The French supplement to Meşveret (Mechveret supplément français), which Rıza had begun publishing in Paris in 1895, reveals the uncomfortable situation in which the Parisian exiles found themselves, torn as they were between patriotic feelings informed by official Ottoman discourse and their shame at the European reaction to the events. A May 1896 article by the movement’s master thinker includes a long demonstration in which Rıza endeavors to show that the anti-Armenian massacres organized by Abdülhamid “flew in the face of the traditions of Islamicism and the precepts of the Koran … We wish to see the sultan surrounded by counselors who are steeped in both Muslim precepts and the ideas of order and progress.”
Rıza thus put forward the thesis that responsibility for the massacres lay with the sultan’s entourage, which had supposedly failed on this occasion to respect national traditions. He thereby exonerated the sultan himself of all blame, illustrating in the process his conception of the government and his attachment to the function of the Sultan-Caliph.
A few weeks later, Rıza expatiated on his approach to the notion of responsibility, thereby revealing his perception of the empire’s Christian subjects. He confessed that he “defended the Muslims more often than the Christians.” “This may seem exaggerated,” he went on, “but the fact is that, in our country, there is no comparison between the fate of the Ottoman Christians and that of the Muslims. The Christians are by far happier, or, if one prefers, less wretched … If Christians are the preferred targets of looting, the reason is that they enjoy greater wealth and material comfort than the Muslims and that, either out of fear or suspicion of the victor, they generally keep their doors shut.”
What the Young Turk leader says here is obviously rooted in a centuries-old Ottoman tradition, marked by the concept of the Christian “guest” who “takes advantage” of his happy lot and displays his lack of gratitude toward his masters by refusing to share what he possesses with them. Thus, the violence exercised by the dominant group is legitimized.
Jules Roches delivered a lecture in December 1895 at the Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes in which he denounced the horrors perpetrated by the Hamidian regime. The reactions that his lecture elicited are as revealing as Rıza’s essay. One of the Young Turks present, who had taken a seat beside Rıza, was unable to contain himself and shouted out: “All this information is false; it has been made up by the Hnchaks.” He then blamed the Armenians for the events that were sullying Turkey’s reputation. This shows how deeply young “liberal” activists, albeit united in their combat against Abdülhamid’s regime, were opposed on a great number of issues, prisoners of their respective cultural backgrounds and traditions.
For their part, the Armenian activists who sought to appeal to Western public opinion complained that the Parisian press depicted them as terrorists and willfully ignored the reality of the massacres. According to Sapah-Giulian, this general trend was reversed by a conversation he had with Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, his professor at the École des Sciences Politiques.
Leroy-Beaulieu, known as an expert on the East, agreed to intervene in the debate. His contribution also took the form of a lecture, “Armenia and the Armenian Question,” delivered at the Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes. This event, which saw a distinguished French personality participating in the discussion, provided Young Turk and Armenian activists with a new opportunity to air their opposing views. It showed, as well, that Istanbul kept close tabs on its opposition in exile.
Münir Bey, the sultan’s ambassador, who had been given the task of monitoring the opposition’s activities in Paris, recruited young Ottoman students, Sapah-Giulian reports, and had them introduced into the lecture hall, where Ahmed Rıza and his partisans were also present. One of Rıza’s supporters, no doubt reflecting his comrades’ mood as well, interrupted the lecturer to ask him whether a scholar like himself could seriously speak in such terms about a “religious group.”
In thus seeking to downplay Armenian identity, the Young Turks were in fact voicing the apprehensions they felt at the campaign mounted by the Hnchaks, who, adding insult to injury, had invited a “foreigner” to join a debate on an “internal matter” and so incited the European chancelleries to intervene in Turkey. Other examples, however, illustrate the solidarity prevailing between the oppositional groups in Paris and the fact that their relations, while sometimes stormy, were quite close.
A meeting that took place between the Young Turk leaders and the Hnchak revolutionaries shortly after the events just discussed was one of the most revealing in this respect. Rıza and Nâzım proposed to the SDHP representatives that they collaborate and “make a joint contribution to the movement of national renewal.” He suggested that, to this end, they “put old quarrels behind them.”
In view of Rıza’s frank aversion to his Armenian interlocutors’ revolutionary methods, it is not easy to say what impelled the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress to seek a rapprochement with the Hnchaks. Possibly Rıza and Nâzım were hoping to profit from the popularity that the Hnchaks enjoyed at the time or even from their relations with certain Parisian intellectual circles. They may also have been seeking to curb the Hnchaks’ anti-Hamidian campaign, which they deemed anti-Ottoman.
The seizure of the Banque Ottomane by militants of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) on 26 August 1896 is another event that serves as a yardstick with which to measure the Young Turk and Armenian positions.
Note- This chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History, pp. 12-14
In Photo-leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress, 1908. Source: Ömer Koç collection
