Religion and race--The Islam policy of Abdul-Hamid and of the Young
Turks--Turanism and Pan-Islamism as political principles--Turanism
and the Quadruple Alliance--Greed and race-fanaticism--Religious
traditions and modern reforms--Reform in the law--A modern
Sheikh-ul-Islam--Reform and nationalisation--The Armenian and
Greek Patriarchates--The failure of Pan-Islamism--The alienation
of the Arabs--Djemal Pasha's "hangman's policy" in Syria--Djemal
as a "Pro-French"--Djemal and Enver--Djemal and Germany--His true
character--The attempt against the Suez Canal--Djemal's murderous
work nears completion--The great Arabian and Syrian Separatist
movement--The defection of the Emir of Mecca and the great Arabian
catastrophe.
In little-informed circles in Europe people are still under the
false impression that the Young Turks of to-day, the intellectual
and political leaders of Turkey in this war, are authentic, zealous,
and even fanatical Mohammedans, and superficial observers explain
all unpleasant occurrences and outbreaks of Young Turkish jingoism
on Pan-Islamic grounds, especially as Turkey has not been slow in
proclaiming her "Holy War." But this conception is entirely wrong.
The artificial character of the "Djihad," which was only set in
motion against a portion of the "unbelievers," while the others
became more and more the ruling body in Turkey, is the best proof
of the untenability of this theory. The truth is that the present
political régime is the complete denial of the Pan-Islamic idea and the
substitution of the Pan-Turkish idea of race.
Abdul-Hamid, that much-maligned and dethroned Sultan, who, however,
towers head and shoulders above all the Young Turks put together in
practical intelligence and statesmanly skill, and would never have
committed the unpardonable error of throwing in his lot with Germany
in the war and so bringing about the certain downfall of Turkey, was
the last ruler of Turkey that knew how to make use of Pan-Islamism as a
successful instrument of authority.
Enver and Talaat and all that breed of jingoists on the _Ittahad_
(Committee for Union and Progress) were upstarts without any schooling
in political history, and so all the more inclined to the doctrinal
revolutionism and short-sighted fanaticism of the successful
adventurer, and were much too limited to recognise the tremendous
political import of Pan-Islamism. Naturally once they had conceived
the idea of the "Djihad," they tried to make theoretical use of
Pan-Islamism; but practically, far from extending Turkey's influence
to distant Arabian lands, to the Soudan and India, they simply let
Turkey go to ruin through their Pan-Turkish illusions and their
race-fanaticism.
Abdul-Hamid with his clever diplomacy managed to maintain, if not the
real sympathies, at any rate the formal loyalty of the Arabs and their
solidarity with the rest of the Ottoman Empire. It was he who conceived
the idea of that undertaking of eminent political importance, the
Hedjaz Railway, which facilitates pilgrimages to the holy cities of
Mecca and Medina and links up the Arabian territory with the Turkish,
and he was always able to quell any disturbances in these outlying
parts of the Empire with very few troops indeed. Nowadays the Young
Turkish Government, even if they had the troops to spare, might send
a whole army to the Hedjaz and they would be like an island of sand
in the midst of that stormy Arab sea. The Arabs, intellectually far
superior to the Turks, have at last made up their minds to defy their
oppressors, and all the Arabic-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire may
be taken as already lost, no matter what the final result of the great
war may be.
The Young Turks had scarcely come into power when they began with
incredible lack of tact to treat the Arabs in a most supercilious
manner, although as a matter of fact the Arabs far surpassed them in
intellect and culture. They inaugurated a most un-modern campaign of
shameless blood-sucking, cheated them of their rights, treated them
in a bureaucratic manner, and generally acted in such an unskilful
way that they finally alienated for ever the Arab element as they
had already done in the case of the Armenians, the Greeks, and the
Albanians.
The ever-recurring disturbances in Yemen, finally somewhat
inadequately quelled by Izzet Pasha, are still in the memory of all.
And later, directly after the reconquering of Adrianople during the
Second Balkan war, there was another moment of real national rebirth
when a reconciliation might have been effected. The visit of a great
Syrian and Arabian deputation to the Sultan to congratulate him over
this auspicious event should have provided an excellent opportunity.
I was staying some months then in Constantinople on my way back from
Africa, and I certainly thought that the half-broken threads might have
been knotted together again then if the Young Turks had only approached
the Arabs in the right way. Even the great Franco-British attack on
Stamboul might have been calculated to rouse a feeling of solidarity
among the Mohammedans living under the Ottoman flag, and in the autumn
and winter of 1915-1916 Arab troops actually did defend the entrance
to the Dardanelles with great courage and skill. But Arab loyalty
could not withstand for ever the mighty flood of race-selfishness that
possessed the Young Turks right from the moment of their entry into the
war. The enthusiasm of the Arabs soon disappeared when Pan-Turkish
ideas were proclaimed all too clearly even to the inhabitants of their
own land, when an era of systematic enmity towards the non-Turkish
parts of the population was introduced and the heavy fist of the
Central Committee was laid on the southern parts of the Empire as well.
An attempt was made to bring the ethnic principle of "Turanism" within
the region of practical politics, but it simply degenerated into
complete race-partiality and was not calculated to further the ideas
of Pan-Islamism and the Turko-Arabian alliance which were both of such
importance in the present war. It is this idea of Turanism that lies
at the back of the efforts being made towards a purely Turkish Turkey,
and that of course makes it clear at once that it must to a very large
extent oppose the idea of Pan-Islamism. It is true that both principles
may be made use of side by side as sources of propaganda for the idea
of expansion and the policy of a "Greater Turkey." Turanists peep over
the crest of the Caucasus down into the Steppes of the Volga, where the
Russian Tartars live, and to the borders of Western Siberia and Inner
China where in Russian Turkestan a race of people of very close kinship
live and where very probably the Ottoman people had their cradle. The
Pan-Islamists want the alliance of these Russian parts as well, but
from another point of view, and, above all, they aim at the expansion
of Ottoman rule to the farthest corners of Africa and South-West Asia,
to the borders of negro territory, and through Persia, Afghanistan, and
Baluchistan to the foot of the Himalayas, while on grounds of practical
politics they strive to abolish the old, seemingly insurmountable
antithesis between Sonnites and Shiites within the sanctuary of Islam.
The programme of the so-called "Djihad" works on this principle, but
goes much farther. As well as stirring up against their present rulers
those parts of Egypt and Tripoli which once owned allegiance to the
Sultan and the Atlas lands, which are at any rate spiritually dependent
on the Caliph in Stamboul, the "Djihad" aims at introducing the spirit
of independence into all English, French, Italian, and Russian Colonial
territory by rousing the Mohammedans and so doing infinite harm to
the enemies of Turkey. It is most important, therefore, always to
differentiate between this "Holy War" "stirring-up" propaganda from
Senegal to Turkestan and British India, and the more territorial
Pan-Islamism of the present war, which goes hand in hand with the
efforts being made towards a "Greater Turkey."
Instead of uniting all these principles skilfully for the realisation
of a great end, making sure of the Arab element by wisely restraining
their selfish and exaggeratedly pro-Turkish instincts and their
despotic lust for power, and so giving their programme of expansion
southwards some prospect of succeeding, the Turks gave way right from
the beginning of the war to such a flood of brutal, narrow-minded
race-fanaticism and desire to enrich the Turkish element at the cost
of the other inhabitants of the country, that no one can really be
surprised at the pitiable result of the efforts to secure a Greater
Turkey.
I should just like to give one small example of the fanatical hatred
that exists even in high official circles against the non-Turkish
element in this country of mixed race. The following anecdote will
give a clear enough idea of the ruling spirit of fanaticism and
greed. I was house-hunting in Pera once and could not find anything
suitable. I approached a member of the Committee and he said in solemn
earnest: "Oh, just wait a few weeks. We are all hoping that Greece
will declare war on us before long, and then _all_ the Greeks will
be treated as the Armenians have been. I can let you have the nicest
villa on the Bosporus. But then," he added with gleaming eyes, "we
won't be so stupid as merely to turn them out. These Greek dogs (_köpek
rum_) will have the pleasure of seeing us take everything away from
them--_everything_--and compelling them to give up their own property
by formal contract."
I can guarantee that this is practically a word-for-word rendering of
this extraordinary outburst of fanaticism and greed on the part of
an otherwise harmless and decent man. I could not help shuddering at
such opinions. Apparently it was not enough that Turkey was already at
war with three Great Powers; she must needs seek armed conflict with
Greece, so that, as was the outspoken, the open, and freely-admitted
intention of official persons, she might then deal with four and a
half millions of Ottoman Greeks, practically her own countrymen, as she
had done with the unfortunate Armenians. In face of such opinions one
cannot but realise how unsure the existence of the Young Turkish State
has become by its entry into the war, and cannot but foresee that this
race-fanaticism will lead the nation to political and social suicide.
Can one imagine a purely Turkish Turkey, when even the notion of a
Greater Turkey failed?
Pessimists have often said of the Turkish question that the Turks'
principal aim in determining on a complete Turkification of Anatolia
by any, even the most brutal, means, is that at the conclusion of
war they can at least say with justification: "Anatolia is a purely
Turkish country and must therefore be left to us." What they propose to
bequeath to the victorious Russians is an Armenia without Armenians!
The idea of "Turanism" is a most interesting one, and as a widespread
nationalistic principle has given much food for thought to Turkey's
ally, Germany. Turanism is the realisation, reawakened by neo-Turkish
efforts at political and territorial expansion, of the original
race-kinship existing between the Turks and the many peoples inhabiting
the regions north of the Caucasus, between the Volga and the borders of
Inner China, and particularly in Russian Central Asia. Ethnographically
this idea was perfectly justified, but politically it entails a
tremendous dissipation of strength which must in the end lead to grave
disappointment and failure. All the Turkish attempts to rouse up the
population of the Caucasus either fell on unfruitful ground or went
to pieces against the strong Russian power reigning there. Enver's
marvellous conception of an offensive against Russian Transcaucasia led
right at the beginning of the war to terrible bloodshed and defeat.
People in neutral countries have had plenty of opportunity of judging
of the value of those arguments advanced by Tatar professors and
journalists of Russian citizenship for the "Greater-Turkish" solution
of the race questions of the Russian Tatars and Turkestan, for these
refugees from Baku and the Caucasus, paid by the Stamboul Committee,
journeyed half over Europe on their propaganda tour. The idea of
Turanism has been taken up with such enthusiasm by the men of the
Young Turkish Committee, and utilised with such effect for purposes of
propaganda and to form a scientific basis for their neo-Turkish aims
and aspirations, that a stream of feeling in favour of the Magyars has
set in in Turkey, which has not failed to demolish to a still greater
extent their already weakened enthusiasm for their German allies. And
it is not confined to purely intellectual and cultural spheres, but
takes practical form by the Turks declaring, as they have so often done
in their papers in almost anti-German articles about Turanism, that
what they really require in the way of European technique or European
help they much prefer to accept from their kinsmen the Hungarians
rather than from the Germans.
To the great annoyance of Germany, who would like to keep her heavy
hand laid on the ally whom she has so far guided and for whom she pays,
the practical results of the idea of Turanism are already noticeable
in many branches of economic and commercial life. The Hungarians are
closely allied to the Turks not only by blood but in general outlook,
and form a marked contrast to Germany's cold and methodical calculation
in worming her way into Turkish commercial life. After the war when
Turkey is seeking for stimulation, it will be easy enough to make use
of Hungarian influence to the detriment of Germany. Turanistic ideas
have even been brought into play to establish still more firmly the
union between Turkey and her former enemy Bulgaria, and the people of
Turkey are reminded that the Bulgars are not really Slavs but Slavic
Fino-Tartars.
In proportion as the Young Turks have brought racial politics to a
fine art, so they have neglected the other, the religious side. More
and more, Islam, the rock of Empire, has been sacrificed to the needs
of race-politics. Those who look upon Enver and Talaat and their
consorts to-day as a freemasonry of time-serving opportunists rather
than as good Mohammedans come far nearer the truth than those who
believe the idea spread by ignorant globe-trotters that every Turk is
a zealous follower of Islam. It was not for nothing that Enver Pasha,
the adventurer and revolutionary, went so far even in externals as
to arouse the stern disapproval of a wide circle of his people. With
true time-serving adaptability to all modern progress-and who will
blame him?--he even finally sacrificed the Turkish soldier's hallowed
traditional headgear, the fez. While the _kalpak_, even in its laced
variety, could still be called a kind of field-grey or variegated
or fur edition of the fez, the ragged-looking _kabalak_, called the
"Enveriak" to distinguish it from other varieties, is certainly on the
way towards being a real sun helmet. Still more recently (summer 1916)
a black-and-white cap that looks absolutely European was introduced
into the Ottoman Navy. The simple, devout Mohammedan folk were most
unwilling to accept these changes which flew direct in the face of all
tradition. They may be externals of but little importance, but in spite
of their insignificance they show clearly the ruling spirit in official
Young Turkish spheres.
This is in the harmless realm of fashion, or at any rate military
fashion, exactly the same spirit as has caused the Turkish Government
to undertake since 1916 radical changes in the very much more
important field of private and public law. Special commissions
consisting of eminent Turkish lawyers have been formed to carry through
this reform of law and justice, and they have been hard at work ever
since their formation. What is characteristic and modern about the
reform is that the preponderating rôle hitherto played by the Sheriat
Law, founded on the Koran and at any rate semi-religious, is to be
drastically curtailed in favour of a system of purely Civil law, which
has been strung together from the most varied sources, even European
law being brought under contribution, and the "Code Napoléon," which
has hitherto only been used in Commercial law. This of course leads to
a great curtailment of the activity and influence of the _kadis_ and
_muftis_, the semi-religious judges, who have now to yield place to a
more mundane system. The first inexorable consequence of the reform
was that the Sheikh-ul-Islam, the highest authority of Islam in the
whole Ottoman Empire, had to give up a large part of his powers, and
incidentally of his income.
The changes made were so far-reaching, and the spirit of the reform
so modern, that, in spite of the unshakable power of Talaat's truly
dictatorial Cabinet which got it passed, a concession had to be made
to the public opinion roused against the measure. The form was kept as
it was, but the Sheikh-ul-Islam, Haïri Effendi, refused ostensibly to
sign the decree and gave in his resignation. Not only, however, was an
immediate successor found for him (Mussa Kiazim Effendi), who gave his
signature and even began to work hard for the reform, but--and this
is most significant for the relationship of the Young Turks towards
Islam--Haïri Effendi, the same ex-Sheikh-ul-Islam who had proclaimed
the _Fetwa_ for the "Holy War," gave up his post without a murmur, and
in the most peaceable way, and remained one of the principal pillars of
the "Committee for Union and Progress."
His resignation was nothing but a farce to throw dust in the eyes of
the all-too-trusting lower classes. After he had succeeded by this
manoeuvre in getting the reform of the law (which as a measure of
Turkification was of more consequence to him now than his own sadly
curtailed juristic functions) accepted at a pinch by the conservative
population who still clung firmly to Islam, he went on to play his
great rôle in the programme of jingoism. A "measure of Turkification"
we called it, for that is what it amounts to practically, like
everything else the men of the "Ittihad" take in hand.
I tried to give some hint of this within the limits of the censorship
as long ago as the summer of 1916 in a series of articles I wrote for
the _Kölnische Zeitung_. Here I should like just to confine myself
to one point. Naturally the reform of the law aimed principally at
substituting these newly formed pure Turkish conceptions for the
Arabian legal ideas that had been the only thing available hitherto.
(Everything that this victorious Turkey had absorbed and worked up
in the way of civilised notions was either Arabian or Persian or of
European origin.) It set to work now in the sphere of family law,
which hitherto had been specially sacrosanct and only subordinate to
the religious _Sheria_, and where tradition was strongest--not like
commercial and maritime law which had been quite modern for a long time.
The reform went so far that it even tried to introduce a kind of civil
marriage, whereas up till now all marriages, divorces, and everything
to do with inheritance had taken place exclusively before religious
officials. I may just add that these newest reforms give women no
wider rights than they had before. Perhaps this may be taken as an
indication that they have been conceived far less from a social than
from a political point of view. What induced the Turkish Government to
introduce anything so entirely modern as civil marriage in defiance
of age-old custom was more than likely the desire to put an end to
non-Turkish Ottomans contracting marriages and making arrangements
about inheritance, etc., before their own privileged, ethnically
independent organisations, and so to deal the final death-blow to the
Armenian and Greek Patriarchates. If Family Law was modernised in
this way, there would not be the faintest shadow of excuse left for
the existence of these institutions which enjoyed a far-reaching and
influential autonomy.
The Armenian Patriarchate got short shrift indeed. By dissolving the
Patriarchate in the Capital, breaking off all relations with the
Armenian headquarters in Etzmiadjin and allowing only a very small
remainder of Patriarchate to be sent up in Jerusalem under special
State supervision, the Turks, as a logical sequence to the Armenian
atrocities, simply dealt the death-blow in the summer of 1916 to this
important social institution.
The Greek organisation, however, conducted by a more numerous and,
outwardly at any rate, better protected people, offered far more
resistance, and could not be simply wiped out with a stroke of the pen.
A direct attempt to suppress it was made as early as 1910, but broke
down entirely in face of the firm attitude of the Greek Patriarch in
Constantinople. Now the Young Turks seem to have come to the conclusion
that less drastic methods, beginning on a juristic basis, may have a
better effect.
We have taken this one example in order to get at the whole neo-Turkish
method of procedure. It consists in pushing forward, if need be with
greater delicacy than before and on the round-about road of real modern
reforms, towards the one immovable goal: the complete Turkification of
Turkey. The reform of the law, which we have treated more exhaustively
as an example of the first rank, is typical of the Young Turkish
national tendency. Naturally it has its use, too, as a means of further
throwing off the foreign political yoke. Through the modernising
of the whole Turkish legal system, Europe is to be shown that the
Capitulations can be dispensed with.
The reform throws a vivid light, too, on the inner relationship
of the jingoistic, pure Pan-Turkish leaders of present-day Turkey
towards religion. And it is perhaps not generally known that at all
the deliberations of the "Committee" where the will of Talaat, the
uncrowned king of Turkey, is alone decisive, the opinion of the Grand
Master of the Turkish Freemasons is always listened to, and that he is
one of the most willing tools of the "Ittihad."
No, the members of the "Committee for Union and Progress" have
for a very long time simply snapped their fingers at Islam if it
hindered them making use of and profiting from their own subjects.
They know very well how to retain at least the outward semblance of
friendliness so long as Islam does not directly cross the path of
Pan-Turkism. But the Armenian atrocities, instigated by Talaat, have
as little to do with religion, they are as exclusively the result
of pure race-fanaticism, professional jealousy, and greed, as the
hostile, devil-may-care attitude towards Greece, and the millions of
well-to-do Ottoman Greeks who are the next troublesome competitors
and suitable victims of aggrandisement to be disposed of after the
Armenians, or as the terrible persecutions against the highest class
of Syrians and Arabs pictured in Djemal Pasha's famous paper. They
are Turks, pure Turks with the most narrow-minded jingoistic point of
view, and not broad-minded Mohammedans, that sit on the Committee in
"Nur-el-Osmanieh" in Stamboul and make all these wonderful political
plans, from internal reforms and measures of government which attempt
to adapt themselves to European technique by sacrificing ancient
traditions, to the hangman's tactics employed against their own
subjects.
Take the case of the Syrians and the Arabs. The "Ittihad" clique,
weltering in a fog of Pan-Turkish illusion, were yet not without
anxiety with regard to the intellectual and social superiority, to
say nothing of the political sharpness, of these peoples compared with
the Turks. They had yielded entirely to their brutal instincts of
extermination and suppression towards foreign races, and the Germans
had made no attempt to curb them. They were political parvenus suddenly
freed from the control of the civilised Great Powers, and they did not
know how to make use of that freedom. Perhaps they felt themselves
already on the edge of an abyss and were constrained to snatch what
they could while there was yet time.
Is it any wonder, then, that the Turks should throw over all trace of
decency towards the Syrians and the Arabs once they were sure that
these peoples, who regarded their oppressors with most justifiable
hatred, would refuse to have anything to do with the "Holy War" of the
Turanian Pseudo-Caliph?
The last remnants of the traditional Pan-Islamic esteem of their Arab
neighbours, already sadly shattered by the Young Turks' ruthless policy
towards them since 1909, were flung light-heartedly overboard by a
Government that knew they were to blame for the Arab defection but
thought they had found a substitute that appealed more to their true
Asiatic character in these Turanistic dreams of expansion and measures
of Turkification. And while fanatical adventurers and money-grubbing
deputies paid by the easily duped German Embassy were preaching a
perfectly useless "Holy War" on the confines of the Arabian territory
of the Turkish Empire, towards the part occupied by the English, while
Enver Pasha continued to visit the holy places of Islam, where he got
a frosty enough reception, although the wonderfully worded communiqués
on the subject succeeded in blinding the population to the true state
of affairs, "the hangman's policy" of Djemal Pasha, the Commander of
the Fourth Osmanic Army, and Naval Minister, had been for a long time
in full swing in the old civilised land of Syria against the best
families among the Mohammedan as well as the Christian population. The
whole civilised world is laying up a store of accusations of this kind
against the Turks, and it is to be hoped that a public sentence will be
passed on these gentlemen of the "Ittihad" on the conclusion of peace
by a combined court of Europeans and Americans.
Here again the Young Turkish Government assumed the existence of a
widespread conspiracy and a Syrian and Arabian Separatist movement
towards autonomy, which was to free these lands from Turkish rule and
to be established under Anglo-French protection. At the time of the
Armenian persecutions the Committee had managed most cunningly to
turn the whole Armenian question to their own account by publishing
false official reports by the thousand, accompanied by any number of
photographs of "bands of conspirators," the authenticity of which never
has been proved and never will be; indeed one can only wonder where the
Turkish Government got them from.
In this case again there was no lack of official printed commentaries
on Djemal Pasha's "hanging list," and any reader of the _Journal de
Beyrouth_ in war-time would have had no difficulty in compiling it. It
is certainly not my intention to question the existence of a Separatist
movement towards autonomy in Syria, but it was a sporadic tendency
only, and ought never to have been made the excuse for the wholesale
execution of highly respected and well-born citizens who had nothing
whatever to do with the matter.
In the Young Turkish memorandum on this act of spying and bloodshed,
the passages most underlined and printed in the boldest characters, the
passages which, according to official intention, were to justify these
frightful reprisals, form the most terrible indictment ever brought
against Turkish despotism, and provide the most complete proof of the
truth of all the accusations made against the Turkish Government by
the ill-treated and oppressed Syrians and Arabians. On anyone who does
not read with Young Turkish eyes the memorandum makes directly the
opposite impression to what was intended. And even if the Separatist
movement had existed in any greater extent--which was quite out of the
question owing to lack of weapons, conflicting interests, the contrasts
in the people themselves, some of them Mohammedan, some Christian,
some sectarian, and the impossibility of any kind of organisation
under the stern discipline of Turkish rule--the Turks would have most
richly deserved it and it would have been justified by the thousands
of brutalities inflicted by the Old and Young Turkish régimes on the
highly civilised Arabian people and their industrious and commercial
neighbours the Syrians, who had always been much influenced by European
culture. Anyone who has once watched how the Committee in Stamboul
made a pretext of events on the borders of Caucasia to exterminate a
whole people, including women and children, even in Western and Central
Anatolia and the Capital, can no longer be in the least doubt as to the
methods employed by Djemal Pasha, the "hangman" of Syrians and Arabs,
how grossly he must have exaggerated and misstated the facts to find
enough victims so that he could look on for a year and a half with a
cigar in his mouth--as he himself boasted--while the flower of Syrian
and Arabian youth, the élite of society, and the aged heads of the best
families in the land were either hanged or shot.
I should like to take the opportunity here of giving a short
description of Djemal Pasha, this man who, according to Turkish ideas,
is destined still to play a great part in Turkish politics. I should
also like to clear up a misunderstanding that seems to exist in
civilised Europe with regard to him. There is still an idea abroad
that Djemal Pasha is pro-French, this man who set out on his adventure
against the Suez Canal as "Vice-king of Egypt," and, after he had been
beaten there, settled in Syria as dictator with unlimited power--even
openly defying the Central Government in Constantinople when he felt
piqued--so that as commander of the Fourth Army he could support
the attempt against Egypt, but principally to satisfy his murderous
instincts. Anyone who has seen this man close at hand (whom a German
journalist belonging to the _Berliner Tageblatt_ with the most fulsome
flattery once called one of the handsomest men in Turkey) knows enough.
Small, thickset, a beard and a pair of cunning cruel eyes are the
most prominent features of this face from which everyone must turn in
disgust who remembers the "hangman's" part played by the man.
It is extraordinary that he should still pass as Pro-French in many
quarters, and perhaps it is part of his slyness to preserve this rôle.
Djemal is not Pro-French; he is only the most calculating of all the
leading men of Turkey. He certainly had pro-French tendencies, in
the current meaning of the word, before the war; that is, he thought
the interests of his country would be best safeguarded against German
machinations for winning over the Young Turks by taking advantage
of Turkey's traditional friendship for France. He was also against
Turkey's participation in the war on the side of the Central Powers,
and he was furiously angry when the fleet which was supposed to be
under his control appeared against his will under the direction of the
German Admiral of the _Goeben_ and _Breslau_ in the Black Sea.
But when the war actually broke out, he very soon accommodated himself
to the new state of affairs. Instead of handing in his resignation,
he added to his naval duties the chief command of the army operating
against Egypt, for Djemal's chief characteristics were characterless
opportunism and inordinate ambition. Suiting his opinions to the facts
of the case, he was not long in advertising his Pro-French feelings
again so that he might be popular with the people of Syria. That of
course did not prevent him later on from carrying out his "hangman's
policy" against the Syrians who were bound by so many social ties to
France. From that it is not difficult to judge just how genuine his
Pro-French feelings are!
The only genuine thing in his whole attitude is his admitted deep
hatred of Germany and his personal animosity towards the pro-German
Enver Pasha, arising partly from jealousy, partly from a feeling of
being slighted, and only concealed for appearance' sake. During the
war he has often enough made very plain utterances of his hatred of
Germany, and it would certainly betoken ill for German politics in
Turkey if Djemal Pasha succeeded in obtaining a more active rôle in the
Central Government. So far the Minister for War has managed to hold him
at arm's length, and Djemal has no doubt found it of advantage to wait
for a later moment, and content himself for the present with his actual
powerful position.
From his own repeated anti-German speeches it has, however, been only
too easy to glean that his anti-German opinions and actions are not
the result of his being Pro-French, but of his being a jingoistic
Pan-Turk. He may simulate Pro-French feelings again and play them as
the trump card in his surely approaching decisive struggle with Enver
Pasha, when Enver's system has failed; Djemal will no doubt maintain
then that he foresaw everything, and that he has always been for France
and the Entente. Everyone who knows his character is at any rate sure
of one thing, and that is that he will stop at nothing, even a rising
against the Central Government, if his ambitious opportunism should
so dictate it. It is to be hoped, however, that public opinion among
the Entente will not be deceived as to his true character, and will
recognise that he is nothing more than a jingoistic, greedy, raging
Young Turkish fanatic and one of the most cunning at that. It would
really be doing too much honour to a man with a murderer's face and a
murderer's instinct to credit him with honest sympathies for France.
Djemal's work is nearing fruition. His cruel executions, his cynical
breaking of promises in Syria, have at any rate contributed, along with
other politically more important tendencies which have been cleverly
utilised by England for the establishment of an Arabian Caliphate,
towards the decisive result that the Emir of Mecca has revolted
against the Turks. The Emir's son and his great Arabian suite had to
pay a prolonged visit to Djemal at one time, and it is evident that
the brutal execution of Arabian notables that he saw then directly
influenced his father's attitude. The movement is bound to spread,
and slowly and surely it will roll on till it ends in the full and
perfect separation from Turkey of all Arabic-speaking districts as far
as Northern Syria and the borders of Southern Kurdistan. The so-called
Separatist movement, that Djemal tried to drown in a sea of blood
before it was well begun, is now an actual fact.
In Egypt England has been seeing for quite a long time the practical
and favourable results of her success in founding the Arabian
Caliphate. She has now gained practically absolute security for her
rule on the Nile, and she has even been able to remove troops and
artillery from the Suez Canal to other fronts. The German dream of an
offensive against Egypt vanished long ago; now even the last trace
of a German-Turkish attempt against the Canal has ceased, and the
English troops have moved the scene of their operations to Southern
Palestine. While I write these lines, there comes from the other side,
from Arabian Mesopotamia, the news of the recapture of Kut-el-Amara by
British troops. I should not like to prophesy what moral or political
results the fall of Baghdad, Medina, and Jerusalem will have for
Turkish rule; possibly, nay probably, iron necessity, the impossibility
of returning, the constraint imposed by their German Allies--for Turkey
is fully under German military rule--may weaken the direct results
of even such catastrophes as these. But the hearts which beat to-day
with high hopes for the freedom of Great Arabia and autonomy for Syria
under Franco-English protection will flame with new rapture, and in the
Turkish capital all grades of society will realise that Osmanic power
is on the decline.
Meantime Djemal Pasha is still occupied in Syria raking in the property
of the murdered citizens and dividing it up among his minions, the
least very often being given over to commissions consisting of
individuals of extremely doubtful reputation. When he is not thus
busily engaged, he spends his time round the green table playing poker.
It is to be ardently hoped that even this great organiser will soon be
at the end of his tether in Syria and have to leave the country where
he has kinged in royally for two years. Then, perhaps, the moment may
come when things are going so badly for the whole of Turkey that Djemal
will at last have the opportunity, in spite of the failure of his
policy in Syria, of measuring his military strength against his hated
enemy Enver in Stamboul. That would be the beginning of the last stage
before the complete collapse of Turkey.