By Edmond Y. Azadian
Throughout its history, Armenia has served as a bone of contention between opposing camps or powers, except perhaps during the reign of Tigranes the Great in the first century BC. In AD 387, Armenia was divided between Persia and the Byzantine Empire. As the superpowers of the era divided Armenia’s territory, they extended their hands over that territory, building friendships and wishing their enemies would suffer under their yoke.
That was not the first time that Armenia was caught between a superpower rivalry. It happened many times in recent history as well. The year 1878 was a typical one, when the Russian armies defeated the Ottoman Empire and by the Treaty of San Stefano (Article 16), Armenians were promised some relief from the Sultan’s persecution. European governors were supposed to be sent to the Armenian provinces to make sure that promised reforms would actually be carried out by the Sublime Porte, as part of that treaty article.
But the treaty alarmed another superpower at the time, namely Great Britain, whose prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, reconvened the conference, this time in Berlin, to revise the terms of the San Stefano Treaty. His urgent reason was that the latter had allowed the Russian forces to have access to warm waters, which at that period, constituted a red line for the British Empire. Thus, the treaty was revised and the destiny of the Armenian provinces was moved to Article 61, completely diluting the terms of the earlier treaty, leaving once again the destiny of the Armenians to the tender mercies of the Sultan. In return, the Sultan ceded the island of Cyprus to Britain, to be used as a military base in the eastern Mediterranean. Thus, Cyprus was the price of the Armenians’ blood bartered between the Sultan and Disraeli.
After World War I, defeated Turkey rose once again and the Treaty of Sevres (1920) was replaced with the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), reducing the survivors of the Armenian community into a toothless minority in Turkey.