Insurrection in the East

For all the arrests and rumours of conspiracy and talk of putting disturbed areas in the east under martial law ¹ Salisbury was able to record his satisfaction in 1892 that there had been a ‘considerable improvement’ in the general administration of the Ottoman Empire in recent years, ² a judgement based on the evidence of his consuls. Throughout Anatolia the ‘quiet state of the country and the relative security of the roads as compared with my experiences eight to ten years ago surprised me’, Colonel Chermside had written in 1889. ³ Almost comically, in view of their terrible reputation, the Kurds seemed as ‘quiet as lambs’ and were even hastening to pay their taxes. ⁴ Salisbury’s despatch must have heartened the incoming ambassador, Sir Francis Clare Ford, but it was not the whole truth. Quite unmistakably, as we have seen, the ‘ancient symbiosis’ between Muslims and Christians ⁵ was breaking down, particularly in the six eastern vilayets where the revolutionaries were concentrating their activities. Their committees were continuing to mobilise and stockpile arms, and inevitably suspicion was beginning to fall on Armenian communities as a whole. ‘The serpents are in my bosom and they feed on my blood’, Abdülhamit had told Vambéry in 1890 ⁶ and within two or three years the situation had grown much worse. Autonomy was still the ostensible goal, and the possibility of European intervention an irresistible magnet. No question could be more embarrassing and more pitiful, wrote Isabella Bird, travelling in the countryside around Van, than the one asked in every village – ‘Will England help us?’ followed by ‘Will you speak to the consul for us?’ ⁷ Among the Armenians there was ‘much absurd talk’ of a kingdom that could be pieced together from the borderlands of the Ottoman state, Russia and Persia. ⁸ With the return of Gladstone to government in 1892 hopes that England would do something were bound to rise, irrespective of the unpleasant realities – that Russian interest had waned and that Britain’s standing with the sultan had sunk so low that its intervention on the Armenian question ‘only made matters worse’. ⁹