The Rebirth of Turkey

by Clair Price

With Turkish civilian opinion now casting about for substitutes for the Parliament which the Damad Ferid Government continued to deny it, Turkish military opinion lost no time in facing the radically new situation which the Phanar’s break with the Porte had precipitated. The General Staff had constituted the driving force of reform in 1908 and it did so again in 1919. Inside a ring of British bayonets, the Asia Minor provinces had been turned loose in semi-independence and were being rapidly disarmed. The Third Army, reduced in personnel and equipment, had been permitted by the Allies to base itself on Sivas and to maintain there a skeleton organization for gendarmerie purposes. Similarly the Ninth Army remained in skeleton form at Erzerum in the eastern provinces, and Turkish refugees were moving slowly back into these wasted and silent provinces and resuming the even tenor of their lives. Greek refugees were being returned to Smyrna and Samsun, a proceeding which would have remained meaningless had not the Oecumenical Patriarchate whose communicants these Greeks were, become openly hostile.

The General Staff had already dispatched agents secretly to the eastern provinces for the formation of local defense committees. Under the Allied military occupation, the Armenian Patriarchate at 21 Rue de Brousse in the Pera suburb of the capital, had openly espoused the program of the old independence committees. The old Armenian Parliamentary bloc had not survived the break-up of the Empire and the old Russian annexationist group had come to a similar end with the break-up of Czarist Russia. Independence of Russians and Turks alike had become the Armenian program and the hope of its realization lay in the British and United States Governments. The former had already manifested concern for the Armenians on numerous occasions, and two organizations were at work in the United States, the Armenia-America Society which was related to the Near East Relief, and the Committee for Armenian Independence which represented the extreme wing of Armenian opinion. American relief workers in the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia were already urging the repatriation of Armenian refugees into the eastern provinces, where they had long constituted Czarist Russia’s sole claim to intervention and eventual annexation. Against this move the General Staff had prepared the eastern provinces. Kiazim Karabekr Pasha, commander of the Ninth Army at Erzerum, had a large quantity of arms at his disposal, some deposited by the Ottoman Armies retreating from Mesopotamia and some dug up from Russian depots concealed in the mountains.

The Phanar’s break with the Porte was a new development, however, against which the General Staff had made no preparation. Rauf Bey had signed an armistice at Mudros with the Allied Powers, but no armistice had been signed with the Rûm and Ermeni communities. If war was now to develope with the latter, action would have to be taken without delay. Accordingly it was determined to dispatch Mustapha Kemal Pasha and Rauf Bey to Samsun and Smyrna, respectively, to form local defense committees and to meet at Sivas where Kemal was to take over the administration of Asia Minor. On the basis of these defense committees, a new political party was to be built up which should compel the Damad Ferid Government to reassemble Parliament and enable the country to consider its future. The beginning of such a party already existed in the capital, but the new National Liberals naturally led a secret existence under the Allied military occupation and it was not until Kemal began building up the party organization in Asia Minor that they openly became the Nationalists.

The surrender of arms to the Allies continued, and in his report to the British War Office on events in Turkey from the time of the Mudros armistice to the signature of the Sevres Treaty, General Milne testifies to the honesty with which disarmament was carried out up to the time of the Greek occupation of Smyrna. The defense committees were not directed against the Allies. Large and small Allied forces, even Allied officers alone, moved freely about the country. The political program with which Kemal was charged, was directed against the Damad Ferid Government, his military program against any partition of the country in favor of Greeks and Armenians. If the Rûm and Ermeni communities of the old Empire attempted a transfer of their historic community life from a religious to a territorial basis, the defense committees would constitute the Turks’ reply.

This program was developed in the utmost secrecy, since the Allied occupation had loosed more spies in the capital than Abdul Hamid had ever employed in his palmiest days. The Ottoman Navy having been interned in the Golden Horn, it was an easy matter to dispatch Rauf Bey to Smyrna. He left Constantinople early in May, 1919. Kemal Pasha, however, was a senior Army officer and under the orders of the Ottoman War Office. It was assumed that the Damad Ferid Government would not object to having the capital rid of his presence, but his effectiveness in Asia Minor depended on his authority. He was ostensibly to be sent out as Inspector-General with command of the skeleton forces which General Milne had sanctioned for gendarmerie purposes at Sivas and Erzerum, and the instructions which defined his powers were shown him as soon as they had been drawn up by the General Staff. In a room at the War Office, Kemal spent three hours “correcting” them, until they empowered him with authority to act in every contingency which might conceivably arise. As thus “corrected,” they were placed hurriedly before Damad Ferid’s War Minister and signed without having been read. Duplicate copies, destined for subordinate commanders in Asia Minor, were signed by members of the General Staff. Thus equipped, Mustapha Kemal Pasha left Constantinople for Samsun the day after Rauf Bey had left for Smyrna.

Kemal found British craft in Samsun roadstead and a British control officer in the town with a handful of Indian troops. Greeks were being disembarked and were pushing into the villages in the immediate hinterland. A project was under way for the detachment of the Black Sea littoral, including the ports of Samsun and Trebizond, from the remnant of the Empire and its erection as an independent Greek State under the name of the Pontus. If the Pan-Hellenic program at Constantinople proposed to re-write five centuries of history, if the Armenian program in the eastern provinces proposed to undo the work of ten centuries, the Pontus program also proposed to set aside a half-dozen centuries. It would hardly be fair, however, to judge these three programs by the standards of practicability which are customarily applied in politics, for their strength lay outside the realm of politics. In 1919, we stood in the presence of a Christendom, damp with centuries of Byzantinism, which proposed to commit the very errors in Turkey for which it had frequently blamed Islam.

To thoughtful Turks, it had long been plain that the old Empire was doomed unless it could disentangle itself from the grip of religious usage. An attempt had been made in 1908 at this precise task of disentangling religion and politics. It had failed because neither the Old Turks nor the Christian communities would permit it to succeed. Christendom and Islam alike proved immovable. Turks, Greeks and Armenians threshed themselves to pieces in the religious deadlock which the Young Turks failed to break in 1908 and by 1919 Greeks and Armenians were prepared to set up new Christian theocracies on the wreck of an old Moslem theocracy. The Rûm and Ermeni communities had clung immovably to their full community rights after 1908 and by 1919 the break-up of the Empire had made possible the transfer of their communities, with the concurrence of Christendom, from their old religious, to a new territorial, basis.

Kemal rode up into the hills behind Samsun. Under the blue skies of an Anatolian spring, he made his way from village to village. He reached Sivas where Colonel Rafet Bey was in command of the skeleton Third Army, simultaneously with a rumor that Great Britain had given Smyrna to the Greeks and that the greatest sea-port of Asia Minor had been the scene of massacres by Greek troops. Telegrams to Angora where a British control officer was receiving munitions surrendered under the Mudros armistice, brought a prompt denial. But the rumor grew. What purported to be stories of the massacres and of the flight of Turkish civilians from Greek soldiers in the hinterland of Smyrna, accompanied it. The British control officer at Angora denied it again, emphasizing the fact that the armistice had been signed by the British Government and no Greek occupation of Smyrna was possible without British consent. But a telegram soon reached Sivas from the Ottoman War Office in Constantinople, announcing that Smyrna had been occupied by the Greeks and that Admiral Calthorpe had supervised the occupation. British control officers along the railways fled to Constantinople at once and most of them were fortunate enough to reach their destination.

Meanwhile, Rauf Bey had reached Smyrna on May 13. On May 14, Admiral Calthorpe entered the bay with an Allied naval squadron from Constantinople. The Allied control officers ashore were ordered to disarm the Ottoman garrison and confine it to its barracks. At 6:30 o’clock in the evening, Admiral Calthorpe announced that the city would be occupied by Allied troops the next morning. A vague rumor that Greek troops were to be used brought a repetition of the announcement that Allied troops would occupy the city. But the rumor persisted and as night drew on, the population of the Turkish quarter withdrew to a hill-top behind the town and gathered around huge bonfires in an all-night protest meeting.

By 7 o’clock the next morning, the Ottoman garrison had been withdrawn to its barracks. By 10 o’clock, British marines had disembarked onto the quai and had occupied the telegraph offices, and Greek troops were landing from their transports. They marched first to the konak, the seat of the provincial administration, and occupied the building amid scenes of growing confusion which the Greek commander either could not or would not control. From the konak, they marched to the barracks and the firing which had already begun culminated in the raking of the barracks with machine guns. At the barracks and elsewhere, in Smyrna City and deep into its hinterland, the killing continued for days. Twice Rauf Bey was overtaken by the rapid Greek advance and had to flee farther into the hinterland. Events might or might not have turned out differently if Rauf had landed at Smyrna a month before he did, but one reason for the lack of any Turkish defense of Smyrna was the quite simple reason that there had been no time in which to prepare a defense.