Contrary to expectations, the high mountain district of Sasun, which dominated the plain of Mush to the north and the valleys in the northern part of the vilayet of Dyarbekir to the south, was not the first area in the vilayet of Mush to come under attack.
Indeed, in summer 1915, Sasun even served as a haven for the tens of thousands of Armenians fleeing deportation and massacre in the vicinity. It seems as if the authorities’ strategy consisted in trapping the survivors in this “mountain sanctuary.” Later they sealed it off.
As we have seen, on 2 June 1915, Kurdish irregulars launched an offensive against the district of Psank/ Busank in the southern part of Sasun in order to confiscate the arms held by the villagers. The failure of this offensive made the authorities more cautious. They had no doubt also learned the lessons of Cevdet’s defeat in Van; this time, they would take as many precautions as they could to ensure the success of their plans.
Alma Johannsen, while visiting the Ottoman general staff in Mush, where she hoped to find surviving women teachers from her orphanage, observed that all these high-ranking officers “were very proud that they had been able to eradicate the Armenians so quickly … and were sorry that such extensive preparatory measures had been taken.”
To wipe out the Sasun district’s 80,233 Armenians, who had repeatedly shown, notably in 1894, that they were not inclined to let themselves be killed without a fight, the authorities took a series of measures. They managed to mobilize some 3,000 Armenian conscripts, who were officially to be enrolled in the military transport service but were in fact taken under guard to Lice and then split up into three groups that were executed between Harput and Palu in May 1915.
Early in May, they also organized the massacre of the Armenians of the kazas of Silvan and Beşiri, to the south of Sasun, probably to make it easier to close off the southern access routes to Sasun – to which several thousand of the Silvan/Beşiri Armenians nevertheless managed to flee. That is, the authorities sought to bring all avenues of communication with Sasun under control without, however, preventing survivors from the plain from fleeing there. They hoped to starve the Armenians in the mountain district into submission, as they had tried to do in Van; for while Sasun had meat in abundance – it was a cattle-and sheep-breeding district – it was utterly dependent on the neighboring regions for its grain supply and salt.
If we add to these refugees the 8,000 and more Armenians of the kaza of Harzan (in the sancak of Siirt), who fled the first massacres in their area perpetrated in mid-June by Halil and Cevdet and found haven in Sasun, we can readily imagine how critical the sanitary situation of these people must have been. It became far worse a month later, in mid-July, when, in their turn, some 20,000 villagers from the plain of Mush poured in through the pass of Havadorig.
As soon as he arrived in Mush, Lieutenant-Colonel Halil (Kut) sent part of the forces under his command – several squadrons of cavalry – to bolster the siege of Sasun, which Kurdish irregulars had been maintaining unaided until then. In any case, it was only after the regular troops had finished cleansing the plain of Mush of its Armenians that they arrived in large numbers to crush the resistance in Sasun.
The operation put in place to eradicate the tens of thousands of Armenians who had taken refuge there resembled a veritable military campaign. The Şeg, Beder, Bozek, and Calal tribes took up positions to the east of the mountain district; the Kurds of Kulp, led by Hüseyin Beg and Hasan Beg, dug in to the west, along with the Kurds of Genc and Lice; Khati Bey of Mayafarkin and the Khiank, Badkan, and Bagran tribes took up their positions to the south; finally, the regular army, equipped with mountain cannons, set out to take Sasun from the north. Additional troops were dispatched from Dyarbekir and Mamuret ul-Aziz to reinforce those already on hand.
Ruben Ter Minasian, one of the two leaders of the Armenian resistance, estimates that the Kurdish-Turkish force encircling Sasun comprised around 30,000 troops. In the besieged district were approximately 20,000 natives of the kaza and some 30,000 refugees who, as we have seen, had come from the plain of Mush and areas to the south.
According to Vahan Papazian, the other main Armenian leader, the self-defense effort was mounted by about 1,000 men who had very few modern weapons and a great many hunting rifles.
The first general assault was launched on 18 July 1915. It was renewed the next day by way of Shenek. The attackers forced the Armenians to fall back to their second line of defense on Mt. Antok, where they held firm for several days running. By 28 July, Sasun was running low on ammunition and famine had begun to claim lives, especially among the refugees.
On 2 August, the defenders decided to attempt a sortie with the whole population of the enclave. A few thousand Armenians succeeded in crossing the Kurdish-Turkish lines and making their way to the Russian positions in the northern extremity of the sancak of Mush, but the vast majority were massacred, notably in the valley of Gorshik, after the hand-to-hand fi ghting of the fi nal battles of 5 August, in which the women, armed with daggers, also took part.
A few days earlier, in late July, some of the refugees had gone back down to the plain in desperation. They had convinced themselves that the sultan’s firman (order), in which he granted the Armenians “his pardon” and promised to spare the lives of those who returned to their homes, was no hollow promise. A few days later, the pyres on which the corpses of some of these gullible villagers were burning in Norshen, Khaskiugh, and Mgrakom sent up billows of foul-smelling smoke that polluted the whole plain.
Other Armenians, a few thousand in number, were deported, while a few hundred were “taken into” Kurdish families or seized as war booty by officers. At the time, the Russian lines, which ran through Melazkırt, were only 25 miles from Mush. It was this distance that the fugitives crossed at night in order to reach the front, when they were not intercepted.
In mid-July, Vahan Papazian, Ruben Ter Minasian, and a few fedayis succeeded in doing so, going by way of the mountain district of Nemrud. Sasun had by this time been emptied of its inhabitants, and its villages lay in ruins.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History.
