As we have just seen, the event signaling the start of the massacres in the vilayet of Bitlis took place in Siirt. The sancak of Siirt, a mountainous region sandwiched between the Armenian and Kurdish settlement areas, had a mixed population: the Armenian presence was more pronounced in the kazas in the northern part of the sancak and very widely dispersed in the kazas in the south, which was also home to 15,000 Orthodox and Catholic Syriacs.
On the eve of the war, there were 146 towns and villages in the sancak, inhabited by 21,564 Armenians, who maintained 45 churches and three monasteries.
Side by side with the “blood-red general staff,” the local Ittihadist club, led by İhsan and Servet Bey, took an active hand in organizing the massacres in the area. The club’s efforts were seconded by government officials – Serfi çeli Hilmi Bey, the mutesarif of Siirt; Erzrumlu Nâzım Hamdi Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie; Rifat Bey, an officer in the gendarmerie; Emin Basri, a captain in the gendarmerie; Arslan Bey; and Bitlisli Ali Effendi, the police chief; as well as several leaders of squadrons of çetes in the Special Organization (Ali Ziya, Haci Mustafazâde Ahmed, Abdüllah Sadık), making a total of some 40 local officials.
It was with the active cooperation of these men that Cevdet and his “butchers” set about executing the orders given them by Halil, who plainly outranked the valis Cevdet and Abdülhalik.
On their way to Bitlis, Halil and Cevdet carried out mass liquidations in the Siirt area. The 35 villages of the easternmost kaza of the vilayet – Pervari, Bohtan/Eruh and Şarnag, with a total population of around 6,000 Armenians – were literally annihilated when the forces commanded by Halil and Cevdet passed through them; the inhabitants were slaughtered on the spot.
In Siirt, the local authorities had anticipated the arrival of Cevdet and his butchers. Four days previously, on 9 June, the Armenian primate of the diocese, Yeghishe, the Catholic Syriac bishop, Addai Şer, the orthodox Syriac Abuna, Ibrahim, and ten of the leading men of Siirt were arrested and shot the next day, half an-hour from the town.
On 11 June, 670 men from Siirt, out of a total Armenian population of 4,032, were summoned to the barracks, ostensibly to transport military supplies to Bitlis. They were, however, arrested and shot the next day, at a half-hour’s distance from the town in the Vedi Ezzreb gorge.
When Cevdet arrived on 13 June he finished the job: over the next few days, he rounded up the remaining older men, whose throats were cut on the town’s central square. The women and children were assembled a few weeks later at the exit from the town and offered to the Kurdish population. Of those the Kurds did not fancy, some were massacred on the spot with axes and knives; around 400 people were deported toward Mardin and Mosul.
No one in the group that was set marching in the direction of Mardin survived; its last surviving members had their throats cut a short distance from town. Fifty deportees in the other caravan reached Mosul alive.
Nobody knows what became of the several hundred villagers from the eight villages in the vicinity of Siirt, or of the 2,853 Armenians from the villages and towns of the kaza of Şirvan/Shirvan. It is known, however, that the 5,000 Syriacs in the sancak of Siirt, both Catholic and Orthodox, received the same treatment as the Armenians.
As for the 8,343 villagers from the 76 towns and villages of the kaza of Harzan, they fled to the mountains of the neighboring district of Sasun, where they suffered the same fate as the local population.
However, as was revealed at the Istanbul trials in 1919, it should be noted that Serfi çeli Hilmi Bey, the mutesarif of Siirt, was transferred to Mosul because he had displayed little enthusiasm for eliminating the Armenians or Syriacs in his prefecture. He was later to draw up a full report on the massacres in Dyarbekir and Mardin and submit it to the German vice-consul in Mosul, Walter Holstein, for transmission to the German ambassador, Hans von Wangenheim.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 339-340.
In picture- http://www.houshamadyan.org/mapottomanempire/vilayet-of-bitlispaghesh.html
