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BY A WITNESS

[We print the following article, because Americans have heard practically nothing of the Turkish side of the Armenian massacres. The author was a high German officer serving in East Anatolia when these atrocities occurred. His account appeared in a Berlin conservative paper, at the time a German court exonerated the Armenian who assassinated Talaat Pasha.]

From Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, June 28
(HUGO STINNES'S PRESS)

For three years and a half, I was in active service with the Turks on the Caucasus front. I wish to explain the situation there as it actually was at that time. Europeans who have not lived in that country are quite unable to understand the conditions which prevail there.

In the first place, it is misleading to talk only of Turks and Armenians. A veritable hodge-podge of races dwells in this region. Turks, Kurds, and Armenians are the most numerous, but there are also many Greeks, and members of various Caucasian tribes. The Armenians are scattered all over Anatolia as far as Constantinople and Smyrna. There are also great numbers of them in the Persian and Russian border districts.

The different races living together in Eastern Asia invariably hate each other. This hatred is particularly keen between the Armenians and the Turks and the Armenians and the Kurds. One of our principal errors is leaving the Kurds out of account in discussing the Armenian question. The Kurds live by raising cattle and by robbery. The Armenians are shrewd merchants. Consequently, the two people are as different in character as it is possible to imagine, and they have been enemies for ages. On the surface, the Kurd seems a brave but barbarous warrior and the

Armenian a righteous man who does no wrong. However, when the Armenians think they are in a majority, they drop their righteousness and become as cruel as their neighbors.

In direct contrast with this, the relations between the Armenians and the Turks were remarkably good until a generation ago. The Armenians are not only shrewd tradesmen, but also skillful artisans and excellent farmers. Armenian mechanics and peasants usually make an excellent impression upon European travelers, but Armenian traders and merchants are not popular with Westerners. This explains why we get such contradictory opinions of these people. These judgments are determined largely by the class of Armenians with which the particular European in question has been associated. In former times, the Armenians were peaceful and popular subjects of the Turks. It is a very common belief, but an utterly false one, that the enmity between these two peoples is due to religious differences. The Turks are the most tolerant people in the world toward men of another faith, so long as their own religion is not interfered with. The enmity which has grown up between the two races is due entirely to politics. It has been sedulously cultivated by the English and the Russians, who used it to promote their own interests in Turkey.

Under the Treaty of St. Stefano, in 1878, the Turks were obligated to introduce certain reforms in the territories occupied by the Armenians. Naturally, bad blood was engendered in carrying out these reforms, and the Armenians were misled into hostility toward the Turks. Their discontent was systematically encouraged by both the Russians and the English. No Turk will dispute Abdul Hamid's misgovernment; but foreign trouble-makers prevented even the well-intended measures of later Turkish rulers from accomplishing any good. When the Turks appointed Armenians to govern their own people, the claim was made that they purposely selected the worst kind of men for such offices; but the fact that the Armenians were free to elect their own representatives to the Turkish Parliament was passed over in utter silence.

The hatred that had been engendered under Abdul Hamid was the direct cause of the Armenian massacres in the nineties. When we discuss these massacres, we are apt to forget that the Armenians under the Russian flag suffered just as badly. It was not until after the Russian Revolution of 1905 that conditions were improved. Governor Prince Voronzoff-Daschkoff offered the Armenian leaders to restore their confiscated estates, to cease persecuting their people, and to deal frankly and fairly with them, if they would let bygones be bygones and stop their agitation. The Armenians agreed to this, and, after that date, were friendly to Russia.

When the war broke out, consequently, profound mutual distrust reigned between the Turks and the Armenians. As soon as mobilization began, it was discovered that the Armenians had Russian rifles. At the same time, a copy of an agreement between certain Turkish Armenians and the Russian

General Staff fell into the hands of a high Turk commander. Under this agreement, the Armenians engaged to cut telegraph lines in Turkey, and to start revolts behind the Turkish lines as soon as the Russians advanced. They fulfilled this engagement to the letter.

After hostilities began, a period of quiet ensued, because the Russian operations were not successful. The first attempt to capture Erzerum failed, and, instead, the Turks invaded Russian territory. However, about New Year, 1915, the Turkish offensive was repulsed with great losses, and by the following spring, their situation was most precarious. The Russians resumed the offensive with superior forces, and the Turks had the utmost difficulty in holding their lines. They could not hope for reinforcements on the Caucasus front, because of the heavy fighting on the Dardanelles.

Just at this critical moment, in April, 1915, the Armenians revolted. Their insurrection was not suppressed until the following August. In other words, they carried out their part of their agreement with Russia. They were repeatedly detected cutting telegraph lines, and admitted that they did this on Russian orders. Whenever the Russians attacked the Turkish lines, uprisings occurred in the Armenian villages immediately to the rear. A big insurrection even occurred far in the interior. Very few Turkish troops were left to garrison the back country. An Armenian conspiracy was discovered in Constantinople itself.

The Turks had given the Armenians no direct cause for revolting. It should be emphasized that the Armenians themselves invited the reprisals that followed. The situation of the Turkish army was extremely critical. It was not a time for nice measures. Moreover, the conduct of the Armenians

was not that of valiant fighters for freedom, but rather of sly and treacherous intriguers.

Thereupon, the Turkish government resolved to take vigorous measures, to remove once for all this danger behind its back. It evacuated the whole Armenian population from that district. Naturally, this was a cruel thing for the Armenians, but it was precisely the sort of thing that Europeans were doing under similar conditions.

Another ray of light upon the situation!

We hear a great deal of massacred Armenians. We hear nothing of the great number of Turks who were slaughtered by the Armenians during their disastrous retreat, after the Russians captured Erzerum in February, 1916. We hear nothing of the cruelties that the Armenians habitually perpetrated on the Turks. For instance, we were constantly receiving reports that

the Turkish inhabitants of a village had all been blinded. Now, one actual instance of how the Russians acted. When captured Turkish soldiers and other Turkish prisoners were sent to Russia, in the winter of 1914 and 1915, they were herded in locked freight-cars. The railway authorities forgot what the contents of these cars were. The cars were shunted about for two or three weeks, and, when they were finally opened, were found to be full of corpses. It was hardly natural to expect the Turks to act the part of lovingkindness toward such enemies as these.

In judging the Turks, therefore, we must judge them in the light of the conditions which existed. It was a case where long-nursed race-hatred burst into action in forms happily less common in Europe than in Asia.

We cannot apply European standards to that country, or impose our ways upon its people.

EAST AND WEST IN INDIA

BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE

[This article was originally written in 1909 and 1910, but has only recently been translated and printed in English.]

From The Modern Review, June 1921

(CALCUTTA LITERARY AND CURRENT-AFFAIRS MONTHLY)

THE History of India - of whom is sunny fields adorned with corn and it the history?

This history began with the day when the white-skinned Aryans, overcoming all obstacles, natural as well as human, made their entry into India. Sweeping aside the vast enveloping curtain of forest, which stretched across her from East to West, they brought on the scene

fruit, and their toil and skill thus laid the foundation. And yet they could not say that this India was exclusively their India.

The non-Aryans became fused with the Aryans. Even in the first blush of the latter's victorious supremacy, they used to take to themselves non-Aryan

girls in marriage. And in the Buddhist age such intermingling became freer. When, thereafter, the Brahminic Samaj set to work to repair its barriers and make its encircling walls impregnable, it found some parts of the country come to such a pass that Brahmins of sufficiently pure stock could not be found to conduct the vedic ceremonies, and these either had to be imported, or new creations made by investiture with the sacred thread. The white skin, on the color of which the difference between Brahmin and Sudra had originally been founded, had meanwhile, tarnished into brown. The Sudras, with their different manners and ideals, gods and rituals, had been taken into the social polity. And a larger Indian, or Hindu, Samaj had been evolved, which not only was not one with the Aryan Samaj of the vedic times, but was in many respects even antagonistic.

But was India able to draw the line of her history there? Did Providence allow her to make the assertion that the history of India was the history of the Hindus? No. For while in Hindu India the Rajputs were busy fighting each other in the vanity of a suicidal competition of bravery, the Mussulmans swept in through the breaches created by their dissensions, and, scattering themselves all over the country, they also made it their own by living and dying on its soil.

If now we try to draw the line here crying: 'Stop! Enough! Let us make the history of India a history of Hindu and Moslem!' will the Great Architect, who is broadening out the history of humanity in ever-increasing circles, modify his plans simply to gratify our pride?

Whether India is to be yours or mine, whether it is to belong more to the Hindu, or to the Moslem, or whether some other race is to assert a greater supremacy than either- that is not the problem with which Providence is

exercised. It is not as if, at the bar of the judgment seat of the Almighty, different advocates were engaged in pleading the rival causes of Hindu, Moslem, and Westerner, and as if the party which wins the decree shall finally plant the standard of permanent possession. It is our vanity which makes us think that it is a battle between contending rights: the only battle is the eternal one, between Truth and untruth.

The Ultimate, the Perfect, is concerned with the All, and is evolving itself through every kind of obstacle and opposing force. Only to the extent that our efforts assist in the progress of this evolution, can they be successful. Attempts to push on one's self alone, whether made by individuals or nations, have no importance in the processes of Providence. That Alexander did not succeed in bringing the whole earth under the flag of Greece was merely a case of unsatisfied ambition, which has long ceased to be of concern to the world. The preparation of Rome for a world-empire was shattered to pieces by the Barbarians; but this fall of Rome's pride is not bewailed by the world today. Greece and Rome shipped their golden harvests on the bark of time their failure to get a passage on it for themselves as well proved no loss, but rather lightened its burden.

So, in the evolving history of India, the principle at work is not the ultimate glorification of the Hindu, or any other race. In India, the history of humanity is seeking to elaborate a specific ideal, to give to general perfection a special form which shall be for the gain of all humanity; nothing less than this is its end and aim. And in the creation of this ideal type, if Hindu, Moslem, and Christian should have to submerge the aggressive part of their individuality, that may hurt their sectarian pride, but will not be accounted a loss by the standard of Truth and Right.

We are all here as factors in the making of the history of Greater India. If any one factor should become rebellious and arrogate to itself an undue predominance, that will only interfere with the general progress. The section which is unable or unwilling to adapt itself to the entire scheme, but struggles to keep up a separate existence, will have to drop out and be lost, sooner or later. And the component which, realizing its dedication to the ultimate ideal, acknowledges its own individual unimportance, will lose only its pettiness and find permanence for its greatness in that of the whole.

So, for ourselves, we must bear in mind that India is not engaged in recording solely our story; but that it is we who are called upon to take our place in the great drama, which has India for its stage. If we do not fit ourselves to play our part, it is we who will have to go. If we stand aloof from the rest, in the pride of past achievement, content with heaping up obstacles around ourselves, God will punish us, either by afflicting us with sorrow unceasing till He has brought us to a level with the rest, or by casting us aside as mere impediments. If we insist on segregating ourselves in our pride of exclusiveness, fondly clinging to the belief that Providence is specially concerned in our own particular development; if we persist in regarding our dharma as ours alone, our institutions as specially fit only for ourselves, our places of worship as requiring to be carefully guarded against all incomers, our wisdom as dependent for its safety on being locked up in our strong rooms then we shall simply await, in the prison of our own contriving, for the execution of the death sentence which in that case the world of humanity will surely pronounce against us.

Of late the British have come in and occupied an important place in India's

history. This was not an uncalled-for, accidental intrusion. If India had been deprived of touch with the West, she would have lacked an element essential for her attainment of perfection. Europe now has her lamp ablaze. We must light our torches at its wick and make a fresh start on the highway of time. That our forefathers, three thousand years ago, had finished extracting all that was of value from the universe, is not a worthy thought. We are not so unfortunate, nor the universe so poor. Were it true that all that was to be done has been done in the past, once for all, then our continued existence could only be a burden to the earth, and so would not be possible. With what present duty, in what future hope, can they live who imagine that they have attained completeness in their greatgrandfathers, and whose sole idea is to shield themselves against the influx of the Modern behind the barriers of antiquated belief and custom?

The Englishman has come through the breach in our crumbling walls, as the messenger of the Lord of the worldfestival, to tell us that the world has need of us; not where we are petty, but where we can help, with the force of our Life, to rouse the World in wisdom, love, and work, in the expansion of insight, knowledge, and mutuality. Unless we can justify the mission on which the Englishman has been sent, until we can set out with him to honor the invitation of which he is the bearer, he cannot but remain with us as our tormentor, the disturber of our quietism. So long as we fail to make good the arrival of the Englishman, it will not be within our power to get rid of him.

The India to which the Englishman has come with his message is the India which is shooting up toward the future from within the bursting seed of the past. This new India belongs to humanity. What right have we to say who

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