regions concerned. This native evidence may be thought to
have somewhat less cogency than the rest, as the witnesses
have suffered personally from the horrors they describe, and
are open to stronger influences of prejudice and emotion
than foreign observers. Errors of detail are more likely to
occur here, especially as regards estimates of numbers. The
Editor wishes to repeat, however, that, after comparing the
different statements of these native witnesses with one
another, and with the documents in the three preceding
classes, he is convinced of the substantial accuracy of all
the evidence, of whatever class, that is presented in this
volume.
The total body of evidence is large, as the considerable bulk of the
volume shows, and this is the more satisfactory because the Ottoman
Government has taken every possible precaution to prevent any
knowledge of its proceedings from reaching the outer world. Private
postal and telegraphic communications were suspended between
Constantinople and the provinces, and between one province and
another. There was a stringent censorship of outgoing mails, even
the consuls of neutral countries were forbidden to telegraph in
cypher, and travellers leaving Turkey were searched and divested of
every scrap of paper, whether written upon or blank, in their
possession. A quotation from a letter, written by the author of one
of our documents[6] just after she had safely passed beyond the
Ottoman frontier, will give some idea of the severity of this
official embargo upon news of every sort:
“As I was coming out from under the hands of the censor, I was asked
to write to you, telling you something of the real situation in our
part of the world. In my opinion the censorship now is worse than it
was in the olden days, for now they have such highly trained men.
One of our censors had a five years’ training in the New York Post
Office. If our letters seem to tell you little, please remember that
there are the strictest orders against the censor’s passing anything
on politics, war or even poverty. Any sentences that even touch on
these subjects are either cut out or marked or blotted out with ink.
A German lady even wrote to a friend of hers in Germany, telling her
of poverty in BM. and asking her to send relief funds. She purposely
mentioned no causes for this poverty, but only said there was such a
condition. The only parts of the letter that reached her friend were
the opening and closing sentences. The knife had claimed the rest.
So, as Mrs. E. said: ‘Please tell our friends in America that when
we write about concerts and field meets and such things, that does
not show that the country is safe or that work is as usual. We write
about that simply because there is nothing else about which we are
allowed to write.’ ”
Nearly all our evidence, therefore, comes from residents in Turkey
who witnessed, like this lady, the events that occurred in some
particular district or districts, and subsequently left Turkey for
some other country, where they could record what they had seen
without endangering their lives. Yet, even on neutral ground, these
witnesses are not beyond the reach of Turkish resentment. Many of
them are anxious to take up their work again in Turkey at the
earliest opportunity, and nearly all of them still have interests in
the country, or fellow-workers, or friends, who are so many gages in
the Ottoman Government’s hands. That Government is known to have
agents in Europe, and possibly in America as well, whose business it
is to inform against anyone who exposes its misdeeds; and the Young
Turkish gang, by whom the Ottoman Government is controlled, have no
shame and no scruple about wreaking vengeance by any and every means
upon accusers whose indictments they are wholly unable to answer
before the judgment seat of the civilised world. It is, therefore,
absolutely essential to withhold in many cases the names of the
witnesses themselves, and of people, or even of places, mentioned in
their testimony. In fact, some of the documents have only been
communicated to the Editor on this express condition—for instance,
the document enclosed with the letter quoted a few lines above. “May
I ask you, however,” continues this very letter, “not to publish my
name or that of any missionary from BM., not even the name of BM.
itself or any of the places which I shall mention, as the censorship
is so strict and terrible now that the mention of names brings us
under suspicion at once. May I instance? Dr. E. and Dr. L. have been
under such suspicion or ill-will that they have not been able to get
a simple family letter through to members of their family in America
for months, and the whole station of AC. is under sufficient
suspicion to prevent most of the letters they write to you and Mr.
N, from reaching their destination. The reason, we feel quite
certain, is a report on Moslem work which was sent to you.”
And the same considerations are urged even more emphatically by Miss
A., the author of Doc. 137 who is our chief witness for the
occurrences at AC. itself:—
For the sake of the people left in Turkey, and especially my orphan
children, I hope nothing will be published as from me. If any word
of it should get into Turkey, it might have very serious
consequences for them.
“Although very few magazines or papers were allowed into the
interior, yet occasionally we saw one. In the coast towns, pieces
are being cut from the papers, and sold at high prices to Turks. I
left my post just because I thought my presence there might make it
hard for those under my charge; but if anything that I am supposed
to have told gets back into Turkey, I fear the whole of my community
may have to suffer. I do not think that those outside Turkey fully
realise what danger there is, even in letters, to those left in the
country. The local authorities seemed to be always on the watch for
something to find as a cause of complaint against both missionaries
and Armenians.
“The poor refugees that we saw in BF. as we passed through begged us
to help them, but, when we got to BJ., the missionaries there said
they had been forbidden to give aid. One woman had been taken to the
Government Building because she had been found helping some poor
families in her own district that she had been visiting for years.
There were many sick at BF., and the pastor and others sent
post-cards, begging us to send help quickly. One man asked me to
lend him some money, saying I could get it back from his brother in
America. It was the danger to him that made me hesitate. The money
was finally sent, but one feared to think what it might be an excuse
for. And so over all the country.
“All the time when people were in great need, the question was in
one’s mind: ‘Will relief endanger their lives?’ New rules were
constantly being sprung upon us. A person would write a letter, but
before it reached its destination it would be ‘against the
regulations.’
“All money in banks and all property belonging to the exiles was
confiscated by the Government. The people who were deported from AC.
did not know it, but when they had used up all that they had taken
with them, they would write to us. It was in this way that we found
out that they had neither money nor property left; but we were
powerless to let them know what the difficulty was, so they would
write again and again.
“All the time, we felt we were in a trap. The most courageous
Armenians dared not come to see me, nor could I go to their homes.
We had to meet at some public building if they wanted to see me
about anything.
“No one living in freedom can understand what it feels like to be in
Turkey these days.”
In face of this, the reader will see for himself that the
publication of names, under present circumstances, would often be a
grave and perilous breach of trust, and the Editor has, therefore,
(though only where absolutely necessary, and without making any
change whatever affecting the substance of the documents),
substituted arbitrary symbols for the names of persons and places in
the text, in the manner shown in the preceding quotation. A complete
key to these symbols has been prepared and communicated, in
confidence, to the British Foreign Office, Lord Bryce, Dr. Barton,
and the Rev. G.T. Scott; and this key will be published as soon as
circumstances permit, or, in other words, as soon as the dangers
which would threaten the persons referred to have ceased to exist.
The Ottoman Government and its allies, whose good name is almost as
seriously compromised as the Ottoman name by the facts, may be
expected to make what capital they can out of the precautions
imposed by their own treatment of their Christian subjects, and to
impugn the genuineness of the documents that have been edited in the
way here described. That was the course they adopted in the case of
the evidence relating to the conduct of the German Army in Belgium,
which was published with the same, equally necessary, reservations.
The Editor can best forestall such disingenuous criticism by stating
clearly the principles on which this suppression of names has been
made:
(_a_) Names of persons are not published in this volume unless
they have already appeared publicly, in the same connection,
in print, or unless the person in question is clearly beyond
the reach of Turkish revenge.
(_b_) Names of places are published wherever possible. They
are only withheld when they would be certain to reveal the
identity of persons mentioned in connection with them.
(_c_) All names withheld are represented in the text by
capital letters of the alphabet or combinations of capital
letters. These letters are not the initials of the names in
question, but were assigned in an arbitrary order, as the
various documents happened to come into the Editor’s hands.
(_d_) The name of a place is always represented by the same
symbol throughout the volume, _e.g._, “X.” stands for the
same place, whether it occurs in Section I. or Section XI.
(_e_) In the case of the names of people the same symbol only
stands for the same person within a single section, _e.g._,
“Miss A.” stands for the same person, in whatever document
it occurs in Section XVII.; but in the documents of Section
XI. “Miss A.” represents someone different.
The Editor wishes to state, once more, that these documents in which
names are represented by symbols are not a whit less valid, as
evidence, than the documents in which no such substitutions have had
to be made. If the reader desires confirmation of this, the Editor
would refer him to the gentlemen mentioned above, who have been
placed in possession of the confidential key.
There are other documents, however, where the names have, on similar
grounds, been withheld from the Editor himself, either by the
authors of the documents or by those through whose hands the Editor
obtained them, or where the ultimate source of the testimony is for
some reason obscure. The Editor has been careful to indicate these
cases as conspicuously as possible. Where there is any name, either
of a place or of a person, unknown to him in the text, he has
represented it by a blank (——). Where the name of the author of the
document is unknown to him, he has stated this in a footnote to the
title by which the document is headed.[7]
The Editor is, of course, aware that these documents which he only
possesses in a defective form cannot be presented as evidence in the
strict sense by himself, and can plausibly be repudiated by the
parties whose crimes they describe. He is the more content to admit
this legal objection to them because they merely confirm what is
established by the other evidence independently of them. They
constitute no more than twenty-two out of the 150 documents in the
whole collection, and, if they are passed over, the picture
presented by the far larger mass of documents that cannot be
impugned remains perfectly precise and complete. The Editor has
chosen to publish them, in their natural order, with the rest,
because he has no more doubt about their genuineness than about the
genuineness of the others—and with good reason, for, out of the
twenty-two documents in question, not less then eleven have been
communicated to him by the American Committee for Armenian and
Syrian Relief—citizens of high standing in a neutral country and
gentlemen of unimpeachable good faith. He repeats, however, that
these twenty-two documents are in no way essential to the
presentation of the case as a whole.
The documents are arranged in groups, in a geographical order, which
is adjusted as far as possible to the general chronological order in
which the different regions were affected by the Ottoman
Government’s scheme. The first group or section contains documents
that do not confine themselves to any one region, but give general
descriptions of events occurring throughout the Ottoman Empire.
These documents are for the most part earlier in date than those
relating to particular districts, and are therefore placed at the
beginning. The second section opens the geographical series with the
documents relating to Van, the north-easternmost province of the
Ottoman Empire in the direction of the Caucasus and Azerbaijan. The
third section deals with Bitlis, the province adjoining Van on the
west, which suffered next in order; the fourth with Azerbaijan, the
Persian province on the eastern side of Van, which suffered during
the Turkish offensive in the winter of 1914-5; the fifth with
Russian Trans-Caucasia, where the refugees from Van and Azerbaijan
sought refuge in August, 1915. The succeeding sections follow one
another in geographical order from east to west, beginning with
Erzeroum, the border province adjoining Van on the north-west along
the Russo-Turkish frontier. Erzeroum constitutes the sixth section,
Mamouret-ul-Aziz the seventh, Trebizond the eighth, Sivas the ninth,
Kaisaria the tenth, the town of X. the eleventh, Angora the twelfth,
Constantinople and the adjacent districts the thirteenth. From this
point the sections run in reverse order from north-west to
south-east, following the track of the Baghdad Railway. The
fourteenth section deals with places along this route between (but
excluding) Adapazar and Aleppo; the fifteenth deals with Cilicia,
the region through which the Baghdad Railway passes half-way along
its course, and this is the only case in which the chronological and
geographical arrangements seriously conflict, for the Cilicians were
the first to suffer—they were already being deported twelve days
before fighting broke out at Van. The sixteenth section is Jibal
Mousa, a group of villages adjoining Cilicia on the south; the
seventeenth the Armenian colonies at Ourfa and AC., two cities on
the Mesopotamian fringe; the eighteenth Aleppo, upon which nearly
all the convoys of exiles converged; and the nineteenth Damascus and
Der-el-Zor, the two districts where the greater part of the
survivors were finally deposited. A twentieth section has also been
added for documents received while the volume was in the press.
Wherever a date is given without further indication, it may be
assumed to be in “New Style.” Where two alternative dates are given
(_e.g._, 26th September/9th October), the first is “Old Style” and
the second “New.” Dates are never given in “Old Style” alone. Where
sums of money are given in Turkish or Persian units, the English
equivalent is usually added in brackets. Sums given in dollars have
always been translated into English pounds sterling.
The names of places have not been spelt on any consistent system,
there being no recognised system in general use. The Editor has
merely endeavoured to standardise the spelling of each particular
name wherever it occurs.
An index of all places referred to by name in the documents that are
in the Editor’s possession, whether the name has been withheld in
the text or not, has been compiled for him most accurately by Miss
Margaret Toynbee, to whom he is grateful for this important addition
to the usefulness of the book. This index is printed at the end of
the volume. The map which accompanies it has been compiled by the
Editor himself from various sources, chiefly from Kiepert’s
excellent sheets of Asia Minor, in the Map Room of the Royal
Geographical Society, where he has received most kind and valuable
assistance from the staff.
I. GENERAL DESCRIPTIONS.
_The Ottoman Government did its utmost to prevent the news of what
it was doing to the Armenians from leaking through to the outer
world. A stringent censorship was established at all the frontiers,
private communication was severed between Constantinople and the
provinces, and the provinces themselves were isolated from one
another. Nearly all our information has been obtained from witnesses
who succeeded in making their way out of Turkey after the massacres
and deportations had occurred, and who wrote down their experiences
after reaching America or Europe. The evidence of these witnesses is
first-hand, but it is mostly confined to the particular region in
which each witness happened to reside, and it has therefore been
grouped in this collection province by province, in geographical
order. We possess, however, certain general accounts which reached
Europe and America at an earlier date, for the most part, than the
individual narratives, and they are printed here in advance of the
rest—partly for the chronological reason, and partly because they
give a broad survey of what happened, which may impress the general
features upon the reader before he approaches the detailed testimony
of the sections that follow._
_In contrast to the bulk of our evidence, the majority of these
preliminary documents give their information at second-hand; but
practically every statement they make is more than borne out in
detail by the first-hand witnesses, and this is particularly the
case with the more startling and appalling of the facts they
record._
_The most interesting document in this section is No. 12, which was
compiled from German sources, published in a German journal, and
immediately suppressed by the German Censorship._
1. DESPATCH[8] FROM MR. HENRY WOOD, CORRESPONDENT OF THE AMERICAN
“UNITED PRESS” AT CONSTANTINOPLE; PUBLISHED IN THE AMERICAN
PRESS, 14th AUGUST, 1915.
So critical is the situation that Ambassador Morgenthau, who alone
is fighting to prevent wholesale slaughter, has felt obliged to ask
the co-operation of the Ambassadors of Turkey’s two Allies. They
have been successful to the extent of securing definite promises
from the leading members of the Young Turk Government that no orders
will be given for massacres. The critical moment for the Armenians,
however, will come, it is feared, when the Turks may meet with
serious reverses in the Dardanelles or when the Armenians
themselves, who not only are in open revolt but are actually in
possession of Van and several other important towns, may meet with
fresh successes. It is this uprising of the Armenians who are
seeking to establish an independent government that the Turks
declare is alone responsible for the terrible measures now being
taken against them[9]. In the meantime, the position of the
Armenians and the system of deportation, dispersion, and
extermination that is being carried out against them beggars all
description.
Although the present renewal of the Armenian atrocities has been
under way for three months, it is only just now that reports
creeping into Constantinople from the remotest points of the
interior show that absolutely no portion of the Armenian population
has been spared. It now appears that the order for the present
cruelties was issued in the early part of May, and was at once put
into execution with all the extreme genius of the Turkish police
system—the one department of government for which the Turks have
ever shown the greatest aptitude, both in organisation and
administration. At that time sealed orders were sent to the police
of the entire Empire. These were to be opened on a specified date
that would ensure the orders being in the hands of every department
at the moment they were to be opened. Once opened, they provided for
a simultaneous descent at practically the same moment on the
Armenian population of the entire Empire.
At Broussa, in Asiatic Turkey, the city which it is expected the
Turks will select for their capital in the event of Constantinople
falling, I investigated personally the manner in which these orders
were carried out[10]. From eye-witnesses in other towns from the
interior I found that the execution of them was everywhere
identical. At midnight, the police authorities swooped down on the
homes of all Armenians whose names had been put on the proscribed
list sent out from Constantinople. The men were at once placed under
arrest, and then the houses were searched for papers which might
implicate them either in the present revolutionary movement of the
Armenians on the frontier or in plots against the Government which
the Turks declare exist. In this search, carpets were torn from the
floors, draperies stripped from the walls, and even the children
turned out of their beds and cradles in order that the mattresses
and coverings might be searched.
Following this search, the men were then carried away, and at once
there began the carrying out of the system of deportation and
dispersion which has been the cruellest feature of the present
anti-Armenian wave. The younger men for the most part were at once
drafted into the Army. On the authority of men whose names would be
known in both America and Europe if I dared mention them, I am told
that hundreds if not thousands of these were sent at once to the
front ranks at the Dardanelles, where death in a very short space of
time is almost a certainty. The older men were then deported into
the interior, while the women and children, when not carried off in
an opposite direction, were left to shift for themselves as best
they could. The terrible feature of this deportation up to date is
that it has been carried out on such a basis as to render it
practically impossible in thousands of cases that these families can
ever again be reunited. Not only wives and husbands, brothers and
sisters, but even mothers and their little children have been
dispersed in such a manner as to preclude practically all hope that
they will ever see each other again.
In defence of these terrible measures which have been taken, the
Turks at Constantinople declare that no one but the Armenians
themselves is to blame. They state that when the present attack
began on the Dardanelles, the Armenians were notified that if they
took advantage of the moment when the Turks were concentrating every
energy for the maintenance of the Empire, to rise in rebellion, they
would be dealt with without quarter. This warning, however, the
Armenians failed to heed. They not only rose in rebellion, occupying
a number of important towns, including Van, but extended important
help to the Russians in the latter’s campaign in the Caucasus.[11]
While this is the Turkish side of the situation, there is also
another side which I shall give on the authority of men who have
passed practically their entire lives in Turkey and whose names, if
I dared mention them, would be recognised in both Europe and America
as competent authority. According to these men, the decision has
gone out from the Young Turk party that the Armenian population of
Turkey must be set back fifty years. This has been decided upon as
necessary in order to ensure the supremacy of the Turkish race in
the Ottoman Empire, which is one of the basic principles of the
Young Turk party. The situation, I am told, is absolutely analogous
to that which preceded the Armenian massacres under Abd-ul-Hamid. So
far, however, the Young Turks have confined themselves to the new
system of deportation, dispersion and separation of families.
-----
Footnote 1:
Memorandum by the Editor, page xli.
Footnote 2:
Memorandum by the Editor, page xl.
Footnote 3:
For instance, the conversation of a German officer reported in Doc.
108 p. 420. For the general attitude of the Turks and German towards
the treatment of the Armenians, see “Historical Summary,” chapter V.
On the 11th January, 1916, Herr von Stumm, Chief of the Political
Department of the German Foreign Office, gave the following answer in
the Reichstag to a question from Dr. Liebknecht: