Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Slaughterhouse Province An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide 1915-1917 by Lesl The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide 1915-1917 by Leslie A. Davis. "30 June. Sir: I have the honor to report to the Embassy about one of the severest measures ever taken by any government and one of the greatest tragedies in all history. Practically every male Armenian of any consequence at all here has been arrested and put in prison. A great many of them were subjected to the most cruel tortures under which some of them died. Another method was found, however, to destroy the Armenian race. This is no less than the deportation of the entire Armenian population, not only from this province, but, I understand, from all six provinces comprising Armenia. For people travelling as these Armenians who are going into exile will be obliged to travel it is certain death for by far the greater part of them. During the last three days crowds of people have visited the Consulate and the American Mission for help of some kind. All feel they are going to certain death. " Citation from: Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province. An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917 (New Rochelle, New York, Aristide D. Caratzas, 1989), pg. 143-7. The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917. Davis, Leslie A. New York: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1988, 224 pages. ISBN 0-89241-458-8. "We know how the largest party of all, the one that left Mamouret-ul-Aziz on Saturday, July 3rd, was taken to Malatia where, as they were entering the city, the men were separated from the women and all of them brutally massacred by the gendarmes; we know how the gendarmes informed some other men that the Vali had sent for them to return to Mamouter-ul-Aziz and when they had taken them a short distance killed everyone of them; we know how their wives and daughters were outraged by the gendarmes who accompanied them and by the Kurds and Arabs whom they met; we know how these women and children were driven over the desert in midsummer and robbed and pillaged of whatever they had. we have heard how thousands from all parts of the Empire were brought together at Deir-ez-Zor, where they remained in the most wretched poverty for nearly a year, after which all who had not perished in the meantime were massacred just outside the city." Leslie Davis. Leslie A. Davis , né en 1876 et mort en 1960, est un diplomate américain en poste dans l'Empire ottoman entre 1914 et 1917. Il est connu pour avoir été l'un des témoins du génocide arménien. Sommaire. Biographie. De 1909 à 1911 Davis fut avocat à New York. Il débuta par la suite sa carrière diplomatique par Batoumi puis il voyagea à travers l'Ouzbékistan et le Caucase. De 1914 à 1917, il est consul américain à Harput. En mai 1918 , il devient le représentant américain à Arkhangelsk, puis il s'installe à Helsinki. Témoin du génocide arménien. Leslie Davis est consul à Harput, dans le vilayet de Mamouret-ul-Aziz. Au début de la Première Guerre mondiale, il est sur le point de partir en congés en Amérique quand il reçoit la consigne de retourner à son poste pour veiller aux intérêts des ressortissants américains sur place : cette région pauvre et reculée n'a aucune activité économique notable mais elle abrite plusieurs écoles chrétiennes et elle est un des points de départ de la diaspora arménienne aux États-Unis. Davis est le seul diplomate étranger dans cette région, ses plus proches collègues étant les consuls américain et allemand à Alep. Au cours de l'année 1915, il voit arriver dans la région plusieurs convois d' Arméniens expulsés de leurs régions d'origine, les uns pour être ensuite déportés vers Deir ez-Zor, les autres égorgés dans la région de Harput. Après la guerre, ses télégraphes et son rapport final sont publiés sous le titre : The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917 [traduction française : La Province de la mort , Complexe, 1994, préface d'Yves Ternon]. The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide 1915-1917 by Leslie A. Davis. Leslie A. Davis (1876 - 1960) was an American diplomat and wartime consul in Kharbert (Kharput), Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1917 and witnessed the Armenian. Between 1909 and 1911 Davis worked as a lawyer in New York. He began a diplomatic career in Batumi and then traveled to Uzbekistan and the Caucasus. From 1914 to 1917 he was U.S. consul in Kharput, Ottoman Turkey. In May 1918 he was appointed the U.S. representative in Arkhangelsk, Russia and moved to Helsinki. While working as a U.S. consul in Kharput, Davis personally witnessed how many of the Armenian population, who were being deported from the outskirts of Kharput to Der Zor's desert of Syria, were redirected in Kharput "only to be slaughtered in this province." Some of his observations concerned the condition of Armenian deportees who arrived from the north. He noted that there were no men in the caravans and the remaining surviving members were very maltreated, starved and exhausted. [1] Leslie Davis was among the mixed group of Americans who examined mass graves of killed Armenians near Kharput. Davis wrote thus a narrative report to the State Department, where he described the tens of thousands of Armenian corpses in and around Lake Geoljuk (present-day Hazar), during his trip to the lake. [2] [3] [4] Mass deportations that had been ordered by the Turks, under which hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forced into trucks and transported hundreds of miles to die in the wilderness or falling victim to killing squads, were far worse than a straightforward massacre, he wrote. "In a massacre many escape, but a wholesale deportation of this kind in this country means a longer and perhaps even more dreadful death for nearly everyone." [3] Leslie Davis helped some Armenians by allowing 80 of them to live in his consulate and organized an underground railway to bring the Armenians on the other side of the Euphrates and into Russia. He did this despite warnings from the Turkish government's ban on helping Armenians. [5] While he did this rescue work, he continued his diplomatic mission and had regular meetings with Kharput's governor, Sabit Bey, who was one of the main characters of the Armenian Genocide. [5] The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat's Report on the Armenian Genocide 1915-1917 by Leslie A. Davis. American diplomat, eye witness of Armenian Genocide Leslie Davis was born in Port Jefferson, New York, in 1876, Davis graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1898. Davis continued his education at George Washington University and obtained a Bachelor’s degree in law in 1904. While still a student, he worked as a journalist. He spoke several languages: English, French, German, Russian and Spanish. Davis’s diplomatic career began in 1912 with his assignment to Batumi (then part of the Russian Empire). In 1913, during a vacation, Davis trekked through Uzbekistan and the Caucasus Mountains and climbed Mount Ararat on September 7, 1913. Due to his manners, described as “unrefined” by A.L. Gottshalk, the head of the American consulate in Batumi, it was decided to delegate him to Kharberd (Harput), “a remote, uncivilized area that did not require courtly manners.” Out of the 13 American consulates across the Ottoman Empire, the one in Kharberd, in the heart of Armenian provinces, was the most remote. Davis’s nearest geographical neighbor was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a deputy consul of Germany in Erzurum. On May 31, 1914, Davis arrived in Kharberd, which he later described as the “slaughterhouse province” in his reports. “It appears that all those… men, women and children were massacred about five hours’ distance from here. In fact, it is almost certain that, with the exception of a very small number of those who were deported during the first days of July, all who left here have been massacred before reaching the borders of the vilayet [province],” Davis wrote. In June 1915, Turkish authorities began arresting Armenian men in Kharberd en masse. On July 1, the first wave of Armenian deportees left Kharberd.“The important thing now is to keep people alive for the present and then to assist them to leave the country as soon as it may be possible. There is no way of knowing, however, what further measures may be taken against the few survivors who remain here and the difficulty under present conditions of saving any in case of emergency from the cut-throats of this region is perhaps greater than can be easily realized by those who are living in more civilized places,” Davis wrote to the U.S. Ambassador in Constantinople Henry Morgenthau on December 30, 1915. Davis risked his own life to hide about 80 Armenians in the building of the American Consulate. One of them was Karapet Petrosyan, the Consulate interpreter and Davis’s bodyguard, corroborated this report. In 1923, Karapet, a Genocide survivor himself, wrote to Wilbur Carr, chief of the Consular Bureau of the State Department: “After a few days we were informed that the people who were deported were being killed within a few miles from the city. Consul Davis would hardly believe this, so he and I went out on horseback from the town and when we were away about three miles, on both sides of the main road the dead bodies could be seen.