The Thirty-Year Genocide
Page 4
and had no wish to see the Ottoman Empire dismantled. Britain and Germany
sought to preserve the balance of power and avert a new pan- European war.
They were therefore loath to get involved with Rus sia’s adventure, which
could lead to widening conflict and weaken their own positions. But as the
Rus sians closed in on Constantinople and the Straits, Eu ro pean leaders took
fright and successfully forced the Rus sians and Turks to accept a ceasefire.
When that broke down, a Rus sian fleet descended on the Bosporus for what
could have been the death blow. Fi nally a British squadron made for the Dar-
danelles. The threat persuaded the Rus sians to halt at San Stefano (Yeşilköy),
a village near Constantinople, where they and the Turks signed the treaty that
ended the war on March 3, 1878.
The Ottomans paid a steep price. They were forced to cede most of
their Balkan possessions. Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro were declared
Abdülhamid
II
in de pen dent; Bosnia and Herzegovina were to enjoy greater autonomy
under Austro- Hungarian tutelage; and the Bulgarians were awarded an en-
larged, autonomous principality. Rus sia entrenched itself in eastern Anatolia
and the southern Caucasus, establishing an official presence in Kars, Batumi,
and other key sites.
Some Ottoman Armenians, alienated by Abdülhamid’s increasingly re-
pressive rule, hoped to make permanent the Rus sian occupation in eastern
Anatolia. During the San Stefano negotiations, the Armenian patriarch in
Constantinople attempted to turn these hopes into real ity. In a secret note
sent via the exilarch, the spiritual head of the Armenian Church at Etchmi-
adzin, he asked the tsar to hold on to the parts of Anatolia captured in the war.
The patriarch also sought Rus sian protection in case the treaty allowed the
Ottomans to retain power over Armenians and asked the Rus sians to ensure
that Armenians would receive the same rights as those granted the Balkan
peoples. Rus sia, the patriarch urged, should insist on supervisory powers and
Armenian security against the marauding Circassian and Kurdish tribes of
the eastern provinces.4 The patriarch didn’t get every thing he wanted, but
Clause 16 of the treaty provided for substantive reforms in the Armenian-
inhabited areas, including a larger mea sure of autonomy, repre sen ta tion in
provincial governance, and security guarantees.5
The treaty almost immediately became a dead letter. Wary of growing
Rus sian influence in the Balkans and eastern Anatolia, the great powers scut-
tled the accord a few months after it was signed. In Berlin in 1878, British
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
agreed on a new settlement, favoring the Ottomans. Macedonia and eastern
Thrace were returned, the size of the Bulgarian autonomous zone was re-
duced, and the Straits were left in Turkish hands, albeit with assurance of
unhampered passage for international shipping.
But the Treaty of Berlin failed to mollify the Ottoman leadership or foster
reconciliation inside the ethnically diverse empire. Indeed, the effect was the
opposite. By preserving a considerable degree of Ottoman rule over the Chris-
tian minorities, while also offering those minorities some protections, the out-
side powers merely reinforced the divisive status quo. The treaty left the
Greek situation ambiguous: Greece was awarded Thessaly and parts of Epirus,
but Crete and some Greek- speaking regions north of Greece remained under
Nationalist Awakenings
Ottoman control, ensuring continued tension and grievances among the
Ottoman Greek minority.
The Ottomans also had misgivings about the treaty’s handling of the Ar-
menians. Article 61, using a common diplomatic term for the Ottoman gov-
ernment, stated:
The Sublime Porte undertakes to carry out, without further delay, the
improvements and reforms . . . in the provinces inhabited by Armenians,
and to guarantee their security against the Circassians and Kurds. It will
periodically make known the steps taken to this effect to the Powers, who
will superintend their application.6
Although San Stefano had also included reforms, it had said nothing about
external supervision.7 The Turkish governing elite saw Article 61 as a pre-
lude to Armenian in de pen dence, abetted by foreign powers.
Even before Berlin the Turks had regarded “their” Christians with suspi-
cion, which the patriarch’s outreach to Rus sia only confirmed. After Berlin
suspicion turned to near- certainty; non- Muslim communities were pegged as
traitors collaborating with outside powers to dismember the empire. The cost
of keeping Rus sia at bay was to elevate Ottoman fears of Christian fifth col-
umnists and thereby further isolate and endanger the minorities whose plight
had so angered Eu ro pean people and governments.
Over the course of the next fifteen years or so, Eu ro pean ambassadors
busied themselves devising mechanisms for reform. They insisted on fair treat-
ment and guarantees of security for Armenians and to some extent for
Greeks. But Constantinople was never on board and sought to derail the pro-
cess, leading to further persecution of minorities who eventually radicalized
in response. It was the growing Armenian nationalist ferment that the govern-
ment sought to crush in 1894.
But it was not Article 61 alone that drove Ottoman anx i eties. The ten-
sion between the empire’s Muslim majority and Christian minorities
had been rising for de cades. To understand what led the outside powers to
advocate Ottoman reform and, ultimately, to the first major outbreak of
anti- Christian vio lence, we need to go back to the first half of the nineteenth
century and trace the changing status of the empire’s non- Muslim minorities.
Abdülhamid
II
Such understanding begins with the recognition that Anatolia’s Christian
groups were not monolithic; while urban communities flourished for much
of the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries, their rural coreligionists suffered
both Ottoman attention and neglect. Where there was government, it often
behaved harshly. Where there wasn’t— for the farther reaches of the vast em-
pire were virtually impossible to control— Kurds, Turkmen, Circassians, and
other non- Turkish Muslim tribes filled the void with tacit state approval. They
tended to rule for the benefit of their own, with little regard for the welfare of Christian minorities. Sometimes local warlords operated in parallel with the
state, piling on additional taxes and supplementing the discriminatory Ottoman
justice system with their own mistreatment. While outside influence and
foreign events inspired the first stirrings of Greek and Armenian nationalism
among prosperous city- dwellers, it was to great extent the plight of rural
groups—
especially Armenians—
that precipitated the growing sense of
ethnic unity among the Christian communities.
This complication— acknowledging the distinctive experiences of urban
and rural communities, and their coproduction of nation
alism— defies con-
ventional historiography. Typically, historians propagate two narratives about
the de cades leading to the explosion of 1894–1896.8 One, crudely referred
to as the Armenian narrative, describes a worsening saga of Ottoman oppres-
sion directed against Armenian and Greek subjects. The other, equally crudely
described as the Turkish narrative, tells the story of an enlightened and gen-
erous Ottoman state falling prey to nefarious outside imperialist forces
conspiring with perfidious Christian minorities. Each account is biased and
po liti cally driven. Each breaks along national- ethnic lines. And each relies
on verifiable historical sources. The two narratives are so far apart that they
seem irreconcilable.
We suggest that both are true—or, more precisely, that solid evidence can
be found to buttress both. The real story is one of urban- rural bifurcation,
which, amid the peasants’ distress, was eventually resolved in the form of emer-
gent proto- national communities. It was these that the Ottoman state found
so threatening.
Nationalist Awakenings
The Rise of the Urban Armenian and Greek Communities
For the major urban Armenian communities of western Anatolia and the
Balkans—in Constantinople, Edirne, Smyrna (Izmir), Bursa, and elsewhere— the
nineteenth century, until the retrenchment of the late 1870s, was largely a time of pro gress, prosperity, and growing autonomy. In par tic u lar, the second half
of the nineteenth century saw a significant increase in commerce with Eu rope
and a concomitant growth of coastal cities such as Smyrna, where Greek com-
munities benefited disproportionately. Greek merchants also had consider-
able success along the Black Sea littoral. Most trade with Eu rope and in the
interior of Asia Minor was in the hands of Greeks and Armenians. And both
groups were prominent in industry, such as goldsmithing, textile production,
mining, and shipping. Armenians dominated Bursa’s silk manufacture.9
Indeed, urban religious minorities had long held impor tant economic roles
in the empire. In the eigh teenth century, the great majority of bankers who
provided loans to Turkish grandees seeking office were Armenian. These
bankers, who became the richest in Eu rope, also lent to local potentates who
leased tax farms (iltizam) from the government and other wealthy individuals and guaranteed the loans. Jews and Greeks had previously dominated this
field.10 Armenians were further valuable as dragomans, interpreters offering
linguistic and cultural guidance. They worked in the newly opened embas-
sies in the fash ion able Constantinople quarter of Pera or as local representa-
tives of commercial enterprises, such as the British Levant Com pany and its
French, Dutch, and Italian rivals.11 Some Armenians prospered by branching
out westward: “By the middle of the nineteenth century there were over thirty
Armenian commercial firms in London and Manchester with their headquar-
ters located either in Smyrna or Constantinople.”12 Armenians and Greeks
also figured significantly in the modern professions. The Armenian Balyan
family, for example, provided the palace with its architects.13 Other Ottoman
minorities rose to prominence as royal financial advisors. Many of these pro-
fessionals were trained abroad, in Eu ro pean universities.
Prosperity earned minorities invitations to join the Ottoman elite. Well-
to-do Armenian families were known as amiras, from “emir.” The title,
initially conferred by the palace only on notables in the sultan’s ser vice, came
to designate all Armenian grandees.14 For their part, several Greek- Orthodox
Abdülhamid
II
families traditionally residing in the Phanar quarter of Constantinople, and
hence known as Phanariotes ( Fenerliler, in Turkish), held some of the most influential positions in the empire, including as prince- governors (hospodars)
of Wallachia and Moldavia. Greeks had the honor of serving as dragomans of
the palace and the imperial navy. However, most of these privileged positions
were rescinded after the Greek mainland revolted against Ottoman rule in
1821, a pro cess that culminated in Greek in de pen dence in 1830.15
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, urban minority communities
were well or ga nized and enjoyed a degree of control over their affairs. The
major urban Armenian communities were divided into three groups: a
religious- clerical hierarchy headed by the patriarch, a notability, and the mass
of cityfolk, most of whom were associated with professional guilds known as
esnafs. 16 While some of the esnafs were ethnically mixed, others, such as the silversmiths, coppersmiths, grocers, and shoe makers, were entirely Greek or
Armenian.17 Though not as rich or power ful as the amiras, the heads of suc-
cessful esnafs wielded considerable influence. Some guilds accumulated large
fortunes, which they used to fund the needs of their communities, such as
paying taxes on residents’ behalf. Such charity assured guilds sway in the day-
to- day running of their respective millets, the empire’s non- Muslim confes-sional communities.
Each millet— the main ones being Armenian, Greek Orthodox, and
Jewish— was governed by the laws of the dhimma. While the patriarchs, chief rabbi, and their organ izations possessed some lawful authority, their communities also had to demonstrate obedience to Muslim rule by fulfilling a series
of obligations such as paying additional taxes and observing limitations on
the construction of churches and synagogues. But marriage, divorce, certain
internal disputes, and matters pertaining to religious law were dealt with
inside the millet. Each had its own courts with the power to enforce verdicts,
including imprisonment and corporal punishment. The mid- nineteenth
century Tanzimat reforms— legal changes introduced by Constantinople to
modernize the country and relieve pressure from Eu ro pean powers—
annulled many of the dhimma laws but essentially left the millet system in
place.18 Minorities were thus granted civil rights that put them almost on a
par with their Muslim peers, while retaining a large mea sure of religious and
lay autonomy.
Nationalist Awakenings
Turkish, Rus sian, Greek, and Jewish boys in Constantinople. The non-Muslim
communities of the Ottoman Empire enjoyed relative toleration for centuries, but
tensions grew at the end of the 1800s.
In the early nineteenth century, urban Armenians— traditionally “the most
pacific of all the ethnic ele ments in the empire”— were already doing well and
were clearly on an upward trajectory.19 Greeks and Jews were, too. The size
of these minorities is unclear: Constantinople periodically conducted surveys
and published estimates, which downplayed the number of non- Muslims; the
Armenian and Greek patriarchates, usually with still greater distortion, exag-
gerated Christian numbers. But what demographic information exists suggests
that, by late century, Christians constituted a significant minority. An 1880
survey prepared by the Armenian Patriarchate found that in the six eastern
vilayets of Anatolia alone there were 1,561,600 Armenians, outnumbering
the 1,054,800 Musl
ims.20 These were largely rural regions, but the size-
able number of eastern Armenians was an impor tant basis for their urban
brethren’s claims to special status. One scholar has estimated that the Ottoman
Empire had a population of 38,500,000 in 1876, of which 35 percent were
Turks, 6.5 percent Armenians, and 5.5 percent Greeks.21 But in Anatolia, the
proportion of Armenians and Greeks was greater. In 1897, after the massacres
Abdülhamid
II
of 1894–1896, the Ottoman authorities, who traditionally under- counted
the number of Christians, assessed that there were more than a million
Greeks and about 1.1 million Armenians in Anatolia, compared with just
over 10 million Turks.22 There were also more than 600,000 Assyrian Chris-
tians in the areas of the Ottoman Empire and western Persia, exclusive of
Greater Syria, before World War I. Most were rural peasants.23
Rural Decline
As urban non- Muslim communities in western Anatolia and the Balkans were
growing stronger eco nom ically and po liti cally, their rural counter parts faced increasing hardship. In part this was a product of Constantinople’s limited
reach. In eastern Anatolia, outside the major towns, central- government con-
trol was mostly nominal. The countryside was dominated by shifting groups
of local notables, insurgents, semi- nomadic Kurdish and Turkmen tribes,
and the occasional governor sent from the capital who might “go native” and
disregard Constantinople’s “instructions” on guidelines.
Po liti cal authority was mea sured mainly by the ability to collect taxes and,
relatedly, extort money from the populace. Peasants often ignored government
demands, instead paying taxes—in cash or kind—to local warlords and fac-
tions. In the areas of Armenian inhabitation, taxes were collected by tribal
leaders, ex- governors and army officers who had martial retinues, and other
potentates. The experience of rural Turkish, Arab, and Greek communities
was much like that of the Armenian peasants: all were fleeced by local big-
shots. The absence of central authority was felt everywhere, and the result was
a gradual weakening of rural society. Ironically, it was these taxes, often forc-
ibly collected from impoverished peasants, which enriched many Armenian