped to incite the Muslim population to rise against the czar.  To Marshal Liman von Sanders, the head of the German Military Mission to Turkey, he confided that he hoped to march, like Genghis Khan in reverse direction, on to Afghanistan and then to India.
       On Christmas Day 1914, Enver Pasha did what Napoleon had done in 1812 and what Hitler would do in 1941--he invaded Russia in winter.  As it had been for Napoleon and would be for Hitler, so too it proved disasterous for Enver.  In two weeks Enver lost 75.000 of his 95,000 men.  They were killed in battle or froze to death in the blizzards of the Turnagel Woods.  Within weeks of having left the capital, he returned to Constantinople humiliated and was never to take personal command of an army offensive again.  In the wake of Enver's loss on the Caucasian front, the Turks became more insecure about their land on the Russian border, and the Armenians were pointed to as the 'cause of trouble' in the region.  Thus the Armenians of Van became even more vulnerable. 
        Enver's disaster in the Caucusus was followed by more failure for the Turks.  The Ottoman army's attempt to take northwestern Persia failed.  This time it was Enver's brother-in-law Jevdet Bey, whose forces were driven out of Tabriz.  In the aftermath of the Russian and Persian setbacks, Talaat appointed Jevdet Bey governor of Van Province in February 1915.  It was a calculated move, because Talaat wished to replace the more tolerant and politic governor Hassan Tahsin.
        Jevdet Bey was openly racist about Armenians, and he had a history of persecuting them.  As a kaymakam of Saray and later mutassarif (district governor) of Bashkale in Van Province, he was known for making constant searches and seizures of so-called militant Armenians in the region.  He was reviled and feared for his practices of torture, which included using cats to claw and bite incarcerated victims.  He also seems to have perfected the practice of nailing horseshoes to the feet of Armenians, thus earning him the name 'the horse-shoe master of Bashkale.'  In short, he made a name for himself and advanced his career through his anti-Armenian zeal.  Duplicitous, aggressive, and prone to violent behavior, the new governor began his job in Van in the winter of 1915, in the wake of his lost Persian campaign, eager to make a scapegoat of the Armenian population of Van."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, pgs.  199-201.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Seven

       "In order to extort as much money as possible from the Armenians, the Turkish authorities often forced them to pay first-class fare before they put them into the cattle cars that would most likely take them to their deaths.  On September 8, 1915, Dr. William S. Dodd wrote:'The exiles were compelled to pay the full fare and then packed forty or fifty together in box-trucks, cattle trucks, or even open flat trucks.  The Railway seems to be as conscienceless in wringing the money out of them as the Government or the Turks.'
       Similarly, Dr. Wilfred M. Post, writing on September 3, 1915, testified to the coordination between the railway deportations and the killing squads:
                    Much that I might add is as nothing, however to what the railway employ
                    -ees report as going on at the end of the line, where the people leave
                     the railway and set out on foot, only to be set upon by brigands, who
                      rob, outrage and kill all the way from Bonzanti to Adana and beyond. . .
                       .Whether these unfortunate people are sent on towards the east or
                      whether they remain where they are along the road, their future is very
                       dark, and it means annihilation for the whole race.
       In the end between a half and two-thirds of the more than two million Armenians living on their historic homeland in the Ottoman Empire were annihilated.  While the number of dead continues to be debated, as is the case with most episodes of mass killing (the U.S. Holocaust Museum, for example, places the number of Jewish dead in the Holocaust at 5.1 to 5.4 million, while other estimates go to 6 million), scholars of genocide, including the largest body of genocide scholars--the Association of Genocide Scholars of North America--conservatively assess that more than a million Armenians were killed, and probably somewhere between 1.2 and 1.3 million.  Some historians put the figure at about 1.5 million, which spans the period from 1915 to 1922, when the last waves of killing took place.

       The sultan had noted that Russian Armenians in the czar's army fought valiantly against the Turks in 1877, and he was forever enraged that the European powers used the Armenian Question to force concessions after the war.  In 1895-96, the Armenians of Van had resisted massacre for a short time before the Turks slaughtered more than twenty thousand of them.  So it is not surprising that in the spring of 1915 Van became a trouble spot again.  Before May was over, the Ottoman government would once again label as sedition what was essentially resistance to massacre.  The Armenian resistance at Van was seen as a provocation--in short, an excuse to proceed with the plan of extermination that had already begun.
       Back in July 1914, as the Ottoman Empire was about to enter World War I, a Turkish delegation approached the Dashnak leaders, who were convened at their eighth party congress in Erzurum, the capital of historic Armenia.  Lead by Dr. Shakir, who was fast assuming a major role in the plan to exterminate the Armenians, the delegation asked the Dashnaks if they would coax the Armenians over the Russian border to rise against the czar so that when war began the Ottoman army would be able to invade the Caucusus more easily.  In return the Turkish delegates promised that the Young Turk government would reward the Armenians with a semiautonomous Armenia, which might include parts of both Turkish and Russian Armenia.  Having experienced nothing but massacre and betrayed promises from the Turks over the past decades (the memory and the effects of the massacres in Van in 1895 and again in 1903 were still deeply felt by the Armenians of the region), the Dashnaks found the plan both unrealistic and dangerous;  they declined.  And they urged the Young Turk leaders to remain neutral instead of joining the war.
       Not surprisingly the Ottoman entrance into the war in November was accompanied by a broadcasting of its hatred of its traditional enemy, Russia.  'The ideal of our nation and people leads us towards the destruction of our Muscovite enemy, in order to obtain thereby a natural frontier to our empire, which should include and unite all branches of our race.'  The party sloganeer, Ziya Goekalp, expressed the sentiment in a poem:  'The land of the enemy shall be devastated./Turkey shall be enlarged and become Turan,' and in order for this to happen, parts of Russia would have to be conquered and that included Russian Armenia. The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, pgs. 195-96 and 198-99.

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade) , Part Six

       "Some of the most striking evidence of the use of the railway for deporting the Armenians comes from the German eyewitness accounts of the Baghdad Railway Company.  Germany's most important foreign project, the company was at the center of the kaiser's imperial designs in the Near East.  It is ironic that the Turks used the railway in ways that the Nazis would later, and that Germans in Turkey in 1915 were on site to testify.  Franz Guenther, a delegate of the Deutsche Bank who headed the project's office in Constantinople and worked closely with the German embassy, reported that the Ottoman government was acting with 'bestial cruelty' and noted that it was hard to justify the company's passivity in the face of what they were witnessing.  When Guenther sent a photograph of a deportation train to Deutsche Bank director Gwinner, Guenther also noted the irony that the railway was billed as 'an upholder of civilization in Turkey.' 
       The railway deportations were directed by the Ottoman government, and Talaat received reports on the numbers of deportees and their locations.  On October 9 and 10, 1915, some 11,000 Armenians who had been transported from other places to Konia were sent south.  Between October 13 and 16, 9,600 more followed.  During the following five days 9,850 more Armenians were sent from Konia.  When Ottoman military needs interrupted the rail deportations, the people were marched along the railway tracks.  Still, in the month of October 1915 alone, more than 30,000 Armenians were packed into livestock cars to be sent to their deaths in the Der Zor Desert.
       As deportation by rail developed, detention camps sprang up alongside the tracks and stations.  From Konia south to the desert, the whole stretch appeared as one long, concatenated detention camp.  There was a long concentration camp by the railway station at Konia;  by the end of October there were about 40,000 at Katma, a town on the deportation route north of Aleppo;  the camp near Osmaniye, less than a hundred miles east of Adana, may have held as many as 70,000.  In the camps the Armenians were attacked by the killing squads;  women were abducted and raped;  and thousands died of disease and starvation.
         Because of the proximity of the railway to the death camps and ultimately to the desert, the German railway engineers and employees were able to report the atrocities.  At Ras-ul-Ain, a horrific refugee camp southeast of Urfa on the railway line to Mosul, two engineers reported seeing in one day three to four hundred women arriving completely naked.  Hasenfratz--an employee who worked for the railway at Aleppo--reported that massacres took place beside the railway track between Tell Abiad and Ras-ul-Ain.  'The bodies,' he wrote, 'without exception, were entirely naked and the wounds that had been inflicted showed that the victims had been killed, after having been subjected to unspeakable brutalities.'
        As the railway and its immediate environs became a zone in which mass murder and rape were perpetually happening, the railway officials were constant witnesses to the atrocities.  An engineer named Speiker reported from Ras-ul-Ain that he continually saw the arrival of remnants of the death marches;  only women and children were left because all the men and boys over twelve had been killed.  In his detailed reports on the systematic mass slaughter of women and children, he noted that a Turkish inspector informed him that nine out of ten Armenians had been killed on the marches.  The engineer also described how Muslim railway officials and Ottoman officers raped women and sold children and women into the slave trade.  One Sergeant Nuri, the overseer of the camp at Ras-ul-Ain, actually bragged about raping children.  Some of the Muslim employees of the railway left their jobs in order to take part in the killing.
          With nearly nine hundred skilled Armenian workers and many more Armenian laborers on the construction sites in the Taurus and Amanus Mountains and in northern Syria, the Armenian presence in the railway company was significant.  Because the war made the railway even more crucial for the transportation of supplies, the Armenian employees were kept on their jobs.  What ensued was a poignant drama in which various Germans in respectable positions tried to intervene with their own government and the Ottoman government to save the Armenians working for the railway.  Guenther, the railway project director from the Deutsche Bank, who worked hard to protect the Armenian staff, 'estimated that already 25 percent of the 2 million Armenians in the empire had been killed,' and he was certain that the government's policy would mean the extermination of the entire Armenian population.  Winkler, the head railway construction engineer in Adana, who likewise tried to protect his workers, was stymied by the vali, who told him that nothing could be done, as the deportation orders had come directly from Talaat and Enver.  In the end the Armenian laborers were deported, and finally so were the Armenian staff employees of the railway.  In order to cover up the massacres, the Ottoman government demanded that the railway cease its bookkeeping in German and use only Turkish.  The Armenian staff was to be replaced by Muslims only."  The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian pgs. 191-193

Kasab Taburu (Butcher Brigade), Part Five

        "But the chetes were only part of a killing operation that involved military police and the provincial police, known as gendarmes.  They were the ones who carried out the rigorous process of arrest and deportation city by city, town by town, village by village.  Staff officers were assigned to the Ottoman army corps and became chiefs of staff in the interior, where they were put in command of their respective killing units in order to assist in 'the liquidation of the Christian elements.'  One reserve officer put it bluntly when he said the aim of the whole process 'was to destroy the Armenians and thereby to do away with the Armenian question.'
        Because Germany was the Ottoman Empire's closest wartime ally, there is a large body of extraordinary German testimony about the Armenian Genocide.  For example, Colonel Stange, the highest-ranking German guerrilla commander in the Russian-Turkish border region, referred to the chetes as 'scum' (Gesindel), who 'in the area of Tercan killed without exception all the Armenians of the convoy coming from Erzurum.'  This 'incontestable fact,' he wrote, was carried out 'with the assistance of the military escort.'  Similarly, German consul Scheubner-RIchter, reporting on the massacres from Harput to Erzinjan, also referred to the killing squads as 'the scum.'  The German consul in Aleppo, Dr. Walter Roessler, in a July 27, 1915 report, noted that the killing squads were created by 'the Turkish government which released convicts from the prisons, put them in soldiers' uniforms and sent them to areas through which the deportees are to pass.'
       While the killing squads and provincial gendarmerie were consumed with massacring and deporting the civilian Armenian population, they also aided the Ottoman army in its scheme to dispose of all able-bodied Armenian men.  Christians had first been conscripted into the Ottoman army in 1909, after the implementation of new constitutional reforms, and so, at the outbreak of World War I, Armenian men between the ages of twenty and forty-five were drafted into the Ottoman army.  It was an army with numerous problems, among them severe ethnic discrimination.  Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and others were subjected to brutal treatment.  Arab soldiers, for example, were often sent to the front lines shackled in chains and escorted by Turks at gunpoint.
       After Enver's humiliating defeat by the Russians at Sarikamish in December 1914-January 1915, Enver and his ruling elite, looking for a scapegoat, blamed the Armenians, claiming they were in sympathy with the Russians.  Within a month, by February 25, 1915, all the Armenian men in the Ottoman army were officially disarmed and thrown into labor battalions.  Almost immediately thereafter, the army began an organized plan of massacring the Armenian men in the labor battalions.  These killings preceded the beginning of the deportations and massacres of the later part of the spring.  As the historian Erik Zurcher has noted, 'Once the massacres started, the unarmed recruits in the labor battalions were sitting ducks.'  Under the guard of armed soldiers, the Armenian soldiers were taken out into secluded areas where they were killed by gunshot or with bayonets by Turkish soldiers, often with the aid of the gendarmes and the chetes.'  In this manner tens of thousands of Armenian men were disposed of.
        If the able-bodied Armenian men were not massacred in the labor batallions of the Ottoman army, they were most often taken out and shot in groups in the first stage of the deportation.  As the Armenians were forced from their homes and organized into caravans to be marched out of town, the men were separated from the women and children and taken out into the fields outside their towns and villages and shot en masse.  By killing the men quickly in these ways, the Turks rendered the rest of the Armenian community increasingly helpless without those who could best resist massacre and offer protection.
       Much like the hierarchical relationship between the Sonderkommandos, who carried out the executive orders in the Nazi bureaucracy, and the Einsatzgruppen killing squads, the CUP created a hierarchical administration to carry out the Armenian killing operations.  Three levels of bureaucrats were given a supreme authority that superseded the traditional government structure in the provinces, and through this network the details of the deportations and mass killings were carried out.  The hierarchy consisisted of Katibi Mesul 'Responsible Secretaries';  Murahhas, 'Delegates';  and Umumi Muefettish, 'General Inspectors.'  Most of the men who held these positions were former army officers;  as loyal party members their job was to maintain the chain of command in the provinces so that the orders for arrests, deportations, and massacre were implemented strictly, and to do this they worked closely with the local CUP clubs, known as Ittihad Clubs.
       In his report of July 28, 1915, from Erzurum, Vice-Consul Schuebner-Richter actually referred to this operation as a 'shadow, or a parallel government' (Nebenregierung) assuming power over the provincial government.  He attributed the severity of the deportations to the party administrators, who vetoed the governor-general's decree exempting the sick, families without men, and women living alone.  The Responsible Secretaries, Delegates, and Inspectors admitted, Scheubner-RIchter reported, that their job was to see the total obliteration (die ganzliche Ausrottung) of the Armenians.  Colonel Stange reported that in Trebizond Province, Dr. Shakir and Gen.  Mahmud Kamil 'ruthlessly and constantly pushed for the expediting of the deportations' with the knowledge that the convoys were being massacred on order.  From Adana, German consul Eugen Buge reported to his embassy in Constantinople that the local party chief (der hiesige Komiteefuhrer) promised to massacre all the Armenians of Adana if any of them were spared deportation.
       Perhaps nobody put it more comprehensively than German ambassador Count Paul von Wolff-Metternich.  Reporting back to the chancellor in Berlin, he expressed his exasperation at the power held by the CUP's Central Committee, hence the SO, in the process of the Armenian massacres:
        Nobody has any more power to restrain the multi-headed hydra of the Com
        -ittee, and the attendant chauvinism and fanaticism.  The Committee demands
         the extirpation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the government
          must yield.  The authority of the Committee is not limited to the Ottoman
          capital where Ittihad {CUP} is organized and functions as a party in power.
          That authority of the Committee reaches into all the provinces.  A Committee
          representative is assigned to each of the provincial administrations, from
          vali down to kaymakam, for purposes of assistance or supervision. . . .
           Turkification means license to expel, to kill or destroy everything that is
           not Turkish, and to violently take possession of the goods of others. . . ."
The Burning Tigris, by Peter Balakian pgs. 183-186.