Background on the Hamidian Massacres of the 1890's

[Joseph]

Hamidian Massacres


During the long reign of Sultan Hamid, unrest and rebellion occurred in many areas of the Ottoman Empire. One of the most serious of these incidents occurred in some Armenian populated parts of Anatolia. The Ottoman reaction to the unrest was to crush the dissidents with brutal force, just as they had crushed revolts in the past. However, this occurred in the 1890s, at a time when the telegraph could spread news around the world and when the Christian European powers were vastly more powerful than the weakening Ottoman state.

The origin of Armenian unrest can be traced, in large part, to the success of Imperial Russia in the Russo-Turkish War, 1877-78. At the end of the war, based on the Treaty of San Stefano the Ottoman government had to give away a large part of territory (including the cities of Kars) and Batumi to the Russians. The Russian government claimed they were the supporters of the belegured Christian communities within the Ottoman Empire and clearly, the Russians could now beat the Ottomans. The Treaty of Berlin - which reduced the magnitude of Russia's gains on the other side of the Black Sea - stated that the Ottoman government had to give legal protection to the Christian Armenians, but in the real world, the treaty's protections were not implemented.

The combination of Russian military success, clear weakening of Ottoman power, and hope that one day all of the Armenian territory might be ruled by Russia lead to a new restiveness on the part of the Armenians still living inside the Ottoman Empire. Added to this was the fact that the Ottomans never applied justice evenly in disputes between Christians and Moslems (Dhimmitude).

Starting around 1890 the Armenians began clamoring to obtain the protections promised them at Berlin. Unrest occurred in 1892 at Marsovan and in 1893 at Tokat. A near revolt occurred in the Sassoun Mountains of Bitlis Province. Armenian peasants refused to pay the Kurdish incremental taxes, a double taxation system imposed on the Armenians by Kurdish chieftains. In 1892, the governor of the Mus district in Bitlis Province encouraged Armenian resistance claiming that the Armenians: 'Couldn't serve two masters at the same time.'

In response to the resistance in Sassoun, the Turkish governor of Mu? responded by inciting the local Muslims against the Armenians. The Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, sent the Ottoman army into the area and also armed groups of Kurdish insurrectionists. The historian Osman Nuri, in the second volume of his three-volume biography of Abdul Hamid, accused Sultans military contingent of 'torching and killing many people.' Many Armenian populated areas were affected.

On August 26, 1896, a group of Armenian revolutionaries raided the headquarters of the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul. Guards were shot and more than 140 staff members were taken hostage - all in an attempt to gain international attention for the plight of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.


In response, tens of thousands of Armenians were massacred, both in Istanbul and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. Abdul Hamid's Private First Secretary wrote in his memoirs about Abdul Hamid that he 'decided to pursue a policy of severity and terror against the Armenians, and in order to succeed in this respect he elected the method of dealing them an economic blow ... he ordered they absolutely avoid negotiating or discussing anything with the Armenians and to inflict upon them a decisive strike to settle scores.'

The killings occurred from 1895 until 1897. In that last year, Sultan Hamid declared that the Armenian question was closed. All the Armenian revolutionaries had either been killed, or had escaped to Russia. The Ottoman government closed Armenian societies and restricted Armenian political movements.


Death Toll

Most estimates of number of victims run from 80,000 to 300,000.
The British ethnographer William Ramsay, who visited the Ottoman empire for his own studies, estimated that from 1894 to 1897, 200,000 Armenians were killed.
Armenophile Johannes Lepsius estimated more than 89,000 dead.
The German government estimated that up to December 20, 1895, 80,000 Armenians were killed.
The British Ambassador White, based on the data submitted to him by British consuls, estimated that up to early December 1895, 100,000 Armenians were killed.
The German author, E. Jackh (a German Foreign ministry operative and Turkophile) estimated that 200,000 Armenians were killed, 50,000 expelled and one million pillaged.
The most complete figures covering the entire era from 1894 to 1897 were probably provided by the French historian, Pierre Renouvin, the President of the Commission in charge of assembling and classifying French diplomatic documents. In a volume based on authenticated documents, he stated that 250,000 Armenians were killed.
Armenian estimates run from 250,000 dead to as high as 350,000 dead.
Turkish estimates run from 20,000 to 30,000 killed.
These events are recalled by the Armenians as the "Great Massacres". The Armenians believed the Hamidian measures proved the capacity of the Turkish state to carry out a systematic policy of murder and plunder against a minority population. The formation of Armenian revolutionary groups began roughly around the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1878 and intensified with the first introduction of Article 166 of the Ottoman Penal code 166, and the raid of Erzerum Cathedral. Article 166 was meant to control the possession of arms, but it was used to target Armenians by restricting them to possess arms. Local Kurdish tribes were armed to attack the defenseless Armenian population. Some diplomats believed that the aim of these groups was to commit massacres so as to incite counter-measures, and to invite "foreign powers to intervene," as Istanbul's British Ambassador Sir Philip Currie observed in March 1894. Even some Turkish authors admit the existence of those revolutionaries was just a pretext for the massacres.
These mass killings clearly were a first step towards the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917.

[Joseph]

The Ottoman Centuries by Lord Kinross
pg. 557
When the Armenians Refused to submit to this double taxation, Turkish troops were called into the area, in close concert with the Kurdish tribesman. Soon they were indiscriminately slaughtering the helpless Armenians. The soldiers pursued them throughout the length and breathed of the region, hunting them "like wild beasts" up the valleys and into the mountains, respecting no surrender, bayoneting the men to death, raping the woman, dashing their children against rocks, burning to ashes the villages from which the had fled. For this operation the Turkish commander, Zeki Pasha, was awarded an appropriate gratuity by the sultan...

Meanwhile, the Armenians themselves, led by the Hunchaks staged a demonstration as they marched through the city of Istanbul to present a petition to the Porte. Voicing their protest and demanding for reform....the demonstration got out of hand when one of them (from Sassun) shouted "liberty or death!" The cry was taken up by the rest, breaking into a revolutionary song and provoking internvention by the police, who bludgeoned many of them to death on the spot. Meanwhile, the fanatical Moslem elements, without police intervention, ran wild through the streets, rooting out Armenians and slaughtering them with clubs...

pg. 558
This heralded throughout eastern Turkey a series of organized massacres, coinciding with the Sultan pretending acceptence of a new plan from the powers for Armenian reform. A telltale feature of them began and ended, as a matter of routine, with a bugle call, like any planned military operation....Their tactics were based on the sultans principle of kindling religious fanaticism among the Moslem population. Abdul Hamids briefed agents, whom he sent to Armenia with specific instructions as to how they should act. It became their normal routine first to assemble the Moslem population in the largest mosque in a town, then to declare in the name of the sultan, that the Armenians were in general revolt with the aim of striking at Islam. Their sultan enjoined them as good Moslems to defend their faith against these infidel rebels. He propounded the precept that under the holy law the property of rebels might be looted by believers, encouraging Moslems to enrich themselves in the name of their faith at the expense of their Christian neighbours, and in the event of resisitance, to kill them. Hence, throughout Armenia "the attack of an ever increasing pack of wolves against sheeps"...

the Ottoman bank raid:

In August, 1896, the succesion of Armenian massacre culminated in Istanbul itself. Once again, as in the previous year, the Turkish authorities were presented with a pretext for action by an Armenian revolutionary group. A small body of Dashnaks was so bold as to enter the Ottoman Bank, the stronghold of European capitalists eneterprise, during lunch hour, for the ostensible purpose of changing money. Porters accompanying them carried sacks which contained, so they pretended, gold and silver coinage. Then at the blast of a while twenty-five armed men followed the into the bank, firing their guns and revealing that the sacks in fact were filled with bombs, ammunition, and dynamite. They declared that they were not bank robbers but Armenian patriots, and that the motive of their action was to bring their grievances, which they specified in two documents, to the attention of the six European embassies, putting forward demands for political reform and declaring that, in that absence of foreign intervention with in forty eight hours, they would "shrink from the sacrafice" and blow up the bank.
Meanwhile, its chief director, Sir Edgar Vincent, had prudently escaped through a skylight into an adjoining building. While his colleagues were held hostages, he hence proceeded to Sublime Porte. He she ensured that no police attack should be made on the Dashnaks while they remained in the bank. Thus he secured for them permission to nagotiate. The negotiation was the first dragoman of the Russian embassy, who after gaining for them a free pardon from the sultan a permission to leave the country, addressed them at lenght with some eloquensce. Finally, with assurance of talks to come, he persuaded them to leave the bank. Retaining their arms but relinguishing their bombs, they proceeded quietly on board Sir Edgars Vincents yacht, later to be conveyed into exile in France. As young men of (their leader was 17 years old) ideals inexperienced in the wiles of political agitation, they had failed to benefit their friends and played in the hands of their enemies. For two days the streets ran with blood as gangs of undisciplined ruffians, religious fanatics, and savage irregulars raged through the Armenian quarter of the capital, brandishing murderous cudgals and knives and iron bars. With out interference from the police or the soldiery, and indeed with their evident connivance and help, they bludgoaned to death every Armenian who crossed their path, breaking into houses to kill all that hid there, and leaving strewn everywhere, a total of some six thousand corpses.

The Ottoman Centuries by Lord kinross

[Gavur]

Good book to read