Armenian Protests and Sultan Abdülhamid II's Violent Response

As the Ottoman Empire’s fortunes declined in the nineteenth century, life for Armenians and other non-Muslims became progressively more difficult. Armenian leaders reported frequent looting and murder in Armenian towns by Kurds and Circassians in the empire’s eastern provinces. They also reported that government officials in those areas demanded Armenians pay them extra in return for protection from the attacks and refused to allow Christians to testify as witnesses in trials. ¹

The options available to Armenians to improve their conditions differed significantly from those available to Balkan nations. Groups such as Greeks and Serbs made up the majority in the provinces in which they lived. As a result, they were able to overcome their unequal treatment in the Ottoman Empire by breaking away and establishing their own independent nation-states. By contrast, the Armenian population was scattered throughout several provinces of the empire, and they did not make up the majority in any province. Therefore, their hopes for safety and security did not rest as much on an independent nation-state as they did on changes in the way they were governed by the empire.

Therefore, the Armenian people launched campaigns to challenge their unequal status in the empire and educate the world about their situation. Some of these campaigns were led by the two largest Armenian political parties—the Hunchaks and the Dashnaks. They hoped that outside pressure from England, France, and Russia might convince Sultan Abdülhamid II to embrace reforms. Instead, the sultan responded with violence. 

Organizing for Change

Scholar Peter Balakian describes Armenian protests in the early 1890s and how the Ottoman government responded: 

In the summer of 1890 in Erzurum, about 200 Armenians met in the cathedral church yard to draw up a petition to protest the conditions under which Armenians were living throughout the Empire. But, as the rally began the police interceded, and before long an Ottoman battalion was dispatched to Erzurum. Before it was over, the Armenian quarter was attacked and looted, and there were more than a dozen dead and 250 wounded. 

A month later in Constantinople, Armenians demonstrated outside their cathedral . . . and again violence broke out between the police, some soldiers, and the Armenian demonstrators. Of the fracas that followed, the British Ambassador, Sir William White, noted what seemed to him the historical importance of the occasion by referring to it as "the first occasion since the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks on which Christians have dared resist soldiers in Stamboul [Istanbul]."

By 1893, Armenian activists were placing yaftas—placards—on the public walls of certain towns in western and central Anatolia. The placards were addressed to Muslims around the world asking them to stand up to the sultan, an incompetent oppressor. Instead of instigating Muslim rebellion, however, the plan, which had come from Hunchak cells throughout Anatolia, instigated a mass of arbitrary arrests and torture across the empire. Nonetheless, by the early 1890s the Armenians were making themselves heard, which further enraged the already paranoid sultan. ²

The Hamidian Massacres

The tensions between the Ottoman government and the Armenians continued to erupt in 1894 after the Hunchak party in Sassun encouraged ordinary Armenians—farmers, peasants, and merchants, frustrated by their unequal status—to withhold their taxes. Ottoman troops were sent in to stop the protest. Instead of restoring the peace, the soldiers began massacres that would spread throughout the Turkish Armenian provinces. All told, about 200,000 Armenians were killed and tens of thousands displaced between 1894 and 1897 in what became known as the Hamidian Massacres.

These widespread attacks on Armenians were directed by the sultan and carried out by Ottoman soldiers as well as local militias, which often consisted of Kurdish tribesmen. The sultan persuaded these militias to participate by emphasizing the religious differences between the Muslim Kurds and Christian Armenians, both of whom occupied many of the same territories.

Ordinary citizens in cities, towns, and villages across the empire also participated in the massacres. Religious tensions between Muslims and Christians motivated many to participate. Historian Jelle Verheij describes how Muslims in the province of Diyarbakir worried that their “natural” higher status than Armenians was being reversed:

It appears that by 1895, whatever Armenians did in Diyarbakir was offensive in Muslim eyes. Armenians were accused of monopolizing import/export trade. They built a clock tower that was higher than a minaret. When a cholera epidemic broke out it was said that more Muslims than Armenians fell victim. ³

According to historian Ronald Grigor Suny, religious tensions prompted some to participate in attacks, but many more joined out of simple greed and lust as the government created a permissive environment for violence, looting, and theft against Armenians. ⁴

Ottoman soldiers recorded their participation in the massacres in letters they sent home. These letters offer a glimpse of the way Armenians had become dehumanized in the eyes of the soldiers. One soldier wrote 

My brother, if you want news from here we have killed 1,200 Armenians, all of them as food for the dogs. . . . Mother, I am safe and sound. Father, 20 days ago we made war on the Armenian unbelievers. Through God's grace no harm befell us. . . . There is a rumor that our battalion will kill all the Armenians there. Besides, 511 Armenians were wounded, one or two perish every day. ⁵

Ottoman officials did everything they could to prevent news of the massacres from spreading. Nevertheless, reports were smuggled out of Turkey and later collected as part of an official investigation conducted by the British, French, and Russian governments. 

Armenian Protests Continue Amidst Violence

On October 1, 1895, 2,000 Armenians marched to the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman capital in Constantinople) to deliver a petition protesting the ongoing massacres and the second-class status of Armenians throughout the empire. Their demands included “fair taxation; guarantees of freedom of conscience; the right of public meetings; equality before the law; protection of life, liberty, property, and honor (and this meant the protection of women).” They also demanded an end to political arrests and torture, as well as the right for Armenians to bear arms. ⁶ As they delivered the petition, the Armenian protesters were attacked by soldiers and police. In the ensuing chaos, a police official was killed; the Ottomans responded with a weeklong massacre of Armenians in the city. 

As massacres of Armenians continued into 1896, leaders of the Dashnak Party redoubled their efforts to get help from European powers. In August, over a dozen Armenian revolutionaries stormed and occupied the Bank Ottoman, a European-controlled bank in Constantinople. They threatened to blow up the building unless European ambassadors negotiated a deal with the sultan to end the massacres of Armenians throughout the empire. The ambassadors defused the crisis by extracting a promise from the sultan to end the violence and agreeing to press the Ottoman government for reforms. The Armenian revolutionaries left the bank and immediately went into exile, but the sultan soon after resumed the massacres of Armenians in the capital.

The massacres across Anatolia diminished in 1897 when the Ottoman Empire went to war with Greece over the island of Crete, shifting the sultan’s attention away from the Armenians. ⁷

• 1Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2006, 36–38.
• 2Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 44–45.
• 3Jelle Verheij, “Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis of 1895,” in Jongerden and Verheij (eds.), Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 91. Quoted in Suny, 115.
• 4Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 130–131.
• 5From a Congressional Resolution cited in The Armenian Genocide and America’s Outcry: A Compilation of U.S. Documents 1890–1923 (Washington, D.C.: Armenian Assembly of America, 1985).
• 6Balakian, The Burning Tigris, 57–59.
• 7Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 102.