Edward Joris

Youth and move into the Ottoman Empire ) Born in 1876, Joris lost his father when he was 4 years old. In 1901 he travelled to Constantinople, where he was briefly employed writing commercial correspondence in French and English and then found work at the Singer sewing machine company. In 1902 his fiancée, Anna Nellens, joined him in Istanbul and they got married, even if he seemed to have been somewhat reluctant to do so. Edward Joris later said that it was the reading of Quillard's journal, Pro Armenia, that motivated his choice to support the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF). The explosives, consisting of 140 kilograms of picric acid, were conveyed by Bulgarian sailors. His wife was also sentenced to death, but in absentia, as she managed to escape before being apprehended by the Ottoman police. He spoke during his trial and declared: They received support from notable Dreyfusards, such as Georges Clemenceau, who published a letter from one of their leaders, Georges Lorand, a progressive Walloon deputy and leader of the Jorisards, in ''L'Aurore''.Our comrades remember Joris, accused in the plot against the Yldiz-Kiosk bandit, sentenced to death by the judges of the massacrer a year and a half ago. [...] The Armenians are arrested en masse, and Joris, the dangerous and terrible one, who from the depths of his cell makes the bombs dance, will suffer from closer surveillance due to the dirty exploits of the police scum.Due to diplomatic pressure from Belgium and France, the sentence was not carried out. A support committee was established by left-wing intellectuals in Belgium to maintain pressure on the Belgian government to work towards his release. Joris was kept in prison until 23 December 1907 and then returned to Belgium. After his return to Belgium, Joris worked as a bookseller and was secretary to the Antwerp branch of the Ligue des droits de l'homme. After the First World War he was convicted of supporting the occupying forces' Flamenpolitik, and sought refuge in the Netherlands. He returned to Belgium after an amnesty in 1929 and worked as a self-employed publicity agent. He died in 1957. == Anarchism and the Armenian national movement ==

The proximity between an anarchist internationalist and the Armenian national movement has been questioned, but Maarten Van Ginderachter believes that during that time, anarchist figures like Bakunin or Proudhon were open to supporting small anti-colonial national movements, such as the demands of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation:Joris’s best friend Resseler explicitly mentioned Armenia in September 1901 as one example of bourgeois-capitalist violence toward the working class in a longer list: ‘Our whole bourgeois society is based on violence: all governments burn and kill in the Transvaal, in China, in the Congo, on Java, in Cuba and on the Philippines, in Armenia’. This was a clear example of the emphatic anarchist interest in anti-imperialism and anticolonialism.From this synopsis it is important to remember that there is no necessary theoretical or practical contradiction between socialism (be it anarchist or reformist), nationalism (be it cultural or political) and internationalism. In general, anarchists were more drawn to anticolonial struggles in the Third World than Marxists. We do know from contemporary sources that Joris held radically internationalist, cosmopolitan ideas, in favor of ‘worldly solidarity’ and ‘humanity’. Recounting the court proceedings to his wife in an undated letter from his Istanbul prison, he claimed to have said in court: ‘The whole Universe is my fatherland, the whole of humanity is my family and all those who suffer are my brothers. I do not recognize any borders.' At the same time, however, Joris clearly believed in the existence of separate peoples that had distinct national qualities. His writings on Armenia are a case in point. ==References==