Humanity in the Midst of Inhumanity

By Shahkeh Yaylaian Setian

Setian provides stories submitted by sixteen descendants of survivors who were saved by Muslims during the 1915 Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks. She offers a corrective to mitigate the prejudice against Muslims and to uphold and to promote their dignity.
She describes the geopolitical situation of the Genocide times and other issues of interest with commentary, such as the betrayal of Armenians by the 1923 Lausanne Peace Treaty, which did not mention Armenia nor the Armenian massacres. The omission of fairly settling the Armenian issue was in order for Allies to control the oil wealth in the region. He who owns the oil will rule the world (M. Henry Berenger, French senate, December 12, 1919).
Setian graphically includes the vicious treatment of victims in order to convey the horrors committed by government officials and out of control citizens that seared the atmosphere. Noble Muslims risked their lives to save Armenians in the midst of such inhumanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462884254

Shahkeh Yaylaian Setian

The daughter of genocide survivors, Dr. Setian is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has three children and five grandchildren and lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She is sensitive to injustice and human rights violations and is dedicated to helping create a just and peaceful world. She lived for a year as an independent volunteer in solidarity with the people that she wanted to help and whom she came to love in post-war Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh), a country that was recovering from the little-known war and attempted ethnic cleansing by neighboring Azerbaijan, a Turkish cohort, against the citizens of the Armenian enclave. She taught at Springfield College, Massachusetts; Cape Cod Community College; and Artsakh State University, has facilitated workshops and presented talks about genocide, injustice, and values. She has earned awards for short stories; has had several articles published, including photojournalist newspaper articles; and coedited two volumes for the Values Realization Institute.

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by Shahkeh Yaylaian Setian.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

96331

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

AFTERWORD

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Map.jpgmap%201.jpgUntitled-1.jpgUntitled-2.jpg

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

—Voltaire

Writer and philosopher (1694-1778)

This book is dedicated to the memory of the brave Turkish Muslims who saved Armenian lives during the Armenian Genocide. They deserve to have memorials created to honor them.

Additionally, this book is dedicated to hope—hope that people of Armenian descent and those of Turkish descent will mourn together their tragic shared past and move toward a relationship that heals the wounds that have seared their lives for close to one hundred years and create an honorable future based on truth and justice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I deeply appreciate those who sent me stories about and photos of relatives who survived the Armenian Genocide with the help of Muslim Turks. Their contributions are a legacy that honors the survivors and brave Muslims and provides a personal record of the Genocide that confirms the historical record. Reading the stories was an emotional experience for me that I will forever be grateful for.

I wish to thank my daughter Sara Setian for her unfailing support throughout the writing of this book. She served as a skillful sounding board. Her encouragement helped to get me through the self-doubt that I experienced from time to time as a first-time writer of a book.

Her suggestions and editing were invaluable.

I want also to thank Wallace Exman for his skillful editing during the development of this book. I was indeed fortunate for his professional expertise as a retired editor with over thirty-five years in book publishing. I also deeply appreciate his warm friendship.

Harry Parsekian has my thanks for phoning me periodically to keep me on track by reminding me of the importance of this work.

I am indebted to Gary Lind-Sinanian, head curator at Armenian Library and Museum of America (ALMA), for guiding me through the extensive collection of books at ALMA when I first began to research material I needed. Gary was not only helpful in directing me to material I needed, but he also impressed me with the wide scope of information he had and that he imparted without the need to refer to any of the publications.

My thanks also to Bridget Bontrager, librarian at Mashpee Library, for tracking down information on Turkey. I also want to thank the others on the Mashpee Library staff for obtaining books from other libraries that I requested that were not part of the Mashpee Library collection. Their friendly and efficient attention to my needs helped to make my work easier.

I am grateful to George Aghjayian for sharing with me his compilation of the names of some of the Armenian places that were changed to Turkish names.

I appreciate Wolfgang Gust who also provided me with current Turkish names of Armenian places.

My sincere thanks to the Armenian National Institute (ANI) for providing me with the map of the 1915 Armenian Genocide in the Turkish Empire based on maps prepared by Z. Khanzadian for the Armenian National Delegation and Raymond H. Kevorkian and Eric Van Lauve for the Biblioth`eque.

I am appreciative without measure to the authors listed in my bibliography whose invaluable works provided information used in the compilation of this book.

S. Y. S.

PROLOGUE

The decision to write this book was inspired by a need to record the stories of Muslims who saved Armenians during the 1915 Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. Despite the threat by the government that anyone who helped an Armenian would have their house burned down, their family killed in front of them, and then he/she would be killed, these brave rescuers acted bravely out of their humanity.

It took me many years to understand how world events affect peoples’ lives. In the learning, my own life was profoundly affected. Looking back on my life, it’s hard to imagine that the quiet, young person who I was while growing up became a passionate risk taker who needed to act to preserve her culture. My youthful silence was broken only by myriad questions that were not satisfactorily answered. I continue to question much.

My search for answers has taken me across the world to connect with the land where the Armenian Genocide occurred in 1915 and to Nagorno Karabagh, a small Armenian enclave bordering Azerbaijan where Armenians were targets of the little-known ethnic cleansing attempts by Azerbaijan, a cohort of Turkey. Nagorno Karabagh has reclaimed its ancient Armenian name, Artsakh.

I scour books and articles about Genocide hoping some clarity will emerge from the research and writings by scholars. My life experience as a daughter of survivors of the Armenian Genocide has been my best teacher.

As a teenager, I used to do my homework on the dining room table. The dining room was separated from the living room by French doors with glass panes. My mother and her friends used to visit with each other in the living room. Through a gap between the doors, I overheard snippets of stories and quiet crying by my mother and her peers who all were survivors of the Genocide. I did not viscerally understand my connection with the catastrophe of the Genocide. The Genocide was an accepted part of who we were as Armenians. An organic understanding of that connection was years away from the time of doing homework on the dining room table and hearing the sounds of grieving from the living room sanctuary.

When I was about sixteen years old, an experience with my mother awakened a vague feeling that something ominous was lurking in my mother’s life. Our family was used to her having what we thought were inappropriate responses to situations that greatly disturbed her.

Sometimes, she would have emotional outbursts for no apparent reason. Her emotions ran the gamut of anger, fear, and confusion.

One day when I came home from school, I knew that my mother was home, but I couldn’t find her. When I went upstairs to search for her, I found her cowering at the end of a long closet in her bedroom. She was whimpering. I coaxed her out of the closet, took her into the living room, and sat her down on the sofa. Not sure of what to do, I calmed her down by playing a recording of Ava Maria by Mario Lanza that I had always found soothing.

I suspected that episodes such as this were somehow connected to her loss of family when she was a child in Ottoman Turkey and her experiences during the massacres of which I had no real knowledge because she never talked about it. Years later, I attributed these episodes to post-traumatic stress disorder of which little was known at the time. It was easy for me to push thoughts of the Genocide and its effect on my mother to the recesses of my mind because we didn’t talk about it and because it was too big an issue for me to wrap my mind around. She was calm for the moment and that was enough.

I pushed the subject of the Armenian Genocide to a place in my consciousness where I didn’t want to go. Later, as a mature married woman, my mother and her peers began to share with me some glimpses of the extent of their suffering and grieving for their loved ones and others lost in the Genocide.

Rather than speaking extensively of their own losses, the women mostly spoke of the pain of their peers with deep sympathy. Through this manner, a picture was formed of their individual and collective pain with each woman being able to keep a safe distance from her own suffering. For many, this was a safe way to speak their hearts, some not wanting to even share their pain with their children in order to spare them the sadness of the truth.

In a relationship now based on married maturity, my mother told me stories of Armenian women I knew and what they had suffered. The impact on me of one story has stayed with me throughout my life.

In a moment of despair, a woman made a decision to save her life, a decision for which she paid a high price. In the midst of the Genocidal massacres, a Turkish soldier/officer, struck by her beauty, saved her and married her. She was a devout Christian, but it was necessary for her to convert to Islam. They had four children together. She later learned that her Armenian Christian fiancé was alive and living in America and asked her Turkish husband to release her from their marriage. He gave her permission to leave, but said she could not take their children with her.

She left for America and married her Armenian fiancé. Throughout their marriage, he beat her and subjected her to verbal abuse. Her daughter, who was a close friend of mine, told me that when her mother became very sick in old age, she would sleep on the floor next to her mother’s bed, and at night, in her sleep, her mother would cry out, Myrig, myrig. Mother, mother. I weep as I write this. After all these many years, I cannot stop this incredible sadness when I think of her. She suffered the Genocide, left her children behind for a life with an abusive husband, and in her old age, on her deathbed, called out for the mother that she lost in the Genocide.

The mother of another close friend of mine was escaping with her baby, two toddlers, and a daughter, a little older than her toddlers, during the forced deportation of the Armenians.

She carried the baby, but the other children were exhausted. There was no food to feed them.

She reached a point when she could not go any further with her children. An unthinkable decision had to be made and it was. She left the baby by the roadside with the hope it would be found and saved. She knocked on the door of a Turkish house and asked that her two toddlers be taken in and taken care of. She kept the older child who could walk along with her. She never knew what became of her three children.

In America, she remarried and raised her daughter and one other daughter, born of the new marriage. Her husband was a good and gentle man. I knew him. My friend, the daughter born in America, told me that her mother thanked God every day for being saved with her young daughter, for her life in America, and for the blessing of her new daughter.

A friend of mine told me that she noticed that I always cried at the wakes of my mother’s peers. I wept not only because I felt sad that they had died and because they had suffered the Genocide. I wept also because of the quiet sadness in the lives of some who spent their lives in mismatched marriages of convenience as a way out of the lives that left them in limbo after the Genocide. I wept also for some who endured abusive husbands. I tried to understand the fierce anger that these men lived with because of their being abused during the Genocide and of being powerless to protect or save the families that they had lost during the Genocide.

My understanding did not lessen my sympathy for their wives nor did it excuse the abuse.

Were there two victims in the star-crossed relationships?

The stories did not impact my life in an immediate way. Instead, they added to circumstances of pieced-together knowledge. I was moved away from a persona that was detached from a tie to the history of the Genocide to being shaped to who I am in relation to that history. My identity cannot be separated from the Genocide.

Facts of that history surfaced in the following ways: through academic studies that included Armenian history, notably, history of the Genocide; I chose second generation Armenian-American women who were daughters of survivors of the Genocide (as I am) as subjects of my doctoral dissertation; my travels twice to historic Armenia and later to Artsakh where I traveled alone and lived as an independent volunteer for a year during their postwar recovery from the savages of war with Azerbaijan, Turkey’s cohort.

Without being quite conscious of a need to touch, hear, see, and understand places and people that were part of my Armenian history, I experienced an epiphany that reached the very depth of my being, a being that is now at peace with the organic connection to my history. The path to that epiphany, its preface and its aftermath, offered an understanding of the dynamics and chilling aspects of ethnic conflict and genocide.

During the 9/11terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Afghan and Iraqi wars, many Americans blamed all Muslims for the violence caused by fanatical Muslim terrorists. In an effort to mitigate the prejudice against innocent Muslims, I sought out stories told to children and grandchildren by survivors of the Armenian Genocide about Turkish Muslims who saved their lives under threat of death. The stories of these brave Muslims are reported in this book. My hope is that individuals of Armenian heritage who harbor hate for the Turkish Muslims who murdered our people during that hateful time will let go of prejudice against all Turks by acknowledging and honoring the memories of these courageous saviors.

Stories about missionaries, individuals, and organizations that came to the aid of the suffering Armenians are included in this book to illustrate the many faces of humanity. Lives were saved, but a country was lost. When the Genocide ended, Armenians were betrayed by world powers for their own financial self-interest in treaties that were crafted at the time. The actions of world powers in attending to the rights of Armenians shamefully reflect on the reputations of the world powers that were involved. Self-interest won out over moral imperative, and historic Armenian land was divided between Turkey and Russia. The perpetrators of the Genocide were rewarded by being gifted the land of their victims.

Humanitarian aid continued in ensuing years while Armenians, scattered throughout the world, reconstructed their shattered lives. The Genocide and the aforementioned happenings are prelude to the passion Armenians feel to preserve the culture that the Ottoman Turks tried to wipe off the face of the earth. Woven throughout Armenian history from its birth as a nation in ancient times to its struggles for survival and growth to its demise and to its rebirth as the Republic of Armenia in 1991, a story is told that personifies love of country, love of land, and love of one’s culture.

In the face of a government edict that threatened death to anyone who helped Armenians, noble Muslims risked death by helping Armenians in the tragic unfolding of Armenian suffering during the Genocide.

April 19, 1915

The Armenians must be exterminated. If any Muslim protects a Christian, first his house shall be burned; then the Christian killed before his eyes, then his [the Muslim’s] family and himself. (Government edict)¹

The Koran said:

Whoever works righteousness, man or woman, and has faith, verily, to him will we give new life, a life that is good and pure. (16:97-Koran)

How did these conflicting edicts affect the lives and the deaths of the vulnerable Armenian victims, other Christians, and Jews during the 1915 Armenian Genocide? Turkish and Christian neighbors had lived together in relative peace in the past. During the turmoil of the Genocide, their lives became entangled in life and death predicaments where integrity, bravery, and other characteristics that shape our humanity were severely tested.

During the Armenian Genocide ordered by the government of the Ottoman Empire, 1.5 million Armenian women, children, and men were brutalized and murdered. They were Christians in a country where the government was obsessed with the idea of purifying the country of anyone who was not Muslim. In addition to Armenians, Pontic Greeks, Assyrians, and Jews were caught up in the bloody net targeting non-Muslims.

Armenians stood in the way of the geopolitical and religious goal of the Ottoman Empire’s Pan-Turkism/Turkification of all lands from the Ottoman Empire to Central Asia. The obsession with their goal created a mind-set of brutality that left little room for the government or members of the military and police force to act in a humane way. The worst in humanity reigned.

When speaking of the Armenian Genocide and condemning the Turks for what they did, Armenians often mention the fact that there were some good Turks who helped Armenians during that brutal time. Knowing that they were putting their own lives and that of their families at great risk, the humanity of these brave Muslims was stronger than the fear of the danger they faced for their heroic actions.

The harrowing experiences of the survivors of the Genocide, instigated and committed by the Ottoman Turk government, have been exacerbated by the Turkish government’s vehement and continuing denial that a genocide occurred. For close to one hundred years, it has been difficult for some Armenians to separate their hatred of what the Turkish government did from their feelings about Turks in general.

In recording the heroic actions of brave Muslims during the Genocide, perhaps people of Armenian and Turkish descent can forge a relationship that will enable them to live in peace as they did before the Genocide and before government precursors to the Genocide poisoned the atmosphere around them. Recognizing the heroic actions of brave Muslims during the Genocide can demonstrate to Turkish citizens and others of Turkish descent that there is reason to be proud before the world of their ancestors who acted in a most humane way during that tragic time.

To understand the dynamics of the Genocide by the Ottoman Empire against its Armenian subjects, one has to look at the histories and evolution of Armenia and that of the Ottoman Empire. Historical events cannot be separated from the geographical location of Armenia, which was at the crossroads of ancient east-west trade routes, making it prey to invaders that traveled across Armenia, including Turkish invaders and conquerors in the 1500s.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was faced with political, financial, and social problems and blamed the Armenians (scapegoats) for their decline. The Genocide was committed under the cover of World War I. Similarly, Germany experienced political and financial problems after their defeat in World War I and II. Jews were blamed (scapegoats) for Germany’s hardships, similar to the Armenian scapegoating in Ottoman Turkey. The twentieth century has been called the Century of Genocides. We have begun the twenty-first century with its record of ongoing genocides. What have we learned from genocidal history?

The survivors described in this book were scattered throughout the Diaspora to begin new lives. They no longer had a homeland. The Ottoman Empire succeeded in getting rid of the hated Armenians and extinguished evidence that Armenians once lived there. When the children survivors became adults and had children of their own, their children were said to be raised by a generation of orphans who were passed the awesome responsibility to carry on a shattered culture and give it new life, a culture wrought from a history of fighting for its survival.

Robert H. Hewsen describes Armenia’s history as prelude to the fate of the Armenian people:

A land of inspiring vistas, rich in wild life and natural resources, dotted with crumbling castles and ruined churches, and capable of arousing deep emotions in the people who live there, it is a land that has seen the coming of Assyrians, Persians, and Kurds; Romans, Byzantines, and Turks; Scythians, Georgians, Russians, and Medes; the Ten Thousand Greeks of Xenophon’s army, The Mongol hordes of Timur, the soldiers of the Red Army… The stage has been set. It will be worthy of the heroic and terrible events that will be played out upon it.²

Although the Armenian people were killed and dispersed from their land during the Genocide, history records that the Armenian civilization prior to the Genocide was one that developed into a culturally rich nation in art, literature, music, and architectural creativity. I needed to walk that land and so I did.

As we approached Istanbul by plane in January of 1998, I take in the sight below. Red clay roofs give way to myriad minarets pointing to heaven. Here are citadels to Allah from which calls to prayer inspire a life well-lived or incite violence. In the past, the call to begin and end massacres was signaled by a green flag waved from the minaret and the sound of a bugle call.³

I am one of twenty-two people of Armenian descent on a tour to connect in some way to a part of our parents that we could not share with them, that private part that they carried deep within the horror of living through the 1915 Armenian Genocide. By walking the land anointed with the blood of the Genocide victims, we bear witness in reverent tribute to our ancient culture, to our parents, and to those who did not survive.

The itinerary for the tour was planned to include the villages and towns of the parents of each of us sojourners. We were strangers when we met. As we stop at villages and towns that hold the stories of each others’ families, our relationships take on the embodiment of kinship. Yes, we are sisters and brothers drawn together by a special knowing of each other through the tears we shed in gratitude for being on the soil where our parents had lived and a shared deep sorrow for what they and other Armenians had endured before and during the Genocide.

On our first day in Istanbul, we visit the Surp Prgich Armenian hospital. It was built in the late nineteenth century with donations from wealthy Armenians. The hospital is divided