Sato Moughalian, author of Feast of Ashes, on the beginnings of the Armenian Genocide.
In light of the passing of Tuesday’s House resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide we present an excerpt from Feast of Ashes: The Life and Art of David Ohannessian» by Sato Moughalian. It is our hope the following excerpt will provide historical context on why this resolution is important.
On March 18, 1915, on the western front, British and French naval forces launched a campaign to breach the Dardanelles strait—the narrow waterway separating Europe from Asia—and enter the Sea of Marmara, aiming their warships for the capital and the Black Sea. The Allied armada suffered fierce bombardment. Three Allied battleships sank, one with more than six hundred men onboard. Three more ships were badly damaged.
The British Fleet admiral48 called off the offensive. The Royal Navy regrouped, summoning Australian and New Zealand battalions from Egypt as well as Indian Army troops.49 When the reconstituted Allied fleet returned to menace the Aegean waters once again, the Ottoman War Ministry dispatched gendarmes into the interior to search Armenian homes and schools for hidden weapons and evidence of treachery. The smallest suspicion of disloyalty to the regime was cause for punishment.
In late March, days after the Dardanelles attack, Turkish gendarmes began to raid Armenian homes and properties in the provincial capital of Brussa, where Ohannessian had recently spent time restoring the tiling of the Green Mosque. One Sunday at dawn, officers entered the city’s Armenian Orthodox church, smashing walls in a fruitless search for arms. The police arrested nearly two hundred and fifty Brussa Armenian intellectuals and business and religious leaders. Thirteen were hanged immediately, and the others were exiled to the interior, tortured, and shot.50 Afterward, chetes burned their bodies.51
In Constantinople, Young Turk leadership, fearful of foreign reprisals for the growing numbers of mass arrests and executions of Armenians throughout the provinces, set a powerful plan into motion. Secreted from the gaze of the capital’s large European community, members of the State Security Directorate and the police force’s Department of Political Affairs composed blacklists of the capital’s most influential, active, and accomplished Armenians. They were all to be exiled into the Anatolian interior. A spy network, directed by Constantinople’s police chief and his assistant, surveilled the subjects carefully, noting their daily movements. The committee hatched a scheme for hundreds of officers to mobilize and apprehend more than two hundred eminent Armenians in a single, grandly orchestrated strike.
On Saturday evening, April 24, 1915, British and Anzac forces positioned themselves for an amphibious landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. The same night, in Constantinople, the Young Turk government unfurled the monstrous plan.
Throughout the late hours of the 24th and past dawn on the 25th, the capital’s police force arrested Armenian cultural, civic, and religious leaders—merchants, lawyers, teachers, architects, clergy, writers, doctors, government functionaries, pharmacists, and performers.
The beloved musician Gomidas Vartabed was among the first to be rounded up. When he returned to his home in the Pangalti neighborhood early on Saturday evening, a plain clothes officer politely asked the priest to accompany him to the local police station, where, he promised, Gomidas would simply be asked for some information. “It won’t take more than five minutes, you will soon be back, nothing of importance,” the policeman prevaricated.52
Across the city, agents of the state accosted Armenians at their homes or offices.53 Peacefully, for the most part, and without being charged with any crime, sleepy and bewildered notables, some still wearing their nightshirts and slippers, climbed into military trucks. Gendarmes drove them to Mehterhane, Constantinople’s central, fortified prison. Still unsure of the grounds for their detention, the men waited in anxious silence.
One of the jailed men, journalist Aram Andonian, noted: “What dumbfounded us most from the first moment was that there was no obvious direction or trend in the arrests. With the revolutionaries were also anti-revolutionaries. . . . There were liberals as well as conservatives. There were educated people with complete illiterates. There were the hot headed alongside the most cautious of people who were even scared of their own shadows. This attempt to mix water with fire worried us. Of course we did not know why we were arrested and what would be the outcome of this mishap. It was obvious that there was a serious and troublesome threat facing not only this or that faction of the Armenian people, but a threat that was looming over the whole [Armenian] nation.”54
Hearing of the arrests, two Armenian parliamentarians, Krikor Zohrab and Vartges Seringiulian, rushed to Talaat Pasha’s home in the early hours of April 25. The interior minister, whom they considered a friend, dodged any explanation.
Later in the morning, Zohrab drafted a memorandum to present to authorities, imploring them to show clemency toward the arrested Armenians “out of respect for the memory of the thousands of Armenian soldiers who [had] died defending the Ottoman fatherland.”55 He and three other Armenian delegates called on the grand vizier, who icily informed them that hidden stores of arms and ammunition had been discovered in Van, dangerously close to the eastern front. In consequence, he stated, the government had decided to remove Armenian activists from the capital.56
The men then hurried to Talaat’s office, hoping for a more sympathetic answer. This time, the minister responded. “All those Armenians,” Talaat 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.”57
On Sunday, as the incarcerated men in Mehterhane waited for news, they heard the dull boom of English and Russian naval cannons nearing Constantinople’s fortress gates.58 A short while later, hundreds of police armed with bayonets herded the prisoners back into the military trucks. In a grandiose display, the Turkish authorities conveyed the arrested luminaries to the Sirkeci port, where a steamship stood ready. One of the prisoners, Father Grigoris Balakian related, “Even the bravest were trembling, because we instinctively felt that we were headed for the grave.”59
Within two days, the number of Armenians seized in the capital rose by over two thousand.60 They too were sent into the interior.
After removing most of the capital’s Armenian intelligentsia, the Young Turk cabinet drafted a temporary law on May 25 to sanction the general expulsion of any urban or rural residents suspected of disloyalty. War Minister Enver Pasha took charge of enforcement. Five days later, CUP lawmakers refined the legislation to include, specifically, Armenians who had “engaged in dangerous activities such as collaborating with the enemy, massacring innocent people and instigating rebellions.”61
This new May 30 legislation, the Temporary Law of Deportation, also contained a crucial provision: “Administrative instructions regarding movable and immovable property abandoned by Armenians deported as a result of the war and the unusual political circumstances.” As published in the newspapers and understood by foreigners in the capital, the law was meant to preserve, for the deportees, the cash value of properties left behind. Liquidation committees—“commissions for abandoned property”—auctioned and meted out orchards, factories, artisanal workshops, and stores. On June 10, the government published an even more comprehensive measure for the relocation of Armenians under war conditions.
Bureaucrats and scribes produced sheaves of documents to record the vast quantities of goods, homes, shops, lands, orchards, and factories left behind. The government appropriated much of it, while maintaining the ruse of safely preserving it or liquidating it for the benefit of the true owners. Corrupt officials and inflamed mobs took their shares as well. The dismemberment of the Armenian community and redistribution of its wealth, schools, church buildings, and other properties were now enshrined in law.
In late July, the Ministry of the Interior, under the direction of Talaat Pasha, ordered the creation of detailed maps with censuses of the various national groups. Non-Muslim and non-Turkish populations were to be limited to no more than 10, 5, or 2 percent of the total in each region.62 In August, towns and cities in the western Anatolian regions began widespread deportations of Armenians eastward toward the Syrian and Mesopotamian wastelands.
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Notes
48. British Fleet Admiral John de Robeck.
49. Erickson, Ordered to Die, 79.
50. Sebuh Akuni, The Crime of the Ages: A Chronicle of Turkey’s Genocide of the Armenians (Toluca Lake, CA: H. and K. Manjikian Publishing, 2010), 33–34.
51. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 558.
52. Aram Andonian, quoted in Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian, The Survivor: Biography of Aram Andonian (London: Taderon Press, 2010), 4.
53. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 252. Grigoris Balakian reported, “Weeks earlier Bedri, the chief of police in Constantinople, had sent official sealed orders to all the guardhouses, with the instruction that they not be opened until the designated day and that they then be carried out with precision and in secrecy.” Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1918, trans. Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 56. Taner Akçam presents new documentation of the authenticity of Talaat Pasha’s orders in 1915. See Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
54. Quoted in Kuyumjian, The Survivor, 12.
55. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 252.
56. Henry Morgenthau and Ara Sarafian, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (London: Gomidas Institute, 2016), 249. According to Ambassador Morgenthau, after the withdrawal of Russian troops from the area around Van, the governor of Van, who was the brother-in-law of Enver Pasha, allowed the Turkish army to “turn their rifles, machine guns, and other weapons upon the Armenian women, children, and old men in the villages of Van. Following their usual custom, they distributed the most beautiful Armenian women among the Moslems, sacked and burned the Armenian villages for days. On April 15, about 500 young Armenian men of Akantz were mustered to hear an order of the Sultan; at sunset they were marched outside the town and every man shot in cold blood. This procedure was repeated in about eighty Armenian villages in the district north of Lake Van, and in three days, 24,000 Armenians were murdered in this atrocious fashion.”
57. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 252–53.
58. Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, 58.
59. Ibid., 59.
60. Dündar, Crime of Numbers, 74.
61. BOA, Meclis-i Vükelâ Mazbatasi 198/163, as translated and quoted in Uğur Ümit Üngör and Mehmet Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 44.
62. Dündar, Crime of Numbers, 45.
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