Truth on Armenian Genocide in Adana witnessed by British Vice-Consul – Independent
Worldwide, Weekly news | ankakh | September 22, 2011 20:43
NEWS.am publishes excepts from British journalist Robert Fisk’s article in The Independent:
On Wednesday morning, April 14 1909, British Vice Consul Major Charles Doughty-Wylie set off to the Turkish city of Adana after receiving a letter from his Turkish translator, saying that “there was a very dangerous feeling in that town, threats had been freely offered, there were some murders…”.
Doughty-Wylie’s dispatches over the next four days are a first-class account of the start of the modern Armenian Holocaust – not the slaughter and butchery and mass rape and death marches in which the Ottoman Turks killed a million and a half Armenians in 1915, but the mass murder of up to 30,000 Armenians in southern Turkey six years earlier.
“I got into uniform, went to the guard, and sharply recalled to the officer his duty to prevent murder,” Doughty-Wylie wrote.
The letters of Doughty-Wylie, are, in fact, a record of heroism, the vice consul rescued numerous British subjects and protected many hundreds of Armenian refugees. Trying to save their lives, the vice consul came under sniper fire from a mosque. The Turks blamed the Armenians for the massacres, claiming that they had armed themselves and planned to set up an Armenian principality on Turkish soil – killers have a habit of blaming the victims for their own deaths. Out of the 2,000 dead in Adana, 1,400 were Armenians.
The Turkish authorities supposedly hanged nine Turks for their part in the slaughter. So much for justice. Exactly two weeks after Doughty-Wylie received the letter from his translator, The New York Times’ journalist in Adana was reporting that in the city’s vilayet (governorate), up to 30,000 Armenians had been murdered.
There are good Turks in these stories – in 1909 as well as 1915 – but there are many criminals.
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