TURKISH NATIONALISM

THE WESTERN TRADITION OF GOVERNMENT TO WHICH THE GRAND NATIONAL ASSEMBLY WAS BUILT—​HOW NATIONALISM WAS CREATED—​GREEK DEFEAT AT THE SAKARIA RIVER—​PEACE WITH THE FRENCH IN CILICIA—​AMERICAN ARMENIANISM AND CILICIA—​HOW A CIVILIAN ADMINISTRATION WAS BEGUN AT ANGORA WHILE FEVZI PASHA WAS RE-MOBILIZING AND RE-EQUIPPING THE TURKISH ARMIES.

When the Grand National Assembly opened its first session on April 23, 1920, in the gray granite building at the foot of Angora, the Crescent and Star went up on the flag-staff atop the building and, although trenches were dug for its military defense if necessary, the Turkish flag has flown there night and day ever since it was first hoisted. At one corner of the grounds, just outside the trenches which encircle the building, a gallows was erected. In a little restaurant near the Assembly building, I have sat at luncheon with that gallows looking in through the window. I have thought several times as I sat there of a number of worthy Americans at home who might have held less simple views on Near and Middle Eastern subjects in days gone by, if they could have sat at luncheon in Angora with the cross-beam and pulley of that gallows looking in upon them.

The Assembly building itself contains a single floor with a corridor down its middle, a row of committee rooms on one side and a comparatively large chamber on the other. The chamber was equipped for the Assembly’s use by the construction of a high desk for “Mr. Speaker” in the center of one wall and a lower desk in front of it to be used by deputies in addressing the Assembly. Grouped in semi-circular fashion around the Speaker’s desk, the small desks to be used by the deputies themselves were crowded upon the floor of the chamber in long rows. Half-way up the side walls, small galleries were built for visitors. The whole equipment was of wood. It looked like a school-room. It was a school-room, possibly as bitter a school-room as any nation has ever attended.

The 342 deputies of the Assembly were in large part, and still are, Easterners engaged in adapting the Western governmental tradition to their own uses, but they have never sold their great Eastern birthright for a mess of Western pottage. When they gathered for their first session at 1 o’clock on April 23, 1920, a small motto, done in Turkish script of white on a blue ground, a quotation from the Koran such as may be found in thousands of devout Moslem homes, was hung on the wall above the Speaker’s desk. A free translation of it into English would be: “Let us meet together in council and discuss.” It was the ground on which the new force of nationalism was carrying the conservative peasantry of Anatolia behind the Caliph in Constantinople to the Koran itself, on which it was wrenching Anatolia away from the Sultan and his Grand Vizier while refraining from any violation of its allegiance to the Ottoman Caliphate.

Beneath that motto, the deputies met at 1 o’clock every day but Friday, which is the Moslem Sabbath. They consisted of men in Western dress and kalpaks, officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman Army days, and hojas in Eastern robes and turbans. They varied in personal appearance from the ample and immaculate figure of Djelal-ed-Din Arif Bey, deputy for Erzerum, to three Kurdish chiefs who could neither read nor write. The din of their conversation, both within the chamber and in the corridor without, was continual and the intermittent tinkle of the Speaker’s hand-bell did little to abate it, for the Assembly at Angora is as noisy as all other Parliaments are.

The military dictatorship which Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha wielded over Anatolia was in the Eastern tradition, but in the institution of the Assembly a Western plant began taking root in the Eastern soil of Anatolia. The military dictatorship would pass with the war but the Assembly was intended to be permanent and it was fashioned in readiness to begin functioning as soon as the war permitted. In its structure, the Western tradition was adapted to what were believed to be the country’s needs. It was necessarily fashioned to a theory at first, for the number of enemies who ringed it about made a dictatorship essential. As the war approached its end, as more men and more money became available, practice might modify it but with the loss of the Parliament at Constantinople it afforded the only attempt at an ultimately civilian administration which the country possessed.

This is the theory to which it was built: Under the Ottoman Constitution, as revived by the 1908 Revolution, the powers of declaring war and peace, of dissolving Parliament, of receiving diplomatic representatives of foreign States, and of appointing the Cabinet and the Senate, had been vested in the Sultan. In the creation of the Grand National Assembly, the Sultan was deposed and his prerogatives were re-distributed. The Assembly itself became the seat of authority and since its sessions were fixed by its fundamental law at two years’ duration, no right of dissolving it was admitted. The power of receiving diplomatic representatives of foreign States was delegated to the President of the Assembly. The power of appointing the Cabinet was taken by the Assembly and since its Ministers were made individually responsible to the Assembly, both the executive and the legislative functions of government were retained in its hands. The Senate disappeared with the Sultan and the Government of the Grand National Assembly became radically republican in structure. Differences of opinion existed in the Nationalist Party respecting its permanent structure, a small school of monarchist opinion holding that a form of government so unreservedly republican would not show itself suited to the country’s peace-time needs, but for the time being domestic controversies were buried deeply beneath the urgencies of the military situation. No differences of opinion have existed among Westerners who know the East, however. It has long been a belief in the West that the East can only be ruled by Sultans. We Westerners may be right or we may be wrong in our views of the East, but Turkish Nationalism has thrown us a most direct challenge in the out-and-out republicanism of its Grand National Assembly. When the war ends, we shall see what we shall see.

The Grand National Assembly speedily set about the elaboration of a fundamental law which may be taken as the Constitution in embryo of the new Turkish State. It was finally adopted on June 17, 1920, and its more important clauses translate from Turkish into English as follows: “Article I. Sovereignty belongs to the nation without reservation. The administration of the nation’s sovereignty is based on the principle of the direct decision of the people.

“Article II. The executive power as well as the legislative power are concentrated in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey which alone represents the nation.