Never has the burning of a town been more systematically carried out than at Adana in 1909.
—H. Charles Woods, The Danger Zone of Europe
It wasn’t long before it became clear to the Armenians that the Young Turk movement was fiercely nationalistic, with little place for the non-Muslim communities of the empire. It was, as one Middle East historian put it, “a patriotic movement of Muslim Turks, mostly soldiers, whose prime objective was to remove a fumbling and incompetent ruler and replace him” with a better government that could defend the empire against what threatened it.1 In the city and region of Adana on the Mediterranean in the spring of 1909, Armenians would learn that their dream of a new era was a tinderbox waiting to go up in flames.
In the months and years following the Young Turk revolution, the Christians of the Balkans succeeded in further severing their ties with the Ottoman Empire. Only months after the onset of the Young Turk revolution, Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Bulgaria declared its independence. To the Turks this was another dramatic sign of their empire’s dissolution, and it fueled their distrust and dislike of their Christian subjects, in particular their Christian subjects inside Turkey—notably the Armenians.
The liberal voices in the Young Turk movement, such as Prince Sabaheddin, who were in favor of a degree of decentralization and some autonomy for the minorities of the empire, were now crushed by the forces that advocated bolstering central authority and pursuing a plan to Turkify the empire. The liberal segment of the movement would forge its most cohesive party in the Liberal Union of 1911, but it was the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) that coalesced power, taking control of the new regime by unseating two liberal elder statesmen: Grand Viziers Said Pasha and Kamil Pasha. As the crises unfolded in 1909, the CUP was able, often behind the scenes, to increase its control of the government.2
In early April the news of a counterrevolution in the capital jolted the new government. It was supported by the Mohammedan Union, a zealous religious organization backed by the softas and some of the dervish societies. The counterrevolution called for a new Muslim orthodoxy, demanding the protection and the implementation of the shari’a, the sacred Muslim law of the Qu’ran. The assassination of an editor of the anti-CUP newspaper, the Serbesti, seems to have ignited the immediate uprising.3
On the night of April 12, some units of soldiers in the First Army Corps in Constantinople revolted. As dawn broke on the morning of April 13, there was an astonishing sight: Regiments of soldiers marched in the morning mist across the bridges from the suburbs to the Golden Horn, shooting their rifles into the sky to announce their advent. Several hundred filled the courtyard outside the parliament in Saint Sophia Square, while others poured into the old Byzantine plaza known as the Augusteon.4
As the mullahs, hojas (religious teachers), and softas in their white turbans and robes joined the soldiers, cries of “Down with the Constitution!” and “Long live the shari’a!” resounded in the plaza and throughout the streets of the city. The presence of the Muslim zealots created such tension that the chief of the Constantinople police was soon in the streets confronting them as they demanded the dismissal of the minister of war and the president of the chamber. The softas and their religious colleagues were also protesting the sight of women in public, a complaint that had become commonplace after the revolution. As the day went on, riots broke out in the streets and the soldiers and the softas sacked and looted the CUP’s newspaper offices, sending many CUP members into hiding.5
In the chaos Grand Vizier Hilmi Pasha resigned, as did other cabinet members. Although the sultan issued an order that the shari’a would be protected, for the moment the government was in disarray. By telegraph, the news of the counterrevolution reached the army in Salonika, and within days an “Army of Deliverance” was mobilized and sent to the capital. Enver Bey, who was in Berlin at the Turkish embassy, rushed back to join his army, and on April 23 the Young Turk troops entered Constantinople. After some clashes with the softas and soldiers, which were over by about five o’clock in the afternoon, the Deliverance Army quashed the counterrevolution.6 The CUP was now in a position to increase its influence over the next few years, in what would be an unstable and transitional time for the Ottoman government.
By the eve of World War I, the CUP would gradually become the dominant political force in Turkey, assuming a new and more authoritarian control of the government. With their belief in strong government, the Young Turks now expanded their passion for Turkish nationalism, and the party embraced a Turkification plan for the country and an ideology known as pan-Turkism. Any liberal ideas about Ottoman multiculturalism and minority rights were dashed. Furthermore the CUP militarized the government and “the army became the most important single factor in the politics of the Ottoman Empire.”7 Not unlike the way the Nazi Party would take control of the military and then pass repressive laws in the 1930s, the Committee of Union and Progress tightened its grip on Turkish society with repressive measures. The “Law of Associations” was passed to prevent the formation of political organizations that were ethnic in nature, and all existing ethnic organizations and clubs were ordered shut down. The “Law for the Prevention of Brigandage and Sedition” was passed to create new battalions to put down any forms of rebellion8—even any perceived rebellion. And in order to bolster the military and exert further control over the minorities, for the first time in Ottoman history non-Muslims were conscripted into the army.9
The counterrevolution was felt not only in the capital but all over the country, where riots and protests were staged. But in the Mediterranean region of Adana—the center of the last independent Armenian state (Cilician Armenia, which fell in 1375)—events exploded in an unforeseen way.
Irrigated by three major rivers, Adana was rich in wheat, cotton, barley, and sesame. Much of the grain was exported from the Mediterranean port of Mersin, the city, according to the British historian and journalist H. Charles Woods, through which Armenians of the Cilician Plain fled “when massacres [were] feared.”10 Ancient Armenian towns like Hajin and Zeitun were perched in the Taurus Mountains, which rise sharply to the north of the farmland, and the rugged farmers and mountaineers trekked down from them to the fields at harvesttime to work.
The Turks of the region had stereotyped the Armenians as wealthy merchants—especially those in the cities of Adana and Mersin, where, in fact, there were prosperous Armenian communities. The majority of Armenians in the rural areas, however, were struggling farmers and shepherds who labored under the inequitable Ottoman tax system. But the stereotype persisted, and the Turks, many of whom were poor, resented the smaller group of Armenians for their wealth, education, and economic stability, and many despised them as well because they were Christian infidels. In the capital city of Adana the Armenians made up almost half the population of about forty thousand, and those who were small businessmen and shopkeepers played a key role in the city’s economic well-being.11
Observing the complex situation of minorities in Adana, Charles Woods noted that the Armenians and the Jews “in spite of oppression and hardship, have never given up their language, customs, and religion,” and they “possess many merits,” including an “aptitude for finance,” an ability to “prosper under the most adverse circumstances.”12
In the aftermath of the constitutional revolution of 1908, Armenians around the empire were feeling hopeful and cautiously optimistic, and in some cases were celebrating their new sense of slowly growing equality with their Muslim neighbors. In Adana, however, some Armenians were considered provocative because they were asserting cultural pride and nationalism by talking openly about their new rights and freedoms. In short, they were beginning to test the long-asked question: Can a Christian be the equal of a Muslim in Turkey? In the social milieu their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors found this offensive—the familiar story of a disliked minority being perceived as too aggressive or “pushy.”
By the second week of April 1909, as the softas and the counterrevolutionary soldiers were stirring up activity around the country, matters in Adana had become tense and then treacherous. The events that followed must be seen in the light of many factors, but certainly within the context of the political corruption in the province. While corruption was rampant throughout the empire, the recently replaced governor of Adana, Bahri Pasha, was noted as one of the most corrupt, and his successor was indebted to the same political system. He governed by bribery and extortion in a region that was plagued by excessive political infighting.13 Furthermore the Muslims of the region were poor and had just endured a season of famine in 1908, creating further resentment toward the more affluent Armenians. To add to the chaos and the Armenians’ vulnerability, it was harvest time for barley, and the Armenian workers from the mountains had migrated down to the plain for the harvest, swelling the population of Adana and its surroundings.
On the day the counterrevolution was declared in Constantinople, the British dragoman Athanasios Trypanis in Adana reported to British vice-consul Doughty Wylie in Mersin that some Armenians had been murdered, and that there “was a very dangerous feeling in that town.”14 With terror percolating in the streets, the Armenian shops around the city began to close. Gangs of Turks armed with “clubs and provided with white saruks15 (a band of white cloth), which the Muslims wrapped around their fezzes for the massacre, were seen buying revolvers and brandishing their guns wherever they went. By midday the Christian merchants had closed their shops and were running to their homes.16
Alarmed by the report Vice-Consul Major C. H. M. Doughty Wylie took the next train to Adana. “So little had I expected that any massacre was imminent,” he wrote, “that I took my wife with me.” Two stations from Adana, Doughty Wylie saw a dead body near the tracks and refugees running toward the train. And then abruptly Armenians from the second-class carriage came running into first class, crying that their lives were being threatened. When the vice-consul ran into the second-class carriage, he “saw two armed Turks threatening the refugees,” and when they saw him, he reported that “they put away their pistols.”17
More dead bodies appeared along tracks as they approached Adana. As they rushed out of the train station to Trypanis’s house nearby, they saw “several men killed under the very noses of the Turkish guard.” At Trypanis’s Doughty Wylie changed into his uniform and walked a mile and a half to the konak (government building). “I saw several men killed on the way, and the town,” Wylie noted, “was full of a howling mob looting the shops,” and gunfire was everywhere.18
Instead of firing on the Turkish looters, Turkish soldiers were firing on the Armenians, who were trying to protect their lives and property against “a pitiless mob of vandals and fanatics.”19 Armenians were being massacred and firing back as they could, but the streets were already filling up with bleeding bodies and Armenian corpses. Doughty Wylie recorded his shock and then disgust that provincial governor Jevad Bey and the commandant, Mustafa Remzi Pasha, refused to do anything but sit in their offices, seemingly inert. When Doughty Wylie demanded some soldiers and officers in order to help quell the violence, the governor grudgingly gave him some soldiers but refused to send any officers.20 “It is obvious,” Charles Woods later wrote, “that if the Turkish troops actually at the Konak had been sent to stop the plundering of Armenian houses, or from the Turkish point of view ‘to protect Moslems’ that the whole catastrophe might have been averted.”21 Similarly, for a week before the massacre began, William N. Chambers and his nephew, Lawson Chambers—the missionaries who ran the American school for girls—urged the governor to take action to prevent what seemed to be certain disaster. Then, when the massacres began, the two missionaries worked desperately and ceaselessly to save lives, and in the end may have saved more Armenians than did anyone else.
Through the swirl of gunfire, screaming people, and the wounded and dead in the streets, Doughty Wylie ran to the American mission, where he posted a guard, and then to Trypanis’s house. By the time he got back to the konak, he was shocked to find that the governor and commandant were still sitting in their offices doing nothing. Enraged, he told them that he would be back in the morning and that he expected fifty soldiers and an officer.
Throughout the next day the main streets of the city “were lined with bashebozuks armed with clubs, sticks, and pistols and claimed to be in terror of the Armenians, who they said were rising up against the government.”22 Again Doughty Wylie was seeing the old pattern of killing Armenians and then claiming that they were seditious and deserved what they got. As he returned to the konak in the dawn hours of the morning, he witnessed the very soldiers who were supposed to be stopping the massacre engaged in killing Armenians.
All morning the looting of Armenian shops and the killing continued. Doughty Wylie was finally given fifty soldiers and an officer, but when it became clear to him that the governing authorities were not going to do anything to stop the killing, he took the law into his own hands. Using his wits, the British vice-consul decided to lead his fifty men into the mayhem of the streets, and he ordered them to blow their bugles, shoot their rifles over the heads of the crowds, and charge with bayonets in order to disband the killing mobs. He even sent criers down streets and alleyways ordering all people back to their houses. At the train station he was able to disband a crowd of Turkish villagers “who were flocking into the town to loot and murder.”23 Successful and heroic as Doughty Wylie was, he couldn’t stop the killing everywhere.
When he later arrived at the Armenian Quarter, he wrote, “I found that two American missionaries were killed. They had been gallantly working for an hour to put out a fire which was threatening their school, and were killed at close range by five Turks who had previously promised to let them alone. The third missionary, Mr. Trowbridge, who was with them, managed to escape.” As they carried the dead and dying bodies from the street, they were fired on from the minaret of a nearby mosque. When Doughty Wylie returned to the Armenian Quarter, he found that the “big bazaar was blazing,” and that Turks and Armenians were now engaged in “house-to-house fighting.” Doughty Wylie left his guard posted by the road to keep it clear, and when he returned a few minutes later he found that “my own guard had joined in the attack on the nearest Armenian house and killed everybody in it.”24
He then proceeded to the Tobacco Régie factory, where it was reported that the killing was even more intense. At the factory the vice-consul was shot and wounded by an Armenian who thought he was a Turkish officer. Realizing that this happened by accident, and aware that it could create an even more flammable situation, the British vice-consul took decisive action. He quickly issued a message to the governor that if the fighting stopped immediately no indemnity or punishment would be dealt. He then telegraphed for a British warship, and gave an order for the Armenian Quarter of the city to be closed off and secured by troops. The rest of the town he ordered to be placed under immediate curfew, with a notice that those who disobeyed would be shot. Having dispatched these orders to the commandant, Remzi Pasha, he went home to take care of his injuries.25
Doughty Wylie’s continued efforts to reach the outside world were thwarted as the railway refused to transmit telegraphs for him and the Adana telegraph office remained closed. Finally, by Saturday, April 17, he sent a message to the governor ordering him to telegraph the “severest orders to outlying districts to stop the massacres.” On Tuesday the twentieth, he had received a telegram from the British ship Swiftsure, which was sailing off the coast and agreed to dock at Mersin, news of which put some fear into the Turkish authorities.
But the fact was that in the first forty-eight hours of killing, some two thousand Armenians were dead in the city of Adana alone. The vice-consul further noted that there were “already 15,000 Armenians in desperate need of food” and living in terror as homeless refugees, the “shops have been burnt and gutted,” and famine was “imminent.”26 As Armenians took refuge in the American School for Girls and various Catholic schools and papal missionary establishments, they cut holes in the sides of the various buildings so they could pass from place to place without having to go out into the streets. So perilous was walking in public that the Armenian pastor, Hovagim Effendi, was shot and killed as Mr. Chambers attempted to escort him across the street from the American School to his house.27 Doughty Wylie continued to report his astonishment that the governor Jevad Bey and commandant Remzi Pasha remained passive, and in doing so enabled the massacre to happen.
Within days of the massacres, the counterrevolution was put down in Constantinople, and Abdul Hamid was sent into permanent exile. Immediately Mahmud Shevket, the commander of the liberation army, ordered several Young Turk regiments from Beirut and Damascus to Adana to restore order. What happened, however, was the reverse.
Not long after the Young Turk regiments arrived in Adana on the evening of April 25, the city went up in flames again. This time the killing was even more brutal and well organized because it was conducted by the new Young Turk liberation army. It began with a claim of provocation, a strategy the Turks and the Ottoman government had used before and would use again to justify massacre.
The newly arrived soldiers claimed that they were fired on by Armenians as they were camping in their tents on the bank of the Sihun River; they claimed the fire came from a church tower in town. Quite quickly it was revealed that shots fired from the church tower could not possibly have reached the bivouacked tents.28 The shots in fact appeared to have been fired by local Muslims with the goal of provoking the troops to go after the Armenians.29
The soldiers now invaded the Christian quarter and opened fire on the Armenians. After the recent cease fire, the Armenians had been completely disarmed, and it wasn’t difficult to kill them en masse and quickly. For this reason the bulk of the killing in Adana happened in this round of massacre, and what followed was—as one historian has put it—“one of the most gruesome and savage bloodbaths ever recorded in human history.”30 In a couple of days some two thousand people were massacred in the Armenian quarter. The Turkish soldiers then set fire to the Mouseghian School, which housed its students as well as two thousand refugees from the first massacre. As the school went up in flames, hundreds of children and their teachers ran outside in terror, burning alive or killed by gunfire of the soldiers, who were posted in adjacent buildings.
Then, as the fire spread to the Armenian church near the school, more refugees were evacuated by a brave Jesuit priest who took them, half-crazed with terror, to the French College, from which they were taken yet again by Major Doughty Wylie when the Turks set the college on fire.31 The killing and looting went on uninterrupted, and the fires destroyed the entire Armenian Quarter as well as the outlying Christian districts; the Gregorian, Catholic, and Protestant churches and the Jesuit school for girls were all burned.
In his consular report of Tuesday, April 26, Doughty Wylie wrote: “It appears to me that about one-half of Adana city will be burnt.”32 As the fires engulfed the Armenian section of the city, thirteen thousand Armenian refugees packed themselves into a large cotton factory owned by a Greek, Trypani. There was no space for a body to lie down, and Doughty Wylie was terrified because the danger of fire in that cotton factory was now so great. In a German factory another five thousand took refuge, and the girls at the American school were hurried off to the British consulate to hide.33 As the weeks of April went by, the massacres spread like a wild fire across the Cilician Plain. Armenian towns and villages along the Gulf of Alexandretta were razed and pillaged. The entire population of the village of Hamidiye sixty miles east of Adana was wiped out. In the mountainous towns of Hadjin and Dortyol in the northern part of the province, Armenians fought tenaciously in resistance, beat back the Turks, and saved themselves from total annihilation.
When it was all over, 4,823 houses in Adana were burned to the ground, of which 4,437 were Armenian.34 Some two hundred villages were also ravaged. In his report Doughty Wylie noted that as yet the death toll in the region was still unknown, but “the loss has been enormous [and] may be estimated at between 15,000 and 25,000; of these, very few, if any, can be Moslems.”36
Of the devastation journalist Charles Woods wrote: “When I visited Adana in the month of October (six months after the massacres) the Christian business quarter of the city was practically no more than many heaps of charred remains intersected by numerous semi-destroyed walls…. the government had not then attempted to rebuild, or even to allow the people to rebuild, the houses which made up the principal Armenian quarter, and included the Christian bazaar…. The burning and destruction were so systematically carried out,” Woods recorded, “that more than one Turkish mosque or Moslem house might be clearly distinguished in the very middle of the Christian ruins.” Then, as he “wandered through the mass of ruins the horror of the scene became more and more real. So great was the destruction that it was almost impossible to discern where streets once existed and where they did not.”37
Even more heartrending were the scenes of once prosperous merchants, workmen, and artisans, persevering amid the ruins. Everywhere, Woods noted, there were “barbers, shoemakers, tailors, or tin smiths…sitting amongst ruined walls (where once their shops existed) carrying on their respective trades. In some cases the re-equipped tradesmen were sheltered from the sun or rain by rough roofs made out of bits of kerosene tins—the contents of which had actually been used to burn the city—whilst in others the labourers had not even a canopy above their heads.” “Never,” Woods wrote, “has the burning of a town been more systematically carried out than at Adana in 1909.”38
Although gestures toward justice were made by the government in the aftermath of Adana, they turned out to be hollow and only for show. An Ottoman parliamentary representative, an Armenian, Hagop Babikian—who was put on the special investigative commission and was, not surprisingly, the most rigorous of the investigators—died mysteriously, many thought from poisoning.39 Some Turks and even some Armenians were sentenced to death. But the government officials who were in some sense the most responsible for the massacres were given mere slaps on the wrist. Governor Jevad Bey was debarred from his office, and the military commandant, Remzi Pasha, was sentenced to three months in jail.
Woods, Chambers, and Doughty Wylie, among others, expressed their outrage at these two men for their refusal to do their jobs and bring the massacres under control. So transparently were the two colluding with those massacring Armenians, that when Doughty Wylie insisted that the Swiftsure land its men on shore to help quell the violence, the governor protested vehemently.40 Even the funds designated by the Ottoman government for relief were mostly extorted by the government officials in the region, and an international relief committee formed under Doughty Wylie’s direction was similarly fleeced.41
The Turkish historian Y. H. Bayur noted that “there are very few movements in the world that have given rise to such great hopes as the Ottoman Constitutional Revolution; there are likewise very few movements whose hopes have been so swiftly and finally disappointed.”42 The Armenian poet Siamanto (Adom Yarjanian) embodied that sense of disappointment and more in a book of poems based on eyewitness accounts he received in letters from an Armenian physician, Diran Balakian, who was doing relief work in the aftermath of the Adana massacres. Siamanto was haunted by the betrayal of the very regime he and other progressive Armenians had supported only a year before.
In this book-cycle of thirteen poems, Bloody News from My Friend (1910), Siamanto depicts the massacres with a graphic realism that was somewhat revolutionary for poetry of the late Victorian period. He creates images of what Ambassador Henry Morgenthau would later call the “sadistic orgies” of Turkish massacre that include rape, torture, and even crucifixion. In “The Dance” Armenian women are burned to death while they are forced to circle-dance: “The charred bodies rolled and tumbled to their deaths.” In “The Cross” a mother is forced to watch the Turks nail her son to a cross: “We’ll do it to you like you did it to Christ.” The poems carry a recurrent tone of grief over the betrayal of the Young Turk revolution and its promise of constitutional reform. “I want to testify about what’s happening to our orphaned race,” Siamanto writes at the opening of “The Cross.” And in “The Dagger” the pain of betrayal leads the poet to exclaim: “The olive branch of our hope for brotherhood/will burn again in the flame of all this.”43 Siamanto’s hope for brotherhood would see further reversal in 1915, when he, along with hundreds of other intellectuals and leaders, would be arrested and murdered at the onset of the Genocide.
What happened in Adana in 1909 was a kind of testing ground for relations—albeit at their worst—between Armenians and Turks in the new Young Turk era of constitutional government. In the Adana massacres, one can see how flammable the network of social, economic, political, and religious conditions were for Armenians in Turkey less than a year after the Young Turk revolution.
If anything, constitutional rights granted to Christians in 1908 deeply disturbed what in Turkish is called muvazene, that is, “social order” or “equilibrium.” In the minds of the Muslim population, the social order had gone awry, and the already devalued Christian minorities, especially the Armenians, were now more problematic than ever to the mainstream culture. In Adana in 1909, the issue of equal citizenship for Christians and Muslims in the Ottoman Empire had been tested again, and again it had failed.
This chain of Armenian massacre, which began in its modern instance in 1878 after the Berlin Conference, escalated in 1894–96, and occurred again in 1909, created what the social psychologist Irvin Staub calls a “continuum of destruction”—a history and cultural orientation that can lead to conditions for genocide. For mass killing or genocide, Staub suggests, “a progression of changes in a culture and individuals is usually required.” In certain instances, Staub notes, “the progression takes place over decades or even centuries and creates a readiness in the culture.”44 The “long history of devaluation and mistreatment of the Armenians,” Staub continues, which includes “large-scale mass killings,” was a result of government bureaucracy ordering and encouraging the killings, and of individuals who participate and then become socialized by them. “People learn,” Staub explains, “by doing, by participation.” People are changed by their participation in destructive and harmful behavior, and the victims are further devalued through this process.45 Scapegoating of the kind that was apparent at Adana and in the Hamidian massacres was clearly the result of devaluing a subgroup, an ethnic minority in this case, in part in order to raise the sinking self-esteem of the majority group—the Turks, who felt their empire threatened by Christian minorities in Anatolia and in the Balkans.46
Again, as in the case of the Hamidian massacres, no justice or punishment was served in the wake of the Adana massacres. And it was this impunity that further devalued an already marginalized group. While there were heroic bystanders and rescuers like Major Doughty Wylie, Lawson, William Chambers, and other missionaries on the scene, there was no foreign intervention. The irony that the warships of seven nations—England, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Germany, and the United States—were stationed just miles away off the coast and did not intervene only dramatizes the failure.
As the concept of Armenian massacre with impunity was hammered deeper and deeper into the social psychology of Turkish society, the Armenian Question was inculcated as an issue that could only be solved by unmitigated state-sponsored and state-sanctioned violence. The Hamidian massacres and the holocaust at Adana were both monumental acts of organized violence, as well as seminal cultural events for Turkish society in the unfolding continuum of destruction that would have its final chapter in the government’s plan for total extermination of the Armenians in 1915. The coming of World War I would provide a new moment for the CUP government—so that Talaat Pasha could say to the U.S. ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, “I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years.”47
In August 1910 in Salonika, Talaat Bey—by then a rising star in the Committee of Union and Progress—gave a talk to his inner circle outlining a platform for the upcoming party congress meeting. “You are aware,” he said, “that by the terms of the Constitution equality of Mussulman and Ghiaur [infidel] was affirmed, but you one and all know and feel that this is an unrealizable idea.” The future minister of the interior went on to say: “The Sheriat [shari’a], our whole past history and the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of Mussulmans and even the sentiments of the Ghiaurs themselves…present an impenetrable barrier to the establishment of real equality.”48 It was a clear and telling expression of how deeply committed to Turkism were Talaat and a growing nationalist faction of the CUP.
Adana was a turning point for the Armenians. The massacres there were another major step in the devaluation of this minority culture, and a step forward on the road to genocide.