by Benny Morris
signed by Bahaeddin Şakır, that the whole Armenian population had to be
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deported and annihilated.” Namık was hastily dismissed and dispatched
elsewhere.93
In mid- May, Johannes Ehmann, Germany’s consular agent in Harput,
alerted his embassy to a wave of arrests of alleged Dashnaks and Hunchaks,
including members of parliament.94 Many prominent Christians were also
detained and tortured. “Practically every male Armenian of any consequence
at all here has been arrested,” Davis reported in late June. “A great many of
them were subjected to the most cruel tortures under which some of them
died.”95 Maria Jacobsen, a Danish missionary, wrote in her diary:
The Turks . . . at night . . . go into the prison. The prisoners are sent for,
especially the well- known men, and made to run around on the wet floor
until their feet become sodden. Then they have to lie on their backs with
men sitting on their chests, while others flog their sodden feet until they
are swollen and bleeding. They rip out their fingernails and the hairs
from their beards one by one. They put their hands and heads in a sort
of pinching machine until bones crack and break.96
When nothing more could be gleaned by torture, the detainees were mur-
dered. “Several hundred of the leading Armenians were sent away at night
and it seems to be clearly established that most, if not all, of them were killed,”
Riggs wrote.97 One of his Armenian colleagues— Tenekejian, a professor of
Turkish and history who had worked in the college for thirty- five years— was
“arrested May 1st without charge.” In clipped sentences, Riggs described what
befell this poor man: “Hair of head, mustache and beard pulled out in vain
effort to secure damaging confessions. Starved and hung by arms for a day
and a night and severely beaten several times. Taken out towards Diyarbekir
about June 20th and murdered in general massacre on the road.”98 Those who
remained in prison were dealt with later, when the wing where they were kept
burned down and those trying to escape were shot.99
As to the mass of Harput’s Armenians, events followed the usual pattern.
Before the deportations began, the Directorate of Muhacir Affairs asked the
vali to keep an eye on money, movable property, and real estate that the de-
portees would be leaving behind.100 The Armenians were hard- pressed to sell
their belongings and wound up having to take virtually nothing for them.
The Eastern River
“Sewing machines which had cost twenty- five dollars were sold for fifty cents.
Valuable rugs were sold for less than a dollar.” The scene reminded Davis of
“vultures sweeping on their prey.”101 Officials, gendarmes, villa gers, tribesmen, and brigands all stole from the meager cash proceeds deportees earned
from the forced sales. Money they deposited in banks or sent to relatives was
seized. Then, after the arrest, torture, and murder of the community leaders,
came the announcement of an imminent, phased deportation.102
On June 28 Harput town criers proclaimed that all Armenians and Assyrians
were to be deported. Dates and assembly points were soon published. “The
full meaning of such an order can scarcely be imagined,” Davis wrote. “A
massacre, however horrible . . . would be humane in comparison . . . . In
a massacre, many escape, but a wholesale deportation of this kind in this
country means a lingering and perhaps even more dreadful death for nearly
every one.”103
As in Trabzon and Erzurum, the Armenians complied. Davis was shocked
by their passivity:
The most remarkable feature of the situation is the helplessness of the
Armenians and the total lack of re sis tance on their part. With two or three
insignificant exceptions, there has not been a blow struck by any of
them. . . . One would think that some would have chosen death here,
knowing that it awaited them a few hours after their departure, and many
talked that way, but when the time has come all have started [on the trek]
without making any re sis tance.104
During the first days of July, Harput, and Mamuret- ül- Aziz generally, were
emptied of Armenians. Most of the men were herded out of town in groups,
tied up, and killed. Women and children were sent on.105 “The women and
girls were dressed in very strange ways as they started out,” Mary Riggs, a mis-
sionary educator and wife of Ernest Riggs, wrote. “So much so that I did not
recognize some of my own pupils until they spoke to me and told me their
names. They had disfigured their faces, marking them with charcoal and col-
oring them so as to make themselves look hideous. I could understand without
asking them what the purpose was. . . . The people wore old clothes for fear
of having good clothes taken from them.”106
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On July 10 the authorities ordered that all those remaining in Harput must
leave town. “Not one single sparrow must be left,” the instruction read.107 A
week later, soldiers and gendarmes rounded up every one left, including the
sick and the el derly. Some women gave away their children to Turks. A number
of Armenians found refuge in mission buildings. Talât agreed they should be
allowed to stay, for a time, lest upsetting the missionaries damage relations with the United States.108
According to Davis, the Harput deportees were to be sent to Urfa, but they
were transported via Malatya, hinting at the government’s intentions. If the
authorities had wanted the deportees to reach Urfa or the Syrian Desert be-
yond, the convoys should have proceeded along the much shorter route
through Diyarbekir.109 The circuitous path through Malatya meant the de-
portees would march endlessly— either until they dropped or into remote
valleys where they could be killed more easily and without witnesses.
Over the course of the summer, Mamuret- ül- Aziz was not only a site of
deportations but also a transit point for deportees arriving from the north.
Missionary Tacy Atkinson saw them at Mezre, near Harput:
At this time, thousands were coming to us from . . . Erzroom, Erzingan,
Ordou, Trebizond and many other places. In the second com pany that
came there were about eight thousand. They said they were about thirty
thousand when they started. They had been attacked seven times by
Kurds, robbed and the men killed, but it had been impossible to kill all
the men as the com pany was so large.
Atkinson described a heroic Turkish doctor who aided the transiting Arme-
nians and whom she hoped to meet one day “in the Kingdom of Heaven.” The
man, in charge of the Red Crescent hospital, “sent away all his sick soldiers
and kept a horse and wagon busy all the time going between his hospital and
the camp, bringing in the sick. He rented other buildings and filled them
all. . . . Many died, but he had done what he could.”110
Seeing these convoys, the Harput Armenians could imagine their own
fate. Davis detailed what happened to them on Monday, July 7. “Many men
were arrested both at Harput and Mezreh and put in prison,” he wrote. The
next day,
The Eastern Ri
ver
they were taken out and made to march towards an almost uninhabited
mountain. There were about eight hundred in all and they were tied to-
gether in groups of fourteen each. . . . On Wednesday morning they
were taken to a valley a few hours distant. . . . Then the gendarmes began
shooting them until they had killed nearly all of them. Some . . . were then
disposed of with knives and bayonets. A few succeeded in breaking the
rope with which they were tied . . . and running away, but most of these
were pursued and killed. A few succeeded in getting away, prob ably not
more than two or three.111
Those who survived continued on their way south. Jackson saw the few
who reached Aleppo. One of the survivors from Harput described the end of
the trek:
On the 60th day when we reached Viran Shehir [Viranşehir], only 300
had remained from the 18,000 exiles. On the 64th day they gathered all
the men and the sick women and children and burnt and killed them
all. The remaining were ordered to continue their way. In one day they
arrived at Rasoulain [Rās al-’Ayn], where for two days, for the first time,
the Government gave them bread.112
Arrival in Mamuret- ül- Aziz did not necessarily mean transit from there. The
vilayet was also a killing field. Most of the roads connecting the northern
vilayets of Trabzon, Erzurum, and Sivas with the Syrian Desert passed through
Mamuret- ül- Aziz. As the convoys— consisting mostly of women, children and
the elderly— pushed southward into the few arteries cutting across the moun-
tains, they gradually merged near Harput and turned into one endless
stream.113 Riggs later wrote, “The number of survivors passing through
Harpoot from the north was very great, but comparatively few were known to
have passed on beyond the vilayet.”114 Swedish missionary Alma Johansson
noted, “Mamouret- ul- Aziz has become the cemetery of all the Armenians; all
the Armenians from the vari ous vilayets were sent there, and those that had
not died on the way, came there simply to find their graves.”115 “The whole
country is one vast charnel house, or, more correctly speaking, slaughter-
house,” Davis wrote.116
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The source caption reads: “A common sight among the Armenian refugees in Syria.
An Armenian child dead in the fields within sight of help and safety at Aleppo.”
Davis made it his mission to trace and document the mass murder. He jour-
neyed on horse back and, once back in the United States, wrote up what he
had seen. Just south of Harput, on the way to Lake Gölcük, he had encoun-
tered infernal scenes, hundreds of women’s and children’s bodies scattered
across the plain, and thousands lying on rocks at the bottom of narrow val-
leys and canyons, especially around the lake.117 The descriptions fill fifty pages of his report:
Few localities could be better suited to the fiendish purposes of the Turks
in their plan to exterminate the Armenian population than this peaceful
lake in the interior of Asiatic Turkey, with its precipitous banks and
pocket- like valleys, surrounded by villages of savage Kurds and far re-
moved from the sight of civilized men. This, perhaps, was the reason
why so many exiles from distant vilayets were brought in safety as far
as Mamouret- ul- Aziz and then massacred in the “Slaughter house
Vilayet.” . . . That which took place around Lake Gooljik in the summer
of 1915 is almost inconceivable. Thousands and thousands of Arme-
nians, mostly innocent and helpless women and children, were butch-
ered on its shores and barbarously mutilated.118
The Eastern River
Since 1915, a series of dams, artificial lakes, and canals have been constructed
around the lake, now known as Lake Hazar. The land is so altered that what-
ever Davis found prob ably is no longer accessible.
Davis performed his investigation in spite of considerable official obstruc-
tion. From Constantinople on down, the order was sent to cover up the killing
in Mamuret- ül- Aziz and beyond. In September 1915 Sabit rebuked his
subordinates:
It has come to my attention that in contravention of my repeated mes-
sages, one may still find a great number of bodies along the roads.
Needless to talk here about the many inconveniencies that this state of
affairs pres ents, and the Interior Minister has once again demanded that
functionaries who are proved negligent in this matter be punished. I re-
peat [my demand] to send to all corners of the vilayet gendarmes in
sufficient numbers . . . charged with carefully burying the bodies that are
found.119
Sabit persisted. A few months later, after Talât angrily cabled the valis that
he “was informed that in certain areas one can see unburied bodies” and de-
manded the names of those “in whose territories such bodies will be found,”
Sabit acted immediately to carry out orders— and protect himself.120 He wrote
to subordinates: “Above I have transcribed a coded tele gram from the Interior
Minister. As soon as these types of corpses are discovered in your kaza, the
kaymakam, mudir, and commanders of gendarmerie will have to be immedi-
ately suspended and referred to a law- court.”121
Perhaps Sabit worried he would be held accountable for what the Allies
had defined in May 1915 as “crimes against humanity.”122 This is corrobo-
rated by his strenuous efforts to obtain personal exoneration. In summer 1915,
as the river of blood was flowing through his vilayet, he arranged a meeting
with the American, German, and Italian consuls and told them he was touched
by the suffering of the people. He promised to end it, if only the consuls would
send him formal letters asking to spare the lives of the remaining Armenians.
He said “he should like to have as many details in the letters as pos si ble, so
that it would appear that all those [Armenians] who were guilty of anything
had been sent away and all those who remained were innocent.” The consuls
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understood that this meant selling out the deportees as criminals and refused
to provide the requested letters.
Sabit tried again later, sending to Davis his chief of police, Reşid Bey, to
make the same entreaty on his behalf. Reşid asserted that three gendarmes had
been shot by Armenians in one of the vilayet’s villages. He insisted that the
deportees had been guilty of similar crimes, while Armenians who remained
were innocent. He then demanded a letter from Davis affirming the same nar-
rative. Reşid “argued and argued and argued that I make some kind of state-
ment,” Davis recounted. “I don’t know that I ever saw a more per sis tent man
in my life. . . . He said orders had already been issued for more severe mea-
sures than ever on the morrow, but he might delay their enforcement a little if
I would make a statement.” Davis declined.123
In 1917 Talât affirmed that no Armenians remained in Mamuret- ül- Aziz.124
Diyarbekir
Under Vali Çerkes Reşid, Diyarbekir vilayet became one of the bloodiest
Christian killing fields of 1914–1916. Reşid murdered Arm
enians, Greeks,
and Assyrians without discrimination. He also executed subordinates who op-
posed or evaded his directives. These included the kaymakams of several
provincial towns, Derik, Lice, and Beşiri, and possibly the mutesarrif of
another, Mardin.125 The vilayet’s health inspector, Dr. Ismail Bey, openly
opposed killings of Christians and especially the murder of babies and
children; he was dismissed and packed off to Constantinople.126 Unlike many
officials who protested innocence or justification, it appears Reşid knew
what he was doing and made no excuses. At the end of the war, he committed
suicide rather than submit to Ottoman and British intelligence agents hard
on his heels.127 By that point more than 100,000 Armenians and some 60,000
Assyrians from Diyarbekir vilayet were dead. These numbers do not include
thousands of unfortunate nonresidents who happened to be in the vilayet at
the wrong time.
What happened in Diyarbekir was especially jarring in light of the pro gress
the vilayet had made after the vio lence of 1894–1896. Not only had trade
picked up in the following de cades, but the quality of administration had also
improved. “The police seemed more efficient and fair,” the British acting vice
The Eastern River
consul wrote in May 1914. “The best branch of the administration appears
to be that of the police.” This was the result of serious reforms by a succes-
sion of honest and hard- working valis, including Ismail Hakki Bey, Celal
Bey, and Hamid Bey.128 Hamid, the last of the valis before the new outbreak of
vio lence, was known for imprisoning Kurdish chiefs who allowed brigandage
in their areas. An outlier in so many ways, Hamid was also pro- British and
was shocked by Turkey’s alliance with Germany. He even offered assistance
to the British consul when he was ordered to pack up and leave.129
Conditions in the vilayet rapidly deteriorated after the start of World
War I. On August 19, 1914, Diyarbekir city’s bazaar, whose proprietors were
mainly Armenians and Assyrians, burned to the ground. Thomas Mugerdit-
chian, the British pro- consul in Diyarbekir, claimed that the fire was an arson
proposed by the city’s CUP parliamentary deputy, Feyzi Bey Pirinççioğlu,