The Hidden Holocaust - 1992 - The Armenian genocide - 1/3

... passionately deny there ever was an Armenian Genocide Above the modern town of Kozan, stands the ancient citadel of Sis capital of the last independent Armenian state, which was overrun by Muslims in 1375. But, though their fortresses fell, the Armenians lived on All over the Ottoman Empire, in cities like this, there continued to be Armenian communities with their own churches and schools, right up to the First World War In 1915, they numbered over two millions, many of them concentrated in their traditional heartlands in northeast Turkey. Today, there are scarcely 40,000 left. [Slow pipe music] Turkey's Armenians have simply vanished. In the cities of the Empire, the Armenians were an elite. They were lawyers, doctors, merchants, metalworkers, professional people and skilled craftsmen. On the land, where they lived for over a thousand years before the Turkish conquerors arrived, they were hardworking peasants - all were fervent Christians. Their religion and their relative prosperity made them outsiders, and exposed them to envy. So in 1915, they were struck down. They were marched off, never to be seen again - their homes and goods were confiscated. A population which had lived in the same place for centuries, suddenly became nonpersons. Their abandoned churches were knocked down or used for stabling animals or converted into mosques. Since then, ancient churches and monasteries have continued to suffer. The Turks have at best neglected, at worst dynamited them. In modern Turkish guidebooks, you will search in vain for the word "Armenian". This desolation was once the Armenian city of Van. In the twilight of the Ottoman empire, many of the subject peoples, including the Armenians, became restive. They started agitating for reform, or freedom, or both. The Turks reacted in the usual way, with force. In 1895, many thousands of Armenians were massacred. But, the empire was beginning to fall apart. A succession of wars stripped it of nearly all its territory in Europe. Only Constantinople and the surrounding area remained. [Military music] As their Empire threatened to disintegrate, the Turks turned to their only hope of salvation, the army. A group of officers calling themselves the Young Turks formed a secret political party to reform the Empire. Ironically enough, the Young Turks had first allied themselves with Armenian and other national minorities to plan a liberal, Western-style, multinational state. But the First World War changed all that. The Turks found themselves on the side of Imperial Germany. It was the Kaiser who armed and trained their troops, and in due course they became Germany's allies in a catastrophic war. As in Germany, nationalism and militarism stifled the first democratic stirrings. Many Armenians fought loyally in the Ottoman army, others looked towards their fellow countrymen from Russian-occupied Armenia, who were fighting on the other side. Turkish suspicions were aroused. The Young Turks reacted by executing the Armenian soldiers and ordering the removal of the Armenian civilian population from the War zone. The architects of this policy were the Minister of War, Enver Bey, and Talat Pasha, the Minister of the Interior. On 24th April 1915, it became clear that their real intentions were much more sinister. 600 leading Armenian citizens were arrested in Constantinople, the modern Istambul. Some of them, people who had actually helped the Young Turks to power. They were summarily executed. The Armenian intelligentsia, the men who might have organised resistance, had been disposed of. Talat had sent a coded telegram to Young Turk party cells - a telegram whose authenticity is accepted by everyone except the Turks. "The government has decided to destroy completely all Armenians living in Turkey - an end must be put to their existence. However criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age, sex, nor to conscientious scruples - Minister of the Interior, Talat" The deportations, according to what the German missionaries from that area told us, were ordered by the Turkish government. They said that it had been revealed to them by German government officials, the these deportations were necessary to remove all minority groups from Turkey. And I'd see women, and children, and men lying beside the road, dying of thirst or hunger, and I could do nothing for them. The Commissar of Police wouldn't permit any help to be given to them. Another key witness was Henry Morgenthal, then ambassador in Constantinople of the still neutral United States. "As my grandfather related the events of 1915 to me, many years later, at the time when he was Woodrow Wilson's ambassador to Turkey, his dealings were primarily with Talat Pasha, who was the Minister of Interior. And there was no question in my grandfather's mind, that the extermination of the Armenian people was a calculated policy of the Turks." "All through the spring and summer of 1915, the deportations took place - in some villages, placards were placed, ordering the whole Armenian population to present itself in a public place, at an appointed time. In other places, no warning was given. The gendarmes would appear before an Armenian house, and order all of the inmates to follow them. They would take women, engaged in domestic tasks, without giving them a chance to change their clothes. The police fell on them, like the eruption of Vesuvius of Pompeii. [Zither music] Women were taken from their washtubs, children were snatched out of bed. Bread was left half-baked in the oven. The family meal was abandoned partly eaten. Children were taken from their schoolrooms, leaving their books open and the men were forced to abandon their cattle and their ploughs on the mountainside. Even women who had just given birth were forced to leave their beds and join the panic-sticken throng. Such things as they could *** - a shawl or a few scraps of food, was all that they could take. It is absurd of the Turkish government to assert that it ever seriously intended to 'deport Armenians to new homes'. The treatment which was given the convoys shows that extermination was the real purpose of Enver and Talat." They said you had to leave the house and go poor grandfather was 70 years old grandmother 60 years old and they wanted to take us too, but how could we walk? We were very little children but they got a car, a mud-cart with a mule, they put us all in, and some other furnitures, only beds, and some food to eat, and they took us out of our house everything was gone, and we were gone too. So, we never saw my uncles and my father, because they were dead killed in the army. Photographing the deportations was an offence punishable by death, but some brave people took the risk, including a German traveller who, from his hotel room window, recorded the forcible removal of the Armenian population from one small town. Most of the very few photographs which have survived, were taken by German missionaries, or German officers like the later peace campaigner, Armin Wegner. "As an officer of Turkish Army for the wounded soldiers, I had no difficulty to enter the camps, and I make many photographs. Here is a photograph where you see Armenian priests to make the grave for the dead, and I remember that that one of these priests said to me 'Once I was a priest and now I am a lamb who is gone to be killed'" [Flute music] Poor grandfather and grandmother, it's good they had money to buy us the water, and some food wherever we stopped. And I was crying, crying saying "I want my father, my father" My mother used to slap me and say, "Be quiet now". And at last we went to a Syrian desert. A black tent they gave us, we put a black tent and we were under the black tent, my grandfather went, bought some vegetables, some bread and some watermelon, it was summer, we sat down and we ate and my grandmother said, 'Thank the Lord, Thank the Lord' and my grandmother was shouting and saying, "How could we thank the Lord, how could we thank him? We are all in the desert" [Flute music] And we crossed the Euphrates, they drove us across the Euphrates, the Turks, the soldiers. And then we camped there for a day or two, and they took my brother, big brother, away, he must have been older, much older, and we never saw him again. So we picked up whatever we had, and the poor little donkey, packed the stuff on that, and moved." By the later summer of 1915, these straggling columns numbered hundreds of thousands of people, and stretched from central Turkey all the way to the Syrian desert. Dragging themselves painfully along, week after week, they were reduced to shuffling bundles of rags. "We got near to [Erzagan] and there my grandmother couldn't come any more, she was just too worn out, and starved, hungry, so we left her right there and went on - because we were driven."