The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—TurkeyHogarth, D. G. (David George)
History
The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey
Hogarth, D. G. (David George)
Balkan Peninsula -- History; Eastern question (Balkan)
Such an occupation, however, would probably not be seriously resisted
or subsequently rebelled against by the Moslem majority in Asia Minor,
supposing Osmanli armaments to have been crushed. The Anatolian
population is a sober, labouring peasantry, essentially agricultural
and wedded to the soil. The levies for Yemen and Europe, which have
gone far to deplete and exhaust it of recent years, were composed of
men who fought to order and without imagination, steadily and
faithfully, as their fathers had fought. They have no lust for war, no
Arabian tradition of fighting for its own sake, and little, if any,
fanaticism. Attempts to inspire Anatolian troops with religious rage in
the Balkan War were failures. They were asked to fight in too modern a
way under too many Teutonic officers. The result illustrated a prophecy
ascribed to Ghasri Mukhtar Pasha. When German instructors were first
introduced into Turkey, he foretold that they would be the end of the
Ottoman army. No, these Anatolians desire nothing better than to follow
their plough-oxen, and live their common village life, under any master
who will let them be.
Elements of the Christian minority, however, Armenian and Greek, would
give trouble with their developed ideas of nationality and
irrepressible tendency to ‘Europize’. They would present, indeed,
problems of which at present one cannot foresee the solution. It seems
inevitable that an autonomous Armenia, like an autonomous Poland, must
be constituted ere long; but where? There is no geographical unit of
the Ottoman area in which Armenians are the majority. If they cluster
more thickly in the vilayets of Angora, Sivas, Erzerum, Kharput, and
Van, i.e. in easternmost Asia Minor, than elsewhere, and form a village
people of the soil, they are consistently a minority in any large
administrative district. Numerous, too, in the trans-Tauric vilayets of
Adana and Aleppo, the seat of their most recent independence, they are
townsmen in the main, and not an essential element of the agricultural
population. Even if a considerable proportion of the Armenians, now
dispersed through towns of western Asia Minor and in Constantinople,
could be induced to concentrate in a reconstituted Armenia (which is
doubtful, seeing how addicted they are to general commerce and what may
be called parasitic life), they could not fill out both the Greater and
the Lesser Armenias of history, in sufficient strength to overbear the
Osmanli and Kurdish elements. The widest area which might he
constituted an autonomous Armenia with good prospect of
self-sufficiency would be the present Russian province, where the
head-quarters of the national religion lie, with the addition of the
provinces of Erzerum, Van, and Kharput.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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