The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon
History
The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: Documents presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon
Armenian question; Armenians; World War, 1914-1918 -- Atrocities; World War, 1914-1918 -- Refugees
(v) In particular it is to be noted that many of the most shocking and
horrible accounts are those for which there is the most abundant
testimony from the most trustworthy neutral witnesses. None of the worst
cruelties rest on native evidence alone. If all that class of evidence
were entirely struck out, the general effect would be much the same,
though some of the minor details would be wanting. One may, indeed, say
that an examination of the neutral evidence tends to confirm the native
evidence as a whole by showing that there is in it less of exaggeration
than might have been expected.
Docs. 7 and 9, for instance, both of which are native reports at
second-hand, refer in somewhat rhetorical terms to the corpses of
murdered Armenians washed down by the waters of the Tigris and
Euphrates. Yet their words are more than justified by many concrete and
independent pieces of evidence. The description in Doc. 12 (German
material) of how barge-loads of Armenians were drowned in the Tigris
below Diyarbekir, renders more fully credible the accounts of how the
Armenians of Trebizond were drowned wholesale in the Black Sea. Doc. 12
also contains the statement, from a German employee of the Baghdad
Railway, that the Armenian exiles who reached Biredjik were drowned in
batches every night in the Euphrates; and similar horrors are reported
from almost every section of the Euphrates’ course. Docs. 56, 57, 59 and
62 describe how the convoys of exiles from the Vilayet of Erzeroum were
cast into the Kara Su (western branch of the Euphrates) at the gorge
called Kamakh Boghaz, and were then either shot in the water or left to
drown. The author of Doc. 5 was present at such a scene, though she was
herself spared, and the information in Docs. 56 and 57 was obtained
direct from a lady who was actually cast in, but managed to struggle to
the bank and escape. The authors of Doc. 62 received their information
from a gendarme who had been attached to a convoy and had himself
participated in the massacre. Doc. 24 records the experiences of an
Armenian woman deported from Moush, who was driven with her
fellow-exiles into the Mourad Su (eastern branch of the Euphrates), but
also managed to escape, though the rest were drowned. Doc. 66 describes
corpses floating in the river in the neighbourhood of Kiakhta, and Doc.
137 the drowning of exiles in the tributaries of the Euphrates between
Harpout and Aleppo. These are evidently instances of a regular practice,
and when we find the exiles from Trebizond and Kerasond being disposed
of in the same fashion in a comparatively distant part of the Turkish
Empire, we are almost compelled to infer that the drowning of the exiles
_en masse_ was a definite part of the general scheme drawn out by the
Young Turk leaders at Constantinople.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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