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MISSIONARIES CHRISTIANITY
Book Excerpts kindly provided by Sukru S Aya
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- * Lords of the Horizons" Jason Goodwin, Henry Holt Co, NY, ISBN 0-8050-4081-1
- * The Slaughterhouse Province - An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide,1915-1917
- * Leslie E. Davis, edited by Susan K. Blair -Aristide D. Caratzas, New York - ISBN-0-89241-458-8
- * From Swedish paper "Nya Daglight Allehanda" 23.April 1917, by H.J. Pravitz
- * From " New York Times Current History" Feb. 1923 "ANGORA AND THE TURKS" by Arthur T. Chester, representative of U.S. Shipping Board in Istanbul, son of Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester
- * "CONSTANTINOPLE" Philip Mansel, St. Martin's Press, NY, ISBN 0-312-141574-8
- * Excerpts from "Britain and the Armenian Question 1915-1923" Croom Helm, London Akaby Nassibian - ISBN0-7099-1820-8
- * ANATOLIAN SUITE" Kildare Dobbs - Little Brown & Co. Canada - ISBN 0316-18779-8
- * The Ottoman Centuries " Lord Kinross, Morrow Quill Paperback, NY 1977 - ISBN 0-688-08093-6
- * from "EMPIRES of the SAND" Efraim & Inari Karsh, ISBN 0-674-00541-4 Harvard Univ.Press
- * From: "PARIS 1919" Margaret Macmillan, Random House - New York ISBN0-375-76052-0
- * Excerpts from old NAT.GEOGRAPHIC Magazines - Turks, Armenians, etc.
- * from "PROTESTANT DIPLOMACY AND THE NEAR EAST" Joseph L. Grabill, ISBN 0816605750 - Univ. of Minnesota Press 1991
- * from "Imperialism Evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians 1878-1896" Jeremy Salt, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. U.K. ISBN - 07146-3448-4
- * Essays in Ottoman & Turkish History, 1774 - 1923" Roderic H. Davison, University of Texas Press, Austin
- * " U.S. RESPONSE to TURKISH NATIONALISM & REFORM" Roger R. Trask. Univ. of Minnesota Press. 1971 "Unnamed Christianity"; The American Educational Effort
(C) Lords of the Horizons Jason Goodwin, Henry Holt Co, NY, ISBN 0-8050-4081-1
P.315: No longer the complacent rulers of the flock, the Ottomans were baffled and afraid when the people rose in nationalist revolt. Massacre became the stock response to threat; the authorities made little effort to check the atrocities; and frenzied blood-lust of the Turks in retreat is still a delicate subject. Excesses were committed by all sides; the arrival of Protestant missionaries, singing Onward Christian Soldiersamong the once quiet Armenians alarmed the Ottomans into thinking that the process which had turned their Bulgarian, Greek or Serbian reaya against them was about to be repeated.
(E)The Slaughterhouse Province An American Diplomats Report on the Armenian Genocide,1915-1917
Leslie E. Davis, edited by Susan K. Blair Aristide D. Caratzas, New York - ISBN-0-89241-458-8
P.16:American missionaries rapidly outnumbered merchants in the Ottoman Empire. The first representatives of the Congregational American Board of Commissionaires for Foreign Mission arrived in Smyrna in 1819 with boundless optimism. When they learned that conversion from Islam to another religion was a crime punishable by death in a country in which the head of the state was also the Moslem spiritual leader, they focused their efforts on the Greek, Armenian and other Christian minorities. Idealistic Americans invested $ 40 million (in 1915 dollars) in schools, hospitals, and churches by the outbreak of World War I. Operating with charters from the Ottoman government, these institutions by 1914 employed more than 450 Americans and 4500 Ottoman nationals of various ethnic origins.
P.39: Since 1876 the American Board has maintained a college there, which was at first called Armenia College, but the name of which was afterwards changed to Euphrates Collegewhere most of the teachers and students were Armenians...
P.45: After the entry of Turkey in the war, the French monks left the country, but were subjected to many annoyances before they went. Soon afterwards all the French monks left... Their buildings are used as a Turkish hospitals...
P.96: All the business of that region had been carried on by Armenians; all the work of missionaries had been among Armenians.... Many had been kept by friendly Turks in their houses; some had been deported and had returned.
P.169: I should estimate that at least three-fourths of the Armenians in this region have now gone. A few are now getting the benefits of the order exempting Catholics and Protestants from deportation, but most of these were sent away before the order was received...
P.183: One of the disappointments in the present terrible situation and one of the saddest commentaries on American missionary work among the Armenians is their lack of religious and moral principles and the general baseness of the race. During all that has happened during the past year I have not heard of a single act of heroism or of self-sacrifice and the noble acts, if any, have been very few. On the contrary mothers have given their daughters to the lowest and vilest Turks to save their own lives; to change their religion is a matter of little importance to most of the people; lying and trickery and inordinate love of money are besetting sins of almost all, even while they stand in the very shadow of death...From every point of view the race is one that cannot be admired although it is one to be pitied.
(F)From Swedish paper Nya Daglight Allehanda 23.April 1917, by H.J. Pravitz
Recently returned home from abroad I have right now i.e. somewhat late had the opportunity to look at two Swedish booklets on the Armenian issue. Sven Hedin adelsman (Sven Hedin a nobility) by Ossiannilsson and Armenians fruktansvarta lage (the terrible situation of the Armenians), by Marika Stjernstedt. The former book went immediately in the waste basket. In all its poorly hidden appreciation of the title character, it annoyed me more than a main article in Dagens Nyheter. The latter, which seemed spirited by the compassion of the suffering Armenians, I have read repeatedly, and it is really this and its inaccuracies that my article is about.
I dare to claim, that any other Swede has had the opportunity like me, to thoroughly and closely study the misery among the Armenians, since I now for about a month have traveled right among all the emigrating poor people. And this, during the right time, fall 1915, during which the alleged brutalities, according to both writers, were practically bad. I want to hope, that what I am describing below, which are my own experiences, will have the purpose to remove the impression of inhumanity and barbarity from the Turkish and German side, which is easily induced by the reading of the two booklets mentioned above. If I understand the contents of thebooks correctly, both writers want to burden the Turks as well as the Germans with deliberate assaults or even cruelties. My position as an imbedded eyewitness gives me the right and duty to protest against such claims, and the following, based on my experiences will support and strengthen this protest. ...I started my journey from Konstantinopel through the Asian Turkey, with a certain prejudiced point of view, partly received from American travelers, about the persecution of the Armenians by their Turkish masters. My lord, which misery I would see, and to which cruelties I would witness! And although my long service in the Orient has not convinced me that the Armenians, despite their Christianity, are any of Gods best children, I decided to keep my eyes open to see for myself to which extent the rumors about Turkish assaults are true and the nameless victims were telling the truth. I sure got to view misery, but planned cruelties? Absolutely nothing. This is precisely why it has appeared to me to be necessary to speak up. To start with, it is unavoidable to state, that a transfer of the unreliable Armenian elements from the northern parts of the Ottoman Empire to the south was done by the Turkish government due to compulsory reasons. It should have been particularly important to remove, from the Erzurum district, all these settlers, who waited only for a Russian invasion to join the invading army against the hated local legal authority. When Erzurum fell in February 1916, an Armenian, with whom I just shared Russian imprisonment, uttered something I interpreted as it would have fallen earlier if we had been allowed to stay. That a country like Turkey, threatened and attacked by powerful external enemies, is trying to secure itself against cunning internal enemies, no one should be able to blame her... Armenians have their own religion, their own language, both in speaking and writing, their own schools etc.... As far as the much discussed major Armenian migration is concerned, I am the first to agree that the attempts of the Turkish side to reduce the difficulties of the refuges left a lot to be desired. But I emphasize again, in the name of fairness, that considering the difficult situation in which Turkey, as the target of attack from three powerful enemies, was in and it was, in my opinion, almost impossible for the Turks under the circumstances, to have been able to keep up an orderly assistance activity... I have seen dying and dead along the roads but among hundreds of thousands there must, of course, occur casualties. I have seen childrens corpse, shredded in pieces by jackals, and pitiful individuals stretch their bony arms with piercing screams of ekmek.But I had travel companion of mine, Dr. Schacht, was also traveling along the river. He also had nothing to tell. In summary, I think that Mrs. Stjernstedt, somewhat uncriticallyhas accepted the hair-raising stories from more or less biased sources, which formed the basis for her lecture... But I do want to, as far as it can be considered to be within the powers of an eyewitness, deny that the regular gendarme forces, who supervised the transports, are guilty of any cruelties. (Rattvik, April 1917, H.J. Pravitz)
(G)From New York Times Current History Feb. 1923 ANGORA AND THE TURKS by Arthur T. Chester,
representative of U.S. Shipping Board in Istanbul, son of Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester
As I came down the hill I was an American again, but I was filled with resentment for the way the Turks had been misjudged, misinterpreted and unjustly treated, and felt the greatest admiration for what they had accomplished against staggering odds...It wants, above everything else, to keep out intriguing and hypocritical international politics. I have known the Turks since the constitutionalrevolution, fourteen years ago, and before closing, I wish to add a few facts that I believe, in justice, should be recorded. In the first place, condemnation without hearing both sides is unjust and un-American, and yet many American have shown this injustice in regard to the Turks... If an Armenian or Greek is killed, it is always referred as the massacre of a Christian...As a matter of cold, indisputable fact there is more religious freedom in Turkey than in any other country of the world, more than has ever been recorded in history.
We hear a great deal about the deportations of Armenians from the North-east of Turkey during the World War. The facts are that the Turks sent an army to the Russian border to defend their country against the threatened Russian invasion. The army consisted of Turkish subjects of all nationalities, being drafted just as ours are drafted.At the front the Armenians used blank cartridges and deserted in droves. This was bad enough, but the Armenians were not satisfied with this form of treachery. The provinces in the rear of the army had a large Armenian population, and these people, feeling that there was an excellent chance of the Russian defeating Turks, decided to make it certainly by rising up in the rear of the army and cutting off from its base of supplies. Let me draw a parallel imaginary case. Suppose that Mexico was a powerful and rival country with which we were at war and suppose that we sent an army to the Mexican border to hold back the invading enemy; suppose further that not only the Negroes in our army deserted to the enemy but those left at home organized and cut off ourline of communication. What do you think we as people, especially the Southerners would do to the Negroes ? Our Negroes have ten times the excuse for hating the whites that the Armenians have for their attitude toward the Turks. They have no representation, although they have an overwhelming majority in large sections of the South and have nothing to say in the making of administration of the laws under which they are governed. South of the Mason and Dixon line they are practically a subject race, while the Armenians in Turkey have not only full representation but special privileges not accorded to any other country. The Turkish Government ordered the Armenians deported from the districts they menaced. That they did not have railways and other means of transportation was not their fault and the deportation had to be carried on foot. That this was not done in the most humane manner possible is undoubtedly a fact and the Turkish Government has condemned the unnecessary cruelties that occurred; but I feel confident that if America had been put in the hypothetical situation above referred to, it would have stopped the insurrection if it had had to kill every Negro in the South and would not have gone to the tedious and laborious defensive of deportation, in spite of our extensive means of transportation .. It is a known fact that on several occasions Armenian leaders have intentionally instigated these massacres for the sole purpose of obtaining foreign sympathy and political aid.
Our papers refuse to publish the account of the barbarities and atrocities committed by the Greeks upon the Turks although authenticated by unbiased foreign officials, including our own, and yet they are as inhuman and blood-curdling as any recorded in history...I have yet to meet a foreigner living in this part of the world and unbiased by politics, religion or pecuniary benefits derived from condemning the Turks, who has not most emphatically stated that of all the races represented in the population of the old Turkish Empire, the Turks are by far the best people.
(I)CONSTANTINOPLE Philip Mansel, St. Martins Press, NY, ISBN 0-312-141574-8
P.47: In the sixteenth century heretics were burnt alive in London and Berlin, massacred in Paris, expelled from Vienna. In 1685 Louis XIV expelled all Huguenots from France; until 1700 appreciative crowds, led by kings and queens of Spain watched heretics burn alive in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid. The Ottoman Empire, however, gave religious freedom to Christians and Jews. George of Hungary wrote in the fifteenth century: The Turks do not compel anyone to renounce his faith, do not try hard to persuade anyone and do not have a great opinion of renegades. In the seventeenth, in the view of the traveler and writer Monsieur de La Motraye: There is no country on earth where the exercise of all sorts of Religions is more free and less subject to being troubled, than in Turkey. He knew what he was writing about, since he himself was a Huguenot forced to leave France after 1685.
P.50: In 1516 the Ecumenical Patriarch Thelepus I hinted to the Tsar that a Russo-Byzantine empire might be created. Clearly, the Patriarch had no objection to the Christian Emperor of all Christiansexpelling the infidel Turks. However, the stage had been set for one of the dramas of nineteenth and early twentieth century European history: the Russian drive south to the Black Sea, the Balkans and the ultimate prize, Russias baptismal font Tsarigrad, the city of emperors. The Patriarch of Constantinople was one of the authors of the drama.
P.51: On 21 March 1657, on the orders of the Grand Vizier, Patriarch Parthenius III was hanged from a city gate for writing to the Prince of Wallachia saying that the era of Islam was approaching its end and that soon the lords of the cross and the bells will be the lords of the empire. The repeated transformation of churches (in all forty-two) into mosques asserted the supremacy of Islam.
P.52: As old churches were lost, new ones were built. Without towers or visible domes, they had to be discreet; even today those built before 1800 are hidden behind walls and invisible from the street.
P.53: The sight of the mosques and the sound of the muezzin made Islam visible and audible throughout Constantinople. Beneath the surface oftriumphant Islam, however, was hidden, Christian world of water. The concept of holy water or holy springs stems from the primeval association of water with life and purification.
P.54: Constantinople is one of the few cities where Muslims as well as Christians have lived together, over several centuries, in nearly equal proportions. It is not surprising that the two religions influenced each other. Balikli for examplewas revered by Muslims as well as Christians. In 1638 Sultan Murad IV is said to haveasked the monks to pray for his victory over Persians. The day they prayed, he took Baghdad. The crowd, drawn from rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, Bulgarian, Armenian and Catholic, was sometimes so great that the whole city seemed to be present.
P.414: The Caliphs secretary Salih Keramet, son of the poet Nigar hanim, recorded in his diary that the cars frequently got stuck in mud on the road, and gendarmerie had to put downs stones to enable to drive free. At 11, tired, hungry, and sad, the party arrived at Catalca railway station. The Caliph tried to smile when the police and gendarmerie gave him his last salute. The station manager tried to make them comfortable in his familys private quarters. He was Jewish and Jews were the only minority to retain bond of loyalty to the dynasty. When the Caliph expressed his thanks, the station manager replied in words which brought tears in all eyes:
The Ottoman dynasty is the savior of Turkish Jews. When our ancestors were driven out of Spain, and looked for a country to take them in, it was the Ottomans who agreed to give us shelter and saved us from extinction. Through the generosity of their government, once again they received freedom of religion and language, protection for their women, their possessions, and their lives. Therefore our conscience obliges to serve you as much as we can in your darkest hour
(J) Excerpts from Britain and the Armenian Question 1915-1923 Croom Helm, London
Akaby Nassibian ISBN0-7099-1820-8
P.37: Bryce was aware of many biblical connections and religious legends and traditions. Erevan, built of clay and plastered brick, claimed to have been founded by Noah, as its name in Armenian was said to mean the Apparent, as evidence that it was the first dry land the patriarch had seen.... Everyone seems greatly struck with your great exploit on Mount Ararat...
P.38: Bryce stressed that many Armenians had entered the civil or military service in Russia and some had risen to posts of dignity. He quoted the example of Loris Melikov, the commander of the invading Russian arm in Asia in 1877.
Bryce believed that the Turkish government deserves to die.
P.59: Helping downtrodden and afflicted communities was a tradition among Quakers. The Church of England and the other religious denominations were equally concerned for the same philanthropic reasons and also probably because Armenia was the first state in the world to have adopted Christianity as its national religion.
P.60: For 1920-1 Miss Burgess had written from Constantinople what an American Missionary from Marsovan had told her: that the Turks had forbidden them to teach, on the grounds that their instruction was poisonous.
A few of the deported Armenians were returning in a most deplorable state. Some little orphans, the pretty ones, had been saved from death, and gathered as Turks put into Moslem homesbut children with plain faces suffered cruel deaths of a most painful nature.
P.64: The Churches in Britain closely co-operated with the Fund and the many clergymen took a very active part in organizing collections.
P.72: The reference, in the original draft, to these crimes being committed against Christendom was omitted on the suggestion of Sir Bertie, the British ambassador in Paris. About 5.000 refugees, mostly women and children, picked up by the French, had arrived in Egypt and were under the care of the British.
P.73: It also seems that by September 1915 it had become part of the policy of the British government to use the Armenian massacres as one of the means available to influence public opinion in the United States of America. They used any available means in their desperate military need. Perhaps they also felt, rightly, that Americans might be more sensitive to Armenian suffering and more sentimentally involved than any other people in the neutral countries, as over the years US missionaries had done more for the education and the relief of that people than any other humanitarian or educational organization in the world.
P.76: The German ambassador had once stated that they appear to be pure invention. He was also said, however, to have defended the Turks, action as a necessary wartime measure...However, it was generally believed in Washington that no official action would be taken unless American missionaries or American property suffered wrong.
P.173: James W. Gerard, formerly American ambassador to Germany, now Chairman of the American Committee for Independence of Armenia, twice cabled Balfour asking him to press at the Peace Conference for an independent Armenia with big boundaries. In March 1919, forty State Governors, 250 college, and university presidents, 85 bishops and 20.000 ministers and priests had petitioned Wilson in this respect. But charity unsupported by political and military assistance was quite insufficient to deal with the unhappy consequences of Turkish cruelty. The British interests in Armenia were purely sentimental.
P.180: By according territory in the vilayets of Erzurum, Trabzon, Van and Bitlis to Armenia, the Allied powers took the decisive step of removing from Turkish rule lands which had constituted the national home of the Armenian people since the dawn of history: lands where they lived from biblical times and for indisputably longer than the Turkish people had been in Anatolia. The Treaty was particularly significant because it acknowledged, at a time when these lands were completely and cruelly depopulated of their native inhabitants, their ownership by the Armenian people.
P.239: Reverend F.B. Mayer, a member of the British Armenia Committee, reported in December 1919 that the Council of the Free Churches had issued to 1.000 of their branches a resolution in support of the claims of Armenia, which they were asked to pass and send to the government.
P.240: The signatories were convinced that the claims of Indian Mohammedans were being used to paralyze action of Britain. It was the Archbishop of Canterbury, however, who, on the eve of the Conference of Lausanne, wrote an exceptionally strong worded letter to Bonar Law, the Prime Minister, claiming to express, together with his own views, those of the Church and of the thoughtfulpeople of the country. He wished, however, to say to the Prime Minister, how widespread among earnest and thoughtful people in England and Scotland would be the sense of unutterable shame were to be announced that Britain was ignoring solemn pledges and leaving great Christian populations to the swords of merciless foe.
P.241: It stated that the question of protecting Christians under Turkish rule had been profoundly modified in that the Turks had practically eliminatedthe Christian elements in Turkey. According to recent American reports there were now practically no Armenians left in Turkish Armenia nor Greeks on the coast of the Black Sea. So, the elaborate minorities provisions of the Treaty of Sevres would be pointless in any new peace treaty with Turkey. The Archbishop should also realize that the British government were not free agents in this matter. They were dependent on the support of their Allies. But the practicability of the safety zonein Cilicia depended on the provision of American financial aid and especially the consent of France to remain in this region. In 1920 the French had suffered some reverses in Cilicia at the hands of the Kemalists and in the summer of 1921 they made it clear that they might withdraw. Replying to T.P. OConnor, Aristide Briand, the Prime Minister, expressed the inability of France to spend financial or military resources on the protection of the Armenians.
P.243: On 26 November 1921, Bishop Toregom in Egypt cabled that the French authorities in Syria and British authorities in Palestine, Egypt and Cyprus were refusing to accept the Armenian refugees. The British government now stated that they could not affordto give the Armenians an asylum in British territory. British government had made public and repeated promises to the Armenians during the war that they would be delivered from Turkish rule.
The government, however, thought otherwise. It believed it was a practical impossibility to accommodate the refugees in Cyprus, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, and there was no money to defray the very heavy expenses of maintenance.
P.244: But these British authorities were naturally not happy at all that they alone should care for over 50,000 refugees at Bakuba camp near Baghdad. The Archbishop of Canterbury asked for the practical, strong, and substantial aid of the Americans for sharing responsibilities towards these Eastern Christians and solving their problems.
P.245: On 11 August 1920 the Arabs of the region had rebelled and had taken control of Bakuba, which, however, later been recaptured by the British. The Armenians had to go to Nahr-Umar camp near Basra and the Assyrians to Mosul.
In December 1920, however, the Armenian republic in the Caucasus had collapsed. It could not possibly be considered the fault of the refugees that they had remained a burden on the shoulders of the British taxpayer.
(K)ANATOLIAN SUITE Kildare Dobbs Little Brown & Co. Canada ISBN 0316-18779-8
P.198: The cow dung fuel was called tezek. Curzon, present as a member of an international boundary commission charged with delineating the borders of Ottoman and Persian authorities, was tremendously amused by the idea of tezek.
There are Armenians, he wrote, who are knowing in tezek.- From prolonged mingling with Ottoman officials and potentates, Curzon caught something of their attitude to the Armenians of the cities. Until early in the nineteenth century, when Russians began the Great Game of imperial expansion toward India, Ottomans had always regarded Armenians as harmless, even useful. But with the Russian menace, it began to strike the Sultans that Armenians and Russians were both Christians. Armenians were a threat no longer to be trusted. And in fact many of them, not unnaturally, did hope to be saved from oppression by the Christian Czar. They had never forgotten their heritage as one of the most ancient peoples on earth, and the first nation to have adopted Christianity.
P.199: Through all their vicissitudes Armenians held fast to their religion, for the most part under the leadership of their Catholics or pope. Incorporated in Byzantium, Armenians became its intellectual and business leaders, supplying also of its best generals and even three dynasties of its Emperors. After the Ottoman conquest, they became, along with Greeks, the bankers, traders, architects and artisans in effect the indispensable middle class elite- of the new empire.-
Curzon, conscious of the Great Game, and his own countrys fear of the Czars designs on India, feared urban Armenians as part of an international conspiracy. The influence of the Catholics in furthering Russias expansionist ambitions seemed to him sinister, spread through patriarchs, bishops and deacons through the Ottoman world.
(M) The Ottoman Centuries Lord Kinross, Morrow Quill Paperback, NY 1977 - ISBN 0-688-08093-6
P.556: But this time it was thwarted from within their own ranks by Bismarck, who expressed readiness to cooperate with the British on any issue except that of pressing Armenian reforms on the Sultan. This was a refusal to which Gladstone deferred. The Armenians themselves tried in vain to achieve measures of reform by peaceful means, making it clear to the Turks that they sought no political autonomy but only personal security. They declared that they had no wish to pass under the rule of the Russians, who in any event did not encourage them to do so. For they were seeking to impose the Russian Orthodox faith on their own Armenians subjects, and so to neutralize their national consciousness. Thus for the remainder of the decade the condition of the Armenians continued to worsen, at the hands of their predatory Moslem neighbors and the Sultans hostile government.
Clearly the time had come now come for the Armenians in Turkey to organize themselves on some kind of political basis. They began to form local nationalist groups in sec ret societies, gaining an impetus from their fellow Armenians in Russia, mainly in the Caucasus, whose concept of revolution, at once socialist and anarchist, were well in advance of their own. Soon they were spreading across the frontier to such centers as Erzurum and Van, with the aim of rousing Turkish Armenians to defense their natural homeland. In 1881 an organization named Protectors of the Fatherland was thus formed in Erzurum. Its object was to defend the Armenian population against the Kurds and Turks and its revolutionary motto was liberty or Death. The first effective Armenian political party, founded in Van in 1885, was that of the Armenians, whose ideas were spread through liberal channels abroad, leading to the formation in London of the Armenian Patriotic Society of Europe. Their explicit objective was to win for the Armenians the right to rule over themselves, through revolution. But their outlook was over moderate and they still relied, somewhat ingeniously, on the great powers to further their aims. In 1887 a more ruthless organization was formed by Armenian émigrés, on Marxist lines, in Geneva. Developing into the first revolutionary socialist party in the Ottoman Empire, its objective was the establishment through revolution of a unified Armenian socialist state, carved out of Turkish territory. Its mouthpiece was a journal, published abroad, named Hunchak, or Bell, which gave the party its resounding name. The Hunchaks were an international movement with widespread links in the capitals of Europe, together with agents as far a field as America.
(N)from EMPIRES of the SAND Efraim & Inari Karsh, ISBN 0-674-00541-4 Harvard Univ. Press
P.73: If Britain was not willing to read the writing on the wall, Russia would have to save the Ottomans from the French on his own. Rattling his saber, the tsar mobilized two army corps and sent his special envoy Prince Alexander Menshikov to Istanbul to undo the Catholic gains and better still, to extract a formal agreement placing the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire under a Russian protectorate. The Porte, buoyed by the British position, informed Menshikov of its readiness to make some minor concessions as a token of goodwill, but rule out any formal recognition of a Russian protectorate over the Ottoman Orthodox. On May 21, 1853 he left empty-handed.
P.151: As a result of Russian agitation, European and American missionary work, and not the least, the nationalist revival in the Balkans, a surge of national consciousness within the three Armenian religious communities, Gregorian, Catholic and Protestant, began to take root, In the 1870s Armenian secret societies sprang at home and abroad developing gradually into militant nationalist groups such as the Hunchakian and the Dashnaksutiun. Uprising against Ottoman rule erupted time and again; terrorism became a common phenomenon, both against Turks and noncompliant fellow Armenians, Nationalists pleaded with the 1878 Berlin Treaty which had obliged the Porte to undertake improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhibited by the Armenians and to guarantee their security against the Circassians and Kurds. By 1903 a vicious circle of escalating violence was under way yet again and rebels engaged in dialogues with Ottoman exiles on joint measures to overthrow the sultan, On July 21, 1905, during the Friday prayers, Abdulhamid narrowly escaped as assassination attempt by a group of nationalists.
(P) From: PARIS 1919 Margaret Macmillan, Random House New York ISBN0-375-76052-0
P.351: (Venizelos) had bravely allowed British and French troops to land at Salonika, when Greece was still neutral; he had spent millions that Greece could not afford on the military; and Greek troops had not fought in the war but had gone off to help Allied anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. He pointed out that Greeks was not asking for Constantinople. He complimented Italians and made flattering references to the work of American teachers in his part of the world.
P.355: To Venizelos Lloyd George was like an Old Testament Prophet, with splendid capacities and clear insight of people and events ; to Lloyd George, his counterparts was a big man, a very big man. Greek troops were fighting with the French against the Bolsheviks. The Americans were sympathetic; the Italians were his only major worry. Wilson asked minor clarification on Turkishatrocities, Clemenceau said virtually nothing.
P.375: The peacekeepers did not get around to the Ottoman empire until January 30, 1919 and then it was only in the course of that difficult discussion over mandates for the former German colonies. Lloyd George who had spent the previous week bringing the Americans and his recalcitrant dominions to agreement, mentioned the Ottoman empire briefly as an example of where mandates were needed. Because the Turks had been so bad at governing their subject peoples, they should lose control of all their Arab territories Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Arabia itself. Since the Arabs were civilized but not yet organized, they would need outside guidance. The Ottomans also ought to lose territory on their northeast frontier. They had behaved appallingly to the Armenians, and clearly and clearly an Armenian state should come into existence, there might have to be Kurdistan, south of Armenia. Lloyd George hoped that Wilson would take a hint and offer the United States as the mandatory power at least for Armenia and the straits. However, the Americans had not clearly established a clear position on the Ottoman empire beyond an antipathy toward the Turks. American Protestant missionaries, who had been active in Ottoman Turkey since the 1820s, had painted a dismal picture for a bankrupt regime.
P.376: Much of their work had been among the Armenians, so they had reported at first hand the massacres during the war. Back in the United States large sums of money had been raised for Armenian relief. House had cheerfully chatted with the British about ways of carving up the Ottoman empire, and Wilson had certainly considered its complete disappearance. The United States had never declared war on the Ottoman empire, which put it in a tricky position when it came to determining the empires fate. The only one of Wilsons Fourteen Points that dealt with it was ambiguous: The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development. What were the Turkish portions ? Who should have autonomous development? The Arabs? The Armenians? The Kurds? The scattered Greek communities?
Before the Peace Conference started it was generally assumed that, at the very least, the United States would take a mandate for Armenia and the straits. Not every was pleased. British admirals, having got rid of the Russian menace, did not want to see a strong United States at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. India Office was also concerned. Mehmet VI was not only the Ottoman Sultan but also the caliph, the nearest thing to a spiritual leader for all Muslims.
P.377: On Feb. 26, the appearance of an Armenian delegation before the Supreme Council briefly reminded the peacemakers that the Ottoman empire remained to be settled. Boghos Nubar Pasha was smooth, rich and cultivated: his father had been prime ministering Egypt. His partner Avetis Aharonian, was tough, cynical poet from the Caucasus. Boghos spoke for the Armenian Diaspora, Aharonian for the homeland in the mountains where Russia, Persia, and Turkey met. In what was by now a familiar pattern they appealed to history the centuries that Armenians had lived there, the persistence of Armenian Christianity to their services to the Allies (some Armenians had fought in Russias armies) and to Allied promises. And, like other delegations, they also staked out a claim for a huge area of land, stretching south, and west from the Caucasus down to the Mediterranean, They placed their hopes on United States. Scarcely a day passed, said an American expert, the mournful Armenians, bearded and black clad, did not besiege the American delegation or, less frequently, the President, setting for the really terrible conditions in their own native land.
P.384: Curiously, Picot and Sykes managed to work well together, Their plan, which was approved by their respective governments in May, 1916, was reasonable enough, if you were a Western imperialist. The Syrian Coast, much of todays Lebanon, was to go to France, while Britain would take direct control over Mesopotamia, around Baghdad, and the southern part around Basra. Palestine, a thorny issue because of the intense interest of the other Christian powers (Russia in particular), would have an international administration. Almost as soon as the deal was made, the British nevertheless began to regret it.Would it not be wiser to control Palestine, so close to the Suez Canal, directly? This was much urged by British officials in Egypt, Why should the French get Mosul? When Russia dropped out of the war in 1917, it suddenly seemed less essential to have France as a buffer. In France, a heterogeneous colonialist lobby fabric manufacturers in Lyon, who wanted Syrian silk; the Chamber of Automobile Manufacturers, who noted that Mosul was a wonderful country for driving, Jesuit priests, whose order ran a university in Beirut; the financiers, officials and intellectuals in the Committee des lAsie Francasie urged their government to stand firm.
P.385: The British position hardened. The Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet, set up in 1918 to work out British policy in the Middle East, returned repeatedly to the need to contain their ally. If France got Palestine and Syria, Britain, according to Curzon, the committees chairman and moving spirit, would be obliged to keep a large force in Egypt to protect the Suez Canal and the vital route to India. Even before the French realized this, British actions aroused their suspicions. French Catholics had been dismayed when British forces under General Allenby swept the Turks out of Jerusalem just before Christmas 1917. The Protestant perilwas taking over the Holy Land. When Picot rushed to Palestine to try to protect French interests, he found Allenby and his staff uncooperative. In the summer of 1918, as the last great German offensive battered the Western Front and the British prepared another major offensive into Syria, the Quai dOrsay warned that the French public opinion would not accept that France be deprived of benefits which were rightfully hers by those who diverted their troops at the crucial moment.
P.428: Britain and France grudgingly conceded a bigger share of the Turkish territories. Lloyd George said sharply to Sonino, You want us to do the work and hand it over to you at the end of the war. Italians dismissed it as empty Hellenic megalomania. They pointed out to Italys need for raw materials (the coal mines at Eregli) or Heraclium...Italy would protect Christians generally and Italian settlers in particular would civilize the Turks.
P.432: Wilson was torn between his wish to act within the letter of the law and his distaste for the Italians. In the end he supported the occupation, which was scheduled for May 15. The whole thing, wrote Henry Wilson, the British military expert is mad and bad. The Orthodox bishop stood ready to bless the soldiers. The blue-and-white flag of Greece flew everywhere. Greek soldiers started firing wildly and when Turkish soldiers stumbled out of the barracks to surrender, the Greeks beat them and prodded them along toward the waterfront with bayonets.
P.494: The peacemakers, however, had to deal with reality, not what might have been. They grappled with huge and difficult questions. How can the irrational passions of nationalism or religion be contained before they do more damage? How can we outlaw war? We are still asking those questions !
(Q) Excerpts from old NAT.GEOGRAPHIC Magazines Turks, Armenians, etc.
P.330: The Armenians export silk and cotton, hides and leather, wine, dried fruits, raisins, tobacco, drugs, and dyestuff. In minerals too the country is rich. Coal, silver, copper, iron, and other minerals lie beneath the surface, but the Turkish government has not allowed them to be exploited. James Bryce thus speaks of the land: Here is a country blest with every gift of Nature; a fertile soil,possessing every variety of exposure and situation; a mild and equable climate; mines of iron, copper, silver and coal in the mountains; a land of exquisite beauty, which was once studded with flourishing cities and filled by an industrious population. But now from the Euphrates to the Bosphorus all is silence, poverty, and despair. There is hardly a sail on the sea, hardly a village on the shores, hardly a road which commerce can pass into the interior. You ask the cause and receive from every one the same answer misgovernment or rather no government; the existence of a power which does nothing for its subjects, but stands in the way when there is a chance of their doing something for themselves. The mines, for instance, cannot be worked without a concession from Constantinople.
Armenian feels behind him this vast antiquity, giving him personal dignity and great national pride. They begin their history with the Garden of Eden, which they claim was in Armenia, basing the claim on the naïve statement that the land is beautiful enough to have included Paradise, and also laughingly asserting that the apples of Armenia were worthy to tempt a most Epicurean Eve. Their first recorded ancestors they find in the book of Genesis.
P.347: The Ottoman Empire was organized into millets, a religious division. There being an Orthodox millet, and a Gregorian millet, a Catholic millet, and in the nineteenth century a Protestant millet. Each of these millets has its head, who is its representative or ambassador at the Porte. This is not a purely ecclesiastical position, like that of the Catholics, but is really a diplomatic and political office, and the demands intellectual rather than spiritual qualification. Therefore that patriarch of the Armenians is not necessarily nor by any means always a religious man, although an occasional patriarch like Ismirlian, is worth of great reverence. It is in this entanglement with politics, and its ancient ritual in dead language that lie the dangers to the Gregorian church, namely formality and lack of application to daily living. One of the best things that Protestant missionaries have accomplished in Turkey is rectifying this ancient and noble institution. It will be readily seen that when an Armenian leaves the Gregorian to join aCatholic or Protestant Church, he in some sense loses touch with his nation, for nation or millet and church are practically one in Turkey. For this reason, if no other, all missionary work within the church is better than that done outside. Turkey governed very well, as governments went, in the first centuries of her rule, and Armenians were not unhappy. They were not admitted to the army, but paid a head tax instead; but many of their men, cleverer than the Turk in finance, became advisers to royalty. The Armenians formed a body of industrious farmers in Asia Minor and were useful business men in the coast cities, where they won respect and envy. There is little, if any, racial antagonism between Armenian and Turks, Had religion and politics never come to antagonize them, they could live together in essential harmony.
(R) from PROTESTANT DIPLOMACY AND THE NEAR EAST Joseph L. Grabill, ISBN 0816605750 Univ. of
Minnesota Press 1991
P.35: Mission blending of society and religion helped Protestant emissaries become important in Ottoman-American relations. Missionaries disavowed union of Church and State but not of Christianity and culture. Since they dealt with the latter dichotomy so little, they were ill-prepared to cope with upheavals in the Empire which inextricably combined politics and religion. When upsets became large in the 1890s, missionaries were then the main interest of the U.S. government in Turkey. Other interests, concerned tourists, academicians, merchants and naturalized Americans. There were diplomatic exchanges not directly concerning the American religionists in the two decades before 1914. But nothing during that period was larger in Turkish-American affairs than the missionaries and their difficulties. - Itdid not seem in 1810 that missionaries were to become ascendant for Yankee traders then dominated relations between the Western republic and the Ottoman Empire.
P.36: In the span from 1811 to 1820 around eighty American ships stopped at Smyrna, sellingcotton goods, tobacco, gunpowder, bread-stuffs, and rum (the last being the most important item). In return, American merchants picked up such Turkish exports as nuts, silver, raw wool, and hides, and participated more and more in the opium trade betweenthe Near East and China. After 1815, U.S. government sought to assist commerce through a naval squadron in the Mediterranean, based at Minorca. During the 1820s Henry Clay of Kentucky, who favored the Greek drive for independence from the Ottoman Empire, thundered in the House of Representatives against pro-Turkish attitude of commercial circles in the U.S.: A wretched invoice of figs and opium has been spread before us to repress our sensibilities and eradicate our humanity. Throughout the Greek war American opinion was divided between merchants who longed the enlarged trade with Turkey on the one hand, and agrarian and missionary interests, which saw a vindication of Christianity and of Americas self-determination in the Greek rebellion on the other. President James Moore in 1823 came close to recognition of Greek independence. But the U.S. government remained aloof while commerce with the Ottoman Empire expanded. The chief merchant at Smyrna, David Offley, after 1811 led these (Yankee) businessmen. Offleys Philadelphia firm controlled about 30% of the goods exchanged there.
New England was remote and unimaginable to the Sultan. As it was to a later shah of Persia who ordered the preparation of camels for a trip to the White House and sent a man to a London bazaarto discover the caravan route to the U.S. Turkey in the early nineteenth century felt no need for formal communication with the U.S., especially since its ships did not touch there and its Greek minority handled most of the transactions atSmyrna. The most the Porte wanted from America was naval aid
P.37: Negotiations in 1830 produced a treaty of commerce and amity, including most-favored-nation clause, and assurances that American individuals would privately assist in rebuilding the Turkish fleet. Consent to the treaty by the U.S. Senate came a year later. Missionaries and traders alike profited from capitulatory rights traditional exemptions for Westerners from Ottoman jurisdiction. The 1830s and 1840s were the heyday of a U.S. outreach guided by people other than those of the American Board. American trade and export of technical know-how declined after 1850, hurried by high tariffs passed by the U.S. Congress, lack of governmental interest in the Ottoman Empire, British competition, European imperialism, and other factors. Business concerns opened the American Chamber of Commerce for the Near East in 1911. But economic and technical commitments by U.S. were non-existent compared with Germans Berlin to Baghdad railway and with British, French, Italian, and Russian investments.
P.38: Prominent U.S. firms operating in Turkey were the AmericanTobacco Co., the Standard Oil Co of New York (Socony), the Singer Sewing Machine Co. (with about 200 agencies and stores) and the Western Electric Co. of Chicago. Alongside the Protestant establishment were various Americans, all curious about the physical habitat that nurtured the Christian Scriptures and the Arabian Nights (Missionaries were the chief sources of information about the non-Western world for decades after American Oriental Societys founding in Boston in 1842.. The work of both of Robinson and Smith and of the Society spurred the appearance of archaeologists, explorers and biblical scholars in the Holy Land. By 1900 such people had founded the American School of Oriental Research at Jerusalem.
P.39: The cumulative effect of missionary andother writings in the U.S. was both an enlarged store of knowledge and a
romantic perception of the Near East. While Americans wrote, their diplomatic representatives in Turkey had little to do
but seek protection of nationals. Most of these nationals were evangelists, educators, returned emigrants and tourists.
The earliest charge daffaires, then minister resident was David Porters, in Constantinople from 1831 to 1843. - Historian
John A. DeNovo has remarked that the White Houses representatives were so relaxed that such missionaries as George
Washington of Robert College and Howard Bliss of the Syrian Protestant College often felt they had become do-it-
yourself diplomats. Washburn and Bliss directly dealt with British officials in Turkey as well as with local administrates.
Troubles around the turn of the century prodded Washington to give the Constantinople officer ambassadorial rank in
1906 and to organize the Division of Near Eastern Affairs within the State Department three years later. Secretary of
State Daniel Webster in the 1840s voiced sympathy for defending Protestant individuals and institutions. Americans kept
pressing for new exemptions from Ottoman law, although such attempts caused resentment among Turks. Only once was
there an extension the Porte revoked this concession in 1884.
P.40:(In 1914 there were some thirty thousand, mostly Armenian and Arab Americans). Turkish Government protested that these people took unfair advantage of their adoptive citizenship. Partly to serve such people, but more because of mission pressure, United States consuls come to reside at Halab, Iskenderun, Baghdad, Beirut, Erzurum, Harput, Jerusalem, Mersin, Sivas, Smyrna and Trabzon. Occasionally missionaries influenced the choice of a council or vice-council or took the latter office themselves. - At no time did the Protestants from America became agents of the State Department, even though other Western missionaries in Turkey sometimes used capitulatory rights to advance their nations imperial interests. Discomfort for missionaries intensified when in the 1880s Sultan Abdul Hamid the Second harassed their schools, occasionally closing them. Often French and Russian agents encouraged measures against American learning centers, because these agents told Ottoman officials the centers had political object.
P.41 : In exasperation, the American Board in 1885 asked the President use the U.S. Navy to help protect missions in the Empire. Only joint American-British complaints prevented disruption of schools. Fearing an insurrection among Christian minorities, Ottoman leaders became neurotic about American colleges which had an Armenian clientele. The student body of Anatolia College in 1893 included ninety-four Armenians, twenty-three Greeks and three Turks. Among the teachers Turks claimed there were two members of an Armenian revolutionary organization who had posted at the school treasonable placards printed on a college duplicator. Turks charged the two Anatolia teachers with treason and condemned them to death; officials also arrested and executed several Merzifon Armenians. Pardoned and exiled because of pleas by British and American diplomats, the two Anatolia College teachers symbolized the growing import of missionaries in Ottoman-Americanrelations. The U.S. Government asked for indemnities from the Porte for mission losses by fire in 1892 and 1893. The Sultan paid $ 2.200 for damage at Anatolia college. Then came terror for the Armenians. Frustrated by small revolutionary Armenian groups,Abdul Hamid promised booty to nomadic Kurds who would pillage Armenians. The Sultan in autumn 1894 also ordered Turkish soldiers to murder Armenians at Sassun West of Lake Van. About 10 % of the casualties were Protestants
P.42: The terror of 1895 and 1896 spurred thousands of Armenians to emigrate to the U.S. where they later helped their government to take an active interest in the diplomacy dismembering the Ottoman Empire. The trickle of 2.000 Armenian immigrants into U.S. before 1895 had become a gush of 20.000 by 1914. The Protestant Armenian church in Harput in 1 year alone lost 25% of its 3.000 constituents as immigrants.
The fury of the Sultan and the Turks hit not only Armenians directly, but the American Board. Beside decimating and scattering Armenian Protestants, the turmoil endangered missionary lives when in November 1895 Turks destroyed thousands of dollars worth of Board property at Harput and Marash. Missionaries soon helped organize relief for thousands of Armenian orphans and widows. A clergyman from a missionary family, Frederick D. Greene, became secretary of the National Armenian Relief Committee. Missionary son Edwin M. Bliss (also assistant editor of the Independent), with assistance from Cyrus Hamlin, wrote a book on the history of the Armenian question and on the killings. Bliss described the relief movement in the United States: Armenian Sundays were observed by many churches; collections were taken in churches, Sunday-schools, colleges, societies and mass meetings: journals opened their columns for relief subscriptions; individuals collected funds privately; Armenians throughout the country contributed from their slender resources; and the money was forwarded promptly to the field. Red Cross and American Board personnel administered aid at missions stations, and the colleges throughout Asia Minor and eventually established orphanages and homes for widows which taught carpentry, tinsmithing, baking, lace making and silk culture.
P.43: U.S. Senator Shelby M. Cullom of Illinois introduced a resolution about the Ottoman Empire in Congress. The Cullom Resolution invited the President to ask European powers to stay the hand of fanaticism and lawless violenceagainst unoffending Armenians, and promised congressional support for the President in the most vigorous action he may take for the protection and security of American citizens in Turkey, and to obtain redress for injuries committed upon the persons or property of such citizens. Persuading the chamber to approve his measure, Cullom helped start what became overly pro-Armenian sentiment in public consideration of the Ottoman Empire. - The heart of all Christendom is stirred to its very depths as it witnesses the piteous pleas of the suffering Armenians beseeching the Christian world to give them protection. Cullom's style indicated images of public opinion and the imaginable environment within which the government then, and in the years ahead, developed policy toward the Ottoman Empire. The ideas of Cullom were like those of the Protestant relief propagandists. A cartoon distributed by missionaries and their associates, showed Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany congratulating Abdul Hamid as they both stand over an Ottoman map strewn with Armenian skulls and bones.
P.44: Miss Willard claimed Armenians physically resembled our Lordmore than any other race, were brave, chaste, simple in faith like New Testament Christians, earnest, unarmed, pastoral, peaceful. She castigated Turks as cruel, vindictive, insane, fanatical, wolfish, detestable, savage, torturing Armenians as could hardly have been excelled if the bottomless pit had vomited forth its leading spirits to urge the battle on. What was the outcome of the Cullom Resolution? President Cleveland dispatched to Turkish waters the cruisers San Francisco and Marblehead. He resisted mission pleadings, as in a public letter of Cyrus Hamlin, for aggressive gunboat diplomacy. The 86 year old Hamlin having missionary children and grandchildren in Turkey, thought a show of American force would stop both the massacres and the attempt of Abdul Hamid to expel the Protestants and destroy their property. The U.S. government asked the Sultan for an indemnity of around $ 90.000 for damage to mission property. The Sultan felt that U.S. schools were a factor behind Armenian disloyalty, a notion that American Minister Alexander W. Terrell allegedly reinforced when he accused the missionaries of fomenting rebellion. The reparation issue escalated into a matter of U.S. national interest, meriting mention in a presidential message to Congress.
P.45: McKinleys concern for the indemnity developed in part because Secretary of State John Hay was a cousin of George Washburn, influential president of Robert College. A British ambassador to the Porte was known to give new members of the diplomatic corps in Constantinople a single piece of advice: Cultivate Dr. Washburn. Urged by this missionary educator, Americans in the U.S. legation at the Ottoman capital persuaded the commander of the Kentucky, a U.S. vessel passing through the Mediterranean in 1900, to bring his ship to Constantinople. - The Empire finally paid the sum in 1901.
In addition to the Hay-Washburn relation, there was another mission tie with an American official which after the events of the e 1890s assisted missionary interests. This association had begun as a boyhood friendship between Howard Bliss of the Syrian Protestant College and Theodore Roosevelt. A bombastic should who deplored the Armenian massacres, Roosevelt declared in 1909: Spain and Turkey are the two powers I would rather smash than any in the world.
P.46: During the Italian-Turkish War of 1911 and 1912 the White House toyed with an offer of mediation, partly because the American Board and several U.S. peacesocieties asked for this step. The President abstained.
One writer has summarized relations between Washington and Constantinople: It should not be understood that the missionaries exploited American diplomacy or that American diplomacy exploited the missionaries.
P.47: ...and despoiling of American Board compounds showed a mission relation to nationalism among minorities in the Near East. Protestant organizations were among private groups in the Ottoman Empire facilitating identity not only among Armenians but also among Arabs, Bulgarians and Albanians. During the first Word War these ties between Americans and minorities would help draws the U.S. into considerations of which countries would gain the lands of the Empire. It appears that the religionists neither endorsed intrigue by Armenians, nor preached political revolt. There is evidence that Armenian extremists held it against the missionaries that they refrained overtly... supporting the movement for the Armenian independence.
The missionaries contribution to violence was insensitivity toward the possible results of their attention to Armenians instead of Turks. Missionaries apparently did not expect that invigoration of the Armenian-Turkish language by a modern bible translation and maintenance of many schools among Armenians would encourage nationalism. American Board members neglected their indirect livening of the conflict. Instead they cried out against Ottoman injustice, and gave the Turks a terrible reputation in the U.S. The Ottoman ambassador to Washington, Ahmet Rustem, remonstrated against oversimplification of his nations affairs: Turkey has been the object of systematic attacks on the part of the press of U.S She is represented as being a sink of iniquity. Missionaries did not understand that they were expecting the Porte to react benignly as they trained an Armenian minority in literacy and professions a minority which included people who spoke of independence. The American Protestants did not imagine how they might behaved if for several decades in their homeland a foreign educational system directed by Muslims had devoted itself to, say, Afro-Americans, with the result that the black Islamic minority became more proficient than the majority of white Americans. Regarding the troubles of 1894 to 1896, George White of Anatolia admitted that the missionaries at Merzifon were intensely. Interested spectators and friends of the Armenian cause. But White believed they were not at all actors on the stage.
P.48: White took them food during the year they were in prison. He apparently did not perceive how removing a single revolutionary from a closet did not appear to Turks adequate to show impartiality in Turkish-Armenian tension, especially when compared to Whites general preoccupation with teaching Armenians and his regular visits to jailed Armenian students. At Central Turkey College in Aintab, the thirty faculty members had trouble in 1909 with a secret Armenian revolutionary society among two hundred male students (almost exclusively Gregorian and Protestant Armenians). - The Turks leniently treated the Armenians, who became the favorite non-Muslin minority in the Ottoman government. The creation of a Tsarist Armenia intensified humiliation among the separated Russian and Turkish Armenians. The Treaty of Berlin made a token statement on behalf of the Armenians, who incorrectly interpreted this comment as a commitment to their freedom. Russia wanted to absorb the Armenians. Britain had a limited interest in an independent Armenia, which would be both inaccessible and peripheral to the route to India. The Treaty of Berlin stimulated nationalism among Russian and Turkish Armenians without Western guarantees of aid, and upped the jitters among Turks without controls on Ottoman hostility.
P.58: Forces released in the Western balance of power helped begin hostilities between the Turks and the Armenians and Arabs, and also begin unprecedented trouble for the Protestants. The American Protestants at first were not certain what to do. Their reaction blended many aspects of diversified mission behavior of 1914: evangelistic and ethnocentric zeal (as represented by the slogan Christianize the nations), theological flexibility, active humanitarianism, and readiness to use government aid for Protestant ends.
P.60: American missions were not critically disturbed until Enver in April 1915 launched an assault near the city of Van against Turkish Armenians whom he considered treacherous. Van was a center of Armenianism in the Empire (60% of its 50.000 people were Armenians) and the locationof both a strong evangelical organization and the Protestant school, American College. Envers brother-in-law Jevdet bey on April 16 murdered some individuals in an Armenian delegation from Van calling him to reaffirm loyalty. Led by the Dashnaks, about fifteen hundred Armenian men (many of whom had pledged allegiance to the Ottoman government) prepared to defend themselves and approximately thirty thousand members of their ethnic group in the walled Armenian Quarter. Within a few days an incident set off exchanges of rifle and cannon fire between Turks and Armenians. At the same time, Jevdets troops began razing twenty nearby Armenian villages and killing many of their inhabitants. For several weeks the besieged Armenians in Van, possessing a few hundredrifles, withstood Turkish bombardment. The eleven missionaries there, including Clarence Ussher and Ernst A. Yarrow, ministered casualties. Ussher, the only physician in the city, worked from down until midnight with Armenians. Two missionary nurses served the wounded among Jevdets soldiers at a Turkish hospital. Thousands of Armenians found refuge in the American Board compound, located next to the quarter. Missionaries and Armenians sent messages to Russia for aid. As the Tsars forces and Russian-Armenian volunteers neared Van the second week in May, Turkish shells fell into mission premises almost incessantly for one day, turning many buildings into rubble. The Turks fled. Next, Armenians burned and murdered: the spirit of loot took possession of them. Soon Turkish civilians found shelter and medical treatment in the American Board compound. By August 1915 the Russians had retreated toward Tiflis, with Americans and Armenians joining the exodus. Amid epidemics in this awful withdrawal, Mrs. Ussher and another missionary wife died. Ussher himself barely survived successive cases of typhus, pneumonia, and dysentery; Yarrow nearly succumbed also.
P.62: The young man tried to kill at least one Turk before death; he then committed suicide. Using this incident toy charge foreigners from the United States with Armenianism, the Turks drove out the Western religionists as well as bereaved women. This expulsion marked the end of American internationalism among Armenians in Bitlis. Why such a Turkish retribution? Large causes had to do with the millet system, scrambled ethnic groups, cultural lag, and Western interference.
P.63: There is evidence that some Turkish Armenians became Allied agent. But Van Armenians were not guilty of plotting an uprising against the government. Extermination possibly would not have reached the proportions it did if the Allied armies bound up in the Dardanelles unable to intervene By early 1916 enormous casualties had been counted among the Armenians, including the missionary constituency, the Evangelical Armenian Church.
P.64: After the British at last withdrew their troops from Gallipoli early in 1916, and McMahon promised ambiguous freedom for the Arabs, Hussein in June of the same year declared war on his surprised Turkish overlords. Helped by T.E.Lawrence of the British Army, Feisal gave direction to the Arab revolt and by December 1916 his men occupied much of the western Arabia. The Arab uprising and the Armenian holocaust brought calamity and massive surge of anguish upon Protestants in the Near East. Cataclysm was the portion of the American Board, whose investments in the Turkish Empire of about twenty million dollars in property and one hundred fifty staff members had fallen by December 1915 to about half of the financialvalue and personnel. Quite a few missionaries had died in epidemics. Many of the Americans became intensely and righteously determined to salvage as much as they could from a centurys labor, wanting to succor the Armenian remnant and to say Amen to punishment of the Turk.
P.65: Liaison between Morgenthau and the missionaries was not new. When in November 1913 he first arrived in the Empire, he had expected the Protestants to be sectarian and narrow. He discovered otherwise. A gregarious, self-confidentDemocrat, Morgenthau had boundless enthusiasm for public causes. Born in Manheim, Germany, he had emigrated as a child to the United States. Graduating from Columbia College, he went into law and then business and became rich. In the presidential race of1912 he supported Woodrow Wilson and was financial chairman for the campaign. His reward was appointment to Constantinople. Gates, a mission veteran, had come from the Midwest. After studying at Beloit College and the Chicago Theological Seminary, he hadgone to the Turkish Empire for the American Board in 1881 and labored at Mardin. From 1894 to 1902 he was president of Euphrates College in Harput, a school with an Armenian clientele. At one commencement exercise during the period from 1894 to 1896, thestudents of Euphrates College interrupted the reading of a mild Armenophile statement which Gates had sanctioned, shouting: Long Live Armenia.
P.67: Morgenthau, Gates and Peet men of nearly the same age and similar sympathy for Armenians knew thatmuch of the missionary structure in the Empire would fall if the Turks continued to eliminate the minority people. They decided that Washington should be notified of the persecutions, By summer Morgenthau had begun sending regular messages to secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who endorsed remonstrance with the Ottomans and with the German ambassador. At Gatessuggestion Morgenthau worked out a plan for moving Armenians to California. The Young Turks, though quite cold to this notion, were willing to consider it. Morgenthaus pleas had little effect upon the Turks. In one talk with Minister of Marine Djemal Pasha, the latter asked Morgenthau if Armenians were Americans. Realizing Djemal was stating that the domestic situation was none of his business, the ambassador replied that he was a friend of the Armenians, particularly since an old hand in the United States embassy, Arshag K. Schmavonian, was one, Djemal in his memoirs declared that constant intervention by the West in the Empire had caused Turks,Kurds and Armenians mistreat one another. Talaat declared that Young Turks were firm about finishing a job three quarters done, and justified their acts by several charges against the Armenians: the minority people had enriched themselves at the expense of Turks, had sought independence, and had helped the Russians Enver warned Morgenthau against American preference for minorities. This Young Turk felt that if Armenians allied with the enemy, as in the Van district, his government would have to squash them.
P.69: After 1881 the American Red Cross had taken an increasingly important place in complementing the religionists. The government role throughout had been minor, since Congress had appropriated relief funds only once, and Washington infrequently provided naval transport for gifts. Early in the First World War came benevolence for Arabs. When in 1914 the Ottoman authorities in Syria requisitioned food and animals, famine followed, bringing death to many people. Out of this tradition of fund-raisingfor the Near East arose Peets scheme of August 1915. By then thousands had escaped Asia Minor, hurdling to Caucasus, Syria and Mesopotamia where Americans could possibly aid them. An important call which arrived in the United States after the Peet letterwas a confidential cable of September 3 from Morgenthau to the State Department. Enver Pasha has promised the ambassador related,the departure of such Armenians to the United States I vouch as bona fide.Crane turned to Woodrow Wilson and contributed 50.000 Dollars in the 1912 campaign. Wilson then offered the ambassadorship to Russia. Crane refused. Thus Crane, whose one son had become Secretary of the State Lansings personal secretary in May 1915, had several handles on machinery which could help the Armenians. The United States consul in Aleppo currently reported over 150.000 refugees in the area, with hundreds dying daily. The consul recommended 150.000 Dollars a month to meet the needs of that locality alone. The Dodhe Relief Committee proceeded to reinforce in the American mind the image of the unspeakable Turk. During the last two weeks of September 1915 headlines which made all Turks look like ogres appeared under nearly every dateline in New York Times papers and periodicals. Mission Board told of Turkish Horrors, 10.000 Christians Drowned in Trabzon. Women seized for Harems.
P.72: At the Bosphorus. Morgenthau, Gates and Peet continued as an Armenophile triumvirate. The three men could transfer funds from the United States but they did not have approval of the Porte to distribute relief goods. Gates worked on Talaat, and the diplomat on Enver. Both Ottomans hesitated because they felt that large outside help would stimulate rebellion. The Young Turks angrily spurned attempts by the Americans to end the death marches or to plead a special dispensation for Protestant Armenians. Only four of some forty board members of the ACASR board were either Jews or Catholics.
P.73: Barton soon was dominant Board administrator. In the positionof foreign secretary he gave priority to educational missions, becoming perhaps the outstanding American promoter of colleges abroad. He eventually assisted the start of development of twenty interdenominational Christian schools of higher learning in Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, India, Ceylon, China, and Japan, helping them secure over thirty million dollars. In a constant dialogue with the United States government, Barton sought to guard Protestant institutions in Turkey and elsewhere. With Barton as ACASR head, missionaries felt that not all would be lost. After months of dismay, the Protestant to Turkey began to hope again.
During the winter of ACASRs birth in 1915 and 1916, Morgenthau left for home. When he reached New York city the executive committee of the ACASR met him on docks.
P.74: Barton soon got him to speak in Massachusetts and to meet privately with the trustees of the American Board. In Boston the ambassador made nearly ecstatic remarks about the missionaries... In Boston the ambassador made nearly ecstatic remarks about the missionaries, and spoke of his abhorrence of the Turks. Ostensibly, he had come back for a vacation. But he had no intention of returning to the Empire. He desired to assist President Wilsons re-election. Together with Crane, he decided on a Jewish attorney, Abraham I. Elkus, as his successor at the Porte. Wilson approved. The Board secretary wanted to make sure that Elkus was indoctrinated... to defend American institutions to the last. Just before Elkus; departure for Constantinople in August 1916, Barton sponsored a banquet at which representatives of the religious groups in Turkey were present. Satisfied he wrote to Morgenthau: I was very pleased with him and with his outlook to the work. In relations with Peet and Gates during his short-lived eight month tenure at the embassy Elkus lived up to Bartons evaluation. Barton also cultivated the prestigious British, James Bryce, who had known many American Protestants in the Ottoman Empire for decades. Bryce hada wide repute as an attorney, sometime professor of law at Oxford, former member of the House of Commons and several British Cabinets, author of the famous American Commonwealth, and ambassador to United States from 1907 to 1913. The Englishman had gone to climb Ararat in 1876, beginning his fascinations with the Armenians, By 1880 he had concluded that to expect the Turk to respect rights of minorities was useless. He became the principle Armenophile in Britain and founder of an Armenophile society. Bryce felt that the potential revitalizers of Asia Minor. In 1914 he visited Howard Bliss at the Syrian Protestant College; after the Armenian conflagration of 1915, he and Barton corresponded. The Englishman persistently tried in the House of Lords and otherplaces to get British troops into Armenia. To block the Turks. But he always heard that London could not spare soldiers from other areas.
P.78: American missionaries, diplomats and consuls distributed aid; mission properties became relief centers. The following individuals served on the local relief committee in Constantinople: Elkus, Lewis Heck (embassy official),
Gates (RC president), Peet, Luther R. Fowle (Peets assistant) and Elizabeth Huntington (Dodges daughter and staff member at Robert College).
The relief goods went almost entirely to non-Turks. Muslim received about 2% of relief Armenian and Arab Christians obtained most of the rest. Constantinople was allowed 35%, Tiflis 30%, Beirut 13% and Tehran and Persia 20%. Nestorian and Armenian displaced persons in Persia, wards of the Presbyterians, received most of Tehrans share. Favoritism for Christian minorities did not promote goodwill with Muslims, many of whom were destitute and pitiable Barton did not forget the American Board and other Protestant Institutions as he pushed the ACASR. He tried in letter in April 1916 to instill a little more gingerin Secretary of State Lansing, to get security for Americans and the forty million dollars invested over years by the different evangelistic, educational, and medical mission groups in the Ottoman Empire. This gesture was like in autumn 1914 when Protestants commercial interests in Turkey requested warships to deter the Porte from acting against Americans and minorities (soon the North Carolina and the Tennessee were in the eastern Mediterranean). At that time the Committee of Union and Progress formally sought to quiet United States fears, with Enver going so far to enroll his brother and two sons in special classes at Robert College.
P.79: The apprehension of Americans hardly disappeared over the first months of combat, because trade virtually ceased and several mission station closed. In his worry of April 1916 Barton came out in the letter to Lansing with the exaggeration that no country other than the United States has so extensive or long established financial interests in Turkey and the Balkans. In reply, the Secretary of State assured him of protection of persons, not property.
On a sophisticated scale ACASR practiced conditional altruism not like that practiced by one untutored American contributor to the ACASR. This contributor wrote that since sending his gift I have thought I would like to have one of the brightest of the (Armenian) girls about 16 years old to live with me I would make a lady out of hire and when she is at a good age probably merry her. Former ambassador to the Porte, Oscar Straus, had noted as early as December 1914 in an article that mission endeavor in Turkey would be an important factorin the postwar development of the Ottoman Empire. Barton and Dodge wanted a Turkish reconstruction which would advance missions.
P.164: (A play in Bartons game) While Paris deliberated about Syria, the American Committee for Relief in the Near East was achieving considerable financial success in its effort to erect a new Near East. Its campaign to raise thirty million dollars had fallen short. But it distributed good worth nine million dollars in the first half of 1919 and dispensed much of ten million dollars in grain and other commodities. Hoovers American Relief Administration had allocated. Its propaganda increased in sophistication and intensity. The monthly News Bulletin received editorial help from Talcott Williams of Columbia Universitys journalism faculty. The ACRNE sent a team to Turkey to prepare a movie version of Ravished Armenia, the story of Aurora Mordigonian. After conducting previews for prominent figures, the relief group showed the movie at theatres in fifty cities. Announcements portrayed a scantly clad Aurora with hands behind her back, dragged by a stallion. Scenes in the movie included flogging of girls who refused to enter Turkish harems, a nailing of twelve Armenian maidens to crosses, As to ACRNE rallies, ex-President Taft declared in Pittsburgh that the Armenian had made Near East valleys bloom like a rose. Morgenthau (chairman of the ACRNE finance committee) stated elsewhere that unless United States aided Armenians the race will die. A newspaper article with the headline, Wars End No Relief from the Outrage to Armenians and Syrians in Persia, mentioned such phrases as fanatical Muslims, five hundred women forced to accept Islam, and absolutely destitute Christians in most abject misery. A full-page ACRNE advertisement in the New York Times, reprinted from Literary Digest, presented two pictures: the first was four million Armenian and Syrian Christians living in lands made luminous by the footprints of Jesus, the second was Christ-led Americans rescuing needy Near Easterners.
P.165: Meanwhile at the beginning of the Peace Conference, Barton had considered with Colonel House the relation of the ACRNE to the Eastern Question. Seeking a quick commitment by the Supreme Council on the Ottoman Empire, the American Board secretary told House that efficient relief and resettlement of Armenian refugees depended on the Councils conclusion about Turkey. The Barton Relief Commission left early in February 1919 for Constantinople. Dodges business associate, Arthur James, remained in Paris as a liaison; James arranged for the passage of what was eventually several hundred relief workers from France to Turkey. In the Ottoman Empire the Commission received red-carpet treatment. British authorities furnished storage and ordered their troops to guard relief supplies; the French and Italians helped. Americans aided the most. Hoover sent a man to Asia Minor to coordinate the American Relief Administration with ACRNE, especially controlling wheat speculators. Hoover allowed Relief Administration grain to go through the ACNE, particularly for Caucasus. His agency was soon was delivering cereal at the rate of five thousand tons a month. This relief helped make known the American Board it prompted Georgians to ask for missionaries in their nation. The first of three ships provided by the U.S. Navy, the Mercurius, docked in Constantinople on Feb.12 with over a million dollarsworth of goods, including 2.000 tons of flour, 2.500 cases of canned foods, 500 cases of condensed milk, 18 trucks, 20 ambulances, 500 sewing machines, 200 oil stoves, 1.750.000 yards of cloth, 50.000 blankets, 800 hospital cots,26 tents, 78 X-ray machines and 200 tons of coal.
P.167: From the Caucasus such statements as the following went to ACRNE at home: Saw Refugee Women stripping flesh from dead horse with bare hands today... Another week will score ten thousand lives lost. For heavens sake hurry.
Missionary Ernest Yarrow succeeded Main in May 1919 the latter went back to the U.S. Groups similar to the Main contingent went by train or U.S. destroyer to various parts of the Empire,. George Washburn led a party to Konya, Harold Hatch to Samsun, Stanley White and Aaron Teitlebaum to Syria and Palestine. Other leaders took workers to such places as Smyrna, Adana and Bursa. Directed by American Board secretary Barton and accompanied by Caleb Gates and Gates son, a twenty-two-car relief train set out on the Baghdad railway, headed straight into evidences about Armenian massacres. The Protestants on the train discovered that the deported minority of Asia Minor usually had not dared to try to repossess its seized property From Aintab the older Gates winced: We have heard many sad, sad tales here. At Urfa young Moore Gates came up with rather stupefying data: only twelve out of four thousand houses were intact in the Armenian Quarter, no more than five hundred of twenty thousand former inhabitants of the Quarter were left, fewer than five hundred Armenian children were in orphanages there, the Protestant Church building was empty ! This information was fuel for Bartons Armenianism. It heated his conscience; he thought it wrong that no Western armies were occupying Anatolia in 1919 to provide security for Armenian survivors to find their broken houses and start afresh. He therefore left his group at Aleppo to go to Cairo for a few days, where early in April he sought persuade General Allenby to send British regiments into Asia Minor.
P.169: President Gates had left the relief train at Aleppo and retraced his way to Robert College. There he made a speech, called bombshell by one missionary, which warned against hope for a final enlightenment of the Muslim-Christian enigma. Less of an Armenophile and farther-seeing than the ACRNE chairman, Gates felt that any treaty setting up a separate Armenia would be unwise. Unless the Peace Conference regarded Armenian and Turkish disputes within a single frame preferably a mandate by the United States strife between Muslims and Christians would persist, The missionary believed that Turks would adjust to this mandate if the Allies acted quickly. In his last comments Gates said: I have been astonished at the ardor and unanimity with which the peoples of Asia Minor, both Turks and Christians, express their desire for an American protectorate. Gatesevenhandedness so upset Armenian workers at Robert College that they planned a strike. Some Armenians in Constantinople were angry enough to think of seeking Gatesremoval as head of the missionary school. With endorsement from Admiral Bristol, Gates departed the Bosphorus on April 24 to present his view at Paris.
P.170: After the Barton Relief Commission was in Turkey, the Herald editor exuberated: It is the biggest advertisement of particular Christian altruism that the world has ever had. The men that are in it are making a demonstration that will never be blotted out of historys page. Hows that for a rhetoric? Rumor in Paris was that members of the Barton Relief Commission were to be part of the future administration of Turkey. The jests of Strong were not hiding the factor that a unique demonstration of Christian altruism was a play in Bartons game. The American Board leader wanted to get an ace, the Woodrow card, on the Near East table. A poor sign was Bartons own unwillingness to give credence to Turkish as well as Armenian nationalism, as the Robert College head had done in his speech at Constantinople. There was no small irony in that for a period of several days in May 1919, two symbolic individuals Barton, the Wests chief Armenophile, and Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the future father of Turkey were in the Samsun-Sivas region and did not speak with each other. The ACRNE chairman coddled Armenians and scarcely communicated with the leaders of the Turkish ethnic group, by then the overwhelmingly majority people of the Eastern Anatolia.
P.171: Peripatetic Barton had the capability not only to mastermind philanthropy but to compose memoranda and other documents indefatigably. At Paris under Boghos Nubars pleadings, he had given attention to Armenia. Boghos insisted with good intuition, but without success, that he needed Bartons guidance in France. The American Board secretary was the principal person to the mission-relief strategy. While there, he was active for Boghos cause: We have spent much time with the Peace Comm., he wrote. I think we will be able to do a good thing for Armenia. The Supreme Council should put a single mandate, preferably by the United States, over the entire country. \In an article for the Missionary Herald, he remarked that leading Muslims were speaking freely of the United States and not Europe as the ideal: The Turks honor and respect American missionaries, their character, integrity and fairness...They know America only as they have learned through American missionaries. Removed from Gates; counsel by April, Barton in his messages thereafter dropped references to a single mandate for all of Turkey. Fresh from hearing sorrowful stories among the ethnic group to which he had given much of his life, he cabled House and others that the Armenians at once should have a guaranteed independence. He begged for a strong mandate immediately: The Turkish Government is not preventing new atrocities to the Armenians. Bartons intimates in the American Board also advertised a United States role in the Near East. A Missionary Herald editorial in March 1919, said that Turkey, because of Protestant education and humanitarianism there should fall to America.
P.172: The Armenian Missionary Association, a group that the American Board had helped organize in America, resolved the deep appreciation to Barton for his acts on behalf of its countrymen overseas. The Armenian Missionary Association requested the Board to facilitate aspirations of Armenia for independence under United States wing.
The words of Dodge and Williams about an obligation by Washington in the Near East were similar to the contentions of three presidents of mission colleges in Turkey. The president of International College in Smyrna, Alexander MacLachlan, responded to a request from the American Peace Commission for his view on aGreek occupation of Smyrna. Of all the possible solutions of the Near East end of the peace settlement, he wrote, the one proposed is the worst. It cannot fail to be disastrous for both Turkey and Greece. Turkey will never submit to Greek domination. Solong a Greek armed force remains in Asia Minor we who are domiciled here will be doomed to live under bitter war conditions. His analysis could not have been more accurate.
P.173: He believed a healing could come to Turkey if Allied troops would replace Greek and if the Council would end its scheme of sovereignty by Athens over southeastern Anatolia: the country can only be saved from ruin under protection of a British or American mandate. The head of Constantinople Womans College, Marry Patrick, went to French capital at the end of June and there prepared an article imitating the Fourteen Points: Fourteen Reasons for an American Mandatory over Turkey. Point one on the distaff side argued that All the people of the Near East would welcome an American mandatory. Armenians, Greeks, Turks would prefer the United States, Miss Patrick said in her other points, because they felt it would be more democratic than other nations, would promote harmony among ethnic groups, introduce a superior educational system, not exploit the country commercially, and stay forever. The American Committee for the Independence of Armenia (ACIA), the institution whose founding Dodge and Barton had aided late in 1918 neglected all Ottoman peoples except Armenians. In contrast to ACIA, Caleb Gates upheld the unity of Asia Minor and showed a considerable objectivity about minorities there.
P.174: Writing member of the American Peace Commission, he said: I think that the crux of the Near East Question is not the Armenians but the Turks. The attention of the Peace Conference should be centered upon giving the Turks a god government rather than upon delivering the Armenians and Greeks from the Turkish government. Because it will be of little profit to establish an Armenia, more than half of whose people will be Turks, if alongside of this new State there remains a Turkey of the old type... To save the Armenians and the Greeks you must save the Turks also. Wilson read this statement of Gates and said it was interesting and important. In Paris the Robert College president opposed Greek control of Smyrna, broad territorial claims by Armenians, and the International Commission on Mandates in Turkey.
Mark Bristol shared much of Gates outlook. The admiral wrote that the Greeklanding at Smyrna and other factors pointed to the absolute need of combining all of the Ottoman Empire under one mandate. Turks were leaning toward America as a mentor. After trips into Asia Minor, Bristol stated that Greeces possession of Smyrna had antagonized Turks tremendously and would make an Ottoman treaty difficult. Seeking to point out from the Greek abuse of Turks in Smyrna that ethnic peoples in the Near East were alike, Bristol claimed that if someone would put all races in a bag and shake them up you could not predict which one would come out first as being the best one. The admiral disapproved of excessive pro-Greek and pro-Armenian propaganda in the United States. He believed it encouraged an American idea about the Empire which would create a new Balkan mess.
P.175: Henry Morgenthau combined the best views of Bristol, Gates and Barton, Using N INVITATION TO HELP THE International Red Cross as an excuse to get to France, the finance chairman of the ACRNE on the first day of arrival, in March 1919, had conversations with Wilson, House and Hoover. He prepared a memorandum for Wilson: The Future Government of Asia Minor. Morgenthau memorandum advocated that one nation, the United States or else Britain, supervise each of the three mandatesConstantinople, Turkish Anatolia and Armenia. The document included much from the overlapping views about Turkey held by people in or related closely to the Protestant lobby. The paper rejected a totally independent Armenia. It took into account theprediction that such an entity with its mixed population would not easily escape hostilities with Turks. (The ACIA felt that the Morgenthau Memorandums failure to approve unqualified freedom for Armenia was immoral). It was most importantly an unorthodox policy proposal, capitalizing Wilsons prescription of a mandate system for Turkey, overriding the secret treaties, disregarding the Cobb-Lippmann and other explanations of Point Twelve, admitting a long-term U.S. embroilment in the Old World. But the Morgenthau Memorandum had important weaknesses. It came late in the Peace Conference. Further, the American public had little or no conditioning to the idea of a U.S. mandate, an idea which probably required the experience in mission-relief-government coordination developed by Barton during the years since 1915, and the American Board secretary was nearly inaccessible to Paris, having left a command post there for scouting in Asia Minor.
P.176: Perhaps it was mission-minded Prof. Albert Lybyer of the University of Illinois who kept the International Commission from expiring, Lybyer had taught for seven years (until 1906) at Robert College. Partly because of this experience, he had been able to write a book on Turkey, one of the best by Americans on Ottoman affairs. He had been one of the activists in the ACRNE. In Paris since Dec. 1918, a specialist on the Balkans within the U.S. delegation, he had worked with Crane, Bliss, Gates, Barton and Peet for American sponsorship of Armenians and Syrians. He also had contacts with such missionary professors visiting Paris as L.Scipio and Abraham Hagopian of Robert College.
P.177: At one point, Gout (French appointee) accused the American missionaries of using ACRNE philanthropy as a bid for United States territorial control of part of the Ottoman Empire; Lybyer protested moralistically. ...the French intended to have Syria regardless. The fraudulent de Caix Note, accepted as authentic by the U.S. Peace Commission, led the Americans next day to decide that the OttomanEmpire was the great loot of the war and that the International Commission would be senseless. Other voices helping in this capitulation to the old diplomacy were those of the United States Zionists. The Zionists had seen that polling Arabs in Palestinewas not the best way to create sentiment for a Jewish homeland and had been importuning Wilson and House with their anxieties. For years the American Zionist movement had been growing, but its competition with missionary diplomacy had not become clear until the Peace Conference.
P.178: Some U.S. ministers and consuls to Turkey in the late nineteenth century had taken an active interest in Jewish immigration to Palestine. Many American Protestants, like Presbyterian clergyman William Blackstone, had supported Zionism. In 1916 the Presbyterian General Assembly passed a resolution, sponsored by Blackstone, which endorsed Jewish homeland. Wilsons daily Bible reading aided assumption that since Jews and Armenians were people of the Bible they were certain to be reborn politically after the war. In 1919 pro-Arab missionaries like Bliss did not feel the same as Wilson and Blackstone about Zionism. These missionaries sensed the strife inherent between Arab nationalism and Zionism: they were not as much anti-Zionist as pro-Arab. An expert with the British peace delegation, Arnold Toynbee, on Saturday, April 19, stimulated Lybyer's imagination. Toynbee informed him that Lloyd George had selected Henry McMahon (former high commissioner in Egypt), the scholar David Hogarth, and Toynbee himself for the British section of the International Commission.
P.180: The President thereupon wrote Dodge: You need not doubt my advocacy of the utmost autonomy and protection for the Armenians and I am sure you do not. Bartons nine point plan for an integral Armenia under U.S. tutelage, noted above, went to the Peace Commission on January 28th. At Supreme Council sessions two days later, Wilson hinted about a United States duty in Turkey. Lloyd George, influenced by James Bryce and other British Armenophiles, said the duty should be in Armenia. On February 8 the President wrote his Secretary of War, asking if it was legal to dispatch American soldiers to Armenia and Constantinople. He got an affirmative opinion, with the caution that bring-the-boys-home demands were increasing. Then the New York Federation of Churches cabled Wilson asking British or Armenian supervision for the Armenians in Asia Minor. Disembarking in Boston after re crossing the Atlantic, Wilson in a speechof February 24 orated there: Have you thought of the sufferings of Armenia? You poured out your money to help succor the Armenians... Now set your strength so they shall never suffer again. Lodge sympathized with Wilsons view, though he wanted nothing to do with Americas appearing to help what he believed were tyrannical Turks.
P.182: The Supreme Council finally discussed the complicated situation. Lloyd George perceived that the best way to block Italys unilateral moves, was an overall revision of the status of Western troops in Turkey. On May 5 he urged U.S. garrisons for Armenia and Constantinople, French garrisons in Syria, and Greek in Smyrna. His last suggestion came partly of his own Phillhellenism and out of Greek Premier E. Venizelos eloquent misapplication of self-determination to the Greek minority in the Smyrna region. Lloyd George hoped that Athens could become an ally of London and a bulwark against possible Russian expansion. In these discussions Wilson balked. He feared anti-Turkishopinion at home (including that of Senator Lodge) and was unsure of political backing for sending soldiers into Anatolia since his nation had not been a belligerent against the Porte. He was afraid to order the U.S. Army into Turkey, in spite of his Secretary of Wars opinion that such a move would be legal. Indeed, the Terrible Turk picture, mostly developed by the ACRNE, was boomerang. The anti-Turk stereotype was returning to strike the missionariesdesires for American protection at Armenia. Wilson went along with Lloyd Georges wish to have Greeks land regulars at Smyrna; he did not bring into play his earlier private statements against splitting Anatolia. The tired President had an inadequate touch with his experts. They were vociferously against a region around Smyrna under Athens control. Wilson apparently was familiar with missionary Mac Lachlans statement against a Greek occupation, but possibly did not realize that Greece and Turkey had been fratricidal enemies for a century, as Italy and Turkey had not been. To throw Greek liquid on the Italian flame in southwestern Anatolia was to add gasoline rather than water.
P,183: Hearing of Gates; proposal for a unified Asia Minor, Gerard of the ACIA cabled House, irresponsibly charging Gates with being more interested in converting Muslims than in defending Armenia. Gerard said the U.S. under no conditions would accept a mandate which included horrible Turks. Boghos Nubar soon expressed similar shock to House. The loose confederation of educators, philanthropists, evangelists, Armenians, and Armenophiles which Barton and Dodge had so laboriously put together in 1918 had begun to come apart. By the next day, May 14, Wilson must have sensed he had neither battalions ready nor support at home to holdout for a unified Anatolia, Also, of course, he had given his blessing for a Greek army at Smyrna. So the weary man bowed to the imperialists, even to Italian leader Orlando, and endorsed resolutions tentatively assigning mandates for Smyrna to Greece, Adalia to Italy, and central Anatolia and Cilicia to France. Subject to confirmation by the Senate, the U.S. was to have Armenia and Constantinople.
Within twenty-four hours the Greek military, escorted by an Allied squadron, landed in Smyrna. The Greek invaders then ripped fezzes and robes off Turks, and forced them to cheer the Greek premier: Long live Venizelos. According to eyewitness Alexander MacLachlan of International College, Greeks killed over five hundred Muslims in acts absolutely barbaric and equal to the worst that the Turks have ever done. This was an auspicious way for the West to civilize the Turks. A few days after the Greek intrusion the infuriated Turkish general, Mustafa Kemal, took a self-appointed lead in organizing a Turkish movement in eastern Anatolia to protect Asia Minor from the European protectors. Soon the frail Erivan Republic on its first birthday (May 28), proclaimed the annexation of six Turkish-Armenian vilayets and increased the anger of Kemalist Turks.
P.185: Not mellowed by his eighty years Clemenceau retorted angrily; the wrinkled French Premier, wearing his black skull cap, suspected an Anglo-American collaboration to lock France out of the Near East. After Clemenceauyss outburst, Wilson calmly said he felt that it should be better not to divide Anatolia, yet was uncertain whether the Republicans would permit a U.S. mandate over Asia Minor. I will examine the question of mandate, but it seems impossible that America will accept this mandate. But she will take the Armenian mandate for humanitarian reasons. Americans have already sent missionaries, money and relief to Armenia. American opinion is interested in Armenia. (Colonel House had asked Hoover about becoming Armenias governor). Setting up a Near East permanent peace to use Dodges phrase, was not turning to be simple that waving the Fourteen Points would get the job done. Instead of missionaries seeing Heaven, they were smelling Hell. Not serenity but confusion was reigning in Paris; peacemakers suffered trauma as old and new orders butted each other. Both the American Peace Commission and the Protestant contingent found that a speedy, united approach to the Near East was ephemeral.
P.241: When Turkey pressed in the mid-1930s for a revision of the Straits regime and later the acquisition of Alexandretta, the U.S. did not take sides. These political problems were chiefly the concerns of Turkey and European nations. The U.S., in contrast to various European nations, did not adopt a big brother attitude toward Turkey. As a matter of fact, as illustrated by frequent comments by Turkish officials, the political disinterestedness of the U.S. in Turkey was an ever present factor promoting closer Turco-American relations. International politics is only apart of international relations. This history of Turkish-American relations from 1919 to 1939 contradicts the view that Americans followed a rigidity isolationist code during these years. Although somewhat reduced in numbers, missionary and lay educators, now catering to Turks rather than to Armenians, Greeks and other minorities, remained an important group of Americans in Turkey.
P.243: The U.S. government, assessing the situation realistically, recognized that only by military force could the Turks be forced to permit establishment of an independent Armenia. U.S. policy toward Turkey, a necessary combination of realism and idealism, recognized the right of the Turks to govern themselves and chart their own development as long as they did not seriously harm American interests. Except for the economic loss, it would have been much easier for American missionaries, for example, to end their work in Turkey in the face of the almost overwhelming obstacles after World War I. They decided, however, to comply with regulations dictated by Turkish nationalism, rather than lose the opportunity, however limited, to advertise the goodness of Christianity by personal example in their schools and medical facilities. Obviously, the missionaries preferred to combine religion with education and to make direct attempts at converting Muslims to Christianity but, realistically, they acknowledged that these courses at action were impossible. At times missionaries and other Americans in Turkey grumbled and asked for diplomatic protection, but generally they recognized and respected Turkish nationalism, The Terrible Turkstereotype was another important conditioner of Turkish-American relations, both during and after World War I. This conception of the Turk, circulated widely by=in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, impeded the State Departments postwar effort to resume the regular relations with Turkey. The description had some historical validity when applied to Turkish treatment of the Armenians, but it was unfair to the Turks of the post-Lausanne period. Armenian-Americans and their supporters, in their fight for an Armenian home and their opposition to the Turkish-American Lausanne Treaty, continued to use time worn epithet. This unfortunate representation contributed strength to the opponents of the Lausanne Treaty and helped defeat it in 1927. Led by the Armenian-American lawyer, Vahan Chardasian, the enemies of Turkey in the United States, sought, with some success to cloud theissues in Turkish-American relations by poisoning American public opinion.
P.262: The American Board secretary reported to Caleb Gates that recent publicity by Near East Relief and the Federal Council of Churches had done something of worth for the Armenians: Washington had decided to join an international inquiry of Muslim-Christian relations in Asia Minor. Giving a sop to Armenianism, Hughes in June 1922 publicly announced Americas commitment to the inquiry. The Secretary followed Bartons desire and James Harbord be the American representative. But the French and Italians balked at a mobe which might weaken their relations with the Ankara government; so the inquiry was put in the hands of the International Red Cross. Dulles in July told Barton that theidea of an international commission was unworkable. Meanwhile Near East Relief continued its philanthropy. It had transferred work out of such Kemalist areas as Kars (annexed from Erivan Republic in December 1920) and Harput to Soviet Armenia and Syria. The Relief Group early in 1922 dismissed twenty-five thousand children from orphanages because of limited funds. It was in August 1922 that relief chairman Barton observed Kemalist momentum pushing all before it. The Turkish nationalists began an offensiveagainst the Greeks, and within three weeks pushed their antagonists into the Aegean sea. Kemalists soon controlled all of Asia Minor. This drive to the Aegean outraged the American Board secretary, not least because a fire in Smyrna inflicted damage more than one hundred thousand dollars to Board property. Foreseeing an Armageddon. Barton burst against Turks, whom he chose to blame for missionary problems: The rights of Americans and of minorities are held in contempt and all civilized laws are defied he wrote to Harding and Hughes as we must always expect from distinctly Mohammedan Government. We are witnessing what promises to be beginning of another European war, in which barbarianism will be arraigned against civilization. He urged a Western ultimatum to the Kemalists, and troops to the Bosphorus to save the Near East. Several church groups passed resolutions with similar language. But the thunder of the First World Wars rhetoric was ineffective.
P.263: The view of Turks in Bartons message to Harding and Hughes was inappropriate, as remarked by President MacLahlan of International College. The Turks did not massacre Greeks, as Greeks had done to Turks in May 1919. About the worst the Turkish Army did was force captured Greek soldiers to shout Long live Mustafa Kemal (in return to their forcing Turks to shout Zito Vrenizelos when they entered Symyrna)as they marched intro detention. Turkish soldiers protected International College during the disruption of the occupation; a Turkish cavalryman rescued MacLahlan from irregulars who nearly beat the missionary to death while trying to loot the agricultural buildings of the college. A three-day Smyrna fire (September 13-15), which Turks made every effort to control, destroyed nearly a square mile in Greek and Armenian areas and made two hundred thousand people homeless. Included in this loss was the American Boards Collegiate Institute for Girls. Mac Lachlans investigation of the fires origin led to the conviction that Armenian terrorists,dressed in Turkish uniforms, fired the city. Apparently the terrorists were attempting to bring Western intervention. Informing Washington of a three million Dollars claim by the American Board against the Ankara government, Barton requested through anaide that the U.S. participate in any conference planned by the Allies to rewrite the Treaty of Sevres. As the West talked of negotiating with the Kemalists, part of the American public began to realize that Armenianism and godliness were not identical, Ever since missionaries in the nineteenth century had become the dominant U.S. concern in the Ottoman Empire, opinion in America increasingly favored Christian minorities.
P.264: With the massacres of the 1890s, attitudes had become fixed on the stereotype of the terrible Turk. It was Gates and Bristol who lead in weakening Armenianism in the American mind. Gates declared in his memoirs: I had often told my students that I was pro-Turk just as I was pro-Armenian, pro-Bulgarian, pro-Greek, pro-Jew. Bristol though never disagreeing with missionaries that the United States should lead Ottoman reconstruction, had opposed their Armenianism. Believing Armenophile publicity exaggerated, misconstructed, and abusiveBristol in early 1920 told Barton in some ways it had called forth the worst Turkish feelings. He said to the mission secretary that it was contrary to the American sense of fair play to kick a man when he was down and give him a chance to defend himself. With concurrence from Gates, Bristol repeated often in 19121 and 1922 that relief workers and minorities had provoked reprisals and were like the boy who poked the hornetsnest and naturally was thoroughly stung. Bristol thought the boy should be paddled. Troubled that killings by Armenians and Greeks did not get into the American press, the admiral wondered in his diary, Why arent the atrocities committed by a Christian nation more heinous than those committed by Moslem races, if Christianity is better than Islam? He worked on the feelings of William Peet, but he decided Peet had an unchangeable resentment against Turks. Bristol acknowledged that since Turks had failed the missionary so many times, there was a reason for his negativenesss.
P.265: In autumn 1922 a pro-Turk statement in an American periodical figured in a public debate about Asia Minor. Retired Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, believing opinion against Turks was harmful to State Department backing for his revival of earlier Chester Project (currently called the Ottoman-AmericanDevelopment Corporation) published, Turkey Reinterpreted. Trying to reverse thirty years of Armenianism in one dramatic attempt, the flighty, seventy-eight-year-old Chester produced an extreme model. He depicted Turks as moral, religious, and honest (Although I have been much in Turkey I never met a crooked Turk). As for the Armenian massacres, he not only stirred up history but made a little of his own: Armenians were moved from inhospitable regions where they...could not actually prosper to the most delightful and fertile part of Syria... In due course of time the deportees, entirely unmassacred and fat and prosperous, returned. He claimed that an acquaintance had seen Armenian towns filled with astonishing live ghosts. What a pity, he remarked, to upset the good old myth of Turkish viciousness...but in the interest of accuracy I find myself constrained to do so, although it makes me feel a bit likre one who is compelled to tell a child that Jack the Killer really found no monstrous men to slay. Themission-relief reaction to the old man was as serious as to California Congressman A,M. Free's public charge a year earlier that Armenians had killed more Turks than vice versa (Free retreated when Near East Relief pressed for evidence). The fat was inflames. In addition to the Chester-Montgomery interchangea, Current Historycarried an analysis of missionary and relief organizations by journalist Clair Price. For a series of four articles Price, visited Ankara and Constantinople, including a talk with Bristol.
P.266:The journalist stated that American missions, Armenian clauses in the Treaty of Berlin, and such societies as the Dashnaktsuthiun had alienated Armenians from Turks. After the war, he declared, missionaries to the Ottoman Empire sought to take over the country and use Armenians for this vast political project. Price said that the Near East Relief was at the same time of his writing flooding the United States with Armenianism through its monthly, New Near East (successor to the News Bulletin). He noted that the editor of the periodical, Talcott Williams, had published a book pleading for America to adopt a protectorate over Asia Minor. (Actually, Williams in his book, although showing special concern for the great people of Armenia , did recognize that both Christians and Muslims committed atrocities against each other. Price regarded Kemalist leaders as trustworthy and not implicated in the Armenian massacres. He thought that mission and relief workers should communicate with the Ankara government, stop clamorous Armenianism, realize that the millet system made it almost impossible for Turks to regard Christianity as anything other than an unfriendly political program, and accept the Turkification of Asia Minor. Montgomery protested in Current History that American Missionary schools were not divisive. Armenian revolutionary leaders criticized the American Board schools, Montgomery said, because they prohibited politics.
P.267: Another missionary defender less restrained than Montgomery was Everet P. Wheeler, who had helped relief among Armenians since 1890s. Wheeler claimed it a perversion of patriotism to blame missionaries and Armenians for seeking victory over the Allied enemy, the Turks. History had praised the defense of the West against Muslim intrusion in the Middle Ages he said, and Christian nations should receive credit for seeking protection of Christians in the Near East.
An unorthodox view had arisen, and Barton saw Bristol and Gates had helped bring it into being. The public debate of late 1922 loosened the grip of Armenianism upon Americans. It also helped threaten the monopoly of opinion about Asia Minor held so long by missionary and Armenian groups. The debate came at the same time that President Harding decided the United States would send observers to a conference at Lausanne, which the Allies were calling to negotiate a peace with the Kemalists. Bristols preaching about un-Christian elements in Armenianism never found its mark with Barton until Kemalist guns made it ridiculous for the American Board to snub Ankara any longer. The Turks eventually named a hospital in Istanbul for Bristol in recognition of his sense of justice. The missionaries since the 1830s often had sustained their enterprise by being anti-Muslim and anti-Turk.
P.268: The American Board also had been willing to idolize its institutions among Armenians more than to remember that God is no respecter of persons. If Barton had heeded Jesus instruction about loving enemies and praying for those who are spiteful, the mission secretary might have seen Christianity in Bristols remarks long before the Greek evacuation of Smyrna.
P.269: Some voices urged a United States mediation between European nations and the Kemalists; Secretary Hughes stated in a speech in Bartons home city that the American Government did not intend to intervene in Turkey, Before Lausanne Conference opened there was an interesting exchange between the Harding administration and Barton forces. The American Board secretaryhad pressed Washington for formal representation at the negotiations. Harding on October 5, 1922, wrote that the United States can be represented informally and properly safeguard American interests.
(S) from Imperialism Evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians 1878-1896
Jeremy Salt, Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. U.K. ISBN 07146-3448-4
P.111: It was from American missionaries concentrated in eastern Anatolia that the outside world received much of its news of what was going in the interior of the Ottoman state. Much of what they had to say in (or to) the outside world was hardly discreet, particularly as the Ottoman authorities already suspected them of spreading sedition in one way or another. They publicly expressed their hostility to the revolutionaries but it was difficult to avoid entanglement with them. The missionary predicament was summed up in a letter written by President Tracy of Merzifon College in May 1895. As we have seen, considerable embarrassment had been caused two years earlier when it was alleged that Armenian teachers had printed revolutionary placards at the college. Tracy wrote: It has come to our knowledge that our enemies the revolutionists have been and are trying to stir up people against us by a double-faced lie secretly accusing us to their sympathizers of having betrayed their nation and with the other face, with holy indignation, accusing us to the government of the very indignities of which themselves are guilty.
P.112: ... the missionaries only wanted to develop the best qualities in the Armenians and if Christians of this empire would but learn to be good subjects and good men they would vastly greater gain than by insubordination. Even in the dispatches of their own diplomatic representatives the words meddling and indiscretion are frequently found, and thus it can be imagined with what suspicion they were regarded by the Ottoman authorities. As we have seen, the missionaries had a long history of involvement in the affairs of Ottoman Christians. If we take the Congress of Berlin as the starting point of the Armenian question as a European diplomatic concern in the nineteenth century, they were also there at the start, trying to influence delegates in favor of the Armenians. Following a letter which Cyrus Hamlin wrote to the Boston Daily Advertiser in 1894, the Ottoman minister in Washington, Mavroyeni (himself a Greek Christian) sent a long letter of complaint to the State Department.
P.113: He wrote: I am surprised to read in this letter that the missionaries of the American Board have been, and they are, the truest friends the Armenians ever had. But I am greatly surprised to see Revd. Hamlin affirms that the Imperial Government is an oppressor, and that the missionaries have stood more than a half century between oppressors and the oppressed. But the Revd. Hamlin goes further, for he affirms that the right of revolution is not to be questioned. It is true, however, that he adds but when circumstances make success impossible, attempts and plots for it become criminal. So then, according to the Revd, Hamlin, it is not because any revolutionary movement whatsoever is criminal far from that, it is solely because the Armenians are not in fact ready for it. It is therefore, in the interests of the Armenians themselves that this strange apostle of the Gospel recommends them to abandon their subversive plans and it is for the same reason he asserts that the American missionaries are sincere advocates of pacific measures.
In his letter to the Advertiser Hamlin went even further, giving the name and address of the leading Hunchak in the United States for those desiring to get further informationand suggesting that the US should perhaps station an ironclad or two in Turkish waters to enforce due regard for the American passport. In the State Department his remarks were described as the mischief a garrulous old man can do when he lets his pen run away with his judgment. As we have seen, Hamlin later had a change of heart and condemned the Hunchacks and the Russian gold and Russian craftwhich he saw standing behind them.
P.114: The missionary line of communication from their stations in Anatolia ran first through missionary offices and the US legation in Istanbul. Terrell referred to the News Notes which were sent from every college in the interior and multiplied on copying machines. These are often filled with details of Turkish outrages, which are obtained of course from the Armeniansand when not intercepted by the Turks, reach the American press to exite and often mislead public opinion. The mail was unreliable and the system was an embarrassment. The missionaries provided not only US minister but also the British Embassy with a constant flow of information about the events taking place in the east.Sir Philip Currie, the British ambassador, acknowledged in 1895 that but for the American missionaries his government would not have known the enormities practiced. Other beneficiaries of missionary correspondence included evangelical alliances abroad, the press and those powerful figures who made the Armenian cause their own particularly the great English apostles (Gladstone, the Archbishop of York and the Duke of Argyll). Every missionary statement highlighting atrocities or criticizing the Ottoman Government was also undoubted benefit to Armenians propaganda organizations such as Garabet Hagopians Patriotic Association in London, the Friends of Armenia and Lord Bryces Anglo-Armenian Association of which Sir Charles Eliot wrote: Their object was to ameliorate the conditions of Armenia, and to secure the introduction of reforms promised by treaty... They invoked public opinion, the rights of Armenia, religious equality...
Of the connections between the missionaries and influential British public figures, Terrell wrote on July 30,1896;
President Washburn of Robert College, a distinguished American educator, took the place last year of the regular Queens Messenger and conveyed confidential dispatches from the British Ambassador to Lord Salisbury, the British Embassy paying the expenses.
P.115: Another eminent American teacher, (President Herrick of Marsovan College) went direct to England after the Marsovan College was burned in 1893 to confer with Mr. Bryce and the British Ministry. Another American professor Dr. Long was a correspondent with Gladstone regarding the political desires of the Armenian race. Both Dr. Washburn and Dr. Dwight had frequent and confidential conferences with the British Ambassador before and during the recent massacres which they carefully concealed from the United States Legation and they were more than once visited by the British Ambassador for like consultations. Our teachers and Bible House people have established here an Evangelical Alliance which corresponds on politico-religious with like alliance in London and the United States and the Duke of Westminster. They furnished from time to time for the press of New York, London and Boston the atrocity articles which excited profoundly public sentiment. Not even by the most generous interpretation of the phrase could these activities be described as non political. Among missionaries in the field there were numerous examples of what Terrelll euphemistically described as indiscretions. In June 1895 missionary Cole sent telegrams from Bitlis to the U.S. Legation and the British embassy claiming that 65 people had died of starvation at Sasun and criticizing the adminstration of the sultans relief fund. But it was found that no one had died of starvation at Sasun and Coles remarks about the workings of the relief fund which were likely to be brought to the attention of higher authorities, were classified by Terrell as an imprudent interference with the charity of others. The indiscretions of another missionary based at Bitlis, George Knapp, were more serious. At the time of the official inquiry into the events at Sasun, Knapp had sent an Armenian courier to Mus with a message typed open a linen band worn around the mans waist. The message urged European consuls present at the inquiry as observers to disregard the evidence of certain witnesses but the courier was intercepted and the message found. Knapp was also the author of a series of articles published by The Times in 1895. The connections were revealing. The articles originated a long statement sent to the State Department and William H. Peet treasurer of the American missions in the Ottoman Empire. This statement was evidently also sent to the Evangelical Alliance in London whence if found its way through channels not explained to The Times.
P.116: According to Terrell, the impression prevailed in Istanbul that the atrocity publications of the British press were chiefly inspired by Americans residing in Asia Minor. In the light of these activities it comes as no surprise to lrearm from a British consul that by the end of 1895 the positions of both Cole and G. Knapp at Bitlis was very unpleasant. Early in 1896 the Babi Ali finally too action against Knapp, accusing him of being mainstay of the Hunchak committee at Bitlis and inciting Christians to attack Muslims. The charges were set out in a statement drawn by an investigating magistrate and were accompanied by the depositions of 19 Armenians, one of them Knapps iwn servant. The missionary was accused of inciting the credulous Armenians to attack the mosques during Friday prayers to kill Christians in order that the crime might be attributed to Mussulmans. In any other country but the Ottoman Empire, the Grand Vizier told the U.S. charge de affaires at Istanbul, Knapp would have been summarily executed. The missionary establishment was furious. Demands were made of Terrell to seek withdrawal of the charges and the establishment of a commission of inquiry into charges that American missionaries were sowing sedition. Terrell was more aware of the realities. He thought an open inquiry would be madness giving his reasons in a dispatch dated Jan. 28th, 1896.
P.117: Surely the missionary boards do not understand how completely terrorism dominates everything and how the very race that our missionaries came to elevate would fear now become the perjured instruments of their destruction, The missions were guarded by Ottoman troops and no American lives were lost but the destruction of property was heavy.
P.118: The school of science and the seminary at Maras were set on fire in October 1895, while at Harput in the same month houses of Allen, Brown, Wheeler, ladies; house, chapel, boarding house, girlstheological school, seminary buildings, worth $ 44.000 burned; personal property $ 55.000: stock and apparatus $ 11.000. At Antep the Muslims were said to be much inflamedagainst the missionaries and several attempts were made to break into the college, the girls school and the hospital. For those who had come to theOttoman Empire in the name of the gospel of love, no contrast could have been more shattering. The question arises as to how close the missionaries came to being expelled from the Ottoman State because of their actual or presumed involvement in the political affairs of Ottoman Christians and particularly the Armenians. Herrick, a missionary in the Ottoman state for 50 years, wrote that the missionaries were threatened with expulsion in the 1840s, and when Mavroyeni was complaining about Hamlin in 1894 it was felt in the State Department that was paving the way for the general expulsion and exclusion of our missionaries from Turkey.
Abdulhamit himself claimed with much emphasis that reports of him issuing an irade to expel American missionaries were false the power, in fact, were continually rolling falsehoods.
P.124: Activists for the Armenian cause believed that Britain had taken the Armenians under its wing and could now abandon them, Many hoped for a military intervention, British or even Russian or a combined European force to save the Armenians. The sultan was described as a miserable caricature of a monarch with a satanic lust for blood who might yet turn his criminal and insane mind towards the destruction of foreign as well as native Christians. Punch portrayed him as the Unspeakable Turk, harking with sword drawn amid ruins of an Armenian village. The Ottoman authorities were accused of working a Plan of Extermination, in which thousands of Christians locked in behind the Toros mountains were being martyred. G.W.E. Russell, founder of the Forward Armenia movement, wrote that the governing impulse of the Turk was hatred of the religion of the Cross. In his view the Ottoman Empire was the great anti-Christian and anti-social power, standing where he ought not to be in the fairest provinces of desecrated Christendom, an empire founded on slavery and polygamy and operating by massacre and rape. Not since the Crusades did there seem to be greater cause for Christian intervention in the Muslim world. ... many of those who had led the Bulgarian agitation returned to the speakers platform to demand action from their government for the Armenians.
P.125: Among them were the Duke of Argyl and Gladstone drawn in Punch as the Old Crusaders sitting on white chargers with lances in hand and the Duke of Westminster, Lord Bryce and an assortment of higher eclectics. Symbolically the first mass meeting of the Armenian agitation (May 1895) was held at St. James hall, Piccadilly. The mood was one of uncompromising hostility to the Turks and their religion. The Duke or Argyl began by insisting that England had the duty to impose a protectorate over the Christians of the Ottoman state. The Moderator of the Church of Scotland spoke of thesacred right of insurrection, of Englands right and duty to intervene alone if necessary and if his reopening of the Eastern Question meant the abolition of the open scandal of the worship of Mahomet in the first great Christian church erected by the first Christian Emperor, the sooner the question was reopened the better (The Times
so reported). Both the Bishop of St, Asaph and Canon MacColl argued for a show of force to save the Christians and bring that abject coward the sultan to his senses. The contribution of Lady Henry Somerset can scarcely be ignored. She spoke of k=love of Christian women for their sisters yonder in the clutch of the harem-despot of Constantinople.
P.128: The Duke of Westminster outlined the case against the Ottoman government and the need for a European supervision to stop the inhuman treatment of Christians in a land where Islam crushed up all prosperity, all progress, all happiness, as it did in the lands to which its withering influence extended.
P.129: Gladstone suggested that recent action of the Porte in Armenia particularly but not in Armenia exclusively were founded on a deliberate determination to exterminate the Christians of that Empire. No one apparently asked for tne evidence or suggested that without it such a statement was inflammatory and irresponsible. The rhetoric was unchanging, generally predictated on Englands rights and responsibilities as a Christian nation and it was usually Englands failure to do something for the Armenians was contrasted with its apparent readiness to go to war with the United States over Venezuela. To fight for a few miles territory did not become us: but war on behalf of the Armenians, on behalf of men being butchered and women who were being ravished, was surely if ever justified. Not everyone was impressed. The ministers of religion who stood up to preach a crusade on Monday night The Times wrote in an editorial after a protest meeting just before Christmas in 1895.
P.130: How a declaration of war against Turkey is to be reconciled with the preaching of peace, goodwill towards men is a point which these champions of the Armenians are no doubt able to settle to the satisfaction of their conscience. There is a time in the history of a nation like Great Britain asserted the Bishop of Hereford, when it should face for a just, inevitable and humanitarian act towards a suffering people. Englands honor, it seemed, was more important than peace. How England could launch an invasion of the Ottoman Empire was not a question which the Bishop of Hereford or other clerics addressed in specifics. Presumably the generals would sort out these petty details once the decision had been taken. If England would not act, suggested G.W.E. Russell, Russia was well placed militarily and geographically to take to take the responsibility for the Armenians herself and even occupy Istanbul if necessary. Even Wilfred S. Blunt, the fierce opponent of British intervention in Egypt supported it for the same of the Armenians.
We have taken the Armenians solemnly under our protection, receiving substantial payment from their master for the protective right in the island of Cyprus. We have encouraged them for our own purpose to organize themselves and rebel, and the Sultan has now got them by the throat and backed by Europe is defying us to come on and deliver them. If we do not go to war we shall be sitting down under the greatest affront we ever suffered as a nation. We bombarded Alexandrian rabble, with Sir Beauchamp Seymours valet, had lost their lives. Here some scores of thousands of peaceful citizens have perished through our fault and we have done nothing but talk.
P.131: On the other side of the Atlantic public outrage was further excited by awareness of the danger to the numerous American missionaries and their families living throughout the eastern provinces of the Ottoman state. Otherwise the American reaction was the mirror image of the Armenian agitation in Britain. Religious sentiment ands patriotism were harnessed in defense of the Armenians. The New York Tribune gave this account of a public meeting addressed by a Miss Kirkorian: The Armenians have suffered and are crushed but thanks be to God the d0oor of His kingdom is open to the Turks, Oh churches of Christendom, do try to keep that door open.After her appeal she again presented to the audience while Miss Leithch, her fellow worker, wrapped her in the folds of an American flag and called on Americans everywhere to see that the protection of the government was extended to her people. This brought cheer after cheer from the audience. Elsewhere prayers were offered up for the death of Islamism and the downfall of the Turks. To some the Quoran seemed the ultimate source of the violence ravaging the Ottoman state because it commands its adherents to go out against the unbelievers sword in hand and slay until Islam is the only religion. Evangelical Alliance of Constantinople at the behest of the British ambassador, accused the Ottoman government of infringing the charter of Christian rights; and by doing so launching a direct war upon the Christian religion itself. Even Terrell fell prey to this mode of thinking writing to the State Department in explanation of what was going on that those who profess to know inform me that among Mohammedans the killing of a Christian becomes a virtue when it tends to advance the cause of Islam, to which the Ottoman minister in Washington, Mavroyeni Bey (a Christian himself) responded with some acerbity that if in time of war the more enemies they kill the better it is for the cause which they are defending then the virtue of which Mr. Terrell is speaking is fully as much as Christian as a Mohammedan one.Returning missionaries gave vivid and often lurid accounts of their lives among the Turks. Frederick Davis Greenes book The Armenian Crisis and the Rule of the Turk, was reviewed at length in the New York World under the heading Chapter of Horrors ... A returned American Missionary Describes the Armenian Massacres.
P.132: A similar reception was given to Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, written by Edwin M. Bliss and Cyrus Hamlin and containing, according to Mavroyeni the most violent accusations against the Mussulman religion, Turkish race and the Imperial Government. The Ottoman minister listed the names of the missionaries who in their letters to the Christian press of the United States. openly pronounce themselves against a Government and a people which after all are offering them hospitality. Mavroyeni kept his government well informed of these activities. In the case of Greene book Terrells dispatch describing the profound sensation it caused at the port is illuminating. Greene later published another similar book. The Armenian Massacres or the Sword of Mohammed (Philadelphia 1896). These calumnies and diatribes emanating from missionary sources were all part of a public mood of unremitting hostility that convinced Mavroyeni that the United States was in the grip of a kind of religious uprising. The Evangelical Alliance of Boston passed a resolution calling on the US government to send such a naval force to Turkish waters as would make the American name respected in the Mediterranean or on the Kurdish mountainsand to take action with other governments to forcibly prevent the butchery of fellow Christians in Armenia. The Alliance approached Abdulhamid directly, in a petition sent to Istanbul in 1896 which warned that unless persecution; of the Armenians is ceased we shall leave no effort untried to unite all liberty-loving people of the civilized world in urging government to avenge the wrongs and sufferings of the Christians of your Empire. When a message arrived back from the sultan, denying persecution of the Armenians and pointing out that the Ottoman state had taken in thousands of Muslim refugees fleeing oppression of Christian Bulgaria and Russia, it was described by the alliances General Secretary Dr. Joisiah Strong, as a superlative illustration of Abdulhamids consummate impudence and mendacity.
P.133: Militancy at home was constantly fed by militancy in the field. By mid 1905 Terrell was complaining that the missionaries wanted to drive the Sultan with a club. Dwight was seeking for a casus belli for a new crusade. A cruiser in the Sea of Marmara could protect Americans living in Istanbul (in fact their lives had never been threatened) and might help to persuade the sultan to grant missionary claims for compensation of property destroyed during the turbulences inthe east. Dwight (he wrote) was seeking to reinforce Divine providence with battleships and propagate the religion with artillery. In any case it was not the missionaries of Istanbul who were in danger but those snowed in behind mountains which no cruiser can climb and he mocked Dwight for clinging his tabernacles of flesh with much tenacity as any sinner.
The US minister was further antagonized by what he regarded as missionary responsibility for some highly personal criticism of him appearing in the American press. It is not pleasant to be subjected to the missionary whip operating through Christian press and press dispatches, he complained to the State Department. It was said in these papers that nothing intelligent or diplomatic ever came out of Texas, Terrells home state; that the US minister dined too frequently with the Sultan; that he had not filled consulates in important towns; and that he had failed to secure adequate protection for American lives and property. Terrell reacted testily to this snipping. He had obtained twice as many irades for American schools in two years as his predecessors had in 50 and he had seen to it that every US mission astation was guarded by troops. No lives had been lost and no schools closed, points thatDwight conceded.
P.134: But as far as the American minister was concerned, as long as he exercised his own judgment about Bible House policies and the Armenian race his efforts seemed to count for n. I am regarded as an obstacle alike by missionaries and Armenians, who hoped to secure autonomy as a state for the latter through the joint action of Great Britain and the United States.
P.135: But the rancor of party prejudice can sometimes be mollified by reason, while the blind fanaticism of religion, whether Christian or pagan, knows no bounds and is even more unscrupulous in its methods. Most of the missionary teachers in Turkey are good people. Some are bad and dangerous. It would indeed be strange if the Missionary Boards should be more successful than their Divine Master in selecting missionaries. He once selected a few of them Himself, and though they were but twelve, one was a liar and another being covetous and mean betrayed Him, their Christ, in the very hour when He was suffering to secureeternal salvation of them all. Terrell was not the first diplomat based in the Ottoman Empire to strike trouble with missionaries. The backbiting revealed in the American dispatches was, of course, generated by the conflict ranging in the eastern vilayets and the struggle of the Armenians and their supporters in England and the United States to secure intervention through the sheer force of outraged public opinions.
(T) Essays in Ottoman & Turkish History, 1774 1923
Roderic H. Davison, University of Texas Press, Austin
P.111 : In the Ottoman empire of the early nineteenth century his religion provided a mans label, both in his own conceptual scheme and in the eyes of his neighbors and governors. He was a Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Gregorian Armenian, Jew, Catholic, or Protestant before he was a Turk or Arab, a Greek or Bulgar, in the national sense, and also before he felt himself an Ottoman citizen. The empire itself was governed by Muslims; its law was based on the religious law of Islam. But within this empire several Christian communities and the Jewish community enjoyed a partial autonomy, whereby the ecclesiastical hierarchy which administered the millet supervised not only the religious, educational, and charitable affairs of its flock; it controlled also such matters of personal status as marriage, divorce and inheritance and it collected some taxes. This mosaic pattern, in which Christian and Muslim living side by side in the same state under the same sovereign were subject to different law and different officials, had served the Ottoman empire well for four centuries. In the Near East law was still, as it had formerly been in the West also, personal rather than territorial.
P.114: But it was during the Tanzimat period of 1839 to 1876, a new era in Ottoman efforts at reform and westernization, that the doctrine of equality of Christian and Muslim was proclaimed in the most solemn manner and came to play a prominent role in the central question of Ottoman revival.
P. 115: The sultan in 1844engaged not to enforce the death penalty for the for apostasy from Islam. Some Christians were appointed and some later were elected, to local advisory councils established in each province. Christians and Muslims were accepted together as students in the newly established imperial lycee of Galatasaray in 1867.
P.124: It also became obvious that the Turks wanted Christians to be equally liable to service so far as sharing the burdens and dangers went but balked at giving the Christians equal opportunity for promotion to the officer corps. Both Turks and Christians were satisfied to see the inequality continue. Another illustration of Turkish reactions is found in the experience of the considerable group of American Congregational missionaries in the empire. They reported in general a decrease in Muslim fanaticism and in interference in their work. One missionary who knew the country well observed that only the ulema, the Muslim theologians, kept up any semblance they could among the people and sponge off the wealthy.
P.126: In a bold letter to Abdul Aziz, he contended that the Christian revolts in the empire were but symptoms of a malady backwardness and bad government that afflicted the uncomplaining Muslims even more than the Christians. The line of division ran, said Mustafa Fazil, only between oppressors and oppressed, not between Christian and Muslim.
P.186: Sazonov was ready to sponsor the Armenian cause. He did this, in the first instance through the Catholics George V. head of the Gregorian Church. The seat of the Catholics was in Etchmiadzin, at the foot of Mt. Ararat, in Russia; this geographical fact made Russian control of his actions easy. But since 1905 the Gregorians had adopted loyalty toward Russia and George V was an ardent exponent of the new spirit. There was thus no difficulty in Russo-Armenian co-operation on this basis. George V appealed formally to the tsarist government to aid his Turkish brethren. He also appointed a delegation headed by Boghos Nubar Pasha, son of the Armeno-Egyptian statesman, to present the Armenian case to Europe in such a way as to prepare opinion for reform under Russias aegis. They seem to have felt that in Russia lay chief Armenian hope, and Nubar kept in touch with Iswolski while making his representations in the Western capitals. Nubar was explicit in saying that the Armenians desired neither separation from Turkey nor Russian occupation, merely reforms. All through the year 1913, Nubar was occupied in Europe with this work. Wangenheim knew of the Russian demarches. The Armenian question was thus raised before all Europe. In both England and France opinion was that consideration of the Armenian question should be postponed until the Balkans were peaceful. This was perhaps reception Sazonov wished, he might then impose upon the Porte a purely Russian reform scheme, or he might send a few Russian troops into Armenia on pretext of keeping order there. But France added that she could countenance nu unilateral action by Russia, which might precipitate the partition of Anatolia. Not only would German opposition be aroused by such a Russian move but also French financial and railway interests in Turkey, which were dependent on the integrity of the country, would be jeopardized.
(U) U.S. RESPONSE to TURKISH NATIONALISM & REFORM
Roger R. Trask. Univ. of Minnesota Press. 1971
Unnamed Christianity; The American Educational Effort
P.147: Before World War I. American missionary educators provided the basis for one of the most important links between the United States and the Ottoman Empire and also played a prominent role in education within the Empire. World War I, which found Turkey fighting with the Central Powers, of necessity led to curtailment of American educational work, especially after the United States became associated with Turkeys enemies in April, 1917. Factors of more significance than World War I in explaining the problems of American educators in Turkey included the postwar disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish nationalist movement, which emphasized secularism among its basic principle of operation. An obvious exemplification of Turkish secularization movement was the intense effort to reform and control the educational system by cleansing it of all religious influences.Turkish fear of foreign political, economic, and cultural domination also affected the educational system, particularly foreign schools, Closing many schools, imposition of crippling taxes, strict regulation of curricula and teaching personnel, and arbitrary inspections were among the by-products of this basic attitudes.
P.148: American educators adjusted admirably to Turkish nationalism, even though they became involved in many disputes requiring the services of American diplomatic representatives, In1939, education continued to be one of the most significant Turco-American contacts, as it had been since the two countries first established formal diplomatic relations in 1830. During the Ataturk era, these American educators by their actions and attitudes contributed much to good Christian-Muslim relationship in an important part of the Islamic world. By the time Turkey and U.S. re-established diplomatic relations in 1927, the American Board conducted classes for fourteen hundred students at eight primary and secondary schools and one institution of higher learning, International College in Izmir. The two private American institutions, Robert College and Istanbul Womans College, continued to operate. By this time (1927) secularization program was well under way. Furthermore, the past work of American schools had been exclusively with minorities, mainly Greeks and Armenians. The Turks wanted to prevent the growth of new Christian communities, which could result from continued Christian missionary work.
P.149: The Turks were also aware of the role played by the missionaries in developing a hostile American public opinion toward Turkey. If American opinion has been uninformed, misinformed and prejudiced,one observer wrote in 1929, the missionaries are largely to blame. Interpreting history in terms of the advance of Christianity, they have given an inadequate, distorted, and occasionally grotesque picture of Moslems and Islam. The Turks believed that a student educated in a foreign school, especially ifreligious teaching was allowed, would be dominated by an alien culture. Foreign schools, if unregulated, would be hostile to Turkish nationalism and instruments of foreign political influence. Ambassador Grew expressed the point well: As for the question of religious teaching in the schools, I heard a remark the other day which seems to me is very much in point. Somebody said, referring to our recent Presidential campaign in the United States, it is therefore not the Catholic religion at all that is under attack, but the idea of the Catholic Church as a foreign institution. If you alter the word Catholic to Christianyou have in a nutshell the attitude of the Turks toward our American schools in Turkey. It is not religion but cultural nationalism thatis the stumbling block.. Christianizing to the Turk means the weaning of Turkish youth away from Turkish nationalism and all that the term implies. Grew later pointed out that the Turks felt character should be formed not through religion but through the training of the mind plus the development of an intense nationalism. A Turkish newspaper complained about unnamed Christianity in American Schools.
P.150: By creating a complete Christian environment for the Turkish youth to live in, their aim is to install in them gradually and unconsciously Christian ways and beliefs under the name of character-building, and so forth. Believing that religion, particularly Christianity, did not mix with nationalism, the Ataturk government early prohibited any religious teaching in foreign as well as Turkish schools. Classrooms were to be free of religious symbols, teachers had to be approved by the government and certain subjects were to be taught by Turkish teachers appointed by government educational authorities.Faced with these restrictions, the missionaries of the American Board had to make the critical decision whether they should continue their work in Turkey. The decision should, it seemed, be based on the answer to this question asked by an American Board missionary, Was it worth while to keep open schools in which the Bible could no longer be the backbone of the curriculum, as it originally was?The missionaries decided this question in the affirmative; their existence would be justified, they felt, if they could maintain a Christian influence on education by personal example and friendly contact. The missionaries were convinced that the Turkish people needed and wanted the American schools. As one American Board leader put it, The Turks acted as if they expected the missionaries to remain. The number of pupils from Moslem families was greatly increased... It was evident from the patronage given that there was a desire and even a demand for the continuance of the schools. The Boards annual report for 1924 pointed out that the Turks had witnessed the great advance made by the Armenians and Greeks through their wide patronage of American institutions...and they covet this same opportunity for their own young men and women.
P.151: Turkish parents who sent their children to American schools knew, of course, that the institutions had Christian affiliations, but they expected that laws against proselytizing would be obeyed. Obviously they did not want their children to become hostile to Turkish culture and traditions, but they recognized that the quality of instruction was superior to that in their own schools. The missionaries believed that through unnamed Christianity they would be able to mold the characters of their students, the majority of whom were Turks. The Christian teacher...will impress upon his pupils those principles which lie at the very foundation of our Christian thinking and Christian living. The missionary will thus have opportunity to build Christian character into the lives of his Turkish pupils, the American Board reported in 1924. Fourteen years later the same spirit prevailed: A Christian atmosphere may be diffused even through secular school or hospital, and the Board is using all the opportunities these present ...Christians in Turkeytoday are trying to demonstrate through Christ-like spirit, that the Christian possesses something of infinite worth; something, too, which Turkey needs, if the republic is to develop into a strong and noble state. Thus , based on the conviction that they were wanted and needed and that they would be able to spread Christianity without open attempts to win converts, the American Board missionaries decided by 1923 to continue their work..
Even though it permitted Christian missionaries to carry on their educational activities, the Turkish government often made it clear that it would not tolerate direct proselytizing. The most obvious example of this attitude occurred in 19128, when the Turks closed the American GirlsLycee in Bursa. This incident defined clearly the basic conflict between secularism of Turkish nationalism and religious teaching.
P.152: The charges against the Bursa school in January, 1928, involved the alleged conversion of three Muslim girls to Christianity. Diaries in which the girls confided their thoughts fell into the hands of government authorities, who closed the school after investigation. The teachers charged with violation of law against religious proselytizing, were tried, and convicted on April 30, 1928. The penalties for the teachers, two of whom had already left Turkey, were three dayshouse imprisonment and fines three lira each. The light sentences proved that the Turks intended to demonstrate their determination to enforce the laws against religious instruction rather than to show vengeance against the three teachers involved.
P.153: In a letter to a friend in the State Department, Grew wrote: The school incident is bad, very bad. But they had it coming to them and it came. Grew was also uneasy about the effect the affair would have on Robert College and Istanbul Womans College, even though they had no religious connections. He reported to Secretary of State Kellog that these institutions deplore the situation owing to possible ultimate effects of the incident on all American educational institutions.
P.155: The Bursa affair did prove that cultural nationalism and secularism were extremely important parts of Turkish nationalism. Foreign schools could continue their work as long as they conformed to Turkish regulations and confined their teaching to secular subjects; the promotion of antinationalism through religious teaching would not be tolerated.
P.156: Significantly. The Turkish government closed all French and Italian schools in April 1924, when they refused to remove Roman Catholic symbols from their classrooms. Also, American schools profited because the Turks were influenced by American educational methods, particularly the progressive ideas advocated by John Dewey. Furthermore considerable emphasis was placed on the teaching of the English language in Turkish schools in the 1930s. As the time drew near for the expiration in August 1931, of the establishment provisions of the Allied Lausanne Treaty of 1923, which protected European schools in Turkey, American diplomatic and educational officials expressed concern about the future of foreign schools. There appears however, to have been no perceptible change in Turkish policy toward American schools after August, 1931, The United States was able to conclude a treaty of establishment and sojourn in October, 1931, guaranteeing most-favored-nation treatment to American nationals residing and working in Turkey.
P.157: The desire of the Turkish government to eliminate all religious influences in the schools accounted not only for various restrictions during the period up to 1939, but also explained Turkish procrastination on the question of reopening various American Board Schools. When ambassador Grew arrived in Turkey in the fall of 1927, his most pressing problem was the Boards campaign to reopen schools closed during the preceding decade.
P.158: Thereupon, the government on February 26, 1928, authorized the reopening of the boys school at Sivas and addition of vocational department to the school in Merzifon. Aras fulfilled his promise to release the Sivas building or to reopen another American school in August, 1928, when the Ministry of Public Instruction announced that the institution at Talas could reopen if it would allow Turkish instructors to teach certainsubjects, appoint a Turkish vice-principal, and comply with several other conditions. Incidentally, if the Turks had permitted other schools to resume instruction, the American Board probably would have closed them later, in view of the curtailment of its work arising from financial difficulties during the depression.
P.164: The financial difficulties which caused the closing of several American Board schools were due to decreasing support from the Congregational Church in the United States. One reason for this, according to Ernest W. Riggs, an American Board official, was the difficulty of convincing people that they should make contributions to schools giving Turkish students a purely secular education. Also critical were the effects of the post-1928 depression, which understandably forced American Board to curtail its work in Turkey as well as other fields.
P.165: By 1939 the only schools operated by the American Board were the American Academy for Girls, Istanbul; the American Collegiate Institute, Izmir,; the American School for Boys, Talas; and the American College, Tarsus.
Robert College and Istanbul Womans College, partly because they had no religious affiliations, were more acceptable to the Turks than the mission schools. Fortunately for RobertCollege, an ill-advised plan to institute religious activities there did not materialize. When Henry Sloane Coffin, chairman of Robert Colleges Board of Trustees, visited Turkey in January, 1935, he intended toy examine the possibility of introducing religious elements into the college program, as actually required by the college charter. Ambassador Skinner, worried about the purposes of Coffins visit, wrote to the Secretary of State that the Turks would never permit Robert College to make such changes in its program. Coffin apparently appreciated this fact, because he did not bring up the religious issue during his visit. His talks with Turkish officials, including Prime Minister Inonu, did indicate that the Turks valued the Work of Robert College.
Conclusion:
P.167: The very fact that the Board schools were in existence in 1939 is proof that they had adjusted to Turkish nationalism. This adjustment did not come without hesitation, but the American institutions realized that they must either conform to Turkish policy or end their work. The events at Bursa 1928 proved this. As for the missionaries, their decision was to rely on unnamed Christianityto propagate their faith. The two independent colleges found that their goal should be to offer to Turkish youth the type of education most fitted to the needs of the Republic of Turkey. The question whether American educators adjusted to Turkish nationalism, with its emphases on secularism, can be answered clearly in the affirmative.
P.168: The mission schools were filled to capacity in 1939 and had educated thousands of young Turks during the interwar period, but there was no increase in the number of Christians in Turkey.
The American Board optimistically reported in 1936 that it was rendering a significant and far reaching service... Here is disinterested service in the name and in the spirit of Christ which can not fail to affect the life of the new Turkey.As late as 1953, the Board observed that its role in the Middle East remains the essential one of representing the Christian West, of bringing the unique gift of Jesus Christ.
P.169: American Christian educators, by remaining in Turkey during the highly nationalistic period in that countrys history, made substantial contributions. Most important, they demonstrated the attitudes and methods necessary for satisfactory relations between Christianity and Islam/
THE GENOCIDE FILES
by
HARRY SCOTT GİBBONS ISBN 0-9514464-2-8 Charles Bravos Publishers – London
Excerpts from book cover:
“The Genocide Files is a thorough research into the so-called “Cyprus problem�.
It exposes the bias of the United Nations Organization towards the Cyprus Turks, and its apparent inability to protect them against their more numerous and militarily more powerful co-inhabitants of the island, the Greek Cypriots.
The book describes how the Greek fixation with Enosis - union with Greece fixation with enosis – union with Greece led to a one-sided war against the Turks and the brutal massacres of their men, women and children.
Harry Scott Gibbons explodes the that Greeks and Turks had lived happily together from independence in 1960 until 1974 when the Turkish armed forces, without reason or provocation, attacked Cyprus and divided the island between the two races. And he explains how the Turkish intervention came only after the mainland Greek-led coup, which caused a war of Greek against Greek in which 2,000 Greeks and Greek Cypriots died in five days, the reason Turkey called its action the “Peace Operation�.
The operation also discovered, in a series of secret documents captured by the Turkish forces, a cold-blooded plan to wipe out the entire Turkish-Cypriot population documents that the author calls The Genocide Files.
His book does not make for pleasant reading. An authentic tale of brutality never does.
Here is all the horror of obsession gone mad, the murders, the massacres, and the rapes. And the mass graves where bulldozers ripped and tore the victims’ bodies out of all recognition.
The author’s research has convinced him that Cypriot Greeks and Turks never have and never will be able to live in peace and harmony. The “Cyprus problem’ was solved, he says, in 1974, when the Turkish Cypriots achieved their own nationhood.
The book has also a fascinating account of the original Greek Colonels’ Junta, from 1967 to 1973, the wars against Italy, Germany, and the Greek Communists, and why they decided the military should take over Greece.
About the author
Harry Scott Gibbons was born in the small coalmining village of Lochore, in Fife, Scotland, of Irish background.
After service in the Royal Air Force, he studied agriculture at Aberdeen University and economics in Copenhagen, Denmark.
His journalist career began as a greyhound racing reporter, then be moved to Beirut, Lebanon, with £10 in his pocket and stayed to become one of London’s Fleet Street’s best-known Middle East Foreign Correspondent.
He has lived and worked in the Arab World, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece and the United States, and speaks Danish and Arabic.
At various times in his life Gibbons has been a farm and forestry worker, an air steward, ship’s steward, and train steward.
A staunch anti-Communist, he is one of the very few Cold War double agents the British Government has ever admitted worked for it.
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