Lewy on the First Sassun Rebellion

The following forms the beginning of "Chapter 3: The Massacres of 1894—96," pp. 20-21:


By 1894 tensions between Armenians and Turks in eastern Anatolia had reached a dangerous point. Armenian revolutionaries were active in all of the provinces, while Turkish authorities were displaying increased severity. There were mass arrests and new reports of the use of torture in the prisons. The Kurds felt encouraged in their new role as the irregular soldiers of the sultan; former consul Graves called them "licensed oppressors of their Christian neighbors in the Eastern provinces."1 Events in the district of Sassun in the vilayet of Bitlis, mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, set off a round of massacres all over Anatolia that were to echo around the world.

Carnage in the Wake of an Attempted Reform

The report of the Turkish commission of inquiry set up after the bloodshed in the summer of 1894 in the Talori region of the district of Sassun blamed the entire episode on Armenian provocation. Hunchak organizers were said to have incited an uprising on the part of the villagers that required the dispatch of regular troops. Heavy fighting lasted over twenty-three days before the disturbance was put down. Muslim villages were said to have been burned by the Armenian bandits, and their inhabitants slaughtered. No more than 265 Armenians had been killed. 2 European consuls, however, denied that there had been an uprising. The villagers had refused to pay double taxation and had taken up arms to defend themselves against attacking Kurds. Turkish troops and Hamidiye regiments had massacred those who had surrendered and many others, including women and children. The total number of Armenian dead was reported to have reached several thousand. 3 Missionary accounts speak of women being "outraged to death" and describe atrocities such as Armenian villagers being burnt alive in their houses and "children [being] placed in a row, one behind another, and a bullet fired down the line, apparently to see how many could be dispatched with one bullet. Infants and small children were piled one on the other and their heads struck off."4

After considerable delay, in July 1895 the three European delegates attached to the Turkish commission of inquiry issued their own report, in which they complained about the difficulties put in their way by Ottoman authorities when they had tried to interview Armenian survivors. The delegates conceded that there had been isolated acts of brigandage by an Armenian band and resistance to the troops, but they denied the charge of an open revolt. The three delegates failed to agree on the number of Armenians killed (their views ranged from nine hundred to four thousand), but they were unanimous in reporting widespread massacres. 5 More recently Dadrian has acknowledged that "the Hunchakists... exacerbated the situation by their intervention in the conflict when two of their leaders, through agitation, tried to organize an armed insurrection." But this agitation, by all accounts, had only limited success and certainly does not justify the massacres of villagers that appear to have taken place.6

The events of Sassun, as one writer puts it, "opened the floodgates to a torrent of Turcophobia in Europe and the United States."7 Just after the Bulgarian atrocities of 1876, there was an outcry of protest, and the press of Britain and America demanded action. The ambassadors of Britain, France, and Russia now began to pressure the sultan to accept political reforms for the six eastern provinces of Anatolia. According to the plan, there was to be an amnesty for Armenian political prisoners, one-third of all administrators were to be Armenians, the gendarmerie was to be mixed, and the Kurdish Hamidiye regiments were to operate only in conjunction with regular army units. The appointment of governors was to be subject to confirmation by the European powers, a control commission was to be established, and a high commissioner was to implement the plan. Many of the Armenians as well as Britain had hoped for more far-reaching reforms, but Russia was adamantly opposed to any scheme that might eventually lead to full Armenian independence or to the use of military pressure to gain acceptance of the plan.8

1. Graves, Storm Centres of the Near East, p. 142.
2. Ertugrul Zekai Okte, ed., Ottoman Archives, Yildiz Collection: The Armenian Question, Talori Incidents, p. 357. See also Jeremy Salt, "Britain, the Armenian Question and the Cause of Ottoman Reform: 1894-96," Middle Eastern Studies 26 ' i99o): 313, who largely accepts the Turkish account. »
3. Memo of Ambassador Currie, November i, 1894, in Simsir, British Documents on Ottoman Armenians, vol. 3, p. 395.
4. Bliss, Turkish Cruelties upon the Armenian Christians, p. 372.
5. The text of the report can be found in Simsir, British Documents on Ottoman Armenians, vol. 3, pp. 93-112. See also Ternon, The Armenians, p. 77.
6. Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, pp. 114—15.
7. Salt, Imperialism, Evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians, 1878—1896, p. 75.
8. Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism, vol. I, pp. 162—63; Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, p. 27.

Lewy on the Second Sassun Rebellion

The following forms the beginning of "Chapter 4: The Young Turks Take Power," pp. 30-32:



After the massacres of 1895—96 Abdul Hamid's rule lasted another twelve years. Until the Young Turks' successful seizure of power in 1908, Armenian revolutionaries kept up their attacks and even came close to assassinating the hated autocrat. They also tried again to achieve the intervention of the European powers. None of this brought the Armenians closer to their goal of liberation from Turkish rule. Indeed, there are indications that these activities stiffened the back of the Turks and eventually led to a new rupture between Armenians and Turks with even more disastrous consequences than during the reign of Abdul Hamid.

Armenian Guerrilla Warfare

In late July of 1897, one year after the ill-fated raid upon the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople, a force of 250 Dashnaks left their base on the Persian border and attacked the encampment of the Mazrik Kurdish tribe in the plain of Khanasor near the city of Van. The attack is said to have been a revenge for the tribe having wiped out an Armenian village.1 Benefiting from the element of surprise, the Armenians scored a major victory described by Armenian writers in various ways: "a major part of the tribe was killed," "part of the menfolk were massacred outright," or "the entire tribe was annihilated.'^ According to Langer, the Armenians "killed or barbarously mutilated men, women and children." 3 The Khanasor raid was widely reported by the European press, but its major effect was on the Armenians. They experienced a sense of encouragement, and hope grew that they would able to attain their political freedom by themselves rather than having to rely on impotent European promises.4

Clashes between Armenian revolutionaries and Turks and Kurds continued in various parts of eastern Anatolia. A survivor recalls that hundreds of young men brought in arms and ammunition from Persia and Russia to be sold to Armenian peasants and city folks alike. 5 Innumerable epic encounters ensued, writes a historian of the Dashnaks: "It was an era of both glory and of heroic self-sacrifice."6

Twenty years after the first bloody fighting in the region of Sassun, a new battle broke out there in the spring of 1904. The Dashnaks had been distributing weapons and organizing fighting units for some time; according to a chronicler of the struggle, this was done "with a view to a general uprising in the future." 7 Led by some of their best- known commanders, such as Andranik (Ozanian) and Murad of Sebastia, the Armenians managed to fight off an attacking force of fifteen thousand Turkish troops for three weeks but finally had to withdraw into the mountains. Several attempts by Armenian fighters in the Russian Caucasus to provide relief failed when they were intercepted and killed by Russian border troops. During the summer of 1905, according to two English missionaries, some three hundred Dashnak fighters conducted guerrilla operations on a fairly large scale in the district of Mush and to the west of Lake Van that cost five thousand lives.8

The larger purpose of these and similar engagements fought by Armenian revolutionaries during these years was not always clear. Some Armenian writers, admirers of the Dashnaks, speak of "immortals" who fought "the Armenian battle of liberation."? They describe legendary heroes larger than life who managed to survive against heavy odds, sometimes through all kinds of miraculous escapes. The revolutionaries are referred to as avengers, who do not hesitate to risk their own lives or to kill those regarded as oppressors. One such fedayee, Kevork Chavoush, is called "the man with the dagger who was always ready to punish those who molested the defenseless people." After the defeat of the rebellion of Sassun in 1904 four of his men went after a particularly cruel Kurdish chief, "raided the Agha's mansion, dispatched the whole family of four," and got away.10 Another author calls such acts "terroristic retaliation" carried out as "self-defense."11 The arming of the population is sometimes described as preparation for an upris- ing; at other times it is called self-defense against marauding Kurds and other aggressors. During the period in question the propaganda of the revolutionaries accented the goal of national liberation, to be achieved through armed struggle, while information meant for foreign consumption stressed the defensive aims of the violence. It is tempting to conclude that the obfuscation was deliberate, and the Turkish authorities facing the attacks of the Armenian revolutionaries may be forgiven if they were not always able to determine exactly what they were dealing with.

1. James H. Tashjian, "The Armenian 'Dashnag' Party: A Brief Statement," Armenian Review 21, no. 4 (Winter 1968): 53.
2. Chalabian, Revolutionary Figures, p. 328; Vratzian, "The Armenian Revolution and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation," p. 27; Atamian, Armenian Community, p. 109.
3. Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism, vol. I, p. 350.
4. Atamian, Armenian Community, p. 109.
5. Aprahamian, From Van to Detroit, p. 21.
6. Tashjian, "The Armenian 'Dashnag' Party," p. 53.
7. Chalabian, Revolutionary Figures, p. 215.
8. W. A. Wigram and E. T. A. Wigram, The Cradle of Mankind: Life in Eastern Kurdistan, pp. 247—50.
9. Chalabian, Revolutionary Figures, p. 265.
10. Mandalian, Armenian Freedom Fighters, p. 142.
11. Atamian, Armenian Community, p. 277.

Christopher Walker on Sassun

Let's take a look at what the famous genocide standard bearer, Christopher Walker, reported on Sassun. (From the 1990 version of his ARMENIA: The Survival of a Nation.)


After finding a monstrous Turkish villain in the form of the vali of Bitlis, Hassan Tahsin Pasha, on the say-so of British Vice-Consul C. M. Hallward (the one the Ottoman government regarded as one of the instigators of the rebellion, as Uras told us; this man was as unfriendly as a foreign consul could get. Since Hallward was serving in Van, how could he possibly have gotten to know the character of the Bitlis governor? In all likelihood, and as usual, from whatever the Armenians told him) Walker justifies the disrespect the Sassun Armenians displayed toward the pasha with: "Perhaps their disobedience was due to the presence in Sasun of two young Hunchak revolutionaries, who had for some years past been laying the groundwork of defiance there; though we should note that Sasun had been in a state of limited rebellion in 1889, before the appearance of revolutionaries." Perhaps? Do you get the feeling Walker was trying to somewhat excuse the two in question, Murad and Mihran Damadian? And as far as trying to get the Hunchaks off the hook by pointing to Sassun's pre-existing state of "limited rebellion in 1889," let's not forget the Hunchaks were formed in 1887, and it is almost certain the Hunchaks or other revolutionaries were hard at work, laying the seeds of discontent.

After informing us that Murad and Damadian organized a small guerrilla gang "In the summer of 1892" (Murad denied, three years later, of having instigated battles with the Kurds during this period; he blamed the government's "system of injustice," instead. Murad's whole idea was, of course, to incite the Kurds, in order to attract the attention of the European imperialists. Even Cyrus Hamlin became aware of this grand Hunchak scheme, which the Turk-despising missionary denounced as "atrocious and infernal beyond anything ever known.") Walker concedes "at least one casualty in 1892 as a result of their activities," and then explains, "They spent the latter part of 1892 trying to calm things over, and reduce tension between the communities." Yes, indeed, Murad and Damadian were such peaceful, nice guys!

In early 1893, Murad left to get funds from the Caucasus, in order to finance his mischief. "Damadian continued to keep relations with the Kurds level." (What a sweetheart!) "But while he was spreading revolutionary ideas," he was pursued and arrested, "taken to Bitlis and then to Constantinople, where he was granted a pardon." Why were the Ottoman authorities so kind to these revolutionaries? If we ask Walker, he will tell us where to lay the blame; Hallward again is cited for his prejudiced opinion: "I do not believe that the agitation amounted to much, or had much effect on the villagers. One thing seems clear, that shortly after his capture the fate of Sasun Armenians was sealed." (Let's understand the logic. The Ottomans let Damadian go, but they were going to make the Sassun Armenians pay for falling under the influence of their leader, Damadian.)

Soon after, "an unprovoked attack was launched by three to four thousand Kurds on the villages of the Talori parish. The Kurds attempted to lay siege to the Talori Armenians, but the latter withdrew into a stronghold they had prepared and successfully withstood their attacks. Several of their small villages were, however, sacked. The Kurds then gave up the attempt, to return to their winter quarters."

After Murad returned, "it appears that the villagers placed enormous trust in him, and his presence gave them strength." In other words, they fell under his spell as the charismatic cult leader that he, in effect, was, and would do anything he said; and what Murad wanted them to do was to rebel.  Walker continues: in June 1894 the kaymakam came to collect arrears of taxes from the Talori Armenians, and as the British consul in Erzerum, R. W. Graves, described: "He proceeded to abuse and maltreat them. They then lost their temper, fell upon him, and, after administering a severe beating, drove him and his zaptiyes (gendarmes) from the district."

Walker explains: "To the official this was armed rebellion, and he reported it as such, adding that a large force would be needed to put it down." If an armed community treats legal officers in the described manner, what nation would not characterize such behavior as rebellious? And if this strong community was able to withstand an attack from 3-4,000 Kurds, you can bet a large force would have been needed to get them in line. Accordingly, the Armenians retreated to their stronghold, and the Ottoman force numbering 300 did not attack.

Meanwhile, a small Ottoman force went elsewhere "to try to compel the notables to present themselves before the governor of Bitlis so that he could extract money from them." Could it be the governor was trying to collect taxes, instead? "The troops arrested five Armenians — but were pursued by armed villagers, who managed to rescue four of the prisoners." It is fairly obvious that would fall under the definition of "rebellious," as well.

After Armenians killed a few Kurds for trying to steal livestock  "in a punitive, extremist manner" (note how Walker always excuses his beloved Armenians; even when they commit murder, it must be their victims' fault.):

"For 12 days (probably 14-25 August) a ferocious battle was fought at Gelieguzan between the tribal Kurds and Armenian defenders." The Armenians held out, but then the Kurds, joined by government troops, succeeded in massacring them, as Walker tells us. British delegate H. S. Shipley, who was not personally there, called it "extermination."

Walker presents estimates of the dead from "a very conservative 900" to 3,000, yet even the propagandizing Dashnak historian, Varandian, gave credence to the "900," as we read above: "Some say six or seven thousand, others say around one thousand Probably the latter is nearer the truth." Remember, the Armenian population of Sassun was about 8,000.  Is Christopher Walker vouching for nearly half having been massacred?

Later, Walker praises Graves and especially Hallward for "their tenacity and their bravery." These consuls worked hand in hand with the Armenians, received their information almost strictly from the Armenians (their interpreters were almost certainly Armenian) and had sympathy for none of the other peoples of the regions. Is Christopher Walker vouching for these British consuls, weaned on Gladstone's "hate the Turk" outlook, as honest and objective people? (Naturally, some were not as bad as others.)

Walker further writes:

"The Porte not only obstructed in the east, it also sent a propaganda agent to Erzerum (where the more senior consuls resided) to process the news and make it palatable to the consuls. This man was a certain Ximenes, a Spaniard who received a regular salary from the Palace, now masquerading as a journalist and ‘writer of distinction’... Certainly, Ximenes told the consuls, massacres have taken place, but the Armenians were rebels, and the perpetrators of the massacres were Kurdish irregulars; the government’s part was an honourable one, having attempted to restore order by calling in regular troops to restrain the Kurds.

We know the Armenians were rebels from the words of the Armenians themselves; note the Hunchak literature from above, published in Mush, and distributed to Armenians in Eastern Anatolia. We even know the Sassun Armenians were rebellious from Walker's own reportage! What matters is not where Ximenes' salary was coming from, but whether the testimony could be corroborated by honest sources that provided similar testimony. And where did Walker know how Ximenes earned his money? Perhaps Walker, himself a journalist, relied upon the rabidly anti-Turkish New York Times, whose February 5, 1895 issue told us that Professor Ximenes of the University of Madrid (which puts into question whether he was actually a "journalist") was accused by, evidently, "The Daily News's correspondent in Marseilles," that Ximenes' "Testimony Was Sold, It Is Said, to the Porte." This was, evidently — the full article was not available for the reading — based upon "Advices from Constantinople." In other words, hearsay. Very likely hearsay from Istanbul Armenians that Western publications immediately latched on to as credible.] Any Westerner who maintained objectivity was subjected to the charge of being an "agent of the Turkish government," a tactic still utilized today. But the fact is, the Ottomans, as even a great Armenian crusader conceded,  were "almost ludicrously innocent of the propagandist’s art." If Sultan Abdul Hamit was such a master of propaganda, he certainly could have hired many such foreign "agents" in their own countries, to offset the awful anti-Turkish propaganda taking place in nations such as Britain and the USA. As far as the rest of Ximenes' testimony that Walker set up for ridicule, even Walker provided testimony that the Ottoman soldiers restrained the Kurds, after which Walker concluded the government soldiers joined the Kurds in the massacring process. It is possible this may have happened, but what is the proof? The word of British consuls who listened exclusively to sobbing Armenians? (The British officer Norman will negate this claim, as we'll see below.)

It should perhaps be noted that now and over the next 20 or 30 years, the Turkish government regularly ascribed the massacre of Armenians to the actions of wild, unsubdued Kurdish tribes, whereas in each case the 'thinning out' or straightforward extermination of Armenians was a matter of considered government policy. The 'Kurdish cover-up' is very frequently met, and only really ended when the Turkish government embarked on deporting and massacring the Kurds themselves, by which time there were, anyway, scarcely any Armenians left."

Sigh!

Without shame, Walker writes: "One man that had discussed the Armenian question with the sultan was that part scholar, part clown, part spy-manqué figure Arminius Vambéry." Vambéry was one who controlled his prejudices, so of course to Walker, anyone who sized up the Turks as short of beasts would be a "clown."

Walker did not get much into the second Sassun uprising; keep in mind that we know from the Armenians themselves (refer to the "Battles of Antranik" book, from above) that what took place was a major uprising between armed Armenians and Ottoman forces. Here is what Walker reported (the pertinent parts are highlighted by Holdwater):

"Although matters remained deadlocked internationally for the Armenians, locally the fedayis' illicit arms were a guarantee for freedom from the government in some localities. The first outstanding leader in the mountains of Turkish Armenia was Serop 'pasha', whose Dashnak guerrilla bands neutralised the locust-like functionaries of the Ottoman government and established a degree of cherished autonomy for Armenians, instituting justice where before there had been none, and, by expelling the government, introducing those very institutions that we associate with government. Serop was killed by the ruse of a Kurd in 1900, and the leadership of fedayi forces fell to Andranik, without question the most famous Armenian guerrilla fighter,5 'a very able man, and implicitly obeyed', in the words of British vice-consul Hampson.6 Born in Shabin Karahisar in 1865, he had joined Dashnaktsutiun in 1892. During the killings of autumn 1895 he had defended the Sasun villages, and four years later had become the leader of the forces in Sasun. In November 1901 he effected a spectacular break-out from the besieged position at Arakelots Monastery, near Moush. His activities reached a climax in 1903-4, when much of the region of Van, Bitlis, Moush and Sasun was in a state of revolutionary turmoil.7 In the spring of 1904 the Turkish army attempted to break the link forged between the villagers and the guerrillas by bombarding the Sasun villages for eight days in mid-April; but the villagers escaped, most to higher ground, and a few to the villages near Diyarbekir. Andranik and his forces were, however, compelled to retreat to Persia, via Aghtamar and Van; thence they moved to the Caucasus, leaving little more than a heroic memory. (Andranik himself resigned from the Dashnak party in 1907, because the party was entering into negotiations with émigré Turkish groups opposed to the sultan.)"

Isn't it jaw-dropping? Christopher Walker is actually corroborating, at least indirectly, that the Armenians were in revolt during the period of the second Sassun uprising ("...in 1903-4, when much of the region of Van, Bitlis, Moush and Sasun was in a state of revolutionary turmoil"; the footnoted British archival source is FO 424/205, p. 181-2), and he is faulting the government forces from trying to establish law and order... which would be the duty of any government. (See next paragraph.) Is Walker under the delusion that there was an independent "Armenia" during those years? The Armenians actually enjoyed an "internal autonomy," according to Richard Hovannisian (1967); their contact with the Ottoman government was usually restricted to tax-collectors, and the forces the Ottomans would send in, when the Kurds got too rowdy; in other words, the Armenians were free to do whatever they wanted, much in opposition to their brethren in Russia. And note how he's presenting mass murderers as Serop and especially Antranik as heroes! Don't the many thousands of innocent villagers these men killed — Antranik (on record for personally raping a Turkish woman, before likely having her killed; no doubt one of many rapes and murders this criminal committed) in particular — mean anything to the bigoted Christopher Walker?

John Brown

In order to gain perspective, why don't we take a look at the fate of a 19th century American counterpart to these revolutionaries, the abolitionist John Brown? As opposed to these mad and greedy Armenians leading their people down the path of destruction, a people who didn't want anything to have to do with them at first, at least Brown had a genuinely noble purpose: he believed in armed insurrection as a means to abolish slavery. The raids Brown conducted led to the deaths of perhaps a dozen men, mostly soldiers (but civilians too), and the wounding of around a dozen more. Compare to the thousands and thousands of innocent villagers that Armenian mass murderers as Antranik were responsible for! Although Brown was regarded as a hero in a number of quarters, President Abraham Lincoln called Brown a "misguided fanatic," and author Ken Chowder, in a study from 2000, described him as "The Father of American Terrorism." Brown was not "murdered" as Walker tells us was the fate of poor, innocent Murad, but executed for the crime of treason. Of course! No matter how "noble" one's cause is, once one resorts to violence where innocents are subjected to harm, one becomes a "terrorist." And when one opposes one's government through armed rebellion, one becomes guilty of "treason." These are the universal rules of all nations, except, in bigoted minds as Christopher Walker, the Ottoman Empire.

Getting back to the non-Armenian lives Walker doesn't give a rat's gas for, from the previous paragraph's end, note how Walker handled the massacre of the Mazrik Kurds that we learned about from Lewy, Uras and the New York Herald Tribune; he confined this episode to the end of his book, buried within the "Biographical Notes" on notable Armenians:

"[Nikol Duman] Planned a punitive expedition against Kurds of the Mazrik tribe, who had served the sultan's ends in the Hamidiye regiments; this plan endorsed by Mikayelian in November 1896, and carried out at Khanasor, 24-5 July 1897."

That's it; in Christopher Walker's bigoted mind, he is making this "punitive expedition" (i.e., massacre) a perfectly justifiable affair, for you see, the Kurds were actually the villains.

Christopher Walker is an emotional partisan, and he has written an awfully one-sided, propagandistic book. (Yes, he is no different than so many other pro-Armenian authors, but this cannot excuse him.) He establishes his case by referring to thoroughly unreliable sources, as the British consuls who, like Christopher Walker, listened exclusively to the Armenian perspective. Who can argue with Esat Uras, as he put it so accurately above: "...The reports of the Consuls, which tend on the whole, as is only to be expected, to be biased in favour of the Armenians."

But when we have the reports of these sources that are usually hostile to the Turks who paint a different picture than what those as Walker would have us believe, then we must pay heed. (As much as those as Walker will try to convince us they are "agents of the Turkish government," without offering evidence, or, otherwise, "clowns.")

Salahi R. Sonyel points to one such source I have never run into before, from his 2000 book, "Falsification and disinformation : negative factors in Turco-Armenian relations": 

"A British Member of Parliament, Sir Ellis Ashmeed Bartlett [Ashmead-Bartlett], in a pamphlet he published in February 1895, which he circulated to the British Parliament, observed that "most of the tales so widely circulated" in connection with the Turco-Armenian incidents were manufactured and directed by "the most imaginative and malevolent spirit". The "deliberate object" of the agitation "was not to obtain redress for the Armenian sufferings, but to excite public feeling in this country (UK) against Turkey and the Turks".

(The sources for the above, combined with a reference to Ximenes [described by Sonyel as "a Spanish geographer and man of science," as well as "an eye witness to the Sasun rebellion"] are: Sir Ellis Ashmeed Bartlett, MP, Armenian "Atrocity" Agitation, Its Genesis, Method, Truth and Consequences, London, February 1895, pp. 3, 5, 8 and 19; see also The Westminster Gazette, 15.12.1894 and 7.1.1895.)

Sonyel also brings up "Another British source, Captain Charles Boswell Norman, who was sent to the Ottoman state as an officer in the Royal Artillery, observed in a manuscript of 1895,[73] "only the Armenian version of the disturbances, embellished with hysterical utterances of their English collaborators" were heard of, whereas in reality "the disturbances in Asia Minor are the direct outcome of a widespread anarchist movement". He insisted that the Hintchakist committee was directly responsible for all the bloodshed in Anatolia. British journalists were duped by the Armenians.[74]" (Finally capping off with: "Many of the Armenian falsehoods were also revealed during the sessions of the Sasun Inquiry Commission, which the Ottoman government established in December 1894, consisting of British, French and Russian representatives, in addition to Muslim ones.[75]")

A more detailed look at Captain Norman is available here; the reader may wish to click that link, as rich details on Sassun are provided; the captain reported that the Armenian people of Sassun were "graded into rebellion" in the Autumn of 1894 by the inflammatory articles in the revolutionary newspapers published in London, Vienna and New York, just as Esat Uras provided a more local example of above; furthermore, Norman knew for a fact that two British journalists who reported on these events never went to Sassun, but received their information from the consul at Erzurum [that would be Graves himself, one of Walker's favorite sources!], allowing Norman to conclude that "It is certain that they were hopelessly duped by Armenian romancers." Norman also asserts that the report of the British delegate was suppressed, and the true mortality was half of Walker's "conservative" figure of 900, in reality less than 500! Norman also, significantly, clears the involvement of Ottoman troops; another British author vouched for the integrity of the commander in charge, Zeki Pasha, in a letter to the Times of London. (Regarding an earlier period.)

What the British officer stated was the absolute truth (and we need to pay particular attention to the well-phrased "'Only the Armenian version of the disturbances, embellished with hysterical utterances of their English collaborators' were heard of." Yet, those as Christopher Walker would have us believe the "hysterical utterances" of these "English collaborators," those as the vice-consul Hallward, whom Uras believably described as "one of the instigators of the rebellion" in the eyes of the Ottoman government. Why should we listen to Hallworth, even if he wasn't directly involved in the Armenians' rebellion, as charged? His sympathies were completely with the Armenians.

And again, by exactly the same token, why should we believe Christopher Walker? His sympathies are also completely with the Armenians. When one embarks upon a work of history, one commits a great transgression if one is unable to maintain an open mind; impressionable readers who buy into the version Christopher Walker describes will look upon Turks as monsters, and that perpetuates hatred and racism. Unfortunately, too often, that is the very intention of such bigoted authors to begin with.