Sasun Massacres Reexamined by Academic Owen Miller at NAASR

Back in the Sasun area, Owen related, Hasan Tahsin Pasha, governor-general of Bitlis province, was encouraging pastoralist groups to defeat local power holders so that he in turn could increase his own power. Tahsin sent a series of increasingly panicked reports to the central Ottoman government that large numbers of Armenians armed with Martini rifles were in the mountains ready to cause problems. The central government panicked in its turn. The sultan ordered local forces to destroy the “bandits” and leave a legacy of terror.

Consequently,12 battalions of Ottoman soldiers murdered and plundered the Sasun Armenians over the course of three weeks, from August to September 1894. The orders were carried out by Ottoman Fourth Army commander Zeki Pasha, the brother-in-law of the sultan, though the cavalry military commander Edhem Pasha, in Moush, refused to obey these same orders.

Zeki Pasha went to Sasun after the murders and wrote a report which was a cover-up. Miller found that this became the official state version of the events, and was repeated in a large number of Ottoman documents. It even ended up in the New York Times and various European newspapers, probably on the take from the Ottoman government.

Miller observed that American missionaries in the area began to collect local information about what happened. In their reports, they presented a much more complex situation, and these reports also reached Western newspapers.

Most Western journalists were denied entry to the region, but two enterprising correspondents managed to get first-hand information. Dr. Emil Dillon of the Daily Telegraph, pretending to be a Cossack, managed to smuggle himself into the area. Daily News reporter, Frank Scudamore, was another who wrote influential reports.

Miller stated that despite the value of their accounts, Ottoman studies today continues to accept the same kind of framing that the Ottoman state entertained about journalists, that they are untrustworthy individuals, just like the Christian missionaries.

Miller mentioned briefly Zeytun and Dersim as two other autonomous mountainous regions with Armenian populations (and Kurds in Dersim) and varied societal structures.

He concluded with a comparison of the cover-up of the My Lai massacre by American soldiers with that of the Sasun massacres of Armenians. In 1968 Charlie Company murdered 400 women and children, and military commander Col. Oran Henderson, like Zeki Pasha, tried to send Charlie Company to the wilderness so its members would not tell their stories, just as Zeki Pasha restricted his soldiers to their barracks for the same reason.

This attempt at controlling historical narrative is a common one. Miller remarked at the end of his talk that it was important to understand that archives reflect the views of those in power, but unfortunately Ottomanists today still have not figured this out.

After his formal presentation, Miller answered questions from the audience. When asked about the varied estimates of the numbers of Armenian dead in the Sasun massacre, he declared that the lack of accurate demographic information was a problem, but under the circumstances he found Garo Sassuni’s figure of one to two thousand killed to be the most credible estimate. In response to another question, Miller critiqued Justin McCarthy’s recent book, Sasun: The History of an 1890s Armenian Revolt, as “a very problematic piece of scholarship.” He found it to be essentially a reworking of the Zeki Pasha report, replete with factual errors.