The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (41 page)

On paper these constitutional amendments of August 1909 promised the Ottoman peoples a system of parliamentary government more widely based than in Tsarist Russia or Hohenzollern Germany.
Reality, however, fell far short of the reformers’ aspirations. The legislative record of the Young Turks in the first year of Mehmed V’s reign was sadly repressive. The Vagabond Law (8
May 1909) treated persistent beggars lacking ‘visible means of support’ rather less generously than did the statutes of early Tudor England. The Law of Associations (16 August 1909)
forbade the formation of political groups bearing the name of nationalities or races; this measure led to the closure of Albanian, Greek and Bulgarian clubs but imposed no restraints on the
Turk
Denegli
(Turkish Society), set up in the previous January, since it was argued that the word ‘Turkish’ implied a spoken language or popular culture and therefore lacked any
political connotation. A ‘Law to Prevent Brigandage and Sedition’ (27 September 1909) provided for the raising of ‘pursuit battalions’ which would root out and suppress
armed bands, particularly the Balkan comitadji. At the same time a Conscription Law introduced the new principle of military obligation on non-Muslims; this application of the CUP’s professed
abhorrence of ‘distinctions of race and creed’ rapidly lost the Unionists support from Christians and Jews. Other laws forbade the printing of books or newspaper articles likely to
incite disorder; organizers of public gatherings were required to obtain police permits and ensure that only subjects notified in advance were discussed at their meetings.
¹⁶

Municipal administration was improved; more schools were founded, particularly for girls; and work began on ending anomalies over the ownership of land, seeking to eradicate the last vestiges of
the
iltizam
system. Yet, though the Unionists emphasized their hostility to the enjoyment by foreigners of special treaty rights, the Capitulations were not
abolished. Despite the new regime’s advocacy of Ottoman self-sufficiency, foreign experts were still encouraged to come to Constantinople and suggest ways of modernizing the
administration: Sir Richard Crawford turned the experienced eye of a British civil servant on the Ottoman Customs service; M. Sterpin was brought from Brussels to direct Posts and
Telegraph—Talaat had no high opinion of the efficiency shown by his old department; and Count Leon Ostrorog, already employed as an adviser on procedure to the judiciary, was given new
authority as councillor responsible for reconciling Ottoman law with the major codes of Western Europe—a post from which, two years later, he resigned in disgust at the pressure exerted by
traditionalist religious groups against whose obscurantism the more enlightened Young Turks had long railed.

It was assumed, both in the capital and abroad, that the reforms were directed by the collective leadership of the CUP, acting through the Grand Vizier and his chosen ministers, as the
constitution required. This was a misleading impression. The CUP was mistrusted in the capital, its spokesmen accused of being irreligious self-seekers, steeped in Freemasonry and/or Zionism.
Significantly, CUP headquarters remained in Salonika until 1912. Moreover, although both Hilmi and Hakki were technically Unionists during their terms of office, they did not have the last word in
determining policy. The real power behind throne and parliament was General Shevket, and he remained outside the Union and Progress Movement.
¹⁷
His
prestige as commander of the Third Army and instigator of the March on Stamboul enabled Shevket Pasha to impose a veiled military dictatorship on the constitutional Empire in the four years which
followed Abdulhamid’s fall. In May 1909 Shevket was confirmed as Inspector-General of the First, Second and Third Armies. A few days later he received wider powers as martial law
administrator, thereafter maintaining for two years a virtual state of siege in towns where there was a risk of disaffection. Early in 1910 he entered Hakki’s cabinet as Minister of War,
observing such tight-lipped secrecy over the disposition of the armies and the purpose of his military budget that even Talaat and Cavit were never sure if he were friend or foe. Eventually Shevket
emerged from the shadows, and for the first six months of 1913 served as Grand Vizier himself.

Disillusionment with the CUP, and more especially a mounting anger at its encouragement of narrowly Turkish nationalist groups, provoked opposition in several regions of
the Empire, widely separated from each other. Resentment over the Law of Associations intensified the growth of secret conspiratorial societies, especially among the Arabs of the Levant. Muslims
educated under French auspices in Syria and Lebanon funded a ‘Young Arab Society’ in Paris in 1911 as a direct challenge to Young Turk policies of centralization. More immediately
serious was unrest in Albania. There had been fighting in the Lyuma district as early as May 1909, when attempts were made to levy new taxes, but a rebellion in the early spring of 1910 made a
greater impression on the authorities, not least because it was concentrated in Kossovo, the region in which Shevket Pasha had so recently served as military governor. He over-reacted to what he
regarded as a personal affront and sent 50,000 troops to restore order, authorizing public flogging of clan chieftains as a means of intimidating a fiercely proud people. The rebellion spread to
include Christian as well as Muslim clans, forcing Shevket himself to lead yet another expeditionary force in April 1911, and two months later to encourage an official visit to the Albanian
provinces by the Sultan-Caliph. And still the fighting dragged on.
¹⁸

While the army was thus engaged at the north-western fringe of the Empire, the Armenian Dashnaks stirred up trouble once more in the north-east. At the same time, in the Sultan’s far
south-eastern lands, two Arab rebellions broke out, respectively under Sheikh Muhammad al-Idrisi in the Asir region south of Jeddah, and under the Iman Yahya Hamid-al-Din further south still,
bordering Britain’s Aden Protectorate. To meet these military emergencies at such distant extremities of the Sultan’s empire, his Ministry of War sent to Arabia another 30,000 men,
drawn from provinces where the Young Turk reforms remained as yet unchallenged. Accordingly transports sailed for the Red Sea, not only from Üsküdar and Smyrna, but from Tripoli and Derna
in modern Libya, then at the south-western extremity of the Ottoman Empire. By the midsummer of 1911 the vilayet of Tripoli and the
sanjak
of Benghazi—the last North African lands
directly under the Sultan’s rule—were garrisoned by no more than 3,400 effective regular troops. This thin defensive
force was spread along a thousand miles of
Barbary coast, barely a night’s steaming from the ports of southern Italy.
¹⁹

Ever since the French had occupied Tunisia, Italian colonization societies had urged successive governments to show an interest in developing and acquiring Libya. In the early years of the
century a new wave of French colonial activity from Morocco eastwards persuaded businessmen in Rome and Milan that if their government did not soon annex Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the opportunity
would be lost for good. There was, so their Foreign Minister later wrote, ‘a general, vague desire to do something’ among his compatriots.
²⁰
As early as February 1911 the Ottoman ambassador in Rome expressed fears to the Porte that Italy was planning an attack, and in June he sent a further warning, which on this
occasion was passed on to Shevket Pasha himself. There was, however, little Shevket could do—apart, that is, from sending 20,000 Mauser rifles and two million cartridges to Tripoli aboard a
fast steamer, with orders that they should be distributed to the Arab tribesmen in the event of war. Despite Young Arab dissidents in Paris and revolts along the lower Red Sea littoral, Shevket
knew that the invasion of Muslim territory by Italian Catholics would rally the tribesmen in support of their Sultan-Caliph against any Christian
giaours
.

On 27 September 1911 the Italians, complaining of Ottoman maltreatment of traders and merchants in Libya, delivered a totally unacceptable ultimatum to the Porte. War followed next day, with a
naval sortie preparing the way for landings at Tripoli, Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk. The depleted Ottoman detachments could offer little resistance to an attack which, as well as bombardment from
modern warships, also used aircraft for the first time, with small bombs dropped by hand from primitive biplanes. The Ottoman General Staff’s improvised strategic plan worked well enough,
however. Although the invaders seized the coastal towns, they could not penetrate the interior; their troops were untrained for desert warfare against skilled Arab horsemen and, in consequence, the
rapid victory sought in Rome and Milan eluded the invaders. A naval blockade prevented Ottoman reinforcements reaching Libya from the Aegean or the Levant, but individual officers in mufti made
their way through British-controlled Egypt and slipped across the frontier
to help the resistance in Cyrenaica. Among these officers were Enver Bey and Mustafa Kemal, both
of whom joined Ottoman regulars and Arab Sanussi tribesmen keeping watch on the Italian garrison at Tobruk. Enver Bey then travelled across the desert into Tripolitania while Kemal remained in the
vicinity of Benghazi and Derna. By early November, when Libya was formally annexed by the Kingdom of Italy, the war had reached stalemate, with the ‘conquerors’ effectively holding no
more than the coastal strip.
²¹

When news of the loss of Tripoli, Benghazi and Derna reached Constantinople there was widespread anger. Hakki Pasha at once resigned as Grand Vizier; the CUP was blamed for weakening the army be
seeking to indoctrinate the officer corps; and some months later Shevket resigned as Minister of War, complaining that it was impossible to modernize the Ottoman armies if differing factions of
Young Turks and Liberals insisted on playing politics in the barracks of every garrison town.
²²

With the coming of spring in 1912 the Italians broadened the scope of the war. On 18–19 April Vice-Admiral Leone Viale’s squadron of twelve warships bombarded the forts of the
Dardanelles, but Viale was forced to abandon plans to escort a flotilla of torpedo-boats up the Straits to attack vessels at anchor in the Narrows: Ottoman gunfire proved too accurate, and his
activities were causing a sensation among the Great Powers—not unnaturally, the Turks at once closed the Straits to all commerce, a particular blow to the Russian Black Sea trade. When
thwarted at the Dardanelles, Viale turned back into the Aegean and, with troop transports joining him at Stampalia, proceeded to occupy Rhodes and the remaining islands of the Dodecanese during the
month of May.

Militarily the successive emergencies of the Italo-Turkish War showed clearly to foreign observers both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Ottoman Empire. Outside Europe well-armed Bedouin,
supporting the Sultan’s regular troops, could with shrewd leadership prevent a final victory, wearing down a conventional enemy force by raids and ambushes; and, nearer to the Ottoman
capital, foreign artillery sited in strategic forts would repel any enemy assault. Although the Ottoman Navy had three modern cruisers, eight destroyers and fourteen torpedo-boats as well as some
venerable battleships, it was of little account as a fighting
fleet: Admiral Williams, who succeeded Sir Douglas Gamble as head of the British mission in 1910, found Turkish
officers resented all attempts at reform; for purposes of prestige, they were more concerned with fitting out two newly purchased twenty-year-old German battleships than with manning their smaller
warships adequately.
²³
There were no manpower problems in the recently enlarged conscript army, but most recruits remained untrained in modern
weapons. Moreover, while staff work was good for limited operations in a particular campaign, it was incapable of handling the logistical problems of a major war waged simultaneously on several
fronts. Had the Young Turk reformers enjoyed five or six years of peace in which to impose genuine ‘Union and Progress’ on the empire, the Ottoman state might well have become
militarily formidable once again. As it was, the crisis years 1911 and 1912 caught the constitutional empire at the weakest moment of partial transition, a time when there could be little hope of
victory in defensive wars which no loyal subject of the Sultan-Caliph wished to fight.

Worse was soon to follow. The evident plight of their once powerful neighbour encouraged the Balkan states to
come together under Russian auspices and make a determined thrust to expel the Ottomans from Europe after five and a half centuries. Despite rival ambitions in the rebellious Albanian lands and in
Macedonia, during the summer of 1912 Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro came together in a Balkan League, with more precise secret military alliances following during the early autumn. The
Balkan Wars began on 8 October when Montenegrin troops advanced into northern Albania and the
sanjak
of Novibazar.
²⁴
The three larger Balkan
kingdoms opened their campaign a day later, with a combined assault on Macedonia, a Bulgarian thrust into Thrace (which soon enveloped Edirne) and Greek naval operations in the Aegean. The Balkan
allies could put more than 700,000 men into the field. Nazim Pasha, the ambitious general who took over from Shevket as War Minister in early June, could not hope to raise more than 325,000 men to
oppose them.

Hurriedly, on 15 October, a peace was made with Italy. By the Treaty of Ouchy the Sultan accepted the loss of Libya in return for recognition of his religious status in the ceded provinces and
an Italian
undertaking—never fulfilled—to evacuate the Dodecanese islands and restore them to Ottoman administration. But there was no speedy way for Ottoman
troops to be withdrawn from Libya and concentrated in Rumelia. It took Kemal and Enver over a month to return to the capital—in Kemal’s case by steamer from Alexandria to Marseilles, by
train to Bucharest and by steamer again from Constanza to the Bosphorus. By the time Kemal had completed his journey, in mid-November, Thrace was already lost to the Bulgarians; Kossovo, Monastir,
Ochrid and Skopje were in Serbian hands; and the Greeks had won the race to seize the greatest of Macedonian prizes, the port of Salonika. The ex-sultan Abdulhamid was hurried back to the Beylerbey
Palace aboard the German stationnaire guardship SMS
Lorelei
as Greek and Bulgarian forces converged on his city of exile.