The Armenian Rebellion at Van (review)

The fate of the Ottoman Armenians during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has become over the past few decades one of the most controversial chapters in the modern history of the Middle East, and shows every sign of remaining as such. The events surrounding Ottoman-Armenian relations in the period are intricate and do not lend themselves to simple judgments and labels. Too often, these have been perceived in the West largely, and thus erroneously, through the lens of Armenians. The history of the Armenian question is marked by an interaction of diverse parts and should not be diluted. Before the First World War, the province of Van in southeastern Anatolia had a population of about 500,000, while the city of Van itself had approximately 100,000 inhabitants. Armenians formed one-fourth of the population. As McCarthy, Arslan, Tas¸kıran, and Turan remind us in The Armenian Rebellion at Van, Van's historical importance was mainly due to "its position on the traditional natural highways that connected Erivan, Bitlis, Tabriz, and Mosul." The authors have teamed up to provide some missing information and assessment necessary to place the episode of Van from the 1870s to 1919 in its proper perspective and give the English-language reader an opportunity to reach a sound conclusion about the policies and motives of the Sublime Porte toward its Armenian subjects. The authors are all well-qualified specialists on the Ottoman Empire who conducted painstaking archival research and who are armed with the essential linguistic and paleographic tools. For this reason, The Armenian Rebellion at Van is most welcome.

The purpose of this book is to fill a substantive gap in the current historiography. In view of the steady flow of publications that expand the bookshelves with studies of the Armenian question, such an intention may at first seem superfluous. But with respect to the effects of the provincial Armenian revolts on the Ottoman government and on its war effort, one still finds major areas that have been incompletely investigated.

The analysis is carefully made and clearly presented. This solid and fascinating study addresses three core themes. First, following the Ottoman-Russian war of 1877 to 1878 Armenians turned their eyes to St. Petersburg, because they reckoned Russia might at any time again be in control of eastern Anatolia. An agitation was in consequence started in Van by the Armenian revolutionary committees, who had contacted their kinsmen in Russia with the object of separation from the Ottoman state. The Armenian revolutionaries rose up at Van in 1896 and 1908 with a view to attracting European intervention. Second, as is amply demonstrated, it was always Armenians who attacked first. Third, Armenians were helpful to Russians in their invasion of Van district in spring 1915. With regard to the capture of Van, McCarthy et al. emphatically state that "there is conclusive evidence that the rebels did significantly aid the Russian cause." And they elaborate: "[I]n the First World War the Armenians did exactly what was needed to aid Russian victory: holding down Ottoman units many times the size of the rebel forces, crippling military communications, forcing hundreds of thousand of refugees onto the roads to hinder army movements, and ultimately making the Ottomans abandon strategies that might have won the war in the East."

Indeed, after Russia's proclamation of war against the Ottoman Empire on 2 November 1914, Armenians began to cause much trouble behind the Ottoman lines, particularly in eastern Anatolia, where they attacked government buildings, killed gendarmes, and massacred Muslim civilians and burned their villages. They often assaulted isolated detachments and convoys. Armenian revolutionaries were helped by local Armenians. When the revolutionaries were pursued by the Ottoman gendarmes, the Armenian villages were a refuge for them. When they needed rescue, the Armenian peasants rallied around them, hiding their arms in the churches, and running to their aid. Many Armenian...