THE “REVOLUTION” AT VAN
The Turkish province of Van lies in the remote northeastern corner of
Asia Minor; it touches the frontiers of Persia on the east and its
northern boundary looks toward the Caucasus. It is one of the most
beautiful and most fruitful parts of the Turkish Empire and one of the
richest in historical associations. The city of Van, which is the
capital of the vilayet, lies on the eastern shores of the lake of the
same name; it is the one large town in Asia Minor in which the Armenian
population is larger than the Moslem. In the fall of 1914, its
population of about 30,000 people represented one of the most peaceful
and happy and prosperous communities in the Turkish Empire. Though Van,
like practically every other section where Armenians lived, had had its
periods of oppression and massacre, yet the Moslem yoke, comparatively
speaking, rested upon its people rather lightly. Its Turkish governor,
Tahsin Pasha, was one of the more enlightened type of Turkish officials.
Relations between the Armenians, who lived in the better section of the
city, and the Turks and the Kurds, who occupied the mud huts in the
Moslem quarter, had been tolerably agreeable for many years.
The location of this vilayet, however, inevitably made it the scene of
military operations, and made the activities of its Armenian population
a matter of daily suspicion. Should Russia attempt an invasion of
Turkey one of the most accessible routes lay through this province. The
war had not gone far when causes of irritation arose. The requisitions
of army supplies fell far more heavily upon the Christian than upon the
Mohammedan elements in Van, just as they did in every other part of
Turkey. The Armenians had to stand quietly by while the Turkish officers
appropriated all their cattle, all their wheat, and all their goods of
every kind, giving them only worthless pieces of paper in exchange. The
attempt at general disarmament that took place also aroused their
apprehension, which was increased by the brutal treatment visited upon
Armenian soldiers in the Caucasus. On the other hand, the Turks made
many charges against the Christian population, and, in fact, they
attributed to them the larger share of the blame for the reverses which
the Turkish armies had suffered in the Caucasus. The fact that a
considerable element in the already changed forces was composed of
Armenians aroused their unbridled wrath. Since about half the Armenians
in the world inhabit the Russian provinces in the Caucasus and are
liable, like all Russians, to military service, there were certainly no
legitimate grounds for complaint, so far as these Armenian levies were
_bona fide_ subjects of the Czar. But the Turks asserted that large
numbers of Armenian soldiers in Van and other of their Armenian
provinces deserted, crossed the border, and joined the Russian army,
where their knowledge of roads and the terrain was an important factor
in the Russian victories. Though the exact facts are not yet
ascertained, it seems not unlikely that such desertions, perhaps a few
hundred, did take place. At the beginning of the war, Union and
Progress agents appeared in Erzeroum and Van and appealed to the
Armenian leaders to go into Russian Armenia and attempt to start
revolutions against the Russian Government; and the fact that the
Ottoman Armenians refused to do this contributed further to the
prevailing irritation. The Turkish Government has made much of the
“treasonable” behaviour of the Armenians of Van and have even urged it
as an excuse for their subsequent treatment of the whole race. Their
attitude illustrates once more the perversity of the Turkish mind. After
massacring hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the course of thirty
years, outraging their women and girls, and robbing and maltreating them
in every conceivable way, the Turks still apparently believed that they
had the right to expect from them the most enthusiastic “loyalty”. That
the Armenians all over Turkey sympathized with the Entente was no
secret. “If you want to know how the war is going,” wrote a humorous
Turkish newspaper, “all you need to do is to look in the face of an
Armenian. If he is smiling, then the Allies are winning; if he is
downcast, then the Germans are successful.” If an Ottoman Armenian
soldier should desert and join the Russians, that would unquestionably
constitute a technical crime against the state, and might be punished
without violating the rules of all civilized countries. Only the Turkish
mind, however--and possibly the Junker--could regard it as furnishing an
excuse for the terrible barbarities that now took place.
Though the air, all during the autumn and winter of 1914-15, was filled
with premonitions of trouble, the Armenians behaved with remarkable
self-restraint. For years it had been the Turkish policy to provoke the
Christian population into committing overt acts, and then seizing upon
such misbehaviour as an excuse for massacres. The Armenian clergy and
political leaders saw many evidences that the Turks were now up to their
old tactics, and they therefore went among the people, cautioning them
to keep quiet, to bear all insults and even outrages patiently, so as
not to give the Moslems the opening which they were seeking. “Even
though they burn a few of our villages,” these leaders would say, “do
not retaliate, for it is better that a few be destroyed than that the
whole nation be massacred.”
When the war started, the Central Government recalled Tahsin Pasha, the
conciliatory governor of Van, and replaced him with Djevdet Bey, a
brother-in-law of Enver Pasha. This act in itself was most disquieting.
Turkish officialdom has always contained a minority of men who do not
believe in massacre as a state policy and cannot be depended upon to
carry out strictly the most bloody orders of the Central Government.
Whenever massacres have been planned, therefore, it has been customary
first to remove such “untrustworthy” public servants and replace them by
men who are regarded as more reliable. The character of Tahsin’s
successor made his displacement still more alarming. Djevdet had spent
the larger part of his life at Van; he was a man of unstable character,
friendly to non-Moslems one moment, hostile the next, hypocritical,
treacherous, and ferocious according to the worst traditions of his
race. He hated the Armenians and cordially sympathized with the
long-established Turkish plan of solving the Armenian problem. There is
little question that he came to Van with definite instructions to
exterminate all Armenians in this province, but, for the first few
months, conditions did not facilitate such operations. Djevdet himself
was absent fighting the Russians in the Caucasus and the near approach
of the enemy made it a wise policy for the Turks to refrain from
maltreating the Armenians of Van. But early in the spring the Russians
temporarily retreated. It is generally recognized as good military
tactics for a victorious army to follow up the retreating enemy. In the
eyes of the Turkish generals, however, the withdrawal of the Russians
was a happy turn of war mainly because it deprived the Armenians of
their protectors and left them at the mercies of the Turkish army.
Instead of following the retreating foe, therefore, the Turks’ army
turned aside and invaded their own territory of Van. Instead of fighting
the trained Russian army of men, they turned their rifles, machine guns,
and other weapons upon the Armenian women, children, and old men in the
villages of Van. Following their usual custom, they distributed the most
beautiful Armenian women among the Moslems, sacked and burned the
Armenian villages, and massacred uninterruptedly for days. On April
15th, about 500 young Armenian men of Akantz were mustered to hear an
order of the Sultan; at sunset they were marched outside the town and
every man shot in cold blood. This procedure was repeated in about
eighty Armenian villages in the district north of Lake Van, and in three
days 24,000 Armenians were murdered in this atrocious fashion. A single
episode illustrates the unspeakable depravity of Turkish methods. A
conflict having broken out at Shadak, Djevdet Bey, who had meanwhile
returned to Van, asked four of the leading Armenian citizens to go to
this town and attempt to quiet the multitude. These men made the trip,
stopping at all Armenian villages along the way, urging everybody to
keep public order. After completing their work these four Armenians were
murdered in a Kurdish village.
And so when Djevdet Bey, on his return to his official post, demanded
that Van furnish him immediately 4,000 soldiers, the people were
naturally in no mood to accede to his request. When we consider what had
happened before and what happened subsequently, there remains little
doubt concerning the purpose which underlay this demand. Djevdet, acting
in obedience to orders from Constantinople, was preparing to wipe out
the whole population, and his purpose in calling for 4,000 able-bodied
men was merely to massacre them, so that the rest of the Armenians might
have no defenders. The Armenians, parleying to gain time, offered to
furnish five hundred soldiers and to pay exemption money for the rest;
now, however, Djevdet began to talk aloud about “rebellion,” and his
determination to “crush” it at any cost. “If the rebels fire a single
shot,” he declared, “I shall kill every Christian man, woman, and”
(pointing to his knee) “every child, up to here.” For some time the
Turks had been constructing entrenchments around the Armenian quarter
and filling them with soldiers and, in response to this provocation, the
Armenians began to make preparations for a defense. On April 20th, a
band of Turkish soldiers seized several Armenian women who were entering
the city; a couple of Armenians ran to their assistance and were shot
dead. The Turks now opened fire on the Armenian quarters with rifles
and artillery; soon a large part of the town was in flames and a regular
siege had started. The whole Armenian fighting force consisted of only
1,500 men; they had only 300 rifles and a most inadequate supply of
ammunition, while Djevdet had an army of 5,000 men, completely equipped
and supplied. Yet the Armenians fought with the utmost heroism and
skill; they had little chance of holding off their enemies indefinitely,
but they knew that a Russian army was fighting its way to Van and their
utmost hope was that they would be able to defy the besiegers until
these Russians arrived. As I am not writing the story of sieges and
battles, I cannot describe in detail the numerous acts of individual
heroism, the coöperation of the Armenian women, the ardour and energy of
the Armenian children, the self-sacrificing zeal of the American
missionaries, especially Doctor Ussher and his wife and Miss Grace H.
Knapp, and the thousand other circumstances that made this terrible
month one of the most glorious pages in modern Armenian history. The
wonderful thing about it is that the Armenians triumphed. After nearly
five weeks of sleepless fighting, the Russian army suddenly appeared and
the Turks fled into the surrounding country, where they found
appeasement for their anger by further massacres of unprotected Armenian
villagers. Doctor Ussher, the American medical missionary whose hospital
at Van was destroyed by bombardment, is authority for the statement
that, after driving off the Turks, the Russians began to collect and to
cremate the bodies of Armenians who had been murdered in the province,
with the result that 55,000 bodies were burned.
I have told this story of the “Revolution” in Van not only because it
marked the first stage in this organized attempt to wipe out a whole
nation, but because these events are always brought forward by the Turks
as a justification of their subsequent crimes. As I shall relate, Enver,
Talaat, and the rest, when I appealed to them in behalf of the
Armenians, invariably instanced the “revolutionists” of Van as a sample
of Armenian treachery. The famous “Revolution,” as this recital shows,
was merely the determination of the Armenians to save their women’s
honour and their own lives, after the Turks, by massacring thousands of
their neighbours, had shown them the fate that awaited them.