BOOKS ROBERT CARVER


KEEP YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER


The Berlin-Baghdad Express: the Ottoman empire and Germany’s


bid for world power 1898-1918 Sean McMeekin ALLEN LANE, 461PP, £25 ■ Tablet Bookshop price £22.50


“T 01420 592974


he Germans are a people with a contempt for common sense,” claimed George Bernard Shaw. Anyone reading this long, com-


plex, bizarre study of Teutonic folly in Turkey and the Middle East will be hard put not to agree. We are so well versed in the serial idiocies of British colonial adventurism that it comes as a surprise to learn that the sup posedly logical and scientific Germans acted with even more stupidity. The British and French were both approached to finance the building of the Berlin-Baghdad railway in the late nineteenth century. They refused, judging it a loser. Under Kaiser Wilhelm II’s enthusiastic patronage, German banks took up the loans, and a river of gold flowed into the sands and rocky wastes of Mesopotamia and Anatolia, all to no pur- pose except to keep German factories busy producing the material required. The idea was to link the ports of Hamburg and Basra, so bypassing the Suez Canal and British con- trol, allowing German exports and influence to spread out across the East. The Kaiser developed an eccentric and contradictory pol- icy of encouraging “jihad” against the French and British to undermine their empires. “Kill all infidels – except Germans, Austrians and Hungarians”, went the slogan. Unfortunately, Muslims likely to be susceptible to such ideas were also likely to make no difference between various nationalities. There was an “easy” route from Constantinople to Baghdad, across eastern Anatolia via Lake Van, and a “difficult” one through the Taurus Mountains which involved blasting multiple tunnels many kilometres long: this had the advantage of linking up with the Mecca-Medina line, so enabling the Sultan to move troops there quickly. Also, the “easy” route might upset the Russians, as it passed near their Caucasus territories. The Germans chose the difficult route. This


suffered attacks by nomadic bandits, and pro- vided scant local supplies; virtually everything


had to be brought laboriously from north Germany. This doomed line was supposed to open in 1911. It was nowhere near complete when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1917- 18, and British forces overran the whole area from the south. Right through the First World War, when German armies were hard pressed on both Russian and French fronts, this colos- sal waste of resources continued. “Why did you join Germany?” McMeekin quotes a junior Turkish functionary asking a senior member of the government, when it was obvious all was lost. “To pay your salary,” came the reply. As McMeekin points out, the Ottoman Empire was bankrupt and collapsing on all fronts when, providentially, Germany appeared with its offers of subsidies, arms and military training. Joining Germany in 1914 meant Turkey could repudiate its massive debts to England and France, which had put the whole empire’s customs administration and revenues into their hands. For both Germany and Turkey the result was a catas- trophe in slow motion. German agents managed to raise a small revolt in Italian- occupied Libya, that the British in Egypt quickly suppressed, and a joint Turkish- German overland attack on the Suez Canal, which didn’t manage to get a single soldier across, was easily defeated and forced to retreat. The Kaiser had a team of orientalist agents which spread out to Persia, Afghanistan, Arabia, the Yemen and other places where the flag of jihad might possibly be raised against the British: in every case the potential jihadis asked the same questions: where is the money? Where are the rifles, artillery, planes, German military advisers?


Germany couldn’t supply them – because the Berlin-Baghdad railway was still stuck blasting tunnels through the Taurus Mountains. No train ever ran from Berlin to Baghdad, let alone Hamburg to Basra. It was all an absurd, ruinously costly fantasy. An American, McMeekin teaches at a


Turkish university, and the continuance of his work permit depends on him not breach- ing “anti-Turkish” defamation laws. This means the Turkish massacres of millions of Christian Armenians in 1916 has to be got round somehow. McMeekin tries to suggest that it was somehow the Germans’ fault for promoting jihad: unfortunately, the Turks have never needed outside encouragement to massacre their Christian subjects – Greeks, Bulgarians, Maronites, Romanians, Serbs and others have all suffered this fate over the centuries. It is still illegal to ring church bells in supposedly secular Turkey today, and Christians for the most part have either fled or been killed off. The excuse McMeekin puts forward, that the Armenians armed them- selves and sought Russian protection, thus inviting Turkish attack, looks at the question from the wrong end: had the Armenians been protected and not persecuted, they would not have needed to arm themselves. McMeekin is not afraid of slang or clichés, indeed every page seems to have been anno- tated by a geeky sophomore from a dud Midwest college to make it more “accessible”. I particularly liked the idea that “Ibn Saud’s followers were making waves in the desert again” – perhaps while surfing on their camels in the palm-lined wadis. “Be my brother – or I kill you,” was how the French playwright Chamfort described the Jacobins – who guil- lotined him for saying it, thus proving his point. The Ottoman and Young Turk Governments massacred their Christian minorities merely for being Christian, which is why there are virtually none left today. Having run out of Christians, they started massacring the Kurds for refusing to consider themselves brother-Turks. Purporting to be history, too much of this book is rather revisionist propaganda, which seeks to blame Armenian victims for their own persecution.


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