A Peace to End all Peace (54 page)

The fate of what remained of the Ottoman Empire was at the heart of the Middle Eastern question as the Allied Powers—throughout 1919, 1920, and 1921—continued to wrangle about the disposition of its Turkish-speaking center in Anatolia. Lloyd George changed his mind several times about what should be done. In early 1919 he favored a plan whereby the United States would take Constantinople and Armenia; Greece would take an enclave centered on Smyrna; and the rest of the country would be divided between France in the north and Italy in the south. A few months later he changed his mind completely and, falling in with the views of his Cabinet, declared that “the Allies had no more right to split up Turkey than Germany, in former days, had had to split up Poland.”
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The treaty that he proposed to impose upon the Sultan the following year nonetheless was harsh, and imposing its terms upon the Turkish government in 1920 proved more difficult than Lloyd George had supposed.

At the end of 1919, elections were held throughout the post-armistice Ottoman Empire for a new Turkish Chamber of Deputies; and Turkish nationalists won an overwhelming victory. Even before the Chamber convened, newly elected deputies converged on Angora (now Ankara), deep in the interior of the country and far from the sea and the guns of the British Navy, where Mustapha Kemal, the 38-year-old nationalist general, had moved his headquarters. There they subscribed to a Kemalist declaration of political principles that became known as the National Pact. The National Pact called for the creation of an independent Turkish Moslem nation-state. The pact’s widespread appeal underscored a comment by the British naval commander in the Mediterranean to the effect that “the Greek occupation of Smyrna has stimulated a Turkish patriotism probably more real than any which the war was able to evoke.”
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In mid-January 1920 the new Chamber of Deputies convened in Constantinople. On 28 January 1920, in secret session, the deputies voted to adopt the National Pact; and on 17 February, they announced to the public that they had done so. While the leaders of France and Britain were meeting in Europe to reach final agreement on the terms of the peace settlement they meant to impose, the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies, without being asked, had defined the minimum terms they were prepared to accept. If the political theme of the twentieth century is seen to be the ending of Europe’s rule over its neighboring continents, then the Ottoman Chamber’s declaration of independence signalled the dawn of the century.

French and British military leaders warned their prime ministers that at least twenty-seven army divisions would be needed to impose upon the rebellious Turks the terms on which the two prime ministers were resolved.
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This was well beyond what the Allies could field. The British Imperial General Staff urged Lloyd George to reconsider his proposed peace terms, but he refused to do so. In early 1920 hostilities commenced. Fighting erupted in Cilicia, the southern Turkish-speaking area (adjoining Syria) that Britain had allowed France to occupy. From February through April, Kemalist forces inflicted repeated defeats on the French, capturing positions, inflicting hundreds of casualties, and taking thousands of prisoners. The French Premier, Millerand, caught between pressures for demobilization and pressures to protect French interests in Syria, ordered his local commander to try to come to some agreement with the Turkish nationalists.
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Lloyd George was opposed to conciliation; he met force with force. In mid-March, Britain led an Allied military occupation of Constantinople.
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Allied troops moved in and replaced the Ottoman police, declaring martial law and dissolving the Chamber of Deputies. The Allied army of occupation promptly arrested 150 Ottoman military and civil officials, including a substantial number of the elected deputies, and deported them to Malta, where Zaghlul and his Egyptian colleagues had been sent (but subsequently released) the year before.
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France and Italy hastened to assure Kemal that these measures represented British policy, not their own.
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The occupation of the Sultan’s capital at Constantinople did not damage Mustapha Kemal. Contrary to what some British authorities believed, he no longer acted for the Sultan—and an unintended effect of the Allied occupation was to destroy whatever prestige or legitimacy that remained to the Sultan’s government and to transfer it to Kemal’s regime. This was illustrated the following month when 100 members of the Chamber of Deputies who remained free joined in Angora with 190 others elected from what they termed resistance groups to form a new Parliament.
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They voted to create a government of the Grand National Assembly, of which Mustapha Kemal was elected president.
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The Sultan was declared a prisoner of the Allies, and his acts invalid. The Sultan’s government, in occupied Constantinople, replied by branding the leaders in Angora as traitors. Kemal’s Angora government prudently chose to leave its relationship to the Sultan’s government ambiguous.

The conflict in Anatolia was clouded by the emergence of semi-autonomous warlords and outlaw bands, sometimes acting for themselves, sometimes acting in alliance with one or the other of the governments, or with the British, or with the Greeks, or with communists (Russian and otherwise). There were local rebellions, in some cases undertaken by great landholding families seeking to reassert their interests, but there were also marauding groups of nomads and refugees, Kurds, Circassians, and Tartars from the Crimea and Central Asia. Though groups such as the Green Army began as expressions of one or another political cause, they tended to degenerate into no more than glorified bandits.
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Torn by anarchy and civil war, the Turkish-speaking Ottoman Empire came increasingly to resemble the lands that had been Czarist Russia, and which in 1918 had formed a vast indistinct battlefield on which Whites and Reds, bandits and warlords, foreign armies and indigenous independence movements engaged in a confusing and multisided conflict. The frontier between the two ancient empires was blurred by local uprisings and the movements of various armed groups; while the flow of Bolshevik agents and propaganda into Anatolia made it seem that an effective border between the two vast and confused ex-empires no longer existed.

The first decision of Kemal’s new government in Angora was to send a mission to Russia, where it arrived in May 1920, possibly in pursuance of earlier agreements between Kemal’s Nationalists and Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
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The working relationship that emerged, though with such difficulty that it was not solidified for nearly a year (in the treaty of 16 March 1921), was one that the British authorities misunderstood. The Russian Bolsheviks had given refuge and encouragement to Enver Pasha, the Ottoman Empire’s exiled wartime leader; and the British wrongly assumed that Enver was behind the Angora government.
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In fact Enver and Kemal were deadly rivals; when this became clear to them, the Russians flirted with the idea of using one against the other but, in the end, felt compelled to choose between them.

Wrong in believing that Kemal was secretly acting on behalf of the Sultan, and wrong, too, in suspecting that he was acting for Enver, the British were also wrong in suspecting that he was acting for the Bolsheviks. Kemal was in fact an implacable enemy of Russian Bolshevism, and as soon as he felt able, he suppressed the Russian-inspired Turkish Communist Party, killed its leaders, and killed or imprisoned its agents. As a result, many of the Russian leaders were disposed to treat Kemal as an enemy. The Kemalists were given the impression that it was only as a result of Stalin’s powerful intervention, and over the objections of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that Russia agreed to deal with Angora at all.
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Stalin, Commissar for Nationalities and for State Control, evidently put Russian national interests ahead of Bolshevik ideology, and recognized that Kemal might be able to inflict damage on the British. Damaging the British was one of Stalin’s chief objectives, and the realistic—or cynical—Bolshevik was willing to support even Kemal in order to achieve his goal. So Soviet money and supplies began to pour over the Russo-Turkish frontier, in amounts still not known, to aid the anti-Bolshevik Nationalists. It was the first significant military aid that Soviet Russia had given to a foreign movement. But within the Bolshevik government, the resistance to supplying aid to Turkish anti-Bolsheviks must have been intense, for it took a year—from the spring of 1920 when the Turkish mission went to Russia to ask for support—to complete the arrangements.

Meanwhile, the possibility that Turkey would be thrown into the arms of the Soviets reinforced the views of Allied military officials, who believed that Lloyd George would be making a mistake in forcing the Sultan’s government to sign a harsh treaty. On the British side as well as the French, it was the view of the admirals and generals most directly concerned that they did not have the manpower to impose terms on the rebellious Turks. Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, told the other Allied leaders that Greek forces could do it alone, but the British service chiefs did not share his confidence.

A close friend asked Lloyd George whether he still thought it wise to give Smyrna to the Greeks. “I have no doubt about it,” replied the Prime Minister. “You must decide whom you are going to back. The Turks nearly brought about our defeat in the war. It was a near thing. You cannot trust them and they are a decadent race. The Greeks, on the other hand, are our friends, and they are a rising people…We must secure Constantinople and the Dardanelles. You cannot do that effectively without crushing the Turkish power.” Referring to the doubts about his policy voiced by British military leaders, he said, “Of course the military are against the Greeks. They always have been. They favour the Turks. The military are confirmed Tories. It is the Tory policy to support the Turks.”
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On the night of 14–15 June 1920, Kemal’s Turkish Nationalist troops attacked a British battalion near Constantinople, posing a threat to the forces occupying the Ottoman capital, where the Allies held the Sultan as a virtual prisoner. Coming only a month after Kemal sent his mission to Russia (though a year before Russo-Turkish arrangements were concluded) and soon after the defeats the Nationalists had inflicted on the French in Cilicia, the Turkish attack caused alarm. The British commanding officer telegraphed for reinforcements. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London reluctantly recognized that the only troops available were Greek, and proposed to the Cabinet that a Greek division be requested to help defend Constantinople. Venizelos was willing to supply it, provided that the Allies also authorized Greece to advance from Smyrna. This would allow the Greek army to seize and occupy the substantial enclave that Venizelos proposed to annex. It would complete the transformation of Greek troops from a temporary policing force into a permanent army of occupation.

Lloyd George was more than willing. He had met with Venizelos earlier, had warned him that the other Allies would not help, had asked Greece to enforce the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres by herself, and had agreed with Venizelos that their military advisers exaggerated the difficulty of doing so.
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On 20 June 1920 French Premier Millerand agreed with Lloyd George to authorize a limited Greek advance from Smyrna. On 22 June the Greeks launched a successful three-pronged attack which by early July had brought them all of Asia Minor as far as the Anatolian plateau. On the far side of the Dardanelles, meanwhile, Greek troops drove through eastern Thrace. Months before—in occupying Constantinople—the Allies had crushed resistance in the capital. Now the Greek army seemed to have crushed resistance outside the capital as well—if the existence of Kemal was ignored. “Turkey is no more,” an exultant Lloyd George announced triumphantly.
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On 10 August 1920 the Treaty of Sèvres was signed by representatives of the virtually captive Turkish Sultan and his helpless government.

The Treaty of Sèvres (see page 411) embodied almost all of the terms that Lloyd George and Venizelos most desired. While reducing the Ottoman state almost to a nonentity, it restored to Greece the coastal lands of Asia Minor that Greeks had settled nearly 3,000 years before. Like Arabs, Greeks were bound together by a common language and civilization rather than by political ties, so that what Greece accomplished in 1920 with British political backing was to extend her territorial frontier in Europe to her cultural frontier in Greek-speaking Asia. It was the Liberal dream of triumphant Hellenism and Christianity, promoted by Gladstone’s political heir, David Lloyd George.

The problem, which seems to have struck Venizelos and Lloyd George almost immediately after the signing at Sèvres, was how to keep the terms of the treaty from being eventually overthrown. The British armed forces had already been demobilized, and there was considerable domestic political pressure in Greece, too, to demobilize immediately. Yet once the Allies departed from Turkey, Kemal might well descend from the Anatolian plateau to retake the coast and undo the treaty. In October 1920 Venizelos raised with Lloyd George the question of the other alternative: whether to send his army into the interior to destroy Kemal’s Nationalists while Greece still had the armed forces to do so.
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Like Napoleon amidst the burning ruins of Moscow, Venizelos and Lloyd George were challenged by an enemy who would neither stand and fight nor surrender. Indeed, Kemal’s plan was to pursue the strategy the Russians had used successfully against Napoleon in the war of 1812: drawing the enemy forces into the interior, while wearing them down.

What Venizelos and Lloyd George would have decided to do can never be known for sure, for one of the most bizarre political accidents in modern history took the matter out of their hands. On 30 September 1920 the young Greek King, Alexander, while taking a walk in the grounds of his palace, was bitten by a monkey. A severe fever set in and, on 25 October, Alexander died. In a famous phrase, Winston Churchill later wrote that “It is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite”
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—for it was his belief that if Alexander and Venizelos had continued to rule Greece, the tragic outcome of the war that Greece was to wage against Turkey in 1921 and 1922 would have been averted (see Chapter 60 below).