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In other words, the Turks were given unequivocally to understand that, while their rule over non-Turkish regions like the Arab provinces must cease, the Turkish regions of the empire were not to pass under alien rule, but were to form a Turkish national state.
If they are resolved to clear their Empire of every non-Turkish element, that is only a step towards extending it over everything Turkish that lies outside. The Turks have not only aliens to get rid of, but an irredenta to win. "The Ottoman Turks," Tekin Alp reminds his readers, "now only represent a tenth of the whole Turkish nation.
The Sultan of Turkey, as the ruler of Mecca, is looked up to by the Sunni or orthodox Mahomedans in all lands as the spiritual head of their Church. Though rulers of the Hejaz, the Turks were not at one with the local population. These are Arabs, and to them the Turkish rule was as unpopular as to most other non-Turkish subjects of that decaying Empire.
Whatever frontiers a Turkish National State may receive, they cannot be drawn without including non-Turkish elements racial geography is nowhere very simple between Bagdad and Vienna and in view of what the Turk's racial minorities have suffered during the War and before it, those left to him hereafter must be safeguarded by stringent guarantees far more stringent than the Capitulations, which, for that matter, protected none but the nationals of foreign Powers.
At the Committee's congress in 1909 the Nationalists were shouted down with the cry: "Our goal is organisation and nothing else ." But Young Turkish ideals rapidly narrowed. Liberalism gave way to Panislamism, Panislamism to Panturanianism, and the "Ottoman State Idea" changed from "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" to the Turkification of non-Turkish nationalities by force.
An idol of 'Pan-Turkism' was erected, and all non-Turkish elements in the population were subjected to the harshest measures. The rigorous action which this policy prescribed against the Albanians, who were mostly Mohammedans and had been thorough loyalists till then, led to the loss of almost the whole of European Turkey.
"All Ottomans are not Turks," he said, "and if the Empire were to be considered purely Turkish, then all the non-Turkish elements would be foreign to it, instead of being living members of the political body known as the Ottoman Empire, fighting the common fight for it and for Islam."
The Prime Minister cites among others also the example of Smyrna where, he says, we had a most careful investigation by a very impartial committee in the whole of the question of Smyrna and it was found that considerable majority was non-Turkish. Who will believe the one-sided "impartial committee's" investigations until it is disproved that thousands of Musselmans have been murdered and hundreds of thousands have been driven away from their hearths and homes?
Their plan was to get rid of all the non-Turkish peoples which separate the Turks of Anatolia from the Turks of Baku and Azerbaijan, and this was the second motive of the Armenian deportations, which they put in hand a month or two after their military projects had failed. The Turkish Irredentists propose, in fact, to gain their ends by bloodshed and terrorism.
Since 1908, then, the fate of Turkey has passed from the control of the Turk and is being decided by an alien clique of infidels, renegades, political freemasons and Jews, in whose hands the Caliph is a helpless tool, and to whom the teachings of Christ and of Mohammed are mere worn-out superstitions. In fact, the Committee is in its essence non-Turkish and non-Moslem.
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