'The Turkish and Pan-Turkish Ideal by Tekin Alp' [‎18r] (40/58)

33
following extracts from an article in the Mercure de France of August 16,
1912 :
“ The Ottoman Turks—the real owners of the Empires—form an
element in the population which is ignored and forgotten in its own
country. The Turks, who belong to the Turkoman race, have remarkably
good traits of character, including uprightness, honesty, industry,
modesty, and .patience. They struggle^in vain with the hard soil of
Anatolia Peninsula that forms most of modern-day Turkey. , and do. not even succeed in making enough to live on. They
are everlasting slaves and prisoners, who waste their best strength in
hard compulsory labour, while their very blood is sucked dry by the tax
farmers. No one protects them. They form the one element of the
people which has filled the barracks and garrisons of the Empire for
centuries past. Its blood has watered the furrows of the Macedonian
fields, and has drenched the trackless plains of Hauran and Yemen.
A pitiless despotism snatches the sons of this race, while still almost
children, from their native soil, and banishes them to the distant barracks
and garrisons on the frontiers of the Empire. They are left there for
gotten—five, ten, fifteen years pass, and the discharge order never comes.
If the poor man who has become a stranger to his home and his work has
the good fortune to be sent home he has no more energy or strength
left to work. His father and mother have probably died in his absence,
and he sees poverty staring him in the face. The field his father left him
has been sold by the hard-hearted tax farmers. Misery such as this is
common in the villages on the Anatolian plain and in the gorges of
Rumelia. Every kind of misfortune assails them—poverty, pestilence,
and the greatest evil of ancient Turkey, the horrors of spying and
suspicion. The best sons of the race are in prison or banished. There
are no newspapers worth mentioning, no clubs or unions. The schools
only exist to teach devotion to the authorities. The Turkish people
seem doomed to everlasting slavery.
“ On the other hand, the Christian population of Turkey has been
consistently progressing, partly by means of privileges too easily granted,
and partly by their own initiative, and they are ousting the real owners
of the country more and more from their heritage. Two nations, pressing
upon them from either side, have succeeded in driving the old ‘ conquerors ’
more and more into the interior of the country. The Greeks from the sea
and the islands have taken possession of the harbours and coast towns of
Anatolia Peninsula that forms most of modern-day Turkey. , and pressed the Turks further and further back into the salt
steppes of the interior. The Armenians, who, thanks to their friendly
relations with England, have become very rich, have cut off their retreat.
The Turk is such a miserable wretch that he has long forgotten the plains
of Turania, without even having been able to assure his footing in the
country he has conquered. He was so convinced of his own power that
he omitted to build bridges between his old and new homes, bridges
between the different conquered territories. For centuries the conquerors
have lived scattered over huge districts without any communication