It was disastrous news which Rauf conveyed through the interior as he continued on his way to join Kemal at Sivas. It affected the Turks far more than even the Armenian sack of Van had affected them, for in 1915 the Enver Government had at least not been disarmed. Even in Constantinople itself, Turkish opinion became so inflamed against the Damad Ferid Government that machine guns were mounted on Galata Bridge and the Allied High Commissioners were finally compelled to dispatch an inter-Allied Commission, headed by Admiral Bristol, to put a stop to the killing behind Smyrna. The Bristol Commission drew up a lengthy report which fixed immediate responsibility for the Smyrna affair, and Mr. Lloyd George suppressed it at the demand of Mr. Venizelos. By such suppressions has the martyr-legend of Near Eastern Christians grown.
The Greek occupation of Smyrna shook the world, from the back hills of Java to the country towns of the United States. Down in the Turkish cockpit, the Damad Ferid Government became an Allied puppet, Mustapha Kemal Pasha brought the skeleton Third Army down to Amasia to prevent a similar Greek landing at Samsun, a Turkish fighting front was hurriedly extemporized against the Armenians who were gathering under the Anglo-French aegis in Cilicia, and Kiazim Karabekr Pasha hewed out a back door to Central Asia past the Armenian Republic of Erivan in Trans-Caucasia. In the United States, the religious press opened its columns to every atrocity-charge against the Turks which Greek and Armenian minds could devise. In India, pious Moslems began trekking across the north-west frontier into Afghanistan, fleeing the British Government at Delhi with motives similar to those with which the Pilgrim Fathers once fled from England. Down in the hinterland of Smyrna, the West stood with bayonets fixed, confronting an East which had been largely disarmed.
It appears to be unquestioned that no clause of the Mudros armistice authorized the Allies to occupy Smyrna. The only clause which has been advanced as possibly covering the occupation, is clause 7 which gives the Allies “the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a situation arising which threatens the security of the Allies.” None of the dozen Allied officers who had been posted to Smyrna has ever claimed that a situation existed there which threatened even their own security, to say nothing of the security of the Allies. Mustapha Kemal Pasha at Sivas interpreted the occupation as a violation of the armistice by the Allies themselves and held it accordingly as no longer binding. The surrender of munitions to the Allies ceased immediately. The Anatolian peasant left his growing crops and went angrily back to war.
XV
THE ORTHODOX SCHISM IN ANATOLIA
KEMAL FALLS TO THE STATUS OF A “BANDIT”—TURKISH NATIONALISM BEGINS TO RE-MOBILIZE AND RE-EQUIP ITS FORCES—THE ERZERUM PROGRAM AND THE NATIONALIST VICTORY IN THE OTTOMAN ELECTIONS—HOW PAPA EFTIM EFFENDI BROKE WITH THE OECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE—THE TURKISH ORTHODOX CHURCH—PAPA EFTIM HIMSELF.
Mr. lloyd george had announced his program at Smyrna. He proposed to build a new Near East on the basis of its Christian minorities, confronting Soviet Russia with a Greek fait accompli across the Straits on a parity with the American mandate in Trans-Caucasia and the eastern provinces, the British Persia and the Afghan-Bokharan business with which it was proposed to confront it elsewhere. As for Islam, he would impose alone upon it that fate which the British Foreign Office and Czarist Russia had agreed in 1907 to impose together.
The reply to this program was Turkish Nationalism. Rid of the burden of the old Empire, freed of sole responsibility for the Caliphate, Mustapha Kemal Pasha proposed to break the religious deadlock in which the Turks had threshed themselves to pieces and to apply the same Westernism to his own nation as the West had long applied to its Greeks and Armenians. Such Old Turkish strongholds as the dervish tekkes at Konia might oppose him, but the Old Turks had no Western backing and Islam in India felt so deeply on the subject of “our brother Turk” that success in maintaining the last of the independent Moslem States would prove its own justification. As for Greeks and Armenians, they could continue to worship in their own way as they had always done under the old Empire, but they would never again be permitted to poison the country with their political reaction.
Inside a ring of British and Greek bayonets, the Turks flocked to the new Nationalist Party, not because the mass of Turkish opinion had any understanding of the meaning of nationalism but because Smyrna had stripped the Damad Ferid Government in Constantinople of the very small Turkish support with which it had entered office. Beginning in the eastern provinces which were farthest from the capital, the defense committees which constituted the framework of the Party, arrested Damad Ferid’s provincial officials and deported them to Constantinople, installing Nationalist administrations in their places. This proceeded so rapidly that Ferid telegraphed Kemal to return to the capital at once. Despite the fact that Ferid’s orders bore all the prestige of the Grand Vizierate, Kemal disregarded them and on July 11, 1919, Ferid dismissed him from the Army. From a senior officer and a military hero, Kemal now fell to the status of a “bandit,” who knew in all probability that it was only a matter of time until he would be caught and shot.