DESCRIBING THE INDESCRIBABLE: 1915: ALAN WHITEHORN

18:21, 9 March, 2015

YEREVAN, MARCH 9, ARMENPRESS. How does one ‘think about the
unthinkable?’ How does one ‘describe the indescribable?’ These are
among the analytical and moral challenges in trying to understand
genocide. As Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the concept of genocide,
noted: genocide occurred in history before the word ‘genocide’ was
created. The history of humans is marked by episodes of great cruelty
and mass killings where groups that were different were targeted for
persecution and slaughter.

The mass deportations and killings of the Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire peaked during WW I, but occurred before the term genocide
emerged in 1944. In fact, the Young Turk regime’s slaughter of the
Armenians would be a catalyst for Lemkin to develop such a legal
concept, in a preliminary way in the 1930s and in final phrasing in
the 1940s.

When trying to understand the events of 1915 onwards, it is useful
to ask: What words and phrases were used by the Armenian survivors,
domestic and foreign witnesses, and newspaper writers to describe
what happened? The challenge was how to describe the indescribable,
or what Churchill would later in 1941 call “the crime without a name”.

The influential international newspaper The New York Times reported
extensively on the massacres of the Armenians under the Young Turk
dictatorship. A content analysis overview of The New York Times for
the year 1915 (the peak year of the deportations and killings) reveals
that a variety of words and phrases were used to try to describe the
horrific scenes and deeds. Reviewing the range of the words employed
can assist in conveying the magnitude of the man-made catastrophe
that befell the Armenians.

Among the terms and phrases offered in the articles in The New York
Times in 1915 were the following: “pillage”, “great exodus”, “great
deportation”, “completely depopulated”, “wholesale deportations”,
“systematically uprooted”, “wholesale uprooting of the native
population”, “young women and girls appropriated by the Turks, thrown
into harems, attacked or else sold to the highest bidder”, “children
are being kidnapped by the wholesale”, “kidnapping of attractive
young girls”, “rape”, “unparalleled savagery”, “acts of horror”,
“murder, rape, and other savageries”, “endure terrible tortures”,
“revolting tortures”, “their breasts cut off, their nails pulled
out, their feet cut off, or they hammer nails into them just as
they do to horses”, “burned to death”, “helpless women and children
were roasted to death”, “massacres”, “slaughter”, “atrocities”,
“unbelievable atrocities”, “systematically murdered men and turned
women and children out into the desert, where thousands perished
of starvation”, “million Armenians killed or in exile”, “1,500,000
Armenians starve”, “dying in prison camps”, “wholesale massacres”,
“slaughtered wholesale”, “fiendish massacres”, “massacre was planned”,
“most thoroughly organized and effective massacres this country has
ever known”, “extirpating the million and a half Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire”, “policy of extermination”, “plan for extirpating
Christianity by killing off Christians of the Armenian race”, “plan to
exterminate the whole Armenian people”, “deliberately exterminated”,
“virtually the whole nation had been wiped out”, “annihilation
of a whole people”, “organized system of pillage, deportations,
wholesale executions, and massacres”, “pillage, rape, murder, wholesale
expulsion and deportation, and massacre”, “systematic, authorized and
desperate effort on the part of the rulers of Turkey to wipe out the
Armenians”, “deliberate murder of a nation”, “war of extermination”,
“race extermination”, “intention was to exterminate the Armenian race”,
“Armenia without Armenians”, “extinction menaces Armenia”, “death of
Armenia”, “deportation order and the resulting war of extinction”,
and “aim at the complete elimination of all non-Moslem races from
Asiatic Turkey”, and “crimes against civilization and morality”.

There are at least ten examples (five in the decades before 1915
and five in the years after) where the biblical word “holocaust”
in the generic sense is used to describe either the mass burning of
Armenians alive, massacres of Christians or attempt at annihilation of
the Armenian people. The New York Times’ references in the 1915-1922
era to the Armenians’ fate include the phrasing “holocaust”, “war’s
holocaust of horror”, “great holocaust” and “final holocaust”.

Clearly authors strained for the words that could explain the magnitude
of such horrific scenes and deeds. Witnesses were often overwhelmed,
particularly at the time of the deadly deeds, but also in the retelling
of the painful accounts. For many who witnessed such atrocities,
it was a life-altering experience.

Within a month of the Ottoman Empire’s April 24, 1915 arrest,
deportation and later killing of key Armenian leaders in Constantinople
and increasing reports of mass deportations and massacres, the allied
Entente countries of Britain, France and Russia used the ominous phrase
“crimes against civilization and humanity”.

This description officially issued on May 24, 1915 (printed in The
New York Times on the same day) was part of a semi-judicial warning
to the Young Turk regime about its crimes and would become a key term
in international law. It was an important step in the development of
the legal concept of genocide.

However, no single word or combination of words or phrases could
adequately convey the magnitude of suffering and horror of what
transpired. Even today, we search for ways to “describe the
indescribable”.

Alan Whitehorn

An excerpt from Alan Whitehorn, ed., The Armenian Genocide: The
Essential Reference Guide (Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO, 2015) to be
published in April.

book: 978-1-61069-687-6

e-book: 978-1-61069-688-3

From: Baghdasarian