The Armenians

A People in Exile

David Marshall Lang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032168821
• eBook ISBN: 9781000514698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1981, this book tells the story of the Armenian dispersion and gives a graphic account of the persecution of the Armenians by the Turks from 1895 to 1922 which foreshadowed the Jewish holocaust at the hands of Hitler, who is said to have modelled some of his own ideas on those of the Young Turks. Drawing upon material from little-known sources, this book follows the trail of the Armenians from their native lands around Mount Ararat to such far-flung spots as lhasa, Harbin and Buenos Aires. This lively and readable book is an excellent account of a people who have been partly in exile for some 2, 000 years.

1

The Armenian Holocaust

DOI: 10.4324/9781003250791-1

THE OTTOMAN genocide perpetrated in 1915 against the X Armenian citizens of Turkey was the first systematic attempt in modern times to bring about the complete, deliberate extermination of a nation.¹ The genocide (‘murder of an entire people’) was ingeniously planned and brilliantly and effectively carried out, making the fullest use of terrain, climate and the auxiliary aid of local populations who were jealous of and hostile to the victims.

1 Some people might qualify this statement by citing American policy towards the North American Indians.

The campaign of mass murder was, to a large extent, the practical result of the adoption of an overtly racialist ideology by the Young Turk junta ruling in Turkey during the First World War. The members of this junta, and their racist policy, were much admired by Adolf Hitler, in spite of their final humiliating overthrow. The Führer’s own work in the field of mass extermination, though on a larger scale, was slow and cumbrous when compared with the deadly speed with which the Young Turks pounced on their largely unsuspecting and predominantly loyal Armenian prey.

The execution of the genocide of the Armenians in 1915 was preceded two decades earlier by widespread massacres perpetrated by Sultan ‘Abdul Hamid between 1894 and 1896. These massacres, which aroused the horror of Europe, may be regarded as an overture or perhaps as a dress rehearsal for the ‘final solution’ of 1915.

The Armenian massacres of the late Ottoman period were the result of complicated historical processes. They were precipitated by the events surrounding the collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean. Universally derided as the ‘sick man of Europe’, the Ottoman regime and its ruling class were forced in upon themselves, and obliged to abandon the old multinational system for a narrow and overtly racialist form of state organization. The Armenians and the Greeks, in addition to the Bulgarians and the Arabs, presented themselves as convenient scapegoats – ‘fifth columnists’ – on whom could be blamed inevitable disorders and upheavals which were really the result of centuries of Turkish misrule, tyranny, inefficiency and sheer intolerance.

By the accession of Sultan ‘Abdul Hamid II in 1876, the Armenians and Turks had lived side by side for over eight centuries – if not in harmony, at least with a modicum of mutual forbearance. Although the Armenian, in the eyes of the Turkish Muslim religious and political hierarchy, was a giaour or infidel, and hence a second-class citizen, he occupied a recognized and relatively secure place in Ottoman society. Ottoman Armenians, as members of the Armenian millet, or national community, came under the jurisdiction of the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople. The Patriarch in turn exercised wide powers delegated to him by the Sultan and the Grand Vizier. The Armenians were often referred to by the Ottoman authorities as ‘the loyal Millet’.

This delicate balance of interests was shattered by the intrusion of the European powers, who regarded Ottoman Turkey as an overripe fruit which might fall into their laps at any moment. The decline of Ottoman power in the Balkans and the Black Sea region had gathered pace in the eighteenth century. Tsar Peter the Great (1682–1725) had been fully aware of the simmering discontent among Balkan Slav, Greek, Georgian and Armenian Christians, and did his best to turn this discontent to Russia’s advantage – a policy ably continued later in the century by Empress Catherine the Great. This disaffection was well known to the Ottoman government, whose response was mass repression accompanied by the erection of such gruesome monuments as the Tower of Skulls, at Nish in Yugoslavia, which I visited in 1968.

During the 1820s, two important events contrived to damage community relations within the Ottoman Empire – firstly, the liberation of Greece through the War of Independence; and, secondly, far to the east, the capture of Erevan and Eastern or Persian Armenia by the Russian general Count Paskevich-Erivansky in 1827. Paskevich then advanced into Turkish Armenia and captured Erzerum. Thousands of Armenian families migrated from Turkish Armenia into Russian Armenia, now reconstituted as a province of the Tsarist empire.

Tsar Nicolas I (1825–55) repeatedly asserted his status as supreme protector of Christians within the Ottoman Empire. All this naturally made both the Tsar and his Christian protégés suspect to successive Sultans, and also led directly to the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853.

During the nineteenth century, the Armenians built up two main cultural centres, which also became focuses of national revival in the political sense. These centres were Tbilisi (Tiflis), capital of the Russian viceroyalty of the Caucasus, and the Ottoman capital of Constantinople.¹ An Armenian named Hagop founded the first regular Turkish-language theatre in Constantinople (1870), and the Armenians had their own opera there. Erevan, present-day capital of Soviet Armenia, was an obscure provincial town, and remained so until after the 1917 Russian Revolution.

1 James Etmekjian, The French influence on the Western Armenian Renaissance, 1843–1915 (New York, 1964).

In the Ottoman capital, the Armenians came into increasingly close touch with British, French and other European commercial interests, who employed them as clerks, managers and local agents, thus arousing the envy of the largely illiterate Turkish populace. Western missionaries, including the American Protestants, selected the Armenians as prime targets for their proselytizing activities. After studying in American-supported schools, Armenians began to travel abroad and study in European universities, returning home to suffer acute frustration as second-class citizens in a backward Muslim society.

During the 1860s, two events sowed the seeds of trouble to come. The first of these was the conclusion of the prolonged negotiations for a new constitution of the Armenian Millet (national community), which the Armenians imagined would result in democratic participation in the affairs of this community, hitherto dominated by the venal Constantinople Patriarchate and an oligarchy of amir as or Armenian magnates. The Imperial ‘Regulation of the Armenian National Community’, signed by Sultan ‘Abdul Aziz in 1863, was seen by Turkish officialdom as an attempt to set up a state within a state. It was in fact suspended by Sultan ‘Abdul Hamid II between 1898 and 1906.

The second event leading to friction was the insurrection of the sorely tried Armenian mountaineers of Zeitoun, in the sanjak or province of Marash, in 1862. Suppressed with the utmost vigour by Ottoman troops, this rebellion focused the attention of the European powers on the sufferings of Armenian villagers in remote parts of Anatolia and Cilicia.¹

1 Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963).

A milestone in the development of the ‘Armenian Question’ was the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8. This conflict was sparked off by Turkish massacres perpetrated in Bulgaria in 1876 and vigorously denounced by Gladstone and other Western statesmen. Russian armies advancing through the Balkans and also on the Caucasian front soon brought Ottoman Turkey to its knees, and Russian statesmen dictated to the Sultan’s government a humiliating treaty signed at San Stefano, close to Constantinople, on 3 March 1878.

Armenian interests were fully safeguarded in the San Stefano treaty, which ceded to Russia the areas of Kars, Ardahan and Bayazid. It was stipulated that administrative autonomy should be guaranteed to the provinces of eastern Turkey which were inhabited by Armenians. The implementation of necessary reforms was to be a prior condition for withdrawal of the Russian troops which had occupied a substantial part of eastern Anatolia during the 1877–8 war.

The treaty of San Stefano was rendered abortive and inoperative, largely through pressure applied by the British Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. On the initiative of European powers hostile to Russian dominance of the Balkans and over the Ottoman Empire, a conference was summoned at Berlin, where a definitive treaty was signed on 13 July 1878.²

2 W. N. Medlicott, The Congress of Berlin and After (2nd edn, London, 1963).

The clause of the San Stefano treaty involving Armenian autonomy was drastically modified. The corresponding clause of the Berlin treaty, Article 61, embodied an innocuous and vague undertaking by the Sublime Porte to effect certain reforms in Turkish Armenia after (and not prior to) the withdrawal of Russian troops, and to inform the interested Powers from time to time of the progress of these measures. As a reward for his services to Ottoman interests, which included the realignment of the Russian-Turkish frontier line in Armenia, Disraeli was able to annex Cyprus to the British Crown.

An Armenian delegation from Constantinople visited Berlin and attempted to secure certain guarantees and basic civil rights for the Armenian community inside Turkey. They returned home bitterly disappointed. Indeed, the Armenians had prematurely thrown in their lot with Turkey’s foreign enemies, and thereby compromised themselves fatally with the new Sultan, ‘Abdul Hamid II. The Sultan quite understandably regarded the Armenians’ relations with foreign powers at San Stefano and at Berlin as treasonable. Many Armenians rather credulously regarded Article 61 of the Berlin treaty as a talisman, assuring automatic protection against Ottoman misrule. All this gave rise to endless misunderstanding and rancour. As the years went by, the Western powers became even less inclined to intervene effectively on behalf of the Armenians, inspiring the Duke of Argyll to remark: ‘What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business!’

Documents now available to us indicate that even before 1878 the Ottoman General Staff had already been making contingency plans for the defence of the inner Turkish dominions in Anatolia. The loss of most of the Balkan lands and of areas of eastern Anatolia in 1877–8 meant that Turkey’s armies had to regroup and prepare to defend the central Anatolian heartland. To quote Turkish military reports of the time, the Balkan and Arab lands could be regarded as the limbs of the Ottoman Empire, and might perhaps be amputated without fatal effect. Asia Minor and Anatolia, on the other hand, were the heart and lungs of the body politic, and if they were cut into, the entire organism must perish.¹ Since the Armenians were closely intermingled with the Turkish population of Asia Minor and Anatolia, the prospect of voluntary agreement on regional autonomy for the Armenians was increasingly dim.

1 See M. Krikorian, Armenians in the service of the Ottoman Empire, 1860–1908 (London, 1978), p. 7. Erzerum was singled out as hub of the military defence of eastern Turkey, to be held at all costs.

During the 1880s, the Armenian community in Turkey nevertheless took a rosy view of their prospects, as ‘guaranteed’ by Article 61 of the 1878 Berlin treaty. The Constantinople intellectuals made grandiose plans for the future of the ‘nation’, as satirized in Baronian’s mordant short novel, Honourable Beggars.² Had Sultan ‘Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909) made some statesmanlike move towards resolving the Armenian question, he would have enjoyed the overwhelming support of the Ottoman Armenian community at large.

2 Trans. M. Kudian (London, 1978).

Sultan ‘Abdul Hamid II was a master of diplomacy, intrigue and repression. He suspended the 1876 Constitution after only two years’ trial, and built up a formidable secret police. Although his mother is supposed to have been an Armenian lady, the Sultan himself detested Armenians. He encouraged Kurdish tribesmen from the south to move into traditional Armenian rural areas of the six Armenian vilayets or provinces of eastern Turkey. These Kurds billeted themselves on Armenian families and committed all kinds of vandalism and outrage, aggravating the state of anarchy and oppression long endemic in eastern Anatolia. Armenians began to quit their native villages. They moved into Russian Armenia, also into the supposed security of Turkish towns and cities, as well as migrating abroad.

Largely in self-defence, the-Turkish Armenians set up several political groups and secret societies, notably the Armenakans (1885), the social-democratic Hunchaks (1887}, and the more militant Dashnaks (1890) – the latter having their original headquarters outside Turkey, in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia and centre of the Russian Causasian viceroyalty. (Some Armenian political extremists regarded Tsarist Russia as an obstacle to national advancement.)

Sultan ‘Abdul Hamid’s response was to organize the Kurdish tribesmen into the so-called Hamidiye cavalry regiments, which terrorized the civil population of eastern Turkey in the same way as the Cossacks did in Russia immediately before the 1917 Revolution. Such was the audacity of these Kurdish irregular units that they even assaulted British consular officers who were supposed to supervise the implementation of the Berlin treaty as it affected Armenia.¹

1 Sir Robert Windham Graves, Storm Centres of the Near East (London, 1933), pp. 113–14.

During this period, a distinctive Armenian community life evolved and flourished for a time in the vilayet or province of Mamuret ul-Aziz (Elazig) and in the adjoining sanjak of Marash, both situated directly between Cilicia and historical Great Armenia. Among the main centres of Armenian settlement were the cities of Kharput, Mezré, Malatya, Arapkir and Hozat, and also Marash itself. Foreign missionaries spread education and encouraged Armenian self-confidence. Even under Sultan ‘Abdul Hamid, Armenians played a significant part in local administration, medicine, finance and engineering.

Armenians and Turks lived ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Preface Page
• Contents Page
• Maps Page
• 1 The Armenian Holocaust
• 2 False Hopes
• 3 Abomination of Desolation
• 4 Land and People: Historical Introduction
• 5 Between Byzantium and Islam
• 6 The Crusades and Links with France
• 7 Towards the Orient: 1 – Palestine, Persia, Central Asia and Beyond
• 8 Towards the Orient: 2 – Armenians in India and South-East Asia
• 9 Eastern Europe and the Russian Connection
• 10 Armenians in the New World
• 11 Armenian Cooking
• 12 As Others See Us: the Armenian Image in Literature
• 13 The Armenians and the Occult
• 14 Armenians and the Arts World-wide
• Select Bibliography
• Index