By the time World War I began, the designation of the Ottoman Empire as “the sick man of Europe” was already old hat. The empire had been dying for decades and the various peoples that made it up were mutating into “nations” and tearing off pieces of its battered incarnation. Greece, Serbia, Armenia, Egypt and the Arabs of the Levant besieged the old Ottoman fortress which, defeated in the Crimea and in the two Balkan wars at the beginning of the 20th century, barely preserved the remains of its former splendor. The empire that had made Europe tremble and that could only be contained at the gates of Vienna seemed doomed to imminent decomposition.
The Western powers had been waiting for the sinking for a long time and the French, English and German armies were struggling to consolidate areas of influence for the future. Meanwhile, in Istanbul, the cruel government of the Young Turks through the only political party in the empire – the Committee of Union and Progress – exacerbated Turkish nationalism and xenophobia against minorities, especially Greeks and Armenians, branded as traitors and fifth columnists.
However, in the Great War, Muslim, Christian and Jewish citizens showed their common willingness to fight and die in what the sultan's government called jihad against the enemies of Islam. It is one of the issues that Ryan Gingeras draws attention to in his book, that of the resilience of the Ottoman state and the surprising durability of its legitimacy in the eyes of its diverse citizenry.
Despite a victory that had mythical resonances that it still maintains – that of Gallipoli, fought in the Dardanelles in 1915 – the war was an unprecedented catastrophe and the Ottoman Empire admitted its defeat on October 30, 1918. British and French troops occupied Istanbul and the CUP, after years of inciting the murder of other ethnic groups and with blood on its hands from the Armenian genocide of 1915, agreed to dissolve as the grand vizier, the country's main civil position, resigned.
The Istanbul parliament described this genocide as a crime and demanded accountability from its instigators. Many of them fled the country, some were sentenced to death and executed, and for a long time having belonged to the Young Turks was something that had to be renounced or carefully hidden. Also at the end of 1918, the peace treaty negotiations were inaugurated that would decide the fate of the country and a period of conflict marked by what Gingeras calls “indescribable”, “apocalyptic” violence, which spread throughout Anatolia.
In this context of defeat and humiliation, the figure of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk appeared, a senior officer who was determined to resume the war against the allies in view of the demands of the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which divided Ottoman territory, and who He led the movement that ended up overthrowing the sultan. By the way, the Treaty of Sèvres was followed by another even worse one, that of Lausanne in 1923, which set a horrible precedent: it was the first to validate “collective population transfers” and, therefore, displacements in the entire history of international law. forced from the Turks residing in Greece and the Greeks from Turkey.
In that period 1921-1923 there was the definitive dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Republic of Turkey at the hands of Atatürk. Sultan Mehmed VI left Istanbul on November 17, 1922 and died in exile, in the Italian city of San Remo without having been able to set foot in his country again and without a cent. Gingeras gives an account of all this in this rigorous and well-documented essay that works and interests and opens surprising views on the past and present of the great neighbor of the eastern Mediterranean.
Ryan Gingeras The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire
Galaxia Gutenberg 359 pages 25.65 euros
