Hamidian Massacres

Hamidian massacres
Part of the persecution of Armenians
A photograph taken in November 1895 by William Sachtleben of Armenians killed in Erzerum
Location	Ottoman Empire
Date	1894–1896
Target	Armenian and Assyrian civilians
Attack type	mass murder, looting
Deaths	200,000–300,000

The Hamidian massacres (Armenian: Համիդյան ջարդեր, Turkish: Hamidiye Katliamı), also referred to as the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896 and Great Massacres, were massacres of Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-1890s, with estimates of the dead ranging from 80,000 to 300,000, resulting in 50,000 orphaned children. The massacres are named after Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who, in his efforts to reinforce the territorial integrity of the embattled Ottoman Empire, reasserted Pan-Islamism as a state ideology. Although the massacres were aimed mainly at the Armenians, they turned into indiscriminate anti-Christian pogroms in some cases, such as in Diyarbekir Vilayet, where some 25,000 Assyrians were killed (see also Assyrian genocide).

The massacres began with incidents in the Ottoman interior in 1894, gained full force in 1894–96, and tapered off in 1897, as international condemnation brought pressure to bear on Abdul Hamid. Although the Ottomans had previously suppressed other revolts, the harshest measures were directed against the Armenian community. They observed no distinction between ages or genders, and massacred them with brutal force. This occurred at a time when the telegraph could spread news around the world, and the massacres received extensive coverage in the media of Western Europe and the United States.

The origins of the hostility toward Armenians lay in the increasingly precarious position in which the Ottoman Empire found itself in the last quarter of the 19th century. The loss of Ottoman dominion over the Balkans was ushered in by an era of European nationalism and an insistence on self-determination by many territories long held under Ottoman rule. The Armenians of the empire, who were long considered second-class citizens, had begun in the mid-1860s and early 1870s to ask for civil reforms and better treatment from their government. They pressed for an end to the usurpation of land, "the looting and murder in Armenian towns by Kurds and Circassians, improprieties during tax collection, criminal behavior by government officials and the refusal to accept Christians as witnesses in trial." These requests went unheeded by the central government. When a nascent form of nationalism spread among the Armenians of Anatolia, including demands for equal rights and a push for autonomy, the Ottoman leadership believed that the empire's Islamic character and even its very existence were threatened.