I thereby present you all with some information which I got from the book of:

Christopher J. Walker, (1991) Armenia The Survival of a Nation, 2nd Edition

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According to articles in the Turkish newspaper Kurun in 1935, written

by Aziz Samih, chief of the historical department of the Ottoman war

ministry during the war. Samih showed that orders to attack Armenian

villages were received in the east between 29 October and 5 November

1914. Some of the Armenian men were forced, in intolerable weather

conditions, to act as pack animals until they dropped.

Dr. Behaeddin Skakir, he was a top party ideologue and a civilian,

was present at the headquarters of the Ottoman 34th Division at

Moush, in early December 1914. This Paris-educated doctor and

intellectual was the chief organiser of the massacres.(1)

The writter goes on to discribe how the Central Committee of the

Committee of Union and Progress decided to take action against the

Armenians. Of course this was the best time to exterminate the

Armenians because the rest of the world was at war, so no foreign

power would intervean to the Turkish Genocide.

In the last ten days of February 1915 Armenian government officials

and employees were dismissed and in the army Armenian soldiers (which

before all this were honoured for their bravery) were taken out of

any combat positions and enrolled in labour battalions (ameliye

taburi), all Armenian officers were imprisoned.

The American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, wrote:

'Up to that time most of them had been combatants, but now they were

all stripped of their arms and transformed into workmen. Instead of

serving their countrymen as artillerymen and cavarlymen, these former

soldiers now discovered that they had been transformed into road

labourers and pack animals. Army supplies of all kinds were loaded

on their backs, and, stumbling under the burdens and driven by the

whips and bayonets of the Turks, they were forced to drag their heavy

bodies into the mountains of the Caucasus. Sometimes they would have

to plough their way, burdened in this fashion almost waist-high

through snow. They had to spend practically all their time in the

open, sleeping on the bare ground - whenever the cealess prodding of

their taskmasters gave them an occasional opportunity to sleep. They

were given only scraps of food; if they fell sick they were left

where they had dropped'.(2)

At the same time all the civilian population was made to give up

their arms, given to them for protection against another enemy of

Turkey the Kurds. Large numbers of Armenians were imprissoned, often

as many as 400-500 per town. No reason was given, but it was clear

that these people were later going to be used as hostages. Then all

Armenians were asked to hand in their weapons or else the hostages if

prison would suffer and the community would face severe consequences.

Armenians did not want to hand their weapons, remembering the

delivery of arms at Urfa in 1895. But in the end people started to

hand in their weapons in an effort to stop the measures.

But because the expected number of weapons was not met, the arms

searches which took place were often violent. The hostages in jail

were tortured, the time-honoured Turkish 'falaka' or bastinado was

used, also the extraction of finger-nails and other well thought

brutalities.(3)

The disarmed Armenians could now be driven to their deaths. In the

words of Arnold Toynbee, writting in the Times History of the War,

'An atmosphere of horror, which breaths through all the eye-witness

accounts, had settled down over the provinces of the empire'.(4)

A good excuse of the times was that there were 'few' rogue cops

'exceeding their instructions'. But be no fool the killings were

deliberate, and government policy, Talaat Pasha himself admitted it

to Morgenthau (the American Ambassador). (5)

(1) See Haigazn Kazarian, 'The Turkish Genocide', Armenian Review,

vol. XXX, no. 1-117 (1977), pp. 14-15

(2) Henry Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosporous (London, 1918), pp.

198-9

(3) A. J. Toynbee, 'The Extermination of the Armenians', The Times

History of the War, (London, 1916), vol. VIII, pp. 363-4

(4) Ibid.,p. 386

(5) Henry Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosporous (London, 1918), pp.

221-3