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.
However, thanks to the defection of Mizanci Murad, who in July 1897 agreed to return to Istanbul after negotiations with representatives of the sultan, Rıza had again assumed the dominant role in the CUP, putting a damper on the plans for a rapprochement between Young Turks and Armenians. The salient feature of this period, however, was the growing influence of the CUP’s Cairo branch, which helped change the Union’s orientation.
After first promoting a union of all Ottoman groups behind Rıza’s idea of Ottomanizing society and secularizing the state, and then defending Murad Bey’s conservative political line, which was favorable to outside intervention, the CUP adopted a new program that called for reconciling Islam with modernity on the basis of a constitutional system.
The Armenian Committees probably took note of these transformations. At all events, a Turkish-Armenian oppositional delegation, headed by Rıza, participated in the 1899 Hague Peace Conference, where it distributed a joint memorandum.
The Turkish leader was accompanied by an Armenian, Minas Tchéraz, a well-known yet independent figure to be sure, and Pierre Anmeghian, one of Tchéraz’s most faithful followers. In other words, he was not accompanied by representatives of the Armenian revolutionary parties.
Yet, the idea of sending a joint delegation to the conference was a success, for it attracted favorable attention from the European delegates. The fact that the Armenian delegates were not altogether representative of their people should not obscure the novelty of this public initiative, from which the Young Turks, who were seeking to enlist European public opinion in their cause and profile themselves as liberals, derived the greater benefit.
Abdülhamid seems to have understood this quite well, for he included Diran Kelekian, a journalist well known for his perceptive analyses of Ottoman society, in the official Ottoman delegation.
Kelekian (1862, Kayseri–1915, near Sıvas), initially a Hnchak activist, joined the Young Turk movement after 1896, during his stays in London and Paris; he was part of the group that returned with Mizanci Murad; it was at this point that he drew closer to Ahmed Celâleddin, the chief of the intelligence service. During his exile in Cairo, he headed the political section of Journal du Caire (1904–1909). Close to certain Ottoman court circles, he helped Bahaeddin Şakir organize the CUP in 1905–1906. He was deported in April 1915.
The positions that the Armenian Revolutionary Federation put forward, after the OCUP issued its call for a union of all oppositional forces in spring 1898, provide a good index of the positive but skeptical attitude reigning in Armenian circles. The Armenian leadership thought that it had detected a change in the OCUP, which, it felt, “had resolved to abandon its passive position once and for all and enter an active phase.”
The ARF’s reaction to the 1899 Hague Peace Conference is also rather revealing of its irritation with the European powers. The tone of the “Declaration Addressed to the Public Opinion of the Civilized World” on the occasion of the conference is sarcastic, almost cynical, and in any case disillusioned in the passages that evoke the Europeans’ foreign policy or their indifference to the 1894–96 massacres.
The “Declaration,” however, says not a word about Rıza’s decision to attend the conference as part of a delegation made up of Turks and Armenians. Also worth pausing over, because they illustrate both the political game as it was played in the Ottoman family and the ARF’s openness to dialogue, are the maneuvers that Sultan Abdülhamid undertook to silence the Armenian opposition in exile, as he had partially succeeded in doing with the Young Turks.
He proceeded by engaging in political negotiations with the party even while pursuing repressive domestic policies. To open discussions between the Sublime Porte and the ARF, which did not become public knowledge until after they were broken off on 11 March 1899, Abdülhamid delegated his undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, Artin Pasha Dadian, a scion of one of the grand Armenian families that had served the Ottoman state for generations.
On 28 October 1896, Dadian’s son, Diran Bey Dadian, arrived in Geneva and met with the ARF’s Western Bureau, which was grouped around the monthly Droschak. The message he bore was clear: the ARF had to abandon its violent activities. In exchange, the sultan pledged to carry out fundamental reforms in the country over the coming nine months.
According to Droschak’s editors, the “Khanasor” operation – a commando raid on 25 August 1897 (6 September, new style), that had taken retaliatory measures against a Kurdish tribe that had participated in anti-Armenian massacres in the Van region the year before – and the abortive attempt to blow up Yıldız Palace on 6/18 August had forced Abdülhamid to take the ARF’s demands seriously.
An accomplished politician, the sultan resorted to his usual methods, seeking to pull the wool over the eyes of the Armenian revolutionaries as he was also attempting to do with the Young Turks. On the sovereign’s orders, Drtad Bey Dadian, a nephew of Artin Pasha’s, spent almost eight months in Geneva, leaving only in March 1899. The length of his stay indicates the seriousness and determination of this initiative. While it proved unsuccessful, it nevertheless enabled the Sublime Porte to take the measure of the Armenians’ demands: at Artin Pasha’s request, the ARF drew up a list of the reforms that it was seeking.
Manifestly, since Mizanci Murad’s “surrender,” the Young Turk movement in exile had once again adopted the positivist leader’s moderate line, even if it did not command unanimous assent. In other words, the movement was paralyzed and found it difficult to recruit new members from the circles opposed to the sultan. It was repeatedly criticized for failing to commit itself to action.
In 1899 and 1900, the discussion between Young Turks and Armenians was carried on in their respective newspapers, which indicates that the parties were, despite everything, interested in each other. The old debate about whether or not it was necessary to build a common front of all those opposed to the Hamidian regime flared up frequently in these papers.
Thus, an anonymous letter, published by Droschak, revealed that toward the middle of 1899, Tunalı Hilmi (a Young Turk militant) had circulated in Cairo a declaration calling for a congress of “Muslims and non-Muslims” aimed at creating an “Ottoman Committee,” and that Damad Mahmud Pasha and his two sons, members of the imperial family, had fled Istanbul to join the Young Turk opposition in exile. The anonymous author of the letter notes, finally, as if in response to his Armenian interlocutors’ criticisms, that Osmanlı did not share Meshveret’s anti-revolutionary positions and that “a good many Young Turks advocate revolutionary methods.”
This is one index of the fact that the ARF embodied the idea of revolution for certain Young Turk circles, especially officers who had graduated from the Military Academy.
Note- This chapter is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History, pp. 15-17
In photo- Diran Kelekian
