When I speak of requisitioning, I do not mean the necessary military carrying off of grain, cattle, vehicles, buffaloes, and horses, general equipment, and so on, in exchange for a scrap of paper to be redeemed after the war (of very doubtful value in view of Turkey's position)—I do not mean that, even though the way it was accomplished bled the country far more than was necessary, falling as it did in the country districts into the hands of ignorant, brutal, and fanatical underlings, and in the town being carried out with every kind of refinement by the central authorities. Too often it was a means of violent "nationalisation" and deprivation of property and rights exercised especially against Armenians, Greeks, and subjects of other Entente countries. If there was a particularly nice villa or handsome estate belonging to someone who was not a Turk, soldiers were immediately billeted there under some pretext or other, and it was not long before these rough Anatolians had reduced everything to rack and ruin.
I do not mean either the terrible damage to commercial life brought about by the way the military authorities, in complete disregard of agricultural interests, were always seizing railway waggons, and so completely laming all initiative on the part of farmers and merchants, whose goods were usually simply emptied out on the spot, exposed to ruin, or disposed of without any kind of compensation being given.
What I do mean is the huge semi-official cornering of food, which must be regarded as typical of the Young Turks' idea of their official responsibility towards those for whom they exercised stewardship.
The "Bakal Clique" ("provision merchants," "grocers") was known through the whole of Constantinople, and was keenly criticised by the much injured public. It was, first of all, under the official patronage of the city prefect, Ismet Bey, a creature of the Committee; but later on, when they realised that dire necessity made a continuance of this system of cornering quite unthinkable, he was made the scapegoat, and his dismissal from office was freely commented on in the Committee newspapers as "an act of deliverance." The Committee thought that they would thus throw dust in the eyes of the sorely-tried people of Constantinople. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish pounds were turned into cash in the shortest possible time by this semi-official syndicate, at the expense of the starving population, and found their way into the pockets of the administrators.
That was how the Young Turkish parvenus were able to fulfil their one desire and wriggle their way into the best clubs, where they gambled away huge sums of money. The method was simple enough: whatever was eatable or useable, but could only be obtained by import from abroad, was "taken charge of," and starvation rations, which were simply ludicrously inadequate and quite insufficient for the needs of even the poorest household, were doled out by "vesikas" (the ticket system).
The great stock of goods, however, was sold secretly at exorbitant prices by the creatures of the "Bakal Clique," who simply cornered the market. That is how it happened that in Constantinople, cut off as it was from the outer world and without imports, even at the end of 1916, with a population of well over a million, there were still unlimited stores of everything available for those who could pay fancy prices, while by the beginning of 1915 those less well endowed with worldly goods had quite forgotten the meaning of comfort and the poor were starving with ample stores of everything still available.
In businesses belonging to enemy subjects the system of requisitioning, of course, reached a climax, stores of all kinds worth thousands of pounds simply disappearing, without any reason being given for carrying them off, and nothing offered in exchange, but one of these famous "scraps of paper." Cases have been verified and were freely discussed in Pera of ladies' shoes and ladies' clothing even being requisitioned and turned into large sums of cash by the consequent rise in price.
The profiteering of Ismet and company, who chose the specially productive centre of the capital for their system of usury, was not, however, by any means an isolated case of administrative corruption, for exactly the same system of requisitioning, holding up and then reselling under private management at as great a profit as possible, underlay and underlies the great semi-official Young Turkish commercial organisation, with branches throughout the whole country, known as the "Djemiet" and under the distinguished patronage of Talaat himself.
After Ismet Bey's fall, the "Djemiet" took over the supplying of the capital as well (with the exception of bread). We will speak elsewhere of this great organisation, which is established not only for war purposes, but serves towards the nationalisation of economic life. So far as the system of requisitioning is concerned, it comes into the picture through its firm opposition to German merchants who were trying to buy up stores of food and raw materials from their ally Turkey. The intrigues and counter-intrigues on both sides sometimes had most remarkable results.
One of the really bright sides of life in Constantinople in war-time was the amusement one extracted from the silent and desperate war continually being waged by the many well-fed gentlemen of the "Z.E.G." ("Zentraleinkaufsgesellschaft," "Central Purchasing Commission") and their minions who tried to rob Turkey of foodstuffs and raw material for the benefit of Germany, against the "Djemiet" and more particularly the Quartermaster-General, Ismail Hakki Pasha, that wooden-legged, enormously wealthy representative of the neo-Turkish spirit—he was the most perfect blend of Oriental politeness and narrow-minded decision to do exactly the opposite of what he had promised. On the Turkish side, the determination to safeguard the interests of the Army, and in the case of the "Djemiet" the effort not to let any foodstuffs out of Germany—a standpoint that has at last found expression in a formal prohibition of all export—then the quest of personal enrichment on the part of the great "Clique"; on the German side, the insatiable hunger for everything Turkey could provide that had been lacking for a long time in Germany: the whole thing was a wonderfully variegated picture of mutual intrigue.