Until the spring of 1915, Cilicia was one of the chief centres of the Armenian race in Turkey, and there was no region, with the possible exception of Van, which they succeeded in making and keeping so thoroughly their own. The Armenian Dispersion in north-eastern Anatolia and the suburban districts round the coasts of Marmora, numerous and wealthy and influential though it was, still constituted no more than an urban class, and even in the towns was usually in a minority. The Cilician highlands, on the other hand, were sown thick with Armenian peasant communities—small but prosperous hill towns and villages, of which the most important were Hadjin and Zeitoun in the north, but which stretched in an unbroken chain from the Taurus to the southern spurs of the Amanus, until, at Dört Yöl, they touched the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean.
The Cilician Armenians were mainly shepherds and husbandmen, but they were also one of the most civilised and progressive sections of the Armenian race. Schools, both Armenian and American, had been established in the mountains, and the mountaineers were in close contact with Adana, Tarsus, Mersina and the other ports and cities of the Adana plain, where commerce and industry were almost entirely in the hands of the Armenian element—an element constantly reinforced from the reservoir of Armenian population in the highlands.
The Cilician Armenians seemed destined to play an important part in the future development of the Ottoman Empire. Their country was of peculiar strategical and commercial importance, for it was to be traversed by the main artery of the Empire, the Baghdad Railway, in the most vital section of its course, where it has to negotiate two mountain-barriers and approach most nearly to the Mediterranean coast. And meanwhile the Armenian population itself was here steadily increasing in numbers, while in almost every other part of Turkey it had been receding under the continuous repression to which it had been subjected since 1878. This increase was the more remarkable because Cilicia had been especially visited by the last outbreak of massacre, which occurred in 1909.
All this, however, only rendered the Cilician Armenians more obnoxious in the Ottoman Government’s eyes, and the war gave it the opportunity it coveted for rooting them out. A universal deportation of all the Armenians in the Empire may or may not have been contemplated before the breach between the Turks and Armenians at Van, in the middle of April, 1915; but, as far as Cilicia is concerned, there is no doubt whatever that the scheme was devised and put in train before any of the events at Van occurred. Fighting began at Van on the 20th April; the first Armenians had been deported from Zeitoun on the 8th April, twelve days before, and by the 19th a convoy of them had already arrived in Syria (Doc. [138]. The Cilician deportations, at any rate, must therefore have been planned at least as early as March, and probably earlier still.
And there is one special feature about the execution of the scheme in Cilicia which makes it evident that it was carried out deliberately and thought out far ahead. Immediately the Armenians were evicted from their villages, their houses were assigned to Moslem refugees. We have occasional evidence of the same practice, during June, in the Vilayets of Erzeroum and Trebizond; but in these cases the Moslem intruders, where we can trace their origin, generally prove to have been Turks or Kurds from the adjoining districts on the east, who had just evacuated their own homes in consequence of the first Russian occupation of Van. Their installation in Armenian houses was apparently extempore and conceivably only provisional. On the other hand, the “mouhadjirs” brought by the Ottoman Government to Zeitoun, Hadjin and the other towns and villages of the Cilician highlands, were all of them Moslem refugees from Europe—from the Roumelian Vilayets ceded by Turkey in 1913, as a result of the Balkan War. They had been on the Government’s hands for over two years, and during all that time they had remained stranded in Thrace or along the Aegean littoral. But now they had been transported from these western fringes of the Empire to the other extremity of the Anatolian Railway, and by the 8th April, 1915, they were in readiness to occupy the homes of the Armenians in Cilicia immediately their rightful owners had started on their road to exile. This is clear proof that, at any rate in Cilicia, the deportation was not only planned systematically, but planned a long time in advance.
Its execution began at Zeitoun in April, and was extended to all the highland villages in the course of May and June. In the cities of the plain and the coast, on the other hand, it did not become drastic till the first week in September—a tacit avowal that the official pleas of Armenian disloyalty and strategical necessity were a pretext hardly intended to be taken seriously even by their authors.
The Zeitounlis were deported in two directions—half of them to Sultania (see Documents 123 and 125) in the Anatolian Desert, and half to the Mesopotamian Sandjak of Der-el-Zor (see Document 145). The exiles at Sultania were subsequently removed to Der-el-Zor to join the rest, and the later convoys seem all to have taken the south-eastward road. The deportation was conducted by the gendarmerie with the same brutality as elsewhere, but the Cilician country is free of nomadic Kurds, so that there was here less wholesale massacre on the way. On the last stages of their journey to Zor the exiles were harassed by the Arab nomads of the steppe, but these are a milder race than their Kurdish neighbours. The chief alleviation of the Cilicians’ fate was their geographical position. The distance they had to traverse was comparatively short, and they only began to die in large numbers after reaching their destination.
119. CILICIA: ADDRESS (WITH ENCLOSURE), DATED 3rd JULY, 1915, FROM THE ARMENIAN COLONY IN EGYPT TO HIS EXCELLENCY LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR J.G. MAXWELL, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S FORCES IN EGYPT.
(a) Address from the Armenian Colony.
We addressed ourselves recently to your Excellency to obtain your authorisation to send three emissaries to Cilicia, in order to inform ourselves of the true situation in that country.