The Greeks of Turkey are not free from the universal characteristic of human nature. You can persecute and browbeat a man, you can bully him and do him physical injury, you can refuse him a share in the government and put him in an inferior social position, and he will continue to endure it. But, rob him of the chance of making a livelihood, and he will commence to conspire against the government. A man's vital point is his pocket-book. That vital point the Young Turks threatened by their boycott.
THE YOUNG TURKS AND THE MACEDONIAN PROBLEM
It was at Salonika that the Young Turk movement first gained its footing in the Ottoman Empire, and until the loss of European Turkey, after the disastrous war with the Balkan States, Salonika continued to be the centre of the "Committee of Union and Progress." Its congresses were always held there. From Salonika the third army corps went forth to suppress, in April, 1909, the counter-revolution in Constantinople. To the Young Turks, Salonika seemed the safest place in all the Ottoman dominions for the imprisonment of Abdul Hamid. Many of the leading members of the party were natives of Macedonia. In fact, it was because the Young Turks saw clearly that European Turkey would soon be lost to the Empire, unless there was a regeneration, that they precipitated in 1908 the revolution which had so long been brewing.
It is natural, then, that the Macedonian problem should be the first and uppermost of all the many problems that had to be solved in the regeneration of Turkey. The "Committee of Union and Progress" saw that immediate action must be taken to strengthen Ottoman authority, so severely shaken since the war with Russia, in the European vilayets.
We have already shown in a previous chapter how the struggle of races in European Turkey had made Macedonia the bloody centre of Balkan rivalry, and had reduced the vilayets of Uskub and Salonika to anarchy.
Up to the coming of the constitutional régime, there had been a very strong element in Macedonia, principally Bulgarian, which saw—oh, how prophetically!—that the liberation of Macedonia from Turkish rule would endanger, rather than aid, the propaganda for eventual Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkan Peninsula. These Bulgarians, wise in their day and generation beyond their emancipated brethren, advocated the intervention of Bulgarian arms, not to secure independence, but autonomy. They felt that by the creation, for a period of years, of an autonomous province of Macedonia under the suzerainty of the Sultan, the felicitous history of Eastern Rumelia would repeat itself.
The Young Turks decided to solve the Macedonian problem by strengthening the Moslem element in every corner of the vilayets of Salonika and Uskub. The means of doing this were at hand. After the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkish agents began to work among the Moslem population in these countries to induce them to emigrate and come under the dominion of the "Padishah," as the Sultan is called by his faithful subjects. They were brought in and settled, with the help of the Government, in those districts of Macedonia where the Moslem element was weak. This was a repetition of the policy of Abdul Hamid after the Congress of Berlin, when, in Eastern Rumelia and Thrace, to oppose the Bulgarians Circassians from the lost Caucasus were settled, and to oppose the Servians Albanian emigration into old Servia and the Sandjak of Novi Bazar was encouraged.
In addition to this, the Young Turks decided to secure the loyalty of their Christian subjects in European Turkey by abolishing the karadj (head tax) which exempted Christians from military service. Bulgarians, Greeks, and Servians were summoned to serve in the Ottoman army.
The first of these measures should never have been adopted. The bitter experience of former years should have taught the Young Turks the lesson that emigration of this nature not only tended to arouse religious fanaticism, but also introduced an element, ignorant and unruly, and wholly worthless from the economic point of view. It has often been recorded that Moslems, prompted to the sacrifice of abandoning everything for their love of remaining Turkish subjects, have made these "treks" after the unsuccessful wars of Turkey of their own initiative. Nothing is farther from the truth. There has never been an exodus of this sort which has not been due to the instigation of political agents. From the very fact that large industrious and influential Moslem elements have remained and prospered under Russian, Bulgarian, and Austrian rule, it can be inferred that those who yielded to the solicitation of Turkish agents were the undesirable Moslem element, who, never having acquired anything where they were, had nothing to lose by making a change. If one excepts a certain portion of the Circassians, the statement may well be made that these emigrants—muhadjirs they are called in Turkish—are an element forming the lowest dregs of the population, as worthless and shiftless as the great majority of the Jews whom the Zionist movement has attracted to Palestine. More than this, the muhadjirs have been fanatical and lawless, and it is they whose massacres of Christians have invariably ended in irretrievable disaster for Turkey.
In Macedonia, the muhadjirs, in conjunction with the Albanian Moslem immigrants, were responsible for the succession of massacres in 1912, such as those of Ishtip and Kotchana, which helped to bring about the Balkan alliance. The same thing is happening to-day in the coast towns of Asia Minor and Thrace, where the brutality and blood lust of the muhadjirs since 1913 will eventually cause another attack of Greece upon Turkey.