Emrullah Akgündüz is a PhD student at the Institute for Religious Studies of the Humanities Faculty of Leiden University. His research interests include the social and economic histories of the non-Muslim communities of the Ottoman Empire, with a main focus on the Syriac Christians. Contact: akgunduze@gmail.com
Suavi Aydin is Professor at the Faculty of Communication of Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. Originally an anthropologist and socio/cultural historian, his research interests and topics include ethnicity, nationalism, state question, ethno-history, history of settlement, tribal relations with the state in Turkey and cultural and historical roots of minority questions in Turkey. Contact: Suavi Aydm, Hacettepe University Faculty of Communication, 06800 Beytepe-Ankara, Turkey. Contact: suavi@hac- ettepe.edu.tr David Gaunt is Professor of History at the Center for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) at Sodertôrn University, Sweden. His current research is on mass violence against minorities in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, with particular focus on Jews, Roma, Armenians, Assyrians/Syriacs and Kurds. Contact: David Gaunt, Center for Baltic and East European Studies, Sodertorn University, SE-14169 Huddinge, Sweden. Contact: david.gaunt@sh.se
Joost Jongerden is Assistant Professor at the Sociology and Anthropology of Development section of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His research interests include socio-spatial and socio-technical constructions of society and related conflicts, with a main area focus on Turkey and Kurdistan. Contact: Joost Jongerden, Sociology and Anthropology of Development, Hollandseweg 1, 6706KN Wageningen, The Netherlands. joost.jongerden@wur.nl
Janet Klein is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Akron. Her research interests include late-Ottoman Kurdistan and contemporary Kurdish history. Contact: Janet Klein, Department of History, CAS 216, The University of Akron, Akron, OH (USA) 44325-1902. klein@uakron.edu
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan is an Assistant Professor of History at Denison University. Her research interests include state-making, changing property regimes, and peasant societies in imperial frontiers with a particular focus on Ottoman Kurdistan. Contact: Nilay Özok-Gündoğan, Denison University, loo West College Street, Granville, OH (USA) 43023. nilayozok@gmail.com
Uğur Ümit Üngor is Assistant Professor at the Department of History of Utrecht University and at the Institute for War and Genocide Studies of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research interests include mass violence and ethnic conflict. He has published on genocide in general, and the Armenian and Rwandan genocides in particular. Contact: Dr. Uğur Ümit Üngor, Utrecht University, Department of History, Drift 10 3512 BS Utrecht, u.ungor@uu.nl Jelle Verheij is an independent researcher, specializing in the history and geography of Eastern Turkey and the late Ottoman Empire. He has published several articles on Armenian- and Kurdish-Ottoman relations before World War I. Contact: yjeh@me.com
Contents
List of Tables / vii About the Authors / ix Note on Names and Spelling / xi
Introduction / 1 Joost Jongerden andJelle Verheij
Confusion in the Cauldron: Some Notes on Ethno-Religious Groups, Local Powers and the Ottoman State in Diyarbekir Province, 1800-1870 / 15 Suavi Aydin and Jelle Verheij
Elite Encounters of a Violent Kind: Milli Ibrahim Pașa, Ziya Gokalp and Political Struggle in Diyarbekir at the Turn of the 20th Century / 55 Joost Jongerden
Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis of 1895 / 85 Jelle Verheij State, Tribe, Dynasty, and the Contest over Diyarbekir at the Turn of the 20th Century / 147 Janet Klein
A “Peripheral” Approach to the 1908 Revolution in the Ottoman Empire: Land Disputes in Peasant Petitions in Post-revolutionary Diyarbekir / 179 Nilay Özok-Gündoğan
Some Notes on the Syriac Christians of Diyarbekir in the late 19th Century: A Preliminary Investigation of Some Primary Sources / 217 Emrullah Akgündüz
Relations between Kurds and Syriacs and Assyrians in late Ottoman Diyarbekir / 241 David Gaunt
Disastrous Decade: Armenians and Kurds in the Young Turk Era, 1915-25 / 267 Uğur Ümit Üngör
Annexes A. Provisional List of Non-Muslim Settlements in the Diyarbekir Vilayet Around 1900 / 299 B. Diyarbekir and the Armenian Crisis of 1895—The Fate of the Countryside / 333 C. Telegraphs from Diyarbekir and Pirinççizade Arif Effendi’s Speech / 345 D. Family Tree of Ziya Gôkalp / 353 E. British map of Diyarbekir and Surroundings, 1904 / 355 Name and Subject Index / 357 Place Index / 365 Tribes (așiret) Index / 371
List of Tables
1. Different types of local government in the Diyarbekir eyâlet in the later 16th and early 19th centuries / 17 2. Arab and Kurdish a§irets in the southern part of Diyarbekir, around 1870 / 26 3. Estimates by British Vice-Consul Hallward in Diyarbekir of the Christian population and number of victims of the conflict in 1895 / 344 4. Community (Christian) schools in Diyarbekir and numbers of students, 1898-1901 / 229 5. Statistics on the number of Syrian villages and families, submitted to the Peace Conference in Paris by the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate, 1919 / 245
2.1. Mardin sancak—Mardin central district Mardin merkez kaza / 320 2.2. Mardin sancak—Midyat kaza / 320 2.3. Mardin sancak—Avine kaza / 324 2.4. Mardin sancak—Nusaybin kaza / 324 2.5. Mardin sancak—Cizre kaza / 327
3.1. Maden sancak—Maden central district Maden merkez kaza / 329 3.2. Maden sancak—Palu kaza / 330 3.3. Maden sancak—Çermik kaza / 332
INTRODUCTION 1
Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij
In the early 20th century, the British traveler, officer, honorary attaché and conservative politician Mark Sykes1 2 wrote about Diyarbekir:
The country between Mount Ahmedi and Diarbekir is as dull and uninteresting as its inhabitants—brown, stony, and unwooded, it offers no attractions of any kind. Even in a remarkable green and balmy spring, it seemed desolate and unpleasing. What it must be like in winter and summer, I can hardy imagine. The town Diarbekir has a sombre and ominous appearance from without. The great dark walls, which bulge out in frowning bastions (...) the funeral black of the basalt, of which the whole of the dwellings are constructed, has a depressing effect. The native artists have endeavoured to relieve the dreariness of the picture by introducing white stone ornaments and decorations; but the effect is that of a mourning-card, and fails to cheer the eye. The inhabitants, who must trace their origin to the low villagers who dwell without, are obviously of the same debased race, though paler and less well formed, and whether Christian or Moslem, are equally displeasing.3
Sykes described the city, its surroundings and inhabitants in unremittingly bleak terms—‘funeral black’, ‘depressing’, ‘debased’, etc.—and yet not without reason, for he had found a city in distress and pain, one which had paid a heavy toll over the course of the 19th century. This was a city exhausted by a long series of Ottoman wars from 1783 onwards, waves of epidemic diseases (in 1799/1800, 1815/1816, 1848 and 1894), and, most importantly, a series of local violent conflicts and confrontations, including the Armenian-Muslim confrontation of 1895. Various political elite groups competed for power and resources. Tensions emerged between a newly constituted class of landlords, and dispossessed peasants and villagers, and between various groups and peoples (ethno-religious communities), exacerbated, among other things, by a newly developing political ideology (nationalism). Diyarbekir at the turn of the 20th century was a city in despair, occasionally raised to its feet by glimmers of hope, such as the constitutional revolution of 1908, when virtually all, Muslims and Christians alike, celebrated the fall of the regime of Abdülhamid II. Initially creating high expectations among the population, however, the revolution and the Second Constitutional Era that it ushered in brought political repression and genocide, the greatest upheaval of all. The age-old presence of the Armenians was terminated by massacres and deportation, and other Christian groups like the Syrians were also violently uprooted. Untold numbers of Muslims died in military service, and starvation and disease were rife. Kurds regarded as disloyal had already been deported from the region during the war, but, with the failure of tentative diplomatic advances towards a Kurdish homeland in Anatolia,4 the war of 1919-23 and subsequent proclamation of the Republic of Turkey, the confrontation between the government (now in Ankara and overtly Turkish nationalist) and the Kurds reached new levels, culminating in the §eyh Said Revolt of 1925—which had its centre in Diyarbekir.
As editors of this book, our motivation derives from a long-term personal commitment to the area under study. But we are also moved by a strong element of dissatisfaction with existing historical studies: Diyarbekir, like many other places in the region, has nearly never been properly studied as an area in its own right. Countless related investigations covering the late 19th and early 20th centuries have included Diyarbekir, but always in other, generally wide-ranging contexts. One dominant perspective has been the imperial one. The central focus here is on the developments in the imperial capital Istanbul, the center of formal power, and the acts of elites, be it the Palace (Porte) or the Committee of Union and Progress. In these works, Diyarbekir—like any other area or city in the empire— figures as a ‘periphery’, and political activity outside the geographies of central power is largely neglected. Another tendency has been to view the period as a kind of pre-history of later developments, largely caused by the tremendous changes associated with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and birth of nation-states across its territories. The foundation of the Republic of Turkey was certainly one of these, with 1923 as its ‘year zero’, and many studies look at the preceding period simply as the pre-history of the Republic (and into which Diyarbekir may be incorporated). The characterization of this period is thus made on basis of a post-facto event, which can be understood in retrospect only. The Armenian genocide discussion has had similar implications, with scores of authors searching for clues and evidence for what was later to occur, teleologically tending to ignore elements which are not ‘useful’ for or even militate against their perspectives. Of the same order also is the tendency to view the history of the area through ‘ethnic’ and ‘nationalistic’ glasses, be it Armenian, Kurdish, Turkish or other, and the usurpation and appropriation of other issues and narratives by and within nationalist discourses.
The contributions in this volume focus on events and relations through which Diyarbekir was produced; they specify the time period of the end of (19th) century without any determining reference to subsequent (or previous) events; and they step outside the confines of nationalist historiography. Overall, they may be characterized by two inversions of perspective. The first is a shift of attention from the so-called center to the so-called periphery, and the second a move from an exclusive focus on the acts and deeds of the elite alone, to one that includes also those of multiple subaltern categories. It may be argued, furthermore, that the approach underlying this book is marked by two concepts, poly-centricity and polyactivity.
‘Poly-centricity’ refers to the idea that the social does not have one single center, but many. Following this, developments in Ottoman and post- Ottoman society were and have been shaped by actions and activities in regional centers throughout the Empire. Diyarbekir was one such center of activity, a place where history was shaped. Political actors in the region contributed considerably to politics and social relations in the Empire as a whole, and the interrelationships between Diyarbekir and various other centers become significant in their own right. ‘Poly-activity’, meanwhile, refers to the approach by which the deeds and actions of several agents are considered. Attention is given to a range of actors and dynamics, networks and interactions, not on just one group or class. In fact, location specific history directly militates against this kind of exclusivity. Exclusion here is in the geographical dimension, within which all and everything needs to be considered, and even this level of exclusivity is ameliorated by the consideration of interaction between centers (i.e. the considerations of external influences, which introduce actors from out of the region). In this book, the actions of a wide range of actors are considered, including state-wide leaders and organizations along with regional and localized, urban and rural, emerging and decaying, elite and subaltern groups as structured by both traditional and modem forms, such as peasants and the urban lower classes, and tribesmen and nationalists, as well as the various ethnic identity groupings and religious sects and denominations. In doing so, we have strived for a multi-faceted image of developments in the Diyarbekir region.
The contributions to this volume bring into focus dramatic and violent events. By taking different perspectives—those of peasants, Hamidiye regiments, officials and activists—and focusing on practices—land-grabbing, straggles for power, violence and genocide—the book gives shape to the idea of poly-centricity and poly-activity. At the same time, this implies, or turns our attention to, some of the practices and social relations through which events and trajectories are constructed. The implication of this is that we should try to go beyond the hierarchy of scale—‘the central state’ above ‘the province' above ‘local officials’—but rather look for the ways in which connections are made and relations constructed. Thus, for example, the land-grab in Diyarbekir does not appear as something that resulted from centrally enacted legal reforms passed down to the provinces and met with peasant resistance as the straggle of local actors against their effects on the ground (sic). Instead, by taking the practice of grabbing and peasant resistance as a starting point, or, resistance against land-grabbing, all of a sudden we may see how different actors, peasants, and urban and rural elites try to establish relations and mobilize resources and support for their cases. Center and periphery, then, do not appear anymore as entities standing in opposition to each other, but become interrelated spaces of action. The petitioning peasants discussed in this book seek connection to those who make up the central state, just as others try to make connections. The Diyarbekir activists in the Committee of Union and Progress or the Hamidiye regiments are not simply to be considered local members of something larger, but also its constituents. They are at the same time both that ‘something bigger’ and ‘the local’, as two sides of the same coin. This is a theme prominent in the contributions ofjoost Jongerden, Janet Klein, David Gaunt and Emrullah Akgündüz. Jelle Verheij, in his contribution shows how actors active in the province and reforms introduced following the Berlin conference of 1878 co-produced the anti-Armenian violence in 1895, while Ugur Omit Üngôr argues in his contribution: ‘Mass murder can develop from this mutual dependence and tacit pact: local elites depend on the center to secure a power base, and the center depends on local elites to carry out genocide. In a way, the emphasis on poly-activity and poly-centricity marks a shift from time-centered analyses focusing on succession to spatial-analyses focusing on simultaneity. The focus on centers—as Istanbul, for example, leading the course of development, with the periphery, the provinces, as lagging behind and catching up or just following the developments in the center—or the retrospective explanation of history—such as from ‘1923’—are illustrations of what we may call the ‘time-centered analysis of succession’. In such analyses, we see a marshalling of space under the sign of time, which leaves no space to tell different stories about the world (Massey 2005:82).5 Time tends to crowd out space in such history-telling— including social, economic, etc. space (as well as the physically or politically/administratively defined)—or rather, time orders space, according to the logic of the sequences analyzed. Looking back, history may appear as unfolding, but when we look seriously at ‘then’, societies—or places, if one likes—were heterogeneous and multiple, and options for the future ‘open’. There were different practices, linked to different trajectories, and the question one of understanding which ‘events’ seem to have emerged from which practices, how they became ‘successful’, and what the submerged trajectories were. This is an approach to history which regards ‘place’ seriously. It is what this book, through the different contributions, focusing on different practices or events as practices, is attempting.
Diyarbekir
In the pre-amble to this book, Suavi Aydin and Jelle Verheij make extensive introductory notes about state and ethno-religious groups in Diyarbekir province, both city and countryside. Yet a few words here on the city and the larger region, province if one likes, may be in place. Situated on the River Tigris in the Fertile Crescent, in what was once northern Mesopotamia, the city of Diyarbekir has an ancient history. For most of this time it was known as ‘Amida’.6 The city was part of an Aramean kingdom, the Neo-Assyrian and the Median Empires, and later the Persian, Roman and Byzantine Empires. Amida was an early Christian center, enlarged and strengthened under the Roman emperor Constantius (Könstantios) II, who also erected new walls around the city (349). After a long siege, it fell to the king of Persia in 359, and then, in 639, to Islamic Arabs including the Bekr tribe, from whence the modem name. Between the 11th and the 16th century, the Diyarbekir area was under the control of different Islamic rulers.7 In 1515, the city of Diyarbekir was conquered by local Sunni forces allied to (Sunni) Ottoman mlers which had emerged as a force in the region. With the fall of the citadel of Mardin at the turn of 1516-17 the Ottoman conquest of the Diyarbekir area was complete. In the Ottoman Empire, the city of Diyarbekir was from the start an important administrative center and remained so until World War I.
The name ‘Diyarbekir’ refers to the province (eyalet, vilayet, il), the smaller, more local sub-province or county (sancak) and district or borough (kaza, ilçe), and the provincial capital (merkez), the actual city itself. The borders of the regional area centered on and referred to as ‘Diyarbekir’ changed several times during the 19th century, as did the administrative divisions within it. The eyalet of around 1800 included a huge swathe of land, from Malatya in the west to Mosul (now in Iraq) in the southeast, and from Kemah (currently in the Turkish province of Erzincan) in the north to parts of current Syria in the south. During the Tanzimat Reform period until 1867, Diyarbekir was named Eyâlet-i Kurdistan (Kurdistan Province ), and for a period also included parts of the provinces of Bitlis and Van. The general trend of the various administrative adjustments was towards reduction in size; nevertheless, Diyarbekir Province of the end of the 19th century remained an impressive stretch of land, encompassing parts of the modem Turkish provinces of Çanhurfa, Mardin, Elazig, Batman, Siirt and §irnak, as well as parts of today’s Northern Syria and Iraq.8 After the Conference of Berlin (1878), it became known to Europeans as one of the six 'Armenian vilayets’, the area in which reforms for the benefit of the Armenians were to be applied. In temporal terms, the opening contribution by Aydin and Verheij stops short of the Berlin conference. Entitled ‘Confusion in the Cauldron: Some notes on Ethno-Religious groups, local powers and the Ottoman state in Diyarbekir Province, 1800-1876’, this offers a detailed introduction to the ethnic and political structure of the Diyarbekir area and an exploration of the relations between the central (Ottoman) state and the local powers of Diyarbekir and its environs. Around 1800, the central state had hardly any influence in the region. Aydin and Verheij describe how the state gradually tightened its grip during the Tanzimat period, a process beset by many twists and turns. Covering a time frame that precedes that of the main focus of this book, this contribution constitutes an essential background to the various developments in the last quarter of the century, and provides a historical introduction to several of the themes covered by other contributors.
The subject of the contribution from Joost Jongerden, ‘Elite Encounters of a Violent Kind: Milli Ibrahim Pașa, Ziya Gökalp and political struggle in Diyarbekir at the turn of the 20th century’, is the nature of a conflict between two elite groups, which he refers to as ‘Hamidian’ and ‘protonationalist’, and which he claims to have had a profound influence on social and political life in Diyarbekir in the period between 1890 and 1910. While discussing the conflict between the elite-groups, he makes two arguments. The first argument is that the formation of these elite-groups and their overall influence was by no means a local affair only. The development of the proto-nationalist elite group in Diyarbekir was influenced by the emergence of the Turkish nationalist movement, in particular the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). However, it is would be wrong to consider the nationalist elite-group just as an ‘instance’ of the CUP. Participants of the nationalist elite-group in Diyarbekir played an important role in the formation of the CUP and its ideological transition from Ottomanist to nationalist. It is not the local shaping the center or the center shaping the local: local-center shaping is a two-way process. The second argument Jongerden makes is related to the extent to which the Hamidiye in Diyarbekir were involved in the anti-Armenian massacres of 1895. While it is often suggested—or assumed—that the Hamidiye regiments were involved on a large scale in the persecution and killing of Armenians, in the case of Diyarbekir, it is argued here, this was not the case. In fact, not only was it was not the existence and activities of the Hamidiye that caused harm to the Armenians and other Christians here, but the exact opposite: it was the disbandment of the local Hamidiye headed by Milli ibrahim Paga that proved detrimental. In respect of the main themes of this book, Jongerden’s contribution focuses attention first on locality as constitutive of general developments (rather than just as an expression of them), and second on the problem of over-generalization.
In ‘Diyarbekir and the Armenian crisis of 1895’, Jelle Verheij explores the bloody confrontation between Armenians and Muslims in November, 1895. The conflict in Diyarbekir was one of a series of similar conflicts all over the eastern provinces that erupted following the Hunchak demonstration in Istanbul and proclamation of reforms, under strong European pressure, for the benefit of non-Muslims. Despite the availability of a comparatively large number of primary sources, these events have never been studied in detail. Using both foreign (British and French) and Ottoman texts and documents, the author compares the Armenian/Western/ Christian view, which has always been to regard the conflicts as a largely unprovoked attack on the Armenians, with the Ottoman/Turkish/Muslim view, which claims that there to have been an (incipient) armed Armenian uprising, but ignores the ensuing conflict. After detailed analysis of what transpired in Diyarbekir, both the events themselves and the periods before and after, Verheij concludes that although there was an element of Armenian protest (which was largely ignored by Armenian-Western sources), local Muslim protest against the Sultan and the reforms introduced following the Berlin conference were the most important factors. In Diyarbekir, a segment of the urban Muslim population was led by a number of notables described as 'Young Turks’ and, by this time, in clear opposition to the Sultan. Violence was by no means confined to the city of Diyarbekir alone after 1895, but spread into virtually all the rural areas, where other actors and motivations also came into play. Attempting to present a comprehensive list of incidents for the whole of the province of Diyarbekir, Verheij explains (see Annex B) how, in the countryside, it was the role of the Kurdish tribesmen that was paramount: in many cases they do seem to have attacked Armenian and other Christian rural settlements unprovoked. Verheij’s contribution is innovative in more than one sense, particularly in his attempt to reconcile the opposing views of the 1895 conflict, and in his extensive use of Ottoman sources. His analysis also makes clear that the conflict was shaped by a number of specific, local social and political factors, which have seldom been considered until now.
Several contributions make reference to the local Hamidiye. The chapter ‘State, Tribe, Dynasty, and the Contest over Diyarbekir at the Turn of the 20th Century1, by Janet Klein, takes as its central subject of inquiry the Hamidiye Light Cavalry, a Kurdish tribal militia created by Sultan Abdülhamid II to serve as a proxy force to deal with perceived threats to his imperial authority, both internal and external. Janet Klein argues that the dynamics exemplified by the power struggles that were exacerbated by the existence of this tribal militia were central in the social shaping of Diyarbekir at the turn of the twentieth century. Most of the regiments were located in areas where Armenian revolutionists were active or which they traversed as they smuggled men and weapons into the Empire from across the borders. This is why Kurdish tribes formed the overwhelming bulk of these regiments: it was they, and not Arabs and Turkmen, who were the ones that lived near and amidst the perceived Armenian threat. While discussing the case of the Hamidiye, Klein demonstrates that we need to look at Diyarbekir within a larger—but still regional, and provincial—unit of analysis, that of the six eastern (‘Armenian’) provinces. Indeed, the province and the wider region may be difficult to separate from each other, implying that in the making of micro-histories we need to take into account the wider struggles unfolding at the time (yet without assuming a centralist perspective), which both inform and are shaped by local particularities. She does that through a close examination of the career of Mustafa Pașa, head of the Miran tribe of Cizre, and known as a notorious robber before he became a Hamidiye commander. Klein shows that significant tensions and rivalries were played out on the ground in attempts to acquire local power and resources between and among tribes and urban notables, and between peasants and their overlords, and the state, which endeavored to utilize these local struggles for its own ends. As such, the national (imperial) becomes part of the local (provincial, or regional), and vice versa. Klein’s plea is that we unravel the specificities of such dynamics and ‘learn’ from history.
In 'A “Peripheral” Approach to the 1908 Revolution in the Ottoman Empire: Land disputes in peasant petitions in post-revolutionary Diyarbekir’, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan focuses on one of the most pressing social-economic issues in the region: peasant dispossession. The problem of dispossession became urgent after the Land Code of 1858, adopted in the spirit of Tanzimat reforms. The objective of the Land Code had been to increase tax revenues, but it also changed the nature of landownership, leading to the formation of a new class of owners of large land estates. In the Ottoman Empire, the vast majority of agricultural land was owned by the state and cultivated by tenants who had a right to cultivation (which they could pass to their heirs). Taxes of agricultural lands were not collected by the state, but transferred to third parties. In the course of the 14th century, this right to collect taxes was granted to military officers and notables, who would use the money in order to raise and arm forces that would fight in the Sultan’s wars. Over time, limited time period grants became indefinite and inherited, and the revenues not used to maintain an army, but for personal wealth acquisition. And with the enactment of the Land Code, formal private ownership became possible on a large scale. Ottoman feudalism was instituted. Local notables and persons of wealth usurped land extensively, but, as Ôzok-Gündogan shows through an analysis of petitions send by peasants to the authorities, the usurpation of land and dispossession of peasants was contested in word and deed. By doing that, she introduces two new perspectives to the historiography of the region. Firstly, as indicated, her analysis does not revolve around ethnicity and religion, the dominant paradigms in Ottoman local and regional studies, but around socio-economic relations and conflict. Secondly, she introduces the peasantry, not as an object of action, but as subject, and in so-doing, offers an insight into the peasant struggles that occurred in the Diyarbekir region at the beginning of the 20th century.
In ‘Some Notes on the Syriac Christians of Diyarbekir in the Late 19th Century: A preliminary investigation of some primary sources’, Emrullah Akgündüz gives a sketch of the Syriac Christian communities in the city. Diyarbekir at the end of the nineteenth century was host to a variety of Christian communities, including the Syriac Christians. Although community constitutes a standard analytical lens for local histories, studies of Syriac-Christians in the city are virtually absent. Employing primary sources such as the salnames and the Mardin Collection, Akgündüz here expands our knowledge of the Syriac-Christians of Diyarbekir with regards to population, economics, education, printing and social relations. The information found shows that the Syriac Christian community, the second largest Christian community in Diyarbekir after the Armenians, was growing during the late nineteenth century. Less information is available regarding their economic status, as it is difficult to ascertain the sectors in which the Syriac Christians worked, though an overview of Diyarbekir’s economy at the time is provided, which along with other clues, suggests they may not have been unprosperous. The Syriac children attended their own community schools by the end of the nineteenth century as well as the Ottoman schools. Finally, this investigation also looks at the social relations of the Syriac Christians with other ethno-religious communities and with each other. Relations with the Armenians, though not cordial at the clergy level, Akgündüz argues, were cooperative. Despite a willingness on the part of the Syriac Orthodox clergy to work with the Ottoman authorities, however, everyday relations between Syriac Christians and Muslims were strained. Intra-relations among the Syriac Christians were characterized by the split between the Catholics and non-Catholics, which, together with the strained clergy-level relations with the Armenians, encouraged the quest on the part of the Syriac Orthodox to become a separate millet (people, nation).
David Gaunt, in his contribution ‘Relations between Kurds and Syriacs and Assyrians in Late Ottoman Diyarbekir’ is concerned with the development of socio-economic and political relations between the two, with a focus on the ‘Syriacs’ or ‘Assyrians’ (these terms referring to various Christian communities in the Mesopotamian region sharing a common background as speakers of Aramaic dialects, i.e. assuming a linguistic basis for ethno-cultural definition). The basis of his research is formed by observations of the close relationship between Syriacs/Assyrians and Kurds at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries—a subject, however, inadequately researched. Gaunt starts his article with a brief discussion on the size of the populations and their settlements in Diyarbekir, which had one of the greatest concentrations of Syriacs/Assyrians among Ottoman provinces. Syriacs or Assyrians were never a category used by the Ottoman census-takers, and available figures on various communities from which the category Syriac/Assyrian is composed should be treated with caution. Relations, or integration, between Syriacs/Assyrians and Kurds had been good, Gaunt argues, as indicated by the existence of Syriac/ Assyrian sub-sections within Kurdish tribal confederations in the Tur- Abdin region in the southeast of the Diyarbekir province. But Gaunt also makes a reservation. The good relations between Syriacs/Assyrians and Kurds that marked the southeastern area were not representative of the whole province, and so we are minded (again) to be careful of overgeneralization and simplification. Gaunt also shows that relations between the Syriacs/Assyrians and Kurds were deteriorating rapidly during the course of the 19th century, culminating in increasingly brutal violence in the first decades of the 20th century, to which an unequal balance in rifle power also contributed. Gaunt argues that the tendency for a struggle over territorial control combined with the CUP policy of separating populations were constitutive in the deteriorating relations and rising violence between the two groupings.
The CUP in particular and Young Turk rule in general as related to the issue of violence forms the main subject of the last contribution, by Uğur Omit Üngör. In ‘Disastrous Decade: Armenians and Kurds in the Young Turk Era, 1915-25’, Üngör links the occurrence of mass violence against the Armenians to the Young Turks' political program of nation-state building, in which the Empire, a heterogeneous space, was to be transformed into the homeland of a Sunni-Turkish population. In this process of transformation, options in respect of the other’ ranged from assimilation to annihilation. Üngör is especially concerned with questions revolving around the issue of the axis of tension between direction from above (the state) and local initiatives (the provinces)—or, as it might be rephrased, between centralist and peripheral perspectives. In his inquiry, he distinguishes between three phases: the process in which people become categorized and the subject of genocide, the dynamic of persecution and violence, and how perpetrator, survivor and bystander live with each other after genocide. A main conclusion from this investigation is that competition between urban elites was a major contributory factor to the intensity of the violence in Diyarbekir. City and province had become the scene of a fierce struggle for political and economic power, among them a local branch of the CUP, which in Istanbul had won control of the state in 1908. This success became translated at the local (regional) level in Diyarbekir as a decisive advantage in the ongoing, increasingly bitter competition. Genocide, the author argues, emerged as an opportunity for perpetrators to pursue self interest.
Further information on specific subjects and some source materials have been added to the book as annexes. Annex A represents an attempt by Jelle Verheij to list all the non-Muslim villages in the Diyarbekir vilayet, with specification of their ethnic/religious composition, their administrative connection and old and new names. Since many discussions center on inter-ethnic relations and population figures while surprisingly few attempts have in fact been made to present a full picture of the settlement situation in the province, we consider this annex to be an important addition to the book.
Clearly, many contributions to this book explore subjects that have been rarely researched until now. The contributions presented here, their information and analyses and arguments, should not, therefore, be interpreted as the final word on the issues raised. Naturally many subjects that could have been treated were passed by, and remain still to be researched. Finally, authors were not supplied with binding guidelines other than the general perspectives explained. It should thus be stressed that the authors themselves, and not the editors of this volume, are ultimately responsible for the contents of the contributions.
1 We are indebted to Andy Hilton, who took responsibility for copy-editing several contributions to this book, and for his valuable remarks.
2 Known best as co-author of the Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret agreement between the governments of the UK and France to divide the provinces of the Ottoman Empire into areas under British and French control, Mark Sykes travelled extensively in the Middle East as a young man, both before and during his period as honorary attaché to the British Embassy in Constantinople, in the period 1905-07, but also later, in 1908-09 and 1913.
3 Sykes 1915: 357-8. 4 See Olson 1989. 5 Although national(ist) narratives do also tend to construct the temporal, of course— again, such as in the case of ‘1923’. 6 Other Latinate forms, variously recorded over the past millennia include ‘Amad’, 'Amid(i)’, 'Amed(i)’ and 'Media’. See, e.g., Mizouri 2007: 24-5.
7 At the end of the eleventh century, following the entry of the Turkic peoples into Anatolia in 1071, control of the city changed hands from the Merwani dynasty to the Oguz. The city then became the capital of of the beylik of the Artuklu dynasty. In 1507, Shah Ismail I succeeded in taking the region for the Persian Shi’ite Safavid Empire from the Akkoyunlu dynasty, which had ruled over eastern Anatolia for a century. Safavid rule lasted only eight years, however.
8 See maps in Yilmazçelik 1995.
Joost Jongerden Jelle Verheij
Social Relations in Ottoman
Brill
Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870-1915 Brill Edited By Joost Jongerden And Jelle Verheij
Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870-1915
The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage Politics, Society and Economy
Edited, by Suraiya Faroqhi, Halil inalcik and Bogaç Ergene
Advisory Board Fikret Adanir - Antonis Anastasopoulos - Idris Bostan Palmira Brummett - Amnon Cohen - Jane Hathaway Klaus Kreiser - Hans Georg Majer - Ahmet Ya§Ar Ocak Abdeljelil Temimi - Gilles Veinstein
Volume 51
The titles published in this series are listed at brillnl/oeh
Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870-1915
Edited, by Joost Jongerden andjelle Verheij
Brill Leiden - Boston 2012
Cover illustration: Blick über Diârbekr, from: Grothe, Hugo, Geographische Charakterbilder aus der asiatischen Tuerkei und dem suedlichen mesopotamisch-iranischen Randgebirge (Puscht-i-kuh): eine Darstellung der Oberflaechengestalt, Bevoelkerung, Siedlung und Wirtschaft. 176 Originalaufnahmen und drei Karten. Leipzig, 1909. (Karl W. Hiersemann)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Social relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870-1915 / edited by Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij. p. cm. — (The Ottoman Empire and its heritage : politics, society and economy, ISSN 1380-6076 ; v. 51) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-22518-3 (hbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-23227-3 (ebook) 1. Diyarbakir İli (Turkey)—Social conditions—19th century. 2. Diyarbakir İli (Turkey)—Social conditions—20th century. 3. Social conflict—Turkey—Diyarbakir İli—History. 4. Ethnic conflict—Turkey—Diyarbakir İli—History. 5. Religious minorities—Turkey—Diyarbakir İli— History. 6. Political violence—Turkey—Diyarbakir İli—History. 7. Diyarbakir İli (Turkey)—Politics and government. 8. Diyarbakir İli (Turkey)—Ethnic relations. 9. Armenians— Turkey—Diyarbakir İli—History. 10. Kurds—Turkey—Diyarbakir İli—History. I. Jongerden, Joost. II. Verheij, Jelle. HN656.5.D59S68 2012 3°3-6og566’77—dc23 2012017164
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