ROBERT FISK: LIVING PROOF OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Independent
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
UK
The US wants to deny that Turkey’s slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians
in 1915 was genocide. But the evidence is there, in a hilltop orphanage
near Beirut
It’s only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it
out, blessed by a flourish of wild yellow lilies. Inside are the
powdered bones and skulls and bits of femur of up to 300 children,
Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and
starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a
converted Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is
the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children – between
three and 15 years old – who lived in the crowded dormitory of this
ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did
indeed commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915.
Barack Obama and his pliant Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton –
who are now campaigning so pitifully to prevent the US Congress
acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million
Armenians was a genocide – should come here to this Lebanese hilltop
village and hang their heads in shame. For this is a tragic, appalling
tale of brutality against small and defenceless children whose families
had already been murdered by Turkish forces at the height of the First
World War, some of whom were to recall how they were forced to grind
up and eat the skeletons of their dead fellow child orphans in order
to survive starvation.
Jemal Pasha, one of the architects of the 1915 genocide, and – alas
– Turkey’s first feminist, Halide Edip Adivar, helped to run this
orphanage of terror in which Armenian children were systematically
deprived of their Armenian identity and given new Turkish names,
forced to become Muslims and beaten savagely if they were heard to
speak Armenian. The Antoura Lazarist college priests have recorded
how its original Lazarist teachers were expelled by the Turks and
how Jemal Pasha presented himself at the front door with his German
bodyguard after a muezzin began calling for Muslim prayers once the
statue of the Virgin Mary had been taken from the belfry.
Hitherto, the argument that Armenians suffered a genocide has rested
on the deliberate nature of the slaughter. But Article II of the
1951 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide specifically states that the definition of genocide –
"to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group" – includes "forcibly transferring children of the
group to another group". This is exactly what the Turks did in Lebanon.
Photographs still exist of hundreds of near-naked Armenian children
performing physical exercises in the college grounds. One even shows
Jemal Pasha standing on the steps in 1916, next to the young and
beautiful Halide Adivar who – after some reluctance – agreed to run
the orphanage.
Before he died in 1989, Karnig Panian – who was six years old when
he arrived at Antoura in 1916 – recorded in Armenian how his own name
was changed and how he was given a number, 551, as his identity. "At
every sunset in the presence of over 1,000 orphans, when the Turkish
flag was lowered, ‘Long Live General Pasha!’ was recited. That was
the first part of the ceremony. Then it was time for punishment for
the wrongdoers of the day. They beat us with the falakha [a rod used
to beat the soles of the feet], and the top-rank punishment was for
speaking Armenian."
Panian described how, after cruel treatment or through physical
weakness, many children died. They were buried behind the old college
chapel. "At night, the jackals and wild dogs would dig them up and
throw their bones here and there … at night, kids would run out to
the nearby forest to get apples or any fruits they could find – and
their feet would hit bones. They would take these bones back to their
rooms and secretly grind them to make soup, or mix them with grain
so they could eat them as there was not enough food at the orphanage.
They were eating the bones of their dead friends."
Using college records, Emile Joppin, the head priest at the Lazarite
Antoura college, wrote in the school’s magazine in 1947 that "the
Armenian orphans were Islamicised, circumcised and given new Arab
or Turkish names. Their new names always kept the initials of the
names in which they were baptised. Thus Haroutioun Nadjarian was
given the name Hamed Nazih, Boghos Merdanian became Bekir Mohamed,
to Sarkis Safarian was given the name Safouad Sulieman."
Lebanese-born Armenian-American electrical engineer Missak Kelechian
researches Armenian history as a hobby and hunted down a privately
printed and very rare 1918 report by an American Red Cross officer,
Major Stephen Trowbridge, who arrived at the Antoura college after
its liberation by British and French troops and who spoke to the
surviving orphans. His much earlier account entirely supports that
of Father Joppin’s 1949 research.
"Every vestige, and as far as possible every memory, of the children’s
Armenian or Kurdish origin was to be done away with. Turkish names
were assigned and the children were compelled to undergo the rites
prescribed by Islamic law and tradition … Not a word of Armenian
or Kurdish was allowed. The teachers and overseers were carefully
trained to impress Turkish ideas and customs upon the lives of the
children and to catechize [sic] them regularly on … the prestige
of the Turkish race."
Halide Adivar, later to be lauded by The New York Times as "the Turkish
Joan of Arc" – a description that Armenians obviously questioned –
was born in Constantinople in 1884 and attended an American college
in the Ottoman capital. She was twice married and wrote nine novels
– even Trowbridge was to admit that she was "a lady of remarkable
literary ability" – and served as a woman officer in Mustafa Ataturk’s
Turkish army of liberation after the First World War. She later lived
in both Britain and France.
And it was Kelechian yet again who found Adivar’s long-forgotten
and self-serving memoirs, published in New York in 1926, in which
she recalls how Jemal Pasha, commander of the Turkish 4th Army in
Damascus, toured Antoura orphanage with her. "I said: ‘You have
been as good to Armenians as it is possible to be in these hard
days. Why do you allow Armenian children to be called by Moslim [sic]
names? It looks like turning the Armenians into Moslims, and history
some day will revenge it on the coming generation of Turks.’ ‘You
are an idealist,’ he answered gravely and like all idealists lack
a sense of reality … This is a Moslem orphanage and only Moslem
orphans are allowed.’" According to Adivar, Jemal Pasha said that he
"cannot bear to see them die in the streets" and promised they would go
"back to their people" after the war.
Adivar says she told the general that: "I will never have anything
to do with such an orphanage" but claims that Jemal Pasha replied:
"You will if you see them in misery and suffering, you will go to them
and not think for a moment about their names and religion." Which is
exactly what she did.
Later in the war, however, Adivar spoke to Talaat Pasha, the architect
of the 20th century’s first holocaust, and recalled how he almost lost
his temper when discussing the Armenian "deportations" (as she put
it), saying: "Look here, Halide … I have a heart as good as yours,
and it keeps me awake at night to think of the human suffering. But
that is a personal thing, and I am here on this earth to think of my
people and not of my sensibilities … There was an equal number of
Turks and Moslems massacred during the [1912] Balkan war, yet the
world kept a criminal silence. I have the conviction that as long
as a nation does the best for its own interests, and succeeds, the
world admires it and thinks it moral. I am ready to die for what I
have done, and I know that I shall die for it."
The suffering of which Talaat Pasha spoke so chillingly was all too
evident to Trowbridge when he himself met the orphans of Antoura. Many
had seen their parents murdered and their sisters raped. Levon, who
came from Malgara, was driven from his home with his sisters aged
12 and 14. The girls were taken by Kurds – allied to the Turks – as
"concubines" and the boy was tortured and starved, Trowbridge records.
He was eventually forced by his captors into the Antoura orphanage.
Ten-year-old Takhouhi – her name means "queen" in Armenian and she was
from a rich background – from Rodosto on the Sea of Marmara was put
with her family on a freight train to Konia. Two of her two brothers
died in the truck, both parents caught typhus – they died in the arms
of Takhouhi and her oldest brother in Aleppo – and she was eventually
taken from him by a Turkish officer, given the Muslim name of Muzeyyan
and ended up in Antoura. When Trowbridge suggested that he would try
to find someone in Rodosto and return her family’s property to her,
he said she replied: "I don’t want any of those things if I cannot
find my brother again." Her brother was later reported to have died
in Damascus.
Trowbridge records many other tragedies from the children he found
at Antoura, commenting acidly that Halide "and Djemal [sic] Pasha
delighted in having their photographs taken on the steps of the
orphanage … posing as the leaders of Ottoman modernism. Did they
realise what the outside world would think of those photographs?"
According to Trowbridge’s account, only 669 of the children finally
survived, 456 of them Armenian, 184 of them Kurds, along with 29
Syrians. Talaat Pasha did indeed die for his sins. He was assassinated
by an Armenian in Berlin in 1922 – his body was later returned to
Turkey on the express orders of Adolf Hitler. Jemal Pasha was murdered
in the Turkish town of Tiflis. Halide Edip Adivar lived in England
until 1939 when she returned to Turkey, became a professor of English
literature, was elected to the Turkish parliament and died in 1964
at the age of 80.
It was only in 1993 that the bones of the children were discovered,
when the Lazarite Fathers dug the foundations for new classrooms. What
was left of the remains were moved respectfully to the little cemetery
where the college’s priests lie buried and put in a single, deep
grave. Kelechian helped me over a 5ft wall to look at this place of
sadness, shaded by tall trees. Neither name-plate nor headstone marks
their mass grave.