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  • The Armenian Mirror-Spectator: Armenian Orphans Became A Source Of E

    THE ARMENIAN MIRROR-SPECTATOR: ARMENIAN ORPHANS BECAME A SOURCE OF ENRICHING GENETIC POOL FOR TURKISH NATION

    http://www.panorama.am/en/society/2013/05/08/the-mirror-spectator/
    12:54 08/05/2013 " SOCIETY

    Below, we present an article by Raffi Bedrosyan published in The
    Armenian Mirror-Spectator.

    During the endless Turkish arguments and Armenian/international counter
    arguments about the number of massacred Armenians in 1915, Hrant
    Dink would repeatedly remind both sides about a more critical topic:
    "We keep talking about the gone dead, let's start talking about the
    remaining living..." The remaining living meant the unknown number
    of Armenians remaining in Anatolia, remaining not as Armenians, but
    as Turks, Kurds, Alewis, Moslems and other identities. Ninety eight
    years after the attempted destruction of a nation, it is time to talk
    more about the hidden Armenians, mostly orphans of 1915 assimilated
    into identities other than their own Armenianness.

    Hrant had the courage to reveal the real identity of one of the
    best-known Turkish heroes as an Armenian orphan. Sabiha Gokcen, the
    first female military pilot and Ataturk's adopted daughter, was in
    reality Hatun Sebilciyan, an Armenian girl orphaned in Bursa in 1915.

    This revelation was the beginning of the end for Hrant, triggering a
    massive hate and threat campaign against him by the government, the
    military and the media, resulting in his assassination three years
    later. But Sebilciyan/Gokcen was only one of tens of thousands of
    Armenian girls and boys torn away from their parents during the 1915
    events. What happened to these orphans? How many were there? This
    article will cite some examples from different parts of Anatolia.

    It is a well-documented fact that during the deportation of the
    Armenian population from all corners of Anatolia to the Syrian desert,
    as the convoys approached their towns or villages, local Turks and
    Kurds snatched Armenian children from their parents to take them home
    as servants or wives. Many children were sold as slaves by them or
    the gendarmes escorting the convoys. There were also a few children
    entrusted by their parents to Kurdish and Turkish neighbors before
    starting on the deportation route. There were some children initially
    rescued by European/American missionaries or Pontian Greek religious
    leaders, but inevitably they were also later seized and sent away
    or murdered. We can cite one of many documented tragic incidents in
    Trabzon, where 600 Armenian orphan children were taken to the Greek
    monastery with the government's permission after their parents were
    massacred by drowning in the Black Sea. But after three months, by
    the order of the Trabzon governor Djemal Azmi, the police forcefully
    removed the orphans from the monastery and handed them over to a
    Turkish boat captain, Rahman Bayraktaroglu, who placed each child in a
    flour sack, securely tied the top and dropped each into the Black Sea.

    It is documented that Governor Jemal later joked, "The harvest of
    smelt (hamsi) will be plentiful this season with all the drowned as
    fish feed."

    Trabzon Governor Djemal Azmi selected about 450 of the best-looking
    girls from the Armenian community of Trabzon and converted the local
    Red Crescent Hospital to a whorehouse for the Turkish elite and
    visiting dignitaries, even sending some of the girls as treats to
    his superiors in Istanbul. The supply of the orphans got replenished
    as needed. He kept a supply of 15 Armenian girls for himself but
    also gave one to his 14-year-old son, Ekmel, as a present. Most of
    the girls were forcefully Islamicized; a few eventually escaped or
    committed suicide. These experiences came to light from witnesses
    during the trials of the Ittihat ve Terakki leaders after the war,
    but also were told in 1921 by Djemal Azmi's son himself to his close
    friend, known to him as Mehmet Ali. The friend, however, happened to
    be an Armenian named Hratch Papazian, disguised and even circumcised
    as a Moslem, who had succeeded infiltrating the Ittihad ve Terakki
    circles hiding in Berlin, in preparation for assassinating the Turkish
    leaders as part of Operation Nemesis (Djemal Azmi and Bahattin Shakir,
    head of the Special Organization [Teskilat-i Mahsusa] who was the
    chief organizer of the deportation massacres, were both assassinated
    in Berlin on April 17, 1922, right in front of the bewildered widow
    of Talat Pasha, a year after Talat himself was brought to justice).

    The Ittihat ve Terakki government had special plans for the surviving
    orphans. In an organized operation, while there was a world war
    going on, most of the surviving orphans were rounded up and sent
    to orphanages set up in multiple locations, with the objective of
    converting them to Islam and to be assimilated as Turks. One of these
    special Turkification orphanages was in Ayn Tura, near Zouk, an hour's
    drive from Beirut, where 1,000 Armenian orphans were kept, between
    the ages of 3 to 15. By the orders of Djemal Pasha, governor of Syria
    and Lebanon, and under the supervision of Turkish intellectuals and
    teachers, including the newly-appointed principal, Turkish novelist
    Halide Edip Adivar, these orphans were converted to Islam and
    Turkified. The boys were circumcised, and were given Turkish names,
    but preserving the initials of their Armenian names and surnames, so
    that Haroutiun Najarian became Hamid Nazim, Boghos Merdanian became
    Bekim Muhammed, Sarkis Sarafian became Saffet Suleyman. The orphanage
    was converted from a Christian school after expelling the Lazarist
    Catholic priests. While famine prevailed everywhere in Lebanon and
    Syria during the war, abundant food was provided to the orphanage,
    with the objective of raising well-fed and healthy newly Turkified
    children. Based on the memoirs of one of the orphans, Harutiun
    Alboyajian, the children were expected to speak Turkish only; if
    the supervisors heard any Armenian spoken, the boys would be beaten
    severely. They were dressed as Turkish children and were taught Islam.

    It was Djemal Pasha's firm belief that the Armenians had superior
    intellect and capabilities, which would help the Turkish nation
    immensely. Despite efforts to keep the orphanage sanitary, about 300
    Armenian orphans died from leprosy and other diseases until 1918. Some
    of the orphans were placed with families in towns where there were
    no Armenians left, and some were distributed to other orphanages. At
    the end of the war, when Near East Relief took over the orphanage,
    there were 670 orphans, 470 boys and 200 girls, who still remembered
    their Armenian names.

    Another example of Turkification experiment was in Eastern Anatolia,
    successfully implemented by Eastern Front commander Kazim Karabekir.

    He estimated that there were about 50,000 desperate orphans after
    the war in his regional area of operations. It is documented that
    about 30,000 of them were circumcised and Turkified. He rounded up
    about 6,000 Armenian children in Erzurum, 2,000 girls and 4,000 boys,
    and placed them in an army camp. Some were given training similar to a
    military school; others were taught trades essential for army supplies
    such as sewing and boot-making. These orphans had become completely
    Turkified and named "The Healthy Children Army." The talented ones
    among these boys were later sent to higher military academies in Bursa
    and Istanbul. Without going into the psychology of the assimilations
    and conversions, it is alleged that these converted military officers
    became the most fanatical ultranationalists in the Turkish army,
    with some of them participating in the May 1960 military coup which
    toppled the civilian government of Adnan Menderes.

    Apart from the orphanages, tens of thousands of young girls and boys
    became slaves after 1915, bought and sold in bazaars and markets.

    Although slavery was officially abolished in the Ottoman Empire in
    1909, slavery markets re-opened after 1915 in order to trade Armenian
    women and children. Kidnapping Armenian children from the deportation
    convoys not only supplied the Turks and Kurds with servants, free labor
    or sex objects in their own homes, but also a marketable commodity that
    could be sold for profit in these markets. The markets were set up in
    Aleppo, Diyarbakir, Cizre, Urfa and Mardin. It is reported that the
    Mardin market had the lowest prices. After being branded and tattooed
    as a slave, Armenian children aged 5-7 found buyers for 20 cents,
    similar to the price of a lamb. Girls or boys aged 14-15 went for 50
    cents, whereas an adult Christian woman was worth about one Turkish
    lira. But if the slave came from a well-known wealthy family, the
    price went up significantly, as owning the slave could also bring the
    future potential of claiming the wealth of the slave's family. There
    are several documented cases from the later Turkish Republic era when
    Kurdish and Turkish families attempted to legalize the ownership of
    many real estate properties, previously owned by their "wives" or
    "daughters."

    There are also documented cases when kind-hearted Assyrian priests or
    European/American missionaries purchased several Armenian children from
    these markets, with the objective of rescuing them. Assyrian Archbishop
    Tappuni of Mardin purchased and saved nearly 2,000 Armenian children
    in 1916. While some Moslems treated the Armenian slaves humanely,
    most owners savagely beat them, as they believed "Christians only
    deserve beatings." The women and girls ended up being second wives
    for the Moslem owners, who received harsh treatment not only from
    their husbands but also from the other wives of their husbands.

    But eventually, they all got absorbed into the Moslem households,
    bearing children, learning the Quran, praying piously as Moslem women.

    According to a post-war report of the League of Nations Rescue
    Commission for Armenian Women and Children, at least 30,000 Armenian
    girls were sold in the markets to be placed in harems, or to be used
    as slave labor. Documented histories of some 2,000 Armenian girls,
    boys and young women rescued from Turkish and Kurdish households
    after the war are archived in the League of Nations offices in Geneva.

    Rescuing the Armenian orphans became one of the first tasks of the
    League of Nations after the armistice in 1918. Following the pleas of
    the Istanbul Armenian Patriarchate, the Allied Forces and the League
    of Nations representatives organized the transfer of most Armenian
    orphans from Anatolia and Syria to Istanbul, and started searches
    of Armenian orphans in Moslem homes. As there was no room to place
    all the orphans in existing orphanages in Istanbul, several schools
    were used to house the Armenian children, including the French Notre
    Dame de Sion, St. Joseph, the Italian school, the Russian monastery,
    and Turkish Kuleli Military Academy.

    As some of the orphans already had Turkish names, there started heated
    discussions between the Armenian Patriarchate and the government
    authorities as to the real identity of the children. In fact, some
    of the orphans were already transferred to Turkish homes in Istanbul
    as maids and servants; among them, 50 orphans sent to the farm of
    Ittihad ve Terakki leader Enver Pasha. The children were conditioned
    and intimidated not to speak Armenian, nor to reveal their Armenian
    identities during the war years.

    Documents show that between 1920 and 1922, there were about 3,800
    Armenian children brought to Istanbul, 3,000 sent to Cyprus, 15,600
    taken to Greece, and 12,000 transferred to Syria from Marash, Urfa,
    Antep, Malatya and Harput. Significantly, the Istanbul Patriarchate
    records indicated that there were still at least 63,000 Armenian
    orphans documented as "Not Rescued" in Turkish and Kurdish households.

    In recent years, genocide scholars have stated that the perpetrators
    not only aim at the "destruction" of the oppressed group but also
    the "construction" of the oppressor group. The 1915 events and the
    consequences clearly show that the Armenian orphans became a source
    of pro-creation for the Turkish nation by enriching their genetic pool.

    There are now tens of thousands of Turkish and Kurdish families, with
    a hidden Armenian grandmother. It is remarkable that, even ninety
    eight years after attempts of forced Turkification, assimilation
    and conversion, there are signs of hidden Armenian identity in
    various places in Anatolia starting to emerge. There is a somewhat
    graphic term defining these people in Turkey, "remnants of the sword"
    (kilic artigi).

    Hrant Dink's lawyer, Fethiye Cetin, in her book My Grandmother, and
    the follow-up, The Grandchildren, co-written with Aysegul Altinay,
    and many other books, documentaries and movies have come out in recent
    years, describing the existence and emergence of the hidden Armenians
    in Turkey, carried from one generation to the next, all originating
    from the 1915 Armenian orphans.

    It is of course very difficult to estimate the number of hidden
    Armenians in Turkey today. One can assume that perhaps up to
    100,000 Armenian orphans survived but got Turkified, converted and
    assimilated. Scholars estimate another 200,000 adult Armenians avoided
    deportation in various Anatolian villages by converting to Islam. It
    is therefore conceivable that 300,000 Armenian souls survived the
    1915 events. The population of Turkey increased seven fold since then.

    Using the same multiple, one can extrapolate that there may exist 2
    million people with Armenian roots in Turkey today.

    I would like to share one of my own personal experiences with a
    hidden Armenian, albeit indirectly. When I was in Armenia in 1995 as
    a voluntary engineer inspecting Hayastan All Armenian Fund-financed
    construction projects, I also visited Spitak where the church
    destroyed in the 1989 earthquake was being rebuilt. I was informed
    that the financing came from Turkey from a still confidential donor,
    as specified in the will of a grandmother of a very wealthy Turkish
    family, who had only revealed her Armenian roots at her deathbed. In
    recent years and especially after the reconstruction of the Surp
    Giragos Armenian Church in Diyarbakir, there has been a resurgence of
    the hidden Armenians in revealing their identities. It is hoped that
    the Turkish government sees this as a positive consequence of the
    recent steps of liberalization and not as a threat, and eventually
    finds the courage to face its past.

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