Chronological Index:

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In order to understand mass violence in the late Ottoman Empire, one should refer to the period of reforms (1839-1876) and to the proclamation of a short-lived constitutional monarchy on the eve of the 1877-1878 Ottoman-Russian War in the Balkans.

The administrative and judicial reforms known as Tanzimat (literally, “re-organization”) and the adoption of the Constitution (1876), which was an anticipated response to the Russian-European demands for political reform and protection of the Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire, aimed to create legal Ottoman citizenship and establish true equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. However, these measures had a series of unintended consequences.

First of all, the reforms were already outdated by the time they were adopted. The Christian communities to whom they promised equality with Muslims had been under the influence of romantic forms of nationalism for decades, and considered themselves national entities. By the 1870s, some sections of the Christian elites were also under the influence of Socialist ideas and described the Ottoman Empire as a territory of barbarity and obscurantism.

Second, the Constitution of 1876 defined Islam as the State’s official religion. This alone was not a breaking-point but it did, however, ossify and radicalize group identities: the very act of defining the State in religious terms also meant defining a political majority and political minorities through sectarian differentiations. Although the electoral code of 1876 was supposed to provide for genuine representation of the non-Muslims, it also established sectarian-based electoral lists, which, in turn, allowed the Christian communities to conceive themselves both as separate entities and as de facto marginalized communities.

As Şerif Mardin suggested, before the Tanzimats, the Ottoman “State” conceived itself as a bureaucratic organ totally separated from society. As other imperial states, of the past, it saw its role as the establishment and preservation of a harmonious “world order” (nizam-i alem) where all communities and social groups “ought to be in their respective places.” In contrast to this imperial doctrine, the new Ottoman doctrine elaborated during the Hamidian rule conceived the State primarily as a State of the Muslims, versus other communities. Thus, in the increasingly secularized Ottoman society, Islam was transformed into a quasi-national identity.

More importantly, to Abdulhamid II, who had ascended the throne in 1876, the reforms, but also the adoption of a Constitution, were strategic mistakes or, even worse, concessions made to European powers. They weakened the Empire, and they also failed to prevent European intervention and the Ottoman-Russian war. Throughout his long reign, Abdulhamid refrained from any adventurous foreign policies (and except for the war with Greece, which led to the proclamation of the autonomy of Crete in 1897, he faced no major foreign policy problems). However, he was convinced that the long peace achieved under his rule was only a prelude to new foreign interventions and wars, which would ultimately lead to the loss of the Empire. Thus, he believed, the State should strengthen its position in Anatolia, which the Sultan considered the only stronghold of Turkishness and Islam. This territorial “hard core” had to be surrounded and protected by a Muslim periphery of non-Turkish populations (Albanians, Arabs and Kurds). The enrolment of some Kurdish tribes in the Hamidiyye Light Cavalry in 1891 was not only a remedy to the tribal unrest in the Kurdish region, it also constituted a strategic step in protecting Eastern Anatolia against its external and internal “enemies,” Russia and Armenian revolutionaries.

 Territorial Losses and the 1894-1896 Massacres

As mentioned previously, Hamidian rule started with a debacle, the so-called “93 War” (1877-1878). During this armed conflict, the Ottomans lost large parts of Bulgaria, which formally remained under the rule of the Empire, but gained de facto independence. Similarly, Bosnia and Herzegovina becqme a protectorate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although there are no reliable figures, we do know that up to a million Muslims residing in these areas were forced into exile in Ottoman Thrace and Anatolia. Some massacres probably took place, thus increasing the number of refugees who had been expelled from the Caucasus or decided themselves to settle in the Ottoman Empire throughout the 19th century. In 1897, the Ottomans also lost Crete; once again, the Muslim population, which probably constituted 45% of the total population of the island, was forced to leave.

Between 1894 and 1896, large-scale massacres of the Armenian populations of Eastern Anatolia took place. Zeki Pacha, the founder of the Hamidiyye Light Cavalry, played a decisive role in these massacres which followed three major acts of Armenian opposition: demonstrations held by the Hintchaksoutioun organization’s militants in Istanbul, the Armenian revolt against the illegal taxes claimed by the Kurdish tribes in Sassoun, and the occupation of the Ottoman Bank by 26 militants of the Dachanksoutioun organization. It took heavy (and overdue) European pressure to stop the massacres which, as J. Verheij and C. Mouradian have suggested, cost the lives of between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians.

Many survivors were compelled to migrate outside the Ottoman Empire. The “conquest” of Armenian lands by Kurdish tribal lords brought about the infamous Armenian “agrarian question” (i.e., their dispossession from their lands) and a real impoverishment of the Armenian peasantry.

 From the Hamidian Period to Unionism

Hamidian rule was contested by many Ottoman Muslim intellectuals who formed a de-territorialized space of opposition in Europe. Although many different protagonists were active in this space, the “Young Turk” opposition was structured by two major organizations: the Union and Progress Committee, whose main leader, Ahmed Riza, was a positivist with Ottomanist-nationalist leanings, and the Organization of Private Initiative and Decentralization of Prince Sabahaddin, who advocated radical administrative reforms, decentralization of the Empire and encouragement of individual entrepreneurship.

In spite of the spread of revolutionary ideas among them, for almost two decades, the Young Turks remained, on the whole, a pacific opposition movement. However, the fate of these dissenters changed between 1905 and 1906, when a new generation of militants trained by the ultra-nationalists Bahaaddin Şakir and Dr. Nazim, along with others, took over the de facto leadership of the Union and Progress Committee. This new “core” did not reflect the sociological and ideological profile of the entire organization, of course. However, it had a clear axiological agenda and openly advocated a pan-Turkist (and to some extent, pan-Touranist) program. The second major change took place in 1908, when a few Unionist officers, including Enver, the future minister of Defense, entered a phase of armed struggle against the State and killed a few high-ranking Ottoman officers. Although this military uprising was in fact a small-scale event, it was sufficient to destabilize Abdulhamid II’s regime. On July 23, 1908, more than 30 years after having suspended the Constitutional monarchy, the Sultan agreed to restore it. He was eventually deposed in 1909 after an insurrection in Istanbul.

The first years of the Constitutional Monarchy were characterized by an obvious contrast: on one hand, the “Young Turk revolution” (which was also called the “French Revolution in the Middle East” or the “Proclamation of Liberty”) was fully “Ottomanist” and led to genuine fraternization between the Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities. The Christians were allowed to have representatives in the Parliament and some of them could even become high-ranking civil servants. On the other hand, Turkish nationalism gradually became the dominant ideology among the Unionist leaders and young officers. The formation of a series of ultra-nationalist or paramilitary organizations as Türk Yurdu (Turkish Fatherland), Türk Gücü (Turkish Power) and Türk Ocaklari (“Turkish Hearths”) also transformed this nationalism into the dominant ideology among intellectuals and students. By 1912-1913, many Turkish nationalist intellectuals, as Yusuf Akçura, Ziya Gökalp and Tekin Alp (Moise Cohen) considered the Christian minorities as a privileged aristocracy and as internal enemies.

This process was accelerated following a few important events: in 1908, immediately after the “Young Turk Revolution,” Bulgaria officially proclaimed its independence and Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina. This led to a wide-spread boycott of Austrian goods, which actually took the shape of a boycott of Christian traders in the Ottoman Empire. In 1911, Italy occupied Tripolitania, thus convincing many Unionists that European aggression toward the Ottomans would continue in spite of their revolution. In 1912, during the First Balkan War, the Ottomans lost almost all of their European territories, including Thessaloniki, a stronghold of Unionism. Although the Ottoman armies were able to retake Edirne during the Second Balkan War in 1913, these wars, which led to the departure of tens of thousands of Muslims from the Balkans, played an important role in the further radicalization of Turkish nationalism.

The military setback of 1912 also set the stage for a Unionist coup d’Etat, which gave birth to a single-party regime. The liberal opposition was banned and its leaders were accused of the assassination of Prime Minister Mahmud Sevket Pacha in 1913 though there was no evidence against them. They were either executed or forced into exile.

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