“Back to the Homeland” (Tebi Yergir): Or, how Peasants became Revolutionaries in Muş

In 1889 the kidnapping and rape of a fourteen-year-old girl in Muş precipitated the creation of the Fedayi movement, a collection of self-defense groups espousing Armenian political liberation. The combination of international attention, the formation of the Hnchak in Istanbul, and the growth of revolutionary fervor in the Eastern Provinces terrified key sections of the Hamidian government. Convinced that history was repeating itself, in the manner of the Bulgarian rebellion of 1876, Abdülhamid II and his administration sanctioned greater repression of any sign of dissent or political organization among Anatolian Armenians. Certain officials within the Ottoman government benefited financially from this oppressive shift, using the Ottoman center’s paranoia to enrich themselves. A cycle of state violence and radicalization laid the ground for the massacres in the Sasun mountains in 1894 and the subsequent massacres throughout the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s.