by Alan Palmer
Despite the obvious hostility of the Sultan towards Jewish penetration of the Holy Land, the German authorities gave occasional support to German Jewish charitable organizations within the Ottoman Empire, at least until the outbreak of the First World War. In 1904 the World Zionist Organization established headquarters in the Rhineland, moving to Berlin seven years later, but with mounting anti-Semitism in Germany and Central Europe the WZO had no influence on decision-making in the Wilhelmstrasse. While the Ottomans thoroughly mistrusted Herzl and his successors in the WZO, they tolerated the aid given by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, head of the French branch of the banking dynasty, to finance pioneer settlements for Polish and southern Russian Jews. Labour on these model settlements was supervised from 1884 onwards by agricultural experts, mostly from France, and their success held out a promise of prosperity and further investment in a part of the Ottoman Empire which was still basically poor and backward. Baron Edmond himself instigated many improvements, such as the planting of vines and the introduction of grapefruit cultivation, and in 1900 he set up the Jewish Colonization Association, of which he remained President until his death thirty-four years later. So long as the Ottoman authorities hoped for loans floated in Paris, they dared not impose too rigid restraint on the Colonization Association’s activities.12
Yet all these Jewish initiatives ran counter to Abdulhamid’s apparent determination to boost Islamic unity and integrate the Arab lands more closely with the Turkish core of his realm. Moreover, as Ottoman rule contracted there was a refugee problem for the empire as a whole. The flight of Muslims from the Balkans, Russia and the French-dominated Maghreb caused grave social distress in the capital and around Smyrna. The Hejaz Railway project, the brainchild of Ahmed Izzet, was in a sense an ideological counterpart to the Jewish settlements, linking faith with material gains, calling as it did for a million pounds to be raised in voluntary donations throughout the Muslim world to improve the transport of pilgrims from Damascus to Medina, and ultimately to Mecca. But troops as well as pilgrims could be moved into the heart of Arabia, and with the townships of Amman and Ma’an linked to the Syrian cities and Beirut there was a prospect of colonizing the vilayet of Suriyya as far south as Aqaba with dispossessed Muslim refugees. The Hejaz Railway, and the telegraph lines running beside it, gave the Sultanate an opportunity to reassert Ottoman control over provinces long since slipping from its grasp.
But were these ‘prospects’ and ‘opportunities’ attainable if Ottoman government remained handicapped by the dark suspicion and inconsistency in Abdulhamid’s paranoic mind and his consequent refusal to delegate power? The Sultan was gifted with a quick intelligence, which enabled him to take advantage of ideas he only half comprehended. Thus he tried to exploit—often simultaneously—Panislamic propaganda, Greater Ottoman sentiment, and ‘Turkism’, an intellectual movement which elevated the (traditionally boorish) Turkic element in the cultural heritage of his empire. But his patronage was capricious: puzzling reports from inventive spies would douse yesterday’s enthusiasms, leaving unfulfilled much that the Sultan had seemed to champion. Sir Philip Currie told the Foreign Office on several occasions of the widespread ‘dissatisfaction with the arbitrary rule of the Palace’ which was encouraging the growth of a secret reform movement.13 Under Currie’s successor in Pera, Sir Nicholas O’Conor, the protest movement became identified as ‘Young Turk’ soon after the turn of the century.
Turkish historians claim, with some justice, that the earliest Young Turk cell was established in May 1889 by army medical students in Stamboul, and that as early as the summer of 1896 more than seventy Young Turk officers and cadets were exiled to Tripoli, after being court-martialled for conspiracy.14 There remain, however, three basic problems in tracing the early history of the movement: the simultaneous existence of cells in Ottoman garrisons, which were necessarily secret, and of Young Turk exile groups in Geneva, Paris and Cairo, which were so vocal that they attracted publicity; the rivalry and backsliding of would-be leaders abroad; and a tendency of conspiratorial groups to accept generic classification as ‘Young Turks’, though differing from each other in tactics, and often in long-term objectives. Much of the inspiration for the Young Turks came from the Young Ottomans of the Tanzimat era, but the new protest movement possessed a broader social basis. Its supporters had benefited from the educational reforms, especially the revival of the university in Stamboul and the sound teaching in the lycées and military colleges. Moreover, by 1900 the Civil Service School (Mekteb-i Mulkiye) which had opened in 1859 was providing the administration with a hundred graduates a year. Of twenty Young Turks who rose to prominence in the first decade of the century, six had passed out of the War College and seven came from the Mulkiye.15
Yet the most revolutionary faction leader in the movement could claim an almost impeccable dynastic lineage. Prince Sabaheddin, who in 1899 had passed into voluntary exile with his father and brother, was a great-grandson of Mahmud II, a grandson of Abdulmecid, and the son of Abdulhamid’s half-sister, Princess Seniha. It was Sabaheddin who, in February 1902, presided over a Young Turk Congress in Paris which passed a resolution calling on the Great Powers, ‘in the general interest of humanity’, to ensure that the Sublime Porte honour its treaty commitments ‘to benefit all parts of the Ottoman Empire’. This resolution, however, was deplored by an influential minority who declared that the Powers were guided by an ‘interest not always in accord with that of our country’. As so often in congresses of political exiles, the will of the minority prevailed: however much the Young Turks might affirm a wish to see ‘European civilization spread in our country’, in practice they became patriotically protective of the empire’s independence. The aristocratic Sabaheddin was left to lead a splinter group, the Ottoman ‘League for Private Initiative and Decentralization’. It was a cumbersome name but, as a statement of intent, admirably specific.
The growth of the Young Turk movement was closely linked to the mounting anarchy within the largest remaining province under direct Ottoman rule in Europe. The brief lull in terrorist activity in Macedonia, after the Greek defeat in the Thirty-Day War, was followed at the turn of the century by a wave of terrorism inspired by the rival groups who sought a Big Bulgaria. The most sensational coup was the seizure by IMRO in September 1901 of an American missionary, Helen Stone, who was held hostage in the mountains around Lake Doiran and eventually released in Strumica after the US Government handed over $66,000 in ransom money. Miss Stone was so well treated by her comitadji kidnappers that on returning to Boston, Massachusetts she became a strong supporter of IMRO claims.16
This episode was not in itself of grave importance, but the kidnapping of a woman missionary inevitably received much publicity in the American, British, French and Italian Press, with the journalists emphasizing the apparent inability of the Turks to prevent rival Supremists and IMRO commanders from terrorizing village headsmen into support. Immediately after Helen Stone’s release, the European Powers began the leisurely process of diplomatic discussions with the Porte over the need for further reform in Macedonia, and in Thrace, too. The diplomats were soon reminded of the urgency of the problem. In the spring of 1903 a series of bomb outrages shook Salonika itself: the Ottoman Bank in the city was blown up, and a few months later there was a sustained guerrilla campaign by Bulgarian comitadji in the mountains. Greeks living in Salonika perished in the bomb blasts; the Ottoman vali, Hassan Fehmi Pasha, kept order in the city with a firmness and impartiality remembered by the Greeks long afterwards. But in 1903 the immediate consequence of IMRO activity was a revival of Greek patriot groups in Salonika and the neighbouring towns and villages. The Greek Consulate became the centre of the new movement. A Greek historian recalls how ‘conference after conference . . . took place within the Cathedral and it was there, many a time, that plans were laid down for the activities to be carried out by the various bodies’ of armed men.17
Not only Bulgars and Greeks threatened to explode the Balkan tinder-box. The new
aggressively nationalistic spirit which followed the restoration of the Karadjordjevic dynasty in Belgrade in June 1903 led to the revival of Serbian revolutionary cells, especially at Üsküb (Skopje) and Monastir (Bitolj). Within eighteen months a ‘small army’ of Chetniks, trained in Belgrade and Niš, was operating in the upper Vardar valley and around Lake Ochrid, only fighting regular Ottoman troops when attacked but constantly staking out Serbian claims to be made when the Turks withdrew. The racial, cultural and religious map of the whole area was remarkably variegated. In Üsküb, for example, where the ulema remained powerful and there was a Serbian Orthodox bishopric, the town’s first theatre was opened by two Roman Catholic merchants, one an Italian and the other, Kole Bojaxhiu, a fez-wearing Albanian married to a Serb. A daughter was born into this typically cosmopolitan Macedonian family at the end of the troubled decade. Her vocation lay far away from the Balkans, among the destitute of India: Ganxhe Agnes Bojaxhiu, an Ottoman subject by birth, became Mother Teresa of Calcutta.18
For a future laureate of one of the then newly-instituted Nobel Peace Prizes to emerge from such a welter of conflict would have seemed ludicrously improbable. By 1903 the Great Powers, already divided by imperial rivalries, were alarmed at the prospect of fresh crises in the Balkans. Events were unpleasantly reminiscent of Bulgaria in the 1870s or, more recently, of Armenia. No government wanted another campaign of mass agitation against ‘The Unspeakable Turk’. Among British Liberals there remained a powerful pro-Bulgarian lobby, and in both London and Paris there was some support for the idea of an autonomous Macedonia, but most governments were prepared to see Ottoman rule continue in the province, with international control of an effective gendarmerie force. Only the British wanted Ottoman troops entirely withdrawn from Macedonia (as from Crete). In October 1903 Tsar Nicholas II and the Emperor Francis Joseph, accompanied by their foreign ministers, met at Mürzsteg, an imperial hunting lodge about a hundred miles south of Vienna. There they agreed on a programme of reforms which the two sovereigns would recommend to the Sultan: a Russian and an Austrian ‘civil agent’ to advise the Turkish governor; a European commander of gendarmerie; and division of the province into ‘spheres of policing’, each the responsibility of a Great Power.
In the last week of November 1903 the Sultan accepted the Mürzsteg Proposals, a threatened naval demonstration by the Great Powers inclining him to respond favourably to a programme which he was known to detest.19 Abdulhamid was, however, a master of dissimulation and delay, and little was done to implement these highly complicated proposals. An Italian took command of the gendarmerie, and officers from the five Great Powers drew up provisional arrangements for policing the region. Two years later—after a further show of naval strength by Britain, France, Italy and Russia—the Sultan made a further concession: an international commission would be set up to supervise revenue and expenditure in Macedonia. Only the Kaiser and Marschall von Bieberstein, his skilful ambassador, abstained from intimidatory action. ‘The Germans do me as much good as they are permitted to do, whereas the rest of Europe do me as much harm as they can,’ Abdulhamid remarked sourly in private conversation.20 What he failed to realize was that the younger generation of army officers could see little distinction between the French, British, Italians or Russians to whom the Sultan seemed markedly subservient, and the Germans who were visibly profiting from the commercial concessions he had accorded them. Moreover, German military instructors, like many previous experts from abroad, showed a patronizing arrogance intolerable to young men of pride and ambition. That strong resentment of all foreign influence, on which Ottoman movements of opposition had so often fed, was by 1905–6 dangerously close to surfacing once again—but this time, with a difference.
In Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, junior army officers from families with no tradition of military service to their sovereign already constituted dangerous pressure groups which threatened to impose upon their respective governments nationalistic policies of their own devising. A similar development was reflected in the changing outlook of the Young Turk movement between the Congress of February 1902 and a second Congress, also held in Paris, in December 1907. To the consternation of Abdulhamid’s secret police agents, there was evidence in 1906–7 of dissident cells in several of the Sultan’s field armies. An Ottoman Freedom Society (Osmanli Hürriyet Cemiyeti), founded in Salonika in September 1906 by the postal official Mehmed Talaat, won support from officers of the Third Army Corps. Two months later Mustafa Kemal, a twenty-five-year-old staff captain born in Salonika and educated mainly at Monastir, founded a secret Fatherland Movement (Vatan) among officers of the Fifth Army Corps at Damascus; Vatan soon established cells in Jaffa, Jerusalem and Beirut. By the following September the Ottoman Freedom Society had established links with Young Turk exiles in Geneva; and soon after the Second Paris Congress the leaders of this combined Young Turk movement adopted the name Committee of Union and Progress (CUP—Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti), whose organization absorbed Kemal’s Vatan and several other dissident bodies as well.21 The common bond between the affiliated societies in the CUP was Macedonia. Most members were serving or had recently served in the troubled province, or had been born there. In 1908 Salonika, second city in modern Greece, acted as a powerhouse for the Young Turk Revolution.
The events of that summer followed no recognizable pattern, the most dramatic episodes taking place in so remote a corner of the empire that it seemed inconceivable they could rock the Ottoman throne. The military Mufti of the Third Army garrison in Monastir was a police agent, a Yildiz Palace spy. By chance, early in June, he stumbled across a CUP conspiracy involving Adjutant-Major Ahmed Niyazi, an officer of suspect loyalty stationed at Resne (now Resen), between Monastir and Ochrid. The Mufti was shot and wounded, to prevent his reporting back to the capital, but Niyazi decided to precipitate a revolt, seizing arms and ammunition during Friday prayers on 3 July and taking to the mountains around Ochrid in an act of armed rebellion. The CUP, fearing counter-measures, supported Niyazi and many junior officers joined him in the hills, the best-known of them being Major Enver, who was serving on the staff of the Inspector-General of Rumelia, Hüseyin Hilmi, himself sympathetic to the young Turks. At Niyazi’s prompting the CUP contacted foreign consuls in Salonika and sent agents to all the principal towns in Macedonia, proclaiming a restoration of the 1876 Constitution. At first Abdulhamid played down the significance of the insurrection. He was, however, shaken by the assassination in Monastir of one of his most loyal generals, and subsequently by the mutinous mood of troops hurriedly sent from Anatolia to suppress the Macedonian rebellion. Reports reaching the capital showed how rapidly the garrisons of Rumelia were declaring themselves in favour of the Constitution. Exactly what they sought was obscure, although it was clear that in several districts the insurgents had support from the Albanians, and from some Bulgarian and Greek communities. There were echoes, too, of older struggles in greater cities: ‘La Patrie, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’, the British vice-consul heard a young CUP officer proclaim in French in the small town of Drama.22
As morale declined at the Yildiz Palace, Sultan Abdulhamid made one last effort to recover the political initiative. Not for the first time in his reign, he decided to forestall the opposition. He dismissed Mehmed Ferid, Grand Vizier for the past five and a half years, and summoned back to office for the seventh time Küchük Mehmed Said, who had read the Sultan’s speech to the Meclis-i Mebusan in that false dawn of Ottoman constitutionalism thirty-one years before. Within forty-eight hours, Said Pasha and his master had agreed to meet the first demand of the Macedonian revolutionaries. The Sultan—so he explained five months later—believed that the peoples of his empire were by now well enough educated to accept the workings of parliamentary government. An imperial irade, made public on 24 July 1908, announced that the suspended Constitution of 1876 would immediately be restored. A few days later a general amnesty for political prisoners and exiles was proclaimed. On 1 August a hatt-i hümayun confirmed the aboli
tion of the secret police, freedom from arbitrary arrest, permission to travel abroad, equality of race and religion, and reorganization of existing governments. The charter also promised the summoning of an elected parliament within three months. Demonstrations of mass enthusiasm, supported by over a dozen nationalities, swept through towns and villages in Europe and Asia.23
The Hamidian era was over. The Young Turks destroyed autocracy without a shot fired nearer to Yildiz than Salonika. But there had been no change of Sultan-Caliph. On 31 August the longest and wiliest survivor for three centuries began the thirty-third year of his reign under the strange mantle of a constitutional monarchy. It lay uneasily across his hunched shoulders.