Between 1894 and 1924 there were three waves of massive anti-Christian violence in Ottoman Asia Minor/Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million to 2.5 million Christians–Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians–were murdered by the country’s Muslims. These waves of mass killings amounted to multiple, drawn-out genocidal campaigns that were accompanied by the rape in towns and villages of many thousands of Christian girls and women by their Muslim neighbors, soldiers, gendarmes, Kurdish tribesmen and Arabs. Additionally, during these campaigns, many of the rape victims and other Christian women and girls were abducted into Muslim households and Islamized, and many hundreds were ostracized by their communities after their “honor” was violated, and turned to “survival sex” and prostitution.Footnote 1
The three waves of genocidal violence occurred against a political-military backdrop. The 1894–1896 Ottoman massacres (that included mass rape) of Armenians occurred against a background of rising Armenian political consciousness and organization in Turkey, especially among the Armenian communities in eastern Anatolia and in Istanbul; Armenian political parties had emerged, calling for “autonomy” or even Armenian independence in the eastern provinces. This political groundswell was accompanied by occasional acts of terrorism against “collaborating” Armenians and, infrequently, against Ottoman officials. The massacres unleashed against the Armenians on the orders of the sultan, Abdulhamid II, in response were designed to quell this Armenian nationalist surge and weaken the Armenian community.
The violence unleashed by the Ottoman state against the Armenians during 1915–1916, amounting to genocide, was in many ways the continuation of a process that had begun with the massacres of 1894–1896. It was geared to “solving” the Armenian problem and ridding Anatolia of its Armenian communities. The genocide occurred during and against the backdrop of World War I, during which the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) government in Istanbul feared Armenian collaboration with the Allied powers, principally Russia. Such collaboration, the government believed, could subvert Turkish war-making and ultimately result in the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The CUP leaders, who aligned themselves with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, found their Empire embattled on multiple fronts against the Russian and the British armies in the Gallipoli Peninsula, the Caucasus and eastern Turkey, Iraq and Palestine-Syria, and threatened internally by Christian minorities. They saw themselves (and their religion, Islam) as existentially threatened. Throughout 1915–1916, in city after city and province after province, the army, gendarmerie and police, abetted by civilians and tribesmen, massacred the Armenian menfolk and drove the women, children and elderly on death marches across Anatolia, toward the deserts of Syria and Iraq. As many as one million Armenians, most of whom offered no resistance, were slaughtered. During the war the Ottoman authorities also ethnically cleansed swathes of Greek villages along Anatolia’s coastlines. Many thousands were killed in the process. Both the mass murder of the Armenians and the deportations inland of Greek communities were accompanied by the mass rape of Christian women and girls.
Following the Ottoman defeat in the world war, the Turkish army was largely demobilized and parts of the country, including Smyrna (Izmir), were occupied by foreign forces. In response, 1919 saw the rise of a revanchist Turkish nationalist movement and army headed by Mustafa Kemak (Ataturk), bent on reclaiming Turkish sovereignty and ridding the country of the occupiers. Nationalists viewed Anatolia’s remaining Christian communities, now predominantly Greek, but also Assyrian and Armenian (those who had survived the war in place or returned from exile), as abettors of the occupiers. Exploiting the military offensives against the Greek army advancing from Smyrna into Anatolia, the Russian forces occupying eastern Turkey, the French army (assisted by local Armenians) that occupied Cilicia and northern Aleppo, and the British who were encamped along the Straits and in Istanbul, Turkish nationalists sought to rid the country of its remaining Christians. Between 1920 and 1923 Ataturk’s fighters and officials launched a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Greek communities around Anatolia, murdering hundreds of thousands and ultimately expelling the remainder to Greece, while killing off the remaining Armenians and hundreds of thousands of Assyrians as the French and Greek armies were gradually pushed out of Anatolia. Across the board and on all fronts, the Turkish offensive and massacres were accompanied by wholesale rape and abduction to Muslim households of Christian women and girls. Along the eastern edge of Turkey, the warfare was accompanied by atrocities committed by all sides as Russian forces withdrew northwards.
The Greek retreat, during the summer of 1922, to Smyrna and the sea, was marked by a policy of scorched earth that was accompanied by sporadic massacres of Turkish villagers and individual cases of rape of Turkish women. The conquest of Smyrna by Ataturk’s army was accompanied by a largescale massacre of Greeks and Armenians, a great deal of rape, and the expulsion of the remaining Greek population, along with some Armenians, to Greece.Footnote 2
There were also a small number of atrocities against Turks by the French and local Armenians during the Franco-Turkish battles in Cilicia, which ended in late 1921. In the years that followed what the Turks called their “War of Independence,” the authorities gradually expelled the remaining Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians of eastern Anatolia. Following the Nationalist victory, the sultanate (and, in effect, empire) were abolished and now almost wholly Muslim Turkey became a republic.
Documentation and the Archives
How do we know about this mass sexual violence? Not from Turkish records. It is doubtful that Ottoman and Turkish military and civilian officials and officers ever explicitly recorded the thousands of episodes of rape and abduction. Indeed, rape by Muslims was never mentioned. And, in their correspondence and reports Turkish officials routinely used euphemism or misdirection when referring to the abductions, which always resulted in death or Islamization. For example, Enis Pasha, the vali of Diyarbekir province, in one of his reports in 1896 referred vaguely to such abductees as “Armenian women who were dispersed here and there during the troubles.”Footnote 3 Such abductions were routinely described as voluntary conversions. At the time, Ottoman officials occasionally covered themselves by issuing explicit prohibitions against rape – while they themselves were committing such acts or while knowing full well that their subordinates were regularly engaged in such pursuits.Footnote 4
If any explicit references or descriptions of sexual crimes were recorded in Ottoman/Turkish files between 1894 and 1924, they were purged in the successive waves of deletion and censorship of almost all the records connected to the genocide by government officials and archivists during the following decades.Footnote 5 This pertains to the Prime Ministerial Archive (Basbakanlik Arsivi)–which is the core archive of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish state. The records in the Turkish Military Archive, in Ankara, the key archive containing the documentation of the armed forces of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) during Turkey’s War of Independence–when most of the country’s Greeks were murdered or expelled–is closed to independent researchers (that is, researchers not in Turkish government pay).
In the decades after 1924 successive Turkish governments published collections of state documents relating to World War One and the War of Independence. None of these volumes contain descriptions of or references to the mass rape of Christian women between 1894 and 1924 (though there are occasional, vague references to Armenian rape of Muslim women, accusations–to the best of my knowledge–without any basis in fact).
So Turkish archives are of no use in furthering our understanding of sexual violence during these years. But researchers investigating Turkish Muslim sexual violence during those years will find a multitude of relevant documents in Western publications and archives. To begin with, over the past decades governments and scholars in the West have published volumes of documents dedicated to the events between 1894 and 1924, including much material relating to mass murder, rape and abduction of Christian women and children.
The first volumes containing some relevant material were published by the United States government in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, the annual volumes containing reports by US diplomatic and consular officials from different areas of the globe. Some of the reports touched on the plight of Christians in the Ottoman/Turkish lands, including evidence of Turkish Muslim sexual violence.
At the same time, between 1895 and 1896, the British government published a series of “Blue Books” (“Turkey No. 1,” “Turkey No. 2,” etc.) consisting of reports from their embassy in Constantinople and their consulates in the Turkish provincial capitals focusing on the first bout of Armenian massacre, which included a multitude of sexual crimes.
The core, second bout of massacre, which historians routinely call the “Armenian Genocide,” occurred during the world war, as the Western democracies and Tsarist Russia faced off against the Central Powers. As part of its political-propaganda warfare against the Central Powers, in 1916 the British government published a volume of reports, written by missionaries, businessmen, travelers and journalists, that zeroed in on the ongoing Turkish destruction of its Christian minorities entitled The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916, Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. The volume, which also incidentally dealt with Turkey’s persecution of its Greek and Assyrian communities, was edited by Viscount Bryce, an eminent British jurist, assisted by Arnold Toynbee, an up-and-coming British historian.
In recent decades, Armenian scholar Ara Sarafian trawled through the United States National Archive and collected and published two volumes of documents, United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide 1915–1917 and United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913–1916 (Henry Morgenthau served as US ambassador in Constantinople). In 2014, a German scholar, Wolfgang Gust, published a similar selection of reports, deposited in the German Foreign Ministry archive, from German diplomats, officers and officials, who served in Turkey during the world war–The Armenian Genocide, Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915–1916. Most recently, in 2020, Robert Shenk and Sam Koktzoglou published a volume entitled The Greek Genocide in American Naval War Diaries: Naval Commanders Report and Protest Death Marches and Massacres in Turkey’s Pontus Region, 1921–1922. These documents graphically described the Turkish destruction of the northern Asia Minor Greek communities and they include evidence of Turkish sexual crimes.
Aside from the wartime Bryce volume, all these publications collated reports by serving officials and officers of the British, American and German governments. The reports–letters, cables, memoranda, diaries–were selected from the massive documentation residing in the national archives of the United States, Britain and Germany. The reports were produced mainly by diplomats and consular officials but also by other westerners residing in or passing through Turkey during those years who had observed what was happening and sent reports to “their” embassies and consuls.
Before, during and after the world war, America, Britain, Austro-Hungary, France, and Germany had dozens of consuls in provincial capitals around Turkey. These consuls regularly sent reports about what was happening in their regions to their ambassadors in Constantinople or directly to their foreign ministries in Washington DC, London, Vienna, Paris and Berlin. As well, the ambassadors sent home reports of their own, summarizing what they had heard from their consuls or subordinate diplomats or information they themselves had personally picked up from various contacts. Over the following decades, when these reports were declassified and made public, Turkish officials and “historians” impugned their authors, saying that they were “Christians” and hence purveyed the Ottoman/Turkish Christians’ viewpoints and propaganda. This is nonsense. All or most of the diplomats in question were professionals who simply tried to report what they had seen and heard (though many, no doubt, were sympathetic towards the oppressed minorities they were reporting about. But such sympathy, as far as I can tell, did not give rise to fabrication and reporting falsehoods).
In addition, many dozens of Christian missionaries, most of them Americans, most of them Protestants, lived and worked around Turkey between 1894 and 1924 and were in close touch with the local Christian communities as well as local Muslim officials and officers. They sent letters to their friends and relatives back home and to their organizations’ headquarters and to “their” consuls and ambassadors reporting on events in their areas. Again, their sympathies by and large may have rested with their co-religionists but their moral code dictated truthful reporting. With both the diplomats and the missionaries, their reports were invariably internal and not for external consumption, distribution or publication (and, indeed, by and large these reports remained classified for decades).
The diplomats and missionaries, apart from what they saw and heard first-hand, were also fed periodic information by visiting countrymen or countrymen working in local organizations, such as the Baghdad Railway. Often, the missionaries and consuls themselves interviewed and debriefed victims of Turkish predation.
Lastly, apart from the diplomats and missionaries, American naval officers, serving after 1918 in the US Naval Squadron in Turkish Waters, regularly harbored in Asia Minor ports (Samsun, Trabzon, etc.) and reported to their superiors or to the American high commissioner–meaning ambassador–in Constantinople during the Turkish War of Independence. Their reports are to be found in the United States National Archive or among the papers of Admiral Mark Bristol, who served (unusually) as both high commissioner and commander of the squadron, deposited in the Library of Congress.
Outside the US National Archive, there is a very substantial collection of missionary reports from between 1894 and 1924 from Turkey in the Houghton Library of Harvard University–the papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the umbrella organization of the Protestant missions in Asia.
Rape and Abduction, 1894–1896
Kurdish (and occasional Turkish) predation of Christian women in Turkey’s eastern provinces had become an established custom during the years before the violence of 1894–1896. In the late 1880s, for example, an American, possibly a journalist, reported after a tour of Erzurum vilayet (province): “The system of abduction of Armenian women by Kurdish agas [chieftains] and landlords was going on, and the violation of women in Armenian villages by bands of Kurds was almost general.” One day, he wrote, he reached the village of Keuprukioi (Koprukoy) in the plain of Passim. It was “in possession of a band of Kurds, who had come in during the night.” They had “turned the unarmed men out of their houses onto the roads, and were indulging in an orgy of outrage among the women,” he reported.Footnote 6
Hence, what happened to Armenian women during the massacres of 1894–1896 was “natural” and foreseeable by both those who unleashed and carried out the depredations and their victims. That first bout of Muslim Turkish violence against the Armenian communities in central and eastern Asia Minor and in Constantinople and its environs, claimed somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Armenian lives (and possibly more if one takes into account the lives lost subsequently to hunger and disease generated by the Turkish depredations). Though there are no exact figures, during the massacres and in their immediate wake thousands of Armenian women were raped and/or abducted into Muslim homes.
The bout began in the wild and mountainous Sason region, in Bitlis vilayet of eastern Turkey, in August-September 1894. Some months before, in November-December 1893, a cluster of rapes were recorded in Ankara vilayet. The episode was triggered in November by the murder of a police informer by an Armenian political activist in the village of Incerli Keris. In response, according to an Armenian preacher who told an assistant of the British Ambassador Philip Currie, gendarmes arrested twenty prominent male villagers and tortured them, inflating their intestines with bellows inserted a posteriori and squeezing their testicles, and so on.Footnote 7 The following month, gendarmes raided a nearby village, Kara Chair, and again arrested twenty local males. While they were in custody and being tortured, the local police chief and gendarmes entered the detainees’ homes and raped six or seven women, “three of whom were virgins.” These events led to a Christian protest meeting and a clash with local Muslims in the nearby town of Yozgat, in which there were casualties on both sides.Footnote 8
British diplomats complained and Constantinople set up a special military court headed by Mustafa Pasha, an “exceedingly fanatical Turk,” according to Currie. British Consul Arnold Cumberbatch attended the court hearings. He recorded that the raped women of Kara Chair were put on the stand and closely questioned by the judges. The judges, he wrote, spoke to them “severely and in very coarse language.” The three victims who had been virgins at the time of the attack were “told to describe the exact details [of the rapes] … The girls began to cry and said they could not tell a man of their own religion such things, much less Turkish officers, and one of them fainted.” However, the married women who witnessed the rapes, Cumberbatch reported, gave “full details” of the assaults to the court. In spite of this testimony, the court ruled that “as the persons said to have been assaulted refused to confirm the details, there was no case,” and no Turks were convicted of rape.Footnote 9
Several Armenians were nonetheless tried for crimes related to the Yozgat violence.Footnote 10 The proceedings were deemed by Western observers a farce. Witnesses who attended the trial later told Cumberbatch that the judges intimidated, reprimanded and harangued Armenian witnesses. One judge proclaimed: “You see, the Islamic nation is great,” and the local mufti issued a fatwa declaring that it was “lawful to kill, assault and falsely accuse” men who opposed the government.Footnote 11 Eventually, one Armenian was hanged, fifteen more were condemned to death, and dozens received long prison sentences.Footnote 12
The British diplomats had managed to force the Turks to admit Armenian women into court as witnesses to rape, and the British consul was able to pass on to London the gist of their testimony. Cumberbatch’s reports, or quotes from them in Currie’s reports, are open to researchers in the British National Archives at Kew. But the Turkish records of the trial, or reports on the trial, are inaccessible in the Ottoman archive and may not exist, possibly destroyed by the Turkish government.
The events in and around Yozgat–presented by the Constantinople government spokesmen as Christian assaults on Muslims–reverberated around Asia Minor. The American consul in Sivas, Milo A. Jewett, informed the British consul in Trabzon, Harry Longworth, that the local vali (provincial governor-general) had declared that “I will outrage the mother of these gaiours [i.e., Christians] or they will outrage mine.”Footnote 13
The events around Yozgat were a prelude to the horrors that followed in Sason, in Bitlis vilayet, where a fullscale massacre accompanied by mass rape took place. Regarding the Sason rapes we have what can be considered direct evidence–statements by the victims deposed by British diplomats soon after. Again, accessible Turkish records offer us nothing.
At Sason, in August-September 1894, after friction between Kurdish tribesmen and Armenian villagers, the tribesmen, backed by regular Ottoman troops, conquered a string of villages, murdered hundreds of their adult male inhabitants and raped and carried off dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of girls and women. After the massacre, thirty-nine local Kurdish chieftains, who had taken part in the massacre, wrote to Queen Victoria blaming Constantinople for what had happened, alleging that Turkish officials had ordered them to rob the Armenians and “seize and abduct their wives and daughters.”Footnote 14 The orders, they implied, had ultimately stemmed from the sultan himself.Footnote 15
The assault on the Sason Armenian villages, the first in the 1894–1896 massacres, began on or around 19 August and lasted three weeks. In all, between 3,000 and 6,000 Armenians died. One survivor later told her story to British diplomats: “When the Kurds came … I … tried to escape with 3 other women … We hastily hid ourselves amongst some thick bushes, where we were soon discovered … We begged … for mercy. But [the Kurds and soldiers] knocked us down … and killed my three companions. Then a soldier snatched my three-months-old babe (a boy) … threw him against a rock, then pierced him with his fixed bayonet … The other soldiers then cut him up into pieces. They then all fell on me … One of the Kurds, finding me young [i.e., attractive], then decided to take me with him. But I refused to follow him and become a Mohammedan. They threatened and tortured me and finally decided to kill me, but I was dressed in fine clothes, [so] they undressed me – so as not to soil them with my blood. When … they discovered the gold coins in my head-dress and some thirty pounds in my belt, they immediately began to fight among themselves. Taking advantage of this opportunity I flew away through the dense brushwood.”Footnote 16
Near Sason’s Geliguzan village Kurdish chieftains and Ottoman officers abducted and raped women. Some were gang-raped in a church in Galin village, then murdered.Footnote 17 It was reported that Kurdish chieftains abducted and sold Armenian children. A chief of the Kurdish Rushkotli tribe reportedly sold a brother and sister, aged nine and eleven, for 150 piasters.Footnote 18 To avoid discovery, Armenian mothers suffocated crying children or jumped with them into a raging river. “The river is said to have been red with blood for three days,” reported a missionary,Footnote 19 and several survivors went mad.Footnote 20 One report by a missionary said that the Bekiranli tribe had taken “400” girls;Footnote 21 another, that soldiers had raped “many others.”Footnote 22 From distant Van, a missionary reported in 1895 that a local Kurdish chieftain, Hussein Pasha, had twenty girls from Sason in his harem.Footnote 23
The Turks did their best to keep consuls and other foreigners away from the Sason area and lied about what had happened. The grand vizier told the British ambassador that “the Armenians had attacked Moslems” and “had desecrated their corpses,”Footnote 24 and told the American minister that what had occurred was an Armenian “revolution.”Footnote 25 The commission of inquiry the Great Powers forced the Turks subsequently to convene simply covered the perpetrators’ tracks and blamed everything on the Armenians.Footnote 26 During the following months Ottoman officials and Kurds continued to mistreat the Armenian survivors who had remained in the area. One consul reported that “women and girls are insulted and dishonored, dragged naked from their beds at night” by Turkish gendarmes.Footnote 27
After Sason, there were those who predicted that if the Great Powers did nothing to curtail or punish the Turks, “similar scenes will be repeated” elsewhere in the empire.Footnote 28 And they were. At Harput (today Elazig) hundreds of Armenians were murdered in November 1895 by a mix of Turks, Kurds and soldiers, and women were raped, “the foremost ravisher being Said Effendi, the commissary of police.”Footnote 29 The surrounding Armenian villages were also systematically assailed. Zaptiehs (gendarmes) were “each [given] an Armenian woman for the night.”Footnote 30 According to the British consul, at Garemja (Zaremja) village “few women and girls … appear to have escaped dishonor.” At Hock village (Hockn) “seventeen females … were carried off … and ravished by Kurds and Turks” (the victims included four girls aged between ten and fourteen). At Aivos village, forty women and girls were “outraged.” Most of the victims were allowed to remain in or return to their villages; a few were murdered or permanently held captive.Footnote 31 The information was passed on to the British and American consuls by local priests and missionaries and was then transmitted to London and Washington. In all, some 4,000 Armenians were murdered in and around Harput; in Mamuret ul Aziz province as a whole, some 15,000 Armenians were forcibly converted to Islam, “5,530 women and girls were outraged” and “1,532” women and girls were forcibly married off to Muslims, according to a western missionary and the American minister in Constantinople.Footnote 32
Similar massacres, accompanied by rape and mass conversions were recorded elsewhere in Turkey during late 1895 and 1896. In Diyarbekir vilayet upward of 500 women and girls were reportedly abducted; in the vilayet’s Palu district, “a large majority” of Christian females aged twelve to forty were “violated,” it was reported. In the village of Yenikoy a local Muslim potentate and his servants, who had briefly harbored Christians, “violated all the young women and girls.”Footnote 33 In January 1896 the American missionary Caleb F. Gates complained that “the Palu Turks still continue to carry off girls and women, keeping them a few days and then returning them with their lives blasted.”Footnote 34 The British consul Fontana reported from Egin as late as April 1897 that the “outraging” of Armenian women continued and wrote that “80 girls” are said to be “with child.”Footnote 35 Most or all of the children born of these rapes ended up in Muslim households or Muslim orphanages.
Rape and Abduction: World War I
During 1915–1916 the Young Turks who ruled the Ottoman Empire, under cover of World War I, carried out a systematic genocide of Armenian and Assyrian minorities in Asia Minor, killing approximately a million people. Mass rape was part of the genocide. The Armenian urban and rural communities, starting in spring 1915, were rounded up, the able adult males shot, and the women, children and elderly driven in endless convoys eastward, toward the deserts of northern Syria and Iraq. Most of the deportees died along the way from shootings, beatings, starvation and disease; those who somehow made it to the deserts were later slaughtered in bouts of mass murder during late 1915 and spring-summer 1916. Along the routes of march, which lasted months, the women and girls were constant victims of rape by the convoy guards and Turkish townspeople and villagers. There is no evidence to suggest that Turkish rapists were ever punished by Ottoman authorities. Indeed, the abundance of rapes and abductions of Christian women into Muslim households across Anatolia indicates that the CUP and the Turkish military regarded what was happening as part and parcel of the desired elimination of the Armenian people, dovetailing, as it were, with the generated increase in Muslim numbers. Children born of such rapes were officially–in line with Muslim law–recognized as Muslims as were the children of Christian women forcibly inducted into Muslim households, where they became wives or concubines of Muslims. Moreover, the general slaughter and destitution pushed Armenian women and girls into “survival sex” and to “professional” prostitution.Footnote 36 Taken together, the campaign of Muslim Turkish sexual violence played a significant role in the destruction of the Armenian communities in Turkey.
Among the first Armenian villages targeted during the Armenian Genocide was Zeytun, in Marash vilayet, in spring 1915. Most of the villagers were sent on a prolonged trek toward Urfa. “The women, children and old men … were clubbed and beaten and lashed as though they had been wild animals,” reported the American consular agent at Urfa, Francis H. Leslie, who watched their arrival. “Their women and girls were daily criminally outraged, both by their guards and the ruffians of every village through which they passed, as the former allowed the latter to enter the camp of the exiles at night and even distributed the girls among the villagers for the night …”Footnote 37
Women were often detached from the convoys by Turkish gendarmes, officers and tribal chieftains and transferred to harems of local functionaries. One Armenian patriarchate report alleged that a customs director, Hadji Bekir Mehmed Ali Bey, “retained at Trebizond young Armenian girls and … kept a number … at the Red Cross hospital while he distributed the rest among the important persons of the Ittihad [i.e., the CUP] …” Some women were simply sold by guards or officers for sex. In Mosul, the authorities set up and stocked brothels with good-looking girls from the convoys for the military’s use. “The opening of the lupanara was announced in official communications from the [town’s] military government.”Footnote 38 According to Swedish missionary Alma Johansson at Mezre “a public house was erected for the Turks – and all the beautiful Armenian girls were put in it.”Footnote 39 Slave markets sprung up in various towns, including Aleppo and Damascus. A British intelligence report from December 1915 stated that in Damascus “the price of an Armenian girl from 12 to 14 years of age was from 2 mejidiehs to one Turkish lira.”Footnote 40 A report from Bucharest said that the average price for an Armenian woman was 0.6 Turkish lira.Footnote 41 Another report stated that “all Armenian women and girls from 7 to 40 years of age” at Vazir Keupru in Merzifon Sanjak (district) “have been sold at auction. Women were also given to the buyers even without money.”Footnote 42
Most of the Christian victims during the Genocide of 1915–1916 were Armenians. But Greek villagers and townspeople were also uprooted and killed in large numbers during World War I. Here, too, rape was always present. In southwestern Turkey, Greek villagers fled to the towns of Makri (today Fethiye) and Livissi (today Kayakoy). On the way, they were robbed and murdered and “women were violated, and their underclothes and shoes were taken away,” reported survivors. In the village of Trimil, Turkish troops raped six women in a night-long “orgy.” When one of their husbands complained, “he was submitted to sodomy.” Near the village of Kestop, villagers raped two women for eight days; one of them later died.Footnote 43 Procope, the Greek Orthodox metropolitan of Konya, wrote in February 1915: “It is no exaggeration to say that the suffering of the Christians here surpasses those of the Hebrews in [Pharaonic] Egypt.”Footnote 44
During the Armenian Genocide Greek communities along the Black Sea coast and Edirne (Adrianople) vilayet were also targeted. At Unye on the Black Sea batches of Greek men were murdered and “the nice-looking women and girls … were raped and dishonored.”Footnote 45 Near Trabzon (Trebizond), according to a Greek report, twenty-six women and girls, “to avoid dishonor,” threw themselves into a river near Gephira. Elsewhere in Trabzon vilayet, the Turks rounded up women and took them to Vazelon Monastery, where they “first violated them, and then put them to death.”Footnote 46 Armenian women and girls in and around Trabzon were serially raped and murdered, sometimes by poison, their bodies often dumped into the Black Sea.Footnote 47 Others were deported in convoys inland where, according to the Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Germanos, “a large number of women and children were killed, the young girls outraged … These girls had to march thirty or forty days across snow-covered mountains and sleep by night in the open … The majority, of course, died on the road.”Footnote 48
Occasionally, Muslim Turkish officials and officers broke ranks and told Western diplomats or officers about this sexual violence. After the war, Shefik Bey, the kaymakam (sub-district governor) of Blanik in Bitlis vilayet, told his British captors that Hodja Ilias, a parliamentary deputy from Marash (today Kharamanmaras), “was addicted to raping Christian girls; it was so well known that it became a scandal among the Muslims, more especially as he wore a turban” (a sign of religious office).Footnote 49 In a rare Muslim Turkish statement to British diplomats, Ottoman Army lieutenant Sayied Ahmed Moukhtar Baas said that in 1915 “government officials at Trebizond picked up [out?] some of the prettiest Armenian women of the best families. After committing the worst outrages on them, they had them killed.”Footnote 50
Alongside the genocide in Asia Minor, Turkish troops and Kurdish auxiliaries in January 1915 invaded the Urmia Lake area in northwestern Persia, which had a large Assyrian Christian population. They occupied the area until May 1915. During these months, alongside occasional massacres, there was continuous rape. At the village of Ardishai seventy-five women and girls ran into the lake to escape the Turks and were shot in the water.Footnote 51 According to another report by missionaries, “one of the most terrible things … was the treatment of Syrian [i.e., Assyrian] women and girls by the Turks, Kurds and local Mohammedans. After the massacre in the village of ––-, almost all the women and girls were outraged, and two little girls, aged eight and ten, died in the hands of Moslem villains. A mother said that not a woman or girl above twelve (and some younger) in the village of –– escaped violation … One man … openly boasted of having ruined eleven Christian girls, two of them under seven years of age …. Several women from eighty to eighty-five years old have suffered with the younger women.”Footnote 52 Many women were taken off to harems. A missionary quoted a girl named Lucy from Tchargousha village about what happened in the village of Gulpashan, to which Lucy had fled: “[The Kurds came.] In the yard [Lucy] saw her younger sister Sherin, a pretty girl of fifteen, being dragged away by a Kurd. … Lucy was helpless [to save her]. [Sherin] tried to conceal her face and daubed it with mud, but she has such beautiful dark eyes and rosy cheeks! The Kurds grabbed the young women and girls, peering into their faces, till each one found a pretty one for himself, then dragged her away.”Footnote 53
In September 1915 American consul general in Aleppo Jesse B. Jackson reported on the massacre of those Armenians who had survived the deportation columns and had reached the Syrian Desert. “The Mutessarif [district governor] of Der el-Zor had arranged and carried out the massacre … Before the end, all the presentable women and girls were outraged by … the Arab tribes there whose participation was at the invitation or command of the Mutessarif.”Footnote 54
Rape and Abduction, 1919–1927
World War I ended in defeat for the Ottoman Empire, its representatives signing an armistice agreement–in fact, an instrument of surrender–at Mudros on 30 October 1918. The CUP leaders fled the country, much of the Ottoman army was disbanded and hundreds of party stalwarts, including mass murderers, were detained by the British authorities and transferred to Malta (though almost all were eventually released without punishment in exchange for British hostages taken by the Turks). Allied forces deployed in parts of Turkey, including Constantinople, and survivors of the Armenian and Greek refugee columns began to trickle back to their homes–or at least to their towns and villages, their homes almost invariably in ruins, occupied by Muslim squatters or confiscated by Muslim officials. But within months, a Turkish Nationalist movement surged in eastern and central Turkey mobilizing around the figure of war hero Mustafa Kemal, later called Ataturk. By the start of 1920 the Kemalists were waging war–what the Turks subsequently called the Turkish War of Independence–against the foreign occupiers, principally the French forces in Cilicia and the Greek army, that had landed in Smyrna (Izmir) in May 1919 and subsequently advanced eastward, toward Ankara. The remaining Christians of Asia Minor, mainly the country’s Greek minority, centered in the Pontus region along the Black Sea coast and in towns in the south (Cappadocia) and west (Ionia) of Asia Minor, and the remaining Armenians and Assyrians bolstered by returnees, were inevitably caught up in the struggle. Whether or not they supported or made common cause with the foreign invaders, the nationalists viewed them as a pro-Western fifth column or potential fifth column and resolved to rid the country once and for all of all its Christians.
In several waves between 1920 and 1922, the nationalist forces systematically uprooted the Christian communities–this time mainly Greeks–and sent them marching in endless convoys through the mountains and wastelands of central and eastern Turkey after systematically murdering or incarcerating in sub-human conditions the adult males. The process was like that applied to the Armenians in 1915–except that now, the Turks had no eastern deserts to which to deport the Christians (Syria had come under French, and Iraq under British, rule). Toward the end of 1922, nationalist policy changed and the Christians in organized fashion were driven to the Black Sea and Mediterranean ports and expelled to Greece while a minority, mainly Armenians, were dispatched southward, by land, to Syria and Lebanon. Between 1920 and 1923 hundreds of thousands of Greeks were murdered. And, as in the world war, the massacres and deportations were accompanied by massive sexual violence.
The nationalist assault on French-held Cilicia and its Armenians began in January 1920 in Marash. “Hundreds of men, women and children [were] massacred daily,” an American missionary cabled from the besieged town.Footnote 55 Many were first caught and then murdered. The Turks were said to be burning the bodies “to hide the fact that they have stolen [i.e., raped] the young girls,” reported an American missionary from the town.Footnote 56
But the major national-religious post-war ethnic cleansing campaign was directed against the Greek minority. Two important eyewitnesses to the process were American missionaries Dr. Mark Ward and Major F.D. Yowell, both based in Harput. In reports that they sent to the American and British governments, they noted that sexual predation against the women in the Greek convoys was frequent. “All along the route Moslems visit the various groups and take of the women and girls whomsoever they want for immoral purposes.”Footnote 57 A Greek observer reported that “many parents kill their sons and daughters, unable to see them violated by the Turks.”Footnote 58 Predation also characterized the subsequent period, in late 1922 and 1923, when the Greeks were concentrated in the port cities while awaiting boats that would ferry them to Greece. An American naval officer reported from Mersin, on the Mediterranean: “The Turkish military entered the churches and refugee dumps and take young girls. Five were taken from [the Georgian Greek] Church last night. Three returned this morning and complained to the Spanish consul … The other two have not yet returned.” The officer interviewed one of the girls who had returned: “She appeared about twenty years of age and was a cumberly [sic, comely?], buxom lass. She stated … she was taken [by four gendarmes] to a Turkish house where there were two more gendarmes and a civilian. She … said they used her repeatedly, until this morning when she was released.” Another of the girls, a twenty-year-old originally from Denizli, told a similar story. Two of her rapists were soldiers, “Suleiman Onbachi and Imzebeit Tehaouchou.” The American officer was also told that “bands of civilians” waylaid Christian women who went to lavatories situated outside the refugee compounds. The assailants “would throw a shawl over the woman’s head and drag her to their harems … At the rate of the stories I have heard the harems should now be overflowing,” commented the officer. The American officer also recorded the text of a Turkish poster hung on walls in the city: “To the Greeks and Armenians. Ingrate Criminals of Mersina. The nationalist government has pardoned you for the innumerable atrocities against Mussulmen during the [French] occupation … You have … soiled the honor of our daughters and wives … All the blood in our veins cries unmercifully for revenge … Mussulmen do not want to see you in their country …” The American officer noted that he had formerly been “pro-Turk” but now considered the Turks “savages and barbarians.”Footnote 59
In their complaints about violation of Muslim women by Greeks, the Turkish authorities were certainly exaggerating. In various locations, atrocities were committed, although there is no evidence that this was Greek army policy or that rape was sanctioned by the high command. As the Greek army advanced eastward, toward Ankara, the nationalist capital, it overran Turkish villages. Turkish guerrillas attacked the Greek supply columns, triggering Greek reprisals that sometimes included the rape of Turkish village women.Footnote 60 In the Yalova-Izmit area along the Sea of Marmara during March-May 1921, Greek troops, according to an Allied commission of inquiry, committed rape and other acts of violence. Several women testified that they had been “raped five times.”Footnote 61 The most serious allegations of rape by Greek troops and the best-reported were those relating to the Greek retreat to Smyrna and the coast after their defeat in Afyon Karahisar in August 1922. During the retreat, Greek troops razed Turkish villages on their route of march and, as reported by Turkish witnesses, raped hundreds of Muslim women.Footnote 62
Perhaps the most concentrated episode in the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks from Asia Minor during the Ataturk years was the destruction of the Christian communities of Smyrna in September 1922, when the Christian quarters were torched. Many thousands of Christians, primarily Greeks, were murdered and hundreds of thousands were expelled to Greece or, in columns, to the interior of Anatolia, where most died. Among the “outstanding features of the Smyrna horror [was] the wholesale violation of women and girls,” wrote the American consul-general in the city, George Horton. He based this, he said, in part on the findings of an American physician, M.C. Elliott, who examined “hundreds” of girls during and after the massacre.Footnote 63
Among the witnesses to the Turkish atrocities in the city were American naval officers who came ashore from gunboats anchored in the bay. Lieutenant Commander H. E. Knauss described a rape-murder witnessed by one of his subordinates: “The Turks had taken her from her father and mother into an alley. Her shrieks were plainly heard, then the Turks returned and one of them wiped a bloody knife on the mother’s forearm, then led them [i.e., the parents] down the street.”Footnote 64 The New Zealand-born Anglican pastor, Charles Dobson, recorded that aboard the British steamship the Bavarian in the harbor, he had met “a woman and her daughter, each of whom had been ravished by fifteen Turkish soldiers.” A day or two before, in Smyrna, he had seen cartloads of “bodies of women and babies and also of young girls who had [he wrote] patently been violated before being killed.”Footnote 65
During the days in mid-September when the bulk of Smyrna’s Christians huddled, tightly-packed, on the quay awaiting salvation by the Allied boats in the bay, Turkish troops plucked out girls and young women from the mass and many were never seen again.Footnote 66 The American vice-consul in the city, E. C. Hole, noted in his report on the devastation of Christian Smyrna that the British warship HMS Serapis took aboard a large number of women and girls but almost none between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five.Footnote 67
While these events occurred in western Asia Minor, Armenian and Assyrian families, mostly from Cilicia, were busy making their way southwards, toward French-ruled Syria, in convoys. They were systematically robbed by Turkish troops and brigands en route; many were subjected to rape. American Consul general Jackson related that near Katma, inside Syria near the Turkish border, a caravan was stopped and the three daughters of Protestant pastor Assadoor Yeghoyian were raped by gendarmes and robbers.Footnote 68
Even after the end of the Turks’ War of Independence, Turkish troops carried out similar atrocities. In October 1925, the Turks forcibly deported the last remaining Assyrians of southeastern Turkey inland, away from the border with Iraq. The Turkish troops, reportedly, raped or sold into concubinage some 200 women and, at night, raped Assyrian girls in the fields. According to survivors, at one convoy stop Turkish officers sold ten girls to Muslim villagers.Footnote 69 The following year the American consulate in Baghdad reported that the Turks were deporting Assyrians and Armenians to Iraq, with mass killings accompanied by mass rape.Footnote 70
Conclusion
In all three bouts of mass murder in Asia Minor, Constantinople and Edirne vilayet between 1894 and 1924 the Ottoman and, later, the Turkish governments denied that they had carried out or were carrying out massacres, let alone a cumulative genocide, arguing that they were reacting to Christian attacks on Muslims or suppressing Christian revolts. They always denied that Muslim soldiers, gendarmes and civilians raped Christian women and girls and occasionally charged that, on the contrary, Christians were busy defiling Muslim women.
Successive Turkish governments purged from their archives documents that would support the narrative that the Turks, in Ottoman and republican times, carried out massacres of Christians and raped Christian women en masse. It is possible that such documents, perhaps a multitude of such documents, were not destroyed and were simply squirreled away in vaults that one day may be opened to researchers. Meanwhile, few Turkish documents have surfaced in archives in Istanbul and elsewhere in Turkey showing that the Turks deliberately massacred Christians, and I have seen none that show that Turks–soldiers, officials and civilians–raped Christian women and girls between 1894 and 1896, 1915 and 1918 and 1919 and 1924.
But the documentation accessible in Western archives are another matter. As we have said, there were hundreds of Christian–American but also British, Canadian, Scandinavian and German–missionaries and dozens of Western consuls and diplomats in Turkey during the three bouts of mass murder and mass rape discussed here. All reported regularly to their headquarters on what they had seen and heard. While the Turks almost invariably carried out massacres and rapes far from prying western eyes, Turkish officials and officers in the various localities, and survivors of both massacres and rapes talked–to missionaries, consuls, naval officers and western travelers–and their stories appear in the documentation that is available in Western archives, primarily in the United States, London and Germany. Occasionally, one encounters depositions by rape or massacre survivors taken by Western consuls. And once in a while there is direct testimony by Turks who witnessed or even participated in anti-Christian atrocities and gave evidence to Western diplomats or missionaries.
But, to be sure, the available documentation covers only part of the story, especially when it comes to rape and abduction of women and girls into Muslim households. Many victims of rape were subsequently killed by their assailants or otherwise died without passing on their stories; and, no doubt, most victims, if alive, preferred to remain silent about what they had undergone, deeming it shameful. As the consuls or missionaries wrote, these rape survivors’ lives had been “blasted.” Certainly, women and girls–and there were many thousands of them–who ended up in Muslim homes (as servants, wives, concubines) kept silent, their lives and futures dependent on those who now fed and housed them. Some may even have come to love or at least care for their Muslim spouses. They probably had children whose lives and futures they wished to safeguard, and ratting on their rapists or abductors would have undermined their lives and wellbeing.
In short, while there are few accessible Ottoman/Turkish contemporary sources describing or even relating to the massive sexual violence exercised by Turkish Muslims and their agents against Christian women and girls between 1894 and 1924, the evidence from reliable Western–mainly diplomatic and missionary–sources is overwhelming and clear: As part of the effort by the successive Ottoman/Turkish governments during these three decades to rid Asia Minor, Edirne vilayet and northern Aleppo vilayet of their Christian inhabitants, the authorities unleashed massive sexual violence against the female Christian inhabitants of these regions, primarily rape and abduction and induction into Muslim households. The purpose of this state-orchestrated violence was to physically reduce the number of Christians, to increase Muslim numbers (the impregnation by Muslims of Christian women produced, by law, Muslim offspring) and to demoralize the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian minority communities as part of the effort to eradicate them. The events and cases described in this article are representative of what transpired and convey with clarity the enormity of what happened in Turkey in the three decades between 1894 and 1924.
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