Int. J. Turkish Studies Vol. 13, Nos. 1&2, 2007
Janet KleinCONFLICT AND COLLABORATION:RETHINKING KURDISH-ARMENIAN RELATIONS INTHE HAMIDIAN PERIOD, 1876-1909 (1)
Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) has gone down in some histories as “the butcher,” or “the red sultan.” These titles were bestowed upon this Ottoman sultan inthe mid-1890s, when widespread massacres of Armenian Ottomans bloodied largetracts of Anatolia; it was widely believed in European circles that the Sultan hadordered the murder of tens of thousands of his Armenian subjects. The not-so-honorific titles were accompanied by caricatures in the European press depicting a bloodthirsty, fanged Sultan slaughtering tiny babies with a butcher knife.(2)
It wasdifficult for Ottoman officials to conceal from the numerous European observers inthe region the extent of the massacres. A century of chances to examine historicalsources confirms that they did indeed take place and claimed thousands of lives.What remains less transparent is the question of culpability. Whether the massacreswere perpetrated at the behest of official orders or as a result of spontaneousoutbursts of rage by local Muslims against their Armenian neighbors continues to bedebated.(3)
The issue of culpability, however, has continued to plague any history ofArmenians in the late Ottoman period. While the matter is certainly important, this paper seeks to set it aside for the moment, as its overwhelming dominance as thekey question guiding these years has tended to obscure and derail attempts tounderstand other aspects of the violence that became widespread in OttomanAnatolia at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.The present study will instead examine broader facets of this violence bysituating it within the larger context of Kurdish-Armenian relations in the Hamidian period. To the extent that this topic has been addressed at all, with few exceptions,(4)

1. This essay is presented in honor of a dear mentor, Professor Norman Itzkowitz, who has been devoted to understanding and solving ethnic conflict. A version of this paper was first presented at the Middle East Studies Association’s annual meeting in 2002.
2. Raymond H. Kévorkian and Paul B. Paboudjian,
Les Arméniens dans l’Empire Ottoman à laVeille du Génocide
(Paris: Les Editions d’Art et d’Histoire, 1992), esp. pp. 18, 48.
3. Jelle Verheij, “‘Les frères de terre et d’eau’: Sur le rôle des Kurdes dans les massacresarméniens de 1894-1896,”
Les Annales de l’autre Islam
5, ed. Martin van Bruinessen. (Paris:ERISM, 1998).
4.See, for example, Verheij,ibid
..and Hamit Bozarslan, “Histoire des relations kurdo-arméniennes,” and “La coercition et la violence au Kurdistan,” in
Le Kurdistan et L’Europe:
Janet Klein154it too has generally been treated only insofar as it relates to the massacres of 1894-1896. Here, two prevalent voices have turned the histories of Kurds and Armeniansin this period into “camps,” each seeking to place or deflect the blame for themassacres, or to explain them away in a highly superficial manner. These twogroups, the “Turkish” and “Armenian” voices (a third, “Kurdish,” voice entered thisdebate relatively recently), have tended to turn any aspect of history in southeasternAnatolia, where Kurds and Armenians predominated during the Hamidian period,into a “question” whose answers, as Hamit Bozarslan has noted, are rife withclichés.
5. At stake is not simply the settlement of this historical episode of violence, but the continuing dispute over the Armenian genocide of 1915.Writers from the “Armenian.[1]