The 1894 Sasun Massacre: Revisiting the Number of Victims

Abstract

In the summer of 1894, the Armenians of several villages in Sasun, a region in the Ottoman province of Bitlis, refused to pay government taxes unless the state protected them from the extortion and illegal taxation levied by local Kurdish chieftains. The provincial authorities magnified the protest into a “rebellion” and requested assistance from the army. With the army’s interference, the incident ended with the massacre of the civilian population which marked the first incident of mass violence against Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. The calculation of fatalities remained unsatisfactory until the time of preparation of this study. By examining fatality data from a range of sources broader than that employed by prior research and by structuring the data into a discernible and informative format, this study revisits the number of victims with an analysis of constraints and a formulation of estimates.

Keywords

• Kurds
• Ottoman Armenians
• Sasun
• Turkish Fourth Army Corps
• Abdülhamid II
• military suppression of social protest