Independent on Sunday (London)
October 16, 2005, Sunday

‘THE TURKS BROUGHT WHOLE FAMILIES UP HERE TO KILL THEM’
ROBERT FISK DESCRIBES HIS RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE ARMENIAN MASSACRE;
THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION BY ROBERT FISK FOURTH ESTATE £25

by ROBERT FISK

Robert Fisk recovers after being beaten by a mob on a road near
Quetta, Pakistan, 2001 HUSSEIN MALLA/AP

Exposed to the air, the bones became soft and claylike and flaked
away in our hands, the last mortal remains of an entire race of
people disappearing as swiftly as their Turkish oppressors would have
wished us to forget them. As many as 50,000 Armenians were murdered
in this little killing field, and it took a minute or two before
Ellsen and I fully comprehended that we were standing in a mass
grave. For Margada and the Syrian desert around it ” like thousands
of villages in what was Turkish Armenia ” are the Auschwitz of the
Armenian people, the place of the world’s first, forgotten,
Holocaust.

The parallel with Auschwitz is no idle one. Turkey’s reign of terror
against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian
race. The Armenian death toll was almost a million and a half. While
the Turks spoke publicly of the need to ‘resettle’ their Armenian
population “as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe”
the true intentions of the Turkish government were quite specific.
On 15 September 1915, for example ” and a carbon of this document
exists ” the Turkish interior minister, Talaat Pasha, cabled an
instruction to his prefect in Aleppo. ‘You have already been informed
that the Government… has decided to destroy completely all the
indicated persons living in Turkey… Their existence must be
terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard
must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience.’

Was this not exactly what Himmler told his SS murderers in 1941? Here
on the hill of Margada, we were now standing among what was left of
the ‘indicated persons’. And Boghos Dakessian, who along with his
five-year- old nephew Hagop had driven up to the Habur with us from
the Syrian town of Deir es-Zour, knew all about those ‘tragic
measures’. ‘The Turks brought whole families up here to kill them. It
went on for days. They would tie them together in lines, men,
children, women, most of them starving and sick, many naked. Then
they would push them off the hill into the river and shoot one of
them. The dead body would then carry the others down and drown them.
It was cheap that way. It cost only one bullet.’