In the first stage the subject peoples paid their tribute of children and
were then left to themselves. In the second stage they were hounded on
to destroy each other by the Machiavellian policy of Abd-ul-Hamid. The
third stage has been introduced by the Young Turks, and they have been
destroying the subject races by systematic government action—a government
employing its resources in the murder of its own people. And this has
been carried on with redoubled vigour and ruthlessness since the Turkish
Government entered the War, and has been sure of Germany’s support in
defying the civilised world.
The Young Turks are “Nationalists” who have learnt in the German and
Magyar school. Their national idea is to impose their own nationality
by force on others. When the Young Turks came into power in 1908 they
announced a programme of “Ottomanisation.” Every language in the
Empire but Turkish was to be driven off the field; Turkish was to be
the sole language of government, and even of higher education. The
non-Turkish majority was to be assimilated to the Turkish minority by
coercion. The programme was copied from the “Prussianisation” of the
Poles and “Magyarisation” of the Roumans, Slovaks and Southern Slavs in
Hungary whom the Allies declare their intention of liberating likewise
from foreign domination in another clause of their Note. But in their
Nationalism, as in their Militarism, the Turks have gone to greater
lengths than their European counterparts. The Prussians expropriate
Polish landowners against the payment of a price for their land; the
Turks drive forth Greeks and Bulgars destitute from their homes and
possessions. The Magyars mobilise troops to terrorise Slovaks and Roumans
at the elections; the Turks draft the criminals from their prisons into
the Gendarmerie to exterminate the Armenian race. From the beginning of
their régime the Young Turks have pursued their nationalistic programme
by butchery. The Adana massacres of 1909, the most terrible slaughter
of Armenians between the Hamidian massacres of 1895-6 and those at
present in progress, occurred within a year of the proclamation of the
Young Turk Constitution, which assured equal rights of citizenship to
all inhabitants of the Empire. In 1913 the Turkish Army was engaged in
exterminating the Albanians because they had an un-Ottoman national
spirit of their own. This work was interrupted by the Balkan War,
but the Turks revenged themselves for their defeat in this war,
which liberated large Greek and Slav populations from their yoke, by
exterminating all Greeks and Slavs left in the territory they still
retained. They occupied themselves with this in the interval between the
end of the Balkan and the beginning of the European War, and Greece was
on the verge of war with Turkey again to protect the dwindling remnant
of the Greeks in Turkey’s power, when the crisis was overtaken by the
greater conflict. As soon as Turkey became Germany’s ally, Germany
restrained the Young Turks from persecuting their Greek subjects, because
it was not to Germany’s interest that Greece should be involved in the
war on the side of the Entente. But she left them a free hand with their
other subject peoples, and the result has been the _Armenian and Arab
atrocities_, which began in 1915 and have gone on ever since.