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ROBERT FISK: NEW LIGHT ON AN OLD HORROR - AND STILL THERE IS NO JUSTICE
http://massispost.com/?p=4361
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
On Wednesday morning, 14 April 1909, British Vice Consul Major Charles
Doughty-Wylie set off to the Turkish city of Adana after receiving
a letter from his dragoman - his Turkish translator, a man called
Trypani - saying that "there was a very dangerous feeling in that town,
threats had been freely offered, there were some murders...".
Doughty-Wylie departed by the next train, memorably adding, in his
dispatch to the Foreign Office in London, that "so little had I
expected that any massacre was imminent, that I took my wife with me".
We can only imagine the good lady's reaction when "about two stations
from Adana we saw a dead body... The nearer we got to Adana the more
bodies there were, and while I was escorting my wife to Mr Trypani's
house ... two or three more men were killed under the very noses of
the Turkish guard...".
Doughty-Wylie's dispatches over the next four days are a first-class
account of the start of the modern Armenian Holocaust - not the
slaughter and butchery and mass rape and death marches in which
the Ottoman Turks killed a million and a half Armenians in 1915,
but the mass murder of up to 30,000 Armenians in southern Turkey six
years earlier, a dry run - albeit a very bloody one - for the later
genocide. "I got into uniform, went to the guard, and sharply recalled
to the officer his duty to prevent murder," Doughty-Wylie wrote.
Having summoned some unwilling Ottoman soldiery to support him, our
vice consul "paraded through the town with bugles blowing... We cleared
the streets sometimes by charging with the bayonet and sometimes by
firing over the heads of the crowd". Ah, those were the days!
The letters of Doughty-Wylie, who was later to have an unconsummated
affair with Gertrude Bell before dying at Gallipoli, are, in fact, a
record of heroism - I am indebted to researcher Missak Kelechian for
finding them in the British National Archives - for the vice consul
rescued numerous British subjects and protected many hundreds of
Armenian refugees. Trying to save their lives, the vice consul came
under sniper fire from a mosque. The Turks blamed the Armenians for
the massacres, claiming that they had armed themselves and planned
to set up an Armenian principality on Turkish soil - killers have a
habit of blaming the victims for their own deaths (see, for example,
the Muslim victims of the Bosnian war, the Palestinian civilian victims
of Gaza in 2008-9, etc) but Doughty-Wylie, while he acknowledged that
an Armenian shot dead two Turks, suspected that the violence included
"some secret preparation on the Turkish side". Of the 2,000 dead in
Adana, 1,400 were Armenians.
The Turkish authorities supposedly hanged nine Turks for their part in
the slaughter. So much for justice. Remarking that many of the dead had
been thrown into rivers, the British vice consul concluded in a further
dispatch to London that "in the villages, while no exact number can
yet be given, the loss ... may be estimated at between 15,000 and
25,000; of these, very few, if any, can be Moslems (sic). In many
cases women, even small children, were killed with the men". Exactly
two weeks after Doughty-Wylie received the letter from his dragoman,
The New York Times's journalist in Adana was reporting that in the
city's vilayet (governorate), up to 30,000 Armenians had been murdered.
And Turkey, just as it does in the case of the later one and a half
million Armenian dead, still denies - along with Britain, the US,
need we add the rest? - that this was genocide. I have pointed out
before that even in the 1930s, Churchill referred to the "holocaust"
of Armenians. Now comes proof that the 1909 genocide, let alone the
later 1915 massacres, were known as a Holocaust - correctly, with
a capital H - before the First World War. For the Armenian Genocide
Museum in Yerevan has just unearthed and published eyewitness Z Duckett
Ferriman's book on the 1909 killings whose original cover bore the
title The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust at Adana in
Asia Minor. The New York Times had, in fact, referred to "Another
Armenian Holocaust" after an 1895 bloodbath, but Duckett Ferriman
collected victims' names, dates, details of individual murders,
statistics of orphans, widows, villages destroyed, photographs, and
the identity of the militias - like the Turkish authorities in 1915
and like the Nazis, the 1909 killers used "special units" for killing
and rape - and the mass violation of women.
By extraordinary chance, Duckett Ferriman's book coincides with the
Beirut publication next week of the memoirs of Hagop Arsenian, a 1915
Armenian Holocaust survivor whose handwritten diaries have just been
translated into English by his granddaughter, Arda Ekmekji. What makes
this work so remarkable is that the Arsenians were very upper middle
class. On their death trail to northern Syria, they were able, for a
short period, to travel by rail, first class. "They were transporting
us to our graves with our own money," Hagop wrote. At other times,
still paying for their train tickets, they were packed into box
cars, 45 to a carriage, Nazi-style. During his Golgotha, Hagop stood
beside a pile of Armenian corpses. "One of them in a suffocating
voice begged the gravedigger not to pull him by the legs and said,
'Brother, I have not died yet. Wait till morning before you bury me.'"
Like many Jews on the way to death in the second Holocaust of the
20th century, Hagop "would wonder whether we were such a terrible
nation that God had chosen ... to manifest His anger and inflict
His punishment on us...". There are good Turks in these stories -
in 1909 as well as 1915 - but there are many criminals.
And again, no justice for the Armenians. Few of the Turkish war
criminals were hanged. One of the worst, Talaat Pasha, was assassinated
in Berlin in 1921, Bin Laden-style, shot by an Armenian revenge group
called Nemesis. Most escaped their just deserts for ever, not even
facing a Demjanjuk-like court in old age. All are now dead. "War
will not end unless the truth is known," a Lebanese humanitarian
agency stated four years ago. And that's all that's left to be
fought for. Acknowledgement that these crimes were real. Justice is
an odd creature.
The Independent,uk
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-new-light-on-an-old-horror-ndash-and-still-there-is-no-justice-2352249.html
http://massispost.com/?p=4361
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
On Wednesday morning, 14 April 1909, British Vice Consul Major Charles
Doughty-Wylie set off to the Turkish city of Adana after receiving
a letter from his dragoman - his Turkish translator, a man called
Trypani - saying that "there was a very dangerous feeling in that town,
threats had been freely offered, there were some murders...".
Doughty-Wylie departed by the next train, memorably adding, in his
dispatch to the Foreign Office in London, that "so little had I
expected that any massacre was imminent, that I took my wife with me".
We can only imagine the good lady's reaction when "about two stations
from Adana we saw a dead body... The nearer we got to Adana the more
bodies there were, and while I was escorting my wife to Mr Trypani's
house ... two or three more men were killed under the very noses of
the Turkish guard...".
Doughty-Wylie's dispatches over the next four days are a first-class
account of the start of the modern Armenian Holocaust - not the
slaughter and butchery and mass rape and death marches in which
the Ottoman Turks killed a million and a half Armenians in 1915,
but the mass murder of up to 30,000 Armenians in southern Turkey six
years earlier, a dry run - albeit a very bloody one - for the later
genocide. "I got into uniform, went to the guard, and sharply recalled
to the officer his duty to prevent murder," Doughty-Wylie wrote.
Having summoned some unwilling Ottoman soldiery to support him, our
vice consul "paraded through the town with bugles blowing... We cleared
the streets sometimes by charging with the bayonet and sometimes by
firing over the heads of the crowd". Ah, those were the days!
The letters of Doughty-Wylie, who was later to have an unconsummated
affair with Gertrude Bell before dying at Gallipoli, are, in fact, a
record of heroism - I am indebted to researcher Missak Kelechian for
finding them in the British National Archives - for the vice consul
rescued numerous British subjects and protected many hundreds of
Armenian refugees. Trying to save their lives, the vice consul came
under sniper fire from a mosque. The Turks blamed the Armenians for
the massacres, claiming that they had armed themselves and planned
to set up an Armenian principality on Turkish soil - killers have a
habit of blaming the victims for their own deaths (see, for example,
the Muslim victims of the Bosnian war, the Palestinian civilian victims
of Gaza in 2008-9, etc) but Doughty-Wylie, while he acknowledged that
an Armenian shot dead two Turks, suspected that the violence included
"some secret preparation on the Turkish side". Of the 2,000 dead in
Adana, 1,400 were Armenians.
The Turkish authorities supposedly hanged nine Turks for their part in
the slaughter. So much for justice. Remarking that many of the dead had
been thrown into rivers, the British vice consul concluded in a further
dispatch to London that "in the villages, while no exact number can
yet be given, the loss ... may be estimated at between 15,000 and
25,000; of these, very few, if any, can be Moslems (sic). In many
cases women, even small children, were killed with the men". Exactly
two weeks after Doughty-Wylie received the letter from his dragoman,
The New York Times's journalist in Adana was reporting that in the
city's vilayet (governorate), up to 30,000 Armenians had been murdered.
And Turkey, just as it does in the case of the later one and a half
million Armenian dead, still denies - along with Britain, the US,
need we add the rest? - that this was genocide. I have pointed out
before that even in the 1930s, Churchill referred to the "holocaust"
of Armenians. Now comes proof that the 1909 genocide, let alone the
later 1915 massacres, were known as a Holocaust - correctly, with
a capital H - before the First World War. For the Armenian Genocide
Museum in Yerevan has just unearthed and published eyewitness Z Duckett
Ferriman's book on the 1909 killings whose original cover bore the
title The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust at Adana in
Asia Minor. The New York Times had, in fact, referred to "Another
Armenian Holocaust" after an 1895 bloodbath, but Duckett Ferriman
collected victims' names, dates, details of individual murders,
statistics of orphans, widows, villages destroyed, photographs, and
the identity of the militias - like the Turkish authorities in 1915
and like the Nazis, the 1909 killers used "special units" for killing
and rape - and the mass violation of women.
By extraordinary chance, Duckett Ferriman's book coincides with the
Beirut publication next week of the memoirs of Hagop Arsenian, a 1915
Armenian Holocaust survivor whose handwritten diaries have just been
translated into English by his granddaughter, Arda Ekmekji. What makes
this work so remarkable is that the Arsenians were very upper middle
class. On their death trail to northern Syria, they were able, for a
short period, to travel by rail, first class. "They were transporting
us to our graves with our own money," Hagop wrote. At other times,
still paying for their train tickets, they were packed into box
cars, 45 to a carriage, Nazi-style. During his Golgotha, Hagop stood
beside a pile of Armenian corpses. "One of them in a suffocating
voice begged the gravedigger not to pull him by the legs and said,
'Brother, I have not died yet. Wait till morning before you bury me.'"
Like many Jews on the way to death in the second Holocaust of the
20th century, Hagop "would wonder whether we were such a terrible
nation that God had chosen ... to manifest His anger and inflict
His punishment on us...". There are good Turks in these stories -
in 1909 as well as 1915 - but there are many criminals.
And again, no justice for the Armenians. Few of the Turkish war
criminals were hanged. One of the worst, Talaat Pasha, was assassinated
in Berlin in 1921, Bin Laden-style, shot by an Armenian revenge group
called Nemesis. Most escaped their just deserts for ever, not even
facing a Demjanjuk-like court in old age. All are now dead. "War
will not end unless the truth is known," a Lebanese humanitarian
agency stated four years ago. And that's all that's left to be
fought for. Acknowledgement that these crimes were real. Justice is
an odd creature.
The Independent,uk
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-new-light-on-an-old-horror-ndash-and-still-there-is-no-justice-2352249.html