Kelahiran Kembali Turki/Bab 21

XXI

THE REBIRTH OF TURKEY

With the rebirth of Turkey, this narrative approaches its end. With the coming of a probable peace, the passions which have been raised in the Near and Middle East need sorely to be allayed, and there would be small usefulness in this narrative of the destruction they have worked, if the past did not contain its element of useful guidance for the future.

We in the West are heavily in debt to England. It is England which has slowly and laboriously fashioned our Western tradition of democratic government and that tradition has placed us all incalculably in England’s debt. That tradition is still evolving and England is still, as it has always been, the scene of its evolution. But in acknowledging our debt to England, we need to think clearly, to distinguish sharply between the British democracy and the British Foreign Office. Between the two, there is no effective connection. The Foreign Office is outside the British Constitution and is not subject to the effective control of the British Parliament. British foreign policy in the Near and Middle East neither originates in Parliament nor is controlled by Parliament. This is a state of things which has been at once a source of enormous strength to British diplomacy and a source of enormous danger to world peace.

It was through the British Foreign Office, under Sir Edward Grey’s Secretaryship, that the British democracy was tied to Czarist Russia in the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. The British democracy did not know it at the time nor does it realize to this day the meaning of the 1907 Treaty, for its Foreign Office has been as blinkers fastened about its eyes. There came a time in 1914 when Czarist Russia clashed with Germany over the control of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. Sir Edward Grey had tied the British democracy to Czarist Russia and in 1914 it remained so tied. Whether Sir Edward Grey permitted his country to believe that the war was to be fought over Belgium and under this impression brought his country into the war, is a question which the British democracy may some day succeed in settling with its own Foreign Office. Events, however, would appear to indicate that Basra was more intimately connected with the Foreign Office’s actual war aims than Belgium was. Three weeks before the Enver Government at Constantinople entered the war, a British Indian brigade lay off Bahrein Island in the Persian Gulf and when German naval officers hustled the Enver Government into the war by bombarding Odessa, events played straight into the Foreign Office’s hand. The brigade off Bahrein struck at Basra instantly and Sir Edward Grey, in conjunction with Czarist Russia, began that partitioning of the Ottoman Empire which had been envisaged in 1907. Czarist Russia was to receive Constantinople and the eastern provinces, the Foreign Office was to achieve its Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta scheme, and the Ottoman Caliphate of Islam was to be destroyed. But of all this the British democracy knew little until Czarist Russia collapsed in 1917 and Soviet Russia published the secret treaties which it discovered in the Czarist archives at Petrograd.

Deprived of its Czarist accomplice at the very peak of its history, deprived even of the tame Kerensky regime, the British Foreign Office in 1919 sought American aid in holding its position. Viscount Grey of Fallodon was dispatched to Washington and American churchmen, with the best intentions in the world, attempted to tie upon American eyes the same Armenian blind as they had permitted to be tied upon their own eyes. But the United States Government does not conduct its foreign affairs as the British Foreign Office does. Viscount Grey went back to London and the Armenian mandate scheme fell through. The effort to establish a closer relationship between England and the United States still continues, however, and it would be interesting to know to what extent, if any, it is directed toward an Anglo-American combination against Islam in succession to the Anglo-Russian combination of 1907. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that we in the United States are under an incalculable debt to the British democracy, but to the British Foreign Office we owe nothing.

The Turkish recovery of Smyrna in 1922 stripped the blind from the eyes of the British democracy, but its Foreign Office blinkers are still fastened about its eyes. Mr. Lloyd George has fallen but Lord Curzon still remains. British diplomacy does not lightly change its aims and the Turk whose end was decreed in 1907, is still an unwelcome outsider in the field of British diplomacy. Lord Curzon has held most of his gains in the Arab lands of the old Ottoman Empire, but in the face of the Turkish recovery he has retreated by inches. He still has a Greek frontier on the Maritza River, 250 miles from Constantinople, he still perpetuates the split in Islam which pivots on Mosul, he still refuses to recognize, even in the elaboration of a new regime for the Straits, the indubitable fact of Soviet Russia. Some day the British democracy may succeed in removing the blinkers from its eyes, in reducing its Foreign Office to an ordinary department of its Government, responsible as its other Government departments are, to its Parliament. Some day the Foreign Office may become the mouthpiece of an informed democracy. In a day when diplomacy is passing to the basis of trade, when British Conservatism has already passed to a business basis, the end of the present anachronism at the Foreign Office may be not distant.

We need to be scrupulously fair, however, to Mr. Lloyd George and his Foreign Secretary. Rid of any actual responsibility to Parliament, they have kicked the beaten Turks into such independence as they have never known since the golden days of the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to the absolutism which Mr. Lloyd George enjoyed, the Turks have finally attained a degree of nationhood “one and indivisible” which is far beyond what the most visionary Young Turks of 1908 hoped to attain. Their historic Christian communities have been rooted up and deported from the land in which they had lived for four peaceful centuries under the rule of the Ottoman Caliph, and for this truly colossal achievement the thanks of a grateful Christendom are due to Mr. Lloyd George, who attempted to impose alone upon Islam that fate which Sir Edward Grey had agreed in 1907 to impose in conjunction with Czarist Russia.

The disestablished Oecumenical Patriarchate still remains in Constantinople and the departure of Meletios IV on July 10, 1923, may open its doors to the new Turkish Orthodox Church of Anatolia. The day seems to be at hand when the remnant of the Turkish Christians, welded firmly into the Turkish State by the flame of nationalism, may restore the Patriarchate to those exclusively religious functions which in the Western view are the only proper functions of a Church.

Nationalism which proposes to substitute its new Eastern regime of law for the old lawlessness of Western imperialism, is the driving force of Turkey today and Turkey happens to be the key country of the world. Nationalism in Turkey today welds and does not divide. Its cry strikes a sound and healthy note. I heard it in its purest form at Adana. It was in a theatre, filled to overflowing with Turkish officers, Turkish townsmen and Turkish peasants. Beyond the footlights, framed in the little proscenium of the theatre, stood the plump figure of the poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, now an old man of seventy-two, his voice hoarsened to a whisper, the perspiration streaming from beneath his kalpak, as he intoned his verse in liquid Turkish. Once a lonely cry in the wilderness, his voice that night was punctuated with quick applause. For twenty years he has been lifting up his cry and today he is still making his way through the scorched and decimated villages of Turkey, still burning himself out with his old cry:

“I am a Turk;

“My race and language are great.”