Nor were the Armenians content to await their fate. In several important instances they took matters into their own hands. It was, perhaps quite natural that many of them, especially those who lived near the Russian frontier, should sympathize with Russia.
Early in April of 1915, a considerable force of Armenians in the city of Van collected and resisted the attempts of Turkish gendarmes to apply the terms of an order banishing certain of their number suspected of Russian or anti-Turk sympathies. In such force were they that they actually, with the help of Russian troops, captured the city.
With the Van revolt Talaat Bey, the powerful Turkish Minister of the Interior, determined upon a ruthless policy of repression, and it was largely due to efforts to put that policy in force that there resulted the subsequent massacre of Armenians that shocked the world. It is difficult for anyone not in possessions of the actual facts to apportion an exact measure of blame for these bloody reprisals; and in the following account, it must be remembered, we are compelled at this juncture to rely almost entirely upon English and Russian, and therefore biased, information.
The district covered by the massacre, in which it has been said 1,000,000 Armenians (probably a gross exaggeration) were killed, were Eastern Anatolia, Cilicia, and the Anti-Taurus regions. It is said that at Marsovan, where there is an American college, the Armenians early in June were ordered to meet outside the town. They were surrounded and 1,200 of their number killed by an infuriated mob. Thousands of the rest were hurled into northern Mesopotamia.
At Bitlis and Mush, in the Lake Van district, it is reported that 12,000 were killed and several Armenian villages entirely wiped out.
As has been pointed out, the Armenians of some districts did not sit still and wait to be massacred. At Shaben Karahissar in northeastern Anatolia, within a hundred miles of Trebizond, the Armenian population held the town for a short time against Turkish troops. Finally they were overcome and 4,000 are said to have been killed. At Kharput, a hundred and twenty-five miles southwest of Erzerum, the Armenians held the town for a whole week, but were finally overcome by troops and artillery. In many of the districts the able-bodied men of the Armenian population have been drafted into the labor battalions for military work at the front and at the bases. The men too old for this class of work, and yet suspected of agitating against Turkish rule, were exiled into districts where their powers for harm would be nil.
It must not be assumed because of these accounts that the Turkish Government gave its unqualified approval of these massacres. Undoubtedly Talaat Bey adopted a deliberately ruthless policy in dealing with all cases of actual or suspected revolt. But it is a far cry from a systematic, intelligent policy of frightfulness to an indiscriminate massacre.
Protests against these massacres were not confined to the outside world. Many influential personages in Turkey openly protested, and in some notable cases conscientious and brave officials actually refused to obey the demands of the Constantinople authorities and hand over Armenian subjects or assist in their exile.
Again in this case, as in that of the proposal of Enver Pasha to send a large number of allied citizens to the bombardment area of Gallipoli as a reprisal, it was Mr. Morgenthau, the American Ambassador at Constantinople, who followed up his protest by real action. He threw himself heart and soul into the work of softening the lot of the unfortunate Armenians. Of course he had to move warily in order not to offend the pride of the Turkish authorities, but working through the American Consular officials stationed throughout Turkey and through the American missionaries and teachers working among the Armenian and Turkish people he undoubtedly saved the lives of thousands of men, women, and children, while other thousands undoubtedly owe to his zeal their escape from exile or starvation.
It was due largely to the publicity given to these deplorable happenings in the American press that the attention of the world was drawn to Asiatic Turkey and the conditions there, resulting in action by the Turkish Government that effectively put a stop, for the moment at least, to the persecution of an unhappy people.[Back to Contents]