EYEWITNESS TO GENOCIDE; MEMOIR A RIVETING INDICTMENT OF THE SLAUGHTER OF ARMENIANS

Ottawa Citizen
August 30, 2009 Sunday
Canada

SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. B4

Armenian Golgotha

By Grigoris Balakian (translated by Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag)
Knopf, $42

"Finally, the horrible year of 1915 passed, leaving in its wake
mourning and wailing, blood and tears."

These words, full of pathos and grief, summarize the collected memory
of Grigoris Balakian concerning the Armenian genocide during the
second year of the First World War.

The epicentre of that monstrous affair was Der Zor, a city on the banks
of the Euphrates River surrounded by the vast desert that runs across
southeast Turkey, Mesopotamia and Syria. There, the author states,
lies the true "Armenian Golgotha." His figures are staggering. Of the
1.5 million Armenians deported to Der Zor from the interior provinces
of the Ottoman Empire in the summer and fall of 1915, about 800,000
were massacred, mainly by Turkish mobile killing squads (chetes),
and another 400,000 died en route from disease and starvation. Of
the Armenians who reached Der Zor, by August 1916 some 250,000 had
fallen victim to starvation and roughly 150,000 had been murdered by
roaming chetes; by August 1918, between 400 and 500 of the original
deportees were left.

Balakian’s narrative is the story of horrible suffering and tragic
murder.

The outbreak of war in September 1914 had caught Balakian in Berlin
studying theology. He at once decided to return to Constantinople,
and was among a group of about 250 Armenian assemblymen, bankers,
doctors, editors, merchants and teachers arrested by the Ittihad
(Committee for Union and Progress) government of Enver Ismail Pasha,
Jemal Pasha and Mehmet Talaat Pasha on April 24, 1915. What then was
dubbed the "night of Gethsemane" is today the date of the worldwide
commemoration of the Armenian genocide.

For the next three years, Balakian was taken on a march of death
into the interior of Turkey: Ekishedir, Chankiri, Kayseri, Hajin and,
finally, Ayran on the Euphrates River. As most of his colleagues fell
by the wayside due to starvation and murder, and as dozens of other
caravans of Armenian deportees joined his, Balakian became obsessed
with surviving in order to write the "horrific story" of the genocide.

Somewhere on that march he decided on the title, Armenian Golgotha. In
September 1918, back in Constantinople with the help of Austrian,
German and Swiss engineers working on the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway,
Balakian began to write. A volume of his narrative appeared in Vienna
in 1922. After a brief stint as prelate of Manchester, Balakian became
bishop of Marseilles, where he died on Oct. 8, 1934. A limited edition
of his memoir was published in Paris in 1959.

The book, newly published in English, is a powerful personal
narrative. The descriptions of the Armenian genocide are striking
and the author spares his readers none of the gruesome details. The
weapons of choice were those of the farmer, butcher and tanner
— axes, sickles, meat cleavers, pitchforks and knives — and the
tortures inflicted were horrendous: beheading, disembowelling, genital
mutilation and eye-gouging. Sexual violence was an integral part of
the genocide. Balakin repeatedly provides details of abductions and
gang rapes of women. The book is not for the faint of heart.

But those seeking a scholarly history of the Armenian genocide will
be disappointed. Balakian revels in stereotypes. The Armenians "for
thousands of years" were master craftsmen, architects, merchants,
physicians and scholars. The Turks "in their 600-year history" were
deceitful, duplicitous, and perfidious, a people who "left no trace of
memory of civilization except massacre, plunder, forced Islamization,
and abduction."

He also writes that the Germans were more than idle bystanders of the
genocide, they were its willing helpers in order to realize their
grandiose dream of using the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway to assault
India, the "crown jewel of the British Empire."

Even Balakian’s great hope for restoring the Armenian nation —
the Entente — proved to be a bitter disappointment. When a united
Entente fleet finally anchored off Constantinople in November 1918,
its commanders showed no interest in the Armenian genocide or in
Armenian nationhood, and instead allowed themselves to be debauched
by Turkish bribes and women. "God," in Balakian’s bitter assessment,
"remained silent."

The book would have lost none of its impact with careful editing,
removing countless repetitious accounts and phraseology and correcting
the many historical inaccuracies for the non-professional reader.

Its greatest shortcoming, of course, is the lack of source
materials. Throughout, and especially in Chapter 11 of Vol. 1, Balakian
refers to the "Plan for the Extinction of the Armenians in Turkey,"
yet he offers no solid evidence for the existence of such a formal
national "plan." Addressing this critical matter in the introduction
would have allowed the book to stand for what it is: a riveting and
powerful indictment of a genocide that became a paradigm for future
genocides, but that remains to be researched in Turkish archives by
Turkish scholars.

Holger H. Herwig is a professor of history at the University of
Calgary.