#meskene

Suriye ordusu Halep'te IŞİD'in elindeki son kasabayı aldı

The camp in Meskene was the first important way station on the line leading to [Der] Zor; it lay at the point where the road from Aleppo intersects the Euphrates. Thinly inhabited at first, the camp grew rapidly in winter 1916. When Hocazâde Hüseyin Bey, a Çerkez [Circassian] from Munbuc, was named Meskene's Sevkiyat [memuru] in January 1916--he succeeded Muhtar Bey--barely 20,00 deportees were living in the camp. In the following weeks, its population jumped to 100,000. The Sub-Directorate for Deportees thereupn decided to add several officers to its staff, including Naim Sefa, well known because he served as Aram Andonian's informant*, and another Çerkez from Munbuc named Ömer. After directing the camp for one year, Hüseyin was relieved of his duties in December 1916, at a moment when the camp had been virtually emptied of its internees. He was replaced by another Hüseyin, known as the One-Eyed Man (Kör). Kör Hüseyin had already distinguished himself as a convoy leader in the camp in Karlık on the outskirts of Aleppo, "where, with his brutality, he had acquired a reputation for terror. He was a short, fat, powerfully built, one-eyed man, and extremely depraved." The camp in Meskene was one of the most deadly on the Euphrates line. Hüseyin Bey's official estimate of the number of Armenians who died there in 1916, carried off by typhus, cholera, or hunger, was 80,000, "although the real figure was much bigger than the well-known çeles kept by the chief gravedigger [mezarcı başı] suggest." Since the chief gravedigger was illiterate, Andonian wrote, he "contented himself with cutting a notch on one of his çeles for every body of which he took charge. Certain people learned from him that the number of bodies that had been simply buried did not include those that had been thrown into the Euphrates: approximately one hundred thousand people, at the very least." Andonian also indicates that there were only 2,100 people in the camp in Meskene in April 1916, most of them craftsmen who would be liquidiated by Kör Hüseyin early in 1917. The German consul, Rössler, confirms that "a Turkish army pharmacist who had been serving in Meskene for six months told [him] that 55,000 Armenians were buried in Meskene alone. A Turkish vice-commander had, moreover, cited the same figure." These estimates of the number of people buried in the city or drowned in the Euphrates indicate that the daily death toll was as high as that registered in the other camps in the area north of Aleppo in which deportees were interned. The American consul Jackson reports similar statistics in a 10 September 1916 dispatch: "Information obtained on the spot permits me to state that nearly 60,000 Armenians are buried there, carried off by hunger, privations of all sorts, intestinal diseases and the typhus that results. As far as the eye can reach, mounds can be seen containing 200 to 300 corpses buried pell-mell, women children and old people belonging to different families." Patriarch Zaven, who traveled through Meskene shortly thereafter on 22 September 1916, saw, above all "bodies and bones" there. Two reports by Armenians from Konya indicate that the Sevkiyat's "inspector general," Hakkı Bey, a çete [gang] chief from Istanbul, arrived in Meskene on 16 August 1916 and had 200 orphans rounded up and "expedited" to Der Zor. Hakkı reminded the deportees that he was now their "second god"--that is, that he had the right of life and death over them. Hardly had the order to set out been issued [than] he took the lead of a squadron of çetes and proceeded to massacre all the males in the convoy on the banks of the Euphrates. Hakkı embodies the symbiosis between the leadership of the Sevkiyat and that of the Special Organization [whose members led in the Armenian Genocide]. Indeed, he does it so clearly that one might well ask if the former was not merely an extension of the latter adapted to the context of the camps and camouflaged as an organization of the Ministry of the Interior.

In 1909, during the Adana massacres, Turkish soldiers attacked Kessab. I was merely a boy then. They were 20,000 strong with Mausers and other artillery.  The men of our town fought back, my father among them, with ancient hunting rifles. We lost 50-60 men before we fled. We returned 5-6 days later to find all our houses burned to the ground. It took us months to rebuild. In 1915, we were the last to be deported out of Kessab because we were Protestant. The American Ambassador in Bolis had apparently secured guarantees for our safety, but we were deported anyway. They took us toward Der-Zor—the interior Syrian desert. Our whole family: my father, mother, four brothers, two sisters. I was 20-21, at the time. We loaded everything we had on mules and horses and set out under armed guards. They took us to Meskeneh on the Euphrates river. Meskeneh was a huge outdoor camp where ten of thousands of Armenians had been deported—bit by bit they were sent to Der-Zor, to their death. We were there for awhile. We lived under tents along with a lot of others from Kessab. Most of the time we had nothing to eat. Sometimes my father would buy bread from the soldiers but they had mixed sand with the flour—so we ate this hard bread and sand crunched under our teeth. Meskeneh was a horrible, horrible place. 60,000 Armenians had been buried under the sand there. When a sandstorm hit, it would blow away a lot of the sand and uncover those remains. Bones, bones, bones were everywhere then. Wherever you looked, wherever you walked.

The crowds were huge in Meskeneh. We were in the middle of a vast sandy area and the Armenians there were from all over, not only from Marash. We had no water and gendarmes would not give us any. There were only two gendarmes for that huge crowd. Just two. Wasn't there a single man among us who could have killed them? We were going to die anyway. Why did we obey those two gendarmes so sheepishly? The word was that from Meskeneh, we were going to be deported to Der-Zor. My father had brought along a tent that was black on one side and white on the other. Each time gendarmes approached us to send another group to Der-Zor, my father would move the tent. He would pitch it on the other side of the crowd—as far away as possible. We were constantly moving. He bought us quite a bit of time that way. Eventually, we crossed the Euphrates River to Rakka where we found an abandoned house—with no doors or windows—and we squatted there. But we still had no food. We used to eat grass. We used to pick grains from animal waste, wash them and then in tin cans fry them to eat. We used to say: "Oh, mommy, if we ever go back to Marash, just give us fried wheat and it will be enough."