Armenian film looks back on 'silent genocide'
Kate Dourian LONDON

TENS OF THOUSANDS OF ARMENIANS DIED DURING DEPORTATION EITHER IN THE HARSH MOUNTAINOUS TERRAIN OF SOUTHEAST TURKEY OR AT THE HANDS OF OTTOMAN TURKISH SOLDIERS 



One day in the summer of 1915 a young Armenian mother hid her baby boy in a mulberry bush in eastern Turkey and prayed the soldiers would not find him. 

by the time the shrub had shed its leaves in the autumn, an entire community of Armenians had died. and, were it not for the baby who survived, the story of what happened in the armenian town of kharpert might never have been told. 

Michael Hagopian, now 86, was that baby. 

He has just completed a documentary film called "Voices from the Lake," reconstructing the harrowing events that unfolded that year. 

It is the story of the mountain town of Kharpert, and the regional capital merze, where 140,000-160,000 Armenians lived and prospered in what was then Ottoman Turkey. 

By 1915, while the world was at war, some 1.5 million Armenians had perished, including virtually the entire population of Kharpert. 

Armenians call it "the silent genocide." Turkey denies the massacre and says thousands of Armenians may have been victims of the russo-turkish war raging at the time. 

Hagopian strokes a mulberry leaf as he repeats the story his mother told him of how a small tree saved his life. 

SAFE CRADLE IN A MULBERRY BUSH
Whenever soldiers came knocking on Armenian doors in Kharpert with deportation orders, Hagopian's mother would rush to the field where tall poplars shielded the mulberries and make him a safe cradle in the foliage. 

"The mulberry bush is symbolic... It has a purpose in the film in that by the time the leaves had fallen in that one year, the genocide had been completed," Hagopian told Reuters from his home in California. 

Hagopian spent four years researching the film and traveled widely to obtain first-hand material with which to piece together the events that unfolded in Kharpert and Merze, now known as Harput and Elazig. 

The result was a documentary that relies mainly on the eyewitness accounts of Western diplomats and missionaries and Armenian survivors. It was shown in London earlier this month as part of events leading up to the 85th anniversary of the genocide, which Armenians mark on April 24. 

By 1915, Imperial Turkey had lost its European territories and was at war against the forces of Britain, France and Russia. Its only avenue for expansion lay to the east but large communities of Christian Armenians in such trading hubs as Kharpert stood in the way. 

Mr. Davis, from the PBS series, "Armenia - Survival of a Nation"

     Hagopian found a detailed account of the killings in the diaries of Leslie Davis, then US consul in Kharpert. 

In 1917, the United States entered World War I. Though no lover of the Armenians, Davis was to provide key evidence that a massacre did indeed occur. 

Hearing reports that bodies had been seen floating in nearby lake Geoljik, Davis took his camera and went to investigate, recording what he saw in his diary. 

He wrote of finding what he counted to be 10,000 bodies of Armenians lying in the lake just west of Kharpert, ironically now called Hazar, the Armenian word for thousand. 

For months, Davis had tried to alert his government to the plight of the Armenians but when it was time for him to leave, he decided not to take the photographs for fear they would be confiscated by the Turkish authorities. 

Instead, he and his Armenian bodyguard Garabed Bedrossian hid the pictures in the garden and left for the United States. 

Bedrossian returned to Kharpert in 1922 and dug up the pictures. Though faded and gnawed at the edges, they provided Hagopian with rare pictorial proof to use in his film. 

Other corroborating evidence came from the diaries and writings of Henry Harrison Riggs, US missionary couple Dr Henry Atkinson and his wife Tacy, Danish medical missionary Maria Jacobsen and German missionary Johannes Ehemann. 

SECRET DIARY FOUND 
Tacy Atkinson's diary contained a notation that Hagopian says nobody knew existed until he discovered it. 

"I could not write it then but there were 10,000 dead in the lake," she wrote, eight years after returning home from Turkey. 

Davis wrote that by his count, only around 8,000 Armenians survived the massacre of 1915. 

Click on Reuters article if you'd like to read the little bit that remains... which ends, of course, with the ubiquitous, Genocide-proving Hitler Quote.

 

When the Earl of Crewe replied on October 5, 1915, in the House of Lords to the Earl of Cromer’s question as to whether H.M.’s Government had received any information confirmatory of the statements made in the press in relating to "renewed massacres of Armenians," he based his information on a report of the British Consul at Batum, which in turn relied on a Tiflis newspaper, probably The Horizon, "an Armenian propagandist organ and therefore quite unreliable." C.F. Dixon-Johnson, British author; the above is an evaluation of his 1916 book, "The Armenians." While the consul in question is not American, it provides insight as to how all Western and Armenian-sympathetic consuls derived their information. In addition, Dixon-Johnson criticizes the claims of another Western consul, the (Italian) Consul (Signor Corrini) who claimed all of Trabzon's Armenian population of from 8,000 to 10,000 was drowned in one afternoon, adding that he had "saw it done with (his) own eyes." Of course, Lord Bryce, who swallowed such a story wholesale, reported it to the Times (as mentioned above), which also swallowed it wholesale, showing how each of these sources fed off each other... the consuls, their bosses, and the press... and how silly it is to hold such biased accounts as reliable, today. ADDENDUM (2-06): Having read Dixon-Johnson's book in the interim, and the Italian Consul's emotional report, it would appear Dixon-Johnson was criticizing Lord Bryce and The Times of London (Bryce's horror story also made it to The New York Times; see first graphic), rather than the consul. More on the consul (whose name was probably "Gorrini") may be found here.

A Report by J. B. Jackson J. B. Jackson took the cake among all the U.S. consuls in providing the most sensational reports... that is what I inferred, anyway, from ANI's Rouben Paul Adalian... and his bio of Henry Morgenthau, where Jackson was singled out as the best producer of these reports, with the word "especially." Dr. Adalian also characterized these consuls as being "eyewitnesses." Who was J. B. Jackson, the man? At this point, I have no idea. (ADDENDUM: Since this writing, I have read "The Burning Tigris," and have learned more.) Apparently, he believed in going all the way with whatever story came his way. Maybe that's how President Lyndon B. Johnson came up with his slogan, years later, with Mr. Jackson serving as inspiration: "All the Way with J. B. J." Here is an example of Consul Jackson's "eyewitnessed" handiwork, from an Armenian web site. "On the first of June, 3000 people, mostly women, girls, and children, left Harput, accompanied by 70 policemen... "On the 15th day they were again troding their way through steep mountains, where the Kurds gathered 150 of the men... and taking them to some distance, butchered them... That day another caravan of exiles, only 300 of which were men, from Sivas, Egin, Tokat joined that from Harput, thus making a bigger caravan, 18,000 all counted... "On the 52nd day they arrived at another village, here the Kurds took from them every thing they had, even their shirts and drawers and for five days the whole caravan walked all naked under the scorching sun. For another five days they did not have a morsel of bread, neither a drop of water... their tongues were turned to charcoal... At another place, where there were wells, some women threw themselves into it, as there was no rope and pail to draw water but these were drowned and in spite of that the rest of the people drank from that well, the dead bodies still staying and stinking in it... "On the 70th day, when they reached Aleppo, 35 women and children were remaining from the 3000 exiles of Harput, 150 women and children from the whole caravan of 18,000." J.B. Jackson, American Consul General at Aleppo, October 16, 1915 U.S State Department Record Group 59, 867.4016/225   Hmmmm. Can I tell you conclusively that the above report is a crock of sh...aving cream? No, I cannot. I was not there. Neither were you. So what we need to rely on is a little bit of logic... and common sense. Before we begin, allow me to remind you of the words of George M. Lamsa, a missionary well known for his research on Christianity. Here's what he wrote in "The Secret of the Near East," The Ideal Press, Philadelphia (1923), page 133: "...In some towns containing ten Armenian houses and thirty Turkish houses, it was reported that 40,000 people were killed, about 10,000 women were taken to the harem, and thousands of children left destitute; and the city university destroyed, and the bishop killed..." Yes, Armenians have a tendency to... ehhhh... "exaggerate," but what's J. B. J.'s excuse? No doubt crimes occurred. And many Armenians and Greeks will have no trouble with accepting this particular story's described horrors at face value, bred to look upon Turks as evil incarnate. But the villainy suggested in this incredible tale of monstrousness and cruelty gives "suspension of disbelief" new meaning. No doubt individual sadists who are capable of such misbehavior exist in our world. But to have every single involved individual to think in the same super-sadistic way, with no human compassion, enters the realm of the unbelievable. (With the exception there was a state-operated network for hatred, as with the school system of the Nazi regime, brainwashing people into believing "The Other" -- Jews, in this case -- were less than human. No such network existed in the tolerant Ottoman state and, besides, Armenian Propaganda tells us the racially inferior Turks so respected Armenians, the Turks made sure to get some of that pure Aryan blood, in order to improve the gene pool.) If there really were seventy policemen (there would have conceivably been hundreds once the other caravans joined in; the seventy only took care of the initial group of 3,000. Let's estimate; if there were 70 cops for 3,000 Armenians, the total number might have been over 400 for 18,000), and if each and every one of these policemen stood by enjoying this nightmare... then they must have all been ordered to implement this slow, sadistic death on the Armenians. Then there must have been a state-sponsored genocide. Unfortunately, for those who relish the thought, there is no proof of state-sponsored genocide... and the possibility of there being hundreds of super-sadistic Hannibal Lecters conveniently coming together at a Hannibal Lecter convention  becomes colossally slim. How many monsters can coincidentally be brought together, realistically? How possible is it that at least a few of them wouldn't have stepped up to the plate and said, "That's enough." Especially if there were females and children involved. Another missionary (who happened to be a Mormon, identifying with the Turks as being "misunderstood," and generally -- but not always -- more credible than the Protestant missionaries from the United States), Elder Tanner, observed about the Turks, in 1886: “After all, they are the most honest and moral of the Orientals." In his "Who Can be So Polite and Courteous As a Turk,” he wrote:  "Turks are vastly more moral respecting women than Europeans." We know the good quality and honorable "clean-fighting" Turks were at the various fronts, and many of the gendarmes were composed of irregulars, since the nation was involved in a battle for its life, and there was no manpower to spare. Well, I don't care if all of these gendarmes were recruited from prisons and were the scum of the earth... while some of them might have been monsters, every single one could not have forgotten about their humanity. (The reality is that there were even gendarmes who gave up their lives to defend Armenians, and many protected Armenians... as this rarity of an Armenian grandmother bore witness.) Again, the more zealous S.S. Nazis could have been that way; however, the Nazis were exposed to hate propaganda for well over a decade before doing their dirty work. Hatred was preached in Nazi schools. There was no network to brainwash and spread hatred among the Turks. (That is, in fact, one critical difference between Turks and most Armenians/Greeks.) If we are to believe every single gendarme would have gone along with this torture, that they deliberately withheld the food, water and other provisions provided for the Armenians (the Ottoman Turks allotted a fortune for the purpose, as bankrupt as they were), and that they were all in cahoots with the marauding and/or blood feuding Kurds, then not a single Armenian could have survived. Perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of 700,000 Armenians were resettled by the end of 1916. We know one million Armenians survived, according to Armenians... out of an initial pre-war population of some 1.5 million, according to neutral sources. If just one per cent of the Armenians survived in this journey (185 of 18,000), many of whom must have died later given their miserable condition (charcoal tongues and all)... and given that Armenian sympathizers love to claim the resettled survivors were polished off after a while anyway, there would have been ZERO Armenian survivors of the 700,000 resettled. Add to this figure the number of Armenian dead from the regular famine and disease that claimed thousands of Turks daily, as Ambassador Morgenthau himself attested in his "Story" book, along with the many Armenians who died as traitorous combatants against their country.... well. Logically, it simply does not add up. Particularly when we keep in mind figures given even by the biased likes of Professor Hovannisian, who estimated: "By the end of 1916, nearly three hundred thousand Ottoman Armenians had sought safety in Transcaucasia, where nearly half were destined to die from famine and disease." (Richard G. Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, Berkeley, 1967, pp. 14-5.) That's almost 150,000 Armenians whose deaths were not caused by Turkish "brutality." One's eyebrows can also involuntarily rise when one encounters documentation on Armenians from Aleppo in later years, where they look pretty well fed (in addition, a Western observer's account of fat Armenians in 1919 Cilicia)... and there are also plenty of younger men among them. (Some 200,000 Armenians in Syria survived by year's end; the Patriarch himself reported 57,000 in Aleppo alone, in 1921. I'd think the bulk of relocated Armenians at other destinations had a similarly positive survival rate; click on last link to see what the Patriarch thought.) Another thing that's crazy about this story is that these people had to travel on roads, through many towns. (This death march took a whopping seventy days... over two months. A lot of villages must have been passed through.) Even under the deplorable wartime conditions every Ottoman citizen suffered through, wouldn't the sight of suffering, naked women and children create a stir with the residents of these towns? Especially among sheltered Moslems, where public nudity must have come as a shock? Even if these residents were afraid to protest to the gendarmes, thinking the gendarmes were all sadistic monsters who might make them their next victim.... how possible is it that none of the many people who witnessed this horrifying and unforgettable sight not speak up publicly, especially after the war was over? This is the kind of sensational story that would have been endlessly corroborated, once the dust settled. If not among the Turks, then certainly among the Arabs, once Aleppo and its environs were taken away from the Ottoman Empire. Who came up with the numbers? How did J. B. J. know what took place on the 52nd day, or that there were 150 men murdered? He certainly did not "eyewitness" these events. Who told him there were 18,000 Armenians at the start of this journey? As this naked group neared Aleppo, is it possible J. B. J.'s "eyes and ears" forewarned the consul of their approach? ("J.B.! Just a handful out of the original thousands is about to enter town, all naked women and children, with charcoal tongues!") After J. B. J. must have logically corrected his informer that since the victims' tongues had already turned to charcoal on the 52nd day, none of the group could have tongues left on the 70th day (and perhaps wondered how anybody could have survived under the sun and the evening cold for over two weeks without clothing, not to mention food and water), why did not J. B. J. come up with the idea to photograph these poor souls as they tottered into Aleppo? That would have been the sort of sensational evidence the Armenian researchers at the Malta War crimes Tribunal could have made good use of. (You'll remember, the one where they could not find any reliable evidence of any war crime?) Unlike co-consul Leslie Davis, J. B. J. must not have had the brains to come up with this simple idea. Since Leslie Davis was Harput's consul, where the 3,000 Armenians started out from, Leslie Davis himself should have had the brains to wire J. B. J. and suggest that Davis would photograph 3,000 healthy Armenians, and J. B. J. should photograph whatever remained at the end of their journey... after all, it was October 1915, and these guys had heard enough terrifying stories to know what to expect. This would have been their big chance to come up with hard proof. (I read in an Armenian site that the Turks prohibited photography. Give me a break. Even if that were the case, where there is a will, there is a way. Armin Wegner did it. Unfortunately, his photos mainly display suffering people, which hit almost every Ottoman citizen, and don't prove a state-sponsored extermination policy. Not that photos of 185 naked, skeletal women and children would have proven a state-sponsored extermination policy, but it certainly would have looked BAD.) That is especially peculiar, since we know J. B. J. must have listened to his boss, Henry "Holier-than-Thou" Morgenthau... that is, if we are to believe Dr. Dennis Papazian, who informed us in his very own "Misplaced Credulity" that: In fact, just to be sure, Morgenthau directed his consuls to personally verify the Armenian killings in each of their regions and to carefully draw distinctions in their reports between what they heard--even from reliable sources--and what they actually witnessed. No doubt J. B. J. went out of his way to "personally verify" this story, that he heard from missionaries and/or Armenians. In fact, he would have had to triple-check and quadruple-check the facts and figures from impartial sources, because the first reaction of any normal, right-thinking person, upon hearing such a far-fetched tale of incredible nonsense, would have been: "That's UNBELIEVABLE!" The final question is... if J. B. Jackson was so quick to report such a horrifying story without making sure it was the bonafide truth, what kind of a man would that make J. B. Jackson?   (This is the same story, by the way, that appeared in Viscount Bryce's "The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire." 185 survivors are left from the original 18,000 in Bryce's version, which was no doubt lifted from J.B.J.'s tale. Morgenthau freely shared information supplied by his consular henchmen with the likes of Lord Bryce and Lepsius, the Axis of Propagandists. Was that the correct thing for Morgenthau to have done, to share strategic information, as the official representative of a "neutral" country? What kind of a man was Henry Morgenthau? )

A rarity of a report by a U.S. Consul that does not incriminate the Turks.

The U.S. Consul in Mersina, Edward Nathan, said in an August 30, 1915 report to Ambassador Morganthau that the railway route from Tarsus to Adana was full of Armenians; and that they traveled from Adana onwards with a ticket; and despite some difficulties due to crowds of people, the government organized this process in the most orderly fashion; and that the Government did not allow any act of violence or disorder, provided sufficient number of tickets to the immigrants and assisted those who were in need.

Prof. Dr. Yusuf Halacoglu, Realities on the Armenian Immigration - (1915), TTK Publications, Ankara, 2001. Source: "EUM, File 2D/13 (see Document 664)"


From ermenisorunu.gen.tr/english/relocation/start.html

Holdwater opines: Incompetent Turks! This was no way to run a genocide...

I know what Armenians and their supporters will say to reports such as this, exploring the "other side" of the relocations: sure, the Turks were just like Nazis, fooling the people into travelling so that they can put them into the equivalent of the gas chambers at the end. Well, guess again. Number One, there were no Auschwitzes, Dachaus, or other concentration camps. Armenophile Christopher Walker claims the Armenians were marched off into the desert, "to die," mostly from abandonment. (From this PBS show.) Since the Ottomans did not have the TECHNOLOGY to commit genocide in a wide scale fashion, what would have been the need for concentration camps... assuming the bankrupt nation would have decided putting aside scarce resources for the construction of such camps would have been a good idea in the first place? Any of the incidental (I say "incidental" not to minimize the terror some Armenians suffered through savage attacks but because I believe MOST Armenians died the same way their fellow Ottomans did... through famine and disease... and fighting as combatants) massacres that occurred upon the marching and poorly protected Armenians by marauding bands took place the crude, old fashioned way... via stabbings and shootings.

Armenians and missionaries took these massacre stories and applied them as the rule of their experience and not the exception because of their agendas. The reason why there was an incredible amount of survivors for such an "exterminated" people was because the Ottoman authorities did the best they could for their Armenian citizens, under these trying circumstances. In parts of the country where there were railways, it seems the Armenians' journey was conducted in a civilized fashion. The above report from Professor Halacoglu goes on to say:

"...There arose difficulties at times to find vehicles transporting immigrants due to the need to dispatch military and food items to the front continuously. Therefore, railway stations were congested. It being harvest season the vehicles were scarce, which caused delays in transportation at times, (7) as well as difficulties in the movement of the convoys. In spite of all these difficult circumstances and adverse conditions, the government succeeded, in an orderly fashion, to transport the immigrating Armenians to their new locations of resettlement."

Yes, it's a Turkish source. Lies? In order to determine that, one must call upon impartial common sense.... the above sounds perfectly sensible, given the desperation of a "Sick Man" fighting a war on some five fronts... and one must examine the real orders that came from the Ottoman government, of which there are plenty that supports a sensitivity and caring toward the Armenians. Instead, bigots choose to focus on the made up orders from Aram Andonian and the like, made up quotes that were put into Talat Pasha's mouth, and other falsifications.

Sometimes a cliché says it best: The Truth Will Set You Free.