It's only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it out. Inside are the bones of up to 300 children, Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children who lived in the dormitory of this ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did indeed commit genocide against the Armenians.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – who are now campaigning to prevent the US Congress acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians was a genocide – should come here to this Lebanese village and hang their heads in shame. For this is a tragic tale of brutality against defenceless children whose families had already been murdered by Turkish forces.
Jemal Pasha, one of the architects of the 1915 genocide, and – alas – Turkey's first feminist, Halide Edip Adivar, helped to run this orphanage of terror in which Armenian children were systematically deprived of their Armenian identity and given new Turkish names, forced to become Muslims and beaten savagely if they were heard to speak Armenian.
The Antoura Lazarist college priests have recorded how its original Lazarist teachers were expelled and how Jemal Pasha presented himself at the front door after a muezzin began calling for Muslim prayers once the statue of the Virgin Mary had been taken from the belfry.
Hitherto, the argument that Armenians suffered a genocide has rested on the deliberate nature of the slaughter. But Article II of the 1951 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide specifically states that the definition of genocide – "to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" – includes "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group". This is exactly what the Turks did in Lebanon.
Before he died in 1989, Karnig Panian – who was six years old when he arrived at Antoura in 1916 – described how, after cruel treatment or through physical weakness, many children died. They were buried behind the old college chapel and the wild animals would dig them up and throw their bones here and there ... at night, kids would run out to the nearby forest to get any fruits they could find – and their feet would hit bones. They would take these bones back to their rooms and grind them to make soup, in order to survive starvation.
Using college records, Emile Joppin, the head priest at the Lazarite Antoura college, wrote in the school's magazine in 1947 that "the Armenian orphans were Islamicised, circumcised and given new Arab or Turkish names."
Lebanese-born Armenian-American electrical engineer Missak Kelechian researches Armenian history as a hobby and hunted down a rare 1918 report by an American Red Cross officer, who arrived at the Antoura college after its liberation by British and French troops and who spoke to the surviving orphans. His much earlier account entirely supports that of Father Joppin's research.
Halide Adivar, later to be lauded by The New York Times as "the Turkish Joan of Arc" – a description that Armenians obviously questioned – was born in Constantinople in 1884 and attended an American college in the Ottoman capital. She served as a woman officer in Mustafa Ataturk's Turkish army of liberation after the First World War. She later lived in both Britain and France.
And it was Kelechian yet again who found Adivar's memoirs, published in New York in 1926, in which she recalls how Jemal Pasha, commander of the Turkish 4th Army in Damascus, toured Antoura orphanage with her. "I said: Why do you allow Armenian children to be called by Moslim [sic] names? It looks like turning the Armenians into Moslims, and history will revenge it on the coming generation of Turks.' 'You are an idealist,' he answered... This is a Moslem orphanage and only Moslem orphans are allowed.'" According to Adivar, Jemal Pasha promised they would go "back to their people" after the war.
Adivar says she told the general that: "I will never have anything to do with such an orphanage" but claims that Jemal Pasha replied: " if you see them in misery and suffering, you will go to them and not think for a moment about their names and religion." Which is exactly what she did.
Later in the war, however, Adivar spoke to Talaat Pasha, the architect of the 20th century's first holocaust, and recalled how he almost lost his temper when discussing the Armenian "deportations" (as she put it), saying: " I have a heart as good as yours, and it keeps me awake at night to think of the human suffering. But that is a personal thing, and I am here on this earth to think of my people and not of my sensibilities ... There was an equal number of Turks and Moslems massacred during the [1912] Balkan war, yet the world kept a criminal silence. I have the conviction that as long as a nation does the best for its own interests, and succeeds, the world admires it and thinks it moral."
The suffering of which Talaat Pasha spoke so chillingly was all too evident to Trowbridge when he himself met the orphans of Antoura. Many had seen their parents murdered and their sisters raped. Ten-year-old Takhouhi was put with her family on a freight train to Konia. Her two brothers died in the truck, both parents caught typhus – they died in the arms of Takhouhi.
Talaat Pasha did indeed die for his sins. He was assassinated by an Armenian in Berlin in 1922. Jemal Pasha was murdered in the Turkish town of Tiflis
It was only in 1993 that the bones of the children were discovered, when the Lazarite Fathers dug the foundations for new classrooms. What was left of the remains were moved respectfully to the little cemetery and put in a single, deep grave. Kelechian helped me over a 5ft wall to look at this place of sadness, shaded by tall trees. Neither name-plate nor headstone marks their mass grave.
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The Independent (abridged)
