The statement was made to American ambassador Morgenthau, who recounted it thus in his postwar memoirs: "Talaat explained his national policy: these different blocs in the Turkish Empire, he said, had always conspired against Turkey; because of the hostility of these native populations, Turkey had lost province after province - Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Egypt and Tripoli. In this way the Turkish Empire had dwindled almost to the vanishing point. If what was left of Turkey was to survive, added Talaat, he must get rid of these alien peoples. 'Turkey fo the Turks' was now Talaat's controlling idea."[40] It should be noted here parenthetically that at this new phase of Turkish nationalism not even Muslim nationalities were spared this treatment, as evidenced in the cases of the Ittihadist oppression of the Albanians and the Arabs.
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40. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1918), p. 51.
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One noteworthy point during that process of charting a course towards genocide were the resolutions and decisions of the 1910 Saloniki Congress of Ittihad, briefly mentioned in the introduction of this work. Even though it was primarily the ongoing tensions in Macedonia and Albania that had triggered these decisions in 1910, one of the main
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