3540) Missed Occasion: Successes Of The Hamidian Police Against The Armenian Revolutionaries, 1905-1908

Abstract: During the last years of Abdülhamit’s era, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation faced huge difficulties, both in the Ottoman Empire and Russia. After years of failed attempt to provoke a foreign intervention through terrorism and, above all, rebellions (1896-1904), the ARF tried to obtain similar results through terrorism alone, in Istanbul and Izmir. In 1905, the Dashnaks tried to kill the Sultan, but failed twice, and their main leader was even killed by his own bomb, during the preparation of the first attempt. Partially as a result of the second failure, the Ottoman police discovered a plot to devastate Izmir, as well as the Izmir-Aydin and Izmir-Usak railways. Most of the plotters were arrested and sentenced. Last but not least, . . . the betrayal of one prominent Dashnak and the denunciations by anonymous Armenians, permitted to the Ottoman security forces to dismember the Dashnak network in Van, the last province where the ARF maintained its capacity as a guerilla force. As a result, it appears that the Young Turk revolution, by naïveté, saved the Dashnaks precisely at the time when they were close to disappearing in the Ottoman Empire as a strong revolutionary party.


Missed Occasion: Successes Of The Hamidian Police Against The Armenian Revolutionaries, 1905-1908

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