CHAPTER 26
Mustafa Kemal (6)
Far away from Eskibahçe, past the Dodekanissos and across the Aegean Sea, it is 1907, and Mustafa Kemal is at last back in Salonika, the town of his birth. He finds to his frustration and irritation that his exile in Damascus has spoiled his chances of becoming a leader of the revolutionaries. There is a new Committee of Union and Progress, consisting of people like Tâlat Bey, Çemal and Ali Fethi. They meet in Masonic secrecy, swear oaths on swords and the Koran, and will one day soon become widely known as “The Young Turks.” They are suspicious of Mustafa Kemal, who finds all the hocus-pocus very tedious, and whose Fatherland and Freedom Society becomes absorbed into the new entity. He spends his time inspecting the Macedonian railways, excluded from the seat of action.
The Sultan sends two commissions to deal with the Committee of Union and Progress, and the leader of the first is shot and wounded. The second apparently seeks conciliation, but there is a young and dashing major who, instead of going to Istanbul to parley, takes his men to the hills. This man is Enver, who is shortly joined by another officer who is an expert in guerrilla warfare. The revolution is openly proclaimed at last, and the Sultan sends troops to deal with it, but they join the revolution instead. The Sultan is forced to restore the old liberal constitution of 1876. The handsome Enver appears on the balcony of the Olympus Palace Hotel, and proclaims the new policy of Ottomanism. There will be no more special privileges for particular ethnic and religious groups, and from now on all obligations and rights are the same for everybody. There is euphoria in Salonika. Rabbis and imams embrace, political prisoners emerge, astonished, into the light. Agents of the Sultan are murdered, and the bodies are spat upon in the streets.
Enver is just the sort of man that Kemal dislikes. He is a good and respectable Muslim who neither smokes nor drinks, and he is vain and punctilious. Kemal is also envious of his leadership and success, and sees no good coming from it. He sees that Enver is a fine officer in the field, but detects no other quality to redeem him. Mustafa Kemal chafes because he is keenly aware of his own superiority.
The revolution is a half-baked affair. It has no real plan and no real ideology beyond the intention to restore the empire to its previous strength. The revolutionaries do not comprehend the power and seduction of the new nationalisms. The Christians are not necessarily pleased at having earned the right to do compulsory military service and become free Ottoman citizens, and very soon the Young Turks find that they have accelerated the disintegration of the empire instead of arresting it. Bulgaria declares independence. Crete declares union with Greece. Austria illegally and opportunistically annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina, thereby setting in train the dismal events that will distort the entire course of European history for more than a hundred years.
Mustafa Kemal sees the chaos, and is more than disgruntled. In the Kristal café, in the White Tower café, in the Olympus café, he complains loudly and bitterly to his brother officers. The Committee of Union and Progress decides to pack him off to Tripoli in order to sort out some local business and Kemal reluctantly agrees to go.
On the way he disembarks in Sicily, and the local children bombard him with lemon peel and mock his Ottoman fez. He suddenly sees for the first time that the fez epitomises all that makes the empire ridiculous in the eyes of foreigners, and he begins to conceive a hatred of it. One day, when he is dictator of Turkey, he will outlaw it in a fit of illiberality.
In Tripoli, Mustafa Kemal has to deal both with fractious Arabs and old-fashioned Ottomans who do not acknowledge the authority of the CUP. He browbeats the local pasha, and, characteristically and unfailingly heroic, he goes to the courtyard of a mosque that is the headquarters of Arabs who are planning to abduct him. He addresses the hostile crowds and ladles patriotism and religion over their heads. He threatens them implicitly by emphasising the power of the CUP, but comforts them by promising that this power is for their protection only.
Mustafa Kemal impresses a sceptical Arab sheikh by tearing up his own papers of accreditation, announcing that his own word is enough and that he has no need of papers, whereupon the sheikh releases from prison the three previous emissaries who had mistakenly relied too heavily upon their own such letters.
In Benghazi, Sheikh Mansour has overborne the local Ottoman authorities, and Mustafa Kemal thinks up a ruse to defeat him. He gathers the local troops together in the barracks, and proposes to the officers that he should lead them in an exercise. He tells them that they are to imagine that they are an infantry regiment marching to confront an enemy upon the left, but which then receives notice to wheel about and face an enemy on the right.
In this way, and without anyone suspecting it in advance, Mustafa Kemal surrounds the house of Sheikh Mansour, who is obliged to send out an emissary with a white flag, and a parley is set up. Mustafa Kemal lectures him upon the nature and intentions of the CUP, and in his turn the sheikh gets Mustafa Kemal to swear upon the Koran that he will not harm the Sultan, the Lord Caliph. It is doubtful in the extreme that Mustafa Kemal would have invested any great seriousness in a Koranic oath, but nonetheless honour is satisfied and order is restored. Mustafa Kemal, his mission entirely accomplished, returns in triumph to Salonika, only to find that the revolution has run aground.