by Benny Morris
for those suffering from “typhus, small- pox, dysentery, pneumonia and
influenza”— before the survivors were launched back onto the roads. Phelps
described one such shelter, an Armenian church. It was “black as any hole in
Calcutta could have been. . . . Sick, dying and dead all in one mass, huddled
together under a very few unspeakably filthy quilts.” Phelps spoke with a
woman from Bafra, who told her that she had forced her two children to walk
the snow- covered mountain paths because she saw that “the children who
were being carried were all freezing to death.” For Phelps and some other mis-
sionaries, this degree of misery was quite a shock. A British diplomat said
that missionaries who had initially “appreciated the Turkish case” wound up
“horrified.” “Miss Phelps, indeed, admitted that she had left Angora” in
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
autumn 1921 “with a firm belief . . . that Mustapha Kemal’s Government
would bring about a regeneration of Turkey. On arriving in Sivas she was
rapidly disillusioned.”278
Another missionary, who travelled in August 1921 from Samsun to Sivas,
described what she saw along the way: “We crossed Anatolia under a blazing
sun, passing groups” from the “Black Sea ports . . . driven by Turkish gen-
darmes. The dead bodies of those who had dropped during the hard tramp
were lying by the roadside. Vultures had eaten parts of the flesh so that in most
cases merely skeletons remained.” By early September she was in Harput,
where she encountered “a city full of starving, sick, wretched human wrecks.”
“ These people were trying to make soup of grass and considered themselves
fortunate when they could secure a sheep’s ear to aid it . . . the only part of
the animal [traditionally] thrown away in Anatolia. . . . I shall never forget the look of a black hairy sheep’s ear floating in boiling water . . . and these poor wretches trying to obtain nourishment by eating it. The Turks had given them
no food on the 500 mile trip from Samsun.” The survivors were those who
had enough money to bribe guards for food. “ Those without money died by
the wayside. In many places, thirsty in the blistering sun and heat, they were
not allowed water unless they could pay for it.”279 Another observer in Harput,
prob ably the missionary Dr. Ruth Parmelee, said that arriving women and
children were “practically naked, sometimes in snow up to the knees, with
just some sacking as covering.” They had been deported “in a blizzard”; on
the roads, “a carriage has sometimes to zigzag to avoid passing over” the
corpses.280
Bessie Bannerman Murdoch and J. Herbert Knapp, two missionaries sta-
tioned in Arapgir, witnessed the regular passage of Convoys in 1921. Each
consisted of several hundred deportees, hailing from Konya and Ordu. Most
of the marchers were Greeks, though often the convoys contained Arme-
nians as well. Usually the group was exclusively military- aged men or else
women, children, and old people. All were escorted by gendarmes. The mis-
sionaries recalled “one large drove” of about 1,000 deportees in late fall,
1921, “herded on a hill above [Arapgir] within 200 yards of a running ditch
of water. They were not allowed to get water from this ditch and were com-
pelled to buy their water from vendors. . . . A few days afterwards they were
started on their way towards Harput . . . middle- aged and old women and
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
men [and] . . . younger women and children, carry ing on their backs large
loads of bedding, food and fagots, and in their hands pots and kettles and
perched upon their load a child . . . the roads were left strewn with their
dead bodies the next day. . . . Many of the women were unable to carry their
children along and they were obliged to leave them by the roadside, and we
took in our orphanage about 20 of these.” Several of them died. There was
“one instance of a woman who came to us with three children, asking us to
take care of one of them . . . whom she was willing to leave behind. She se-
lected the oldest one, a boy of about eleven, but in parting with him she fi-
nally deci ded she couldn’t be separated and took him along. . . . We were
convinced . . . [that the Turks’] intention was to subject them to such expo-
sure that they would perish.”281
But starvation and exposure did not entirely replace the sword. As we
have seen, there were the massacres in and around Kavak Gorge. Elsewhere,
a deportee attached to the third convoy from Samsun wrote that “660 were
killed” by gendarmes as the column was descending a mountain. He survived
by feigning death. The “guards came up and stripped us of all our clothes
leaving us our shirts and pants only which were soaked with . . . blood.” Those who remained, “left without food or water and almost naked,” were pushed
on to Sivas and Kangal. He himself escaped to the mountains.282
Cosmos Lilidas, a nineteen- year- old relief worker, related another tale of
unlikely escape. His convoy, prob ably the second from Samsun, left town
around June 20. One day “the guards suddenly opened fire” while the convoy
stopped for lunch near Djinbush. The assailants “then went about with
knives and bayonets making sure that those . . . shot were dead.” Lilidas rolled over in a ditch to play dead, but the Turks “stabbed [him] in the arm and
back.” The convoy then resumed its march southward, “292 remaining out of
the thousand.” Lilidas survived his wounds and eventually reached Sivas.283
During 1919–1923, as during 1915, the Turks often resorted to deceit.
Two witnesses related that in August 1921 the authorities in Trabzon ordered
all adult Greek men to pres ent themselves for paid labor on fortifications. Five hundred or more complied; they were immediately imprisoned and their
homes pillaged. The men were then deported to the interior in groups of fifty
and forced to march for seven days “without as much as a morsel of bread.”
One night they were taken away in groups of ten and shot.284
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
Muslim civilians occasionally participated in the killings. A Greek witness
described the death by stoning of a deported priest who had fallen down from
exhaustion: “The soldiers dragged him to the side” of the road “and began
to beat him with their rifle butts. . . . Turkish children . . . ran down to the scene. The soldiers withdrew . . . and the children began at once to stone the
body which was in its death throes. For some time we could hear the dull thud
of the stones as they began to accumulate atop the priest.”285
Convoy guards made up rules and practices in an ad hoc manner. Gener-
ally, the Turks provided convoys neither food nor water, though occasionally
deportees were allowed to purchase both. NER workers were often forbidden
to supply food, clothing, and water, but occasionally there would be no such
prohibition.286 Sometimes Turkish officials allowed columns to rest in
towns. Families were allowed to leave convoys and stay in defi nitely in some
places— usually for a fee. In most locations, officials quickly drove deportees
back onto the roads. Here and there NER or
phanages were allowed to take in
deportees; elsewhere, this was forbidden. At one point NER in Harput was
given an old German missionary building and allowed to take in a number
of Greek children. “But in a very few days the building was empty,” Amer-
ican Missionary Ethel Thompson reported. “The Turks had driven the
children over the mountain.”287
Ill- treatment of children was common. On February 5, 1922, Thompson
ventured out on horse back to visit an outlying Christian orphanage. Five min-
utes outside of Mezre, she reached a watershed where some “300 small
children who had been driven together in a circle” were being “cruelly” beaten
by twenty gendarmes wielding heavy swords. When a mother rushed in to
save a child, she was also beaten. “The children were cowering down or
holding up little arms to ward off the blows,” Thompson reported. “We did
not linger.” She pointed out that the missionaries appealed to be allowed to
take in Greek children whose mothers had died, but the missionaries were
almost “always refused.”288
The most detailed and comprehensive description of the convoys during
August 1921– February 1922 comes from two NER missionaries stationed in
the Harput area, Major F. D. Yowell and Dr. Mark Ward. After they were ex-
pelled by the Turkish authorities in March 1922, they presented their find-
ings to Jackson and Bristol. The British High Commission in Constantinople
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
described the two missionaries’ reports as highlighting “the deliberate attempt
of the Angora Government to exterminate the Greek population of
Anatolia.”289
Yowell and Ward described, among other things, the severe restrictions
the authorities imposed on NER operations.290 Before the Kemalists took
over, the Harput authorities had been “friendly” and had assisted NER. But
“since the Nationalists have been in control . . . the local politicians who
took part in the deportations and massacres of Armenians in 1915 and 1916
have gradually returned to power,” Ward wrote.291 He noted that many of the
better- educated Muslims, including Muslim clerics, opposed the govern-
ment’s treatment of NER.292
In May 1922 Yowell and Ward published some of their findings in the New
York Times and the Times of London, causing the Turks and the American High Commission much embarrassment, in addition to some awkwardness
for NER itself. They first obtained NER permission to “release . . . such news
material as may possibly awaken the conscience of the American people.”
Yowell was “speaking merely as an American citizen,” Harold Jaquith, head
of NER in Turkey, noted, and not on behalf of the organ ization.293
Yowell and Ward reported that, of 30,000 Greek deportees who had passed
through Sivas in early summer 1921, 5,000 had died before reaching Harput
and another 5,000 had escaped the convoys. Of the 20,000 who reached
Harput, 2,000 died there and 3,000 were scattered around the vilayet. The
remaining 15,000 trudged on to Diyarbekir. Of these, 3,000 died on the way,
1,000 died in Diyarbekir, 2,000 remained in Diyarbekir, and the remaining
9,000 were sent toward Bitlis. What had happened to them was unknown. But
“the deportees all know that they were being sent there to die. The Turkish
officials all know it,” the missionaries reported. “The Turkish authorities
were frank in their statements that it was the intention to have all the Greeks
die and all of their action— their failure to supply any food or clothing— their
strong opposition to relief by the N.E.R.— their choice of routs [ sic], weather, etc.— concentrations in unhealthful places, and last of all their deliberate
choice of destination, Bitlis, a place almost totally destroyed, with no industry
and located far up in the mountains, seem to fully bear this statement out.”294
The core of the report constituted extracts from Ward’s diary, which
detailed the convoys passing through Harput— their composition, origin,
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
destination, and, occasionally, fate. Initially, during May– June 1921, the con-
voys were mostly Armenian, from the Konya area. By July, they were predomi-
nantly Greek, from the Pontus. On June 3, Ward recorded, a convoy of 125
Greeks and 187 Armenians, from Eskişehir and Kütahya, reached town.
“They have been eating grass, having no money to buy bread as they were
robbed on the way.” On June 20 a small convoy of twenty, from Konya,
reached Ward’s hospital to be deloused. The group included businessmen,
an engineer, and “the well- known Professor Haigazian, president of the Amer-
ican College in Konia,” who was ill. Ward wanted to admit him, but the Turks
sent him to a quarantine camp. Most of the party was sent away on the 28th,
but Haigazian was permitted to remain in exchange for a fee paid in gold.
“The following day we got him to our hospital,” Ward wrote. But “by that
time the rash of typhus had appeared. . . . He died on the 7th of July. We were
permitted to bury him.” On November 10, 1,700 Christians passed through;
“they were 2,000 when they left Diarbekir.” On December 31, 300 arrived
from Konya. “They left January first for Bitlis but at the foot of the mountain
it is reported they were robbed and afterwards many died on the mountain
roads from exposure.” In all, Ward recorded 20,526 deportees passing
through Mezre- Harput between May 1921 and February 1922, about 18,000
of them Greeks and 2,000 Armenians.295
Ward and Yowell noted that sexual predation against women in the con-
voys was frequent. “All along the route . . . Moslems visit the vari ous groups
and take of the women and girls whomsoever they want for immoral purposes,”
they wrote.296 A Greek observer reported that “many parents killed their sons
and daughters, unable to see them violated by the Turks.”297 One NER mis-
sionary described three teenage girls she found in a cave outside Sivas: two
had been clubbed to death, perhaps after being raped.298
The Grand National Assembly in Ankara condemned the Ward- Yowell
allegations at a secret session on May 18, 1922. Interior Minister Fethi claimed,
“No Christians, Greek or Armenian, had been illegally punished.” If some had
been deported “provisionally from the sea coast, it was solely in the interests
of safeguarding [Turkish] in de pen dence.” He “received an ovation from the
deputies.”299 Kemal himself denounced the “lying Yowell” and his “calum-
nious statement” that “Turkey is unjust to Christians.”300 The Nationalists
went so far as to forge and publish a letter in which Jaquith— they misspelt
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
his name “Jacquith”— supposedly avowed that Turkey’s Christians “pass their
lives in perfect peace and tranquility. They maintain the best of relations with
their Moslem neighbors.”301
The Turks dismissed Ward and Yowell as “pro- Greek” and spoke instead
of Greek persecution of Muslims.302 Rumbold dismissed the Turkish charges
as “designed to divert attention from Turkish atrocities.”303 The Turks were
especially
stung by accusations that they had abused women. Shortly after the
session on Ward and Yowell’s report, Ankara declared, “The accusation that
Christian women and girls have been used for immoral purposes by the Turks
is entirely false.”304
Bristol joined the Turks in decrying the missionaries’ report. He told Ward
that he regarded the publication as a British government “intrigue” that, “if
successful, would greatly strengthen the En glish position in the Near East, in-
jure the prestige of American interests considerably, place the Turkish Na-
tionalists very much on the defensive and give the En glish . . . an excuse . . .
to stop the pres ent negotiations for peace and even to back the Greeks in their
war on Turkey. The total result would be the resumption of hostilities in
Turkey with more people killed, more of Anatolia devastated, more refugees
and more misery.”305 Bristol acted to discredit the Ward- Yowell reports.306
American missionaries came to dislike Bristol intensely but were careful not
to show it, given his influence. Hosford no doubt was correct in claiming to
“represent the opinion of the large majority of Americans in Anatolia when I
say that he is . . . grossly unfair to the minority peoples in Asia Minor.” He
called for Bristol’s replacement.307 On the British side, the reports triggered
demands for an international commission of inquiry. But Bristol vetoed the
idea, and the French pressed instead for an investigation of Greek massacres
of Turks.308
The Turks devoted considerable energy to covering up their atrocities.
Jaquith, who spent seven weeks traveling around eastern Anatolia in summer
1922, wrote that the Yowell- Ward reports gave only “a portion of the truth;
they described only facts either witnessed or definitely ascertained. There had
been no eyewitnesses of what had occurred in out- of- the- way places.” Jaquith
himself had “noticed along the sides of the roads thousands of shallow mounds
round many of which lay skulls and bones uncovered by the wandering pa-
riah dogs. This evidence the Turks had not had the patience or the time to
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
