The Court-Martial, sent to Adana from Constantinople after the new Sultan was established upon the throne and the Young Turks were certain of their position, had every guarantee to enable it to do its work thoroughly and justly. It was not influenced or threatened. There was, however, no honest intention to give decisions impartially and in accordance with the facts that the investigation would bring forth. The methods and findings of the Court-Martial were a travesty of justice. Its members refused absolutely to go to the bottom of the massacre, and to punish those who had been guilty. I happen to be the only foreign witness whose deposition they took. They refused to allow me to testify against the Vali and his fellow-conspirators. The line of conduct had been decided before their arrival. The idea was to condemn to death a few Moslems of the dregs of the population, who would probably have found their way to the gallows sooner or later any way. With them were to be hanged a number of Armenians, whose only crime was that they had defended the lives and honour of their women and children. The Vali of Adana, who had planned the massacre and had carried it out, and two or three Moslem leaders of the city who had co-operated with him and with the military authorities in the effort to exterminate the Armenians, were not even sent to prison. No testimony against them was allowed to be brought before the Court-Martial. They went into exile "until the affair blew over."
When a future generation has the prospective to make researches into the downfall of the Young Turk constitutional régime in Turkey, they will probably find the beginning of the end in the failure to punish the perpetrators of the Adana massacres. For this was a formal notification to the Christians of Turkey that the constitutional régime brought to them no guarantees of security, or justice, but, on the other hand, made their position in the Empire even more precarious than it had been under the despotism of Abdul Hamid. After Adana, the Armenian population became definitely alienated from the constitutional movement, and was convinced that its only hope lay in the absolute disappearance of Turkish rule.
THE ATTEMPT TO SUPPRESS THE LIBERTIES OF
THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
When Mohammed the Conqueror entered Constantinople in 1453, he showed a wise determination to continue the policy of his predecessors by preserving the independence of the Orthodox Church. For he knew well that the success of the Osmanlis had been due to religious toleration, and that no durable empire could be built in Asia Minor and the Balkan Peninsula by a Moslem government, unless the liberties of the Christian inhabitants were assured through the recognition of the Greek patriarchate. The first thing that Mohammed did was to seek out the Greek patriarch, and confirm him in his position as the political, as well as the religious, head of Christian Ottoman subjects.
Islam is a theocracy. The spirit of its government is inspired by the sacred law, the Sheriat, based upon the Koran and the writings of the earliest fathers of Islam. Down to the smallest details, the organization of the state, of the courts of justice, and of the social life of Mohammedan peoples, is influenced by ecclesiastical law, and by the power of the Church. As this law does not provide for the inclusion of non-Moslem elements either in the political or social life of the nation, it has always been evident that people of another religion, within the limits of a Moslem state, can exist only if they have an ecclesiastical organization of their own, with well-defined liberties, privileges, and safeguards.
This principle was recognized by the Osmanlis for over five hundred years; even the most despotic of sultans never dreamed of abandoning it. There might be persecutions, there might be massacres, there might be even assassination of patriarchs, but, until the Young Turk régime, no Ottoman ministry ever dreamed of destroying the organism which had made possible the life of Moslem and Christian under the same rule.
The thesis of the Young Turks was, from a theoretical standpoint, perfectly sound and just. They said that ecclesiastical autonomy was necessary under a despotism, but that it had ceased to have a raison d'être under a constitutional government. The constitution guaranteed equal rights, irrespective of religion, to all the races of the Empire. Therefore the Greek Church must resign its prerogatives of a political nature, for they were wholly incompatible with the idea of constitutional government.
Many foreigners, carried away by the reasonableness of this argument, severely condemned the Orthodox Church for continuing to resist the encroachments of the new Government upon its secular privileges—secular in both senses of the word. They attributed the attitude of the Greek ecclesiastics to hostility to the constitution, to the reactionary tendency of every ecclesiastic organization, and to selfish desire to hold firmly the privileges which enabled them to keep in their clutches the Greek population of Turkey, and continue to enjoy the prestige and wealth accruing to them from these privileges. Such criticism only revealed ignorance of history and a lack of appreciation of the real issue at stake.
No ecclesiastical organization can, under a constitutional government, continue indefinitely to be a state within a state, and to enjoy peculiar privileges and immunities. But the application of the constitution must come first. It must enter into the life of the people. It must become the vital expression of their national existence, evolved through generations of testing and experimenting. The constitution is finally accepted and supported by a nation when, and because, it has been found good and has come to reflect the needs and wishes of the people. Then, without any great trouble, the ecclesiastical organization will find itself gradually deprived of every special privilege. For the privileges will have become an anachronism.
But, just as in the establishment of the constitution, in their attitude toward the Greek Church the Young Turks acted as if the work of generations in other countries could be for them, in spite of their peculiarly delicate problems and the differences in creed involved, the act of a single moment. This mentality of the half-educated, immature visionary has been shown in every one of the numerous senseless and disastrous decisions which have brought the Ottoman Empire so speedily to its ruin.