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305

(1928) [MARC] Author: Fridtjof Nansen - Tema: Russia
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ARMENIA IN MODERN TIMES 305
columns, robbing, maltreating, murdering, and violating the
woraen.
A foreign witness has said that these deportation columns
were merely " a polite form of massacre " ; but in reality they
were infinitely worse and more heartless ; for instead of
instant death they forced the victims to undergo all sorts of
inhuman sufferings, while this cowardly and barbarous plan
was to save the face of the authorities by posing as " a necessary
military measure " ! From June till August 191 5, the hottest
time of year, when the victims were most likely to succumb,
these processions of death wended their way endlessly from
all the vilayets and towns where there were Armenians, south
wards in the direction of the desert. Strange to say, Constanti
nople, Smyrna, and Aleppo were spared—or practically so—no
doubt because there were too many Europeans to see what
was going on, and because the proceedings in Smyrna were
stopped by German officers.
As an instance of what these marches meant I may mention
on the authority of a German eyewitness that out of 18,000
expelled from Kharput and Sivas, only 350 reached Aleppo,
and that out of 19,000 from Erzerum there were eleven
survivors.1
According to the estimates of Dr. Lepsius, an average of
more than two-thirds ofthe people in these doomed processions
succumbed and disappeared on the way ; of the survivors—
emaciated, almost naked skeletons—who managed to struggle
on to Syria and Mesopotamia, the majority were driven out
into the desert, there to die in fearful agonies. The columns
marched on for months, and even at the end of their death
march they were not left in peace, but were driven round in
circles for weeks. The concentration camps were filled and
emptied again while the cold-blooded taskmasters allowed
their unhappy victims to die of starvation and disease, or
massacred them by the thousand. Typhus raged among
them. The corpses by the roadside poisoned the atmosphere.
In several places the va/is and the Turkish authorities
considered it unnecessary to resort to the subterfuge of these
u
1 Cf. A. N. Mandelstam, La Société des Nations et les Vuissances devant le
Probléme Arménien, p. 44, note 1, Paris, 1925.

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