_THE OPENING OF PARLIAMENT_
On December 17 Abdul Hamid drove through the streets of his capital
between cheering crowds to open the Turkish Parliament. The scene
has been often described, and it is unnecessary here to relate again
the events of that memorable day. That night I sailed through the
Dardanelles, and on either side of me, on the shores of both Europe and
Asia, every little town and village and the anchored fleets of fishing
craft in the harbours were brightly illuminated; isolated farm-houses
on snowy hillsides had their windows full of lights; fires blazed on
many a lonely peak; and so it was all along the shores of Turkey from
the Adriatic and the Ægean to the Black Sea and the shores of the
Persian Gulf. It was a day and a night of rejoicing, and so contagious
was the sincere enthusiasm that even the most cynical foreigner in the
land had not the heart to speak otherwise than hopefully of the future
of this freed country.
Some months have passed since that winter’s day. As might have been
expected, things have not gone altogether smoothly in Turkey, and
there have been reports of internal dissensions that have puzzled and
alarmed the English well-wishers of the new _régime_. As regards the
open rebellions against the Government that have occurred in various
portions of the Empire, no one imagined that the proclamation of a
Constitution would suddenly bring peace, once and for all, to restless
races that have been fighting and raiding for centuries. The complete
pacification of these regions cannot but be a work of time. The lawless
Albanian tribes are again carrying on their organised brigandage, even
in that Dibra district where Niazi Bey’s propaganda had been so wholly
successful; the Northern Albanians are agitating for autonomy, even as
they were thirty years ago when I wandered through their highlands;
Turkish troops, even as I am writing this, are defending Armenians
against raiding Kurds;[1] risings of fanatical Arabs in Arabia
are being suppressed; and the Greek bands are once more troubling
Macedonia. These are unfortunate happenings, but with a Government
that combines firmness with justice and patience, this lawless state
of things will disappear; and it must be remembered that sheer love of
fighting and raiding rather than political disaffection is the cause of
some of these disturbances. These revolts and raids had become almost
chronic complaints under the old _régime_; the world is now watching
Turkey; events that would have passed almost unnoticed a year ago are
reported in the European press, and their importance is naturally
overrated by those who read of them.
[1] This was written before the counter-revolution and the
terrible massacre of Armenians that followed it.
But the political dissensions among the Turks themselves—which have
been much embittered of late—are more alarming to the friends of
Turkey than are any of these risings of lawless peoples. This is no
time for the patriotic element to be divided against itself, and it
behooves the Young Turks to present a solid and united front to the
many external and internal enemies of Turkey’s liberty and the Empire’s
integrity. The Committee of Union and Progress, the deliverer of Turkey
from the Despotism, has enemies in the land who are unsparing and
unscrupulous in their attacks, and most cunning in their intriguings.
The anomalous position of the organisation has naturally invited some
honest criticism. Almost immediately after the proclamation of the
Constitution, not only reactionary Turks and politicians jealous of
the Young Turk party, but also European friends of Turkey, including
certain British diplomatists and a section of the Press that voices
their views, began to urge that the Committee, its work having been
accomplished, no longer had a _raison d’être_ and should be dissolved
at once. It was pointed out that an irresponsible power behind the
Parliament was unconstitutional, and that the Committee, with its
unknown leaders, had become an illegal institution now that Turkey had
been granted representative government.
Now surely this argument savours of a legal pedantry that ignores
surrounding conditions. The Committee was, of course, an illegal
institution from its inception; it saved Turkey by illegal methods;
a revolution cannot but be an illegal operation: and it would be
obviously unsafe on the morrow of a successful revolution—when a
nation is still in confusion, when the people have yet no idea how
they should exercise their new rights, when the new institutions from
their very freedom lie open to the attack of cunning foes—to adhere
strictly to constitutional technicalities and legalities, and to break
up the strong organised power that has brought about the overthrow of
a _régime_. After the English revolution Cromwell had no scruples in
violating law to save a cause. If there had been a strong Committee
of Union and Progress behind the Constitution which the Sultan swore
to observe on his coming to the throne, Turkey might have been saved
thirty years of despotism and the loss of much territory.
The Young Turks fully realised the difficulties and dangers before
them. Many were the foes of the newly freed fatherland. There were
those of the Great Powers to whom constitutional liberty in Turkey
meant interference with their designs to enrich themselves and obtain
territorial expansion at Turkey’s expense; there were the smaller
Powers on the frontier, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, eager to scramble
over the partition of Macedonia; and, far more dangerous than these,
there were the Turkish reactionaries, who began to intrigue everywhere
against the Constitution immediately after its proclamation, ready
to seize their chance when they saw it. The Young Turks in their
hour of triumph had freely pardoned all save a few of the worst of
the creatures of the Palace, but this great clemency gained them no
gratitude. It was also a source of no small danger that the Young
Turks, having but few trained administrators in their own ranks, had
retained the services of such high officials of the old _régime_ as had
no notoriously evil records for corruption or oppression. Some of these
men are the secret enemies of the new order of things. The Young Turks,
therefore, determined to remain on their guard and see to it that
Turkey’s newly won liberty was not wrested from her. As I have stated
in a previous chapter, they held that, far from losing its _raison
d’être_ on the opening of Parliament, the Committee of Union and
Progress would be more necessary than ever for the protection of the
country, and they decided not to dissolve this powerful organisation,
but to maintain it, legally or illegally, supported as heretofore
by the army, until such time as the Constitution should be firmly
established. Such was their justification, and they were sincere in
their explanations of their resolution.
As will have been gathered from what I have said in this book the
Committee of Union and Progress is no small body of patriots. When I
was in Turkey it numbered seventy thousand members. I understand that
it now has a membership of about a hundred thousand. It includes all
that is best and most patriotic of the educated young Moslem manhood of
the country. There are now the many Christians, too, on the Committee
who have rejected the idle separatist aspirations of their several
races and have Ottoman unity as their ideal, and also many of those
Jews who from the beginning have co-operated loyally with the Young
Turks. When I was in the country last autumn it looked much as if this
Committee had as its members nearly all the men to whom it would be
safest to leave the guidance of the Empire.
Unfortunately, it seems to be an undoubted fact that the Committee of
Union and Progress has made many enemies even among those who cannot
be accused of reactionary tendencies. The Committee has undoubtedly
done some ill-advised and tactless things, and its arbitrary methods
have raised up against itself some relentless foes; but there can, I
think, be no doubt that it has been actuated throughout by pure and
patriotic motives, and that its errors have been those of zeal and
inexperience. I have met several members of the party recently, and
they all sincerely believe that the Committee had very good reasons
for compelling Kiamil Pasha to resign the Grand Vizierate in February
last; they are confident that the aged statesman had been misled by
the plausible enemies of Turkey’s liberties and was being duped by
reactionaries. The friction between the Committee and the Grand Vizier
commenced some months before the opening of the Parliament; Kiamil,
being a Pasha of the old school, naturally resented the dictation of
the Committee, and complained that while his was the responsibility
the Committee held all the power. The Committee was alarmed by
Kiamil Pasha’s friendly relations with the Liberal Union, the party
in opposition to the Committee, and recognised the insidious work of
reactionary influence when Kiamil despatched from Constantinople to
Macedonia certain battalions that were faithful to the Committee,
thus imperilling, in the eyes of the Young Turks, the safety of the
constitutional cause in the capital. When the Grand Vizier, without
consultation with his ministers or with the party, suddenly dismissed
the Ministers of War and Marine, the nominees of the Committee, and
placed others in their stead, the crisis was precipitated. The Young
Turks, above all things, were determined that those in whom they did
not place implicit confidence should not control the army, so the
Committee, even as it had compelled the resignation of Said Pasha,
because he had left the appointment of the Ministers of War and Marine
in the hands of the Sultan, now insisted upon the resignation of Kiamil
Pasha, and effected its purpose in so peremptory a way that it lost
much of its popularity with the people and afforded its unscrupulous
enemies a handle for attack. The intrigues connected with the fall of
Kiamil Pasha need not be discussed here; but one gathers that the man
chiefly to blame is Kiamil’s own son, Said, a worthless person who
enriched himself by co-operating with the brigands in the neighbourhood
of Smyrna. On several previous occasions he has compromised by his
intrigues his aged father, the one person in Turkey who believes that
there is no real harm in this very bad specimen of a young Turkish
gentleman. Of Kiamil Pasha’s successor to the Grand Vizierate, Hilmi
Pasha, I have already spoken.
The Committee justified its treatment of Kiamil Pasha and its other
arbitrary acts by pleading the necessity of protecting the nation
against the strong reactionary forces which certainly do exist, despite
the assertions of the organs of the Liberal Union, which have ever
ridiculed the possibility of a reactionary movement, and have accused
the Committee of having invented this bogey as an excuse for its own
despotic methods. Kiamil Pasha had ever been the friend of the English,
and his removal from the Grand Vizierate produced—to the great regret
of the Young Turks—a somewhat bad impression in England, the country
above all others whose friendship is valued by patriotic Turks. Those
who had held that the Committee was an illegal institution and ought
to be dissolved became alienated for a while from the men who had been
the saviours of Turkey; and it is a great pity that this was so, for
at that critical time the Young Turks, who never before had trod the
tortuous ways of politics, and were apt to fall into the traps that
were cunningly laid for them, were much in need of the sympathetic help
and advice from those whose experience and knowledge qualified them to
offer these. The result is, I think, that the Young Turk side of the
question has not been understood in England.
The Young Turk party, as represented by the Committee of Union and
Progress, is now but one of several parties in Turkey professing
Liberal principles. In Parliament the Committee’s nominees form the
large majority; but the rival parties, though they may be numerically
small and were regarded as insignificant when I was in the country,
have displayed great energy in winning supporters outside the Chamber,
and are no longer a negligible quantity. Though diametrically
opposed to each other in their principles, they appear to be united
in their hatred and jealousy of the Young Turk party, without whose
self-sacrificing struggle for freedom they would never have had an
opportunity of existing at all. The Young Turks, as I have explained,
desired Ottoman unity, perhaps an impossible but certainly a noble
ideal, and it was a disappointment to them that, so soon as Parliament
met, the Deputies who were not partisans of the Committee divided
themselves into distinct nationalist groups, some of them impracticably
socialistic in their aims, others separatist at heart.
By far the most powerful of these groups, a composite party, composed
of Moslems, Christians, and others, calls itself the Liberal Union.
Whereas the Young Turks, while advocating equality without distinction
of race or creed, insists that the supremacy of the Mussulman Turks
should be safeguarded, desires to bring about a fusion of the different
elements, and wants no greater administrative decentralisation than is
necessary; the Liberal Union, on the other hand, is opposed to what it
terms Turkish Chauvinism, and asks for a degree of decentralisation
which the Young Turks regard as dangerous to the integrity of the
Empire. The Liberal Union therefore stands for home rule. It is largely
supported by the Greek element, and this fact does not commend it to
those who desire Ottoman unity. It is understood that the party has
been well supplied with funds by the Greek merchants in Turkey, who are
ever generous in their subscriptions to a Greek national cause; but
one cannot feel that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire is safe in
their hands. A source of weakness to the Committee are its self-denying
principles, whereby there are to be no known leaders, no gratification
of personal ambition by its members, and no seeking for the plums of
office. The Liberal Union has no such principles of self-abnegation,
and it has for its leader the Albanian Ismail Kemal Bey, a victim of
the Despotism and for some time an exile, a man of marked ability and
of great ambition. He left the Young Turk party on the grounds that
its principles were not sufficiently Liberal, and formed this party
of his own, which is the bitterest and most unscrupulous enemy of the
Committee of Union and Progress.
The organs of the Liberal Union have been carrying on a press campaign
against the Committee of Union and Progress. Among other things they
have asserted that the best men have deserted the Committee, that
the heroes of the revolution, such as Niazi Bey and Enver Bey, have
left it in disgust, that reactionaries and self-seeking adventurers
have worked their way into the Committee’s centre and are directing
its policy. It is, of course, possible, and even probable, that some
unworthy men have been admitted into the Committee, but I am certain
that they have exercised no influence, and I am of opinion that
they would not have been allowed to remain in it after their true
characters had been discovered. When I was in Turkey last autumn it
was not altogether an easy matter to become a member of the Committee.
On more than one occasion when I have asked a member whether some
mutual friend was in the Committee, he has replied in the negative,
explaining that the person in question had expressed his wish to join
the Committee, and that he seemed a fitting person, but that the
Committee would not elect him until more was known concerning him. As
to the allegations made by the organs of the Liberal Union, many of the
most active members of the Committee, men obviously actuated by the
sincerest patriotism, are my friends, and I know that not one of them
has left the Committee or has lost faith in it. I also know that the
single-minded patriots who made the revolution are still members of the
Committee. Both Niazi Bey and Enver Bey have flatly contradicted the
statements that were made concerning them.
The Young Turks who write to me from their own country or who converse
with me in London are unanimous in describing the situation as serious,
but in their opinion the Committee is too strong for its enemies. They
say that the Sultan himself is on the side of the Committee, and
disapproves of the machinations of the Liberal Union. They maintain
that whatever professions of Liberalism the Liberal Union may make
it is reactionary in its policy, has known reactionaries within its
ranks, and is led by self-seeking politicians lacking in patriotism.
They allege that many of the Greeks who support the Liberal Union,
having thrived as parasites of the old _régime_, prefer despotisms to
constitutions. They, moreover, explain that some members of the Liberal
Union are exceedingly clever and cunning men who have succeeded in
winning over honest men of the Young Turk party—including _ulemas_ and
other strict adherents of the Mussulman creed—by specious arguments and
misrepresentations. All this seems probable, and it is certain that
numbers of the Young Turks, though true patriots, are simple-minded
honest men who are likely to be duped by the trained intriguers among
the Committee’s enemies.
One gathers, therefore, that an incongruous alliance of non-Moslem
socialists, Greek separatists, reactionaries, and misled upright
Mussulmans is opposed to the Committee of Union and Progress. A most
malignant press campaign is being carried on against the Committee, and
the organs of the Committee strike hard in return, with the unfortunate
result that on either side an intense hatred has been engendered which
cannot but be injurious to the country’s interests, imperils the
Constitution, and plays into the hands of Turkey’s external foes.
The Committee of Union and Progress is not rich and has not attempted
to enrich itself; but it appears that the Liberal Union is well
supplied with funds wherewith to carry on its campaign, purchase
newspapers, and buy the consciences of men. It is known that the Greeks
have been the largest contributors to these funds. The Palace gang is
also said to have supplied its share. When I was in Constantinople I
was informed that the Committee had intercepted correspondence between
the Palace and a certain Pasha—who was then an exile in England passing
under various aliases—and had obtained proof that this notorious
person was the trustee of large sums lying in London banks which
were intended to meet the expenses of intriguing for the restoration
of the old _régime_. Certain foreign Powers, which have no love for
the Young Turk _régime_, have also been openly accused of intriguing
with the reactionaries. If they are innocent of this they have but
themselves to blame for the suspicion that attaches to them, for one
can only judge of their present policy by regarding their past. How
unscrupulously Germany exploited the old _régime_ is known to all the
world. Some of the Germans whom I met in Constantinople expressed
their conviction and their hope that the days of the new _régime_
were numbered. It was interesting to hear these men, who represented
the political commercialism of their country, frankly state, as if it
were an incontrovertible axiom, that all European peoples, whether
German, British, or any other, had for their one aim in Turkey the
exploitation of a helpless country. The Germans are perfectly sincere
when they assert that the Balkan Committee is the paid agent of a
cunning British Government, that the expression of British sympathy
for oppressed nationalities is organised hypocrisy with the attainment
of selfish ends as its one motive. As they look with their cold, blue
eyes into yours you realise that they quite believe these things.
The materialism of modern Germany has so sunk into the souls of her
sons—including some of the most illustrious of them—that it has become
inconceivable to them that a nation, or a group of the citizens of
that nation, can take a disinterested interest in the affairs of
other nations and sympathise unselfishly with its misfortunes or
triumphs. To the Germans the enthusiasm with which the success of the
Young Turk cause was welcomed in England was all humbug—a cleverly
engineered manifestation of friendship whose object it was to secure
for Great Britain the influence in Turkey which Germany had lost by the
revolution but confidently looked forward to recovering at an early
date by more straightforward if more brutal methods.
The thirty years of despotism, by its deliberate encouragement of
corruption, had demoralised a great part of the Turkish nation. The
cure cannot come in a day, and those well provided with money can still
buy power in Constantinople. It was amid very corrupt surroundings
that the Young Turks, pure themselves, set to work to undertake the
regeneration of Turkey and to make the Empire strong. To begin with,
Constantinople is full of men who have lived by corrupt practices
all their lives—the men who were blackmailing spies under the old
_régime_, or had belonged to that huge tribe of useless functionaries
who used to crowd every public department and had to be bribed by
those whom business brought into contact with them. All these people,
their occupation now gone, are wandering about the capital in very
disconsolate mood, hard up, regretting “the good old days,” and hating
the purifying influence that has brought this change about. These men
are all reactionaries; many of them know well how to poison the minds
of ignorant people against the Committee with cunning inventions.
They are largely responsible for the growing popular dislike of the
Committee. It is very difficult for the people in the capital to arrive
at the truth, and they are largely at the mercy of paid agitators
and schemers. Even foreign Governments are able to influence public
opinion in Turkey. The Germans and Austrians possess a useful piece of
machinery for the dissemination of news to serve their own interests in
the shape of a telegraphic agency which supplies Constantinople with
practically all its foreign information, and sells its despatches by
the column to the newspapers of that city at a low rate that cannot
possibly pay the expenses of the service. The news which purports to
come from London is often of an astonishing character.
I understand that the Committee of Union and Progress is now about to
reorganise its constitution and convert itself into what we should
call a Parliamentary party; but under whatever name it continues its
existence it is to be hoped that this body of men, which has done
such great and noble work for Turkey, which contains so many men of
single-minded, self-sacrificing patriotism, will remain the dominating
party in the country. But it will have to be as the strong man armed
and ever watchful, for its enemies are many and have the money
wherewith, alas! the consciences of both men and newspapers can still
be purchased in Turkey.