THE ARMENIAN QUESTION
At the end of the nineteenth century, Sultan Abdul Hamid II had become the most notorious despot known to the Western world. (The brutality of Belgian king Leopold II’s treatment of the Africans in the Congo had not yet come to full public awareness.) The “Bulgarian horrors,” and the sultan’s policy of wholesale massacre of the Armenians between 1894 and 1896 led Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone and the press in Great Britain to refer to him as “the bloody Sultan” and “the great assassin,” while the French press and President Georges Clemenceau denounced him as “le Sultan rouge” and “Monstre de Yildiz.” Not only was the sultan making headlines in the Western press, but dozens of cartoons condemning him and his ruthless policies appeared in the British magazine Punch in the 1890s and on into the early years of the twentieth century.
By 1890, Arminius Vambery reported, the one issue that obsessed Abdul Hamid more than any other was Armenia. In his memoir Vambery recalled a night at Yildiz Palace, when he and the sultan were peacefully sipping their after-dinner coffee; the sultan suddenly turned to him with a look of cold determination and said, “I tell you, I will soon settle those Armenians. I will give them a box on the ear which will make them smart and relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.” The remark upset Vambery, who wrote later that by “this ‘box on the ear,’ he meant the massacres which soon after were instituted. The Sultan kept his word.”1
Sir Edwin Pears—the distinguished British writer and journalist who had lived in Constantinople since the 1870s—noted that “the very name of Armenia” had become “anathema” to the sultan. “He had long since given orders that it should never be employed in the newspapers, and the order had to be strictly obeyed. By an imperial decree Armenia ceased to exist.”2 He closed Armenian schools on the slightest pretext and prohibited the entry into the empire of any books that mentioned Armenia or that dealt with its history. Armenian teachers, in particular, were loathed and were constantly arrested without reason, imprisoned without trials, tortured, and often killed. Clarence Ussher, an American physician and missionary who went to the Armenian provinces in 1899, upon entering the country was searched by Ottoman customs officials who confiscated his dictionary because it contained the words “liberty” and “revolution,” and who then proceeded to cut the maps out of his Bible because the name “Armenia” appeared on them.3 So pathological was the sultan’s obsession with expunging the name of Armenia from public consciousness that he demanded that the State of Massachusetts change the name of the missionary college in Harput from Armenia College, and so it became Euphrates College.4
There is speculation that the Armenian Question was even more complex for the sultan because it was rumored that his mother was Armenian. Her name was Pirimujan. A former dancer who was only nineteen when he was born, she has been referred to as either Circassian or Armenian. Further mystery was added to the circumstances of his birth when it took the harem officials three days of record checking to verify his mother’s identity. For the rest of her short life, Pirimujan was assiduously ignored by Hamid’s father, Sultan Mejid. The young prince, who was close to his mother, watched her slowly die of consumption, and after her death, when he was seven, he fell into inconsolable grief. Some said he had an Armenian-looking face, but Abdul Hamid always denied vigorously that he had any “Armenian blood in his veins.”5
In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Armenian Question emerged as an international issue and it came to be defined by the question of reform for the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, who were seeking security for life, property and some civil liberties. The Armenian Question had grown out of the Ottoman reform movement known as Tanzimat, meaning the restructuring of Ottoman society. Two Tanzimat reform acts, in 1839 and 1856, proposed constitutional and social change within the Ottoman Empire. Among the serious problems with which the Tanzimat reforms grappled were the issues of more equitable treatment for the non-Muslim minorities, which were discriminated against at every social and political level.
The Ottoman scholar Roderick Davison has noted that the 1839 imperial edict, Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhane, made an official declaration of equality for all the nationalities of the empire; and the Hatt-i Hümayan of 1856 promised equal opportunity in the administration of justice, taxation, military service, education, and government appointments. In short it promised to end prejudice and discrimination against non-Muslims.6 Understandably the Armenians were encouraged by these Tanzimat proclamations. Correspondingly, between 1850 and 1870, the Armenian patriarch sent 537 notes to the Sublime Porte (office of the grand vizier) requesting and often pleading for protection from the daily abuses of violence and social and political injustice to which Armenians were subject. The patriarch asked for his people’s protection from brigandage, murder, abduction and rape of women and children, confiscatory taxes, and fraud and extortion by local officials.7
In certain salient ways the Armenian reform movement was also inseparable from the tangle of Russo-Turkish relations that were so flammable in the nineteenth century that four Russo-Turkish Wars broke out (1806–12, 1828–29, 1853–56, and 1877–78). While the wars were bound up in national struggles for control and domination of strategic areas in the Balkans, along the Black Sea, and in the Caucasus, the plight of the Christians under Ottoman rule also figured into Russia’s concern for its coreligionists across the border.
When the Russians went to war in 1853 in the Crimea—a peninsula jutting into the northern Black Sea—part of their justification was to protect the Ottoman Christians, and to settle a secondary squabble about whether the Latin church or the Greek would have the right to protect holy sites in Palestine. France and Sardinia, both Roman Catholic countries, joined the Ottoman Empire against Russia. Because the ruling Tory party in Great Britain could not abide the thought of Russian encroachment into Turkey, British forces also joined the war on the Turkish side. After three years of bloodshed, the British had helped the Ottoman army to win.
Following the Crimean War, the Russians were forbidden from protecting the Armenians in Turkey, and the Armenians stayed within the realm of the sultan’s “own sovereign will.” The Hatt-i Hümayan was inserted into the peace treaty, thus promising more equitable treatment of Christian subjects, prohibiting mistreatment and discrimination against them. It also explicitly forbade the major powers “either collectively or individually” from interfering in relations between the sultan and his subjects.
But continual struggles between Turkey and Russia brought them to war again in 1877–78. This Russo-Turkish War was inspired by a Russian freedom cry for the subject peoples of Eastern Europe, who were predominantly Christian, and who were seeking more autonomy from Ottoman rule. The Greeks had already broken free of Ottoman rule in 1832, and now the Balkan nationalities felt that they too had the right to free themselves from oppressive Ottoman rule. In 1876 Serbia and Montenegro joined Bosnia and Herzegovina in seeking independence, and a year later Bulgaria too rebelled. Ottoman reprisals against Bulgarians—which took the lives of more than fifteen thousand innocent people—were well covered in the British press and brought outcries across England against the “Bulgarian horrors” and against entering another war on the side of Turkey.8
Czar Alexander II, who saw himself as a Christian liberator, called the Sublime Porte “immovable in its categorical refusal of every effectual guarantee for the security of its Christian subjects.” The czar invoked “the blessing of God” upon his armies as he ordered them to “cross the frontier of Turkey” on April 24, 1877.9 The Russians defeated the Turks quickly, making extraordinary gains. By the terms of a preliminary armistice, signed by the Turks in January 1878 in order to prevent the Russians from marching on Constantinople, Bulgaria was to be autonomous; Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia independent; and Bosnia and Herzegovina to have autonomous administrations.
Russian gains were considerable in the East as well, and the Russian army now occupied the heavily populated Armenian territories including Kars, Ardahan, and Batum, and as far west as Khorasan. For the Armenians the peace treaty signed at San Stefano, near Constantinople, in March 1878 offered brightening prospects: Article 16 stated that Russian troops would evacuate the Armenian provinces they were occupying once the Sublime Porte implemented “the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by Armenians, and to guarantee their security from Kurds and Circassians.”10
But the Turks were angry over their losses in the Treaty of San Stefano and appealed to the British to intervene. Lord Salisbury, Disraeli’s foreign secretary, was sympathetic to the sultan’s request and demanded that Russo-Turkish issues be settled by the European powers. In Salisbury’s mind the Russian gains were a threat to Europe and in particular to British interests in the Near East and Asia. He was particularly hostile to the Russian gains in the Armenian territories because European trade that passed from Trebizond to Persia would now be subject to Russian governmental jurisdictions. With commercial and political interests at stake, Salisbury and Disraeli insisted that a new treaty be drawn up at a congress that would meet in Berlin later the same year.
The Treaty of Berlin returned thirty thousand square miles of territory and 2.5 million Europeans to the sultan’s administration. Disraeli managed to have article 16 of the Treaty of San Stefano nullified and reversed, ironically, by article 61 of the new Treaty of Berlin. Article 61 authorized the return of just two Armenian provinces, with neither Russian forces nor an organization of European militia remaining there to protect the Armenians. Article 61 in fact contained the identical reasoning of the earlier Hatt-i Hümayan reforms, which put the very sultan who had been abusing the Armenians in charge of protecting them from himself—a classic case of having the fox guard the henhouse. Disraeli agreed to establish British consulates in the region to try to restrain the Turks, and after signing the treaty, the Sublime Porte disclosed “to the amazement of the delegates” that it was giving Cyprus, which happened to be populated mostly by Greeks, to England.11
Notwithstanding the success of Turkish pressure on Great Britain to reverse the Treaty of San Stefano, the fact remained that in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War, the treatment of the Armenians had been made an international issue. Not only Russia but the other European powers were to oversee the Armenian reforms. An angry Abdul Hamid II now referred to European concern and demands for the improvement of life for the Armenians as “the everlasting persecutions and hostilities of the Christian world.”12 Consequently, in the period after 1878, social and political conditions for the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire grew worse; and the question of what it meant to be a Christian and an Armenian in the Ottoman Empire grew more acute.
The French ambassador to Turkey, Paul Cambon, assessed the Armenian plight:
The masses simply yearned for reforms, dreaming only of a normal administration under Ottoman rule…. The inaction of the Porte served to vitiate the good will of the Armenians. The reforms have not been carried out. The exactions of the officials remained scandalous and justice was not improved…from one end of the Empire to the other, there is rampant corruption of officials, denial of justice and insecurity of life…. The Armenian diaspora began denouncing the administrative misdeeds, and in the process managed to transform the condition of simple administrative ineptness into one of racial persecution.13
INFIDEL STATUS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
From the time they first came under Ottoman rule in the fourteenth century, the Armenians as Christian subjects were designated under Ottoman law as dhimmi—that is, non-Muslim subjects living under the protection of the Muslim Turkish ruling order—and were ostracized as gâvur. By the eighteenth century the Turks had organized the Armenians, as a conquered people, into communities known as millets, and within the millets, the Armenians had permission for limited self-governance. They were allowed to run their communities’ internal affairs, such as the institutions of marriage and inheritance, and the building of schools and hospitals. But the payback for this autonomy was often severe, and the arrangement of being protected as dhimmi has been described by one historian as closer to racketeering.14
Perhaps nothing was so discriminatory as the fact that Christians and Jews had almost no legal rights in Turkey’s pre-Tanzimat Muslim society. While Armenians had courts and prisons for their own communities and could conduct civil cases for conflicts between a Christian and a Muslim, an Armenian had no recourse in the Islamic court system. A Muslim could apply to have his case heard in the religious court (the sheriat mehkeme), but there non-Muslim testimony was either disallowed or accorded significantly less value. A Muslim need only swear on the Koran and the case was settled. In this way the deck was powerfully stacked against the Armenians and all other dhimmi. The amount of theft and extortion, as well as rape and abduction of Armenian women, that was allowed under this Ottoman legal system placed the Armenians in perpetual jeopardy.
Armenians were made vulnerable by other policies that often rendered them incapable of defending themselves. They were not allowed to own weapons, which made them easy prey for Turks and Kurds. Since only Muslims were allowed to join the army to defend Islam, Christians were exempt from military service; if this spared them from warfare, it also kept them out of positions of military power and removed them from the warrior class, with its knowledge and skills. Notwithstanding all that, Christians were also subjected to what was known as boy collection or devshirme, which meant that Ottoman officials would take children from their Christian families, convert them to Islam, and put them to work in the Ottoman military and civil service.15
The Ottoman system of taxation further burdened and exploited Christian subjects. The Armenians and other Christians, along with Muslim peasants, were subjected to the tax-farming system—a system in which the right to collect taxes was sold to the highest bidder, who then farmed out the actual collection duties to an array of underlings, which resulted in corruption and extortion. Christians also were forced to pay a special head or poll tax, which was later converted into a military exemption tax to compensate for their exemption from the service. Armenians paid a “hospitality tax” to the vali (governor) that entitled “government officials, and all who pass as such,” to free lodging and food for three days a year in an Armenian home.
Another burden solely for the Armenians was the kishlak, or winter-quartering obligation, which enabled Kurds and Turks to quarter themselves, their families, and their cattle in Armenian homes during the long winter months. The fact that the Kurdish way of life was nomadic and rough and the Armenian dwellings did not allow for much privacy made the intrusion unbearable, and knowing that the unarmed Armenians had neither physical nor legal recourse, a well-armed Kurd or Turk could not only steal his host’s possessions but could rape or kidnap the women and girls of the household with impunity. The dhimmi were also required to follow institutionalized codes of behavior. Armenians, for example, had to be deferential before Muslims in public; they could not ride a horse when a Muslim was passing by; they were to wear dress that made them easily identifiable; they were forbidden to own weapons.16
In a basic way the lives of the Armenians were in the capricious hands of the ruling vali, feudal lords, or tribal chieftains, who, if they chose, could exert a degree of control over the local Muslim populations. Thus in one province, under a relatively kindhearted vali, the Armenians might have a period of respite, while in another their fate could be exceptionally cruel—as in districts such as Afyon Karahisar, where the ruling official had at one time decreed that an Armenian could speak his native language only at the risk of having his tongue cut out, so generations of Armenians learned to speak only Turkish.17
In the late nineteenth century, with much encouragement from the sultan, the authorities in the eastern provinces also allowed the collection of illegal levies; official tax collectors would come around a second time insisting that the taxes had never been paid, or the Kurdish chieftains would impose taxes, claiming they were representing the central government. In addition the Turkish chieftains demanded protection money to prevent their people from attacking and kidnapping Armenian women, and when two Kurdish clans were at odds, or claimed to be, the chiefs of each side demanded payment to protect the Armenians from the other. The Armenians were well aware that these were not taxes at all—although they passed as such—but outright extortion.
The British vice-consul stationed in Adana, P. H. Massy, put it perceptively:
The Armenian population is everywhere oppressed by a system of government which takes from them the means of circulating freely, of earning a livelihood, and of enjoying a feeling of security to life and property, even on the most frequented highway. Taxes are levied without mercy, even from the poorest. The prisons are filled with innocent men, who lie there for months without trial.18
The British ethnographer William Ramsay—who spent more than a decade in Turkey doing fieldwork and was fond of the Turks—described what it meant to be an infidel:
Turkish rule…meant unutterable contempt…. The Armenians (and the Greeks) were dogs and pigs…to be spat upon, if their shadow darkened a Turk, to be outraged, to be the mats on which he wiped the mud from his feet. Conceive the inevitable result of centuries of slavery, of subjection to insult and scorn, centuries in which nothing that belonged to the Armenian, neither his property, his house, his life, his person, nor his family, was sacred or safe from violence—capricious, unprovoked violence—to resist which by violence meant death.19
At the heart of the problem—whether in the Balkans or in the Armenian provinces of the east—was the legal, political, and social status of Christians in the Ottoman Empire. On one front the fundamental question was: Can a Christian be the equal of a Muslim? The question was raised again and again by the Christian minorities and by the European powers, and in the end the answer from the Ottoman ruling elite was a resounding no. And the Armenians, as well as the Assyrians and the Greeks, all paid dearly for that answer.
ARMENIANS RESPOND
In the aftermath of 1878, as Armenian frustration grew, a new Armenian activism emerged. Because article 61 of the Berlin treaty was an obvious hollow clause, Armenian expectations for reform were dashed and, in fact, conditions grew worse. With the Treaty of Berlin signed and sealed, Abdul Hamid felt emboldened to send masses of Muslim refugees (muhajirs), whom the Russo-Turkish wars had driven from the Balkans and the Caucasus, into eastern Anatolia. This led to open violence against the Armenians—as murdering, looting, and pillaging were sanctioned. Enraged that the Armenian Question had become an international issue, the sultan by 1890 had created the Hamidiye, a well-trained force made up of Kurds whom he armed and had clothed in distinctive uniforms. Hamidiye regiments were responsible only to the sultan and were fanatically loyal to him.20
In forming the Hamidiye (literally, “belonging to Hamid”) regiments the sultan could both control the unruly Kurds and at the same time use them to deal with the Armenians as he wished. The lands over which the Kurdish nomads roamed bordered on and often dovetailed with those of the Armenian peasants, whom the Kurds resented for their relative prosperity. It was the old scheme of divide and conquer.
Thrown back into misrule and wanton violence, Armenians began to take matters into their own hands. Even at the time of the Treaty of Berlin, the Armenians had eagerly, even if naively, sent a delegation to Berlin, headed by the venerated and popular former patriarch, Mugerditch Khrimian (known affectionately to the Armenian people as Khrimian Hairig—Father Khrimian). The Armenian delegation hoped to secure some agreements for security of life and property and some governance reform. Khrimian Hairig and his delegation were ignored as they stood outside the conference hall in Berlin. When the Armenian delegation read article 61 of the new Treaty of Berlin, which declared that the Sublime Porte would carry out “improvements and reforms” in the Armenian provinces, they were furious about the hollow clause and wrote a formal protest, boldly stating that the Armenians had “been deceived” and that “their rights [had] not been recognized.”21 On returning home Archbishop Khrimian gave a sermon in the Armenian Cathedral in Constantinople and expressed his sense of betrayal over what had happened in Berlin. In short, he likened the peace conference to a “big cauldron of Liberty Stew,” into which the big nations dipped “iron ladles” for real results, while the Armenian delegation had but a “Paper Ladle.”
“Ah, Dear Armenian people,” Khrimian said, “could I have dipped my Paper Ladle in the cauldron it would sog and remain there! Where guns talk and sabers shine, what significance do appeals and petitions have?”22
In Turkish Armenia the rising tide of progressive ideas about liberty, human rights, and equality came both from the Armenian intellectuals in Russia and from a long-standing intellectual relationship with Europe and its Enlightenment. Western ideas had come to Armenians either in the course of travel or study in Europe, if their families were well-to-do, or because they had been educated at one of the many American Protestant schools in Anatolia, where they were instilled with the egalitarian ideas of the American Revolution.
But the formation of three political parties gave voice to Armenian aspirations in ways that were unprecedented for them and their Turkish rulers. The fall of 1885 saw the founding of the Armenakan Party in Van—that Armenian cultural center near the Russian border. It was a secret society and had its first meetings literally underground in a burrow used for pressing grapes. The party espoused self-defense in the face of violence, and it affirmed Armenia’s right to self-rule, trusting that the European Powers would eventually come to Armenia’s aid. More vociferous and centralized was the Hunchak Party, founded in 1887 by a group of Russian Armenians in Geneva. A socialist party with a strong Marxist orientation, its members believed that a new and independent Armenia would initiate a worldwide socialist revolution.23
By the summer of 1890, Dashnaktsutiun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) was founded in Tiflis. Dedicated to a revolutionary struggle for Armenian advancement and freedom, this third party evolved into a more nationalist platform that involved a commitment to engage in armed struggle in the face of wholesale violence and oppression; eventually it would become the best known and most controversial of the three.24
As the political parties evolved so did civic protest. In the summer of 1890 in Erzurum, about two hundred Armenians met in the cathedral yard to draw up a petition to protest the conditions under which Armenians were living throughout the empire. The police interrupted the rally and before long an Ottoman battalion was dispatched to Erzurum. Before it was over, the Armenian quarter was attacked and looted, and there were more than a dozen dead and 250 wounded. A month later in Constantinople, Armenians demonstrated outside their cathedral in the Kum Kapu section of the city, and again violence broke out between the police, some soldiers, and the Armenian demonstrators. Of the fracas that followed, the British ambassador, Sir William White, noted what seemed to him the historical importance of the occasion by referring to it as “the first occasion since the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks on which Christians have dared resist soldiers in Stamboul.”25
By 1893 Armenian activists were placing yaftas—placards—on the public walls of certain towns in western and central Anatolia. The placards were addressed to Muslims around the world asking them to stand up to the sultan, an incompetent oppressor. Instead of instigating Muslim rebellion, however, the plan, which had come from Hunchak cells throughout Anatolia, instigated a mass of arbitrary arrests and torture across the empire. Nonetheless, by the early nineties the Armenians were making themselves heard, which further enraged the already paranoid sultan.26
The Armenian Question was received by a sultan who—notwithstanding his cunning—was mentally unstable.27 The Armenian quest for reform also dovetailed with the rule of a sultan whose empire was collapsing at an accelerating pace, causing him and his empire a crisis of self-esteem. The Ottoman Empire had been dubbed the “sick man of Europe” in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Sultan Abdul Aziz escalated the empire’s plunge into debt with a decadence and profligacy that had become scandalous. Now his nephew Abdul Hamid plunged his empire deeper into crisis. Under Hamid’s reign the debt grew worse, misgovernment and political corruption became further institutionalized, and the condition of his subject peoples, particularly the Christians, grew disastrous. “In one of the worst periods of his reign,” Sir Edwin Pears wrote, “one of the ablest of his Ministers remarked that if Abdul Hamid could be removed better government could be secured for the Empire.”28
As the state of the empire and the state of the sultan were tightly intertwined, Abdul Hamid’s paranoia had a profound and complex impact on the infrastructure of his empire. His residence in Constantinople was an apt emblem of that entanglement. After his ascension to power in 1876, the sultan began building a fortress and a maze around himself. Having moved permanently to Yildiz Palace overlooking the Bosporus, he appropriated contiguous houses and grounds for miles, including two Christian cemeteries, and built a rambling patchwork of gardens and high walls around him. On every vantage point he then built a chalet or a kiosk fully furnished for sleeping, and had powerful telescopes installed in each so his guards could survey the outside world.29
Against a second large encircling wall he ensconced his imperial guards in barracks, making Yildiz a kind of arsenal. He assembled a private, self-contained world inside the walls that included a farm, a small artificial lake, stables, workshops, a menagerie, and an aviary. With the women of his harem and his servants, there were about five thousand people in residence, along with another seven thousand men in the Imperial Guard.30 A police office and a prison were in operation close to the palace grounds, and as Edwin Pears put it, “There can be no reasonable doubt that many persons suffered tortures for offences committed in and around Yildiz, for the details given of these horrors are too many and too detailed not to have in them a large amount of truth.”31
An early riser, the sultan had a simple breakfast, after which he devoted himself to the reports of his spies, who were part of an enormous surveillance network he had created to keep tabs on things. Deeply superstitious, he took advice from fortunetellers and soothsayers, one of whom had told him when he was a young man that he would come to his death from cholera or poison unless he drank from one pure spring at Kiat-hane, which he did every day for the rest of his life.32
Apart from being a heavy smoker and coffee drinker, Abdul Hamid was, unlike his predecessors, frugal and almost austere in his habits and meals. He preferred a good pilaf and stuffed squash and cucumber to the elaborate concoctions prepared by his Greek chef. Yet, however simple his food, the most elaborate precautions were taken in its preparation. His special kitchens had barred windows and iron doors. Before it was served, each dish had to be tasted by the chief chamberlain, Osman Bey, whose title was Superintendent of the Kitchens and Guardian of the Sultan’s Health and Life.33 The sultan’s meals were transported from the kitchens to Little Mabeyn, the tightly guarded kiosk adjoining the palace that was now his private apartment. Then two officials in gold-embroidered uniforms wheeled a trolley holding the imperial dinner service. Covered with a black cloth, a second trolley held the various dishes on an enormous silver tray. A lackey followed carrying a covered bread basket, and last came the water carrier, bearing a sealed bottle of water from the springs of Kiat-hane.34
His staff lived in fear of him. He was an insomniac for whom his physician’s sedatives seemed not to work. He often dismissed—long before dawn—the harem woman who was to share his bed on a given night, and the palace eunuchs reported seeing him wandering from room to room inspecting various couches to sleep on. He kept a gold-and-mother-of-pearl pistol in his pocket and had been known to fire spontaneously on anyone if startled: A palace gardener was shot dead when he inadvertently surprised the sultan, who thought he was alone in a secluded part of the garden. A little slave girl who had strayed from her mother and was playing with one of the jeweled firearms she’d found in the palace was killed on the spot.35 As one historian put it, the “entire Hamidian system had but one aim: the security of the Sultan himself.”36
From the start, as historian Bernard Lewis has noted, the sultan was “bitterly hostile” to constitutional ideas and reform.37 In the aftermath of the treaties of San Stefano and Berlin, when constitutional reform was being urged by the Europeans and by liberal forces within Turkey, the newly installed sultan grew angry and intransigent. In short, “He hated the very word ‘constitution’ and everyone who approved of it.”38
The idea of reforms for the Armenians was part of the sultan’s aversion to change. The British ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Henry Layard, a Disraeli appointee and a Turcophil, worked hard to get the sultan to implement the proposed reforms for Armenia but came to see that his efforts were futile. When Gladstone’s Liberal Party came to power in 1880, there was an outcry to recall Ambassador Layard because of his failure to negotiate reforms for the Armenians and other Christians in the empire. The sultan was delighted because he believed he had won a victory over Great Britain—a country which he was coming to despise, in large part because of its concern for the Armenians.39 But, in assiduously ignoring the efforts of the European powers to implement article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin—and in ignoring the demand for constitutional government by disbanding parliament after one session and in dismissing his most able and reform-minded minister, the grand vizier, Midhat Pasha—Abdul Hamid made it clear that his reign would be autocratic. In 1880 one British official summed it up: “There is less security for life and property; poverty has increased, while crimes of oppression and corruption have increased proportionately with the impoverished state of the Empire.”40
A protomodern autocrat in some sense, the sultan was attracted to those aspects of modernization that would facilitate his power and control. He saw in the railroad and the telegraph powerful tools for centralizing his authority more efficiently. His pragmatic interests in education were, in part, motivated by his fear that, due to the impact of the missionary colleges on the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian populations, his Christian subjects were far outstripping the Muslim majority. Thus he promoted professional (meaning for the professions) education for the Muslim elite.41
But the sultan’s response to the new age of information also bordered on the absurd. He declared numerous words and subjects taboo and illegal. Beyond his strict censorship of all words and references to Armenia, he ordered a ban on any form of expression that referred to regicide or the murders of heads of state. The name of the deposed Sultan Murad V was banned; the king and queen of Serbia were reported to have died of indigestion; Empress Elizabeth of Austria was said to have died of pneumonia, French president Carnot of apoplexy, and President William McKinley of anthrax.42 In his fear of his non-Turkish subjects, he outlawed all historic Anatolian geographic names, at the center of which was the name Armenia, whose use was also forbidden in the press.43 So far did his paranoia carry him that he ordered his censors to expunge all references to H2O from science textbooks because he feared the symbol would be read as meaning “Hamid the second is nothing.”44
The French writer Paul Fesch in 1907 summed up the state of the press under the sultan: “For thirty years the press has ceased to exist in Turkey. There are indeed newspapers, many of them even, but the scissors of censorship cut them in so emasculating a manner that they no longer have any potency. If I dare, I would call them gelded newspapers—or rather, to keep the local color, eunuchs.”45 Correspondingly, intellectual expression and book publishing were also under strict censorship.46
It is not surprising, then, that Armenian political activism was met with rage by the sultan. Anyone suspected of sedition—which meant a genuine part of the population, in a society that was enveloped in the sultan’s network of espionage and surveillance—was arrested, tortured, killed, or exiled. It was in this climate that a group of liberal Turkish intellectuals and politicos known as the Young Turks created a movement that demanded reform and constitutional government. As it grew in power, Abdul Hamid did what he could to tighten the muzzle on all political opposition. But the empire-wide corruption and the sultan’s own paranoia had corroded even the military, so that what was supposed to be the army of the sultan’s protection became the seat of discontent and the seed ground for the Young Turk movement.
Since the army was a “police force” designed to maintain “control of the Turkish overlords over their subject peoples,”47 the sultan’s loss of control of it would have consequences for the Armenians as well—ironically, not positive ones. Caught between his “desire to maintain a strong army and the fear of allowing it to become too powerful,” the sultan let his army deteriorate. Pay for soldiers and officers was so poor and conditions for the men so harsh that bribery and other forms of corruption became part of Ottoman army life. Because the sultan had subjected the army to his surveillance system, soldiers found ways of gaining advancement by framing their fellow soldiers. By the end of the century, small mutinies riddled army life throughout the empire, and dislike of the sultan was so rampant that, as one historian put it, “it was difficult to find a Turkish officer in all European Turkey who was not pledged to overthrow the government he served.”48 Similarly, the navy was in disrepair because the sultan let the ships founder where they were moored in the Golden Horn below his palace. While he was nervous to be out of sight of his guns, he was also afraid of his ships having guns. Thus when new ships were acquired, he often ordered parts of them to be dismantled and often had the ammunition removed from the vessels.49
Afraid of his military forces and obsessed with the growing unrest among his subjects, the sultan continued to enlarge the Hamidiye as the political tensions of the 1890s unfolded. As he sent his special army into the trouble spots of the empire, the Armenian provinces became the top priority. The British consul Charles Hampsun, reporting from Erzurum in the winter of 1891, disclosed something of the impact of the Hamidiye on the Armenians:
The measure of arming the Kurds is regarded with great anxiety here. This feeling is much increased by the conduct of the Kurds themselves, many of whom openly state that they have been appointed to suppress the Armenians, and that they have received assurances that they will not be called to answer before the tribunals for any acts of oppression committed against Christians.
The Armenians in this town are very uneasy, and very many of those who are in a position to be able to do so have expressed their intention of leaving Erzerum as soon as the roads are open.50
While the Hamidiye made the sultan feel more secure, the Armenians in the interior were now living under their impact, as the troops pillaged, looted, and terrorized the region. At the end of 1892 a British military attaché reported that there were thirty-three Hamidiye regiments, each with five hundred men, and that more were being formed under a new commander, Zeki Pasha, who would play an important role in the empire-wide massacres of the Armenians that were only a few years away.51
The Armenians of the Ottoman Empire at the time of the Sultan’s massacres comprised a multifarious socioeconomic community that spanned the entirety of Turkey. In 1882, the Armenian patriarchate in Constantinople estimated the Armenian population of the empire at 2,600,000; of those, 1,630,000 lived in the six vilayets of historic Armenia. By 1914, the population had dropped to 2,100,000 due to massacre and subsequent migration. In the six vilayets, Armenians constituted about a third of the population, and in some areas they were often the largest single ethnic group.
Even before the end of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Armenians could be categorized in four groups. The wealthy, influential Armenians of Constantinople and Smyrna, some of whom had ties with the elite echelons of Ottoman government, were known as the amira class. The few factories in Constantinople in the early part of the nineteenth century were often started and run by Armenians. Arakel Dadian managed the gunpowder factory in San Stefano; his son Hovhannes was director of the imperial paper mill. The Kavafian family built and managed a major shipyard. In other sectors, members of the Duzian family held the post of superintendent of the Ottoman mint for more than a century, and the Balian family dominated Ottoman architecture from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, building some of the most important buildings of the capital, including the Dolmabahche Palace. And it was an Armenian, Hagop Vartovian, who founded the Turkish Theater in 1868.
Although the amira class (which by the end of the century had given way to a new bourgeoisie) had almost no contact with Armenians of the provinces, in the towns and the villages of the interior there was a vital class of traders, artisans, doctors and pharmacists, and low-level bureaucrats. There was as well, the third and largest group of Ottoman Armenians, the peasantry—the agrarian community that populated villages all across Turkey, and most densely in the six provinces. They worked the land and tended flocks and were often ground down by the tax-farming system of their local Kurdish and Turkish overlords and chieftains.
Lastly, in the rugged highlands and mountains of, most prominently, the Sassoun and Zeitoun regions, the Armenian mountaineers constituted a tough and independent society that in most ways was untouched by the central government and its bureaucracy. Like the Kurds of the Dersim, the Armenian mountaineers were armed and were good fighters; and they defended themselves against Kurdish and Turkish extortion. It was this complexly layered Christian culture situated across the empire from Constantinople to Van, from Tabzon to Adana that Sultan Abdul Hamid II would begin to destroy openly now with his tactic of planned massacre.52