Turkey's Special Organization

12/12/2006

The story of the Special Organization's (Teskilat-i Mahsusa) exploits in the melee of World War One is one of history's most tragic and forgotten tales. So that you might appreciate its lessons, and so that a million Christian civilians might not have died in vain, I'd like to review their story in the context of place and time.

In 1914, before the start of World War I, there were two million Armenians eking out a serf-like existence in the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Most were Apostolic Christians. Like all non-Muslims, they were taxed heavily and afforded few civil rights. For example, in a legal dispute, their testimony against a Muslim in Islamic courts was held to be inadmissible. And while Muslims were all armed, it was illegal for a non-Muslim, like an Armenian Christian, to own a weapon of any kind.

In this land poisoned by Islam, the Armenian Christians were called Infidels. They were held in utter contempt, and treated as pigs. If their shadow touched a Turk they were spat upon and forced to wipe the dust from the Muslim's feet. The Christian Armenians were routinely enslaved by the Ottoman Muslims and their homes, property, wives, and children were never safe from attack. But should the Christian resist the Muslim's assault on his family, they would be killed.

During Sultan Hamid's long reign, he suspended the Ottoman constitution so that he would endear himself to the Muslim population by making all forms of abuse on the Christian minority permissible. But the immoral code of conduct only served to weaken his empire, enabling the Russians in 1877 to claim considerable swaths of Ottoman land, including that which was populated by the Armenians. Sadly, the Russians, who treated the Christians as human, ceded their land back to the Islamic regime with the Treaty of Berlin. The terms of the transfer required the Turks to provide legal protections to the Christian Armenians, but being Muslims, the Ottomans disavowed their promises. Minor unrest on behalf of the Armenians met with ruthless brutality on behalf of the Muslims.

Under the control of Islam, the Christians had virtually no rights, their taxes were debilitating without benefit of services, they had no say in the political process, and they had no legal protections. It was discrimination of the worst kind.

Then as they do today, Turkish political authorities in league with Islamic clerics, used their mosques to propagate lies, teach hate, and inspire terrorism. The Muslims were told by their imams that the Armenian Christians, who were unarmed, were poised to attack Islam. The Sultan sent the Ottoman army into the Armenian areas to aid and abet the Muslim militants. A reign of terror ensued with Muslims burning Armenian villages to the ground, raping their women, murdering the men, and selling the children into slavery.

It was as if Muhammad had been reborn. The world was reliving his barbarism against the Qaynuqa, Qurayza, and Khaybar Jews. In the Urfa Cathedral fire alone, 3,000 Christians were burned to death. In Istanbul, 40,000 were massacred. But because Sultan Hamid closed Armenian communities to Western officials and since he prevented Christians from leaving, we will never know how many were murdered in the first phase of the genocide. But according to the most complete investigation conducted, a French commission studying the massacre in its immediate aftermath said that in the Hamidian massacre in 1894 to 1897, 250,000 Christians were slaughtered by the Turks and 1,000.000 were pillaged. Sultan Hamid's First Secretary wrote in his memoirs: "The Sultan decided to pursue a policy of severity and terror against the Armenians." Keep in mind, this was just a warm-up act. The main event was a score of years away.

In the five years before the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire came under the control of the Young Turks, a secret society of university students and military cadets. Their revolt was spurred on in 1908 when the Ottoman Empire was facing the Macedonian Question, with the Russians and Austrian-Hungarians both vying for the Balkans, which at the time were still under the oppressive hand of the Muslims. In order to save their conquered territory, the Ottoman's proposed a new constitution which provided assurances of equal treatment for non-Muslims. But it was this concession which catapulted the Young Turks to power. They immediately rescinded the tolerance provisions. This in turn caused the Ottoman Empire to splinter, with Bosnia-Herzegovina being annexed by Austria-Hungary, Libya and Rhodes being annexed by Italy, and revolts in Albania, Syria, and Egypt.

Since no Islamic nation has ever been economically viable on its own, it has always required plunder. The Ottoman Empire was crumbling not only because there were no new lands to conquer, but also because they were losing their ability to tax their previous conquests. (For those who think that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, Iran, and Iraq are financially viable economically, read the story of OPEC on this site and learn how the crude cartel came to fleece the West.).

By 1913, the Ottoman's were losing the Second Balkan War, prompting a coup and the rise of three Islamic warlords. Known as the Three Pashas, the Turks now had a Grand Vizier named Muhammad, a Minister of War named Ishmael, and a Minister of the Navy named Ahmed. They allied with Germany in 1914, entered the war, and after attacking Russians in the Black Sea and Caucasus, found themselves isolated and fragmented - torn apart by competing factions. In 1915, nearly 90% of the Ottoman 3rd Army was destroyed by Russian forces in the Battle of Sarikamis. In full retreat, Ishmael Enver, who was the Ottoman Minister of War, blamed the Armenians for his defeat.

The Ottoman War Office had already prepared the necessary propaganda to present the Armenian Christians as a liability worthy of death. An Ottoman naval officer in the War Office described the scheme: "In order to justify this enormous crime [of the Armenian Genocide] the requisite propaganda material was thoroughly prepared in Istanbul. It included such statements as ‘the Armenians are in league with the enemy. They will launch an uprising in Istanbul and kill off our leaders.' These vile and malicious incitements were used to persuade people into no longer feeling the pangs of conscience over the fate of these people.".

The defeated Ottoman War Minister, Ishmael Enver, confiscated all weapons possessed by Armenians who had been conscripted into his army. Under the guise of sending the Christians to "labor battalions," he sent them into the clutches of Turkish death squads known as Chetes, similar to the Nazi SS paramilitary Einsatzgruppen, which annihilated Jews during the Second World War. At first, the Christians became Muslim slaves, they then became beasts of burden (construction mules), and eventually, they were slaughtered.

Then, by order of the Ottoman government, the Special Organization (Teskilat-I Mahsusa) was formed to facilitate a final solution to the Armenian Christian problem. On April 24th, 1915, 250 Armenian leaders were arrested during the night. With the community leaderless, the Special Organization began releasing criminal convicts from it prisons, so long as they agreed to serve the Teskilat-I Mahusa by rounding up and escorting Armenian Christians to their death. Vehib, Commander of the Ottoman 3rd Army, called the Muslim convicts employed by the Special Organization "Butchers of the Human Species.".

According to the military tribunals set up after the war, the convicts had to be ruthless killers to be selected as a member of the Special Organization. The Mazhar commission, during the military court, provided lists revealing that most of the participants were in prison for murder. This selection process was clearly indicative of the government's intention to commit mass murder on its Armenian Christian population.

By May 25th, 1915, on orders from the Talat Pasha, the ruling Islamic triumvirate, nearly a million Armenians from across Anatolia to Mesopotamia were forced from their homes and into the Syrian and Iraqi desert. No food, supplies, nor shelter were provided during or after the long forced march of men, women, and children. The defeated Ottoman government prevented their deportees from helping themselves, and they prohibited any outside assistance. During the march, the Islamic criminals serving the Special Organization were encouraged to rob, rape, and kill the Armenian Christians. The Ottoman troops escorting them also participated in these same vile acts.

For those who survived the hellish march, twenty-five concentration camps under the command of the Sukru Kaya were set up to torment them. The Sukru Kaya reported directly to the senior leaders of the Ottoman government and functioned as SS troops. These camps ultimately became little more than mass burial zones, as most of the Armenian Christians who survived their Islamic tormentors lived but a few more days. Those who continued to cling to life were subjected to being burned alive en masse or were given poisoned food.

In total, between 1915 and 1917, the Islamic government of what is today Turkey systematically murdered over a million Christians, bringing the combined assault to 1.3 million Armenians.

The United States was officially a neutral party at this time, and would not join in the war until 1917. As such, the U.S. had consulates throughout the Ottoman Empire. The State Department mission was headed by Ambassador Henry Morgenthau. As the order for deportations and massacres were given, many American consular officials reported back to the ambassador on what they were witnessing. One such documentation came in September 1915 by the American consul in Kharput, Leslie Davis described his discovery of the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians dumped into several ravines near Lake Göeljuk, noting the stench of the corpses. Other eyewitness testimony came from Americans in Aleppo and Van, which prompted meetings with War Minister Enver. He acknowledged the mass exile, but the American Ambassador did nothing and said nothing.

Protestant missionaries in the region vividly described the torturous methods deployed by the Turkish forces, and they documented many accounts of their atrocities. The New York Times ran 145 articles on the genocide, but they could not stir America's collective conscience sufficiently to act on behalf of Islam's victims.

The British, who were fighting the Ottomans in Syria and Iraq witnessed the same mass killings the Americans had reported. A British diplomat in Baghdad wrote down the testimony of a captured Ottoman soldier: "On February 3rd the battalion left Aleppo and reached Ras al-Ain. Some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated under the guard of a hundred Kurds. These Kurds were really just butchers. Parties of them were publicly ordered to take groups of Armenians, of both sexes, to various destinations, but had secret instructions to destroy the males, children and old women. One Kurd confessed to killing 100 Armenians himself. The young women's bodies were abused in such a way as to be indescribable. The empty desert cisterns and caves were filled with corpses.".

Famed historian Arnold Toynbee compiled statements from survivors and eyewitnesses who similarly attested to the deliberate massacre of innocent Armenian Christians by the Islamic Ottoman government and its army. Along with Viscount Bryce, in 1916 they published The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. The University of Oxford said of the tome: "I realize that in times of persecution passions run high. But the evidence of these letters and reports will bear any scrutiny and overpower any skepticism. Their genuineness is established beyond question.".

Winston Churchill in his multi-volume work on the war, The World Crisis, 1911-1918, called the genocide an "administrative holocaust" and noted that "the clearance of race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act could be.... There is no reason to doubt that that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons. The opportunity presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race opposed to all Turkish ambitions.".

German Major General Otto von Lossow attested in 1918: "The Turks have embarked upon the total extermination of the Armenians in Trans-Caucasia.... The aim of Turkish policy is, as I have reiterated, the taking of possession of Armenian districts and the extermination of the Armenians. Talaat's government wants to destroy all Armenians, not just in Turkey but also outside Turkey. On the basis of all the reports and news coming to me here in Tiflis there hardly can be any doubt that the Turks systematically are aiming at the extermination of the few hundred thousand Armenians whom they left alive until now.".

A German military medic who was assigned to serve German troops building a railway through the region, Armin Wegner, took hundreds of pictures, documenting the massacre. He and his German military officers witnessed tens of thousands of Armenians being crammed into cattle cars, up to 90 per car, and shipped by railroad to death camps. While he described the scene as "bestial and cruel" and the purpose "a plan of race extermination," Germans would copy these methods exactly, replicating what they had seen in just twenty years time.

And yet to this day, Turkey denies the whole affair. Their penal code specifically calls for the prosecution of anyone who calls for the recognition of the Armenian genocide. Islam consistently demonstrates that truth needs to be irrelevant and that life is meaningless.

While many of those responsible for the genocide of over a million people (the Armenians claim 1.5 million) were sentenced to death in absentia, the accused not only escaped custody, they destroyed the majority of the government documents pertaining to the Christian holocaust.