Download PDF | Jeremy Salt - The Last Ottoman Wars_ The Human Cost, 1877-1923-The University of Utah Press (2019).
441 Pages
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the true Ottoman scholars, including students at my former university (Bilkent), whose intensive primary research has benefitted this more-general study of late Ottoman history. I thank them all for the documentary detail that is essential to historical research. I also wish to thank others who helped in various ways by providing rare books or pointing to sources, among them Nuri Yildirim and Fatma Sarıkaya. With the help of Uğur Belger of Izmir, Nuri put me on the trail to more information about Hasan Tahsin (Osman Nevres), who fired the first Turkish shot after Greek troops landed on the Izmir waterfront in 1919. Fatma provided a rare, neutral source on the great fire in Izmir: Fred K. Nielsen, American-Turkish Claims Settlement Under the Agreement of December 24, 1923, and Supplemental Agreements Between the United States and Turkey. Opinions and Reports (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1937). Atilla Oral joined in the search for a suitable cover illustration.
I am grateful for his assistance. Very many thanks are due to Mehmet Oğuzhan Tulun, who found and translated excerpts from four books on the war and its aftermath: Halil Ataman, Harp ve Esaret: Doğu Cephesi’nden Sibiriya’ya [War and Captivity: From the Eastern Front to Siberia] (Istanbul: Türkiye Iş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2014); Sami Önal, Tuğgeneral Ziya Yergök’un Aniları: Sarıkamiş’tan Esarete (1915–1920) [Brigadier General Ziya Yergök’s Memoirs: From Sarikamiş to Captivity (1915–1920)] (Istanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2007); and Mehmet Törehan Serdar, Istiklale Açilan Ilk Kapı: Bitlis (Işgali ve Kurtuluşu) [The First Door Opening to Independence: Bitlis (Occupation and Liberation)] (Bitlis: Bitlis Valiliği Kültür Yayınları, 2017), as well as Gürsoy Solmaz, Ikinci Kuşak Anılarında Erzurum ve Civarinda Ermeni Zulmü [Armenian Oppression in Erzurum and Its Surroundings According to Second-Generation Memoirs], Yeni Turkiye 60 (2014):1–29. Oğuzhan was always ready with helpful advice, no matter how busy he happened to be.
Very many thanks are also due to Erman Şahin, a fine young scholar, who read two chapters, made helpful suggestions (and one correction), and pointed me in the direction of further useful research material. Professor Justin McCarthy, Distinguished University Scholar at the University of Louisville, not only helped to select the maps that appear in the book but prepared them for publication. I wish to thank him for his generous assistance. Thanks are also due to the editorial staff of the University of Utah Press for seeing the manuscript through to publication, especially Dr. John Alley, Editor-in-Chief when I made my initial approach; Pat Hadley, Managing Editor; Thomas Krause, Acquisitions Editor; and Jeff Grathwohl, who edited the text with patience, care, and consideration. On the business side, the marketing and packaging of the book were handled by Hannah New, Marketing Manager, and Dianne Lee Van Dien, Marketing Assistant. Many thanks to both of them for their enthusiastic participation in this project. Professor Ali Doğramacı, former Rector of Bilkent University and currently Chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees, arranged a modest financial grant when I took leave without pay in 2009–2010 to begin research for the book. Ali was a mainstay of daily academic life at Bilkent for many years, an ebullient and cheery figure on campus, never forgetting names and always encouraging academic staff to follow through on their ideas.
I am grateful for his friendship and his help. Thanks also to the Turkish people, whose taxes were the ultimate source of the research grant, provided through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which, along with the grant arranged by Ali, helped me get through a fairly impecunious year of reading, taking notes, and writing in the Australian countryside. The book now published is very different from the one I thought of writing in 2009. I had intended to write just on the First World War as experienced in the Ottoman Empire, concentrating on the human cost. However, it was not long before I realized that the war came toward the end of a fifty-year cycle of history, one part leading to the next and all fitting together, creating the necessary context for understanding what happened after war broke out in 1914. The cycle ends with the Turkish War of Independence (1919–1922).
Sources were an early issue. As nearly 90 percent of the Ottoman civilian population was illiterate in 1914, diaries would not have been written. First-hand experiences were recorded when armies and government administrators were able to return to occupied regions. There are many such documents in the archives, but not until many decades later—when the generation that survived the war was well into its old age—were oral histories recorded. While much has been written on the fate of Ottoman Christians, the Muslim majority disappeared into history as if it had never existed. Recent books have begun to bring these previously invisible Muslims back into the light of day, and my overriding hope with this book is that I have gathered sufficient information to convey the enormity of their suffering. For the Ottoman civilians, the war was a catastrophe on an epic scale. Some chapters here will be regarded as “controversial” because they challenge the mainstream narrative on late-Ottoman history. They are not controversial to me, for they put back into history what should have been there in the first place. I have written only the truth as I see it. No historian can do more. Some of the history—especially in the Balkans—is a complex mélange of names and dates that had to be digested. I have tried to avoid mistakes and errors of fact, but if I have still made them—and no doubt I have—the responsibility is all mine.
Introduction
How should a war be studied, any war? How deep does the historian need to dig to discover the roots? What needs to be understood before even looking at what happened on the battlefield? How much needs to be known about government, finance, infrastructure, and social relations? Insofar as Britain, Germany, or France were concerned, the answers to many of these questions—as they relate to the First World War—would be taken for granted. Logistics are always an issue in war, but one need not ask whether these countries had a rail network or a developed road system because it would be known that they did. Russia and the Ottoman Empire fitted into different categories. Away from the cities, in the distant provinces, both were underdeveloped and closer to medieval than modern life, as measured by western European standards. Culturally, Russia was Christian but Orthodox, its rites even more florid to an English or German Protestant than those of the Catholic church. With its territories in the east stretching to the borders of China and down into Central Asia, it could accurately be called “half Asiatic,” in the language of the time, but the expression was more pejorative than geographical. The jump from “half Asiatic” to “half barbarian” was a small one when war beckoned, and the threatening profile of the Russian “bear” needed to be magnified. The Ottoman Empire was even more of an unknown. Indeed, what was frequently thought to be known was not known at all but was rather the product of centuries of religious and ethnic prejudice against Islam and “the Turk,” fed constantly by the bad press arising from chronic Ottoman maladministration. Diplomats and consuls grappled with the causes in their dispatches, sometimes fairly, often not, but these accounts were far too complex and tedious in their detail to be summed up in any newspaper article and of interest anyway only to the small number of readers whose concern with Ottoman affairs went beyond the marginal. What did capture the imagination were the graphic and generally lurid accounts of the mistreatment of Christians in the Balkans at the hands of the “bashibozuks” (başıbozuk, “broken head,” irregular soldiers) or the Kurds in eastern Anatolia. These reports were usually pieced together far from the scene weeks and sometimes even months later. They were often based on questionable sources, but this was the Ottoman Empire as it was generally understood in the run-up to the First World War. Across this faltering empire, how did all the pieces fit together? Away from the battlefield, how did this war affect the lives—or end the lives— of the civilian population? While the social history of wars has caught up with the history of wars in Europe, this cannot be said of Turkey yet. The suffering of Ottoman Christians, especially the Armenians, has been the subject of many studies, but the immense losses suffered by Ottoman Muslims between 1877 and 1923 still have virtually no place in the “western” cultural mainstream, despite the epic nature of what they went through and often did not survive. Between 1877 and 1914, the Balkans were largely cleansed of their Muslim population, massacred or stampeded out of towns and villages by advancing armies in what we would now not hesitate to call ethnic cleansing. During the First World War and the fighting that continued afterwards, millions more Muslim civilians died in Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Iran or were turned into refugees. A central theme of this study will be to bring these invisible victims of war back into the picture. As long as they are outside the frame, how can any history of this period and these events be considered history? In the last decades of its life, weakened by wars, uprisings, and chronic financial problems that affected society at all levels, the Ottoman government could only patch up problems that needed a permanent solution. Endlessly on the defensive, it was able through these repairs to defer but not prevent the final collapse in 1918. With the powers occupying Istanbul, the sultan was turned into a cooperative prisoner in his own palace, as strongly opposed to the nationalist “rebels,” “outlaws,” and “bandits” as his captors were until it became apparent that it was these “rebels” who had the support of the people and not the sultan. One by one the Turkish nationalists defeated all their enemies. At this point the game was almost up. With only Britain left, David Lloyd George called on Commonwealth and Dominion governments to send troops back to the theater of war they had only recently left. However, his apparent readiness to take on “the Turks,” rather than yield control of the straits, was never put to the test. France had already backed out of this entanglement, and now the various components of empire either said no to his request or made only token offers of help. Their unwillingness to go to war again on behalf of the British government and its imperial interests cleared the way for negotiations that ended with the recognition by the powers of the Turkish republic within its present borders. This was a real peace compared to the “peace” in Paris, the consequences of which raise the question, “peace for whom?” Insofar as Germany was concerned, the punitive terms of Versailles set the stage for economic and social turmoil, the capture of power by the National Socialists, and eventually the Second World War. In the Ottoman Empire, the imposition of the mandates and the attempted imposition of the Treaty of Sèvres—the harsh Turkish parallel to Versailles—precipitated armed resistance in all territories that fell under allied occupation. The Turkish nationalists fought the French in what is now southeastern Turkey and after three years finally turned back an invasion that had brought a Greek army to within a day’s march of Ankara. In Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, the mandate system was described as a “sacred trust” of civilization. In Iraq, Syria, and Palestine, the phrase was sugar coating for an occupation pushed through with such force as was deemed necessary. The reality of the “sacred trust” was French tanks and the bodies of dead “rebels” put on display in the middle of Damascus, British planes bombing Kurdish villages in northern Iraq, British and colonial troops suppressing tribal uprisings in southern Iraq, and British troops and police killing thousands of Palestinians during the 1936–1939 uprising. In western Turkey, a war launched by Greece in the name of fulfilling the Megali Idea turned a largely spontaneous struggle against occupation into a war of Turkish national resistance. Four days after the Greek landing at Izmir on May 15, 1919, Mustafa Kemal (given the surname of “Atatürk,” “father of the Turks,” in 1934 by the Grand National Assembly, the Turkish parliament) stepped ashore at the Black Sea port of Samsun and moved to the safety of the interior. At this transitional point between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish nation state, there was not yet a Turkish “people.” However, the collective threat from Greece, Britain, and France was so great that ethnonational differences (especially between Kurds and Turks) had to take second place to a united national front. Ultimately, it was the Greek and Turkish peoples who paid the price for this war through death, large-scale destruction by the Greek army, and the population exchange of 1923. In its declining years down to 1914 the enfeeblement of the Ottoman Empire went a stage further after each war it lost. The cost was not just lost territory and a twice-shattered army (after the 1877–1878 war with Russia and the Balkans war of 1912–1913) but the financial consequences, measured not just by the big things, i.e., the inability of the government to meet the interest on loans taken out on the European money market but the more mundane aspects of government: its inability to pay bills and the salaries of soldiers and civil servants (memurlar) on time, degrading its capacity to govern effectively and institute the reforms needed to pull the empire into a modern age characterized by industry, improved infrastructure, and centralized education and social welfare systems. Some parts of the empire had more of such things (the cities, Istanbul, Izmir, and Beirut, for example), but none had all of them, and in many parts of the empire they were absent altogether. Maladministration and the inability of the government to defend the empire against aggression weakened it even in the eyes of the sultan’s Muslim subjects. The earlier successes of Greek and Bulgarian nationalists encouraged Armenians and other Christians to follow them in the pursuit of autonomy and eventual independence. The hope (if not the expectation) of intervention by the powers was a critical element in their calculations. What is perhaps surprising is that an empire beset by so many lethal problems was able to remain standing for so long. Even right at the end it had sufficient strength to send a conquering army all the way to Baku. The geography in this study ranges from the Balkans to eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. The politics involves the interests of the Ottoman government, the European powers, and the Balkan monarchs for whom Ottoman weakness sharpened grandiose and irreconcilable irredentist claims. Their servants were quarrelling politicians and army officers who might not always be loyal, sometimes with lethal consequences. Ultranationalists, secret societies, and the church complicated politics still further. Every Balkan state had its backers among the European powers, whose endless jockeying for advantage created space for the scheming of their proteges. The inability of the Ottoman government to put its own house in order completed the mix, turning the Balkans into an arena of chronic political instability. Finally, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 turned this house of straw into chaff. Having just fought two more wars—after all the wars of the nineteenth century—in Libya (1911–1912) and against four Balkan states (1912–1913), the Ottoman Empire finally came off the fence in late 1914 and joined the war that ended in its destruction. In Ottoman domains, this was a modern war fought in a premodern setting. The rail networks, roads, communications systems, supply systems, arms factories, and industrialization of western Europe scarcely existed in Ottoman lands. Soldiers often had to walk long distances to the front. Diseases might kill them before they got there. In many of the war zones, there were no railways to carry supplies and ammunition to the front, so armies had to rely on wagons and draft animals. These conditions affected the lives of civilians as well. In the eastern Anatolian provinces, the conveniences of life that people in Europe took for granted did not exist. Hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies were few and for all practical purposes inaccessible to people living in remote villages. The basics of sanitation and health care were scarcely understood and rarely applied in daily life, let alone even in hospitals. It is partly, if not largely, for these reasons that the death toll among soldiers from disease was higher than on the battlefield. As the army had some sort of integrated health system and civilians did not, the civilian death rate was probably proportionally higher. Only estimates can be made but the civilian deaths from all wartime causes probably hovers around 3 million. Just as Justin McCarthy has published seminal studies on the fate of Muslims in the Balkans and Anatolia,1 so Leila Tarazi Fawaz has focused on civilian life in Syria during the First World War.2 In an even more recent study, Yiğit Akın has dealt with the misery of war on the home front, including the burdens carried by rural women in the absence of men.3 All Ottoman civilians suffered terribly, irrespective of religious or ethnic background, and I follow as well as I can the consequences of the war in their daily lives. Disease, malnutrition, exposure, and internecine massacres were the prime causes of the death toll, with Allied blockades of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts destroying the import-export trade on which local cash economies were based and disrupting the transport of food and other daily necessities from one part of the empire to another. Originally, I planned to write a book just on the First World War as experienced in and by the Ottoman Empire. However, I soon concluded that 1914–1918 would be more effectively discussed as part of fifty-year cycle of history, beginning with the Ottoman-Russian war of 1877–1878 and ending in 1922 after a Greek army invading Ottoman lands had been driven back to the Aegean coast. Resistance to this final attack—launched by Greece in 1919—soon turned into a war of national independence. By the time it ended the Ottoman Empire was gone and a Turkish Republic had emerged from the ruins. The trail I follow starts with the financial problems that affected every aspect of Ottoman life. It then moves to the nature of the land and the difficulties experienced by the people living on it before I turn to the crisis of 1877–1878 and its consequences. The settlement of this conflict opened up the question of “reform” for the Armenian population of the eastern Anatolian provinces. Its strongest advocate was Britain, whose strategic interests lay in preventing Russia from capitalizing on Christian grievances in eastern Anatolia as it was thought to have just done in the Balkans. The “reforms” as proposed would have entailed provincial reorganization benefiting Armenians but excluding the Kurds, who, along with the sultan and ministers at the Bab i-Ali (Sublime Porte) government offices, reacted to these plans with the suspicion they undoubtedly deserved. The scene was thus set for conflict with the western European powers (particularly Britain), confrontation with Armenian revolutionary committees encouraged by European support, and a struggle between Armenians and Kurds over territory they both claimed that was to culminate in the violence of the First World War. If quotes must be used around “reform,” it is because European “reforms” for the Ottoman Empire were politically driven, ultimately, and were often inconsistent with the reforms the sultan and his ministers had in mind. “Reform” was also on the agenda in the Balkans, where four monarchs took advantage of political upheaval in Istanbul and the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 to launch their own war against the Ottoman state in 1912. This counterpoint to the conflict of 1877–1878 largely completed the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from southeastern Europe: with Macedonia gone, all that remained was eastern Thrace and the small pockets of Muslims left in the victorious states. France and Britain had occupied Tunisia (1881) and Egypt (1882) before the European powers allowed Italy to join the imperial club by seizing Libya in 1911. A year later they sat back as four Balkan states embarked on a war of conquest against the Ottoman Empire: in the wash-up they allowed the aggressors to retain the spoils, which greatly enlarged Greece, in particular. These were the same powers that had repeatedly reaffirmed the commitment they had made in the settlement of the Crimean War (1853–1856) to maintain the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. What really seemed to be on their minds was a share of the spoils when the empire finally collapsed. Could it be wondered that even by the 1880s the Ottoman government was turning toward Germany? There is substantial evidence in support of this interpretation of history. Margaret MacMillan’s reference to the British government having “propped up” the Ottoman government has to be questioned. The empire had certainly proved useful at times of crisis (most notably during the Crimean War) but otherwise Britain and other countries had kicked away the props whenever it suited individual or joint interests. Their central concern was that premature action by one power might suck all into a European war. Britain played this game of imperial chess more deftly than most, taking territory for itself when possible and allowing others to help themselves as long as they did not step on Britain’s toes. If their annexations actively served British interests, all the better. Britain also meddled in the “Armenian question” without being prepared to pay for the “reforms” it was demanding or having a fallback plan when the sticks being turned in this wasp’s nest upended it in the 1890s. Under the heading of “battlefield sketches,” some of the major military campaigns are covered in this study, but the bulk of the chapter on the “last Ottoman war” deals with the terrible consequences for the civilian population. Many narratives give the impression of a binary division between Muslim perpetrators of large-scale violence and Christian victims. In fact, there was no such division. Circumstances might change according to the fortunes of war, but Christians and Muslims alike were both perpetrators and innocent victims of such violence. One would think that 1914–1918 was enough war for the time being but no sooner had it ended than the victors plunged into other wars: the small wars needed to impose their occupation on Arabs and Turks, the “war of intervention” against the Bolsheviks in the Caucasus, and the Greek invasion of western Turkey in 1919, strongly supported by Britain. Between 1918 and 1920, the victorious powers calculated that they could carve up the Middle East to suit themselves. In the short term, their calculations were borne out, thanks to their tools of diplomatic and economic persuasion ultimately backed by military power and the willingness to use it. Even a book of this size can only skate across a broad surface. Categories that have been scarcely touched include the postwar fate of Ottoman civilians, the Armenians whose property had been stolen, the Muslims whose villages and homes had been destroyed, the orphans who had been placed in care, and the enormous flow of uprooted people. These themes are still far from having been fully explored, often generating more propaganda heat than historical light. This study was written as an extended overview of late Ottoman history. While it is to be hoped that it will hold the attention of the specialist scholar, the primary intended audience is the general reader, outside Turkey, avid for history, knowing little of the Ottoman past beyond what is available in the mainstream, but open to challenges to what he or she might have read and believe to be true. I follow the historical trail only where it leads: interpretations are my own and finally, as always, responsibility for factual errors rests with the author. Burhaniye, March 2019
A Note on Spelling and Names In the spelling of personal and place names, I have followed modern Turkish except where I am quoting directly from source. Thus, it is Abdülhamit rather than Abdulhamid, Zeytun rather than Zeitun or Zaytun, Istanbul rather than Constantinople, and Izmir rather than Smyrna. In the Caucasus and the Balkans, many cities underwent name changes as a result of war. I use the name by which the city was known, within the sovereign territory of which it was part, until the point of conquest and the subsequent name change: thus, Ottoman Selanik up to 1912 and Salonica following the capture of the city by Greece, and Tiflis until the reversion to Georgian Tbilisi after the collapse of the Russian empire. I have tried to be consistent, but the observant reader will no doubt pick up inconsistencies.
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