MACEDONIANS IN ANATOLIA

The importance of the Macedonian roots of the Unionists for their

policies in Anatolia after 1914.

Erik-Jan Zürcher (Leiden)

On 25 April 1906 the young general staff captain Musa Kâzım

witnessed something that would remain with him for the rest of his

life. After his graduation (first in class) from the General Staff

College (Erkan-i Harbiye Mektebi) in İstanbul he had received his

posting to a cavalry regiment in Bitola/Manastır1 in February and,

having been born and bred in İstanbul, he was still getting used to

the realities in the Ottoman Balkans (Rumeli in Ottoman parlance)

every day. On 25 April he went with a few friends to the railway

station in Manastır, because they had heard that a group of

“Komitacis”, that is to say: Bulgarian nationalist guerrilla

fighters, was going to be sent into exile.

“41 Bulgarians and 4 Rum (Greek Orthodox) were put on the

train, handcuffed together two by two. A Bulgarian priest gave

each of them a gold coin and a few words of encouragement. As

soon as the train began to roll, they shouted with one voice

“Long live our Bulgarian nation!” They were joyful like

soldiers that are released and return to their hometowns. Until

the train disappeared from view they shouted and waved. We

watched it with foreboding and I said to my friends: “That is

what you call a national ideal. The day our nation shows this

kind of existence it will have been saved.”2

Later that year the captain would be one of the founders of the cell

of the Ottoman Freedom Committee (Osmanlı Hürriyet Cemiyeti) in 1 The toponyms that occur in this article have often changed at least once and often more than once since 1912. I give the modern and Ottoman names separated by a forward slash at the first occurrence in the text and use the Ottoman thereafter.2 Kâzım Karabekir, İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti Neden Kuruldu, Nasıl Kuruldu, Nasıl İdare Olundu, edited by Faruk and Emel Özerengin, İstanbul: private publication, 1982 [written in 1945], p. 101.

Manastır, into which he was initiated by his close friend Enver. He

was actually the eleventh member of this society, that would adopt

the name “Committee of Union and Progress” (İttihat ve Terakki

Cemiyeti) after its merger with the Paris-based “Committee of

Progress and Union” (Terakki ve İttihat Cemiyeti) in September 1907.

As Kâzım Karabekir he would have a brilliant military career and

become the hero of the eastern front in the Turkish war of

independence. At the time of his death in 1948 he was president of

the Turkish national assembly in Ankara.

What is the relevance of this little anecdote to the topic of this

article? Primarily that it is part of a body of evidence that shows

that, to understand the events of World War I and after in the

Ottoman Empire, we have to look not only at the immediately

preceding period – the Balkan Wars and the tensions on the eve of

World War I. There is now an expanding school of thought that

explains the demographic engineering of Anatolia during and after

World War I as a result of the trauma of the defeat in the Balkan

War.3 There can be no doubt that this trauma was tremendously

important, but it is the contention of this article is that we also

have to look at the formative years of the Young Turk opposition

movement as it came into being in Macedonia in the years 1906-1908,

in order to understand the nature and worldview of this movement as

well as the actions of its members.

It is important to look at precisely this part of the history of the

Young Turk movement, because it was the underground network of

civilians and military officers in Ottoman Rumeli that was formed in

these years, that brought about the constitutional revolution,

3 See for example: M. Hakan Yavuz, “Warfare and Nationalism: The Balkan Waras a Catalyst for Homogenization,” in M. Hakan Yavuz and İsa Blumi (ed.), War and Nationalism. The Balkan Wars 1912-1913, and their Sociopolitical Implications, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013, p. 31-84.

rather than the much older Paris-based opposition movement. As Tarik

Zafer Tunaya already pointed out twenty-five years ago in his

monumental history of the Committee of Union and Progress, this

organization “was born in this struggle [over Macedonia] and carries

a birth certificate from the Balkans. This makes it imperative to

look for the roots of the CUP. in the Balkans. The CUP is

Macedonian.”4

After the revolution of July 1908 membership of the committee was

opened up and many times more people joined it, often for

opportunistic reasons, but before the revolution the organization

consisted of some 2000 members only (a quarter of whom were based in

Thessaloniki/Selânik), with an inner core of decision makers of no

more than a few dozen persons.5 In the regime crises of the following

decade: the counterrevolution of April 1909 (the “Otuz Bir Mart”),

the Balkan War and the Bab-i Ali coup of January 1913 as well as the

decision to resist the post-war settlement of 1919-1920, each time

it was the core network of committee members who had joined before

the constitutional revolution that came to the fore. It was also

this core that dominated the political, administrative and military

leadership of the early Turkish Republic.

We can form ourselves a fairly good picture of the activities and

outlook of the people involved in the preparation of the revolution

on the basis of well-documented eyewitness accounts of a number of

the protagonists: the already mentioned Kâzım Karabekir, but also

4 Tarık Zafer Tunaya, Türkiye’de Siyasal Partiler. Cilt III İttihat ve Terakki. Bir Çağın, bir Kuşağın, bir Partinin Tarihi, İstanbul: Hürriyet, 1989, 13.

5Erik Jan Zürcher, “Who were the Young Turks?” in Erik Jan Zürcher, The YoungTurk Legacy and Nation Building. From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey, London: I.B. Tauris, 2010, p. 101.

Enver6, Niyazi7, Galip Pasinler8 and Kâzım Nami Duru9. Detailed

histories of the Young Turk movement by their adversaries Ahmed

Bedevi Kuran10 and Hikmet Bayur11 also offer insights. Memoirs of

younger Turks who grew up in Rumeli, such as Zekeriya Sertel12 and

Şevket Süreyya Aydemir13 give us an insight into the realities of the

Ottoman society of its day. Contemporary publications like that of

Tunalı Hilmi14 show us the Young Turk thinking on the Macedonian

issue of the time.

1906, the year in which Musa Kâzım arrived in Manastır was, as

François Georgeon has noted in his biography of Abdülhamid II, a

decisive year in the history of the Young Turk opposition.15 The

first Young Turk movement, which had been founded in 1889 in the

Military Medical School had been destroyed as a force inside the

empire by Abdülhamid’s police in 1896 and for ten years had led an

ephemeral existence in exile, where its main organization had been

the Paris-based Committee of Union and Progress. Its activities had

been largely confined to the publication and distribution of

newspapers and pamphlets addressing both a European readership and

6 Halil Erdoğan Cengiz, Enver Paşa’nın Anıları 1881-1908, İstanbul: İletişim, 1991. 7 Kolağası Resneli Ahmed Niyazi, Hatırat-ı Niyazi yahud Tarihçe-yi İnkılab-ı Kebir-i Osmanlıdan bir sahife, İstanbul: Sabah, 1326 [1910]8 “Galip Paşa’nın Hatıraları”, Hayat Tarih Mecmuası 2/6-9 (1966).

9 Kâzım Nami Duru, “İttihat ve Terakki” Hatıralarım, İstanbul: Sucuoğlu, 1957.10 Ahmed Bedevi Kuran, İnkılâp Tarihimiz ve İttihad ve Terakki, İstanbul: Tan, 1948. 11 Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, Türk İnkılâbı Tarihi Cilt 1 Kısım 1, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1940, p. 429-478.12 Zekeriya Sertel, Hatırladıklarım, İstanbul: Gözlem, 1977, p. 11-48.13 Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, Suyu Arayan Adam, Ankara: Öz, 1959.

14 Tunalı Hilmi, Makedonya Mazisi, Hali, İstikbalı, Cairo: s,n, 1909.15 François Georgeon, Abdulhamid II le sultan calife, Paris: Fayard, 2003, p. 393.

an Ottoman one, as well as to incessant infighting among the expats.

The reconciliation of the elected leader of the Committee of Union

and Progress, “Mizancı” Murat Bey, with the Sultan in 1898 had been

a body blow to the credibility and morale of the CUP and the 1902

“Congress of Ottoman Liberals” in Paris had laid bare the divisions

among the Young Turks. It was the arrival in Paris of the two

medical doctors Bahaettin Şakır and Nazım with a much more activist

mentality in 1905 that started to turn the “Committee of Progress

and Union”(as it had been renamed after the 1902 congress) into an

effective network of cells in the empire and in the neighbouring

countries.16 From 1906 onwards the CPU, with the assistance of the

Armenian Dashnakzutiun, was successful in establishing cells in the

east, in places like Trabzon and Erzurum, but far less so in the

West. Founding a cell in Selânik, the third largest city of the

empire, was a priority for the Paris-based committee, as its

correspondence in the summer of 1906 shows,17 but it was not due to

their instructions that such a cell came into being. Many officers ,

bureaucrats and intellectuals in Macedonia were avid readers of the

publications sent from Paris, most notably the CPU newspaper Şurayı

Ümmet (Council of he [Islamic] Community), but when they decided to

organize, they did so of their own accord, inspired, but not

instructed by Paris. In this decision, the rumours about a serious

illness of the sultan that circulated widely in the summer of 1906

played an important part, as the Young Turks feared that the sultan,

with the connivance of the great powers would change the line of

succession before his death, eliminating the heir to the throne,

Prince Reşad, with whom the Young Turks had close contacts.18 16 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution. The Young Turks 1902-1908, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 130-190.17 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Op. Cit, p. 211.18 Franois Georgeon, Op. Cit, p. 391.

The founding of the Ottoman Freedom Committee in Selânik in

September 1906 was the result of a series of meetings among a group

of ten friends, partly military officers and partly civilians, that

had been going on since July. The initiative seems to have come from

Talât Bey,19 the chief clerk of the Selânik telegraph office. Some

among the ten had been members of the original Young Turk movement

since before 1896. As Kâzım Nami Duru writes, this made them

partisans of “freedom”, that is to say the reintroduction of

parliamentary and constitutional rule, but that rather abstract

ideal was not enough to get many people to join the movement. More

direct concerns were much more suitable for mobilization. The first

among these concerns was the establishment of foreign tutelage over

the so-called “Macedonian” provinces of the empire: Selânik,

Manastır and Skopje/Üsküb. The most visible expression of this

tutelage was the establishment of a gendarmerie force commanded by

officers from six European countries under an Italian general. A

gendarmerie school had been opened and the intention was that from

now on soldiers in the gendarmerie would be recruited proportionally

from the different religious communities.20 In addition, the Ottoman

inspector-general for the three provinces was ”assisted” by an

Austrian and a Russian advisor. According to Kâzım Nami it was this

foreign interference that was the main irritant for the young

officers in Macedonia and the one factor that made them eager to

19 According to Mithat Şükrü Bleda in his memoirs (Midhat Şükrü Bleda, İmparatorluğun Çöküşü, İstanbul: Remzi 1979) and Kâzım Nami Duru, Op. Cit, p.13. Kâzım Karabekir heard from one of the ten, Naki (Yücekök) that he, Talât and six others had actually been involved in an earlier attempt to found a CPU branch in Selânik in 1902, but that Ahmet Rıza had advised themfrom Paris to act independently as the Paris committee had become ineffective. This was shortly after the first congress of Ottoman liberals in Paris and the split in the movement (Kâzım Karabekir, Op. Cit, p. 158). 20 İpek Yosmaoğlu, Blood Ties. Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia 1878-1908, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014, p. 33.

join the Ottoman Freedom Committee.21 This is corroborated by the

memoirs of Enver, Niyazi and Kâzım Karabekir

The OFC started to spread among the younger officers and bureaucrats

in Selânik and, from December 1906 onwards also to the garrison town

of Manastır. Enver, the later Enver Pasha, who had been initiated

into the committee in Selânik, but was stationed in Manastır (the

most important Ottoman military base), linked the two centers. This

explains his central role in the OFC and later in the Committee of

Union and Progress after its merger with the Paris-based CPU in

September 1907.

From the beginning the OFC was open explicitly to Muslims, of

whatever ethnic background: Turks, Albanians and some Arabs and

Kurds were also initiated. The first seventy members were all

Muslims, but in the course of 1907, some non-Muslims started to be

accepted and initiated as members. It is important to note that

these were Jews, Vlachs and Armenians. They were also very few in

number.22 No Greeks, Bulgarians or Serbs were ever accepted or even

approached. This is a very important indicator of the dividing line

between “us” and “them” as it was understood in the early days of

the constitutional movement in Macedonia. Above all else, the OFC

was an organization founded to prevent the loss of the “Macedonian”

provinces to the European powers or the Christian nation states of

the Balkans and, especially since the big Bulgarian “Ilinden”(St.

Elias Day) rebellion of 1903, Bulgarian, Greek and Serb agitation

was seen as a lethal threat. Macedonia was a very violent place and,

as İpek Yosmaoğlu has shown in her recent book, the Ottoman

authorities had the greatest problems asserting their authority in

21 Kâzım Nami Duru, Op. Cit, p. 14.

22 Kâzım Karabekir, Op. Cit, p. 177-178.

the face of the lawlessness created by guerilla bands that not only,

or even primarily, attacked the Ottoman forces, but each other.23

For the young officers who joined the OFC in Manastır – people like

Enver, Kâzım, but also Eyüp Sabri, Cafer Tayyar, Süleyman Askeri,

Aziz Ali al-Misri, or Niyazi – contra-guerrilla warfare against

Bulgarian, Greek and Serb bands was the dominant everyday reality of

their lives in 1904-1908. They were continuously engaged in the

defence of the realm against internal enemies sponsored by

neighbouring states. Enver, who gained a particularly strong

reputation as a counterinsurgency expert, fought no less than 54

engagements with guerrilla bands in the years before the

constitutional revolution.24

Michael Reynolds is undoubtedly right when he says that “a desire

to preserve the state, not to destroy it, motivated the

revolutionaries.”25 Whether that makes them conservatives, as Şükrü

Hanioğlu states, is a matter for discussion. They were in favour of

constitutional rule, because they saw it as a means to an end- a

means to modernize and strengthen the state. Because of this, the

“Ottomanism” of the OFC (and of the reconstituted CUP) was always

fundamentally ambivalent, as the events and proclamations in the run

up to the constitutional revolution of 23 July 1908 clearly

demonstrate. Their policies vis à vis the different nationalist

movements were also essentially opportunistic and fluid. The Young

Turks in Macedonia saw the right wing of the IMRO as the greatest

danger, but relations with Sandansky’s left wing were much better.

23 İpek Yosmaoğlu, Op. Cit, chapter 6.24 Halil Erdoğan Cengiz, Op. Cit, p. 11-12.

25 Michael Reynolds, Shattering Empires. The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires 1908-1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 22-25.

There can be no doubt that it was the meeting of Tsar Nicholas and

King Edward in Reval/Tallinn on 9 June 1908 and the ensuing rumours

that agreement had been reached between Britain and Russia on a

regime of autonomy in Macedonia, that triggered the revolution.26 The

first reaction on the part of the CUP was to draft a very long

memorandum that was handed to the consular representatives of the

European powers (except Russia) in Manastır.27 The discourse of the

memorandum already shows the CUP’s ambivalence. Its main message is

that the great power interference in Macedonia of the past four

years is making the situation worse and that Russia is abusing the

situation to promote nationalist agitation from Serbia, Bulgaria and

Greece. It demands that Europe should stop interfering in Macedonia

and instead support efforts to end oppression for all Ottoman

communities, Muslim and non-Muslim alike in the empire as a whole –

a classic “Ottomanist” position. At the same time, the memorandum

mounts a spirited defence of the Muslims of Macedonia. According to

the text, they form and have always formed a majority. Islam is

known for its tolerance towards other religions, but the Muslims

have been the victims of aggression from the minorities. So far,

they have refrained from violence, but it is only normal that the

Muslims “whose heroism is known worldwide” will no longer stand by

as their destruction is being prepared and the moment that they will

resist is now possibly quite near. In other words: the memorandum

is both a call for foreign support for an empire-wide Ottomanist

solution, and a threat of Muslim resistance.

26 Erik Jan Zürcher, “The historiography of the Constitutional Revolution: Broad consensus, some disagreement and a missed opportunity,” in François Georgeon (ed.), “L’ivresse de la liberté” La revolution de 1908 dans l’Empire Ottoman [Collection Turcica XVII], Leuven: Peeters, 2012, 91-106. 27 Niyazi, Op. Cit, p. 51-61.

When the memorandum did not elicit a reaction, a number of Unionist

officers – Niyazi in Resen/Resne , Enver in Tikveş and Eyüp Sabri

in Ohrid/Ohri, later also Selahattin and Hasan in Kičevo/Karaçova –

with the approval of the committee, “went into the mountains” and

started the armed insurrection against Abdülhamid’s regime in early

July 1908. Although they were military officers, they did not start

guerrilla warfare at the head of their units. Following the example

of the Bulgarian Komitacıs, Serb Çetes and Greek Andartes, they went

into the mountains at the head of a “National Detachment” (Millî

Müfreze) of volunteers, some of whom were soldiers while others were

not.28 The actions and statements of these national detachments

issued during the weeks of armed insurrection before the revolution,

confirm the layered message present in the memorandum.

To begin with, they consciously chose Muslim villages – Albanian in

the case of Niyazi, Turkish in the case of Enver – as their

operational base. As Niyazi says, the aim was “first to unite all

Muslims and then to take in the minorities.”29 The officers

emphasized the Muslim character of their movement. Niyazi even had

his band recite the Muslim creed out loud as they entered the

villages.30 They appealed to the fears of the Muslim population that

a foreign occupation of Macedonia was imminent and that that would

mark the end for the “Muslim majority.” They pointed to the

weakness and corruption of the government (never the Sultan!) as the

cause of this danger and presented the constitution as the solution.

In much the same way yet another CUP officer, Galip Bey (Pasinler)

convinced the 20.000 Albanians that had gathered in

Ferizoviç/Firzovik from 5 July onwards because of rumours that the 28 Of Niyazi’s original 160 followers, only nine were soldiers from his battalion (Niyazi, Op. Cit, p. 79.29 Niyazi, Op. Cit, p. 109.

30 NIyazi, Op. Cit, p. 88.

Austrian army was coming to occupy Kosovo, that only the

constitution could avert this danger.

While he was building up support among the Muslim Albanian

villagers, Niyazi also had a proclamation in Bulgarian distributed

to the Christian villages in the area. In it he called upon the

“Christian compatriots” to reject the empty promises of the “small

governments surrounding the empire” that fomented discord among the

Ottoman population. He remarked:

“O compatriots! Bulgarians! Even if Bulgaria, Serbia and

Greece, who have been working on it for thirty years, continue

for another sixty years, they will never reach their goals and

their dreams. This land is ours and it will remain ours. If you help them,

you will be sorry.”

In line with the rhetoric of the CUP’s memorandum to the consuls,

Niyazi then blames the feeble and corrupt government in Istanbul for

allowing foreigners to interfere and calls on all Ottomans, whatever

their creed or nationality to join the CUP. He promises equality

and justice, but ends with a very explicit threat:

“If, after you have received this proclamation, we see places

where our programme is not applied, we will call on those who

obstruct it and destroy their villages. If a [Bulgarian] band

enters a village after this proclamation of mine the people of

the village have to notify the nearest Muslim village or the army. If

they do not do so, the leaders of the village will be

executed.”31

This tells us something about the nature of the Ottomanism of the

CUP and it confirms Hanioğlu’s view that it was entirely

instrumental, if not opportunist. The minorities are offered

31 Niyazi, Op. Cit, p. 105.

equality and cooperation in exchange for a total abandonment of any

form of separatism and loyalty to an Ottoman state that is clearly

to be dominated by the Muslims (“This land is ours”).

A similar sentiment is expressed in another interesting document,

the proclamation of the Manastır branch of the CUP to the leaders of

the local Greek community. This dates from 22 July, one day before

the official proclamation by the palace restoring the constitution.

By this time a number of branches of the Bulgarian Internal

Macdeonian Revolutionary Organization (Vnatrešna Makedonska Revolucionerna

Organizacija or IMRO) had laid down their arms. The Greek bands of

“Andartes” were more hesitant. In the proclamation the aim of the

CUP is explained as the restoration of the constitution and the

ending of the ethnic and religious strife that has been the result

of the oppression. But the Greeks are warned as well:

“This should also be clearly understood: if our Greek brothers

diverge from this great aim and continue to serve the idea and

dream of Hellenism, they will have entered upon a dangerous

road that will end badly and they will have destroyed the future of the

Greeks in Anatolia, who are several times more numerous than they

themselves.”32

Prophetic words, written a full six years before the start of the

expulsions of Anatolian Greeks!

Significantly, immediately after the revolution, when it had taken

over power in Manastır, the CUP announced that it would levy a

contribution of two percent on the Turkish (probably: Muslim)

population alone. As Nader Sohrabi has pointed out: this is a clear

indication of whom they considered their primary constituency.33

32 Yusuf Hikmet Bayur, Op. Cit, p. 465.33 Nader Sohrabi, “Illiberal Constitutionalism. The Committee Union and Progress as a Clandestine Network and the Purges,” in: François Georgeon

The question to what extent Turkish nationalism already played an

important, or dominant role, in the identity politics of the Young

Turks at this stage, has been much debated. In his studies of the

Paris-based CUP, Şükrü Hanioğlu detects a clear drift towards

Turkish nationalism in the years immediately before the

constitutional revolution, when the “activists” started to dominate

Ahmet Rıza’s organization. He points out that this development is

due primarily to the influence of the branches in places like the

Caucasus, Bulgaria, Romania and Crete for whom Ottomanism held

little attraction. While it is certainly true that a form of

nationalism had become dominant even before 1908 (and that therefore

the old idea that Ottomanism was rejected only after the Balkan War

is a fallacy) I have been inclined to see “Ottoman Muslim

nationalism” as a rather more apposite descriptive term, seeing the

triumph of Turkish nationalism as something that belongs to the

republican era, but that is perhaps due to my looking at the

internal Young Turk organization rather than the external one.

When we look at the OFC/CUP in the years 1906-1908 the picture is

complicated. The major issue confronting the Young Turk officers was

that of the Muslim Albanians. Two thirds of the Albanian population

was Muslim and they constituted by far the largest Muslim community

in the key area of Western Macedonia where the revolution took

place. The CUP here had to compete with a movement for Albanian

autonomy that had its origins in the Albanian Bashkimi club in

Manastır and that had started a guerrilla movement under Cercis

Topulli a couple of years earlier. For Niyazi, an Albanian Ottoman

officer who operated in the same area as Cercis, coming to an

understanding with the Albanian committees was essential. In this he

was successful, and the Albanian committees, including Cercis,

(ed.), “L’ivresse de la liberté” La revolution de 1908 dans l’Empire Ottoman [Collection TurcicaXVII], Leuven: Peeters, 2012, 113.

decided to cooperate with the CUP. The arguments exchanged are

interesting. The representatives of the Albanian committee saying

that they had been forced into acting independently because of what

the Turks had done in the name of Ottomanism, while Niyazi

characterized the Turks as brave, dependable and patient and said

that they had only played a small role in Abdülhamid’s tyrannical

rule.34 Here Niyazi clearly positions himself as a fellow Albanian

talking about “those Turks” while rejecting Albanian nationalism. On

the other hand, the same Niyazi also appealed to Ottomanism. He

addressed his ethnic Albanian followers on the first day of his

rebellion saying “Friends, are you ready to set an example that

befits the great character of the Ottomans?”.35 Clearly he

understood himself to be both – Albanian and Ottoman. Identities

were fluid and multifaceted. Albanians could see themselves as

Ottomans, but also as Turks. Kâzım Karabekir tells us how he

introduced the singing of a rousing march composed to the text of

Mehmed Emin Yurdakul’s famous 1897 poem Cenge Giderken (Going into

Battle) as part of the daily routine. The Albanian soldiers

enthusiastically joined in the singing of the line “Ben bir Türküm,

dinim cinsim uludur” ( I am a Turk, my religion and race are great”)

as they understood “Türk” to mean Muslim.36

The previous argument can be summarized in four statements:

1. The OFC/CUP network of 1906-1908 was an Ottoman-Muslim

organization of people who, whatever their ethnic background,

identified themselves as “Turks” in the sense that they felt

themselves to be part of the “dominant nation”(millet-I hakime)

and that they identified with the Ottoman state as their own.

34 Niyazi, Op. Cit, p. 163.35 Niyazi, Op. Cit, p. 80.36 Kâzım Karabekir, Op. Cit, p. 103.

2. Their outlook was determined almost entirely by the exigencies

of the Macedonian problem. This also determined their

perception of in- and outgroups: Jews, Armenians and Vlahs were

seen as potential allies, Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbs as

potential enemies.

3. The Ottomanism of these Young Turks was essentially

instrumental and conditional. They offered national solidarity

and equality on condition of the minorities demonstrating

loyalty to the Muslim-dominated Ottoman state to the exclusion

of all national aspirations.

4. The ultimate aim of the movement was a strengthened state that

could successfully resist movements towards the autonomy or

partition of the Macedonian provinces.

As is well known, the July revolution was followed by a brief but

intense period of euphoria. There are many accounts and there exists

ample photographic evidence of Greek, Albanian and Bulgarian bands

“coming down from the mountains” and being rapturously received in

the towns, along with representatives of the CUP. There were joint

celebrations of the different ethnicities and in Istanbul especially

of Muslims and Armenians. Joint services were held in churches and

mosques to give thanks and remember the victims of the Hamidian

regime. The celebrations in Selanik and İstanbul were witnessed by

many foreigners who reported on them. Bernard Lory has recently

written a blow by blow account of the events in Manastır.37 The basis

for these celebrations and this fraternization was a fundamental

misunderstanding. Because the CUP had carried out its revolution

outwardly (in its proclamations and telegrams to the representatives

37 Bernard Lory, “Manastir/Bitola, bereceau de la revolution,” in: François Georgeon (ed.), “L’ivresse de la liberté” La revolution de 1908 dans l’Empire Ottoman [Collection Turcica XVII], Leuven: Peeters, 2012, p. 241-156.

of the government), not in the name of the concrete concerns of its

members, as described by Kâzım Nami Duru, but in the name of the

abstract notion of constitutional and legitimate rule and better and

more just government, using the slogan of “Freedom, Equality,

Fraternity and Justice”, this gave every community the opportunity

to understand the revolution and the constitutional regime as the

fulfillment of its own particular wishes. That these wishes were

often diametrically opposed to one another was something that was

hidden from sight as long as the euphoria about the fall of the

“regime of tyranny” lasted, and it lasted for two months at most. In

this way, it is perhaps reminiscent of the “Arab Spring”,

particularly the way it played out in Cairo in 2011. There, too,

communities with fundamentally opposed visions of the future, could

feel themselves part of one big movement – for a while. The

fundamental difference between the perception of the CUP and the

non-Muslim organizations seems to have been that where the CUP

envisaged a centralized modern state built on an Ottoman national

identity that would fully replace any other loyalties in a Muslim-

dominated state (after all: by 1908 Muslims constituted close to 80

percent of the population), the minority organizations saw it as a

framework offering opportunities for decentralization based on

“hyphenated” identities – Ottoman-Greek, Ottoman-Bulgarian, Ottoman-

Armenian. The differences could be overlooked until the ideals were

given concrete form in legislation. Issues like the imposition of

military service on all communities under the law of 25 July 1909

quickly brought the fundamental differences of opinion to the

surface. The Bulgarian demand that Bulgarian recruits be put into

mono-ethnic units with Christian officers and priests was the exact

opposite of the Unionists’ ideal of the army as a melting pot. The

mass emigration and acquisition of foreign passports by Ottoman

Greeks also clearly showed that they did not share his ideal.

In the years between the revolution and the outbreak of the Balkan

War in 1912 the CUP did not manage to control the political process,

indeed by 1912 it had been ousted from political power altogether.

It did manage to hold on to its influence within the officer corps,

however. The action of the “Saviour Officers” (Halâskar zabitan”)

who threatened a counterrevolution in May 1911 was an embarrassment

for the CUP in that it was led by Colonel Sadık Bey, who had been

the “Godfather” of the CUP activists in Manastır before 1908, but,

as Sina Akşin has shown, it involved no more a handful of officers

(no more than twelve in Macedonia).38 It had a major impact

politically on the already unstable and divided cabinet and led to

the CUP losing its position in government, but it did not exert much

influence in the army. When the Balkan war broke out in October

1912, the CUP was once more an underground organization, and a

number of the leading Unionist officers were engaged in guerrilla

warfare against the Italians in Tripolitania, but they returned as

quickly as they could and by the time of their return at the end of

1912, they found their networks in the army largely intact. This

enabled them to make a comeback and take over power in a coup d

‘état in January 1913, much like it was army support that had

enabled them to overcome the counterrevolution in Istanbul in April

1909. Once in power they had to deal with the aftermath of the

Balkan defeat.

The CUP had not been able to bring peace and stability to Macedonia.

Bulgarian and Greek agitation continued and in addition 1910-11 had

seen a large-scale Albanian rebellion. The situation remained tense

and the attack by the Balkan states in October 1912 therefore was

not in itself such a shock, but the rout of the Ottoman army within

the first month of the war was. The Ottoman army had won its last

war against the Greeks (in 1897) with ease and there was great 38 Sina Akşin, Jön Türkler ve İttihat ve Terakki, İstanbul: Remzi, 1987, p. 199.

confidence that the army had been successfully reformed by the Young

Turks and Mahmud Şevket Pasha. The parades and war games in 1911

had been judged very positively by foreign observers. A famous

newspaper cartoon showed Nâzım Pasha, the war minister, buying

railway tickets for a tour of Sofia, Athens, Belgrade and Cetinje.

According to the caption, when asked whether he was travelling

alone, he answered “No, I’m bringing 7-800.000 companions.”39 But

after the defeats in October against the Serbs at Kumanovo and

against the Bulgarians at Lüleburgaz, Rumeli was effectively lost.

Apart from shock and disbelief, the main reaction to this loss was a

call for revenge. Both memoirs and contemporary texts are full of

expressions of revenge. In his memoirs Şevket Süreyya Aydemir (who

grew up in Edirne) remembers it like this:

When the sky cleared for a moment and a few events followed

each other that could give a little hope, a bit of courage, the

first

reaction was a feeling of revenge that enveloped our souls.

This

feeling was so strong that we even held Allah responsible for

the

disaster that had befallen us. It was ferocious enough for us

to say

“O, you, greatest creator of the Bulgarian beastliness!40

Marches were composed to express this feeling :

In 1912 the honour of the Turks was soiled

Revenge! Revenge!

Crosses were put on top of the mosques39 Tobias Heinzelmann, Die Balkankrise in der Osmanischen Karikatur. Die Satirenzeitschriften Karagöz, Kalem und Cem, 1908-1914, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1999, p. 221.40 Şevket Süreyya Aydemir, Op. Cit, p.

Minarets were torn down each time

Mothers, fathers, orphans and invalids

Were shamelessly cut down.

And:

The sound of the Ezan is no more to be heard

A cross has been raised on the minber

The Godless enemy had raised his flag

On the mosques everywhere.41

When it was all over and parliament finally reconvened in 1914, the

calls for revenge had died down somewhat, but Halil (Menteşe) opened

the session with an emotional appeal to the nation never to forget

“Beloved Selânik, the cradle of the light of the torch of freedom

and constitutionalism; Green Manastır, Kosova, Skhoder/Üsküdar,

Joannina/Yanina, all of beautiful Rumeli”42 and to always keep its

memory alive in class rooms and in literature. When Cavit Bey, the

finance minister, took the rostrum after him to present the 1914

budget, he bitterly commented:

“One after another we surrendered all the martyrs of Rumeli to

the enemies. The martyrs of Üsküdar, where the epic stories of

Ottoman victories had been read on its mountain tops, the

martyrs of Yanina sleeping on the silent banks of its lake, the

martyrs of Kosova that kept in its bosom the beautiful memory

of the remains of the sainted martyr Sultan Murad I, then the

martyrs of Manastır that had given the Ottoman nation the right

to live and breathe through the cries for freedom that had 41 Kâzım Nami Duru, Op. Cit, p. 62-63.42 Tarık Zafer Tunaya, Türkiye’de Siyasal Partiler Cilt III İttihat ve Terakki Bir Çağın, bir Kuşağın,bir Partinin Tarihi, İstanbul: Hürriyet, 1989, p. 465.

resounded from its green mountain tops en finally the martyrs

of Selanik, whose emerald and shining coast had been washed by

the light and dark blue pearls of the open sea.”43

Cavit here apparently refers to a particularly sensitive aspect of

the loss of territory, the fact that the Muslim graveyards were left

behind, very often to be razed by the Christian conquerors.

For the core membership of the CUP the loss of Rumeli and the

islands of the Aegean was not only a trauma because they had

started their professional and political careers there, but also

because a very high proportion of them was born and bred in the

territories now lost. Like the CUP itself, they had a Macedonian

birth certificate. Of the 25 members of the Central Committee of

the CUP, who served between 1908 and 1918, eleven came from the

Balkans and four from the Aegean and of the most prominent 21

politically active army officers, ten hailed from the Balkans and

one from the Aegean. Most of the others hailed from Istanbul. So:

roughly half of the Unionist core lost their ancestral home in 1912-

13, which helps to explain the strength of their feelings, but

among the lessons they thought could be learned from this historic

loss, there was more than bitterness and anger alone. We also see a

recurrence of the feelings expressed by young Kâzım Karabekir seven

years before: a feeling that the Balkan states, and in particular

the Bulgarians, had shown what could be achieved by becoming a true

nation. The conviction that the creation of a Muslim/Turkish nation-

state (as the “revenge marches” quoted earlier show, the terms are

still used interchangeably) was the only road to survival spread

very quickly from 1913 onwards. It was the notion that informed Ziya

Gökalp’s writings and Halide Edib also urged the Ottomans to follow

the example of the European nation-states. Tüccarzade İbrahim Hilmi

43 Tarık Zafer Tunaya, Op. Cit, 466.

bluntly told the Ottomans that they had been sleeping while the

Bulgarian nation had awoken thanks to the efforts of its writers,

poets and teachers.44 One particularly interesting example is that

of Mustafa Kemal, the later Atatürk, who was stationed at the

Ottoman embassy in Sofia as military attaché in 1913-14, and whose

letters written at that time reflect his admiration of Bulgarian

nation building and modernity.45

Revenge, bitterness and a desire for nation building after the

Balkan examples – all three were expressed, not in efforts to undo

the result of the Balkan War (the Unionists realized that the empire

was in no position to try this) but in efforts to reshape Anatolia.

An increased interest in Anatolia is already discernible after 1908.

It was motivated by a desire know more about this land that figured

in the schoolbooks as the fabled cradle of the Ottoman Empire, but

about which the Young Turks, whether they hailed from the Balkans,

the Aegean or Istanbul, actually knew next to nothing. That is why

the Unionist newspaper Tanin started its series of reports from the

Anatolian interior in 1909.46 After the Balkan defeat the interest in

Anatolia increased dramatically and more and more writers started to

advocate embracing Anatolia as the true homeland of the Turks. But

that does not mean that knowledge on Anatolian realities was

widespread. Realising its own ignorance, the CUP in 1914

44 See for example Tüccarzade Ahmet Hilmi quoted in Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 30 and Halide Edib Adıvar’s article “Felâketlerden Sonra Milletler” in Türk Yurdu (May 1913), quoted by Erol Köroğlu in his Türk Edebiyatı ve Birinci Dünya Savaşı (1914-1918) Prpoagandadan Millî Kimlik İnşasına, İstanbul: İletişim, 2004, p. 122. Hilmi’s book has been reprinted in facsimile and modern script as Tüccarzade İbrahim Hilmi, Balkan Harbi’ni Niçin Kaybettik? Istanbul: İz, 2012. (edited by Mecit Yıldız and Hamdi Akyol). 45 Andrew Mango, Atatürk, London: John Murray, 1999, p. 130-131.46 Ahmet Şerif, Anadolu’da Tanin. Birinci Gezi, İstanbul: Kavram, 1977.

commissioned research on the heterodox Muslims, Alevis, Tahtacıs and

Bektashis of Anatolia as well as on the Armenians and on the

(Turcoman and Kurdish) tribes.47 This unfamiliarity with inner

Anatolian realities would prove an important factor later on, but

the first reverberations of the Balkan defeat came in an area and

against a community with which the Macedonian Unionists were

intimately familiar: against the Greeks in Thrace and in the Aegean.

Doğan Çetinkaya has shown that from 1912 onwards Ottoman Greeks were

the target of economic warfare through boycotts just as much as

Hellenic ones.48 After the end of the Balkan War the situation

escalated further. As Hans Lukas Kieser has shown in his research on

Mehmet Reşit Bey, important Unionists like him were already seeing

the Greek Orthodox of western Anatolia as a lethal threat that had

to be removed in 1913.49 A report by the Türk Ocağı (Turkish Hearth

Society) on Izmir, discussed by Emre Erol, is equally alarmist: if

nothing is done, the Aegean coast will go the way of Macedonia and

Mytilene/Midilli.50 Within a year this perception was to lead to the

forced expulsion of some 150.000 Greek orthodox from the West,

organized by Mahmud Celâl (Bayar), himself a son of refugees from

Bulgaria, with the full backing of Talât as Minister of Interior.

This episode, in June 1914, can still be seen as a direct

continuation of the Balkan War. It was partly motivated by fear that

47 Nejat Birdoğan, İttihat ve Terakki’nin Alevilik Bektaşilik Araştırması, İstanbul: Berfin, 1994, p. 7-9.48 Doğan Çetinkaya, The Young Turks and the Boycott Movement: Nationalism, Protest and the Working Classes in the Formation of Modern Turkey, London: I.B. Tauris, 2014.49 Hans-Lukas Kieser, “From Patriotism to Mass Murder. Dr. Mehmed Reşid (1873-1919),” in: Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (ed.), A Question of Genocide. Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 126-148.50 Emre Erol, Captalism, Migration, War and Nationalism in an Aegean Port Town: The Rise and Fall of a Belle Époque in the Ottoman County of Foçateyn, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis Leiden, 2013, p. 202-205.

war with Greece could recommence and that the coastline would prove

vulnerable to invasion; it took place in the same “theater” and

against a community that had already been seen as an enemy by the

Unionists before 1908 and had always been the least accommodating

towards the CUP since 1908. The same cannot be said of that other

large Christian community of Anatolia – the Armenians.

Of course, the most cataclysmic part of the final struggle for

survival of the Ottoman Empire under CUP rule was to be the mass

deportation and massacres of the Anatolian Armenians in 1915-16.

This tragedy was linked to the developments in the Balkans and the

loss of Rumeli in the Balkan War, but in a much more indirect

fashion than the expulsion of the Greeks from the Aegean and Thrace

or their deportation inland from 1914 onwards had been.

For the Young Turk opposition based in Europe before 1908, Armenian

nationalist agitation had been very visible and the relationship

between the CPU and the Armenian nationalist organizations,

particularly the Dashnakzutiun, had been important and ambiguous.

They were united by their desire to end the regime of Abdülhamid,

but differed deeply about the means to be employed (the CPU

resisting the use of violence until 1907 and the Dashnaks openly

embracing terrorism) and the ultimate aim (a strengthened state

versus decentralization and autonomy). Nevertheless they had

collaborated in the run-up to the constitutional revolution,

particularly in Eastern Anatolia.

For the OFC/CUP that emerged in Macedonia and Thrace in 1906-1908

the Armenians and their activism were not really on the radar

screen. Along with the Vlachs and Jews they were counted among the

communities that were loyal to the empire. Some Armenians were

elected members and they were never addressed, as the Serbs,

Bulgarians and Greeks were, with calls for loyalty and cooperation,

nor were they threatened. Unlike the Bulgarians and Greeks, the

Armenians did not resist the introduction of universal conscription

in 1909 and Dashnakzutiun on the whole continued to support the

policies of the CUP until mid-1911.

It was in fact the post-Balkan War developments that triggered the

CUP policies against the Armenians. Two factors in particular played

a role here: the successful Russian diplomatic campaign to force

through reforms under European tutelage in the six so-called

“Armenian“ provinces in Eastern Anatolia and the refusal by

Dashnakzutiun first to reject foreign intervention and then to call

for an Armenian rebellion against Russia in the Caucasus. Although

the agreement signed in February 1914 on reforms in the East had

watered down the Russian plans somewhat, the imposition of two

inspectorates under European inspectors-general (the Dutchman

Westenenk and the Norwegian Hoff) in order to oversee the

implementation of the reforms originally envisaged by article 61 of

the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, must, as Michael Reynolds has remarked,

have looked to the Unionists as an exact repetition of what had

happened in Macedonia after 1903.51

A crucial moment in he relationship between the CUP and the Dashnaks

was the latter’s refusal in 1913 of Talât and Halil’s request that

they should reject foreign intervention in the reform process and

make a deal with the Ottoman government alone, followed by the

refusal of the Eighth Congress of Dashnakzutiun in Erzurum in August

1914 to call for an Armenian uprising against Russian rule in the

Caucasus. Although the official position of the Dashnaks was that

each Armenian community should stay loyal to the empire in which

they lived, in the eyes of the CUP they failed the litmus test of

loyalty twice. As pointed out earlier in this article, The CUP’s

51 Michael Reynolds, Op. Cit, p. 75

offers of equality under constitutional rule, their “Ottomanism”,

always had been conditional on the minorities’ loyalty to a Muslim-

dominated state to the exclusion of all other loyalties. This was as

true in Anatolia in 1914 as it had been in Macedonia in 1908.

Here, the fact that the Unionists had such a distinct personal

background in Rumeli and Istanbul played an important role. Their

lack of familiarity with Anatolia led them to overlook the important

differences in the situation. It is well documented that Russia

raised the issue of Armenian reform out of political considerations.

Like everyone else in 1913 the Russians concluded from the Balkan

defeat that the Ottoman Empire was doomed and acting as the sponsor

of Armenian reform would allow it to extend its sphere of influence

in the case of an Ottoman break-up. In this respect the Unionists

were right to see similarities with the Russian policies in the

Balkans. But the fact that they looked at the situation in eastern

Anatolia through the prism of Macedonia also caused significant

distortions. In none of the provinces did the Armenians constitute a

majority or even a plurality. There were only very few districts

(sancak) where Armenians were the largest community. Nor were the

provinces surrounded by national states with an irredentist agenda,

such as Bulgaria and Greece. As Bloxham and Reynolds have shown very

clearly, the Russian Empire, not being linked to the Armenians by

Panslavist or Pan-Orthodox sentiment and wary of Armenian agitation

in Russia itself, was very ambiguous in its attitude towards the

Armenians, at times actually preferring cooperation with the Kurds.

But people like Talât, Enver, Cemal, Halil (Menteşe), Mithat Şükrü

(Bleda), Rahmi (Arslan) or Fethi (Okyar) - typical members of the

Unionist inner circle - had never been to the East. In addition to

this, because of the strategic importance of the area, the

administrators and officers the CUP government sent to the East

tended to be people it trusted precisely because of their background

in the pre-1908 CUP. These people, provincial administrators like

Abdülhalik Renda (from Yoannina/Janina), Tahsin Uzer (from Selânik),

and officers like Kâzım Özalp (from Velesh/Köprülü) or Süleyman

Askeri (Prishtina/Priştine) and later Kâzım Karabekir or Mustafa

Kemal all came to the Eastern provinces for the first time between

1913 and 1916 when they were in their mid-thirties. They could not

but interpret the circumstances there in the terms with which they

were familiar through their youth, adolescence and early

professional and political careers in the totally different world of

Rumeli and the Aegean. In their eyes, Erzurum and Van were going the

way of Macedonia, Mytilene and Crete.

In conclusion I would therefore say that is undoubtedly true that

the defeat in the Balkan War was a very important catalyst in the

process that led to the Ottoman cataclysm, the maelstrom of ethnic

violence that enveloped Anatolia from 1914 onwards and that would

continue at least until 1922 or even 1925 if we include the

population exchange between Turkey and Greece. However, the events

in Anatolia in 1914-18 are not simply triggered by the experience of

the Balkan War alone. The process cannot be properly understood

without reference to the background of the Unionists in Rumeli in

the years before the constitutional revolution. Their worldview and

identity had already been shaped in those years and it was that

worldview, and that identity, radicalized by the enormous trauma of

losing Rumeli in 1912, that produced the Young Turk policies of

World War I and beyond.

The political and cultural elite of the Republic of Turkey for a

generation (at least until the nineteen fifties) was dominated by

this same circle of former Unionists, so many of whom had roots in

the Balkan and the Aegean.52 It is an interesting question to what

extent their early experience there also influenced the way they

attempted to shape modern Turkey.

Erik Jan Zürcher, Leiden University

52 Erik Jan Zürcher, “How Europeans adopted Anatolia and discovered Turkey,” European Review 13/3 (2005), 379-394.