The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution and the Making of the Modern East, 1908-1923 by Sean McMeekin (Allen Lane, £30)
“The Ottoman Empire is in the news again,” writes Sean McMeekin at the beginning of his new book about the “making of the modern Middle East.”
McMeekin, whose previous book, July 1914, dealt with the origins of the First World War, observes that “scarcely a day goes by without some media mention of the contested legacy” of that conflict in the region. Today, German troops are stationed on the Syrian border, more or less where their great-grandfathers were in the days when General Erich von Falkenhayn commanded his Lightning Army Group in 1918.
At the very end of the war, when Woodrow Wilson campaigned for the idea of national self-determination, two nations won—Israel and Turkey. The latter, after an epic war of independence and a determined challenge to Islamic ways, is a success story. By contrast, the Armenians and the Greeks failed, in Anatolia at least. So too did the Kurds. Artificial states were established by the British and French in the shape of Iraq and Syria, and these too have failed. It is no wonder that books such as McMeekin’s are now appearing.
The Ottoman Endgame is the natural successor to David Fromkin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Peace to End All Peace (1989), which ought to be on the bedside table of any thinking diplomat in the Middle East. McMeekin tells the story of the Young Turk reform movement of the early 20th century, the battles of 1914-18, including Gallipoli, and Turkey’s eventually wresting of independence from a coalition of ill- wishers—including Lloyd George and Hovhannes Katchaznouni, the Prime Minister of Armenia.
McMeekin’s story begins in 1877. Tsarist Russia, with its Balkan allies, had attacked Ottoman Turkey in the name of Christian Europe, and, this time, unlike in the 1850s, when their support for the Turks led to the Crimean War, the British did not intervene. The Ottoman army initially crumbled, and Russian troops invaded Bulgaria. Then, for months on end, in the mountainous territory around Plevna, the Turks stood their ground, and had demonstrative support from the Benjamin Disraeli government. In the end, they did give in, and Russian troops reached what is now the site of the Atatürk airport outside Istanbul. But the Russians were in no condition to go on, and at the Congress of Berlin had to accept only a limited victory. Ottoman Turkey had a respite.
There were millions of refugees to digest, and the public finances were in a mess, but Abdul Hamid II, the last real Sultan (1876-1909), was astute and applied a successful formula. The Ottoman empire had since the start been at least half Christian. Defeat reduced this portion of the population to a quarter, one susceptible to nationalist appeals, whether Greek or Armenian. Abdul Hamid responded by using Islam, rather than Ottoman parliamentary liberalism, as cement. He encouraged religious reformers who argued that, if Islam could only learn western techniques, it could stand on its own. He made terms with western banks, and encouraged native capitalism. In foreign affairs he was careful to have good relations with Russia.
Abdul Hamid grew tired, however, and was eventually overthrown in 1909 by army officers and their masonic sympathisers, known as “Young Turks.” They promised (and in many ways delivered) reforms that foreshadowed those of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, 20 years later. They naively imagined that Europe would support them. It did not. The Austrians annexed Bosnia and the Italians invaded Libya. In 1912, the Balkan nations allied and struck: Turkey lost almost all its European possessions, including Salonica (modern-day Thessaloniki), hometown of the Young Turks. By 1913, almost no one imagined that the Ottoman empire had much time left, and partition was in the air. The French eyed Syria and the Russians cultivated links with the Armenians of eastern Anatolia and the Kurds, too. (A century earlier, in 1807, a similar bargain had been discussed at Tilsit by Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I— Constantinople for the Russians, Cairo for the French and nothing for the British.)
Only Germany offered help to the Young Turks, because they intended to take over Anatolia, not as a colony, but as what one of them, in envy of the British, called “Our Egypt.” In 1914, when Europe went to war, Turkey joined in on the German side. It was a disaster, and one can imagine Enver Pasha, leader of the Young Turks’ military wing, echoing the words of the Austrian Foreign Minister who said: “We were bound to die. We were at liberty to choose the manner of our death, and we chose the most terrible.” All the Great Powers made similar miscalculations in 1914, and all the European empires fell as a result—the German, Austrian, Turkish empires in the short run, the British and French in the longer term.
In April 1915, the Turks had their backs to the wall. The British and French were attacking in the Dardanelles. A German-Turkish attempt against the Suez Canal had failed, and an army had been lost in the snows of the east, at Kars, against the Russians. There were four Armenian brigades on the Russian side, and guerrilla warfare had started behind the Turkish lines. McMeekin explains that in this military context orders went out for the deportation of the civilian Armenian population, which occurred in horrible circumstances, described by the many missionaries and foreign consuls in the area. Turkish records show that about 500,000 people were involved. Fifty-thousand died, half from exhaustion and disease, half from attacks by Kurdish tribesmen in pursuit of loot. The Turks themselves put about 1,500 of their own officials on trial for what had happened, and executed 50, including a provincial governor who had stolen. The survivors, deported mainly to Syria, also died in droves. A plague of locusts stripped the leaves from the trees, and there was mass starvation. It affected everyone in the area.
McMeekin documents all of this, but refrains from using the term “genocide.” There is simply no proof that the Ottoman government intended to wipe out the Armenians. The direct evidence consists of forgeries. A Turkish commentator, Taner Akçam, looked at the record in the late 1980s and pronounced genocide. His works were respectfully reviewed. However, they were also subjected to withering attack by researchers who knew the Ottoman language better than he did. For instance, Erman Sahin claimed, in a respected journal, that Akçam translated “pillage” as “extermination,” a charge that the latter has never answered. Until he does so, he can be ignored. Most readers of Prospect will maybe assume the reality of the “Armenian genocide” as a matter of course. But things are not that simple. There was, as McMeekin shows, an element of Armenian provocation, and we await an Armenian historian who will break ranks, as Akçam did for the Turks.
In 1918, the Ottoman empire finally gave up, after seven centuries of ruling the Middle East. General Franchet d’Esperey rode into Constantinople on a white horse, consciously in imitation of Sultan Mehmet in 1453. The British and French thought that they would remake the Middle East, and took over. But they had given the Turks an example: the nation state. Resistance gathered. McMeekin ends with the establishment of modern Turkey as the outcome of that war of independence, and it is a moving story.
It is an enormous story, too, and McMeekin is a worthy chronicler of it. He writes too much about 1876, and 1922 comes off too short—you want to read more about Atatürk. But The Ottoman Endgame is the most satisfactory and thought-through of the recent books on the subject that I have seen.
“The Ottoman Empire is in the news again,” writes Sean McMeekin at the beginning of his new book about the “making of the modern Middle East.”
McMeekin, whose previous book, July 1914, dealt with the origins of the First World War, observes that “scarcely a day goes by without some media mention of the contested legacy” of that conflict in the region. Today, German troops are stationed on the Syrian border, more or less where their great-grandfathers were in the days when General Erich von Falkenhayn commanded his Lightning Army Group in 1918.
At the very end of the war, when Woodrow Wilson campaigned for the idea of national self-determination, two nations won—Israel and Turkey. The latter, after an epic war of independence and a determined challenge to Islamic ways, is a success story. By contrast, the Armenians and the Greeks failed, in Anatolia at least. So too did the Kurds. Artificial states were established by the British and French in the shape of Iraq and Syria, and these too have failed. It is no wonder that books such as McMeekin’s are now appearing.
The Ottoman Endgame is the natural successor to David Fromkin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Peace to End All Peace (1989), which ought to be on the bedside table of any thinking diplomat in the Middle East. McMeekin tells the story of the Young Turk reform movement of the early 20th century, the battles of 1914-18, including Gallipoli, and Turkey’s eventually wresting of independence from a coalition of ill- wishers—including Lloyd George and Hovhannes Katchaznouni, the Prime Minister of Armenia.
McMeekin’s story begins in 1877. Tsarist Russia, with its Balkan allies, had attacked Ottoman Turkey in the name of Christian Europe, and, this time, unlike in the 1850s, when their support for the Turks led to the Crimean War, the British did not intervene. The Ottoman army initially crumbled, and Russian troops invaded Bulgaria. Then, for months on end, in the mountainous territory around Plevna, the Turks stood their ground, and had demonstrative support from the Benjamin Disraeli government. In the end, they did give in, and Russian troops reached what is now the site of the Atatürk airport outside Istanbul. But the Russians were in no condition to go on, and at the Congress of Berlin had to accept only a limited victory. Ottoman Turkey had a respite.
There were millions of refugees to digest, and the public finances were in a mess, but Abdul Hamid II, the last real Sultan (1876-1909), was astute and applied a successful formula. The Ottoman empire had since the start been at least half Christian. Defeat reduced this portion of the population to a quarter, one susceptible to nationalist appeals, whether Greek or Armenian. Abdul Hamid responded by using Islam, rather than Ottoman parliamentary liberalism, as cement. He encouraged religious reformers who argued that, if Islam could only learn western techniques, it could stand on its own. He made terms with western banks, and encouraged native capitalism. In foreign affairs he was careful to have good relations with Russia.
Abdul Hamid grew tired, however, and was eventually overthrown in 1909 by army officers and their masonic sympathisers, known as “Young Turks.” They promised (and in many ways delivered) reforms that foreshadowed those of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, 20 years later. They naively imagined that Europe would support them. It did not. The Austrians annexed Bosnia and the Italians invaded Libya. In 1912, the Balkan nations allied and struck: Turkey lost almost all its European possessions, including Salonica (modern-day Thessaloniki), hometown of the Young Turks. By 1913, almost no one imagined that the Ottoman empire had much time left, and partition was in the air. The French eyed Syria and the Russians cultivated links with the Armenians of eastern Anatolia and the Kurds, too. (A century earlier, in 1807, a similar bargain had been discussed at Tilsit by Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I— Constantinople for the Russians, Cairo for the French and nothing for the British.)
Only Germany offered help to the Young Turks, because they intended to take over Anatolia, not as a colony, but as what one of them, in envy of the British, called “Our Egypt.” In 1914, when Europe went to war, Turkey joined in on the German side. It was a disaster, and one can imagine Enver Pasha, leader of the Young Turks’ military wing, echoing the words of the Austrian Foreign Minister who said: “We were bound to die. We were at liberty to choose the manner of our death, and we chose the most terrible.” All the Great Powers made similar miscalculations in 1914, and all the European empires fell as a result—the German, Austrian, Turkish empires in the short run, the British and French in the longer term.
In April 1915, the Turks had their backs to the wall. The British and French were attacking in the Dardanelles. A German-Turkish attempt against the Suez Canal had failed, and an army had been lost in the snows of the east, at Kars, against the Russians. There were four Armenian brigades on the Russian side, and guerrilla warfare had started behind the Turkish lines. McMeekin explains that in this military context orders went out for the deportation of the civilian Armenian population, which occurred in horrible circumstances, described by the many missionaries and foreign consuls in the area. Turkish records show that about 500,000 people were involved. Fifty-thousand died, half from exhaustion and disease, half from attacks by Kurdish tribesmen in pursuit of loot. The Turks themselves put about 1,500 of their own officials on trial for what had happened, and executed 50, including a provincial governor who had stolen. The survivors, deported mainly to Syria, also died in droves. A plague of locusts stripped the leaves from the trees, and there was mass starvation. It affected everyone in the area.
McMeekin documents all of this, but refrains from using the term “genocide.” There is simply no proof that the Ottoman government intended to wipe out the Armenians. The direct evidence consists of forgeries. A Turkish commentator, Taner Akçam, looked at the record in the late 1980s and pronounced genocide. His works were respectfully reviewed. However, they were also subjected to withering attack by researchers who knew the Ottoman language better than he did. For instance, Erman Sahin claimed, in a respected journal, that Akçam translated “pillage” as “extermination,” a charge that the latter has never answered. Until he does so, he can be ignored. Most readers of Prospect will maybe assume the reality of the “Armenian genocide” as a matter of course. But things are not that simple. There was, as McMeekin shows, an element of Armenian provocation, and we await an Armenian historian who will break ranks, as Akçam did for the Turks.
In 1918, the Ottoman empire finally gave up, after seven centuries of ruling the Middle East. General Franchet d’Esperey rode into Constantinople on a white horse, consciously in imitation of Sultan Mehmet in 1453. The British and French thought that they would remake the Middle East, and took over. But they had given the Turks an example: the nation state. Resistance gathered. McMeekin ends with the establishment of modern Turkey as the outcome of that war of independence, and it is a moving story.
It is an enormous story, too, and McMeekin is a worthy chronicler of it. He writes too much about 1876, and 1922 comes off too short—you want to read more about Atatürk. But The Ottoman Endgame is the most satisfactory and thought-through of the recent books on the subject that I have seen.
