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Paul B. Henze
Foreign Affairs Consultant,
Washington, DC, U.S.A.
International Terrorism and the
Drug Connection, Ankara (Ankara -
University Press), 1984. pp. 179-202.
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THE
ROOTS OF ARMENIAN VIOLENCE:
How Far Back Do They Extend? |
Introduction
Is there something unusual about Armenians as a people, or about their historical
experience, that has made them prone to violence? How deeply rooted is Armenian-Turkish
enmity? Does devotion to Monophysite Christianity predispose Armenians to hostility toward
Islam? What caused Armenian nationalism to intensify in the 19th century and Armenian
nationalists to resort to increasingly provocative forms of activity? Did they represent a
majority of the Armenian people? Is late 20th century Armenian terrorism, among the most
persistent and irrational on the international scene, the natural and unavoidable outcome
of difficulties in the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
This essay will address each of these questions in turn. In doing so, it will also raise
additional questions. It cannot answer them all. Its purpose is to encourage reflection
and discussion. It is also to shift all of these controversial issues to a broader
historical plane and dampen some of the extreme emotionalism that has obstructed rational
discourse about Armenian-Turkish relations during the past decade.
The Distant Past
Armenian history is not easy to study. It is long, complex, sometimes obscure and often
controversial. There are rich records to draw upon, but texts and traditions have not been
as meticulously and critically examined by independent scholars as those of many other old
nations. The history of Egypt, or Greece and Rome, for example, has been written primarily
by people who are not directly descended from the ancient civilizations. Texts and
inscriptions bearing on the history of these societies have been studied from all possible
directions by scholars who have no emotional interest in using them as a basis for
glorifying the distant past of the peoples involved—though some, of course, have done
so. Armenian history has been studied and written almost entirely by Armenians. The same
could be said, though perhaps not to the same degree, of many other peoples, such as the
Georgians, Bulgarians, and Hungarians, who have tenaciously survived the vicissitudes of
history. But Armenians seem to represent an extreme case, much more so than Jews, e.g.
People who write their own history tend to glorify their past and avoid objective
examination of controversial features of it. Armenians have been more prone to do this
than most peoples and the trend has become accentuated during the latter half of the 20th
century.
It has resulted in emotional dramatization of Armenians as a martyr nation unique in their
virtues from time immemorial and unique in their sufferings in both ancient and modern
times. This kind of process becomes self-reinforcing, especially so among peoples whose
cultural life operates in the diaspora. Poles are prone to it, but Armenians are much more
so. They have projected much of their modern history into their past—and have thus
transformed it into mythology.1
There are other problems with Armenian historical writing. Most of it tends to ignore the
distinction between nation and state.2 The origin of the Armenians as a nation remains
obscure. There is a cultural and territorial relationship to ancient Urartu, but there are
important differences, especially of language. The Empire of Tigranes the Great (1st
century BC), which is glorified as Greater Armenia at its maximum extent, was a
short-lived and loosely organized state which almost certainly contained a minority of
Armenians. It was overwhelmed by Rome in 66 BC and no single unified Armenian state ever
came into being again. Division into kingdoms and principalities which were sometimes
independent but more often owed allegiance to surrounding states and empires did not
prevent Armenians from developing a sense of national consciousness. Acceptance of
Christianity contributed to this process. It also helped Armenians maintain their
distinctiveness and an orientation toward the West during a period of intense involvement
with Persians and then Arabs. Like the Jews, Armenians very early in their history
developed habits of living in diaspora—not only as the result of political misfortune at
home but at least as much out of a sense of enterprise as traders, craftsmen and servants
of foreign rulers. Armenian communities in Persian and Arab lands and in many parts of the
Byzantine Empire predate the conversion to Christianity.
The Armenians’ first experience of Islam was Arab conquest of their core territories,
which occurred in the mid-7th century AD and less than a century later led to the
Nakhichevan Massacre of much of the Armenian nobility in 750. But Armenians as a whole
accommodated successfully to Arab rule. Dvin, the capital of Arab Armenia, continued to be
an important center or religious life and trade. Lands inhabited by Armenians (which seem
never to have included large territories of exclusively Armenian population—they were
always mixed with Georgians, Kurds, Persians, Greeks and other Caucasian peoples) were
continually caught up in the great imperial rivalries and movements of peoples that
dominate the history of the entire region where the Caucasus, Anatolia and Persia meet:
Byzantine vs. Arab, Persian vs. Byzantine, Arab vs. Persian. From the 11th century onward
Mongols and Turks enter the scene. By this time the patterns of Armenian interaction with
surrounding peoples were firmly set and did not change decisively with the appearance of
these more Central Asian newcomers.
There are fascinating parallels between the Armenian relationship to the Byzantine Empire
and later Armenian involvement with the Ottoman Empire. Some Armenian princes sought
allies among Persians, Arabs and other Muslims against the Byzantines. Others sided with
the Greeks against their Eastern rivals. Many Armenians emigrated to Byzantine territory
and some rose to high positions including the imperial throne. When the Turks appeared on
the scene, the Byzantine and Armenian Christians did not join to resist them. Monophysite
Christianity reinforced a profound sense of competitiveness between Armenians and Greeks.
The Armenian princes judged their situations in terms of traditional patterns of
competition for power—habits of intense internecine political and religious strife had
already become deep-seated. When Ani, capital of an important Armenian kingdom, fell to
the Seljuks in 1064, its population remained and the city continued to enjoy prosperity
under Muslim rule.3 As the Seljuks advanced into Anatolia following the Battle of
Manzikert in 1071, they found diverse Armenian communities in many cities, where they had
settled under the Byzantines. These Armenians continued to practice their professions and
their religion.
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My purpose is not to retell, even in summary form,
this history, entertaining as it is, but to underscore the fact that there is
nothing in it that helps us understand Armenian terrorism in the 20th century.
Armenians did not differ from other peoples living in this part of the world in
their essential characteristics. They were recognized as a lively and energetic
people, which explains in part their religious and political fractiousness. They
were already widely dispersed. A combination of circumstances—not simply flight
from the advancing Turks in Eastern Anatolia—resulted in the migration of
significant numbers of Armenians to the Taurus Mountains and the Mediterranean
coast. Here the arrival of the Crusaders created conditions favorable to
consolidation of an unusual Armenian state, the Kingdom of Cilicia, which became
deeply entangled in the complex warfare and political maneuvering between Muslims
and Christians that dominated this part of the Near East for two centures. Though
initially identifying with the Crusaders and intermarrying with them, the Armenians
of Cilicia were motivated as much by anti-byzantine as anti-Islamic sentiment.
Eventually both the Armenian kingdom and the Crusaders were defeated by the
Mamelukes.4
Armenians and Ottomans
Consolidation of Ottoman power over Anatolia was advantageous to the Armenians who
had been settled in small numbers in almost every part of the country since
Byzantine times, for the Ottomans established peace for the first time in centuries
over large areas and encouraged trade and industry. As the Ottoman Empire expanded,
the area open to enterprising Armenians broadened. Thus Armenian craftsmen,
merchants and money-changers prospered. Mehmet the Conqueror recognized the Armenian
millet in 1461 with the Armenian patriarch of Istanbul as its head. When the
Ottomans conquered southeastern Anatolia and Syria from the Mamecluke, the Armenians
who had remained in the region after the demise of the Cilician kingdom welcomed
them.
The principal problem Armenians had to contend with in the Ottoman Empire from the
16th century to the 19th was of their own making—sectarian and personal religious
contentiousness. A history of the Armenian church describes a situation that arose
in the 17th century:
The patriarchal dignity of Constantinople and Jerusalem, however, after the
departure of the Pontiff from the former city, became an object of ambition to
several restless individuals, who aiming continually at supplanting each other in
that dignity, by bribing the Turkish officers, again filled the Armenian community
with confusion.5
Developments during the Greek struggle for independence are recounted in the same
history, written by a pro-Roman Catholic Mekhitarist:
About this period the Turkish government was involved in a war against the
Greeks. When at Navarino, the Turkish fleet being destroyed by the Christians, the
Sultan’s rage was at the highest pitch. He wished for some occasion to avenge
himself against the Christians. This being observed by the Armenian Patriarch, he
took advantage of the circumstance to proceed against the Romanizing Armenians.6
Though causing the Turkish authorities headaches with their quarrelsomeness, the
Armenians well into the 19th century continued to be regarded as the most faithful
of the Sultan’s non-Muslim subjects. After Greece became independent, more
Armenians moved into posts in the Ottoman civil service. An Armenian study of this
subject, based on Ottoman sources, comments:
There are hundreds of books on the Armenian Question and massacres but they
emphasize one side of the story to the obscuring of the other side and, accordingly,
one can hardly imagine after reading this type of literature that Ottoman-Armenian
co-operation ever existed or that the Armenians had rendered a considerable service
to Ottoman public life. My work has been, therefore, to demonstrate the great part
which the Armenians took in the public administration of Eastern Anatolia and Syria
in the period of the ‘Tanzimat’.. . It should be understood how much the three
million Armenians of Anatolia contributed to the economic and general development of
the country, apart from official service, through trade, agriculture, handicrafts
and the professions.7
Outside Influences
Two very different sources of outside influence combined to cause great changes in
the situation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the course of the 19th
century. Like most such developments, these seemed at first of no great significance
and were perceived as peripheral by the great majority of the Armenians themselves:
(1) the Russian imperial advance into the Caucasus and consequent acquisition of a
substantial Armenian population; and (2) foreign missionary activity, primarily
American, in Anatolia, of which the Armenians became the principal beneficiaries.
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From the dawn of their history, the territory of the Armenians
had been seen as divided into two parts: (a) Persian Armenia and (2)
Roman/Byzantine/Turkish Armenia. From the beginning of the 19th century, Russian Armenia
becomes an important concept. By the end of the century, the two contrasting sections of
what Armenians increasingly came to regard as their “homeland” (though they formed a
majority of the population only in small districts of it) were Turkish and Russian Armenia
— there were still sizable Armenian minorities in northwest Iran — was of little
political consequence.
It is in these developments during the first.half of the 19th century that we find the
germs — if not the roots — of the political ferment that would propel small groups of
Armenians into political violence. It would be absurd to argue, of course, that late 19th
century violence and the extreme terrorism of the late 20th century are the inevitable
result of the incorporation of Armenians into the Russian Empire or the activities of
missionaries among them. Least of alt did the missionaries, whose initial preoccupation
was saving souls but who quickly turned to education and medicine as their major
endeavors, have violent intentions. They were largely unaware of the political
consequences of their activity. The Russians were less so, but their approach was not
different from that of any other power of the time. All powers exploited the ambitions and
disaffections of subject peoples to weaken their rivals. Some, more than others, continue
to do so today.
Armenians and Russians
Sentimentality about “liberating” the Christians of the Caucasus played only an
incidental role in the imperial Russian advance toward the south. Larger strategic goals,
including a desire for trade, were primary and the Persian Empire, like the Ottoman in a
condition of decline, was a major target. As early as the time of Peter the Great,
Georgians and Armenians were seen by the Russians as potential military and political
allies. Given the well-known trading talents of the Armenians, they were additionally
attractive for the part they could play in expanding Russian commercial activity. Neither
Christian nation was able to organize significant military forces to help the Russians,
however, for the Georgian kingdom was rent by political strain and the Armenians were
widely scattered, both among the Georgians (where they formed the largest element in the
population of Tbilisi) and in the various Muslim khanates which recognized Persian
overlordship. The ancient religious center of Echmiadzin remained the seat of the supreme
Armenian patriarch (who was often at odds with the patriarch in Istanbul) but the
population of the surrounding Khanate of Erivan was probably no more than 20% Armenian at
the end of the 18th century.
Peter the Great's Caucasian campaigns resulted in no permanent gains. During the era of
Catherine the Great (1762-1796) Russian southward expansion accelerated. The Crimea was
conquered from the Ottoman Empire (1783) and Georgia accepted Russian protection the same
year. The stage was set for a determined Russian advance into the eastern Caucasus and
southward into Iran. Armenians long resident in these regions welcomed the Russian advance
and were exploited by the Russians to undermine local Muslim rulers. Russia made major
territorial gains as a result of the first Persian war (1804-1813) and consolidated them
in the second Persian war (1826-28) just before going to war with Turkey again.8 Erivan
was ceded to Russia by Iran in the Treaty of Turkmanchai in 1828. Not only did Russia
acquire sizable numbers of new Armenian citizens in such territories; there had also been
a steady flow of Armenians into Russian-held territory during the previous 50 years, often
from locations deep in Iran. Settlement with Iran in 1828 gave this process further
impetus and it was paralleled in part by outflow of Muslims from Russia’s new
Transcaucasian possessions.9 From the 1830’s onward, Armenians became an important
component of the Russian imperial population. As often occurs with refugees, they exerted
themselves to make a new life and profited from the well-established Russian imperial
principle of co-optation of non-Russian elites. During the 19th century Armenians became
military officers, officials, professional people and entrepreneurs not only in the
Caucasus but in other parts of the Russian Empire as well. Their numbers were steadily
augmented not only by natural increase, but by immigration from Persian and Ottoman lands.
Each Russo-Turkish war resulted in a new stream of Armenian immigrants into Russian
territory.10 Armenians took advantage of expanding opportunities for education in 19th
century Russia and developed their own cultural and educational institutions. These
complemented the much older institutions Armenians had long maintained in the Ottoman
Empire and in Venice. While Constantinople remained the foremost center of Armenian
culture life during the 19th century, both religious and secular activity increased
rapidly in Tbilisi and Baku and in major cities in the Ukraine and European Russia.
Russian Armenians were not always comfortable with Czarist policies and some aspired to
greater autonomy. On the whole, however, at least until the dawn of the 20th century,
evolution was primarily in the direction of close identification of Russian and Armenian
interests. Each of the three great Russo-Turkish wars of the 19th century brought an
intensification of these trends and resulted in a more sophisticated effort on the part of
the Russians to exploit Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, especially those in Eastern
Anatolia, for their political and military advantage.”
Armenians and Missionaries
It has become dogma among some liberal intellectuals and politicians in America to
maintain that their government is by nature imperialist and interventionist, while the
American people are not. Quite the opposite conclusion would have to be drawn from the
early history of the republic. The fledgling U.S. Government shunned foreign entanglements
but American traders, missionaries and adventurers went off to all corners of the world
and involved themselves in other peoples’ affairs with zest. None were more bold than
the missionaries who founded the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in
1810 and the American Bible Society in 1816.
The Armenians, more
than any other minority in the Ottoman Empire, were what the missionaries were
seeking.
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The American Board was chartered to propagate the
gospel in “heathen lands” and took within its purview not only the Indian tribes
of North America but also Muslims, “the more benighted parts of the Roman Catholic
world” and the “nominal Christians of Western Asia.”” Its first missionaries
to the Ottoman Empire sailed from Boston to lzmir in November 1819. A decade later,
when the American Board was already operating out of a headquarters in Istanbul, it
sent its first representatives to explore “Armenia.” Eli Smith, a 29-year-old
Yale graduate, and Harrison Gray Otis Dwight, 27, a product of Andover and Hamilton
in upstate New York, made their way across Anatolia, visiting Tokat, Erzurum and
Kars in the wake of the recent war. Russian troops were withdrawing and many
Armenians were preparing to move to Russian territory. The young missionaries were
shocked at the behavior of the Russian army, “a false and scandalous specimen of
Christianity,” but equally appalled at the condition of the faith among the
Armenians:
...an illiterate population lived in underground houses and worshipped in
underground churches presided over by ignorant priests.13
When Smith and Dwight finally crossed the frontier and arrived in Tbilisi, they
found conditions among Georgian Christians no better and compounded by the Georgians’
love of alcohol. Visiting a caravanserai, they found a hogshead of New England rum:
What a harbinger, thought we, have our countrymen sent before their missionaries!
What a reproof to the Christians of America, that, in finding fields of labor for
their missionaries, they should aliow themselves to be anticipated by her merchants,
in finding a market for their poisons.14
They went on to visit Nakhichevan and Echmiadzin, where they were first received
coolly but eventually participated in a religious ceremony and engaged in
theological discussion with the secretary of the patriarch before departing after a
five-day stay.
These initial contacts set the tone for the missionary relationship to the Armenian
church hierarchy during the remainder of the 19th century. Their reception by the
Ottoman authorities was less equivocal — they were welcomed by Turkish officials
eager to capitalize on their desire to set up schools and spread modern education.
Military setbacks both in Greece and on the Caucasian front during the 1820s
convinced the Ottoman military leadership of the necessity of modernization. They
welcomed help both from the missionaries and from American naval officers who
established a relationship with the Ottoman Empire during this same period. These
early beginnings in Turkish-American relations are worth recounting separately, but
here we will consider only the Armenian aspect. The chief effort of the missionaries
was directed toward organizing a high school for the Armenians which opened in Pera
(Beyoglu) in October 1834.
“Still a novel institution in the United States,” the high school’s curriculum
placed heavy emphasis on languages (teaching English, French, Italian, ancient
Greek, Armenian and Turkish) and offered instruction in composition, arithmetic,
geometry and geography, bookkeeping and the natural sciences.’5 Demand for places
for students was so great that the Istanbul Armenian community decided in 1836 to
organize another school, in Haskoy, with places for 500 students. The Armenian
church hierarchy objected to the evangelical tone of the Haskoy school and forced
its closing in 1838. But the missionaries were not to be frustrated for long by
conservative “nominal Christians.” They had meanwhile set up mission stations
with elementary schools at several locations in the Anatolian interior: Trabzon,
Kayseri, Tarsus and at Urmia beyond the Persian frontier. The pattern was set.
Missionary education among Armenians expanded steadily during the 19th century. And
when new higher educational institutions were established, they were kept firmly
under missionary control.
The Armenians, more than any other minority in the Ottoman Empire, were what the
missionaries were seeking. Exemplifying the New England concept of seeking salvation
through an energetic commitment to life and self-improvement, the missionaries
offered exactly what an intelligent minority in the Armenian community was most
eager to receive: modern education, a formula for self-development and community
improvement through rational effort consistently applied. Missionary activity
attracted increasingly high-quality people, both men and women, from the best of
colleges that were expanding all over America. They demanded little of life except
the opportunity to be effective. They were ready to settle in bleak and isolated
places with their families and devote their entire lives to their calling. Armenians
did not have to uproot themselves to benefit from missionary services.
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The
American missionaries regarded themselves as champions of religious liberty in Turkey |
The missionaries were ready to accept converts from
native Christians because they knew their status with the Ottoman authorities
depended on strict avoidance of proselytizing among Muslims. The appeal of American
Protestant Christianity to Armenians eager to modernize lay in its dynamism and
openness in contrast to the conservative traditionalism of the Armenian national
church. The traditional hierarchy became increasingly hostile to the missionaries
after a group of Protestant converts formed a society in 1839. When these people
were excommunicated by the Patriarch in 1846, the Armenian Evangelical Church with
more than 1000 members was officially established. Thus a third distinct faction was
added to the Armenian religious scene, for an Armenian Catholic movement had become
well established in the 18th century.’6 Neither the Catholic nor Protestant
Armenian churches attracted large numbers of converts but their influence on the
intellectual and political life of the Armenian community was out of all proportion
to their size. There was a darker side to these developments as well:
Far from acknowledging the divisive effect of their activities, the American
missionaries regarded themselves as champions of religious liberty in Turkey.17
The ability of the national church to lead and discipline the Armenian community was
impaired. Other factors contributed to this process but the effect of the
missionaries was catalytic. While the Ottoman authorities became increasingly
concerned about factionalism in the Armenian community, they did not impede the
missionaries who steadily expanded their work during the 1840s and 1850s. Bulgaria
became a major area of missionary expansion in the 1850s and when Robert College got
under way in the 1860s Bulgarians were attracted to it like Armenians. When Bulgaria
became independent in 1878, a major portion of its senior leadership consisted of
Robert college graduates.18
Armenian Awakening
The awakening of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in which American missionaries
played an important role was paralleled by similar developments in the Russian
Empire, where urban Armenians improved their status through education and
involvement in trade and commerce.
Unharrassed by missionaries and enjoying a
sometimes uneven but essentially more favorable relationship with the Russian
Orthodox Church, the Armenian national church enjoyed a more secure position in the
Russian Empire. The Czarist government realized the political advantage of having
the ancient seat of the Armenian Church on its territory at Echmiadzin. Armenian
intellectuals eager to explore the national heritage, restore and purify the
language and spread knowledge of their history among their rural countrymen did not
find themselves at odds with the religious hierarchy as frequently as their
compatriots in Turkey. Contacts between Russian and Turkish Armenians expanded
steadily during the 19th century. lstanbul was an important intellectual center for
Russian Armenians and many traveled there. The Russo-Turkish border was not the
barmier it became in the Soviet period — there was continual movement across it
not only by Armenians from both sides but by the other peoples of the region as
well.
The Armenians had no separate territorial or corporate status in the Russian Empire
and though the Armenian element in the population of the Transcaucasus grew steadily
by both natural increase and immigration, Armenians also moved to other regions. Old
communities, dating from medieval times, in the Ukraine and Poland, developed new
life. But political development—political ferment is perhaps a better term —
came slowly in Russian compared to the Ottoman Empire, where the Armenians had been
recognized for 400 years as a separate millet — i.e., nation.
The Patriarch, as head of the millet, was traditionally assisted and advised by a
millet assembly chosen by the community. Several groups were recognized in the
community of which the amiras (bankers, rich merchants, higher government officials)
and the esriafs (small businessmen, traders, craftsmen) were most important. The new
intellectual class derived from both these groups. The eastern peasantry played no
role in the politics of the millet, which centered in Istanbul, nor, until the
1840s, did the Armenian laborers of the capital.19
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Russian
Armenians were influenced by Russian revolutionary movements which were increasingly
dominated by advocates of violence |
The excitement the missionaries caused with their schools —
and the closing of the Haskoy school in 1838 — gave rise to a chain of events which kept
the Istanbul Armenian community in turmoil throughout the 1840s. Elections to the millet
assembly were hotly contested by the amiras and the esnafs, though the two eventually
joined together against a new Patriarch popular with the community as a whole. The Ottoman
government intervened with the result that two new assemblies, one religious and one
secular, were elected. Intrigues continued and the Patriarch resigned in protest against
the undemocratic working of the assemblies. The whole Armenian community joined in a mass
demonstration on the Kumkapi district of the capital in 1848 to support the Patriarch, who
was nevertheless replaced. It may be going too far to call this sequence of events the
Armenian equivalent of the European revolutions of 1848, as some Armenian historians have
done,’° but it ushered in a period of intense and constructive effort on the part of
the Ottoman Armenian community to organize itself, which culminated in the codification of
the Armenian National Constitution in 1860. Intellectuals with a modern education played a
major role in this process.
The constitution was approved by the Sultan in 1863 and henceforth formed the basis for
regulation of the religious, cultural and educational life of the Armenian community in
the Ottoman Empire. It is difficult to argue that Ottoman mule was despotic and repressive
as a matter of principle as many contemporary Armenian historians have done — in light
of these developments. The effects of this constitution, as an Armenian historian
acknowledges, were that it laid the groundwork for a system of public education for the
Armenians of Turkey and, in doing so, helped bring about a literary renaissance that
disseminated liberal ideas and thus led to stiffer opposition to Ottoman rule.”
So by the 1860s prospects looked brighter for the Armenians than at any previous period in
their history. Relative peace and prosperity in both the Ottoman and Russian empires led
to a substantial increase in population in the cities and in the countryside. But it is
important also to recall that the newly educated teachers, professional men and
entrepreneurs—the movers and shakers who secured the 1860 constitution and inspired the
rebirth of community life in both Russia and Turkey—were only a very small proportion of
the total population. Rural Armenians in Anatolia and the Caucasus still led lives
unchanged from age-old patterns.22
Evolution Toward Violence
In 1862 a rebellion against the Ottoman authority broke out in the district of Zeitun
(Zeitin), an isolated region in the eastern Taurus where an Armenian community had lived
since the time of the Cilician Kingdom. It had been granted autonomy by Sultan Murat IV in
1618. “Since Zeitun still remained semi-independent, it was probably considered a
suitable center for political agitation by the Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople
and Russian Transcaucasia.”23 Trouble had first developed here during the Crimean War
when an ideological preacher, Hovagim, came to arouse the population. To get financial
backing he set out for Russia. He was arrested in Erzurum and hanged as a wartime traitor.
The 1862 troubles developed over the governments efforts to collect taxes and settle
Muslim refugees in the district. Another adventurer, Levon, who claimed to be a descendant
of the last Citician dynasty and sought assistance from the French government, figured in
these disturbances. Some of the Muslims of the region also had grievances against the
central government. The Pasha of Marash brought in an army to enforce order but was unable
to subdue the Armenians. They sent a delegation to Istanbul to negotiate. Meanwhile an
Armenian emissary had gone from Istanbul to Paris to persuade Napoleon Ill to press the
Porte to call off the military expedition. Conservative Armenian leaders in Istanbul
intervened with the same aim. The military expedition was abandoned and Zeitun was left to
its autonomy. All the factors that entered into this complex local situation — which did
not, except for the Armenian factor, differ greatly from many similar episodes of local
unruliness in an empire where the authority of the central government was often difficult
to enforce in the provinces — have never been studied. The affair was declared a victory
for Armenian nationalism and widely publicized among Turkish and Russian Armenians:
The Zeitun Rebellion. . . became the first of a series of insurrections in Turkish
Armenia. . - which were inspired by revolutionary ideas that had swept the Armenian world.
The Zeitunli insurgents had had direct contacts with certain Armenian inteliectuals in
Constantinople who had been influenced by Mikael Nalbandian, a visitor from Russia to the
Turkish capital in 1860 and 1861.24
In what is known of the troubles in Zeitun in the summer of 1862, we can see all the
elements that combined to generate an inexorable movement toward violence during the final
decades of the 19th century:
• Growing nationalism fostered by intellectuals and disseminated through an
increasingly numerous and efficient Armenian press.
• External exacerbation of regional situations by outside agitators who improved
communication with each other from year to year.
• The Russian factor — passive, as far as we know, in respect to events in Zeitun —
the Armenians were seeking Russian help. During the Crimean War, however, the Russian
government has been active in encouraging the Armenians of Turkey to serve its
interests.25
• The European factor — the successful appeal to the French government
• A confused response by the Ottoman authorities — a combination of overreaction and
hesitancy, followed by withdrawal under foreign pressure and then passivity; poor
coordination between Istanbul and provincial authorities.
• Growing Muslim hostility, fed in large part by the vast flood of North Caucasian
Muslim refugees who were given asylum in Turkey following the defeat of Shamil in 1859 and
Russian operations against the Circassians in the 1860s. At least half a million of these
destitute and bitter refugees were settled in Anatolia betwen 1860 and 1870. They resented
growing Russophilia among the Armenians, in some cases brought anti-Armenian prejudices
with them from the Caucasus, and were often not under effective governmental discipline.
The 1860s and 1870s brought an explosion of Armenian literary and journalistic activity. A
second and then a third generation of educated Armenians in both Turkey and Russia
welcomed ideas from the West, including revolutionary doctrines that were fashionable in
Europe. The missionaries were no longer a primary channel for intellectual stimulation of
Armenians. Russian Armenians were influenced by Russian revolutionary movements which were
increasingly dominated by advocates of violence, such as Narodnaya Volya. Much Armenian
literary activity was concerned with questions of language purification and modernization,
history and poetry, but political activists made skillful use of seemingly benign
intellectual undertakings and contacts between groups in both countries to lay the
groundwork for agitation and rebellion.
If the Ottoman government had been as oppressive as most
modern Armenian historians claim in retrospect it was, this activity could hardly have
taken place
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If the Ottoman government had been as oppressive as
most modern Armenian historians claim in retrospect it was, this activity could
hardly have taken place in such unhindered fashion. Compared to the international
travel controls and internal security arrangements of the Turkish Republic (and most
modern states), let alone the extreme limitation on travel and all forms of
communication which the Soviet Union has always enforced, it is astonishing to read
how easily Armenian journalists, propagandists, political agents and churchmen
serving the nationalists’ revolutionary cause moved across borders and maintained
contact with each other in the latter half of the 19th century. The result was that
all of the currents affecting the growth of Armenian nationalism combined to propel
it toward making demands and creating expectations that greatly exceeded the
capacity of any of the elements of authority to satisfy.
As the direct influence of the missionaries declined—though their schools and
community services continually expanded—a modus vivendi with the national church
evolved. Recognition by the Ottoman authorities after 1850 of separate status for
the Armenian Protestants reduced the friction between them and the traditional
church hierarchy. During the 1870s and 1880s, nationalist intellectuals became less
hostile toward the national church, and the church less hostile to them. Both
accepted each other as an essential component of the process of national
self-assertion. Both contributed to the process of creating exaggerated expectations
about where Armenian nationalism could lead.
Balkan Developments
For more than 400 years the Ottoman Empire had
functioned as a remarkably effective multi-national state, but in the 19th century
everything began to come apart at the same time. No Ottoman territory remained
unaffected by the currents of nationalism that grew to flood strength, though the
Turks themselves were the last to experience the phenomenon. Troublesome as they
were, areas of Armenian population were a backwater compared to the Balkans, where
ferment had been intensifying ever since the Greek independence struggle and the
Empire had suffered extensive territorial tosses. The Russians and European powems
were constantly drawn into Balkan affairs.
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The
Balkan States that Broke Away (1822-1913)
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A critical period began in the mid-1870s when
insurrection in Bosnia and agitation in Serbia brought European pressure on the
Turks to accelerate reform. The French and German consuls in Salonika (still
Turkish) were murdered by a mob in May 1876. Istanbul riots broke out and Sultan
Abdulaziz was found dead under mysterious circumstances. The Ministers of War and
Foreign Affairs were murdered by a disaffected army officer. Serbia declared war on
Turkey. The new Sultan Murat proved unstable and was replaced in August by
Abdulhamid. Meanwhile a revolt had been planned in Bulgaria with hope of Russian
intervention but was betrayed to local Ottoman authorities. Irregular troops were
mobilized locally to crush it, and carnage ensued.
What came to be known as the Bulgarian Horrors caused a furor in the British and
European press, and a wave of concern about the Christian population of the Ottoman
Empire swept Europe. Armenian activists were eager to capitalize on the situation,
but they attracted little attention except among their compatriots in Russia. In
Russia, too, the main concern was for the Balkan Slavs. Czarist ministers sensed an
opportunity to avenge the defeat in the Crimean War. The Turks, however, quickly
gained military superiority over the Serbs but were forced by a Russian ultimatum to
agree to an armistice. Britain, in spite of strong public pressure over the
Bulgarian Horrors, did not abandon her long-standing policy of supporting the
Ottoman Empire against Russian desires to deal it a death blow.26
Britain was instrumental in convening a six-power conference in Istanbul at the end
of the year to try to stave off a Russian declaration of war against Turkey. The
conference approved a declaration of independence for Bulgaria which had actually
been drawn up by the American consul general in Istanbul, Schuyler,27 and wrestled
with formulas for guaranteeing the security of Serbia and Montenegro. Russia was
determined not to miss the opportunity to advance its interests in the Balkans more
decisively and declared war in April 1877.
Fighting in the Balkans proved tougher than the Russians had expected. They suffered
two serious defeats at Plevna before they prevailed over Turkish forces and moved on
to Edirne in January 1878. On the Caucasian front, the Russians advanced rapidly
after war was declared. They made a more determined effort than in any previous
Russo-Turkish war to exploit the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia, and many
Armenians responded. Turkish battle losses were heavy, and concern about security of
rear areas was high. Kars was captured, but Erzurum and Batum held out until after
the armistice had been signed at Edirne. The Russians advanced to Catalca after the
armistice, but the British fleet moved up to prevent occupation of Istanbul. Russia
rushed to impose a peace treaty on Turkey, which was signed at San Stefano on 3
March 1878. The Armenian Patriarch in Istanbul tried to persuade the Russians to
include provision for an independent Armenian state in eastern Anatolia in this
treaty in recognition of Armenian services to Russian interests during the war. The
Russians were more interested in their own territorial expansion and understandably
apprehensive — in light of cooperation between Russian Armenians and anti-Czarist
revolutionaries — about the effect an independent Armenia might have on Russian
Armenians. (Here we see the same combination of attitudes that led to the Bolshevik
throttling of Armenian independence in 1920—21.) So the Patriarch had to settle
for Article XVI of the Treaty of San Stefano in which the Porte promised reforms in
areas of Armenian population and protection against Muslim attacks which were linked
to arrangements for Russian troop withdrawal.
Britain and Austria were not about to let Russia get away with the San Stefano
treaty — the main point at issue was not Armenian interests or Russian territorial
ambitions in the Caucasus, but the Greater Bulgaria Russia wished to establish. The
European powers insisted on an international settlement of the Russo-Turkish war. A
conference convened in Berlin in June, and Armenians built up naive hopes that it
would result in a revised treaty more favorable to their interests. Instead, the
requirement linking reforms and protective measures to Russian troop withdrawal was
dropped, and the Armenians were thus deprived of legal basis for requesting Russian
intervention in the event of disagreements with Ottoman authorities over reforms or
local incidents. In return for abandoning Greater Bulgaria, Russia was awarded
Batum, Kars and Ardahan, so Turkey, as well as the Armenians, lost in the Treaty of
Berlin.28
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Maximalist
territorial claims were pressed ever more vigorously |
Unrealistic Armenian expectations over the Treaty of
Berlin, when frustrated, left nationalist activists resentful and contributed to further
radicalization of the Armenian nationalist movement during the next decade. The Treaty of
San Stefano has gone down in Armenian annals as an example of great power perfidy, a
precursor of the abortive Treaty of Sèvres at the end of World War I.
Bulgaria had gained independence. Bulgarians were a people whom Armenians regarded as
having a much less distinguished history than their own. If Bulgaria deserved to be
independent, why not Armenia? Revolutionary nationalists who embraced such argumentation
in the 1880s and 1890s willfully avoided facing the essential difference between their
situations and that of the Bulgarians. Though there was serious controversy about Bulgaria’s
proper boundaries,29 and though Bulgaria contained sizable minorities, the newly
independent country was nevertheless a coherent geographical entity inhabited by a
majority of Bulgarians.
Nothing comparable existed in territories claimed by the Armenians. They were outnumbered
by Muslims in every one of the six eastern provinces traditionally called Armenian. In the
city of Erzurum, which many nationalists regarded as their natural capital, Armenians were
a distinct minority. Only the city (not province) of Van held an Armenian majority, but in
the surrounding districts Muslims predominated. An independent Armenia would inevitably
contain only a minority of Armenians unless the Muslims were expelled.30 What about Muslim
rights? Occasionally Armenian nationalist publications addressed the subject, but no
formulas were ever agreed on. So maximalist territorial claims were pressed ever more
vigorously — and unrealistically — by Armenian journalists and political agitators
during the i880s and 1890s as first the relatively moderate Armenakan, then the radical
Marxist Hunchak, and finally, the eclectic Dashnak parties, were formed. All were
declaredly revolutionary, and the last two advocated terror as a means of advancing the
fight for independence.
Istanbul continued to be the most important seat of Armenian activity. It had the most
active intellectual, professional, and commercial Armenian population, but they were still
a distinct minority in comparison to the Turks. What was to be the relationship of
Istanbul Armenians to an independent Armenia? Many wished to have nothing to do with the
notion. Others paid it lip service. Some sensed the disastrous potential revolutionary
activism held for Armenians everywhere in the Ottoman Empire. But their zeal kept Armenian
revolutionary nationalists from acknowledging, in practical terms, the fact that the
Armenians have been for the most part a diaspora nation since at least medieval times.31
The Road to Ruin
So by the end of the 1880s we see the roots of Armenian violence — and violence against
Armenians — in full view. Violence became inevitable because the Armenian demands which
were most vigorously pressed had become irrational, impossible of attainment. The
irrationality did not deter the Czarist government from supporting Armenian extremists for
their own political purposes even as they increasingly restricted the activities of
Armenian nationalists in their own territories.
Armenian nationalists — always a minority of the total Armenian population, whether in
Turkey or Russia — continued to write, to agitate and to plot, to seek—and often to
find — what they regarded as foreign support for their aspirations and their struggle.
For an Ottoman bureaucracy hard pressed to meet demands for political and administrative
reform among subject peoples as well as Turks, maintenance of order in outlying regions
became increasingly difficult. Once clashes began to occur and order broke down, no one
— government or local communities — possessed the physical strength, the political
skill, or the powers of persuasion to contain disaster. It was not only the Armenians of
the Ottoman Empire who were affected, but Muslims as well. Everyone lost.
Armenian communities
in many parts of the world — notably in France and the U.S.— have been remarkably
equivocal about (if not openly supportive of) such terrorism
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When war broke out in 1914, the Russians again
encouraged Armenian expectations and exploited the eastern Anatolian Armenians as a
fifth column. In the end they did not intervene to protect the Armenians when
Ottoman authorities, in a life and death wartime situation, moved to deport them,
nor were the Russians about to protect their collaborators against the vengeance of
local Muslims when Ottoman authority collapsed. As had happened so often before
during the preceding 150 years, Russia was willing to exploit Armenians for her own
purposes but unprepared to make sacrifices on their behalf.
Armenian embitterment and chagrin at the disaster which intemperate and irrational
nationalism brought on the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire have persisted through
three generations. Violence against Turkish officials in the 1920s proved to be a
less characteristic reaction than the publicity campaigns and lobbying which long
prevented resumption of U.S.-Turkish relations, though the U.S. had never actually
declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Soviet rule with collectivization and purges
brought violence and the threat of it to the Soviet Armenian Republic, and tensions
between the Armenians of the Caucasus and the Muslims and Georgians of the area are
still said to persist. But Armenian violence and the threat of it were absent from
the international scene until the early 1970s when Armenian terrorists began
assassinating Turkish diplomats and attacking Turkish offices abroad under extremely
irrational circumstances. This campaign has gained momentum, and the terrorists have
gained skill. There are many reasons to suspect that the campaign is part of the
massive effort to destabilize Turkey and destroy democracy there to which the Soviet
Union devoted major resources during the 1970s — and which may still not have been
entirely abandoned.
Armenian communities in many parts of the world — notably in France and the U.S.—
have been remarkably equivocal about (if not openly supportive of) such terrorism.
The terrorists are remembered in Armenian church services, and large sums are
collected in Armenian communities for their defense when they are put on trial. The
climate for this astonishing advocacy of violence is maintained by an emotionalized
version of Armenian history which is propagated in the ethnic press, taught in
cultural programs, and pressed on school authorities for inclusion in curricula.
Even in the 1970s, it has been hard to find a more extreme version of what one
American historian has called “creedal passion”” which provokes populations to
irresponsible behavior. Armenian-origin intellectuals and journalists have become
viciously intolerant of non-Armenian-origin colleagues who do not accept their
biases and who venture to question Armenian statistics or try to examine Armenian,
Ottoman, and relevant Russian historical records according to recognized standards
of objectivity and respect for methodology.
One is driven to wonder, for example, whether an essentially honest example of
scholarship such as Louise Nalbandian’s Armenian Revolutionary Movement, which
originally appeared more than 20 years ago, would even be published by a scholar of
Armenian origin today.
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1 A good example of this process is the work of a
rare non-Armenian scholar-enthusiast, David Lang, Professor of Caucasian Studies in
the University of London, Armenia, Cradle of Civilization (Third, Corrected
Edition), London (Allen and Unwin), 1980.
2 This important distinction is carefully defined in a recent authoritative work by
Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States, Boulder, CO (Westview Press), 1977, where the
Armenians are discussed as a “diaspora nation,” inter alia in pp. 383-391.
3 See “The Shaddadids of Ani-Dvin, Ani and Trade-Routes” in V. Minomsky, Studies
in Caucasian History, London (Taylor), 1953, pp. 104-106.
4 A convenient summary history of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia is available in
T.S.R. Boase (ed), The Cilician Kingdom of Armenia, Edinburgh/London (Scottish
Academic Press), 1978, pp. 1-33.
5 Rd. Dr. James Issaverdens, History of the Armenian Church, Venice (Armenian
Monastery of St. Lazarus), 1875, p. 243.
6 lbid., p. 345.
7 Mesrob K. Krikorian, Armenians in the Service of the Ottoman Empire, 1860-1908,
London (Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul), 1977, pp. 2-3. The author’s reference to “three
million Armenians of Anatolia” is an interesting example of mythology adopted by
an author who goes to considerable lengths to avoid it. The Armenian Patriarchate
claimed an Armenian population of 2,100,000 in the entire Ottoman Empire in 1912.
Ottoman census figures, as cited in Stanford J. and Ezel K. Shaw, History of the
Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. II, London New York (CUP). 1977, p. 205,
indicate that the total Armenian population of the empire during the period
1882-1914 never exceeded 1,300,000. The most thorough study of this complex subject
yet to appear, Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities, the Population of Ottoman
Anatolia and the End of the Empire, New York/London (NYU Press), 1983, concludes
that official censuses undercounted and develops formulae for compensating for the
under-counting, arriving at an Armenian population of 1,493,276 in 1912 (p. 112).
8 This history is comprehensively treated, with remarkable objectivity, by Muriel
Atkin in Russia arid iran, 1780-1828, Minneapolis (U. of Minnesota Press), 1980.
9 For a useful short analysis, with statistics, see George A. Bournoutian, “The
Population of Persian Armenia prior to and immediately following its Annexation to
the Russian Empire: 1826-1832,” Washington, 1980 (Smithsonian Institution/Wilson
Center, Kennan Institute Occasional Paper 91).
10 W.E.D. Allen & Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields, a History of the
Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828-1921, Cambridge (CUP), 1953.
11 Ibid.
12 James A. Field, America and the Mediterranean
World, 1776-1882, Princeton (PUP), 1969, pp. 92-93.
13 Field, op. cit., pp. 156-57.
14 Eli Smith & H.G.O. Dwight, Missionary
Researches in Armenia, including a Journey through Asia Minor and into Georgia and
Persia. Vol. 1, pp. 21 5-16, as cited in Field, op. cit., p. 157.
15 Robert I. Daniel, American Philanthropy in the Near East, 1820-1960,
Athens, Ohio (Ohio Univ. Press), 1970, pp. 46-47.
16 A contemporary evaluation of the influence of Armenian Catholics provides a
measure of the importance of this group:
The Roman Catholic branch of the Armenian Church has done much more for
literature and civilization than the original body. Few Catholics are found in
Armenia itself, excepting at Erzeroom and other cities, where a remnant remain;
while at Constantinople a great number of the higher and wealthier Armenians give
their adherence to that creed. Their minds are more enlarged, they are less Oriental
in their ideas, being usually considered half Franks by their more Eastern
brethren...
Cited from Robert Curzon, Armenia: a Year at Erzeroom, and on the Frontiers of
Russia, Turkey and Persia, London (John Murray), 1854, p. 227.
17 Daniel, op. cit., p. 51.
18 Field, op. cit., p. 362ff.
19 The immediately preceding discussion and that
which follows draw heavily on Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary
Movement, Berkeley/Los Angeles (Univ. of California Press), 1963.
20 e.g., Nalbandian, op. cit., p. 45.
21 Nalbandian, op. cit, p. 48.
22 Curzon, who lived among them for a year in the 1850s, found little to admire in
Armenian life. His views are typical of dozens of other 19th century travelers of
many nationalities:
Ignorance and superstition contend for mastery among the lower classes of
Armenia, whose religion shows that tendency to sink into a kind of idolatry which is
common among other branches of the Church of Christ in warmer climates. . . Their
manners and customs are the same as those of the Turks, whom they copy in dress and
in their general way of living. - .More than 100,000 Armenians are settled in
Constantinople; these are not so ignorant, and are, even in appearance, different
from those of their original country, who are a heavy and loutish race, while [those
in Istanbul] are thin, sharp, active in money-making arts, and remarkable for their
acuteness in mercantile transactions. - - The superiority of the Mahometan over the
Christian cannot fail to strike the mind of an intelligent person who has lived
among these races - . - This arises partly from the oppression which the Turkish
rulers in the provinces have exercised for centuries. . - this is probably the chief
reason; but the Turk obeys the dictates of his religion, the Christian does not; the
Turk does not drink, the Christian gets drunk; the Turk is honest; the Christian is
a liar and a cheat; his religion is so overgrown with the rank weeds of superstition
that it no longer serves to guide his mind...
Curzon, op. cit., p. 221, pp. 232-235.
A German traveler in the Caucasus nearly 20 years later had somewhat similar
observations on the condition of the Armenians there:
The Armenians, numbering about 600,000 souls. . . have no special dwelling-place
in the country; they are everywhere to be found. With them the line of separation
between the peasant and the remaining population is still more sharply defined than
with the Tartars. The peasants, who in the governments of Erivan and Elizavetpol
have intermixed with the Tartars, can, in outward appearance, scarcely be
distinguished from them. The Armenian of the town is, however, of quite another
stamp. He is the merchant par excellence. There is scarcely a single village in the
country where one or more Armenians are not playing the part of Jews. . Sly, pliant,
persevering, seldom if ever conscientious, they monopolise all transactions in
business, and speedily become the bankers and tyrants of the place. Still it must
not be concluded from this that there are no honourable exceptions among those whose
intelligence and energy have conferred signal benefits upon the country...
—Baron Max von Thielmann, Journey in the Caucasus, Persia and Turkey in Asia,
London (John Murray), 1875, Vol. I, pp. 40-41.
23 Nalbandian, op. cit., p. 69.
24 Nalbandian, op. cit., p. 71.
25 C.F. Allen & Muratoff, op. cit., p. 84.
26 For a good short summary of these complex events, see Hugh Seton-Watson, The
Russian Empire, 1801-1917, Oxford (Clarendon Press), 1967, pp. 448-459.
27 See “The Independence of Bulgaria” in
Field, op. cit., pp. 359-373.
28 Nalbandian, op. cit., pp. 82-83.
29 The Macedonian question stilt generates strain between Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and
Greece.
30 Some of these provinces also contained small groups of other Christians and
heterodox sects such as Yezidis.
31 Their attitude is reminiscent of the territorial claims ASALA makes today, the
granting of which would result in cession of up to one quarter of Turkey’s
national territory, where 7-10 million Muslims and no Armenians live, to the Soviet
Union!
32 Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics — The Promise of Disharmony, Cambridge,
MA (Harvard Univ. Press), 1981, pp. 85ff.
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