World War I and the End of the Ottomans

From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide

Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem, Maurus Reinkowski, Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem, Maurus Reinkowski

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857729477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With the end of the First World War, the centuries-old social fabric of the Ottoman world an entangled space of religious co-existence throughout the Balkans and the Middle East came to its definitive end. In this new study, Hans-Lukas Kieser argues that while the Ottoman Empire officially ended in 1922, when the Turkish nationalists in Ankara abolished the Sultanate, the essence of its imperial character was destroyed in 1915 when the Young Turk regime eradicated the Armenians from Asia Minor. This book analyses the dynamics and processes that led to genocide and left behind today s crisis-ridden post-Ottoman Middle East. Going beyond Istanbul, the book also studies three different but entangled late Ottoman areas: Palestine, the largely Kurdo-Armenian eastern provinces and the Aegean shores; all of which were confronted with new claims from national movements that questioned the Ottoman state. All would remain regions of conflict up to the present day.Using new primary material, World War I and the End of the Ottoman World brings together analysis of the key forces which undermined an empire, and marks an important new contribution to the study of the Ottoman world and the Middle East.
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PART I

TOWARD WAR

CHAPTER 1

THE OTTOMAN ROAD TO TOTAL WAR (1913–15)

Hans-Lukas Kieser¹

An Ottoman Road to Total War?

This chapter examines the extent to which Ottoman total war differed from contemporary total war in the European war arena.² It deals with what “Ottoman total war” meant – once World War I arrived on this stage. It does so within this volume's framework that conceptualizes the last Ottoman decade, dating roughly from 1911 to 1922, as both a catastrophic and an acutely transformative “Ottoman cataclysm”.

The road to be scrutinized in this chapter leads from the massive Ottoman losses of the Italian war (September 1911–October 1912) and the First Balkan War (October 1912–May 1913), to the large-scale expulsion of Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christians (Rûm) in June 1914,³ to an all-embracing military mobilization beginning in August, a declaration of jihad in mid-November, and failed offensives at different fronts in the winter of 1914–15. The first military success on this road was the defence of the Ottoman capital at the Dardanelles, beginning in March 1915. The road reached its climax during the following months when, in April, the Young Turk regime merged the war at its borders with a “war” at home.

From the very beginning of the war, the state questioned the imperial loyalties of certain populations. It saw Maronite Christians in Mount Lebanon as the potential allies of France, Jews in Palestine as those of Britain, Arabs around Sharif Husayn of Mecca also as those of Britain, and both Kurds and Armenians as those of Russia. This perception intensified over the course of the war. In 1915 the state arrested and publicly hanged Arab leaders for treason, and it launched a programme to deport the entire Ottoman Armenian community from Anatolia. Moving Armenians to Syria meant not only moving a vulnerable people into a region already struck by severe food shortages but also exposing them to desert conditions without adequate supplies. Wartime conditions and state policies destroyed Ottoman imperial bonds as much as, and before, military defeat in 1918.

In a mirror image to populations it considered potentially disloyal, the top Ottoman leadership regarded certain populations residing in enemy territories – Georgians and Muslims in the Caucasus, Muslims in Central Asia, and Egyptians under British rule – as natural allies. Afghanistan and Iran, too, the central powers hoped, could be won over to their side. The ideologies of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism and the discourse of Christian and European oppression could all be deployed to attract the support of these varied populations.

The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 had revived the Ottoman reform ideal of democratic equality in an ethno-religiously pluralistic society. The revolution sidelined the sultan, brought back the constitution of 1876, and provided for empire-wide elections and the reopening of the Ottoman parliament. To bring the revolution to fruition, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) had collaborated with fellow secret organizations of various ethnic stripes, in particular the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF).⁴

Having restored the constitution by arms, the CUP presented itself as the liberator of all Ottomans. The new political space opened up by the revolution, however, was quickly filled by a multitude of political parties and social organizations.

In the face of Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria's declaration of independence, and Crete's union with Greece – all in rapid succession – these groups found themselves united in their demands for the empire's sovereignty and international security. Boycotts of Austrian, Bulgarian, and Greek businesses and goods extended from Trabzon to Beirut. Large crowds, often numbering in the thousands, gathered in protests for public burnings or tearings of Austrian-made fezzes. By 1910–11, the boycott movement began to target the shops of Christian and Jewish Ottomans as well.⁵

On 23 January 1913, CUP militants including Enver and Talaat stormed the offices of the grand vizier and forced him to resign. From mid-1913 on, the Unionists ruled increasingly through censorship and coercion. The CUP marginalized any political alternative, in particular the group of Prince Sabahaddin, who had advocated a decentralized empire and private (not state-controlled) initiative in economy and culture. Acquainted with defeat and loss since the Italian usurpation of Ottoman Libya in 1911, and then by the Balkan wars, CUP activists saw the outbreak of World War I as an opportunity to forge a new deal internally and in their external relations. By this time, the CUP regime contemplated the adoption of policies of imperial expansion and pan ideologies.

Even if the road to 1915 demonstrates longer-term continuities since the late nineteenth century from the age of Sultan Abdülhamid II, context nonetheless matters. Without Europe's embrace of the risk of total war in June 1914, the Ottoman road to total war would have been impossible. At the same time, the European World War I would have been considerably different, less global and total, without willing Ottoman participation. Only beginning with the First Balkan War and the CUP putsch of 1913 can we talk about a tangible and concrete Ottoman road to total war.

The first part of this chapter deals with the total character of the Ottoman World War I. The second explores a climax of propaganda and mobilization since 1912. It also analyzes Ottoman war strategies since the autumn of 1914 in their relation to ideology in an empire soon struck by famine. The third part exposes a crucial particularity of Ottoman total war: removal and genocide.

Ottoman Total War

We argue in this volume that the Ottoman World War I was a “total war” from its very beginning. It may, in some important points, be considered more comprehensive than the World War I in Europe. We argue so not because of industrial warfare, since the Ottoman Empire lacked a developed and broad industry that could have been completely put at the service of war; nor because of an efficient and thoroughly organized home front to back the struggle at the front. Yet the Ottoman Empire began mobilizing in August 1914 to a degree it had never done before in its over-600-year history.⁶

World War I differed from the empire's wars in 1911 and 1912–13 in crucial respects. While the earlier wars remained geographically confined, the war of 1914 affected all regions of the empire all at once. Food shortages affected civilian populations as early as August 1914, from Thrace in the north to Yemen in the south. The closure of the port of Beirut put an end to grain imports for the city of Beirut and Mount Lebanon, the epicentre of the Syrian famine. In Syria, over half a million civilians starved to death in 1915 and 1916.⁷ The horrors of the famine constitute a central aspect of the Ottoman cataclysm. Along with those who perished also vanished the bonds that tied the regions of the empire together. Sharif Husayn's decision to break with Istanbul, finally, in 1916 must be seen in the context of the famine and the increasing strength of the British all around him, in Egypt and in Basra.

The main reason for thinking of the Ottoman World War I as a total war is that it was offensively fought both to the exterior and the interior. From 2 August 1914, when the secret war alliance with Germany was concluded, the principal Young Turk leaders – War Minister Ismail Enver and Interior Minister Talaat Pasha – perceived both exterior (the Entente cordiale) and interior enemies (Ottoman Christians). Consequently, their war aims comprehended territorial defence and expansion as well as “revolutionary” changes at home. These aims were ambitious, to say the least – and especially so with regard to imperial restoration and expansion. In contrast to Germany's diffuse aspiration to dominance in Europe and Weltgeltung (global standing), however, the CUP possessed a concrete, minimal goal: the preservation of the Young Turk power organization together with the establishment of a firm Turkish Muslim base or home in Asia Minor.

Since 1913, Asia Minor had been projected by influential circles of the new ethno-nationalist movements of the Türk Ocağı and Türk Yurdu, which were sponsored by the CUP, as a Turkish Muslim national home (Türk Yurdu) and a safe haven for Muslim refugees from the Balkan and the Caucasus.⁸ For the Young Turks, the participation in World War I served the preservation of the state and the establishment of its full sovereignty. In this regard it can be called a Young Turk “war of independence”.⁹ Expansive dreams, social Darwinist notions, and pan-ideologies taken into account, it was, however, an overstrung “struggle for imperial existence”.

The Ottoman World War I anticipated phenomena that would emerge only in later stages of the European era of the world wars. There was a revolutionary group at the reins of imperial power. It engineered demographic and economic transformations tantamount to a genocide of its state's own citizens. The design and effects of this policy transcended in quality and quantity the considerable wartime removals, including atrocities by Russia, Germany, or Austria-Hungary.¹⁰ In the Ottoman case, the state's fighting the war abroad and at home made it total.

Moreover, we emphasize as crucial that the interior destruction and restructuring since the first year of the Ottoman World War I coincided with frustrated designs of imperial restoration and expansion based on pan-Turkist and pan-Islamist ideas. Broadly spread by propaganda since August 1914, these pan ideologies informed the CUP government's total war effort, in particular domestically and toward the Caucasus and central Asia. They have to be taken more seriously into account by historians of the Ottoman cataclysm than was the case with Kemalist historiography and its Western partners.

The Ottoman cataclysm reached its climax with the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian community in 1915–16 – the central piece of a comprehensive demographic engineering of Asia Minor headed by Interior Minister Talaat.¹¹ This transformation went hand in hand with incisive measures to establish a national economy, that is an economy dominated by Muslim Turks. With these drastic changes, the centuries-old plural Ottoman social fabric was destroyed irreversibly in 1915. The Ottoman world itself, as far as groups declared as disloyal were concerned, was turned into an area of total war, in particular in the eastern provinces.

The mobilization of religion for the sake of modern war was a factor of total war not only in the Ottoman Empire. War homilies were common in Western countries, particularly in Germany since its national “Whitsun event” (its quasi-religious nationalist enthusiasm) of August 1914.¹² Specific to the Ottoman landscape, however, was the destruction in the name of religion of its own citizens, who had been for centuries, religiously speaking, members of a protected community (zimmi). During the long reign of the pious sultan Abdülhamid II, jihad had never been proclaimed. A member of the CUP and intimate of Talaat, the sheik ul-Islam Mustafa Hayri Efendi wrote the jihad fatwa that was solemnly read out on 14 November 1914.¹³ Although this declaration must be seen in the context of pan-Islamist anti-Entente propaganda, jihad must also be pondered, since late 1914, in the reality of religious polarization and the brutalization of a war that included militias, irregulars, and tribes at the eastern front.

If jihad there began to mean a religiously sanctioned war that resulted in the destruction of Christian communities in the eastern provinces and partly in northern Iran, even as late as 1916 the state at times aimed propaganda at its Christian and Jewish populations. A publication by Major Mehmed Şükrü, an army recruiting officer in Zonguldak on the Black Sea, addressed directly the role of non-Muslims. Even though fighting on behalf of the state was a religious duty, non-Muslims should be full participants in this struggle to save the state, he claimed:

Our Christian and Jewish friends are also the children of this homeland. Together with us they, too, are obligated to fight against the enemy for the defense of our ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Toward War
• Part II Demise of Ottomanity in the Balkans and Western Anatolia
• Part III Ottoman Perspectives in Palestine
• Part IV Reform or Cataclysm in the Kurdo-Armenian Eastern Provinces?
• Afterword
• Chronology
• Bibliography