Assyrian and Greek Genocide Sources

 

By David Gaunt

 

Despite differences in time and place the sources for studying the Assyrian and Pontic Greek (Rum) genocides have similar features. In both cases many primary sources were published at the close of and just after the first world war. With few exceptions these books and pamphlets included eye-witness testimonies, the accounts of survivors or of other persons near to the actions they managed to describe. The intention of these reports was to influence public opinion, to appeal for contributions to humanitarian aid, or to influence the delegations negotiating the peace treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923). The individuals behind the compilations of witness testimony were usually religious figures which influenced their interpretation of events and gave biblical analogies to how these were to be presented in writing. A second wave of printing primary sources has arrived since the 1990s with the discovery of manuscripts written generations ago but lying in archives and libraries throughout the world. Written historical accounts (sometimes referred to as secondary sources), in particular scholarly works based on the study of archival documents, with only a few exceptions, did not appear until after the year 2000. In parallel with the academic research, there are now considerable writings about the memory and post-memory of these national tragedies among diaspora associations. These books and articles support lobbying for pressure for governmental and political recognition of what happened as conforming to the United Nations definition on genocide. In many ways the efforts for recognition were inspired by and mimicked the campaigns of Armenians. On occasion Assyrian and Greek organizations combine with Armenian organizations in order to speak with one voice in demanding recognition.

Sources relating to the Assyrian genocide

A convenient introduction to a wide variety of primary sources can be found in Joseph Yacoub’s The Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Genocide (Oxford 2016). Documents can also be found in the national archives of many countries. Usually, they are mixed in between statements about the massacres and deportations of Armenians. Selections have been published in book form and sometimes can be accessed on-line. The most detailed documents are in German, Austrian and American archives because the first two countries were allied with Turkey while the United States was neutral until 1917. Their embassies in Constantinople and consul generals in the provinces sent reports on the situation to their governments.[1] For the Assyrians the most important reports came from consulates located in Aleppo and Mosul. Relevant Ottoman documents are kept in the Presidential Archive (BOA) in Istanbul and in the Military History Archive in Ankara. The Presidential Archive has a section of cipher telegrams sent by Minister of Interior Talaat Pasha who was the architect of the anti-Christian extermination programme. Iranian archival documents have seldom been researched, but there is a printed selection of reports relating to Ottoman army atrocities committed against Christian Iranian citizens during its occupation of the Urmia region in the first part of 1915.[2] These documents were presented to the delegates at the Paris Peace Conference as part claims for either independence, or self-governing autonomy or compensation from Turkey.

Perhaps the most important and earliest testimonies about the parallel harsh treatment of both Assyrian and Armenians came in a 1916 British official government report issued in its “Blue Book” series. The report was composed and summarized by the later world-famous historian of international relations Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) together with Viscount James Bryce (1838-1922).[3] At that time the concept of genocide had yet to be formulated so Its title was The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-1916.[4] The bulk of the 150 documents printed here came from American missionaries via the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian (commonly used name for what would later be termed Assyrians or Assyro-Chaldeans) Relief. Despite the title the book includes witness statements dealing with Assyrians in the Hakkari Mountains and in the Urmia district of northwestern Iran during Ottoman army occupation (January-May 1915). Chapter four (pages 135-224) contains fourteen statements on or reports of Ottoman brutality towards the Assyrians of Urmia town and its surrounding region and five further reports on the dire situation of Assyrians across the border in Hakkari and Bohtan. These documents were obtained up to the summer of 1916 and were part of following up the declaration by the Entente powers (Britain, France and Russia) made in May 1915 to hold the Ottoman government and its agents responsible for crimes against humanity and civilization committed against its Christian minorities. Some of the dossiers attesting to persons accused of perpetrating or ordering atrocities against the Christians can be found in British archives. A few of these Ottoman officials and politicians were involved in atrocities against Assyrians.[5] For their part, Russian authorities collected testimony from Christian refugees streaming in from eastern Turkey. Most of those interviewed were Armenians but a few of them were Assyrians coming from Hakkari. These testimonies and other documents are held in the Archive for Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire in Moscow. A selection of Russian documents has been published.[6] Throughout the war years the Vatican maintained relations with the Ottoman Empire and there is a rich documentation of reports on conditions in the Vatican archives and some have been published concerning the Catholic Assyrians.[7]

Abraham Yohanan (1853-1925) a lecturer in Oriental languages at Columbia University wrote in 1916 The Death of a Nation or the Ever Persecuted Nestorian or Assyrian Christians (New York: Putnam’s) on the basis of correspondence with Christians living in Iran. This work is rather partial, but is an example of the opinion-building that Armenians and Assyrians had begun while the first massacres were fresh in mind. The intention was to show a fundamental long-standing hatred of Muslims towards Christians so that they could not continue under Turkish rule.  Somewhat similar in argumentation is a 1916 work by William Walker Rockwell and published by the American Committee for Assyrian and Syrian Relief.[8]  Both of these deal with the eastern Assyrians living in the Turkish-Iranian borderlands.

The fate of the western Assyrians (also known as Syriacs) in the region of Diyarbakir and its surroundings was nearly unknown during wartime. Reports from foreign missionaries working there were subject to strict censorship and the region was little known. However, much was written and kept in secrecy as manuscripts in various archives and libraries. Many have been rediscovered and printed in connection educating Assyrian youth or campaigns for recognition of genocide. The most important of these rediscovered manuscripts deal with the Christian villages in the sub-province of Mardin. The most detailed is that of Ishaq Armale (1879-1954) who served as the secretary of the Syriac Catholic archbishop of Mardin. In that capacity he was normally part of meetings between his church leaders and Ottoman officials, as well as various gatherings between the different Catholic church leaders, such as the Armenian Catholic archbishop Ignace Maloyan and the Chaldean Catholic bishop. Immediately after the war he published his notes in chronological order in a very detailed book issued in Lebanon. He did this anonymously under the name of an “eye witness”. [9]  Three French Dominican monks who had been based in Mosul where they drove a theological school were interned as enemy aliens from 1915 to 1916 in Mardin in the building of the Syriac Catholic archbishopric. All of them composed reports on what they experienced. Of the three, Jacques Rhétoré’s (1841-1921) chronical is the most scholarly, detailed, comprehensive and analytical. He was expert in the eastern Assyrians. Among his many writings was a grammar of the vernacular language of the Chaldeans living on the Nineve plain (northeast of Mosul) and reports of mission work among Nestorians and Chaldeans in Van and Hakkari. The manuscript on the genocide was discovered in Mosul after the first Gulf War and published in France.[10] It deals with the fate of both Assyrians and Armenians and details the extermination of both communities not just in Mardin, to which he was eye-witness, but also in the outlying rural villages for which he recorded survivor testimony. The published book was put together from several notebooks and there are some missing parts, especially lamentable is that of the massacres in the Tur Abdin district which would have been chapter thirteen. Rhétoré also makes an attempt to approximate the number of victims divided into the various churches both for Diyarbakir province (vilayet) and for the sub-province (sancak) of Mardin (Pages 135-142). Another noteworthy chronicle was put together by, Rhétoré’s compatriot, the French Dominican monk Hyacinthe Simon (1867-1922).[11] Simon gives a chronological list of the many massacres that took place in Mardin and its surroundings during 1915. He also lists the various crimes that local civil officials orchestrated through a secret committee and lists the vast amounts of extortion money that police chief Memduh squeezed out of desperate Armenian and Assyrian families. A less comprehensive report was that of Marie-Dominique Berré (1857-1929) which takes up the same crimes and describes the same perpetrators but with much less attention to detail.[12] Very recently a manuscript composed in Aramaic language on the genocide composed by Mardin’s Chaldean bishop Israel Audo (1859-1941) has begun to be translated and published in European languages.[13] In English this book would be given the title “Persecution of the Christian Armenians and Arameans in Mardin, Diyarbakir, Siirt, Cizre and Nusaybin in 1915”. This covers much the same territory and events as the other testimonial works, but tends to blame the Armenians for provoking Muslim rage against all of the Christians as well as describing the genocide as God’s collective punishment. On the positive side, Audo remained in Mardin after the war was over and could overhear statements and observe perpetrators bragging about their crimes.

There are very few contemporary sources from the Syriac Orthodox side. An exception is a chronicle composed by Abdulmesih Qarabashi (1903-1983) who gave it the title Dmo Zliho (Spilled Blood). Beginning in the late 1990s it has been published and translated into many languages.[14] The author purports to have started the book when he was a teenaged novice training at the Zafaran monastery near Mardin. Some of the episodes his book records were self-experienced, others were oral testimonies given to him by people seeking shelter inside the monastery. Unique is a long description of conditions in a mixed Armenian and Assyrian forced labour battalion that constructed a road outside Diyarbakir. A collective memory work made long after World War One comes from Syriac Orthodox refugees in Qamisli, Syria. It was compiled and edited by Süleyman Henno, a priest.[15] This work brings together separate chapters on massacres in many of the largest Syriac villages of Tur Abdin. Most contain details of the perpetrators and the most outrageous aspects of the attacks. Many of the informants were children or youths at the time of the attacks and massacres.

The Chaldean Catholic Joseph Naayem (1888-1964) from Urfa published a volume just after the end of the world war. It contained his own story of escape from Urfa plus interviews and testimonies taken from survivors from many parts of south-eastern Anatolia.[16] These survivors, mostly female, spoke of the horrors of deportation marches, among other things kidnapping of boys and girls, rape, slavery and random killing. This book was translated in English with an introduction by the already-mentioned British politician James Bryce.

Many pamphlets and leaflets were made for the Paris Peace conference. There were several separate Assyrian groups that tried influencing decision-makers in Paris. Foremost among them was the Assyro-Chaldean delegation composed of American, Turkish and Iranian Christian leaders. It had financing from Assyrian diaspora groups in the United States. The group distributed a pamphlet written by Said Namik and Rustem Nedjib, both Chaldean lawyers originally from Diyarbakir, stating the claims of the Assyrians for an independent country on account of their suffering during the war and describing the destruction of the Assyrian population.[17] It gave some preliminary estimates of the loss of population in both Ottoman and Persian territory.  Another member of the same delegation Joel E. Werda, an Iranian-born American journalist and president of the Assyrian National Associations of America, printed a slightly different set of claims. This included claims for compensation from Persia.[18] Important insights into the internal conflicts within the delegation and the difficulties of getting access to decision-makers come through a diary-like report composed by one of the delegation’s most important members, Abraham Yoosuf, an American physician born in Harput and who had served in both the Ottoman and US armies.[19]  Throughout the peace negotiations diaspora newspapers and journals followed the Assyrian efforts to gain influence. Worth mention is among others: the journal Bethnahrin published in Peterson, New Jersey and edited by Diyarbakir-born Naum Faiq. A selection of articles has been translated into English.[20] Very important is the Beirut journal L’action assyro-chaldéenne printed by the Chaldean Patriarchate in Lebanon. Further Joel E. Werda edited and published the Assyrian American Courier. All of these diaspora media printed materials sent to them by survivors and eyewitnesses or letters from the delegation in Paris.

Secondary Sources and Research

For many years after the 1920s very little was written about the massacres of Assyrians. The Republic of Turkey denied that any evil-doing had been intentionally done by the Turkish side towards the Assyrians. Consequently, the Syriac Orthodox leadership representing the largest Assyrian population still living inside post-World War One Turkey also felt the need to silence memory of the massacres to accommodate the government. The first historian to apply the concept of genocide on the massacres of the Assyrians is the French scholar, Joseph Yacoub. He made a very comprehensive study on the negotiations about the Assyrians in the Paris Peace Treaty and the subsequent treatment of the “Assyrian Question” at the League of Nations. [21]

To my knowledge, the first to do academic research on the Assyrian genocide came from two Assyrian refugees who had settled in the Soviet Union. Their book was issued in 1968, but it made hardly any international impact and did not connect into genocide research.[22] The first publication based on primary documents was written by Gabriele Yonan, a German linguist and human-rights activist. Her book entitled a “Forgotten Holocaust” focused on the eastern Assyrians, particularly the Nestorians, and uses official and private German archival documents.[23]  In 1998 French historian Florence Hellot-Bellier wrote a doctoral thesis on persecution and destruction of eastern Assyrians along the Turkish-Iranian borderlands. This has since then been published.[24]  It has the advantage of using official Iranian documentation on the devastating effects of the two Turkish military occupations of northwestern Iran (in 1915 and 1918) on the Christian communities.

The French historian Yves Ternon’s monograph on Mardin’s Armenians of course mentions the Assyrians, but labours under the misconception that the Syriacs were spared from massacre and deportation.[25]  A student of Ternon, Sébastien de Courtois researched specifically the fate of the western Assyrians in the Mardin sub-province. His doctoral thesis was published in book form. He used mainly French foreign office and military archival documents which meant that it was rather thin about what actually happened during the world war. But it has much about testimony emerging after the war and about the many massacres and repression that took place before the war.[26] The Italian historian and religious scholar Andrea Riccardi has also written on Mardin.[27] Coving the entire province of Diyarbakir, Hilmar Kaiser describes not just the destruction of the Armenians but also the Assyrians and Yezidis.[28] David Gaunt treats both western and eastern Assyrians in both Ottoman and Persian territory.[29]

The French scholar Claire Weibel Yacoub deals primarily with the eastern Assyrians during and just after World War I. She wrote a biography of Surma, the sister of the assassinated Mar Shimun, who became a very important international spokesperson for Assyran refugees.[30] Further she wrote about the ultimately disappointing diplomatic campaign to grant independence to the Assyrians because of their military support to the Entente powers.[31]  The English missionary Wigram made a small book describing the wartime exploits of the Assyrians on the side of the Russian army.[32] Viktor Shklovsky, a famous Soviet-era literary critic, was stationed in Persia as commissar responsible for the evacuation of the Russian army after the revolution. He describes his contacts with and appreciation of Assyrian soldiers in a book of memoirs.[33] Using Russian military-history archives Vyacheslav Faris gives a comprehensive history of the Assyrian brigades operating in parallel with the Russian army in Persia.[34]

Several anthologies based on international conferences on the history and culture of the Assyrians touch upon the genocide. [35] Sometimes more general conferences on genocide topics include research on the Assyrians.[36]

 

The Case of the Pontic Greeks

Primary and secondary sources dealing with the massacres and deportations of the Pontic Greeks are not as plentiful as for the Armenians or even the Assyrians. There are many reasons behind this. Attacks on the Pontic Greeks took place in the final phases of the First World War and in the years directly afterwards. From the start, international concern for the atrocities committed on the Pontic Greeks were overshadowed by the greater interest directed to finding justice for the Armenians. Most outside observers who had occasion to make comparisons judged that the Pontic Greeks had been treated with less cruelty than the Armenians. Some added that most of those who were subject to deportations actually arrived at their destinations and in some cases were allowed to return. Another factor was that after the war several of the Grear Powers such as France, the United States and the Soviet Union, not to mention Greece itself tried for geopolitical reasons to keep on friendly terms with the new Kemalist regime. Last, the Treaty of Lausanne 1923 between Greece and Turkey set a legal lid on the war between the two countries and decreed a finality in the form of a population exchange which had international approval from the League of Nations. Questions of compensation for loss of life and property were no longer relevant. In some ways the Lausanne Treaty painted the image that the Greek minority problem inside Turkey no longer existed or needed to be discussed.

Together recent research on minorities in the late Ottoman Empire stresses the common victimization of all Christian groups. Increasingly scholars treating the Armenian genocide contain information on the Assyrians and in particular the Greeks along the Aegean seacoast including articles dealing with them.[37] In contrast, few deal with the Pontic Rum which reflects the paucity of research on them. A first major synthesis covering all Christians was written by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi who describe a “Thirty-Year Genocide” stretching from 1894 to 1924 in which the Christian minorities were destroyed through massacres in the 1890s, massacres and deportations during and after the World War, culminating in forcing out survivors.[38] The German organization Mit einer Stimme sprechen and the Zoryan Institute have published scholarly anthologies bringing together studies of the multiple suffering of non-Muslim groups, including that of the Ottoman Greeks traditionally called the “Asia Minor Catastrophe”. Greek refugees from Turkey had great difficulty in getting wholehearted recognition of their genocide even inside Greece. One way forward politically was to isolate the case of the Pontic Greeks settled along the Black Sea from that of the Anatolian Greeks living on or close to the Aegean Sea. The atrocities committed against the Anatolian Greeks were entangled with the Greco-Turkish War 1919-1923 which could be considered driven by an aggressive imperialistic policy, with which modern Greece did not want to be associated. In contrast the territory of the Pontic Greeks was far outside that conflict and the attacks upon them were as a rule unprovoked. Thus, there is now a degree of political and international recognition of a specific “Pontic Greek” genocide, but not for an all-encompassing “Greek Genocide”.

Considerable academic research has been done on the Armenian genocide, to lesser extent on the Assyrians but that on the Pontic Rum is very limited. Recent publications highlight the Ottoman Rum tragedy, but most deal with the Greeks of western Anatolia, particularly the 1922 destruction of Smyrna, rather than Greeks in Pontos.[39] The first scholarly work, dated from the 1980s, was done by Polychronis Enepekidis a professor at the University of Vienna. He researched diplomatic correspondence in the diplomatic archives of Germany and Austria and published a short book based on his findings.[40] This was followed up by Konstantinos Fotiadis in the late 1990s with a massive 14-volume collection of archival documents including a final book summarizing his discoveries, which has been recently translated into English.[41] Fotiadis was one of the first to use the term genocide for the massacres and deportations of the Pontic Rum. His important documentary works were published in Greek language only, thus making the international impact limited. Some early documentation is available in official archives of foreign countries and there were several local Greek-language newspapers reporting on arrests, executions, deportations and massacres.[42] Further, there is a penetrating intellectual history of how political recognition of the genocide of Anatolian Greeks has been constructed.[43]

Basic research on the Pontian genocide is currently being done at the Chair of Pontic Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Studies from this group and its associates have focused on source-critical investigations of various archives such as that of Pontus National Council Archive, the Vatican, American missionary archives[44], a French government commission on Anti-Hellenic persecutions, as well as a commission to investigate war crimes plus Turkish archival documents.[45] The Pontos National Council had its headquarters in Batumi in Russia from 1919 and assumed the role of temporary government and representative for the Greeks of the Black Sea littoral. The archive, now in Thessaloniki, contains collections of testimonies from survivors and reports from local investigative commissions up until the population exchange of 1922-1923 and it created statistics over the losses of life and property. There were even some plans for an independent Republic of Pontus, that are used by Turkish denialists to prove the treacherous separatist movement that could justify the anti-Greek activities in Pontus. At the Paris Peace Treaty Conference the Greek Metropolitan of Trabzon Chrysanthos appealed to the allies to help refugees that had fled to Russia to return to their homes in Pontus. His efforts are documented in the French Foreign Affairs archives. When the World War ended the strict censorship of foreign correspondence ceased and missionaries could report events in clear language. Many Americans were attached to philanthropic organizations, such as the Near East Relief, and described the atrocities and injustices they witnessed and in particular documented the attacks led by the notorious Topal Osman and his militia band. Additional and very similar drastic reports came from American naval officers and the British and French commissioners serving in the region. These documents also reveal the frustration of witnesses when their urgent messages were dismissed by the United States High Commissioner Admiral Mark Bristol who instead prioritized friendly commercial relations with Turkey and expressed antipathy towards the non-Muslim minorities.[46].

The Pontic Rum ethnic group living on the Black Sea coast and its interior was far away from other Greeks living throughout the Empire. In isolation the Black Sea Greeks developed unique cultural features and vernacular dialects and some spoke only Turkish. In the never-realized Treaty of Sèvres, Greece was assigned large parts of western Anatolia and Thrace, but not Pontos. Greece’s dominant political figure Venizelos had great ambitions for annexing Greek-populated Thrace and Aegean regions, but was willing in the agreement between Greece and the Supreme Council of allies to abandon the Pontic Greeks and allowed them be part of an imagined future greater Armenia.[47] The highest representatives of the Pontic Rum seldom succeeded in breaking through the lack of interest marking Athenian politicians. [48]

In areas with Rum settlements arrests, and executions of leaders, massacres, plunder and torching of villages occurred, but Trabzon was occupied by Russia almost continuously until February 1918 and the Greeks there were safe. After much hesitation, Greece officially declared war on the Ottoman Empire in June 1917. Thereafter Ottoman governors needed no longer to handle the Rum cautiously. Starting from the Greek army occupation of Smyrna in May 1919 until the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 there were massacres and deportations against the background of the Greco-Turkish war (1919-August 1922) and the emergence of Turkish paramilitary bands. The most intensive year of massacres and deportations was 1922. The final stage starting in May 1923 was the exchange of populations stipulated by the Convention of Lausanne (January 1923) with Turkish nationals belonging to the Greek Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Churches being sent to Greece and Muslims in Greece being sent to Turkey.[49] By the time the exchange began most Rum had already left Turkish territory so the exchange involved the remaining 200,000 Greek Orthodox believers from Pontos and Cappadocia. The Greek census of 1928 recorded the presence of 626,954 refugees from Asia Minor, of them 182,169 were from the Black Sea coast.[50]         

In late 1916 Talaat ordered the deportation of Pontic Greeks.[51] An important opinion among scholars holds that the Pontic Rum were treated somewhat milder than the Armenian population, with few massacres but rather displacement without taking adequate measures for their survival instead of outright murder.[52]  Most Rum were deported without great violence, but in the Pontic region some lost their lives as early as 1915 and some took to the mountains to fight as partisans. The existence of these guerrilla groups (although ineffective) plays a large role when pro-Turkish historians justify repression against the Rum population. These were independent bands using whatever arms, ammunition and food they could scrape together with little outside support. In October 1915 retaliatory raids hunted down partisans, torched villages and executed prominent Greeks. These uncoordinated massacres against the Pontic Rum escalated with the appearance on the scene of Topal Osman, self-proclaimed mayor of Giresun. Even in the harshest winter Rum would be evacuated from their villages and towns and marched over mountains to far distant places. According to Henry Morgenthau, ambassador of the United States, although the Turks dreamed of wiping out the Rum, in contrast to the Armenians they were usually not being massacred along the way as authorities “stopped short at direct loss of life”.[53] This may have been true based on Talaat’s policy, statements that the Pontic Rum were treated less brutally were countered by testimony made during the later Kemalist period by America missionaries and humanitarian workers that the treatment of Greeks was equal or even worse than for the Armenians.[54]

By the spring of 1922, the bulk of the Greek population in the Pontos region, which was far from the Greco-Turkish war zone, had been deported to the interior and their homes looted and/or burned.” [55] An American medical doctor working for the Near East Relief hospital in Kharput observed that between May 1921 and January 1922 18,000 Pontic Greeks had arrived in 38 convoys. Many had already expired of exhaustion dropping by the wayside and freezing to death at night. “The little children gave up first and fell behind, and later crawled to the side of the road to die.”[56] An often-quoted figure for the number of Pontic deaths is 353,000, but this figure lacks evidence.[57] Already in 1922, the National Assembly issued a selection of documents to prove that the Pontic Greeks were planning to form an independent state and prepared warriors for that purpose. This collection has been reprinted several times and is used to counter claims of genocide.[58] Some Independent Turkish scholars have challenged the denialist stance and researched aspects of nationalist activities that targeted innocent Greeks falsely accused of being part of such a conspiracy.[59]

The massive displacement and destruction of Ottoman Greek populations has been termed the “Asia Minor Catastrophe”. However, only those actions that targeted the Pontics have won political and scholarly recognition as genocide. The Hellenic Parliament in 1994 passed a law recognizing the genocide of the Black Sea Greeks and declaring May !9 the day of its remembrance. There is some international recognition by politicians in Cyprus, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia plus the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Since the 1980s agitation by Pontic Greek civic associations led to political victory.[60] Inside Greece, however, disputes emerged among historians about the applicability of the UN concept genocide given that the destruction of Ottoman Greek communities occurred in the context of a war in which Greece was clearly the aggressor. Further during 1919-1922 Greek soldiers allegedly massacred Muslims.

 

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[1] Johannes Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien 1914-1918: Sammlung diplomatischer Akrenstücke. Potsdam: Tempel Verlag 1919. An improved an expanded edition is Wolfgang Gust, ed. The Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915-1916. New York: Berghahn 2014. Ara Sarafian, ed, United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1913-1917. London: Gomidas Institute 2019. See also Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. London: Gomidas Institute 2016.

[2] Empire de Perse, Ministère des affaires étrangers, Neutralité Persanne: Documents diplomatiques. Paris: Georges Cadet 1919.

[3] Bryce was at that time a well-known historian and liberal political figure who had previously been a cabinet member of several governments as well as British ambassador to the United States. In 1915 he composed official report on German army atrocities in Belgium at the start of World War One: Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages (1915).

[4] The original report did not include the names of the witnesses nor the names of the places mentioned. For an “uncensored” version see the edition with the same title edited by Ara Sarafian for Gomidas Institute in 2000. 

[5] Vartkes Yeghiayan, British Foreign Office Dossiers on Turkish War Criminals. La Verne, Calif., American Armenian International College 1991.

[6] G. A. Abraamyan & T, G. Sevan-Khachatryan, eds., Russkie istochniki o genotsid armyan v Osmanskoi imperii 1915-1916 gody Yerevan: Areresum-Ani 1995

[7] Georges-Henri Ruyssen, ed., La Questione Caldea e Assira 1908-1938. Rome: Pontificio Instituto Orientale 2019.

[8] William Walker Rockwell, The Pitiful Plight of the Assyrian Christians in Persia and Kurdistan. New York: American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief 1916.

[9] Al-Qusara fi nakabat al-nasara. Beirut 1919,

[10] Jacques Rhétoré, ”Les chrétiens aux bêtes”: Souvenirs de la guerre sainte proclamée par les Turcs contre les chrétiens en 1915, edited and presented by Joseph Alichoran. Paris: Cerf 2005.

[11] Hyacinthe Simon, Mardine la ville heroique: Autel et tombeau de l’Arménie (Asie mineure) durant les massacres de 1915. Jounieh, Lebanon: Maison Naaman pour la culture 1991.

[12] Marie-Dominque Berré, ”Massacres de Mardin” in Haigazian Armenological Journal 17 (1997), 81-106.

[13] Israel Audo, Förföljelsen av de kristna armenierna och araméerna i Mardin, Diyarekir, Siirt, Cizre, Nisibin 1915. Stockholm: Arameiska kulturcentret och Edessa skolan 2015.

[14] The Spilled Blood: Torments, Massacres, and the Subsequent 1915 Genocide of the Assyrian/Syriac People by the Ottoman Turka and their Kurdish Accomplices in Mesopotamia. Santa Clara, Calif., Seyfo Center 2019.

[15] Gunhe d-suryoye d-turabdin. Glane/Losser, Netherlands: Bar Hebräus Verlag 1987.

[16] Joseph Naayem, Les Assyro-Chaldéens et les Arméniens massacres par les Turcs: Documents inédits recueillis par un témoin oculaire. Paris: Bloud et Guy 1920; see also Shall This Nation Die? New York: Chaldean Rescue 1921. Both language versions have been reprinted recently.

[17] La Question assyro-chaldéenne devant la conference de la paix. Dated July 16, 1919.

[18] ”The Claims of the Assyrians before the Preliminaries of Peace at Paris” printed as appendix in Joel E. Werda, The Flickering Light of Asia or the Assyrian Nation and Church. New York: author 1924, 199-220.

[19] ”To the Executive Committee of the Assyrian National Association”, printed in Abraham K. Yoosuf, Assyria and the Paris Peace Conference. Nineveh press 2017, 89-138.

[20] Abboud Zeitoune, Naum Faiq and the Assyrian Awakening. Wiesbaden, Germany 2023.

[21] Joseph Yacoub, The Assyrian Question. Chicago 1986.

[22] K. P. Matveev & I. I. Mar-Yukhanna, Assiriiskii vopros vo vremya i posle pervoi mirovoi voiny. Moscow: Izdatel’svo Nauka 1968.

[23] Gabriele Yonan, Ein vergessener Holocaust: Die Vernichtung der christlichen Assyrer in der Türkei. Göttingen: Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Völker 1989.

[24] Chroniques de massacres annoncés. Les Assyro-Chaldéens d’Iran et du Hakkari face aux ambitions des empires 1896-1920. Paris: Geuthner 2014.

[25] Yves Ternon, ”Mardin 1915: Anatomie pathologique d’une destruction” Special issue of Revue d’histoire arménienne contemporaine 4 (2002).

[26] Sébastien de Courtoise, Le génocide oublié: Chrétiens d’Orient, les derniers Araméens. Paris: Ellipse 2002.

[27] Andrea Riccardi, La strage dei Cristiani: Mardin, gli Armeni e la fine di un mondo. Rome: Editori Laterza 2015.

[28] Hilmar Kaiser, The Extermination of the Armenians in the Diarbekir Region. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press 2014. 

[29] David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I. Piscataway, New Jersey: Gogias Press 2006.

[30] Claire Weibel Yacoub, Surma, l’Assyro-Chaldéenne (1883-1975). Dans la Tourmente de Mesopotamie. Paris: L’Harmattan 2007.

[31] Claire Weibel Yacoub, Le rêve brisé des Assyro-Chaldéens: L’introvable autonomie. Paris: Cerf 2011.

[32] W. A. Wigram, Our Smallest Ally a Brief Account of the Assyrian Nation in the Great War. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 1920.

[33] Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917-1922 translated by Richard Sheldon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1970.

[34] Vyacheslav Faris, Assiriiskie otryady Russkoi armii 1916-1918. Moscow: Archeodoksiya 2019.

[35] David Gaunt, Naures Atto & Soner Barthoma, eds., Let Them Not Return: Sayfo the Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Berghahn 2017. Hannibal Travis, ed., The Assyrian Genocide: Cultural and Political Legacies. London: Routledge 2017; Shabo Talay & Soner Barthoma, eds., Sayfo 1915: An Anthology of Essays on the Genocide of the Assyrians/Arameans During the First World War. Piscataway, New Jersey: Gorgias Press 2018.

[36] Taner Akçam, Theodosios Kyriakidis & Kyriakos Chatzikyriakidis, eds. The Genocide of the Christian Populations in the Ottoman Empire and its Aftermath. London: Routledge 2023, has 2 articles on Assyrians. Hülya Adak, Fatma Müge Göçek & Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Critical Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915. London: Routledge 2023 has one article on the Assyrian genocide.

 

[38] Benny Morris & Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press 2019.

[39] George N. Shirinian, ed. The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ottoman Greek Genocide: Essays on Asia Minor, Pontos, and Eastern Thrace, 1912-1923. Bloomingdale, Illinois. The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center 2012; Tessa Hofmann, Matthias Bjørnlund and Vasileios Meichanetsidis, eds. The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks: Studies on the State-Sponsored Campaign of Extermination of the Christians of Asia Minor 1912-1922 and Its Aftermath; History, Law, Memory. Athens: Aristide D. Caratzas 2011; Konstantinos Emm. Fotiadis, The Genocide of the Pontian Greeks. Thessaloniki: K & M Antonis Stamoulis Publications, 2019 translator unknown; Taner Akçam, Theodosios Kyriakidis and Kyriakos Chatzikyriakidis, eds. The Genocide of the Christian Population in the Ottoman Empire and its Aftermath (1908-1923). London: Routledge 2023; Attila Tuygan, ed. Dünya Savaşı ve Sonrasında Pontos Soykırımı – Konferans Tebliğleri.  Istanbul: Pencere Yayınları 2020.

[40] Polichronis K. Enepekidis, Oi diogmoi ton Ellenon toi Pontoy (1908-1918). Athens 1962.

[41] Konstantinos Emm. Fotiadis, H genoktonia ton Ellenon toi Ponton. Volumes 1-14. Thessaloniki: Herodotos 2002-2004; and the same author’s The Genocide of the Pontian Greeks. Thessaloniki: K. & M. Ant. Stamoulis Publications 2015).

[42] Memorandum Submitted to the Peace Conference by the National Delegation of the Euxine Pontus. Paris 1919; Memorandum Presented by the Greek Members of the Turkish Parliament. New York: Columbia University for the American-Hellenic Society 1919; Germanos, Archbishop of Amassia and Samsoun. The Turkish Atrocities in the Black Sea Territories. Manchester: Pan-Pontic Congress 1919; Archbishop Chrysanthos, Memoire sur la question du Pont-Euxin, Paris: no publisher 1919; Mark H. Ward, The Deportations in Asia Minor 1921-1922. London: Anglo-Hellenic League 1922; Central Council of Pontus, Black Book: The Tragedy of Pontus 1914-1922. Athens 1922; Serdar Korucu & Emre Can Dağlıoğlu, “Mapping Out of the Turkish Documents on the Unweaving of Greeks from the Black Sea (81919-1923)” in George N. Shirininan, ed., The Greek Genocide 1913-1923: New Perspectives, Chicago: Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Center, 2019, 7-28; Harry Tsirkinidis, At Last We Uprooted Them: The Genocide of Pontos, Thrace and Asia Minor through the French Archives, Athens: Kyriakidis Brothers 1993; Robert Shenk & Sam Koktzoglu, eds. The Greek Genocide in American War Diaries: Naval Commanders Report and Protest Death Marches and Massacres in Turkey’s Pontus Region 1921-1922. New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press 2020; Genelkurmay Başkanlığı, Arşiv Belgelerilye Rum Faaliyetleri. Cilt 1 (1918-1922). Ankara: Genelkurmay Başımevı 2009.

[43] Erik Sjögren, The Making of the Greek Genocide. Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe. New York: Berghahn 2017.

[44] Many of the American missionary accounts can be accessed online through the Istanbul-based Saltresearch.org website.

[45] Kyriakos Chatzikyriakidis, “The Pontic Greek Genocide Documented by Political Archive of the Pontus National Archive”; Theodosios Kyriakidis, “Testimonies of American Charitable and Missionary Organizations on the Genocide of the Pontic Greeks”; Euripides Georganopulos, “The Evidence of the French Commission in Pontus on the Anti-Hellenic Persecutions after the End of the First World War (1919-1920)”; Marilena N. Papadaki, “The Systematic Extermination of the Christian Element as Presented before the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties (1919-1920)” all of these articles are in Akçam,Kyriakidis & Chatzikyriakidis eds., Genocide of the Christian Populations, 19-42, 43-72, 73-93,173-197; Serdar Korucu & Emre Can Dagioğlu, “Mapping Out the Turkish Documents on the Unweaving of Greeks from the Black Sea (The Pontic Genocide 1919-1923)”, and Theodosios Kyriakidis, “The Roman Catholic Accounts Testifying to the Pontic Geek Genocide”, both in George N. Shirinian ed., The Greek Genocide 1913-1923: New Perspectives. Chicago: Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center 2019.

[46] Edward Hale Bierstadt, The Great Betrayal: A Survey of the Near East Problem. New York: Robert McBride 1924. Bierstadt served as executive secretary of the Near East Refugees organization.

[47] Sean McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923. London: Penguin 2016, 431

[48] Memorandum Submitted to the Peace Conference by the National Delegation of the Euxine Pontus, Manchester: Norbury, Natalo & Co. 1919.

[49] Renée Hirschon, ed., Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey, New York: Berghahn 2003.

[50] Alexander Kitroeff.  ”Asia Minor Refugees in Greece; A History of Identity and Memory, 1920s-1980s”, in Shirinian, ed., The Asia Minor Catastrophe, 229-247, here 235; Emilia Salvanou, “From imperial dreams to the refugee problem: population movements during Greece’s ‘decade of war’, 1912-1922”, in Peter Gatrell & Liubov Zhvanko, eds. Europe on the Move: Refugees in the Era of the Great War. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017, 284-303.

[51] Hans-Lukas Kieser. Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2018, 257-258, 355

[52] Gevorg Vardanyan. ”The Greek Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Parallels with the Armenian Genocide”, in Shirinian, ed. Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, 274-299; Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, 342-343; Taner Akçam, The Young Turk’s Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2012, 123; Stéphane Yérasimos, “La Question du Pont-Euxin (1912-1923)”, Guerres mondiales et conflits contempoaines no 153 (1989), 15-

[53] Morgenthau to Secretary of State 10 August 1915 cited by Morris and Ze’evi. Thirty Years Genocide, 389 and 593.

[54] Theodosios Kyriakidis, “Testimonies of American Charitable and Missionary Organizations on the Genocide of the Pontic Greeks”, in Akçam, et. al., The Genocide of the Christian Populations, 47, 53, 56, 60.

[55] George N. Shirinian, “Collective State Violence against Greeks in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1821-1923”, in Asturian & Kévorkian, eds. Collective and State Violence. 206.

[56] Mark H. Ward, The Deportations in Asia Minor 1921-1922, London: Anglo-Hellenic League & British Armenia Committee 1922.

[57] Fotiadis, Genocide of the Pontian Greeks. 211 and 221.

[58] Pontos Meselesi, ed. Yusuf Gedikli, Istanbul: Iz Yayincılık 2008.

[59] Sail Çetinoğlu, “The Pseudo Independence Courts and Trials in Pontos” online at www.PontosWorld; Ayşe Hür, “Pontus’un Gayri Resmi Tarihi” Taraf March 14, 2010; Taner Çilıngir. Pontos gerçeği: 1914-1923 yıllarıarasında Karadeniz’de yaşananlar. Istanbul: Belge 2016.

[60] Erik Sjöberg, Making of the Greek Genocide.