The Castle of Bitlis (Source: Center for Information and Documentation on Armenia, Berlin)
Destruction
“After ‘cleansing’ Siirt of its Armenians and Syriacs (…) Cevdet and his
Grace Highley Knapp (September 1885)
‘butchers’ battalions’ promptly set out for Bitlis, with Halil’s Expeditionary Corps hard on their heels, for the Russian troops were also marching on the city. In the regional capital, Vali [governor] Abdülhalik had already taken the initiative of waging a campaign of destruction against the villages in the north. The members of the big American mission in Bitlis, which included a hospital and an Armenian girls’ school, witnessed events in the region, as did a nurse in the military hospital who had recently arrived from Van, Grace H. Knapp. Knapp was the only one to leave a written account of what she saw.
On 16 May [1915], Knapp’s boat arrived in Tatvan [Armenian: ԴատվանDatvan] , located at the western extremity of Lake Van, at the same time as thousands of wounded or exhausted villagers from the 56 villages of the kaza of Bitlis, which had a total population of 16,651, and the 22 villages of the northern kaza of Akhlat, inhabited by 13,432 Armenians. These Armenians, among whom were virtually no men, had been attacked by Kurds and had fled to Bitlis. She also noted that every evening the Kurdish squadrons returned from their expeditions to their villages after finishing ‘their work of murder and destruction’. In the space of a few days, some 12,000 refugees, many of them wounded, had thronged into Bitlis. Seven hundred of them were taken into the American mission, while the others found a place in Armenian institutions in the last days of May 1915. The bishopric and the mission fed and cared for these refugees as best they could.
When the missionaries asked the vali for explanations of what they were hearing from the rural zones of the sancak about atrocities perpetrated against the Armenians, Abdülhalik affirmed that Kurdish brigands were sowing disorder there and that he was doing all he could to ‘put an end’ to it. Early in June, however, the throng of refugees in Bitlis was gradually moved out of the city on the road leading south, guarded by gendarmes. A woman who escaped from one of these convoys and fled to the American mission revealed that the convoys were being attacked and decimated en route by Kurds. At a meeting with Abdülhalik, Grace Knapp’s father, George Knapp, the head of the American mission and a Protestant minister, and the Armenian Protestant minister in Bitlis, Khachig Vartanian, requested that he authorize the caravans to take the road to Mush so that they could avoid the Kurdish attacks – but to no avail. (…)
Around 15 July, when the liquidation of the Armenians of the sancak was virtually complete, the Russian forces stepped up their pressure and the local government made serious plans to evacuate the city. To this end, a battalion of 1,000 Armenian conscripts was sent southward with the vali’s library and archives. All these men were massacred at some distance from Bitlis, and the governor’s archives were destroyed. The authorities would later accuse George Knapp of having hoisted the American flag over the roof of the hospital in which wounded soldiers and Muslims suffering from typhus were being treated in order to ‘guide the enemy’. Yet the Turks were the first to express surprise when they learned on 24 July that the Russian troops had pulled back. After this brief moment of panic, two staff members of the local branch of the Banque Impériale Ottomane returned to Bitlis and reported on the ghastly scenes that they had witnessed on the road leading south. The banks of the Bitlis Çay [River] were covered with piles of rotting corpses; in many places, mountains of dead bodies blocked the road and the sides of the road were littered with the remains of the deportees from Bitlis and the surrounding region.
We have little information about the fate of the villages in the vicinity of Bitlis, with the exception of the important town of Khultig, lying two hours southeast of the city, with an Armenian population of 2,598. In May, gendarmes went to Khultig to collect arms; in exchange, they promised the villagers protection. With the first acts of violence in Bitlis, on 25 June, some of these villagers fled, only to be massacred in
Rafael de Nogales Mendez
the countryside. It was not until 2 July that Khultig was occupied by 100 soldiers and Kurdish militiamen. The inhabitants were then packed into barns and burned alive by Humaşli Farso and his men. Thirty young men managed to escape and subsequently joined the volunteer battalions. Some 100 women and children from the village were later found among the Kurdish tribes of the region, and another five women and ten orphan girls were found in Bitlis when the Russians took the city in 1916.
Thus Rafael de Nogales’ estimate of 15,000 Armenians were massacred in the sancak of Bitlis alone seems quite plausible.”
Excerpted from:Kévorkian, Raymond: The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011, pp. 340-343
Report of 5 November 1915 by the German diplomat Maximilian Ludwig Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, vice-consul at Erzurum:
”On the journey from Erzurum to Mosul via Khinis, Mush, Bitlis and Sairt [Siirt], all the villages and homes I came across, all of which used to be inhabited by Armenians, were found to be totally empty and destroyed. I did not see any living male Armenian. It is said that a number of them fled into the mountains. Around 500 Armenian women and children find themselves in deplorable conditions in the Armenian church in Bitlis. Armenian women are thought to be held captive in Turkish households. On the entire journey, I and the German gentlemen who were accompanying me, saw the corpses of Armenian men, women and children: most displayed signs of multiple bayonet wounds. This was seen despite the route having been cleared of corpses by gendarmes at the instruction of the Government. According to statements given by Kurds, all Armenians in the area around here had been murdered. According to my information a revolution or an uprising prepared by Armenians had taken place only in Van, in other places it was self-defense. The Turks, among them officers, have spread the news and in many cases actually believe it themselves, that the German government arranged for the extermination of the Armenians.”
