The Armenians

by C. F. Dixon-Johnson

When one first hears the tale of the Malatia massacre, one says, now indeed there was no excuse for the Turks; this was a brutal attempt to destroy a harmless population; but on inquiry it is the same foolish, hopeless tale, the usual boastful Armenian threats, the inevitable noisy talk of freedom and liberty; the cry that the Turks were on the verge of collapse! the arms collected! the usual pointless intrigue and the inevitable betrayals by each other; the final provocation given, and the natural outbreak of the Moslems, resulting in massacre. The Armenians had intended to fight; had prepared for a revolution; had collected weapons from all parts; but as usual, on the very first onslaught they were hopeless and panic-stricken, and what they intended to have been a battle ended in a pitiless slaughter.

The only few who maintained anything like a bold front were those who took possession of the Armenian Church and held it against the mob; but my admiration for them was lost when I learned that these miserable hounds, when they saw Franciscan monks escaping from their convent, fired on them at 200 yards in hopes of killing a European and so forcing the hand of the Powers. This ruse I have alluded to before, and it seems to be a favourite stratagem, exhibiting the Armenian nature in its most unpleasant light.

How massacres could well have been avoided is hard to imagine. The Armenians insisted on threatening revolutions; openly boasted that the Powers would help them; silently intrigued against the Government; silently betrayed one another’s intrigues; collected arms and gave offence to the Moslems, and yet possessed no more cohesive fighting or military capacity than rabbits.

The falsity of the suggestion of the Pro-Armenians that these were unprovoked massacres inspired by the Turkish Government working upon Moslem fanaticism and Kurdish greed, is also shown by the following passage from Sir Edwin Pears’ book:[7]

As a friend to the Armenians, revolt seemed to me purely mischievous. Some of the extremists declared that while they recognized that hundreds of innocent persons suffered from each of these attempts, they could provoke a big massacre which would bring in foreign intervention.

The only apparent reason why Sir Edwin Pears regarded as “mischievous” these revolts, resulting in the sacrifice of hundreds of innocent persons, is indicated by his adding that “such intervention was useless so long as Russia was hostile,” and it is interesting also to note the callousness with which the extremists at the cost of hundreds of innocent victims endeavoured to provoke a massacre of thousands of their compatriots.

In August 1896 the revolutionaries, having failed to stir up a general rising in Asia determined to adopt desperate measures in Constantinople in the hope of forcing the hands of the Ambassadors. About 1 p.m. on an August afternoon they suddenly attacked with bombs and revolvers the guard of the Ottoman Bank, twelve of whom they killed. They then broke in and seized the European staff as hostages. Besieged in the top story of the bank they threatened to blow up the building with all who were in it, rather than surrender. The Ambassadors hastily appealed to the Porte, who yielded to their importunities on behalf of their nationals and allowed them to guarantee a safe conduct to the conspirators. That night they were quietly smuggled away on Sir Edgar Vincent’s yacht.

Bombs were also thrown in the Grand Rue de Pera, near the Galata Serai, and some of the conspirators who had taken a position upon the roofs of the houses in that, the principal thoroughfare of Constantinople, fired upon the populace in the street below.

There seems little doubt that the revolutionists had contemplated a series of attacks at different important points, to be followed by a more or less general rising of the Armenian population, which numbered from 200,000 to 400,000.

A cry went through the city that the Armenians had risen in revolt and were massacreing the other citizens. Many persons armed themselves with cudgels and, joined by a cosmopolitan mob from Pera and Galata, many of whom were Greeks anxious to pay off old scores on their hated commercial rivals, wreaked vengeance on the Armenian population. The soldiers and police took no part in the killing. It is estimated that about 1,000 persons perished, including those killed by the bombs and revolvers of the conspirators. What happened in London and Liverpool after the sinking of the “Lusitania” affords an idea of how the East End people of London, who claim to be far more highly educated than the Constantinople rabble, would have behaved if German desperados, after murdering twelve of the sentinels on guard at the Bank of England, had been allowed to escape free in deference to the representations of the American and Spanish Ambassadors, especially after the fears and passions of the mob had been aroused by German aliens shooting and bombing from the roofs of the houses. In considering the question of massacre we must always bear in mind that mob law is inevitably cruel and senseless, as witness the excesses committed during the French Revolution and the Commune, the lynchings in America of to-day, and the pogroms of Russia.