The Rebirth Of Turkey - free ebook by Clair Price

THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY

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FOREWORD

This book contains my own observations and my own deductions from them. The responsibility for them is mine alone. I have never engaged in commercial, educational or missionary work. My interest in the Near and Middle East began with a newspaper assignment, and has continued with curiosity as its motive. This book is the result. My thanks are due to the proprietors of Current History , New York, and Fortnightly Review , London, for their courteous permission to re-print herein parts of certain a

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THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY

HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE—THE EASTERN TRADITION OF GOVERNMENT UNDER WHICH HE WAS BORN—THE WESTERN TRADITION WHICH HE HAS SOUGHT TO TRANSPLANT TO HIS COUNTRY—THE DIVERSION OF THE TURKS FROM A MILITARY TO AN ECONOMIC LIFE, WHICH HE IS BEGINNING—“DO YOU THINK YOU WILL SUCCEED?” H aving applied at the Foreign Office in Angora for an appointment with Mustapha Kemal Pasha, a message finally reached me about 2 o’clock in the afternoon that a half-hour had been arranged for me at the close of the day’

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I

If it is possible to press down the difference between these two traditions of government into the limits of a single sentence, it might be said that the Eastern tradition is that of action and the Western tradition is that of argument. Under the Eastern tradition, government is centralized in a single ruler whose power is as nearly absolute as his own personal abilities enable him to make it. Under the Western tradition, the functions of government are decentralized and authority is carried dow

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II

Over these 600,000 square miles of country, the Sultan at Constantinople maintained the loosest sort of government, permitting his subjects to conduct their own affairs largely in their own ways and confining his administration to the task of keeping the trade routes open and the taxes collected, for under the Eastern tradition this was the whole duty of government. There were about 25,000,000 of his subjects, the overwhelming majority of them Moslems. The great Moslem reformation had swept the

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III

But in reality the Army was only the instrument of Abdul Hamid’s power. The substance of his power lay in Moslem law and in the unswerving devotion to it of the Old Turks. Strong simple men, these Old Turks were, men who knew nothing of the arts of debate, broadly tolerant of the usages of others and rigidly conservative of their own usages, men who took their starkly simple faith very seriously, in whose lives religion was still the dominating factor. They were found in the mosque schools rathe

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IV

Having seized Batum from the Sultan, Russia continued the consolidation of Trans-Caucasia under its own provincial governors and stamped the entire region with the unmistakable imprint of a Russian economic regime . It pierced the barrier of the Caucasus Range with a military highroad to Tiflis, which it prolonged as a railroad to Kars and the Armenian center of Erivan. It drove its railways past the east end of the Caucasus Range to make a Russian railhead and a Russian Caspian port of Baku, ar

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V

But the Caliph and the Emperor of India had parted company. Attempts to interest the British Government in the possibilities of Young Turkish achievement definitely failed. The fate of the Ottoman Empire had been settled far outside its own frontiers. Before an Anglo-Russian entente , its end was only a matter of time. Already the name of Constantine had been introduced into the Russian Imperial Family. With the Defender of the Faith and the Caliph now posed in opposition, the way was opened at

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VI

The precise route of the Bagdad Railway was a matter not easily settled. Russia had driven it south from its original Caesarea-Sivas-Diarbekr route and Great Britain now tried to pull it still further south, all the way down to the beach back of Alexandretta Bay where the British Navy could cut it when requisite without more trouble than that of sending off a landing party. The beach route was avoided, however, even though its avoidance necessitated heavy tunnelling to breach the Taurus, but the

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VII

KEMAL HURRIES BACK TO CONSTANTINOPLE AND RAUF BEY ASKS THE BRITISH EMBASSY TO FINANCE NEUTRALITY—ENVER ENTERS THE WAR AND PERSIA ATTEMPTS TO FOLLOW HIM—THE HARD POSITION OF ISLAM IN INDIA. K emal left his post as military attache at Sofia immediately on the outbreak of war in Europe, and hurried back to Constantinople, still a young officer but an officer with a brilliant past, a hatred of the Enver Government which was both personal and political, and a prestige in the Army comparable to the

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VIII

By this time, Austria-Hungary had smashed Serbia out of the way and both sides now poured out money and intrigue to win over Greece and Bulgaria. But Greece refused to budge without the promise of Constantinople which was in course of being promised to Russia, and Bulgaria demanded Macedonia. Victories, however, are the most telling arguments when Balkan Governments are sitting on the fence and Great Britain launched its Dardanelles campaign in 1915, possibly to open the road to Russia, possibly

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IX

That the Armenians were grossly maladministered by the modern Sultans in Constantinople, there can be no manner of doubt. And so were their Turkish and Kurdish neighbors. It was in this very maladministration that the problem of the modern Ottoman Empire lay, and that problem was a Turkish problem as well as an Armenian problem. The Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 was an honest attempt to solve it by reviving the Constitution and decentralizing the Government, but in the hands of the Committee

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X

What is worthy of attention here, however, is the fact that Arab nationalism involved Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the three sites of the holiest places of Islam. With the Egyptian Expeditionary Force marking time at Kantara, Mecca and Medina lay on the southern flank of its advance and to the north in the lower end of the Syrian corridor lay Jerusalem. The three constituted a line lying across the line of the E. E. F.’s advance, a line guaranteed to all Islam by its Ottoman Caliph and additiona

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XI

On June 11, the French deposed Constantine at Athens, the Venizelist Government which was imposed on Old Greece entered the war on the side of the Allies, and ever since the failure of the British Dardanelles campaign, there had been an Allied Army based on Salonica, the key to Constantinople. In July, Kerensky ordered General Baratoff to withdraw the Russian Armies from Persian soil. They melted away both from Persia (with the exception of a small force of die-hards who continued to hold Tehera

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XII

Meanwhile the East Persia Cordon regularized the position of its garrisons in Meshed and Merv by styling them “Afghan Consulates-General under armed guard.” It will be recalled that the Amir Habibullah Khan of Afghanistan, a wild country which tilts up to the roof of the world above the north-west frontier of India, had stuck loyally to the British despite a fiery nationalist party which sought to carry him into the war against the Anglo-Russian entente . He was still sticking loyally to the Bri

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XIII

Here in Stamboul also, in the small Greek suburb of the Phanar at the head of the Golden Horn, was the Oecumenical Patriarchate, the head of the Rûm community in the old Empire. The old Byzantine Empire had lost its territorial basis in 1453, but it had remained in the political capital of Islam as an ecclesiastical, political and commercial force centering at the Phanar. The Patriarch himself had become an official of the Ministry of Justice in the Ottoman Government and was appointed by the Ot

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XIV

Across this unlovely landscape, the Phanar’s break with the Ottoman Government fell like a thunderbolt. Rauf Bey had surrendered at Mudros to an Emperor of India purged of his Russian alliance, but it now became apparent that the Venizelist Government at Athens had succeeded to the place in the Anglo-Russian entente which Russia had vacated. Rauf had applied to Admiral Calthorpe for an Anglo-Turkish alliance, but it now appeared that no such alliance would be granted and it is easy to imagine wh

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XV

So rapidly did the Party grow that two months after the Smyrna occupation, Kemal and Rauf were able to assemble it in a caucus at Erzerum in the eastern provinces. Kemal’s staff drove up to Erzerum along the crude mountain roads with the rest of the provincial delegates, but Kemal himself rode alone over back trails and through lonely villages. Here in the wrecked mountain town of Erzerum, the Party platform was drawn up, a document which was later to become famous under the name of the National

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XVI

On May 11, the terms of peace were handed to two of Ferid’s appointees at Paris. These terms proposed to close the Greek pincers about Constantinople, to cut it off from Asia Minor permanently with a garrison restricted to 700 men, to isolate the Straits from Asia Minor by the institution of an International Commission on which Russia and Turkey would be represented if and when they became members of the League of Nations, and to place what remained of Turkey in Asia Minor under the permanent mi

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XVII

There appears to be no doubt that the Pontus program had reached the status of a definite organization determined on independence, an organization which was peculiarly difficult to combat by reason of the fact that any move against it would be disseminated in the Black Books of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople as evidence of “persecution of the Christians.” Believing that one of the organization’s centers was a body of Greek students which called itself the Pontus Literary Society

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XVIII

Beneath that motto, the deputies met at 1 o’clock every day but Friday, which is the Moslem Sabbath. They consisted of men in Western dress and kalpaks , officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman Army days, and hojas in Eastern robes and turbans. They varied in personal appearance from the ample and immaculate figure of Djelal-ed-Din Arif Bey, deputy for Erzerum, to three Kurdish chiefs who could neither read nor write. The din of their conversation, both within the chamber and in the corridor

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XIX

On June 21, the Allied Governments offered Greece their intervention, but the Royalist command behind Smyrna was preparing to resume its march toward Angora and intervention was refused. In March, 1922, the Allied Governments summoned delegations from Athens, Constantinople and Angora, the Angora delegation headed by Yusuf Kemal Bey who had succeeded Bekr Sami Bey as Foreign Minister. On March 22, an Allied proposal for an armistice in Asia Minor was forwarded to Athens and Angora, and was follo

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XX

“Gentlemen, when history applies itself to searching the causes of the grandeur and of the decadence of a people, it invokes political, military and social reasons. It is evident that ultimately all the reasons spring from social conditions but that which is in closest bearing to the existence, the prosperity and the decadence of a people is its economics. This historical truth is confirmed in our existence and our national history. In fact, if one examines the history of the Turkish people, one

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XXI

Nationalism which proposes to substitute its new Eastern regime of law for the old lawlessness of Western imperialism, is the driving force of Turkey today and Turkey happens to be the key country of the world. Nationalism in Turkey today welds and does not divide. Its cry strikes a sound and healthy note. I heard it in its purest form at Adana. It was in a theatre, filled to overflowing with Turkish officers, Turkish townsmen and Turkish peasants. Beyond the footlights, framed in the little pro

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