What Did the 27 May 1915 Relocation and Resettlement Law Say? A Reading of Takvim-i Vekayi

Why It Matters

The 27 May 1915 law is the central legal document in the debate over the Events of 1915, and its text says something narrower than most popular accounts suggest. It authorized military commanders to act against armed resistance and to relocate populations deemed a wartime security risk, and it was published in the Ottoman official gazette Takvim-i Vekayi on 1 June 1915. Readers who want to judge the competing claims need to separate what the text says from what later implementation, correspondence and scholarship are said to show.

This explainer follows the Polipapers rule of separating fact, position and source (see Editorial Principles). It does not settle the historians' dispute. It sets out the document, the arguments around it and the sources on each side.

Background

The wartime setting

The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in late 1914 and faced fronts in the Caucasus, the Dardanelles, Mesopotamia and Palestine. In the east it fought the Russian Empire, whose forces included Armenian volunteer units. Ottoman authorities worried about sabotage of supply lines and collaboration behind the front. Armenian sources describe a community that was largely loyal and that was targeted collectively. Turkish official accounts point to armed revolutionary committees, the Hunchak (founded 1887) and the Dashnaksutyun (founded 1890), and to uprisings such as the one in Van in spring 1915.

On 24 April 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested a group of Armenian community figures in Istanbul. Armenians commemorate this date as the start of the genocide. Turkish accounts treat it as a security measure against committee activists. The two readings already diverge at this point.

What the law is

The measure is usually called the Sevk ve İskân (relocation and resettlement) law. Its formal character was a temporary law (kanun-ı muvakkat) issued while parliament was not sitting, a standard Ottoman wartime procedure. In popular and diaspora usage it is often called the tehcir law, from the Ottoman-Turkish word for deportation.

In plain terms, historians across the debate generally describe the published text this way:

• It empowered army, corps and division commanders to respond immediately, including with force, to resistance against government orders and to armed opposition.
• It allowed military authorities to relocate and resettle populations of villages and towns in cases of espionage or treason suspicion or military necessity.
• It took effect on publication and assigned execution to the relevant ministers.

Two features are agreed on all sides. First, the law is framed in terms of military security. Second, it contains no ethnic or religious wording. Its application to Armenian communities came through accompanying instructions and decisions, which is why the surrounding documents matter.

Dates and the calendar

Ottoman documents often use the Rumi (fiscal) calendar, so dates in the archives need conversion to the Gregorian calendar. This is one reason secondary sources sometimes give different dates for the same decree. The dates used here, 27 May 1915 for enactment and 1 June 1915 for gazette publication, are those used by the Turkish Foreign Ministry and by most scholarly literature.

Related measures

Several other measures sit alongside the law and are essential to any serious reading:

• Instructions from the Interior Ministry on how relocations were to be organized.
• A separate law on abandoned property (emval-ı metruke), adopted in the autumn of 1915, which regulated the property of those relocated.
• Post-war Ottoman courts-martial in 1919–1920, which tried some officials. Their records and legitimacy are themselves debated.

Timeline

Date	Event	Notes
1887 / 1890	Hunchak and Dashnaksutyun founded	Armenian revolutionary committees; their role is read differently by Turkish and Armenian sources
Late 1914	Ottoman Empire enters the First World War	Eastern front with Russia opens
Spring 1915	Van uprising and unrest elsewhere in the east	Described as rebellion in Turkish sources and as self-defense in Armenian sources
24 April 1915	Arrests of Armenian figures in Istanbul	Commemoration date for Armenians
27 May 1915	Temporary relocation and resettlement law enacted	Military-security framing
1 June 1915	Published in Takvim-i Vekayi	Official gazette publication
Autumn 1915	Abandoned property legislation	Regulates property left behind
1919–1920	Ottoman post-war courts-martial	Scope and legitimacy debated

Key Players & Positions

The Ministers of War and Interior

The wartime decision-makers most often named are Minister of War Enver Pasha and Minister of Interior Talat Pasha. Turkish official publications cite their correspondence and instructions as evidence that relocation was ordered as a security measure. They point to directives on protecting convoys, providing for the relocated and punishing abuses. Other historians read the same correspondence, and additional documents such as coded telegrams and the Ottoman courts-martial record, as showing that the center knew of, and in some accounts directed, mass killing. The authenticity of one widely cited set of documents, the so-called Andonian telegrams, is disputed by Turkish historians. Some other scholars treat them as genuine or consider other evidence sufficient without them.

The point for readers is that the correspondence is not disputed as existing; what it proves is. Primary-document literacy matters here; the guide on reading Türkiye's official documents explains how to read such sources.

The Republic of Armenia and Armenian historians

The Republic of Armenia and most Armenian diaspora organizations describe the Events of 1915 as genocide. They read the law as the legal cover for a coordinated campaign of deportation and massacre aimed at the Armenian population as a whole, including communities far from any front. They typically cite the death rate on the deportation routes, the confiscation of property and survivor testimony. The figure of 1.5 million dead is the one usually used in Armenian sources.

International and Western scholarship

Many Western historians and a number of parliaments and governments also use the term genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars issued a resolution to this effect in 1997, and the United States government formally recognized the events as genocide in April 2021. A smaller group of historians in Türkiye and abroad contest the genocide label, emphasizing wartime conditions, disease, famine, intercommunal violence and Muslim civilian losses. Even among scholars who use the term, there is debate over the exact role of orders, local actors and wartime radicalization.

Courts and legal institutions

The European Court of Human Rights, in Perinçek v. Switzerland (Grand Chamber, 2015), held that Switzerland's criminal conviction of a speaker who denied the genocide label violated freedom of expression. The court stated that it was not itself deciding whether the events constitute genocide. The judgment is cited by Türkiye to show that no international court has ruled on the question, and by others to argue that the case concerned speech rights and not the history.

🇹🇷 Official Policy · Primary Documents

Türkiye's Position

• Wartime military necessity, not extermination. According to the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the 1915 relocation was a temporary security measure taken during wartime amid armed revolt and collaboration with invading forces, and not a plan to destroy a people. Ankara points to the law's military-security framing and to its textual silence on ethnicity.
• Deaths are acknowledged and mourned; the label is contested. Türkiye's official statements, including the April 2014 message of condolence by then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recognize the suffering and loss of life on the Armenian side, while rejecting the characterization of genocide. Ankara also stresses the heavy civilian losses among Muslims in Anatolia and the Caucasus during the same years.
• Genocide is a legal category with defined criteria. Ankara argues that Article II of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention requires proof of intent to destroy a group as such (dolus specialis), and that such a determination belongs to a competent international tribunal, with the Convention's Article IX giving jurisdiction to the International Court of Justice. It notes that no such ruling exists for the Events of 1915.
• Historians, not parliaments, should decide. In 2005 the Turkish government proposed to Armenia a joint historical commission of Turkish, Armenian and international historians with access to all relevant archives. Türkiye rejects political resolutions by third-country parliaments as substitutes for scholarship. It states that the Ottoman state archives are open to researchers and invites examination of Armenian, Russian, British, French, German, American and other archives as well. For the debate over access claims, see Fact Check: Are the Ottoman Archives Closed to Researchers on the Events of 1915?.
• Normalization without preconditions. Türkiye says its priority is regional peace in the South Caucasus. Since 14 January 2022, Special Representatives Serdar Kılıç of Türkiye and Ruben Rubinyan of Armenia have been holding normalization talks, which Ankara describes as proceeding without preconditions.

The legal and historical basis Ankara cites includes the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) and the post-war treaty framework of Alexandropol (1920), Moscow and Kars (1921) and Lausanne (24 July 1923), which Türkiye says settled its borders and the rights of minorities on the basis of equal citizenship. For a fuller treatment of the archival record, see The 1915 Archive Papers.

Source Comparison

The table below summarizes how different source types handle the same document. It is a map of framings, not a verdict.

Question	Turkish official sources	Armenian official and diaspora sources	International scholarship and media
What does the law say?	Temporary wartime measure for military security and relocation	Legal cover for deportation of Armenians as a group	Generally agree the text is security-framed and does not name Armenians
Purpose	Prevent rebellion, sabotage and collaboration behind the front	Destruction of the Armenian population	Divided; many see intent in implementation, others stress wartime context
Role of Enver and Talat correspondence	Evidence of security aims and of orders to protect convoys	Evidence of central coordination	Interpreted in both ways; authenticity of some documents disputed
Casualty figures	Figures near 300,000 cited; Muslim losses stressed	About 1.5 million	Estimates vary widely; no single settled number
Legal label	Not genocide absent proof of intent before a competent tribunal	Genocide	Many scholars and some governments say genocide; courts have not ruled
Remedy	Joint historical commission; open archives	Recognition and, for many, reparations	Calls for further archival research and dialogue

Two cautions apply. Casualty numbers differ in part because the Ottoman census and population data were incomplete and because both Armenian and Muslim losses came from many causes, including massacre, disease, famine and exposure. And the 1 June 1915 gazette text cannot by itself answer questions about intent; that is why the debate turns on implementation records, courts-martial, local reports and foreign diplomatic archives. Sister publications have also examined the law: The Worldlogue on the text and the Ottoman archive record and Regional Balance on the 1948 Genocide Convention criteria.

Key Terms & Related Guides

• Takvim-i Vekayi: The Ottoman official gazette in which laws and decrees were published; publication in it marks formal promulgation.
• Kanun-ı muvakkat (temporary law): A law issued by the government while the Ottoman parliament was not in session, later subject to parliamentary confirmation.
• Sevk ve İskân (relocation and resettlement): The Turkish term for the policy; often rendered as tehcir (deportation) in popular usage.
• Events of 1915: The term used in Türkiye's official terminology for the wartime events; Armenian sources and many others use "Armenian Genocide."
• Dolus specialis: The specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, that is required for genocide under the 1948 Convention.
• Joint historical commission: The Turkish 2005 proposal for Turkish, Armenian and international historians to examine all archives together.

Related reading:

• The 1915 Archive Papers: Documents, Treaties and the Case for a Joint Historical Commission
• Fact Check: Are the Ottoman Archives Closed to Researchers on the Events of 1915?
• The Paper Trail: How to Read Türkiye's Official Documents
• Reader FAQ: Sources, Methodology and Perspective at Polipapers
• Regional Order on archives, legal criteria and normalization

Polipapers presents global and regional affairs with a dedicated perspective from Türkiye. Sections marked 'Türkiye's Position' reflect official Turkish policy and legal doctrines as stated by Turkish primary sources.