On Patriarch Zaven’s account, all the precautions taken by the government to avoid alarming the Armenians of the capital were thrown to the wind with the announcement of the “rebellion” in Van. If we were asked to name the event that convinced the Ittihad to put its genocidal program into practice precisely on 24 April, we would have to answer that the “rebellion” it had programmed at Van constituted the ideal alibi for it. In other words, the CUP chose what it deemed the propitious moment to resolve the problem that the Armenian presence in Turkey represented in its eyes. To that end, it had accumulated material enabling it to accompany its acts with an intense propaganda campaign.
This propaganda comprises, even today, the heart of the “Turkish version of the story,” which others call revisionist history. The first sign that the authorities intended to demonstrate that “the Armenians” were guilty of wrongdoing and play up the outcry over the desertions and the Van rebellion came on 28 April 1915, when the presiding judge of the court-martial in Istanbul announced that the Hnchak leaders, most of whom had been behind bars since late July 1914, had been indicted for “disturbing public order and for subversion.”
In a certain sense, this was the trial of all the Armenians. It lent the actions of the authorities judicial legitimacy while also providing them with the opportunity to give formal expression to their criticisms of the Armenian nation. Shortly before noon on 11 May, the 28 accused – two of whom, Stepanos Sapah-Giulian and Dr. Varazdat, were “fugitives from justice” and therefore tried in absentia – were brought before the court-martial conducted by General Nafiz Bey.
Two Armenian-speaking interpreters had also taken their places in the room, Sureya Bey and Mustafa Reşad Bey himself, the head of the national police force’s Department of Political Affairs. The presence of a “personal judge” (teharri memüri) surprised the accused: this was Arthur Esayan, alias Arshavir Sahagian, the man who had revealed the secret decisions of the Hnchaks’ December 1913 Constanza Congress to the minister of the interior.
In his opening statement, the presiding judge regretted that the accused had had to wait in prison for ten months to be judged. He also made a point of reminding them that, “since the Ottoman government had conferred on all Ottomans the right to choose their political party freely, I declare that we do not consider the mere fact of belonging to the Hnchak party to be [grounds] for indictment.”
Combining courtesy with an insistence on the letter of the law, he also promised the accused that they would have the right to explain their actions and defend themselves and that they would be given a fair trial. The Hnchak activists responded with the observation that the charges brought against them were largely based on the content of their statutes and program in the form they took prior to the July 1908 restoration of the Constitution. During the second session of their trial, however, held on 15 May, some extremely compromising documents were read into the court record: they revealed that certain members of the SDHP had planned to organize self-defense efforts among the Armenians and that they had also sought to overthrow the Ittihadist government.
The indictment, which was read out during the fifth session of the trial, included the following counts: 1) a separatist conspiracy; 2) a plan to create an “autonomous or independent Armenia”; 3) a conspiracy to stage insurrections; and 4) terrorist plots elaborated in complicity with “traitors” (an allusion to Colonel Sadık and General Şerif Pasha).
However, at the sixth session of the trial, held on 26 May, important information about the opposition of the Hnchak Central Committee of Turkey to the decisions of the Constanza Congress was entered into the court record. At its Third General Assembly, held in Istanbul from 24 July to 8 August 1914 with the participation of 31 delegates from local committees, the SDHP of Turkey declared that the Constanza Congress had been illegal. It had not attained a quorum, since only 17 of the SDHP’s 64 branches in the Ottoman Empire had been represented at it.
One might, of course, suppose that the positions adopted at this Third General Assembly, which were made public in August 1914 and once again served notice of the desire of the Hnchaks of Turkey to operate within the bounds of the law, were motivated by the mid July arrests of the party’s activists. But that would be to ignore the fact that the Constanza Congress clearly excluded most of the Turkish branches of the party and tried to ram through positions to which, as it was well aware, the Ottoman activists would be opposed. The court acknowledged these facts while also observing that some Turkish branches of the party had endorsed the Constanza positions.
The last session of the Hnchaks’ trial is particularly noteworthy, for it provides a perfectly clear illustration of the nature of the antagonism between “Turks” and “Armenians.” In his opening statement, the vice-president of the court-martial, Çerkez Hurşid, said that he was moved by the “boundless patriotism” of the accused, yet could not understand what had impelled men “who were full of life and energy” to set off down “a dead end.”
“You have,” he added, “suffered for the sake of the struggle against injustice; we, for our part, have always thought that particularistictendencies have to pay their tribute to the onerous obligations that govern the world. That is where our ways part.”
This striking formulation nicely sums up the two logics that clashed here: that of the state or those who control it is always the logic that “has to be respected.” The homage that the court thus paid to the accused did not leave them unmoved. In his response, Paramaz, who came forward as the leader of the Hnchaks in the dock, confessed that he had been touched by Hurşid Bey’s words. He also pointed out how hard he and his comrades had struggled “for the happiness of this poor country,” how much blood they had shed and how many sacrifices they had made “to make the brotherhood between Turks and Armenians a reality” and “foster mutual trust between them.”
However, he went on, you have, by your indifference, condemned our enormous effort to sterility and deliberately pursued [the goal] of exterminating us, forgetting that the liquidation of the Armenians is tantamount to the destruction of Turkey. It is you who have encouraged crimes and pillage and sought to silence every expression of our protest. For centuries, you lived off our lifeblood, but were never willing to give the fountain from which it sprang the right to stand firm and produce. You oppressed us when, as weak-willed rayas [members of a subjugated group], we endured all this servility with the patience of the wretched. You terrorized us the day we decided to demand from our masters the means of living half an existence. You flew into a rage when we sought to cultivate the seeds of Western civilization in the East, with a view to securing our future and yours. You began massacring us when, one day, we decided to assume a position that would allow us our self-respect. You excluded us from the protection of the law when we sought to benefit from the rights granted by Midhat’s truncated constitution. Among the groups making up Turkey, we were the most dedicated and productive, and we were the ones you forced to suffer the most. Even today, brandishing the charge that we seek to create an independent Armenia, you want to crush us.
It would be hard to produce a better description of the nature of the relationship between Armenians and Turks in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, a combination of close attachment and mutual exasperation. But the eloquent exchange between the judge and the Hnchak leader also resembled a last exchange before the divorce imposed by the Young Turk Central Committee. Twenty of the accused were condemned to death for “high treason and separatism.”
Around half past three on the morning of 15 June 1915, they were hanged in the courtyard of the War Ministry amid the greatest possible secrecy. The death sentence was, moreover, not officially announced until 17 June. While the Hnchaks’ trial was in progress, an intense press campaign was set in motion – spearheaded, of course, by the Young Turk daily Tanin. Magisterially conducted by Hüseyin Cahid, it sought to expose the danger represented by the Armenians as a group. On 9 May, Tanin began publishing a series of articles entitled “The Grand Conspiracy.” The “conspiracy” revolved around a plan woven by the leader of the opposition in exile, General Şerif Pasha, and his partisans to overthrow the Ittihadist government and assassinate the Young Turk ministers. The article contended that this “conspiracy” had been hatched on the initiative of prominent anti-Turkish Europeans who wanted to “drive a wedge between Turkey and Germany.” Above all, it indicated that Armenians were heavily involved in the plot: the Hnchaks Stepanos Sapah-Giulian, Paramaz and Varazdat were supposedly key players, alongside the famous Colonel Sadık, the organizer of the July 1912 coup d’état and the Ittihadists’ bête noire.
Aram Andonian notes that the publication of these articles accusing the Hnchaks – “the Armenians” – of complicity in a plot against “state security” engendered smoldering hostility toward the Armenian population of the capital, poisoning the atmosphere. The articles charged Sapah-Giulian in particular with having dispatched terrorists to Istanbul, at Şerif Pasha’s request, in order to assassinate the Ittihadist leaders and seize power. In “return for services rendered, he was to be given the portfolio of economy and finance in the new government.”
It is not hard to guess the objective of these articles, teeming with improbable details: the Young Turks were trying to discredit both the opposition and the Armenian “conspirators” by exposing a vast “plot” directed against their party. The simultaneous publication in the same daily of several articles by one Mehmed Midhat (in fact a pseudonym used by the “traitor” Arshavir Sahagian) that insisted on the Hnchak leaders’ complicity with Şerif Pasha probably had no other aim than to underscore the key role played by the Armenian activists in this affair.
For his part, Sapah-Giulian, who was one of the main targets of these accusations and was condemned to death in absentia by the Istanbul court-martial in May 1915, affirms that after the 1913 attempt on Şerif Pasha’s life in Paris, which was very probably engineered by the Ittihad, Prince Sabaheddin made a rapprochement with the Ittihadists, and was allowed to live since he was regarded as a possible alternative to the reigning sultan. Most importantly, Sapah-Giulian also reveals that in spring 1915, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was plunged in crisis, Talât summoned Sabaheddin and Şerif Pasha to Vienna, where it was agreed that Sabaheddin and his supporters would take power if the Entente succeeded in taking control of the capital. Sapah-Giulian even spells out that it “was their Arab friend Nazir Azuri” who informed them of these behind-the-scenes maneuvers.
We have no other sources of information on these negotiations. In view of what we know about the Young Turks’ usual operating methods, however, Sapah-Giulian’s account is plausible. Let us add that the assassination attempt against Talât and Enver was conceived in late 1913 or early 1914, after the attempt on Şerif’s life, but that the war broke out before it could be put into practice. In other words, the Ittihad launched a press campaign around an affair that was more than a year old. The objective was, without a doubt, to bolster the propaganda effort that aimed to make the Armenians out to be “domestic foes” while providing a context for the Hnchaks’ trial, the legal component of the Ittihad’s campaign. The Young Turks found it harder to stage a courtroom spectacle that would help it rid itself of its Dashnak “allies.” The Dashnaks had consistently sought to defuse the provocations orchestrated by the Ittihad’s representatives in the provinces; thus the Ittihad had to fall back on less “legalistic” methods in order to eliminate the ARF leaders, such as ruses or thinly veiled murders amid the confusion of the war.
Of the long list of charges officially leveled against the Armenians by the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior, let us, by way of example, mention the ostensible facts cited to justify what was undoubtedly the most appalling of the large-scale massacres perpetrated in summer 1915 against the Armenians of the kaza of Boğazlian and the surrounding area, including the vilayet of Angora.
“Sizeable Armenian bands attacked Muslims. Before they were relocated, the Armenians attempted to destroy the houses and cities that they were leaving behind by setting huge fires.” The author of these lines obviously did not strain his imagination. At the trial of those responsible for this slaughter, during which more than 65,000 people were killed in the space of a few days (this trial began in February 1919 and was thus less constrained than were those that took place in the days of the “national movement” in Anatolia) an important witness gave testimony on Friday, 21 February 1919 that shed considerable light on the “Armenian revolt.”
When one of the judges asked Colonel Şahabeddin, the commander of the Fifteenth Division, assigned to this area, how many soldiers he had sent to put down the insurrection after learning of it, Şahabeddin admitted that he had sent 200. When the presiding judge went on to ask about the nature of this rebellion and the number of rebels involved, Şahabeddin needed a recess before he could bring himself to concede that “there were five or six Armenian insurgents, who had taken refuge in the mountains.”
The rest of the interrogation showed, moreover, that the “revolt” of five or six individuals occurred only after the “displacement” of the Armenian population. Another grave accusation bore on the Armenians of the Kayseri region, where, according to the official propaganda account: The Imperial authorities discovered bombs, arms, gunpowder, and codes for encrypting secret correspondence destined for the revolutionary bands, along with other documents. It has been proved that the Armenian primate was at the head of the movement; moreover, the accused have confessed that the confiscated bombs were intended to obtain independence for Armenia.
However, the information assembled during the pretrial investigation of the “vicar” in question, Bishop Khosrov of Caeserea, was not quite as categorical. In early summer 1914, Khosrov had gone to Holy Etchmiadzin to be consecrated bishop by the Armenian catholicos. It was on these grounds – travel to an enemy country, as the indictment put it – that nearly one year later, in spring 1915, “the Armenian bishop of Kayseri, Khosrov Effendi,” came under suspicion of “complicity with the revolutionary movements.”
The court martial feared that its “jurisdictional prerogatives” were too narrow to allow it to try the case – that Khosrov could not be arraigned because of his status as a clergyman. However, while waiting for the opening of the procedure against the bishop, the military commander of Kayseri voiced apprehensions that the prelate would use the time at his disposal “to sow disorder and make propaganda.” He therefore suggested that Khosrov be exiled. The bishop’s rather summary trial ended one week after his arrest. It revealed that the “the Armenian bishop of Kayseri, Khosrov Effendi, had been apprised of [the] revolutionaries’ preparations,” which is to say that he had not found himself “at the head of the Armenian revolutionaries,” as government propaganda put the matter several months after his trial.
On these grounds, the court found “that there were extenuating circumstances” in the bishop’s case and “condemned him to 13 years of detention in a fortress.” Oddly, when the commander of the Fifth Army informed the minister of war of the verdict rendered in the case of the Armenian bishop Khosrov Effendi, he depicted the bishop as “one of those who inspired the preparations for a revolution and the revolutionary movement that had set out to create a future Armenian state,” contradicting the terms of the judgment delivered against the clergyman. This supplementary judgment was surely designed to satisfy the minister of war, since he had transformed the sentence into a death sentence shortly after the trial, before the Council of Ministers, on 20 July 1915, finally commuted the bishop’s punishment to life in prison.
In any case, Khosrov was one of the large numbers of clergymen murdered in the following months. The Kayseri revolutionaries mentioned in the official brochure of the Ministry of the Interior were themselves Hnchak activists. According to an account by Manuel Mgrian, a pharmacist in Everek, some 300 of these Armenians were being held in Kayseri’s civilian prison in April–May 1915, where the feet of most of them were beaten to a pulp with truncheons. Sometime in May, Mgrian had also been sent to Kayseri’s military prison to treat a prisoner with serious injuries. There he discovered the parliamentary deputy and Hnchak leader Murad (Hampartsum Boyajian), who had been recently transferred to Kayseri from Ayaş, where the “political” prisoners deported from Istanbul were being held.
Murad refused to submit to a new round of questioning from the mutesarif, pointing out that he had already told Talât everything he had to say. For this outrage, he was tortured with a red-hot iron. The pharmacist provides us with a detailed description of the effects. Boyajian did receive some treatment before being hanged at night some time later. One may well wonder about the capacity of the Armenians of Kayseri, a tiny Turkish-speaking minority surrounded by Muslims, to transform itself into a subversive force and go on to struggle “for the independence of Armenia.”
The formulations employed to describe the resistance put up by some of the Armenian inhabitants of Şabinkarahisar also have a certain flair: Early in June of this year, the Armenians attacked the city of Sharki Karahisar, suddenly and for no ascertainable reason, burning down the Muslim neighborhoods. The 800 rebels who barricaded themselves in the city’s citadel refused to listen to the fatherly advice and conciliatory proposals of the Imperial authorities. They were responsible for the deaths of 150 people, including the commander of the gendarmerie. We will come back to the fate of these people who are said to have attacked their own city by entrenching themselves in its citadel. To conclude, the Young Turks’ campaign to present the Armenians as collectively guilty often exploited old facts – sometimes dating back to before the 1908 revolution – that were revamped when necessary to suit present purposes. It also used all available means to exploit the least little detail capable of proving Armenian “treachery.”
Thus, the Ittihad succeeded not only in painting a plausible picture of the “enemy within” but also in whipping up the population against the “traitors,” thus preparing them to stand by and watch the mass violence to come without qualms, or even to participate in it. On 22 April and 6 May – that is, twice in the space of some two weeks – a decree was promulgated ordering that arms be requisitioned from the civilian population. The decree also stipulated that everyone possessing arms had to turn them in to the military commanders within five days, with the exception of those individuals holding special permits issued by the military authorities. This constituted the true beginning of the campaign of persecution of the Ottoman Armenians. With the requisition order, which officially applied to the entire population, a pretext had been found for legalizing violence, as it were. Police raids now mushroomed in the capital as well as in the provinces. Once again, the Ittihad had shown great imagination in hiding its objectives behind what might appear to be almost normal wartime measures.
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 254-259.
