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The Narrative Gap in Ottoman Armenian history.
Jeremy Salt.
Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 39, No.1, Jan 2003, pp. 19-36
Published by Frank Cass, London
(Thanks to Hector)
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Early in 2001 French parliamentarians passed a resolution asserting that 'France publicly
recognizes the genocide of the Armenians in 1915'. [1]
Similar resolutions have been passed elsewhere in Europe and in the United States and
others are being planned. The French decision was taken without any apparent regard for
the practical consequences on France's relations with Turkey, where the resolution was
received with indignation and anger and (by parties on the right) as further evidence of
European hostility towards Turkey. Government contracts with French companies were
cancelled and at one university, courses in French dropped from the curriculum. Counter
accusations were made against France over the brutality of its occupation of Algeria
(1830-1962). There is indeed much to be said about European double standards, hypocrisy
and selective morality but it is all beside the point, which remains what happened and why
in the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
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Prof. Jeremy
Salt: Scholar par excellence |
The Armenian claim is based on massacres which took place
in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The claim of
genocide — vehemently denied in Turkey — is based on a reading of history from which
the Ottoman narrative is absent except for marginal references in English language
sources. This is partly because very few scholars have the language skills necessary to
work in the archives, partly because Turkish governments have been slow in releasing
archival material on the Armenian question and partly because the amount of material that
stands in need of researching before more complete histories can he written is vast. Thus
by default most accounts of the Armenian question are still being written almost wholly
from European language sources and largely from the archives of two countries — England
and France — that were at war with the Ottoman Empire from 1914 to 1918. However, even
if these problems of language and access to sources were overcome the Armenian question as
presented in Europe and the United States would still stand as a case study of 'history'
shaped largely by propaganda and religious bias. The involvement in the Armenian question
of religious figures with powerful political connections in the United States and Britain
carried over from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. The proposed remaking of the
Middle East after 1918 was undertaken partly on the advice received from the religious
figures who were regarded as experts on the area. Of the nine members of the King-Crane
commission of inquiry despatched to the Near East by the US government after the war to
ascertain the political wishes of the local people, five were clergymen. Missionaries had
taken a leading role in the propaganda campaign for the Armenians from the late nineteenth
century onwards. They did not hesitate to exploit historical antipathy to the Turks and
Islam. 'There is no danger of any propaganda making the Americans feel that the Armenians
are maltreating the Turks', the leading US missionary figure James L. Barton, who bad
spent many years in the Ottoman Empire, wrote of the accounts of the killing of Muslims by
Armenians during the First World War. [2] 'The idea is
universally established here that the Armenians are the worst sinned against of any on the
face of the earth and that the chief of the sinners is the Turk backed by the Teuton.' For
his American Committee of Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR) Barton 'selected writers who
were casual about objectivity'. [3] Through the ACASR
missionaries 'flooded the US with anti Turk and pro minority publicity'. [4]
The Ottoman documents already translated certainly cast a different light on the events of
1915. These did not occur in a vacuum. The decision to 'relocate' the Armenians was taken
after a year in which Armenian guerilla bands incited and armed by the Russians and
organized by the Dashnaks had thrown themselves into the war effort against their own
government. Not for the first time in late Ottoman history, some Armenians saw
collaboration with the Russians as their best chance of carving an independent state out
of the historical Armenian homeland straddling the Ottoman-Russian border. By the Ottoman
government they were naturally regarded as traitors. At a time when the Ottomans were
fighting a war on several fronts, Armenian guerilla bands were attacking government
offices, killing gendarmes and massacring Muslim civilians and burning their villages.
Thousands of Armenians were involved in these activities. The fighting between the Russian
and Ottoman armies in the eastern provinces was accompanied by ruthless conflict between
the local Muslim and Christian population which can be seen as the culmination of decades
of simmering tension punctuated by explosions of savage communal conflict. As a matter of
military necessity the decision was taken on 27 May to move the Armenian population away
from the fighting to districts south of Diyarbakir. The details of how this was to be
effected were left to the local authorities. The decision was published as the Provisional
Law of Relocations (techir kanunu). Ottoman documents on the relocations — sent
in secret and seized by British intelligence in the 1920s after the occupation of Istanbul
— included 'strict and explicit rules' on the protection of Armenian lives and property.
[5] Yet on the convoys moving south in the direction of
the Arab provinces Armenians were set upon and massacred. Wartime deaths through armed
conflict, massacre, disease, famine at makeshift camps in Syria (where there was a general
famine during the war), along with relocation or emigration to other countries reduced the
Armenian community in the Anatolian heartland of the Ottoman empire to a mere remnant. The
explanation put out by the Ottoman government in 1916 was that infuriated by Armenian
treachery and massacres, the Muslim population 'at last took the law into their own
hands'. [6] Those directly responsible for the killings
included roving bands of marauders and soldiers who were supposed to be protecting the
Armenians. Revenge because of attacks by Armenian bands on Muslims during the previous
year was clearly a motive. The government defended itself by arguing that when it was
fighting a war on many fronts it was too hard pressed to prevent these attacks from taking
place. The number of Armenians who died during the war remains another controversial
aspect of this question. The figure which is often quoted in Armenian propaganda is 1.5
million but this is not supported by estimates made by pro-Armenian sources at the end of
the war let alone the figures given by Ottoman historians and Turkish scholars. Sonyel
writes that 700,000 Armenians had been relocated by 1917 and that, of the entire Armenian
population, about 300,000 died as a result of rebellion, massacre and death through
starvation or diseases for which no medicines were available. [7] The number of Muslims who died during the same period was bound to be
much higher than any estimates of Armenian casualties given the numerical preponderance of
Muslims to Christians throughout the empire. The president of the Armenian National
Delegation, Boghos Nubar, stated in 1919:
Although the losses of the Armenians are very great, those of the Turks
in the course of the war have not been less. A German report gives 2,500,000 as the total
losses of the Turks by war, epidemics and famine which have caused terrible havoc owing to
the improvidence and shortage of hospital personnel and medicines. At least half these
losses have been sustained by the population of the Armenian provinces ... which have been
invaded both by the Russian and Armenian armies. [8]
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If the Ottoman government really had ordered the massacres, why would it
send confidential orders to provincial officials instructing them to safeguard the
lives of the Armenians during the relocation?
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Here it should be mentioned that statistics have always been a crucial propaganda
aspect of the Armenian question. Estimates of the numbers of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century varied greatly according to whether they
were provided by the Armenian patriarchate, by the Ottoman government (whose figures
were based on the censuses regularly carried out) or by outside observers such as
Vital Cuinet. Nor is there any agreement on the numbers of victims of the communal
upheaval that overtook the eastern provinces between 1894 and 1896, let alone the
tragedy of 1915. Clearly the greater the number of Armenians who could be shown to
be living in the Ottoman Empire, the stronger the claim that could be made for
autonomy or independence; yet in what Boghos Nubar called 'the Armenian provinces'
of eastern Anatolia there is no doubt that the Armenians constituted a small
minority of the overall population.
A central enigma of 1915 relates to the relocation orders. If the Ottoman government
was playing a double game — issuing orders for the protection of Armenians while
formulating a policy of massacre — for propaganda reasons these orders surely
would have been sent openly, but they were not. They were only discovered by British
intelligence officers raking through the Ottoman archives in the 1920s. The original
order was reiterated in subsequent instructions. These are genuine documents. If the
Ottoman government really had ordered the massacres, why would it send confidential
orders to provincial officials instructing them to safeguard the lives of the
Armenians during the relocation?
The question of responsibility is pivotal. It is obvious that the relocations would
not have taken place but for Armenian collaboration with the Russians in the
previous year. Direct responsibility for what happened during the relocations lies
with those who actually did the killing and provincial officials who were culpable
through direct complicity or indifference or perhaps cowardice (and it here it must
be added that many Armenians were saved by being taken under the wing of Muslims).
If the central government's self defence is to be taken at face value and there was
not a 'policy' of massacre it was still responsible to the degree that it ordered
the relocations without having the means to ensure that they were carried out in
accordance with its own instructions. Beyond that and beyond the general
responsibility of a government for everything that happens within its own territory
the picture becomes blurred, but the British intelligence officers who went through
the archives in Istanbul found no documentary evidence of a policy of massacre.
A dominant aspect of the Armenian question, like all history, is how it is told, by
whom and on the basis of what sources. Up to the present time most narratives of the
Armenian question presented to western reading audiences have been based on western
sources. There is a received view of Armenian life under Ottoman administration
which has been carried forward intact from the nineteenth century. There are good
reasons for being sceptical of this presentation of history. First of all, the
Ottoman account direct from sources is almost wholly absent, with the policies of
the Ottoman government and the views of the sultan and his ministers presented only
second-hand through the reports, records and recollections of the European diplomats
and travellers with whom they talked. Second, the main archival source for western
writers on the Armenian question remain the documents lodged in European archive
collections and particularly Britain's Public Record Office. These are certainly
very valuable but the fact remains that Britain, in particular, was deeply
implicated in the development of the Armenian question from the 1870s onwards,
sharply critical of, when not hostile to, Ottoman policies in the nineteenth century
and at war with the Ottoman state in 1914-18. In the 1890s worsening relations
between Muslims and Christians had already led to a savage communal upheaval of
which the Armenians were the principal victims. In England it was the Sultan
Abdulhamit II who was made to take the blame when it is clear that whatever the
sultan's role, successive British governments were also responsible for pursuing
policies that were unworkable and for encouraging the Armenians to strive for goals
that were unattainable. Neither can British accounts of what was happening in the
sultan's domains always be taken as accurate or impartial. Consuls were often not on
the scene of the events they described and relied on informants whose identity they
concealed but were almost certainly Armenians or American missionaries and
consequently likely to have a biased view of what was happening.
This leads directly to the third area of scepticism in search of truth — the
propaganda aspect of the Armenian question from its modern political birth in the
nineteenth century until its terrible climax in 1915. Understanding of the Armenian
question was enmeshed in European views of the Turks and Islam. The wartime
propaganda of the twentieth century was built on the foundations of well established
negative views of the Turks. The ostensible British policy from the 1870s of
humanitarian relief of the Armenians through reforms drew support from the broadly
held perception of Christian suffering under Muslim rule. The counterweight of
Muslim suffering from misgovernment was largely if not wholly ignored and the result
was a distortion of the overall picture. Yet it is on the basis of sources that are
questionable in their veracity and balance that the modern history of the Ottoman
Armenians is still being written.
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In the sense of conflicting narratives the events of 1894-96 — when accusations of
centrally organized massacres of Armenians were first made against the Ottoman government
— stand as a cautionary tale. The 'Armenian Question' had been inscribed on the European
diplomatic agenda nearly 20 years before at the Congress of Berlin (1878). The recent war
between Russia and the Ottoman state had ended in a Russian victory. The Ottomans had lost
most of their territory in south-eastern Europe and the ratification of these losses when
the diplomats met in Berlin was one of the most savage blows in their history. Bulgaria
was given its autonomy, and European attention now turned to the Ottoman Christians —
the Armenians — amongst whom it was thought the Russians were most likely to stir up new
trouble not just for the Ottoman government but for the European powers and especially
Britain. Russian involvement with the Armenians was regarded as a long term threat to
British strategic interests further afield. It is this threat — to be regarded within
the broader context of Anglo-Russian rivalry covering a vast band of territory stretching
from the Balkans to the borders of China — rather than the professed humanitarian
concern that dictated official British interest in the Armenians. Under article 61 of the
Treaty of Berlin the Ottoman government was obliged to 'carry out without further delay
the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in provinces inhabited by the
Armenians and to guarantee their security against the Circassians and Kurds. It will
periodically make known the steps taken to the Powers who will superintend their
application'. The British pursued the reform question as hard as they could. The grandiose
talk in the immediate aftermath of Berlin was of a 'protectorate' over the Armenians but
it soon became clear that the most the European governments (and especially the British)
could hope to achieve were 'reforms'. Even these met with strong resistance. They were
perceived as the first step towards granting the Armenians the autonomy which would then
become the foundation for demands for independence.
The Ottoman suspicions were well grounded. The Ottomans were interested in reform
themselves but European (and largely British) 'administrative' reforms went against the
grain of Ottomanism which was the ruling state philosophy. They were 'ethnographic' in
nature. They sought a reduction in the number of eastern vilayets and an administrative
separation between Armenian Christians and Muslim Turks, with the Muslim Kurds kept out of
the reform plans altogether because of what was regarded as their wild and predatory
nature (a great irony considering current European sympathy for the Kurds). [9] Not only were these 'reforms' intrinsically divisive but among the
sultan's Muslim subjects they were seen as an attempt by the European powers to dictate
terms to the Ottoman government in the interests of their Christian proteges. By the
Armenian revolutionary committees — active in Russia, western Europe and the Ottoman
Empire but never representing more than a fraction of the general Armenian population —
European interest in reform was regarded as the means by which they could eventually carve
an independent state out of Ottoman territories. These committees launched a program of
propaganda, assassination and armed uprisings across the eastern vilayets of the Ottoman
state. The combination of their provocations, Ottoman suppression and outraged public
opinion in Europe ensured that the Armenian question stayed close to the top of the
diplomatic agenda. As the situation deteriorated in the six eastern provinces, demands
(particularly by missionary boards and other supporters of Christians suffering under the
Ottoman 'yoke') to send in the fleet and even occupy the troubled regions became more
common. The Cullom Resolution passed by the US Congress called on the President to seek
European intervention on behalf of the Armenians. The warships San Francisco and Marblehead
were sent to Ottoman waters but the more extreme demands were too impractical to be
considered seriously on either side of the Atlantic. The fate of the Armenians fitted into
a matrix of other issues and by the 1890s European interests had changed. Of the powers
mostly closely involved in the Armenian question, Britain had turned its attention away
from the Ottoman Empire towards Africa, and Russia towards the far East and the burgeoning
power of Japan. Russia also had too many internal problems with revolutionary groups of
various stripes to want to give further encouragement to Armenian revolutionary
nationalism. The relationship between tsar and sultan — two monarchs on the defensive
against an array of internal and external problems — was probably more cordial than it
had ever been; as a result, in its dealings with the Ottoman state, Russia would go no
further than diplomatic pressure would allow. It would not agree to joint action of a
military nature, and if there was to be no joint action there could be no unilateral
action either because this might precipitate a scramble for Ottoman territory and thus a
European war. Humanitarianism had to give way before hard national interest, but by the
time all this became clear communal order in the eastern provinces had collapsed and from
all districts came reports of chaos, mayhem and massacre.
Although Britain had played the leading role in igniting the burning trail that led to
this powder keg, many in Britain now laid all the blame on Sultan Abdulhamit II, who had
in fact been warning for years of the explosion that was likely to follow if reforms were
imposed on him which favoured the Armenians and which his Muslim subjects would not
accept. But where Christian minorities were concerned it was common in Europe not to take
anything said or done by the sultan and his government seriously. The Ottoman reform
programme begun decades earlier was dismissed as dust being thrown in Europe's eyes — to
quote an expression commonly used at the time — despite all the evidence that the
Ottoman government was seriously committed to reforms if not the 'reforms' that the
European powers wanted. Thanks largely to the inflammatory rhetoric of the Liberal leader
William Gladstone, who had whipped up the 'Bulgarian atrocity' propaganda of the 1870s and
tried to do the same for the Armenians in the 1890s, the sultan entered history as Abdul
the Damned, Abdul the Assassin and the Red Sultan. In fact, there was no evidence that
Abdulhamit was hostile to the Armenians on racial, religious or ethnic grounds. There was
no evidence of such animosity towards the Armenians throughout the whole coarse of Ottoman
history but in the wake of the terrible events occurring in the eastern provinces the
sultan was turned into a convenient architect of a 'plan of extermination'. Successive
British governments published the parliamentary papers (the Blue Books) which have been
raked through ever since for evidence against the sultan. It is not there. There is
hearsay and the whisperings of diplomats in Istanbul who had good reason to cover their
own tracks but there is nothing that links Abdulhamit to a policy of massacre. In any
case, not all of Britain went along with these accusations against the sultan. The
Conservative Prime Minister of the 1890s, Lord Salisbury, refused to accept that the
sultan had ordered 'all those cruelties to be perpetrated' and instead blamed 'the race
faction and the creed faction driven to the highest point in their corruptest and most
horrible form'. [10]
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Yet the 'policy' of massacre is the theory that still prevails in western histories.
Two influential books, Christopher Walker's Armenia: The Survival of a Nation
(1980) and Robert Melsom's Revolution and Genocide (1992), deal with the
events of 1894-96 in considerable detail. This period begins with the Armenian
insurrection in the Talori and Sasun districts of the Bitlis vilayet. There is no
doubt that the Armenians of the region were living in deplorable conditions. Their
problems included oppression by tax collectors, tax debts, corruption and
inefficiency in the Ziraat (Agricultural) Bank which drove them into the hands of
loan sharks; bullying and mistreatment by Kurdish aghas and beys and Kurdish troops
(the Hamidiye cavalry, the basibazuk irregulars and the militia); the despotic
behaviour of the local gendarmerie; a justice system lacking justice that was
driving young people in particular into the hands of insurgent bands; and a general
level of poverty and population decline brought about by all of the above. This
summary was compiled in 1895 by the Department of the General Staff which
recommended a series of measures to combat these evils but by then the people of
Sasun had risen against the government. [11] In
the sequence of cause and effect retold by Walker from the accounts of British
consuls stationed near but not in the district, long-standing tension between the
authorities and the local Armenian population was brought to a head when a local
kaimakam (sub-governor) abused the Armenians for not paying their taxes and was then
beaten by them and turned away with his contingent of zaptiyes. Soldiers were sent
to the district. Other small incidents took place and at this point Kurds appeared
on their annual migration and also came into conflict with the Armenians. 'In at
least one case' the Armenians 'reacted' by killing 'several Kurds'. After conferring
with the troops the Kurds (the Bekirkanli) fell on two Armenian villages and
destroyed them. The villagers fled to nearby mountains and as fighting continued
they moved their women and children to the 'greater safety' of Mt Andok. The men
took up positions in the village of Geliguzan where they fought 'a ferocious battle
over 12 days' with tribal Kurds and soldiers before being driven out by a detachment
of Hamidiye cavalry and taking refuge on Mt Andok below the women and children.
There, however, soldiers and Kurds broke through their defensive system and killed
'all they could lay their hands on.... The soldiers — a nightmare touch —
dressed in black [and] the Kurds in white'. [12]
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Prof.
Robert Melson: Integrity Alert!
During a 2005
Indiana genocide
conference, an audience member
asked Melson whether he
considered the Blue Book a valid
historical source. After getting the
predictable affirmative response,
the questioner (Alp Berker) began
to reveal the embarrassing
inconsistencies, at which point
the shoddy scholar moved on to
another question! Melson also
did not have the guts to stick
around when follow-up speaker,
Turkkaya Ataov, had his turn. |
Melson tells a similar if less detailed story
of a massacre taking place without any real provocation. [13] He repeats (British) Vice-Consul Hallward's claim of 8,000 dead
(though Hallward 'had heard higher estimates') while Walker talks of a 'very
conservative' low figure of 900 killed up to perhaps a figure of 3,000. [14] In England Bryce talked of 15,000 being
killed. [15] Most of these figures are gross
exaggerations: an Ottoman Commission of Inquiry later found that less than 300
people were killed and even the British consul who was one of the foreign observers
permitted to watch the proceedings put the figure at no higher than 900. [16] As Hallward's reports formed the substance of
the allegations made against the Ottoman government it should be noted that they
were pieced together far from the scene and furthermore — as Walker observes —
from 'second hand and third hand sources'. [17]
Sir Philip Currie, the British ambassador, refers to the 'eye witnesses' and
'trustworthy sources' on whom Hallward relied, [18])
but there is no indication of who these individuals were and consequently no means
of appraising the veracity of the claims made. We only have Currie's word, and as
Currie was himself the most aggressive proponent of reforms the European governments
were trying to impose on the sultan — and an overbearing representative of British
power capable of reducing the sultan to tears [19]
— he cannot be regarded as an impartial source himself. He was deeply implicated
in the unravelling of the Armenian question and arguably had his own exposed
position to protect.
The question of provocation is reduced by both Melson and Walker to a statement by
Hallward that while one Armenian revolutionary had been agitating amongst the people
of the region in 1893-94 'I do not believe that the agitation amounted to much or
had much effect on the villagers'. [20] Sir
Philip Currie accepted this view, writing that an investigation 'would show that
statements that the Armenians had risen in insurrection at the instigation of a
revolutionary agent were untrue. Such disturbances as had occurred were caused by
the attacks of Kurds on the Armenians and the resistance offered by the latter'. [21] Melson writes of the Armenians 'possibly
being encouraged' by agitators and of then being 'set upon' by regular soldiers and
the Hamidiye cavalry. [22]
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These interpretations greatly understate the
scale of the revolutionary — insurrectionist challenge to Ottoman authority being
launched across the six eastern provinces in the 1880s and 1890s. An entirely
different picture of the Talori 'incidents' emerges from Ottoman documents,
according to which local villagers rose in revolt in 1894 under the leadership of
the Hunchak revolutionary (or incendiary according to the Ottoman government)
Hampartsum Boyadjian, who had been agitating amongst the villagers for several years
under the field name of Murat. He told them that 'he would bring over a military
force from England by balloon after the emergence of an uprising since all the
states have agreed on protecting the Armenians'. [23]
The 'naive' Armenians of 12 villages were persuaded (others were not) 'and went to a
monastery on the top of a mountain nearby after having burned their villages and
slaughtered all the inhabitants of all the Mussulman villages on the way and burned
their villages too. This is the correct statement of Mourad in his declaration on
his cross-examination as reported by the Chief Commander of the Fourth Army Corps'. [24] The picture presented in the Ottoman
documents is of a general insurgency in the region, with the Talori rebels joining
forces with groups coming from the plain of Mus and the districts of Kulp and Silvan
before all of them took up positions on Mt Andok. It was from this stronghold that
they launched attacks on Kurdish tribal encampments. In armed clashes there were
casualties on both sides but shocking atrocities were also reported to have been
committed by the Armenians. (The gory details of these events are also to be found
in despatches from the US Minister Plenipotentiary in Istanbul and some foreign
newspapers as well as the Ottoman archives). [25]
Military forces were sent to the region to suppress the uprising. Initially, it was
thought that 4,000 Armenians were involved: this estimate fluctuated according to
the information provided by field commanders but eventually settled at around 3,000.
The sultan framed a response to the uprising according to the information he was
being sent in daily despatches, most of them from the Commander in Chief of the 4th
Army based at Erzurum, Zeki Pasha. Reading through these documents one is able to
follow a decision making process shaped from day to day by the events that were
happening on the ground. Contrary to the impression given in western histories, the
operations in the Talori district were not dominated by the Kurdish Hamidiye cavalry
but by the regular army. In fact the role of the Hamidiye was limited. The regular
forces sent to the Talori district from the town of Mus, according to a despatch
sent from the Department of General Staff to the Imperial First Secretary on 27
August 1894, [26] consisted of an initial
contingent of 200 soldiers and four mountain guns from the Fourth Army; three and a
half battalions of regular troops sent shortly afterwards; a reserve force
consisting of the Eighth Marksmen's Battalion and the second battalion of the 26th
Regiment based at Harput. There were 500 troops in each of the reserve battalions.
Each other battalion consisted of 800 troops, amounting to a regular army force of
about 4,000 troops. By contrast only half a Hamidiye regiment — consisting of 300
men — was sent to take part in the action and not the 'regiments' to which Melson
refers. [27]
Thus the forces facing each other in the Talori district consisted of something like
4,300 Ottoman soldiers and cavalry and 3,000 Armenian rebels, some armed with modern
weapons but many only with muskets, swords and hatchets. The rebels had apparently
planned to attack Mus with the aim of seizing weapons from the arsenal of the
reserve militia but according to Zeki Pasha were put off by the approach of military
forces. Their failure to secure more weaponry spelt the doom of the uprising. In
action on and around Mt Andok that extended through August until early September the
rebels were crushed and their leaders captured and later interrogated. Their losses
(dead or wounded not specified) are given as around 1,000, with their Hunchak leader
and 11 of his followers being captured in a cave. [28]
The Ottoman archives record that women, children and the elderly who had taken
refuge on Mt Andok or who had joined the rebels gradually returned to their villages
and were given food and clothing 'and all kinds of help on Islamic and humanitarian
principles'. Zeki Pasha wrote that he had witnessed this himself. [29] Accusations of the rape of women and massacre of civilians are
vehemently denied.
The question of what Walker and Melson call 'provocation' over the 1894-96 period is
an important one. The activities of the revolutionaries from the 1880s onwards
included assassination (of Ottoman officials and Armenian 'traitors') and the
instigation of a number of uprisings, yet both Walker and Melson manage to dismiss
provocation as a serious factor (it 'falls short of being a credible explanation'
for the massacres according to Melson [30]) and
thus other 'real' reasons have to be found. The trail leads directly to Yildiz
Palace. Melson quotes some extremely partisan sources, including Johannes Lepsius,
who believed (in Melson's words) that the massacres which took place between 1894-96
were 'initiated by the Porte, that is the regime of Abdul Hamid II from
Constantinople'. [31] Why the sultan would want
to 'initiate' or 'tolerate' massacres of the Armenians is put down to the fact that
he was 'a deeply conservative if not reactionary head of state who wanted to
preserve his empire even at the cost of severe repression' [32] (unlike, of course, every other European monarch of the
nineteenth century). Another reason, projected against a background of internal
disintegration, is the sultan's desire to 'guard the old order and revitalize Islam'
and to protect 'his most sacred values' against the challenge represented by the
Armenian social, economic and cultural renaissance which was 'altering the relative
status between them [the Armenians] and their Ottoman superiors'. [33] (Such a comment reveals a basic misunderstanding of social
stratification within Ottoman society. As Roderic Davison has observed of the class
relationships in Ottoman society: 'The line of basic demarcation ... ran not between
Muslim and Christian, Turk and non-Turk but between ruler and ruled, oppressor and
oppressed. Those on top — whether Ottoman civil servants or army officers, Greek
or Armenian bankers or merchants or higher ecclesiastics — looked down on the
masses.' [34] These Armenians would have had no
hesitation in describing themselves as Ottoman Armenians.) Yet another possible
reason — taken from the writings of Edwin Pears — is the sultan's presumed
'irrational hatred' of the Armenians. [35]
Melson's overall emphasis is on the threat posed by the Armenians to the traditional
hierarchical order; there was a policy of massacre or at least massacre was 'used or
acceded to by the regime' [36] to restore this
order and if the sultan did not proceed from massacres to extermination or 'total
domestic genocide' in the 1890s it was because 'he was a reactionary conservative
who opposed radical transformations of state and society. Indeed, to commit genocide
by destroying the Armenian millet would have been a radical departure from the
sultan's ideology and it would have undermined Islam and the millet system as myths
of legitimation linking the Ottoman state to Ottoman society.' [37]
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Melson's case for a 'policy' of massacre is built on the stepping stone of one supposition
after another and yet it is this structure that serves as the foundation for his case that
the 'policy' of massacres of the 1890s was the prelude to the 'genocide' of 1915. His
suppositions about what was going on in the sultan's mind have no basis in fact or in what
is known of the sultan's character. The sultan was suspicious (to the point of paranoia
according to his detractors) but there is no evidence that he hated Armenians as an
ethno-religious group (as much as the activities of the revolutionary committees clearly
infuriated him) and neither is there any evidence that he ever contemplated massacring
them. To put such a sequence of thoughts into the sultan's mind is lese-history on a grand
scale. The observations that the sultan was conservative, that he wanted to protect the
existing order and that he had a deeply religious nature and sought to enhance or
'revitalize' Islam within the Ottoman state and beyond its boundaries are no basis for an
indictment against him. Abdulhamit was a man of his time and cannot be judged outside it.
There was not one European monarch who could not be described in similar terms. They were
all religious and conservative and anxious to strengthen the dominant religion
(Christianity in their case) within their own countries and to bring its benefits to
others as well. In this sense Abdulhamit was entirely unexceptional. Did he oppose
revolutionary movements? He certainly did, but so did they all. Whether these groups were
Muslim (the Young Turks) or Christian (the Armenians and the Macedonians) was beside the
point. It was revolution that he opposed. As for the Armenian renaissance it was the
Ottoman government itself which encouraged the modernizing reforms of the Armenian millet
in the nineteenth century. There is no evidence that the sultan was resentful of the
Armenians for economic or social reasons although there is some evidence that his Muslim
subjects were. The amira class was close to the palace and indeed the leading Armenian
families established much of their wealth on the basis of this connection. They served in
the bureaucracy and mixed in the same court circles as the sultan's Muslim pashas: in
general the nature of the relationship between the sultan and the Armenians close to the
palace bears out the observations made by Davison. What can be said without any doubt is
that Abdulhamit was determined to repress any movement which threatened to bring about the
further disintegration of the empire. That was his responsibility as the sultan. If
Armenian autonomy — almost certainly leading to demands for an independent state — is
to be regarded as part of the 'Armenian renaissance' he would oppose it to the limit of
his powers. Was there any other European monarch who would not have done the same in the
face of an internal uprising?
Melson includes the Armenian peasants of the eastern vilayets in the Armenian
'renaissance'. Instigated (or incited) by revolutionary activists there is no doubt that
many peasant villagers underwent a form of national awakening but in its broader cultural
sense the word would be misapplied. In Europe it was common to think of the Armenians as
the 'Europeans of the east' but the sophistication of the cities was not to be found among
either Muslims or Christians in the distant parts of the Ottoman Empire and Armenian
priests could be just as narrow minded and fanatical as Muslim imams. The general level of
education was low and it was precisely on ignorance and fanaticism that the
revolutionaries traded, convincing Armenian villagers before the uprising in the Talori
district in 1894 that British troops were about to come to their rescue in balloons and
then leading them in attacks on Muslim villages. The allusion to the Armenians as being
the 'wretched of the earth' [38] singles them out
from the rest of the population in their suffering yet there is a mass of evidence even in
the British Parliamentary Papers to show that problems from misgovernment were just as
much the lot of Muslims. An argument can even be made that in many respects the Muslims
were worse off, carrying the truly onerous burden of conscription (from which Christians
were exempt) and living in just as much hardship in their remote eastern villages as the
Christians, but in the nineteenth century the problems of Muslims were generally invisible
to the outside world. The Christian world was concerned about Christians and only about
pagans, heathens and Muslims when it was thought that there was some chance of converting
them. This singling out of a minority and the corresponding invisibility of the Muslim
majority are two of the strongest characteristics of western 'orientalist' attitudes
towards the Middle East from the nineteenth century up to the present time.
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What is more significant than any of the suppositions and opinions linking the
values and dislikes of the sultan to the ultimate supposition of a government policy
of organized massacres is what was actually happening or what was believed to be
happening in the eastern provinces (perceptions strongly shaped by gossip and rumour
spreading from town to town and village to village being almost as important as the
events themselves). All the evidence suggests that the revolutionary/insurrectionist
movement constituted a threat to social order somewhere along the plane between
substantial and serious, and possibly constituted a threat to the integrity of the
empire itself given the involvement and interests of the European powers. The active
members of the revolutionary movements might have been few in number but they were
well organized in cells across the six eastern provinces and they were capable of
rousing hundreds if not thousands to their cause. Figures have been given for the
rising in the Talori district. Hundreds were involved in a revolt at Van and far
greater numbers were caught up in the Hunchak-directed uprising which took place at
Zeitun in 1895. This was a well planned, well organized and bloody affair which
lasted from late summer until a settlement was finally negotiated with the rebels in
January 1896 through the mediation of the consuls of the foreign powers. The Ottoman
government estimated that 12,000-14,000 Armenians were involved in the uprising. [39] About 18,000 Ottoman troops — regular
soldiers and redifs (reserves) — were sent to the region to lay siege to the town.
Zeitoun had a long history of turbulence, rebellion and resistance to the payment of
taxes on the grounds of the poverty of the people. A British military consul
visiting the town in 1881 wrote that the Zeitunlis were
a semi-barbarous and depraved community, little better than
savages and so ignorant, self-opinionated and conceited that it is impossible to do
any good with them by argument or persuasion. Strongly convinced that they are a
power of themselves, that the Turkish government is afraid of them, very excitable,
reckless, idle to a degree and utterly ignorant of what goes on outside their own
mountains they are now in such a state that I can hardly conceive that order can be
restored without bloodshed. [40]
The uprising began when rebels overwhelmed the government building and the town
garrison and took hundreds of people prisoner, including the kaymakam (sub-governor)
and 600 soldiers and 50 officers. Almost all the captured soldiers were subsequently
massacred (by the women of Zeitun according to one account). The rebels then spread
rebellion throughout the region: according to a decree from the Office of the
Imperial Secretariat at the Palace to the Cabinet
Through the disclosures made in this telegram [from the governor
of Aleppo] it is evident that the insurgents have burnt down numerous Muslim
villages and killed many Muslim children. They furthermore cut off the breasts of
Muslim women and committed mass murders of the Muslim folk who could not escape. The
insurgents were not content with these barbarous deeds and through the help of their
own populous crowd they killed a big portion of the soldiers in the barracks at
Zeitoun, in fact according to a rumour all the soldiers except one or two officers,
and seized weapons such as guns and rifles and military equipment and ammunition.
According to the latest available information it is understood that a very small
number of soldiers in the barracks are alive. [41]
By any standards this was a major uprising. The timing was significant. The uprising
began while the sultan was considering the latest 'reform' proposals put to him by
the powers. He finally accepted them in a limited form on 17 October. Outlining
measures for better government that would bring greater numbers of Armenians into
the provincial administration, they were issued in the form of an irade and were not
described as reforms but as 'orders to enforce existing laws or regulations in
harmony with them'. [42] They were not
officially published until November 1896 which can be taken as a sign of
Abdulhamit's sensitivity to theft probable effect on Muslim public opinion. In any
case, once they became common knowledge they were regarded as a victory by the
Hunchaks, at least as a limited victory by the British government which had led the
pressure for reform and as a disaster by Muslims. The three months which followed
were the bloodiest of the three-year period from 1894-96.
In short it cannot credibly be argued that the revolutionary parties did not
represent a serious threat. Their influence was not just to be measured by the
destabilising effects of their activities on social order but by the possibility
that the sultan could be forced through European pressure to set up a segregated
'ethnographic' administration in the eastern provinces. As understood by Abdulhamit
such an ethno-religious Armenian enclave would be a stepping stone first to autonomy
(along the lines of the autonomy granted, under European pressure, to the Maronites
of Mt Lebanon in 1864 and the Bulgarians in 1878 under European pressure) and
finally independence.
Although British pressure for reforms was cloaked in humanitarian concern it was
intensely political and predominantly self serving. The intention after the Congress
of Berlin was to block the spread of Russian influence. The British were alarmed
that the Russians would annex 'Armenia' and use it as the base to threaten Britain's
strategic position in the region and as far afield as India. British involvement in
the affairs of the Armenians was regarded as a strategic necessity. A 'protectorate'
over the Christians in the eastern vilayets would have greatly strengthened the
British position on the ground near the Russian border. It soon became clear that
there was no chance that the sultan would accept such a project but 'reforms' in the
eastern vilayets might do almost as well. As originally envisaged by the British
these reforms would have been supervised by British consuls and judges overseeing
all aspects of the administration including tax collection, the police and the court
system. Quite clearly the whole arrangement would have undermined the sovereignty of
the sultan within his own domains and for that reason he was bound to resist it. He
had no intention of allowing what remained of his empire to be lost through internal
agitation fed by outside involvement. No European monarch would have acted any
differently and it is in this context that his reaction to the rise of the Armenian
revolutionary movement and the machinations of European governments should be
understood and not through imaginative references to his sacred values. The sultan
was fully aware of the shortcomings of his provincial administrators. He was
autocratic but he was not hostile to reforms as any study of late Ottoman history
will show. He drew up his own proposals after Berlin but no reform plan was likely
to succeed against the background of violence and disorder that began sweeping the
Ottoman provinces from the 1880s.
The gap between alternative narratives of the events that took place in the 1890s is
vast. Official documents always have to be read sceptically but this applies to
British documents as well as the Ottoman. Hallward wrote the reports which inflamed
opinion in England on the basis of second-hand information. So did Vice Consul
Fitzmaurice whose graphic account of the burning of the Armenian church at Urfa was
penned many months after the event. There is also the question of the political use
of the British parliamentary papers (the 'Blue Books'). Governments usually have a
reason for publishing some documents and withholding others and the British
government was unlikely to be any different. By insinuating in despatches that the
sultan was to blame, was it trying to protect itself from responsibility for the
disastrous consequences of its own failed policies? In addition there was the
religious bias which permeated popular and parliamentary discussion of the Armenian
question. The terrible denouement of the Armenian question in the 1890s seemed proof
of what was already known about Islam and the awfulness of the Turks. No further
questions needed to be asked. Gladstone was still a powerful public figure,
agitating for the rights of Christians in the Ottoman Empire as he had been doing
since before the Congress of Berlin. Although he denied having any special animus
against the sultan or Islam it is quite clear that he did, that he loathed the
sultan (of whom he wrote venomously in his diaries) and that he shared the
antagonistic Christian view of Islam as a religion and of the Turks as a people,
whom he had described in the 1870s as being, 'from the first black day they entered
Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity'. [43] Views such as his — coming out of centuries of adversarial
religious history — were shared by influential figures within or close to the
British government as well as by missionaries and by Christian opinion generally on
both sides of the Atlantic.
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archives remain largely unconsulted. When so much is missing from the fundamental
source material, no historical narrative can be called complete and no conclusions can
be called balanced. |
It was only 20 years until 1915 and attitudes had not changed in that time. Many of the
political and religious figures who had agitated for the Armenians in the nineteenth
century (Bryce being the most influential of them) were still on the scene. Again the
Armenian question became a propaganda weapon: in the hands of the Armenian national
movement, trying to secure support for a state to be carved out of the eastern Ottoman
Empire when the war was over; in the hands of the governments locked in war with Germany
and the Ottoman state; and in the hands of the missionaries and religious humanitarians
who had been fulminating against the evils of Islam and 'Muhammadan government' for
decades, and for whom Christian suffering at Muslim hands was inevitable.
Now there are genocide and counter-genocide allegations. In the case of the resolution
passed in France the practical damage done to diplomatic and trade relations with Turkey
has already been noted. As three French commentators have observed, the negative effects
within Turkey include the weakening of pro-EU Turks and the strengthening of the 'military
— nationalistic clique'. [44] This is all politics
but the historical question cannot be ignored. The central problem from the standpoint of
history remains the sources on which the western historical narrative is still being
written. The Ottoman archives remain largely unconsulted. When so much is missing from the
fundamental source material, no historical narrative can be called complete and no
conclusions can be called balanced. If the Ottoman sources are properly utilized, the way
in which the Armenian question is understood is bound to change but from such close
scrutiny no one is likely to emerge with unstained hands — not Turks or Kurds
responsible for the killings, not the Armenians who engaged in revolt against the Ottoman
government and were themselves guilty of massacres, and certainly not the European
governments playing minority politics in the Middle East in time of peace and in time of
war from the nineteenth century until the present. There is unlikely to be a pristine
version of history that neatly accommodates the foundation myths necessary to Armenian
nationalism. The search for 'truth' will probably remain chimerical but is more likely to
lead somewhere if left to historians rather than politicians and lobbyists.
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NOTES
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1. On 18 Jan. 2001.
2. J. L. Grabill, 'Missionaries amid Conflict:
Their Influence upon American Relations with the Near East 1914-27' (Unpublished Ph.D
thesis, Indiana University, Bloomington IN, 1964), p.80 (UMI Dissertation Services,
Ann Arbor MI, 1997).
3. Ibid., p.38.
4. Ibid., p.40.
5. Salahi Ramsdan Sonyel, The Ottoman
Armenians: Victims of Great Power Diplomacy (London: K. Rustem and Brother, 1987),
p.300.
6. Ibid., p.305.
7. Ibid., p.300. A useful table of comparative
figures is to be found in Youssef Courbage and Philippe Fargues, Christians and Jews
Under Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), pp. 126-7. Arnold Toynbee arrived at a figure
of between 460,000 and 860,000 Armenian dead. The German pastor Johannes Lepsius put
the number at between 996,000 and 1,046,000. The Ottoman scholar Justin McCarthy, who
has specialized in demographics, estimated that 584,000 Armenians died.
8. Ibid., p.301.
9. See Jeremy Salt, 'The Ambassadors Propose',
Imperialism, Evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians 1878-1896 (London and Portland, OR:
Frank Cass, 1993), Ch.7.
10. Ibid., p.2.
11. Ottoman Archives. Yildiz Collection, The
Armenian Question, Vol.II (Istanbul: Historical Research Foundation, 1989), p.285ff,
from Department of General Staff to Prime Ministry on 'administrative, economic and
military measures to be taken in order to relieve tension around Bitlis, Mush and its
vicinity'.
12. Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The
Survival of a Nation (New York: St Martin's Press, revised 2nd edition, 1990), p.141.
13. Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide:
On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp.41-69.
14. Walker, Armenia, p.142.
15. Salt, Imperialism, p.75.
16. Ibid., p.75.
17. Walker, Armenia, p.143.
18. Bilal N. Simsir (ed.), British Documents
on Ottoman Armenians, Vol.III, 1891-95 (Ankara: Turkish Historical Society, 1989),
p.395, no.281, Sir Philip Currie to the Earl of Kimberley, Therapia, 4 Nov. 1894, inc.
no.1.
19. Salt, Imperialism, p.152. The sultan
believed that Currie was a 'wicked man'.
20. Melson, Revolution, p.45.
21. British Documents, p.396.
22. Melson, Revolution, p.44.
23. Ottoman Archives, Vol.I, coded telegram
16 Sept. 1894, Zeki Pasha (commander in chief in the Fourth Army) to Ministry of
National Defence on 'ongoing military operations to suppress the uprising at Talori
and a report of the latest situation'. See also Salt, Imperialism, p.74.
24. Salt, Imperialism, p.74.
25. See United States National Archives (USNA)
despatches from US Ministers to Turkey 1818-1906 (microcopy T46), Constantinople
Legation, No.351, 4 Dec. 1804, Terrell to Gresham, reporting a discussion with
Abdulhamit.
26. Ottoman Archives, Vol.I, p. 183.
27. Melson, Revolution, p.45. Plans to send
three companies of Hamidiye to Talori were dropped once information had been received
that the insurgents had been 'completely overpowered'; Ottoman Archives, Vol.I, p.237.
Imperial First Secretary to Department of General Staff, 2 Sept. 1894.
28. Ibid., p.307, 4th Army Command to
Department of General Staff, 18 Sept. 1894.
29. Ibid., p.299.
30. Melson, Revolution, p.51.
31. Ibid., p.47.
32. Ibid.,
p.53.
33. Ibid., p.61.
34. Salt, Imperialism, pp.22-3.
35. Melson, Revolution, p.63.
36. Ibid., p.67.
37. Ibid., p.69.
38. Ibid., p.67.
39. Ottoman Archives, Vol.II see Imperial
Decree, Office of the Imperial Secretariat (Yildiz Palace) to the Cabinet on 'the
Armenian uprising at Zeitoun and the measures to be taken against the intervention of
foreign states during [the] quelling [of] the rebellion', p.377ff.
40. Salt, Imperialism, p.60.
41. Ottoman Archives, Vol.II, p.381, See also
Esat Uras, The Armenians in History and the Armenian Question (Istanbul: Documentary
Publications, 1988), pp.746-55.
42. Salt, Imperialism, p.93.
43. W.E. Gladstone, The Bulgarian Horrors and
the Question of the East (London: J. Murray, 1876), p.9.
44. See Liberation, 9 Feb. 2001, p.5, Alain
Dugrand, Jeran Keyahan and Gilles Perrault, 'Paris a desservi les Turcs democrates'.
Copyright 2003, EBSCO Publishing
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