Secrets of the Bosphorus

by Henry Morgenthau

But, as I have already described, all these aspirations vanished like a dream. Long before the European war began the Turkish democracy had disappeared. The power of the new Sultan had gone, and the hopes of regenerating Turkey on modern lines had disappeared, leaving only a group of individuals, headed by Talaat and Enver, actually in possession of the State. Having lost their democratic aspirations, these men now supplanted it with a new national conception. In place of a democratic constitutional State they resurrected the idea of Pan-Turkism; in place of equal treatment of all Ottomans they decided to establish a country exclusively for Turks. I have called this a new conception; yet it was new only to the individuals who then controlled the destiny of the Empire, for, in reality, it was merely an attempt to revive the most barbaric ideas of their ancestors. It represented, as I have said, merely an atavistic reversion to the original Turk.

We now saw that the Turkish leaders, in talking about liberty, equality, fraternity, and constitutionalism, were merely children repeating phrases; that they had used the word “democracy” merely as a ladder by which to climb to power. After five hundred years’ close contact with European civilisation the Turk remained precisely the same individual as the one who had emerged from the steppes of Asia in the Middle Ages. He was clinging just as tenaciously as his ancestors to that conception of a State as consisting of a few master individuals whose right it is to enslave and plunder and maltreat any peoples whom they can subject to their military control. Though Talaat, Enver, and Djemal all came of the humblest families, the same fundamental ideas of master and slave possessed them that formed the statecraft of Osman and the early Sultans. We now discovered that a paper constitution, and even tearful visits to Christian churches and cemeteries, could not uproot the inborn preconception of this nomadic people, that there are only two kinds of people in the world—the conquering and the conquered.

When the Turkish Government abrogated the capitulations, and in this way freed themselves from the domination of the foreign Powers, they were merely taking one step toward realising this Pan-Turkish ideal. I have told of the difficulties which I had with them over the Christian schools. Their determination to uproot these, or at least to transform them into Turkish institutions, was merely another detail in the same racial progress.

Similarly, they attempted to make all foreign business houses employ only Turkish labour, insisting that they should discharge their Greek, Armenian, and Jewish clerks, stenographers, workmen, and other employees. They ordered foreign business houses to keep their books in Turkish, and I had some difficulty in arranging a compromise by which they could keep them in both French and Turkish. The Ottoman Government even refused to have any dealings with the representative of the largest Austrian munition maker unless he admitted a Turk as a partner. They developed a mania for suppressing all languages except Turkish. For decades French had been the accepted language of foreigners in Constantinople; all street signs were printed in both French and Turkish. One morning the astonished foreign residents discovered that all these French signs had been removed and that the names of streets, the directions on street cars, and other public notices, appeared only in these strange Turkish characters, which very few of them understood. Great confusion resulted from this change, but the ruling powers refused to restore the detested foreign language.

These leaders not only reverted to the barbaric conceptions of their ancestors, but they went to extremes that had never entered the minds of the wary Sultans. Their fifteenth-and sixteenth-century predecessors treated the subject peoples as dirt under their feet, yet they believed that they had a certain usefulness and did not disdain to make them their serfs. But this Committee of Union and Progress, led by Talaat and Enver, now decided to do away with them altogether. The old conquering Turks had made the Christians their servants, but their parvenu descendants bettered their instruction, for they determined to exterminate them wholesale and Turkify the Empire by massacring the non-Moslem elements. Originally this was not the statesmanlike conception of Talaat and Enver; the man who first devised it was one of the greatest monsters known to history, the “Red Sultan,” Abdul Hamid. This man came to the throne in 1876, at a critical period in Turkish history. In the first two years of his reign he lost Bulgaria, as well as important provinces in the Caucasus, his last remaining vestiges of sovereignty in Montenegro, Serbia, and Rumania, and all his real powers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Greece had long since become an independent nation, and the processes that were to wrench Egypt from the Ottoman Empire had already begun. As the Sultan took stock of his inheritance, he could easily foresee the day when all the rest of his domain would pass into the hand of the infidel.

What had caused this disintegration of this extensive Turkish Empire? The real cause, of course, lay deep in the character of the Turk, but Abdul Hamid saw only the more obvious fact that the intervention of the great European Powers had brought relief to these imprisoned nations. Of all the new kingdoms which had been carved out of the Sultan’s dominions, Serbia—let us remember this fact to her everlasting honour—is the only one that has conquered her own independence. Russia, France, and Great Britain have set free all the rest. And what had happened several times before might happen again. There still remained one compact race in the Ottoman Empire that had national aspirations and national potentialities.

In the north-eastern part of Asia Minor bordering on Russia there were six provinces in which the Armenians formed the largest element in the population. From the times of Herodotus this portion of Asia has borne the name of Armenia. The Armenians of the present day are the direct descendants of the people who inhabited the country three thousand years ago. Their origin is so ancient that it is lost in fable and mystery. There are still undeciphered cuneiform inscriptions on the rocky hills of Van, the largest Armenian city, that have led certain scholars—though not many, I must admit it—to identify the Armenian race with the Hittites of the Bible. What is definitely known about the Armenians, however, is that for ages they have constituted the most civilised and most industrious race in the eastern section of the Ottoman Empire. From their mountains they have spread all over the Sultan’s dominions, and form a considerable element in the population of all the large cities. Everywhere they are known for their industry, their intelligence, and their decent and orderly lives. They are so superior to the Turks intellectually and morally that much of the business and industry had passed into their hands. With the Greeks, the Armenians constitute the economic strength of the Empire. These people became Christians in the fourth century and established the Armenian Church as their State religion. This is said to be the oldest State Church in existence.

In face of persecutions which have no parallel elsewhere, these people have clung to their early Christian faith with the utmost tenacity. For fifteen hundred years they have lived there in Armenia, a little island of Christians surrounded by backward peoples of hostile religion and hostile race. Their long existence has been one unending martyrdom. The territory which they inhabit forms the connecting link between Europe and Asia, and all the Asiatic invasions—Saracens, Tartars, Mongols, Kurds, and Turks—have passed over their peaceful country. For centuries they have thus been the Belgium of the East.

Through all this period the Armenians have regarded themselves not as Asiatics, but as Europeans. They speak an Indo-European language, their racial origin is believed to be by scholars Aryan, and the fact that their religion is the religion of Europe has always made them turn their eyes westward; and out of that western country, they have always believed, would some day come the deliverance that would rescue them from their murderous masters. And now, as Abdul Hamid in 1876 surveyed his shattered domain, he saw that its most dangerous spot was Armenia. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that these Armenians, like the Rumanians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, and the Serbians, aspired to restore their independent individual nation, and he knew that Europe and America sympathised with this ambition.

The Treaty of Berlin, which had definitely ended the Turco-Russian War, contained an article which gave the European Powers a protecting hand over the Armenians. How could he free himself permanently from this danger? An enlightened administration, which would have transformed the Armenians into free men and made them safe in their lives and property and civil and religious rights, would probably have made them peaceful and loyal subjects. But no Turk could rise to such a conception of statesmanship as this. Instead, Abdul Hamid decided that there was only one way of ridding Turkey of the Armenian problem—and that was to rid her of the Armenians. The physical destruction of 2,000,000 men, women, and children by massacres, organised and directed by the State, seemed to be the one sure way of forestalling the further disruption of the Turkish Empire.