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Turkey in Europe & Europe in Turkey
Turgut Özal

The Indepence of the Balkan Christian Nations

"God imposes on each man only what he is able to bear "
Koran, II. 286.

After their second unsuccessful attempt to besiege Vienna in 1683, the Ottomans were unable to prevent the Austrian armies from advancing into Imperial territory.

This first major defeat led to the signing in 1699 of the Treaty of Carlowitz, which brought about the loss of vast areas where non-Muslims were in the majority.

Having passed through a period of stagnation, the Empire openly went into decline four centuries after its foundation. The eighteenth century had started badly, but compared with what the nineteenth century would bring, the situation was not yet desperate. Further defeats, such as those marked by the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, continued to shrink the territory of the Empire.

The wars of 1736-9 recovered certain provinces, but only for a short time. Vanquished by the Russians, the Ottomans signed the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 and, for the first time, were obliged to cede a region with a Muslim majority, the Crimea.

By appropriating the north coast of the Black Sea, regarded till then as an Ottoman lake, Russia gained, at least in her own opinion, equal rights over that Sea. These claims, which in particular related to the passage through the Straits to the Mediterranean, led after much argument and struggle to the present status of the Straits, defined by the International Conference of Montreux (1936).

In the Balkans, the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca had caused the loss of some other territories, most of which, it is true, had a Christian majority. Much larger areas with predominantly Muslim populations still remained an integral part of the Empire. This was perhaps the reason why no further territory was lost until 1878, with some minor exceptions.

Lastly, the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca gave Tsarist Russia the authority to intervene on behalf of the Orthodox population of the Empire, declaring that it had certain protective rights.

By the time the French Revolution erupted fifteen years later, in 1789, the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca had created the political conditions necessary to enable the Christian communities to embark on their own struggles for independence.

The Treaty of Campo-Formio (1797), which defined the division of the Venetian possessions, allotted to France the territories which Venice had held in Greece and Albania, so making France a neighbour of the Ottoman Empire.

Shortly afterwards, alarming reports were received from Morea. Ideas of equality and liberty were spreading in the province, the most vulnerable of the Empire. Here is an extract from a memorandum sent to the Divan, at the request of the Sultan, by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ahmet Atif Efendi:

It is one of the things known to all well-informed persons that the conflagration of sedition and wickedness that broke out a few years ago in France, scattering sparks and shooting flames of mischief and tumult in all directions, had been conceived many years previously in the minds of certain accursed heretics, Voltaire and Rousseau, and other materialists like them, had printed and published various works, consisting, God preserve us, of insults and vilification against the pure prophets and great kings, of the removal and abolition of all religion, and of allusions to the sweetness of equality and republicanism, all expressed in easily intelligible words and phrases, in the form of mockery, in the language of the common people. Finding the pleasure of novelty in these writings, most of the people, even youths and women, inclined towards them and paid close attention to them, so that heresy and wickedness spread like syphilis to the arteries of their brains and corrupted their beliefs. When the revolution became more intense, none took offence at the closing of churches, the killing and expulsion of monks, and the abolition of religion and doctrine: they set their hearts on equality and freedom, through which they hoped to attain perfect bliss in this world, in accordance with the lying teachings increasingly disseminated among the common people by this pernicious crew, who stirred up sedition and evil because of selfishness or self-interest. It is well known that the ultimate basis of the order and cohesion of every state is a firm grasp of the roots and branches of holy law, religion, and doctrine; that the tranquillity of the land and the control of the subjects cannot be encompassed by political means alone; that the necessity for the fear of God and the regard for retribution in the hearts of God's slaves is one of the unshakably established divine decrees; that in both ancient and modern times every state and people has had its own religion, whether true or false but, finding supporters like themselves in every place, in order to keep other states busy with the protection of their own regimes and thus forestall an attack on themselves, they had their rebellious declaration which they call `The Rights of Man' translated into all languages and published in all parts, and strove to incite the common people of the nations and regions to rebel against the kings to whom they were subject.

The French Revolution was thus regarded as equally dangerous for the Empire as for the Christian countries; it constituted a threat to all established order, Muslim or Christian.

Napoleon's Egyptian campaign increased the concern and the confusion, for France was an old ally and the adviser on the military reforms which had recently been undertaken.

Contrary to what one would have expected, the execution of Louis XVI and the abolition of the monarchy did not have any serious repercussions. The Ottomans had already seen many kings executed, and their relations with Venice and Dubrovnik had made them aware of republican institutions.

On the other hand, secularism, the official abandonment of all religious doctrine, and the worship of Reason provoked very serious reactions. Here was a Western ideology which distanced itself from Christianity, hence it proved itself able to penetrate the Muslim communities. However, it seems likely that at the time the influence of the Revolution on the Christian subjects of the Empire was not correctly assessed. The Ottomans did not appreciate clearly the danger that an anti-Christian religion represented to their millet system, which was based on religious denominations, though their inability to perceive this threat is understandable in a society where nationalism was as yet unknown. They knew that in the old days the Byzantine in general and the Greeks in particular had preferred them to the Latin's. They had been living together ever since, not to the dissatisfaction of the Eastern Christians.6s The Ottomans failed, however, to understand the attraction that Western Christianity, now in the ascendant, through the Enlightenment and the consequent religious skepticism, could exercise on the Orthodox populations.

Before moving on to consider the tactics followed by the Christian communities in their struggle for independence, we first need to examine the motives of their new protector, Russia.

In the Balkans, a new struggle was being undertaken by the Russians who - and this is the big difference - were themselves Orthodox. The Russians were also Slavs, so they benefited from being related racially and linguistically to most of the Balkan nations. In the post-revolutionary era, when the nation-state was emerging, language and race were important elements of national identity. Lastly, the Russians, unlike the Latin crusaders, avoided occupying the liberated regions. They presented themselves as protectors of the newly independent peoples.

In the regions taken from the Ottomans, all that the Russians wanted to achieve was the creation of small states, each aware of its dependence on and vulnerability to the Russian influence. The outcome of this policy in the Balkans (Greece excepted) proves the long-term wisdom of their strategy.

With the aid of Russian agents, the Christians took up the struggle, creating clandestine associations and forming bands of partisans. These first guerrilla's chose as their principal target the civilian Muslim population. Their aim was to provoke a Muslim counter-attack and, after a series of attempts, they achieved their objective.

European public opinion, while all but oblivious to the atrocities committed against the Muslims, did not ignore the response which they evoked. Propaganda about Ottoman cruelty towards Christians spread far and wide, and the reactions aroused by this propaganda served to legitimize all subsequent wars against the Ottomans, and the creation of new Christian states on Ottoman territory.

Each time a new state was established, hundreds of thousands, or even, as in the case of Bulgaria, millions of Muslims were driven out of their homelands.

The survivors of massacres were forced to leave the lands where they had lived for four or five centuries. The pogroms, sometimes rapidly covered up, provoked almost no response from Western public opinion. Although regrettable, it was said that they represented a part of the price which had to be paid in the pursuit of independence. Anyway, had not the Ottomans for a long time oppressed the Christians? The reaction of the Christians, brutal though it was, was surely only in accordance with the nature of things, and therefore understandable.

Under Muslim sovereignty, Muslims and Christians had lived on good terms for centuries. Why, when the sovereignty passed to the Christians, were they not able to live in peace with the Muslims? Why did they drive them from their homes by sword and by fire? The explanation given was quite simple. The Ottoman Empire was based only on force and had contributed nothing to the progress of humanity. It was by force alone that this barbarian power had kept civilized Christians so long under its yoke. It was therefore entirely natural that the Christian communities, having at last recovered their liberty, should have reacted brutally.

Western Europe evidently could not absolve the Christians without vehemently blaming the Ottomans, particularly now that the latter were in a weakened position. There was also a competitive element in this defamation, with accusers trying to outdo each other in the viciousness of their accusations.

Undoubtedly, certain rulers of these recently created weak states regarded the retention of a Muslim population, particularly if more numerous than the Christian population, at least in certain regions, as a danger in itself, and a potential source of Muslim claims in the future.

We should note that these young states all adopted the `nation-state' form, that is to say they were founded on a unity of language, race, and religion. The nationalism of each of them was born out of opposition to the Ottoman Empire. Its focus and development were based on anti Ottoman feeling, so everything inherited from the `oppressors' became incompatible with the new national identity. The Ottomans, whose own nationalism still lay dormant, but whose loyalty to the defence of the Empire was still strong, could certainly not subscribe to these concepts.

Were there other more profound reasons impeding the coexistence of Christians and Muslims? Byzantium, an exclusively Christian state, had accepted only Christians within its frontiers. Four hundred years before these events in the Balkans, the Muslims of Spain had been liquidated by the Catholics even though they had previously lived together for centuries. Likewise m 1492 Spanish Jews had had to emigrate towards Ottoman lands. The Western Christians who succeeded in influencing the Orthodox in the nineteenth century had shown, then as now, that they could not live together with Muslims or with the adherents of the other monotheistic religion, namely the Jews. It is possible that some of the opponents of Turkey's entry into the European Community draw their inspiration from the same sources. In any case, the eviction of the Turks from the Balkans cannot be explained satisfactorily either by strategic reasons, or by the existence of nationalist movements, because the same lack of tolerance had existed for a long time before the rise of nationalism.

In order to illustrate the strategies employed by the Balkan Christians during the wars of independence, I will quote certain extracts from reports on the subject sent by Western diplomats appointed to Istanbul. It is regrettable that these well informed diplomats did not succeed in counteracting the effects of the anti-Turkish propaganda aimed at Western public opinion. I suppose one should not be surprised. Even today Western diplomats who, like their predecessors, remain faithful to the truth and dare to contradict the official line of their governments when faced with similar campaigns, are scarcely more successful.

The suppression by the Ottoman authorities of an insurrection which erupted at Strelitz (Bulgaria) in April 1875 was presented to the eyes of Europe in a completely distorted manner by a propaganda campaign which one could hardly call unbiased.

The following is one of the despatches of Sir Henry Layard to Lord Derby describing the actual true events. It gave Mr. Gladstone the opportunity to make his famous `bag and baggage' speech concerning the campaign which he proposed should be launched against the Turks.

The English people are not yet ready, perhaps, to endure hearing the truth about the events of last year, but it is my duty to state it to your Lordship. The marvelous cleverness displayed by Russia and her agents in misleading public opinion in England and elsewhere has been amply rewarded. It may still require some time to sift the true from the false, it will be too late when history shall have made that discrimination. The Porte has not had recourse to any efficacious means for presenting its case to Europe. It has not utilized for this purpose either the press or competent agents. A great proportion of the English public at this very moment is probably under the impression that the declarations upon which the first accusations were made against Turkey were true: 60,000 Christians violated or massacred, carts filled with human skulls, crowds of women burned in barns and other similar horrors. There are people, among whom I regret to say are Englishmen, who boast of having invented narratives with the design of discrediting, `writing down' Turkey, to which they have been instigated by one who is well known. The public in England will find difficulty in believing that the most exact and competent inquiries into the events that occurred last year in Bulgaria have now reduced the number of the dead to about 3,500, including Turks who were in the first place assassinated by Christians. No impartial person is able today to deny that an uprising of Christians planned by its leaders to result in a general massacre of Moslems was projected, and that the insurrection was directed by Russians and Panslavist agents.

Here now is a letter from Dr. Hamlin, founder and first President of Robert College in Istanbul. It is dated 23 December 1893, and was published in The Congregationalist of Boston.

A very intelligent Armenian, who speaks English as fluently and correctly as he does Armenian, and who is an eloquent defender of the revolution, assured me that they had strong hopes of preparing the way for Russia to enter into Asia Minor and take possession of the region. In response to the question how this was to be brought about, he said: 'These Hintchakist bands, organized in all parts of the empire, will await opportunities to kill the Turks and the Kurds and to burn their villages, after which they will take refuge in the mountains. Then the enraged Moslems will rise and fall upon defenseless Armenians, and kill them with such savagery that Russia, in the name of humanity and Christian civilization, will precipitate herself upon Turkey and invade the country.' When I called his attention to the fact that this plan was the most cruel and infernal that could be imagined, he calmly answered: `So it appears, no doubt, to you, but the Armenians are determined to free themselves. Europe interested herself in the Bulgarian horrors and freed Bulgaria. Without doubt she will lend her ear to our appeal, which will consist of the cries and blood of millions of women and children.

We owe a great debt to Mr. Chedo Myatovich, who was at one time the Serbian plenipotentiary minister in London and Constantinople. In the Asiatic Quarterly of October 1913, that is after Serbia had realized its `aspirations' with regard to Turkey, he wrote:

It must be admitted that it is political interest which has caused us (the nations of the Balkans) to describe the Turks as cruel Asiatic tyrants, unamenable to European civilization. An impartial history would show that the Turks are rather Europeans than Asiatic and that they are not cruel tyrants, but a nation that loves justice and freedom, and that possesses virtues and qualities deserving of recognition and respect.

I repeat: the Turks, who were regarded as the sword and standard of Islam during the crusades and during the Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, were not hostile to Christians. The Empire, multi-national and multi-denominational-perhaps the only one of its kind which institutionalized tolerance by transforming religious privileges into rights embodied in laws-was ecumenical and unifying. I am not the only one to say this. Several of the new generation of Western historians have already gone much further in this direction on several points.

The struggle of the Balkan Christian communities for their independence therefore threatened the very principles on which the Empire was built, and its raison d'être. The secession of Christians signified the end of the Empire's mission of unification and ecumenical character. Furthermore, the tactics of the guerrilla's of making provocative attacks against the Muslim populations would inevitably compel the State to react. It was henceforth obliged in self-defence rigorously to suppress the rebellious elements.

The image of the Ottoman Muslim as the oppressor of Christians was thus created, exaggerated, and widely disseminated.

When this image had come to be generally accepted as the truth, the Western historian, who had learned it at school, believed he had to rewrite the history of relations with the Turks since the crusades in the light of this new perspective. Thus the Turk was seen in retrospect always to have been the enemy. Every method then had to be used in order to liberate from such brutal oppression the Christians and the territories where they lived. It was a mission demanded in the name of humanity and religion.

Such is the worst of the black myths which were propagated in the West in the last century. Since then the West has not managed to secularize and transcend it. The Westerners, having failed to live peacefully with the Muslims themselves, concluded that the converse must also be true, namely that the Turks would not be able to live in harmony with the Christians. Furthermore, it was felt that the revolt of the Balkan countries was going in the `direction' of History, that is to say, towards nationalism.

From the Ottoman point of view, the prospect of independence for the Balkan Christians assumed a vital importance, not only for Rumelia, but also for Anatolia, the heart of the Empire. The Greek revolt of 1821 was of particular concern to the Porte because large Greek and Christian communities lived in Anatolia itself. Although the Muslims were an overwhelming majority of the population in Anatolia, this concern developed into a sense of mortal danger as the tribulations endured by other Muslim majorities in the Balkans became known. Most of the reforms - imposed on the Porte by the West - were designed to protect the rights of Christian subjects in the name of civilization, and this in a manner that tended to create a `state within a state'. In addition, the missionary schools, which were set up in Anatolia in the nineteenth century, mainly by priests who had been forced to leave France following the Revolution, taught Eastern Christians to seek independence.

It has to be admitted that the millet system then lapsed, and Greeks were refused access to public services. A little later, in 1890, it was the turn of the Armenians to revolt. They acted no differently from the other Christian communities, but in their case it was they who were quelled. This is perhaps one of the reasons why this anachronistic question has been kept alive today, while the sufferings of the Turks in the Balkans have long been relegated to oblivion.

Thus the Empire became principally the concern only of Turks and Muslims.

A number of states came into being in the Balkans as a result of the wars instigated by Russia and the West in the name of humanity and civilization, which in reality were waged for religious reasons. Their populations were mostly Christian, with a Muslim minority. The new Turkish state created in Anatolia represented the opposite situation. The Christians gained the Balkans but lost Anatolia. That was the risk they had taken, and the price they paid.

Indeed, the price was unimaginably high for all. At that date there were few districts in the Ottoman Empire whose population was even approximately homogeneous in linguistic nationality, and also few which possessed even the rudiments of statehood.

Their feeble energies were absorbed in local disputes over small parcels of territory and their bitterest animosities were those which they harbored against each other. In relation to the outside world they found themselves in a situation not unlike that of their predecessors during the centuries immediately preceding the establishment of the Pax Ottomanica. In that age Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, and Rumans had been confronted by a choice between domination by their medieval Western fellow-Christians or domination by the Osmanlis. In a post-Ottoman age the alternatives that confronted them were incorporation into a secular modern Western body social or subjection, first to a Petrine, and thereafter to a Communist Russia.

We sometimes come across allegations that the Ottomans failed to raise their Christian subjects to political maturity or caused them to remain outside the evolutionary current set in motion by the Renaissance. Firstly, the Ottoman Empire was not a nineteenth-century colonial empire with an historical mission to introduce modern civilization into the distant lands of Asia and Africa. It was a universal state dedicated to preserving the cultures of its ethnic components. As to depriving their Christian subjects of the chance of progress, I have indicated earlier the incompatibility of Orthodox and Renaissance humanism's. I should perhaps confine my remarks here to the example of Tsarist Russia, which also failed to engage on an indigenous progressive course, despite the wide-ranging westernizing reforms of Peter the Great.

Given these facts, and even making allowance for the sufferings endured by the newly emancipated states, it is, however, difficult to accept the exaggerated accusations directed at Turkey in the history books of these countries.

Do they imply that, had there been no oppression on the part of the Ottomans, there would have been no need for them to wage wars of independence? Is it an unconscious confession by them that they were not ready for national independence? Or do they wish to glorify their independence struggle as a means of nation-building by overstressing the Ottoman repression? Perhaps they wish to justify their own harsh treatment of the Muslims who were left to their care after the withdrawal of the Ottoman armies. On the other hand, they mostly used these accusations in order to further their irredentism claims over the remaining Ottoman territories where their ethnic minorities still lived.

Historically speaking, the ecumenical structure of Islamic societies was condemned to extinction even before the advent of nationalism. That is what happened to the Ummayads of Cordoba in their struggle against the very Catholic kings of Spain whose political ideal, like that of Western Europe, was based on religious homogeneity. This tendency of the West has only been reinforced by nationalism and industrial revolution. In fact, the multiethnic and multi-religious nature of the Ottoman Empire was the main obstacle in the way to modernization. The distribution of labour on ethnic lines, namely the Muslim administrative and military élite as against the financial and commercial élite of the Christian minorities, was utterly incompatible with the emergence of a modern bourgeoisie. What is more, the wars fought by the Ottomans against the West on account of the liberation of the Balkan nations throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries so prohibitively taxed the energy of the country that the westernizing reforms always fell short of the objectives.

Right to the end, the Ottomans, acutely aware of the disruptive effects of nationalism on their state structure, avoided opting for Turkish nationalism at the cost of limiting their westernizing reforms in scope. The fact that the industrial revolution based on market forces necessitated a nation-state as a sine qua non presupposed, however, the demise of the Ottoman Empire as universal state.

But before discussing this evolution in the following chapter, I should like to sketch the image of the West which was formed in the mind of the Turks by this punishing succession of wars.

I have already shown how the Capitulations and their consequences had not given the Ottomans a very high opinion of the West. But the universal humanism of the Renaissance in the West, the idea of the equality of men as men, profoundly impressed Ottoman intellectuals. The advantages of a Western civilization in full intellectual and material evolution fired their imagination.

On the other hand, the unreserved and unscrupulous support given to Christian communities in the name of religion, the excusing of their atrocities while the Muslims were represented as the source of all evils, the iniquitous accusations, all these had persuaded the Turks that Western civilization was not genuine. Its moral judgments seemed to be made according to a religiously tainted double standard. In the West, 'man' meant `a Christian'. The authors of such a flagrant injustice could not be civilized.

The particular conditions imposed on them by the struggle for the survival of their country generated a black myth concerning the West, which became deep rooted in the subconscious of the Turks. Their long history had taught them that relations between states have to obey the principles of realpolitik. But the hostility of which they were the object appeared to them to exceed by a long way the demands of realpolitik. The cultural veneer called `civilization' could not disguise the atavistic motives that it covered. On the contrary, this `civilization' was merely their instrument.

Nevertheless, the Ottomans had to survive and they did what was necessary to achieve that end. On the way, the unexpected occurred: wishing to westernize and to modernize, they transcended their history.

Today, some of the resolutions of the European Parliament seem to want to remind us of our past, in that they only follow the principles of the Christian world. Our secular concept of history sometimes appears to the Christian world to be a denial of our own past. However, certain members of the European Parliament need to learn to read and interpret history from a secular point of view, as we have done, if they wish truly to progress along the path of civilization.

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