by Benny Morris
days, and then killed or sent on their way. Lieutenant Ahmed Moukhtar Baas
testified that “government officials at Trebizond picked up some of the pret-
tiest Armenian women of the best families. After committing the worst out-
rages on them, they had them killed.”28 Shefik Bey, kaymakam of Bulanik in
Bitlis vilayet, told his interrogators that Hodja Ilias, a deputy for the Maraş
region, “was addicted to the raping of Christian girls; it was so well known
that it became a scandal among the Muslims, more especially as he wore a
turban”— a sign of religious office.29
Witnesses have testified of women taken to the makeshift harems of local
functionaries, where they would be raped by their abductors and possibly
their abductors’ guests.30 A patriarchate report alleged that a customs director,
Hadji Bekir Mehmed Ali Bey, “retained at Trebizond young Armenian
girls and . . . kept a number of these girls at the Red Crescent hospital while
he distributed the rest among the impor tant persons of the Ittihat [CUP] at
Trebizond.”
Armenian women were also sold for sex. According to the same patriarchate
report, authorities in Mosul set up brothels (lupanara) stocked with good-
looking deportee girls for the military’s use. “The opening of the lupanara was
announced in official communication from the military government of the
The Young Turk s
town.”31 Swedish missionary Alma Johansson reported that in Mezre, “a
public house was erected for the Turks— and all the beautiful Armenian girls
were put in it.”32 In Constantinople, “hundreds of young Armenian girls” were
driven by destitution into prostitution.33
Some of these prostituted women may have been brokered on slave mar-
kets. Although slavery was abolished in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning
of the twentieth century, markets sprung up in Aleppo, Damascus, and
elsewhere. The cost of a slave girl was extremely low. A British intelligence
report from December 1915 states that, in Damascus, “the price of an Arme-
nian girl from 12 to 14 years of age was from 2 mejidiehs to 1 Turkish Lira.”34
(In 1914 one Turkish lira—five mecidiyes— was worth about 0.9 British
pounds sterling, or slightly more than four U.S. dollars.35) Dashnaks in Bu-
charest reported the average price of an Armenian women was sixty piasters,
or 0.6 Turkish Lira.36 Fellow activists reported that “all Armenian women
and girls from 7 to 40 years of age” at Vazir Keupru in Merzifon sanjak, “have
been sold at auction.”37 As a rule, only Muslims were allowed to participate
in the auctions.38
This trade occurred with the complicity of state security personnel. A
British agent stationed at a hotel near the barracks in Damascus reported
seeing Ottoman soldiers pushing in front of them hundreds of naked Arme-
nian girls and women. “ These were put up for auction and the whole lot dis-
posed of, some for 2, 3, and 4 francs,” the agent wrote.39 From the American
Hospital in Konya, Dodd wrote, “I myself noticed that in several places large
groups of young women and girls were being kept separate from the rest and
guarded by the police, and was told that in several instances the police had
allowed them to be outraged.” 40 In another letter, Dodd reported that Protes-
tant and Catholic women and girls were distributed among Turkish villages,
“the Turks . . . choosing what they wanted.” 41
Collectively, practices of abduction, prostitution, family separation, adop-
tion, and marriage between Armenian women and Muslim men resulted in
masses of converts and dependents for whom the state was not prepared. This
is telling: it appears that when CUP leaders drew up their plans, they did not
have survivors in mind. While the procedures surrounding deportation
and massacre were routinized from the start, those concerning conversion,
adoption, and the fostering of orphans evolved haphazardly throughout
A Policy of Genocide
1914–1916. The central government was placed in a reactive position, is-
suing contradictory directives as it sought to keep up with facts on the
ground.
Thus, at times during the deportations, the government encouraged Muslim
men to take Armenian wives. The Directorate for Tribes and Refugees Set-
tlement repeatedly instructed officials in the provinces that “the marriage of
young [Armenian] girls and widows to Muslim men” was “suitable.” In De-
cember 1915 the directorate urged that it was not just suitable but in fact “nec-
essary for young [Armenian] girls to be married with Muslims.” A few
months later, in April 1916 all the provinces were notified that “young [Ar-
menian] women and widows [should be] married.” 42
Yet top officials also showed great skepticism toward such marriages and
conversions. On June 22, 1915, after it had become clear to Constantinople
that converts were multiplying, Talât ordered that those already converted be
“dispersed in Muslim villages around the province.” At this stage, he toler-
ated the act of conversion but did not trust the sincerity of the converts; they
could not be treated like any other Muslim, but instead were objects of
suspicion.43
About a week later, he hardened his instructions to provincial authorities:
Some of the Deported Armenians have petitioned to convert to Islam,
either collectively or individually, in the hope of remaining in their orig-
inal places. . . . It is to be expected that such acts do not arise from true
conviction but from a will to save themselves from danger, and therefore
should not be trusted. From now on, you should not accept the conver-
sion of those who are doing so for their own interests . . . and you should
keep sending them to the designated places.44
Even then, officials were left some discretion, but orders soon changed
again. Talât apparently concluded that there was no such thing as genuine
Armenian conversion, so converts would receive no protection. “Since the
conversion of Armenians is merely an excuse to serve their interest, do not
tarry in deporting them,” he instructed the mutessarif of Kayseri in mid-
August.45 In September Talât reiterated the point, writing one vali, “We hear
that some of the people and officials are marrying Armenian women. We
The Young Turk s
strictly prohibit this, and urgently recommend that these women be . . . sent
away.” 46
Yet this was not the final word, for in the midst of issuing a blanket ban,
Talât made an exception for young women, whose offspring almost certainly
would be raised as Muslims. A few days after the admonition to the mutes-
sarif of Kayseri, he wrote an official in Niğde, “Armenian girls who have been
converted must not be abused, and it would be appropriate to marry them
off to Muslims.” 47
The authorities also vacillated on the care for and integration of orphans.
Days before deportation began in Mamuret- ül- Aziz vilayet, the Interior Min-
istry asked about Harput buildings suitable as orphanages for Armenians
younger than fifteen.48 But the government was sufficiently reluctant to hou
se
orphans that thousands were left to Christian- run ser vices established on local initiative to pick up the slack. Such was the case in Trabzon, where Christians
tried to mobilize the authorities’ support for an asylum run by the Greek
Orthodox community. The asylum functioned for a short while under the
auspices of the vali, until the local CUP secretary caught on. Something sim-
ilar happened in Aleppo, where Sister Rohner took over a shelter for more
than a thousand children and ran it for several months as an in de pen dent
semi- missionary institution.49
At times Talât endorsed placing orphans in government- operated facilities,
but at other times he said children should be sent to Muslim villages.50 In Sep-
tember 1916 he instructed the mutesarrif of Kayseri to remove girls from an
orphanage and “ settle them in appropriate places.”51 Then, in November, Talât
instructed the mutesarrif of Canik to care for the needs of orphans in his area,
whether or not they had converted.52 At about this time, the government set
up its own orphanages in Lebanon, Konya, Balıkesir, Izmit, and Adapazarı.
The government insisted that all orphans be transferred to its own institutions,
which would promote Islamic learning and the Unionist party line.53
By the end of the deportation and annihilation pro cess, Talât had fi-
nally made up his mind about the genocide’s unexpected remainders. In
December 1917 he cabled Sivas vilayet, warning against “ those who have
converted in areas close to the front” who might act as spies. He asked Sivas
officials to respond with confirmation of the converts’ deportation. He even
advised the officials against showing mercy to orphans. “ There is no need for
A Policy of Genocide
an orphanage,” he wrote. “It is not the time to give way to sentiment and feed the orphans, prolonging their lives. Send them away and inform me.”54
During the war, the inconsistent conversion rules left thousands in limbo.
Some women taken by Muslims were registered as converts, but not all.
Adopters of Armenian children may have received official guarantees or let-
ters of permission to keep them, or they may have received no authorization of
any kind. After the war, the government that replaced the CUP issued large
batches of identity cards making marriages and adoptions official and regis-
tering women and children as muhtedi— converts.55 (The formation of that government, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is discussed in the next chapter.)
Constantinople’s evolving positions on conversion and integration were
outgrowths of its initial silence on the matter. CUP leadership had no assimi-
lation policy because it had no interest in assimilation; its goal and expecta-
tion lay in deportation and annihilation.56 The CUP was trying to restore the
lost grandeur of an empire led by and encompassing all Turkic peoples. Doing
so required the defeat of enemies, traitors, and those who might upset the pan-
Turanian ambit of the empire by challenging its Turkish leaders. Though
CUP leaders were no doubt Muslims, and though faith often factored in their
decisions, their goals did not require demographically enhancing the sphere
of Islam.57
To do so was not unacceptable: unlike the Nazis, the Turks did not believe
in an insurmountable racial difference; a Jew could not become Aryan, but an
Armenian could become Muslim. That made conversion a vehicle for the era-
sure of Armenians, and, indeed, millions of today’s Turkish Muslims have at
least one ancestor who began life Armenian.58 But to the degree that conver-
sion complicated their goals of preserving and uplifting the state, CUP leaders
were wary of it.59 They would have felt justified in their skepticism, given
memories of the recent past. In 1894–1896 some Armenians opted for con-
version to escape death, but when the clouds lifted the majority returned to
Chris tian ity. Assisted by Eu ro pean diplomats and missionaries, Armenian
leaders located stray sheep— children in orphanages, abducted women, even
communities that had converted en bloc— and convinced them to return to
the fold.60 There is no reason to believe that these reverse converts were
actually a threat to the empire, but, filtered through the CUP’s paranoia, re-
lapse would have looked much like treason.
The Young Turk s
Ultimately, the confusion surrounding conversion reflected the priorities
of the par tic u lar ethnic- cleansing program the CUP designed. The first
priorities clearly were the elimination of Armenian notables throughout the
empire and men in the eastern provinces. Women and children were less
concerning and therefore more of an afterthought. Their fates would be dealt
with as exigencies arose.
What was not left to ad- hoc determination was the genocide itself. It was
protean, its terms changing as the months went on and official focus shifted
to whichever Armenian groups had not yet been destroyed. But the prepon-
derance of the evidence indicates that nationwide destruction was the goal all
along.
III
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
7
Historical Background, 1918–1924
Between the armistice ending World War I and 1924, hundreds of thousands
of Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians were murdered in new waves of mas-
sacre and deportation. Countless others were exiled, some of them re-
deportees. And, in 1923–1925 tens of thousands of Greeks were officially
exchanged for Muslims from the Balkans. At the end of this pro cess Anatolia
was almost completely cleansed of its Christian populations. This chapter de-
scribes the historical context in which this last, five- year bout of ethnic
cleansing and genocide took place.
On October 30, 1918, Ottoman Navy Minister Rauf Bey and Admiral Som-
erset Arthur Gough- Calthorpe, commander of the British Eastern Mediter-
ranean Fleet, met aboard HMS Agamemnon in Mudros (Mondros) harbor, on
the Greek island of Lemnos, to sign an armistice ending the Great War in the
Middle East the following day. The terms of the armistice amounted to a
Turkish surrender, though Turkish officials at the time claimed that the agree-
ment was not “concluded between victor and vanquished; rather it is more a
situation in which two equal powers . . . cease hostilities.”1 Two weeks before,
on October 14, the war time CUP and Special Organ ization leaders— including
Enver, Talât, Cemal, Şakır, and Nȃzım— had fled Turkey in a German vessel,
fearing punishment for war crimes.2 In the following months, the Ottoman
parliament annulled the deportation decree, of May 27, 1915, and the
confiscation law of September 27, 1915, which had sanctioned the appro-
priation of Armenian property. ( These decrees would be reinstated, as law, on
September 14, 1922.3)
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
The Mudros agreement provided, among other things, for Allied occupa-
tion of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus forts (the “Straits”), “the withdrawal
of [Turkish] troops from Cilicia with the exception of those necessary to
maintain order,” Allied occupation of the Taurus tunnel system and the in-<
br />
stallation of “control officers” along Turkish railway routes, and the demobi-
lization of the Turkish army except for troops needed for “surveillance of
the frontiers” and “maintaining internal order.” The numbers and disposi-
tions of these troops were to be determined later by the Allies “ after con-
sultation with the Turkish Government.” All Allied prisoners of war and
“interned” Armenians were to be handed over unconditionally, and it was
stipulated that the Allies had the “right to occupy any strategical points in
the event of any situation arising which threatens” Allied security. Clause 24
stated that “in case of disorder in the six Armenian vilayets, the Allies reserve
the right to occupy any part of these.” 4
As it turned out, Allied troops only minimally occupied Turkish soil, the
Ottoman Army was only partially demobilized, and the great bulk of the
Turkish people never knew that they had been defeated or else never ac-
cepted defeat.5 This posture of denial was to underlie Turkish attitudes and
policies toward both the Christian minorities and the Great Powers in the
years to come. As one British officer put it, “The Turk in Anatolia still feels
himself to be a member of the ruling nation. Defeat has not been brought
home to him. [He has never heard the truth about] the disasters in Palestine
and Mesopotamia. . . . He has seen no Allied troops and his towns and vil-
lages have not suffered.” 6
During November– December 1918, British, French, and Italian troops oc-
cupied Constantinople and strongpoints along the Dardanelles, including
parts of Thrace. The British also occupied a string of towns in northern
Aleppo vilayet and Cilicia, and installed control officers, with small military
detachments, in towns along the Black Sea coast and at principal rail junc-
tions. In February 1919 a small group of French officers, led by Col o nel
Edouard Brémond, deployed in Adana. They were to be the area’s future
“military governors,” under overarching British control.7 Greek troops oc-
cupied points along the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara and, from
March 1919 until July 1921, Italian contingents lightly occupied the south-