The Rebirth of Turkey

by Clair Price

Allied Commander-in-Chief at Constantinople until its evacuation in September and October, 1923.

GENERAL ISMET PASHA

Commander of the Western (Smyrna) Front until the re-capture of Smyrna in September, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Mudania Armistice, October, 1922; head of the delegation which signed the Peace Treaty of Lausanne, July, 1923; Minister of Foreign affairs of the Second Grand National Assembly.

In the meantime, Russia had achieved a contact with the Armenians of a wholly different sort. Having broken through the barrier of the Caucasus Range and established its provincial administrations in Trans-Caucasia, Russia had transferred large numbers of Armenians from Ottoman to Russian sovereignty, had stripped them of the autonomy of their community institutions and had kept them in order with an iron hand. In the Russo-Turkish War of 1876, its Armies had halted their march toward Alexandretta at Kars whence they overlooked the Ottoman Armenians in the eastern provinces. The Treaty of San Stefano which closed the War of 1876 was quashed and in the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, Russian provision for reforms to be applied to the Armenians was agreed to by all the signatory Powers. In the Cyprus Convention of 1876, however, Great Britain had bound itself to maintain the Sultan’s realm against Russia, and the eastern provinces, now the most difficult and the most important provinces in the outer Empire, became the theatre of directly opposed British and Russian policies. But Russia, despite its resentment at the loss of the San Stefano Treaty, had won at Berlin. The Armenian clauses in the Berlin Treaty reinforced the Armenian disposition to secure redress of their wrongs independently of their Turkish neighbors who were equal sufferers with them under the Hamidian regime. This tendency presently found further reinforcement in the Nihilist movement which developed in Russia after the Russo-Turkish War. The persecuted Armenians of Russian Trans-Caucasia joined the Nihilist movement, but their headquarters at Tiflis were stamped out by the Czar’s police and the Armenian revolutionists fled to Switzerland, Paris, London and New York.

Relations between Turks and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire had thus far been generally peaceful. They both suffered alike under the Government at Constantinople and even when Westernism was alienating the Bulgarians in Europe, the Armenians in the eastern provinces were still “the loyal community.” But the Armenian revolutionists in the West, instead of confining their work to Russian Trans-Caucasia, sought to raise funds in the Ottoman Empire as well, and the ancient Turco-Armenian relationship began to be poisoned. Armenian committees succeeded in giving the Turks the impression that “the loyal community” was no longer loyal, and Abdul Hamid replied in the savage massacres of 1894 and 1896. For this business the West rightly fastened the blame upon “Abdul the Damned,” and the Turkish people whose patience sometimes reaches the proportions of a grievous handicap, were generally exempted from blame.

In 1907, the eastern provinces became the scene of an about-face in Anglo-Russian relations. Under the Anglo-Russian Treaty of that year, the two Powers effected an immediate partition of Persia and envisaged a future partition of the Ottoman Empire in which the eastern provinces would go to Russia and Mesopotamia would go to Great Britain. This would have admitted Russia to a military position whence it could have threatened both the Syrian corridor to Egypt and Mesopotamia itself, but presumably the British belief which prompted the 1907 Treaty was that, if Old Russia had made life well-nigh impossible for the British in Asia, Liberal Russia which was believed to have been born in the 1905 Revolution, would prove a neighbor with whom it was possible to live on friendly terms in Asia. So Russian annexation of the eastern provinces became the common program of Great Britain and Russia alike, and from that date Russia adopted a policy so liberal toward its Armenians in Trans-Caucasia that a small Russian annexationist group soon appeared among the Armenians in the eastern provinces. The fact must be emphasized that there has never been any Russian population in these provinces and that the Armenians constituted Russia’s only ground for intervention and eventual annexation.

The Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 was quickly followed by the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. Turks and Armenians alike rejoiced at the downfall of the Hamidian regime. An Armenian bloc was formed in the new Parliament and the Committee of Union and Progress entered into apparently amicable relations with it. The bulk of Armenian opinion in the Empire seemed to be willing to work the revived Constitution and to begin, in common with its Turkish neighbors, the reforms of which all the Ottoman races stood in the direst need. But the Armenian revolutionaries in the West had already planted independence committees in the Empire and drilled them in the technique of revolution. The committees’ reply to what seemed to be Turco-Armenian cooperation in the Parliament at Constantinople, was the Adana “massacre.” This was on a quite different plane from Abdul Hamid’s savagery in 1894 and 1896, and the principal fault which may be found with the Turks at Adana was their tardiness in putting a stop to it. The independence committees launched it in the approved style of Balkan revolution, staging it at Adana presumably with a view to attracting Western intervention at the near-by port of Mersina. Western battleships did in fact anchor in the Mersina roadstead, but refrained from landing men.

Russia now loomed above the eastern provinces but during the Balkan Wars refrained from action, possibly in order to permit the Enver Government to defend Constantinople against the Bulgarians, Russia having designs of its own on Constantinople. Still anxious to reach some solution of the problem of its eastern provinces which would counter the Russian menace, the Enver Government in 1912 voluntarily demanded British administrators, as it had a right to do under the Cyprus Convention of 1876. The British Foreign Office turned down the demand on the ground that Russia would object to the employment of British in the vicinity of its frontier. Only a year before, the Foreign Office had turned down the request of Mr. Morgan Shuster, American Treasurer-General of Persia, for the employment of a British officer at Teheran and had cited the same reason for its action. There was nothing in the letter of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 which authorized the Foreign Office to forbid Major Stokes’ appointment at Teheran, nor was there anything in the letter of that Treaty which partitioned the Ottoman Empire between Russia and Great Britain. These understandings come under the head of what Sir Edward Grey called the “spirit” of the 1907 Treaty.

When the British Government after the late war dispatched Sir Edward Grey, then Viscount Grey of Fallodon, to Washington intending to make him British Ambassador to the United States, he was permitted to return to London without having taken up his duties. But American churchmen have not always been as close to reality as their Government at Washington has been. American educators in the Ottoman Empire, however, have watched missionary work at first hand for a sufficient length of time so that today the oldest of them make the most complete abstinence from any sort of missionary endeavor the first essential in the management of their schools.