A timely history of the Ottoman war that, refreshingly, places Turks, Arabs – and the Armenian genocide – at its centre
In 1989, the American historian, lawyer and oenophile David Fromkin published A Peace to End All Peace,
which showed how the Ottoman empire had spent the first world war
fighting on several fronts before collapsing along with its German
allies and bequeathing the modern Middle East.
Fromkin’s view was panoramic but anglocentric – hardly surprising
given his heavy reliance on British sources and ignorance of Middle
Eastern languages. Churchill, TE Lawrence and Lord Kitchener bestrode
events and for the first time many readers met the irrepressible amateur
Sir Mark Sykes, whose enthusiasm for the Middle East resembled that of
Toad for the motorcar – and who, in conjunction with the French colonial
officer Charles Georges-Picot, authored an infamous Anglo-French
agreement to divide up the region. Whether they realise it or not, the
militants of Islamic State know their Fromkin. When setting up their cod
caliphate in Mesopotamia last year, they announced that they were
“smashing Sykes-Picot”.
A generation on, along comes another big history of the Ottoman war.
Such is the variety of the historical terrain that it is possible to
describe the same events, with the same regard for the truth, and still
come up with something fresh. Eugene Rogan, author of The Fall of the Ottomans,
is a different kind of historian from Fromkin. Brought up in the Middle
East (his father worked for the warplane manufacturer Northrop), he is
at home in Arabic and Turkish, and is now an associate professor at St
Antony’s, Babel of the Oxford colleges.
For the planners in Whitehall the war in the Middle East was both a
distraction from the western front and an opportunity to kill off an
enfeebled empire that many thought should have been put out of its
misery decades earlier. The Ottoman “Young Turk” leaders, a trio of
authoritarian modernisers who believed in the power of Islam to unite
the Sultan-Caliph’s Muslim subjects against the Christian powers at the
gates, and the potential fifth columnists (Armenians in particular)
skulking within, had opposite ambitions. Seizing territory that had been
lost to Russia in the war of 1878; marching through Afghanistan to
India; recapturing the former Ottoman province of Egypt from the British
– all seemed possible to the excitable triumvirs, one of whom, Ismail
Enver Pasha, had pretensions to Napoleonic genius on the battlefield.
Fortunes oscillated over the next four years, as the British balanced
European priorities with their desire for a second front – further
complicated by the need to avoid aggression in the lands of Islam so
naked that it might precipitate worldwide jihad and drag in the Muslims
of British India.
Early
in the war, Enver’s attempt to smash his way into the Caucasus was
thwarted by poor equipment, blizzards (a hazard that the Pasha had
somehow failed to predict in the middle of the Anatolian winter), and
stiff Russian resistance; of 100,000 Turkish participants in the
campaign, just 18,000 returned. The Turks’ morale was restored in the
Gallipoli campaign of 1915‑16, when they rebuffed allied attempts to
reach Istanbul through the Dardanelles, as well as by their annihilation
of an Indian army force that had landed at Basra and advanced inland,
and that surrendered after a horrendous siege at Kut-al-Amara, on the
River Tigris.
Rogan deals sensibly with the main events of these campaigns, but his
book is most valuable when it tells of ordinary, non-western lives in
the war. The experiences of British and Dominion troops at Gallipoli
have been exhaustively documented; Rogan delves into the memoirs of a
Turkish medic, Ali-Riza Eti, from the Caucasian campaign – which
describe killing a Russian officer and looting his knapsack – and cites a
gleeful Ottoman newspaper report about the transfer of allegiance by
some Indian army Muslims to the cause of the caliph.
An Arab soldier in the Ottoman army, correctly (but treasonously)
predicting the empire’s dismemberment, describes the great locust
infestation of 1915, when the sky darkened over Jerusalem and the people
collected locust eggs for destruction at government depots.
Unsurprisingly, for these and other local populations, the Turkish word
for mobilisation, seferberlik, became synonymous with “crop failure, inflation, disease, famine, and death among non-combatants on an unprecedented level”.
The worst civilian suffering was experienced by the ancient Armenian
community of Anatolia, exterminated in 1915 under cover of a declared
policy of resettlement. On the whole, Rogan deals judiciously with the Armenian genocide,
avoiding reflexive Turk-bashing (a trait that mars many Armenian
accounts) while firmly rejecting Turkish claims that the death of around
1 million Armenians was but an unintended consequence of war.
The Turkish medic Corporal Eti provides an insight into hardening
Turkish feelings beforehand, as many Armenians made common cause with
the approaching Russians or stopped helping the Ottoman war effort.
“Could we [Turks and Armenians] be brothers and fellow citizens after
this war?” Eti asked himself when a dying Turkish soldier told him that
he had been abandoned by his Armenian orderly. “For my part, no.” And he
enjoyed himself tormenting his Armenian underlings.
The start of the genocide is usually dated to 24 April 1915, with the
arrest of 240 prominent Armenians in Istanbul, after which deportations
began across Anatolia. Rogan takes at face value the assertion by some
historians that alongside the resettlement directives came oral orders
for the Armenians to be killed. This is hard to prove, and alleged
written orders to this effect have been exposed as fraudulent in the
past. What can be said is that the massacres and death marches that took
place across Anatolia and Syria had the tacit approval of the central
government and foreclosed any prospect of an Armenian state in eastern
Anatolia. (The modern republic of Armenia occupies only a portion of the
historical homeland.)
The later chapters of The Fall of the Ottomans
describe the Arab revolt that, under British orchestration, drove the
Ottomans out of Palestine and Syria and prepared the way for the
hotchpotch of unsatisfactory nation states that today constitute the
Middle East. As Rogan points out, the Sykes-Picot agreement has been
unfairly scapegoated, for it was quickly superseded by other plans of
imperial conquest and benefaction – not least the Balfour Declaration of 1917,
which called for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for
the Jewish people”. But Sykes-Picot lives on, and not only in Isis
ranks, as an ineradicable symbol of western perfidy.
Compared to the western front, the Middle East was a sideshow for all
but those who called it home. Rogan has rightly put these Turks,
Armenians and Arabs at the centre of his account. With the demise of
empire arose the nation state of Turkey,
whose current president makes no secret of his pride in the imperial
regime. Across Turkey’s southern border, in Syria and Iraq, the Isis
“caliphate” is an opportunistic attempt to recreate the unified Islamic
community that evaporated with the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in
1924. Nostalgia thrives in today’s Middle East, but not much else.
• To order The Fall of the Ottomans for £20 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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