A Parliamentary commission set off to Anatolia in order to call upon Mustafa Kemal to give up his hostility to the Entente and lay down arms with the least delay.
Moreover, the Government decided to send some delegates in order to make inquiries and point out to the leaders of the Nationalist movement the dangerous consequences of their stubbornness and open rebellion.
The first delegation was to include an aide-de-camp of the War Minister, and an Allied superior officer. Another delegation was to consist of members of Parliament, among whom were Youssouf Kemal Bey, member for Sivas; Vehbi Bey, member for Karassi; Abdulla Azmi Bey, member for Kutahia; and Riza Nuri, member for Sinope, the very man who had brought in a motion against the occupation of Constantinople and the arrest of some members of the Ottoman Parliament, and who was credited with having said: “Anatolia has a false conception of the occupation of Constantinople. We are going to give clear explanations of the seriousness of the situation in order to avoid disastrous consequences. We are going to tell Anatolia the ideas of the Government about the interests of the nation.”
An Imperial decree prescribed the dissolution of the Chamber, and the members before whom it was read left the Chamber quietly.
But it was obvious that the Damad Ferid Pasha Cabinet no longer represented the country, and that in the mind of most Turks it could no longer express or uphold the free will of the Turkish people, whose hidden or open sympathies, in view of the foreigner’s threat, were given to the Nationalist movement.
It must be owned that the Turkish Nationalist movement had at the outset co-operated with some questionable elements and had been mixed up with the intrigues of the former members of the Committee of Union and Progress. But it now became impossible, in order to belittle it, to look down upon it as a mere plot or insurrectionary movement. In consequence of the successive events that had taken place since the armistice and of the attitude of the Allies, especially England, after the occupation of Constantinople, carried out under British pressure with the approbation of the French Government notwithstanding the protest of the French Press, and in view of the provisions that were likely to be included in the Peace Treaty, Turkish patriotism, which could not allow Turkey to be destroyed and meant to maintain her traditional rights, had tacitly joined that movement. Besides, Mustafa Kemal, who, at the very outset, had been a member of the Committee of Union and Progress, had soon disagreed with Enver, and it should be borne in mind that he was his enemy during the greater part of the war, as he was an opponent of the German Marshal Falkenhayn. Some people have tried to make out there was only personal enmity between them, and have denied the possibility of political opposition; but the very fact that their enmity would have ruined any common political designs they might have had proves there were no such designs.
So Mustafa Kemal did not seem greatly moved by the measures mentioned in the manifesto issued by the Government under pressure of the foreign occupation and amidst the perturbation caused by recent events.
At the end of March Mustafa Kemal warned the Sultan that, in consequence of the occupation of Constantinople, he broke off all connection with the central Government, which henceforth was quite under foreign control. In a proclamation issued to the Mussulmans, he declared it was necessary to form a new independent Ottoman State in Anatolia and to appoint an assistant Sheik-ul-Islam. The reason he gave was that the Sultan could no longer be looked upon as Caliph, for it is a fundamental principle of Islam that the Caliph must be an independent Sovereign, and, since the Allied occupation of Constantinople, he no longer enjoyed his freedom of action. In that appeal, which was not intended for the Mussulmans of Algeria, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli, for it seemed to be aimed at Great Britain alone, he regarded the occupation of Constantinople as a new crusade against Islam.
According to news from Nationalist sources, Mustafa Kemal formed a Cabinet, in which he was War Minister of the new Anatolian Government.