The removal of the sultan and other political changes and upheavals must have added to the many-faceted life problems and intensified the people’s need for authority, for a positive self-concept, and a world view that offered guidance and hope.
Steps along the continuum of destruction
Devaluation and increasing mistreatment. In some ways the Turkish image of the Armenians was strikingly similar to the German image of Jews. The two minoritiers had a similar status in society and had developed in similar ways over centuries of persecution. Because of their religious beliefs and a tradition of militarism, the Turks devalued and avoided commerce, finance, and other middle-class occupations. These as well as low- and middle-level administrative positions were open to the Armenians.19 Foreigners preferred minority group members as trading partners because of their better education, shared religion, and contacts with Europeans. The Armenians were hardworking, capable, and intelligent. Many were successful, and some became wealthy. They became essential for the maintenance of the country. The result was the two-sided devaluation familiar from our discussion of German attitudes toward Jews: Armenians were seen as of low character, as cunning and treacherous, and as parasites, exploiters who plotted against Turks.
Aside from their “unofficial” victimization by Kurds and Circassians, Armenians were also subject to violence directly inspired by the authorities, which intensified under Abdul Hamid. In 1894-96, special troops composed mainly of Kurds, the Hamidaya, massacred over two hundred thousand Armenians in the midst of an apparently approving population.
Abraham Hartunian, an Armenian pastor, who survived both the killings of 1894-96 and the genocide of 1915-16, wrote of the earlier killings:
On Sunday morning, November 3,1895, the church bells were silent. The churches and schools, desecrated and plundered, lay in ruins. Pastors, priests, choristers, teachers, leaders, all were no more. The Armenian houses, robbed and empty, were as caves. Fifteen hundred men had been slaughtered, and those left alive were wounded and paralyzed. Girls were in the shame of their rape....
On Thursday, November 7, the fifth day of our imprisonment, we were taken out and driven to the courtyard of a large inn. As we moved along in a file under guard, a crowd of Turkish women on the edge of the road, mocking and cursing us like frenzied maenads, screeched the unique convulsive shrill of the zelgid, the ancient battle cry of the women of Islam-the exultant lu-lu-lulu filled with the concentrated hate of the centuries.20
Under the Young Turks massacres of the Armenians continued. In Adana in the spring of 1909, about thirty thousand Armenians were killed. Administrative and military officials did not try to stop the massacre, and some of the troops fired on the Armenians. While the Young Turks probably did not initiate the killings, they let the two principal officials of Adana off with light sentences.21 Dr. Chambers, the director of the American Missionaries at Adana, wrote in a message to London:
A frightful massacre began on April 14; it subsided on the 16th, but it is continued in the suburbs. The following week an organized effort was made to bring help to 15,000 sufferers. The massacre began all over again furiously on the 25 of April, the soldiers and the bashibozouk (irregulars) began a terrible volley of firearms on the Armenian school where around 2,500 persons had taken refuge. Then the building caught fire and when the refugees tried to save themselves by running outside they were fired upon; many perished in the flames. The destructive fire continued until Tuesday morning. Four churches and the adjacent schools were burned as well as hundreds of homes in the most populated quarters of the city.22
Armenian “provocation”
Some writers claimed that the genocide was a response to Armenian provocation, to the great threat the Armenians presented to Turkey and the Committee of Union and Progress.23 The Armenians increasingly resisted repression and violence against them and demanded greater rights and more autonomy. From the middle of the nineteenth century, they repeatedly turned to foreign powers for protection. Russia helped other subject peoples, such as the Bulgarians, in their fight for independence, and its 1877 military action was at least partly on the instigation of Armenians. The Turkish government constantly feared that foreign powers would intervene on behalf of the Armenians or use the Armenians as an excuse for their designs on Turkey. The Armenians were closely linked to Russia (much hated by the Turks as the ancient and current enemy) by their Greek Orthodox religion and, after the Russian conquest of parts of Armenia, by the large population of Armenians in Russia. It was thus easy to associate the loss of power and humiliation by foreigners with the Armenians inside Turkey.
The Armenians attempted to gain increased rights as well as protection as conflicts between them and displaced Muslims moving into Turkey intensified. They organized and formed societies. The government-directed killings in 1894-96 arose partly from the sultan’s fear of the “Armenian peril,” a result of Armenian “agitation,” protests, and demonstrations.24 Occasional refusal to pay taxes, for what to the Armenians seemed justifiable reasons, also incited anger. One of the events leading up to the massacre of Armenians at Sassoon in 1893 was refusal to pay taxes; they claimed the Kurds forced them to pay and could not pay a second time.25
Armenian acts designed to call attention to their plight also resulted in violence. At the time of the large-scale killings under Abdul Hamid, in 1896, a group of Armenians seized the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople and held it until they were guaranteed free passage to Europe. More Armer in massacres followed in Constantinople.26 Once an intensely negative image of a group develops, its acts of self-assertion or defense will be regarded as evidence of hostility and evil nature.
In 1876 the Young Turk movement sought the cooperation of the Armenians against their common enemy, the sultan, for the “good of the fatherland.” The appeal was rejected, and the Young Turks interpreted this as evidence of Armenian aspirations “apart from the welfare of Turkey,” which pushed them to “criminal resolution.”27
