Page:Rosa Luxemburg - The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The "Junius" Pamplhet) - 1918.pdf/43

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Turkey became the most important field of operations of German imperialism; the "Deutsche Bank," with its enormous Asiatic business interests, about which all German oriental policies center, became its pacemaker. In the 50's and 60's Asiatic Turkey worked chiefly with English capital, which built the railroad from Smyrna and leased the first stretch of the Anatolian railroad, up to Ismid. In 1888 German capital appeared upon the scene and procured from Abdul Hamid the control of the railroad that English capital had built and the franchise for the new stretch from Ismid to Angora and branch lines to Scutari, Brussa, Konia and Kaizarili. In 1899 the Deutsche Bank secured concessions for the building and operation of a harbor and improvements in Hardar Pasha, and the sole control over trade and tariff collections in the harbor. In 1901 the Turkish Government turned over to the Deutsche Bank the concession for the great Bagdad railroad to the Persian Gulf, in 1907 for the drainage of the Sea of Karaviran and the irrigation of the Koma plain.

The reverse of this wonderful work of "peaceful culture" is the "peaceful" and wholesale ruin of the farming population of Asia Minor. The cost of this tremendous undertaking was advanced, of course, by the Deutsche Bank on the security of a widely diversified system of public indebtedness. Turkey will be, to all eternity, the debtor of Messrs. Siemens, Gwinner, Helfferich, etc., as it was formerly that of English, French and Austrian capital. This debtor, now, was forced not only to squeeze enormous sums out of the state to pay the interest on these loans, but, in addition, to guarantee a net income upon the railway thus built. The most modern methods of transportation were grafted upon a primitive, in many cases purely agricultural, population. From the unfruitful soil of farming sections that had been exploited unscrupulously, for years, by an oriental