Turks Distrust Kemal Pasha

The Toronto Daily Star

OCTOBER 24, 1922

CONSTANTINOPLE.—Mustapha Kemal Pasha a few months ago was regarded as a new Saladin by the Moslem world. He was to lead Islam into battle against Christianity and to spread a holy war through all the East. Now the East is beginning to distrust him. Mohammedans I have talked to say: “Kemal has betrayed us.” There is no talk now of the holy war.

This has happened because Kemal, the conquering general, has shown himself to be Kemal the businessman. He is now in something of the position Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins occupied in Ireland just before their death. That is, he is taking the tangible gains offered him, making what appear to the Pan-Islamites to be humiliating compromises, and trying to salt down his winnings—always planning to try for more when these are consolidated.

As yet his de Valera has not appeared. But if he continues to play a waiting game, there will be a de Valera sooner or later. And this possibility of a split in the Turkish forces may be the saving of the western power in the Orient.

One thing that may bring it about is the report that is current that the heads of the Turkish nationalist movement, which it should always be remembered is the Kemalist party, are many of them atheists and French Freemasons rather than good Mohammedans. That is the report you get as gossip when the Mohammedans talk politics and it is bringing about a distrust that is growing up in regard to Kemal in the minds of those people who had regarded him as a conquering Messiah for the Mohammedan peoples.

The Jews claim that Kemal is a Jew. His thin, intense, rigid face does look Jewish. But the Jews also claim Gabriele D’Annunzio and Christopher Columbus and a thousand years or so from now may even be claiming Henry Ford. At any rate that rumor about Kemal is doing him no harm and gaining very little credence; the charge of atheism is much more dangerous, for that is the one crime that any Turk is prepared to believe any other Turk is guilty of but there is no blacker crime in the Mohammedan world.

The Kemalists have a treaty and an alliance with Bolshevist Russia. They also have a treaty and something very like an alliance with France. As I explained in my last article, one of these alliances must go. Whichever alliance Turkey drops clears the air very little, because the one big aim of the Kemalists, the aim for which they are being criticized now in their own circles for not having fulfilled, the aim which does not appear in any published pacts but that everyone in the country understands is the possession of Mesopotamia. [Editor’s note: A cable dispatch received yesterday says it is understood the Turks will claim Mesopotamia at the peace conference.] Turkey is bound to have Mesopotamia. If France is her ally when she goes after it or if, having broken with France, she is backed by Russia, the situation is equally dangerous. If there is war in Mesopotamia between Great Britain and Turkey, and I give Mustapha Kemal twenty months to consolidate his present gains before he provokes such a war, it may be the blaze that will start the holy war that the Pan-Islamites are praying for to destroy all western domination in the east. France, if she is Kemal’s ally at that time, will probably remain neutral. Russia might not remain neutral.

It is oil that Kemal and company want Mesopotamia for, and it is oil that Great Britain wants to keep Mesopotamia for, so the East that is disappointed in Kemal the Saladin because he shows no inclination to plunge into a fanatical holy war may yet get their war from Kemal the businessman.