Uncle Yegi

Even though most of my childhood memories are gone, there are a few that stay with me. Those that have made an impact in my life. One of my childhood memories was of a man who I called Uncle Yegi. He was a delightful person who lived in Kansas City and sold oriental rugs.

What fascinated me about him was the two large scars located on the side of his face that stoled his dimples. He had stories about his two scars but they were stories of his own creation. I remember a hint of sadness when he told his tales that made me aware that these stories were fairy tales. Still I loved hearing the stories and I regret now not being able to recall them in it’s entirity.

It wasn’t until years later, when I was older and could understand the cruelties of war, that my mother told me what little she knew of Uncle Yegi’s past. Mom knew a lot about his life in the United States but his past was clouded in mystery. For reasons lost in the past he talked to my parents about his past. He was Armenian, as a child he was a part of the “death march” and he was shot in the face. The bullet entered and exited through his mouth.

Was it genocide or was it a massacre during a chaotic time, not an organized campaign of genocide as Turkey claims it to be?

If time allows read the following article and you decide.

In June 1915, the Turkish government ordered the deportation of all remaining Armenians from Turkey into the deserts of Syria and Iraq to the south. During the deportation, some Turks, Kurds, Arabs, and government officials aided and even hid Armenian families. But most of the Muslim population cheered the expulsion of Turkey's largest Christian minority group.
When the Turkish authorities assembled Armenian villagers for deportation, they often immediately shot to death any able-bodied adult males. The women, children, and elderly men were then forced to travel hundreds of miles, mainly on foot, into the southern deserts. The Turkish government provided them with little food, water, shelter, or protection.
Along the way, outlaws, local people, and even the police guarding the deportees attacked, robbed, raped, and murdered them at will. Minister of War Enver created a paramilitary unit called the "Special Organization," made up mainly of convicted criminals released from prison. Its mission was simply to attack and kill Armenians.

Kurdish horsemen also raided the Armenians, robbing them and sometimes taking women and children as slaves. The Turkish government did little to discourage such acts.
The Reverend F. H. Leslie, an American missionary in Urfa, a city in southeast Turkey, wrote:
For six weeks we have witnessed the most terrible cruelties inflicted upon the thousands . . . daily passing through our city from the northern cities. All tell the same story . . .: their men were all killed on the first day's march from their cities, after which the women and girls were constantly robbed . . . and beaten, criminally abused and abducted along the way. Their guards . . . were their worst abusers but also allowed the baser element in every village . . . to abduct the girls and women and abuse them. We not only were told these things but the same things occurred right here in our own city before our very eyes and openly on the streets.
The forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of Armenians led to their mass destruction by murder, starvation, and disease. At most, 25 percent of those who were forced to leave Turkey reached Syria and Iraq. But most of these people were finally massacred or left to die of thirst in the desert.

At times, the Armenians resisted. In 1915 on a mountain called Musa Dagh (Mt. Moses), located on Turkey's southern Mediterranean coast, Armenian villagers defied the government's deportation order and took up defensive positions on the mountain slopes. For 53 days, they fiercely fought against the Turkish army. Finally, more than 4,000 Armenian men, women, and children escaped by ships to Egypt where they lived in refugee camps until the end of the war.
Many foreigners witnessed the destruction of the Armenians, including diplomats and missionaries. In May 1915, Great Britain, France, and Russia jointly issued this warning to the Young Turk government:

In view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied governments announce publicly . . . that they will hold personally responsible [for] these crimes all members of the . . . government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.
On July 16, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau cabled the State Department that the deportations were increasing and "a campaign of race extermination is in progress."

Abandoned After the War
On the losing side at the end of World War I, Young Turk leaders Talaat, Enver, and Jemal fled the country. A new sultan, hostile to the Young Turk regime, formed a temporary government. He set up military courts to try members of the Young Turk government for war crimes. Talaat, Enver, and Jemal were prosecuted even though they had escaped the country and were absent at their trials.

The Turkish war crimes trials of 1919 documented "the massacre and destruction of the Armenians." The defense attempted to show that the Armenian minority was disloyal and a threat to Turkey during the war. The prosecution, however, showed that most Armenians remained loyal to Turkey and did not threaten its war effort. The prosecution also presented evidence that the executions, deportations, and massacres had been part of a premeditated "centrally directed plan" to get rid of the Christian Armenians in Turkey once and for all.
The Turkish war crimes courts found the defendants guilty of planning and carrying out the destruction of the Armenian people, a crime against humanity that would later be called "genocide." Talaat, Enver, and Jemal were sentenced to death while lesser officials received prison terms.

World War I ended the Ottoman Empire. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a war hero, formed a Turkish republic in 1923. He ordered the release of all those held for war crimes. Armenians seeking vengeance later assassinated Talaat and Jemal who were living in exile in Europe.
The peace treaty between Turkey and the victors of World War I called for the creation of an independent Armenian republic formed out of Turkish territory. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson pushed this idea and even asked Congress to authorize an American trusteeship to oversee the newborn nation, but this never happened. The short-lived Armenian Republic collapsed when Ataturk attacked it and confiscated "abandoned properties" that had been owned by the Armenians before the deportations.

In 1923, the final peace agreements that formally ended World War I abandoned any support for an independent Armenia. The agreements also ignored the right of Armenian survivors to return to their homes in Turkey and be compensated for the loss of their property. The Soviet Union carved out a small area for its Armenian citizens.