Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

With all these conflicting aims, motives, and treaty entanglements, is it any wonder that the Peace Conference year brought no agreement as to the terms of the treaty to be imposed upon Turkey? When the Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties were imposed, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria were compelled to sign a blank check, agreeing beforehand to whatever disposition of the Ottoman Empire the Principal Allied and Associated Powers might make. So they were out of it! But these treaties did contain a very definite provision for the peoples of Turkey. Article XXII of the League of Nations Covenant provides a mandatory government “to those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of states which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” The “well-being and development of such people form a sacred trust of civilization,” so the Covenant declared, and they were divided into three classes. The first dealt with the liberated regions of the Ottoman Empire. The text is explicit:

Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.

The mandatory idea was seized upon by General Smuts as a way of overcoming Mr. Wilson’s strenuous objection to the fait accompli of the distribution of Germany’s colonies. The American President accepted this in good faith, and agreed to present to the American people the proposal that the United States assume the Armenian mandate. Taking for granted the sincerity of his colleagues, he proposed that an international commission be sent to the Ottoman Empire to ascertain “the wishes of these communities” in regard to the selection of mandatory powers. His colleagues agreed; but they did not send their delegates. The Americans went alone, and brought back a report quite at variance with the mandate distribution as arranged among the Entente Powers.

What Mr. Wilson did not appreciate was the fact that the moot questions had been settled long before the war ended by secret compacts, and that the object of the Paris Conference was not to draw up terms of peace, in the interest of the peoples and regions concerned, but to arrive at a satisfactory adjustment of interests among the victors. The Turkish treaty was not drafted in 1919 simply because the Entente premiers could not agree upon a satisfactory compromise. They paid no attention to the Covenant, with its mandatory provision. It was too much to ask of them the fulfilment of this promise when they were unable to reconcile their previous commitments.

For instance, Article XII could not be carried out either in Palestine or Syria. Ninety per cent of the Palestinians, including thousands of its Jewish population, were bitterly opposed to the Balfour Declaration. Mr. Wilson’s mandate commission discovered that the great bulk of the Syrians were hostile to the French mandate. When Emir Feisal took over Damascus, in conformity with the Anglo-Hedjaz agreement and the undoubted wishes of its inhabitants, the French sent an army against him, drove him out, and hanged “for treason” many of his followers. In vain the Hedjaz invoked Articles XIII, XV, XVI, and XVII of the Covenant, which were supposed to make impossible such an event as the French expedition against Damascus. The inhabitants of Palestine, also, have tried for more than four years to get a hearing from the League of Nations, which has consistently ignored Article XXII. The Arabs of Mesopotamia were unable to secure the recognition of their rights until they had succeeded in driving the British almost entirely out of their country. The French formed the Armenians of Cilicia into regiments, told them that they were fighting for their independence, and then deserted them when French interests seemed to make it advantageous to betray the Armenians and hand Cilicia back to the Turks.

The Conference of Paris adjourned without having come to an agreement upon three vital questions: the terms of the treaty with Turkey, the adoption of a common policy toward Russia, and an understanding as to the means to be employed to compel Germany to fulfil the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. These problems led to a series of continuation conferences from 1920 to 1923, without reaching understandings of even a quasi-permanent nature. The continuation conferences as a whole are discussed in another chapter. Here we shall limit ourselves to the Conference of San Remo, in April, 1920, which endeavored to settle the devolution of the Ottoman Empire by drafting a treaty with Turkey. The results of its deliberations were the ill fated Treaty of Sèvres and the demonstration of two facts: that the three great problems cited above could not be dissociated; and that the Entente premiers believed that the League of Nations could not help in the solution of any one of them.

Had Czarist Russia survived the war, she would have installed herself at Constantinople. There would have been no question of international control of the Straits, an independent Armenia, or the satisfaction of Greek national aspirations. When the three premiers met at San Remo, almost a year after Premier Venizelos had been invited at Paris by Great Britain, France, and the United States to occupy Smyrna, they had to reckon with electorates weary of war and taxes and unwilling to engage in further military ventures in the Near East. Outside of Constantinople, held under the guns of battle-ships, the only forces available for compelling respect of their decisions were the Greek armies in Western Thrace and Smyrna. It was a case either of surrendering the fruits of the victory over Turkey or of recognizing, in a measure at least, Greek claims.

The first alternative was dismissed. Russia seemed to be behind Turkish nationalism, and the Entente Powers feared that a capitulation of Turkey would not bring peace, but rather the spread of Bolshevism in western Asia, the stirring up again of Bulgaria, the weakening of Rumania and Poland, and the encouragement of nationalist movements throughout the Mohammedan world. It seemed the lesser of two evils to allow the Greeks to defend Thrace and the Smyrna region against the Turks by granting the titles Venizelos claimed. Lloyd George faced the breakdown of the attempt to make the Caucasus a barrier to Bolshevism, and Millerand knew that the French army in the Orient was not strong enough to hold the positions it had occupied confidently the year before. In fact, the Nationalists under Mustafa Kemal Pasha had already defeated the French and driven them out of several cities, and it was only a question of time when General Gouraud would be compelled to ask the Turks for an armistice in Syria. Premier Nitti had withdrawn the Italian forces from Konia, and had adopted the policy of encouraging the Nationalists against the Greeks. The Greek army might be able to create such a diversion in Thrace and the hinterland of Smyrna as to save French prestige and prevent the whole-hearted coöperation of Turks with Russians.

In regard to Turkey, three decisions were necessary: what territories to detach, how to force the Turks to give them up, and what to do with them. The premiers were no more ready to make these decisions in April, 1920, than they had been the year before, but there always must be an end to a transitory period. The delay was affecting the prestige of the Entente Powers, was giving encouragement to Germany, and was threatening the harmonious relations among the visitors in the World War.

The compromise of San Remo, embodied in the treaty to be presented to the Turks at Sèvres, followed the lines of the other treaties. Its principal conditions were: (1) open Straits in peace and war to all ships; (2) control of the Straits by an international commission; (3) demolition of fortifications, and demilitarization within a zone twelve miles inland from the coast on both sides of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, thus excluding the Turks from Gallipoli peninsula; (4) cession of Thrace up to the defenses of Constantinople to Greece; (5) limitations in the Turkish sovereignty over Constantinople; (6) Greek protectorate over Smyrna, with a generous hinterland; (7) Italian protectorate over Adalia; (8) acceptance of a boundary in the east to be communicated later, beyond which Armenia would be independent; (9) and cession to Great Britain and France of all the Arabic-speaking portions of the empire.