"The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks"
Date: 2021-05-03T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Eastern question; Turkey -- Politics and government

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Title: "The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks"

Author: Arnold Toynbee

Author of introduction, etc.: Viscount James Bryce Bryce

Release date: May 3, 2021 [eBook #65248]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** 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.)

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Table of Contents

- “THE MURDEROUS TYRANNY OF THE TURKS.”

- The Aims of the Allies.

- The Subject Peoples of Turkey.

- The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks: The First Stage.

- The Second Stage: Abd-ul-Hamid.

- The Third Stage: The Young Turks.

- The Armenian Atrocities of 1915.

- “Radically Alien to Western Civilisation.”

- The Reorganisation of Europe.

- The Principle of Nationalities.

- Constantinople.

- The Right to Full Security.

- No Alternative.

- The Turco-German Compact.

- A Free Hand to “Ottomanise.”

- The Campaign Against the Missionaries.

- The Turco-German Alliance.

- The Answer of the Allies.

- Footnotes.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE