Unfortunately, the men in power in Constantinople possessed no such powers of foresight. Leroy-Beaulieu, a respected academic on Eastern Europe, in 1890 made this very observation : "With refusing to implement paragraph 61 in the Berlin Treaty, the Sublime Port failed to, through an independent Armenia, raise a wall between himself and the Russian Caucasus." 106
Sadly, the Ottoman Empire continued its anti-Armenian policy, placating Europe all the while with its lies, using its old diplomatic tactics against the objections of the major powers. 107
At the same time, the Ottoman government was busy altering the statistics to show a smaller Armenian population in the Armenian provinces, so that they could be described as an insignificant minority. 108
Before the Armenian Question arose, the official Ottoman estimate of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire was fairly significant. The official book of Turkey, compiled by Sallahedin Beg in 1867, puts the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire at 2,400,000. 109 As soon as the Armenian Question emerged, in the context of the Russian-Ottoman war of 1877-1878, the Ottoman official books showed an astonishing decrease in the number of Armenians, thanks to manipulated statistics.
During the 1880 negotiations with the European powers, the crown prince of the Ottoman Empire, Abedin Pasha, submitted the population figures of the six Armenian provinces in the empire, Erzurum, Van, Bitlis, Diyarbakir, Kharpout and Sivas (also Aleppo, Adana and Trabizond), 620,000 Muslims (Turks, Kurds and Arabs) 727,000 Armenians and 283,000 other Christians.
This aberration did not escape unnoticed. The joint letter which the ambassadors of the major powers addressed to the Ottoman government on September 7, 1880, included the following: "Among the characteristics of these provinces is the largeness of the number of the Christian population in the majority of the parts…" and "…that alone is proof that the Sublime Port is trying to decrease the signification of this paragraph [paragraph 61 in the Berlin Treaty] and this he wishes to achieve by comparing the number of Christian inhabitants to the total population. However, the relation which the Sublime Port states is in conflict with the accurate figures at hand and the major powers regard them as incorrect." 110
Sir Edwin Pears observed that the total population in these six Armenian provinces was approximately 2 600 000, of which around 1 200 000 were Armenians. 111 The Armenians had a relative though not an absolute majority, while the Muslim population in these provinces consisted of a mix of Turks and Kurds in equal halves. On the other hand, the Armenians had an absolute majority in at least two out of the six Armenian provinces, in Van and Bitlis (old Moush).
Subsequently the Ottoman Empire was very careful in revising these figures to suit their purpose. The figures presented by Vital Cuinet, who worked for the Ottoman government, in his publication about Asian Turkey (1890, 1894), were assembled with great care to make the Armenians appear an insignificant minority in the Armenian provinces. 113
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