INDUSTRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NATIONALISM 293
party: Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Djemal Pasha, and it was these "three
Pashas" who happened to be ruling the truncated remains of the Ottoman
empire in 1914, when the long-anticipated European civil war broke out.
In Europe, it was called the Great War; to the Middle World, however, it
looked like a European civil war at first: Germany and Austria lined up
against France, Britain, and Russia, and most other European countries
soon jumped in or got dragged in unwillingly.
Muslims had no dog in this fight, but CUP leaders thought that they
might reap big benefits by joining the winning side before the fighting
ended. Like most people, they assumed the war would last no more than a
few months, because the great powers of Europe had been stockpiling "ad-
vanced" technological weapons for decades, fearsome firepower against
which nobody and nothing could possibly stand for long, so it looked as if
the war could only be a sudden bloody shootout from which the first to
fire and the last to run out of ammo would emerge as winner.
CUP strategists decided this winner would be Germany. After all, Ger-
many was the continent's mightiest industrial power, it had already
squashed the French, and it held central Europe, which meant that it could
move troops and war machines through its own territory on its superb rail
network to every battlefront. Besides, by siding with Germany, the Turks
would be fighting two of its enduring foes, Russia and Great Britain.
Eight months into the war, with Russian troops already threatening the
northern border of their empire, CUP leaders ordered the infamous De-
portation Act. Officially, this order was supposed to "relocate" the Arme-
nians living near Russia to sites deeper within the empire where they
wouldn't be able to make common cause with the Russians. To this day,
the Turkish government insists that the Deportation Act was purely a se-
curity measure necessitated by war. They admit that, yes, some killing did
take place, but a civil war was raging, so what can you expect, and besides
the violence went both ways-such is the official position from which no
Turkish government has yet budged.
And the fact is, there was a war on, the Russian were coming, some Ar-
menians were collaborating with the Russians, some Armenians did kill
some Turks, and some of the violence of 1915 early on was, it seems, a
continuation of that unstructured hatred that burst out in the 1890s as