The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian

Author:Peter Balakian [Balakian, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

Leslie Davis worked hard to save Armenians in his region, but he also believed he could make a difference by sending telegrams and dispatches to Ambassador Morgenthau with the hope that the reports they contained would help mobilize relief efforts back home. “Telegram after telegram and dispatch after dispatch” he wrote, “went out from the Consulate…to convey to the Embassy and the Department [of State] news of the terrible tragedy which was taking place around us.” He hoped his dispatches would lead to what he called “some effective protest or some action taken to stop it,” and hoped that “the civilized world might learn of the needs of the survivors.”47 Some of the telegrams did make it through, but many were intercepted by the CUP officials. Davis was not alone in his efforts; he worked carefully with other Americans and Europeans who also were risking their lives to rescue Armenians.

When the deportation orders were announced, Davis and six others went to see the vali, Sabit Bey. Four American missionaries—Dr. Henry Atkinson, Mr. Pierce, Henry Riggs, and his brother Ernest W. Riggs, the current president of the college—along with the German Protestant missionary Johannes Ehmann, and Mr. Picciotto, Austrian assistant director of the Ottoman Bank, were “received in sullen silence,” Henry Riggs wrote. When the group asked the vali to halt the order for the deportation, they were told it was impossible, as “the order had been sent from Constantinople.” As they adamantly requested provisions and safety for the Armenians on the deportation, Sabit Bey answered, “I am going to furnish them with guards who will see to it that no one harms them.” He then assured them that “no one’s nose shall bleed on the journey.” The statements were so absurd, Riggs wrote, that it made them all the more anxious.48

One encounter with the Turkish authorities tested Davis’s mettle and disclosed a new facet of the government’s operation. At the end of the summer of 1915, a new police chief (mudir), Reshid Bey, was assigned to the district. A native of the region, he had been recalled by Talaat from his post in Baghdad because he knew the lay of the land so well. A fat, boyish young man with a smooth face, he played, as Davis put it, “one of the bloodiest roles of all in the tragedy enacted that summer.” A ruthless fanatic, he was intent on one thing: wiping the region clean of Armenians. To Davis he was sociable and friendly, even though he disliked the consul’s concern for the Armenians.49

On the occasion of one of the principal Turkish holidays that summer, Davis appealed to the vali to stop the deportations. The vali asked Davis to put his request in a formal letter and told him that the police chief would see him about it that evening. When Reshid Bey showed up at the consulate that night, he told Davis he had come to collect the letter that the vali had asked him to write earlier (asking

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