The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  CHAPTER 14

  SEEKING UNION AND PROGRESS

  THE SUDDEN RESTORATION OF THE CONSTITUTION TOOK THE Committee of Union and Progress by surprise. Its founder-members had envisaged a longer campaign before they could persuade the Sultan to resume the tentative experiments in representative government after a lapse of thirty-two years. It had seemed likely that, in partnership with sympathetic ulema dignitaries, the Young Turks would first need to devise a way of deposing the reigning sovereign. Instead it soon became clear that the imperial irade had transformed the existing relationship between ruler and ruled. On 31 July, the Friday after it was proclaimed, Abdulhamid ventured as far as the Ayasofya mosque for the weekly şelamlik, the first time in a quarter of a century that he had mustered sufficient courage to cross the Golden Horn in order to pray in the ancient basilica of Byzantium. The carriage drive was a minor personal triumph; he was even cheered in the narrow streets where he most feared assassination.1 It was with some reluctance that, early in August, he conceded it was still necessary for him to receive a CUP deputation and discuss the merits of their programme of reform.

  This gracious accessibility of a not unpopular Sultan created problems for the would-be revolutionaries: who would go to Yildiz as their spokesmen? The CUP was not a political party: it was not even a nationwide movement of protest. Outside Macedonia it lacked any co-ordinated organization and there was, as yet, no single person who stood out as leader. For Major Niyazi, Major Cemal, Major Enver or any of the junior officers to travel to the capital was dangerous; they might legitimately be regarded as rebellious mutineers. The most experienced CUP member in Macedonia was Dr Nazim, director of the Salonika Municipal Hospital and chief contact between the Young Turk conspirators and the exiles in Paris; but, though he became Secretary General of the CUP’s central committee two months later, Nazim always chose to remain out of the public eye. There was also Hüseyin Hilmi, a respected figure throughout Rumelia who had publicly proclaimed the Sultan’s irade in Salonika amid great enthusiasm. Yet Hilmi, too, was unsuitable; while sympathizing with Young Turk objectives, he was loyal to the lost liberalism of an older generation. At fifty-five Hilmi could hardly serve as spokesman for officers and administrative officials more than twenty years his junior.2

  Eventually the Committee chose three skilled bureaucrats: Mehmed Cavit (often transcribed as ‘Djavid’), a Salonika merchant’s son with a flair for economics; Mustafa Rahmi, who came from one of the wealthiest land-owning families in Rumelia; and Mehmed Talaat, who had helped set up the Ottoman Freedom Society in Salonika almost two years earlier. Talaat, born into an Edirne peasant family, possessed a powerful intelligence. While too self-made a politician to risk isolation through ready compromise, he was also too ambitious to limit his options by blind acceptance of a doctrinaire fanaticism. Over the following ten years it was Talaat rather than any of his more flamboyant colleagues who effectively transformed CUP resolutions into political action. Major Ahmed Cemal (or ‘Djemal’) and Major Enver, the two ruthless Third Army staff officers, became better-known abroad; but as the confused memoir material on the Young Turk movement becomes clearer, so Mehmed Talaat, the one-time telegraph clerk, stands out more and more as mastermind in this formidable triumvirate.

  Even in his first audience with Abdulhamid, Talaat seems to have imposed his personality. On its arrival in the capital the deputation had been treated with contemptuous disdain by Said Pasha; Talaat and his two companions duly asked the Sultan to dismiss Said and appoint a more liberal ministry. Within four days Said was out of office and the anglophile Mehmed Kamil Pasha became Grand Vizier for a third time, bringing together a cabinet of reformers in which only the şeyhülislâm and the Foreign Minister had previous experience of office. The new-found confidence of the CUP led to the arrival in the capital of four other inner members, including Cemal and Enver. This inner committee resolved that it would not seek a takeover of government itself but would remain in being as a pressure group, influencing decision-making in the palace, the Porte and eventually in parliament, too. At the end of August Sir Gerard Lowther, a recent arrival as ambassador, patronizingly informed London that ‘considering the country is being run by the Committee of the League, a collection of good-intentioned children, things are going pretty well.’3

  Like earlier reformers, both Kamil’s government and the CUP emphasized the need to convert the Ottoman Empire into a modern centralized state. Such a programme had been proclaimed at least four times in the previous century, with achievements on each occasion falling sadly short of that good intent which Lowther thought he once more saw around him. Yet while Kamil’s proposed reforms looked extremely familiar, the CUP sought more drastic measures. Their ideal was a Muslim capitalist bourgeois society, proud of its Anatolian Turkish origins: all Ottoman subjects, irrespective of race and religion, should enjoy equal rights and accept equal obligations in service to a centralized state. There would be no more variations of law under the millet system and no more resort to the ‘Capitulations’, the privileged status in commerce and at law enjoyed by foreigners. The CUP also favoured agricultural reform and a fairer system of taxation. But even this new and vigorous programme of change provided one interesting instance of continuity with the past: the Young Turks called for the extension and completion of the Mecelle, the civil code which Ahmed Cevdet’s commission had evolved forty years before.

  The newly established freedom of the press and rights of political association favoured the growth of a multi-party system.4 But, while there was a hard core of Islamic traditionalists and a small Ottoman Democratic Party in the field, the election of 1908 was contested by only two main groups: the CUP, though not yet organized as a party, campaigned as the ‘Unionists’ (Ittihatçilar); and in mid-September there was established a decentralist Liberal party (Ottoman Liberal Union, Osmanli Ahrar Firkasi), which included among its members the Grand Vizier and Prince Sabaheddin, who returned hurriedly from Paris to enter the political arena. The elections, conducted in November and early December again through an indirect electoral college system, gave overwhelming support to the Unionists. For the moment, however, the Mehmed Kamil government remained in office. On 17 December 1908 Sultan Abdulhamid once more braved the perils of Stamboul’s narrow streets to open the third parliament of his reign in the government offices behind the Ayasofya mosque. A few months later the Çiraan Palace was converted for the use of both chambers of parliament; the palace had been vacant since August 1904, when the incarceration of the wretched ex-Sultan Murad V ended with his death from diabetes.

  The development of an Ottoman constitutional monarchy was hampered by a succession of foreign crises. News of the Young Turk Revolution caused alarm in Vienna and Budapest. For thirty years Francis Joseph’s ministers and soldiers had treated the nominally Ottoman provinces of Bosnia–Herzegovina as a virtual colony. What would happen if the new regime in Constantinople challenged Habsburg authority by seeking the return of parliamentary deputies from Bosnia and Herzegovina? And what, too, if the Ottoman Parliament claimed representation from tributary states like Bulgaria? It was in the interests of the Sultan’s neighbours to clarify and define the limits of his authority in the Balkans. Already, before the Young Turk revolution, Baron von Aehrenthal, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, had raised the ghost of traditional Balkan enmities by support for a projected railway from Sarajevo through the sanjak of Novibazar to Mitrovica and on to the port of Salonika, thus opening up Habsburg Croatia at the expense of independent Serbia. The CUP’s activities spurred both Aehrenthal and the ruler of Bulgaria into action. In the first week of October 1908 Austria–Hungary formally annexed Bosnia–Herzegovina, and in Sofia Prince Ferdinand was proclaimed independent ‘Tsar of the Bulgarians’ (a title downgraded to ‘King’ when independence was recognized by the Powers six months later). Soon afterwards the Cretans sought formal acknowledgement of their freedom from Ottoman sovereignty and their union with Greece.5

  The first effect of the
crisis inside the Ottoman Empire was to strengthen the hands of the anglophiles. Two leading CUP officials, Dr Nazim and Ahmed Riza, travelled to London in the second week of November 1908 to seek an Anglo-Ottoman alliance, and were received by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. They explained to him that the CUP wished to change the character of the Ottoman Empire; potentially, so they claimed, ‘Turkey was the Japan of the Near East.’ Grey assured them of ‘our entire sympathy in the good work they were doing in Turkey’ and offered to lend ‘men to organise customs, police, and so forth, if they wished them.’ But he explained that there could be no close Anglo-Ottoman partnership since, except in the Far East, Britain still stood firmly outside the alliance system. It was an amiable but unproductive interview.6 Although Grey and his principal advisers knew the importance of his two visitors, the Foreign Office seems to have been acutely conscious that they were technically private travellers rather than envoys from the Ottoman government. And there is no doubt that the Foreign Secretary himself rated lowly any prospect of a lasting Young Turk civilian administration. ‘It may well be that the habit of vicious and corrupt government will be too strong for reform,’ Grey had already written to Lowther ten weeks before meeting Nazim and Ahmed Riza. ‘Out of the present upheaval there may be evolved a strong and efficient military despotism.’7

  Yet it is hard to avoid a feeling of opportunities lost by the British during the Bosnian Crisis. With Germany, Austria–Hungary’s staunchest ally, temporarily discredited at Constantinople, Grey might have welcomed a chance to recover Britain’s lost influence at the Porte. Interests had, of course, changed over the last twenty years. No Foreign Secretary would wish to see European peace endangered by a scramble for land, as the Ottoman tide finally receded in the Balkans. But since the turn of the century, the Foreign Office—and, even more, the India Office—had been showing a greater concern for the Persian Gulf and the future of Mesopotamia than for the Straits; and the CUP was as alive to the importance of the Sultan’s Asian lands as Abdulhamid himself. By 1899 skilled negotiations, conducted for the most part locally by agents of the Viceroy of India, had ensured that all the small Persian Gulf sheikdoms, including Kuwait, were in practice British protectorates, even if technically under the Sultan’s sovereignty; and the London-registered Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company had a monopoly of port rights at Baghdad and Basra unchallenged until the Ottoman treaty concessions to Berlin in the Baghdad Railway agreements. Germany’s discomfiture in the winter of 1908–9 should have given Grey an opportunity to safeguard trading interests in a region where the traditional Anglo-Indian commercial predominance was under threat. More was at stake than railway construction. By now oil politics, too, influenced decision-making at the Foreign Office and at the Porte. On 26 May 1908—just nine weeks before the Young Turk Revolution—the first significant flow of oil in the Gulf region was reported from Masjid-i-Sulaiman, across the Persian frontier but barely 150 miles from Basra. Not surprisingly, one of the first actions of the Kamil Pasha government, under CUP pressure, was a decree which transferred oil revenue and property from the Sultan’s Privy Purse back to the Ottoman State, thus countering Abdulhamid’s swift initiative eighteen years before. Foreign bids for oil concessions and development, provisionally approved or subject to tentative bargaining under the old regime, had now to be resubmitted through the Ministry of Finance. Over such matters Ambassador Lowther’s ‘good-intentioned children’ were precociously shrewd.8

  The Bosnian Crisis absorbed the attention of Europe’s chancelleries for some six months, and throughout this period the Ottoman Government continued to stress its desire for friendship with Great Britain. To a limited extent British diplomacy secured some compensation for the Young Turks: Grey persuaded his Russian Entente partners to postpone discussion of a revised Straits Convention, on the grounds that it was an ‘inopportune’ moment in Turkish affairs to raise so general a question; the presence of a British naval squadron off Crete emphasized Grey’s insistence on ruling out any immediate transfer of sovereignty over the island to Greece; and in Anglo-Russian exchanges a curious bargain was struck by which the Turkish recognition of Bulgaria’s independence won a renunciation by the Russians of forty Ottoman instalments of the 1878 war indemnity.9 At the same time a British naval mission, headed by Rear-Admiral Sir Douglas Gamble, was sent to Constantinople to set in order, yet again, the Sultan’s fleet.

  All these face-saving gestures could hardly offset the sad reality that the coming of constitutional government coincided with a resumption of the old dreary round of territorial losses, after twenty years of Hamidian pride in empire. Muslim purists, already offended by the sight of unveiled ‘modern’ wives and daughters in the smarter streets of the cities, began to campaign against the reformers: a socially conservative Society of Islamic Unity was established, with the Sultan’s fourth son, Mehmed Burhaneddin, as a member, and with rumours of financial backing from the palace. In the second week of February 1909 the CUP engineered the fall of the liberal Kamil Pasha and his replacement as Grand Vizier by their nominee, Hüseyin Hilmi. This political manoeuvre gave substance to Islamic Unity’s complaint that the men from Macedonia were creating a new autocracy. Friction developed between the First Army, garrisoning the capital, and the officer politicians of the Third Army who had travelled from Salonika to direct the constitutional revolution. On the night of 12/13 April 1909 troops from the First Army barracks mingled with religious students in Stamboul, demanding the resignation of the government and the establishment of a Muslim fundamentalist regime strictly observing the şeriat code and respecting the authority of the Sultan as Caliph. Next morning a mob burst into the parliament building and killed two deputies. Abdulhamid willingly gave in to the demonstrators’ demands and Ahmed Tevfik improvised a loyal coalition—which might be described as a ‘Government of the Friends of Yildiz’. Foreign diplomats duly reported the restoration of imperial autocracy.10

  Such an assessment was premature. The counter-revolutionary coup did not follow the traditional pattern; the demonstrators did not capture the CUP leaders, nor indeed did they detain—or kill—more than a handful of parliamentary deputies. There were, moreover, dissident officers who, though critical of many modernizing reforms, preferred the patriotic ideology of the Unionists to the uncertainties of Yildiz autocracy. Among these officers was the fifty-three-year-old general, Mahmud Shevket Pasha; he had spent nine years in Prussia co-ordinating the secondment of Ottoman officers to the German army, and was serving as Governor of Kossovo when the Young Turk Revolution began. The Pasha never joined the CUP, but he was entrusted by the new regime with crucial responsibilities as commanding general of the Third Army in Macedonia. When reports of events in the capital reached Salonika, Shevket Pasha ordered his divisional chief-of-staff, Adjutant-Major Mustafa Kemal, to organize the movement of the Third Army to the outskirts of the capital; and by 22 April a combination of Kemal’s logistical planning and the benefits of a strategic railway enabled troops and guns to be concentrated at San Stefano. There Shevket’s formidable army could offer protection to an assembly of parliamentary delegates who issued a manifesto formally condemning the Sultan’s actions. After desultory fighting next day outside the Porte administrative buildings and the barracks in Taksim, Abdulhamid gave way and dismissed Tevfik’s ministry. This time, however, the Sultan’s swift change of heart could not save him. The CUP was determined his reign must end.11

  Outwardly the conventions of law were observed. Under considerable pressure from Talaat, the şeyhülislâm sanctioned a fetva which provided for the removal of the Sultan from the throne; and on 27 April 1909 the sixty-six-year-old Abdulhamid II was succeeded by his sixty-five-half-brother, Mehmed V. But in two respects this deposition differed significantly from the thirteen depositions which had preceded it. The request to the şeyhülislâm came, not from the viziers in council, but from representatives of parliament affronted by a ruler who ‘swore to re-enter the path of righteousness, but broke hi
s oath and raised a civil war’; and the Sultan was informed of his fate by a parliamentary delegation of two senators and two deputies who told him that ‘the Nation has deposed you’.12 Secondly, Abdulhamid was not to be immured in the kafe of an Ottoman palace. He was told parliament had decided he must be exiled to the provinces: a villa would be found for him in Salonika. On hearing of his destination, Abdulhamid fainted into the arms of his Chief Eunuch (an unfortunate who was soon to suffer a worse fate, being publicly hanged on Galata Bridge for cruelties perpetrated in his master’s name in Yildiz’s hidden cells). Abdulhamid’s pleas and protests were in vain. Late that same night the ex-Sultan, two princes, three wives, four concubines, five eunuchs and fourteen servants set out on their twenty-hour train journey to the city where his troubles had begun.13

  Apart from Abdulhamid’s hated henchmen at Yildiz, there was no blood purge of yesterday’s politicians, for in several instances the new regime needed their services. Ahmed Tevfik went to London as ambassador and stood aside from politics for the next ten years, declining to consider any inducements to hold office so long as the Unionists retained their grip on the reins of power. On 5 May Hüseyin Hilmi returned as Grand Vizier, heading the government until the closing days of the year, when he was succeeded by the jurist and former diplomat, Ibrahim Hakki Pasha. Two prominent Unionists held cabinet office under both Hilmi and Hakki, Talaat as Minister of the Interior and Cavit (Djavid) as Minister of Finance. Of the other CUP leaders, Colonel Cemal was successively military governor of Üsküdar and Adana, while Major Enver went to Berlin as military attaché. Four months after Abdulhamid was deposed Enver attended German military manoeuvres at Würzburg, where he made a considerable impression, not least upon his fellow guest, Winston Churchill.14 If, over the next few years, statesmen and soldiers in Western Europe liked to assume that the handsome young Major was virtual ruler of the Ottoman Empire, then it was not in Enver’s nature to disabuse them. There were moments when he believed it himself.