A History of the Middle East (14 page)

The young sultan built up his own remarkable system of autocracy. Gradually he reduced the powers that had been delegated to the grand vizier and reinforced his personal bureaucracy, which reported directly to him. His deeply mistrustful nature caused him to rely on an elaborate system of espionage with Istanbul as the heart of the spider’s web of imperial intrigue. He had no friends and trusted no one. His fears of abduction or assassination became paranoid to the extent that he always extracted his own teeth and prepared his own medicines. His emissaries not only reported on individuals or groups in the provinces who showed signs of becoming too powerful or ambitious but also acted on the sultan’s orders to promote local rivalries and antagonisms. He preferred the use of the silken cord to the sword.

While Abdul Hamid had no sympathy for constitutionalism or democracy, he was not a hidebound reactionary. In contemporary terms he was a modernizer rather than a westernizer. Like certain of his predecessors, he accepted the need to learn from Europe in order to stand up to its power. In the early years of his reign he was prepared to fulfil the
Tanzimat
reforms and went some way towards carrying them through.

His first grand vizier, Mehmed Said Pasha – known as ‘Ingiliz Said’ because of his Anglophile tendencies – declared in a lengthy memorandum on the subject of reform that ‘the advancement of a state can only be secured through knowledge and uprightness.’ The people must be better educated; the state must be more just and less corrupt.

Public education was the field in which reform was most successful – especially at the higher level. The Mulkiye, or civil-service training-college, and the Harbiye, or war college, were greatly expanded and improved and some eighteen new higher and professional schools were established. The long-delayed project for the University of Istanbul – described as ‘the first truly indigenous modern university in the Muslim world’ – was carried through, although it was not until 1900 that it opened its doors.

Elementary and secondary education were also expanded. New schools were needed to supply the training-colleges with pupils. They still served only a small minority of the population, and a truly public education system was still a distant goal; nevertheless, the new Turkish élite, trained in modern languages and disciplines, had become much more numerous by the end of the century. The spread of literacy, the growth of higher education and the expansion of printing transformed the intellectual and cultural life of the cities. However, under Abdul Hamid the censorship which already existed was tightened to an absurd degree. Although newspapers multiplied, they were emasculated by the censor. Because the sultan was terrified of assassination, no report of the violent death of a head of state could be published. When the King and Queen of Serbia were murdered in 1903, Turkish newspaper-readers were informed that they had died of indigestion.

The ban on political activity and discussion limited the new generation of Turkish intellectuals to literary or academic writing. But there was no way in which they could be insulated against revolutionary or secular ideas. Political feelings were merely driven underground.

Discontent was fed by the constant, humiliating erosion of Ottoman power at the hands of Europe, despite all the efforts of the sultan and his grand vizier. Since the Capitulations were one of the most obvious manifestations of Ottoman weakness, the Ottoman government endeavoured to bring them under control. The privileges of the Capitulations had been granted to non-Muslims within the empire in the sixteenth century, when Ottoman power was at its height. In order to stimulate trade and industry, they exempted non-Muslims from taxes and gave them the right to be tried in their own consular courts. As Ottoman power declined, these privileges were reinforced and became flagrantly abused. The foreign communities were not only privileged and protected; they were virtually above the law. The European powers argued that, in spite of the reforms introduced in 1869, the Ottoman legal system was in no way suitable to be applied to their nationals in the empire.

In the first few years of Abdul Hamid’s reign an effort was made to meet these objections. A newly established Ministry of Justice was given control first over the commercial courts and then over all non-religious courts. A new law attempted to regulate the mixed courts which had been created earlier in the nineteenth century to try cases between Muslim and non-Muslim Ottoman subjects. All these efforts were a failure. The European powers brusquely refused to recognize the new regulations. The extraterritorial privileges were unassailed and continued to flourish. The impetus behind all legal reform was removed, and in 1888 the sultan disbanded the official drafting committee which had been set up by his predecessor to prepare the new laws.

The fact that the extraterritorial privileges of the powers of Europe remained unscathed was bad enough; it was far worse that
the empire itself was bankrupt and forced to submit to a measure of outside financial control.

Bankruptcy had in effect been declared in 1875, in the last year of the reign of Sultan Abdul Aziz, when his government announced that, in view of the size of the budget deficit, it would service only half of the external debt in cash and would make up the rest by a new issue of treasury bonds. The deficit was caused partly by a series of disastrous harvests in Anatolia but much more by the heavy military spending involved in the suppression of Balkan rebels and the war with Russia. The rival European powers had difficulty in co-ordinating their policies towards Istanbul but they moved inexorably towards imposing their financial conditions on the empire. The Congress of Berlin made the situation much worse by forcing the sultan to give up his richest Balkan provinces. A committee representing European holders of Ottoman bonds attended the Congress to press their claims, and they secured warm support from their governments.

In his desperate need to satisfy his European creditors, Abdul Hamid in 1881 issued the Decree of Muharrem, setting up a Council of the Public Debt in agreement with the bond-holders to ensure that the Ottoman debt would continue to be serviced. The Council was to include both bond-holders and Ottoman representatives. Although it was not a full international commission with official foreign-government representatives, as the powers had proposed at the Congress of Berlin, and the sultan could deny that it infringed Ottoman sovereignty, it was difficult to disguise the fact that the empire had submitted to a large measure of foreign financial control, and this became increasingly apparent over the years. Several of the more economically backward European states – not to mention the Latin American countries – had defaulted on their debts and the powers had given their bond-holders varying degrees of support to resolve the situation. But it was a wholly different matter for the caliph/sultan – the leader of the only Muslim great power – to accept such humiliation.

European manufactured goods had already begun to flow into
Turkey in the first half of the nineteenth century as the Ottoman efforts at protection collapsed. European financial control assisted the flood of imports. Three major foreign-controlled banks – the National Bank of Turkey, the Imperial Ottoman and the Deutsche Bank – as well as the foreign embassies were always ready to provide support for the policies of the Council of the Public Debt. However, the European powers were not attempting to stifle local Turkish industry – on the contrary, they encouraged the Ottoman reformers’ efforts to increase production as the best means of raising the taxable capacity of the population and hence the ability of the Ottoman government to pay its debts. Both Abdul Aziz and Abdul Hamid were aware of the dangers of increasing economic dependence on Europe, and the
Tanzimat
reforms attempted to address the problem. But the measures were half-hearted and incompetently administered. New infant industries not only lacked protection but also, amazingly, still suffered from Ottoman internal taxes on the movement of goods which were only gradually and grudgingly removed. Existing local industries were unable to compete with the imports of increasingly sophisticated products from Europe – armaments factories, for example, found themselves confined to producing small arms, ammunition and military clothing.

Attempts to increase agricultural output and exports were rather more successful. Much of this success was not due to the government. The rising prosperity of industrializing western Europe had already increased the demand for exports of Turkish crops. British imports in particular received a powerful boost from the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1841. The American Civil War created a boom for Turkish cotton which did not entirely disappear when the war ended. The richer agricultural areas of the coastal plains and the Anatolian river valleys prospered.

The trouble was that the twin objectives of the nineteenth-century Ottoman reformers were contradictory: the creation of a prosperous class of peasant freeholders was incompatible with the desire for a powerful centralizing government which would re-establish the rights of the state wherever they had been eroded.
Inevitably the progress of reform was extremely slow and, equally inevitably, wherever freehold rights were established they went to the richest and most powerful or to those with the best connections.

A new factor in the situation was the right granted to foreigners to own land and property, under the reform law of 1867. The Ottomans had hoped and expected that, in return, the Europeans who acquired estates in the empire would forgo their privileges under the Capitulations. They were disappointed: the Europeans insisted on retaining their rights to immunity from police interference or the payment of Ottoman taxes.

Ottoman reformers and their European advisers were under no doubt that the biggest single obstacle to the improvement of the Turkish economy was the poor communication systems. When Abdul Hamid came to the throne there were only a few hundred miles of railway; the road system was rudimentary and the ports were primitive. The costs of moving farm produce across the country for export were prohibitive.

Road-building schemes were largely a failure because those roads that were built were not maintained and soon fell into disrepair. Railway building, largely by foreign concession-holders, achieved more results, and from the 1880s a boom in railway construction linked the regions of Anatolia with Europe and extended from Turkey to the Arab provinces of the empire. The length of track in this vast region was still modest by European standards, but the railway was of huge symbolic importance. In August 1888 the first Istanbul Express left Vienna.

It can be seen that much of the nineteenth-century development of the Ottoman Empire’s heartland was due to the privileged foreigners. Railways were built by Europeans; banking and finance were largely in foreign hands; and foreign entrepreneurs were even responsible for the investment and installation of machinery that turned cotton into Turkey’s most successful export industry. However, there was one aspect of nineteenth-century technical progress which Abdul Hamid and his ministers were determined to keep in Turkish hands; this was the telegraph. When Abdul Hamid
came to the throne, in 1876, a French concessionnaire had already linked the entire empire to Istanbul with a telegraph network. Initially the system was operated by foreigners using the French language, but from the 1860s onwards the Ottomans made a special effort to turkize the system and place it under the control of a new Ministry of Posts & Telegraphs. Abdul Hamid immediately recognized the importance of the telegraph as a means of maintaining his despotic and centralized control over the empire. He could issue immediate orders to his officials in the most distant provinces, who found that they could no longer act as if they were semi-autonomous. Foreign ambassadors of despotic rulers were soon to make the same discovery.

Turkish indebtedness and relative military weakness forced Abdul Hamid to use intrigue and diplomacy to keep the powers of Europe divided in their Eastern policies. He had enjoyed some success in this following the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Although the powers were shocked to varying degrees by the sultan’s reneging on his promises concerning the treatment of his Armenian subjects, joint action was prevented because Bismarck, chairman of the Congress, said he would co-operate on any matter except the imposition of Armenian reform on the sultan.

The Armenian situation drastically worsened during the following two decades. As Abdul Hamid made use of the Kurds, who coveted much of the same territory, to suppress the Armenian rebellion, the Armenians intensified their organized political activities. They raised their demands to seek a fully independent homeland in eastern Turkey and internationalized their movement by forming branches in western European capitals. Its most extreme form was the Hunchak (or ‘Bell’), established in Geneva in 1881, which was the first revolutionary socialist movement in the Ottoman Empire. In 1890 the Armenian Revolutionary Federation was founded at Tiflis (the modern Tbilisi) in Russian Georgia, and armed bands began to make raids into Ottoman territory. The sultan responded by encouraging increased anti-Armenian activities among the Kurdish tribesmen, whom he trained and formed into cavalry regiments.
There was no attempt to conceal the fact that their role was to suppress the Armenians.

The response of the inflamed Armenians was an exceedingly unwise attempt to stir up a revolt among the sultan’s Muslim subjects in Anatolia. This gave Abdul Hamid the excuse to incite a series of horrific massacres which took place throughout 1895 and 1896. Both regular Turkish troops and Kurdish irregulars took part. In some places the ordinary Muslim population was incited by rumours that the Armenians were about to murder them while they were at prayers in their mosques. Sometimes the Armenians sought refuge in their churches and asked for protection, but this was of no avail. The sound of a bugle was a signal for the massacres to begin. Most of eastern Turkey was affected, and perhaps a hundred thousand Armenians were murdered or died from subsequent disease and starvation.