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What They Said...
"...It would seem that
three-fourths or four-fifths of the whole nation has been wiped out, and there
is no case in history, certainly not since the time of Tamerlane, in which any
crime so hideous and upon so large a scale has been recorded."
"...Wherever the
Armenians, almost wholly unarmed as they were, have fought, they have fought in
self-defence to defend their families and themselves from the cruelty of the
ruffians who constitute what is called the Government of the country. There is
no excuse whatever, upon any such ground as some German authorities and
newspapers allege, for the conduct of the Turkish Government. Their policy of
slaughter and deportation has been wanton and unprovoked. It appears to be
simply an application of the maxim once enunciated by Sultan Abdul Hamid: "The
way to get rid of the Armenian Question is to get rid of the Armenians"; and the
policy of extermination has been carried out with far more thoroughness and with
far more blood-thirsty completeness by the present heads of the Turkish
Administration - they describe themselves as the Committee of Union and Progress
- than it was in the time of Abdul Hamid."
VISCOUNT JAMES BRYCE
British
Statesman and Scholar,
Regina
Professor of Civil Law at Oxford,
Undersecretary of State for foreign affairs,
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster,
President of the Board of Trade,
Chief
Secretary for Ireland,
Ambassador to Washington,
Author of many historical works among
which
The Armenians under the Ottoman Empire.
Extracts
from a speech delivered in the House of Lords
of Great
Britain, on October 6, 1915.
"I would
like to see Europe, that wept of Uncle Tom's Cabin, think over the outrages
perpetrated by the Turks in Armenia. Eight centuries ago a lesser injustice than
these crimes would have caused an avenging Crusade. It is the duty of the Allied
Powers, fighting now against the Central Empires, to grant freedom to Armenia.
Otherwise the remnant of this unfortunate nation will become anarchists, and if
they were to destroy Constantinople by dynamite, I a bishop, standing before the
altar of Christ, would without any compunction pronounce their action not only
justified, but even sanctified."
MONSIGNOR TOUCHET
Bishop
of Orleans, France.
"The
Great Massacres and persecutions of the past seems almost insignificant when
compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."
"When
the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely
giving the death warrant to a whole race: they understood this well, and in
their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the
fact."
HENRY
MORGENTHAU
United
States Ambassador at Constantinople,
during
the First World War.
Extract
from "Ambassador Morgenthau's Story".
"If there
is a race which has been closely connected with the Turks by its fidelity, by
its services to the country, by the statesmen and functionaries of talent it has
furnished, by the intelligence which it has manifested in all domains -
commerce, industry, science and all the arts - it is certainly the Armenians."
GENERAL SHERIF PASHA
Turkish
Exile in Paris.
"In
April, 1915, the Ottoman Government began to put into execution throughout
Turkey a systematic and carefully-prepared plan to exterminate the Armenian
race. In six months nearly a million Armenians have been killed. The number of
victims and the manner of their destruction are without parallel in Modern
History."
DR.
HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS
Extract
from "The Blackest Pages of Modern History".
"The
scheme was nothing less than the extermination of the whole Christian population
within the Ottoman frontiers...Nothing remained but the opportunity to strike a
stroke that would never need repetition. "After this", said Talat Bey, when he
gave the final signal, "there will be no Armenian Question for fifty years"."
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE
British
Historian.
Extract
from "The Murder of a Nation".
"Then,
coming to the broad question of Armenia, we remember those terrible massacres in
1895 and 1896, but they pale into insignificance before what has been done
during this War. The Germans have been guilty of the most ghastly and
unspeakable crimes, but there is no crime so ghastly and unspeakable as the
wholesale massacres, under circumstances of the greatest possible barbarity and
atrocity, of the Armenians themselves."
SIR
GEORGE GREENWOOD
"Of the
2,000,000 Armenians in Turkey in 1914, one million have been slaughtered, and
the survivors only 130,000 remain in Turkey and the rest are refugees and
exiles. Armenian property losses are valued at over 5,000,000,000 dollars are
more than three fourths of the estimated wealth of the Armenian race."
H.
ADAM
Extract
from "Armenia in the World War".
"Let us
not forget that the Armenian Nation has had a long and glorious history; that it
was one of the earliest to create a civilisation and cultured society; that is
was the first nation to adopt Christianity for all these centuries, through
every horror. But even this is not enough to say of the essential greatness of
Armenian History and the Armenian character. It is necessary to remember that it
was at one period of its history, the greatest power among nations of Asia, that
it governed itself with success and Christianity between Asia and Europe and
finally these traditions of faith and of patriotism have been carried on through
many centuries and numberless generations while religion and national spirit
have not suffered the slightest diminution in either valor or tenacity."
THOMAS POWER O'CONNER
(Tay
Pay)
(1848-1929)
Irish
journalist and nationalist leader.
"Our
fellow countrymen committed unheard of crimes, resorted to all conceivable
methods of despotism, organised deportations and massacres, poured gas over
babies and burned them, raped women and girls in front of their parents who were
bound hand and foot, took girls in front of their parents and fathers,
appropriated personal property and real estate, drove people to Mesopotamia and
treated them inhumanly on the way... they put thousands of innocent people into
boats that were sunk at sea... they put Armenians in the most unbearable
conditions any other nation had ever known in its history."
NEMRUD MUSTAFA KEMAL PASHA
Judge of
the Turkish Court Marshall No.1
Constantinople, January 20, 1920
Extract
from court records.
"The
whole plan of extermination was nothing less than a cold blooded, calculated
political measure, having for its object the annihilation of a superior element
in the population, which might prove troublesome, and to this must be added the
motive of greed".
FRIDTJOF NANSEN
(1861-1930)
Norwegian Statesman and humanitarian,
Winner
of the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize,
High
Commissioner for Refugees under
the
League of Nations.
"As for
the Armenians, they were treated differently in the different vilayets. They
were suspect and spied upon everywhere, but they suffered real extermination,
worse than massacre, in the so-called "Armenian Vilayets". There are seven of
these, and five of them (including the most important and thickly populated)
unhappily for me formed part of my own Consular Jurisdiction. These were the
vilayets of Trebizond, Erzeroum, Van, Bitlis and Sivas.
"In my
district from the 24th June onwards, the Armenians were all "interned" - that
is, ejected by force from their various residences and dispatched under the
guard of the gendarmerie to distant, unknown destinations, which for a few will
mean the interior Mesopotamia, but for four-fifths of them has meant already a
death accompanied by unheard-of cruelties."
COMM.
G. GORRINI
Italian
Consul General at Trebizond.
Extracts
from an interview published in the
newspaper IlMessaggero, Rome, 25th August 1915.
"The
Turkish Government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous massacre and
deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor. The clearance of the race from Asia
Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be."
SIR
WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL
(1874-1965)
British Prime Minister and Historian.
"From May
until October, the Ottoman Government pursued methodically a plan of
extermination far more hellish than the worst possible massacre. Orders for
deportation of the entire Armenian population to Mesopotamia were despatched to
every province of Asia Minor. These orders were explicit and detailed. No hamlet
was too insignificant to be missed. The news was given by town criers that every
Armenian was to be ready to leave at a certain hour for an unknown destination.
There were no exceptions for the aged, the ill, the women in pregnancy."
DR.
HERBERT A. GIBBONS
Extract
from "The Blackest Page of Modern History".
Putnam,
New York, 1916.
"A pallid
light extends over the atrocities committed against the Armenians, atrocities
which have raised the indignation of humanity. They gave us our country
transformed into a gigantic slaughter house."
RASHID PASHA
Minister
of Foreign Affairs.
December
21, 1918.
"Have you
thought of the sufferings of Armenia? You poured out your money to help succor
the Armenians after they suffered; now set your strength so that they shall
never suffer again."
PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON
President of the United States of America
Extract
from a "Speech in Boston, Massachusetts,
February
24, 1919.
"The
Allies see clearly that the time has come to put an end to Turkish domination
over other races. During the past twenty years Armenians have been massacred
with unexampled brutality. During the war, the exploit of the Turkish
Government, in massacres, deportations and bad treatment of prisoners of war,
exceeded in ferocity its former misdeeds. Not only has the Government failed to
protect its subjects against murder and pillage, but it itself has organised and
perpetrated these outrages. The Allies are determined to liberate from Turkish
rule the regions inhabited by non-Turks."
ALEXANDER MILLERAND
(1859-1943)
President of the French Republic.
July 16,
1920.
"The Ottoman Empire should be
cleaned up of the Armenians and the Lebanese. We have destroyed the former by
the sword, we shall destroy the latter through starvation."
ENVER PASHA
One of the triumvirate rulers.
Publicly declared on 19 May 1916.
"It was at first communicated to you
that the Government, by order of the Jemiet had decided to destroy completely
all the 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 or sex nor to conscientious scruples."
TALAT PASHA
Minister of the Interior
September 6, 1916. - To the
Government of Aleppo.
"Armenia is dying, but it will
survive. The little blood that it still has left is precious blood that will
give birth to a heroic generation. A nation that does not want to die, does not
die."
ANATOLE FRANCE
French Author, 1916.
"Turks continued their previous
policy. They would not stop committing massive and most awful massacres that
even Leng Timur (Tamerlane) would not dare to do."
VALERII BRUSOV
Russian Poet, 1916.
"Who can describe the feelings that
an eyewitness experiences when he thinks of this heroic and unfortunate nation.
Its courage and spirit surprise the world. A nation that yesterday was one of
the most energetic and progressive nations of the Ottoman Empire is becoming a
memory."
FAYEZ EL HUSEIN
Arab Publicist, 1917.
"The deportations of Western
Armenians are nothing but concealed race extermination. There is no language
rich enough to describe the horrors of it."
JACQUES de MORGAN
French scientist, 1917.
"The German Consul from Mosul
related, in my presence, at the German club at Aleppo that, in many places on
the road from Mosul to Aleppo, he had seen children's hands lying hacked off in
such numbers that one could have paved the road with them."
DR.
MARTIN NIEPAGE
Extract from the Horrors of Aleppo,
seen by a German eyewitness,
translated by the New York Times
publication
Current History Vol. 5 Nov. 1916 pp
335-37.
"A remarkable thing about the bodies that we saw
that nearly all of them were naked. I have been informed that the people were
forced to take off their clothes before they were killed as the Mohammedans
consider the clothes taken from a dead body to be defiled. There were gaping
bayonet wounds on most if the bodies, usually in the abdomen or chest, sometimes
in the throat. Few persons had been shot, as bullets were too precious. It was
cheaper to kill with bayonets and knives. Another remarkable thing was that
nearly all the women lay flat on their back and showed signs of barbarous
mutilation by the bayonets of the gendarmes, these wounds having been inflicted
in many cases probably after the women were dead. We also noticed that all the
bodies in these valleys were apparently those of people who had been on the road
at least one or two months, showing that they were not from Harput but were from
distant places.
"We estimated in the course of our ride around the
lake, and actually within the space of twenty-four hours, we had seen the
remains of not less than ten thousand Armenians who had been killed around lake
Goeljuk."
LESLIE A. DAVIS
Lawyer and U.S Consul at Harput (Turkey) 1914-1917.
132 Page report prepared at the request of Wilbur J.
Carr,
director of the Consular Bureau of the US Department
of State.
The Slaughterhouse Province. An American
Diplomat's Report
on the Armenian Genocide 1915-1917. (New
Rochelle, NY, 1989)
"As one
of the few Europeans who have been eyewitness of the dreadful destruction of the
Armenian people from its beginning in the fruitful fields of Anatolia up to the
wiping out of the mournful remnants of the race on the banks of the Euphrates, I
venture to claim the right of setting before you these pictures of misery and
terror which passed before my eyes during nearly two years, and which will never
be obliterated from my mind. I appeal to you at the moment... When the Turkish
Government, in the Spring of 1915, set about the execution of its monstrous
project of exterminating the Armenians, all the nations of Europe were unhappily
bleeding to exhaustion, owing to the tragic blindness of their mutual
misunderstandings, and there was no one to hinder the lurid tyrants of Turkey
from carrying onto the bitter end those revolting atrocities which can only be
likened to the acts of a criminal lunatic...
"...Here
they died-slain by Kurds, robbed by gendarmes, shot, hanged, poisoned, stabbed,
strangled, mowed down by epidemics, drowned, frozen, parched with thirst,
starved-their bodies left to putrefy or to be devoured by jackals. Children wept
themselves to death, men dashed themselves against the rocks, mothers threw
their babies into the brooks, women with child flung themselves, singing into
the Euphrates. They died all the deaths on the earth, the deaths of all the
ages...
"Everyone
who knows the events of this war in Anatolia, who has followed the fortunes of
this nation with open eyes, know that all those accusations which were brought,
with great cunning and much diligence, against the Armenian race, are nothing
but loathsome slanders fabricated by their unscrupulous tyrants, in order to
shield themselves from the consequences of their own mad and brutal acts, and to
hide their own incapacity for reconciliation with the spirit of sincerity and
humanity."
ARMIN
T. WEGNER
Ein
Vermachtnis in der Wuste (A Testament in the Desert)
Berliner Tageblatt No 86, 23 February 1919.
Appeared
in an Open letter to President Woodrow Wilson.
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