by Benny Morris
harvest is generally good” in the Muş and Bitlis sanjaks. The Sason area had
achieved a condition “bordering on prosperity.” Muş Plain, though, remained
in “a la men ta ble condition,” still bedev iled by “outrages” and 4,000 refugees
The Massacres of 1894–1896
who needed substantial relief.527 In Trabzon vilayet the state of public secu-
rity was more than “satisfactory.” “Incredible though it may be,” Longworth
wrote, “such safety to life and property as at the pres ent exists has not been
known for many a year. It is an agreeable surprise. . . . Acts of lawlessness and vio lence indeed have been remarkably few. . . . Brigandage in par tic u lar seems to have died out.”528
But there had been no pro gress in the implementation of the reforms agreed
to in 1895 or, for that matter, some twenty years earlier. In par tic u lar, unequal and oppressive taxation continued. Following the massacres tax farmers in
much of the countryside demanded— and sometimes got— sums determined
in the pre- massacre days. For example, Fontana reported in early 1897 that
the taxmen were demanding “the ordinary yearly tax” from the largely Arme-
nian village of Tadem, Mamuret- ül- Aziz vilayet, where 200- odd homes had
been plundered and razed. The villa gers had managed to pay 32,000 of the
required 40,000 piastres and were hoping to scrounge up the rest, but the tax
collector then demanded a further “30,000 piastres owing for last year.” The
inhabitants of Mismishan were also hit hard. Almost all the houses there had
been destroyed; the village was “a shapeless pile of ruins among which the
inhabitants burrow under brushwood roofing constructed over such walls as
have not wholly subsided.” Yet even after extracting 23,000 piastres, tax col-
lectors were demanding a further 20,700 in arrears. Fontana complained to
the vali, who eventually ordered arrears waived for Tadem and Mismishan.
Fontana called the effort to levy the arrears “monstrous.”529
Elsewhere, while there were occasional murders, robberies, rapes, and
threats of massacre, a general quiet was maintained— clearly the product of
orders from Constantinople. The exception appears to have been the series of
massacres at Tokat and surrounding areas of Sivas vilayet, on March 19, 1897.
The assault was carried out by locals and villa gers who arrived in town “the
day before.” The killings went on for hours, while the 500- strong military gar-
rison did nothing. The commander, Mustafa Bey, reportedly was “unable to
get the men to obey orders and disperse the crowd.”530 Some of the vio lence
was of “exceptional brutality,” Bulman reported. He pointed to the case of
two Armenians “whose legs were cut off.” The men were then “thrown into
the street.”531 Altogether about ninety Armenians were murdered in Tokat.532
Abdülhamid
II
Sixteen more were killed during the plunder of the nearby village of Bizeri
and an adjacent monastery, another nine in the village of Biskunjik, and another
seven in a third village whose name is unrecorded.533
According to Bulman, the perpetrators— many from surrounding villages,
and some of them Circassian tribesmen— were invited by letter to “to come and
pillage and massacre.” The letters, stating “that there was an order from the
Sultan for a massacre at Tokat,” were reportedly signed by two Tokat
Turkish notables, Hajji Sali and Ali Bey. In another version of the story, the
letters were signed by one Rezi Effendi. The signatories appear to have been
fronting for se nior officials, including the Tokat town commandant, Hasan
Fehmi Pasha, and the mutesarrif, Mahmud Nazim Pasha. On the day of the
outbreak, the mutesarrif was reported to have seated himself near the Pasha
Han, a prominent building, and given the order for the massacre to begin. Yet
another explanation emerged from the subsequent trial of the perpetrators:
that “a committee of about 20 men, notables and others,” secretly or ga nized
the massacre.534 Bulman, however, believed that “the government itself
ordered the massacre.”535
A handful of Muslims were put on trial, following the work of a commis-
sion of inquiry, which made its way swiftly to Tokat on orders from Constan-
tinople. Twelve perpetrators were sentenced to death and dozens to prison
terms. According to Bulman, the Tokat massacre had had one “good result”:
it persuaded those who could emigrate to do so, for they now realized they
could never be sure the massacres were over.536
Tokat did prove to be the last ember in the conflagration that engulfed Asia
Minor in 1894–1896. Throughout eastern Anatolia, Armenian survivors—
the tens of thousands of widows and orphans, the newly homeless and
impoverished— spent the next several years, if not the rest of their lives, trying to hold body and soul together.537 They were assisted by large injections of
Western relief and grudging, minimal aid from the Ottoman government.
II
The Young Turks
3
A More Turkish Empire
The sultan’s absolute rule came to an end in 1908. Under pressure from the
Committee of Union and Pro gress (CUP), also known as the Young Turks,
Abdülhamid II restored the Constitution of 1876, ushering in a new era of
multiparty parliamentary politics.
Over the ensuing de cade, the Young Turks’ vision of the Ottoman state
became ascendant. At least initially, it encompassed a complex set of ideas.
As the leaders of an avowedly multinational empire, the Young Turks made
some efforts to protect and advance the po liti cal rights of minorities. At the
same time, the Unionists were driven by their commitment to what they un-
derstood as the Turkish race. Consistent with the guiding notion of pan-
Turkism (Turanianism), the CUP sought the po liti cal union of all ethnic
groups speaking Turkic languages, from China’s Uyghurs to Eastern Eu rope’s
Tatars and Turks.1 Cemal Pasha, one of the three leaders of the CUP during
World War I, synthesized these opposites— imperial cosmopolitanism and
Turkish nationalism— eloquently. “Speaking for myself,” he wrote in his
memoirs, “I am primarily an Ottoman, but I do not forget that I am a Turk,
and nothing can shake my belief that the Turkish race is the foundation stone
of the Ottoman Empire.”2
This attitude was clear, for example, in the Unionists approach to the vast
Muslim, Arabic- speaking areas of the empire. The CUP had no intention of
jettisoning these regions. Instead, they hoped to “Turkify” them. “Increasingly
after 1909,” Eugene Rogan writes, Turkish “displaced Arabic in schools,
courtrooms and government offices in the provinces of Greater Syria and Iraq.
Se nior government appointments went to Turkish officials, while experienced
The Young Turk s
Arab civil servants were left to fill lower- level jobs.”3 Although widely con-
sidered secularists, the CUP embraced Hamidian pan- Islamic ideas, which
may have helped to keep Arab regions comfortable in the imperial fold.
Ultimately the CUP’s goal was to foster a strong Ottoman state, which, in
the view of the party’s leader
s, demanded a population wholly loyal to it. In
1910 the CUP congress at Salonica resolved to Ottomanize “all Turkish sub-
jects,” even if this “could never be achieved by persuasion, and recourse must
be had to force of arms.” 4 Such stridency further alienated minorities in the
Balkans and North Africa, whose own efforts to escape imperial control
strengthened the Young Turks’ attachment to their historic heartland, Ana-
tolia. This was especially the case as the disaster of the First Balkan War sunk
in. In 1912 the Ottomans were defeated by a coalition of Bulgaria, Serbia,
Greece, and Montenegro. Describing the po liti cal impact within the empire,
Erik- Jan Zürcher writes, “ After the loss of the Balkans in 1912, Mehmet Ziya
Gökalp,” the leading Young Turk ideologue, “propagated the idea that the
peasants of Anatolia represent ‘true’ Turkish culture and values as opposed to
the ‘Byzantine’ and ‘Arab’ high culture of the Ottomans.”5
The debacle of the First Balkan War provided the Young Turks an oppor-
tunity to wrest full control of the state. On January 23, 1913, after almost five years of sharing power with the weakening sultanate, a group of CUP activists led by Mehmed Talât and Ismail Enver carried out a coup against the
government of Kâmil Pasha, whom they blamed for the Balkan disaster.
Nominally Sultan Mehmed V was head of state, but, while he was not an ir-
relevant figure, the Young Turks were firmly in command. From there they
increasingly ignored the opposition— indeed, abandoned the very idea of
multiparty government they had once fought for. They also shed any com-
mitment to a supranational state.
This reversion to the exclusivist politics of Abdülhamid, we believe, was
most clearly manifest in the subsequent deportation and murder of the em-
pire’s Armenians. In the midst of World War I, the CUP initiated what has
become known as the Armenian Genocide: the forced march of Anatolian
Armenians south, to Syria and Mesopotamia, and the slaughter that accom-
panied it. The CUP government’s methods differed from Abdülhamid’s, but
the aim was much the same: to de- Christianize the empire. Whereas Abdül-
hamid used winks, nods, and informal allies among eastern Anatolia’s Muslim
A More Turkish Empire
tribes to carry out his campaign of massacre, the CUP adopted a more sys-
tematic approach, issuing direct orders, overseeing the pro cess, and tallying
up the results with bureaucratic precision.
The government would turn to a shadowy construct, the Special Organ-
ization (Teşkilat- ı Mahsusa), to aid in its policy of Armenian removal. Born during another Ottoman defeat—at Italy’s hands, in 1911–1912— the Special
Organ ization was refashioned during the Great War to wreak havoc in the
Rus sian Caucasus. But as the policy of genocide moved to the fore after
May 1915, the Special Organ ization’s focus changed, and its original cadres
of Circassians, Kurds, and former soldiers were reinforced by more than
10,000 criminals— including murderers and rapists— freshly released from
prisons. They were deployed mainly in the eastern vilayets, home to the
densest populations of Armenians: “Enver relied on his Special Organ-
ization . . . to carry out the dirty jobs of assassination or terror against ga-
vurs.” 6 That is, against infidels. Even when the Special Organ ization itself was not directly involved in massacres, its members handled their logistics, led
gangs of brigands (çetes), and arranged death marches.
That the Ottomans forcibly and methodically deported Armenians be-
tween 1914 and 1916 is beyond dispute. Nor can there be any doubt that
hundreds of thousands died in the pro cess. What remains controversial are
questions of justification and intent. Why did the Ottoman government re-
move the Armenians? Did the state intend from the first to kill them off, or
were the killings a side- effect of barbarous war time conditions? Was depor-
tation the nasty, if understandable, business of war—an effort to neutralize
dangerous revolutionaries and Russian- sympathizing Armenians by removing
them from conflict zones? Or was the mass deportation a novel means
toward fulfilling a longstanding goal of ethnic cleansing?
In Chapter 6 we will argue that, in spite of Turkish efforts to cover their
tracks, there exists abundant evidence to support the charge of genocide. It
is our contention that resettlement was never the intended outcome of depor-
tation; the ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Armenians was the goal throughout
the planning and execution of the pro cess. Between 1915 and 1918, the
CUP- dominated government deliberately marched Armenians to their deaths,
or hastened the pro cess using bayonets and bullets, advancing the same agenda
Abdülhamid had begun before them.
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GREECE
The Main Sites of Massacr
A More Turkish Empire
For now, we turn to the origins of the crisis. The genocide plan, also
discussed in Chapter 6, was hatched between December 1914— just after the
empire signed on with the Central Powers fighting in Europe—
and
May 1915, when the first deportation orders were sent from Constantinople
to the provinces. During that half- year period, several events deepened
the CUP’s conviction that the Armenian prob lem required an immediate,
radical solution.
Planning was already underway in February 1915, when the Ottoman army
was decimated by the Rus sians at the Battle of Sarıkamış. But the embarrassing
defeat was blamed on disloyal Armenians and became a pretext for killing them
