Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Holocaust That History Forgot
by Stephen Deal, Evening News (Edinburgh) - February 1, 2001, Thursday
Posted: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 01:20 am CST

Few Scots know him but, says Stephen Deal, James Bryce is a hero to Armenians shattered by a genocide Turkey denies ever took place

IT was an horrific waste of life which all but wiped out an entire race. In a century littered with acts of atrocity, the death of up to a million Armenians was described at the time as being unrivalled by any other crime in history.

In one brutal afternoon 10,000 people perished when they were thrown into the sea to drown.

Had it not been for the persistent efforts of a politician thousands of miles away in Edinburgh, the world may have been much slower to learn the full horror of what happened in the former Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1915.

Appalled by the stories he was hearing, Lord James Bryce pulled together a vast collection of eyewitness accounts and gave the British Government a publication called The Blue Book.

The man whose body has lain in Edinburgh's Grange Cemetery since his death in 1922 is so highly regarded in Armenia today that an urn containing earth from his grave has been set into the stone of a plaque there.

He is not nearly so well known in his own country - something Edinburgh-based Armenian father of two Dr Hagop Bessos is determined to change.

The 50-year-old clinical scientist hopes to capitalise on last week's Holocaust Memorial Day by raising awareness of Lord Bryce's work.

Turkey denies genocide took place. While acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died, official records state that this was mainly as a result of fighting over independence, starvation, illness and exposure. And Turkey's Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit, recently said: "There has never been any genocide in Turkey's entire history."

Dr Bessos will not have it: "My uncle, Bessilios Bessos, was a member of the intelligentsia and was therefore singled out at Aintab College, where he was a professor in theology.

"He was rounded up with others in 1915 and taken to a prison in Aleppo.

"One morning they were asked to assemble in the prison courtyard and were greeted by soldiers with their bayonets ready.

"My uncle knew they were all going to die but he was a lay preacher and so asked for a few moments of grace to preach words of courage and comfort to the other men, telling them their lives had not been in vain.

"A Turkish eyewitness later told my family that it moved him to tears. It had no such effect on the surrounding soldiers, though, who then bayoneted my uncle and the other men down.

"My family will never forget him, and my son has been named after him."

Dr Bessos also lost three great uncles on his mother's side of the family. With the world engaged in The Great War, little global attention was paid to what was happening in the Ottoman region of Turkey - but Lord Bryce was determined to change all that.

Born in Belfast in 1838, his family moved to Scotland eight years later and he went to Glasgow University. Afterwards he soon proved a skilled politician and developed a passion for mountain climbing. It was this pastime which first took him to the Ottoman region, where many Armenians lived.

He became British Ambassador to the United States, before returning to Britain in 1913, becoming Viscount Bryce and joining the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Two years later, as Allied troops started arriving in Gallipoli, it is alleged that mainly Muslim Turkey decided to turn its attention to the Christian Armenians in the Ottoman region - Armenia at the time being split between the Ottoman Empire and Russia.

They met with pockets of resistance, which history suggests only spurred the Turks on to attack towns and villages as part of raiding parties.

When Viscount Bryce began hearing stories of unspeakable horrors he decided the world had a duty to help.

Together with historian Arnold Toynbee, he began collecting accounts and didn't hold back in telling Parliament about what was going on.

He told MPs there had been no crime in history "so hideous and on so large a scale".

"The customary procedure was to round up the whole of the population as a designated town," he said. "A part of the population was thrown into prison and the remainder were marched out of town and, in the suburbs, the men were separated from the women and children.

"The men were then taken to a convenient place and shot and bayoneted. The women and children were then put under a convoy of the lower kind of soldiers and dispatched to some distant destination.

"They were driven by the soldiers day after day. Many fell by the way and many died of hunger, for no provisions were furnished them. They were robbed of all they possessed, and, in many cases, the women were stripped naked and made to continue the march in that condition.

"Many of the women went mad and threw away their children. The caravan route was marked by a line of corpses. Comparatively few of the people ever reached their destination."

Viscount Bryce added: "The authorities were implacable and hunted out all the Christians and then drove them to the sea front. They then put them aboard sail boats and carried them some distance out to sea and threw them overboard. The whole Armenian population, numbering 10,000, was thus destroyed in one afternoon."

Viscount Bryce based The Blue Book on the written testimonies of many different nationalities, including Greek, Bulgarian, Italian, Armenian, English and American. All agreed the extermination of non-Muslims was being carried out across a wide area.

Viscount Bryce used contacts he had made in the US in an attempt to persuade the country it had to help.

HIS efforts have never been forgotten by Armenia. Dr Bessos says: "He is held in the greatest of affections by Armenians and I would love people here to know more about what he did.

"Armenians across Britain are trying to raise awareness of 1915, as it is not nearly so well known as what happened to Jews in the Second World War.

"It would be a fitting testament to the work Lord Bryce did if we can help raise awareness of it."

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