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Generally speaking, the lower strata of the provincial Armenian population, and even of the Ottoman capital, yearned for a Russian regime. The merchant classes, the higher echelons of the clergy and conservative Armenians preferred the Ottoman regime. The dual rationales thus dividing the Armenian millet had reference to more or less two antithetical, imageries.
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Furthermore, Lynch injects a caveat about the statistical meaning of the category of "Muslim," suggesting that multitudes of Christians who voluntarily or forcibly converted to Islam retained their loyalty to their ethnic origin. Here is his observations on this point:
"... Just as in the northern zone of peripheral mountains
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One noteworthy point during that process of charting a course towards genocide were the resolutions and decisions of the 1910 Saloniki Congress of Ittihad, briefly mentioned in the introduction of this work. Even though it was primarily the ongoing tensions in Macedonia and Albania that had triggered these decisions in 1910, one of the main
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Admission of Turkey to the Public Law of Europe and the Rudiments of Formal Reform
In his inaugural speech to the Council of State in 1868, Abdul Aziz, the successor of Sultan Mecid who had enacted the two Reform edicts cited above, vowed to protect and defend the members of all nationalities as "children of the same fatherland." Yet, in spite of all these professions and asssurances, intermittently reasserted up to the 1876 Constitution and beyond, "No genuine equality was ever attained." [10] The reason was evident. The reforms were a repudiation of fundamental socio-religous traditions deeply enmeshed in the Turkish psyche, and institutionalized throughout the Empire. When the 1856 edict was proclaimed:
" Many Moslems began to grumble: 'Today we lost our sacred national rights which our ancestors gained with their blood. While the Islamic nation used to be the ruling nation, it is now bereft of his sacred right. This is a day of tears and mourning for the Moslem brethren.' [11] "
Within few years (1859), these reations culminated in what is known as the Kuleli revolt in the capital. Army officers joined hands with Muslim clergymen and teachers in an attempt to overthrow the regime in protest against what they considered to be sumbisliveness to foreign powers, and the illegimitimacy of the act of granting equal rights to the Christians.
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10. Roderic H. Davison, "Turkish Attitudes Concerning Christian-Muslim Equality in the Nineteenth Century," American Historical Review 59 (July 1954), p. 848
11. Şerif Mardin, The Genensis of Young Ottoman Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 18
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The statement was made to American ambassador Morgenthau, who recounted it thus in his postwar memoirs: "Talaat explained his national policy: these different blocs in the Turkish Empire, he said, had always conspired against Turkey; because of the hostility of these native populations, Turkey had lost province after province - Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Egypt and Tripoli. In this way the Turkish Empire had dwindled almost to the vanishing point. If what was left of Turkey was to survive, added Talaat, he must get rid of these alien peoples. 'Turkey fo the Turks' was now Talaat's controlling idea."[40] It should be noted here parenthetically that at this new phase of Turkish nationalism not even Muslim nationalities were spared this treatment, as evidenced in the cases of the Ittihadist oppression of the Albanians and the Arabs.
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40. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1918), p. 51.
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