by Alan Palmer
This decisive move followed three weeks in which it had seemed likely the Allies would soon occupy every harbour and sizeable town remaining within the Ottoman Empire. Disorder was spreading rapidly through the outlying provinces. A stern warning was delivered to the Sultan by the High Commissioner, who laid particular emphasis on the anarchy prevailing along the Black Sea coast, where the Ottoman Ninth Army seemed incapable of policing a turbulent region.9 Mehmed VI Vahideddin was most conciliatory: a high-powered military mission, led by a vigorous Inspector-General, should at once be sent to impose discipline on the Ninth Army; and, the British authorities were assured in the last days of April, he had every confidence in the skill of General Mustafa Kemal Pasha to undertake just such a mission. With some hesitancy, the British took the Sultan at his word: a visa was duly stamped authorizing Kemal, as Inspector-General of the Ninth Army, to sail from Constantinople for the small port of Samsun. Accordingly, on the day after the Greeks landed in Smyrna, Kemal boarded a British-built coaster, the Bandirma, and set off through the Bosphorus, pledged to restore order along the Black Sea coast. ‘Pasha, you can save the country,’ the Sultan told him in a farewell audience, with that cryptic obscurity which he found more congenial than clear directives. A few hours later a British officer spotted Kemal’s name on a list of dangerous troublemakers. At once the British military attaché set out for the Porte, with orders to see the Grand Vizier and make certain the Inspector-General remained in the capital. ‘Too late, Excellency,’ Damit blandly told him. ‘The bird has flown.’10
In the modern Turkish Republic Kemal’s arrival at Samsun, on 19 May, is still commemorated each year with a national holiday, as if it were the start of the revolution which was to sweep away Sultan and sultanate. Yet the landing at Samsun was not in itself a remarkable event. For more than a week Kemal behaved cautiously. Only when he set out for the Anatolian plateau, officially to impose order in towns where there had been clashes between the Turks and national minorities, did he begin to show independence. The first genuinely revolutionary act was taken at Amasya, the old Hittite fortress overhanging the gorge of the river Yesirlimak. There, on 21 June, Kemal issued a Declaration of Independence, calling on the Turkish people to send delegates to a national congress, which would be held at Sivas in Anatolia because the Sultan, his capital city and his administration were all under foreign duress. Peremptorily the Inspector-General was summoned back to Constantinople, but he refused to go. On 8 July he resigned his commission.
There followed eight months of political confusion. Kemal was not the first of the military commanders to urge resistance in what was already being called a ‘War of Independence’, but he was certainly the ablest of the generals to take to the mountains; and his ascendancy was recognized by a congress at Erzerum as well as the Sivas meeting. In some respects the Sivas Congress was a disappointment; only thirty-nine men were able to make the journey there. But at both meetings the delegates endorsed a manifesto whose principles were later clarified and embodied in what became known as the ‘National Pact’.11 The manifesto insisted that ethnic Turks had a right to self-determination, that Anatolia and all European Turkey constituted an indivisible entity in which there could be no Armenian or Greek state, and that the Allies should abandon their plans for partitioning the empire and regulating the government in Constantinople. From Sivas came, too, a call for a new, elected parliament, to meet in a city where deputies would not be intimidated by an Allied military or naval presence.
In this programme there was little to which the Sultan or his Grand Vizier could object. Although the Sultan confirmed orders for Kemal’s arrest, contact was maintained between Constantinople and the Nationalists. Eleven days after the Sivas Congress finished, a US fact-finding team, commissioned by the President to discover whether an American mandate was a feasible proposition, visited Sivas and discussed the problems of self-determination with Mustafa Kemal. Four weeks later the rebellious general received the Ottoman Minister of Marine at Amasya, and sent him back to the capital with a version of the National Pact. As chairman of the Nationalist Representative Committee, Kemal asked for elections to be held for a parliament which would meet in a town free from foreign domination, and he also requested that the NRC should have the opportunity of vetoing the appointment of Ottoman delegates to the Peace Conference. These terms were rejected by Ali Riza Pasha, who had succeeded Damat Ferid as Grand Vizier on 2 October.12 For parliament to meet in any town where its work could not be scrutinized by the Sultan seemed unthinkable to Mehmed VI. He had no wish to exchange the comfortable security of his Bosphorus palaces for some remote, impromptu capital in Anatolia. Elections were duly held; Kemal’s Nationalists won more seats in the lower House than any other party; but when parliament met, in the second week of January 1920, the deputies still gathered in Stamboul.
Surviving letters show that the British authorities could not make up their minds over Kemal.13 To some he was a bandit, to others a brigand; it was a fine distinction. None looked upon him as a responsible spokesman for the Turkish people. He had been elected to represent Erzerum, but he stayed away from a city where he would almost certainly have been arrested or killed. As an absentee deputy, he may even have made a greater impact on the parliament than had he spoken in the chamber. Immediately after the Sultan’s formal opening speech, a message of welcome telegraphed by Kemal from Ankara (then Angora) was read to the deputies; and throughout the nine weeks of the parliamentary session, the Nationalists determined the day-to-day work of the chamber. A group of deputies secretly sought to have him elected as President (Speaker) of the Chamber, hoping that official status would give him immunity from arrest. The proposal was dropped for fear it might prompt the Sultan to dissolve the assembly. By keeping parliament in session, the deputies were able to endorse Kemal’s National Pact in the second week of February, thus giving constitutional recognition to the Sivas manifesto.
The defiant mood of the Ottoman Parliament alarmed the British High Commissioner, Admiral Sir John de Robeck, who had succeeded Admiral Calthorpe a few months earlier. He was already concerned by reports that substantial stocks of arms were reaching Kemal, some from French and Italian sources. Against whom would they be employed? In London, detailed discussion of the treaty terms to be offered the Sultan continued throughout the weeks that the Ottoman Parliament was in session. If these demands ran counter to the National Pact, Sir John de Robeck anticipated prolonged resistance from the Turks. He sought permission for the High Commissioners to take preventive action strengthening Allied control over the Sultan and the administration in Constantinople.14
This request posed awkward problems at the highest level. The United States was fast withdrawing into isolation: Wilson’s grave illness and the hostility of many Democrats and all Republicans to the League of Nations ensured that the proposed American mandates were already being written off as historical aberrations, though it was not until June that Congress formally declined to accept them. The three Allied Powers had difficulty in agreeing on policy or objectives. Friction between Britain and France over the Levant antedated the World War: ‘So far as Syria is concerned it is France and not Turkey that is the enemy,’ T.E. Lawrence had written in February 1915 (though in a private letter home, rather than an official report).15 The French, for their part, deeply resented the speed with which the British had seized Mosul in the last days of the war, for Sykes and Picot had considered that rich oil-producing district to fall within the French sphere of influence. Nor were Anglo-Italian relations any easier. For four years Italy had opposed British support for Venizelist Greece, whether in Macedonia, Albania or the Aegean; and the government in Rome resented Lloyd George’s patronage of the Greek adventure in Anatolia. The actions of both their Allies continued to puzzle the British. François Georges-Picot had travelled to Anatolia and met Kemal personally towards the end of 1919 and, although Kemalist troops subsequently fired on French forces occupying the predominantly Armenian districts around Marash, by th
e following spring it was clear that the French were preparing to pull back from their advanced line in Cilicia, to make sure of their hold on Syria. The Italians, too, appeared to seek an understanding with Kemal, provided always that they could retain the Dodecanese. Yet, despite such disunity and mistrust among the Allies, the Supreme Council responded favourably to Robeck’s request: the High Commissioners might complete the occupation of the Ottoman capital, arrest dangerous dissidents, and send them to Malta for internment.16
The military occupation of Constantinople was not a joint Allied operation: neither the French nor the Italians made any move on the first day. Early in the morning of 16 March 1920 British soldiers, marines and seamen took over the principal buildings of Stamboul and Pera, while their armoured cars patrolled the streets. The Turkish War Office was occupied and searched by British officers, thereafter remaining jointly under the control of the three Allies. Eighty-five parliamentary deputies and some sixty army officers or senior bureaucrats were arrested. The Ottoman Parliament was formally dissolved on 18 March, never to meet again. Martial law prevailed throughout the Sultan’s capital. The odium for interfering so drastically in Turkey’s internal affairs was directed at the British.
A few weeks earlier Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, had urged his cabinet colleagues to seek the end of Ottoman rule in Constantinople and thereby ‘settle once and for all a question which more than any single cause has corrupted the public life of Europe for nearly 500 years’.17 His memorandum, which runs to more than eight pages of close print in the published British documents, was prompted by two developments: a visit to Downing Street by the French Prime Minister, Clemenceau, who favoured the retention of Ottoman rule in the city; and claims by the Indian Secretary, Edwin Montagu, that the expulsion of the Sultan-Caliph from his palaces in Europe would provoke grave unrest among the Muslims of the sub-continent. ‘There never has been till in the last two or three years any pronounced feeling among Indian Moslems in favour of Constantinople as the seat of the Khalifate or the capital of Islam,’ Curzon declared, with all the authority of a distinguished ex-Viceroy. ‘Personally I think that if we rob the Turks of Smyrna we shall do more to fan the flame of racial religious animosity in Turkey in Asia than by any steps we might take with regard to Constantinople.’18 He therefore recommended some form of international status for the city and the Straits. But Curzon failed to carry the cabinet with him: Montagu’s fears of what might happen in Muslim India if the Caliph were to be unceremoniously booted across the Bosphorus prevailed. Far better, it was felt, to have a temporary occupation of the city, followed by the appointment of a career diplomat as High Commissioner, someone who would convince the Sultan of his need for ‘the friendship of England’: Admiral de Robeck was succeeded by Sir Horace Rumbold in November.
The burdens assumed by these British High Commissioners were considerable. They became responsible for policing and administering a city which faced bankruptcy and was troubled by the constant arrival of refugees fleeing from Bolshevik vengeance across the Black Sea; sixty ships, with 12,000 Russian refugees aboard, were moored in the crowded waters of the Sea of Marmara in the week Rumbold reached Constantinople. For almost three years a British colonel, Colin Ballard, commanded the Inter-Allied Police Commission in the Sultan’s capital, and when the Ottoman authorities could not find the money to pay their gendarmerie it was the High Commissioner who had to safeguard their monthly salaries. Presiding ineffectually over what remained of his empire was Sultan Mehmed VI, who had reappointed Damat Ferid Pasha as Grand Vizier early in April 1920. A strong Sultan would have slipped away from the capital and put himself at the head of the Turkish Nationalists in Anatolia; a wily Sultan might have pursued a policy of passive non-compliance; but Mehmed and Damat were so weak in character that they collaborated as closely as possible with the High Commissioners. Even the pusillanimous şeyhülislâm proclaimed Kemal and his Representative Committee to be faithless betrayers of the şeriat who might be shot dead on sight.19
Such fulminations did not unduly disturb Kemal. In Ankara he established a Grand National Assembly to continue the work of the Ottoman Parliament. On 23 April the Assembly confirmed Kemal’s status as executive president of a Council of State, although no formal constitutional act was presented to the Grand National Assembly for another nine months. ‘The Sultan-Caliph’, Kemal ambiguously proposed, ‘shall take his place within the constitutional system in a manner to be determined by the Assembly as soon as he is free from the coercion to which he submits.’20 No member of the Assembly dissented.
While the Grand National Assembly was in session, the Allies met in conference at San Remo to decide on the final terms of the peace treaty. It had been drafted by British, French and Italian experts, some of whom knew the Middle East well. Bargains were struck, notably concessions by Britain to France over the Mosul oilfields, an agreement giving the French favourable treatment and the right to draw on the yield of the oilfields to service their development of Syria. Repeatedly Lloyd George’s cabinet colleagues and expert advisers tried to dissuade the Prime Minister from backing the demands of Venizelos for a permanent Greek zone around Smyrna. It ‘would be a canker for years to come, the constant irritant that will perpetuate bloodshed in Asia Minor probably for generations,’ Admiral de Robeck wrote to Curzon in the second week of March.21 The Foreign Secretary agreed with him, even though he was basically sympathetic to the Greek cause; he would have liked to see the Greeks holding the Gallipoli peninsula, thus making the Dardanelles a frontier as well as a channel between Europe and Asia. No arguments could persuade Lloyd George to change his policy; he remained a staunch champion of Venizelos.
The peace terms were presented to the Sultan’s delegates in the second week of June 1920.22 Soon afterwards they became public knowledge, through leaked information in Athens. The treaty was harsher than the Turks had anticipated. They were resigned to the loss of the Sultan’s Arab lands, but were shocked by the proposed border in Europe; by advancing the Greek frontier eastwards to include Edirne and the whole of Thrace up to the Lines of Chatalja, the new map would leave Constantinople with only twenty-five miles of hinterland in Europe. At the same time, Greece was to gain eight islands in the Aegean, while Smyrna would be placed under Greek control but nominal Ottoman sovereignty for five years, after which there would be a plebiscite to decide whether the region should remain Greek or Turkish. Rhodes and the Dodecanese were ceded to Italy. An independent Armenian state, with access to the Black Sea, was to include most of the six disputed vilayets, together with Russia’s Armenian provinces; Woodrow Wilson—or those Americans acting in the stricken President’s name—accepted an offer to determine the state’s boundaries after arbitration, and astonished even the turcophobe Lloyd George by assigning the fortress of Erzerum and the port of Trebizond to the Armenians. The treaty also proposed an autonomous Kurdistan east of the Euphrates, with the Kurds having the right after twelve months to choose independence. The Straits were to be demilitarized, and controlled by an international commission; the Ottoman Army would be limited to 50,000 men and the navy restricted to coastal defence vessels; the Capitulations were restored, to benefit foreign traders; Britain, France and Italy would jointly control the Ottoman state budget and public loans.
Marshal Foch thought the proposed treaty a threat to peace. To enforce such terms on a reluctant Turkey the Allies would need an army of 27 divisions (about 325,000 men), he warned in April.23 No war-weary government would contemplate such a commitment. When, a few months later, Sir Charles (‘Tim’) Harington was given the high-sounding post of ‘General Officer Commanding the Allied Forces in Turkey’, he found he could call on no more than 8,000 British soldiers to hold Constantinople and the Straits. Only Venizelos was prepared to authorize a campaign in Anatolia to try to crush the Nationalists. For the moment the Allies held him back, awaiting the reaction of the Turks—which, when it came, was bad. The proposed frontiers aroused such resentment among Turkish soldiers
hitherto loyal to the Sultan that they deserted to Kemal, whose troops advanced to the Sea of Marmara. There they were halted by shellfire from Allied warships and fell back into the hinterland, beyond the range of naval guns.
At this point the Allies lifted their veto on a Greek campaign. Venizelos proposed that the Greek army should advance into Thrace and stamp out any Kemalist guerrilla forces operating in Europe, while the main Greek expeditionary force based upon Smyrna should be used to clear Kemal’s Nationalists from western Anatolia. On 22 June the Greek regiments went forward and met only sporadic resistance. Within two and a half weeks they had forced the Kemalists back into the mountains and cleared the whole of south-western Anatolia. A month later the Sultan’s plenipotentiaries, having failed to achieve any revision of the settlement, signed the peace treaty in the Parisian suburb of Sèvres. But, even as they signed, they protested strongly at the harsh terms laid down by the Allies. It would be several months before the Porte could ratify the treaty, thereby making it effective. Before then, the Sultan’s ministers had every hope of securing the annulment of the treaty’s more vindictive terms.
Long negotiations, constant bargaining, elaborate exchanges between viziers and ambassadors, the playing off of one Great Power against another—all these ploys were familiar features of Ottoman diplomacy. And the published documents confirm that Ahmed Tevfik, the last Grand Vizier, and his ministers were skilled players of this traditional game.24 But the decisive contest took place not on the Straits, but in Anatolia; and it followed other rules. Kemal did not, for example, simply protest at the proposed establishment of an Armenian state. Seven weeks after the Treaty of Sèvres was signed, Nationalist forces advanced through the Armenian vilayets and captured Kars while, soon afterwards, the Soviet Red Army established a puppet Armenian republic at Erivan. By the first week of December the Ankara Government and the Soviet authorities had signed the Treaty of Gümrü, thereby establishing, across a divided Armenia, a Russo-Turkish frontier which was to survive longer than the Soviet Union itself. Not only did Kemal safeguard his eastern flank, he was able to count on Russian arms and equipment in his fight against ‘western imperialism’. By January 1921 he was better placed to withstand a Greek offensive than in the previous summer. That month four Greek infantry divisions advanced from Bursa along the main Anatolian railway, through difficult mountain terrain towards the important junction at Eskisehir. They were checked near the small town of Inönü, on the last ridge before road and railway descend to the Eskisehir plain. Two months later a second battle was fought at Inönü, to coincide with a Greek thrust inland from Smyrna. Once more the Kemalists held their ground, and the Greeks failed to make progress.25