The eradication of the 141,489 Armenians of the sancak of Mush and the destruction of the 234 towns and villages in which they lived constituted an objective that was incomparably harder to attain for the Turkish authorities than cleansing Bitlis and Siirt of their Armenian populations.
The two conscription campaigns of August 1914 and March 1914 had drained the area of its vital forces, as we have already pointed out, and considerably diminished the Armenians’ ability to defend themselves. For the authorities, the priority was obviously to extirpate the population of Sasun and take control of its mountain fastnesses.
In May, they launched their first attack on the area with support from Kurdish tribes – the Beleks, Bekrans, Şegos, and so on – which they armed. This attack was repulsed. These operations were carried out at the same time as those that targeted the civilian populations of the kazas south of Sasun, Silvan and Beşiri, and in the northern part of the sancak of Mush, in Bulanik.
The timing of the two actions suggests that the next stage in the plan was the liquidation of the “big piece in the middle” comprising the 103 villages of the plain of Mush, with its 75,623 Armenians.
The failure of the offensive against Sasun conducted by the Kurdish çetes probably convinced the Young Turks to appeal exceptionally to “regular” troops in order to get the better of this dense cluster of Armenians. Here, no doubt, lies the explanation for the June lull in the action in Mush: the harassment and plunder of the villages in the district “suddenly ceased everywhere, and perfect order prevailed in Mush.”
The calm held for three weeks, during which Halil’s and Cevdet’s forces were busy liquidating the Armenians of the sancaks of Siirt and Bitlis. They became available for other operations only in early July, at which point Cevdet and Lieutenant-Colonel Kâsim Bey, accompanied by a division, left Halil to fi nish his task in Bitlis and gained the plain of Mush.
It was not until 8 July 1915 that Halil and his Expeditionary Corps, equipped with mountain cannons, linked up with them. But the authorities also needed to mobilize local forces to maximize their chances of success. They were greatly aided in this by the June arrival in Mush of a key personage, Hoca Ilyas Sâmi, a Kurdish religious dignitary and a member of the Ottoman National Assembly.
Sâmi, who galvanized the Muslim populations of the region, does not appear to have returned from Constantinople by accident. One historian says that the mutesarif, Servet, called him to the rescue; in fact, he had just been named CUP inspector in Mush. As in the other vilayets, an operational committee was created, and Sâmi was named to head it; the other members included Servet; Halil (Kut); Falamaz Bey, Hoca Ilyas’s fi rst cousin; Derviş Bey; Haci Musa Beg, Hoca Ilyas’s uncle; Dido Reşid, the CUP delegate in Mush; and Salih Bey – all of whom were tribal chiefs belonging to the Young Turk club in Mush.
The committee could also rely on the support of civilian officials such as Bedirhan Effendi, the head of the land-registry office; İbrahim Effendi, the director of the hospital; Esad Pasha, the kaymakam of Bulanik; Mahmud Effendi, the police chief; Kâzım Effendi and Rıza Effendi, police officers; and military personnel such as Behcet Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie, and Dr. Asaf, an army pharmacist.
The Special Organization had squadrons of Kurdish hamidiyes at its disposal, as well as the members of local tribes rallied by Haci Musa Beg, the commander-in-chief of the irregular forces. Haci Musa Beg was seconded by the commanders of the çetes: Rustamoğlu Hayrullah; the sons of Haci Yasin, Kazaz Mahmud, Kotunlı Dursun, Şükrü, Mustafa and Arif from Haci Ali; Abdül Kerim; the sons of Topal Goto; Kotunlı Ahmed; Şeikh Niazi and his brother, Cemil Effendi, from Beyrakdar; Nurheddin from Slo; Arif from Asad; Haci İbrahim; Bakdur Hüseyin; and Deli Reşidoğlu Mahmud. Some of these officers of the Special Organization, such as Dido Reşid, along with his 500 men, had already participated in the military operations at Van. Others were just arriving on the scene. All, however, received arms, ammunition and a salary from the prefecture, and were employed as “regular forces” on mission.
Hoca Ilyas Sâmi continued to play an altogether central role in Mush. The fact that he was a high religious dignitary endowed him with considerable prestige, which he used to preach the jihad in the city’s grand mosque.
Yet, like all the local notables, he was doubtless only executing orders received from Lieutenant-Colonel Halil (Kut), one of the leaders of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa. The first measure taken after the 8 July arrival of Halil’s Expeditionary Corps in Mush was designed to bring all the access routes to the city under control and cut off communications between the localities of the plain, which were attacked the next day by squadrons of çetes under the command of Haci Musa Beg.
In the days preceding the attacks, the same çetes confiscated arms in all the villages after systematically torturing the villagers into revealing where they had hidden their rifles. In other words, steps were taken to make it possible to swing into action as soon as the upper echelons of the Special Organization gave the order. The task before these çetes was easier in that there were hardly any young men left in the localities they were to attack.
The various survivors’ accounts at our disposal indicate that much the same method was applied throughout the plain. The çetes would encircle a village, round up the men, tie them together in groups of 10 to 15, lead them from the village, and kill them in a nearby orchard or fi eld. Then they would shut the women and children up in one or more barns, picking out children and the “prettiest” young women for themselves before dousing the building(s) with kerosene and burning those inside alive.
Finally, they would plunder the village and then burn it to the ground. An eyewitness account given to a French press correspondent who was in Istanbul during the trial of the Young Turk leaders describes the case of 2,000 women who were surrounded by these Kurdish çetes and “sullied and looted.” The women were suspected “of having swallowed their jewels to keep them out of the bandits’ hands.” Disemboweling them proved to be too time-consuming a job. They were therefore doused with kerosene and burned alive. The next day, their ashes were run through a sieve.
No fewer than six days, from 9 to 14 July, were required to extirpate the Armenians from the plain of Mush and the northwestern kaza of Varto (nine villages with a total Armenian population of 649). Roughly 20,000 people managed to flee to the Sasun highland, near Havadorig, where they crowded into an area with a circumference of three to three-and-ahalf miles, a veritable trap in which they found themselves surrounded, along with the rest of the Sasun mountain district.
A few people from villages in the northeastern part of the plain, such as Vartenis, succeeded in fleeing to the Russian lines near Akhlat. Colonel Nusuhi Bey, in the testimony on the violence on the plain of Mush that he gave to the 1919 court-martial, states that he suggested to Mahmud Kâmil that the women and children be “left in peace.”
However, on his return to Mush, he found that preparations for the violence were in progress and met the leader of the çetes “charged with killing the Armenians,” Musa Beg, together with his band. This would seem to indicate that the orders to eradicate the Armenians were issued by an authority independent of the army, most probably the leadership of the Special Organization, whose highest-ranking representative in the region was Halil (Kut).
The chronology of events shows, moreover, that Halil personally supervised operations. Whereas the villages on the plain were razed on 9 July, he gave his men the order on 10 July to take control of the Armenian houses on the heights dominating the city, the strategically located quarter known as the “Citadel,” with a view to setting up his mountain cannons there.
On 11 July, the local authorities had the munedik (town crier) announce that all males over 15 had to register for their departure, with their families, for Urfa, in compliance with government orders. The next day, 200 people who had shown up to register were arrested and sent the following night to a village on the plain, Alizrnan, where they were slaughtered.
The day before, the mutesarif, Servet Bey, had had 300 worker soldiers from Mush, who had already been enrolled in amele taburis, executed on the road to Chabaghchur (in the sancak of Genc). He also turned a battalion of 700 worker-soldiers over to the police chief, Kâzım; the men were locked up for two days without food or water, tied up, and then sent to Garmir, where they were shot.
These initial operations were designed to complete the arrangements to eliminate all those who might offer resistance to the program of destruction. After the vicar and a few leading men of the city begged the mutesarif to spare the women and children, he fi nally agreed to grant them a respite of three days, until 14 July.
It seems reasonable to suppose, however, that the 12 July arrest of the bishop of Mush, Reverend Vartan, and 100 other people, all of them subsequently taken under guard to Khaskiugh and shot, was part of the general plan put in place by the authorities, who had never intended to deport the Armenian population of the region, but rather meant to liquidate it on the spot.
Only after bringing these initial operations to their term and beginning to cleanse the Armenian villages on the plain of their population did the Young Turk leaders in Mush give the order, on 12 July, to shell the Armenian neighborhoods of the city, and then to send units of the army and squadrons of çetes into action against them.
The 3,000 inhabitants of the neighborhoods located in the lower part of the city, Chikrashen and Prudi, were the first to be rounded up and escorted to Arinchvank, a short distance northwest of the city. Here they were separated into two groups: the men were shot in the village orchard, while the women and children were shut up in barns that were then set on fire.
Çetes and soldiers went through these neighborhoods house by house; they broke down doors and, without further ado, massacred all those who had barricaded themselves in their homes, using axes or bayonets.
Part of the population of the city and the inhabitants of the villages near Mush succeeded in fleeing to Veri Tagh, Tsori Tagh, and St. Marineh, where resistance was organized around a core of some 60 armed men, led by Hagop Godoyan.
The cannons in the upper city pounded these neighborhoods as the regular troops and çetes steadily advanced, taking first St. Marineh and then Veri Tagh. The civilian population fled in panic to the last Armenian enclave, Tsori Tagh, the “Quarter of the Little Valley.” Many of the refugees were caught as they tried to escape, and were either killed on the spot or locked into houses “doused with kerosene” and burned alive.
Thus, a group of 1,100 women and children was detained in the courtyard of the police station and then sent to Karist, where these Armenians were shut up in barns and burned alive on the orders of Behcet Bey, the commander of the gendarmerie, who saw to it that the gold and jewels found in the ashes were collected.
After several days of desperate resistance, the fighters defending the Tsor neighborhood abandoned their positions on 17 July, leaving the çetes and regular soldiers a clear field. The soldiers were followed by a mob intent on looting. Many of the Armenians perished in an attempt to flee into the mountains on the night of 17/18 July; those who survived were taken under guard to Komer, Kashkiugh, Norshen, Arinchvank, or Alizrnan, where 5,000 people were packed into barns and burned alive.
The heads of certain households opted to poison themselves and all the members of their family; others managed to escape to the mountains of Sasun. The stragglers and the wounded left behind in the city were stacked up on a “huge pyre” and set ablaze. This cycle of violence was brought to a close when the Armenian neighborhoods were systematically burned down.
Some 10,000 women and children from the villages on the plain of Mush – Sorader, Pazu, Hasanova, Salehan, Gvars, Meghd, Baghlu, Uruj, Ziaret, Khebian, Dom, Hergerd, Norag, Aladin, Goms, Khachkhaldukh, Sulukh, Khoronk, Kartsor, Kizil, Aghatch, Komer, Sheikhlan, Avazaghpiur, Plel, and Kurdmeydan – were “deported” westwards by way of the eastern Euphrates valley (the Murat Su) under Kurdish escort.
Some of the women died or were abducted on the way. Others were massacred by Kurds who had come from Jabahçur in the gorges of the Murat Su, the entry to which lies west of Genc. These were the only Armenians of the sancak who were not put to death in their native region.
Even the children and teaching staff of the Deutscher Hilfbund’s orphanage in Mush, where the Swedish missionary Alma Johannsen (1880–1974) worked, were targeted for destruction. A squadron of regular soldiers went to see the Swedish missionary under the lead of a commanding officer who presented her with “a written government order” to “turn over” the orphan girls and Armenian women present in the institution (many women had found sanctuary there during the massacres) to him so that they could be “sent to Mesopotamia.”
Apparently under no illusion as to the fate in store for these women and girls, Johannsen attempted to resist the orders of the commanding officer. The next day, she discovered that, apart from the handful of her protégés who had “found a protector,” the others, several hundred in all, had been “assembled in a house and burned alive,” or else buried alive in big mass graves outside the city.
Combing the city in search of possible survivors, she heard a gendarme boasting that he had burned the “little girls” of her orphanage alive. The authorities had shown a certain respect for the formalities in dealing with this conscientious missionary, the only “foreign” witness to events in the region, who, moreover, worked for a German institution; they presented her with an official written order.
They did not, however, succeed in preventing her from reporting on the bloody practices of the government and army, which here showed themselves to be pliable tools in the hands of the Ittihad’s Central Committee. Johannsen notes, moreover, that Servet Bey tried to evacuate the German woman and another Swedish woman who ran the Deutscher Hilfsbund’s orphanage with her to Harput, but that only the German obeyed his order to leave.
The few conversations Johannsen had with the mutesarif also contain the only first-hand descriptions we have of the mood of this militant Young Turk. Johannsen made an attempt to save her orphan girls by wringing permission from Sevret to take them to Harput. He consented, but added, “Since they are Armenians, their heads may be, and indeed will be, lopped off on the way.”
Thus, all pretences had been dropped; no further attempt was made to hide the CUP’s true objectives. The Swedish missionary observes that, after the slaughter was over, “all the officers were boasting about how many victims they had personally massacred, thus helping rid Turkey of the Armenian race.”
Here, as elsewhere, the economic dimension of the program to eradicate the Armenians has to be taken into account. Certain local notables, such as the parliamentary deputy Hoca Ilyas Sâmi, even managed to reconcile their “patriotic” duty with their personal interests. On friendly terms with the leading Armenians of Mush, Sâmi had, from the very beginning of the massacres in the city, suggested to several of these notables that they come to stay in his home, where they would be safe.
Nazaret Keshishian, Dikran Mezrigian, Aram and Bedros Baduhasian, and Mgrdich Amrighian and their families accepted the offer. In this fashion Sâmi succeeded in getting his hands on their property; he then turned his guests over to the government, which had them murdered on the edge of town.
This handful of advantages in kind, like the goods that the mob of looters took from the Armenians’ homes and boutiques, amounted to very little in comparison with the lion’s share of the booty that the four men who organized and carried out the carnage took for themselves. A witness observes that after the butchers had fi nished their work, Abdülhalik, Hoca Ilyas, Cevdet, and Halil left the city, “followed by a long string of camels loaded down with eighteen big bundles. These bundles, covered with gaily colored sheets, were full of gold, silver, precious objects and antiques.” The caravan was bound for Constantinople.
It is also easy to imagine the precious objects that were seized when the big monasteries were plundered; their treasures, which had in some cases been accumulating for 15 centuries, were of inestimable value, to say nothing of their unique collections of medieval manuscripts, of which today only fragments survive thanks to the determination of a handful of people. It is likely that the bulk of these stolen goods were earmarked for the Central Committee of the Ittihad and its individual members. That said, how are we to explain the weakness of the resistance in Mush? To begin with, unlike the plain, Mush had a majority Muslim population, and the number of regular troops stationed there was much higher than in Van: counting the squadrons of çetes as well, there were more than 20,000 troops in the city.
Vahan Papazian, who remained in Mush until mid-June, writes in his memoirs that opinions diverged within the Dashnak leadership of Daron about the steps to take to safeguard the population. Should the Armenians anticipate the arrival of the Turkish regular forces by trying to seize control of the city, or should they withdraw to the mountains of Sasun with the men capable of fi ghting?
It seems that the Armenian leaders had not defi nitely opted for one or the other alternative, but thought that the authorities were planning to attack Sasun before turning to the plain of Mush. They consequently assumed that it was preferable to withdraw into the mountains with the fi ghters and all available arms, since it was the mountain district that was in any event going to serve as a refuge for the villagers of the plain. The infl uence that the Russian advance had on the choices made by both the Armenians and the authorities must also be considered. Late in June, the Russian army occupied Manazgerd/Melazkırt, attaining on 18 July the westernmost point that it would reach during the fi rst phase of the war, the nahie of Liz (in the kaza of Bulanik). From there, it was a 16-hour march to Mush.
Even if the Dashnak leaders in the region did not have exact intelligence, especially after their withdrawal to Sasun, they had set their hopes on a prompt rescue by their cousins from the north, with whom they had only recently had execrable relations. Rafaël de Nogales, who continued to see Cevdet and Halil for the next few years despite his negative experiences at Van and Siirt, put the number of Armenians massacred in Mush and on the plain at 50,000. He did not count those who succeeded in fleeing to Sasun only to be eradicated a few weeks later.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History.
In picture- the bridge of Suluskh
