290 DESTINY DISRUPTED
seemed like an age-old feature of the two communities' relationship. The
Ottoman policy of dividing the population into self-governing communi-
ties was originally a way of conferring upon each a measure of cultural sov-
ereignty. It reflected tolerance. It functioned as an instrument of harmony.
Now, this same policy became a deficiency, a liability, a crucial key to the
coming troubles, because it worked to separate, isolate, and spotlight the
unfortunate Armenians. In fact, the millet system became a mechanism for
exacerbating existing fault lines in Ottoman society.
Between 1894 and 1896, in eastern Anatolia, a series of anti-Armenian
pogroms broke out. Turkish villagers began to massacre Armenians, much
as Jews were being massacred in eastern Europe and Russia, but on an even
larger scale. As many as three hundred thousand Armenians died before
the madness subsided, and it subsided then only because Europeans put
pressure on the Ottoman government to do something. Since the power of
Europeans to dictate to Ottoman officials was a factor in the resentment
vented upon the Armenians, this authority ending the violence only exac-
erbated the original psychosocial sources of the violence. It was like parents
stepping in to protect a little boy from neighborhood bullies and then
going off about their business: once the little boy is alone with the bullies
again, he's in worse trouble than before.
Meanwhile, even though the sultan had scuttled the constitution,
power remained divided between old guard and new bucks. The political
struggle kept raging on and the balance inexorably tipped back to the new
guys, for here, as in Iran, the tide was with the modernists. By 1900, a
whole new generation of activists were calling for the constitution to be re-
stored. They wanted their parents' French Revolution back.
Politically it was an exhilarating but confusing time. It wasn't like one
group of agitators were nationalists, another group secular modernists,
some other one liberal constitutionalists. Many ideologies and movements
were intertwined and interacting. Any single person might espouse a bit of
this and a bit of that. There had not yet been time enough to sort out
which ideas went together and which were incompatible. All who set
themselves against the old guard thought themselves Ottoman citizens
with a common stake in reshaping the empire. All felt like young people in
the know aligned against clueless elders, comrades-in-arms merely because
they all fiercely favored the "modern," whatever that was.