The Rebirth of Turkey

by Clair Price

The Nationalist Party had a dual program. Its political objective was to compel the Damad Ferid Government in Constantinople to re-assemble Parliament and permit the country to consider its future. Its military objective was to prevent the further partition of what it believed to be Turkish soil. Under the impetus of Smyrna, it was comparatively easy to take over province after province in Asia Minor and to put the Government in a position in which it would sooner or later be compelled to reckon with its new Opposition. Its military objective was far less easy of attainment. About 20,000 troops had been permitted to remain at Sivas and Erzerum for gendarmerie purposes. A quantity of munitions, particularly in the eastern provinces, had not yet been surrendered. A further quantity was dug up from old Russian depots, concealed during the great Russian advance of 1915-’16. More were smuggled across the Black Sea from Denikin’s rear in South Russia, as soon as it became known that a market for arms had developed in Asia Minor. Still more, particularly artillery, had been dismantled by the Allies and left in Turkish possession; these needed only new breech-blocks and range-finders, the construction of which began at once out of any scrap metal available. Hidden away in the secrecy of Asia Minor, Nationalism began to re-mobilize and re-equip its tattered and frequently bare-footed soldiers.

ASSEMBLY BUILDING AT ANGORA

So rapidly did the Party grow that two months after the Smyrna occupation, Kemal and Rauf were able to assemble it in a caucus at Erzerum in the eastern provinces. Kemal’s staff drove up to Erzerum along the crude mountain roads with the rest of the provincial delegates, but Kemal himself rode alone over back trails and through lonely villages. Here in the wrecked mountain town of Erzerum, the Party platform was drawn up, a document which was later to become famous under the name of the National Pact.

This document re-stated and amplified the Izzet Government’s position, as Rauf Bey had conveyed it to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. Autonomy for the Arabs under the necessary suzerainty of the Caliph at Constantinople and Allied recognition of the Enver Government’s abrogation of the Capitulations, were its principal planks. The break-up of the old Empire was accepted and in the new map of the Near and Middle East, the Caliphate of Islam was modified to permit the application of the Western tradition of nationalism to Turks and Arabs alike, an application to which the Turks claimed as complete a right as the West had long before acknowledged to Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians. From the Greeks, the West had never asked Capitulations. It would therefore not ask Capitulations from the Turks. As for the rights of minorities, such rights as the Greeks gave their Moslem minorities, the Turks would give their Christian minorities. The Straits would remain open to world commerce, subject only to the necessary military security of Constantinople, “the seat of the Caliphate of Islam, the capital of the Sultanate, and the headquarters of the Ottoman Government.” In the delineation of the new Turkey’s frontiers, certain border areas were under dispute. Two of these border areas, Cilicia and the Mosul province, “are inhabited by an Ottoman Moslem majority united in religion, in race and in aim, imbued with sentiments of mutual respect for each other and of sacrifice, and wholly respectful of each other’s racial and social rights and surrounding conditions,” and these belonged within the Turkish frontiers. To certain other border areas (Western Thrace and the three districts of Kars, Ardahan and Batum in Trans-Caucasia), the West could, if it wished, apply the device of the plebiscite with which it was accustomed to decide the destinies of populations elsewhere. As for the place of the new Turkey in the family of nations, the Party repeated Rauf Bey’s statements to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros: “It is a fundamental condition of our life and continued existence that we, like every country, should enjoy complete independence and liberty in the matter of assuring the means of our development, in order that our national and economic development should be rendered possible and that it should be possible to conduct affairs in the form of a more up-to-date regular administration.” On this note, the Party’s platform closed. Three weeks later, a copy of it lay on Lord Curzon’s desk in the Foreign Office in London, and Colonel Alfred Rawlinson, a brother of Lord Rawlinson, Commander-in-Chief in India, was returned to Erzerum to learn what it was that Kemal really wanted.

Having drawn up the Party’s platform, the Erzerum caucus adjourned to meet in September at Sivas, where a standing council of twelve members was chosen to sit continuously at Angora, a provincial capital whose rail and telegraphic communication with Constantinople was more direct than Sivas’s. The Damad Ferid Government’s position with respect to the country had now become so impossible that it fell on October 5 and was replaced by the Ali Riza Government which was authorized by the Sultan to hold a general election. This was a clean-cut victory for the Nationalists and two days after the new Government took office, Kemal telegraphed the Party’s platform to Ali Riza Pasha in Constantinople, as the terms of peace on which the Nationalists appealed to the country.

At this junction, the Oecumenical Patriarchate at the Phanar forbade Ottoman Greeks to participate in the elections on the ground that they were no longer Ottoman subjects. This injunction was of course obeyed in the capital where Allied troops were in occupation, but a considerable portion of the Rûm community lived in Asia Minor and here, already gravely compromised with their Turkish neighbors by the Phanar’s break with the Porte and by the Greek occupation of Smyrna which had followed that break, it only added to their difficulties. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what move more dangerous to its own communicants in Asia Minor the Phanar could have made. It so increased the suspicion which attached to them in the eyes of the Nationalists that hundreds of them were clapped into Nationalist jails and were not released until a Turkish-speaking Orthodox priest from Kiskin, twelve miles from Angora, announced his intention of breaking with the Phanar and participating in the elections as an Ottoman subject. He immediately undertook to effect a similar break on the part of the Turkish-speaking Orthodox churches in the interior, and the Oecumenical Patriarch summoned him to report at the Phanar at once. He disregarded both the Phanar’s summons and the excommunication which followed it, and continued to align his people with the Nationalists.

Papa Eftim Effendi, acting metropolitan of the Turkish Orthodox Church, is a subject to be approached with all caution for he may yet develope into a phase of the new Turkey more important for Christendom than Kemal himself. Christian solidarity broke down when the Phanar threw its communicants in Asia Minor into a political position which brooked not an instant’s neutrality. As long as Ottoman Christians were given an inferior position under Moslem law, the concern of Western Christians for the Rûm and Ermeni communities of the old Empire had a legitimate basis. The Byzantinism which colored our Western concern for Ottoman Greeks and Armenians may have blinded us at times to the actual position they occupied in the old Empire, but the legal position which Moslem law gave them was certain ultimately to be resented. There came a time when thoughtful Turks agreed with us, not out of concern for non-Moslems but in the belief that the Empire was being slowly strangled by the religious usages which had tightened about it. The Young Turks made an honest attempt in 1908 at reforms designed ultimately to give all races of the Empire an equal position as Ottoman citizens in an Ottoman State. That attempt broke down for several reasons. One was that the Young Turkish program was repugnant to Islam. Another was that the Rûm and Ermeni communities stuck to every jot of their community rights. Whether rightly or wrongly, they would not be given a common position with their Moslem neighbors. To American missionaries on the spot, the failure of the Young Turkish program was a bitter disappointment for they knew what the price of failure would be to Turks, Greeks and Armenians alike. But American Protestantism in the United States generally concurred in the refusal of the Ottoman Christians to make that gesture of confidence without which the Young Turkish program was bound to fail. The missionaries knew that if the religious deadlock which the 1908 Revolution sought to break, had finally to be broken by force, only Western military intervention could save the Christians from defeat. But their tongues were tied in the United States. Churchmen at home stiffened the Greeks and Armenians while refusing to note the very grave problems for which it was essential that the Turks should discover a solution.

Papa Eftim Effendi, however, has made the gesture of confidence. Under his leadership, sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior gave up their church schools on March 1, 1922, their pupils being sent thereafter to the Government’s schools. The old Rûm community regarded its schools with considerable pride, for they were centers of Greek nationalism. In the old Empire, they were centers of Orthodox reaction just as the mosque schools were centers of Moslem reaction. These churches in the interior have given up their right to administer Orthodox civil law. Turkish courts, under the Ministry of Justice, now administer Orthodox law for Orthodox litigants, supposedly as British courts administer Moslem law in India. The churches which have formed the new Turkish Orthodox Church under Papa Eftim’s leadership, are as free to worship as they have always been (and that freedom has been possibly greater than Westerners have sometimes attributed to the Ottoman Government). Politically, however, their communicants have thrown in their lot with the Turks. Their clergy wear the black robe and black cylindrical hat of Orthodoxy only while engaged in their clerical duties. At all other times, they wear the Turkish kalpak.