Remembering the forgotten

MARDIN, Turkey—The hill country of Tur Abdin rises above the Tigris River valley in southeastern Turkey, watering lands also soaked in blood. Tur Abdin means “mountain of the servants of God” in Syriac, the dialect of Aramaic that’s been spoken here since before the time of Jesus. From the hillsides of Mardin, a city of 90,000 still dotted with some of the oldest churches in the world, churches where Scripture still is read in Syriac, the flat grassy plains stretch east across Syria and to the deserts of Nineveh in Iraq.

In the years of end-on-end massacres of Armenians that began in 1915, Tur Abdin became both a transit for survivors and a graveyard for victims. That winter the Ottoman army set up labor battalions of Armenian men, but eventually disarmed then slaughtered them.

Without their men, Armenian communities increasingly were vulnerable: Deportations and massacres spread the length and width of Turkey, and the Ottoman armies force-marched women, children, and the elderly out of their towns and toward Tur Abdin then further down to Aleppo in modern-day Syria and across the desert to Mosul in Iraq, all at that time under the Ottomans.

Tens of thousands died of starvation and disease in these wide-open hills, and many eventually were massacred in what they’d been led to believe was a safe haven. The deportations to this region, in fact, were systematic, the Turkish army forcing the Armenian Christians into remote, unreachable country before their slaughter. Some were stuffed into caves where they died of starvation or were asphyxiated by brush fires lit inside—primitive gas chambers, as journalists uncovering the Holocaust would later point out.

As the killings extended into 1916, a new wave of genocide spread from Tur Abdin into the deserts of today’s Iraq—including not only Armenians but also Assyrian Christians. What’s commonly portrayed as an ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian population was in fact a religious cleansing of all Christians in the Turkish heartland. The expert historians say somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the genocide—but 250,000 Assyrian Christians also were murdered. (Some estimates say the number is much higher, but a delegation representing Christians to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 documented this number of deaths.) Their plights and those of their surviving relatives are even less noted than the Armenians’.

Today in Tur Abdin they are still collecting the bones of so much carnage. At Mor Augin, a Syrian Orthodox monastery south of Mardin dating from the fourth century, a cave sits about 30 yards from the entrance. Inside locals and church leaders have collected an untold number of human remains they believe date to 1915-16. The cave may have been the site of an actual massacre a century ago, but now bones lie scattered about. In addition, several dozen sacks sit to the side, full of skeletal remains. Even in recent years, human remains have been brought from construction sites and other places nearby where locals continue to uncover them.

“This sounds like a major discovery,” David Gaunt told me after I sent him photos by email from the cave site. Gaunt is professor of history at Södertörn University College, Stockholm, Sweden. He’s also an expert on the genocide of Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syrian Christians during World War I, and author of the book Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Gorgias Press, 2006).

Gaunt has traveled the region examining remains and has studied 150 separate massacre sites in Mardin carried out in the summer of 1915. In Mor Augin the bones all seem to date from the same time period, signifying killings en masse, but it’s impossible to know much more since they’ve been moved.

“In order to determine causes of death, it would be necessary to examine the soil beneath the bodies,” Gaunt said; “for instance bullets that were in the bodies would drop down into the ground, even pieces broken off from swords or knives might be there.”

One reason the Mor Augin site has become a sequestered repository for human remains is that others have been tampered with, even destroyed, by Turkish officials. In 2007 Gaunt had his own run-in with authorities. He and other experts traveled to Turkey after several newspapers reported the discovery of a mass grave dating to 1915 near Nusaybin, about 12 miles from Mor Augin. From published photographs, the site, a hole in the ground about 6 feet deep, appeared extensive—possibly 200 bodies—and included many skulls and large bones that appeared stacked as those killed at one time might be.

Upon arrival, Gaunt found, “the many skulls and skeletons shown in the newspaper photos were entirely missing.” The site, he and others concluded, had been “more than just ‘tampered with.’”

Gaunt was told local police carried the bones away, and later learned from a British archaeologist the site had been burned or doused in a chemical. The Turkish Historical Society, which initially had invited Gaunt to investigate, subsequently dated the bones to Roman times. And the Kurdish newspaper in Turkey that first reported the finding was shut down. Gaunt’s conclusion: “We are not sure that the time is ripe for really investigating by international scientific project … mass graves in Turkey.”

For the survivors, present-day realities are steeped in what happened a century ago. “Tur Abdin had a million Christians 100 years ago,” said Yusuf Begtas, “and now they have been killed and scattered through all the world.”

Saliba Ozmen, the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Mardin, told me only 3,000 Christians remain in the area. “We are Christians and so we are always under attack, for the sake of Christ,” he said, “but I think it is important these days to realize that early Christianity spread from this part of the world. Our Christian legacy is not important only for ‘our side’ but for the West too.”

Restrictions on Christians, particularly those who want to highlight their genocidal past, continue. The Turkish government refuses to return property belonging to Armenian or Assyrian Christians confiscated a century ago. It blocks access to the archives of the Ottoman Empire. And it has written the genocide out of history textbooks, required texts for all schools in Turkey, including what few Armenian institutions remain—only 16 schools, all in Istanbul.

Elementary and middle-school textbooks for the 2014-15 school year (available by download on the internet) characterize Armenians as people “incited by foreigners, who aim to break apart the state and the country, and who murdered Turks and Muslims.” The genocide is described as “the Armenian matter” and as a lie meant to threaten Turkish security.

CHRISTIANS IN THIS PART OF TURKEY are acutely aware of the latest threat: ISIS, or Islamic State, controls villages just across the border in Syria from Nusaybin and about 40 miles from Mardin. In early March ISIS captured Assyrian villages along the Khabur River, killing 15 Christian residents, kidnapping about 200 (whose whereabouts remain unknown), and displacing 1,400 families. Those families currently live in churches or with other Assyrian families in the nearby cities of Qameshli and Hassaka.

From Nusaybin and other parts of Tur Abdin, the Khabur River valley is visible across a chain-link fence border. In March from there one could see smoke rising from the Assyrian villages where ISIS was burning homes and churches. The latest attacks are eerily reminiscent of the deportations and massacres of a century ago.

“We must stay at it, and we must finish Islamic State,” said Yusuf Begtas. “So everyone can be free to live a kind of common life as in past centuries.” Ottoman Turks killed Begtas’ grandfather and grandmother in Tur Abdin in 1915, the year his father was born. His great-aunts lived in a cave outside the town of Midyat and later were forced to become Muslims to survive.

Many contemporary Muslims are discovering they have Christian roots—popularized by the 2008 memoir My Grandmother by Fethiye Çetin. Çetin, a Muslim, learned upon her grandmother’s death she was an Armenian Christian kidnapped and adopted by a Turkish soldier.

Begtas’ father grew up in an Assyrian village that escaped massacres, though in the nearby village of Zas, 350 Assyrians were killed “all together,” he told me.

Begtas’ father became a priest, and while other relatives eventually left for Europe, his immediate family stayed. “My father told me not to leave my county. And so I am here. My brothers, sister, and my mother are here, to help our culture, our tradition, and our language. We have good knowledge of the Syriac language. It binds us here.”

Who speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

Warning: this article contains graphic detail.

According to documents exhibited at the Nuremberg Tribunal following World War II, Adolf Hitler wrote on August 22, 1939: “I have placed my death-head formations in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Thankfully, some today do speak of the killing of 1 million or more Armenians that began on April 24, 1915. Pope Francis on April 12 called it “the first genocide of the 20th century.” The parliament of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s biggest state, passed a resolution declaring April 24 “Armenian Genocide Recognition and Remembrance Day.” The German government, which for years had refused to use the word “genocide,” changed its position on April 20. Two dozen countries and 43 states have declared the mass murder to be “genocide.”

Candidate Barack Obama in 2008 pledged, “as president I will recognize the Armenian Genocide”; but Turkey’s government wishes to suppress the story, and President Obama once again this year refused to use the word “genocide.” On April 21 Ken Hachikian, chairman of the Armenian National Committee of America, said, “President Obama’s surrender to Turkey represents a national disgrace. It is, very simply, a betrayal of truth.”

To understand what happened in 1915, we should start with what happened 20 years earlier in eastern Turkey, where Christians had lived for almost two millennia. Here’s part of a missionary’s letter published in the June 1895 Woman’s Journal: “The less horrible outrages were some of the following: bayoneting the men … outraging [a euphemism for raping] women and then dispatching them with bayonets or swords; ripping up pregnant women; impaling infants and children on the bayonet, or dispatching them with the sword; houses fired and the inmates driven back into the flames.”

A British couple described numerous Armenians walking around “mutilated, hands and right arms cut off, and eyes gouged out,” with Turks taunting them: “Where is your Christ now? Where is your Jesus? Why does he not save you?” British consul Henry Barnham visited the town of Aintab and described its massacre: “The butchers and the tanners, with sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, armed with clubs and cleavers, cut down the Christians with cries of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ … when midday came they knelt down and said their prayers, and then jumped up and resumed the dreadful work.”

Imams incited mobs, and mosques became places of mobilization, especially on Fridays. Under Ottoman law churches were to be respected as places of refuge, but one survivor, Abraham Hartunian, wrote about what happened in the town of Severek: “The blows of an axe crashed in the church doors. The attackers rushed in, tore the Bibles and hymnbooks to pieces, broke and shattered whatever they could, blasphemed the cross. … The leader gave the order to massacre. The first attack was on our pastor. The blow of an axe decapitated him. His blood, spurting in all directions, spattered the walls and ceiling.”

British ethnographer William Ramsay, who spent more than a decade in Turkey and was fond of the Turks, noted that in some cases Ottoman officials were “especially merciful [and] offered their victims an escape from death by accepting Mohammedanism.” British Counsel G.H. Fitzmaurice told of how on December 28 and 29, 1895, some 10,000 Armenians died in Urfa, known in ancient times as Edessa. Survivors of an initial Turkish attack sought refuge in their cathedral, but Turkish troops broke down the iron door, shot or bayoneted everyone on the floor of the church, blocked up the staircases leading to the gallery, and set the church on fire.

Eyewitness accounts in The New York Times and other newspapers around the country prompted an outpouring of contributions to help Armenians. Officials allowed Clara Barton to come with an American Red Cross relief squad in spring 1896. The Republican Party platform in 1896 declared, “The massacres in Armenia have aroused the deep sympathy and just indignation of the American people, and we believe that the United States should exercise all the influence it can properly exert to bring these atrocities to an end.”

THE ATROCITIES DID END—then. But in 1915, during World War I, ostensibly concerned that Armenians would give aid and comfort to potential Russian invaders, Ottoman leaders decided to complete the job begun two decades before. Mustafa Hayri Bey, the Ottoman Empire’s leading Sunni authority, urged his followers to commence jihad. One pamphlet declared, “He who kills even one unbeliever … shall be rewarded by Allah.” The Ottoman Ministry of the Interior gave instructions to exterminate all males under 50, all priests, and all teachers—but leave girls to be Islamized.

The Ottoman government set up special killing squads and developed techniques later used by the Nazis, such as piling those to be killed into train cars—90 in a car with room for 36—and leaving them locked in for days, starving and terrified. U.S. Consul Jesse B. Jackson in 1916 described the results: Armenians for five days “did not receive a morsel of bread, neither a drop of water. They were scorched to death by thirst, hundreds upon hundreds fell dead along the way, their tongues turned to charcoal. … On the seventy-fifth day when they reached Halep [Aleppo] 150 women and children remained from the whole caravan of 18,000.”

The governor of Van province, Jevdet Bey, gained the nickname “the horseshoe master” because he nailed horseshoes to the feet of Armenians. I visited Lake Van a decade ago and saw its beautiful deep blue, but a century ago the shore turned red. Consul Jackson described what he saw: “The sides of the roads are strewn with the bones of decaying bodies.”

Since some of the Armenians, like Jews in Germany, were often richer than the majority populations, Jackson called the jihad a “giant plundering scheme as well as a final blow to extinguish the race.”

Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador to Turkey, later described what the rare survivors had told him: Those torturing a man would pull off his fingernails and toenails, then “tear off his flesh with red-hot pincers, and then pour boiled butter into the wounds. In some cases the gendarmes would nail hands and feet to pieces of wood—evidently in imitation of the Crucifixion, and then while the sufferer writhes in his agony, they would cry, ‘Now let your Christ come help you.’”

MORGENTHAU, moved by what he heard, tried repeatedly to get Ottoman officials to call off their assassins. Interior Minister Mehmed Talaat once asked him, “Why are you so interested in the Armenians anyway? You are a Jew; these people are Christians.” Morgenthau replied, “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.” Talaat later asked if American life insurance companies that had written policies for Armenians could be pushed to name as beneficiaries the Ottoman government, since they will “have left no heirs to collect the money.”

One survivor’s story became a hit book, Ravished Armenia, that was then turned into a silent film. Aurora Mardiganian had made it to Ellis Island in 1917 following the deaths of her mother, father, brother, and sisters. British authorities allowed showing of the film in their country only after producers deleted a scene of Armenian women being crucified—but the story behind that scene shows how today’s Islamic State is not setting the record for barbarism.

Mardiganian acknowledged that the scene, which showed the women crucified on large crosses with their long hair covering their nude bodies, was inauthentic. She said, “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.”

She said Americans had made a more civilized movie: “They can’t show such terrible things.”

For a further study ...

The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian (Harper, 2004)

They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else by Ronald Grigor Suny (Princeton, 2015)

Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian (Vintage, 2010)

Ravished Armenia by Aurora Mardiganian (Indo-European Publishing, 2014)

Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story by Henry Morgenthau (Cosimo Classics, 2007)

Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian (Laurel Leaf, 2002)

My Grandmother by Fethiye Çetin (Verso, 2008)

“100 Lives” (100lives.com), an online, ongoing documentary project collecting stories of “survivors and saviors” of the Armenian Genocide.