The Armenian deportations begin

In the spring of 1915 the authorities of the Ottoman Empire began deporting the Armenian population, deportations which over the following months turned into mass killing, known today as the Armenian genocide. The British chronology of the war on which this site is based records the start of the deportations and massacres under 8 April 1915, with the reservation that the date is approximate. There was no single day on which it all began. On 8 April, according to most studies, the first convoy of deportees left Zeytun, a mountain town in Cilicia whose population was the first Armenian community in the empire to be driven from its homes in its entirety. Armenians, however, commemorate the genocide on 24 April, the anniversary of the arrests of the Armenian elite in Constantinople.

Background

Before the war the Ottoman Empire was home to between about 1.2–1.3 million Armenians according to Ottoman censuses and over 2 million according to the Armenian Patriarchate, most of them in eastern Anatolia, along the borders with Russia and Persia, but also in Cilicia and in the cities of the western part of the country. For decades they had been victims of violence. In 1894–1896, under Sultan Abdülhamid II, between several tens of thousands and several hundred thousand of them were killed in massacres, according to various estimates, and in 1909 about 20,000 in and around Adana. From 1913 power in Constantinople was held by the Committee of Union and Progress, and within it by a triumvirate: the minister of war Enver Pasha, the minister of the navy Djemal Pasha and the minister of the interior Mehmed Talat, later known as Talaat Pasha.

The war with Russia worsened the position of the Armenians. Bands of Armenian volunteers fought on the Russian side, partly made up of refugees from Turkey, and the Ottoman authorities presented this as proof of the treason of the whole nation, although thousands of Armenians served in the Sultan’s army. After the defeat at Sarikamish the search for culprits among the Armenians intensified. In February 1915 the ministry of war ordered Armenian soldiers to be disarmed and transferred to labour battalions. In March Armenian men from Dörtyol on the Gulf of Alexandretta were arrested and likewise sent to labour battalions.

Zeytun

Zeytun, today Süleymanlı in Kahramanmaraş province, lay in the Taurus Mountains north of Marash. Its inhabitants, the great majority of them Armenians, were proud of their tradition of independence, and in 1895–1896 they had held out against the army until the great powers mediated. In the late winter and early spring of 1915 deserters from the Ottoman army were hiding in the area. According to most accounts there were clashes between them and gendarmes in March, and a group of young Armenians and deserters barricaded themselves in a monastery outside the town. Armenian notables and clergy called for calm and cooperated with the authorities, but several thousand soldiers were brought to Zeytun. The defenders of the monastery, having inflicted losses on the troops, managed to escape at night. The authorities treated these events as a rebellion of the whole town. Several dozen notables were arrested, and the population was ordered to leave their homes.

The first convoy set out, according to the most commonly given date, on 8 April. Some sources move the start of the expulsions to the last days of March. The inhabitants of Zeytun and the surrounding villages were sent off in several groups. The first were directed west, across the Taurus passes to the area of Konya, to the wastelands near Sultaniye, one of the unhealthiest places in Anatolia. Later groups were driven south, to Aleppo, and on to the Euphrates, to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. According to historians, at the end of April the ministry of the interior ordered that those already sent towards Konya should also be redirected to the Syrian desert. The number of people deported from Zeytun and its surroundings is uncertain. The historian Raymond Kévorkian writes of about 18,000 people; other estimates speak of 20,000–25,000. By mid-May the town was empty. Armenian houses were taken over by Muslim settlers, and in June Zeytun was renamed Süleymanlı.

The deportees went on foot, often in cold and rain, without food or shelter. American missionaries and diplomats who saw them on the road described women with children driven on with whips and people dying of hunger and disease. The American consul general in Beirut predicted in June that without help most of them would die.

From deportation to genocide

Historians still argue over when the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress decided to destroy the Armenians. Some scholars, among them Kévorkian and Taner Akçam, link the decision to meetings of the central committee in the second half of March 1915, when one of the leaders of the secret Special Organisation, Dr Bahaeddin Şakir, returned to Constantinople from the Caucasus front. Others, such as Ronald Suny, see rather a gradual radicalisation, accelerated in April and May by the Allied landing at Gallipoli and the fighting at Van. All agree that the deportations from Zeytun and Cilicia were the first stage of this process.

On the evening of 24 April, on Talat’s orders, between about 240 and 270 Armenian political leaders, writers, journalists, doctors, clergy and merchants were arrested in Constantinople in the first wave. Most of them were murdered in the following months. Similar arrests were carried out in provincial towns. In May the government issued a temporary deportation law, which gave a legal basis to expulsions that had already been going on for several weeks, and in the summer they extended them to almost every Armenian community in the empire. Men were often murdered on the spot or just outside town, while women, children and the old were driven in columns into the Syrian desert. On the way the convoys were attacked by units of the Special Organisation, Kurds and local bandits.

The number of victims is disputed. According to most historians’ estimates, between about 600,000 and over a million Armenians died in 1915–1916, while the Armenian side speaks of 1.5 million. Assyrians and other Christians of eastern Anatolia also fell victim to the deportations and massacres. These events were one of the examples on which the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin based the concept of genocide during the Second World War. Turkey still does not recognise them as genocide, although many states have done so, including Poland.