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This obscure work came out in the
early 1940s.... the author, Wilfred T.F. Castle, sounds Turk-friendly
(what with that title! Certainly an improvement over "The Blight of Asia"),
but he might have been forcing himself, not wanting to give any excuse for
Turkey to slip in with the Nazis. His heart, however, is with the Greeks and
Armenians... he glosses over the massacres and the Burning of Izmir,
indicating his real sympathies.
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"Grand
Turk," Pages 112-115 |
There, on the 23rd of April, 1920, the revolutionary “Turkish Grand
National Assembly” (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi) met in the building formerly
occupied by the local Committee of Union and Progress. Kamâl Atatürk was President. Its
first act was to make clear to the world the position of the new Turkish Government. The
courage of its words is astonishing:
“Thefl Grand National Assembly sitting in Ankara will preside over the destiny of Turkey
as long as the Capital is in the hands of the foreigner. It has appointed an Executive
Council, which has taken in hand the government of the country. Istanbul, the Sultan and
the Government being in the hands of the enemy, all orders from there are automatically
null and void. The nation’s rights have been violated. The Turkish nation, though calm,
is determined to maintain its rights as a sovereign independent State.”
So far the patriots had been regarded as rebels by one and all. But now in May 1920 the
French opened negotiations with them and concluded a twenty days truce—the first
recognition by an Allied Power of the free Turkish Government, and the first step in “foreign
policy” taken by Ankara. The next step was a mission to the Bolshevik Government at
Moscow. It left Ankara on the 11th of May. There was no doubt that the Russian
revolutionaries at first imagined that Turkey would be an easy convert—that the Turkish
Nationalists would soon throw in their lot with the other Nationalist movements within the
sphere of Moscow’s influence, and along with Finland, Poland, Hungary and the Ukraine,
form one link in a chain of communist States—a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But
Kamâl Atatürk, fighting for freedom from foreign interference, was not likely to be
sidetracked by essays in doctrinaire politics. It was to be Turkey for the Turks at last,
not Turkey for International Communists. Every ill against which the patriots had been
struggling had arisen from foreign minorities within or from foreign interference from
without, frequently from both simultaneously. Besides, there was simply no class feeling
in Turkey, and scarcely any capitalism. Nevertheless the atmosphere of the Moscow
discussions was friendly: neither side could afford to make more enemies, and the Turks
were willing to learn from any progressive movement, anxious to obtain ideas which they
could adapt to their own conditions.
The terms, if widely accepted, would
have been the death sentence, not only of the Ottoman Empire but of what was now
correctly described as “Turkey” [See below]
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At last, as the month of May 1920 was drawing to its
close, the Allies published the terms of peace which they were willing to make with
Mehmet VI. A small and helpless “Ottoman Empire” was to be entirely under the
supervision of the the Allied Powers; all the Arab provinces were to become Mandated
Territories, and of these Syria and Iraq were to share between them a large portion
of Southern Anatolia; the whole of Eastern Anatolia was to be added to the State of
Armenia which had been already established in the former Imperial Russian provinces;
around Izmir was to be a large Greek district; Antalya was to become Italian,
together with a huge “sphere of influence”; Cilicia was to go to the French; the
Ottoman capital itself was to be an “international centre” lying on neutral
seaways under the control of Britain, France and Italy. Turkish Thrace was to be
added to the portions of Macedonia and Thrace taken from Bulgaria, and the whole
handed to Greece. The islands of Imroz and Boscaada (Tenedos) were to go to Greece.
Only the immediate hinterland of Istanbul was to remain of the once extensive “Turkey
in Europe”. As Hans Froembgen remarked in his Kamal Atatürk, “the Turks were to
live in what may be described as a sort of Indian reservation.”
The terms, if widely accepted, would have been the death
sentence *, not only of the
Ottoman Empire but of what was now correctly described as “Turkey”, which,
weakened beyond the possibility of independence, could only have awaited the
inevitable Italian or German overtures of the coming years, or the Bolshevik
pressure from the north. The collision of these interests with the Greeks, British
and French would probably have provided the occasion for a premature second Great
War. By entertaining the very idea of signing a treaty based on such terms, the
Ottoman Government at Istanbul was branded by the patriots as a puppet government of
traitors and dotards, and almost the entire Turkish nation accepted the Turkish
Government at Ankara.
There was no one to enforce the terms of the treaty, in the event of Mehmet signing
it. Except for the Greeks in and behind Izmir, and the Allied forces at Istanbul or
on the coast, there was nobody. Even in Thrace, at Edirne itself (now claimed by
Greece), there was a Turkish Nationalist army. Alike in Europe and in Asia the force
of a fierce patriotism was rising like a hurricane; the Allies were not in a
position to face a fresh war in the East: only the Greeks were brave enough, or
foolhardy enough (or both) to join issue with the Turks. The two most courageous
nations of the Near East were at each other’s throats in a moment: the Greeks
being pushed on against their best feelings by politicians, the Turks defending, not
Arabian or Serbian provinces for some rapacious Sultan, but their own home land for
their own people.
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* Holdwater: The author will
explain that Turkey would inevitably fall under the domination
of Nazism or Soviet communism, but the real death threat lay
with the populating of eastern Anatolia with Greeks, and western
Anatolia with Armenians, both of which subscribed to a deadly
ethnic cleansing campaign philosophy, in order to avail
themselves of new land, combined with their racist hatred of
Turkish people. As the treaty availed Turkey of only a token
army, Turkey would have been dead meat in time, with the tacit
approval of the Christian imperialists. Take a look at the
minimized territory Turkey would have wound up with, encircled
by hostile enemies. The map (which offers an enlarged version)
is based on the wartime secret treaties between England, France
and Russia, which is what mostly wound up as the Sèvres Treaty.
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The
treaty...went down to history (or to oblivion) as the Treaty of Sèvres. |
The Greeks are notoriously good soldiers when advancing, and
when operations began on the 23rd of June, 1920, on two fronts — the Anatolian front on
the hills above Izmir, and the Thracian front towards Edirne — every movement was an
advance. On the 25th of July, 1920, King Alexander of Greece made a triumphal entry into
Edirne. A typical Turkish city, crowned by the glorious Selimiye mosque, it had fallen to
the Russians in 1828, become Ottoman once more in 1829, again fallen to the Russians and
their Bulgarian allies in 1877, was restored in 1878, became a Bulgarian town in 1913,
reverting to the Ottoman Empire the same year. Now it was Greek, and so was the rest of
Thrace almost up to the very walls of Istanbul. The Greeks had enforced at least one
clause of the unsigned treaty. The arrival of their Asiatic forces at a point halfway
towards the Baghdad Railway and the preparation for an advance on Eskishehir and Ankara
would have been well on the way to, enforcing the rest of the terms on the Nationalists.
As it was, the Ottoman Government of Istanbul obediently signed the treaty on the 10th of
August,1920, which went down to history (or to oblivion) as the Treaty of Sèvres.
The signing of
the original Armistice aboard HMS Agamemnon, guaranteed Turkey's frontiers, and
Admiral Calthorp, who represented the British government, gave assurances in writing
that the integrity of Turkish borders would not change.
Signed on 10 August
1920. The treaty of Sevres was based upon the carving up of Turkish land contrary
to the armistice agreement between Hussein Rauf (Minister of Marine) and Admiral
Calthorp. Greed by the Greeks and the absence of a true Turkish delegation also
played in important part in its nullification.
The government of
the Turkish National Assembly, formed earlier on 23 April 1920, rejected the Treaty of
Sevres and the war of independence started by Mustafa Kemal , had prevented its
application.
Lord Curzon at
Sevres had said that this conference is nothing but a circus act and that the main
players were the Greeks. And asked “”who is going to be the snake in this circus
paradise””
Yet silly Greeks
and Armenians hold true the Treaty of Sevres.
Ismet The Historian |
The acquiescence of the prisoners on the Bosphorus only served
further to irritate the Nationalists, who ignored the treaty. But the military position
could not be ignored. The Greeks, preparing themselves for a new offensive, and a little
surprised at the stern resistance of “the rebels”, would have found the Turkish
attacks much more formidable had it not been for another artificial military “frontier”
biting into the Turkish homeland. With the dissolution of the Imperial Russian Army in the
Caucasus in 1917 the Armenians of the former Russian Empire had formed an Armenian State
on the 28th of May, 1917. Some of the territory of this new Armenia was pre-war Russian
country, including the capital, Yerevan, and of this a great deal had been Ottoman before
1878. The rest, captured by Russia in the Great War, was predominantly Turkish, including
the towns of Trabzon, Rize, Erzurum, Bitlis and Van. This State was declared to be “free
and independent” by the Treaty of Sèvres, but in the face of Turkish opposition to its
expansion at the expense of Turkish territory, and Communist intrigue from its great
neighbour, the new State was doomed to suffer a tragic fate. Turkish Nationalists, anxious
to regain their homes and soil, advanced from the west; Bolsheviks and Tartar irregulars
advanced from the east. On the 30th of October, 1920, the victorious armies of free Turkey
entered Kars, which, permeated with Bolshevik propaganda, fell without a struggle. Kars
had been taken from the Ottoman Empire by the Russians in November 1877: by the 7th of
November, 1920, the Turks were already beyond the limits of Abdül Hamit’s dominions and
in the real old Imperial Russian territory at Leninakan, then called “Alexandropol”,
an important railway junction for the only line which Imperial Russia had built in the
province conquered in 1877 — the broad-gauge line down to Kars and Sarikamish and its
war-time narrow-gauge extension to Erzurum and Yenikoy.
(Armenia signed) a
desperate treaty of peace with the free Turkish Government on the 3rd of December,
1920 — the Treaty of Leninakan
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The last act of the independent Armenian Republic
was to sign a desperate treaty of peace with the free Turkish Government on the 3rd
of December, 1920 — the Treaty of Leninakan — by which Nationalist Turkey
regained from the Armenians almost all that the Ottoman Empire had lost to Russia
since 1877, including the port of Batumi (Batoum), the possession of which was
disputed with Georgia, a new republic which still retained Artvin and Ardahan.
The campaign in the East was over, the Armenian Soviet Republic came into being on
old Russian territory, and Eastern Anatolia was Turkish once more. The new frontier
became permanent on the 14th of March, 1921, when the Treaty of Moscow was signed by
the new Soviet power, responsible for Trans-Caucasia, and by the free Turkish
Government. The Turks handed over Batumi to the Soviet Republic of Georgia, but by
the Treaty they were well compensated with moral and material help: the two regimes
at Moscow and at Ankara respectively were described as “sharing the principle of
the brotherhood of nations and of the rights of the peoples to self-determination,
and confirming the solidarity which unites them in the struggle against imperialism.”
From Georgia the Turks regained a portion of the district of Batumi and the
districts of Artvin and Ardahan.
In the West the battle had yet to be fought. On the 21st of August,1921, the Greeks
attacked. In the mountain country above the Sakarya River, some fifty kilometres
west of Ankara, the two valiant peoples fought almost man to man for fourteen days
under the burning heat of an August sun, the Greeks attacking with reckless abandon,
the Turks hanging grimly on to the heights, Atatürk now their Commander-in-Chief.
By the 4th of September the critical moment had come: the Greeks were at the end of
their strength. On the 12th they recrossed the Sakarya and began to retire steadily,
but there was no question of the Turks immediately following up their advantage. It
was not until the end of August 1922 that Atatürk was able to sound his famous
battle-call: “Soldiers! Your goal is the Mediterranean! Forward!”
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Related: Terms of the
Treaty of Leninakan/Gumru/Alexandropol.
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