CHAPTER XX

_THE OPENING OF PARLIAMENT_

On December 17 Abdul Hamid drove through the streets of his capital between cheering crowds to open the Turkish Parliament. The scene has been often described, and it is unnecessary here to relate again the events of that memorable day. That night I sailed through the Dardanelles, and on either side of me, on the shores of both Europe and Asia, every little town and village and the anchored fleets of fishing craft in the harbours were brightly illuminated; isolated farm-houses on snowy hillsides had their windows full of lights; fires blazed on many a lonely peak; and so it was all along the shores of Turkey from the Adriatic and the Ægean to the Black Sea and the shores of the Persian Gulf. It was a day and a night of rejoicing, and so contagious was the sincere enthusiasm that even the most cynical foreigner in the land had not the heart to speak otherwise than hopefully of the future of this freed country.

Some months have passed since that winter’s day. As might have been expected, things have not gone altogether smoothly in Turkey, and there have been reports of internal dissensions that have puzzled and alarmed the English well-wishers of the new _régime_. As regards the open rebellions against the Government that have occurred in various portions of the Empire, no one imagined that the proclamation of a Constitution would suddenly bring peace, once and for all, to restless races that have been fighting and raiding for centuries. The complete pacification of these regions cannot but be a work of time. The lawless Albanian tribes are again carrying on their organised brigandage, even in that Dibra district where Niazi Bey’s propaganda had been so wholly successful; the Northern Albanians are agitating for autonomy, even as they were thirty years ago when I wandered through their highlands; Turkish troops, even as I am writing this, are defending Armenians against raiding Kurds;[1] risings of fanatical Arabs in Arabia are being suppressed; and the Greek bands are once more troubling Macedonia. These are unfortunate happenings, but with a Government that combines firmness with justice and patience, this lawless state of things will disappear; and it must be remembered that sheer love of fighting and raiding rather than political disaffection is the cause of some of these disturbances. These revolts and raids had become almost chronic complaints under the old _régime_; the world is now watching Turkey; events that would have passed almost unnoticed a year ago are reported in the European press, and their importance is naturally overrated by those who read of them.

[1] This was written before the counter-revolution and the terrible massacre of Armenians that followed it.

But the political dissensions among the Turks themselves—which have been much embittered of late—are more alarming to the friends of Turkey than are any of these risings of lawless peoples. This is no time for the patriotic element to be divided against itself, and it behooves the Young Turks to present a solid and united front to the many external and internal enemies of Turkey’s liberty and the Empire’s integrity. The Committee of Union and Progress, the deliverer of Turkey from the Despotism, has enemies in the land who are unsparing and unscrupulous in their attacks, and most cunning in their intriguings. The anomalous position of the organisation has naturally invited some honest criticism. Almost immediately after the proclamation of the Constitution, not only reactionary Turks and politicians jealous of the Young Turk party, but also European friends of Turkey, including certain British diplomatists and a section of the Press that voices their views, began to urge that the Committee, its work having been accomplished, no longer had a _raison d’être_ and should be dissolved at once. It was pointed out that an irresponsible power behind the Parliament was unconstitutional, and that the Committee, with its unknown leaders, had become an illegal institution now that Turkey had been granted representative government.

Now surely this argument savours of a legal pedantry that ignores surrounding conditions. The Committee was, of course, an illegal institution from its inception; it saved Turkey by illegal methods; a revolution cannot but be an illegal operation: and it would be obviously unsafe on the morrow of a successful revolution—when a nation is still in confusion, when the people have yet no idea how they should exercise their new rights, when the new institutions from their very freedom lie open to the attack of cunning foes—to adhere strictly to constitutional technicalities and legalities, and to break up the strong organised power that has brought about the overthrow of a _régime_. After the English revolution Cromwell had no scruples in violating law to save a cause. If there had been a strong Committee of Union and Progress behind the Constitution which the Sultan swore to observe on his coming to the throne, Turkey might have been saved thirty years of despotism and the loss of much territory.

The Young Turks fully realised the difficulties and dangers before them. Many were the foes of the newly freed fatherland. There were those of the Great Powers to whom constitutional liberty in Turkey meant interference with their designs to enrich themselves and obtain territorial expansion at Turkey’s expense; there were the smaller Powers on the frontier, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, eager to scramble over the partition of Macedonia; and, far more dangerous than these, there were the Turkish reactionaries, who began to intrigue everywhere against the Constitution immediately after its proclamation, ready to seize their chance when they saw it. The Young Turks in their hour of triumph had freely pardoned all save a few of the worst of the creatures of the Palace, but this great clemency gained them no gratitude. It was also a source of no small danger that the Young Turks, having but few trained administrators in their own ranks, had retained the services of such high officials of the old _régime_ as had no notoriously evil records for corruption or oppression. Some of these men are the secret enemies of the new order of things. The Young Turks, therefore, determined to remain on their guard and see to it that Turkey’s newly won liberty was not wrested from her. As I have stated in a previous chapter, they held that, far from losing its _raison d’être_ on the opening of Parliament, the Committee of Union and Progress would be more necessary than ever for the protection of the country, and they decided not to dissolve this powerful organisation, but to maintain it, legally or illegally, supported as heretofore by the army, until such time as the Constitution should be firmly established. Such was their justification, and they were sincere in their explanations of their resolution.

As will have been gathered from what I have said in this book the Committee of Union and Progress is no small body of patriots. When I was in Turkey it numbered seventy thousand members. I understand that it now has a membership of about a hundred thousand. It includes all that is best and most patriotic of the educated young Moslem manhood of the country. There are now the many Christians, too, on the Committee who have rejected the idle separatist aspirations of their several races and have Ottoman unity as their ideal, and also many of those Jews who from the beginning have co-operated loyally with the Young Turks. When I was in the country last autumn it looked much as if this Committee had as its members nearly all the men to whom it would be safest to leave the guidance of the Empire.

Unfortunately, it seems to be an undoubted fact that the Committee of Union and Progress has made many enemies even among those who cannot be accused of reactionary tendencies. The Committee has undoubtedly done some ill-advised and tactless things, and its arbitrary methods have raised up against itself some relentless foes; but there can, I think, be no doubt that it has been actuated throughout by pure and patriotic motives, and that its errors have been those of zeal and inexperience. I have met several members of the party recently, and they all sincerely believe that the Committee had very good reasons for compelling Kiamil Pasha to resign the Grand Vizierate in February last; they are confident that the aged statesman had been misled by the plausible enemies of Turkey’s liberties and was being duped by reactionaries. The friction between the Committee and the Grand Vizier commenced some months before the opening of the Parliament; Kiamil, being a Pasha of the old school, naturally resented the dictation of the Committee, and complained that while his was the responsibility the Committee held all the power. The Committee was alarmed by Kiamil Pasha’s friendly relations with the Liberal Union, the party in opposition to the Committee, and recognised the insidious work of reactionary influence when Kiamil despatched from Constantinople to Macedonia certain battalions that were faithful to the Committee, thus imperilling, in the eyes of the Young Turks, the safety of the constitutional cause in the capital. When the Grand Vizier, without consultation with his ministers or with the party, suddenly dismissed the Ministers of War and Marine, the nominees of the Committee, and placed others in their stead, the crisis was precipitated. The Young Turks, above all things, were determined that those in whom they did not place implicit confidence should not control the army, so the Committee, even as it had compelled the resignation of Said Pasha, because he had left the appointment of the Ministers of War and Marine in the hands of the Sultan, now insisted upon the resignation of Kiamil Pasha, and effected its purpose in so peremptory a way that it lost much of its popularity with the people and afforded its unscrupulous enemies a handle for attack. The intrigues connected with the fall of Kiamil Pasha need not be discussed here; but one gathers that the man chiefly to blame is Kiamil’s own son, Said, a worthless person who enriched himself by co-operating with the brigands in the neighbourhood of Smyrna. On several previous occasions he has compromised by his intrigues his aged father, the one person in Turkey who believes that there is no real harm in this very bad specimen of a young Turkish gentleman. Of Kiamil Pasha’s successor to the Grand Vizierate, Hilmi Pasha, I have already spoken.

The Committee justified its treatment of Kiamil Pasha and its other arbitrary acts by pleading the necessity of protecting the nation against the strong reactionary forces which certainly do exist, despite the assertions of the organs of the Liberal Union, which have ever ridiculed the possibility of a reactionary movement, and have accused the Committee of having invented this bogey as an excuse for its own despotic methods. Kiamil Pasha had ever been the friend of the English, and his removal from the Grand Vizierate produced—to the great regret of the Young Turks—a somewhat bad impression in England, the country above all others whose friendship is valued by patriotic Turks. Those who had held that the Committee was an illegal institution and ought to be dissolved became alienated for a while from the men who had been the saviours of Turkey; and it is a great pity that this was so, for at that critical time the Young Turks, who never before had trod the tortuous ways of politics, and were apt to fall into the traps that were cunningly laid for them, were much in need of the sympathetic help and advice from those whose experience and knowledge qualified them to offer these. The result is, I think, that the Young Turk side of the question has not been understood in England.

The Young Turk party, as represented by the Committee of Union and Progress, is now but one of several parties in Turkey professing Liberal principles. In Parliament the Committee’s nominees form the large majority; but the rival parties, though they may be numerically small and were regarded as insignificant when I was in the country, have displayed great energy in winning supporters outside the Chamber, and are no longer a negligible quantity. Though diametrically opposed to each other in their principles, they appear to be united in their hatred and jealousy of the Young Turk party, without whose self-sacrificing struggle for freedom they would never have had an opportunity of existing at all. The Young Turks, as I have explained, desired Ottoman unity, perhaps an impossible but certainly a noble ideal, and it was a disappointment to them that, so soon as Parliament met, the Deputies who were not partisans of the Committee divided themselves into distinct nationalist groups, some of them impracticably socialistic in their aims, others separatist at heart.

By far the most powerful of these groups, a composite party, composed of Moslems, Christians, and others, calls itself the Liberal Union. Whereas the Young Turks, while advocating equality without distinction of race or creed, insists that the supremacy of the Mussulman Turks should be safeguarded, desires to bring about a fusion of the different elements, and wants no greater administrative decentralisation than is necessary; the Liberal Union, on the other hand, is opposed to what it terms Turkish Chauvinism, and asks for a degree of decentralisation which the Young Turks regard as dangerous to the integrity of the Empire. The Liberal Union therefore stands for home rule. It is largely supported by the Greek element, and this fact does not commend it to those who desire Ottoman unity. It is understood that the party has been well supplied with funds by the Greek merchants in Turkey, who are ever generous in their subscriptions to a Greek national cause; but one cannot feel that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire is safe in their hands. A source of weakness to the Committee are its self-denying principles, whereby there are to be no known leaders, no gratification of personal ambition by its members, and no seeking for the plums of office. The Liberal Union has no such principles of self-abnegation, and it has for its leader the Albanian Ismail Kemal Bey, a victim of the Despotism and for some time an exile, a man of marked ability and of great ambition. He left the Young Turk party on the grounds that its principles were not sufficiently Liberal, and formed this party of his own, which is the bitterest and most unscrupulous enemy of the Committee of Union and Progress.

The organs of the Liberal Union have been carrying on a press campaign against the Committee of Union and Progress. Among other things they have asserted that the best men have deserted the Committee, that the heroes of the revolution, such as Niazi Bey and Enver Bey, have left it in disgust, that reactionaries and self-seeking adventurers have worked their way into the Committee’s centre and are directing its policy. It is, of course, possible, and even probable, that some unworthy men have been admitted into the Committee, but I am certain that they have exercised no influence, and I am of opinion that they would not have been allowed to remain in it after their true characters had been discovered. When I was in Turkey last autumn it was not altogether an easy matter to become a member of the Committee. On more than one occasion when I have asked a member whether some mutual friend was in the Committee, he has replied in the negative, explaining that the person in question had expressed his wish to join the Committee, and that he seemed a fitting person, but that the Committee would not elect him until more was known concerning him. As to the allegations made by the organs of the Liberal Union, many of the most active members of the Committee, men obviously actuated by the sincerest patriotism, are my friends, and I know that not one of them has left the Committee or has lost faith in it. I also know that the single-minded patriots who made the revolution are still members of the Committee. Both Niazi Bey and Enver Bey have flatly contradicted the statements that were made concerning them.

The Young Turks who write to me from their own country or who converse with me in London are unanimous in describing the situation as serious, but in their opinion the Committee is too strong for its enemies. They say that the Sultan himself is on the side of the Committee, and disapproves of the machinations of the Liberal Union. They maintain that whatever professions of Liberalism the Liberal Union may make it is reactionary in its policy, has known reactionaries within its ranks, and is led by self-seeking politicians lacking in patriotism. They allege that many of the Greeks who support the Liberal Union, having thrived as parasites of the old _régime_, prefer despotisms to constitutions. They, moreover, explain that some members of the Liberal Union are exceedingly clever and cunning men who have succeeded in winning over honest men of the Young Turk party—including _ulemas_ and other strict adherents of the Mussulman creed—by specious arguments and misrepresentations. All this seems probable, and it is certain that numbers of the Young Turks, though true patriots, are simple-minded honest men who are likely to be duped by the trained intriguers among the Committee’s enemies.

One gathers, therefore, that an incongruous alliance of non-Moslem socialists, Greek separatists, reactionaries, and misled upright Mussulmans is opposed to the Committee of Union and Progress. A most malignant press campaign is being carried on against the Committee, and the organs of the Committee strike hard in return, with the unfortunate result that on either side an intense hatred has been engendered which cannot but be injurious to the country’s interests, imperils the Constitution, and plays into the hands of Turkey’s external foes.

The Committee of Union and Progress is not rich and has not attempted to enrich itself; but it appears that the Liberal Union is well supplied with funds wherewith to carry on its campaign, purchase newspapers, and buy the consciences of men. It is known that the Greeks have been the largest contributors to these funds. The Palace gang is also said to have supplied its share. When I was in Constantinople I was informed that the Committee had intercepted correspondence between the Palace and a certain Pasha—who was then an exile in England passing under various aliases—and had obtained proof that this notorious person was the trustee of large sums lying in London banks which were intended to meet the expenses of intriguing for the restoration of the old _régime_. Certain foreign Powers, which have no love for the Young Turk _régime_, have also been openly accused of intriguing with the reactionaries. If they are innocent of this they have but themselves to blame for the suspicion that attaches to them, for one can only judge of their present policy by regarding their past. How unscrupulously Germany exploited the old _régime_ is known to all the world. Some of the Germans whom I met in Constantinople expressed their conviction and their hope that the days of the new _régime_ were numbered. It was interesting to hear these men, who represented the political commercialism of their country, frankly state, as if it were an incontrovertible axiom, that all European peoples, whether German, British, or any other, had for their one aim in Turkey the exploitation of a helpless country. The Germans are perfectly sincere when they assert that the Balkan Committee is the paid agent of a cunning British Government, that the expression of British sympathy for oppressed nationalities is organised hypocrisy with the attainment of selfish ends as its one motive. As they look with their cold, blue eyes into yours you realise that they quite believe these things. The materialism of modern Germany has so sunk into the souls of her sons—including some of the most illustrious of them—that it has become inconceivable to them that a nation, or a group of the citizens of that nation, can take a disinterested interest in the affairs of other nations and sympathise unselfishly with its misfortunes or triumphs. To the Germans the enthusiasm with which the success of the Young Turk cause was welcomed in England was all humbug—a cleverly engineered manifestation of friendship whose object it was to secure for Great Britain the influence in Turkey which Germany had lost by the revolution but confidently looked forward to recovering at an early date by more straightforward if more brutal methods.

The thirty years of despotism, by its deliberate encouragement of corruption, had demoralised a great part of the Turkish nation. The cure cannot come in a day, and those well provided with money can still buy power in Constantinople. It was amid very corrupt surroundings that the Young Turks, pure themselves, set to work to undertake the regeneration of Turkey and to make the Empire strong. To begin with, Constantinople is full of men who have lived by corrupt practices all their lives—the men who were blackmailing spies under the old _régime_, or had belonged to that huge tribe of useless functionaries who used to crowd every public department and had to be bribed by those whom business brought into contact with them. All these people, their occupation now gone, are wandering about the capital in very disconsolate mood, hard up, regretting “the good old days,” and hating the purifying influence that has brought this change about. These men are all reactionaries; many of them know well how to poison the minds of ignorant people against the Committee with cunning inventions. They are largely responsible for the growing popular dislike of the Committee. It is very difficult for the people in the capital to arrive at the truth, and they are largely at the mercy of paid agitators and schemers. Even foreign Governments are able to influence public opinion in Turkey. The Germans and Austrians possess a useful piece of machinery for the dissemination of news to serve their own interests in the shape of a telegraphic agency which supplies Constantinople with practically all its foreign information, and sells its despatches by the column to the newspapers of that city at a low rate that cannot possibly pay the expenses of the service. The news which purports to come from London is often of an astonishing character.

I understand that the Committee of Union and Progress is now about to reorganise its constitution and convert itself into what we should call a Parliamentary party; but under whatever name it continues its existence it is to be hoped that this body of men, which has done such great and noble work for Turkey, which contains so many men of single-minded, self-sacrificing patriotism, will remain the dominating party in the country. But it will have to be as the strong man armed and ever watchful, for its enemies are many and have the money wherewith, alas! the consciences of both men and newspapers can still be purchased in Turkey.