Men of a labor battalion in the Turkish Army, in this case mainly composed of Greek Christians. On February 25, it became official policy that all Armenians in the army would serve in such unarmed labor battalions rather than in front-line roles, though in practice the order mainly applied in the Caucasus to the few Armenians not already disarmed.

February 25 1915, Erzurum–After the disastrous Turkish defeat at Sarikamish, the Turkish government became increasingly distrustful of its Armenian population. There were many factors at play here, including fervent Turkish nationalism, pan-Islamic feeling, the fervent support that the Russian Armenian population gave to the Russian Army during the Turkish invasion, and Enver Pasha’s search for someone else to blame for his failures at Sarikamish. The “Armenian Question” was certainly on the minds of most in the government; a meeting may have taken place earlier in the month in which mass deportations and/or exterminations of the Armenian population may have been planned.

On February 25, Enver Pasha issued an order that any Armenians serving in Turkish armies were to be disarmed: they would be removed from front line roles and instead put in labor battalions doing work behind the lines. This formed an extremely clear official statement of how the Turkish government felt about its Armenian population, labeling them officially as traitors.

Tens of thousands of Armenians had been called up during the first months of the war. For example, in the Vilayet of Bitlis, 25,000 Armenian men were called up, out of a total Armenian population of 218,000. This latter figure comes from a census taken by the Armenian church shortly before the war, which enumerated just over 1.9 million Armenians throughout Turkey. However, Enver’s order probably only ended up applying directly to a few thousand troops in the Third Army in the Caucasus. Many of the conscripts had been sent directly into labor battalions and other support roles, while many of those initially armed had been disarmed before or during the Sarikamish campaign. Others (especially those not from eastern Anatolia) were sent to fronts other than the Caucasus, where, despite Enver’s order, many were kept on the front lines. Armenians served throughout the Gallipoli campaign in 1915/1916, and on the front in Palestine and Sinai until the end of the war.

Of the few thousand Armenian troops left that were affected by the order, there is some limited evidence to suggest that some of them were simply “disappeared” rather than reassigned. An Armenian soldier, Hayg Aghababian, described how five to twenty soldiers would be taken nightly from camp, never to be seen again; this continued until all the Armenian forces in that detachment had been “disappeared.” This is likely the sole account of what happened to those affected by Enver’s order; whether it reflects a more widespread practice cannot be known.

Sources include: Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History. Image Credit: “Labor Battalions (Amele Taburu)” by Uknown - http://infognomonpolitics.blogspot.gr/2012/05/blog-post_3503.html#.UWnX6cp4-XU. Licensed under Copyrighted free use via Wikimedia Commons.