The Thirty-Year Genocide

by Benny Morris

  tion to this effect and sent it to the Interior Ministry.49

  By July the government had lost patience with Mazhar’s delays. Talât sent

  to Ankara a new police chief and deputy governor, Atif Bey, a young and

  zealous CUP apparatchik. His job was to carry out the deportation, no matter

  Mazhar’s wishes. Mazhar later recounted, “One day Atif Bey came to me and

  orally conveyed the interior minister’s orders that the Armenians were to be

  murdered during the deportation. ‘No, Atif Bey,’ I said, ‘I am a governor, not

  a bandit, I cannot do this, I will leave this post and you can come and do it.’ ”50

  Mazhar resigned on July 25, and Atif was named acting vali . To remain in step with the eastern provinces, Atif and his men had to move fast. In a matter of

  days they carried out the preliminaries: they searched for arms, arrested Ar-

  menian leaders, and formed a local branch of the Special Organ ization com-

  prising gangs of volunteers and ex- prisoners.

  On August 11 Ankara’s entire Armenian population was rounded up and

  concentrated in a number of buildings. The first removed were the notables,

  herded in step to the rhythm of marching bands and murdered in a forest a

  few hours outside town. Next were convoys of able- bodied men; they were

  also murdered. Among them were many of the politicians and party figures

  expelled from Constantinople in April.51 Lieutenant Palmer would later re-

  port that the massacre “was committed at Hassan Oglu Ashi Yozgat, a village

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  4 hours east” of Ankara. He alleged that “55 troops of a Turkish battalion

  helped in the massacre.”52

  As in other vilayets, Armenian Catholics and Protestants were initially

  spared on orders from the central government. But this exemption, requested

  by foreign ambassadors, was rapidly discarded in secret.53 Most of Ankara’s

  Catholics and Protestants were eventually deported, and many were killed

  along the route. According to Richard Lichtheim, Die Welt’s correspondent

  in Constantinople, among Catholic and Protestant males, “only boys under

  five were permitted to live and all of them were circumcised. Women and girls

  were made Moslems and distributed.”54

  A Catholic priest from Ankara later told British officials:

  After our departure, all our churches, convents, schools, houses and

  shops were first pillaged and afterwards, burnt down; so that, of a Chris-

  tian community dating back to the time of St. Paul, there remains not a

  trace save heaps of cinders. . . . Of 18 Priests who left with me only seven

  are left, all the others died on the road either of hardship or by violent

  death.55

  On September 17, with a final batch of 550 Armenians awaiting departure

  in Ankara’s train station, Atif reported his mission accomplished.56 “Angora

  now is a dead town,” Stepan Semoukhine— a steward of the Rus sian Embassy,

  who had been exiled to Ankara with 129 other Rus sian Armenians— observed

  in November. “All goods belonging to Armenians are sold at auction. At six

  o’clock in the eve ning every thing is dreary and mournful and even the Turkish

  families are grasped by fear.”57 According to Talât’s bookkeeping, before the

  war there were 44,661 Armenians in the vilayet. After, there were 12,766, with 4,560 of Ankara’s Armenians living in other vilayets.58

  Konya

  Konya was chosen as an initial destination of deportees because of its small

  Armenian population: it could absorb more without compromising its Muslim

  majority.59 The number of Armenians there grew quickly, though. According

  to Dodd, “ there were, at one time, 45,000 lying out in the fields with no pro-

  The Western River, and Downstream

  vision for their food or shelter.” Conditions were grotesque. “I saw men and

  women lying in ditches half- filled with mud and water gasping out their last

  breath, some conscious and some unconscious,” Dodd reported. “The scant-

  iness of the water supply added to their sufferings.” 60 He tried to feed them

  but was overwhelmed by the size of the prob lem.61

  The relatively few Armenians native to Konya were deported and killed

  alongside Armenians sent there from elsewhere. Plans were handled by local

  CUP agents, whom missionaries referred to as “the Salonika clique.” 62 Their

  greatest obstacle was the clogged railway lines. As Dodd put it, “Emptying

  out the population is so out of proportion to the executive ability to keep the

  channels of travel open, that the result is this great damming.” 63 Konya’s Ereğli station, where lines converged, was a major bottleneck. Deportees had to leave

  the trains, wait for convoys to form, and then trudge down to Adana and

  Aleppo.64 Some managed to escape the forced marches and returned to Konya,

  but they were usually rounded up, placed in new convoys, and re- deported.65

  Vari ous ostensibly exempt groups were deported to and from Konya. These

  included not only Catholics and Protestants but also soldiers’ families. Even

  when soldiers and officers were left in the service— usually because their skills were indispensable— the authorities made their wives’ efforts to obtain exemption so difficult that one can hardly imagine the policy was more than a fig

  leaf. When soldiers’ wives asked for exemption, they were required to pay for

  and prepare a special petition, which then had to be stamped by three dif-

  fer ent agencies, including, absurdly, the Hejaz railway. If the petition was ac-

  cepted, the wife had to pay another fee to tele gram her husband’s unit and

  verify the request. Navigating this bureaucratic thicket was not only expen-

  sive but also time- consuming. In many cases, verification did not arrive

  when needed, and ostensibly exempt families were deported along with

  every one else.66

  In Konya the perpetrators moved quickly in order to avoid obstruction by

  an incoming vali— Celal Bey, the deportation opponent previously stationed

  in Aleppo. Transferring Celal to Konya allowed the government to kill two

  birds with one stone. The previous vali, Samih, had also been recalcitrant.

  Though in May 1915 he banished Konya’s leading Armenians to the remote

  town of Sultaniye, he allowed them to take money and receive remittances.67

  Just as the insubordinate Samih had to be removed from Konya, Celal had to

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  be removed from Syria, where deportation survivors would congregate and

  eventually be annihilated. In Konya, Celal could apply his skills in a location

  of negligible Armenian population— negligible because the government hoped

  to carry out the cleansing of Konya during the gap between Samih’s and

  Celal’s tenures.68 Indeed, no deportations were scheduled for the period

  after Celal’s arrival; the Salonika clique was confident it could finish the job

  before he took his post.69

  But when Celal fi nally came in late August, there were still tens of thou-

  sands of Armenians stranded in Konya. He refused to continue their depor-

  tation. The Special Organ ization’s Nȃzım Bey sent CUP Deputy Ali Rıza

  Efendi to persuade Celal that Armenian removal was crucial for the state’s sur-

  vival and should not be resisted. In any case, Ali Riza claimed, the central

&nb
sp; government had made its decision.70 Unconvinced, Celal traveled to Con-

  stantinople to argue his case, but, Post later testified, “with diabolical cleverness the officials in Konia plotted in his absence and one day the larger part of

  that great crowd of 50,000 was driven off on foot with whip and cudgel.”71

  Still, Celal’s efforts were not entirely wasted. He prob ably saved some lives,

  as reflected in the relatively small percentage of Konya Armenians who were

  killed. In mid- October, Konya’s CUP responsible secretary, Ferid, reported

  that some 9,600 of its Armenians had been deported, yet Post noted that many

  thousands still roamed the streets and surrounding fields.72 Talât was surely

  disappointed to discover that, according to his calculations, 56 percent of

  Konya Armenians were accounted for in 1917. That still meant that about

  5,700 had dis appeared.73

  Kayseri

  In February 1915, after a bomb exploded at the home of an Armenian activist

  in Kayseri, police conducted searches across the province. Scores of home-

  made bombs were found. As elsewhere, some were of recent manufacture or

  were freshly filled with explosives, but most were relics. The usual script then

  played out to its awful conclusion.

  First the government ordered Armenians to surrender their arms. But, re-

  calling 1895–1896, when disarmament preceded slaughter, the Armenians

  hesitated. In response, there were further searches and more weapons found,

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  most of them old guns.74 In late April Ottoman officials claimed to have found

  more bombs and some Martini rifles in an Armenian church.75 Armenian no-

  tables and activists were then rounded up. Under torture, a few admitted to

  collaborating with the Rus sians or to heading sabotage cells, but most of the

  detainees had nothing to do with revolutionary operations.76 The police then

  ordered the prisoners, and a few notables still walking free, to prepare for de-

  portation to Diyarbekir. None finished the journey. Within three days of de-

  parture, the wagons returned empty, and word spread that they had been

  murdered.77 In August dozens of other notables— including a former parlia-

  mentary deputy, Hampartsoun Boyadjian— were tried for treason and hanged.78

  A few days later, fresh orders arrived instructing Kayseri officials to deport

  the province’s entire Armenian community.79 They were given three days’

  notice, then dispatched. Along the route they were joined by deportees from

  neighboring Talas and subjected routinely to robbery, abduction, and other

  abuses. In many cases, the men were first weeded out and murdered. Clara

  Richmond, a missionary in Talas, recounted that men and boys from a nearby

  village were locked in a church, bound in groups of five, taken out, and shot.80

  Some villa gers, who had heard of the massacres, resisted the gendarmes. “Most

  were slaughtered . . . by their Moslem neighbors,” an unnamed missionary

  wrote.81 In one Kayseri village, Boğazlıyan, the kaymakam ordered 3,160

  Armenians massacred. Most of the men were lined up and killed, while

  women and children were taken to Muslim houses.82

  On September 5 Vali Zekai reported to the Interior Ministry that “a total

  of 49,947 Armenians, including Catholics and Protestants, were deported to

  Aleppo, Sham [Damascus] and Mosul” from Kayseri. The vali and his men

  were exceedingly diligent: “Seven hundred and sixty . . . who were deported

  earlier but managed to escape and return and lived in hiding were also cap-

  tured and sent back to exile,” he told his superiors. The deportees included

  members of supposedly protected classes: some were “families of soldiers and

  others . . . Catholics and Protestants. These were dispersed in the villages at a ratio of 5% of the population.” 83 In November Armenian teachers in the

  American mission schools— a group that generally managed to pull strings and

  stay behind for a while— were deported.84

  Some Kayseri Armenians were initially saved by conversion.85 “We were

  told that it was in accordance with the princi ple that in the new Turkey, no

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  Christian must be found,” a local missionary explained.86 But the Security

  Directorate later deci ded that the option of lifesaving conversion had been

  granted too liberally. The Directorate warned Zekai that Armenians tended

  to convert only to save themselves and instructed him not to hesitate to de-

  port converts.87 The situation was diff er ent for younger converts, who could

  be forcibly integrated in Muslim communities. Many children in Kayseri were

  taken to government orphanages and circumcised.88

  In March 1916 the surviving leaders of Constantinople’s exiled Armenian

  community were sent to the Syrian Desert via Kayseri. One of them, a priest

  named Grigoris Balakian, wrote in his memoir of entering Talas:

  When our caravan was passing through the streets . . . , we saw in the

  win dows of the two- story stone houses women clutching handker-

  chiefs, apparently crying. Subsequently we heard that these were

  Islamized Armenian families who had been moved at the sight of

  new caravans of exiled compatriots. No doubt they thought that we

  too were being taken to Der Zor, that Armenian graveyard without

  tombstones.89

  According to Ottoman reports and Talât’s calculations, there were 47,974

  Armenians in Kayseri at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1917 6,650

  lived in the vilayet and 6,979 were living in other parts of the empire. Alto-

  gether 71 percent of Kayseri’s Armenians had dis appeared.90

  Adana

  As mentioned in Chapter 3, in April 1909, during the brief spell of anarchy

  following the pro-Hamidian coup d’état, Adana vilayet was the scene of a

  large- scale massacre of Christians.91 By most accounts, more than 20,000

  Armenians and Assyrians were murdered by Muslim mobs in Adana city and

  throughout the province, leaving behind traumatized, impoverished commu-

  nities.92 Although CUP representatives took part in the incitement and

  vio lence, the party denied involvement and saddled reactionary Hamidian

  ele ments with responsibility. Investigations and trials followed; 7 Armenians

  and 124 Muslims were convicted and hanged.93

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  By 1915, though, the CUP was little interested even in the appearance of

  clean hands. Party leaders prob ably did worry that finishing the job in Adana

  would constitute proof of its responsibility for the 1909 massacre, but if the

  Armenian prob lem was ever to be solved, the region could not be ignored.

  There were more than 200,000 Armenians in the vilayet, prob ably the largest

  concentration in Anatolia. Towns such as Dörtyol were almost entirely Ar-

  menian, and Armenians were prominent throughout the area’s economy and

  civic life. The CUP was also keenly aware that, as the capital of the Medieval

  Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, Adana was seen by many Armenians as the core

  of a future state. If the vilayet achieved in de pen dence alongside the six in the east, Anatolia would be cut off from the Rus sian border and a wedge driven

  between the Turkic brothers on either side.94 What is more, Adana ha
d a

  particularly large concentration of Protestants and Catholics as well as a

  dense network of German, American, and British missionary activity. These

  strong links to the Great Powers made Adana’s Armenians appear especially

  threatening. The CUP would therefore have to be doubly careful: cautious

  not to provoke its Christian allies and neutral powers, yet also exhaustive in

  eliminating the danger.

  Another aggravating factor was Adana’s strategic location. Straddling the

  country’s main route southeastward, Adana served as the gateway for mili-

  tary forces and supplies to Syria and Iraq. The British and French knew it,

  too. In 1914–1915 their military planners discussed landings near Adana, to

  sever the Arab provinces from Anatolia, and on December 18, 1914, a landing

  party from HMS Doris destroyed telegraph lines in Adana and sabotaged a

  nearby railway, causing a train crash. Doris then shelled the coast and destroyed railway bridges at Dörtyol and Payas. The gunboat also hosted sev-

  eral Armenian visitors on board.95 Thereafter, in preparation for a pos si ble

  large-scale landing, British intelligence sent expatriate Armenian agents into

  the area to promote dissent. But their attempts to recruit locals were largely

  unsuccessful. These overtures may have prompted hopes of deliverance, but

  actual cooperation was rare.96

  Still, the possibility of Allied- Armenian collusion weighed on the minds

  of Turkish officials, prompting home searches. In April 1915 a few pistols and

  hunting rifles were found in Adana city, precipitating the arrest and torture of notables.97 Later that month Cemal Pasha, the 4th Army commander, ordered

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  the deportation of some Armenians from Adana city and Hacin and all the

  Armenians of Dörtyol and the port city of Mersin.98 Cemal’s reasoning was

  prob ably based on military concerns, but his orders were incompatible with

  the plan taking shape in Constantinople: the deported Armenians were to be

  sent to unspecified locations in the Anatolian interior, not to the desert. The

  timeline prob ably also differed from that taking shape in the CUP’s discus-

  sions. Talȃt rescinded the order.99

  Unaware of the bigger picture, the American consul in Mersin ascribed the