by Benny Morris
to the government and resisted demands to join the rebels. They were none-
theless deported. On April 20 Constantinople inquired as to whether their
lands were fertile enough to maintain Balkan muhacirs.151 In May U.S.
Consul Jackson summarized the Zeytun and Maraş deportations:
Between 4,300 and 4,500 families, about 26,000 persons, are being re-
moved by order of the government from the districts of Zeytun and
Marash to distant places where they are unknown, and in distinctly
non- Christian communities. Thousands have already been sent to the
northwest into the provinces of Konia, Cesarea, Castamouni, etc., while
others have been taken southeasterly as far as Dier- el- Zor, and reports
say to the vicinity of Baghdad. The misery these people are suffering
is terrible to imagine. . . . Rich and poor alike, Protestant, Gregorian,
The Young Turk s
Orthodox, and Catholic, are all subject to the same order. . . . The sick
drop by the wayside, women in critical condition giving birth to children
that, according to reports, many mothers strangle or drown because of
lack of means to care for. Fathers exiled in one direction, mothers in
another, and young girls and small children in still another. According
to reports from reliable sources the accompanying gendarmes are told
they may do as they wish with the women and girls.152
On April 19, after the start of the Zeytun and Maraş deportations, the
Dashnak leadership wrote to the American Embassy in Constantinople, “The
government has deci ded to evacuate by force all the other Armenian
regions.”153 At the time, this was only a suspicion. It proved alarmingly
accurate.
4
The Eastern River
In the earliest days of the mass deportation, it was still pos si ble to believe that the government had no overarching design against Anatolia’s Armenians, to
believe that Turkey, however ham- fistedly, was defending itself from its
war time enemies. “I have to admit,” Celal Bey wrote after the war, “I was not
convinced that these orders and actions were meant to destroy the Arme-
nians, because I believed it was improbable that a government would destroy
its own subjects in such a way, and in par tic u lar the human trea sure that had given it such riches. I believed these were merely steps stemming from the necessities of war, meant to remove the Armenians temporarily from the cam-
paign arena.”1 Merrill, one of the missionaries stationed in Zeytun during the
first deportation, for his part thought he had witnessed the unfolding of
“a plan for the breaking down of the Christian population without blood-
shed and with the color of legality.”2
While deportations from Zeytun and some frontier areas began in April,
formal orders to deport Armenians began reaching the provinces only on
May 23. On May 27 an act of parliament made of the orders a comprehensive
law. The Tehcir (Deportation) Law made no direct mention of Armenians,
instead using neutral- sounding terms and a series of exemptions to ensure that
Armenians would bear the brunt of the damage. The law specified military
action against rebels and resisters, for the purpose of maintaining peace and
security. It also provided for mass displacement from communities whose resi-
dents, in any number, were suspected of treason or sedition. Turks readily
understood these terms as legalizing and therefore encouraging the mass arrest,
exile, and killing of Armenians. The law’s explicit exemption of Catholics
The Young Turk s
and Protestants reinforced the point, although, in practice, Catholics and
Protestants would be deported and violated routinely. (The same was true of
Armenian soldiers’ families. Though technically exempt, they were also sub-
jected to deportation and massacre.)
A July 12 cable from Talât, one of the few accessible official documents ad-
mitting to massacres, confirms that the government selected Armenians for
eradication. Talât was writing to Dr. Çerkes Reşid (Cherkes Reshid), a CUP
founding father, gradu ate of Constantinople’s Military Medical School, and
vali of Diyarbekir. Reşid was such an energetic and indiscriminate murderer
of Christians that Talât had to remind him he was only allowed to kill one spe-
cific group.
Lately it has been reported that massacres were or ga nized against the
Armenians of the province and Christians without distinction of religion,
and that recently for example people deported from Diyarbekir, together
with the Armenians and the Bishop of Mardin and seven hundred per-
sons from other Christian communities, were taken out of town at night
and slaughtered like sheep, and that an estimated two thousand people
have been massacred until now, and if this is not ended immediately and
unconditionally, it has been reported that it is feared the Muslim popu-
lation of the neighboring provinces will rise and massacre all Christians.
It is absolutely unacceptable for the disciplinary mea sures and policies
destined for the Armenians to include other Christians as this would
leave a very bad impression upon public opinion, and therefore these
types of incidents . . . need to be ended immediately.3
Consistent with the CUP’s Islamist and secular goals, the purpose of the
massacres was not to quell rebellious Christians: it was to replace them with
Muslims on whose loyalty the state could rely. The deportation law permitted
the resettlement of muhacirs in former Armenian lands, and it was Talât’s in-
tention to see that the law was followed. On July 13 he wrote to the commis-
sion of abandoned properties in Aleppo and Maraş, “The definitive solution
of the Armenian question” (Ermeni meselesinin suret- i katiyede hall- i keyfiyeti) was the “transfer and deportation of Armenians” coupled with “increasing the
Muslim population by settling refugees and tribes in their place.” If these
The Eastern River
refugees were reluctant to settle in the homes of the dispossessed— were they
to “flee or hide”— officials were instructed to herd them into the abandoned
villages.4
The dilution of the Armenian population and its replacement by muhacirs
was rigorously enforced on the basis of a demographic formula promulgated
by the central government. Shortly after the first deportation orders were
issued in late May, “The Ottoman General Staff determined three conditions
for the re-settlement of Armenians. First, the ratio of Armenians to be settled
‘should not be more than 10 percent of tribal and Muslim inhabitants.’ Second,
newly- established Armenian villages should not contain more than ‘50
house holds.’ Third, once resettled, they would at no time be permitted to
change their location.”5 The orders evolved to encompass more and more Ar-
menians. The first order was quickly followed by another endorsing the de-
portation of all Armenians from the “war zone.” 6 Then Talât and his team
deci ded that the six eastern provinces were to be emptied of Armenians en-
tirely. Armenians could be resettled in other provinces of Anatolia and in Deir
Zor, but at a ratio of no more than 5 percent of the Muslim population. In
Aleppo the figure was 2 percent. In practice, the ratio was usually 5 percent,
rarely 10 percent. “Each new decision to deport was taken only after the ratio
of Armenians (including Catholics and Protestants) to the Muslim popula-
tion was calculated,” Turkish historian Fuat Dündar writes.7
There is evidence of direct orders to kill off Turkey’s entire Armenian pop-
ulation. After the war Ahmed Moukhtar Baas, an Ottoman army lieutenant
who took part in the ethnic cleansing of Trabzon, told his British interroga-
tors that he and his troops had received two instructions. One was the Inte-
rior Ministry’s official deportation order of June 21, calling for the expulsion
of “all Armenians, without exception,” from the vilayets of Trabzon, Diyar-
bekir, Sivas, and Mamuret- ül- Aziz and from Canik sanjak. The other was an
irâde, an imperial directive from the sultan himself. The deportation order
specified that “deserters” were to be shot without trial. In the irâde, the word
“Armenians” was substituted for deserters.8 Reşid Akif Pasha, who served
briefly in the Ottoman cabinet immediately after the war ended, told a similar
story. Speaking to the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies on November 21, 1918,
he announced that he had found several hidden documents. After the initial
order of deportation was sent to the provinces, he said, “The inauspicious
The Young Turk s
order was circulated by the Central Committee to all parties so that the
armed gangs could hastily complete their cursed task. With that, the armed
gangs then took over and the barbaric massacres began to take place.”9
But the rec ord of what actually happened on the ground testifies more
persuasively than any order or irâde. Armenians throughout Asia Minor
were funneled southward in convoys toward Syria. In the east, able- bodied
men were rounded up, separated from their families, and massacred im-
mediately after departing in convoys, if not before. In the west, where the
risk of or ga nized Armenian re sis tance was lower, men were typically al-
lowed to join the convoys. Anyone on the road— men, women, children,
the sick or elderly— might be massacred, or else die of disease, starvation,
injuries, exposure, and exhaustion. Throughout the journey, the deportees
were robbed, raped, and forced to convert to Islam. Those who reached
the Syrian and Iraqi deserts around Deir Zor were subsequently butchered
in the tens of thousands.
The Eastern River of Deportation and Massacre, 1915
N
Black Sea
Sinop
Tbilisi
Kastamonu
Trabzon
7/1915
Merzifon
Samsun
Russians take Trabzon 6/1916
6/1915
Russians withdraw 1/1918
Amasya
8/1915
Gümüşhane
Kars
Tokat
Ankara
Sarıkamış
8/1915
7/1915
8-9/1915
12/1914-1/1915
Yozgat
Bayburt
Sivas
Erzincan
Erzurum
7/1915
5-6/1915
5-6/1915
Mama Hatun
Kemah Gorge
Doğubeyazit
6-7/1915
6-7/1915
Harput
Kayseri and Talas
Lake
6-7/1915
8/1915
Euphrates
Van
Malatya
Gölcük lake (Hazar Golu)
Van
Zeytun
Summer and fall 1915
4/1915
Konya
3-4/1915
Gügen Boğaz
Diyarbekir
Russian reach van 22/5/1915
Siirt
8/1915–3/1916
Kahramanmaras
summer and fall 1915
6-10/1915
Russians withdraw 7/1915
4-5/1915
Şeytan Dere
Gaziantep
Hakkari
6-10/1915
Adana
Osmaniye 9-10/1915
Mersin
Midyat
Mardin
8-11/1915
Iskenderun
Urfa
6-10/1915
9-10/1915
Adana, Dortyol,
7/1915
T
Ras al-Ayn
i
10/1915
g
Mersin, Iskanderun
Musadağ
ris
Al Bab
1909
7-9/1915
Ar Raqqah
Mosul
8/1915
Mediterranean
Antakya
Aleppo
2/1916
Sea
Maskanah
Ash Shaddadi
0
100
200
300
Deportation
Mass kill zone
Organized resistance
Battle
KM
The Eastern River
In his memoirs, Celal Bey recalled what it felt like to witness what were, in
effect, death marches. “I was like a person sitting beside a river,” he wrote,
but “with no means of rescuing anyone from it”:
Instead of water, blood was flowing down the river. Thousands of in-
nocent children, blameless old men, helpless women and strong young-
sters were streaming downriver towards oblivion, straight to dust and
ashes. Anyone I could hold onto with my bare hands, with my finger-
nails, I saved. The rest, I believe, went down the river, never to return.10
Erzurum
The vilayet of Erzurum had one of the largest Armenian populations in eastern
Anatolia, roughly 125,000 in 1914. As such, it had been a focus of massacre
in 1895. Thousands lost their lives, and many emigrated. But the rise of the
CUP seemed to portend fundamental change. In a signal of reconciliation,
the CUP and the Dashnaks signed their 1909 cooperation agreement in
Erzurum. Intellectuals, journalists, and po liti cal leaders celebrated the
accord and dreamed of a rosy future.11
Nothing came of these hopes. During the Balkan Wars, a wave of nation-
alist fervor swept the region, leading to heightened Armenian demands
for equality and autonomy, which angered officials. In January 1914 Rus-
sian intelligence sources described meetings among Erzurum’s Muslim
notables, which featured “open talk of massacres.” Some Muslims donned
white turbans, indicating their readiness to die as jihadi martyrs whenever
Constantinople gave the sign.12 In December, after the Ottomans joined the
world war, Wangenheim reported routine attacks on Erzurum’s Armenian
villages and priests. Locals ascribed the attacks to CUP instigation.13 By
early 1915, with genocide planning underway in Constantinople, Erzurum
officials were seeking guidance on which of the city’s Armenians to eradi-
cate. On February 17 local officials sent the central government lists of
Armenians whose professional expertise was essential, the implication being
that they should be exempted from harm.14
At the end of the month, Şakır, the Special Organ ization chief, arrived i
n
the city. At first, not much happened. All eyes were on Van, and Şakır laid low,
The Young Turk s
maintaining his official front as a representative of the Red Crescent.15 Then,
on April 5, the Directorate of Muhacir Affairs urgently requested housing in
the Erzurum area for 20,000 refugees. The Interior Ministry replied that Şakır
would handle the matter.16 Soon after, Şakır and Nȃzım, the other Special
Organ ization chief, met with Mahmud Kâmil Pasha, the commander of the
Third Army, and Tahsin Bey, the vali of Erzurum recently transferred from
Van. Although there is no documentation from the meeting, postwar testimony
indicates that Şakır and Nȃzım relayed Constantinople’s as- yet- unannounced
decision to deport large numbers of Armenians, and prob ably to murder them
as well. The group then developed procedures to carry out the removal and
to resettle muhacirs.17
The decisions taken at this meeting likely affected areas beyond Erzurum.
Testimony indicates that the plans hatched there were coordinated with valis
Muammer of Sivas, Cevdet of Van, and Mustafa Abdülhalik of Bitlis. At about
the same time, Sivas and a number of other eastern vilayets were instructed
to search Armenian homes and businesses for weapons and ammunition.18
After Şakır’s arrival in Erzurum, Scheubner- Richter wrote to Wangenheim
predicting that life would soon get much harder for the Armenians. But the
ambassador told his consul not to interfere. Scheubner- Richter could try to
provide aid, but, Wangenheim warned, “It is impor tant to avoid appearing as
if we have a right to protect the Armenians and intervene in the activities of
the authorities.”19 On May 20 Scheubner- Richter reported that the authori-
ties had ordered the deportation of all Armenian villa gers from the plain of
Passin, north of Erzurum, southward to the area of Mama Hatun (Tercan),
midway between Erzurum and Erzincan. According to the consul, they were
given two hours’ notice, and as they left, their houses were plundered by sol-
diers and neighbors.20 The Dashnaks made similar reports. In one they
identified Şakır, Hilmi Bey, and former CUP deputy Seyfullah Effendi as
prominent culprits. Their plan, the report claimed, was to provoke the Ar-
menians into acts of re sis tance that would justify massacre.21 But there was
no re sis tance.
Tahsin told Scheubner- Richter that he opposed the mea sures but had to
follow orders from Constantinople. Next in line, he said, would be the inhab-