Are we willing to see our skeleton in the mirror of history? How did the idea of liquidating the Ottoman Empire arise?

The national identities of all the Arab (in guise) states established on the Ottoman lands occupied after the First World War were founded on anti-Turkishness rather than on opposition to the countries that occupied them. It did not accord with the facts of history that, without harboring any hostility toward the states that were in fact occupying, exploiting and crushing them, they should regard as more distant and more hostile the Ottomans under whose rule they had lived securely and peacefully for 400 years, but this was the ideological content of the national education imposed on them: the Ottomans and the Turks had stood on their lands for 400 years as colonizers and occupiers and had left no legacy worth remembering in the name of goodness.

Of course, this narrative did not match the realities the Arab peoples lived every day; it was not a narrative that the Arab collective conscience could accept. That is why what the Arab peoples' memory held was entirely different from what their states told their children in schools and told themselves every day in newspapers and broadcasts. The Arab Spring process also meant a process in which the Arab peoples cast aside the narratives imposed on them and met the Turks.

After the people's revolution in SYRIA, it was announced in recent days that the new Syrian administration had abolished MARTYRS' DAY, officially celebrated for a hundred years, and that it would no longer be observed. Martyrs' Day was an official day commemorating the Syrian-Lebanese Arab intellectuals executed on Cemal Pasha's orders in Marjeh Square in Damascus and Burj Square in Beirut. This announcement, while saying that no credit at all was being given to the narrative behind this day, also announced that the Turks would no longer be looked at from the old Arab nationalist perspective.

THE ABOLITION OF MARTYRS' DAY IN SYRIA: THIS WAS WHAT WAS EXPECTED

It had been announced earlier too that all the narratives and discourses that formerly existed against the Turks had been purged from the Syrian national education curriculum. This is of course an expression of the new Syrian administration's friendly approach toward Turkey and the Turks. However, although the Syrians' not bringing up the activities and policies of Cemal Pasha, or of the Committee of Union and Progress officers in general, in Syria and Lebanon, so that no strife may come between them and the Turks, is a noble and positive gesture on their part, this does not change the truth of history. The truth of history is that creating insurmountable emotional distances between Arabs and Turks was a Masonic Union and Progress and Young Turk project that began long before the First World War. Of course, whose project and what kind of project they were is understood from whom the things they did ultimately served at the end of the day.

Cemal Pasha's forcing the speaking of Turkish in particular on Arab lands in Syria, his pursuing rigid centralist policies, and his hanging Arab intellectuals and notables, as if humiliating the social segments behind them, without questioning the front and back of the false intelligence that reached him, stoked Arab nationalism, which the same hands were in effect already trying to kindle as a strife against the Turks. That is, these practices were the greatest party responsible for Arab nationalism and for an Arab betrayal, if there was one. Despite this, anti-Ottoman and anti-Turkish sentiment did not find as broad a base as is supposed; on the contrary, against the role of the Ottoman officers in the Ottoman collapse, these betrayals are not even worth mentioning.

HOW WE REACHED THE POINT OF "LANDS THAT ARE NOT OURS"

We wrote before that attempts to put emotional and identity distances between Arabs and Turks had begun long before even these practices of Cemal Pasha, indeed years before the First World War. Perhaps thinking of that transformation of mentality together with the practices of Cemal Pasha and his comrades, as complementary steps, would be far more apt for understanding how the Ottomans collapsed.

Precisely in the period when the oil fields were being discovered, when instead of an Ottoman state already fallen there was a state still standing, for better or worse, with all its institutions, how did the mental transformation that required us to look at these regions as "lands that are not ours" take place, and why did it take place at precisely this time? Earlier, when these regions had no oil, when the British and French had not set their eyes on them, when governing them even required paying a greater price, they were never seen as "lands that are not ours"; is the explanation for their being seen this way now not within itself?

"THE LIQUIDATION OF THE OTTOMANS MUST NOT BE LEFT TO THE ENEMY": BUT WHY?

In earlier pieces I relayed from Falih Rıfkı Atay anecdotes about how Ottoman officers argued among themselves in the period 1906-8. One of those anecdotes contained a reference to Ali Fuat Cebesoy, Mustafa Kemal's close friend, who was always at his side in these discussion settings. In his book titled "My Classmate Atatürk: Memoirs of School and Youth and Officer Years" (İnkılap ve Aka, 1967), how the idea of "withdrawing" to the borders encompassed by the National Pact took shape back at that time is described in all its detail as follows:

"The whole weight and defense of a state of which half the population was non-Turkish and which occupied a vast area had been loaded onto the shoulders of the Turk; the Christian minorities not only secured their own interests but did not wish to miss the opportunity to unite with neighboring states of the same race. The remaining Turks and Arabs would be turned into colonies of separate states, and the elements other than Turks would side with the enemy states. In that case, would it be more correct and more beneficial to be crushed and ruined under the rubble that would result from the collapse of the body of the state, or to withdraw to a national border with a Turkish majority and defend that? I see salvation in the application of the second idea.

The meaning that emerged from these words of Mustafa Kemal was this: the work of liquidating the Ottoman Empire must not be left to our enemies, to the detriment of the Turk. The administration that the Constitutionalists, who were understood to be going to come to power at the end of a revolution, would establish must carry out the liquidation itself with a courageous decision. This is the path of salvation.

Well then, how should this liquidation be carried out? Mustafa Kemal thought as follows:

In Rumelia, Eastern and Western Thrace would remain with us. The northern borders of Edirne would be corrected at Bulgaria's expense; at a conference to be convened in Istanbul under Ottoman chairmanship, with Albania, Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, on the principle of national majority, the parts of the Ottoman Rumelian continent other than Eastern and Western Thrace would be left to the states named above. Albania would become independent, and Bosnia-Herzegovina would be divided justly between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. The islands close to the Anatolian coasts would remain in the new Turkish state, the others would be given to Greece. Our southern borders would include the provinces of Hatay, Aleppo and Mosul, and the others would be abandoned to the Arabs. There would be no change in the east and north-east of Anatolia. The Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian minorities that would remain within the new Turkey would be exchanged with the Turks left outside." (Cebesoy, pp. 116).

I know it has been a long quotation, but I think it is very important in order to reflect a historical event in all its clarity. Upon reading these statements it is of course impossible for far more questions not to crowd into the mind. So is the National Pact not a border we were compelled to accept or a will to exist, but a will to withdraw thought out and planned long in advance, an operation of "liquidation" of the Ottomans that was not to be left even to the enemies? What was there to settle with the enemies we went to war with over a liquidation that was not to be left to enemies, such that hundreds of thousands of Turkish children were martyred?

HOW IS WHAT COULD YESTERDAY BE SEEN AS BETRAYAL SEEN TODAY

Ottoman officers who were thinking of liquidating the Ottoman land as early as 1906-8, when there was not even a war around, are in fact very well aware of what such an idea corresponds to. No one should think that the idea that seems so abnormal to us today seemed normal then. Indeed, Cebesoy continues with the following explanation attributed to Mustafa Kemal:

"I know, he said. Those who do not want to see ahead will not welcome sacrificing land from the Empire; they will even accuse us of treason. In spite of this, we must ensure that our views are made into a program for after the Constitution, and we must defend it vigorously both in the General Center and among our friends."

(Cebesoy, 117.

Well then, with our present conception of homeland, with a sense of duty loyal to state and nation, whose account do we enter these analyses and a struggle that proceeds from them in, how do we interpret them? Are we willing to see our skeleton in the mirror, are we ready to face it?