Electronic version of  “ARMENIA: The Survival of a Nation”, revised second edition © 1990 Christopher J. Walker

 

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5 No Help Came.

 

 

The mass and majesty of this world, all

That carries weight and always weighs the same

Lay in the hands of others; they were small

And could not hope for help and no help came …

– W. H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles

 

 

The Impotent Protectorate

 

Turkish Armenia appeared to have a special status after the Cyprus Convention. In view of Britain's responsibility, it could even be called a British protectorate. (A study of the area published in London in 1879 bears the title Our New Protectorate.¹) But the region was never given the title officially, and those who wished to minimise British responsibility were able to claim that it was just a part of the Ottoman empire whose administration Britain was attempting to influence.

            After the treaty of Berlin Britain despatched a series of special consuls to Asiatic Turkey. (She had had a regular consul in Erzerum since 1836.) Their ostensible purpose was to make the sultan keep the promise to introduce reforms which he had made in the Cyprus Convention. But their powers were very limited. Their chief, Col. C. W. Wilson, was based at Sivas and held the title 'military consul-general in Anatolia'. His instructions were to observe, to advise, to assist and if necessary to remonstrate.² His most extensive power was access to his ambassador.³

            If one compares these powers with those which France exercised at almost the same time in her protectorate of Tunis – her part of the bargain struck at Berlin - through her resident-general and contrôleurs civils⁴ (by which she soon got a firm control on the region), the difference is immediately striking, for France sought control of Tunis, whereas Britain, unimpressed by the colonial possibilities of Turkish Armenia and fearful of provoking the jealousy of the other powers, had no such ambitions. And with no such ambitions her actions were feeble, only adding up to an irritating intrusion, and in the process driving a deeper wedge between rulers and ruled.

            The consuls, too, were not posted there solely to attend to the needs of the population. That indeed was a secondary job. Their principal task was that of gathering military intelligence. (All the consuls were initially army officers.) In the words of R. W. (later Sir Robert) Graves,⁵ diplomat and uncle of the poet, they

 

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had been appointed, not so much in pursuance of the policy outlined in the Cyprus Convention as on account of the importance of maintaining posts of observation on the Russian and Persian frontiers, and this practice was continued, as far as Van was concerned, until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914

 

 

Administrative Divisions

 

Soon after the treaty of Berlin, Sultan Abdul Hamid made extensive changes to the boundaries of the province of Turkish Armenia.⁶ Hitherto, for ten years, the Armenian districts had been encompassed by the three provinces of Erzerum, Sivas and Diyarbekir. (Those provinces also included many areas which had never been Armenian, and where there were only a very few Armenians.) Of the three, that of Erzerum contained by far the largest share of Turkish Armenia, since it included the towns of Kars, Erzerum, Van, Bitlis and Moush. After the treaty, Kars was lost, and the other Armenian districts of the Erzerum province were divided to create three provinces: Erzerum, Van and Bitlis. These three, together with those of Sivas, Diyarbekir and Mamuret el-Aziz (or Kharput) became known as the 'six vilayets (provinces)' of Turkish Armenia. But in using the term, one should always remember that Armenians were far from an overall majority in the areas, although in many places, especially the fertile country regions, they constituted the largest group in an area in which, taken as a whole, none of the populations constituted more than 40 per cent.

 

Map 5. Administrative Divisions in Ottoman Armenia after 1878

 

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The Aftermath of the War of 1877–8

 

Conditions were very disturbed throughout Turkish Armenia after the war of 1877–8, so that there was scope for the British consuls to use any powers they had. Numbers of Circassians and Laz from the Russian empire had arrived in the Ottoman empire, and settled themselves at the expense of the local population. The Kurdish tribal leaders, who had fled during the war, reappeared, with apparently limitless licence to rob and kill. These men were truly the terrors of the countryside, not only to Armenians but to the settled, non-tribal Kurds as well. Major Trotter noted the following (which also gives an interesting picture of the coexistence of the settled communities), on 5 January 1879:

 

            I stopped a few minutes at the village [Madrak, in the Chabakchur district] and was at once surrounded by a crowd of Armenians, who, while loudly complaining of the misdeeds of the Kurds from the neighbouring country, professed to be on good terms with, and well treated by, the Kurds of their own village; and in truth the Kurdish priest or imam was standing by, and joining in all the assertions of the Armenian priest, who was the principal spokesman. There is no doubt that not only do both Christians and Kurds suffer terribly from bands of roving insurgent Kurds from the neighbouring mountains, but in many villages the Armenians also suffer terrible oppression at the hands of their own [Kurdish] beys and aghas, the old feudal lords of the soil. As far as I can make out, these beys, however oppressive themselves, are willing to protect their own subjects, as far as lies in their power, from external violence, but in the present disorganised state of the country they can defend neither their Christian serfs not their own coreligionists.⁷

 

            However, every attempt by the consuls to set up machinery to improve the administration of justice in the eastern provinces was met with calculated obstruction by the Ottoman government. But since they lacked all coercive power their only result was to produce a series of well researched reports, and nothing more. Even the arch-Turkophile Sir Henry Layard ultimately lost his temper with Sultan Abdul Hamid because the latter refused to make the reforms.⁸

 

 

The Liberals' Failure

 

When Gladstone returned to power in April 1880 one of his first actions was to recall Sir Henry Layard from Constantinople, and appoint George Goschen (MP for Ripon) to the post, with a special mission to see that the terms of the Berlin treaty were carried out. Goschen succeeded in compelling Turkey to hand over the port of Antivari on the Adriatic to Montenegro by means of a blatant threat of force.⁹ But over Armenia Goschen attempted to act in concert

 

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with the other signatories of the Berlin treaty, instead of acting alone as Layard had done –and as he himself did over Antivari. The result was a series of identic notes and collective notes from all the powers addressed to the Porte, which brought no practical improvement at all to the situation.¹⁰

            From 1880 to 1882 the powers deliberated, eventually agreeing in February 1882 to implement a plan of reforms. The possibility of action hovered in the air. But then there arose a new difficulty: Germany refused to act in concert with the other powers. In a despatch from Berlin on 16 May 1883 the British ambassador, Lord Ampthill, noted that Bismarck was basically prepared to act in concert with the other powers. Over one question, however, he could not follow Britain: the Armenian question.¹¹ Bismarck claimed that the constant pressure on the sultan humiliated him in the eyes of his subjects, and weakened him in the eyes of his enemies; besides, 'interference with the happiness of other sovereigns' subjects was philanthropy, and … he hated philanthropy in politics.' He would decline to press the Armenian reforms on the sultan.¹² The concert of Europe was reduced to silence on this issue.

            Nevertheless, Britain held certain individual responsibilities; and here it is prima facie puzzling that the British Liberal government, in power until 1885, did nothing about the condition of Armenia, despite much moralistic verbiage about the wickedness of the Turks in Armenia. Goschen left Constantinople as early as May 1881,to make room for a career diplomat, Lord Dufferin. Goschen had most lamentably failed to make the Porte implement article 61 of the Berlin Treaty. There was no attempt at all to act alone, in accordance with the Cyprus Convention. Instead, as a result of Liberal policies elsewhere in the Near East, the autocracy of Abdul Hamid was made even more secure. The British occupation of Egypt of 1882, into which Gladstone and his fellow Liberals were swept by a tide of jingoism, had the effect of squashing constitutionalism throughout the Islamic world, and reinforcing despotism. So the total result of the Liberals' excursus into the affairs of the region was that the condition of the Armenians grew steadily worse. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt summed up the situation succinctly when he wrote (in 1896):

 

            Neither in 1880, when Mr Gladstone returned to office, nor at any subsequent period of Liberal ascendancy, has the smallest attempt been made to undo or repair the wrong. Mr Gladstone in office became undistinguishable in his treatment of the eastern question from Lord Beaconsfield.¹³

 

            As evidence of the British government's embarrassment at its failure in Turkish Armenia, the Blue Books on the subject stopped appearing in 1881, and did not reappear publicly for eight years. Blue Books were collections of diplomatic documents edited from the Foreign Office's Confidential Print, which were made available to the general public, usually within a few months from the date of the last document in them. Their purpose was to keep Members of Parliament informed on current affairs. A confidential Blue Book

 

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was, however, 'laid but not distributed' – that is, made available to MPs only – in 1884.¹⁴ The government was clearly too ashamed to give it wider currency.

            Thus, vice-consul Eyres reported from Van on 15 September 1883 of the 'utter corruption and incapacity of the authorities'.¹⁵ The governor of Van, Arif Pasha, was out collecting bribes most of the time, but when he returned, 'the nightly burglaries double in number and murders are of daily occurrence.'¹⁶

            Eyres wrote from Van, 4 January 1884, that 'the courts of justice are a mere farce. They are neither more nor less than engines for extorting money from litigants for the benefit of officials.'¹⁷ The zaptiyes (gendarmerie) were 'the scourge of the country … they live on the people.' Many Armenians had emigrated, and Eyres added, 'I cannot understand how those who do remain still manage to exist.'¹⁸

            The ambassador, Lord Dufferin, commented on a series of reports on four of the eastern provinces made in January and February 1884. 'These documents repeat the same tale of wrong, misery, corrupt and incapable administration.'¹⁹ The condition of the country was declining steadily; poverty was increasing everywhere. Such were the blessings of the Liberals' foreign policy.

 

 

Political Stirrings

 

The situation for Armenians was intolerable, and no people, even if they appear to have had fighting spirit knocked out of them by centuries of subservience, can endure such a situation for ever. The Armenians were in effect cornered by their own government. So they slowly moved towards defiance. In doing so, entire ideologies and self-images were called into question. In a people whose hope had hitherto been their religious faith alone, defence of the body became as assiduously cultivated as salvation of the soul.

            Driven by Ottoman oppression, some of them began gradually to reject the theocratic system of the Ottoman empire, and so rethink their position in the world. From three directions ideas came to them, which chipped away at the Ottoman system. First, from across the alien, foreign-imposed border – that imperial convenience – which divided them from their fellow Armenians in Russian Transcaucasia. Radical, Populist political notions had been current there in recent decades. These ideas, or portions of them, were carried across the border, to Van, Erzerum and other Armenian centres. In the second place, since the 1820s American Protestant missionaries had established a network of congregations and schools throughout Anatolia and Turkish Armenia. They had gone there initially with the intention of converting the Muslims and Jews, but, making no headway, had taken it upon themselves to 'reform' the Christianity of the Armenians, which they considered to have become a very dark glass through which to see the teaching of the founder. By the end of the

 

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century the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions had established there 127 Protestant congregations with 13,000 communicants, and 400 schools with 23,000 pupils.²⁰ The vast majority were Armenians; the others were Greeks, Assyrians and Syrian Jacobites. Colleges had been established by the missionaries at Marsovan, Aintab, Marash and Kharput. A new, quite un-Ottoman system of thinking developed among the Armenians; young Armenians rapidly assimilated European intellectual currents and moved from the fatalism of a subject minority in an age of faith to an attitude of energetic down-to-earth pragmatic realism. The third channel for new ideas was through Constantinople; many of the well established Armenian bankers sent their sons to Europe for their education.

            Ottoman Armenians began to organise themselves politically. Rudimentary attempts at political organisation – secret societies, local groups and so forth – had existed since the early 1870s. In 1881 a new, more ambitious organisation, the 'Protectors of the Fatherland', was established in Erzerum.²¹ It was dedicated, its historians tell us, to the defence of the Armenian population against the Kurds and Turks; but it was almost certainly a revolutionary organisation, since the words 'Liberty or Death' were found inscribed on an official document when members of the organisation were caught by Ottoman police in November 1882. After the arrest of these men, 76 were tried (twice, for there was a retrial) in 1883; 40 were found guilty.²² The trial was a political confrontation, and it inspired the revolutionary song

 

            Tsain më hnchets Erzrumi Haiots lerneren

                        Tount tount yelan Haiots srder zenki shachiunen…

            A voice rang out from the Armenian mountains of Erzerum,

                        Thrilled were the hearts of Armenians by the sounds of the weapons;

            For centuries the Armenian villager had seen neither sword nor weapon –

                        He left his field and, instead of spade, took sword and rifle.

 

Twelve years later this song was to be sung on the streets of Constantinople, as the Armenians staged a demonstration against Ottoman tyranny.

 

 

The Armenakan Party

 

The first recognisable Armenian political party – with a platform, a central body, and an official publication – was the Armenakan party, founded in Van in the autumn of 1885.²³ The guiding spirit behind its foundation was one Mëkërtich Portukalian, the son of an enlightened Constantinople banker. Portukalian was a distinguished Armenian figure; typically, a tireless educator. During the late 1860s he had been a teacher in Tokat; he had travelled extensively in western Anatolia and the Balkans in the mid-1870s, and had opened a school in Van in 1878. (Interestingly, it was open to Christian and Muslim alike; besides Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds and Turks could all enrol.)

 

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Factional strife among the Armenians – a recurring impediment – forced it to close after less than a year; but in 1881 he was able to open another, the Central School (Kedronakan Varzharan). But this time it was the authorities that objected, and after four years of work the school was closed in March 1885. Portukalian left Van, to spend the rest of his life exiled in Marseilles.

            It was as a direct result of his activity that the Armenakan party was founded in 1885; from Marseilles he himself kept in touch with its leaders, and published a journal of political and social enlightenment, Armenia. One of Portukalian's main points was that Armenians abroad should help those in their native land, both financially and by telling the world about their oppressed condition. Some expatriate Armenians took note: in December 1885 an Armenian Patriotic Society of Europe was founded; its headquarters were in Chesilton Road, Fulham – the private house of its leader, Garabed Hagopian. This society was to play an important part in disseminating news and arousing liberal opinion in Britain nine years later, when details of the Sasun massacre began to leak out.

            Despite the absence of their leading spirit, the Armenians of Van worked out their political principles. In great secrecy – in a burrow used for pressing grapes, furnished with nothing but a straw mat – Portukalian's disciples met and hammered out their ideological platform. Their central aim, they decided, was to 'win for the Armenians the right to rule over themselves, through revolution'. The Armenakan concept of revolution was distinctly low-keyed, compared with that of succeeding organisations; terror, agitation and militant demonstrations were viewed with disfavour. The people were to be trained with arms, as guerrilla fighters, but essentially for defensive purposes, against the terrorism of the Ottoman empire. How would the land of Armenia be liberated from the Ottoman yoke – since self-defence and guerrilla warfare do not by themselves free a nation? Hope was placed in the great powers. Armenakans were to 'prepare the people for a general movement, especially when the external circumstances – the disposition of the foreign powers and neighbouring races – seem to favour the Armenian cause'.²⁴

            It is arguable that this belief – that the great powers would intervene in the Ottoman empire, and rescue the Armenian people and their revolutionary leaders from the clutches of Turkish misrule – was the greatest single error of the Armenian revolutionary parties throughout the period 1885–1908. With hindsight we can see that after 1881, when Tsar Alexander II with his unpredictable idealism was no more, and when Gladstone's Liberalism had become tarnished by experience and failure, it was futile to hope that the solid, bourgeois powers of Europe would intervene in favour of a revolutionary uprising. But Armenians placed enormous faith in those twin creations of British diplomacy: the Cyprus Convention and article 61 of the Berlin treaty. They believed that under the terms of these two instruments the powers, and especially Britain, were bound to intervene in their affairs when Ottoman rule manifested its true face.

 

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            The Armenakans soon had cells outside Van, in other towns in the province, as well as in Trebizond and Constantinople. Beyond the Ottoman empire the party developed in a small way in Russian Transcaucasia, in Persia and in the United States.

            One of their exploits, although it failed, is of interest because of the testimony left behind by one of the participants. The incident was known as the 'Salmas affair'. Three Armenakans, Garabed Kulaksizian, Ohannes Akribesian and Vartan Koloshian, originally from Van, now living in Salmas (Persia), where two of them were school teachers, disguised themselves as Kurds and, armed, attempted to cross secretly from Iran to Turkey, probably to recruit adherents to their cause. They were caught by zaptiyes just inside the Turkish border; a dust-up ensued; one was killed, another seriously injured and later murdered, and the third got away (28 May 1889). A document was found on Kulaksizian headed 'My last decision', which, although not great literature, is remarkable for showing the mind of a man moving from passive acceptance to active challenge, and the painful readjustment necessary for a man belonging to a community which had eschewed violence for centuries. The following is part of his testimony:

 

            I have come to the end of the last of those years in which I have begun to live. When I drifted into the current of life, I resembled a man whose eyes had been bandaged, who had been isolated from real life, and kept in an imaginary world for many years; at length this man is allowed to enter upon real life, the poor man opens his eyes which have been blindfolded for several years, he finds himself in a world totally different from the life which he has hitherto led; every obstacle that he meets causes him to stumble, he goes on foot, often he falls, but he takes courage and gets up again; he changes his path for another direction, hoping that this new way will lead him to a better road, although he is convinced that he will only discover a world more or less resembling that in which he has hitherto lived…

            But he has not been taught how to set to work. He pauses a moment, looks around him; in every direction he sees misery, persecution, and baseness, and human corruption. Thinking of his childhood, he passes his hand across his forehead, and the fearful vision of the past presents itself before his eyes; he beholds the torture which his relatives have endured, he beholds his fellow-countrymen abandoned and despairing through the persecution of the cruel Turks.

            Finally he calls to mind that he has sworn in his childhood to assist his compatriots when he grew up, and not to allow himself to be so mercilessly treated.²⁵

 

            However, resistance to robbery often degenerated into cold-blooded killing of Kurds; legitimate liberation and self-defence became short-sighted aping of the opponent's methods. Much of the enlightenment developed by Portukalian

 

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and his immediate successors was lost in sterile brutality. Agents of the government could not have thought up a more skilful scenario for delaying political development among the Kurds and Armenians, who, in revolt together, would have posed a serious threat to the empire. When Abdul Hamid armed the Kurds into Hamidiye battalions in 1891 he obtained the same result as those Armenians who indulged in vengeance: division of the two peoples from one another.

 

 

The Hunchaks

 

Against the background of a system of law which was the very denial of law, the first socialist and revolutionary Armenian party was founded. This society, whose doctrine was Marxist, was founded in Geneva in 1887.²⁶ Its members, all of whom were Russian Armenians, took the ideas of Portukalian and the Armenakans and gave them a clear imprint of Caucasian revolutionary thought. But the beam of their attention, along with that of other Russian Armenian groups, was directed upon Turkish Armenia, yerkirë, the homeland.

            The aims of this party (which had no name yet) were drafted in 1886.²⁷ Broadly, they were for the achievement of socialism and the freedom of Turkish Armenia. A new, unified, socialist state was to be carved out of the existing imperial regimes; and this could only be brought about by revolution. The party would be a national one, in that it worked for the alleviation of the plight of the Armenian people, who were oppressed in eastern Turkey as a national group – that is, they suffered merely for being Armenians, not for being workers or peasants; but it would not be a nationalist party. The leaders saw the new, socialist Armenia as a beacon for the world socialist revolution. The draft of the party's principles contained a model of the Armenian state envisaged, and described how the revolution would occur; more extreme than the Armenakans, the party did not eschew agitation and terror. The instruments of the revolution were to be workers and peasants, whose activities were to be directed by a central committee.

            In 1887 the party was actually formed, and the first issue of the party organ, Hunchak (properly Hnchak – 'bell'), produced. (It was probably thus named after Alexander Herzen's Kolokol.) Not until 1890 did the party adopt a name – the 'Hunchakian Revolutionary Party', or Hunchaks for short.

            Leader of the Hunchaks was the young Avetis Nazarbekian (or Nazarbek; b. 1866), a dedicated revolutionary and propagandist, but a man who seems to have enjoyed to excess the acclaim he received abroad for being a revolutionary. According to David Garnett, who met him and his future wife Maro when they were guests of Garnett's mother Constance, he was 'dark, slender, very handsome in an oriental style, and played the violin'.²⁸ In the early and mid-1890s he was frequently in European capitals, especially London; and in 1894 the Turkish government complained to Britain that she

 

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was harbouring a man who was a danger to the Ottoman state, and gave his address as 23 The Parade, Uxbridge Road, Acton.

            The Hunchaks soon had agents in Ottoman Turkey, Europe and America, and in the Russian Caucasus. It was an international movement. Soon there emerged other organisations which stuck much more closely to the only practical centre for Armenian revolutionaries, the Caucasus, which, although ruled by the bureaucratic functionaries of the tsar, was nevertheless a place where Armenians could meet, collect funds and organise without too much secrecy.

            The first native Caucasian born organisation of any real significance was the Young Armenia Society, founded in 1889 by Kristapor Mikayelian.²⁹ It only lasted for a year, before developing into a greater and more comprehensive organisation. Although Mikayelian held genuine political principles, the Young Armenia Society's policy was crude. It largely consisted of making forays into Ottoman territory in order to 'punish' the Kurds for their oppression and violence towards Armenians. An important word in the Society's vocabulary was vrezh – revenge. The idea that Kurds too were victims, but less obvious ones, of the Ottoman system was not apparent. Moreover, the Society believed in foreign intervention; as Russia had intervened after the Bulgarian atrocities, so, it held, would one or more powers come to their aid. In this, its leaders failed to note the changed political circumstances of the late 1880s.

            The oppression under which the Ottoman Armenians lived, and the official manner in which it was sanctioned, were such as to make revolutionary terrorism an entirely natural consequence. The Ottoman system of law was a denial of law itself. It was symbolised at this time by the Kurdish brigand-chief Musa Bey, whose villainy and violence were so great that foreign representatives demanded his arrest. He was taken to the capital, and, after a trial that was a mockery of justice, set free. An outcry resulted in the European press, and the sultan thought it prudent to banish him to Arabia, whence he quietly returned to his former activities.³⁰

            Nevertheless Armenians were no longer suffering passively. They were raiding Ottoman territory, and, politically more significantly, the Hunchaks defied the government both in Constantinople and in Erzerum, 'the capital of Turkish Armenia'.³¹ Social relationships throughout the empire were shifting as a result. George Washburn, principal of Robert College, Constantinople, noted of the years 1890–2 that 'the old friendly feeling between the Turks and Armenians, who had always been regarded with more favour than the other Christian nationalities,^* and who seemed to understand each other better, had given place to distrust and fear.'³² And in the Caucasus, also in 1890, a new word entered the vocabulary of the Armenian revolutionary societies – Dashnaktsutiun, or federation.

 

                * Washburn is referring here to the position of the Armenians in the capital, and in a few other towns in the western part of the empire, not the poor, downtrodden agricultural class in the east.

 

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Dashnaktsutiun

 

The Federation of Armenian Revolutionaries (Hai Heghapokhakanneri Dashnaktsutiun) emerged from the need for an umbrella organisation for all the groups. And initially they all belonged to it. Nazarbekian and Mikayelian planned jointly to edit Hunchak – the journal of the new Dashnaktsutiun – in Geneva. The main objective of the federation was to win freedom for Armenia by a people's war.

            Details, however, were not worked out; perhaps because there were too many people pulling in different directions. Indeed, by the summer of 1891 the Hunchaks had split from the Dashnaktsutiun, less because of ideological differences than personal ones; and the following year the Federation's name was changed to Hai Heghapokhakan Dashnaktsutiun, (Armenian Revolutionary Federation), the name it has today. Thereafter, Hunchaks and Dashnaks would almost always be rivals. Policy divergencies, in the early years, were often slight; but in succeeding years it became clear that the Hunchaks gave priority to socialism, while the Dashnaks, in general, pursued a more nationalist path. There were also differences in the internal structure of the two on the issue of centralisation. Both nevertheless believed that in the prevailing conditions armed struggle was essential, and were prepared to use terror and intimidation – which were, indeed, used all the time by both tsarist and Ottoman governments – in order to achieve their aims.³³

 

 

Confrontation in Erzerum

 

The revolutionaries first showed their strength in 1890 No longer now were the men who were prepared to take action self-doubting, rather ineffectual intellectuals like Kulaksizian, but iron men, who were prepared to sink themselves, their wills and their consciences in the revolution. In June of that year there was a rumour that weapons were being stored in two Armenian establishments in Erzerum, the cathedral and the Sanasarian College, an educational institution founded by a Russian Armenian in 1880. The police searched them minutely on 18 June, and found nothing. Three days later the Armenian quarter was attacked by Turks and Kurds; there was some firing, and several on both sides were killed.³⁴

            Later that day 200 Armenians gathered in the cathedral churchyard to draw up a petition to the sultan. This was unprecedented in Ottoman Turkey; it was seen by the police as a hostile demonstration, and the Armenians were ordered to disperse. Initially they refused. This too was unprecedented. Finally, after a request by the Armenian bishop, an Ottoman battalion was despatched to Erzerum to keep order in city. But revolutionary elements, Hunchaks – and this is the first time they made their presence known – would have none of it, and fired on the soldiers as they approached, killing two and wounding three.

 

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The Armenian quarter was then attacked with ferocity; there was much looting and killing; 15 were killed, and 250 wounded.

            A significant new division was emerging among the Armenians, between the old, clerical, Ottomanised leadership and the new revolutionary elite. Both strove to win the allegiance of the mass of the people, the clerical faction by means of their traditionally established power, the revolutionaries not hesitating to use terror and blackmail for their ends.

 

 

The Kum Kapu Affray

 

The following month this new division was brought dramatically into focus – in the capital itself, in the cathedral in Kum Kapu (T.: 'sand gate'), Stambul.

            On Sunday morning, 27 July 1890, the Armenians of Constantinople were assembled in their cathedral for mass.³⁵ It was the feast of the Transfiguration. Suddenly a Hunchak from Van by the name of Harutiun Djangulian advanced towards the altar with a statement in his hand, which he evidently intended to read. The patriarch then indicated that this was not the time for reading such statements. Several members of the congregation thereupon shouted out, demanding that it be read. Among them were two men whose names would be renowned over the next five years Mihran Damadian and Hampartsum Boyadjian. Djangulian then read the manifesto, which demanded Armenian reforms. Disorder then ensued, and as the patriarch was preparing to leave the cathedral, Djangulian drew a revolver and aimed it at him; but the patriarch escaped, assisted by his clergy. The disorder grew to a near-riot; a large number of Armenians from the eastern provinces of the empire entered the church, and started smashing windows. They accused the patriarch and his officials of neglecting the interests of the nation (millet), and of being indifferent to massacre. Their position was intolerable, they said.³⁶

            Outside the cathedral the demonstrators told – indeed ordered – the patriarch to go to the sultan with a petition, and after a heated argument he agreed to go. But just as his cab was preparing to leave, soldiers emerged from the neighbouring streets, surrounding patriarch and demonstrators. The patriarch melted into the background, and the confrontation developed into one between demonstrators and soldiers. In the ensuing fracas, shots were fired by demonstrators, and the police replied by bayoneting the crowd. Two soldiers were killed in the mêlée, and there were one or two deaths among the Armenians.

            Of the Kum Kapu Affray – as it has become known – the British ambassador Sir William White wrote, with a colourful sense of history: 'The remarkable thing about it is, that this appears to be the first occasion since the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks on which Christians have dared resist soldiers in Stamboul.'³⁷ However, the real significance of the affray was the Hunchaks' challenge to their own traditional clerical leaders, whom they con-

 

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sidered, qua leaders, as slothful and collaborationist, and their attempt to wrest the leadership of the community from them. Implicitly it was a challenge to the government; and it was a veiled threat too to the six powers, that they would not be allowed to forget article 61 of the Berlin treaty and keep the Armenian question entombed indefinitely, and that if necessary blood would be shed in order to resurrect it.

 

 

The Gougounian Expedition

 

Two months later the revolutionaries struck in the Caucasus: a young man named Sarkis Gougounian led an expedition planned to be a raid on Turkish territory.³⁸ His plan had, in its early stages, been endorsed by Dashnaktsutiun (at this time still the inclusive organisation), but they later disavowed it. Even before Gougounian had crossed the Russo–Turkish border the expedition had disintegrated; the partisans had lost their way, and grew short of supplies. After three days' wandering they were captured by Russian Cossacks, put on trial and jailed. Gougounian himself was given 20 years' hard labour in Siberia (though he was pardoned in 1906). As an armed attack it had failed; but the idea of the expedition struck a profound note among the people, and brought to the surface their longing for liberation and their hatred for the irrelevant empires that encompassed them. Henry Howard, of the British Embassy, St Petersburg, wrote: 'The solidarity shown in this case between the Russian and Turkish Armenians, as regards their patriotic aspirations, seems to me of importance.'³⁹

 

 

Pan-Islamism and the Formation of the Hamidiye Cavalry

 

At the same time there was an important and sinister development in Ottoman policy. The sultan adopted a policy known as pan-Islamism. Despite its name, pan-Islamism is essentially a political, and not a religious, programme: men were able, after all, to be complete Muslims before the doctrine was invented. Moreover, Sultan Abdul Hamid was by no means the faithful Muslim that he has often been represented; like so many heads of state, he was an opportunist as regards matters of religious faith. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt noted the following after a conversation with Arminius Vambéry, who was the best-placed European to understand the sultan at this time: 'He declares that, though superstitious, the sultan is at heart a free thinker, his religion being with him a matter of policy, and he related several anecdotes bearing on this point.'⁴⁰

            Pan-Islamism is the attempt to unify the Islamic peoples against a non-Muslim threat. As such, it can be used for either revolutionary or reactionary ends. It was used as a revolutionary instrument by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1837–97), who sought to kindle the fire of Islam among downtrodden Muslim

 

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peoples, to enable them to withstand the corrupt and enslaving materialism of 'Christian' Europe; and it was used for reactionary purposes by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who attempted, and to a large extent succeeded, in ironing out the difference between, say, Turk and Kurd, or Turk and Albanian, and uniting them against the alleged 'threat to Islam' posed by revolutionaries from the Christian communities – Balkan in the west, and Armenian in the east.

            At this end, and to prevent a recurrence of Kurdish revolt – for the Kurds had been in revolt against the Porte in 1830, in the early 1840s, during the Crimean war, in the late 1870s and in 1880 under Sheikh Ubaydullah⁴¹ – the sultan armed the Kurds, and enrolled them into cavalry regiments, which he named Hamidiye, after himself. The pattern was said to be that of the Russian Cossacks. British ambassador Sir William White wrote to Lord Salisbury on 24 February 1891:

 

            His majesty imagines that by organising the Kurds in a military fashion he will introduce discipline among them, and create a very efficient and loyal cavalry, thus strengthening the defence of the border provinces of the empire against a powerful military neighbour.⁴²

 

            However, he added: 'There is a great deal that might be a priori objected to the probable success of such a scheme.'

            Four days later Consul Hampson, writing from Erzerum, pointed out that

 

this 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.⁴³

 

The British military attaché reported on 15 December 1892 that to that date 33 regiments of 500 men each were in existence; 13 more were in the process of being formed. Their commanding officer was Zeki Pasha, a Circassian.⁴⁴ The following years showed that their military value as auxiliary frontier troops was practically nil; instead they only added to the lawless chaos of the region, looting and pillaging villages and travellers at will, and with complete impunity. They ruthlessly terrorised those whose land they shared. The creation of the Hamidiye cavalry was one of the cleverest and most effective pieces of divide-and-rule legislation ever devised by an imperial power.

 

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The Yaftas: Revolutionary Strategy

 

The revolutionaries, for their part, extended the scope of their activities. Early in 1893 seditious placards (yaftas) appeared on the walls of several of the principal towns in western and central Anatolia. They were written in Turkish, and addressed exclusively to Muslims everywhere, even in India, and they bade them revolt against their oppressors.⁴⁵ Abdul Hamid was unworthy, incapable of ruling. He was only a Hamid chavush – 'Hamid the doorkeeper'. The Porte suspected, rightly, Armenian revolutionaries. Hunchak cells in Marsovan, Yozgat, Amasia, Chorum, Tokat, Angora and Diyarbekir had executed a plan which showed an internationalism which stood out in contrast to the pointless series of 'punitive' raids that some revolutionaries undertook in the east. But no Muslim revolt followed. Instead, on orders from the Palace, hundreds of Armenians were immediately rounded up and jailed throughout the length and breadth of Anatolia; typically, Ottoman Turkey over-reacted, and soon the allegations of arbitrary arrest torture and punishment without trial reached the foreign embassies – especially the British, since many Armenians still vainly thought that Britain had some responsibility for their plight, in view of the Cyprus Convention. The British ambassador despatched his consul in Erzerum, R. W. Graves, to investigate. After a tour of the districts, Graves's conclusion was that it was 'more than probable' that Armenian revolutionaries were responsible for the yaftas, since this action was consonant with their overall stategy.⁴⁶ This, Graves figured, was to create 'a semblance of revolt' (by cutting telegraph wires, bombing the odd government building, etc.);⁴⁷ the sultan would then panic, and local authorities act in a stupid or over-zealous way. They would take excessively punitive measures and would arouse the Turkish and Kurdish masses with religious fanaticism, and a massacre would occur. The six powers would then be forced to intervene, in view of the relevant article of the Berlin treaty, and reforms would be imposed on the sultan (as indeed was to happen in Crete). Life would then be made at least tolerable for Armenians.

            This plan, which was endorsed by some of the revolutionaries, was not the cold, vicious calculation that it has sometimes been represented to be, with the revolutionaries calmly accepting the possibility of thousands of deaths among their own people in order to gain narrow political objectives. In reality, the extreme measures to which they sought to provoke the Porte were only a speeded-up version of what was happening all the time to Armenians. There was little to choose between a thousands dying in a week and a thousand dying in a year. What the revolutionaries tried to do was to be catalysts – to show to the European powers (which had a certain, if ill-defined, responsibility for their government) the true nature of Ottoman rule, and to force them to do something about it. Assuredly Europe would do nothing if those thousand deaths were spread over a year; but there was hope that, if there was a sudden, fright-

 

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ful outbreak of bloodletting, the powers might intervene. Disraeli himself had acknowledged that British policy had been blown off course by the Bulgarian atrocities. Then (they reasoned) let there be atrocities, if this was the only way to stir Europe to honour its obligations. Morally, their case could be defended on utilitarian grounds. Moreover, the actual execution of such measures lay with the government, which was always more terrorist than any bunch of revolutionaries could ever hope to be. The revolutionaries' great error was one of tactics, believing they could force Europe to intervene – a perpetually false hope.

 

 

Sasun: the Preliminaries

 

South of Moush, between the mountain ranges of Kurtik (or Hachresh) and Andok, there lay in 1894, three large Armenian villages – Semal, Shenik and Gelieguzan. One at least can be found on the map today. The scenery amidst which they are set is of breathtaking magnificence; a British vice-consul described the landscape in 1895 as 'alternate high ridges and deep valleys, many of them thickly wooded with walnuts, oaks, willows, mulberries, figs and vines, and abounding in streams'.⁴⁸ Travelling was very difficult, since there were none but the roughest footpaths.

            Of the three villages, Semal was closest to Moush. A few miles east of Semal was Shenik; and closest to Mount Andok was Gelieguzan. At this time they were administered directly from Moush, though they were commonly said to belong to the sub-district of Sasun (or Sassoun – so named, allegedly, after Sannazar, one of the sons of Sennacherib). According to official figures – probably low estimates – there were 48 houses in Semal, 38 in Shenik and 82 in Gelieguzan (4 of which were Kurdish).⁴⁹ Their Armenian inhabitants, cut off from any urban life, lived in archaic, patriarchal style, with huge 'extended' families, numbering sometimes 40, 50 or even more in each house, but more usually about 10.⁵⁰ One contemporary British document describes them as 'a stalwart race of mountain shepherds'.⁵¹

            The valley-land was rich and fertile – excellent cattle-rearing land. The streams which water it eventually gather themselves into the Talori Su, which flows south to join the Batman Su, and eventually broadens out to join the upper Tigris about 200 miles west of Jezirah. Amidst the twists and turns of the Talori Su, where the terrain is even more mountainous and impassable, there lay another cluster of Armenian dwellings, which together made up the nahiye, or parish, of Talori (or Talvorik). In the 13 wards of this district – for they were too small to be considered villages – there were approximately 450 houses.⁵²

            To the west of the entire district was a region known as Kurdish Sasun, inhabited by settled Kurdish farmers. Their society was dominated by powerful aghas (Lords), who often feuded amongst themselves. To the south, too, there were Kurdish villages.

 

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Map 6. Sasun

 

            The third element in the population was the nomadic Kurds, who used to migrate from the Diyarbekir region in the summer through the district, in search of summer pasture, though in recent years they had been forbidden to do so, in view of the havoc they created. They were none too welcome to either settled population, bringing with them theft and lawlessness – although it was always possible to rob thieves as well as be robbed by them.

            Armenians and Kurds got on with one another tolerably, but not particularly well. One Armenian woman described relations between her people and the nomadic Kurds as between 'brothers of earth and water',⁵³ and the phrase is apt for those between the two settled communities, too. Relations between the peoples only became impossible when the government supported one against another. However, the Armenians deeply resented the fact that the Kurdish aghas used to demand from them a kind of protection tax – an annual due of crops, cattle, silver, iron ore (for there were a few primitive mines in Sasun), agricultural implements or clothes. This unofficial tax was known as hafir.⁵⁴ And when an Armenian girl married, her parents were forced to pass on to an agha half the sum which their son-in-law paid them as a dowry; this tax was called hala. With the half-hearted spread of government authority to the country areas – which always meant first and foremost government taxation – these local exactions had not disappeared, so in many places the Armenians were being forced to pay double taxes. As col. Chermside put it to

 

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Sir William White in the summer of 1889, after a tour of the district:

 

            Prior to the abolition of the feudal system by the enactment of the Tanzimat [reorganisation], the rayahs [non-Muslims] received considerable protection from the beys and aghas to whom they were subject. On the power of the latter being broken, and the substitution for it of a weak, often nominal, local government, the rayahs suffered much from the violence and oppression of their Kurdish neighbours. At the same time, the descendants of the beys and aghas in many localities still exacted from the rayahs contributions and forced labour, and maintained other ancient customs for which they gave no just equivalent. Remnants of feudality linger to the present day in Hakkiari, Bohtan and a great part of the Bitlis vilayet, the villages paying to the aghas taxes termed kabal.⁵⁵

 

Sasun, Chermside continued, was one of the those places where the Armenians paid double taxes.

            The Ottoman government was represented in this district by a functionary who, despite his limited powers in the face of the traditional structure, was as villainous and corrupt as any in the empire. Hassan Tahsin Pasha, vali (governor) of Bitlis, was described by the British vice-consul in Van, C. M. Hallward, as ‘continually trading on the “Armenian question”, extorting money by threats from Armenians in every part of the province’.⁵⁶ His method was simple. He used to summon Armenians to appear before him, make his illegal demands, and if they refused, jail them. Incarceration in the Bitlis jail was sufficient to subjugate the hardiest spirits, and they would pay up. However, the Sasuntzis outwitted Hassan Tahsin by an even simpler ruse: after a summons to Bitlis, they failed to turn up at all.

            Perhaps their disobedience was due to the presence in Sasun of two young Hunchak revolutionaries, who had for some years past been laying the groundwork of defiance there; though we should note that Sasun had been in a state of limited rebellion in 1889, before the appearance of revolutionaries.⁵⁷ Both had been at the Kum Kapu affray in June 1890. One was Mihran Damadian, an Armenian Catholic from Constantinople. Born in 1863, he had received his education in his native city and at the school of the Mëkhitarist Fathers, on the Isola San Lazzaro, Venice. In 1880 he became a teacher, and from 1884 to 1888 was principal of an elementary school in Moush. It was this experience, in which he saw the downtrodden aspect of his people, that made him become a revolutionary, and join the Hunchaks. After the Kum Kapu affray he went to Athens, where he took part in an anti-Turkish demonstration in July 1891.

            In August 1891 he left Athens for Sasun, disguised as Melkon Khurshid, a porter from Moush. Throughout the autumn and winter he was active in Sasun, teaching, training and arming.

 

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            The following spring he was joined by another veteran of Kum Kapu, Hampartsum Boyadjian. He was a native of Hadjin, near Marash, and had studied medicine in Constantinople and Geneva. Travelling from Transcaucasia to Sasun, he had eluded the imperial spies by disguising himself as a Muslim sheikh with the name of Murad – a name which became his revolutionary name. With his medical skills and his message of defying the ever-present oppression and extortion, he soon gained the confidence of the villagers.

            In the summer of 1892 Murad and Damadian together organised a seven-man guerrilla gang. Three years later, when Murad was being cross-examined about this period, it was put to him that he had instigated battles with the Kurds; he denied that this was so, saying that any blood shed among Armenians and Kurds was merely a function of the ‘system of injustice’, as he termed it, which the government upheld.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, there was at least one casualty in 1892 as a result of their activities. They spent the latter part of 1892 trying to calm things over, and reduce tension between the communities; but there were a few more incidents, and feeling ran high.

            Early the following year Murad left for the Caucasus, to get funds. He said he would be back by May. Damadian continued to keep relations with the Kurds level. But while he was spreading revolutionary ideas among the villagers of the plain of Moush – west of the town – he was pursued by zaptiyes (mounted gendarmes) and arrested after suffering a leg injury from being kicked by a horse. He was taken to Bitlis and then to Constantinople, where he was granted a pardon. In summing up his activities in Sasun, vice-consul Hallward says, ‘I do not believe that the agitation amounted to much, or had much effect on the villagers. One thing seems clear, that shortly after his capture the fate of Sasun Armenians was sealed.’⁵⁹

            After the arrest of Damadian events moved fast in Sasun. In July the nomadic Kurds were for the first time for several years permitted to pass through Sasun and Moush. Their more lawless activities were patently supported by the government: they were co-ordinated by the mutessarif (local governor) of neighbouring Gendj, who also gave his backing to a notorious anti-Armenian fanatic, the sheikh of Zeilan. In a matter of weeks an unprovoked attack was launched by three to four thousand Kurds on the villages of the Talori parish. The Kurds attempted to lay siege to the Talori Armenians, but the latter withdrew into a stronghold they had prepared and successfully withstood their attacks. Several of their small villages were, however, sacked. The Kurds then gave up the attempt, to return to their winter quarters. But the Armenians were not left alone; shortly afterwards the mutessarif of Gendj arrived with soldiers, arrested some leading Armenians, sent them to Bitlis, and reported that the people were in revolt against the government.⁶⁰ Most of the Armenians were able to stay defiantly in their mountain fastnesses. With the onset of winter the troops withdrew, and the people came down.

 

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The Battle

 

Next spring, as the frosts cracked, and the sun dazzled the beautiful valleys and streams back into life, the Sasuntzis must have known that they would confront the authorities again, in greater, and perhaps more terrible, form. In the empire of the Osmanlis no subject people could so challenge the government with impunity. However, Murad was among them – he had returned in the autumn, not in May as he had hoped – and it appears that the villagers placed enormous trust in him, and his presence gave them strength.

            In June 1894 the kaimakam (sub-governor) of Kulp, a village to the West of Sasun, came to Ishkhentsor both to collect arrears of taxes from the Armenians of Talori and to arrest the notables who persisted in eluding the snares of the governor of Bitlis. He was accompanied by zaptiyes. The men of Talori said they were willing to pay government taxes if the government would put an end to unofficial Kurdish exactions. Then, according to R. W. Graves, British consul in Erzerum,⁶¹ ‘he proceeded to abuse and maltreat them. They then lost their temper, fell upon him, and, after administering a severe beating, drove him and his zaptiyes from the district.’

            To the official this was armed rebellion, and he reported it as such, adding that a large force would be needed to put it down. About 300 soldiers and zaptiyes went to the spot; but the Armenians retired into their stronghold, and the Ottoman commander refrained from attacking. At about the same time a small Ottoman force went to Shenik and Semal, again to try to compel the notables to present themselves before the governor of Bitlis so that he could extract money from them. The troops arrested five Armenians – but were pursued by armed villagers, who managed to rescue four of the prisoners.⁶²

            In this tense situation the tribal Kurds appeared, on their seasonal migration, in very large numbers. Incidents occurred between them and the Armenians, often beginning in a trifling way – the stealing of a few sheep or oxen – but developing in a punitive, extremist manner. In at least one case the Armenians reacted harshly, killing several Kurds. These incidents aroused the Kurds, and the leaders of the two of the main tribes, Bekiranli and Velikanli, met to discuss the situation. Another tribe, the Karikanli, were for attacking the Armenians at once, but were restrained by regular troops, stationed at Merghemuzan, half an hour from Shenik.⁶³

            Shortly afterwards, however, between 60 and 80 Bekiranli went to Merghemuzan, and conferred with the troops. The substance of their discussions became clear from the action which followed. On their return they fell upon Shenik and Semal. The villagers fled to the nearby heights of Chai and Köprü-sherif-khan, where fighting continued for two days. But there their position became impossible, and the women, children and flocks were moved to the greater safety of Mount Andok; the men were forced to retire to Gelieguzan.⁶⁴ Meanwhile Semal and Shenik had been gutted by fire. The troops, it was apparent, had changed from instruments of restraint to accomplices; not only

 

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had the Bekiranli attacked after conferring with them, but also, while the attack was continuing, the troops had made no effort to interpose themselves.

            For 12 days (probably 14–25 August) a ferocious battle was fought at Gelieguzan between the tribal Kurds and Armenian defenders. Throughout that time the Armenians were able to hold the Kurds off. Three of the defenders managed to get a message⁶⁵ to Murad, probably on the 25th, in which they said:

 

if you ask about us, we have nothing left, because for the last twelve days we have been fighting, and by the Lord’s mercy we are conquerors; but yesterday morning the fighting began in all directions: we were attacked; he [their attackers] captured Husseindzik, and in the evening entered the village and laid all in ashes. Today, in the morning, he attacked us from all points on the Andok, and we only just escaped complete destruction.

 

On the back of the letter: ‘At present we do not know what will happen; it may be that by the evening there will be a change, and that he will put us to the sword.’ On the same day a detachment of Hamidiye cavalry had reached Gelieguzan, rushed there specially from Erzindjan. It succeeded in doing what the tribal Kurds had failed to do – dislodge the Armenians. However, when their position became hopeless most of the Armenians were able to escape to the heights of Mount Andok, where they took up protective positions below the women and children.

 

Massacre and Betrayal

 

But amidst the ravines and crags and soaring irregularities of Mount Andok, any attempt at an orderly defence was bound to break down. Soon the soldiers and Kurds broke through the rough defensive system, and then searched out and killed all they could lay their hands on, including many from the Talori district, by now likewise overrun and sacked by government forces 3,000 strong.⁶⁶ They killed entirely ruthlessly, the soldiers – a nightmare touch – dressed in black, the Kurds in white. Armenians, men, women and children, were ‘the object of repeated pursuit on the part of the soldiers, Kurds and zaptiyes, who wounded or killed, without distinction of age or sex, all who fell in their hands.’⁶⁷ Children were dashed against the rocks, pregnant women barbarously mutilated.

            In the words of H. S. Shipley, British delegate at the commission which followed these events,⁶⁸ for a period of some three weeks

 

the Armenians were absolutely hunted like wild beasts, being killed wherever they were met, and if the slaughter was not greater, it was I believe solely owing to the vastness of the mountain ranges of that district, which

 

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enabled the people to scatter, and so facilitated their escape. In fact, and speaking with a full sense of responsibility, I am compelled to say that the conviction has forced itself on me that it was not so much the capture of the agitator Murad, or the suppression of the pseudo-revolt, which was desired by the Turkish authorities, as the extermination, pure and simple, of the Gelieguzan and Talori districts.

 

Estimates of those killed vary between a very conservative 900⁶⁹ and 3,000.⁷⁰

            Some Armenians, however, in order to escape from the labyrinth of death, resolved to give themselves up. They were men and women of Semal, and their leader was their priest, Ohannes (one of the three who had signed the note to Murad, written just before the flight to Mount Andok).⁷¹ The priest managed to make contact with the colonel, Tewfik Pasha, and he received assurances that they would be unharmed if they came down. With this promise the priest reassured his flock – the traditional leader taking the initiative and showing the authority that his people expected.

            They reached Gelieguzan, only to be betrayed by the soldiers. On orders from the colonel, Ohannes was seized, his eyes gouged out, and amidst taunts from the soldiers, he was bayoneted to death. Of his followers, the men were separated from the women and children, and at night the women were mass-raped by the soldiers. The following night the men, in an adjoining field, were bayoneted to death like their priest.⁷² The woman could hear the dreadful sounds of butchery. Trenches were dug for the corpses, which were thrown in, with only the thinnest covering of topsoil.

 

The Unravelling

 

For some days after that the pursuit over Andok Dagh continued; but by about the end of September the authorities felt themselves satisfied. Murad had been caught, the villagers taught a lesson. However, the row about Sasun, which would turn it into an incident with international repercussions, was only just beginning. It did not take long for the truth to leak out, and the more alert British consuls, noting the activity of the Kurds, had been expecting a conflict for some months. The two outstanding British consuls in the area were R. W. Graves in Erzerum and C. M. Hallward in Van. It would be difficult to praise the activities of these two men, their tenacity and their bravery, highly enough. In a sense, they complemented one another: Hallward was determined to get to the truth at all costs, to pierce the hide of Ottoman evasion, temporising and circumlocution, impelled, one feels, by the horror of Ottoman injustice he saw around him, and the powerless poverty to which it consigned so many Armenians; Graves, was less passionately committed (not, after all, what representatives of Her Majesty’s Government are trained to be!), more of a sceptic, more accurate in his despatches, but sharing Hallward’s contempt for

 

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Ottoman misgovernment – his sense of justice more hidden behind a hearty, bluff exterior (he was keener on trout-fishing than rescuing Armenians). These two men, together with the British ambassador, Sir Philip Currie, made up a formidable, relentless trio of criticism to the Porte. Although it would be fair to argue that the events which had occurred in Sasun were due to the policies of their own government two decades earlier, none of the three was blinkered by the ass-like obstinacy of men such as Elliot or Layard, who had been unable to see outside their most immediate imperial interest.

            On 2 September Currie sent a note to Said Pasha, the grand vizier, in which he said he had been informed that three ‘Kurdish regiments of irregular cavalry’, i.e. Hamidiye regiments, were being sent against the Armenians of Sasun. He reminded His Highness ‘that it was the acts of irregular cavalry in Bulgaria which produced so painful an impression in Europe, and were the cause of so many misfortunes to Turkey’, and urged him to do his utmost to prevent a repetition.⁷³ (Yet even now corpses littered Andok Dagh and filled the trenches at Gelieguzan, and the villages were charred ruins.) Not long afterwards he asked Hallward to visit Moush, to try to find out what had happened.⁷⁴ Hallward arrived on 30 September. He found the atmosphere thick with fear, suspicion, unwillingness to talk. The local Armenian bishop sent an urgent message to him begging him not to try to meet him. So Hallward tried to get the authorities’ permission to visit the district in question, to see the three villages in question. No, he was told, you cannot proceed; the town of Moush is in quarantine after a cholera outbreak – there is still a battalion at Semal, and you must not infect them. This was a very feeble excuse for preventing him from going, since the soldiers had themselves brought the infection from their headquarters in Erzindjan. Hallward had to wait in Moush, and all the while he was chafing to reach the villages before winter supervened.⁷⁵ He managed, however, to collect enough material from second and third-hand sources to send a devastating report to his ambassador on 9 October, much of which later proved to be true.⁷⁶

            The Porte not only obstructed in the east, it also sent a propaganda agent to Erzerum (where the more senior consuls resided) to process the news and make it palatable to the consuls. This man was a certain Ximenes, a Spaniard who received a regular salary from the Palace, now masquerading as a journalist and ‘writer of distinction’. Graves soon realised what his real job was, perceiving that ‘he was in constant communication by cypher telegram’ with the Palace. Certainly, Ximenes told the consuls, massacres have taken place, but the Armenians were rebels, and the perpetrators of the massacres were Kurdish irregulars; the government’s part was an honourable one, having attempted to restore order by calling in regular troops to restrain the Kurds.⁷⁷

            It should perhaps be noted that now and over the next 20 or 30 years, the Turkish government regularly ascribed the massacre of Armenians to the actions of wild, unsubdued Kurdish tribes, whereas in each case the 'thinning out' or straightforward extermination of Armenians was a matter of considered

 

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government policy. The 'Kurdish cover-up' is very frequently met, and only really ended when the Turkish government embarked on deporting and massacring the Kurds themselves, by which time there were, anyway, scarcely any Armenians left.

            The Porte was agitated, and the sultan shaken by the bold plan and forthright action of a British vice-consul.⁷⁸ A claim was made in early November that Hallward was instigating the Armenians to hold meetings, to sign a paper against the government, even to rise against the imperial government. Currie retorted briskly to this serious allegation – a British vice-consul raising a rebellion – by declaring that he would immediately despatch his military attaché, Colonel Chermside, to the spot to investigate. The Porte, shuddering at the prospect of another foreign consular official at the scene of its atrocities, withdrew the allegation a few days later.⁷⁹

            Europe became apprised of the 'Armenian atrocities', as they were termed, at about this time. A letter in The Times of 17 November 1894 from G. Hagopian (writing from Fulham), in which he gave rather imprecise details of the massacre, marked the beginning of a campaign by liberal opinion in Europe to persuade their governments to act, and make the Porte implement article 61 of the Berlin treaty.⁸⁰

            The Porte was in a tricky position; Europe knew that a massacre had occurred in Sasun, and something had to be done to stop her nosy consuls, journalists and other intruders from making an on-the-spot investigation. Hence Said Pasha, the grand vizier, proposed to Currie that an Ottoman commission should be sent to Bitlis. Currie noted that the commissioners were a 'fairly good selection'. But shortly afterwards it was learnt that the terms of reference for the inquiry were to report on 'the criminal conduct of Armenian brigands'; there was no mention of allegations of massacre of Armenians.⁸¹ Moreover, the sultan made it clear that 'if he was now sending one [a commission] it was only out of regard for the friendly representations of England, with whom he desired to maintain the good relations which existed'.⁸² A sop to British liberals, in other words.

            Then, apparently of his own accord, Currie thought it a good idea if the powers which had consuls at Erzerum – Britain, France and Russia – should send delegates to be present at the sittings of the commission, to survey its progress.⁸³ The three powers consented; and eventually M. Vilbert was delegated for France, M. Prjevalsky (Przhevalsky) for Russia, and H. S. Shipley for Britain. These men would not be actual members of the commission, but would be present to 'assist' it (giving it information if needed, suggesting questions to the commission's president, even themselves asking the witnesses questions, if necessary). They would see that the inquiry was conducted with impartiality, and ensure its sincerity.⁸⁴ The commissioners and delegates eventually assembled in late January 1895 in Moush, in the ice-bound heart of the Armenian winter.

 

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Abdul amid, Arminius Vambéry and Armenians

 

In Constantinople the pressure from the ambassadors, and from liberal European opinion, had transformed what the Palace and the Porte hoped would be a trifling incident, soon forgotten, into a major issue. Abdul Hamid had for many years considered the Armenians a special kind of threat – those of the six vilayets, that is, not the wealthy, Ottomanised amiras of the big cities of the west, such as Smyrna and the capital, with whom on the whole he got on well. He feared the power of the peasant population of the east – that, since his own empire had reduced them to poverty unequalled since the Mongol irruptions, they were fair game for revolutionaries or foreign intervention.

            One man that had discussed the Armenian question with the sultan was that part scholar, part clown, part spy-manqué figure Arminius Vambéry, at this time professor of oriental languages at the university of Budapest. A self-taught orientalist, in the 1860s he had travelled into Central Asia in disguise. Lately he had developed close links with the sultan – closer, perhaps, than any other foreigner. About twice a year, from the late 1880s, he used to go to the Palace, and have lengthy, detailed discussions with the sultan. The British foreign office paid for these trips, and in return Vambéry wrote them long reports of his conversations.⁸⁵ Clearly the sultan, who knew of the arrangement, liked Vambéry and talked freely to him. Vambéry's wide knowledge of Islam, Islamic peoples and the Turkish language made him a welcome guest in the otherwise plot-crazed labyrinth of the Star Palace. Another thing cemented the friendship of the two men: their bitter common hatred of Russia. Vambéry was an extreme Russophobe-Turkophile, proudly sporting the cloak of a Disraeli or a Layard, in a curious, hyper-British manner, long after such fashions had been dropped in all but the crudest centres of British capitalism. Any bid made by a subject people of the Ottoman empire for the lessening of its oppression he regularly interpreted as the evil machinations of Russia, a power he detested with blind heartiness.

            In the colourful reports which Vambéry sent to the foreign office, made pungent for its mandarins with more than a whiff of journalistic sensationalism, references to the Armenians occur from 1889 onwards. Vambéry's report of 22 October of that year is especially interesting.⁸⁶ He describes the nervous agitation which seemed to possess the sultan whenever the Armenian question was raised: he 'grew greatly excited while discussing it', and 'in his anger he lifted repeatedly his fez' Disclaiming responsibility for the disorder in the east, Abdul Hamid put the blame for it on his pashas. (The possibility of dismissing them and appointing new ones does not appear to have been raised.) And the sultan is said to have added:

 

'Tell your English fiends, and particularly Lord Salisbury, for whom I have a great consideration, that I am ready to cure the evils in Armenia, but I will

 

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sooner allow to severe [sic] this head from my body' (and here grew very excited) 'than to permit the formation of a separate Armenia.'

 

            Six years later he wrote – it is just possible recalling the 1889 discussion:

 

            About two years ago he said to me whilst grasping nervously to his neck, 'they can severe [again sic] that head from my neck, but never Armenia from my empire … What is the Armenian question? One blow will suffice to stamp out the whole movement.'⁸⁷

 

How much of this was Abdul Hamid, and how much the embellishment or the invention of the professor, we shall never know. Vambéry was prolix in his reports with his opinions, principally hatred of Russia, which he described as the fons et origo mali. He was so blinded by this hatred that the sufferings of the Armenians were completely excised from his mind. The potential freedom of Armenia was nothing more than the expansion of Russia, and he tried to insinuate such a viewpoint into the Foreign Office: 'From my English [point] of view I look upon every connivance shown to the creation of an Armenian province as upon a sinful attack against the vital interests of England.'⁸⁸

            The picture that emerges of Abdul Hamid, despite Vambéry's sympathy for him, is of a man at once tyrannical and craven, wearying himself with agitation that the Armenians, his subjects, had dared protest about their sufferings and oppressions, and fawning for the aid of England, still playing that battered and torn up card, the 'Russian danger', the northern menace.

            Such was the man now confronted by the storm of the Sasun affair. Constantinople was in a state of turbulence, not least because the sultan's subordinates only reluctantly carried out the brutal orders of their imperial master. That they were the orders of Abdul Hamid there can be no doubt, in the light of a report of 25 December 1894 by Adam (later Sir Adam) Block, Chief Dragoman at the British embassy, which is marked Very Confidential and consequently not published in any of the Blue Books.⁸⁹ Block remarks that 'The sultan has from the first known that a massacre of some kind took place in consequence of his orders, and hence his aversion to any inquiry.' The memorandum also gives details of the consternation that had reigned in official Ottoman circles during the previous two months, and outlines the prospects of the Sasun commission. According to Block, Abdul Hamid was convinced that there was 'widespread sedition among his Armenian subjects'. On being informed by the governor of Bitlis that 'thousands of Armenians had assembled in open rebellion', the sultan, 'in a moment of panic or irritation, gave orders to stamp out the movement and destroy the villages'. Only reluctantly did the grand vizier pass the orders on to the marshal of the Fourth Army at Erzindjan, Zeki Pasha, who in turn sent a detachment of Hamidiye cavalry to Moush to do the killing, and later followed there himself to try to clear things up. Subsequently there was a furious scene between the sultan and his first secretary,

 

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Sureyya Pasha, which concluded with the latter having a heart attack, collapsing and dying. Zeki himself – 'A very powerful man closely connected with the Palace' – stormed, 'I did not approve of the proceedings, but don't let them press me or make me speak out, for I still have the sultan's orders by me written by Sureyya.' Further disaffection was shown by the sultan's aide-de-camp, Abdallah Pasha, whom block describes as 'a fairly straight man'; he was initially detailed by the Palace to be president of the Sasun commission, but 'received such instructions that he refused to go at first, and was kept a close prisoner at Yildiz until his departure'.

            On the future of the commission, Block concludes that

 

the ministers and Palace still hope that they will succeed in evading the presence and assistance of foreign delegates, and, in spite of them, will be able to hush up the affair, whitewash the culprits, and prevent the sultan's orders from becoming known. Every delay has been of assistance; at the very beginning the local authorities began to rebuild houses, to remove all traces of massacre, and to put out of reach all who could give information. I know that these orders have quite recently been repeated, The commission was in a hurry to get on the spot and get the job finished before our delegates arrived, and the snow and difficulty of moving about is hailed with delight by the Palace. The delegates will have to contend with all kinds of obstruction and chicanery, in which the Turkish official is a past master, and the climate and the preparations of the vali will render their efforts almost powerless. Hassan Tahsin has received his instructions, and no one will venture to speak out unless he is assured of protection after the commission leaves. I am informed that already the vali has informed the Porte that a new movement on the part of the Armenians is preparing, and that he has sent spies to investigate; this is impossible, with the winter season so far advanced, and can only be alleged with the object of either distracting attention from the Sasun incident, or of tightening his hold on the Armenians with the object of scaring them from coming forward to give evidence.

 

 

The Sasun Commission

 

Much of Block's gloomy prognosis proved true. The Sasun commission seemed intent on only attempting to prove the Porte's version of events. After the initial 12 sittings it had only attempted to investigate the allegations against the Armenians.⁹⁰ Important divergencies of evidence were not followed up, and only one hurried on-the-spot investigation was made – to visit the death-pit at Gelieguzan. Witnesses were tampered with by the authorities: as an afterword to the report of the proceedings for 14 March 1895, there is the following note:

 

            The delegates consider it their duty to point out that the three witnesses

 

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heard at this sitting, illiterate peasants belonging to different villages, not only repeat the same facts, but make use of identical terms for an identical account, and seem to them to be repeating a lesson which they have learnt by heart.⁹¹

 

One man, an Armenian from Shenik, was told when he arrived in Moush that ‘he must accuse the Kurds of all that happened, and not the soldiers’. A secret report from Prjevalsky gives further details of how the inquiry was stage-managed by the local authorities: ‘Witnesses for the commission’, he reported, ‘are selected mainly, if not entirely, by the local police.’⁹² Moreover the manner in which the inquiry was conducted was most irregular:

 

            Depositions favourable to the Turks are not interrupted by the president, and are carefully written down by the secretary. But witnesses who speak against the authorities and the troops merely answer the questions put to them, and the interrogatory is conducted in the most confusing fashion in order to entrap them in contradiction of detail.⁹³

 

            Nevertheless a mass of grim and horrifying detail did emerge from the commission, so that it is possible to piece together what happened.

            Despite strenuous attempts by the Ottoman government to impose a news blackout, two enterprising British special correspondents – E. J. Dillon of the Daily Telegraph and F. I. Scudamore of the Daily News – managed to reach Turkish Armenia, and to send long and graphic reports of the Sasun Commission to their papers.⁹⁴ The secret police were agitated by their presence. Dillon datelined his despatches from Moush, although he never got further than Erzerum; but since the news had travelled fast on the local grapevine, his reports were none the worse.⁹⁵

 

 

Another ‘Reform Scheme’

 

After the inquiry, action was needed; but the proponents of reform found themselves up against the perennial problems of Ottoman administrative change. It was immediately clear that it would be very difficult to get the six powers to act in concert. As regards Ottoman reform, three had virtually lost interest by 1895 – Germany, Austria and Italy. Russia’s foreign policy was in the hands of Prince Lobanov, the inflexible aristocratic reactionary who had succeeded Giers. France would do nothing that would upset her intimate diplomatic relationship with Russia. Ironically, in view of her policy at Berlin, which had permitted this disastrous chain of misrule, insurrection and massacre to occur, Britain was now the only power prepared to take positive and realistic action.

            A modest reform scheme for Turkish Armenia was drawn up after lengthy

 

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negotiations between the Constantinople ambassadors, and presented to the sultan on 11 May 1895, before the Sasun commission had finished its sittings. This programme,⁹⁶ prefaced as 'the minimum of the measures and reforms which it is necessary to apply in the provinces that have been disturbed by recent occurrences',⁹⁷ sought to establish just and reasonable governors at all levels from vali to mudir, who would be representative of the people they governed and – a major departure – not barred from office by religion. There would be police and gendarmes that protected, rather than attacked, the civilian population, and in which, again, Armenians could participate. The nomad Kurds would be controlled and there would be reforms in the administration of justice.

            But this time Russia obstructed. Prince Lobanov was fearful that the alleviation of Armenian servitude would act as a dangerous precedent for similar moves in his own sovereign's empire. Typically, he justified his authoritarian decision by his fear of the 'Armenian committees', which, 'in London and elsewhere' – one notes his rigid distaste for the capital of free opinions – aimed at the creation in Asia Minor of a district in 'which the Armenians should enjoy exceptional privileges, and which would form the nucleus [noyau] of a future independent Armenian kingdom'.⁹⁸

            Thus Britain was left alone seeking effective action. But she could no longer act alone under the terms of the Cyprus Convention because such action would now be construed by the other powers as trying to seek an unfair advantage over them. So yet again the reform of affairs in Turkish Armenia was paralysed.

            Lord Salisbury returned to power in July 1895. He lost no time in speaking 'very earnestly' to the Ottoman ambassador:

 

            The essential matter was that provision should be made for securing equitable government to the Armenians. I repudiated all ideas of autonomy as absurd, and I asked no privileges for them, but simple justice between man and man; that Kurds should not oppress Armenians, nor Armenians Kurds.⁹⁹

 

            On the 18th, probably in response to Salisbury's earnest speaking, the sultan's own reform plan was announced, putting into force 'reforms which are not contrary to laws and regulations already in existence'.¹⁰⁰ Taken aback, and somewhat sceptical, the powers waited. Their scepticism was well founded, for the linchpin of the scheme was to be Shakir Pasha, former Ottoman ambassador in St Petersburg. He had indeed already (28 June) been appointed 'inspector of certain localities in the provinces of Asiatic Turkey', and his position was confirmed by the sultan's new announcement. For an estimate of Shakir Pasha we need look no further than a letter from Arminius Vambéry; he described Shakir Pasha as 'not at all the man fit for that office', adding that he

 

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was 'the diabolus rotae of the whole disastrous policy of the sultan'.¹⁰¹ It took only a few months to prove Vambéry right.

            It was 20 October 1895 before the Grand Vizieral Order was finally issued, which detailed the reforms – in essence a thinner version of the May reforms.¹⁰² One of the main proposals was that Muslim officials, whether vali, mutessarif or kaimakam, would have non-Muslim muavins, or assistants. This might seem sound; but the men appointed were in no sense representative of the people they controlled, and the Armenian population had no faith in them, believing they would soon inevitably become evetjis, yes-men. Adherence to the revolutionary parties grew apace.¹⁰³ The roving commission, of which Shakir Pasha was head, had moreover no executive power, so that even if the general inspector had not been the malevolent functionary that Vambéry describes, the commission could not have achieved anything.

 

 

Armenian Opinion after Sasun

 

In the east, many changes of opinion and attitude had taken place since the events in Sasun. The government-sponsored massacre had led to the destruction of what was left – admittedly little – of any sort of harmony and tolerance between the different communities. It is fashionable today to say that European nationalism destroyed what was good in the Ottoman empire, but in the eastern vilayets of Anatolia it was unquestionably the Ottoman government itself which brought fear, hostility, destruction and finally murder. Thus Hallward writing from Van, 2 February 1895:

 

            On their Christmas it is the custom of the Armenians to exchange visits among themselves, and to receive visits from the Turks, but this year the Turks in general abstained from paying them any visits. There is really no special ill-feeling between the local Turks and Armenians, but the former take their cue from the government.¹⁰⁴

 

A few sentences later he observes

 

that all the local officials, high and low, are penetrated with the idea that any act of oppression or injustice towards Armenians will be overlooked, if not actually rewarded, by their superiors; an idea which has also taken root and borne fruit among the Kurds of the country districts.

 

            In a long memorandum of 28 January 1895 G