The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire
Page 36
Ismet’s efforts were, in the end, astonishingly successful.4 The principal task of the conference was to replace the Treaty of Sèvres by a negotiated settlement which would both recognize the transition from Ottoman rule to national sovereignty in the Middle East, and safeguard the new Turkey’s foothold in Europe. The Treaty of Lausanne—signed on 24 July 1923—accepted the division of Thrace, with the river Maritsa forming a frontier between Greece and Turkey, but with Edirne confirmed as a Turkish city. Greece’s tragic misadventure in Asia Minor was at an end: the Turks retained Smyrna and its hinterland in full sovereignty, as well as the islands of Tenedos and Imbros and the shores of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, although there were to be demilitarized zones on the Straits as well as along the Thracian frontier. No Arab lands were claimed by the Turkish delegates, but an attempt was made to recover some of the predominantly Kurdish districts around Mosul, and it was not until 1926 that the League of Nations finally decided Mosul should remain in British-mandated Iraq, with Turkey promised ten per cent of the revenue from the British-owned oilfields of the region. The greatest problems at Lausanne were caused by the attempts of the British and French, and to a lesser extent the Italians, to reimpose Capitulations and other forms of financial control and economic supervision. So deep was the conflict over this question that the conference broke down in the first week of February 1923 and did not reconvene until the last week in April. Ultimately Ismet’s wishes prevailed. The Capitulations were discarded for all time and, apart from a temporary limitation on Turkish tariff rates, the Ankara Government was left free to prepare its own economic plans. Unlike Germany, Austria, Hungary or Bulgaria, Kemal’s Turkey was not required to pay reparations to the victorious Allies.
Some questions went unresolved at Lausanne. Talks over the future fate of the Turkish and Greek minorities antedated the first sessions of the Conference, but it was not until after the Lausanne Treaty was ratified that bilateral agreements between Ankara and Athens provided for an exchange of populations. More than a million Greeks left Asia Minor; some 350,000 Turks emigrated from Macedonia to seek a new life in Anatolia. Both these uprooted communities suffered great hardship from the drawing of the new frontier lines.
So, too, in a different way, did two other nationalities, ancient enemies of one another. The claims of the Armenians and the Kurds were virtually ignored at the Conference. Nothing more was heard of an independent Armenia, nor of an autonomous Kurdistan.5 Proposals were put forward for the creation of an Armenian ‘National Home’, but the Turks refused to consider the matter and it was not pressed by the French or the British. The Armenians therefore remained a divided people, some in the Soviet Union, many settling in Syria and Lebanon, others keeping their heads down in the city which was now known as Istanbul. The Kurds, on the other hand, technically became a ‘non-people’ in Kemal’s national state, where they were identified quite simply as ‘mountain Turks’. A Kurdish rebellion two years after the signing of the treaty was brutally suppressed. There were further risings in 1929 and 1930, while in 1987 the guerrilla campaign initiated by the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) in south-eastern Turkey led to the imposition of martial law in eight of modern Turkey’s seventy-one provinces; and the terrible cycle of terrorism and repression has continued into the last decade of the century. Like the Armenians, the Kurds were a people split asunder by the frontiers of the post-Ottoman map of the Middle East; and their sufferings were intensified by a thirty-year struggle in Iraq (where in 1961 the Kurdish minority formed a fifth of the population).
In three respects the Lausanne terms disappointed the Grand National Assembly in Ankara. There was some resentment at the creation of an International Straits Commission, based at Istanbul and committed to upholding freedom of navigation along the great waterway linking the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Other deputies regretted the failure to secure Mosul, and criticized the inclusion in French-mandated Syria of the district of Hatay, with the port of Iskenderun and the historic city of Antioch (Antakya). But in an assembly of two hundred and fifty delegates, only fourteen voted against ratification of the Lausanne Treaty.6
Ismet’s success at Lausanne enabled Kemal to seal his revolution. Within ten weeks of the signing of the treaty, the Allied occupation of the Ottoman capital came to an end, General Tim Harington leaving a city in which he had enjoyed astonishing popularity. On 2 October 1923 a battalion of the Coldstream Guards paraded in the square outside the Caliph’s residence, the Dolmabahche Palace, before boarding the troopship Arabic, at anchor in the Bosphorus.7 Turkish troops marched back into Istanbul four days later. Their reception was, however, not as warm as the Nationalists had anticipated, possibly because Kemal never hid his mistrust of the Sultans’ capital, with its notorious record of political intrigue and corruption. Less than a fortnight later, the imperial city was deposed. On 13 October the Grand National Assembly adopted a constitutional amendment, proposed four days earlier by Ismet Pasha, declaring that ‘Ankara is the seat of government of the Turkish State’. Finally, on the evening of 29 October the Assembly resolved that ‘the form of government of the Turkish State is a Republic’. Within a quarter of an hour the Assembly elected Mustafa Kemal as Turkey’s first President, thereby confirming the national leadership he had exercised for the past four years.8
Abdulmecid II may, perhaps, have envisaged a dual system, with Istanbul providing a home for the Caliphate while all the business of politics took place in central Anatolia. If so, he was swiftly disillusioned. The Republic was only eleven weeks old when a stern Presidential rebuke warned him not to follow ‘the path of his ancestors the Sultans’; as Kemal explained, ‘We cannot sacrifice the Republic of Turkey for the sake of courtesy or sophistry. The Caliph must be content to know who he is and what his office is.’9 But what exactly was this office? That problem perplexed two prominent Muslims on the Indian subcontinent, Ameer Ali and the Aga Khan, who wrote to Ismet, now Turkey’s Prime Minister, recommending that the Republic should bestow a special international status on the Caliphate since it ‘commanded the confidence and esteem of the Muslim peoples’. The letter, leaked to the press ahead of its arrival at Ankara, was exploited by the President. The Assembly was told that, so long as the Caliphate was retained in Istanbul, it would provide outsiders with an opportunity to interfere in Turkey’s internal affairs. Conversely, abolition of the Caliphate would ‘enrich the Islamic religion’, enabling the Republic to purge the ulema. Dutifully the National Assembly voted for the final breach with the Ottoman past: on 3 March 1924 the Caliphate was abolished, Abdulmecid II formally deposed, and all members of the former ruling dynasty expelled from the Turkish Republic.10
Abdulmecid was hustled out of the Dolmabahche next morning before the newspapers announcing his deposition could go on sale in the streets. A car sped him to Chatalja, well outside the sprawling city. There he waited throughout that Tuesday, while other members of the family were brought to the small town. In the evening the most famous of Balkan locomotives stopped briefly at Chatalja; and it was aboard the Orient Express that the Ottomans were carried, bag and baggage, into Europe.11
No leading Ottoman politician served the new Republic. Nor, indeed, did any ministers who had held office under the Young Turk regime. Most were already dead. Enver, clinging still to his ideal of an independent Turkestan in Central Asia, was killed in 1922 during an obscure cavalry skirmish with the Red Army; and by then Cemal, Said Halim and Talaat had all been assassinated in exile by Armenian extremists, seeking to avenge the sufferings of their compatriots. Two prominent Young Turks of the pre-war period, Mehmed Cavit and Dr Nazim, chose to remain in the Republic and in 1926 were, on the flimsiest evidence, found guilty of alleged conspiracy to kill President Kemal; they were publicly hanged in the centre of Ankara. More than a dozen lesser luminaries of the old CUP sat as deputies in the Grand National Assembly. Apart from Ismet himself, they gained no particular distinction in the chamber.12
Yet the Ottoman dynasty left a greate
r legacy in the Middle East than either the Turkish Republic or its other successor states cared to acknowledge.13 Tanzimat restructuring had made possible the emergence of a well-educated bureaucracy, trained as civil servants at the Mulkiye, and a highly professional officer corps, graduates of the war college, the Harbiye. The remarkable programme of modernization achieved in Kemal’s Turkey would have been impossible without the skills of administrative officials from the Mulkiye; and it might well be argued that the final vindication of Harbiye teaching came as late as November 1950, when the Turkish brigade serving in Korea met the first onslaught of the Chinese Red Army with disciplined good order. Ottoman-trained personnel administered Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and to a lesser extent Iraq between the two world wars, often in conflict with the mandatory powers, France and Britain; and the Ottoman military tradition remained strong among the armies of all the Middle Eastern states, even in the Free Officers’ Committee which became the powerhouse of Egypt’s national revolution. The Mecelle, the code of law drawn up in the early 1870s to help modernize the empire, provided a framework for the Turkish republic too, although the civil code promulgated in 1926 also borrowed extensively from Swiss practice. Outside republican Turkey, the Mecelle remained a model for all communities seeking to reconcile Islamic traditions with Western legal concepts. In many parts of the old Ottoman Empire, local government was little changed until mid-century. Nor, indeed, was the influence of the absentee landowning political élite, who simply transferred their service from the Ottomans to the successor governments. These ‘notables’ were thus able to bring a surprising stability into what appeared on the map to be a fragmented region; they maintained a delicate balance of power until a new generation succeeded them during the very years when the old European governments ceased to dominate the region. A shadow Ottoman paternalism long outlived the empire of the Sultans.
Why, then, did the Ottoman Empire, which had survived so many challenges to its existence, finally fall in the aftermath of the First World War? The Kemalists were prepared to advance a determinist theory of history which was almost as mechanical as the workings of Marxist dialectic. They gloried in the Asiatic origins of the Turkish people and argued that, once the Sultans had crossed into Europe and accepted the role of legatees for the Byzantine Emperors, they became ensnared by their new acquisitions; the inheritance fatally weakened what was essentially a warrior empire, and the House of Osman was therefore doomed from the moment it settled on the shores of the Bosphorus. There is some truth behind this much simplified thesis. For as long as the Empire was expanding, Constantinople served as the natural base for the penetration of the Balkan peninsula and the Danube Basin; but as the Ottoman lands receded the city became a dangerously exposed foothold on an alien continent. Some later Sultans, notably Abdulhamid II, accepted that the Empire still had a mission to fulfil in Asia and, less certainly, in North Africa; but they could not shake off the bonds of Rumelia. Had these later Sultans not been encumbered by their European inheritance, they could have developed the resources of Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the Levant for the profit of their empire. An enlightened Sultan could thus have brought stable government and effective administration to those regions of the Middle East where, even without the benefit of such improbably wise rule, Ottoman habits and traditions survived for almost half a century after the fall of the dynasty.
Theorizing of this nature is, of course, idle speculation. More relevant to the question is the relationship between the Sultanate and Islam; the essentially religious basis of the Ottoman State gave the empire both its strength and its weakness. That ‘firm grasp on the strong cord of the law of Muhammad’, of which Mustafa Koçi wrote in the early seventeenth century,14 enabled the sultans to draw on the religious loyalty of their peoples in a succession of foreign wars against infidel Christians; and, so long as government could be seen to rest upon the şeriat, the ulema formed staunch pillars of the state. But the Western European revolutionary years at the end of the eighteenth century allowed new concepts of centralized government to filter into the Ottoman Empire. Thereafter the politics of the laity increasingly encroached on prerogatives tenaciously held by the religious hierarchy, raising doubts over the viability in an Ottoman state of such westernized institutions as a conscript army or a parliament. Yet, just as the sultans looked to preserve both their European and their Asian lands, so too they sought the best of both worlds, secular and spiritual. The claims of the Ottoman Caliphate were never so strongly asserted as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though these were the decades in which a sceptical intellectualism and a popular Turkish nationalism made the greatest inroads on traditional ways of thought and behaviour. The incomplete Young Turk revolution destroyed the Sultan’s autocracy and championed the concept of religious disestablishment without finding adequate alternatives, political or spiritual, before plunging the empire into a disastrous war from which wiser councillors might have stood aside, as did Ismet Inönü’s government a quarter of a century later. Fear of Mustafa Kemal’s veiled laicism led in April 1920 to the proscription of the National movement by the Sultan-Caliph and the şeyhülislâm thus emphasizing how remote were the sovereign and the spiritual leader from their peoples. When, four months later, Mehmed authorized the signing of the Sèvres Treaty, he distanced himself still further from his subjects.
‘May God preserve us from such a weak-kneed Sultan,’ Ali Hayder, an Arabian prince loyal to the dynasty, wrote in his journal when he heard of Mehmed VI’s flight. ‘The Turkish Imperial Family are largely to blame’ for the ‘disintegration’ of the Muslim world, Ali added in a later diary entry.15 Although it remains unfashionable to stress the influence of individual rulers on great events, there is no doubt that the Ottomans were ill-served by Abdulhamid’s successors. Significantly, once he had sailed off to Malta, the last Sultan was content to drop out of the pages of history. He settled in San Remo, on the Italian Riviera, making no attempt to establish a court-in-exile. Only once did his movements arouse even passing interest and that was when, soon after his deposition, he decided to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Thus, so he believed, he would fulfil an obligation binding on every good Muslim and shamefully neglected by all thirty-five of his predecessors on the throne.
Yet, even though he no longer ruled as Sultan or Caliph, those knees remained pathetically weak. Mehmed VI duly sailed through the Suez Canal and disembarked at Jeddah. He made the fifty-four-mile journey from the coast into the barren valleys of the limestone hills, and saw for himself the Great Mosque around the sacred Kaaba. But he did not wait to perform the full pilgrimage at the Sacred House, with its sevenfold circumambulation of the Kaaba and the contrite kissing of the black stone. While Mehmed was in Mecca, he heard that his one-time rebellious vassal, King Hussein of the Hejaz, was again seeking to secure for himself the title of Caliph. Rather than risk being caught up in the intrigues of Arabian politics, the ex-Sultan hurried back to his sanctuary in Mussolini’s Italy. There he died on 15 May 1926, three months after his sixty-fifth birthday. He was the first Sultan since the fall of Constantinople who could not be buried in the city which his namesake had conquered; but French mandatory officialdom relented, allowing his body to be brought to territory over which he was briefly the ruler. His tomb lies in Damascus.16
A stranger fate was reserved for the last Ottoman Caliph. While Mehmed VI survived his deposition for only forty-two months, Abdulmecid II had more than twenty years of exile ahead of him when he stepped down from the Orient Express; as a man of exquisite culture, he chose to spend his last days in Paris, the city where his artistry had once been exhibited. He lived quietly, virtually forgotten in the inter-war world of strutting dictators, and he lived longer than any previous head of the Ottoman dynasty. When death came to him in his seventy-seventh year, his passing went unnoticed in the wider world, not even a brief obituary being slipped into The Times of London.17 But this is hardly surprising: Abdulmecid died on 23 August 1944—an abnormal day in t
he history of Paris, with the Grand Palais in flames as Free French tanks and American infantry hurried to liberate his chosen city of exile from Nazi occupation. As if to atone for upstaging Abdulmecid’s final exit, the Allied authorities gave permission for his body to be conveyed to the second Holy City of Islam. Alone among Ottoman rulers, the last Caliph was interred at Medina.
SULTANS SINCE THE OTTOMAN CAPTURE OF CONSTANTINOPLE
Mehmed II reigned
1444–1481
Bayazed II
1481–1512
Selim I
1512–1520
Suleiman I, the Magnificent
1520–1566
Selim II, the Sot
1566–1574
Murad III
1574–1595
Mehmed III
1595–1603
Ahmed I
1603–1617
Mustafa I
1617–1618 & 1622–1623
Osman II
1618–1622