Kelahiran Kembali Turki/Bab 19
XIX SMYRNA, 1922
ALLIED EFFORTS TO HITCH THE SEVRES TREATY TO TURKISH NATIONALISM—GREEKS TRANSFER TROOPS FROM SMYRNA TO EASTERN THRACE FOR A MOVE ON CONSTANTINOPLE AND WHEN FETHY BEY IS REFUSED A HEARING IN LONDON, FEVZI PASHA LAUNCHES HIS ATTACK—THE TURKISH RECOVERY OF SMYRNA—MR. LLOYD GEORGE RESIGNS AND THE OTTOMAN SULTAN FLEES—LAUSANNE.
Through the winter of 1921-’22, the Angora scene was a busy one. In the little restaurant near the Assembly building, Cabinet Ministers, deputies and Army officers crowded the pine tables at the luncheon hour, glancing up from their small talk as the unpainted pine door opened to admit others of their number. The Bokhara Mission would be in tomorrow. Somebody had been newly named for the Mission to Kabul. The Minister of the Interior was to make an important statement to the Assembly shortly. From far away the staccato rat-tat of machine-gun practice knocked faintly at the ear without occasioning any more interruption than the squeak of the passing ox-carts outside. But the small talk paused in its flow when two young gentlemen of the Azerbaijan Legation entered and joined three young ladies of the Russian Embassy in a cigarette at their corner table. The small talk recovered slowly. So-and-so Bey, newly arrived from the Ritz in Paris, entered with the announcement that he had been unable to find a room in the town and had had to borrow a soldier and a bucket of whitewash to build himself a house. Could we come up to the housewarming tomorrow night? We could. For somebody else with whom we had promised to dine had had to cancel the invitation on further reflection, the wind being in the wrong direction and his stove smoking in consequence.
Outside the restaurant, the falling snow etched its white tracery across the street panorama of Angora. Peasant women in red ragged pantaloons, turbaned hojas robed in more somber colors, smart Turkish officers in the old great-coats of Ottoman days, Turkish soldiers in somebody’s cast-off khaki, Government officials in kalpaks and European dress, a Turkish policeman in the old Ottoman brilliance of red cuffs and brass buttons, six white-robed male nurses from a Red Crescent hospital bearing on their shoulders a heavy covered stretcher on its way to an empty grave outside the town—these came and went through the veil of snow. Groups of men, sitting at their coffee around glowing braziers in front of the cafes, lifted their faces from the Constantinople papers at the approaching music of a military band (true, the Constantinople papers were ten days old by the time they reached Angora, but many of these men had left their homes and families in Constantinople, and all they possessed in the world was hidden somewhere in the old capital, awaiting their return). Out of a narrow sidestreet the band moved into sight with a withered little mad woman dancing in her rags beside it. She was fairly well known in Angora. They said that her father and two brothers had been killed in the Balkan Wars, her husband and three sons had been killed in the Great War, and her youngest son had been killed at Inë-Onü. But however these things might have been, she was dancing down the street beside the heavy-shod bandsmen, dancing as lightly as the snowflakes to the crashing rhythms of the Mustapha Kemal Pasha March.
In the wake of the band came the tramping shuffle of a long column of soldiers, stolid men, heavily accoutred, with khaki kalpaks, their rifles tipped with new bayonets. They marched away down the broad road which led past the Assembly building to the railway station, a wooden building with the single word “Angora” in Turkish and English script on its sign-board. A low pall of woodsmoke, belched from the stacks of half a dozen locomotives, hung over the railway yard. A long column of ox-carts was discharging its cargo of new rope-handled wooden boxes into freight cars. With the band playing, the column of soldiers broke ranks and scrambled up into another freight train alongside the station platform. They entrained within a half-hour, a rattle of couplings ran along the length of the train, and it moved out of the station toward the west, where the Greeks were still dug in before Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar….
On Feb. 21, 1921, the Allied Governments had received delegations from Athens, Constantinople and Angora in London in an effort to reconcile the Treaty of Sevres and the new force of Turkish nationalism. The Angora delegates were received as technically members of the Constantinople delegation, but the latter delegated its leadership to Bekr Sami Bey, a huge sloping Circassian who was Foreign Minister at Angora. Bekr Sami Bey belongs to a type of leadership which is one of Turkey’s peculiar assets, a type which has enjoyed a long and rich experience in diplomacy and which as a result has developed a genius for stripping away non-essentials and holding fast to essentials. There is an old and true saying to the effect that what an Englishman is at sea, what a Frenchman is on land, a Turk is in diplomacy. It is a statement which closely characterizes men of the type of Bekr Sami Bey.
The Allied Governments offered to institute an international commission for the investigation of population statistics in Eastern Thrace and Smyrna, on condition that Turkey and Greece accepted its findings and that the remainder of the Sevres Treaty stood unaltered. Bekr Sami Bey accepted the offer, subject to certain conditions in the conduct of the investigation and certain reservations as to the remainder of the Sevres Treaty. The Greek delegation would accept no alteration in the Sevres Treaty of any sort.
On March 12, the Allied Governments proposed a series of modifications in the Sevres Treaty, undertaking inter alia that “the region called the Vilayet of Smyrna would remain under Turkish sovereignty and a Greek force would remain in Smyrna town, but in the rest of the sanjak order would be maintained by a gendarmerie with Allied officers and recruited in proportion to the numbers and distribution of the population as reported by an Inter-Allied Commission. The same proportional arrangement, equally according to the report of the Commission, would apply to the administration. A Christian governor would be appointed by the League of Nations and assisted by an elective assembly and an elective council. The governor would be responsible for payments to the Turkish Government of annual sums expanding with the prosperity of the province. This arrangement would in five years be open to review on the demand of either party by the League of Nations.” This pleased neither Greeks nor Turks and the 1921 Greek offensive put a speedy end to its consideration.
On June 21, the Allied Governments offered Greece their intervention, but the Royalist command behind Smyrna was preparing to resume its march toward Angora and intervention was refused.
In March, 1922, the Allied Governments summoned delegations from Athens, Constantinople and Angora, the Angora delegation headed by Yusuf Kemal Bey who had succeeded Bekr Sami Bey as Foreign Minister. On March 22, an Allied proposal for an armistice in Asia Minor was forwarded to Athens and Angora, and was followed on March 26 by an Allied Note making further modifications in the Sevres Treaty and proposing “the peaceful evacuation of Asia Minor by the Greek forces and the restitution of Turkish sovereignty over the whole of that region” within a period of four months after the armistice. The Greek Government accepted the proposal, but Yusuf Kemal Bey on April 7 stipulated that in his Government’s view an armistice could only be agreed to after the Greek evacuation. The Allied Governments replied on April 15 that the period of the Greek evacuation would be shortened but that it was conditional on a prior armistice. On April 22, Yusuf Kemal Bey offered to meet Allied delegates at Ismid in an effort to explore further peace conditions which the acceptance of the armistice proposal would impose on his Government, conditions which had been left “open to discussion” in the Allied Note of April 15. The Ismid proposal came to nothing and in June, Ali Fethy Bey, Minister of the Interior at Angora, was dispatched to Paris and London with the object of discovering the nature of the peace conditions which had not yet been defined by the Allies and effecting an agreement if possible.
On July 22, the Royalist Greek command transferred 20,000 Old Greek troops from its lines behind Smyrna to the Chatalja lines in Eastern Thrace for a move on Constantinople itself, a move which the Allied Governments vetoed. It replaced them behind Smyrna with raw Anatolian Greek levies and on July 30, “autonomy under the guarantee of the Greek Army” was proclaimed upon “Ionia.” This radically changed the military situation, but Fevzi Pasha who was now ready at Angora, was ordered by his Government to withhold action pending news from Fethy Bey. In Paris, Fethy Bey had been well received but when he crossed to London late in July, Lord Curzon’s engagement with him was cancelled and it was only after protests were made on his behalf that Sir William Tyrrell of the Foreign Office received him. Sir William, however, was not empowered to discuss terms of peace and on August 11, Fethy Bey left London for Rome, stopping in Paris long enough to wire the news of his reception in London to Angora. The solution of the Smyrna deadlock was now committed to Fevzi Pasha.
At dawn on August 26, Ismet Pasha attacked the Greek position before Afium-Karahissar. The secrecy which had marked the re-mobilization and re-equipment of the Turkish Armies throughout, had been maintained to the last and Ismet Pasha found the Greeks wholly unprepared. They abandoned Afium and Kutahia and endeavored to stand on September 1 before Ushak, but on September 2, Turkish cavalry drove into Ushak through and over the Greeks, swept up General Tricoupis and his entire staff, and escaped to their own lines. The rest was easy. The distance from Ushak to Smyrna is 160 miles, but the Greeks covered it in eight days, abandoning everything but their rifles, living off the country and stopping only long enough to wreak their last revenge on the villages through which they fled. On September 5, they began streaming into Smyrna and nothing speaks more highly of Fevzi Pasha’s staff work than the fact that all branches of his Army succeeded in keeping pace with them. On September 9, advance Turkish units entered Smyrna. Meanwhile, a secondary attack in the north had been launched against Biledjik on August 30, the Greeks evacuated Eski-Shehr on September 2 and by September 12, their stragglers were crossing from Mudania and Panderma to Eastern Thrace.
From the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States, the Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna shook the world. Islam which had been staggered by the Greek occupation in 1919, threw itself into rejoicing with “our brother Turk.” Christendom which had passed over the Greek occupation in silence, was as staggered by the Turkish re-occupation as if one of the Commandments had dropped out of the Decalogue. Of the three elements which were present in Smyrna, Armenians, Greeks and Turks (to mention them in alphabetical order), American churchmen assumed that it was the Turks who started the fire which razed part of Smyrna town within a week after the re-occupation. As for the Turks themselves, budding Turkish linguists greeted the news from Smyrna with shouts of “Finish imperialisme!”
Only the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the Greek occupation of Eastern Thrace in the Allied rear, now confronted Fevzi Pasha. On September 16, Mr. Lloyd George issued his call to the British Dominions to rally to the defense of “the freedom of the Straits.” Doubtless Mr. Lloyd George knew what he meant by the phrase, but while Soviet Russia and Turkey had repeatedly and publicly defined it, Mr. Lloyd George had refrained from any public definition of it. More was involved, however, than “the freedom of the Straits” in the manifesto of September 16. That manifesto was a direct descendant of the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907. With Habibullah dead, with Said Mir Alim in exile, with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, with the Greek fait accompli across the Straits in process of collapse, the now exposed British command of the Straits and the Black Sea was all that remained of the vast territories which the collapse of Czarist Russia had vacated before an aggressive British imperialism.
On September 30, Mr. Lloyd George sent General Harington, Allied Commander-in-Chief in Constantinople, a six-hour ultimatum ordering the Turkish forces to withdraw from contact with the British lines behind Chanak. If that ultimatum had been served, it would have precipitated an Anglo-Turkish war and with British reinforcements already streaming to the Straits, it is difficult to see with what other purpose it could have been dispatched from London. Instead of serving it, however, General Harington dropped it into his pocket and went to Mudania on October 3 with his Allied colleagues to negotiate an armistice with Ismet Pasha. At dawn on October 11, the Mudania armistice was signed, the Allies agreeing to evacuate the Greeks from Eastern Thrace immediately and to return it to Turkey up to the Maritza River, admitting the Turkish civil administration, supported by a force of 8,000 gendarmes, within a period of thirty days after the Greek evacuation.
On October 19, Mr. Lloyd George who might have written the Mudania armistice in ink instead of in blood, handed his resignation to the King. In Mr. Bonar Law’s Government, however, Lord Curzon remained at the Foreign Office. Preparations were now made for a peace conference, beginning at Lausanne on November 13, for the winding up of hostilities between the Allies and Turkey and between Turkey and Greece. Invitations were issued to, among others, the old Ottoman Government in Constantinople to send delegates to the conference. That Government, from the Sultan-Caliph down, had been stripped of actual authority long before by the Allied occupation of the old capital, and the Grand National Assembly speedily put an end to its technical existence. On November 1, the Assembly reiterated its previous declaration that “the form of government based on personal sovereignty in Constantinople” had ceased to exist on March 16, 1920, adding that “the Caliphate belongs to the Ottoman dynasty and the Grand National Assembly will nominate him of the dynasty who is the most upright and wise in knowledge and character. The Turkish nation is the supporting power of the Caliphate.”
On the morning of November 4, the Constantinople Cabinet handed in its resignation to the Caliph-Sultan and at noon Rafet Pasha took over the administration of Constantinople as one of the provincial capitals of the new Turkish State. In the early hours of November 17, the Caliph-Sultan fled on a British battleship to Malta and on the following day the Grand National Assembly at Angora elected the heir presumptive, Abdul Medjid Effendi, to the Caliphate of Islam. Turkish nationalism was continuing to surmount that Old Turkish conservatism which had helped to wreck the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908. As for Islam in India, such was the siege-encircled secrecy in which Turkish nationalism had developed that the end of its historic Ottoman theocracy fell upon it as a severe blow, but it stuck loyally to “our brother Turk.” As for the Emperor of India, he was uncertain whether the seat of the Caliphate was Constantinople or Mecca. The ex-Sherif Hussein had two sons perched on precarious thrones, Feisal at Bagdad and Abdullah at Amman, and had himself been referred to as “Supreme Pontiff of the Islamic world and temporal ruler of Arabia.”
On November 20, Lord Curzon finally opened the peace conference at Lausanne, with Ismet Pasha, now Foreign Minister in the Turkish Government, heading the only Turkish delegation. Negotiations went forward until Jan. 31, 1923, when Lord Curzon served a draft treaty on Ismet Pasha and on the night of February 4 abruptly left for London. This breach in the negotiations left British military and naval forces in occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the Greek Army facing east along the Maritza; but the snows of the Balkans melted without incident. On April 23, Sir Horace Rumbold, British High Commissioner in Constantinople, took Lord Curzon’s place at the resumed conference and the Treaty of Peace, together with a number of subsidiary documents, was finally signed at Lausanne on July 24.
We have noted previously the fate of the vast British acquisitions which followed the collapse of Czarist Russia. With Habibullah dead, with Said Mir Alim in exile, with the command of the Caspian lost, with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with the American mandate project dead and Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, Mr. Lloyd George had at last been compelled to abandon his hostility toward both Russia and Turkey, and at the Genoa Conference in 1922 he attempted to re-write the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 with Soviet Russia. But the Soviet had abrogated the 1907 Treaty in 1918 and in 1922 it refused to purchase British recognition by a reversion to Czarist diplomacy. The liquidation of the British acquisitions continued. The Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna wiped out the Greek fait accompli across the Straits and brought the Turks down to the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The Mudania armistice returned the European shore to Turkey. Only an insecure command of the Straits and the Black Sea now remained of the vast British acquisitions of 1918 and 1919, and this remnant Lord Curzon now sought to salvage from the wreck by negotiation at Lausanne with the Turkish delegation alone. Soviet Russia having refused to re-write the 1907 Treaty against Turkey at Genoa, Lord Curzon now drew up the Straits Convention against Russia at Lausanne and on May 8, 1923, he dispatched an ultimatum from London to Moscow which seems to have been designed to cancel the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement and to break off all relations with Soviet Russia. The British Foreign Office has lived on wars and the brink of wars since 1914 and the time has not yet come when it is willing to conclude a full and normal peace with both Turkey and Russia.
The Straits Convention, thus drawn without Russian collaboration at Lausanne, opens the Straits to all merchantmen when Turkey is at peace and to all neutral merchantmen, subject to the Turkish right of search, when Turkey is at war. All warships are to be allowed passage when Turkey is at peace and neutral warships when Turkey is at war, both of these provisions to be subject to a number of restrictions, one of which is that the “maximum force which any one Power may send through the Straits into the Black Sea is not to be greater than that of the most powerful fleet of the littoral Powers of the Black Sea existing in that sea at the time of passage; but with the proviso that the Powers reserve to themselves the right to send into the Black Sea, at all times and under all circumstances, a force of not more than three ships, of which no individual ship shall exceed 10,000 tons.”
By this Convention, Lord Curzon retains access to the southern and Trans-Caucasian ports of Soviet Russia. Ismet Pasha signed it in the course of the general signature at Lausanne on July 24. Soviet Russia signed it at Rome on August 14. Early in September, Mr. Amery, First Lord of the British Admiralty, paid a visit of inspection to Malta where he announced that for the next year or two the principal British squadron would remain in the Mediterranean, and from Malta he continued to Constantinople.
Lord Curzon also succeeded at Lausanne in securing agreement that “the frontier between Turkey and Iraq shall be laid down in friendly arrangement to be concluded between Turkey and Great Britain within nine months. In the event of no agreement being reached between the two Governments in the time mentioned, the dispute shall be referred to the Council of the League of Nations.” The Turco-Arab split in Sunni Islam which the Foreign Office engineered in 1915 through the Residency in Cairo, still lives in the Mosul controversy. Arab autonomy under the religious suzerainty of the Ottoman Caliph which Rauf Bey had stipulated to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros in 1918, still awaits, inter alia, the fate of Mosul.
The rest of the Lausanne Conference was a rout. The military victory which Ismet Pasha had won over the Greeks at Smyrna, he duplicated as a diplomatic victory over the Allies at Lausanne. Having salvaged the Straits Convention from the wreck and having postponed the Mosul matter, Lord Curzon abandoned the unhappy scene on Feb. 4, 1923, leaving Sir Horace Rumbold to save what he could when the conference resumed on April 23. Ismet Pasha restricted himself as far as possible to a settlement of the political terms of peace, referring concessionaires to his Government at Angora, but it was not until July 17 that Sir Horace consented to sign peace without the Turkish Government’s acquiescence in the claim of the so-called Turkish Petroleum Company upon the oil of the Mosul province. Excepting for further negotiation over Mosul, the political terms of peace between the Allies and Turkey were signed at Lausanne on July 24. Several of the economic issues of the peace, the most important of which is the question of the currency in which Turkey is to pay interest on its share of the Old Ottoman Public Debt, are still in process of negotiation.
On August 4, terms for the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States and Turkey were signed at Lausanne. Relations had been severed on April 20, 1917, by the Enver Government at Constantinople and on May 5, 1923, Ismet Pasha had written Joseph C. Grew, American Minister to Switzerland, proposing negotiations looking toward the resumption of regular relations. Two Turco-American Treaties resulted, one a general treaty and the other an extradition treaty, the former recording American acquiescence in the abrogation of the Capitulations which Ismet Pasha had imposed upon the Allies. Under this treaty, Americans and American institutions in Turkey are hereafter to be subject to Turkish law and Turkish taxes, Turkey having voluntarily agreed during negotiations with the Allies to appoint four legal advisers, nationals of countries neutral in the late war, who are to serve for a term of five years and whose function is to be rigorously restricted to the offering of advice. By this abrogation of the Capitulations, Turkey enters into a status of equality in the family of nations. In July, 1894, Buddhist Japan began a five-year probationary period preparatory to its acquisition of that status of equality which previously been the exclusive right of the Christian nations, but in July, 1923, its Treaty of Peace with the Allies conferred upon Moslem Turkey a status of immediate equality with the Christian nations and Japan.
Ratification of the two Turco-American Treaties is to be exchanged at Constantinople “as soon as possible” and the Treaties are to take effect two months after ratification, the intervening period being allowed for the evacuation of the American naval forces from Turkish waters.
Meanwhile, Greco-Turkish agreements signed at Lausanne on Jan. 30, 1923, had preceded Greek participation in the Allied Peace Treaty of July 24. On January 30, Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange their Moslem and Orthodox nationals, respectively, amounting to a total of possibly 500,000 persons, exception being made for Moslems of Western Thrace and Orthodox of Constantinople, Turkey permitting the Oecumenical Patriarchate to remain at the Phanar in Stamboul subject to its disestablishment and to the departure of Meletios IV, the then Patriarch. With this precedent agreement, Greece recognized in the Peace Treaty of July 24 “her obligation to make reparation for the damage caused in Anatolia by the acts of the Greek Army or administration which were contrary to the laws of war. On the other hand, Turkey, in consideration of the financial situation of Greece resulting from the prolongation of the war and from its consequences, finally renounces all claims for reparation against the Greek Government.” In lieu of reparation, Turkey accepted the suburb of Karagatch across the Maritza from Adrianople, which was surrendered by the Greek Army on September 15 in as wrecked a condition as the towns from which the Greek Army had fled in Anatolia a year before.
On August 23 the Grand National Assembly at Angora ratified the Peace Treaty of Lausanne by a vote of 215 to 20, and on the following day the Allied evacuation of Constantinople and the Straits began, to be completed within a period of six weeks….
To realize the meaning of the Treaty of Lausanne, we shall have to go back some distance into Ottoman history. Sultan Selim III who was deposed in 1808, was possibly the first of the Ottoman reformers. Mahmoud II who succeeded him, was another great Sultan who saw the need of introducing Western methods into his Eastern realm, and it was he who abolished the Janissaries in 1826 as a result of their long opposition to reform. Abdul Medjid I was a third great reformer who proclaimed the Tanzimat in 1839 under whose terms all Ottoman subjects were to be given an equal status in temporal law. The Tanzimat dealt with sweeping reforms in education, in methods of tax collection and in the courts, but Czarist Russia put a stop to Ottoman reform in the aggression of 1853 which resulted in the Crimean War.
Under Abdul Aziz, a Western-trained group of Turks revived Ottoman reform and when Abdul Hamid II became Sultan, Midhat Pasha succeeded in proclaiming a Constitution. Again Czarist Russia put a stop to reform in the Russo-Turkish War of 1876 and the Berlin Congress adopted the title of “the Sick man of Europe” which the Czar had invented for the Sultan. Czarist Russia and Western Europe now took over the problem of Ottoman reform themselves, directing it to the benefit of the Sultan’s Bulgarian and Armenian subjects while passing over the equally urgent needs of his Turkish subjects. Ottoman reform as thus directed now became the fixed objective of Christendom from Czarist Russia to the country towns of the United States, while Islam in time from the Balkans to the back hills of Java became increasingly anxious over “our brother Turk.”
Alarmed by the dividing effect of Ottoman reform in Western hands, the Western-trained Young Turks again revived their own program of reform and when Sir Edward Grey agreed with Czarist Russia in 1907 on the eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks hurriedly revived Midhat Pasha’s Constitution in the Revolution of 1908. But the end was already at hand. Austria-Hungary immediately annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bulgaria proclaimed its independence. Insurrections began in Albania in which Austria-Hungary was not disinterested and in Kurdistan in which Czarist Russia was not disinterested. The Italians landed in Tripoli and the First Balkan War brought the Bulgarians to the Chatalja lines behind Constantinople, putting an end not only to any attempt at Young Turkish reform but almost to the existence of the Empire. In the Western view, this sort of thing constituted Ottoman reform, and in 1914 the Anglo-Russian combination closed on the Empire and reformed it out of existence. The Sevres Treaty in 1920 finally wrote the last chapter in the story of Western reform by proposing to hand over the richest provinces of the Turkish country to Greeks and Armenians while denying the Turks any right whatever to an independent existence. The Sevres Treaty was and still is a full and complete definition of the word “reform” when applied by Allied diplomacy to Turkish lands.
In the meantime, the Young Turks abrogated the Capitulations in 1914 and with their hands untied for the first time in their modern history, a number of other reforms followed in rapid succession despite the fact that they were engaged in a world war. When Rauf Bey met Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros to apply for an armistice in 1918, he stipulated that the abrogation of the Capitulations would have to be recognized, but the first act of the Allies upon occupying Constantinople was to re-impose the Capitulations and to undo every reform which the Young Turks had succeeded in making. Within a few months, the Greek occupation of Smyrna threw the Young Turks into the heart of Anatolia. Turkish nationalism repeated and amplified Rauf Bey’s stipulations at Mudros in the Erzerum program of 1919. The Ottoman Parliament committed itself to the Erzerum program early in 1920 under the name of the National Pact. British officers reformed the Ottoman Parliament out of existence on the night of March 15-16, 1920, but away in the heart of Anatolia Turkish nationalism possessed as free a hand for its own program of reform as its state of siege permitted. What the Sevres Treaty was to Western reform in Turkey, the Grand National Assembly became to Turkish reform in Turkey; and when Soviet Russia recognized the National Pact in 1921, the fingers which had long strangled Ottoman reform were removed, temporarily at least, from the Turkish throat.
Afghanistan quickly recognized the Pact. The three Soviet Republics of Trans-Caucasia recognized it. Insofar as it concerned Cilicia, France recognized it. Soviet Ukrainia recognized it early in 1922. Insofar as it concerned Eastern Thrace, Mr. Lloyd George and his Foreign Secretary recognized it at the point of the bayonet in the Mudania armistice. But at Lausanne, Ismet Pasha placed the rest of the Pact before Lord Curzon and early in 1923 Lord Curzon, having swallowed a few drops of the nasty stuff, returned to London. There seemed then to be as little chance of Ismet Pasha’s diplomatic success as there had once seemed to be of Fevzi Pasha’s military success, but Turkish reform would not be alive today if it had not learned long ago to achieve the impossible. Little by little, Ismet Pasha dropped away the non-essentials of the Pact while holding fast to the abrogation of the Capitulations which the Enver Government had decreed on Sept. 28, 1914, and on July 24, 1923, the British Foreign Office finally accorded its recognition to the essentials of the National Pact, exception being made for further negotiation over Mosul.
For the last century, the Ottoman Empire has sought justice at the hands of Czarist Russia and the West. Czarist Russia has finally ceased to exist and Turkey has finally gained justice from the West at the point of the bayonet, a fact which we Christians of the West might do well to ponder. It secured from the West at Lausanne a belated recognition of its right to control its own reforms in its own country and since Czarist Russia and the West by their long endeavor to impose reforms from without for the exclusive benefit of the Turk’s minorities, have made it impossible for the Turk and his minorities to live together, the Turk today has only himself to consider in Turkey. Insofar as no further Western attempts are made to strangle Turkish reform (and if the past is any clew to the future, such attempts are quite certain to be made), the future of Turkey now depends on the Turk. We know at last who is responsible in Turkey, and this is a very substantial gain.