The Rebirth of Turkey

by Clair Price

“Article III. Turkey is governed by the Grand National Assembly and its Government is entitled ‘the Government of the Grand National Assembly.’ “Article IV. The Grand National Assembly is composed of members elected by the inhabitants of provinces.

“Article V. The election of members of the Grand National Assembly takes place once in every two years. The duration of membership is two years only. Members may be re-elected. The Assembly continues its session until the new Assembly is convened. In case it is impossible to hold new elections, the session of the Assembly may be prolonged for one year only. Each member of the Grand National Assembly represents not only his province but is also a representative of the nation.

“Article VI. The general session of the Grand National Assembly takes place on the first of November without convocation.

“Article VII. Fundamental rights such as the enactment dispositions of the Sheriat (Moslem law), the making, modification and abrogation of laws, the conclusion of conventions and treaties of peace, and the call for the defense of the country, belong to the Grand National Assembly. The making of laws shall be based on principles of jurisprudence which are most closely adapted to the needs of the nation and to the requirements of its customs and habits. The powers and duties of the council of mandatory Ministers of the nation shall be determined by special laws.

“Article VIII. The Grand National Assembly administers its governmental departments through mandatory Ministers elected by the Assembly, according to rules to be provided in a special law. It is the Grand National Assembly which instructs the mandatory Ministers in executive matters and if necessary changes the Ministers….

“Article XI. In local matters, the province has an autonomous personality. With the exception of internal and external policy, the Sheriat, justice, military affairs, international economic relations, government imposts and inter-provincial matters, the provinces are charged with the administration, under laws to be promulgated by the Grand National Assembly, of the Evkaf (Moslem religious endowments), educational institutions, sanitary services, local economics, agriculture, public works and social services….”

The remaining articles outline the organization of the provincial and sub-provincial administrations. In this fundamental law, the Nationalist Revolution of 1920 undertakes to effect the same decentralization in administration as the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 failed to effect. It undertakes infinitely more than that. At a single stroke, it lifts the new Turkish State out of the dead grip of ancient religious usage which strangled the 1908 Revolution, which in fact made effective revolution of any sort a traditional and hackneyed impossibility in the old Ottoman Empire. Whether the new Turkish State will succeed in maintaining its new and highly promising freedom from the stiff religious traditions which imprisoned the old Empire, remains to be seen. Christian reaction has been met and defeated on the field of battle, but Moslem reaction is still suppressed by the iron hand of the Assembly’s Treason Law. Hidden away in the bitter loneliness of Anatolia, the Nationalist Party has used drastic methods in laying the foundations of its Western governmental structure in the Eastern soil of Anatolia. If those foundations have been well and firmly laid, we have something new in the East at last.

Westerners who did not penetrate the thick veil of war which screened Anatolia from the world during its years of seige, will not find it easy to realize the suspicion with which it regarded us in the West. Deceived again and again by Mr. Lloyd George, goaded by repeated Greek atrocities unwittingly reinforced by wild atrocity tales to which the hospitable American press opened its columns, only a man of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s iron patience could have compelled his angry countrymen to persevere in the search for a peaceful escape from the fate which loomed above them on every frontier. Yet amid the suspicion which possessed Anatolia during those hard years, the Nationalist Party created a new and very real human force known as nationalism. Patriotism, love of one’s own soil, is a Western sentiment which would have required a generation under normal circumstances for its transplantation to the Eastern soil of Anatolia, but under the circumstance of a Greek Smyrna, it sprang into existence overnight. The Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, travelling from village to village in Anatolia with a Turkish officer attached to him, added fuel to the new flame of nationalism with his old cry, “I am a Turk; my race and language are great.” Newspaper plants, smuggled out from Constantinople, pieces of press machinery concealed in travellers’ baggage, handfuls of type dropped into travellers’ pockets, produced new dailies and weeklies in Anatolia which poured more fuel on the new flame. The whole culture of the Turks was moved bit by bit from the old capital to the new center of the nation’s life. Rafet Pasha’s Military Courts of Independence suppressed any attempt to quench the new flame. These Courts were a harsh reminder that there was such a thing as a distinctive Middle Eastern civilization and that it had come to a time when there was no longer any room in Anatolia for natives who were not loyal to their own civilization. The old religious divisions which had split the Anatolian population swiftly melted away in the heat of the new flame. Papa Eftim Effendi gave up his community rights and sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior followed him into the new Turkish Orthodox Church, agreeing to appoint no metropolitans except those who could read and write Turkish, who were of Ottoman parentage, who had lived at least five years in the country and who had abstained from “political activity.” They agreed furthermore that metropolitans accused of secular crimes, instead of being immune from arrest without having first been degraded and then being subject to imprisonment only in the Oecumenical Patriarchate, were to be arrested and tried as any other Turkish subject would be. Moslems permitted a new personage called the Minister of Sacred Law to become an ordinary member of the Cabinet at Angora, and the huge wealth which was locked up in the country’s Moslem endowments was opened and placed at the disposition of the provincial administrations. Moslem courts and schools were taken over by the Ministers of Justice and Education, respectively. Although American churchmen still thought in terms of the old Ottoman Empire, still played upon the old religious division between Moslems and Christians which had proved the ruin of them both, the new political force of nationalism was blending them in Turkey as in Syria, in Palestine and in Egypt. Nationalism is a strangely new and Western force in the East today and thus far Anatolia has clung to it in the face of every effort which Mr. Lloyd George and American churchmen could exert to throw the country back into the ruin of its bitter past.

For a year after the Greeks landed at Smyrna on May 15, 1919, they sat in the hinterland of the great port waiting for the Sevres Treaty, while Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha worked like Trojans at Angora. In May, 1920, they threw their screen in front of the Straits, Ismet Pasha making no effort to molest them. In November, 1920, Old Greece finally rid itself of Mr. Venizelos, a wedge was driven between Athens and the Phanar, and the French made Constantine an excuse for disentangling themselves from the Greeks. Royalist officers now took over the front behind Smyrna with no respect for the Allied veto on a drive toward Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar. With these two railway junctions occupied, the Greeks would possess the great semi-circle of railway which runs from Constantinople to Smyrna, and the Turks would be deprived of the interior Angora-Konia line with which they were secretly re-mobilizing and re-equipping their Armies on the Smyrna front. Accordingly in January, 1921, the Royalist Greek command tried its strength from Brussa toward Eski-Shehr and retired without encountering Turkish opposition. The situation was now plain. Eski-Shehr and Afium were theirs whenever they cared to take them. As for Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha at Angora, they had imposed a strict embargo on travellers into the interior of Anatolia and the secrecy they succeeded in preserving was one of their striking successes.

Two months later, in March, 1921, the Royalist Greek command launched its double advance, the Southern Army moving on Afium from Ushak, the Northern Army on Eski-Shehr from Brussa. To their surprise, both advances encountered organized Turkish forces of considerable strength. The Southern Army, against stiff opposition, succeeded in occupying Afium but the Northern Army, following the route it had walked over in January, ran into a murderous battle at Inë-Onü and had to fall back to its old position at Brussa, the Southern Army falling back from Afium to Ushak with it. That battle was the first meeting of Greek and Turkish troops in Asia Minor and is today one of the epics of the new Turkey.