Kelahiran Kembali Turki/Bab 20
XX
THE REAL PROBLEM OF TURKISH NATIONALISM
ECONOMIC BEGINNINGS IN THE NEW TURKISH STATE—MUSTAPHA KEMAL PASHA OPENS THE SMYRNA CONGRESS—THE CHESTER CONCESSION A STEP FROM IMPERIALISM TO LAW.
As soon as the Erzerum program had been definitely committed to negotiation at Lausanne, Mustapha Kemal Pasha lost no time in diverting into the ways of peace the energy with which Turkish nationalism had re-mobilized and re-equipped its Armies. For the building up of a new and Western economic tradition with which to supplement the old and Eastern military tradition which had long distinguished its nation, the new Turkish Government had laid its foundations well. It had refrained from the issue of paper money, confining itself to the use of paper issued by the old Ottoman Government during the war. As fast as this paper became worn out, it was sent to the headquarters of the Public Debt administration in Constantinople to be exchanged for clean paper. Unlike a number of post-war European Governments, it had refrained from financing itself by the use of the printing press but the merit of this achievement is of course lessened by the primitive nature of the country which it governed. A country which could survive forty percent requisitions hardly needed to use the printing press. If many of its minor officials and soldiers never saw a pay-day, it was not money which had drawn them into the bitter loneliness of Angora. The deputies in the Assembly were paid out of the Evkaf (Moslem religious endowments) in their constituencies. Mustapha Kemal Pasha himself was paid £T300 a month, a salary which in its buying power in Asia Minor today, is equivalent to about £T75, or $375, pre-war. The cost of living has gone up severely in Asia Minor but not quite as severely as it has in the West. A camel which before the war could have been bought for £T25 gold, will now cost about £T100 paper.
Gold has completely disappeared from circulation, most of it drained away to Germany during the war. There is a little nickel in circulation, but practically all transactions in Asia Minor, however small, are conducted in paper. By the time the Battle of the Sakaria River was fought and won, the Government had collected a gold reserve which amounted to about £T1,000,000 (say $5,000,000) in Ottoman and other gold coins and about 200 kilos of bar gold. Its trade had been destroyed, its population had been broken, it was confronted with great devastated areas in the “Pontus,” in Cilicia, in the eastern provinces and behind Smyrna. Its financial position was about as low as can be imagined, but it must be emphasized that low as its financial position was, it was sound. The foundation was good, and the only question pertaining to it was the durability of the economic structure which the Turk would prove himself able to build upon it.
The abrogation of the Capitulations on Sept. 28, 1914, had turned the customs traiff over to the Government and when Angora inherited the burden of debt and undevelopment which had borne Constantinople down, the customs tariff was increased from five to fifteen times over the old Capitulatory tariff. This was done primarily for protective purposes. Insofar as the war permitted, the development of home industries was to be given every possible stimulus. Even down to such minor industries as the manufacture of men’s headwear, nationalist solicitude for home industries was quickly shown. Presumably one reason why the lamb-skin kalpak has been substituted in the new Turkey for the old Ottoman fez, is the fact that fezzes were manufactured in Austria. Although it deprived the Government of a revenue which was said to amount to £T4,000,000 a year at a time when it needed every piaster it could lay its hands on, country-wide prohibition was voted soon after the Grand National Assembly was convened at Angora.
Since Asia Minor is in large part an agricultural area, the Government’s first economic plans were directed toward the development of agriculture, and a scheme was evolved under which farm machinery was to be purchased abroad by a Government company and distributed through the branches of the Government’s Agricultural Bank. This scheme may or may not materialize as the Government enters more fully into foreign commercial relationships, but its spirit is highly significant. Trade has passed definitely into the hands of the Turks and in the building up of an economic tradition to which the Turks have heretofore been strangers, Turkish nationalism confronts its real problem.
On Feb. 17, 1923, Mustapha Kemal Pasha opened the country’s first economic congress at Smyrna. More than 500 delegates were present. Farmers and producers were given the center block of seats, traders and business men the right block, and skilled workmen the left block, with a special section of the hall given over to an exhibition of agricultural machinery, most of it from the United States. It was a unique event in Turkish history, and its significance may be gathered from Kemal Pasha’s opening address, which merits quotation in part:
“Gentlemen, when history applies itself to searching the causes of the grandeur and of the decadence of a people, it invokes political, military and social reasons. It is evident that ultimately all the reasons spring from social conditions but that which is in closest bearing to the existence, the prosperity and the decadence of a people is its economics. This historical truth is confirmed in our existence and our national history. In fact, if one examines the history of the Turkish people, one will see that her grandeur and her decadence are merely corollaries of her economic life. So in order to raise the new Turkey to the desired level, it is necessary, cost what it may, to accord all our solicitude to the questions which concern her economics.
“In the course of Ottoman history, all the efforts employed, all the activities of her statesmen, have had as their aim, not to satisfy the desires of the people nor to realize their aspirations, but rather to appease petty yearnings and personal ambitions. Comrades, if one examines closely the reigns of Mohammed II, of Selim and of Suleiman, one finds that these great and powerful monarchs based their foreign policy on their desires to satiate their personal leanings and ambitions. They had thus to regulate their internal organization in accordance with their foreign policy. Now foreign policy ought to be, on the contrary, subordinated to the internal organization—that is to say, foreign policy should be dominated by the internal economic situation.”
Kemal Pasha went on to explain that the monarchical policy of subordinating internal organization to foreign policy, had led to the necessity of allowing conquered elements to retain their national organizations in which they devoted themselves peacefully to economic pursuits while the “essential element” protected them, wielding the sword against their enemies on every frontier of the Empire. “Gentlemen, those who effect conquests by the sword finish by being beaten by those who employ as their arm the plow, and by ceding their place to them. In the struggle between the sword and the plow, it is always the plow which comes out on top.”
As soon as Rauf Bey returned from Malta, he was given the Ministry of Public Works at Angora, where the elaboration of a scheme of railway development was given immediate attention. Negotiations ensued with the representatives of the Ottoman-American Development Company, backed by Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, U. S. N. (retired), who had been in previous negotiation with the old Ottoman Government in Constantinople. On April 11, 1923, the development scheme which the Government had formulated, was made over to the Ottoman-American Company by the Grand National Assembly and on April 30, the Minister of Public Works signed a convention with two representatives of the Company for what has long been famous as the Chester Concession.
This Turkish program falls into three parts—the construction of 2,714 miles of new railway line, the construction of a new capital city at Angora and of ports at Samsun, Yamurtalik and Trebizond together with the re-construction of towns and villages wrecked by the Greeks, and the exploitation of mineral rights within twenty-kilometer zones on each side of the new railway lines. The convention with the Chester group runs for a term of ninety-nine years unless the Turkish Government chooses to exercise its right of purchase after thirty years. The Turkish company which is to operate the new railway lines is to pay thirty percent of its profits to the Government and is to be subject to all Turkish taxation except customs duties on its construction materials and its coal, the latter of which is to be exempt for a period of ten years only. The company may employ foreign experts (the original Chester project of 1909 stipulated that they were to wear the fez and a Government uniform), but Turks are to be trained to take their places and the labor gangs are to be purely Turkish. There is no kilometric guarantee, nor does the Concession add any financial burden to the burdens which the Turkish Government already bears, until such time as the Government may decide to take over the lines.
The backbone of this Turkish program is its railway scheme, and in this respect it differs widely from the original Chester project of 1909. Czarist Russia having disappeared, the Turkish Government now revives the central Anatolian scheme which was first suggested for the Bagdad Railway and vetoed by Russia. It proposes to extend the Eski-Shehr-Angora line which was orginally intended for the main line of the Bagdad Railway, to Sivas, Kharput, Diarbekr and Mosul, but it adapts its railway program to the needs which have developed during the last four years. It may be assumed that military considerations have played a part in the framing of the Government’s railway scheme, for the war in Europe is not yet ended, and nobody knows how long a breathing space Turkey is to be permitted.
The first line to be built is to be the Yamurtalik-Kharput-Bitlis line, with a branch dropping to Mosul, Kirkuk and Suleimanieh. If and when this line is completed, it will strengthen the Syrian and Mesopotamian frontiers, and its western end, terminating in an excellent harbor at Yamurtalik on the Turkish side of Alexandretta Bay, will afford the Government a port which it sorely needs on the Mediterranean.
The second line to be built is to be the Angora-Erzerum line with branches dropping to Samsun and Trebizond on the Black Sea. At present the Government has no access by rail to any of its Black Sea ports. Possibly if it had had speedy access to the “Pontus” provinces, they would not have been devastated by irregular warfare during these last four years.
The final lines to be built are embodied in a group by which the Angora-Sivas line is to be connected via Caesarea with Ulu Kishla on the Bagdad Railway, and the Erzerum line is to be extended to Bayazid on the Persian frontier. The Erzerum and Bayazid lines in the eastern provinces are of obvious bearing on any future Russian attempt to repeat the great invasion of 1915-’16. They are of more meaning than that. At present Soviet Russia and Turkey are at peace with each other, and if and when the railway program which the Turkish Government has made over to the Chester group is completed, Russia may be afforded an overland outlet to the Mediterranean at Yamurtalik. The Russian and Turkish gauges differ, the former being 5 feet and the latter 4 feet 8½ inches, but the political possibilities in affording Soviet Russia peacefully what Czarist Russia sought by force, are incalculable. Peaceful access to the Mediterranean over the Chester lines might easily reduce the Straits to a very small factor in Russia’s foreign policy. While Turkey is not a Socialist State and presumably will not be, Russo-Turkish peace is the very foundation of any world peace and if the Chester group is able to contribute effectively to an enduring Russo-Turkish peace, it will perform a service of incalculable worth to the cause of world peace.
A month after the grant of the Chester Concession, Allied concessionaires began filtering into Angora from Constantinople, to begin economic negotiations with the Turkish Government simultaneously with the political negotiations which were dragging toward an end at Lausanne. These economic negotiations comprised four subjects: (1) the status of pre-war concessions; (2) the status of modifications authorized by the Ottoman Government after the Mudros armistice; (3) compensation for war damage to the property of concessionaires; and (4) the extension of concessions for a period equal to that in which they had been non-operative during the war. By the middle of June, the Constantinople Telephone Company (British) had reached agreement with the Turkish Government. Early in July, similar agreements had been reached by the Smyrna-Aidin Railway (British) and the Mudania-Brussa Railway (French).
Meanwhile, the Assembly adjourned for new elections. Peace not yet having been signed at Lausanne, the Nationalist Party went to the country on the basis of the National Pact and was returned by an overwhelming majority. It was a war election, somewhat reminiscent of Mr. Lloyd George’s “khaki election” of 1918, and party government with a strong Opposition in the Assembly is hardly to be expected at Angora until after an assured peace has come to Turkey.
The Second Assembly was convened in the gray granite building at the foot of Angora on August 11 and Mustapha Kemal Pasha was re-elected President by 196 of the 197 deputies who had reached the capital. Presumably the lone dissenting vote was the vote of “the Pasha” himself. Ali Fethy Bey, Minister of the Interior, was elected Prime Minister in place of Rauf Bey and most of the remaining Ministers were re-elected, Ismet Pasha retaining the portfolio of Foreign Affairs and Fevzi Pasha remaining Chief of the General Staff. The Treaty of Lausanne having been ratified on August 23, the Assembly lost no time in approaching the urgent problem of its own economy and on September 5 Fethy Bey announced the main lines of the Government’s policy. He stressed first the problem of finance and the necessity of readjusting taxation. Further points on which the Government proposed to concentrate, he said, were the schools system and the gendarmerie. His speech was noteworthy for the brevity of its references to foreign affairs. Given peace abroad, the Government’s program as enunciated by Fethy Bey is an internal program.