IXTHE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS OF 1915ENVER AND THE ARMENIAN PATRIARCH—WHERE THE ARMENIANS LIVED—AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND THE ARMENIANS—RUSSIA AND THE ARMENIANS—GREAT BRITAIN JOINS RUSSIA IN THE 1907 TREATY—ENVER’S DEMAND FOR BRITISH ADMINISTRATORS IN THE EASTERN PROVINCES—THE WAR AND THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS.Whenthe Enver Government entered the war, Enver Pasha himself warned the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople against any attempt to turn the war to Armenian advantage. This contact introduces us into the most intimate of Ottoman relationships and one which can not be adequately surveyed unless we divest our minds of the Capitulations and of that attitude toward the Ottoman Government to which they gave birth.In themselves, the Capitulations dated back to pre-Ottoman days when foreigners were accustomed to being governed under their own laws and usages wherever they happened to live. In the golden days of the Ottoman Empire, the Sultans confirmed them and as Ottoman prestige declined, an increasing number of Capitulatory rights grew up outside the specific rights originally stipulated in the imperialfirmans. In general, it may be said of them that they conferred a diplomatic status on all Westerners in the Empire, attaching them to their own Consulates instead of to the Ottoman Government in whose country they lived. They were abrogated by the Enver Government on Sept. 28, 1914, in a unilateral declaration which the Central Powers were not in a position to prevent and against which the Allied Powers could only register their protests.But the Capitulations were more than merely a legal process. They constituted a mental attitude toward the Ottoman Government. They made it the Western habit to disregard that Government and to establish Western contacts with its subjects quite independently of the fixed and existing relationships of the country. Under the Capitulations, the West long ago established contact with the Ottoman Government’s Christian subjects and a code of governmental conduct was unwittingly built up which the West has applied to that Government alone. Under this code, any Ottoman Christian was given the right to rebel against the Government but the Government, although it was the only body charged with the maintenance of peace in the country, was denied the right to put down Christian rebellion. This code the West has applied to no other Government. Orthodox Russia has repeatedly stamped out Moslem rebellion in Central Asia with as great brutality as the Ottoman Government has ever used against its Christians, but the code which the West has applied to the Ottoman Government it has never applied to Russia. The West has never acquired the habit of disregarding the Russian Government in the country in which it was charged with the duty of administration. Russia is a modern growth which has never known Capitulations.If it is possible for us to divest our minds of the last vestige of the Capitulations, to apply to the Ottoman Government precisely the same code of governmental conduct which it has been our custom to apply to the Eastern absolutism of Old Russia, the relationship of the Ottoman Government to its Armenians may be profitably examined.The Armenian population before the late war consisted of about 1,500,000 in the Ottoman Empire, about 1,000,000 in the Russian Empire, about 150,000 in Persia and about 250,000 in Egypt, Europe and the United States. Although small colonies of them were to be found in all parts of the Ottoman Empire, the bulk of them lived in the eastern provinces, a mountainous tableland on which, with their Turkish neighbors, they formed a sedentary peasantry among a nomadic population of Kurds.In none of these eastern provinces did they constitute a majority of the population and in this respect they differed sharply from the Greeks and Bulgarians of the old Balkan provinces. This was not due to the Ottoman conquest, for the last of the independent Kingdom of Armenia Major had disappeared in the Seljuk invasion of 1079, and the Egyptians put an end to Armenia Minor in Cilicia in 1375. It was not until 1514 that the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, in his campaign against the Persians, occupied the modern eastern provinces and brought their tangled populations into the Ottoman Empire. In accordance with the tolerance which distinguished the great Sultans, the Gregorian Church to which the Armenians belonged, was made a recognized community in full enjoyment of its ecclesiastical and cultural liberty. Unlike Greeks and Bulgarians in Europe who did possess majorities and who consequently had within themselves all the elements of nationhood, the Armenians enjoyed in their community institutions the only degree of autonomy which they could have enjoyed. It was comparatively easy for Greeks and Bulgarians, once Western ideas of nationalism had reached them, to enlarge the autonomy of their own community institutions into territorial independence, but any attempt to transfer Armenian autonomy from a religious to a territorial basis was quite another matter. The population of the modern eastern provinces was such that a resuscitation of the old Armenian Kingdom was impossible and it would have remained impossible until some means had been discovered of re-writing ten centuries of history.That the Armenians were grossly maladministered by the modern Sultans in Constantinople, there can be no manner of doubt. And so were their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors. It was in this very maladministration that the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire lay, and that problem was a Turkish problem as well as an Armenian problem. The Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 was an honest attempt to solve it by reviving the Constitution and decentralizing the Government, but in the hands of the Committee of Union and Progress the Revolution swiftly broke down and the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire remained unsolved.American missionaries established contact with the Armenian minorities nearly a century ago, and began drawing out of the Gregorian Church a number of converts to Protestantism. These converts were so bitterly persecuted by the Gregorian clergy that the Sultan finally recognized them, some time in the 1850’s, as a separateProdesdancommunity in enjoyment of the right to worship as they pleased. Continued Gregorian persecution threw them increasingly into the arms of the missionaries who became a means by which Americans in the United States were drawn into touch with the newProdesdancommunity in the Ottoman Empire. It was inevitable that this touch should bring the Armenians into contact with American civil as well as religious ideas, with the Western civilization which American Protestantism embodies, and that the very real and undoubted wrongs which the Armenians were suffering under Hamidian administration should become known in the United States. This was in itself an entirely healthy process, but its tragedy lay in the fact that the missionaries either could not or would not make it plain to their supporters in the United States that the Turks suffered from precisely the same wrongs. Thus instead of bringing all the races of the Empire impartially into the American vision, instead of making it plain in the United States that the Hamidianregimein Constantinople was the oppressor and that Turks and Armenians alike were its victims, the result of American missionary endeavor was to focus American concern on the Armenians’ sufferings alone.Illustration: Charles HaringtonLIEUT.-GEN. SIR CHARLES A. HARINGTON,G. B. E., K. C. B., D. S. O.Allied Commander-in-Chief at Constantinople until its evacuation in September and October, 1923.Illustration: ISMET PASHAGENERAL ISMET PASHACommander of the Western (Smyrna) Front until the re-capture of Smyrna in September, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Mudania Armistice, October, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, July, 1923; Minister of Foreign affairs of the Second Grand National Assembly.In the meantime, Russia had achieved a contact with the Armenians of a wholly different sort. Having broken through the barrier of the Caucasus Range and established its provincial administrations in Trans-Caucasia, Russia had transferred large numbers of Armenians from Ottoman to Russian sovereignty, had stripped them of the autonomy of their community institutions and had kept them in order with an iron hand. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1876, its Armies had halted their march toward Alexandretta at Kars whence they overlooked the Ottoman Armenians in the eastern provinces. The Treaty of San Stefano which closed the War of 1876 was quashed and in the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, Russian provision for reforms to be applied to the Armenians was agreed to by all the signatory Powers. In the Cyprus Convention of 1876, however, Great Britain had bound itself to maintain the Sultan’s realm against Russia, and the eastern provinces, now the most difficult and the most important provinces in the outer Empire, became the theatre of directly opposed British and Russian policies. But Russia, despite its resentment at the loss of the San Stefano Treaty, had won at Berlin. The Armenian clauses in the Berlin Treaty reinforced the Armenian disposition to secure redress of their wrongs independently of their Turkish neighbors who were equal sufferers with them under the Hamidianregime. This tendency presently found further reinforcement in the Nihilist movement which developed in Russia after the Russo-Turkish War. The persecuted Armenians of Russian Trans-Caucasia joined the Nihilist movement, but their headquarters at Tiflis were stamped out by the Czar’s police and the Armenian revolutionists fled to Switzerland, Paris, London and New York.Relations between Turks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had thus far been generally peaceful. They both suffered alike under the Government at Constantinople and even when Westernism was alienating the Bulgarians in Europe, the Armenians in the eastern provinces were still “the loyal community.” But the Armenian revolutionists in the West, instead of confining their work to Russian Trans-Caucasia, sought to raise funds in the Ottoman Empire as well, and the ancient Turco-Armenian relationship began to be poisoned. Armenian committees succeeded in giving the Turks the impression that “the loyal community” was no longer loyal, and Abdul Hamid replied in the savage massacres of 1894 and 1896. For this business the West rightly fastened the blame upon “Abdul the Damned,” and the Turkish people whose patience sometimes reaches the proportions of a grievous handicap, were generally exempted from blame.In 1907, the eastern provinces became the scene of an about-face in Anglo-Russian relations. Under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of that year, the two Powers effected an immediate partition of Persia and envisaged a future partition of the Ottoman Empire in which the eastern provinces would go to Russia and Mesopotamia would go to Great Britain. This would have admitted Russia to a military position whence it could have threatened both the Syrian corridor to Egypt and Mesopotamia itself, but presumably the British belief which prompted the 1907 Treaty was that, if Old Russia had made life well-nigh impossible for the British in Asia, Liberal Russia which was believed to have been born in the 1905 Revolution, would prove a neighbor with whom it was possible to live on friendly terms in Asia. So Russian annexation of the eastern provinces became the common program of Great Britain and Russia alike, and from that date Russia adopted a policy so liberal toward its Armenians in Trans-Caucasia that a small Russian annexationist group soon appeared among the Armenians in the eastern provinces. The fact must be emphasized that there has never been any Russian population in these provinces and that the Armenians constituted Russia’s only ground for intervention and eventual annexation.The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 was quickly followed by the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. Turks and Armenians alike rejoiced at the downfall of the Hamidianregime. An Armenianblocwas formed in the new Parliament and the Committee of Union and Progress entered into apparently amicable relations with it. The bulk of Armenian opinion in the Empire seemed to be willing to work the revived Constitution and to begin, in common with its Turkish neighbors, the reforms of which all the Ottoman races stood in the direst need. But the Armenian revolutionaries in the West had already planted independence committees in the Empire and drilled them in thetechniqueof revolution. The committees’ reply to what seemed to be Turco-Armenian cooperation in the Parliament at Constantinople, was the Adana “massacre.” This was on a quite different plane from Abdul Hamid’s savagery in 1894 and 1896, and the principal fault which may be found with the Turks at Adana was their tardiness in putting a stop to it. The independence committees launched it in the approved style of Balkan revolution, staging it at Adana presumably with a view to attracting Western intervention at the near-by port of Mersina. Western battleships did in fact anchor in the Mersina roadstead, but refrained from landing men.Russia now loomed above the eastern provinces but during the Balkan Wars refrained from action, possibly in order to permit the Enver Government to defend Constantinople against the Bulgarians, Russia having designs of its own on Constantinople. Still anxious to reach some solution of the problem of its eastern provinces which would counter the Russian menace, the Enver Government in 1912 voluntarily demanded British administrators, as it had a right to do under the Cyprus Convention of 1876. The British Foreign Office turned down the demand on the ground that Russia would object to the employment of British in the vicinity of its frontier. Only a year before, the Foreign Office had turned down the request of Mr. Morgan Shuster, American Treasurer-General of Persia, for the employment of a British officer at Teheran and had cited the same reason for its action. There was nothing in the letter of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which authorized the Foreign Office to forbid Major Stokes’ appointment at Teheran, nor was there anything in the letter of that Treaty which partitioned the Ottoman Empire between Russia and Great Britain. These understandings come under the head of what Sir Edward Grey called the “spirit” of the 1907 Treaty.When the British Government after the late war dispatched Sir Edward Grey, then Viscount Grey of Fallodon, to Washington intending to make him British Ambassador to the United States, he was permitted to return to London without having taken up his duties. But American churchmen have not always been as close to reality as their Government at Washington has been. American educators in the Ottoman Empire, however, have watched missionary work at first hand for a sufficient length of time so that today the oldest of them make the most complete abstinence from any sort of missionary endeavor the first essential in the management of their schools.The British Foreign Office had no sooner turned down the Enver Government’s demand than Russia served its own demands at Constantinople. The Enver Government appealed to Germany and a compromise was eventually effected under which a Dutchman and a Norwegian were appointed Inspectors-General in the eastern provinces. Neither of them had ever been in the Near East and neither knew any Near Eastern language. The war began shortly and neither of them ever reached the Near East.The Armenianblocin the Parliament at Constantinople was holding its 1914 congress at Erzerum in the eastern provinces when the Enver Government entered the war. Government emissaries visited them there and laid before them the Pan-Turanian project whose immediate object was to throw Russia back. A partition of Russian Trans-Caucasia was proposed, the conquered territory to be divided between Armenians, Georgians and Tartars, each to be accorded autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty. The Armenianblocreplied that if war proved necessary they would do their duty as Ottoman subjects but they advised the Government to remain neutral. It may be assumed that the Armenian deputies in the Parliament were still willing, despite the disappointments of the Enverregime, to work the Constitution with the Turkish deputies. The independence committees, however, found their inspiration in the West and their program was electrified by the professed concern for Armenian independence with which the Allied Powers began the war. The Russian annexationist group was similarly affected. In their view, Russia’s opportunity to “liberate” the eastern provinces was at hand.Under the 1908 Constitution, the Enver Government had a right to mobilize Armenians of military age as well as Turks, but armed opposition broke out at once, notably at Zeitun, a town of Armenian mountaineers who had long enjoyed an almost complete local independence. Along the eastern frontier, Armenians began deserting to the Russian Armies and the Enver Government, distrusting the loyalty of those who remained, removed them from the combatant forces and formed them into labor gangs whose commissariat, to put it mildly, worked even more decrepitly than that of the combatant troops.With this situation in his rear, Enver Pasha crossed both the Russian and Persian frontiers but in January, 1915, he was thrown back behind his own frontier by the Russian victory at Sarykamish. This victory fired the annexationist hopes and armed bands of Armenian volunteers began operating behind the Ottoman Armies. In April, Lord Bryce and the “Friends of Armenia” in London appealed for funds to equip these volunteers, and Russia also was presumably not uninterested in them. Seeing that both Great Britain and Russia were at war with the Ottoman Government, it would have been surprising if so obvious a move had been overlooked. These volunteer bands finally captured Van, one of the eastern provincial capitals, late in April and, having massacred the Turkish population, they surrendered what remained of the city to the Russian Armies in June. The news from Van affected the Turks precisely as the news from Smyrna affected them when the Greeks landed there in May, 1919. The rumor immediately ran through Asia Minor that the Armenians had risen.By this time, the military situation had turned sharply against the Enver Government. The Russian victory at Sarykamish was developing and streams of Turkish refugees were pouring westward into central Asia Minor. The British had launched their Dardanelles campaign at the very gates of Constantinople, and Bulgaria had not yet come in. It does not seem reasonable to assume that this moment, of all moments, would have been chosen by the Enver Government to take wide-spread measures against its Armenians unless it was believed that such measures were immediately necessary. Measures were taken. The provincial governors in those parts of the Empire which were exposed to the enemy,i. e., the eastern provinces and the Mediterranean coast where British and French men of war were maintaining a patrol, were ordered to assemble their Armenians and march them south into the Arab country for internment. If these deportations were to be carried out in an orderly fashion, the strongest and most reliable police arrangements were necessary but these arrangements the Enver Government either could not or would not make. In general, the deportations only gathered the Armenians together and exposed them without protection to a population alarmed and angered by the news from Van. They broke down into a dreadful business in which Armenian men of military age were shot down in batches and the remnant of women, children and old persons who had not already made their way as refugees into Russian Trans-Caucasia, were finally interned in Mesopotamia and Syria under conditions of the direst want.This business deprived Russia of its sole claim to intervention in the eastern provinces, and the British Foreign Office which shared in the Anglo-Russian program of partitioning the Ottoman Empire as Persia had already been partitioned, has naturally made the most of it. Lord Bryce’s estimate of the number of Armenians who died in the course of it was 800,000.
ENVER AND THE ARMENIAN PATRIARCH—WHERE THE ARMENIANS LIVED—AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND THE ARMENIANS—RUSSIA AND THE ARMENIANS—GREAT BRITAIN JOINS RUSSIA IN THE 1907 TREATY—ENVER’S DEMAND FOR BRITISH ADMINISTRATORS IN THE EASTERN PROVINCES—THE WAR AND THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS.
Whenthe Enver Government entered the war, Enver Pasha himself warned the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople against any attempt to turn the war to Armenian advantage. This contact introduces us into the most intimate of Ottoman relationships and one which can not be adequately surveyed unless we divest our minds of the Capitulations and of that attitude toward the Ottoman Government to which they gave birth.
In themselves, the Capitulations dated back to pre-Ottoman days when foreigners were accustomed to being governed under their own laws and usages wherever they happened to live. In the golden days of the Ottoman Empire, the Sultans confirmed them and as Ottoman prestige declined, an increasing number of Capitulatory rights grew up outside the specific rights originally stipulated in the imperialfirmans. In general, it may be said of them that they conferred a diplomatic status on all Westerners in the Empire, attaching them to their own Consulates instead of to the Ottoman Government in whose country they lived. They were abrogated by the Enver Government on Sept. 28, 1914, in a unilateral declaration which the Central Powers were not in a position to prevent and against which the Allied Powers could only register their protests.
But the Capitulations were more than merely a legal process. They constituted a mental attitude toward the Ottoman Government. They made it the Western habit to disregard that Government and to establish Western contacts with its subjects quite independently of the fixed and existing relationships of the country. Under the Capitulations, the West long ago established contact with the Ottoman Government’s Christian subjects and a code of governmental conduct was unwittingly built up which the West has applied to that Government alone. Under this code, any Ottoman Christian was given the right to rebel against the Government but the Government, although it was the only body charged with the maintenance of peace in the country, was denied the right to put down Christian rebellion. This code the West has applied to no other Government. Orthodox Russia has repeatedly stamped out Moslem rebellion in Central Asia with as great brutality as the Ottoman Government has ever used against its Christians, but the code which the West has applied to the Ottoman Government it has never applied to Russia. The West has never acquired the habit of disregarding the Russian Government in the country in which it was charged with the duty of administration. Russia is a modern growth which has never known Capitulations.
If it is possible for us to divest our minds of the last vestige of the Capitulations, to apply to the Ottoman Government precisely the same code of governmental conduct which it has been our custom to apply to the Eastern absolutism of Old Russia, the relationship of the Ottoman Government to its Armenians may be profitably examined.
The Armenian population before the late war consisted of about 1,500,000 in the Ottoman Empire, about 1,000,000 in the Russian Empire, about 150,000 in Persia and about 250,000 in Egypt, Europe and the United States. Although small colonies of them were to be found in all parts of the Ottoman Empire, the bulk of them lived in the eastern provinces, a mountainous tableland on which, with their Turkish neighbors, they formed a sedentary peasantry among a nomadic population of Kurds.
In none of these eastern provinces did they constitute a majority of the population and in this respect they differed sharply from the Greeks and Bulgarians of the old Balkan provinces. This was not due to the Ottoman conquest, for the last of the independent Kingdom of Armenia Major had disappeared in the Seljuk invasion of 1079, and the Egyptians put an end to Armenia Minor in Cilicia in 1375. It was not until 1514 that the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, in his campaign against the Persians, occupied the modern eastern provinces and brought their tangled populations into the Ottoman Empire. In accordance with the tolerance which distinguished the great Sultans, the Gregorian Church to which the Armenians belonged, was made a recognized community in full enjoyment of its ecclesiastical and cultural liberty. Unlike Greeks and Bulgarians in Europe who did possess majorities and who consequently had within themselves all the elements of nationhood, the Armenians enjoyed in their community institutions the only degree of autonomy which they could have enjoyed. It was comparatively easy for Greeks and Bulgarians, once Western ideas of nationalism had reached them, to enlarge the autonomy of their own community institutions into territorial independence, but any attempt to transfer Armenian autonomy from a religious to a territorial basis was quite another matter. The population of the modern eastern provinces was such that a resuscitation of the old Armenian Kingdom was impossible and it would have remained impossible until some means had been discovered of re-writing ten centuries of history.
That the Armenians were grossly maladministered by the modern Sultans in Constantinople, there can be no manner of doubt. And so were their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors. It was in this very maladministration that the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire lay, and that problem was a Turkish problem as well as an Armenian problem. The Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 was an honest attempt to solve it by reviving the Constitution and decentralizing the Government, but in the hands of the Committee of Union and Progress the Revolution swiftly broke down and the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire remained unsolved.
American missionaries established contact with the Armenian minorities nearly a century ago, and began drawing out of the Gregorian Church a number of converts to Protestantism. These converts were so bitterly persecuted by the Gregorian clergy that the Sultan finally recognized them, some time in the 1850’s, as a separateProdesdancommunity in enjoyment of the right to worship as they pleased. Continued Gregorian persecution threw them increasingly into the arms of the missionaries who became a means by which Americans in the United States were drawn into touch with the newProdesdancommunity in the Ottoman Empire. It was inevitable that this touch should bring the Armenians into contact with American civil as well as religious ideas, with the Western civilization which American Protestantism embodies, and that the very real and undoubted wrongs which the Armenians were suffering under Hamidian administration should become known in the United States. This was in itself an entirely healthy process, but its tragedy lay in the fact that the missionaries either could not or would not make it plain to their supporters in the United States that the Turks suffered from precisely the same wrongs. Thus instead of bringing all the races of the Empire impartially into the American vision, instead of making it plain in the United States that the Hamidianregimein Constantinople was the oppressor and that Turks and Armenians alike were its victims, the result of American missionary endeavor was to focus American concern on the Armenians’ sufferings alone.
Illustration: Charles HaringtonLIEUT.-GEN. SIR CHARLES A. HARINGTON,G. B. E., K. C. B., D. S. O.Allied Commander-in-Chief at Constantinople until its evacuation in September and October, 1923.
LIEUT.-GEN. SIR CHARLES A. HARINGTON,G. B. E., K. C. B., D. S. O.
Allied Commander-in-Chief at Constantinople until its evacuation in September and October, 1923.
Illustration: ISMET PASHAGENERAL ISMET PASHACommander of the Western (Smyrna) Front until the re-capture of Smyrna in September, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Mudania Armistice, October, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, July, 1923; Minister of Foreign affairs of the Second Grand National Assembly.
GENERAL ISMET PASHA
Commander of the Western (Smyrna) Front until the re-capture of Smyrna in September, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Mudania Armistice, October, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, July, 1923; Minister of Foreign affairs of the Second Grand National Assembly.
In the meantime, Russia had achieved a contact with the Armenians of a wholly different sort. Having broken through the barrier of the Caucasus Range and established its provincial administrations in Trans-Caucasia, Russia had transferred large numbers of Armenians from Ottoman to Russian sovereignty, had stripped them of the autonomy of their community institutions and had kept them in order with an iron hand. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1876, its Armies had halted their march toward Alexandretta at Kars whence they overlooked the Ottoman Armenians in the eastern provinces. The Treaty of San Stefano which closed the War of 1876 was quashed and in the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, Russian provision for reforms to be applied to the Armenians was agreed to by all the signatory Powers. In the Cyprus Convention of 1876, however, Great Britain had bound itself to maintain the Sultan’s realm against Russia, and the eastern provinces, now the most difficult and the most important provinces in the outer Empire, became the theatre of directly opposed British and Russian policies. But Russia, despite its resentment at the loss of the San Stefano Treaty, had won at Berlin. The Armenian clauses in the Berlin Treaty reinforced the Armenian disposition to secure redress of their wrongs independently of their Turkish neighbors who were equal sufferers with them under the Hamidianregime. This tendency presently found further reinforcement in the Nihilist movement which developed in Russia after the Russo-Turkish War. The persecuted Armenians of Russian Trans-Caucasia joined the Nihilist movement, but their headquarters at Tiflis were stamped out by the Czar’s police and the Armenian revolutionists fled to Switzerland, Paris, London and New York.
Relations between Turks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had thus far been generally peaceful. They both suffered alike under the Government at Constantinople and even when Westernism was alienating the Bulgarians in Europe, the Armenians in the eastern provinces were still “the loyal community.” But the Armenian revolutionists in the West, instead of confining their work to Russian Trans-Caucasia, sought to raise funds in the Ottoman Empire as well, and the ancient Turco-Armenian relationship began to be poisoned. Armenian committees succeeded in giving the Turks the impression that “the loyal community” was no longer loyal, and Abdul Hamid replied in the savage massacres of 1894 and 1896. For this business the West rightly fastened the blame upon “Abdul the Damned,” and the Turkish people whose patience sometimes reaches the proportions of a grievous handicap, were generally exempted from blame.
In 1907, the eastern provinces became the scene of an about-face in Anglo-Russian relations. Under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of that year, the two Powers effected an immediate partition of Persia and envisaged a future partition of the Ottoman Empire in which the eastern provinces would go to Russia and Mesopotamia would go to Great Britain. This would have admitted Russia to a military position whence it could have threatened both the Syrian corridor to Egypt and Mesopotamia itself, but presumably the British belief which prompted the 1907 Treaty was that, if Old Russia had made life well-nigh impossible for the British in Asia, Liberal Russia which was believed to have been born in the 1905 Revolution, would prove a neighbor with whom it was possible to live on friendly terms in Asia. So Russian annexation of the eastern provinces became the common program of Great Britain and Russia alike, and from that date Russia adopted a policy so liberal toward its Armenians in Trans-Caucasia that a small Russian annexationist group soon appeared among the Armenians in the eastern provinces. The fact must be emphasized that there has never been any Russian population in these provinces and that the Armenians constituted Russia’s only ground for intervention and eventual annexation.
The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 was quickly followed by the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. Turks and Armenians alike rejoiced at the downfall of the Hamidianregime. An Armenianblocwas formed in the new Parliament and the Committee of Union and Progress entered into apparently amicable relations with it. The bulk of Armenian opinion in the Empire seemed to be willing to work the revived Constitution and to begin, in common with its Turkish neighbors, the reforms of which all the Ottoman races stood in the direst need. But the Armenian revolutionaries in the West had already planted independence committees in the Empire and drilled them in thetechniqueof revolution. The committees’ reply to what seemed to be Turco-Armenian cooperation in the Parliament at Constantinople, was the Adana “massacre.” This was on a quite different plane from Abdul Hamid’s savagery in 1894 and 1896, and the principal fault which may be found with the Turks at Adana was their tardiness in putting a stop to it. The independence committees launched it in the approved style of Balkan revolution, staging it at Adana presumably with a view to attracting Western intervention at the near-by port of Mersina. Western battleships did in fact anchor in the Mersina roadstead, but refrained from landing men.
Russia now loomed above the eastern provinces but during the Balkan Wars refrained from action, possibly in order to permit the Enver Government to defend Constantinople against the Bulgarians, Russia having designs of its own on Constantinople. Still anxious to reach some solution of the problem of its eastern provinces which would counter the Russian menace, the Enver Government in 1912 voluntarily demanded British administrators, as it had a right to do under the Cyprus Convention of 1876. The British Foreign Office turned down the demand on the ground that Russia would object to the employment of British in the vicinity of its frontier. Only a year before, the Foreign Office had turned down the request of Mr. Morgan Shuster, American Treasurer-General of Persia, for the employment of a British officer at Teheran and had cited the same reason for its action. There was nothing in the letter of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which authorized the Foreign Office to forbid Major Stokes’ appointment at Teheran, nor was there anything in the letter of that Treaty which partitioned the Ottoman Empire between Russia and Great Britain. These understandings come under the head of what Sir Edward Grey called the “spirit” of the 1907 Treaty.
When the British Government after the late war dispatched Sir Edward Grey, then Viscount Grey of Fallodon, to Washington intending to make him British Ambassador to the United States, he was permitted to return to London without having taken up his duties. But American churchmen have not always been as close to reality as their Government at Washington has been. American educators in the Ottoman Empire, however, have watched missionary work at first hand for a sufficient length of time so that today the oldest of them make the most complete abstinence from any sort of missionary endeavor the first essential in the management of their schools.
The British Foreign Office had no sooner turned down the Enver Government’s demand than Russia served its own demands at Constantinople. The Enver Government appealed to Germany and a compromise was eventually effected under which a Dutchman and a Norwegian were appointed Inspectors-General in the eastern provinces. Neither of them had ever been in the Near East and neither knew any Near Eastern language. The war began shortly and neither of them ever reached the Near East.
The Armenianblocin the Parliament at Constantinople was holding its 1914 congress at Erzerum in the eastern provinces when the Enver Government entered the war. Government emissaries visited them there and laid before them the Pan-Turanian project whose immediate object was to throw Russia back. A partition of Russian Trans-Caucasia was proposed, the conquered territory to be divided between Armenians, Georgians and Tartars, each to be accorded autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty. The Armenianblocreplied that if war proved necessary they would do their duty as Ottoman subjects but they advised the Government to remain neutral. It may be assumed that the Armenian deputies in the Parliament were still willing, despite the disappointments of the Enverregime, to work the Constitution with the Turkish deputies. The independence committees, however, found their inspiration in the West and their program was electrified by the professed concern for Armenian independence with which the Allied Powers began the war. The Russian annexationist group was similarly affected. In their view, Russia’s opportunity to “liberate” the eastern provinces was at hand.
Under the 1908 Constitution, the Enver Government had a right to mobilize Armenians of military age as well as Turks, but armed opposition broke out at once, notably at Zeitun, a town of Armenian mountaineers who had long enjoyed an almost complete local independence. Along the eastern frontier, Armenians began deserting to the Russian Armies and the Enver Government, distrusting the loyalty of those who remained, removed them from the combatant forces and formed them into labor gangs whose commissariat, to put it mildly, worked even more decrepitly than that of the combatant troops.
With this situation in his rear, Enver Pasha crossed both the Russian and Persian frontiers but in January, 1915, he was thrown back behind his own frontier by the Russian victory at Sarykamish. This victory fired the annexationist hopes and armed bands of Armenian volunteers began operating behind the Ottoman Armies. In April, Lord Bryce and the “Friends of Armenia” in London appealed for funds to equip these volunteers, and Russia also was presumably not uninterested in them. Seeing that both Great Britain and Russia were at war with the Ottoman Government, it would have been surprising if so obvious a move had been overlooked. These volunteer bands finally captured Van, one of the eastern provincial capitals, late in April and, having massacred the Turkish population, they surrendered what remained of the city to the Russian Armies in June. The news from Van affected the Turks precisely as the news from Smyrna affected them when the Greeks landed there in May, 1919. The rumor immediately ran through Asia Minor that the Armenians had risen.
By this time, the military situation had turned sharply against the Enver Government. The Russian victory at Sarykamish was developing and streams of Turkish refugees were pouring westward into central Asia Minor. The British had launched their Dardanelles campaign at the very gates of Constantinople, and Bulgaria had not yet come in. It does not seem reasonable to assume that this moment, of all moments, would have been chosen by the Enver Government to take wide-spread measures against its Armenians unless it was believed that such measures were immediately necessary. Measures were taken. The provincial governors in those parts of the Empire which were exposed to the enemy,i. e., the eastern provinces and the Mediterranean coast where British and French men of war were maintaining a patrol, were ordered to assemble their Armenians and march them south into the Arab country for internment. If these deportations were to be carried out in an orderly fashion, the strongest and most reliable police arrangements were necessary but these arrangements the Enver Government either could not or would not make. In general, the deportations only gathered the Armenians together and exposed them without protection to a population alarmed and angered by the news from Van. They broke down into a dreadful business in which Armenian men of military age were shot down in batches and the remnant of women, children and old persons who had not already made their way as refugees into Russian Trans-Caucasia, were finally interned in Mesopotamia and Syria under conditions of the direst want.
This business deprived Russia of its sole claim to intervention in the eastern provinces, and the British Foreign Office which shared in the Anglo-Russian program of partitioning the Ottoman Empire as Persia had already been partitioned, has naturally made the most of it. Lord Bryce’s estimate of the number of Armenians who died in the course of it was 800,000.