Damad Mahmud Pasha’s “Open Letter to the Armenians,” sent out from his Parisian exile in summer 1900, was the first credible sign that the Young Turk opposition wanted to pool the energies of all those opposed to the sultan, even if the letter blamed Abdülhamid alone for all the empire’s ills.
Mahmud expressed his regrets over the “appalling massacres” organized by the sultan, while also criticizing the Armenians for maintaining too great a distance from the Turks. He ended his letter with a call for unity, restoration of the constitution, and “federation with the Turks.”
The last formula was unprecedented: coming from someone of Damad’s stature, it was no mere rhetorical flourish, but a promising invitation to construct “the new Turkey.” The response of Droschak’s editors shows that they took Prince Damad’s offer seriously.
The ARF was not the only organization to respond to Prince Damad’s overtures. The SDHP also made itself heard in the person of Sapah-Giulian. He pointed out that the state was organized in such a way that there were no real bonds between its various constitutive elements, that no institution had sought to unite them in a bond of solidarity with the throne, and that, if the country were not reorganized on new foundations, it was condemned to disappear.
Finally, Sapah-Giulian reminded his readers that the very moderate desires and the short-term goals put forward by the Armenian nation and the Armenians’ fighting forces have never stood in opposition to the real, permanent interests of Turkey considered as a state. What the Armenians are demanding today is not in any way intended to weaken or paralyze Turkey, to dismember and, ultimately, destroy it, to pulverize the Turkish people and, on its ruins, re-establish the Home of the Armenians. The Armenian people’s modest desires for reform and all the political, economic and social institutions to which it aspires contain, not the seeds of Turkey’s destruction, but, abundantly, the seeds of its renewal.
These reactions to Damad Mahmud Pasha’s invitation sum up the Armenian Committees’ political vision and reflect their determination to help rebuild a common state. The Ottoman dignitary’s proposal to forge an “Armenian-Turkish federation” doubtless reflected an option for founding the state anew shared by certain liberal circles that had emerged from the Ottoman elite. However, the Armenian Committees, still shaken by the violence inflicted on their compatriots in the eastern provinces, remained skeptical about the possibility of yoking their fate to that of this opposition, whose weakness and unrealistic objectives they had pointed out.
The end of the first stage of the rapprochement between Young Turks and Armenian revolutionaries throws up a crucial question: why did the largely legitimist Young Turk opposition seek to cooperate with the revolutionaries? On the face of it, everything separated a prince of the house of Osman from an Armenian intellectual who pleaded for socialism and even espoused revolutionary violence.
Part of the answer no doubt lies in the common education and shared cultural references of the members of these two elites, who both spoke French and were steeped in European sociopolitical concepts.
Another reason is to be sought in the existence of a vast network of Armenian militants, capable of operating in many different regions of the empire and characterized by their iron discipline, spirit of self-sacrifice and unwavering dedication: the Young Turk movement lacked any such base.
We should also not overlook the fact that the Young Turk elite, especially the elite with roots in the Ottoman court or the upper echelons of the state administration, had necessarily come into contact with the high-ranking Armenian officials who had chosen to serve the state and did so with an effectiveness that no one dreamed of contesting.
In addition, the same Young Turk elite was aware of the importance of the Armenian and Greek businessmen who were the moving spirits behind the industrialization of the country.
Finally, we must not underestimate the pro-Armenian network that the Armenian Committees had succeeded in building up in Europe. Its by no means negligible ability to mobilize Western public opinion constituted the essential antidote to the propaganda campaigns of Abdülhamid and his agents, waged with the help of large “subsidies.”
The first phase of the Armenian-Turkish negotiations also revealed, however, the antagonistic positions of the two main Young Turk groups on basic issues such as foreign intervention or local autonomy.
The organizing committee, indeed, had not so much as asked Rıza for his opinion before compiling the lists of invitees. It would seem that the members of the old OCUP were hostile to the Armenian Committees and, especially, the ARF. But Damad Mahmud’s whole strategy turned on the idea of a rapprochement between Young Turks and Armenians. He therefore sought to neutralize Rıza while arranging to invite the three Armenian parties – the ARF; the Verakazmial Hnchaks, who accepted the offer; and the Hnchaks, who turned it down.
Each committee was represented by three delegates and agreed to work in coordination with the others. In January, they held preparatory meetings with the two princes and İsmail Kemal Bey to make certain that the negotiations would take Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin and the Memorandum of 11 May 1895 as points of departure.
Avetis Aharonian headed the Dashnak delegation. The Armenian side was further represented by three Paris-based veterans of the anti-Hamidian opposition – Minas Tchéraz, Garabed Basmajian and Archag Tchobanian.
Minas Tchéraz (1852, Constantinople-1929, Paris) was a member of the Armenian delegation that sought to participate in the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Exiled in London in 1889, he published the newspaper Arménie in French; after settling in Paris in 1898, he published the same periodical there until 1906. He returned to Istanbul in 1908.
Garabed Basmajian (1864, Constantinople–1942, Paris) was a physician, pharmacist and philologist who published the newspaper Panaser in Paris from 1899 to 1907.
Arshag Chobanian (1872, Constantinople–1954, Paris) was a writer and publisher exiled to Paris in 1895. Since he was close to Hnchaks who left the party in September 1896 to found the Verakazmial Hnchak Party, it may be assumed that he represented this party at the congress.
The Young Turk delegation included, among others, Hüseyin Tosun, İsmail Hakkı, Hoca Kadri, Çerkez Kemal, Dr. Lütfi , Mustafa Hamdi, Ali Fehmi, Dr. Nâzım, and Yusuf Akçura. The congress was opened by Prince Sabaheddin (whose father had just died) on 4 February 1902. There were six sessions conducted, at the Armenians’ request, in French as well as Turkish. Only a few Greek, Albanian, and Kurdish delegates took part. As for the Macedonians, they had not even been invited. Thus, the congress rapidly evolved into a tête-à-tête between the Young Turk groups and the Armenian delegation.
This parts is from Raymond Kévorkian’s book, THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE A Complete History, pp. 18-19.
In photo- Arshag Chobanian
