Nationalism

Russia, Armenia and the Caucuses

Today the Russian province of Erivan is the main part of the Armenian Republic but in the 1820s Turkish Muslims made up the majority of its population. The Armenian population whose descendants would live in the Armenian Republic were in the 1820s scattered over the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. In 1826, the Russians began a great forced exchange of population that was to create an Armenia in Erivan and cause great suffering to both the Turks and Armenians.

The ongoing exchange of population changed the demographic picture of the East and caused great hardship and hatred on both sides. If blame were to be assigned to anyone it would be to the Russian imperialists, but the hatred that developed was between the Muslims and the Armenians. By the end of the nineteenth century sides had been drawn... As the Russians advanced both Turks and Armenians were gradually drawn into the conflict that had its bloody conclusion in the First World War. (pp.334,5)

Greek Independence

Turks were a sizeable minority in many of the Balkan territories of the Ottoman empire. As national states successfully revolted, the presence of Turks, seen as part of the old system of Ottoman dominance, was intolerable to many. Furthermore, the nationalists saw the same potential problem as seen by the Russian imperialists -- if Turks were left behind after a revolution, might they not support an Ottoman re-conquest? The solution was obvious. A mixture of ethnic and religious hatred and practical politics sealed the fate of the Turks.

The first of the major national revolutions in the Balkans began in Greece in 1821.... When the call to revolt was heeded in Morea (southern Greece) the first act of the rebels was the slaughter of all the Turks. Peasants interested in appropriating the lands of the Turks joined in the massacres.

"[from George Finlay] In the meantime the Christian population had attacked and murdered the Mussulman population in every part of the peninsula. The towers and country homes of the Mussulmans were burned down, and their property was destroyed, in order to render the return of those who had escaped into the fortresses hopeless. From the 26th of March until Easter Sunday, which fell, in the year 1821, on the 22nd of April, it is supposed that fifteen thousand [Muslims] souls perished in cold blood and that about three thousand farmhouses or Turkish dwellings were laid waste."

By the end of the rebellion and creation of the new Greek kingdom, the Turks whose ancestors had lived in southern Greece for centuries, were dead or exiled. The governments of Europe were anxious to set up an independent Greek state, so anxious that through military action they forced the Ottoman government to capitulate. What they did not force was the repatriation of the surviving Turkish refugees. Their lands were forfeit. The Turks of southern Greece had thus been violently removed The strategy of 'removing' Turks to create a homogenous national state was an obvious success. It was to be repeated. [Ethnic cleansing, in modern parlance!] (pp327-9)

Serbia, Bulgaria and the Balkan Wars

Russian support for Serbian and Montenegran independence and expulsion of Muslim populations was to be a central component of the history of the two countries throughout the nineteenth century.

Serbia and Montenegro both coveted the Territory of Ottoman Bosnia-Herzogovina. The ottoman province of Bosnia was almost 50% Muslim in population, but had large Orthodox (Serbian) and Catholic (Croatian) minorities. In 1875, Serbs in Bosnia began a rebellion, intending to joining the province to Serbia and Montenego,... The rebellion was particularly bloody... [But] the Ottoman army was able to put down the revolt.

Bulgarian nationalists began a revolt in 1876... [which was] similar to what had occurred fifty years earlier in Greece -- in the first days of the revolt 1,000 Turkish peasants were killed in cold blood.... Because the [Ottoman] army was fighting elsewhere, the government armed local Turks, as well as Circassian and Tatar refugees who had been settled in Bulgaria, as well as Circassian and Tatar refugees who had been settled in Bulgaria, and allowed them to put down the rebels. They did so with the same ferocity the rebels had used in killing Turks. Between 3,000 and 12,000 Bulgarian Christians died before the revolt was crushed.

In 1877 and 1878 the Russians made use in Bulgaria of all the tactics they had perfected in the Caucasus. Their official agents were the Cossacks and sometimes other army units. To these were joined Bulgarian revolutionaries and Bulgarian peasants eager to seize the lands, crops and cattle of the Turks. The tactics were once again those of state terror. In a typical Turkish village, Cossacks would disarm the villagers, then surround the village and shoot all but a few who tried to escape. Hemmed in, the Turks were attacked by Bulgarians, who murdered the inhabitants... The scenes recorded by European diplomats equal any pictures of inhumanity and horror in history....

When peace came in 1878, European powers intervened and called the Congress of Berlin to set the terms of the Russian victory. The Russians were forced by the British, Germans and others who dominated the Congress to agree to let the Turkish refugees return to their homes, but they seldom did so. Many of those who tried to return were murdered or enslaved,. and many refused to leave their refugee enclaves until the Ottomans, once again, took them into settlements in Anatolia.

After Bulgaria had been detached from the Ottoman Empire and Austria had seized Bosnia and Herzogovina in 1878, the region left to the Ottoman Empire in Europe was predominantly Muslim.... In 1912, Greece Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro all declared war on the Ottoman Empire with the intention of seizing Ottoman lands. Ottoman armies were unable to defend the Muslim population and give them time to escape. The experience of the Bulgarians in cementing their national state through forced migration was a lesson well learned by the Balkan states. Their actions ensured that the majority of Muslim population would not remain after their conquest.

... Among the invading armies there was obviously a deliberate intention to ensure that the Turks would never return. Muslim houses, villages and quarters of cities were destroyed so that the refugees would have nothing to which they could return. ... Muslim refugees fled on foot to the mountains, the sea coast and if they could make it to Istanbul and Anatolia.

They were joined by Jews, equally persecuted by the invaders. Great numbers dies on the journey; European observers estimated that half the refugees from many areas never reached sanctuary.... A detailed Ottoman count of the refugees who were settled in the Empire after the wars showed 413,000 survivors. Many had first passed through refugee camps where disease took a terrible toll. In the great camp outside Istanbul, for example, cholera broke out. In other camps, typhus and typhoid were widespread.

As the Ottoman Empire came to the period of the First World War, it had already suffered greater blows than any other combatants were to suffer in the Great War. Beginning at the end of the 18th century, the Ottoman Empire was forced to absorb millions of refugees.... Then refugees came just as the Ottomans were attempting to reform. It was a time at which all resources should have been given over to new schools, new industries and all the needs of modernization. Instead, government resources went to settling refugees... [and] into defending the Empire in losing battles....

Nationalism and Zionism

The Zionism that was responsible for most of the Jewish immigration [to Palestine] is a complex movement... based [in part] on the Old Testament from which is derived the basic belief that the Jews are a separate and exclusive people chosen by their God to recover the land of Canaan (Palestine) as patrimony from their ancestors, the ancient Israelites. Their history duty and destiny is to occupy and settle this land... Zionism [therefore] involved colonialism, a nationalism that because of the historical circumstances of its appearance, manifested itself as colonialism. Reacting to the discrimination persecution and economic hardships experienced in Europe, the Zionists propagated the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.... But Palestine already was inhabited by a stable Arab population that numbered about 500,000 in the mid-nineteenth century ...

The colonialist component of Zionism was articulated from the very beginning by pioneers such as Moses Hess (1812-75) and Theodore Herzl (1860-1904). Living during the golden age of European imperialism, they naturally sought Great Power support and projections by depicting a Jewish Palestine as a strategic link in overseas colonial enterprise.

If the Jews had appeared in Palestine half a century earlier, they might have achieved their "return" with relatively little opposition. In 1857, the Ottoman government issued a settlement decree offering immigrants free land, religious freedom and exemption from taxes and military service for six years in the European provinces and for twelve years in the Asian. Ottoman representatives abroad were swamped with inquiries from prospective immigrants all over Europe and even from the United States. But Jewish applicants were conspicuous by their absence, [it is believed that reforms in Russia held out hope for Jews and they decided to stay or indeed, emigrate to Russia].

[But] by the turn of the century, when pogroms and economic pressures were forcing Europe's Jews to think of a Palestinian homeland, conditions in the Middle East had completely changed. By that time the authorities had no desire to foster another disaffected minority group and therefore would accept Jewish immigration in any province except Palestine. More important, the virus of nationalism had spread among the Arabs during the intervening decades, so that a belated Jewish colonialism had to cope with a simultaneous Arab national awakening. Contrary to popular belief, the few Jewish immigrants before WWI were not welcomed or accepted by Local Arabs. "The Turks and Arabs", writes N. Mandel, quickly "took active cognizance of the Jews who came to Palestine motivate by nationalist ideas from 1882 onwards and ... by 1914 the 'Zionist question' had become a ramified issue of some importance in Ottoman politics. [Stavrianos, pp.540-45]