Feasibility of foreign military intervention to stop Armenian massacres of 1894-1896

Keenir

Banned
If Balakian ain't an Armenian family name and if that book hasn't managed to cheery pick contemporary sources to deliver a biased message, then slap me silly and strip me of my Armenian heritage.

what if only half of that is true? (kidding)

Oh, and, er...

huh.
usually during these threads, Abdul tells us that none of the Armenians in (Constantinople/the eastern half of the Empire) were killed.
 
The book The Burning Tigris: A History of the Armenian Genocide by Peter Balakian is a detailed account of the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896, the Armenian genocide and the reactions by Britain and the United States to those events.

Balakian cites contemporary sources which gave estimates of the death toll in the massacres:

It was militarily possible for say Britain, France and Russia to have intervened. It was political rivalry and the fear by Britain and France that Russia would grab Constantinople that stopped them. But presumably Russia could have intervened through the Caucasus.

It's simply not true. Lepsius didn't see any massacres or victims himself, he only had hearsay provided by Armenians, and saw only places Armenians took him too. From that he extrapolated. He was a pastor, not a statistician, and it is physically impossible for 250,000 Armenians to have been killed, let alone 100,000. We have census data from before the massacres, and census data from after. There is no 250,000 gap.

Almost all contemporary sources agreed that the number was about 15,000.

However, that doesn't matter, as 1 Christian killed is enough for a Western intervention. After all, in the Greco-Ottoman War of 1897, the Ottomans were responsible for exactly zero civilian deaths in a war that they won against Greece which had invaded the empire without cause or declaration and massacred large numbers of Muslims, yet the Powers took Crete and gave it to Greece.

However, in the case of the Ottoman Empire, there was no real way to intervene without Russia, and all the gains would be Russian.

The British couldn't really do much, except maybe bombard ports, which would end up killing large numbers of Christians, and it would all be photographed.

This might have been an opportunity to partition the empire, but that's a step that even Salibury feared to take. If perhaps Abdul Hamid II had been killed in one of the constant stream of Armenian terrorist attacks, that might have led to political chaos that might have prompted Britain to participate in a partition.
 
well, the legal pretext for humanitarian intervention, by Russia or any of the other Powers, could'vve been under the Treaty of Berlin 91878) which was supposed to guarantee protection for the rights of Armenians.

The Treaty of Berlin mentioned vague reforms in the "Armenian Provinces", which Salisbury thought implied a British protectorate over the entire Empire, but Abdul Hamid managed to sidestep by playing Russia against Britain.

It was actually the British themselves that had sparked the massacres by moving the Mediterranean Fleet off the Dardanelles. That made people thing the British planned to create an Armenian state, which would result in the massacre of all the Muslims therein as had been the case in all the other states created out of Ottoman territory.

I'm not sure what form an intervention could take, as the British really had no means of reaching Eastern Anatolia.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
what if only half of that is true? (kidding)



huh.
usually during these threads, Abdul tells us that none of the Armenians in (Constantinople/the eastern half of the Empire) were killed.

Actually Abdul tell us that it was the Turks that were massacred by the evil Armenian imperialists.
 

Keenir

Banned
Actually Abdul tell us that it was the Turks that were massacred by the evil Armenian imperialists.

that's when he's feeling sarcastic. usually he says that the death toll was the same on both sides - partly because of the geography and weather, partly because of Kurdish raiding parties.
 
That's because usually these threads are about the WWI events.

Yes. In 1896 there were massacres in Istanbul in response to a particularly bad terror campaign. Abdul Hamid was blamed for ordering it because at first he didn't do anything about it (he actually did, for instance closing the bridge). Once passions cooled, he did move to restore order firmly.

The reason for this is because he himself was in danger of being deposed by the mob, because there was a perception that he wasn't defending the country against foreign intervention.
 
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