THE YOUNG TURK _RÉGIME_ IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
No event during the first decade of the twentieth century was heralded
throughout Europe with so great and so sincere interest and sympathy as
the bloodless revolution of July 24, 1908, by which the _régime_ of
Abdul Hamid was overthrown and the constitution of 1876 resuscitated.
Although the world was unprepared for this event, it was not due to any
sudden cause. For twenty years the leaven of liberalism had been
working in the minds of the educated classes in the Ottoman Empire.
Moslems, as well as Christians, had been in attendance in large numbers
at the American, French, Italian, and German schools in Turkey, and had
gone abroad to complete their education. Just as in Italy and in
Germany, Young Turkey had come into existence through contact with
those free institutions in the outside world which other races enjoyed,
had been emancipated from superstition and from the stultifying
influences of religious formalism, and had grown, in the army, to
numbers sufficient to dictate the policy of the Government.
From the beginning of his reign, Abdul Hamid had {181} done all in his
power to prevent the growth of the liberal spirit. The result of
thirty years, in so far as civil officials of the Government were
concerned, had been the stamping out of every man who combined ability
with patriotism and devotion to an ideal. The best elements had taken
the road to death, to imprisonment, or to exile, so that from the
palace down to the humblest village, the Turkish civil service was
composed of a set of men absolutely lacking in independence and in
honour, and devoted to the master who ruled from Yildiz. But in the
army, this same policy, though attempted, had not wholly succeeded. A
portion at least of the officers received an education; many of them,
indeed, had been sent abroad to Germany and to France in order to keep
abreast with the development of military science, so essential to the
very existence of Turkey. In the army, then, hundreds of officers of
high character and high ideals were able to avoid the fate which had
come to other educated Moslems in Turkey. They learned to love their
country, and with that love came a sense of shame for the results of
the despotism under which they existed. To have lived in Paris or in
Berlin was enough to make them dissatisfied; to have visited Cairo or
Alexandria, Sofia or Bukarest or Athens, and to have contrasted the
conditions of life in these cities, recently their own, with
Constantinople, Salonika, and Smyrna, was sufficient.
It is impossible in the limits of this book to tell how this bloodless
revolution was planned by exiles abroad and officers at home. It was
successful, as {182} well as bloodless, because the army refused to
obey the orders of the Sultan. To save his life and his throne, Abdul
Hamid was compelled to resuscitate the constitution which he had
granted, and then suppressed, at the beginning of his reign.
We who lived through those dream days of the beginning of the new
_régime_ will never forget the sense of joy of an emancipated people.
The spy system was abolished, newspapers were allowed to tell the truth
and express their own opinions, passports and _teskeres_ (permissions
to travel from one point to another within the Empire) were declared
unnecessary, _bakshish_ was refused at the custom house and police
station. Moslem _ulema_ and Christian clergy embraced each other in
public, rode through the streets in triumph in the same carriages, and
harangued the multitudes from the same platform in mosque and church.
A new era of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, they said, had dawned
for all the races in Turkey. The Sultan was the father, Turkey the
fatherland, barriers and disabilities of creed and race had ceased to
exist. It seemed incredible, but these scenes were really happening
from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf.
Optimism, hope for the future, was so strong that one had not the heart
to express very loudly his belief that no real revolution was ever
bloodless, that no real change in political and social life of the
people could come in a single day or as a result of an official
document. No one could think of anything else but the constitution,
which had broken the chains for Moslem and Christian alike, the
constitution which {183} was going to restore Turkey to its lawful
place among the nations of Europe, the constitution which was to heal
the sick man and solve the question of the Orient. In Smyrna, in
Constantinople, in Beirut, and in Asia Minor, I heard the same story
over and over again. But there was always the misgiving, the
apprehension for the future, from which the foreigner in Turkey is
never free. It seemed too good to be true; it _was_ too good to be
true. It was against the logic of history. The most wonderful
constitution that the world has ever known is that of England. It does
not exist on paper; there is no need for a document. It is good, and
it has endured, because it has been written in blood, in suffering, and
in the agony of generations, on the pages of eight centuries of
history. Could Turkey hope to be free in a day?
The first test of the constitution came, of course, with the election
and composition of the Parliament. The election was held quietly, in
some parts of the Empire secretly even, and when the Parliament
assembled at Constantinople, one began to see already the handwriting
on the wall. For its composition was in no way in accordance with the
distribution of population in the Empire. The Turk--and by the Turk I
mean the composite Moslem race which has grown up through centuries of
inter-marriage and forcible conversion--had always been the ruling
race. With the establishment of a constitutional _régime_, the Young
Turks did not mean to abdicate in favour of Moslem Arabs or Christian
Greeks and Armenians. They had "arranged" the elections in such a way
that they would have in the {184} Parliament a substantial majority
over any possible combination of other racial elements.
One cannot but have sympathy with the natural feeling of racial pride
which is inborn in the Turks. A race of masters,--who could expect
that they would be willing to surrender the privileges of centuries?
But they forgot that a constitutional _régime_ and the principles of
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity must necessarily imply the yielding
of their unique position in the Empire. The Turk, as a race, is
composed of two elements, a ruling class of land-owners and military
and civil officials, arrogant though courteous, corrupt though honest
in private life, parasitical though self-respecting, and a peasant
class, hopelessly ignorant, lacking in energy, initiative, ambition,
aspirations, and ideals. The great bulk of the Turkish element in the
Empire looked with the indifference of ignorance and the hostility of
jealous regard for their unique position in the community upon the
granting of a constitution. I doubt if five per cent. of the Turkish
population of the Empire has ever known what a constitutional _régime_
means, or cared whether it exists or not.
There remains the five per cent. Of these the great bulk belong either
to the corrupt official class, whose subjection to the tyranny of
Yildiz Kiosk had totally unfitted them for service under the new
_régime_ on which they were entering, and the land-owners, whose wealth
was dependent upon the unequal privileges that the law allowed to them
as Moslems, and whose interests were totally at variance with the
spirit of the constitution. There are {185} left small groups of
younger army officers and of professional men, who had been educated in
foreign schools or by foreign teachers in Turkey and abroad. They
were, for the most part, either without the knowledge of any other
_métier_ than the army, or, if civilian, unfitted by training and
experience for governmental executive and administrative work.
Consequently from the very beginning, the genuine Young Turks who were
honest in their idealism had to make a compact with the higher army
officers and with corrupt civil officials of Abdul Hamid. When the
real Young Turks controlled the Cabinet, their disasters were those of
theorists and visionaries. When they yielded the control of affairs to
men more experienced than they, it was simply the renewal of the
tyranny of Abdul Hamid. It was because these two elements were united
in the firm resolution to keep the control in the hands of Moslem
Turks, that the constitutional _régime_ in Turkey has gone from Scylla
to Charybdis without ever entering port.
From the very beginning, thoughtful men pointed out that there was only
one way of salvation and of liberal evolution for the Ottoman Empire.
That was an honest and sincere co-operation with the Christian elements
of the Empire, and with the Arabic and Albanian Moslem elements.
Fanaticism and racial pride prevented the Young Turks from adopting the
sole possible way of establishing the constitutional _régime_. From
the very beginning, then, they failed, and it is their failure which
has plunged Europe into the series of wars that has ended in the
devastation of unhappy Belgium, so far remote from the cause and {186}
so innocent of any part in the events which brought upon her such
terrible misfortunes. One could write a whole book upon the events of
the first five years of constitutional government in Turkey and could
show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, how from the very beginning there was
no honest and loyal effort made to apply even the most rudimentary
principles of constitutional government. Despotism means the
subjection of a country to the will of its rulers. Constitutionalism
means the subjection of the rulers to the will of the country. The
Young Turks, embodied in the "Committee of Union and Progress," merely
continued the despotism of Abdul Hamid. They were far worse than Abdul
Hamid, however, for they were irresponsible and unskilled. One
handling the helm, knowing how to steer, might have kept the ship of
state afloat, all the more easily, perhaps, because the waters were so
troubled. Many hands, none knowing where or how to go, steered the
Ottoman Empire to inevitable shipwreck.
Although the vicissitudes of various Cabinets and Parliaments can have
place in our work only so far as they have a direct bearing on foreign
relations, there are six matters of internal policy which must be
mentioned in order to explain how rapidly and surely the Ottoman Empire
went to its destruction; the treatment of Armenians before and after
the Adana massacres; the attempt to suppress the liberties of the
Orthodox Church; the Cretan question, ending in the Greek boycott; the
Macedonian policy; the Albanian uprisings; and the lack of co-operation
and sympathy with the Arabs.
{187}
THE ARMENIANS AND THE ADANA MASSACRES
Among the various races of the Ottoman Empire, none was more overcome
with joy at the proclamation of the constitutional _régime_ than the
Armenian. Scattered everywhere throughout the Empire, and in no region
an element of preponderance, the Armenians had always made themselves
felt in the commercial and intellectual life of Turkey far out of
proportion to their numerical strength. They appreciated and
understood, best of all the Christian populations, the significance of
constitutional government. Honestly applied, it meant more to them
than to any other element of the Empire.
In the first place, the burden of Turkish and Moslem oppression had
fallen most heavily on them. It was not only the massacres of 1894 to
1896, horrible as they were, which had put the Armenians in continual
fear for their lives; it was the centuries-old petty persecution, from
which they believed they were now to be freed. Turkish officialdom had
grown rich in extorting the last farthing from the Armenians. Only
those who had seen this persecution and extortion can realize how large
a part it played in the daily life of the Armenians, and how continuous
and rich a source of revenue it was to the official Turk. For every
little service the official expected his fat fee, always charging up to
the limit his victim was able to pay. You could not carry on your
business, you could not build a house, you could not enlarge or alter
or repair your shop, you could not get a tax on your harvest estimated,
you could {188} not travel even from one village to another for the
purpose of business or pleasure or study, without paying the officials.
Very frequently between the local Turkish official and the Armenian
stood a middle man who must also be paid for the purpose of carrying
the fee or bribe to the official in charge. How people could have
lived under such a _régime_ and have prospered, is beyond the
comprehension of the Occidental. Nothing speaks so eloquently for the
business acumen of the Armenian race, as well as for devotion to the
religion of its fathers.
Naturally, the Armenians expected that the constitution would bring to
them a complete relief from economic repression, as well as from the
terrors of massacre. They were led to believe this by the Young Turks
who had so long plotted the overthrow of Abdul Hamid's despotism.
During the campaign from 1890-1908, the Young Turks needed the money
and the brains of Armenians in the larger centres of population where
they had their _foyers_, and in the cities abroad where they lived in
exile. It cannot be doubted that there were among the Young Turks
during the period when they had to keep alive their ideals in the fire
of hope, an honest intention to give the Armenians a share in the
regeneration of the Ottoman Empire. But, as soon as they realized
their ambitions, racial and religious fanaticism came to them with such
force that they forgot the brilliant promises as well as the
affectionate intercourse of the days of suffering and struggle.
In the second place, Armenians, unlike the Greeks, the Macedonians, and
the Arabs, had, as a race, no {189} separatist tendencies. They were
not looking towards another state to come and redeem them. They feared
Russia. They were too scattered to hope to form, by the break-up of
the Ottoman Empire, a state of their own. They loved the land in which
they lived with all the passion of their nature. In many regions,
Turkish was their native tongue. They were industrious tillers of the
soil, as well as merchants. The Sultan could have had no more loyal
subjects than these, had he so desired.
Although the composition of the new Parliament chosen in October, 1908,
and of the first constitutional Cabinet, was a prophecy of how they
were to be left out in the cold, the Armenians were throughout that
winter, when the constitution was new, firm and loyal, as well as
intelligent, supporters of regenerated Turkey. The wish was father to
the thought. For them there was no longer the barrier of race and
creed. All were Osmanlis, and willing to lose their identity in the
politically amalgamated race. The reign of Abdul Hamid was a
nightmare, quickly forgotten. The future was full of hope. If only
the Young Turks had realized what a tremendous influence the Armenians
could have played in the creation of New Turkey, if only they had been
willing to use these allies, we might have been able to write a
different history of the past few years in Europe.
But the awakening was to be cruel. It came in a region of the Empire
that never before experienced the horrors of a general massacre, where
Christians felt not only at ease, but on friendly terms with their
Moslem neighbours.
{190}
On April 14, 1909, on a morning when the sun had risen upon the
peaceful and happy city of Adana, out of a clear sky came the tragedy
which was the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire. Without
provocation, the Moslem population began to attack and kill the
Christians. The Governor of the province and his military officials
not only did nothing whatever to stop the bloodshed, but they actually
handed out arms and munitions to the blood-frenzied mob of peasants,
who were pouring into the city. For three days, killing, looting, and
burning of houses were aided by the authorities. The massacres spread
west through the great Cilician plain to Tarsus, and east over the
Amanus Range into northern Syria, as far as Antioch, where the
followers of Jesus were first called Christians. The world, horrified
by the stories which soon made their way to the newspapers, realized
that the "bloodless revolution" had not regenerated Turkey. The blood
had come at last, and without the regeneration! The Great Powers sent
their warships to Mersina, the port of Tarsus and Adana. Even from the
distant United States came two cruisers, under pressure, over six
thousand miles.
In the meantime, events of great importance, but not of equal
significance in the future of Turkey, were taking place at
Constantinople. On the eve of the first Adana massacre, Abdul Hamid,
having corrupted the soldiers of the Constantinople garrison, set in
motion a demonstration against the constitution. The soldiers shot
down their officers in cold blood, marched to Yildiz Kiosk, and
demanded of the {191} Sultan the abolition of the constitution, which
they declared was at variance with the _Sheriat_, the sacred law of
Islam. Abdul Hamid gladly consented. Popular sympathy in
Constantinople and throughout the Empire was with the Sultan, as far as
the object of the revolution went. But the way in which it was brought
about made it impossible for the Sultan to remain within the pale of
civilization. Of all nations, none relied on its army more than
Turkey. Were the assassination of the officers to go unpunished, the
disintegration of the Empire necessarily followed. So the military
hierarchy, "Old" Turks as well as "Young," rose against the Sultan.
The army corps in Salonika under the command of Mahmud Shevket pasha,
marched against the capital and with very little resistance mastered
the mutiny of the Constantinople garrison. Abdul Hamid was deposed,
and sent into exile at the Villa Alatini at Salonika. His brother,
Reshid Mohammed, came to the throne, under the title of Mohammed V.
As soon as the Young Turks found themselves again in control of the
situation, even before the proclamation of the new Sultan, they sent
from Beirut to Adana a division of infantry to "re-establish order."
These regiments disembarked at Mersina on the day Mohammed V ascended
the throne, April 25th. Immediately upon their arrival in Adana they
began a second massacre which was more horrible than the first.
Thousands were shot and burned, and more than half the city was in
ruins. This second massacre occurred in spite of the fact {192} that a
dozen foreign warships were by this time anchored in the harbour of
Mersina.
It is impossible to estimate the losses of life and property in the
_vilayets_ of Cilicia and northern Syria during the last two weeks of
April, 1908. Not less than thirty thousand Armenians were massacred.
The losses of property in Adana alone were serious enough to cause the
foremost fire insurance company in France to fight in the courts for
two years the payments of its claims. But it is not in the realm of
our work to follow out the local aftermath of this terrible story. We
are interested here only in its bearing on the fortunes of the Empire
and of Europe.
From the very beginning, the Young Turks, now re-established in
Constantinople with a Sultan of their own creation, and having nothing
more to fear from the genius and bad will of Abdul Hamid, protested
before Europe that the massacres were due to the old _régime_ and that
they had been arranged by Abdul Hamid, whose deposition cleared them of
responsibility. But the revelations of the _New York Herald_, the
_Tribuna_ of Rome, and the _Berliner Tageblatt_, translated and
reprinted in the British, French, and Russian press, were so moving
that it was necessary for the Young Turks to send special commissions
to the capitals of Europe to counteract the impression of these
articles.
Europe was willing to accept the explanation of the Constantinople
Cabinet, and to continue its faith, though shaken, in the intentions of
the Young Turks to grant to the Christians of Turkey the _régime_ of
equality and security of life and property {193} which the constitution
guaranteed. Even the Armenians, terrible as this blow had been, were
also willing to forgive and forget. But the condition of forgiveness,
and the proof of sincerity of the declarations of the Young Turks, both
to the outside world and to the Armenians, would be the punishment of
those who had been guilty of this most horrible blot upon the
civilization of the twentieth century. This was to be the test.
The Court-Martial, sent to Adana from Constantinople after the new
Sultan was established upon the throne and the Young Turks were certain
of their position, had every guarantee to enable it to do its work
thoroughly and justly. It was not influenced or threatened. There
was, however, no honest intention to give decisions impartially and in
accordance with the facts that the investigation would bring forth.
The methods and findings of the Court-Martial were a travesty of
justice. Its members refused absolutely to go to the bottom of the
massacre, and to punish those who had been guilty. I happen to be the
only foreign witness whose deposition they took. They refused to allow
me to testify against the Vali and his fellow-conspirators. The line
of conduct had been decided before their arrival. The idea was to
condemn to death a few Moslems of the dregs of the population, who
would probably have found their way to the gallows sooner or later any
way. With them were to be hanged a number of Armenians, whose only
crime was that they had defended the lives and honour of their women
and children. The Vali of Adana, who had planned the {194} massacre
and had carried it out, and two or three Moslem leaders of the city who
had co-operated with him and with the military authorities in the
effort to exterminate the Armenians, were not even sent to prison. No
testimony against them was allowed to be brought before the
Court-Martial. They went into exile "until the affair blew over."
When a future generation has the prospective to make researches into
the downfall of the Young Turk constitutional _régime_ in Turkey, they
will probably find the beginning of the end in the failure to punish
the perpetrators of the Adana massacres. For this was a formal
notification to the Christians of Turkey that the constitutional
_régime_ brought to them no guarantees of security, or justice, but, on
the other hand, made their position in the Empire even more precarious
than it had been under the despotism of Abdul Hamid. After Adana, the
Armenian population became definitely alienated from the constitutional
movement, and was convinced that its only hope lay in the absolute
disappearance of Turkish rule.
THE ATTEMPT TO SUPPRESS THE LIBERTIES OF
THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
When Mohammed the Conqueror entered Constantinople in 1453, he showed a
wise determination to continue the policy of his predecessors by
preserving the independence of the Orthodox Church. For he knew well
that the success of the Osmanlis had been due to religious toleration,
and that no durable empire could be built in Asia Minor and the Balkan
{195} Peninsula by a Moslem government, unless the liberties of the
Christian inhabitants were assured through the recognition of the Greek
patriarchate. The first thing that Mohammed did was to seek out the
Greek patriarch, and confirm him in his position as the political, as
well as the religious, head of Christian Ottoman subjects.
Islam is a theocracy. The spirit of its government is inspired by the
sacred law, the _Sheriat_, based upon the Koran and the writings of the
earliest fathers of Islam. Down to the smallest details, the
organization of the state, of the courts of justice, and of the social
life of Mohammedan peoples, is influenced by ecclesiastical law, and by
the power of the Church. As this law does not provide for the
inclusion of non-Moslem elements either in the political or social life
of the nation, it has always been evident that people of another
religion, within the limits of a Moslem state, can exist only if they
have an ecclesiastical organization of their own, with well-defined
liberties, privileges, and safeguards.
This principle was recognized by the Osmanlis for over five hundred
years; even the most despotic of sultans never dreamed of abandoning
it. There might be persecutions, there might be massacres, there might
be even assassination of patriarchs, but, until the Young Turk
_régime_, no Ottoman ministry ever dreamed of destroying the organism
which had made possible the life of Moslem and Christian under the same
rule.
The thesis of the Young Turks was, from a theoretical standpoint,
perfectly sound and just. They {196} said that ecclesiastical autonomy
was necessary under a despotism, but that it had ceased to have a
_raison d'être_ under a constitutional government. The constitution
guaranteed equal rights, irrespective of religion, to all the races of
the Empire. Therefore the Greek Church must resign its prerogatives of
a political nature, for they were wholly incompatible with the idea of
constitutional government.
Many foreigners, carried away by the reasonableness of this argument,
severely condemned the Orthodox Church for continuing to resist the
encroachments of the new Government upon its secular
privileges--secular in both senses of the word. They attributed the
attitude of the Greek ecclesiastics to hostility to the constitution,
to the reactionary tendency of every ecclesiastic organization, and to
selfish desire to hold firmly the privileges which enabled them to keep
in their clutches the Greek population of Turkey, and continue to enjoy
the prestige and wealth accruing to them from these privileges. Such
criticism only revealed ignorance of history and a lack of appreciation
of the real issue at stake.
No ecclesiastical organization can, under a constitutional government,
continue indefinitely to be a state within a state, and to enjoy
peculiar privileges and immunities. But the application of the
constitution must come first. It must enter into the life of the
people. It must become the vital expression of their national
existence, evolved through generations of testing and experimenting.
The constitution is finally accepted and supported by a nation {197}
when, and because, it has been found good and has come to reflect the
needs and wishes of the people. Then, without any great trouble, the
ecclesiastical organization will find itself gradually deprived of
every special privilege. For the privileges will have become an
anachronism.
But, just as in the establishment of the constitution, in their
attitude toward the Greek Church the Young Turks acted as if the work
of generations in other countries could be for them, in spite of their
peculiarly delicate problems and the differences in creed involved, the
act of a single moment. This mentality of the half-educated, immature
visionary has been shown in every one of the numerous senseless and
disastrous decisions which have brought the Ottoman Empire so speedily
to its ruin.
The Greek Church resisted bitterly every move of the Young Turks to
bring about the immediate millennium. The patriarch was a man of wide
experience, of sound common sense, and of undaunted courage. Backed by
the Lay Assembly, which has always been an admirable democratic
institution of the Orthodox Church, he refused to give up realities for
chimeras. With all its privileges and all its power, it had been hard
enough for the Orthodox Church to protect the Greek subjects of Turkey.
The patriarch did not intend to surrender the safeguards by which he
was enabled to make tolerable the life of his flock for illusory and
untested guarantees. Let the constitution become really the expression
of the will of the people of Turkey, let it demonstrate the uselessness
of any safeguards for {198} protecting the Christians from Moslem
oppression, let the era of liberty and equality and fraternity actually
be realized in the Ottoman Empire, and then the Church would resign its
privileges. For they would be antiquated, and fall naturally into
desuetude. But in constitutions, as in other things, the proof of the
pudding is in the eating.
What the Young Turks attempted to do was to destroy the privileges of
the Orthodox Church, on the ground that these privileges were a barrier
to the assimilation of the races in the Empire. Americans, above all
nations, have deep sympathies for, and well justified reasons for
having faith in, the policy of assimilation. Have not the various
races of Europe, different in religion and in political and social
customs, passed wonderfully through the crucible of assimilation on
American soil? But by assimilation the Young Turks meant, not the
amalgamation of races, each co-operating and sharing in the building up
of the fatherland, as in America, but the complete subjection and
ultimate disappearance of all other elements in the Empire than their
own. They intended, from the very first days of the constitutional
_régime_, to make Turkey a nation of Turks. Theirs was the strong,
virile race, into which the other races would be fused. Turkey was
weak, they declared, because it was the home of a conglomeration of
peoples. If Turkey was to become like the nations of Europe, these
different nationalities must be destroyed. To destroy them, the
Government had first to aim at the _foyer_ of national life, the
ecclesiastical hierarchies.
{199}
I have talked with many a zealous Young Turk. What I have written here
is not only the logical interpretation of the facts; it is also the
faithful expression of the ideas of the most earnest and intelligent
Turkish partisans of the new _régime_. They pointed out, with perfect
logic, that this process had gone on in every European country, and
that it was the only way in which a strong nation could be built. So
far they were right. But, aside from the fact that in Europe this
political and social evolution had taken centuries, there was also the
working of the law of the survival of the fittest. In European nations
it had been the element, always composite, which deserved to live, that
formed the nucleus of a nationality. The whole root of the question in
Turkey was, were the Young Turks justified in believing that the Turk
was this element?
There is not space to discuss the reasons for the supremacy of the
Osmanli in the Ottoman Empire. Up to the eighteenth century, the
Osmanli was undoubtedly the "fittest" element. For the past two
hundred years, the continued domination of Turk and the continued
subjection of Christian populations, in Turkey, has been due to causes
outside of the Empire. The Turk has remained the ruling race. But is
he still the fittest? One may examine the different elements of the
Ottoman Empire, and measure them by the tests of civilization. From
the intellectual standpoint, from the business standpoint, from the
administrative standpoint, the Turk is hardly able to sustain his claim
to continue to be, in a twentieth-century empire, the element which can
{200} hope to assimilate Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Slav, and Arab. He
is less fit than any of the others, especially than the Greek and
Armenian in intellectual and business faculties, and than the Albanian
in administrative faculties. There remains, then, as his sole claim to
dominate the other races, his physical superiority. By history and by
legend, he is the fighting man and rules by right of conquest and force.
It was always the sane--and only safe--policy of the Turks to keep
Christians out of the army. They saw to it that the _métier_ of arms
remained wholly to the Moslems. In spite of the increasing wealth and
education of the Christian elements of the Empire, the ascendancy was
preserved to the Turk through the army. But at what a sacrifice! By
reason of military service, the Turkish peasant has been kept in
economic and intellectual serfdom, while his Christian neighbour
progressed. The Turkish population has actually decreased, and the
ravages of garrison life, due to dyspepsia and syphilis, have
diminished fearfully the physical vigour of the race. By the same
token, the upper classes, knowing only the life of army officers, have
been removed from the necessity of competing in the world for position
and success. Can manhood be formed in any other mould than that of
competition, where the goal is achievement, and is reached only by
continued effort of will and brain? The upper class Turk is a
parasite, and, like all parasites, helpless when that upon which he
feeds is taken from him.
[Illustration: Map--Europe in 1911]
{201}
The attack of the Young Turk party upon the Greek Church failed. The
patriarch refused to surrender his privileges. The Greek clergy and
the Lay Council held out under persecution and threats. In October,
1910, when the Lay Council met in Constantinople, its members were
arrested, and thrown into jail. In Macedonia and Thrace, in the Ægean
Islands, along the coast of Asia Minor, the bishops and clergy suffered
untold persecutions. Some were even assassinated. I shall never
forget a memorable interview I had with Joachim III, during that
crisis. His Holiness untied with trembling fingers the _dossier_ of
persecutions, which contained letters and sworn statements from a dozen
dioceses. "They treat us like dogs!" he cried. "Never under Abdul
Hamid or any Sultan have my people suffered as they are suffering now.
But we are too strong for them. We refuse to be exterminated. I see
all Europe stained with blood because of these crimes." How prophetic
these words as I record them now!
The Turk could not hope to assimilate the Greek by peaceful methods,
because he was his intellectual inferior. When he planned to use
force, the Balkan Alliance was formed. The battle of Lulé Burgas took
away from the Turk his last claim to fitness as dominant race. He
could no longer fight better than Christians. The first Balkan War
gave the _coup de grâce_ to the final--and has it not been all along
the only?--argument for Turkish racial supremacy.
THE CRETAN QUESTION AND THE GREEK BOYCOTT
The island of Crete had long been to Turkey, in relation to Greece,
what Cuba had been to Spain, in {202} relation to the United States.
In both cases, and about the same time, wars of liberation broke out.
But Greece was not as fortunate in her efforts for the emancipation of
an enslaved and continually rebellious population as was the United
States. Powerless and humiliated, after the war of 1897, Greece could
no longer hope to have a voice, by reason of her own force, in the
direction of Cretan affairs. Crete became the foundling of European
diplomacy.
Together with the declaration of Bulgarian independence, and the
annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary, the Young
Turks had to face a decree of the Cretan assembly to the effect that
Crete was indissolubly united to the kingdom of Greece. The Young
Turks could do nothing against Bulgaria. For the ceremony of Tirnovo
had been no more than the _de jure_ sanction of a _de facto_ condition.
The only cause for conflict, the question of the railroads in eastern
Rumelia, was solved by Russian diplomacy. Against Austria-Hungary a
boycott was declared. It resulted in a few successful attempts to
prevent the landing of mails and freights from Austrian steamers, and
in the tearing up of several million fezes which were of Austrian
manufacture. These, by the way, were soon replaced by new fezes from
the same factories. The Sublime Porte settled the Bosnia-Herzegovina
question by accepting a money payment from Austria-Hungary.
All the rancour resulting from these losses and humiliation, all the
vials of wrath, were poured upon the head of Greece. The Cretan
question became {203} the foremost problem in European diplomacy. The
Cretans stubbornly refused to listen to the Powers, and decided to
maintain their decision to belong to Greece. But Greece was threatened
with war by Turkey, if she did not refuse to accept the annexation
decree voted by the Cretans themselves. In order to prevent Turkey
from attacking Greece, the Powers decided to use force against the
Cretans. Turkey, not satisfied with the efforts of the Powers to
preserve the Ottoman sovereignty and Ottoman pride in Crete, demanded
still more of Greece. She asked that the Greek Parliament should not
only declare its disinterestedness in Crete, but should take upon
itself the obligation to maintain that disinterestedness in the future.
To go into all the tortuous phases of the Cretan question up to the
time of the Balkan War would make this chapter out of proportion; and
yet Crete, like Alsace-Lorraine, has had a most vital influence upon
the present European war. The one point to be emphasized here is, that
to bring pressure to bear upon Greece in defining her attitude toward
Crete, the Young Turks decided to revive the commercial boycott which
they had used against Austria. I have seen from close range the
notorious Greek boycott of 1910 to 1912. It was far more disastrous to
the Turks than to the Greeks of Turkey. It threatened so completely,
however, the economic prosperity of Greece, which is a commercial
rather than an agricultural country, that it forced Greece into the
Balkan Alliance much against her will, for the sake of
self-preservation.
{204}
If this boycott had been carried on against the Greeks of Greece alone,
it would not have affected vitally the prosperity of the Greeks in the
Ottoman Empire. Their imports come from every country, and for their
exports the freight steamers of all the European nations competed. But
it was directed also against the Greeks who were Ottoman subjects. In
Salonika, Constantinople, Trebizond, Smyrna, and other ports, commerce
was entirely in the hands of Greeks. They owned almost every steamer
bearing the Ottoman flag. They owned the cargoes. They bought and
sold the merchandise. The Young Turks, working through the _hamals_ or
longshoremen and the boatmen who manned the lighters,--all Turks and
Kurds,--succeeded in tying up absolutely the commerce of Ottoman
Greeks. The Greek merchants and shippers were ruined. It was urged
cleverly that this was the chance for Moslems to get the trade of the
great ports of Turkey into their own hands. The Government encouraged
them by buying and maintaining steamship lines. But the Turks had no
knowledge of commerce, no money to buy goods, and no inclination to do
the work and accept the responsibilities necessary for successful
commercial undertakings. The result was that imports were stopped,
prices went up, and the Moslems were hurt as much as, if not more than,
the Christians. After several voyages, the new government passenger
vessels were practically _hors de combat_. There was no longer first,
second, and third class. Peasants squatted on the decks and in the
saloons. Filth reigned supreme, and hopeless confusion. No {205}
European could endure a voyage on one of these steamers, and no
merchant cared to entrust his shipments to them.
The boycott died because it was a hopeless undertaking. For many
months, the Government lost heavily through the falling off in the
custom house receipts. The labouring class (almost wholly Moslems) of
the seaports suffered terribly, as our labouring class suffers during a
prolonged strike. The boycott was removed, Greeks were allowed to
resume their business, so essential for the prosperity of the
community, and, as is always the case in Turkey, everything worked
again in the same old way.
But, just as the failure to punish the perpetrators of the Adana
massacre alienated definitely and irrevocably the sympathy and loyal
support of the Armenian element from the constitutional _régime_, so
the boycott, iniquitous and futile, lost to the Young Turks the
allegiance of the Greeks of the Empire. Already alarmed by the attack
upon the liberties of the patriarchate, the Greeks began to look to
Greece for help; and, in the islands of the Ægean and in Macedonia, the
hope was strong that a successful war might put an end to what they
were suffering.
The Greeks of Turkey are not free from the universal characteristic of
human nature. You can persecute and browbeat a man, you can bully him
and do him physical injury, you can refuse him a share in the
government and put him in an inferior social position, and he will
continue to endure it. But, {206} rob him of the chance of making a
livelihood, and he will commence to conspire against the government. A
man's vital point is his pocket-book. That vital point the Young Turks
threatened by their boycott.
THE YOUNG TURKS AND THE MACEDONIAN PROBLEM
It was at Salonika that the Young Turk movement first gained its
footing in the Ottoman Empire, and until the loss of European Turkey,
after the disastrous war with the Balkan States, Salonika continued to
be the centre of the "Committee of Union and Progress." Its congresses
were always held there. From Salonika the third army corps went forth
to suppress, in April, 1909, the counter-revolution in Constantinople.
To the Young Turks, Salonika seemed the safest place in all the Ottoman
dominions for the imprisonment of Abdul Hamid. Many of the leading
members of the party were natives of Macedonia. In fact, it was
because the Young Turks saw clearly that European Turkey would soon be
lost to the Empire, unless there was a regeneration, that they
precipitated in 1908 the revolution which had so long been brewing.
It is natural, then, that the Macedonian problem should be the first
and uppermost of all the many problems that had to be solved in the
regeneration of Turkey. The "Committee of Union and Progress" saw that
immediate action must be taken to strengthen Ottoman authority, so
severely shaken since the war with Russia, in the European _vilayets_.
We have already shown in a previous chapter how {207} the struggle of
races in European Turkey had made Macedonia the bloody centre of Balkan
rivalry, and had reduced the _vilayets_ of Uskub and Salonika to
anarchy.
Up to the coming of the constitutional _régime_, there had been a very
strong element in Macedonia, principally Bulgarian, which saw--oh, how
prophetically!--that the liberation of Macedonia from Turkish rule
would endanger, rather than aid, the propaganda for eventual Bulgarian
hegemony in the Balkan Peninsula. These Bulgarians, wise in their day
and generation beyond their emancipated brethren, advocated the
intervention of Bulgarian arms, not to secure independence, but
autonomy. They felt that by the creation, for a period of years, of an
autonomous province of Macedonia under the suzerainty of the Sultan,
the felicitous history of Eastern Rumelia would repeat itself.
The Young Turks decided to solve the Macedonian problem by
strengthening the Moslem element in every corner of the _vilayets_ of
Salonika and Uskub. The means of doing this were at hand. After the
annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkish agents began to work
among the Moslem population in these countries to induce them to
emigrate and come under the dominion of the "Padishah," as the Sultan
is called by his faithful subjects. They were brought in and settled,
with the help of the Government, in those districts of Macedonia where
the Moslem element was weak. This was a repetition of the policy of
Abdul Hamid after the Congress of Berlin, when, in Eastern Rumelia and
Thrace, {208} to oppose the Bulgarians Circassians from the lost
Caucasus were settled, and to oppose the Servians Albanian emigration
into old Servia and the Sandjak of Novi Bazar was encouraged.
In addition to this, the Young Turks decided to secure the loyalty of
their Christian subjects in European Turkey by abolishing the _karadj_
(head tax) which exempted Christians from military service.
Bulgarians, Greeks, and Servians were summoned to serve in the Ottoman
army.
The first of these measures should never have been adopted. The bitter
experience of former years should have taught the Young Turks the
lesson that emigration of this nature not only tended to arouse
religious fanaticism, but also introduced an element, ignorant and
unruly, and wholly worthless from the economic point of view. It has
often been recorded that Moslems, prompted to the sacrifice of
abandoning everything for their love of remaining Turkish subjects,
have made these "treks" after the unsuccessful wars of Turkey _of their
own initiative_. Nothing is farther from the truth. There has never
been an exodus of this sort which has not been due to the instigation
of political agents. From the very fact that large industrious and
influential Moslem elements have remained and prospered under Russian,
Bulgarian, and Austrian rule, it can be inferred that those who yielded
to the solicitation of Turkish agents were the undesirable Moslem
element, who, never having acquired anything where they were, had
nothing to lose by making a change. If one excepts a certain portion
of the Circassians, the {209} statement may well be made that these
emigrants--_muhadjirs_ they are called in Turkish--are an element
forming the lowest dregs of the population, as worthless and shiftless
as the great majority of the Jews whom the Zionist movement has
attracted to Palestine. More than this, the _muhadjirs_ have been
fanatical and lawless, and it is they whose massacres of Christians
have invariably ended in irretrievable disaster for Turkey.
In Macedonia, the muhadjirs, in conjunction with the Albanian Moslem
immigrants, were responsible for the succession of massacres in 1912,
such as those of Ishtip and Kotchana, which helped to bring about the
Balkan alliance. The same thing is happening to-day in the coast towns
of Asia Minor and Thrace, where the brutality and blood lust of the
_muhadjirs_ since 1913 will eventually cause another attack of Greece
upon Turkey.
The second policy--that of enrolling Christians in the army--was
recorded, back in the days of the first attempt at the emancipation of
Christians, the _Tanzimat_ of 1839, as a measure which would ameliorate
their lot and bring about equality. The idea was splendid, but its
application was impracticable. Ottoman Christians are so wholly
incompatible, from their social and educational background, with
Ottoman Moslems, that they cannot be placed in the army, in mixed
regiments, without incurring humiliation, degradation, and persecution
of the most cruel sort.
The only way in which Christians could be called to serve in the
Ottoman army would have been the formation, at first, of separate
regiments, where the {210} soldiers would enjoy immunity from
persecution. When this reform was made, there should have been also a
provision from the very first, that the ranks of officers be recruited
from the Christian elements in the Empire, in proportion to their
numerical strength. But with both Christians and Jews, obligatory army
service was used from the beginning--it is still used today--as a means
of extorting money from those who could pay, and terrorizing and
reducing to slavery those who could not raise the forty pounds required
for exemption. Even if there were no religious fanaticism, even if it
were not necessary for Christians of intelligence to serve in an army
wholly officered by Moslems, the terrible and criminal conditions of
service which they were called upon to suffer would have justified the
Christians in adopting every possible measure to avoid military service.
Throughout the Empire, intelligent Christians who could not purchase
their freedom from this obligation preferred exile to military service.
From 1909 to 1914, Turkey has lost hundreds of thousands of its best
young blood.
The result in Macedonia of the coming of the _muhadjirs_ and the taking
of Christians for the army, was that the Macedonians abandoned their
advocacy of autonomy, under the suzerainty of the Sultan, and looked to
the Balkan States for freedom from Turkish rule.
THE ALBANIAN UPRISINGS
Albania was never fully conquered by the Osmanlis. Like the
Montenegrins, the Albanians were always {211} able to resist the
extension of Turkish authority in their mountains. Not only did the
nature of the country favour them, but their proximity to the Adriatic,
and their ability to call at will for Italian and Austrian help, made
it advisable for the Supreme Porte to compromise with them. Many
Albanians, including principally, as in Bosnia, the landowning
families, were converted to Mohammedanism, and attached themselves to
the fortunes of Turkey. Without ever giving up their local
independence, these renegade Albanians became the most loyal and
efficient supporters of Ottoman authority _outside of Albania_.
Turkey has gained much from the Albanians. Her higher classes, endowed
with extreme intelligence and physical activity, have been the most
valuable civil and military officials that the Government has ever
enjoyed. Because they were Moslems, they were able to take high
positions in the army and government service. It is one of the most
remarkable facts of Ottoman history that the great majority of the
really great statesmen and soldiers of the Empire, if not of Christian
ancestry, have been, and still are, Albanians. In strengthening the
Turkish domination in the European provinces, after the period of
decline set in, the Albanians have been indispensable. Their
emigration from their mountains into Epirus, Old Servia, the valley of
the Vardar, and the coast towns of Macedonia checked for a long time
the conspiracies and rebellions of the Christian elements.
The Sultans of Turkey and their counsellors have always recognized the
value of the Albanians. In {212} return for their great services to
the Empire, they were allowed to retain their local privileges. This
meant independence, in reality, rather than autonomy. They gave what
taxes they pleased, or none. Military service was rendered upon their
own terms. Christian Albanians, as well as Moslem, have preferred
Ottoman sovereignty to any other. They have never thought of
independence, because this would have brought them responsibilities and
dangers from which, under the fetish of "the integrity of the Ottoman
Empire," they were free. So they resisted every effort of Italian,
Austrian, Slav, and Greek to weaken their allegiance to the Sultan.
Turkey also allowed them to remain under the mediæval conditions in
which they lived back in the fourteenth century. They wanted neither
railways, roads, nor ports. Among all the subjects of the Sultan, the
Albanians were best satisfied with the absolute lack of progress under
Moslem rule. These are the reasons why the majority of Albanians want
to return once more to the fold of Turkey.
The Young Turks were no more felicitous in their treatment of the
Albanians than of the Greeks and Armenians. Without any consideration
of the peculiar problems involved, they decided immediately, tackling
every problem at once, that Albania must be civilized and that Ottoman
sovereignty must work there in exactly the same way as in any other
part of the Empire. Albanians must render military service, and submit
to being sent wherever the authorities at Constantinople decided.
Local independence must cease. Taxes must be paid regularly. When the
{213} Albanians resisted, as they did immediately, an army was sent to
pacify the country.
One cannot but sympathize with the principle laid down by the Minister
of the Interior at Constantinople, that the central authority must be
recognized and that the only way to stamp out the Albanian anarchy was
to disarm the population. But the Young Turks knew no other way of
doing this than by force. They did not realize that anarchy and
lawlessness disappear only with education and economic progress.
Instead of starting to "civilize" the Albanians by establishing schools
and opening up the country with railways, they sent rapid-firing guns.
In the summer of 1909, the rebellion was stamped out with ruthless
cruelty by the burning of villages, the destruction of crops, and the
seizing of cattle. Such measures were a very poor argument for the
Albanian to induce him to comply with the disarmament decree. Under
ordinary circumstances an Albanian would rather lose his leg than his
gun. Under these circumstances, he preferred risking his life to
giving up what he considered his only means of defence.
Every year the Albanian rebellion broke out afresh. Every year the
Young Turks exhausted the strength and spent the resources of their
armies in European Turkey against the invulnerable mountains of
Albania. After every "pacification," Albania in arms was just as
certain each May as the coming again of summer.
In 1912, when affairs were in a critical state as regards the Christian
neighbours, the Cabinet in {214} Constantinople was once more engaged
in the hopeless task of subduing Albanian opposition. The Albanians,
however, seemed to gain strength rather than lose it. In September,
1912, I was in Uskub just four weeks before the Balkan War broke out.
The Albanian chieftains were there, having made a truce for Ramazan
(the sacred month of the Moslem fasting). They said to me that the
next year, if the Turks did not stop persecuting them, they would take
their army to Constantinople. Others were to get ahead of them, and
they were to win their independence without having to fight the Turks
again. The poor showing of the Turkish arms against the Greeks and
Servians is very largely due to the exhaustion which had come to them
through continuous and unsuccessful attempts to get the better of the
Albanian uprisings. The Balkan States knew how severely the western
Macedonian army had suffered in July and August, 1912. It was one of
the considerations which decided them to strike at that moment.
THE TREATMENT OF THE ARABIC ELEMENT
In Asiatic Turkey there are supposed to be about eight million
Arabic-speaking inhabitants. These figures may be an exaggeration, for
no census has ever been taken. But the _vilayets_ are occupied almost
exclusively by Arabs and races speaking Arabic. They form a half of
the Empire's dominions in Asia, starting with the Taurus and Amanus
ranges, south through Syria to Arabia and east and south-east through
Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf.
{215}
These large stretches of territory were never thoroughly conquered by
the Turks. They did not settle there in the way they had done in the
Balkan Peninsula, outside of Albania and Montenegro, and in Asia Minor.
The race from whom they had taken their religion and from whom they
soon absorbed whatever culture and art they can be said to possess, was
never assimilated by the Turks. Their simple warrior and herdsman
language was enriched by Arabic substantives, as Anglo-Saxon was
enriched by the Latin gotten through the Normans and through the
Church. But there was no racial fusion.
Only in appearance did Turkish officialdom and the authority of the
Sultan ever get a real hold over the Arabs. By habit they came to
respect the Sultan as Khalif. The allegiance which they gave him as
ruler was altogether without value--a pure matter of form. An
aggressive pasha found it easy to detach Egypt from Turkish rule. It
was conglomerate populations and a lack of natural boundaries for
forming states that prevented the other Arabic portions of the Ottoman
Empire from following Egypt. In Arabia proper, and in the larger
portion of Mesopotamia, up to the present day, the Arabs have been as
independent of the Sublime Porte as have been the Albanians.
In the reign of Abdul Hamid, when the idea of the Pan-Islamic movement
was conceived, the importance of joining the sacred cities of Medina
and Mecca more closely with the Turkish Empire was recognized. French
interests were building a railway across the Lebanon Mountains to
Aleppo and Damascus. The {216} Germans had launched their project for
the _Bagdadbahn_. Abdul Hamid decided to create a railway directly
under government control, from Damascus to Medina and Mecca. For the
first time since they were joined to the Ottoman Empire, the Arabic
provinces saw themselves in prospective connection with the capital.
It had been for a long time easier and quicker to go from
Constantinople to the United States or to China than to Bagdad or to
Mecca. The railways would have one of two results: either the Arabs
would be brought more closely into connection with the Empire, or they
would be definitely alienated from it.
The Arabic question stood thus when the constitution was re-established
in 1908. There are many Arabs among the Young Turks, but these, like
the Slavs in the military and official service of Austria-Hungary, have
been definitely alienated from their own nationality. Here was the
opportunity to bring into sympathy with the constitutional movement the
millions of Arabic-speaking subjects of the Sultan, who formed the most
numerous Moslem element in the Empire. But the Young Turks were no
more tactful in the treatment of the Arabs, who were mostly of their
own religion, than of the Greeks and Armenians. In the first
Parliament, they were almost as unfair to Moslem Arabs as to
Christians. In the apportionment of places in the Cabinet, the Arabs
were ignored. It is true that some Cabinet members, some high
officials both in the military and civil administration, and some
members of the inner council of the Committee of Union and Progress
{217} were of Arabic origin. But they must be counted practically as
Turks, for they had lived so long away from their own country and their
people that they had lost all Arabic sympathies. Some who were called
Arabs were in reality members of the old Turkish families, who in
Mesopotamia, as in Syria and Egypt, had received large tracts of land
at the time of the conquest, and had always been Turks by interests and
by atmosphere. The younger nationalistic Arabic element, educated, and
living by professional or business interests in cities of the Arabic
portion of the Empire, were from the very beginning ignored.
Two things soon became evident. In the first place, the Young Turks
tried to impose their language in local administration as the sole
official language of the Empire. In many places in Syria and
Mesopotamia, civil officials, even in the courts of justice, were
appointed without a knowledge of the language of the people among whom
they had to serve. In the Balkans and in Asia Minor, where there were
so many races and so many tongues, the Turks were acting reasonably and
sensibly in imposing their own language as a medium for the transaction
of government business, but in _vilayets_ which were _wholly_ Arabic
speaking, the foisting of the Turkish language upon the people could be
likened to a bastard child endeavouring to rule the branch of his
family from which he had received his best and purest blood. Before a
year had passed, the educated, intellectual Arabs were wholly out of
sympathy with the new _régime_. Many of them began to dream of the
revival of {218} the Arabian khalifate, and looked to the nationalistic
movement in Egypt as the seed from which their Pan-Arabic tree would
some day grow. Others, older and less sentimental, did not hesitate to
express a desire to see British or French sovereignty extended over
Syria and Mesopotamia.
In the second place, among the quasi-independent tribes of the Syrian
_hinterland_, and of the Arabian peninsula, the attempt of the Turks to
destroy their privileges ended in the same way as it had done in
Albania. From 1908 up to the outbreak of the Balkan War, millions of
treasure and thousands of the best soldiers of the Empire were lost in
fruitless efforts to realize the aspirations of the Young Turks. We
cannot even enumerate these rebellions. They were as perennial as the
Albanian uprisings, and as disastrous to the Turkish army. In Arabia,
rebellious Arabs treated with the Italians. In Syria, beyond the
Jordan, they made a practice of tearing up the tracks and burning the
stations of the Hedjaz railway. In Mesopotamia, they refused to
respond to the obligation of military service.
This incomplete summary of the Young Turk _régime_ in the Ottoman
Empire has been given to throw light upon the collapse of the
constitutional _régime_ and of the military reputation of Turkey. I
have refrained from going into a discussion of party politics, of
intrigues, and of the bickerings of Parliament. Enough has been told
to show that the constitutional _régime_ was marked for failure from
the beginning for three reasons: There was no honest {219} attempt to
bring together the various races of the Empire in a common effort for
regeneration. The Young Turks, having no statesmen among their
leaders, depended upon untrained men and upon those Abdul Hamid had
trained in sycophancy and despotism. In spite of the heroic and able
efforts of the German military mission and the British naval mission,
no progress was made in reforming the only force by which the Young
Turks could have held in respect and obedience the Sultan's own
subjects, as well as those foreign nations who were looking for the
opportunity to dismember the Empire.
If the hopes of the true friends of Turkey had been realized, if only
the constitution had been applied, if only there had been the _will_ to
regenerate Turkey, all the wars of the past few years, including the
one which is now shaking Europe to its foundations, would have been
avoided.
{220}