Reform and Chaos

Abdülhamit had predicted that the European campaign for reforms would end in blood and indeed the irade finally imposed on him by the powers ushered in one of the bloodiest periods to afflict Ottoman society in the nineteenth century. In the last three months of 1895 the six eastern vilayets were ravaged by violence on a grand scale. Not since 1875–76 in Bulgaria had there been such savage internal conflict, and the events of 1895–96 far eclipsed what happened then. Ever since the 1870s the eastern vilayets had been the target of Ottoman reforms, of European pressure and intrigues and of revolutionary violence and finally the top of this pressure cooker seemed to be blowing off. Provoked beyond endurance, Muslims and Christians threw themselves at each other in a situation which Sonyel describes as approaching civil war. ¹ But it was an unequal struggle, simply because there were far more Muslims than Christians, and one that the Armenian revolutionary movements, enlisting support where they could, could not hope to win unless the European powers intervened on their behalf. This had been the cornerstone of their strategy all along. The right circumstances had been created, and if the powers could not bring themselves to intervene against the backdrop of the terrible scenes being enacted all over the east in the autumn of 1895 then it was probable that they never could.