Kelahiran Kembali Turki/Bab 17

XVII

ANGORA

FEVZI, RAFET DAN KIAZIM KARABEKR PASHA DAN KEDIKTATORAN MILITER MEREKA DI BAWAH KEMAL PASHA—​DEPORTASI “PONTUS”—​MOSUL, KURDI DAN PERPECAHAN DALAM ISLAM—​FRONT PRANCIS-ARMENIA DI KILIKIA, GARIS DEPAN YUNANI DI SMYRNA, DAN FRONT SEKUTU DI KONSTANTINOPEL—CARA PARLEMEN TERPECAH DIREKONSTRUKSI DI ANGORA—​PERLAWANAN FERID-REVOLUSI DI KONIA.

Angora membentang di bukitnya, sebuah selimut abu-abu dari atap datar berhias dengan menara-menara putih dan tumbuh-tumuhan hijau, dan terhimpun di tengah-tengahnya dengan reruntuhan tahun 1915. Di kakinya terbentang rawa dangkal yang terbentang dari kota itu sendiri sampai stasiun kereta apinya, yang berharaj satu setengah mil. Di sepanjang pinggiran cekungan pada pesisir selatan, terdapat vila-vila musim panas dari keluarga-keluarg kaya, yang diamankan atas dasar malaria cuaca hangat dari rawa.

Jantung kota terbentang sepanjang wilayah hilirnya. Kala kongres Sivas menggerakkan dewan Partai Nasionalis ke Angora pada akhir September 1919, Kemal sendiri menmpatkan dirinya di ruang atas di stasiun kereta api dan lokomotif Decauville tetap digerakkan siang malam pada jendelanya, dalam kesiapan untuk mengantarnya jauh ke pelosok pada peringatan cepat. Bangunan pertama yang orang lalui kala memasuki kota tersebut dari stasiun kereta api adalah bangunan granit abu-abu yang sampat dipakai sebagai markas besar lokal Komite Persatuan dan Kemajuan, dengan teater kayu yang berdiri di tengah taman seberang jalan. Beberapa jarak dari kiri, sebagaimana orang bergerak menuju kota, adalah konak lama, atau bangunan Pemerintahan, tempat pemerintahan provinsi dulunya bermukim. Pada seberang lapangan di depannya, terdapat Kantor Pos dan Telegraf. Di sisi kanan kala kota tersebut dimasuki, sebuah jalan besar yang dilewati berdiri teater dan berujung di sekitaran kaki kota di bagian indah dari Kolese Sultana. Nyaris berseberangan dengan teater tersebut kala orang melewati jalan tersebut, adalah bangunan sekolah besar yang terbuat dari batu dan beberapa jarak lebih jauh sepanjang jalan adalah bangunan batu yang dulu diduduki oleh kepengurusan lokal dari Pajak Masyarakat. Lebih jauh lagi, jauh dai pinggiran kota, bangunan biru-putih Kolese Sultana berdiri pada tembok bangunan mereka. Disini, Fevzi Pasha, seorang Turki Anatolia tersohor dengan kumis besar, dan Rafet Pasha, seorang sosok kecil, melakukan re-mobilisasi dan persenjataan ulang Tentara. Fevzi Pasha adalah seorang raksasa dengan penampilan besar untuk bekerja dan sikap penuh dari hubungan sosial dari kalangan manapun. Rafet Pasha memiliki kapasitas serupa untuk bekerja namun ia memadukannya dengan kecerdikan alami untuk hubungan sosial. Aku melihatnya dalam sejumlah latar yang sangat beragam, dari kawasannya di Kolese Sultana sampai perlintasan gunung Anatolia pada ujung musim dingin, namun ia dinyatakan tak bersalah atas perilaku dan penampilan sebagaimana jika ia melangkah keluar dari ruang gambar.

Di bawah Mustapha Kemal Pasha, Fevzi Pasha dan Rafet Pasha memerintah Anatolia untuk Nasionalis, otoritas mereka tercapai pada provinsi-provinsi melalui para gubernur militer yang membantu mereka pada ibukota provinsi yang lebih kritis. Kiazim Karabekr Pasha yang memegang provinsi-provinsi timur dari Erzerum, berniat untuk menyebutkan mereka. Merupakan hal mudah yang dibutuhkan untuk mengambil alih Anatolia dari Pemerintahan Damad Ferid, karena pendudukan Yunani atas Smyrna menaungi pemegangan Ferid atas negara tersebut dalam keadaan terguncang. Namun, memegang Anatolia melawan upaya Ferid untuk memulihkannya adalah persoalan lain. Fevzi, Rafet dan Kiazim adalah orang yang memegangnya, dan apapun tradisi dari kemajuan pribadi yang mereka wariskan dari Pemerintah Utsmaniyah lama, ambisi pribadi mereka tenggelam dalam kepentingan umum dalam mempertahankan sisa negara tersebut. Aku meyakini bahwa pernyataan tersebut juga menghimpun kebenaran Kemal. Penekananku terhadapnya adalah bahwa ia akan bergabung dengan salah satu batalion buruhnya sendiri dan menggali jalan di balik pasukannya sendiri jika ia menganggap bahwa dengan melakukan yang ia dapat secara lebih efektif berkontribusi pada pertahanan negaranya.

Orang tersebut menghimpun penanganan kecil orang-orang Barat modern dalam kendali negara Timur yang sangat abad pertengahan, namun tugas mereka disederhanakan oleh ketiadaan mendasar Levantinisme yang meracuni Konstantinopel. Seperti negara mereka, ini merupakan homogen antara Wina dan Bagdad. Terdapat Turki, Kurdi, Sirkasia, Turcoman, Tartar dan Laz di negara tersebut, sedikit Armenia yang tersisa di pelosok, jumlah Yunani yang meningkat antara Samsun dan Trebizond di sepanjang belahan Laut Hitam, dan sejumlah orang Amerika yang banyak tersebar, kebanyaklan dalam penugasan Near East Relief. namun, sebagian besar penduduk adalah Turki dan kebanyakan non-Turki terikat dengan Turki lewat penerimaan mereka terhadap Islam. Meskipun sepenuhnya primitif, negara tersebut jauh lebih berpemikiran tinggal ketimbang ibukotanya yang telah ada sepanjang seabad. Penanganannya terhadap Amerika diwakili di Angora oleh dua anggota korps Near East Relief, Miss Annie T. Allen dan Miss Florence Billings. Kebanyakan kontak mereka adalah dengan Rafet Pasha dan, walau mengalami hal serius dari posisi mereka, hubungan mereka dengan Rafet Pasha umumnya bahagia.

Situasi militer yang didapati Turki sendiri, singkatnya disederhanakan oleh perang singkat yang diluncurkan oleh Kiazim Karabekr Pasha dari Erzerum melawan Republik Armenia Erivan. Ini membuka jalur penarikan ke Trans-Kaukasia dan Asia Tengah, dan jika Kemal, Fevzi dan Rafet Pasha dipaksa untuk menurunkan arsip mereka ke kalpak-kalpak mereka dan kabur, pintu belakang akan disediakan untuk pelarian mereka ke Timur.

Proyek Pontus yang dilakukan oleh Yunani di sepanjang kawasan Laut Hitam telah diluncurkan, tak mudah untuk ditangani. Pendudukan Yunani terhadap Smyrna kemudian menjadikannya dibutuhkan untuk memindahkan Angkatan Ketiga dari Amasia ke pelosok Smyrna dan penyebutan Pontus dilakukan dengan pasukan ireguler di bawah komando Osman Agha, walikota Laz dari Kerasund. Terorisme yang ia perluas menghimpun usaha yang Hamid Bey, salah satu sosok terbaik yang ada di Angora, dikerahkan ke Samsun sebagai walikota. Hamid Bey adalah seorang Turki Rhodes dengan rambut lurus, kumis mirip Kaiser, mulut penuh emas dan suara meledak-ledak, sebuah perpaduan yang memberikan satu pertamuan terhadapnya untuk pertama lainnya dengan esensi yang mendatangkan beberapa spesies manusia liar baru, namun pengakuan lanjutan engannya menguak eksntrisistas permukaan karakter integritas solid dan penghakiman alot. Ia menjadi gubernur provinsi dan fakta bahwa jabatan walikota di Samsun dianggap menguntungkan diisi oleh mantan gubernur yang diambil sebagai indikasi kekhawatiran Rafet Pasha untuk menemukan beberapa solusi damai dari masalah Pontus. Terorisme Osman Agha masih banyak masalah di ANgora sebagaimana terorisme Yunani yang membuahkan hasil, namun solusi akhirnya ditemukan untuknya kala Osman, yang telah menembak 900 Yunani dan Armenia di Marsovan dalam pembalasan terhadap penikaman 200 Turki oleh pasukan Yunani di Ismid, berkirab ke Angora untuk menawarkan dirinya dan para pengikut Laz-nya ke ketentaraan. Ia memasuki Angora sebagai pahlawan penduduk yang murka dan jengah dan Kemal, usai memperkenankannya untuk menikmati pidato penuhnya, memasukkan pengikutnya ke pasukan kejut Turki dengan mereka dipotong menjadi berkeping-keping dalam Pertempuran Sungai Sakaria. Setelah itu, taka da lagi orang Marsovan yang disebut Pontus, walau masalah Yunani-nya masih ada.

Muncul tanpa keraguan bahwa program Pontus telah mencapai status organisasi definitif yang menentukan kemerdekaan, sebuah organisasi yang sulit untuk dilawan oleh alasan fakta bahwa pergerakan apapun melawannya akan terhimpun dalam Buku-buku Hitam Patriarkat Oekumenikal di Konstantinopel sebagai bukti “penindasan Kristen.” Meyakini bahwa salah satu pusat organisasi tersebut adalah badan murid Yunani yang menyebut dirinya Perhimpunan Sastra Pontus di kolese Amerika di Marsovan, Angora meminta Dr. George E. White, presiden kolese, untuk menekan Perhimpunan tersebut. Diyakini lupa bahwa negara tersebut berada dalam keadaan perang dan kini lebih pahit bahkan ketimbang di Marsovan, Dr. White enggan menekan Perhimpunan tersebut. Sehingga, Angora menekan kolese tersebut, mendeportasi staf guru Amerika-nya ke pesisir tempat mereka dipindahkan ke Konstantinopel. Sejumlah Yunani kemudian ditangkap di Marsovan atas bukti yang diyakini oleh Angora mengindikasikan kegiatan mereka dalam organisasi Yunani; mereka dipindahkan ke Angora, ditempatkan pada pengadilan di hadapan mahkamah militer atas dakwaan pengkhianatan pada masa perang, didakwa dan digantung. Namun ketonjolan pada hal yang disebut Pontus masih berlanjut. Yunani dan Turki membakar desa satu sama lain dan bertikai satu sama lain di ladang. Jenis hal tersebut diturunkan sampai 1922, kala Angora, yang gagal untuk memecah organisasi Yunani, mendeportasi seluruh penduduk Yunani di sepanjang Laut Hitam ke pelosok, yang meliputi pria, wanita dan anak-anak.

Kala deportasi telah diperintahkan di Angora, eksekusi mereka ditinggalkan ke kepala polisi lokal dan tindakan eksekusi mereka seragam dengan tekanan kepala polisi lokal dan sejumlah spulai disediakan di setiap provinsi. Kepala polisi dan sejumlah suplai yang tersedia sangat beragam, dan perlakuan orang-orang yang dideportasi pada kirab sangat beragam. Laporan yang dibuat oleh Dr. Mark Ward, tenaga kerja Near East Relief yang dideportasi dari Kharput, diserahkan kepada Kemenlu Inggris di London serta Pemerintahannya sendiri di Washington, menyatakan bahwa penderitaan mereka di Kharput sangatlah berat. Dr. Ward dalam laporannya melayangkan kesalahan atas penderitaan mereka terhadap Angora. Apapun, kala metode lain gagal untuk memecah organisasi Pontus Yunani, Angora melayangkan pernyataan untuk menyatakan bahwa deportasi merupakan proses menonjol bagi Yunani, adalah pertanyaan dalam kekurangan bukti mutlak yang masih tetap tak terjawab disini. Namun, ini diperlihatkan padaku untuk lebih menekankan kesalahan asli dari orang-orang yang mendaratkan orang-orang Yunani di Asia Kecil tanpa alat perlindungan mereka disana. Peristiwa “Pontus” bukanlah peristiwa pertama kala Kekuatan Barat memperkenankan Yunani untuk menyatakan bangsanya sendiri untuk memperingatkan dalam harapan bahwa penderitaan mereka akan mendatangkan bantuan Barat. Terdapat minoritas di setiap kawasan antara Wina dan Bagdad dan tindakan mereka membahayakan bagian teknik pengerjaan negara Balkan. Kejahatan Yunani di Ismid disebabkan oleh pembalasan terhadap Osman Agha di Marsovan. Bukanlah tak mungkin bahwa keperluan terhadap kejahatan Yunani di sepanjang pesisir Marmora dimulai. Tentunya, sulit untuk mendapati keperluan dalam dalam tindakan pasukan reguler Yunani. Sehingga, orang-orang Balkan merancang garis depan baru mereka. Sehingga, ini terjadi sepanjang sebaad dan kemudian mungkin akan berlanjut sepanjang Barat mengijinkan.

It seems to me (and I must add in fairness that my knowledge of the “Pontus” deportations, while gleaned at Angora and the Oecumenical Patriarchate alike, is purely second-hand) that it is open to question whether Angora’s deportation of Greek women was justified and whether it made the fullest use of such scanty supplies as it had in caring for the deportees on the march. On the other hand, the action of the British in disembarking the Greeks into the “Pontus” without protest from the Oecumenical Patriarchate, could only be justified if the Turks remained helpless and passive. As soon as Nationalism began to gather strength in the interior, the most elemental sense of humanity on the part of the British and the Oecumenical Patriarchate should have prompted negotiations with Angora looking toward the re-embarkation of the “Pontus” women and the humane internment of the men.

The deportation of the “Pontus” Greeks and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha’s victory over the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia kept Angora’s rear open. The British front in the Mosul province of Mesopotamia has never threatened Angora’s rear, for the mountainous nature of the country ahead of them has made impossible any further advance on the part of the British. Here the British have sought to partition the Kurdish population, leaving its northern half to Angora and incorporating its southern half in the Arab State of Iraq. Whether the chiefs of the Kurdish tribes prefer to be under Turkish rule or under Arab rule or independent under the British aegis, is a question to which Angora and Bagdad furnish widely varying answers. It seems probable, however, that Kurdish opinion, such as it is, does not relish partition and if there are Kurdish deputies at Angora, it is because the Turks are the only parties to the Mosul controversy who do not propose to divide the Kurdish country. There is a wider aspect, however, to the Mosul controversy. Turks and Arabs alike are Sunni Moslems and as long as the British can maintain a controversy over Mosul between the new Turkish State and the Arab State of Iraq, Islam remains in a divided condition. It is the desire to abstain from any action over Mosul which might widen that breach, which has prompted Djavid Pasha, the Turkish commander at Diarbekr, to refrain from the use of force in the recovery of Mosul. The sheikh of the Senussi who girded the late Caliph on his accession to the Throne in 1918, and who fled from Brussa to Angora when the Greeks entered Smyrna, has been at Diarbekr for the last three years, attempting to heal the Turco-Arab breach over Mosul. Thus far, the conduct of the Turkish command on the Mosul “front” has been marked by a conspicuous restraint.

As Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas looked toward the West, they were confronted by three military fronts, the Cilician front on their left, the Greek front behind Smyrna on their center, and the Allied occupation of Constantinople on their right. In the winter of 1919-’20, the British high command in Cairo withdrew its forces from Cilicia in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, to Palestine, leaving the French command at Beirut in sole occupation of the northern end of the Syrian corridor and of Cilicia. Here, under the French aegis in Cilicia, an Armenian enclave was being carved out and the Turkish administration had withdrawn to Bozanti, a town at the top of the Taurus Range. The French front extended from the Taurus east to the Mosul province, but it was in Cilicia that the weight of the French occupation made itself chiefly felt. The Armenians revenged the undoubted wrongs which they had suffered under the Ottoman Sultans in drastic fashion and there were streets even in Adana itself in which it was not safe for a Turk to show himself after dark. The Turkish towns outside the rim of the French area, possibly inflamed by the tales of Turkish refugees from Adana, soon launched a guerilla warfare against the Franco-Armenian regular troops and began isolating out-lying garrisons. Much of this was directed by the Turkish ex-administration at Bozanti, but it was carried on largely by Turkish irregulars with any following which they could impress into service.

As for the Greek front behind Smyrna, the first defense which was used was that of the Circassian bandit leader, Edhem, but the Greek command soon won him over and made a considerable hero of him. This left Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas without defense and the skeleton Third Army which was hastily transferred from Amasia, covering Samsun, to the Smyrna front was too depleted in strength to offer effective resistance. Nuri Ismet Pasha, a slight deaf man but an able pupil of von der Goltz and the Potsdam War College, was given command on the Smyrna front and the hasty extemporization of munition factories began at Konia in his rear. Until his forces should be built up to an effective strength, however, he restricted himself to keeping in touch with the Greeks, and with all of Asia Minor behind him in which to maneuvre, he traded territory for time whenever the Greeks showed an inclination to move. Luckily for Angora, the Greeks sat waiting on the Allies and attempted little movement after their first rush ended.

Thus hemmed about with enemies, the Nationalist Party had won a clean-cut political victory by installing its Parliamentary majority in Constantinople, and its troops had penetrated into the very suburbs of the capital in search of surrendered munitions with which to re-equip themselves. Although the Mudros armistice had been torn up at the Greek occupation of Smyrna and a state of war again existed, Angora was in close telegraphic communication with Rauf Bey, the leader of its Parliamentary majority in Constantinople. Indeed, with the British Navy commanding those sections of its perimeter which were not in the occupation of enemy Armies, Angora’s wire to Constantinople constituted its only means of communication with the West.

But on the night of March 15-16, 1920, General Milne isolated Constantinople from Anatolia, conducted a series of lightning raids at midnight in Stamboul, arrested Rauf Bey and many of his colleagues for deportation to Malta, and not only cut off Angora from the legal Parliamentary machinery which it had spent eight months in building up, but cut it off from any means of effective communication with the West. This was a staggering blow. Angora immediately ordered the arrest of the few British officers who remained in Asia Minor, chief among them Lord Rawlinson’s brother who was jailed at Erzerum, but with Rauf Bey and his colleagues on their way to Malta as prisoners of the British, the Nationalists lost some of the best brains in the Party. The Italians soon opened their cable from Adalia to Rhodes whence a wireless was in communication with Rome, but Angora’s sole contact with the West was even then at the disposal of a foreign Power.

Within the next few weeks, deputies who had escaped General Milne’s midnight raids in Stamboul, began filtering into Angora and an attempt to reconstruct the shattered Parliament began. A month was allowed for escaped deputies to reach Angora and claim their seats in the new Parliament, and the seats of others who had been interned on Malta were awarded in new “elections,” one of which is said to have been held in the Asiatic suburbs of Constantinople itself where Italian forces were in occupation; Italy has never relished the hurried Greek occupation of Smyrna.

So on April 23, 1920, the reconstructed Parliament, with deputies sitting for constituencies in all the areas covered by the Erzerum program, from Thrace to Mosul, began its session in the old Committee of Union and Progress building in Angora, under the new name of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. Mustapha Kemal Pasha was made Commander-in-Chief and President, Fevzi Pasha became Chief of the General Staff and Prime Minister, Rafet Pasha became Minister of War and Interior, and the deputies acquiesced in the military dictatorship which they found at Angora. Even in the West, democracy does not thrive in time of war, nor did it in the war-ringed isolation of Angora. Forty percent requisitions, accompanied by ruinously heavy taxation afforded, not enough money to balance the Assembly’s budgets, but enough to enable Fevzi and Rafet Pashas to continue re-mobilizing and re-equipping the Army.

On April 6, Damad Ferid Pasha again became Grand Vizier in Constantinople and began at once a determined effort to regain a foothold in Anatolia. Fevzi and Rafet Pashas replied to him with a series of so-called Military Courts of Independence, before which any late Ottoman subject suspected of anti-Nationalism could be brought, tried under the Army code for treason in time of war, and if convicted summarily hung. In the Nationalist view, the Ottoman Sultanate and the Ottoman Government had alike ceased to exist on the night of March 15-16, 1920, and Damad Ferid Pasha, with the prestige of the Ottoman Caliphate at his disposal, now added himself to the Western enemies who surrounded Angora in a final struggle for the possession of the new Turkish State.

The Greeks were hurriedly flung in front of the Straits, Ismet Pasha making no attempt to oppose them, and from behind them Ferid in Constantinople appealed to Old Turkish opinion at Konia to uphold the conservative usages of Islam and denounce the Nationalists. It was an appeal which had helped to nullify the Young Turkish Revolution in 1908, which had helped to keep the old Empire in the stiff dead grip of religious usage. It was a very powerful appeal and the Greek command at Smyrna lost no time in re-inforcing it by proclaiming its solicitude for the Caliphate of Islam. Moslem and Christian reaction were the rocks on which the 1908 Revolution had come to grief and the Greek command at Smyrna lost no time in dropping them into the channel which the Nationalist Revolution of 1920 would have to thread. Since Greeks and Armenians were then at war with Turkey, Christian reaction had no standing at Angora, but Moslem reaction is a rock which Turkey is to this day still engaged in passing and will be for some years to come. Ferid had no more powerful weapon with which to attack the Nationalist hold on the conservative peasantry of Asia Minor and on the dervish tekkes of Konia. The Nationalists could handle their strong but docile peasantry, but if the worst came to the worst at Konia the Nationalists could make it plain that Indian and Algerian Moslems had fought against the Ottoman Government during the war and that in the new Turkish State the needs of the country took precedence over the letter of Moslem law.

From April 6, 1920, when Damad Ferid Pasha re-entered office in Constantinople, a Nationalist coastguard was instituted on the Mediterranean opposite Konia in order to oppose any attempt at a landing, whether by Ferid’s followers from the capital or by Greeks engaged in the interesting business of proclaiming their solicitude for Islam. Konia itself, a dusty wind-swept provincial capital on the Anatolian plateau, replete with old Seljukian and pre-Seljukian mosques, was linked with Angora by a great semi-circle of railway line which bent westward via Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar, and thrice-a-week trains made the journey in eighteen hours. At the same time, this bend of railway line was identical from Eski-Shehr to Afium with another bend from Constantinople to Smyrna. With Smyrna and its hinterland in Greek hands, the Greek command added to its new interest in Islam a scheme for the revival under Greek auspices of the old Seljukian Empire with its seat at Konia. The Seljukian program is another of the ghosts which became stirred to life when the Ottoman Empire went down in 1918 to join the dead.

Ferid’s agents and Greek agents kept slipping through the Greek lines toward Konia and moving back and forth under the coasts of Asia Minor with their eyes on Konia. In the British view, the Ottoman dynasty had lost the Caliphate in 1914 when it was used to declare a holy war against the British and their Allies. Events at Mecca had since changed the British view, but if the Caliphate were not too serious a matter for light speaking, it might be added that in the Nationalist view the British lost the Caliphate in 1920 when they used it to declare a holy war against the Nationalists. Ferid finally recovered Konia in the counter-revolution of October, 1920, but Rafet Pasha hurried 2,000 men down the railway from Angora, occupied Ala-ed-Din hill in the outskirts of the city and drove out Ferid’s administration in three days of sharp fighting. Rafet Pasha appointed as military governor of Konia, Ghalib Pasha, a tall white-haired Albanian who had defended the Caliphate as Ottoman commander in the Hejaz during the war, and the tchelebi of the Mevlevi dervishes whose historic right it had been to gird each Caliph with the Prophet’s Sword forty days after his accession to the Throne, went to Angora as one of Konia’s eight deputies in the Grand National Assembly. So the Seljukian ghost was laid and the Caliphate came into the Nationalists’ keeping.

The Nationalist hold on the interior of Asia Minor now became indisputable. The munition factories in the rear of Ismet Pasha’s slowly growing forces on the Smyrna front, were quickly enlarged and Konia became a war-center of the first importance in the interior. A considerable number of Armenians who had been returned to Konia after the Mudros armistice and who had voluntarily remained in their homes when the British offered to evacuate them at the time of their own evacuation of the Bagdad Railway, had been compromised anew by the Greek occupation of Smyrna and were placed under increasing military surveillance as the number of Turkish munition factories in the town grew. Armenian “indiscretions,” however, finally led to the deportation of men of military age farther into the interior, and the locking up of their churches in Konia. The juxtaposition of a Turkish munition factory and an Armenian church is one which is possibly apt to produce “indiscretions.” When I was last in Konia, the only Armenians there were women and children. A number of mosques in the town had been taken over for military depots, but no Armenian church in the town had been so taken over. The churches were locked up but otherwise untouched. The Armenian women in the town were permitted to receive no mail from the outside world, for the Nationalist censors were supposed to read Turkish and French only, not Armenian. No Turk ever learns Armenian, and apparently there was no Armenian in whose loyalty the Turks had sufficient confidence to enable them to entrust Armenian mail to him for censorship. The Armenian women were being taxed to the point of robbery, and so were their Turkish neighbors. Ghalib Pasha told me that he was treating Turks and Armenians on a basis of scrupulous equality, and I believe that he meant precisely what he said. If there were enough men like Ghalib Pasha in Turkey to fill all the provincial administrations, Turkey would be a model country. But men like Ghalib Pasha are not appointed chiefs of police in highly delicate places like Konia.

Damad Ferid Pasha did not cease his efforts to regain a foothold in Anatolia, after his brief counter-revolution in Konia. With the Greek advance in the spring and summer of 1921, his agents renewed their activities along the coasts. In Smyrna the Greeks welcomed them and in Mersina, the port of Cilicia, the French and Armenians welcomed them. Their work increased with the 1921 Greek offensive, until Nationalist agents boarded the British steamer Palatina at Adalia, discovered Topal Osman and four confederates hidden in a cargo hold, and shot them down. It was a wholly illegal proceeding but it put an end to Ferid’s efforts to return to Anatolia. Incidentally, it so embarrassed the Italians who were occupying Adalia under the secret war-time agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, that they evacuated their zone. Technically, they had been hostile to the Turks but actually their hostility was directed to the Greeks in Smyrna. Their departure now afforded the Nationalists their first access to the Mediterranean, and their first representation in the West was soon at Rome.