into the service of the new régime. As soon as the Ottoman
Constitution was restored, the Armenian political parties abandoned
their revolutionary programme in favour of parliamentary action, and
co-operated in Parliament with the Young Turkish bloc so long as
Young Turkish policy remained in any degree liberal or democratic.
The terrible Adana massacres, which occurred less than a year after
the Constitution had been proclaimed, might have damped the
Armenians’ enthusiasm (though at first the proof that the Young
Turks were implicated in them was not so clear as it has since
become). Yet they showed their loyalty in 1912, when the Turks were
fighting for their existence. It was only under the new laws that
the privilege and duty of military service had been extended to the
Christian as well as the Moslem citizens of the Empire, and the
disastrous Balkan Campaign was the first opportunity that Armenian
soldiers were given of doing battle for their common heritage. But
they bore themselves so well in this ordeal that they were publicly
commended by their Turkish commanders. Thus, in war and peace, in
the Army and in Parliament, the Armenians worked for the salvation
of the Ottoman Commonwealth, from the accession of the Young Turks
in 1908 till their intervention in the European War in 1914. It is
impossible to reconcile with this fact the Turkish contention that
in 1914 they suddenly reversed their policy and began treacherously
to plot for the Ottoman Empire’s destruction.
V. THE DEPORTATIONS OF 1915: ANTECEDENTS.
There is no dispute as to what happened in 1915. The Armenian
inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire were everywhere uprooted from
their homes, and deported to the most remote and unhealthy districts
that the Government could select for them. Some were murdered at the
outset, some perished on the way, and some died after reaching their
destination. The death-roll amounts to upwards of six hundred
thousand; perhaps six hundred thousand more are still alive in their
places of exile; and the remaining six hundred thousand or so have
either been converted forcibly to Islam, gone into hiding in the
mountains, or escaped beyond the Ottoman frontier. The Ottoman
Government cannot deny these facts, and they cannot justify them. No
provocation or misdemeanour on the part of individual Armenians
could justify such a crime against the whole race. But it might be
explained and palliated if the Armenians, or some of them, were
originally in the wrong; and therefore the Ottoman Government and
its German apologists have concentrated their efforts on proving
that this was the case.[229] There are three main Turkish
contentions, none of which will bear examination.
The first contention is that the Armenians took up arms and joined
the Russians, as soon as the latter crossed the Ottoman frontier.
The standard case its champions cite is the “Revolt of Van.” The
deportations, they maintain, were only ordered after this outbreak
to forestall the danger of its repetition elsewhere. This contention
is easily rebutted. In the first place, there was no Armenian revolt
at Van. The Armenians merely defended the quarter of the city in
which they lived, after it had been beleaguered and attacked by
Turkish troops, and the outlying villages visited with massacre by
Turkish patrols. The outbreak was on the Turkish side, and the
responsibility lies with the Turkish governor, Djevdet Bey. The
ferocious, uncontrollable character of this official was the true
cause of the catastrophe. Anyone who reads the impartial American
testimony on this point, in section II. of the present collection of
documents, will see that this was so. And, in the second place, the
deportations had already begun in Cilicia before the fighting at Van
broke out. The Turks fired the first shot at Van on the 20th April,
1915; the first Armenians were deported from Zeitoun on the 8th
April, and there is a record of their arrival in Syria as early as
the 19th[230]. The case of Van, which the apologists have made so
much of, simply falls to the ground[231], and they cannot
rehabilitate themselves by adducing any previous revolt at Zeitoun.
It is true that twenty-five fugitive conscripts defended themselves
for a day in a monastery near Zeitoun against Turkish troops, and
decamped into the mountains during the night. But this happened only
one day before the deportation, and the deportation must have been
decided upon far in advance, for it was preceded by a protracted
inquisition for arms, and there were Moslem refugees from the
Balkans concentrated on the spot, ready to occupy the Zeitounlis’
houses the moment the rightful owners were carried off. During all
these preliminary proceedings—most of which were violations of the
charter of liberties held by Zeitoun from the Ottoman Government—the
population as a whole (15,000 individuals as against the 25 who
rebelled) very scrupulously kept the peace. This was the policy of
the leaders, and they were obeyed by the people. Nothing happened at
Zeitoun that can account for the Government’s scheme of deportation.
There were several other instances in which the Armenians took up
arms, but none of them are relevant to the case. They were all
subsequent in date to these cardinal instances, and were simply
attempts at self-defence by people who had seen their neighbours
massacred or deported, and were threatened with the same fate
themselves. The Armenians of Moush resisted when they were attacked
by Djevdet Bey, who had already tried to massacre the Armenians of
Van and had succeeded in massacring those of Sairt and Bitlis. The
Armenians of Sassoun resisted when the Kurds had destroyed their
kinsmen in the plain of Diyarbekir and were closing in upon
themselves. This was in June, and the Nestorian Christians of
Hakkiari resisted under the same circumstances and at the same date.
Further west, a few villages took up arms in the Vilayet of Sivas,
after the rest of the Sivas Armenians had been deported; and at
Shabin Kara-Hissar the Armenians drove out their Turkish
fellow-townsmen and stood for several weeks at bay, when they heard
how the exiles from Trebizond and Kerasond had been murdered on the
road. The defence of Djibal Mousa in August (the only story in this
volume with a happy ending) was similarly inspired by the previous
fate of Zeitoun. The resistance at Ourfa in September was another
act of despair, provoked by the terrible procession of exiles from
Harpout and the north-east, which had been filing for three months
through Ourfa before the Armenian colony there was also summoned to
take the road. These are all the instances of resistance that are
reported, and they were all a consequence of the deportations, and
not their cause. It may be added that, wherever resistance was
offered, the Turks suppressed it with inconceivable brutality, not
merely retaliating upon the fighting men, but, in most cases,
massacring every Armenian man, woman and child in cold blood after
the fighting was over. These cases were not palliations of the
atrocities, but occasions of the worst excesses.
The second contention is that there was a general conspiracy of
Armenians throughout the Empire to bring about an internal
revolution at a moment when all the Ottoman military forces were
engaged on the frontiers, and so deliver the country into the hands
of the Allies. The prompt action of the Ottoman Government in
disarming, imprisoning, executing and deporting the whole
people—innocent and guilty alike—is alleged to have crushed this
movement before it had time to declare itself. This is an insidious
line of argument, because it refuses to be tested by the evidence of
what actually occurred. If the actual outbreaks were isolated,
inspired by panic, confined to self-defence, and posterior in date
to the Government’s own preventive measures, all that, on this
hypothesis, is not a proof of the Armenians’ innocence, but only of
the Government’s energy and foresight. Yet when this indictment is
examined, it, too, is found to rest on the most frivolous grounds.
The revolution, it is alleged, was to break out when the Allies
landed in Cilicia—but such a landing was never made; or it was
arranged in conjunction with the landing at the Dardanelles—but the
landing was made and the outbreak never happened. Indeed, it is hard
to see what the Armenians could have done, for nearly all their
able-bodied men between twenty and forty-five years of age were
mobilised at the beginning of the war, and the age limit was soon
extended in either direction to eighteen and fifty. The Turks make
sweeping allegations about secret stores of bombs and arms, which
prove to be false in every case where they can be checked. The
Armenians certainly possessed a moderate number of rifles and
revolvers, because, for the past six years, under the Young Turkish
régime, they had been permitted to carry arms for their personal
security, a privilege that had always been enjoyed, as a matter of
course, by every Moslem in the Ottoman Empire. But evidently there
were not enough arms in their possession to go round, even among the
comparatively few men left behind after mobilisation; for when, in
the winter of 1914-5, the Ottoman authorities made a house-to-house
search for arms, and conducted their inquisition by atrocious
physical tortures, the Armenians bought arms from each other and
from their Moslem neighbours, in order to be able to deliver them up
and suffer no worse punishment than mere imprisonment. This practice
is recorded independently by several trustworthy witnesses from
various localities[232].
The stories of bombs are more extravagant still. In the town of X.,
for instance, a bomb was unearthed in the Armenian cemetery, which
was made the pretext for the most atrocious procedure against the
Armenian inhabitants. Yet the bomb was rusty with age, and was
believed to date from the days of Abd-ul-Hamid, when the Young
Turks, as well as the Armenian political parties, were a secret
revolutionary organisation and not averse to using bombs themselves.
In the same town, a blacksmith in the employment of the American
College was cruelly tortured for “constructing a bomb”; but the
“bomb” turned out to be a solid iron shot which he had been
commissioned to make for the competition of “putting the weight” in
the College athletic sports.
It was also alleged that Armenians resident on the coast had been in
treacherous communication with the Allied fleets. The Armenian
boatmen of Silivri[233], for instance, on the Sea of Marmora, were
deported on the ground that they had furnished supplies to British
submarines; and before this, as early as April, 1915, half-a-dozen
Armenians from Dört Yöl, a village on the Gulf of Alexandretta, were
hanged at Adana on the charge of having signalled to the
Franco-British cruiser squadron—a step which was followed up by the
deportation of the whole population of Dört Yöl into the interior,
to do navvy-work on the roads. This charge against Dört Yöl can be
checked, for the witness of the hangings (a resident in Cilicia of
neutral nationality and excellent standing)[234] states, from his
personal knowledge, that only one Armenian from Dört Yöl had had any
communication with the Allied warships. This evidence is
authoritative, and it has probability on its side; for, if Dört Yöl
was in regular communication with the Allied squadron, it is
inconceivable that the Armenians of Djibal Mousa, a few miles
further down the coast, should have taken 44 days to attract the
same squadron’s attention, when it was a question for them of life
and death[235].
Thus the second contention breaks down, and we are left with the
third, which lays little stress on justice or public safety and
bases the case on revenge. The Armenian civil population in the
Ottoman Empire, it is argued, owes its misfortunes to the Armenian
volunteers in the Russian Army. “Our Armenians in Turkey,” say the
Turks in effect, “have certainly suffered terribly from the measures
we have taken; they may even have suffered innocently; but can you
blame us? Was it not human nature that we should revenge ourselves
on the Armenians at home for the injury we had received from their
compatriots fighting against us at the front in the Russian
ranks—men who had actually volunteered to fight against us in the
enemy’s cause?”
This is almost the favourite argument of the apologists, and yet it
is surely the most monstrous of any, for these Armenian volunteers
owed no allegiance to the Turks at all, but were ordinary Russian
subjects. Through territorial acquisitions and free immigration from
across the frontier, the Russian Government had, by 1914, acquired
the sovereignty over little less than half the Armenian race[236].
Russia was as much the lawful “fatherland” of this substantial
minority as Turkey was of the remainder. It is a misfortune for any
nation to be divided between two allegiances, especially when the
states to which they owe them elect to go to war; but it is at least
an alleviation of the difficulty, and one that does honour to both
parties concerned, when either fraction of the divided nationality
finds itself in sympathy, even under the test of war, with the
particular state to which its allegiance is legally due. The loyalty
of the Russian Armenians to Russia[237] cast no imputation upon the
Ottoman Armenians, and was no concern of the Turks. The latter will
probably explain that they had no objection to the Russian Armenians
doing their duty, but resented their doing more: “The conscripts
naturally answered the summons, but why did those who were exempt
equip themselves so eagerly as volunteers? The Ottoman Armenians
adopted a painfully different attitude. At the beginning of the war,
the Young Turkish Party sent representatives to the Congress of the
Armenian ‘Dashnaktzoutioun’ Party at Erzeroum, offered them
concessions to their nationality, and called upon them to organise
volunteers and join in the invasion of Russian territory[238]. Yet
they decidedly refused—refused in this case when their kinsmen did
not wait to be asked in the other. This reveals the real sympathies
and aspirations of the Armenian people, not only the Armenians in
Russia, but those in our country as well.”
There is, of course, a crushing answer to these tirades. If the
Armenians felt so differently towards the Turks and the Russians,
then that was a serious reflection on their treatment by the
Turks, and the logical way to change their feelings was to treat
them better. Could the civilian Armenians who remembered the
massacre of their innocent kinsfolk at Adana a few years before
have been expected to volunteer in support of those who had
commanded these massacres? Could their feelings have been other
than they were? But so long as only their feelings were in
question and their behaviour remained correct, the Turks had no
right to proceed with them in any but a humane and constitutional
manner. The argument can be driven home by a parallel. There are
Polish volunteer legions in the Austro-Hungarian Army. What would
the Turks’ German apologists have said if the Russian Government
had appeased its resentment against these Austrian-Polish
volunteers by wiping out all the Russian-Polish civilians on their
own side of the frontier?
It is a significant fact that all these Turkish complaints are
directed against Russian Armenians in Russian service. There is no
hint of treachery or malingering on the part of those Ottoman
Armenians who had been drafted, many of them illegally, into the
Turkish Army—no insinuation that their record was not as
satisfactory in 1914 as in 1912[239]. To the editor’s knowledge,
the German apologists have only been able to fasten upon two
“traitors” in the legal (though not in the moral) sense of the
word. There have been refugees, of course, like Mourad of Sivas,
who escaped into the Caucasus when the atrocities were in full
course—men who had just been compelled to fight for their lives,
and had seen their neighbours and kinsfolk massacred once more on
all sides of them. Not even the German apologists would dare to
censure these men under these circumstances for enrolling in the
volunteers. But there are only two cases adduced of Ottoman
subjects who went over to the Russians before the atrocities
began—a certain Karakin Pasdermadjian, a deputy in the Ottoman
Parliament, and another Armenian named Suren, stated to have been
a delegate at the “Dashnaktzoutioun” Congress at Erzeroum. “In
face of this,” argues the German writer from whose pamphlet these
instances are taken[240], “it was the Ottoman Government’s duty to
uphold public law and order. In wartime, measures of this kind
assume an especially weighty and pressing character”—and with this
generality he implicitly condones the atrocities of 1915. If this
represents the official apologia of the Ottoman Government, the
only answer is a _reductio ad absurdum_. On the same principle,
when Sir Roger Casement landed from a German submarine on the
Irish coast, it would have been the British Government’s duty to
deport all the Roman Catholic inhabitants of Ireland and maroon
them, say, on the coast of Labrador or in the central desert of
Australia. The parallel is exact, and leaves nothing more to be
said, unless, indeed, what was said by Talaat Bey, the Young
Turkish Minister of the Interior, in a recent interview with a
correspondent of the _Berliner Tageblatt_[241]. “The sad events
that have occurred in Armenia,” he vouchsafed, “have prevented my
sleeping well at night. We have been reproached for making no
distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty; but
that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that _those who
were innocent to-day might be guilty to-morrow_.” There is no need
of further witnesses.
The various Turkish contentions thus fail, from first to last, to
meet the point. They all attempt to trace the atrocities of 1915 to
events arising out of the war; but they not only cannot justify them
on this ground, they do not even suggest any adequate motive for
their perpetration. It is evident that the war was merely an
opportunity and not a cause—in fact, that the deportation scheme,
and all that it involved, flowed inevitably from the general policy
of the Young Turkish Government. This inference will be confirmed if
we analyse the political tenets to which the Young Turks were
committed.
The Young Turkish movement began as a reaction against the policy of
Abd-ul-Hamid. Its founders repudiated his “neutralisation of
forces”; they maintained that the Ottoman Empire must stand by its
own strength, and that this strength must be developed by a radical
internal reconstruction. From their asylum at Paris they preached
the doctrines of the French Revolution—religious toleration,
abolition of caste-privileges, equality of all citizens before the
law, equality of obligation to perform military service,
constitutional government through a representative parliament. And
when they came into power, they made some attempt to put these
doctrines into practice. In Turkey for a brief space of the year
1908, as in France twelve decades before, the vision of “Pure
Reason” did bring peace and goodwill among men. Nearly all the
foreign observers who were in the country when “Huriet” came,
testify to this momentary, magic transfiguration of hatred into
love; and the Armenians, who had desired more than any of their
neighbours to see this day, might well believe that the Young Turks’
ideal was identical with their own. Yet there were vital differences
beneath the surface. The Young Turks realised that the Christian
elements were an asset; they did not propose, at the outset, to
destroy them, as Abd-ul-Hamid had done; but they wanted still less
to co-operate with them as separate partners in the Ottoman State.
The “Millets” were as abhorrent to them, as an institution, as the
autocracy of Abd-ul-Hamid. They set up against the principle of the
“Millet” the programme of “Ottomanisation.” The Turkish leaven was
to permeate the non-Turkish lump, until it had all become of one
uniform Turkish substance. In Parliament this programme took such
forms as a bill to make the Turkish language the universal and
compulsory medium of secondary education[242], and the Armenian
deputies found themselves opposing it in concert with the Liberal
Party, which included the Arab bloc and stood for the toleration of
national individualities. The Young Turks, in fact, had imbibed both
the good currents and the bad in the modern political atmosphere of
Western Europe—its democratic doctrines but its chauvinism as well.
Most political theorists debarred from responsible practice give
this same confused allegiance to incompatible ideals, and all, when
they come into power, are compelled by circumstances to choose which
master they will serve. In 1908, the choice of the Young Turks was
not predestined; the “Committee of _Union_ and _Progress_” might
have set its face towards either of its divided goals; but
disillusionment soon decided its orientation. The magic dawn of
“Huriet” faded; the old, crushing burden of Ottoman Government
descended upon shoulders not expert, like Abd-ul-Hamid’s, at
balancing the weight; the Austro-Bulgarian violation of the Treaty
of Berlin and the subsequent territorial losses of the Balkan War
shook the Young Turkish Party’s prestige, aggravated the difficulty
of their problem, and embittered their attitude towards its
solution. The current of chauvinism gained upon them more and more,
and their intervention in the European War demonstrated that its
mastery was complete, for their calculations in intervening were of
a thoroughly Prussian character. A military triumph was to restore
them their prestige; it was to recover ancient territories of the
Empire in Egypt, the Caucasus and the coveted Persian province of
Azerbaijan; it was to shake off the trammels of international
control, and solve the internal problem by cutting the Gordian Knot.
But the hopes of conquest and prestige were early shattered by the
strategical failures of the winter of 1914-5, which were almost as
humiliating as those of 1912, and then the Young Turks concentrated
savagely upon “Ottomanisation” at home.
Ottomanisation has become the Young Turks’ obsession[243]. Their
first act after declaring war was to repudiate the Capitulations;
their latest stroke has been to declare the Turkish language the
exclusive medium of official business in the Empire, with only a
year’s delay—a step which has caused consternation among their
German allies. And in this mood they turned to the Armenian
question, which happened at the moment to have reached an important
phase.
In 1912-3 the diplomatists of Europe had once more met in
consultation over the Ottoman Empire, and the Armenians had
presented their case to the Conference at London, as they had
presented it at Berlin thirty-five years before.[244] When the
Conference proved unable to take cognizance of their petition, they
applied to the individual governments of the Powers. The Russian
Government took the initiative and drafted a new scheme for the
administration of the Six Vilayets, which it submitted to the
Signatories of the Treaty of Berlin. The German Government opposed,
but was won over by the Russian diplomacy and by the representations
of the Armenian delegates, who repaired to Berlin in person. Then,
when the German opposition had been withdrawn, the Russian draft was
revised by the Ambassadors of the Powers at Constantinople,
accepted, with modifications, by the Young Turkish Government, and
actually promulgated by them on the 8th February, 1914.