The Dandarnelles Disaster

by Dan Van der Vat

  Venizelos’s ambitions did not end there and extended to Constantinople itself. He also wanted to embed the new Greece in a modernising western world. The merest glance at a modern map of the Aegean shows how the Greeks gained land, especially islands, from the waning Ottomans in the Balkan wars and afterwards: the international boundary between Greece and Turkey hugs the Turkish coast, leaving all the larger islands, including Lemnos, Mitylene, Chios, Lesbos, Cos and Rhodes, all just offshore, in Greek hands. Imbros (Imroz), off the mouth of the Dardanelles, is the only large Aegean island that remains Turkish. An estimated 1.5 million ethnic Greeks lived in Constantinople, Smyrna and other parts of Ottoman territory, including the coasts of the Black and Aegean seas and the eastern Balkans; they had established themselves in these areas centuries before the Romans created the Byzantine Empire and a couple of millennia before the Turks moved into Anatolia. Many of the more remote ethnic Greeks spoke unrecognisable dialects (or no Greek at all), even using the Greek alphabet to write in Turkish, their DNA probably only fractionally distinguishable from that of their Turkish neighbours and their ethnicity recognisable only by the fact that they attended the Greek Orthodox Church (whose Patriarch resided in Constantinople, not Athens) rather than the mosque, and sent their children to Christian schools. To this day only the language it is written in distinguishes a Greek menu from a Turkish one; many Turks also lived in Greece. Voluntary Greek migration to Turkey continued in considerable numbers in the years immediately before the First World War. The traditional Ottoman laissez-faire attitude to minorities however began to fade under the CUP from 1908 and was further diminished after the Balkan wars, when inter-communal unrest and reprisals began. Both communities turned increasingly to nationalism.

  The charismatic Venizelos was lionised by western leaders as a statesman when he attended the negotiations at Versailles from November 1918, which led to the most important peace treaty, with Germany, in June 1919. The conference was intended to settle all issues between all the belligerents but in many respects made a worse fist of it than the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars. Venizelos denied that Greece wanted Constantinople but secretly calculated that if the city were removed from Turkish rule, the large and enterprising Greek population there would effectively take the place over. It was, he was wont to say privately, virtually and historically a Greek city already.

  But if the Ottoman state and the Turkish nation were prostrate after their defeat in 1918, Greek unity was not much less fragile. The struggle for power between King Constantine and Venizelos deeply, and it seems permanently, split the country and almost led to civil war, with the Prime Minister in and out of office, purging his political opponents in all major institutions when he was in power. In 1917 he brought Greece into the war in the Allied cause – the winning side – whereas Enver had ruined Turkey by choosing the losers. Greece had helped the Allies before that, whether lending them captured Turkish island territory off the Dardanelles or allowing Allied troops into Salonica, with Greek troops fighting alongside. They were also fighting alongside the French against the Bolsheviks in 1919, among the many other foreign military interventions against the revolution.

  On 3 February 1919 Venizelos got his opportunity to address the peace conference and seized it with both hands, producing a tour de force of passionate, persuasive, utterly reasonable-sounding rhetoric. He wanted Greek possession of the Aegean Islands confirmed, he wanted half of Albania, as well as a great swathe of territory between the Aegean and the Black Sea and a generous coastal slice of Anatolia as far south as Smyrna. Ostentatiously he did not ask for Constantinople. The result would have been a curiously circular rim-state wrapped round Turkish territory and waters, which would arouse not only Turkish but also Bulgarian hostility, against which it would be incapable of defending itself should the highly likely need arise. Even some, though not enough, of his admirers saw that Venizelos was seriously overreaching himself as he exploited the sentimentality of classically educated diplomats, so numerous in the Allied delegations (especially the British), and misrepresented the swarthy modern Greeks as the direct descendants of Homer and Pericles, Herodotus and Praxiteles. Recent history enabled him to set the nobility of the Greek liberation struggle against the brutality and corruption of the Turks whom they had fought for their freedom, for which Lord Byron and other foreigners had actually died. The result was a disaster whose consequences continue to reverberate in the twenty-first century.

  The British, keen as ever to maximise protection of the sacred route to India via the Mediterranean and Suez and unable to rely on Turkey for the purpose, saw a stronger Greece as an attractive alternative. Lloyd George, still Prime Minister after 1918, knew Venizelos well, liked him and called him the greatest Greek statesman since Pericles. Of the main western powers, only Italy, which had expansionist ambitions of its own in Albania and Asia Minor (as did Serbia, Montenegro and even France), had strong reservations, not unconnected with its recent island acquisitions from the Turks in the Aegean, which the Greeks regarded as part and parcel of the greater Greece of which they were recklessly dreaming. The Americans, albeit benevolent, were mostly neutral, although President Woodrow Wilson admired Venizelos personally very much.

  The caretaker government that supplanted the CUP in October 1918 sent word to Vice-Admiral Sir Arthur Gough-Calthorpe, the British commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean at the time, asking for talks. They began aboard his flagship, HMS Agamemnon, at Mudros on 28 October between the admiral and Hussein Rauf, a decorated Turkish naval officer and Minister of Marine. On the flimsy grounds that the Turkish approach had been made specifically to the British, the French were excluded. The talks were swiftly and pleasantly concluded, the two principals toasted each other in champagne and signed an armistice on 30 October. Emollient assurances were given to the Turks that the Allies, having availed themselves of the residue of Ottoman Arab territory in the Near and Middle East, had no interest in occupying Constantinople. The terms included the surrender of all Turkish troops everywhere, Allied control of the railways and telegraph services and access to all Turkish ports for Allied warships. The Allies reserved the right to occupy any ‘strategic points’ if their security was threatened. Points could hardly be more strategic than Constantinople, which was soon filled with Allied ships, soldiers and diplomats behaving as if they owned the place.

  Mustafa Kemal rushed back to the city to urge every Turkish official he could reach to stand up to the de facto invaders. The last Sultan of Turkey, Mehmet VI, who had only ascended the hollow throne in summer 1918, adopted a policy of appeasement, dissolving parliament in November and trying to exercise direct rule, but without the necessary governmental infrastructure. The erstwhile heart of the eastern Roman and then Ottoman empires was dirty and neglected, its people desperate for food and coal. Refugees poured in from Russia, Armenia and the dismantled empire; tens of thousands of homeless people slept on the bitterly cold streets. There was an eruption of blue and white Hellenic flags as the large Greek community anticipated territorial and commercial profit for their race. For foreigners from the victorious powers the atmosphere seems to have been very similar to that of Weimar Berlin just a few years later: cafés, nightclubs and brothels flourished and hard currency (or food or tobacco) could buy a great deal of debauchery and valuables for very little. There was even an unofficial foretaste of the division of Berlin into sectors in 1945, with the main powers each taking over and policing a segment of the city. When the occupation of Constantinople became official in March 1920, hardly anyone noticed.

  The moment an avid Greece overreached herself came in mid-May 1919, when Venizelos, with the blessing of Britain and France and the concurrence of the United States, sent soldiers to occupy Smyrna (now Izmir), the port city midway along Turkey’s western coast. Smyrna was indeed ethnically Greek (including large numbers of recent immigrants) but it was a key part of the Turkish economy and its hinterland was overwhelmingly populated by Turks. The triumphant arriva
l of Greek troops was marred by inter-communal riots in which hundreds of Greeks and Turks died. The disorder spread to the surrounding countryside and major demonstrations by Turks in Constantinople and other centres followed. This was the nadir of Turkish fortunes in the eyes of Mustafa Kemal and his growing tally of nationalist sympathisers. Alarmed, the British demanded that the Turkish government send out an inspector-general to restore order. Kemal, in Constantinople, angled for the job and, armed with a British laissez-passer, set off with a small staff for Samsun, a port half-way along the Black Sea coast of Anatolia. He arrived on 19 May – still a national holiday in Turkey, commemorating the moment when the worm turned. Kemal set out to recruit undemobilised Turkish officers and troops for the nationalist cause, reorganising units in the Anatolian interior without the knowledge of the British and French.

  As the powers dithered in Paris, there was talk of separate Kurdish and Armenian states, Italian and French territorial ambitions, mandates in Asia Minor for the Americans, of hiving off Constantinople and the straits – soon Turkey could become the rump of a rump. With total commitment Kemal roamed Anatolia turning pockets of protest into a broad nationalist campaign. In June 1919 he warned the Armenians and foreign intruders that the Turks would fight for their territory to the bitter end, and if they could not win their country back they would destroy it. Under Allied pressure the Sultan recalled Kemal, who refused to come and promptly resigned on 23 June, summoning a national congress at Erzerum which declared that all places, including Constantinople, where Turks lived must stay part of Turkey. Meanwhile in Paris the ‘Big Three’ – America, Britain and France – carved up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire in blissful ignorance of the significance and strength of Kemal’s movement.

  In London the Lord Privy Seal in Lloyd George’s Cabinet, Curzon, who knew more than most about ‘abroad’, especially the Ottoman Empire, was deputising at the Foreign Office (he was about to become Foreign Secretary in place of former premier Arthur Balfour, who was in Paris). Lloyd George intensely disliked Curzon, who had become Viceroy of India at the age of 39, from 1898 to 1905, for his privileged and wealthy background and effortless superiority (his detractors quoted a little doggerel: ‘My name is George Nathaniel Curzon/And I’m a most superior person’). A know-all as brilliant as Churchill but much less stable, Curzon warned again and again that it would be a disaster to partition Turkey proper, not least because it would antagonise the Muslim world, which extended to British India. Foreign Secretary at last from October 1919, his great ambition achieved, he became Turkey’s most important advocate, opposing Lloyd George’s strong support for the Greeks in Smyrna. On his promotion he sent as a secret envoy an army colonel, who had previously met Kemal, to sound him out. The nationalist leader declared Ankara, in the middle of Anatolia, as the new capital of Turkey, as it still is, in place of Constantinople, which remained in a state of chaos and want. As the Americans withdrew into isolationism, the British, French and Italians with varying degrees of reluctance officially occupied Constantinople in March to restore order, arresting a number of nationalists and officers. Kemal replied in kind, arresting every Allied officer he could find in the Turkish interior, including Curzon’s emissary, Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Rawlinson. He also founded a new nationalist parliament.

  Curzon could not persuade Lloyd George to let the obviously organised and formidable Kemal run with the ball and take charge of Turkey. Instead a draft treaty was drawn up and sent to the Sultan’s government. It was extremely humiliating. The Treaty of Sèvres, the settlement between a prostrate Turkey and the Allies negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference, was signed by Mehmet VI on 10 August 1920. It not only formalised the amputation of all former Ottoman provinces outside Turkey itself; it put the Dardanelles and the Bosporus under international control – and ceded Smyrna and Thrace to Greece, despite Italian ambitions to acquire the city as part of a slice of south-western Anatolia (opposite ‘their’ island of Rhodes). Italy and France got ‘spheres of influence’ in Anatolia; Kurdistan got home rule; and Armenia independence. Several British army divisions from Mesopotamia and Constantinople were in the Caucasus with an eye to the oilfields. To the north General Denikin’s White Russians were trying to oust the Bolsheviks. Losing appetite for this massive military involvement in the Caucasus, Lloyd George and the Cabinet decided to withdraw by the end of 1919, promising material support to Denikin if he laid off Armenia. But the Bolsheviks got the upper hand and, desperate for allies anywhere for their pariah state, they supported Kemal. Armenia was in effect crushed between them after a few shaky months of independence. Kurdistan remained divided among Turkey and its neighbours.

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

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

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

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

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

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