InternationalRemembering the Cilician massacres of 1909
Published: Saturday April 18, 2009
Related Articles
Remembering the tragedy of Cilicia 100 years later
This International Women’s Day, let’s celebrate Zabel Yesayan
“In the ruins of the city, in the ruins of their hearts, all has been destroyed. I can still see the gesture of a crazed village woman: summing up everything that happened in their village, she makes a sweeping gesture with her hand and repeats mechanically, ‘If you want to believe it, believe it, if you don't want to believe it, don't; everything is ruined, everything is ruined.’
“It is not the charred houses or the devastated gardens that seem past saving in this boundless catastrophe, nor is it the large numbers of the dying. It is rather that crippling inner feeling which drifts through everyone's eyes – a feeling of misery, of despondency. It is the feeling of a people that has been trampled underfoot, ground into the earth under the soles of brutes. The heads that, thirsting for light and freedom, had for a moment been lifted with human dignity, have now been mercilessly, ruthlessly smashed. Tortured by this thought, I look out upon the destroyed city, whose heaps of charred rubble now take on a different and terrible meaning. And yet, amidst this deathly desolation and despair, a smile of hope blooms.
“In the ruins, a group of women has taken refuge in the shade of the half-wrecked walls. Suspended between one wall and another, a cradle is gently rocking. Who knows? What the violence of our grief represents as impossible is perhaps possible after all for the people's unwearying, unconscious genius for rebirth. For that poor child's humble cradle, indifferent to the immense general misery, quick with an invincible instinct for life, is rocking above this vast cemetery, disdaining both the abject wretchedness of the martyred people and the criminals' monstrous savagery.”
Zabel Esayan, In the Ruins, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, ch. 2
One hundred years ago on April 14, the Armenian quarter of Adana came under attack. The first wave of the massacres of Cilicia began.
Less than a year earlier, in the summer of 1908, Ottoman revolutionaries – Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, and others, together – had forced Sultan Abdülhamit II to restore the Ottoman constitution. In the capital, Armenians and Turks had hugged each other with joy, as they welcomed the Constitutional Revolution.
Elections took place in the fall. Armenians were represented by 14 deputies out of 288.
But the supporters of the sultan organized a counterrevolution on the night of April 12, 1909. While the restoration was underway in the capital, agents sent by the sultan started massacres of Armenians in Cilicia.
"Heads that, thirsting for light and freedom, had for a moment been lifted with human dignity," were now "mercilessly, ruthlessly smashed," as Zabel Esayan put it in one of the greatest works of Western Armenian literature, In the Ruins. The book is based on her experience as a member of a delegation sent by the Armenian Church to aid the stricken and organize the search for orphans.
What followed the first wave of massacres was perhaps more shocking. The counterrevolution was defeated on April 24. The restored government sent troops to stop the massacres. But the troops joined in the second wave of massacres, which took place on April 25–27.
According to Stephan H. Astourian, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the participation of the Turkish public in the massacres was motivated in part by a deep-felt resentment against the freer public behavior of Armenians under the constitution. How dare they behave like full-fledged citizens of the Ottoman state? It was also motivated by the opportunity for looting property in a region where Armenians controlled much of the trade and almost all artisanal activities.
More than 20,000 Armenians were killed in these massacres.
It is hard not to look at these massacres in the context of the genocide that began six years later. The Adana bloodletting must be distinguished from the Genocide in that the organizers of the former did not seek to annihilate the Armenian people. All the same, the fact that these massacres and an earlier round, in 1894–96, went unpunished must have given the perpetrators a sense of impunity and fed into their genocidal fantasies.
The infant in the cradle witnessed by Esayan has grown up, thanks to our "people's unwearying, unconscious genius for rebirth." We still disdain "the criminals' monstrous savagery." But the anniversary we mark this week reminds us that impunity breeds new crimes against humanity.
Even as we look to the future, we cannot and should not rest until the Turkish state ends its efforts to cover up and deny the crimes perpetrated against our people. Turkey must come to terms with its history and its consequences.
The translation of Esayan is taken from Marc Nichanian, Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century,
