Social Relations in Ottoman

Diyarbekir, 1870–1915
Edited by
Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij

LEIDEN • BOSTON
2012

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 22518 3

 CONTENTS

List of Tables  .................................................................................................... vii

About the Authors  .......................................................................................... ix
Note on Names and Spelling  ....................................................................... xi

Introduction  ..................................................................................................... 1
Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij

Confusion in the Cauldron: Some Notes on Ethno-Religious

Groups, Local Powers and the Ottoman State in Diyarbekir
Province, 1800–1870  ................................................................................... 15
Suavi Aydın and Jelle Verheij

Elite Encounters of a Violent Kind: Milli İbrahim Paşa,

Ziya Gökalp 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

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vi contents

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
Efffendi’s Speech  ................................................................................... 345
D. Family Tree of Ziya Gökalp  ............................................................. 353
E. British map of Diyarbekir and Surroundings, 1904 ................... 355

Name and Subject Index  .............................................................................. 357

Place Index   ...................................................................................................... 365
Tribes (aşiret) Index ....................................................................................... 371

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 22518 3

 INTRODUCTION1

Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij

In the early 20th century, the British traveler, offfijicer, honorary attaché
and conservative politician Mark Sykes2 wrote about Diyarbekir:
The country between Mount Ahmedi and Diarbekir is as dull and uninter-
esting as its inhabitants—brown, stony, and unwooded, it offfers no attrac-
tions 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 efffect. The native artists have endeavoured
to relieve the dreariness of the picture by introducing white stone orna-
ments and decorations; but the efffect 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 unremit-
tingly 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, includ-
ing the Armenian-Muslim confrontation of 1895. Various political elite
groups competed for power and resources. Tensions emerged between a

1 We are indebted to Andy Hilton, who took responsibility for copy-editing several con-
tributions 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 traveled 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.

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2 joost jongerden and jelle verheij

newly constituted class of landlords, and dispossessed peasants and villag-

ers, and between various groups and peoples (ethno-religious communi-
ties), 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 régime of Abdülhamid II. Initially
creating high expectations among the population, however, the revolu-
tion and the Second Constitutional Era that it ushered in brought political
repression and genocide, the greatest upheaval of all. The age-old pres-
ence 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 diplo-
matic advances towards a Kurdish homeland in Anatolia,4 the war of
1919–23 and subsequent proclamation of the Republic of Turkey, the con-
frontation between the government (now in Ankara and overtly Turkish
nationalist) and the Kurds reached new levels, culminating in the Şeyh
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—
fijigures 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

4 See Olson 1989.

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 introduction 3

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 dis-
cussion 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, Kurd-
ish, 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 previ-
ous) events; and they step outside the confijines of nationalist historiogra-
phy. Overall, they may be characterized by two inversions of perspective.
The fijirst 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 poly-
activity.
‘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 signifijicant 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, net-
works and interactions, not on just one group or class. In fact, location
specifijic 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

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4 joost jongerden and jelle verheij

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 modern 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 diffferent perspectives—those of peasants, Hamidiye reg-
iments, offfijicials and activists—and focusing on practices—land-grabbing,
struggles 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 offfijicials’—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 struggle of local actors against their
efffects 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 diffferent 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 enti-
ties 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 connec-
tions. 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 of Joost 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 Uğur Ümit Üngör 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.’

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 introduction 5

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 diffferent 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 politi-
cally/administratively defijined)—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 diffferent practices, linked to diffferent trajectories, and
the question one of understanding which ‘events’ seem to have emerged
from which practices, how they became ‘successful’, and what the sub-
merged trajectories were. This is an approach to history which regards
‘place’ seriously. It is what this book, through the diffferent contributions,
focusing on diffferent practices or events as practices, is attempting.

Diyarbekir

In the pre-amble to this book, Suavi Aydın and Jelle Verheij make exten-
sive introductory notes about state and ethno-religious groups in Diyar-
bekir 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 Meso-
potamia, 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

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.

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6 joost jongerden and jelle verheij

and Byzantine Empires. Amida was an early Christian center, enlarged

and strengthened under the Roman emperor Constantius (Kōnstantios) 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 includ-
ing the Bekr tribe, from whence the modern name. Between the 11th and
the 16th century, the Diyarbekir area was under the control of diffferent
Islamic rulers.7 In 1515, the city of Diyarbekir was conquered by local
Sunni forces allied to (Sunni) Ottoman rulers 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 bor-
ough (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 modern Turkish provinces of Şanlıurfa, Mardin, Elazığ, Bat-
man, Siirt and Şirnak, 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 benefijit
of the Armenians were to be applied.

7 At the end of the eleventh century, following the entry of the Turkic peoples into Ana-
tolia in 1071, control of the city changed hands from the Merwanî dynasty to the Oğuz. The
city then became the capital of of the beylik of the Artuklu dynasty. In 1507, Shah İsmail 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 Yılmazçelik 1995.

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 introduction 7

In temporal terms, the opening contribution by Aydın 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 offfers 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. Aydın 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 back-
ground 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 İbrahim Paşa, 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 ‘proto-
nationalist’, 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 fijirst argument is that the formation of these elite-groups
and their overall influence was by no means a local afffair only. The devel-
opment 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 impor-
tant 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 massa-
cres 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

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8 joost jongerden and jelle verheij

headed by Milli İbrahim Paşa that proved detrimental. In respect of the

main themes of this book, Jongerden’s contribution focuses attention fijirst
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 dem-
onstration in Istanbul and proclamation of reforms, under strong Euro-
pean pressure, for the benefijit 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 Otto-
man 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 Arme-
nian 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 intro-
duced 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 confijined 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 con-
flict, and in his extensive use of Ottoman sources. His analysis also makes
clear that the conflict was shaped by a number of specifijic, local social and
political factors, which have seldom been considered until now.
Several contributions make reference to the local Hamidiye. The chap-
ter ‘State, Tribe, Dynasty, and the Contest over Diyarbekir at the Turn of
the 20th Century’, by Janet Klein, takes as its central subject of inquiry the
Hamidiye Light Cavalry, a Kurdish tribal militia created by Sultan Abdül-

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 introduction 9

hamid 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 exemplifijied 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 pro-
vincial—unit of analysis, that of the six eastern (‘Armenian’) provinces.
Indeed, the province and the wider region may be difffijicult 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 with-
out 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 Paşa, head of the Miran tribe of Cizre, and known as a
notorious robber before he became a Hamidiye commander. Klein shows
that signifijicant 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 specifijicities
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 Diyar-
bekir’, 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 col-
lected by the state, but transferred to third parties. In the course of the
14th century, this right to collect taxes was granted to military offfijicers and

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10 joost jongerden and jelle verheij

notables, who would use the money in order to raise and arm forces that
would fijight in the Sultan’s wars. Over time, limited time period grants
became indefijinite 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 Özok-Gündoğan 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 eth-
nicity 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, offfers 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 com-
munity 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 sec-
ond 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 difffijicult 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

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 introduction 11

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 develop-
ment of socio-economic and political relations between the two, with a
focus on the ‘Syriacs’ or ‘Assyrians’ (these terms referring to various Chris-
tian communities in the Mesopotamian region sharing a common back-
ground as speakers of Aramaic dialects, i.e. assuming a linguistic basis for
ethno-cultural defijinition). The basis of his research is formed by observa-
tions 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 Otto-
man census-takers, and available fijigures 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 over-
generalization and simplifijication. 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 fijirst 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 popu-
lations 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
Ümit 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,

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 22518 3

12 joost jongerden and jelle verheij

in which the Empire, a heterogeneous space, was to be transformed into

the homeland of a Sunni-Turkish population. In this process of transforma-
tion, options in respect of ‘the other’ ranged from assimilation to annihila-
tion. 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 fijierce 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 specifijic 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 specifijication of their ethnic/religious composition, their administra-
tive connection and old and new names. Since many discussions center
on inter-ethnic relations and population fijigures while surprisingly few
attempts have in fact been made to present a full picture of the settle-
ment 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 inter-
preted as the fijinal 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.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 22518 3

 introduction 13

References

Abdul-Rahman Mizouri. 2007. ‘Udday bin Musafijir Al-Kurdy Al-Hakary is not an Umayyad’.
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27/L%2027%20E/L%2027%20E.3.pdf.
Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage Publications.
Yılmazçelik, İbrahim. 1995. XIX. Yüzyılın İlk Yarısında Diyarbekir (1790–1840). Ankara: Türk
Tarih Kurumu.
Olson, Robert. 1989. The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion,
1880–1925. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Sykes, Mark. 1915. The Caliphs’ Last Heritage. London: MacMillan and Co.

© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978 90 04 22518 3