The Dandarnelles Disaster (36 page)

In June 1920, in return for sending troops to support the Allied presence in Constantinople, Lloyd George let Venizelos off the leash and allowed the Greek Army to advance from Smyrna into the country around it on a broad front. The troops pushed 250 miles into the interior by August as thin Turkish nationalist forces withdrew before them. Kemal for the time being concentrated on the north-east and on crushing Armenia, which, shrunk to a scrap of territory, signed an armistice with him, opting to become a republic within the USSR in December. (In
March 1920 the Treaty of Moscow settled the Russo-Turkish border as it stands to this day, with the Soviets formally returning previously occupied territory to Turkey. The Bolshevik representative for both these settlements was a certain Commissar Joseph Stalin.)

The removal of Armenia from his agenda enabled Kemal at last to turn his attention westward to deal with the Greeks. They had been shaken by the defeat of Venizelos in the November 1920 general election. The exiled King Constantine came back and sympathy for Greece among the Allies melted away. Her troops fought on, making a remarkable advance over dreadful terrain worthy of Xenophon and his Ten Thousand, but in the opposite direction. Short of Ankara, and 400 miles from Smyrna, logistical problems proved insurmountable, the Greeks faltered and lost heart, and in August 1922 Kemal at last struck back towards Smyrna, which he entered in triumph on 10 September after roundly defeating the Greeks in the field. Turkish vengeance was terrible, with widespread massacres, rape, pillage and arson which razed the Greek districts of the city. Kemal next turned north along the Anatolian coast. Only the British Army, which had taken up positions at Chanak on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles, stood between him and Constantinople. Lloyd George was ready to go to war, but no other power was interested in supporting him except New Zealand, and common sense (and the arguments of Curzon and British generals) prevailed. An armistice on 11 October gave eastern Thrace back to Turkey, while Kemal undertook not to move into Constantinople pending negotiations for a new Turkish settlement.

Lloyd George's coalition government collapsed under the strain and the Conservative Andrew Bonar Law took over as Prime Minister in November 1922. Curzon remained Foreign Secretary and went to Lausanne for talks on a fairer settlement. Also present were the new French premier, Poincaré, a deflated Venizelos (back in office), an Italian representative called Mussolini, along with Bulgarian and Russian delegates. The Americans limited themselves to sending observers. Kemal's representative, General Ismet, led the Turkish delegation; Kemal had already abolished the sultanate. Ismet did not negotiate but merely repeated like a cracked gramophone record his demand for an independent Turkey freed of all outside interference. Now the defeated enemy had the upper hand, with a victorious army in the field, while the victors of 1918 had little or no stomach for a fight. Sèvres was all but torn up. The Treaty of Lausanne of July 1923 formalised a new Turkey within the borders it now enjoys, apart from the boundary with the new British mandate of Iraq, which was settled
by the League of Nations in 1925. The straits remained Turkish but with guarantees for their international use. Constantinople, once Byzantium, became Istanbul.

Greeks in their hundreds of thousands moved out of Turkey towards Greece, including Greeks who had never been there, Greeks who spoke no comprehensible Greek, or any at all – a pre-enactment of the exchange of populations accompanying the partition of India in 1947. In their turn Turks soon started to move out of expanded Greece in the opposite direction under the Treaty of Lausanne, which permitted a small Greek community to remain in Constantinople, and a small Turkish one in western Thrace. Salonica and the birthplace of Mustafa Kemal remained Greek.

Kemal went on to abolish the caliphate in March 1924 and embarked on a series of far-reaching social reforms, including the adoption of the Latin alphabet in place of Arabic script, and of the modern international calendar, rights for women, secularisation of education and the law, agricultural and industrial reforms and cultural innovations. First elected president by the ‘Grand Assembly' in 1923, his mandate was renewed every four years until and including 1935. He occupied modest apartments within the vast Dolmabahçe Palace on the Bosporus, the last home of the Sultans, and lived simply, although he was over-fond of women, tobacco and alcohol: his liver failed on 10 November 1938 and he died aged only 57. All the palace clocks still show the time of his death: 9.05 a.m. He was buried at Ankara, and reburied 15 years later in a great mausoleum after a state ceremony on 10 November 1953, a national hero
sans pareil.

The ‘Turkish Question' had at last been answered – by a Turk. Or had it? To leap forward from Atatürk's rule to the present day, there is a new ‘Turkish question' which is once again exercising the minds of the European powers, and dividing them: should Turkey, most of which is in Asia, be allowed to join the European Union? Every Turkish number plate today features a small blue tag, the bottom half of which carries the letters TR; the top half is blank. It looks just like the tags on plates in EU member-states – except that the EU motif of a circle of twelve gold stars is missing. At the same time, the Turkish Army stubbornly occupies, ever since 1974 and the ‘enosis' scare when Greece appeared poised to absorb Cyprus, some 40 per cent of that island, creating the universally unrecognised ‘republic of Northern Cyprus' – a large slice of the territory of a member of the European Union which Turkey purportedly wants to join. With ‘Europe' in mind, the Turks have been trying fitfully to improve their human-rights
record, but it remains a crime to attack ‘Turkishness'. The distinguished writer Orhan Pamuk was even prosecuted for daring to suggest that the Armenians were massacred in large numbers at the time of the First World War (but was acquitted under massive international pressure). One of the greatest legacies of Atatürk was a strictly secular republic with no official role for Islam in its affairs. But amid all the enduring discontent in the Muslim world in general, there are strong pressures within contemporary Turkey for a reversal of this provision. A straw in the wind came in 2008, when the Turkish parliament, with a pro-Islamic majority, voted to allow women to wear veils at university. Atatürk must have been turning in his grave at the time at this first inroad on his secular legacy; but the army was already showing signs of returning to its self-appointed role of defending the secular state. So often the Turks appear to be their own worst enemy, with no trace either of that valuable ability to see themselves as others see them or of understanding the value of public relations. If the mullahs ever took over, that would surely be the end of Turkey's already shaky prospects of joining the EU.

Yet modern Turkey is a lot more stable than most of its Asian neighbours which left, or were taken from, the Ottoman Empire during and after the First World War. The story of the demolition of the Turkish Empire in Asia – which had lasted since before the capture of Constantinople in 1453, longer than the Roman Empire in the west, much longer than the British Empire – is soon told. The British made a protectorate of Transjordan in 1916: it became the independent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1946. Syria and Lebanon were mandated to France by the League of Nations in 1922 although the French had moved in already in 1919 – their share of the Ottoman spoils. Both territories were wrested from Vichy government control during the Second World War and became independent in 1941 and 1943 respectively. What was left of the Arabian Peninsula (the world's largest) after the territories round its edge (Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the Emirates) went their own way, had been the scene of a spectacular campaign by that mysterious, romanticised figure, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, who fostered a revolt in the desert against the Turks by Arab and Bedouin tribesmen. It was not until 1932 that Ibn Saud completed the unification of the four tribal provinces of Hejaz, Azir, Najd and Al-Hasa into the present-day kingdom of Saudi Arabia. An absolute monarchy, it observes the strictest form of Islam, Wahhabism, as it protects Islam's holiest shrines of
Mecca (the birthplace of the religion) and Medina, and rejoices in the world's largest-known national oil reserve.

Mesopotamia was wrested from Turkish control by British troops after 1916 and was mandated to Britain in 1921 as the new state of Iraq, following a series of rows between the British and French over this, over control of Middle Eastern oil and over Syria. Under the Ottomans Mesopotamia, a geographical expression for the region between and adjacent to the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, had been divided into three very distinct provinces – Mosul in the north (where many Kurds live), Baghdad in the centre and Basra in the south. The new political entity was not a nation but a line on a map, rather like Nigeria or the London Borough of Croydon, drawn for administrative convenience. Arabs rose in revolt in Mosul and the Baghdad region in 1920 against British rule, destroying communications, laying siege to garrisons and killing British officials. The rebels were brutally suppressed by punitive expeditions while the infant RAF introduced a new stratagem, the airborne bombing and strafing of civilians as a means of crushing resistance. In March 1921 Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, decided to turn Iraq into a kingdom under the Hashemite Feisal, who had alongside Lawrence raised the banner of rebellion against Turkish rule in Arabia; his brother Abdullah was made king of Transjordan, still ruled as Jordan by his descendants. Churchill was handing out thrones like chocolate bars, rewards for the support given to Lawrence, whose lavish promises to the Arabs had not been honoured.

The Iraqi monarchy, granted independence in 1932, was overthrown in 1958 and a republic was declared. The emergence of Saddam Hussein from the ruling Ba'ath Party as dictatorial president in 1979 inaugurated a quarter of a century of ruinous war, against Iran, against the Kurdish population, against Kuwait, which was briefly occupied in 1991, against a US-led coalition which liberated Kuwait in that year and finally in 2003, when a second American-led invasion toppled Saddam, who was executed in 2007 after a ramshackle trial. The results of the invasion, openly aimed at regime-change but with underlying commercial motives, based on false or forged ‘intelligence' and without an exit strategy, have been an unmitigated disaster for the people of Iraq. So far the cure has been worse than the disease and a stupefying quantity of blood and treasure has been wasted.

Turkey can hardly be blamed for what has become of the constituent parts of the Ottoman Empire since it was dispossessed of them in 1918. This applies above all perhaps to Palestine, which was mandated to Britain in

1920 – three years after the fateful Balfour Declaration promising a Jewish homeland. There had however been a considerable influx of Zionists into Palestine under the Ottomans in the 1880s. Balfour's extraordinary document is a perfect illustration of the principle that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Arthur (later Earl) Balfour (1848–1930) was Conservative Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905 and was a member of the War Council from 1914, briefly succeeding Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty until serving as Foreign Secretary from 1916 to 1919. He was nicknamed Bloody Balfour for his enthusiastic suppression of Irish republicans; critics of his declaration regard this as an appropriate nickname for another reason. His notorious promise was contained in a short note to the second Baron Rothschild of the enormously influential, Anglo-German Jewish banking dynasty, the nub of which reads:

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people … it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.

By 1923 it had been clarified as British official policy which included: encouragement of Jewish immigration to Palestine under the auspices of a special body created for the purpose; protection of the rights of non-Jews; equal status for Hebrew, Arabic and English. All this ignored the mathematical and logical principle that two into one won't go. The Arabs complained that the Jews were being given preference at their expense and the rate of immigration threatened their interests; the Jews claimed that the British were dragging their feet in fulfilling their promise to the Jewish people. Tension mounted in Palestine between the wars as more and more Jews fled the Nazis after 1933; then came the unspeakable Holocaust of six million European Jews. This not only encouraged a new wave of migration to Israel by survivors but also left a legacy of guilt among the western powers, especially in Britain, which retained its mandate after 1945, and the United States, where millions of Jews lived thanks to earlier migrations from Europe and collectively wielded enormous political influence.

But, as many a Palestinian Arab has remarked in recent years: ‘Why are we being punished for Auschwitz?' The hapless British were demonised for their efforts to control the Jewish influx, which included several public-relations disasters; Jewish groups in Palestine formed terrorist gangs which perpetrated atrocities; and in 1947 the United Nations, successor
-organisation to the League of Nations, supported the establishment of two states in Palestine, one Jewish, one Arab. Britain, which had just given up the core of its empire in the Indian sub-continent, could not wait to be relieved of its mandate, and when a date could not be agreed at the UN, gave unilateral notice of its intention to leave in 1948. The Arabs rejected the two-state solution, so David Ben-Gurion promulgated the state of Israel on 14 May 1948. Challenges from the neighbouring Arab states were beaten off, and Israel became the local superpower in a series of further wars with the Arabs (1956, 1958, 1967, 1973, 1982 and 2007, not to mention aerial bombings of neighbouring states), acquiring nuclear weapons along the way and confining the Palestinians to the teeming Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the River Jordan.