The Thirty-Year Genocide
Page 45
among local Muslims.107 At first, according to the Armenian Patriarchate, the
Constantinople Government was responsible for the obstruction, but eventu-
ally the Nationalists took the reins.108 They systematically prevented the return
of Armenians hailing from Van, Erzurum, and Bitlis vilayets. These refugees
either stayed put in the Caucasus or somehow reached Cilicia. By 1921 it was
reported that these three vilayets were effectively free of Armenians. According to the Patriarchate, any found there “are persecuted to annihilation.”109
In spring 1919, general po liti cal questions to do with the future of Turkey
also acted as a break on return, or at least on Western enthusiasm for an
Turks and Armenians, 1919–1924
Armenian return. American diplomats thought that a return needed to be
linked to the “fate of Armenia,” meaning to the provinces in part or whole
earmarked for Armenian sovereignty. If a future Armenia— independent, au-
tonomous, or under a Western mandate— would include some combination
of Adana and the six vilayets, then the Allies should direct the returnees from
Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Caucasus to these areas rather than to their na-
tive sites. And perhaps the returnees should wait in their places of exile until
the fate of these territories was determined.110 Bristol suggested delaying
repatriation until either all of Turkey was occupied by Allied troops or the
Peace Conference placed all of Turkey under a mandatory regime (he sup-
ported an American mandate).111
The Armenian Patriarchate and community leaders in Constantinople also
favored delaying repatriation. So did British diplomats, who soon suggested
that the repatriation officers limit themselves to recovering women and
children and property. “The repatriation in Anatolia at this juncture of Chris-
tian deportees and refugees might dangerously increase the pres ent tension
between Christians and Moslems, and might prove in the end a doubtful
blessing to the Christians themselves,” one wrote.112 The British army in Mes-
opotamia, for its part, recommended holding off on repatriation of exiled
Assyrians until po liti cal conditions became clearer.113 The Greek Government
chimed in that, due to the “steadily worse” situation in Asia Minor, they too
opposed repatriating refugees “before the military occupation of these regions
is affected.” The Greeks were thinking of Smyrna and its environs.114 Another
factor inhibiting return were the stories circulating about con temporary mas-
sacres, as of 600 Armenians allegedly murdered in Karabagh by Azeris.115 And
there were economic considerations. By March 1919 it was clear that the mass
of Armenian deportees could not be properly resettled in time for sowing that
year’s crops.116
For their part, Armenian nationalists calculated in summer 1919 that mass
repatriation should be hurried. The swifter and larger the repatriation, especially to the six vilayets, the easier it would be to sustain their claim to those territories, where Armenian numbers had been vastly reduced by the war time
deportations. For them, repatriation served a clear po liti cal purpose.
Deportees, both Armenian and Greek, steadily trickled back to their vil-
lages and towns over the spring and summer of 1919. In September, the British
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
high commissioner wrote that “the people have solved the question” of de-
laying a return until a “new Armenia” is created “in large part of themselves
by returning . . . to the places where they used to live.”117
For the Allies, the costs and difficulties of maintaining deportees in
place, and the bleak choices available, are illustrated by the case of the
Ba’quba camp, near Baghdad, in British- occupied Mesopotamia. Set up
in August 1918, by summer 1919 Ba’qubah held some 50,000 Christian
survivors—40,000 Assyrians, mainly from the Urmia area, and more than
10,000 Armenians, mainly from the Van area. The camp operated for three
years. It apparently cost the British taxpayer £6,500 pounds a day (close to
half a million current U.S. dollars). The British wanted to send the refugees
home, but conditions in Urmia, from which the Assyrians had fled in summer
1918, were dicey, and the Assyrians refused to move back without adequate
British protection and arms. (Persia objected to arming them.) And the Arme-
nians could not be repatriated to Van, because the route ran through hostile
Kurdish territory.
Armenians from Mesopotamia, Syria, and Kurdistan steadily drifted into
the camp, while some Assyrians left, heading north. By January 1920 the camp
held 16,000 Armenians and 23,500 Assyrians. A handful of Armenians left
for South Africa and the United States, but most had nowhere to go.118 Some
British officials thought that most could be permanently settled in Mesopo-
tamia itself.119 Curzon preferred Yerevan.120 No one spoke any more of Asia
Minor. In summer 1920 the Armenians were moved to Basra vilayet, and were
apparently later shipped to Yerevan. The Assyrians were sent to a new camp
at Mindan, in Mosul vilayet, in readiness for transfer to Urmia.121 The Assyrian
men, at last armed by the British, proceeded northward over snow- covered
mountain passes, battling Kurdish tribesmen along the way. But they failed
to reach Urmia.122 Eventually they resettled in Mosul vilayet, where their de-
scendants have continued to suffer persecution, most recently at the hands of
the Islamic State.
By the end of 1919 the rush of Christian return to Asia Minor had become
a trickle. The British even halted Armenian repatriation to Cilicia, now largely
under French control. Cilician Muslims, incited by Kemalist agents, were “in
a state of excitement.” Security was poor. Tens of thousands of returnees hun-
kered down in Adana. Overall, the tide had turned; more Christians, many
Turks and Armenians, 1919–1924
recent returnees, were leaving Anatolia than were returning. De Robeck listed
the methods the Turks were “employing to render [Christian] life unendur-
able”: “The Greek or Armenian is no longer systematically massacred; he is
prevented from making a livelihood. . . . His business is boycotted, his nut
crops made dangerous of access and farmed out to Moslems, who repudiate
their engagements, and his houses and property retained.”123
Perring, who was stationed on the Black Sea Coast, reported, “I found ev-
erywhere that Greek refugees who had returned to Turkey since the armi-
stice have either left the country again or are on the point of doing so, in many cases accompanied by Greeks who had remained in Turkey throughout the
war.” Armenians were leaving for Rus sia. In one village near Giresun, a party
of Greek returnees was “met by the Turkish occupiers of their homes, beaten,
and robbed . . . and forced to return to Kerasun.” The local Turkish authorities
did nothing. But when Turkish villa gers complained of Christian attack, gen-
darmes were promptly dispatched. “In many cases” they went on to pillage the
Christians.124 In Platina, outside Trabzon, “the only Armenians to return . . .
were assassinated shortly after their arrival.”125
edly under the instigation of Nationalist leaders, have appeared si mul ta neously in several areas . . . and the blood of Armenians flows once again,” a report
from a Paris- based Armenian information bureau explained.126 Still, many re-
turnees stayed put; they had nowhere else to go. Bristol had it right. He
wrote, “The Turks, undoubtedly, want to get rid of the Armenians and will
prob ably exterminate them if they cannot find another means . . . . A large per-
centage of the Turks are murderous fanatics.”127 The Armenian Patriarchate
reported that some Kemalists “officially” declared that they had deci ded “to
annihilate the Armenians . . . settling definitely the question of Cilicia.”128
Recovering Christian Women and Children
During their occupation, the British tried to recover, or help missionaries and
clerics recover, Christian women and children from Muslim homes and or-
phanages. Most of the abductees were Armenian. Rumbold thought he un-
derstood why Turks abducted girls and women during the Great War. Some
were moved by “humanity”— the desire to save helpless people from death
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
or destitution. But others were inspired by “the wish to acquire merit by
turning Christians into Moslems, or to reduce the relative proportion of Chris-
tians to Moslems in the Empire, a desire to obtain cheap domestic labour,
and more ignoble intentions which can easily be imagined.”129
In 1922 the League of Nations issued its own report on why and how so
many Armenian women and children ended up in Muslim homes during the
war. Of course, some were abducted. Others were “bought for a trifle.” Some
joined Muslim house holds “of their own free will, seeking protection.” There
were also children given up by their mothers, who could carry them no longer
or could not bear to see them die of hunger. And “some were picked up half
dead from the roads out of mere charity.” The treatment of these Armenians
varied. “Some women became the beloved wives of the Moslems and hon-
oured mistresses of the harem; some children were adopted and treated as well
as any child could be. But the great number of them were but slaves, given
entirely into the hands of their masters without any rights or protection at all,
ill- treated and misused.”130 For the same reasons, Turks continued to abduct
Greek and Armenian women and girls during 1919–1923, though in much
smaller numbers.131
Some girls had “changed owners (masters) 5 or 6 times.”132 Many girls were
sold by their captors. Kevorkian writes that in this “lucrative trade,” Arme-
nian girls sometimes ended up as far afield as “the slave markets in Arabia”
and “Tunisia or Algeria, where they were taken by pilgrims returning from
Mecca.”133
The recovery efforts had begun already in spring 1917, when the British
reported rescuing “about 80 Armenian girls” from “Mohammedan families”
after the conquest of Baghdad.134 (Two years later, a British officer reported
that there were about 1,000 Armenians in Baghdad, a number “daily in-
creasing as girls and children are rescued from [nearby] Arab house holds.”135)
The British occupation of Aleppo vilayet, Deir Zor, and Cilicia in late 1918
led to a massive expansion of the recovery campaign. Sometimes Muslims
handed over Christians voluntarily; others were rescued by force. Occasion-
ally, they were bought back, as happened with Eftimia Topalian, an eleven-
year- old Armenian girl who was recovered from Mamdouch (Mamduh) Bey
“for 46 pounds.” Most of her family had been murdered in Diyarbekir during
the war.136
Turks and Armenians, 1919–1924
Fairly often women and children refused to leave Muslim homes, even of
those who had murdered their families.137 Their recalcitrance had numerous
causes. For some women, “it [was] a choice of staying with the Turks or star-
vation.”138 Sometimes women had formed “a certain attachment for the man”
or felt “a certain amount of fear” at the prospect of leaving.139 Some were
branded or tattooed by their Muslim masters on the “forehead, both cheeks
and point of the chin”; they had nowhere or no one to return to.140 For many,
leaving a Muslim husband meant having “to leave behind children.”141 Western
officials found recovery of Christians from Muslim house holds easier in
Constantinople, where aid agencies and Christian churches were headquar-
tered and where there were still large Christian communities.142
After the armistice, the Constantinople government instructed provincial
officials to locate Christian women and orphans and hand them over to
Christian bodies.143 At the same time, Faisal, the Hashemite de facto ruler of
Damascus and British ally, issued a proclamation ordering Arabs harboring
Armenian women and children to return them to “their people.”144 Egyp-
tian Armenians or ga nized squads to recover women in Mesopotamia and
Syria from Bedouin. A squad headed by one Rupen Herian reportedly re-
trieved 533 women and children during June– August 1919.145 In the Con-
stantinople area, a team led by Arakel Chakrian recovered 750 orphans held
in Muslim orphanages and homes.146 NER’s John Dunaway and Stanley
Kerr, working out of Aleppo, in early 1919 recovered several hundred Arme-
nian women and children from the Bab area.147 Caris Mills, an American
social worker, ran a rescue house in Constantinople tending to hundreds of
children, some of whom were eventually shipped out and adopted in the
United States.148 Thousands were recovered in Cilicia.
Rumbold estimated that, during November 1918– December 1920, 30,000
Armenian orphans and 24,000 women were recovered, 10,000 of the children
and 2,000 of the women by the British.149 How many remained in Muslim
hands is unclear. In February 1920, Gates estimated that more than 60,000
Armenian “young girls and orphans” were in Muslim house holds; in mid-
1919, the Armenian Patriarchate had spoken of 70,000 orphans and 50,000
women in Muslim house holds, and of 87,000 Armenians in orphanages in
Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia.150 All these numbers seem to exclude Greeks.
In May 1923 the British Foreign Office maintained that “more than one
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
hundred thousand Christian women and children” had been reclaimed
from Muslim homes, but a year later, it stated that “not less than 80,000”
Christians, half of them Armenian “and prob ably more,” were still “forcibly
detained in Turkish houses,” many in “slavery.”151
In early 1921 the newly created League of Nations appointed a commis-
sion to investigate the prob lem.152 The following year, the League reported
that some freed Christian women later returned to Muslim homes, finding no
way to maintain themselves, and “ really became Moslems.” The report sug-
gested that “more than 50%” of the adult Christian women in Muslim
house holds were afraid to leave. But there were also hundreds of women who
“sigh for liberation.” Many twelve- to- twenty- yea
r- olds were afraid to flee,
dreading savage beatings; some were inculcated with a false picture of life
“outside.”153
In the course of 1919, the Turkish authorities increasingly obstructed
British, Armenian, and Greek efforts to recover abductees. In May the interior
minister announced that it was illegal to press women to leave a Muslim hus-
band to whom they wished to stay married. The women should remain with
their new families, the minister felt.154 By summer, the government was backing
local officials and the public in refusing to give up abductees.155
The longer abductees lived in Muslim house holds, the less they wanted to
leave. Most had nowhere to go; their families were dead, their homes destroyed
or confiscated, their communities shattered. As with the abductees of 1894–
1896, many, now “sullied,” feared that they would not be welcomed back by
their families or communities. By war’s end, many were with bastard Muslim
children. And many children recovered from Muslim house holds, it was
found, “want[ed] to go back.”156 An American officer reported that a group
of Armenian orphans aged ten to thirteen, who had been “forcibly removed
from their Turkish home[s],” had run away from their escort and “returned”
to their Turkish families.157
The recovery efforts generated extreme tensions. Already in 1919 Allied
officers were often persuaded that recovery “entailed so much difficulty that
the advantages attained were sometimes outweighed by the resentment
aroused and the consequent danger to which the relics of the Armenian com-
munity were exposed.”158
Turks and Armenians, 1919–1924
There was violent Muslim re sis tance. In many towns, local gangs protected
the “honor” of those who took Armenian women or children.159 Bristol re-
ported that “in some cases the Kurds and Arabs will murder the women rather
than give them up,” and Turkish gendarmes sent to fetch such women and
children “often commit assault upon them.”160 Occasionally, “aggrieved”
Muslim husbands harassed missionaries at rescue homes and tried to retrieve
their lost “property.” An American missionary in Harput, Henry Riggs, re-
ported that one husband came to the local rescue home repeatedly and shot