2162) One Ottoman-Armenian's Path To Treachery

Titled Armenian Will Reach City On Great Mission
The Republican and Times, February 1922

TITLED ARMENIAN WILL REACH CITY ON GREAT MISSION

General Azgapetian and Wife to be Guests of Cedar Rapids Wednesday

A titled Armenian and his wife, both of whom served with distinction during the world war and saw much of the tragedy of the past seven years, will arrive in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday to plead the cause of the Near East relief during the present campaign.




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"Titled Armenian..."


He is General Mesrop Azgapetian, soldier, diplomat, linguist, wearer of a dozen decorations and veteran of service in Persia, Trans-caucasia, Russia and Turkey during a long period of years.

Educated by English tutors and governesses in his father's home in Constantinople, and at Robert college, an American institution on the Bosphorus, the general also took post-graduate courses at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and at Columbia University, New York city. He is a fluent speaker.

During his studies in New York city, the general's activity for the Armenian cause made it impossible for him to return to Armenia. Later he went to Persia and served as an aid-de-camp to the shah and was afterwards made first secretary of the Persian legation in Washington. He resigned some years before the war and went to New York to make his home.

When the war broke out, the general and his wife and several hundred Armenian volunteers went to Petrograd and offered their services to the czar. The general went into the army and Lady Azgapetian served with him as a nurse attached to one of the field hospital units of the army of the Caucasus under Grand Duke Nicholas.

So difficult was it to get nurses in [?] where Lady Azgapetian was arriving that she was obliged to work in the hospitals even to the night her little daughter was born. When the child was 3 months old the Russian revolution broke out, soon the army disintegrated, conditions became unbearable, and then followed ten months of wandering through Russia, ten months of danger and starvation that seemed like a horrid nightmare compared with the peace, security and plenty in America.

"Not half — not a tenth — has been told of the danger and hardships of life in the Near East," Lady Azgapetian recently declared in one of her speeches.

"If the women of America could see conditions as they are in that unfortunate section of the world, they could ...?plicity."

"It was inevitable that all this [revolutionary] movement should affect the Armenians of Turkey, and equally inevitable that by so doing it should destroy the few merits of the Ottoman administration — its easy tolerance, and its readiness to let Christians prosper financially and commercially at the expense of the Moslims" [sic]

Charles Eliot, Turkey in Europe, 1908, p. 399

The following analysis is confined to the information provided by the news account, as nothing else about General Azgapetian life is known.

(So many "Titled" Armenians have given themselves the title of "General," haven't day? How did this fellow become a "general," exactly? It does not sound as though he rose through the ranks of any military service. Did he become a "general" in the same manner by which "Visiting Scholar" Taner Akcam became a "Professor"?)

There are two key paragraphs from the above to focus on, the third describing his past, and the fifth that begins with:

When the war broke out, the general and his wife and several hundred Armenian volunteers went to Petrograd and offered their services to the czar.

So here is this fellow who is the offspring of yet another wealthy Ottoman-Armenian, in a nation that Armenian propaganda tells us mainly offered persecution to the Armenians. The father was so well off, in "The King and I" fashion, he was able to afford private "English tutors and governesses" in Istanbul, for his general-to-be son. Azgapetian junior was later able to attend schools in Europe and America, almost certainly on dad's tab. Notice Azgapetian is able to travel freely; he's not reined in, in what was in many ways the tolerant and free Ottoman society. He was one of many young Ottoman-Armenians who enjoyed a good life, generally better than the average Turk / Muslim.

And how does he reward this society that enabled his family to thrive and prosper? He chooses to stab his nation in the back.

This colonist goes out of his way to do so, leaving the comfortable environs of his home in America, all the way to Russia, with "several hundred Armenian volunteers" probably from America as well, who, like Azgapetian, were formerly from the Ottoman Empire only a short time before.

His private missionary tutors, as well as those from Robert College, in all likelihood instilled in Azgapetian a sense of superiority, and bred in him the seeds of rebellion, polished along the way by fanatical Dashnaks and others harboring a cultivated hatred for Turks. Regardless of his influences, it was Azgapetian who chose to turn against his nation in so traitorous a manner. Moreover, he cast his lot with the neighboring empire that was truly persecuting Armenians, particularly in the early part of the 20th century.

If he served militarily in a leadership position, he mostly excelled in slaughtering Ottoman women and chidren, as did other "generals" such as Dro and Antranik, in lieu of facing real armies.

Let us also bear in mind another fallacy offered by Armenian propaganda to maintain the illusion of innocence: that the Armenians in the Russian army were Russian-Armenians. Of course there were Russian-Armenians, the bulk of whom had originally arrived from the Ottoman Empire, filtering in once what is today's Armenia was conquered from Iran in the early 19th century. But as we can see from Azgapetian's example, a good number of the "Russian-Armenians" in the Russian army had arrived directly from the Ottoman Empire from 1914 onwards, or from other nations Ottoman-Armenians had moved to only a short time before.

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© Holdwater

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