Blood-Dark Track (46 page)

I was confronting this disagreeable truth, as the train pulled slowly clear of Adana and trundled through the dull, industrialized flatlands of the Çukurova delta, because I was thinking of the hundreds of thousands of Armenians who had passed this way in the autumn of 1915. The Armenians had been forcibly evacuated from places as distant and diverse as Erzerum and Van in the far north-east, and Sivas and Istanbul and Izmir in the west, and Adana and Mersin. They were sent, without proper sustenance, on a journey which took most of them through hundreds of kilometres of mountains and deserts before they reached the Taurus Mountains, where they funnelled through Pozanti and the Cilician Gates before struggling on across Çukurova. Much of their ghastly voyage followed the railroad on which I was travelling. Almost all major stations on the line were the site of lethally unsanitary accumulations of deportees. In November, 20,000 were reported at Tarsus, another 20,000 at Adana, 150,000 more scattered between Adana and the Amanus Mountains. They were on their way to Aleppo and, from there, bound for the Mesopotamian and Syrian deserts. As they marched across Turkey and Syria, the Armenians were subjected to robbery, butchery, starvation, thirst, sexual attacks, and disease. Estimates of the final number of fatalities ranged from 300,000 to over 1.3 million. To put it another way, before the Great War around one and a half million Armenians lived in the territory occupied by modern-day Turkey; by 1923, only 100,000 remained.

In September 1915, Joseph Dakak also headed for Aleppo, where
he was about to start his last year of school. It was practically certain that he saw the Armenians trekking east, and since as a schoolboy in Aleppo he was not confined to the grounds of the school and was at liberty to walk around town, he would have seen thousands of Armenians in transit in Aleppo. They formed, by all accounts, a terrifying and heart-rending spectacle. And yet my grandfather never spoke of the death-marches, just as he never spoke about the massacres of 1909 or the Armenian exodus in 1921. At first I’d thought that his was a terrorized dumbness; but I came to realize that it reflected the kind of benighted gulf that divided me from my fellow train passengers.

Just how many Armenians were killed, and in what circumstances, and due to what causes, were questions that continued to cause great controversy. Over eighty years later, Armenians were haunted by an awful sense that a terrible and clear crime against their nation, which had been witnessed and contemporaneously documented in detail by missionaries, consuls, medical workers and other western bystanders resident in Turkey, had gone unacknowledged. Groups like the Armenian National Institute in Washington DC conducted a passionate and relentless campaign to perpetuate the memory of the victims and to gain international recognition of the genocidal character of their deaths and losses: in other words, that what happened was a premeditated effort by the Ottoman government to exterminate the Armenian people. Orthodox Turkish history maintained that the Ottoman government undertook drastic but essentially defensive wartime evacuation measures designed to eliminate a real threat to the security of the State: for example, the Armenian population in Van, in the far east of Anatolia, sided with the Russian forces in a campaign in which tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers died. Insofar as mass deaths and brutalities did occur – and doubt was cast in this regard on ‘pro-Armenian’ accounts – it was said that these were, in essence, the unauthorized work of independent third parties, Kurds, bandits, rogue gendarmes and war-crazed military personnel, whose dreadful actions, calmly considered, were not proof of a State intention of racial annihilation.

Earlier that summer, the French national assembly had voted to declare its recognition of what it expressly called the Armenian genocide. Although the vote was unlikely to be ratified by the Senate, it represented a significant triumph for the Armenian campaign, which had only met with full official success in Russia and Canada. The United States, for example, limited itself to expressing sympathy for the ‘tragedy’, since its relationship with Turkey, a key NATO ally, precluded any further acknowledgement. There was also the wider hazard of setting a precedent. If the Armenians were accommodated, what would there be to stop an even more influential political grouping – the Irish-Americans, for example – from pressing for similar recognition, and historical crystallization, of the moral and legal character of events in their national past? Current Irish historical grievances went at least as far back as 1649, the year Oliver Cromwell re-established the English Parliament’s control of Ireland. Ireland had been unruly since October 1641, when perhaps 4,000 Protestant Ulster settlers were killed by their Catholic neighbours. The massacre – never forgotten by the settlers or their unionist descendants, for whom it served as an example of what would happen to them in Ireland without the protection of the Crown – inspired a widespread Irish rebellion headed, most notably, by Owen Roe O’Neill (no relation); Cromwell’s response was to authorize the killing of thousands of non-combatants at the towns of Drogheda and Wexford. Three and a half centuries later, these slaughters still resonated in certain Irish (and Irish-American) minds as examples not of military barbarity but of a genocidal tendency in the British treatment of the Irish. This tendency was also to be glimpsed in Cromwell’s shipment as slaves to the West Indies of thousands of captured Irish soldiers, and in the ethnic cleansing of the Irish propertied classes in the 1650s, when land in the ownership of indigenous Roman Catholics was turned over to British Protestant settlers while the natives were deported to the wilds of Connacht; but its fullest manifestation occurred with the Great Potato Famine. In terms of the number of dead and deported – the Irish emigrants had, arguably, been subject to a species of expulsion – and also in terms of the catastrophic testimonies of squalor
and mass starvation and disease they generated, the victims of the Famine were comparable to the victims of the Armenian holocaust; and from there it was only a short step to another comparison, namely of the nature of the English government’s responsibility for the Famine with that of the Young Turk government’s responsibility for the fate of the Armenians.

I had always doubted that many Irish people subscribed to this kind of analysis with any vehemence or, if they did, gave it much contemporary significance. Most of us felt that the injustice and oppression suffered by our ancestors had been adequately ventilated over the past century and that our duties to them were sufficiently performed by the moderate forms of remembrance that were now in place: classroom history lessons, the occasional film or book, and ceremonies like the Great Famine Event in 1997. We were ready for fresh stories about ourselves, and this had apparently been confirmed by the famous referendums of 22 May 1998. But on 15 August 1998, which was only a week before I boarded the Taurus Express at Adana, a huge bomb exploded in the centre of Omagh, a market town in Co. Tyrone, killing 29 civilians. The massacre – the worst in the last 30 years of violence – was said to be the work of the Real IRA, a group associated by the press with Bernadette Sands, the sister of the hunger striker Bobby Sands. Bernadette Sands had come to my notice a few months before Omagh, when I’d heard her bitterly pronouncing on the failure of the Good Friday Agreement to make definite provision for a united Ireland. What had interested me wasn’t the fact of her opposition to the peace process – inevitably, some republicans would be incapable of compromise – but the grounds she relied on: that the Agreement rendered vain the sacrifices and exertions of bygone republicans – republicans like her dead brother and, of course, Jim O’Neill. Was it for a devolved assembly, she rhetorically asked, that so many volunteers died and sacrificed years of freedom? For Sands, it seemed, the resolution of present-day political grievances turned, on some fundamental level, on the discharge of assumed obligations to the wronged dead, whose shadowy needs were to be added to those of the living and unborn.

At what point were we released from participation in the
injustices of the past? The Armenian nation still craved our attention and made demands on our pity and outrage, and as I sat on the Taurus Express, I felt under a blurry duty to fight off my tiredness, to remember those who passed through this unremarkable landscape eighty years before. But I fell asleep.

When I awoke, we were moving along the edge of a cool valley in a corridor of pine trees. Clusters of poplars signalled the course of a small river, and, in the hills, villages thick with fruit trees appeared among the pine woods. Every five minutes, it seemed, we stopped at a tiny, beautiful old station.

We climbed higher and the train began pleasantly to pass in and out of tunnels. We had reached the Amanus Mountains, which were the scene in the Great War of frantic efforts by the Baghdad Railway Company to complete the construction of the railway. Nevertheless, the Armenians working here were rounded up and marched off in June 1916 and replaced by 1,600 British and Indian prisoners of war. Just over a month later, Joseph Dakak started work at the construction camp at Belemedik, where the Taurus tunnels, the longest on the Baghdad railway, were being built. There, the Armenian workforce was still in place: the military imperative of completing the work and the lack of readily available skilled replacements had contrived to exempt them from deportation. The luck of these railway workers and their families held out for the rest of the war. They formed one of the very few cadres of Armenians to escape deportation.

After a lengthy stop in a hill-station, the train descended from the Amanus into typical Anatolian territory: flat farmland and marshy scrubland stretching out for miles up to a blur of distant hills. The train continued to crab towards Gaziantep, which lay directly to the east, along a maddeningly indirect loop of track. I fell asleep again and awoke again. Still the same scenes: cottonfields, cornfields and inconsequential stony fields. When I next opened my eyes, the train, escorted by a cloud of butterflies, was thundering by groves of pistachio trees. We entered the sprawling, dusty industrial city of Gaziantep, the source of so many summer visitors to Mersin’s coastline.

I didn’t linger. I went straight from the train station to the
otogar
and caught a mini-bus back towards the coast, to Iskenderun. My thoughts went back to a character in my grandfather’s testimony, Aram Hachadourian, the Armenian native of Gaziantep who’d lived in Iskenderun until he was forced out in 1939, when France conceded Hatay – that fertile strip of East Mediterranean shoreline to which Syria still laid claim – to Turkey.

It was mid-afternoon when I arrived in Hatay. The mini-bus stopped at Dörtyol, which used to be a mainly Armenian village, and then continued south. On the left, the Amanus loomed as vaporous and cloud-smudged as the Wicklow Mountains viewed from the Curragh. Passing through lemon and orange groves that overwhelmed me with memories – or fantasies – of a time when Mersin was ringed by just such gardens, we reached the coast at the small port of Payas. During the 1909 massacres, 272 Armenian deaths were reported in Payas, Dörtyol and other villages around Iskenderun.

After going through a heavily industrialized area of factories and container yards, we came to Iskenderun, picturesquely wedged between steaming, spectacularly proximate wooded mountains, and a Mediterranean Sea that seemed greyer and choppier than the one that lapped against the shore at Mersin. I checked into the Hitit Hotel, a half-gutted ’seventies construction that either had never been completed or was already ruined. The balcony of my room overlooked the sea and the post office, a grand limestone building built by the French. I took a shower and then strolled out into the humid early evening. I wasn’t sure what to expect. This was my first visit to my grandfather’s birthplace.

The waterfront was a less polished, more intimate version of the one at Mersin. There was a boulevard, palm trees, sparse traffic, and a congenial little park where, after dinner and dark, children would play on swings and seesaws until late in the warm night. A couple of horse-drawn carriages made their way decoratively up and down the boulevard, where a very few degenerating examples remained of the row of Ottoman villas that had, during the Second World War, housed the residence of the Turkish general commanding the region, and the Italian and German and British and
United States consulates. Behind the waterfront was a neighbourhood of narrow streets and small, rickety houses. It was wonderfully quiet, and the odour of jasmine and the echoing calls of turtle doves stirred in me a sharp, bittersweet ache. My nostalgia intensified when I was surprised by the chatter of Arabic drifting from the small gardens; how comforting was the sound of a language I first heard spoken by elderly ladies who loved me! It was in this quarter, just behind the waterfront, that I came across the Greek consulate, housed in an old building that retained a crumbling, slightly ludicrous grandeur. Next door to it, in the only carefully restored Ottoman structure I’d seen, was the British consulate: it had returned to its 1909 location, the offices of Catoni, maritime agents and agent of Lloyd’s underwriters. I sensed, as I wandered back to the waterfront to the sound of Arabic mingled with Turkish and the smell of horse-dung, that something was left of the Ottoman Syrian town in which Joseph Dakak had passed his first ten years. There still stood in Iskenderun a Catholic church, two Orthodox churches and even an Armenian church. It was also easy to imagine, as the Amanus Mountains darkened in the east and I rejoined the locals in strolling along the boulevard, the intrigue and espionage that had taken place in this small, intense port during the last war. C.T.C. Taylor, the British SIME agent, wrote that German intelligence had approached a certain Y, a prominent resident of Hatay, to use his position to obtain intelligence about Allied troop movements in Syria and Palestine, but Y notified the British of the approach and offered his services as a double agent. On one occasion, Taylor met Y at Antakya under the surveillance of intensely suspicious Turkish plainclothes detectives; another time, they met at the open air restaurant of Joseph Ayvazian, the Axis informer, where Taylor dropped a parcel in the darkness for collection by Y. Taylor’s greatest coup was bribing the cleaner at the Italian consulate to place the contents of the consul’s – the Marquis di San Felice’s – waste-paper baskets into bags and pass them on to the British.