Military Governor of Cilicia on re-occupation by Turkish forces in January, 1922.
MEHMED EMIN BEY
The Poet of New Turkey.
On November 20, Lord Curzon finally opened the peace conference at Lausanne, with Ismet Pasha, now Foreign Minister in the Turkish Government, heading the only Turkish delegation. Negotiations went forward until Jan. 31, 1923, when Lord Curzon served a draft treaty on Ismet Pasha and on the night of February 4 abruptly left for London. This breach in the negotiations left British military and naval forces in occupation of Constantinople and the Straits, and the Greek Army facing east along the Maritza; but the snows of the Balkans melted without incident. On April 23, Sir Horace Rumbold, British High Commissioner in Constantinople, took Lord Curzon’s place at the resumed conference and the Treaty of Peace, together with a number of subsidiary documents, was finally signed at Lausanne on July 24.
We have noted previously the fate of the vast British acquisitions which followed the collapse of Czarist Russia. With Habibullah dead, with Said Mir Alim in exile, with the command of the Caspian lost, with the Anglo-Persian Agreement defunct, with the American mandate project dead and Trans-Caucasia again under the Russian aegis, Mr. Lloyd George had at last been compelled to abandon his hostility toward both Russia and Turkey, and at the Genoa Conference in 1922 he attempted to re-write the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1907 with Soviet Russia. But the Soviet had abrogated the 1907 Treaty in 1918 and in 1922 it refused to purchase British recognition by a reversion to Czarist diplomacy. The liquidation of the British acquisitions continued. The Turkish re-occupation of Smyrna wiped out the Greek fait accompli across the Straits and brought the Turks down to the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. The Mudania armistice returned the European shore to Turkey. Only an insecure command of the Straits and the Black Sea now remained of the vast British acquisitions of 1918 and 1919, and this remnant Lord Curzon now sought to salvage from the wreck by negotiation at Lausanne with the Turkish delegation alone. Soviet Russia having refused to re-write the 1907 Treaty against Turkey at Genoa, Lord Curzon now drew up the Straits Convention against Russia at Lausanne and on May 8, 1923, he dispatched an ultimatum from London to Moscow which seems to have been designed to cancel the Anglo-Russian Trade Agreement and to break off all relations with Soviet Russia. The British Foreign Office has lived on wars and the brink of wars since 1914 and the time has not yet come when it is willing to conclude a full and normal peace with both Turkey and Russia.
The Straits Convention, thus drawn without Russian collaboration at Lausanne, opens the Straits to all merchantmen when Turkey is at peace and to all neutral merchantmen, subject to the Turkish right of search, when Turkey is at war. All warships are to be allowed passage when Turkey is at peace and neutral warships when Turkey is at war, both of these provisions to be subject to a number of restrictions, one of which is that the “maximum force which any one Power may send through the Straits into the Black Sea is not to be greater than that of the most powerful fleet of the littoral Powers of the Black Sea existing in that sea at the time of passage; but with the proviso that the Powers reserve to themselves the right to send into the Black Sea, at all times and under all circumstances, a force of not more than three ships, of which no individual ship shall exceed 10,000 tons.”
By this Convention, Lord Curzon retains access to the southern and Trans-Caucasian ports of Soviet Russia. Ismet Pasha signed it in the course of the general signature at Lausanne on July 24. Soviet Russia signed it at Rome on August 14. Early in September, Mr. Amery, First Lord of the British Admiralty, paid a visit of inspection to Malta where he announced that for the next year or two the principal British squadron would remain in the Mediterranean, and from Malta he continued to Constantinople.
Lord Curzon also succeeded at Lausanne in securing agreement that “the frontier between Turkey and Iraq shall be laid down in friendly arrangement to be concluded between Turkey and Great Britain within nine months. In the event of no agreement being reached between the two Governments in the time mentioned, the dispute shall be referred to the Council of the League of Nations.” The Turco-Arab split in Sunni Islam which the Foreign Office engineered in 1915 through the Residency in Cairo, still lives in the Mosul controversy. Arab autonomy under the religious suzerainty of the Ottoman Caliph which Rauf Bey had stipulated to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros in 1918, still awaits, inter alia, the fate of Mosul.
The rest of the Lausanne Conference was a rout. The military victory which Ismet Pasha had won over the Greeks at Smyrna, he duplicated as a diplomatic victory over the Allies at Lausanne. Having salvaged the Straits Convention from the wreck and having postponed the Mosul matter, Lord Curzon abandoned the unhappy scene on Feb. 4, 1923, leaving Sir Horace Rumbold to save what he could when the conference resumed on April 23. Ismet Pasha restricted himself as far as possible to a settlement of the political terms of peace, referring concessionaires to his Government at Angora, but it was not until July 17 that Sir Horace consented to sign peace without the Turkish Government’s acquiescence in the claim of the so-called Turkish Petroleum Company upon the oil of the Mosul province. Excepting for further negotiation over Mosul, the political terms of peace between the Allies and Turkey were signed at Lausanne on July 24. Several of the economic issues of the peace, the most important of which is the question of the currency in which Turkey is to pay interest on its share of the Old Ottoman Public Debt, are still in process of negotiation.