Third, we may permit the Armenians to work out their future alone. This is the course which thoughtful Armenians in Turkey now desire us to adopt, and its principal remaining opponents are certain Armenians who live in New York and are frightfully far from reality. If we adopt this course for the future, it seems quite possible that those Armenians who prefer to live in their own country will in time find their way into Soviet Armenia and those who remain in Turkey will be given equal rights and equal duties with the Turks themselves. Turks and Armenians understand each other well. Until fifty years ago, they had lived together on generally peaceful terms for several centuries and the fact (to come no nearer home) that Czarist Russia has disappeared, seems to promise the possibility of an eventual resumption in the new Turkish State of that peace which once characterized their relationship….
The French evacuation of Cilicia cleared the Turkish left, but the Greeks on the Eski-Shehr-Afium line still confronted the Turkish center and the Allies in Constantinople still confronted the Turkish right. Meanwhile, the British command in the capital executed in a lesser degree the same climb-down as the French had made with respect to Angora. As a result of the Turkish victory on the Sakaria River, the Turkish deportees on Malta were exchanged at Ineboli on the Black Sea coast for British prisoners held in Anatolia. So Rauf Bey came back to Angora.
No Turk has been a greater lover of the British than Rauf Bey (Rauf is of Circassian and Albanian blood, but politically he is a Turk and unlike most Turks his foreign language is English instead of French). He had applied to the British Embassy in 1914 for help in keeping his country neutral, but no reply had been given him. He had applied to Admiral Calthorpe in 1918 for an armistice, but that armistice led to the Allied occupation of Constantinople and the Greek occupation of Smyrna. He had acted in good faith upon an intimation from General Milne in 1920 and had brought the Nationalist deputies from Angora to Constantinople, but that action landed him behind British barbed wire on Malta. Is it a matter of wonder that the great tradition which generations of Englishmen had built up in Constantinople, has now disappeared? No Turk has fought harder for the British than Rauf Bey, and few countries have ever more consistently wounded their own friends in Turkey than the England over which Mr. Lloyd George presided. Rauf Bey’s tragic experience at the hands of their country is one which Englishmen might do well to ponder during these new days, when Turkish tugs are piloting British merchantmen into the Gulf of Smyrna.
Ali Fethy Bey, a mild, almost shy, Macedonian Turk whose modest bearing gives no hint of the strength he has contributed to Angora, returned with Rauf and a long list of other deputies in the late Parliament at Constantinople. Here were the civilian brains of which Angora stood in the greatest need and it now became possible for the Grand National Assembly to begin the erection of a civilian administration. Winter was coming on and the military situation would necessarily remain at a stand-still. The Assembly gave its War Office (the Ministry of National Defense is its official title) an immediate shake-up. Rafet Pasha fell and the Ministry of the Interior was separated out and given to Ali Fethy Bey. Here he encountered the same difficulty as so many of the Nationalist leaders encountered—he knew nothing of Anatolia and it required most of the winter merely to learn the ins and outs of his department. Rauf Bey was given the Ministry of Public Works but in a re-shuffle of the Cabinet, he presently displaced Fevzi Pasha as Prime Minister, a position more nearly commensurate with his very high abilities. The Ministry of Finance was elevated to an actual, as distinct from a figurehead, authority and the Near East Relief’s representatives who had been accustomed to consulting Rafet Pasha on matters of mutual interest, now found themselves referred to Hassan Tahsin Bey, Minister of Finance, when they desired to obtain exemption of relief supplies from the payment of customs duties. Rafet Pasha had been accustomed to pass on their applications as if they were personal matters, but Tahsin Bey was a stranger. With the regime of the Capitulations ended, Americans were finding themselves in a position in which it became necessary to treat a Government official in Turkey as though he were a Government official. For some Americans, the change has proven, and is still proving, a difficult one.
In the meantime, the Foreign Office which had been housed in the old Public Debt building, had signed a treaty of mutual recognition with Soviet Russia on March 16, 1921, at the same time as a similar Russo-Persian treaty was being signed. In the Russo-Turkish treaty, full Russian recognition was given to the Erzerum program, including that clause of it respecting Constantinople and the Straits. No more vivid illustration exists of the meaning of the Russian Revolution than the contrast between the Russo-Turkish Treaty of 1921 and the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907.
The application of the provisions of the 1921 Treaty to the new Russo-Turkish frontier in the Kars Treaty which was signed Oct. 13, 1921, brought about peace in the eastern provinces, and Azerbaijan and Afghan Ministers, accredited to Mustapha Kemal Pasha, were received in Angora. A Russian Ambassador was also received and the elaboration of consular and commercial treaties was begun.
Only three sections of the frontiers of the Turkish State now remained to be fixed—the Mosul frontier, the Smyrna frontier and the frontier in Europe. Communication with the West, with a view to the peaceful settlement of these disputed frontiers, was now open to Constantinople direct, the British command having opened the wire from the General Post-Office in Stamboul to “the interior” at the same time as it returned the deportees from Malta. The carriage road from Adabazar which was available by rail from Constantinople, on past the Greek left to Angora was also thrown open, but Greek and Circassian brigands raided it so frequently that its use was impossible without a strong guard. Access to Angora was in practice still confined to the railway from Mersina to Konia and thence by carriage to Angora, or up from the Black Sea coast through the mountains to Angora. Admission to the interior, however, was rarely granted by the Turkish Government’s new representative in Stamboul, for the Greeks were still dug in before Eski-Shehr and Afium-Karahissar and the war was still on.
Conditions in Anatolia greatly improved during the winter of 1921-’22. The beginnings of a civilian administration appeared, but the military situation necessarily continued to dominate. Fevzi Pasha continued to snap up munitions wherever he could get them. Some came from the Italians, some came from the French (it is not impossible that the American uniforms in which some of the Turkish soldiers have been clad, were originally left as American surplus stocks in France), and some came from the British, for the British Commander-in-Chief and the British High Commissioner in Constantinople were in as happy accord on the subject of the Greeks as the British War Office and the British Foreign Office have been on a number of other Eastern subjects. In the main, however, the Turkish forces were re-mobilized and re-equipped by the native resourcefulness of the Turk himself, as personified in the dour towering figure of Fevzi Pasha. Even after he had secured foreign ammunition, after gangs of peasant women had trekked it up from the coasts in ox-carts and on the backs of mules and camels, machinery had to be scraped together to change the calibre of much of it before it would fit his guns. There is hardly a more remarkable story in modern military history than the story of how Fevzi Pasha re-mobilized and re-equipped the Turkish forces out of left-over lots of dismantled artillery and misfit ammunition. The cost of those forces to Anatolia in its impoverished condition has been appalling, but their creation by Fevzi Pasha under the conditions of siege which prevailed, has been no less than miraculous.