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

by E. F. Knight

But the political dissensions among the Turks themselves—which have been much embittered of late—are more alarming to the friends of Turkey than are any of these risings of lawless peoples. This is no time for the patriotic element to be divided against itself, and it behooves the Young Turks to present a solid and united front to the many external and internal enemies of Turkey’s liberty and the Empire’s integrity. The Committee of Union and Progress, the deliverer of Turkey from the Despotism, has enemies in the land who are unsparing and unscrupulous in their attacks, and most cunning in their intriguings. The anomalous position of the organisation has naturally invited some honest criticism. Almost immediately after the proclamation of the Constitution, not only reactionary Turks and politicians jealous of the Young Turk party, but also European friends of Turkey, including certain British diplomatists and a section of the Press that voices their views, began to urge that the Committee, its work having been accomplished, no longer had a raison d’être and should be dissolved at once. It was pointed out that an irresponsible power behind the Parliament was unconstitutional, and that the Committee, with its unknown leaders, had become an illegal institution now that Turkey had been granted representative government.

Now surely this argument savours of a legal pedantry that ignores surrounding conditions. The Committee was, of course, an illegal institution from its inception; it saved Turkey by illegal methods; a revolution cannot but be an illegal operation: and it would be obviously unsafe on the morrow of a successful revolution—when a nation is still in confusion, when the people have yet no idea how they should exercise their new rights, when the new institutions from their very freedom lie open to the attack of cunning foes—to adhere strictly to constitutional technicalities and legalities, and to break up the strong organised power that has brought about the overthrow of a régime. After the English revolution Cromwell had no scruples in violating law to save a cause. If there had been a strong Committee of Union and Progress behind the Constitution which the Sultan swore to observe on his coming to the throne, Turkey might have been saved thirty years of despotism and the loss of much territory.

The Young Turks fully realised the difficulties and dangers before them. Many were the foes of the newly freed fatherland. There were those of the Great Powers to whom constitutional liberty in Turkey meant interference with their designs to enrich themselves and obtain territorial expansion at Turkey’s expense; there were the smaller Powers on the frontier, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, eager to scramble over the partition of Macedonia; and, far more dangerous than these, there were the Turkish reactionaries, who began to intrigue everywhere against the Constitution immediately after its proclamation, ready to seize their chance when they saw it. The Young Turks in their hour of triumph had freely pardoned all save a few of the worst of the creatures of the Palace, but this great clemency gained them no gratitude. It was also a source of no small danger that the Young Turks, having but few trained administrators in their own ranks, had retained the services of such high officials of the old régime as had no notoriously evil records for corruption or oppression. Some of these men are the secret enemies of the new order of things. The Young Turks, therefore, determined to remain on their guard and see to it that Turkey’s newly won liberty was not wrested from her. As I have stated in a previous chapter, they held that, far from losing its raison d’être on the opening of Parliament, the Committee of Union and Progress would be more necessary than ever for the protection of the country, and they decided not to dissolve this powerful organisation, but to maintain it, legally or illegally, supported as heretofore by the army, until such time as the Constitution should be firmly established. Such was their justification, and they were sincere in their explanations of their resolution.

As will have been gathered from what I have said in this book the Committee of Union and Progress is no small body of patriots. When I was in Turkey it numbered seventy thousand members. I understand that it now has a membership of about a hundred thousand. It includes all that is best and most patriotic of the educated young Moslem manhood of the country. There are now the many Christians, too, on the Committee who have rejected the idle separatist aspirations of their several races and have Ottoman unity as their ideal, and also many of those Jews who from the beginning have co-operated loyally with the Young Turks. When I was in the country last autumn it looked much as if this Committee had as its members nearly all the men to whom it would be safest to leave the guidance of the Empire.

Unfortunately, it seems to be an undoubted fact that the Committee of Union and Progress has made many enemies even among those who cannot be accused of reactionary tendencies. The Committee has undoubtedly done some ill-advised and tactless things, and its arbitrary methods have raised up against itself some relentless foes; but there can, I think, be no doubt that it has been actuated throughout by pure and patriotic motives, and that its errors have been those of zeal and inexperience. I have met several members of the party recently, and they all sincerely believe that the Committee had very good reasons for compelling Kiamil Pasha to resign the Grand Vizierate in February last; they are confident that the aged statesman had been misled by the plausible enemies of Turkey’s liberties and was being duped by reactionaries. The friction between the Committee and the Grand Vizier commenced some months before the opening of the Parliament; Kiamil, being a Pasha of the old school, naturally resented the dictation of the Committee, and complained that while his was the responsibility the Committee held all the power. The Committee was alarmed by Kiamil Pasha’s friendly relations with the Liberal Union, the party in opposition to the Committee, and recognised the insidious work of reactionary influence when Kiamil despatched from Constantinople to Macedonia certain battalions that were faithful to the Committee, thus imperilling, in the eyes of the Young Turks, the safety of the constitutional cause in the capital. When the Grand Vizier, without consultation with his ministers or with the party, suddenly dismissed the Ministers of War and Marine, the nominees of the Committee, and placed others in their stead, the crisis was precipitated. The Young Turks, above all things, were determined that those in whom they did not place implicit confidence should not control the army, so the Committee, even as it had compelled the resignation of Said Pasha, because he had left the appointment of the Ministers of War and Marine in the hands of the Sultan, now insisted upon the resignation of Kiamil Pasha, and effected its purpose in so peremptory a way that it lost much of its popularity with the people and afforded its unscrupulous enemies a handle for attack. The intrigues connected with the fall of Kiamil Pasha need not be discussed here; but one gathers that the man chiefly to blame is Kiamil’s own son, Said, a worthless person who enriched himself by co-operating with the brigands in the neighbourhood of Smyrna. On several previous occasions he has compromised by his intrigues his aged father, the one person in Turkey who believes that there is no real harm in this very bad specimen of a young Turkish gentleman. Of Kiamil Pasha’s successor to the Grand Vizierate, Hilmi Pasha, I have already spoken.

The Committee justified its treatment of Kiamil Pasha and its other arbitrary acts by pleading the necessity of protecting the nation against the strong reactionary forces which certainly do exist, despite the assertions of the organs of the Liberal Union, which have ever ridiculed the possibility of a reactionary movement, and have accused the Committee of having invented this bogey as an excuse for its own despotic methods. Kiamil Pasha had ever been the friend of the English, and his removal from the Grand Vizierate produced—to the great regret of the Young Turks—a somewhat bad impression in England, the country above all others whose friendship is valued by patriotic Turks. Those who had held that the Committee was an illegal institution and ought to be dissolved became alienated for a while from the men who had been the saviours of Turkey; and it is a great pity that this was so, for at that critical time the Young Turks, who never before had trod the tortuous ways of politics, and were apt to fall into the traps that were cunningly laid for them, were much in need of the sympathetic help and advice from those whose experience and knowledge qualified them to offer these. The result is, I think, that the Young Turk side of the question has not been understood in England.

The Young Turk party, as represented by the Committee of Union and Progress, is now but one of several parties in Turkey professing Liberal principles. In Parliament the Committee’s nominees form the large majority; but the rival parties, though they may be numerically small and were regarded as insignificant when I was in the country, have displayed great energy in winning supporters outside the Chamber, and are no longer a negligible quantity. Though diametrically opposed to each other in their principles, they appear to be united in their hatred and jealousy of the Young Turk party, without whose self-sacrificing struggle for freedom they would never have had an opportunity of existing at all. The Young Turks, as I have explained, desired Ottoman unity, perhaps an impossible but certainly a noble ideal, and it was a disappointment to them that, so soon as Parliament met, the Deputies who were not partisans of the Committee divided themselves into distinct nationalist groups, some of them impracticably socialistic in their aims, others separatist at heart.

By far the most powerful of these groups, a composite party, composed of Moslems, Christians, and others, calls itself the Liberal Union. Whereas the Young Turks, while advocating equality without distinction of race or creed, insists that the supremacy of the Mussulman Turks should be safeguarded, desires to bring about a fusion of the different elements, and wants no greater administrative decentralisation than is necessary; the Liberal Union, on the other hand, is opposed to what it terms Turkish Chauvinism, and asks for a degree of decentralisation which the Young Turks regard as dangerous to the integrity of the Empire. The Liberal Union therefore stands for home rule. It is largely supported by the Greek element, and this fact does not commend it to those who desire Ottoman unity. It is understood that the party has been well supplied with funds by the Greek merchants in Turkey, who are ever generous in their subscriptions to a Greek national cause; but one cannot feel that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire is safe in their hands. A source of weakness to the Committee are its self-denying principles, whereby there are to be no known leaders, no gratification of personal ambition by its members, and no seeking for the plums of office. The Liberal Union has no such principles of self-abnegation, and it has for its leader the Albanian Ismail Kemal Bey, a victim of the Despotism and for some time an exile, a man of marked ability and of great ambition. He left the Young Turk party on the grounds that its principles were not sufficiently Liberal, and formed this party of his own, which is the bitterest and most unscrupulous enemy of the Committee of Union and Progress.

The organs of the Liberal Union have been carrying on a press campaign against the Committee of Union and Progress. Among other things they have asserted that the best men have deserted the Committee, that the heroes of the revolution, such as Niazi Bey and Enver Bey, have left it in disgust, that reactionaries and self-seeking adventurers have worked their way into the Committee’s centre and are directing its policy. It is, of course, possible, and even probable, that some unworthy men have been admitted into the Committee, but I am certain that they have exercised no influence, and I am of opinion that they would not have been allowed to remain in it after their true characters had been discovered. When I was in Turkey last autumn it was not altogether an easy matter to become a member of the Committee. On more than one occasion when I have asked a member whether some mutual friend was in the Committee, he has replied in the negative, explaining that the person in question had expressed his wish to join the Committee, and that he seemed a fitting person, but that the Committee would not elect him until more was known concerning him. As to the allegations made by the organs of the Liberal Union, many of the most active members of the Committee, men obviously actuated by the sincerest patriotism, are my friends, and I know that not one of them has left the Committee or has lost faith in it. I also know that the single-minded patriots who made the revolution are still members of the Committee. Both Niazi Bey and Enver Bey have flatly contradicted the statements that were made concerning them.