“The Ottoman Empire is Dead. Long Live Turkey!”
In the meantime, however, while the Sèvres Treaty was still in the making, there was a small handful of Turkish patriots who were determined at all costs to win that complete independence for which Turkey had entered the war. These Nationalists were outraged by the Greek occupation of Smyrna, in May, 1919, which they considered a forecast of the kind of peace to be dictated to Turkey. During the summer of 1919 they held two conferences at Erzerum and Sivas and agreed to reject any treaty which handed over Turkish populations to foreign domination, which would reduce Turkey to economic servitude to the victorious Powers, or which would impair the sovereignty of their country. Upon this program they won a sweeping victory in the parliamentary elections of 1919–1920. For leadership they depended largely upon that brilliant soldier and staunch Turk, Mustapha Kemal Pasha, who had distinguished himself by his quarrel with Liman von Sanders at the Dardanelles and his defiance of von Falkenhayn in Syria. Mustapha Kemal Pasha, who had bitterly contested the growth of German influence in Turkey during the war, was not likely to accept without a struggle the extension of Allied control over Turkish affairs.[40]
In Constantinople, January 28, 1920, the Nationalist members of the Turkish Parliament signed the celebrated “National Pact”—frequently referred to as a Declaration of Independence of the New Turkey. “The Pact was something more than a statement of war-aims or a party programme. It was the first adequate expression of a sentiment which had been growing up in the minds of Western-educated Turks for three or four generations, which in a half-conscious way had inspired the reforms of the Revolution of 1908, and which may dominate Turkey and influence the rest of the Middle East for many generations to come. It was an emphatic adoption of the Western national idea.”[41] It was based upon principles which had received wide acceptance among peoples of the Allied nations during the war: self-determination of peoples, to be expressed by plebiscite; protection of the rights of minorities, but no further limitations of national sovereignty. As regards the Capitulations and the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, the Pact is explicit: “With a view to assuring our national and economic development,” it reads, “and with the end of securing to the country a more regular and more modern administration, the signatories of the present pact consider the possession of complete independence and liberty as the sine qua non of our national existence. In consequence, we oppose all juridical or financial restrictions of any nature which would arrest our national development.” Rather that Turkey should die free than live in slavery! Foreswearing any intention of recovering the Sultan’s former Arab possessions, the Pact proceeded to serve notice, however, that Cilicia, Mosul, and the Turkish portions of Thrace must be reunited with the fatherland. “The Ottoman Empire is dead! Long live Turkey!”[42]
With this amazing program Mustapha Kemal Pasha undertook to liberate Turkey. In April, 1920, the government of the Grand National Assembly was instituted in Angora and proceeded to administer those portions of Anatolia which were not under Allied or Greek occupation. The proposed Treaty of Sèvres—which was handed to the Turkish delegates at Paris on May 11—was condemned as inconsistent with the legitimate national aspirations of the Turkish people. The Allies and the Constantinople Government were denounced—the former as invaders of the sacred soil of Turkey, the latter as tools of European imperialists. Then followed a series of successful military campaigns: by October, 1920, the French position in Cilicia had been rendered untenable, the Armenian Republic had been obliterated, the British forces of occupation had been forced back into the Ismid peninsula, and the Italians had withdrawn their troops to Adalia. In the spring of 1921 separate treaties were negotiated with Russia, Italy, and France, providing for a cessation of military operations and for the evacuation of certain Turkish territories.[43] Then came the long, bitter struggle against the Greeks, terminating with the Mudania armistice of October 10, 1922, which assured to the Turks the return of Smyrna and portions of Thrace. On November 1, the Sultanate was abolished, and Turkey became a republic. Four days later the Turkish Nationalists entered Constantinople in triumph. The struggle for the territorial and administrative integrity of a New Turkey seemed to be won.
The victory of the Nationalists scrapped the Treaty of Sèvres and called for a complete readjustment of the Near Eastern situation. When the first Lausanne Conference for Peace in the Near East assembled on November 20, 1922, there were high hopes that a just and lasting settlement might be arrived at. The conference was only a few days old, however, when the time-honored obstacles to peace in the Levant made their appearance: the rival diplomatic policies of the Great Powers; the desire of the West, by means of the Capitulations, to maintain a firm hold upon its vested interests in the East; the imperialistic struggle of rival concessionaires, supported by their respective governments, for possession of the raw materials, the markets, and the communications of Asiatic Turkey. Once more the Bagdad Railway, with its tributary lines in Anatolia and Syria, became one of the stakes of diplomacy!