The 25 Armenian villages in the kaza of Hinis/Khnus, which lay in an isolated area in the southern part of the sancak of Erzerum, had 21,382 inhabitants.
These villagers did not suffer the fate of the other localities in the region, but were massacred on their native ground. As elsewhere, operations began with the arrest of the local elites. In Khnus, the administrative seat of the kaza, Nusreddin Effendi, Haci Isa, Fehim Effendi, Şükrü Mahmud Ağaoğlu, and Egid Yusuf Ağaoğlu formed a deportation committee that was headed by Şeyh Said.
This committee recruited çetes from the local Turkish population and made public declarations about the threat to Islam embodied by the Armenians, said to be preparing “to join with their brothers of Russia in order to massacre Muslims.”
The first massacres were perpetrated in the kaza in April, when Hoca Hamdi Bey, the commander of a squadron of çetes, led his men, billeted in the Armenian village of Gopal in the eastern part of the kaza, in an attack on two neighboring localities, Karaçoban (pop. 2,571) and Gövenduk/Geovendug (pop. 1,556).
The çetes massacred a number of peasants, abducted young women, and plundered the villages.
Tahir Bey, the kaymakam of Khnus, was by no means the least zealous when it came to liquidating Armenian villagers. It was Tahir who took command of the 600 to 700 çetes recruited by the deportation committee. In these remote rural mountain districts, the Turkist ideology of the Istanbul elites was a less powerful spring of action than Ottoman Islam, so that the latter rather than the former was exploited to mobilize local energies.
Tahir was a classic example of the middle level government officials with a rudimentary education who nursed a deep hatred of these Armenian villagers pretentious enough to try to give their children a proper education and make social life a little less rude. Faithfully following the strategy designed by the Special Organization, the kaymakam began by attacking his prey where it was weakest.
The first victims of the “deportations” initiated on 1 June 1915103 were the villagers of Karaçoban, or what was left of it: they were taken to the furrows that the waters of the melting snow had carved in the Çağ gorge and had their throats cut. The neighboring village of Geovendug was subjected to the same fate the very same day. The çetes next attacked the villages of Burnaz/Purnaq (pop. 449) and Karaköprü (pop. 1,161); their inhabitants were stabbed and clubbed to death in an isolated area.
The task of massacring the remaining villagers had been entrarsted to a Kurdish chieftain, Feyzullah, who inaugurated his campaign in the village of Khert (pop. 408) at the head of a squadron of çetes, then attacked Khozlu (pop. 1,770), a village controlled by a Kurd named Moro. Feyzullah and his çetes first killed the men and then proceeded to slaughter the women and children, taking “the prettiest women for themselves” as they went along.
The inhabitants of the village of Yeniköy (pop. 451), in turn, had their throats cut in the Kurdish village of Burhana, where their neighbors had invited them to take refuge. Some of the villagers of Çevirme (pop. 1,361) were subjected to the same fate at Kızmusa, while the rest were put to the sword by Feyzullah’s bands. The most agonizing death was reserved for the inhabitants of Elbis (pop. 608): Şükrü Bey, their “protector,” burned them alive in a barn.
In the first days of May, Aghchamelik (pop. 318) and Pazkig (pop. 876) were attacked by Feyzullah’s squadrons, as were Shabadin (pop. 391), Maruf (pop. 338) and Duman (pop. 398). The inhabitants of all these villages were put to death.
The Armenians of Yahya (pop. 305) were liquidated by the garrison established in this village. Khırımkaya (pop. 425), Salvori (pop. 245), Dorukhan and Gopal (pop. 1,375) were wiped off the map by soldiers under the command of Haci Hamdi. Thanks to accounts by three different eyewitnesses, we know that 75 men from Gopal, a village with a great deal of livestock, were arrested and shot during the Russian offensive of late April 1915 – Israel Sarksian, Dikran Avdalian, Tiko Kévorkian and Egho Barigian, among others – and that the remaining villagers were massacred by the soldiers quartered in the village.
A few people managed to flee to the Russian lines, while a child, Harutiun Serovpian, was adopted by Kurds and converted to Islam.106 It seems that only the villagers of Sarlu (pop. 540) and Mezhengerd (pop. 75), both near Khnus, were deported, to an unknown destination.
The last village to be attacked, Haramig (pop. 898), valiantly withstood the çetes’ assaults under the command of Hagop Kharpertsi, a hekim who practiced traditional medicine. The people of Haramig held out for two weeks until their ammunition ran out; they inflicted heavy losses on the Kurds. A few old men and children who had survived these slaughters and been left to wander through the villages were gathered together in Hinis and deported a few weeks later.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 303-304.
