Empire: World History - 36. The Armenian Genocide: Road to the Deportations

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

The Armenian community has ancient, deep roots in Anatolia. But from the late 19th century onwards, violence and forced deportations at the hands of the Ottoman Empire puts them in doubt. Listen as William and Anita are once again joined by Eugene Rogan as they discuss one of the most tragic events of world history. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. On April the 24th, 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian intellectuals, and community leaders in Constantinople. Thus began the Armenian genocide, one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century.

Today we remember the one and a half million Armenians who were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination and mourn the tragic loss of so many lives. Now, that was a statement by Joe Biden, which was made on the 24th of April 2022. So less than a year ago, and it formally recognized the Armenian genocide as a genocide, which previously no US president had done. And that is the subject of today's topic. Our special guest, you have met him before, but he is, again, the best person to speak about this. He has written extensively and researched extensively the subject.

And it is Eugene Rogan. And Eugene, we should recognize right at the start of all of this that we are going to be treading some very tricky terrain here. Why is there such a contentious, even subject to be talking about in this podcast? Thank you, Anita. I mean, I think you find when you approach the history of the Armenian genocide that there are conflicting narratives, Armenians who have been in search of justice and recognition for the suffering of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire and still feel that they run up against a wall of denialism from the Turkish government. And the Turkish government and and patriotic Turks, who for generations have sustained a narrative that what happened to the

Armenians was not deliberate genocide, but was the consequences of war, and that the Armenians were not the only ones to suffer in a terrible war that claimed millions of Turkish lives as well. These are rival narratives that are very difficult to reconcile, but I think the historian today really faces a challenge of balancing these narratives to try and get to the grips with why mass murder happens, not to justify it, but to understand it, because it's definitely not gone away. It's a phenomenon that plagues our world today. Eugene, do you feel that there is some ways in which those two divergent narratives are beginning to at least establish some central ground that there were large numbers of

Armenians killed and massacred during the course of World War I in Anatolia? William, I think that tremendous ground has been gained in coming towards some convergence on what happened. And I think credit really belongs to a growing number of very courageous Turkish scholars who have been scouring their archives to the evidence to try and counter an official narrative of denial. It's really interesting. There's nothing more stubborn than a Turkish historian. And when the government tells them, you are forbidden from approaching this subject, it seems to encourage all the best and brightest of the historical establishment in Turkey to really redouble their efforts. And their work is making such a difference. But it does converge

towards your Armenian narrative, and it does break down the wall of denial. Can I ask? I've always thought that there are two tracks of history. You know, there's the written record, which is so fragile, and you know that libraries can be burned, and documents can be sent off into holes in the ground and never to be seen again. And then there is also the historical archive that's left in monuments. It's like sort of braille on the landscape. And William, I mean, you started, it's really interesting, you started your writing career, looking at a landscape which changes in your lifetime.

Can you tell us a bit more about that? Correct. This is a subject which I got very, very passionate and interested in my late teens and early 20s, partly because I just came across, in a sense, the ongoing tremors of this personally. In 1987, I visited the town of Sivas in eastern Turkey, and I spent some time rootling around and photographing and noting. What I thought at the time, I think, was probably a mixed graveyard because there were stones that were clearly Ottoman-Turkish, Muslim. There were stones that were in the Armenian script and there were stones which were in the Greek script. Now, in fact, it can't have been a graveyard. It must have just been a lapidarium where some archaeologists had brought together in one place, stones from different communities that had been

lying around in Seavass. And this was in the Gokmadressee, one of the early colleges built by the Seljuks in the centre of Sevas. And I noted these things and photographed them. And then a year later, I came back to take further notes because I was writing my first book in Zanadu, and the Greek stones were still there, and the Turkish stones were still there. But the Armenian stones had gone, and there was a place on the grass where you could see where they'd been lying. The grass was lying down, discolored and flattened. And I tried to find out from the people looking after this what was going on, and they denied that the stones had ever been there. That was my mistake. But I had the photographs.

So I knew that there was something. odd going on. And I then, I mentioned in the last podcast, I had a cousin that used to live in Erzurum, and I used to go and spend a lot of time with him. He was there for many years, establishing silk farming up there. And he had noticed the same thing. He'd gone walking in the hills above Erzurum towards Tortum. And he'd come across these beautiful carved stones that the Armenians used to leave in the Middle Ages called Kachkas, cross stones. And he said he'd used to go and see these, because it was near a place, he used to go fishing. And recently, he used to, the government had come and these stones have been smashed up and there and there remains taken away.

And I'm almost my first ever journalistic topic. I think about 1988, 1989 for the independent magazine. I went around collecting evidence of this and went to different Armenian communities in Jerusalem, Aleppo, Paris and various Armenians in Britain, gathering before and after photographs of monuments that had been enormous flourishing monasteries at the end of the 19th century, which had then been damaged or burnt down in the course of the First World War, and which had then either completely disappeared or been ruined in most cases, or in some cases converted into barns and just left to rot, or become goat shelters or whatever. And I had some very haunting journeys across Anatolia looking at the remains of what had once been flourishing large Armenian communities with monasteries and banks and jewelry shops and homes of local

officials. Then in places like Silicia, to the south, there were medieval castles and beautiful forts, all of which have been left by a historically well-attested civilization. They were the first people to convert to Christianity formerly as a nation. They had preceded Constantine in their acceptance, of the Christian faith. There are huge numbers of gospel books and illustrated manuscripts. And this stuff is out there. And then there are 19th century travel accounts of people like a man called Lynch who did a two-volume account of the different Armenian communities in Anatolia. So it's not like this is a kind of mystery area, whereas there's a question of whether these people existed or not, or maybe they didn't. Historians can go to sources and find

considerable evidence for large numbers of Armenians surviving into the early 20th century. Well, let's bring Eugene in on this. So the last episode, we were talking about Gallipoli, and it's taking us to some crucial dates here in the history of the Armenians. But when we talk about the Armenian community at this point, what are we talking about at this juncture in 1914, 1915? So the Armenian community of the Ottoman Empire was concentrated in three locations. You had the largest concentration of Armenians in the capital city of Constantinople, modern Istanbul. You had a large concentration of Armenians around the area of Antakia and Alexandria, the epicenter of the most recent earthquake to shock that poor devastated land.

And a third grouping in the Caucasus region to the eastern extremity of Turkey facing the Russian frontier. And in these three areas, you had minority communities that could represent, you know, 15 to 20 percent of the population in any one place, but was the largest Christian community in those areas. Eugene, the numbers are obviously highly disputed, but if you had to take a shot at how many Armenian Christians were living in Anatolia and Constantinople in the run up to World War I, what sort of figures would you take a guess at? Yeah, demographers debate about this because, of course, that's how they're going to judge the magnitude of the loss of life. But I think a figure in the millions, I mean, sort of two million people would be probably sustainable by Ottoman census figures. But, you know, that would be open to argument. It might be three. It might be one point five.

But it's going to be a minority in the millions. It's not in the thousands. But crucially, unlike the Greeks, they're not the majority in any place. The Greeks had Greece. they were always, particularly in the Peloponnes and in the south, a majority there. But the Armenians were not. They were scattered along many different towns in Anatolia and were nowhere a majority. It's a really good point, William, because in the case of the Greeks, when the Ottomans began to

see Ottoman Greeks as a fifth column, then they initiated a series of, in their own way, very brutal measures to deport the Greeks of Anatolia to a Greek kingdom. There was, if you like, a hinterland, to which people could be deported. There was no Armenian hinterland other than the Russian Empire, which had come to dominate a large share of Armenian communities after 1878 with the Russian-Turkish war and the lands that they gained in the Caucasus around Batum and Kars. So, you know, the Armenians were next door. Eugene, I mean, that Russia-Turkish war is the first time we hear even this notion of the Armenian question being floated. What,

was being discussed at that time? Well, Anita, obviously a nationalism had emerged with a vengeance in the Ottoman Balkans, among Christian communities, many of them Slavic, who were bidding for a separation from the Ottoman Empire to create countries of their own. And out of that, you'll get Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia. They're all the names that make the Balkans sound like a volatile part of the world. The one community of Christians in the Ottoman Empire that had not in the 19th century really emerged in the same way were the Armenians, because they were not concentrated in one territory

the way Bulgarians or Serbs were. were diffused across the territory of Anatolia. But it didn't spare the Armenians from the appeal of nationalism. And they had all the elements in terms of a separate language, a separate religious identity, a distinct history of Armenian empires with capital cities like Ani, with huge ruins. And so a national movement begins to emerge among the Armenians. And the Russians are very quick to capitalize on this, not out of any love for Armenian Orthodox. There's a lot of evidence the Russians were actually quite hostile to Armenian orthodoxy.

But because this was, if you like, a possible client state for the extension of Russian influence. And that's what makes the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire so compromised. Because Russia is enemy number one for the Ottoman state. And if the Armenians are increasingly being seen as a client of Russia, it is something that's going to compromise them in the eyes of the Ottomans. And not entirely without reason, because many Armenian intellectuals do go over to Russian territory. do gather arms, weapons and support from that side of the border and see the Russians as a safe house where they can grow their political movements and so on? Well, again, there will be that tension, but it's important not to lose sight of how involved

the Armenians were in the political life of the Ottoman Empire, how they threw their lot in with the Young Turk Revolution, and how 14 Armenians were elected to Parliament when the Parliament was reconvened after the Revolution in 1908. And they're voted into that parliament on a popular vote, or they have a reservation of that many seats given to the Armenians? Or what's the situation? There was definitely a quota system at work in certain provinces to make sure that all communities were represented. But it does represent a popular vote as well. The Ottomans operated on a two-tier electoral system where you had a popular vote for electors and the electors who actually chose the parliamentarians.

And so in this way, communities had to say in making that quota work. So as well as the complication of the Russians and the growing nationalisms on both sides of the border, you have an Armenian community split down the middle between some who think it's very important to be loyal to the Ottomans or to seek reform within the Ottoman movement on one hand. And on the other hand, those who want to break off like the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs and other Christian communities. I think in the first instance, rather than a separatist movement, what you saw among the Dashnax and the Hunchaks, Those two names just to explain are the two Armenian political groupings. They are. The Dashnak's emerging out of Russia, the Hunchak's emerging out of the Armenian diaspora in Europe, founded in Geneva.

Both emerged in the 1890s and both are nationalist organizations who have at different times used violence to try and advance their political goals. What you saw among the Dashnax and the Hunchaks was a bid to gain greater autonomy within the Ottoman Empire and using Russian support to try and achieve that political aid. Right. And so, I mean, violence or begets violence. So, you know, if you've got an Ottoman empire, which has already been badly bruised by Russian ambition, and then you have this community, which some see as being ideal for grooming for the Russian cause, there is a violent reaction towards them. And thinking about the Hamidian massacres, and this is named for Abdul Hamid, the sartan at the time, I mean, is it even contentious to say that those things happened? because I'm very well aware that everything is contentious in this field, or is this acknowledged that there was an awful chapter of bloodletting at this time? I think what compromises the Armenian position is the fact that political violence was being used by organizations like the Dashnax and the Hunchucks. And so in 18904-5-6, you have specific instances of these organs.

There was a takeover of the Ottoman Bank, for instance, in 1896, where 150 people in the bank were held hostage. to try and secure political gains. Sort of Ottoman money heist. It's an odd, well, you know, it's using the Ottoman banks capital, cultural as well as economic, as a way to try and leverage.

It was a manly bankersy. I've been in that building, the Wittal family, an English family founded it, isn't it? Yes, the irony of it, of course, is the Ottoman Bank is not Ottoman. It is British.

But, you know, that sets off a major backlash against Armenians in and around Istanbul that leads to thousands of deaths. You know, before that, you had an attack, popular demonstrations in Istanbul set off massacres in eastern Anatolia, where the numbers killed, you know, they range wildly from the 30,000 number to as high as a couple hundred thousand.

I mean, there's a cathedral and earther that, you know, I've read about where supposedly 3,000 people were rounded up and put inside 3,000 Armenians, and then they were set light. The whole building was set light. Funny enough, I've actually been past that cathedral at a time when it was being converted into a mosque. And I talked to the workmen there and said, you know, what are you doing? And it had this extraordinary conversation where they said, oh, we're making into a mosque. And the whole story came out. It had been left errant. So they knew the story.

They could tell the story. They would tell the story of what happened. Well, the ones I think they got a bit muddled about was they said the Armenians have all gone to Israel, rather than Armenia, was their version of events. But yes, they knew that there had been a community there. And now this was time to turn it into an active mosque. So that, I mean, that's an important moment because you have Armenians then who are identified and codified as the possible enemy within. But then that sort of seems to go away until the 1909 counter coup against the young Turks. Now tell us why that was a pivotal moment again in

this lead up to the Armenian genocide? You know, Anita, it's one that really puzzles me in the sense of what was the motivation for a massacre of Armenian communities in the town of Adina. The immediate context was an attempt by Sultan Abdul Hamid, who had been forced by the Young Turk Revolution a year before, to restore the constitution and recall Parliament. And in 1909, the old Sultan Abdul Hamid II makes an attempt to rally consulate. conservative forces to turf the young Turks out and restore his autocratic powers. And the action army comes back to preserve the gains of the Young Turk revolution. They depose the sultan at this

point. And immediately after that, you have a massacre in Adda. So you can point to growing tensions between communities as creating, if you like, underlying tensions. But it still remains something of a mystery to me, why it would be the Armenian community of Adana, which was virtually no role to play in the counter coup. That would be the target of those antagonisms. We're casually talking about sort of little massacres, but there are 25,000 supposed to have been killed in Adana at this time. Is that figure sound right to you, Eugene? Again, yes, I mean, I would have said 20, but the level of atrocity is something which surpasses our imagination. And it happens with the speed through white weapons and guns. I mean, this is face-to-face, neighbours killing neighbours. It's a brutality that's really

quite hard for us to imagine. Well, I mean, but it's important for us to try and get our heads around it because we talked in partition about how neighbours turned on neighbours. And although there was an element of just bloodlust and anger and rage and loss and all of the worst aspects of humanity, wanting to take your neighbour's land or punish your neighbour for taking your cousin's land across the border, there is also. an aspect of it, which we can only now talk about with India and Pakistan, where there were organized groups that went out, organized, armed Sikhs or organized Sikh, demilitarized Muslims who are sent to ravage lands and ethnically cleanse. What is going on here at this

point? Is it as simple as just neighbors turning on neighbors? Or is there something centralized or controlled or, you know what I mean? Something deliberate about it. I think when we want to look for the deliberate plan where there's something centralized and controlled, it's what distinguishes the events of 1915. And I can find nothing to match the degree of an organized action, which is, of course, why you move from talking about massacres in the 1890s or in 1909, as horrible as they are. And William, you're quite right to bring in the order of magnitude. It's atrocious. And then something which will cross the threshold. into an attempt to eliminate a whole community of humanity in the crime of genocide.

Gosh, right. It's just completely awful. So we have explained the horrific massacres of Armenians in the run-up to the First World War. Do join us after the break when we look at what happens once the war breaks out, as this is in many ways the trigger that escalates all of this into a genocide. Welcome back. So now we are at that moment. moment where the First World War is breaking upon the world. And what is the position of Armenians at this point? We have fantastic eyewitness accounts from an Armenian priest whose autobiography

about the genocide published English under the title Armenian Golgotha. His name is Gregoros Balikian. And his account really captures a kind of enthusiasm within the Armenian community of Istanbul for what they see as an impending deliverance from Ottoman rule. The idea that the Ottomans are now at war, not with petty Balkan states, but with Russia, with France, with Britain, spells the end of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of Ententech shipping into the Straits of the Dardanelles moving towards Constantinople, has them gathering publicly along the promenades over the Sea of Marmora, listening to the shelling they can hear from there,

and anticipating with mounting enthusiasm, a day of deliverance when the Allied fleet actually arrives in Istanbul. And that, of course, provokes just outrage among the Muslim majority in Constantinople, the Ottoman capital. So what happens then? The Ottomans are aware that there is growing interaction between the Russians and Armenians to the east. And they've actually witnessed an uprising emerge in villages in the Alexandretta region to the southeast of Turkey, around the village of Zaytun, where partisans have been gathering, have been in contact with Russia, have been asking for aid and arms to mount an internal revolt

against the Ottomans that might open a way for Russian forces to come in and occupy. This is a bit too far for the Russians to contemplate, as preoccupied as they are, fighting against the Habsburgs in Germany further north. But it's enough to raise concerns in the Armenian community of Zaytun that they will be exposed for having been disloyal at a moment of war. And a group of well-intended notables as they tune alert the Ottomans that young hotheads have been plotting something with the Russians, hoping that by this show of loyalty, it might actually spare them the violence of the state. But in fact, it does the exact opposite. It confirms to the Ottoman authorities in the Gulf of Alexandria that there is a deal being hatched between

the Armenians and the Entente. And they move to clamp down. And this leads to an uprising. as the partisans take to the hills and try and stir villages of Armenians to revolt against the Ottomans. Eugene, is this the same area that there's a later, very famous Armenian movie, 40 Days of Musadag, which is in the same Alexandretta area where there's a siege of a hilltop where Armenians are holding out? Is this the same time or a little later? So the siege of Musadah will follow these events and will take it into the spring of 19th. but definitely the same area. And it's one community that faced with Ottoman attack decided to fight back and to resist. And they hold out for 40 days until they're able to escape to

the coastline and are secreted away by friendship to safety in Egypt. Okay. So I mean, in any time of war, there is, you know, for central government or central command, it is like there are short circuits going off everywhere when it's a complicated, especially a complicated ethnic mix. And I wonder the CUP, who are in charge at this time, the Committee of Union and Progress, they must be hearing these stories of outbreaks of resistance and pro-Russian feeling, but they're also, they are well aware, aren't they, that there are Armenians fighting on front lines for the Ottoman Empire. And I wonder, what is the calculation going on within the CUP's head at this time in 1915? Well, the CUP is leading the empire into total warfare, and they've had to mobilize people

as never before in conscription, requisitioning food and whatnot. So total warfare leads to a certain paranoia. And the paranoia here is the threat from the outside is so enormous that you begin to really doubt the threat from within. And I think this is where the Armenians particularly fall under the crosshairs. Because as we've already said, Anita, there are three areas, Constantinople, the Gulf of Alexandria, and the Caucasus region. As we said last time round, the Caucasus becomes the first theater of conflict for the Ottoman Empire against the Russians, and they lose massively. The third army is shredded. And Armenians are serving on that front. They responded to the call for recruitment. They took up arms against the Russians

where they came under a great deal of pressure by Armenians on the Russian side to cross lines. And we have accounts of thousands of Armenian soldiers who did so. Is it as literal as come here, people waving over because this is not sort of leaflet drops. This is, is this people shouting over trenches. Come over here, drop your arms. Come over here. You're our brothers. I mean, how does it work?

The accounts we have by Turkish soldiers on the Eastern Fund suggest exactly that. And there was a memoir that I used a great deal by a medical corporal name, Dali Riza, Eti, where he talks about seeing, you know, scores of Armenians literally cross over the lines where the trenches were close enough they could do so. Gosh. And this convinced him of the disloyalty of the Armenian comrades on the Eastern Front. And you show in your book that he becomes more and more hardened against them until he begins to talk about the accidental deaths of the Armenians on his own side,

implying that people are doing them in deliberately, that Ottomans are shooting their own soldiers. William, to the extent that one man's account can represent a kind of national public opinion, Eti's account is so fascinating because he really, in his own narrative demonstrates how Turks go from seeing Armenians as being disloyal to a fifth column, to actual scapegoating defeats to the disloyalty of this fifth column, and that leading from distrust to hatred to murder. And the stories about discharging guns in the general direction of Armenian comrades that he accounts, and how no one's ever held to account for that,

suggests that killing Armenian comrades in the front line must have been one more thing driving Armenian soldiers to take up the Russian invitation across lines. So it's, I mean, it is such a vicious circle. It is such, and beautifully explained, vicious circle. There are two characters, if we could focus on now, who I'd like to know more about. Bahedin Sakir of the CUP and Talat Pasha, who is with the Interior Ministry, is that right? Tell us, first of all, about these two characters.

Who are they? How much power do they hold? And what do they cook up between them? Well, Talat Pasha is one of the ruling triumvir. of the Ottoman Empire. He is one of the most influential and powerful young Turks. He will later emerge as Prime Minister or Grand Vizier in the course of the First World War. And as Minister of Interior, the preservation of internal order against internal threats is precisely his top responsibility. And Bahadine Shacker, Dr. Shacker, is a particularly notorious character. He heads up

the very secretive Teshkilat Imasusa, which is a sort of secret intelligence branch created by the Ministry of Interior. Deployed for a lot of both military intelligence and internal surveillance within the empire, they are seen as playing a key role as architects of the annihilation of the Armenian community. Having identified Armenians as an internal threat, a fifth column, they begin to put in place the measures to neutralize this threat through mass murder. And we know that there were meetings held after the fall of the Ottoman Third Army in the Battle of Sarakamish around February, March, 1915, between these two men, Dr. Shaker, the head of the secretive Teshki Lati Masusa, and the interior minister Talat Pasha, one of the most influential and powerful

men in the empire. And the two of them begin to hatch out a plan for how they would eliminate the Armenian threat in the east and across the country. And so as blatant as that, that's what that, I mean, you know, with the Nazis, we go back and we say, right, we can pinpoint the moment, the meeting, the table, the chairs around the table, and the people sat in those chairs when that phrase, the final solution is first raised. Do we have that moment here as well? Well, I think that there is a tendency to both link the Armenian genocide to the Nazi showaugh of European jury. Famously, Hitler says who now remembers the Armenians. Well, precisely. And of course,

in defining that distinct crime of humanity called genocide. The Armenian example was one of the most prominent on which the definition was based. What I would say is I think a lot of historians have been influenced by that Kait-Zansei conference, isn't it, where the plan for the annihilation of European Jews is taken. You know, I think that a lot of historians are trying to portray the meetings between Shacker and Talat Pasha in such a light. But, you know, all we know is out of their deliberation. we have both a public law passed for the deportation of Armenians.

And that is public. That's a matter of public record that Armenians were by government order to leave their villages and be taken into deportation camps by the authorities. And then a series of secret orders, which were re-communicated verbally by Dr. Shacker in many cases himself, he traveled around eastern Anatolia, or else by leading secretaries of the Committee of Union of Progress in their regional provinces. to call for the mass murder, particularly of the men detained. And so this becomes, if you like, the plan for the elimination of the Armenian threat.

Part of it open and public record, part of it secretive and only to be discovered, you know, through later inquiries. Eugene, what is the evidence in a sense for the secret orders? What do we have in the archives? The best thing I've seen so far of the existence of these secret orders is one, in the aftermath of the First World War, there actually were trials in the Ottoman Empire against those responsible for the massacres of Armenians, as it was still branded. And part of the evidence there, we have testimony, say, and, you know, we have now learned

that on top of the public orders, that, you know, verbal orders were given to commanders to carry out the ugly act of eliminating those that they were rounding up. And secondly, we have at the time instances of governors who had requested written authorization for the killing. And there was a governor in Jarbucker who asked for such written confirmation. He was dismissed from his post. He was convened and on the road to his meeting with his hires up was killed. And so, you know, his murder and his request for written authority has been taken as indirect evidence that he was not satisfied to act on the basis of what he was talking about.

told you verbally, he wanted it in writing. And so it's this kind of evidence which has been mounting. There's been more and more of this published in the 21st century, again, by Turkish historians, that leaves little doubt that this two-branched approach of the public order of deportation, which, by the way, is made public so that Armenians will obey, that they will respond to the call to leave their villages, to gather in its village squares, and be marched by the Ottoman authorities to whichever detainment center they were sent to. And how is it expressed? So notices are posted to church doors and around municipal centers,

telling Armenians to gather the possessions they needed to live by. So pack a suitcase of clothes. They could deposit in many cases their possessions, any of their valuables, with the Ottoman authorities for safekeeping. And they were to gather in a central place, and they were to follow the instructions of the officers who would accompany them to a holding place where they would be determined. until further notice. And it was as vague as that. But the accounts that we have of these deportations

were that the men and women were separated. And it was the women who would be marched out. The men would be taken to an isolated place and they were killed pretty much on spot. And men would be pretty much anyone over the age of 12, males over the age of 12. And only the very elderly men would be allowed to leave with the women to be marched under very difficult conditions to places of preliminary detainment, where they were then held without adequate food, sanitation, warmth to ensure the safety or the health of the people being detained. Some of the eyewitness accounts from the Armenian side and hotly contested, I should say, by a sort of Turkish government voices for many years, are of extreme, and again, they say

organized brutality, that there is an encouragement to take women and rape them, There are children who are, it's actually really strangely, there was one story I came across one account, which sounded like it could have been lifted from partition of a cart loaded up with young children between the ages of six and eight. And it's just repeatedly they are struck with pitchforks. And the only way one child survives is just like he's stabbed but not dead and he just has to pretend to be dead until his mother comes later and is able to take him out. the level of atrocities are they again I'll ask is it bad apples or a bad orchard that is making this happen again you know I think that there is a real effort to try and distance the Turkish civil population from the atrocities because the attempt to try and paint the barbaric Turks is in some way a different kind of humanity from the rest of humanity that has found itself in moments where

extermination seems a reasonable solution. And again, I would stress, Anita, this phenomenon of genocide is not a historic phenomenon, it's current affairs. And it's not limited to any one continent. You know, in the 21st century, we have seen accusations of genocide in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East, and in Eastern Europe. And so I just feel like it's really important to try and contextualize the violence and understand who the actors were. In the case of who was actually doing the violence, it was hard to find willing collaborators for mass murder. And so the, again, the Teshkilati Masuse, the secretive intelligence agency, allegedly

recruited prisoners from jail and was feeding them with the line that by attacking Armenians, they were advancing the Sultan-Kalif's call for a jihad against the enemies of the state. And that in this way, killing Armenians could almost be seen as a benevolent act or an act that was favored by the Sultan-Kalif. When I was first getting interested in this in the 1980s, there were still people alive who'd survived this. And I interviewed in the Armenian community of Jerusalem some old men who had been in an orphanage in Trabzon on the Black Sea.

And they had been taken out in boats. And the orders were that they were to be drowned, these children. And weights were to be tied, or stones were to be tied to them. And of course, not everyone is willing to do this sort of thing, particularly to children. And the fishermen who've been given this job, or the sailors who've been given this job, refused to do it and got these children out. Were there many other stories like that of people refusing to do this horrible work? Undoubtedly, there were. It's worth stressing that in Hanafi Islam, children are innocent of any religious differentiation. All people are born Muslim. And when you reach maturity and adhere to the religion of your parents and, let's say, become an Orthodox Christian or a Jew, it's at that moment where you depart from the protection of Islam. So in a sense, if you are killing children under the age of 12, you are performing an act that is again. against Islam. And that was widely held by Ottoman Sunni Muslims. So, you know, the business of

taking people out of jails is important because a lot of people locked up in jail were probably psychopaths. You know, people who had blood on their hands were murderers and were only too happy to be given free license to kill, to rape, and to rob the people who are now completely defenseless individuals. But it didn't mean that that was what the average Turk in the street was willing to do. I also met in Aleppo, an old man whose father had been making boots for the Ottoman army. And he, he was Armenian, the most famous cobbler in Aleppo. And he was given special exemption to continue his work because he was obviously supplying the army. And I was told this extraordinary story, rather like a sort of Schindler's List story, whereby he was able to keep

taking orphans passing through Aleppo on their way south, on these death marches. and he got a larger and larger factory, making more and more boots for the Ottoman army, saving. And it's the nearest thing I'd heard to, as I say, a kind of Shinders list story in this genocide. And it's, I mean, it's a human nature to want to cleave to those stories. But the greater horror of this is that you have hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people who are being marched to their deaths into places which have no water, no food, and if they get there, they're just basically left there. Is it to die?

I mean, is that the thought process behind this? Or is it a containment? Because concentration camps are, you know, they don't start with the Second World War. We know this. I mean, we know about the term is coined by Kitchener and his actions in South Africa. But what is the thinking? What is to become of these women, children and old people who are being marched thousands and thousands of miles?

and many of whom don't even make it. Well, that question takes us to another dark and horrible chapter in this story and one that we actually don't have enough time to delve into today. So how will our listeners be able to hear the answer? They're going to have to tune in on Thursday for a second episode. With the Armenian genocide being such an important topic, we don't want to rush it and cram it into one episode. Therefore, we will finish the story in another full episode that will be released on Thursday.

Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita. Arnond. And me, William Duremberg.