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.
The operation, the kind that the press delighted in covering, found a much broader international echo than the massacres of autumn and winter 1895–96, doubtless because it struck directly at European financial interests. This was, however, not a peaceful demonstration like the one that had taken place in October 1895; most of the French press reacted very harshly, painting the Armenians as terrorists.
The Paris Hnchaks suddenly felt that they had lost the fruits of the public awareness campaign that they had been waging for the past year. The SDHP therefore requested a meeting with the leaders of the ARF, who agreed to make the trip from Geneva – their European headquarters and the city in which they published their official organ, Droschak.
Sapah-Giulian asked them why they had mounted this operation. He seems to have received an embarrassed response; it came down to the idea that the ARF wanted to make an attention-grabbing appeal to Europe in order to bring an end to the Armenian massacres. In private, the Hnchak leaders did not hesitate to speak of “political immaturity.”
It seems reasonable to suppose that the competition between the two organizations for leadership of the Armenians had helped motivate the ARF’s spectacular strategy. Leaving a meeting with the historian Ernest Lavisse and the academician Albert Vandale, Sapah-Giulian, who had asked the two Frenchmen to intercede on the Armenians’ behalf, ran straight into Rıza and Nâzım, “arm-in-arm” in front of the main entrance to the French Senate building.
Rıza exclaimed, “Mr. Sapah-Giulian, this time they are massacring people by the tens of thousands … What remains of the Armenian Question, the 11 May plan and European intervention?” Nâzım added, “The [death toll] of the massacres of the past few days is over one hundred thousand; it seems that they are not going to leave a single Armenian [alive].”
The Hnchak leader did not fail to note the ironic tone adopted by his interlocutors, who did not for a moment consider condemning these crimes, but had already begun calculating their demographic and political impact.
The Hnchak Committee finally decided to turn to a “heavyweight” in an effort to reverse the anti-Armenian trend. It sent a memorandum to Jean Jaurès defending the Armenians’ struggle against Abdülhamid’s regime and asking Jaurès to take a public stand in order to stem the flood of anti-Armenian propaganda in the French press. Sapah-Giulian points out that the socialist leader had previously rejected this suggestion because of his apprehensions about “Armenian nationalism.” After a conversation with Sapah-Giulian, however, he decided to throw himself into the fray.
At the same time, he confessed that he had misgivings about the fact that he would be defending the same position as certain conservative pro-Armenian circles in France. Jaurès’s first intervention came on 3 November 1896, at the podium of the French Parliament, which was full to the point of bursting. The session was opened by Denis Cochin, but Jaurès did not take the floor until the conservatives had finished speaking. His entry into the lists came as a surprise, for no one had been expecting him to address a foreign policy issue. He made a strong impression on those present and on public opinion generally, in particular by indicting the French government for its policy on Turkey of the past four years.
Jaurès’s one-and-a-half hour speech marked the real beginning of the pro-Armenian movement in France. The Parisian newspapers, which, as everyone knew, pocketed generous subsidies from agents of the Ottoman sultan, now struck a new tone.
There was a perceptible détente in relations between Young Turks and Armenian activists in late 1895. Changes within the Young Turk movement undoubtedly helped create the conditions for real cooperation among the various opponents of the Hamidian regime.
Murad Bey Mizanci’s arrival in Europe earlier in the year had already established a connection between OCUP circles in Istanbul and Europe, long isolated from each other. Unlike Rıza and Nâzım, Murad Bey, who had worked for a long time in the Hamidian administration, favored European intervention as well as rapprochement with the Armenian revolutionary committees and the formation of a united front. In December 1895, he began publishing the review Mizan (Balance) in Cairo, which had considerable impact in circles sympathetic to the Young Turks.
In this review, Murad Bey challenged Rıza’s anti-revolutionary positions. He dealt Rıza the deathblow upon his return to Paris in July 1896, in the course of a meeting at which a new central committee was elected after Rıza had lost the support of the majority. Murad assumed leadership of this committee, with Nâzım as his second-in-command.
On his initiative, the Young Turks apparently established warmer relations with the ARF in particular. In April 1897, the Turkish intelligence service intercepted a message from the ARF’s Paris branch to the committee in Erzerum; it indicated that the Armenian organizations and the CUP had now come together around a common goal, dethroning the sultan. No trace of such an agreement is to be found in Armenian sources, but it is the more plausible in that all branches of the CUP had been directly linked to Paris after the Constantinople branch was dissolved under pressure from the Hamidian political police.
For a long time to come, the ARF was the Young Turks’ main Armenian interlocutor, even if we should not attach undue importance to this initial rapprochement. That the ARF and CUP united around common goals is more likely; the social complexion of the Turkish organization had changed with the 1896–97 arrival in Paris of officers and army doctors.
Note- This chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History, pp. 14-15, to be continued
