The Return of the Turk

Mr. President and Gentlemen,--The Turk has returned and nobody wants him. Yet he has returned; and, if he knows when he is well off, with European sanction perhaps for another five centuries, certainly for our time. He has returned with colours flying, talking of his rights of sovereignty; and the western world must swallow him as best she can. Hard, stubborn, unpalatable facts, and to make things worse four years ago that Turk was prostrated by defeat as never before, already all but bag-and-baggaged out of Europe, his oppressed minorities as good as freed. And every good Gladstonian was singing nunc dimittis, and saying a long farewell to the Near Eastern question.

Plainly some one has blundered. And the air is full of recriminations, of charge and counter-charge

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Mr. Ralph Hodder-Williams, M.C., M.A., Oxon., A.M., Columbia, was Associate Professor of History in the University of Toronto. He came to Toronto in 1911, enlisted in the Second University Company in 1915, went overseas, joined the P.P.C.L.I., was commissioned, served in France at Ypres and the Somme, was wounded at Courcelette, received the M.C., and was invalided home. Later he was instructor to the Officers Training Corps at Columbia University, and remained there till 1918 when he came back to Toronto. In 1923 he returned to England to join the firm of Hodder and Stoughton, Publishers.

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bandied among the victors, while the vanquished comes his way rejoicing that he has no friends with whom to quarrel.

Now we are not to look for a blunder but for a tale of blunders, the like of which has seldom had to be told; in the devil's kitchen of post-war diplomacy there are so many pots that can call so many kettles so very black. It is useless for one partner to harbour resentment against the others; and there is nothing for it but to cut the losses--a process more or less decently veiled under the name of the Treaty of Lausanne--and to examine the books. It will be well to do that literally and examine the history books, for it is they that show us where we went wrong; and since the evidence was written down before the war ever began, we can ignore the gibe of being, wise after the event.

Now, there are certain central facts of the story of the Turk which it is fair to say should have been regarded as danger signals when the hour struck for a final settlement of the Turkish question. One is the secular relationship between Ottoman ruling caste and Christian, especially Greek, subject races of Lord and Villein, master-citizen and helot. A second is that in modern times the succession to Turkey in Europe has always been one of diplomacy's unsolved problems, and that our European forefathers have never allowed themselves the luxury of not taking the Near Eastern question seriously. A third is that Turkey has lived for a century and a half on the division of interest among Western Powers, and that that division of interest connoted an absence of policy which secured Turkey in Europe long after she was due to depart. And a fourth is that history has come full circle, that the Ottoman has turned round again towards Asia, and that Turkey as an Asiatic nation has been getting ever stronger as Turkey as a European Empire dwindled to nothing. It is my object today to eschew detailed study of a crisis familiar to every newspaper reader, and to limit my address to a very brief historical survey of these points, so as to show how, and with what results, they have been ignored since the Armistice, I shall keep to my high road leaving much of the surrounding country unexamined, omitting for instance the Russians.

Now mistakes, follies, call them crimes if you like, on the part of the Allied and Associated powers would not have made Kemal Pasha what he is if he had nothing on which to build. Let us see on what factors the Turkish nationalist has to count. First, the creed of Islam, a strong social bond, uniting subjects in a loyalty to a government which by and large has always professed the championship of that creed. The bond was particularly strong in Asia Minor, always nursed by the sultanate from the earliest days; with the result that at the disposal first of the sultanate, then of Enver Pasha, last (owing to circumstances we shall have to consider) of Kemal Pasha, there are the resources of a country which we are told on high authority "no administration, however improvident and malign has been able to exhaust." Second, and you have an example before you in Kemal Pasha, the Ottoman Turk so called neither lost his age-old will to power or his capacity for governing under military law. The new Turk as a civil ruler of non-Moslem minorities or a diplomatist at Lausanne may fill us with apprehension and disgust. But the Kemal Pasha who by the law of the firing squad produced order out of the appalling chaos let loose by the disbanded rabbles of 1919 is true to type, and obviously a force to be reckoned with. Third, the control of Constantinople has become associated with the prestige of Islam over a far larger area than the dominions of the Turkish rule. How far in the future, perhaps the near future, the defection of Arabia, the loss of the Holy places, the contempt of the Pan-Turanian for Pan-Islam may change all this is hard to say. But tradition dies hard among distant Asiatic peoples. Certainly in the recent past the Turkey-bag-and-baggaged-out-of-Europe Policy has sapped the loyalty of seventy millions in British India, to whom Islam is everything and independent India of itself but a very little thing.

One may frankly dislike the application of the principle "Divide and Rule" to British India after the war. But it remains true that for the vast majority of British people the world over who believe that we must hasten slowly in the emancipation of India, the friendship or the enmity of this great minority is vital to the continuance of one of our Empire's most precarious policies. A very close and competent observer told me categorically in England a few weeks ago that I should assure you that to the Moslem Indian the presence of the Turk in Constantinople is essential to the prestige of Islam; that that feeling had been in no way affected by events during and since the war; that the Moslem in India has deduced hostility to his creed from British neutrality in the Turco-Italian war, British support of the Balkans in the Balkan War, and British responsibility in the Treaty of Sevres; but that if that feeling is removed by British policy now, the threat of the alliance between Moslem and Hindoo extremist in India may rapidly disappear. If this opinion is good, the Turkish claim to Constantinople is to be considered no less in our Imperial policy than in our European policy.

Or take the attitude of France. It is common knowledge that the Secret Treaty of Angora had its origin in the fact that France herself has millions of Moslem subjects (fighting men) to whom the Treaty of Sevres was distasteful. One need not admit that the desires of the North African provinces of France should dictate French policy, any more than that the desires of Moslem India should be the controlling factor in British policy. But it remains true that France, since the breakdown of the Anglo-American pact has felt thrown back upon her own military resources for security, and that the North African Empire provides her with a very considerable part of her war strength. So the two greatest European powers of today are both concerned with the relationship of Constantinople to Islam. Neither considers itself free to ignore that relationship, without running grave Imperial danger. Plainly this disturbing influence might become a source of strength to Turkey and weakness to her enemies.

Finally, and in the long run most significant of all, the strength of Turkey is in the Anatolian stock. The peasant of Asia Minor is enduring and vigorous; and while the Turco-Greek Ottoman may be decadent, the mass of the population through which he wields his power shows no decline in physical and mental development. "One cannot be among them now" (wrote an observer prophetically in 1914) "without feeling that their day is not only not gone, but is still to be."

The nationalization of Turkey with its 19th Century reformers was set back by the bloody inefficiency of Abdul Hamid. But even then the reorientation-from Empire to nation-went on. Rumania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Caucasia went. Abdul cut his losses, like his greater predecessors. We went on making his empire ever less European, ever more Asiatic. Asia was sympathetic to autocracy, Asia was the home of Islam; and if Turkey in Europe was a slave, harnessed in capitulations, Turkey as a feudal Asiatic power, exerting a temporal dominion over eighteen millions and religious influence over five times as many, might get a new place in the sun. The dream of Abdul set in blood. Yet in essentials the Young Turk movement which overthrew him carried on the new policy. For it was a movement born of national humiliation, and though it cried Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, its essence was militant nationalism. Easily enough the Young Turk turned to the sun of militant nationalism. Germany wooed and won; and in the common crash of 1918 the fall of Turkey resounded heaviest of all. As she had been shorn of her expansion in Europe so now was she shorn of her expansion in Asia. The British were in Palestine and Mesopotamia, the Italians in south-west Asia Minor, the French in Cilicia. The revolt of Arabia and the loss of the Holy Places was a deadly blow at the prestige of Constantinople in the world of Islam; while Constantinople was at long last occupied by the Great Powers, categorically declining in the flush of victory to consider the sick man as anything but a dead man.

Now examine the extraordinary reversal of fortune that four years have brought about, and the moral will appear with little help from the professor. The loss of the war settled the hash of Enver Pasha and the Committee of Union and Progress. All the interest shifted immediately across the Hellespont into the highlands of Anatolia, the old home of the Turco-Greek Ottomans. Hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers, their discipline gone, indulged in anarchy unheard of even in those wild lands. It soon became apparent that the central government at Constantinople was powerless to deal with its own internal politics. The prestige of the Ottomans had gone; and the hard-working peasantry of Anatolia was ready for any government which would bring order in its train. The chance was missed, for the Allies were making the blunder already-a blunder utterly unjustified by historical experience-of taking neither the Near Eastern Question nor the Turk himself seriously. The outward manifestation of this criminal negligence was the withdrawal of General Allenby's Army after the Armistice. The Turks understood and respected that army because it had just given them one of the biggest hidings in the history of arms. That army had all the makings of a super-diplomatist. And now it was disbanded; and no sooner had it gone home than the Turkish will to power began to revive under a typical Turco-Greek militarist. Granting the war-weariness of the British peoples it remains true that this withdrawal threw away the best chance of dealing with the Near Eastern Question as a whole while the omens were really propitious. It seems to be incomparably the strongest point in the French attempt to affix the responsibility on the British Government.

The weight of responsibility next shifts to the United States of America. The experts accompanying President Wilson and President Wilson himself are known to have first seen the solution of the Turkish debacle in the creation of a mandate state in Anatolia and an inter-nationalized Constantinople. That mandate, they believed, as we know, should have been taken by their own country, the only one that a dillusioned Europe wanted to trust with the Dardanelles--because it had no interests there. President and experts alike failed to convince the people at home. One of the American experts, speaking at Philadelphia in 1920, put the matter in these words, which cannot easily have been forgotten by his audience:

"We, the people of the United States, might have saved the Armenians had we been willing to accept a mandate, preferably for all the northern part of the Turkish Empire; but at least for the Armenian portion. We may justify ourselves as we will. The mandate for Armenia was offered us and we refused to accept its obligations and the undoubted troubles which their acceptance would have entailed. We feared foreign entanglements; that fear was justified, but it is fear. We were asked to assist in the establishment of a new international policy in the control of undeveloped peoples under the mandate system advocated by liberal sentiment the world over, by able leaders from South Africa, Canada, China, Great Britain, South America, and where not. It was entirely acceptable, if honestly enforced, to the people to whom it was to be applied. When boldness, confidence in the strength of our own political integrity and active support of a new political ideal might have saved Armenia and with it the Near East, we held back. President Wilson is not responsible for this. We are--we the people of the United States. The decision was ours and we took it,--American safety first. Where we might have led at the zero hour of political opportunity we faltered and refused to go over."

Nothing then came of the American hope and more valuable time was lost. Turkey had to wait upon Germany and the treaty with Turkey had to compensate friends of the Allies who could not be compensated in the treaties with the Central Powers.

Meanwhile Kemal Pasha set up in the fastnesses of Anatolia a government which quite rightly regarded the Sultanate at Constantinople to have lost the power of independent action. Inheriting the traditional will to power of the Ottoman Turk he restored order among the brigands, while Paris discussed hanging the Kaiser.

So by the time that the Allies really applied themselves to the Near Eastern settlement, which was to take form in the illstarred Treaty of Sevres, the situation was already sufficiently serious. The Russian solution envisaged in the past of 1915, the American solution envisaged by Mr. Wilson, had both been abandoned. The course of the Paris conference had divided rather than united the powers upon whom the real responsibility for the Turkish settlement devolved-that is England and France; and the down-and-out Ottoman of 1918 was beginning to show his head again in the revolutionary government set up by Kemal Pasha. Yet nothing had so far been done or left undone which made impossible a permanent settlement of the Turkish question on the lines to which every one had looked forward in 1918. The irretreviable mistake, arising like all the others from a failure to read historical portents, was the opportunism of the peace-makers at Paris in casting the Greek people for a role hopelessly beyond their power unless they were to be the agents of a considered policy to be imposed by the whole weight of the victorious arms.

I have tried to emphasize the relation of Turk to Greek in the past. That relationship is age-old and unchanging. In the history of the Ottoman Empire the Turk has been the master, the Greek Christian has been the helot on whom the Turkish Mohammedan power has been based. The decision to recompense Greece in Asia Minor by the Treaty of Sevres because it had been necessary to recompense Rumania and Jugo-Slavia in Europe by the Treaties with Germany and Austria; and the inevitable corollary-the choice of the Greek as the scourge of the Ottoman nationalists of Angora-were certain to have dangerous repercussions. The aggrandizement of Greece in Asia Minor would be regarded as the final humiliation by the Ottoman, who regarded the Greek as his secular inferior. Second, that humiliation would also be widely felt wherever the prestige of Islam was a matter of concern. Third, the aggrandizement of Greece was bound to turn the earlier acquiescence of Asia Minor into indignant distrust of the Great Powers. Fourth, it presented Kemal Pasha with a nationalist rallying cry. The cement of humiliation is a standard mixture for rebuilding nations, well known to every student of modern politics.

How utterly unfit the Greeks were for this dangerous game is now old history. The combination of rash imperialism (not unstained by atrocity) with inefficiency at the top and war-weariness in the ranks led directly to the disaster of Smyrna. But Greece has been sufficiently punished, and we will waste no time on the lugubrious story of her mistakes It is far more important to see how it came about that she was left with an impossible task, the only result of which was the great Turkish revival and the strength of Turkey today, which was based on the victory gained over her.

The story can be paralleled from other incidents of the period of peace-making. A committee of the Great Powers which has a particular interest for us in that it was often presided over by Sir Robert Borden, reported in March, 1919, the bases upon which the Near Eastern question ought to be solved. They were not unanimous--of course! They were dealing with Turkey. Italy disagreed on every point with the British Empire, France and America; America, acting on the advice of her historical experts of the House commission, dissented from the view of the British Empire and France on the all-important recommendation that. Smyrna, the key port of Asiatic Turkey, should pass into the hands of Greece. But President Wilson overruled his experts and in agreement with Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau suddenly decided to authorize an armed Greek occupation of Smyrna and its hinterland. Mystery has always surrounded this sudden and vitally important decision, but it is significant at least that Mr. Wilson's change of front coincided with the quarrel with the Italians over Fiume, and it is said that Greek troops were put in Smyrna by the Big Three at a few hours' notice in order to forstall independent action by the Italians. It would be hard to imagine a more unfortunate method of reasoning by which to arrive at a solution of a problem that has caused trouble for a century and a half. But whatever the cause of this opportunist policy the corollary was plain. Greece would have to deal with Kemal Pasha; a military, administrative and economic burden had been placed upon her which she could only possibly carry under one essential condition, unanimous and effective support from the powers that had allowed, nay encouraged, her to challenge the whole tradition of Turkish dominion. That support was not withdrawn; it was never given.

If Britain was benevolently neutral (which was no practical use at all and dangerous if the benevolence was taken more seriously than it was meant) France became definitely hostile, treated with the enemy, and broke up the whole European concert on the Near Eastern Question. Here lies the real responsibility of France--not that she changed her mind, but that she broke the European concert in disregard of what such breaches had meant over and over again in the nineteenth century's dealings with the Ottoman. She found herself faced with liabilities in the Near East which she was unprepared to go on facing. She felt she could neither risk the military expense nor jeopardize the sentiment of her millions of Moslem subjects if she remained at war with the traditional Moslem power. But she issued no frank statement upon which concerted action might be based.

The secrecy of the Treaty of Angora with Kemal poisoned Anglo-French relations, already estranged over the application of the Treaty of Versailles; it made impossible the rational revision of the Treaty of Sevres; above all it gave to Kemal Pasha the one card that he still needed for a perfect hand. He had restored the prestige of the Ottoman among his own people by restoring order when Europe and America had done nothing, he had reconsecrated the Turkish national movement to a crusade against the despised Greek; and now Europe presented to him, as she had presented to his predecessors over and over again the ace of trump--a Europe divided against itself.

Great Britain showed no inclination to fight for the Greek, France was definitely pledged not only not to fight the Turk but to support him with munitions and at the conference table. The division of the Allies showed more and more, the Greek army was demoralized by the knowledge that the Anatolian experiment had failed and that sooner or later they must go. Negotiations dragged on, for Kemal Pasha had inherited too much oriental sagacity to force the pace. But by August everything was ready. On the 23rd he struck, the Greeks collapsed, as no European army had ever collapsed before an Asiatic foe in history, and in seventeen days Smyrna was in flames.

Kemal Pasha, strong in the knowledge of European disunion, made the most of his chance. In a few days he was threatening the Straits of Constantinople in the territory held on both sides of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles by an Allied force of French, British and Italians, under the command of Sir Charles Harington.

Was the Turk to be forced, if necessary by bloodshed, to halt and make terms, or was he to occupy Constantinople and cross, hot with victory, back into Europe? If the latter, says an unimpassioned reviewer:--

"A fire would have been kindled beside which the burning of Smyrna was no more than a candle flame. In Constantinople itself there were thousands of armed Turks, and with a Christian population of three-quarters of a million the retirement of the Allied garrison could only have led to the renewal of the horrors of St. Bartholomew's Eve. Fire and slaughter would have swept over Thrace and only a miracle could have saved Europe from the revival of a general war. The Balkan States have too clear a memory of Turkish oppression ever to allow the clock to be put back beyond 1913 Russia in alliance with Turkey and with an army on the frontiers of Rumania, eager to recover the lost province of Bessarabia, could not for long have remained neutral, and by her entry must have unchained chaos."

At this critical moment those divisions upon which Kemal Pasha was relying came to a head. When the British Government issued on September the 16th its note to the dominions (the political advisability of which, being of such minor importance, I propose to leave severely alone), it was counting on French and Italian support, in view of an announcement made only two days before that the three Allied Governments were in agreement on the necessity of defending the neutral zone, but Kemal Pasha knew or guessed better than Mr. Lloyd George. There was in fact no agreement. The French announced that under no circumstances would they use force against the Turks, and their withdrawal was followed by that of the Italians.

There follows the one bright spot in the whole Near Eastern muddle. At the most critical moment of all, Great Britain did what could be done to remedy her own mistakes and the mistakes of her friends, and to her eternal honour decided to stand alone. Only that stand has made any peaceful and rational solution of the Turkish revival possible. But the mistakes have gone too deep, the lessons of history have been so consistently flouted since the Armistice, that the best we can show for having put up a brave front and done the right thing at the end, is a treaty of which one may justly say that if we have to make the best of it, this is the best we can make. The history of the Armistice and the Treaty of Lausanne has not yet been written. In it one suspects that there will appear a sordid strain of typical Turkish chicanery and of as typical European division. But at least this much may be said, that Lord Curzon, and the Empire in supporting him, has shown that we appreciate the fact that concessions must be made to the farthest limit, if by them the Near Eastern Question can be settled and the seven devils of disunion driven out of the dealings of Christian Europe with the Mohammedan Nearer Asia.

By the Treaty of Lausanne, the Turkish nation is fairly established as the first power of the East. Constantinople and all Asia Minor will be hers in complete sovereignty, and though Adrianople, Western Thrace and most non-Turkish Europeans have been saved out of the ruin, the defensive European frontier of the Maritza and in Eastern Thrace is regained. In the Dardanelles, while Turkey must allow complete freedom of passage in time of peace and in any war in which she is a neutral, she will be free by treaty agreement to close them to all but neutral vessels when she is herself at war. The old capitulations which gave judicial, fiscal and commercial privileges to outsiders are in principle abrogated and must in a short time disappear. All these terms are consistent with what is now after all the best hope for a permanent solution: that, free of incumbrances and restored in prestige, a real Turkey of the Ottoman Turks will more and more revert towards her Asiatic origin; that Anatolia will really become the centre of the state; that Smyrna rather than Constantinople may become its real point of contact with the outside world.

Yet it would be folly to close on too optimistic a note. There is in one sense the freedom of Christian minorities in which the Treaty of Lausanne guarantees nothing; and that, we must be free to confess, is the sense in which it will be' most critic, ally read on this side of the Atlantic. For the rest, the Christian minorities have practically no better guarantees of toleration than they had in the nineteenth century, and what value those guarantees have had before, the nineteenth century gives all too painful a record. Since this is a matter of such great interest in Canada and America, as was shown by the way it overshadowed all other considerations in the press in the hour of crisis, it may be well to quote the draft treaty on the point, in order that we may be left with no illusions

The Turkish Government to undertake to accord to all the inhabitants of Turkey full and entire protection for their lives and liberty without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion. Complete equality between Moslems and non-Moslems.

In the matter of public education, the Turkish Government to accord in the towns inhabited by a considerable proportion of non-Moslems the requisite facilities to ensure that in the primary schools education shall be given in their own language to the children of Turkish subjects. The teaching of Turkish shall be everywhere obligatory.

Turkey, with respect to the protection of minorities, to agree to accept the same stipulations as the Western States which have signed the so-called Minorities Treaties. Her international obligations would thereby be placed under the guarantee of the League of Nations. In case of dispute the Hague International Court of Justice to decide. Under the same head is the obligatory exchange of populations which is the subject of a special convention.

Finally, none of the inhabitants of Turkey or Greece shall be disturbed or molested on account of their military or political conduct; a full and entire amnesty shall accompany the signature of the treaty (Turco-Greek Convention).

That these well-sounding paragraphs can be closely paralleled from more than one document of the nineteenth century which failed to save Christians in Turkey from fire and sword and every kind of horror, is the measure of what western civilization has had to pay for its mistakes. One is entitled to hope that at last a Turkish promise may mean something, but one is not entitled to hope for very much more.

PRESIDENT WILKINSON extended the thanks of the Club to the speaker.