The best answer to the question of genocide is the report written by Leslie Davis, who was U.S. consul in Harput in eastern Turkey from 1914 to 1917. The 132-page account was only recently found in the National Archives by Susan Blair, a researcher obsessed with compiling proof of the Armenian genocide. Davis's report, written upon his return to the United States, makes up the bulk of this book, which has an enthusiastic introduction and informative annotation by Blair, who received bomb threats after the book's publication was announced.
The Davis report is a find, the first unearthed eyewitness account from a neutral party, and we should all be grateful for Blair's sleuthing. Davis was a keen observer in a remote outpost. He was a good reporter,…show more content… They left without resistance. But soon reports came in that the Armenian men had been taken into the mountains and killed by Turkish guards. In one episode, on July 5, 1915, about 800 Armenian men were arrested, marched out of town into the mountains and slaughtered. Turkish gendarmes, who began the massacre using their rifles, were ordered not to waste bullets and to employ their bayonets instead. Armenian children, Davis reported, were drowned in a nearby…show more content… Turkish society is not well acquitted in his report. He described Turks holding prayer meetings in front of the consulate, where he hid Armenians. "We could all hear them piously calling upon Allah to bless them in their efforts to kill the hated Christians." When Armenians were "deported" and had to get rid of their possessions, their Turkish neighbors gladly bought their valuable property at bargain rates.
Armenians rounded up in other areas of the country were marched through Davis's region, and the consul investigated the camps outside Harput, where the deportees were kept: "All of them were in rags and many of them were almost naked. They were emaciated, sick, diseased, filthy, covered with dirt and vermin, resembling animals far more than human beings." When Davis first saw one of these camps he found it "the most horrible scene I have ever witnessed, one not surpassed by any in Dante's 'Inferno.' " The vilayet, or province, where his consulate was based came to be known as the "Slaughterhouse
