BY DR. VAHRAM L. SHEMMASSIAN
During the Armenian Genocide the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling party in the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1918, pursued a policy of demographic homogenization through the assimilation of Armenian women and children concurrently with the physical elimination of other Armenians, especially adult males. Total integration in Muslim society caused the loss of Armenian identity. Raising Armenian children as Muslims, forced conversions to Islam, and marriages to young Armenian girls and women against their will by ordinary Muslims, as well as army officers and government functionaries, became common practice. With the eradication of the Armenian family and the destruction of institutions and/or expropriation of properties, all vestiges of Armenian civilization and memory in the Ottoman Empire would thus be relegated to the dustbin of history.
The Department of Refugees within the Ottoman Ministry of Interior in 1921 published a booklet in which it presented the case of wartime Armenian orphans as follows. While the Ottoman army was engaged in suppressing the Armenian “revolts and uprisings” in “six different fronts” and putting an end to Armenian massacres of “defenseless people,” it encountered “on the mountain tops, in the ruined villages, on the roads, and the cities which had been scene to these massacres, many orphan children struggling with death for existence, and to assure their safety it hastily established, with no discrimination of race or religion, many orphanages in different places.” In fact, the report continued, “the very first thought…had been that of their safety before there was time to classify them according to their race and religion. Later on, however, due to investigations were made, the Moslem and the Armenian children were separated.” The official Ottoman version further maintained that in the provinces those orphanages “had managed somehow to exist up to the year preceding the armistice, but later on account of lack of funds, it was found necessary to close them up. During this abolishment all necessary instructions were given for the return of Armenian children whith [sic] close or distant relatives to such, and of the ones with no relatives to the Armenian community.”
The evidence and logic, however, negate this official Ottoman account respecting Armenian orphans. First, the Armenians were falsely portrayed as the victimizers rather than the victims and the cause for so many children to lose their parents. Second, if the Armenians were the perpetrators of massacres, it would be inconceivable for them to also kill members of their own ethnic group resulting in large numbers of Armenian orphans alongside Muslim ones. Third, the placement of Armenian orphans in government orphanages was by all accounts not implemented based on humanitarian considerations, but rather to Turkify Armenian children and then distribute them among Turkish families in Istanbul and elsewhere. Besides, the official version does not acknowledge the numerous Armenian youngsters kept and raised in Muslim households. As for Armenian children in orphanages in the Anatolian hinterland, hardly was any one returned by the government to their surviving kin or the Armenian community at large without pressure from the Allies, mainly the British, or the impelling presence of American relief personnel in some locations, although many ordinary Turks, “fearing punishment by the allies, released thousands of Armenian women and children, turning some over to Armenian neighbors or churches, but simply ejecting many others from the shelter of their Turkish homes with no means of existence…” or protection.
As soon as the war ended, surviving Armenian leaders and intellectuals in refugee centers in the Middle East hastened to reconstruct the Armenian nation through a new identity characterized by two concomitant processes. One involved a complete break with the Ottoman Empire, hatred of the Turk, and a campaign against all things Turkish including language and music that span several decades. The other process strove to reclaim, protect and rehabilitate Armenian children held in Turkish orphanages and families and women in bondage among Turks, Kurds, Arabs, and other Muslims. Thus, liberated orphans and women became the “symbols of national regeneration,” although serious misgivings existed about women who had been compelled to resort to prostitution for survival or who were forcibly married to Muslim men and bore their children. This article highlights the rescue of captive Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in the immediate aftermath of World War I.
In late 1918, Armenian individuals began to collect Armenian children in the various neighborhoods of Istanbul, but without a systematic methodology. Most prominent among the fetchers was Arakel Chakrian, formerly professor of chemistry at the Istanbul University, who by April 4, 1919 had been able to reclaim 750 Armenian orphans from Turkish orphanages in the capital. The need to conduct rescue operations on solider grounds, however, necessitated the formation of a formal organization, called the Orphan Collecting Body (OCB/Vorbahavak Marmin), which began to function effective April 17, 1919 as an instrument of the larger National Caretaker Agency (Azgayin Khnamatarutiun). The OCB personnel consisted of a secretary, three-four orphan fetchers in the various quarters of Istanbul each, an operative dealing with Turkish orphanages, and a liaison officer to maintain communication with the police headquarters.
The rescue of orphans took place in the following manner. After receiving reliable information about the whereabouts of an Armenian child, the Armenian fetcher in the area of interest, armed with a document from the Allied and Turkish police, would conduct further investigation to confirm the veracity of the information. He then would inform the OCB secretary, who in turn would obtain an official rescue request from the British Embassy through the Armenian Patriarchate and give it to the designated fetcher. The latter would present it to the Allied police, who would take with them a Turkish policeman to search the targeted house. But despite the set procedure, the recovery of orphans did not come about easily. The Turks “carry them from house to house, garden to garden, conceal them in hideouts, even in box[es], on tree[s].” In such cases the Allied police would help the fetcher search the house thoroughly several times and through various tactics over a period of days and even weeks until its successful outcome.
When Turks began to lodge complaints that the children taken away from them were real Turks and not Armenian, the British Embassy instructed the Armenian Patriarchate to establish a so-called Neutral House where the national identity of contested cases could be determined. Situated in the Shishli neighborhood, the Neutral House was supervised by one Armenian and one Turkish woman, named Zaruhi Hagop Bahri and Nezihe Hanum, respectively. The latter, dissatisfied with the results of the joint screening process, resigned three months later. According to the Turkish feminist writer Halide Edib, Nezihe Hanum, “[Hanum] used to say that her presence [at the Neutral House] did not in any way help the Turkish children, who were being Armenianized daily. The children who were brought to the association were left in the care of the Armenian women, and these Armenian women, either by persuasion or threats or hypnotism, forced the Turkish children to learn by heart the name of an Armenian woman for their mother and the name of an Armenian man for their father.” After Hanum’s resignation, the Neutral House at Shishli was closed down and a new one was opened at Bebek under the supervision of the American Near East Relief. The new center operated until August 1922.
The Turkish complaints actually emanated from the government itself, as well as from the press. Newspaper articles revealed the prevalent mindset of at least some segment of the Turkish public as it continued to adhere to CUP attitudes and goals vis-à-vis the Armenians. In its June 3, 1919 issue, for instance, the Ileri newspaper reported that 220 Muslim orphans had been brought from Kayseri and relinquished to the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, where they were allegedly severely beaten, some to death, in order to extract admissions from them about their Armenian origin. Those who had survived physical abuse required medical treatment. The newspaper then inquired as to the measures that the Ottoman government would take in order to resolve this matter.
The Armenian press wasted no time in rebutting those allegations, which once again aimed at recasting the role of the victimizer as that of the victim. An editorial in the June 6, 1919 issue of Jakatamart (battle) not only responded to Ileri but also Alemdar, Tasvir, and Hadisat as follows: “Continue gentlemen to lie, dupe, pillage, massacre, in this manner you can certainly save that which remains of your fatherland.” Also, on June 6, Zhamanak (time) maintained that “those who invent or diffuse the echo of all of their lies and calumnies are those who accused the Armenians yesterday of having massacred millions of Muslims.”
It is true that cases of mistaken identity existed, that is, some Turkish children were erroneously taken as Armenian. Nevertheless, two clarifications need to be made. First, it would be only natural to have such mistakes given the very complex nature of the issue at hand. Second, those instances constituted only a small fraction of the children recovered from Turkish orphanages and homes.
At any rate, two years later the Armenians conducted their own internal investigation when confronted with accusations of fraud and foul play. According to Patriarch Zaven Der Yeghiayan, “a dispute arose among the members of the Commission [that ran the Neutral House during the last year of its existence] concerning the issue of the determination of a certain orphan’s identity.” A member of the commission “wrote a newspaper piece in which he characterized the Commission as an ‘Inquisition Court.’” The issue was discussed during three sessions of the Armenian National Assembly in August 1921. The allegations were examined by a Parliamentary Commission, which submitted its findings on December 2. The internal investigation concluded that “the scandalous stories and bribery accusations concerning the abusive practices at the Neutral House and the sale of orphans to Turks are entirely unfounded and untrue. There may have been irregularities and errors in the examination of the orphans and certain undesirable situations accommodated, but it has not been possible to establish the staff’s responsibility for these.”
As for Armenian women and children held among Muslims in the Turkish interior, their situation was precarious at best. Two cables reaching American Near East Relief from Malatia, for instance, maintained that “on representations received from the Turkish govt. [sic] in Constantinople, the local authorities were discharging from Moslem houses the Armenian women and children detained there and that although the local Armenians had asked the Turkish Authorities not to pursue this course until the women and children could properly be cared for, yet the Turkish Authorities refused to comply…” According to the minutes of the March 4, 1919 meeting of the Armenian-Greek Section of the British High Commission in Istanbul, an office that was formed the month before “to implement operationally and tactically the terms of the Mudros Armistice related to Armenian and Greek issues,” and “it was generally agreed,” among American repatriation and British officers, “that unless some actions were taken the Turkish Government might occasion us very great difficulties and at the same time claim for itself a cheap and quite unfounded merit. It would be typical of the Turkish Government to throw to the streets all the Armenian women and children in their custody, before we were ready to receive them and then turn around to the world and pretend that whereas they had done their duty the Armenians had let the children die.” The meeting accordingly decided to deliver “a firm letter” to the Turkish government “pointing out that we were fully up to the possibility of their playing the game, but that we would not tolerate it and throw the entire responsibility for feeding and care of the children in question on the Turkish Government till this charge could be assumed by the children’s rightful owners.” At the same time, however, the Armenian-Greek Section advised the Christian communities to “avoid, as much as possible, all national public manifestations as this only irritated the Moslems and only led to further trouble for their own nationals in the Interior.”
Throughout 1921, in Harput and elsewhere, American sources reported that “all Armenians who had been forcibly Islamised during the War and all skilled Armenian workmen were being enlisted [in the Turkish Nationalist Army of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk] while the names of all other Armenians and even of young boys in the Orphanages were being registered.” Indeed, the Nationalists did conscript “young Armenian orphans for the Turkish Labour Battalions in Anatolia.” It was reported in November, furthermore, “that the Nationalist Authorities are now deporting the Christian women and children in small numbers, the excuse for deportation being that as the males of the various families are in hiding, to escape deportation, other members of their families must, as a punishment, be arrested and deported.”
At the end of July 1921 a renewed massacre of Armenians took place at Merzifon. “At the conclusion of the Armistice there were some 2000 Armenians … [there], many of whom had escaped deportation and massacre by forced conversion to Islam. Encouraged by the presence of British Indian Troops and… [that] of… [a] Relief Officer under the British High Commission, these Armenians reverted to Christianity and appear now to have become the victims of Moslem fanaticism.”
In one, perhaps unique case or strange twist, some Turks, whose Armenian wives had been rescued at the end of war, expressed readiness to embrace Christianity in order to repossess and keep them. Two such husbands from Urfa in early 1919 appealed to Jakob Kunzler, a Swiss missionary there, with the following statement and query: “These women taught us a family life that we never knew before. They read us from the Bible and did our housework. And we were astonished; they became so dear to us that it is impossible for us to leave them. We rather part from our old belief. And you should know that we are not alone in this view and in this situation. There are about fifty other men who sent us here who are ready to become Christians in order to [hold on to] their new lives with Christian women. Since the Turkish government would throw us in jail as soon as we converted, we wanted to know if the English would intervene to free us.” Kunzler responded “that the British would not get involved in such things” and declined the request.
Detailed information about each and every rescued child under Armenian custody was recorded on special cards, which were classified alphabetically and kept in special cases. The surveys, conducted through interviews and questionnaires, included, among other things, the orphan’s picture, “civil status,” captor’s name, provenance, and, significantly, ownership of properties for future inheritance claims. Questionnaires were likewise distributed among Armenian families with adopted children.
The disposal of rescued Armenian orphans and women, as well as the search for other Armenians lost during the genocide, were carried out through an Information Bureau established by the Patriarchate. Every two weeks, the Information Bureau posted a list of liberated Armenians, as well as of relatives looking for their loved ones, in the Armenian churches of Istanbul and circulated copies in the provinces, whether or not under Allied occupation.
These rosters were likewise sent to Armenian newspapers worldwide, including those published in the Republic of Armenia, Russia, Egypt, Europe, and the United States. As a result, by the end of October 1919 the Information Bureau had been able to gather the names of 36,000 Armenian survivors from the provinces, as well as over 1,000 individuals who had been listed as “disappeared.”
To conclude, “the total number of Armenian women and children rescued [in Turkey from 1919-1921] in addition to the thousands voluntarily freed is difficult to estimate. Near East Relief reported that by late 1919 10,000 Armenian women had been rescued from Turkish harems through American aid. A year later the British High Commission announced that it had recovered 2,300 Armenian orphans. To these must be added the uncounted others freed through the indirect influence or even mere presence of American relief workers or British control officers in the interior. Armenian authorities reported that in Constantinople alone, 3,000 of the estimated 4,000 to 5,000 captive Armenian orphans had been rescued by late 1921. On the other hand, these authorities also claimed that about 100,000 Armenian orphans, primarily in the interior provinces, had still not been rescued.”
The League of Nations in 1921 constituted a Commission of Inquiry for the Protection of Women and Children in the Near East to continue the reclamation of Armenians in bondage. The commission had two branches, one in Istanbul and the other in Aleppo. The Istanbul branch lasted five years, until 1926, during which time 8,000 persons were recovered in Turkey, although not all were Armenian. Information is lacking—and it is doubtful—as to whether any search and rescue missions were carried out thereafter. The Aleppo branch operated a year longer, until 1927, under the directorship of Karen Jeppe, who was able to rescue and rehabilitate 1,600 Armenians.
