The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (50 page)

Mustafa Kemal had every intention of cultivating nationalist sentiment, but he wished it to be patriotically Turkish in character, rather than Islamic. Under his instructions Ismet
Pasha—the later President, Ismet Inönü—sought to convince the British, French and Italian delegates at the Lausanne Conference that the Ankara Government favoured the creation
of a homogeneous Turkish national state, which would be
both free from outside interference and disinclined to embark on foreign adventures of its own. Those National
Assembly deputies who championed the Caliphate therefore threatened to make Ismet’s task more difficult; and it is hardly surprising that the Turkish delegation to the Conference was
determined to concentrate on purely secular issues. So, too, by now, were the old wartime Allies. British backing for an Arab caliphate effectively went down with Kitchener, in the wreck of HMS
Hampshire
, for more knowledgeable specialists in Arab affairs convinced Whitehall that a caliph could never be simply a spiritual leader, like a post-1870 pope (as Kitchener seems to have
believed); no imperial Power asserting sovereignty over the Indian subcontinent could welcome the association of Muslim peoples under a single caliph, in whatever country he resided. Throughout the
seven months of negotiations at Lausanne, both Ankara and London preferred to ignore the existence of the Caliphate.

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 greater 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
ş
eriat
, 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
ş
eyhülislâm
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.