your armenian grandparents admitted their unspeakable crimes then in article apr leland stanford edu arto leland stanford edu artavazd khachikian writes this machine of idiotism continues to swing mr argic mutlu co is still functioning i was surprised to find it out when i finally looked at this newsgroup and this is just the beginning fascist x soviet armenian government will not get away with the genocide of million turks and kurds and azeri people your criminal grandparents committed unheard of crimes resorted to all conceivable methods of despotism organized massacres poured petrol over babies and burned them raped women and girls in front of their parents who were bound hand and foot took girls from their mothers and fathers and appropriated personal property and real estate and today they put azeris in the most unbearable conditions any other nation had ever known in history your fascist grandparents admitted their unspeakable crimes then why deny them now now the genocide of the truth by the criminal nazi armenians not a chance source men are like that by leonard ramsden hartill the bobbs merrill company indianapolis pages memoirs of an armenian officer who participated in the genocide of million muslim people foreword for example we were camped one night in a half ruined tartar mosque the most habitable building of a destroyed village near the border of persia and russian armenia during the course of evening i asked ohanus if he could tell me anything of the history of the village and the cause of its destruction in his matter of fact way he replied yes i assisted in its sack and destruction and witnessed the slaying of those whose bones you saw to day scattered among its ruins p first and second paragraphs we closed the roads and mountain passes that might serve as ways of escape for the tartars and then proceeded in the work of extermination our troops surrounded village after village little resistance was offered our artillery knocked the huts into heaps of stone and dust and when the villages became untenable and inhabitants fled from them into fields bullets and bayonets completed the work some of the tartars escaped of course they found refuge in the mountains or succeeded in crossing the border into turkey the rest were killed and so it is that the whole length of the borderland of russian armenia from nakhitchevan to akhalkalaki from the hot plains of ararat to the cold mountain plateau of the north were dotted with mute mournful ruins of tartar villages they are quiet now those villages except for howling of wolves and jackals that visit them to paw over the scattered bones of the dead p second paragraph the tartars were for the most part poor some of them lived in villages and cultivated small farms many of them continued in the way of life of their nomadic forefathers they drove their flocks and herds from valley to valley from plain to mountain and from mountain to plain following the pasturage as it changed with the seasons they ranged from the salt desert shores of the caspian sea far into the mighty caucasus mountains even the village tartars are a primitive people only semicivilized i can see now that we armenians frankly despised the tartars and while holding a disproportionate share of the wealth of the country regarded and treated them as inferiors the fact that the russians looked down upon all armenians in much the same way as armenians regarded tartars far from proving a bond between ourselves and our racially different neighbors intensified an attitude and conduct on our part that served only to exacerbate hostility p second paragraph our men armed themselves gathered together and advanced on the tartar section of the village there were no lights in the houses and the doors were barred for the tartars suspected what as to happen and were in great fear our men hammered on the doors but got no response whereupon they smashed in the doors and began a carnage that continued until the last tartar was slain throughout the hideous night i cowered at home in terror unable to shut my ears to the piercing screams of the helpless victims and the loud shouts of our men by morning the work was finished p second paragraph as things were the members of the dashnack party were without administrative experience consequently the government they instituted quickly proved itself incompetent to rule by legitimate means the members of the government had been revolutionists working in secret and outside the law when they became a legally instituted recognized governing body with the destiny of armenia in their hands they proved incompetent to do better than resume the terrorist tactics that had characterized their fight against the russian and turkish governments in their outlaw days the outstanding feature of their rule now that they were in power was as in the old days trial and execution without hearing a man evoking the displeasure of the government or of some official would be tried and condemned without arrest or preference of charges against him the method of execution was for a government mauserist to walk up behind the condemned man in his home or on the street place a pistol to the back of his head and blow out his brains this simple way of getting rid of those who were undesirable in the view of the government and soon became a common way of paying debts p first paragraph a soldier succeeded in driving his bayonet through the tartar i saw the point of the weapon emerge through his back another soldier seized a rock and pounded the tartar s head with it the armenian who had bayoneted him sprang to his feet wrested the weapon from the tartar s body and raising it to his lips licked it clean of blood exclaiming in russian slodkey slodkey sweet p second paragraph one evening i passed through what had been a tartar village among the ruins a fire was burning i went to the fire and saw seated about it a group of soldiers among them were two tartar girls mere children the girls were crouched on the ground crying softly with suppressed sobs lying scattered over the ground were broken household utensils and other furnishings of tartar peasant homes there were also bodies of the dead p first paragraph i was soon asleep in the night i was awakened by the persistent crying of a child i arose and went to investigate a full moon enabled me to make my way about and revealed to me all the wreck and litter of the tragedy that had been enacted guided by the child s crying i entered the yard of a house which i judged from its appearance must have been the home of a turkish family there in a corner of the yard i found a women dead her throat had been cut lying on her breast was a small child a girl about a year old p slowly the train of oxcarts lumbered along through the snow the cart jolting and the loads swaying boys ran along the line of oxen encouraging them with shrill tartar cries and belaboring the beasts with sticks in the carts the women veiled as is the tartar way held children in their arms wrapped in blankets and huddled among the goods that burdened the carts they sought protection from the wind and cold a few old men plodded along on foot across the road through the ravine a barrier had been thrown the leading oxteam reached this barrier and halted the gunmen and other ruffians concealed among the rocks opened fire women and children leaped and scrambled from the carts screamed ran and sought vainly for safety this massacre was not complete the armenian soldiers in the near by barracks hearing the firing and the turmoil hurried to the scene that same day the abandoned tartar quarter of alexandropol was looted and completely destroyed p great swarms of peasants who had come out of their hiding places on the retreat of the turks followed our army as it advanced they entered into the city with the army and immediately began plundering the stores that had been left by the turks p terrible vengeance was taken upon tartars kurds and turks their villages were destroyed and they themselves were slain or driven out of the country p the fanatical dashnacks hated the turks above all others and then in order of diminishing intensity tartars kurds and russians p first and second paragraphs russian troops did terrible things in the turkish villages we armenians did not spare the tartars if persisted in the slaughtering of prisoners the looting and the rape and massacre of the helpless become commonplace actions expected and accepted as a matter of course i have been on the scenes of massacres where the dead lay on the ground in numbers like the fallen leaves in a forest they had been as helpless and as defenseless as sheep they had not died as soldiers die in the heat of battle fired with ardor and courage with weapons in their hands and exchanging blow for blow they had died as the helpless must with their hearts and brains bursting with horror worse than death itself p first paragraph in this movement we took with us three thousand turkish soldiers who had been captured by the russians and left on our hands when the russians abandoned the struggle during our retreat to karaklis two thousand of these poor devils were cruelly put to death i was sickened by the brutality displayed but could not make any effective protest some mercifully were shot many of them were burned to death the method employed was to put a quantity of straw into a hut and then after crowding the hut with turks set fire to the straw p first paragraph the tartar section of the town no longer existed except as a pile of ruins it had been destroyed and its inhabitants slaughtered the same fate befell the tartar section of khankandi p second paragraph many of our men had served in the russian army and were trained soldiers we armenians were rich and possessed arms tartars had never received military training they were poor and possessed few arms beyond knives shortly after the killing of the tartars in our village the revolution in russia was suppressed p third paragraph within a few years following the beginning of the movement an invisible government of armenians by armenians had been established in turkish armenia in armed opposition to the turkish government this secret government had its own courts and laws and an army of assassins called mauserists professional killers to enforce its decrees p first paragraph the dashnacks were in continual open rebellion against the turkish government p third paragraph the dashnacks engineered a general revolt of armenians in turkish armenia under the mistaken belief that european nations would intervene and secure independence for turkish armenia p second paragraph the dashnacks were fanatics p third paragraph the dashnacks took advantage of this situation and extended their revolutionary activities into the russian province they instituted a campaign of terrorism and employed threats and force in securing contributions to the party funds from rich armenians a wealthy man would be assessed a stipulated sum refusal to pay brought upon him a sentence of death every member of the party was pledged to carry out orders without question if a man were to be assassinated lots might be drawn to select an executioner or the job might be assigned to one of the mauserists of the party p first paragraph in moments of victory against turks and kurds or tartars they armenians have been remorseless in seeking vengeance p third paragraph the city was a scene of confusion and terror during the early days of the war when the russian troops invaded turkey large numbers of the turkish population abandoned their homes and fled before the russian advance p second paragraph i made a cannon a huge gun to lift which required four men i made balls for it with my cannon the armenians could knock down any of the tartar houses and so they were able to drive the tartars out p first paragraph the tartar villages were in ruins p third paragraph the dead tartar lay with his head in a pool of mud and blood his beard still setaceous and now crimsoned serdar argic we closed the roads and mountain passes that might serve as ways of escape for the turks and then proceeded in the work of extermination ohanus appressian in soviet armenia today there no longer exists a single turkish soul sahak melkonian
