The Property Law and the Spoliation of Ottoman Armenians

Abstract

The genocide perpetrated against the Ottoman Armenians obviously had several dimensions: in addition to the physical destruction of the population, it included the appropriation of all collective and individual assets, in other words the systematic spoliation of a historical group for the benefit of a state or of private individuals. Beyond the extreme violence perpetrated to accomplish these criminal aims, the later management of such spoils remains a legal headache that will take generations and a panoply of laws to digest.

This aspect of the Armenian Genocide is all the more important since for more than a century it has perpetuated a material memory of the Armenian presence through houses, schools, churches, and so on, which have survived or still survive. In certain respects, spoliation constitutes a central element of the immoral development of individual and collective actors observed in Turkey. Moreover, it was clearly one of the acts favoring the material construction of the modern Turkish state. It is even today one of the reasons for the denial organized by the Turkish state and shared by a large part of Turkish society. It is this issue that this chapter will examine over time, while also drawing up a corpus of the official laws adopted to carry out the program of spoliation of Armenians.

The genocide perpetrated against the Ottoman Armenians obviously had several dimensions: in addition to the physical destruction of the population, the appropriation of all collective and individual assets, in other words the systematic spoliation of a historical group for the benefit of a state or of private individuals. Beyond the extreme violence perpetrated to accomplish these criminal aims, the later management of such spoils remains a legal headache that will take generations and a panoply of laws to digest.

This aspect is all the more important since, for more than a century, it has perpetuated a material memory of the Armenian presence through houses, schools, churches, and so on, which have survived or still survive. In certain respects, spoliation constitutes a central element of the immoral development of individual and collective actors. Moreover, it clearly furnished a foundation for the construction of the modern Turkish state. It is even today one of the central reasons for the denial organized by the Turkish state and shared by a large part of Turkish society. It is this issue that we propose to examine here over time.

“National Assets”

The case of the Armenians is part of a state and legal context, that of an Ottoman Empire in which not all constituent groups enjoyed the same rights under the law. We are talking here about non-Muslims. In other words, when it comes to “national assets” belonging to Armenian institutions like the Armenian Patriarchate and humanitarian or educational foundations, for instance, their status seems to have evolved over time and, by extension, was more or less assimilated to that of the Muslim institutions better known as waqf (charitable foundations), in conformity with Sharia law. Properties belonging to God are by definition inalienable, and are usually dedicated to a specific purpose that the beneficiaries were supposed to respect in their day-to-day management; but this definition could not apply to Christian places of worship, whose development was contrary to Sharia.¹ In other words, in the absence of a decree from the sultan himself, the status of a religious establishment could not be regularized by a Sharia court, nor was there any question of envisaging the construction of a new building. Law and politics were thus closely intertwined and required Armenian institutions to jump through countless administrative hoops in a process that could last dozens of years. In most cases, however, the oral testimony of a witness was the principal element retained by the courts to confirm the legality of a waqf, unless the person held a decree signed by the sultan himself.

A note on the ways of making donations of waqf properties, written by jurists from the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople recommends, in Article 3, that donors “entrust the settling of the estate to the Patriarch, in the case of those living in Constantinople, and to the archbishops, for those living outside the city.”²

The practical information contained in this document further indicates that the donation can be made to a church or a school, a monastery or a hospital, but only “to satisfy the needs of poor students or the sick”.³ In addition, anyone can make a waqf donation of his land rents (mulk), money or real estate in the following ways: (a) he can retain lifelong usufruct, with the beneficiaries entering into full possession of the legacy upon the donor’s death; (b) he can also receive the income from the waqf during his lifetime; (c) he can assign part of the waqf revenues to his children, grandchildren, parents and strangers; (d) he can require part of the income from the legacy to be reinvested in the capital; (e) he can retain the right to change the conditions of the management and distribution of a waqf.⁴

One last important detail: since a waqf is inalienable, the “assets that make up the waqf cannot be withheld or sold; only the distribution of the income can be modified as the circumstances dictate.”⁵ The same document recalls that there are categories of real property that cannot be inherited or transformed into waqf; these are: emlakı mevkufe and arazi emiriye properties.⁶ There were, therefore, appropriate mechanisms for transforming belongings, according to their nature, from personal to “national” assets, a terminology commonly employed when talking about properties belonging to Armenian institutions.

The transformations that occurred throughout Armenian society in the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s would gradually restrict the prerogatives of the religious orders, or at least impose the centralization of their control, modeled on the state itself; these restrictions came from the Armenian authorities, in this case the services of the administration of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople.⁷ In the 1870s, this administration went on to impose even stricter methods of management.

Two committees were directly involved in the administration of waqf assets:

• The Administrative Committee, made up of seven elected members was responsible for the administration and upkeep of “national assets” (churches, real estate, businesses, mills, rental properties, etc.) and the income from them (collection of rents, taxes), purchase and sale of real-estate properties, verification of the legacies, expenditures and revenues concerning hospitals, parish council accounts and the establishment of the draft budget.⁸

• The Monasteries Committee, made up of seven appointed members, was responsible for overseeing the administration of the convents, which was in turn carried out by the religious congregations. The same committee published regular detailed accounts of its activities, which provided some indication of the way the bulk of the waqf held by Armenian institutions were managed.⁹

Among the waqf held by the monastic congregations were one hundred sixty more or less wealthy active convents,¹⁰ and nearly three hundred other convents that were unoccupied or had been confiscated by local feudal chiefs, mainly Kurdish beys.

With the internal reform carried out under the services of the Patriarchate in the 1870s, the religious congregations and the provincial dioceses were required to report to the authorities in Istanbul and to keep current lists of their properties and indicate those that did not have a tapu or deed.¹¹

In 1871, the Patriarchate decided to update the list of “national assets”; in other words, assets that were waqf or considered to be such, which were managed by the parish councils.¹² It must be remembered, though, that in the case of non-Muslim foundations, it was forbidden to mention a community institution as beneficiary in the deed of a waqf. This legal obstacle could be circumvented by the use of a method known as the “right of collusion” (muvazaa).¹³ That is, the trustee would call upon a third party to act for him, as, for example, a church that asks a trustworthy person—one of its administrators, most often a priest—to register a real-estate property in his own name. The prohibition could also be circumvented by registering the property concerned under a fictitious name, that of a saint, the Virgin Mary, Christ, son of Joseph, and so on.

The table of the expenditures and revenue of the Patriarchal administration for the fiscal year 1872–1873, which includes those of the Patriarch himself, shows that, out of a total operating budget of 614,000 Turkish pounds, 120,000 came from revenues generated by waqf directly attached to the Patriarchate,¹⁴ which comes to nearly 20% of the sums entered. This amount is an indication of the considerable value of the assets held by the Patriarchate alone.

Private Assets

The status of private real-estate properties, too, was long governed by the immutable rules established in the traditionally Muslim empire. The sultan owned, as it were, the assets of all his subjects but granted them the right to use them as they pleased. And so, what one passed on from one generation to the next was more the usufruct of a property than the property itself, in the European sense of the term. Modernization of the Ottoman state meant centralizing power and setting up an efficient administration—in other words applying a European model to the empire. The result was a series of political and socio-economic transformations whose scope had clearly not been anticipated by the instigators. The new Ottoman land code, adopted in 1858, instituted individual property, in the European sense, but it was immediately hijacked or exploited by the tribal chiefs, sheiks and other urban aghas in view of obtaining the property deeds that would challenge customary rights, in other words the usufruct of lands that had been enjoyed by generations of peasants but without benefit of the slightest official document.

After the 1878 Berlin Congress, which turned the Armenian question into an issue of territory and politics in which land played a central role, the state encouraged a new political occupation of land. This policy not only encouraged the spoliation of Armenian peasants, but also settled “Circassian” refugees from the North Caucasus in the Armenian provinces and the Balkans.¹⁵ The concentration of domains in the hands of a few, rarely qualified to farm them, accelerated a process of depopulation of the region as the peasants were dispossessed of their livelihood and de facto excluded from their ancestral lands. This was the end of an age-old “symbiosis” established by the sultans, which had consisted in allowing the Kurdish population to settle in Armenian localities, which were then given “godfathers” from the Kurdish tribes who ensured their security in return for goods and services provided by the Armenian peasants. The consequences were pauperization, rural exodus, emigration or simply conversion to Islam. Furthermore, the Sublime Porte experienced the greatest difficulty in imposing centralization, which challenged the power of local tribes; nor was the collection of taxes or the draft any easier in these regions whose masters had until then been the tribal chiefs.

The formation of Hamidiye light cavalry gave rise to considerable political and social change in all of the vilayets in the east.¹⁶ Appointed by the sultan, the heads of these militia—approximately 60,000 men—became the new “masters” of the region, replacing the former feudal families. The regiments not only repressed the Armenians but also and especially policed the region on behalf of the sultan and the empire. They enjoyed a number of privileges in exchange for “working in the interests of the empire, or at least for not working against it.”¹⁷ They were allowed to appropriate the lands of sedentary peasants, whether Armenians or Kurds, since that helped deprive these “internal enemies” of their means of subsistence, even if the official rationale for these militias was the necessity of combatting “Armenian revolutionaries.”

The spoliation procedures, which targeted primarily agricultural lands, in other words the peasant’s livelihood, were extremely varied, but in many ways similar both before and after the formation of the Hamidiye light cavalry. The case of the Hayderan tribal chief, Hüseyin Pasha, whose tribe dominated the lands along the Turko-Persian border, is exemplary. Reputed for his violent dealings with villagers, imprisoned several times but always set free, he was appointed head of a Hamidiye regiment in 1891.¹⁸ He took advantage of his new position to continue to harass the Armenian villages, which he systematically emptied of their inhabitants, replacing them with newly settled Kurds.

By creating the Hamidiye regiments and giving their chiefs a right of predation, the sultan hoped to obtain the submission of a new generation of Kurdish tribal chiefs. These he intended to use for various forms of harassment designed to create a permanent state of insecurity and socio-economic precariousness in view of driving the Armenian populations into exile. This strategy, with its obvious demographic consequences, sparked reactions of self-preservation and in particular self-defense movements that were all the more revolutionary for following in the wake of dozens of years of persecutions and spoliations. The land issue, which had become a matter of survival, became even more acute with the massacres perpetrated between 1894 and 1896. The 135 volumes of complaints recorded by the Armenian Patriarchate between 1890 and 1910 list some 7,000 cases of spoliation of lands in thirty-two departments (sancak).¹⁹

At the end of the day, one of the major consequences of these massacres was the transfer of Armenian lands to the Kurdish tribal chiefs.²⁰ Many villages, for instance in the region of d’Erciş, were emptied of their Armenian population and directly occupied by Hamidiye.²¹ Janet Klein documents in remarkable detail the effects of these massacres on the people and the land. In particular she emphasizes that after the massacres, the lands of Armenian emigrants and fugitives were considered by the local land registry to be mahlul (“abandoned”) and were allocated or sold to Muslims. In some cases, a whole village was occupied and its population exterminated or driven out.²² In the Akhlat and Bulanik districts, in 1897, villagers were still being forced to yield their lands, together with their official documents, to Kurdish chiefs in order to secure their protection.²³ In any case, these events facilitated the policy of sedentarizing the Kurdish tribes through the transfer of land. This contributed greatly to the disintegration of the Armenian territory, something of which the Armenian political elites were perfectly aware even from Constantinople.

The Constitutional Period (1908–1914)

When the Constitution was re-established, after the July 1908 constitutional revolution that brought the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) to power and allowed the Armenian political class to emerge from hiding, the Armenian Chamber of Representatives renewed its membership and held its first session in October of the same year. The Political Council, headed by the liberal Stepan Karayan, was soon faced with the painful realities on the ground: alarming news of continuing insecurity poured into the Patriarchate. At the 17 October session, the lawyer Krikor Zohrab presented the Chamber with a report on the overall situation in Armenia and the means to improve it. Despite the proclamation of the Constitution, he stressed, nothing had really changed: the governors continued the Hamidian policy; famine had driven several thousands to seek refuge in the capital, where they were being maintained by the Patriarchate. In reply, Zohrab proposed the creation of a fact-finding mission composed of Turks and Armenians, which would have executive powers; dismissal of the Hamidiye valis and officers found guilty of abuse of power; prosecution of looters and assassins before a Constantinople court of justice; return of confiscated lands to their legitimate owners; rights and waivers for exiles wanting to return home similar to those accorded the muhajir; a ban on the continuing ransom of peasants by the beys and aghas; emergency aid for populations on the brink of famine in the form of wheat and seed.²⁴ Archbishop Mattheos Izmirlian, newly returned from exile, suggested urgent relief for destitute farmers in the form of beasts of burden and farming tools. During the same session it was reported that the refugees returning from the Caucasus after the proclamation of the Constitution had been unable to reclaim their lands, which were occupied by Kurds.²⁵ The Chamber therefore formed a delegation charged with taking these issues before the Sublime Porte. Led by Zohrab, Hrant Assadur and Dr. Torkomian, they were assured by the authorities that every means would be used to restore the Armenians in their rights.²⁶

Nevertheless, Consul reports show that the situation remained tense and there were threats of massacre in the Armenian provinces.²⁷ The Kurdish tribal chiefs and the local Turkish dignitaries saw the Armenians’ newfound freedom as a provocation. The Ittihad leaders did not disband the Hamidiye cavalries, they simply renamed them. They were now known as Aşiret Hafif Süvari Alayları. All of these initiatives were presented as a policy for securing safety and order, but in reality, the regiments stayed in place and in November 1908 officially became “reserve militias.”²⁸

Under the guidance of local authorities, the policy of the Committee of Union and Progress to placate the tribal chiefs amounted to nothing more than expressions of good will. The expropriated farmers continued to complain to the Armenian Chamber in Constantinople. At first the Chamber simply brought the takrir (official complaints) before the appropriate services of the Ottoman government, but it soon became clear that these were no longer simply time-honored abuses of power but a concerted policy emanating from the highest authorities of the state.²⁹ Negotiations were begun between the Political Council and the Defteraharhane in view of restoring the rights of the peasants. In fact, however, in the name of the law and of the reorganization of the state administration, the authorities launched a counter-attack on the sensitive issue of national assets, demanding the deeds to the properties. The Armenian response was obvious. Most of the assets in question, in particular the churches and monasteries, had been acquired or built well before the Ottoman conquest, between the fifth and the fourteenth centuries. This was not enough to satisfy the authorities. A bargain was even proposed: the government officials offered to draw up legal property deeds if the Armenians would agree to pay taxes on these domains usually exempt because they came under the law on assets belonging to religious institutions.³⁰

In an attempt to circumvent this harassment, the Armenian officials turned to the Grand Vizier. To bolster their dossier, a special Commission, elected by the Chamber, examined and analyzed the 135 volumes of petitions registered between 1890 and 1910, reporting 7,000 cases of spoliation in thirty-two departments (sancak) in Ottoman Armenia,³¹ and published a four-volume summary.³² It appeared that national assets and private property were appropriated without distinction; that examination of the petitions revealed a systematic policy aimed at depriving the Armenians of farmland; that the local government officials collaborated in this either by closing their eyes to the brutality with which such operations were carried out or by directly participating in the expropriations by means of all manner of legal devices; that not only lands were targeted for confiscation but also houses, buildings, shops, and mills; that the state itself did not hesitate to evict Christians from their homes and to install Circassians or Kurds; that in some cases a whole village was forcefully expropriated and its population’s assets confiscated; or that Kurdish beys took over monasteries for their headquarters; that often the owner of a field continued to pay the tax on it even though he could no longer work it; that many fields on which the farmer had had usufructuary rights for generations without possessing an actual deed had been registered in the name of local potentates.

The Commission counted no fewer than thirteen different methods of expropriation, confiscation or spoliation. They admitted that they could see no serious way of fighting these abuses insofar as the authorities did not apply the law and no trial had ever resulted in a conviction. Nevertheless some progress could be seen in the adoption of the decree-law of 1913, which established a status for legal persons, Article 3 of which authorized non-Muslim community institutions to register a real-estate property in their name as a waqf, thus putting an end to the practice of registering these assets under the name of Christ or the Virgin Mary.³³ In response to this decree and in compliance with its guidelines, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, whose status was compatible with this legal provision, decided to register in its own name all the churches, monasteries and “national assets” that had previously been registered in the name of private individuals or divine persons. The law gave institutions six months to comply. The services of the Patriarchate, with the help of the provincial diocesan administrations, quickly set to work and registered with the Defter-i Hakani Emaneti (Department of property deeds),³⁴ more than 2,000 churches, several hundreds of monasteries, cemeteries, hospitals and schools that were under their authority, a portion of which—those concerning the churches and monasteries—was published fifty years ago by the Catholicosate in Etchmiadzin. But it is not certain that these lists are exhaustive, because there may not have been time to register the domains or buildings spoliated in the preceding decades.

The month of January 1913 was undeniably a turning point in the history of the constitutional period: after Enver and the radicals who had returned to power in a coup d’état, after the first the first and disastrous Balkan war, followed by the assassination of the Grand Vizier Mahmud Şevket on 11 June 1913, the radical swing of the CUP was manifested particularly by the declaration of a state of emergency, the arrest of opposition members, and the establishment of a dictatorship.

The Armenian Chamber followed the political developments with concern. At the session on 3 May 1913, the Patriarch told the deputies that 176 takrir had been filed with the government between October 1912 and May 1913. All reported looting and plunder, forced conversions and confiscation of land in the provinces of Armenia.³⁵ In Khizan, Van and Mush, the agha and other beys terrorized the villagers and put them to flight. According to the most recent information reaching the Patriarchate, several thousand peasants had been forced to take refuge in the mountains. In this light, the steps taken by the Patriarchate to obtain reforms in the Armenian provinces can be seen as a last attempt to secure the assets and persons in these regions. Among the many points of the reform project envisaged, point 8 calls for “the formation of a special commission charged with examining the confiscation of lands in recent decades,” in other words the “agrarian” issue, a frequent term at the time for the land problem created by the spoliation of Armenian assets in the preceding decades.³⁶

The Great War and the Spoliation of Armenian Assets

The economic side of the liquidation of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire conceived by the CUP has rarely been seen, or at least put into perspective, as one of the major material and ideological goals of the Ittihad Central Committee and as one of the triggers of the subsequent genocide. The Armenians themselves had the distinct feeling that these acts of spoliation were different from traditional looting as it had occurred under Abdülhamid II. The most astute understood that they were facing a coordinated movement designed to ruin them and deprive them of their assets. But it is not certain that they had fully measured the consequences of the unilateral abolition of capitulatory rights on 1 October 1914.³⁷ Traditionally presented in the official historiography as a manifestation of the country’s desire to shake off colonial fetters, the suppression of these bilateral agreements had the effect of depriving foreign investments and assets in the Ottoman Empire of all legal protection and more particularly of favoring their “nationalization.”

With this act, the Ittihad Central Committee set in place the first phase of its nationalization of the economy; the second phase was aimed at Greek and Armenian assets. Following the same global strategy, the Ittihad authorities also targeted, in addition to private assets, what were then called “national assets,” inalienable assets in large part administered by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople and the provincial dioceses, which were classified as waqf. There are at least two types of national assets: real-estate properties composed mainly of shops, buildings and leased land; and religious edifices, principally 2,538 churches and 451 monasteries,³⁸ which have the particularity of making up the bulk of the Armenian architectural heritage; in other words “cultural assets” of which the legitimate owner, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, was despoiled in favor of the Ottoman state, soon to be replaced by the Republic of Turkey.

For the purpose of seizing Armenian assets, whatever their nature, the authorities adopted, bit by bit, a whole arsenal of directives, laws and implementing decrees. Shortly after adoption of the Temporary law on deportation—the main tool designed to uproot the Armenian populations from their homes—a Directive dated 10 June 1915, established local missions charged with “protecting” “abandoned assets.”³⁹ This simple administrative measure, immediately accompanied by secret directives addressed to the valis of the provinces,⁴⁰ formed the basis for the spoliations conducted until the autumn of 1915. The law formally authorizing the looting of Armenian assets can thus be said to have been adopted after the fact, that is to say after most Ottoman Armenians had already been deported. It is useful to add that this Temporary law concerning the assets, debts and receivables of deportees, dated 13/26 September 1331/1915 (17 Zilkade 1333),⁴¹ had been prepared by the Directorate for Settlement of the tribes and emigrants, attached to the Ministry of the Interior, with the primary goal of planning a program of deportations. The temporary law was completed by Rules governing the application of the temporary law of 13 September 1331/1915 concerning the commissions for the liquidation of assets left behind by deportees and their attribution, dated 26 October/8 November 1331/1915 (30 Zilhidiye 1333),⁴² and creating the commissions for Emvali Metruke (“abandoned assets”) similar to a regulatory decree.

Article 1 of the law alludes directly to persons “who have been deported under the temporary law of 14/27 May 1331/1915,”⁴³ but not to the directive of 10 June 1915, which must have been insufficient. As we said, the first phase of the deportations had almost been completed when the law on “abandoned assets” and its implementing decree were published on 13 September and 8 November 1915. This arsenal of legislative measures probably was meant to “legalize” the ongoing spoliations and to arbitrate the countless disputes they spawned and, more surely to respond to the protests from Foreign Legations, in particular from allied countries, since the spoliation of Armenian movable and immovable assets also harmed German or Austrian businesses to whom the Armenians owed money or who owed them.⁴⁴

None of these texts even mentions the Armenian population by name. Yet we read, in Article I, that “the assets, receivables and debts abandoned by natural or legal persons will be liquidated by the courts on the basis of mazbata that the commissions established for this purpose have drawn up for each case.”⁴⁵ The “denationalization” of these assets is therefore aimed at natural and legal persons, in other words, also at “inalienable” national assets owned by religious institutions, known as waqf. This is explicit proof that the law is aimed not only at despoiling Armenians but also at “requisitioning” their historical heritage, which includes thousands of churches and monasteries.

Article 2 nevertheless provides that “officials in the Land Registration Office will act as the opposing party in the event of complaints concerning such assets.”⁴⁶ In other words it is expected that “deportees” may complain! Another clause makes a provision for fraud, in this instance for the possibility that the owners have “in the two weeks preceding their deportation, sold their real estate using a simulated act or for a fraudulently lower price.” This in fact means that a deported owner does not have the right to sell his assets before leaving. Implicitly the text says that in the conditions in which the seller finds himself, he has no other choice but to sell at a loss and consequently harm the interests of the state, which wants to benefit from the liquidation of assets.

Article 9 stipulates more specifically that waqf assets “can, in accordance with the regulations concerning emigrants, be ceded and distributed free of charge to immigrants (muhacir).”⁴⁷ In other words, the removal of the deportees, although “temporary,” must make way for the muhacir. This means that, in the mind of the “lawmaker,” these departures are “definitive.”⁴⁸

The implementation decree published 8 November 1915 also deserves close examination. It provides that the commissions established in each kaza to administer these assets be made up of tax officials, officials from the Land Registration Office and from the Evkaf. Article 1 provides that deportation “shall be recognized by a written act from the highest official in the locality.”⁴⁹ Article 2 also provides the rapid establishment of records of all lands and buildings belonging to natural or legal persons and a list “of the villages that have been entirely evacuated subsequent to the deportation of all inhabitants.”⁵⁰ After which these documents are transmitted to “commissions for the liquidation” of “unclaimed assets.” Article 5 states that these commissions are made up of a president “appointed by the minister of the Interior and of two members appointed one each by the minister of Justice and the minister of Finances.”⁵¹ Article 7 provides that “the documents (mazbata) of liquidation shall be [registered] with the civil court in the place of the deportee’s legal residence.”⁵² The following articles regulate the possibility for any creditor of a deportee to file a petition with the presidents of the commission to claim “the movable or immovable assets left by the deportees” (Article 12).⁵³

Article 16 further provides that a “list of the objects, images, holy books found in the churches shall be drawn up and the said objects conserved. The right to dispossess schools and monasteries of all their belongings shall be assigned to the Ministry of Public Instruction.”⁵⁴ Article 18 recommends that the assets be auctioned off “at a price corresponding to their true value,” while Article 22 stipulates that the “central administration” shall oversee the “operations of the commissions.”⁵⁵

We also have numerous details on the destruction of religious edifices in 1915–1916, sometimes carried out by Armenian soldiers (amele taburi, “work battalions”), as in the case of the Armenian cathedral of Sıvas.⁵⁶

In Bayburt, according to one survivor, Mgrdich Muradian, the first convoy of deportees left the town on 4 June 1915, followed by a second on 8 June and a third on 14 June 1915. On 11 June, Ismail agha, Ibrahim bey and Piri Mehmed Necati bey began the destruction of the monasteries of Surp Kristapor in Bayburt and Surp Krikor in Lesonk, looting the monastery treasures at the same time.⁵⁷ In the north of Cilicia, in December 1915, an American missionary writes that a “Kurd brought us secret news that the building of the new church in Şar had been partially blown up with dynamite.”⁵⁸

We also have information on the destruction of the Armenian cathedral in Erzinjan, begun on 7 July 1915, and of the cathedral in Angora (Ankara) in the same period. These actions carried out in the immediate wake of the massacres and deportations can in some ways be interpreted as a clear statement of the official will to show the local populations that the régime had also decided to eradicate every trace of the Armenian heritage and presence. This phenomenon would be long lived.

To this end, the regime set up thirty-three liquidation commissions based throughout the empire; they were given the task of making an inventory of all movable and immovable assets. According to one reliable German source (at the direction of the Deutsche Bank), the Ottoman Imperial Bank collaborated directly with the authorities to seize deportees’ accounts.⁵⁹

In the Wake of the Armistice: Restitution or Absorption of Armenian Assets

The immediate priority after the signature of the armistice of Mudros at the end of October 1918 was to restore the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople. This also meant restoring the Armenians’ previous status, which had been repealed by the authorities in the summer of 1916.⁶⁰ The restoration was therefore all the more urgent because several questions crucial for hundreds of thousands of survivors remained to be resolved. In a declaration made public in November 1918, the French and British High Commissioners demanded that the Ottoman government assume responsibility for repatriating the deported Greek populations and the Armenian survivors, but also that it effect the restitution of the assets and bank accounts that had been confiscated.⁶¹ The most urgent dossiers before the Armenian authorities concerned the reestablishment of the returning survivors in their rights, their maintenance and the implementation of a legal procedure.

Even before the return of the Patriarch of Constantinople Zaven, still in exile in Mosul, an Armenian directorate had been formed. In January it sent a Memorandum to the Entente Powers that laid out its position.⁶² If it did not doubt the “good intentions” of Grand Vizier Tevfik, it wondered how the victims could be rehabilitated when “80% of the civil servants in place were Unionists and had been involved in the same crimes.”

In the rather peculiar climate that set in after the installation of the High Commissioners of the three Entente Powers, the Armenians had the feeling that the war experience had not altered the practices of those in power. The Armenian directorate was even convinced that “the government would not punish the culprits.”⁶³ The columnist for the Spectateur d’Orient thoroughly understood this when he wrote: “It is the first time in Turkish history that a former grand vizier and former ministers have been brought to justice and risk punishment for crimes committed on the population of this country. … Today, former leaders of Turkey are on trial for having ordered the massacre of Christians. This is unique in the history of the empire; it is a profound change in the mores of this country. Where should we seek the cause? This cause lies nowhere but in the outcome of the world war.”⁶⁴

In other words, the perspective of the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire drove the new authorities to bring the Ittihadist leaders to justice against the majority opinion. The tone of the Istanbul newspapers convinced the Armenian directorate that it had no chance of obtaining reparation in the Ottoman courts. It therefore opted for the formation of an “International Court of Justice” and began actively working in that direction. In a public statement made on 6 January 1919, Doctor Krikor Tavitian, president of the political council, stressed that, despite the departure of those chiefly responsible for the massacres, the majority of the Turkish population had not changed their attitude and remained a threat: “we see, especially in the provinces, the same lack of interest in returning the “booty,” the orphans, the girls and the women; the same threats hang over the wreckage that escaped the carnage.”⁶⁵

In the meantime, the destruction of Armenian religious edifices continued. In the south of the vilayet of Angora (Ankara), the local Turkish population destroyed the church and the school in Fenese in July 1919: “The religious objects were stolen by the Turk Ahmed Haci Saidoğlu.”⁶⁶ Not far away, in November 1919, armed gangs attacked one of the churches in Tomarza, then destroyed the houses of the Armenians in Kayseri, and used them “for firewood.”⁶⁷

Admiral Calthorpe rapidly set up a committee composed of Greeks and Armenians,⁶⁸ to care for refugees, but also to help him identify, arrest and convict the authors of crimes against humanity. Doctor Krikor Tavitian was the committee’s Armenian representative.⁶⁹ But it would not be until Patriarch Zaven returned from exile, on 19 February 1919, that a Bureau of Information (Deghegadu Tivan) could be established, headed by Arshag Alboyajian (1879–1962) and placed under the direct authority of the Armenian Political Council.⁷⁰ Patriarch Zaven Yeghiayan was received, the authorities complained, by a large crowd in conditions that were “likely to upset the religious and national feelings of the people of Istanbul.”⁷¹

The second thorny dossier before the Patriarchate, which interests us more particularly here, concerns the restitution of the assets spoliated during the genocide. It raised the question of reparation for the material losses inflicted on the Armenian population and thus it challenged construction of the “national economy” and the transfer of Armenian assets that had benefited especially those associated with the Young Turk movement. The first step obviously was to obtain the repeal of the Law of abandoned assets, adopted on 26 September 1915, which had legalized the takeover of these assets.⁷² In February 1919, a mixed commission including representatives of the Armenian-Greek committee established by the British, submitted a project for the repeal of the law to the Ottoman Council of Ministers; the aim of the project was to regulate recovery of properties illegally retained by the state or by individuals.⁷³ It is easy to imagine the host of problems thrown up by this procedure, in particular in regions where muhacir had been installed in Armenian homes; and equally to imagine that such a perspective did much to federate the local dignitaries and tribal chiefs who were the main beneficiaries of these assets. The murders and intimidations aimed at the survivors who returned to their homes were no doubt motivated primarily by economic considerations.

Repealing the law on abandoned assets meant taking on the local elites, calling into question their ownership of assets they regarded as definitively theirs and sparking a general outcry from these circles. Satisfying the demands of the survivors was therefore very risky. And so, the Ottoman government carefully refused to ratify the law that would have allowed survivors to recover their assets throughout the empire and regularly delayed taking action, all the while making a show of good will,⁷⁴ which exasperated both the Armenians and the Greeks. “National assets” were in principle inalienable, and their legitimate owner was the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople. The list of these assets included: more than two thousand five hundred churches, four hundred monasteries with their lands, two thousand teaching establishment, and rented lands and buildings.⁷⁵ In July 1919, the Political Council of the Patriarchate sent an official note to the government, demanding aid and payment of the income from the national assets, waqf, confiscated during the war. These monies would help cover the enormous expenses occasioned by the return of the survivors, who had flocked to the capital. According to Patriarch Zaven, the Council never received a reply from the Sublime Porte.⁷⁶

In the absence of a law, the Patriarchate tried to recover its assets as best it could. When the Patriarch learned that there were still, in Istanbul and in the provinces, warehouses containing Armenian assets, he did not hesitate to resort to “illegal” means to recover them. But he never succeeded.⁷⁷ Furthermore the Entente Powers maintained a certain reserve in order not to favor the development of the Unionist-Kemalist movement and to preserve the social peace. A report by the Information Bureau thus states that the warehouse of the Central Commission for “abandoned assets,” located in Istanbul, Grand Bazar, Hurkci Han, first floor nos. 5 and 6, still held, after the armistice, some thirty strong-boxes, some of which could not be opened, which remained “unclaimed.” The same floor also held antiques, old manuscripts and sacred vessels, all looted during the war.⁷⁸ After more than a year of procrastination, on 8/21 January 1920, following one last complaint from the Patriarchate,⁷⁹ the authorities finally adopted a Law governing the “restitution of Armenian properties”; it contained thirty-three articles.⁸⁰ The articles devoted to movable assets constituted a sort of post-genocide legal vade-mecum. But the provisions were by no means commensurate with the demands formulated in February 1919 by the Mixed Armenian-Greek Committee, which proposed the following provisions:

• “Art. 1. Are considered null any discharge or receipt given by a deported Armenian, any alienation by him of his movable assets if the discharge or receipt were given and the alienation converted during the time of deportation or in the month preceding it.”

• “Art. 2. Any Armenian having been deported or, in the event of his death, his heir can demand return of his movable assets of which he was despoiled, in one way or another by the administration or an ad hoc commission, by whoever holds them.

• “Art. 3. Any Armenian having been deported or, in the event of his death, his heir is eligible to demand compensation from the government for any loss he may have incurred owing to the sale of his movable assets by ad hoc commissions. A commission made up of the president of the civil court, the president of the local municipality and a delegate from the Armenian Patriarchate will be charged with assessing the value of the objects of which the plaintiff claims to have been despoiled.”

• “Art. 4. Any violation by functionaries of the provisions set out in Articles 1, 2 and 3 is punishable by a fine of five hundred Turkish pounds and two years in prison.”⁸¹

The Finance Minister sent the text of this law to the provincial authorities,⁸² but it was never applied in the regions in which the central administration had long since yielded its authority to the Kemalist movement; furthermore, in many provinces, especially in the eastern vilayets, there were no survivors to demand anything, and no civil or religious authority had been reconstituted to re-appropriate the national assets and other waqf.

More generally, the law confirmed the “sale” of the Armenian assets agreed to during the war and envisaged financial “compensation” for the legitimate owners if they or their heirs were living; in other words, this was a way of confirming the definitive eradication of the presence of Armenians in Asia Minor.

The failure to apply this law made it necessary to introduce a special clause concerning “abandoned assets” into the Treaty of Sèvres.⁸³ For, despite its limitations, this law was firmly condemned and rejected by the Kemalist counter-government in Ankara in a first vote on 20 April 1922⁸⁴; then by a decision of the Kemalist authorities on 14 September of the same year.⁸⁵

Once the Kemalist regime was securely in power, it even adopted a new law on “abandoned assets.” on 15 April 1923, based on the law of 26 September 1915; nevertheless, several articles were altered and the temporary document of 20 April 1922 was thus repealed.⁸⁶ Among the significant changes were the new provisions relating to waqf assets, which were originally registered with the Ministry for Charitable Foundations and the Finance Ministry. After their liquidation, the income from these assets was deposited with the Treasury for the “benefit of evacuees.” The new provisions thus provided that complaints with regard to these assets could be considered within four months after publication of the law for Turkish residents and within six months for persons residing abroad.⁸⁷

The Treaty of Lausanne officially recognized Turkey and at the same time regulated the status of its recognized minorities; but it obliged the Kemalist authorities to revise certain provisions of the laws relative to “abandoned assets” because they were not in accordance with the terms of the treaty signed by Turkey.⁸⁸ According to these provisions, the Turkish state was obliged unconditionally to restore the properties to their legitimate owners. The Kemalists adopted an arsenal of exclusion orders and laws aimed at bringing the country into conformity with their relevant obligations. But in fact, they refused in particular to return the assets of non-Muslims residing outside the country.

The first decree was passed on 5 February 1925. It suggested that the properties of persons having left the country after the signature of the Treaty of Lausanne were not included.⁸⁹ The second decree, dated 15 July 1925, concerned seizure of the bank accounts of “persons absent” which were supposed to be returned to their legitimate owners.⁹⁰

It could therefore be said that the Treaty of Lausanne had modified the status of “abandoned assets” to a certain extent and thus opened a legal breach in the system. The most important law, adopted on 13 June 1926, modified the provisions contained in the laws of 26 September 1915 and 20 April 1923. It reiterated that the state has the obligation to seize abandoned properties, especially if the authorities became aware of the abandonment before the signature of the Treaty of Lausanne. But if this was observed after the signature, the state would return the seized assets to their legitimate owners, or if they were not found, would “manage them [the assets] on their behalf.” The law also provided for compensation of owners whose property was given to migrants.⁹¹ Insofar as the bulk of the immovable assets were appropriated well before the signature of the Treaty of Lausanne, this law, which claims to be in accordance with international provisions, confirms, as it were, the fait accompli through a curious use of the legal concept of retroactivity.

The minutes of the session of the Turkish Grande Assembly for 15 April 1923, concerning one of the laws on “abandoned assets,” contains an interesting piece of information about the fate of waqf goods. After having reported that one tenth of the immovable assets are still in the hands of the state, the assets entrusted to the Directorate for Charitable Foundations (Waqiflar Mudurlugu) alone are assessed at 500 million Turkish pounds.⁹² Compared with the 111.3 millions of Turkish pounds of the state budget for 1923, as Üngör and Polatel⁹³ rightly point out, these 500 million were in proportion with the Turkish state’s extraordinary holdup of its minority groups during and after the First World War.

The real problem the authorities had to solve in the 1920s was that between 70% and 80% of the immovable assets listed as “abandoned” had no legitimate owner in possession of a property deed. This seems to have been behind Prime Minister Ismet Inonü’s move to adopt the revealingly entitled order of 13 June 1926; “Legislation and transfer by notarized act of abandoned assets transferred without documentation.”⁹⁴ These repeated “reforms” where thus motivated more by the need to regularize the situation of the usufructuaries of these Armenian assets than by the restitution of any assets to their legitimate owners.

Nevzat Onaran lists other laws adopted on 2 June 1929 and 19 March 1931 also seeking to legalize the transfer of Armenian real-estate property “considered vacant for fifteen years,” providing the petitioners could prove they had occupied the site “continually for at least ten years.”⁹⁵

National assets, and in particular the Armenian architectural heritage, continued to be the victim not only of the onslaught of time but also of an ongoing policy of eliminating all trace of the Armenian presence. In her remarkable study of the Armenian experience in Turkey since the genocide, Talin Suciyan calls attention to a few cases, among others, of the destruction of religious buildings, often presented as accidents. For example, she reports the case of the church of Ordu, destroyed in 1939 on the pretext that it had been seriously damaged by the earthquake at Erzinjan, some 500 km away. However, a witness notes that the local authorities had fabricated a report presenting the church as a danger in order to carry out the destruction lawfully, thus depriving the ten or fifteen Armenian families still living there of both their place of worship and their priest.⁹⁶

On 24 April 1947, the central administration also attempted to publicly auction off three Armenian churches in Kayseri and its vicinity as well as the properties attached to them, or a total of three hundred properties.⁹⁷ These were, namely, the church of Talas, with the grounds of the Armenian school, the church of Munjusun (Muncusum) and the church of “Lise Meydanı” at Kayseri with its adjoining school.⁹⁸

The church of Sivas was destroyed in 1950. The daily newspaper Marmara reports that the church, which had been disused and occupied by the army for years, was dynamited on the pretext that it was in bad condition. The Armenians still living there had made every attempt to obtain permission to have the building restored, but since it was in a military zone, the demolition was carried out.⁹⁹

The church of Tokat underwent a similar fate in the 1940s.¹⁰⁰ The outbuildings and the seminary of the monastery of Aghtamar, on Lake Van, were dynamited in 1951, and the tenth-century church, now restored, was spared the same fate only due to the presence of a young journalist, at present a famous writer, Yaşar Kemal, who prevailed on the editor-in-chief of his daily, Cumhuriuet, Nadir, to intervene and stop the demolition.¹⁰¹

From this standpoint, the ideological and political continuity between the Young Turk regime and the Kemalists is largely attested. The law requiring the restitution to their owners, or failing that, the confiscation of waqf assets received before 1936 was not officially repealed until the summer of 2011: it stipulated that, if the assets wrongly recovered by the Turkish state were sold, the legitimate owners were to be compensated in accordance with the formula used in the 1920s. This measure has since been implemented, but it is already clear that few properties will be physically restored to their former owners, who at best will have to be content with “compensation.” This law is a response to European Union demands and, perhaps even more, to the countless cases lost in the last few years by the Turkish state before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The relative openness that the AKP government has shown during its first years in power can never hide the fact that it still depends on the army for certain questions of security. General Tayyar Elmas, head of the planning department for mobilization and war preparedness and a member of the National Security Council, which includes high-ranking military leaders and members of the government, questioned a directive dated 26 August 2005, which he had sent to the Directorate general charged with property and land registers. That directorate had digitized and was preparing to post on an official Internet site of the registers from the Ottoman period.

It reads: “The Ottoman archives that you keep on your premises must be sealed and inaccessible to the public since they may be exploited to support complaints concerning purported genocide and claims to waqf assets held by the Ottoman Charitable Foundation.”¹⁰² In other words, a ban was placed on the diffusion of the land registers predating the First World War, which contain a systematic inventory of all real-estate properties in the former Ottoman territory, which would enable a complete inventory of the Armenian assets spoliated in 1915, including private assets or national assets, known as waqf, together with the names of their owners.