“I hope Your Excellency will excuse me if this letter is not couched in the usual diplomatic style, and will consider that when the life and rights of his nation are so grievously endangered it is most difficult for a patriot to keep his thoughts and feelings under control.”
As early as April 19, the San Remo Conference, which seemed to have come to an agreement about the main lines of the treaty to be submitted to Turkey, but had not yet settled the terms of this treaty, decided to summon the Ottoman plenipotentiaries to Paris on May 10.
In a note sent on April 20, 1920, to M. Nitti, as president of the San Remo Conference, Ghalib Kemaly Bey, formerly Ottoman minister plenipotentiary to Russia, now living in Rome, wrote:
“In order to justify the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire it has been asserted that the Turks are not able to administer a large country inhabited by various races, and they have been especially charged with hating and oppressing the Christian element. But a history extending over ten centuries at least plainly shows, by innumerable facts and truths, the absurdity of such assertions.
“If the Ottoman Empire, in spite of its wonderful efforts for the last 130 years, has not been able to reform and renovate itself as the other States have done, that is because, in addition to a thousand other difficulties, it has never had, for the last two centuries, either the power or the peacefulness that would have been necessary to bring such a protracted task to a successful end; for every ten, fifteen, or twenty years, it has been attacked by its neighbours, and the events of the last twelve years testify still more forcibly than any others to the fact that any step taken by the Turks on the way to progress—in the European sense of the word—was not only resented, but even violently opposed by their merciless enemies.
“As to the would-be oppression which the Christians are supposed to have endured in the Empire, let us merely consider that, whereas in Europe the Christians mutually slaughtered each other mercilessly and unceasingly in the name of their sacred Faith, and the unfortunate Jews were cruelly driven away and tortured in the name of the same Faith, the Turks, on the contrary, after ruling for a thousand years over Turkish Asia with many vicissitudes, not only tolerated the presence of millions of Christians in their large, powerful Empire, but even granted them without any restriction, under the benefit of Turkish laws and customs, all possibilities to subsist, develop, and become rich, often at the expense of the ruling race; and they offered a wide paternal hospitality to many wretched people banished from Christian Europe.
“To-day Greece, trampling upon justice and right, lays an iniquitous claim to the noble, sacred land of Turkish Thrace and Asia. Yet can she show the same example of tolerance, and give a strict account of her home policy towards the non-Greek elements, especially concerning the condition and fate of the 300,000 Turks who, before 1883, peopled the wide, fertile plains of Thessaly, of the hundreds of thousands of Moslem Albanians, subjects of the Empire, of the 150,000 Moslems in Crete, and of the 800,000 Moslems in Macedonia, whose unfortunate fate it was to pass under her dominion?
“I need not dwell at length on this painful subject, which will be an eternal shame to modern civilisation, for the victorious Powers know a great deal more—after the inter-Allied inquiry held four months ago in Smyrna—about the ‘gentle and fatherly’ manner in which thousands of Mussulmans were slaughtered and exterminated by the descendants of the civilisation of ancient Greece, who invaded that essentially Turkish province during the armistice under pretence of restoring order.”
And after recalling the figures of the various elements of the population of the Turkish Empire after the 1914 statistics, he concluded:
“Such figures speak but too eloquently, and the painful events that drenched with blood the unfortunate Ottoman land since the armistice raise only too much horror. So the Turkish people most proudly and serenely awaits the righteous, humane, and equitable sanction of the victorious Powers that have assumed before history the heavy responsibility of placing the whole world on a lasting basis of justice, concord, and peace.