page_title: Halide Edib Adıvar
section_title: During World War I and the Armenian Genocide
hierarchical_section_title: Halide Edib Adıvar / During World War I and the Armenian Genocide
caption_attribution_description: Halide Edib
context_page_description: Halide Edib Adıvar was a Turkish novelist, nationalist, and political leader for women's rights. She was best known for her novels criticizing the low social status of Turkish women and what she saw as the lack of interest of most women in changing their situation.
  During World War I, Halide Edib ran an orphanage at the former Saint Joseph College in Antoura for Armenian orphans.
  She was a Pan-Turkist and several of her novels promoted Turanism.
context_section_description: She married again in 1917 to Dr. Adnan (later Adıvar) and the next year took a job as a lecturer in literature at Istanbul University's Faculty of Letters . It was during this time that she became increasingly active in Turkey's nationalist movement, influenced by the ideas of Ziya Gökalp.
  In 1916–1917, she acted as Ottoman inspector for schools in Damascus, Beirut and the Collège Saint Joseph in Mount Lebanon. The students at these schools included hundreds of Armenian, Arab, Kurdish, and Turkish orphans. In the course of the Armenian Genocide and under the direction of Halide Edib Adıvar and Djemal Pasha, one of the Three Pashas who organized the Armenian Genocide, about 1,000 Armenian and 200 Kurdish children were Turkified at the Collège Saint Joseph in Aintoura.
  Halide Edip's account of her inspectorship emphasizes her humanitarian efforts and her struggles to come to terms with the violence of the situation. However an American witness for The New York Times, describing her as "this little woman who so often boasts of her American ideals of womanhood and of which her Western friends make so much", accused Halide Edip of "calmly planning with [Cemal Pasha] forms of human tortures for Armenian mothers and young women" and taking on "the task of making Turks of their orphaned children." Robert Fisk wrote that Halide Edip "helped to run this orphanage of terror in which Armenian children were systematically deprived of their Armenian identity and given new Turkish names, forced to become Muslims and beaten savagely if they were heard to speak Armenian".
  Karnig Panian, author of Goodbye, Antoura, was a six-year-old Armenian Genocide survivor at the orphanage in 1916. Panian's name was changed to the number 551. He witnessed children that resisted Turkification being punished with beatings and starvation:
  At every sunset in the presence of over 1,000 orphans, when the Turkish flag was lowered, 'Long Live General Pasha!' was recited. That was the first part of the ceremony. Then it was time for punishment for the wrongdoers of the day. They beat us with the falakha [a rod used to beat the soles of the feet], and the top-rank punishment was for speaking Armenian.
  Emile Joppin, the head priest at the Saint Joseph College in Antoura, wrote in a 1947 school magazine:
  The Armenian orphans were Islamicised, circumcised and given new Arab or Turkish names. Their new names always kept the initials of the names in which they were baptised. Thus Haroutioun Nadjarian was given the name Hamed Nazih, Boghos Merdanian became Bekir Mohamed, to Sarkis Safarian was given the name Safouad Sulieman.
  In a 1918 report, American Red Cross officer Major Stephen Trowbridge, met with surviving orphans and reported:
  Every vestige, and as far as possible every memory, of the children's Armenian or Kurdish origin was to be done away with. Turkish names were assigned and the children were compelled to undergo the rites prescribed by Islamic law and tradition ... Not a word of Armenian or Kurdish was allowed. The teachers and overseers were carefully trained to impress Turkish ideas and customs upon the lives of the children and to catechize [sic] them regularly on ... the prestige of the Turkish race.
  Professor of Human Rights Studies Keith David Watenpaugh compared the treatment of non-Turkish orphans by Halide Edip and Djemal Pasha to the American and Canadian schools for Native American children that were forcibly assimilated and often abused. He wrote that Edip showed a strong hatred of Armenians in her writings, portraying them as "a mythical and existential enemy of the Ottomans" and even made claims of blood libel and child cannibalism similar to those in anti-Semitism. She also claimed a conspiracy to turn Turkish children into Armenians, "thus also turning the accusations leveled against her for her work at Antoura back toward the Armenians themselves". Watenpaugh writes of her:
  Modernizing Turkey and defending its Muslim elite against Western criticism are key elements of Halide Edip's life's work, but her reluctance to protect Armenian chi
caption: Early photo of Halide Edib wearing a yashmak.
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