ABSTRACT
From the revolutionary point of view nothing could have provided stronger justification for European intervention than the scenes which took place in the Sasun district, horribly reminiscent as they were of the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ nearly 20 years before. A Reuter’s correspondent sent to the scene upheld the Ottoman claim that the Armenians themselves had committed terrible outrages, ‘in order that the infuriated Turks should shock the Christian world by the atrocity of the retaliation’. 1 The Christian world was indeed shocked by the ‘retaliation’, but not at all by the provocation. A torrent of abuse was directed against the sultan, the Ottoman government and Islam, and the Armenian lobbyists made the most of the opportunity. ‘The events reported’, the Armenian Patriotic Association submitted to the Foreign Office, ‘are a re-enactment of the Bulgarian atrocities, repeated with their most horrible and sickening details of fiendish lust and atrocious cruelties on unarmed Christians, deliberately planned and executed under orders from Constantinople’. 2 A ‘letter from Bitlis’ told of women and children being cut down by the soldiers who were supposed to have ‘protected and respected the submissive portion of the population’ and ‘restored order’. 3 Gladstone was outraged and returned to his rhetoric of the 1870s. If what he had heard was true, he told visitors to Hawarden in December, then
it is time one general shout of execration not of men but of deeds, one general shout of execration directed against deeds of wickedness should rise from outraged humanity and should force itself into the ears of the Sultan of Turkey and make him sensible, if anything can make him sensible, of the madness of such a course. 4
