Hamidieh soldier

Infobox Military Unit
unit_name = Hemidieh soldier

caption = "major"
dates = 1890-1908
country = Ottoman Empire
allegiance = Kurdish people
branch = Army
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Hamidieh soldiers ("Hamidiye")were irregular Kurdish cavalry, well-armed and called the Hamidieh after the Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid II. [Hilmar Kaiser "Imperialism, Racism, and Development Theories: The Construction of a Dominant Paradigm on Ottoman" page 5. ] .

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Organization

In 1891 Sultan Abd al Hamid authorized the establishment of an irregular mounted force in eastern Anatolia, designating it after himself, the Hamidiya Cavalry. The intention was to imitate the Russian Cossack regiments which had been used so effectively as scouts and skirmishers in the Caucasus.

Given the social context of the region, the Hamidiya was raised from selected Sunni Kurdish tribes, preferably of proven loyalty, to form mounted regiments of approximately 600 men. In many cases these regiments were drawn solely from one tribe, and its commanding officer was the tribal chief. In cases where tribes were too small, each might provide a squadron for a composite regiment. In any case tribal solidarity was always maintained by keeping fellow tribesmen in one unit.

There were enormous advantages for both a chief invited to levy a regiment, and for his recruits. Chiefs and their officers were to be sent to a special military school in Istanbul. They were outfitted in dashing Cossack-styled uniforms to lend weight to their new status. Hamidiya tribes were exempted from one of the most unpopular measures of Ottoman centralization, the liability for conscription which was being introduced into the region for the very first 'time. Hamidiya chiefs were invited to send their sons to one of the tribal schools established in both Istanbul and Kurdistan, in order to absorb them into the Ottoman establishment. In some of the principal 'Hamidiya' villages the authorities also offered to establish schools for the population. Since Kurdistan was the most neglected, backward and impoverished corner of the empire, the offer held serious attraction.

The ostensible purpose of the Hamidiya Cavalry was to provide a bulwark against the Russian threat. It was important to stiffen the resolve of Kurds as part of the empire, especially as some tribes inside Ottoman territory had been willing to support czar versus sultan in previous wars. Besides, an increasing number of tribes had fallen inside Russia's orbit in the Caucasus. The formal deployment of the Hamidiya regiments was primarily along an axis from Erzerum to Van.

Yet the fact that the Hamidiya tribes were an irregular force only to be marshalled in units greater than regimental strength on the instructions of the mushir, or military commander, meant that in practice these regiments remained disposed in their usual habitat except when called upon for duty. Furthermore it was generally suspected that most Hamidiya tribesmen would desert rather than move too far from their encampments and livestock.

Establishment

It was not long before the creation of the Hamidiya led to trouble. For one thing, squabbles and fights broke out between various chiefs for senior rank within one tribe, and for another, local commanders did not differentiate between enemies of their tribe qua tribe, and enemies of the Hamidiya Cavalry. Scores soon started to be settled between Hamidiya tribes, armed by the state, and local adversaries. The powerful Sunni Jibran tribe, which had fielded four Hamidiya regiments, soon started attacking the Alevi Khurmaks, confiscating their lands. As reviled Alevis, or Qizilbash, it was not surprising that the state authorities did nothing to obtain redress for them or for other Alevi tribes suffering similarly. But even Sunni tribes not similarly favoured with Hamidiya status were liable to land theft by force of arms. H.RB. Lynch who was travelling in the region in 1894 wrote of recent pillaging bands around Erzerum:

It is well known that these bands were led by officers in the Hamidiyeh regiments tenekelis, or tin-plate men, as they are called by the populace, from the brass badges they wear in their caps. The frightened officials, obliged to report such occurrences, take refuge behind the amusing euphemism of such a phrase as "brigands, disguised as soldiers.'

When the government could not afford to pay Hamidiya officers, it offered them tax-collecting rights on local Armenian villages, causing further hardship for the latter. In several cases a Kurdish chief was not only commander of a Hamidiya regiment but also the local civil authority.

Such circumstances apart, those who sought recourse to government still found that the civil administration had no power to restrain the Hamidiya, who were answerable solely to the mushir of the Fourth Army in Erzerum. The mushir, Zakki Pasha, who happened to be the sultan's brother-in-law, was subject not to the wali but direct to Istanbul. He was clearly using the Hamidiya as the instrument of a policy that had little in common with the brief of the civil administration of the region. The civil administration had nothing but contempt for the Hamidiya, a view echoed by British military consuls:

The Hamidiye troops, in fact, are under no control whatever, beyond that of their own native Chief, which does not appear to be exercised much in the interests of law and order. It is a curious sight to see Kurds walking about the streets of the town [Bashkale) in their native costume.... They have a habit of taking what they require out of the shops without payment.

The lawless activities of the Hamidiya set an example which non-Hamidiya tribal Kurds were soon to imitate. In fact there were any number of young swells anxious to look the part. Local blacksmiths did a roaring trade with such dandies, forging Hamidiya badges for wear with lambskin busbies. As with the Hamidiya, the civil authorities found themselves powerless to curb them, while the army commanders ignored or indulged tribal excesses.

Although most affrays initially were inter-tribal ones, it was the client peasantry, Muslim and Christian, which suffered most. Soon it became clear both that the Armenians were the primary targets, and that the Hamidiya was egged on or even deliberately directed by the Ottoman military authorities.

Armenian & Hamidieh soldier conflicts

By the early 1890s Ottoman-Armenian relationships had deteriorated considerably. Largely because after the disastarous defeat of Ottomans by The Russians in the i877-78 Ruso-Turkish War, which resulted in large chunks of the Ottoman Empire being separated, some Armenians realized that Ottomans could be pushed back and Russia supported such separatist and nationalist elements wholeheartedly. Kurdish tribes and the Muslim citizens of mixed towns and cities were also reacting to the poor conditions in the Eastern provinces of the disintigrating Empire. In 1882 'Protectors of the Fatherland', almost certainly a revolutionary group, was uncovered in Erzerum. In 1885 the Armenakan Party began to operate from Van, supported by groups in Russian Transcaucasia and Iran. After its formation in 1887 the internationalist Hunchak Party established armed cells in eastern Anatolia and Russian Transcaucasia. In 1889 an armed Armenakan group was caught crossing the frontier from Persia. Other militant groups appeared, giving rise to a well-founded paranoia both in Istanbul and in the eastern provinces. In 1893 seditious placards appeared on the walls of several Anatolian towns. Agitators tried to arouse dissident Alevi tribes in Dersim and peasant Kurds around Sasun, reputedly descended from convert Armenians.

1. Sasun Resistance

However, the event that paved the way for more widespread attacks on Armenians took place in Sasun district, south of Mush where a Hunchak group had intermittently ambushed and killed Kurds since 1882. In summer 1894 (Sasun Resistance (1894)) an affray between Armenian villagers and the local kaymakam concerning tax arrears gave the pretext for armed conflict in which local Hamidiya tribesmen played a prominent part. Over 1,000 villagers probably perished. By spring 1895 the representatives of Britain, France and Russia wanted reforms for the Armenian provinces: an amnesty for Armenian prisoners; 'approved' governors; reparations for victims of the outrages at Sasun and elsewhere; Kurdish nomadic movements to be allowed only under surveillance and for them generally to be encouraged to settle; and the Hamidiya to be disarmed. Abdūlhamid had to agreed to these demands. Continued level of insecurity had reduced agriculture to famine levels by 1897-98.

Kumkapı Affray

For a year there was relative quiet, but on 30 September 1895 a violent incident took place between Armenian demonstrators and police in Istanbul, named as Kumkapı Affray, which marked the beginning of a more widespread attack on Armenians in the city, in which hundreds perished, some at the hands of the many Kurdish porters there. A week later over 1,100 Armenians were massacred in and around Trabzon. By the end of October there had been massacres in Erzincan, Bitlis, Erzurum and elsewhere, in each of which hundreds were killed. In the first ten days of November about 1,000 Armenians perished in Diyarbakır, almost 3,000 each in Arapkir and Malatya. More massacres followed, in Harput, Sivas, Kayseri and Urfa. The perpetrators were a mixture of Muslim citizenry, both Turks and Kurds, and Ottoman soldiers, including the Hamidiya.

Khanasor Expedition

Some Armenian villages stood up to this harassment and won the begrudging respect of the tribes, such as in Khanasor Expedition. Some became Muslim, others invited Kurdish chiefs to settle in their villages at the cost of offering inducements, for 'policemen have to be paid.' By 1897 even the urban Turkish population had begun to protest about the intolerably disruptive effect of the Hamidiya Kurds.

Why did Sultan Abdūlhamid allow such mayhem in his eastern provinces? They had been raised ostensibly in order to mobilize the Kurdish tribes as auxiliaries in the event of another war with Russia.

It was well known that some Kurds - both Sunni and Alevi tribes - had responded to intermittent Russian overtures since the war of. 1827-29. The Russians had skilfully exploited tribal unhappiness with both the centralization that had led to suppression of the old amirates, and the reforms which seemed to favour the Christian peasantry. Similarly the Russians fomented the tribes, particularly the Alevi Kurds of Dersim, during the Crimean War in 1854, and 1877-78. Fear of Kurdish disaffection remained real. In fact, not long after the establishment of the Hamidiya, the Russians invited a disaffected Badr Khan to Tiflis to discuss the formation of a pro-Russian counterweight.

Enrolment of tribesmen, exemptions from taxation, the education of tribal officers, and particularly chiefs' sons, in Istanbul were all part of an attempt to draw the Kurds more closely into the fabric of the empire. In principle it was a good idea. The more the Kurdish tribes were integrated into the Ottoman regime, the more secure would be the eastern border and, hopefully, the tamer the Kurds. In practice integration never really happened. The tribes remained wild while some of the chiefs took town houses.

It was also a policy of weakness. Sultan Abdūlhamid could not afford to alienate the Kurds, neither militarily nor indeed with regard to tax collection. For the tribes, rapacious as they were, could facilitate or ftustrate the collection of taxes in the countryside. So he permitted their depredations, and as Army Commander in Erzurum his brother-in-law, Zakki Pasha, indulged and protected them from local civil administrators. He could have crushed them, but only by virtual military occupation of the region, creating tension with Russia and alienating the Kurdish tribes.

It was also as much out of weakness as deliberate policy that Abdūlhamid allowed the Hamidiya to inflict such suffering on the Armenians. By 1895 neither the average Hamidiya tribesman nor Turkish soldier made any distinction between Armenian peasants and revolutionaries, The tanzimat had risked alienating the tribes already, better now to allow them free rein. So Abdūlhamid swallowed the European reforms thrust upon him in Istanbul but made sure, by putting the Hamdiya under Zeki Pasha rather than the civil authorities, that they could never be properly implemented. Law and order took second place to loyalty on this vulnerable border.

Nevertheless, the Hamidiya Cavalry was clearly a failure. On the whole, there was little sign of integration into a wider Ottoman context. On the contrary, through the licence allowed to the Hamicliya regiments, tribalism enjoyed a strong resurgence. Furthermore, as the local British consul reported, 'Zeki [Pasha] is a king among them; they recognize no authority but his. The opinion is that he means to make himself a Prince of an independent Kurdistan."' It is unlikely Sultan Abd al Hamid distrusted Zakki Pasha for he was only removed from his post after his own overthrow in 1908.

2. Sasun Resistance

Yet the revival of tribal power was a different matter. However much Abdūlhamid was opposed to reform, he could hardly have had in mind a reversion to the tribal principalities his forebear Mahmud II had abolished. By 1900, with fears of Russian attack abating and popular irritation with the Hamidiya mounting, Zeki Pasha began to curb their excesses and punish Hamidiya chiefs who only a year or two earlier could have counted on protection. Yet, even so, they remained a menace. In 1904, 2. Sasun Resistance happened. As the empire slid towards revolution, it was not seditious Turks but the Hamidiya chiefs who still gave provincial governors the real cause for concern. Even on the battlefield the Hamidiya proved a disappointment, and several regiments were disbanded.

Young Turk revolution

After the overthrow of Abd al Hamid's regime by the Committee of Union and Progress in 1908, a theme discussed more fully in the next chapter, the Hamidiya regiments were renamed as 'Tribal Regiments' (ashirat alaylan) but remained essentially the same. The triumph of the Young Turks, the threat which they posed to supporters of the ancien regime, and their reversion to authoritarian and explicitly Turkish rule after a brief spate of liberalism led to disorder in many parts of the empire: within Kurdistan itself, among the Bulgars of Macedonia, the Catholic tribes of northern Albania, in Yemen where a new Mahdi proclaimed himself, and among the formidable Druzes of the Syrian Hawran.

Tribal regiments were sent to some of these trouble spots alongside regular troops. Tribal contingents were despatched to Yemen in 1908 and to Albania in 1911 where they performed badly, sustaining heavy losses, and acquiring a reputation for savagery while restoring order.

Word War I

It could be said that on the eve of the First World War, the Kurds were generally noted mainly for their disorderliness, banditry and harassment of the Armenians.

Thus the nineteenth century ended with a firmer Ottoman grip on the towns of the region, but a more volatile situation with simmering inter-communal conflict, lawless tribes and the now familiar pattern of periodic Russian land seizures - a mixture finally detonated in autumn 1914.

ee also

*Peshmerga

References