United States or Caribbean Netherlands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Jemal opened negotiations with the Government from his asylum, and was finally persuaded to leave Persia quietly. It was said that he received generous treatment in the matter of his leaving, but I am aware that he stated he had cause for complaint on this head.
The higher clergy in Christian circles, Bishops and Monsignors, were a favourite target, and among Moslems influential Sheikhs. Sometimes there was a parody of a trial; sometimes the parody was dispensed with, and when the black curtain was last raised over Syria, Jemal the Great had disposed of over eight hundred of the heads of the most influential of Syrian Arabs.
When the Turco-Teuton blade was actually drawn in Holy War I was down with enteric, which I had contracted while working in disguise among seditious circles in the slums of Old Cairo. I just convalesced in time to join the Intelligence Staff on the Canal the day before Jemal Pasha's army attacked. His German staff had everything provided for in advance with their usual thoroughness.
Jemal was already Minister of Marine as well as commander of the Syrian army, so the Emperor asked him to pay another visit to Berlin, and he has been visiting Krupp's works and German naval yards, and we shall find probably that in the future his activities will be marine rather than military, and that von Falkenhayn will have a free hand in Syria.
There had been some talk that at certain of these concentration camps there was no water supply, and he gave orders, did Jemal the Great and the Merciful, that water should be sent. A train consisting of trucks of water accordingly was despatched to one of those camps, situated in the desert, with no supply nearer than six miles, and an eye-witness describes its arrival.
Would not the great Ottomanisers temper their patriotism with a little clemency? Talaat Bey disagreed: he wanted to make a complete job of it, but Jemal the Great, fresh from his visit to Germany, supported the idea, and, in spite of Talaat's opposition, made a spectacular exhibition of clemency, in which, beyond doubt, we can trace an 'Imitatio Imperatoris, in the following manner.
It seems very probable that it was this that directed the attention of Jemal the Great to the Jewish colonies in Palestine: possibly it was merely that he was a more thorough Ottomaniser than his colleagues in Constantinople. In any case he ordered the 'deportation' of all Jews from Jaffa, Gaza, and other agricultural districts.
The German chief of the General Staff telegraphed to Berlin that the 'military considerations' on which Jemal based his deportations did not exist, and Herr Cohn in the Reichstag drew the Imperial Chancellor's attention to this.
Thus, and in no other way had the massacres of the Armenians begun, and, that there should be no mistake about it, Jemal threatened them explicitly with the fate of the Armenians. Next day Ludd was evacuated also; the evacuation of Haifa and Jerusalem was threatened, and artillery was sent to Jerusalem. There can be no doubt in fact that Jemal planned and began to carry out a massacre of all Jews.
And this brings to my recollection a matter connected with the Austrian Legation at Tehran which occurred after the deportation of Jemal-ed-Din in 1891. Mohamed Reza, the murderer of the late Shah, remained in Tehran, and continued the treasonable practices which had been originated by Jemal, even to the extent of disseminating his revolutionary opinions by means of printed papers.
Word Of The Day