The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (39 page)

In Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, junior army officers from families with no tradition of military service to their sovereign already constituted dangerous pressure groups which threatened to
impose upon their respective governments nationalistic policies of their own devising. A similar development was reflected in the changing outlook of the Young Turk movement between the Congress of
February 1902 and a second Congress, also held in Paris, in December 1907. To the consternation of Abdulhamid’s secret police agents, there was evidence in 1906–7 of dissident cells in
several of the Sultan’s field armies. An Ottoman Freedom Society (
Osmanli Hürriyet Cemiyeti
), founded in Salonika in September 1906 by the postal official Mehmed Talaat, won
support from officers of the Third Army Corps. Two months later Mustafa Kemal, a twenty-five-year-old staff captain born in Salonika and educated mainly at
Monastir, founded
a secret Fatherland Movement (
Vatan
) among officers of the Fifth Army Corps at Damascus;
Vatan
soon established cells in Jaffa, Jerusalem and Beirut. By the following September the
Ottoman Freedom Society had established links with Young Turk exiles in Geneva; and soon after the Second Paris Congress the leaders of this combined Young Turk movement adopted the name Committee
of Union and Progress (CUP—
Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti
), whose organization absorbed Kemal’s
Vatan
and several other dissident bodies as well.
²¹
The common bond between the affiliated societies in the CUP was Macedonia. Most members were serving or had recently served in the troubled province, or had been born there. In
1908 Salonika, second city in modern Greece, acted as a powerhouse for the Young Turk Revolution.

The events of that summer followed no recognizable pattern, the most dramatic episodes taking place in so remote a corner of the empire that it seemed inconceivable they could rock the Ottoman
throne. The military Mufti of the Third Army garrison in Monastir was a police agent, a Yildiz Palace spy. By chance, early in June, he stumbled across a CUP conspiracy involving Adjutant-Major
Ahmed Niyazi, an officer of suspect loyalty stationed at Resne (now Resen), between Monastir and Ochrid. The Mufti was shot and wounded, to prevent his reporting back to the capital, but Niyazi
decided to precipitate a revolt, seizing arms and ammunition during Friday prayers on 3 July and taking to the mountains around Ochrid in an act of armed rebellion. The CUP, fearing
counter-measures, supported Niyazi and many junior officers joined him in the hills, the best-known of them being Major Enver, who was serving on the staff of the Inspector-General of Rumelia,
Hüseyin Hilmi, himself sympathetic to the young Turks. At Niyazi’s prompting the CUP contacted foreign consuls in Salonika and sent agents to all the principal towns in Macedonia,
proclaiming a restoration of the 1876 Constitution. At first Abdulhamid played down the significance of the insurrection. He was, however, shaken by the assassination in Monastir of one of his most
loyal generals, and subsequently by the mutinous mood of troops hurriedly sent from Anatolia to suppress the Macedonian rebellion. Reports reaching the capital showed how rapidly the garrisons of
Rumelia were declaring themselves in favour of the Constitution. Exactly what they sought
was obscure, although it was clear that in several districts the insurgents had
support from the Albanians, and from some Bulgarian and Greek communities. There were echoes, too, of older struggles in greater cities: ‘
La Patrie, Liberté, Égalité,
Fraternité
’, the British vice-consul heard a young CUP officer proclaim in French in the small town of Drama.
²²

As morale declined at the Yildiz Palace, Sultan Abdulhamid made one last effort to recover the political initiative. Not for the first time in his reign, he decided to forestall the opposition.
He dismissed Mehmed Ferid, Grand Vizier for the past five and a half years, and summoned back to office for the seventh time Küchük Mehmed Said, who had read the Sultan’s speech to
the
Meclis-i Mebusan
in that false dawn of Ottoman constitutionalism thirty-one years before. Within forty-eight hours, Said Pasha and his master had agreed to meet the first demand of the
Macedonian revolutionaries. The Sultan—so he explained five months later—believed that the peoples of his empire were by now well enough educated to accept the workings of parliamentary
government. An imperial
irade
, made public on 24 July 1908, announced that the suspended Constitution of 1876 would immediately be restored. A few days later a general amnesty for political
prisoners and exiles was proclaimed. On 1 August a
hatt-i hümayun
confirmed the abolition of the secret police, freedom from arbitrary arrest, permission to travel abroad, equality of
race and religion, and reorganization of existing governments. The charter also promised the summoning of an elected parliament within three months. Demonstrations of mass enthusiasm, supported by
over a dozen nationalities, swept through towns and villages in Europe and Asia.
²³

The Hamidian era was over. The Young Turks destroyed autocracy without a shot fired nearer to Yildiz than Salonika. But there had been no change of Sultan-Caliph. On 31 August the longest and
wiliest survivor for three centuries began the thirty-third year of his reign under the strange mantle of a constitutional monarchy. It lay uneasily across his hunched shoulders.

C
HAPTER
14

S
EEKING
U
NION AND
P
ROGRESS

T
HE SUDDEN RESTORATION OF THE
C
ONSTITUTION TOOK THE
Committee of Union and Progress by surprise. Its founder-members had
envisaged a longer campaign before they could persuade the Sultan to resume the tentative experiments in representative government after a lapse of thirty-two years. It had seemed likely that, in
partnership with sympathetic
ulema
dignitaries, the Young Turks would first need to devise a way of deposing the reigning sovereign. Instead it soon became clear that the imperial
irade
had transformed the existing relationship between ruler and ruled. On 31 July, the Friday after it was proclaimed, Abdulhamid ventured as far as the Ayasofya mosque for the weekly
ş
elamlik
, the first time in a quarter of a century that he had mustered sufficient courage to cross the Golden Horn in order to pray in the ancient basilica of Byzantium. The carriage drive
was a minor personal triumph; he was even cheered in the narrow streets where he most feared assassination.
¹
It was with some reluctance that, early in
August, he conceded it was still necessary for him to receive a CUP deputation and discuss the merits of their programme of reform.

This gracious accessibility of a not unpopular Sultan created problems for the would-be revolutionaries: who would go to Yildiz as their spokesmen? The CUP was not a political party: it was not
even a nationwide movement of protest. Outside Macedonia it lacked any co-ordinated organization and there was, as yet, no single person who stood out as leader. For Major Niyazi, Major Cemal,
Major Enver or any of the junior officers to travel to the capital was dangerous; they might legitimately be
regarded as rebellious mutineers. The most experienced CUP
member in Macedonia was Dr Nazim, director of the Salonika Municipal Hospital and chief contact between the Young Turk conspirators and the exiles in Paris; but, though he became Secretary General
of the CUP’s central committee two months later, Nazim always chose to remain out of the public eye. There was also Hüseyin Hilmi, a respected figure throughout Rumelia who had publicly
proclaimed the Sultan’s
irade
in Salonika amid great enthusiasm. Yet Hilmi, too, was unsuitable; while sympathizing with Young Turk objectives, he was loyal to the lost liberalism of
an older generation. At fifty-five Hilmi could hardly serve as spokesman for officers and administrative officials more than twenty years his junior.
²

Eventually the Committee chose three skilled bureaucrats: Mehmed Cavit (often transcribed as ‘Djavid’), a Salonika merchant’s son with a flair for economics; Mustafa Rahmi, who
came from one of the wealthiest land-owning families in Rumelia; and Mehmed Talaat, who had helped set up the Ottoman Freedom Society in Salonika almost two years earlier. Talaat, born into an
Edirne peasant family, possessed a powerful intelligence. While too self-made a politician to risk isolation through ready compromise, he was also too ambitious to limit his options by blind
acceptance of a doctrinaire fanaticism. Over the following ten years it was Talaat rather than any of his more flamboyant colleagues who effectively transformed CUP resolutions into political
action. Major Ahmed Cemal (or ‘Djemal’) and Major Enver, the two ruthless Third Army staff officers, became better-known abroad; but as the confused memoir material on the Young Turk
movement becomes clearer, so Mehmed Talaat, the one-time telegraph clerk, stands out more and more as mastermind in this formidable triumvirate.

Even in his first audience with Abdulhamid, Talaat seems to have imposed his personality. On its arrival in the capital the deputation had been treated with contemptuous disdain by Said Pasha;
Talaat and his two companions duly asked the Sultan to dismiss Said and appoint a more liberal ministry. Within four days Said was out of office and the anglophile Mehmed Kamil Pasha became Grand
Vizier for a third time, bringing together a cabinet of reformers in which only the
ş
eyhülislâm
and the Foreign Minister had previous experience of office. The
new-found confidence of the CUP led to the arrival in the capital of four other inner members, including Cemal and Enver. This inner committee resolved that it would not seek a
takeover of government itself but would remain in being as a pressure group, influencing decision-making in the palace, the Porte and eventually in parliament, too. At the end of August Sir Gerard
Lowther, a recent arrival as ambassador, patronizingly informed London that ‘considering the country is being run by the Committee of the League, a collection of good-intentioned children,
things are going pretty well.’
³

Like earlier reformers, both Kamil’s government and the CUP emphasized the need to convert the Ottoman Empire into a modern centralized state. Such a programme had been proclaimed at least
four times in the previous century, with achievements on each occasion falling sadly short of that good intent which Lowther thought he once more saw around him. Yet while Kamil’s proposed
reforms looked extremely familiar, the CUP sought more drastic measures. Their ideal was a Muslim capitalist bourgeois society, proud of its Anatolian Turkish origins: all Ottoman subjects,
irrespective of race and religion, should enjoy equal rights
and
accept equal obligations in service to a centralized state. There would be no more variations of law under the
millet
system and no more resort to the ‘Capitulations’, the privileged status in commerce and at law enjoyed by foreigners. The CUP also favoured agricultural reform and a fairer system of
taxation. But even this new and vigorous programme of change provided one interesting instance of continuity with the past: the Young Turks called for the extension and completion of the
Mecelle
, the civil code which Ahmed Cevdet’s commission had evolved forty years before.

The newly established freedom of the press and rights of political association favoured the growth of a multi-party system.
⁴
But, while there was a
hard core of Islamic traditionalists and a small Ottoman Democratic Party in the field, the election of 1908 was contested by only two main groups: the CUP, though not yet organized as a party,
campaigned as the ‘Unionists’ (
Ittihatçilar
); and in mid-September there was established a decentralist Liberal party (Ottoman Liberal Union,
Osmanli Ahrar
Firkasi
), which included among its members the Grand Vizier and Prince Sabaheddin, who returned hurriedly from Paris to
enter the political arena. The elections,
conducted in November and early December again through an indirect electoral college system, gave overwhelming support to the Unionists. For the moment, however, the Mehmed Kamil government
remained in office. On 17 December 1908 Sultan Abdulhamid once more braved the perils of Stamboul’s narrow streets to open the third parliament of his reign in the government offices behind
the Ayasofya mosque. A few months later the Çira
an Palace was converted for the use of both chambers of parliament; the palace had been vacant since August
1904, when the incarceration of the wretched ex-Sultan Murad V ended with his death from diabetes.