Note- According to the Constantinople’s Armenian Patriarchate’s Information Bureau, in the Vilayet of Erzerum, before the Armenian Genocide, the Armenians lived in 425 localities, had 406 churches and 76 monasteries, 322 schools with 21.348 schoolboys and schoolgirls. The total Armenian population was 202.391.
After the departure of the first convoy, the primate of Erzerum, Smpat Saadetian, who had received specific information about the massacres in the sancak of Erzincan, went to see the vali and the German vice-consul. The vali told him that the Armenians of Erzerum would be spared and that incidents of the kind he had been told about would not happen again.
The German promised to protect the Armenian bishop. The primate let himself be persuaded and urged his flock to obey. The second convoy set out in the direction of Bayburt on 18 June 1915. It was made up of 1,300 middle-class families, who were joined en route by 370 families from the little town of Garmirk (in the kaza of Kiskim), making a total of some 10,000 people.
They were escorted by hundreds of gendarmes commanded by Captain Muştağ and Captain Nuri, under the supervision of two leaders of the Special Organization, the kaymakam of Kemah and Kozukcioğlu Munir. Two survivors from this convoy, Garabed Deirmenjian and Armenag Sirunian, later stated, referring to their arrival in Pirnagaban, a village halfway between Erzerum and Bayburt: “We encountered an automobile in which the famous Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir and Oturakci Şevket were sitting … We learned a few days later that they were on their way back from Ispir, where they had organized the eradication of all the Armenians living in that district.”
The caravan made its way through Bayburt, which had already been emptied of its Armenian population, and reached the bridge that spans the Euphrates at the entrance to the Kemah gorge without mishap. Here çete bands led by Oturakci Şevket and Hurukcizâde Vehib sorted the deportees into groups. Several hundred men were separated from the rest of the convoy. Guarded by çetes, the caravan continued on its way southwest as far as the area around Hasanova.
There, the irregulars of the Special Organization extorted money from the deportees, who were traveling on foot or in carts and pitched their tents every night. They then proceeded to carry out the fi rst massacre. Thereafter, the convoy continued on its way, passing close by Eğin/Agn and Arapkir, and finally arriving near Malatia. There, the deportees camped in a place known as Bey Bunar, where their guards from Erzerum turned them over to the local authorities, first and foremost the mutesarif of Malatia, Reşid Bey.
When the caravan reached the mountain district of Kahta, south of Malatia and east of Adiyaman, the deportees were suddenly confronted with an appalling sight: the gorge just outside Fırıncilar was filled with the corpses of people from earlier convoys. They were, in fact, entering one of the main killing fields regularly used by the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. It had been put under the supervision of the parliamentary deputy from Dersim, Haci Baloşzâde Mehmed Nuri, and his brother Ali Pasha, who had two Kurdish leaders from the Reşvan tribe under their command, Zeynel Bey and Haci Bedri Ağa, as well as Bitlisli Emin, a retired gendarmerie offi cer.
Once the caravan reached the gorge, Zeynel Bey directed operations from a height, following a well-established ritual. He first had the men separated from the convoy and put to death. The operation went on for a full hour and a half. According to Alphonse Arakelian, who was in this convoy, 3,600 people lost their lives, but some one hundred men survived. One of Arakelian’s companions, Sarkis Manukian, later declared, for his part, that 2,115 men were slain that day in the Kahta gorge.
The next day, the deportees, who the surviving men had rejoined, came face to face with a newly arrived inspector (mufettiş), “officially” representing the mutesarif of Malatia and the kaymakam of Adiyaman. The mufettiş ordered that the deportees be subjected to a body search, and had “tents, rugs and anything else that seemed as if it might have value” confiscated, including watches, jewels, money, and checks.
The survivors then set out on their way again. They now encountered the kaymakam of Adiyaman, Nuri Bey, who had probably come in order to assess the effects of the treatment to which the deportees were being subjected, but also to claim the share of the Armenians’ property due to the Special Organization. The deportees’ route led them back to the banks of the Euphrates at Samsad, where the gendarmes threw “the sick and crippled” into the river and made off with young women and children. Four months after the second convoy left Erzerum, “what was left of some sixty families” arrived in Suruc (in the sancak of Urfa).
From there they were set marching in the direction of Rakka and the Syrian Desert. Thanks to Boghos Vartanian’s eyewitness account, we know what happened to the men who were separated from the convoy at Kemah. There were between 900 and 1,000 people in this group. Their escorts carefully searched them and stripped them of their belongings on the Kemah road. Three hundred Armenians were packed into a stable on the spot and left without food and water; they had to bribe their guards to open the door to let in a little air or give them water from the Euphrates, which they paid for by the glassful.
The guards exacted 2,000 Turkish pounds in the form of checks from another group of 160 men who had been shut up in the church in exchange for a promise to set them free. In the small hours of the morning, when the commander arrived, a list of the deportees present was drawn up, specifying their age and place of origin. The same officer informed them that they were to be assigned to labor battalions but that for security reasons they would do better to turn their money and valuables over to him.
Only half-convinced by these reassuring words, the deportees gave him a mere 14 Turkish pounds, along with rings and 14 watches. The çetes then entered the stable and brought the men out in groups of from 15 to 30, after tying them together. The wealthiest individuals were tied together in pairs, back to back, so that they could walk only with difficulty. This was on 18 July. The prison, too, was emptied of its last occupants, some 20 Dashnaks – Vagharshag Zorigian, Bedros Baghdigian, Shah-Armen, Vahan Dandigian and others – who had requested that they be tied together and killed together.
These groups of bound men were then taken under guard toward the Euphrates and the bridge over the Kemah gorge. The operation was directed by the strong man of the district, Çetebaşi Jafer Mustafa, who had chosen the heights where the groups of men were killed before being thrown down into the turbulent waters of the Euphrates.
Vartan Der Azarian was one of the first to die. He asked that those who survived tell his family where he had been slain. The çetes circulated among the groups who were waiting for their turn to be killed, collecting the money that the deportees would no longer need. Some of these irregulars were perhaps sorry that they had to do a job of this sort: “We are only carrying out government orders,” they said. Some even declared that they were collecting this money “in order to give it to [the men’s] families, who had been detained elsewhere.” By nightfall, there were only ten “roped groups” left.
The çete leader Jafer ordered his men to abandon the usual methods, which involved killing the people in these groups one by one, and execute them all at once instead. When the group of men in which our witness found himself reached the edge of the cliff overhanging the Euphrates, they saw hundreds of lifeless bodies down below; the çetes were inspecting them and finishing the wounded off with their bayonettes.
Of this last group, attacked at dusk, less carefully than had been the case in the preceding hours, four wounded men survived because the bodies under which they found themselves lying had protected them. These men were Boghos Vartanian, our witness, Bedros Baghdasarian, and two peasants from the plain, Yervant Kloyan and Harutiun Mnatsaganian. After walking east along the left bank of the Euphrates, the survivors finally decided to head toward Dersim, where the local Kurds were reported – accurately – to be protecting Armenian deportees. Bedros eventually collapsed in the sand, temporarily unable to go on.
After a four-day trek, the men arrived in Dersim on 22 July, where the Kurds fed them and sent them on to their mountain pastures. Krikor, an Armenian orphan between 10 and 12 years old whom they met on their way, served Boghos Vartanian as a guide and gave him all the bread he had as provisions for the rest of his voyage. As Boghos penetrated ever deeper into the Dersim district, he met 16 Armenians from Kampor/Koghk (in the kaza of Ispir/Sper) and then, on 28 July, two families from Erzincan.
The women fed him and tended his wounds. The case of these Armenians who found refuge in Dersim was no rarity. Vartanian met others, such as Father Arsen Arshaguni from the village of Ergans (in the kaza of Erzincan), who was now living in the camp of Ali Said Ağa. Our witness remained in the same camp for ten months, until spring 1916, when the Russians took Erzincan. When he returned to Erzerum, Vartanian found its Armenian neighborhoods in ruins; the houses had been burned down.
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 297-299
