by Benny Morris
darmes deployed around town and corralled Armenians into the main squares.
From there they were pushed in droves to a clearing just outside the city. Some
brought along carts and carriages but were ordered to send them back. The
first 2,000 were assembled in three convoys and launched southward, to
Gümüşhane and Erzincan. An additional 4,000 would be dispatched a few
days later, and more from the vilayet as a whole.51 Heinrich Bergfeld, the
German consul in Trabzon, estimated at the end of July that 30,000 people
had been deported from the vilayet through Typhus- infested countryside.
Even without deliberate murder, he wrote, the journey would claim an enor-
mous number of victims.52
Trabzon’s Armenian men were massacred at Gümüşhane. According to
Baas’s testimony,
When the first batches of deported Armenians arrived at Gumush-
Khana, all the able- bodied men were sorted out with the excuse that
Armenians assembling for deportation in the main square of an Anatolian town, 1915.
The Eastern River
they were going to be given work. The women and children were sent
ahead under escort with the assurance . . . that their final destination was
Mosul and that no harm will befall them. The men kept behind were
taken out . . . in batches of 15 or 20, lined up on the edge of ditches pre-
pared beforehand, shot and thrown into the ditches. Hundreds . . .
were shot every day.
The pro cession of old men, women, and children faced a similarly grim fate
at the hands of brigands, with whom “the military escorts had strict orders
not to interfere.”53 Many deportees were thrown into the Değirmendere
River, polluting the water and air for miles around.54 Bergfeld wrote that the
riverbanks were “filled with piles of corpses.”55 Others were loaded on boats,
ostensibly headed for Samsun, but which usually returned empty after just a
few hours. “It is generally believed,” Heizer wrote to Morgenthau, “that such
persons were drowned.”56 It was not just men. Kwiatkowski noted, “ Others
( women, children) have been put on boats and sunk in the sea. This has been
confirmed by several reports.”57 Nail Bey, Vali Cemal Azmi Bey, and Mehmet
Ali Bey, a battalion commander, later ordered the removal of Armenian Cath-
olics and anyone ambulatory, even if they were pregnant or infirm.58
In the last stages of the Trabzon deportation, Lieutenant Baas was ordered
to take a convoy southward. Setting out with a group of 120 men, 200 women,
and 700 children, he reached Gümüşhane, where the men were taken away
and killed. Continuing on the road to Erzincan with the rest, Baas passed
“thousands of bodies of Armenians unburied.” The convoy was periodically
halted by gangs demanding the women and children. Lieutenant Baas refused,
but he did hand over some 200 children to Muslims willing to adopt them,
whom he must have considered decent people. At Kemah, according to his
statement, he fell ill and asked to be relieved, but was ordered to keep going,
moving his charges from place to place as long as they were still alive. Fi nally, he managed to foist his deportees onto another convoy, from Erzurum, led
by an acquaintance, a gendarmerie officer named Mehmet Effendi. The group
apparently did not survive long. Mehmet later told Baas that, upon reaching
the Euphrates, south of Kemah, the convoy was attacked by brigands. The
gendarmes kept clear, and the gangs shot the remaining Armenians and threw
them into the river. Baas explained that Kemah was the brigands’ regional
The Young Turk s
headquarters; their commander, a Kurd named Murzabey, boasted that
he alone had killed 70,000 Armenians. Even the Turks considered him
dangerous. He was later charged with assaulting a gendarme and executed.59
According to a non- Armenian soldier, an Armenian construction bat-
talion working on the road between Trabzon and Gümüşhane was massa-
cred along with Trabzon deportees. The witness told Heizer that he did not
observe the killing, but he heard rifle fire and shortly thereafter took part in
the burial detail. The bodies, he said, “ were all naked, having been stripped
of clothing.” 60
With Trabzon’s Armenians gone, the authorities began emptying their
houses and shops. Furniture, bedding, and other valuables were put in storage.
No attempt was made to rec ord owner ship of the belongings. “The idea of
‘keeping the property in bales under the protection of the government, to be
returned to the owners upon their return,’ is simply ridicu lous,” Heizer wrote.
“The goods are piled without any attempt at labeling or systematic storage.” 61
About a year later, in June 1916, the Rus sians captured Trabzon. Dr. Lyndon
Crawford, principal of the American school, wrote that as the Rus sians en-
tered, about five hundred Armenians suddenly emerged from caves in the
mountains. Others, mainly young children taken by Greek and Turkish fami-
lies, were handed over to the Rus sians.62 Little by little, other Armenians
who had survived the ordeal returned and reestablished a community.
Some avenged themselves by committing atrocities against Turks. But in early
1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Rus sians hastily departed, and the
Ottoman forces returned. The subsequent atrocities rivaled “ those of 1915,”
according to one report. “Wholesale drowning in the Black Sea is said to have
been resorted to on this occasion, as it was three years ago. Male children es-
pecially have been thus disposed of, while women and girls have been
handed over, even more extensively than before, to Moslem families.” 63
Sivas
In early 1915 Fazıl Berki toured Anatolia preparing hearts and minds for the
deportations. An army physician and a rising star in the CUP, Berki was an
able orator, well suited to what the Armenian Patriarchate dubbed an “anti-
Christian propaganda tour.” Speaking in March at the central mosque of Sivas
The Eastern River
city, he labeled Armenians “enemies of the Turkish nation” and declared that
the empire would have to get rid of them. He also conveyed the party’s latest
thinking to Vali Muammer and the local CUP branch secretary, Gani. Ac-
cording to a special report by the Armenian Patriarchate, the three men or ga-
nized a secret committee to oversee the coming deportations and massacres
in Sivas vilayet. A few weeks after Berki’s visit, Gani traveled to Constanti-
nople to confer with CUP chiefs and coordinate the campaign.64 By May 19,
before deportations from Sivas began, the government had plans to replace
the vilayet’s Armenians with tens of thousands of Balkan muhacirs, many of
whom were already in the province waiting for housing.65
Throughout the spring, local Turkish newspapers fanned the flames,
helping to impress on Turks the justification for deportation. Early 1915 had
seen small clashes between Armenian militants and government forces out-
side the town of Sivas, with both sides suffering casualties. The newspapers
Kızıl Irmak and Sivas reported sensationalized versions of the events, exaggerating the Armenians’ crimes and claiming that Armenian co
nspirators were
caught planning to stab the empire in the back.66 In response about eighty
gendarmes “of notoriously evil reputation” were brought in to bolster the local
garrison.67
Massive roundups began in mid- June, with about 2,000 middle- class
Armenians arrested in Sivas town.68 The detainees were routinely tortured,
and most were never released. Under torture, some detainees disclosed old
weapons caches, where a few Hamidian- era bombs were found.69
The deportation was announced on July 2, and removal began three days
later. Large groups were marshalled to a staging area outside the city and sent
away in caravans, each accompanied by four or five gendarmes. The deportees
left behind most of their property, but many rented ox carts and piled them
high with house hold items. Some took donkeys, cows, and chickens. In less
than a month, some 25,000 Armenians were deported. About a thousand,
most of them new converts, stayed in Sivas.70 Surrounding villages and towns
were also depopulated.71 Deportees from throughout the vilayet were sent to
Aleppo and Mosul. The missionary and educator George E. White described
the sad squeaking of the ox carts passing by his college night after night, for
weeks.72 He recounted, that, “in all about 1,200 persons, mostly women and
girls” converted, after the men had been removed.73
The Young Turk s
In late July Sivas’ small population of Protestant Armenians was also de-
ported. Unusually, Mary Graffam, a Protestant school principal, was allowed
to accompany her students and the rest of the deportees, 2,000 in total. She
provides a rare firsthand description of a convoy’s arduous trek. On the second
day, the routine began: “The gendarmes would go ahead and have long con-
versations with the villa gers and then stand back and let them rob and trou ble
the people until we all began to scream, and then [the gendarmes] would come
and drive [the villa gers] away.” On the third day, the men were separated from
the women. The convoy commander claimed that they had gone back to Sivas,
but villa gers told them that the men had been executed.
When we approached the bridge over [the stream of ] Tokma Su it was
a certainly fearful sight. As far as the eye could see over the plain was
this real slow moving line of oxcarts. For hours not a drop of water on
the road and the sun pouring down its very hottest. As we went on we
began to see the dead from yesterday’s com pany and the weak began to
fall by the way. . . . I piled as many as I could on our wagons and our
pupils both boys and girls worked like heroes.74
When the convoy reached Malatya, the authorities ordered Graffam to re-
turn to Sivas. The deportees trudged on. U.S. Consul Jesse B. Jackson, who
witnessed the convoy’s arrival at Aleppo, provides an epilogue:
One of the most terrible sights ever seen in Aleppo was the arrival, early
in August 1915, of some 5,000 terribly emaciated, dirty, ragged and sick
women and children, 3,000 in one day and 2,000 the following day.
These people were the only survivors of the thrifty and well to do
Armenian population of the province of Sivas.75
Similar stories piled up around Sivas vilayet. In the city of Merzifon, “gen-
darmes went through the town gathering up all the Armenian men they could
find, old and young; rich and poor; sick and well.” All were detained and sup-
posedly moved to Sivas city, the provincial capital. The first group dis-
patched sent messages to their homes indicating that they were safe. Their
survival may have been a ruse concocted by the Turks to mislead others or allay
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their fears, because subsequent groups of men sent to Sivas were never heard
from again. Wagon drivers and officials told missionaries that they had been
killed on the road.76 J. K. Marsden, a Merzifon missionary, described the
pro cess:
They were in groups of four with their arms tied behind them and their
deportation began with perhaps one- hundred or two- hundred in a batch.
As we afterward learned, they were taken about twelve miles across the
plains to the foothills, stripped of their clothing and in front of a ditch
previously prepared, were compelled to kneel down while a group of
villa gers with knives and axes quickly disposed of them. For a week, every
night, this was repeated until twelve hundred and thirty of the leading
Armenian men had been disposed of.77
White, the missionary, later claimed that officials had “supervised the whole
[pro cess], under tents that were erected close at hand, and an official named
Husseyin Effendi was said to have supervised the excavating of the trenches
before the deportations from the city.”78
When the killing was done, only a few hundred of Merzifon’s 12,000 Ar-
menians were left alive.79 The kaymakam, a Dr. Faik, openly boasted about
killing thousands of Armenians. Faik, who was also the CUP branch secre-
tary, was too cruel—or, perhaps, too honest about his cruelty— even consid-
ering his party’s standards; he was soon dismissed and investigated.80
Similar atrocities took place in the large provincial towns of Amasya and
Tokat. In Amasya, out of 9,598 Armenians, 1,454 converted, most of them
women who married Muslims. About half of the male population was drafted
for the labor battalions. The rest were deported. The figures from Tokat look
much the same.81 In August 1915 an American consular agent in Samsun
wrote Morgenthau that the men of these towns had been taken away and had
not been heard from since.82 Exactly what happened to them is not clear.
While many Armenian prisoners in Sivas vilayet were killed, a substantial
number were spared. Some were even allowed to join their families on the trek
south, prob ably thanks to lobbying by missionaries.83
According to Talât’s interim calculations of 1917, of the 141,592 Arme-
nians who had lived in Sivas vilayet before the war, about 8,000 remained after
The Young Turk s
deportation. Another 4,000 were dispersed in other provinces.84 That leaves
almost 130,000 dead, missing, exiled from the empire, or, owing to conver-
sion, no longer counted as Armenian. When the deportations were over, the
authorities plowed up the Armenian cemetery in Merzifon and put the land
to agricultural use.85
Mamuret- ül- Aziz
In February 1913 the president of Harput’s Euphrates College, Ernest Riggs,
sent a cheerful letter to James Barton, the foreign secretary of the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Riggs described a city looking
toward a harmonious future. He believed that the Armenians’ neutrality in the
Balkan Wars would “tend to make the Turks more tolerant toward them and
their religion.” He also had considerable faith in the moderating power of
secular governance. “The divisions between the parties of Turks tend to the
obliteration of the old great division between Christian and Moslem,” he
explained. “Just now, we are basking in the unusual sunshine of good gov-
ernment and all looks rosy.” 86
The Armenians seemed to be thriv
ing. Even some of those who had emi-
grated in the 1890s to the United States and Eu rope had felt safe enough to
return. There were about 120,000 Armenians in Mamuret- ül- Aziz vilayet, cen-
tered on Harput. Armenians in the province were leaders and innovators in
industry, especially the silk business.87
But the situation worsened in 1914. The mountains and crags of Mamuret-
ül- Aziz were natu ral hiding places for deserters, who formed small gangs
with Kurdish tribesmen in the wild Dersim region. A March tele gram from
the Interior Ministry instructs the vali and other local governors to deal with
these outlaws.88 Once the war began, reports of banditry became more fre-
quent; in May 1915 tribal chiefs were given an ultimatum to hand over the
deserters.89
These steps appear to have originated with CUP orders. The local CUP
secretary, Mehmet Nuri Bey, helped to install a new vali, Sabit Cemal Sağırzade,
a hardliner who at one point told Scheubner- Richter that “the Armenians in
Turkey must and were going to be killed.” Promoted from his former posi-
tion as mutesarrif of Dersim, Sabit was indebted to the CUP and eager to help
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Se nior American missionaries, including Ernest Riggs, president of Harput’s Euphrates College. Riggs and his wife Mary witnessed the destruction of Harput’s Armenians, as well as the condition of deportees passing through on their way to the killing fields of the Syrian Desert.
carry out its plans. When Nȃzım Bey arrived in late spring to or ga nize the de-
portations and killings, he found an energetic partner in government house.90
Sabit seemed in fact to relish the job, sending out joking, sarcastic tele grams
about his victims. In one, from late July, he assured Talât that all the deportees were being treated with dignity.91
In early May Sabit ordered the local chief of police, Mehmet Namık, to col-
lect Armenians’ weapons and arrest revolutionaries. The police found only
twenty- nine Dashnaks and few weapons.92 Namık urged Sabit to punish
only those against whom there was proof of revolutionary activity, but the vali
“refused to listen, replying that orders had come from the central government,