Europe indeed learnt this bitter lesson before long through suffering huge losses, and came to understand that if policy based on compassion and the protection of human rights involves some danger and risk, the policy of non-intervention ends all to often in a field full of human corpses. 279
The Role of Profits
As with every international political situation, the economic factor, and the profit to be made, played an important role in the positions of the European governments in regard to the Armenian Question. The economic element is also vital to explaining the Eastern Question of 1919-1923.
The Ottoman Empire was slow to borrow capital from foreign sources. The first loan issued was in 1854, but the Turks soon came to borrow more frequently. From 1854 to 1875, the Ottoman Empire borrowed more than five billion gold Francs, most of which were loaned from France and England.
These loans were a good source of income for European financial institutions. Of the five billion which was borrowed between 1854 and 1875, the Ottoman Empire received only three billion while the rest went directly into the pockets of the banks and the middlemen. 280
In addition to these loans granted to the Ottoman government, significant European investments were made in several areas of the Ottoman Empire (including railroads, loading docks, mines and tobacco). Due to the disorder and corruption which existed under Ottoman rule, these investments had become a very profitable source of income for the investors, not necessarily for the contractors, but for the institutions, the middlemen and the brokers who filled their pockets with money. According to the confession of one merchant "the Ottoman Empire is like a sick man, but the same sick man is the source of our health as he proffers countless privileges such as banks, mines, harbours, railroads and the like."
As Victor Berard observes, the sultan apportioned a large amount of the imperial income "in form of purchase of military equipment, the salaries of foreign officials, gifts to actors in the stock market, media, prime ministers and federal chancellors as guaranties for financial activities, not to include the individual corruption of the parliamentarians and politicians in other countries who received bribes from him." 281
Inevitably, during the massacres of 1894-1896, these actors became staunch defenders of the Ottoman Empire, pressurising their respective governments and manipulating public opinion to depreciate intervention from the major powers, as intervention posed a threat to the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, their golden calf and the source of their various incomes. 282
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