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Electronic version of “ARMENIA: The Survival of a Nation”, revised second edition © 1990 Christopher J. Walker
[Page 177]
6 The Rebirth of Oghuz
Still better known to my heart is Oghuz Khan, a dark and enigmatic figure in history. In me he still lives in all his fame and greatness – Zia Gökalp, quoted by Tekin Alp in Türkismus and Pantürkismus.1
The Twilight of the Red Sultan
Abdul Hamid's autocracy lasted longer than observers had anticipated. Through his obstinacy, his manipulation of the powers and the hordes of spies who kept him informed of even the most elementary plot against him, he was able to cling to his throne. His policies (if such they can be called) were of drift and inertia, deriving from his 'warped ideas and insane prejudices' (Adam Block).2 As a result, by the beginning of this century the Ottoman empire had become (in the words of Dr Allan Cunningham) a clock which had stopped.3
Thousands of Armenians left their native soil after the events of the 1890s, and settled in Europe or America. The expansion of the community of Fresno, California, so vividly described by William Saroyan in My Name is Aram, dates from this period.
The villages which remained were in many cases impoverished, homes were wrecked, and the peasantry deprived of flocks of thousands of sheep, with which the Kurds enriched themselves.4
Prevailing conditions led to seething revolutionary activity in the mountains of Turkish Armenia. Chiefly concerned was Dashnaktsutiun, much the most prominent revolutionary body at this time. Dashnak fedayis operated throughout the land. (The term fedayi is an Islamic one, and signifies a man prepared to die for his faith; it was allegedly a designation given to the Armenian revolutionaries by the Turks and Kurds out of respect for their bravery.) Scores of expeditions and raids were mounted. But in political terms their influence was negligible. International speculation in the Near East centred almost exclusively on Macedonia; and Russia, at this time, was through the agency of Prince Golitsyn pursuing her vendetta against Armenians and in no mood for reactivating the Armenian question. The powers had developed a diplomatic strategy for avoiding the embarrassing consequences of their indifference. Only in 1903–4 did the fedayis come near to organising an uprising and shaking Ottoman power in Armenia. Even then it was unthinkable that the empire would lose any of her territory, since the idea of intervention was far from Russia.
[Page 178]
Although matters remained deadlocked internationally for the Armenians, locally the fedayis' illicit arms were a guarantee for freedom from the government in some localities. The first outstanding leader in the mountains of Turkish Armenia was Serop 'pasha', whose Dashnak guerrilla bands neutralised the locust-like functionaries of the Ottoman government and established a degree of cherished autonomy for Armenians, instituting justice where before there had been none, and, by expelling the government, introducing those very institutions that we associate with government. Serop was killed by the ruse of a Kurd in 1900, and the leadership of fedayi forces fell to Andranik, without question the most famous Armenian guerrilla fighter,5 'a very able man, and implicitly obeyed', in the words of British vice-consul Hampson.6 Born in Shabin Karahisar in 1865, he had joined Dashnaktsutiun in 1892. During the killings of autumn 1895 he had defended the Sasun villages, and four years later had become the leader of the forces in Sasun. In November 1901 he effected a spectacular break-out from the besieged position at Arakelots Monastery, near Moush. His activities reached a climax in 1903–4, when much of the region of Van, Bitlis, Moush and Sasun was in a state of revolutionary turmoil.7 In the spring of 1904 the Turkish army attempted to break the link forged between the villagers and the guerrillas by bombarding the Sasun villages for eight days in mid-April; but the villagers escaped, most to higher ground, and a few to the villages near Diyarbekir. Andranik and his forces were, however, compelled to retreat to Persia, via Aghtamar and Van; thence they moved to the Caucasus, leaving little more than a heroic memory. (Andranik himself resigned from the Dashnak party in 1907, because the party was entering into negotiations with émigré Turkish groups opposed to the sultan.)
The activity of Dashnak fighter in Turkish Armenia during this period did not stem from bravado and opportunism. It was based solidly on the needs of the people. Livelihood, land and possessions were slowly being stripped from the Armenians, with the connivance of the government.8 British vice-consul Geary noted, in a despatch from Bitlis written on 18 September 1906:
The creditors are almost without exception Turks or Kurds, who in many cases are gradually becoming proprietors of land formerly in Armenian hands. The system known locally as selef [literally 'predecessor'] contributes largely to this result. By this system money is borrowed on the security of future crops and repayment made in kind, the interest often amounting to 300 or 400 per cent. … Extortion and bribery appear to be the order of the day, and many tales of brutality were poured into my ears.9
On the notorious system of tax-farming, Geary adds: 'In this district the farmer of the tithes often acts in concert with the tax gatherer, and the latter compels the villager to borrow back at high interest the tithes which he has just paid to the former.'
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Some Armenians plotted to assassinate the sultan, the corner-stone of the destitution, but no attempt was successful. One narrowly failed in Constantinople. In another incident, in 1905, the Dashnak party founder, Kristapor Mikayelian, was killed by the bomb he was handling in Bulgaria.10
Conflicting Aims
The forces that eventually succeeded in overthrowing Abdul Hamid were a combination of intellectual opposition in exile, mainly in Paris, and military force in Macedonia. A sizeable proportion of the exiles were from the empire's subject peoples, and of these perhaps the most active were the Armenian Dashnaks.
Some years earlier, both Hunchak and Dashnak groups had entered into a dialogue with Ottoman liberals in Paris. The presence among the Turks of Prince Sabaheddin, nephew of Abdul Hamid, gave genuine hope to them that they would receive autonomy, and not – once Abdul Hamid was overthrown – just a modernised tyranny. Sabaheddin, who had fled Constantinople in 1899, was a genuine believer in decentralisation. The Armenian groups took part in the First Congress of Ottomans Liberals, held in February 1902;11 with them were Turkish, Arab, Greek, Kurdish, Albanian, Circassian and Jewish (not Zionist) representatives The resolutions passed by the congress were humane and conciliatory, seeking equal rights for all, local self-administration, defence of the empire's borders and restoration of the Ottoman constitution of 1876, which had been suspended in 1878.
The Armenians initially held that only European intervention (of some sort) would be an effective guarantee of the reforms that they sought, and so they included it in their platform.12 But in the years that followed they seem to have abandoned it, realising that it was seen by Turkish liberals as a negation of the empire's sovereignty. They became very close indeed to the Turks during the years of anti-Hamidian conspiracy; and indeed after the revolution had turned sour for other non-Turks, they were the last to be disillusioned. The Dashnaks really believed that constitutionalism could work in Ottoman Turkey, and while they held that belief they abandoned their hopes for foreign intervention in the empire. They ceased to look to article 61 of the treaty of Berlin, and instead trusted their own efforts, harnessed to those of their Turkish colleagues. It was a brave and historic attempt to break with centuries-old attitudes. For Turkish Armenia they sought not foreign intervention or independence, but only autonomy.
But not all of the Turks among the exiled conspirators were liberal, decentralist followers of the ideas of Prince Sabaheddin. Others believed that the entire empire should become a unitary, specifically Turkish state, whose dominant ideology should be Turkish nationalism. In the first place they realised that, with the onset of democracy, the Turks might easily lose their
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privileged position in the empire, since they constituted a minority far outnumbered by the combined total of other nationalities. And in the second place, with the disappearance of the former rigid Islamic loyalties, it was not only doctrines of liberty and equality that were taking their place. Sinister ideologies, with a hint of political fanaticism, were beginning to take shape. Deriving from European linguistic researches, the idea of a Turkish race as an incipient political unit was developing. (The European researchers included Arminius Vambéry, Leon Cahun, and Constantin Borzecki, who adopted the name Mustafa Jelalleddin Pasha, and tried to prove the 'Touro-Aryan' origin of the Ottoman Turks.)13 Simultaneously, a number of Turks were becoming aware of the political aspirations of the Turko-Tatars of the Russian empire, especially those of Baku and the Crimea, and to a lesser extent of Kazan and Astrakhan; for their part, the Tatars from these regions approached Ottoman Turks with the idea of turning the tables on their Russian masters and unifying their forces to create a gigantic Turkish state. Numbered among them were Yusuf Akchurin (from Kazan), Ali Husseinzade (from Azerbaijan), Ahmed Agaev (also from Azerbaijan) and Ismail Gasprinsky (from the Crimea).14
In the ever more secular milieu of educated Ottoman Turks, these currents of thought made a deep impression. They made it possible for them to think in terms of pan-Turkism – the ambition to unite all the peoples who were linguistically related to the Turks, from the Balkans to Siberia.
Pan-Turkism (or pan-Turanianism, which is really just another name for it) is often confused with pan-Islamism, but a moment's reflection will show that the two are quite distinct. In the first place there are many non-Turkish Muslims, and a number of non-Muslim Turkish-speakers (such as the Yakuts of Siberia). Secondly, the racial ideology of pan-Turkism is not Islamic at all. A circular found on the body of a dead Turkish soldier at Medina during the first world war shows the essential antipathy between Islam and pan-Turkism.15 (The soldier was a member of the pan-Turkist group Turk Odjaghi, founded by Yusuf Akchurin.)
That monstrous fiction of the imagination, which is known as the community of Islam, and which has for long past stood in the way of present progress generally, and of the realisation of Touranian unity in particular, has now entered on a phase of decline and ruin. We need not apprehend from it any further danger to the execution of our hopes and principles.
However, pan-Turkist ideas had gained only a small currency before 1908; they had not yet gained mastery of the Young Turk exiles, as they plotted to seize power from the sultan. There seems only to have been a shadowy awareness of them. The most that the more nationalist among the Turkish members of the plotters held was that a Muslim was superior to a Christian (but by a smaller margin than hitherto), and that of Muslims the Turks deserved pride of place in the empire.
[Page 181]
The 1908 Revolution
By early 1908 the centre of gravity for the revolution had shifted from the smoke-filled rooms of Parisian exiles to the barracks of discontented army officers in Macedonia; and on 23 July 1908 the revolution burst upon the capital.
The 1876 constitution was restored. Freedoms were assured for the citizens of the empire. The happiness and relief were immense; the dark night of arbitrary violence seemed to be over. The manifestations of the citizens on the streets seemed to prove that the narrow divisive policies of Abdul Hamid had been swept away – that the Armeno-Turkish hostility had been a special phenomenon artificially engineered by the scheming sultan.
Mr. G. Barclay, British acting-consul in Constantinople,* wrote to the Foreign Office on 25 July, 'The crowd is animated with good humour, and it is remarkable to see the fraternisation of Muslims and Christians, especially Armenians.'16
Ten days later the newly arrived British ambassador, Sir Gerard Lowther, related (4 August):
An extraordinary event took place yesterday in the Armenian cemetery at Shishli, where the victims of the massacres in 1895 and 1896 were buried. A procession of Armenians and Turks numbering several thousand proceeded thither and prayers were offered by the priests of both religions over the dead.17
On 25 August he reported of the revolution that 'the Armenians fully approve, and are going into it heart and soul'.18
Who were the losers, among the euphoria? Barclay said on 26 July that 'practically the only victims have been spies'.19
But the euphoria, and the cries of 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity', should not disguise the essential features of the men who made the revolution. They were plotters and conspirators; and even after the new day had dawned, their own politics remained in the shadows. The Ittihad ve Terakke Jemieti, or Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), as they called themselves, remained in the background, pulling the strings of power, and conspiring against their rivals. They remained in Salonika, guiding events from a distance. It was as though the light of freedom had penetrated everywhere except into the secret politics of the CUP itself. The CUP was keen at all costs to act through others; thus, they even kept Abdul Hamid on the throne, though they made sure he appointed officials only of their choosing. Only when there was fairly clear
* The Foreign Office had been caught napping by the coup. Not only was there no British ambassador in Constantinople, but at the very time of the revolution most of the embassy staff were out watching the lawn tennis finals of the Ottoman empire.
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evidence of Abdul Hamid's complicity in the brief counter-revolution of April 1909, when for a fortnight it looked as though the old regime had returned, did they send him into exile in Salonika.
Nevertheless, the forms of parliamentary democracy were observed, and initially the debates in the chamber had real worth in airing grievances; the minorities, too, were able to come face to face with one another, and with Turks – who remained the 'ruling race', even though their numbers scarcely warranted it. (In the first parliament, out of a total 288 deputies, there were 147 Turks, 60 Arabs, 27 Albanians, 26 Greeks, 14 Armenians, 10 Slavs and 4 Jews. In 1913 Armenian representation was increased marginally to 16.20) But the manner in which the Committee of Union and Progress managed its parliamentary business meant that very soon the chamber had almost no significance for the political development of the empire. Philip Graves, correspondent for The Times, noted:
I went frequently to the Chamber of Deputies, but I must confess that from 1909 onwards the parliamentary debates lost reality. The Parliamentary Committee [sc. of Union and Progress] Party, which could still count upon a large majority in spite of quarrels and secessions, was better organized and disciplined than the CUP itself. Its deliberations were held in secret and were often attended by ministers, summoned to defend their policies, or by leaders of the extra-parliamentary organization, who came to lay its counsels or commands before the deputies. Its members were said to be sworn to silence, and the reticence of those who had seceded from it was certainly impressive. Debates affecting the government as a whole followed a stereotyped procedure.
The opposition were allowed some liberty of criticism, while the Committee bloc listened in moody silence, broken by occasional protests, until its leaders rose, indicated the views of the majority in a few words, and moved the closure or a vote of confidence as the situation demanded. Then the party voted as one man, and all was over with the opposition until the next occasion when the same comedy would be played with the same dénouement.21
The situation in the provinces improved in the months following the 1908 revolution. British acting consul Safrastian reported from Bitlis on 1 September 1908 that there had been fraternisation in Moush, and that hundreds of Armenians were returning from Russia.22 In succeeding despatches he stressed the security that prevailed in the eastern provinces, and the hopes for prosperity.
Adana
In the Cilician province of Adana conditions were, however, far from auspicious for the success of the constitution. The province was a rich and
[Page 183]
fertile region, where wheat, cotton and barley were cultivated. But on the proclamation of the constitution, Adana was appallingly governed; its governor, Bahri Pasha, was so corrupt that dishonesty and venality had become a way of life there. Notions of 'constitution' and 'justice' were fictions.
The revolution was ill-received here. During the months that followed, the Turks were angry that their dominance, unquestioned for centuries, was suddenly eroded. The Armenians, who constituted between a half and a third of the total population of the city of 40,000, and whom Major C. H. M. Doughty Wylie, the British vice-consul in Mersina, described as 'the most intelligent, the most educated, and by far the most talkative' section of the population,23 imagined that the moment for demonstrating their superior ability had arrived, and that self-determination was virtually theirs for the asking; and they chattered about it, in the khans and coffee-shops, endlessly, and for men who knew the temper of the Turks, tactlessly.
Then in the second week of April 1909, at the same time that the forces were gathering for the counter-revolution in the capital, the atmosphere in Adana became charged: there were some murders, threats were made, and shops were hastily closed. The British dragoman, Athanasios Trypanis, reported this to Doughty Wylie on 13 April 1909 (the very day of the counter-revolution in Constantinople). Currently there were more than the normal number of Armenians in Adana and its surrounding villages, for this was the time of the seasonal migration of Armenian workers from Marash to gather in the barley harvest.24
When Doughty Wylie received Trypanis's letter on the following day, he resolved to go straight to Adana, and took the afternoon train. He saw no reason for exceptional precautions, and took his wife with him. From the train he began to suspect that things might be rather worse than he had anticipated: he saw the odd dead body near the track, and refugees running panic-stricken towards the train.
As they approached Adana more bodies were seen strewn beside the track. At Adana he went straight to Trypanis's house, quite near the station. There he changed into his uniform, secured an escort, and set off to the konak (government building). He found himself in the midst of a furious massacre; all around was screaming, killing, looting; firing in all directions.25
In the konak there was total disorder. The two men with authority, the provincial governor, Jevad Bey, and the commandant, Mustafa Remzi Pasha, behaved like cowards, and seemed to be in a state of hysterical panic. When Doughty Wylie demanded soldiers, with officers, he was unwillingly given a few soldiers, but no officers. Towards evening he crossed the town, and posted a guard beside the American mission. Heavy firing was continuing in the vicinity. Regardless, he returned to Trypanis's house; and thence again, through bullets and past blazing fires, to the konak. The governor and commandant had still done nothing to improve the situation; they sat in their offices, immobilised, it seemed, by fear. Doughty Wylie told them he would return in the morning, demanding 50 soldiers and an officer.
[Page 184]
Early on the 15th Doughty Wylie again left for the konak.26 On his way he caught sight of some soldiers taking part in the murders. At the konak he was given 50 men and the commandant of the gendarmerie.
In the city looting and murdering continued. Since no one else attempted to quell it, Doughty Wylie and his men set about doing the job themselves. They paraded up and down throughout the city, with bugles blowing: 'Wherever we went the fighting ceased. We cleared the streets sometimes by charging with the bayonet and sometimes by firing over the head of the crowd.'27 Alternatively, Doughty Wylie had a crier order everyone to go home, warning them that he intended to fire down the street. But this proved only partially effective, since the city was large and impossible for one band of men to control all the time. Back near the station he was just in time to stop a large crowd of Turkish villagers from flocking into the town and joining the massacre.
By midday the town’s main bazaar was on fire, and the Turks and Armenians were engaged in house-to-house fighting, almost impossible to control. The poor quality of the soldiers aggravated the situation: in one place Doughty Wylie had posted a guard, but as soon as his back was turned the man joined in killing Armenians.
An urgent message came to him to go down to the Tobacco Régie factory, where there were many wounded. While there, he was shot by an Armenian at close range, and his arm was broken. Doughty Wylie comments: ‘He was probably deceived by my military uniform into thinking I was a Turkish officer, or else too wild with terror or despair to know what he was doing.’28 His injury did not prevent him from thinking fast: suppose the Turks learnt that the British vice-consul had been wounded by an Armenian? Would this not be a signal for a general storm on the Armenian quarter? He sent the commandant of the gendarmerie back to the konak with an urgent message to the two officials there that, even now, if they stopped the massacre, no indemnity or punishment would be demanded by Doughty Wylie. He backed up the request with a reminder to them that he had already telegraphed for a British warship, and that if the outbreak continued he would hold them responsible. As a practical solution he suggested that the Armenian quarter be sealed off with regular troops and good officers; no one should be allowed in or out; and the rest of the town should be patrolled, with people being driven indoors, shooting if necessary. Having despatched the commandant of the gendarmerie, he returned home to tend his wound.
The main authorities were acting like cowards; what of their subordinates, and those with lesser authority? Doughty Wylie relates that the reserves, called up by the commandant and roaming the streets, ‘did an infinite amount of harm’.29 The Muslim leaders were divided, some trying to quieten the crowd, others taking rifles and joining in the męlée.
By the morning of the 16th the outbreak had died down, for the time being – not least because HMS Swiftsure and other foreign warships were cruising off the Cilician coastline. But the death, wreckage and homelessness result-
[Page 185]
ing from 48 hours of uninterrupted massacre were vast. Doughty Wylie estimated 2,000 dead in Adana, and between 15,000 and 25,000 in the villages.30 Such estimates were likely to be conservative. Homeless refugees, still frightened of further massacre, amounted to 15,000.31
During the period of the killings of 13–16 April the Young Turks had been ousted from power in Constantinople, and the reactionary regime had been reinstated. But on 24 April, as a result of the march on the capital by the ‘Action Army’ headed by Mahmud Shevket, the parties loyal to the constitution again seized power, and compelled sultan Abdul Hamid (whom they suspected of complicity in the counter-revolution) to go into exile in Salonika.
One of the first actions of Mahmud Shevket was to order two regiments of Rumeliot troops – crack Young Turk soldiers – from Beirut and Damascus to Adana. But shortly after their arrival, at dusk on 25 April, further bloodshed and fire began in the city, perpetrated in a more thorough and brutal manner than before.32 A Turkish version held that the initial firing of the second outbreak came from the Armenian quarter on the troops’ encampment. But on inspection this was found to be physically impossible. An alternative explanation for the outbreak was that some Turks dressed up as Armenian revolutionaries, and, declaring that a revolution had begun, opened fire. What followed was that the Rumeliot troops opened fire on the Armenian quarter, and, in the words of H. Charles Woods (who visited Adana soon after these events), ‘for a time at any rate took part in the looting of houses and the killing of innocents’.33
The most virulent Turkish fire was directed on the Mousheghian school, which contained many who had been wounded in the earlier massacre, and about 2,000 refugees. Firing was directed on the school from the house of a Turkish bey which was actually situated in the Armenian quarter; about 30 soldiers had collected there. The school was evacuated, but next to it was an Armenian church, where 600 people had sought refuge. As the situation of these people became critical, threatened by fire from the school, they were rescued by a Jesuit father and a Turkish officer.34
The worst feature of this second outbreak was the fires, which were much more extensive than during the first. In the old part of the city, where the houses were close-packed and back-to-back, fires spread rapidly. Doughty Wylie says that his impression while going around Adana at this time was of a great number of cartridges exploding in burning houses, and of wreckage falling across the street.35 Woods was highly suspicious about the origin of these fires, when he went to investigate the disturbances in Adana. He felt that they had been started deliberately ‘from the numerous blackened [kerosene] tins which for months told their tell-tale evidence wherever one turned throughout the ruins’.36 Nearly all the houses which were burnt belonged to Armenians – 4,437 out of a total of 4,823.37
However, it was not only the city of Adana that suffered these outbreaks in April 1909. All across the Cilician plain villages were attacked and
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plundered – over 200 in all. Armenians were slaughtered, whether landowners, farmers, peasants or migrant workers assisting with the barley harvest. Many died amid organised brutality; thus, at Hamidiye, 40 kilometres east of Adana, virtually the entire Armenian population of 500 was wiped out after a siege of 22 days;38 and those living in the nearby Armenian villages, a population of about 1,500, quite unprotected, were cudgelled to death.39 Nor was it only on the Cilician plain that Armenians were killed – the whole of the coastline round the gulf of Alexandretta was hit. In Antioch 135 Armenian men were killed.40
Two towns, however – Hadjin and Dörtyol – resisted the onslaught. Hadjin, 110 kilometres north-east of Adana, is a remote mountain town inhabited exclusively by Armenians of the tough, defiant type, similar to the Zeituntzis. The Turks laid siege to it for about ten days, but failed to bend the stern Hadjintzis; then they tried to burn the town (much of which was constructed of wood), but fortunately the wind changed at the critical moment. Only 60 Armenians were killed or wounded, out of a total population of 20,000–30,000.41
In Dörtyol (T.: 'four ways') the 10,000 Armenians were besieged by 7,000 Turks, 400 of whom were armed with rifles. On the third day of the siege the Turks seized the water supply, turned it off and kept it off. Two days later the Armenians attempted unsuccessfully to force their way to the source. Negotiations took place three days later, and the Turks promised to turn it on again for a two days' truce. But they treacherously disregarded their promise, and continued their attack. A few days later a further attempt at a truce was made; this time one was arranged through the good offices of the British acting consul in Alexandretta: Turkish troops would re-occupy the barracks in the town, the water would be turned on, and the siege raised. But again, despite the undertaking, the besiegers made one last abortive attempt to capture the town, attacking from four directions simultaneously. It failed: and the siege was eventually raised on 26 April, with the loss of only ten Dörtyol Armenians.
It appears, too, that attacks were planned throughout Asia Minor as well as Cilicia. At Kharput there were disturbances, but the firmness of the local governor prevented any trouble; at Kayseri a similar outbreak threatened, but again a local official took firm action; and at Van a late snowstorm put a blanket over the plans for killings.43
Responsibility for Adana
At a time when plots, hatred and rumours abounded, it is difficult to reach a clear verdict on the killings. The Ottoman government itself made a show of being keen to get to the truth of the matter. In early May it despatched a military tribunal to Adana, which did little except frame Armenians. This was followed by a special investigative commission, made up of two deputies from the recently re-assembled Parliament, Hagop Babikian and Yusuf Kemal; this in
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turn was followed by another commission, composed of two Turks and one Armenian. At all stages the attempts of the men to reach the truth were thwarted, apparently by orders from Constantinople. Babikian, the keenest investigator, died on 1 August, quite possibly from poisoning.
Sentences were carried out in the autumn and winter. Nine Turks and 6 Armenians were executed as a first group, and later on 25 more Turks:44 the first time that Turks had been executed for massacring Armenians. But it was generally felt that the sentences were unsatisfactory, since the court itself adopted unusual procedures, examining witnesses in an unorthodox manner. Impartial observers considered that some of those sentenced (both Turks and Armenians) were wrongly convicted. By contrast the ex-governor was only sentenced to be debarred from holding office, and the former commandant got nothing more than three months in jail.
One man who put the blame on the CUP was Ihsan Fikri, the editor of the local paper of the Committee of Union and Progress, Iktidal, which had published inflammatory articles.45 He was sentenced to two years' exile, and managed to escape to Cairo. There he implicated the CUP heavily in the massacres, alleging that the violent editorials published in his paper were in fact written by a local functionary of the Committee.46
In assessing blame there are three groups to consider: the Armenians themselves (who might have been staging an uprising, which could be said to be legitimately put down); the reactionaries, belonging to the group who staged the counter-revolution of 13 April, who were generally known as the Society for Muslin Unity, or Ittihad-i Muhammediye Djemieti; and the Young Turk progressives themselves.
The Armenians of Adana were not the innocent passive sufferers that they have sometimes been pictured. They were insufferably and tactlessly loquacious, and their archbishop, Moushegh, was a foolish firebrand who had urged his people to buy arms at any price during the months preceding the violence. (It later transpired that he had a commercial interest in the sale of arms.) The Turks claimed that he was seeking to force the foreign powers to intervene, with the ultimate end of declaring himself 'King of Cilicia'47
Two objections, however, can be laid against this fanciful explanation. In the first place the powers had hardly any representatives in Cilicia; and secondly, direct occupation was not an idea that could be countenanced by Britain or France, the only possible occupying powers, in 1909, since belief was too strong in Turkey's own internal regeneration.
It was out of the question that any revolutionary would start an uprising on the Cilician plain. The fortress towns of Zeitun or Hadjin would be far more suitable. Furthermore, it was a most unfavourable time of year to choose for an uprising, since the town of Adana and its surrounding villages contained a large additional population of thousands of defenceless Armenian migrant workers, there to gather in the barley harvest. So any idea of Armenians fomenting the disturbances may be discounted.
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There remain the Society for Muslim Unity and the Young Turks. It is clearly important to make a distinction between the first Adana massacre, which broke out on the day of the counter-revolution in the capital, and the second, which began the day after the Young Turks had regained power, and Mahmud Shevket had despatched the Rumeliot troops to Adana. There seems to be no evidence directly to implicate the Society for Muslim Unity in the first massacre; but circumstantially things are loaded heavily against them, since their agents might well try to re-assert the traditional position of Muslims against Christians, after nine months of disturbing notions of equality, on the very day that their colleagues seized power in the capital. (Some weeks after the events a certain Avnullah was arrested in Kirkuk, who was reported to have incited the Adana Muslims to attack the Armenians; he was said to be an agent for the Muslim Society.)
It is unlikely that the Young Turks would have fomented the first Adana massacre, on the very day that they were ousted from power; although it is possible, since political events moved more slowly in the provinces than in the capital. Evidence for the implication of the Young Turks is the attitude of the governor and the commandant – contrived cowardice, so that the killings could continue; but, on the other hand, it is quite possible they may have been ordered to adopt their attitudes by the reactionaries who were back in power.
But were the Young Turks behind the second outbreak – was this a grim foretaste of the killings which were to follow six years later? It is possible, but I think it credits even the able Rumeliot troops with too great an efficiency. They had just arrived in a strange city. Was it likely that they would be able to locate and deliberately attack the Armenian quarter in semi-darkness within a few hours of their arrival? Doughty Wylie, who was on the spot, does not think so. He points out that it was dusk when the killings began, and that troops, believing that they were being fired on, would fire back in the assumed direction of the attack, even if they were in error.48 The extreme ferocity of their attack can be attributed to their training, not to the fact that they were firing into the Armenian quarter.
Whatever secret plots were afoot in Adana in April 1909, we must not overlook the local antagonisms. Without the local hatreds the explosion of the violence would not have occurred. It needed very few terrorist emissaries to set the two communities at one another's throats; indeed, to keep the affair in proportion, it is probably fairest to say that local enmities caused the flare-up in Adana, and the part played by the agents from one or another of the committees was marginal.
After Adana
After the events of April 1909 Armenians were more wary, but still prepared to co-operate with the Young Turks. The Dashnaks in particular held on to their
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hopes for an accord with the Young Turks, and on 6 September 1909 both bodies signed a five-point circular. They agreed to work unsparingly together to put the constitution into effect, and to consolidate progress in the country; to act with united resolution against any possible reactionary movement; to dissipate gossip in public opinion that Armenians aimed at independence; they also declared themselves in agreement on the subject of extending privileges in the provinces; and finally, warned by the counter-revolution and the 'regrettable disaster in Adana', to work hand in hand to bring into effect the foregoing points.49
The Dashnaks were criticised for signing this agreement by other Armenians, most of whom believed in CUP responsibility for the Adana massacre. Nevertheless, as the five points make clear, it was a positive gesture towards the Young Turks, and an attempt to salvage what was good in the Young Turk revolution: to try to slow down, or even halt, the slide into racist Turkish chauvinism, by demonstrating that at least one non-Turkish group in the empire was prepared to support them.
Zia Gökalp and Pan-Turkism
But the period of possible co-operation was rapidly vanishing, as the vestiges of liberalism disappeared from the Committee of Union and Progress. In 1910 the membership of its Central Committee changed radically, and it included men of a ferociously nationalist outlook: Eyub Sabri, Omer Nadji, Dr Nazim (a 'bleak fanatic' in the opinion of Philip Graves) and Zia Gökalp.50 None of these held ideas remotely conciliatory towards non-Turks.
Zia was to become the chief theoretician of the CUP in succeeding years, and the political philosophy that he developed had grave implications for Armenians. He was the most articulate and persuasive proponent of pan-Turkism, and showed that, far from being a harmless movement for the unity of a dispersed people, it meant the ruthless suppression of the millions of non-Turkish people who lived in between the remote and haphazard concentrations of Turkic-speakers across the globe.
Zia adopted the second name of Gökalp – it was many years before the Turks had surnames – which already showed the line of his thinking: for gök is the Turkish for 'blue' or 'sky', with the further implication of 'eastern'; and alp means 'hero'. He was born in Diyarbekir (a Kurdish city) in the mid-1870s.51 The political philosophy that he elaborated was more discriminatory and infinitely more sinister than that embodied in the corrupt mehkémés of the period of absolute autocracy. (Yet curiously Zia is hailed today by experts on Turkish history on both sides of the Atlantic as a 'progressive intellectual'.) According to his biographer, Zia believed that the 'Turkish nation' of the future would consist of Turkish-speaking Muslims only; Greeks, Armenians and Jews
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might be Turks in regard of citizenship, but not of nationality. Kurds, he hoped, would become assimilated.52
The profoundest of his ambitions was the great racist dream of pan-Turkism. He outlined three successive phases of its realisation. According to Serge Zenkovsky:53
First the Ottoman Turks had to consolidate their grip over their empire, and Turkize its minorities. In the second, 'pan-Turkic', phase, the closest relatives of the Ottoman Turks – the Azerbaijanis of Russia and Persia (the south-eastern group of Turkic peoples) – were to be taken into the Turkic state. The third step would be the uniting of all the Turanian people of Asia around the Turkish core.
Zia's biographer, Uriel Heyd, adds: 'In the succeeding years Gökalp, Halide Edib and their associates dreamt of a union of all the Turks under a single ruler who would renew the days of Attila, Jengiz Khan and Timur-leng.'
The implications for the Armenians of such racist-nationalist theorising were grave indeed. Zia's 'first step' would mean the forcible Turkisation of the Armenians – something which would not be accomplished easily, in view of the stubborn adherence of the Armenians throughout the centuries to their language and Church; but the Turks, longing to renew the days of 'Attila, Jengiz Khan and Timur-leng', would presumably not stop at employing the methods used by their illustrious predecessors. The second stage clearly involved, at the very least, expansion to Baku (something the Turks were indeed to achieve, briefly in 1818), and north-west Persia. This would entail overrunning Russian Armenia (or, to be precise, the Kars district and Yerevan province); most of all, it meant annihilating Armenia in theory and practice, so that she would never again put forward political demands for independence or autonomy, both of which were anathema to the proponents of the establishment of an 'Oghuzistan', a Turkic state stretching from Anatolia to the shores (initially west and south) of the Caspian sea.55 It entailed, too, ridding the region of the power of Russia, which alone in the area would protect Armenia. Another pan-Turkist, Tekin Alp (who, like Borzecki, was another renegade – he was born Moise Cohen, and his adopted name means 'unique hero'), explained the matter thus, in his book Türkismus and Pantürkismus, published in 1915:
Ten centuries of history have brought about no change in the position of the Germans and Turks towards the Slavs. The two nations have always remained the common foe of Slav power, and must both protect themselves from the menace of the Muscovite empire. As long as the Russian colossus remains, Germanism [Deutschtum] is threatened with isolation, on account of her geographical position and ethnographical formation. In the same way pan-Turkism cannot come to its full development and realisation until the
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Muscovite monster [das moskowitische Ungeheuer] is crushed, because the very districts which form the object of Turkish irredenta, such as Siberia, the Caucasus, the Crimea, Afghanistan, etc., are still directly or indirectly under Russian rule.56
These ideas permeated the Committee of Union and Progress in the years 1910–14, and made it impossible for nationalities such as the Armenians to work with them. Emphasising the importance of pan-Turkism in practice as well as in theory, a Tatar from Baku became a member of the Central Committee of the CUP in 1911: Ali Husseinzade. Here was a man not even born in the Ottoman empire, who was now a member of its supreme ruling body; a striking demonstration of how expansion, and specifically expansion eastwards, had become a dominant Ottoman obsession.57 Ali Husseinzade lost his seat in the Central Committee in the following year; but among those appointed was, like Nazim, another coldly fanatical doctor, the Paris-educated Behaeddin Shakir, whose attentions too were above all focused on the east.
In public, Young Turk politics were dominated from about 1910 onwards by three men: Enver, Talaat and Djemal. Their precise relationship with the party's Central Committee need not concern us here;58 but it should be noted that Enver belonged to it from 1908 to 1910, Talaat from 1908 to 1910 and 1911 to 1916. Djemal was a member before 1908. (He was the least important of the 'triumvirate'.) Talaat seems to have been the main channel through which the secret decisions of the Central Committee were translated into policy; whereas Enver was a man of action – or at least one who had an image of himself as a man of action – and had little time for committees. Enver nevertheless was dedicated to pan-Turkism as a political creed. His activities during the first world war demonstrate that. In the period before the war his dedication to this ideology took the form of patronage of the 'Turanian' youth movement, the izji, which appears to have been modelled on the British Boy Scout movement. The movement's banner showed a grey wolf (boz kurt) against a red background, symbolising the legendary belief that Turks were led out of Central Asia by a grey wolf, and implying that their true destiny lay with racial origins, and not with the multiracial empire that they had built up around Constantinople (whose only racial quality had been the dynasty of the sultan himself).59 The banner of the izji was a deliberate insult to Islam, an expression in terms of antique legend of narrow, exclusive racist intolerance – and a deeply sinister threat to those who lay outside the limits of the race as defined by its proponents.*
* A comparison of some aspects of the pan-Turkism and Nazism is striking and illuminating. Both ideologies despise conventional religion, and hark back to pagan mythologies in order to justify deeds that pagan man himself would have shuddered to accomplish. Both propound the notion of a master race, with the implication of legitimised terror towards those who do not belong to it. Yet it is a comparison that our professors seem reluctant to draw.
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Turkism in Practice
By 1910 the Young Turks had overtly abandoned the idea of treating all the peoples of the empire as equals. This was demonstrated by their abandonment of the land question In Turkish Armenia. For decades before the 1908 revolution the Armenians had gradually been losing their lands to Kurds and Turks (and rapidly during the period of 1894–6 massacres), and as a result had become impoverished and been forced to quit their land. In the hey-day of co-operation after the revolution a scheme was devised which would lead to the restoration of some of the stolen lands to Armenians. In reporting that the CUP had abandoned the scheme, the British ambassador, Sir Gerard Lowther, commented in his annual report: 'The Committee prefer that there should be division between races.'60 A few months earlier, Lowther had written (6 September 1910):
That the Committee have given up any idea of Ottomanising all the non-Turkish elements by sympathetic and constitutional ways has long been manifest. To them 'Ottoman' obviously means 'Turk', and their present policy of 'Ottomanisation' is one of pounding the non-Turkish elements in a Turkish mortar. It was hoped that perhaps as they became more firmly seated in the saddle, and effective opposition had disappeared under the state of siege, the Committee would broaden rather than narrow their policy as regards internal administration, but Talaat Bey's utterances seem to make the fulfilment of such hopes more remote.61
In the same year the Armenian schools were subordinated to the Turkish Director of Public Instruction, an infringement of the guaranteed rights of the Armenian patriarchate.62
Towards Military Dictatorship
Until 1911 the Committee of Union and Progress dominated Ottoman politics almost unopposed. But then a split developed within its own ranks, with one faction of the CUP calling itself a 'New Party'. More seriously, a genuine opposition party, the Liberal Union, was formed in November. Within a month of its foundation it had won a by-election in Stambul. The Committee of Union and Progress was alerted to this threat to itself; it dissolved parliament, and in a massively corrupt general election in April 1912 procured on overwhelming majority for itself. Again a group of army officers took to the hills, determined this time to crush the CUP's illegal power. By a careful blend of threats and military manoeuvres in the wild hills of Albania these men, known as the 'Saviour Officers', secured their aim, and compelled the CUP to relinquish power in July 1912.63
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But international developments were to forestall any hopes of a movement towards liberalism and democracy in Ottoman Turkey. Already in 1911 the Italians had invaded Libya, which they gained in the following year. Then in October 1912, only three months after the Saviour Officers had expelled the CUP from office, the hitherto quarrelling Balkan states of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro united and drove the Turks out of Macedonia. Except for the small region of eastern Thrace, 'Turkey-in-Europe' was finished.*
Devoid of legitimate power the Committee used the pretext of national emergency – the government was thought to be about to hand over Edirne to Bulgaria – to stage a violent coup d'état. On 23 January 1913 Enver shot his way to power, by storming the Sublime Porte, killing the minister of war and compelling the grand vizier to resign. A military dictatorship was imposed, and tightened after the murder in June 1913 of the new grand vizier, Mahmud Shevket Pasha. The pattern was now in place for the outbreak of the war.
No Change for Turkish Armenia
In the face of the growth of the narrow and extreme nationalism of the CUP, Armenian disillusion was profound. Despite the Dashnaks' attempt to come to an agreement with the CUP after Adana, by 1912 they had quite broken with them. In the east, Armenians were, after a short spell of hope, suffering again as much from abuses as they had in the day of Abdul Hamid. Here the constitutional revolution was a sham. Two things were quite denied the Armenians: legitimate possession of their own lands and houses, and the impartial maintenance of the law. Denied these, existence, let alone progress, was almost impossible. In the course of his visit to Russian Armenia mentioned above (pp. 79–81), Noel Buxton also visited the Turkish part of the country, where he observed:
We found many Kurd families [migrants from Russian-dominated north-west Persia] installed in an Armenian village, the ejected population being crowded into the remaining houses. Other peasants had been notified to give up their houses, by a fixed date, to Kurds still occupying their summer tents. This was not the usual phenomenon of robbery. It was systematically ordered and carried out by authority – vali, kaimakam, mudir and zaptiye – a far more scandalous matter. It proved to be in force in numbers of other villages.64
* Eight thousand Armenians (who of the Christians 'alone fought well') served loyally with the Ottoman armies – only to be opposed by Armenian volunteers fighting under Andranik with the Balkan armies (George Young, Constantinople (London, 1926), p. 269).
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The Final Reform Scheme
Against this pattern of continuing oppression of Armenians the foreign powers moved towards the idea of another scheme of Armenian reforms for the Ottoman empire. The notion was at last agreeable to Russia, since she was keeping her options open for a decisive move into northern Persia. (Since the Anglo–Russian entente of 1907 Persia had been divided into a Russian 'sphere of influence' in the north and a British one in the south, with a neutral buffer zone in the middle. Armed with this legality, the Russians twice cynically assisted the crushing of the constitutional revolution, in 1905–6 and 1909; in alliance with the British they opposed the reforms of W. Morgan Shuster, and compelled the Parliament to close in 1911.) A quiet and co-operative Armenia – both Russian and Turkish – was essential to Russian designs.65
Reforms were discussed, in the classic nineteenth-century manner, at Constantinople, by the ambassadors of the six powers. The Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia attempted to push them through, but they were obstructed by Germany and Austro-Hungary. Turkish nationalism, for its part, opposed intervention, but in April 1913 the CUP endorsed an idea that British officials might assist the administration of the eastern provinces, at a time when the proposal was seen as a means of arousing Russian suspicion of Britain and breaking the Entente.
Throughout the rest of 1913 the powers showed their endemic fears and jealousies of each other. Like paranoid hysterical lovers, each attempted to thwart and counter-thwart the others. They projected wild and contradictory guesses of the future: Germany, that a reform plan would partition the Ottoman empire; Russia, that a partition would occur if no reforms were introduced.66
Distractedly wandering through thicket and briar, like the unhappy lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, they sought a Puck who would squeeze Love-in-idleness upon the correct eyelids. The magic potion materialised as a reform programme, eventually signed – by representatives of the Russian and Ottoman empires only – on 8 February 1914.67
Here at last, it was felt, was a reform scheme which would work – which had teeth. Temporising and inaction would be things of the past. The six provinces of Turkish Armenia were to be divided into two administrative districts (thereby getting rid of the superfluity of corrupt and incompetent officials that had plagued the region since the accession of Abdul Hamid); each district would be administered by a European inspector-general, who would be appointed by the Turks but approved by the great powers. His job would be to supervise all aspects of administration. Bribery was to be prohibited, justice enforced. Interracial harmony was to be enforced, too. Tax-collecting was to be simplified. Nomadic populations would be settled.68
The two inspectors-general were appointed in April: they were Westenenk, a Dutch colonial administrator, and major Hoff, of the Norwegian army. By the
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summer of 1914 Hoff had reached Van, and Westenenk was about to set off to Erzerum. But the hopes raised by the reform programme were blown apart by the outbreak of the first world war. The scheme was abandoned, and Hoff left for home.
It is interesting, but ultimately pointless, to speculate whether the reform scheme would have survived the militant pan-Turkism of the rulers of the empire if the war had not broken out. It was a gamble: on the face of it no more risky than the reform schemes of the period of Abdul amid. But the possibility of failure was more dangerous, for the Young Turks differed from Abdul Hamid in one vital respect – not that they were more patriotic or nationalistic, but that they were dedicated to an expansionist political philosophy. The sultan had been happy to stonewall, and to play off one self-appointed reformer against another. His 'pan-Islamic' policy beyond the borders of the empire had been merely a creaking contrivance. But the outward aspirations of the CUP were motivated by a militant racist determination, given strength by the secret councils of the politbureau of the CUP. Their provincial administration of the empire was as feeble and malevolent as that of the former times; but the resemblance ended there. The steely eye of the Young Turks was fixed on the land east of Armenia. With men of this chilling outlook the failure of a reform scheme was filled with foreboding.
Note
1. Tekin Alp [Moise Cohen], Türkismus and Pantürkismus (Weimar, 1915), p. 16.
2. FO 424/198, p. 108.
3. Allan Cunningham, 'The Wrong Horse?: a Study of Anglo-Turkish Relations before the First World War' in A. Hourani (ed.), Middle Eastern Affairs no. 4, St Antony's Papers no. 17 (London, 1965), p. 63.
4. FO 424/195, pp. 2–3.
5. Leon Trotsky, 'Andranik i ego otred', Kievskaya Mysl, no. 197 (19 July 1913); to be published soon in New York in a collection translated by Brian Pearce entitled The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars.
6. FO 424/205, p. 182.
7. Ibid., pp. 181–2.
8. See FO 424/203, pp. 147–8.
9. FO 424/210, p. 178; see also FO 424/197, p. 60.
10. Richard G. Hovannisian, 'The Armenian Question in the Ottoman Empire', Armenian Studies (Beirut) [no. 1] (1973), p. 14.
11. Ibid., p. 15.
12. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, 1961), p. 138.
13. Ibid., 339–42.
14. See V. Minorsky, 'Turan' in Encyclopedia of Islam, 1st edn; 'Gasprali', ibid., 2nd edn.
15. CAB 25/42, p. 23.
16. Turkey no. 1 (1909), p. 11.
17. Ibid., p. 44.
18. Great Britain, Foreign Office, British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914, eds. G. P. Gooch and Harold Temperley (London, 1928), vol. V, p. 267 (henceforward 'Britain, Origins of the War').
19. Turkey no. 1 (1909), p. 18
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20. Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks, (Oxford, 1969), p. 145.
21. Philip P. Graves, Briton and Turk (London, 1941), pp. 160–1.
22. Turkey no. 1 (1909), p. 89.
23. FO 424/220, p. 70.
24. FO 424/219, p. 80.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 81.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., p. 82.
30. Ibid., p. 85.
31. Ibid., p. 84.
32. Ibid., pp. 92–3.
33. H. Charles Woods, The Danger Zone of Europe (London, 1911), p. 136.
34. Ibid.
35. FO 424/219, p. 93.
36. Woods, Danger Zone, p. 138.
37. G. F. Abbott, Turkey in Transition (London, 1909), p. 305.
38. Ibid., p. 304.
39. Woods, Danger Zone, pp. 155–7.
40. Ibid., p. 160.
41. Ibid., pp. 160–1.
42. FO 424/219, p. 199; Woods, Danger Zone, pp. 161–2.
43. Woods, Danger Zone, p. 165.
44. FO 424/219, p. 195.
45. Ibid., p. 107.
46. Woods, Danger Zone, pp. 186–7.
47. FO 424/220, p. 70n.
48. FO 424/219, p. 123.
49. Jean Mécérian, S. J., Le génocide du peuple arménien (Beirut), p. 39.
50. FO 371/1017.43063, p. 3.
51. Uriel Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism (London, 1950), pp. 19–21.
52. Ibid., p. 132.
53. Serge A. Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 111.
54. Heyd, Foundations of Turkish Nationalism, p. 127.
55. See map in G. Lewis, trans., The Book of Dede Korkut (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 8.
56. Alp, Türkismus and Pantürkismus, p. 47.
57. FO 371/1262.41648.
58. See Feroz Ahmad, book review in Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (January 1960), p. 102.
59. A. J. Toynbee, Turkey: a Past and a Future (London, 1917), p. 34; also Alp, Türkismus and Pantürkismus, p.33.
60. FO 424/250, p. 39.
61. Quoted in Britain, Origins of the War, vol. IX, part I, p. 207.
62. FO 424/250, p. 39; see also FO 371/1017.46557.
63. Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, pp. 217–19.
64. Noel and Harold Buxton, Travels and Politics in Armenia (London, 1914), p. 117; see also Britain, Origins of the War, vol. X, part I, p. 513.
65. Roderic H. Davison, 'The Armenian Crisis, 1912–1914', American Historical Review, vol. LIII, no. 3 (April 1948), pp. 481–5; see also Britain, Origins of the War, vol. X, part I.
66. Davison, 'The Armenian Crisis', p. 497.
67. Ibid., p. 504.
68. Richard G. Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 39; also FO 424/252, pp. 160–3.
