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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (116884)	10/15/2003 3:10:41 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

re: 1858-59 -- Turkey. The U.S. Secretary of State requested a display of naval force along the Levant after a massacre of Americans at Jaffa and mistreatment elsewhere "to remind the authorities (of Turkey) of the power of the United States." As is the case today, many Americans will make the assumption that this violence done to Americans in foreign places, is due to the inherent savagery of foreigners, and that Westerners had done nothing to provoke it. Here's the context: In the Ottoman Empire in the 1850s, Western Europeans enjoyed a regime of "capitulations," or special rights earned in treaties with Western powers. Europeans were exempt from most taxes, and exempt from local law. They were guaranteed European courts of law. These "unequal treaties" were imposed by force by Europeans, all over the world, in the 19th Century, and led to repeated riots against foreigners, which sometimes led to insurrections, like the Boxer Rebellion in China, and many others. These treaties eroded local control, and were often the first step in a process leading eventually to outright colonization. The Crimean War (1854-1856) demonstrated the superiority of European militaries. The Turks had been defeated by the Russians. They, in turn, were defeated by the British and French, who the Turks were now dependent on. The Ottoman Empire was in the process of disintegrating, with all the constituent nationalities, from the Serbs to the Egyptians, agitating for autonomy, and then independence. As central Ottoman control slowly waned, the various European powers maneuvered to assert control of "spheres of influence". A similar process happened a bit later, in China and Africa. As the Russian Empire's borders moved south into Muslim areas, and non-Muslim nations revolted against Ottoman control throughout the 19th Century, there were repeated episodes of ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Turks were massacred in April 1821 in the Morea (the Peloponnese) when the Greek revolt started. The Nogay Tatars were expelled from the Crimea in the late 1850s. 200,000 Muslim Circassians died in the 1860s, when the Russians "cleaned" them out of their homeland in the Caucusus.