ALBANIA AND THE YOUNG TURKS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1011, 29 December 1910, Page 5

ALBANIA AND THE YOUNG TURKS.

DEMAND FOR AUTONOMY,' ■ (By Telegraph—Press Association Copyright) Sofia, December 27. Two .thousand armed Albanians, in reply to a Turkish offer of an amnesty, make the following demands:— The use of the Albanian national language in the schools. . Removal of the, embargo on newspapers. The establishment of agricultural banks. Government officials to be Albanians.Taxes to be -'expended- in Albania alone. These constitute the first explicit' Albanian demand for autonomy.; ; , The demand is traceable to- tlio Young Turks' policy of repression and denationalisation.

NEW TYRANNY AND THE OLD.',

. To-day there is only one burden in all the news that leaks out of Macedonia (writes H. .N. Brailsford in tho "Manchester Guardian"). Nothing is altered ill: the spirit of tlio government, and the only changes are that the new tyranny is much more efficient than the pld, while the check of European supervision is removed. The Young Turks are' engaged in an attempt to create in a hurry an essentially artificial Ottoman- unity. But to unify the various races and religions of Turkey' with a noii-existent 1 Ottoman patriotism as its spiritual bond and with Turkish as the language of its culture and its official, life is at present' a crudely chimerical conception. Patriotism in the European sense of the word is not an Eastern sentiment. The loyalty of creed takes its place, and levels distinctions at once of: race and nationality. ' Among the Moslems of Turkey only the Albanians and the Arabs have tho sense for race and nationality, and it'makes them anti-Turkish. With a generatiqu of tolerance, forbearance, and education the little group of Positivists. and thinkers who control the Committee of Union and .Progress might have bred .among all races a reasoned sentiment of Imperial loyalty such as the French Canadians feel. But they have chosen to set to work to crush out- Hie sectional loyalties that stood in '' their way. They are attempting to destroy.- the nationalities precisely as the Magyars do in Hungary,'* but without even the poor excuse of a superior. culture which the Magyars can allege. A Law of Association forbids the formation of. any club or society, whether political or literary, which has a nationalist basis. The control erf the churches oVer their schools, si privilege which dates from tho concjuest, is gravely threatened. Through five centuries the Turks have failed to impose their speech i even -on the nonTurkish Moslems of the Empire as the language of culture and the medium of common intercourse. At a moment when policy dictated Hie most tactful efforts to win the confidence and the. gratitude of the non-Turkish races, they are at-' tempting to force it upon all the higher schools not merely as a subject of study but .as the medium of instruction. Nothing could display, more clearly their obscurantist hostility to every alien culture than their attempt to force the. Albanians to write their Aryan language with the Arabic script. ■ The old regime, when a race grew too strong, used to thin it by massacre. Tho Young Turks are making war up'on the Greeks by means of a boycott of their shipping and their commerce. The Bulgarians are being checked by the systematic planting of Mahometan colonies in the districts where they predominate. There are doubtless European parallels and precedents for all these. things. Cromwell "planted" in Ireland, and the next generation reaped rebellion.