The round-up of Constantinople’s Armenian elite that took place during the night of 24/25 April affected several hundred people – not only Dashnak, Hnchak and Ramgavar political activists, but also the most prominent Armenian journalists, as well as writers, lawyers, doctors, secondary school principals, clergymen, and merchants.
A handful of individuals, including Sebuh Aguni and Yervant Odian, slipped through this vast dragnet – but they would be arrested later. Two eminent Armenian leaders, the parliamentary deputies Zohrab and Seringiulian, were left at liberty. Early in the morning of Sunday, 25 April, the two deputies, who had been informed of the arrests made that night, in particular those of the Dashnak leaders Aknuni, Rupen Zartarian, and Garabed Khan Pashayan, went together to Talât’s house to ask their close acquaintance for an explanation.
Talât temporized. Zohrab wrote with some bitterness in his diary that “the ARF, after working side by side with the Ittihad and in its interests, has now been dealt a heavy blow by it.” He claimed to know why he himself was still in freedom, but did not state the reason. We are inclined to think that, with his colleague Vartkes, he was being held in reserve because the government feared that the course of events might take an unfavorable turn for the empire: on 25 April, French and British forces had begun disembarking in the Dardanelles at Gallipoli, and preparations to transfer the government to Eskişehir, in the interior of the country, had been accelerated.
After maneuvering and concealing its real aims for several weeks in order to forestall the possibility of an Armenian reaction, the Ittihad had at last decided to act. The first step was to neutralize the Armenian elite. Quite obviously, this operation, which mobilized several hundred state agents, had been carefully prepared.
According to reports that the Patriarchate’s Information Bureau gathered after the Mudros Armistice, the minister of the interior had, at an unspecified date that we can put around February–March, created a special committee responsible for overseeing all those aspects of the Young Turks’ plan that touched on administrative and police-related matters in the capital as well as the provinces. This committee was under the CUP’s direct control.
It included eminent members of the CUP leadership – İsmail Canbolat, general director of the Office of State Security and later governor of the capital; Aziz Bey, the head of State Security at the Interior Ministry; Ali Münîf, an undersecretary in the same ministry; Bedri Bey, the police chief in the capital; Bedri’s assistant, Mustafa Reşad, from early 1915 to June 1917 director of the national police force’s Department of Political Affairs; and another close collaborator of Bedri’s, Murad Bey, assistant police chief in Constantinople. It was these officials who were responsible for compiling lists of the members of the Armenian elite to be arrested on 24 April.
The Armenians had in fact been spied on for weeks. According to the memoirs of the journalist Yervant Odian, arrested a few weeks later, rumors to the effect that the police were putting together a “list of Armenians to be exiled” had already been making the rounds in Istanbul’s Armenian community. Odian also reports that when he learned of the arrests of the Dashnaks, including the editorial board of Azadamard, he assumed that these were “isolated cases.”
He gradually lost his illusions in the course of the following day, Sunday, 25 April, when he learned that among those arrested the previous night were well-known personalities such as Teotig, Barsegh Shahbaz, Daniel Varuzhan, Sarkis Minasian, the parliamentary deputy Nazaret Daghavarian, Dr. Torkomian, Piuzant Kechian, Diran Kelekian, Aram Andonian, Sebuh Aguni, Aknuni, Khazhag, Mikayel Shamdanjian, Dr. Jelal, Dr. Boghosian, director of the psychiatric ward at Surp Prgich Hospital, Hayg Khojasarian, Father Krikoris Balakian, Father Gomidas, and others.
On 26 April 1915, the Mixed Council examined the memorandum prepared by Zohrab. It appealed to the government to treat the Armenians less severely, “out of respect for the memory of the thousands of Armenian soldiers who [had] died defending the Ottoman fatherland.”
The Council then chose four delegates to call on the grand vizier, Said Halim – the patriarch, Zohrab, Dr. Krikor Tavitian, president of the Political Council, and Archbishop Yeghishe Turian, president of the Religious Council.
Responding to protests from the Armenian leaders, Halim declared that arms and ammunition had been discovered in various localities, notably Van, and that the government, taking alarm, had decided to neutralize the political activists. Zohrab retorted that it was unjust to treat Armenians in this way when the community had since the general mobilization demonstrated that it was deeply conscious of its duties; that the Armenians had fulfilled their obligations as citizens and as soldiers; that they had often chosen not to protest despite the abuses they had suffered; that it was unwise to make the civilian population suffer the consequences of minor faults; and that these people should not be unnecessarily humiliated.
Directly following this exchange with the grand vizier, the delegation met with Minister of the Interior Talât, who received the Armenians in the company of the president of the Senate, Rifat Bey. Talât struck a firm tone. “All those Armenians,” he said, “who, by their speeches, writings or acts, have worked or may one day work toward the creation of an Armenia, have to be considered enemies of the state and, in the present circumstances, must be isolated.”
When the delegates replied that among those deported on 24 April were people who had never had anything to do with the national question, the minister answered that he did not know if “errors had been made,” as in the case of the hapless cook of Senator Abraham Pasha, but that the matter would be looked into and the innocent released. He took pains to add that he continued to have confidence in the Armenians and that “only members of political parties had been affected by the measures taken.”
“Clearly,” he said, “we have no indications of the existence of a real movement directed against the state, but, in the interests of state security, the decision was taken to isolate the party activists and dissolve the parties.”
The Armenian delegates pointed out that “it was pointless to examine the case of each individual deportee in the absence of evidence that the political parties had conspired against the state” and that, consequently, they favored the “return of all of them.” At this point, the patriarch writes, Talât called the police chief in the Armenians’ presence and was told that no further arrests were to be made.
It has been established that the arrests were not as well prepared as they might have been, and that among those detained were people who happened to have the same names as the real targets of the repression, as well as others who had no connections with Armenian activist circles and were arrested and deported for no reason. Moreover, the list of those arrested included a number of very well-known personalities who could be described as being above all suspicion – for example, Diran Kelekian, the editor-in-chief of the Turkish-language newspaper Sabah, which, as we have seen, had, in collaborating with Bahaeddin Şakir, provided great service to the CPU/CUP when the party was in the opposition.
As for the declarations that the minister of the interior made to the Armenian delegates, they illustrate the classic strategy of the CUP, which sought to carry out its plan without “tipping its hand,” so as to reassure its victims or leave them guessing. Once the Constantinople Armenians had been arrested and banned, they were transferred to two places of internment.
One, Ayaş, was in the vilayet of Angora, 12 miles west of the city; the other was in Cankırı, 60 miles northeast of Angora in the vilayet of Kastamonu. These operations unfolded in several stages – arrest, at home or at the workplace, by agents of the State Security Office and the Political Department of the police; an identity check at State Security headquarters; internment for 24 hours or more in Istanbul’s central prison; transfer under police escort to the Haydar Paşa railroad station in the Asian part of the capital; and rail transport to Angora at the deportee’s expense.
In Angora, the banned Armenians were divided into two groups: the “political prisoners” or those considered to be such (some 150 people) were interned in Ayaş; the “intellectuals” (also about 150 in number) were kept under surveillance in Çankırı, but allowed to circulate freely in the city on the condition that they report daily to the local police station.
People as important as Aknuni, Rupen Zartarian, Harutiun Shahrigian, Hayg Tiriakian, Levon Pashayan, Khazhag, Murad (Boyajian), Harutiun Jangulian, and Nerses Zakarian – Dashnak and Hnchak leaders – as well as the parliamentary deputy Nazaret Daghavarian, were interned in Ayaş. The internees were quartered in an immense barracks divided into “dormitories” by means of a few separating walls.
According to what one of the few survivors from the Ayaş group, Piuzant Bozajian, seems to affirm, a delegate of the Ittihad was sent to Ayaş to confer with the Dashnak leaders Aknuni and Pashayan. Their conversations remained secret, but Bozajian reports rumors that the Young Turk delegate once again proposed to the Armenian leaders that they collaborate with the Turks against the Russians.
Aknuni is supposed to have replied that they had to be set free before all else. This information is, however, contradicted by another internee, Dr. Boghosian. In his view, what was involved was a simple interrogation, the purpose of which was probably to verify that the internee was indeed the Dashnak leader Aknuni.
To provide a clearer picture of the circumstances surrounding the arrest of the Armenian elite of the capital, we shall take the case of Dr. Boghosian, a psychiatrist arrested in his home on 25 April around two o’clock in the morning. Three “policemen” “hauled him in,” escorting him to the offices of the “police chief” on the pretext that he was ill and needed emergency care (such stratagems, designed to veil the real objectives of the police, were often employed in the course of these arrests).
In the face of Boghosian’s reluctance to leave the house with them so late at night, the arresting policeman finally served notice of their intention to use force. Boghosian’s arrest involved an Ottoman subtlety. Since he held the rank of an officer in the health services, he was taken to the prison of the Ministry of War at Sultan Bayazid Square and detained in a building reserved for officers, where he was joined by Dr. Bardizbanian, the chief managing editor of Azadamard (the men would see each other again at Ayaş).
Later, Boghosian was brought before İsmail Canbolat, the general director of the Office of State Security and a man who struck Boghosian as a “born criminal.” When the psychiatrist protested about his arrest, which was perfectly illegal because no charges had been brought to justify it, Canbolat flew into a rage: “If I killed you right here, like a dog, who would come looking for you? If I exterminated the entire Armenian race, as I aspire to do, who would call me to account? I used to think your people were intelligent. You’re all stupid, one stupider than the next. Do you imagine that Europe is going to call me to account? Not at all: Europe’s not as harebrained as you are. Get out of here”.
Boghosian, apparently not unduly troubled by these words, retorted: “You can kill me and the whole Armenian people as well. But rest assured that, in a certain way, you will be killing Turkey if you do.” This conversation, apparently authenticated, certainly provides an accurate summary of the mood of the Young Turk leaders in late April 1915.
Long obliged to bridle their emotions in order to allay the Armenians’ suspicions, it seems they now felt that the time had come to vent frustrations that had been accumulating for years on their victims. In the fourth part of this study, we shall see the fate that was reserved for the provincial Armenian elite as well as all those deported to Ayaş and Cankırı.
Let us here content ourselves with noting that on 1 May 1915, “secret” information arrived at the Patriarchate from the provinces: there had been a massive wave of arrests there. Zohrab, who was not deported until 2 June, wondered, “What date has been reserved for the massacre of the Armenians?” Ibranosian and Brothers, one of the biggest firms in Turkey, suddenly discovered around 9 May that the directors of all its branches in the provinces were under arrest. This was an indication that the Ittihad had now also begun to put its “economic” plans into practice.
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, pp. 251-254.
In photo- Istanbul Haydarpaşa Terminal
