Tiflis, the Batoum district and a part of the province of Trebizond;
to the Tatars, Shousha, the mountain country as far as Vladivkavkaz,
Bakou, and a part of the province of Elisavetpol; to the Armenians
they offered Kars, the province of Erivan, a part of Elisavetpol, a
fragment of the province of Erzeroum, Van and Bitlis. According to
the Young Turk scheme, all these groups were to become autonomous
under a Turkish protectorate. The Erzeroum Congress refused these
proposals, and advised the Young Turks not to hurl themselves into
the European conflagration—a dangerous adventure which would lead
Turkey to ruin.
The Young Turks were irritated by this advice.
“This is treason!” cried Boukhar-ed-Din-Shakir, one of the delegates
from Constantinople: “You take sides with Russia in a moment as
critical as this; you refuse to defend the Government; you forget
that you are enjoying its hospitality!”
But the Armenians held to their decision.
Once more before the outbreak of war between Russia and Turkey, the
Young Turks tried to obtain the Armenians’ support. This time they
opened their _pourparlers_ with more moderate proposals, and
negotiated with the Armenian representatives of each Vilayet. At
Van, the _pourparlers_ were conducted by the provincial governor
Tahsin Bey, and by Nadji Bey; at Moush, by Servet Bey and Iskhan Bey
(this latter is at present a prisoner of war in Russia); at
Erzeroum, by the same Tahsin Bey and by others.
The project of an Armenian rising in the Caucasus was abandoned.
Instead, the Ottoman Armenians were to unite themselves with the
Transcaucasian Tatars, whose insurrection was, according to the
Young Turks, a certainty.
Once more the Armenians refused.
From the moment war broke out, the Armenian soldiers had presented
themselves for service at their regimental depôts, but they
refused categorically to form irregular bands. On the whole, up to
the end of 1914, the situation in Armenia was quiet. But when the
Turks had been expelled from Bayazid and driven back in the
direction of Van and Moush, their fury turned upon the Armenians,
whose co-religionists in the Caucasus had formed themselves into
volunteer legions under the leadership of Andranik and other
patriotic leaders, and had been giving aid to the enemy.
It was then that the disarming of Armenian soldiers, gendarmes and
members of the other services began. The disarmed Armenian soldiers
were formed into groups of a thousand each, and sent into different
districts to build bridges, dig trenches and work at the fortresses.
At the same time the wholesale massacres began. The first victims
fell at Diyarbekir, Erzeroum and Bitlis. Soldiers, women and
children, both in the towns and villages, were slaughtered _en
masse_. By the end of last January the massacres had extended over
the whole of Armenia. In the Armenian villages, the whole male
population above the age of twelve was led out in batches and shot
before the eyes of the women and children.
The first movement of revolt declared itself towards the beginning
of February, at Koms. Seventy Turkish gendarmes had arrived there
with orders to massacre the chief men of the place, and among them
Roupen and Gorioun. When the Armenians learned their purpose, they
threw themselves upon the gendarmes and killed them all. They
proceeded to take the local governor prisoner, and found on him the
following order from the governor of Moush:—
“Execute the decision communicated verbally to you.”
On the same day the leading Armenians retired into the mountains,
where they were joined by the young men under arms from the district
of Moush.
Two thousand Turks, commanded by Mehmed Effendi, took the offensive
against them, but were annihilated by the Armenians.
This was how the revolt in Armenia began.
The Government saw that the insurrection was spreading, and
announced the suspension of the process of disarmament, rescinding
at the same time the order for the deportation and extermination of
the people of Sassoun. A commission of enquiry was appointed,
consisting of Essad Pasha, the Kaimakam of Boulanik, the President
of the Military Tribunal at Moush, and Mr. V. Papazian, an Armenian
member of the Ottoman Parliament.
The commission found that the gendarmes were the whole cause of the
trouble between the Armenians and the Turks, and the Government
promised to put an end to the reprisals. Talaat Bey telegraphed from
Constantinople that the representatives of the Armenians were not to
be molested.
Quiet was re-established for the moment, but in the month of May the
Turks attempted to force their way into Sassoun, and at the same
time the massacres began again without warning at Harpout, Erzeroum
and Diyarbekir. The Armenians repulsed the Turks and took up a
position round the town of Moush, where a large number of Turkish
troops were concentrated. This was the situation when the Turks
perpetrated the great massacre of Moush at the end of June. Half the
inhabitants of Moush were massacred, the other half were driven out
of the town. The Armenians never knew that at that moment the
Russian troops were only two or three hours’ distance from Moush.
The massacres extended over the whole plain of Moush. The Armenians,
who had managed to retreat on to the heights of Sassoun with a
remnant of their forces and a slender supply of munitions, attacked
the Turks in the valleys and gorges of Sassoun, and inflicted
considerable losses upon them. A fraction of the Armenians who
escaped the massacre broke through the Turkish lines and reached
Van, which was already in the hands of the Russian troops.
The number of Armenian victims is very large. In the town of Moush
alone, out of the 15,000 Armenian inhabitants there are only 200
survivors; out of the 59,000 inhabitants of the plain hardly 9,000
have escaped.
22. BITLIS, MOUSH AND SASSOUN: RECORD OF AN INTERVIEW WITH ROUPEN,
OF SASSOUN, BY MR. A.S. SAFRASTIAN; DATED TIFLIS, 6th NOVEMBER,
1915.
At the moment of writing, there is very little doubt that during the
months of June and July last the Turks have almost completely wiped
out about 150,000 Armenians of Bitlis, Moush and Sassoun.
When a detailed account of the horrors which accompanied these
massacres is fully disclosed to the civilised world, it will stand
out in all history as the greatest masterpiece of brutality ever
committed, even by the Turk. A short description of these horrors
was given to me by Roupen, one of the leaders in Sassoun, who has
miraculously escaped the Turkish lines after long marches across
Moush and Lake Van and has been here for the last few days. As soon
as the Turks went into the war, they entered into negotiations with
the Armenian leaders in Moush and Sassoun with a view to
co-operating for the common defence. The Turkish representatives,
however, laid down such conditions as a basis for agreement that the
Armenians could scarcely entertain them as serious. Until January
things had gone on fairly smoothly, and the Armenians were advised
by their leaders to comply with all legitimate demands made by the
authorities. On the failure of negotiations, the Turks adopted hard
measures against the Armenians. They had already ruthlessly
requisitioned every commodity they possibly could lay hands on, and
now they demanded the surrender of their arms from the peasantry.
The Armenians said that they could not give up their arms while the
Kurds were left armed to the teeth and went about unmolested.
Towards the end of January, a Turkish gendarme provoked a quarrel in
Tzeronk, a large Armenian village some 20 miles west of Moush, where
some 70 people were killed and the village destroyed. Soon
afterwards, another quarrel was started by gendarmes in Koms (Goms),
a village on the Euphrates, where the Turks wanted to raise forced
labour for the transport of military supplies. As a previous batch
of men employed on similar work had never returned home, the
peasants grew suspicious and refused to go. Local passion ran high,
and the Turks desired to arrest one Gorioun, a native of
considerable bravery, who had avenged himself upon Mehmed Emin, a
Kurdish brigand, who had ruined his home in the past. All such
conflicts of a local character were settled in one way or another by
negotiation between the authorities and the leaders of the
Dashnaktzoutioun party. In the meantime, Kurdish irregulars and
Moslem bands, who were just returning from the battle of Kilidj
Geduk, where they had been roughly handled by the Russians, began to
harry the Armenians all over the country to the limit of their
endurance. In answer to protests, the authorities explained away the
grievances and gave all assurances of good-will towards the
Armenians, who naturally did not believe in them.
_The Massacres at Sairt and Bitlis._—Towards the end of May, Djevdet
Bey, the military governor, was expelled from Van, and the town was
captured by the native Armenians[40] and then by the Russo-Armenian
forces. Djevdet Bey fled southwards and, crossing the Bohtan,
entered Sairt with some 8,000 soldiers whom he called “Butcher”
battalions (Kassab Tabouri). He massacred most of the Christians of
Sairt, though nothing is known of the details. On the best
authority, however, it is reported that he ordered his soldiers to
burn in a public square the Armenian Bishop Yeghishé Vartabed and
the Chaldean Bishop Addai Sher. Then Djevdet Bey, followed by the
small army of Halil Bey, marched on Bitlis towards the middle of
June. Before his arrival, the Armenians and Kurds of Bitlis had
agreed upon a scheme for mutual protection in case of any emergency,
but Djevdet Bey had his own plans for exterminating the Armenians.
He first raised a ransom of £5,000 from them, and then hanged
Hokhigian and some 20 other Armenian leaders, most of whom were
attending the wounded in field hospitals. On the 25th June, the
Turks surrounded the town of Bitlis and cut its communications with
the neighbouring Armenian villages; then most of the able-bodied men
were taken away from their families by domiciliary visits. During
the following few days, all the men under arrest were shot outside
the town and buried in deep trenches dug by the victims themselves.
The young women and children were distributed among the rabble, and
the remainder, the “useless” lot, were driven to the south and are
believed to have been drowned in the Tigris. Any attempts at
resistance, however brave, were easily quelled by the regular
troops. The recalcitrants, after firing their last cartridges,
either took poison by whole families or destroyed themselves in
their homes, in order not to fall into the hands of Turks. Some
hundred Armenian families in the town, all of them artisans or
skilled labourers badly needed by the military authorities, were
spared during this massacre, but since then there has been no news
of their fate.
It is in such “gentlemanly” fashion that the Turks disposed of about
15,000 Armenians at Bitlis; and the Armenian peasantry of Rahva,
Khoultig, and other populous villages of the surrounding district
suffered the same fate.
_The Massacres in Moush._—Long before this horror had been
perpetrated at Bitlis, the Turks and Kurds of Diyarbekir, followed
by the most blood-thirsty tribes of Bekran and Belek, had wiped out
the Armenians of Slivan, Bisherig, and of the vast plain extending
from Diyarbekir to the foot of the Sassoun block. Some thousands of
refugees had escaped to Sassoun, as the only haven of safety amid a
sea of widespread terror. They told the people of Sassoun and Moush
of the enormities which had been committed upon themselves. The line
of conduct to be adopted by the Armenians was now obvious. The Turks
were resolved to destroy them, and therefore they had to make the
best of a hopeless situation by all means at their disposal. Roupen
tells me that they had no news whatever as to the progress of the
war on the Caucasian front, and that the Turks spread false news to
mislead them. The general peace was maintained in the Province of
Bitlis until the beginning of June, when things came to a climax.
The outlying villages of Boulanik and Moush had already been
massacred in May. Now Sassoun was attacked in two main directions.
The Kurdish tribes of Belek, Bekran, and Shego, the notorious Sheikh
of Zilan and many others were armed by the Government and ordered to
surround Sassoun. The 15,000 Armenians of these mountains,
re-inforced by some other 15,000 from Moush and Diyarbekir, repelled
many fierce attacks, in which the Kurds lost heavily, both in men
and arms; whereupon the Government again entered into negotiations
with the Armenian leaders, through the Bishop of Moush, and offered
them a general amnesty if they laid down their arms and joined in
the defence of the common fatherland. And, as a proof of their
genuineness, the authorities explained away the massacres of Slivan,
Boulanik, &c., as due to a deplorable misunderstanding. Oppressions
suddenly ceased everywhere, and perfect order prevailed in Moush for
about three weeks in June. A strict watch, however, was kept over
the movements of the Armenians, and they were forbidden to
concentrate together. In the last week of June, one Kiazim Bey
arrived from Erzeroum with at least 10,000 troops and mountain
artillery to reinforce the garrison at Moush. The day after his
arrival strong patrols were posted on the hills overlooking the town
of Moush, thus cutting all communication between Moush and Sassoun.
Kurdish bands of “fedais” and gendarmes were commissioned to sever
all intercourse between various villages and the town of Moush, so
that no one knew what was going on even in the immediate
neighbourhood.
Early in July, the authorities ordered the Armenians to surrender
their arms, and pay a large money ransom. The leading Armenians of
the town and the headmen of the villages were subjected to revolting
tortures. Their finger nails and then their toe nails were forcibly
extracted; their teeth were knocked out, and in some cases their
noses were whittled down, the victims being thus done to death under
shocking, lingering agonies. The female relatives of the victims who
came to the rescue were outraged in public before the very eyes of
their mutilated husbands and brothers. The shrieks and death-cries
of the victims filled the air, yet they did not move the Turkish
beast. The same process of disarmament was carried out in the large
Armenian villages of Khaskegh, Franknorshen, &c., and on the
slightest show of resistance men and women were done to death in the
manner described above. On the 10th July, large contingents of
troops, followed by bands of criminals released from the prisons,
began to round up the able-bodied men from all the villages. In the
100 villages of the plain of Moush most of the villagers took up any
arms they possessed and offered a desperate resistance in various
favourable positions. In the natural order of things the ammunition
soon gave out in most villages, and there followed what is perhaps
one of the greatest crimes in all history. Those who had no arms and
had done nothing against the authorities were herded into various
camps and bayoneted in cold blood.
In the town of Moush itself the Armenians, under the leadership of
Gotoyan and others, entrenched themselves in the churches and
stone-built houses and fought for four days in self-defence. The
Turkish artillery, manned by German officers, made short work of all
the Armenian positions. Every one of the Armenians, leaders as well
as men, was killed fighting; and when the silence of death reigned
over the ruins of churches and the rest, the Moslem rabble made a
descent upon the women and children and drove them out of the town
into large camps which had already been prepared for the peasant
women and children. The ghastly scenes which followed may indeed
sound incredible, yet these reports have been confirmed from Russian
sources beyond all doubt.
The shortest method for disposing of the women and children
concentrated in the various camps was to burn them. Fire was set to
large wooden sheds in Alidjan, Megrakom, Khaskegh, and other
Armenian villages, and these absolutely helpless women and children
were roasted to death. Many went mad and threw their children away;
some knelt down and prayed amid the flames in which their bodies
were burning; others shrieked and cried for help which came from
nowhere. And the executioners, who seem to have been unmoved by this
unparalleled savagery, grasped infants by one leg and hurled them
into the fire, calling out to the burning mothers: “Here are your
lions.” Turkish prisoners who had apparently witnessed some of these
scenes were horrified and maddened at remembering the sight. They
told the Russians that the stench of the burning human flesh
permeated the air for many days after.
Under present circumstances it is impossible to say how many
Armenians, out of a population of 60,000 in the plain of Moush, are
left alive; the one fact which can be recorded at present is that
now and then some survivors escape through the mountains and reach
the Russian lines to give further details of the unparalleled crime
perpetrated in Moush during July.
_The Massacres in Sassoun._—While the “Butcher” battalions of
Djevdet Bey and the regulars of Kiazim Bey were engaged in Bitlis
and Moush, some cavalry were sent to Sassoun early in July to
encourage the Kurds who had been defeated by the Armenians at the
beginning of June. The Turkish cavalry invaded the lower valley of
Sassoun and captured a few villages after stout fighting. In the
meantime the reorganised Kurdish tribes attempted to close on
Sassoun from the south, west, and north. During the last fortnight
of July almost incessant fighting went on, sometimes even during the
night. On the whole, the Armenians held their own on all fronts and
expelled the Kurds from their advanced positions. However, the
people of Sassoun had other anxieties to worry about. The population
had doubled since their brothers who had escaped from the plains had
sought refuge in their mountains; the millet crop of the last season
had been a failure; all honey, fruit, and other local produce had
been consumed, and the people had been feeding on unsalted roast
mutton (they had not even any salt to make the mutton more
sustaining); finally, the ammunition was in no way sufficient for
the requirements of heavy fighting. But the worst had yet to come.
Kiazim Bey, after reducing the town and the plain of Moush, rushed
his army to Sassoun for a new effort to overwhelm these brave
mountaineers. Fighting was renewed on all fronts throughout the
Sassoun district. Big guns made carnage among the Armenian ranks.
Roupen tells me that Gorioun, Dikran, and 20 other of their best
fighters were killed by a single shell, which burst in their midst.
Encouraged by the presence of guns, the cavalry and Kurds pushed on
with relentless energy.
The Armenians were compelled to abandon the outlying lines of their
defence and were retreating day by day into the heights of Antok,
the central block of the mountains, some 10,000 feet high. The
non-combatant women and children and their large flocks of cattle
greatly hampered the free movements of the defenders, whose number
had already been reduced from 3,000 to about half that figure.
Terrible confusion prevailed during the Turkish attacks as well as
the Armenian counterattacks. Many of the Armenians smashed their
rifles after firing the last cartridge and grasped their revolvers
and daggers. The Turkish regulars and Kurds, amounting now to
something like 30,000 altogether, pushed higher and higher up the
heights and surrounded the main Armenian position at close quarters.
Then followed one of those desperate and heroic struggles for life
which have always been the pride of mountaineers. Men, women and
children fought with knives, scythes, stones, and anything else they
could handle. They rolled blocks of stone down the steep slopes,
killing many of the enemy. In a frightful hand-to-hand combat, women
were seen thrusting their knives into the throats of Turks and thus
accounting for many of them. On the 5th August, the last day of the
fighting, the blood-stained rocks of Antok were captured by the
Turks. The Armenian warriors of Sassoun, except those who had worked
round to the rear of the Turks to attack them on their flanks, had
died in battle. Several young women, who were in danger of falling
into the Turks hands, threw themselves from the rocks, some of them
with their infants in their arms. The survivors have since been
carrying on a guerilla warfare, living only on unsalted mutton and
grass. The approaching winter may have disastrous consequences for
the remnants of the Sassounli Armenians, because they have nothing
to eat and no means of defending themselves.
-----
Footnote 40:
See preceding section.
23. MOUSH: STATEMENT BY A GERMAN EYE-WITNESS OF OCCURRENCES AT
MOUSH; COMMUNICATED BY THE AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR ARMENIAN AND
SYRIAN RELIEF.
Towards the end of October (1914), when the Turkish war began, the
Turkish officials started to take everything they needed for the war
from the Armenians. Their goods, their money, all was confiscated.
Later on, every Turk was free to go to an Armenian shop and take out
what he needed or thought he would like to have. Only a tenth
perhaps was really for the war, the rest was pure robbery. It was
necessary to have food, &c., carried to the front, on the Caucasian
frontier. For this purpose the Government sent out about 300 old
Armenian men, many cripples amongst them, and boys not more than
twelve years old, to carry the goods—a three weeks’ journey from
Moush to the Russian frontier. As every individual Armenian was
robbed of everything he ever had, these poor people soon died of
hunger and cold on the way. They had no clothes at all, for even
these were stolen on the way. If out of these 300 Armenians thirty
or forty returned, it was a marvel; the rest were either beaten to
death or died from the causes stated above.
The winter was most severe in Moush; the gendarmes were sent to levy
high taxes, and as the Armenians had already given everything to the
Turks, and were therefore powerless to pay these enormous taxes,
they were beaten to death. The Armenians never defended themselves
except when they saw the gendarmes ill-treating their wives and
children, and the result in such cases was that the whole village
was burnt down, merely because a few Armenians had tried to protect
their families.
Toward the middle of April we heard rumours that there were great
disturbances in Van. We have heard statements both from Turks and
from Armenians, and as these reports agree in every respect, it is
quite plain that there is some truth in them. They state that the
Ottoman Government sent orders that all Armenians were to give up
their arms, which the Armenians refused to do on the ground that
they required their arms in case of necessity. This caused a regular
massacre. All villages inhabited by Armenians were burnt down. The
Turks boasted of having now got rid of all the Armenians. I heard it
from the officers myself, how they revelled in the thought that the
Armenians had been got rid of.
Thus the winter passed, with things happening every day more
terrible than one can possibly describe. We then heard that
massacres had started in Bitlis. In Moush everything was being
prepared for one, when the Russians arrived at Liz, which is about
14 to 16 hours’ journey from Moush. This occupied the attention of
the Turks, so that the massacre was put off for the time being.
Hardly had the Russians left Liz, however, when all the districts
inhabited by Armenians were pillaged and destroyed.
This was in the month of May. At the beginning of June, we heard
that the whole Armenian population of Bitlis had been got rid of. It
was at this time that we received news that the American Missionary,
Dr. Knapp, had been wounded in an Armenian house and that the
Turkish Government had sent him to Diyarbekir. The very first night
in Diyarbekir he died, and the Government explained his death as a
result of having overeaten, which of course nobody believed.