reform which had been regarded as cardinal ever since 1878. There
was to be a mixed Gendarmerie, under a European chief, recruited
from the Turks and Armenians, but closed to the Kurds; Moslem and
Christian were to be equal before the law; the Armenian language was
to be a recognised medium in the courts and public offices (a bitter
clause for the Young Turkish nationalists); there were to be no
restrictions on the multiplication of Armenian schools. Finally, the
vilayets affected by the scheme[245] were to be divided into two
groups, and each group was to be placed under a European
Inspector-General. The two Inspector-Generals were authorised to
appoint and dismiss all officials in their respective spheres,
except those “of superior rank.” They were themselves to be
appointed by the Ottoman Government, on the recommendation of the
Powers, for a term of ten years, and not to be removable within this
period. The Government duly proceeded to select two candidates for
these Inspectorates, a Dutchman and a Norwegian, but its treatment
of these gentlemen soon showed that in diplomacy, at any rate, the
Young Turks had adopted the methods of Abd-ul Hamid. A clause was
inserted in the Inspectors’ contract of engagement, empowering the
Government to denounce it at any moment upon payment of an indemnity
of one year’s salary—a flat violation of the ten years’ term
provided for under the scheme; and the list of “superior officials”
was inflated until the patronage of the Inspectors, which, next to
their irremovability, would have been their most effective power,
was reduced to an illusion. The unfortunate nominees were spared the
farce of exercising their maimed authority. They had barely reached
their provinces when the European War broke out, and the Government
promptly denounced the contracts and suspended the Scheme of
Reforms, as the first step towards its own intervention in the
conflict.
Thus, at the close of 1914, the Armenians found themselves in the
same position as in 1883. The measures designed for their security
had fallen through, and left nothing behind but the resentment of
the Government that still held them at its mercy. The deportations
of 1915 followed as inexorably from the Balkan War and the Project
of 1914 as the massacres of 1895-6 had followed from the Russian War
and the Project of 1878. Only in the execution of their revenge the
Young Turks revealed all the sinister features of their
dissimilarity to Abd-ul-Hamid. The Sultan, so far as he differed
from the familiar type of Oriental despot, had been an opportunist
in the tradition of Metternich—a politician of mature experience and
delicate touch, unencumbered by any constructive programme to
disturb the artistry of his game of finesse. He repressed the
Armenians to a nicety after preparing for it eighteen years. The
Young Turks were adventurers who had caught the catchwords of
another generation and another school—the apes of Danton and
Robespierre, and doctrinaires to the core. For the old,
anachronistic ascendency of Moslem over Rayah, to the maintenance of
which Abd-ul-Hamid had cynically devoted his abilities, they
substituted the idea of Turkish nationalism, which clothed the same
evil in a more clearly-cut and infinitely more dynamic form. They
were fanatics with an unreasoned creed, builders with a plan that
they meant to carry through, and no half-measures would content
them, no inhibitions of prudence or humanity deter them from the
attempt to realise the whole. Hindrances only exasperated them to
sweeping action, and a blind concentration on their programme
shielded them from doubts. “Our acts,” Talaat Bey is reported to
have said, in the interview quoted above, “have been dictated to us
by a national and historical necessity. The idea of guaranteeing the
existence of Turkey must outweigh every other consideration.” The
first of these sentiments is the pure-milk of the eighteenth century
ideologues; there is a Prussian adulteration in the second, which
smacks of more recent times. It is the voice of the youngest,
crudest, most ruthless national movement in Europe, and the acts
which it excuses, and which the documents in this volume describe,
were the barbarous initiation of the Near East into the European
fraternity.
VI. THE DEPORTATIONS OF 1915: PROCEDURE.
The atrocities of 1915 are described in detail in the documents
collected in this book, but it will be well to give in conclusion a
bare summary of events, partly to make the detail less confusing to
the reader, and partly to bring out the essential unity of design
which underlay the procedure against the Armenians at the various
dates and in the various provinces of the Empire to which the
documents relate. This fundamental uniformity of procedure is more
sinister than the incidental aggravations of the crime by Kurds,
peasants, gendarmes or local authorities. It is damning evidence
that the procedure itself, which set in motion all the other forces
of evil, was conceived and organised by the Central Government at
Constantinople.
The dismissal of the Inspectors-General and the abrogation of the
reforms were followed immediately by the mobilisation of the Ottoman
Army for eventual participation in the war, and with this the
sufferings of the Armenians began. It has been mentioned already
that the Young Turks had extended the duty of military service to
their Christian fellow-citizens, and that the Armenian recruits had
distinguished themselves in the Balkan War; but naturally the
measure was not retrospective, and Armenians who were already past
the statutory age of training when it was introduced, were allowed
to pay the “Rayah” poll-tax as before, under the formula of an
exemption-tax in lieu of military service. In the autumn of 1914,
however, there was a general levy of all males in the Empire from
twenty years of age to forty-five, and soon from eighteen to fifty,
in which the Armenians, whether they had paid their annual
exemption-tax or not, were included with the rest. There were also
drastic requisitions of private supplies, by which the Armenians,
again, were the principal sufferers, since they were the chief
merchants and store-keepers of the country. These were considerable
hardships and injustices, but they were not necessarily in
themselves the result of a malevolent design. Apart from what
actually followed, they might have been simply the inevitable
penalties of a country which had been embarked by its Government on
a struggle for existence.
In October, when mobilisation was completed, the Government had, in
fact, declared war on the Allies, and in December its grandiose
military operations began. Enver Pasha, with the main Ottoman
forces, started an encircling movement against the Russian troops in
Caucasia, along a front extending from Erzeroum to the Black Sea
Coast; Halil Bey led a flying column across the frontier of
Azerbaijan, and raised the Kurds; Djemal Pasha felt his way across
the Sinai Peninsula towards the Suez Canal. For a week or two the
invading armies met with success. They reached Ardahan, almost in
the rear of Kars, they pushed the Russians back from their rail-head
at Sari-Kamysh, and they occupied the capital of Azerbaijan, Tabriz.
But then the campaign broke down in disaster. Two Turkish army corps
were destroyed at Sari-Kamysh in the first week of January, 1915,
and the rest were driven out of Russian territory by the end of the
month; on the 30th January, the Russians even re-occupied Tabriz.
Djemal’s Egyptian expedition was a month in arrear, but its fortunes
were the same. He reached the Canal at the beginning of February,
after a creditable desert march, only to return by the way he came,
after an abortive night attack. There was no more question of the
offensive for the Turks, but only of defending their own straggling
frontiers; and this breakdown was a bitter blow to Young Turkish
official circles, for it shattered half the hopes that had lured
them into the war. The unmeasured optimism of the winter gave place
to equally violent depression, and under the influence of this new
atmosphere the persecution of the Armenians entered a second and
more positive phase.
A decree went forth that all Armenians should be disarmed. The
Armenians in the Army were drafted out of the fighting ranks,
re-formed into special labour battalions, and set to work at
throwing up fortifications and constructing roads. The disarming of
the civil population was left to the local authorities, and in every
administrative centre a reign of terror began. The authorities
demanded the production of a definite number of arms. Those who
could not produce them were tortured, often in fiendish ways; those
who procured them for surrender, by purchase from their Moslem
neighbours or by other means, were imprisoned for conspiracy against
the Government. Few of these were young men, for most of the young
had been called up to serve; they were elderly men, men of substance
and the leaders of the Armenian community, and it became apparent
that the inquisition for arms was being used as a cloak to deprive
the community of its natural heads. Similar measures had preceded
the massacres of 1895-6, and a sense of foreboding spread through
the Armenian people. “One night in the winter,” writes a foreign
witness of these events[246], “the Government sent officers round
the city to all Armenian houses, knocking up the families and
demanding that all weapons should be given up. This action was the
death-knell to many hearts.”
The appalling inference was in fact correct, for the second phase of
persecution passed over without a break into the third and final
act, and it is evident that the whole train had been laid by the
Ministry at Constantinople before the first arms were called in or
the first Armenian thrown into prison. This carries the detailed
organisation of the scheme at least as far back as February, 1915,
and, indeed, the elaborate preparations that had already been made
by the 8th April, the date of the first deportation at Zeitoun,
presuppose at least as long a period. It is extremely important to
emphasise these chronological facts, because they refute the attempt
of the apologists to disconnect the last phase from the phases that
preceded it, and to represent it as an emergency measure dictated by
the military events of the spring.
In reality, the situation had been growing tenser before the spring
began. In outlying villages, the inquisition for arms had been
accompanied by open violence. Men had been massacred, women violated
and houses burnt down by the gendarmerie patrols, and such outrages
had been particularly frequent in the Vilayet of Van, where the
soldiers seem to have been exasperated by their recent reverses and
were certainly stimulated by the truculence of the Governor Djevdet
Bey, who had returned to his administrative duties after his
unsuccessful campaigning beyond the frontier. The crowning outrage
was the murder of four Armenian leaders from the City, when they
were on their way to an outlying district to keep the peace, at
Djevdet’s own request, between the local Armenians and their Moslem
neighbours. The Armenian inhabitants of the City of Van took warning
from the fate of the villagers and from this last and most sinister
crime, and prepared themselves, in case of need, for self-defence.
Their action was justified by Djevdet Bey himself, for he had been
drawing a cordon round the garden suburbs of Van, where the majority
of the Armenian population lived, and on the 20th April he unleashed
his troops upon them without provocation. The Armenians of Van found
themselves fighting for their lives against a murderous attack by
what was supposed to be the lawful Government of their country.
There had been the same sequence of events at Zeitoun. The search
for arms had been accompanied by a formidable concentration of
troops in the town, and the final phase had been opened, not indeed
by a butchery, but by the deportation of the first batch of the
inhabitants. This had occurred on the 8th April, twelve days before
Djevdet Bey’s outbreak at Van, and both events were previous to the
new turn in the military situation. In fact, it was the distress of
the Armenian civil population at Van that decided the Russian
initiative. A Russian column, with a strong contingent of
Russian-Armenian volunteers, forced its way towards the city from
the direction of Bayazid, and relieved the defenders on the 19th
May, after they had been besieged for a month. The strategy of
encirclement was now retorted upon the Turks themselves, for on the
24th May another Russian column occupied Urmia, and drove the last
of the Turco-Kurdish invaders out of Azerbaijan. A British
expeditionary force was simultaneously pressing up the Tigris, and
while events were taking this serious turn in the east, the heart of
the Empire was threatened by the attack on the Dardanelles. By the
end of May, 1915, the outlook was as desperate as in the bad days of
1912, but it must be emphasised again that the final phase in the
procedure against the Armenians had already begun before these acute
military dangers emerged above the horizon. The military straits in
which the Young Turks found themselves in the spring of 1915 may
have precipitated the execution of their Armenian scheme, but have
no bearing whatever upon its origination.
On the 8th April, then, the final phase began, and the process
carried out at Zeitoun was applied to one Armenian centre after
another throughout the Ottoman Empire. On a certain date, in
whatever town or village it might be (and the dates show a
significant sequence), the public crier went through the streets
announcing that every male Armenian must present himself forthwith
at the Government Building. In some cases the warning was given by
the soldiery or gendarmerie slaughtering every male Armenian they
encountered in the streets, a reminiscence of the procedure in
1895-6; but usually a summons to the Government Building was the
preliminary stage. The men presented themselves in their working
clothes, leaving their shops and work-rooms open, their ploughs in
the field, their cattle on the mountain side. When they arrived,
they were thrown without explanation into prison, kept there a day
or two, and then marched out of the town in batches, roped man to
man, along some southerly or south-easterly road. They were
starting, they were told, on a long journey—to Mosul or perhaps to
Baghdad. It was a dreadful prospect to men unequipped for travel,
who had neither scrip nor staff, food nor clothes nor bedding. They
had bidden no farewell to their families, they had not wound up
their affairs. But they had not long to ponder over their plight,
for they were halted and massacred at the first lonely place on the
road. The same process was applied to those other Armenian men (and
they numbered hundreds or even thousands in the larger centres) who
had been imprisoned during the winter months on the charge of
conspiracy or concealment of arms, though in some instances these
prisoners are said to have been overlooked—an involuntary form of
reprieve of which there were also examples during the French Reign
of Terror in 1793. This was the civil authorities’ part, but there
was complete co-ordination between Talaat Bey’s Ministry of the
Interior and Enver Pasha’s Ministry of War, for simultaneously the
Armenian Labour Battalions, working behind the front, were
surrounded by detachments of their combatant Moslem fellow-soldiers
and butchered in cold blood.
The military authorities also made themselves responsible for the
civil population of Bitlis, Moush and Sassoun, who were marked out
for complete and immediate extermination on account of their
proximity to Van and the advancing Russian forces. This task was
carried out by military methods with the help of the local
Kurds—another reversion to the tactics of Abd-ul-Hamid—but its
application appears to have been limited to the aforementioned
districts. In the rest of the Empire, where the work was left in the
hands of the civil administration, the women and children were not
disposed of by straightforward massacre like the men. Their destiny
under the Government scheme was not massacre but slavery or
deportation.
After the Armenian men had been summoned away to their death, there
was usually a few days interval in whatever town it might be, and
then the crier was heard again in the streets, bidding all Armenians
who remained to prepare themselves for deportation, while placards
to the same effect were posted on the walls.[247] This applied, in
actual fact, to the women and children, and to a poor remnant of the
men who, through sickness, infirmity or age, had escaped the fate
marked out for their sex. A period of grace was in most cases
accorded for the settlement of their affairs and the preparation of
their journey; but here, again, there were cases in which the
victims were taken without warning from the loom, the fountain or
even from their beds, and the respite, where granted, was in great
measure illusory. The ordinary term given was a bare week, and it
was never more than a fortnight—a time utterly insufficient for all
that had to be done. There were instances, moreover, in which the
Government broke its promise, and carried away its victims before
the stated day arrived.
For the women there was an alternative to deportation. They might
escape it by conversion to Islam; but conversion for an Armenian
woman in 1915 meant something more physical than a change of
theology. It could only be ratified by immediate marriage with a
Moslem man, and if the woman were already a wife (or, rather, a
widow, for by this time few Armenian husbands remained alive), she
must part with any children she had, and surrender them to be
brought up as true Moslems in a “Government Orphanage”—a fate of
uncertain meaning, for no such institutions were known to be in
existence[248]. If the convert could find no Turk to take her, or
shrank from the embraces of the bridegroom who offered himself, then
she and her children must be deported with the rest, however
fervently she had professed the creed of Islam. Deportation was the
alternative adopted by, or imposed upon, the great majority.
The sentence of deportation was a paralysing blow, yet those
condemned to it had to spend their week of grace in feverish
activity, procuring themselves clothing, provisions and ready money
for the road. The local authorities placed every possible obstacle
in their way. There was an official fiction that their banishment
was only temporary, and they were therefore prohibited from selling
their real property or their stock. The Government set its seal upon
the vacated houses, lands and merchandise, “to keep them safe
against their owners’ return;” yet before these rightful owners
started on their march they often saw these very possessions, which
they had not been allowed to realise, made over by the authorities
as a free gift to Moslem immigrants, who had been concentrated in
the neighbourhood, in readiness to step into the Armenians’
place[249]. And even such household or personal chattels as they
were permitted to dispose of were of little avail, for their Moslem
neighbours took shameless advantage of their necessity, and beat
them down to an almost nominal price, so that when the day of
departure arrived they were often poorly equipped to meet it.
The Government charged itself with their transport, and indeed they
were not in a position to arrange for it themselves, for their
ultimate destination was seldom divulged. The exiles from each
centre were broken up into several convoys, which varied in size
from two or three hundred to three or four thousand members. A
detachment of gendarmerie was assigned to every convoy, to guard
them on the way, and the civil authorities hired or requisitioned a
certain number of ox-carts (arabas), usually one to a family, which
they placed at their disposal; and so the convoy started out. The
mental misery of exile was sufficiently acute, but it was soon
ousted by more material cares. A few days, or even a few hours,
after the start, the carters would refuse to drive them further, and
the gendarmes, as fellow-Moslems, would connive at their
mutinousness. So the carts turned back, and the exiles had to go
forward on foot. This was the beginning of their physical torments,
for they were not travelling over soft country or graded roads, but
by mule-tracks across some of the roughest country in the world. It
was the hot season, the wells and springs were sometimes many hours’
journey apart, and the gendarmes often amused themselves by
forbidding their fainting victims to drink. It would have been an
arduous march for soldiers on active service, but the members of
these convoys were none of them fitted or trained for physical
hardship. They were the women and children, the old and the sick.
Some of the women had been delicately brought up and lived in
comfort all their lives; some had to carry children in their arms
too young to walk; others had been sent off with the convoy when
they were far gone with child, and gave birth on the road. None of
these latter survived, for they were forced to march on again after
a few hours’ respite; they died on the road, and the new-born babies
perished with them. Many others died of hunger and thirst,
sunstroke, apoplexy or sheer exhaustion. The hardships endured by
the women who accompanied their husbands on Sir John Moore’s retreat
to Corunna bear no comparison with the hardships these Armenian
women endured. The Government which condemned them to exile knew
what the journey would mean, and the servants of the Government who
conducted them did everything to aggravate their inevitable physical
sufferings. Yet this was the least part of their torture; far worse
were the atrocities of violence wantonly inflicted upon them by
fellow human beings.