The Cradle of Mankind; Life in Eastern Kurdistan

by W. A. Wigram; Edgar Thomas Ainger Wigram

The programme of massacre was identical in practically every district. First, the chief local leaders of the Armenians (Parliamentary Deputies and so forth) were quietly entrapped and assassinated before their vague forebodings had ripened into serious alarm. Then those who had been called up for military service (of course, the pick of the nation) were disarmed, drafted into labour battalions, and set to road-making and other tasks in remote and sparsely populated districts, where they were soon worn out with hard work, exposure, and starvation, or shot down at leisure in idle sport by their armed guards. Then all the better class townsfolk—doctors, teachers, merchants, tradesmen, and artificers—were arrested, formed into columns, and marched away from their homes, ostensibly for some distant destination. It was arranged that armed Kurds (or their own escort) should fall upon them during the journey; and all that was known of them subsequently was that they had never arrived. The villages and towns were then sacked in detail, and the men almost all exterminated, though young and good-looking girls were reserved for the Mussulman harems. If any pretext were needed, it was generally supplied by demanding the surrender of a stated number of rifles, which it was assumed that the villagers were concealing, and torture was often applied to extort what they had never possessed.

Then the “Red Massacres” were over, and the “White Massacres” started. The victims of these were mostly the miserable women and their children—practically all who still survived. These were formed up into columns and literally marched to death. With bleeding feet, starving and unsheltered, they were driven pitilessly forward—day after day, week after week—on a march that was never intended to have any ending till the last of them had dropped and died.[{389}] And such of them as survived to cross the Taurus were finally thrust forth into the bleak foodless waterless desert; Talaat professing with fiendish effrontery that he was thus “colonising Mesopotamia.”

Surely if ever assassination was justified it was in the death of this monster, and it is the shame of all Europe that it was to an assassin that they left the task.

We have said that some Turks protested, and were deprived of their offices for protesting. The Vali of Aleppo and the Mutaserif of Mardin were two of these. In some towns the Moslem population presented petitions against the massacres. In Urfa—even in fanatical Urfa—there was one such petition sent in. Diarbekr was true to its grim traditions, and here there was no relenting. Here the notables of the city had formed a “Committee for the Study of the Armenian Question,” and the fruit of their “Studies” was a revival of Carrier’s infamous noyades. The clothes of which the victims were stripped before they were flung overboard were, with sickening shamelessness, sold openly by their executioners in the bazaar.

At Mosul the sword was stayed; we cannot conceive for what reason. But perhaps the Arabs, though equally keen robbers, were not found such practised butchers as the Kurds.

Jevdet Bey, the Vali of Van, was one of the most relentless murderers; and the thoroughness of his methods in the villages of his Vilayet even caused him to be employed as an expert in redeeming slackness elsewhere. But of Van city itself—thanks to its proximity to the frontier—he made rather a botched job. Aram, the Tashnakist whom we mentioned in an earlier chapter[167] was by accident absent from the city when the other two local leaders were assassinated. The Armenians took alarm betimes and stood on their defence.

Van was a large sprawling city, and the Armenians formed rather the larger half of the population. They had much[{390}] previous experience of massacres and alarms of massacre; and they now drew together instinctively in their own quarter of the Garden City, and fortified themselves with abattis and barricades. They sent a message to their Moslem fellow-citizens that they had no quarrel with them and were only defending themselves against the Vali. And the Moslems replied sympathetically though they said they would be obliged to fight.

Perhaps it was owing to their lukewarmness that Jevdet, though supported by the regular soldiers of the garrison, never ventured to deliver a formal assault upon the entrenched quarter; but there was much desultory fighting, and most of the city was burned. Jevdet relied principally upon blockading his victims, and reducing them by hunger; and, to quicken their surrender, he even refrained from massacring the few surviving villagers, and drove them into the entrenchments to help in consuming supplies. After four weeks’ leaguer this scheme was on the point of succeeding, when suddenly the despairing Armenians saw their enemies preparing to withdraw. The Russians advancing from Sara Hamish had approached within striking distance, and next day Van was relieved.

When the Russians withdrew a little later the Armenians, of course, fled with them, and took refuge across the border, near Tiflis and Erivan. How many of them, we wonder, have survived their later tribulations—war, famine, typhus, internecine strife and Bolshevism?

And the motive for all this butchery? The alleged “plot” is merely a subterfuge. The Armenians would, no doubt, have welcomed the coming of the Russians; what subject race in Turkey would not? But, until the Russians arrived, they were no more a menace to the rear of the Turks than the citizens of occupied Belgium were to the rear of the Germans. There is something, perhaps, in the suggestion that one motive was sheer plunder. Many Armenians were wealthy; and the Turks, impoverished by a series of wars, were intent on seizing their wealth, never reflecting that by the extermination of their cleverest traders, and their best artificers and husbandmen, they were only consigning themselves[{391}] to a deeper and more hopeless poverty. There was certainly also a religious motive; for, though we can hardly say that the profession of Islam would in all cases have secured quarter, yet it is certain that this was made an essential condition in the sparing of the few who were spared. And what but religious bigotry could have involved the Jacobites in the fate of the Armenians? There was no plot to fear from the Jacobites. They had neither the cohesion nor the national aspirations of the Armenians. Their escapes in previous massacres prove that the Turks could have spared them if they wished. And yet this time they were not spared.