graphics mode c r o s s X c o n n e c t previous | next

| main page
| issue contents
| contributors
| e-mail us
x
c
o
n
n
e
c
t
   t h e    a r m e n i a n    q u e s t i o n,    1 9 1 5

--- G R E G O R Y   D J A N I K I A N


			And from the outside world the perpetrators of
			genocide learned the lesson of impunity.
				--Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell"

How much more killing would it have taken, how many more bodies piled up like rugs along the roadsides, how many photographs

...mute testimony...

how much more proof, how many eyewitness descriptions, diaries, how many official dispatches of outrage from attachés, provincial consuls, how many more cables from Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to Constantinople

...history of the human race contains no such horrible episode... persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant...

from Count Wolff-Metternich, German ambassador to Turkey

...the misery of the Armenians is indescribable and far greater than we have been told... if we cannot act... how many more accounts by foreigners caught up in the nightmare journey, nurses, doctors, how many by Martin Niepage who could see the starvation camps from his classroom, the children emaciated, having forgotten how to eat Amid such surroundings, how are we... to decline and conjugate irrelevant words... our educational work becomes a mockery of human sympathy... by relief workers in the eastern provinces, by Europeans traveling on business who could only watch from their windows, hear the appeals for bread from their rooftops

...the most dreadful massacres. everlasting infamy will be attached...

how many stories in the New York Times of the exterminations, more than the 145 already run--

...atrocities surpassing the savagery of Genghis Kahn and Tamerlane... even the most hardened heart must bleed...

how many letters on the editorial pages by witnesses who could scarcely endure their own words, how many by Viscount Bryce himself

the story of these horrors must surely touch... no man in whom any pity lives can...

how many speeches by the Archbishop of Canterbury

...not merely render impossible the continuance of the present horrors, we want to prevent their recurrence in years to come...

lectures given by Armin Wegner, writer, photographer, having taken more than 8000 grisly pictures and writing to Woodrow Wilson Travelers passing along the road turned their eyes away in horror... If you, Mr. President... championing oppressed nations... will not fail to perceive...

how many more children bayoneted, men carved up on the butcher's block, how many women raped and left for the others

how many more before a word might have been whispered in just right ear, some small show of disapproval, some signal to say we don't intend for this to go on something besides utter annihilation to put an end to it?

© crossconnect, inc 1995-2004 |
published in association with the |
university of pennsylvania's kelly writers house |