The New Map of Europe (1911-1914) / The Story of the Recent European Diplomatic Crises and Wars and of Europe's Present Catastrophe

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

Every year the Albanian rebellion broke out afresh. Every year the Young Turks exhausted the strength and spent the resources of their armies in European Turkey against the invulnerable mountains of Albania. After every "pacification," Albania in arms was just as certain each May as the coming again of summer.

In 1912, when affairs were in a critical state as regards the Christian neighbours, the Cabinet in Constantinople was once more engaged in the hopeless task of subduing Albanian opposition. The Albanians, however, seemed to gain strength rather than lose it. In September, 1912, I was in Uskub just four weeks before the Balkan War broke out. The Albanian chieftains were there, having made a truce for Ramazan (the sacred month of the Moslem fasting). They said to me that the next year, if the Turks did not stop persecuting them, they would take their army to Constantinople. Others were to get ahead of them, and they were to win their independence without having to fight the Turks again. The poor showing of the Turkish arms against the Greeks and Servians is very largely due to the exhaustion which had come to them through continuous and unsuccessful attempts to get the better of the Albanian uprisings. The Balkan States knew how severely the western Macedonian army had suffered in July and August, 1912. It was one of the considerations which decided them to strike at that moment.

THE TREATMENT OF THE ARABIC ELEMENT

In Asiatic Turkey there are supposed to be about eight million Arabic-speaking inhabitants. These figures may be an exaggeration, for no census has ever been taken. But the vilayets are occupied almost exclusively by Arabs and races speaking Arabic. They form a half of the Empire's dominions in Asia, starting with the Taurus and Amanus ranges, south through Syria to Arabia and east and south-east through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf.

These large stretches of territory were never thoroughly conquered by the Turks. They did not settle there in the way they had done in the Balkan Peninsula, outside of Albania and Montenegro, and in Asia Minor. The race from whom they had taken their religion and from whom they soon absorbed whatever culture and art they can be said to possess, was never assimilated by the Turks. Their simple warrior and herdsman language was enriched by Arabic substantives, as Anglo-Saxon was enriched by the Latin gotten through the Normans and through the Church. But there was no racial fusion.

Only in appearance did Turkish officialdom and the authority of the Sultan ever get a real hold over the Arabs. By habit they came to respect the Sultan as Khalif. The allegiance which they gave him as ruler was altogether without value—a pure matter of form. An aggressive pasha found it easy to detach Egypt from Turkish rule. It was conglomerate populations and a lack of natural boundaries for forming states that prevented the other Arabic portions of the Ottoman Empire from following Egypt. In Arabia proper, and in the larger portion of Mesopotamia, up to the present day, the Arabs have been as independent of the Sublime Porte as have been the Albanians.

In the reign of Abdul Hamid, when the idea of the Pan-Islamic movement was conceived, the importance of joining the sacred cities of Medina and Mecca more closely with the Turkish Empire was recognized. French interests were building a railway across the Lebanon Mountains to Aleppo and Damascus. The Germans had launched their project for the Bagdadbahn. Abdul Hamid decided to create a railway directly under government control, from Damascus to Medina and Mecca. For the first time since they were joined to the Ottoman Empire, the Arabic provinces saw themselves in prospective connection with the capital. It had been for a long time easier and quicker to go from Constantinople to the United States or to China than to Bagdad or to Mecca. The railways would have one of two results: either the Arabs would be brought more closely into connection with the Empire, or they would be definitely alienated from it.

The Arabic question stood thus when the constitution was re-established in 1908. There are many Arabs among the Young Turks, but these, like the Slavs in the military and official service of Austria-Hungary, have been definitely alienated from their own nationality. Here was the opportunity to bring into sympathy with the constitutional movement the millions of Arabic-speaking subjects of the Sultan, who formed the most numerous Moslem element in the Empire. But the Young Turks were no more tactful in the treatment of the Arabs, who were mostly of their own religion, than of the Greeks and Armenians. In the first Parliament, they were almost as unfair to Moslem Arabs as to Christians. In the apportionment of places in the Cabinet, the Arabs were ignored. It is true that some Cabinet members, some high officials both in the military and civil administration, and some members of the inner council of the Committee of Union and Progress were of Arabic origin. But they must be counted practically as Turks, for they had lived so long away from their own country and their people that they had lost all Arabic sympathies. Some who were called Arabs were in reality members of the old Turkish families, who in Mesopotamia, as in Syria and Egypt, had received large tracts of land at the time of the conquest, and had always been Turks by interests and by atmosphere. The younger nationalistic Arabic element, educated, and living by professional or business interests in cities of the Arabic portion of the Empire, were from the very beginning ignored.

Two things soon became evident. In the first place, the Young Turks tried to impose their language in local administration as the sole official language of the Empire. In many places in Syria and Mesopotamia, civil officials, even in the courts of justice, were appointed without a knowledge of the language of the people among whom they had to serve. In the Balkans and in Asia Minor, where there were so many races and so many tongues, the Turks were acting reasonably and sensibly in imposing their own language as a medium for the transaction of government business, but in vilayets which were wholly Arabic speaking, the foisting of the Turkish language upon the people could be likened to a bastard child endeavouring to rule the branch of his family from which he had received his best and purest blood. Before a year had passed, the educated, intellectual Arabs were wholly out of sympathy with the new régime. Many of them began to dream of the revival of the Arabian khalifate, and looked to the nationalistic movement in Egypt as the seed from which their Pan-Arabic tree would some day grow. Others, older and less sentimental, did not hesitate to express a desire to see British or French sovereignty extended over Syria and Mesopotamia.