The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  The CUP was soon put to the test of defending the Empire it had been set up to renew. In 1911 Italy seized Libya, the last Ottoman province in North Africa, Enver vainly attempting to organize desert resistance. A year later, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria combined to launch a joint attack on the Ottoman armies in the Balkans, which within a matter of weeks had all but swept them out of Europe. The CUP, which had been briefly dislodged from power in the summer of 1912, escaped the odium of this massive defeat, and when its enemies fell out with each other, was able to regain at least the province of Edirne. But the scale of the imperial catastrophe was traumatic. Rumelia had long been the most advanced region of the Empire, the prime recruiting-ground of Ottoman elites from the time of the devshirme to the Young Turks themselves, who kept their Central Committee in Salonika, not Istanbul, down to 1912. Its final loss, not even at the hands of a great power, reducing Ottoman domains in Europe to a mere foothold, and expelling some 400,000 Turks from their homes, was the greatest disaster and humiliation in the history of the Empire.

  The effect on the CUP was twofold. The Empire was now 85 per cent Muslim, lowering any incentive for political appeals to the remaining quotient of unbelievers, and increasing the attraction of playing the card of Islam to rally support for its regime. But though the leaders of the Committee, determined to keep hold of the Arab provinces, made ample use of this, they had before them the bitter lesson taught by the Albanians, who had seized the opportunity offered by the Balkan wars to gain their independence—a defection by fellow-Muslims that suggested a common religion might not be enough to prevent a further disintegration of the state they had inherited. The result was to tilt the ideological axis of the CUP, especially its inner circle, in an increasingly ethnic—Turkish, as distinct from Muslim—direction. The shift involved no cost in outlook: virtually to a man, the Young Turks were positivists whose view of matters sacred was thoroughly instrumental.10

  Nor were they disposed to accept a diminished station for the Empire. Expulsion from Rumelia did not inspire a defensive posture, but an active will to avenge defeats in the Balkans, and recoup imperial losses. ‘Our anger is strengthening: revenge, revenge, revenge; there is no other word’, Enver wrote to his wife.11 The lesson the CUP drew from 1912 was that Ottoman power could be upheld only by alliance with at least one of Europe’s Great Powers, which had stood aside as it was rolled up. The Young Turks had no particular preference as to which, trying in turn Britain, Austria, Russia and France, only to be rebuffed by each, before finally succeeding with Germany on 2 August 1914, two days before the outbreak of the First World War.12 By now the CUP occupied the foreground: Enver was minister of war, Talat of the interior, Cemal of the navy. The treaty as such did not commit the Empire to declare war on the Entente, and the Young Turks thought to profit from it without much risk. They banked on Germany routing France in short order, whereupon Ottoman armies could join up safely with the Central Powers to knock out Russia, and garner the fruits of victory—regaining a suitable belt of Thrace, the Aegean islands, Cyprus, Libya, all of Arabia, territory ceded to Russia in the Caucasus, and lands stretching to Azerbaijan and Turkestan beyond.

  But when France did not collapse in the West, while Germany pressed for rapid Ottoman entry into the war to weaken Russia in the East, much of the cabinet got cold feet. It was only after weeks of disagreement and indecision that Enver, the most bellicose member of the junta now in control, succeeded in bouncing the government into war in late October 1914, with an unprovoked naval bombardment of Russian coastal positions in the Black Sea.13 However, the Ottoman navy, even manned by German crews, was in no position to effect landings in the Ukraine. Where then was Young Turk mettle to be displayed? Symbolic forces were eventually sent north to buff out Austro-German lines in Galicia, and half-hearted expeditions dispatched, at the prompting of Berlin, against British lines in Egypt. But these were sideshows. The crack troops of the army, led by Enver in person, were flung across the Russian border in the Caucasus. There, waiting to be recovered, lay the three provinces of Batum, Ardahan and Kars subtracted from the Empire at the Conference of Berlin in 1878. In the snow-bound depths of the winter of January 1915, few returned. The Ottoman attack was shattered more completely than any comparable offensive in the Great War—fewer than one out of seven survived the campaign. As they straggled back, frostbitten and demoralized, their rearguard was left exposed.

  In Istanbul, the CUP reacted swiftly. This was no ordinary retreat into the kind of rear where another battle of the Marne might be fought. The whole swathe of territory extending across both sides of the frontier was home to Armenians. What place could they have in the conflict that had now been unleashed? Historically the oldest inhabitants of the region, indeed of Anatolia at large, they were Christians whose church—dating from the third century—could claim priority over that of Rome itself. But by the nineteenth century, unlike Serbs, Bulgars, Greeks or Albanians, they comprised no compact national majority anywhere in their lands of habitation. In 1914, about a quarter were subjects of the Russian, three-quarters of the Ottoman Empire. Under the tsars, they enjoyed no political rights, but as fellow Christians were not persecuted for their religion, and could rise within the imperial administration. Under the sultans, they had been excluded from the devshirme from the start, but could operate as merchants and acquire land, if not offices; and in the course of the nineteenth century they generated a significant intellectual stratum—the first Ottoman novels were written by Armenians.

  Inevitably, like their Balkan counterparts and inspired by them, this intelligentsia developed a nationalist movement. But it was set apart from them in two ways: it was dispersed across a wide and discontinuous expanse of territory, throughout which it was a minority, and it was divided between two rival empires, one of which posed as its protector, while the other figured as its persecutor. Most Armenians—about 75 per cent—were peasants in the three easternmost Ottoman provinces, where they numbered perhaps a quarter of the population. But there were also significant concentrations in Cilicia, bordering on today’s Syria, and vigorous communities in Istanbul and other big cities. State suspicion of a minority with links across a contested border, latent popular hostility to unbelievers, and economic jealousy of alien commercial wealth made for a combustible atmosphere around their presence in Anatolia. Abdülhamid’s personal animus ensured they would suffer under his rule, which saw repeated pogroms against them. In 1894–6, anywhere between 80,000 and 200,000 died in massacres at the hands of special Kurdish regiments he had created for ethnic repressions in the east.14 The ensuing international outcry, leading eventually to the theoretical appointment—it came to nothing—of foreign inspectors to ensure Armenian safety in the worst-affected zones, confirmed belief in the disloyalty of the community.

  The CUP’s immediate fear, as it viewed the rout of its armies in the Caucasus, was that the local Armenian population might rally to the enemy. On 25 February, it ordered that all Armenian conscripts in its forces be disarmed. The telegrams went out on the day that Anglo-French forces began to bombard the Dardanelles, threatening Istanbul itself. Towards the end of March, amid great tension in the capital, the Central Committee—Talat was the prime mover—voted that the entire Armenian population in Anatolia should be deported to the deserts of Syria, to secure the Ottoman rear. The operation was to be carried out by the Teskilât-ı Mahsusa, the ‘Special Organization’ created for secret tasks by the party in 1913, now some thirty thousand strong under the command of Bahaettin Şakir.15

  Ethnic cleansing on a massive scale was no novelty in the region. Wholesale expulsion of communities from their homes, typically as refugees from conquering armies, was a fate hundreds of thousands of Turks and Circassians had suffered as Russia consolidated its grip in the northern Caucasus in the 1860s, and Balkan nations won their independence from Ottoman rule in the next half century.16 Anatolia was full of such mujahir, with bitter memories of their treatment by Christians. Widespread slaught
er was no stranger to the region either: the Armenian massacres of the 1890s had many precedents, on all sides, in the history of the ‘Eastern Question’ as elsewhere. Nor was forcible relocation on grounds of security confined to one side in the First World War itself: in Russia, at least half a million Jews were rounded up and deported from Poland and the Pale by the tsarist regime.17

  The enterprise on which the CUP embarked in the spring of 1915 was, however, new. For ostensible deportation, brutal enough in itself, was to be the cover for extermination—systematic, state-organized murder of an entire community. The killings began in March, still somewhat haphazardly, as Russian forces began to penetrate into Anatolia. On 20 April, in a climate of increasing fear, there was an Armenian uprising in the city of Van. Five days later, Anglo-French forces staged full-scale landings in the Dardanelles, and contingency plans were laid for transferring the government to the interior, should the capital fall to the Entente. In this emergency, the CUP wasted no time. By early June, centrally directed and coordinated destruction of the Armenian population was in full swing. As the leading comparative authority on modern ethnic cleansing, Michael Mann, writes: ‘The escalation from the first incidents to genocide occurred within three months, a much more rapid escalation than Hitler’s later attack on the Jews’.18 Şakir—probably more than any other conspirator, the original designer of the CUP—toured the target zones, shadowy and deadly, supervising the slaughter. Without even pretexts of security, Armenians in western Anatolia were wiped out hundreds of miles from the front, as eradication caught up with them too.

  No reliable figures exist for the number of those who died, or the different ways—with or without bullet or knife; on the spot or marched to death—in which they perished. Mann, who thinks a reasonable guess is 1.2 to 1.4 million, reckons that ‘perhaps two-thirds of the Armenians died’—‘the most successful modern murderous ethnic cleansing achieved in the 20th century’, exceeding in its proportions the Shoah.19 A catastrophe of this order could not be hidden. Germans, present in Anatolia as Ottoman allies in many—consular, military, pastoral and other—capacities, witnessed it and reported home, most in horror or anguish, at what was going on. Confronted by the American ambassador, Talat scarcely bothered even to deny it. For its part the Entente, unlike the Allies who kept silent at the Judeocide in the Second World War, denounced the extermination without delay, issuing a solemn declaration on 24 May 1915, that promised to punish as criminals those who had organized it.

  Victory in the Dardanelles saved the CUP regime. But this was the only real success, a defensive one, in its war effort. Elsewhere, in Arabia, in Palestine, in Iraq, on the Black Sea, the armies of a still basically agricultural society were beaten by its more industrialized adversaries, with great civilian suffering and huge military casualties, exceeded as a proportion of the population only by Serbia. With the collapse of Bulgaria, the Ottoman lifeline to the Central Powers, at the end of September 1918, the writing was on the wall for the CUP. Talat, passing back through Sofia on a trip to Berlin, saw the game was up, and within a fortnight had resigned as grand vizier. A new cabinet, under ostensibly less compromised leaders, was formed two weeks later, and on 31 October the Porte signed an armistice with the Entente, four days before Austria on 3 November and two weeks before Germany on 11 November. It looked as if dominoes were falling in a row, from weakest to strongest.

  3

  The impression was misleading. In Vienna, the Habsburg monarchy disintegrated overnight. In Berlin, soldiers’ and workers’ councils sprang up as the last Hohenzollern fled into exile. In Sofia, Stamboliski’s Peasant Party, which had staged a rising even before the end of the war, came to power. In each case defeat was incontestable, the old order was utterly discredited by it, and revolutionary forces emerged amid its ruins. In Istanbul there was no such scenario. The Ottoman Empire had entered the war with a gratuitous decision unlike that of any other power, and its exit was unlike that of any other too. For the CUP leaders did not accept that they were beaten. Their hand-over of the cabinet was a reculer pour mieux sauter. In the fortnight between their resignation from the government and the signature of an armistice, they prepared for resistance against an impending occupation, and a second round in the struggle to assert Turkish might. Enver invoked the Balkan disasters of 1912–13, when redemption had been snatched with his recovery of Edirne, as inspiration for the future.20 Talat set up a para-military underground, Karakol, headed by close associates—including Enver’s uncle—and equipped with arms caches and funds from the Special Organization, which was itself hastily dissolved, and the Unionist Party renamed. Archives were removed and incriminating files methodically destroyed.21

  After surrender had been signed on the island of Lemnos on 31 October, but before Allied forces had entered the Straits, the CUP leaders made their final move. Dispositions were now complete, and there was no panic. During the night of 1–2 November, eight top leaders of the regime secretly boarded a German torpedo-boat, the former Schastlivyi captured from the Russians, which sped them to Sebastopol.22 There Germany, still at war with the Entente, controlled the Ukraine. The party included Enver, Talat, Şakir, Nazım and Cemal.23 From the Crimea, Enver made in the direction of the Caucasus, while the rest of the party were taken by stages in disguise to Berlin, which they reached in January 1919. There they were granted protection under Ebert, the new Social Democratic president of the Republic. Unionism was not Nazism, but if an analogy were wanted, it was as if in 1945 Hitler, Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Goebbels and Goering, after laying careful preparations for Werewolf actions in Germany, had coolly escaped together to Finland, to continue the struggle.

  Ten days later, the Allies entered Istanbul. At the war’s end, the Habsburg Empire had spontaneously disintegrated; the Hohenzollern gave way to a republic that had to yield up Alsace-Lorraine and suffer occupation of the Rhineland, but no real loss of German territorial integrity. The Ottoman Empire was another matter, its fate far more completely at the mercy of the victors. In late 1918, four powers—Britain, France, Italy and Greece—shared the spoils, the first two dividing its Arab provinces between them, the latter competing for gains in south-west Anatolia. It would be another two years before any formal agreement was reached between them on how the Empire was finally to be dismembered. Meanwhile, they exercised joint supervision in Istanbul, initially quite loose, over an apparently accommodating cabinet under a new sultan, known for disliking the CUP.

  Yet though the post-war misery of a defeated society was much worse than in Germany or Austria, its resources for resisting any potentially Carthaginian peace were greater. In the capital, Karakol was soon funnelling a flow of agents and arms into the interior, where plans had already been laid to move the centre of power during the war, and there was little foreign presence to monitor what was going on. Crucially, moreover, the October Revolution, by removing Russia from the ranks of the Allies, not only ensured that eastern Anatolia remained beyond the range of any occupation. It left the Ottoman Ninth Army, which Enver had sent to seize the Caucasus, once the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk cleared the path for it to advance all the way to Baku, intact in the region under its Unionist commander.

  In the spring of 1919, another Unionist officer stepped on stage. Kemal, who also came from Rumelia, was an early member of the CUP who had risen to prominence in the defence of the Dardanelles, before spending the rest of the war in Syria with Cemal. Uneasy relations with Enver had excluded him from the inner core of the party, absolving him from involvement with its Special Organization. Returning from Damascus in pursuit of a ministry in the post-war cabinet, he was offered instead a military inspectorate in the east. The proposal probably came out of discussions with Karakol, with whom he made contact on getting back. Once arrived on the Black Sea coast, Kemal moved inland and began immediately to coordinate political and military resistance—at first covert, soon overt—to Allied controls over Turkey. In what would in time become the War of Independence, he was assisted by four fav
ourable factors.

  The first was simply the degree of preparation for resistance left behind by the CUP leaders, which included not only extensive arms dumps and intelligence agents underground, but also a country-wide network of Societies for the Rights of National Defence as a quasi political party above ground; plus—more by fortune than forethought—a fully equipped regular army, out of Allied reach. The second was the solidarity extended by Russia, where Lenin’s regime, facing multiple Entente interventions to overthrow it in the Civil War, supported Turkish resistance to the common enemy with arms and funds. The third lay in divisions of the Entente itself. Britain was the principal power in Istanbul. But it was unwilling to match its political weight with military force, preferring to rely on Greece as its regional proxy. But the Greek card—this was the fourth essential element in the situation—was a particularly weak one for the victors to play.

  Not only was Greece resented as an inferior rival by Italy, and suspected as a British pawn by France. In Turkish eyes a jackal scavenging behind great powers, who were worthy adversaries of the Empire, it had made virtually no contribution to the defeat of Ottoman arms, and yet was awarded the largest occupied zones, where substantial numbers of Greeks had already been expelled by the Special Organization before the war, and ethnic tensions ran high. On top of all this, Greece was a small, internally divided state, of scant significance as a military power. A better target for a campaign of national liberation would have been difficult to imagine. Four days before Kemal arrived on the Black Sea, Greek troops landed in Smyrna and took over the surrounding region, igniting anger across the country, and creating perfect conditions for an enterprise that still looked risky to many Turks.