At Angora the Vali arrested the Armenian manager of the Imperial Ottoman Bank,
who was sent away in a carriage and killed by the Vali’s orders some miles
from the town. Mukhlis Bey, a prominent member of the Committee of Union and
Progress, then produced an order from the Central Executive of the Committee
ordering the slaughter of the most prominent Armenians whether Gregorian or
Catholic. The order was served on the Military Commandant, who refused to
obey it. Mukhlis then armed the rabble and 683 unarmed Armenians were
killed. Many were Catholics, whose cruel fate is known to have aroused
vigorous protests on the part of the Vatican.
At Bitlis and Mush a large number, according to some accounts 12,000
Armenians, many of them women, are reported to have been shot or drowned. At
Sivas, Kaisari, and Diarbekr there were many executions, and several
Armenian villages are reported completely wiped out. At Mosul the unhappy
Armenians who were brought from the north in gangs were set upon by the mob.
Many were killed and turks and Kurds came from as far as the Persian border
to buy the women.
At Urfa, where the male Allied subjects formerly resident in Syria and one of
two prisoners of war are now interned by Djemal Pasha’s orders, the first
massacre took place in the third week of August. It was witnessed by the
some of the Allied women and children who recently escaped from Syria. An
English girl of 10 years of age saw an Armenian’s brains blown out and the
bodies of women and children burnt with kerosene. Several smaller massacres
followed the first outbreak, in which about 150 Armenians were killed. The
military took no part in it, but left full freedom to the rabble, who
slightly wounded several French prisoners who has been allowed to walk in
the town. It is not surprising that the British, French, and Russian women
who have escaped from Uría should express the liveliest apprehensions as to
the fate of their menfolk prisoners in what is probably the most fanatical
town in Turkey, and the scene of the burning of about 6,000 Armenians of
both sexes in the Cathedral during the Hamidian massacres.
A DESPERATE RESISTANCE
The massacred Armenians had mostly given up their arms in accordance with the
advice of their clergy. At four widely separated places resistance was
offered. At Shaban Karahissar in North-East Anatolia, the Armenians took up
arms, held off the Turkish troops for some time, and were finally
overwhelmed. Some 4,000 were believed to have been killed or sold – the fate
of the women and children – at this place. At Kharput, on hearing of the
intention of the authorities to deport them, the Armenians rose on June 3,
and for a week held the town. They were then overpowered by troops with
artillery, and were mostly killed. The outbreak at Zeitun seems to have
taken place in March and to have been a very trivial affair. The Armenians
of the town of Zeitun, though formerly a turbulent race, handed over the few
insurgents to the Turks, hoping thus to be spared, but Fakhry Pasha, the
author of the second Adana massacre, nevertheless killed a few of the
townsmen on the spot, and may have drafted the rest into labour battalions.
The women, children, and infirm were sent to Zor – described by a most
competent authority as a “human dustbin” where they are reported to by dying
in large numbers.
The Armenians of Jebel Musa were ordered to quit their homes late in July.
Believing very naturally that the Turks proposed to make away with them,
they rose in revolt to the number of 600. Though poorly provided with arms,
they held out for a month against about 4,000 Turkish troops. Their losses
were slight. Those of the Turks, who seem to have been troops of inferior
quality, are said by refugees from Syria to have amounted to from 300 to
400. The fighting was ruthlessly waged. The Turks carried off some 20
Armenian women and children, and executed 2 prisoners before the Armenian
position. The Armenians retaliated by executing a Turkish major, a notable
who had plundered one of their villages, and other prisoners whom they took.
Ammunition was running low early in September, and a massacre seemed
inevitable when French warships and a British vessel arrived and took off
the Armenians to the number of 4,000, mostly women and children.
It may be noted that the only massacres reported in the Arab countries –
namely, north of Baghdad, where about 1,000 Armenians are said on Armenian
authority to have been killed at the end of their long journey from the
North; and at Kebusie, in the Homs district, where a body of 250 Armenian
deportees were killed, forcibly converted or, in the case of the girls, sold
– were committed by the military, apparently Turks and Kurds.
DEPORTATION OR STARVATION
It remains to describe Talaat Bey’s methods in detail. Massacre was followed
by a crueller system of persecution than Abdul Hamid ever invented. The Red
Sultan’s abominations were seldom accompanied by the wholesale deportation
of the survivors; the violation and abduction of women and the conversion of
children, though sadly frequent in some places, were by no means general in
the massacres of 1894-1896. Then the wild beast was allowed to run amok for
24 hours, and was then usually chained up.
In Talaat Bey’s campaign the preliminary massacre, which was sometimes
omitted, was followed by the separation of the able-bodied men from their
women folk. The former were drafted into labour battalions or simply
disappeared. The women, children, and old men were next driven slowly across
country. They were permitted to take no carts, baggage animals, or any large
stock of provisions with them. They were shepherded from place to place by
gendarmes, who violated some of the women, sold others, and robbed most.
Infirm or aged folk, women great with child, and children were driven along
till they dropped and died by the way. Gendarmes who returned to
Alexandretta described with glee to Europeans how they robbed the fugitives.
If these refused to give up their money their escort sometimes pushed them
into streams or abandoned them in desolate places.
A European who witnessed the exodus of some of the Armenians of Cilicia says
that most were footsore, all looked half starved, and no able-bodied man
could be seen among them. At Osmanic on the road between Aleppo and Adana
they were given only 8 hours’ notice by the town crier to make ready for
their departure. The French and British refugees from Urfa saw the bodies of
“hundreds” of women and children lying by the road and met another of these
lamentable half-starved caravans. An American who accompanied a group of
Armenian exiles from Malatia reports that the road to Urfa was marked all
along its course by the bodies of those who had died. Travellers by the
Anatolian Railway report that the hills near Bilejik Geive, and other
stations in the hinterland of Brusa were crowded with Armenians from Brusa,
Ismid, and other settlements near Constantinople, who had no shelter and
were begging their bread. Large bodies of the exiles are said to have been
simply led into the desert south of the Euphrates and left there to starve.
THE TALLEST POPPIES
