William Saroyan, in his introdcution of Leon Surmelian's "I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen," called the book "gentle, civilized" and "a story without hate." And one of the remarkable features of this book is that its author does not automatically make all Turks out to be monsters. It is this disarming quality that makes the "extermination" chapter all the more alarming. Since Surmelian sounds so credible, the evil acts he presents come across as believable. . . .
And perhaps they happened just the way in which he depicted them, during the "death march." No one denies there were times the Armenians were abused, even by the gendarmes who were assigned to protect them.
Yet Surmelian provides giveaway signs of his own Dashnak mentality, even when he was a little boy. As objective observers are keenly aware, trust is not a favor to be granted to the "end-justifies-the-means" Dashnak personality.
As K. S. Papazian astutely concluded in (p. 67 of) his 1934 book, "Patirotism Perverted," the Dashnaks' "hands are raised against everybody, its plots and crimes have rocked the conscience of all decent Armenians, and have disgraced our people before the civilized world."
So was Surmelian being honest in his reportage, or was his "unhateful" style a sneaky bone that he threw, in the knowledge such would have presented a more believable format for his Dashnak ideology and his service for the "Armenian Cause"? As with the rest of the "genocide" madness, you weren't there and neither was I.
The fact is, throughout his narrative, Surmelian wastes little opportunity in painting the Turks in the same brush as typical Armenian propaganda. The Turks are stupid, sinister, and basically evil, despite token descriptions of humanity (which are quite laudable, given their absence in the "regular" channels). On the surface, there is then an "unhateful" nature with the book. But as with the "genocide," if one wishes to get to the truth, one must scratch beneath the surface. It does not take much scratching to conclude that, despite what Saroyan tells us, "I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen" offers quite a bit of hatred... as we'll soon see.
The clarity with which Surmelian remembers the most minute details from thirty years ago, as a nine-year-old, already is the greatest cause for suspicion. The way he rounds out the story with the injections of "Armenian genocide-speak" (such as all the Armenian men being subjected to annihilation... as if today's worldwide Armenian population could have reached 7 million from what was 3 million, had all the men been wiped out) makes it appear that he used this opportunity to lay on the typically deceptive Armenian propaganda.
Regardless: the book offered some interesting observatioins aside from the "cause" that are worth taking a look at.
Leon Surmelian and his family were in Trabzon/Trebizond when the war started. The two Armenian newspapers were the "prudent" Byzantion and the "hot-headed" Azatamart. His pharmacist father comes across as one of the many good Armenians who was trapped between loyalty to the state and the pressures brought upon by the greedy, fanatical revolutionary leaders. ("Father was strongly for Armeno-Turkish friendship, and the only Armenian in Trebizond critical of Russia... he heaped again his scorn for the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. 'It's destroying our nation! It has ruined our schools, disunited our people. What do your people know about international politics? Wasn't it all this revolutionary foolishness that started the Massacre?'" Three cheers for Surmelian the senior!)
The fact that Leon Surmelian had a "humane" Armenian for a father (an intelligent father whom Surmelian deeply respected for being "always right"), and a mother who shunned political conversations (and thus, theoretically, would not have served as an anti-Turkish influence) makes it all the more profound that Surmelian harbored such traitorous feelings for his Ottoman nation, as he reveals time and again... even as an impressionable nine-year-old. (At such a young age, often it is the parents who do the impressing.) Thus, ironically, the one truth that is revealed from "I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen" is that young Surmelian represented the way most Armenians must have felt. The "average Joes" of the Armenian community — not all, but all too many — were basically anti-Turkish and ready to collude with the enemy during wartime.
It appears Surmelian's Uncle Leon was a member of the Dashnak Armenian Revolutionary Federation, at odds with a cousin named George. ("Brother George, as we children called him—was hardly on speaking terms with Uncle Leon, because of past party quarrels. He had been a member of a rival revolutionary faction, the Hunchak, or Bell, and still had a revolver. But he had resigned from the party, disillusioned and bitter, and withdrawn from all political activity.")
[Pg. 17]: "An old Turkish beggar was calling on us. Turkish beggars did not fare very well in our exclusively Christian street; our old clothes and leftover food usually went to Christian beggars but we were extremely generous with this man... We were quite certain that God, seeing our good deed, would summon back the angel of death and permit Uncle Harutiun to live."
This passage indicates the Armenians in this neighborhood were isolated from the Muslims; this was not always the case from other accounts I've read, where there was a community feeling between the two groups. (More on this later.) In this example (along with other clues that will emerge), we can see there is a "looking down on" the Turks, even at the level of the beggars. (I'd presume most would feel those who have hit bottom are of the same class, and don't deserve further prejudice.) Much the same way as Ohanus Appressian revealed in "Men Are Like That": "I can see now that we Armenians frankly despised the (Turkic) Tartars, and while holding a disproportionate share of the wealth of the country, regarded and treated them as inferiors." This is a recurring theme in much of Armenian literature, and surely too many Armenian youths from Internet forums have nothing but contempt for what they regard as "racially inferior" and subhuman Turks.
It's interesting the family decided to become charitable with the beggar in the hopes of being rewarded for their "good deed."
Antranig Ozanian
Uncle Leon was again reassuring [about the real attitude of the Ittihad]. "It’s common knowledge in Constantinople that the minister of the interior, Talat Pasha, dines and plays backgammon with our party leaders,� he said. “And the Ittihad does what he says. Jemal Pasha, the new minister of the navy, is also friendly.� “How about Enver?� That was the most magic name of all for the Turks. “Enver had nothing but praise for our soldiers during the Balkan War. It wasn’t easy for our boys to fight against the Christian Bulgarians — with Antranik serving in their army. (...) But Uncle Leon... also had words of caution for them from the party leaders. “We can dine and play backgammon with them, but we must never cease to organize. They can fool us again...�
A quick look at Jemal Pasha, according to the notorious Turk-hater, Johannes Lepsius, from his book, Deutschland und Armenian: "Jemal Pasha... prevented serious rioting in his district and took some steps to feed those who had been deported and provide necessary services..." At another point in the book, an April 1, 1915 telegram from German Consul Rossler states: "Jemal Pasha gave the order... any Mohammadan who attacks an Armenian will be court-martialed." The fact is, Jemal Pasha always stood up for the Armenians, and his reward was to be murdered at the hands of Armenian terrorists.
Surmelian's paragraph above continues with a deeper condemnation of how evil the Turks really are, but I ask you this, ladies and gentlemen: how feasible is it for leaders to show a genuine friendliness toward Armenians to later go and conduct an extermination policy against them? In his book, I'm not sure whether Surmelian provided a murder motive (I didn't have the luxury of examining at length, aside from a quick read-through, and a hurried xeroxing of some pages), but the typical one is that the Ottoman Empire intended to "Turkify" the nation, that is, pan-Turanism. If the motive was based on such racism, can you imagine the pretense of dining with the object of racial hatred, and playing board games with them? Would Hitler have asked a Jew to share a few beers?
On the other hand, a good reason why the Armenians gained their reputation for disloyalty is that they thought little of demonstrating outward friendship while colluding with the enemies of their country; if "fooling" was taking place, it was on the part of the Armenians.
While it was nice of Surmelian to reveal the Turkish leaders had human dimensions — that was far more to expect than your general Armenian "genocide" writer — the author's real intention appears to be the demonstration of how really inhuman these Turks were. The style of "civility" troublingly comes across as a pretense, akin to the Nazis' playing sweet music for concentration camp arrivals. (Surmelian will go on to give a really atrocious example of this, with two Turkish boys that had befriended him, coming up.)
[p. 62] We all knew the Turkish march:
Yashasun hurriet, edalet, mussavat,
Yashasun millet!
Long live liberty, fraternity, equality,
Long live the people!
Brass-band words borrowed by the Young Turks from the slogan of the French Revolution. That such words should exist in Turkish, we thought. . . . Yet the music was good, and we sang it lustily, with imitations of various band instruments.
Yes, here the Armenians were granted an autonomy by the Ottomans when the Armenians' previous rulers, the Byzantines did not... and even when the Armenians' rulers-to-be, the Russians, would not... allowing for the Armenians to maintain their national identity since the 11th century (starting with the Seljuks), and Surmelian provides this awful dig for his unwary English-speaking reader, already immersed in "Terrible Turk" propaganda. The funny thing is, the more "liberty, fraternity, equality" the Armenians were granted, the greater would Surmelian's beloved Dashnaks (and other fanatical revolutionists) feel free to draw a deeper wedge between the two peoples. Once again, Surmelian doesn't miss the opportunity to slip in an awful and untruthful dig, in his "gentle, civilized" fashion.
While last fall I was visiting in California I spent a day with Leon Surmelian, the author of "I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen." In the course of a conversation, as we were discussing the Fedayi commanders, Leon suddenly said to me: "Dro was the greatest commander of them all; he was never defeated in battle."
Now Leon is not a military man nor is he a historian...
James G. Mandalian, DRO, The Armenian Review, June 1957
Indeed, Surmelian is no historian. He is yet another Armenian believer who has allowed the false Armenian version of events to wash all over him, if he's going to make a ridiculous statement like Dro's never having been defeated. (Dro was Armenia's war minister in the 1920 war with the Turks that led to Armenia's crushing defeat [under an administration Surmelian himself served under]; the cowardly, terroristic butcher was best in battle when facing defenseless villagers to exterminate, not real soldiers. Fables of his valor and military genius come strictly from Armenian historians.)
In his book, Surmelian's heart belongs only to Antranik; it looks like his hero-worship of Armenian mass-murdering heroes took another turn, in later years.
[p. 64] Avedis had tried to organize the first trade union in Trebizond, and staged a demonstration on May Day by unfurling a large red flag on the Gray Hill, and then with a band of his comrades, mere schoolboys, marching into the city singing La Marseillaise and an Armenian socialistic song. The Turks thought the Armenians of the city had risen in revolt, to establish a kingdom of their own—their old bugaboo—and a mob of Laz cutthroats, dervishes, theological students, and other such patriots, armed to their teeth, gathered in the Maydan, the central plaza, to “suppress� this new rebellion of the infidels. Fortunately the town commandant happened to be a more enlightened man and knew something about May Day celebrations in Europe. When the alarmed leaders of our community appealed to him for protection, he sent troops to disperse the murderous mob, and a massacre was narrowly averted.
In the entire book, Surmelian gives overt examples of the Armenians' treacherous disloyalty (especially deriving from himself, as the best example), and the possibility of Armenian revolt is termed as an insignificant "bugaboo"? The thousands of Turks the vicious Armenians subjected to outright murder, especially in the past forty-odd "terrorist" years, was a very serious matter.
An example of losses (albeit exaggerated) comes from the diary of Aghasi, who began the 1895 Zeitun rebellion: "From the beginning until the end of the insurrection, the Turks lost 20,000 men, 13,000 of whom were soldiers, and the rest were bashi-bozuks [irregulars]. We had lost only 125 men, 60 of whom had died in battle, and 65 of whom were dastardly killed during the cease-fire." (p. 306] )
As W.W.I approached, the local residents had good reason to fear Armenian treachery... for quite unlike the innocent martyr nation the world came to know them as, when Turks were at the mercy of Armenians, rarely was mercy shown.
Note how this episode is presented: the Muslims are such an inferior sub-species, it is in their nature to massacre, in a heartbeat. If the Ottoman Muslims were so dangerous and murderous, wouldn't the time to have approached the "enlightened" commandant have been before the May Day celebration had taken place?
"If the Turks had attacked us, we would have defended ourselves," Uncle Leon said, while Mother got up and left the room. These political arguments in our home made her acutely unhappy.
"Defended with what?" Father shouted.
"Our party had eight hundred members in our region."
"All right, you had eight hundred heroes against how many Turks? — eight hundred thousand, with millions more behind them. Did you expect the British fleet to force the Dardanelles to come to your help—and climb maybe to the top of Mount Ararat? Or did you think the Russian Emperor would declare war on the Sultan because Avedis was waving a red flag and singing socialism?"
I did not know what socialism meant, I did not understand half of what they said. Though it seemed to me that Father was right—he was too smart to be wrong—and though George and Vertanes agreed with everything he said, and disagreed with everything Uncle Leon said, I was nevertheless heart and soul for Uncle Leon. In fact I resented my cousins...
The fact that the revolutionists might have been numerically inferior never stopped them from creating riots and massacres in years past. After centuries of harmony, the sequence for the troubles that occurred nearly always followed the same pattern: The Armenians would ACT, and the Turks would REACT. If the Armenians had not stirred trouble... if they had remained loyal, as they were up to the 19th century... none would have had to fear a "massacre." (Just as Surmelian's dad said. He was too smart to be wrong!)
Although father served as the voice of reason and was "right," Surmelian's heart and soul still belonged with his Dashnak uncle. A good revelation as to how the ordinary Ottoman-Armenian must have felt, after years of prior agitation by the missionaries and the imperialist powers.
[p. 65] I wanted to ask Father, "Then why do you call Uncle Leon, and not Brother George or Brother Vertanes, to protect you with his revolver when you go out at night?"
Father was in terror of the Turkish toughs who attacked Christian pedestrians in the streets, robbed them, beat them, and sometimes knifed them to death. The main street, from his pharmacy to our home, was fairly safe, but the dark crooked narrow side streets were not. We had to carry a lantern when we ventured into these perilous alleys on visiting our relatives. When it was Father’s turn to keep his pharmacy open until past midnight, or when he went out after supper, Uncle Leon had to accompany him as bodyguard.
It's amazing Father was evidently never a victim of a mugging, after years of such operation. As if a second man (the "bodyguard") would be of much use if a small gang were of the mind to cause mischief. Yes, lawless criminals is a problem peculiar to every country, and the gangs in this part of the world were surely not exclusively Turkish. The Turkish ones most certainly did not ask their victims if they were Christian before attacking them. The truth is, everyone suffered from toughs of all stripes, particularly in regions of the empire where Ottoman control was weak. (This type of account would be rare in an area where control was strong, as in Istanbul.) Yet note again how the author gives the impression of anti-Christian persecution. .
[p. 66] We continued our vacation, and then suddenly there was a war in Europe. The Great Christian Powers were fighting among themselves. And Turkey, backed by Germany, saw her chance of settling old scores with Russia and her allies—our friends.
Was that the reason? The bankrupt, war-weary Ottoman Empire suddenly decided this would be a good opportunity to take on the combined might of Russia, England and France? Or did the reason have more to do with how these nations were trying to take the empire apart, reducing the empire to little more than a European colony.... so that the Ottomans knew if the Entente Powers were to win against Germany, nothing would stand in the way of the empire's dissolution? Even with this backdrop, the Ottomans dragged their feet, and would have entered as easily on the side of the Allies as with Germany, if not for circumstances that real historians know all too well.
These "Great Christian Powers" were some "friends" of the Armenians, by the way. Even if they behaved like real friends, if your nation goes to war, then these friends would need to stop being regarded as friends. Yet, the Ottoman-Armenians decided to betray their nation, by choice or coercion, and became "belligerents de facto."
As if to signal the approach of our doom there was a total eclipse of the sun at this time. Old women in the village shook their heads and said gravely: “It’s an ill omen. May God protect us."
An allusion to the oncoming "genocide." However, if there were such an omen, it affected all Ottoman peoples. The Muslims who suffered in far greater numbers did not count, and still don't count... including the over half-million who died as a direct result of savage Armenian treatment, along with some Russian help.
We found the city a veritable war camp in September, with ships in the harbor unloading troops and supplies, and Turkish soldiers, trained by German officers, marching off to war goose-stepping.
Let's keep in mind the book's release was in 1945, when terms like "goose-stepping" had a particularly chilling effect. The description brings us a step closer to "genocide."
Men and materials were being rushed to Erzurum, the great fortress breasting the Russian Caucasus.
There was a general mobilization. Vertanes, wearing the uniform of a Turkish lieutenant, came to bid us good-bye. He, too, was going to Erzurum. He let me play with his sword. I practiced drawing the long heavy blade out of its scabbard. If he was worried, he tried not to show it. He knew he looked well in his uniform. The ends of his black mustache were waxed and twisted up like Enver Pasha’s. He was in the medical corps. He asked Nevart to play the piano for him once more, and when she finished her number, he clapped his hands and cried, “Bis! Bis! Repetez!� with his customary enthusiasm. He acted as if he had done nothing all his life but attend concerts.
Uncle Leon, being a widow’s sole support, was allowed to pay an exemption tax of forty gold pounds—half of which he had to borrow from Father.
“Before long they will take me too,� Father said gloomily. “It’s going to be from seven to seventy.� The schools opened as usual, but Trebizond was not the same city any more.
Why would father have thought the mobilization would grow to be so all-encompassing? In his wisdom, he must have recognized what a desperate situation this was for his country. Far from the Ottoman Empire's opportunistically choosing to go to war, as son Surmelian informed us, the Ottoman Empire would face three of the greatest superpowers of the period. Indeed, all the fighting the Ottomans were engaged in during W.W.I was of a "defensive" nature (save for Enver's ill-fated attack leading to Sarikamish, at the outset).
Given this desperate life-or-death struggle, where every man was needed to hold off such superior forces from multiple fronts, the Armenian soldiers were of great need. This would be the worst time to initiate an "extermination" program, even if the Ottoman Turks were of the mind to do so. The securing of the borders would have needed to come first, otherwise there would be no land left to "Turkify" anything, particularly with the treaties the Allies had agreed upon secretly, to divvy up Ottoman real estate. This is only common sense. And Leon Surmelian has indirectly borne witness to this fact, through his father, who was always right.
Chapter 5: My Turkish Playmates
[p. 67] The frog said to the heron, “Please take me up with you, friend heron. I am tired of living in this slimy water.�
The heron replied, “Very well, friend frog. Hang on with your mouth to this stick in my beak. Take care not to say anything while we are in the air. Be sure to keep your mouth shut.�
“I will not say a word,� the frog promised.
So they went up together. The heron flew over fields and mountains, and the frog was delighted. But soon it forgot its promise, and as it opened its mouth to speak, it fell to the ground and was killed.
OUR Turkish lesson that day was about the frog that talked too much. There were many stories with a moral in our Turkish reader. This particular lesson made me think of what my father often said: we Armenians talked too much; we did not know how to keep our mouths shut. Thus we proclaimed our love for Russia, England, and France from the house tops. The Turkish comic paper Karagoz had truthfully said, If you want to know the situation in the Dardanelles, look at an Armenian’s face.
The Turks were very different from us; one could never tell what they really thought, what they really knew. They kept their secrets to themselves, and if they talked, they often meant the opposite of what they said.
The above passage is very telling. It gets to the heart of the matter as to why the "Armenian Genocide" has become the accepted wisdom throughout the world. The Armenians are noisy and screech at every opportunity; the Turks prefer silence.
This difference is the reason why there is no limit to Armenian "Oral History," and the Turkish counterpart is difficult to find. It's because the Turks don't like to speak of their sufferings, they are the polar opposite of a "please feel sorry for me" people. This British archival source provides understanding, as [Shown here].
According to Realities Behind the Relocation, 3,400 Armenians were sent away from Surmelian's area of residence, Trebizond. (p. 131); Vahakn Dadrian states in his chapter of "America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915" that 8-10,000 lived in the city by the same name, and 55,000-60,000 in the province (p. 69), the "wholesale liquidation... all but completed" by mid-to-late August 1915 (p. 88), a good chunk of which (not "minimal," p. 82) via "drowning operations."
But we know Dadrian was blowing his usual hot air from the writings of missionary Ernest C. Partridge, who wrote: "the Armenians who had lived in this territory and all the way up to the Black Sea (Trebizond), who had survived began to trek back," in "Mary Louise Graffam," Armenian Affairs, (Winter 1949-1950). If there were a true policy of "wholesale liquidation," none could have survived.
[p. 70-72] On our way home German army trucks loaded with Turkish soldiers roared down the main street. The war had brought the first automobiles to Trebizond, and the Turks believed they were driven by shaitans, devils, but I knew better. Automobiles were like electricity, products of modern civilization, of European science.
As we passed by the French school, now converted to a Turkish military hospital, we saw a group of German army nurses, young women with pink cheeks and determined chins. They had red crosses on their white caps and arm bands. This strange Alliance of the Christian cross with the Turkish crescent disturbed and puzzled me. "Have the Germans become Mohammedans?" I asked Aunt Azniv.
"No, my dear, I don’t think so. But they might as well be," she added indignantly.
Quite the contrary, the Germans often allowed their "Christianity" to supersede their alliance with the Ottomans. One reason why race-and-religiously prejudiced Germans (like the aforementioned consul, Rossler), similarly hoodwinked by missionaries and Armenians, provided testimony for the Armenians' genocide. (An example of this attitude: The Germans treated the Turks with high contempt, and more than one told me how glad he was to meet another white man in this “native� country. "Turkey in Travail")
Note how the Turks are painted as village idiots, and even a nine-year-old Armenian boy betters them, by knowing what's up with those cars.
The next day we went to school as usual. Many boys exhibited pieces of Russian shrapnel, and asked big prices for them. I got one by trading for it a Nestlé chocolate premium, a pocket mirror with the picture of a pretty girl on the back of it, and two rare stamps. That lovely piece of jagged steel was now my prized possession. It symbolized the might of Christian Russia.
We were so restless and distracted in the classroom that even Mr. Ohanian had to rap for order and attention. Well, sooner or later the Russians would be in Trebizond. The Turks weren’t going to stop them. Why, one of those Cossacks could cut down fifty Turks!
Two months later the Russian fleet bombarded Trebizond again, and this time it seemed they would really land troops and occupy the city. The new bombardment lasted five hours. Buildings were crashing down all around us. it was a terrifying, yet glorious experience. But the Russian warships steamed away at nightfall, and from the balcony of a neighbor’s house, in the shell-proof basement of which we had taken shelter; we watched them disappear.
The next day both Turks and Christians fled to villages. We moved to Zefanoz, where my grandmother had an estate. It was a cold, rainy day in February. On reaching the village we found both of Grandmother’s houses requisitioned by a prominent Turkish official, Remzi Sami Bey. His uniformed orderlies had taken the keys from the caretaker and were busy cleaning the buildings. His wife and children were expected to arrive momentarily.
We stood in the rain, shelterless. It was revolting. But what could we do? To oppose a government requisition was a crime punishable by death. We wondered whether his wife belonged to the old bigoted or the new “enlightened� class of Turkish women.
Happily she turned out to be of the latter. She was unveiled, which meant she was emancipated and civilized. She and her two sons, riding on horseback, were accompanied by a few soldiers. Pale, slender, chic, she was extremely attractive. She told us that she was born and educated in Constantinople. We relaxed.
Her name was Selma Hanum. She apologized in exquisite Turkish phrases for the inconvenience she had caused us, and she said she did not know the houses had been requisitioned without their owner’s knowledge and consent. She was sorry. However, because of her husband’s official position, which necessitated many important conferences in their home with high German and Turkish officers, they had to live in this village, which was close enough to the city, yet out of the reach of the Russian guns. Perhaps we could rent to her the large house? Rent? We could hardly believe our eats. She was a real lady. With mutual thanks and compliments an agreement was reached.
She talked with us freely and without covering her face, for we had no menfolk with us. Father had to remain in the city to keep his pharmacy open, as required by law, and Uncle Leon was to join us in the village a few weeks later. She expressed the wish, patting my head, that Onnik and I would play with her two sons, Mahmut Bey and Shukri Bey. As their father was a bey, they were beys too, and she called them by their titles. Both were fair, good-looking boys, in European clothes. We had never played with Turkish children before, but now we shook hands and talked like friends.
Selma Hanum paid us a ceremonious visit, which we duly returned. After this exchange of diplomatic courtesies, we became good neighbors, and Onnik and I played with Shukri Bey and Mahmut Bey. Their mother would watch us approvingly. Mr. Ohanian was also in the village, and she engaged him as Turkish tutor for her sons. I was very happy because he was a poor man and had a family to support. We had no idea Turks could be so nice. Selma Hanum won us over completely. In a few weeks the winter was over. The crocus bloomed..
It is to the author's credit to relate this example of the one Turk who was "so nice." I found this statement to be a sad commentary: "We had never played with Turkish children before." Because of segregation? Because of feelings of superiority?
I believe in the truth of eyewitness interviews from this report covering the 1915 Van revolt. In the section entitled, "The Pre-1915 Status of the Van Armenians & Relations with the Muslims," we get accounts such as: 'Zahide Coskun of Koprukoy said: "We had Armenian neighbours both in our village (at the time she was living in the village of Gollu) and in the neighbouring villages. We got on with these neighbours of ours just as we got on with the Muslims. Everything was good"...' I don't know what to make of this picture of severe segregation that Surmelian presents. True, "Armenian quarters" may have been separate in many villages. Yet, it's hard to fathom that the Turks would be regarded as such an alien , unknown species, as Surmelian's story indicates.
[p. 73-74] I awoke one morning with the gay riot of sparrows under the eaves of our roof. Onnik threw a pillow at me. I threw it back at him, and we chased each other on all fours, growling and barking like dogs.
“Stop that racket !“ Mother cried. “You can take an example from Shukri and Mahmut. See how gentlemanly, how well behaved they are.�
We had to agree that they were. We were pretty wild and rough compared to them. They wore long pants, too, though they were not older than we.
“Onnik! Zavén !“ Shukri and Mahmut called us from the lawn, standing under the windows of our bedroom. “Sabahunuz hayir olsun! May your morning be felicitous !“
“Sabahunuz hayir olsun!� we returned, leaning out the window.
Mother smiled. They were so glad to see us. It seemed they couldn’t get along without us.
"Come on down, and let’s play tip-cat," Shukri begged. He sent a small stick flying through the air with a blow of his bat. "See how I have improved !"
"You certainly have," we agreed. ~We had taught them the game. We were their only playmates in the village; they did not associate with other boys, not even Turks.
(...)
I had planted some beans under an acacia tree, and dashed over to see if they had sprouted. Clawing the earth back, I felt them with the tip of my finger. They were firm. They had taken root!
"My beans are growing !" I shouted excitedly, and grabbing Mahmut whirled around with him. He was happy too.
"We have sunk another English battleship," he said. "Father got the news last night."
"Our soldiers in the Dardanelles are eating English chocolate," his brother Shukri added, laughing.
But what was good news for them, was bad news for us. I became glum. Mahmut sang “Illeri! Illeri!� and marched across the lawn. He was always playing soldier, like me. But while I aspired to be another Napoleon, his idol was Enver Pasha. He maintained that Enver Pasha was greater than Napoleon and would clean up Russia, England, and France. I was careful not to betray my feelings too much, and did not argue with him.
After breakfast we played tip-cat with them, and then watched the Turkish recruits drilling on our lawn. Remzi Sami Bey had transformed part of our lawn into a drill ground. The Christian soldiers were not given arms any more and were herded in labor battalions.
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How mysterious. The Armenian soldiers were given arms to begin with, which is odd if the idea had been to exterminate the Armenians all along. Now why would you suppose the decision was made to take these arms away? (Hint: "At the front the Armenians used blank cartridges and deserted in droves.")
At least Surmelian treats the "labor battalion hell" issue fairly, by acknowledging the other side of the coin... a great rarity in Armenian propaganda (although he couldn't resist adding another example of his own superiority, compared with the dim-witted Turks):
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[pp. 74-5] For them life in the Turkish Army was hell. But even the Moslems suffered. I felt sorry for these recruits. They were such a miserable, submissive lot, just resigned to their kismet. They never joked or laughed. Some of them were barefooted. They lived on bean soup and brown bread, but the soup was like dishwater, and lucky was the man who fished out a bean. They were starving. This group was almost ready to go to the front; they had finally learned which side was left, and which side right. The sergeants had an awful time teaching them that. I knew the commands much better than they.
While we were watching them drill, and the air was filled with the hoarse shouts of the sergeants, the telephone rang. Telephones were strictly for high official use, and Remzi Sami Bey had installed one in the large house. This particular call was for Shukri and Mahmut, and came from another village. They ran to answer it, and then told us proudly that they had just talked to the sons of the governor-general, who was coming to spend a week with them. Their fathers were close personal friends.
The guests arrived in the afternoon, on horseback, with a few orderlies. I disliked them intensely the minute I met them. The three sons had mean faces, and were loud and spoiled. Shukri and Mahmut included us in all their plans for the week, but their guests could barely hide their contempt for us. We were nothing but giaour dogs in their eyes. We were afraid to antagonize them; otherwise we would have preferred not to have anything to do with them. The youngest, about my age, was the meanest. We played marbles and knucklebones, and he flew into a rage when he lost. In the running game, “taking prisoner,� I purposely let him catch me a few times, though I could run faster than he. When I caught him, he insisted he had not crossed my boundary. We had an argument. I was willing to let him have his way, since his father was governor-general and our lives were in his hands. I wanted to be diplomatic, since we were living in dangerous times, but I lost my patience.
"Giaour dog, you can’t talk to me like that !" he shouted in my face. "You don’t have many more days to live anyhow. We will cut your throats. We will massacre all of you. We will not leave a single Armenian alive I" He moved his hand across his throat and showed me how they would butcher us.
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Let's bear one thing in mind with this anecdote: we're dealing with children. Children have a tendency to be cruel, and these spoiled, mean Turkish kids sure sound like they were trouble.
Consider their governor dad was getting all the lowdown on Armenian treachery, that Surmelian himself provided a representation of, in his nine-year-old state. Imagine the headaches the armed Armenian rebels were causing the beleauguered Ottoman army, from behind-the-lines. The dinner table conversation in their household must not have held the traitorous Armenians in the highest esteem. Of course these kids would have been influenced, and would have treated poor little Leon with contempt. Among humans, this would be the normal REACTION to treacherous ACTION.
Now let's add the factor that these were kids, and mean-spirited ones at that. (Sons of the governor! Imagine the superiority complex.) It's natural to assume, in creepy little kid-speak, that WE WILL KILL YOU would be a natural outcome of the miserable situation.
Yet author Surmelian actually takes this outburst as "extermination" evidemce!
As if the governor... even if he were made aware of secret extermination orders, assuming they were a reality... would pass on such sensitive information to his little kids! (And his "loud," big-mouthed kids, at that.)
I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, is that not mind-boggling?
But here's where Surmelian enters "unforgivable" territory:
After the spoiled brats make such an ugly comment, little Leon Surmelian turns to his good friends, Shukri and Mahmut ... and they respond with an embarrassed silence. Entirely in keeping with their "gentlemanly" character, especially in the face of the other vicious boys.
How does Surmelian interpret this silence?
He indicates to the reader that it's obvious Shukri and Mahmut have also been made aware of these extermination orders!
Yes, these little boys... seemingly devoid of prejudice, as children naturally would be before their parents or other influences corrupt them.... these little boys who played such warm, loving games with little Leon, are made out to be -- in my opinion -- worst monsters than the governor's creepy kids, for knowing that their Armenian friend's life would soon be kaput.
This is the nature of the evil Turks, then... according to Leon Surmelian.
The "Genocide" begins
[p. 80] ...[S]omehow news of events in Constantinople, Van, Erzurum and elsewhere in Turkey reached us in Zefanoz. All the outstanding Armenian intellectuals in the capital, hundreds of poets, journalists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, and even members of the Ottoman parliament, had been rounded up by the police in one night and sent under heavy guard to the interior, nobody knew exactly where. They had disappeared and had not been heard from. In Van an Armenian uprising had taken place after their leaders were treacherously seized and murdered by the governor-general Jevdet Bey, who was Enver Pasha’s brother-in-law, and the entire Armenian community there was threatened by a general massacre. The Turks were bombarding the Armenian quarters of Van from the fortress. The Van Armenians were famous fighters and Uncle Leon was confident they would resist to the last man.
In Trebizond the blow first fell on the Russian subjects, several of whom were in Zefanoz, and we had relatives among them. They were summoned to the palace of the governor-general to hear an "important message"—and never returned. We understood they were put in boats and deported to Kerasund, in the custody of gendarmes and chetas.
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I had been lulled by the "gentle, civilized" nature of what I hoped to be a rare, fair example of "Armenian Oral History," but Leon Surmelian's treatment of Shukri and Mehmet drove home for me that this is yet another exercise in Armenian propaganda. So it's hard to take whatever Surmelian says seriously. Particularly when he informs his reader that the ringleaders who had been rounded up had disappeared and had not been heard from.. Even Peter Balakian provided a couple of examples of survivors in his abominable "The Burning Tigris." According to Balakian, they had escaped.... including his "action priest" relative. Or were they released, like the musician Komitas, after a two-week imprisonment? No doubt most were executed, and there were likely innocents among them, but there was a full-scale rebellion going on. Leaders had to plan these rebellions, and the price for treason is a high one in any nation; particularly during wartime... and particularly during a war when super-powered nations are at the gates. (Incidentally, the Armenian who ratted out some of these leaders -- Harootyoun Mugurditchian -- was later assassinated.... by none other than Talat Pasha's killer, Soghoman Tehlirian! [The Armenian Review, Autumn 1950, pgs. 46-7]
And here we go again with the blackening of that eternal Turkish villain, Jevdet Bey. (The one Balakian actually would have us believe, from his "Tigris" work, nailed horseshoes on Armenian feet..) Curiously, it was on the Armenians' very own "Date of Doom," April 24, that a telegram was sent suggesting a "deportation." It was sent by Jevdet Bey, and the "deportation" concerned the endangered Muslims in his district, not the Armenians:
"Until now approximately 4,000 insurgent Armenians have been brought to the region from the vicinity. The rebels are engaged in highway robbery, attack the neighbouring villages and burn them. It is impossible to prevent this. Now many women and children are left homeless. It is not possible nor suitable to relocate them in tribal villages in the vicinity. Would it be convenient to begin sending them to the western provinces?"
Armenian propaganda loves to tell us the Armenians were only defending themselves in Van, and Surmelian happily obliges in repeating this lie. The fact is, this was one of several Van uprisings, the first one taking place only days after Russia had declared war in late 1914. It was not the Armenians threatened with massacre, but the Turks and Muslims... since the menfolk were all away, fighting on the mulitple, desperate wartime fronts. The well armed Armenians began their offensive on May 8, and started burning down the Muslim quarters. Jevdet Bey had no choice but to order the evacuation of Van, and Turkish defense forces left Van on May 17... whereupon the Armenians began to set fire to the evacuated Turkish quarters ... clearing the way for Russian entry.
It is interesting that those of Russian ethnicity were living in Trebizond and were also subjected to "deportation." Since the lawless chetas (gangs) accompanied this move (amazing the details a nine-year-old boy learned... and retained, for thirty years), we can infer the heartless Turks must have murdered them all.
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About a week later a proclamation by the governor-general was posted in the streets of the city and announced by town criers. Copies of it reached Zefanoz and Mr. Ohanian, our instructor of Turkish, read and translated it to the anxious people who gathered around him. He wiped his pincenez glasses with a silk handkerchief exactly as in our classroom before he started reading that lengthy edict. It went like this:
Our Armenian fellow-countrymen, having allied themselves with the enemies of the state and religion, and being in revolt against the government, are to be deported to special districts in the interior and shall have to remain there for the duration of the war.
We hereby order every Armenian in the province of Trebizond to be ready to leave in one week, June 24 to July 1. Every Armenian without a single exception is subject to this decree. Only those who are too ill and too old to walk will be temporarily exempted from the deportation and taken care of in government hospitals. Armenians from this day on are forbidden to sell anything and are allowed to take with them on their journey only what they can carry with them. No carriages can be supplied.
In spite of their ingratitude the government will not deny its Armenian subjects its usual paternal care and protection, will keep their houses and stores under seal, and restore them to their owners when they return from their temporary exile.
We are forced to take this extreme measure for the defense of the fatherland as well as for the good and security of our misguided Armenian fellow-countrymen. If any Armenian opposes this decision of the government by armed resistance or otherwise, or tries to hide himself, he will be taken dead or alive. All those who hide an Armenian or give him food, shelter or aid of any kind will be punished by hanging, whether they be Moslems or Christians.
Mr. Ohanian wiped off the beads of perspiration that had sprung up on his scholarly brow. The color was completely gone from his face.
"I devoted my life to the teaching of the Turkish language," he said in a voice charged with emotion, "and now I have to read and translate a proclamation like this."
People discussed the implications of this order and I listened eagerly.
"The Germans have deported thousands of Belgians, but this is not a mere copying of German methods. This accursed government wants to destroy our nation."
"Calling us ungrateful when Armenians have built Turkey We have built the palaces in which their bloody sultans live, we have built their greatest mosques, we have sewed their clothes and made their shoes and treated their sick and even taught their children how to read and write their own language. We have built and they have destroyed. And now the Ittihad is going to solve the Armenian question by exiling all of us, men, women and children."
"Where are they going to send us?"
"To the Arabian deserts. That’s where they are sending the Armenians of Erzurum. We have to walk to Mosul and Baghdad." "It would take us at least four months to reach Mosul."
"This is wartime and the government is disturbed by what has happened at Van, so wants to remove the Armenian population farther away from the front as a military necessity. I think, on the advice of the German high staff. We shall suffer, yes, but deportation is better than massacre."
"What we should do is to escape to the mountains, as many of us as possible, and fight our way to the Russian lines." This proposal thrilled me. Oh, boy, how I would fight! "Don’t talk nonsense. It will be sheer suicide. Fight with what? Can we muster up fifteen rifles?"
They argued pro and con. Uncle Leon summed up the discussion by saying out of the corner of his mouth: "Whatever will happen will happen to us men." Meaning the government’s intention was to kill the men, but merely deport the women and children.
And that seemed to be the general belief.
Uncle Leon was one of the few known revolutionaries in the village and being a marked man, friends urged him to take his rifle and go join the band of peasant deserters in the mountains, among whom was his cousin Barnak. But he shook his head:
"I can’t leave my mother alone."
"Don’t worry about me," Grandmother said. "I have lived long enough. You run away and save yourself."
"I am going to stay with you no matter what happens."
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A few words on the proclamation. Yes, it was an awful directive, to disrupt the lives of so many. (And let's bear in mind, it was not only Armenians who were "deported" by the Government, but Turks as well. One example, from the Palu region: "...the entire civil population, Turkish as well Armenian, were sent away." Leslie Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, p. 104) Yet, given the treachery that Surmelian has given wonderful evidence of, and given the desperate wartime situation, no other nation would have acted differently.
Arthur Tremaine Chester gave the following analogy, were a similar situation to occur in the United States, and logically predicted the USA's "internal enemies" would have been treated much worse. Nobody shed a tear for the Muslims the Russians ruthlessly exiled during this period, even though the Muslims were not in revolt. In fact, Enver Pasha preferred the Ottomans to adopt the Russian course, as this May 2, 1915 telegram specifies; he preferred to truly "deport" (to move out of the country, and not around the country) the Armenians. Would that have been the greater humanitarian course? (A tip: Hovannisian has written some 150,000 Armenians who accompanied the Russian retreats died of famine. Imagine what would have happened to these Armenians had they been cruelly driven to Russian territory, without provisions and the care the Ottomans had set aside for the Armenians.
As it were, an Armenian representative reported to Ambassador Morgenthau himself that half a million Armenians had "already settled down to business" and were "earning their livings," by September of 1915... over two months after this march from Trebizond. In another private communication that the contemptible ambassador kept from his propagandistic "Story" book, Morgenthau was quoted (by Vahan Cardashian, in a March 3, 1916 letter to Lord Bryce) as saying Armenians were found in good numbers in almost all the interior cities of Turkey, and that the attitude of the Government was passive. (The Armenian Review, Winter 1957, p. 107.)
Yet, Leon Surmelian will deceitfully go on to make his reader believe extermination was the fate of the Armenians.
There were more exemptions granted to classes of Armenians (such as Catholics and Protestants), but note how we are told above that the sick and the old would be exempted. If the idea was to exterminate the Armenians, why would this be? (The genocidal nation pro-Armenians love to compare with the Ottomans, Nazi Germany, had a policy of euthanasia for its sick. Maybe Hitler got the idea from the Armenians; from a Turkish proclamation in Davis' The Slaughterhouse Province: In January and February 1915, many Moslem sick and injured who were returning to their homes from the front, were pitilessly massacred in Armenian villages through which they passed.)
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[p. 83] When in the evening Remzi Sami Bey, who had been extremely busy that week with conferences in the city, returned to the village, a delegation of Armenian women headed by Mother appeale.d to him to spare the women and children.
"We don’t know where to turn, whom to appeal to except you. You are our neighbor, you know us," Mother said, blushing. Others, more frank and voluble, raised their voices, half protesting, half begging him to exempt the women and children. At his request this meeting took place on the lawn next to ours. His wife and sons kept discreetly out of sight. Standing like a god before us the mighty bey listened to these appeals, and then gave his official answer in a thundering voice.
"Ladies, Hanum effendiler! The Armenians of Van revolted to stab our heroic army in its back, while the regiments of Armenian volunteers in the Russian army are carrying on a war of extermination against us. We were obliged to withdraw from Van, and the unprincipled traitors there who have taken up arms against their own government, have committed terrible atrocities on the peaceful Turkish population."
He paused, surveyed the crowd before him, and throwing back his big handsome head roared louder. "The Russians have set up an Armenian government in Van under the presidency of the chief of those bloodthirsty fiends, and the very existence of our fatherland is threatened! We are very sorry, but we have to remove all Armenians without exception to the interior in order to protect the rear of our army. I give you my word of honor that our gendarmes will protect you on your way and no harm whatever will come to you. The Ottoman State is magnanimous. After the war, which cannot but end by the complete victory of our arms, you will be permitted to return to your homes and receive back all your properties and goods. The day will come when you will realize that Russia and your own comitadjis are your worst enemies, and you will thank the government for securing the freedom and safety of the country and your own future happiness and prosperity by the expedience of temporary exile."
He turned on his heel, and strode back to his house.
For some reason I visualized the Armenians of Van as human warriors living and battling in a red sky. Oh, if I could only be at Van! If I could somehow fly on a fiery horse to those red clouds. The word “Van� constantly hammered in my mind as I lay in bed that night, unable to sleep.
I find it highly interesting that Leon Surmelian would include the above speech; he must have done so with a wink, assuming his reader will realize that everything Remzi Sami Bey thundered was a lie. (Particularly with Surmelian's upcoming chapter dealing with the "deportation," where he leaves no doubt the aim was extermination.) Yet I get the strangest feeling, Surmelian's conscience (given his "gentle, civilized" style) chose to give a little "equal time" here. Everything the bey promised was the truth — at least truth that he believed in.
The reasons he provided for the Armenians' removal were right on the button. Atrocities were committed after the Van Armenians had won, and the existence of the "fatherland" (is that Surmelian's "Nazi" parallel at work again? Surely he knew the Turkish term would have been "motherland") was surely threatened.
I'm sure he believed the gendarmes would have protected the Armenians, and despite the horrors Surmelian will tell us that they inflicted, perhaps they did. The Bey was 100% truthful in conveying the fact that the relocation was of a temporary nature, the state did issue orders safeguarding Armenian property (even though no doubt there were abuses... but these genuine orders were not issued for show), and the Armenians were allowed to return.
The one area in which he erred (aside from, probably, the gendarmes' behavior) was when he believed the Armenians will realize the error of their ways, and concede they were the dupes and pawns of the Russians and the horrible revolutionary leaders who did not care for their own people. Fat chance.
The next day all the Armenians in the village were busy preparing for departure. Women and girls sewed knapsacks, breeches and caps as if they were going on a vacation. Mother hoped we might be exempted from the deportation, Father being a pharmacist. The government surely could not afford to deport him when epidemic diseases killed more soldiers than enemy bullets and pharmacists were even scarcer than doctors. We were quite certain Father would attach himself to an army hospital or do something like that to save us. There were many influential Turks among his friends and clients, and he was known to be a conservative man, opposed to our political parties.
If Surmelian Senior was the one voice of sanity among his people, a true injustice was committed if he was not granted an exemption. Particularly if a lot of influential Turks knew him, and particularly since his profession was a valuable one. (Exemptions were granted, including for those who were soldiers and their families... especially those who worked in the medics corps, as we learned was the assigned area for Vertanes; I don't recall what his fate was, if provided.)
Perhaps the authorities decided the exemption would have been too risky, if they had gotten wind of what a traitor Surmelian Junior happened to be.
BEFORE THE WAR STARTED ON NOVEMBER 2
Armenians were in preparation for their rebellion all over the nation. In Surmelian's region of Trabzon (Trebizond), Governor Jemal Azmi Bey sent the following internal communication to the Ministry of the Interior on October 8, 1914 (source: The Armenian File, Gurun):
"A band of 800 people comprising the Ottoman and Russian Armenians in Russia, has been armed by the Russians, and sent to the vicinity of Artvin. We have been informed that they will spread out between Artvin and Ardanuch, that their number will be increased to 7,000, and that they will be used to disturb security within the Ottoman country."
[p. 85-87] We did not want the Turks to gather the crops planted by Armenian peasants. Then we broke into the orchard of Mother’s aunt. Her sour cherries were ripe, and we devoured fistfuls of them. She appeared in the doorway of her cottage, a severe old dame dressed in black.
“Hey! You good-for-nothing rascals! Get out of my orchard!� she cried. “I was keeping those cherries to make jam.�
“Jam?� We burst out laughing.
“Do you want the Turks to come and eat them?� I asked her, swinging merrily on top of a tree.
She realized that this was not an ordinary cherry season, that in a few days we would be on our way to Mesopotamia, and she need not worry any more about serving her guests the sour-cherry sherbet of which she was so proud. And, shrugging her shoulders, she went in.
On the afternoon of that same hectic day Mother received a note from Father. Unlike the other families we did not make any preparations as we did not know what Father wanted us to do. His note was laconic and gave us no hope of a possible exemption. He asked us to take only a few blankets with us and return to the city, to Aunt Shoghagat’s house.
We looked like a group of forlorn refugees as we left Zefanoz. We did not lock the door of our house, knowing the futility of doing so. Turkish peasants, sensing the rich booty in store for them, had already gathered like vultures around the village. Since we were forbidden to sell anything and had to travel to Mesopotamia on foot our possessions were of no earthly use to us anyhow. We were not so naive as to believe the government would keep them under seal, in spite of Remzi Sami Bey’s assurances.
What I regretted most leaving behind me was my potted pink carnation. I watered it for the last time and hid it on the roof. I would have asked Shukri and Mahmut to water and take care of it during my absence, and also to be kind to my beans, but their door and windows were closed again. All departures make one not only sad, but forgiving. I wanted to shake their hands and say good-bye, but they did not come out of their house.
On our way back to Trebizond we met a Turkish family, obviously going to a village for their summer vacation. The women rode astride on donkeys holding their little ones in their laps, while the men jogged along the dusty road, big checkered handkerchiefs tied around their perspiring necks. We were curious to know how the rank and file of the Turks, families like this one, took the deportation order. The women were veiled and we could not see their expressions, but the men seemed to tell us with their sad eyes: “Why should such things happen? Isn’t there room enough for all of us to live in peace? You have done us no harm, and we wish you no harm. Allah be with you.�
The city was dead. Practically all the stores were closed, the streets deserted. Now and then a Turk passed by, grave and silent. We almost wept when we saw the shutters of our pharmacy drawn too, in broad daylight. That was something we had never seen before. Poor Father! What was he thinking of, what was he doing, now that they had taken his pharmacy away from him?
Aunt Shoghagat, Father’s sister, older than Aunt Azniv, lived in a Turkish ward. We went down a very narrow street that descended like a winding stairway to the beach, a ghostly lane impervious to the sun, cool as caverns and smelling of the refuse of the sea. Life in this Turkish street was so very different, so somber and mysterious, with latticed windows and exhortations from the Koran carved over the façade of an old public fountain. Here we saw a few women fill their brass ewers, different in shape from those Christians used. They had longer and narrower necks. These women were shrouded and bundled in the mystery of the East, and only their fingertips tinged with henna were uncovered. As they walked before us clitter-clattering in their clogs we could not tell whether they were toothless old hags or beautiful girls and brides.
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To Surmelian's credit, we get an idea the Turkish "rank and file" were not filled with hatred for their Armenian neighbors. Quite the opposite impression from what Prosecutor Vahakn Dadrian would have us believe, when he stated, " There was massive, popular participation in the atrocities."
"The Highway of Death"
This chapter is the one where Surmelian pulled out the stops. So strongly propagandistic, I'll have to give a recap of the worst moments.
Once again, no one is denying the Armenians endured great hardship, even at the hands of the sometimes low-quality gendarmes who were assigned to guard them. (Although there were instances when gendarmes lost their lives, trying to defend the Armenians from Arab bandits and other nogoodniks. Example 1: Amb. Morgenthau; Example 2: Tehlirian trial.) Those who are predisposed to believe in the monstrosity of the Turks will hungrily devour Surmelian's claims. Objective readers who can see the Dashnak author's blatant display of pushing typically propagandistic assertions will know otherwise.
Highlights (or, more appropriately, Lowlights):
1) The Armenians who begin their miserable journey know from the outset that they will be exterminated, whereas before they had thought only the men would be killed, as you read above. Since they arrived at this conclusion, unlike most unwitting Jews who were being transported during the Holocaust, the question needs to be asked: why didn't the 50,000 "volunteers" Boghos Nubar bragged about, most presumed behind Ottoman lines acting as a fifth column, make it their business to rescue "their" women and children? Particularly since the caravans were ill-guarded, and by low-quality gendarmes? This is the critical question Senator Reed raised while the Mandate possibility was being discussed in the U.S. Congress. In other words, the men of any race would make it their business to protect their own... and here was a situation where the Armenian men were armed and ready.
"...In the early part of 1915, therefore, every Turkish city contained thousands of Armenians who had been trained as soldiers and who were supplied with rifles, pistols, and other weapons of defense. The operations at Van once more disclosed that these men could use their weapons to good advantage..."
Henry Morganthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, New York (1918), page 301
The Armenians had their war paint on even before war began, in all corners of the Empire, according to other hostile foreign diplomats. Just two of many examples:
"The Armenians of Deurt-yol [Dortyol-Mersin] are now well armed with modern rifles, every male adult having one in his possession."
British Consul Fontana [Aleppo] to his government, Oct. 21, 1913, FO, 371/1773, No. 52128
"One of the leaders.., Boghos Nubar Pasha, has represented to me that the Armenian population of Cilicia would be ready to enroll themselves as volunteers in support of a possible disemberkation at Alexandretta, Mersina, or Adana on the part of the allied forces...."
Mr. Chetham to Sir Edward Grey, Nov. 12, 1914, FO, 371/2146, No. 70404
Could it be that Surmelian was "exaggerating," and the notion that the Armenians knew they would be goners was a convenient, cause-serving afterthought?
2) Anticipating the moment of slaughter, some in the group pass out a form of poison, which doesn't work. Turns out to be a false alarm. At one point (probably this one), some women are taken to be raped.
3) One of the women, unable to go on, is presumably shot. (The group hears the shot ring out from behind.) If this actually happened, it would have been real murder, and an abomination. My belief is that the author had an opportunity for poetic license here, and took it. To my knowledge, those who were unable to go on were left by the roadside, and it is obscene of Surmelian to paint a picture that these unfortunates would have been purposely executed.
If the idea was to exterminate, 500,000 could not have collected, according to no less an authority than the Turcophobic Morgenthau, himself. (Settling "down to business" and "earning their livings.") 1 million Armenians could not have survived, as the Armenians themselves concede, from a pre-war population of some 1.5 million. (Most succumbing to reasons having nothing to do with murder... the same reasons that claimed the lives of nearly 3 million Turks/Muslims. Morgenthau wrote thousands of Turks were dying daily of starvation.)
Here is another example of "Armenian Oral History" regarding those who could no longer go on. The gendarme in this case was far from trigger-happy, and probably saved the Armenians' lives.
Enver gets the Extermination credit
4) Surmelian's sisters are saved because they were adopted by a Muslim family. I guess the author's point was that they were taken against their will, although luckily he didn't sink so low as to imply they were victims of a Turkish "harem." Once again, the good nature of Turks who took Armenians into their homes was made out to look like an "act of evil." (I wonder how many racial-purity driven Armenians kindly took in Turkish orphans into their homes, when the Armenians went on their ethnic-cleansing binges.)
5) Surmelian himself is saved when he is "auctioned," yet another requirement of Armenian propaganda. Nobody wants him, he pleads with a last-chance Turk to take him on, and when Surmelian wants out, the Turk lets him go. At this point, the kid is free to carve his own destiny, and he makes way for the soon-to-be Republic of Armenia. (Its nationhood made possible by the Ottoman Empire, by the way. ("...[T]he Armenian nation would never forget that it was the Ottoman Government which first conceived the idea of founding an independent Armenia, and recognized it," wrote Avetis Aharonian in a Sept. 9, 1918 telegram to his leader. Two years later, Aharonian would show his gratitude by signing the Sevres Treaty, the death sentence for the Ottoman nation.)
As an interesting aside, Surmelian lays the blame for the Armenians' "extermination" on Enver Pasha, and not the typical fall guy, Talat.
In later years, Surmelian joins the Armenian military
[p. 218-220] He could not read and write Armenian, and conducted all his correspondence in Russian. I was willing to forgive him that; he was brought up in Russia, educated in Russian schools, and being a trained soldier, a technician, our people needed him. What disturbed me was his complete lack of national consciousness. The map in his office was not of Armenia, but of the Crimea, where General Wrangel was still holding out against the Bolsheviks. Time and again I saw him standing before that map, lost in deep meditation. He had marked with a blue string the positions of the White and Red troops on the Crimean front, and seemed to be totally indifferent to the position of the Turkish and Armenian troops. His mind obviously was in the Crimea with General Wrangel. We needed a great soldier as our Chief-of-Staff, but there was nothing great about this man.
The Minister of War was a peasant leader from Sassoun, and as such “one of ours.� On the morning I first reported for duty, I took his hat and raincoat as soon as he came in and reverently hung them from a rack in his office. I noticed that his battered hat was minus its lining, and his raincoat was a shabby one, which predisposed me further in his favor. At noon I brought him his borsch and black bread, exactly the same amount and quality as received by the humblest private; I hoped he would not eat his lunch and leave it to me, but he always ate it. However, he did not impress me as the right person to occupy such a responsible position. Our republic was not fighting Kurdish guerrillas but a regular war of international importance against crack Turkish divisions commanded by a first-rate general. He did not seem to have anything to do, and neither, for that matter, was the Chief-of-Staff particularly busy. I could not understand it. I thought they should be in their offices at least ten hours a day, giving orders, making urgent telephone calls, dispatching important messages, but because of their strange inactivity I myself had very little to do.
I would look at their faces to find out how things were going for us at the front. The Minister of War had a poker face and it was impossible to know what he was thinking, and he hardly ever spoke. The most silent man I had ever met. His face betrayed no emotion of any kind. And there were absolutely no signs of worry or emotional strain on the handsome face of the Chief-of-Staff.
The Commander-in-Chief, General Nazarbekian, about whom I had read so much, was a towering man with white hair, and tired, heavy-lidded eyes, wearing his uniform of a Russian general with the blue cross of St. George hanging from his neck. There was something of hoary Ararat about him, but like the Chief-of-Staff he spoke and corresponded in Russian. Every morning, before he came to his office, I would examine his large military map on the wall—at least he had a map of Armenia—and study the tragic progress of the war. I wondered, did he suffer spiritual agonies as he set the blue string on it back every day, ceding to the Turks another slice of territory consecrated by the bones of our ancestors and the blood of our peasant soldiers? That string always moved back, never forward. I could not help thinking that he discharged his duties as commander-in-chief as would any Russian general appointed to his post. He was too old, and should have retired long ago. We needed a man who would personally lead our troops at the front, encourage them, goad them to heroic effort.
I suffered one disillusionment after another. Our army, as I saw it, was incompetent or in utterly indifferent hands. We just did not have the right men, we did not have real Armenians at the head of our troops. I could not distract myself by reading, for which I had plenty of time. I would read a page or two from Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, and Shakespeare’s Othello (in Armenian translations) mechanically, without understanding what I read, and then pause and listen to the sound of the guns on the Arax.
Kars fell. The Turkish occupation of this key fortress meant the collapse of our front, but the Chief-of-Staff did not seem to be affected by the debacle at all: he came to his office promptly at ten o’clock, drank his cocoa promptly at eleven o’clock, and left promptly at three o’clock. Things continued as usual in the ministry of war; the same old indifferent expressions on the faces of generals and colonels.
It was practically a hopeless struggle from the very beginning, but I thought with the right leadership we could have kept Kars either by a successful resistance or through the intervention of Soviet Russia, which professed friendship for our people: all we had to do was to adopt a pro-Soviet policy. Politically we were a naive and inexperienced nation.
Believing that it was a Bolshevik army attacking Kars with the purpose of handing it over to Soviet Russia, our troops, whose morale left much to be desired, were unwilling to fight their Turkish “comrades.� It was the general belief among Armenians in the Kars region that the revolutionary army of Red Turkey was attacking under the red flag of socialism, for the Turkish flag is all red, with the exception of a white crescent and star in the center. For three days these Turkish comrades robbed, raped and butchered the Armenians of Kars, not even sparing those who showed their communist membership cards. Hundreds of prisoners were stripped of their clothing and sent to Erzurum to work in labor gangs, and practically every one of them died of hunger and cold. Meanwhile there was a mass movement of Turkish men, women and children to Kars to settle in the vacant homes of massacred or exiled Armenians, and thus another part of historic Armenia was completely Turkified.
The Turks had won the war, and further resistance was futile. Armenia sued for peace. The Grand National Assembly of Ankara, speaking through its “People’s Cornmissar for Foreign Affairs,� demanded, and got, half of the territory of our republic, and almost all the arms, ammunition, mules and rolling stock Armenia had.
And while negotiations for a suicidal peace treaty were going on at Alexandropol, the government sent us to Nor Bayazet, to resume our agricultural studies.
Wrapping it up
"(The Turks) demanded, and got, half of the territory of our republic."
Would that happen to be the eastern Anatolian lands the Armenians occupied, carrying out their bloodthirsty spree of ethnic cleansing, before and after the Russians withdrew? How did these centuries-old Turkish possessions suddenly become the territory of the Armenian Republic? Is it because Woodrow Wilson decreed it?
Lands of "Historic Armenia"? What we know as Armenia today only became popuated with Armenians circa the 1820s, thanks to the Russian policy of "kick the Muslims out and put the Christians in." Maps of ancient Armenia did not refer to what we know today as Armenians; they were one of many tribes, known as the Haik. (Already we know from the name "Armenia" stood for something different.) Only around a half century before the birth of Christ did reference to the "Armenians" as we know them, began to appear. The Haik emigrated from elsewhere, most likely the Balkan region, or nearby:
"The Armenians are the former inhabitants of today's Switzerland"
Ruppen Courian, Armenian author of Promartyrs de la Civilization (1964, p. 27);
As far as the Armenians who were butchered at Kars.... who are we going to believe, a Dashnak Armenian propagandist like Leon Surmelian, or American eyewitnesses who were there at the time? Anti-Turkish Near East Relief representatives, no less, who wrote accounts as the following:
"All the Americans in Kars are well, and the Turkish Army is full of concern for us and accords us all considerations. We have been given permission to continue our activities as before. The Turkish soldiers are well disciplined and there have been no massacres."
Edward Fox, District Commander N.E.R. Kars
Halfway down this page, detailing the proclamation of the Treaty of Alexandropol-Gumru (See under "Appendix !!"), we are told the Armenian Dashnak government turned everything over "to the Supreme Commander of the Army to which office is appointed War Minister Dro." Yet Surmelian alludes to a different war minister in the second paragraph of the previous excerpted section. (For more excerpts regarding this period of Surmelian's life, see "Appendix I" of the indicated above link.)
Surmelian was expert in
the art of fiction
writing to have written
a book on the topic.
Two fun facts regarding the author. In the United States, Surmelian worked as a professor of English, just like Peter Balakian. He wrote at least one book on the fundamentals of good writing. Judging by his authorship of "I Ask You Ladies and Gentlemen," he was one fine writer. The man deserves much credit for his mastery over a foreign tongue, given that English was not one of his native languages.
Secondly, this book was the last straw that flipped Vahakn Dadrian's lid and allowed for the preeminent prosecutor to devote his life to the "genocide" with such zeal. The first of the three books that drove Dadrian mad was another work of fiction, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. As James Mandalian rightly called it in his 1957 Armenian Review article, Surmelian was no historian. How appropriate that Dadrian was so inspired by two works of pseudo history, to go on and offer the world his own brand of "history."
Leon Surmelian might have had a "gentle, civilized" side to him as a human being, allowing him some restraint that is atypical in the annals of "Armenian Oral History." However, he couldn't restrain himself from piling on the propagandistic poop, making it seem all the more believable, given his "fair" style. Some might say he had the right; his family did go through a terrifying experience, and at least his very decent-sounding parents seem to have been killed.
Had he a stronger code of morality, he would have seen his people had no one but themselves to blame.... like, the parents of Edward Tashji, who went through similar despair as their fellow Ottoman-Armenians, in the hellhole of the war years. But Leon Surmelian could not be expected to see where the responsibilities lay. In this book, he has revealed the attitude he had, even as a young boy. The Armenians were under the "Turkish yoke," and were entitled to perform their treachery. He openly admits, not without pride, whose side he was on during the war. He really thought the Armenians were entitled to openly applaud the enemies of his country, as he did with the Cossack officers while the Turkish soldiers were gnashng their teeth. What nation on earth would tolerate such an attitude among its citiizens?
if you betray your country, there is going to be a price to pay — it's as simple as that. But Leon Surmelian felt his Armenians were exempt from this rule. He felt free to lay on thick the propagandistic principles of his cause, disguising some as actually having been experienced by his nine-year self, sometimes to the minutest detail. The perfect grounds to sucker his unwary reader.
(By the way, should you open up the Tashji link directly above, note the real Turkish word to indicate one's homeland in the second-to-last paragraph. The translation is "motherland." Sneaky Surmelian, fully aware of this word, preferred to use "fatherland," a word that brought "genocide" to mind for 1945 readers.)
We don't know how Surmelian's family members died, assuming they did. (It's possible these details were in the book, and I missed them.) The harsh conditions affecting all Ottomans — such as famine and disease — probably claimed their lives, and not outright massacre. If they were massacred, we don't know who the culprits were, as much as Surmelian prefers the finger to be pointed at the gendarmes. Regardless, contrary to Surmelian's desire to have his readers believe the Armenians were exterminated by Enver Pasha, we know for a fact the relocation policy ended in early 1916. (Corroborated by Ambassador Morgenthau himself, in a March 1916 letter by Vahan Cardashian to Lord Bryce, as shown above.) We know a million Armenians survived, according to the Armenians... of a pre-war population of some1.5 million. if the idea was extermination, the relocated Armenians would have been ripe pickings. .. exactly like the defenseless Muslim villagers were at the hands of the Armenians occupying eastern Anatolia. There could not have been 625,000 (actually, 644,000 or so, including the unaccounted) postwar Armenians in the empire, just before the Sevres Treaty, according to the Armenian Patriarch.... added to the hundreds of thousands of Ottoman-Armenians who left on their own accord. (500,000 refugees in Transcaucasia alone, by Richard Hovannisian's count.)
On p. 63 of his book, Surmelian wrote that his father thought "the Europeanized Turks were far more sinister than the conservative, old-school Turks." In this fashion, since his father was always right, Surmelian might have been influenced with his strategy. Writing in his "gentle, civilized" style, he became far more sinister than the typical Armenians who wear their racism on their sleeves.
While preparing this page, I ran into an eyewitness account from the "other side" that has been a part of TAT for a while. It's from a Turk who was around the same age as Leon Surmelian, at the time. Why is this account believable? Because, as with the rest of "Turkish Oral History," the Turks preferred to -- in Surmelian's words -- keep " their secrets to themselves." These real eyewitnesses were content to only tell their stories to close ones, if at all, and were content to take their memories with them to their deaths. In general,, they didn't go out and broadcast their horrible experiences to the world, as did Leon Surmelian and so many other Armenians, in keeping with their "genocide program." Whomever recorded the few examples of Turkish Oral History did so as an afterthought, and only in response to the Armenians' Con Job. (The Armeno-Turkish dynamic at play, as usual: Action... Reaction.) In other words, these people did not go out of their way to tell their experiences; it was a "by the way" thing, when someone doing research proposed the idea. These people had no agenda, and thus would have had no reason to tell nothing but the truth. (Often corroborated by genuine eyewitness accounts of the Armenians' allies, the Russians... far more legitimate than their "Armenian" eyewitness counterparts, the bigoted missionaries and foreign consuls, who relayed their opinions through hearsay and fabrications.)
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© Holdwater
tallarmeniantale.com/surmelian.htm
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