After “cleansing” Siirt of its Armenians and Syriacs – all things considered, rather rapidly –Cevdet and his “butchers’ battalions” promptly set out for Bitlis, with Halil’s Expeditionary Corps hard on their heels, for the Russian troops were also marching on the city.
In the regional capital, Vali Abdülhalik had already taken the initiative by waging a campaign of destruction against the villages to the north. The members of the big American mission in Bitlis, which included a hospital and an Armenian girls’ school, witnessed events in the region, as did a nurse in the military hospital who had recently arrived from Van, Grace H. Knapp.
Knapp was the only one to leave a written account of what she saw.
On 16 May, Knapp’s boat arrived in Tatvan, located at the western extremity of Lake Van, at the same time as thousands of wounded or exhausted villagers from the 56 villages of the kaza of Bitlis, which had a total population of 16,651, and the 22 villages of the northern kaza of Akhlat, inhabited by 13,432 Armenians.
These Armenians, among whom there were virtually no men, had been attacked by Kurds and had fled to Bitlis to seek the protection of the government. “They had no idea,” Knapp wrote, “that the affair had been ordered by the government.”
The American missionary was in fact witnessing the results of the first massacres in the northern areas of the sancak of Bitlis. She also noted that every evening the Kurdish squadrons returned from their expeditions to the villages after finishing “their work of murder and destruction.”
In the space of a few days, some 12,000 refugees, many of them wounded, had thronged into Bitlis. Seven hundred of them were taken into the American mission, while the others found a place in Armenian institutions in the last days of May 1915.
The bishopric and the mission fed and cared for these refugees as best they could.
When the missionaries asked the vali for explanations of what they were hearing from all the rural zones of the sancak about atrocities perpetrated against the Armenians, Abdülhalik affirmed that Kurdish brigands were sowing disorder there and that he was doing all he could to “put an end” to it.
Early in June, however, the throng of refugees in Bitlis was gradually moved out of the city on the road leading south, guarded by gendarmes. A woman who escaped from one of these convoys and fled to the American mission revealed that the convoys were being attacked and decimated en route by Kurds.
At a meeting with Abdülhalik, Grace Knapp’s father, George Knapp, the head of the American mission and a Protestant minister, and the Armenian Protestant minister in Bitlis, Khachig Vartanian, requested that he authorize the caravans to take the road to Mush so that they could avoid the Kurdish attacks – but to no avail.
On 22 June, at a time when Bitlis was under serious threat from the Russian troops and the vali and local government were already making plans to leave, panic gripped the city with the arrival of the Kurdish chieftains of Modgan/Mutki.
It was later learned that, shortly before coming to Bitlis, the Kurds had destroyed the 27 Armenian villages in their kaza, massacring the 5,469 villagers where they found them.
The same day, the destruction of the Armenians of Bitlis began. The first step was the arrest of Reverend Vartanian, followed a day later by an operation targeting the American mission: it was surrounded by soldiers and gendarmes, who took the handful of Armenian pharmacists, nurses, and teachers employed there into custody.
It would appear that the presence of these foreign missionaries was extremely troublesome from the authorities’ point of view.
When they proceeded to arrest all the males in Bitlis the same day, Reverend Knapp immediately went to see Abdülhalik to demand an explanation. Courteous as always, the vali justified the arrests by citing information to the effect that letters from Van had been received by “some Armenians” in the city: “the object of arresting all the men was to discover who the recipients [of these letters] were.”
These feeble excuses, inspired by the offi cial discourse, could hardly hide the true objective of the systematic round-up, accompanied by unprecedented acts of violence, of all males over ten from the streets, schools, bazaar, and houses of Bitlis – namely, to eliminate all possibility of resistance from the outset.
From 22 June on, the men were led out of the city under escort in small groups of between 10 and 15 individuals, depending on the length of rope available to tie them up. They were then shot to death or killed with axes, shovels, or sharp stakes. It took a full two weeks to liquidate the Armenian male population of Bitlis.
In the testimony that Colonel Nusuhi Bey, a witness for the prosecution who had served in the Bitlis region, gave to the court-martial in 1919 about the activities of the commander-in-chief of the Third Army, Mahmud Kâmil, he noted in passing that the Armenians of Bitlis were killed “in a valley at a half-hour’s distance from the city,” where “they poured oil on them and burned them.”
On 25 June, Cevdet arrived in Bitlis with his 8,000 “human butchers.” The effect was not only to keep the Russian forces, then one hour away in Han Alam, from marching on the city, but also to cut off the city’s communications with the outside world.
The authorities could now go serenely about their business. Cevdet, the better to mark his arrival, immediately had Hokhigian and a few other Dashnak leaders in the city tortured. They were subsequently hanged on a nearby promontory, Taghi Klukh.
He then turned his attention to the imprisoned Armenian notables, from whom he extorted 5,000 Turkish pounds before demanding the “hand” of the daughters of two of them, Araxi and Armenuhi.
Doubtless in order to bring matters to a conclusion as speedily as possible, 700 men were conducted to a spot six miles from the city, slain, and then thrown into pits that they had been made to dig themselves. Not even very young children, it seems, were spared: all the boys from ages one to ten were taken from their families, led out of the city, thrown into a huge pit, doused with kerosene, and burned alive, “in the presence of the vali of Bitlis.”
A different fate was reserved for women, and the children from the city and surrounding villages who did not fall into this category – some 8,000 people in all. The police began in the city or in the courtyard of the cathedral, and then, early in July, conducted by gendarmes and policemen to the southern exit from Bitlis, at the entrance to the Arabi Gorge near the bridge of the same name, where they remained for two weeks.
The gorge served as a market where anyone who wished to could help himself to the woman, girl or child of his or her choice. At the end of this vast auction, at which 2,000 people found takers, the 6,000 unfortunates who had not were attacked at dawn by Cevdet’s çetes; several hundred perished.
The survivors were led in a caravan down the road to Siirt, guarded by gendarmes. The caravan was again harassed by çetes at Dzag Kar. What was left of it trekked past Siirt to Midyat, where approximately 1,000 deportees were murdered, leaving some 30 survivors with the option of continuing on their way.
By mid-July, only a dozen Armenian men were left in Bitlis – artisans whom the army considered indispensable – together with the women and girls held by the former parliamentary deputy Sadullah, the mal müdir, the chief of the post office, Hakkı, the proprietor of the hamam, and others.
The authorities also had to hunt down a few children still roaming the streets of the city; they were thrown into the river, or into pits whose sides were so steep that they could not climb back out of them.
Finally, Cevdet and Abdülhalik insisted on evicting the handful of women who had found refuge in the American mission, together with the girls at the school.
Grace Knapp’s detailed report about the harassment to which the mission was subjected bears witness to the two Young Turk leaders’ resolve to fulfill their mission: to wipe out the Armenian presence in Bitlis without leaving a trace behind.
Thus, we are told that gendarmes regularly called on the mission to arrest the women who had found refuge with the Americans. Some managed to stay where they were by bribing the gendarmes, but only for a few days, after which they met the common fate.
The arrest in the American mission of an orphan girl aged two or three, the daughter of an Armenian schoolteacher from Tatvan, illustrates the zeal displayed by the local police. It is true that the girl kept repeating, to whomever cared to listen, the name of the Kurd who had murdered her father.
The well-educated, polyglot girls at the American school aroused the desires of Young Turk officers, who even seem to have put pressure on the vali – this, at least, is what the Americans affirm – to turn the girls over to them.
It seems more likely, however, that these girls were destined to disappear like the others, even if the biological conception of Turkism then prevailing did not rule out such alliances. In the end, the girls of the American school escaped with their lives thanks to the chief physician at the Turkish Military Hospital, Mustafa Bey, an Arab who had been educated in France and Germany.
Aware that “the presence of these girls in the school was a constant thorn in the flesh to the government,” he nevertheless stubbornly opposed their deportation on the grounds that the hospital was absolutely incapable of operating properly without them: a stand that earned him the enmity of the Turkish officers who were impatiently awaiting their prize.
Thanks to Mustafa Bey’s resistance, the matter took on a certain importance, so that Mustafa Abdülhalik was left with no choice but to refer the question to Cevdet, who came only occasionally to Bitlis because he had other
business to attend to on the plain of Mush.
We may thus note in passing that Cevdet, both a military leader and a former vali, outranked Abdülhalik. In any event, Cevdet decided in favor of the army physician.
Around 15 July, when the liquidation of the Armenians of the sancak was virtually complete, the Russian forces stepped up their pressure and the local government made serious plans to evacuate the city. To this end, a battalion of 1,000 Armenian conscripts was sent southward with the vali’s library and archives. All these men were massacred at some distance from Bitlis, and the governor’s archives were destroyed.
The authorities would later accuse George Knapp of having hoisted the American flag over the roof of the hospital in which wounded soldiers and Muslims suffering from typhus were being treated in order to “guide the enemy.”
Yet the Turks were the first to express surprise when they learned on 24 July that the Russian troops had pulled back. After this brief moment of panic, two staff members of the local branch of the Banque Impériale Ottomane returned to Bitlis and reported on the ghastly scenes that they had witnessed on the road leading south. The banks of the Bitlis Çay were covered with piles of rotting corpses; in many places, mountains of dead bodies blocked the road and the sides of the road were littered with the remains of the deportees from Bitlis and the surrounding region.
We have little information about the fate of the villages in the vicinity of Bitlis, with the exception of the important town of Khultig, lying two hours southeast of the city, with an Armenian population of 2,598. In May, gendarmes went to Khultig to collect arms; in exchange, they promised the villagers protection.
With the first acts of violence in Bitlis, on 25 June, some of these villagers fl ed, only to be massacred in the countryside. It was not until 2 July that Khultig was occupied by 100 soldiers and Kurdish militiamen. The inhabitants were then packed into barns and burned alive by Humaşli Farso and his men.
Thirty young men managed to escape and subsequently joined the volunteer battalions. Some 100 women and children from the village were later found among the Kurdish tribes of the region, and another five women and ten orphan girls were found in Bitlis when the Russians took the city in 1916.
Thus Rafaël de Nogales’s estimate that 15,000 Armenians were massacred in the sancak of Bitlis alone seems quite plausible.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 340-343.
Map – Houshamadyan
