Tag: Norman Stone

  • Turkey has been maligned by European public opinion – thanks to Greeks and the Liberal Party

    Turkey has been maligned by European public opinion – thanks to Greeks and the Liberal Party

    Istanbul bazaar
    Istanbul's Grand Bazaar (Photo: Getty)

    by Ed West

    I’ve been reading Norman Stone’s excellent Turkey: A Short History. It’s worth looking at because in all the debate about Turkey, Europe and its potential membership of the EU, there’s an underling historical hostility, and Stone provides an alternative narrative. So while Turkish atrocities down the years are well known, they were often the victims, too, and in many parts of south-east Europe Muslims were victims of a borderline genocide.

    Stone argues that the Turks have been much maligned in Europe, largely because of a casual anti-Turkishness started by well-placed Greeks in 19th-century London. These Greeks “were good at playing London, certainly much better than the Turks; they had a – the – Indo-European language, had shipping money, Masonic connections and, with marriages often enough in surprisingly high places, the right invitations. They were especially good at cultivating the Liberal Party.

    A century and a half of Greco-Turkish violence began in 1770 when Catherine the Great sent Russian officers to Morea, as the Peloponnese was known at the time, under the banner of Orthodox Christianity. In 1828 a clergyman proclaimed another rising, and organised a gruesome massacre of Muslims, killing the entire Muslim population of Corinth, including women and children, and even though they had agreed to leave with safe-passage organised by the British.

    The Turks in retribution hanged the Patriarch and 20 other prominent Greeks, and then massacred the inhabitants of the wrong island, Chios rather than Samos. But despite this the Turks were bound to lose the PR battle: Europe, especially Germany, was in awe to Ancient Greece, and it was easy to take sides even when the story was more complicated. The Greeks were egged on by western romantics, such as George Gordon, Lord Byron, then living in the Adriatic in his mid-30s and “running out of inspiration and money”. Byron, according to Stone, was a bit of a prat, but was nevertheless a dashing figure and started a long process “by which western writers turn up in odd places to stand on barricades and say no pasaran”.

    Being anti-Turkish became fashionable in the West, even though “when it came to atrocities, the Greeks gave as good as they got. Somehow, then and later, the Muslim victims were forgotten, and the Greeks were practised hands at image-management, whereas the Turks were not.”

    Turkey made great progress in the mid 19th century, but it all unravelled after the panic of 1873, which sent the world economy into depression. There was an uprising in Herzegovina against a crackdown on tobacco-smuggling (still a major industry today – read the brilliant McMafia), followed by trouble in Bulgaria. Bulgaria was filled with refugees from Russian wars, Tatars and Circassians, as well as the native Muslims, called Pomaks, who had lived there for centuries and had good relations with their neighbours. Relations between Circassians and Bulgarian Christians, on the other hand, were tense, and resulted in a massacre of the latter.

    This became a cause in the West, and Liberal leader William Gladstone went up and down Britain whipping up outrage, and writing a bestseller,Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. Yet the Bulgarians were no innocents, and the British ambassador in Constantinople, Austen Henry Layard, told the foreign secretary that Gladstone was lying. As Stone says: “A curious collection of would-be high-minded clergymen, professors of English history who did not know anything substantial about the area, seem to have acquired a caricature vision of the Turks, lolling around in harems, smoking hashish and ravishing virgins.”

    The worst violence was yet to come. In 1897 there was an uprising in Crete, still part of the empire, which eventually the Greeks won, but history ignores the unfortunate fact that Crete was one third Muslim. “Within a decade, Crete was in effect free, and what the world now knows as ‘ethnic cleansing’ went ahead – the Muslims cruelly pushed out, with a great deal of killing. If, two generations later, the Turks resisted very strongly over Cyprus, where there was a comparable situation, this needs to be put in context.”

    Most controversially, Stone argues that if the mass murder of Armenians in World War One was genocide, then “it could legitimately be extended to cover the fates of the millions of Muslims driven from the Balkans or the Caucasus as the Ottoman Empire receded”.

    The abiding hatred between Greeks and Turks culminated with the burning down of Smyrna, the transfer of a million and a half people in 1922 and, finally in 1955, the final pogrom that ended two and a half millennia of Greek life there.

    Greek culture, that is, for the Turks themselves are largely descended from Greeks, and Stone goes as far as to say they are the real heirs to Byzantium. “Byzantium had really been destroyed by the Italians, not the Turks who, if anything, had saved it. Ancient Greece had been destroyed by Celts, after Alexander, and then she had been destroyed all over again by Slavs in the eight century. She had been re-hellenized by the Byzantines, and Greek nationalists could never agree as to whether they were Hellenes or – clerically – Byzantines.”

    But, Stone says, the tragedy of Greco-Turkish hatred should not overshadow the achievements of the Turkish Republic, and especially its founder, Mustafa Kemal. The Turkish worship of Atatürk is strange to foreigners, but he was certainly one of the great men of the 20th century, and the achievements of secular Turkey in contrast to the failings of the rest of the Middle East are starting. And despite Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey remains “the only country between Athens and Singapore where, judging by the refugees, people actually wanted to live”.

    Turkey’s success is illustrated by this one fact. Although there are five times as many Arab as Turkish speakers, some 11,000 books are translated into Turkish every year; just 300 into Arabic.

    Ed West is a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture. He is @edwestonline on Twitter.

    blogs.telegraph.co.uk, April 17th, 2011

  • Mountain megalomaniacs

    Mountain megalomaniacs

    Norman Stone

    Published 06 November 2008

    Between Russia and the Middle East, the Caucasus is one of the world’s most diverse regions – and as recent fighting in South Ossetia and Abkhazia showed, still boiling with ethnic tensions. Norman Stone reviews a history which makes sense of this complexity

    The surrender of the Circassian leader Sheikh Shamil to the tsarist forces in 1859

    The Ghost of Freedom: a History of the Caucasus

    Charles King

    OUP, 219pp, £17.99

    A Georgian professor came to my (Turkish) university a few years ago and said: “People who live in mountains are stupid.” You probably hear such things often enough in the Caucasus, but it is not the sort of remark that you expect professors to pass. However, there is maybe something in it, a point made by the crazy loyalism of the Jacobite Highlanders of the Forty-Five, or for that matter of the Navarrese Carlists: brave and romantic, certainly, with their own codes of honour, but not very bright.

    A French sociologist, André Siegfried, developed this theme a century ago, because he had noticed that voting patterns depended on altitude; in the valleys, people got on with normal lives, but, the further up you went, the less this was true. The diet was very poor, the economy was sheep-stealing or smuggling, resentment simmered against the valley settlers, and religion of a wild sort reigned. The Caucasus also fits Siegfried’s pattern, with the difference that, the further uphill you went, the more weird languages you hit on. In Charles King’s words, “the north-east harbours the Nakh languages . . . as well as a mixed bag of disparate languages that includes Avar, Dargin and Lezgin”.

    He has missed out the Tats, who are mountain Jews, and he has mercifully missed out a great deal else, because the whole region is a kaleidoscope, and the ancient history is very complicated, with an Iberia and an Albania in shadowy existence; the Ossetians, of whom the world recently heard so much, are apparently what is left of the Alans, one of the barbarian tribes that swept through the later Roman Empire (and ended up in North Africa).

    Charles King’s great virtue is that he is a very proficient simplifier and misser-out; he writes well, and can read the languages that matter (for some reason, quite a number of the important sources are in German; Germans were especially interested in the Caucasus, and in 1918 even had plans to shift U-boats overland to the Caspian). All the important themes are here, with some interesting additions.

    King concentrates on the modern history of the Caucasus, roughly from 1700, when Russia began to take over the overlordship from Persia and the Ottoman Empire. In 1801, she annexed much of Georgia. This was relatively easy, since it is a very divided country (and the language – so difficult that even Robert Conquest, writing his biography of Stalin, found it impossible – itself sub-divides). It was also Christian, the nobility on the whole glad to come to terms with the tsar, and it could easily be reached from the sea, whereas other parts of the Caucasus, given the very mountainous and forested terrain, were much more difficult. The various Muslim natives of the northern Caucasus were then generally known as “Circassians” (the present-day Chechens are related) and they put up an extraordinary resistance to Russian penetration.

    Cossacks came in, as the 19th century went ahead, and a line of forts was established; but a ferocious tribal-religious resistance grew up, under a legendary figure, Sheikh Shamil. Combining mystical-religious inspiration with an extraordinary astuteness as to guerrilla tactics, Shamil kept the Russians pinned down for a whole generation. (King’s bibliography is very solid and useful, but he might have mentioned a classic book about this, Sabres of Paradise, by Lesley Blanch, who went on to write The Wilder Shores of Love about the erotic Orient.)

    In the event, the Russians “solved” the problem of the Circassians by mass-deportation. About 1,250,000 of them were forced out, and King is very good at describing their fate, as a third of the deportees died of disease or starvation or massacre, and the rest scattered over the Near and Middle East. Settling in eastern Anatolia, they encountered the Armenians, and bitter conflict resulted. A generation later much the same fate occurred to the Armenians of eastern Turkey. King quite rightly makes the parallel.

    Shamil was at long last captured, but the Russians treated him well, and part of his family faded into the tsarist aristocracy. This is incidentally a dimension of matters that King could have explored: the relations of Russia and Islam. He has a good chapter about the image of the Caucasus in Russian literature (Lermontov and Tolstoy especially) but both Pushkin and Dostoyevsky were fascinated by Islam, and the Russians, whether tsarist or communist (and even nowadays) were quite adept at dealing with Muslims. The Tatars have turned into rather a plus: Nureyev and Baryshnikov, whose names mean “light” and “peace” in Turkish, being a case in point.

    In fact, as the 19th century went ahead, the Caucasus was opened up, and many of the Muslims became loyal subjects of the tsar. Tiflis, the Georgian capital (why must we use these wretched “Tbilisis” and “Vilniuses” for places so well marked on the historic map?), was the seat of a viceroyalty that stretched from Kars in eastern Anatolia to the Caspian, and the railways, or the military roads, snaked ahead. Oil was struck on the Caspian side, and Baku, the capital of today’s Azerbaijan, grew up as a boom town, much of the architecture rather distinguished in late- Victorian style. One of the great mansions has been spectacularly restored as a historical museum.

    To this day, the solid architecture of Kars, now in eastern Turkey, is impressive, and though the town went through a very bad period, when the Cold War was going on, it is doing much better now, as the oil pipeline to Baku pumps away, and the old railway links are restored. Even now, despite the gruesome climate, the inhabitants of Kars are notably sharper and better-educated than those of Trabzon or Erzurum, which remained under Ottoman rule. According to Orhan Pamuk’s novel on the town, Snow, its theatre was very good, but if you needed Islamic female costumes you had to send off to Erzurum, which was (and is: the calls to prayer are frequent and deafening) very provincial-pious. In its way, Kars shows in miniature that pre-1914 period which is the great might-have-been of Russian history: 1914 aborted a period of growing prosperity even, if you like, a bourgeois revolution. The revolution of 1917 finished all of that.

    There was a pathetic episode, as the three nations of Transcaucasia – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – established a shadowy independence, even though the peoples of each were (and to some extent still are) intermingled. Baku and Tiflis had large Armenian populations, and Yerevan, the territory of today’s Armenia, was roughly half Muslim, whether Azeri or Kurdish. “Ethnic cleansing” then went ahead, the Armenians especially becoming megalomaniac, and even, as a first act on independence at Christmas 1918, invading Georgia. To this day, much of the Armenian diaspora seems never to have forgiven the west for failing to support their cause: hence these strange and persistent demands for the tragedy to be recognised as genocide. Perhaps it was, but as King shows, Armenians were not the only victims – not by any means – and it is rather to the credit of the Circassians’ (and others’) descendants that they are not demanding similar recognition of genocide from Congress or the Assemblée Nationale or Cardiff City Council or the Edinburgh City Fathers etc.

    Sovietisation of the Caucasus then happened, and it was the communists’ turn to find out just how difficult the national question was going to be: eventually, it destroyed them. Communism had a very strong appeal to begin with when it came to the national question: who, looking at the Caucasus (as with Yugoslavia) would not be desperate for anything that would stop the rise of vicious tinpot nationalism? Many stout communists, beginning with Stalin himself, came from the Caucasus, and Stalin in the end had recourse to deportation (of the Chechens and many, many other peoples) as the only solution. That created the counter-hatreds that have made post-Soviet life so difficult. The Armenians repeated their fantasy of 1918 and invaded a neighbour – Azerbaijan – in pursuit of a fantasy. They victoriously set their standards afluttering over Karabakh, with much swelling of diaspora bosoms. The effort, and the isolation it brought them, caused nothing but economic trouble to what was already a poor, land-locked little place, and the original population, three million, is now, from emigration, below two: independence, in other words, having done more damage than ever the Turks did. The Georgians had an 18th-century ruler who described himself as “The Most High King, by the Will of Our Lord King of Kings of the Abkhaz, Kartvelians, Kakhetians and Armenians and Master of All the East and the West”: more megalomania with a contemporary ring, in other words. Charles King has written a very instructive and interesting book about it all.

    Norman Stone’s most recent book is “World War One: a Short History”, now available as a Penguin paperback (£7.99)

    Source: www.newstatesman.com, 06 November 2008