Hidden Armenians in Turkey

 
The 1964 reprint of the Naim-Andonian forgeries tried to make a villain out of Halide Edip. Here, she is identified as surrounded by Armenian orphans. To such propagandists, no other orphans existed... no one else suffered, only the Armenians.

It happened at that time that I was visiting Nezih� Hanum in the Red Crescent office, when two frightened boys, one limping and the other wounded on the head, which was tied up with a dirty white rag, broke into her room. They wore the khaki uniform of the orphanages; their clothes were torn, and they looked miserable and frightened beyond description. And they told their story. They came from an orphanage recently brought to the church. They had fiercely objected to being made into Armenians: Armenians had massacred their parents. They had been badly beaten but they had managed to run away. The first member of the police they met had brought them up to the Red Crescent office. They begged in tears to be protected and not sent back. Nezih� Hanum telephoned to a few Turkish press representatives and asked them to take the children to the British embassy and make them say what they had to say to Mr. Ryan, the first dragoman, the man who had been directing the British policy in Turkey for years and who spoke good Turkish. Although well known for his intense hatred of the Turks, still, the sight of two innocent children in this helpless condition might make him look at their case favorably, thought Nezih� Hanum. Two young journalists went with them to the embassy. It was quite dramatic. I heard that as the children were speaking, an Armenian employee entered the room to say something to Mr. Ryan, whereupon one of the children turned and exclaimed, "This is the man who has kicked us and beaten us." Apparently the man was a member of the council in the church of Koum Kapou.

In the meantime these public scandals led the British to ask the American Near East Relief to open a center in Bebek to take care of the children and to give judgment, among other things, as to which was which. The center was opened-it had the advantage of being clean-and the children were well looked after. It was run on more equitable lines; but there also the Armenians got the benefit of the doubt. As Nezih� Hanum had retired, it was Naki� Hanum this time who represented the Turks. She also could not bear it for more than a few weeks. The difficulty was the impossibility of producing official papers. Any child who could not produce identification papers, which many could not, was taken as an Armenian. The last case had been too much for Naki� Hanum. A Turkish boy called Kiazim, from Adana, had been taken as an Armenian but did not submit easily. The boy was the son of a Turkish official in Adana. His father had died. As he had no mother either, the neighbors had given him to the orphanage to get something of an education. The boy remembered his father and his former life very clearly. But when the commission wrote to Adana and asked for a copy of his birth certificate, it was found that the government house, together with the desired papers, had been burned during the riots. The boy was pronounced Armenian. He had stuck to Naki� Hanum, crying and begging to be saved. But the commission was obdurate. Then the boy had stood up and said, "Kiazim is small, Kiazim is weak, his fists cannot protect him, but the time will come when Kiazim will be strong: then he will show the world that he is a Turk."

Naki� Hanum left the Bebek center and never returned, nor could the Bebek center itself keep going. For the Armenians were not content with occasionally wresting a Turkish child from its nationality; they wanted every child brought there to be pronounced an Armenian without exception. So far even the American missionaries could not go in their Christian zeal.

The pain of the little creature affected me strangely as Naki� Hanum told me about it. To me he was a symbol of the helpless Turkish nation at the moment. He had been small and weak.