Turkistan

“ It is doubtful though whether those early Turkish tribes, if they had come under the influence of Christianity instead of Islam, would have advanced any further on the path of culture than they have arrived to-day. Though they have been in contact with the West since the seventh century, though they conquered the Empire of the East and made its Christian peoples their subjects, and from the City of Constantine overflowed Eastern Europe up to the gates of Vienna, yet the Turk has learnt nothing. ”

“ As a country inhabited by 18,000,000 Moslems, 5,000,000 Christians and a scattering of lesser faiths, the internal life of the Empire had been generally peaceful and not ignoble, but if its population were to be changed over into a matter of 9,000,000 Turks, 8,000,000 Arabs, 2,000,000 Greeks, 2,000,000 Kurds, 1,500,000 Armenians, etc., all of them inter-tangling into each other, the prospect of trouble was limitless, not only for the Turks themselves but for every race in the country. ”

“ There were Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Turcomans, Tartars and Laz in the country, a few remaining Armenians in the interior, an increasing number of Greeks between Samsun and Trebizond along the Black Sea littoral, and a handful of widely scattered Americans, mostly in the employ of the Near East Relief. The large majority of its population, however, was Turkish and most of the non-Turks were bound to the Turks by their acceptance of Islam. The country, while wholly primitive, was far more single-minded than its capital had been for a century. ”

“ The danger to Turkey in its Eastern provinces of Asia Minor and in its European provinces in Macedonia and Epirus is the comparison between the condition of those who were freed in 1878 from the Sultan’s rule, and who have become self-governing, as in the case of the Bulgarians, or have gone under the rule of Austria, Russia, or Greece, with those who remain the subjects of Turkish rule. When, on one side of mere geographical lines, without any physical difference, the populations are flourishing and improvements of all kinds in roads, railways, harbours, schools, etc., are being effected ”

“ For years the history of Turkey was a monotonous tale of domestic disorder and foreign intervention. There was endless turmoil among the warring races and religions of Macedonia, and from time to time some dreadful outrage against the Armenians of Asiatic Turkey. The nations of Europe were constantly seeking reparation for wrongs done to their citizens or urging reforms for the benefit of the Sultan’s Christian subjects. It seemed only a question of time when Turkey would be blotted from the map by the powers of Europe. ”

“ Someone has said: "The greatest enemy of Turkey is the Turk." I have too much love for the Turkish people, too much sympathy for them, to adopt this pessimistic attitude without great inward opposition; but unfortunately it is only too true. We have seen how the Turkey of Enver and Talaat has reacted sharply against the Western-minded, [Pg 263] liberal era of the 1876 and 1908 constitutions, and has turned again to Asia and her newly discovered ideal, Turanism. To the Turks of to-day, European culture and civilisation are at best but a technical means; they are no longer an end in themselves. ”

“ They seem to be under the delusion that Turkey in Asia is mainly inhabited by Turks! As a matter of fact (except as aforesaid, in Anatolia) one may live for years in Asiatic Turkey without so much as meeting a single Turk. Even the official classes are largely Circassians and Arnauts; and the bulk of the population are Arabs and Armenians and Syrians and Greeks and Kurds, all of whom are profoundly disaffected and only acquiesce in Turkish rule because they will on no account support each other in usurping its place. ”

“ It is a stirring history, full of ups and downs, that of the Turkish people. As we have seen, they emerged from a seething mass of nomadic humanity which infested Central{158} Asia, and threatened those Empires which had settled and acquired civilization, such as China, whence, by the way, come some of the earliest records of the Turks. These nomads had no other use for civilization than to acquire unearned riches ”

“ The power of Turkey is crumbling before our eyes. The region extending southwards, from the Taurus along the Mediterranean coast, contains no indigenous Turkish population. It is inhabited by races mainly of Semitic origin, and it has been held by the right of the sword since the year 1516, when the Turkish Sultan Selim defeated at Aleppo the Mameluke Sultan, whose ancestors had won Syria from the successors of Saladin.
On every side we see the nationalities once conquered by the Turks recovering their freedom and the right of self-government. ”

“ What was the justification for breaking up the Turkish Empire? The portions to be cut out of Turkey have a population the majority of which is non-Turkish. Cilicia and Southern Anatolia might constitute a possible exception. In these territories massacres and misgovernment had perhaps succeeded at last in turning the balance in favour of the Turk. But in the main the distributed regions were being cultivated and developed before the war by a population which was Western and not Turanian in its origin and outlook. This population represented the original inhabitants of the soil. ”

“ That a State so raised, so maintained, should act as an organization for protecting and furthering the interests of its subjects, of whatever race or creed, is not to be expected, neither did the great body of the Turkish nation ever wish it to assume such functions. For the Turks were the dominant race, the conquerors, and to them any idea of their non-Islamic, non-Turk fellow-subjects as equals was inconceivable ”

“ During the second period, from the Turkish re-conquest of the Morea down to the close of the War of Independence, Turkey was declining, slowly but surely, in all save the one art which she has never lost even in her political dotage, the art of fighting. For, like the Roman and the Briton, the Turk has ever been a good soldier, but, unlike those two great unintellectual peoples, many of whose qualities he shares, he has never been a good administrator; even when his arrangements have been excellent in theory, as they often are, they have frequently proved to be miserable in practice. ”

“ It is incredible how large a proportion of Turks are illiterate, and what fantastic views of the world and their place in it the common people hold. To nothing more than this ignorance must be laid a great part of Turkey’s troubles. But another part is due to the character of the empire which it befell the Turk to conquer. If he had happened, like ourselves, into a remote and practically empty land he might have developed his own civilisation. ”

“ Here also, with the unimportant exception of the islands of Samos and Cyprus and the somewhat privileged district of Lebanon, all the Turkish possessions constitute vilayets directly controlled by the Porte. They comprise the geographically distinct regions of the Anatolian plateau (Asia Minor) , the Armenian and Kurdish highlands, the Mesopotamian lowlands, the hilly and partly mountainous territory of Syria and Palestine and the coast lands of west and north-east Arabia. Asiatic Turkey is conterminous on the east with Russia and Persia ”

“ Such is the present state of Turkey—universal corruption and oppression, and things going all the time from bad to worse.
And yet this wretched Government rules over the fairest portion of the globe. The Turkish Empire is territorially the finest in the world. Half in Europe and half in Asia, it extends over many degrees of latitude and longitude, including many countries and many climates, "spanning the vast arch from Bagdad to Belgrade." ”

“ Turkish nationality is equally meaningless. The descendants of Asiatic nomads became masters of western Asia without ever conferring the boon of government or of nationality upon the land and its peoples. In Gibbon’s mordant words “the camp and not the soil is the country of the genuine Tatar.” And Turkey is still a vast field in which the Turk has pitched his tent and merely waits, knowing that the day is not far off when he will have to break camp and seek new pasturages for his herds and flocks. ”

“ It consists in pushing forward, if need be with greater delicacy than before and on the round-about road of real modern reforms, towards the one immovable goal: the complete Turkification of Turkey. The reform of the [Pg 195] law, which we have treated more exhaustively as an example of the first rank, is typical of the Young Turkish national tendency. Naturally it has its use, too, as a means of further throwing off the foreign political yoke. Through the modernising of the whole Turkish legal system, Europe is to be shown that the Capitulations can be dispensed with. ”

“ The result is a lesson to the other discontented provinces, and a warning to all Europe, that Turkey, though she may be dying, is not dead, and that she will die hard.
This proof of her remaining vitality will not surprise one who has seen the Turks at home. Misgoverned and ruined financially as Turkey is, she is yet a very formidable military power—not, indeed, as against Russia, or Germany, or Austria, but as against any second-rate power, and especially as against any of her revolted provinces.
Her troops are not mere militia, they are trained soldiers. ”

“ Such Old Turkish strongholds as the dervish tekkes at Konia might oppose him, but the Old Turks had no Western backing and Islam in India felt so deeply on the subject of “our brother Turk” that success in maintaining the last of the independent Moslem States would prove its own justification. As for Greeks and Armenians, they could continue to worship in their own way as they had always done under the old Empire, but they would never again be permitted to poison the country with their political reaction. ”

“ The first man of the row put aside his narghile and rose quietly. Unlike all the other nationalities in Turkey, the Turks alone never jostle each other for a fare. They have a system of their own which they scrupulously adhere to.
The caïque-tchi who approached at my summons was an old man. He was dressed in full baggy trousers, and wore a white turban on his head. He must have been already old when Sultan Medjid, thirty years previously, had substituted the fez for the turban, and he had not cared to adopt the new head-dress. ”

“ The blood of the myriads of innocents who have fallen victims to the Turks' incurable barbarism throughout these centuries, cries aloud against such a brazen and deliberate travesty of the truth.
One of the principal enactments of the Treaty of Paris was to admit Turkey into the comity of the Great Powers of Europe. To-day, after a probation of sixty years, at a fearful cost to her Christian subjects, it is at last admitted that Turkey has proved herself "decidedly foreign to Western civilization." ”

“ I was of military age and Turkey was under blockade. When I had left Constantinople a few years after the Turkish revolution, the whole country was exhilarated, filled with joy, with ambition and with hope. Freedom and emancipation from an autocratic domination had been obtained. Nothing was to prevent the normal advance of Turkey and the Turks along the road to progress. We were at last to obtain full recognition as a civilized nation. We were at last to receive equal treatment from the other European nations. ”

“ This is what we pray for for Anatolia, the real New Turkey after the war. In other districts, also, now fully under European control, the pure Turkish element will flourish much more exceedingly than ever before under the beneficent protection of modern, civilised Governments. Frankly, the dream of Turkish Power has vanished. But new life springs out of ruin and decay; the history of mankind is a continual change. ”

“ They are to enjoy equal rights. No advantage is to be given to any religion. The Young Turks announced that this tolerance was not to be merely a passive one, that where Christian populations had no churches or schools these would be provided for them at the expense of the State, and that in these schools the teaching of such national languages as Albanian or Servian would be permitted. In the second place, Turkey is to be made strong by262 progress—the regeneration of a people whose energies have been sterilised by a long oppression, the restoration of prosperity to an impoverished land. ”

“ It is possible that in Asia Minor peasants of pure Turkish blood may still be found, but in European Turkey—that “lumber room of many races”—the strong and noble Turkish stock has been so largely intermingled with a number of other races that the racial characteristics of the Osmanli have practically disappeared. It is more rare to find features of the Mongolian stamp among the modern Turks than among the Christian peoples over whom they rule. ”

“ It is a real Babel, but of costumes not of languages: every one speaks Turkish. Turkish Anatolian peasants, with baggy trousers, wide blue belts and thin turbans over their fez, fraternize with Tartars and Kirghiz of Turkestan. Azerbeidjanian and Caucasian Turks, with tight-fitting black coats and enormous black astrakan kolpaks on their heads—runaways from Bolshevik Russia—are discussing the principles of real democracy as applied to Nationalist Turkey and comparing them with the so-called democracy of Soviet lands. Muslim Chinamen and Hindoos are talking over the future of Turkey and Islam. ”