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ARMENIA IN MODERN TIMES 285
Russian Armenia was now to be tyrannized and forced to
adopt the Russian language and the Russian Church. Conse
quently the heart-rending appeals of the Turkish Armenians
fell on deaf ears so far as these statesmen were concerned.
Meanwhile the Powers’ advocacy of the Armenian cause at
the Berlin Conference, their many high-sounding words and
notes in the following year, and the solemn promises extorted
from Turkey had convinced the Armenians that salvation
was at hand. They were simple, naive people, who knew
nothing about the game of international politics, and thought
a promise was a promise, especially when given by the Great
Powers. Soon the excitement spread to the Armenians in
Europe, and the various Armenian associations laboured
actively and zealously to support their kinsmen and rouse
them to work for their liberation. The movement derived
fresh encouragement from the successful fight put up by the
small Armenian colony at Zeitun, in the Taurus Mountains
of Cilicia (see p. 266), against Turkish oppression. The aim
of this liberationist movement was not consciously the
separation of Armenia from Turkey ; the population there
had by now become too mixed, and the Armenians were not
sufficiently in a majority ; the object in view, therefore, was
to secure conditions which would make life possible, with
administrative freedom in domestic affairs.
But the Sultan had determined to crush the Armenians, and
the unrest that this liberationist movement caused here and
there in Anatolia gave him a welcome pretext for fresh
persecutions and acts of violence, imprisonment, torture in
the prisons, looting, extortion, and every form of maltreat
ment. In reply to European protests the Turkish Government
answered with scornful cynicism that if they were acting
with severity they were compelled to do so as a measure of
self-defence, on behalf of the poor terrorized Moslem
population.
In order to secure a willing instrument to carry out his
further plans, Abdul Hamid raised in Anatolia, in the summer
of 1 891, a force of frontier cavalry called hamidije, who were
recruited chiefly from the Kurdish nomad tribes and had
Kurdish chiefs to command them. These troops were
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