'A Reign of Terror'

‘A Reign of Terror’ CUP Rule in Diyarbekir Province, 1913-1923 Uğur Ü. Üngör University of Amsterdam, Department of History Master’s thesis ‘Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ June 2005 ‘A Reign of Terror’ CUP Rule in Diyarbekir Province, 1913-1923 Uğur Ü. Üngör University of Amsterdam Department of History Master’s thesis ‘Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ Supervisors: Prof. Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies Dr. Karel Berkhoff, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies June 2005 2 Contents Preface 4 Introduction 6 1 ‘Turkey for the Turks’, 1913-1914 10 1.1 Crises in the Ottoman Empire 10 1.2 ‘Nationalization’ of the population 17 1.3 Diyarbekir province before World War I 21 1.4 Social relations between the groups 26 2 Persecution of Christian communities, 1915 33 2.1 Mobilization and war 33 2.2 The ‘reign of terror’ begins 39 2.3 ‘Burn, destroy, kill’ 48 2.4 Center and periphery 63 2.5 Widening and narrowing scopes of persecution 73 3 Deportations of Kurds and settlement of Muslims, 1916-1917 78 3.1 Deportations of Kurds, 1916 81 3.2 Settlement of Muslims, 1917 92 3.3 The aftermath of the war, 1918 95 3.4 The Kemalists take control, 1919-1923 101 4 Conclusion 110 Bibliography 116 Appendix 1: DH.ŞFR 64/39 130 Appendix 2: DH.ŞFR 87/40 132 Appendix 3: DH.ŞFR 86/45 134 Appendix 4: Family tree of Y.A. 136 Maps 138 3 Preface A little less than two decades ago, in my childhood, I became fascinated with violence, whether it was children bullying each other in school, fathers beating up their daughters for sneaking out on a date, or the omnipresent racism that I did not understand at the time. In essence, I was interested in why people hurt each other physically and psychologically. The German occupation of the Netherlands provided much food for thought, so I started reading thick popular books and Dutch war novels in primary school. Later, in my adolescence, this interest became more serious as it chrystallized further to include the televised race riots in Los Angeles, the nationalist wars like those in Yugoslavia or Eastern Turkey, the televised Rwandan genocide, and finally, the Holocaust – my first monomaniac fascination. I was absorbed by the black-and-white propaganda movies of thousands of well-dressed Nazis rhythmically marching and saluting through streets draped with hundreds of flags. But this was no over-moralized cliché anti-Nazi statement. On the contrary, my interest was rooted in other emotions: I wanted to be like them, to experience in person that nationalist hysteria, the feeling of belonging to an enormity, the unlimited power, and the occult satisfaction of mass hate. But upon seeing the images of the death camps, the children, the injections, the obscenity of the body count, I realized that something insane was going on. With very strong emotions of righting injustice, I wanted to leap into history to free the victims, break their chains, tear down the barbed wire and end the suffering. Since I was determined to know more about the evils committed in this period, I kept searching and finding material about the Nazi genocide. I wrote several papers and organized a documentary screening about the shoah, and by the time the topic was finally taught in my third- year history class, I knew more about it than my history teacher, Mr. Henk Wes, whom I would like to thank on this occasion for his inspiring classes and for urging me to pursue my interest further. In this never-ending quest for finding satisfying answers to those disturbing questions haunting me since my childhood, I registered for Sociology at the University of Groningen. With the intellectual equipment of the modern social sciences, genocide didn’t seem like an unfathomable mystery anymore. Since the dawn of time human beings have been involved in organizing the mass-murder of their fellow human beings. Along with a growing expertise in genocide studies and a continuous process of redefining ethic frameworks, I became interested in the Armenian Genocide. Not only was this one of the major examples of modern genocide, it was also carried out in the region where I was born (Eastern Turkey). Well before any scholarly exercise I began interviewing the elderly from that region, as will be explained in the introduction. Not only did I realize that the events were very much alive in the collective memories of present local communities, it also became clear that these memories fully contradicted the denialist policies of Turkish state organs. In order to fully commit myself to a more or less thorough study 4 of an aspect of the genocide, I opted for the one-year MA programme that the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies offered at the University of Amsterdam. During this intensive course I experienced a very productive year, culminating in 3 publications and this MA thesis. Naturally, I owe many people gratitude. First of all, thanks to the CHGS staff for their ceaseless efforts to consort with their parameters as this included educating their students; Ton Zwaan of the University of Amsterdam for guiding me through the process of understanding how human societies and genocides function; the staff at the Zoryan Institute for everything; Osman Aytar of Stockholm University for providing addresses in Istanbul; Ara Sarafian of the Gomidas Institute for everything including chip butty; Mesut Özcan of Kalan Publishing for everything; Samuel Totten of the University of Arkansas for giving me books; Erdal Gezik for his inspiration and hospitality; Canan Seyfeli of Ankara University for sending me certain ciphers; Hilmar Kaiser for intellectual exchanges; Fuat Dündar for re-emphasizing important details of archival research; the staff of the Ottoman archives in Istanbul for their professional help; Jan Bet-Sawoce for his help on Syriac sources; in particular Ahmet Taşğın of Diyarbakır Dicle University for everything; Müfit Yüksel for sharing his erudition; Mark Levene of Southampton University for his help and enthusiasm; Gürdal Aksoy for help with oral history; Şerafettin Kocaman of the Beyazıt Library for help with the Takvim-i Vekayi issues; Sabri Atman for introducing me to Syriac society; George Aghjayan for sending me oral histories; Zülfikar Özdoğan of the International Institute for Social History for help with sources; Fatih Özdemir of Middle East Technic University for intellectual exchanges, and Ali Levent Üngör for carrying my suitcase with 46 kilos of books from Turkey to Germany. I specifically thank my good friend Nişan Sarıcan, whose help and support during the writing process was indispensible. Then, I also have to thank the dozens of (partly anonymous) respondents that I interviewed for the sake of oral history material. Special acknowledgement also goes out to the AUV Fund (University of Amsterdam) and GUF Fund (University of Groningen). With a generous grant each, their financial support facilitated my research greatly. Above all I would like to thank my supervisors: Prof. Dr. Johannes Houwink ten Cate and Dr. Karel Berkhoff of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. Finally, thank you to my extended family for their endless support and for putting up with me. September 2004, İstanbul May 2005, Amsterdam 5 Introduction This is a study of Ottoman government policies in the province of Diyarbekir from 1913 to 1918. In this period, the Ottoman Empire was under the rule of the then reigning ‘Committee of Union and Progress’ (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti). From 1913 on, a small but radical faction within this semi-official political party ordered empire-wide campaigns of ethnic cleansing, involving mass-deportation, forced assimilation, and genocidal destruction of various ethnic communities. Hundreds of Arab, Armenian, Kurdish, Syriac, and other communities suffered losses as a result of these forced relocations and persecutions. Combined with wartime famines due to corruption, failed harvests due to deportations, and the outbreak of contagious diseases, millions of human beings died. The CUP put its policies into practice for the sake of a thorough ethno-religious homogenization of the empire, resulting in the establishment of a Turkish nation-state in 1923. In the first Republican decades, processes of social engineering went on as many CUP potentates remained influential and continued to formulate and implement new nation-building policies in the Turkish Republic. Although several general studies on these ethnic policies have been written, there are only few case-studies.1 The wartime history of provinces such as Bitlis, Adana, Mamuret-ul Aziz, or Diyarbekir have been left practically unexplored by historians. This study will analyze the wartime history of Diyarbekir province, which has been selected because of its centrality in the Ottoman Empire. Its administrative, legal, and military importance is illustrated by the fact that it lodged a powerful governorship, a court-martial, and the Second Army. Furthermore, it harboured a broad diversity of ethnic and social groups of whom little is known. Diyarbekir is especially an interesting case because it can provide opportunity for testing the following research questions. As mentioned above, the two main lacunes in the historiography of the First World War of the Ottoman Empire are firstly the local implementation of anti-Christian policies, and secondly the fact that many other communities suffered losses too. These two issues will be addressed for Diyarbekir province: the deportation and destruction of Ottoman Christians, and the deportation and settlement of Ottoman Muslims. It is not widely contested that between 1914 and 1924 Anatolia was more or less cleansed of Ottoman Christians through migration, forced conversion, deportation, and massacres. Throughout time, these events came to be known as ‘the Armenian Genocide’, the planned, coordinated CUP program of systematic destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community.2 However, history proves to be more complex as innovating research 1 Hilmar Kaiser, “‘A Scene from the Inferno’: The Armenians of Erzerum and the Genocide, 1915-1916,” in: Hans-Lukas Kieser & Dominik J.

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