The confiscation of Armenian property in the vilayet of Erzerum seems to have been a process that unfolded in several stages, depending on the type of assets in question.
Initially, it was doubtless the secret provisions of the Temporary Deportation Law that provided an official as opposed to a legal framework for the operations of the local authorities; for the “Law on Abandoned Property” and its decree of application were not promulgated until fall 1915 – that is, well after the Armenian population had been deported.
It is probable that the extortion and various abuses from which civilian and military officials personally profited, and also the prevailing uncertainty as to who now owned what, compelled the Ittihadist authorities to adopt basic laws to protect the interests of the state and party, at least as far as real estate went. General Vehib Pasha, in the deposition he submitted to the Mazhar Commission, forthrightly stated how the cash and other valuables in the possession of the deportees from Erzerum and Trebizond were parceled out in the Kemah gorge:
After [the deportees] were stripped of their money and jewels on the edge of the gorge there [and then] massacred and thrown into the waters of the Euphrates … the sums that had been taken from them were divided up on the basis of one-third for the Party of Union and Progress, one-third for the government, and one-third for the heads of the bands that carried out the massacres.
In other words, those responsible for the deportations were invited, in some sense, to pay themselves for their labors out of what they took from the exiled Armenians. Two men played key roles in organizing the seizure of Armenian assets in the vilayet of Erzerum: Hakkı Bey, the director of the customs offi ce and future president of the local commission of the Emvalı Metruke, and Hüseyin Tosun Bey, the Ittihad’s delegate in Erzerum and also “Milli agens müdiri” (head of the Milli Agency). These two Ittihadist officials took a particular interest in the regional capital’s well-to-do families – that is, in their real estate, stocks of merchandise, and bank accounts.
The information about the assets of these affluent families that Kaiser has brought to light – in particular, material from German consular archives – shows that early in June, after it had been established that these families would be deported, the local authorities were obviously not prepared to handle issues related to their property. When the question of the confiscation of their holdings was raised, the director of the local branch of the Banque Impériale Ottomane (BIO), Pierre Balladur, went to Vali Tahsin with the suggestion that a mixed commission be created and charged with safeguarding the deportees’ assets, although the bank would not insure them against loss.
Balladur fairly quickly obtained approval for the plan from his board of directors in Istanbul. Approval from Tahsin Bey’s superiors was somewhat longer in coming: on 9 June, Tahsin received rather precise instructions from the Interior Ministry to the effect that all property belonging to the Armenians was to be auctioned off.
The stocks of Erzerum’s major wholesale merchants had, however, already been transferred to the Armenian cathedral on the BIO’s authority. It seems that it was the BIO board, made up of three administrators in Istanbul – two of them Armenian – which turned to the minister of finance (Talât had become interim finance minister after Cavid’s resignation) with the request that he settle the dispute over the Armenian assets held by the bank. The board demanded that “a ruling be made to protect the bank’s interests.”
André Autheman, in his history of the BIO, notes that the question was more pressing in Erzerum than elsewhere because the bank had been entrusted with a “considerable amount” of property in that city – merchandise worth over 400,000 Turkish pounds – while “the Armenians’ assets, after their departure, had been taken in hand by the local authorities, but under conditions that had not been defined.”
In other words, Talât no doubt conceived the idea of passing a Law on Abandoned Property after being thus approached by the BIO While the “considerable amount” of property entrusted to the bank was ultimately confiscated after the creation of the local commission of the Emvalı Metruke in October 1915, over the stiff resistance by Pierre Balladur, it proved much harder for the authorities to lay their hands on the bank accounts of the Armenians deported from Erzerum and elsewhere.
The only way to do so was to nationalize the BIO, which was distinguished by the fact that most of its capital was held by two enemy countries, France and Great Britain, while it continued to perform the crucial function of a bank of issue. On 11 July 1915, the Council of Ministers did indeed decide to take over administration of the bank – not, as Autheman rather naively seems to think, “in order to secure advantages from it,” but rather in order to be able to deal with the Armenians’ accounts as it saw fit.
Let us add that the BIO decided in February 1916 to freeze the accounts of these “clients currently traveling,” some of whom before then had succeeded in obtaining advances from its branches in Syria and Mesopotamia.
According to a report written after the war by a well-informed survivor from Erzerum, the Armenians of the vilayet of Erzerum controlled 80 per cent of local commerce, as well as trade with the other provinces of the empire and foreign trade; they owned some 60 commercial fi rms with an annual turnover of more than 30,000 Turkish pounds, 500 firms with a turnover between 10,000 and 15,000 Turkish pounds, and 2,500 firms with a turnover between 800 and 1,000 Turkish pounds. The author of the report also underscores the generally elevated educational level of the Armenian population, the knowhow of its artisans, and the substantial amount of property belonging to national institutions, particularly monastic communities such as Garmir Vank and Lusavorichi Vank, as well as the cathedral of Erzerum.
According to Alphonse Arakelian, the property “abandoned” by the Armenians of the vilayet had a total value of 17,503,000 Turkish pounds. The value of that held by merchants was 7,300,000 Turkish pounds; civil servants, 1,000,000 Turkish pounds; the three big religious institutions and 37 monasteries, 850,000 Turkish pounds; the diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church of Erzerum, 310,000 Turkish pounds; the diocese of the Armenian Catholic Church, 50,000 Turkish pounds; and the Armenian Protestant Church, 10,000 Turkish pounds. To these sums we must add 372 village churches, with their properties, representing a value of 581,000 Turkish pounds; the holdings of 19,000 peasant families, with a value of 5,730,000 Turkish pounds; and the assets of 8,390 artisan families, with a value of 1,672,000 Turkish pounds.
To be continued
Note- this chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A Complete History, p. 315-317.
Image – the Sanassarian college in Karin/Erzurum
