by Benny Morris
cases, she wrote, villa gers fought until their ammunition was spent and then
fled with the women who could follow, “leaving the women with little children
to be killed or insulted by the Turks.” Kurds joined the fray; Cevdet, Ussher
explained, had promised them “plunder and glory.” Thousands of Armenians
were killed and others fled.115
Many Turkish soldiers were averse to the killing but carried it out anyway,
on orders from CUP- aligned officers.116 One of these officers was Halil Pasha,
Enver’s uncle. After an expeditionary force under his command was driven
back from Iran, he blamed his defeat on local Christians and ordered his troops
to exact revenge on villages in the Van countryside. Enver justified Halil’s ac-
tions by claiming that “Rus sian Armenians were responsible for destroying
with bombs public buildings.”117
Van’s Armenians pressed on. Some 10,000 villa gers eventually battled their
way into the city to join the rebels. Many died en route. Rafael de Nogales, a
Venezuelan soldier who fought for the Ottomans during World War I, recalled
in his memoirs, “To right and left of the road, circled screaming flocks of black
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vultures, disputing with the dogs the putrefied Armenian corpses thrown
about on every side.”
To deplete the Armenians’ food and medical stocks, Cevdet ordered that
Armenian women and children scattered in the villages be escorted “to the
trenches of the besieged, in the belief that the latter would admit them to the
city.” De Nogales was astonished to see the Armenian defenders, aware of
the ploy, fire on the approaching survivors, who turned and fled. In the
town, the siege was characterized by “furious fighting,” de Nogales wrote.
“It was an uninterrupted combat, sometimes hand to hand or with only a
wall between. Nobody gave quarter nor asked it. The Christian or the Moor
who fell into the enemy’s hands was a dead man. To try to save a prisoner
during those days would have been almost as difficult as to try to snatch the
prey from a starving tiger.”118
With the noose tightening, the Armenians appealed for the intervention of
Rus sian troops stationed a few miles to the northeast. In mid- May, they
began to close in.119 On May 17 the vali and his troops fled and joined forces
with Halil’s column. They wreaked havoc on Armenians in the Van country-
side, around Siirt, and in Bitlis and Diyarbekir vilayets.120
On May 22 the Rus sians, with some Armenians, reached Van’s outskirts
and unleashed an intense barrage on the town’s Muslim quarters. Within days
most of the Muslim population fled along with the remaining Ottoman troops.
After the siege was lifted, some 20,000 Armenians from the surrounding hin-
terland arrived in the city. They burned homes and massacred Turks left
behind. Missionaries took in, and saved, more than a thousand Muslim women
and children. “The Armenians seem perfectly debauched,” Mattie Raynolds,
a missionary, wrote her husband. “Plundering and revenge the only thought
of the day, and we might as well talk to the wall. The Armenians have suffered
awfully and the [Turkish] massacring was done so cruelly it is no won der per-
haps that they are swept away.” But they were not driven only by revenge,
Raynolds believed. “I think too . . . the Armenians [wish] to make this a purely
Armenian province.”121
The withdrawing Ottoman forces continued to massacre Christians. In
mid- June, in the mountains south of Van, de Nogales saw thousands of
“half- nude and still bleeding corpses, lying in heaps.” He was told that Cevdet
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had ordered massacres around Van and in Bitlis to avenge Armenian collabo-
ration with the Rus sians.122
In Van town, conditions were dim in the wake of the siege. No food ar-
rived from the devastated countryside. Many died of hunger, untended
wounds, and typhus. Almost all the missionaries working in the hospital were
infected; Ussher died from the disease. To make matters worse, Ottoman
troops were gathering to retake the city and areas of the province that had been
conquered by the Rus sians, who were now outnumbered. In mid- July they
were routed by Cevdet’s forces and began withdrawing to Tiflis, modern- day
Tbilisi. Armenians joined them in great numbers. Missionaries such as Yarrow,
whom the Turks accused of colluding with the Rus sians, also fled. Through
the long trek, Turkish villa gers and Kurdish tribesmen attacked the evac-
uees. Many died on the way to Tiflis, and many others— including Raynolds,
who was injured during the flight— died soon after arriving.123
In December 1916, after the Rus sians had reoccupied the Van area, Yarrow
returned to survey the damage. The town was in ruins. Once the thriving
center of the province, now it was practically uninhabited. Of the missionary
schools and orphanages, only ashes remained. The Armenian church was a
black husk. “ There is not much that I can say,” he wrote. “It was a doleful
time . . . like being in a city of the dead.”124 The “black book,” a meticulous
province- by- province survey of the Armenian population prepared by Talât’s
assistants, estimated that in 1914 Van was home to 67,792 Armenians. Yarrow
encountered not one during his return visit.
Zeytun: The Beginning of Systematic Deportation
In April 1915 the isolated, mountainous region of Zeytun became both a
makeshift lab and a model for the campaign of deportation- cum- genocide that
would begin a month later. In Zeytun neither deportations nor massacres were
planned ahead of time; the national- scale preparation was still underway in
Constantinople as events in Zeytun unfolded. Nor were Zeytunlis the first Ar-
menians deported. In October 1914 Talât, fearful of Christian- Russian col-
laboration, had ordered the deportation of small numbers of Armenians and
Assyrians from borderlands to inland areas.125 But the symbolism and timing
of the Zeytun deportation were impor tant to the pro cess of genocide.
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In 1895 the Zeytunlis had put up strong re sis tance to Turkish repression.
Crushing a perceived rebellion there twenty years later dampened Armenian
morale and reinforced Muslims’ distrust, just in time for the state campaign of
terror. Zeytun also served, like Van and Sarıkamış, as a potent propaganda tool,
helping to justify a more general Armenian repression in the eyes of Ottoman
Muslims. When large- scale deportations began in May 1915, the government
could point to Zeytun. There, according to the official narrative, deportation
cut away the cancer of Armenian insurrection before it could metastasize. Who
could object if the Turkish remedy were applied, again and again, elsewhere?
Zeytun had done its best to rebound from 1895, and some Armenian and
Turkish leaders had tried to foster a spirit of reconciliation. In a January 1914
letter, the Western traveler Philip Price described a church mass attended by
the Turkish kaymakam and the region’s mufti. There were skirmishes from
time to time in the nearby countryside, though, as Kurdish
tribes and govern-
ment troops continued to assail Armenians. The town of 10,000, nearly all
The formerly Armenian town of Zeytun, in the mountains above Maraş. One of the few Armenian communities that fought back against Turkish oppression, the Zeytunlis were massacred and deported en masse on three separate occasions.
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Armenians, also experienced tension with its small muhacir population. Some
Zeytunlis joined revolutionary bands, which occasionally attacked tax collec-
tors and police officers.126
In Zeytun, as in Van, the government’s mobilization orders were greeted
with suspicion. Many believed that Constantinople was keen on payback for
the 1895 re sis tance, and adult men feared being sent away while their loved
ones were left without protection. Rather than the army, some Zeytunlis joined
resisters in the mountains. In response to the defiant draftees, the authorities
arrested several dozen Zeytun notables and dragged them to Maraş in chains.
Most were executed or tortured to death.127 When Armenians complained that
gendarmes were molesting women and other wise harassing townspeople and
residents of surrounding villages, the kaymakam and gendarmerie chief
turned a deaf ear.
As the war dragged on, more Armenians evaded the draft or deserted. Ten-
sions rose yet further on March 9, when, as Walter Rössler, the German
consul in Aleppo, reported, “Armenian deserters . . . shot a couple of Turkish
gendarmes.” The true number may have been greater. Zeytun’s leaders
condemned the attack, and, at first, Ottoman officials managed to avoid
bloodletting. Taking note of the situation throughout the kaza, Rössler ex-
plained, “The Islamic population of Marash clearly was going to use this
incident as a reason to start a massacre but remained calm since the set-up
of a court- martial was announced.” The possibility of killings remained,
though. “If the inhabitants do not hand over the ring leaders,” Rössler feared,
“military intervention will be used.”128
On March 13 government troops arrested a handful of notables, despite
their opposition to the deserters’ attack. Soon after, the army sent in troops
to ferret out deserters and draft dodgers holed up in the St. Astvatsatsin Mon-
astery, above the town. On March 25–26, the Ottomans razed the monastery
to the ground.129 In response the townspeople “hoisted a white flag.”130 At
this point the potential for further vio lence was extreme; to their credit, dip-
lomats, clerics, civic leaders, and local Ottoman officials sought to prevent a
repeat of 1894–1896. On March 30 the American consul in Aleppo, Jesse B.
Jackson, telegraphed Wangenheim, asking that he press the Porte to send Vali
Celal Bey of Aleppo, “a very able man and knowing Armenians thoroughly,”
to Zeytun to prevent disaster. But before anything could be done, the govern-
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ment flooded the town with troops “to bring the rebels to justice.” Troops
arrested and tortured dozens of leading citizens “and declared victory.”131
As in so many cases, Turkish complaints of violent insurrection read as
post- hoc justification. No doubt many Zeytunlis were sympathetic to the Ar-
menian national cause. In March 1915 Allied intelligence sources estimated
the number of activists (“Hunchakists”) in the Zeytun area at about 3,000,
with revolutionary committees active in all the province’s towns. But they
could not have rebelled had they wished to: the government had disarmed
them well before any putative rebellion, even taking away their knives.132 When,
on March 12, Wangenheim informed his government that Zeytun had “risen,”
he was merely repeating what Ottoman sources had told him. In that same
dispatch, he referred to his consul in Adana, who was close to the scene and
denied that there was a rebellion. Rather, the consul described the incidents in
Zeytun as “isolated expressions in reaction to recruitment procedures.”133
For his part, when Consul Rössler visited the area, he found no evidence
of Rus sian or other foreign influence. Though he didn’t ignore the killing of
the gendarmes, he blamed the government for escalating the situation. The
Ottomans were arresting and prosecuting “rich and respected Armenians”
who had nothing to do with the vio lence. Indeed, these prominent Armenians
wanted the “robbers removed.” Rössler believed that events in Zeytun re-
flected not just countermea sures in the face of rebellion but the will of a gov-
ernment faction “inclined to consider all Armenians as suspicious, even
hostile.”134
In this he was correct, for the fate of Zeytun was deci ded long before any
revolutionary event could be construed there. As early as February Cemal had
proposed deporting Armenian families from the Zeytun area, and Talât had
agreed.135 The deportations began about a week after the Ottoman army de-
clared victory in Zeytun. On April 8 a batch of notables were sent to Osmaniye
with their wives.136 Cemal cabled Talât the following day, widening the scope
of deportation to include all “of those whose residence in Zeytun and Maraş
is deemed to be harmful”— which is to say, every Armenian.
The first group of deportees arrived in Tarsus a week after setting out, not
much worse for wear but anxious about the children they had left behind in
Zeytun.137 They were then sent northwest by train to Konya but were stopped
on the way and separated.138 The women were dispatched to Ankara- area
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villages and the men to Deir Zor and the desert to the southeast.139 Cemal
also requested that muhacirs waiting in Antep be settled in Zeytun “for po-
liti cal reasons.”140
In this moment before widespread deportation, a missionary who came
upon the Armenians passing through Maraş found the pro cess incompre-
hensible. His only explanation was greed. “When I heard exactly who had
arrived today, it hurt me, because they included people who had done
every thing to fulfil the wishes of the government, and still they had to be
deported. But why? Because they are wealthy! I am convinced of it.” He
added that “among them there were no Eshkians,” meaning eşkiya— rebels.141
Dr. John Merrill, another missionary, lamented the future awaiting the de-
portees. They were being sent “to the Irak” where they would be “Christian
emigrants among an Arabic- speaking population of strong Mohammedans,
branded at the same time as having been disloyal to the government.” They
were, Merrill realized, suffering for their willingness to work with the authori-
ties. “They never would have trusted the government and surrendered to it, if
they had dreamed that the result was to be this.”142
In the weeks after the initial deportation of notables, Zeytun was emptied
of Armenians. Celal Bey, the vali of Aleppo who was never given the chance
to mediate in Zeytun, wrote in his memoirs, “Without any justification, the
military was sent in, and the people were deported, along with their fami-
lies.”143 The exiles were sent to Maraş and then southward. According to
Rössler, the Turks em
ployed deceit to eject the Zeytunlis from their homes:
It appears that those who have been led away from Zeitun were not told
the truth but, as I have heard from the people themselves, they were told
that they would be brought to Marash, and in the hope that they will be
able to stay here, they accepted it all in silence. Once they were here, they
were simply put in a khan and transported on after only one day of rest.144
An American witness reported what happened to the Zeytunlis along the
roads east:
Hundreds of them have been dragged through [Urfa] on their way to
the desert whither they have been exiled. These poor exiles were mostly
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women, children and old men, and they were clubbed and beaten and
lashed along as though they had been wild animals. Their women and
girls were daily criminally outraged, both by their guards and the ruffians
of every village through which they passed, as the former allowed the
latter to enter the camp of the exiles at night and even distributed the
girls among the villa gers for the night. . . . About two thousand of them
have passed through [Urfa], all more dead than alive.145
In early May Talât confirmed his plans, ordering that Zeytun be completely
emptied of Armenians and muhacirs settled in their homes.146 On May 12 the
Interior Ministry completed the erasure of Zeytun, changing its name to
Yenişehir, meaning Newtown.147 By mid- May there were no Armenians there
or in nearly all of the forty- five adjacent villages.148 According to Raymond
Kevorkian, 18,000 Armenians were deported from the Zeytun district in the
spring of 1915, 6,000 to Konya and the rest to Aleppo, Rakka, Deir Zor,
Mosul, and Baghdad.149 The Interior Ministry created a special commission
to apportion the property left behind.150
On the heels of Zeytun, and still in advance of the May general deporta-
tion order, a string of nearby areas was cleared of Armenians. In mid- April
the authorities called up the adult males of Maraş; after Armenian men regis-
tered and were taken away, their families were rounded up and marched off.
The inhabitants of the villages of Furnuz and Gehen had sworn allegiance