Kelahiran Kembali Turki/Bab 18
XVIII
TURKISH NATIONALISM
THE WESTERN TRADITION OF GOVERNMENT TO WHICH THE GRAND NATIONAL ASSEMBLY WAS BUILT—HOW NATIONALISM WAS CREATED—GREEK DEFEAT AT THE SAKARIA RIVER—PEACE WITH THE FRENCH IN CILICIA—AMERICAN ARMENIANISM AND CILICIA—HOW A CIVILIAN ADMINISTRATION WAS BEGUN AT ANGORA WHILE FEVZI PASHA WAS RE-MOBILIZING AND RE-EQUIPPING THE TURKISH ARMIES.
When the Grand National Assembly opened its first session on April 23, 1920, in the gray granite building at the foot of Angora, the Crescent and Star went up on the flag-staff atop the building and, although trenches were dug for its military defense if necessary, the Turkish flag has flown there night and day ever since it was first hoisted. At one corner of the grounds, just outside the trenches which encircle the building, a gallows was erected. In a little restaurant near the Assembly building, I have sat at luncheon with that gallows looking in through the window. I have thought several times as I sat there of a number of worthy Americans at home who might have held less simple views on Near and Middle Eastern subjects in days gone by, if they could have sat at luncheon in Angora with the cross-beam and pulley of that gallows looking in upon them.
The Assembly building itself contains a single floor with a corridor down its middle, a row of committee rooms on one side and a comparatively large chamber on the other. The chamber was equipped for the Assembly’s use by the construction of a high desk for “Mr. Speaker” in the center of one wall and a lower desk in front of it to be used by deputies in addressing the Assembly. Grouped in semi-circular fashion around the Speaker’s desk, the small desks to be used by the deputies themselves were crowded upon the floor of the chamber in long rows. Half-way up the side walls, small galleries were built for visitors. The whole equipment was of wood. It looked like a school-room. It was a school-room, possibly as bitter a school-room as any nation has ever attended.
The 342 deputies of the Assembly were in large part, and still are, Easterners engaged in adapting the Western governmental tradition to their own uses, but they have never sold their great Eastern birthright for a mess of Western pottage. When they gathered for their first session at 1 o’clock on April 23, 1920, a small motto, done in Turkish script of white on a blue ground, a quotation from the Koran such as may be found in thousands of devout Moslem homes, was hung on the wall above the Speaker’s desk. A free translation of it into English would be: “Let us meet together in council and discuss.” It was the ground on which the new force of nationalism was carrying the conservative peasantry of Anatolia behind the Caliph in Constantinople to the Koran itself, on which it was wrenching Anatolia away from the Sultan and his Grand Vizier while refraining from any violation of its allegiance to the Ottoman Caliphate.
Beneath that motto, the deputies met at 1 o’clock every day but Friday, which is the Moslem Sabbath. They consisted of men in Western dress and kalpaks, officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman Army days, and hojas in Eastern robes and turbans. They varied in personal appearance from the ample and immaculate figure of Djelal-ed-Din Arif Bey, deputy for Erzerum, to three Kurdish chiefs who could neither read nor write. The din of their conversation, both within the chamber and in the corridor without, was continual and the intermittent tinkle of the Speaker’s hand-bell did little to abate it, for the Assembly at Angora is as noisy as all other Parliaments are.
The military dictatorship which Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha wielded over Anatolia was in the Eastern tradition, but in the institution of the Assembly a Western plant began taking root in the Eastern soil of Anatolia. The military dictatorship would pass with the war but the Assembly was intended to be permanent and it was fashioned in readiness to begin functioning as soon as the war permitted. In its structure, the Western tradition was adapted to what were believed to be the country’s needs. It was necessarily fashioned to a theory at first, for the number of enemies who ringed it about made a dictatorship essential. As the war approached its end, as more men and more money became available, practice might modify it but with the loss of the Parliament at Constantinople it afforded the only attempt at an ultimately civilian administration which the country possessed.
This is the theory to which it was built: Under the Ottoman Constitution, as revived by the 1908 Revolution, the powers of declaring war and peace, of dissolving Parliament, of receiving diplomatic representatives of foreign States, and of appointing the Cabinet and the Senate, had been vested in the Sultan. In the creation of the Grand National Assembly, the Sultan was deposed and his prerogatives were re-distributed. The Assembly itself became the seat of authority and since its sessions were fixed by its fundamental law at two years’ duration, no right of dissolving it was admitted. The power of receiving diplomatic representatives of foreign States was delegated to the President of the Assembly. The power of appointing the Cabinet was taken by the Assembly and since its Ministers were made individually responsible to the Assembly, both the executive and the legislative functions of government were retained in its hands. The Senate disappeared with the Sultan and the Government of the Grand National Assembly became radically republican in structure. Differences of opinion existed in the Nationalist Party respecting its permanent structure, a small school of monarchist opinion holding that a form of government so unreservedly republican would not show itself suited to the country’s peace-time needs, but for the time being domestic controversies were buried deeply beneath the urgencies of the military situation. No differences of opinion have existed among Westerners who know the East, however. It has long been a belief in the West that the East can only be ruled by Sultans. We Westerners may be right or we may be wrong in our views of the East, but Turkish Nationalism has thrown us a most direct challenge in the out-and-out republicanism of its Grand National Assembly. When the war ends, we shall see what we shall see.
The Grand National Assembly speedily set about the elaboration of a fundamental law which may be taken as the Constitution in embryo of the new Turkish State. It was finally adopted on June 17, 1920, and its more important clauses translate from Turkish into English as follows: “Article I. Sovereignty belongs to the nation without reservation. The administration of the nation’s sovereignty is based on the principle of the direct decision of the people.
“Article II. The executive power as well as the legislative power are concentrated in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey which alone represents the nation.
“Article III. Turkey is governed by the Grand National Assembly and its Government is entitled ‘the Government of the Grand National Assembly.’ “Article IV. The Grand National Assembly is composed of members elected by the inhabitants of provinces.
“Article V. The election of members of the Grand National Assembly takes place once in every two years. The duration of membership is two years only. Members may be re-elected. The Assembly continues its session until the new Assembly is convened. In case it is impossible to hold new elections, the session of the Assembly may be prolonged for one year only. Each member of the Grand National Assembly represents not only his province but is also a representative of the nation.
“Article VI. The general session of the Grand National Assembly takes place on the first of November without convocation.
“Article VII. Fundamental rights such as the enactment dispositions of the Sheriat (Moslem law), the making, modification and abrogation of laws, the conclusion of conventions and treaties of peace, and the call for the defense of the country, belong to the Grand National Assembly. The making of laws shall be based on principles of jurisprudence which are most closely adapted to the needs of the nation and to the requirements of its customs and habits. The powers and duties of the council of mandatory Ministers of the nation shall be determined by special laws.
“Article VIII. The Grand National Assembly administers its governmental departments through mandatory Ministers elected by the Assembly, according to rules to be provided in a special law. It is the Grand National Assembly which instructs the mandatory Ministers in executive matters and if necessary changes the Ministers….
“Article XI. In local matters, the province has an autonomous personality. With the exception of internal and external policy, the Sheriat, justice, military affairs, international economic relations, government imposts and inter-provincial matters, the provinces are charged with the administration, under laws to be promulgated by the Grand National Assembly, of the Evkaf (Moslem religious endowments), educational institutions, sanitary services, local economics, agriculture, public works and social services….”
The remaining articles outline the organization of the provincial and sub-provincial administrations. In this fundamental law, the Nationalist Revolution of 1920 undertakes to effect the same decentralization in administration as the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 failed to effect. It undertakes infinitely more than that. At a single stroke, it lifts the new Turkish State out of the dead grip of ancient religious usage which strangled the 1908 Revolution, which in fact made effective revolution of any sort a traditional and hackneyed impossibility in the old Ottoman Empire. Whether the new Turkish State will succeed in maintaining its new and highly promising freedom from the stiff religious traditions which imprisoned the old Empire, remains to be seen. Christian reaction has been met and defeated on the field of battle, but Moslem reaction is still suppressed by the iron hand of the Assembly’s Treason Law. Hidden away in the bitter loneliness of Anatolia, the Nationalist Party has used drastic methods in laying the foundations of its Western governmental structure in the Eastern soil of Anatolia. If those foundations have been well and firmly laid, we have something new in the East at last.
Westerners who did not penetrate the thick veil of war which screened Anatolia from the world during its years of seige, will not find it easy to realize the suspicion with which it regarded us in the West. Deceived again and again by Mr. Lloyd George, goaded by repeated Greek atrocities unwittingly reinforced by wild atrocity tales to which the hospitable American press opened its columns, only a man of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s iron patience could have compelled his angry countrymen to persevere in the search for a peaceful escape from the fate which loomed above them on every frontier. Yet amid the suspicion which possessed Anatolia during those hard years, the Nationalist Party created a new and very real human force known as nationalism. Patriotism, love of one’s own soil, is a Western sentiment which would have required a generation under normal circumstances for its transplantation to the Eastern soil of Anatolia, but under the circumstance of a Greek Smyrna, it sprang into existence overnight. The Turkish poet, Mehmed Emin Bey, travelling from village to village in Anatolia with a Turkish officer attached to him, added fuel to the new flame of nationalism with his old cry, “I am a Turk; my race and language are great.” Newspaper plants, smuggled out from Constantinople, pieces of press machinery concealed in travellers’ baggage, handfuls of type dropped into travellers’ pockets, produced new dailies and weeklies in Anatolia which poured more fuel on the new flame. The whole culture of the Turks was moved bit by bit from the old capital to the new center of the nation’s life. Rafet Pasha’s Military Courts of Independence suppressed any attempt to quench the new flame. These Courts were a harsh reminder that there was such a thing as a distinctive Middle Eastern civilization and that it had come to a time when there was no longer any room in Anatolia for natives who were not loyal to their own civilization. The old religious divisions which had split the Anatolian population swiftly melted away in the heat of the new flame. Papa Eftim Effendi gave up his community rights and sixty-eight Orthodox churches in the interior followed him into the new Turkish Orthodox Church, agreeing to appoint no metropolitans except those who could read and write Turkish, who were of Ottoman parentage, who had lived at least five years in the country and who had abstained from “political activity.” They agreed furthermore that metropolitans accused of secular crimes, instead of being immune from arrest without having first been degraded and then being subject to imprisonment only in the Oecumenical Patriarchate, were to be arrested and tried as any other Turkish subject would be. Moslems permitted a new personage called the Minister of Sacred Law to become an ordinary member of the Cabinet at Angora, and the huge wealth which was locked up in the country’s Moslem endowments was opened and placed at the disposition of the provincial administrations. Moslem courts and schools were taken over by the Ministers of Justice and Education, respectively. Although American churchmen still thought in terms of the old Ottoman Empire, still played upon the old religious division between Moslems and Christians which had proved the ruin of them both, the new political force of nationalism was blending them in Turkey as in Syria, in Palestine and in Egypt. Nationalism is a strangely new and Western force in the East today and thus far Anatolia has clung to it in the face of every effort which Mr. Lloyd George and American churchmen could exert to throw the country back into the ruin of its bitter past.
For a year after the Greeks landed at Smyrna on May 15, 1919, they sat in the hinterland of the great port waiting for the Sevres Treaty, while Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha worked like Trojans at Angora. In May, 1920, they threw their screen in front of the Straits, Ismet Pasha making no effort to molest them. In November, 1920, Old Greece finally rid itself of Mr. Venizelos, a wedge was driven between Athens and the Phanar, and the French made Constantine an excuse for disentangling themselves from the Greeks. Royalist officers now took over the front behind Smyrna with no respect for the Allied veto on a drive toward Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar. With these two railway junctions occupied, the Greeks would possess the great semi-circle of railway which runs from Constantinople to Smyrna, and the Turks would be deprived of the interior Angora-Konia line with which they were secretly re-mobilizing and re-equipping their Armies on the Smyrna front. Accordingly in January, 1921, the Royalist Greek command tried its strength from Brussa toward Eski-Shehr and retired without encountering Turkish opposition. The situation was now plain. Eski-Shehr and Afium were theirs whenever they cared to take them. As for Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha at Angora, they had imposed a strict embargo on travellers into the interior of Anatolia and the secrecy they succeeded in preserving was one of their striking successes.
Two months later, in March, 1921, the Royalist Greek command launched its double advance, the Southern Army moving on Afium from Ushak, the Northern Army on Eski-Shehr from Brussa. To their surprise, both advances encountered organized Turkish forces of considerable strength. The Southern Army, against stiff opposition, succeeded in occupying Afium but the Northern Army, following the route it had walked over in January, ran into a murderous battle at Inë-Onü and had to fall back to its old position at Brussa, the Southern Army falling back from Afium to Ushak with it. That battle was the first meeting of Greek and Turkish troops in Asia Minor and is today one of the epics of the new Turkey.
Inë-Onü was the first evidence the Greeks had of what Fevzi Pasha and Rafet Pasha had been doing at Angora, and Athens began feverishly to increase its forces in order to administer a “knockout” before Ismet Pasha’s command should be built up into a regular Army. Athens was ready by July and three Armies, starting from the southern, center and northern fronts, were ordered to converge on Kutahia, about half-way between Eski-Shehr and Afium. The operations developed according to plan, Kutahia fell, Eski-Shehr was evacuated under the threat of encirclement and, although Ismet Pasha pounded at the exhausted Greeks in Eski-Shehr for ten days, the Greeks held and Ismet Pasha withdrew to the Sakaria River, covering Angora itself. The Greek command had won the railway junctions of Eski-Shehr and Afium and now possessed the bend of railway line which connects Constantinople and Smyrna. The Turkish command had lost its interior railway line and the only connection between Angora and Konia was now a carriage road over which the two towns were five days apart.
Still lured by the possibility of a “knockout,” the Greek command now rested for a month and then resumed its march. Toward the end of August, it re-established contact with the Turks on the Sakaria River, where Field Marshal Mustapha Kemal Pasha had taken command in person. At Angora the civil Government had made preparations for evacuation to Caesarea, crowds of refugees had thronged the already overcrowded town, and occupants of larger dwellings were dispossessed to make room for military hospitals.
The Battle of the Sakaria River which ensued, was another Inë-Onü but on a larger scale. It lasted three weeks and even Kemal Pasha himself was wounded in the course of it, although the only announcement which was made of his injury in Angora was a brief communique to the effect that he had “fallen from his horse.” Attempting to encircle the Turkish left, the Greek command drove south across an area of desert but Kemal pulled down his forces to meet them. The Greeks drove inland forty miles in a vain endeavor to find the Turkish left, and finally changing their plan of battle, threw themselves against the Turkish lines in a straight frontal engagement, some of the Greek attacks driving all the way through and then being held up by the failure of flanking regiments to follow them. Heavy Turkish counter-attacks finally made it plain that the Greek command had underestimated the Turkish strength and that the long Greek lines of communication exposed it to the risk of a disorderly retreat. By the middle of September, the Greek command began pulling back its forces, burning Turkish villages as they went. By the first of October, the Greeks were back in their old positions covering the railway junctions at Eski-Shehr and Afium and the Turkish recovery of Smyrna became only a matter of time. By the end of October, the late Miss Annie T. Allen and Miss Florence Billings, the Near East Relief’s representatives in Angora, compiled a report on the state of the Turkish villages which the Greeks had burned during their retreat and forwarded it to the Near East Relief’s headquarters in Constantinople. But the Near East Relief has never published that report, just as Mr. Lloyd George never published the Bristol report on Greek misdeeds at Smyrna.
The Turkish victory on the banks of the Sakaria radically changed the political complexion of the Near and Middle East. For 200 years, the West had been breaking down the old Ottoman Empire, but on the Sakaria River it encountered the Turk himself and when it touched the Turk the tide of history turned. History will one day find in this obscure engagement on the Sakaria one of the decisive battles of our era.
The French Foreign Office which had been waiting on the outer rim of events ever since the Mudros armistice deprived the French Army of its anticipated sole command in Constantinople, now dispatched M. Henry Franklin-Bouillon to Angora, where he negotiated the Franco-Turkish peace agreement of October 20, 1921. Although the covering letter from Yusuf Kemal Bey, Foreign Minister of the Turkish Government, contains the only reference to “economic preference” which marked the result of the Franklin-Bouillon negotiations, the French Foreign Office probably hoped in this agreement not only to put an end to the expensive state of war which the French command at Beirut was facing in Cilicia, but also to salvage the Perier railway concession which had been the subject of French negotiations with the old Ottoman Government in 1914. A French loan of £22,000,000 had been offered the old Government in February of that year of which £16,000,000 was paid in the following April, the French Perier group taking in return a concession for 1,800 miles of railway line in northern and eastern Anatolia. The loan, however, had never been completed, the concession had never been ratified by the old Parliament and it seems quite probable that, even if it had been, the war would have cancelled it. But peace in Cilicia had become an urgent necessity, for the Turkish forces were slowly pushing the Franco-Armenian Armies back toward the sea. To secure peace, as well as any other objectives which M. Franklin-Bouillon may have had in mind, the French Foreign Office surrendered to Turkey a long strip of territory, beginning with Cilicia and running east to the Mosul province, a French company, however, maintaining the right of operating the Bagdad Railway from the port of Mersina in Cilicia to its eastern terminus on the flatlands of Upper Mesopotamia.
News of this surrender so embittered the French Army that General Dufieux, the French commandant in Cilicia, left Adana immediately for Beirut, leaving behind him only subordinate French officers to carry out the evacuation. It threw the Armenians in Cilicia into a panic. In preparing their independent Armenian State under the French aegis, they had taken a drastic revenge on the Turks in Cilicia and there was doubtless ample ground for their fears that the Turks would continue the ugly business. In order to assuage their fears, the Turkish Government proclaimed a blanket amnesty, exempted them from military service which it had a legal right to claim from them, exempted them from the forty percent requisitions which it exacted from all other Turkish subjects in the country, and guaranteed their security in the strongest terms it could use. To back up these guarantees, it dispatched two of the best men it had available, Muheddin Pasha as military governor of the re-occupied territory and Hamid Bey, who has been mentioned above in connection with Samsun, as political officer. Muheddin Pasha is a representative of the finest type of old Ottoman Army officer. He was one of Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s teachers in the War Academy at Constantinople and he has been introduced by Kemal Pasha as “the man who gave us all our ideas of liberty.” He had nothing to do with the Armenian deportations of 1915 or with the Enver Government which ordered them; under the Hamidian regime, he had been exiled four times and twice condemned to death, and during the war he served as Ottoman commander in the Yemen which was about as far from the capital as Enver Pasha could have sent him.
The Turkish re-occupation was timed to begin Dec. 1, 1921, and to be completed by Jan. 4, 1922. On November 20, Muheddin Pasha and Hamid Bey published a proclamation in the Turkish newspaper, Yeni Adana, which was designed to assuage the Armenians’ fears. On November 22, they met a deputation of Armenian leaders in an upper room of the Yenidje railway station, and M. Franklin-Bouillon reached Yenidje later in the day from Angora to repeat their re-assurances. On November 26, they motored to Mersina where some 40,000 Armenians were waiting for ships and met a deputation of 100 Armenian notables in the Government building. On November 29, M. Franklin-Bouillon returned to Mersina alone and held a final conference with the Armenians. Since they had once been Ottoman subjects, the Turkish Government had a probable right in law to forbid their departure from Turkish soil, but it had become clear that no guarantees it could offer would persuade them to remain voluntarily and the Government refrained from keeping them involuntarily. Most of them went to Syria to live on the charity of the Near East Relief at Alexandretta, only a few miles away, and their abandoned homes in Cilicia were put into the hands of a Turkish committee appointed by Hamid Bey to be kept for them for a year’s time. Most of Cilicia was in a devastated condition and there was an appalling amount of work to be done in repairing the ravages of war, but the bulk of the Armenians settled down to live in idleness on American charity at the old Alexandretta barracks.
It may be that some means will yet be discovered of re-writing ten centuries of history in the eastern provinces and five centuries in Cilicia; it may be that some way will yet be opened of transferring the semi-autonomy of the old Ermeni community from a religious to a territorial basis, but with all possible good will, the discovery of it or of the faintest possibility of it has proven beyond the feeble powers of the present writer. If the Armenian problem had ever been really understood in the United States, certainly no sane American would ever have meddled with it. The past, however, is beyond recall. In the tragic position to which the Armenians have been reduced today, three courses suggest themselves as being open to Americans in the future:
First, Congress may declare war on Turkey and by dispatching an expeditionary force of a strength of possibly 200,000 men, we may conquer Cilicia and install an Armenian State which will stand as long as our Army or some other Western Army remains in occupation and no longer; and by so doing, we shall succeed in righting one wrong by committing a greater wrong. Happily, this course is out of the question.
Second, we may continue to support the Armenians with charity and to insist upon “minority rights” in Turkey as distinct from the rights of Turkey’s majorities. This course we have followed consistently since 1918, and it has only succeeded in stiffening the Turks, pauperizing the Armenians, and preventing that peace which is the very first essential of both.
Third, we may permit the Armenians to work out their future alone. This is the course which thoughtful Armenians in Turkey now desire us to adopt, and its principal remaining opponents are certain Armenians who live in New York and are frightfully far from reality. If we adopt this course for the future, it seems quite possible that those Armenians who prefer to live in their own country will in time find their way into Soviet Armenia and those who remain in Turkey will be given equal rights and equal duties with the Turks themselves. Turks and Armenians understand each other well. Until fifty years ago, they had lived together on generally peaceful terms for several centuries and the fact (to come no nearer home) that Czarist Russia has disappeared, seems to promise the possibility of an eventual resumption in the new Turkish State of that peace which once characterized their relationship….
The French evacuation of Cilicia cleared the Turkish left, but the Greeks on the Eski-Shehr-Afium line still confronted the Turkish center and the Allies in Constantinople still confronted the Turkish right. Meanwhile, the British command in the capital executed in a lesser degree the same climb-down as the French had made with respect to Angora. As a result of the Turkish victory on the Sakaria River, the Turkish deportees on Malta were exchanged at Ineboli on the Black Sea coast for British prisoners held in Anatolia. So Rauf Bey came back to Angora.
No Turk has been a greater lover of the British than Rauf Bey (Rauf is of Circassian and Albanian blood, but politically he is a Turk and unlike most Turks his foreign language is English instead of French). He had applied to the British Embassy in 1914 for help in keeping his country neutral, but no reply had been given him. He had applied to Admiral Calthorpe in 1918 for an armistice, but that armistice led to the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Greek occupation of Smyrna. He had acted in good faith upon an intimation from General Milne in 1920 and had brought the Nationalist deputies from Angora to Constantinople, but that action landed him behind British barbed wire on Malta. Is it a matter of wonder that the great tradition which generations of Englishmen had built up in Constantinople, has now disappeared? No Turk has fought harder for the British than Rauf Bey, and few countries have ever more consistently wounded their own friends in Turkey than the England over which Mr. Lloyd George presided. Rauf Bey’s tragic experience at the hands of their country is one which Englishmen might do well to ponder during these new days, when Turkish tugs are piloting British merchantmen into the Gulf of Smyrna.
Ali Fethy Bey, a mild, almost shy, Macedonian Turk whose modest bearing gives no hint of the strength he has contributed to Angora, returned with Rauf and a long list of other deputies in the late Parliament at Constantinople. Here were the civilian brains of which Angora stood in the greatest need and it now became possible for the Grand National Assembly to begin the erection of a civilian administration. Winter was coming on and the military situation would necessarily remain at a stand-still. The Assembly gave its War Office (the Ministry of National Defense is its official title) an immediate shake-up. Rafet Pasha fell and the Ministry of the Interior was separated out and given to Ali Fethy Bey. Here he encountered the same difficulty as so many of the Nationalist leaders encountered—he knew nothing of Anatolia and it required most of the winter merely to learn the ins and outs of his department. Rauf Bey was given the Ministry of Public Works but in a re-shuffle of the Cabinet, he presently displaced Fevzi Pasha as Prime Minister, a position more nearly commensurate with his very high abilities. The Ministry of Finance was elevated to an actual, as distinct from a figurehead, authority and the Near East Relief’s representatives who had been accustomed to consulting Rafet Pasha on matters of mutual interest, now found themselves referred to Hassan Tahsin Bey, Minister of Finance, when they desired to obtain exemption of relief supplies from the payment of customs duties. Rafet Pasha had been accustomed to pass on their applications as if they were personal matters, but Tahsin Bey was a stranger. With the regime of the Capitulations ended, Americans were finding themselves in a position in which it became necessary to treat a Government official in Turkey as though he were a Government official. For some Americans, the change has proven, and is still proving, a difficult one.
In the meantime, the Foreign Office which had been housed in the old Public Debt building, had signed a treaty of mutual recognition with Soviet Russia on March 16, 1921, at the same time as a similar Russo-Persian treaty was being signed. In the Russo-Turkish treaty, full Russian recognition was given to the Erzerum program, including that clause of it respecting Constantinople and the Straits. No more vivid illustration exists of the meaning of the Russian Revolution than the contrast between the Russo-Turkish Treaty of 1921 and the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.
The application of the provisions of the 1921 Treaty to the new Russo-Turkish frontier in the Kars Treaty which was signed Oct. 13, 1921, brought about peace in the eastern provinces, and Azerbaijan and Afghan Ministers, accredited to Mustapha Kemal Pasha, were received in Angora. A Russian Ambassador was also received and the elaboration of consular and commercial treaties was begun.
Only three sections of the frontiers of the Turkish State now remained to be fixed—the Mosul frontier, the Smyrna frontier and the frontier in Europe. Communication with the West, with a view to the peaceful settlement of these disputed frontiers, was now open to Constantinople direct, the British command having opened the wire from the General Post-Office in Stamboul to “the interior” at the same time as it returned the deportees from Malta. The carriage road from Adabazar which was available by rail from Constantinople, on past the Greek left to Angora was also thrown open, but Greek and Circassian brigands raided it so frequently that its use was impossible without a strong guard. Access to Angora was in practice still confined to the railway from Mersina to Konia and thence by carriage to Angora, or up from the Black Sea coast through the mountains to Angora. Admission to the interior, however, was rarely granted by the Turkish Government’s new representative in Stamboul, for the Greeks were still dug in before Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar and the war was still on.
Conditions in Anatolia greatly improved during the winter of 1921-’22. The beginnings of a civilian administration appeared, but the military situation necessarily continued to dominate. Fevzi Pasha continued to snap up munitions wherever he could get them. Some came from the Italians, some came from the French (it is not impossible that the American uniforms in which some of the Turkish soldiers have been clad, were originally left as American surplus stocks in France), and some came from the British, for the British Commander-in-Chief and the British High Commissioner in Constantinople were in as happy accord on the subject of the Greeks as the British War Office and the British Foreign Office have been on a number of other Eastern subjects. In the main, however, the Turkish forces were re-mobilized and re-equipped by the native resourcefulness of the Turk himself, as personified in the dour towering figure of Fevzi Pasha. Even after he had secured foreign ammunition, after gangs of peasant women had trekked it up from the coasts in ox-carts and on the backs of mules and camels, machinery had to be scraped together to change the calibre of much of it before it would fit his guns. There is hardly a more remarkable story in modern military history than the story of how Fevzi Pasha re-mobilized and re-equipped the Turkish forces out of left-over lots of dismantled artillery and misfit ammunition. The cost of those forces to Anatolia in its impoverished condition has been appalling, but their creation by Fevzi Pasha under the conditions of siege which prevailed, has been no less than miraculous.