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Title: "The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks"
Author: Arnold J. Toynbee
Contributor: James Bryce
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "THE MURDEROUS TYRANNY OF THE
TURKS" ***
“THE MURDEROUS
TYRANNY OF THE
TURKS”
by
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE
with a Preface by
VISCOUNT BRYCE
_“THE LIBERATION OF THE PEOPLES WHO NOW
LIE BENEATH THE MURDEROUS TYRANNY OF
THE TURKS”; and “THE EXPULSION FROM
EUROPE OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE WHICH
HAS PROVED ITSELF SO RADICALLY ALIEN TO
WESTERN CIVILIZATION.”_
Joint Note of the Allied Governments in answer
to President Wilson.
HODDER & STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
1917
COPIES CAN BE OBTAINED FROM
G. H. DORAN COMPANY,
NEW YORK.
PRICE 5 CENTS.
“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner,
namely, by carrying away themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs,
their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas,
one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out from the province
they have desolated and profaned.”
GLADSTONE.
“A near future will, it is to be hoped, blot out the scandal that such
heathendom should ever have established itself on European soil. What has
this Turkish Empire done in three entire centuries? It has done nothing
but destroy.”
TREITSCHKE.
PREFACE.
No one who has studied the history of the Near East for the last five
centuries will be surprised that the Allied Powers have declared their
purpose to put an end to the rule of the Turk in Europe, and still
less will he dissent from their determination to deliver the Christian
population of what is called the Turkish Empire, whether in Asia or in
Europe, from a Government which during those five centuries has done
nothing but oppress them. These changes are indeed long overdue. They
ought to have come more than a century ago, because it had then already
become manifest that the Turk was hopelessly unfit to govern, with any
approach to justice, subject races of a different religion. The Turk
has never been of any use for any purpose except fighting. He cannot
administer, though in his earlier days he had the sense to employ
intelligent Christian administrators. He cannot secure justice. As a
governing power, he has always shown himself incapable, corrupt and
cruel. He has always destroyed; he has never created.
Those whom we call the Turks are not a nation at all in the proper
sense of the word. The Ottoman Turks were a small conquering tribe from
Central Asia, ruled during the first two centuries of their conquests by
a succession of singularly able and unscrupulous Sultans, who subjugated
the Christian populations of Asia Minor and South-Eastern Europe,
compelling part of these populations to embrace Mohammedanism, and
supporting their own power by seizing the children of the rest, forcibly
converting them to Islam, and making out of them an efficient standing
army, the Janizaries, by whose valour and discipline the Turkish wars
of conquest were carried on from early in the fifteenth down into the
nineteenth century. As a famous English historian wrote, the Turks are
nothing but a robber band, encamped in the countries they have desolated.
As Edmund Burke wrote, the Turks are savages, with whom no civilised
Christian nation ought to form any alliance.
Turkish rule ought to be ended in Europe, because, even in that
small part of it which the Sultan still holds, it is an alien power,
which has in that region been, and is now, oppressing or massacring,
slaughtering or driving from their homes, the Christian population of
Greek or Bulgarian stock. It ought to be turned out of the western coast
regions of Asia Minor for a like reason. The people there are largely,
perhaps mostly, Greek-speaking Christians. So ought it to be turned
out of Constantinople, a city of incomparable commercial and political
importance, with the guardianship of which it is unfit to be trusted. So
ought it to be turned out of Armenia and Cilicia, and Syria, where within
the last two years it has been destroying its Christian subjects, the
most peaceful and industrious and intelligent part of the population.
If a Turkish Sultanate is to be left in being at all, it may, with
least injury to the world, be suffered to exist in Central and Northern
Asia Minor, where the population is mainly Mussulman, and there are
comparatively few Christians—and those only in the cities—to suffer
from its misgovernment. Even there one would be sorry for its subjects,
Mussulman as well as Christian, but a weak Turkish State, such as it
would then be, could not venture on the crimes of which it has been
guilty when it was comparatively strong.
That the faults of Turkish government are incurable, has been most
clearly shown by the fact that the Young Turkish gang who gained power
when they had deposed Abd-ul-Hamid, have surpassed even that monster of
cruelty in their slaughter of the unoffending Armenians. The “Committee
of Union and Progress” began by promising equal rights to all races and
faiths. This was “Union.” It proceeded forthwith not only to expel the
Greek-speaking inhabitants of Western Asia Minor, and to exterminate the
Armenians, but to attempt to Turkify the Albanians (Muslims as well as
Christians) and to proscribe their language. This is what “Union” has in
fact meant. What “Progress” has meant in the hands of ruffians like Enver
and Talaat, Prussianised Muslims worse than the old Turkish pashas, we
have all seen within the last three years. The Muslim peasant of Asia
Minor is an honest, kindly fellow when not roused by fanaticism, but the
Turk, as a Governing Power, is irreclaimable, and the Allied Powers would
have been false to all the principles of Right and Humanity for which
they are fighting if they had not proclaimed that no Turkish Government
shall hereafter be permitted to tyrannize over subjects of another faith.
BRYCE.
“THE MURDEROUS TYRANNY OF THE TURKS.”
THE AIMS OF THE ALLIES.
President Wilson, in his note to all the belligerent governments, called
upon both parties to state in the full light of day the aims they have
set themselves in prosecuting the War. The Allied Nations, in their joint
response made public on January 11th, 1917, explain that they find no
difficulty in meeting this request, and make good their words by stating
a series of definite conditions. Among them are:—
“_The liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath the murderous tyranny
of the Turks; and_
“_The expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, which has proved
itself so radically alien to Western Civilisation._”
The plan of the Allies for the settlement of Turkey is thus communicated
to the world without reserve, and it is worth examining what it involves,
and why it is right.
THE SUBJECT PEOPLES OF TURKEY.
Who are the peoples in Turkey whom the Allies are determined to liberate?
The Ottoman Empire contains somewhat more than 20,000,000 inhabitants,
and of these only about 8,000,000—less than 40 per cent. of the
whole—are Turks.[1] There are 7,000,000 Arabs; there are 2,000,000
Armenians (or, rather, there were, before the atrocities of 1915); the
Greeks, too, number little short of 2,000,000, and there are probably
the same number of non-Turkish mountaineers—Kurds, Nestorians, Druses,
Maronites and so on. The non-Turkish peoples thus amount to more than 60
per cent. of the population of Turkey. They were all of them settled in
the country before the Turks arrived—the Turks conquered Asia Minor about
the time the Normans conquered England, while several of the conquered
races have lived there from time immemorial—and all these races have been
at their lowest ebb since and so long as they have been under Turkish
Government.
The Greeks were leaders of civilisation in the Ancient World and in
the Middle Ages, till the Greek Empire of Constantinople was conquered
by the Turks in 1453. From that moment they dropped out till the War
of Liberation, a century ago, restored part of the Greek nation to
independence. The Greeks who have remained under Turkish government have
also remained cut off from Greek national life.
The Armenians were the first people to make Christianity their national
religion. They are an intellectual people, clever and industrious in
practical affairs and in the life of the spirit. When they possessed an
independent kingdom they produced a fine literature and architecture,
which Turkish conquest destroyed. Since then the Turks have repressed all
symptoms of Armenian revival by massacres, the most terrible of which was
perpetrated last year.
The Arabs created a wonderful civilisation at the time when Medieval
Europe was in its darkest age. Their discoveries in mathematics,
astronomy, chemistry, medicine, are the foundations of modern science,
as is witnessed by the Arabic words in our scientific vocabulary. This
Arabic civilisation was swamped by the Turkish migrations from Central
Asia in the 11th century, and blotted out by the Mongols, who followed in
the wake of the Turks and sacked Baghdad, the Arab capital, in the 13th
century. The Arabs are still the most progressive race in the Islamic
world; they are almost as numerous as the Turks in the population of the
Ottoman Empire, and they are not divided from the Turks by difference
of religion. Yet the Turkish government excludes them from all share
of control, and has thwarted their revival as persistently as it has
thwarted that of the Armenians and Greeks. They too have been massacred
and exiled during the present War.
The Kurds, also, were there before the Turks, but they have not the same
tradition as the other three races behind them. In their case the Turks
have not destroyed an existing civilisation, but have prevented them
acquiring civilisation when they showed inclination to do so. The Kurd
has been a lawless mountain shepherd for many centuries, but he becomes
a hard-working, peaceable cultivator when he comes down into the plains.
The Turkish government deliberately checked this tendency, which began to
show itself in the Kurds about half a century ago, by serving out arms to
them and licensing them to harry their Armenian neighbours.
THE MURDEROUS TYRANNY OF THE TURKS: THE FIRST STAGE.
This maiming and warping of more gifted peoples is in itself a capital
indictment of Turkish domination, but the wrong is made infinitely worse
by the outrageous methods by which it has been carried out. These methods
are justly described as a “_murderous tyranny_” in the Allies’ Response
to President Wilson’s question.
There are three stages in the history of Ottoman tyranny, and the worst
stage is the present. The Ottoman State has been a purely military State
from beginning to end. Osman, its founder, from whom the Osmanli Turks
take their name, was the hereditary chief of a wandering band of Turkish
freebooters from Central Asia, whose father was licensed by Turkish
Sultans already established in Asia Minor to carve out a principality
for himself at the expense of the neighbouring Christians, just as the
Teutonic knights carved out the principality of Prussia at the expense of
the original native population. This Ottoman dominion, which started thus
in the 13th century with a few square miles of territory in North-Western
Asia Minor, expanded during the next three hundred years till it
stretched from within a few miles of Vienna to Mecca and Baghdad. It
destroyed the Ancient Empire of Constantinople, which had preserved Greek
learning during the Middle Ages; the free Christian kingdoms of Bulgaria,
Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia, Moldavia and Hungary; and the independent
Moslem states of Western Asia. Such a career of destructive conquest was
a disaster to civilisation, and it was only made possible by a ruthless
militarism.
The Ottoman method of conscription was to take a tribute of children
from the conquered Christians—so many children from each family every
so many years—bring them up in barracks as fanatical Moslems and train
them as professional recruits. These “Janissaries,” militarised from
their youth up and divorced from every human relation except loyalty to
their war-lord, were the most formidable soldiers in Europe, and each new
Christian land they conquered was a new field of recruitment for their
corps. The Ottoman Empire literally drained its victims’ blood, and its
history as a Vampire-State is unparalleled in the history of the world.
THE SECOND STAGE: ABD-UL-HAMID.
This was the first stage in Ottoman history; the second, inevitable in
a purely military state, was internal and external decay. The Empire
was cut short by Austria, Russia and other foreign powers; the subject
peoples began to win back their freedom by breaking away from under the
Turkish yoke. A good government would have met these dangers by improving
the conditions of the Empire. It would have tried to make the subject
peoples contented, to give their capacities for development free play,
to build of them a bulwark against outside enemies. But the Turkish
government had not the imagination or the good will to adopt a policy
like this. It had nothing but its military tradition of violence and
cunning, and it tried to stave off the consequences of its own rottenness
by making the subject peoples even weaker and more wretched than itself.
This was the policy of Abd-ul-Hamid, who reigned from 1876 to 1908, and
his method was to set one race against another. The Kurds were encouraged
to massacre the Armenians; the Turkish soldiers were ordered to join in
the massacre when the Armenians put up a resistance. The Bulgars were
allowed to form armed bands to “Bulgarise” the villages of Macedonia,
and the Greeks to form bands of their own to withstand them; the
Macedonian peasants were harried by both parties, and if they harboured
the bands to avoid incurring their vengeance, Turkish troops came up and
burned the village for treason against the Ottoman State.
THE THIRD STAGE: THE YOUNG TURKS.
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.
THE ARMENIAN ATROCITIES OF 1915.
Only a third of the two million Armenians in Turkey have survived, and
that at the price of apostatising to Islam or else of leaving all they
had and fleeing across the frontier. The refugees saw their women and
children die by the roadside, and apostacy too, for a woman, involved
the living death of marriage to a Turk and inclusion in his harem. The
other two-thirds were “deported”—that is, they were marched away from
their homes in gangs, with no food or clothing for the journey, in fierce
heat and bitter cold, hundreds of miles over rough mountain roads. They
were plundered and tormented by their guards, and by subsidised bands of
brigands, who descended on them in the wilderness, and with whom their
guards fraternised. Parched with thirst, they were kept away from the
water with bayonets. They died of hunger and exposure and exhaustion,
and in lonely places the guards and robbers fell upon them and murdered
them in batches—some at the first halting place after the start, others
after they had endured weeks of this agonising journey. About half the
deportees—and there was at least 1,200,000 of them in all—perished thus
on their journey, and the other half have been dying lingering deaths
ever since at their journey’s end; for they have been deported to the
most inhospitable regions in the Ottoman Empire: the malarial marshes in
the Province of Konia; the banks of the Euphrates where, between Syria
and Mesopotamia, it runs through a stony desert; the sultry and utterly
desolate track of the Hedjaz Railway. The exiles who are still alive have
suffered worse than those who perished by violence at the beginning.
The same campaign of extermination has been waged against the Nestorian
Christians on the Persian frontier, and against the Arabs of Syria,
Christians and Moslems without discrimination. In Syria there is a
reign of terror. The Arab leaders have been imprisoned, executed, or
deported already, and the mass of the people lie paralysed, expecting
the Armenians’ fate and, dreading every moment to hear the decree of
extermination go forth.
This wholesale destruction, which has already overtaken two of the
subject peoples in Turkey, and threatens all that 60 per cent. of the
population which is not Turkish in language, is the direct work of the
Turkish government. The “Deportation Scheme” was drawn up by the central
government at Constantinople and telegraphed simultaneously to all the
local authorities in the Empire; it was executed by the officials,
the Gendarmerie, the Army, and the bands of brigands and criminals
organised in the government’s service. No State could be more completely
responsible for any act within its borders than the Ottoman State is
responsible for the appalling crimes it has committed against its subject
peoples during the War.
“RADICALLY ALIEN TO WESTERN CIVILISATION.”
These crimes, and the phases of Ottoman History which lead up to them,
demonstrate, in the language of the Allies’ Note, that “_the Ottoman
Empire has proved itself radically alien to Western Civilisation_.” Where
Ottoman rule has spread, civilisation has perished. While Ottoman rule
has lasted, civilisation has remained in abeyance. It has only sprung
up again when the oppressed peoples, at the cost of their own blood and
by the aid of civilised nations more fortunate than themselves, have
succeeded in throwing off the Turkish yoke; and these struggles have
been so much regained for liberty and progress in the world, because the
infliction of Turkish rule upon any other people has been an incalculable
loss.
To this long history of horror the Allies are determined to put an end.
They will “_liberate the peoples who now lie beneath this murderous
tyranny_.” But they proclaim no tyrannous intention against the Turks
themselves. In another clause of their note, they put it on record that
“_it has never been their intention to seek the extermination or the
political extinction of the Germanic peoples_.” The declaration holds
good, by implication, for the Magyar, Bulgar, and Turkish peoples who are
the Germanic peoples’ allies. There are regions in Asia Minor where the
Turk is undisputed occupant of the land. The Allies have no intention of
“deporting” or exterminating the Turk from these regions, as the Turk has
deported the Armenians from the regions that are theirs. The Turk, like
the German, Magyar and Bulgar, will remain where he belongs. Out of the
broad territory over which he at present domineers, he will be allowed
to keep his just pound of flesh, but woe to him hereafter if he sheds one
drop of Christian blood....
THE REORGANISATION OF EUROPE.
This settlement of Turkey is a logical element in the Allies’ general
aim in the War:—“_The reorganisation of Europe, guaranteed by a stable
settlement, based alike upon the principle of nationalities, on the right
which all peoples, whether small or great, have to the enjoyment of
full security and free economic development, and also upon territorial
agreements and international arrangements so framed as to guarantee land
and sea frontiers against unjust attacks._”
This aim is no invention of yesterday; it has been the aspiration of all
lovers of liberty for a century past.
“_Let the Turks_,” said Mr. Gladstone in a famous speech, “_now carry
away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying
away themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and
their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and
baggage, shall I hope clear out from the province they have desolated and
profaned._”
The province for which Mr. Gladstone pleaded was Bulgaria; but since
Bulgaria has been freed, the other peoples who have still remained under
the tyranny have suffered horrors infinitely worse in their extent and
their iniquity than those which in 1876 aroused the indignation of the
world.
Heinrich von Treitschke loved many things more than liberty, but the
profanation of liberty by the Turk drew from him a denunciation as
strong as Gladstone’s own. “_A near future_,” he writes, “_will, it is
to be hoped, blot out the scandal that such heathendom should ever have
established itself on European soil. What has this Turkish Empire done in
three entire centuries? It has done nothing but destroy._”
Treitschke and Gladstone, men who stood for very different ideals in
Europe, both called with one voice for liberation from the Turk; and the
Allies are struggling now to bring what they strove for to completion.
THE PRINCIPLE OF NATIONALITIES.
In the settlement of Turkey, conspicuously, the Allies will be crowning
a historic task, at which they themselves have laboured in former
times. The _liberation of the subject peoples of Turkey_, and the
_reorganisation upon the principle of nationalities_ of countries under
the Sultan’s _murderous tyranny_, began a century ago with the national
struggles for independence of the Serbs and Greeks—struggles which were
part of the general struggle for freedom in Europe, and which gave
inspiration to the people of other subject lands. England, France and
Russia stepped in in 1827 to secure Greece the reward of her heroism when
she was almost succumbing to her oppressor; Russia compelled Turkey to
recognise Serbian autonomy in her treaty of peace with Turkey in 1831;
Russia again, by taking up arms in 1877, freed Rumania and Serbia from
Turkish suzerainty, liberated more of their oppressed brethren for Serbia
and Greece, and restored Bulgaria to national existence. In the Balkan
War of 1912-13, the Balkan nations carried on the work by their unaided
strength, and expelled the Ottoman Empire from all the provinces over
which it still tyrannised in Europe, with the exception of Constantinople
and Thrace. In 1916, the Sherif of Mecca, at the opposite extremity of
the Ottoman conqueror’s domain, liberated an Arab province and the Holy
Arab City of which he is the legitimate head. It is for the Entente to
liberate the Arabs of Syria and the Armenians, who cannot save themselves.
The Syrians and Armenians have not, as the Turks and Germans allege,
been disloyal to Turkey in her hour of danger. The Arab and Armenian
conscripts have fought dutifully for a cause not their own in the Balkan
War and in the present more terrible conflict. Their leaders are too
prudent and the people too peaceable, their stake is too great, their
forces are too scattered, to allow them for a moment to contemplate
rising in arms. But their loyal and straightforward conduct has not
preserved them from the ferocity of their Turkish rulers; it has only
exposed them to a cold-blooded scheme of extermination which the
Young Turks are prosecuting at this moment with all their might. The
redemption of these innocent peoples from the hell into which they have
been cast, and where they will remain in agony so long as Ottoman and
Prussian militarism holds out, is incumbent upon the Allies if they are
to redeem their plighted word.
CONSTANTINOPLE.
This is what the Allies owe in the settlement of Turkey to the _principle
of nationalities_. But they are further pledged to vindicate _the right
which all peoples, whether small or great, have to the enjoyment of full
security and free economic development_, and this touches the status of
Constantinople.
Constantinople, since the Turks conquered it from its last Christian
Emperor in 1453, has been the political capital of the Ottoman Empire.
But ever since it has been a city at all, it has also been the
strategical and economic key to the Black Sea, conditioning the security
and dominating the economic development of all peoples bordering on the
Black Sea coasts. It is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. It is
the Turk’s at present by right of conquest, but that right justifies his
expulsion by war if it justifies his original intrusion, and on broader
considerations of population, sentiments, traditions and monuments of
the past, Constantinople is more truly the capital of all the Christian
peoples of the East. But it is not the exclusive possession of any of
its native inhabitants, whether their presence there dates from more
ancient or from comparatively recent times. The most important quarter
in Constantinople is Pera, across the Golden Horn, which is inhabited by
a foreign mercantile community, as international in its composition as
the mercantile community in the Chinese “Treaty Port” of Shanghai. The
chief volume of the transit trade which gives Constantinople its rank
as a port, passes through these foreign residents’ hands. But even they
are not the parties most vitally concerned in the economic status of
Constantinople and the Straits. If conditions do not suit them, they can
transfer their business elsewhere. The parties to whom the destiny of
Constantinople is a matter of life and death are Russia and Rumania, two
countries bound for ever by their geographical position to conduct their
maritime trade through the Black Sea and the Straits that give entrance
to it, and therefore at the mercy economically of any third power that
holds the control of the Straits in its hands.
THE RIGHT TO FULL SECURITY.
And this is not a theoretical question. It is a practical problem for
the national economy of Russia every year, and introduces a factor
of uncertainty into Russia’s national trading which is profoundly
detrimental to her prosperity. As sovereign of the Straits, Turkey not
only possesses the technical right of closing the Straits to shipping;
she exercises it in an arbitrary fashion. Three times the Straits have
been closed by Turkey within the last half-dozen years—during her war
with Italy, during the war with the Balkan States, and after the outbreak
of the European war at a date previous to the intervention of Turkey
herself in the struggle. It is possibly arguable that the closing was
necessary in each of these cases from a military point of view, to
safeguard Turkey’s political ownership of these “territorial waters.” But
if so, that is in itself the strongest argument for taking out of the
hands of an independent, irresponsible government a highway of commerce
the proper regulation of which is essential to the economic well-being
of the Russian and Rumanian peoples. Even if Turkey were a friendly,
steady-going State, the situation would hardly be tolerable; but
actually, whether through fault or misfortune, she has been at war more
often during the last century than any other State in the world, and her
hostility has been directed principally against Russia, the country most
vitally affected by the disturbance of the traffic through the Straits.
The closing of the Straits in the last instance, when Russia was at war
with Germany and was in urgent need of the importation of supplies, can
hardly be interpreted otherwise than as a hostile act—an anticipation
of the open war which Turkey made on Russia within the next few weeks.
To leave this economic weapon in Turkey’s hands at the peace settlement
would be impossible. By closing the Straits in any given year at the
precise moment when the Russian harvest was shipped and ready to sail,
and when the Russian importers had made their annual foreign purchases
on credit up to the full prospective value which the harvest would
realise in the markets of the world, Turkey could threaten Russia with a
financial crisis verging on national bankruptcy. _Full security and free
economic development_ for Russia would have vanished beyond the horizon,
and not only for Russia but for the whole world, for with such a trump
card in their hands, Turkey and her German patrons could never resist the
temptation of waging an economic “war after the war,” which might bring
Russia to her knees and enable them to realise those ambitions against
her which they have been unable to realise by force of arms.
NO ALTERNATIVE.
That is why the control of the Straits, as well as the dominion
over subject peoples, must be taken from the Ottoman Turks in the
_reorganisation of Europe, guaranteed by a stable settlement_, which
is the aim of the Allies. But neutrals, rightly anxious for a peace as
speedy as may be compatible with the attainment of the essential objects
at stake, may ask whether either or both of the objects essential to
the settlement of the Turkish Empire are not attainable by less drastic
measures than a redrawing of frontiers and a transference of territorial
sovereignty. Cannot the liberation of the subject peoples be effected,
without impairing Turkey’s territorial integrity, by some system of
devolution or local autonomy, under external guarantee and supervision?
Is not this a field where the chief belligerents on either side, with
the addition of the United States, might work together in concert? The
answer is that this was precisely the solution attempted during the
19th century, and that through the present war it has finally broken
down. During the 19th century the Concert of Europe did actually bring
Turkey under a certain tutelage. The Ottoman tariff was regulated by
treaty; the customs and other branches of revenue were managed by an
International Administration of the Ottoman Debt, representing Turkey’s
bondholders. There were various experiments in local autonomy; Crete
and the Lebanon enjoyed self-government under foreign guarantee; there
was an attempt to cure the anarchy deliberately fomented by the Turkish
government in Macedonia, by forcing the government to accept foreign
gendarmerie-inspectors with definite spheres of supervision; there was a
promise of reforms in the Armenian Vilayets, exacted from Turkey at the
International Congress of Berlin, but never carried beyond the stage
of paper schemes. It is unfortunately true that this joint European
tutelage was illusory, that it failed to remove or even mitigate the
_murderous tyranny_ that has always characterised Turkish government, and
that the Young Turks have used the opportunity of the War to repudiate
it altogether. The British people have not lightly or inconsiderately
accepted this conclusion—as they have, by implication, accepted it in
framing this joint Note in conjunction with their Allies. They advance
these two aims with regard to the settlement of Turkey—_the liberation
of the subject peoples_ and _the expulsion of Turkey from Europe_—in
the absolute conviction that they are necessary and right. But this
conviction is in itself a very bitter confession of failure. It marks
the reversal of a policy pursued for a century past; for during the
whole of the 19th century Great Britain was the chief advocate of the
policy which aimed at the settlement of Turkey by the preservation of
her territorial integrity subject to the active tutelage of the Concert
of Europe. British diplomacy was constantly exerted on this behalf, and
British belief in this policy was so sincere that half a century ago
Great Britain embarked in pursuit of it on a bloody war with one of her
present allies. If Great Britain is now a convinced adherent of the
alternative and more drastic settlement, it is because the system of
joint European control, after a century of experiment which perpetuated
and aggravated the ancient tyranny, bloodshed and despair, has been made
finally impossible by the present War.
THE TURCO-GERMAN COMPACT.
It was to end it that the Young Turks entered the war on Germany’s side;
for foreign control automatically breaks down if one Great Power, and
still more if a group of two Powers, stands out of the Concert, renounces
responsibility for the policy of the Turkish government towards the
subject peoples and the economic highways which it holds in its power,
and supports that government effectively in repudiating all claim to
intervention on the part of the other Powers concerned. But this was the
bargain struck between Germany and the Young Turks when Turkey attacked
the Allies, without provocation, in October, 1914. The Young Turks placed
all their economic and military resources at Germany’s disposal. Turkish
troops (including of course the due percentage of conscripts from the
subject peoples), are fighting Germany’s battles on the Riga, Halicz and
Dobrudja fronts. The vast undeveloped economic resources of the Empire
are, in the event of victory, to be thrown open to German exploitation
when peace returns. These are concessions which Turkey has always
jealously refrained from making to any other Power; and the price Germany
has paid for them is the guarantee of just one thing—that the Young Turks
shall have a free hand to repudiate all external control and to carry
through their policy of “Ottomanisation” to a finish.
A FREE HAND TO “OTTOMANISE.”
The Turks have not delayed in carrying out their side of the bargain,
and they have been equally prompt in using the free hand assured them
by Germany in return. First they repudiated the “Capitulations”—a
system of treaties not particularly equitable in themselves, but still
treaties to which Turkey was pledged—by which the civil liberties of
foreign residents in Turkey were guaranteed against the imperfections of
Turkish judicial procedure. Then they repudiated the tariff treaties,
and substituted for them a new tariff (recently published) of their
own. Next they abrogated the Reform Scheme for the Armenian Vilayets,
which the Concert of Europe had finally induced them to ratify, and
dismissed the two Inspectors-General, a Dutchman and a Norwegian, whom
they had themselves commissioned to carry the scheme into effect. But
these breaches of contract were minor offences compared to the Armenian
Deportations, the horror of which has been indicated briefly above, and
which they did not venture to carry out until the Dardanelles Expedition
had failed. To complete the elimination of every non-Turkish element
in the Empire, they are now trying to rid themselves of the American
Missionaries.
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE MISSIONARIES.
The attitude of the Young Turks towards the Missionaries shows that
their “Nationalism” has made them not only criminal but insane. The
American Missionaries have worked in Turkey for more than eighty years.
Their aim has been to revive religion in the subject Christian peoples
and to give them an enlightened modern education; they have pursued
this aim disinterestedly with a striking measure of success, and they
have extended their work to the Moslems as far as the latter have
responded to their advances. They are the creators of practically all the
secondary education that exists in Turkey to-day. The most intelligent
and progressive elements in the population of the Empire have come
most under their influence, and have received from them a moral and
intellectual stimulus which they could never have found for themselves.
The educational work of the Missionaries should have been mentioned among
the attempts made during the 19th century to reform Turkey gradually
by a reconstruction within; for the effect of this work was far more
penetrating, and far more fraught with hope for the future, than most of
the political expedients instituted with diplomatic pomp and ceremony by
the Concert of the Powers. And the Missionaries were the best friends of
the Turkish government as well as of their subject peoples. They took no
part in their pupils’ politics; they had no ulterior political purpose of
their own to serve. They were the most valuable voluntary assistants the
Young Turks could have had in what should have been their foremost aims
if they had acted up to their democratic professions, and they were the
assistants whom they had least of all to fear.
Actually, however, the Young Turks, after they had destroyed the
Missionaries’ work by exterminating the subject peoples among whom it
was principally carried on, dragging away to exile, shame and death the
boys and girls in their schools, torturing to death the native professors
whom the Missionaries had trained up to be their colleagues, have
finally confiscated the American schools, colleges and mission-stations
in many parts of the Empire, and have put the harshest pressure on
the Missionaries themselves to quit the country of which they are the
benefactors.
On April 4th, 1916, the Turkish newspaper _Hilal_ published an article in
praise of a lecture by a member of the German Reichstag called Traub, in
which the lecturer is reported to have declared himself “opposed to all
missionary activities in the Turkish Empire.”
“The suppression,” writes _Hilal_, “of the schools founded and directed
by ecclesiastical missions, a measure which follows the abolition of
the capitulary régime, was no less important. Thanks to their schools,
foreigners were able to exercise great influence over the young men of
the country, and they were virtually in charge of the spiritual and
intellectual guidance of our country. By closing them the Government has
put an end to a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous....”
This is the policy of Ottomanisation. But it was put more bluntly by
a Turkish gendarme in conversation with a Danish Red Cross Sister,
who had been dismissed from her post in a hospital at Erzindjan for
protesting against the Armenian Deportations. “‘First,’ he said, ‘we kill
the Armenians, then the Greeks, then the Kurds,’ He would certainly,”
the Danish lady comments, “have been delighted to add: ‘And then the
foreigners.’”[2]
THE TURCO-GERMAN ALLIANCE.
If they had not had the moral and military support of Germany, the
Young Turks would never have been able to wage this final campaign of
extermination upon every element of good in the countries and the peoples
that are in their power. But it is not mere chance that the Turks and
Germans have come together for these unholy ends.
In pursuing her ambition, Germany has found invaluable instruments in
the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires. These States would be anachronisms in
a free democratic Europe, and were destined, if all went well with the
world’s development, to be transformed into willing federations or else
to dissolve into their constituent peoples. But neither federalisation
nor dissolution suited the interest of the tyrannous minority which has
so far dominated and exploited each of these Empires for its own selfish
purposes. In the Hapsburg Empire the tyrants are the corrupt Magyar
aristocracy, which dominates Hungary, and through Hungary the Empire as a
whole. In the Ottoman Empire they are the Young Turks, a secret society
with its central committee at Constantinople and branch committees in the
provinces, and with a gang of sordid adventurers as their puppets in the
nominal headship of what professes to be a democratic government.
The Young Turks and the Magyar Oligarchy saw that the guarantee of
Prussia, and that alone, could preserve their tyranny against the
progress of Democracy in Europe. The Prussians saw that the Turks and
Magyars could sell them 70,000,000 human beings for “canonen futter,” in
addition to the 70,000,000 Germans, Poles, Alsatians and Danes whom they
already possessed. This extra 70,000,000 seemed to put world dominion
within their reach. The bargain was struck, and the War was made under
which the whole world is suffering, and must still suffer for a season,
if liberty is to be saved and the evil of centuries to be brought to a
tardy end.
There is no possibility of returning to the _Status Quo_ before August
1914—first, because the _Status Quo_ under the Turks was itself the mere
perpetuation of an oppression and a misery that disgraced the civilised
world, and that should have been ended long before; and secondly, because
it has been made unspeakably worse during the War than it was before it.
Every element of good that had maintained its existence under Turkish
government, and that made less intolerable a system that in itself
was too wicked to survive, is being stamped out now by deportation,
spoliation, abduction and massacre. The evil has purged itself altogether
of the good. Turkish tyranny has been stimulated by the German alliance
into an unnatural vitality, and the Central Confederates dream of putting
the clock in South-Eastern Europe a century back. Debauching one of the
Balkan States by gorging her with spoil from the rest, they hope to stamp
out liberty in the Balkans altogether, to reconquer for Militarism the
field which the 19th century won here for Democracy, and to build over it
a bridge by which three tyrant peoples, the Prussian, the Magyar and the
Turk, shall join hands in dominating and destroying without interference
a multitude of smaller and weaker peoples from Alsace to Rumania and from
Schleswig to Baghdad.
It is not a question of ameliorating the _Status Quo_. The _Status Quo_
in Turkey, irremediable before, is being actively changed into something
infinitely worse, and this is being accomplished, behind the bulwark of
Militarism, under the eyes of the civilised world....
THE ANSWER OF THE ALLIES.
This is why the Allies’ aims are drastic, but it is also why they _find
no difficulty in stating them in the full light of day_. Germany, who
has not, like the Allies, met President Wilson’s request because she is
ashamed of her aims and dare not face the reception they would have among
all the free democratic peoples of the civilised world, will doubtless
take what advantage she can of the Allies’ franker and more honourable
rejoinder. In anticipation of such insidious manœuvres, the _Murderous
Tyranny of the Turks_, both during the War and for centuries before it,
has been set forth here for the judgment of the reader.
FOOTNOTES.
[1] The word “Turk” is here used as equivalent to “Turkish-speaking”;
but of course only a fraction of the present Turkish-speaking population
in the Ottoman Empire is Turkish by descent. The rest are older native
elements, forcibly assimilated by the handful of Turkish conquerors from
Central Asia.
[2] See British Official Publication: “The Treatment of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire” (Misc. 31, 1916.)
_Printed in Great Britain by Barclay & Fry, Ltd.,
The Grove, Southwark, S.E._
_Pamphlets on the War._
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My Return from Rome.
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Loyal India.
An interview with LORD HARDINGE OF PENSHURST, G.C.B., G.M.S.I., etc.
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For Our Soldiers.
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HIS EMINENCE CARDINAL MERCIER, July 21st, 1916,
at Sainte Gudule, Brussels.
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The Great Parallel.
Reprinted from “The New York Tribune,” of November 2nd, 1916.
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