Electronic version of  “ARMENIA: The Survival of a Nation”, revised second edition © 1990 Christopher J. Walker

 

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7 The Death of Turkish Armenia

 

 

Turkey, Germany and the Outbreak of the War

 

Since the middle of Abdul Hamid's reign Turkey had been moving closer to Germany. A loan from the Deutsche Bank in 1888 financed the newly formed Anatolian Railway Company, and in the following decade two sections of the projected Berlin–Baghdad railway were completed. Germany, too, took an active interest in reorganising the Ottoman army – General (later Field-Marshal) von der Goltz had arrived in Constantinople as early as 1882, and his mission bore fruit in the Turkish defeat of the Greeks in Thessaly in 1897. The German reorganisation of the army was, however, only partial, since the sultan was concerned that his officers might become too successful or indeed too educated. Relations thereafter between the Germans and the revolutionary Young Turk officers were close and secret. After 1908 Enver himself went to Berlin to study military tactics and the German language. Nevertheless, the Ottoman army fared badly in 1911–13. A new and much larger German military mission arrived in Constantinople in 1913, headed by General Liman von Sanders. Forty-two German officers came with him. The Entente powers protested, to no avail; the battle-lines for the first world war were drawn.¹

            On 2 August 1914, two days before the outbreak of the war, Ottoman Turkey signed a secret agreement with the Central powers, which stipulated that if Russia, supporting Serbia, entered the war against Austria and Germany, Turkey would join the Central powers.² Enver, minister of war since January 1914, saw the chance of a war with Russia as a means toward the fulfilment of his pan-Turkist dream. His internal policy showed the same hankerings for conquest and glory, for on 5 August he ordered the setting up of a paramilitary 'Special Organisation' (Teshkilat-i Makhsusiye),³ to be led by members of the Central Committee of the Committee of Union and Progress, who included Dr Nazim. Behaeddin Shakir was charged with the execution of its decisions. The purpose of this organisation was externally to prepare lands beyond the borders of the Ottoman empire (the Caucasus and Iran) for an Ottoman conquest; internally the Special Organisation controlled the administration of the empire. It was an instrument of the party which made sure that party decisions were carried out to the letter.

            It was in this spirit that the CUP, before the actual formation of the Teshkilat-i Makhsusiye, attempted to intervene at the eighth general congress of Dashnaktsutiun, held in Erzerum in July 1914. The Ittihadist leaders present included Behaeddin Shakir. They pressed the Dashnaks to agree, in the event

 

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of the outbreak of war, to use their influence to encourage the Russian Armenians to rise against the tsar, thereby affording an easy passage for the Ottoman army in the Russian empire. In return the Ittihadists promised a semiautonomous Armenia consisting of parts of Russian Transcaucasia and some sanjaks of Turkish Armenia. Dashnaktsutiun rejected the plan, and advised the Young Turk leaders to steer clear of an involvement in a European war; but should, the leaders added, a war break out in which the Ottoman empire was a participant, Armenian Ottoman citizens would enlist and fight as loyal nationals.⁴

 

 

Turkey Joins the War

 

The Ottoman empire entered the war on 30 October 1914. On the following day the Young Turk government issued a proclamation stating its war aims. Part of it read:

 

            Our participation in the world war represents the vindication of our national ideal. The ideal of our nation and people leads us towards the destruction of our Muscovite enemy, in order to obtain thereby a natural frontier to our empire, which should include and unite all branches of our race.⁵

 

            Zia Gökalp, the CUP ideologist, issued a 'poem' reeking of blood and bones, containing the lines:

 

The land of the enemy shall be devastated.

Turkey shall be enlarged and become Turan.⁶

 

            At the same time Armenians throughout the empire gave pledges of loyalty – which should not all be taken as bogus, when one remembers the fine showing that the Armenians had made in defence of the Ottoman empire just two years earlier in the Balkan war. Services were held in Armenian churches for an Ottoman victory; how many secretly prayed for the reverse cannot be known, but in the light of their treatment by imperial Turkey over the past 40 years, the number cannot have been small.

            Some were openly defiant: the Hunchaks, at their party congress held in Constantza (Romania) shortly before the outbreak of the war, pledged determined opposition to the Ottoman empire. (As a result, 20 of their leaders were hanged in Constantinople in June 1915. Their leader, Paramaz, continued to declaim revolutionary utterances until the noose tightened around his neck.) One Armenian deputy in the Ottoman Parliament, Karekin Pastermadjian, known as Armen Karo, a Dashnak and a veteran of the Ottoman Bank incident in 1896, left to join up in one of the Armenian volunteer partisan units

 

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that were being formed in Russian Armenia.⁷ The action was foolish and short-sighted, and shows that Pastermadjian cannot have appreciated the delicacy of the Armenian position. To the Ittihadist leaders his action must have cast a new light on Dashnaktsutiun's pledge of loyalty which had been given at the Erzerum congress.

 

 

Sarikamish

 

The first significant military activities in the Caucasian theatre of the war were astonishing and dramatic. Encouraged by Russian reverses in Europe, Enver took personal control of the Ottoman Third Army. His immensely ambitious plan was to advance on the Russian military bas of Sarikamish, thence seize the fortress of Kars, and press eastwards to Baku, where he anticipated the first of the risings against the tsarist empire. In all seriousness, he told Liman von Sanders the he contemplated marching through Afghanistan to India.⁸

            One factor, however, proved the nemesis of this Napoleonic ambition: the terrible Caucasian winter, the same winter that had checked Lucullus in 68 BC. Enver's offensive began on 25 December 1914; but within the next two weeks almost 80 per cent of the Ottoman Third Army (75,000 ill-equipped, poorly fed troops, out of a total of 95,000) had either been cut down by Russian guns or frozen to death amid crippling blizzards in the Turnagel woods overlooking Sarikamish.⁹ Stories were told later of entire divisions killed by the frost in situ, discovered weeks later like the relics of some ice-bound Pompeii. For the Ottoman empire Sarikamish was a calamity.

            Enver Pasha, totally defeated, returned to Constantinople, never to take personal command again. It is often held that the Sarikamish disaster was the decisive factor which precipitated the ensuing catastrophe for the Armenians; Enver is alleged to have used them as scapegoats for his folly, claiming that they acted as spies among the civilian population, and in the battle area. (A large number of Ottoman Armenians had, like Armen Karo, joined the Russian-sponsored volunteer regiments – perhaps an unwise move, but not surprising in view of the Ottoman empire's persistent rejection of them as its citizens.) Yet outwardly Enver was full of admiration for Armenians, as a message he sent in February 1915 to the Armenian bishop of Konya suggests:

 

            I am giving you my thanks and using this opportunity to tell you that the Armenian soldiers of the Ottoman army are executing their duty in the theatre of war scrupulously, as witness my own experience. I wish you to communicate to the Armenian nation, known for its complete devotion to the imperial Ottoman government, the expression of my satisfaction and gratitude.¹⁰

 

Enver also expressed, to the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople, 'special

 

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satisfaction as regards the conduct and bravery of the Armenians, who gave an excellent account of themselves'; however, he added ominously that in the event of 'the smallest occurrence' he would take 'most drastic measures'.

 

 

First Moves against Armenians

 

Even before the Sarikamish battle, measures were being taken against Armenians, according to articles in the Turkish newspaper Kurun in 1935, written by Aziz Samih, chief of the historical department of the Ottoman war ministry during the war. Samih showed that orders to attack Armenian villages were received in the east between 29 October and 5 November 1914. Some of the Armenian men were forced, in intolerable weather conditions, to act as pack animals until they dropped. At the same time Samih noted that Dr Behaeddin Shakir was at the headquarters of the Ottoman 34th Division at Moush, in early December 1914. The presence of the top party ideologue, a civilian, at army headquarters is puzzling until we realise that the Paris-educated doctor and intellectual was the chief organiser of the massacres.¹¹

            The actual decision to take measures against Armenians seems to have been taken by the Central Committee of the Committee of Union and Progress in mid-February 1915. From the actions which followed, which have been thoroughly documented, we can gather what the measures were: quite simply, the extermination of Ottoman Armenians in Armenia. Such a decision follows naturally from the development of meticulous Turkish racism since 1910. Turkish nationalism, plus the 'Turkey Faces East' ambitions of the pan-Turkists, meant that Armenia had to be emptied of Armenians. And what better chance than a world war, when there would be none of the foreigners present whom Abdul Hamid had to contend with, like Currie, Graves or Hallward? The war provided a thick black velvet arras, behind which the Young Turks could act with impunity.

            In the last ten days of February 1915 Armenian government officials and employees were dismissed; and in the army Armenian soldiers were taken out of any combat positions and enrolled in labour battalions (ameliye taburi). Armenian officers were imprisoned. The American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, puts it thus:

 

            Up to that time most of them had been combatants, but now they were all stripped of their arms and transformed into workmen. Instead of serving their countrymen as artillerymen and cavalrymen, these former soldiers now discovered that they had been transformed into road labourers and pack animals. Army supplies of all kinds were loaded on their backs, and, stumbling under the burdens and driven by the whips and bayonets of the Turks, they were forced to drag their weary bodies into the mountains of the Caucasus. Sometimes they would have to plough their way, burdened in this fashion,

 

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almost waist-high through snow. They had to spend practically all their time in the open, sleeping on the bare ground – whenever the ceaseless prodding of their taskmasters gave them an occasional opportunity to sleep. They were given only scraps of food; if they fell sick they were left where they had dropped.¹²

 

            At about the same time the civilian population was ruthlessly searched for arms. Armenians had been permitted to bear Arms for self-protection in the years following the revolution of 1908, when the Young Turks realised that it was impossible to disarm the Kurds. Now these same arms were held to be evidence of plans for treason and insurrection. Violent and extreme methods were employed against Armenians, isolated in the remote towns and villages of the interior of Anatolia. Large numbers of Armenians were jailed, often as many as 400–500 per town. No reason was given at first, but it was soon clear that these men were to be used as hostages. Then each governor or other official ordered the local Armenian community to deliver up as many arms as he believed were in their possession. If they did not, it was intimated, severest measures would be taken both against the hostages in prison and against the Armenian community as a whole. Mass civilian reprisals, in other words, were threatened. The people were unwilling to hand in their arms. They remembered such things as the demand for the delivery of arms at Urfa in December 1895, and sensed an imminent disaster of some sort. Reluctantly they handed them in. Both clergy and political leaders persuaded them to do so, in the hope of avoiding any pretext for measures to be taken against 'disloyal' Armenians.¹³

            The total number of arms fixed in each case was arbitrary and quite in excess of any reasonable estimate of the number of arms held by Armenians. The arms searches became a pretext for brutal persecution: Armenians who were searched were often beaten up, and to the hostages in jail the foulest tortures were meted out, notably the time-honoured Turkish falaka, or bastinado – beating the soles of the feet to a pulp while the victim is suspended upside down by a rope; also extraction of finger-nails, and other well-thought-out brutalities.¹⁴ Henry Morgenthau relates that the Constantinople chief of police made no secret of the tortures formulated by the CUP at this time.¹⁵ In desperation, in order to fill their quotas, Armenians bought arms from their Turkish neighbours. On several occasions the whole lot were then solemnly photographed by the local authorities, and the pictures sent to Constantinople as 'evidence of Armenian treachery'.¹⁶

            Then, disarmed, the Armenians could be driven to their death. In the words of Arnold Toynbee, writing in The Times History of the War, 'An atmosphere of horror, which breathes through all the eye-witness accounts, had settled down over the provinces of the empire.'¹⁷

            That the killings were deliberate none but dedicated Turkists deny. The horror of which Toynbee speaks was too similar in each locality for the killings to have been spontaneous manifestations, or the actions of a few 'rogue cops'

 

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exceeding their instructions.^* The killings were deliberate, and government policy; this much is clear. (Talaat Pasha himself admitted it to Morgenthau.¹⁸) Were they also premeditated? In a sense any government policy is by its nature premeditated. The Armenian deportations and massacres were decided upon at least eight weeks before they were begun; but whether they represented the outcome of a well-prepared plot of perhaps months earlier is open to question. In view of the devotion of the Young Turks to pan-Turkism, and the necessary reduction of the Armenians that that ideology entailed, it would not be surprising. The evidence is not yet conclusive.

 

 

The System of Extermination

 

The pattern was this.¹⁹ Initially all the able-bodied Armenian men of a certain town or village would be ordered, either by a public crier or by an official proclamation nailed to the walls, to present themselves at the konak (government building). The proclamation stated that the Armenian population would be deported, gave the official reasons for it, and assured them that the government was benevolent. Once at the konak, they would be jailed for a day or two. No reason was given. Then they would be led out of jail and marched out of town. At the first lonely halting place, they would be shot, or bayoneted to death. Some days later the old men, and the women and children, were summoned in the same way: they were often given a few days' grace, but then they had to leave. It was their misfortune not to be killed at the first desolate place. The government's reasoning appears to have been: the men might pose a threat – leaders might spring up among them, who would defy the order; but why waste valuable lead on women, old men and children? Instead they were

 

                * Yet astonishingly this approximates to the view taken by Professor Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw in their History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (1977). They write (vol. II, p. 315):

 

               Specific instructions were issued for the army to protect the Armenians against nomadic attacks and to provide them with sufficient food and other supplies to meet their needs during the march and after they were settled. Warnings were sent to the Ottoman military commanders to make certain that neither the Kurds nor any other Muslims used the situation to gain vengeance for the long years of Armenian terrorism. The Armenians were to be protected and cared for until they returned to their homes after the war.

 

                In support of these preposterous claims the authors quote Turkish official sources. One need do no more than remind them of Sir Charles Eliot's distinction between the real and the paper government of Turkey.

 

               If one takes as a basis the laws, statistics and budgets as printed it is easy to prove that the Ottoman empire is in a state of unexampled prosperity. Life and property are secure; perfect liberty and toleration are enjoyed by all; taxation is light, balances large, trade flourishing. Those who have not an extensive personal acquaintance with Turkey may regard such accounts with suspicion and think them highly coloured, but they find it difficult to realize that all this official literature is absolute fiction, and for practical purposes unworthy of a moment's attention (Turkey in Europe (1908 and reprints), p. 130).

 

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forced to walk, endlessly, along pre-arranged routes, until they died from thirst, hunger, exposure or exhaustion. Most were driven south to the burning Syrian desert; a few from Cilicia were initially sent in a north-westerly direction, towards the marshlands of Konya and the gloomy, empty landscape around the great salt lake. All suffered atrociously, as convoy after convoy, accompanied by gendarmes, was moved on. Very soon, under those conditions, when given food and water very erratically, if at all, life became unendurable. Like the first-person narrator in Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable, their life became 'You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on' – for if they stopped, exhausted, they were mercilessly whipped by the Turkish soldiers (some regular, some irregular) until they continued. The soldiers who accompanied them, and the local populations who were encouraged to attack them en route, saw them as good for only two things: gold and rape. Once on the move, any money was liable to be stolen from them (the lucky ones were able to purchase water). Attractive girls were either raped then beheaded on the spot, or snatched away into a Turk's household. The Turkish soldiery in 1915, far from being the 'clean fighters' who figured among the legends of British Turkophiles, were worthy heirs to Attila and Jengiz Khan in their remorseless brutality.

            Gradually the ranks of Armenians thinned – although remarkable survivals are recorded, such as a native of Hadjin, who survived a forced march all the way to Mosul; most died in these terrible convoys; the dead and dying, their throats parched, their lips cracked, their bodies racked with misery and pain, were left by the road, to be devoured, by day by the vultures, by night by the jackals.

            Simultaneously, the government had arranged for their empty homes to be taken over by muhajirs, the 750,000 Turkish refugees mostly from western Thrace, who had either been driven out or left voluntarily from the lands conquered from the Ottoman empire during the Balkan wars. This policy was devised by Dr Nazim. Government resettlement of Turks, Kurds or Circassians was from this time onwards a central feature of the process of killing Armenians. Resettlement of refugees is too complicated a process to be conjured out of the air; the frequency with which it occurs in 1915 highlights again the deliberateness of government policy.

 

 

Zeitun

 

Zeitun, the miniature Armenian Montenegro, so troublesome to the rulers of the empire when they tried to curb its independence, was the first town to have its Armenian people departed. A Turkish general, Fakhri Pasha, went with two officers and 3,000 soldiers to Zeitun in late March 1915.²⁰ His mission can only have been to subdue Zeitun and expel its inhabitants, since Turkish muhajirs from Macedonia were waiting in the background, ready to move in at once and take over the homes of Armenians.²¹ The Zeitun Armenians, for their

 

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part, were initially careful to avoid giving the Turks a pretext for action. But many of them expected the collapse of the Ottoman empire, and some, as revolutionaries, were working for that end. From February 1915 Armenians of Zeitun had been in touch with the Caucasian headquarters of the Russian army; they reached a rough agreement (nothing appears to have been formalised) that, given weapons, the Zeitun Armenians would facilitate the Russian advance through the Ottoman empire (in rather the same way that Enver had hoped that the Teshkilat-i Makhsusiye would ease his way to Russian Turkestan). But nothing came of the plan, nor of another similar, that Armenians in Cilicia might assist an Allied landing at Alexandretta, with the aim of breaking the Ottoman empire in half.²²

            No one from Zeitun had enlisted in the Ottoman army; an unwise move, but they had the legal right to claim exemption, on payment of a tax (£T44; £40 sterling, 1915 values). General Fakhri Pasha seized on this point, and demanded immediate enrolment of all fit men of Zeitun. The notables of Zeitun were in agreement, but the fighting men refused, and fled to the hills. Eventually 40 or 50 were persuaded to present themselves at the barracks. But they were not enrolled in the army – which was not surprising, in view of what had happened to Armenian soldiers elsewhere in the Ottoman army; instead, they were driven like cattle to Marash, and jailed.²³

            Then a band of about 25 young fighters came down from the hills, occupied the strategically placed monastery of the Mother of God, and took the offensive against the Turkish troops. The battle lasted for 24 hours; 300 Turkish soldiers were slain, and one of the officers, by the name of Suleiman. (Hence the name which the Young Turks, and subsequently the Kemalists, have sought to rename Zeitun – Suleimanli) The fighters withdrew to the mountains under cover of darkness. On capturing the monastery, the Turks burnt it to the ground.²⁴

            Then the deportations began: initially the families of the leading men, followed by more, and more, of the ancient indigenous inhabitants of Zeitun. In the succeeding days others followed. In the words of the Reverend Dikran Andreasian, Protestant pastor of Zeitun:

 

            In this way three or four hundred families at a time were sent off on foot, with no proper supply of food, by devious routes through the mountains, some north-west towards Konya, some south-east towards the hot and unhealthy plains of Mesopotamia.²⁵

 

Recalling the sight of the last of his community streaming down the valley into banishment and parched, unutterable deprivation, he added, 'We had seen massacres, but we had never seen this before. A massacre at least ends quickly, but this prolonged anguish of soul is almost beyond endurance.'²⁶

            Initially some Zeituntzis were deported to Sultania, in the province of Konya. The Konya Armenians begged permission to help the deportees, most

 

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of whom by then were ragged and filthy skeletons; but they were forbidden.²⁷ However, a short while later an Albanian officer arrived in Sultania; he was disgusted by what he saw, and allowed relief to be given.²⁸ (He was one of the few Ottoman officers who showed compassion for Armenians, and, typically, he was not a Turk.) Some weeks afterwards these wretched people were sent back eastwards, to Aleppo, and on to Deir ez-Zor, which was to become a vast and horrific open-air concentration camp.

            After Zeitun had been emptied other towns in Cilicia followed – Geben, Furnus and Albistan. Similar methods were used: first, the leaders of the community were isolated, and driven off in the first convoy (only later were the male deportees summarily despatched outside the town); lesser citizens followed. Some, not knowing the true purpose of the 'deportations' – for surely the term is too mild – paid to be taken by horse and cart; the driver of the cart would take them a short way out of the city, dump them and refuse to take them further, and turn back for more.

 

 

Van and Djevdet Bey

 

In the east, the Sarikamish disaster had not been the only Turkish failure of the early months of the war. To the south, Ottoman forces attacked Russian-occupied Persian Azerbaijan, and occupied its capital, Tabriz (January 1915). There was a large non-Muslim population in this district, consisting partly of Armenians and partly of Assyrians – (Nestorian Christians, who call themselves Syrians). Many of these fled with the retreating Russian army, in a harrowing, destitute winter trek to the Russian border town of Julfa. Those that remained endured a grim period of looting and massacre; many villages were plundered and destroyed.

            The Turks were thrown out of Tabriz on 30 January 1915, but remained in occupation of part of Persian Azerbaijan. A campaign to capture Khoi, 160 kilometres north-west of Tabriz, ensued, led by Djevdet Bey, brother-in-law of Enver. It was unsuccessful. Perhaps out of revenge, Djevdet ordered the cold-blooded killing of about 800 people – mostly old men, women and children – in the Salmas district (to the north-east of Lake Urmia) in early March.²⁹

            Djevdet had been governor of Van since February 1915. Van, and indeed the whole of the east, had been tense since the beginning of the war. In early 1915 there was a minor rebellion of Armenians at Koms, ten miles north of Moush, when they rose in self-defence against the brutal and threatening behaviour of some Turkish gendarmes. A commission of enquiry was appointed, consisting of two Turks and one Armenian, Vahan Papazian, Ottoman deputy for Bitlis, which found the gendarmes at fault, and for a short time there was peace.³⁰

            Several features meant that Van was especially tense. In the first place, both in the town and the province Armenians were in an actual majority over the

 

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combined Turkish and Kurdish population, and however much Armenians might protest their loyalty, both government and people could not ignore the fact of the pull of Russian Armenia.³¹ (The Armenians of Van, too, were in dress and appearance like those of Tiflis – like, indeed, any urban population in Europe at the time.) As in Cilicia, the Armenian political leaders, the most important of whom were the Dashnaktsakans Vramyan, Aram (Manukian), Ishkhan and the Ramkavar Armenak Yekarian, told their followers to submit to anything rather than antagonise the government; for on past experience, they and all Armenians knew the propensity of any Turkish government to massacre Armenians. But the most critical feature of the situation in Van was the character of the governor, Djevdet Bey. He had replaced the cunning and plausible ostensibly philo-Armenian Hassan Tahsin Pasha, who had gone to Erzerum. Djevdet's extremism was more open, his streak of barbarity more pronounced. He was also, like Talaat, a man of dangerously unpredictable moods, friendly one moment, ferociously hostile the next, capable of treacherous brutality.

            After his return from the abortive expedition in north-east Persia, Djevdet returned to Van and instigated a reign of terror in the outlying villages of the province on the pretext of searching for arms. But the Armenian leaders in the city did not protest. However, when Djevdet demanded 4,000 Armenians for the Ottoman army, the Armenian leaders demurred; they offered him 400, and the rest in exemption (which they were legally entitled to do). But Djevdet insisted on men, not money.³² In mid-April – just a week or so after the deportation of Zeitun, of which, since all communication had been cut, the Vanetzis can have known nothing, there was trouble in the village of Shadakh, not far from Van: a schoolmaster had been arrested, and there had been a local demonstration in his favour. Djevdet asked for prominent Armenians to go there, together with four leading Turks, to mediate and conciliate. The commission set out, seen off by a Turkish guard of honour. Leader of the Armenians was Ishkhan. At the first village at which they stopped a feast was prepared for them; and it was there that the four Armenians were treacherously murdered.³³ It was Friday, 16 April 1915.

            At the same time the arms searches were continuing. The gendarmes stopped at nothing in their treatment of Armenians; they liberally murdered those whose arms they were allegedly gathering. Partly in retaliation, and partly in self-defence, a patrol was attacked by Armenians in another village near Van. Djevdet's fury was extreme.³⁴

            By now the Armenians were thoroughly alarmed, and had almost decided to give up the 4,000 men for the army, but dared not do so, sure that they would all be killed immediately. They asked Dr Clarence Ussher, missionary and representative of the neutral United States, to mediate. Djevdet attempted to contravene the diplomatic immunity of Ussher's compound by trying to quarter 50 Turkish soldiers in it. It was clear to Ussher that any attempt at mediation would be futile.³⁵

 

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Monday, 19 April was a quiet day. Ussher says that Djevdet issued a general order throughout the province of Van, which read: 'The Armenians must be exterminated. If any Muslim protect a Christian, first, his house shall be burnt; then the Christian killed before his eyes, then his [the Muslim's] family and himself.'³⁶

            Before sunrise on the following day, shots were heard on the Varak plain, to the east of the city. It was a trivial incident: a group of Turks had seized a young girl, two Armenians had run up to rescue her, but they were then fired on and killed. This was the signal for a general fusillade on all sides.³⁷

            For over a week the Armenians had been carefully strengthening the defences of their quarters; leaders of all three political parties had been expecting a Turkish onslaught. Walls had been built within walls. There were two parts of the city to protect: the Armenian part of the old city of Van, consisting of old, tall, back-to-back houses, clustered together beneath the ancient citadel of Van along narrow, winding streets; and the new, prosperous garden suburb, known as Aikesdan (Armn: 'vineyard'), stretching eastwards from old Van, much of which consisted of villas built by prosperous Armenians from the mid-nineteenth century until the period of Hamidian persecutions of the 1890s. Foreign vice-consulates were situated in the Aikesdan.

            To defend their quarters, the Armenians had only 300 men armed with rifles, and 1,000 with pistols and antique weapons. The initial Turkish onslaught had been anticipated, and was thrown back. Firing continued all day, and by the evening Ussher counted ten houses in flames. In overall military command was Armenak Yekarian. The Armenians also coolly organised a provisional government of besieged Van, dealing with defence, provisions and administration – and foreign relations, to ensure that the neutrality of foreign property was respected. Judges, police and health officials were appointed.

            Besides defending their own population of 30,000, Armenian strategy was to inflict as much damage on Turkish strongholds as they could, to try to hold off the Turks until the Russians could reach them, or to force Djevdet to see the folly of his murderous attack. In the first few days they tunnelled out and seized two barracks (one police and one military) and destroyed them with the aid of kerosene; likewise, too, the British consulate, which had become an important Turkish stronghold.³⁸ The Turks for their part hurled down grenades from the top of the rock of Van, also a kind of napalm (Ussher calls it Greek fire), and very large bombs. All this the Armenians took quite calmly; there was no panic among the besieged population, only a determination to cope with every hazard. Ussher himself noted incredible scenes of bravery among the Armenians, notably from Aram himself.

            All Armenian villages throughout the province, that is all those under Djevdet's jurisdiction, had been attacked by Turkish soldiers on the 19th. The entire Armenian male population of Akantz (north-east of lake Van), about 2,500, had been murdered on that day. Three, feigning death, had escaped. Only inaccessible places, those heights that Armenians had come to know so

 

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well over the last thousand years, secured Armenians from attack – and also places under the protection of powerful Kurdish chiefs, who were friendly to Armenians and detested the government as much as they; Moks was one such place. Of these attacks on the villages Ussher says, 'We have absolute proof that 55,000 people were killed. ³⁹ The attack on the villages leads Ussher to conclude, quite plausibly, that 19 April was the date originally planned by Djevdet for a simultaneous attack on all Armenians throughout the province; but that the attack on the city was delayed for 24 hours because of Ussher's insistence on not accepting the 50 Turkish soldiers immediately.

            While the Armenians of Van were battling to defend themselves, Djevdet worked out a scheme to force them to surrender: he allowed large numbers of refugees, women and children, to enter the besieged quarters. By the end of the month these numbered 15,000.⁴⁰ Of those still outside Ussher notes:

 

            Some of our patients had been protected and cared for by Kurds. One woman had fallen down the mountain and broken her thigh. A passing Kurd had taken her on his back, carried her up the mountain and laid her under the shelter of a haystack. Her children kept her supplied with snow, which was, with the exception of a few grass roots and flower bulbs, their only food for twenty days.⁴¹

 

Another patient, a young man, had been hidden by a Kurd in his house, disguised as a woman.

            Food rapidly became low. It soon became urgent to get a messenger out, to tell the Russians of their plight. Twelve messengers were sent out in disguise, with messages sewn into the seams of their garments.

            By the beginning of the fourth week of the siege, the outlook was grim. Djevdet was far superior in men and arms – although the Turkish fire, which was mostly shells, was fairly ineffectual against sun-dried brick.

            Then on Friday evening, 14 May, Ussher saw a flotilla of ships sailing away from Van, westwards across the lake; and more followed the next day.⁴² He realised that the Turks were evacuating their women and children. On Sunday there was a massive bombardment of 46 shells, and extra-territorial property was not spared. Ussher concluded, 'The Turks are saying goodbye. '⁴³ Through his field-glasses he descried some Turks hoisting the wheels of a mountain gun on to the back of a mule. Elsewhere, Turks were running away.

            By Monday, 17 May 1915, Van was in the hands of the Armenians. The relief after five weeks of fighting was unimaginable. Soon the advance guard of the Russian army, consisting of Armenian volunteers, arrived. Russian regular soldiers followed. On his arrival, the keys of the city and citadel were handed to General Nikolayev;⁴⁴ a day or so later he confirmed the Armenian provisional government in office, with Aram as governor. But not for long; six weeks later the Russian forces were compelled to retire, and as many of the Armenians of

 

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Van who could fled with them (Ussher too), a perilous and agonising flight into Transcaucasia.

            It is important to get the events of Van in perspective, because Turkish writers and apologists have spoken of an Armenian 'revolutionary plot' to seize power and kill the Turks. Specifically, Dashnaktsutiun is blamed; but (as Professor Hovannisian points out), if there had been a plot, would the Dashnak party have allowed Ishkhan to leave for the peace mission on which he was so treacherously murdered?⁴⁵ In Van the attitude of the Armenians was initially cautious co-operation with the Turks, yet preparedness for everything that the last 40 years had taught an Armenian to expect from a Turkish government. Their five-week battle with the Turks was not a rebellion, but legitimate self-defence, a reaction to the terrorism of the government's representative, Djevdet, which he had directed against the entire Armenian community.

 

 

Events in Constantinople

 

During the siege of Van, as news of the armed confrontation between Armenians and Turks reached Constantinople, a calamity had overtaken Armenians throughout the empire: the government had begun to exterminate them. Only in March the Turkish leaders in Constantinople had been put under so great pressure by the British and French naval attack upon the Dardanelles that they had prepared to quit Constantinople and set up a temporary government in Eskishehir. Suddenly, on 18 March, the Allied naval attack was called off. In the interval between it and the Allied landings (25 April), the Turks regained their confidence. In their new mood, they struck at the Armenians. As darkness fell on 23 April 1915, throughout the night and into the morning of the 24th, the police arrested 235 leading Armenians – politicians, writers, educators, lawyers and so forth.⁴⁶ These men were held at the central police station for three days, before being exiled into the interior – half to Ayash, and half to Chankiri. Further arrests brought the figure to 600. Only a very few were ever allowed to return home; most, on being released in the wilds of Anatolia, were slaughtered. One of the few who were lucky enough to escape was Komitas, the composer and folk-song collector. But the sufferings of his fellow Armenians that he witnessed at this time and later, the butchery and torture, unhinged his mind, and he died in an asylum in Paris in 1935.

            At the same time the Constantinople police arrested a much larger number – the figure is probably in the region of 5,000 – of Armenians of the poorest class – young men from the provinces, now working as labourers, doorkeepers or messengers.⁴⁷ These too were never seen again, but taken into the interior and murdered.

            To the Armenians of the capital this action was totally unexpected. They considered themselves entirely loyal to the regime. Some were personal friends

 

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of Young Turk leaders: men like the parliamentary deputy for Rodosto, Krikor Zohrab, who had given shelter to Talaat during the counter-revolution of April 1909. Yet all such were dragged off to the interior, and bludgeoned to death with the others. (Zohrab and his fellow deputy Vartkes were exiled and killed a few weeks after 24 April.)

            Today, Armenians all over the world hold 24 April as a day of mourning, the anniversary of the day on which the Turkish government began its systematic extermination of Turkish Armenians.

            Talaat Pasha, minister of the interior, did not deny ordering the arrest of the Constantinople leaders on 23–4 April, or the mass killing of Armenians that followed it. To Henry Morgenthau he justified the action by saying that the government was acting in self-defence: Armenians had opposed the government at Van and Zeitun and were in communication with the Russians. Hence, he said, the deportations.⁴⁸

            'Deportation' was just a euphemism for mass murder. No provision was made for their journey or exile, and unless they could bribe their guards, they were forbidden in almost all cases food and water. Those who survived the journey landed up in appalling concentration camps beside the Euphrates, between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor. Descriptions of those by visitors to them in 1915 and 1916 will show what the Turkish government intended by deportation. Moreover, no distinction was made between innocent, suspect or guilty – a point which prompted a query from a correspondent on the Berliner Tageblatt; any such distinction, Talaat replied, was 'utterly impossible', since 'those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow.'⁴⁹

            After 24 April, death shadowed every Armenian within the Ottoman empire. With the exception of the Armenian patriarch in Constantinople, Zaven, the people were leaderless. Even he was deported later on. The civilised, constitutional political world, based on the concept of law, that they had attempted to build in the Ottoman empire since 1908 had been smashed, and all that was left was their representative, whose office dated back to Mehmed II. All communication was cut between the capital and the provinces. The American ambassador himself complained that he was suddenly forbidden to communicate with his consuls in the interior by cypher.

            Initially it seemed that only those Armenians in the security risk areas would be deported – those, that is, in Cilicia and in the eastern border region. But as 1915 wore on, it became apparent that Armenians far from the battle zone – in places like Kharput, Sivas. Mersifun, Angora – all were to be victims, too. With the typical thoroughness of the racist, the Turkish government was allowing none to escape.

            By the second half of May Zeitun was empty of Armenians and full of Turks. Between 6,000 and 8,000 of its inhabitants were sent initially to the Konya district, and the survivors then continued to Deir ez-Zor.⁵⁰ Between 15,000 and 16,000 went directly to Deir ez-Zor.

 

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Djevdet in Bitlis

 

Some of the earlier massacres were carried out directly by the embittered and vengeful Djevdet and his kesab taburi – 'butcher battalions', a name he gave them himself – after the failure to dislodge the Armenians of Van. Djevdet retreated south and west. Initially he attacked Sairt, and killed off a large part of its Armenian and Assyrian population. Then he moved on to Bitlis; and at about the same time reinforcements arrived from Erzerum, estimated at about 10,000 men. (The number of troops that the Turks used, while the war was on, to satisfy their own ideological fanaticism was quite remarkable.) At Bitlis Djevdet employed similar, but more ruthless, tactics to those at Van. After making certain demands, and hanging some of the leading citizens, he surrounded Bitlis with Turkish troops (25 June); nearly all the men were arrested and then shot. Women and children, as so often, were distributed like chattels among the Turkish/Kurdish population; and the rest – the 'useless ones' – were driven south to die with other deportees. Self-defence by an armed population, so successful at Van, was a lingering alternative to suicide in Bitlis. No Russian forces arrived; the defenders were quite cut off. An estimated 15,000 died in the siege, massacre and deportation of Bitlis.⁵¹

            As in the days of Abdul Hamid, the Turks of 1915 took great care to kill off the Armenian peasantry, as well as the town-dwellers. The beautiful villages around Bitlis – one report specially mentions those of Rahva and Khultig – were systematically destroyed after the main town was silent.⁵²

 

 

Moush and Sasun

 

Villages on the Moush plain, the next region to be attacked by security forces, appear to have been destroyed before the main town. They, and the villages in the Bulanik district (about 50 miles north-east of Moush) were attacked in late May. A big drive was made against nearby Sasun, too, using Kurdish irregulars. (Already the 15,000 inhabitants of Sasun had been joined by a further 15,000 Armenian villagers from the plain.) Sasun was under siege; but the Turks and Kurds again proved themselves to be no match for the Armenian defenders, and a truce was arranged at the end of May.⁵³

            For a few weeks there was peace, and an end to oppression throughout the district. But at the end of June a determined assault was made against the whole region – Bitlis, Moush and, of course, Sasun. Troops arrived from Erzerum with mountain guns, and severed all contact between Moush and Sasun. In Moush itself, in early July, the mood changed to one of the most dire oppression: further exactions were made, and demands for arms; moreover, leading Armenians of the towns and villages were subjected to frightful tortures – finger-nails pulled out, limbs twisted, teeth knocked out, noses beaten down; and wives and daughters were raped in public before their broken menfolk.⁵⁴

 

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            From the villages – in all about 100 – around Moush the men were rounded up on 10 July; here, as elsewhere, the operation was conducted by the Teshkilat-i Makhsusiye, using Turkish prisoners who had been specifically released from jail for the purpose. The villagers resisted as far as they could, but the special forces closed in on them, captured the men, herded them into concentration camps and bayoneted them all. In Moush itself the men resisted for four days from the stone-built houses and churches, before going down fighting. For the women and children of the town a grimmer death followed: they were driven out of the city into specially prepared large wooden sheds in the nearby Armenian villages; these were then set on fire, and amid scenes of horror, and the vilest, most sadistic brutality from the Turkish guards, the defenceless women and children were all burnt to death.⁵⁵

            Before the massacre of Moush 60,000 Armenians had been living in the town and surrounding villages of the plain; very few survived. Over the next few months occasional survivors escaped across the mountains and through the Russian lines to tell the story.

            Having thus disposed of the Armenians of Moush, the Turkish forces moved against Sasun. Sasun, quiet since the pact made in late May, was invaded in July. Infantry and guns were brought from Moush; the Kurds, reorganised, invaded from south, west and north. Fighting was incessant in late July. The Armenians were prepared for another invasion; but the threat of starvation loomed large on this occasion, since thousands of plainsmen had been driven to seek refuge in the mountains. Soon they were living exclusively on unsalted roast mutton, since the rich harvest of fruit and honey, in which Sasun abounds, was rapidly finished. Ammunition, too, soon became low; and the defenders had the misfortune to lose all their leaders, with the exception of Ruben Ter-Minasian, by a single Turkish shell. Harder and harder the Turks pushed against the Sasuntzis, driving them up Mount Andok, so often their refuge in the past. When ammunition gave out, the defenders fought with knives, scythes and stones – anything they could find; and many boulders were rolled down the steep ravines against the enemy. By early August their position was hopeless, and on 5 August 1915 the Turks captured Andok. Very few Armenians survived. Sasun, to which Ottoman rule had bequeathed only corruption and murder, had received the ultimate imperial gifts – extermination, desolation and silence.⁵⁶

            Meanwhile, the frontier areas further north were being emptied of their Armenians, principally the province of Erzerum. Here the actual procedure of deportation was put into effect, which had been lacking in the attacks on the Armenians of Sairt, Bitlis, Moush and Sasun.

 

 

Erzindjan

 

The Armenians of Erzindjan knew of their forthcoming deportation in early June 1915. They would be transported to Mesopotamia (they were told), but

 

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there would be no massacre. Several days' grace was given to them to sell up their property, to get cash for the journey. They would be provided with food, and protected by a military escort.⁵⁷

            The first convoy set off on 7 June. Rich people hired carts. (Again, one is amazed by their simple trust in Turkish words.) They were to go, in the first place, to Kharput, taking the lengthy, semi-circular route via the Kemakh gorge, a rough road full of twists and turns, some 300 kilometres to the south-west of Erzindjan.⁵⁸

            For four days convoys left Erzindjan. As they left Erzindjan, the process began: men were separated from the rest, and killed on the spot. Women and elderly men had to go on. (The authorities were initially lenient with regard to children, permitting them to be parcelled out among Muslim families, but after a few days insisted on their departure as well.) A terrible fate awaited all the exiles. Many were attacked in the early stages of the journey, and their clothes were taken from them. When they reached the Kemakh gorge – where the Euphrates flows between two sheer walls of rock – they were stopped, and their hands were tied behind their backs. The order was given to kill them by pushing them over, and they were cast into the ravine. Many were bayoneted to death, too; but the majority were despatched straight into the river, since this method proved speedier. For the numbers were large; probably 20,000 to 25,000 Armenians of Erzindjan were slaughtered, and of these about half at the Kemakh gorge.⁵⁹

            The Armenians of Baiburt, north-east of Erzindjan, were rounded up and deported at about the same time. Seventeen thousand Armenians lived in the town and surrounding villages.⁶⁰ They went in three main convoys, in the direction of Erzindjan and the Kemakh gorge. According to the account of one of the women on one of these convoys, who escaped, the Armenians, on asking the gendarmes whither they were being sent, were told 'To a safe place, away from the Turks, where the mob cannot massacre you. It is the duty of the government to protect its subjects. You will remain there until peace is re-established.'⁶¹ All this the Armenians believed. Just outside the town, according to the same witness, the guards began to threaten, demanding first money, then girls, then more money, and more girls, until they had no money left to buy food, and all their prettiest young girls had been abducted. As they trudged onwards brigands would swoop down from the hills, and steal their clothing; and past Erzindjan they were physically attacked by more brigands. In desperation, worn out and weak though they were, they tried to run back to Erzindjan; but the gendarmes opened fire. Some lived to be driven onwards to Kemakh, where the atrocities recently visited upon the Erzindjantzis were visited upon them too.⁶² Another report, from a member of one of the other convoys from Baiburt, tells how all the men were separated from the others and shot just outside the town; and how at the Euphrates the children were separated from their mothers, and thrown in: those who could swim to the sides were ruthlessly shot down by gendarmes.⁶³

 

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Hassan Tahsin and Erzerum

 

Erzerum and Baiburt were both at this time in the province of Erzerum. The governor was Hassan Tahsin, a plausible and ostensibly friendly and concerned man, but beneath this exterior a hardened Young Turk racist fanatic, dedicated like the others to riveting Ottoman Turkey to Russian Azerbaijan over the corpse of Armenia. He had been governor of Van before Djevdet's appointment there, at the time when the success of the February 1914 reform scheme seemed likely. The Young Turks had put him there knowing that his patina of civilisation would appeal to Europeans; while his mind was full of images of whitening skulls, typical to the other Young Turks of the period who sought to emulate Timur and Jengiz Khan.

            In Erzerum in the spring Armenians had suffered the brutalities that accompanied arms searches elsewhere. On 18 April, at a public meeting, Armenians were branded as 'traitors' and enemies of the empire. Muslims were ordered on no account to shield Armenian friends; those who did so would suffer as Armenians.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, the German liaison officer General Posselt noted to a member of his embassy staff on 26 April that 'the Armenians will stay calm if they are not pressured or molested by the Turks,' and added, 'the behaviour of the Armenians has been perfect (tadellos)'.⁶⁵

            In late May, as the Russians advanced, Armenian refugees arrived form Melazkert and Pasin, driven by the Turks. Forbidden to enter Erzerum itself, half-starved and totally exhausted, they were kept outside the city, in the rain, for seven days.⁶⁶ Those that survived were then sent to the Kemakh gorge, and died there as so many others had.

            On 4 June a convoy of peasant Armenians – mostly women and children – from the villages on the plain of Erzerum departed westwards. Their destination was to be Kemakh. Thither they trudged, through mud, along difficult, treacherous roads, slipping, falling and dying by the wayside. At nightfall the Turks took their usual levies – money and girls. In a few days they were robbed of almost everything – food, clothes and money. Then, as they approached Kemakh, a signal was given by a shot in the air, and merciless bands of irregulars shot or bayoneted to death the remnants of the convoy.⁶⁷

            Forty families from the city of Erzerum were deported on 16 June. They were to go to Diyarbekir, via Kighi and Palu. Between the latter two towns they were surrounded and nearly all killed. On the 19th about 10,000 Armenians left, initially to Baiburt. There the convoy was swelled to about 15,000 people. On they travelled, to Erzindjan. Tahsin, the governor, was there too, to 'check on their security'. From Erzindjan they had expected to go on the main road to Sivas, but they were led aside, as others had been before, to the deadly Kemakh gorge. There the men were separated from the women and children, and all killed. Women and children were forced to foot-slog to remote and burning areas of the empire: some were driven to Mosul in the east, to Raqqa in the south, and to Aleppo and Aintab in the west.⁶⁸

 

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            The deportations of Erzerum continued until the end of July 1915. By the latter months of the year only those Armenians needed for essential services (such as building) were left in the town; this too was the pattern elsewhere. By February 1916, when the Russians entered the town, captured during their massive and successful spring offensive, there were only 80–100 Armenians left in the town,⁶⁹ out of a 1914 figure of 20,000. The total for the villages on the plain of Erzerum had been a further 45,000, the vast majority of whom had likewise been deported and killed.⁷⁰

 

 

The Assyrians

 

Besides the Armenians, another Ottoman people was deported and killed by its own government in 1915. These were the Assyrians, who confusingly call themselves Syrians. As Armenians were divided by the Russo-Turkish border, so Assyrians were divided by the Perso-Turkish border. In the Ottoman district they inhabited they constituted a minority, but a substantial one, interspersed with Kurds. They were politically less sophisticated than Armenians, but the education that they had been receiving had taught them to demand greater autonomy, less subservience, and security from their predatory neighbours.

            Persian Assyrians had been looted, sacked and killed by Turkish forces during their occupation of north-west Persia in the early months of 1915.⁷¹ This was only to be expected. But when the Turks were forced out of Persia by the Russians in May, the Turks turned on their own Assyrians. In mid-June (at the same time as the assaults on Bitlis and Moush) an attack was launched on the mountainous dwellings of the Assyrians, initially against the Qodshanis (Kochannes) in the Hakkiari district, the seat of their spiritual leader, whose title is Mar Shimun. The mountains of Hakkiari, the homeland of this community, are more sheer and inaccessible than any of the mountains of Armenia. The attack was unprovoked. From within their church they defended themselves against Turkish regular soldiers for two days before their ammunition ran out, whereupon they escaped by night to Persia. At the same time a second attack was launched, against the Assyrian villagers of Tkhuma, Tiari and Baz. The villagers fought fiercely from their mountain strongholds for 40 days, before being compelled to take refuge near the top of a high mountain. The Turks tried to starve them out; but when the Russians had regained the initiative in the war, Mar Shimun (a good shot himself) was able to go with a band of men into the interior to bring relief to the besieged men. Astonishingly, he reached them, and after many encounters was able to lead them back across the mountains to Persia.⁷² Fifteen thousand were saved. These episodes were only the beginning of the upheaval, dispersion and massacre that characterised the history of the Assyrians throughout the war and into the mid-1930s.

 

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Shabin Karahisar

 

June 1915 was the peak month in the bleak story of Armenian deportations. But a significant exception to the tale of hopeless passive suffering took place at Shabin Karahisar, birthplace of Andranik, though it too was doomed, a brief flame of defiance soon extinguished in gloom and ashes. Shabin Karahisar is on the western fringe of 'historic' Armenia. It did not have a history of defiance of imperial Ottoman misgovernment, like Zeitun or Sasun. Nevertheless when its Armenian men guessed the intentions of the government, they took to the hills nearby, and withstood the Turkish forces. For four weeks they fought, from 2 to 30 June, and held off all attempts to force them into submission, until being overwhelmed and massacred to the last man.⁷³

 

 

Trebizond

 

Also outside historic Armenia was Trebizond. The province had a total population of 1,000,000, only 53,000 of whom were Armenians; in the town itself the proportion of Armenians was somewhat higher. (The largest Christian population was the Greeks, and the largest Muslim grouping was Georgian-speaking Laz peasants. There were very few Turks.) Against the Armenian population threats, arbitrary arrests and arms searches had continued as elsewhere. The proclamation ordering the deportation of Armenians was posted on the streets at the end of June.⁷⁴ According to the Italian consul Signor Gorrini:

 

            The official proclamation of internment came from Constantinople. It was the work of the central government and the 'Committee of Union and Progress'. The local authorities, and indeed the Muslim population in general, tried to resist, to mitigate it, to make omissions, to hush it up. But the orders of the central government were categorically confirmed, and all were compelled to resign themselves and obey.

            The consular body intervened, and attempted to save at least the women and children. We did, in fact, secure numerous exemptions, but these were not subsequently respected, owing to the interference of the local branch of the 'Union and Progress Committee' and to fresh orders from Constantinople.⁷⁵

 

            Trapezuntine Armenians, like those elsewhere, were forbidden to sell their property (or only to sell it very cheaply) so that they could have no money for the journey; and Muslims were forbidden to shield them.⁷⁶

            They were killed off by forced marches, by shooting and by bayoneting. Since, too, Trebizond is on the coastline, the CUP took full advantage of the fact and sent many out to sea before throwing them overboard. Indeed, on the very day of the decree 45 leading Armenians were put on a launch for

 

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Kerasond (Giresun), and when a little way from the coast were capsized into the Black Sea. Deportations reached their peak in the last week of June and the first week of July; by the 7th the thousand Armenian houses of Trebizond were empty. All were expelled, including the old and sick – and the Catholic Armenians, too, who constituted a substantial proportion of the Armenian population of Trebizond.⁷⁷ Many were driven south, along the valley of Trebizond's river, the Deyirmeni, in the direction of Gumush-khana; but few got beyond the village of Djevizlik, six hours away. 'At the same time', reports the kavass, or caretaker, of the local branch of the Ottoman Bank, who was a Macedonian, 'The river Yel-Deyirmeni brought down every day to the sea a number of corpses, mutilated and absolutely naked, the women with their breasts cut off.⁷⁸

            Leon Surmelian, today a distinguished American-Armenian author and translator, is a native of Trebizond. He has recorded his boyhood experiences. Among other things, he notes the polished, civilised manners of the local leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress. Of the deportation he writes:

 

            They let us rest for a while on marshy ground. We were not allowed to go near the river and had to drink the water of stagnant pools swarming with tadpoles. I kept dipping my biscuit box in a slimy pond and passing it around to the women and girls.

            We had not gone far after this brief rest when I saw a woman's nude body in the river, which was rather shallow here. Her long hair floated down the current, her bloated white abdomen glistened in the sun. I noticed that one of her breasts was cut off. Further up I saw another body, this time a man's; then a human arm caught up in the roots of a tree. The corpses became a common sight, but after I had counted fourteen of them, Aunt Azniv scolded me and told me not to look at the river any more. I had never seen bodies of grown people in the nude and gazed at them with a morbid curiosity.

            When, some minutes later, I looked at the river again, I saw a long, long band of frothy blood clinging to its banks. It is impossible to describe the impression that ghastly scene made upon me, although I can see it now as if it were before my eyes. The exposed roots of trees and shrubs coiled around like blood-sucking, blood-loving red snakes. Now none of us spoke, we all tramped on silently, on our faces the solemnity of death.⁷⁹

 

            Consul Gorrini estimated that there were 17,000 Armenians in the town of Trebizond before the massacre; when he left, on 23 July 1915, there were hardly 100 left. During that appalling month, he says,

 

            I neither slept nor ate; I was given over to nerves and nausea, so terrible was the torment of having to look on at the wholesale execution of these defenceless, innocent creatures.

            The passing of gangs of Armenian exiles beneath the windows and before

 

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the door of the consulate; their prayers for help, when neither I nor any other could do anything to answer them; the city in a state of siege, guarded at every point by 15,000 troops in complete war equipment, by thousands of police agents, by bands of volunteers and by members of the 'Committee of Union and Progress'; the lamentations, the tears, the abandonments, the imprecations, the many suicides, the instantaneous deaths from sheer terror, the sudden unhingeing of men's reason, the conflagrations, the shooting of victims in the city, the ruthless searches through the houses and in the countryside; the hundreds of corpses found every day along the exile road; the young women converted by force to Islam or exiled like the rest; the children torn away from their families or from the Christian schools, and handed over by force to Muslim families, or else placed by hundreds on board ship in nothing but their shirts, and then capsized and drowned in the Black Sea and the river Deyirmen Dere – these are my last ineffaceable memories of Trebizond, memories which still, at a month's distance, torment my soul and almost drive me frantic.⁸⁰

 

 

Kharput

 

Five hundred kilometres south of Trebizond, far inland, far from any border area, was Kharput, one of the intellectual centres for Ottoman Armenians; in the late nineteenth century American missionaries had established there a distinguished and progressive educational institution, Euphrates College. First there were the usual savage arms searches and arbitrary arrests, brutalisation in jail and photographing of arms (mostly bought from Turks) as 'evidence of revolution';⁸¹ there followed the murder of 13,000 Armenian soldiers who had enrolled in the Ottoman army and who were stationed at Kharput.⁸² Then the deportations began.

            The first convoy left in late June. Little or no time was given to prepare for departure; all the local officials were hostile.

            On the first convoy were four professors from Euphrates College. No better example can be given of the hostility of the Committee of Union and Progress towards learning and the intellectual development of the Ottoman Armenian people than to note the fates of these men, as recorded in the statement of 19 July 1915 made by the principal of the college, Professor Ernest W. Riggs, on the losses that the college had suffered:

 

            Professors – Four gone, three left, as follows:–

            Professor Tenekedjian. Served college 35 years; representative of the Americans with the government. Protestant askabed [community head], professor of Turkish and History. Besides previous trouble, arrested 1 May without charge; hair of head, moustache, and beard pulled out, in vain attempt to secure damaging confessions; starved and hung by arms for a

 

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day and night, and severely beaten several times; taken out towards Diyarbekir about 20 June, and murdered in general massacre on the road.

            Professor Nahigian. Served college 33 years, studied at Ann Arbor, professor of Mathematics. Arrested about 5 June, and shared Prof. Tenekedjian's fate on the road.

            Professor Vorperian. Taken to witness a man beaten almost to death; became mentally deranged; started with his family about 5 July into exile under guard, and murdered beyond Malatia. Principal of preparatory department; studied at Princeton; served college 20 years.

            Professor Boudjikanian. Served college 16 years, studied at Edinburgh; professor of Mental and Moral Science. Arrested with Prof. Tenekedjian and suffered same tortures; also had three finger nails pulled out by the roots; killed in the same massacre.

            Professor Soghigian. Served college 25 years. Arrested 1 My; not tortured, but sick in prison; sent to Red Crescent Hospital, and after paying large bribes is now free.

            Professor Khatchadourian. Served college for over 15 years, studied in Stuttgart and Berlin, professor of Music. Escaped arrest and torture and thus far escaped exile and death, because of favour with the kaimakam secured by personal services rendered.

            Professor Luledjian. Served college about 15 years, studied at Cornell and Yale (M.S.), professor of Biology. Arrested about 5 June, beaten about the hands, body and head with a stick by the kaimakam himself, who, when tired, called on all who loved religion and the nation to continue the beating; after a period of insensibility in a dark closet, taken to the Red Crescent Hospital with a broken finger and serious bruises. Now free.⁸³

 

            One of the grimmest and most vivid accounts of the expulsion of the Kharput Armenians was sent by an American consul to ambassador Morgenthau in Constantinople, using material gathered from a survivor of the seventy-day foot-slog from Kharput to Ras ul-Ain, via Malatia, Kiakhta and Viranshehir. It was a typical story – one that was repeated many times over in the Ottoman empire during 1915 and 1916.

            When this convoy left Kharput there were 3,000 people on it – including women, girls and little children. They took with them what they could get together in terms of food, belongings and money. Many hired carts to take them as far as Malatia. Seventy gendarmes accompanied them. A Turkish notable, Faiki Bey, came with them, saying that he would stay with them for much of the journey. On the second day Faiki suggested he take £T400 from them (£363 sterling, 1915 values), 'just to keep it safe', till they reached Malatia. The same day he disappeared and was not seen again.⁸⁴

            By the third day the semi-civilised mountain tribes were swooping down and carrying off the women (or simply robbing and killing them if they were plain), being incited to do so all the while by the seventy 'protective' gendarmes.

 

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            On the following day they reached Malatia, where they stayed only very briefly, before setting off again for Ras ul-Ain. It was at Malatia that the gendarmes finally deserted them (not failing, however, to take a final £T200), leaving them to the mercy of the local Kurdish bey.

            Two days later 150 men (aged between 15 and 90) were rounded up and murdered; at the same time the new 'protectors' carried out further robbery of the people. At that juncture, too, they met another convoy – an army of sufferers coming from Sivas, together they moved forward, in all 18,000 people.

            On they went, a nightmarish spectacle of degraded humanity, subject to violence, robbery, girl-snatching and instant death for any stragglers.

            Forty days from their day of departure they came to the Murad river (eastern Euphrates), where they saw the bodies of more than 200 men floating in the river. On the banks were bloodstained clothes. The headman of the village took £T1 from each man for the privilege of not being thrown in the river. Twelve days later, nearly demented with suffering, they arrived at another village,

 

and here the Kurds took from them everything they had, even their shirts and drawers, so that for five days the whole convoy marched completely naked under the scorching sun. For another five days they did not have a morsel of bread, nor even a drop of water. They were scorched to death by thirst. Hundreds upon hundreds fell dead on the way, their tongues were turned to charcoal, and when, at the end of the five days, they reached a fountain, the whole convoy naturally ran towards it. But here a policeman barred the way and forbade them to take a single drop of water. Their purpose was to sell it at from £T1 to £T3 the cup, and sometimes they actually withheld the water after getting the money. At another place, where there were wells, some women threw themselves into them, as there was no rope nor pail to draw up the water. These women were drowned, and, in spite of that, the rest of the people drank from the well, the dead bodies still remaining there and stinking in the water. Sometimes when the wells were shallow and the women could go down into them and come out again, the other women would rush to lick or suck their wet, dirty clothes, in the effort to quench their thirst.

            When they passed an Arab village in their naked condition, the Arabs pitied them and gave them pieces of old clothes to cover themselves with. Some of the exiles who still had money bought some clothes; but some still remained who travelled thus naked all the way to the city of Aleppo. The poor women could hardly walk for shame; they walked all bent double.⁸⁵

 

            Twelve days later, at Viranshehir, only 300 remained out of the 18,000. Four days later, the sick women and children, and all the men, were collected together and burned to death. The rest were ordered to continue.

            They reached Ras ul-Ain the next day. Here, for the first time, since they

 

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had started, the authorities gave them bread, and that was uneatable. The few wretched starved specimens of humanity that remained were here, after further bribes, able to get on a train for Aleppo. At Aleppo, ten days later, only 150 women and children remained from the two convoys.⁸⁶

 

 

Sivas

 

Sivas was another of the towns where the Armenians took up arms against the brutal actions of the government. Persecution of Armenians began in the winter of 1914–15, partly due to general wartime suspicions against Armenians, partly due to allegations that they had poisoned the bread supplied to Turkish soldiers. Led by a Dashnaktsakan by the name of Murad, a band of Armenians made a brief stand of self-defence in the neighbourhood of Sivas; by their bravery and knowledge of the terrain, they were able to keep the Ottoman soldiers at bay until the autumn of 1915, when they were able to reach the Black Sea coast, and, with the aid of friendly Greeks, get a boat and escape to Batum safely.⁸⁷ But the villagers among whom they had moved in the Sivas district, and who had sheltered them, paid a heavy price in Turkish retribution – though perhaps no higher than the fate which would have befallen them in any case.

            In Sivas itself the story was one of gloomy, silent familiarity. In April 1915 arms searches throughout the province were accompanied by violence against Armenians – extreme torture, often ending in death. At the end of June the expulsion and massacres began: the men separated from the women, and summarily despatched; the women and children driven off in a south-easterly direction, to become another wretched, parched, footsore and exhausted convoy. In this way the 25,000 Armenians of the town of Sivas were reduced to a shadow – a few hundred – consisting of the very old and the very young. Of the estimated 160,000 Armenians of Sivas province only 10,000 remained by the end of 1915.⁸⁸

 

 

Angora

 

All other towns in central or eastern Anatolia with an Armenian population were subject to similar persecutions. In Angora (Ankara, Engürü), by far the largest section of the Armenian population was Catholic (15,000–20,000); it was polished, sophisticated and devoid of any Armenian nationalist aspirations. Turkish was its language. But they too were deported, a few weeks after the expulsion of those Armenians who were members of the Armenian Apostolic Church, always considered more defiant by the Turkish authorities. The Austrian ambassador in Constantinople, Count Pallavicini, managed to exert some pressure on their behalf, but only to the extent of commuting instant death to the slow, exhausted murder of deportation.⁸⁹ The political mania of

 

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the Committee of Union and Progress was such that no appeals or requests could temper it.

 

 

Marsovan

 

Marsovan (Mersifun) was an Armenian intellectual centre, dominated by Anatolia College, another American Protestant institution, which had 425 boy students, and an attached girls' school with 276 pupils. Over half the teaching staff were Armenian. In the town the Armenians numbered some 12,000 before the expulsions, just under half the total; after, a mere shadow of a hundred or so. According to the college's principal, Theodore Elmer, during the expulsions and the period of legitimised violence towards Armenians, the college itself, which was American property, held as many Armenians as possible within its precincts. The governor, who had expelled the mass of the people in late June and July, said he would deal with the rest as it suited him. The president of the college, fearful for their safety, sought assurances from the capital that those he protected would not be harmed. US ambassador Morgenthau was assured of their safety by Enver and Talaat, and conveyed his assurance back to the college. But the governor of Marsovan alleged that he had received contrary orders, and, with all the precise fanaticism and attention to detail that characterises an agent of systematic mass murder, sought out the few remaining Armenians within the American compound. Seventy-one men and boys were taken in early August, and 62 girls. They suffered the prescribed fate: death by expulsion into the desert wilderness.⁹⁰

 

 

Diyarbekir

 

The great, grim city of Diyarbekir was an inferno of torture and murder at this time, since many Armenians were converging upon it, from all parts of Anatolia; and there was, throughout the province, a large Armenian population. Faiz al-Ghusain, a Muslim Arab, who was born a member of the Beduin tribe of the Sulut (in the Hawran, Syria), and who had become a kaimakam of Mamuret el-Aziz and later a practising lawyer in Damascus in partnership with a famous Arab nationalist (hanged by Djemal Pasha) Shukri al-Asli and Abdul Wahhab al Inglizi, was in jail in Diyarbekir in August 1915. While there he was visited by 'one of my Diyarbekir colleagues', and this man, who was close to those charged with carrying out the murders, told Faiz that the figure for all those killed to date – including those from other districts – in Diyarbekir province was the terrifying total of 570,000.⁹¹

 

 

Directions

 

All throughout the empire Armenians – disarmed, defenceless and terrorised – were being driven to their deaths, men mostly killed locally, women

 

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and children struggling over steep mountain paths to the parched deserts beyond, robbed of all they had, raped if attractive, and killed – thrown away like refuse, to be devoured by the scavengers of the desert. Those who survived were driven onwards in two directions – either towards Damascus, or along the Euphrates to Deir ez-Zor. The Damascus deportees escaped relatively lightly, many of them finding shelter in Arab villages between Aleppo and Homs; but an incomprehensibly frightful fate awaited those driven along the Euphrates, who were deposited in concentration camps which were little more than heaps of human wreckage. Only on a few occasions can the world have witnessed such a dense mass of suffering victims and such sadistic guards.

 

 

Musa Dagh

 

Across this darkened barren landscape of suffering there has only so far been one brief beacon of light – the rescue of the Van Armenians from the murderous siege of Djevdet in May. There was, however, in September 1915 another, more illustrious rescue – that of the tough mountaineers of Musa Dagh, or Jebel Musa – the mountain of Moses, situated in what is today the Turkish province of Hatay, the small finger of coastline territory that points southwards into Syria, seized from that country (then under French mandate) by the Kemalists in 1939.

            The villages of Musa Dagh, six in number, together making up one nahiye, or parish, lay to the west of the mountain. The inhabitants of one of them, Yoghonoluk, are described by its Protestant pastor as simple, industrious folk:

 

            For years past their chief occupation has been the sawing and polishing by hand of combs from hard wood and bone. Many of our men are also expert wood-carvers. In the neighbouring villages the chief occupations are the culture of silk worms for producing raw silk, and the weaving of silk by hand looms into handkerchieves and scarves. Our people are very fond of their churches, and since the opening of schools by the American missionaries most of our children have learned to read. Every home is surrounded by mulberry trees, and many beautiful orchards cover the terraced slopes towards the south and west. Travellers who have been to southern Italy tell us that the villages near Naples very much resemble ours.⁹²

 

            On 13 July 1915 the order came: prepare yourselves for deportation eight days hence. What should they do? If they resisted, death would swiftly overtake them; yet the alternative was the parched, exhausted death in the desert, flogged by gendarmes, with vultures flying overhead. Some, too hopefully, thought that resistance was folly, and that death by forced march might after all – somehow, they knew not how – be modified into a more usual form of exile; they left, 60 families in all. None heard of them again.

            The rest left their six villages in the foothills, and climbed up the

 

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mountain – their beautiful, sheltering mountain – taking with them their flocks, farm implements, and as much food as they could carry; and all the weapons they could lay their hands on – 120 modern rifles and shotguns, and about 350 old flintlocks and horse-pistols.

            It took them a day to ascend the mountain, and they immediately began making barricades and building trenches. A committee of defence was elected to supervise the measures.⁹³

            The eight days’ grace expired on 21 July. The Turks, who had realised what the villagers had decided, launched an assault on their positions with an advance guard of 200 regulars (nizams). Their commander allegedly boasted that he could clear the mountain in a day. But the early attacks were a failure, and after suffering several casualties, and being forced to abandon a mountain-gun, they were driven off.⁹⁴

            But only temporarily. All knew they were regrouping and massing their full strength, in order to squash the Armenians who dared defy the Turkish order for their sun-scorched death. Three thousand regulars were now gathered, and a huge crowd of local ‘irregulars’, ready to complete, in true Turkish fashion, the regulars’ job of military victory with their own historic roles of looting and massacre.

            Then one day the Armenians’ scouts brought word that the enemy was all around – at every mountain pass. Small Armenian forces dispersed to oppose each of these concentrations; but all the Turkish moves were feints, except for one at a vital pass, where the Turks poured through in great strength. Soon they occupied the high ground, and threatened the Armenian camp; more and more kept pouring through, all equipped with sophisticated weapons. By the evening they were 400 yards from the Armenians, separated only by a deep ravine.⁹⁵

            A hasty, whispered congress of Armenians took place, in total darkness. Eventually a bold plan was hammered out: at the dead of that very night they would creep round behind the Turks and envelop their forces, surprise them and engage them in hand-to-hand fighting. Silently the men set out, and with their intimate knowledge of the mountain that had stood over them all their live, they crept through the dense, dark woods and encircled the Turkish force. Suddenly they attacked. The Turks were thrown into total confusion, rushing, stumbling in the darkness, their officers shouting contradictory orders. Thousands of Armenians – so the Turks believed – had attacked; and soon the colonel gave the order to retreat.⁹⁶

            By dawn the woods were virtually clear of Turks; and the Armenians had augmented their precious store of weapons by seven Mauser rifles.

            Shortly afterwards, however, an even larger Turkish force was assembled, with yet more ‘irregulars’. Full siege conditions operated, as the Turks tried to starve the Armenians out. Soon bread, cheese and olives were exhausted, and they had to live on meat alone. Even that, by late August, was only sufficient for two more weeks.

 

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            Plans for an escape were made. A runner was despatched to Aleppo with a message for the American consul, but he failed to arrive; and a strong swimmer swam up to Alexandretta harbour, to the north, to see if an Allied warship was in her waters. But there was none. On 2 September, three swimmers were put on permanent alert, to be ready to dive in and swim out to any passing vessel. And two large flags were made, one with a large red cross in the middle of it, and the other with the legend (in black) writ large, in English: ‘CHRISTIANS IN DISTRESS: RESCUE’. These were fastened to tall trees, and a dawn-to-dusk watch was kept. Hope was none too high, for in the coastal region it was the season of fogs and heavy rains.⁹⁷

            Days passed; the Turks attacked again, but more cautiously than before, and unsuccessfully; and nothing was seen. The sea was bleak and deserted. Then suddenly, on Sunday morning, 12 September 1915, the fifty-third day of the siege, a battleship was sighted, which had clearly seen the distress flags, since it was heading straight for them.

            It was the French vessel Guichen. As she lowered her boats, a few of the Armenians raced to the shore. When they had told the captain of their plight, he telegraphed the admiral aboard the flag-ship Ste Jeanne d’Arc, in the vicinity, and the vessel speedily approached, along with others. An English cruiser, too, hove in sight. The French admiral, much moved by their story, gave orders for the entire community to be taken on board. Five vessels (four French, one English) finally transported the community to Port Said, where they arrived in the middle of September. One estimate gives the number of men, women and children saved as 4,200;⁹⁸ another 4,058.⁹⁹

 

 

Urfa

 

Other than Musa Dagh and Van, 1915 was the year of total disaster for Armenians. While Musa Dagh was besieged, some towns in north Syria were attacked by the authorities. (Such towns were of second priority, and hence were cleared later than eastern Anatolia