Morning Star
September 20, 2004

The first tragedy;
PICK:GEOFF SIMONS is shocked to discover the truth about a terrible
forgotten holocaust of the 20th century.

by GEOFF SIMONS

THE BURNING TIGRESS by Peter Balakian (William Balakian, GBP 18.99)

MANY of us are familiar with the words Adolf Hitler uttered to his
military advisers eight days before the nazis invaded Poland:

“Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
– a prelude to the nazi extermination of the Jews, Gypsies,
homosexuals and other victim groups.

Few of us, I reckon, know about the sheer scale of the vast crime
perpetrated by the Turks against the Armenian nation.

This was the first holocaust of the 20th century, predating by
decades the horrors of the World War II. Regarding the Armenian
extermination, the US was to emerge as a principal holocaust denier.

Balakian describes in graphic and harrowing detail the three stages
of persecution of the Armenian people, from the relatively
small-scale massacres under Abdul Hamid II to the ethnic cleansing
undertaken by the forces of the Turkish Committee of Union and
Progress under the cover of the first world war.

Extensive use is made of eyewitness accounts of US diplomats,
missionaries, massacre survivors and others and of the gruesome
testimony of the persecutors themselves, given during the short-lived
trials of the 1920s.

The great powers failed to respond effectively, just as they failed
to halt later genocides.

As Hitler knew, the fate of the Armenians was largely forgotten and
the dreadful lessons of the genocide were largely ignored.

It is to Balakian’s credit that he has helped to restore an early
20th-century tragedy to its rightful place in history.

I read this book with a mounting sense of shock. It is enough to
quote, almost at random, from the account of the massacres:

“Acommon practice was to . . . begin with bastinado . . . which
consists of beating the soles of the feet with a thin rod . . . until
the feet swell and burst . . . not infrequently, they have to be
amputated.

“In some cases, the gendarmes would nail hands and feet to pieces of
wood . . . they even delved into the records of the Spanish
inquisition and other historic institutions of torture and adopted
all the suggestions found there.”

The tortures were perpetrated as a prelude to or during the massive
phases of ethnic cleansing. ” The deportations quickly became either
scenes of mass killing for the men, death marches for the women,
children and elderly who were whipped, raped, tortured and shot in an
ongoing procession.”

In one account, a soldier wrestles a donkey away from a young woman
with a baby. “The Turk’s scimitar descended on her wrist and the hand
fell off.”

Rivers and brooks were filled with “swollen” and “worm-eaten
corpses.” There was no time to bury the thousands of bodies. “Most of
them had been partially eaten by dogs.”

At the village of Mollahkeuy, one of thousands similarly treated,
hundreds of dead bodies were scattered on the plain, nearly all of
them women and children.

Many of the women lay flat on their backs, showing signs of barbarous
mutilation by the bayonets of the gendarmes.

Ammunition was too valuable to use, so most of the killings were done
with “axes, cleavers, shovels and pitchforks.” The Turks “dashed
infants on the rocks” before the eyes of their mothers.

The carnage around Ankara was so vast that Talaat Pasha ordered more
than 40,000 bodies to be quickly buried in mass graves, “but the
stench of death and the mounds of bodies overwhelmed the landscape.”

As one witness travelled from Keghvenk to Mezre, he saw thousands of
corpses half buried.

On the beach of Lake Goeljuk, hundreds of bodies were piled on top of
each other, almost all women and children, all “naked” and showing
“signs of the brutal mutilation” that the Turks had inflicted.

In the valley, there were no fewer than 2,000 corpses.

The witness estimated “that, in the course of our ride around the
lake, we had seen the remains of not less than 1,000 Armenians.” The
“fiendish purpose of the Turks” was “to exterminate the Armenian
population.”

Another witness described the “game of swords” played by the Turkish
killing squads with Armenian girls.

Swords would be planted in the ground with the blades uppermost.
Then, men on horseback would each grab a girl and ride at a gallop,
throwing the girl to impale her on a sword.

If she was only wounded, she would be scooped up again and thrown
until she was finally impaled. The bodies were then thrown in the
Tigris river.

In 2000, an Armenian genocide resolution, acknowledging the full
horrors perpetrated by the Turks, was proposed by the US congress.

Turkey, in response, mounted a massive propagan – da campaign with
the support of Israel, declaring that, if the Bill were passed,
Ankara would close its airbase to US planes.

President Clinton then instructed House Speaker Dennis Hastert to
kill the Bill. “Once again, the attempt to commemorate the century’s
first genocide had been effectively censored by a foreign
government.”

In October 2000, shortly after Clinton had caved in to Turkish
pressure, France passed an A r m e n i a n genocide resolution into
law, declaring the fact of the vast extermination.

Turkey protested hysterically and withdrew its ambassador from Paris.

Six months later, Turkish diplomatic relations with France were
resumed and business was back to normal.