With these sensitive subjects, I think it is best to begin by emphasising that historians are not in the business of telling people what normative attitude to take. There is no royal way from knowledge to a normative attitude. As the Scottish philosopher (and historian!) David Hume observed, I can tell you all the facts about what would happen if you let the world burn, you may still find it perfectly acceptable to let the world end. So, in no way will I try to specify whether the Ottoman government was 'right' or 'wrong' to do the things it eventually did to its Armenian population. Nor will I even briefly consider whether the Armenians in question were 'just' or 'unjust' in their actions. It's not because I'm a relativist or I believe there is no such thing as justice. It's just that, history as a wissenschaft is simply not about deciding such matters.

Your question is quite palpable and calls for a concrete answer. That's what I will seek to do, which, I hope, will help avoid creating further polemics. Namely, I'll point at two examples of Armenians acting against the Ottoman Empire in cooperation with Russia or pro-Russian forces before 1915. These will be uncontroversial examples, the truth of which are accepted by virtually all parties.

A final note concerns 'Armenians' or 'Ottomans' or 'Turks'. As with any group of such heterogeneity and size, it would be extremely misguided to think when 'the Armenians revolted', each and every Armenian revolted and felt the same things. That, obviously, was not the case.

With these reminders out of the way, we can turn to our first example: Armenian volunteers in the Bulgarian Army during the First Balkan War, 1912-13. The number of Armenians who fought for the Bulgarian Army during the conflict is debatable and, at any rate, not very significant (not in tens of thousands for certain, perhaps around five hundred). For one thing, Bulgaria was quite far from Armenia. But there are two things that make the Armenian participation in the Bulgarian war effort particularly noteworthy. First, imagine the hatred between some Turks and Armenians; so great it was that some Armenians (like Andranik Ozanian and Garegin Nzhdeh, to both of whom several monuments are dedicated in Armenia) that they took the time and effort to go and join forces with the Bulgarians! Second, the Balkan Wars was quite a scar on the Ottoman-Turkish political conscious. Many towns and cities that had been Ottoman for centuries were lost. Muslim inhabitants of these lands were treated badly in an attempt to cleanse the Balkans of Turks, Pomaks, Albanians and Muslim Roma people. Shortly, a whole literature emerged in the Ottoman Empire dedicated to narrating the traumas of those who came from the battlefront, especially the civilians. Raped women, burnt and plundered villages, mass murders, anything you imagine, you can find in these booklets. Many leading figures of the Empire and the future Republic took part in the conflict as well: Enver and Mustafa Kemal as officers, Talat as a civil official (and he witnessed the loss of his birthplace, Edirne, to Bulgarians). Very much a difficult experience, in short. That the Balkan nations were Orthodox and hence, related to the Armenian 'millet' according to the reigning Ottoman perspective (shared by Christians too) did not make things better. Also, consider the fact that the Balkan states' war effort was perceived to have been instigated and supported by the Russians.

Much more concrete in terms of the military operations was the threat posed by the Armenian volunteer units in the Russian Army. We know two things for sure: the number of these Armenian soldiers was quite high (at the very least something close to 100.000 in 1914, more later; compare that to some hundreds in the Balkan Wars) and second, the Ottoman government was aware of their presence. Ozanian and Nzhdeh were both involved in preparing Armenian volunteers for the Russian forces in 1914. There were many other prominent leaders of the Armenian movement on the Russian side, of course: this was no personal story about either Ozanian or Nzhdeh.

Why would the Ottoman government fear Armenian volunteers in the Russian Army? Well, first, these were no strangers to Eastern Anatolia. Many Armenians on the Russian side would know the geography of the area very well. They'd be able to find their way in the dangerous mountain passes where, perhaps, otherwise, Ottoman armies and Kurdish tribes could ambush Russian troops. Second, these were people with local connections. Even the Armenian intellectuals affiliated with various revolutionary parties to date proved dangerous enough: they did manage to play a part in previous clashes. They'd cross the border from Russia (many were educated in Russia anyway) and start 'propagating' among Armenian villagers about how they'd be liberated from the yoke of the Ottoman state and the Kurdish tribesmen. Now there were tens of thousands of these potential 'troublemakers'. Only, this time, with the Russian Army behind them. Finally, combining these two factors, if Armenians were successful, they could effectively take out the supply and communication lines of the Ottoman Army. In front of the Army were some Armenian villages (and some Turkish and Kurdish ones, and some mixed ones too!). Behind the Army, it was the same. If the Armenians on the side of the Russians were able to penetrate into Ottoman Eastern Anatolia and popularise themselves among the villagers, their impact would be massive. Early reports from the Caucasus front certainly show that many commanders thought this was the case. There were numerous reports about how the Russians distributed arms to Armenian villagers, how churches were armed by Armenian revolutionaries backed by the Russians, how a given Muslim village behind the front was raided by Armenians, and so on. These reports are quite well-known in the literature and any work by scholars who espouse the non-genocide thesis, as well as some who do define the events of 1915 as a genocide mention them. Of course, the possibility of exaggeration is always there, but it is unlikely that all these were false beliefs.

In short, there is no question that there were occasions where Armenians joined forces with anti-Ottoman powers to fight against what they perceived to be 'the Muslim yoke'. More concretely, a considerable number of Armenians were already part of the Russian Army in 1914 and many more joined them between 1915 and 1919. All these are, pretty much, brute facts both parties accept. Such that the stories about the Armenian volunteers in the Russian Army in 1914 can be found in the standard books on Armenian nationalism written by Armenians. The example of Richard Hovannisian's Armenia on the Road to Independence is one example that springs to mind.

So were the Ottomans right, after all, to do what they did? I can tell you that theirs was not a 'baseless paranoia', if baseless means completely unrealistic, never corresponding to any facts. The threat they perceived was, at least in part, real. But it also meshed with bitter memories of the past, of the Balkan Wars, the many clashes between Armenians and Muslims... So I think we'd be wrong to see, say, Talat as very calmly observing the front and deciding with a heavy heart that he had to do it. That the threat they perceived was in part real does not automatically mean they were 'right' or 'wrong'; I am not in a position to tell you that, nor is any other historian. Our job is to tell people about what the world was like in the past, as best as we can. The answer to that question is about what the world should be like, what, if anything, constitutes a good reason to kill people, and so on. We historians can give you what happened and even line out what your normative stance should be given your preferences and the facts, but we can never hope to just bypass all this and feed the public with ready-made normative solutions.