Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

The events of September, 1922, proved to be a greater blow to Hellenism than the fall of Byzantium in 1453 or any other of the vicissitudes suffered by the Greeks in the original Turkish conquest of Asia Minor and the Balkans; for the Turks resolved this time to stamp out Hellenism for good and all. The burning of Smyrna was accompanied by wholesale massacres. The expulsion of the Greeks from Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace followed the signature of an armistice at Mudania on October 10. The negotiations were carried on between the Entente Powers and the Turks. Greece, by her defeat, had been eliminated and was forced to accept the loss of Eastern Thrace in order to secure the armistice.

Before the Mudania Conference, when it was learned that the Entente Powers had sent a note to Kemal Pasha, leader of the Turkish Nationalists, offering to restore Eastern Thrace to Turkey as one of the conditions of peace, a revolution broke out among the Greek soldiers who had found refuge on the island of Mytilene. The troops demanded that they be escorted to Athens. Under the joint leadership of Colonels Gonatas and Plastiras, they arrived in Greece on September 26, forced the abdication of Constantine, and accepted Crown Prince George as King, on condition that he promise to regard his father’s abdication as final and to place the Government in the hands of the revolutionary committee they had formed. The first act of the revolutionaries was the arrest of former premiers and ministers whom they regarded as responsible for the Asia Minor disasters. These, they asserted, would be tried for high treason. The new masters of Greece declared that they would not give up Eastern Thrace. Only on this condition, however, could they secure the intervention of Venizelos, who knew the futility of attempting to renew the war and further indispose the Entente Powers.

After the evacuation of Eastern Thrace in October, Venizelos consented to represent Greece at the new peace conference, which was to open at Lausanne on November 20. The evacuation of Adrianople, which began on October 15, created immediate difficulties for the new Government. Had it not made the revolution for the avowed purpose of saving Thrace? Martial law had to be proclaimed. Then, to appease popular excitement, the revolutionary leaders began the investigation of the causes of the disaster. A committee reported on November 8 that all the anti-Venizelist Governments, from 1915 to 1922, were guilty of high treason because they had alienated the sympathies of the Entente Powers during the World War and since, because they had blindly supported Constantine, because they had neglected to comply with the requests and demands of the Entente Powers in regard to Asia Minor, because they had concealed from the people the successive warnings as to the impracticability of holding their foothold in Asia Minor, and because they had permitted an occult government to exist in Greece under Prince Nicholas, in defiance of the constitution. Another brother of the ex-king, Prince Andrew, was arrested on the charge that he was immediately responsible for the recent disaster. The report demanded that six ex-premiers and ex-ministers, Admiral Goudas, and General Hadjianestis, commander-in-chief of the Greek army in Asia Minor, be tried for high treason before a special court martial.

Greek statesmen, including Premier Krokidas, who had consented to serve under the revolutionary Government, begged that before the sentence was announced there be granted right of appeal to a National Assembly, which was to be elected in the near future. Krokidas resigned when the plea was rejected. On November 25 Colonel Gonatas, unable to get a civilian to take the office, assumed the premiership himself. Three days later former Premiers Gounaris, Stratos, and Protopapadakis, former Foreign Minister Baltazzi, former War Minister Theotokis, and General Hadjianestis were condemned to death and fined sums amounting to the confiscation of their private fortunes. A few hours later they were shot. Prince Andrew escaped the death sentence; but he was banished after military degradation.

The execution of the former ministers aroused a storm of protest in Greece and abroad. The British minister left Athens, and the Greek minister at Washington cabled his resignation. But Colonel Plastiras, Chief of the Revolutionary Committee, not only assumed responsibility, in the name of the committee, for what had happened, but declared that all persons, civilian and military, connected with the Asia Minor disaster would be brought to trial. He denied the charge that the court martial was not a proper means of decreeing punishment. He announced, moreover, that the General Election would be indefinitely postponed.

It was feared that the political executions, coming at the beginning of the Lausanne Conference, would increase the already unfavorable international situation of Greece. But Venizelos stuck at his task, fought hard to save what he could, and through both periods of the conference, lasting weary months, he watched for every opportunity to profit by the resentment aroused among all the Entente delegates by the unreasonableness and insolence of the Turks. Other patriotic Greeks abroad, following the example of Venizelos, accepted and supported, even where they could not defend, the Revolutionary Committee. They felt that the debacle of Hellenism would be rendered complete if there were a new outbreak of civil war in their unhappy country. There had been too much of political strife during the years of miraculous expansion.

The two preoccupations of Greece in 1923 have been the care of refugees and the reorganization and strengthening of the army.

The refugee problem became acute immediately after the retreat. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks, Circassians, and Armenians, and a large number of non-Kemalist Turks fled pell-mell to the coast, overcrowded Chios, Mytilene, and Samos, and flowed over to Athens and Saloniki in a never ceasing stream. To these were added refugees from Thrace. Then came the Christians expelled from the Black Sea littoral. The Turks had retained, and deported into the interior for labor battalions, the able-bodied men and boys. The Greek refugee situation developed much the same as the earlier Armenian problem—countless thousands of women, children, and old people, incapable of earning their own living, even were there a chance to do so.

As virtually all the Christian population of Asia Minor and Thrace had fled or had been exiled, Greece within a few weeks saw her population increased by between 1,200,000 and 1,300,000 wholly dependent immigrants, bringing disease with their poverty. They came at the beginning of winter. All needed shelter, food, clothing, bedding, and medical attention. The problem was appalling, and it still threatens to overwhelm Greece in the summer of 1923. There is little hope of these refugees’ being able to return to their homes. How can a country, not self-supporting, bankrupt, and without credit abroad, take care of a 20 per cent increase in its population, not of able-bodied men, but of dependents? Charity, notably that administered by the Near East Relief, has kept the refugees from starving and freezing. It cannot continue indefinitely, however, and very many Greeks believe that salvation lies in a new test at arms with the Turks. They are by no means convinced of the military superiority of the Angora Nationalists, unless they are helped, as they were last time, from the outside. The Greeks still have their fleet, which gives them mastery of the sea. If not interfered with, they can blockade the Turks.

The lesson of the protracted and fruitless negotiations at Lausanne seems to be that force alone counts for anything in international relations. Throughout the discussions the attitude of the Turks was that of defiance, and only military threats brought them to a compromise. The best argument Venizelos had was the fact that 150,000 Greeks were still under arms, most of them in Western Thrace, with their morale restored, and ready to try again. This prevented the Turks from prodding him too hard, and this alone made the Entente Powers willing to consider that, despite the debacle of 1922, there might still be a promising future for Hellenism, and some profit to be had for friends of the Greeks.