Robert T. Melson. "Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: The Massacres of 1894-1896"

from his Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Univ of Chicago Press 1992

Chapter 2

"I have been informed at the Porte in answer to an inquiry, that Armenians at Talori, in the Vilayet of Bitlis, have risen, and that in order to quell the revolt a small number of troops are being sent to the scene" Sir Philip Currie to the Earl of Kimberley Constantinople, 31 August 1894

During the period 1894-96, some twenty years before the genocide of 1915, tens of thousands of Armenians were massacred in the Ottoman Empire ruled by Sultan Abdul Hamid II. This suggests that even before the genocide the existence of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was both problematic and tenuous. The questions raised by this chapter are, What caused the massacres and what was their relation to the later genocide?

A number of prominent historians contend that the massacres were the understandable result of Armenian provocations, especially those of the revolutionary parties. In response to this provocation thesis, the suggestion will be made that it is impossible to account for the policy of any regime without taking its ideology motives, and perceptions into account. And these cannot simply be reduced to a response to "provocations."

It will be proposed that the Armenian massacres were either initiated or allowed to take their course because the regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II wanted to preserve the Ottoman Empire and the old order based on Muslim law and tradition. He feared nineteenth-century Armenian social and political mobilization-some have called it a renaissance-and to abort it he was willing to use force, including massacre. Nonetheless, as has been suggested in Chapter 1, massacre is not the same thing as genocide.

Chapter 5 will show that although some of the same factors that precipitated the massacres also led to the genocide, the latter instance of violence was qualitatively different. In the first instance the regime of Abdul Hamid II used massacre against the Armenians not to destroy the community but to restore an old order; in the later genocide the regime of the Committee of Union and Progress used genocide to eliminate the Armenians from the Turkish social structure. This suggests that under the old regime there were limits to the extent of violence against component communities of the Ottoman Empire and that these limits were breached by the Turkish revolution. Chapter 2 is divided into five sections. The first one briefly discusses the massacres; the second addresses the provocation thesis. The third section suggests that the massacres were an attempt by the regime to preserve an old order. Here the situation of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire is briefly described. The fourth section raises the question, If the regime wanted to use force against the Armenians, why did it choose massacre and not some other means? The last section concludes with a brief discussion contrasting the massacres of 1894-96 to the genocide of 1915.

The Massacres

The massacres of 1894-96 began in August in Sassoun, a community in the vilayet, or province of Bitlis; here Armenian peasants, possibly encouraged by agitators, resisted the depredations of Muslim Kurdish pastoralists and were set upon by regular troops and Hamidiye regiments.

A most telling source for details of the Sassoun massacres is the correspondence between Sir Philip Currie, the then British ambassador to the Sublime Porte-the Ottoman court-and his vice-consul, C. M. Hallward, who was dispatched to the area to investigate allegations of massacre.

In Hallward's final report, he indicated that "the attention of the Government appears to have been drawn towards that district by one Damadian, an Armenian Catholic from Constantinople who was engaged in political agitation among the Sassunis." He had been captured in 1893 and later pardoned in Constantinople. "I do not believe that the agitation amounted to much, or had much effect on the villagers," continued Hallward. Shortly after Damadians capture, however, the fate of the Sassoun Armenians was sealed.

In the summer of 1894, after an attack by tribal Kurds was repulsed by armed Armenian villagers, Hamidiye regiments, as well as regular troops from the Bitlis and Moush garrisons joined by reinforcements from the Fourth Army Corps, were sent in, and massacre ensued. "The operation lasted some twenty-three days, from the 18th of August to the 10th of September". Though he had heard higher estimates, Hallward suggested a figure of 8, 000 killed.

Were the massacres a disproportionate response to Armenian insurrection?

" There was no insurrection, as was reported in Constantinople; the villagers simply took up arms to defend themselves against the Kurds. The statement made to me by an official here of their having killed soldiers and Zaptiehes, I found after careful inquiry to be false. Before arriving in Moush, I naturally supposed that something of the sort must have occurred to call for such a display of military force, but neither the Mutesarif nor the Military Commandant with whom I spoke on the subject hinted at anything of the sort, nor did I learn elsewhere that the Armenians had been guilty of any act of rebellion against the Government."

The massacre at Sassoun was followed by a brief period when European powers protested the treatment of the Armenians, leading the Porte to appoint a commission of inquiry that met from 24 January 1895 to 21 July 1895 in Moush. The commission, however, refused to hear Armenian testimony and stated in its terms of reference that it should inquire "into the criminal proceedings of the Armenian brigands." The vali of Moush, who had called in the troops in the first place, as well as Zeki Pasha, the commandant of the Fourth Army Corps, were decorated for their participation in the massacres while the mutessarif of Moush, who had protested, was dismissed.

In protest, the British, French, and Russian consular delegates themselves traveled to Sassoun to hear evidence. Following testimony from the consular delegates, the European powers exerted pressure on the Porte to institute reforms that had been agreed upon in the treaties of San Stefano and Berlin in 1878 but which had never been implemented.

The reforms upon which the Europeans insisted were to go into effect in October 1895, but this was precluded by the launching of widespread massacres of Armenians throughout the Ottoman Empire. These are the phenomena that concern us here. The occasion for violence was a procession organized in Constantinople on 30 September 1895 by the Hnchakist party an Armenian nationalist organization. The ostensible aims of this party in organizing the procession was to present the grand vizier with a petition, but its real goals were to add emphasis to the demands of the European powers and to dramatize the plight of the Armenians. The procession was set upon, and hundreds of Armenians were killed. Soon after, massacre became widespread throughout the empire but especially in the six vilayets of Erzerum, Bitlis, Van, Harpout, Sivas, and Diarbekir, where reforms had been slated to go into effect. Commencing at Ak-Hissar and Trebizond on 3 and 4 October, massacres were perpetrated at fifteen locations in the month of October, at twenty locations in November, in five locations in December, and ceased briefly after an outbreak at Biredjik on I January 1896.

Then on 24 August 1896 another revolutionary Armenian party, the Dashnaktsutiun, seized the Imperial Ottoman Bank in Constantinople to protest the massacres and apparently to prompt external intervention. Though the protest succeeded in dramatizing the Armenian situation, and the revolutionaries were allowed to escape, their action was followed by the wholesale massacre of Armenians in Constantinople, where it is estimated that six thousand perished. As to European succor, one scholar has noted, "European intervention unsustained by force added to the tragedy of the Armenians."

Although this is not the place for detailed controversy pertaining to population statistics, it should be clear that those writers who seek to underestimate the extent of death and damage will underestimate the size of the victimized population before the violence and overestimate the number of survivors; while, conversly, writers wishing to exaggerate the carnage will reverse that procedure. This caveat will serve in good stead not only here but also in Chapter 5, when I turn to the genocide.

The reader should therefore be cautioned by Roderic H. Davison's warning "There are no trustworthy figures on the population of the empire. Reasonably accurate statistical methods have not existed in Turkey until very recent years under the republic." Under the circumstances, given the problem of amassing reliable data, it should be no surprise that there is wide variation in the numbers of people reported to have been killed and in the estimation of material damage. Louise Nalbandian estimates that between 50,000 and 300,000 Armenians were massacred; Richard G. Hovannisian suggests that the number may vary between 100,000 and 200,000, and Johannes Lepsius cites a figure of some 88,000. The Shaws do not cite overall figures, but they do believe that the estimate of 20,000 killed following the events at Sassoun to be a great exaggeration. Using Davison's figures, the population of the Ottoman Empire in 1876, when Abdul Hamid came to power, was 38,493,000, of whom Ottoman Turks constituted 13,500,000 or 35 percent, and the Armenians 2,500,000 or 6.5 percent. If one assumes a low figure of 50,000 dead and a high figure of 300,000 dead, between 2 percent and 12 percent of the Armenian population was killed during the massacres.

According to Lepsius, the massacres were initiated by the Porte, that is, the regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II from Constantinople. He notes that "the Armenian massacres were nothing but an administrative measure, which was ordered by the central government in the name of the Sultan, and was executed with only too great willingness by the provincial officials." Indeed, Lepsius suggests that variation from place to place depended only on how quickly violence could be prepared. Another source, the British vice-consul G. H. Fitzmaurice, who was chief dragoman of the British Embassy and was sent to the provinces to investigate, reports that the massacres were centrally initiated and made legitimate on political and religious grounds.

Writing of orders that had come down from the Porte after the demonstration of Constantinople, Fitzmaurice noted:

"The Mussulmans here and elsewhere interpreted them as the Sovereign's wish that they should put into execution the prescription of the "Sheri" [Shariah or Islamic law], and proceeded to take the lives and property of the rebellious Armenian "rayahs" [reaya or subjects]. The demonstration at Constantinople was represented by the officials as an attempt by the Armenians to storm the Sublime Porte; rumours reached here of massacres of Armenians by their [sic] co-religionists in other towns in Anatolia; they were told that the Armenians were attacking mosques and using dynamite, while word came from their Mussulman brethren in towns where massacres had occurred inciting them to do their duty by Islam. The government. too, began to serve out arms and cartridges to the Zantiehs and other guards, and had the Armenian quarter patrolled.

I should add that the telegraphic news of acceptance of reforms was interpreted to the Mussulmans as the granting of autonomy to the Armenians, an interpretation which must have come from the Government officials. and which had a disastrous effect on Moslem feeling towards Armenians."

According to Lepsius, the civil and military authorities had different hut complementary roles to play in the massacres. The military authorities were in charge of distributing weapons to Kurdish and Circassian irregelars as well as to those of the Muslim population who were still in need of them. In terms of direct participation, the army was mostly called to assist the Hamidiye regiments when and if there was Armenian resistance, as occurred at Sassoun, Gurun, Diarbekir, and Zeitoun. "In one or two places just before the massacres, the authorities removed garrisons whose relations with the Christian population were suspected of being too friendly". The civil authorities, on the other hand, had the difficult double task of preparing the Muslim population for massacre while at the same time convincing the targeted groups that no violence was about to take place, so as to prevent resistance and thus maximize the extent of the slaughter.

Lepsius suggests that some of the motivation of local Muslims derived from the active encouragement of authorities, the legitimation of violence in the name of the sultan and of religion, the opportunity for plunder, and the absence of external fetters or fear of resistance. Another point worth mentioning is one raised by the Shaws. They suggest that the lead in the massacres was taken by Muslim refugees who themselves had fled violence at the hands of Christians, most notably the Russians.

This is an important point because, as the Shaws point out, "millions" of Muslim refugees were resettled not just anywhere in the Ottoman Empire but precisely in the vilayets where the majority of Armenians lived. To the intentions implied by Lepsius and Fitzmaurice, one might therefore add the motives of revenge and displaced aggression. This too is a point that will be picked up again in the discussion of the genocide in Chapter 5.

At odds with the Lepsius-Fitzmaurice interpretation, the Shaws' explanation as to the role of the sultan is somewhat ambiguous. They seem to make two arguments (1 ) that if the sultan had a hand in the massacres, it was as a result of the provocations of the Armenian revolutionary parties, but they also raise another possibility (2) that the massacres were mass uprisings of Muslim peasants against the Armenians These two views are not mutually exclusive. The massacres may have commenced as popular uprisings as, for example, at Sassoun (though we have Hallward's testimony to the contrary) and the sultan may have then placed himself at the head of such an uprising and, indeed, may have encouraged it. In that case, we are still left with the question of the motive for his role, that is, why would he have encouraged the massacres? But in any event, for a full explanation we need more information about the Muslim peasantry and pastoralists at the time of the massacres. This, unfortunately, the Shaws leave out.

Leaving the sultan and the government out of the explanation is possible but not credible. It assumes that the Ottoman regime played no role in the massive violence that lasted for two years, occurred in forty one locations (some of them hundreds of miles apart), and in which tens of thousands of Ottomans participated either as perpetrators or victims. Had the Ottoman regime been extraordinarily weak and incompetent, one might yet want to argue that the process of massacre spread by a kind of diffusion, but that is not at all the picture of the regime that the Shaws themselves paint. To the contrary, they argue forcefully that the administration of Abdul Hamid was competent and extremely well informed. We are, however, left with a last possibility-that the massacres were initiated and spread by others but that the sultan decided to stay aloof. This still begs the question why he or his regime would decide to stay aloof from the massacre of one of his millets. And so we return to the role of the sultan and his regime. This brings us back full circle to the Shaws' first implication, namely, that the sultan was provoked by the activities of the Armenian revolutionary parties.

As noted, the Shaws in their influential work of 1977 suggest that the massacres were a reaction to Armenian provocation. Their picture is that of a strict but beneficent Ottoman order sorely tested by the vagaries and insubordination of the Armenian millet and by the revolutionary activities of the nationalist parties. According to them, these parties pursued a kind of "the-worst-the-better" strategy. They hoped that, by provoking the sultan into mass reprisals against the Armenians, they could elicit intervention by the European powers and thus bring about the liberation or Armenia. Thus the Shaws noted that in the period 1890-93,

" terrorism and counterterrorism went on for three years with the government acting sternly, albeit sometimes harshly to keep order. The Hunchaks were, however, denied the kind of harsh reprisals that they really needed to make their case in Europe. They then organized a major coup at Sasun . . . the strongest area of Armenian population, where there were many marauding tribesmen who had caused trouble to the cultivators in the past."

Further, the Shaws claim that the Hnchakists intended to create "a Socialist Armenian Republic presumably in the six Anatolian provinces from which all Muslims would be driven out or simply killed." Beyond the fact that there is no confirming evidence for this opinion in the writings of other historians, the Shaws make this assertion without any citations or qualifying remarks. What is left is a clear intention to place the blame for the massacres on the Hnchakist and Dashnak parties, and beyond them on the Armenians themselves.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, three Armenian revolutionary parties were active in the Ottoman and Russian Empires. These were the Armenakan party, the Hnchakist party, and the Dashnaktsutiun. All three parties were nationalist, favoring a lesser or greater degree of autonomy or self-determination. The Hnchakist party, in particular, had a socialist orientation, indicating the growth influence of Russian revolutionary thought and activity.

Given the available evidence, it is not possible to assess precisely the extent of support and influence of these parties, and it is therefore difficult to judge with precision whether they were or were not a threat and a provocation to the Ottoman regime. The impression one gets, however, is that the influence of these parties was limited. Van was the place where the Armenakan party was most influential, but it seems to have declined after the massacres. It is possible that the Hnchakist party was influential in the Sassoun area, but any power it might have had also declined after the massacres and gave way to the more popular Dashnaktsutiun. As to the extent of Hunchak support, Nalbandian notes dryly: "The opponents of the Hunchaks were not willing to see a large part of their nation destroyed in order that the Hunchaks attain a dubious political goal." To this Hovannisian adds that the views of the Hunchaks were assessed by most Armenian leaders as "impracticable and utopian." Although Sarkis Atamian argues that the Dashnaktsutiun was widely popular, Davison, writing of a somewhat later time, suggests that "the peasant mass was not very vocal. Higher classes of Ottoman Armenians wished rather for a regenerated and orderly Turkey and thought that Autonomy would be possible only within Turkey and not under Russian domination."

The provocation thesis falls short of being a credible explanation for the massacres because it neither convincingly demonstrates that the revolutionary parties were a serious threat nor does it address itself to the question of why they were seen as a threat. If they were viewed by the government as a threat, the question arises as to the perceptions and motives of the Porte itself, a question the provocation thesis does not raise. There are other problems with the argument as well. It does not explain why the reaction was so heavily incommensurate to the supposed provocations It does not explain why some of the most serious reprisals were taken against upper-class Armenians in Constantinople and Trebizond who had opposed the revolutionary parties. And it does not explain why some massacres of Armenians, preceding the 1894-96 period, occurred prior to the formation of such parties. In all, as proposed in Chapter I and discussed again in Chapter 5, the provocation thesis rests on a simple action-reaction model of human events without making either action or reaction credible.

Perhaps without meaning to, the Shaws themselves point to a more tenable explanation. They note that at the time of the supposed provocations "the mass of Ottoman Armenians remained loyal subjects, but the deeds of the few who did not left a feeling of mistrust." This statement completely undermines the provocation thesis, for if it is the case that the mass of Armenians was loyal, where are we to place the blame-on "the deeds of the few," or on those who were left with "a feeling of mistrust"? We suggest that the feeling of mistrust of the Ottoman regime is at least as important a source of explanation as the deeds of some of the Hnchakists and Dashnaks.

Finally, it is of interest that a provocation thesis need not ipso facto derive from a desire to defend the Ottoman regime. Johannes Lepsius, as we have seen, no defender of Ottoman rule during the massacres, suggests an explanation that also rests on a theory of provocation, albeit not the provocations of the Armenians but those of the Great Powers. It should be noted that Lepsius's thesis, published in 1897, is presented in opposition to the notion, popular at the time, that the massacres were due to a religious conflict, that they were a form of religious persecution.

" What are the Armenian massacres then? A conflict of race? No, for during the centuries Turks have managed to get on more or less well with their Armenian subjects. A national rising? No, for the Armenian population in Armenia neither knows, nor wishes to know anything of the political propaganda of certain agitators who in London, Paris, or Constantinople form revolutionary clubs and issue political pamphlets A persecution of the Christians? Not simply this, for there was no immediate provocation. Then what do the Armenian horrors mean? Without any question their origin was purely political, or to state it more exactly, they were an administrative measure."

To his argument that the massacres may have taken the form of a religious persecution but were not caused by religious motives, he may have added the observation that the Greeks, who were after all Christians, were for the most part not harmed during the massacres of the Armenians. Further, to say that the massacres were due to an administrative measure begs the question of why such a measure was taken. Lepsius addresses himself to this question in a later passage:

" For years the instruments of destruction appointed by the government had been working silently and unnoticed, when suddenly the Porte saw itself forced by threatened Armenian reforms to hasten the process, and even at the risk of a general rising in Europe, deter- mined at one stroke to annihilate the Armenian nation, and to sweep away that hated Christianity which was always awakening the sympathy of Europe."

It is hard to make out what were the "instruments of destruction" and why they worked for years "silently and unnoticed," but the second part of the explanation does have an empirical reference. If we may phrase it differently, Lepsius suggests that the Armenian massacres were provoked by the demands for reforms made by the Great Powers. He does not develop this argument further, nor does he draw the conclusion that the Shaws do, namely that the Ottoman regime was not to blame for the violence. Nevertheless, without an examination of the perceptions and motives of the regime, even his argument can be used to shift responsibility from those who made the decision to use violence onto to those who were said to have provoked it. Our goal is not to blame the Ottoman regime and the sultan, but it is clearly not possible to examine or explain the massacres without taking them into consideration.

The following discussion attempts to move beyond the provocation thesis to the beliefs, motives, and perceptions of the sultan and his regime that might have affected their actions, including their decisions concerning the Armenians. It seeks to establish that the sultan's actions were shaped by the context against which he viewed the Armenians, by his beliefs and ideology, and by the activities of the Armenians themselves.

The term context, as used here, does not mean "general historical background as might be understood by a student of the Ottoman Empire"; rather it means "the situation as might have been experienced by the sultan and his regime." This is an important distinction because it draws the study away from the general history of Armenian-Ottoman relations while concentrating on that portion of history that may have been known to Abdul Hamid himself. In particular, two aspects of this history seem to be significant (1) Armenian history in the nineteenth century unfolded against a background wherein other millets and nationalities of the empire were agitating, some with notable success, for self-determination and even secession. Often they were aided in such endeavors by the great powers who used minority demands for self-determination as pretexts for intervention in the affairs of the Ottoman state. (2) The majority of Ottoman-Armenians lived in Eastern Anatolia close to the border with Russia at a time when that traditional enemy loomed ever more powerful and threatening.

As to the sultan's ideology and beliefs, we maintain with other historians that Abdul Hamid was a deeply conservative if not reactionary head of state who wanted to preserve his empire even at the cost of severe repression. This readiness to use violence for the sake of the unity of the empire may have been one of the factors leading him to initiate or tolerate massacre against recalcitrant minorities like the Armenians.

Concerning the behavior of the Armenians, not only the emergence of the revolutionary parties but the flowering of the Armenian millet-some have called it a renaissance-may have had unintended consequences. The very success of the Armenians gave this Christian minority the appearance that it was challenging a traditional and hierarchical, Muslim and imperial, religious and political order.

A useful beginning for a discussion of the context in which Abdul Hamid perceived the Armenians is the millet system and its challenge by the nationality problems of the nineteenth century.

The religious communities of the Ottoman Empire were called millets and each had well-defined status, duties, and obligations. The Muslim community was governed by Islam and the Shariah or Islamic law, but dhimmi communities of Jews and Christians, though assigned a status lower than that of the majority, were themselves protected by this law and by long usage.

The root of the attitude toward the dhimmi millets goes back to the Prophet, who was acquainted with five religions Judaism, Christianity, Sabianism, Zoroastrianism, and the various polytheistic cults of Arabia. The peoples of Scripture-the dhimma-were singled out by Mohammed in contrast to the polytheists. Jews and Christians were not to be slain or enslaved, as long as they did not rise and take up arms against Muslim authority Having once been conquered, the dhimma were allowed, under special conditions, to practice their religion as before.

Treatment of the millets in the Ottoman Empire varied over the years according to beliefs prevalent in the main orthodox branches of Islam, according to whether they were Jews or Christians, Orthodox or Armenian, and according to whether the empire was expanding or contracting, conquering or being conquered. Despite all these variations certain constants remained. Millets were given a great deal of local autonomy This derived not only from the corporate nature of the empire but also from the Sacred Law itself, which regulated Muslim behavior and the relationship of dhimmi to Muslim. The Shariah did not claim to regulate behavior within the dhimmi community. Under the millet system, behavior within each community was governed by ecclesiastical authorities, rabbis or patriarchs, and these functionaries were themselves responsible to the sultan for discipline within their flocks. Despite their local autonomy, millets were responsible for a cyzia, or tax, and their members were excluded from military service. Both of these features were viewed as emblematic of dhimmi inferiority.

Until the nineteenth century, the two main Christian millets were the Greek Orthodox and the Armenian. The Orthodox, both because of its size and of its special relations dating back to the devsirme conscription had great influence. It consisted of the Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Rumanians, and the inhabitants of Southern Albania. Significantly these national differences carried no particular meaning for the Ottoman government, not, that is, until the nineteenth century when nationalism began to foster new political identities. "To the Ottomans, these various groups were part of the Rum milleti, and since Rum also denoted Greek they tended all to be regarded more or less as Greeks."

As to the Armenians, "the precedent set by Mehmed the Conqueror of organizing the various communities of Dhimmis [sic] into recognized millets was not followed by his successors. They simply maintained the three original millets and classified all their non-Orthodox Christian subjects as Armenians" The Armenian patriarch's authority extended over such incompatibles as Catholics, Nestorians, and lacobites. It was not until the nineteenth century that non-Apostolic Armenian groups like the Catholics and the Protestants were granted millet rights of their own.

It has been claimed that religious communities, millets, found a great deal of autonomy if not tolerance in the Ottoman Empire. Especially some dissenting Christian sects like the Nestorians preferred the relative autonomy and tolerance of the millet system to the intolerance and persecutions of Greek Orthodox Christianity. Indeed, Hovannisian notes that the millet system with all its limitations and inequalities "proved workable and beneficial for the Armenians."

One needs to view Ottoman tolerance toward minorities in some perspective: it was tolerant compared to the Christian world, and it was certainly more tolerant than the regime headed by the Committee of Union and Progress that replaced it in 1908. A distinction, however, should be made between the Ottoman theory of tolerance and the actual experience of Armenian peasants living in the eastern vilayets or provinces. Here the relatively defenseless Armenian may have been allowed to practice his religion, but his life and property became increasingly less secure as, in the nineteenth century, the plateau became populated by Turkish and Kurdish pastoral groups.

The process whereby Armenian security was undermined in Anatolia can be traced back to the sixteenth century. The conquest of Arab lands incorporated large Muslim populations, making the Empire more Orthodox, practicing a stricter form of Sunni Islam, and becoming less dependent on the Greek millet for manpower. Both of these developments made for a decreased level of tolerance of all minorities, which was reduced still more as the empire began to lose territory to Christian powers. Dhimmis once thought to be innocuous were increasingly viewed as in league with the foreign enemy. Beyond the vagaries of rise and fall, however, there did remain certain constants though the conditions of life for the dhimmi millets remained insecure, the Ottoman state as state did not begin to persecute them, especially the Armenians until the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Official Ottoman tolerance and devolution of power, however, had a price. This was the explicit agreement that dhimmis were never to consider themselves the equals of Muslims. The Ottoman state considered Muslim superiority to be both just and natural, and the necessary if not sufficient condition for its continued tolerance of inferior minorities.

"Christians.... were inevitably considered second-class citizens in the light of religious revelation-as well as by reason of the plain fact that they had been conquered by the Ottomans. This whole Moslem outlook was often summed up in the common terms, Gavur (or Kafir), which meant unbeliever or "infidel" with emotional and quite uncomplimentary overtones."

It would take us too far afield to recapitulate the fascinating and important work of other historians who have described the decay of the millet system and the rise of the nationality problem in the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century. Here we can touch only on some of the highlights that may have been pertinent to Abdul Hamid and his regime and that provided the context against which they perceived the Armenians.

When the sultan came to power in 1876, the empire had already experienced more than a century of dissolution and dismemberment. Not only was it subjected to the military and economic pressures of the Great Powers, but it also found itself trying to stem the tide of nationalism and self-determination among its own nationalities and millets. Notably, in 1829 Greece had become independent, and after the treaty of San Stefano in March of 1878, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria either became autonomous regions or independent states. In each of these instances one or another of the Great Powers had a hand in fostering the autonomy or self-determination of minorities in the Ottoman Empire.

It should be noted that prior to Abdul Hamid's reign the empire had tried limited reforms as a policy to maintain unity. Beginning roughly in 1856 with the proclamation of the Hatt-i Humayun, an imperial edict, the Ottoman regime attempted to satisfy the demands for equality and self-determination of the various peoples under its rule by granting greater autonomy and legal rights to dhimmis. It is significant that the reform movement failed to promote unity and that Abdul Hamid came to power in part as a reaction to its failure.

Although he came to power at the crest of the Tanzimat, or period of the reform movement, within a short time Abdul Hamid shelved the reform constitution and had Midhat Pasha, the grand vizier most associated with that liberal document, assassinated.

"I made a mistake when I wished to imitate my father, Abdulmecit, who sought to reform by persuasion and by liberal institutions. I shall follow in the footsteps of my grandfather, Sultan Mahmut. Like him, I now understand that it is only by force that one can move the people with whose protection God has entrusted me."

As the Shaws note, instead of reform Abdul Hamid "developed a structure of personal control that, with the centralized system of administration created by Tanzimat, made possible a far more extensive and complete autocracy than anything ever achieved by the greatest of the Sultans." And Midhat Pasha remarked "Everything that had been accomplished in the way of reform or high politics during the time of his father and his predecessors he considered to be misfortunes for the dynasty and the Empire."

On the other hand, it is well not to overdo the contrast between the reign of Abdul Hamid and the Tanzimat reform period. Though this is not the place for a full discussion of Tanzimat, there are two important points that should be stressed about its intentions and about its effects, especially as these pertained to the Armenians. First, though Tanzimat, notably as expressed in the Hatt-i Humayun, was ostensibly a movement toward equality, at bottom it was a reform meant to preserve the empire. And second, the equality proclaimed for the millets was hardly put into practice. In all, the failure to institutionalize the Tanzimat reforms revealed the incapacity of a traditional order, the millet system in particular, to deal with the disintegration of empire and the emergence of the nationality problem.

In brief, the sultan may have become wary of the Armenians, seeing them against a backdrop of disloyal millets, seceding nationalities, and Great Power pressures. His suspicions may have been reinforced by the geographical location of the Armenians on the Russian border. Indeed, it was very dangerous for the Armenians to be straddling the Russo-Turkish border in a period of war, when the Ottoman Empire was contracting and the Russian expanding.

Hovannisian estimates that, out of a population of 4,700,000 in Russian Transcaucasia in 1886, there were 940,000 Armenians, or 20 percent. By 1917, the Armenian population had grown to 1, 783,000, but the area as a whole had also expanded to 7,500,000, leaving the fraction of Armenians, at 24 percent, nearly unchanged. In Erevan and Kars, disputed border provinces under sometimes Ottoman sometimes Russian rule, however, there were 669,000 Armenians or 60 percent, and I 19, 000 or 30 percent, respectively. Throughout the period 1877-1917 there was something of a population transfer, with Muslims fleeing Russia and Armenians fleeing the Ottoman Empire.

"In 1878 three-fourths of the inhabitants of the Kars oblast were Moslem, but in the following two years approximately seventy-five thousand of them sought refuge within the Ottoman Empire. Their abandoned lands were repopulated by Russian religious dissenters and Turkish dissenters who continued to filter across the border."

Had relations between the Ottomans and the Russians been peaceful, it is possible that the Armenians on its border would not have been viewed with alarm by the Porte. As we know, however, relations between the two great empires of the area were anything but harmonious and it is in this context that Armenians in the eastern vilayets came to be seen as harboring pro-Russian sympathies. And, indeed, this mistrust was not totally unfounded. Russian Armenians led by Armenian generals in the Russian forces had fought with valor against the Ottomans, especially in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78; the Great Powers used the Armenian question as a pretext to force concessions from the Porte, and the Hnchakist and Dashnaktsutiun parties were either influenced by or had their origins in Russia. It takes no great empathy therefore, to understand why the sultan may have been wary of the Armenian millet. That he fostered massacre in 1894-96, and that his successors, as can be noted in Chapter 5, perpetrated genocide is another matter altogether.

Abdul Hamid's attitudes and intentions concerning the massacres may be gauged from a letter sent by the sultan to Sir Philip Currie, the British ambassador, in which he explains why harsh measures had to be taken at Sassoun, the scene of the first massacre in August 1894. To Sir Philip's allegations that "shocking atrocities were said to have been committed and the number killed is said to have reached several thousands," the sultan responded as follows:

"His majesty states that he is well aware of your Excellency's friendly disposition towards himself and the Empire; and he does not for a moment imagine that in bringing these matters to his notice Your Excellency wishes to raise the Armenian Question.

His Majesty continues by stating that just as in other countries there are Nihilists, Socialists, and Anarchists, endeavouring to obtain from the Government concessions and privileges which it is impossible to grant them, and just in the same manner steps had to be taken against them, so it is with the Armenians who for their own purposes invent these stories against the Government, and finding that they receive encouragement from British officials, are emboldened to proceed to open acts of rebellion, which the Government is perfectly justified in suppressing by every means in its power.

"His Majesty says that your Excellency will remember that the Bulgarians, [sic] concocted the same stories against the Government, and proceeded just as the Armenians do, and that the British Government extended a certain protection to the Bulgarians, who now been formed into separate provinces This cannot possibly, however, happen in the case of the Armenians. The Armenian population is spread over a large extent of the country and in no place are tbey a majority. Their expectations, therefore, can never be realized, and all the exaggerated stories of oppression and persecution, got up with tbe object of exciting European sympathy to enable them to obtain an impossible end, should not be relied upon...."[Emphasis added].

Naturally the Ottoman government was bound to take strong measures to put down sedition, and when people were found with arms in their hands resisting the authorities, it was only natural that the Government should mete out to them summary punishment. Only a short time ago in Italy the Italians put down disorder with a strong hand. England herself had, in India, resorted to the strongest measures to stamp out rebellion, and even in Egypt, England had put down disorder with a high hand. His Imperial Majesty treated the Armenians with justice and moderation and as long as they behaved properly all toleration would be shoum to them [emphasis added], but he had given orders that when they took to revolt or to brigandage the authorities were to deal with the Armenians as they deal with the authorities.

His Majesty had read the account which your excellency had given him with horror and sorrow. His Majesty had had no knowledge of these facts, and yesterday morning, when he read the report, he immediately instructed the Minister of the Interior to make inquiries and cause a telegram to be sent to Zeki Pasha, Commandant of the Fourth Corps d'Armee, instructing him to report at once.

The letter fails to mention that this same "Zeki Pasha, Commandant of the Fourth Corps d'Armee," had been decorated for his "bravery" at Sassoun.

We have quoted the sultan at length in order to show his relative sophistication pertaining to world affairs, his resentment of British pretensions to moral superiority, and above all his views on the Armenians. As regards the Armenians, we see that the Bulgarian secession "into a separate province" agitates him, and he imputes to the Armenians the same desires for secession and independence that had motivated the Bulgarians "This cannot possibly, however, happen in the case of the Armenians. . . Their expectations . . . can never be realized."

Beyond wanting to preserve the unity of the empire and imputing to Armenians secessionist intentions which he was willing to repress by force, possibly even by massacre, Abdul Hamid, as many historians have pointed out, wanted to guard the old order and to revitalize Islam. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to assume that he wanted to preserve the millet system and its orderings as well. Here again Armenians challenged his most sacred values.

Thus Ismail Kemal Bey who had served under the liberal Midhat Pasha and was well situated to understand the sultan's perspective, wrote that the bulk of the Muslim population gave the sultan no cause for alarm,

"but it was a different matter with the Christians, who frequented the foreign educational establishments in the country, who traveled and carried on constant relations with Europe and America, and he felt powerless to stay their evolution. In the Sultan's mind, the Armenians, spread as they were all over the Empire and in close relationship with their Muslim neighbors, whom they resembled in manner and customs, and whose language they spoke, were the only people in the Empire who might propagate liberal-and from this point- pernicious ideas. The same Armenians who had been considered useful to the state by former liberal statesmen, he now regarded as highly dangerous and for the same reasons."

If he felt powerless to stay their evolution, what indeed might be the sultan's reaction and that of the Ottoman ruling class who believed in the millet system and the subservient status of dhimmis, to discover that the structure of the millets was crumbling and that dhimmis, especially Armenians, had experienced a social, economic, and cultural renaissance that was altering the relative status between them and their Ottoman superiors?

It may be suggested that the reaction of the sultan would be to attempt to restore the previous traditional equilibrium by destroying the gains in status of the Armenian millet. One of the policies that would be available to him would be the use of force, including massacre. What needs to be shown is that Armenians during the reign of Abdul Hamid II did in fact rise in status, that their status was seen to rise to the point where they could challenge a traditional, hierarchical, and valued rank ordering among Muslims and dhimmis, and that massacre was a preferred response to their many challenges.

There is consensus among writers, even among those not sympathetic to Armenian claims, that in the nineteenth century the Armenian community experienced a sudden flowering in culture, a development in its economic standing, and a new assertiveness in politics to an extent that some have called it a renaissance.

"The Armenian people, subjected for centuries to foreign domination, experienced a cultural and political renaissance during the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries The growth of national consciousness was manifested in literary movements, in the establishment of hundreds of schools . .. throughout the Ottoman and Russian empires, and in the emergence of societies striving for Armenian self-administration. The focus of concern was the great Armenian plateau in eastern Anatolia On this land the Armenian nation had taken form in the first millennium before the Christian era It was there that Armenian kings had reigned and a distinctive native culture had developed."

The Armenian renaissance had cultural, economic, and political features. As to cultural activity, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there occurred a marked advance in Armenian literacy, an increased development of the press, and a flowering of a literature in the vernacular. Until 1790 Armenians had been allowed only to educate seminarians and to build seminaries Under the rule of Selim III, however, they were permitted to form community schools, and these multiplied rapidly, first in Istabul and later in the interior. By 1830 a school for girls was established and a number of secondary schools as well.

As for the press, by the middle of the nineteenth century two outstanding Armenian journals were founded in Istanbul and one in Moscow, indicating among other things that there was a growing reading public capable of and interested in consuming news pertinent to Armenian life. The three papers were the Massis, the Ardzai Vaspurakan, and the Huisissapile. The Ardzvi Vaspurakan is of special interest because it was published by Bishop Mekertitch Khirimian (1820-1907), known popularly as Khirimian Hairig, who combined both religious and early nationalist leadership in one person. In l858 he moved his paper from Istanbul to Van, in the Armenian heartland, a significant development in that it indicates that the Armenian reading public was not limited to Istanbul but had appeared as well in the eastern vilayets.

As to economic activity, several writers point out that in the nineteenth century Armenians became quite active in trade, banking, and industry, and the Amira, a wealthy Armenian merchant class, was in the forefront of early Ottoman economic development.

As to political activity, we know that figures like Odian Efendi and Artin Dadian Efendi were active at the highest levels of the reform movement and that Armenians were active as well in the ranks of the revolutionary parties. The Armenian renaissance, in all of its dimensions, not only may have appeared to threaten the unity of the state but may also have confronted the ideology and practice of Muslim superiority and Armenian inferiority.

One need not agree with observers like Edwin Pears who argue that the sultan had an irrational hatred for Armenians to see that from his perspective the Armenians represented an intolerable challenge. Nor, however, must one then side with writers like the Shaws who contend that the Porte's view was fully justified by the intentions and activities of the Armenians themselves. There is a third alternative that may be suggested given the disintegration of empire due to Great Power pressures and minority secessions, and given the location of the Armenians on the border with Russia, their contacts with the European powers, and especially their renaissance at a time of trouble for the Ottoman Empire, the ground or context against which they had once been viewed shifted, and what had once been perceived as a loyal and useful millet came to be seen as insurrectionary and provocative.

The alteration of perceptions on the part of the Porte need not have had anything to do with the intentions or even the actions of the Armenians. The conservative ideology of the sultan, however, was a most important predisposing and magnifying factor Not only did he want to maintain the integrity of the empire, he thought he could do it by reinvigorating Islam and by restoring the old order-that is, the millet system with the Muslims on the top and the Christians on the bottom- and he felt that he could affect these changes by the use of force. In this interpretation, if restoration was a means toward unification, force, including massacre, was a means toward restoration.

Returning briefly to the role of the Armenian revolutionary parties, their role in the perceived provocation did not stem from their feckless activities and improbable manifestos but from the wider context in which the Armenian millet was viewed as leaving its preassigned place and challenging the traditional order of the Ottoman Empire. An observer of the period comes close to my own interpretation:

"When I say that the Armenian massacres were caused by the revolutionists, I tell the truth, and a very important one, but it is not the whole truth. It would be more correct to say that the presence of the revolutionists gave occasion and excuse for the massacres. That the Turks were looking for an excuse, no one can doubt who has traversed that country."

For the Armenians or for writers who understand the Armenian situation and outlook, the revolutionary parties did not represent a real threat to the Porte, and the Porte's reaction was totally disproportionate to the actual level of provocation. Viewed from the vantage point of the Porte, however, given the context of the times, these parties represented an intolerable danger This is a far cry, of course, from arguing that the Armenians were somehow responsible for their own massacres. It is one thing to begin to understand the motives and perceptions of the perpetrators, and quite another to blame the victims for what went on in the minds of their killers.

To this point it has been suggested that the massacres were prompted not only by the supposed provocations of the Armenian revolutionary parties but also by the ideology of the sultan and his regime, by the shifting context of Armenian-Ottoman relations, including Great Power pressures on behalf of the Armenians, and by the unintended consequences of the Armenian renaissance. The question, however, remains, Why did the sultan choose or accede to massacre when he could have used policies short of mass murder? For example, he could have used legal repression and police powers to cut down or even to destroy the parties. Or, conversely, he might have sided with the liberal reforms and opted for genuine egalitarian pluralism Given his reactionary perspective, the hierarchical structure of Ottoman society, and the many challenges of the Armenian renaissance, however, the sultan may have found massacre to be the most useful and desirable policy option.

Police repression as such could be directed effectively against individuals or parties, but it could not be used to prevent the renaissance of a major communal group. For renaissance implies a whole population on the move in the economic, cultural, social, and political spheres To abort such a broad-based social mobilization, what is needed is a broad-based policy designed to prevent change not only in one sphere of human progress but in all of them. Consider what massacre accomplished it "thinned out" or reduced the Armenian population; it seriously harmed its economic base; it humiliated, where it had not destroyed, its leadership; and it demonstrated in no uncertain terms that the Muslim segment and the Ottoman state had sufficient power to repress any challenge from dhimmis.

To argue from the advantageous results of a policy to the intentions of policymakers is not necessarily to fall into the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. What is needed is indication that the regime itself recognized in advance the results that a policy of massacre might produce.

In the case of the sultan, the evidence is not conclusive, but it is suggestive. First, massacre was not a new policy in the area. Massacre had been used against Christians before, most notably in Bulgaria, and it had been used against Armenians even before the period of 1894-96. The regime may have been well aware of the destructive and repressive aspects of massacre before that time. Further, Muslims, too, had been the victims of massacre, notably in Crete and in the Balkans, and it has been said that many of the Muslim refugees who had experienced Cossack violence in the Crimea had been settled in the eastern vilayets among the Armenians. Thus Muslims too knew from firsthand experience the effects of massacre, and among those seeking revenge it might have been a popular measure. And as a last point, massacre may also have been attractive to the regime because it was a subterfuge. In permitting local authorities and peasants to participate in repressing Armenians, massacre could achieve the desired results without clearly implicating the central government At a time when the regime was hard-pressed by European powers and was afraid of external intervention, this may have been by no means the least of the attractive features of this policy.

It should be noted, however, that the sultan had before him a policy alternative that would have avoided massacre He might simply have continued the policies of his predecessors by institutionalizing the reform constitution for which Midhat Pasha and other Ottomans, including Armenians, had labored so long and so diligently. As it turned out, in the long run the sultan failed in any event to stem the forces of disintegration. Ironically though he likely also would have failed had he followed the liberal reformers-nationalism was probably unstoppable-it is possible that no massacres of Armenians would have occurred.

This is an attractive argument, but it neglects a basic contradiction. The sultan and indeed the Ottoman Empire as a whole could not, at one and the same time, accommodate both the Armenian renaissance, with its implications of equality, and the millet system, with its implications of hierarchy and Muslim superiority. Something had to give. Either the Armenians had to be prevented from becoming the equals of Muslims, or the ideology, political myth, and practice of Muslim superiority had to be scrapped and replaced by a genuine egalitarian pluralism, one that might even have permitted self-determination. As has been seen, the sultan was not prepared to move in the direction of authentic equality and liberty.

We started this chapter by raising two questions: ( l ) What caused the Armenian massacres? (2) Why did they not evolve into a total domestic genocide like that of 1915 or the Holocaust? The first question has been addressed in the main body of this chapter, but some of the factors identified, such as the perceptions and ideology of the sultan, the alleged connections between the Armenians and the Russians, the enemies of the Ottoman regime, and the social mobilization of the Armenian millet may be restated in general terms as lessons that might apply to other cases of massacre. The second question cannot be fully answered until we discuss the genocide of 1915 in Chapter 5, but a provisional discussion is suggested below.

There are at least three lessons derived from the violence of 1894- 96 that might apply to other instances of massacre or partial genocide.

1.A communal group may appear to a regime as threatening enough to massacre, not only because of what that group intends to do or does, but also because of the ideology of those who feel threatened by it or because of changes in the context in which it is being perceived.

2. No matter how small or inoffensive it really is, a communal group may appear as threatening enough to massacre if it appears that it is in league with the enemies of the ruling regime.

3. In culturally plural societies undergoing the rigors of rapid change, upwardly mobile communal groups are likely to generate intergroup tensions. The more steep and rapid a group's ascent- from alien or pariah to elite status-the sharper the reaction against it. In instances where traditional elites are losing their grip on power or have already lost it, the rapid rise of low-status communal groups can lead to violence, including massacre.

The first proposition is so elementary that it is restated here only because it is so often forgotten. As against the provocation thesis, which argued that the Armenians themselves were responsible for the massacres, a principal design of this chapter has been to show that the stance of the perpetrator, how he views a threatening situation, must also be taken into account. Here Abdul Hamid imputing to Armenians the same motives that he had found among the Bulgars and other secessionist minorities is a case in point.

The second proposition is a generalization drawn from the apparent threat that the geopolitical situation of the Armenians posed to the Porte. Though there are other communal groups straddling borders in various parts of the world, the notable threat derives not just from the geographical location but from an alleged connection between the group and an external enemy of the state. Preceding the First World War, Ottoman rulers assumed that Armenians were in league with the empire's external enemies, above all Russia. Following Pearl Harbor, many Americans were convinced that Japanese Americans were in league with Japan. Though Japanese Americans were not massacred like the Armenians, the general principle that minorities who may have ethnic or other links to the enemies of the state are in danger of repression holds for both instances.

As to the third proposition, it is seldom when the wretched of the earth are most wretched that they suffer massacre. To the contrary, it is when they become upwardly mobile, begin to improve their economic, social, cultural, and political situations that they are most likely to be the subjects of massacre. "Negroes" were most likely to be Iynched after, not before, Reconstruction. Pogroms in the Russian pale coincided with Jewish advance and increased in the latter part of the nineteenth century as theJews began to leave the ghettos in increasing numbers Anti-lbo riots in Northern Nigeria, preceding Biafra by some twenty-five years, occurred with increasing severity in the urban enclaves. These riots coincided with the period of Ibo ascent, when this once despised communal group began successfully to compete with local traders and to challenge local politicians. As for the present study, it is striking that the Armenian massacres of 1894-96 occurred not when Armenian peasants lived out an isolated, backward, and obscure existence in the eastern vilayets but when they experienced a renaissance.

In the examples cited under the third proposition, the ruling elites suffered a period of disintegration and decline, and society was challenged by forces it lacked the capacity to assimilate. Massacre was used or acceded to by the regime in order to restore a traditional and hierarchical order, one that seemed to be intolerably threatened by the improved fortunes of groups that in other times had occupied a low, despised, or pariah status.

As a corollary to the third proposition, it may be suggested that the state may find massacre to be an especially advantageous policy to employ in repressing upwardly mobile communal groups. Other forms of repression may be too broad, too narrow, or too difficult to execute, as the case may be. Thus genocide may be too broad an option because it eliminates a communal group from the social structure when the goal may be only to halt its progress or to reduce its status. Conversely, police repression may be too narrow an option. The arrest of leaders and the destruction of political parties may not serve to slow the progress of a communal group in the economic, cultural, social, and political spheres. Forced emigration as has been used by Vietnam and Cuba in recent years may not be a possibility because it may create unmanageable international tensions There are other measures like assimilation or conversion, which may not be feasible if a majority rejects incorporating a minority or if a minority insists on a separate identity Finally, one needs to stress, when a state ceases to view the progress of a despised minority as a "problem," it may then cease to consider massacre as a "solution."

In Chapter 3 it will be seen that Jews in Imperial Germany who were another despised group thought to be inferior, also experienced a sharp reaction to their emancipation and progress. This reaction did not take the form of massacres but of an antisemitic movement that attempted to stem their assimilation and integration into German society The Kaiserreich cannot be equated, however, to the regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid. Imperial Germany was a powerful and widely legitimate state whose elites had broad ambitions but could not be said to be disintegrating. Moreover, the institutional context was also quite different, allowing for political parties and representation in a parliament. As will be seen in Chapter 4, the structure of the state directed Jew-hatred into the direction of political party activity and ideological pronouncements that were missing in the Ottoman context.

When we shall turn to the Armenian Genocide and to the Holocaust we shall see that some of the same elements that entered into the massacres of 1894-96 were also present in those two instances of total genocide. Given revolution and war, Armenians and Jews were perceived as deadly threats to the Turkish and German states; Armenians and Jews were said to be in league with the enemies of Turkey and Germany, respectively; Armenian and Jewish social mobilization were viewed as illegitimate in Turkey and Germany, though by 1908 and 1918 both states paid lip service to the values of equality. And yet, the massacres of 1894-96 were not a total domestic genocide.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II had no intention exterminating the Armenians or destroying the Armenian millet as such. Indeed, it may be noted that once the massacres were over,

"relations between Muslims and Armenians in the empire for the most part returned to normal. Armenian officials again were appointed to high positions in the bureaucracy and Armenian merchants and cultivators resumed their activities. But the terrible events had taken their toll The harmony that had prevailed for centuries was gone."

Though the massacres poisoned relations between Muslims and Armenians and may be viewed as a prelude to the genocide, the Armenian community survived the violence as a component millet of the Ottoman Empire.

Why did the massacres-terrible as they were-not lead to a total genocide of the Armenians? Such a hypothetical question necessarily leads to speculative responses, but these may be instructive for the discussion of total genocide that will follow later. One possibility, of course, was that the Porte was constrained by external forces, especially the fear of the Great Powers, but that is not the main point.

The main reason total genocide was not perpetrated by the Ottoman regime in 1894-96 was its commitment to Islam, to the millet system, and to restoring the old order. Abdul Hamid was not a revolutionary. He was a reactionary conservative who opposed radical transformations of state and society. Indeed, to commit genocide by destroying the Armenian millet would have been a radical departure from the sultan's ideology, and it would have undermined Islam and the millet system as myths of legitimation linking the Ottoman state to Ottoman society.

The Porte was able to go along with or to help perpetrate massacre, but it was not willing to go so far as to destroy the Armenian millet. In contrast, as we shall see, by 1915, the Young Turks had no such scruples. They were revolutionaries who wanted to destroy the old order, including the millet system, and to replace it with one based on Turkish nationalism. When the time came, for the sake of a homogeneous national state and a Pan-Turkish empire, they did not hesitate to annihilate the Armenian community.