BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE. BLACKWOOD'S No. MCLII. OCTOBER 1911. VOL. CXC. ASIATIC TURKEY UNDER THE CONSTITUTION. It is by no means easy to form an appreciation of the changes wrought in Turkey by the advent of constitutional government. The difficulty is not confined to those who watch the country from without; it is almost as great for such as are acquainted with a part, or parts, of the Ottoman dominions. The empire is vast, the means of communication insufficient, and provincial distinctions so strongly marked that experience of any one district is little or no warrant for embracing generalisations. Nor is there any salient unity of aspiration; public opinion in each province is determined by local conditions and uninfluenced by consideration of the needs of neighbouring districts, concerning which correct information is seldom to be obtained. Every traveller in Asiatic Turkey must be familiar with the baffling conviction that his views are based upon VOL. CXC.-NO. MCLII. evidence as fragmentary as the glass in a kaleidoscope. You follow with absorbed interest the political drama which is being developed in the centre wherein you find yourself; the actors are all known to you; you have heard the issues discussed from the hour of the first morning caller soon after dawn, until the prolonged evening coffee-drinking draws to a close towards midnight. You ride away over desert and mountain, where the talk is all of the ravages of raider and of locust, and coming again to some city on the telegraph line you attempt to pick up the threads where you dropped them. It is not to be done; there is no news, or what news there is takes the form of inconsequent and contradictory gossip. You must be content to fall once more into eager participation in local perplexities, partly dissimilar from those you left behind, though 2 F series of impressions which lead at times to conclusions somewhat beyond the field of personal observation. The past two years have not, in Asia, been years of promise unfulfilled. I will not say that they have been a period of unbroken progress, but it cannot be denied that an effort has been made to solve age-long problems of government and that, upon the whole, it has been made on the right lines. The first of these problems is how to protect the settled population from the lawlessness of the tribes. It affects the greater part of Turkey in Asia, though along the Syrian coast-land based on the same administra- I am conscious of a definite tive problems. The story thus constructed consists of a series of disconnected episodes not one of which can be brought to an end without revisiting the theatre of its action. And if incidents that have taken place near at hand are so little known, still less well defined is provincial comprehension of the policy and relative strength of party and faction in the capital, the vagueness of which is only comparable to to the the ignorance that prevails in Constantinople touching the affairs and the temper of Asia. It is subject to these limitations that I venture to offer some description of the events of the last two years in the provinces of Asiatic Turkey, the tribes have been banished or, to be strictly accurate, in Syria, Mesopotamia, and the southern parts of Kurdistan. Through these regions I travelled two years ago, at a time when the continued existence of the new Government was still a matter of conjecture. I heard, and I have related, the anxious fears of men who had seen the revolution of 1908 fall far short of their hopes; I was in Turkey when the sudden upheaval of April 1909, bringing the Cilician massacres in its train, seemed to be on the point of justifying their gravest apprehensions. Bearing in mind the vivid recollection of those stormy months, I attempted to gauge, when I revisited the country, the results of two years of constitutional government. I do not propose to overstep the boundary of my own experience, yet by the advance of the cultivator, and in Asia Minor the half nomadic Turks have never, as far back as my experience goes, been difficult to handle. But from the western borders of the Syrian desert to the frontiers of Persia, civilisation has stood helpless before the depredations of the Bedouin and the more highly organised insubordination of the Kurds, and the latter, often with the connivance of the central authorities, have kept the mountain districts that border Mesopotamia to the north and Asia Minor to the east in a perpetual state of turmoil. In all the provinces which are subject to tribal brigandage, I found this year a marked increase in the security of life and property. Desert highways which had been systematically harried, roads which had become so unsafe that the post with its military escort had ceased to pass over them, could be traversed without hazard; crops which had never been reaped in full by their lawful owners were left to ripen untouched. At the root of the improvement lie the reforms which have taken place in the army and the police. Of these the most remarkable is regularity of payment. All through the Turkish Empire every soldier and every zaptieh receives the just measure of his pay month by month, together with the allowance due to him of summer and winter clothing. The ragged barefoot regiments of old are now dressed in khaki and properly shod; the gendarme, whose patched garments scarcely retained any likeness to an official uniform, has been turned into a smart horseman, clad in blue cloth with a stout overcoat strapped behind his saddle. Nor is the transformation confined to externals; it extends to discipline. In the towns the police no longer spend their days lounging in cafés over brazier and narghileh; they are to be seen alert at every street corner, and I was assured by European residents, whose testimony may be taken as unprejudiced, that the cities of Turkish Arabia have never been so effectually patrolled. It is the same with the gendarmerie. Since they are regularly paid they are forbidden to squeeze a livelihood out of the peasants, and the old extortions have materi at ally diminished, to the great alleviation of the village population. In the province of Baghdad, which had been ruled by the strong hand of Nazim Pasha, most of the zaptiehs who rode with me refused to take my tip, on the ground that all bakhshish was forbidden. Many complained, however, that they had been better off under former conditions than they they are present. Before the Constitution they were nominally in receipt of 4 mejidehs a month (about 148.) together with their clothing. The salary was always in arrear and the clothing so irregularly supplied that they were obliged to supplement it out of their own resources. They now receive 8 mejidehs, docked of a small sum (2 or sum (2 or 3 piastres if I remember rightly) which goes towards the cost of their uniforms. But the real income of a zaptieh under the old régime depended largely upon his skill in coercion, whereas the man who dares not accept bribes finds it hard to keep himself, his horse, and his family, on a salary strictly limited to 8 mejidehs a month. Moreover their duties are heavier since the keeping of the peace has become more than a purely nominal function. On a few of the main roads over which I travelled, especially in the province of Baghdad, the number of mounted police had been increased. I found the guardhouses fully supplied, and in some cases (notably on the important roads near the Persian frontier, which were also under Nazim Pasha's jurisdiction) small military posts had been added between the zaptieh stations. Even so the work of the gendarmerieI commit an anachronism when I use the word zaptieh-is more than they can reasonably be expected to perform. They are constantly riding up and down their beat on escort, tax collecting, and other official duties, and one of the men with me was not far from the truth when he assured me that the internal peace of the Turkish Empire depended upon the indefatigable vigilance of the gendarme. "Effendim," said he, in conclusive proof of his argument, "that is why we are called Jon Durma. It is because they say to us 'Durma'!" Durma in Turkish means pause not. has In Still more attention been given to the army. the larger military centres model regiments have been formed and trained by Turkish officers, usually those who have themselves passed through the hands of General von der Goltz. In one case I met with a German cavalry instructor who was intrusted with the task of bringing a picked cavalry division up to European standards on the parade-ground and in barracks. It must not be forgotten that in experience of campaigning, Turkish troops, under the existing conditions of the Arab and Kurdish provinces, yield to none. A series of small punitive expeditions has kept them perpetually on the move, and I was told by a lieutenant of artillery that he had been employed unremittingly on active service ever since he had joined, two years before I came across him camping in wilderness. I did not need to ask him the reason for his activity. I knew that but for the energetic measures which had been taken by Sami Pasha in Damascus and Nazim Pasha in Baghdad I should not have crossed hundreds of miles of empty desert without an escort and in complete tranquillity. These two men had imposed a certain respect for the law even upon regions where no Turkish soldier had as yet ventured to show his face. They had established a reputation among the tribes, and they had done it by a combination of tact with force which made their achievement exceedingly creditable. Sami Pasha, Commander-inChief of the vilayet of Damas cus (he is now military inspector for the whole of Syria), is a good example of the modern soldier. He has spent several years in Germany, and speaks French and German with fluency; he is cousin to the Minister for War, Mahmud Shevket Pasha, and he brings to his task of Syrian reorganisation the advantage of being by birth an Arab. He belongs to an influential Baghdad family, and speaks exceptionally beautiful Arabic. In the autumn of 1910 he was charged with the subjection of the Druzes of the Hauran. He set about the campaign in a manner so systematic that the Druzes realised almost at once the hopelessness of resistance, and he concluded it with a leniency to which they have not been accustomed. The general who wins a victory without bloodshed, and reduces to order a proud and restless people without leaving behind him a bitter trail of resentment, is a valuable asset to the State. Among his minor triumphs, perhaps I may be allowed to count the conquest of my sympathies. I know the Druze sheikhs well, and hold many of them in high esteem. Thanks to their good will, the Hauran mountain has always been open to me, and being myself in complete security, I have rejoiced in the picturesque aspects of tribal independence, listened enthralled to the tales of raid and adventure with which the land resounded, and watched (not without admiration) the old men exercising a patriarchal authority and the young men preparing, under their direction, for battle. These things are captivating to the spirit, and I regret that I shall see them in the Mountain no more. But I recognise that no Government could continue to countenance the irritation on its frontiers which was set up by the frequent irruption of armed bands of Druzes into the settled districts, and with a small personal reservation in favour of the good old days of lawlessness, I accept the inevitable encroachments of civilisation. And since such changes must come, let them be directed by men like Sami Pasha. No less instructive was the episode which followed upon the heels of the pacification of the Hauran, the revolt of the Arab tribes near Kerak, on the Hajj railway. This revolt, of which I have already given an account in a former article, was due to an inopportune stringency on the part of the Governor of Damascus, which led the Bedouin to fear that they would be called upon to perform military service. Logically, there may be no objection to enrolling the tribes; practically, the measure would be inexpedient and in my opinion unwise, for the undisciplined Arab is not good material for the army. And here I should like to point a moral. The Governor was a strong Committee man; he was carrying out the Committee policy of Ottomanisation. He saw no reason why the tribes should not be numbered and assessed like other Ottoman subjects, and he paid no attention to the warnings of the man on the spot, the Mutesarrif of Kerak. The result was an outbreak as destructive as it was brutal, followed by punishment necessarily more severe than that which had been meted out to the Hauran. In the one case military intervention called for by a provocative policy which leaves the desert, even when momentarily subdued, uneasy and ill-disposed; in the other it was unavoidable, and the evils were minimised by good sense and moderation. But no one can count Sami Pasha as an ardent adherent of the Committee, and in this was |