Turkey: A Past and a Future Part 1

[Yervant1]

Turkey: A Past and a Future Part 1

 

http://www.yerkir.am/en/news/34709.htm

18:18 - 05.11.2012

 

What is Turkey? It is a name which explains nothing.

There were less than twenty million people in Turkey before the War,

and during it the Government has caused a million or so to perish by

massacre, starvation, or disease. Yet, in spite of this demoniac

effort after uniformity, they are still the strangest congeries of

racial and social types that has ever been placed at a single

Government's mercy. The Ottoman Empire is named after the Osmanli, but

you might search long before you found one among its inhabitants.

These Osmanlis are a governing class, indigenous only in

Constantinople and a few neighboring towns, but planted here and

there, as officers and officials, over the Ottoman territories. They

come of a clan of Turkish nomads, recruited since the thirteenth

century by converts, forced or voluntary, from most of Christendom,

and crossed with the blood of slave-women from the entire world. They

are hardly a race.

Thus there are three distinct "Turkish" elements in Turkey, divided

by blood and vocation and social type; and even if we reckon all who

speak some form of Turkish as one group, they only amount to 30 or 40

per cent. Of the whole population of the Empire.

The rest are alien to the Turks and to one another. Those who speak

Arabic are as strong numerically as the Turks, or stronger, but they

too are divided, and their unity is a problem of the future. There are

pure-bred Arab nomads of the desert; there are Arabs who have settled

in towns or on the land, some within the last generation, like the

Muntefik in Mesopotamia, some a millennium or two ago, like the Meccan

Koreish, but who still retain their tribal consciousness of race;

there are Arabs in name who have nothing Arabic about them but their

language - most of the peasantry of Syria are such.

The Kurds themselves are more scattered than any other stock in

Turkey, and divided tribe against tribe, but taken together they rank

third in numerical strength, after the Arabs and Turks. There are

mountain Kurds and Kurds of the plain, husbandmen and herdsmen, Kurds

who have kept to their original homes along the eastern frontier, and

Kurds who, under Ottoman auspices, have spread themselves over the

Armenian plateau, the North Mesopotamian steppes, the Taurus valleys,

and the hinterland of the Black Sea.

The Greeks and Armenians, for instance, are, or were, the most

energetic, intellectual, liberal elements in Turkey, the natural

intermediaries between the other races and western civilization - "were"

rather than "are," because the Ottoman Government has taken ruthless

steps to eliminate just these two most valuable elements among its

subjects. The urban Greeks survive in centers like Smyrna and

Constantinople, but the Greek peasantry of Thrace and Anatolia has

mostly been driven over the frontier since the Second Balkan War. As

for the Armenians, the Government has been destroying them by massacre

and deportation since April, 1915 - business and professional men,

peasants and shepherds, women and children - without discrimination or

pity. A third of the Ottoman Armenians may still survive; a tenth of

them are safe within the Russian and British lines.

What common factor accounts for the name? What has stained this coat

of many colors to one political hue? The answer is simple: Blood.

Turkey, the Ottoman state, is not a unity, climatic, geographical,

racial, or economic; it is a pretension, enforced by bloodshed and

violence whenever and wherever the Osmanli Government has power.

 

The new Turkish Nationalism is the immediate factor to be reckoned

with. It is very new - newer than the Young Turks, and sharply opposed

to the original Young Turkish program - but it has established its

ascendancy. It decided Turkey's entry into the War, and is the key to

the current policy of the Ottoman Government.

The Young Turks were not Nationalists from the beginning; the

"Committee of Union and Progress" was founded in good faith to

liberate and reconcile all the inhabitants of the Empire on the

principles of the French Revolution. At the Committee's congress in

1909 the Nationalists were shouted down with the cry: "Our goal is

organization and nothing else.

But Young Turkish ideals rapidly narrowed. Liberalism gave way to

Panislamism, Panislamism to Panturanianism, and the "Ottoman State

Idea" changed from "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" to the

Turkification of non-Turkish nationalities by force.

"The Turks realized that, in order to live, they must become

essentially Turkish, become a nation, be themselves.... The Turkish

nation turned aside its gaze from the lost territory and looked

instead upon Turania, the ideal country of the future."

Ziya Bey a Turkish poet had endeavored before to dispense with the 95

per cent. (?) of the vocabulary that was borrowed from Persian and

Arabic, and "his poetry had to be published in small provincial papers

because the important newspapers of the towns would not accept it."

The established writers in the traditional style made a hard fight,

but Tekin Alp claims that the Yeni Lisan (New Language) "is to-day in

possession of an absolute and unlimited authority." Borrowed rhythms

have been banned as well as borrowed words, and there is even an

agitation to replace the Arabic script by a new Turkish alphabet - an

imitation of the Albanian movement which was opposed so fiercely by

the Turks themselves before the Balkan War.

[Yervant1]

Turkey: A Past and a Future: Part 2

 

http://www.yerkir.am/en/news/34740.htm

12:35 - 06.11.2012

 

The established writers in the traditional style made a hard fight,

but Tekin Alp claims that the Yeni Lisan (New Language) "is to-day in

possession of an absolute and unlimited authority." Borrowed rhythms

have been banned as well as borrowed words, and there is even an

agitation to replace the Arabic script by a new Turkish alphabet - an

imitation of the Albanian movement which was opposed so fiercely by

the Turks themselves before the Balkan War.

"Because it is written in the Koran that Islam knows no nationalities,

but only Believers, the Islamjis thought that to occupy oneself with

national questions was to act against the interests and principles of

Islam itself.... According to the Nationalists, the pronouncement in the

Koran was directed exclusively against the very frequent dissensions

of clans and parties in the various Arab races." (A sneer which is

meant to have a modern application.) "Although the Nationalists

proclaim themselves the most zealous followers of Mohammed,

nevertheless they do not conceal the fact that their interpretation of

Islam is not the same as that of the Arabs. They maintain that the

Turks cannot interpret the Koran in the same manner as the Arabs....

Their idea of God is also different."

The Ministry of Evkaf (Religious Endowments) recently made a grant of

£50,000 (Turkish) towards the publication of works on these worthies;

the students at the Military College in Constantinople are alleged to

have been diverted from their studies by their devotion to such

literature, and on the eve of the War the Professor of Military

Education there is reported to have delivered the following address to

an instruction class of reserve officers:

"We are, gentlemen, before all, Turks. I wonder why we are called

Ottomans, for who is Osman after whom we are named? He is a Turk from

Altai, who overran this country with his Turkish Army. Therefore it is

more of an honor to us to be named after his origin than after

himself. We have so far been deceived by the ignorance of our

forebears, and fie on these forebears who made us forget our

nationality.... Be sure that Turkish nationality is better for us than

Islam, and racial pride is one of the greatest social virtues."

"They sought after a judicious mingling of the religious and national

impulses. They realized only too clearly that the still abstract

ideals of Nationalism could not be expected to attract the masses, the

lower classes, composed of uneducated and illiterate people. It was

found more expedient to reach these classes under the flag of

religion."

This sentence reveals in a flash one motive of the Armenian

"Deportations," which followed Turkey's intervention in the War; and a

celebrated German authority, in a memorial written in 1916, gives this

very explanation of their origin.

"Turkey's entry into the War," he writes, "was unwelcome to Turkish

society in Constantinople, whose sympathies were with France, as well

as to the mass of the people, but the Panislamic propaganda and the

military dictatorship were able to stifle all opposition. The

proclamation of the 'Holy War' produced a general agitation of the

Mohammedan against the Christian elements in the Empire, and the

Christian nationalities had soon good reason to fear that Turkish

chauvinism would make use of Mohammedan fanaticism to make the War

popular with the mass of the Mohammedan population."

The evidence presented in the British Blue Book on the Treatment of

Armenians in the Ottoman Empire shows that this explanation is

correct. The Armenians were not massacred spontaneously by the local

Moslems; the initiative came entirely from the Central Government at

Constantinople, which planned the systematic extermination of the

Armenian race in the Ottoman Empire, worked out a uniform method of

procedure, dispatched simultaneous orders to the provincial officials

and gendarmerie to carry it into effect, and cashiered the few who

declined to obey.

The Armenians were rounded up and deported by regular troops and

gendarmes; they were massacred on the road by bands of chettis,

consisting chiefly of criminals released from prison by the Government

for this work; when the Armenians were gone the Turkish populace was

encouraged to plunder their goods and houses, and as the convoys of

exiles passed through the villages the best-looking women and children

were sold cheap or even given away for nothing to the Turkish

peasantry. Naturally the Turkish people accepted the good things the

Government offered them, and naturally this reconciled them

momentarily to the War.

A Turkish officer, taking our informant for a Turk too, remarked to

him: "Those Arabs wish to get rid of us and are secretly in sympathy

with our enemies, but we mean to get rid of them ourselves before they

have any chance of translating their sympathy into action." This caps

what a Turkish gendarme in Armenia said to a Danish sister serving

with the German Red Cross: "First we kill the Armenians, then the

Greeks, then the Kurds." Every non-Turkish nationality in the Ottoman

Empire is threatened with extermination.

A German teacher in the German Technical School at Aleppo, who

resigned his appointment as a protest against the Armenian atrocities

in 1915, thus records his personal judgment in an open letter to the

Reichstag:

"The Young Turk is afraid of the Christian nationalities - Armenians,

Syrians and Greeks - on account of their cultural and economic

superiority, and he sees in their religion a hindrance to Turkifying

them by peaceful means. They must therefore be exterminated or

converted to Islam by force. The Turks do not suspect that in so doing

they are sawing off the branch on which they are sitting themselves.

The Turks, the least gifted of the races living in Turkey, are

themselves only a minority of the population, and are still far behind

the Arabs in culture.

"We teachers, who have been teaching Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Turks,

and Jews in German schools in Turkey for years, can only pass judgment

that of all our pupils the pure Turks are the most unwilling and the

least talented. When for once in a way a Turk does achieve something,

one can be sure in nine cases out of ten that one is dealing with a

Circassian, an Albanian, or a Turk with Bulgarian blood in his veins.

>From my personal experience I can only prophesy that the Turks proper

will never achieve anything in trade, industry, or science.

The German memorialist presses the indictment:

"You cannot become a merchant by murdering one. You cannot master a

handicraft if you smash its tools. A sparsely-populated country does

not become more productive if it destroys its most industrious

population. You do not advance the progress of civilization if you

drive into the desert.

[Yervant1]

Turkey: A Past and a Future: Part 3

 

http://www.yerkir.am/en/news/34762.htm

15:43 - 06.11.2012

 

"Your great business is with the fundamental doctrines and duties of the

Gospel."

In this spirit the American missionaries have worked. They have had no

warships behind them, no diplomatic support, no political ambitions,

no economic concessions.

As Evangelicals their first step was to translate the Bible into all

the living languages and current scripts of the Nearer East. For the

Bulgars and Armenians this was the beginning of their modern

literature, but the jealousy of the Orthodox and Gregorian clergy was

naturally aroused. Native Protestant Churches formed themselves - not by

the missionaries' initiative but on their own. They were trained by

the missionaries to self-government, and as they spread from centre to

centre they grouped themselves in unions, with annual meetings to

settle their common affairs. The missionaries also encouraged them to

be self-supporting, and in 1908 the contributions of the Native

Churches to the general expenses of the missions were twice as large

as those of the American Board.

The Protestant Armenians, in spite of a nominal exemption, were

deported and massacred like their Gregorian fellow-countrymen; the

boys and girls were carried away from the American colleges, the

nurses and patients from the hospitals; the empty buildings were

"requisitioned" by the Ottoman authorities; the missionaries

themselves, in their devoted efforts to save a remnant from

destruction, suffered as many casualties from typhus and physical

exhaustion as any proportionate body of workers on the European

battlefields. The Turkish Nationalists congratulated themselves that

the American work in Western Asia was destroyed. In praising a lecture

by a member of the German Reichstag, who had declared himself "opposed

to all missionary activities in the Turkish Empire," a Constantinople

newspaper wrote:

"The suppression of the schools founded and directed by ecclesiastical

missions or by individuals belonging to enemy nations is as important

a measure as the abolition of the Capitulations. Thanks to their

schools, foreigners were able to exercise great moral influence over

the young men of the country, and they were virtually in charge of its

spiritual and intellectual guidance. By closing them the Government

has put an end to a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous."

But the missionaries' spirit was something they could not destroy.

"When they deported the Armenians," wrote a missionary, "and left us

without work and without friends, we decided to come home and get our

vacation and be ready to go wherever we could after the War."

After the War the Turks in Anatolia may still be infatuated enough to

banish their best friends, but in Armenia, when the Turk has gone, the

Americans will find more than their former field; for, in one form or

another, Armenia is certain to rise again. The Turks have not

succeeded in exterminating the Armenian nation.

Half of it lives in Russia, and its colonies are scattered over the

world from California to Singapore. Even within the Ottoman frontiers

the extermination is not complete, and the Arabian deserts will yield

up their living as well as the memory of their dead.

One thing is certain, that, whatever land is restored to them, the

Armenians will turn its resources to good account, for, while their

town-dwellers are the merchants and artisans of Western Asia, 80 per

cent., of them are tillers of the soil.