The Rebirth of Turkey

by Clair Price

As for the Greek front behind Smyrna, the first defense which was used was that of the Circassian bandit leader, Edhem, but the Greek command soon won him over and made a considerable hero of him. This left Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas without defense and the skeleton Third Army which was hastily transferred from Amasia, covering Samsun, to the Smyrna front was too depleted in strength to offer effective resistance. Nuri Ismet Pasha, a slight deaf man but an able pupil of von der Goltz and the Potsdam War College, was given command on the Smyrna front and the hasty extemporization of munition factories began at Konia in his rear. Until his forces should be built up to an effective strength, however, he restricted himself to keeping in touch with the Greeks, and with all of Asia Minor behind him in which to maneuvre, he traded territory for time whenever the Greeks showed an inclination to move. Luckily for Angora, the Greeks sat waiting on the Allies and attempted little movement after their first rush ended.

Thus hemmed about with enemies, the Nationalist Party had won a clean-cut political victory by installing its Parliamentary majority in Constantinople, and its troops had penetrated into the very suburbs of the capital in search of surrendered munitions with which to re-equip themselves. Although the Mudros armistice had been torn up at the Greek occupation of Smyrna and a state of war again existed, Angora was in close telegraphic communication with Rauf Bey, the leader of its Parliamentary majority in Constantinople. Indeed, with the British Navy commanding those sections of its perimeter which were not in the occupation of enemy Armies, Angora’s wire to Constantinople constituted its only means of communication with the West.

But on the night of March 15-16, 1920, General Milne isolated Constantinople from Anatolia, conducted a series of lightning raids at midnight in Stamboul, arrested Rauf Bey and many of his colleagues for deportation to Malta, and not only cut off Angora from the legal Parliamentary machinery which it had spent eight months in building up, but cut it off from any means of effective communication with the West. This was a staggering blow. Angora immediately ordered the arrest of the few British officers who remained in Asia Minor, chief among them Lord Rawlinson’s brother who was jailed at Erzerum, but with Rauf Bey and his colleagues on their way to Malta as prisoners of the British, the Nationalists lost some of the best brains in the Party. The Italians soon opened their cable from Adalia to Rhodes whence a wireless was in communication with Rome, but Angora’s sole contact with the West was even then at the disposal of a foreign Power.

Within the next few weeks, deputies who had escaped General Milne’s midnight raids in Stamboul, began filtering into Angora and an attempt to reconstruct the shattered Parliament began. A month was allowed for escaped deputies to reach Angora and claim their seats in the new Parliament, and the seats of others who had been interned on Malta were awarded in new “elections,” one of which is said to have been held in the Asiatic suburbs of Constantinople itself where Italian forces were in occupation; Italy has never relished the hurried Greek occupation of Smyrna.

So on April 23, 1920, the reconstructed Parliament, with deputies sitting for constituencies in all the areas covered by the Erzerum program, from Thrace to Mosul, began its session in the old Committee of Union and Progress building in Angora, under the new name of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Mustapha Kemal Pasha was made Commander-in-Chief and President, Fevzi Pasha became Chief of the General Staff and Prime Minister, Rafet Pasha became Minister of War and Interior, and the deputies acquiesced in the military dictatorship which they found at Angora. Even in the West, democracy does not thrive in time of war, nor did it in the war-ringed isolation of Angora. Forty percent requisitions, accompanied by ruinously heavy taxation afforded, not enough money to balance the Assembly’s budgets, but enough to enable Fevzi and Rafet Pashas to continue re-mobilizing and re-equipping the Army.

On April 6, Damad Ferid Pasha again became Grand Vizier in Constantinople and began at once a determined effort to regain a foothold in Anatolia. Fevzi and Rafet Pashas replied to him with a series of so-called Military Courts of Independence, before which any late Ottoman subject suspected of anti-Nationalism could be brought, tried under the Army code for treason in time of war, and if convicted summarily hung. In the Nationalist view, the Ottoman Sultanate and the Ottoman Government had alike ceased to exist on the night of March 15-16, 1920, and Damad Ferid Pasha, with the prestige of the Ottoman Caliphate at his disposal, now added himself to the Western enemies who surrounded Angora in a final struggle for the possession of the new Turkish State.

The Greeks were hurriedly flung in front of the Straits, Ismet Pasha making no attempt to oppose them, and from behind them Ferid in Constantinople appealed to Old Turkish opinion at Konia to uphold the conservative usages of Islam and denounce the Nationalists. It was an appeal which had helped to nullify the Young Turkish Revolution in 1908, which had helped to keep the old Empire in the stiff dead grip of religious usage. It was a very powerful appeal and the Greek command at Smyrna lost no time in re-inforcing it by proclaiming its solicitude for the Caliphate of Islam. Moslem and Christian reaction were the rocks on which the 1908 Revolution had come to grief and the Greek command at Smyrna lost no time in dropping them into the channel which the Nationalist Revolution of 1920 would have to thread. Since Greeks and Armenians were then at war with Turkey, Christian reaction had no standing at Angora, but Moslem reaction is a rock which Turkey is to this day still engaged in passing and will be for some years to come. Ferid had no more powerful weapon with which to attack the Nationalist hold on the conservative peasantry of Asia Minor and on the dervish tekkes of Konia. The Nationalists could handle their strong but docile peasantry, but if the worst came to the worst at Konia the Nationalists could make it plain that Indian and Algerian Moslems had fought against the Ottoman Government during the war and that in the new Turkish State the needs of the country took precedence over the letter of Moslem law.

From April 6, 1920, when Damad Ferid Pasha re-entered office in Constantinople, a Nationalist coastguard was instituted on the Mediterranean opposite Konia in order to oppose any attempt at a landing, whether by Ferid’s followers from the capital or by Greeks engaged in the interesting business of proclaiming their solicitude for Islam. Konia itself, a dusty wind-swept provincial capital on the Anatolian plateau, replete with old Seljukian and pre-Seljukian mosques, was linked with Angora by a great semi-circle of railway line which bent westward via Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar, and thrice-a-week trains made the journey in eighteen hours. At the same time, this bend of railway line was identical from Eski-Shehr to Afium with another bend from Constantinople to Smyrna. With Smyrna and its hinterland in Greek hands, the Greek command added to its new interest in Islam a scheme for the revival under Greek auspices of the old Seljukian Empire with its seat at Konia. The Seljukian program is another of the ghosts which became stirred to life when the Ottoman Empire went down in 1918 to join the dead.

Ferid’s agents and Greek agents kept slipping through the Greek lines toward Konia and moving back and forth under the coasts of Asia Minor with their eyes on Konia. In the British view, the Ottoman dynasty had lost the Caliphate in 1914 when it was used to declare a holy war against the British and their Allies. Events at Mecca had since changed the British view, but if the Caliphate were not too serious a matter for light speaking, it might be added that in the Nationalist view the British lost the Caliphate in 1920 when they used it to declare a holy war against the Nationalists. Ferid finally recovered Konia in the counter-revolution of October, 1920, but Rafet Pasha hurried 2,000 men down the railway from Angora, occupied Ala-ed-Din hill in the outskirts of the city and drove out Ferid’s administration in three days of sharp fighting. Rafet Pasha appointed as military governor of Konia, Ghalib Pasha, a tall white-haired Albanian who had defended the Caliphate as Ottoman commander in the Hejaz during the war, and the tchelebi of the Mevlevi dervishes whose historic right it had been to gird each Caliph with the Prophet’s Sword forty days after his accession to the Throne, went to Angora as one of Konia’s eight deputies in the Grand National Assembly. So the Seljukian ghost was laid and the Caliphate came into the Nationalists’ keeping.

The Nationalist hold on the interior of Asia Minor now became indisputable. The munition factories in the rear of Ismet Pasha’s slowly growing forces on the Smyrna front, were quickly enlarged and Konia became a war-center of the first importance in the interior. A considerable number of Armenians who had been returned to Konia after the Mudros armistice and who had voluntarily remained in their homes when the British offered to evacuate them at the time of their own evacuation of the Bagdad Railway, had been compromised anew by the Greek occupation of Smyrna and were placed under increasing military surveillance as the number of Turkish munition factories in the town grew. Armenian “indiscretions,” however, finally led to the deportation of men of military age farther into the interior, and the locking up of their churches in Konia. The juxtaposition of a Turkish munition factory and an Armenian church is one which is possibly apt to produce “indiscretions.” When I was last in Konia, the only Armenians there were women and children. A number of mosques in the town had been taken over for military depots, but no Armenian church in the town had been so taken over. The churches were locked up but otherwise untouched. The Armenian women in the town were permitted to receive no mail from the outside world, for the Nationalist censors were supposed to read Turkish and French only, not Armenian. No Turk ever learns Armenian, and apparently there was no Armenian in whose loyalty the Turks had sufficient confidence to enable them to entrust Armenian mail to him for censorship. The Armenian women were being taxed to the point of robbery, and so were their Turkish neighbors. Ghalib Pasha told me that he was treating Turks and Armenians on a basis of scrupulous equality, and I believe that he meant precisely what he said. If there were enough men like Ghalib Pasha in Turkey to fill all the provincial administrations, Turkey would be a model country. But men like Ghalib Pasha are not appointed chiefs of police in highly delicate places like Konia.