Armenian atrocities

The Armenian atrocities (Turkish: Ermeni Mezalimi, Ottoman Turkish: ارمنى مظالمى) were the violent acts committed by Armenian revolutionaries against Turks during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Those included mass killings, looting, extortion, arson and rape. Documents from the Ottoman archive show that a total of 518,105 Turks were killed by the Armenians. Massacred were recorded in foreign reports, primarily by the reports of General James Harbord. It is possible to find documents regarding massacres in the Ottoman, British, French, German and Russian archives. These are supported by memoirs of historical figures, oral history and hundreds of mass graves found in the region. There is a memorial erected for victims in Iğdır, Turkey. In Kozan, Adana, a bakery, where Turks had been boiled alive by Armenians, was converted to a museum.

Armenians settled in Anatolia in 515 BC. With the start of Roman–Persian wars in 54 BC, Armenians were caught in between the struggle of great empires. In 301 AD, Armenian became the first state to officially adopt Christianity. Armenian people were subject to persecution under Byzantine rule due to their religious differences. When Seljuk Turks conquered Anatolia in 11th century, they gave autonomy to Armenians, allowing them to live in a tolerant and just manner. With the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, the region of Armenia joined the Ottoman Empire. Armenians were ruled under the millet system. This provided them with cultural and political privileges. Armenians were held exempt from the miltiary service in exchange of Jizya. The Ottoman Empire protected the rights of its Armenian subjects and resolved their disputes in courts. Sultans llike Murat III guarded Armenians who were forced to religious conversion by other rulers.

19th century saw the nationalism and liberalism movements took over Europe with the beginning of the French Revolution. In 1829 Greece gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire, and in 1878 Romania, Bulgaria, Montonegro followed. The Armenian question emerged in a such a volatile landscape as a result of the Treaty of San Stephano. This treaty mandated the Ottoman Empire to make reforms in its Armenian provinces in the East. However, the real concern of the Russian government was not the wellbeing of the Armenians. Russian Empire, looked after its own interests through the Panslavism policy and wanted the strengthen its hegemony in the Near East. As a matter of fact, Western states like Britain, who were afraid that Russia was getting too powerful, revised the provisions about Armenians in the Treaty of Berlin, thus making the Armenian question an international matter.

In the 19th century, American missionaries tried to spread Christianity among Ottoman Muslims, but seeing they are unsuccessful, they collaborated with the Armenians in religion, education and medicine. Those American missionaries became the primary source of information for Western knowledge about the Ottoman Empire. The missionaries, which were rejected by the Turks but embraced by the Armenians, spread news portraying Turks as aggressors and Armenians as victims. This created a anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe. Western governments instigated animosity between Turks and Armenians by exploiting religion. British prime minister William Gladstone changed the British foreign policy and conspired with the Russians to destroy Turks. Armenian revolutionary organizations that emerged during this period committed every kind of violent act to create an independent Armenia.

The origin of the massacres harkens back to the activities of Hunchak and Dashnak committees in the Ottoman territories in 1890s. Armenian revolutionaries, inspired by the 1876 April Uprising, wanted to create an independent Armenia. Their plan was to provoke Muslims by organizing terrorist attacks and have them massacre Armenians. Thereupon, they expected the European powers to intervene and liberate Armenia. In this purpose, they instigated Sasun Revolt in 1894 and stormed the Ottoman Bank in 1896. They staged a failed assassination attempt on Sultan Abdulhamid II.

In the summer of 1905, 5,000 people lost their lives in Mush as a result of the attacks of a 300-person Armenian gang. During the 1909 Adana incident, Armenian Bishop Musheg Seropian publicly stated that Armenians had started bearing arms and they would destroy ten Turks for every Armenian harmed. In April, Armenian gangs started attacking Muslims. An armed Armenian group departed towards Erzin to murder Muslims in Cebel-i Bereket. The rebellion was quelled with the intervention of government Asaf Bey. During the counterinsurgency operation, innocent Armenians also lost their lives.

During World War I, Armenian committees resumed massacres. It is documented that in March 1915, 30,000 Muslims were beaten to death with rifle butts by Armenian gangs in Kars and Ardahan, their houses were burned and women and children were deported under harsh conditions. In April 1915, Armenian gangs receiving arms support from Tsarist Russia revolted in the Van province and massacred Muslims. German Ambassador Wangenheim stated that during the Van Rebellion, 300 Turkish soldiers in the fortress were killed and 80,000 Muslims were forced to migrate. An estimated 30,000 Muslims died as a result of the revolt. Until the deportation decision was made on 27 May 1915, the total number of Muslim deaths reached 100,000, and by 1918 it had exceeded 363,000.

When Tsarist Russia withdrew from the war in 1917, Eastern Anatolia remained under the control of Armenian militia. After this date, Armenians continued to carry out massacres under the pretext of "revenge" for the deportation. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the leader of the National Struggle, described the cruelty inflicted on the Muslims of Maraş by Armenian gangs as "an unprecedented savagery in history." Şevket Süreyya Aydemir stated that he saw 3,000 Turks in masses on the day Erzurum was liberated and that the basements of the buildings were full of corpses. General Harbord, who was assigned by the United States to investigate the situation in the Near East, stated that the government of the Armenian Republic, established in 1918, had given the order to exterminate the Muslims and that he had personally seen the document of this order. Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, described the massacres carried out by Armenians in 1920 as "barbaric, bloodthirsty attacks." The total number of deaths in the massacres that took place from 1919 to 1921 was 154,964.

According to information received from the Tehran Embassy, a document from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stating the fate of Muslim men who were massacred around Kars and Ardahan, and women and children whose homes were burned and who were exiled under difficult conditions:

It has been reported by the Tehran Embassy that the number of Muslim men killed by the Armenians, especially at the instigation of the government, in the Kars and Ardahan region has reached thirty thousand, that their houses have been burned and that the situation of the helpless women and children who have been thrown into the snowy and icy mountains is heartbreaking, that the Ottoman prisoners who were given to the Armenians to protect were subjected to various ill-treatments by them and were beaten to death with rifle butts, and that our benefactors in the Caucasus are criticizing the presence of Greeks and Armenians among the Ottoman soldiers who were in contact with the Russians, and that according to the rumors, some of them were deliberately taken prisoner and then escaped, providing intelligence to Russians, and that caution must be exercised for this reason. The full details of the incident were conveyed to the Supreme Ministry of War. In order to achieve the goal of treating our prisoners well, strong initiatives have been taken several times with the Italian Embassy, and it has been reported that otherwise, severe measures will be considered against the Russian prisoners, sir.

— BOA. HR. SYS. 2878/1, Document no: 2

Armenian gangs that started a rebellion in Van in 1915 carried out terrible massacres against Muslims. The gangs used rifles, automatic pistols and dynamite bombs in the clashes; they targeted gendarmerie stations in their attacks, massacred Muslim men in the villages they occupied, raped women and locked the victims in mosques and burned them alive. Similar incidents are recorded in the testimonies of Van Mayor Abdurrahman, Van Gendarmerie Regiment Commander Ali Javad, Van commissar Sani Zübeyr and retired lieutenant Recep, as well as other witnesses:

When the Russians first entered the center of Saray district, Köprüköyü Village, which had a population of two hundred, was raided by Armenian gangs and all of its people, men, women and children were killed and the village's grain was looted and burned, as witnessed by the Deputy Chief of the Regional Police, Mehmed Hulusi Efendi, and there were also those who saw the bodies of many of the people who came from Karakeşiş village to İririn village by boat, passing through Lake Van on a boat, while coming from Erzurum for a short distance and with a desire for change, being carried to the sands of the sea by the turbulence of the waves. No investigation was carried out because the roads were blocked by the Armenians and the telegraph lines of many centers had been cut. In fact, Şatak district was put under a kind of blockade by the Armenians. Hamid Agha warriors coming from Diyarbakır were able to cross the trenches built between the villages of Engil and Atlan, three hours away from Van, under the leadership of Russian Viremyan and deputy Münib Efendi, leaders of the Van committee, as if they were getting permission to cross the border, and this was the result of open rebellion.

— BOA. HR. SYS. 2872/2, Document no: 56-62

Şevket Süreyya Aydemir's testimony about the massacre in Erzurum:

It is a fact that the Armenians carried out violent actions against the Turks in the places where they took control. The author of this work saw, on the day of the liberation of Erzurum, for example, at the Erzurum Gürcü Kapı station, an estimated 3,000 Turkish dead were piled up. The basements of the buildings we occupied were also full of dead. The number of Turks killed in Erzurum is very large. We recorded these scenes as we moved along on all the routes. The massacre of Turks also took place in the Turkish regions we evacuated after the armistice and in the region of Kars and the Aras River.

— Şevket Süreyya Aydemir

After the Armistice of Mudros, Armenian gangs carried out armed attacks on Muslim civilians in Maraş, which was under French occupation. Despite the strong protests of the Turks, the French regional governor, Colonel Bremond, and other officials adopted a pro-Armenian policy and took the gangs under protection. In the West, the massacres committed against Muslims were denied and false news was spread that the Turks had attacked the Armenians. Atatürk mentioned the Maraş massacre in his speech at the 2nd CHP Congress:

[...] Armenians armed by foreign forces in the southern regions were taking courage from the protection they were granted and were attacking Muslims in the localities where they were present. With the idea of revenge, they were turning to a policy of killing and annihilating people ruthlessly everywhere. The disastrous Maraş incident had occurred for this reason. Armenians, who had joined with foreign forces, had destroyed an old Islamic city like Maraş with cannons and machine guns. They had devastated and annihilated thousands of helpless and innocent mothers and children. The perpetrators of this savagery, which had no precedent in history, were Armenians. Muslims had resisted and defended themselves only out of concern for their honor and their lives. The telegram sent to the representatives in Istanbul by the Americans who had stayed in the city with the Muslims during the Maraş massacre, which continued for twenty days, regarding this incident, determined the perpetrators of the tragedy in an irrefutable manner. Muslims in the province of Adana were being subjected to massacre at every moment, under the threat of the bayonets of the Armenians, who were armed to the teeth. While this policy of oppression and destruction, which was being implemented against Muslims who wanted nothing more than the preservation of their lives and independence, was of a nature that would attract the attention and fairness of civilized humanity, how could the claim that the opposite was the case and the proposal to ignore it be accepted seriously?

— Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

• Kazım Karabekir's report documenting the massacre of 600 Turks by Armenians in the Aşkale district
• A mansion where Turks were locked up and burned alive, Erzurum
• Wounded Muslim refugees from Erzurum during World War I
• Turkish civilians, men, women and children, massacred in Erzincan
• Turkish men massacred in Eastern Anatolia in 1918
• Turks massacred by Armenian gangs in Bayburt
• A team investigating the persecution of Turks in a town in Eastern Anatolia
• Monument and Museum of Turkish Martyrs Massacred by Armenians, Iğdır

• Persecution of Muslims during the Ottoman contraction
• Armenian national awakening

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