I WITNESSED and LIVED THROUGH

The things I personally witnessed and heard during the two months
that passed until the Turkish forces’ delivering Erzurum are beyond all
the evil one would think of the Armenians.
None of the Armenians were allowed to enter neither in the city nor
in its environs during the occupation of Erzurum by the Russians in
1916. During the office of the Commander of the 1st Corps General
Kaltin, who was the commander of the forces in Erzurum and its
environs, no military units having Armenian troops were sent to this
region.
After the lifting of all the measures, following the Revolution,
Armenians attacked Erzurum and its environs in waves.
Synchronous to those attacks, the houses in Erzurum and in the
villages were pillaged and people were killed. The presence of the
Russian units and Russians were keeping the Armenians from
committing massacres. They were conducting massacres and
pillaging in secret and cautiously.
In 1917, the Erzurum Revolutionary Executive Committee, mainly
composed of the Armenian military personnel, launched a search for
confiscating the firearms the people had. As the searches could not
have been carried out properly, troops of uncontrollable mob
gradually started full scale pillaging. The Armenian troops did their
best to tyrannize and torture people during battles.
One day, as I was riding through one of the streets in Erzurum I saw
a group of soldiers, lead by an Armenian, dragging two elderly
Turkish people, both about 70 years old, along the street. An
Armenian soldier was carrying a whip made of wire fencing. Streets
were all covered with ditches and mud.
This mob, composed mainly of the Armenian soldiers, was dragging
these two poor elderly men in mud all over the street. The elderly
men were drenched in mud, and whenever they found an opportunity
to stand up they would drag them again and commit all sorts of
torture.
I tried hard to persuade them to behave in a civilized manner
towards those two poor elderly men. The Armenian soldier leading
the mob, walked over me with his whip made of wire fencing, and
shouted, “You are backing them are not you? They are killing us, and
you are backing them!” The mob started walking over me. At that
time, the Russian soldiers were so out of control that they were
beating, and even murdering the Russian officers.