William Saroyan – a Biography: Part One, Armenian Massacres

William Saroyan the American writer was only possible because of bloodshed.

By the end of the 19th century Turkey – and the now crumbling Ottoman Empire - had ruled Armenia for the best part of five hundred years, and for most of that time had shown little or no interest in the high, rugged, country that borders modern day Iran to the south, Azerbajian to the east, and Georgia to the north. And as Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford describe in their biography of Saroyan, it was only when the Turks found they had to take sides between:

” … a town-building, crop-planting people, the Armenians, and the nomadic Kurds…”

that things became murderous.

If the Armenians had been allowed to fully cultivate its plains Armenia might have become self-sufficient in food and timber. But the Kurds wanted the same land to graze their flocks; they were also numerous enough to ensure the Armenians continued to live in small scattered groups, ensuring they were unable to communicate effectively with each other and therefore fend off what they – the Armenians – increasingly began to see as an enemy supported by the Turkish state. In fact the Turks had already instructed the Armenian farmers to feed and water Kurdish flocks, and the Kurds themselves, as they passed through Armenian farm land.

Through their understandable, and ever louder, complaints the Armenians – who were Christians ruled by Muslims – had become a very large thorn in the Turkish backside, a thorn pushed further and further into that corrupt nation’s faltering flesh by the increasingly vociferous and politically astute Kurds, who, of course, wished only to take over the increasingly pasture rich Armenian homelands (only made and kept fertile by the hard work of the Armenians of course) for themselves. In the end, the Turkish government, in order to, hopefully, rid themselves of the Kurds once and for all from Turkey, gave in, armed the Kurdish tribesmen to the teeth and looked the other away when the inevitable massacres of the peaceful Armenian population took place.

And the massacres were an efficient rehearsal for Hitler’s barbarism, Stalin’s savagery, and the ethnic cleansing of more recent years in Europe and Africa. As Lee and Gifford remind us hundreds, if not thousands, of Armenian men were forced to dig their own graves before being bayoneted (it saved on bullets) to death, leaving only a handful remaining to bury the last before being killed and buried themselves. Women and children were force-marched into the wintry plains without food or water where they were left to die.

It would be this barbarism that forced many thousands of the remaining Armenians to flee their native homeland, including William Saroyan’s forebears.

To Be Continued…