The Most Violent Decade (1912-1922) and Kemalism

A decisive new factor for the politics of domestic violence under the CUP in the 1910s was the interplay of domestic jihad with a new, radical Turkism that the dictatorial CUP leadership adopted on the eve of and during the First World War.

Gokalp was the main prophet of an Islamist Turkism, while his friend Mehmed Talaat (Pasha) was Istanbul's main political leader in the 1910s. In contrast to their ideology and politics of war and violence after 1913, the horizon of democratic equality, multicultural peace and pragmatic collabora­tion had emerged as a more hopeful goal during the Ottoman spring after the Young Turk Revolution of July 1908. However, just a few years later, this vision turned to bloody dystopia. Political infighting and Talaat's disillusion with parliamentarism, continued territorial losses and Europe's unfriendly diplomacy, all played a role in the CUP's turn to war and violence. (The European Powers did not actively maintain Ottoman integrity despite the promises of the Berlin Treaty of 1878 that had determined the parameters of the late Ottoman Empire.) Talaat and his friends then hastily abandoned the constitutional ideals of 1908 that had valorised hitherto discriminated groups and made the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (the main Armenian party) their political ally.

The dynamics of the Ottoman descent into violence started with the Balkan Wars that coincided with the re-emergence of the conflict about the reforms for eastern Asia Minor in 1912-14, based on the Berlin Treaty. The political atmosphere made it easy for detractors of internationally monitored reforms to denounce egalitarian reforms as an anti-Ottoman and anti-Sunni plot. Ottoman war dynamics became a factor for larger Europe's cataclysm in July 1914. It culminated in the genocide of 1915-16 and ended provisionally when the war for Asia Minor was decided in 1922. Seen from Istanbul, Italy's invasion of Ottoman Libya in the autumn of 1911 had already polarised the political situation in accordance with the old lines of Europe versus the Orient, and Christians against Muslims. The First Balkan War in autumn 1912 entrenched these lines even more. Heavy losses in this war made the CUP leadership resentful against Christians in general, both domestically and internationally. Yet, importantly, Talaat's acceptance of war and domestic polarisation had been his choice on the eve of the First Balkan War in September and early October 1912. The weak performance of the liberal­conservative cabinet in power during the war played into the hands of the future putschists.

In 1913, the CUP installed the first single-party regime in the twentieth century. Domestically at a nadir after an anti-CUP coup had temporarily succeeded in July 1912, they embraced the hazardous politics of war and a putsch. They managed to establish their regime after a coup in January 1913. In 1914, they started to combine the politics of imperial restoration and expansion with comprehensive demographic engineering and a right-wing­revolutionary transformation of society. Establishing a Muslim war ummah, the CUP secured a safe support base for its radical regime. Unprecedented in Levantine history, public domestic violence, organised or instigated by authorities, killed over a million Armenians and Assyrians in 1915-16.

In 1922, the results of an extremely violent decade favoured radical Turkish nationalism. This brand of Turkish nationalism is called Kemalism after the former CUP general, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who became the decisive leader after 1918. Gokalpian Turkism then turned from Talaat to the new leader and the Ankara-based Republic, and rapidly dominated after 1923. It repudiated political Islam, and instead emphasised Gokalp's ethno-nationalist tenets. However, Kemal's decisive War of (Turkish-Muslim) Independence in 1919-22 was fought together with Sunni Kurds in the name of Islam. The early Kemalist movement cooperated with late Ottoman political Islam to win this war for Asia Minor, before rejecting it in favour of a radical and exclusive Turkism. The brusque rejection of political Islam won Turkey the sympathy of the West, and to a lesser degree also of Soviet Russia, which had already been a crucial ally during the war for Asia Minor. Yet the break suppressed any serious soul-searching regarding previous jihad and genocide. Decades later, this unclarified history facilitated the return of Islamism. Attempts at making a break with the experience of massive domestic vio­lence, including trials against perpetrators and a few attempts at public ostracism, failed within two years after 1918.

Those responsible for the anti-Christian violence in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire remained therefore largely in power at all levels of the administration in post-Ottoman Turkey, except at the head of the state itself. The perpetrators, their successors and their spokesmen in the new capital Ankara continued over decades to rationalise the use of violence by the CUP as mainly self-defence, in line with CUP propaganda.

Talaat and most CUP Central Committee members understood the First World War as a jihad for the sake of Turkey's power.^[453] For them, the violence perpetrated between 1911 and 1922 was in defence of the Islamic empire and the state and for a last sovereign resort for Turkish-speaking Muslims in Asia Minor. It was also expansionist, combining a seemingly constitutional parlia­mentary rule with an aggressive party dictatorship inspired by Gokalp's pan-Turkism. Gokalp's pan-Turkism had been built on Islam's supposed supremacy. Islam-sceptical Kemalism attempted to found its authority on a pseudo-scientific ‘Turkish History Thesis' that pretended that ethno- historical Turkdom was the cradle of human language and civilisation and had been present in Anatolia since prehistoric times. The socio-political conclusion was similar: Turkdom was supreme, and non-Turks, a fortiori non-Muslims, had no claim on and no equal rights in Anatolia.

Despite defeat in the First World War, the main players saw the violent removal of Christians as a crucial achievement and the Treaty of Lausanne as a diplomatic triumph, at least in respect to the genocide. Against the back­drop of such successful violence, the CUP lastingly prefigured the domestic patterns and behaviour of various post-Ottoman power players, namely the Kemalist single-party regime and the Arab Baath parties. Also, the reverse conversion of AKP luminaries in Ankara from fresh reform-oriented demo­crats in the 2000s to war-prone, national-Islamist authoritarians under Erdogan in the 2010s displays a political behaviour that is familiar from the early 1910s.

This perpetuation of patterns is true, although Kemalism abstained from imperial ambitions and repressed political Islam until the end of the 1990s. It did this, however, only insofar as it feared Islamic competition in the politico- cultural arena, not when it conformed to common concepts of the enemy. Islamism developed in the second half of the twentieth century into the hegemonic ideology in the Levant (and the Islamic world in general), when the superficially secular post-Ottoman regimes began to show major short­comings. Kemalist actors reared up forcefully a last time in the military putsch of September 1980, when violence and mass imprisonments targeted above all left-wing and Kurdish militants. This intervention did not stop the return of political Islam in Turkey. On the contrary, a semi-official Turkish- Islamic synthesis resulted, and compulsory Islamic instruction was intro­duced in public schools after the coup.

As a comparatively strong and messianic ideology based both on Gokalp’s Turkism and a cult of Ataturk, Kemalism had inspired a state whose structure was, however, no less at risk than that of other post-Ottoman states, because it too lacked a true social contract. Turkey was caught up by Islamism comparatively late, after its role as a Middle Eastern cornerstone of NATO in the Cold War had expired and a promising road to real democracy had been usurped by authoritarianism. The ‘religious turn’, or the emergence of religion on the political surface, was a global phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. Besides Islam in the Middle East, we also saw the rise of the religious right in the United States, a religious shift in post-1967 Israel, and an explicit eschatological reading of Zionism by Jews and Christians. In Europe, and partly also in Turkey, this religious turn remained long hidden in the shadow of ideological Cold War conflicts.

It is true that Turkey’s re-intensified interaction with the European Union, which had condemned the 1980 putsch and recognised the Armenian geno­cide, opened new windows of opportunity and access to new instruments of conflict resolution from 2000 on.

Conclusion

From a population of over 15 million, Asia Minor lost more than 6 million inhabitants in 1914-23, two-thirds of them Christians, and half of them killed. The organisers of the latter's removal gave actors of domestic jihad ample opportunity to kill, rob and rape. Of about 4 million deaths in the Ottoman First World War, less than 800,000 were soldiers. Domestic death and killing caused far more fatalities than military violence at the fronts. Rebellions or domestic war in the inter­war period continued to kill tens of thousands in the former Ottoman world, the majority of them Kurdish civilians.

The 1878 Berlin Treaty was replaced in 1923 by the even more fundamental Lausanne Treaty, which is still valid today in its main points, but, in real terms, the post-Ottoman world has never come to rest. After the Second World War, Israel's wars took centre stage. Since the late 1970s, interstate and domestic wars such as the Iran-Iraq war, the anti-Kurdish Anfal campaign, the Lebanese civil war, the Kurdish guerrilla wars in Turkey, the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the US-invasion and its long aftermath in Iraq, the civil war in Syria and the war in Yemen have killed millions of people and forcibly removed many more. In contrast to the Cold War-related mass violence in South-East Asia, unrest has increased in the Levant since the late twentieth century. In both areas, it has been openly marked by ethno-religious refer­ences. Jihad played a major role.

Since 1945, there has been an incomparably higher death toll through war and violence in the post-Ottoman world than in continental Europe, includ­ing in war-torn former Yugoslavia (Europe's own post-Ottoman region). Unsettled issues and a lack of social contracts have kept this vast expanse of human geography in a state of violent unrest since the cataclysm of the 1910s. Jihad - domestically even more than towards the exterior - is a crucial aspect of this violence. Kemalism failed in overcoming Islamism, as it pretended, but acted like an ersatz Islam, perpetuating former patterns of imperially biased, leader-centred politics that favoured (in this case, urban) Turkish-speaking Sunnis.

Recent research on violence, inspired by the social sciences, has empha­sised social, political, economic and spatial factors in explanations of violence and helped deconstruct monolithic ideas on polarisation. Yet it has long failed to address certain significant elements. The genocide of 1915, a topic dis­missed by Western academia until the end of the twentieth century, is the most striking among them, and its long-term consequences still wait to be explored. Religion is another. Twentieth-century scholarship in general missed analysing and measuring the resilience and power of prophetic religion. Historical developments in the Levant went against the grain of disciplines rooted in Western Enlightenment. Sectarian resurgence and vio­lence since the 1960s, in particular the civil war in Lebanon and the Islamic revolution in Iran, have taken Cold War-focused Western intellectuals and strategists by surprise.

Because ethno-religious differences accompany categorical eschatological claims, social contracts resulting from a pragmatic negotiation, based on equality, are almost impossible in the Levant. This is manifest in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Israel-Palestine and the whole former Ottoman world. Myths of power, identity and hierarchies hold sway in politico-religious discourses and practices. Research must expose them and their resilience. Among the strongest imperial myths are those such as Islamist, (pan-)Turkist and neo- Ottomanist that refer to the Ottoman sultanate-caliphate, which is the most durable Islamic empire in history. Among the strongest religious myths is apocalyptic Wahhabism, whose birth goes back to the eighteenth century, when it reacted against an Ottoman capital seen as weak, corrupt, and under European influence. Referring to the Koranic society of the seventh century and holy scriptures, it has developed a violent global apocalypticism over recent decades. Due to the Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran, Shiism also strongly displays eschatology on the surface of its political discourse. The historico-religious lines dividing Shiism from Wahhabite or neo-Ottomanist Islamisms, however, are deep and have determined alliances on the battle­fields in Syria in the 2010s.

Current Sunni and Shiite apocalypticisms cannot be understood without considering interaction with the West. Not only do they react against American intervention and presence in the Middle East, but they are also influenced by products such as the films, books, pamphlets and games of a late twentieth-century industry of apocalypticism in the USA. This industry sold and sells pre-millennialist representations of violence along religious lines. Militant Islam in the spirit of ISIS claims to hasten by war Mahdi- Messiah Jesus' second coming and his establishment of a global Muslim rule, and this is a pattern of Sunni eschatology of which many Christians are not aware. Although the ‘millennium' or Kingdom of Jesus cannot be forced by violence or conquest in most Christian traditions, sales-oriented pre- millennialist fantasy made its arrival a spectacle of unavoidable mass killing. Shiite eschatology displays faith in its own militancy and in Jesus' coming at the side of the Mahdi, the revealed hidden Imam. Though more flexible in general, Shiite Mahdism in the militant form of Iran's Islamic Revolution mirrors Sunni eschatology in its emphasis on global Muslim conquest and superiority, and marginalises Sufi or liberal interpretations.

Taking seriously the political weight of legacies, but refusing essentialism, this chapter has explored patterns of violence, particularly domestic jihad, rooted in ethno-religious inequality and conflicting eschatology. Often con­trolled by or going in tandem with state power, such patterns exist to this day in the post-Ottoman Levant. They encompass demographic engineering, genocide, annihilating urban warfare, serial suicide attacks, pogroms, med­iatised atrocities, and war in the name of religion and eschatology. This chapter has understood the persistence of violence and brutalisation of societies as a lack of effective social contracts. It has dealt with the failure of attempts to achieve them in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman Levant. It has argued that negotiating them is nowhere more demanding than in a geography where the historical claims of all revealed monotheisms meet, and religious mobilisation is rewarded. Given the force of diverging eschatol­ogies claiming supremacy for their groups and projecting the future in absolute terms, it is hard to see an end to polarisation in the present Levant.