The Rebirth of Turkey

by Clair Price

The heart of the town lies along its lower fringes. When the Sivas congress moved the Nationalist Party’s council to Angora late in September, 1919, Kemal himself took up his abode in an upper room at the railway station and a Decauville locomotive was kept fired up night and day beneath his window, in readiness to hurry him farther into the interior on an instant’s warning. The first building one passes upon entering the town from the railway station is the gray granite building once used as the local headquarters of the Committee of Union and Progress, with a wooden theatre lying in the center of a garden across the road. Some distance to the left, as one continues into the town, is the old konak, or Government building, where the provincial administration was formerly housed. Across the square in front of it, is the Post and Telegraph Office. On the right hand as the town is entered, a broad street turns off past the theatre and leads around the foot of the town to the beautiful compound of the Sultana College. Almost opposite the theatre as one turns into this road, is a large school building of stone and some distance farther along is the stone building formerly occupied by the local administration of the Public Debt. Still farther along, far out in the outkirts of the town, the blue and white buildings of the Sultana College stand within the walls of their compound. Here Fevzi Pasha, a towering Anatolian Turk with drooping moustaches, and Rafet Pasha, a dapper little figure, were engaged in re-mobilizing and re-equipping the Army. Fevzi Pasha is a dour giant of a man with a gargantuan appetite for work and a complete aversion from social intercourse of any sort. Rafet Pasha has a similar capacity for work but he combines with it a natural genius for social intercourse. I have seen him in a number of widely varying settings, from his quarters in the Sultana College to the mountain passes of Anatolia in the dead of winter, but he is invariably as immaculate both in manner and appearance as if he had just stepped out of a drawing room.

Under Mustapha Kemal Pasha, Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha ruled Anatolia for the Nationalists, their authority reaching down into the provinces through military governors whom they assigned to the more critical provincial capitals. Kiazim Karabekr Pasha who held the eastern provinces from Erzerum, ought to be mentioned with them. It had been easy enough to take over Anatolia from the Damad Ferid Government, for the Greek occupation of Smyrna undermined Ferid’s hold on the country at a stroke, but to hold Anatolia against Ferid’s efforts to recover it was quite another matter. Fevzi, Rafet and Kiazim were the men who held it, and whatever traditions of personal advantage they inherited from the old Ottoman Government, their personal ambitions were sunk in the common cause of defending the remnant of the country. I believe firmly that this statement holds true of Kemal as well. My impression of him is that he would have joined one of his own labor battalions and dug roads behind his own Army if he thought that by so doing he would be able more effectively to contribute to his country’s defense.

These men constituted a small handful of modern Westerners in control of a vast mediaeval Eastern country, but their task was simplified by the comparative absence of the Levantinism which had poisoned Constantinople. Such as their country was, it was as homogeneous as any between Vienna and Bagdad. There were Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Turcomans, Tartars and Laz in the country, a few remaining Armenians in the interior, an increasing number of Greeks between Samsun and Trebizond along the Black Sea littoral, and a handful of widely scattered Americans, mostly in the employ of the Near East Relief. The large majority of its population, however, was Turkish and most of the non-Turks were bound to the Turks by their acceptance of Islam. The country, while wholly primitive, was far more single-minded than its capital had been for a century. Its handful of Americans were soon represented at Angora by two members of the Near East Relief’s corps, the late Miss Annie T. Allen and Miss Florence Billings. Most of their contact was with Rafet Pasha and, despite the serious delicacy of their position, their relations with Rafet Pasha were generally happy.

The military situation in which the Turks found themselves, was shortly to be simplified by the brief war which Kiazim Karabekr Pasha launched from Erzerum against the Armenian Republic of Erivan. This opened a line of retreat to Trans-Caucasia and Central Asia, and if Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas had been forced to drop their archives into their kalpaks and flee, a back door would have been available for their escape into the East.

The Pontus project which the Greeks along the Black Sea littoral had launched, was not so simple to handle. The Greek occupation of Smyrna eventually made it necessary to transfer the Third Army from Amasia to the hinterland of Smyrna and the so-called Pontus had to be held with irregulars under the command of the late Osman Agha, the Laz mayor of Kerasund. The crude terrorism he wielded proved to be such an ugly business that Hamid Bey, one of the best men available in Angora, was dispatched to Samsun as mayor. Hamid Bey is a Rhodes Turk with up-standing hair, Kaiser-like moustaches, a mouth full of gold and a booming voice, a combination apt to give one meeting him for the first time a sense of having met some new species of wild man, but a further acquaintance with him reveals beneath his surface eccentricities a character of solid integrity and ripe judgment. He had been a governor of provinces and the fact that the post of mayor in Samsun was thought worthy of being filled by an ex-governor may be taken as an indication of Rafet Pasha’s anxiety to discover some peaceful solution of the Pontus problem. Osman Agha’s terrorism remained as much of a problem at Angora as the Greek terrorism which it sought to overcome, but a solution was finally discovered for it when Osman, having shot down 900 Greeks and Armenians in Marsovan in reprisal for the knifing of 200 Turks by Greek troops at Ismid, marched to Angora to offer himself and his Laz followers to the Army. He entered Angora as the hero of a goaded and angry population and Kemal, after permitting him to enjoy his ovation to the full, incorporated his followers in the Turkish shock troops with whom they were cut to pieces in the Battle of the Sakaria River. Thereafter there were no more Marsovans in the so-called Pontus, but the problem of its Greeks still remained.

There appears to be no doubt that the Pontus program had reached the status of a definite organization determined on independence, an organization which was peculiarly difficult to combat by reason of the fact that any move against it would be disseminated in the Black Books of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople as evidence of “persecution of the Christians.” Believing that one of the organization’s centers was a body of Greek students which called itself the Pontus Literary Society in the American college at Marsovan, Angora requested Dr. George E. White, president of the college, to suppress the Society. Possibly forgetting that the country was in a state of war and nowhere more bitterly so than in Marsovan, Dr. White refused to suppress the Society. Angora thereupon suppressed the college, deporting its American teaching staff to the coast whence they were removed to Constantinople. A number of Greeks were then arrested in Marsovan on evidence which Angora believed indicated their activity in the Greek organization; they were removed to Angora, placed on trial before a military court under a charge of treason in time of war, convicted and hung. But the tumult in the so-called Pontus still continued. Greek and Turkish irregulars burned each other’s villages and ambushed each other in the fields. This sort of thing dragged along until 1922, when Angora, having failed to break up the Greek organization, deported into the interior the entire Greek population along the Black Sea, men, women and children alike.

Once these deportations had been ordered at Angora, their execution was of necessity left to the local police chiefs and the manner of their execution varied with the temper of the local police chiefs and the amount of supplies available in each province. Both the police chiefs and the amounts of supplies available varied widely, and the treatment of the deportees on the march varied accordingly. The report which Dr. Mark Ward, the Near East Relief worker who was deported from Kharput, made to the British Foreign Office in London as well as to his own Government in Washington, indicates that their sufferings at Kharput were heavy. Dr. Ward in his report laid the blame for their sufferings on Angora. Whether, once other methods had failed to break up the Greek Pontus organization, Angora possessed the means to make deportation a bearable process for the Greeks, is a question which in the lack of conclusive evidence must remain unanswered here. It seems to me more to the point, however, to point out the original guilt of those who landed the Greeks in Asia Minor without the means of protecting them there. The “Pontus” episode is not the first in which Western Powers have permitted the Greeks to expose their own people to danger in the hope that their sufferings will attract Western assistance. There are minorities in every country between Vienna and Bagdad and their exposure to danger constitutes part of the technique of Balkan statecraft. Greek atrocities at Ismid resulted in Osman Agha’s reprisals at Marsovan. It is not impossible that that was the purpose with which Greek atrocities along the Marmora shore began. Certainly it is difficult to find any other purpose in the conduct of Greek regular troops. Thus it is that Balkan peoples draw their new frontiers. Thus it has been for a century and thus presumably it will continue to be, as long as the West permits.

It seems to me (and I must add in fairness that my knowledge of the “Pontus” deportations, while gleaned at Angora and the Oecumenical Patriarchate alike, is purely second-hand) that it is open to question whether Angora’s deportation of Greek women was justified and whether it made the fullest use of such scanty supplies as it had in caring for the deportees on the march. On the other hand, the action of the British in disembarking the Greeks into the “Pontus” without protest from the Oecumenical Patriarchate, could only be justified if the Turks remained helpless and passive. As soon as Nationalism began to gather strength in the interior, the most elemental sense of humanity on the part of the British and the Oecumenical Patriarchate should have prompted negotiations with Angora looking toward the re-embarkation of the “Pontus” women and the humane internment of the men.

The deportation of the “Pontus” Greeks and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha’s victory over the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia kept Angora’s rear open. The British front in the Mosul province of Mesopotamia has never threatened Angora’s rear, for the mountainous nature of the country ahead of them has made impossible any further advance on the part of the British. Here the British have sought to partition the Kurdish population, leaving its northern half to Angora and incorporating its southern half in the Arab State of Iraq. Whether the chiefs of the Kurdish tribes prefer to be under Turkish rule or under Arab rule or independent under the British aegis, is a question to which Angora and Bagdad furnish widely varying answers. It seems probable, however, that Kurdish opinion, such as it is, does not relish partition and if there are Kurdish deputies at Angora, it is because the Turks are the only parties to the Mosul controversy who do not propose to divide the Kurdish country. There is a wider aspect, however, to the Mosul controversy. Turks and Arabs alike are Sunni Moslems and as long as the British can maintain a controversy over Mosul between the new Turkish State and the Arab State of Iraq, Islam remains in a divided condition. It is the desire to abstain from any action over Mosul which might widen that breach, which has prompted Djavid Pasha, the Turkish commander at Diarbekr, to refrain from the use of force in the recovery of Mosul. The sheikh of the Senussi who girded the late Caliph on his accession to the Throne in 1918, and who fled from Brussa to Angora when the Greeks entered Smyrna, has been at Diarbekr for the last three years, attempting to heal the Turco-Arab breach over Mosul. Thus far, the conduct of the Turkish command on the Mosul “front” has been marked by a conspicuous restraint.

As Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas looked toward the West, they were confronted by three military fronts, the Cilician front on their left, the Greek front behind Smyrna on their center, and the Allied occupation of Constantinople on their right. In the winter of 1919-’20, the British high command in Cairo withdrew its forces from Cilicia in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, to Palestine, leaving the French command at Beirut in sole occupation of the northern end of the Syrian corridor and of Cilicia. Here, under the French aegis in Cilicia, an Armenian enclave was being carved out and the Turkish administration had withdrawn to Bozanti, a town at the top of the Taurus Range. The French front extended from the Taurus east to the Mosul province, but it was in Cilicia that the weight of the French occupation made itself chiefly felt. The Armenians revenged the undoubted wrongs which they had suffered under the Ottoman Sultans in drastic fashion and there were streets even in Adana itself in which it was not safe for a Turk to show himself after dark. The Turkish towns outside the rim of the French area, possibly inflamed by the tales of Turkish refugees from Adana, soon launched a guerilla warfare against the Franco-Armenian regular troops and began isolating out-lying garrisons. Much of this was directed by the Turkish ex-administration at Bozanti, but it was carried on largely by Turkish irregulars with any following which they could impress into service.