UC Berkeley

The famous trial of the Kurdish chieftain Musa Bey, whose crimes and acquittal in 1889 embodied for many the insecurities and inequities faced daily by Armenians in eastern Anatolia, opened a period of crisis between the Armenian population and the Ottoman Muslim majority, one culminating in massacres over the next decade that took some 200,000 lives. Contrary to those who believe that Armenians were victims of Great Power diplomacy, or that Western public outrage, by encouraging Armenian militants to provoke massacres in hopes of intervention, was at least co-responsible for the horrors, the article argues that the massacres were an outgrowth of Abdülhamit's insecurities, driven by a deepening crisis of Ottoman legitimacy and identity, and spurred in part by previous reforms proclaiming civic equality. The interactions between public opinion, European diplomacy and the Ottomans, as well as comparisons from across the Atlantic, reveal real dilemmas of humanitarian conscience too often ignored by works such as Samantha Power’s influential ‘A problem from hell'. Some problems, they suggest, are beyond intervention.