safe from outrage. The Moslem peasants mobbed and plundered them as
they passed through the cultivated lands, and the gendarmes connived
at the peasants’ brutality, as they had connived at the desertion of
the drivers with their carts. When they arrived at a village they
were exhibited like slaves in a public place, often before the
windows of the Government Building itself, and every Moslem
inhabitant was allowed to view them and take his choice of them for
his harem; the gendarmes themselves began to make free with the
rest, and compelled them to sleep with them at night. There were
still more horrible outrages when they came to the mountains, for
here they were met by bands of “chettis” and Kurds. The “chettis”
were brigands, recruited from the public prisons; they had been
deliberately released by the authorities on a consideration which
may have been tacit but which both parties clearly understood. As
for the Kurds, they had not changed since 1896, for they had always
retained their arms, which Abd-ul-Hamid had served out and the Young
Turks could not or would not take away; and they had now been
restored to official favour upon the proclamation of the Holy War,
so that their position was as secure again as it had been before
1908. They knew well what they were allowed and what they were
intended to do. When these Kurds and chettis waylaid the convoys,
the gendarmes always fraternised with them and followed their lead,
and it would be hard to say which took the most active part in the
ensuing massacre—for this was the work which the brigands came to
do. The first to be butchered were the old men and boys—all the
males that were to be found in the convoy except the infants in
arms—but the women were massacred also. It depended on the whim of
the moment whether a Kurd cut a woman down or carried her away into
the hills. When they were carried away their babies were left on the
ground or dashed against the stones. But while the convoy dwindled,
the remnant had always to march on. The cruelty of the gendarmes
towards the victims grew greater as their physical sufferings grew
more intense; the gendarmes seemed impatient to make a hasty end of
their task. Women who lagged behind were bayoneted on the road, or
pushed over precipices, or over bridges. The passage of rivers, and
especially of the Euphrates, was always an occasion of wholesale
murder. Women and children were driven into the water, and were shot
as they struggled, if they seemed likely to reach the further bank.
The lust and covetousness of their tormentors had no limit. The last
survivors often staggered into Aleppo naked; every shred of their
clothing had been torn from them on the way. Witnesses who saw their
arrival remark that there was not one young or pretty face to be
seen among them, and there was assuredly none surviving that was
truly old—except in so far as it had been aged by suffering. The
only chance to survive was to be plain enough to escape their
torturers’ lust, and vigorous enough to bear the fatigues of the
road.
Those were the exiles that arrived on foot, but there were others,
from the metropolitan districts and the north-west, who were
transported to Aleppo by rail. These escaped the violence of the
Kurds, but the sum of their suffering can hardly have been less.
They were packed in cattle-trucks, often filthy and always
overcrowded, and their journey was infinitely slow, for the line was
congested by their multitude and by the passage of troops. At every
stopping-place they were simply turned out into the open, without
food or shelter, to wait for days, or even weeks, till the line was
clear and rolling-stock available to carry them a further stage. The
gendarmes in charge of them seem to have been as brutal as those
with the convoys on foot, and when they came to the two breaks in
the Baghdad Railway, where the route crosses the ranges of the
Taurus and Amanus Mountains, they too had to traverse these, the
most arduous stages of all, on foot. At Bozanti, the rail-head west
of Taurus, and again at Osmania, Mamouret, Islohia and Kotmo,
stations on either slope of the Amanus chain, vast and incredibly
foul concentration camps grew up, where the exiles were delayed for
months, and died literally by thousands of hunger, exposure, and
epidemics. The portion of them that finally reached Aleppo were in
as deplorable a condition as those that had made the journey on foot
from beginning to end.
Aleppo was the focus upon which all the convoys converged. In April,
it is true, half the Zeitounlis had been sent north-westward to
Sultania, in the Konia district, one of the most unhealthy spots in
the Anatolian Desert. But the authorities changed their mind, and
despatched the exiles at Sultania south-east again, to join their
fellow-townsmen in the Desert of Syria[250]. Thenceforward, the
south-eastern desert was the destination of them all, and Aleppo,
and in a secondary degree Ourfa and Ras-ul-Ain, were the natural
centres of distribution.
Some of the exiles were planted in the immediate neighbourhood of
Aleppo itself—at places like Moumbidj, Bab, Ma’ara, Idlib[251]—but
these seem to have been comparatively few, and it is not certain
whether their quarters there were intended to be permanent. Many
more were deported southward from Aleppo along the Syrian Railway,
and allowed to find a resting-place in the districts of Hama, Homs
and Damascus. A still larger number were sent towards the east, and
cantoned on the banks of the Euphrates, in the desert section of its
course. There were some at Rakka; Der-el-Zor was the largest depôt
of all, and is mentioned in this connection more frequently than any
place after Aleppo itself; some were sent on to Mayadin[252], a
day’s journey further down the river, and Moslem travellers reported
meeting others within forty-eight hours’ journey of Baghdad[253]. No
first-hand evidence has come in of their presence at or near Mosul,
though they were frequently informed on their journey that their
destination was to be there.
The dispersal of the exiles was thus extremely wide, as the authors
of the scheme had intended that it should be, but certain features
are common to all the places to which they were sent. They were all
inhabited by Moslem populations alien to the Armenians in language
and habits of life; they were all unhealthy—either malarious or
sultry or in some other respect markedly unsuitable for the
residence of people used to a temperate climate; and they were all
remote from the exiles’ original homes—the remotest places, in fact,
which the Government could find within the Ottoman frontiers, since
Christians were debarred from setting foot on the sacred deserts of
the Hidjaz, and a British expeditionary force was occupying the
marshes of Irak. The Ottoman Government had to content itself with
the worst districts at its disposal, and it did its utmost to
heighten the climate’s natural effect by marooning the exiles there,
after an exhausting journey, with neither food, nor shelter, nor
clothing, and with no able-bodied men among them to supply these
deficiencies by their labour and resource.
The transmission of the exiles to these distant destinations was
naturally slow—indeed, the slowness of the journey was one of the
most effective of its torments. The first convoy started from
Zeitoun on the 8th April, 1915; fresh convoys followed it during the
seven ensuing months from the different Armenian centres in the
Empire, and there is no record of any stoppage until the 6th
November. On that date an order from Constantinople reached the
local authorities, at any rate in the Cilician plain[254], directing
them to refrain from further deportations; but this only applied to
the remnant of the local Armenian residents, and the masses of
exiles from the north and north-west who were still painfully
struggling across the barriers of Taurus and Amanus, were driven on
remorselessly to their journey’s end, which cannot have been reached
by them (or by such of them as survived) before the very close of
the year. The congestion of the routes was partly responsible for
this delay; but the congestion would have been still more pronounced
if the scheme had not been carried out methodically, region by
region, in an order which betrays more than anything else the
directing hand of the Central Government. Cilicia was the first
region to be cleared, just as it had been the principal region to
suffer in the massacres of 1909. Strategically and economically, it
was the most vital spot in Asiatic Turkey, and its large and
increasing Armenian population must always have offended the
sensibilities of the Young Turkish Nationalists. It was the natural
starting-point for the execution of the Ottomanisation Scheme, and
the deportations were in progress here fully six weeks before they
were applied to the remainder of the Empire. Zeitoun was cleared on
the 8th April; Geben, Furnus and Albustan within the next few days;
Dört Yöl before the end of the month. At Hadjin, on the other hand,
the clearance did not begin till the 3rd June, and dragged on into
September; while at Adana, the city of the plain, there was only an
abortive clearance in the third week of May, and the serious
deportations were postponed till the first week in September.
The next region to be cleared was the zone bordering on Van and
immediately threatened by the Russian advance, from the Black Sea to
the Persian frontier. In the south-eastern districts of this
zone—Bitlis, Moush, Sassoun and Hakkiari—the clearance, as has been
remarked already, was not effected by deportation, but by wholesale
massacre on the spot. Outlying villages of the Boulanik, Moush and
Sassoun areas were destroyed in the latter part of May, and before
the end of the same month Djevdet Bey retreated down the Bohtan
Valley from Van, and massacred the Armenians of Sairt. The Armenians
of Bitlis were next massacred by Djevdet, on the 25th June; and, in
the first week of July, 20,000 fresh troops arrived from Harpout and
exterminated the Armenians of Moush—first the villagers and then the
people of the town, which was bombarded by artillery on the 10th
June. After making an end of Moush these troops joined the Kurdish
irregulars operating against Sassoun, and on the 5th August, after
bitter fighting, the surviving Sassounlis—man, woman and child—were
annihilated in their last mountain stronghold. At the end of July
the Ottoman forces temporarily re-entered Van, and slaughtered all
the Armenian inhabitants who had not escaped in the wake of the
Russian retreat. In June and July the Nestorian (Syrian) communities
of the district of Hakkiari, in the upper basin of the Greater Zab,
were also attacked by the Kurds and destroyed, except for a remnant
which crossed the watershed into the Urmia basin and found safety
within the Russian lines.
In the north-western districts of the frontier zone the semblance of
deportation was preserved, but the exiles—women and children as well
as men—were invariably massacred in cold blood after a few days on
the road. Before the end of May there was a massacre at Khnyss, and
on the 6th June the deportations began (with the same consummation)
in the villages of the Erzeroum plain. At Erzeroum itself the first
deportation took place on the 16th June, and the last on the 28th
July (or on the 3rd August, according to other reports). The
Armenian Bishop of the city was deported with this last convoy, and
never heard of again. At Baibourt, the surrounding villages were
similarly cleared before the town, and the townspeople were
despatched in three convoys, the last of which started on the 14th
June. From the town of Erzindjan four convoys started on successive
days, from the 7th June to the 10th. Practically none of the exiles
from Erzindjan, Baibourt or Erzeroum seem to have outlived the first
stages of the journey.
At Harpout, the clearance began on the 1st June, and continued
throughout the month. On the 2nd, 3rd and 4th July the adjoining
town of Mezré was emptied as well. The convoys from these two places
and the neighbouring villages were terribly thinned by atrocities on
the road.
At Trebizond the deportations were carried out from the 1st to the
6th July, and seem to have been simultaneous in the various coast
towns of the Vilayet. Here, too, deportation was merely a cloak for
immediate massacre. The exiles were either drowned at sea or cut
down at the first resting-place on the road.
In the Vilayet of Sivas, again, the villages were dealt with first,
but the city itself was not cleared till the 5th July. At X. the men
were deported on the 26th June, the women on the 5th July, and the
last remnant, who had found protection with the American
Missionaries, were carried away on the 10th August. All the men, and
many of the women, were massacred on the road.
The Armenian population in the provinces west of Sivas, and in the
metropolitan districts surrounding Constantinople, was removed by
train along the Anatolian Railway to Konia, and thence towards
Aleppo along the several sections of the Baghdad line. In all this
region the scheme was put into execution distinctly later. At Angora
the deportations began towards the end of July, at Adapazar about
the 11th August; at Broussa there seems to have been no clearance
till the first weeks of September, but this is stated to have been
one of the last places touched[255]. At Adrianople, however, the
Armenians were not deported till the middle of October; and at K.,
in the Sandjak of Kaisaria, not till the 12th/15th November.
The south-eastern outposts of the Armenian Dispersion were left to
the last, although their immediate neighbours in the Cilician
highlands had been taken at the very beginning. The villagers of
Djibal Mousa were not summoned till the 13th July; Aintab was not
touched till the 1st August, and then only cleared gradually during
the course of the month. The summons to Ourfa, which was answered,
as at Djibal Mousa, by defiance, was not delivered till the last
week in September.
Glancing back over this survey, we can discern the Central
Government’s general plan. The months of April and May were assigned
to the clearance of Cilicia; June and July were reserved for the
east; the western centres along the Railway were given their turn in
August and September; and at the same time the process was extended,
for completeness’ sake, to the outlying Armenian communities in the
extreme south-east. It was a deliberate, systematic attempt to
eradicate the Armenian population throughout the Ottoman Empire, and
it has certainly met with a very large measure of success; but it is
not easy to present the results, even approximately, in a
statistical form. The only people in a position to keep an accurate
account of the numbers affected were the Ottoman authorities
themselves; but it is unlikely that they have done so, and still
more unlikely that they would ever divulge such figures to the
civilised world. We are compelled to base our estimates on the
statements of private persons, who were excluded from detailed
investigation by the jealous suspicion of the Government officials
and were seldom able to observe events in more than a limited
section of the field. We must make our computations by piecing
together these isolated data from private sources, and since
Oriental arithmetic is notoriously inexact (and this is scarcely
less true of the Nearer than of the Further East), we shall only
make use of testimony from foreign witnesses of neutral nationality.
Such witnesses may be assumed to be comparatively free from
unconscious exaggeration and completely innocent of purposeful
misrepresentation, and we can accept their statements with
considerable assurance.
The first step is to establish the number of Armenians living within
the Ottoman frontiers at the moment the deportations began. All the
other figures ultimately depend upon this, but it is harder than any
to obtain, for there are no independent foreign estimates of this on
record, and the discrepancy between the native estimates is
extreme[256]. The Armenian Patriarchate, after an enquiry conducted
in 1912, placed the number as high as 2,100,000[257]; the Ottoman
Government, in its latest official returns, puts it at 1,100,000 and
no more. Both parties have an equal political interest in forcing
their figures, but the Armenians are likely to have had a greater
respect for exactitude, or at any rate a stronger sense of the
futility of falsification. The most “neutral” course under the
circumstances is to halve the difference, and to take the number
provisionally as being 1,600,000, with the qualification that the
true figure certainly lies between this and 2,000,000, and probably
approaches more closely to the latter. The rest of the necessary
figures can fortunately be drawn from foreign neutral testimony, in
which such baffling discrepancies are rarer.
The second step is to estimate the number of those who have escaped
deportation. There are the refugees who have escaped it by crossing
the frontier—182,000 into the Russian Caucasus and 4,200 into Egypt,
according to detailed and trustworthy returns[258]. There are also
two important Armenian communities in Turkey where practically all
but the leaders have been left unmolested—those of Smyrna and
Constantinople. At Constantinople about 150,000 Armenians must still
remain. Then there are the Catholic and Protestant Millets, which
were nominally exempted from deportation, and the exempted converts
to Islam. It is impossible to estimate the numbers in these
categories with any plausibility, for the conduct of the authorities
in respect of them was quite erratic. Many of the converts to
Islam[259], as well as Armenians of the other denominations, were
given the same treatment as the Gregorians, and the actual
percentage of conversions is unascertainable, for they were
encouraged in some places and discouraged in others. We must also
allow for those who managed to elude the Government’s net. As a
general rule, this category is more numerous in reality than it
appears to be, and this is especially so in the Near East. But in
the present case the Young Turks seem to have put a Prussian
thoroughness into the execution of their scheme, and the margin of
ineffectiveness was evidently narrow. In the towns, such as Zeitoun,
Hadjin, Sivas, X., and Erzeroum, where we have sufficient testimony
to cross-check the estimates presented, the clearance, by
deportation or massacre, seems to have been practically complete. At
Erzeroum, for instance, there were 20,000 Armenians before the
clearance began, and when it was over there were not more than 100
left[260]. Concealment on any considerable scale can only have been
practised in the villages, yet the number of those who have emerged
from hiding since the Russian occupation is extraordinarily small.
According to the investigations of the Patriarchate, there were
580,000 Armenians in 1912 in the Vilayets of Erzeroum, Bitlis and
Van, which are now within the Russian lines[261]. The American
Relief Committee has recently been informed by its agents on the
spot that there are now only 12,100 left alive there[262]. Whatever
arbitrary margin of reduction the absence of confirmatory statistics
may make it necessary to subtract from the former figure,
the proportion borne to it by the 12,100 survivors remains
infinitesimal. Putting the communities at Constantinople and Smyrna
and the refugees together at about 350,000, we shall certainly not
be reckoning too low if we allow a quarter of a million for the
Protestants, Catholics, converts and others who were spared, and
estimate the total number of Armenians in Turkeywho escaped
deportation at not more than 600,000.
This leaves at least 1,000,000 to be accounted for by deportation
and massacre, and probably 1,200.000 or more.
The third step is to estimate what proportion of these million
Armenians has perished and what proportion survived, and here again
our material is scanty and generalisation unsafe, the procedure of
the authorities being erratic in this respect also. In certain
vilayets, like Van and Bitlis, there was no deportation at all, but
massacre outright; in others, like Erzeroum and Trebizond, and again
at Angora, deportation and massacre were equivalent, the convoys
being butchered systematically at an early stage on the road. In
Cilicia, on the other hand, the men as well as the women seem to
have been genuinely deported, and the convoys seem only to have been
reduced by sickness and exhaustion. Yet even where there was no
wholesale massacre on the journey, a convoy might practically be
exterminated by degrees. A large combined convoy, for instance, of
exiles from Mamouret-ul-Aziz and Sivas, set out from Malatia 18,000
strong and numbered 301 at Viran Shehr, 150 at Aleppo[263]. In this
case, however, the wastage appears to have been exceptional. We have
one similar instance of a convoy from Harpout which was reduced on
the way to Aleppo from 5,000 to 213, a loss of 96 per cent.[264];
but in general the wastage seems to fluctuate, with a wide
oscillation, on either side of 50 per cent.; 600 out of 2,500 (24
per cent.) reached Aleppo from a village in the Harpout
district[265]; 60 per cent. arrived there out of the first convoy
from the village of E. (near H.), and 46 per cent. out of the
second; 25 per cent. arrived out of a convoy from the village of D.
in the same neighbourhood[266]. We shall certainly be well within
the mark if we estimate that at least half those condemned to
massacre or deportation have actually perished.
We can check this estimate to some extent by the record of
arrivals at certain important centres of traffic on the exile
routes, or at the final destinations of the convoys. On the 16th
August, 1915, for instance, an exceedingly competent neutral
resident at Constantinople stated that, to his knowledge, there
were then 50,000 exiles scattered along the route from Bozanti
(the first break in the Baghdad line) to Aleppo; on the 5th
November, another witness[267], who had just traversed this route,
wrote back from Aleppo that he had passed 150,000 exiles between
there and Konia. Again, 13,155 exiles had reached or passed
through Aleppo by the 30th July, 1915, and 20,000 more arrived
there between that date and the 19th August[268]. By the 3rd
August 15,000 of these had been transmitted alive to Der-el-Zor,
and this was only the beginning of the arrivals in the Zor
district. No exiles reached Damascus before the 12th August, but
between that date and the 3rd October, 1915, 22,000 of them had
come through[269]. These are isolated data, and prove little in
themselves, but in its Bulletin of the 5th April, 1916, the
American Relief Committee has published a cable recently received
in the United States from a competent source, in which the total
number of Armenian exiles alive at that time in the regions of
Der-el-Zor, Damascus and Aleppo is estimated roughly at
500,000[270]. This figure is possibly an exaggeration, but it is
not incompatible with our two previous conclusions, that the total
number of Armenians affected by the Young Turks’ scheme was at
least a million, and that at least 50 per cent. of these have
perished. To the alleged 500,000 survivors in the three regions
mentioned we must add an uncertain but inconsiderable margin for
the exiles who may have been planted at Mosul or who may still, in
March, 1916, have been held up on the road; and this will raise
the original number affected to something approaching 1,200,000,
which we considered, on other grounds, to be nearer the real
figure than the bare million which we accepted.
We can sum up this statistical enquiry by saying that, as far as our
defective information carries us, about an equal number of Armenians
in Turkey seem to have escaped, to have perished, and to have
survived deportation in 1915; and we shall not be far wrong if, in
round numbers, we estimate each of these categories at 600,000.