Turks Ordered Massacre of Armenian Christians at Aleppo
Parents murdered, orphan boy tails a column of deportees.
EARLY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the Turks determined to slaughter every Armenian on their soil. The Turks were Muslims and their victims were descendants of the world’s first Christian nation. After disarming the Armenians, the Turks began killing them in 1914. This genocide continued throughout World War I.
In some localities, governors were not as zealous as the central planners wished. When a few Muslim governors refused to kill the helpless Christians, the administration replaced them with “patriots” willing to carry out the brutal measures.
In the city of Aleppo Christians were temporarily able to buy safety with bribes. (This was possible because, by and large, Armenians belonged to Turkey’s prosperous middle class—traders, craftsmen, and shopkeepers.) Failure to carry out the genocide in Aleppo, however, displeased Turkey’s Interior Minister Mehmed Talaat.
On this day, March 9, 1915, he issued a directive to Aleppo:
All rights of the Armenians to live and work on Turkish soil have been completely cancelled, and with regard to this the Government takes all responsibility on itself, and has commanded that even babes in the cradle are not to be spared. . . . Without listening to any of their [Armenian] reasoning, remove them thence—women or children, whatever they may be, even if they are incapable of moving; and do not let the people [Turks] protect them, because, through their ignorance, they place material gains [bribes] higher than patriotic feelings, and cannot appreciate the great policy of the Government in insisting upon this. Because instead of the indirect measures of extermination used in other places—such as severity, haste (in carrying out the deportations), difficulties of travelling and misery—direct measures [i.e.: outright killing] can safely be used there [Aleppo], so work heartily.
The Turks butchered most of the men outright or sent them to work on public constructions projects, killing them only when the labor was complete. Police and soldiers amused themselves by torturing others. On the whole, however, women and children received the cruelest treatment. Pretty Armenian girls were raped in the streets in front of foreign visitors. Some were sold as slaves or concubines to Muslims who forced them to convert to Islam. The majority, however, were “exiled” to desert regions, where they were forced to march back and forth until they dropped dead from thirst and exhaustion.
Altogether Talaat and his associates were responsible for the massacre of one and a half million Armenians. The pleas of the pope, European allies, and the United States fell on deaf ears, and no outcry came from the Islamic world either. Today many Turks deny the outrage or claim the Armenians were rebels. However, contemporaries of the events documented the atrocities with pen and camera.
—Dan Graves
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