In Chapter 3 of this section, we reviewed the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Special Organization and saw that its activities were initially focused on the Caucasian front. We shall now observe what the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa did in the field from August 1914 to early March 1915, with a view to identifying its leaders and examining the nature of the actions it carried out during the first military operations of winter 1914–15.
Arif Cemil’s memoirs, which we have already exploited to determine the Special Organization’s objectives, will prove extremely valuable here as well. They attest to the hastily improvised fashion in which army officers, “Enver’s fedayis,” were sent east without a precise destination. This momentary indecision was probably a consequence of the struggle between the Central Committee and the minister of war for control over the Special Organization. The precipitate departure of “Enver’s fedayis” finds its explanation in the fact that two days previously the Central Committee’s rival organization, led by Bahaeddin Şakir, had also set out for the east. Cemil, moreover, states that his group had to wait for 17 days in Erzerum before headquarters in Istanbul issued it the order to move on to Trebizond. In other words, it was in the latter half of August 1914 that the conflict between Enver and the Central Committee was laid to rest and the tasks of the Special Organization’s officers were clearly defined. The arrival in Trebizond two weeks later of Kara Kemal, a Central Committee member and the head of the party in the capital, was no doubt also related to the Central Committee’s desire to restore order in the Special Organization. Enver had apparently got a head start on his rivals by sending two of his officers, Yenibahçeli Nail and Yusuf Rıza Bey, both of them reputable Ittihad fedayis, to Trebizond early in the day.1 Since Talât, however, had for his part urged Bahaeddin Şakir to go to Erzerum, there sprang up, de facto, zones of influence: Enver’s partisans controlled the Trebizond region while Talât’s controlled the region around Erzerum. The two groups nevertheless adopted the same recruitment procedures, swelling their ranks with brigands and criminals who had been released from prison on special authorization. This indicates that they were working on the basis of the same directives. Cemil also informs us that when Kara Kemal arrived in Trebizond, Colonel Süleyman Askeri of the general staff had just been appointed head of operations. He adds that the CUP’s leader in the capital was accompanied by two Germans, Louis Mosel and Captain Oswald von Schmidt. The Germans had been charged with training and supervising 16 Georgians who had recently returned to the area from Istanbul and were supposed to conduct operations behind the Russian lines.2
According to Cemil, the groups in Trebizond and Erzerum were not collaborating effectively at this point, while the national leadership was taking its time settling the conflict between them. The situation was so tense that Süleyman Askeri had to step in and demand that a meeting be held to discuss coordinating their efforts. The meeting took place in Bayburt, halfway between Trebizond and Erzerum. It was attended by Şakir and his assistant, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, on the one hand, and on the other, Kara Kemal and Yusuf Rıza. They decided to summon representatives of their networks in Russia to Trebizond and Erzerum in order to plan with them, among other operations, the sabotage of ammunition depots as well as the rebellions the Turks hoped to trigger.3
The Special Organization’s first operations were thus plainly designed to pave the way for an offensive in the Russian Caucasus that had probably already been decided upon in principle. War, however, had not yet been declared; hence there were still Russian consuls in Trebizond and Erzerum and the leaders of the Special Organization had to proceed with caution. Their first contacts with the Turkish speakers of the valley of Corok were apparently encouraging: these people indicated their willingness to revolt. Using Rize as his base of operations, Yenibahçeli Nail concentrated on enlisting the leaders of local bands.4 Şakir’s activities extended as far as Persian Azerbaijan, where he recruited an important local dignitary, Hoca Ali Khan, who was “very influential” in Khoy and Salmast.5 This is an indication not only of the Special Organization’s military objectives in the region, but also of the Turkist dimension of its operations. According to information Şakir sent back to Istanbul, the Georgians were ready to revolt as soon as military operations commenced. His direct collaborator, Şakir Niyazi, a Russian speaker, regularly moved back and forth between the border zones, where he met with the Special Organization’s informers. Şakir also obtained information from the men he had infiltrated into the mass of Greek and Armenian refugees already making their way to the Caucasus.6
Another incident is worth pausing over – the attempt to murder the last Dashnak delegates to leave the Erzerum Congress for the Caucasus. Cemil gives us a precise account of it. Ahmed Hilmi, in a 3/16 September 1914 letter to his superior, confirmed that he had received the latter’s encrypted telegram about “the persons leaving Erzerum” and informed him that “orders have been issued where necessary to ensure that we can apprehend them ... Like the objectives to be pursued outside the country, there are also people to eliminate in the country. That is our viewpoint, too.”7 While no definitive decision had yet been made about the fate to be meted out to the Armenian population, these two eminent CUP members displayed at the very least a hostile attitude toward the activists who had been the Committee’s most dependable supporters from 1908 on. Cemil further states that Şakir personally demanded that the vali of Erzerum expel the last ARF delegates, who had been lingering in the city, and adds that the Central Committee had instructed Ömer Naci to engage discussions with them, doubtless because Naci and the Dashnak leaders were old acquaintances. However, the Caucasian delegates, who knew their Young Turk friends very well, took roundabout routes on their way out of the city, thus managing to escape Hilmi’s çetes.8
Şakir, in the report he sent Talât in mid-September, described the inspection tours that he had made in the region of Narman, “whose killers are effecient,” and also in Hasankale. The main subject of his report, however, was the theft of more than 1,000 sheep and 400 cows and water buffalos from the Armenian peasants living on the other side of the border. This operation seems to have delighted Şakir, who deemed these exploits a success even if they brought on a number of bloody skirmishes with the Cossacks at the frontier.9
According to Cemil commandos were already operating behind enemy lines by September 1914. The leaders of the Special Organization had now taken up their stations in the region: Şakir, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi and Şakir Niyazi were at the command center in Erzerum, Halil Bey had been assigned to Kötek and Narman, and Dr. Fuad Bey and Necati were in Bayazid. Necati had arrived there the first week of September and recruited his squadrons of çetes from the local Kurdish population, who had been promised in exchange that they would be granted amnesty for the crimes of which they were accused.10 Another Ittihadist fedayi, Abdül Gaffar, who had recently been dispatched to the region from Istanbul, met with Rostom in Erzerum in late August and suggested that searches be carried out in the villages with all possible speed in order to disarm the population. He asked for money for this purpose for himself and Ömer Naci,11 who had been working in the Van region as an inspector for the Ittihad since late August, and he let it be known that he had recruited the men needed to do the job from among the very cooperative Kurdish tribes. He added that the Armenians of Van were “gentler than those from Erzerum.”12 Talât consequently recommended in a 6/19 September 1914 telegram that Naci accelerate the organization of the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa in Persia and fan the flames of the revolt that had broken out near Urmia.13 In the following weeks, a number of Kurdish tribes in Persian Azerbaijan, notably those led by Seyid Taha, rose up in revolt. They had begun to represent a problem for the Russian troops already present in the region and for the local Christian populations as well.14
In Trebizond, the vali, Cemal Azmi, played a significant role in recruiting çetes from the ranks of brigands living in the mountain districts of the vilayet by obtaining amnesties for them.15 The only factor complicating operations here was the antagonism between Yenibahçeli Nail and Major Yusuf Rıza Bey, rivals for the position of commander of the Special Organization’s squadrons in the region.16 Their conflict was finally settled in favor of Rıza, who was a member of the Ittihad’s Central Committee. Nail nevertheless managed to assemble 700 çetes by early November, all of them convicts released from prison, and prepared to lead them into the frontier zones via the coast.17
According to Cemil, Şakir was then focusing his efforts on the Olti and Artvin regions, but he also inspected the Special Organization’s forces in Bayazid. Here, noticing that there were Armenian conscripts serving among the troops guarding the borders, he suggested that they be transferred to the garrisons “in the interior.”18 Our eyewitness and participant in the events, Cemil, affirms that the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa was operational by late October, and adds that it was then that the minister of the interior, Talât, proposed to Şakir that he either accept an appointment as vali of Erzerum or continue to serve as the chief of the Special Organization.19 In either case, the Ittihadist specialist in forensic medicine would remain in the important regional center, north of which, at Tortum, the Third Army had established its headquarters with jurisdiction over the six eastern vilayets. In a 17 November 1914 cable, the minister of the interior, in response to a message of Şakir’s, asked him to proceed to Trebizond, where he said Yakub Cemil would give him extremely important oral instructions.20
We do not know the content of the message that Talât transmitted to his fellow Central Committee member. It is likely, however, that it briefed Şakir on his appointment to the presidency of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa’s political bureau. Cemil says that Şakir was its president in February 1915, adding that its vice-president was Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi.21 But it is possible that the decision to give Şakir the post was made earlier.
In the field, the first operations conducted by the Special Organization’s squadrons were led by Major Yusuf Rıza, who advanced as far as Maradidi, a village dominating Batum. He and his men were soon joined by the 700 çetes under the command of Nail, who distributed arms to the Georgians in the village so that they could defend this highland area.22 We know from another source that in early December 2,000 çetes who had set out from Istanbul arrived in Bortchka, not far from Maradidi, under Yakub Cemil’s command. The plan was for these forces to link up with the squadrons that Şakir had concentrated in Artvin, Ardanush (captured on 3 December by Yusuf Rıza), and Olti.23 By 5 December 1914, Şakir had settled into Artvin, which had been occupied on 24 November; he considered leading an attack on Ardahan from there.24 With support from Cemil’s forces and the Eighth Infantry regiment commanded by Colonel Stanger,25 Şakir’s troops launched a successful attack on Ardahan, which was defended by Cossacks. They took the city on 29 December,26 but pulled back to Yusufeli almost immediately thereafter.27
Somewhat further to the southwest the Third Army, commanded by General Hawiz İsmail Hakkı,28 repulsed a brief attack launched by the Russian forces on Köprüköy, between Kars and Sarıkamiş, in November.29 It was, however, the offensive that the minister of war personally launched at the head of the Third Army in late December – an operation that Liman von Sanders described as “extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible”30 – that determined the outcome of the military campaign. The nearly total destruction of this 90,000-man army, routed in Sarıkamiş on 4 January,31 left a profound mark on people’s minds. At Sarıkamiş, Enver lost some of his prestige and influence within the CUP,32 but it was above all the Ittihad’s ambitions in the region that had now to be scaled down. The vice-generalissimo’s precipitate return to Istanbul in mid-January no doubt marks a turning point in the Ittihadists’ psychological development. According to von Sanders, “the extent of this bloody defeat” was long kept a secret. “Very little information about the event,” he wrote later, “ever reached Germany.”33
As we have seen, all the operations just evoked were military in nature. To be sure, in the areas in which the Special Organization had been active, the çetes had perpetrated localized massacres, abductions, and acts of pillage against the Armenian population. A review of the reports on these exactions in military and diplomatic German and Turkish sources34 does not, however, justify the assertion that what was involved were premeditated acts or a preestablished plan.
The crimes committed in the villages of the plain of Erzerum,35 reported in early December 1914 by the German vice-consul in the city, Dr. Paul Schwarz – murders of priests and peasants and attempts to extort money by threats – must be classified, even if they occurred repeatedly, as excesses brought on by the presence of large numbers of troops in the region. In contrast, those committed by squadrons of the Special Organization under Şakir’s command in late November and early December in the villages of Pertus and Yoruk, near Ardanush and Olti, were more like large-scale massacres. in these two villages, 1,276 Armenians were mowns down and 250 young women and girls were abducted.36 The çetes, accompanied this time by Adjars, committed other atrocities in Artvin and Ardanush. Johannes Lepsius puts the number of Armenian victims in these frontier zones at 7,000 in the November-December 1914 period.37 The majority of the massacres took place before Enver launched his offensive. In our view, they reflect the logic of the twofold objective that we outlined in Chapter 3 of this section. For the time being, priority was given to the offensive in the Caucasus. The “enemy within,” however, was by no means ignored.
The exactions perpetrated in the kaza of Başkale, southeast of Van, in December 1914–January 1915 were similar to those that occurred further north. In the first week of December, massacres took place in the villages of Paz, Arak, Pis, Alanian, Alas, Soran, Rasulan, and Avak, which had a combined population of some 3,500 to 4,300 Armenians.38 Their victims were primarily men.
The targets of the killing, looting, and kidnapping committed in the kaza of Saray-Mahmudiye, located just north of the kaza of Başkale on the Persian frontier, were the most remote Armenian villages in this region – Hasaran (15 December), Satmants (20 December), Akhorig and Hasan Tamran (30 December), and Avzarig (14 January 1915).39 Perpetrated for the most part by Kurdish çetes, these crimes were very probably the fruit of the work that Ömer Naci had been carrying out in the area since August 1914 with a view of forming squadrons of çetes for the Special Organization, but they were also related to the offensive that had been launched against Iranian Azerbaijan. They affected isolated Armenian localities strung out the length of the frontier with Persia, not the big population centers of the interior.
Desertions of Armenian soldiers from the Third Army during the battle of Sarıkamiş, attested by Turkish and German sources,40 as well as the fact that two battalions of Armenian volunteers entered the battle alongside the Russian forces, are commonly supposed to provide the explanation for these massacres, which are described as retaliatory measures. The desertions are supposed to have profoundly affected the Ottoman general staff and to have heightened their mistrust of the Armenian soldiers. Zürcher, however, in his discussion of the problem of deserters from the Ottoman army during the First World War, points out that desertion was a widespread phenomenon in all Ottoman armies beginning with the Third Army,41 and that there were diverse reasons for it, notably the soldiers’ deplorable living conditions and lack of food and equipment. While he provides no figures for the winter offensive of 1914–15, which, it is true, relatively few Ottoman soldiers survived (estimates have it that some 12,000 escaped death), he notes that, in the wake of the winter 1916 capture of Trebizond and Erzerum by the Russians, the same Third Army, in which there were no longer any Armenian troops, lost 50,000 to desertion – more than half of its strength.42 Moreover, substantial numbers of soldiers in the Third Army were captured and interned in Siberia; these men were very probably counted as casualties or deserters. The Armenian soldiers held in Siberia with other Ottoman soldiers in similar conditions were, let us add, freed only in June 1916, after the Catholicos of Armenia had repeatedly interceded on their behalf with the Russian military authorities. They spent a total of 18 months as prisoners of war.43 Finally, Enver himself survived the inferno of Şarıkamiş only because an Armenian officer from Sıvas, a veteran of the Balkan Wars, carried him from the debacle on his back, something the vice-generalissimo noted in the letter of high praise that he wrote about this episode to the Armenian primate of Konya, Karekin vartabed (Doctor in theology).44 Cemil, for his part, reports that there were many desertions even from the ranks of the Special Organization. One commander of a squadron of çetes, Topal Osman, who would make a name for himself in spring 1915 thanks to his operations against the Armenians of Trebizond, was brought before the court-martial of Rize established by Yusuf Rıze and charged with abandoning the front along with his çetes. He was condemned to 50 strokes of a stick.45 The Laz deserters from the Special Organization were also punished: their moustaches were shaved off, the supreme insult in Laz society.46 When the Special Organization decided to evacuate Artvin under Russian pressure on 23 March 1915, its interim president informed Şakir that çetes were deserting en masse.47 Thus, it seems that the accusations of desertion, a widespread phenomenon at the time, should be treated with caution.
Donald Bloxham observes, in connection with the battalions of Armenian volunteers engaged in military operations against the Ottoman forces, that most of the massacres of November–December 1914 and January 1915 took place in the zones where these volunteers were fighting on the front – for example, in Karakilise and Bayazid, where by way of retaliation after the Russian retreat, 18 villages suffered exactions at the hands of the çetes of the Special Organization.48 This, however, is not enough to explain why there were some 16,000 victims in the frontier regions between November and January. The many massacre victims in the far northern regions near Ardahan, for example, were killed in areas in which the offensive launched by the Turkish forces had met with resistance from Cossacks alone. It seems more probable that these atrocities were an expression of the hostility toward the Armenians that was deeply rooted in the Special Organization, even if it is beyond doubt that no plan yet existed systematically to destroy the Armenians.
The demonization of the Armenian population can be clearly seen in the retrospective discourse of Arif Cemil. He points out that the çetes of the Special Organization, retreating before the advancing Russian troops at Çaldıran, discovered “a large number of documents” in the possession of an Armenian pharmacist in Arcış, which “indicated that the Armenians were planning to conduct their movement in collaboration with the Russians and revealed how they would go about implementing their extermination policy.”49 Cemil makes a great deal of these “documents” and does not hesitate to publish them, for they seem to him to provide material proof of the Armenians’ treachery. “The Armenians of the interior,” he writes,
tried, with the help of organized commandos, to put the rear of our army in danger and close off its avenues of retreat. A certain number of important orders regarding the Armenian çetes fell into our hands. These orders, which had to do with their future movements, contained absolutely everything, in great detail.50
Although this passage was written more than 15 years after the event and was doubtless influenced by the discourse on the Armenians’ treason that Istanbul concocted ex post facto, it reflects a mood that must have been common among the Turks. There can be no doubt about the fact that Cemil and his companions-in-arms were convinced of the Armenians’ treachery: that is what led Cemil to publish these “important orders” in their entirety.51 A close reading, however, reveals that they are in fact the contents of a booklet, its meaning somewhat distorted by the military translator, that originated in Sultan Hamid’s day and was intended for Armenian fedayis – Rules of Battle, by the celebrated Antranig.52 This, then, is how Cemil’s precis of the Young Turk perception of the Armenian conspiracy came into being. One would be hard put to say whether that perception was mere propaganda or genuine conviction symptomatic of a skewed perception of reality.
After the debacle at Sarıkamiş, the Special Organization clearly acknowledged that it had been dealt a hard blow. The squadrons of çetes were assembled in Melo on the orders of Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi Bey, while Kara Kemal headed back to Constantinople and Şakir Niyazi Bey, Bahaeddin Şakir’s assistant, went to Maraş “to rest.”53 On 11 February 1915, Dr. Şakir himself withdrew to Yusufeli, in the vicinity of Artvin, and began trying to put his squadrons back in order.54 But, Cemil reports, a typhus epidemic had attained such proportions that Şakir was assigned to create, from his base in Erzerum, a healthcare system out of whole cloth and to coordinate the efforts of the physicians in the city.55
At the time, the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa was, despite the desertions, one of the rare forces still capable of offering resistance to the Russians, who were cautiously waiting for winter to end before pursuing their advance. Cemil, moreover, voices a symptomatic apprehension: “There was no doubt that the Russians, if they succeeded in taking back the lands that we had conquered, were not going to leave a single Turk or Muslim alive.”56 It is not possible categorically to affirm that this apprehension was a direct consequence of the exactions that the çetes had perpetrated in these regions, but that certainly seems probable.
Without specifying a date, Cemil indicates that, ultimately, “the president of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir, left Erzerum for Istanbul in order to save the situation; he named Hilmi Bey temporary president of the organization.”57 Another military officer states that the president of the Special Organization left Erzerum for Istanbul on 13 March 1915.58
Hilmi stayed in touch with his superior and repeatedly appealed to him for help, particularly when he was confronted with the army’s desire to incorporate the existing çete units, a project that in his opinion could only hinder the realization of their objectives. Clearly, the fact that the Special Organization operated autonomously was not to the military’s liking. The question was presumably discussed at the highest levels, inasmuch as Avni Pasha and Kara Vasıf, two ranking members of the Ittihad, were now entrusted with the task of disciplining the Special Organization “as if it were a regular army.”59
Cemil’s conclusions should be cited here, for they sum up the Ittihad’s evolution after Şakir’s return to Istanbul. According to Cemil, the
numerous documents that were discovered [plainly showed] that the domestic enemies who had organized inside the country were preparing to attack our army from the rear. After Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir had brought all this to the attention of the Ittihad’s Central Committee in Istanbul, the Committee worked together with him on defining the measures to be taken; thanks to them, the Turkish army avoided a great danger. The result of their collaboration was the deportation law.60
While we cannot be certain that Şakir triggered the Central Committee’s decision to translate words into deeds simply by showing it these “numerous documents,” it is quite certain that his report did a great deal to bring this decision about. His colleagues on the Committee were doubtless more inclined than ever to heed his arguments.
It is just as clear that the “many agents [who] were sent to Persia or Batum to create Organizations there,” as the former minister of public works, Çürüksulu Mahmud Pasha, put it in his deposition before the fifth commission of the Ottoman parliament,61 had been given the mission of developing the Ittihadists’ expansionist plans in a Turkish-speaking environment, whereas Şakir’s activities in the area under the jurisdiction of the Third Army fell into the category of Ottoman domestic policy in an Armenian-speaking environment. The failure of the operations outside Turkey obviously accelerated implementation of the plan for the demographic homogenization of the eastern provinces.