Turkey; the Awakening of Turkey; the Turkish Revolution of 1908

by E. F. Knight

And even the spies themselves had other spies set to spy upon them by the all-suspicious ruler. The Sultan’s spies were in every foreign capital—sometimes working with its secret police—to keep an eye upon the exiles and seek evidence to entrap friends of theirs in Turkey who might be in communication with them. And from this great army of spies a flood of denunciations poured into the Palace. The denunciations were well paid for, so the supply never failed, even when the terrorised people avoided any conduct that could be construed into a political offence. Agents provocateurs incited men to acts that would afford ground for accusation. The spies did not hesitate to bear false testimony against the innocent, and, as in the case of Midhat Pasha, the creatures of the Palace, when desirous of ruining some individual, employed wretches to trump up the tale that would condemn him. A friend of mine suffered long imprisonment because the secret police searched his house and there pretended to find compromising papers which they themselves had forged. It is scarcely necessary to add that vile people availed themselves of the system to levy blackmail by threatening denunciation.

The denounced were often condemned without any pretence of a legal trial. Many of the best men in the country disappeared from their families never to return, their fate the oubliette, or death by the cord, or the traditional dropping into the Bosphorus of a sack containing the victim. Exile or imprisonment for a term of years were the punishments awarded for minor indiscretions—chance words expressing disapproval of the methods of the Palace, or the possession of a foreign paper of liberal views. People were tortured in the Palace to betray their friends and relations. Thousands of families in Turkey have had to mourn members torn away after denunciations by the spies. After the proclamation of the Constitution about seventy thousand exiles returned to Turkey from remote parts of the Empire (the Siberias of Turkey) and from foreign countries, and how many thousands have been put to death or have died in captivity no man can tell.

I may mention here that during the latter years of the Hamidian régime many Turks were denounced and suffered because they manifested friendship for the English. The Turks are not a fickle people, and despite the thirty years’ aloofness of the English through misconceptions regarding the Turkish people, the Turks themselves have ever remained faithful to their old friends, and the present enthusiasm for England is no passing wave. But the Palace hated the British Government which had attempted to force reforms upon Turkey, and it suspected all Englishmen of sharing the views of the Balkan Committee. On the other hand, German influence became ascendant at the Palace about twelve years ago, and remained so until the overthrow of the Despotism; for German diplomacy is not sentimental; it did not worry the Palace with humanitarian pressure for the sake of securing the better government of the unfortunate subjects of the Sultan; and it even assisted the Porte to thwart the efforts of the other Powers. Its main object was to further German commercial interests. The German Embassy in Constantinople squeezed concessions out of the Turkish Government by curious methods, and knew well how to make use of Palace intrigues and corrupt officialism. Helped by their Government, German syndicates, with cynical disregard of the fact that they were hurrying the country to its ruin, worked in league with those in the Palace, who were ready to betray their fatherland for a bribe, and secured the Baghdad railway concession with its iniquitous kilometric guarantee, and other privileges, on terms far more onerous for Turkey than could have been obtained from other quarters, thus burdening the country with unfair obligations, which now cripple her efforts for reform and reorganisation.

But I must not digress into the tortuous ways of Turkish finance, which is outside the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that German influence at the Palace undoubtedly intensified the Sultan’s hatred of England, and the obsequious spies received their cue. The English in Turkey were in no wise molested, but they were declared taboo by the authorities. For a Turk even to be seen talking to an Englishman was dangerous. Turks feared to look towards the English Embassy as they passed it. They were forbidden to visit certain English establishments, such as the English book-shop in Pera, and the quaint old inn in Galata, built long ago by the Genoese, where, with a retired British sea-captain as host, naval officers, British and Turkish, had been wont to foregather in good fellowship. The spies were busily employed in denouncing such Turks as were supposed to be Anglophil. A friend of mine, who at that time held a good appointment and enjoyed a large income, was reported by the spies as having intrigued to bring the British fleet to Constantinople. He was imprisoned for five years. He was released with all other political prisoners after the successful revolution, and came back to the world to find himself penniless; to learn that his wife, having first become blind from unceasing weeping, had died practically in a starving condition, and that his children were living on charity.

It ought not to be forgotten by Englishmen that when they were engaged in their last war with the Boers, and all Europe was reviling them, the Turks alone—and notably those of the educated classes who now rule the country as the Young Turk party—were in sympathy with them, and some of them suffered in consequence. A number of young officers of the army and navy, and others, put their names to a document in which they expressed their hope that the British arms would prove successful in South Africa, and this they carried to the British Embassy to present to the English Ambassador. The Palace heard of this; the spies were set to work to ascertain what names appeared upon the incriminating document, and one by one every one of these men disappeared, being snatched up to be put into prison, or to be sent into exile. One of these young officers, Sirret Bey, escaped from those who arrested him, hid himself for some time in the guise of a cook in the British Consulate, and is now one of the leading members of the Committee of Union and Progress in Salonika.

This dreadful system of espionage and the suppression of all intellectual liberty fell harder on the educated Mussulmans than on the Christian subjects of the Sultan, for despotism had no such fear of the Greek or Armenian as it had of the patriotic Turk, and the Christians therefore were not so closely watched and had more chance of public appointment. The Christians also had one important advantage over the Mussulman Turks in so much as their privileges allowed them to establish schools uncontrolled by the State, which provided a more liberal education than was possible in the Moslem schools. It can be readily understood, therefore, how patriotic Turks of the upper and middle classes, ground down under this tyranny that gave them no voice in the administration and placed over them mean men who were hurrying the country to its destruction, were prepared to join in any movement that promised a fair chance of overthrowing the Hamidian régime.

It is also easy to understand that the Christians, who during this reign were deprived of some of their ancient rights, who were treated with a more galling contumely than ever before, as a subject and despised people, and lived in perpetual dread of massacre and outrage, welcomed the revolution that placed them on an equality with the Mussulmans; but how it came to pass that the Despotism became so intolerable to the masses of the Turkish people as to excite to rebellion even the patient, religious Moslem peasants, who had hitherto revered the Sultan as their spiritual ruler as well as their monarch, and had been blindly and fanatically obedient to his will, requires some explanation. The thrifty, hard-working Turkish peasants suffered as much as the Christians from the evils of the administration; they paid the same heavy taxes, and, like their Christian neighbours, they were cheated by the tax-collectors, being often illegally mulcted and most harshly treated by petty tyrants. The provincial officials did not receive their pay regularly, and so recouped themselves by corrupt practices. Thus the rich, by paying bribes, succeeded in many cases in avoiding taxation altogether, and many unfair exemptions were allowed; with the result that in some places nearly all the burden of taxation fell upon the poor. The peasants were shrewd enough to perceive that the money thus wrung from them did not produce any good for themselves or their country, but went to enrich the ruling clique, and that Constantinople swallowed up the huge sums that were collected in every part of the Empire. They knew that there were Ministries established in costly palaces and maintaining a large number of well-paid officials, while the result of this extravagant expenditure was not anywhere to be seen. Thus there was a Ministry of Public Works, but there were no roads or irrigation works; a Ministry of Police, but no protection of life and property; a Ministry of Justice, and no justice; a Ministry of War, and a starved army.

But the stoical Mussulman peasants, whose faithfulness is as that of a dog, were loth to think ill of their Sultan, and they put the blame upon his Ministers as doing wrong without his knowledge. Oppression and unjust taxation by themselves would not have driven these people into revolt, and the Young Turk movement would have had small chance of success, had not Abdul Hamid neglected to secure—what would have been so easy to secure—the continued fidelity and affection of his army, of which the splendid peasantry of the country form the backbone. I have explained that the Sultan was careful to pamper the Albanian and other regiments that were stationed in Constantinople to protect his person, overawe the city, and preserve the Despotism; and he saw to it that these men duly received their pay, were well fed and properly clothed. But with this exception the military administration of the Empire was left wholly in the hands of the Palace favourites, who, with their characteristic greed and total lack of patriotic sentiment, enriched themselves at the expense of the national defence and, with a callous indifference to the sufferings of the men, practically starved the army.

In Turkey, the burden of obligatory service is placed exclusively on the Mussulman population, the Christians up till now having enjoyed complete exemption, in return for which they have paid a small poll-tax. The Turkish soldier is among the toughest as well as the bravest in the world, and he will undergo great hardships uncomplainingly; but there are limits even to his endurance. It would be difficult to exaggerate the pitiable condition of these fine troops, as I have often seen them in provincial garrisons and posts in the days of the old régime. They never received their full rations; sometimes they were in a starving condition; they were ill-clothed even when guarding the frontier through the hard Balkan winters; often in rags and tatters, with what remained of their uniforms supplemented with such native garments as they could pick up; their small pay was always in arrears; they were untrained and undisciplined—a pitiful waste of the finest military material in Europe; and the officers themselves irregularly paid, slovenly, because they had no means to procure the decencies of life, and estranged one from the other by the hateful spy system, were in no condition to inspire their men with the high spirit and esprit de corps that used to distinguish the Turkish army. But despite all this, when fighting had to be done these men remembered that they were Turkish soldiers, and fought well.

The Turkish soldier might even have put up with all this during his four years of service with the colours, for it takes much to rouse him to mutiny; but his oppression took one form that was intolerable to him and to his family; the iniquitous custom grew up of keeping him with the army for several years after his term of service had legally expired; and the reservists also, when called out for their periodical training, were not infrequently carried off to remote parts of the Empire and compelled to resume their military service for an indefinite time. The worst lot of all was that of regiments ordered to the Hedjaz or the Yemen. In those wild regions the wretched troops, ill-equipped, with wholly inadequate transport, and therefore always short of food, and generally provided with insufficient ammunition, had to carry on long campaigns against the rebel Arabs. They thus suffered great privations, and were not seldom defeated and massacred in consequence of the criminal negligence of Turkey’s rulers. Educated surgeons were rarely attached to these expeditions, and I have been assured by old soldiers, who had served in Arabia, that if a man was sick or wounded, so that he was unable to march, there was little chance for him, as there were no means for carrying him; and that in these circumstances the ignorant and ill-paid men who played the part of army doctors, after pretending to examine a man, would declare that he was in a dying condition, and had him buried in the sand while yet alive. It often happened, too, that soldiers in Arabia, when they did get their discharge—probably because they were unfit for further service—were refused transport back to Turkey on the Government ships, and, being penniless, had to remain in that alien land until charitable people, of whom there are happily plenty among the Turks, came to their rescue. A friend of mine, who was recently British consul in a Turkish port, after careful investigation in his particular district, found that not more than twenty per cent. of the soldiers who were sent to the Yemen returned to their homes. Whenever conscripts were carried away for service in that dreaded land there were piteous scenes, and crowds of wailing women would come to the ship’s side to bid a last farewell to the relatives whom they never expected to see again, and already mourned as dead.