The human tragedies spawned by the 1894-96 massacres should not, however, blind us to the fact that these acts of mass violence were instigated by the Ottoman state in reaction to its own incapacity to carry out reforms and in consequence of the Sultan's obsession with “demographics.” After the disaster of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which had stripped the Ottoman Empire of many of its former European possessions and given rise to the first influx of Muslim muhajir from Bosnia and Bulgaria, the Sultan seems to have concluded that the Armenian segment of the population had to be “reduced” in order to diminish its relative demographic weight in the Eastern provinces. While the presence of an Armenian population in Western Anatolia was not a matter of particular concern in his eyes, the continuing existence of a large, basically rural population concentrated in a single region in the East seemed to him dangerous and intolerable. Doubtless the elites long established in Constantinople had become aware of this region's needs and the risk of annihilation hanging over it only as a result of the Hamidian massacres and the turmoil caused by the resistance movements that had sprung up there.
Paradoxically, the effort that the regime agreed to make to modernize the Empire and endow it with a centralized administration had primarily benefited its dominated populations. Thus the Armenians had at least partially freed themselves from the trammels of a feudal system whose rule they had borne for better than four centuries; rapidly built up a school system that had unquestionably raised the educational level of Armenian children; increased the number of ... Read all
Charity, Philanthropy, and Relief Work
Armenian orphanage in Sebastia/Sivas in 1902 (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris)
Nubar Pasha (1825-1899), Prime Minister in various Egyptian governments (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris)