1. EVERYDAY LIFE IN OTTOMAN ARMENIA

At the turn of the 20^th century, Armenians were mainly concentrated in the six Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, in the vilayets of Sıvas, Erzurum, Van, Diyarbekir, Bitlis and Kharpert: ancestral Armenian land. In addition, important Armenian urban communities were located in Constantinople and in the major cities of Anatolia The majority of Ottoman Armenians lived in rural areas, where their life was ruled by patriarchal traditions and characterized by a complex coexistence with semi-nomadic or recently settled Kurds.

On the other hand, provincial cities included an educated and enterprising Armenian society entering the age of modernity.

This Ottoman Armenian world would suffer mass killings and lootings at the end of the 19^th century, triggering mass migration before being definitively eradicated in 1915.

1891 marks a turning point in the policy of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). That year, he formed Kurdish irregular brigades: the hamidiye. Abductions, looting and plundering created permanent insecurity in the Armenian provinces. The first instance of mass violence occured during the summer of 1894 in the Armenian quarter of Sassoun. These massacres, though presented by the authorities as the result of a “revolt” by Armenians, convinced European powers to work together to impose long-awaited reforms in the six eastern vilayets of the Ottoman Empire. In October 1895, as a display of his good will, the Sultan signed decrees reorganizing the local administration in order to ensure the safety of individuals and their property. In reality, Abdülhamid II allowed and encouraged the large-scale massacres that followed.

Beginning in Trebizond on September 26, 1895, these massacres spread across the whole of Anatolia until December and took the same form.

According to the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Hamidian massacres caused a human and socio-economic disaster with 200,000 deaths and widespread looting and destruction.

3. THE MASSACRES OF CILICIA IN APRIL 1909: A DRESS REHEARSAL?

Less than one year after the Committee of Union and Progress seized power and restored the Ottoman constitution, a “reaction” aiming to re-establish the Sultan’s complete control targetted the Unionist leaders. Starting on March 31, this anti-Unionist reaction was supported by soldiers and officers of the garrison in Constantinople as well as religious opponents. However, the Unionists quickly halted this reaction and eliminated the liberal opposition in Constantinople at the same time.

Almost simultaneously, a series of massacres struck the Armenians of Adana and Cilicia in April 1909. While the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress blamed them on the reactionary forces, the anti-Armenian violence in Cilicia cast strong suspicion on the involvement of local Unionist leaders and the central government. The Adana massacres seriously undermined the hope that part of Ottoman Armenian society had started to feel after the restoration of the Ottoman constitution in 1908 and, for some (considering the example of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation or the Tashnag Party) their hope for the initial political project of the Committee of Union and Progress.

The First Phase of the Massacres in Cilicia: April 14-16, 1909

Constantinople, April 24, 1909: arrival of General Mahmud Şevket, commanding the forces sent to crush the rebellion (Historical Division of the Army, Vincennes, France).

The violence that set all of Cilicia aflame beginning on April 14 was not a spontaneous act. Unfounded rumors of Armenians killing Muslims had circulated, been relayed by Muslim religious authorities and local officials, and were supported by notables and the police. On the first day, April 14, rioters began with the destruction of Armenian shops at the bazaar and the massacre of Armenian seasonal workers on farms on the plain of Adana. But wider bloodshed was avoided thanks to organized self-defense efforts, especially in the Armenian neighborhoods of Adana.

The Second Phase of the Massacres in Cilicia: Adana, April 25-27, 1909

Clearing the ruins of the Armenian quarter of Adana after the massacres, May 1909 (Saint-Grégoire Collection, Beirut).Troops were sent by the Ottoman government soon after the outbreak of violence in Adana in order to restore order. Urged by the British consul in Adana, Armenians agreed to surrender their weapons and placed themselves under the protection of Ottoman soldiers. Yet these same troops were going to attack defenseless Armenian neighborhoods and continue for three days to massacre thousands of their inhabitants, including those who had found sought in foreign missions.

III - THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE GENOCIDE

A ceremony before the departure of a squadron of hamidiye from Diyarbekir that had joined to Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa (AGBU Nubar Library, Paris). 

1. THE TOOLS OF EXTERMINATION

The decision to exterminate Armenians was made between the March 20-25, 1915, during several meetings of the Central Committee of the CUP. The implementation of the extermination plan was entrusted to the Special Organization (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa), a paramilitary group led by a political bureau, including members of the Unionist Central Committee, such as Drs. Bahaeddin Şakir and Mehmed Nâzım, Atıf Bey and Yusuf Rıza Bey.

The headquarters of the Special Organization was based at the headquarters of the CUP in Istanbul. The Organization was represented by Kuşçubaşızâde Eşref [Sencer] in the Ministry of War, which provided the training and equiped the forces of the Special Organization, as well as provided it with funding. Its officers were recruited from among members of the party and those who carried out the orders were recruited from among criminals released by the Ministry of Justice, or among Circassian and Kurdish tribes. The brigades operated in specific places by attacking convoys of Armenian deportees.

The role of the administration and Unionist local secretaries

In the division of labor, the planning of the deportations was organized by the Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Migrants (Iskan-ı ve Aşâyirîn Muhâcirîn Müdüriyeti, or IAMM), under the direction of Muftizâde Şükrü Kaya. The latter had been sent to Aleppo in late August 1915 in order to establish a Sub-Directorate for Deportees. The police drew up lists of people to be deported. Gendarmes were supposed to “escort” the convoys. The division of the Treasury was also drawn on to recover and distribute “abandoned properties.” The coordinators of these operations were the secretaries and officials delegated by the Committee of Union and Progess in the provinces.

The role of the Army in Mass Violence

The Third Army, controlling the six eastern vilayets, was directly involved in the atrocities committed against civilians between December 1914 and February 1915 on the Caucasian front and in the vilayets of Van and Bitlis, in cooperation with brigades of the Special Organization.

2. THE FIRST PHASE OF THE GENOCIDE (APRIL - OCTOBER 1915)

The elimination of Armenian conscripts in the Ottoman Third Army and adult men

 Convoy of Armenian men being escorted, leaving Mezre for an unknown destination (Mekhitarist Fathers Collection, Venice).On the order of Enver Pasha, the Minister of War, on February 28, 1915, tens of thousands of Armenian conscripts serving in the Third Army were disarmed and assigned to labor battalions (amele taburiler) or executed.

In May 1915, the authorities imprisoned and killed men aged 16 to 60 or ordered the conscription of the spared 16-19 year-old and 41-60 year-old Armenian males in districts with dense Armenian population.

These men were assassinated far from towns and villages in remote areas.

The arrest of Armenian Elites

On April 24, 1915, by order of the Minister of the Interior, Talât, the authorities proceeded to arrest the Armenian elite in Istanbul and in provincial towns.

These men were executed on the spot or exiled and temporarily interned in Çangırı (near Kastamonu) and Ayaş (near Ankara) before being murdered. By the end of the war, April 24 (April 11 in the Julian calendar, used by the Ottoman Armenians at the time) was chosen as the day of commemoration for the Armenian genocide.

Circular sent by the Ministry of the Interior and the Directorate General of the National Police to the commander-in-chief of the Ottoman Army and other institutions, ordering "the arrest of leaders and committee [political party] members […] widely known by the police," dated April 24, 1915 and signed by the Minister of the Interior, Mehmed Talât.

The deportations in Zeytun and the resistance in Van

The heights of Zeytun [Süleymanlı]. Zeytun’s population, deemed combative and recalcitrant toward the central government, was deported first by early April 1915 (Mekhitarist Fathers Collection, Venice).

From the end of March 1915, the first signs of the genocidal campaign of the CUP could be seen: the Armenian population of Zeytun (now Süleymanlı) and Dörtyol was deported.

On April 18 and 19, about 15,000 surrounding villagers took refuge in the city of Van, fleeing the massacres committed by the brigades of the Special Organization. During the previous days, two Armenian leaders had been murdered on the orders of the vali Cevdet.

After April 20, taking refuge in their two neighborhoods, the Armenians of Van resisted Turkish forces for more than a month until Russian troops approached the city.

These events were presented in Istanbul as an Armenian revolt, and utilized to justify the beginning of the deportations.

In May 1915, having occupied the vilayet of Van, the Russian army counted 55,000 corpses, i.e. more than 50% of the Armenian population of the province.

Resistance and fleeing towards the Caucasus in the vilayet of Van

Convoy of Armenians fleeing to the Caucasus, photographed a few kilometers from Kızılkilise (AGBU Nubar Library, Paris)

In late July 1915, while the Russian army was approaching Bitlis, a general evacuation order came from St. Petersburg. The Armenians of Van, Chadakh and Khizan then left for the Caucasus, thus escaping the massacres.

The deportation of women, children and the elderly

An examination of the deportation process shows that the removal of the Armenian populations of the six Eastern vilayets - the historic lands of the Ottoman Armenians - was a priority for the Committee of Union and Progress. The deportation of women, children and elderly men was preceded by extermination on the spot of men considered healthy and potentially dangerous. The convoys sent from the Eastern vilayets in May and June 1915 were systematically destroyed along the way and only a small minority of the deportees reached the “relocation sites.” On the other hand, from July to September 1915, the Armenians of Western Anatolia and Thrace were sent to Syria as families, often by train, and made their way on foot to Cilicia.

The Sites of Slaughter of the Special Organization

Used by the historian Raymond Kévorkian (Le génocide des Arméniens, Paris, 2006) to designate major massacre sites set up by the Special Organization on the roads of deportation, the term “slaughterhouse site” refers to the phrasing used by some contemporary witnesses to the genocide, such as the consul of the United States in Kharpert [Harput, present-day Elazığ], Leslie Davis, in his report on the “slaughterhouse province” (The Slaughterhouse Province: an American diplomat's report on the Armenian genocide, 1915-1917, first publication New Rochelle, 1989). The two most important slaughterhouse sites were located in gorges serving as checkpoints for the convoys: the site of Kemah, southwest of Erzincan on the upper Euphrates, where tens of thousands of men were exterminated in May and June of 1915 under the direct supervision of Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir, head of the Special Organization; and Kahta in the mountains south of Malatya, through which five hundred thousand deportees passed.

3. THE DISPOSSESSION AND LIQUIDATION OF ARMENIAN PROPERTIES

Kara Kemal (1866-1928). A program called Millî İktisat (“national economy”) was the economic dimension of the Armenian genocide, serving both as a justification and a direct incentive for its implementation, from the top of the state to the actors in the field. This program mainly benefited the Unionist elite and the party state constituted by the Committee of Union and Progress, but also the CUP supporters in general. Officially, the aim of the Millî İktisat was to set up a “Turkish” entrepreneurial class by transferring ownership of Armenian businesses and properties to them. The activities of the “commissions of abandoned properties” (emval-i metruke) also allowed the Young Turk regime to monopolize the movable and immovable properties of deported peoples, and the supposedly inalienable vakıf properties of religious institutions. Among vakıf goods, many monasteries and churches symbolizing the millennia-old presence of Armenians in these regions were destroyed after 1915-1916.

 Cemal Pasha, a prominent member of the Committee of Union and Progress, Minister of the Navy, commander of the Fourth Ottoman Army, along with leaders of Bedouin tribes. Syria was under his control, but he had no power over the administration of the concentration camps (AGBU Nubar Library, Paris). The final step of the annihilation process targeted deportees from Asia Minor and Cilicia, and to a lesser extent, from the Armenian provinces of Eastern Anatolia. Twenty concentration camps were established in Syria and Upper Mesopotamia starting in October 1915. These camps were managed by the Sub-Directorate of Deportees, part of the Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Migrants (Iskan-ı ve Aşâyirîn Muhâcirîn Müdîriyeti, or IAMM), under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior, and have held about 700,000 deportees. Over 100,000 Cilicians were also sent to rural and remote areas along a line stretching from Aleppo to the Red Sea.

In March 1916, about 500,000 remained interned in camps in Syria and Mesopotamia and other relocation sites. The final decision to exterminate them was then made by the Unionist Central Committee. From April to December 1916, two sites, Ras ul-Ayn and Der Zor, were part of the systematic killings that left hundreds of thousands dead, mostly women and children.

Table of Victims Who Died “a Natural Death”  in Concentration Camps

(related to hunger, disease and weather)

estimated number of victims

c. 40,000

c. 60,000

c. 10,000

c. 60,000

?

c. 50,000

c. 4,000

c. 13,000

c. 30,000

c. 5,000

c. 60,000

?

c. 40,000

 1. THE INCREASE IN POWER OF THE COMMITTEE OF UNION AND PROGRESS

Ideology and Influence of the Young Turks

Mehmed Talât, Ismail Enver and Halil Bey, prominent members of the CUP (photo published in Alfred Nossig, Die Neue Türkei und ihre Führer, Halle : O. Hendel, undated [1916], p. 8).Dolmabahçe Palace, headquarters of the Committee of Union and Progress. (Michel Paboujian Collection).

From 1908 to 1918, the Ottoman Empire was led, almost without interruption, by the Committee of Union and Progress, a party fully controlled by a central committee of nine members constituting a hidden power.

Despite the hopes they had been stirred in its rise to power, by dangling the establishment of true equality within the Ottoman Empire between Muslims, Christians and Jews, leaders of the CUP were largely imbued with a European-inspired social Darwinist ideology. In their eyes, the mission of the CUP was to regenerate the “Turkish race.”

Mainly composed of officers and members from the geographical margins of the empire, essentially from the Balkans and the Caucasus, the CUP cemented its power by developing a network of local clubs, and gradually replacing the army officers and the heads of the administration with party activists or sympathizers. Meanwhile, the CUP has forged close ties in the provinces with local elders as well as religious and tribal leaders. All these ramifications favored his influence on the ground, and later proved to be great supporters at the time of the implementation of the genocide.

The Balkan Wars and Internal Crisis

Between the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 and the coup on January 25, 1913, which established a one-party regime, leaving the Committee of Union and Progress to do what it pleased, internal and external crises multiplied and contributed to the radicalization of its leaders.

Following the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 and the humiliating defeat of Ottoman forces by allied Balkan nations that led to the loss of almost all the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe, the most radical elements within the CUP took power.

 Doctor Mehmed Nâzım (1870-1926), member of the Unionist Central Committee.

He was one of the heads of the Special Organization (Teskilât-ı Mahsusa) during the genocide (Mekhitarists Fathers Collection, Venice).

 Mehmed Talât (1874-1921), head of the Unionist Central Committee, Minister of the Interior. Strongman of the regime and the Party, he influenced the most radical elements inside the CUP. (AGBU Nubar Library, Paris).

2. THE REFORM PROJECT IN ARMENIA: A LAST CHANCE AT COEXISTENCE

Dispossession and Lasting Insecurity

The Etchmiadzin Cathedral in the early 20^th century. (AGBU Nubar Library, Paris).

The ascent of the Young Turks was perceived as progress and an opportunity to implement reforms that would improve the safety of the Armenian population in the Eastern provinces. After four years of fruitless efforts, while the Eastern provinces were rid of their population because of mass emigration caused by insecurity and misery, the Armenian authorities decided in October 1912 to internationalize the issue of reform. The Catholicosate of Etchmiadzin, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, Armenian political parties and some individuals then participated in negotiations between the Sublime Porte and the Great Powers.

The Plan for Reform

Baron Hans Von Wangenheim, German ambassador to Constantinople, negociator in the plan for reform in Armenia (The World’s Work, vol. 36, 1918).On December 25, 1913, the Germans and Russians officially submitted a draft reform to the Ottoman government. The plan called for the unification of the six Eastern “Armenian” vilayets; the appointment of a Christian governor, either Ottoman or European; the appointment of a board of directors and a joint provincial assembly, both Muslim and Christian; the formation of a joint police force; the dissolution of the hamidiye brigades created during the reign of Abdülhamid II, which were still active; the formation of a commission to examine the confiscation of land that had occurred in preceeding decades, etc. On February 21, 1914, the Sublime Porte ultimately accepted the agreement, without being able to remove the clause about foreign control which would be established to monitor the effective implementation of reforms in the Armenian provinces. Two general inspectors from Norway and the Netherlands were nominated but did not have the chance or the time to actually fulfil their roles, because of the outbreak of war.

3. THE WORLD WAR AND THE RADICALIZATION OF UNIONIST LEADERS AGAINST THE ARMENIANS 

Ottoman troops mobilized at the railway station in Istanbul, August 1914. (photo by Victor Forbin, British Foreign office archives, Kew).

The Ottoman Empire entered the war alongside the Central Powers in October 1914, but the general mobilization had already been decreed in the month of August. Armenian men aged 20 to 40, i.e. the “lifeblood” of the Armenian millet, had been mobilized and thus neutralized. It is in this favorable context, while the great powers were themselves facing full-scale war, that the Unionist leaders accelerated their policy of ethnic homogenization of Asia Minor by making the decision to destroy the Armenian and Syriac communities of the Empire.

General mobilization and parade of Ottoman troops, Constantinople, November 1914 (AGBU Nubar Library, Paris).

At the end of December 1914, after the scathing defeat suffered by the Ottoman army in Sarıkamış on the Russian front, the Central Committee of the CUP adopted a radical policy against the Ottoman Armenians. The Central Committee of the CUP was formed by Mehmed Talât, Midhat Şükrü, Dr. Nazım, Kara Kemal, Yusuf Rıza, Ziya Gökalp, Eyub Sabri [Akgöl], Dr. Rüsûhi, Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir and Halil [Menteşe].

EARLY MASS VIOLENCE ON THE CAUCASIAN FRONT (DECEMBER 1914 TO FEBRUARY 1915)

The Ottoman offensive on the Caucasian front was accompanied by localized massacres, particularly in the region of Artvin and along the border with Persia, where the Armenian population of twenty villages was massacred, just as in Persian Azerbaijan, where Ottoman troops, backed by Kurdish tribal leaders, annihilated Armenian villagers living of the plains of Khoy, Salmast and Urmia.

Survivors identified at the end of the war may be classified into two main categories:

> thousands of children and girls kidnapped by Bedouin tribes who were recovered after the armistice of October 1918;

> over a hundred thousand deportees, mostly from Cilicia, whom British forces discovered in an indescribable state during their slow conquest of Palestine and Syria, from the end of 1917 and into 1918.

Tens of thousands of survivors and refugees were also found in the Caucasus and Persia.

Survivors of the Genocide: between hope and disillusionment

 Genocide survivors were scattered in Arab lands, often abandoned to their fate. Most of them were women and children who hoped to return home. By January 1919, a vast repatriation campaign to Cilicia began under the direction of the French, which had then taken military and administrative control of the region. However, in October 1921, France signed an agreement with Kemalist Turkey and ceded Cilicia, a decision which generated a new exodus of the Armenian population to Syria and Lebanon.

Exodus of Armenians at the railway station in Adana (Paul du Véou, La Passion de la Cilicie, Paris : Geuthner, 1954).

 2. GATHERING AND REHABILITATING: A PRIORITY

Upon the entry of British troops into Turkish territory, Armenian organizations tried to gather abandoned women and children and establish them in group homes. These humanitarian operations to support orphans, women and children taken into Turkish, Kurdish and Bedouin families were the priority of Armenian and Western organizations engaged in offering relief and assistance to genocide survivors.

3. PUNISHING THE PERPETRATORS: THE UNFINISHED TASK

Soghomon Tehlirian (1897-1960) shortly after his acquittal for the murder of the former Ottoman Minister of the Interior and head of the Committee of Union and Progress, Mehmed Talât, in 1921. (AGBU Nubar Library, Paris)Following the Armistice of Mudros (October 31, 1918), while the main Unionist leaders had already fled to Germany, an investigative commission was established by imperial decree on November 21, 1918. Several courts-martial were set up to try the Young Turk criminals.

Ultimately, only three low ranking actors were sentenced to death and executed, the main defendants being sentenced to death in abstentia. Measures taken by the British and French governments to bring these criminals before an international “high court” were unsuccessful. Armenian activists then planned Operation Nemesis, an undercover operation to track down and assassinate former Unionist leaders in exile.

The most emblematic case concerned Mehmed Talât, the main orchestrator of the Armenian genocide, assassinated in Berlin by Soghomon Tehlirian on March 15, 1921.

4. EARLY MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE GENOCIDE: 

AURORA MARDIGANIAN’S STORY AND RAVISHED ARMENIA

The movie, Ravished Armenia, inspired by her story, produced in Hollywood in 1919

Poster of the movie "Ravished Armenia". (DR)Born in 1901 in Tchemeshgadzak (Çemişgezek) in the north of the vilayet of Kharpert/Mamuret ul-Aziz, Aurora Mardiganian experienced the common fate of Armenian deportees. Her convoy went through the largest transit camp and site of slaughter, located ten kilometers south of Malatya, on the plain of Fırıncılar, at the entrance to the gorges of Kahta, where brigades of the Special Organization committed unspeakable crimes during the summer of 1915.

Surviving the genocide, Aurora Mardiganian published her story in 1919 in the United States. The Armenians in California chose her as the heroine of the film Ravished Armenia, shot in Hollywood in 1919, with the intention of informing the general audience about the crimes committed against the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. Based in California, where she established a new family, she died in 1994.

For Copyrights issues, we did not wish to insert the movie on our Website. Kindly follow the link below on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTnCaW-Uo_s