While most Armenians in Van were concentrated in the quarter known as Aykesdan (the “Gardens”), located in the eastern part of the city just below the fortress, some of them lived in the fortified old city, where the shops and main government offices were located.
Between the two neighborhoods lay a virtually uninhabited area. Thus, the resistance movements that the Turkish forces battled for three weeks – one in the old city and the other in Aykesdan – could not, practically speaking, communicate. The first clashes occurred on 20 April in Aykesdan, at dawn; the Armenians barricaded themselves in the old city three hours later, when Van was shelled from the western part of the Urartuan citadel in which one of the city’s barracks and the ammunitions depot were found.
Dr. Clarence Ussher, who had been the private physician of Tahir Pasha, the former vali of Van, had known his son Cevdet well when Cevdet was still a young man, as well as his wife, the sister of Minister of War Enver. In his description of this modern, refined Young Turk, the American physician remarks that he “had proved himself past-master of the art of concealment and dissimulation” by convincing the Armenians of his good intentions in order to assassinate Ishkhan the more easily, and by maintaining “pleasant social relations” with the missionaries before shelling this den of “infidels” and frankly voicing his real feelings about them.
In the missionary’s view, everything went to show that Cevdet “had planned for 19 April a massacre of all the Armenians in the vilayet.” At the missionaries’ insistence, however, he agreed to discuss with them his proposal to station gendarmes in the American mission “for [their] protection,” and even postponed executing his plans for the city for 24 hours, a “delay [that] had been responsible for the effective defense.” Of all the participants in these events, Ussher is the only one to have suggested this hypothesis.
However, the chronology of the massacres in all the kazas of the vilayet of Van, with the exception of the Shadakh/Şatak massacre, seems to corroborate it. Van’s defenders, albeit heavily outnumbered and poorly armed, had an advantage – they found themselves in a densely urban environment – and a disadvantage: their positions communicated directly with all the government buildings in the city, such as the Administration of the Public Debt, the courthouse, the police station, and the regional government building, which constituted so many positions from which the Turkish forces could attack them.
This explains why the leaders of the resistance decided on the very first day of the fighting to send out commandos with the mission of burning these buildings down.
Shortly after the fighting began, during the night of 21–22 April, an eyewitness and central participant in the Van events, Rafaël de Nogales, the Venezuelan officer who had been put at the disposal of the vali of Van, arrived on a boat in the city’s lakeport.
After witnessing the massacre of Adilcevaz’s Armenians the day before, he saw, while he was still crossing the lake, the bright light emanating from the “burning villages,” especially the village of Ardamed, where affluent families from Van spent the summer (the village church was blazing “like a torch”).
The next morning, while Nogales was inspecting positions in both parts of Van, he witnessed the arrival of several hundred Kurds who were supposed “to help in killing all the Armenians” and take part in the “bacchanal of barbarity” – a manhunt for the handful of Armenians who had not been able to make their way to one of the quarters that were resisting.
A brave attempt notwithstanding, de Nogales was unable to rescue two young men from the hands Kurdish çetes, who ignored his orders to desist and killed both of them.
In the outskirts of Aykesdan, in front the American mission, he averted his gaze so as not to have to witness the spectacle of dogs fighting over corpses. Further on, he observed “the Musulman populace during [its] zealous search for treasure” in the Armenian homes outside the combat zone. He also noted the care the authorities took to have the corpses of the Armenian victims burned, in order to wipe away “the other traces of their crimes.”
When, a little later, de Nogales went to dine with Vali Cevdet, he discovered “a panther in human form” in his luxurious villa, dressed “à la dernière mode parisienne.”
Cevdet was flanked by one Captain Reşid and his battalion of Laz “Janissaries.” Reşid’s task was to carry out all the vali’s “secret orders.” The Venezuelan officer was struck by the contrast between the violence raging a few dozen yards away and the refined surroundings of the residence of the vali, who was an educated man. Among the guests was “a gentleman called Achmed Bey,” who fascinated Nogales.
Wearing a well-cut English tweed suit and fluent in several languages, “with his aristocratic manners and his rather blasé expression,” this was “none other than the notorious bandit” Çerkez Ahmed, the leader of a group of “Circassian” çetes.
A native of Serez in Macedonia, this fedayi of the Ittihadist Central Committee and major in the army had made headlines a few years earlier by assassinating high-ranking government officials and journalists who had denounced the political practices of the Young Turks, and also by taking part in the 23 January 1913 coup d’état that cost the minister of war his life.
After fading back into anonymity for a time, the major was named one of the officers of the Special Organization and dispatched to Van with his squadron of butchers in order to lend Cevdet a hand.
Nogales was well aware that the “only political offense … of hundreds of innocent women and children consisted in being Christians.” This by no means prevented him from accepting the mission Cevdet assigned him: he was to take “the direction of the siege” and coordinate two companies of artillery that he set up in the citadel.
A considerable force had been put at his disposal. It consisted of battalions of Circassian and Turkish volunteers, battalions of gendarmes, including a mounted battalion, regular troops, and 1,200 to 1,300 Kurdish çetes, almost all of them “attracted by the hope of sacking the town.”
Thus, he had the rough equivalent of a division at his command – 10,000 to 12,000 men.
One of the major problems that the other camp, the Armenians, had to contend with was the Turkish artillery, which pounded their two fallback positions without let-up. The network of deep trenches that they had dug went only part of the way toward solving the problem: every night, brigades of masons repaired the holes that Turkish shells had ripped in the defense lines. The other major problem that the defenders of Aykesdan had to overcome was the fact that the Hamudağa barracks butted up against the eastern part of the Armenian quarter; from there the Turkish forces chipped away at the Armenian positions.
However, a few audacious Armenian soldiers succeeded in making their way to the basement of the barracks, which had been built in 1904 in order to control Aykesdan; they crawled through the network of kanas, the tunnels traditionally used for the distribution of water in the city. On 22 April, at 4 p.m., mines that were placed with great precision under the foundations of the barracks exploded, setting off a fi re that reduced the building to ashes and forced the Turkish troops to abandon the adjacent position of Şahbender.
This swift success both relieved and galvanized the Armenians. Nogales, for his part, noted that “the resistance of the Armenians was terrific … Each house was a fortress that had to be conquered separately.”
He even had the feeling that the Armenians were always able to guess his intentions, because the positions that he considered attacking were consistently defended by men in large numbers.
On the Venezuelan officer’s own admission, Cevdet was unnerved by the “heroic resistance of Van” – the expression is Nogales’s – which withstood the fierce assaults conducted by regular forces or çetes as well as the déluge de feu that rained down on the city. After five days of fighting and a by no means negligible loss of human life, the Turkish and Kurdish volunteers were visibly demoralized, as their commander observed: the Kurds “evaporated by the dozens, and toward the last by the hundreds, as the siege was prolonged.”
Among the other measures taken by Cevdet, Nogales notes that he ordered the American mission shelled, although the vali himself claimed that the shelling resulted from an error; subsequent events showed that he was determined to liquidate the “American giaours [infidels].”
Cevdet also ordered the bombardment of St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, a building in the old city that had “a monument of unquestionable historical” value.
Of course, relations between the authorities and the Armenians were broken off in the first days of the fighting. The Italian consular agent G. Sbordoni was the only European diplomat still working in Van. He had maintained friendly relations with Cevdet to this point, and decided on 24 April to attempt to intercede with him. Sbordoni reminded the vali that his sole motive was a desire to restore peace and that he had already had occasion, during their conversations of the previous few weeks, to call his excellency the vali’s attention to the fact that “regrettable incidents could arise in consequence of the militias’ attitude and lack of tact,” since the militiamen “were incapable of acting in strict accordance with [Cevdet’s] orders.”
After assuring the vali that he had perfect confidence in him in view of his extensive experience and that he was certain that he would find a “solution,” Sbordini added that he was convinced that his proposals “would be well received in Armenian circles.”
He emphasized, however, that there was no chance of bringing the Armenians to accept a proposal to lay down their arms “and unconditionally surrender in the prevailing situation.” “If the Armenians have had recourse to arms,” the Italian told the vali, “it is because they are convinced that the government, using military service as a pretext, wishes to eliminate every last one of them [and have therefore decided] to defend the lives of their families.”
“Five cannonballs,” he went on to complain, “have struck our consulate.” They had, however, caused only material damage, and the consul was happy to learn that the vali had now ordered that the cannons be pointed in a different direction. Finally, speaking on behalf of the American and German missions, he told the vali that they wished to inform him that they had not given shelter “to armed individuals,” but only to women, children, and the ill, and asked that he be so good as to take “the measures required to ensure their protection.”
In Aykesdan, the Defense Committee had now been organized, but had to deal with the throng of 7,000 refugees who arrived on 25 April from the villages of the nahies of Arjak and Timar and the surrounding areas. The overriding concern was to feed all these people. The committee also had to use its ammunition sparingly or else replenish it; it therefore improvised a cartridge factory, a gunpowder factory (directed by a chemist), and an arms factory.
A smithy was even converted into a cannon foundry. Although this project was of merely symbolic value, it seems to have sustained the morale of the populace, which was invited to donate its copper pots and pans; they were melted down to make an “Armenian cannon” that was used to shell the Hacibekir barracks on 4 May, albeit to no great effect.
Like the firing of this cannon after days of memorable effort, another feat of arms left its mark on people’s minds, beginning with Nogales’s: on 28 April, the Armenians dug a tunnel and blew up the Reşidieh barracks, where the notorious kaymakam of Perkri was stationed with his çetes, whose exactions in the Perkri district we have already examined.
In response to these acts of force, Cevdet ordered Çerkez Ahmed and his çetes to go to the villages in the environs of Van and liquidate the women and children still to be found there. According to Nogales, this squadron committed acts of such violence that even Cevdet felt obliged to give Major Ahmed a dressing down, “sincerely or not,” for the horrors he had perpetrated.
In early May, when the news from the front had begun to alarm the Turks, and both Kurdish çetes and Turkish volunteers were abandoning the city, Cevdet attempted one last maneuver: he told de Nogales that he had just signed an “amnesty” with the Armenians.
The Armenians’ situation, too, was critical: by now, 15,000 refugees had poured into the city from the rural zones of the sancak of Van.74 It was for this reason that they agreed to negotiate the terms of an “amnesty,” although they were persuaded that this was another ruse of the vali’s. Cevdet, for his part, ordered a cease-fire in all combat zones on 3 May.
The written proposal that he submitted to the Armenians is worth examining in detail, for it is symptomatic of Cevdet’s turn of mind and the methods of disinformation he used.
Maintaining his accusatory tone, the vali complained about the Armenians’ “insurrection,” which he said had produced a bloodbath. The district of “Arjag and part of the district of Timar have received the punishment they deserved,” he went on, thus creating the impression that the massacres in this region had been retaliatory measures, although they took place on 19 April, before the Armenian population of Van had retrenched itself in its quarters.
However, he struck a magnanimous pose, announcing that he was granting “a respite to the refugees on the island of Lim and in Timar”; he promised that if they surrendered, “no harm would be done to their women and children” – although he was perfectly aware that the 12,000 refugees who had flocked onto the island of Lim were doomed to perish for lack of an adequate food supply.
He then returned to the “insurrection” in Van, launching out on a discourse designed to justify his actions by presenting them as legitimate measures. He first affirmed, in defiance of all logic, that he had given orders not to return the “insurgents’ fire”; however, when it became apparent that “these imbeciles continued to fire away to the sound of drums and trumpets,” he had “given the order to shoot back.”
In other words, the assault launched against Aykesdan at dawn on 20 April had been a riposte. Continuing in the same tone, the vali accused the Armenians of having “fired on the guards” and of killing “a few policemen and passers-by,” which left him with no choice but to use cannons. To lend credibility to his thesis that the Armenians were the aggressors, he added: “I know that there are many people from the villages in the city. I am convinced that they want to attack the fortress” – although the Armenian quarter was besieged, and had been saved thanks only to its defensive posture.
Cevdet employed a threatening tone in the rest of his missive: “Be warned that the artillery is on the way … As soon as the cannons arrive, they will be turned on the city and will fire away until it is nothing but a pile of rubble.”
The vali then listed his military exploits, as if trying to convince himself of his own strength: he announced that he had captured the villages of Tarman and Gokhbants, whose inhabitants, as we have seen, had fled to the slopes of Mt. Varak, and then described the exploits of those of his troops who had taken control of a zone stretching from the Hamudağa barracks to Cross Street.
Here, too, he said, “we have proved to be stronger, and have burned everything down.” In question, however, was an area of the city that was essentially unsettled.
Compounding threats with lies, the vali then told the Armenians, who had no external source of information, that Halil Bey’s troops, “sweeping aside the Russian troops they had encountered on their path, had entered Khoy” the day before. In fact, Halil’s Expeditionary Corps was in retreat after a heavy defeat in Dilman. In his conclusion, Cevdet betrayed the true purpose of his letter: “Please understand that you must abandon all hope of being saved.”
The coda was a set of proposals prefaced with a preamble formulated in classically Ottoman style:
To the present day, we have loved and protected this people as if it were the light of our eye; its sole response has been ingratitude and treachery. It must be punished. Think of your innocent families. What sin have they committed? If you have no pity on yourselves, take pity on them, at least.
In other words, if the defenders of Van did not surrender, “innocent families,” who had already fallen victim to massacres throughout the vilayet, would suffer official retaliatory action brought on by the “insurrection.”
Cevdet accordingly proposed to the Armenians that they “1) give up all weapons and 2) surrender, placing [their] confidence in the generosity of the government to which [they had] to swear fidelity.”
The vicar Eznik, to whom Cevdet’s letter was formally addressed, answered in his response on 4 May that the Armenians had never ceased to recognize the sultan’s sovereignty – that is, that they had simply reacted to the threat facing them.
Rafaël de Nogales adds that the Armenians were willing to leave the city and go to Persia, but demanded that the vali accompany them in person to guarantee their safety. Nogales accordingly proposed, in vain, to accompany them in the vali’s stead. “We all knew,” the Venezuelan captain observes, “that Cevdet was hoping that the Armenians would leave the city “so that he might have them slain on the way.”
Even as he was negotiating, Cevdet ordered the execution of seven Armenians who had served in the mounted gendarmerie without the least criticism from anyone.82 He also ordered that Armenian prisoners be executed, beginning with the Hnchaks whom he had had arrested well before the onset of the events. Their throats were cut in the city’s outskirts.
Sbordoni provides us with information that precisely contradicts the affirmations of the vali, who, the Italian consul wrote, “sought to create the impression that the government had extended its benevolent protection to the peaceful populations.” “Unfortunately,” he added, we are receiving, from outside sources, reports of acts of unheard of cruelty perpetrated in villages that were absolutely unarmed. The Armenians lost all confidence when they heard these reports; they are increasingly convinced that the government is pursuing a program of generalized massacre and are increasingly inclined to defend themselves.
Finally, Sbordoni gave the lie to the vali’s denial that the inopportune shelling of the Americans had been deliberate, after he had personally inspected “the damage that the shells had done to the American church.”
Nogales, too, observed the practices of the local administration when he visited Van’s military hospital on 1 May. There, two nurses – a German named Martha, and Grisell MacLaren, an American – told him that the hospital’s senior physician, İzzet Bey, had “gotten rid” of his Armenian personnel and let his Christian patients die of gangrene, refusing to provide them with the least treatment. But Nogales witnessed another spectacle that shocked him still more profoundly: Cevdet had the women and children who had been rounded up by his çetes during their raids on the villages brought to the city, where he had them executed in full view of the besieged Armenians.
In his last letter to Cevdet, dated 4 May, the Armenian prelate gave him to understand that he had not been fooled by the vali’s talk of a possible “amnesty.” He reminded him of what really mattered: “If you truly wish to save my unfortunate country, put an end to the massacres of women and children – of an innocent population in its entirety.”
The Armenians’ problem was that the committees in the old city, where the prelate lived, and in Aykesdan, where Aram Manukian was, were unable to communicate, so that neither knew anything about the other’s mood and intentions.
For information, they accordingly depended on the affirmations of the vali, for whom, as we know, they had no great esteem, and, perhaps, the Italian consul, whose services Cevdet called on in negotiating with Aykesdan. When the vali warned the prelate that he was expecting a “definite answer” the following day, 6 May, reminding him that, “as he very well knew, the government could not contract agreements with its subjects,” the military situation was alarming from the Turkish point of view.
Halil and his Expeditionary Corps had retreated toward Başkale after their defeat at Dilman and established their headquarters further to the south, in Tokaraga, in the upper Zab valley.
Moreover, the battalion of Armenian volunteers commanded by Vartan, backed up by several brigades of Cossacks, had been authorized by Major-General Nikolayev, the commander of the corps of the Russian army operating in the Igdir area, to open an offensive on Perkri, where violent fighting had occurred in early May.
As we have seen, Cevdet, who had probably given up hope of overcoming the resistance in Van, had on 8 May ordered the “Erzerum battalion” to attack the Armenian positions on Mt. Varak. It is true that the arrival in Van of several thousand refugees from this mountain district had further complicated the sanitary situation and made it harder to feed the population. Nonetheless, Cevdet no longer had the forces he needed to crush the Armenian resistance. All indications are that, by 7 May or the day after, the vali had understood that he could not bring the city to its knees. Nogales, at any rate, had come to that conclusion by now, and asked Cevdet to relieve him of his command.
He was not, however, given permission to leave until 14 May.
It was also on 14 May that the Muslim population and Ottoman forces began to evacuate Van. The last troops left the city on 16 May after burning down their barracks. According to Nogales, Halil had ordered Cevdet to abandon Van and link up with Halil’s Expeditionary Corps by way of Khoşab. The Armenian sources report the besieged Armenians’ joy upon learning that the Turks had left, but also, with consternation, how the inhabitants of Van pillaged and sacked the city’s deserted Turkish neighborhoods.
The vali had clearly anticipated the 18 May arrival from the north of the Russian vanguard, with the volunteer battalion under Vartan’s command at its head. The next day, Major-General Nikolayev’s division arrived. To avoid a political vacuum, the Russian commander appointed Aram Manukian provisional governor of Van and authorized him to create a local administration. It functioned to the end of July.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 326-331.
In picture- Akhtamar, photo by Tatul Hakobyan
