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Title: The Rebirth of Turkey
Author: Price, Clair
Language: English
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THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY
[Illustration: FIELD MARSHAL MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA
President and Commander-in-Chief of the First Grand National
Assembly; President of the Second Grand National Assembly.]
THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY
by
CLAIR PRICE
[Illustration: Printer's Logo]
New York
Thomas Seltzer
1923
Copyright, 1923, by
Thomas Seltzer, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
TO
ALL AMERICANS
BETWEEN ALASKA AND ANGORA
FOREWORD
This book contains my own observations and my own deductions from
them. The responsibility for them is mine alone. I have never engaged
in commercial, educational or missionary work. My interest in the Near
and Middle East began with a newspaper assignment, and has continued
with curiosity as its motive. This book is the result.
My thanks are due to the proprietors of _Current History_, New York,
and _Fortnightly Review_, London, for their courteous permission to
re-print herein parts of certain articles which have previously
appeared in their pages.
CLAIR PRICE.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA, THE MAN 1
His personal appearance――The Eastern tradition of government
under which he was born――The Western tradition which he has
sought to transplant to his country――The diversion of the
Turks from a military to an economic life, which he is
beginning――“Do you think you will succeed?”
CHAPTER II
THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE 11
Kemal’s birth at Salonica――How he became a Young Turk――What
the old Ottoman Empire was like――The division of its
population into religious communities――The Western challenge
of its _Rûm_ (Greek) community――Its duty to Islam.
CHAPTER III
THE YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM 22
Kemal’s arrest and his exile to Damascus――His eventual
return to Salonica――What the Young Turks wanted――The
religious conservatism which confronted them――The role of
American missionaries and educators――Christendom vs. Islam.
CHAPTER IV
THE RUSSIAN MENACE 38
How Russia and Great Britain fought across the old Ottoman
Empire――How Russia entered Trans-Caucasia and came into
contact with the Armenians――How it approached the back of
British India through Central Asia――How Great Britain
finally surrendered in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.
CHAPTER V
THE YOUNG TURKISH REVOLUTION 48
“On the morning of July 23, 1908”――The Old Turkish
counter-revolution and its defeat――How Islam and the
Christian communities nullified the Young Turkish
program――Kemal’s break with Enver and his retirement from
politics――The Balkan wars and nationalism.
CHAPTER VI
GERMANY AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 56
British policy at Constantinople――The Bagdad railway
concessions――Russia’s veto and the change of route――The
Achilles’ Heel of Aleppo――Germany and Islam――The British
Indian frontier in Serbia――The Great War.
CHAPTER VII
CHRISTENDOM AND THE WAR 65
CHAPTER VIII
THE WAR AND ISLAM 68
Kemal hurries back to Constantinople and Rauf Bey asks the
British Embassy to finance neutrality――Enver enters the war
and Persia attempts to follow him――The hard position of
Islam in India.
CHAPTER IX
THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS OF 1915 76
Enver and the Armenian Patriarch――Where the Armenians
lived――American missionaries and the Armenians――Russia and
the Armenians――Great Britain joins Russia in the 1907
Treaty――Enver’s demand for British administrators in the
Eastern provinces――The War and the Armenian deportations.
CHAPTER X
THE 1907 TREATY AND THE CALIPHATE 89
Great Britain promises Constantinople to Russia――Arab
nationalism and the Holy Places of Islam――The Hejaz becomes
independent of Constantinople――The British capture
Jerusalem――The Caliphate agitation in India.
CHAPTER XI
THE COLLAPSE OF CZARIST RUSSIA 98
The Czar abdicates――The French depose Constantine at
Athens――Kemal urges Enver to withdraw from the War――Mr.
Lloyd George’s new war aims in Turkey――The Anglo-Russian
Treaty of 1907 abrogated――Pan-Turanianism leaps into life on
the heels of the Russian rout――The Mudros Armistice opens
the British road to the chaos in Russia.
CHAPTER XII
THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN WAR OF 1918-’20 108
How Mr. Lloyd George tried to impose alone upon Islam that
fate which Great Britain and Russia had agreed to impose
together in 1907――The Anglo-Persian Agreement――The “Central
Asian Federation”――The American Mandate in
Trans-Caucasia――The return of Soviet Russia.
CHAPTER XIII
THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR BEGINS 120
Constantinople and the growth of Greek Nationalism――
Surrounded by British forces, the Turks go back to
peace――Application of the secret treaties which the Allies
had drawn up during the War――The Oecumenical Patriarchate
breaks off its relations with the Ottoman government.
CHAPTER XIV
SMYRNA, 1919 127
Kemal returns to Constantinople――Turkish confusion in the
capital――The Turks ask for an American mandate――How Kemal
and Rauf Bey left for Samsun and Smyrna, respectively――The
Greek Pontus program――The Greek occupation of Smyrna――The
Turks go back to war.
CHAPTER XV
THE ORTHODOX SCHISM IN ANATOLIA 142
Kemal falls to the status of a “bandit”――Turkish Nationalism
begins to re-mobilize and re-equip its forces――The Erzerum
Program and the Nationalist victory in the Ottoman
elections――How Papa Eftim Effendi broke with the Oecumenical
Patriarchate――The Turkish Orthodox Church――Papa Eftim
himself.
CHAPTER XVI
THE TREATY OF SEVRES 154
Rauf Bey takes the Nationalist Deputies from Angora to
Constantinople――India compels Mr. Lloyd George to leave
Constantinople to the Turk and General Milne breaks up the
Parliament, deporting Rauf and many of his colleagues to
Malta――The Sevres Treaty and how Damad Ferid Pasha secured
authority to sign it.
CHAPTER XVII
ANGORA 160
Fevzi, Rafet and Kiazim Karabekr Pashas and their military
dictatorship under Kemal Pasha――The “Pontus” deportations――
Mosul, the Kurds and the split in Islam――The Franco-Armenian
Front in Cilicia, the Greek Front before Smyrna, and the
Allied Front before Constantinople――How the broken
parliament was reconstructed at Angora――Ferid’s
counter-revolution at Konia.
CHAPTER XVIII
TURKISH NATIONALISM 177
The Western tradition of government to which the Grand
National Assembly was built――How Nationalism was created――
Greek defeat at the Sakaria River――Peace with the French in
Cilicia――How a civilian administration was begun at Angora
while Fevzi Pasha was re-mobilizing and re-equipping the
Turkish Armies.
CHAPTER XIX
SMYRNA, 1922 199
Allied efforts to hitch the Sevres Treaty to Turkish
Nationalism――Greeks transfer troops from Smyrna to Eastern
Thrace for a move on Constantinople and when Fethy Bey is
refused a hearing in London, Fevzi Pasha launches his
attack――The Turkish recovery of Smyrna――Mr. Lloyd George
resigns and the Ottoman Sultan flees――Lausanne.
CHAPTER XX
THE REAL PROBLEM OF TURKISH NATIONALISM 219
Economic beginnings in the new Turkish State――Mustapha Kemal
Pasha opens the Smyrna Congress――The Chester Concession a
step from imperialism to law.
CHAPTER XXI
THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY 229
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIELD MARSHAL MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
HUSSEIN RAUF BEY GENERAL RAFET PASHA 16
FIELD MARSHAL FEVZI PASHA ALI FETHY BEY 48
LIEUT.-GEN. SIR CHARLES A. HARINGTON, G. B. E., K. C. B.,
D. S. O. GENERAL ISMET PASHA 80
PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI MELETIOS IV 112
ASSEMBLY BUILDING AT ANGORA 144
REAR-ADMIRAL COLBY M. CHESTER REAR-ADMIRAL MARK L. BRISTOL,
U. S. N. 176
GENERAL MOUHEDDIN PASHA MEHMED EMIN BEY 208
THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY
I
MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA, THE MAN
HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE――THE EASTERN TRADITION OF GOVERNMENT UNDER
WHICH HE WAS BORN――THE WESTERN TRADITION WHICH HE HAS SOUGHT TO
TRANSPLANT TO HIS COUNTRY――THE DIVERSION OF THE TURKS FROM A MILITARY
TO AN ECONOMIC LIFE, WHICH HE IS BEGINNING――“DO YOU THINK YOU WILL
SUCCEED?”
Having applied at the Foreign Office in Angora for an appointment with
Mustapha Kemal Pasha, a message finally reached me about 2 o’clock in
the afternoon that a half-hour had been arranged for me at the close
of the day’s session of the Grand National Assembly. The gray granite
building which houses the Assembly, stands at the foot of Angora, with
the red and white Crescent and Star flying above it by night as well
as by day. “The Pasha’s” car stood at the curb. He lives in a villa
presented to him by the town of Angora, at Tchan-Kaya, a suburb three
miles away, and the sight of his car, a long gray machine of German
make, is one of the few means of tracing him. He is the easiest of all
men to meet, but the most difficult of all men to find.
Within the building, one of Kemal’s _aides_ led me to a large room off
the corridor, within which to await the end of the session. It was the
room in which I had first met him, a large room with a flat-top desk
in the center of one side, with a row of chairs around the four walls,
and a sheet-iron stove with a pile of cut wood beside it, in the
middle of the carpet. I waited possibly a half-hour, listening to the
noise from the Assembly’s chamber and making guesses as to what the
trouble was. I had hoped to secure an hour or two with Kemal and had
been listing, during the month I spent at Angora, a number of subjects
on which I was anxious to secure his opinions. But he is not only
difficult to find but difficult to hold for long. I had applied to the
Foreign Office a week before and I believe they were not only willing
but anxious to secure the appointment I wanted. My application,
however, happened to coincide with a crisis in the Assembly and I had
to make the best of a half-hour.
The session had no sooner broken up and the clamor of the deputies
begun to overflow from the chamber into the corridor, than the _aide_
summoned me. We crossed the corridor into a small room with a flat-top
desk and, in the corner behind the desk, the limp folds of a tall
green banner inscribed with Turkish letters of gold. From his chair at
the desk, the military figure of Kemal himself in civilian clothes
rose to greet me――a man with a face of iron beneath a great iron-gray
_kalpak_. He spoke in French and the flash of much gold in his lower
teeth gave sparkle to the military incisiveness of his manner, a
manner which conveyed an instant reminder of cavalry.
His face is one of severely simple lines. The lower line of the
_kalpak_ comes down close to the straight eyebrows, and there is no
waste space between the eyebrows and the eyes themselves. “The Pasha”
is reputed to have occasional fits of temper which reveal themselves
in a noticeable squint in the pupils of his eyes, but during all the
time I talked with him that afternoon, those eyes of pale blue fixed
themselves on me and never left me.
There is a story of some famous German general who is reputed to have
smiled only twice in his life, once when his mother-in-law died and
once when he heard that the Swedish General Staff had referred to
certain military works outside Stockholm as a fortress. Applied to
Kemal, the story would hardly hold true for he has the gift of making
himself genuinely pleasant when he cares to exercise it. I can speak
of it only in connection with the handful of Westerners who have lived
in Angora during the last four years. Turkey has been not only Turkish
but desperately Turkish during these last years, yet no public
celebration of its victories has occurred in Angora without the
handful of Westerners in the town attending and without Kemal himself
making an opportunity to receive them upon its conclusion. On these
occasions, they have been received with a sensitive cordiality hardly
understandable by those Westerners at home to whom it has never
occurred that nations are born, not in debating societies, but in the
mud and blood of suffering.
Kemal is, however, a professional soldier, dismissed from the old
Ottoman Army by the Damad Ferid Ministry in Constantinople and now
occupying a politico-military position at the head of the new Turkish
Government. He has brought to Angora the blunt directness of the
soldier rather than the statesman, and his remarkable personal
prestige has colored his entire Government. Yet it is not sufficient
to define him as a soldier. The head of the new Turkish State happens
to be a soldier because the dominant tradition of the old Ottoman
Empire was the Turkish military tradition. In any country with a great
military tradition, the best brains of the country tend to flow into
the Army and the best brains of the Army tend to flow into the General
Staff. Kemal reached the General Staff of the old Ottoman Army at a
time when the best brains in the country were attempting to carry it
from those Eastern traditions of government in which it had had a long
and rich experience, to the newer Western traditions at which it is
still serving its apprenticeship.
If it is possible to press down the difference between these two
traditions of government into the limits of a single sentence, it
might be said that the Eastern tradition is that of action and the
Western tradition is that of argument. Under the Eastern tradition,
government is centralized in a single ruler whose power is as nearly
absolute as his own personal abilities enable him to make it. Under
the Western tradition, the functions of government are decentralized
and authority is carried down to a popular electorate, represented by
deputies in a parliament to which the Government of the day is
immediately responsible. Under the Eastern tradition, all things are
possible to an individual ruler as long as he disposes of sufficient
force to impose them. Under the Western tradition, all things are
possible to an electorate as long as it abstains from force in
imposing them. London is the home of the modern Western tradition but
to find the home of the Eastern tradition today it is necessary to go
farther east than Turkey, to a country like Afghanistan. One episode
which illustrates the contrast between the two traditions, is that of
an Afghan notable who happened to be in London at a time when the
Government fell, and who lost no time in sending an _aide_ into the
West End to purchase arms with which to defend himself. For further
illustration, I might draw on my own experience. I called on the
Afghan Ambassador at Angora in the course of my stay there and
discovered, I thought, an astonishing ignorance of our Western ways.
His was a charming tea, served by a charming gentleman who kept a
charming revolver on his desk throughout the period of our talk and
two charmingly brawny Secretaries of Embassy close at hand in case, I
suppose, of emergency. It happened, however, that no emergency
developed and our talk of an hour’s duration ended as happily as it
began.
But if we Westerners have slowly built up our own peculiar traditions
of government at home, we have not always carried them with us into
the East. In our contacts with Eastern peoples in their own lands, we
have tended to adopt the Eastern tradition. We have met force with
force and it is possibly difficult to blame the more provincial of
Eastern peoples if they conclude from their contacts with us along
their own frontiers, that our traditions of government are the same as
theirs. We cherish at home the reign of law, but our imperialisms in
the East have not always exemplified our love of law. Probably their
relatively lawless nature has been justified by necessity, for the
complicated machinery of Western trade demands conditions of security
if it is to work smoothly. Doubtless imperialism which is the simplest
method of affording it a degree of security, will continue as long as
it is able to command superior force, although naturally it is a daily
humiliation to the strongest of Eastern peoples. Necessity will tend
to justify its continuance until Easterners demonstrate that they can
adapt our tradition of law to their own needs and that they are
themselves able to afford legitimate Western trade (not of the
get-rich-quick sort) that security which it has a right to expect. It
is this task of adapting the Western tradition of law to Eastern
needs, of substituting in the East a new and Eastern _regime_ of law
for the lawlessness of imperialism, while disturbing as little as
possible the inter-flow of sound and legitimate trade――it is this task
which constitutes the Turkish problem today.
Kemal is a Westerner who was born under the Eastern absolutism of
Abdul Hamid. He has known the East, the West and that curious
offspring of both of them, imperialism. He is the son of a country
which has belonged in the past to any man who proved strong enough to
take it and which has rewarded its strong men with prestige or a cup
of poison or both. He has been a consistent Young Turk, although his
beliefs once flung him out of his country in disgrace and later tossed
him the dying remnant of his country to do what he could with it. In
his unaffected bearing, he embodies the old Ottoman officer type at
its best, and at its best that type was a very fine type indeed. He is
a great Turk and as a man among men he towers head and shoulders above
the type of man which our Western democracies have sometimes projected
into political life. A century from now, the historian of the future
will see him in a larger and more adequate perspective than we are
able to look upon him as he moves among us today.
He resumed his chair behind the desk, with the green and gold banner
hanging limply in the corner behind him, and took from his pocket a
string of amber beads with a brown tassel. His cheek bones are rather
high, his nose is straight and strong, his mouth is straight and
thin-lipped. I think a cartoonist would find him easy to do――a
towering iron-gray _kalpak_, and beneath it the straight strong lines
of the eyebrows, the mouth and the chin. He wore an English shooting
suit of tweed, a gray soft collar with a gray tie, and high-laced tan
boots with the short vamp which is native to the Near East.
Physically, he gives a lean, wiry impression.
He speaks either Turkish or French (he knows no English) in the
mildest of tones, hardly above a whisper and with a blunt frankness
which manages to remain free from any suggestion of truculence. I
formed the impression that he does not find talk congenial; he says
what needs to be said but he prefers to listen. Certainly he is quite
devoid of that love of talk which sometimes afflicts Western statesmen
and which is one of the less beautiful aspects of our Western
tradition of popular government. Like any other good soldier, there is
not the faintest trace of pose in him. He does not employ to
Westerners the, to us, exaggerated courtesies of the East; when he
does talk to us, he talks as we ourselves endeavor to talk to each
other, with simplicity and directness. At one time in our talk, I
asked him for photographs of himself since they were not then
obtainable elsewhere in Angora and weeks afterward I happened to
mention the matter to a Western friend in Constantinople. “What did he
tell you?” “That he would have them sent me the next day.” “And did
he?” “Yes.” My friend thought it over; he has lived in Constantinople
for some thirty years. “If you can really get any Turk to give you a
definite word on any subject under the sun without making you wait a
month for it,” he said finally, “its fairly certain there’s been a
revolution in the country.”
I had a feeling from the first that I was talking to an iron image,
that his brain was miles away busying itself with a thousand and one
affairs. He had a manner of dismissing question with question as
though he were very busy but desired not to be discourteous, and the
heaped-up pile of papers on his very neat and orderly desk made it
probable that this was precisely the case. I changed my tactics
finally and began firing questions at him abruptly, determined to get
his undivided attention. He reached up suddenly with a gesture which
might have savored slightly of impatience, and flung aside his
_kalpak_, revealing a tall sloping forehead, fringed at the top with
very thin brown hair, a forehead totally out of keeping with the
severely simple lines of his face. If his face is the iron face of the
cavalry officer, his forehead is the forehead of the statesman.
I kept on firing questions at him until I felt that his brain had
paused at its distance to listen. I continued to fire questions at him
until I felt that his brain had turned, had rushed down from its
distance and was sitting intently behind those fixed blue eyes,
staring out at its questioner:
“Suppose Turkey’s Western population leaves the country _en masse_
when it becomes certain that the Capitulations are ended?”
“The West can help us or hinder us greatly,” he said, “but it ought to
be remembered that we Turks have our own problem to work out in
Turkey.”
“Just what do you mean by your own problem?”
“You have seen the country, you know the condition in which Turkey is.
Our villages, our towns, our communications, all need to be built anew
from the ground up. We have had a good Army in times past. I don’t
believe there has been a better Army in Europe. But we hope soon to be
able to demobilize and then our real work will begin. We shall have a
potentially rich country on our hands and we shall have the right
which we have not had recently, to do what we can with it. We want to
make it a country worthy of its name, we want to give it not only the
best its own civilization offers it but the best we can take from
other civilizations. To that end, we shall welcome the help of others
but in the very nature of our task, any help we secure from others
must be subordinated to our own efforts. If we can not succeed, nobody
else can.”
“Do you think you will succeed?”
“If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what
sort of beginning we have made.”
When my time was up, I left him and walked back in silence to my
rooms. I dispatched the aged Armenian maid after tea, took off my
shoes and donned my slippers. I felt somewhat as a man does when he
has seen a great cavalry charge and has returned to his billet and
taken his boots off. I became aware finally of the squeak of ox-carts
beneath my windows. A long string of them was passing on its 300-mile
trek up from the coast to the Army bases in the interior. The air was
filled with their slow screaming squeak, a squeak which with infinite
deliberation removed the skin from every note in the chromatic scale,
the squeak of wooden axles daubed with tar to tickle the musical
palates of a team of oxen. Each cart, a mere wooden platform mounted
on wooden wheels, bore a tall mound of hay for the oxen and beneath
the hay the rope-handled ends of two or four or six new wooden boxes
protruded, the number of boxes depending on the _calibre_ of the
shells within. Most of the drivers were Turkish peasant women,
jacketed and pantalooned, their feet shod in rope-bound woollens,
their faces and hands reddened by exposure. Dead men’s fathers and
sons and brothers in the Army, widows and dead men’s daughters behind
the Army――but still the rope-handled boxes squeaked up from the sea….
It is out of the dumb stubborn strength of this peasantry that the
Turkish military tradition has been fashioned in centuries past. But
can the Turks direct this strength from their native military
tradition into a new and Western economic tradition? This is the
question mark which hangs over the Turkish problem today and Kemal
knows it.
“Do you think you will succeed?” I had asked him.
“If you will come back two years after the peace, you will see what
sort of beginning we have made.”
II
THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE
KEMAL’S BIRTH AT SALONICA――HOW HE BECAME A YOUNG TURK――WHAT THE OLD
OTTOMAN EMPIRE WAS LIKE――THE DIVISION OF ITS POPULATION INTO RELIGIOUS
COMMUNITIES――THE WESTERN CHALLENGE OF ITS _Rûm_ (GREEK) COMMUNITY――ITS
DUTY TO ISLAM.
Forty-two years ago, when Abdul Hamid II ruled in Constantinople and
the Ottoman Crescent and Star still floated over Salonica, an
underling in the Salonica customs office died, leaving his widow with
a small daughter and an infant son on her hands. The daughter in time
grew up and married, as is the way of Turkish daughters. The son was
intended by his mother for the mosque school and the career of a
_hoja_, as is the way of Turkish mothers, but he became fascinated by
the uniforms of the Ottoman Army officers whom he saw about the
streets, as is the way of Turkish sons. In time he succeeded in
passing the examinations for the military preparatory school at
Salonica, where his mathematics teacher became so fond of him that he
left off calling him by his given name of Mustapha and dubbed him
Kemal, a Turkish name meaning rightness.
The military preparatory school at Salonica, the officers’ school at
Monastir and the War Academy at Constantinople finally graduated him,
a headstrong youth of 22, into the Army in 1902 with the rank of
lieutenant. He had hardly reached the War Academy from Monastir before
his adolescent mind became tainted by the political ferment with which
the school was secretly permeated. A copy of the forbidden play
_Watan_ (The Fatherland) fell into his hands. Abdul Hamid had caused
every known copy of it to be confiscated and burned; he had forced its
author, despite his very high place in modern Turkish literature, to
flee into exile; he had driven out of the capital every Ottoman
subject whom his spies suspected of having read it. But _Watan_ gave
the young Kemal his first taste of Western ideas and made him secretly
a Young Turk and a bitter opponent of Abdul Hamid, which at the time
was a rather ridiculous thing to be.
Abdul Hamid was an able Easterner who maintained his grip on his
country by such a system of espionage that the life and liberty of no
Ottoman subject was safe who was remotely suspected of having heard of
the French Revolution, a system of espionage which could not keep
Western ideas out of the capital but which could, and did, keep them
underground. The military tradition of the country continued to
attract its best brains into the Army but the network of espionage
which radiated from Yildiz Kiosk had the effect of giving the Army a
sort of dual existence. On the surface, it continued to be a military
organism, the trustee of an Eastern military tradition, but beneath
the surface it became a ferment of forbidden Western ideas and the
example of Nihilism in Russia which did much to spread the secret
society craze, found no more fertile element to work upon than the
yeasty mentality of the War Academy and the Military College of
Medicine in Constantinople. So a secret political society which called
itself the Society of Liberty was formed among the students at the War
Academy and a similar society, the Society of Progress, was launched
across the Bosphorus at the Military College of Medicine. But both
were mere seeds sprouting underground in the rich and rotting soil of
the capital. The country itself, outside the capital, was still a
primitive Eastern land ruled by any man who proved himself strong
enough to take it.
There were some 600,000 square miles in the old Ottoman Empire when
Abdul Hamid came to the Throne. It was a compact area, lying at the
junction of three continents. On the west, it ran deeply into the
Balkans in Europe; on the east, it extended into Trans-Caucasia and
down the frontier of Old Persia in Asia; on the south, it followed the
Arabian coast of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and crossed to the
African coast to include a waning sovereignty over Egypt. In the
Balkans and Asia Minor, it consisted of a mountainous _massif_ tilting
up to the high plateau of Trans-Caucasia, its slopes dotted with
isolated villages quite out of effective touch with any Government
which might exist in Constantinople. Only the larger villages had a
_gendarmerie_ post, fewer still had a telegraph key to connect them
with the provincial capital and throughout most of the country such
Western contrivances as railroads were wholly unknown. With the
country’s administration rigidly centralized in Constantinople, only
the high prestige of the _Padishah_ linked these scattered villages in
their loosely organized provinces.
South of Asia Minor, the mountains dipped into a great desert arched
by the Tigris-Euphrates basin on the east and by the green Syrian
corridor on the west. Here, except in the Syrian corridor, the
inaccessibility of the country from Constantinople and the nomadic
nature of its sparse population gave the provincial administrations a
degree of semi-independence which increased to complete independence
down in the Arabian peninsula. The case of the Syrian corridor was
exceptional, however. Compared with the distant Tigris-Euphrates
basin, it was easily accessible from Constantinople; it was the home
of a settled population with a very high culture of its own; and it
was on the only line of land communication with the most venerable
holy places of Islam, the _Haram-esh-Sherif_ at Jerusalem, the
Prophet’s Tomb at Medina and the sacred _Kaaba_ at Mecca. The first of
these lay at the southern end of the corridor and the other two amid
the arid mountains which parallel the Arabian coast of the Red Sea.
Over these 600,000 square miles of country, the Sultan at
Constantinople maintained the loosest sort of government, permitting
his subjects to conduct their own affairs largely in their own ways
and confining his administration to the task of keeping the trade
routes open and the taxes collected, for under the Eastern tradition
this was the whole duty of government. There were about 25,000,000 of
his subjects, the overwhelming majority of them Moslems. The great
Moslem reformation had swept the entire area centuries ago, but in
accordance with the tolerance prescribed by the Prophet, Christians
and Jews, while set aside in their own community organizations as
dissenters, had been allowed to worship in their own ways. This was
quite in accord with the loose Eastern idea of government which
permitted every man to go his own way as long he paid his taxes
regularly and refrained from disturbing the peace of the country. Even
foreigners were likewise set apart under the Capitulations and were
permitted to govern themselves under their own laws and customs.
On the surface, the Sultan’s administration of his country from
Constantinople was very much like the King’s administration of his
realm from London. Both the Ottoman Sultan and the British King were
the heads of the dominant faiths in their respective countries. The
Sultans had become Caliphs of Islam in 1517, although not all Moslems
recognize them as such, just as the British Kings had become Defenders
of the Faith in 1521, although not all Christians recognize them as
such. The Sultan administered the spiritual affairs of his country
through the _Sheikh-ul-Islam_ and its temporal affairs through the
_Grand Vizier_, just as the King in London administers the spiritual
affairs of his realm through the Archbishop of Canterbury and its
temporal affairs through the Prime Minister. The surface of both
countries is feudal and mediaeval, and springs from the same source,
but their resemblance in the reign of Abdul Hamid II stopped at the
surface. Beneath the surface, England during the latter half of the
nineteenth century, was in a state of transition from feudalism to the
modern Western idea of democracy. A growing industrial plant was
giving rise to trade unions and trade unions, exerting a growing
influence on ideas of government, were drawing authority down to a
popular electorate. Government was tightening its hold on the lowliest
peasant and a civil service was being formed as a permanent body to
which the increasing duties of government were entrusted. The country
was becoming a powerful industrial unit, able to mobilize the vast new
energies which machinery was opening up to it. It was embarking on
manufacture and trade on such a scale as had never been dreamed of
before. It was becoming the ganglion of a financial nervous system
whose sensitive fibres covered the world. The old religious aspect of
government was dwindling and in its place we saw a drilled and
disciplined industrialism taking form beneath the feudal trappings
which still constitute the surface of British government.
[Illustration: HUSSEIN RAUF BEY
Head of the Ottoman Delegation which signed the Mudros Armistice,
October, 1918; Nationalist Party Leader in the Ottoman Chamber,
January and February, 1920; arrested and deported to Malta, March 16,
1920; Minister of Public Works and Prime Minister of the First Grand
National Assembly after his return from Malta in November, 1921.]
[Illustration: GENERAL RAFET PASHA
Minister of War and Interior of the First Grand National Assembly
until November, 1921; Minister of War until January, 1922; Governor of
Eastern Thrace since November, 1922.]
But when Abdul Hamid II ascended the Ottoman Throne at Constantinople,
religion was still the dominant factor in his primitive and loosely
organized country. From its surface to its core, the Ottoman Empire
was still Eastern. The Moslem community was still the governing
community, a community with a profound self-respect and a knowledge of
its own duties as well as of the deference which was due to it. The
dissenting communities were exempt by Moslem law from the duty of
preserving the peace and hence were able frequently to attain a degree
of prosperity which many Moslems never knew. Since the bulk of the
Sultan’s revenue was obtained from taxation provided for in Moslem
law, foreigners, most of whom were Christians, were naturally exempt
from the payment of any but secular taxes such as land tax and customs
duties. We Westerners think of it today as a hopelessly mediaeval
method of governing a country, but we sometimes forget that it
permitted every man in the country a generous liberty which we in the
West have lost. It exemplified the Eastern tradition at its best and
if we in the West have won for ourselves the blessings of modern
industrialism, we have paid for them with a considerable share of the
liberties we once enjoyed. What larger liberties our new industrial
democracies may yet confer upon us in exchange for the liberties they
have taken from us, remain to be seen. We are still evolving our
Western tradition of government, but at present it has taken from us
feudalism and the open fields and given us in exchange democracy and
the machine-shop.
Even before Abdul Hamid II came to the Throne, the Western tradition
had begun to make itself felt in the old Empire, for it was obvious
that Western industrialism would succeed eventually in generating such
power that no non-industrial country could stand against it. The
disturbing lure of the Western tradition was heightened by the
religious element, for both Islam and Christendom, while divided
within themselves, tend to draw together when menaced from without.
The Islamic world found its political leadership in Constantinople,
its scholastic leadership in Cairo and its juridical leadership in
Mecca, and it was natural that it should resent any menace to the old
Ottoman Empire within whose frontiers these three centers of
leadership lay. At the same time, the memory of the great Moslem
reformation had not yet passed from Christendom and it was natural
that it should resent the fact of Moslem rule over Palestine and the
inferior position necessarily accorded to Christian communities in a
Moslem country. There were a number of these Christian communities in
the Ottoman Empire, but we shall confine ourselves here to the mention
of the two of them which most vitally concern us――the _Rûm_ community
which included all members of the powerful Orthodox Church who
recognized the Oecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople, and the
_Ermeni_ community or the Gregorian Church, a small but historic sect
whose membership was limited to Armenians. Both these communities were
exempt from the operation of Moslem law and subject instead to their
own Christian laws. Both were officially established and represented
in the Sultan’s Government, the Oecumenical Patriarch himself
representing the _Rûm_ community and the _Ermeni_ community, since the
seat of its _Catholicos_ is in Trans-Caucasia, being represented by a
Patriarch appointed for the purpose in Constantinople. These
communities included most of the Christians who had survived the great
Moslem reformation and on the whole they lived quite peaceably under
Moslem rule. While their Moslem neighbors formed the governing class,
they formed the trading class and in any feudal country trading is the
occupation of the lower class. Still, their ablest men were frequently
utilized by the Sultan in the government of the country and when they
were so utilized, they were called upon quite without reference to
their position as religious dissenters, just as Nonconformists,
Catholics and Jews are utilized in the British Government without
reference to their attitude toward the Church of England.
It was through the Greeks, as the _Rûm_ community is called in the
West, that the Western tradition of government was first introduced
into the Ottoman Empire. They introduced it in its crudest form, a
form in which the basis of the State was shifted from religion to
race. The Greeks of Old Greece revolted successfully in the 1820’s and
were immediately recognized by the West as an independent State. But a
curious feature of their State was that it contained none of the
provisions for reasonably secure dissent which had marked the Empire.
Although the modern Greeks were without experience in the government
of dissenters, the West gave them immediate and full control over
their entire population without community organizations for dissenters
or Capitulations for foreigners. We Christians appear to be
characterized by this inability to tolerate dissent. Once we were
burning dissenters at the stake and today, although we have won
religious liberty for ourselves in the West, we have not even yet
succeeded in looking upon all religions and all races with the broad
tolerance which distinguishes Islam.
The revolt of the Old Greeks disturbed the peaceful relations which
had existed between the Sultan and his _Rûm_ community, but not as
violently as might have been expected. In time it disturbed Moslem
minds, for if this Western emphasis upon race were to gain any headway
in the Empire, there was literally no end to the amount of disruption
it could effect. As a country inhabited by 18,000,000 Moslems,
5,000,000 Christians and a scattering of lesser faiths, the internal
life of the Empire had been generally peaceful and not ignoble, but if
its population were to be changed over into a matter of 9,000,000
Turks, 8,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000 Greeks, 2,000,000 Kurds, 1,500,000
Armenians, etc., all of them inter-tangling into each other, the
prospect of trouble was limitless, not only for the Turks themselves
but for every race in the country.
To the Greeks of Old Greece, the new Westernism offered the prospect
of a reversal of the subordinate position they had occupied ever since
the Moslem reformation had all but swept Christianity out of existence
in the very land of its origin, and this prospect was heightened by
the increasing territorial losses which the Ottoman Empire had
suffered for two centuries. The same prospect made itself quickly felt
throughout the West, a fact which may afford evidence that the unity
of Christendom is greater than it appears to be on the surface, for
surely there can be no greater contrast within the limits of a single
faith than the contrast between the rich and decadent ritual of
Orthodoxy on one hand and the Spartan simplicity of British
Non-conformism and American Protestantism on the other.
But the challenge which the Greeks had found it comparatively easy to
fling down, was far from easy for the governing Moslems of the Empire
to pick up. In the first place, they had built the Empire to the
specifications of their own Moslem law and in the second place, quite
irrespective of any wishes they might have had in the matter, they
bore a heavy responsibility to the rest of Islam for their faithful
stewardship of that law. It had come to a time when the Empire was one
of the very few Moslem States which were able to interpret Moslem law
independently of external pressure, and Islam looked as it had never
looked before to its political leadership in Constantinople and its
juridical leadership in Mecca. The Sultan was the trustee of that
venerable Eastern civilization which was Islam’s own. The Caliphate
which Selim the Grim had lightly taken at Cairo in 1517, when Islam
was powerful, was now in the days of Islam’s political decline,
becoming an actual and heavy responsibility. The position was not a
hopeless one, for Indian Moslems who comprise some of the best brains
in Islam, had shown in their accommodation to the fact of British
India, that Moslem law is not inflexible. But for Moslems both within
and without the Empire, the challenge which the Old Greeks had flung
down, produced a position about as serious as can be imagined.
The Ottoman Empire was becoming the cockpit of an enormous arena whose
slopes extended from the back hills of Java to the country towns of
the United States. With the eyes of this worldwide audience upon them,
a handful of Young Turks in Constantinople were beginning secretly to
grope about after a way out of the apparent _impasse_ in which they
found themselves, after some formula which should adapt the Empire,
not to the hothouse Westernism of the Old Greeks, but to the maturer
and healthier Westernism of England. Luckily, the fact of India’s
70,000,000 Moslems had thrown the Caliph of Islam in Constantinople
and the Emperor of India in London into intimate contact.
III
THE YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM
KEMAL’S ARREST AND HIS EXILE TO DAMASCUS――HIS EVENTUAL RETURN TO
SALONICA――WHAT THE YOUNG TURKS WANTED――THE RELIGIOUS CONSERVATISM
WHICH CONFRONTED THEM――THE ROLE OF AMERICAN MISSIONARIES AND
EDUCATORS――CHRISTENDOM VS. ISLAM.
The young Kemal had no sooner been graduated from the General Staff
classes at the War Academy in Constantinople, than he engaged a small
apartment in Stamboul to serve as the headquarters of the secret
Society of Liberty. But an acquaintance whom he trusted and whom he
permitted to sleep in the apartment at night on the plea that he was
penniless, proved to be one of Abdul Hamid’s spies and Kemal was
arrested. Having been questioned at Yildiz Kiosk, he was held for
three months in a police cell and then exiled late in 1902 to a
cavalry regiment in Damascus. Fresh from the War Academy, fired with
the spirit of revolution and schooled in its _technique_, he lost no
time at Damascus in getting into touch with other exiles from the War
Academy and the Military College of Medicine in the capital. His
colonel, Lutfi Bey, introduced him to the keeper of a small stationery
shop in the Damascus bazaars who had been exiled from the College of
Medicine, and the two of them secretly organized a branch of the
Society of Liberty among the officers of the garrison. Under the
supposed necessity of his military duties, Kemal was soon dispatched
to Jaffa and Jerusalem where similar branches were organised, the
Jaffa branch attaining considerable strength. He soon became
convinced, however, that work in Syria was a mistake, that if the
challenge of Westernism which Old Greece had flung down was ever to be
picked up, it would have to be picked up where it had been flung down.
The political life of the Empire centered in Constantinople, but the
espionage system which radiated from Yildiz had the capital so
completely in its grip that revolutionary work there was subject to
the greatest dangers. Outside of the capital, the life of the Empire
was divided into two categories, that of the coast towns and that of
the interior. The life of the former was in a sort of touch with the
outside world, but the provincial capitals of the interior were quite
self-sufficient. Smyrna, the greatest of all the coast towns, was in
touch with all the outside world, but it was confronted in the
interior by Konia whose historic dervish _tekkes_ were a well of Islam
undefiled. It was the _tchelebi_ of the Mevlevi dervishes at Konia who
girded each new Caliph with the Prophet’s sword forty days after his
accession to the Throne, and when proud Konia spoke, its voice was
weighted with all the venerable conservatism of Islam.
But in Europe the coast town of Salonica was faced by no such
conservatism in its hinterland. The raw turbulent races of the Balkans
were already in a ferment of Westernism and in their grim way were
preparing to disentangle themselves in the wake of the retreating
Empire. Salonica, Uskub and Monastir were already seething with
forbidden political ideas and if the Empire were ever to halt its
retreat, it was here it would have to make its peace with Westernism.
It was here that Old Greece had flung down its challenge and it was
here that challenge would have to be picked up. Furthermore, if any
force were to be mobilized to thrust Westernism upon Abdul Hamid in
Constantinople, it was from Salonica that it would inevitably be
launched.
Kemal accordingly abandoned his work in Syria and induced Lutfi Bey to
give him leave under an assumed name to Smyrna, intending to make his
way from there to Salonica. Fearing, however, that Constantinople
would detect his presence in Smyrna, he went to Egypt instead and
sailed from Alexandria to the Piraeus, whence he reached Salonica.
Constantinople was coming more and more completely into the grip of
Abdul Hamid. The General Staff was being periodically broken up and
scattered to the four corners of the Empire, and the Military College
of Medicine was finally locked up and abandoned. Hamid was beginning
in similar fashion to tighten his grip on Salonica and, although Kemal
remained there in strictest hiding, his presence was discovered after
four months and he fled precipitately to Jaffa, where a convenient
outbreak of “trouble” at Akaba on the Red Sea gave him an alibi which
served to soothe the ruffled feelings of the capital. From Akaba he
went back to Damascus and waited there until a change of War Ministers
in Constantinople made it possible for him to request, and secure, a
transfer to the Staff of the Third Army at Salonica. Back in Salonica
again, he threw himself into the work of the secret Young Turkish
organization.
A little group of Ottoman exiles in Paris of whom Ahmed Riza Bey was
the leader, had discovered the formula which was to achieve that
internal unity which the Empire had long enjoyed and without which no
Empire could endure. It was the formula of Ottomanization. “A new
Ottoman Empire one and indivisible” was their dream, an expression
which they had borrowed from the French Revolution. “Oh, non-Moslem
Ottomans――Oh, Moslem Ottomans” was their program. All the races of the
Empire were to be drawn together into “a new nation,” “a new Ottoman
Empire,” whose military strength would enable it to halt its long
retreat and put an end to interference in its internal affairs from
without. To Riza Bey, Moslems and Christians alike were sufferers
under Abdul Hamid’s Easternism. The restoration of the still-born
Constitution of thirty years before, was his objective; with the
Constitution restored, Moslems and Christians would enjoy alike the
rights and the duties of Ottoman citizenship. Moslems would no longer
suffer in silence. Christians would no longer lift their complaints
throughout Europe and the United States. “We shall no longer be
slaves, but a new Ottoman nation of freemen.”
This was the ideal which Riza Bey lifted up in the little
revolutionary periodical _Mechveret_ which was smuggled into every
garrison in the Empire from his little flat in the Place Monge, near
the Montmarte section of Paris. This was the ideal which young Turks
like Enver and Niazi and Kemal were propagating, as they built up the
secret organization which was to compel Abdul Hamid to restore the
Constitution. Throughout the Empire, they had their agents in every
garrison, converting both the officers and the enlisted personnel of
Abdul Hamid’s Army, and assassinating hostile officers and men known
to be spies. Small organizing committees had been planted in all the
larger garrisons and directing committees were functioning in
Constantinople, Salonica, Smyrna, Adrianople, Uskub and Monastir.
Under the Eastern tradition of government, it was the Army which
immediately mattered. Deprived of his Army, Abdul Hamid for the moment
would be caught defenseless.
But in reality the Army was only the instrument of Abdul Hamid’s
power. The substance of his power lay in Moslem law and in the
unswerving devotion to it of the Old Turks. Strong simple men, these
Old Turks were, men who knew nothing of the arts of debate, broadly
tolerant of the usages of others and rigidly conservative of their own
usages, men who took their starkly simple faith very seriously, in
whose lives religion was still the dominating factor. They were found
in the mosque schools rather than in the War Academy, in Konia rather
than in Salonica, and in winning over the Army, the Young Turks were
not touching the vast and silent body of conservative Old Turkish
opinion which formed Abdul Hamid’s real strength. Here was a dead
weight of usage which knew no necessity for change and which would
have resisted to the end if it had. True, there was a section of Old
Turkish opinion in the capital and the larger provincial centers,
which disliked Abdul Hamid the Sultan, but Abdul Hamid the Caliph was
quite another matter. Under the Caliph, Moslem and non-Moslem were
_not_ equal. Non-Moslems had been given far more tolerant treatment
under the Caliph than religious dissenters had sometimes been given
under Christian rule in the West, but the tolerance which the Caliph
guaranteed them did not make them the equals of Moslems.
Whether Moslem law was really thus inflexible was obviously a matter
for Moslems themselves to determine, but the record of India’s Moslems
in accommodating themselves to British rule would have seemed to
indicate otherwise. India’s Moslems, however, were in touch with the
Western world as the Old Turks were not. The very fact of British
rule, not to mention their long contact with Hindus, had given India’s
Moslems a breadth of vision which Old Turkish opinion lacked. Old
Turkish leadership embodied Islam at its best, but in the range of its
experience it embodied Islam at its narrowest.
Meanwhile, the _Rûm_ community whose relations with the Sultan-Caliph
were still generally peaceful, had a very large source of strength
outside the Empire. Had the Young Turks eventually proved successful
in equalizing Moslem and non-Moslem in an Ottoman citizenry, the _Rûm_
community might or might not have accepted the change and undertaken
to work the newly Ottomanized Empire. But if the Young Turks failed,
there were sources of outside strength available to the Oecumenical
Patriarchate in Constantinople which would have broken the Old Turks
by force and substituted a new _regime_ which might be described as
Old Greek. The old Byzantine Empire had been snuffed out as an
independent political entity in 1453, but it still lived as an
ecclesiastical, commercial and political force in the Oecumenical
Patriarchate in the Phanar suburb of Stamboul. Its clergy still
perpetuated its memory in the black cylindrical hats and the black
robes of Orthodoxy, but for the time being their communicants wore the
red _fez_ which marked the Ottoman subject.
The King at Athens whence the challenge of Westernism had first been
flung down to the Empire, had adopted the title of King of the Greeks
and Orthodoxy dominated Old Greece with a degree of intolerance which
had never marked Islam in the Empire. Orthodoxy had established its
hold on Russia and Orthodox Russia had become the most powerful enemy
Islam had ever known. Russia had acquired the protectorship of the
_Rûm_ community in the Empire and the great yellow-brown mosque of
_Ayiah Sophia_ in Stamboul had become the most sacred irredentum of
the Orthodox. Russia sent thousands of pilgrims annually from Odessa
to Palestine, and built a hospice on the Mount of Olives which
commands Jerusalem in a military sense, with a tower which could not
have been better adapted for the uses of a signal tower if it had been
built for the purpose. Between Orthodoxy and Islam, there had arisen
that state of bitter truce which was typified in the juxtaposition of
a Russian church and a Turkish _serai_.
France which had divorced Church and State at home, still held the
protectorship of the _Katolik_ community in the Ottoman Empire. Italy
whose relations with the Vatican at home had not always been friendly
clung tenaciously to the rights of Italian Catholic orders in
Palestine. Germany whose Lutherans had no specified rights in the
Christian holy places and whose Kaiser had proclaimed himself the
friend of Islam, had planted stronger colonies in Palestine and more
buildings in Jerusalem than any other Western Power, and had built a
hospice on the Mount of Olives “strengthened” by a wall which could
hardly have been better adapted for the uses of military defense if it
had been built for the purpose. So we had a city sacred to Moslems,
Christians and Jews, dominated by Russian and German hospices on the
Mount of Olives, strong fortress-like structures erected _ad gloriam
maiorem Dei_. Meanwhile the Caliph of Islam continued to administer
the city with fairness to the communicants of all three faiths,
keeping his garrison down at Jaffa on the coast except on the
occasions of such religious festivals as required its temporary
presence in Jerusalem.
One expects from American Protestantism and British Nonconformism an
attitude of aloofness from this sort of thing, for both have revolted
against the use of the Church by the State. Both have revolted against
that ritualism which marks the older forms of Christianity and have
set up for themselves a form of service severely simple and
aggressively evangelical. In accordance with the finest of its
evangelical traditions, American Protestantism has carried on a long
and vigorous missionary endeavor in the old Ottoman Empire, but actual
contact with Islam in its own country has done much to make plain to
the missionaries themselves the reasons for the great Moslem
reformation which all but swept Christianity out of existence in the
land of its origin. Whatever may have been thought in the United
States as to the work in which American missionaries have been engaged
in the Empire, that work has been directed towards the reformation of
the decadent survivals of Christian worship. The missionaries
themselves, as distinct from their supporters in the United States,
have rightly observed that Christianity will not command the respect
of Islam until Moslems have been shown a different type of Christian
from that type to which they have been accustomed. The missionaries
accordingly, beginning on one of the outermost fringes of Christendom,
have devoted themselves to work largely among the Armenians and have
drawn away from their Gregorian Church a new community which the
Caliph in Constantinople recognized as the _Prodesdan_ community.
But an important circumstance exists which is inevitably present in
any missionary endeavor in an alien land and of which we sometimes
need to remind ourselves. In actual practice, Islam is not only a
religion but a form of civilization as well and, in the life of any
devout Moslem, it would be very difficult to say where the one ends
and the other begins. Precisely the same is true of American
Protestantism. It might be simple enough to state the theology of
American Protestantism, but that theology would fall far short of
defining the actual missionary. For the missionary is not only a
Protestant but an American as well, and in any alien country he
embodies the American Protestant form of civilization. However rigidly
he may seek to confine his work within the limits of religious
teaching (and I am thoroughly convinced that the overwhelming majority
of missionaries have so sought to confine their work in the Ottoman
Empire), it is impossible for him not to be an American and a center
of American ideas. In actual practice, it proved impossible for him
not to stand as a center of Westernism in an Eastern country to which
the application of Western ideas necessitated the utmost caution. The
Armenians among whom most of the missionaries worked, were the
farthest East of all the Ottoman peoples and among the non-Moslem
communities they were the last to respond to the Western lure. For
centuries they have lived generally in peace under the Caliph’s rule.
Themselves an Eastern people, they had lived under their Eastern
masters in the enjoyment of the autonomy of their community
institutions. The terms under which the _Ermeni_ community conducted
its own affairs in its own way, were the only terms under which they
could have enjoyed the degree of autonomy which they did enjoy, for
they had a majority in no province[1] and the Western idea presupposes
a majority as the first requisite of independence.
If Christian worship as it was practiced in the Ottoman Empire was
ever to command the respect of Moslems, in theory it was all to the
good that the missionaries should draw their new Protestant community
out of the old Gregorian Church. But that the Armenians should be
exposed incautiously to Western ideas of nationalism was quite another
matter. Events might have worked out differently had the missionaries
been able to lay aside their Americanism, had they became Ottoman
subjects themselves and confined their work to the propagation of
Protestantism under Ottoman rule. But this sort of thing is not done.
Without the steadying influence of responsibility to the Ottoman
Government, they permitted their work to take them into the most
intimate and delicate parts of the Ottoman structure. Their attitude
toward the Ottoman Government was that of the Capitulations, their
only responsibility was to their American supporters at home to whom
the Ottoman Government was as far away as the moon.
Nobody has ever expected American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire
to become Ottoman subjects. Indeed, nothing could have made such a
proceeding more ridiculous than the mere mention of it, and I am
inclined to believe that in the very ridicule which its mention would
have provoked, there is food for very sober reflection. Among
imperialists, one can thoroughly understand such an attitude, for
imperialism is based on force and prestige is the very necessary
legend of the invincibility of Western force. But do we Christians
also build on force?
Yet the history of Old Greece is by no means an isolated instance of
intolerance in modern Christendom. We Christians have built a world in
which only Christian nations are admitted to equality (the recent
example of Japan to the contrary notwithstanding). Old Greece and Old
Russia we have recognized as complete equals with us and if the
Armenians had gained their independence, presumably we would have
recognized Armenia also as an equal, although every American
missionary who knows the Armenians in their own country knows what
their abilities are. But forgetting that the true worth of a nation
lies in character, we have never recognized Moslem nations as equals
with us. We found in the Turks a people of integrity and tolerance,
but because they refused to turn Christian, we have concurred in the
modern Capitulations and have visited the butcher-legend upon them
while exalting Greeks and Armenians upon an equally artificial
martyr-legend. Among imperialists, one can understand the necessity of
an inflexible attitude of superiority, but among Christians it
corresponds neither to reality nor to the teachings of the First
Christian.
“And he spake also this parable unto certain who trusted in themselves
that they were righteous, and set all others at nought: Two men went
up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a
publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I
thank thee, that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust,
adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week; I give
tithes of all that I get. But the publican, standing afar off, would
not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote his breast,
saying, God, be Thou merciful to me a sinner. I say unto you, this man
went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one
that exalteth himself shall be humbled; but he that humbleth himself
shall be exalted…”
The missionaries remained Americans as well as Protestants. They
administered Westernism as well as Protestantism to the Armenians, and
the result of the administration of Westernism was bloodshed. The
example of Nihilism in Russia lured the Armenians on into the secret
society craze. Armenian revolutionary societies answered bloodshed
with more bloodshed, and the tragedy began whose ghastly fruition we
have seen.
Some of the missionaries recoiled from further missionary effort and
opened schools and hospitals instead which they threw open impartially
to all the races of the Empire. These schools were instituted solely
for educational purposes and the largest of them offered as good a
schooling as most American colleges in the United States offered.
Their effort was to offer the best that Americans at home had and even
in such incidentals as the architecture of their buildings, they made
themselves as completely American as possible. Two of the largest of
them were built high on the wooded shores of the Bosphorus and nobody
can glance at them today without knowing at once that they are
American. High above the suburbs of the old capital, they look as if
they had been transported bodily from Chicago.
One can share our pride in our own devices and our own customs, one
can sympathize in our desire to see other countries adapt themselves
to American methods, but it was not the effort of these schools to
strike a balance between American and Ottoman cultures. What these
schools offered was out-and-out Americanism and their attitude toward
the Ottoman Government was the sharply aloof attitude of the
Capitulations. This was obviously a quite unusual proceeding in any
supposedly independent foreign country and the only defense of it
which can be made is that it was the customary thing among all
Westerners in the Ottoman Empire. Behind the Capitulations, Western
schools, Western missionaries, Western traders and a number of less
creditable Westerners, alike found freedom to carry on their own
affairs in their own way. The Capitulations provided Western
imperialists with an opportunity which they were not likely to
overlook and as long as imperialism flourished at Constantinople,
American schools and American missionaries enjoyed a security which
was well-nigh complete, however humiliating this state of things might
have been to the Ottoman Government. Even today there are American
educators and American missionaries in Constantinople to whom the word
“imperialism” means nothing, who say in the dazed manner of men who
have suddenly seen the very ground drop out from under their feet,
“Imperialism has never bothered _us_….”
While Christendom stood thus gazing into the Ottoman cockpit, the Old
Turks were not idle. Abdul Hamid had lifted up the imperilled
Caliphate in Constantinople so that all of Islam could see it. As far
back as 1889, Pan-Islamism had sought to bring the _Shiah_ Moslems of
Persia under the suzerainty of the _Sunni_ Caliph and this scheme
involved considerations so far-reaching in their scope that it finally
brought about a project for a conference of all Islam at Mecca in
1902. But Abdul Hamid had his own imperialism to consider, made
necessary though it was by the Eastern institution of the Caliphate,
and his fear that his Arab populations would use the conference to air
their secessionist program led him to quash the project. Pan-Islamism
gave way to the new Pan-Turanian program under which Turkish and
Tartar Moslems were to shelve the Arabs who had given Islam to the
world, the Turkish tongue was to supplant Arabic as the sacred tongue
of Islam, and all Arabic words were to be rooted out of the Turkish
language. This proved too large a morsel for conservative Islam to
swallow, and Pan-Turanianism prospered no more than Pan-Islamism. It
did live, however, as a political project for welding the Tartar
peoples against Orthodox Russia, for the Turkish ancestry runs deeply
into Central Asia.
Much of this Islamic maneuvring was the work of sophisticated Islamic
capitals. Old Turkish opinion itself continued to place its simple
reliance in the institution of the Caliphate which had now become the
repository of the most venerable of Moslem usages. To the more
thoughtful of the Old Turks, it was a matter of profound re-assurance
that the British Empire contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000
Christians, and that the Emperor of India in London was in friendly
contact with the Caliph. Those were the days when the _Sheikh-ul-Islam_
in Constantinople was one of the last independent interpreters of
Moslem law, and when the British Empire proudly called itself the
greatest Moslem Power in the world.
But King Edward’s first visit to Austria in 1903 disquieted Moslem
opinion both in the Ottoman Empire and in India. The Emperor of India
was growing impatient. His further visits in 1905 and 1907 resulted in
a program of reforms in _gendarmerie_, finances, judiciary, public
works and the Army, which were to be imposed from without upon the
rigidly conservative Empire. To the Young Turks who had been working
feverishly ever since the first visit to Austria in 1903, preparing to
attempt the imposition of their really fundamental reforms from
within, his program was only a step toward the final break-up of the
Empire. Already, instead of securely bridging the gap between East and
West the Empire creaked and cracked as though presently it would
tumble into the widening chasm.
Late in 1907, the Emperor of India’s patience ran out. In the spring
of 1908, Edward VII touched a match to the carefully laid gun-powder
of Young Turkish revolution which lit the Empire with the flare-up of
1908. Ten years later, the blackened ruin of a once noble structure
disappeared from history and the gap between East and West yawned wide
and empty.
[1] My authority for this statement is “Reconstruction in
Turkey,” a book published for private distribution in 1918
by the American Committee of Armenian and Syrian Relief, the
predecessor of the Near East Relief. “The estimate of their
(the Armenians’) number in the empire before the war,” says
Dr. Harvey Porter of Beirut College on page 15, “ranges from
1,500,000 to 2,000,000, but they were not in a majority in
any _vilayet_.”
IV
THE RUSSIAN MENACE
HOW RUSSIA AND GREAT BRITAIN FOUGHT ACROSS THE OLD OTTOMAN EMPIRE――HOW
RUSSIA ENTERED TRANS-CAUCASIA AND CAME INTO CONTACT WITH THE
ARMENIANS――HOW IT APPROACHED THE BACK OF BRITISH INDIA THROUGH CENTRAL
ASIA――HOW GREAT BRITAIN FINALLY SURRENDERED IN THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN
TREATY OF 1907.
Old Russia was a great Eastern absolutism which had looked upon the
modern West and faithfully copied the methods of its imperialism.
These it utilized in its search for a secure outlet to the sea. It had
reached the sea at Archangel on the Arctic, but Archangel is blocked
by ice for nine months of the year. It had reached the sea along the
Baltic shores, but its Baltic ports were as landlocked as the Lake
ports in the United States. The Baltic was commanded by Germany and
Germany in turn was commanded by Great Britain. It had touched salt
water along the Black Sea, but its Black Sea ports were commanded by
the Ottoman Empire astride the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.
It was unable to rectify its position in the Baltic without
precipitating a European war and European wars are not only expensive
but to Eastern Powers like Russia are sometimes disastrous. It spent
the better part of a century in trying to solve its Black Sea problem
by hewing back the Ottoman Empire and attempting to fasten its control
over the Ottoman Sultan at Constantinople. But the Straits had already
become the most vulnerable spot in the armor of the British Indian sea
lines and the Ottoman Sultan was accordingly backed by all the
influence which the great British Embassy in Constantinople could
exert.
Thus when Russia compelled the Sultan to pay its price for stopping
Mohammed Ali’s drive up the Syrian corridor from Egypt in 1832, Great
Britain did not hesitate to quash Russia’s treaty with the Sultan. And
when the issues which the quashing of that treaty had left unsettled,
were revived twenty years later, Great Britain did not hesitate to
enter the Crimean War to hold Russia back from any further approach to
the Straits. And when twenty years still later, the Mother Slav State,
following the lead of the South Slavs of Serbia, declared war on the
Sultan and smashed its way into San Stefano in the very suburbs of
Constantinople, the British Navy did not hesitate to steam boldly up
the Straits and anchor off the Ottoman capital. For if the Russian
Army had been permitted to occupy it, the British sea lines from India
might easily have been thrown back to the long Cape route and another
Trafalgar necessitated in order to settle again the question of the
command of the Mediterranean, a question which the British Navy did
not propose to re-open.
So we reach that titanic struggle between two outside imperialisms
which kept the Ottoman Empire tied hand and foot but still alive.
Against Russia, Great Britain made common cause with the Ottoman
Empire. The Emperor of India and the Caliph of Islam stood together.
It is our misfortune that the Church of England was not able to avail
itself of the position which its Defender then occupied, to discover
what common ground existed on which the two great monotheistic faiths
of Christianity and Islam might co-operate. Success in such a task
would have placed all of us, Christians and Moslems alike, heavily in
its debt. But Englishmen to this day have never discovered the full
breadth and depth of the meaning of British India.
Despite the Russian naval base of Sebastopol, Great Britain not only
kept the Sultan in command of the Straits but even kept the Black Sea
neutral. East of the Black Sea, however, the British writ did not run.
Here between the Black Sea and the Caspian is the ancient barrier of
the Caucasus Range, below which the Trans-Caucasian plateau forms a
bridge both to the back of the Ottoman Empire and to Persia. Below the
blue peaks of the Caucasus Range lay Tiflis, the capital of the
Georgian Kingdom midway between the Black Sea and the Caspian, with
the Turkish village of Batum on the Black Sea shores and the Tartar
village of Baku on the Caspian. Turks and Tartars were both Moslem,
but the old Georgian Kingdom was Orthodox and, extending in a broad
belt down through the Ottoman provinces in eastern Asia Minor were
most of the Armenians.
Expanding Russia was not long in bursting the barrier of the Caucasus
Range. More than a century ago, it swallowed the Georgian Kingdom,
snuffed out the eight little Tartar chieftains around Baku and found
itself in contact with the Armenian _Catholicos_ and the eastern
fringes of the _Ermeni_ community in the Ottoman Empire. In further
accord with its policy of undermining that Empire, it availed itself
of the presence of the Armenians in the usual imperialist manner and,
in its war of 1876 against the Sultan, it drove its way deeply into
his eastern provinces, transferring the Armenians from Ottoman to
Russian sovereignty as it went. Its objective was the great bay of
Alexandretta on the Mediterranean which was to free it of its Black
Sea jail, a scheme which Great Britain recognized by secretly taking
over the “administration” of Cyprus from the Sultan. The treaty of San
Stefano stopped the Russian advance hundreds of miles short of
Alexandretta and in front of the new Ottoman frontier, Russia
developed Kars into a great fortress as a base for its further advance
toward Alexandretta when opportunity offered.
Having seized Batum from the Sultan, Russia continued the
consolidation of Trans-Caucasia under its own provincial governors and
stamped the entire region with the unmistakable imprint of a Russian
economic _regime_. It pierced the barrier of the Caucasus Range with a
military highroad to Tiflis, which it prolonged as a railroad to Kars
and the Armenian center of Erivan. It drove its railways past the east
end of the Caucasus Range to make a Russian railhead and a Russian
Caspian port of Baku, around which lay one of the greatest oil-fields
in the world. It developed the village of Batum into a fortified
Russian port on the Black Sea and with its Trans-Caucasian railroads
from Batum _via_ Tiflis to Baku, it made Batum the gate to the Caspian
for all the Western world. Long before, it had driven the Persians
from the Caspian, making a Russian lake of that inland sea, and
Russian steamship lines from Baku to Enzeli, the port of Teheran, now
made Batum the world’s gate to the Persian capital.
From the Trans-Caucasian bridge, the Russian march toward the sea
forked into two directions. The direction in which the Russian Armies
of 1876 turned, was toward Alexandretta on the Mediterranean. The
other direction was indicated later when a railroad was carried from
Kars to the Persian frontier, whence it was to be continued when
requisite to Tabriz and Teheran. This might have exposed the Persian
Gulf to Russia, but the Government of India had already made the Gulf
more British than the Mediterranean. The Gulf had become a land-locked
British lake whose narrow door-way into the Indian Ocean was dominated
by the potential British naval base of Bunder Abbas. If Russia had
succeeded in reaching the Gulf through Persia, a Russian port on its
shores would have been imprisoned by Bunder Abbas, as the Russian
Black Sea ports were already imprisoned by Constantinople and the
Russian Baltic ports by the Sound. For the time being, the Russian
Trans-Caucasian railhead on the north-west frontier of Persia awaited
events.
East of the Caspian, however, a century of Russian advances down
across the Moslem populations of Central Asia had brought the Russian
frontiers all the way down to Persia and Afghanistan. Russian rule
throughout this vast area had been as thoroughly consolidated under
Russian provincial governments as had the Trans-Caucasian bridge. In
time, a line of railway was driven from St. Petersburg _via_ Moscow
and Orenburg to Tashkent at the back of Afghanistan, whence it linked
with the Trans-Caspian Railway from Krasnovodsk, opposite Baku on the
Caspian. Direct communication was thus afforded from St. Petersburg
and from the Trans-Caucasian country to Persia and Afghanistan. With a
Russian resident ruling in the ancient Moslem capital of Bokhara, a
spur had been dropped from the Trans-Caspian line at Bokhara City to
Termez on the northern frontier of Afghanistan whence a caravan road
threads its way up into the passes of the Hindu Kush and down again to
Kabul and the Khyber Pass. From the Merv oasis, also on the
Trans-Caspian line, another spur had been dropped to Kushklinsky Post
on the Afghan frontier whence the traditional Herat-Kandahar-Kabul
road leads to the Khyber Pass and the fat plains of India.
This long loop of line from St. Petersburg and the Caspian to the back
of Afghanistan traversed territory securely held by Russian arms and
the British had no contact with it, except the frontal contact of
their railheads on the southern frontier of Afghanistan, _i. e._,
within India itself. Except for diplomatic exchanges between London
and St. Petersburg, the Government of India had no means of making
itself felt at Bokhara City and the Merv oasis. Indeed, Russia had
made even the Afghan capital of Kabul an intermittent nightmare in
India. Long ago, Russian intrigue in the Afghan capital had compelled
the East India Company in 1839 to dispatch an expeditionary force to
occupy Kabul and unseat its Amir, an expeditionary force which found
Afghanistan so hostile that it was wiped out of existence in such a
disaster as British India has never known before or since. Again in
1879, Russian resentment over the Congress of Berlin led to the
dispatch of a Russian mission to Kabul and when a British mission was
turned back at the frontier, the Government of India sent a second
expeditionary force to set up a new Amir at Kabul. Intrigue at Kabul
became Russia’s favorite reply to any strain in Anglo-Russian
relations, but it was not in Afghanistan that the real weight of
Russian expansion finally made itself felt. Its construction of the
Trans-Caspian railway had given it a base at Askabad on Persia’s
north-east frontier, for an advance down across Persia to the Indian
Ocean outside Bunder Abbas. Here was a project which at one stroke
would not only free Russia of its inner Black Sea jail and its outer
Mediterranean jail, but would enable it to create a second Vladivostok
on the Indian Ocean which would take the British Indian sea lines in
the flank and cut the Indian peninsula bodily out of the British
Empire.
Russia now projected a railway from Askabad to the Persian provincial
capital of Meshed and thence south past the Seistan, reaching the
Indian Ocean presumably at Chahbar or Gwatter Bay. Having filled the
Persian capital of Teheran with Russian intrigue and having thoroughly
Russianized Meshed, Russia now began to close the Seistan gateway
through which the great British Indian fortress of Quetta flanked the
route of its projected railway. Belgian customs officials in the
employ of the Russianized Persian Government, Russian “scientific”
missions and a strange “plague cordon” began mysteriously to break up
the caravans which were moving into and out of the Seistan.
In the meantime, the Government of India had drawn the western
frontier of its Baluchistan province to include Gwatter Bay and had
made a British railhead of Chahbar. Further than this, it was
difficult to go effectively. There was no subject population in the
south of Persia to subvert from its rulers in the north, as was the
case with the Arabs in the adjacent Ottoman Empire. Nor could the
great British Legation at Teheran bolster up the weak Persian
Government as a buffer against Russia, for the Persian capital lay far
away to the north in the very shadow of Russia. Ever since that day a
century ago when Russia burst the barrier of the Caucasus Range, a day
whose dire meaning for India was only beginning to be realized,
Teheran had been exposed to Russia. It lay now only 200 miles from
Enzeli on the Russianized Caspian and some 1,600 miles from Quetta
inside the Seistan, a caravan route so arduous as to be out of the
question. The Government of India’s only road to Teheran was the
800-mile highroad _via_ Bagdad from Basra at the head of the Persian
Gulf.
The situation was a perilous one, however. The Cairo-Calcutta line of
the great British Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme would be cut in
Persia by Russia’s projected route from Askabad to the Indian Ocean.
The Government of India had envisaged a line extending from
Constantinople to Kabul as an outworks in front of its Cairo-Calcutta
line. That Constantinople-Kabul line was the common interest of the
Ottoman Caliph and the Emperor of India, but its conception was
hopelessly tardy. It had been broken a century ago when the East India
Company was fretting about France, and Russia was bursting the barrier
of the Caucasus Range to occupy the Trans-Caucasian bridge; for in any
Constantinople-Kabul line, the Caucasus Range is a frontier as
indispensable to the Government of India as the Hindu Kush itself.
Even at Constantinople, the accustomed rule of the British Embassy had
been supplanted by the rising influence of the German Embassy. A
formidable new German enemy was already moving in force along the
roads to British India. Great Britian was losing ground both in
Constantinople and in Persia, which had now become the most vulnerable
spots in its very vulnerable Indian Empire. The Czar was on his way to
become the ruler of the world, and the British Government surrendered.
At the price of a heavy retreat in Persia, it purchased a truce with
its Russian enemy and faced about to meet its new German enemy.
That truce with Russia was the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which
enabled King Edward to meet the Czar at Reval in 1908 to conclude the
Anglo-Russian _entente_ against Germany. Under the terms of this
historic Treaty, Russia abandoned Afghanistan to the Government of
India, and Persia was divided into three “zones of influence,” the
northern half of the country to Russia, most of the arid southern half
a neutral zone, and a small triangle in south-east Persia to the
Government of India, a triangle which was drawn to include all of
Persia’s open seaboard from Bunder Abbas to Baluchistan, including
Chahbar, Gwatter Bay and any other potential ports which Russian
surveyors might have staked out. This division of the country was
accompanied by mutual Russian and British engagements “to respect the
integrity and independence of Persia,” a clause which gives us quite
the correct imperialist touch.
The purpose of the two signatories in drawing this historic Treaty was
“to settle by mutual agreement different questions concerning the
interests of their States on the Continent of Asia,” and this they did
with conspicuous success. They began by breaking Persia. They
continued by breaking the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate of Islam.
They have finished by breaking Christendom.
Possibly in the new humility and the broader tolerance in which
Christendom will one day emerge from its present collapse, we shall
all be the better for it.
V
THE YOUNG TURKISH REVOLUTION
“ON THE MORNING OF JULY 23, 1908”――THE OLD TURKISH COUNTER-REVOLUTION
AND ITS DEFEAT――HOW ISLAM AND THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES NULLIFIED THE
YOUNG TURKISH PROGRAM――KEMAL’S BREAK WITH ENVER AND HIS RETIREMENT
FROM POLITICS――THE BALKAN WARS AND NATIONALISM.
Three months after King Edward’s visit to Reval in the spring of 1908,
the frightened Young Turks launched their revolution with Niazi Bey’s
mutiny at Resna, fifteen miles from Monastir. On the morning of July
23, 1908, the house walls of Monastir were placarded with mottoes in
Turkish――“Death or Liberty,” “The Nation and Liberty,” “Freedom and
the Constitution.” Enver Bey proclaimed the Constitution at Salonica.
Telegrams from Salonica invited the Sultan to choose between the
Constitution and war. The officers of his Army were Young Turks to a
man. Even the reliable Anatolian regiments refused to march against
the rebels. Abdul Hamid surrendered. Parliamentary government with
free and equal suffrage for all the races of the Empire, was
proclaimed from the Throne. Abdul’s exiles came trooping home to find
Moslem _hojas_ and Orthodox clergy embracing each other and shouting
for the _Padishah_. The magic of that Western word “Constitution”
blended all the Empire in a transport of joy. The Young Turks were
swept into the Government on a wave of rejoicing.
[Illustration: FIELD MARSHAL FEVZI PASHA
Prime Minister and Chief of the General Staff, First Grand National
Assembly; Chief of the General Staff, Second Grand National Assembly.]
[Illustration: ALI FETHY BEY
Nationalist Deputy in the Ottoman Chamber until his arrest and
deportation to Malta on March 16, 1920; Minister of the Interior of
the First Grand National Assembly after his return from Malta in
November, 1921; Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior of the
Second Grand National Assembly.]
But the Caliph and the Emperor of India had parted company. Attempts
to interest the British Government in the possibilities of Young
Turkish achievement definitely failed. The fate of the Ottoman Empire
had been settled far outside its own frontiers. Before an
Anglo-Russian _entente_, its end was only a matter of time. Already
the name of Constantine had been introduced into the Russian Imperial
Family. With the Defender of the Faith and the Caliph now posed in
opposition, the way was opened at last for the Church of England to
open theological disquisitions at the Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow,
which looked toward the setting up of the joint capital of the two
communions in Constantinople.
The Young Turks had won over the Army with ease, but they had not won
over the silent mass of conservative Old Turkish opinion in which lay
the real strength of Abdul Hamid. Four months after their new
Parliament had assembled under the revived Constitution, the Old Turks
suppressed it and Constantinople troops scattered the deputies with
shouts of “_Sheriat!_” (Moslem law). Mahmoud Shevket Pasha, with the
young Kemal as his Chief of Staff, immediately marched on
Constantinople with the Third Army from Salonica, and in less than a
week the Parliament was restored. Four of its deputies――two Turks, a
Christian and a Jew――presented themselves before Abdul Hamid with the
demand of the Young Turks for his abdication. The last of the
out-and-out Easterners left Yildiz Kiosk to spend the remainder of his
days in a Salonica dungeon, and Mohammed V succeeded him with the
Young Turkish Parliament as the seat of authority in his Government.
And the seat of authority in the Young Turkish Parliament was the
Committee of Union and Progress, which ruled the capital from its
headquarters at Salonica.
Ottomanization had won and held its opportunity by force, but in the
application of its Westernism to a large Eastern community of Moslems
and smaller Eastern communities of Christians, it met with instant
difficulties. If Moslems and non-Moslems were to be made equals in an
Ottoman citizenry, it was necessary that both should give up their
dividing community institutions and assume instead equal duties and
equal rights under the Parliament. This only shocked the Old Turks and
as for the Christians, the suggestion only made them cling the more
tightly to their community institutions. The application of
Ottomanization only drove them into nationalism. Westernism was as
unpalatable to the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities as to the dominant
Islamic community. The Empire was locked in the dead grip of ancient
religious usage. Moslems and Christians alike were gripped by the dead
fingers of the past. Even if the Empire had had a longer span of life
ahead of it than it did have, it is quite possible that nothing but
force would have pried away those dead fingers and released the
vigorous life they contained. But if force was to be used, the Old
Turks would have used it to prevent any violation of the usages of the
faith they loved and served, and Greeks and Armenians would have used
it to pull down an ancient Moslem theocracy and set up in its place
their own Christian theocracies.
Very well, said the Young Turks, give us a generation of universal
education and we will create our Ottoman Nation; in the meantime, we
Young Turks will hold the Empire together. And so they proceeded, the
Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica maintaining its iron
control of the rigidly centralized Government at Constantinople and
the revolution degenerating for the time being into a mere _coup
d’etat_. As for Kemal, he recoiled in bitter disillusionment from the
fiasco into whose preparation he had thrown all his young energies. He
broke with Enver in a sharp quarrel at the 1910 congress of the
Committee of Union and Progress at Salonica, and devoted himself to
reforms in the Army until Enver exiled him to Tripoli. Izzet Pasha
shortly brought him back to Salonica, Mahmoud Shevket took him to
Albania, and when the war with Italy began, Enver sent him back to
Tripoli to command native irregulars. During the First Balkan War, he
was permitted to twiddle his thumbs on the Dardanelles but he
participated in the recapture of Adrianople in the Second Balkan War.
Thereafter he was dispatched to Sofia as military _attache_ where he
joined Ali Fethy Bey, another Staff officer and a former acquaintance
at the War Academy in Constantinople, who was then Minister to
Bulgaria.
The Italian War and the two Balkan Wars were natural sequels to the
Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. Far outside the frontiers of the Empire,
its final break-up had been decreed, and the conference at Bucharest
which ended the Second Balkan War was a diplomatic maneuvring for
position between Russia and Austria-Hungary. The latter won and Serbia
was wrapped round with a hostile Albania, a hostile Bulgaria and a
hostile Greece. The only other interest which the Balkan Wars hold for
us, lies in the fact that they left a Constantine, wedded to a Sophia,
preparing at Athens for still another war.
Five centuries ago, the Catholics of Spain had driven the Moors out of
Europe and destroyed the great Moslem monuments at Cordoba, Grenada
and Toledo. The Orthodox of Old Greece were now planning to visit the
same fate on the Turks and to restore a Byzantine Christian theocracy
in Constantinople. The Young Turks’ attempt at Ottomanization had made
their _Rûm_ community more than ever tenacious of its institutions,
and it had come to a time when the Ottoman Greeks in the capital were
ready to join with Athens and the Phanar in lifting the Cross over the
yellow-brown dome of the great mosque of _Ayiah Sophia_ in Stamboul.
An ugly and a mediaeval business, but a business in which the Greeks
were by no means alone. Its irony lay in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of
1907. The Church of England had followed its Foreign Office into
contact with _Russian_ Orthodoxy and it was only a matter of time
until the Foreign Office should acquiesce in the _Russian_ claim to
the steep green shores of the Bosphorus and the honey-colored coasts
of the Dardanelles.
The shock of defeat in the Balkan Wars turned the Young Turks in the
direction of nationalism. Their subject races had never been
amalgamated, and now that Greeks, Armenians and even Arabs were
developing racial consciousnesses of their own, efforts at
amalgamation were hopelessly tardy. Ottomanization had swiftly broken
down into Turkification which became a bitter business of force and
only drove the races of the Empire farther apart. But the only
alternative to Turkification was the abandonment of the Empire and
with it the Caliphate of Islam. Still borne down by the heavy
responsibilities whose faithful discharge Islam expected of them, the
Old Turks clung tenaciously to the Caliphate but the Young Turks,
while refraining from a break with Islam, moved increasingly out of
the grip of old religious usage toward a new Western nationalism.
There was much that was fine in their crude nationalism. It prized its
own Turkish culture. It attempted to purge its language of its
borrowed Persian and Arabic vocabulary. It sought to open up the
resources of Western literatures by copious translations into Turkish.
It even translated the Koran although in so doing it ran close to an
open break with Islam, which counts it a sin to print the Koran in any
language but the sacred language of Arabic. It broke down the barriers
which fence off the enormous religious endowments of Islam, and the
Ministry of _Evkaf_ supplied funds to start a national library and to
subsidize a national architecture. It started schools and began
reforms in the Moslem seminaries, which were Old Turkish strongholds.
It began a widespread physical culture after the type of the Slavic
_Sokols_ and the Boy Scouts. It found voice in the impassioned cry of
the Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, “_I am a Turk, my race and language
are great._” It looked forward to the day when the humiliating
Capitulations should be abolished and the Turks should take their
place as an equal among equals in the family of nations. But it still
had to accommodate its fine youth to the old conservatism of Islam,
the Empire still obscured and confused it.
The two Balkan Wars had reduced the Empire to a condition which in the
West would have been regarded as the end of all things. It was on the
verge of bankruptcy, but the Capitulations still prevented it from
increasing its sources of revenue. Rauf Bey’s exploits with the raider
_Hamidieh_ during the Balkan Wars had stimulated its pride in its Navy
and Constantine’s preparations at Athens for another war, this time
against Constantinople itself, had shown the immediate need for a
larger Navy, but so low had it fallen that money had to be raised by
private subscription before an order could be placed with British
yards for two new battleships.
Yet the existence of the Empire still preserved a sort of surface
peace among its races. They had become drunken on Westernism and they
waited only the day of the Empire’s break-up to begin the process of
their disentanglement, a process which in any area between Vienna and
Bagdad is not a pretty one to contemplate. The Old Greeks were
preparing their march to the relief of the “unredeemed” Greeks of
Constantinople. The Young Turks were preparing their own march to the
“unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan province in Persia, of Russian
Trans-Caucasia and the Russian provinces of Central Asia.
The moment was at hand when the Anglo-Russian mill-stone was to close
upon the Empire and grind it to pieces, when the broken pieces of it
were to be whelmed beneath a very deluge of disentanglement. Meanwhile
the Committee of Union and Progress still ruled in Constantinople,
with its local committees in every province. There was an Opposition,
the old Union and Liberty faction, better known as the Liberal
_Entente_ Party, but it had a poor time of it.
VI
GERMANY AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
BRITISH POLICY AT CONSTANTINOPLE――THE BAGDAD RAILWAY CONCESSIONS――
RUSSIA’S VETO AND THE CHANGE OF ROUTE――THE ACHILLES’ HEEL OF
ALEPPO――GERMANY AND ISLAM――THE BRITISH INDIAN FRONTIER IN SERBIA――THE
GREAT WAR.
I must make it plain that we are not here concerned with any aspect of
Germany west of the Balkans. The scene of this narrative lies east of
the Balkans and, insofar as it is possible to do so, we shall restrict
it to its proper _locale_. Although there was no German tradition in
Constantinople comparable to its British and French traditions,
Germany’s highway to the East crossed at the Straits the favorite
Russian route to the Mediterranean and hence afforded to the Ottoman
Government the same protection from its Russian enemy as the British
had once afforded. Nor was the German attraction solely diplomatic.
The Bagdad railway scheme afforded the Empire an opportunity for that
internal economic development which the Capitulations had made it
impossible for the Government itself to finance.
The British had not only supported the Government in Constantinople in
order to bar Russia from the Straits, but incidentally in order to bar
western Europe from the ancient land lines which make Constantinople a
potential gate to India. We in are West who are accustomed to lives of
peace, sometimes forget that war is usually a business of attacking
and defending the sources and the routes of trade, and that
imperialism concerns itself with the security of the trade sources and
the trade routes. If we did not live in a world of enemies, matters
might be quite different, for from any standpoint of abstract
economics, where trade is able to flow both by land and sea, it is
usually desirable that it should. The sea lines are only the slow
freight lines and the land lines the fast mail and passenger lines.
But to the imperialist, the first requisite of any important trade
route is its security against attack by any possible enemy, and where
native Governments are kept in a tied condition, it is the
imperialists who mark out the long distance trade routes. The British
Navy made the sea lines secure but, short of becoming a land Power as
well as a sea Power, no means existed by which the British could
control any land line from Constantinople toward India, to say nothing
of rendering it secure against attack by any possible enemy.
Accordingly, Great Britain spared no effort at Constantinople to
confine western Europe’s communication with India to the sea lines
which converge into the Suez Canal, although incidentally the Ottoman
Empire was thus long denied the through railway it sorely needed and
western Europe was permitted to content itself with slow freight
facilities to India.
But with the passing of British influence from Constantinople, the
land lines toward India were at last uncovered. In 1888, the Ottoman
Government transferred to a syndicate formed by the _Deutsche Bank_ of
Berlin a 56-mile railway from Haidar Pasha, a suburb of Constantinople,
to Ismid on the Sea of Marmora, and accompanied the transfer with a
concession to extend the line some 300 miles due east _via_ Eski-Shehr
to Angora. In the acceptance of this transfer and the exploitation of
the concession which accompanied it, Germany began to free itself of
the Suez Canal.
This concession was utilized by a German group calling itself the
Ottoman Anatolia Railway Company, which soon received a further
concession for the construction of a 230-mile extension of the Angora
line to Caesarea. The new concession contemplated still further
concessions through Sivas and Diarbekr to Mosul and thence down the
Tigris to Bagdad, a route which would have cut Russia’s projected
route from Kars to Alexandretta. Russia promptly vetoed it and the
Caesarea concession was dropped. A second concession had been received
at the same time, however, for a 269-mile line from Eski-Shehr on the
Ismid-Angora line to Konia, and Russia’s veto now changed the Konia
line from a feeder line to the main Bagdad line. The necessary
concessions for its extension from Konia through the Taurus Mountains
and on to Bagdad and Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf were
granted in 1903 to the Imperial Bagdad Ottoman Railway Company, which
took over the franchises of the original Ottoman Anatolia Company.
With railways and railway concessions in its possession for a
1,800-mile line from Haidar Pasha to Basra, the Bagdad Railway Company
now compared in its high political significance with the late East
India Company or the Suez Canal Company or the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company. The Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme of which it was part, isolated
Russia from the Mediterranean by cutting its projected land line
through Serbia to the Adriatic, its projected sea line through the
Straits and its projected land line from Kars to Alexandretta.
Politically, it had even a wider meaning. In 1898, the Kaiser visited
Constantinople in person and, after receiving the highest honors which
the Ottoman Sultan could confer upon him, continued his tour down the
Syrian corridor to Damascus and Jerusalem, proclaiming himself the
friend of Islam. Some years later, this move acquired significance to
that body of Islamic peoples who live between Constantinople and Kabul
and who found themselves locked in the vise-like grip of the
Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.
The precise route of the Bagdad Railway was a matter not easily settled.
Russia had driven it south from its original Caesarea-Sivas-Diarbekr
route and Great Britain now tried to pull it still further south,
all the way down to the beach back of Alexandretta Bay where
the British Navy could cut it when requisite without more trouble than
that of sending off a landing party. The beach route was avoided,
however, even though its avoidance necessitated heavy tunnelling to
breach the Taurus, but the British menace at Alexandretta was never
wholly escaped. For Aleppo through which its route was finally fixed,
was only a two days’ march from Alexandretta which in turn was only a
half-day’s steaming from Cyprus, which the British had taken secretly
from the Sultan in 1876. Aleppo became the most vulnerable spot in the
Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme, protected in case of war only by the fact
that prior Russian and French claims upon it might tie the British
hands. Here the Bagdad Railway was to effect a junction with the
French railways which drop down the Syrian corridor to Damascus, and
the Caliph’s inland Hejaz Railway dropped from Damascus down the back
of the Syrian corridor to Medina whence it overlooked Mecca. Had the
British been free in case of war to occupy Aleppo from Cyprus, the
Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme would not only have been cut, but the Ottoman
Empire would have fallen at once into two parts and ultimately into
three. Deprived of the use of the sea, Constantinople would have been
cut off from Syria and the Hejaz immediately and its communication
with Mesopotamia would have been driven north into the heart of Asia
Minor where the inevitable Russian advance from Trans-Caucasia would
have imperilled it. Aleppo became the Achilles’ heel of the Empire,
pointed out to all who know their maps by the tell-tale finger of
Cyprus.
When finally adopted, the route of the Bagdad Railway began at Konia
on the Anatolian plateau, 3,300 feet above sea level, and well back
into the hinterland approached the Taurus whose peaks rear their
snow-clad summits against the sky at an altitude of 12,000 feet. Once
through the Taurus, its route descended to the low plain of Cilicia
and rose again to surmount the 5,000-foot Amanus Range which rims off
the top of the Syrian corridor. Thence it dropped to the 1,200-foot
level of Aleppo at the top of Syria. The rest of the way to Bagdad was
easy.
Work on it began at once and continued until the Ottoman Government
signed its Mudros armistice in October, 1918. By that time, its
isolated sections had been linked in a continuous line from Haidar
Pasha to Nisibin on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia, a distance of
1,100 miles. Here seems to have been the beginning of a land line to
India, a line which might now be carrying fast mail and passenger
traffic not only toward India but toward South Africa as well. The
Indian traffic might some day be continued from Bagdad across the
Persian plateau and into the Seistan to link with the Nushki Railway
from Quetta, or alternatively from Basra along the Persian seaboard to
the Indian railhead of Chahbar. Similarly, the South African traffic
would be diverted at Aleppo down the Syrian corridor to Cairo and on
to Khartoum in the Sudan, to be continued some day over whatever
rail-and-ferry route is finally chosen for the Cape-to-Cairo system.
It is by no means to be assumed that the Bagdad Railway would have
proved itself a sound commercial proposition or that the world is in
immediate need of those land lines to India and South Africa of which
it would have formed a part. Its route was not dictated by the
economic needs of the Ottoman Empire, although it did incidentally
afford that Empire the promise of a trunk line from Constantinople to
Bagdad of which it stood in sore need. Some day when native
Governments have won for themselves the right to mark out their own
railway routes, projects like the Bagdad Railway may correspond more
closely to the economic needs of the countries through which they
pass, and international trains will presumably still be afforded us
over long distance routes just as they are afforded us in Europe. But
the imperialists have other matters to think about beside the economic
needs of native Governments.
However sound as an economic proposition the Bagdad Railway might
ultimately have shown itself to be, it did merit the most serious
attention in the West as a possible step in the economic development
of the East, and this is precisely what it did _not_ receive. Germany
backed it and Great Britain fought it, both of them for the same
reason, namely, that it escaped the Suez Canal. The legitimate needs
of the Ottoman Empire governed neither of them.
As at first proposed, the Bagdad Railway would have given Germany a
foothold from which to call in question almost at once British control
of the Persian Gulf. Here Great Britain had recently tapped the
southern end of that rich oil-belt which runs all the way down the
western rim of Persia from Baku. In a day when the basis of industry
was shifting from coal to oil, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had
tapped the Persian fields at Ahwaz and piped their flow 100 miles down
to its refineries at Abadan near Basra, of which the Bagdad Railway
now proposed to make a German railhead. Negotiations between London
and Berlin prompted the Bagdad Railway Company to drop its
Bagdad-Basra concession, but even if Bagdad were to become a German
railhead, it would have cut the Government of India’s only line of
communication with Teheran and would have menaced at Basra the
Cairo-to-Calcutta line of its great Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme.
The Bagdad Railway, however, did not expose itself to British
diplomatic sabotage as France’s canal across the Egyptian isthmus had
been exposed, for the British Embassy was no longer supreme at
Constantinople. It was in Serbia that the German highway to the East
crossed the Russian line to the Adriatic, and Austria-Hungary was
still seeking a pretext to clear the remnant of the South Slavs from
Germany’s path. In Serbia lay the frontier of British India. Over the
Serbian criss-cross, Great Britain joined Russia in the Anglo-Russian
Treaty of 1907, France joined the two of them after the Agadir crisis
of 1911 in Morocco, and Europe was divided into two armed camps, a
division which pivotted on Serbia.
Meanwhile Great Britain, Russia and France continued negotiations with
Germany over the Bagdad Railway. In the Potsdam Agreement of 1911,
Russia finally turned down the British scheme for a Trans-Persian line
linking the Russian Trans-Caucasian railways with the Nushki Railway
from Quetta, and chose to link its Trans-Caucasian system with the
Bagdad Railway instead, undertaking to build feeder lines from the
Russian zone in north Persia to the main Bagdad line in Mesopotamia.
By 1914, Great Britain had withdrawn its objection to the Bagdad
Railway and had agreed to support no rival railway, exception being
made for a Cairo-Basra line along the Cairo-Calcutta leg of its
Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle. At the same time, negotiations
were nearing completion between France and Germany, but all these
agreements lightly disappeared when the long-expected bugle call
finally sounded out of Serbia on June 28, 1914, and away to the north,
the east and the west, the drums began their answering roll.
VII
CHRISTENDOM AND THE WAR
The effect of the war of 1914-18 upon modern Christendom would not
concern us here if the scene of this narrative were not a Moslem
country to which Christendom, beginning with Old Greece and running
west to the country towns of the United States, has adopted an
attitude of superiority. I do not need to say that the subject of
Christianity itself is very far removed from the realm of controversy,
but its communicants are human beings and are not only subjects of
legitimate controversy but of entirely healthy controversy.
Moslems are usually hospitable to all foreigners and they frequently
respect missionaries personally. They use mission hospitals and
occasionally they avail themselves of the advantages of foreign
schools. But for missionaries as Christians, engaged in spreading a
gospel of peace while their contemporaries at home invent poison gas,
Moslems have neither understanding nor respect. In their Christian
capacities, missionaries are tolerated as long as they do not offend.
The older missionaries know these things. They know that in their
effort to spread Christianity, their greatest enemies have been the
Christians, and most of their work in the Ottoman Empire has been an
effort to convert Eastern Christians to a Western interpretation of
Christianity. But this their supporters in the United States have to
this day never realized. Americans at home have assumed that the word
_Christian_ is an all-sufficing label, that the communicants of the
Orthodox and Gregorian Churches in the East are Christians as Western
Protestants understand the term, that Eastern Moslems are heathen in
the Western meaning of the word; and on this assumption they have
built up out of the mutual tragedies of racial and religious
disentanglement in the Ottoman Empire, their Christian martyr-legend
and the sorry butcher-legend which they have attached to the Turks.
The missionaries’ supporters at home are firm believers in
prohibition, but the missionaries themselves know that the liquor
traffic in the Ottoman Empire has been in the hands of native and
Western Christians, protected under the Capitulations by Christian
Governments. Yet so habitual has the Christian attitude of superiority
become, that American churchmen have actually gone to Constantinople
within these last four years and have come away unhumbled. The city of
Islam has been under the Christians’ control for four years and the
sight of it has been such a rebuke as Christendom has not suffered
since the great Moslem reformation first purged the decadent Eastern
Christendom of the Middle Ages. Americans at home have not yet learned
that European Governments have sometimes accepted Christianity “in
principle” rather than in fact, and that only when the Christians
themselves, from British Foreign Secretaries down to the humblest
Greek dive-keepers in Galata, have been converted to the practice of
Christianity, will the missionaries gain the understanding and respect
of Islam.
I am attempting to speak plainly upon a subject which can be no more
than suggested here for it carries us quickly outside the proper scope
of this narrative, but it is necessary to touch upon it if our subject
is to be plumbed to its depths. I believe that American Protestantism
and British Nonconformism have their greatest task still ahead of them
and that that task lies nearer home than Islam. I believe that task is
nothing less than the salvage of the practice of Christianity from the
wreck the Christians themselves have made of it.
VIII
THE WAR AND ISLAM
KEMAL HURRIES BACK TO CONSTANTINOPLE AND RAUF BEY ASKS THE BRITISH
EMBASSY TO FINANCE NEUTRALITY――ENVER ENTERS THE WAR AND PERSIA
ATTEMPTS TO FOLLOW HIM――THE HARD POSITION OF ISLAM IN INDIA.
Kemal left his post as military _attache_ at Sofia immediately on the
outbreak of war in Europe, and hurried back to Constantinople, still a
young officer but an officer with a brilliant past, a hatred of the
Enver Government which was both personal and political, and a prestige
in the Army comparable to the prestige in the Navy which Hussein Rauf
Bey had won in the raider _Hamidie_. The probability that Russia would
participate in the European war had afforded the Enver Ministry the
opportunity it sought to achieve its Pan-Turanian project, to carry
the Crescent and Star to the “unredeemed” Turks of the Azerbaijan
province of Persia, of Russian Trans-Caucasia and of the Russian
provinces in Central Asia. Fired by the same crude Westernism as had
turned the eyes of the Old Greeks to the “unredeemed” Greeks of
Constantinople, the Enver Ministry had envisaged a Greater Ottoman
Empire which, while maintaining the Caliphate out of deference to Old
Turkish and Islamic opinion, would “liberate” 40,000,000 “Turks” then
“groaning under the heel of the Russian oppressor” and would emerge
from the war a Great Power extending from the Balkans to Bokhara. The
Arabs to the south would be hammered into that respect for the
Caliphate which they had once manifested, but the Turks’ real future
lay away to the east. So the Enver Ministry concluded its secret
agreement with Germany, the British Government seized the two Ottoman
battleships which were building in British yards, and Germany was soon
to run the Goeben and Breslau into the Straits to take their places.
To Kemal and Rauf, the latter of whom had brought his crew home from
one of the two seized battleships in England, Enver’s Pan-Turanianism
was a program which the Empire could not afford. Both of them were
Westerners, but their Westernism was hard and practical and close to
the ground. Within the limits imposed upon them by the Caliphate,
which made the Empire the leader of Islam, they held that the Turk’s
first duty was to his own country. Russia having entered the war in
Europe, a defense of the eastern frontier would be necessary but the
Empire’s internal condition made it essential that events in Europe
should not be permitted to carry it further than a state of armed
neutrality. In the country’s bankrupt condition, the Enver Ministry
had secured the promise of German loans on condition that it
participated in the war against Germany’s enemies, and Rauf went to
the British Embassy immediately on his return to Constantinople, to
say that payment by the British Government for the two battleships it
had seized would strengthen the hands of the Opposition by enabling it
to finance mobilization on the eastern frontier without resort to
German money.
In this, Rauf spoke not only for the political Opposition but for the
strong British and French traditions in Constantinople to which
Enver’s course was a source of genuine grief. Rauf says, however, that
the British Embassy made him no reply. To quote his precise words:
“England made every effort to get Honduras, Paraguay and Greece into
the war on the side of the Allies, but for us she had no word.” The
Emperor of India and the Caliph had parted company in 1907. Great
Britain remained true to its commitments to Russia. Enver’s
Pan-Turanianism may have been impractical or not, but to any Ottoman
Government, whether headed by Enver or Rauf, there were only two
courses in the face of Russia――either to defend itself or to cease to
exist. The Enver Government secured its loans from Germany on the only
terms on which it could get them and if those terms involved war
against Great Britain, it illy becomes British statesmen to complain.
It was not the Enver Government which drew up the Anglo-Russian Treaty
of 1907.
German naval officers hustled the Enver Government to a break by
bombarding Odessa and dropping the mined nets which closed the
Straits, thus banging and bolting the Black Sea gate to Russia as
their own Navy in the north had already banged and bolted Russia’s
Baltic gate. The Caliph proclaimed a Holy War against all Christians
except Germans and Austrians, a proclamation which presumably was
intended to wreck British India but which had the immediate effect of
wrecking Tokatlian’s restaurant in Pera instead. The Enver Government
abrogated the humiliating Capitulations and proclaimed its war aims:
“Our participation in the world war represents the vindication of our
national ideal. The ideal of our nation and people leads us toward the
destruction of our Russian enemy, in order to obtain thereby a natural
frontier to our Empire, which should include and unite all branches of
our race.” Enver himself took command on the eastern frontier and his
main body crossed into Russian Trans-Caucasia, while a smaller force
crossed the Persian frontier toward Tabriz. Ahead of him in both
directions lay large Turkish-speaking populations, and behind him in
Constantinople the Opposition had been scattered. Rauf, the hero of
the _Hamidie_, was eventually exiled to a volunteer command in Persia,
a great seaman fighting with the infantry. Kemal was eventually sent
to the Dardanelles, possibly in the hope that a British shell might
put an end to him.
By this time, Austria-Hungary had smashed Serbia out of the way and
both sides now poured out money and intrigue to win over Greece and
Bulgaria. But Greece refused to budge without the promise of
Constantinople which was in course of being promised to Russia, and
Bulgaria demanded Macedonia. Victories, however, are the most telling
arguments when Balkan Governments are sitting on the fence and Great
Britain launched its Dardanelles campaign in 1915, possibly to open
the road to Russia, possibly to enter Constantinople itself, possibly
to impress Greece and Bulgaria, possibly with all three objects. It
was here, in holding up the British before Anaforta, that Kemal became
a military hero in Germany and would have become the hero of his own
country if Enver had not suppressed the story of Anaforta in
Constantinople. Two years later, when it did leak out in the C. U. P.
year-book for 1917, Enver confiscated the entire remaining issue of
the year-book and had it destroyed. The British used to tell a story
of Kemal’s defense of Anaforta by way of showing that the Turks were
better soldiers than the Germans. According to their version, Kemal at
Anaforta telephoned his German superior, Limon von Sanders, for
permission to attack immediately. Von Sanders refused permission and
Kemal, tearing the telephone from the wall in a fit of anger, attacked
on his own responsibility and won. The story is doubtless false, but
it indicates the sort of legend which was growing up around a soldier
who was, firstly, a Turk and who, secondly, looked upon Germans and
British with equal coldness.
The ending of the British Dardanelles expedition, however, failed to
impress either Greece or Bulgaria. It did impress Constantinople and
when Ali Fethy Bey, Ottoman Minister at Sofia, not only supplied
Bulgaria with the necessary promise of Macedonia but made over to it
at once that bend in the Maritza River in which Karagatch, a suburb of
Adrianople, lies, Bulgaria came in and the Enver Government found
itself on the crest of a great wave of popularity. The Berlin-to-Bagdad
highway was now complete and on the afternoon of January 17, 1916, the
first express rolled into Constantinople direct from Berlin, while
Sirkedji Station rang with cheers.
British defeat at the Dardanelles was a severe blow to the legend of
British invincibility, and the promise of friendship to Islam which
the Kaiser had made at Damascus in 1898 now offered a possible means
of escape from the vise-like grip of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.
The Enver Government had shown the way out and Persia which had felt
the weight of the 1907 Treaty most heavily, was not long in following.
The German Legation in Teheran helped it along with much talk of
Kaiser _Hajji_ Wilhelm Mohammed II and that sort of thing, but when
the Persian Parliament fled from Teheran in 1915 to declare war
against the Allies at Kum, the Russian and British Ministers hastened
to the Palace and threatened to complete their partition of the
country the moment the Shah left the capital. Thereafter the Shah
remained a prisoner in Teheran, while Russians, British, Persian
Nationalists and Turks fought across his chaotic country.
As for Afghanistan, the war found the Court at Kabul divided into two
parties, one led by the Amir’s stepmother Bibi Halima which backed him
in sticking loyally to the British, and the other led by his younger
brother Nasrullah Khan which demanded that he seize the chance of
powerful alliance in breaking out of the Anglo-Russian vise.
Nasrullah’s party grew rapidly, despite the fact that the Amir fought
it with every resource at his command. He confronted it personally
when in November, 1914, he strode onto Kabul bridge in royal state
and, holding the Koran in his hand, declaimed to his enemies: “These
_feringhis_ (British) are our friends. They are my friends. I the
Light of Faith, I, the Torch of the Nation, have decreed, and now
repeat my decree, that no subject of mine shall lift a finger against
the _feringhis_.”
As for Islam in India, its position became one of the sheer
curiosities of contemporary history. Its Emperor in London was at war
with its Caliph in Constantinople. As the result of the 1907 Treaty,
its temporal and its religious allegiances were thrown into direct
opposition. Its leaders attempted to harmonize this contradiction in
its loyalties by drawing a distinction between its Caliph and the
Ottoman Sultan, by conceiving of the war as existing between its
Emperor in London and the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, and by
demanding an undertaking from the Government of India that the war
involved purely temporal objectives and was not concerned in any
degree whatsoever with the Caliphate. The Government of India
accordingly gave an undertaking that the question of the Caliphate was
one for Moslem opinion alone to decide, and on this explicit
understanding Moslem troops were enlisted in India for service against
“our brother Turk.”
This use of Indian Moslems against the Ottoman Sultan, one of the most
delicate of operations, formed one of the outstanding British
successes of the war, but Englishmen at home have never succeeded in
discovering that British India exists. Forgetful of the fact that the
British Empire was “the greatest Moslem Power in the world,” that it
contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians, British
statesmen in England publicly referred to Salonica as “the portal of
Christianity” and to the Egyptian Expeditionary Force which later
advanced into Palestine, as “Crusaders.” At a moment when the
Government of India was making every effort to give its vast country a
sense of security, such references in England made Islam in India
instantly alert for its Caliphate.
IX
THE ARMENIAN DEPORTATIONS OF 1915
ENVER AND THE ARMENIAN PATRIARCH――WHERE THE ARMENIANS LIVED――AMERICAN
MISSIONARIES AND THE ARMENIANS――RUSSIA AND THE ARMENIANS――GREAT
BRITAIN JOINS RUSSIA IN THE 1907 TREATY――ENVER’S DEMAND FOR BRITISH
ADMINISTRATORS IN THE EASTERN PROVINCES――THE WAR AND THE ARMENIAN
DEPORTATIONS.
When the Enver Government entered the war, Enver Pasha himself warned
the Armenian Patriarch in Constantinople against any attempt to turn
the war to Armenian advantage. This contact introduces us into the
most intimate of Ottoman relationships and one which can not be
adequately surveyed unless we divest our minds of the Capitulations
and of that attitude toward the Ottoman Government to which they gave
birth.
In themselves, the Capitulations dated back to pre-Ottoman days when
foreigners were accustomed to being governed under their own laws and
usages wherever they happened to live. In the golden days of the
Ottoman Empire, the Sultans confirmed them and as Ottoman prestige
declined, an increasing number of Capitulatory rights grew up outside
the specific rights originally stipulated in the imperial _firmans_.
In general, it may be said of them that they conferred a diplomatic
status on all Westerners in the Empire, attaching them to their own
Consulates instead of to the Ottoman Government in whose country they
lived. They were abrogated by the Enver Government on Sept. 28, 1914,
in a unilateral declaration which the Central Powers were not in a
position to prevent and against which the Allied Powers could only
register their protests.
But the Capitulations were more than merely a legal process. They
constituted a mental attitude toward the Ottoman Government. They made
it the Western habit to disregard that Government and to establish
Western contacts with its subjects quite independently of the fixed
and existing relationships of the country. Under the Capitulations,
the West long ago established contact with the Ottoman Government’s
Christian subjects and a code of governmental conduct was unwittingly
built up which the West has applied to that Government alone. Under
this code, any Ottoman Christian was given the right to rebel against
the Government but the Government, although it was the only body
charged with the maintenance of peace in the country, was denied the
right to put down Christian rebellion. This code the West has applied
to no other Government. Orthodox Russia has repeatedly stamped out
Moslem rebellion in Central Asia with as great brutality as the
Ottoman Government has ever used against its Christians, but the code
which the West has applied to the Ottoman Government it has never
applied to Russia. The West has never acquired the habit of
disregarding the Russian Government in the country in which it was
charged with the duty of administration. Russia is a modern growth
which has never known Capitulations.
If it is possible for us to divest our minds of the last vestige of
the Capitulations, to apply to the Ottoman Government precisely the
same code of governmental conduct which it has been our custom to
apply to the Eastern absolutism of Old Russia, the relationship of the
Ottoman Government to its Armenians may be profitably examined.
The Armenian population before the late war consisted of about
1,500,000 in the Ottoman Empire, about 1,000,000 in the Russian
Empire, about 150,000 in Persia and about 250,000 in Egypt, Europe and
the United States. Although small colonies of them were to be found in
all parts of the Ottoman Empire, the bulk of them lived in the eastern
provinces, a mountainous tableland on which, with their Turkish
neighbors, they formed a sedentary peasantry among a nomadic
population of Kurds.
In none of these eastern provinces did they constitute a majority of
the population and in this respect they differed sharply from the
Greeks and Bulgarians of the old Balkan provinces. This was not due to
the Ottoman conquest, for the last of the independent Kingdom of
Armenia Major had disappeared in the Seljuk invasion of 1079, and the
Egyptians put an end to Armenia Minor in Cilicia in 1375. It was not
until 1514 that the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, in his campaign against
the Persians, occupied the modern eastern provinces and brought their
tangled populations into the Ottoman Empire. In accordance with the
tolerance which distinguished the great Sultans, the Gregorian Church
to which the Armenians belonged, was made a recognized community in
full enjoyment of its ecclesiastical and cultural liberty. Unlike
Greeks and Bulgarians in Europe who did possess majorities and who
consequently had within themselves all the elements of nationhood, the
Armenians enjoyed in their community institutions the only degree of
autonomy which they could have enjoyed. It was comparatively easy for
Greeks and Bulgarians, once Western ideas of nationalism had reached
them, to enlarge the autonomy of their own community institutions into
territorial independence, but any attempt to transfer Armenian
autonomy from a religious to a territorial basis was quite another
matter. The population of the modern eastern provinces was such that a
resuscitation of the old Armenian Kingdom was impossible and it would
have remained impossible until some means had been discovered of
re-writing ten centuries of history.
That the Armenians were grossly maladministered by the modern Sultans
in Constantinople, there can be no manner of doubt. And so were their
Turkish and Kurdish neighbors. It was in this very maladministration
that the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire lay, and that problem
was a Turkish problem as well as an Armenian problem. The Young
Turkish Revolution of 1908 was an honest attempt to solve it by
reviving the Constitution and decentralizing the Government, but in
the hands of the Committee of Union and Progress the Revolution
swiftly broke down and the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire
remained unsolved.
American missionaries established contact with the Armenian minorities
nearly a century ago, and began drawing out of the Gregorian Church a
number of converts to Protestantism. These converts were so bitterly
persecuted by the Gregorian clergy that the Sultan finally recognized
them, some time in the 1850’s, as a separate _Prodesdan_ community in
enjoyment of the right to worship as they pleased. Continued Gregorian
persecution threw them increasingly into the arms of the missionaries
who became a means by which Americans in the United States were drawn
into touch with the new _Prodesdan_ community in the Ottoman Empire.
It was inevitable that this touch should bring the Armenians into
contact with American civil as well as religious ideas, with the
Western civilization which American Protestantism embodies, and that
the very real and undoubted wrongs which the Armenians were suffering
under Hamidian administration should become known in the United
States. This was in itself an entirely healthy process, but its
tragedy lay in the fact that the missionaries either could not or
would not make it plain to their supporters in the United States that
the Turks suffered from precisely the same wrongs. Thus instead of
bringing all the races of the Empire impartially into the American
vision, instead of making it plain in the United States that the
Hamidian _regime_ in Constantinople was the oppressor and that Turks
and Armenians alike were its victims, the result of American
missionary endeavor was to focus American concern on the Armenians’
sufferings alone.
[Illustration: LIEUT.-GEN. SIR CHARLES A. HARINGTON, G. B. E.,
K. C. B., D. S. O.
Allied Commander-in-Chief at Constantinople until its evacuation in
September and October, 1923.]
[Illustration: GENERAL ISMET PASHA
Commander of the Western (Smyrna) Front until the re-capture of Smyrna
in September, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Mudania
Armistice, October, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the
Peace Treaty of Lausanne, July, 1923; Minister of Foreign affairs of
the Second Grand National Assembly.]
In the meantime, Russia had achieved a contact with the Armenians of a
wholly different sort. Having broken through the barrier of the
Caucasus Range and established its provincial administrations in
Trans-Caucasia, Russia had transferred large numbers of Armenians from
Ottoman to Russian sovereignty, had stripped them of the autonomy of
their community institutions and had kept them in order with an iron
hand. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1876, its Armies had halted their
march toward Alexandretta at Kars whence they overlooked the Ottoman
Armenians in the eastern provinces. The Treaty of San Stefano which
closed the War of 1876 was quashed and in the Treaty of Berlin of
1878, Russian provision for reforms to be applied to the Armenians was
agreed to by all the signatory Powers. In the Cyprus Convention of
1876, however, Great Britain had bound itself to maintain the Sultan’s
realm against Russia, and the eastern provinces, now the most
difficult and the most important provinces in the outer Empire, became
the theatre of directly opposed British and Russian policies. But
Russia, despite its resentment at the loss of the San Stefano Treaty,
had won at Berlin. The Armenian clauses in the Berlin Treaty
reinforced the Armenian disposition to secure redress of their wrongs
independently of their Turkish neighbors who were equal sufferers with
them under the Hamidian _regime_. This tendency presently found
further reinforcement in the Nihilist movement which developed in
Russia after the Russo-Turkish War. The persecuted Armenians of
Russian Trans-Caucasia joined the Nihilist movement, but their
headquarters at Tiflis were stamped out by the Czar’s police and the
Armenian revolutionists fled to Switzerland, Paris, London and New
York.
Relations between Turks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had thus
far been generally peaceful. They both suffered alike under the
Government at Constantinople and even when Westernism was alienating
the Bulgarians in Europe, the Armenians in the eastern provinces were
still “the loyal community.” But the Armenian revolutionists in the
West, instead of confining their work to Russian Trans-Caucasia,
sought to raise funds in the Ottoman Empire as well, and the ancient
Turco-Armenian relationship began to be poisoned. Armenian committees
succeeded in giving the Turks the impression that “the loyal
community” was no longer loyal, and Abdul Hamid replied in the savage
massacres of 1894 and 1896. For this business the West rightly
fastened the blame upon “Abdul the Damned,” and the Turkish people
whose patience sometimes reaches the proportions of a grievous
handicap, were generally exempted from blame.
In 1907, the eastern provinces became the scene of an about-face in
Anglo-Russian relations. Under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of that year,
the two Powers effected an immediate partition of Persia and envisaged
a future partition of the Ottoman Empire in which the eastern
provinces would go to Russia and Mesopotamia would go to Great
Britain. This would have admitted Russia to a military position whence
it could have threatened both the Syrian corridor to Egypt and
Mesopotamia itself, but presumably the British belief which prompted
the 1907 Treaty was that, if Old Russia had made life well-nigh
impossible for the British in Asia, Liberal Russia which was believed
to have been born in the 1905 Revolution, would prove a neighbor with
whom it was possible to live on friendly terms in Asia. So Russian
annexation of the eastern provinces became the common program of Great
Britain and Russia alike, and from that date Russia adopted a policy
so liberal toward its Armenians in Trans-Caucasia that a small Russian
annexationist group soon appeared among the Armenians in the eastern
provinces. The fact must be emphasized that there has never been any
Russian population in these provinces and that the Armenians
constituted Russia’s only ground for intervention and eventual
annexation.
The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 was quickly followed by the Young
Turkish Revolution of 1908. Turks and Armenians alike rejoiced at the
downfall of the Hamidian _regime_. An Armenian _bloc_ was formed in
the new Parliament and the Committee of Union and Progress entered
into apparently amicable relations with it. The bulk of Armenian
opinion in the Empire seemed to be willing to work the revived
Constitution and to begin, in common with its Turkish neighbors, the
reforms of which all the Ottoman races stood in the direst need. But
the Armenian revolutionaries in the West had already planted
independence committees in the Empire and drilled them in the
_technique_ of revolution. The committees’ reply to what seemed to be
Turco-Armenian cooperation in the Parliament at Constantinople, was
the Adana “massacre.” This was on a quite different plane from Abdul
Hamid’s savagery in 1894 and 1896, and the principal fault which may
be found with the Turks at Adana was their tardiness in putting a stop
to it. The independence committees launched it in the approved style
of Balkan revolution, staging it at Adana presumably with a view to
attracting Western intervention at the near-by port of Mersina.
Western battleships did in fact anchor in the Mersina roadstead, but
refrained from landing men.
Russia now loomed above the eastern provinces but during the Balkan
Wars refrained from action, possibly in order to permit the Enver
Government to defend Constantinople against the Bulgarians, Russia
having designs of its own on Constantinople. Still anxious to reach
some solution of the problem of its eastern provinces which would
counter the Russian menace, the Enver Government in 1912 voluntarily
demanded British administrators, as it had a right to do under the
Cyprus Convention of 1876. The British Foreign Office turned down the
demand on the ground that Russia would object to the employment of
British in the vicinity of its frontier. Only a year before, the
Foreign Office had turned down the request of Mr. Morgan Shuster,
American Treasurer-General of Persia, for the employment of a British
officer at Teheran and had cited the same reason for its action. There
was nothing in the letter of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which
authorized the Foreign Office to forbid Major Stokes’ appointment at
Teheran, nor was there anything in the letter of that Treaty which
partitioned the Ottoman Empire between Russia and Great Britain. These
understandings come under the head of what Sir Edward Grey called the
“spirit” of the 1907 Treaty.
When the British Government after the late war dispatched Sir Edward
Grey, then Viscount Grey of Fallodon, to Washington intending to make
him British Ambassador to the United States, he was permitted to
return to London without having taken up his duties. But American
churchmen have not always been as close to reality as their Government
at Washington has been. American educators in the Ottoman Empire,
however, have watched missionary work at first hand for a sufficient
length of time so that today the oldest of them make the most complete
abstinence from any sort of missionary endeavor the first essential in
the management of their schools.
The British Foreign Office had no sooner turned down the Enver
Government’s demand than Russia served its own demands at
Constantinople. The Enver Government appealed to Germany and a
compromise was eventually effected under which a Dutchman and a
Norwegian were appointed Inspectors-General in the eastern provinces.
Neither of them had ever been in the Near East and neither knew any
Near Eastern language. The war began shortly and neither of them ever
reached the Near East.
The Armenian _bloc_ in the Parliament at Constantinople was holding
its 1914 congress at Erzerum in the eastern provinces when the Enver
Government entered the war. Government emissaries visited them there
and laid before them the Pan-Turanian project whose immediate object
was to throw Russia back. A partition of Russian Trans-Caucasia was
proposed, the conquered territory to be divided between Armenians,
Georgians and Tartars, each to be accorded autonomy under Ottoman
suzerainty. The Armenian _bloc_ replied that if war proved necessary
they would do their duty as Ottoman subjects but they advised the
Government to remain neutral. It may be assumed that the Armenian
deputies in the Parliament were still willing, despite the
disappointments of the Enver _regime_, to work the Constitution with
the Turkish deputies. The independence committees, however, found
their inspiration in the West and their program was electrified by the
professed concern for Armenian independence with which the Allied
Powers began the war. The Russian annexationist group was similarly
affected. In their view, Russia’s opportunity to “liberate” the
eastern provinces was at hand.
Under the 1908 Constitution, the Enver Government had a right to
mobilize Armenians of military age as well as Turks, but armed
opposition broke out at once, notably at Zeitun, a town of Armenian
mountaineers who had long enjoyed an almost complete local
independence. Along the eastern frontier, Armenians began deserting to
the Russian Armies and the Enver Government, distrusting the loyalty
of those who remained, removed them from the combatant forces and
formed them into labor gangs whose commissariat, to put it mildly,
worked even more decrepitly than that of the combatant troops.
With this situation in his rear, Enver Pasha crossed both the Russian
and Persian frontiers but in January, 1915, he was thrown back behind
his own frontier by the Russian victory at Sarykamish. This victory
fired the annexationist hopes and armed bands of Armenian volunteers
began operating behind the Ottoman Armies. In April, Lord Bryce and
the “Friends of Armenia” in London appealed for funds to equip these
volunteers, and Russia also was presumably not uninterested in them.
Seeing that both Great Britain and Russia were at war with the Ottoman
Government, it would have been surprising if so obvious a move had
been overlooked. These volunteer bands finally captured Van, one of
the eastern provincial capitals, late in April and, having massacred
the Turkish population, they surrendered what remained of the city to
the Russian Armies in June. The news from Van affected the Turks
precisely as the news from Smyrna affected them when the Greeks landed
there in May, 1919. The rumor immediately ran through Asia Minor that
the Armenians had risen.
By this time, the military situation had turned sharply against the
Enver Government. The Russian victory at Sarykamish was developing and
streams of Turkish refugees were pouring westward into central Asia
Minor. The British had launched their Dardanelles campaign at the very
gates of Constantinople, and Bulgaria had not yet come in. It does not
seem reasonable to assume that this moment, of all moments, would have
been chosen by the Enver Government to take wide-spread measures
against its Armenians unless it was believed that such measures were
immediately necessary. Measures were taken. The provincial governors
in those parts of the Empire which were exposed to the enemy, _i. e._,
the eastern provinces and the Mediterranean coast where British and
French men of war were maintaining a patrol, were ordered to assemble
their Armenians and march them south into the Arab country for
internment. If these deportations were to be carried out in an orderly
fashion, the strongest and most reliable police arrangements were
necessary but these arrangements the Enver Government either could not
or would not make. In general, the deportations only gathered the
Armenians together and exposed them without protection to a population
alarmed and angered by the news from Van. They broke down into a
dreadful business in which Armenian men of military age were shot down
in batches and the remnant of women, children and old persons who had
not already made their way as refugees into Russian Trans-Caucasia,
were finally interned in Mesopotamia and Syria under conditions of the
direst want.
This business deprived Russia of its sole claim to intervention in the
eastern provinces, and the British Foreign Office which shared in the
Anglo-Russian program of partitioning the Ottoman Empire as Persia had
already been partitioned, has naturally made the most of it. Lord
Bryce’s estimate of the number of Armenians who died in the course of
it was 800,000.
X
THE 1907 TREATY AND THE CALIPHATE
GREAT BRITAIN PROMISES CONSTANTINOPLE TO RUSSIA――ARAB NATIONALISM AND
THE HOLY PLACES OF ISLAM――THE HEJAZ BECOMES INDEPENDENT OF
CONSTANTINOPLE――THE BRITISH CAPTURE JERUSALEM――THE CALIPHATE AGITATION
IN INDIA.
The Anglo-Russian _entente_ which had been created by the 1907 Treaty,
went to work in 1914 according to plan, the Russian mill-stone
grinding in from the north and the British mill-stone from the south.
The moment of the Ottoman Empire’s final break-up had arrived, such a
moment as had never occurred before in the history of modern
imperialism and is unlikely to occur again.
Early in 1915, Great Britain and Russia wrote the sequel to the 1907
Treaty in the Sazonoff agreement, negotiated in London. The British
surrender continued. Under the terms of this agreement, Constantinople,
the seat of the Caliphate and the political capital of Islam, was
surrendered to Russia and the neutral zone in Persia (exception being
made for the town of Ispahan) was added to the British zone. The
agreement was necessarily kept secret. At a moment when the Government
of India was exerting every effort to re-assure Indian Moslems on the
subject of the Caliphate, its contents might have exploded India.
The Anglo-Russian partition of the Ottoman Empire was soon agreed
upon. Mesopotamia was duly awarded to Great Britain and the eastern
provinces to Russia (without provision for the independent Armenia for
which the Allied Governments have so frequently expressed concern).
Palestine, an integral part of the Caliph’s domain, was awarded to an
international Western _regime_, and the rest of the Syrian corridor,
together with a great hinterland running north-east to meet the new
Russian frontier and east to the Persian frontier, was awarded to
France as a buffer between the Russian and British acquisitions. But
the German drive on Paris made it impossible for France to release an
Army for the occupation of its zone. Under the military pressure on
the Western Front, France had no recourse but to recall its
Consul-General at Beirut and to maintain a diplomatic watch upon its
zone. Incidentally, its zone included Aleppo, the Achilles’ heel of
the Ottoman Empire, which lay only a two days’ marching distance from
Alexandretta which in turn lay a half-days’ steaming from the British
base at Famagusta on Cyprus. But although the British Government
raised the project of striking at Aleppo time and again, France and
Russia interposed and maintained their vetoes. As a result, the
British Egyptian Expeditionary Force and Indian Expeditionary Force
“D” in Mesopotamia were put in the interesting position of having to
operate for four years against an enemy whose military rear was open
at Aleppo.
It now becomes possible to reconstruct the British war program. The
Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta project which proposed to embed the Suez
Canal in 8,000 miles of British territory running from South Africa to
India, was its goal. It was not an incident in the growth of the
Empire, it was its very climax and full fruition. It was the peak of
British imperialism.
Its center was Cairo and with the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the
enemy alliance, the great British Embassy at Constantinople abdicated
in favor of the British Agency in Cairo. It was from Cairo that Islam
was paralyzed by the split between Arabs and Turks. If Lord Kitchener
were alive today, it seems safe to say that he would be the ruler in
Cairo of an Arab area stretching from the Sudan to Persia, with a
protege at Mecca in the person of King Hussein dignified by the newly
acquired Caliphate of Islam. As for the Ottoman Caliphate, Czarist
Russia was to reduce the Sultans to simple Amirs of Anatolia, a
program in which the Foreign Office connived and whose result has been
what Englishmen since the war have referred to as British “abdication”
in India. We in the West might understand more vividly what “our
brother Turk” means to Islam in India if we had been in the habit of
entering India by an overland route rather than by the sea route which
we customarily use….
Great Britain’s declaration of war against the Ottoman Empire on Nov.
5, 1914, enabled it to transfer Cyprus to the Colonial Office at once.
In Cairo, it enabled the British Agency to depose the Sultan’s
_Khedive_ and to set up a _Khedive_ of its own. London’s repeated
pledges to France on the subject of Egypt made it hesitate at the
final cancellation of Ottoman sovereignty but the situation was a
difficult one and the British Protectorate was duly proclaimed, the
Agency’s _Khedive_ assuming the title of Sultan. The Agency was now
elevated to the status of a Residency and martial law was proclaimed.
Very soon, German and Ottoman forces struck at the Suez Canal through
which British Indian, Australian and New Zealand forces were streaming
_en route_ to France and whose banks were garrisoned with a mixed
assemblage of troops known as the Force in Egypt, a Force uncertain as
Lord Kitchener afterward reminded it whether it was expected to defend
the Canal or the Canal was expected to defend it. The enemy was thrown
back from the very banks of the Canal and, having itself crossed to
establish the bridgehead of Kantara, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force
marked time while the _Grand Sherif_ of Mecca communicated the terms
of Arab nationalism to the Residency in Cairo. Arab nationalism made
it necessary for the Foreign Office in London to consult France and
the result of that consultation was the secret Sykes-Picot agreement
which did not long detain the Residency in Cairo and which need not
long detain us here.
What is worthy of attention here, however, is the fact that Arab
nationalism involved Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the three sites of
the holiest places of Islam. With the Egyptian Expeditionary Force
marking time at Kantara, Mecca and Medina lay on the southern flank of
its advance and to the north in the lower end of the Syrian corridor
lay Jerusalem. The three constituted a line lying across the line of
the E. E. F.’s advance, a line guaranteed to all Islam by its Ottoman
Caliph and additionally guaranteed to Islam in India by the Government
of India’s undertaking that the Caliphate was a matter for Moslem
opinion alone to decide. This guaranteed line, however, lay across the
Cairo-Calcutta leg of the Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle and in
due time the Foreign Office handed down its instructions. The
Residency in Cairo began the extemporization of a British Arabia which
should pivot on Mecca with provincial capitals at Damascus and Bagdad.
Thus was carried into effect one of the most momentous decisions in
the history of an Empire which once called itself “the greatest Moslem
Power in the world,” a decision which plumbs the depths of the British
surrender in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The Ottoman Caliphate
was the last great barrier in front of imperialism. The 1907 Treaty
broke it.
The Residency now lost no time in establishing contact with the _Grand
Sherif_ of Mecca. The Ottoman Caliph hurried reinforcements to the
Hejaz, but the _Sherif’s_ son Feisal drew a cordon around them in
Medina at the southern terminus of the Hejaz Railway. Although British
officers directed him in repeated efforts to isolate Medina by cutting
the Hejaz Railway, the Caliph succeeded in holding it until after the
Ottoman Government signed its armistice in 1918, but throughout the
rest of the Hejaz, his garrisons sooner or later were removed to
British prison camps in Egypt. In the summer of 1917 the _Grand
Sherif_ declared his independence of Constantinople, assuming the
title of King Hussein I.
The loss of Mecca broke the Ottoman Caliphate. King Hussein had his
own lineal qualifications for the Caliphate. An Anglican-Orthodox
union had been projected with its capital in a Russian Constantinople,
and an Arab king at Mecca may indicate the disposition which the
Foreign Office in London proposed to make of the Caliphate. From that
day to this, the burden of supporting the Hejaz has been transferred
from Constantinople to London. Once it was part of the burden of the
Ottoman Caliphate. Today it is maintained by a British subsidy. Two of
the three most venerable shrines of Islam are financed by the Colonial
Office which, whatever else may be said of it, is not a Moslem bureau.
With its right secured, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was now free
to advance on Jerusalem. With British officers on its right fetching
Feisal’s Hejaz Army northward toward Damascus, the E. E. F. wheeled
into the lower end of the Syrian corridor against stubborn
Turco-German opposition. With small French and Italian detachments
posted to it in view of the award of Palestine to an international
Western _regime_, the E. E. F. finally occupied Jerusalem late in 1917
and, having broken up repeated enemy attempts to recover it, rested on
its arms while the Residency at Cairo converted it into a British
_fait accompli_.
When Godfrey de Bouillon captured Jerusalem in a former episode, he
waded through blood to his saddle girth to rescue the Holy Sepulchre,
but mediaevalism has changed its methods. When General Allenby
captured it in 1917, he tacked up an “Out of Bounds” sign on the Holy
Sepulchre, the Residency at Cairo hurried up one of its _attaches_ to
serve as military governor of the town, an assistant city engineer
from Alexandria hurriedly arrived to draw up a new town plan for it
and a landscape artist was hurried down from London to put the new
town plan into effect. So Jerusalem became a British _fait accompli_
and so it remains to this day. And the new town plan, having
presumably served its purpose, has disappeared.
The war has given us all an aptitude for loose thinking and a full
share of loose thought has attached to General Allenby and his
Egyptian Expeditionary Force. Under our Western political tradition, a
majority of the population is given the right to determine its own
destiny, provided it is of a sufficient degree of intelligence to
shoulder its responsibilities. If the faith of that majority in
Palestine happens to be Islam, is not Islam the only one of the three
faiths to which both Christian and Jewish shrines are equally sacred
with its own? Has Islam ever failed in respect to the Christian and
Jewish shrines in Jerusalem during its centuries of trusteeship? And
what has happened to Islam’s shrines in Cordoba, Grenada and Toledo,
in Sicily and Malta, under Christian rule?
At the British demand, the Ottoman Caliph finally withdrew his
garrison from Medina after the armistice in 1918. It is simple enough
to upset the theology of an Ottoman Caliphate, but the British Foreign
Office, despite the Government of India’s specific undertaking to
Moslems in India, has upset the _fact_ of an Ottoman Caliphate and in
the last fifty years the fact and the theology of the matters. The
Caliphate has become the symbol of all those Eastern traditions which
are woven into the fabric of Islamic civilization, a symbol thrown
into vivid relief by the increasing inroads which Western and Russian
imperialisms have been making into that civilization. However narrow
Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly it confined the Young
Turks to a rigidly conservative interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam
in India could Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate adjust
its Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab
nationalism. But the forcible imposition of Western civilization upon
the Arabs was a still further step in that process of Western
imperialism against which the very existence of the Caliphate had
become a protest.
Until the war ended, Islam in India relied not only on the Government
of India’s undertaking to the effect that the Caliphate was a matter
for Moslem opinion alone to decide, but on the fact that the Empire as
a whole contained 100,000,000 Moslems to 80,000,000 Christians. With
these assurances, Indian Moslem troops even participated in the
capture of Jerusalem, but when the peace proposed to continue what the
war had begun, the Caliphate agitation in India soon became the most
formidable fact in the British Empire. The Foreign Office and the
India Office are supposed to be housed on the same quadrangle off
Downing Street in London, but the distance which the Anglo-Russian
Treaty of 1907 has brought between them is one of the sheer
curiosities of contemporary history. One sometimes wonders, on that
exalted plane on which Sovereigns dwell, what the Emperor of India has
been saying to the Defender of the Faith since 1907 and what reply the
Defender of the Faith has been making to the Emperor of India.
XI
THE COLLAPSE OF CZARIST RUSSIA
THE CZAR ABDICATES――THE FRENCH DEPOSE CONSTANTINE AT ATHENS――KEMAL
URGES ENVER TO WITHDRAW FROM THE WAR――MR. LLOYD GEORGE’S NEW WAR AIMS
IN TURKEY――THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN TREATY OF 1907 ABROGATED――PAN-TURANIANISM
LEAPS INTO LIFE ON THE HEELS OF THE RUSSIAN ROUT――THE MUDROS ARMISTICE
OPENS THE BRITISH ROAD TO THE CHAOS IN RUSSIA.
Following the East India Company’s lead, the Government of India had
long continued to weave into closer mesh the fabric of British
influence which covered the land-locked Persian Gulf. In Nejd, Koweit
and Mohammerah, in the maintenance for more than a century of an Agent
at Bagdad, there lay the seeds of a British Arabian enterprise
comparable to the great enterprise of British India. The Anglo-Russian
Treaty of 1907 ensued and in 1914 the Government of India diverted a
brigade of Indian Expeditionary Force “A” for Egypt and France, to the
Persian Gulf where it lay off Bahrein Island to make a lightning
stroke against Basra, the key to Bagdad. As soon as war was declared,
it was heavily reinforced and, having been designated Indian
Expeditionary Force “D,” it moved at once on Basra which it occupied
in three weeks. Its Political Officer urged an immediate advance on
Bagdad, but the Government of India was already groaning under the
pressure from London. “D” Force succeeded, however, in advancing
slowly north against a stiffening Turco-German opposition until it
reached Kut-el-Amara.
At this stage, the tired Government of India suddenly woke up and
ordered a bold dash to Bagdad. This turn of events changed the whole
basis of “D” Force’s operations from the defensive to the offensive, a
change for which the Force as then constituted was quite inadequate.
The result was that the Turco-German command was able at Ctesiphon to
throw General Townshend back to Kut-el-Amara where he was surrounded
and held out for five months while the Government of India launched
successive failures to relieve him. Kut-el-Amara was finally starved
into surrender, General Townshend was removed to Constantinople as a
prisoner of war, and the Government of India was forthwith relieved of
its command. Indian Expeditionary Force “D” now became the
Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force under War Office command, although
the Government of India retained its political command in Sir Percy
Cox.
It was not until the end of 1916 that the War Office was ready to
begin operations for the recapture of Kut-el-Amara, and by the end of
February, 1917, the enemy was in full retreat. On the heels of his
rout, Bagdad was occupied on March 11 and, although the Turco-German
command made repeated attempts to recapture the city, its British
defense held and Germany’s Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme was left in the
air.
The Russian Armies by this time had not only advanced deeply into the
eastern provinces but had occupied their zone in northern Persia in
sufficient force to link with the British in Mesopotamia. A very few
of them had even been permitted to travel to Basra and below it to
gaze upon the blue and British waters of the Persian Gulf.
But on March 12, 1917, the Czar abdicated.
On May 16, Kerensky’s Republican Cabinet was set up at Petrograd, and
the British Foreign Office entered at once into cordial relations with
it.
On June 11, the French deposed Constantine at Athens, the Venizelist
Government which was imposed on Old Greece entered the war on the side
of the Allies, and ever since the failure of the British Dardanelles
campaign, there had been an Allied Army based on Salonica, the key to
Constantinople.
In July, Kerensky ordered General Baratoff to withdraw the Russian
Armies from Persian soil. They melted away both from Persia (with the
exception of a small force of die-hards who continued to hold Teheran
hoping that the trouble at Petrograd would soon blow over), and from
the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
On Sept. 30, General Mustapha Kemal Pasha who had thrown up his
command of the Sixteenth Army in disgust after a break with Falkenhayn
over the recapture of Bagdad, urged Enver Pasha to make the Russian
collapse the occasion of withdrawal from the war. The disruption of
the country’s economic life and the constant drainage away of its gold
to Germany could have but one end, he wrote from Aleppo. Even with
Russia eliminated, Great Britain and France could not be divided and
they could not be beaten. The British would conquer Palestine, would
set up a Christian Government with which to hold the Suez Canal, and
would isolate the remnant of the Empire from the rest of Islam――“a
sound war policy made possible by our entry into the war against
England, a policy whose success means irreparable loss for us and
whose failure means German domination for us…. Falkenhayn has said
repeatedly to anyone who will listen to him, that he is a German and
is naturally interested first in Germany. If he can hold Palestine, he
will place himself before the world and before our country as one of
the great victors of the war. We shall then lose our own country and
to this end, Falkenhayn will sacrifice every ounce of gold and every
soldier he can squeeze out of us.” But in the wake of the Russian
rout, Pan-Turanianism had leaped into new life. Enver’s reply was to
give Falkenhayn command of the Palestine front and to exile Kemal,
together with Rauf Bey, to Germany in the suite of the Crown Prince.
On Nov. 7, another revolution lifted its head amid the chaos of the
Kerensky administration and Soviet Russia was born, to be attacked at
once by the British Foreign Office with a vindictive hatred which has
not even now run its full course.
On Jan. 5, 1918, Mr. Lloyd George, then barred from access to Soviet
Russia by the bolted Straits, declared in London: “Nor are we fighting
… to deprive Turkey of its capital or of the rich and renowned lands
of Asia Minor and Thrace, which are predominantly Turkish in race…. We
do not challenge the maintenance of the Turkish Empire in the
homelands of the Turkish race with its capital at Constantinople.”
This declaration was interpreted by what remained of the Opposition in
Constantinople, to mean that the Emperor of India, freed from his
Russian incubus, was in a position to renew his old understanding with
the Caliph.
On Feb. 1, Soviet Russia abrogated the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907
and the British Foreign Office “shook hands with murder” to the extent
of concurring in the abrogation. But the 1907 Treaty had already
worked out to its ghastly fruition. Nothing remained of Persia’s
independence but an imprisoned Shah at Teheran. The Caliphate of Islam
was destroyed, and few countries have ever been flogged into such ruin
as now prevailed in the Turkish remnant of the Ottoman Empire.
On March 2, Germany imposed its peace terms on Soviet Russia at
Brest-Litovsk, detaching the Ukraine from Russia, embedding the Black
Sea firmly in the Berlin-Baku-Bokhara scheme (the old Berlin-to-Bagdad
scheme had been left in the air by the British capture of Bagdad), and
making over Batum to the Turks. A Turco-German conference at Trebizond
on the Black Sea speedily effected a joint policy for Trans-Caucasia,
under whose terms Baku was named as the capital of a new
Trans-Caucasian State to be christened “Azerbaijan,” presumably after
the Azerbaijan province in north-west Persia which it was proposed to
claim as an irredentum for the new State. An Ottoman Army, accompanied
by a German military mission, now lost no time in moving on Baku and
the British Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force simultaneously detached a
small body which it designated the “Dunsterforce,” hurriedly
dispatching it across Persia for Tiflis in Trans-Caucasia. Turks,
Germans and British raced for Baku, all three determined now that
Russia had fallen back behind the barrier of the Caucasus Range, to
hold it there.
In the eastern provinces, the Russian rout had left hardly as much as
a street cat alive. In what had been Russian Trans-Caucasia, beyond
the eastern provinces, three small and quarrelsome Governments bobbed
about like corks in the chaos, a Tartar Government at Baku controlled
by the local Russian Soviet, an Armenian Government at Erivan
controlled by the brigand-patriot Antranik, and a Liberal Georgian
Government at Tiflis which feared the Russians and despised the
Armenians. The Ottoman Army drove its way easily to Baku. The British
Dunsterforce reached there first but only in time to flee back to
Persia, for the Ottoman forces stormed the city’s hurriedly
extemporized defensive works, installed their Azerbaijan Government,
signed their treaty of close military alliance with it, organized the
Turkish Federalist Party in its support and set about the task of
fetching all Trans-Caucasia under its rule. Firmly founded on the
German Berlin-Baku-Bokhara scheme, Pan-Turanianism had finally become
a reality.
Meanwhile on July 3, the Crown Prince succeeded to the Throne at
Constantinople. The Sixth Mohammed took up his abode in the white
marble palace of Dolma Bagtsche on the Bosphorus. But it was not the
Old Turks who girded him with the Prophet’s Sword. Instead of the
Mevlevi _tchelebi_ from Konia, he was girded by the _sheikh_ of the
great Senussi order whose seat is at Jarabub in the Sahara. A German
submarine had taken him aboard at an empty place on the African coast
and had landed him at Pola. Throughout the crossing, he had said his
prayers five times a day in the forward battery compartment, facing
toward Mecca by standard compass.
General Mustapha Kemal Pasha who had spent most of a year touring
Germany and Austria-Hungary in disgrace, was now recalled and given
the _Yilderim_ group (Fourth, Seventh and Eighth Armies) on the
Palestine front. But it was too late. Amid the din of a world war
crashing to its close, simultaneous offensives were launched in
September, by the French command at Salonica with Constantinople as
its objective and by the British command in Palestine with Aleppo as
its objective. With General Allenby’s great break-through overrunning
the Syrian corridor, the French imposed an armistice on Bulgaria and
the Enver Government fell in Constantinople. Enver Pasha fled to
Daghestan, a dapper young Turk still in earnest pursuit of the
Pan-Turanian will-o’-the-wisp, and the Opposition inherited the wreck
with its capital gripped by a German garrison and French fingers
reaching for it from the Maritza.
But the great wheel twirled and clicked. From a French command with
the Old Greeks in tow, the new Izzet Government in Constantinople had
nothing to hope. From the Emperor of India, freed from his Russian
incubus, it had everything to hope. Secretly in order not to provoke
the Germans to counter-action, the Izzet Government lost no time in
dispatching General Townshend who was still a prisoner of war on
Prinkipo, to the British naval Commander-in-Chief at Port Mudros
outside the Straits. Rauf Bey, Minister of Marine in the Izzet
Cabinet, followed in hurried secrecy with two colleagues. If their
mission was a success, the German garrison in Constantinople would
have to be confronted with a _fait accompli_.
In the cabin of H. M. S. Agamemnon, Admiral Calthorpe’s flagship at
Port Mudros, Rauf outlined the Izzet Government’s program in seeking
an armistice: (1) a return to the understanding which the Caliph and
the Emperor of India had enjoyed down to 1907; (2) autonomy for the
Arabs under the Caliph’s sovereignty; (3) recognition of the
abrogation of the Capitulations; and (4) temporary financial help, if
necessary. Admiral Calthorpe asked only that the Straits be unbarred
and the road to Soviet Russia be opened. As for Pan-Turanianism, it
might prove useful in holding Russia behind the barrier of the
Caucasus Range. Clause 11 of the Mudros armistice stipulated as
follows: “Immediate withdrawal of Turkish troops from North-West
Persia to behind the pre-war frontier has already been ordered and
will be carried out. Part of Trans-Caucasia has already been ordered
to be evacuated by Turkish troops, the remainder to be evacuated if
required by the Allies after they have studied the situation there.”
Clause 15 added: “Allied control officers to be placed on all
railways, including such portions of Trans-Caucasian railways now
under Turkish control, which must be placed at the free and complete
disposal of the Allied authorities, due consideration being given to
the needs of the population. This clause to include Allied occupation
of Batum. Turkey will raise no objection to the occupation of Baku by
the Allies.”
So “hostilities between the Allies and Turkey” ceased “from noon,
local time, on Thursday, 31st October, 1918.” The Straits were
unbarred and when the French fingers closed upon Constantinople,
British fingers closed with them. General Franchet d’Esperet had to
share his command with General Milne. Between rows of British and
French bayonets, the German garrison marched out of the capital and
the Turks were relieved that the Emperor of India was once again the
friend of the Caliph. Allied fleets, to be strengthened soon by most
of the British Grand Fleet from the North Sea, steamed up the
Dardanelles and anchored in the Bosphorus. Greek battleships followed
them, anchoring under the windows of Dolma Bagtsche palace, and the
Ottoman Caliph, to spare himself the painful sight, repaired to Yildiz
Kiosk which for thirty-two years had been the hermit-home of Abdul
Hamid. With Liberal Russia destroyed, the Church of England was soon
to transfer the venue of its theological disquisitions with the
Orthodox Church from the Patriarchate at Moscow to the Phanar in
Constantinople. Five centuries of history were about to be re-written
and Ottoman Greeks in the capital, trampling their _fezzes_, donned
Western hats in transports of the wildest joy. The remnant of the
Ottoman Armenians did the same; both the Ottoman Empire and Russia
were destroyed and nothing (except ten centuries of history) now
remained to prevent the resuscitation of the mediaeval Kingdom of
Armenia.
But the Ottoman capital had been reduced to a supply base for Denikin.
With an Anglo-French command in firm control of the great city, the
Russians at last began their entry into Constantinople――big Slavs in
uniform who had borne the British to their knees in 1907, huge
slit-eyed men once kings in Kafiristan, now grovelling for crusts in
the gutters of Galata.
XII
THE ANGLO-RUSSIAN WAR OF 1918-’20
HOW MR. LLOYD GEORGE TRIED TO IMPOSE ALONE UPON ISLAM THAT FATE WHICH
GREAT BRITAIN AND RUSSIA HAD AGREED TO IMPOSE TOGETHER IN 1907――THE
ANGLO-PERSIAN AGREEMENT――THE “CENTRAL ASIAN FEDERATION”――THE AMERICAN
MANDATE IN TRANS-CAUCASIA――THE RETURN OF SOVIET RUSSIA.
The war now began in bitter earnest.
Czarist Russia had been a weight upon Islam which had increased until
1907 when, in agreement with Great Britain, the two Powers began
grinding to pieces the last of the independent Islamic States.
Russia’s collapse in 1917 and the resultant abrogation of the 1907
Treaty, coinciding with Germany’s collapse, afforded the British
Government a marvelous opportunity to reconsider its policy toward
Islam. The British had no great enemy left in the East, but apparently
the fact did not occur to Mr. Lloyd George. In the Anglo-Russian war
of 1918-’20, the British Government took over the business of crushing
Islam which Czarist Russia had begun, while attempting to overthrow
the Soviet Government and re-instate in office a Russian Government
which should concur in the fate which the British alone now sought to
impose on the last of the Islamic States. With Constantinople
occupied, the Ottoman Sultans could be reduced to simple Amirs of
Anatolia whenever Mr. Lloyd George chose. In the meantime, what
happened in Turkey hardly mattered. What happened in Russia did
matter.
The little Dunsterforce which had been thrown back into Persia by the
Turkish capture of Baku, was quickly reinforced from Bagdad and became
the British North Persia Force with its base at Kasvin, not far from
Teheran. Here it stood in the heart of the old Russian zone, despite a
small body of Czarist die-hards who still clung to the old Russian
zone in Teheran. Meanwhile the old British zone in the southern half
of Persia had been occupied by the South Persia Rifles whose officer
personnel was British, and early in 1918 the Government of India had
dispatched the East Persia Cordon from Quetta along the Nushki Railway
to the new railhead of Duzdap in the Seistan, whence it ran a lorry
road north through Persia to Meshed in the old Russian zone and flung
out detachments to occupy Askabad and the Merv oasis on the Russian
Trans-Caspian Railway.
Late in 1918, the Mudros armistice enabled the North Persia Force to
re-occupy Baku in Trans-Caucasia (where it left the Turkish Federalist
Party in power) and General Milne occupied Batum from Constantinople.
Ostensibly to hold Denikin’s rear, the British occupation of
Trans-Caucasia was rapidly completed, the Turco-German forces being
evacuated into the eastern provinces and the remnants of the Czarist
forces being rounded up and dismissed to Denikin’s front. At Baku, the
Czarist Caspian Fleet was maneuvred into British hands and removed to
British keeping at Enzeli on the Persian coast. Opposite Baku on the
eastern coast of the Caspian, the East Persia Cordon detached from
Askabad a small garrison for Krasnovodsk, and Persia was now not only
held by British and Indian forces but all its approaches, from north,
south, east and west, were in the same hands.
In Denikin’s rear, General Milne at Constantinople now commanded a
single British front which crossed Trans-Caucasia from Batum to Baku,
which made a British lake of the Caspian, and which extended into
Central Asia from Krasnovodsk to Askabad and the Merv oasis. Over all
of it, the double-headed eagle of Czarist Russia had waved only a year
before. Behind this truly remarkable front, railway projects were
speedily envisaged by which the new British Arabia, British Persia and
British Trans-Caucasia were to be firmly bound to each other and to
British India, a Bagdad-Teheran-Enzeli line to develop Enzeli into a
British naval base which should command the Caspian, and a Batum-Kars-
Tabriz-Duzdap line to fetch the frontiers of British India to the
Black Sea as they had already been fetched to Haifa on the
Mediterranean. The Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta triangle had not only
been made good, but the collapse of Czarist Russia had made the
British a present of the Constantinople-Kabul line in addition.
British officers were glum with expectation.
Sir Percy Cox, chief political officer of the Mesopotamian
Expeditionary Force, was dispatched to Teheran as British Minister as
soon as the Mudros armistice brought the war to an end on the
Mesopotamia front, and began formulating the Anglo-Persian Agreement
at once. Persia had then been swallowed whole by the British. The
North Persia Force was paying 350,000 _tomans_ a month (roughly
$800,000) to keep the Persian Government in being and 100,000 _tomans_
a month to keep the old Cossack Division quiet. Under these
conditions, Sir Percy Cox began negotiations in January, 1919, with
three Persian grandees and by June the Agreement was ready to be
signed. It provided for a British loan of £2,000,000 to the Persian
Government and for British advisers in the Persian Ministries.
Briefly, it had the effect of reducing Persia to another of the
British Indian frontier States. It was finally approved by the British
Foreign Office and was signed by the three Persians on August 9. It
had been drawn up secretly and no public announcement of its signature
was made until August 15, when it was announced simultaneously that
the Shah had left for a prolonged tour in Europe. It was to take
effect as soon as the Persian Parliament ratified it. At the moment
the Parliament was not in session, the deputies having left Teheran in
1915, intending to re-assemble at Kum to follow the Ottoman Empire
into war against the Anglo-Russian _entente_.
Meanwhile the East Persia Cordon regularized the position of its
garrisons in Meshed and Merv by styling them “Afghan Consulates-General
under armed guard.” It will be recalled that the Amir Habibullah Khan
of Afghanistan, a wild country which tilts up to the roof of the world
above the north-west frontier of India, had stuck loyally to the
British despite a fiery nationalist party which sought to carry him
into the war against the Anglo-Russian _entente_. He was still
sticking loyally to the British when Czarist Russia fell in 1917 and
all of Central Asia fell with it into the most complete confusion.
North of him, Bokhara, a smaller country which adjoins the Afghan
frontier for nearly half its length, had been nominally independent
under the rule of its Emir, Said Mir Alim Khan, in Old Bokhara City,
but actually ruled by the Czarist Resident in the Russian cantonment
of New Bokhara. The Kerensky Cabinet at Petrograd continued this
_regime_, but Soviet Russia recalled the Resident and left the Emir in
control. The mutual abrogation of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 had
the effect of leaving both Bokhara and Afghanistan in enjoyment of
actual independence. The Young Uzbeg Party in Bokhara immediately
began an agitation for the introduction of Parliamentary government,
but the Emir Said Mir Alim lost no time in discovering new friends at
Merv where the Government of India’s East Persia Cordon had set up one
of its “Afghan Consulates-General under armed guard.”
It had never been possible for the British to dictate their own terms
to Afghanistan as they did to Persia after the Russian retreat, for
the Afghans are made of sterner stuff. Neither the Uzbegs of Bokhara
to the north nor the Punjabis of India to the south have shown much
love for the Afghans. As for the Persians, the Afghans could doubtless
do what they pleased with them. But with the dispatch of the East
Persia Cordon to Meshed and Merv, Said Mir Alim of Bokhara and
Habibullah of Afghanistan reached an understanding respecting a
“Central Asian Federation” which should be “independent of Russian
domination.”
[Illustration: PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI
Until the Ottoman General Election in November, 1919, an Orthodox
priest at Kiskin, near Angora; after the General Election, “acting
metropolitan” of the Turkish Orthodox Church.]
[Illustration: MELETIOS IV
Oecumenical Patriarch from February, 1922, to July, 1923.]
The meaning of Bokhara to British India has already been indicated.
British command of the Caspian now isolated the Trans-Caspian Railway
from Soviet Russia, and with Bokhara detached from Russia and brought
within the British Indian orbit, the only remaining Russian railway to
the back of India, _i. e._, the Moscow-Orenburg-Tashkent line, would
stop at Samarkand as far as its military usefulness to any future
Russia was concerned. The Russian spurs to Termez and Kushklinsky Post
on the northern frontier of Afghanistan which had been nightmares in
British India, would lose their meaning. Any future Russian move
against British India would be countered at Bokhara which lies at a
sufficient distance to prevent the unsettling effect of Anglo-Russian
trouble from making itself felt in India.
But on Feb. 20, 1919, Habibullah was assassinated. Nasrullah seized
the throne but, convicted in open durbar of murdering the Amir, he was
unseated in favor of the Amir’s third son, Amanullah. Nasrullah’s
strong nationalist following rushed pell-mell into an invasion of
British India, but was thrown back by the Indian Army. The East Persia
Cordon was hurriedly withdrawn to Quetta and the announcement of the
Anglo-Persian Agreement’s signature at Teheran was followed three
weeks later by a Bokharan revolution in which the Young Uzbeg party
dethroned Said Mir Alim and set up its Parliament. Possibly the Young
Uzbegs feared a similar British _coup_ at Bokhara City.
Said Mir Alim having fled into Afghanistan, the Soviet Government at
Moscow finally concluded military and commercial treaties with the
Young Uzbegs on March 4, 1921, which purport to recognize the
independence of the Bokhara People’s Soviet Republic. This is
Bokhara’s present title, but the British Foreign Office still
withholds full recognition from any of the Soviet States. Even as late
as May 8, 1923, a note from Lord Curzon to the Soviet Government
demanded _inter alia_ the recall of the Soviet Ministers from Teheran
and Kabul, and a long statement by Said Mir Alim on the subject of
Soviet “treachery” was circulated to the London press on the evening
of June 4….
The East Persia Cordon’s hurried scuttle back to Quetta early in 1919
still left the British in control of Persia and in occupation of
Trans-Caucasia and Constantinople. General Milne still commanded the
Black Sea, the line of the Caucasus Range, the Caspian and the
trans-Caspian town of Krasnovodsk. Denikin still stood between Soviet
Russia and the British.
Having isolated the starving Armenians of Erivan from any possibility
of Russian relief, whether from Denikin or Soviet Russia, the British
permitted Americans to embroil themselves in Armenian affairs as
intimately as they would. If the United States Government had
permitted itself to be rushed into the acceptance of a mandate over
the Armenians in Trans-Caucasia, it is not impossible that the British
would have gratefully accepted the barrier between Soviet Russia and
British Persia which such a mandate would incidentally have furnished.
The Armenians had once constituted Czarist Russia’s sole claim to
intervention in the eastern provinces of the old Ottoman Empire, and
if that claim had been disposed of to the United States, not only
would an effective barrier have been interposed in front of Russia’s
inevitable return to Trans-Caucasia but the remnant of Turkey would
have been cut off from the rest of Islam.
By the summer of 1919, however, it had become plain that the United
States Government, while anxious to see American relief extended to
the Armenians, was unwilling to incur an inevitable quarrel with the
future Russia, and General Milne in Constantinople announced that
Italy would occupy Trans-Caucasia. Three months later, an Italian
military mission on the spot followed the example which the United
States Government had set and in September, 1919, the necessity of
reinforcing his Constantinople garrison compelled General Milne to
pull in his isolated packet of troops in Krasnovodsk and to evacuate
Trans-Caucasia down to Batum. Will the Royal Army Service Corps ever
issue another ration of caviare in Baku?
Mr. Lloyd George now began peddling Trans-Caucasia all over Europe,
offering the Armenians in turn to Holland, Sweden, Rumania, to the
League of Nations, to Canada and New Zealand, and even flirting with
Turkish Pan-Turanianism. But the spectacle of Mr. Lloyd George bearing
gifts to the world attracted the same scrutiny elsewhere as it had
already attracted at Washington. Presumably anybody who was able to
hold Trans-Caucasia could have had the Armenians in those days (except
Denikin and Soviet Russia who alone were both able and willing to take
them), for demobilization at home was rapidly putting an end to
British ability to hold anything more than Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria,
Egypt, Cyprus and Constantinople.
This sort of thing continued until Denikin began his retreat early in
1920, which sooner or later would expose Trans-Caucasia to the Soviet
Government. Still tub-thumping on the subject of the Armenians, the
British Foreign Office now gave _de facto_ recognition to the Turkish
Federalist Government of Azerbaijian, the _Dashnakoutzian_ Government
of Armenia, and the Liberal Government of Georgia. The British War
Office rushed men and munitions into Trans-Caucasia to stiffen the
three Governments against the approaching Soviet Armies. The British
Admiralty hurried out a naval mission to overhaul the old Russian
Caspian Fleet in the Persian port of Enzeli.
But the Soviet Armies intercepted the Admiralty’s mission at Baku,
threw its personnel into jail, and themselves sent an expedition to
Enzeli to take over the old Russian Fleet from beneath the guns of the
British North Persia Force. That interception announced Russia’s
return to Trans-Caucasia which, since the collapse of Czarist Russia
in 1917, has seen more horrors than any other area on the face of this
small planet.
The Turkish Federalist Government at Baku was quickly overthrown and
on Sept. 30, 1920, the Soviet Government at Moscow concluded peace
with the Government of the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic which calls
itself “the first Moslem Republic in the world.”
The _Dashnakoutzian_ Government of Armenia stood for some time. Like
the Armenian independence committees of the old Ottoman Empire, its
inexperienced leadership was engaged in appealing to Mr. Lloyd George
and to American opinion to protect it, and had refrained from any
attempt to achieve that peace with its Russian and Turkish neighbors
which was the very first essential of its existence. In the Treaty of
Sevres, signed at Paris on Aug. 10, 1920, it was awarded a Turkish
frontier which was to be delineated by Mr. Wilson. The American
mandate project having fallen through, the Wilson frontier was
presumably thought to be the next best method of drawing the United
States into Trans-Caucasia. The Wilson frontier had the sole effect of
destroying any hopes which might have existed of a Turco-Armenian
peace. A state of war which neither Turks nor Armenians could afford,
continued to exist until December, 1920, when the Turkish command at
Erzerum put a stop to the streams of Moslem refugees which had been
flowing out of Armenia, by invading the country and occupying Kars. A
Soviet ultimatum stopped Kiazim Karabekr Pasha at Kars. The
_Dashnakoutzian_ Government fled. The Soviet Republic of Armenia
succeeded it and Mr. Lloyd George’s interest in the Armenians abruptly
ceased.
Compelled by the necessity of still further reinforcing his
Constantinople garrison, General Milne finally evacuated Batum in
favor of the Liberal Government of Georgia. Boundary disputes with the
neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenian Governments soon brought the
Georgian Liberals into petty frontier wars and a revolution in March,
1921, overthrew them in favor of what is now the Socialist Soviet
Republic of Georgia.
Soviet Russia was no in contact with Nationalist Turkey and in the
Treaty of Kars which the Turks signed on Oct. 13, 1921, with the
Soviet States of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the Kars and Ardahan
provinces which had been wrested from the Ottoman Empire in the
Russian War of 1876, were returned to Turkey, and the port of Batum
was opened unreservedly to Turkish commerce.
Soviet Russia was now in contact with Persia also. Here, despite the
fact that the country was occupied by the North Persia Force and the
South Persia Rifles, Sir Percy Cox had been unable to assemble a
Persian Parliament which would ratify the Anglo-Persian Agreement of
1919 and in February, 1921, a Russo-Persian Treaty was signed at
Moscow in which Soviet Russia abandoned all Czarist Russian claims on
the Persian Government and recognized no zones of influence in the
country. Meanwhile the North Persia Force maneuvered the Czarist
die-hards out of Teheran and itself took over the old Cossack
Division, officering it with British personnel. At the last moment,
just before the North Persia Force was to retire to its base at Bagdad
early in the summer of 1921, the Cossack Division marched on Teheran
and installed a new Persian Government which valiantly repudiated the
Anglo-Persian Agreement and proposed to share out the Persian
Ministries among the Allied Governments and the United States,
reserving for the British the right to appoint advisers in the
Ministries of War and Finance only. But the Zia-ed-Din Government
lasted only as long as the North Persia Force lasted. Zia fled to
Bagdad with the last of the North Persia Force in May, 1921. The last
of the British officers were withdrawn from the Cossack Division and
the South Persia Rifles were disbanded. At present, neither British
nor Russians are engaged in reiterating “in the most categorical
manner the undertakings which they have repeatedly given in the past
to respect absolutely the independence and integrity of Persia.”
Soviet Russia has lifted from Islam the weight with which Czarist
Russia once bore it down and Mr. Lloyd George’s Government has not
succeeded in its effort to supply alone the weight it took both
Russians and British to supply in 1907. Mr. Lloyd George could not
prevent Islam in India from joining the Hindus in non-cooperation with
the West. He could not prevent Islam in Persia from following to the
extent of non-cooperation with his Foreign Secretary. That demon which
Sir Edward Grey once lightly referred to as the “spirit” of the
Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907, has been slowly departing, wrenching
civilizations apart as it went. Its stubborn retreat from the
countries it wasted and the slow return of Islam to life in its wake,
comprise the background before which the remainder of this narrative
is set.
XIII
THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR BEGINS
CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE GROWTH OF GREEK NATIONALISM――SURROUNDED BY
BRITISH FORCES, THE TURKS GO BACK TO PEACE――APPLICATION OF THE SECRET
TREATIES WHICH THE ALLIES HAD DRAWN UP DURING THE WAR――THE OECUMENICAL
PATRIARCHATE BREAKS OFF ITS RELATIONS WITH THE OTTOMAN GOVERNMENT.
As every body knows, a brook called the Sweet Waters of Europe ripples
down into a long bay called the Golden Horn, which divides
Constantinople in Europe into two parts. On the northern side, between
the crowded Golden Horn and the great Bosphorus, lie the suburbs of
Galata and Pera, Galata behind the thicket of masts along its quai and
Pera climbing the steep streets onto the hill beyond. Galata and Pera
constitute the foreign suburbs where the Embassies, armed with the
Capitulations, have never permitted the Ottoman Government to govern,
except during the four years of the war when they were not in a
position to prevent the Government from abrogating the Capitulations.
Here were the Embassies and Legations, all of them except the Persian
Legation, although the Ottoman Government was not here and never has
been.
Between the little Golden Horn and the great green Sea of Marmora, a
bold peninsula curls out to Seraglio Point. Here, within the five-mile
wall which encloses its landward side, lies Stamboul to which Galata
and Pera bear the same cultural and historical relationship as Yonkers
bears to New York. Indeed, one could ignore Galata and Pera as
negligible suburbs of foreigners were it not that by the slow
expansion of the Capitulations through the centuries, these small
foreign suburbs have slowly turned the capital upside down until the
Mudros armistice in 1918 finally ushered the Anglo-French command into
Pera in possession of complete authority. Here in Stamboul was the
seat of the Ottoman Government and here are the greatest monuments of
Islam. The broad peninsula on which Stamboul lies is tipped with the
great shrines of Islamic culture, its sky-line is pierced with the
minarets of its mighty mosques, of _Ayiah Sophia_, _Ahmedieh_,
_Valideh_, _Bayazid_, _Suleimanieh_ and _Mohammed II_.
Here in Stamboul also, in the small Greek suburb of the Phanar at the
head of the Golden Horn, was the Oecumenical Patriarchate, the head of
the _Rûm_ community in the old Empire. The old Byzantine Empire had
lost its territorial basis in 1453, but it had remained in the
political capital of Islam as an ecclesiastical, political and
commercial force centering at the Phanar. The Patriarch himself had
become an official of the Ministry of Justice in the Ottoman
Government and was appointed by the Ottoman Minister from a list of
three candidates proposed by the Holy Synod. Relations between the
Caliph-Sultan and the Patriarch remained generally peaceful even after
the Old Greeks secured their independence in the 1820’s, and there was
no appreciable Greek nationalism in the _Rûm_ community until the
Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 called upon Moslems and Christians
alike to give up their dividing community institutions and assume the
equal rights and the equal duties of Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman
nation. That call, accompanied by the opening of the Parliament at
Constantinople, brought Greek nationalism from Old Greece into the
Ottoman _Rûm_ community, and the Balkan Wars widened the breach which
was opening between the Ottoman Government and the Phanar. It produced
so difficult a situation that an agreement was finally reached in 1914
between the Old Greek and the Ottoman Governments for an exchange of
minorities, but the outbreak of war suspended its operation. Until the
spring of 1916 the Ottoman Government, in view of the neutrality of
Old Greece, refrained from any steps against its _Rûm_ community, but
when the French command at Salonica imposed the Venizelos Government
on Athens and brought Old Greece into the war as an enemy, the Ottoman
Government took immediate steps to deport its _Rûm_ communicants along
the coast of Asia Minor out of the range of Allied naval activity.
Like the great Armenian deportations of 1915, these Greek deportations
were military in their origin but they were far better controlled
throughout their course than the former had been.
After the Mudros armistice in 1918, these Greeks in Asia Minor began
to flow back to what remained of their homes, and the remnant of the
broken Empire went back with relief to its peacetime pursuits. An
unsurpassed commercial opportunity lay ahead of Asia Minor, for the
Russian collapse had put an end to the great export of wheat from the
South Russian ports. Constantinople, its population swollen by the
Allied military and naval forces, now looked exclusively to Asia Minor
for its sustenance. Western business men had followed the Allies into
the capital in large numbers, and money was available in such
quantities as Constantinople had never known. The Empire having been
“liberated” from the “Ottoman blight,” American capitalists abounded
in the capital, all of them anxious to get in on the ground floor of
the boom. Under the Allied aegis, Western trade faced a prodigious
opportunity and the peasantry of Asia Minor lost no time in seeking
whatever small share of the melon might fall to them. The spring of
1919 found them back at the handles of their rude, ox-drawn plows.
But there were Greek battleships anchored among the Allied men of war
in the Bosphorus, and a Turkish guard was quartered in the great
mosque of _Ayiah Sophia_ in Stamboul. Ottoman Greeks in the capital
had gone wildly nationalist, finding their hero in Mr. Venizelos, the
man who had brought Old Greece into the war. The Oecumenical Patriarch
at the Phanar had turned likewise toward Mr. Venizelos, the deliverer
of the “unredeemed” Ottoman Greeks. But Balkan wars break when the
snow melts in the spring. Through the winter of 1918-’19, the
Anglo-French command maintained an outward peace in Constantonople.
Three British high commands held the remnant of the Empire in Asia as
firmly in the British grip as Persia was bring held. The Mesopotamian
Expeditionary Force, with its G. H. Q. at Bagdad, had pushed its way
up from the flatlands of the lower Tigris-Euphrates basin into the
rugged hills of southern Kurdistan, the Turkish administration of
Mosul withdrawing in front of it to Diarbekr. The Egyptian
Expeditionary Force, with its G. H. Q. at Cairo, had reached the top
of the Syrian corridor at Aleppo and had flung out small detachments
to establish contact with the Bagdad command to the east, and to
occupy Cilicia and the Taurus tunnels of the Bagdad Railway to the
west, the Turkish administration of Cilicia continuing in office
pending an indication of British intentions. Armenian deportees, some
of whom had been interned by the Turks in Syria and some of whom had
made their way into Egypt to be interned by the British, were being
run into Cilicia in large numbers and a few of them were being carried
on along the Bagdad Railway as far as Konia, where the E. E. F.’s
control ended. The British co-command of the Army of the Black Sea
whose Anglo-French G. H. Q. was in Pera, had stationed control
officers along the Bagdad Railway from Konia to its Constantinople
terminus, along the railways in the hinterland of Smyrna and along the
old Russian railways in Trans-Caucasia. The Bagdad Railway had been
broken up into its two original parts. The Bagdad and Cairo commands
had confiscated it from Konia east and their military trains were
rapidly wracking it to pieces. Western Europe was not to be again
permitted to escape the Suez Canal. The Pera co-command, however, was
working the original Anatolian Railway from Constantinople to Angora
and Konia for the _Deutsche Bank_, pending its permanent disposition
in the peace treaty.
The collapse of Czarist Russia had enabled the British to establish
control not only over Asia Minor but over all its approaches from
north, south, east and west, and under the British aegis the secret
treaties which had been drawn up during the war for its partition
(with the exception of Czarist Russia’s share in them) were soon put
into application. The French were admitted to Beirut whence they
posted detachments to the Syrian and Cilician centers, remaining
however under the British high command in Cairo. Italian forces were
disembarked at Adalia and rapidly pushed their way into the hinterland
as far as Konia, still keeping their eyes on Smyrna, the greatest of
the Asia Minor prizes. Smyrna had been made over to Italy in the
secret agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, but the Venizelos
Government at Athens had entered the war after that agreement was
signed. As for Czarist Russia’s share of the spoils, the United States
Government might be persuaded to take the eastern provinces under the
supposition that in this twentieth century they still constituted
Armenia. As for Czarist Russia’s right to Constantinople, the High
Church Party in the Church of England was soon to transfer the venue
of its theological disquisitions with Orthodoxy from the Patriarchate
at Moscow to the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar. Old Greeks
and Ottoman Greeks are alike traders and British naval command of the
Mediterranean served to reinforce the less worldly influences which
moved Greece inevitably into the British orbit. The French who had
brought Greece into the war as soon as Czarist Russia collapsed, only
to be compelled to divide their Constantinople command with the
British, quickly cooled toward the Greeks and waited for the great
wheel to twirl again.
The Anglo-French command in Pera soon divided the Constantinople area,
the British taking over the Galata and Pera suburbs, the French taking
Stamboul itself, and the Italians taking the Asiatic suburbs. The
Ottoman Navy was quickly disarmed and interned in the Golden Horn.
With the French controlling the railways in Europe and the British
controlling the Anatolian railways, the Ottoman Armies began
demobilizing and disarming under Allied supervision, skeleton forces
remaining for _gendarmerie_ purposes. So the Turkish remnant of the
Ottoman Empire went back to the pursuits of peace and in the lack of
Russian exports the Anatolian peasant enjoyed every prospect of a
greater prosperity than he had ever known.
But to Mr. Lloyd George, it was an opportunity to impose alone upon
Islam that fate which the British Foreign Office and Czarist Russia
had agreed in 1907 to impose together. They were more than Balkan
snows which began to melt when the Oecumenical Patriarchate broke off
its relations with the Ottoman Government on March 9, 1919.
XIV
SMYRNA, 1919
KEMAL RETURNS TO CONSTANTINOPLE――TURKISH CONFUSION IN THE CAPITAL――THE
TURKS ASK FOR AN AMERICAN MANDATE――HOW KEMAL AND RAUF BEY LEFT FOR
SAMSUN AND SMYRNA, RESPECTIVELY――THE GREEK PONTUS PROGRAM――THE GREEK
OCCUPATION OF SMYRNA――THE TURKS GO BACK TO WAR.
General Allenby’s great break-through in Palestine had thrown Mustapha
Kemal Pasha back to Adana in Cilicia, where a cypher telegram from
Constantinople told him that Rauf Bey was on his way to Mudros to sign
an armistice with the British. It was the end of the world for Kemal.
He returned to the capital to find an Anglo-French command quartered
in Pera and the entire Constantinople area under effective military
occupation. None of the twenty-five clauses of the Mudros armistice
seems to have authorized such an occupation. The only mention of
Constantinople which occurred in the armistice was a stipulation in
clause 4 that Allied prisoners of war and interned Armenians were “to
be collected in Constantinople and handed over unconditionally to the
Allies.” Allied “use of all ship repair facilities at all Turkish
ports and arsenals” was provided in clause 9 and clause 11 stipulated
that “wireless telegraphy and cable stations” were “to be controlled
by the Allies, Turkish Government messages excepted.” In accordance
with these clauses, Allied officers had been assigned to all Turkish
ports for control and intelligence purposes. Clause 21 had provided
for “an Allied representative to be attached to the Turkish Ministry
of Supplies in order to safeguard Allied interests,” but the
attachment of an Allied representative would seem to be no more a
synonym for military occupation than the use of ship repair facilities
or the control of wireless and cable stations.
Allied occupation of Batum was provided in clause 15 and Allied
occupation of Baku was mentioned. “Allied occupation of Dardanelles
and Bosphorus forts” was specifically stipulated in clause 1, but is
the Pera suburb of Constantinople one of the “Dardanelles and
Bosphorus forts”? “Secure access to the Black Sea” was stipulated in
clause 1 and clause 7 gave the Allies “the right to occupy any
strategic points in the event of a situation arising which threatens
the security of the Allies.” But no such situation had arisen at
Constantinople and it is difficult to imagine how it could have arisen
with the capital lying under the guns of as great a fleet of
battleships as lay in the Bosphorus. It is true that the mere
appearance of Allied men of war off the city so affected its Greek
minority as to bring about a most explosive situation, of which Rauf
Bey had warned Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. But a military occupation
seems to be quite a different matter from the temporary landing of
troops to restrain the Greeks. It is also true that Constantinople was
a very useful supply base for Denikin, yet the terms of the Mudros
armistice are down in black and white, with Admiral Calthorpe’s
signature attached to them, and they do not appear to make an Allied
occupation of the capital a legal proceeding.
Rauf Bey had made it plain to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros that no
Ottoman Government could submit to the re-imposition of the
Capitulations. Under the occupation, the Allies re-imposed them. None
of the Allied Governments had recognized their abrogation, but the
Mudros armistice was a military and not a civil instrument. Under
military law, occupying Armies are authorized to administer only the
existing body of enemy civil law and usage, pending the permanent
disposition of their occupied enemy territory in the terms of peace.
The Mudros armistice contained no mention of the Capitulations or of
any other civil matter at issue between the Allied Governments and the
Ottoman Government, and their re-imposition during a state of
armistice does not seem to have been a legal proceeding.
When Mustapha Kemal Pasha reached the capital, he discovered that the
Parliament had been prorogued, the Izzet Government had fallen, and
Damad Ferid Pasha had been sent for by the Sultan to form a new
Government. The Sultan had left Dolma Bagtsche for Abdul Hamid’s late
home at Yildiz Kiosk, and such sound reforms as the Young Turkish
Revolution of 1908 had succeeded in making, the Allies had speedily
unmade. In its golden age, the Ottoman Empire had been broadly
tolerant, but during its last two centuries of agony the Christian
imperialisms of the West had turned its tolerance to poison and since
1908 its own Christian communities had helped to keep the poison
circulating in its veins. Its Christian military occupants now
re-injected as much of the poison as it had succeeded in throwing out,
and this in its capital, the very heart of the country.
With its Parliament prorogued and its press stifled by a military
censorship, Turkish opinion was drifting leaderless into confusion.
Opposition parties are apt to suffer in time of war and the late Enver
Government had so thoroughly broken up its Opposition that the Damad
Ferid Government no longer commanded confidence. The intrigues of
three Allies, each of them cultivating Turkish support, added to the
confusion. Western concession hunters and the Levantinism with which
the capital stank, trailed the slime of money over the scene.
Across this unlovely landscape, the Phanar’s break with the Ottoman
Government fell like a thunderbolt. Rauf Bey had surrendered at Mudros
to an Emperor of India purged of his Russian alliance, but it now
became apparent that the Venizelist Government at Athens had succeeded
to the place in the Anglo-Russian _entente_ which Russia had vacated.
Rauf had applied to Admiral Calthorpe for an Anglo-Turkish alliance,
but it now appeared that no such alliance would be granted and it is
easy to imagine what effect this desperate situation, if it had really
come upon them, had upon the Turks in the capital. The Phanar had now
become openly an enemy in Stamboul itself, the Turkish guard in the
great mosque of _Ayiah Sophia_ was heavily reinforced, and a French
guard stacked its rifles outside the mosque.
The panic-stricken Turks, still thinking in terms of the Empire, still
blind to the great fallen columns about them, launched their Wilsonian
League as a bid for new friends. The United States had not declared
war against them. The Enver Government had severed diplomatic
relations when Washington joined the Allies, but the break had gone no
further. Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, U. S. N., a naval officer on
State Department duty, had occupied the American Embassy in Pera as
High Commissioner, restricting his communication with the Ottoman
Government to the medium of the Swedish Legation pending the
resumption of diplomatic relations. A large colony of Americans had
followed him into Constantinople, part of them business men who
presently became restive under the tardiness of the boom in
materializing, part of them relief workers who discovered to their
surprise that Turks have the same number of eyes and ears and legs and
arms as the rest of us have. Some of the American colony of which
Admiral Bristol was the head, afford this somber narrative a lighter
aspect. All our American types were represented in Constantinople――
deep-breathing bishops: apostolic governors of Kansas: “Y” workers
whose given names were Fred and Henry and Dick: business men who knew
what they wanted and couldn’t get it: courteous and correct Embassy
_attaches_: old missionaries with broken hearts and tight lips:
sailors who blew in from Mersina, oiled up and blew out again to
Samsun: young and autobiographical Near East Relief workers: college
presidents who had lived long in the land and were vaguely concerned
about the Capitulations: young lady missionaries with a sweetly simple
reliance on “these darling British”: and stern “commissioners” of the
Near East Relief on “tours of inspection” who learned from Greeks and
Armenians that the worst they had been told of the Turk was quite
true. At the head of them all was Admiral Bristol, equipped with a
flotilla of American destroyers and charged with the defense of
American interests in the Ottoman Empire. He enjoyed what was probably
the most difficult American position in all of Europe and in it he
proved himself a very tower of American strength.
The colony of which he was the head was divided into two sorts,
American business men who looked to the American Embassy for their
leadership, and American missionary, educational and relief workers
who looked not only to the American Embassy but to the British from
the Foreign Office in London down to the British Army in Pera without
reminding themselves as frequently as they might have done that the
British Army, while one of our most gallant Armies, interests itself,
and quite rightly, in the King’s peace and in no other peace.
In the absence of any Parliament to speak for than, a number of the
most influential Turks in the capital formed themselves into a
delegation from the Wilsonian League and pledged themselves early in
1919 to accept an American mandate over the entire country, provided a
definite term, preferably fifteen or twenty years, was named for it.
This pledge was communicated to Admiral Bristol and forwarded by him
to Washington. If such a mandate would not apply the Westernism of the
Fourteen Points to the case of Turkey, it was reasoned, it would at
least afford the Turks the time they needed to consider their
position.
With Turkish civilian opinion now casting about for substitutes for
the Parliament which the Damad Ferid Government continued to deny it,
Turkish military opinion lost no time in facing the radically new
situation which the Phanar’s break with the Porte had precipitated.
The General Staff had constituted the driving force of reform in 1908
and it did so again in 1919. Inside a ring of British bayonets, the
Asia Minor provinces had been turned loose in semi-independence and
were being rapidly disarmed. The Third Army, reduced in personnel and
equipment, had been permitted by the Allies to base itself on Sivas
and to maintain there a skeleton organization for _gendarmerie_
purposes. Similarly the Ninth Army remained in skeleton form at
Erzerum in the eastern provinces, and Turkish refugees were moving
slowly back into these wasted and silent provinces and resuming the
even tenor of their lives. Greek refugees were being returned to
Smyrna and Samsun, a proceeding which would have remained meaningless
had not the Oecumenical Patriarchate whose communicants these Greeks
were, become openly hostile.
The General Staff had already dispatched agents secretly to the
eastern provinces for the formation of local defense committees. Under
the Allied military occupation, the Armenian Patriarchate at 21 Rue de
Brousse in the Pera suburb of the capital, had openly espoused the
program of the old independence committees. The old Armenian
Parliamentary _bloc_ had not survived the break-up of the Empire and
the old Russian annexationist group had come to a similar end with the
break-up of Czarist Russia. Independence of Russians and Turks alike
had become the Armenian program and the hope of its realization lay in
the British and United States Governments. The former had already
manifested concern for the Armenians on numerous occasions, and two
organizations were at work in the United States, the Armenia-America
Society which was related to the Near East Relief, and the Committee
for Armenian Independence which represented the extreme wing of
Armenian opinion. American relief workers in the Armenian Republic of
Erivan in Trans-Caucasia were already urging the repatriation of
Armenian refugees into the eastern provinces, where they had long
constituted Czarist Russia’s sole claim to intervention and eventual
annexation. Against this move the General Staff had prepared the
eastern provinces. Kiazim Karabekr Pasha, commander of the Ninth Army
at Erzerum, had a large quantity of arms at his disposal, some
deposited by the Ottoman Armies retreating from Mesopotamia and some
dug up from Russian depots concealed in the mountains.
The Phanar’s break with the Porte was a new development, however,
against which the General Staff had made no preparation. Rauf Bey had
signed an armistice at Mudros with the Allied Powers, but no armistice
had been signed with the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities. If war was
now to develope with the latter, action would have to be taken without
delay. Accordingly it was determined to dispatch Mustapha Kemal Pasha
and Rauf Bey to Samsun and Smyrna, respectively, to form local defense
committees and to meet at Sivas where Kemal was to take over the
administration of Asia Minor. On the basis of these defense
committees, a new political party was to be built up which should
compel the Damad Ferid Government to reassemble Parliament and enable
the country to consider its future. The beginning of such a party
already existed in the capital, but the new National Liberals
naturally led a secret existence under the Allied military occupation
and it was not until Kemal began building up the party organization in
Asia Minor that they openly became the Nationalists.
The surrender of arms to the Allies continued, and in his report to
the British War Office on events in Turkey from the time of the Mudros
armistice to the signature of the Sevres Treaty, General Milne
testifies to the honesty with which disarmament was carried out up to
the time of the Greek occupation of Smyrna. The defense committees
were not directed against the Allies. Large and small Allied forces,
even Allied officers alone, moved freely about the country. The
political program with which Kemal was charged, was directed against
the Damad Ferid Government, his military program against any partition
of the country in favor of Greeks and Armenians. If the _Rûm_ and
_Ermeni_ communities of the old Empire attempted a transfer of their
historic community life from a religious to a territorial basis, the
defense committees would constitute the Turks’ reply.
This program was developed in the utmost secrecy, since the Allied
occupation had loosed more spies in the capital than Abdul Hamid had
ever employed in his palmiest days. The Ottoman Navy having been
interned in the Golden Horn, it was an easy matter to dispatch Rauf
Bey to Smyrna. He left Constantinople early in May, 1919. Kemal Pasha,
however, was a senior Army officer and under the orders of the Ottoman
War Office. It was assumed that the Damad Ferid Government would not
object to having the capital rid of his presence, but his
effectiveness in Asia Minor depended on his authority. He was
ostensibly to be sent out as Inspector-General with command of the
skeleton forces which General Milne had sanctioned for _gendarmerie_
purposes at Sivas and Erzerum, and the instructions which defined his
powers were shown him as soon as they had been drawn up by the General
Staff. In a room at the War Office, Kemal spent three hours
“correcting” them, until they empowered him with authority to act in
every contingency which might conceivably arise. As thus “corrected,”
they were placed hurriedly before Damad Ferid’s War Minister and
signed without having been read. Duplicate copies, destined for
subordinate commanders in Asia Minor, were signed by members of the
General Staff. Thus equipped, Mustapha Kemal Pasha left Constantinople
for Samsun the day after Rauf Bey had left for Smyrna.
Kemal found British craft in Samsun roadstead and a British control
officer in the town with a handful of Indian troops. Greeks were being
disembarked and were pushing into the villages in the immediate
hinterland. A project was under way for the detachment of the Black
Sea littoral, including the ports of Samsun and Trebizond, from the
remnant of the Empire and its erection as an independent Greek State
under the name of the Pontus. If the Pan-Hellenic program at
Constantinople proposed to re-write five centuries of history, if the
Armenian program in the eastern provinces proposed to undo the work of
ten centuries, the Pontus program also proposed to set aside a
half-dozen centuries. It would hardly be fair, however, to judge these
three programs by the standards of practicability which are
customarily applied in politics, for their strength lay outside the
realm of politics. In 1919, we stood in the presence of a Christendom,
damp with centuries of Byzantinism, which proposed to commit the very
errors in Turkey for which it had frequently blamed Islam.
To thoughtful Turks, it had long been plain that the old Empire was
doomed unless it could disentangle itself from the grip of religious
usage. An attempt had been made in 1908 at this precise task of
disentangling religion and politics. It had failed because neither the
Old Turks nor the Christian communities would permit it to succeed.
Christendom and Islam alike proved immovable. Turks, Greeks and
Armenians threshed themselves to pieces in the religious deadlock
which the Young Turks failed to break in 1908 and by 1919 Greeks and
Armenians were prepared to set up new Christian theocracies on the
wreck of an old Moslem theocracy. The _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities
had clung immovably to their full community rights after 1908 and by
1919 the break-up of the Empire had made possible the transfer of
their communities, with the concurrence of Christendom, from their old
religious, to a new territorial, basis.
Kemal rode up into the hills behind Samsun. Under the blue skies of an
Anatolian spring, he made his way from village to village. He reached
Sivas where Colonel Rafet Bey was in command of the skeleton Third
Army, simultaneously with a rumor that Great Britain had given Smyrna
to the Greeks and that the greatest sea-port of Asia Minor had been
the scene of massacres by Greek troops. Telegrams to Angora where a
British control officer was receiving munitions surrendered under the
Mudros armistice, brought a prompt denial. But the rumor grew. What
purported to be stories of the massacres and of the flight of Turkish
civilians from Greek soldiers in the hinterland of Smyrna, accompanied
it. The British control officer at Angora denied it again, emphasizing
the fact that the armistice had been signed by the British Government
and no Greek occupation of Smyrna was possible without British
consent. But a telegram soon reached Sivas from the Ottoman War Office
in Constantinople, announcing that Smyrna had been occupied by the
Greeks and that Admiral Calthorpe had supervised the occupation.
British control officers along the railways fled to Constantinople at
once and most of them were fortunate enough to reach their
destination.
Meanwhile, Rauf Bey had reached Smyrna on May 13. On May 14, Admiral
Calthorpe entered the bay with an Allied naval squadron from
Constantinople. The Allied control officers ashore were ordered to
disarm the Ottoman garrison and confine it to its barracks. At 6:30
o’clock in the evening, Admiral Calthorpe announced that the city
would be occupied by Allied troops the next morning. A vague rumor
that Greek troops were to be used brought a repetition of the
announcement that _Allied_ troops would occupy the city. But the rumor
persisted and as night drew on, the population of the Turkish quarter
withdrew to a hill-top behind the town and gathered around huge
bonfires in an all-night protest meeting.
By 7 o’clock the next morning, the Ottoman garrison had been withdrawn
to its barracks. By 10 o’clock, British marines had disembarked onto
the quai and had occupied the telegraph offices, and Greek troops were
landing from their transports. They marched first to the _konak_, the
seat of the provincial administration, and occupied the building amid
scenes of growing confusion which the Greek commander either could not
or would not control. From the _konak_, they marched to the barracks
and the firing which had already begun culminated in the raking of the
barracks with machine guns. At the barracks and elsewhere, in Smyrna
City and deep into its hinterland, the killing continued for days.
Twice Rauf Bey was overtaken by the rapid Greek advance and had to
flee farther into the hinterland. Events might or might not have
turned out differently if Rauf had landed at Smyrna a month before he
did, but one reason for the lack of any Turkish defense of Smyrna was
the quite simple reason that there had been no time in which to
prepare a defense.
It was disastrous news which Rauf conveyed through the interior as he
continued on his way to join Kemal at Sivas. It affected the Turks far
more than even the Armenian sack of Van had affected them, for in 1915
the Enver Government had at least not been disarmed. Even in
Constantinople itself, Turkish opinion became so inflamed against the
Damad Ferid Government that machine guns were mounted on Galata Bridge
and the Allied High Commissioners were finally compelled to dispatch
an inter-Allied Commission, headed by Admiral Bristol, to put a stop
to the killing behind Smyrna. The Bristol Commission drew up a lengthy
report which fixed immediate responsibility for the Smyrna affair, and
Mr. Lloyd George suppressed it at the demand of Mr. Venizelos. By such
suppressions has the martyr-legend of Near Eastern Christians grown.
The Greek occupation of Smyrna shook the world, from the back hills of
Java to the country towns of the United States. Down in the Turkish
cockpit, the Damad Ferid Government became an Allied puppet, Mustapha
Kemal Pasha brought the skeleton Third Army down to Amasia to prevent
a similar Greek landing at Samsun, a Turkish fighting front was
hurriedly extemporized against the Armenians who were gathering under
the Anglo-French aegis in Cilicia, and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha hewed out
a back door to Central Asia past the Armenian Republic of Erivan in
Trans-Caucasia. In the United States, the religious press opened its
columns to every atrocity-charge against the Turks which Greek and
Armenian minds could devise. In India, pious Moslems began trekking
across the north-west frontier into Afghanistan, fleeing the British
Government at Delhi with motives similar to those with which the
Pilgrim Fathers once fled from England. Down in the hinterland of
Smyrna, the West stood with bayonets fixed, confronting an East which
had been largely disarmed.
It appears to be unquestioned that no clause of the Mudros armistice
authorized the Allies to occupy Smyrna. The only clause which has been
advanced as possibly covering the occupation, is clause 7 which gives
the Allies “the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a
situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies.” None of
the dozen Allied officers who had been posted to Smyrna has ever
claimed that a situation existed there which threatened even their own
security, to say nothing of the security of the Allies. Mustapha Kemal
Pasha at Sivas interpreted the occupation as a violation of the
armistice by the Allies themselves and held it accordingly as no
longer binding. The surrender of munitions to the Allies ceased
immediately. The Anatolian peasant left his growing crops and went
angrily back to war.
XV
THE ORTHODOX SCHISM IN ANATOLIA
KEMAL FALLS TO THE STATUS OF A “BANDIT”――TURKISH NATIONALISM BEGINS TO
RE-MOBILIZE AND RE-EQUIP ITS FORCES――THE ERZERUM PROGRAM AND THE
NATIONALIST VICTORY IN THE OTTOMAN ELECTIONS――HOW PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI
BROKE WITH THE OECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE――THE TURKISH ORTHODOX
CHURCH――PAPA EFTIM HIMSELF.
Mr. Lloyd George had announced his program at Smyrna. He proposed to
build a new Near East on the basis of its Christian minorities,
confronting Soviet Russia with a Greek _fait accompli_ across the
Straits on a parity with the American mandate in Trans-Caucasia and
the eastern provinces, the British Persia and the Afghan-Bokharan
business with which it was proposed to confront it elsewhere. As for
Islam, he would impose alone upon it that fate which the British
Foreign Office and Czarist Russia had agreed in 1907 to impose
together.
The reply to this program was Turkish Nationalism. Rid of the burden
of the old Empire, freed of sole responsibility for the Caliphate,
Mustapha Kemal Pasha proposed to break the religious deadlock in which
the Turks had threshed themselves to pieces and to apply the same
Westernism to his own nation as the West had long applied to its
Greeks and Armenians. Such Old Turkish strongholds as the dervish
_tekkes_ at Konia might oppose him, but the Old Turks had no Western
backing and Islam in India felt so deeply on the subject of “our
brother Turk” that success in maintaining the last of the independent
Moslem States would prove its own justification. As for Greeks and
Armenians, they could continue to worship in their own way as they had
always done under the old Empire, but they would never again be
permitted to poison the country with their political reaction.
Inside a ring of British and Greek bayonets, the Turks flocked to the
new Nationalist Party, not because the mass of Turkish opinion had any
understanding of the meaning of nationalism but because Smyrna had
stripped the Damad Ferid Government in Constantinople of the very
small Turkish support with which it had entered office. Beginning in
the eastern provinces which were farthest from the capital, the
defense committees which constituted the framework of the Party,
arrested Damad Ferid’s provincial officials and deported them to
Constantinople, installing Nationalist administrations in their
places. This proceeded so rapidly that Ferid telegraphed Kemal to
return to the capital at once. Despite the fact that Ferid’s orders
bore all the prestige of the _Grand Vizierate_, Kemal disregarded them
and on July 11, 1919, Ferid dismissed him from the Army. From a senior
officer and a military hero, Kemal now fell to the status of a
“bandit,” who knew in all probability that it was only a matter of
time until he would be caught and shot.
The Nationalist Party had a dual program. Its political objective was
to compel the Damad Ferid Government in Constantinople to re-assemble
Parliament and permit the country to consider its future. Its military
objective was to prevent the further partition of what it believed to
be Turkish soil. Under the impetus of Smyrna, it was comparatively
easy to take over province after province in Asia Minor and to put the
Government in a position in which it would sooner or later be
compelled to reckon with its new Opposition. Its military objective
was far less easy of attainment. About 20,000 troops had been
permitted to remain at Sivas and Erzerum for _gendarmerie_ purposes. A
quantity of munitions, particularly in the eastern provinces, had not
yet been surrendered. A further quantity was dug up from old Russian
depots, concealed during the great Russian advance of 1915-’16. More
were smuggled across the Black Sea from Denikin’s rear in South
Russia, as soon as it became known that a market for arms had
developed in Asia Minor. Still more, particularly artillery, had been
dismantled by the Allies and left in Turkish possession; these needed
only new breech-blocks and range-finders, the construction of which
began at once out of any scrap metal available. Hidden away in the
secrecy of Asia Minor, Nationalism began to re-mobilize and re-equip
its tattered and frequently bare-footed soldiers.
[Illustration: ASSEMBLY BUILDING AT ANGORA]
So rapidly did the Party grow that two months after the Smyrna
occupation, Kemal and Rauf were able to assemble it in a caucus at
Erzerum in the eastern provinces. Kemal’s staff drove up to Erzerum
along the crude mountain roads with the rest of the provincial
delegates, but Kemal himself rode alone over back trails and through
lonely villages. Here in the wrecked mountain town of Erzerum, the
Party platform was drawn up, a document which was later to become
famous under the name of the National Pact.
This document re-stated and amplified the Izzet Government’s position,
as Rauf Bey had conveyed it to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. Autonomy
for the Arabs under the necessary suzerainty of the Caliph at
Constantinople and Allied recognition of the Enver Government’s
abrogation of the Capitulations, were its principal planks. The
break-up of the old Empire was accepted and in the new map of the Near
and Middle East, the Caliphate of Islam was modified to permit the
application of the Western tradition of nationalism to Turks and Arabs
alike, an application to which the Turks claimed as complete a right
as the West had long before acknowledged to Greeks, Bulgarians and
Armenians. From the Greeks, the West had never asked Capitulations. It
would therefore not ask Capitulations from the Turks. As for the
rights of minorities, such rights as the Greeks gave their Moslem
minorities, the Turks would give their Christian minorities. The
Straits would remain open to world commerce, subject only to the
necessary military security of Constantinople, “the seat of the
Caliphate of Islam, the capital of the Sultanate, and the headquarters
of the Ottoman Government.” In the delineation of the new Turkey’s
frontiers, certain border areas were under dispute. Two of these
border areas, Cilicia and the Mosul province, “are inhabited by an
Ottoman Moslem majority united in religion, in race and in aim, imbued
with sentiments of mutual respect for each other and of sacrifice, and
wholly respectful of each other’s racial and social rights and
surrounding conditions,” and these belonged within the Turkish
frontiers. To certain other border areas (Western Thrace and the three
districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batum in Trans-Caucasia), the West
could, if it wished, apply the device of the plebiscite with which it
was accustomed to decide the destinies of populations elsewhere. As
for the place of the new Turkey in the family of nations, the Party
repeated Rauf Bey’s statements to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros: “It is
a fundamental condition of our life and continued existence that we,
like every country, should enjoy complete independence and liberty in
the matter of assuring the means of our development, in order that our
national and economic development should be rendered possible and that
it should be possible to conduct affairs in the form of a more
up-to-date regular administration.” On this note, the Party’s platform
closed. Three weeks later, a copy of it lay on Lord Curzon’s desk in
the Foreign Office in London, and Colonel Alfred Rawlinson, a brother
of Lord Rawlinson, Commander-in-Chief in India, was returned to
Erzerum to learn what it was that Kemal really wanted.
Having drawn up the Party’s platform, the Erzerum caucus adjourned to
meet in September at Sivas, where a standing council of twelve members
was chosen to sit continuously at Angora, a provincial capital whose
rail and telegraphic communication with Constantinople was more direct
than Sivas’s. The Damad Ferid Government’s position with respect to
the country had now become so impossible that it fell on October 5 and
was replaced by the Ali Riza Government which was authorized by the
Sultan to hold a general election. This was a clean-cut victory for
the Nationalists and two days after the new Government took office,
Kemal telegraphed the Party’s platform to Ali Riza Pasha in
Constantinople, as the terms of peace on which the Nationalists
appealed to the country.
At this junction, the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar forbade
Ottoman Greeks to participate in the elections on the ground that they
were no longer Ottoman subjects. This injunction was of course obeyed
in the capital where Allied troops were in occupation, but a
considerable portion of the _Rûm_ community lived in Asia Minor and
here, already gravely compromised with their Turkish neighbors by the
Phanar’s break with the Porte and by the Greek occupation of Smyrna
which had followed that break, it only added to their difficulties.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what move more dangerous to its own
communicants in Asia Minor the Phanar could have made. It so increased
the suspicion which attached to them in the eyes of the Nationalists
that hundreds of them were clapped into Nationalist jails and were not
released until a Turkish-speaking Orthodox priest from Kiskin, twelve
miles from Angora, announced his intention of breaking with the Phanar
and participating in the elections as an Ottoman subject. He
immediately undertook to effect a similar break on the part of the
Turkish-speaking Orthodox churches in the interior, and the
Oecumenical Patriarch summoned him to report at the Phanar at once. He
disregarded both the Phanar’s summons and the excommunication which
followed it, and continued to align his people with the Nationalists.
Papa Eftim Effendi, acting metropolitan of the Turkish Orthodox
Church, is a subject to be approached with all caution for he may yet
develope into a phase of the new Turkey more important for Christendom
than Kemal himself. Christian solidarity broke down when the Phanar
threw its communicants in Asia Minor into a political position which
brooked not an instant’s neutrality. As long as Ottoman Christians
were given an inferior position under Moslem law, the concern of
Western Christians for the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_ communities of the old
Empire had a legitimate basis. The Byzantinism which colored our
Western concern for Ottoman Greeks and Armenians may have blinded us
at times to the actual position they occupied in the old Empire, but
the legal position which Moslem law gave them was certain ultimately
to be resented. There came a time when thoughtful Turks agreed with
us, not out of concern for non-Moslems but in the belief that the
Empire was being slowly strangled by the religious usages which had
tightened about it. The Young Turks made an honest attempt in 1908 at
reforms designed ultimately to give all races of the Empire an equal
position as Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman State. That attempt broke
down for several reasons. One was that the Young Turkish program was
repugnant to Islam. Another was that the _Rûm_ and _Ermeni_
communities stuck to every jot of their community rights. Whether
rightly or wrongly, they would not be given a common position with
their Moslem neighbors. To American missionaries on the spot, the
failure of the Young Turkish program was a bitter disappointment for
they knew what the price of failure would be to Turks, Greeks and
Armenians alike. But American Protestantism in the United States
generally concurred in the refusal of the Ottoman Christians to make
that gesture of confidence without which the Young Turkish program was
bound to fail. The missionaries knew that if the religious deadlock
which the 1908 Revolution sought to break, had finally to be broken by
force, only Western military intervention could save the Christians
from defeat. But their tongues were tied in the United States.
Churchmen at home stiffened the Greeks and Armenians while refusing to
note the very grave problems for which it was essential that the Turks
should discover a solution.
Papa Eftim Effendi, however, has made the gesture of confidence. Under
his leadership, sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior gave up
their church schools on March 1, 1922, their pupils being sent
thereafter to the Government’s schools. The old _Rûm_ community
regarded its schools with considerable pride, for they were centers of
Greek nationalism. In the old Empire, they were centers of Orthodox
reaction just as the mosque schools were centers of Moslem reaction.
These churches in the interior have given up their right to administer
Orthodox civil law. Turkish courts, under the Ministry of Justice, now
administer Orthodox law for Orthodox litigants, supposedly as British
courts administer Moslem law in India. The churches which have formed
the new Turkish Orthodox Church under Papa Eftim’s leadership, are as
free to worship as they have always been (and that freedom has been
possibly greater than Westerners have sometimes attributed to the
Ottoman Government). Politically, however, their communicants have
thrown in their lot with the Turks. Their clergy wear the black robe
and black cylindrical hat of Orthodoxy only while engaged in their
clerical duties. At all other times, they wear the Turkish _kalpak_.
But the wider interest which gathers around Papa Eftim at present lies
in the fact that he has destroyed the old basis of Christian
solidarity and has opened up the possibility of a quite new basis. The
old solidarity, whether rightly or wrongly, has levied a fearful toll
upon Turks, Greeks and Armenians alike during these last few years.
But it is just possible that Papa Eftim has given us the prospect of a
new solidarity upon a purely religious basis. It is a prospect to be
approached with all reserve, for it suggests a new Western attitude
toward the Near and Middle East whose benefits both to Christendom and
to Islam may prove to be incalculable. Time will develope Papa Eftim’s
full significance. Unless hostility to the Turk is an article of the
Christian creed, his is the most meaningful figure in Turkey today.
A note reached me late one morning during my stay in Angora, to the
effect that Papa Eftim Effendi was in the city and was anxious to
call. Two hours later, Djelal Noury Bey, a prominent Turkish editor
and a deputy in the Grand National Assembly, entered with Papa Eftim
following. Eftim was a black-eyed, bushy little man and the figure he
presented, a Turkish _kalpak_ resting on his uncut Orthodox hair and
his long Orthodox beard flowing over the turned-up collar of a
wolfskin coat, is one which may be commended to those who knew the old
Ottoman Empire. The following dialogue ensued:
Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you a Turk?
Djelal Noury (smiling): He is of the Turkish race.
Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you of Turkish blood?
Djelal Noury (smiling cordially): The Turkish Orthodox Church was his
own idea. He organized it himself.
Self (to Papa Eftim): Do you speak Turkish?
Djelal Noury (still smiling cordially): He wants to go to the League
of Nations at Geneva. He asks do you think he ought to go?
Self (to Papa Eftim): Are you a Turk?
Djelal Noury (smiling still more cordially): He asks whether you may
be a Protestant. He says if you are, you and he are the same for
neither of you recognize the Pope.
This sort of thing seemed to be of no profit to any of us and the
matter was accordingly allowed to drop, Djelal Noury leaving with Papa
Eftim carefully in tow. We Westerners of course are quite superior to
this device of the carefully staged interview, since our own
politicians in the West are as indifferent to publicity as a cat is to
catnip.
A half-hour later, a Turk happened to call and in the most casual
fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim. I told him I
had formed the highest opinion of his chaperone but had had no
opportunity to form any opinion of Eftim himself. Something apparently
happened behind the scenes during the next day or two for two evenings
later, Papa Eftim unexpectedly knocked at my door and entered stark
alone. It was two hours afterward when he left and during those two
hours nobody interrupted us. I believe that no lawyer ever put a
witness through a more thorough examination than I put Papa Eftim on
that evening. When he left, his pale thin hands shook with emotion. As
he went out, he stopped in the door-way and this is what he said:
“This is our country and the Turks are our own people. How can we
forsake our country when it needs us?”
I have no means of knowing who put this strangely Western idea into
Papa Eftim’s head originally. Certainly it was not that stronghold of
Easternism, the Oecumenical Patriarchate. Wherever it did come from, I
believe there is not the slightest question of the sincerity with
which Papa Eftim holds it today. His is the almost fanatical sincerity
of a minority which feels itself misunderstood.
The morning after I talked with him, a Turk happened to call and in
the most casual fashion asked what opinion I had formed of Papa Eftim.
I made him a non-committal answer to the effect that he seemed to me
to be the merest shadow of a man physically to be cast in such a great
_role_. Fifteen minutes after my Turkish caller left, my door opened
and the largest Orthodox priest I have ever seen loomed in the
door-way, a vast ignorant mound of a man who announced unctuously that
he was one of Papa Eftim’s assistants in the Turkish Orthodox Church.
I looked him over slowly from his huge feet all the way up to his
uncut Orthodox beard and the Turkish _kalpak_ stuck on top of it,
while he watched me with the black ox-like eyes of a people whom no
man has ever long succeeded in budging unless they were willing to be
budged. Then I thanked him and told him he would do quite nicely. He
turned slowly and the stairs creaked beneath his tread as he went
ponderously away.
XVI
THE TREATY OF SEVRES
RAUF BEY TAKES THE NATIONALIST DEPUTIES FROM ANGORA TO CONSTANTINOPLE――
INDIA COMPELS MR. LLOYD GEORGE TO LEAVE CONSTANTINOPLE TO THE TURK AND
GENERAL MILNE BREAKS UP THE PARLIAMENT, DEPORTING RAUF AND MANY OF HIS
COLLEAGUES TO MALTA――THE SEVRES TREATY AND HOW DAMAD FERID PASHA
SECURED AUTHORITY TO SIGN IT.
The elections which the Ali Riza Government held, resulted in a clean
sweep for the Nationalists and a situation of considerable delicacy
was now precipitated. It was hardly possible for the new Parliament,
charged with the execution of the Erzerum program, to function freely
under the enemy occupation in the capital. On the other hand, it was
the country’s legally elected Parliament and it was highly desirable
that it should be recognized as such. Pending decision as to its
course, its deputies assembled at Angora where the Party’s standing
council was in session in the gray granite building which had once
been the provincial headquarters of the Committee of Union and
Progress. Here an intimation reached the deputies that the Allies were
prepared to recognize the new Parliament if its session was held in
the capital and was opened in a legal fashion by the Sultan’s speech,
but that it would not be recognized if it met in Angora. Accordingly a
large proportion of the deputies, headed by Rauf Bey, the
Parliamentary leader of the Party, left Angora for Constantinople and
on Jan. 11, 1920, the new Ottoman Parliament opened its session.
Despite the conditions of military occupation under which it met, Rauf
Bey discharged his duties with inflexible courage and on January 28,
the Erzerum program, now known as the Turkish National Pact, was
legally adopted by the legal Parliament sitting in its legal capital.
Trouble was now plainly in the air. Only the day before the adoption
of the Pact, the re-mobilizing Nationalist forces in Asia Minor had
raided a dump of surrendered munitions on the Gallipoli peninsula.
Behind its Asiatic suburbs, their forces had crept into the very
outskirts of Constantinople. The Allied occupation was becoming a
touch-and-go matter.
Other developments contributed to the gravity of the situation. Mr.
Lloyd George who had been striding up and down the Rubicon, had made a
dismaying discovery. It seemed that there was a place called India.
The British Foreign Office was also having its troubles. Pilgrimage to
Mecca had ceased and Islam was not displaying that gratitude at the
payment of British subsidies to King Hussein of the Hejaz, which Lord
Curzon expected of it. Mr. Lloyd George accordingly ceased striding up
and down the Rubicon and seated himself in a waiting posture on its
bank. On February 26, he told the House of Commons in London that his
statement of Jan. 5, 1918, respecting Constantinople as the Turkish
capital, “was specific. It was unqualified and it was very deliberate.
It was made with the consent of all parties in the community. It was
not opposed by the Labor Party.” Preparations were accordingly made to
leave Constantinople to the Turk in the peace settlement, and London
editors (who as a rule are not Moslems) began turning over projects
for the “Vaticanization” of the Caliphate of Islam.
On the night of March 15-16, during the temporary absence of his
French co-commander, General Milne seized the telegraph offices in
Constantinople, isolated the capital from Asia Minor, executed a
series of lightning raids at midnight, arrested every Nationalist
deputy in the Ottoman Parliament whom he could lay his hands on, and
embarked them on transports for internment on Malta. By dawn of the
16th, British forces held the city securely in their grip, Rauf Bey
and many of his colleagues were _en route_ to barbed wire compounds on
Malta, the rest of the Nationalist deputies were clambering up the
Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus to begin their long trek back to
Angora, General Milne was soon to be recognized as the Allied
Commander-in-Chief, and Constantinople was ready to be left to the
Turk.
On April 6, the Ali Riza Government gave way to a second Damad Ferid
Government. On April 11, Ferid issued a Sultanic edict denouncing
Nationalism, and a similar edict was issued by the _Sheikh-ul-Islam_
who had entered his high office upon the arrest and deportation to
Malta of his predecessor (the German occupation of Belgium during the
war had left Cardinal Mercier unmolested, but no such nice scruples
have troubled the British occupants of Constantinople). Meanwhile,
military events were moving rapidly. The Circassian leader, Anzavur,
who had been launched against the Nationalists, had flickered out
after a few local successes along the Asiatic shore of the Straits,
and it became evident that serious operations would have to be
undertaken if Constantinople was to be held. Every British man of war
in the Mediterranean was ordered to Constantinople and, with the
second Ferid Government launching its religious thunderbolts at the
Nationalists, Allied conferences at Hythe and Boulogne called on the
Greeks behind Smyrna to screen the Straits from the “Kemalists.” In
conjunction with British naval units, the towns along the Asiatic
shore of Marmora were quickly occupied. Thrace was given to the Greeks
in Europe to protect the capital from the Nationalists in its rear,
and a British Constantinople was now firmly embedded in a Greek
setting. The High Contracting Parties were now prepared to “agree that
the rights and title of the Turkish Government over Constantinople
shall not be affected, and that the said Government and His Majesty
the Sultan shall be entitled to reside there and to maintain there the
capital of the Turkish State.”
On May 11, the terms of peace were handed to two of Ferid’s appointees
at Paris. These terms proposed to close the Greek pincers about
Constantinople, to cut it off from Asia Minor permanently with a
garrison restricted to 700 men, to isolate the Straits from Asia Minor
by the institution of an International Commission on which Russia and
Turkey would be represented if and when they became members of the
League of Nations, and to place what remained of Turkey in Asia Minor
under the permanent military, economic and financial control of Great
Britain, France and Italy. As for Smyrna, “the city of Smyrna and the
territory in Article 66 will be assimilated, in the application of the
present Treaty, to territory detached from Turkey. The city of Smyrna
and the territory defined in Article 66 remain under Turkish
sovereignty. Turkey however transfers to the Greek Government the
exercise of her rights of sovereignty over the city of Smyrna and the
said territory. In witness of such sovereignty the Turkish flag shall
remain permanently hoisted over an outer fort in the town of Smyrna.
The fort will be designated by the Principal Allied Powers…. The Greek
Government may establish a Customs boundary along the frontier line
defined in Article 66, and may incorporate the city of Smyrna and the
territory defined in the said Article in the Greek customs system….
When a period of five years shall have elapsed after the coming into
force of the present Treaty the local parliament referred to in
Article 72 may, by a majority of votes, ask the Council of the League
of Nations for the definitive incorporation in the Kingdom of Greece
of the city of Smyrna and the territory defined in Article 66. The
Council may require, as a preliminary, a plebiscite under conditions
which it will lay down. In the event of such incorporation as a result
of the application of the foregoing paragraph, the Turkish sovereignty
referred to in Article 69 shall cease. Turkey hereby renounces in that
event in favor of Greece all rights and title over the city of Smyrna
and the territory defined in Article 66.” As for Constantinople, it
remained the Turkish capital, but “in the event of Turkey failing to
observe faithfully the provisions of the present Treaty, or of any
treaties or conventions supplementary thereto, particularly as regards
the protection of the rights of racial, religious or linguistic
minorities, the Allied Powers expressly reserve the right to modify
the above provisions, and Turkey hereby agrees to accept any
dispositions which may be taken in this connection.”
There being no Ottoman Parliament in session, Damad Ferid Pasha
summoned eighty prominent Turks to Yildiz Kiosk to authorize signature
of the peace terms. Permitting no discussion of it, Ferid ordered
those who favored signature to stand and, scenting trouble ahead, he
whispered to the Sultan to stand. Considerations of etiquette bade
every one present stand, but the late “Topdjeh” Riza Pasha broke into
vigorous protest. In a voice trembling with emotion, he told Ferid
that the meeting had risen out of respect to the _Padishah_ and not in
resignation to the peace terms, that the meeting had no power to
authorize their signature and that, even if it had, it could not
authorize their signature as long as Anatolia was in open and armed
revolt against them. Without further ado, Ferid declared the signature
of the peace terms authorized and added audibly that Anatolia could go
to the devil.
So the peace terms were signed by three of Ferid’s appointees (one of
them a teacher in an American college near Constantinople) on August
11 at Sevres in the suburbs of Paris. Sevres is in Christendom and the
year was 1920.
XVII
ANGORA
FEVZI, RAFET AND KIAZIM KARABEKR PASHAS AND THEIR MILITARY
DICTATORSHIP UNDER KEMAL PASHA――THE “PONTUS” DEPORTATIONS――MOSUL, THE
KURDS AND THE SPLIT IN ISLAM――THE FRANCO-ARMENIAN FRONT IN CILICIA,
THE GREEK FRONT BEFORE SMYRNA, AND THE ALLIED FRONT BEFORE
CONSTANTINOPLE――HOW THE BROKEN PARLIAMENT WAS RECONSTRUCTED AT
ANGORA――FERID’S COUNTER-REVOLUTION AT KONIA.
Angora lies tilted up on its hill, a gray blanket of flat roofs
pierced with white minarets and green cypresses, and scarred across
its middle with the ruins of 1915. At its foot lies a shallow marsh
stretching from the town itself to its railway station, a mile and a
half away. Along the rim of the basin up whose southern slope it
sprawls, are the summer villas of its wealthier families, secure above
the hot-weather malaria of the marsh.
The heart of the town lies along its lower fringes. When the Sivas
congress moved the Nationalist Party’s council to Angora late in
September, 1919, Kemal himself took up his abode in an upper room at
the railway station and a Decauville locomotive was kept fired up
night and day beneath his window, in readiness to hurry him farther
into the interior on an instant’s warning. The first building one
passes upon entering the town from the railway station is the gray
granite building once used as the local headquarters of the Committee
of Union and Progress, with a wooden theatre lying in the center of a
garden across the road. Some distance to the left, as one continues
into the town, is the old _konak_, or Government building, where the
provincial administration was formerly housed. Across the square in
front of it, is the Post and Telegraph Office. On the right hand as
the town is entered, a broad street turns off past the theatre and
leads around the foot of the town to the beautiful compound of the
Sultana College. Almost opposite the theatre as one turns into this
road, is a large school building of stone and some distance farther
along is the stone building formerly occupied by the local
administration of the Public Debt. Still farther along, far out in the
outkirts of the town, the blue and white buildings of the Sultana
College stand within the walls of their compound. Here Fevzi Pasha, a
towering Anatolian Turk with drooping moustaches, and Rafet Pasha, a
dapper little figure, were engaged in re-mobilizing and re-equipping
the Army. Fevzi Pasha is a dour giant of a man with a gargantuan
appetite for work and a complete aversion from social intercourse of
any sort. Rafet Pasha has a similar capacity for work but he combines
with it a natural genius for social intercourse. I have seen him in a
number of widely varying settings, from his quarters in the Sultana
College to the mountain passes of Anatolia in the dead of winter, but
he is invariably as immaculate both in manner and appearance as if he
had just stepped out of a drawing room.
Under Mustapha Kemal Pasha, Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha ruled Anatolia
for the Nationalists, their authority reaching down into the provinces
through military governors whom they assigned to the more critical
provincial capitals. Kiazim Karabekr Pasha who held the eastern
provinces from Erzerum, ought to be mentioned with them. It had been
easy enough to take over Anatolia from the Damad Ferid Government, for
the Greek occupation of Smyrna undermined Ferid’s hold on the country
at a stroke, but to hold Anatolia against Ferid’s efforts to recover
it was quite another matter. Fevzi, Rafet and Kiazim were the men who
held it, and whatever traditions of personal advantage they inherited
from the old Ottoman Government, their personal ambitions were sunk in
the common cause of defending the remnant of the country. I believe
firmly that this statement holds true of Kemal as well. My impression
of him is that he would have joined one of his own labor battalions
and dug roads behind his own Army if he thought that by so doing he
would be able more effectively to contribute to his country’s defense.
These men constituted a small handful of modern Westerners in control
of a vast mediaeval Eastern country, but their task was simplified by
the comparative absence of the Levantinism which had poisoned
Constantinople. Such as their country was, it was as homogeneous as
any between Vienna and Bagdad. There were Turks, Kurds, Circassians,
Turcomans, Tartars and Laz in the country, a few remaining Armenians
in the interior, an increasing number of Greeks between Samsun and
Trebizond along the Black Sea littoral, and a handful of widely
scattered Americans, mostly in the employ of the Near East Relief. The
large majority of its population, however, was Turkish and most of the
non-Turks were bound to the Turks by their acceptance of Islam. The
country, while wholly primitive, was far more single-minded than its
capital had been for a century. Its handful of Americans were soon
represented at Angora by two members of the Near East Relief’s corps,
the late Miss Annie T. Allen and Miss Florence Billings. Most of their
contact was with Rafet Pasha and, despite the serious delicacy of
their position, their relations with Rafet Pasha were generally happy.
The military situation in which the Turks found themselves, was
shortly to be simplified by the brief war which Kiazim Karabekr Pasha
launched from Erzerum against the Armenian Republic of Erivan. This
opened a line of retreat to Trans-Caucasia and Central Asia, and if
Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas had been forced to drop their archives
into their _kalpaks_ and flee, a back door would have been available
for their escape into the East.
The Pontus project which the Greeks along the Black Sea littoral had
launched, was not so simple to handle. The Greek occupation of Smyrna
eventually made it necessary to transfer the Third Army from Amasia to
the hinterland of Smyrna and the so-called Pontus had to be held with
irregulars under the command of the late Osman Agha, the Laz mayor of
Kerasund. The crude terrorism he wielded proved to be such an ugly
business that Hamid Bey, one of the best men available in Angora, was
dispatched to Samsun as mayor. Hamid Bey is a Rhodes Turk with
up-standing hair, Kaiser-like moustaches, a mouth full of gold and a
booming voice, a combination apt to give one meeting him for the first
time a sense of having met some new species of wild man, but a further
acquaintance with him reveals beneath his surface eccentricities a
character of solid integrity and ripe judgment. He had been a governor
of provinces and the fact that the post of mayor in Samsun was thought
worthy of being filled by an ex-governor may be taken as an indication
of Rafet Pasha’s anxiety to discover some peaceful solution of the
Pontus problem. Osman Agha’s terrorism remained as much of a problem
at Angora as the Greek terrorism which it sought to overcome, but a
solution was finally discovered for it when Osman, having shot down
900 Greeks and Armenians in Marsovan in reprisal for the knifing of
200 Turks by Greek troops at Ismid, marched to Angora to offer himself
and his Laz followers to the Army. He entered Angora as the hero of a
goaded and angry population and Kemal, after permitting him to enjoy
his ovation to the full, incorporated his followers in the Turkish
shock troops with whom they were cut to pieces in the Battle of the
Sakaria River. Thereafter there were no more Marsovans in the
so-called Pontus, but the problem of its Greeks still remained.
There appears to be no doubt that the Pontus program had reached the
status of a definite organization determined on independence, an
organization which was peculiarly difficult to combat by reason of the
fact that any move against it would be disseminated in the Black Books
of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople as evidence of
“persecution of the Christians.” Believing that one of the
organization’s centers was a body of Greek students which called
itself the Pontus Literary Society in the American college at
Marsovan, Angora requested Dr. George E. White, president of the
college, to suppress the Society. Possibly forgetting that the country
was in a state of war and nowhere more bitterly so than in Marsovan,
Dr. White refused to suppress the Society. Angora thereupon suppressed
the college, deporting its American teaching staff to the coast whence
they were removed to Constantinople. A number of Greeks were then
arrested in Marsovan on evidence which Angora believed indicated their
activity in the Greek organization; they were removed to Angora,
placed on trial before a military court under a charge of treason in
time of war, convicted and hung. But the tumult in the so-called
Pontus still continued. Greek and Turkish irregulars burned each
other’s villages and ambushed each other in the fields. This sort of
thing dragged along until 1922, when Angora, having failed to break up
the Greek organization, deported into the interior the entire Greek
population along the Black Sea, men, women and children alike.
Once these deportations had been ordered at Angora, their execution
was of necessity left to the local police chiefs and the manner of
their execution varied with the temper of the local police chiefs and
the amount of supplies available in each province. Both the police
chiefs and the amounts of supplies available varied widely, and the
treatment of the deportees on the march varied accordingly. The report
which Dr. Mark Ward, the Near East Relief worker who was deported from
Kharput, made to the British Foreign Office in London as well as to
his own Government in Washington, indicates that their sufferings at
Kharput were heavy. Dr. Ward in his report laid the blame for their
sufferings on Angora. Whether, once other methods had failed to break
up the Greek Pontus organization, Angora possessed the means to make
deportation a bearable process for the Greeks, is a question which in
the lack of conclusive evidence must remain unanswered here. It seems
to me more to the point, however, to point out the original guilt of
those who landed the Greeks in Asia Minor without the means of
protecting them there. The “Pontus” episode is not the first in which
Western Powers have permitted the Greeks to expose their own people to
danger in the hope that their sufferings will attract Western
assistance. There are minorities in every country between Vienna and
Bagdad and their exposure to danger constitutes part of the
_technique_ of Balkan statecraft. Greek atrocities at Ismid resulted
in Osman Agha’s reprisals at Marsovan. It is not impossible that that
was the purpose with which Greek atrocities along the Marmora shore
began. Certainly it is difficult to find any other purpose in the
conduct of Greek regular troops. Thus it is that Balkan peoples draw
their new frontiers. Thus it has been for a century and thus
presumably it will continue to be, as long as the West permits.
It seems to me (and I must add in fairness that my knowledge of the
“Pontus” deportations, while gleaned at Angora and the Oecumenical
Patriarchate alike, is purely second-hand) that it is open to question
whether Angora’s deportation of Greek women was justified and whether
it made the fullest use of such scanty supplies as it had in caring
for the deportees on the march. On the other hand, the action of the
British in disembarking the Greeks into the “Pontus” without protest
from the Oecumenical Patriarchate, could only be justified if the
Turks remained helpless and passive. As soon as Nationalism began to
gather strength in the interior, the most elemental sense of humanity
on the part of the British and the Oecumenical Patriarchate should
have prompted negotiations with Angora looking toward the
re-embarkation of the “Pontus” women and the humane internment of the
men.
The deportation of the “Pontus” Greeks and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha’s
victory over the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia kept
Angora’s rear open. The British front in the Mosul province of
Mesopotamia has never threatened Angora’s rear, for the mountainous
nature of the country ahead of them has made impossible any further
advance on the part of the British. Here the British have sought to
partition the Kurdish population, leaving its northern half to Angora
and incorporating its southern half in the Arab State of Iraq. Whether
the chiefs of the Kurdish tribes prefer to be under Turkish rule or
under Arab rule or independent under the British aegis, is a question
to which Angora and Bagdad furnish widely varying answers. It seems
probable, however, that Kurdish opinion, such as it is, does not
relish partition and if there are Kurdish deputies at Angora, it is
because the Turks are the only parties to the Mosul controversy who do
not propose to divide the Kurdish country. There is a wider aspect,
however, to the Mosul controversy. Turks and Arabs alike are _Sunni_
Moslems and as long as the British can maintain a controversy over
Mosul between the new Turkish State and the Arab State of Iraq, Islam
remains in a divided condition. It is the desire to abstain from any
action over Mosul which might widen that breach, which has prompted
Djavid Pasha, the Turkish commander at Diarbekr, to refrain from the
use of force in the recovery of Mosul. The _sheikh_ of the Senussi who
girded the late Caliph on his accession to the Throne in 1918, and who
fled from Brussa to Angora when the Greeks entered Smyrna, has been at
Diarbekr for the last three years, attempting to heal the Turco-Arab
breach over Mosul. Thus far, the conduct of the Turkish command on the
Mosul “front” has been marked by a conspicuous restraint.
As Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas looked toward the West, they were
confronted by three military fronts, the Cilician front on their left,
the Greek front behind Smyrna on their center, and the Allied
occupation of Constantinople on their right. In the winter of
1919-’20, the British high command in Cairo withdrew its forces from
Cilicia in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916,
to Palestine, leaving the French command at Beirut in sole occupation
of the northern end of the Syrian corridor and of Cilicia. Here, under
the French aegis in Cilicia, an Armenian enclave was being carved out
and the Turkish administration had withdrawn to Bozanti, a town at the
top of the Taurus Range. The French front extended from the Taurus
east to the Mosul province, but it was in Cilicia that the weight of
the French occupation made itself chiefly felt. The Armenians revenged
the undoubted wrongs which they had suffered under the Ottoman Sultans
in drastic fashion and there were streets even in Adana itself in
which it was not safe for a Turk to show himself after dark. The
Turkish towns outside the rim of the French area, possibly inflamed by
the tales of Turkish refugees from Adana, soon launched a guerilla
warfare against the Franco-Armenian regular troops and began isolating
out-lying garrisons. Much of this was directed by the Turkish
ex-administration at Bozanti, but it was carried on largely by Turkish
irregulars with any following which they could impress into service.
As for the Greek front behind Smyrna, the first defense which was used
was that of the Circassian bandit leader, Edhem, but the Greek command
soon won him over and made a considerable hero of him. This left
Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas without defense and the skeleton Third
Army which was hastily transferred from Amasia, covering Samsun, to
the Smyrna front was too depleted in strength to offer effective
resistance. Nuri Ismet Pasha, a slight deaf man but an able pupil of
von der Goltz and the Potsdam War College, was given command on the
Smyrna front and the hasty extemporization of munition factories began
at Konia in his rear. Until his forces should be built up to an
effective strength, however, he restricted himself to keeping in touch
with the Greeks, and with all of Asia Minor behind him in which to
maneuvre, he traded territory for time whenever the Greeks showed an
inclination to move. Luckily for Angora, the Greeks sat waiting on the
Allies and attempted little movement after their first rush ended.
Thus hemmed about with enemies, the Nationalist Party had won a
clean-cut political victory by installing its Parliamentary majority
in Constantinople, and its troops had penetrated into the very suburbs
of the capital in search of surrendered munitions with which to
re-equip themselves. Although the Mudros armistice had been torn up at
the Greek occupation of Smyrna and a state of war again existed,
Angora was in close telegraphic communication with Rauf Bey, the
leader of its Parliamentary majority in Constantinople. Indeed, with
the British Navy commanding those sections of its perimeter which were
not in the occupation of enemy Armies, Angora’s wire to Constantinople
constituted its only means of communication with the West.
But on the night of March 15-16, 1920, General Milne isolated
Constantinople from Anatolia, conducted a series of lightning raids at
midnight in Stamboul, arrested Rauf Bey and many of his colleagues for
deportation to Malta, and not only cut off Angora from the legal
Parliamentary machinery which it had spent eight months in building
up, but cut it off from any means of effective communication with the
West. This was a staggering blow. Angora immediately ordered the
arrest of the few British officers who remained in Asia Minor, chief
among them Lord Rawlinson’s brother who was jailed at Erzerum, but
with Rauf Bey and his colleagues on their way to Malta as prisoners of
the British, the Nationalists lost some of the best brains in the
Party. The Italians soon opened their cable from Adalia to Rhodes
whence a wireless was in communication with Rome, but Angora’s sole
contact with the West was even then at the disposal of a foreign
Power.
Within the next few weeks, deputies who had escaped General Milne’s
midnight raids in Stamboul, began filtering into Angora and an attempt
to reconstruct the shattered Parliament began. A month was allowed for
escaped deputies to reach Angora and claim their seats in the new
Parliament, and the seats of others who had been interned on Malta
were awarded in new “elections,” one of which is said to have been
held in the Asiatic suburbs of Constantinople itself where Italian
forces were in occupation; Italy has never relished the hurried Greek
occupation of Smyrna.
So on April 23, 1920, the reconstructed Parliament, with deputies
sitting for constituencies in all the areas covered by the Erzerum
program, from Thrace to Mosul, began its session in the old Committee
of Union and Progress building in Angora, under the new name of the
Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Mustapha Kemal Pasha was made
Commander-in-Chief and President, Fevzi Pasha became Chief of the
General Staff and Prime Minister, Rafet Pasha became Minister of War
and Interior, and the deputies acquiesced in the military dictatorship
which they found at Angora. Even in the West, democracy does not
thrive in time of war, nor did it in the war-ringed isolation of
Angora. Forty percent requisitions, accompanied by ruinously heavy
taxation afforded, not enough money to balance the Assembly’s budgets,
but enough to enable Fevzi and Rafet Pashas to continue re-mobilizing
and re-equipping the Army.
On April 6, Damad Ferid Pasha again became _Grand Vizier_ in
Constantinople and began at once a determined effort to regain a
foothold in Anatolia. Fevzi and Rafet Pashas replied to him with a
series of so-called Military Courts of Independence, before which any
late Ottoman subject suspected of anti-Nationalism could be brought,
tried under the Army code for treason in time of war, and if convicted
summarily hung. In the Nationalist view, the Ottoman Sultanate and the
Ottoman Government had alike ceased to exist on the night of March
15-16, 1920, and Damad Ferid Pasha, with the prestige of the Ottoman
Caliphate at his disposal, now added himself to the Western enemies
who surrounded Angora in a final struggle for the possession of the
new Turkish State.
The Greeks were hurriedly flung in front of the Straits, Ismet Pasha
making no attempt to oppose them, and from behind them Ferid in
Constantinople appealed to Old Turkish opinion at Konia to uphold the
conservative usages of Islam and denounce the Nationalists. It was an
appeal which had helped to nullify the Young Turkish Revolution in
1908, which had helped to keep the old Empire in the stiff dead grip
of religious usage. It was a very powerful appeal and the Greek
command at Smyrna lost no time in re-inforcing it by proclaiming its
solicitude for the Caliphate of Islam. Moslem and Christian reaction
were the rocks on which the 1908 Revolution had come to grief and the
Greek command at Smyrna lost no time in dropping them into the channel
which the Nationalist Revolution of 1920 would have to thread. Since
Greeks and Armenians were then at war with Turkey, Christian reaction
had no standing at Angora, but Moslem reaction is a rock which Turkey
is to this day still engaged in passing and will be for some years to
come. Ferid had no more powerful weapon with which to attack the
Nationalist hold on the conservative peasantry of Asia Minor and on
the dervish _tekkes_ of Konia. The Nationalists could handle their
strong but docile peasantry, but if the worst came to the worst at
Konia the Nationalists could make it plain that Indian and Algerian
Moslems had fought against the Ottoman Government during the war and
that in the new Turkish State the needs of the country took precedence
over the letter of Moslem law.
From April 6, 1920, when Damad Ferid Pasha re-entered office in
Constantinople, a Nationalist coastguard was instituted on the
Mediterranean opposite Konia in order to oppose any attempt at a
landing, whether by Ferid’s followers from the capital or by Greeks
engaged in the interesting business of proclaiming their solicitude
for Islam. Konia itself, a dusty wind-swept provincial capital on the
Anatolian plateau, replete with old Seljukian and pre-Seljukian
mosques, was linked with Angora by a great semi-circle of railway line
which bent westward _via_ Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar, and
thrice-a-week trains made the journey in eighteen hours. At the same
time, this bend of railway line was identical from Eski-Shehr to Afium
with another bend from Constantinople to Smyrna. With Smyrna and its
hinterland in Greek hands, the Greek command added to its new interest
in Islam a scheme for the revival under Greek auspices of the old
Seljukian Empire with its seat at Konia. The Seljukian program is
another of the ghosts which became stirred to life when the Ottoman
Empire went down in 1918 to join the dead.
Ferid’s agents and Greek agents kept slipping through the Greek lines
toward Konia and moving back and forth under the coasts of Asia Minor
with their eyes on Konia. In the British view, the Ottoman dynasty had
lost the Caliphate in 1914 when it was used to declare a holy war
against the British and their Allies. Events at Mecca had since
changed the British view, but if the Caliphate were not too serious a
matter for light speaking, it might be added that in the Nationalist
view the British lost the Caliphate in 1920 when they used it to
declare a holy war against the Nationalists. Ferid finally recovered
Konia in the counter-revolution of October, 1920, but Rafet Pasha
hurried 2,000 men down the railway from Angora, occupied Ala-ed-Din
hill in the outskirts of the city and drove out Ferid’s administration
in three days of sharp fighting. Rafet Pasha appointed as military
governor of Konia, Ghalib Pasha, a tall white-haired Albanian who had
defended the Caliphate as Ottoman commander in the Hejaz during the
war, and the _tchelebi_ of the Mevlevi dervishes whose historic right
it had been to gird each Caliph with the Prophet’s Sword forty days
after his accession to the Throne, went to Angora as one of Konia’s
eight deputies in the Grand National Assembly. So the Seljukian ghost
was laid and the Caliphate came into the Nationalists’ keeping.
The Nationalist hold on the interior of Asia Minor now became
indisputable. The munition factories in the rear of Ismet Pasha’s
slowly growing forces on the Smyrna front, were quickly enlarged and
Konia became a war-center of the first importance in the interior. A
considerable number of Armenians who had been returned to Konia after
the Mudros armistice and who had voluntarily remained in their homes
when the British offered to evacuate them at the time of their own
evacuation of the Bagdad Railway, had been compromised anew by the
Greek occupation of Smyrna and were placed under increasing military
surveillance as the number of Turkish munition factories in the town
grew. Armenian “indiscretions,” however, finally led to the
deportation of men of military age farther into the interior, and the
locking up of their churches in Konia. The juxtaposition of a Turkish
munition factory and an Armenian church is one which is possibly apt
to produce “indiscretions.” When I was last in Konia, the only
Armenians there were women and children. A number of mosques in the
town had been taken over for military depots, but no Armenian church
in the town had been so taken over. The churches were locked up but
otherwise untouched. The Armenian women in the town were permitted to
receive no mail from the outside world, for the Nationalist censors
were supposed to read Turkish and French only, not Armenian. No Turk
ever learns Armenian, and apparently there was no Armenian in whose
loyalty the Turks had sufficient confidence to enable them to entrust
Armenian mail to him for censorship. The Armenian women were being
taxed to the point of robbery, and so were their Turkish neighbors.
Ghalib Pasha told me that he was treating Turks and Armenians on a
basis of scrupulous equality, and I believe that he meant precisely
what he said. If there were enough men like Ghalib Pasha in Turkey to
fill all the provincial administrations, Turkey would be a model
country. But men like Ghalib Pasha are not appointed chiefs of police
in highly delicate places like Konia.
Damad Ferid Pasha did not cease his efforts to regain a foothold in
Anatolia, after his brief counter-revolution in Konia. With the Greek
advance in the spring and summer of 1921, his agents renewed their
activities along the coasts. In Smyrna the Greeks welcomed them and in
Mersina, the port of Cilicia, the French and Armenians welcomed them.
Their work increased with the 1921 Greek offensive, until Nationalist
agents boarded the British steamer _Palatina_ at Adalia, discovered
Topal Osman and four confederates hidden in a cargo hold, and shot
them down. It was a wholly illegal proceeding but it put an end to
Ferid’s efforts to return to Anatolia. Incidentally, it so embarrassed
the Italians who were occupying Adalia under the secret war-time
agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, that they evacuated their zone.
Technically, they had been hostile to the Turks but actually their
hostility was directed to the Greeks in Smyrna. Their departure now
afforded the Nationalists their first access to the Mediterranean, and
their first representation in the West was soon at Rome.
[Illustration: REAR-ADMIRAL COLBY M. CHESTER, U. S. N. (RETIRED)
To whose associates the First Grand National Assembly granted the huge
development program known as the Chester Concession.]
[Illustration: REAR-ADMIRAL MARK L. BRISTOL, U. S. N.
United States High Commissioner at Constantinople from February, 1919,
to the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States
and Turkey.]
XVIII
TURKISH NATIONALISM
THE WESTERN TRADITION OF GOVERNMENT TO WHICH THE GRAND NATIONAL
ASSEMBLY WAS BUILT――HOW NATIONALISM WAS CREATED――GREEK DEFEAT AT THE
SAKARIA RIVER――PEACE WITH THE FRENCH IN CILICIA――AMERICAN ARMENIANISM
AND CILICIA――HOW A CIVILIAN ADMINISTRATION WAS BEGUN AT ANGORA WHILE
FEVZI PASHA WAS RE-MOBILIZING AND RE-EQUIPPING THE TURKISH ARMIES.
When the Grand National Assembly opened its first session on April 23,
1920, in the gray granite building at the foot of Angora, the Crescent
and Star went up on the flag-staff atop the building and, although
trenches were dug for its military defense if necessary, the Turkish
flag has flown there night and day ever since it was first hoisted. At
one corner of the grounds, just outside the trenches which encircle
the building, a gallows was erected. In a little restaurant near the
Assembly building, I have sat at luncheon with that gallows looking in
through the window. I have thought several times as I sat there of a
number of worthy Americans at home who might have held less simple
views on Near and Middle Eastern subjects in days gone by, if they
could have sat at luncheon in Angora with the cross-beam and pulley of
that gallows looking in upon them.
The Assembly building itself contains a single floor with a corridor
down its middle, a row of committee rooms on one side and a
comparatively large chamber on the other. The chamber was equipped for
the Assembly’s use by the construction of a high desk for “Mr.
Speaker” in the center of one wall and a lower desk in front of it to
be used by deputies in addressing the Assembly. Grouped in
semi-circular fashion around the Speaker’s desk, the small desks to be
used by the deputies themselves were crowded upon the floor of the
chamber in long rows. Half-way up the side walls, small galleries were
built for visitors. The whole equipment was of wood. It looked like a
school-room. It was a school-room, possibly as bitter a school-room as
any nation has ever attended.
The 342 deputies of the Assembly were in large part, and still are,
Easterners engaged in adapting the Western governmental tradition to
their own uses, but they have never sold their great Eastern
birthright for a mess of Western pottage. When they gathered for their
first session at 1 o’clock on April 23, 1920, a small motto, done in
Turkish script of white on a blue ground, a quotation from the _Koran_
such as may be found in thousands of devout Moslem homes, was hung on
the wall above the Speaker’s desk. A free translation of it into
English would be: “Let us meet together in council and discuss.” It
was the ground on which the new force of nationalism was carrying the
conservative peasantry of Anatolia behind the Caliph in Constantinople
to the _Koran_ itself, on which it was wrenching Anatolia away from
the Sultan and his _Grand Vizier_ while refraining from any violation
of its allegiance to the Ottoman Caliphate.
Beneath that motto, the deputies met at 1 o’clock every day but
Friday, which is the Moslem Sabbath. They consisted of men in Western
dress and _kalpaks_, officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman Army
days, and _hojas_ in Eastern robes and turbans. They varied in
personal appearance from the ample and immaculate figure of
Djelal-ed-Din Arif Bey, deputy for Erzerum, to three Kurdish chiefs
who could neither read nor write. The din of their conversation, both
within the chamber and in the corridor without, was continual and the
intermittent tinkle of the Speaker’s hand-bell did little to abate it,
for the Assembly at Angora is as noisy as all other Parliaments are.
The military dictatorship which Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha wielded
over Anatolia was in the Eastern tradition, but in the institution of
the Assembly a Western plant began taking root in the Eastern soil of
Anatolia. The military dictatorship would pass with the war but the
Assembly was intended to be permanent and it was fashioned in
readiness to begin functioning as soon as the war permitted. In its
structure, the Western tradition was adapted to what were believed to
be the country’s needs. It was necessarily fashioned to a theory at
first, for the number of enemies who ringed it about made a
dictatorship essential. As the war approached its end, as more men and
more money became available, practice might modify it but with the
loss of the Parliament at Constantinople it afforded the only attempt
at an ultimately civilian administration which the country possessed.
This is the theory to which it was built: Under the Ottoman
Constitution, as revived by the 1908 Revolution, the powers of
declaring war and peace, of dissolving Parliament, of receiving
diplomatic representatives of foreign States, and of appointing the
Cabinet and the Senate, had been vested in the Sultan. In the creation
of the Grand National Assembly, the Sultan was deposed and his
prerogatives were re-distributed. The Assembly itself became the seat
of authority and since its sessions were fixed by its fundamental law
at two years’ duration, no right of dissolving it was admitted. The
power of receiving diplomatic representatives of foreign States was
delegated to the President of the Assembly. The power of appointing
the Cabinet was taken by the Assembly and since its Ministers were
made individually responsible to the Assembly, both the executive and
the legislative functions of government were retained in its hands.
The Senate disappeared with the Sultan and the Government of the Grand
National Assembly became radically republican in structure.
Differences of opinion existed in the Nationalist Party respecting its
permanent structure, a small school of monarchist opinion holding that
a form of government so unreservedly republican would not show itself
suited to the country’s peace-time needs, but for the time being
domestic controversies were buried deeply beneath the urgencies of the
military situation. No differences of opinion have existed among
Westerners who know the East, however. It has long been a belief in
the West that the East can only be ruled by Sultans. We Westerners may
be right or we may be wrong in our views of the East, but Turkish
Nationalism has thrown us a most direct challenge in the out-and-out
republicanism of its Grand National Assembly. When the war ends, we
shall see what we shall see.
The Grand National Assembly speedily set about the elaboration of a
fundamental law which may be taken as the Constitution in embryo of
the new Turkish State. It was finally adopted on June 17, 1920, and
its more important clauses translate from Turkish into English as
follows:
“Article I. Sovereignty belongs to the nation without reservation. The
administration of the nation’s sovereignty is based on the principle
of the direct decision of the people.
“Article II. The executive power as well as the legislative power are
concentrated in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey which alone
represents the nation.
“Article III. Turkey is governed by the Grand National Assembly and
its Government is entitled ‘the Government of the Grand National
Assembly.’
“Article IV. The Grand National Assembly is composed of members
elected by the inhabitants of provinces.
“Article V. The election of members of the Grand National Assembly
takes place once in every two years. The duration of membership is two
years only. Members may be re-elected. The Assembly continues its
session until the new Assembly is convened. In case it is impossible
to hold new elections, the session of the Assembly may be prolonged
for one year only. Each member of the Grand National Assembly
represents not only his province but is also a representative of the
nation.
“Article VI. The general session of the Grand National Assembly takes
place on the first of November without convocation.
“Article VII. Fundamental rights such as the enactment dispositions of
the _Sheriat_ (Moslem law), the making, modification and abrogation of
laws, the conclusion of conventions and treaties of peace, and the
call for the defense of the country, belong to the Grand National
Assembly. The making of laws shall be based on principles of
jurisprudence which are most closely adapted to the needs of the
nation and to the requirements of its customs and habits. The powers
and duties of the council of mandatory Ministers of the nation shall
be determined by special laws.
“Article VIII. The Grand National Assembly administers its
governmental departments through mandatory Ministers elected by the
Assembly, according to rules to be provided in a special law. It is
the Grand National Assembly which instructs the mandatory Ministers in
executive matters and if necessary changes the Ministers….
“Article XI. In local matters, the province has an autonomous
personality. With the exception of internal and external policy, the
_Sheriat_, justice, military affairs, international economic
relations, government imposts and inter-provincial matters, the
provinces are charged with the administration, under laws to be
promulgated by the Grand National Assembly, of the _Evkaf_ (Moslem
religious endowments), educational institutions, sanitary services,
local economics, agriculture, public works and social services….”
The remaining articles outline the organization of the provincial and
sub-provincial administrations. In this fundamental law, the
Nationalist Revolution of 1920 undertakes to effect the same
decentralization in administration as the Young Turkish Revolution of
1908 failed to effect. It undertakes infinitely more than that. At a
single stroke, it lifts the new Turkish State out of the dead grip of
ancient religious usage which strangled the 1908 Revolution, which in
fact made effective revolution of any sort a traditional and hackneyed
impossibility in the old Ottoman Empire. Whether the new Turkish State
will succeed in maintaining its new and highly promising freedom from
the stiff religious traditions which imprisoned the old Empire,
remains to be seen. Christian reaction has been met and defeated on
the field of battle, but Moslem reaction is still suppressed by the
iron hand of the Assembly’s Treason Law. Hidden away in the bitter
loneliness of Anatolia, the Nationalist Party has used drastic methods
in laying the foundations of its Western governmental structure in the
Eastern soil of Anatolia. If those foundations have been well and
firmly laid, we have something new in the East at last.
Westerners who did not penetrate the thick veil of war which screened
Anatolia from the world during its years of seige, will not find it
easy to realize the suspicion with which it regarded us in the West.
Deceived again and again by Mr. Lloyd George, goaded by repeated Greek
atrocities unwittingly reinforced by wild atrocity tales to which the
hospitable American press opened its columns, only a man of Mustapha
Kemal Pasha’s iron patience could have compelled his angry countrymen
to persevere in the search for a peaceful escape from the fate which
loomed above them on every frontier. Yet amid the suspicion which
possessed Anatolia during those hard years, the Nationalist Party
created a new and very real human force known as nationalism.
Patriotism, love of one’s own soil, is a Western sentiment which would
have required a generation under normal circumstances for its
transplantation to the Eastern soil of Anatolia, but under the
circumstance of a Greek Smyrna, it sprang into existence overnight.
The Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, travelling from village to village
in Anatolia with a Turkish officer attached to him, added fuel to the
new flame of nationalism with his old cry, “_I am a Turk; my race and
language are great._” Newspaper plants, smuggled out from
Constantinople, pieces of press machinery concealed in travellers’
baggage, handfuls of type dropped into travellers’ pockets, produced
new dailies and weeklies in Anatolia which poured more fuel on the new
flame. The whole culture of the Turks was moved bit by bit from the
old capital to the new center of the nation’s life. Rafet Pasha’s
Military Courts of Independence suppressed any attempt to quench the
new flame. These Courts were a harsh reminder that there was such a
thing as a distinctive Middle Eastern civilization and that it had
come to a time when there was no longer any room in Anatolia for
natives who were not loyal to their own civilization. The old
religious divisions which had split the Anatolian population swiftly
melted away in the heat of the new flame. Papa Eftim Effendi gave up
his community rights and sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior
followed him into the new Turkish Orthodox Church, agreeing to appoint
no metropolitans except those who could read and write Turkish, who
were of Ottoman parentage, who had lived at least five years in the
country and who had abstained from “political activity.” They agreed
furthermore that metropolitans accused of secular crimes, instead of
being immune from arrest without having first been degraded and then
being subject to imprisonment only in the Oecumenical Patriarchate,
were to be arrested and tried as any other Turkish subject would be.
Moslems permitted a new personage called the Minister of Sacred Law to
become an ordinary member of the Cabinet at Angora, and the huge
wealth which was locked up in the country’s Moslem endowments was
opened and placed at the disposition of the provincial administrations.
Moslem courts and schools were taken over by the Ministers of Justice
and Education, respectively. Although American churchmen still thought
in terms of the old Ottoman Empire, still played upon the old
religious division between Moslems and Christians which had proved the
ruin of them both, the new political force of nationalism was blending
them in Turkey as in Syria, in Palestine and in Egypt. Nationalism is
a strangely new and Western force in the East today and thus far
Anatolia has clung to it in the face of every effort which Mr. Lloyd
George and American churchmen could exert to throw the country back
into the ruin of its bitter past.
For a year after the Greeks landed at Smyrna on May 15, 1919, they sat
in the hinterland of the great port waiting for the Sevres Treaty,
while Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha worked like Trojans at Angora. In
May, 1920, they threw their screen in front of the Straits, Ismet
Pasha making no effort to molest them. In November, 1920, Old Greece
finally rid itself of Mr. Venizelos, a wedge was driven between Athens
and the Phanar, and the French made Constantine an excuse for
disentangling themselves from the Greeks. Royalist officers now took
over the front behind Smyrna with no respect for the Allied veto on a
drive toward Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar. With these two railway
junctions occupied, the Greeks would possess the great semi-circle of
railway which runs from Constantinople to Smyrna, and the Turks would
be deprived of the interior Angora-Konia line with which they were
secretly re-mobilizing and re-equipping their Armies on the Smyrna
front. Accordingly in January, 1921, the Royalist Greek command tried
its strength from Brussa toward Eski-Shehr and retired without
encountering Turkish opposition. The situation was now plain.
Eski-Shehr and Afium were theirs whenever they cared to take them. As
for Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha at Angora, they had imposed a strict
embargo on travellers into the interior of Anatolia and the secrecy
they succeeded in preserving was one of their striking successes.
Two months later, in March, 1921, the Royalist Greek command launched
its double advance, the Southern Army moving on Afium from Ushak, the
Northern Army on Eski-Shehr from Brussa. To their surprise, both
advances encountered organized Turkish forces of considerable
strength. The Southern Army, against stiff opposition, succeeded in
occupying Afium but the Northern Army, following the route it had
walked over in January, ran into a murderous battle at Inë-Onü and had
to fall back to its old position at Brussa, the Southern Army falling
back from Afium to Ushak with it. That battle was the first meeting of
Greek and Turkish troops in Asia Minor and is today one of the epics
of the new Turkey.
Inë-Onü was the first evidence the Greeks had of what Fevzi Pasha and
Rafet Pasha had been doing at Angora, and Athens began feverishly to
increase its forces in order to administer a “knockout” before Ismet
Pasha’s command should be built up into a regular Army. Athens was
ready by July and three Armies, starting from the southern, center and
northern fronts, were ordered to converge on Kutahia, about half-way
between Eski-Shehr and Afium. The operations developed according to
plan, Kutahia fell, Eski-Shehr was evacuated under the threat of
encirclement and, although Ismet Pasha pounded at the exhausted Greeks
in Eski-Shehr for ten days, the Greeks held and Ismet Pasha withdrew
to the Sakaria River, covering Angora itself. The Greek command had
won the railway junctions of Eski-Shehr and Afium and now possessed
the bend of railway line which connects Constantinople and Smyrna. The
Turkish command had lost its interior railway line and the only
connection between Angora and Konia was now a carriage road over which
the two towns were five days apart.
Still lured by the possibility of a “knockout,” the Greek command now
rested for a month and then resumed its march. Toward the end of
August, it re-established contact with the Turks on the Sakaria River,
where Field Marshal Mustapha Kemal Pasha had taken command in person.
At Angora the civil Government had made preparations for evacuation to
Caesarea, crowds of refugees had thronged the already overcrowded
town, and occupants of larger dwellings were dispossessed to make room
for military hospitals.
The Battle of the Sakaria River which ensued, was another Inë-Onü but
on a larger scale. It lasted three weeks and even Kemal Pasha himself
was wounded in the course of it, although the only announcement which
was made of his injury in Angora was a brief _communique_ to the
effect that he had “fallen from his horse.” Attempting to encircle the
Turkish left, the Greek command drove south across an area of desert
but Kemal pulled down his forces to meet them. The Greeks drove inland
forty miles in a vain endeavor to find the Turkish left, and finally
changing their plan of battle, threw themselves against the Turkish
lines in a straight frontal engagement, some of the Greek attacks
driving all the way through and then being held up by the failure of
flanking regiments to follow them. Heavy Turkish counter-attacks
finally made it plain that the Greek command had underestimated the
Turkish strength and that the long Greek lines of communication
exposed it to the risk of a disorderly retreat. By the middle of
September, the Greek command began pulling back its forces, burning
Turkish villages as they went. By the first of October, the Greeks
were back in their old positions covering the railway junctions at
Eski-Shehr and Afium and the Turkish recovery of Smyrna became only a
matter of time. By the end of October, the late Miss Annie T. Allen
and Miss Florence Billings, the Near East Relief’s representatives in
Angora, compiled a report on the state of the Turkish villages which
the Greeks had burned during their retreat and forwarded it to the
Near East Relief’s headquarters in Constantinople. But the Near East
Relief has never published that report, just as Mr. Lloyd George never
published the Bristol report on Greek misdeeds at Smyrna.
The Turkish victory on the banks of the Sakaria radically changed the
political complexion of the Near and Middle East. For 200 years, the
West had been breaking down the old Ottoman Empire, but on the Sakaria
River it encountered the Turk himself and when it touched the Turk the
tide of history turned. History will one day find in this obscure
engagement on the Sakaria one of the decisive battles of our era.
The French Foreign Office which had been waiting on the outer rim of
events ever since the Mudros armistice deprived the French Army of its
anticipated sole command in Constantinople, now dispatched M. Henry
Franklin-Bouillon to Angora, where he negotiated the Franco-Turkish
peace agreement of October 20, 1921. Although the covering letter from
Yusuf Kemal Bey, Foreign Minister of the Turkish Government, contains
the only reference to “economic preference” which marked the result of
the Franklin-Bouillon negotiations, the French Foreign Office probably
hoped in this agreement not only to put an end to the expensive state
of war which the French command at Beirut was facing in Cilicia, but
also to salvage the Perier railway concession which had been the
subject of French negotiations with the old Ottoman Government in
1914. A French loan of £22,000,000 had been offered the old Government
in February of that year of which £16,000,000 was paid in the
following April, the French Perier group taking in return a concession
for 1,800 miles of railway line in northern and eastern Anatolia. The
loan, however, had never been completed, the concession had never been
ratified by the old Parliament and it seems quite probable that, even
if it had been, the war would have cancelled it. But peace in Cilicia
had become an urgent necessity, for the Turkish forces were slowly
pushing the Franco-Armenian Armies back toward the sea. To secure
peace, as well as any other objectives which M. Franklin-Bouillon may
have had in mind, the French Foreign Office surrendered to Turkey a
long strip of territory, beginning with Cilicia and running east to
the Mosul province, a French company, however, maintaining the right
of operating the Bagdad Railway from the port of Mersina in Cilicia to
its eastern terminus on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia.
News of this surrender so embittered the French Army that General
Dufieux, the French commandant in Cilicia, left Adana immediately for
Beirut, leaving behind him only subordinate French officers to carry
out the evacuation. It threw the Armenians in Cilicia into a panic. In
preparing their independent Armenian State under the French aegis,
they had taken a drastic revenge on the Turks in Cilicia and there was
doubtless ample ground for their fears that the Turks would continue
the ugly business. In order to assuage their fears, the Turkish
Government proclaimed a blanket amnesty, exempted them from military
service which it had a legal right to claim from them, exempted them
from the forty percent requisitions which it exacted from all other
Turkish subjects in the country, and guaranteed their security in the
strongest terms it could use. To back up these guarantees, it
dispatched two of the best men it had available, Muheddin Pasha as
military governor of the re-occupied territory and Hamid Bey, who has
been mentioned above in connection with Samsun, as political officer.
Muheddin Pasha is a representative of the finest type of old Ottoman
Army officer. He was one of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s teachers in the War
Academy at Constantinople and he has been introduced by Kemal Pasha as
“the man who gave us all our ideas of liberty.” He had nothing to do
with the Armenian deportations of 1915 or with the Enver Government
which ordered them; under the Hamidian _regime_, he had been exiled
four times and twice condemned to death, and during the war he served
as Ottoman commander in the Yemen which was about as far from the
capital as Enver Pasha could have sent him.
The Turkish re-occupation was timed to begin Dec. 1, 1921, and to be
completed by Jan. 4, 1922. On November 20, Muheddin Pasha and Hamid
Bey published a proclamation in the Turkish newspaper, _Yeni Adana_,
which was designed to assuage the Armenians’ fears. On November 22,
they met a deputation of Armenian leaders in an upper room of the
Yenidje railway station, and M. Franklin-Bouillon reached Yenidje
later in the day from Angora to repeat their re-assurances. On
November 26, they motored to Mersina where some 40,000 Armenians were
waiting for ships and met a deputation of 100 Armenian notables in the
Government building. On November 29, M. Franklin-Bouillon returned to
Mersina alone and held a final conference with the Armenians. Since
they had once been Ottoman subjects, the Turkish Government had a
probable right in law to forbid their departure from Turkish soil, but
it had become clear that no guarantees it could offer would persuade
them to remain voluntarily and the Government refrained from keeping
them involuntarily. Most of them went to Syria to live on the charity
of the Near East Relief at Alexandretta, only a few miles away, and
their abandoned homes in Cilicia were put into the hands of a Turkish
committee appointed by Hamid Bey to be kept for them for a year’s
time. Most of Cilicia was in a devastated condition and there was an
appalling amount of work to be done in repairing the ravages of war,
but the bulk of the Armenians settled down to live in idleness on
American charity at the old Alexandretta barracks.
It may be that some means will yet be discovered of re-writing ten
centuries of history in the eastern provinces and five centuries in
Cilicia; it may be that some way will yet be opened of transferring
the semi-autonomy of the old _Ermeni_ community from a religious to a
territorial basis, but with all possible good will, the discovery of
it or of the faintest possibility of it has proven beyond the feeble
powers of the present writer. If the Armenian problem had ever been
really understood in the United States, certainly no sane American
would ever have meddled with it. The past, however, is beyond recall.
In the tragic position to which the Armenians have been reduced today,
three courses suggest themselves as being open to Americans in the
future:
First, Congress may declare war on Turkey and by dispatching an
expeditionary force of a strength of possibly 200,000 men, we may
conquer Cilicia and install an Armenian State which will stand as long
as our Army or some other Western Army remains in occupation and no
longer; and by so doing, we shall succeed in righting one wrong by
committing a greater wrong. Happily, this course is out of the
question.
Second, we may continue to support the Armenians with charity and to
insist upon “minority rights” in Turkey as distinct from the rights of
Turkey’s majorities. This course we have followed consistently since
1918, and it has only succeeded in stiffening the Turks, pauperizing
the Armenians, and preventing that peace which is the very first
essential of both.
Third, we may permit the Armenians to work out their future alone.
This is the course which thoughtful Armenians in Turkey now desire us
to adopt, and its principal remaining opponents are certain Armenians
who live in New York and are frightfully far from reality. If we adopt
this course for the future, it seems quite possible that those
Armenians who prefer to live in their own country will in time find
their way into Soviet Armenia and those who remain in Turkey will be
given equal rights and equal duties with the Turks themselves. Turks
and Armenians understand each other well. Until fifty years ago, they
had lived together on generally peaceful terms for several centuries
and the fact (to come no nearer home) that Czarist Russia has
disappeared, seems to promise the possibility of an eventual
resumption in the new Turkish State of that peace which once
characterized their relationship….
The French evacuation of Cilicia cleared the Turkish left, but the
Greeks on the Eski-Shehr-Afium line still confronted the Turkish
center and the Allies in Constantinople still confronted the Turkish
right. Meanwhile, the British command in the capital executed in a
lesser degree the same climb-down as the French had made with respect
to Angora. As a result of the Turkish victory on the Sakaria River,
the Turkish deportees on Malta were exchanged at Ineboli on the Black
Sea coast for British prisoners held in Anatolia. So Rauf Bey came
back to Angora.
No Turk has been a greater lover of the British than Rauf Bey (Rauf is
of Circassian and Albanian blood, but politically he is a Turk and
unlike most Turks his foreign language is English instead of French).
He had applied to the British Embassy in 1914 for help in keeping his
country neutral, but no reply had been given him. He had applied to
Admiral Calthorpe in 1918 for an armistice, but that armistice led to
the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Greek occupation of
Smyrna. He had acted in good faith upon an intimation from General
Milne in 1920 and had brought the Nationalist deputies from Angora to
Constantinople, but that action landed him behind British barbed wire
on Malta. Is it a matter of wonder that the great tradition which
generations of Englishmen had built up in Constantinople, has now
disappeared? No Turk has fought harder for the British than Rauf Bey,
and few countries have ever more consistently wounded their own
friends in Turkey than the England over which Mr. Lloyd George
presided. Rauf Bey’s tragic experience at the hands of their country
is one which Englishmen might do well to ponder during these new days,
when Turkish tugs are piloting British merchantmen into the Gulf of
Smyrna.
Ali Fethy Bey, a mild, almost shy, Macedonian Turk whose modest
bearing gives no hint of the strength he has contributed to Angora,
returned with Rauf and a long list of other deputies in the late
Parliament at Constantinople. Here were the civilian brains of which
Angora stood in the greatest need and it now became possible for the
Grand National Assembly to begin the erection of a civilian
administration. Winter was coming on and the military situation would
necessarily remain at a stand-still. The Assembly gave its War Office
(the Ministry of National Defense is its official title) an immediate
shake-up. Rafet Pasha fell and the Ministry of the Interior was
separated out and given to Ali Fethy Bey. Here he encountered the same
difficulty as so many of the Nationalist leaders encountered――he knew
nothing of Anatolia and it required most of the winter merely to learn
the ins and outs of his department. Rauf Bey was given the Ministry of
Public Works but in a re-shuffle of the Cabinet, he presently
displaced Fevzi Pasha as Prime Minister, a position more nearly
commensurate with his very high abilities. The Ministry of Finance was
elevated to an actual, as distinct from a figurehead, authority and
the Near East Relief’s representatives who had been accustomed to
consulting Rafet Pasha on matters of mutual interest, now found
themselves referred to Hassan Tahsin Bey, Minister of Finance, when
they desired to obtain exemption of relief supplies from the payment
of customs duties. Rafet Pasha had been accustomed to pass on their
applications as if they were personal matters, but Tahsin Bey was a
stranger. With the _regime_ of the Capitulations ended, Americans were
finding themselves in a position in which it became necessary to treat
a Government official in Turkey as though he were a Government
official. For some Americans, the change has proven, and is still
proving, a difficult one.
In the meantime, the Foreign Office which had been housed in the old
Public Debt building, had signed a treaty of mutual recognition with
Soviet Russia on March 16, 1921, at the same time as a similar
Russo-Persian treaty was being signed. In the Russo-Turkish treaty,
full Russian recognition was given to the Erzerum program, including
that clause of it respecting Constantinople and the Straits. No more
vivid illustration exists of the meaning of the Russian Revolution
than the contrast between the Russo-Turkish Treaty of 1921 and the
Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.
The application of the provisions of the 1921 Treaty to the new
Russo-Turkish frontier in the Kars Treaty which was signed Oct. 13,
1921, brought about peace in the eastern provinces, and Azerbaijan and
Afghan Ministers, accredited to Mustapha Kemal Pasha, were received in
Angora. A Russian Ambassador was also received and the elaboration of
consular and commercial treaties was begun.
Only three sections of the frontiers of the Turkish State now remained
to be fixed――the Mosul frontier, the Smyrna frontier and the frontier
in Europe. Communication with the West, with a view to the peaceful
settlement of these disputed frontiers, was now open to Constantinople
direct, the British command having opened the wire from the General
Post-Office in Stamboul to “the interior” at the same time as it
returned the deportees from Malta. The carriage road from Adabazar
which was available by rail from Constantinople, on past the Greek
left to Angora was also thrown open, but Greek and Circassian brigands
raided it so frequently that its use was impossible without a strong
guard. Access to Angora was in practice still confined to the railway
from Mersina to Konia and thence by carriage to Angora, or up from the
Black Sea coast through the mountains to Angora. Admission to the
interior, however, was rarely granted by the Turkish Government’s new
representative in Stamboul, for the Greeks were still dug in before
Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar and the war was still on.
Conditions in Anatolia greatly improved during the winter of 1921-’22.
The beginnings of a civilian administration appeared, but the military
situation necessarily continued to dominate. Fevzi Pasha continued to
snap up munitions wherever he could get them. Some came from the
Italians, some came from the French (it is not impossible that the
American uniforms in which some of the Turkish soldiers have been
clad, were originally left as American surplus stocks in France), and
some came from the British, for the British Commander-in-Chief and the
British High Commissioner in Constantinople were in as happy accord on
the subject of the Greeks as the British War Office and the British
Foreign Office have been on a number of other Eastern subjects. In the
main, however, the Turkish forces were re-mobilized and re-equipped by
the native resourcefulness of the Turk himself, as personified in the
dour towering figure of Fevzi Pasha. Even after he had secured foreign
ammunition, after gangs of peasant women had trekked it up from the
coasts in ox-carts and on the backs of mules and camels, machinery had
to be scraped together to change the _calibre_ of much of it before it
would fit his guns. There is hardly a more remarkable story in modern
military history than the story of how Fevzi Pasha re-mobilized and
re-equipped the Turkish forces out of left-over lots of dismantled
artillery and misfit ammunition. The cost of those forces to Anatolia
in its impoverished condition has been appalling, but their creation
by Fevzi Pasha under the conditions of siege which prevailed, has been
no less than miraculous.
XIX
SMYRNA, 1922
ALLIED EFFORTS TO HITCH THE SEVRES TREATY TO TURKISH NATIONALISM――GREEKS
TRANSFER TROOPS FROM SMYRNA TO EASTERN THRACE FOR A MOVE ON
CONSTANTINOPLE AND WHEN FETHY BEY IS REFUSED A HEARING IN LONDON,
FEVZI PASHA LAUNCHES HIS ATTACK――THE TURKISH RECOVERY OF SMYRNA――MR.
LLOYD GEORGE RESIGNS AND THE OTTOMAN SULTAN FLEES――LAUSANNE.
Through the winter of 1921-’22, the Angora scene was a busy one. In
the little restaurant near the Assembly building, Cabinet Ministers,
deputies and Army officers crowded the pine tables at the luncheon
hour, glancing up from their small talk as the unpainted pine door
opened to admit others of their number. The Bokhara Mission would be
in tomorrow. Somebody had been newly named for the Mission to Kabul.
The Minister of the Interior was to make an important statement to the
Assembly shortly. From far away the staccato _rat-tat_ of machine-gun
practice knocked faintly at the ear without occasioning any more
interruption than the squeak of the passing ox-carts outside. But the
small talk paused in its flow when two young gentlemen of the
Azerbaijan Legation entered and joined three young ladies of the
Russian Embassy in a cigarette at their corner table. The small talk
recovered slowly. So-and-so Bey, newly arrived from the Ritz in Paris,
entered with the announcement that he had been unable to find a room
in the town and had had to borrow a soldier and a bucket of whitewash
to build himself a house. Could we come up to the housewarming
tomorrow night? We could. For somebody else with whom we had promised
to dine had had to cancel the invitation on further reflection, the
wind being in the wrong direction and his stove smoking in
consequence.
Outside the restaurant, the falling snow etched its white tracery
across the street panorama of Angora. Peasant women in red ragged
pantaloons, turbaned _hojas_ robed in more somber colors, smart
Turkish officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman days, Turkish
soldiers in somebody’s cast-off khaki, Government officials in
_kalpaks_ and European dress, a Turkish policeman in the old Ottoman
brilliance of red cuffs and brass buttons, six white-robed male nurses
from a Red Crescent hospital bearing on their shoulders a heavy
covered stretcher on its way to an empty grave outside the town――these
came and went through the veil of snow. Groups of men, sitting at
their coffee around glowing braziers in front of the cafes, lifted
their faces from the Constantinople papers at the approaching music of
a military band (true, the Constantinople papers were ten days old by
the time they reached Angora, but many of these men had left their
homes and families in Constantinople, and all they possessed in the
world was hidden somewhere in the old capital, awaiting their return).
Out of a narrow sidestreet the band moved into sight with a withered
little mad woman dancing in her rags beside it. She was fairly well
known in Angora. They said that her father and two brothers had been
killed in the Balkan Wars, her husband and three sons had been killed
in the Great War, and her youngest son had been killed at Inë-Onü. But
however these things might have been, she was dancing down the street
beside the heavy-shod bandsmen, dancing as lightly as the snowflakes
to the crashing rhythms of the Mustapha Kemal Pasha March.
In the wake of the band came the tramping shuffle of a long column of
soldiers, stolid men, heavily accoutred, with khaki _kalpaks_, their
rifles tipped with new bayonets. They marched away down the broad road
which led past the Assembly building to the railway station, a wooden
building with the single word “Angora” in Turkish and English script
on its sign-board. A low pall of woodsmoke, belched from the stacks of
half a dozen locomotives, hung over the railway yard. A long column of
ox-carts was discharging its cargo of new rope-handled wooden boxes
into freight cars. With the band playing, the column of soldiers broke
ranks and scrambled up into another freight train alongside the
station platform. They entrained within a half-hour, a rattle of
couplings ran along the length of the train, and it moved out of the
station toward the west, where the Greeks were still dug in before
Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar….
On Feb. 21, 1921, the Allied Governments had received delegations from
Athens, Constantinople and Angora in London in an effort to reconcile
the Treaty of Sevres and the new force of Turkish nationalism. The
Angora delegates were received as technically members of the
Constantinople delegation, but the latter delegated its leadership to
Bekr Sami Bey, a huge sloping Circassian who was Foreign Minister at
Angora. Bekr Sami Bey belongs to a type of leadership which is one of
Turkey’s peculiar assets, a type which has enjoyed a long and rich
experience in diplomacy and which as a result has developed a genius
for stripping away non-essentials and holding fast to essentials.
There is an old and true saying to the effect that what an Englishman
is at sea, what a Frenchman is on land, a Turk is in diplomacy. It is
a statement which closely characterizes men of the type of Bekr Sami
Bey.
The Allied Governments offered to institute an international
commission for the investigation of population statistics in Eastern
Thrace and Smyrna, on condition that Turkey and Greece accepted its
findings and that the remainder of the Sevres Treaty stood unaltered.
Bekr Sami Bey accepted the offer, subject to certain conditions in the
conduct of the investigation and certain reservations as to the
remainder of the Sevres Treaty. The Greek delegation would accept no
alteration in the Sevres Treaty of any sort.
On March 12, the Allied Governments proposed a series of modifications
in the Sevres Treaty, undertaking _inter alia_ that “the region called
the _Vilayet_ of Smyrna would remain under Turkish sovereignty and a
Greek force would remain in Smyrna town, but in the rest of the
_sanjak_ order would be maintained by a _gendarmerie_ with Allied
officers and recruited in proportion to the numbers and distribution
of the population as reported by an Inter-Allied Commission. The same
proportional arrangement, equally according to the report of the
Commission, would apply to the administration. A Christian governor
would be appointed by the League of Nations and assisted by an
elective assembly and an elective council. The governor would be
responsible for payments to the Turkish Government of annual sums
expanding with the prosperity of the province. This arrangement would
in five years be open to review on the demand of either party by the
League of Nations.” This pleased neither Greeks nor Turks and the 1921
Greek offensive put a speedy end to its consideration.
On June 21, the Allied Governments offered Greece their intervention,
but the Royalist command behind Smyrna was preparing to resume its
march toward Angora and intervention was refused.
In March, 1922, the Allied Governments summoned delegations from
Athens, Constantinople and Angora, the Angora delegation headed by
Yusuf Kemal Bey who had succeeded Bekr Sami Bey as Foreign Minister.
On March 22, an Allied proposal for an armistice in Asia Minor was
forwarded to Athens and Angora, and was followed on March 26 by an
Allied Note making further modifications in the Sevres Treaty and
proposing “the peaceful evacuation of Asia Minor by the Greek forces
and the restitution of Turkish sovereignty over the whole of that
region” within a period of four months after the armistice. The Greek
Government accepted the proposal, but Yusuf Kemal Bey on April 7
stipulated that in his Government’s view an armistice could only be
agreed to after the Greek evacuation. The Allied Governments replied
on April 15 that the period of the Greek evacuation would be shortened
but that it was conditional on a prior armistice. On April 22, Yusuf
Kemal Bey offered to meet Allied delegates at Ismid in an effort to
explore further peace conditions which the acceptance of the armistice
proposal would impose on his Government, conditions which had been
left “open to discussion” in the Allied Note of April 15. The Ismid
proposal came to nothing and in June, Ali Fethy Bey, Minister of the
Interior at Angora, was dispatched to Paris and London with the object
of discovering the nature of the peace conditions which had not yet
been defined by the Allies and effecting an agreement if possible.
On July 22, the Royalist Greek command transferred 20,000 Old Greek
troops from its lines behind Smyrna to the Chatalja lines in Eastern
Thrace for a move on Constantinople itself, a move which the Allied
Governments vetoed. It replaced them behind Smyrna with raw Anatolian
Greek levies and on July 30, “autonomy under the guarantee of the
Greek Army” was proclaimed upon “Ionia.” This radically changed the
military situation, but Fevzi Pasha who was now ready at Angora, was
ordered by his Government to withhold action pending news from Fethy
Bey. In Paris, Fethy Bey had been well received but when he crossed to
London late in July, Lord Curzon’s engagement with him was cancelled
and it was only after protests were made on his behalf that Sir
William Tyrrell of the Foreign Office received him. Sir William,
however, was not empowered to discuss terms of peace and on August 11,
Fethy Bey left London for Rome, stopping in Paris long enough to wire
the news of his reception in London to Angora. The solution of the
Smyrna deadlock was now committed to Fevzi Pasha.
At dawn on August 26, Ismet Pasha attacked the Greek position before
Afium-Karahissar. The secrecy which had marked the re-mobilization and
re-equipment of the Turkish Armies throughout, had been maintained to
the last and Ismet Pasha found the Greeks wholly unprepared. They
abandoned Afium and Kutahia and endeavored to stand on September 1
before Ushak, but on September 2, Turkish cavalry drove into Ushak
through and over the Greeks, swept up General Tricoupis and his entire
staff, and escaped to their own lines. The rest was easy. The distance
from Ushak to Smyrna is 160 miles, but the Greeks covered it in eight
days, abandoning everything but their rifles, living off the country
and stopping only long enough to wreak their last revenge on the
villages through which they fled. On September 5, they began streaming
into Smyrna and nothing speaks more highly of Fevzi Pasha’s staff work
than the fact that all branches of his Army succeeded in keeping pace
with them. On September 9, advance Turkish units entered Smyrna.
Meanwhile, a secondary attack in the north had been launched against
Biledjik on August 30, the Greeks evacuated Eski-Shehr on September 2
and by September 12, their stragglers were crossing from Mudania and
Panderma to Eastern Thrace.
From the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States,
the Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna shook the world. Islam which had
been staggered by the Greek occupation in 1919, threw itself into
rejoicing with “our brother Turk.” Christendom which had passed over
the Greek occupation in silence, was as staggered by the Turkish
re-occupation as if one of the Commandments had dropped out of the
Decalogue. Of the three elements which were present in Smyrna,
Armenians, Greeks and Turks (to mention them in alphabetical order),
American churchmen assumed that it was the Turks who started the fire
which razed part of Smyrna town within a week after the re-occupation.
As for the Turks themselves, budding Turkish linguists greeted the
news from Smyrna with shouts of “Finish _imperialisme_!”
Only the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the
Greek occupation of Eastern Thrace in the Allied rear, now confronted
Fevzi Pasha. On September 16, Mr. Lloyd George issued his call to the
British Dominions to rally to the defense of “the freedom of the
Straits.” Doubtless Mr. Lloyd George knew what he meant by the phrase,
but while Soviet Russia and Turkey had repeatedly and publicly defined
it, Mr. Lloyd George had refrained from any public definition of it.
More was involved, however, than “the freedom of the Straits” in the
manifesto of September 16. That manifesto was a direct descendant of
the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. With Habibullah dead, with Said Mir
Alim in exile, with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with
Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, with the Greek _fait
accompli_ across the Straits in process of collapse, the now exposed
British command of the Straits and the Black Sea was all that remained
of the vast territories which the collapse of Czarist Russia had
vacated before an aggressive British imperialism.
On September 30, Mr. Lloyd George sent General Harington, Allied
Commander-in-Chief in Constantinople, a six-hour ultimatum ordering
the Turkish forces to withdraw from contact with the British lines
behind Chanak. If that ultimatum had been served, it would have
precipitated an Anglo-Turkish war and with British reinforcements
already streaming to the Straits, it is difficult to see with what
other purpose it could have been dispatched from London. Instead of
serving it, however, General Harington dropped it into his pocket and
went to Mudania on October 3 with his Allied colleagues to negotiate
an armistice with Ismet Pasha. At dawn on October 11, the Mudania
armistice was signed, the Allies agreeing to evacuate the Greeks from
Eastern Thrace immediately and to return it to Turkey up to the
Maritza River, admitting the Turkish civil administration, supported
by a force of 8,000 _gendarmes_, within a period of thirty days after
the Greek evacuation.
On October 19, Mr. Lloyd George who might have written the Mudania
armistice in ink instead of in blood, handed his resignation to the
King. In Mr. Bonar Law’s Government, however, Lord Curzon remained at
the Foreign Office. Preparations were now made for a peace conference,
beginning at Lausanne on November 13, for the winding up of
hostilities between the Allies and Turkey and between Turkey and
Greece. Invitations were issued to, among others, the old Ottoman
Government in Constantinople to send delegates to the conference. That
Government, from the Sultan-Caliph down, had been stripped of actual
authority long before by the Allied occupation of the old capital, and
the Grand National Assembly speedily put an end to its technical
existence. On November 1, the Assembly reiterated its previous
declaration that “the form of government based on personal sovereignty
in Constantinople” had ceased to exist on March 16, 1920, adding that
“the Caliphate belongs to the Ottoman dynasty and the Grand National
Assembly will nominate him of the dynasty who is the most upright and
wise in knowledge and character. The Turkish nation is the supporting
power of the Caliphate.”
On the morning of November 4, the Constantinople Cabinet handed in its
resignation to the Caliph-Sultan and at noon Rafet Pasha took over the
administration of Constantinople as one of the provincial capitals of
the new Turkish State. In the early hours of November 17, the
Caliph-Sultan fled on a British battleship to Malta and on the
following day the Grand National Assembly at Angora elected the heir
presumptive, Abdul Medjid Effendi, to the Caliphate of Islam. Turkish
nationalism was continuing to surmount that Old Turkish conservatism
which had helped to wreck the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. As for
Islam in India, such was the siege-encircled secrecy in which Turkish
nationalism had developed that the end of its historic Ottoman
theocracy fell upon it as a severe blow, but it stuck loyally to “our
brother Turk.” As for the Emperor of India, he was uncertain whether
the seat of the Caliphate was Constantinople or Mecca. The ex-_Sherif_
Hussein had two sons perched on precarious thrones, Feisal at Bagdad
and Abdullah at Amman, and had himself been referred to as “Supreme
Pontiff of the Islamic world and temporal ruler of Arabia.”
[Illustration: GENERAL MOUHEDDIN PASHA
Military Governor of Cilicia on re-occupation by Turkish forces in
January, 1922.]
[Illustration: MEHMED EMIN BEY
The Poet of New Turkey.]
On November 20, Lord Curzon finally opened the peace conference at
Lausanne, with Ismet Pasha, now Foreign Minister in the Turkish
Government, heading the only Turkish delegation. Negotiations went
forward until Jan. 31, 1923, when Lord Curzon served a draft treaty on
Ismet Pasha and on the night of February 4 abruptly left for London.
This breach in the negotiations left British military and naval forces
in occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the Greek Army
facing east along the Maritza; but the snows of the Balkans melted
without incident. On April 23, Sir Horace Rumbold, British High
Commissioner in Constantinople, took Lord Curzon’s place at the
resumed conference and the Treaty of Peace, together with a number of
subsidiary documents, was finally signed at Lausanne on July 24.
We have noted previously the fate of the vast British acquisitions
which followed the collapse of Czarist Russia. With Habibullah dead,
with Said Mir Alim in exile, with the command of the Caspian lost,
with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with the American mandate
project dead and Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, Mr.
Lloyd George had at last been compelled to abandon his hostility
toward both Russia and Turkey, and at the Genoa Conference in 1922 he
attempted to re-write the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 with Soviet
Russia. But the Soviet had abrogated the 1907 Treaty in 1918 and in
1922 it refused to purchase British recognition by a reversion to
Czarist diplomacy. The liquidation of the British acquisitions
continued. The Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna wiped out the Greek
_fait accompli_ across the Straits and brought the Turks down to the
Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The Mudania armistice
returned the European shore to Turkey. Only an insecure command of the
Straits and the Black Sea now remained of the vast British
acquisitions of 1918 and 1919, and this remnant Lord Curzon now sought
to salvage from the wreck by negotiation at Lausanne with the Turkish
delegation alone. Soviet Russia having refused to re-write the 1907
Treaty against Turkey at Genoa, Lord Curzon now drew up the Straits
Convention against Russia at Lausanne and on May 8, 1923, he
dispatched an ultimatum from London to Moscow which seems to have been
designed to cancel the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement and to break off
all relations with Soviet Russia. The British Foreign Office has lived
on wars and the brink of wars since 1914 and the time has not yet come
when it is willing to conclude a full and normal peace with both
Turkey and Russia.
The Straits Convention, thus drawn without Russian collaboration at
Lausanne, opens the Straits to all merchantmen when Turkey is at peace
and to all neutral merchantmen, subject to the Turkish right of
search, when Turkey is at war. All warships are to be allowed passage
when Turkey is at peace and neutral warships when Turkey is at war,
both of these provisions to be subject to a number of restrictions,
one of which is that the “maximum force which any one Power may send
through the Straits into the Black Sea is not to be greater than that
of the most powerful fleet of the littoral Powers of the Black Sea
existing in that sea at the time of passage; but with the proviso that
the Powers reserve to themselves the right to send into the Black Sea,
at all times and under all circumstances, a force of not more than
three ships, of which no individual ship shall exceed 10,000 tons.”
By this Convention, Lord Curzon retains access to the southern and
Trans-Caucasian ports of Soviet Russia. Ismet Pasha signed it in the
course of the general signature at Lausanne on July 24. Soviet Russia
signed it at Rome on August 14. Early in September, Mr. Amery, First
Lord of the British Admiralty, paid a visit of inspection to Malta
where he announced that for the next year or two the principal British
squadron would remain in the Mediterranean, and from Malta he
continued to Constantinople.
Lord Curzon also succeeded at Lausanne in securing agreement that “the
frontier between Turkey and Iraq shall be laid down in friendly
arrangement to be concluded between Turkey and Great Britain within
nine months. In the event of no agreement being reached between the
two Governments in the time mentioned, the dispute shall be referred
to the Council of the League of Nations.” The Turco-Arab split in
_Sunni Islam_ which the Foreign Office engineered in 1915 through the
Residency in Cairo, still lives in the Mosul controversy. Arab
autonomy under the religious suzerainty of the Ottoman Caliph which
Rauf Bey had stipulated to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros in 1918, still
awaits, _inter alia_, the fate of Mosul.
The rest of the Lausanne Conference was a rout. The military victory
which Ismet Pasha had won over the Greeks at Smyrna, he duplicated as
a diplomatic victory over the Allies at Lausanne. Having salvaged the
Straits Convention from the wreck and having postponed the Mosul
matter, Lord Curzon abandoned the unhappy scene on Feb. 4, 1923,
leaving Sir Horace Rumbold to save what he could when the conference
resumed on April 23. Ismet Pasha restricted himself as far as possible
to a settlement of the political terms of peace, referring
concessionaires to his Government at Angora, but it was not until July
17 that Sir Horace consented to sign peace without the Turkish
Government’s acquiescence in the claim of the so-called Turkish
Petroleum Company upon the oil of the Mosul province. Excepting for
further negotiation over Mosul, the political terms of peace between
the Allies and Turkey were signed at Lausanne on July 24. Several of
the economic issues of the peace, the most important of which is the
question of the currency in which Turkey is to pay interest on its
share of the Old Ottoman Public Debt, are still in process of
negotiation.
On August 4, terms for the resumption of diplomatic relations between
the United States and Turkey were signed at Lausanne. Relations had
been severed on April 20, 1917, by the Enver Government at
Constantinople and on May 5, 1923, Ismet Pasha had written Joseph C.
Grew, American Minister to Switzerland, proposing negotiations looking
toward the resumption of regular relations. Two Turco-American
Treaties resulted, one a general treaty and the other an extradition
treaty, the former recording American acquiescence in the abrogation
of the Capitulations which Ismet Pasha had imposed upon the Allies.
Under this treaty, Americans and American institutions in Turkey are
hereafter to be subject to Turkish law and Turkish taxes, Turkey
having voluntarily agreed during negotiations with the Allies to
appoint four legal advisers, nationals of countries neutral in the
late war, who are to serve for a term of five years and whose function
is to be rigorously restricted to the offering of advice. By this
abrogation of the Capitulations, Turkey enters into a status of
equality in the family of nations. In July, 1894, Buddhist Japan began
a five-year probationary period preparatory to its acquisition of that
status of equality which previously been the exclusive right of the
Christian nations, but in July, 1923, its Treaty of Peace with the
Allies conferred upon Moslem Turkey a status of immediate equality
with the Christian nations and Japan.
Ratification of the two Turco-American Treaties is to be exchanged at
Constantinople “as soon as possible” and the Treaties are to take
effect two months after ratification, the intervening period being
allowed for the evacuation of the American naval forces from Turkish
waters.
Meanwhile, Greco-Turkish agreements signed at Lausanne on Jan. 30,
1923, had preceded Greek participation in the Allied Peace Treaty of
July 24. On January 30, Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange their
Moslem and Orthodox nationals, respectively, amounting to a total of
possibly 500,000 persons, exception being made for Moslems of Western
Thrace and Orthodox of Constantinople, Turkey permitting the
Oecumenical Patriarchate to remain at the Phanar in Stamboul subject
to its disestablishment and to the departure of Meletios IV, the then
Patriarch. With this precedent agreement, Greece recognized in the
Peace Treaty of July 24 “her obligation to make reparation for the
damage caused in Anatolia by the acts of the Greek Army or
administration which were contrary to the laws of war. On the other
hand, Turkey, in consideration of the financial situation of Greece
resulting from the prolongation of the war and from its consequences,
finally renounces all claims for reparation against the Greek
Government.” In lieu of reparation, Turkey accepted the suburb of
Karagatch across the Maritza from Adrianople, which was surrendered by
the Greek Army on September 15 in as wrecked a condition as the towns
from which the Greek Army had fled in Anatolia a year before.
On August 23 the Grand National Assembly at Angora ratified the Peace
Treaty of Lausanne by a vote of 215 to 20, and on the following day
the Allied evacuation of Constantinople and the Straits began, to be
completed within a period of six weeks….
To realize the meaning of the Treaty of Lausanne, we shall have to go
back some distance into Ottoman history. Sultan Selim III who was
deposed in 1808, was possibly the first of the Ottoman reformers.
Mahmoud II who succeeded him, was another great Sultan who saw the
need of introducing Western methods into his Eastern realm, and it was
he who abolished the Janissaries in 1826 as a result of their long
opposition to reform. Abdul Medjid I was a third great reformer who
proclaimed the Tanzimat in 1839 under whose terms all Ottoman subjects
were to be given an equal status in temporal law. The Tanzimat dealt
with sweeping reforms in education, in methods of tax collection and
in the courts, but Czarist Russia put a stop to Ottoman reform in the
aggression of 1853 which resulted in the Crimean War.
Under Abdul Aziz, a Western-trained group of Turks revived Ottoman
reform and when Abdul Hamid II became Sultan, Midhat Pasha succeeded
in proclaiming a Constitution. Again Czarist Russia put a stop to
reform in the Russo-Turkish War of 1876 and the Berlin Congress
adopted the title of “the Sick man of Europe” which the Czar had
invented for the Sultan. Czarist Russia and Western Europe now took
over the problem of Ottoman reform themselves, directing it to the
benefit of the Sultan’s Bulgarian and Armenian subjects while passing
over the equally urgent needs of his Turkish subjects. Ottoman reform
as thus directed now became the fixed objective of Christendom from
Czarist Russia to the country towns of the United States, while Islam
in time from the Balkans to the back hills of Java became increasingly
anxious over “our brother Turk.”
Alarmed by the dividing effect of Ottoman reform in Western hands, the
Western-trained Young Turks again revived their own program of reform
and when Sir Edward Grey agreed with Czarist Russia in 1907 on the
eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks hurriedly
revived Midhat Pasha’s Constitution in the Revolution of 1908. But the
end was already at hand. Austria-Hungary immediately annexed Bosnia
and Herzegovina. Bulgaria proclaimed its independence. Insurrections
began in Albania in which Austria-Hungary was not disinterested and in
Kurdistan in which Czarist Russia was not disinterested. The Italians
landed in Tripoli and the First Balkan War brought the Bulgarians to
the Chatalja lines behind Constantinople, putting an end not only to
any attempt at Young Turkish reform but almost to the existence of the
Empire. In the Western view, this sort of thing constituted Ottoman
reform, and in 1914 the Anglo-Russian combination closed on the Empire
and reformed it out of existence. The Sevres Treaty in 1920 finally
wrote the last chapter in the story of Western reform by proposing to
hand over the richest provinces of the Turkish country to Greeks and
Armenians while denying the Turks any right whatever to an independent
existence. The Sevres Treaty was and still is a full and complete
definition of the word “reform” when applied by Allied diplomacy to
Turkish lands.
In the meantime, the Young Turks abrogated the Capitulations in 1914
and with their hands untied for the first time in their modern
history, a number of other reforms followed in rapid succession
despite the fact that they were engaged in a world war. When Rauf Bey
met Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros to apply for an armistice in 1918, he
stipulated that the abrogation of the Capitulations would have to be
recognized, but the first act of the Allies upon occupying
Constantinople was to re-impose the Capitulations and to undo every
reform which the Young Turks had succeeded in making. Within a few
months, the Greek occupation of Smyrna threw the Young Turks into the
heart of Anatolia. Turkish nationalism repeated and amplified Rauf
Bey’s stipulations at Mudros in the Erzerum program of 1919. The
Ottoman Parliament committed itself to the Erzerum program early in
1920 under the name of the National Pact. British officers reformed
the Ottoman Parliament out of existence on the night of March 15-16,
1920, but away in the heart of Anatolia Turkish nationalism possessed
as free a hand for its own program of reform as its state of siege
permitted. What the Sevres Treaty was to Western reform in Turkey, the
Grand National Assembly became to Turkish reform in Turkey; and when
Soviet Russia recognized the National Pact in 1921, the fingers which
had long strangled Ottoman reform were removed, temporarily at least,
from the Turkish throat.
Afghanistan quickly recognized the Pact. The three Soviet Republics of
Trans-Caucasia recognized it. Insofar as it concerned Cilicia, France
recognized it. Soviet Ukrainia recognized it early in 1922. Insofar as
it concerned Eastern Thrace, Mr. Lloyd George and his Foreign
Secretary recognized it at the point of the bayonet in the Mudania
armistice. But at Lausanne, Ismet Pasha placed the rest of the Pact
before Lord Curzon and early in 1923 Lord Curzon, having swallowed a
few drops of the nasty stuff, returned to London. There seemed then to
be as little chance of Ismet Pasha’s diplomatic success as there had
once seemed to be of Fevzi Pasha’s military success, but Turkish
reform would not be alive today if it had not learned long ago to
achieve the impossible. Little by little, Ismet Pasha dropped away the
non-essentials of the Pact while holding fast to the abrogation of the
Capitulations which the Enver Government had decreed on Sept. 28,
1914, and on July 24, 1923, the British Foreign Office finally
accorded its recognition to the essentials of the National Pact,
exception being made for further negotiation over Mosul.
For the last century, the Ottoman Empire has sought justice at the
hands of Czarist Russia and the West. Czarist Russia has finally
ceased to exist and Turkey has finally gained justice from the West at
the point of the bayonet, a fact which we Christians of the West might
do well to ponder. It secured from the West at Lausanne a belated
recognition of its right to control its own reforms in its own country
and since Czarist Russia and the West by their long endeavor to impose
reforms from without for the exclusive benefit of the Turk’s
minorities, have made it impossible for the Turk and his minorities to
live together, the Turk today has only himself to consider in Turkey.
Insofar as no further Western attempts are made to strangle Turkish
reform (and if the past is any clew to the future, such attempts are
quite certain to be made), the future of Turkey now depends on the
Turk. We know at last who is responsible in Turkey, and this is a very
substantial gain.
XX
THE REAL PROBLEM OF TURKISH NATIONALISM
ECONOMIC BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW TURKISH STATE――MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA
OPENS THE SMYRNA CONGRESS――THE CHESTER CONCESSION A STEP FROM
IMPERIALISM TO LAW.
As soon as the Erzerum program had been definitely committed to
negotiation at Lausanne, Mustapha Kemal Pasha lost no time in
diverting into the ways of peace the energy with which Turkish
nationalism had re-mobilized and re-equipped its Armies. For the
building up of a new and Western economic tradition with which to
supplement the old and Eastern military tradition which had long
distinguished its nation, the new Turkish Government had laid its
foundations well. It had refrained from the issue of paper money,
confining itself to the use of paper issued by the old Ottoman
Government during the war. As fast as this paper became worn out, it
was sent to the headquarters of the Public Debt administration in
Constantinople to be exchanged for clean paper. Unlike a number of
post-war European Governments, it had refrained from financing itself
by the use of the printing press but the merit of this achievement is
of course lessened by the primitive nature of the country which it
governed. A country which could survive forty percent requisitions
hardly needed to use the printing press. If many of its minor
officials and soldiers never saw a pay-day, it was not money which had
drawn them into the bitter loneliness of Angora. The deputies in the
Assembly were paid out of the _Evkaf_ (Moslem religious endowments) in
their constituencies. Mustapha Kemal Pasha himself was paid £T300 a
month, a salary which in its buying power in Asia Minor today, is
equivalent to about £T75, or $375, pre-war. The cost of living has
gone up severely in Asia Minor but not quite as severely as it has in
the West. A camel which before the war could have been bought for £T25
gold, will now cost about £T100 paper.
Gold has completely disappeared from circulation, most of it drained
away to Germany during the war. There is a little nickel in
circulation, but practically all transactions in Asia Minor, however
small, are conducted in paper. By the time the Battle of the Sakaria
River was fought and won, the Government had collected a gold reserve
which amounted to about £T1,000,000 (say $5,000,000) in Ottoman and
other gold coins and about 200 kilos of bar gold. Its trade had been
destroyed, its population had been broken, it was confronted with
great devastated areas in the “Pontus,” in Cilicia, in the eastern
provinces and behind Smyrna. Its financial position was about as low
as can be imagined, but it must be emphasized that low as its
financial position was, it was sound. The foundation was good, and the
only question pertaining to it was the durability of the economic
structure which the Turk would prove himself able to build upon it.
The abrogation of the Capitulations on Sept. 28, 1914, had turned the
customs traiff over to the Government and when Angora inherited the
burden of debt and undevelopment which had borne Constantinople down,
the customs tariff was increased from five to fifteen times over the
old Capitulatory tariff. This was done primarily for protective
purposes. Insofar as the war permitted, the development of home
industries was to be given every possible stimulus. Even down to such
minor industries as the manufacture of men’s headwear, nationalist
solicitude for home industries was quickly shown. Presumably one
reason why the lamb-skin _kalpak_ has been substituted in the new
Turkey for the old Ottoman _fez_, is the fact that _fezzes_ were
manufactured in Austria. Although it deprived the Government of a
revenue which was said to amount to £T4,000,000 a year at a time when
it needed every _piaster_ it could lay its hands on, country-wide
prohibition was voted soon after the Grand National Assembly was
convened at Angora.
Since Asia Minor is in large part an agricultural area, the
Government’s first economic plans were directed toward the development
of agriculture, and a scheme was evolved under which farm machinery
was to be purchased abroad by a Government company and distributed
through the branches of the Government’s Agricultural Bank. This
scheme may or may not materialize as the Government enters more fully
into foreign commercial relationships, but its spirit is highly
significant. Trade has passed definitely into the hands of the Turks
and in the building up of an economic tradition to which the Turks
have heretofore been strangers, Turkish nationalism confronts its real
problem.
On Feb. 17, 1923, Mustapha Kemal Pasha opened the country’s first
economic congress at Smyrna. More than 500 delegates were present.
Farmers and producers were given the center block of seats, traders
and business men the right block, and skilled workmen the left block,
with a special section of the hall given over to an exhibition of
agricultural machinery, most of it from the United States. It was a
unique event in Turkish history, and its significance may be gathered
from Kemal Pasha’s opening address, which merits quotation in part:
“Gentlemen, when history applies itself to searching the causes of the
grandeur and of the decadence of a people, it invokes political,
military and social reasons. It is evident that ultimately all the
reasons spring from social conditions but that which is in closest
bearing to the existence, the prosperity and the decadence of a people
is its economics. This historical truth is confirmed in our existence
and our national history. In fact, if one examines the history of the
Turkish people, one will see that her grandeur and her decadence are
merely corollaries of her economic life. So in order to raise the new
Turkey to the desired level, it is necessary, cost what it may, to
accord all our solicitude to the questions which concern her
economics.
“In the course of Ottoman history, all the efforts employed, all the
activities of her statesmen, have had as their aim, not to satisfy the
desires of the people nor to realize their aspirations, but rather to
appease petty yearnings and personal ambitions. Comrades, if one
examines closely the reigns of Mohammed II, of Selim and of Suleiman,
one finds that these great and powerful monarchs based their foreign
policy on their desires to satiate their personal leanings and
ambitions. They had thus to regulate their internal organization in
accordance with their foreign policy. Now foreign policy ought to be,
on the contrary, subordinated to the internal organization――that is to
say, foreign policy should be dominated by the internal economic
situation.”
Kemal Pasha went on to explain that the monarchical policy of
subordinating internal organization to foreign policy, had led to the
necessity of allowing conquered elements to retain their national
organizations in which they devoted themselves peacefully to economic
pursuits while the “essential element” protected them, wielding the
sword against their enemies on every frontier of the Empire.
“Gentlemen, those who effect conquests by the sword finish by being
beaten by those who employ as their arm the plow, and by ceding their
place to them. In the struggle between the sword and the plow, it is
always the plow which comes out on top.”
As soon as Rauf Bey returned from Malta, he was given the Ministry of
Public Works at Angora, where the elaboration of a scheme of railway
development was given immediate attention. Negotiations ensued with
the representatives of the Ottoman-American Development Company,
backed by Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, U. S. N. (retired), who had
been in previous negotiation with the old Ottoman Government in
Constantinople. On April 11, 1923, the development scheme which the
Government had formulated, was made over to the Ottoman-American
Company by the Grand National Assembly and on April 30, the Minister
of Public Works signed a convention with two representatives of the
Company for what has long been famous as the Chester Concession.
This Turkish program falls into three parts――the construction of 2,714
miles of new railway line, the construction of a new capital city at
Angora and of ports at Samsun, Yamurtalik and Trebizond together with
the re-construction of towns and villages wrecked by the Greeks, and
the exploitation of mineral rights within twenty-_kilometer_ zones on
each side of the new railway lines. The convention with the Chester
group runs for a term of ninety-nine years unless the Turkish
Government chooses to exercise its right of purchase after thirty
years. The Turkish company which is to operate the new railway lines
is to pay thirty percent of its profits to the Government and is to be
subject to all Turkish taxation except customs duties on its
construction materials and its coal, the latter of which is to be
exempt for a period of ten years only. The company may employ foreign
experts (the original Chester project of 1909 stipulated that they
were to wear the _fez_ and a Government uniform), but Turks are to be
trained to take their places and the labor gangs are to be purely
Turkish. There is no _kilometric_ guarantee, nor does the Concession
add any financial burden to the burdens which the Turkish Government
already bears, until such time as the Government may decide to take
over the lines.
The backbone of this Turkish program is its railway scheme, and in
this respect it differs widely from the original Chester project of
1909. Czarist Russia having disappeared, the Turkish Government now
revives the central Anatolian scheme which was first suggested for the
Bagdad Railway and vetoed by Russia. It proposes to extend the
Eski-Shehr-Angora line which was orginally intended for the main line
of the Bagdad Railway, to Sivas, Kharput, Diarbekr and Mosul, but it
adapts its railway program to the needs which have developed during
the last four years. It may be assumed that military considerations
have played a part in the framing of the Government’s railway scheme,
for the war in Europe is not yet ended, and nobody knows how long a
breathing space Turkey is to be permitted.
The first line to be built is to be the Yamurtalik-Kharput-Bitlis
line, with a branch dropping to Mosul, Kirkuk and Suleimanieh. If and
when this line is completed, it will strengthen the Syrian and
Mesopotamian frontiers, and its western end, terminating in an
excellent harbor at Yamurtalik on the Turkish side of Alexandretta
Bay, will afford the Government a port which it sorely needs on the
Mediterranean.
The second line to be built is to be the Angora-Erzerum line with
branches dropping to Samsun and Trebizond on the Black Sea. At present
the Government has no access by rail to any of its Black Sea ports.
Possibly if it had had speedy access to the “Pontus” provinces, they
would not have been devastated by irregular warfare during these last
four years.
The final lines to be built are embodied in a group by which the
Angora-Sivas line is to be connected _via_ Caesarea with Ulu Kishla on
the Bagdad Railway, and the Erzerum line is to be extended to Bayazid
on the Persian frontier. The Erzerum and Bayazid lines in the eastern
provinces are of obvious bearing on any future Russian attempt to
repeat the great invasion of 1915-’16. They are of more meaning than
that. At present Soviet Russia and Turkey are at peace with each
other, and if and when the railway program which the Turkish
Government has made over to the Chester group is completed, Russia may
be afforded an overland outlet to the Mediterranean at Yamurtalik. The
Russian and Turkish gauges differ, the former being 5 feet and the
latter 4 feet 8½ inches, but the political possibilities in affording
Soviet Russia peacefully what Czarist Russia sought by force, are
incalculable. Peaceful access to the Mediterranean over the Chester
lines might easily reduce the Straits to a very small factor in
Russia’s foreign policy. While Turkey is not a Socialist State and
presumably will not be, Russo-Turkish peace is the very foundation of
any world peace and if the Chester group is able to contribute
effectively to an enduring Russo-Turkish peace, it will perform a
service of incalculable worth to the cause of world peace.
A month after the grant of the Chester Concession, Allied
concessionaires began filtering into Angora from Constantinople, to
begin economic negotiations with the Turkish Government simultaneously
with the political negotiations which were dragging toward an end at
Lausanne. These economic negotiations comprised four subjects: (1) the
status of pre-war concessions; (2) the status of modifications
authorized by the Ottoman Government after the Mudros armistice; (3)
compensation for war damage to the property of concessionaires; and
(4) the extension of concessions for a period equal to that in which
they had been non-operative during the war. By the middle of June, the
Constantinople Telephone Company (British) had reached agreement with
the Turkish Government. Early in July, similar agreements had been
reached by the Smyrna-Aidin Railway (British) and the Mudania-Brussa
Railway (French).
Meanwhile, the Assembly adjourned for new elections. Peace not yet
having been signed at Lausanne, the Nationalist Party went to the
country on the basis of the National Pact and was returned by an
overwhelming majority. It was a war election, somewhat reminiscent of
Mr. Lloyd George’s “khaki election” of 1918, and party government with
a strong Opposition in the Assembly is hardly to be expected at Angora
until after an assured peace has come to Turkey.
The Second Assembly was convened in the gray granite building at the
foot of Angora on August 11 and Mustapha Kemal Pasha was re-elected
President by 196 of the 197 deputies who had reached the capital.
Presumably the lone dissenting vote was the vote of “the Pasha”
himself. Ali Fethy Bey, Minister of the Interior, was elected Prime
Minister in place of Rauf Bey and most of the remaining Ministers were
re-elected, Ismet Pasha retaining the portfolio of Foreign Affairs and
Fevzi Pasha remaining Chief of the General Staff. The Treaty of
Lausanne having been ratified on August 23, the Assembly lost no time
in approaching the urgent problem of its own economy and on September
5 Fethy Bey announced the main lines of the Government’s policy. He
stressed first the problem of finance and the necessity of readjusting
taxation. Further points on which the Government proposed to
concentrate, he said, were the schools system and the _gendarmerie_.
His speech was noteworthy for the brevity of its references to foreign
affairs. Given peace abroad, the Government’s program as enunciated by
Fethy Bey is an internal program.
XXI
THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY
With the rebirth of Turkey, this narrative approaches its end. With
the coming of a probable peace, the passions which have been raised in
the Near and Middle East need sorely to be allayed, and there would be
small usefulness in this narrative of the destruction they have
worked, if the past did not contain its element of useful guidance for
the future.
We in the West are heavily in debt to England. It is England which has
slowly and laboriously fashioned our Western tradition of democratic
government and that tradition has placed us all incalculably in
England’s debt. That tradition is still evolving and England is still,
as it has always been, the scene of its evolution. But in
acknowledging our debt to England, we need to think clearly, to
distinguish sharply between the British democracy and the British
Foreign Office. Between the two, there is no effective connection. The
Foreign Office is outside the British Constitution and is not subject
to the effective control of the British Parliament. British foreign
policy in the Near and Middle East neither originates in Parliament
nor is controlled by Parliament. This is a state of things which has
been at once a source of enormous strength to British diplomacy and a
source of enormous danger to world peace.
It was through the British Foreign Office, under Sir Edward Grey’s
Secretaryship, that the British democracy was tied to Czarist Russia
in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The British democracy did not
know it at the time nor does it realize to this day the meaning of the
1907 Treaty, for its Foreign Office has been as blinkers fastened
about its eyes. There came a time in 1914 when Czarist Russia clashed
with Germany over the control of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire.
Sir Edward Grey had tied the British democracy to Czarist Russia and
in 1914 it remained so tied. Whether Sir Edward Grey permitted his
country to believe that the war was to be fought over Belgium and
under this impression brought his country into the war, is a question
which the British democracy may some day succeed in settling with its
own Foreign Office. Events, however, would appear to indicate that
Basra was more intimately connected with the Foreign Office’s actual
war aims than Belgium was. Three weeks before the Enver Government at
Constantinople entered the war, a British Indian brigade lay off
Bahrein Island in the Persian Gulf and when German naval officers
hustled the Enver Government into the war by bombarding Odessa, events
played straight into the Foreign Office’s hand. The brigade off
Bahrein struck at Basra instantly and Sir Edward Grey, in conjunction
with Czarist Russia, began that partitioning of the Ottoman Empire
which had been envisaged in 1907. Czarist Russia was to receive
Constantinople and the eastern provinces, the Foreign Office was to
achieve its Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme, and the Ottoman
Caliphate of Islam was to be destroyed. But of all this the British
democracy knew little until Czarist Russia collapsed in 1917 and
Soviet Russia published the secret treaties which it discovered in the
Czarist archives at Petrograd.
Deprived of its Czarist accomplice at the very peak of its history,
deprived even of the tame Kerensky _regime_, the British Foreign
Office in 1919 sought American aid in holding its position. Viscount
Grey of Fallodon was dispatched to Washington and American churchmen,
with the best intentions in the world, attempted to tie upon American
eyes the same Armenian blind as they had permitted to be tied upon
their own eyes. But the United States Government does not conduct its
foreign affairs as the British Foreign Office does. Viscount Grey went
back to London and the Armenian mandate scheme fell through. The
effort to establish a closer relationship between England and the
United States still continues, however, and it would be interesting to
know to what extent, if any, it is directed toward an Anglo-American
combination against Islam in succession to the Anglo-Russian
combination of 1907. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that we in
the United States are under an incalculable debt to the British
democracy, but to the British Foreign Office we owe nothing.
The Turkish recovery of Smyrna in 1922 stripped the blind from the
eyes of the British democracy, but its Foreign Office blinkers are
still fastened about its eyes. Mr. Lloyd George has fallen but Lord
Curzon still remains. British diplomacy does not lightly change its
aims and the Turk whose end was decreed in 1907, is still an unwelcome
outsider in the field of British diplomacy. Lord Curzon has held most
of his gains in the Arab lands of the old Ottoman Empire, but in the
face of the Turkish recovery he has retreated by inches. He still has
a Greek frontier on the Maritza River, 250 miles from Constantinople,
he still perpetuates the split in Islam which pivots on Mosul, he
still refuses to recognize, even in the elaboration of a new _regime_
for the Straits, the indubitable fact of Soviet Russia. Some day the
British democracy may succeed in removing the blinkers from its eyes,
in reducing its Foreign Office to an ordinary department of its
Government, responsible as its other Government departments are, to
its Parliament. Some day the Foreign Office may become the mouthpiece
of an informed democracy. In a day when diplomacy is passing to the
basis of trade, when British Conservatism has already passed to a
business basis, the end of the present anachronism at the Foreign
Office may be not distant.
We need to be scrupulously fair, however, to Mr. Lloyd George and his
Foreign Secretary. Rid of any actual responsibility to Parliament,
they have kicked the beaten Turks into such independence as they have
never known since the golden days of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the
absolutism which Mr. Lloyd George enjoyed, the Turks have finally
attained a degree of nationhood “one and indivisible” which is far
beyond what the most visionary Young Turks of 1908 hoped to attain.
Their historic Christian communities have been rooted up and deported
from the land in which they had lived for four peaceful centuries
under the rule of the Ottoman Caliph, and for this truly colossal
achievement the thanks of a grateful Christendom are due to Mr. Lloyd
George, who attempted to impose alone upon Islam that fate which Sir
Edward Grey had agreed in 1907 to impose in conjunction with Czarist
Russia.
The disestablished Oecumenical Patriarchate still remains in
Constantinople and the departure of Meletios IV on July 10, 1923, may
open its doors to the new Turkish Orthodox Church of Anatolia. The day
seems to be at hand when the remnant of the Turkish Christians, welded
firmly into the Turkish State by the flame of nationalism, may restore
the Patriarchate to those exclusively religious functions which in the
Western view are the only proper functions of a Church.
Nationalism which proposes to substitute its new Eastern _regime_ of
law for the old lawlessness of Western imperialism, is the driving
force of Turkey today and Turkey happens to be the key country of the
world. Nationalism in Turkey today welds and does not divide. Its cry
strikes a sound and healthy note. I heard it in its purest form at
Adana. It was in a theatre, filled to overflowing with Turkish
officers, Turkish townsmen and Turkish peasants. Beyond the
footlights, framed in the little proscenium of the theatre, stood the
plump figure of the poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, now an old man of
seventy-two, his voice hoarsened to a whisper, the perspiration
streaming from beneath his _kalpak_, as he intoned his verse in liquid
Turkish. Once a lonely cry in the wilderness, his voice that night was
punctuated with quick applause. For twenty years he has been lifting
up his cry and today he is still making his way through the scorched
and decimated villages of Turkey, still burning himself out with his
old cry:
“_I am a Turk_;
“_My race and language are great_.”
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s note:
The one footnote was moved to the end of the chapter in which its
related anchor occurs.
Dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings, and misspelled words
were left unchanged.
Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed.
Duplicate partial words at line endings were removed.
The text of one sentence, in which one or more lines of text were
misplaced, was not changed:
However narrow Old Turkish opinion was, however stubbornly
it confined the Young Turks to a rigidly conservative
interpretation of the Caliphate, Islam in India could
Caliphate may have come to be two quite separate adjust its
Caliphate to such modern and healthy growths as that of Arab
nationalism.
Two instances of wrong usage of words were not changed:
“are” should be “the” ―― “We in are West who are accustomed …”
“no” should be “not” ―― “… was no in contact …”
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