It was a
self-inflicted disaster by a shortsighted leadership blinded by imperialist
ambitions. Had the Ottomans heeded the Entente's repeated pleas for neutrality,
their empire would most likely have weathered the storm. But they did not, and
this blunder led to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire by the British army
and the creation of the new Middle Eastern state system on its ruins. Yet even
this momentous development was not inevitable, and its main impetus came not
from the great powers but from a local imperial aspirant: Hussein ibn Ali of
the Hashemite family, the sharif of Mecca and custodian of Islam's two holiest
shrines. As late as June 1915, nearly a year after the outbreak of World War I,
an interdepartmental British committee regarded the preservation of a
decentralized and largely intact Ottoman Empire as the most desirable option.
("Report of the Committee on Asiatic Turkey;' June 30, 1915, CAB 27/1, pp.
4, 29.)
By October 1915
however, the British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Arthur Henry McMahon, had
been sufficiently impressed by Hussein's promises to raise the Arabic-speaking
Ottoman subjects in revolt against the sultan to accept his vision of a
successor empire and to agree to his main territorial demands, albeit in a
tentative and highly equivocal fashion. Hussein's achievement was nothing short
of extraordinary. Notwithstanding his pretense to represent "the whole of
the Arab Nation without any exception” the sharif represented little more than
himself. (Correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon, His Majesty's High
Commissioner at Cairo, and the Sherif of Mecca July 1915-March 1916, presented
by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to Parliament by Command of His
Majesty," Cmd. 5957, London, 1939, p. 3)
The minimal backing
he received from a few neighboring tribes had far less to do with a yearning
for independence than with the glitter of British gold and the promise of
booty. Hussein could not even count on the support of his own local
constituency. As late as December 1916, six months after the sharif and his two
prominent sons, Abdallah and Faisal, launched what came to be known
euphemistically as "The Great Arab Revolt;' the residents of Mecca were
"almost pro- Turks.” ("Intelligence Report;' Dec. 28,1916, Fa 686/6,
p. 176; Arab Bulletin, June 23,1916, p. 47 and Feb. 6, 1917, pp. 57-58, Fa
882/25; McMahon to Grey, act. 20, 1915, Fa 371/2486/154423.)
Not unlike modern
Islamists, the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said was impressed by
Ottoman colonialism, and he advocated the destruction of the State of Israel
and the relegation of its Jewish population to a minority group on the lines of
the Ottoman colonial model.
It is doubtful
whether the former Ottoman subjects would share this view. This imperial
notion, by its very definition, posits the domination of one ethnic, religious,
or national group over another, and the Ottoman Empire was no exception. It
might have tolerated the existence of vast non-Muslim subject populations in
its midst, as did earlier Muslim (and non-Muslim) empires, but only provided
that these acquiesced in their legal and institutional inferiority in the
Islamic order of things. Whenever these groups dared to question this status,
let alone attempt to break free from the Ottoman colonial yoke, they were
brutally suppressed. The simmering tension between the Ottomans and their more
nationally aware subjects first boiled over in Greece, when in January 1822 a
newly convened National Assembly adopted a constitution, elected the first
president of the Hellenic Republic, and issued a Declaration of Greek
Independence: "The Greek nation calls Heaven and Earth to witness that in
spite of the dreadful yoke of the Ottomans, which threatened it with
destruction, it still exists.” See Russia's Foreign Secretary Nesselrode's
instructions to the ambassador in Constantinople, Feb. 23/March 7, 1821, in Ministerstvo inostrannykh del
SSSR, Vneshniaia politika Rossii XIX i nachala
XX veka: dokumenty rossiiskogo ministerstva inostrannykh del, Moscow, 1980, Ser. 2, Vol. 7, pp. 36-38;
Russian Circular No. 8, March 18/30, 1821, in Barbara Jelavich, Russia and
Greece during the Regency of King Othon 1832-1835: Russian Documents on the
First Years of Greek Independence (Tessalonika:
Institute of Balkan Studies, 1962), Appendix 1, pp. 123-24. For the Greek
national awakening see, for example, Richard Clogg, The Movement for Greek
Independence, 1770-1821, 1976; Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle for
Independence, 1821-1833, 1973.
To Sultan Mahmud II
(1808-39), the declaration was an unabashedly treacherous act. The Greeks were
the most privileged and prosperous of his Christian subjects, enjoying a high
degree of autonomy and achieving pride of place in the empire's administrative
and commercial life, and the sultan saw no conceivable reason for them to bite
the hand that fed them. As far as he was concerned, the Greeks were a subject
people, had always been and would always be. The notion of an independent Greek
nation-state on a par with its imperial master was not only an unspeakable
affront to Ottoman-Muslim dignity but also a subversive ideal that could
undermine the very foundations of the Ottoman colonial order: Whereas it has
become a sacred duty upon all and every member professing the Mahomettan Faith, from first to last to form themselves in
one body [i.e., the universal umma] the encouragement of such idle
reports [that is, nationalist sedition] would, God forbid, be a means of
operating with those very purposes which are peculiar to the infidel race, and
be the cause of rendering dissension permanent among the Mussulmans: which is
unworthy of man professing the true Faith We are true believers, and all in
strict union together. (PRO, Proclamation addressed to the Janissary Aghas on
May 8,1821, FO 78/98.)
Before long, the
Ottoman-Greek confrontation deteriorated into an endless exercise in violence.
Almost immediately the Greek rebels embarked on wanton massacres of their hated
Muslim masters, with the Ottomans responding with ferocious attacks on Greek quarters
in the towns of Anatolia. In Istanbul itself, the sultan shocked all of
Christendom, especially Orthodox Russia, by having the venerable patriarch,
Gregorius V, publicly hanged at dawn on Easter Day. (Stratford to Castlereagh,
May 1, 1821, encl. in FO 78/98; Stratford to Londonderry, June 12, 1821, FO
78/99/46; Russian despatch, June 22/July 4, 1821, in
Jelavich, Russia and Greece, Appendix. II, pp. 124-28.)
It mattered not that
Gregorius had preached restraint to his congregation; as far as the sultan was
concerned, the patriarch, as the head of the Orthodox millet, was the guarantor
of the community's loyalty. Having failed to deliver this, he had to pay the
ultimate price. As his forces failed to subdue the uprising, Mahmud II was
gradually pushed to approach the Egyptian governor Muhammad Ali, promising him
the island of Crete in return for his services. The ambitious viceroy agreed
and sent his son Ibrahim Pasha to crush the Greek revolt. This Ibrahim did with
great enthusiasm, sending a bag of rebels' ears to Istanbul to prove his efficiency.
He was then ordered to move against the Greek mainland, after Muhammad Ali had
extracted further concessions from the sultan. By early June 1827 the Greek
garrison in Athens had been forced to surrender. This alarmed the European
powers, which feared the all-out destruction of the Greeks, and on February
3,1830, after three more years of bloodshed and mayhem, an international
conference in London ceremoniously declared that "Greece shall form an
independent State.” For the text of the London Protocol see Thomas Erskine
Holland, ed., The European Concert in the Eastern Question: A Collection of
Treaties and Other Public Acts, Oxford, 1885, Text 1.)
Greece's new
government was to be a monarchy, and its territorial integrity would be
guaranteed by Britain, Russia, and France. On May 7, 1832, the three powers,
together with Bavaria, signed a convention that named Prince Otto of Bavaria
the king of Greece, and provided for a much-needed loan for the new monarch,
who arrived in Athens in February 1833. This was a truly revolutionary
development for the Ottoman Empire, signaling the first loss of territory to
the rising force of nationalism and the onset of a steady process of
decolonization that was to squeeze it out of its European provinces by the end
of the nineteenth century. The next chapter in this saga unfolded in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in the
summer of 1848, when a revolutionary government adopted a constitution that
abolished feudal rights and social distinctions and declared an independent
Romania, comprising the two principalities. And while the Ottomans managed to
arrest this development temporarily with the support of the European powers,
which were equally anxious to stem the mounting tide of nationalism before it
wrecked their own empires, by the mid-1870s the Danubian
crisis had been fully rekindled, this time developing into a string of revolts
across the Balkans.
The Balkan powder keg
was sparked in July 1875 by a peasant uprising in the province of Herzegovina,
at the southwestern extreme of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, which spread
rapidly to engulf the neighboring province of Bosnia. "Dead bodies were lying
in various corners unburied; and we noticed the head of a boy in one of the
streets blackening in the sun;' the British consul in Sarajevo reported of a
typical "battlefield" scene: ''A little Turkish girl was brought to
us, wounded in the throat, and we were told that an insurgent was on the point
of cutting off her head when she was snatched from him as far as could be
ascertained some fifty or sixty persons perished on both sides during the
attack [on the previous day]."( Holmes to Elliot, Sept. 28, 1875, encl. in
No. 32, in Great Britain, Foreign Office, "Turkey, No. 2 , 1876, Bosnia
and Herzegovina. Correspondence Respecting Affairs in the Bosnia and
Herzegovina"; hereafter "Turkey, No. 2 .1876.)
Ottoman efforts
to suppress the insurrection triggered a cycle of violence, and before long the
turmoil in Bosnia-Herzegovina was reverberating throughout the region. In
Serbia and Montenegro nationalist passions were flying high. In the port town of
Salonika, foreign consuls were murdered. A revolt in Bulgaria in September 1875
invoked the Bosnian insurrection as "the spark which will set the whole
Balkan Peninsula in flames and will lay the Turkish monarchy in ruins."
For Ottoman attempts to crush the uprising see Safvet
Pasha to Musurus Pasha, Aug. 9, 1875, doe. 10; Safvet Pasha to Musurus Pasha,
Aug. 22, 1875, doe. 15; proclamation by Server Pasha in Holmes to Derby, encl.
2 in No. 28; promulgation of reforms by Sultan Abdul Hamid on Oct. 3, 1875,
encl. in No. 29; Holmes to Elliot, Sept. 28, 1875, encl. in No. 32; Reshid
Pasha to Musurus Pasha, No. 54; Reglement
respecting the functions of the executive council, No. 61, all in Turkey, No.
2 (1876).
This prognosis proved
somewhat premature, as the revolt was brutally suppressed, but a year later the
Bulgarians rose again in the Balkan Mountains, supported by Serbia and emigre
revolutionaries. The Ottoman authorities responded heavy-handedly, and the
uprising deteriorated into a bloodbath. Massacres of Bulgarians and the
destruction of villages by Turkish irregulars and equally gruesome atrocities
by the rebels became commonplace. By June 1876 the Ottomans had suppressed the
uprising, only to be confronted with Serb and Montenegrin declarations of war.
Unlike Bosnia and
Herzegovina, the Serb and Montenegrin move was no spontaneous and poorly
organized insurrection but a carefully planned revolt by the two most powerful
South Slav nations, determined to substitute their own regional empire for the
existing colonial subjugation. Yet the Ottomans had no intention of simply
packing their bags and leaving. The graver the threat to their empire, the
harsher their response became. Although Montenegro scored some initial
successes, Serbia was soon brought to its knees. Rumors of a Serbo-Russian
alliance, setting off loud alarm bells in Istanbul, turned out to be baseless.
Not only had Russia not been consulted on the war, it would also not support
the insurgents and made it eminently clear that if Serbia committed aggression
against the Ottoman Empire, Russia would abandon it to its fate. At a meeting
on July 8, a week after the Serbian declaration of war, the Russian and
Habsburg foreign ministers decided not to intervene in the new conflict and
agreed that none of the belligerents would be allowed to reverse the status quo
ante bellum in the event of victory. This meant that the SerboMontenegrin
dream of a South Slav empire could not be achieved, and in September 1876 the
Ottomans routed the Serbs and advanced on Belgrade.
Had the Ottomans
stopped at this point and accepted a European pacification plan for the
region, they would have retained their Balkan provinces. Yet intoxication with
their Serbian exploits, exacerbated by the deeply troubled personality of the
new sultan, the thirty-five-year-old Abdul Hamid II, who, on August 31, 1876, replaced
his half-brother, Murad V, on the throne, precluded such an eventuality.
Notwithstanding his pledges of reform, which had helped him to gain power in
the first place, Abdul Hamid was imbued with pan-Islamic ideals: religious
conservatism, not Western - type reform, was for him the key to restoring
imperial glory. Suspicious to the point of paranoia, the new sultan lived in
constant fear of domestic conspiracies· and foreign machinations. He surrounded
himself with an elaborate system of spies and double agents, going so far as to
have all the water pipes in his palace disinterred under his own watchful eyes
and replaced with new ones, running closer to the surface, to ensure that any
attempt to use them for bad purposes would be instantly detected.
Aggravated by these
psychological pressures, Abdul Hamid's near-messianic commitment to the
preservation of Ottoman Islamic order was to have a profound impact on the
domestic and foreign affairs of the empire for more than three decades. In the
turbulent months of 1876 and 1877, it undermined the international efforts
toward a peaceful resolution of the Balkan conflict and landed the Ottoman
Empire in a disastrous war with Russia, brought to an end by the March 1878
peace treaty of San Stefano, which effectively squeezed the Ottoman Empire out
of the Balkans.
Although these
setbacks were somewhat reversed by a great-power congress that convened in June
1878 in the German capital of Berlin, half a millennium of Ottoman imperialism
in Europe was to all intents and purposes at an end as the Muslim empire was
forced to give up most of its European colonies aside from a tenuous foothold
on the continent. The independence of Romania, Montenegro, and Serbia,
proclaimed in San Stefano, was reaffirmed, while eastern Rumelia south of the
Balkan Mountains, where the Ottomans had established their initial colonial
presence, was placed under a Christian governor and made semi-autonomous.
Greece received Thessaly and part of Epirus, Bosnia and Herzegovina passed to
Austro- Hungarian control, and Russia received southern Bessarabia and the
Asiatic territories of Kars, Ardahan, and the port of
Batum on the Black Sea. Only in Macedonia and a smallish Bulgaria, completely
severed from the Aegean, did the Ottomans manage to maintain a semblance of
their former imperial rule. The sixty-year orgy of bloodletting and mayhem
attending the Ottoman Empire's rearguard action to keep its reluctant European
subjects under its domination pales in comparison with the treatment meted out
to the foremost nationalist awakening in Turkey-in-Asia: that of Armenia. This
discussion of the Armenian genocide draws on Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh,
Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East 1789-1923,
Harvard University Press, 1999, Chapter 10.
For an incorporation of more recent German sources see
our two lectures in Bonn, March 26, 2003.
By the second half of
the nineteenth century the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire totaled
some two million, three-quarters of whom resided in so-called Turkish Armenia,
namely, the velayets of Erzerum,
Van, Bitlis, Sivas, Kharput,
and Diarbekir in eastern Anatolia. The rest, about
half a million Armenians, were equally distributed in the Istanbul-eastern
Thrace region and in Cilicia, in southwestern Anatolia. (For population figures
see, for example, Mallet to Grey, Oct. 7, 1914, FO 371/2137/56940;
"Turkey: Annual Report, 1913. By the Embassy;' FO 371/2137/79138, p.25.)
As a result of
Russian agitation, European and American missionary work, and, not least, the
nationalist revival in the Balkans, a surge of national consciousness began to
take place within the three Armenian religious communities-Gregorian, Catholic,
and Protestant. In the 1870s Armenian secret societies sprang up at home and
abroad, developing gradually into militant nationalist groups. Uprisings
against Ottoman rule erupted time and again; terrorism became a common
phenomenon, both against Turks and against non-compliant fellow Armenians.
Nationalists pleaded with the European chancelleries to enforce Ottoman
compliance with the 1878 Berlin Treaty, which had obliged the empire to
undertake "improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the
provinces inhabited by the Armenians, and to guarantee their security against
the Circassians and Kurds." But the great powers were reluctant to weaken
the Ottoman Empire in any way, and Abdul Hamid made the best of this
reluctance. In a brutal campaign of repression in 1895-96, in which nearly
200,000 people perished and thousands more fled to Europe and America, Armenian
resistance was crushed and the dwindling population cowered into submission.
But not for
long. Armenian nationalism continued to breathe beneath the embers, and by the
early 191 Os, despite years of cultural repression,
including a ban on the public use of the Armenian language and a new round of
horrendous massacres (in the spring of 1909), it had been fully rekindled. In
April 1913, for example, Armenian nationalists asked Britain to occupy Cilicia,
from Antalya to Alexandretta, and to internationalize Istanbul and the straits
as a means of "repairing the iniquity of the Congress of Berlin;' which
had stipulated Ottoman reforms "in the provinces inhabited by the
Armenians:' At about the same time, a committee of the Armenian National
Assembly, the governing body of the Apostolic Ottoman Christians, submitted to
the Russian embassy in Istanbul an elaborate reform plan for Ottoman Armenia.
(Fontana to Lowther, March 25,1913, FO 371/1773/16941; Lowther to Grey, April
5,10,1913, FO 371/1773/16736; Admiralty to FO, April 15, 1913, FO
371/1775/17825.)
Bowing to
international pressure, in February 1914 the Ottoman authorities accepted a
Russo-German proposal for the creation of two large Armenian provinces, to be
administered by European inspector-generals appointed by the great powers. This
was a far cry from the Armenians' aspirations for a unified independent state,
yet it was the most significant concession they had managed to extract from
their suzerain, and most of them were anxious to preserve this gain, come what
may. Hence, when the Ottoman Empire entered World War I the Armenians
immediately strove to demonstrate their loyalty: prayers for an Ottoman
victory were said in churches throughout the empire, and the Armenian
patriarch of Istanbul, as well as several nationalist groups, announced their
loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and implored the Armenian masses to perform their
obligations to the best of their ability. Not all Armenians complied with this
wish. Scores of Ottoman Armenians, including several prominent figures, crossed
the border to assist the Russian campaign. Others offered to help the Entente
by different means. In February 1915, for example, Armenian revolutionaries in
the Cilician city of Zeitun pledged to assist a
Russian advance on the area, provided they were given the necessary weapons; to
the British they promised help in the event of a naval landing in
Alexandretta.( Ironside to Foreign Office, March 3, 1915, and War Office to the
Foreign Office, March 4,1915, FO 371/2484/25073 and 25167; Foreign Office to
Ironside, March 9, 1915, FO 371/2484/28172 and 22083.)
Although these
activities were an exception to the otherwise loyal conduct of the Armenian
community, they confirmed the Ottoman stereotype of the Armenians as a
troublesome and treacherous people. This view was further reinforced by a
number of crushing defeats in the Caucasus, in which (nonOttoman)
Armenians were implicated in the Russian war effort. Above all, as the largest
nationally aware minority in Asiatic Turkey, the Armenians constituted the
gravest internal threat to Ottoman imperialism in that domain; and with
Turkey-in-Europe a fading memory and Turkey-in-Africa under AngloFrench-Italian
domination, the disintegration of Turkey-in-Asia would spell the end of the
Ottoman Empire, something that its rulers would never accept. Before long the
Ottoman Armenians were subjected to the kind of retribution that had been
inflicted on rebellious Middle Eastern populations since Assyrian and
Babylonian times: deportation and exile. First the Armenians had to be rendered
defenseless; then they were to be uprooted from their homes and relocated to
concentration camps in the most inhospitable corners of Ottoman Asia. The
Armenians' towns and villages would then be populated by Muslim refugees, their
property seized by the authorities or plundered by their Muslim neighbors.
Whether or not there
was a premeditated genocidal master plan, something that contemporary Ottoman
leaders and latter-day Turkish politicians and academics would persistently
deny, is immaterial. It must have occurred to the Ottoman leadership that the destruction
of such a pervasive nationalist movement would inevitably entail suffering on
an enormous scale, and that the forceful relocation of almost an entire people
to a remote, alien, and hostile environment amid a general war was tantamount
to a collective death sentence. In the end, whatever their initial intention,
the Ottoman actions constituted nothing short of genocide. The polemical
literature on this issue is immense. Leavin out the
German, French, and Russian literature on the subject see, for example, Talaat
Pasha, "Posthumous Memoirs of Talaat Pasha;' New York Times Current
History, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Nov. 1921); Verite sur le mouvement
revolutionnaire armenian et
les mesures gouvernementales
(Constantinople, n.p., 1916); Aspirations et agissements revolutionnaires des
comites armeniens avant et apres la proclamation de
la constitution ottomane (Constantinople, n.p., 1917); Ahmed Rustem Bey, The World War and the TurcoArmenian Question (Berne: Staempfli
& Co., 1915); Kamuran Gtirtin, The Armenian File:
The Myth of Innocence Exposed (London: K. Rustem & Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1985). Some Western scholars have accepted the Turkish apologia at face value.
See, for example, Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman
Empire and Modern Turkey: Vol. II: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise
of Modern Turkey, 1808-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p.
315; Bernard Lewis, interview with Le Monde, Nov. 16, 1993. Interestingly
enough, in the first and second editions of his book The Emergence of Modern
Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961 and 1968), Lewis described these
tragic events as "the terrible holocaust of 1915, when a million and half
Armenians perished;' p. 356. For the opposite see, for example, Haigazn
Kazarian, "The Turkish Genocide;' Armenian Review, Vol. 30 (spring 1977);
Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (New
Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987); Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide:
History, Politics, Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1992); The Permanent Peoples'
Tribunal, A Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide (London: Zed Books, 1985); Navasard Derymenjian, "An
Important Turkish Document on the 'Exterminate Armenians' Plan;' Armenian
Review, Vol. 14 (1961), pp. 53-55; William Yale, The Near East: A Modern
History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), pp. 230-31.
The first step in
this direction was taken in early 1915, when the Armenian soldiers in the
Ottoman army were relegated to "labor battalions" and stripped of
their weapons. Most of these fighters-turned-Iaborers
would never get the opportunity to toil for their suzerain: they would be
marched out in droves to secluded places and shot in cold blood, often after
being forced to dig their own graves. Those fortunate enough to escape summary
execution were employed as laborers in the most inhumane conditions. At the
same time, the authorities initiated a ruthless campaign to disarm the entire
Armenian population of all personal weapons. This sent a tremor throughout
Armenia: the 1895-96 massacres had been preceded by similar measures, and most
Armenians had no illusions regarding the consequences of surrendering their
arms while their Muslim neighbors were permitted to retain theirs. Nonetheless,
the community's religious and political leaders persuaded their reluctant flock
to do precisely that in order to avoid harsh retaliation by the government. But
even this was not a simple task. The Ottoman authorities demanded that the
Armenians produce a certain number of weapons, regardless of the actual number
of arms-bearers, thus putting many Armenians in an impossible position: those
who could not produce arms were brutally tortured; those who produced them for
surrender, by purchase from their Muslim neighbors or by other means, were
imprisoned for treachery and similarly tortured; those found to have hidden
their arms were given even harsher treatment.
With the Armenian
nation rendered defenseless, the genocidal spree entered its main stage: mass
deportations and massacres. Having ethnically cleansed Cilicia by the autumn of
1915, the authorities next turned their sights to the foremost Armenian settlement
area: the velayets of eastern Anatolia. First to be
cleansed was the zone bordering Van, extending from the Black Sea to the
Iranian frontier and immediately threatened by Russian advance; only there did
outright massacres often substitute for otherwise slow deaths along the
deportation routes or in the concentration camps of the Syrian desert.
The main executioner
was Djevdet Pasha, the brother-in-law of the minister
of war, Enver Pasha, who, in February 1915, was made governor of Van. A sadist
known throughout Armenia as the "horseshoer of Bashkale"
for his favorite pastime of nailing horseshoes to the feet of his victims, Djevdet inaugurated his term in office by slaughtering some
eight hundred people-mostly old men, women, and children. By April the death
toll had risen to ten thousand, and in the following months the population of
the Van zone would be systematically exterminated. In the western and
northwestern districts of Ottoman Armenia, depopulated between July and
September, the Turks attempted to preserve an appearance of a deportation
policy, though most deportees were summarily executed after hitting the road.
In the coastal towns of Trebizond, for example, the authorities sent Armenians
out to sea, ostensibly to be deported, only to throw them overboard shortly
afterward. Of the deportees from Erzerum, Erzindjan, and Baibourt, only a
handful survived the initial stages of the journey.
The Armenian
population in western Anatolia and in the metropolitan districts of Istanbul
was somewhat more fortunate, as many people were transported in (grossly
overcrowded) trains for much of the deportation route, rather than having to
straggle along by foot. In Istanbul, deportations commenced in late April, when
hundreds of prominent Armenians were picked up by the police and sent away,
most of them never to be seen again; some five thousand "ordinary"
Armenians soon shared their fate. Though the majority of the city's
150,000-strong community escaped deportation, Armenians were squeezed out of
all public posts, with numerous families reduced to appalling poverty.
Deportations in Ankara began toward the end of July; in Broussa,
in the first weeks of September; and in Adrianople, in midOctober.
By early 1916 scores of deportees, thrown into a string of concentration camps
in the Syrian desert and along the Euphrates, were dying every day of
malnutrition and diseases; many others were systematically taken out of the
camps and shot. (Viscount Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon,
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Laid Before the Houses of Parliament as
an Official Paper and Now Published by Permission,London,
1916, pp. 645-49.)
The Ottoman
authorities tried to put a gloss of legality and innocence on their actions.
The general deportation decree of May 30, 1915, for example, instructed the
security forces to protect the deportees against nomadic attacks, to provide
them with sufficient food and supplies for their journey, and to compensate
them with new property, land, and goods necessary for their resettlement. But
this decree was a sham. For one thing, massacres and deportations had already
begun prior to its proclamation. For another, the Armenians were never informed
of its existence, hence could not even hypothetically have insisted on its
observance. Most important, as is overwhelmingly borne out by the evidence,
given both by numerous first-hand witnesses to the Ottoman atrocities and by
survivors, the rights granted by the deportation decree were never honored.
Take the provisions for adequate supplies for the journey and compensation for
the loss of property, for example. After the extermination of the male
population of a particular town or village, an act normally preceding deportations,
the Turks often extended a "grace period" to the rest of the
populace, namely, women, children, and the old and the sick, so they could
settle their affairs and prepare for their journey. But the term normally given
was a bare week, and never more than a fortnight, which was utterly
insufficient for all that had to be done. Moreover, the government often
carried away its victims before the stated deadline, snatching them without
warning from streets, places of employment, or even their beds. Last but not
least, the local authorities prevented the deportees from selling their
property or their stock under the official fiction that their expulsion was to
be only temporary. Even in the rare cases in which Armenians managed to
dispose of their property, their Muslim neighbors took advantage of their
plight to buy their possessions at a fraction of their real value. (Ibid.,
pp. 641-42, plus Johannes Lepsius, Der Todesgang des armenischen Volkes, 1930,
pp. 301-04.)
Nor did the deportees
receive even a semblance of the protection promised by the deportation decree.
On the contrary, from the moment they started on their march, indeed even
before they had done so, they became public outcasts, never safe from the most
atrocious outrages, constantly mobbed and plundered by the Muslim population as
they straggled along. Their guards connived at this brutality. There were, of
course, exceptions in which Muslims, including Turks, tendered help to the
long-suffering Armenians; but these were very rare, isolated instances.
Whenever the
deportees arrived at a village or town, they were exhibited like slaves in a
public place, often before the government building itself. Female slave markets
were established in the Muslim agglomerations through which the Armenians were
driven, and thousands of young Armenian women and girls were sold in this way.
Even the clerics were quick to avail themselves of the bargains of the white
slave market.
Suffering on the
deportation routes was intense. Travelers on the Levantine railway saw dogs
feeding on the bodies of hundreds of men, women, and children on both sides of
the track, with women searching the clothing of the corpses for hidden
treasure. In some of the transfer stations, notably Aleppo, the hub where all
convoys converged, thousands of Armenians would be left for weeks outdoors,
starving, waiting to be taken away. Epidemics spread rapidly, chiefly spot
typhus. In almost all cases the dead were not buried for days, the reason
being, as an Ottoman officer cheerfully explained to an inquisitive foreigner,
that it was hoped the epidemics might get rid of the Armenians once and for
all.
Independent estimates
of the precise extent of the Armenian genocide differ somewhat, but all paint a
stark picture of national annihilation of unprecedented proportions. In his
official report to the British parliament in July 1916, Viscount Bryce calculated
the total number of uprooted Armenians during the preceding year as 1,200,000
(half slain, half deported), or about two thirds of the entire community.
Johannes Lepsius, the chief of the Protestant Mission in the Ottoman Empire who
had personally witnessed the atrocities and had studied them thoroughly, put
the total higher, at 1,396,000, as did the American Committee for Armenian and
Syrian Relief, which computed the number of deaths at about 600,000 and of
deportees at 786,000. And Aaron Aaronsohn, a
world-renowned Zionist agronomist who set up the most effective pro-Entente
intelligence network in the Middle East during World War I, estimated the
number of deaths at between 850,000 and 950,000. Bryce, The Treatment of
Armenians, pp. 649-51; "Annex F: Statistical Estimate Included in the
Fifth Bulletin of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, Dated
New York, 24th May 1916;' ibid., pp. YY2; Johannes Lepsius, Deutschland und
Armenian, 1914-1918 (Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919),
pp. lxv, 256; Lepsius, Der Todesgang, pp. 301-04;
Aaron Aaronsohn, "Pro Armenia;' Nov. 16, 1916,
p. 13, Aaronsohn Archives (Zichron
Yaacov, Israel), File 2C/13; Aaronsohn, "On the
Armenian Massacres: Memorandum Presented to the War Office, London, November
1916;' Aaronsohn Archives, File 2C/14.
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