Материал: Payaslian S., The History of Armenia From the Origins to the Present

On November 3, 1914, the British government gained total control over Egypt, and on November 4 it terminated Turkish sovereignty over the island of Cyprus, proclaiming it a “Crown colony,” followed on December 17, 1914, by the abrogation of Turkish sovereignty in Egypt. The British replaced the pro-Ottoman khedive, Abbas Hilmi II, by Prince Hussein Kamil Pasha, Hilmi’s uncle, and proclaimed him the new sultan of Egypt. British policy in the eastern Mediterranean clashed directly with Germany’s eastern geopolitical designs, for, as the German ambassador in the Ottoman capital, Hans von Wangenheim, explained, while his government preferred to avoid Turkish conquest of Egyptian or Russian territories, “as that would make adjustment more difficult,” Germany also sought to strengthen Turkey so as to prevent it from absorption into the Russian or English empires.34

Jemal’s Egyptian campaign proved as disastrous as Enver’s. In early November the British army launched an offensive against Turkish strongholds at the Persian Gulf and within a month advanced to control Basra. Losses on the battlefield in the Caucasus and Mesopotamia placed Jemal’s Fourth Army under severe pressure to register a military success. His military campaign to conquer the Sinai Peninsula and the Suez Canal escalated during the second half of January 1915. By then, however, the British had deployed about 70,000 troops in Egypt against the advancing Turkish forces of 20,000. British and French surveillance aircraft detected their movements, and the British forces offered an insurmountable defense. Within weeks the Turkish army suffered humiliation in this offensive as well.35

Mismanagement and misfortunes on the battlefield jeopardized the political legitimacy of the Ittihadist triumvirate, who had justified their January 1913 military coup as saving the empire from further humiliation experienced in the Balkans. The Ittihadist leaders, now suspecting their own institutions and supporters, friends and foes alike, of collusion in conspiracies against their rule, unleashed their nationalist, fanatical outrage, immeasurably intensified by wartime hostilities toward the European powers, against the unarmed Armenians.36 As the optimism in the early days of Turkey’s entry into the war was replaced by military defeats in December 1914 and January 1915, hostilities toward Armenians escalated.37

Events unfolding across the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire gave Armenians cause for little hope for their physical safety. The Young Turk regime relied on anti-Christian propaganda in the form of jihad to mobilize the Turkish masses with fanatical nationalism and hostility toward the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek communities. The Ittihadists were intensely scornful toward religion and religious leaders and institutions. As U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau commented in his Story, “Practically all of them were atheists, with no more respect for

Mohammedanism than for Christianity, and with them the one motive was cold-blooded, calculating state policy.”38 Contrary to the conventional view that the Young Turks committed a genocide against the Armenians because the latter refused to convert to Islam, they merely used religion as an instrument of propaganda to mobilize the Muslim masses against the Armenians for political, territorial, and economic gains. The jihad was directed at the European powers and against the Armenians.39 In Kharpert, for example, the local economy rested primarily on agricultural production, although several modern businesses, such as the Singer Sewing Machine Company, had been operating for years. The Singer factory operated nearly 150 machines before it closed its doors after its local Armenian agent was deported in July 1915. A significant proportion of businesses—merchants, carpenters, bankers, doctors, dentists, lawyers— were owned by Armenians, and it was estimated that as much as 95 percent of the deposits in the banks belonged to Armenians.40 Like Sultan Abdul Hamid II before them, the Young Turk leaders viewed with profound suspicion the close relationship between western business and missionary communities and the Armenians, and they sought to terminate all such ties to prevent what they considered interference in internal affairs and threats to national sovereignty.

For the Young Turk leadership, the principles of national sovereignty and territorial integrity were particularly sensitive in the aftermath of the ill-fated Sarikamish and Sinai campaigns, which had heightened their vulnerability to a growing domestic political opposition.41 In fact, the triumvirate of Enver, Talaat, and Jemal began to suffer from a crisis of political legitimacy, as fear of failure, national humiliation, and even physical attacks created an acute sense of political and personal insecurity. Paranoid delusions of imagined attacks from all quarters were further exacerbated by the end of January 1915 by rumors of conspiracies to oust them from power. For example, rumors spread of a plan prepared under the leadership of Prince Sabaeddin in Paris and Athens against the regime.42 Determined to remain in power and further consolidate power, the Ittihadists accelerated their attacks on Armenians, whom they viewed as a potential source for a coup. Armenian political organizations, the Ittihadists reasoned, had colluded with them to overthrow the despised Sultan Abdul Hamid, and there could be no assurances that the same Armenian organizations would not now conspire with new opposition groups against them. Beginning in February 1915, the Young Turks ordered the removal of all Armenian officials in Constantinople from their government posts, followed by the closing of Azatamart, the main Dashnaktsutiun newspaper in the capital.43

During a conference on February 14 at the Nuri Osmaniye headquarters in Constantinople, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)

Central Committee decided to shoulder the responsibility of “freeing the fatherland of the aspirations of this cursed race” and to put an end to the Armenian Question during the war.44 The CUP leaders in attendance included Talaat, Enver, the famous poet and party ideologue Ziya Gokalp, Minister of Trade Mehmed Javid, Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, Minister of Education Midhad Shukri, Dr. Mehmed Nazim, and Hussein Jahid (editor of the CUP organ Tanin). The CUP wished to create a brighter future for the Turkish nation and accordingly granted the government wide authority to eliminate all Armenians living in Turkey.45 The Ittihadist regime thus responded to the combined forces of real and imagined external and internal threats by defining the Armenian people within the empire as the principal internal threat and by declaring total war against the Armenians. It ordered the removal of the entire Armenian population, ostensibly as a matter of military security.

WAR AND GENOCIDE

By the end of January 1915, the Turkish military had commenced attacks on Armenians in the Turkish-Russian-Persian frontiers near Lake Urmia and the Zeitun-Marash-Aintab region in eastern Cilicia. Since September of 1914, the Turkish and Russian military campaigns had created thousands of refugees and led to the massacre of Armenians by the Turkish troops and local Turks and Kurds in several towns across the Caucasus region and stretching to Lake Urmia. In one instance, local Turks and Kurds led by Khan Simko viewed a Russian evacuation from the region of Urmia as a sign of weakness and ambushed the Armenian, Nestorian, and Persian refugees marching from the town of Urmia to Dilman and Tabriz inside Persia. Russian General Chernozubov dispatched General Tovmas Nazarbekov (Nazarbekian) to take control of Khoy, Dilman, and Kotur, while Chernozubov himself, ordered by General Yudenich to reassert Russian command in the area, advanced from Julfa to Tabriz and occupied the city.46

The eastern region of Cilicia had already become mired in political and military crises. Decades of official and unofficial persecution of Armenians there had led them to mistrust government officialdom and Turks in general. It was not surprising therefore that at the outbreak of the war, most Armenians in the region hoped for an Allied victory so as to secure a degree of autonomy.47 The Turkish government, for its part, suspected Allied military engagements in the region, such as a bombardment by a French warship off the Gulf of Alexandretta in early January 1915, which heavily damaged the railway in the area, as providing an opportunity for Armenian collusion with the invading armies. The authorities arrested several hundred Armenians in Dort Yol and Hasan Beyli and

forced them to rebuild the railway. The government subsequently ordered the arrest of the prominent Armenians in Dort Yol and transferred them to Adana for trial. On February 14 armed forces surrounded Dort Yol and demanded the surrender of all Armenian men over the age of twelve. Nearly 1,600 Armenian men were gathered and forced to march to Entili (Intili), where they were ordered to labor and were subjected to brutalities by the gendarmes; subsequently, most were murdered. The small numbers of survivors were permitted to return to Dort Yol. Upon their return, however, they and their families were deported to Aleppo and thence to Hama or Ras ul-Ain. After this group, the entire Armenian population of Dort Yol, totaling about 20,000 persons, was soon deported to Aleppo.48

Meanwhile, General Fakri Pasha and kaimakam (district governor) Husein Husni led 3,000 soldiers into Zeitun to thwart any rebellious activities against government orders to mobilize.49 Government oppression in Zeitun intensified under the pretext of suppressing Armenian revolutionaries. Pierre Briquet, serving on the staff of St. Paul’s Institute of Tarsus, noted: “It is obvious that the Government are trying to get a case against the Zeitounlis, so as to be able to exterminate them at their pleasure and yet justify themselves in the eyes of the world.”50 In late February, the county governor of Marash, Mustafa Ahmed Mumtaz, successor of Ali Haidar Bey, entered Zeitun with between 2,000 and 3,000 troops and arrested Armenian political and religious leaders, intellectuals, and members of the wealthier classes. Minister of War Enver warned that Armenian violation of the law and killing of any Muslim would instigate massacres. As noted earlier, some Armenians in Zeitun, fearing massacres, had armed themselves, and during skirmishes from April 4 to April 8, about 300 Armenian leaders were imprisoned in Zeitun and Marash and deported. Mass deportations from Zeitun also began during the week of April 4; within the next three weeks nearly 20,000 Armenians were deported from the area. Divided into two caravans, one was deported westward to Sultaniye in the Anatolian desert and the other southward to Deir el-Zor in the Syrian desert. By May between 20,000 and 30,000 Turkish soldiers had been stationed in the region of Zeitun. The fighting continued in the nearby mountains, while the city was emptied of its Armenian population. Soon thousands of Muslim muhajirs (refugees) from the Balkans—who after the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 had been transported to Cilicia—occupied the houses owned but now evacuated by Armenians.51

Armenian political and religious leaders appealed to the authorities to alleviate the dangerous situation. In March 1915 Catholicos Sahak Khapayan (Sahag Khabayan) of the Great House of Cilicia at Sis appealed to Jemal Pasha to provide for the physical safety of the Armenian deserters. Jemal replied that those loyal to the government would be guaranteed

protection and that only the deserters would be subject to government measures. The catholicos also expressed his apprehensions about the conditions in Zeitun in a letter to Jelal Bey, the governor of Aleppo vilayet. Despite such appeals, however, under the pretext of searching for arms, the authorities arrested some of the notable Armenians, while Turks and Kurds raided and plundered the Armenian communities, razed their houses to the ground, and killed the inhabitants.52

By the middle of April, as the scope of arrests widened exponentially and the pace accelerated, Catholicos Gevorg V, the supreme patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church at the Holy See of Echmiadzin, appealed to foreign powers to use their good offices with Constantinople to cease the persecutions.53 On April 23 a group of Armenian leaders in Constantinople, including members of the Ottoman parliament Krikor Zohrab and Vartkes (Hovhannes Serengulian), met at the Armenian patriarchate and decided to convey to the Sublime Porte their concerns regarding the gravity of the situation.54

The following day, on April 24, in response to the Allied campaign at Gallipoli, soldiers were stationed throughout Constantinople. During the night of April 24–25, the government arrested and exiled more than 200 Armenian community leaders, followed by an additional 600 Armenians immediately thereafter. Most were sent to the predominantly Muslim town of Ayash west of Angora city, others to Changri, located in Kastamuni province and between the cities of Angora and Kastamuni, and farther east to Chorum in northern Angora province. The government’s campaigns against the Armenians continued unabated: within weeks, for example, 600 were arrested and deported in Erzerum, 500 in Sivas, 100 in Izmid, 80 in Adabazar, 50 in Shabin-Karahisar, 40 in Banderma, and 20 in Diarbekir.55 Whether the Allied campaign at Gallipoli instigated the wholesale arrests of the Armenians in Constantinople is subject to debate,56 but Minister of War Enver justified these measures on grounds that Armenian revolutionaries and Russian Armenians had attacked government officials and buildings in Van. The fact that Armenians sided with the Russians, Enver maintained, led to the security measures taken in Constantinople as Turkish authorities, fearful of a similar collusion by the Dashnaktsutiun in the capital, deported the city’s leading Armenians.57

The Gallipoli campaign, which began on March 18, 1915, as Allied heavy artillery fired at the forts of Chanakkale and Hamidiye, provided one of the rare opportunities at this early stage in the war that perhaps, if successful, could have prevented further deportations and massacres. The Russian military command had proposed the Allied attack on the Dardanelles so as to diffuse the pressure in the Caucasus when Enver’s