by Benny Morris
vacillation to tension between local CUP leaders and Adana’s vali, Hakki Bey.
Hakki’s attitude upset CUP stalwarts, who reported him to Constantinople.100
Yet it seems that, at this stage, the source of indecision was the government
itself. Even when the general deportation order arrived in May 1915, Adana
city and a few surrounding towns were exempted.101
The rest of the vilayet, however, was not. Thousands were directed to
railway stations, but the trains going south were already filled to capacity with soldiers and supplies bound for the front. As in Konya, Armenians camped
outside the stations for weeks.102 Then, on August 4, Talât ordered the depor-
tation of Adana city’s Armenians, as well as those of Mersin and Sis. As usual,
the government took mea sures to prevent the Armenians from profitably
selling their property and to assure that it fell into Muslim hands.103 Thou-
sands more joined the camps around the stations.104 Catholics and Protestants
were uprooted with the rest. Eugen Büge, the local German consul, thought
that the order to spare Catholics and Protestants was a deliberate deception,
with secret orders to do other wise delivered to the vali by a special envoy, CUP
Secretary Ali Munif Bey.105
By late August, as its own Armenians were leaving, Adana was flooded by
thousands of deportees from central Anatolia. They filled the encampments,
many dying of disease and malnutrition. Some were executed. Taking stock
of the crowd passing through the city and the many dying there and en route,
Büge surmised that “the number of Armenians ordered to be murdered prob-
ably already exceeds the amount of victims in the Young Turkish massacre of
1909.”106 William Nesbitt Chambers, an Adana- based Canadian missionary,
felt similarly. “We thought that the massacres [in 1909] were the acme of ruth-
less cruelty,” he wrote. “But they were humane as compared to this.”107
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The deportations were briefly halted in October. There is reason to believe
that Cemal was responsible— that he tried to prevent ethnic cleansing in
Adana, an area under his jurisdiction, though he did not directly challenge
the policy elsewhere.108 Kevorkian suggests that “his opposition” was “rooted
in a certain military rationale that consisted in profiting from the Armenian
deportees’ labor power before liquidating them.” Yet Cemal worked,
sometimes with foreign consuls, to assist the refugees created by the depor-
tation pro cess; quite a few were spared.109
Cemal’s exact motivations are hard to pin down. Aaron Aaronsohn, a
Palestinian- Jewish agronomist and British spy, who had worked closely with
Cemal in the eradication of Palestine’s 1915 locust plague, provides insight
into the general’s thinking. On the one hand, Aaronsohn told his British han-
dlers that at one point Cemal went to Constantinople and “insisted that the
massacres should cease, urging that it was not only a crime but a mistake.”
Those killed and deported were, he said, needed for “public works in Syria
and Palestine.” Aaronsohn reported that, in appreciation, 40,000 Armenians
paraded past Cemal’s house in Constantinople as he stood on the balcony
“with his arms folded like Napoleon the Great.”
But Aaronsohn concluded that Cemal was no great humanitarian. Rather,
his “actions [ were] a mere farce to impress the outside world, and to increase
[his own] importance.” In other circumstances, he had sent off the Armenians
in “his clutches . . . to remote parts of Syria and Palestine” to prevent them
infecting the Turkish population with diseases. Upon visiting Cemal’s refugee
camps, Aaronsohn discovered a deep vein of exploitation and sadism:
They were made to live in the desert. Men, women and children were
put to hard labour, and each working man and woman received 2 pence a
day. . . . In some cases, there was no water nearer than 6 miles. . . . The
writer has seen an overdue train, carry ing water, arrive. The Armenians,
parched with thirst, rushed to the halting place, each carry ing an earthen
jar or a tin. As soon as the train stopped it was besieged by the mob,
which was beaten back by the Turkish guard. . . . All the taps of the tanks
were then turned on and the water allowed to run to waste in full view
of the hundreds who were dying for want of it. The administration duly
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despatched water to the desert, and that was enough as far as Djemal
Pasha and his friends were concerned. . . . Hunger and thirst swept away
half the numbers in these camps in a few weeks. . . . In the meantime,
Djemal loudly proclaimed that he was colonizing waste lands with thrifty
Armenians, which was enough for the inspired press and the Central
Powers to give out to the world that in the last two years Syria and Pal-
estine under Djemal’s administration had flourished.110
What ever Cemal believed and sought to achieve, in February 1916 the gov-
ernment launched another wave of deportations in the vilayet, mostly of aged
and handicapped Armenians from Adana city.111 And some evidence indicates
that earlier deportees were being massacred. A group had managed to sneak
back and find work on the Baghdad railway under German supervision. But
when the government discovered the breach, the workers, numbering between
9,000 and 11,000, were rounded up and sent away once more. Unconfirmed
reports allege that the majority were killed.112
Downstream: The Syrian Desert
The architects of genocide envisioned a site of exile si mul ta neously within and without. It had to be a place deep in the empire, where Armenians who survived the massacres and marches would be far from the battlefield and the for-
eign powers arrayed there. But it also had to be far from home and from other
Ottoman Christians who might rally to their side. The sort of place where they
could be lost and forgotten.
That place was the Syrian Desert, in par tic u lar the area encompassed by
Aleppo and Deir Zor vilayets. The city of Aleppo became a critical transit
point for Armenians from eastern and western Anatolia alike. Some, after
an arduous stay in the Aleppo camps, were settled for a time in Mosul. But
in the course of 1916–1917, the second stage of the Armenian Genocide,
most of those who had reached Aleppo— along with the estimated 37,000
Armenians native to it— were dispatched to Rās al-’Ayn or Deir Zor for
extermination.113
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Aleppo
When Celal Bey, Aleppo’s vali, learned in April 1915 that deportees from
Zeytun and Maraş were heading his way, he asked Constantinople for funds
to prepare lodgings. The request revealed his naiveté. A moderate, relative plu-
ralist, and outsider in CUP circles, Celal was not privy to the government’s
plan for the Armenians. He later recalled that, in response to his request, the
government “sent a functionary, whose official title was ‘Head of the Muhacirs
Section at the Directorate for Tribes and Muhacir Settlement,’ but in real ity
was charged with deporting the Armenians.”114
The convoys began arriving
in early summer. Celal was told that Aleppo
would be their ultimate destination, but he was also ordered to deport all his
vilayet’s Armenians to Deir Zor. He refused on the grounds that doing so
would be criminal. It was then that Talat ordered Celal moved to Konya and
replaced him with Bekir Bey. But Bekir, it turned out, was also no genocide
enthusiast, and he made excuses to avoid deporting Aleppo’s Armenians. He
also asked Talât to send deportees to vilayets other than Aleppo.115
In late October Talât solved this critical vilayet’s administrative prob lem
by installing as vali one of his own relatives, Mustafa Abdülhalik Bey. Abdül-
halik and his aides immediately started deporting Armenians from the
coastal areas of Alexandretta, Antakya, and Harem. He also ordered the de-
portation of Armenians from Antep and Kilis, but effective intervention by
Consul- General Jackson, backed by Morgenthau, delayed implementation.116
However, the Americans were unable to prevent another round of deporta-
tions beginning in August.117
Abdülhalik was assisted by likeminded local officials such as Ahmet Bey,
the newly appointed mutesarrif of Antep. After the war, the British occupying
Aleppo laid hold of a batch of tele grams containing correspondence between
Abdülhalik and Ahmet. In one, dated November 7, 1915, Ahmet requested
female deportees be sent to his district, prob ably for use as servants and con-
cubines.118 On January 11, 1916, after Antep had been emptied of its own Ar-
menians, Abdülhalik wrote Ahmet, “We hear that there are Armenians from
Sivas and Kharput in your vicinity. Do not give them any opportunity of set-
tling there, and, by the methods you are acquainted with, which have already
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been communicated to you, do what is necessary and report the results.”119 A
week later Ahmet replied,
It has been ascertained that there are about five hundred people from
the said provinces in the vicinity of Roum Kale, which is under our ju-
risdiction. The Kaimakam of Roum Kale reports that most of them are
women and children, and that, in accordance with the methods, with
which the Turkish officials were acquainted . . . these women and
children have been sent under Kurdish guards with the understanding
that they are never to return.120
We do not know why it was deemed necessary to promptly drive off the sur-
viving women and children from Sivas and Harput, rather than allow them to
continue south and expire slowly like many others. But Ahmet was not about
to question orders.
As for the many thousands of deportees who filled Aleppo, they had
survived massacre, abduction, rape, robbery, disease, exposure, and starva-
tion, yet the last leg of their journey may have been the most agonizing.121
Rössler, the German consul in Aleppo, provides a glimpse into the par tic u lar
horrors of a forced march coming to its conclusion. On September 12, 1915,
he witnessed the arrival of 2,000 battered Armenians. “Using whips, the gen-
darmes drove the wretched, emaciated creatures, many of whom had a
death- look about them, through the streets of Aleppo to the train station,
without permitting them to drink a drop of water or to receive a piece of
bread,” he wrote. “Two women fell down to give birth and were only pro-
tected from being whipped by the gendarmes by town dwellers, who rushed
to help them.”122
The refugees faced horrific living conditions. Crowded into empty build-
ings, khans, and churches, hundreds died in their own excrement each day.123
The arrivals of early 1916 carried a strain of typhus that killed hundreds more,
including soldiers.124 “On some days the funeral carts were insufficient to carry the dead to the cemeteries,” de Nogales observed.125 Some of the survivors
were sent to makeshift camps erected in barren fields north of the city. But
the camps could only house a fraction of the deportees, so the rest hunkered
down on their fringes. The camp- dwellers were easy prey for gendarmes.
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Armenian doctors hanged in Aleppo, 1916, with Turkish officers standing in the
foreground.
Each day they collected groups of women, children, and old people— there
were almost no able- bodied men— from the camps and drove them toward
Deir Zor.126
Jackson and his assistants were energetic in helping Armenians deported
to and from Aleppo. For instance, American diplomats collected valuables
from deportees at their places of origin and worked hard to locate the owners
downstream. When the authorities told Jackson to stop, he ignored them.
When his consular resources were depleted, he sought and received additional
funds from the U.S. State Department. “Very soon the consulate was the
Mecca for the deported Armenians that were lucky enough to arrive with suf-
ficient strength to carry them hither,” he wrote.127
The consulate tried to get the deportees off the streets, where they were
targets for deportation sweeps and slavers; women were sold for a pittance in
the markets of Aleppo. Fortunately diplomats found Muslims, Christians, and
Jews willing to take in deportees. For the people of Aleppo, it was not easy
The Young Turk s
to absorb deportees, who were mostly weak and unhealthy and spoke little
Arabic. Still the consulate managed to place some 40,000 women and chil-
dren in homes as servants, where presumably they were better off than in the
homes of Turks to the north and certainly better off than massacre victims.128
Saving men was more difficult, but Jackson and his contacts managed to
persuade Cemal to place them in factories producing uniforms and other
items. The authorities set up six textile factories in Aleppo vilayet employing
10,000 men and women. They worked for virtually nothing— a bowl of soup
and a loaf of bread a day, per the terms Jackson had arranged with Cemal. But
they did receive something of priceless value: documents assuring their status
as workers in war industries, which saved them from deportation and almost-
certain death.129
Orphans constituted another major humanitarian challenge. Many were
sent to the camps, but thousands still thronged Aleppo’s streets. The author-
ities opened an orphanage, but it was badly managed and children died there
in droves. When local Armenians came to donate blankets, the Turks sent
them away, saying that the government could take care of them. In November,
Rössler reported the anguished findings of Baron von Kress, Cemal’s German
chief of staff, who had inspected the orphanage:
When the Turks have the men killed during the pro cessions, they can
use the excuse that they must defend themselves against rebellion; when
women and children are raped and kidnapped, the Turks can use the
excuse that they do not have the Kurds and gendarmes under control;
when they let those in the pro cessions starve, they can use the excuse
that the difficulties of feeding people on the march are so great that they
cannot master them; but when they let the children in the middle of the
town of Aleppo become run- do
wn from hunger and dirt, then that is
inexcusable.130
American missionaries responded to the situation by inviting the experi-
enced Swiss missionary Beatrice Rohner to Aleppo to take charge of the
orphanage. Cemal assented, and, on December 29, 1915, she was appointed
director. Taking charge of more than a thousand orphans, she rented new
premises; hired employees, including Armenians who thus acquired protec-
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tion; and obtained food and clothing from all pos si ble sources, including the
reluctant government.131
In addition to running the orphanage, Rohner worked with Jackson to
establish an underground network of communication and support with the
outlying deportation camps. Older kids in the orphanage and other young Ar-
menians would smuggle letters between the deportees and the townspeople and
bring the deportees money. The network proved a crucial source of witness
and, as long as the deportees were still alive, humanitarian aid: the smuggled
letters informed aid workers and diplomats of camp conditions and of the fate
that befell residents there, and some deportees were able to use the money to
live another day or bribe officials to set them free.132 The operation ground to a halt in September 1916, when the Turks caught one of the messengers, who,
under torture, revealed the system’s workings. After the network was exposed,
Rohner concentrated exclusively on the orphanage. Eventually the authorities
shut that down, too, and transferred the wards to a fa cil i ty in Lebanon run by
Halide Edip, who later became a well- known Turkish nationalist politician
and women’s rights activist. In the Lebanese orphanage, the children were
Armenian refugee children in Aleppo. Many were later transferred to Turkish orphanages in Lebanon and brought up as Muslims.
The Young Turk s
circumcised and indoctrinated in Turkish nationalism.133 Her work subverted,
Rohner suffered a ner vous breakdown in March 1917 and left Aleppo.134
On April 20, 1917, when the United States entered the war, there were still
some 50,000 Armenians in Aleppo and almost twice that number in sur-
rounding villages and towns. This despite the removal over the previous
