CHAPTER 3: BLOOD FLOWS

1. For a complete recounting of the start of World War I with emphasis on Ottoman Empire participation, see David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001).

2. Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1918, trans. Peter Balakian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), p. 42.

3. The story of Major Hovannes Karnik Papazian, an Armenian artillery officer stationed in Gallipoli, is worth noting. Throughout the war, Armenians who were seen as irreplaceable were not deported; instead they were retained to perform essential services. Though he was Armenian, Papazian had risen up through the ranks during the short period after the reinstatement of the constitution when Armenians were allowed to serve. In fact, he had gone to military academy at the same time as Mustapha Kemal Ataturk. Papazian’s efforts on the battlements were significant enough to earn him a medal for valor, the Harp Medalyasi. By 1915, realizing that his life was in danger, Papazian escaped to Aleppo and in time settled in the United States. Author’s interview with Papazian’s grandson Onick Papazian. See also http://www.tanerakcam.com/debates/sarkis-torossian-debate for information on another Armenian Ottoman officer, Sarkis Torossian.

4. For a more complete investigation of property seizure, see Ugur Umit Ungor and Mehmet Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011).

5. Mae M. Derdarian, Vergeen: A Survivor of the Armenian Genocide; Based on a Memoir by Virginia Meghrouni (Los Angeles: ATMUS Press Publications, 1996), p. 38.

6. “Frequently, heaps of used Armenian clothing and sometimes children’s shoes were auctioned. Auctions were conducted by town criers who received half of a 5 percent tax on auctioned goods (the other 2½ percent was transferred to the government). Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 97, 98.

7. To give an air of legitimacy to the massacres and theft of Armenian property, two laws were enacted by the Ittihad government. The Temporary Law of Deportation and the Temporary Law of Confiscation and Appropriation were announced in the early summer months as villages were emptied and property collected. The first law did not specify that the Armenians in particular were to be moved, but it laid the foundation for the later argument that the Armenians were being moved because of the ongoing war activity in their provinces. The second “law” was for the purposes of providing an alibi. Denialists of the genocide note that laws concerning “abandoned property” included clauses providing for the “safekeeping” of deportees’ possessions as well as procedures for the eventual return of goods and land. These laws were only window dressing only. First of all, the property was not “abandoned.” Second, even if people managed to survive, nothing was returned to them. For additional information, see Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

8. See Raffi Khatchadourian, “A Century of Silence,” The New Yorker (January 5, 2015), pp. 32–53.

9. Giacomo Gorrini, Il Messaggero (Rome), August 1915, quoted in James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce, ed. Ara Sarafian (Reading, UK: Taderon Press, 2000), pp. 317, 318; hereafter cited as Viscount Bryce, “Blue Book.”

10. The United States did not enter the war until April 1917 and at that time made a declaration of war only against Germany. The United States was never at war with the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), and so its representatives retained a certain freedom of movement within the empire.

11. Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosphorus (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1918), pp. 215, 216.

12. See Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes (New York: Riverhead, 2011).

13. See Joseph L. Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East: Missionary Influence on American Policy, 1810–1927 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 19.

14. Ibid., p. 7.

15. Ibid., pp. 11, 12.

16. H. G. O. Dwight, Christianity in Turkey: A Narrative of the Protestant Reformation in the Armenian Church (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1854), pp. 8, 10.

17. Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and Other Middle-Eastern Studies (1970; reprint, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984), pp. 287–88.

18. James L., Barton, comp., Turkish Atrocities: Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915–1917 (Ann Arbor: Gomidas Institute, 1998), pp. 12, 15.

19. From Maria Jacobsen, Diaries of a Danish Missionary: Harpoot, 1907–1919, ed. Ara Sarafian, trans. Kristen Vind (Princeton: Gomidas Institute Books, 2001), p. 65 (May 30), p. 83 (July 29), p. 86 (August 7), pp. 86, 87 (August 14), p. 93 (October 2).

20. The quotations that follow are from Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917, ed. Susan K. Blair (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1989), pp. 8, 81.

21. United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, comp. Ara Sarafian (Princeton: Gomidas Institute, 2004).

22. Military Mission B, no. 1950 Secret, Constantinople, November 17, 1916, in The Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915–1916, ed. Wolfgang Gust (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), p. 686.

23. Heinrich Vierbücher, Armenia 1915: What the German Imperial Government Concealed from Its Subjects; The Slaughter of a Civilized People at the Hands of the Turks, ed. Ara Ghazarians (Arlington, MA: Armenian Cultural Foundation, 2006), p. 52.

24. Gust, The Armenian Genocide, p. 329.

25. From the Gust Guide (document 1915-07-21-DE-012), an extract from his publication on the Armenian Genocide. See http://www.sci.am/downloads/musgen/WolfgangGust.pdf, p. 59.

26. Gust, The Armenian Genocide, document 1916-02-09-DE-001, pp. 542–55.

27. Khatchig Mouradian, “The Ottoman Archives Are Open… Almost: An Interview with Hilmar Kaiser,” Aztag Daily (Lebanon), September 22, 2005.

28. Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 205.

29. Ibid., including p. 209, n. 8.

30. These accounts are all from Verjiné Svazlyan, The Armenian Genocide: Testimonies of the Eyewitness Survivors, trans. Tigran Tsulikian and Anahit Poghikian-Darbinian (Yerevan: “Gitoutoyun” Publishing House of NAS RA, 2011), pp. 384, 443, 270–71, 289.

31. The Kurds have officially recognized the Armenian Genocide as well as their part in it. They have issued numerous apologies. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdish_recognition_of_the_Armenian_genocide for a complete listing with quotes.

32. Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 169.

33. Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosphorus, p. 108.

34. The perpetrators understood at the time that the war would end someday and that this mass killing would be viewed as a “crime against humanity.” On May 24, 1915, the Triple Entente nations had warned the Ottoman Empire that “in view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as their agents who are implicated in such massacres.” See Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1918 (1968; repr., Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1989), p. 210. A full English translation of the original text can be found in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915, supplement, p. 981.