Henry Morgenthau:The Diplomat Who Called Out Mass Murder By L. Gordon Crovitz
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-diplomat-who-called-out-mass-murder-1430688452
Using just a pen and a phone, Henry Morgenthau exposed Ottoman atrocities.
Turkey’s massacre of more than one million of its Armenian citizens remains controversial on its 100th anniversary, with Ankara doing its best to whitewash what happened. That’s impossible thanks to a U.S. diplomat who, long before social media and online video, called his fellow Americans’ attention to the atrocities.
In 1915 Henry Morgenthau Sr. was U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He witnessed the first targeted arrests and killings of hundreds of leading Armenians in Istanbul. He gathered reports of forced deportations of Armenians from their homes in eastern Turkey, which few survived. His State Department cables and candid discussions with Turkish officials became a 1918 book, “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” which remains the leading source of information about what happened.
Morgenthau became U.S. ambassador in 1913 and served until 1916, when the U.S. was still neutral in World War I. He established close communications with leading Turkish officials. During the deportations, he collected daily reports from Western missionaries and consular officers across Turkey about the fate of Christian Armenians.
The marches of Armenians from their homes “represented a new method of massacre,” Morgenthau reported—a “campaign of race extermination”: “When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.”
The only modern communication tool Morgenthau had was a telephone, one of the few in Istanbul. He used it to try to persuade the Turkish authorities to stop the atrocities. They were “annoyed” by his pestering.
Interior Minister Talaat Pasha asked him: “Why are you so interested in the Armenians anyway? You are a Jew; these people are Christians. . . . Why can’t you let us do with these Christians as we please?”
Morgenthau replied: “I am not here as a Jew, but as American ambassador. My country contains something like 97 million Christians and something less than three million Jews. So, at least in my ambassadorial capacity, I am 97% Christian. But after all, that is not the point. I do not appeal to you in the name of any race or religion, but merely as a human being.”
He added: “Our people will never forget these massacres. They will always resent the wholesale destruction of Christians in Turkey.”
Morgenthau recruited American missionaries and philanthropists in 1915 to form the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, which solicited donations from across the U.S. The group distributed vivid posters with the tagline “Give or We Perish.” After leaving his post, Morgenthau often spoke on behalf of the relief effort. Americans contributed $100 million, equivalent to almost $2.5 billion today.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secularist who founded modern Turkey after World War I and the empire’s collapse, criticized his predecessors, “who should have been made to account for the lives of millions of Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse from their homes and massacred.”
More recently, debate has focused on whether this was legally a genocide. In marking the anniversary, President Obama called it the “first mass atrocity of the 20th century.” Robert Morgenthau, the ambassador’s grandson and a former Manhattan district attorney, criticized the administration’s equivocation: “Moral leadership is impossible when crimes against humanity are met with euphemisms,” he wrote in New York’s Daily News.
When Pope Francis used the word genocide, Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, responded with a threat: “I condemn the pope and would like to warn him not to make similar mistakes again.”
We like to think that modern communications make us better informed and more engaged than earlier generations. And today’s massacres are well-documented. The online video showing ISIS beheading 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya in February left nothing to the imagination.
After the Turkish atrocities, many Armenians settled in Syria, where their descendants are among the 200,000 who have been killed in the civil war. Christians are targets for ethnic cleansing throughout the Middle East and in North Africa by Islamic State, al Qaeda, al-Shabib, Boko Haram and other Islamist groups.
In 1939 as Hitler prepared to invade Poland, he assured his military commanders that they’d get away with it: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Without resolute leadership in Washington, there is less pressure to stop massacres today than a century ago, when an American diplomat had only a pen and a phone.
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