by Benny Morris
seen “riding through the streets, urging on the soldiers in their bloody
work.”202 “It does look as tho’ deliberate extermination was purposed,” one
missionary wrote.203 Following the massacre, another missionary argued that
“ there was no rebellion here and no re sis tance . . . except in one or two isolated cases when individuals seeing that death was certain tried to sell their
life as dearly as they could.”204
Harput
In the summer of 1895 Harput, in Mamuret- ül- Aziz vilayet, was calm. The
vali was “taking good care to preserve order,” an Armenian reported. But in
the surrounding countryside the situation was “intolerable.” Armenian villa-
gers were assaulted, and gendarmes and Kurds were committing “all kinds of
exactions and outrages,” especially in Palu kaza.205
The situation then worsened in response to the demonstration and mas-
sacres in Constantinople, with Harput itself gearing up for vio
lence.
Dr. Herman Norton Barnum, an American missionary in the town, reported
on October 2 that Christians were “almost [in] a panic” as some officials were
busily distributing arms in Muslim villages and mending fences with Kurdish
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II
agas.206 Other missionaries reported a mea sure of Armenian provocation:
“Almost every day lads from 15 to 18 years of age gather outside the town
singing Armenian national songs, and then parade to the town.”207 On
October 24, sensing impending massacre, the Armenians “hastily closed
their shops.” “Turks were seen to be openly carry ing arms, gathering in
little knots . . . and some thought they even heard them say that the work
was to begin at noon.” “The air,” one anonymous letter- writer said, “is full
of . . . rumors.”
At first the vali, the local chief financial officer (defterdar), and Harput’s leading Muslim cleric took effective steps to restrain the townspeople, including by bringing in troops.208 As a signal of goodwill, the Christians gave
up their weapons, thereby casting “themselves wholly upon the protection of
the government,” a missionary noted. The authorities issued reassurances
even as “the circle of fire kept on contracting around the city.”209
The dam broke in the countryside, deluged in what a British consul de-
scribed as a “religious crusade.” Starting on November 2, a Kurdish band and
“fanatical Mussulman neighbors” attacked and plundered the village of
Shepik. The attackers took every thing, including doors and win dows, and
stripped the women and children of “their shoes and clothing.” They burnt
houses and murdered two priests who refused to convert. They abducted and
then murdered forty young men “who had acquired wisdom”— presumably
the best- educated villa gers— and also refused conversion. One parent de-
scribed how, “with . . . feet bare, little clothing upon us, we passed from rock to rock, mountain to mountain, with great wailing and lamentation, to find
our children.”210
The flood reached Harput itself on the morning of November 11. Muslims
attacked the town’s Christian quarter, killing three. At first they were driven
off by soldiers, but the Armenians were soon abandoned by their defenders.
Caleb F. Gates, president of the missionary- run Euphrates College, described
what happened, as seen from his vantage point up the hill: at noon, a crowd
of Kurds and Turks, some 800 strong and armed mainly with “clubs and
knives,” advanced on a military outpost at the city’s entrance, then halted. The
crowd’s leaders, town notables, and Turkish officers conferred. The soldiers
then packed up and “marched leisurely back to the city, dragging their
cannon.” Then the Kurds advanced, “shouting ‘Allah, Allah,’ ” and stormed
The Massacres of 1894–1896
into the Christian quarter, supported by soldiers. “The work of plunder
was largely done by the Turks of the city,” according to Gates, but the sol-
diers “seemed to superintend” it.211 Other observers confirm soldiers’
participation.212
After the pillage, the houses were torched. Most inhabitants fled to the mis-
sionary buildings, chased by a “storm of bullets.”213 Some Armenian women
were raped, “the foremost ravisher being Said Effendi, the commissary of
police.”214 The soldiers made a “sham” of firing at the Kurds, hitting none.215
As the massacre unfolded, Derviş Effendi, the kaymakam (sub- district gov-
ernor), asked the missionaries to leave the compound, where 450 Armenians
were holed up. When the missionaries refused, the mob, joined by soldiers,
entered, plundered, and torched homes and school buildings. Col o nel Şükrü
Bey looked on. One missionary later wrote that “at one time it looked as if we
should all go up in a fiery chariot together.” Another lamented that “for nearly
forty years we have been here and never dreamed that we had such neigh-
bors.”216 Only one Ottoman official, a Circassian regimental commander
named Mehmet, came to the missionaries’ aid, guarding them and helping to
douse the flames. The massacre ended the following day when the soldiers,
under orders to shoot offending Muslims, drove back Kurds approaching
the city.217
The attack on the Christian quarter and the torching of the missionary
houses and college all had the appearance of orchestration and premeditation,
and evidence points to orders from above. British consul Raphael Fontana,
who investigated the massacre, reported that, weeks before, the city’s military
commander, General Mustafa Pasha, had personally visited “vari ous Kurdish
villages” and “sent emissaries” to others “with instructions to invite the tribes to attack the town.” The authorities gave the Kurds modern Martini rifles, and
one chieftain, Bekir Effendi, was “ordered by letter to bring 500 of his clan to
the sack of Harput.” According to Fontana, Kurds later told Armenians that
government officers had visited “bearing letters authorizing the slaughter of
Christians and the pillage of their property” and that a bugle had sounded
the beginning of the assault on the missionary quarter.218
Barnum found that “the soldiers . . . presided over the affair so as to keep
the Kurds and the mass of the Turkish population of the city . . . from going
beyond the prescribed limits” and that the authorities intended that Euphrates
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College and other missionary schools be torched.219 One missionary subse-
quently related that a leading cleric and judge, Deli Haji, blessed the mob as
it left a mosque, saying, “May your swords be sharp.”220 Six months later,
Turks questioned by a British investigator referred to what had happened as
resmi jinayet—an official crime.221
Gates later learned that a high official in Harput said the attackers had acted
“in accordance with a prearranged plan” and that “the raiders”— presumably
referring to the 800 who entered the city— “ were soldiers of the reserve corps”
who had dressed as Kurds. He alleged that the soldiers used artillery to break
down the missionary compound’s gates. To Terrell, he wrote, “We are con-
fronting a . . . plan . . . to render the reforms useless by destroying the Christian population.”222 In a letter to a fellow missionary, he was more straightforward.
“It is perfectly clear,” he wrote, “that this whole thing emanated from the
Sultan.” Gates took the Kurds and the local Turks at their word when they
said that “they had orders from the Sultan to kill the Christians.” Noting that
“si mul ta neously” with the proclamation of the reforms the Kurdish tribes and
Turks, “in localities widely separated, began to move,” he again concluded that
there was afoot “a deliberate plan to exterminate the Christians so that they
might not enjoy the benefits secured to them by the Powers.”223
According to a British investigation, at the start of the massacre soldiers had
opened fire on the Christian quarter while “the Kurds were still outside the
city.” After the cannonade, some thirty soldiers were seen entering a madrassa
and putting on Kurdish costumes. The soldiers and civilians then attacked the
Protestant quarter. An officer shouted, “On to the pastors’ houses,” and the
crowd surged in, setting fire to the American missionary compound.224
British rec ords of the massacre contain the translation of extracts from a
letter by a Turkish soldier, Hafiz Mehmet, of the 25th Regiment, 2nd Battalion,
4th Com pany. He informed his family, “We have killed 1,200 Armenians, all
of them as food for the dogs.” He went on, “20 days ago we made war on the
Armenian unbelievers . . . I myself fired 47 cartridges.” According to Hafiz
Mehmet, the massacre was a resounding success: “If you ask after the soldiers
and Bashi- Bazouks, not one of their noses has bled”— that is, none of the Turks
were hurt. Fi nally, addressing his parents, he wrote, “ There is a rumor that
our battalion will be ordered to your part of the world—if so we will kill all
the Armenians there.”225
The Massacres of 1894–1896
In the weeks after the Harput massacre, surrounding villages were subjected
to consistent depredations. “All the Christian villages and Christian quar-
ters of villages . . . have been burnt so far as I know,” a missionary reported.226
In Husenik, a mile from the city, about 200 Christians were killed. In
Choonkoosh (Çüngüş), 600–700 died. Neighboring Adish (Adış?) was “al-
most exterminated.”227
Violation of women was the norm. According to Gates’s in for mants, “when
zaptiehs come, the Turks give to each an Armenian woman for the night.”228
At Zaremja (Garemja), “few women and girls . . . appear to have escaped dis-
honor.” At Hock (Hockn), “seventeen females . . . were carried off . . . and
ravished by Kurds and Turks.” These included four girls between the ages
of ten and fourteen. At Aivos forty women and girls were “outraged.” In
Habab, more than a dozen were assaulted. Most of those raped were allowed
to stay in their villages or return to them; a few were killed or permanently
held captive.229
The village raids also saw forced conversions.230 In Içme, outside Harput,
many crowded into the Gregorian church for safety. “They were taken out,
one by one, and whoever would not renounce his faith . . . was shot down or
butchered. Fifty- two were killed. . . . Pastor Krikor was one of the first. . . .
The Gregorian Church is turned into a mosque and the Protestant church
is used for a stable.” In the village of Oozoonova (Uzun Oba), across the
Euphrates, a large number were driven to a Turkish village “to change their
faith.” “In their desperation,” dozens of Armenians “rushed into the river
and were drowned rather than deny their faith.” Many women were abducted
to Muslim homes.231 “In some places [the converts] are circumcised by
force,” a Harput missionary reported in December. “To- day word has come
from Perching (Perçin?) that this is being done there. . . . The same is being
done in Reawan,” between Siirt and Mardin, and “a sheikh is teaching the
Christians the tenets of Islam.” An official tele gram from Mamuret- ül- Aziz
reported that some Christians circumcised themselves out of desperation. In
Çüngüş the pastor’s house was torched. When he emerged he was offered
the choice to “accept Islam or die.” He died.232 In one Palu- area village,
Turks tore down a church “and it is [now] used as a privy.”233
In December 1895, under great- power pressure, Constantinople sent a
commission of inquiry to Harput to investigate. Muslims and Christians were
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II
summoned. According to a missionary who observed the proceedings, the
Muslims testified first. Then the commissioners “harangued” Armenian wit-
nesses about alleged “seditious practices” and accused them of “sending men
to Washington and Chicago to agitate, of publishing secret newspapers, of stir-
ring up strife.” One commissioner threatened that the Armenians would be
“blotted out” if they renewed their rebelliousness.234 The Christians in Harput
and the countryside were repeatedly pressed to sign statements blaming them-
selves for what happened.235
The death toll in and around Harput was im mense. One tabulation, by the
local Gregorian bishop, found 4,127 deaths in the episcopate, which included
Harput and seventy- three surrounding villages. More than a thousand of these
were due to “hunger and cold.”236 In mid- January 1896, a missionary counted
39,000 dead in Mamuret- ül- Aziz vilayet as a whole. The missionary also re-
corded 8,000 wounded, 28,562 homes burned, 15,179 people forcibly con-
verted to Islam, 5,530 “ women and girls outraged,” and 1,532 women and
girls forcibly married to Muslims. He also claimed that nearly a hundred thou-
sand people, mostly women, children, and the el derly, were left “absolutely
destitute.”237
The Harput mission district now had 4,000–5,000 orphans.238 Children
were left wandering “bare- footed in the snow, great spaces of purple flesh
showing through the rags, no bed to lie in at night, no food to eat, the future
all dark.” In Malatya, orphans wandered in the markets, “where those who
had made them orphans broke off scraps of bread and threw at them [ sic] as if they were dogs and laughed to see them scramble for the pieces.”239
American missionaries set up an Armenian Relief Commission to raise
funds for the orphans, but the good deed would not go unpunished. The
money reaching destitute Armenians “stimulated” the authorities to launch a
forceful tax- collection campaign. Villa gers would collect funds in Harput, and
officials would waylay them on the route home. In the village of Shehaji
(Şehaci), for example, tax collectors took “ every piaster [of the] 420 piasters”
Armenians had received in relief. Harput missionaries warned the relief com-
mission, based in Constantinople, “You must know that some of the money
which you send goes into the government trea sury.”240
The Massacres of 1894–1896
Urfa
The Armenians of Urfa were subjected to two massacres: one in October 1895,
the other, far larger, in December. Much of what is known about
the vio lence
in Urfa comes from Fitzmaurice, the British consular official and Turkish
speaker who visited the town in mid- March 1896. He found that, despite the
authorities’ “attempts during the preceding ten weeks to remove the traces,”
Urfa, and especially its Armenian quarter, had “the aspect of a town which
had been . . . laid waste by some scourge more terrible than any war or siege.”
The scenery was devastating. “The shops with their win dows and doors
broken in, lay empty and deserted, practically no grown males were vis i ble,
and only a few ill- clad and ill- fed children and women, with a scared look on
their faces, were to be seen moving about apparently in search of . . . dry bread and scanty bedding.”
Fitzmaurice was keen to understand how the massacres came about. On
the basis of interviews with dozens of Muslims and Christians, he dismissed
the charge of widespread Armenian insurrectionary activity, though he be-
lieved that there had been “well- grounded discontent” among Armenians
who were treated by the authorities “practically as outlaws.” But “the amount
of actual disloyalty among them was very restricted,” he wrote. Some
“revolutionary pamphlets” had reached Urfa but “no rifles or explosives.”
Rather, he found that the source of the massacres lay in the events in Con-
stantinople and their aftermath, which inflamed anti- Armenian sentiment.
Fitzmaurice discovered that, following the Constantinople demonstration,
the government had instructed local authorities to quell any Armenian dis-
turbances that might arise. If there was re sis tance, the Armenians were to be
taught “a terrible lesson” (terbiyyeh shedideh). The locals, who were fed rumors of Armenians slaughtering Muslims across the Empire, interpreted
the instructions as an order to “put into execution the prescription of the
[sharia], and proceed to take the lives and property of the rebellious Arme-
nian ‘rayahs.’ ” In addition, “the telegraphic news of [Ottoman] ac cep-
tance of the reforms was interpreted by the Mussulmans as the granting of
autonomy to the Armenians,” which had “a disastrous effect on Moslem
feeling.” The masses were incited to “do their duty by Islam.” He concluded
that Muslims and non- Muslims agreed that “the Government wished these