Two war years in Constantinople

by Harry Stürmer

The Armenian Patriarchate got short shrift indeed. By dissolving the Patriarchate in the Capital, breaking off all relations with the Armenian headquarters in Etzmiadjin and allowing only a very small remainder of Patriarchate to be sent up in Jerusalem under special State supervision, the Turks, as a logical sequence to the Armenian atrocities, simply dealt the death-blow in the summer of 1916 to this important social institution.

The Greek organisation, however, conducted by a more numerous and, outwardly at any rate, better protected people, offered far more resistance, and could not be simply wiped out with a stroke of the pen. A direct attempt to suppress it was made as early as 1910, but broke down entirely in face of the firm attitude of the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople. Now the Young Turks seem to have come to the conclusion that less drastic methods, beginning on a juristic basis, may have a better effect.

We have taken this one example in order to get at the whole neo-Turkish method of procedure. It consists in pushing forward, if need be with greater delicacy than before and on the round-about road of real modern reforms, towards the one immovable goal: the complete Turkification of Turkey. The reform of the law, which we have treated more exhaustively as an example of the first rank, is typical of the Young Turkish national tendency. Naturally it has its use, too, as a means of further throwing off the foreign political yoke. Through the modernising of the whole Turkish legal system, Europe is to be shown that the Capitulations can be dispensed with.

The reform throws a vivid light, too, on the inner relationship of the jingoistic, pure Pan-Turkish leaders of present-day Turkey towards religion. And it is perhaps not generally known that at all the deliberations of the "Committee" where the will of Talaat, the uncrowned king of Turkey, is alone decisive, the opinion of the Grand Master of the Turkish Freemasons is always listened to, and that he is one of the most willing tools of the "Ittihad."

No, the members of the "Committee for Union and Progress" have for a very long time simply snapped their fingers at Islam if it hindered them making use of and profiting from their own subjects. They know very well how to retain at least the outward semblance of friendliness so long as Islam does not directly cross the path of Pan-Turkism. But the Armenian atrocities, instigated by Talaat, have as little to do with religion, they are as exclusively the result of pure race-fanaticism, professional jealousy, and greed, as the hostile, devil-may-care attitude towards Greece, and the millions of well-to-do Ottoman Greeks who are the next troublesome competitors and suitable victims of aggrandisement to be disposed of after the Armenians, or as the terrible persecutions against the highest class of Syrians and Arabs pictured in Djemal Pasha's famous paper. They are Turks, pure Turks with the most narrow-minded jingoistic point of view, and not broad-minded Mohammedans, that sit on the Committee in "Nur-el-Osmanieh" in Stamboul and make all these wonderful political plans, from internal reforms and measures of government which attempt to adapt themselves to European technique by sacrificing ancient traditions, to the hangman's tactics employed against their own subjects.

Take the case of the Syrians and the Arabs. The "Ittihad" clique, weltering in a fog of Pan-Turkish illusion, were yet not without anxiety with regard to the intellectual and social superiority, to say nothing of the political sharpness, of these peoples compared with the Turks. They had yielded entirely to their brutal instincts of extermination and suppression towards foreign races, and the Germans had made no attempt to curb them. They were political parvenus suddenly freed from the control of the civilised Great Powers, and they did not know how to make use of that freedom. Perhaps they felt themselves already on the edge of an abyss and were constrained to snatch what they could while there was yet time.

Is it any wonder, then, that the Turks should throw over all trace of decency towards the Syrians and the Arabs once they were sure that these peoples, who regarded their oppressors with most justifiable hatred, would refuse to have anything to do with the "Holy War" of the Turanian Pseudo-Caliph?

The last remnants of the traditional Pan-Islamic esteem of their Arab neighbours, already sadly shattered by the Young Turks' ruthless policy towards them since 1909, were flung light-heartedly overboard by a Government that knew they were to blame for the Arab defection but thought they had found a substitute that appealed more to their true Asiatic character in these Turanistic dreams of expansion and measures of Turkification. And while fanatical adventurers and money-grubbing deputies paid by the easily duped German Embassy were preaching a perfectly useless "Holy War" on the confines of the Arabian territory of the Turkish Empire, towards the part occupied by the English, while Enver Pasha continued to visit the holy places of Islam, where he got a frosty enough reception, although the wonderfully worded communiqués on the subject succeeded in blinding the population to the true state of affairs, "the hangman's policy" of Djemal Pasha, the Commander of the Fourth Osmanic Army, and Naval Minister, had been for a long time in full swing in the old civilised land of Syria against the best families among the Mohammedan as well as the Christian population. The whole civilised world is laying up a store of accusations of this kind against the Turks, and it is to be hoped that a public sentence will be passed on these gentlemen of the "Ittihad" on the conclusion of peace by a combined court of Europeans and Americans.

Here again the Young Turkish Government assumed the existence of a widespread conspiracy and a Syrian and Arabian Separatist movement towards autonomy, which was to free these lands from Turkish rule and to be established under Anglo-French protection. At the time of the Armenian persecutions the Committee had managed most cunningly to turn the whole Armenian question to their own account by publishing false official reports by the thousand, accompanied by any number of photographs of "bands of conspirators," the authenticity of which never has been proved and never will be; indeed one can only wonder where the Turkish Government got them from.

In this case again there was no lack of official printed commentaries on Djemal Pasha's "hanging list," and any reader of the Journal de Beyrouth in war-time would have had no difficulty in compiling it. It is certainly not my intention to question the existence of a Separatist movement towards autonomy in Syria, but it was a sporadic tendency only, and ought never to have been made the excuse for the wholesale execution of highly respected and well-born citizens who had nothing whatever to do with the matter.