On
April 24th, millions of people around the world will mourn the
implementation of a plan—devised by Ottoman officials a hundred years
ago, amid the chaos of the First World War—to annihilate the Armenian
people in their native homeland. Initiated in 1915, the policy was
brutally effective; by the war’s end, it had resulted in the destruction
of virtually every Armenian community outside Constantinople, and the
elimination of more than a million people from territory in what is now
modern Turkey. This is what is meant by the term “Armenian genocide.” In
any context, one would expect that such an event would cause lasting
collective trauma. For many Armenians living around the world, in a
state of post-Ottoman diaspora, that trauma has been compounded by the
lack of official recognition and reconciliation. To this day, the
Turkish state denies that a systematic annihilation ever occurred (by
the name of genocide, or any other). And Armenians continue to struggle
with the official negation: to endlessly combat it is its own form of
prison, but to try moving past it unilaterally, abandoning the horrific
events of 1915 in the shadows of denial, is to succumb to willful
blindness and injustice. Decades ago, The New Yorker published a
short story by William Saroyan, titled “The Duel,” which offered the
possibility of magical self-release from this dilemma: its protagonist, a
trash-talking teen-age Armenian-American, decides in a moment of
delirious oratory that he’ll simply turn his eyes from any Turks in the
world, and thus be free from the need to engage in the ceaseless
duelling. But, of course, one side on its own cannot heal the scars of
genocide. As Pope Francis noted in a recent sermon on 1915, “Concealing
or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without
bandaging it.”
Recently, however, there has been cause for optimism. Haltingly, and with difficulty, well beneath the upper strata of government in Ankara, a reckoning with history is edging forward in Turkey. For the first time in decades, it is possible to utter the words “Armenian genocide” there without facing certain criminal prosecution. Liberal-minded Turks in increasing numbers are challenging the old taboos, and many Kurds living in Turkey now speak with plain remorse about their ancestors’ complicity in the massacres. At the municipal level, some cities have even taken steps toward reconciliation. Reactionary forces certainly push against these changes—the word “Armenian” remains a slur, apparently even for Turkey’s President—but, in a way that feels new and genuine, one can now map the direction of progress: within a decade or two, denying the effort to exterminate Armenians may well become untenable in Turkey.
My ancestors were Ottoman Armenians: on my mother’s side from Istanbul and Malatya, and on my father’s from the city of Diyarbakir. In a piece that ran in The New Yorker earlier this year, titled “A Century of Silence,” I wrote about my family’s survival in Diyarbakir, and also about the remarkable spirit of atonement that has taken hold in that city. The people of Diyarbakir encouraged me to feel a sense of belonging there, and I’ll respond by expressing a wish on the genocide’s centenary: that a small street in Ankara be renamed. For decades, that street, near Botanik Park, has honored the Ottoman governor of Diyarbakir in 1915, Dr. Mehmet Reşid. This should be an affront to Turks and Armenians alike.
A little about Reşid. He was Circassian, born in Russia in 1873. When he was one year old, his family fled the Tsarist persecution of Muslims and immigrated to the collapsing Ottoman Empire. As a doctor in training, he became preoccupied with the empire’s weakness. “The Ottoman element is shrinking,” he recalled telling veterans of the Greco-Turkish War with tears in his eyes. “Ottoman land is disappearing piece by piece. Of this we are witness, and we know who the culprits are.” By the time he assumed Diyarbakir’s governorship, he had come to view Armenians as harmful “microbes,” and treated them as such: he once boasted that he had eliminated a hundred and twenty thousand people from the region. The violence that Reşid wrought upon Diyarbakir province was so indiscriminate, targeting Christians of myriad sects among the Armenians, that the Interior Minister ordered him to dial it back. (“It is categorically prohibited for disciplinary measures imposed in regard to the Armenians to be implemented against other Christians,” a secret telegram stated.) Reşid ignored the directive, and, assiduously, he removed local officials who refused to carry out the genocidal “discipline.” In May of 1915, the district governor of Mardin told him, “I am not a man without conscience; I have nothing against the Christians of Mardin; I will not execute these orders.” He was expelled. Two other local officials who refused were murdered. Evidence later gathered by Ottoman investigators indicated Reşid’s culpability; after the war, when a Turkish journalist found Reşid and asked him about the assassinations and the mass killings, he threatened to walk out of the interview. “It’s all slander,” he declared. “Aren’t newspapers the source of defamation and anarchy, anyway?”
It is hard to overstate the symbolism of that street name, of its endurance in a world capital even now, but perhaps a personal story can help to illustrate it. I never met my father’s father, a tailor by trade who passed away before I was born. Nor did I ever meet my mother’s father. But an elderly man from Diyarbakir, Nishan Tususian, a pharmacist in Queens who had helped my father immigrate to New York, played the role of grandfather in my life. He would stay in our home for days, taking my sister and me on walks, collecting leaves, spotting birds. Often, he spent afternoons beside a sunlit window reading the Encyclopædia Britannica. When he was not with us, he travelled, almost compulsively. (In a worn suitcase, he always packed an old hammer, for protection.) His presence in our home was a given, a simple thing; to think of it as the result of survival, as the result of bravery or cleverness in the face of mass murder, or as the consequence of random events falling into life-saving alignment, was impossible then, and maybe it still is for me. Mr. Nishan, as we called him in Armenian, was a man of quiet gentleness, seemingly untouched by cruelty of any kind. Last year, in a suitcase stuffed with old photos in my parents’ home, I found a picture of him from the nineteen-fifties, outside the city of Tripoli, on the northern coast of Lebanon. (I can guess the decade because my uncle, who is dressed in a dark suit, was accidentally killed by a stray bullet, in Beirut, in 1958.) Nishan stands at the center—a younger, more vital version of the man that I remember.
The youngest of nine brothers and sisters, Nishan grew up in a stone house with a courtyard in the center of Diyarbakir city. He began his memoir by explaining that he graduated from secondary school in 1912, intending to go to college the following year. The Great War broke out in 1914; several months later his father’s hardware store was burned, along with hundreds of others Armenian businesses. In March of 1915, Reşid was appointed governor in Diyarbakir, replacing a more tolerant predecessor, and a climate of terror soon took hold among Armenians. Some of Nishan’s siblings had emigrated, but three brothers and two sisters remained. His brother Hagop was quickly detained and killed. His brother Vahan was conscripted into the Ottoman Army, released after the payment of a fee, but then arrested and imprisoned for carrying a pistol. His brother Dikran was imprisoned because of his membership in a political party. Nishan’s father, who was eight-four, died of old age that year. Two months later, his mother succumbed to typhoid fever. By the time of her burial, even the priest was unwilling to venture to the graveyard, so Nishan, who was then living with a sister and her family, went out with the pallbearers to learn of her resting place. “At the funeral procession, I was the only one there,” he wrote.
Reşid had assembled a strike force to enact “punishment.” Working with the local office of the Committee of Union and Progress, the party then in control of the Ottoman state, and with Kurdish irregulars, he created eleven battalions, populated by “the worst specimens of thieves, brigands, murders, deserters, etc.,” the former British pro-consul in Diyarbakir wrote in a report filed to the U.S. State Department in 1919. The eleventh battalion became known as the Butcher’s Battalion. At the end of May, on Reşid’s orders, more than six hundred Armenians who were detained in Diyarbakir prison—Nishan’s brother Vahan among them—were sent down the Tigris River on rafts and killed. The massacre was a turning point; the province thereafter became a wasteland of corpses. “I witnessed numerous ghastly scenes, women and children lying here and there in the valleys, either killed or dead from exhaustion,” a survivor later recalled. Another remembered women being separated from their children at a valley near Mardin: “When our mother came for the last time and kissed us madly, I remember she was clad only in her white underwear; there were no ornaments, no gold and no velvet clothes. We, the children, were unaware of the events happening there. In reality, they had taken off their clothes, one after the other, had arranged the garments on one side, had stripped the women completely, had cut their heads with axes and had thrown them into the valley.” Streams of people were forced to march south across the provincial landscape, into Arabia. As the Minister of Interior told the American ambassador, “We will not have Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert, but nowhere else.”
In June, a Turkish official arrived at Nishan’s home and instructed the family to pack: they were being deported to the south. Nishan’s brother Dikran was released, so he could join them. Nishan was pressed into a convoy and expelled to Urfa, then to Aleppo, then through an archipelago of isolated transit camps, toward a forlorn settlement, now in the Syrian Desert, called Der Zor. It is estimated that two hundred thousand people were slaughtered at Der Zor. The convoy, lead by Circassians and Kurds, varied in number as it moved, but it began in Diyarbakir with three hundred people: “all our neighbors, about forty boys, two men, including my brother who was released from prison.” Because Nishan’s brother could not walk, the family purchased a cart for five gold pieces. “When we emerged from the city gate, we saw by the city wall three-to-five-year-old boys, about a hundred of them helpless, out of the passing caravans,” he recalled. Shortly afterward, Dikran was removed from the cart and killed. The memoir devotes only a sentence to his slaying: a displeased Circassian gendarme “with three or four Kurds knifed him by the side of the road.”
On the way to Urfa, the convoy camped at a spot known as the Devil’s Valley, where, Nishan wrote, “they picked seven men and shot them.” (Several days later, scores of Armenians from Urfa, including the city’s archbishop, were massacred in that valley.) Passing a village named Karacadağ, he saw a gendarme with a rifle, joined by men with whips and cudgels, emptying homes of people. One of the men beat a girl trying to revive her mother, who had fainted. “There were a thousand bodies shot and scattered a mile around,” Nishan wrote; as the convoy progressed, “a donkey stumbled, and fell. Our neighbor Manoug helped the driver raise the donkey. He was shot.” The convoy diminished as it moved, leaving in its trail ailing women and children, who could not keep up, scattered possessions, and the dead. Farther down the road, one of the Circassians prepared to murder six boys, Nishan among them. In an interview that Nishan later provided to an Armenian oral-history project, he recalled that moment: standing away from the gendarme, stunned, imagining the knife entering his body, while the other boys begged for mercy. Several women in the convoy intervened: “They collected some money, and the gendarme was pacified.” Taking the money and a twelve-year-old girl, the Circassian mounted his horse and rode off.
From Urfa, along with other deportees, Nishan was packed into a train for Aleppo. He sought out relatives there, and for a month lived incognito, until he was discovered and forced into another convoy headed for Der Zor. Moving south along the Euphrates, the convoy grew to five hundred deportees; after several days of marching, it reached a camp called Abuharar, where, Nishan wrote, “there was starvation. People who could not stand on their feet were taken and lined up on one side of the camp, to wait their end.” Nishan met a friend of his brother who told him that if they did not escape they would either be marched until they died of exhaustion, or killed at their destination—“Der Zor means death.”
The two planned to meet at a telegraph pole outside the camp. “I got away first, waited by the pole for some time,” Nishan wrote. “My friend did not show up.” Alone, using the stars as his guide, Nishan fled through the desert, stopping on four occasions. “The first time, an Arab shepherd robbed me. The next day a good Arab took me into his tent, fed me, put me on the right road. The third time, two gendarmes caught me. They could have shot me, but they let me go. The fourth time, when the day dawned, I found myself in a flat country. There was no place to hide.” Some friendly villagers took him in. “I slept there during the day, and was on my way as soon as it was dark. In the morning, I came across a caravan going to Aleppo. I asked permission to join them. I reached Aleppo.”
In the last, dispassionate words of his personal account, he wrote, “It took me three days to recover myself. The ordeal was over. This completes my Odyssey.” Nishan devoted the final page of his brief memoir to a family photo. Here it is, along with captions that he wrote for a younger relative: thirteen typed lines, as succinct a story of 1915 as can be told.
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