| The Armenian tableland (Russian and Turkish provinces) | 906,984 |
| Caucasus and remainder of Russian Transcaucasia | 450,000 |
| Astrakan and Bessarabia | 75,600 |
| Remainder of Asiatic Turkey | 751,500 |
| Turkey in Europe | 186,000 |
| Azerbaijan province of Persia[15] | 28,890 |
| Colony of Julfa (Ispahan) and remainder of Persia[16] | 14,110 |
| Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia | 5,010 |
| Rumania | 8,070 |
| Austria | 1,230 |
| 2,427,394 |
Two sets of causes are responsible for the recent outbreaks of Armenian sentiment in regions where this people are an insignificant minority, separated from the natural and historical seats of their race. There is in the first place the political and social inequality between the Christians and the Mohammedans. Just as beside some stagnant pool among the recesses of the rocks the returning tide awakens the folded life of plant and shell, so our Western civilisation, recoiling upon Asia, arouses the hopes which have slept for centuries in the breasts of the Christians of the East. It is not that they are denied religious freedom, as some of their partisans are bold enough to assert. The tolerance of the reigning Sultan is active throughout his empire. The traveller marvels at the liberty, almost amounting to license, which is allowed to the votaries of the several creeds. Take the capital: there are the Greeks with their noisy carnivals, so repugnant to Mussulman austerity. Or the Moslem wayfarer is hustled from the street by some funeral procession with its bevy of priests, conducting an open coffin where the lineaments of the deceased are exposed to a curious and respectful crowd. What invisible force controls all this fermenting human material?... Nor will the favourable impression be diminished by the wider experience of a provincial tour. In the country the sound of Christian bells falls upon the landscape from some cloister nestling in the lap of the hills. In the towns the observance of Sunday effects a change in urban life which is almost as marked as in a Christian state. Trades are suspended, shops are closed, chimes ring from the churches.
What is denied to the Christians is political equality. They are tolerated and they are taxed; but they remain the unbelievers, the victims of a prejudice stronger than any law. In the case of the Armenians they are rigorously prohibited from possessing firearms, and they do not serve in the army. They are excluded from the highest administrative posts. Their share in the provincial government is almost as nothing. The edicts which have pronounced in favour of equality have been inoperative and are in abeyance. At the same time the voice of the West is heard louder and nearer; and the rebellious spirits appeal to the example of Eastern Europe, freed for ever from a Mussulman yoke.
But why did the movement fasten upon these scattered communities—hostages, as it would seem, to the Mussulman power? I think the reason is not very far to seek. Because of the severity with which the outbreaks in Armenia were quelled during 1890 and the preceding years. It was evident to the revolutionary party that the spirit of their countrymen had become cowed in the land where they are native. However real their wrongs—and I think I have testified to their reality—they had learnt by recent experience to endure them in silence without attempting to obtain redress. The movement, suppressed in its place of origin, broke out on new ground.
Sasun, a mountainous region belonging to the southern peripheral zone on the outer margin of the Armenian tableland, was the scene of the first events in the latest recrudescence of the old malady, smothered but not cured. The district extends from the southern slopes of the mountains overlooking the plain and town of Mush, situated upon their northern verge, to the neighbourhood of the town of Hazo. It formed a canton of the old Armenian province of Aghdznik, which is sometimes joined by Armenian writers with that of Korduk, the modern Kurdistan. The name of the canton, Sasun, is said to be derived from Sanasar, one of the two sons of the Assyrian monarch Sennacherib, who, after slaying their father, fled into Armenia.[17] His descendants appear to have been known as the Sanasuns or Sasuns[18]; they were princes of Aghdznik, and occupied the very highest rank at the court of the Armenian Arsakid king.[19] Their territories were no doubt occupied by an Armenian population; and the memories of that distant period still linger among the peasantry who are scattered over the wild but in places fertile land.[20] But the vicinity of the region to the towns of the lowlands must have rendered wellnigh impossible the maintenance by its inhabitants of their Christian religion during the period of Mussulman expansion. We know from history that its Armenian ruler at the close of the ninth century had adopted a Mussulman name and outwardly professed the Mohammedan religion.[21] At the present day some handfuls of Armenian Christians preserve with obstinacy the habits of their race and the practice of their religion among remote fastnesses. The bulk of the population have adopted Islam, are classed as Kurds, and can with difficulty be distinguished from the Kurdish people.
Strange indeed are the anomalies which are presented in these little-known districts of Turkish Kurdistan. On the southern fringe of Sasun live a tribe called the Baliki or Beleke, speaking a mixed language of Arabic, Kurdish and Armenian. Their religion cannot be classed either as Christian or Mohammedan, nor even as that professed by the Kizilbashes. When they make oath it is in the name of a church or monastery. But they possess neither churches nor mosques. Marriage is a rite which they ignore. Their women go about in perfect freedom and unveiled, wearing white trousers like the Yezidis or so-called devil-worshippers. Wives are bought or exchanged—a woman of forty for one of twenty, the owner of the latter being compensated by a few silver pieces. A girl may be purchased from them by a stranger, provided always that you take her away. These Baliki are probably a particular remnant of the old inhabitants, with whom the Armenians, dispersed among them as traders, would scarcely recognise any racial link.
Serfdom is an institution which is not unknown in the country, though its existence is softened over by the Turkish authorities, who shrink from dispensing a purely nominal sovereignty. The serfs, who are Armenians, are known as zer kurri, signifying bought with gold. In fact they are bought and sold in much the same manner as sheep and cattle by the Kurdish beys and aghas. The only difference is that they cannot be disposed of individually; they are transferred with the lands which they cultivate. The chief appropriates as much as he wishes from their yearly earnings, capital or goods; and in return he provides them with protection against other Kurdish tribes. Many stories are told to illustrate the nature of the relation. A serf was shot by the servant of a Kurdish agha who possessed lands in the neighbourhood. The owner of the serf did not trouble to avenge his death on the person of the murderer, still less upon that of the agha, his neighbour. He rode over to the agha’s lands, and put bullets through two of his serfs, the first that he happened to meet.... The serf of a chieftain residing a few hours’ distance from the town of Hazo had settled in Hazo, where he had become treasurer to the Turkish Government. One night his house was attacked by another Kurdish chief, his money carried off and he and his cousin murdered. In this case the owner was not so easily propitiated. He gathered his people together, bearded his fellow-brigand in his lair, killed him, burnt down his house, and put to death every living thing. Both these incidents occurred during the lifetime of people who are still living; the one is related by no less an authority than a British Consul, and the other by an individual in a responsible position, whose sympathies are on the side of the Turkish Government.
On the tableland of Armenia such relations between the Kurds and the Armenians are altogether unknown. Their existence in one form or another among the inaccessible retreats of Kurdistan provided material for the revolutionary propaganda of the agitator, Damadean, whose early doings in the Sasun region I have chronicled in my chapter on Bitlis, and who presents a striking and almost legendary figure even in the sober narrative of the Blue-books.[22] This man and his successor Boyajean knew full well that there in Sasun they were breaking virgin ground. They were further encouraged by the fact that the Armenian peasantry of that region were in possession of arms and knew how to use them. The result of their efforts and of the ill-advised action of the local authorities was the Sasun massacre of 1894. It was followed by the massacres of 1895, which devastated the country districts and most of the great towns of the Armenian tableland, but of which the principal and new feature was the occurrence of such tragedies among the Armenian communities spread over the face of the Ottoman Empire.
I have not been able to learn that the condition of these scattered communities presents any special cause for disaffection; and I do not believe that the revolutionary movement, in which they all participated in some degree, was either spontaneous in its nature or indigenous in its growth. Few if any of them are engaged in a struggle for life and death with hordes of Kurds, let loose on territory which is not Kurdish and which is far from being suited to that race of lawless shepherds. Most of them are fairly prosperous citizens in the towns; and whatever grievances they may possess are shared in a greater or a lesser degree by all the Christian subjects of the Sultan. The Armenian cause, as a cause with a justifiable and reasonable aim, is not founded upon any such grievances. For all practical and constructive purposes it is simply a question of the proper government of the provinces of Armenia which are inhabited by Mussulmans as well as by Armenians, but which are raided and drained of their resources by tribal Kurds.
One other aspect of this part of the subject remains to be considered. The massacres of 1895 were certainly not the outcome of a spontaneous rising of the Mussulmans against the Christians. All or nearly all were organised from without. I well remember how, while taking coffee with an official high in the Turkish service in the neighbourhood of a great provincial centre, my host, pointing to the road which we overlooked from the open windows, said: “I can never look upon that road without remembering the occasion when I sat in this very room and saw strange people passing along it—immigrants, so they seemed, from the mountains in the north. Our massacre followed at no long interval.” The Mussulmans of the Armenian provinces are perfectly well aware that their own turn will closely follow upon the disappearance of the Armenians. They will not, indeed, be butchered by imported bands of ruffians; but they will be swallowed by the Kurds. Some of their villages have already been raided by this people, who are less to blame for such natural exercise of their appetites than those who have transplanted or enticed them from their native seats.... I must now pass without any preamble to the larger bearings of the Armenian Question: does it offer any scope for a practical and special solution which need not embrace the reform and rejuvenescence of the Ottoman Empire as a whole? And what are the interests of the progressive states of Europe, and of Great Britain in particular, in the settlement and disposal of the Question?