Before this, General Milne had had a few deputies and senators arrested, together with a few men considered as having a share in the Nationalist movement, such as Kutchuk Jemal Pasha, ex-War Minister in the Ali Riza Cabinet; Jevad Pasha, formerly head of the staff; Tchourouk Soulou Mahmoud Pasha, a senator; Dr. Essad Pasha; Galatali Shefket Pasha, commanding the Straits forces; Reouf Bey, Kara Vassif Bey, Shevket Bey, Hassan Tahsin Bey, Nouman Ousta Effendi, Sheref Bey, deputies.
Reouf Bey and Kara Vassif Bey were considered as representing in the Turkish Parliament Mustafa Kemal Pasha and the people who ensured the transmission of his orders.
All these men were arrested illegally and brutally, with the consent of the French Governor, though they had always evinced much sympathy for France, under the pretext that they corresponded with the national army; and yet their intervention might have had favourable consequences.
Among the men arrested that night, Jemal, Jevad, and Mahmoud Pasha, all three former Ministers, were insulted and sent to prison in their nightclothes, with their arms bound. Their doors and windows were broken open, and their Moslem wives were threatened in the harem. Some children of thirteen or fourteen were also arrested and thrashed. Eight Turkish soldiers on duty at Shahzade-Bashi were killed in the morning while they lay asleep on their camp-beds, and the censorship probably suppressed other deeds of the same kind.
The Ottoman Government could not understand how members of Parliament could be imprisoned, especially by the English, the founders of the parliamentary system. The deputy Jelal Noury Bey, who is neither a Nationalist nor a Unionist, was apprehended, merely because he opposed Ferid Pasha’s policy.
England, to enhance her influence over public opinion, got control over the chief newspapers which were not friendly to her. Jelal Noury Bey, the director of the Ileri, a radical newspaper, and Ahmed Emin Bey, the director of the Vakit, were deported. The Alemdar, the Peyam Sabah, the Stambul, edited by Refi Jevad, Ali Kemal, and Said Mollah, which, since the first days of the armistice, had praised the English policy, fell into English hands; which accounts for the varying attitudes successively assumed by those journals in their comments on current events. Their editors were mostly members of the “Club of the Friends of England,” and sought in every possible way to increase the number of the adherents of that committee, which was subsidised by the British High Commissioner, and whose chief aim was that the Turkish mandate should be given to England.
On March 21, 1920, the British at Skutari requisitioned the police courts, the law courts, the police station, the town hall, and the prison, thus almost completely disorganising the administration of the town.
In the note signed by the High Commissioners, this occupation was described as a measure of guarantee, with a view to the execution of the treaty that was going to be forced on Turkey. Yet it seemed rather strange that such measures should be taken before the treaty was concluded—or was it because the English, being aware the treaty was unacceptable, thought it necessary to gag the Turks beforehand, or even sought to exasperate them?—for if the Turks offered resistance, then the English would have a right to intervene very sternly, and thus could justify the most unjustifiable measures of repression. What would England and the United States have answered if France had proposed such coercive measures against Germany in addition to those of the armistice? It was stated in this note that the occupation would not last long, and was no infringement upon the Sultan’s sovereignty, that it aimed at rallying the Turks in a common endeavour to restore prosperity to Turkey in accordance with the Sultan’s orders; but it also threatened that, should disorder last longer in Asia Minor, the occupation might be extended and the provisions of the treaty might be made harder, in which case Constantinople would be severed from Turkey.
The Daily Telegraph said about that time: