The first tragedy

MANY of us are familiar with the words Adolf Hitler uttered to his military advisers eight days before the nazis invaded Poland: "Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?" - a prelude to the nazi extermination of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other victim groups.

Few of us, I reckon, know about the sheer scale of the vast crime perpetrated by the Turks against the Armenian nation.

This was the first holocaust of the 20th century, predating by decades the horrors of the World War II. Regarding the Armenian extermination, the US was to emerge as a principal holocaust denier.

Balakian describes in graphic and harrowing detail the three stages of persecution of the Armenian people, from the relatively small-scale massacres under Abdul Hamid II to the ethnic cleansing undertaken by the forces of the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress under the cover of the first world war.

Extensive use is made of eyewitness accounts of US diplomats, missionaries, massacre survivors and others and of the gruesome testimony of the persecutors themselves, given during the short-lived trials of the 1920s.

The great powers failed to respond effectively, just as they failed to halt later genocides.

As Hitler knew, the fate of the Armenians was largely forgotten and the dreadful lessons of the genocide were largely ignored.

It is to Balakian's credit that he has helped to restore an early 20th-century tragedy to its rightful place in history.

I read this book with a mounting sense of shock. It is enough to quote, almost at random, from the account of the massacres:

"A common practice was to ... begin with bastinado ... which consists of beating the soles of the feet with a thin rod ... until the feet swell and burst ... not infrequently, they have to be amputated.

"In some cases, the gendarmes would nail hands and feet to pieces of wood ... they even delved into the records of the Spanish inquisition and other historic institutions of torture and adopted all the suggestions found there."

The tortures were perpetrated as a prelude to or during the massive phases of ethnic cleansing. " The deportations quickly became either scenes of mass killing for the men, death marches for the women, children and elderly who were whipped, raped, tortured and shot in an ongoing procession."

In one account, a soldier wrestles a donkey away from a young woman with a baby. "The Turk's scimitar descended on her wrist and the hand fell off."

Rivers and brooks were filled with "swollen" and "worm-eaten corpses." There was no time to bury the thousands of bodies. "Most of them had been partially eaten by dogs."

At the village of Mollahkeuy, one of thousands similarly treated, hundreds of dead bodies were scattered on the plain, nearly all of them women and children.

Many of the women lay flat on their backs, showing signs of barbarous mutilation by the bayonets of the gendarmes.

Ammunition was too valuable to use, so most of the killings were done with "axes, cleavers, shovels and pitchforks."

The Turks "dashed infants on the rocks" before the eyes of their mothers.

The carnage around Ankara was so vast that Talaat Pasha ordered more than 40,000 bodies to be quickly buried in mass graves, "but the stench of death and the mounds of bodies overwhelmed the landscape."

As one witness travelled from Keghvenk to Mezre, he saw thousands of corpses half buried.

On the beach of Lake Goeljuk, hundreds of bodies were piled on top of each other, almost all women and children, all "naked" and showing "signs of the brutal mutilation" that the Turks had inflicted.

In the valley, there were no fewer than 2,000 corpses.

The witness estimated "that, in the course of our ride around the lake, we had seen the remains of not less than 1,000 Armenians." The "fiendish purpose of the Turks" was "to exterminate the Armenian population."

Another witness described the "game of swords" played by the Turkish killing squads with Armenian girls.

Swords would be planted in the ground with the blades uppermost.

Then, men on horseback would each grab a girl and ride at a gallop, throwing the girl to impale her on a sword.

If she was only wounded, she would be scooped up again and thrown until she was finally impaled. The bodies were then thrown in the Tigris river.

In 2000, an Armenian genocide resolution, acknowledging the full horrors perpetrated by the Turks, was proposed by the US congress.

Turkey, in response, mounted a massive propaganda campaign with the support of Israel, declaring that, if the Bill were passed, Ankara would close its airbase to US planes.

President Clinton then instructed House Speaker Dennis Hastert to kill the Bill. "Once again, the attempt to commemorate the century's first genocide had been effectively censored by a foreign government."

In October 2000, shortly after Clinton had caved in to Turkish pressure, France passed an Armenian genocide resolution into law, declaring the fact of the vast extermination.

Turkey protested hysterically and withdrew its ambassador from Paris.

Six months later, Turkish diplomatic relations with France were resumed and business was back to normal.