Located on the northeastern shore of Lake Van, the kaza of Erciş/Arjesh boasted 54 Armenian towns and villages on the eve of the war, with a total population of 10,381.
In the administrative seat of the kaza, Agants (2,078 Armenians), the kaymakam, a Young Turk from Istanbul, Ali Rıza Bey, ordered on 19 April that all the Armenian men in the small town gather before the sub-prefecture.
Four hundred men were locked up on that day in the town jail. In the evening, the men were bound together in groups of ten and conducted by gendarmes and militiamen toward the lakeport, near the village of Khargen (pop. 285), where they were shot.
The same day, 700 to 800 men from the neighboring villages who had been confined in the barracks near the town’s southwestern exit met the same fate.
Among the men detained in the town jail and executed in the evening were the auxiliary primate, Father Yeghishe, and the other leading citizens of the town: Nicolas and Sarkis Shaljian, Harutiun, Nshan, Khosrov, and Serop.
An eyewitness remarks that in the evening the kaymakam delivered a solemn speech to the militiamen assembled on Agants’s central square, urging them to pursue their operation to help save the fatherland.
In the course of the day, these çetes of the Special Organization had systematically attacked all the Armenian villages in the kaza and massacred the rest of the population.
According to A-To, of the 10,381 Armenians in the kaza, 2,378 had been massacred by 19 April, 518 (for the most part young women and children) had been abducted, 953 had been carried off by disease or starvation, and 693 were missing.
This represented 4,542 people, nearly 45 per cent of the total Armenian population. The survivors managed to flee northeast behind the Russian lines, which were then situated on a line running through Dyadin.
Thus, a method that would be used elsewhere in the following weeks had already been applied here: it consisted in first liquidating the men and then wiping out the towns and villages.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, p. 323.
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