Oil, Israel and Modernity: The West's cultural and military interventions in the Middle-EastVestens kulturelle og militære interventioner i Mellemøsten

By Steffen Hahnemann

The bloody confrontations over the last decades between the West and countries in the Middle-East (including Libya) ought very highly to be seen in the light of the historic relation between these two regions. As it has developed especially from the time up to and during the First World War. British and French strategic, imperialist and economic interests were playing a more and more prominent role up to that war.

The book goes through the most decisive happenings around the break-down of the Ottoman empire and the disposition over its left-behind by the European Great Powers.

From the beginning of the 20th century the discovery of vast deposits of oil influenced the West's (now gradually including the United States) interest in the Middle-East. Provoking several conflicts up to now. The book intends to treat the most decisive events.

The establishment in 1917 of a "national home" for the Jews in Palestine meant a further strengthening of the clash of interests toward the Muslim countries. Especially the strong commitment of the United States to Israel has led to tensions between the West and the neighbouring Arabian countries. Without delving into the most decesive years of 1948 and 1967 the book analysis, besides the development around the Balfour-Declaration, other less debated events of importance to the relations.

Finally, the cultural confrontation, strengthened by the rise of the Western involvement in the region, provoked strong tensions between the two cultures, a situation that had its roots back in the American Protestant activities from the most part of the 19th century and onwards. Acivities that the book tries to expose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Dec 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9788771454468

Steffen Hahnemann

Forfatteren er tidligere, nu pensioneret læge. Han har i mange år beskæftiget sig med landbohistoriske emner i samarbejde med landbohistorisk selskab og udgivet flere ­bøger om emnet. Han har desuden udgivet flere ­arbejder om den aktuelle situation i Mellemøsten.

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decades.

Chapter 1

In general

No doubt there is continuity behind the convictions harboured by the American missionaries, when they took on their activities in the Middle-East in the first half of the nineteenth century, and al the way up to the arguments - not very often put forward but yet alive - when president Bush II and the people around him decided to invade Iraq. President Bush had a mission too, and from entering their task the missionaries had entered too on a civilizing project. According to Andrew Basevich, American historian and former colonel in the American army, to-days edition of that which took its beginning nearly two hundred years back might look the following: America's status as a force for good in a world that pits good against evil has provided a rationale for bribing foreign officials, assassinating foreign leaders, overthrowing governments, and undertaking major inventions. George W. Bush did not invent this practice; he merely inherited and expanded upon it.¹

That the Western missionaries -beyond propagating the Gospel - took upon themselves other tasks is reported by the South-African professor in theology David J. Bosch: The Western missionary enterprise of the period….proceeded not only from the assumption of the superiority of Western culture over all other cultures, but also from the conviction that God, in his providence, had chosen the Western nations, because of their unique qualities, to be the standard-bearers of his cause even to the uttermost ends of the world. This conviction, commonly referred to as the notion of manifest destiny, was only barely identifiable during the early decades of the nineteenth century but gradually deepened and reached its utmost pronounced expression during the period 1880–1920. This was also the era known as the heyday of colonialism. There is undoubtedly an organic link between Western colonial expansion and the notion of manifest destiny."²

Bosch evidently see a connection between the mission and western imperialistic expansion in the years up to the First World War. At that time the British and the French were the colonialists - periodically amassed by the Germans and the Austrians.

About the development after the First World War

During the First World War the United States entered the scene, and definitively contributed to the victory of the Entente over the Axis Powers, maybe primarily by the delivery of oil, the oil that had created the prosperity of the United States and now fuelled the war-machinery of the allied powers. Even though the United States did not declare war against the Ottoman empire, yet they contributed to the final defeat of the Turks.

As the possibly most impressive: Following the American president, the Presbyterian Woodrow Wilson, quite new reasons for future wars were presented on the world-scene. The motivations he put forward to engage the United States in war with Germany in April 1917, and subsequently his religiously coloured contributions to the peace-negotiations at Versailles among them his Fourteen Points and the establishment of the League of Nations. Since then the United States was engaged in world-politics and from that early with a religiously founded self-estimation as God's chosen people. Up to the First World War this vision of a manifest destiny mostly expressed itself in a wide-ranging missionary activity, escalating through the nineteenth century - parallel to the culmination of European imperialism. Those two movements expanded in the same regions of the world and together they shaped that powerful picture, as it presented itself to the colonized populations. Throughout the twentieth century the old colonial powers faded, and supplanting them the United States took over the common duties and interests, and in harmony with its original point of departure assigned the ongoing missionary and world-conquering movement its American religious foundations.

The United States did not have the intention of following up on European imperialism and colonial policy. Quite contrary it was the foremost intention in the Fourteen Points of Wilson to free the British and French colonies. When the Americans nevertheless took on the British footwear, when it had grown too big for the old colonial power, it owed a lot to their conviction that the United States therewith had the noblest intentions, and the best religious as well as civilizing aims.

It is this development, as it took form in the Islamic Middle-East, this book would try to figure out. The most deeply rooted reason, why this process did adopt such a dramatic character, was the fact, that the Muslims were not, or at any rate: almost not, to be converted. They were forbidden to convert under menace of severe punishment. Further it might have been one of the main reasons why the dogma of religious freedom was established as a fundamental human right throughout the nineteenth century and in due time taken to the charter of the United Nations after the Second World War. It remained one of the humanitarian reasons for the increasing confrontations between the United States and the Islamic society in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The reason that focus came especially on the countries in the Middle-East might be that their enormous reservoir of oil became the secular supplement to the religious-humanitarian motives of the West.

The reason why the dogma on religious freedom got such a central place in the United States' view on the elementary human rights, was, beyond the stubborn Islamic societies, the conviction of the Americans, that Christianity in one form or another was the natural choice for mankind. That was a fundamental vision for the mission that took on in the nineteenth century, and it has continued up to now as a part of the mental equipment of the American military, as it actually appears on the scene as armed missionaries.

The American protestant mission to the Middle-East

In 1810 the American protestant sect the Congregationalists - a split from the Presbyterian - organized the American Board of Commissionairs for Foreign Missions with its head-quarter in Boston (mostly just called The Board) and a few years later ushered in its missionary activity in Turkey and Persia.

The American presence in eastern Turkey and the western part of Persia took its beginning with two missionaries who made their landing in Anatolia in 1819. But gradually the mission expanded and in 1900 it embraced 149 missionary stations including 206 American missionaries and 1.150 native assistants, driving nine hospitals and teaching in 542 schools, in which they offered a secular education for about 17.000 Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Nestorian, Jewish and other children. The American activities in Egypt were led by the Presbyterians and its dimensions were nearly equal to that of the Congregationalists in Turkey and Persia.

They went out there to convert Muslims, but they found it a lot easier to convert the existing reminiscent Christians to Western, especially American religious and civilian norms and habits. That inspired the American Board to change its strategy and introduce The Great Experiment: In stead of aspiring to convert Muslims, the opinion of The Board had shifted and was now aiming at the same through a conversion of the local Christian minorities. Now the intention was through suitable means to rouse and reactivate these Christian groupings so that they might emanate as a light in the darkness and smooth the way on to the Muslim majority. In the beginning the intention was to work respectfully with the local churches.³ However, these dispersed congregations were - after the missionaries point of view - not in a condition to command respect from the Muslims still less present an example or model. So the missionaries soon choose to aim at conversions to their own protestant, Calvin church-order and - rituals, in recurring confrontations with the local congregations and church-leaders. After 1845 the sight of the American Board was exclusively centred on missions to the Armenians, Jews, Nestorians and not to Turks, Arabs or Muslims in general.⁴ The visions behind The Great experiment were no doubt naive and unrealistic. Without insight in Islam and in the historic relations between Islam and the Christian (and Jewish) minorities.

The way, in which the mission tried to renew the Christian minorities was through education.⁵ In 1845 there was in Anatolia seven schools with 34 missionaries and twelve local assistants and 135 pupils. In 1913 the activities had expanded to 209 schools with 209 missionaries and 1299 local assistants teaching 25922 pupils. - mostly from the Christian minorities.⁶

As one might read in the following report from The Board in 1839: Hence a comprehensive and wise system of effort for the conversion of the Mohammedans of western Asia, will embrace a system of effort for the spiritual renovation of the oriental churches. As commented by the South-African expert on missionology Peter Pikkert: This reasoning, applied as it was to the marginalized Orthodox Christian tribes of Anatolia, led to an empowerment which would have catastrophic results.

Pieter Pikkert continues: These mission-run educational facilities, where Western enlightenment values were taught and modelled, made a great socio-political impact on the Christian minorities. Most of the pupils that received a higher education were converted from their Orthodox church to protestantism. as mentioned above, the intention of the mission had not, from first on, been to convert to protestantism, but the temptation had been too big and the eagerness to convert too much for the missionaries. Besides the introduction delivered to Western civilization made its impact and by itself resulted in conversions. Soon after the first meetings the Orthodox Patriarchs experienced the threat from the protestant missionaries. Armenians who were in a more constant contact with the missionaries were excommunicated from their Orthodox church. According to Pikkert there soon erupted an open war between the missionaries and the oriental church. Both of them looked on the other part as their enemy. It was early evident that the missionaries saw their Protestantism as far elevated over the local churches, and it happened that the missionaries uttered expressions of contempt at and devaluation of the local Christian constituencies.

From 1859 to 1909 Protestantism expanded in Turkey. The number of evangelical churches rose from 40 to 140, including seventeen Greek….The number of members of the Protestant congregations rose from 1277 to 15748 and the number of registered protestants went up from 7000 to 54000. In 1863 the privately founded Robert College in Constantinople was established, an institute for more advanced learning for the Christian minorities. The American historian Douglas Little writes that in 1890 this college together with its analogue, the American Presbyterian College in Beirut, had developed into notorious hotbeds, where Arabs, Kurds and Armenians began to dream of and scheme for national independence. In stead of attracting Muslims the activity of the missionaries created a bigger distance and further strains between them and the Christian minorities. And Douglas Little continues: While most United States observers seem to have agreed that the Christians of Armenia and Syria might profit enormously from these lessons, few churchmen or diplomats expected such revolutionary teachings to spell anything but disaster in the Muslim world.⁷

According to the South-African theologian Peter Pikkert The Great Experiment was a failure as a means of evangelizing the Muslims. It was more than a failure; it led to a clash of civilizations of such proportions that it would contribute to calamity.⁸

The Christian minorities and the Capitulations

In principle the capitulations belonged to the colonial days. It concerned special favours for the most part of juridical and fiscal art given to foreigners, mostly western nationalities operating in the Ottoman empire. Indirectly in Anatolia it developed further in to special favours for the Greeks and for the Armenians connected to the missionaries, as the missionaries favoured these Christian minorities.

The great Western powers in great extent took their Ottoman servants or helpers under their protection calling upon the capitulations - a privilege they had originally acquired centuries ago encompassing only their own foreign tradesmen. Now they equipped the Armenians and to some extent the Greeks with British (mostly) or (French) citizenship and papers of protection in accordance with the capitulations, drawn up by their embassies or their consulates. Attaining British or other foreign citizenship meant, that the person in question was comprised in the capitulations and so withdrawn from Ottoman jurisdiction. Now they could only be persecuted by the foreign consuls. The British had, since 1878, stationed consuls in all bigger cities in the eastern Anatolia.

The capitulations signified a definite advantage for the foreign traders, but even for the Christian and Jewish minorities, who had their benefit by them and in time were able to attain a dominating place in the bank- and business-world: In the course of the colonizing process, as the limitations of the Middle-Eastern economy gained increasing recognition, changes occurred also in the balance of economic power between the region's principal religious communities. In particular, Christians and Jews pulled ahead of Muslims, as groups….As the West became an economic powerhouse, Middle-Eastern minorities came to play highly disproportionate roles in various lucrative sectors, including trading with the West, local commerce in the largest cities, banking and insurance.⁹

Originally, these arrangements concerning economic privileges were reserved for a small number of missionaries and for non-Muslims appointed as dragomans on the foreign embassies. But now they got a far more extensive expansion.

In order to fight against this development, a development that created big problems for the Ottoman state, the government in Constantinople in 1869 forbid the attainment of foreign citizenship with official acceptance. But the Great Powers ignored the provisions, claiming that the capitulations obliged them to offer protection. The Turkish historian Mim Kemal Öke writes, that They even reiterated at every opportunity that it was their historical mission to save their co-religionists from the oppressive policies of the theocratic Ottoman State.¹⁰

Missionaries and the Enlightenment

With the enlightenment the God-state had gone. Religion was now referred to the private sphere, while reason should rule in the official.¹¹

With the enlightenment reason dislodged tradition and the preordained or fixed by custom. Following it liberalism was born and its ideal: the free, independent, autonomous individual. To be free meant to be free from any authority, to develop one's own individuality in free competition with others. To be free meant to be unrestricted by any transmitted tradition and to be set free from any religious authority from God or church. The adverse was the unquestioning, authority-bound individual, that had to be fought, at best by the power of the word but, if necessary the authority had to be overthrown by power to free those it had dominated. For the convinced Liberal the main-enemy was the inveterate believer.

The individual experienced himself or herself as liberated from the tutelage of God and church….All were born equal with equal rights. These were, however, not derived from religion, but from nature…Both capitalism and Marxism derive from this enlightenment vision of human beings as autonomous individuals without any supernatural reference.¹² In Europe the development led to a secularization, which, however, according to the British philosopher John Gray, unconsciously carried pronounced metaphysical elements. In the United States the development was different. The revolt against the authority of the church was yet stronger than in Europe, but it merely led to a negation of the established and authorized Anglican church and a flowering of sects like Mormonism, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Jehova's Witnesses, the Adventist Church, etcetera. The American citizen became free to make a sovereign choice af which God or religion he wanted to follow. But mostly he preserved his respect for the authority of the divinity - in its special American disguise: As the enlightened European finally found, that God did not exist or was superfluous as he, the human being, was able to find out by himself, the American saw himself as the one that without merit - and yet perhaps not completely undeserved - was chosen by God to a life in richness and abundance in ongoing progress toward the millennium, not as an eschatological idea, but as a this-worldly future reality. But therewith he was obliged to mediate this benevolent religion forward to the non-illuminated part of humanity. This was his manifest destiny. The foundation for American exceptionalism. The unique obligation in history for America.¹³

The American historian, critic toward the offensive foreign policy of the United States, writes in 2008: We touted our status as God's new Chosen People…destined to illuminate the world. We acted at the behest of providential guidance or responded to the urgings of our manifest destiny. We declared our obligation to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ or to uplift little brown brother. Citing President Wilson, we took on the obligation to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.¹⁴

Freedom and Democracy were key-words. For the liberal democracy meant, that every single individual was a sovereign, and without foreign authority chose the leaders for his community. Leaders that were removable, and presented themselves in their provisionality as a result of the summary of self-dependent citizens decision. The citizen was self-dependent and free in the sense, that in his public relations there was no absolute ethical authority beyond the legislative to influence his proceedings. religion was referred to privacy. And when it nevertheless became a directing power for the American missionary, might that be in Boston or in Washington, then the reason must be found in this deeply fateful a priori, the inevitable and pre-emptive imperative, manifest destiny.

It was not only the destiny of the American to lead the unenlightened world to a clarified religious end-station, at the same time it was evident, that the exceptional material progresses, that followed in its wake, in itself were testimonies to its superiority compared to the articles of faith, that could not point at comparable proficiency in technology and ensuing richness and prosperity.¹⁵

For all their good intentions, missionaries were also participants in America's imperialist turn. Progressivism, missions, and imperialism all originated from a similar source in the American imagination: a belief in progress…in the missionary mind, their way was the only way because it was both American and Christian.¹⁶

So with the enlightenment came the confidence in reason and science making up for faith and tradition. Science was accompanied by the technological development and following that the unbelievable material prosperity, the definitive testimony for the superiority of the Western way of life in relation to those cultures bound up in customs and religious dogma. Especially for the American protestant mission in the Middle-East it became the final testimony for what was the true religion - the post-millennialist faith: that we have reached the last phase of the Apocalypse, the millennium. Schools, hospitals, teachers, doctors and nurses were the avant-garde of the mission, creating oases in the middle-eastern wilderness. Demonstrating the superiority of the Western religion compared to the retarded Islam.

For American missionaries, there was no fundamental gap between the Gospel, scientific progress, democracy, social change, and enlightened belief in universal human commonality in contrast to innate difference….In contrast to the continental European notion of Enlightenment…in the Anglo-American world religion, prophecy, and Enlightenment did not stand in sharp antithesis to one another.¹⁷

David J. Bosch says about the lack of openness in the meeting of the missionaries with the foreign cultures: Among American mission advocates, the importance of the improvement in the position of women was always first and foremost, usually followed by accounts of advancement in the areas of education and medicine…..There is, however, also a negative side to this picture….the inordinate pride many speakers took in these accomplishments, but the almost total absence of any ability to be critical about their own culture or to appreciate foreign cultures……..They were, therefore, predisposed not to appreciate the cultures of the people to whom they went – the unity of living and learning; the interdependence between individual, community, culture and industry; the profundity of folk wisdom, the proprieties of traditional societies – all these were swept aside by a mentality shaped by the Enlightenment which tended to turn people into objects, reshaping the entire world into the image of the West…..¹⁸

About the Missionaries' view on Islam

Over time the Missionaries view on Islam was changing, but in the first century of the mission the relation to Islam could, without exaggeration, be called unkindly. The change for the better throughout the nineteenth century, ought not to be overstated, What we meet of invectives against Islam especially from protestant missionaries are not without resemblance to the Western actual bearing to what is called Islamism or fundamental Islam.

Pieter Pikkert has gathered a culling of declarations concerning Islam expressed by the early missionaries or missionary societies. Thus this quoting from a book published by one of the leading American missionaries in 1889: …We have to look upon Mohammedanism as, in its deepest nature, a reaction and aggression of the Kingdom of Darkness against the Kingdom of Light. The same missionary has some contemplations over this theme that could remind us about the actual discussion about who is the threatened part: By far the most formidable adversary of Christianity, as a national institution and dominant political force in the world, is the politico-religious system ushered in by Mohammed. Mohammedanism stands forth in history as the great anti-Christian Power, the hereditary enemy of Christendom.. Pikkert further quotes a periodical for missionaries, The Muslim World for the following considerations in 1916 over the religious faith of the Turks, which have to be recognised before his character can be known. It is the faith of fatalism; a faith without any appeal to constructive effort on behalf of others; a faith without any inspiration to him to extend the arts of peace and goodwill. To the Turk a member of another faith is something outside and beneath him. Something to be either crushed or lived upon, but never something to be helped or protected.

Again, the question between the lines and behind the text about who it is, that is threatened. Quite early the mission thought in offensive ways with expressions such as peaceful crusade and conquering the world for Christ. According to Pikkert The missionary community…seemed compelled to paint Islam in the worst possible colours to justify its endeavours and, possibly, to explain the lack of success. Islam was an enemy, an antagonist from which nothing good could be expected and which needed to be defeated. This militant attitude shared the same boldness, aggression, and spirit of conquest as the colonial venture. A quotation from a handbook for missionaries from 1834: Remember that you are soldiers engaged in warfare, and in a war of conquest….

Concerning the attitude of the mission to the Turkish, Islamic majority in Anatolia, Pikkert quotes the publisher of The Board's periodical Avedar in Constantinople for the following characteristic of the Turk: Lack of moral principle is the greatest defect of the Turkish character…The lack of honest, trustworthy, and truly patriotic men is the greatest misfortune of Turkey.

The American historian Heather Sharkey writes: It is hard to avoid the term imperial Christianity in the context of missions to Muslims during this period because, far from extolling a gentle gospel of love, American and British missionaries describes evangelizing, very clearly and on many occasions, as war.¹⁹

Islam's view on the mission

A jump in time: In the late twentieth century several Muslim Arab thinkers published treatises that labelled Christian missionary activities in the Middle-East as part of a Western imperial crusade against Islam. Together, the polemical works of this nature constitute a distinct Arab genre characterized by its anti-missionary, antiimperial, post-colonial tone.²⁰

The author finds it surprising, that these points of view are flourishing at a time, when the missionaries had converted very few Muslims, and the Middle-East governments represses missionary activities, but bethink, that …these works may have struck a chord by acknowledging the humiliation that Western dominance has entailed in the modern Arab world, where Britain and France imposed forms of colonial control in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and where, in the second half of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union repeatedly intervened. Their authors accuse missionaries, as bearers of a Western Christian message, of striking a deep blow at Muslim Arab notions of communal and religious identity, authority, and pride.²¹

At the end of the First World War the Ottoman empire and Islam was reduced to the unrecognisable. The Europeans had colonized all of North Africa. Aden and the Persian Gulf were under European rule as well, and now, after the war, the Europeans took control over Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine. An attempt to part Anatolia between the Greeks, the Italians, the French, the Armenians and the Kurds was prohibited by Kemal Atatürk in spite of (and maybe partly as a reaction to) a jihad issued against him by the last Ottoman Sultan, sitting in Constantinople as an allied hostage. But even Kemal Atatürk's victorious progress in Anatolia became a doubtful victory for Islam, as Atatürk abolished both the Caliphate and the Sultanate and established a modern Turkey based on Western values with a separation between state and religion (Islam was, however, still the religion of the new state).

According to Heather Sharkey the Missionaries fit into this story of imperialism because they benefited directly from the expansion of Western influence in the Middle-East - they enjoyed access to a set of special legal rights and exemptions, known as the Capitulations, which afforded something akin to diplomatic immunity; they also enjoyed the protection of their country's consuls, who used political and economic leverage to defend missionary co-nationals…Yet the worst, most dangerous, and most chronically debilitating aspect of Christian evangelism for Islamic society was…the missionaries denigration or defamation of Islam and their promotion of Western culture…planted doubts in the minds of Muslims…and particularly in the minds of children - about the capacity of Islamic society for social progress, development, and relevance in the modern world.²²

Heather Sharkey mentions the resistance Islamic authors put up against the Western influence. One of the most important Islamic writings against the western missionaries were published by Mustafa Khalidi, a former professor in obstetrics by the American university in Beirut and Umar Farrukh, a specialist in early Islamic history, classic Arab poetry and Sufism. Their book came out in six editions and was translated in more languages (but no Western European)

According to Sharkey, Khalidi and Farrukh maintains that the Christian missionaries were the most important and the most dangerous agents for Western imperialism, and that the missionary institutions, like schools, hospitals, bookshops, etcetera were instruments for the Western attempt to gain political and economic hegemony over the Middle-East. Their conclusion was, that the missionaries intended to introduce foreign values in order to demolish the Muslim culture; that they threatened the people of the East with cultural destruction.

These points of view concerning the relation between the missionaries and Islam you could find again among prominent theologians and specialists in missiology. thus we will see analogue estimations put forward by the two former mentioned South-African theologians David J. Bosch and Pieter Pikkert, who both have provided penetrating analyses of the missionary movement in the Middle-East from its beginning unto the end of the twentieth century.

Comparable views are forwarded by the Swiss historian Hans-Lukas Kieser (translated from German): …one can´t deny that by the mission a theological and culturally founded deficiency in a constructive intercourse with the Muslim majority became a reality. Their leaders consequently saw themselves…fortified in a dangerous secular-apokalypse sentiment of conspiracy. They felt themselves to be delivered into a war of defence for their survival, a fight that would leave only victors and destroyed.²³

By the way, farther towards south happenings were going on, that would become yet an attack of Western civilization against Islam. The British mandate over Palestine with its build-in obligation to work for the establishment of a Jewish national home, understood by both the British, the Jews, and the Palestinians as a synonym for a Jewish state, should become one of the most severe charges in the relation between Europe and the Arab-Muslim world.

The mission-movement and colonialism

Originally the word and the concept mission is indispensably knit to colonialism. The term supposes an established church in Europe which dispatched delegates to convert overseas people and was as such an attendant phenomenon of European expansion,²⁴

As early as in the 1820s the missionaries opened up for a fruitful cooperation with British diplomats and consuls. Heather Sharkey writes of the period from 1880 to 1918: American missionaries in the Middle-East regarded Britain as an ally of the Protestant cause and cheered its advances.²⁵ The missionaries comprised a lever for British imperial policy… the British were glad to make use of the American need to and wish for British assistance in expanding their imperial interests.²⁶

Through most of the nineteenth century the British had backed up behind the Ottoman empire in accordance with their point of view that it formed a bulwark against Russian expansion in the direction of Persia and India. This attitude was changed in the years leading up to the First World War, primarily because of those alliances England established with powers on the European continent with the purpose of restraining German economic, industrial, and political expansion. This led to an approach to France, who had formed an alliance with Russia. In 1907 England and Russia entered an alliance. The resulting alliance between the three countries was called the Triple-Entente. As said its main purpose was to constrain Germany, which from the time of Bismarck was endeavouring too to make European alliances. In Bismarck's days Germany had tried to make alliance with Russia, but in the end Russia chose France and later on England. Together with Germany stood Austria-Hungary and Italy in a confederacy called the Tripple- alliance.

Important in connection to the Middle-East is the alliance England established with Russia. With that the traditional defence of the Ottoman empire came up for revision. And now England and Russia in common paid attention to German expansion in the Middle-East. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, a controversy remained between England and Russia concerning the question about Constantinople and the Straits as well as concerning eastern Anatolia in regard to the control of the northern part of Persia and the main trade-routes to India. In that connection the Armenians came into focus, and a harmony of interests developed between the great powers and the missionaries around the patronage and the role of guardian and benefactor to the Christian Armenians.

A long time before 1914 the European Great Powers had contemplated the future of the Ottoman empire. The British Prime-minister for most of the period 1878 to 1903, Lord Salisbury was in favour of cooperation with Russia and was against the traditional British policy aiming at a conservation of the Ottoman empire. But Lord Salisbury wavered between two possibilities, either a parting between the European powers or the establishment of a European protectorate. The Russians were mostly interested in a partition, whereby they would make demand on a considerable part of the northern coast of Anatolia as well as on Constantinople and the Straits. The last part of the demand was opposed by France and England, but after the war had broken out and strong elements in the Russian government argued for an approach to Germany, the British government preferred to give way and enter into an agreement with the Tsar, that paid honour to the Russian demands (after the Revolution in 1917 the Soviet rule, however, abandoned all territorial demands).

However, in the power-play about the eastern Anatolia the Armenians had entered the scene. They were conscious that they were just a pawn in the game of the western powers plan to undermine the Ottoman rule, but they eyed a possibility for with their help to acquire autonomy or maybe independence. Not in the least seen in the light of what had happened in Balkan; developments that led both Greeks in western Anatolia as well as the Armenians to eye the possibilities to get free of Ottoman, Islamic rule.²⁷

To their misfortune both Christian minority-groups were drawn into that, which hereafter more and more took form of an imperialistic Crusade against Islam.

The same Great Powers had, in cooperation with the missionary movements, been strongly involved in the break-up in Balkan. That created unrealistic expectations among Armenians and Greeks about analogue engagement from the English and the Russians behind their wishes or demands for independence or autonomy.

The cooperation between the Armenians and the Great Powers, especially England and Russia, became more intensive during the congress in Berlin in 1878, forming the conclusion of the Russian-Turkish war, and which should be dominated by a race between England and Russia for the control or influence over eastern Anatolia and therewith the role as patrons for the Armenians.

In a report to prime-minister Salisbury in 1878, the British ambassador Layard in Constantinople pointed out the importance of the Sultan's regime would show the Armenians that they in the future would engage in establishing a righteous regime for them - to be a hindrance toward Russian interference or intentions of rising the Armenian Question.

In chapter 61 in the treaty from the Berlin-congress stands: The Sublime Port undertakes to carry out, without further delay, the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians, and to guarantee their security against the Circassians and Kurds. It will periodically make known the steps taken to this effect to the Powers, who will superintend their application.

The main-aim for the British by the Berlin-congress was to pull back the Russians from their territorial demands especially in the eastern Anatolia and along the Black Sea-coast. Demands they had put forward after they had emanated from the war with Turkey as absolutely victorious. But a parallel interest was, to extend their control over the Ottoman rule. A control that escalated and accelerated in the decades up to the First World War. The Armenians as the pawn in the game while for the chess-officers the game was primarily about the control of northern Persia and the main routes to India.

An independent Armenia was, seen in that light, hardly of interest to the British (still less to the Russians). That was not the reason behind their backing-up of the Armenians.

Yet the apportioned supervision about the conditions for the Armenians got a high priority in the British