In Defense of Zeki Pasha

Dec. 21, 1894
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

Sir, — During my visit to Armenia three years ago, an American missionary mentioned to me the actions taken by Zeki Pasha in June, 1890, in order to prevent the scenes of rioting and bloodshed which were then taking place in Erzeroum being repeated at Erzinghian — his headquarters as Commandant of the Fourth Army Corps. My informant said he prevented this by placing a battery of guns in position to command the Turkish quarter of the town, and threatened to open fire upon it if its Moslem occupants attempted to raise a finger against their Christian neighbours. The threat had the desired effect.

This incident and others I heard about the kindly disposition of the Pasha leads me to feel that, if the officer sent by him in command of the troops charged to restore order in the Mousch and adjacent districts has been unwarrantably severe, no one will deplore it more than he will. Allow me further to say, from what I know of the humane feelings of officers of the regular Turkish army from actual contact with them, that it is not fair upon mere report to assume that this officer has been guilty of the atrocities with which he has been charged.

Without wishing to palliate any over-acts this subordinate officer in the disturbed districts may have committed, I feel compelled — in view of the information I then also obtained of the attempts then being made by the Russian Armenian Committee at Tiflis, and subsequently by that at Athens, to ferment sedition and incite insurrection in Turkey — to charge them with being accessories before the fact for the calamities which fell last year on their co-religionists in the district of Sivas and those more recently in Mousch and vicinity, and for which they now appeal to our sympathies. It should be generally known in this country, as it is beginning to be understood by many of us, that the ulterior objects of these committees and that which has its headquarters in London, is not so much the bringing about the objects aimed at it in the 61st Article of the Treaty of Berlin, but to secure eventually the rescuscitation of the Ancient Kingdom of Armenia by securing for that purpose primarily such a Constitution as that given to the Lebanon at the instigation chiefly of France and England in 1861. The first must be regarded as too visionary to require consideration and the second as politically impossible from the fact that the Moslems are numerically greater in number in Kurdistan — as Armenia is now administratively known — than are the Armenians.

If, therefore, the Anglo-Armenian Committee and their British sympathizers would confine their efforts to the practical and common-sense object of pressing for the introduction of the reforms asked for in the Berlin Treaty, they would aim at conferring an undoubted blessing both on Christian and Turk alike in Armenia. The course of agitation on which they are now engaged will not only further delay the introduction of these necessary reforms by the Imperial Ottoman Government, but will also weaken the efforts which have been made since 1879 and which are now being so ably made by her Majesty's Ambassadors to the Porte in the same direction.

I am yours truly, A.F.M. London, Dec. 15

W. G. Palgrave has the number of the pro-Armenians 

Preceding the following letter, also by the amazing W.G. Palgrave, was a "memorial" prepared by Armenians living in Britain. It is filled with the usual hogwash, such as 4 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, but parts of it were refreshingly fair. In 1878, the Armenians were not yet too spoiled, and were a bit more modest. They actually regarded their Moslem neighbors as fellow human beings, paying note to their sufferings as well! About half of the article is reproduced below, describing the state of affairs; the rest regarded what needed to be done.

July 5, 1878

THE ARMENIANS.

The following memorial has been presented to her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs by the Armenian Corninttees of London and Manchester:--

"On behalf of the Armenian residents in England, we venture to submit to your lordship the following statement of the sufferings of our fellow-countrymen in Turkish Armenia and the measures which seem needed in order to deliver them from present evils and secure their future welfare. Their condition, as we shall have to show, is more pitiable than that of any of the other Christian subjects of the Porte, and their claims to be favourably considered by the Powers of Europa are certainly not less strong.

“The total number of Armenians in the Turkish Empire is about 4,000,000, and of these nearly 2,000,000 live in Armenia proper—that is to say, in the territory lying between the Black Sea, the Russian and Persian Empires, and the plains of Mesopotamia, a territory which is included in the vilayets of Erzeroum, Trebizond, Van, and Diarbekir. Here they dwell intermingled with a Moslem population, which is in some districts larger than the Christian, and in other distircts the Christian element preponderates. Of this Moslem population, however a large part consists of half-savage nomad tribes, who live by their frocks or by brigandage. The Armenians constitute the bulk of the settled and agricultural inhabitants, and in the towns they have nearly all the trade in their hands, being, as is generally admitted, superior to the Moslems both in natural intelligence and in education. Although deeply attached to their National Church, whose faith they have clung to through many centuries of misery and persecution, they are not fanatical -- in fact, eminently tolerant, and live on perfectly good terms with the settled and peaceable part of their Mahomedan fellow subjects.

"The evils from which the Armenian Christians suffer are partly those endured in common by all the subjects of the Porte, partly others peculiar to the region they inhabit. Like the Christians of European Turkey, they complain of oppressive taxation, of the unjust exactions of the tithe farmers, of the impossibility of obtaining justice in courts where their evidence is not received, of being excluded from the army and the police, and thus, as unacquainted with the use of arms, left at the mercy of any rapacious official or ill-disposed neighbour. In these respects and in others of the same kind, which it is needless to enumerate, since your lordship must be already familiar with them, their state is fully as bad as that of the people of Herzegovina and Bulgaria, of whom so much has been said. In other respects it is even worse. There are few European Consuls in Armenia to whom an appeal for protection or redress can be made. But the greatest evil by far is the presence in their country of Kurds and other predatory tribes, who carry on a perpetual war against them. These ferocious robbers drive away the cattle and seize the crops of the peaceable and unarmed Armenian peasant. expel him from his fields, defile his churches, carry off his wife or daughters, and maim or kill him if he attempts to resist. In some places the Kurdish Beys claim the Armenian villagers as their serfs, sell them to one another, and murder them if they try to escape or migrate. This course of things has gone on for centuries, but has become sensibly worse during the last 30 or 40 years, as the Turkish Government has become weaker and fanaticism has increased. The Government is utterly powerless to control the Kurds, who follow their own chieftains and do not care for the officials of the Sultan. These officials seldom venture to interfere; but if they do, the Kurds take vengeance probably on them, and certainly on the village of the Armenian who has dared to complain. Under such misfortunes the Christian population is daily diminishing in numbers the cultivation of the land is being abandoned and the whole country, naturally fertile and once covered by thriving towns, is falling back into a more and more abject state of poverty and misery. The agricultural Moslem population also suffers; but as they are armed and can sometimes, obtain redress in the courts of law, their conditions is not so bad as that of the Christians. And we must not omit to mention that, besides the Armenians, the Nestorian Christians, who inhabit the country to the south-east of Van, are equally the objects of Kurdish attacks. But we desire that your lordship should consider that what we are endeavouring to set forth is the case, not of the Armenians only, but of all the peaceable inhabitants, both Christian and Mahomedan, of this part of Asia. For proof. it is sufficient for us to refer to the reports addressed to the British Foreign Office during the last ten years by Her Majesty's Consuls in Erzeroum and Diarbekir. and in particular to the accounts of the terrible massacre perpetrated early in last summer by the Kurds in the neighbourhood of Van, and of the burning some months earlier of a large part of that city by the Turkish soldiers. We desire also to refer your lordship to the documents called 'Reports of Provincial Oppressions,' addressed by the Armenian Patriarch at Constantinople, as the official head of our National Council, to the Sublime Porte, copies of which we subjoin.

“Lamentable as the state of Armenia is at this moment, after the terrible massacres we have mentioned, and the ravages of the Irregular Troops, it is likely to become far worse when peace has been finally concluded. For then, the Turkish armies being disbanded, a mass of savage Bashi Bazouks, Circassians and other robbers will be dispersed over Asiatic Turkey, and will avenge their defeats in the field by killing and plundering the unhappy and defenseless Christians. The effect of the war has been to inflame the hatred which the Mahomedans bear to those of a different faith, and the bankrupt Turkish Government will be less able than ever to protect its subjects.

“The remedies called for by these evils are in large measure the same as those which have been repeatedly pressed on the Sublime Porte by Her Majesty’s Government, and which the Porte has repeatedly promised to apply; and in particular the reform of the fiscal administration, the abolition of the Chari or Mahomedan law, in cases where a Christian is concerned, and the reception of Christian evidence. It is. however, not only the laws that are at fault; it is also, and indeed much more, their administration that Is to be blamed..."





A little commentary before proceeding on to Mr. Palgraves' stupendous "indirect" reply (i.e., he was not responding directly to the above): once again, even though the above was "gentler and kinder" than the usual Armenian propaganda, it's still replete with deception. In order to gain all-important sympathy, we're told the Armenians, unlike their Muslim neighbors, were unarmed and could not protect themselves against Kurdish attacks. The truth is, Armenians were no less armed. (Although that does not mean the Armenians didn't suffer, of course.) For example, British Consul Trotter, just a few months after the above article appeared (dated March 22, 1879), described the Armenian village of Tellerman as "well-armed and holding their own amongst their Arab, Kurdish and Circassian neighbors." The Kurds did not single out Armenians; the fact is, Kurdish tribes were generally a force onto themselves. Even the better-equipped, post WWI British found subduing the Kurds almost impossible in northern Iraq. The problem was there were few Ottoman police because there was no money. The Kurds preyed on Muslims and even other Kurds, and the reason why it may seem Armenians were favored mainly had to do with their greater wealth. (British Consular Agent Rassam to Layard, Van, 15 Oct. 1877: "Mahommedans suffered as well as Christians from the ravages of the Kurds. The [names of three tribes]... spare neither Christians nor Mahommedan.") The Kurds revolted as we know the Armenians did, and some even fought with the Russians. Predictably, Europeans who complained bitterly whenever Armenian rebels were imprisoned, constantly complained that the Ottomans were not forceful enough in dealing with Kurdish tribes. Moreover, Muslims did not have a monopoly in causing robberies and civil disorders. For example, British Consul Biliotti reported Armenian attacks on Muslims were not unknown (dated 1880). The above precious information is from Justin McCarthy's "Death and Exile," 1995, pp. 40-47. The professor cautioned: "One must be careful when identifying the Kurds as a disruptive element." The ones doing the disrupting were tribal groups, and "if tribes cooperated, it was out of mutual benefit, not ethnic loyalty."


TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

Sir,—I venture a few words of remark on a proposal embodied in a resolution moved by the Earl of Carnarvon at a meeting convened yesterday in the Jerusalem Chamber by the Anglo-Armenian Committees of this capital. His lordship on that occasion recommended, as a thing to he approved of and carried out by the collective wisdom and statesmanship of Europe in Congress, “the creation of a separate Armenian province, with such a system of local institutions as the Inhabitants may be found capable of working.”

There is no fear that the well-informed and well-practised statesmen assembled at Berlin will not rate the noble earl’s recommendation at its just value. But, for the better comprehension of such among your readers as may not happen to be equally versed in Eastern actualities, I respectfully observe that this same recommendation is based on four distinct fallacies, each one of which taken singly would suffice, not to discredit it merely, but absolutely to cancel and annul it.

Fallacy the first—that an extensive district, by name Armenia, peopled wholly or at least in major part with. Armenians, is to be found somewhere or other in Ottoman Anatolia. None such, I need hardly say, exists. The “Armenia” of Lord Carnarvon is a historical memory at seven full centuries past, not an actual fact. If we visit Eastern Asia Minor, we find it ethnically divided by local and recognised nomenclature into Gurgistan, Lazistan, and Kurdistan—the land of the Georgians, the Lazes, the Kurds. Who ever heard of Armenistan? Certainly, In six years of residence, not I, Nor could one well hear of what has no existence. It is true that, scattered here and there over the region to which the noble earl presumably meant to allude, a certain number of Armenian peasants, making up, at the most liberal calculation, a fifth of the village dwellers, may in some districts be discerned; while a somewhat larger proportion —a third at the very most—is gathered in a few of the town centres. But the bulk of the population is Kurd, Laz, Georgian, or Turkoman everywhere; Armenian nowhere.

Hence, to create the proposed “Armenia,” one of two things must be done—either the vast majority of the inhabitants must be, by the “bag-and-bageage“ policy, expelled bodily from the lands of their birth and inheritance; or, if suffered to remain, must be subjected to the rule of a small caste minority, governing by its own special institutions, its own usages, its own system, its own Procrustean rule, — much, doubtless, to the advantage and gratification of the governors themselves, hardly so to those of the governed. Which of the two alternatives does the noble earl propose to recommend?

Fallacy the second— that the Armenian inhabitants of Anatolia have any capacity, or any desire for “autonomy,” entire or partial. For their incapacity when, during brief intervals of long-past ages, the opportunity was theirs in fact, I need but refer to the pages of Gibbon, Finlay, and the other authentic historians of the Roman or Byzantine East. At present a busy, industrious, money-loving, money-making race, they are, and for centuries past have been, the most acquiescent, not to say the most abject servants, of whatever Government — Russian, Ottoman, or Persian—has claimed or ruled them. An ecclessiastical organization, much broken and cleft by endless internal schisms, a vestry unison, made up of, rather than interrupted by, a continuous succession of vestry quarrels, a scanty and legendary literature, just kept up by monastic antiquarianism and cloistered study—such are the only evidences of a “national individuality,” the “elements of stability,” the “light that is to illumine surrounding nations,” discerned by the gladdened eye of enthusiasts. They will hardly command themselves for such to the more limited vision of practical observers.

Were the Jewish indwellers of any European State, of Germany, say, of France, of Russia, of England, to lay before Congress a claim to a “separate province,” “autonomy,” and so forth, would any one be equally ready to back their petition! And yet what title to these desirable things can the Armenians produce that the Jews cannot vindicate for themselves twofold and more? “The Armenians had a literature of their own, a Church of their own, a history of their own, and last, but by no means least, they had a national individuality which had never been absorbed, even amid the conflicts and persecutions of centuries.” Be it so. Now for “Armenians” substitute “Jews” throughout; how reads the sentence? Is it weakened or emphasised by the substitution? And how about aptness for “autonomy “as illustrated by the past? True from Saul to Alroy the history of Jewish self-rule is but a chequered one, alas ! but compared with the brief Intervals of semi-independence, the discords, the treasons, the base servilities, the ignominious submissions of what the antiquary can obscurely trace as Armenian nationality, it is glory, it is success itself. Surely the orators of the Jerusalem Chamber had more justly recommended the reconstitution of Jadea than of Armenia; perhaps more judiciously too.

No doubt the Armenian natives of Asia Minor desire a better mode of government than that they have thus far experienced, especially of late years; so also do the Kurds, the Georgians, the Turkomans, the Lazes; and rightly all of them. But that better government is not to be found in widened division, in fomented discord, in caste antitheses, in sectarian fanaticisms, in baseless enthusiasms, in empiric fancies, but in organized union, in social fusion, in common administration, in equal brotherhood, in law, in justice, in coherent fact. And these are the true remedies for existent evils, not few nor light ones I own (though not exactly those specified or asserted by the Papasians and Hagopians of Manchester or London), which the noble earl may securely expect from the statesmen of Europe, and not least of England.

FaIlacy the third—that the Ottoman Government could, without an evident purpose of suicide, consent to the measure his lordship- recommends.

Fallacy the fourth—that England could or would. But the length of which I have already dwelt on the two preceding fallacies, forbids my explaining more particularly— if, indeed, explanation be needed for what is self-evident—the grounds of the two last assertions. The intelligence and good sense of English readers, will easily supply the deficiency. Apologizing for having so widely trespassed on your valuable space,

I remain, &e.,

London, July 2.

W.G. PALGRAVE