Documents: Swedish Newspaper

The following is a selection of newspaper articles about the ongoing massacres in the Ottoman Empire during WWI. The cited articles are from: Svenska Morgonbladet (SvM), Dagens Nyheter (DN), Nya Daglig Allehanda (NDA), Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) and the Socialdemokraten (SD).

1915 | 1916 | 1917 | 1918 | 1919 | 1920


1915


SvM 26/5 Terrible massacres in Armenia
(Paris) Since about a month ago, the Kurdish and Turkish people in Armenia have in accord with each other and with the help of Turkish authorities undertaken mass murders of Armenians. These have occurred in the middle of April, in Erzerum, Dertsjun, Egin, Bitlis, Mush, Sassun and other places.


SvM 28/9 A small page out of the war history
Monday 19 April began the slaughter of Armenians around Van. In one place 2,500 men were killed. They were put in groups of 50 and were shot. Even the boys shred the men's fate. But the girls and the women were given to the soldiers to be treated as they pleased. Many were subjected to ignominious force. Women tried to escape to the mountains, where they tried to satisfy their hunger with snow.


SvM 2/10 The recent atrocities against the Armenians
(London) From Samsun, and Trebizond, from Ordu and Aintab, Marash and Erzerum stories about atrocities are received. People are crucified in cold blood, mutilated and forced to perform hard labour. Large crowds of children are taken away and forcibly converted to Islam, women violated and taken as slaves to the interior of the country, shot down or sent out with their children in the desert west of Mosul, where there is neither food nor drink to be found. - Many of these unfortunates do not even get to the destination. Their guards drive them on, so that many of them fall and when the kicking and punching does not persuade them any longer, they are left to perish by the wayside. The road these caravans go is characterized by flocks of ravens. The victims are often tied two in pairs with their backs to each other and then thrown alive in to the rivers.



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SvM 6/10 United States and the massacres of Armenians
(Washington) United States Ambassador in Constantinople, Morgenthau, has been ordered to inform the Turkish Foreign Secretary that if the massacre of the Armenians do not stop, the friendly relations with the United States will to be endangered.

1916


DN 22/2
The Turks flee now through that part of Armenia where the Turkish gendarmes in September last year drove women and children by the thousands into the houses which were then set on fire so that the stench of the burned corpses filled the air.


DN 7/6 Atrocities against Armenians
(Petersburg) The delegate of the Caucasian Department of the urban league, Baboff, has completed its survey of 45 Armenian villages in the neighborhood of Trebizond, which before the war housed 8,343 inhabitants against 367, who were found after the area was occupied by the Russians. In Trebizond, for each 10,000 inhabitants only 92 are remaining alive. The eradication of Armenians has proceeded systematically.


DN 15/8 The Armenian calamity during the war
Armenian Arschak Safrastian, who was a correspondent for the English newspapers, depicts the human slaughter in Turkey with shocking realism. He denies that the Turks can crack the surviving Armenians' moral courage:
We are a small people. All our young men have been killed and our beautiful women have been desecrated; but we have an unquenchable vitality. We want to live! And therefore we hope that the day again will come when we can rise up against the oppressor as that of the Prussia which was once annihilated by the Napoleonic wars, but which rose up against their enemy.
Now, it is necessary to try to do something for the half million Armenians who were chased away to Mesopotamia, where a certain death awaits them unless a helping hand reaches out to them. The atrocities committed until now have been done with the German government's blessing. But the German nation does certainly know nothing about this. I know that the German missionaries in Turkey, who have seen everything have written to their homeland in indignant terms of what has happened. But these letters have been censored and so they have never come to the German people's knowledge about how things are down there.



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DN 30/8 A Challenge against Swedish chivalry
The Swedish initiatives to help the Armenians are absent. The editor G H Von Kock points out the Swedish passivity:
It is with sorrow that one must also note that, as far as it is known, yet has nothing or at least very little been done to succor the Christian Armenians and Syrians in Asia Minor who have in hundreds of thousands been murdered by Kurds and Turks. Regarding this horrible religious war, about which the testimonies begin to arrive from impartial missionaries and American aid expeditions and are also depicted in a heartbreaking way in Swedish newspapers, not even the Swedish Christian Church has a uttered a shining cry for help and support. It sometimes feels as if we here in Sweden have been paralyzed before all the misery that prevails now and constantly increases in the world.



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1917

DN 24/3 Sweden and Armenia's fate
Interpellation to the Minister by the Mayor of Stockholm Carl Lindhagen:
Could it possibly be expected by the government whether it, alone or in conjunction with other neutral governments, , who could have any influence on the issue, to rise for the Armenian population's right to protect their lives, their property and their nationality?


SvD 28/3 Protest Meeting for Armenians
Against the assaults towards the Armenians, a protest rally is held before a full house at the Auditorium in Stockholm. Mayor Carl Lindhagen is presiding the meeting, the Social Democratic leader Hjalmar Branting holds the opening speech and the author Marika Stjernstedt delivers the keynote speech. The French, Russian, Belgian and Italian Ambassadors are present. A collection takes place.
Branting: The suffering of the Armenians did not begin during World War I; time after time during the recent decades information about the devastation which has struck the country has reached the civilized world. And though now during the war a long silence prevailed down there, testimonies have finally not been able to be silenced. The messages became more forceful and more ominous and 1916 came the great accusation, the English historian Viscount Bryce's collection of documents, with testimony from 150 people who were eyewitnesses to the massacres ... There are the testimonies amassed, given by the credible and impartial people: Americans, Armenians, Scandinavians, some of them missionaries, and by not so small number of Germans ... They have testified that in Armenia a fully organized genocide [folkmord] has been executed and the incidents down there is unprecedented in all that has happened during the war.
Stjernstedt: Armenians are, like us, an Aryan and a Christian people ... They have always had a high culture, are tough, industrious and talented and have, precisely because of these characteristics always been a thorn in the eye of the Turks. However, unlike most other conquered people, the Armenians have never had any separatist aspirations ... Then came the 1915. The Young Turks thought to resolve the Armenian question, while the world was busy elsewhere, and deportations and massacres, organized in every detail were launched. There has been attempts from the Turkish side to advance arguments for the procedure, reasons which however, according to unanimous testimonies, are unsustainable ... The atrocities started with a general disarming. Afterward searches and torturous hearings to force confessions, whereby all medieval torture methods were used. And then came the order that after a few days of grace period to leave home and country; the so-called deportations, when the hundreds of thousands of people were driven away, down to the Syrian deserts to perish there, unless they died on the way of privation, abuse, and fatigue, which much more than half of them did any how... The children were torn from their parents, were sent to Mohammedan homes, men were in the hundreds put into boats and were drowned. Almost all young women in the deportation caravans were desecrated, madness and suicide were daily phenomena; women and children, who could not manage to follow, were driven to huge bonfires, and stench from these then poisoned the air. In months the Euphrates brought a lot of corpses around, often several bodies tied together, massacred in the most horrible ways. However, the most lucky were those who, in what terrible manner then it may happened, were killed. The deportation caravans were worse. Of several thousand deportees only a few hundred reached the destination, to helplessly die in the hot deserts of Syria ... The Turkish minister in Berlin: They reproach us for not making any difference between the guilty and the innocent. But it has been impossible for us. By the way, those who are not guilty today will certainly be so tomorrow.



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SvM 2/4 A Turkish protest in regard to the Auditorium meeting
The Turkish legation in Stockholm is noticeably annoyed by the protest meeting in the Auditorium. The legation assures the Swedish readers that it has always been the Armenians who have instituted the bloody clashes between Armenians and Muslims in Turkey.
When the world war broke, the Turkish government stated that any revolt attempts should be punished severely. The Armenians continued nevertheless their former policy and bloodshed and attacks on Turks began - in a word, all symptoms of a full rebellion.


DN 11/4
Marika Stjernstedt comes back with an enthusiastic article about the Armenian massacres. New eyewitnesses confirm the charges against the Turks.


DN 2/8 War and the Armenians. What they expect of peace
To the upcoming international peace conference in Stockholm which has already gathered numerous delegates from east and west, the devastated and occupied Armenia has also sent a representative of its scattered people, namely Mr. Zorian. Mr. Zorian was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Armenia and now comes from the Caucasus via Russia ... He will in the Congress especially highlight the principle of peoples' freedom of self determination over their own destiny. Thus, a possible free Poland, Finland, Armenia, according to the respective people's desire to live independently or dependent under another state ... The population of the provinces who rose and managed to defend themselves until Russian reinforcements have managed to arrive, as already mentioned, have found refuge in Russian territory. Much of the Armenian people have, however, been sent to the interior of the Turkish Empire. Women and children have been sold off, ended up in the Turkish harems and disappeared without any trace. Towns and villages stand in ruins, especially the Christian churches and monasteries are demolished and their inhabitants have been killed.



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1918


SvD 30/3 To be an autonomous Armenia is created:
(Petrograd)
Caucasian Parliament, after declaring the country independent, approved the establishment of a separate peace with Turkey, whereby the boundaries of 1914 restored and an independent Armenia is created.


SvD 6/4 Armenian war against the Turks
(Petrograd)
The papers include a telegram from Tifilis, according to which the Armenian elite troops under the command of national hero Andronio have recaptured Erzerum and its entire surrounding from the Turks.


Svenska Dagbladet, SvM 28/5 The Turks commit mass murder
(Moscow)
... The events which take place show that the policy of extermination against the Armenian people which has been used over decades will continue. Russia had the upper hand on the Turkish front and was forced to abandon Ardahan, Kars and Batum on the sole ground that Turkey had Germany as an ally. The responsibility for the atrocities against the Armenian people ... falls thereby likewise on the German government, whose direct support gave Turkey the opportunity to take possession of these lands.


DN 10/8 The displaced Armenians will return to their country
(Constantinople)
It has now been decided to recall those Armenians who have been deported and are now in various vilayets. This favor towards the Armenians will give them another opportunity to show their feelings of gratitude towards the imperial throne. The paper clarifies the benefits which the empire can have from commercial and economic point of view from the Armenian element as soon as they return to their core.



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1919


SvM 3/1
The massacre in Armenia have claimed 1.5 million victims in accordance to a French commission of inquiry.


SvM 11/2 Armenians' executioners are ransacked
Governors and commanders who are accused of having instigated the massacres are court-martialed.


SvM 25/2
Women in Scandinavia appeal for the Armenians. The books Blood and tears, and At the foot of Ararat, issued by the Swedish Mission Church publishing hous, are recommended in an ad entitled An Appeal.


SvM 15/8
A U.S. investigation commission is sent to Armenia in order to, on President Wilson's initiative, investigate the situation from the military point of view.


DN 1/9
In America, the mandate mission is discussed, which the Republicans condemn.



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1920


DN 19/2
Turkish troops and Kurds have massacred 7,000 Armenians in Cilicia.


SvD 19/2
The Peace Conference today appointed an international committee which will consider the borders of the Armenian Republic.


SvD 29/2
16,000 people have been killed in Marash in Cicilia during the evacuation of the French troops.


NDA 12/3
The Allies consider the massacres in Marash as a deliberate attempt by the Turkish side to preclude the implementation of the planned peace treaty.


SvD 18/3
The organisation Save the Children is appealing for help for Armenia's children.



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SvD 26/3
Armenia should obtain as much territory as possible, and access to the sea, states President Wilson in a note concerning Turkey. The mandate for Armenia is offered to the League of Nations.


SvM 6/4
The United States would not undertake the mandate.


DN 15/4 A global loan for Armenia's establishment. Mandate to Sweden
(Kristiania) From London as telegraph has reached Morgenbladet:
Daily News reports that the League of Nations at its Council meeting in Paris has suggested that an international loan is to be taken for Armenia, to which all the League member nations of shall contribute. It is hoped that it should thereby be easier to find a state which wants to take over the mandate over Armenia. Daily News reports that it would evoke great satisfaction if the Netherlands, Sweden or Norway were able to take upon themselves the mandate obligation, whereby even Canada seems to be willing. The final decision is likely to take place during the Allied meeting in San Remo.



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SvD 22/4
League of Nations has declined to take mandate over Armenia.


DN 23/4 Sweden does not wish to receive the mandate over Armenia
The mandate over Armenia is not, as suggested previously, to the League but to a neutral power. Thus, as a first choice, the conference had Sweden in mind or Norway, as a second choice if they would be willing, as it is said, to help the Armenian people to create a free state ... It seems so, that the Swedish side, with bearing in mind the objective which may underlie such a task, is of the view that an assignment for mandate over Armenia would pose too onerous economic and military claim to our country.



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SvM 24/4
The Conference in San Remo has approved the proposal to grant Erzurum to Armenia.


SvM 26/4
"Armenia - a country where Swedish mission has been conducted successfully for 35 years," is the title of an article about Armenia in connection with the proposal that Sweden, Norway or Holland would be mandate power for Armenia.


DN 29/4
The League of Nations has not, as stated previously, refused to undertake the mandate over Armenia, but, the Council has declared its willingness that, since it obviously lacks the financial and military resources, encourage some of the League member states to undertake the task. It is envisaged some of the smaller, neutral states, provided that financial resources were made available from another sources. The League Council's plan is based on the fact that the powers represented in the Allied Supreme Council will share the expenditure.


DN 3/6
U.S. Government assumes no mandate over Armenia and has also declined the proposal for an international commission for Armenia's reconstruction.



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DN 22/10 Armenia asks the Allies for help against Russia
(Paris) Armenia have appealed to the Allies for help because of Soviet-Russia's ultimatum. No decision has yet been made. According to a Bussel telegram, Independence Belge states that the League of Nations regarding Armenia was to propose that the Supreme Council should determine a mandate power for the country.


DN 22/11 Armenia had to be saved
(Geneva) At the League of Nation's Assembly on Saturday morning the Belgian delegate, Senator Lafontaine, emphasized in profound terms his conviction that Armenia is dying and will be destroyed before the sight of a congregation of nations, which counts 41 states with millions of soldiers. If we had an international army, we would have the means to act. The speaker suggested that a commission would be appointed with instructions to immediately address the issue of Armenia's rescue and demanded that the countries which suffered least from the war shall be the soldiers of the justice.


DN 23/11 The League of Nations decides aid to Armenia
(Geneva) The meeting began with a short speech by Branting, who urged that the major powers would at last give Armenia effective help and gave his support to Robert Cecil's proposal with a additional proposal by the Belgian Socialist Lafontaine. These proposals are based on the idea that a commission of six members would be appointed to propose practical measures. Branting's speech, which was delivered in French, and was delivered clearly and energetically aroused the liveliest applause.


NDA 23/11
Will the Armenian question lead to the establishment of an international police force?



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DN 26/11 Armenians conclude treaty with Moscow
(London) Times reports from Constantinople on the 23:rd on this month that the Armenian government resigned due to its inability to simultaneously fight the internal disorder and the Turkish invasion at the same time that the successor extremists, who signed the treaty with Moscow on November 11, whereby they enter an immediate ceasefire with the Turks and the Bolshevik occupation of the disputed territories, pending the establishment of a definitive peace. According to the message from Tifilis, the Turks are unhappy with the agreement.


DN 30/11 The Armenian independent Soviet Republic
(Paris) According to the telegram from Constantinople it is stated that the government in Moscow considers Armenia as an independent soviet republic.


DN 2/12 A truce between Turks and Armenians
Peace negotiations have begun on November 25 in Alexandropol in the presence of a Bolshevik commissioner.



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