Note– According to the Constantinople’s Armenian Patriarchate’s Information Bureau, in the Vilayet of Erzerum, before the Armenian Genocide, the Armenians lived in 425 localities, had 406 churches and 76 monasteries, 322 schools with 21.348 schoolboys and schoolgirls. The total Armenian population was 202.391.
The vilayet of Erzerum was the major theater of the fighting between the Russians and Turks and, as such, constituted a central strategic stake of the First World War. The fortress of Erzerum and the surrounding plain constituted the rear base of the Third Army, which had its headquarters in Tortum, north of the regional capital.
With the failure of the Turkish offensive in winter 1914–15, the Third Army was decimated and the Ottoman general staff had to make a strenuous effort to form new unities. In February, Enver suggested that Liman von Sanders, the head of the German military mission, take command of this front, but the German general rejected the offer since the troops with which he was supposed to rebuild the army were in a catastrophic state: “approximately one-third of the troops in the region’s training camps were ill, while another third had deserted on their way to the recruitment centers.”
The command of the Third Army had consequently been entrusted to Kâmil, a former classmate of the minister of war. From the moment he took office in May, the new vali of Erzerum, Tahsin Bey, had also been confronted with a typhus epidemic that was wreaking havoc on the soldiers and the civilian population (he had been briefly aided in his new post, as we have seen, by the president of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, Bahaeddin Şakir, before Şakir’s departure for Istanbul on 13 March 1915). Thereupon, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi Bey, a famous CUP fedayi, took the reins of the Special Organization as its interim president.
So far, we have seen that the violence inflicted on the Armenian population, which basically occurred during the military operations in the winter of 1914–15, affected border zones and can be explained in terms of strategic imperatives and the Ittihad’s desire to eliminate potential enemies.
The rest of the vilayet of Erzerum had, generally speaking, been spared massacres. On the other hand, we noted the excesses that accompanied the military requisitions, as well as acts of violence, confirmed by German diplomats, in certain kazas of the Erzerum vilayet.
The incidents were serious enough that the German ambassador Wangenheim felt compelled “to address them in conversations with the Sublime Porte … The Grand Vizier thinks that these incidents could not have taken place without provocation from the Armenians.” The German consul Paul Schwarz, however, noted in a 5 December 1914 report to his ambassador that the Armenians were in a state of high alarm as a result of certain incidents “that they considered to be warning signs of new massacres.” He mentioned in particular the murder of the parish priest in Odzni on 1 December by “three Turkish irregulars” who had spent the night in his house, as well as the exactions committed by other çetes of the Special Organization (for example, in the village of Tevfik, where a dozen irregulars had illegally locked up the men of the village because they were unable to produce the 100 Turkish pounds demanded of them). Violence had also been perpetrated by regular Turkish troops, who compensated for the shortage of barracks by taking up quarters in Armenian villages, evicting the inhabitants and consuming their food reserves.
The celebrations and patriotic manifestations that had been organized in the capital after the capture of Ardahan were now things of the past, as were the congratulations that Enver Pasha had extended to the Armenian primate of Konya on the conduct of the Armenian soldiers on the Caucasian front. On his retreat to Erzerum, moreover, the minister of war had taken 200 Armenians from the Olti area hostage. They were imprisoned in Erzerum and later executed. Enver also had 30 Armenian civilians from Ardahan, whom he had likewise taken hostage after the defeat at Sarıkamiş, hanged beneath the ramparts of Erzerum at the Istanbul Gate. To be sure, the allegedly hostile activity of these foreign civilians was cited to justify the treatment meted out to them, but it did not frighten the Armenian population of Erzerum any less for that. The Armenians interpreted it as a clear sign of the Young Turk government’s mood. The intensification of the hostility toward the Armenians peaked, without a doubt, on 10 February 1915, when, in broad daylight, two soldiers murdered the assistant director of the Erzerum branch of the Banque Ottomane, Setrak Pastermajian, in the middle of the street. The directors of the bank in Constantinople learned that the local authorities had announced that Pastermajian had died of typhus, which was then raging in the region. In private, however, as well as in diplomatic circles, it was rumored that he had been killed because his brother, a former parliamentary deputy from the vilayet, was working for the Russians.
The military commander of the garrison, General Posseldt, who took an interest in the matter, observed that the murderers, whom everyone knew, had not been arrested. This was an indication that the soldiers had been acting under orders. According to Constantin Trianfidili, a Greek notable from Erzerum, many more Turks than Christians had refused to enlist in the army ever since the 3 August announcement of the general mobilization, yet only the Christians were harassed.
The same witness claimed that Pastermajian had been murdered in order to see how the Armenians would react, and they had not budged. For his part, Alphonse Arakelian observes that “the deportations did not come out of a clear blue sky; the government first had recourse to provocations.”
Bands of çetes raped and looted in the rural districts, while murders of soldiers took place more frequently. But “still no-one budged.” The Armenians of Erzerum knew, says the same witness, that a large number of military units had pitched camp in the area; “what is more, almost all the young Armenian men were already in the army.”
Thus, here, as in the vilayet of Van, provocations began mushrooming from February 1915 on, although the phenomenon did not take on the dimensions it did there. As has already been said, a good many Armenian inhabitants of the kazas of Pasın (pop. 12,914), Narman (pop. 655), Bayazid (pop. 1,735), Dyadin (pop. 1,111), Karakilisa (pop. 6,034), and Alaşkert (pop. 7,732) – a total of 30,181 villagers in all (3,726 households) – followed the retreating Russian forces in late December and early January.
In the kaza of Pasın, however, only the Lower Pasın district was evacuated. In areas further to the west, not far from Erzerum, 4,000 people remained behind, notably in Ekabad, Hertev, Hasankale, and Badijavan. In late March, the peasants of these villages in the Pasın district were deported on the pretext that “they lived too close to the border and there was good reason to be suspicious of the Armenians.”
These provocations notwithstanding, the Armenians of Erzerum were not unduly molested until April. When violence did occur, the primate, Smpat Saadetian, would go with a few other notables to lodge a complaint with Vali Tahsin, who “played dumb or pretended to be deaf, depending on the circumstances.”
The first sign of alarm came in late February 1915, when 70 Armenian notables from Erzerum were arrested. Sixty of those detained were released after the prelate interceded on their behalf, but ten members of the editorial board of the Dashnak newspaper Harach, Aram Adruni and his comrades, were kept in prison and then transferred to an unknown destination.
The target of these actions was plainly the local Dashnak committee. For the time being, however, the local authorities seemed to content themselves with measures of intimidation. As elsewhere, the Armenian elite of the region was arrested on 24 and 25 April 1915. Some 200 individuals were apprehended, including the Dashnak leaders Kegham Balasanian, Stepan Stepanian (known as Maral), Pilos, and Mihran Terlemezian. The next day, Adruni, Stepanian, Balasanian, Hrant Koseyan and Boghos Papaklian, among others – 30 notables in all – were ordered to be transferred to Erzincan and were slain on their way there.
The others were held in the central prison of Erzincan and interrogated under torture about arms caches as well as alleged plans to revolt. Four to five hundred prisoners were squeezed into squalid cells. Officially, the aim was to forestall a general insurrection. The real aim, however, was to obtain compromising “revelations” by means of torture. These confessions were meant to justify in advance the events that were about to unfold.
A telegram that Bahaeddin Şakir sent on 21 April 1915 from Erzerum to the CUP delegate responsible for the vilayet of Mamuret ul-Aziz, Resneli Boşnak Nâzım Bey, shows that the head of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa had returned to the region in the latter half of April. He quickly set up a special deportation committee; Cemal Bey, secretary general of the vilayet (a sort of “vice vali”) and an influential member of Erzerum’s Ittihadist club, was named as its president. He was assisted by the kaymakam of Hasankale, Tahir Bey; Hulusi Bey, the police chief; Mustafa Efendi Ali Guzelzâde, an Ittihadist; and Jafer Mustafa Effendi, the commander of the squadrons of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa in Erzerum. All deportation orders were executed under the supervision of this committee, which handled the lists of deportees.
The çetes were under the supervision of Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi Bey, Şakir’s assistant. Information communicated to ambassador Wangenheim by the German vice-consul Scheubner-Richter, who was reporting explanations given by Vali Tahsin, indicates that the deportation orders were issued by the military authorities – more exactly, by the commander of the Third Army, Mahmud Kâmil – whereas the civilian authorities, especially the vali, were reluctant to implement these measures.
Thanks to information provided by an Armenian survivor from Erzerum, Boghos Vartanian, we can give a more coherent explanation of the process that culminated in the application of the decision to eradicate the Armenians. According to Vartanian, the Sublime Porte sent a telegram to Erzerum about the treatment to be meted out to the Armenians. In response, a secret meeting was held at Vali Hasan Tahsin’s residence from 18 April to 21 April 1915. In attendance were the local Ittihadist leaders and notables from the city, some 120 people in all. Those present fell into three groups. A group of 40 people argued for limiting the pending measures to removing the Armenians from the border zones. The 20 people in the second group recommended that the Armenians be left alone. A third block, headed by the vali, the parliamentary deputy Seyfullah, and the principal Young Turk leaders of the city, demanded “that all the Armenians be eradicated, that all of them be taken from their homes and then massacred, until not a one is left alive.”
The date of this conclave gives us reason to think that Şakir and Filibeli Hilmi took a discrete part in the discussions, submitting the “patriotic” arguments of the Young Turk Central Committee to the consideration of their friends from Erzerum. It is, consequently, probable that local officialdom and the local elite were brought into the decision-making process in all the vilayets. The content of the message that Şakir sent from Erzerum to the CUP delegate in Harput, Resneli Nâzım, on the last day of the Erzerum conclave, 21 April 1915, reinforces this suspicion. Furthermore, a cable that Vali Tahsin sent to the minister of the interior on 13 May 191531 seems to confirm that the army played the central role in the initial operations aimed at cleansing the region of its Armenians.
More exactly, it confirms that the CUP had chosen to address its deportation orders to the military hierarchy as a way of legitimizing its discourse about ensuring the security of the army’s rear. Concealed behind this official facade, however, as the instructions dispatched by the interior minister show, was an administrative apparatus on the one hand and the Young Turk network on the other. Yet we must not neglect the real hostility of certain high-ranking government officials to these measures, either because they were loath to carry out such tasks or, as in the case of Hasan Tahsin, because they were aware of all the negative consequences that this deportation could have for the local economy, the provisioning of the army and, more generally, the maintenance of social peace in the vilayet.
Tahsin was also made uncomfortable by allegations of an Armenian insurrection, which seemed too implausible to him; he suggested that the civilian population be allowed to remain at home. But the official response of the minister of the interior, dated 23 May, recommended that the civilian officials of the eastern vilayets apply the orders issued by the military authorities – in other words, by the commander of the Third Army, which had jurisdiction over the six eastern vilayets.
The collection of documents for the years 1915–20 published by the General Directorate of the State Archives unfortunately does not include the deportation order transmitted to the valis, probably because it did not have an official character. According to Sebuh Aguni, who had a great many documents at his disposal in his time, this order arrived in Erzerum on 5 May 1915, even before the cabinet had officially decided, on 13 May, to deport the Armenian population and, on the 27 May, made the “law” on the matter public.
Thus, there was a marked lag between the CUP’s political decisions, the corresponding discussions in the provinces, and their formal translation. The only information we have on the content of the message sent to the local governments is provided indirectly by the resolution of the Council of Ministers, which still bears the marks of the Ittihad’s militant discourse and is much less formal than the “temporary deportation law” published two weeks later. The resolution is, in fact, of the order of a propaganda declaration: it evokes, pell-mell, “Armenians engaged in dangerous operations, collaborating with the enemy, slaughtering an innocent [Muslim] population and plotting rebellions.”
It is probable that the Ittihadist leaders came to the conclusion, after publishing a resolution designed for internal consumption, that it was not likely to appear credible outside Ottoman circles. In any event, the deportation orders in the three eastern provinces of Van, Bitlis, and Erzerum were issued before any decision had been reached by the cabinet. The Central Committee used its own channels to circulate them, but rapidly realized that, despite the presence of its delegates in the provinces, it could not set its extermination program in motion without offering local governments a legal justification for their acts. In other words, the CUP was at the outset certainly planning to conduct operations in line with its usual internal procedures – in secret and without the slightest legal grounding – but then changed its mind.
It is doubtless no accident that on the very day on which Talât confirmed the deportations from the vilayet of Erzerum – 23 May – the minister of the post and telegraph office ordered that all its Armenian employees in the provinces of Erzerum, Angora, Adana, Sıvas, Dyarbekir, and Van be dismissed. The desire to ensure the confidentiality of communications and the nature of the orders to come undoubtedly mandated such precautions. The first operations targeting Armenian civilians were so violent that, notwithstanding the many measures taken in advance to keep them out of the public eye, the German viceconsul, Scheubner-Richter, felt compelled to alert his embassy. For his part, Dr. Mordtmann, who was responsible for the “Armenian file” at the embassy, demanded an explanation from the interior minister.
Talât responded that very serious charges had been leveled against the Armenians of Erzerum, who were involved in a conspiracy. He saw proof of this in the discovery of “bombs,” a term to which the minister of the interior frequently resorted by way of explanation. Yet the German diplomat’s reports and the offi cial correspondence published by the General Directorate of the State Archives, which are rife with accusations of this kind, make no mention of such discoveries in Erzerum. No doubt Talât had been extemporizing. He informed the Germans in the same breath that the decision to deport the Armenians was irrevocable.
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 289-293.
In photo- Photo showing scene of deportation of Erzurum Armenians published | ARMENPRESS Armenian News Agency
