The Republic of Armenia, proclaimed on only 12 thousand square kilometres, significantly expanded within one year, when the Ottoman Empire armies, which were defeated in World War I, retreated from the Transcaucasus in accordance with the Mudros Armistice and under pressure from the British. The Armenian forces settled in the Armenian-populated territories left by the Ottoman Turks, right up to the1914 Russian-Turkish borders, including in the Kars and Olti coal mines.
However, when retreating from Armenian territories, the Ottoman Turks took the supplies of bread and food, leaving the Armenian nation starving. In Simon Vratsyan’s words, “The Turks had found a new way to massacre – more realistic and noiseless. Six more months and Russian Armenia would be in the same condition as Turkish Armenia. Was it worth fighting in those conditions, occupying military units and spilling blood in vain? Leaving the problem of the Armenians to hunger and typhoid, the Turks directed their forces towards Baku.”
Armenia’s situation was also worsening because Georgia and Azerbaijan, with whom it had border disputes, were implementing an economic blockade. The situation worsened in December 1918, when a two-week long war erupted between Armenia and Georgia because of a border dispute and Armenia, having no outlet to the sea, became completely blockaded.
In one of its February1919 issues, in an article entitled “Starving Armenia”, this is how the Armenian Haraj newspaper described the situation: “Because of its blind, limitless love and faith towards Russia and its allies, today Armenia is in a severely tragic situation. On all sides it is surrounded by an ill-disposed and hostile circle. It is dying from hunger, cold, a lack of fuel, clothing and medicine, and its friends and neighbours are not helping. Georgia is not giving bread, Azerbaijan is not giving fuel, and its allies are the silent and indifferent spectators to the unique and exceptional tragedy of this martyr nation.”
Besides poverty, the cold, which penetrated to the bone, was distressing the Armenian nation. The foreign press was also not indifferent.
An American eyewitness, overwhelmed by the misery, wrote: “A terrible population! Unspeakably filthy and tatterdemalion throngs; shelterless, death stricken throngs milling from place to place; children crying aloud; women sobbing in broken inarticulate lamentation; men utterly hopeless and reduced to staggering weakness, heedless of the tears rolling down their dirt-streaked faces. As a picture of the Armenians most in evidence in Armenia I can think of nothing better than this, unless I turn to other kinds of mobs. Large numbers here and there, wide-eyed, eager, hands outstretched in wolfish supplication; teeth bared in a ghastly grim that had long since ceased to be a smile – an emancipated, skin-stretched grim, fixed and uncontrollable.”
In Yerevan, Ashtarak, the Sevan basin, the Ararat valley, and in the rest of the regions of the small republic, the starving Armenian nation was literally dying of hunger. Foreign eyewitnesses have left written evidence of the collective, unique sufferings of the Armenian nation.
Igdir (now part of Turkey) was one of Armenia’s most devastated and famine-stricken districts. An American correspondent described the situation there in the spring of 1919, that is, after the freezing weather had already passed: “We found the children, such as they were, inhabiting an orphanage wherein one sickened at the putridity’s horrible odor, and were informed that there were neither medicines nor disinfectants wherewith to allay the conditions of the many little sick-beds. Sick? Say, rather the bed-ridden, a word which more justly describes those tiny, withered up, crone-like creatures, upon whose faces the skin seemed stretched to a drumhead’s tightness; whose peering eyes shot terror and anguish, as if Death’s presence were already perceptible to them, and who lay there at Famine’s climax of physical exhaustion. In those young, yet grotesquely aged faces, we seemed to see a long lifetime of tragedy packed into eight or ten childish years.”
The condition of the orphans and starving children, whose parents had already passed on to the other world from hunger or pandemic, was especially heart-breaking. The homeless masses, the Western Armenians who had survived genocide had become vagrants in the land of starvation.
The population had fallen upon the fields; it was grazing, swelling, and dying. Naked, barefoot, or covering a part of their grotesque bodies with assorted rags, and bent under the burden of their little ones, the refugee population wandered from village to village begging for bread, but bread was not to be found. There were among the refugees, nourished by grass instead of bread, many cases of poisoning. Or else, as if crazed, they roamed the streets uttering incoherent and disconnected phrases. Many of the refugees in this district still lived under open skies and passed their days in the snow, rain, and mud.
The first winter in the Republic of Armenia brought unbearable suffering to the people and insurmountable difficulties to the coalition government of Hovhannes Kajaznuni. The winter of 1918-1919 was one of the longest and most severe in the annals of Yerevan.
“The cruel claws of hunger pierce the Armenian peasant’s breast. Thousands, tens of thousands died,” wrote Artashes Babalyan, one of the witnesses to those dreadful days. “And in six months on a small plot of land, 180,000 Armenians died from hunger and disease. They died without complaining, realising that the last of the grain had been consumed and there was no hope for help.”
The homeless masses, lacking food, clothing, and medicine, passed hellish months under blizzard conditions. The pitiful multitude lay in the snow, in partially-destroyed buildings, on doorsteps of churches, eventually too weak to protest or even to beg any longer. They lived in the land of stalking death, waiting with sunken face and swollen belly for the touch of that angel. And death came, delivering from anguish thousands upon thousands of refugees and native inhabitants alike. Many who withstood the exposure and famine succumbed to the ravaging diseases that infested derelict masses. Typhus was the major killer. The insensible bodies were gathered from the streets by the hundreds each week and covered in mass graves, often without mourners or final rites. The statistics were horrifying. Almost twenty percent of the republic’s population had perished by mid-year. It was verily a land of death.
Visiting Tiflis in the winter of 1919, Avetik Sahakyan, the Speaker of Armenia’s Parliament, related to one of the local journalists, “The situation is dreadful. We were freed by one enemy when another enemy besieged us – hunger and typhus. In our country about two thousand people die each day from the pandemic, mainly from hunger. Currently Armenia needs bread, bread, and bread. The closest store from where to bring grain to Armenia is Kars, where the Turks have stored the wheat they took from our country, as a result of which the Armenian nation is suffering.”
In January 1919, the British sent six trains of wheat and flour from Kars, which was under the control of the Turks, to Alexandrapol, which had passed into Armenian control, and several wagons from Sharur (now part of Nakhijevan/Azerbaijan), which was also in the hands of the Muslims. A small quantity of flour was also brought from Tiflis, after which food supplies did not enter Armenia from abroad until the end of April.
From the first days of February a “Starvation Fund” was opened in the Haraj editorial office. “Starting today our paper is accepting donations for the starving Armenian Nation.” On the second and third pages of the paper, in large letters, were the words, “Help! Armenia’s people are dying from hunger. Help! Help in the name of democracy and humanity. Help the people of Armenia dying from hunger, cold and the lack of clothes, sugar, and medicine. Save the last of our nation from the claws of death. Help!”
“For months everyone is crying out loud. The Armenian nation in Armenia is dying from hunger. This is the naked and cruel truth. But the Armenian community in Tiflis continues its guilty indifference. Moreover, Surfeited Tiflis continues its Roman-style pleasures and profligate life. Our Rome continues its lucullan parties while, there, the Armenian nation is dying. Here, pleasure is the only goal and principle of life. There, hunger and death reign everywhere. It has been a week since our paper and the Zakavkazskoye Slovo have opened the ‘Starvation Fund’. We have only received seven thousand roubles and the Zakavkazskoye Slovo has received roughly double that amount. And this is how billionaire Tiflis responds to starving Armenia,” added the paper.
In January 1919, in order to “stop the starvation threatening the country,” at Prime Minister Kajaznuni’s proposal it became necessary to appeal to the Allied Powers, in particular “To the United States of North America, to import large quantities of bread into Armenia, from foreign markets.”
“Armenia’s appeals, as well as the activities carried out abroad, were finally heard. Help was not late in arriving. The deliverer of help was America; the food dictator [Herbert] Hoover, Europe’s saviour from post-war hunger, helped. Hoover was Armenia’s true savior.”
The American flour reached starving Armenia in the spring of 1919 and ended this horrifying situation. In a short period of time, 21 thousand tons of flour and 4.2 thousand tons of wheat were brought by sea to Batum and from there by train to Armenia. Besides that, the “American Relief Committee” formed in 1915, was taking care of the approximately fifteen thousand orphans (within the territory of Armenia and mainly survivors of the genocide). Large quantities of clothes, underclothes, medicine, condensed milk, sugar, and other food supplies were also sent to Armenia.
Note- This chapter is from Tatul Hakobyan’s book– ARMENIANS and TURKS
In picture- May 28 1919 celebration in Yerevan
