The Thirty-Year Genocide

by Benny Morris

  At the end of October 1914, the Ottomans entered the war by bombarding

  Rus sian targets in the Black Sea. Rus sia responded by deploying to the Cau-

  casus a large army, which included two battalions of Armenian volunteers.70

  Thus, just as its most hated foreign adversary had returned for another fight,

  Constantinople’s gaze returned to its most hated internal one. In November

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  and December, the Special Organ ization massacred thousands of Armenians

  along the front lines, ostensibly on suspicion of collaborating with the enemy.

  The Rus sians took similar actions against their Muslim border communities.

  Soldiers on both sides deserted. Some Ottoman Armenian deserters joined

  the tsar’s battalions, triggering Ottoman revenge attacks. Armenian civilians

  on the frontier, and Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army, were both sub-

  ject to assaults.71

  The Rus sians believed that the Ottomans would not be foolhardy enough

  to attack during winter, but Enver Pasha had other ideas. Taking personal

  charge of the 120,000- man- strong Ottoman Third Army, he prepared to attack

  Rus sians encamped in the Caucasian town of Sarıkamış. He aimed to envelope

  the Rus sian army, take the town, and cut the enemy off from his bases. The

  maneuver, which would push two corps around the Rus sians’ right flank, was

  modeled on German operations in August 1914’s Battle of Tannenberg, in

  which the Rus sian Second Army was almost entirely destroyed.72 Enver’s plan

  demanded perfect timing and the ele ment of surprise. Otto Liman von Sanders,

  a German general who advised the Ottomans, described the operation as

  “extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible.”73

  Adding to the difficulty was a lack of supplies. To preserve mobility and

  prevent a drawn- out and highly vis i ble buildup of forces, Enver ordered his

  soldiers to leave behind much of their baggage, including tents, blankets, ra-

  tions, and munitions.74 This proved fatal. “Carrying only flat bread for rations,

  dressed in light uniforms without proper coats . . . , and shod with inadequate

  footwear,” the troops pushed off on December 22 in the midst of a blizzard.75

  Snow and freezing temperatures slowed the advance and caused many casu-

  alties, helping to level the playing field with the smaller but better- equipped

  Rus sian army.

  It took the Rus sians just a few weeks to drive back Enver’s offensive. Re-

  treat turned into near- rout as the Ottomans, riddled with disease and frostbite,

  made their way through the snow- covered Allahuekber Mountains.76 By battle’s

  end, in mid- January of 1915, less than a third of Enver’s troops were still

  standing. His huge ambitions— dealing a decisive blow, stabilizing the eastern

  front, freeing the Third Army to reinforce other theaters of operation, and,

  perhaps, opening the way for a pan- Turanian union across the Caucasus— had

  “burst like a soap- bubble.”77 He never again commanded an army in the field.

  A More Turkish Empire

  The debacle would have a severe impact on Turkey’s Armenians. The

  Ottoman leadership viewed Sarıkamış as proof of Armenian perfidy and said

  so publicly. Although at Sarıkamış a wearied Enver was himself saved by an

  Armenian officer who carried him back to Ottoman lines, the pasha and his

  colleagues “framed the story of the battle in their own way, and the prevailing

  view placed Armenian treachery at the center of the narrative,” Ronald Grigor

  Suny writes.78 “Given the attitudes and sentiments that many Muslims had

  toward Armenians, they became a con ve nient . . . scapegoat.”79 As for the

  thousands of Ottoman Armenian troops taken prisoner by the Rus sians and

  sent to Siberia, the Ottoman army listed them as deserters.80 In general, the

  ease of the subsequent Rus sian advance into Anatolia was blamed on sup-

  posed Armenian fifth columnists.

  In March Şakır, arriving from the eastern front, presented the govern-

  ment with documents supposedly proving Armenian coordination with

  Rus sia to undermine Ottoman forces. The evidence was thin. Exhibit A,

  found in an Armenian village during the fighting at Sarikamiş, was a seditious

  booklet written more than a de cade earlier. But it dovetailed with the accusa-

  tions Enver and his staff were making.81 The government hardly needed per-

  suasion: it had already deci ded to punish the Armenians, starting with those

  in Ottoman military ser vice.

  Disarmament and Massacre in the Ranks

  Christians were first conscripted into the Ottoman Army in 1909, during the

  more liberal early days of the Young Turk revolution.82 The decision was con-

  troversial, and all the more so after the Balkan Wars, as Ottoman Muslims

  came to believe that non- Muslim recruits had “made common cause with their

  co- nationals,” weakening the imperial army.83 The government was wary about

  drafting Christians for the Great War, too. But, facing the realistic prospect of a multi- front conflict, the Ottomans needed a large army; able- bodied Christian men aged twenty to forty- five were called up, while teen agers and older

  men were mobilized in labor battalions or as munitions carriers.

  If the government was ambivalent about drafting Christians, draftees were

  no happier about being forced to serve. Indeed, desertion was rampant among

  all ethnic groups. After the war, General Liman claimed there were more

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  Turkish deserters than soldiers in ser vice.84 Just a few weeks after the initial mobilization announcement, bands of deserters were already roaming the

  countryside, hiding from police and gendarmes. “It was not unusual for units—

  even as large as divisions—to lose up to half their strength on their way to the

  front,” Zürcher writes. “The prob lem was especially great with Arab units.”

  There are “reports describing how Arab recruits were being taken to their

  frontline units under escort— and in chains.” 85 Still, many Armenians showed

  up for ser vice, enough to impress the German ambassador and leave him

  fearful for the communities they left behind: “Their villages have been left de-

  fenseless before the excesses and attacks of military deserters,” Wangenheim

  observed.86

  The prob lem ran deeper, though. As Zürcher points out, “Drafting the Ar-

  menian male adults” not only deprived their hometowns of defenders but

  also placed the soldiers themselves “in a vulnerable position within the army.” 87

  That vulnerability was heightened in the wake of Sarıkamış and the opening

  of the Gallipoli campaign— the Allied naval attack in the Dardanelles, which

  began on February 17. On the 25th Enver instructed the army to disarm all

  Armenian soldiers and ordered that “Armenian individuals are absolutely not

  to be employed in armed ser vice, either in the mobile armies or in the mobile

  and permanently deployed gendarmerie, nor in ser vice in the retinue or of-

  fices of the army headquarters.” By March most Armenian soldiers had been

  disarmed, and many had been moved to labor battalions.88

  Enver justified his orders with the usual allegations of treason. In par tic-

  u lar he alleged that secret codes in French and Rus sian wer
e discovered in

  the hands of Armenian spies. He also pointed to a report stating that the Ar-

  menian Patriarchate was transmitting military secrets to the Rus sians. But his-

  tory vindicates the observations of Captain Sarkis Torosyan, an Armenian

  artillery officer who served at Gallipoli. In his memoirs he wrote that disar-

  mament was linked to “plans for large- scale massacres and wiping out the Ar-

  menian population, or deporting it from the interior of the country . . . and

  reducing it to slavery.”89 For, as Zürcher writes, “The unarmed recruits in the

  labour battalions were sitting ducks. . . . Here there were tens of thousands

  of Armenian men, who were already assembled and under guard of armed

  soldiers. They did not stand a chance.”90 They were also weakened by

  A More Turkish Empire

  harsh conditions: even in the best of times, men in the labor battalions “ were

  underfed, exhausted, suffering from disease. Their officers beat them

  mercilessly.”91

  In one case, in Harput in November 1915, disarmed soldiers were assem-

  bled and detained in a large building called the Red Konak, where they were

  kept for two days without food or water.92 After their brief incarceration, they were joined by able- bodied Armenian civilians, and the whole group was

  divided into labor units. Initially they were sent to pave the road to Malatya;

  many died from the cruel work regimen.93 A month later the Harput town

  commandant, Süleyman Faik, reconvened the remaining laborers, declared

  himself “the friend of the Armenians,” and announced that he was “sending

  them to a good place.”94 They were divided again, and the sub- groups sent

  piecemeal on the road to Diyarbekir. En route, they were slaughtered by their

  escorts, assisted by local gangs, at a mountain pass called Deve Boynu (Guğen

  Boğaz).95

  Faik duly informed Third Army Commander General Kâmil of what had

  happened, but with his own spin. “Armenian brigands attacked the caravan,”

  he claimed, “and the Armenian Ameles [laborers] began to desert. The escort opened fire and killed a great part of the battalion and the brigands. . . . In

  the affray one of our soldiers dis appeared.”96 After the war, Faik was

  court- martialed; Mustafa Pasha, a judge in the case, rejected this story as

  nonsense.97

  The numbers killed were massive. When General Vehib Pasha took com-

  mand of the Third Army in February 1916, he learned that an entire labor

  battalion, some 2,000 men, had gone missing. They had been stationed in

  Aleppo vilayet, far from any battlefield. He sent investigators to find out what

  happened. He discovered that the whole battalion had been executed.98 A

  year later he arrested Kör Nuri, the gendarmerie commander in charge of the

  labor battalions, and Çerkes Kadir, head of the gang who operated under his

  instructions. Both were hanged. During the postwar court- martial, General

  Vehib also accused the vali of Sivas of responsibility. “Vehib’s December 5,

  1918 deposition for the court- martial,” Vahakn Dadrian writes, “is the most

  explicit and unequivocal confirmation of the premeditated and or ga nized na-

  ture of the Armenian genocide.”99

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  The massacre of labor battalions— which is also recalled in the memoirs of

  Jakob Kunzler, a Swiss missionary who worked at Urfa’s missionary hospital—

  testifies to the government’s overarching interest in Armenian eradication.100

  Armenians’ work building roads and shuttling supplies should have been seen

  as crucial to the war effort. From the standpoint of the Ottoman authorities,

  though, Armenian men were better off dead than helpful. Many laborers

  were executed by their supposed comrades in arms. American Ambassador

  Henry Morgenthau wrote that laborers were taken away in groups of fifty or

  a hundred to a secluded spot, stripped naked, and shot by fellow soldiers

  or gendarmes.101

  Van, Crushed

  Van in the spring of 1915 was home to the Armenian eruption that the CUP,

  and Abdülhamid before, both feared and cultivated through their repressive

  mea sures. In April and May, Armenians in the town fought off an Ottoman

  siege, and did so with the enemy’s help. Here was the proof. Armenians, taking

  up arms en masse against the state, and joined by the Rus sian army. By the time

  the dust settled, those Rus sians estimated that, all told, as many as 55,000

  corpses were scattered across Van vilayet.102 The government’s May deporta-

  tion orders reached a cadre of eastern authorities very much primed for action.

  To say that Van’s Armenians were provoked would be an understatement,

  but clearly their grievances bred anti- Ottoman subversion. Life in Van had

  never been easy. The Armenians had been hard hit in the massacres twenty

  years earlier, and the effects lingered amid new depredations. While mission-

  aries strained to provide housing and education, tribesmen raided Christian

  villages in the surrounding countryside.103 In November 1914, with prepara-

  tions for Sarıkamış in full swing, the government diverted troops from Van

  and undertook large- scale requisitions of the region’s munitions, wagons, and

  beasts of burden. Both orders heightened the Christians’ vulnerability, de-

  priving them of both the means to protect themselves and potential protec-

  tors against Kurdish marauders.104 Alienated and threatened, many Armenians

  evaded the call-up. Some draft dodgers joined robber bands, whom the au-

  thorities quickly labeled “revolutionary.”105 Others really did have foreign

  allegiances, though. Some Armenians joined a Russian- backed Christian mi-

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  litia in the nearby Urmia district of Persia, to defend against pos si ble attack

  by Muslims. And occasionally Christian clerics, including a Nestorian bishop,

  even converted to Orthodoxy to prove their loyalty to the Rus sians.106 Turks

  suspected that the Rus sian government was supplying the Armenians with

  arms.107

  It was amid these tensions that, on March 15, a new vali took over. Cevdet

  Bey, Enver’s brother- in- law, arrived with thousands of fresh troops, most of

  them Circassians and Kurds with a reputation for brutality. Cordial at first,

  he promised to compensate Armenians for losses due to Kurdish predation.

  But he soon changed his tune. Like other governors in the east, Cevdet sent

  most of the Armenian police officers in his jurisdiction to distant Mosul. He

  also demanded that Van’s Armenians supply 4,000 able- bodied men for the

  labor corps. Fearing execution, the Armenians refused, deepening tensions

  and elevating Ottoman concerns about rebellion. In April, on instructions

  from Constantinople, Cevdet arrested several leading Van Armenians, some

  of whom were murdered in jail. In surrounding villages, his irregulars killed

  hundreds of Armenians. The townspeople called these troops Kasap Taburu,

  the Butcher Battalion.108

  Inside Van, Armenians made a fateful choice. Rather than hunker down and

  absorb punishment, they barricaded their quarters and appealed for the re-

  lease of their surviving leaders. To Cevdet, this was rebellion, and he was in

  no mood to ba
ck down. On April 17 he summoned two American mission-

  aries, Ernest Yarrow and Elizabeth Ussher, to relay a message to the Arme-

  nian community. “He was determined,” he said, “to crush the rebellion [even]

  if it involved the extermination of the whole Armenian population, but that

  he would prefer not to injure the women and children.”109

  The confrontation escalated. On April 20 Cevdet’s artillery began shelling

  the Armenian quarters from the citadel above the town. The Armenians

  responded by attacking the Muslim quarters. The Ottomans then sent rein-

  forcements from Erzurum, Bitlis, and Başkale and laid siege to the Armenian

  quarters.110

  With so little documentation available, it is impossible to say whether

  Cevdet truly believed the Armenians were a threat when he ordered the

  shelling, or whether he was trying to trigger re sis tance that could justify massacre and deportation. It also is not clear whether Cevdet’s actions were

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  coordinated with Constantinople, though he did inform the government of

  the supposed rebellion before unleashing the batteries.111 We can be confi-

  dent, though, that he would have disagreed with the assessment of Max

  Erwin von Scheubner- Richter, the German vice- consul in Erzurum. The

  Armenians fighting in Van, he wrote Ambassador Wangenheim, were not

  traitors. The trigger for their re sis tance had been the Turks’ “arrest and murder”

  of the Armenian dignitaries.112

  As the siege set in, missionaries opened their compound to noncombatants,

  including refugees from the countryside. At the end of April, the town’s post

  office burned down, largely preventing uncensored news from Van reaching

  the outside world.113 The telegraph wires, which were less accessible than

  postal mail, still worked, though. On April 26 local officials sent the Interior

  Ministry an incendiary note claiming that many of the Armenians killed in the

  old city wore Russian- made clothes or uniforms, which the Turks took as evi-

  dence of collusion with the enemy.114

  In early May Morgenthau reported wide- ranging massacres in the Van

  countryside, where government forces had complete control. From her

  win dow in Van, Ussher saw surrounding villages going up in smoke. In some