'File F/1 Criminal Intelligence, Circular Memoranda: Pan-Islamism' [‎25r] (49/68)

Muliammadan gentlemen of fortune, who had taken a wide part in the social
and literary activities of Beirut. Some of them were delicate poets, others
encyclopaBdists, who had striven for a revival of Arabic letters. One had
been the leader of the Committee which by constitutional means had
urge the Turkish Government to grant to the more enlightened parts of Syria
some measure of devolution; that the language of the people might be spokeu
in their courts; that their functionaries might be people of their own race, and
that a proportion at least of their taxes might be spent locally. For asking for
this in the Ottoman Parliament he was hanged and his friends were hanged,
because they were his friends. Such was the fate of Abdul Kerim El Khalil.
Next Jemal broke open the seals of the American Consulate-General upon
the archives of the French Consulate at Beirut, and abstracted the documents.
Seeing that there were no Jews incriminated the American Government failed
to protest till six months later, when all the harm the documents could do had
been done.
With the materials so obtained Jemal Pasha An Ottoman title used after the names of certain provincial governors, high-ranking officials and military commanders. began a new campaign. He
announced that they incriminated a large number of the leading men in
Damascus and elsewhere, and had them thrown into prison, and their families
deported to non-Arab provinces. He then condemned to death about 30 of
them, and hanged them in public : among them the Senator Abdul Hamid-
el-Zahrawi and many others received sentences of imprisonment and deport
ation. He then published a selection from the documents which he had
seized. The publication of these excerpts was an amazing piece of effrontery,
for they incriminated only one of the condemned, Shefik Bey-el-Moayad,
and he a man who had been notoriously out of touch and sympathy with hia
fellows ! Against the others there seems to have been no shadow of written
evidence.
It is perhaps worth noting that the Syrian political groups, while
chafing under the restrictions of Ottoman rule, and in some cases hoping for
the time when an Arab Empire and Khalifate would be restored, and Islam
subjected to it, had not envisaged for the present any severance from
the Ottoman Empire. They had seen their impotence alone, even against
Turkey, and had asked only for local autonomy, devolution, or administrative
reform. One wing of the party had gone' further, and suggested the necessity
of foreign guarantee or protection, for the realisation of those reforms, but in
the mass neither the Syrians, nor the Armenians whose demands were similar,
had done anything disloyal to the Sultanate of Turkey, or anything incompat
ible with strict obedience to the Ottoman Empire. Their opposition had been
all to the Committee of Union and Progress, an imperium in imperio within
Turkey which had not, and has not, any legal authority or standing whatever,
save what is derived from " made " elections and a coup d'etat.
However, what Jemal Pasha An Ottoman title used after the names of certain provincial governors, high-ranking officials and military commanders. wanted were not legalities, but heads. With
most of the social and intellectual leaders of Syria dead on the gallows or in
prison he felt himself entitled to give full rein to the Sadie impulses of his
real nature. His mind had been long on the down grade. His sexual
excesses, the drinking bouts in which he continually engaged, and the excite
ment of gambling and rigging the market in a country where his every
word was law, had sapped what little mental restraint be had ever had. His
medical advisers have reported him as subject to fits of homicidal madness,
even when he is sober. Since that day of the hangings in Beirut his rule has
been one long torment for the Syrians. The rich men are first plundered of
their wealth (by means of Sursock, Jemal Pasha An Ottoman title used after the names of certain provincial governors, high-ranking officials and military commanders. 's Christian accomplice and
business partner) and then exiled, condemned to death, or merely imprisoned.
The poor are systematically starved, to further the fiour trust which Jemal and
Sursock have invented, and if they protest, are handed over to the mercies of
the Gendarmes.
The flour trust is so characteristic a measure of Jemal's later stage that
something should be said about it. JSorth Syria is a rich corn-growing
country, which produces far more wheat and barley than it needs for itself,
above all now in war time, when there is no export, and so many of its men
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