by Benny Morris
western segment of Anatolia as far inland as Konia; the Italians argued that
Historical Background, 1918–1924
British Indian troops taking part in the occupation of Constantinople.
the area had been ruled by Rome 2,000 years before.8 Rus sian and Russian-
backed Armenian troops controlled areas of northeastern Turkey. And, east
of the border, in May 1918, Armenian nationalists established an Armenian
republic with Yerevan as its capital.
In May 1919, with authorization from the Allied Supreme Council, the
Greek Army occupied Smyrna and the contiguous coastline. Turkish nation-
alist groups— which would later unify under a single flag and take control of
the country under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal— responded with a fero-
cious guerrilla war. As early as January 1915, the British had tried to persuade
the Greeks to join the Allied cause with the vague promise of territorial
compensation in Asia Minor.9 But the Greeks had declined, and the Allies
promised the Ionian coast to Italy.10 But then, in June 1917, the Greeks (re-
luctantly) joined the Allies, leaving the British and French prime ministers,
David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, in a quandary. The situation
came to a head in spring 1919. The Italians landed troops in Antalya, and
appeared to be inching toward Smyrna. Meanwhile, Turkish anti- Christian
terrorism was on the rise, with massacre threatened. On May 5–6, the
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
principal Allied leaders— Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and U.S. President
Wilson— deci ded to let the Greeks have Smyrna. The British foreign secre-
tary, Arthur Balfour, immortally described their meeting: “ These three all-
powerful, all- ignorant men [are] sitting there and carving up continents with
only a child to lead them.”11 (The “child” in question may have been forty-
one- year- old Maurice Hankey, secretary of Britain’s War Cabinet.) Lloyd
George then summoned Eleftherios Venizelos, the Greek statesman, and
asked, “Do you have troops available?” Venizelos replied, “We do. For what
purpose?” Lloyd George responded that the Allies had “deci ded today that
you should occupy Smyrna.” Venizelos: “We are ready.”12 Ten days later
the Greeks landed.
In June– July 1920, with Allied authorization and after Nationalist troops
attacked British positions in Izmit, the Greek Army pushed inland, occupying
Bursa and other parts of the western Anatolian highlands as far as the Sakarya
River. They also occupied Eastern Thrace (Edirne vilayet).13 In doing so, the
Greeks bit off more than they could chew: their aims were monumental, but
they had relatively meager resources. With the defeat of the Ottoman Empire
in World War I, some Ottoman Greeks began pushing for unification with
mainland Greece, their desires dovetailing with those of many mainland pol-
iticians. On March 16, 1919, for example, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchal
Council of Constantinople endorsed “Union with Greece” and distributed
to the city’s churches a declaration: “The Greeks of Constantinople . . . re-
gard Union with the mother country Greece as the only firm basis for natu ral
development in the future.” Here and there Ottoman Greek schools and homes
raised Greek flags.14 On the mainland Venizelos and many others, driven by
the Megali Idea, sought to incorporate the lost Aegean islands, the western
Anatolian coastline, Constantinople, and perhaps even the Pontus in a reborn
Greek Empire.
The Turkish Nationalist war against the Greek Army following the landing
in Smyrna was soon accompanied by a campaign of ethnic cleansing against
the Ottoman Greek communities, which had in some mea sure rooted for
Greece during the Balkan and Great wars. The Nationalists’ campaign against
the Greeks expanded during 1919–1920 into a simultaneous confrontation
with the Rus sians and Armenians in the eastern marchlands and with the
Historical Background, 1918–1924
French, who at the end of 1919 had taken over from the British in Cilicia and
Aleppo vilayet.
It looked as if the Turks faced an insuperable challenge. But during 1920
the tide began to turn. Though thrice embattled, the Turks drove the Russian-
backed Armenians out of Kars and Alexandropol in the east and in 1921
forced the French out of Cilicia and northern Aleppo vilayet. The following
year they swept the Greeks into the Aegean.
At the base of what the Turks were to call their War of In de pen dence was
a deep sense that they had been wronged—in the Balkan wars, during the
world war, and by the foreign occupations that followed. Xenophobia bur-
geoned, mixing hatred for the Allied Powers with hatred for Christians in
general. Among most Turks there was no “spirit of regret, much less of re-
pentance at what had taken place, . . . The spirit of race hatred . . . is everywhere dominant,” the American missionary James Barton observed after a
5,000- mile trek through Asia Minor. He concluded that the Christian in-
habitants were “in danger of extermination.”15
But the picture was a little more nuanced, and some Turkish leading fig-
ures publicly opposed the continued persecution of Christians. When the war
ended and the Ottoman parliament reconvened, there were stormy debates
about the anti- Christian atrocities. Some deputies blamed the CUP and ab-
solved the rest of the Turkish po liti cal establishment.16 Many demanded that
the war time ministers be tried. When three Greek Orthodox parliamentar-
ians proposed that the state acknowledge the atrocities, some of their Muslim
colleagues concurred.17 But the new government’s interior minister, Fethi Bey,
finessed the question of blame, while seemingly conceding that “injustice” had
occurred and promising that the new regime would make concrete amends:
The approach of the government will be to grant freedom and perfect
equality to all segments of society. . . . Apart from this, it is the intention
of the government to cure every single injustice done up until now, as
far as the means allow, to make pos si ble the return to their homes of those
sent into exile, and to compensate for their material loss as far as
pos si ble. . . . It is also our common duty to make sure that such an event
does not recur.18
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
Even those who pressed for individual blame tended to hew to the overall
tenor of the debates, which held that the Turkish nation as a whole bore no
responsibility for what had happened.19
Events conspired to harden the Turkish position, and Allied actions exac-
erbated Turkish xenophobia. During 1919 the Allies— principally Britain—
tried to redress some of the wrongs committed. They helped Armenian
deportees return to their homes and regain their property, incarcerated in
British- ruled Malta hundreds of Turkish officers and officials implicated
in the massacres and the abuse of Allied prisoners of war, and extricated
women and children abducted to Muslim homes. According to one pos-
sibly exaggerated calculation, by September 1919 some 90,000 women and
orphans— out of a
total of 170,000 war time abductees— were recovered.20
Armenians were also freed from prisons.21
But by 1920 these reparative efforts were largely ended, and Turkey slipped
out of Allied control. Horace Rumbold, Britain’s perspicacious high commis-
sioner in Constantinople, put it this way a year later: “The history of the
armistice has been the history of the gradual decline of Allied influence and
Armenian survivors on a train back to Anatolia.
Historical Background, 1918–1924
authority in Turkey. . . . Allied influence counts for nothing at all in the bulk of Asia Minor.”22
During the first months of the armistice, the Ottoman government, under
the guns of Allied warships in the Sea of Marmara, played along with Allied
wishes, or at least pretended to. But the government quickly lost legitimacy
and power, partly because of this appearance of subservience. It was gradu-
ally replaced by a new, uncowed Turkish force, in de pen dent of Constanti-
nople. These were the Nationalists, based in Ankara and led by Mustafa
Kemal, the Salonica- born general who projected a “marble like coldness.”23
The surge of Turkish nationalism— and of the Nationalist movement that
gave it expression and came to govern the country from Ankara— were prod-
ucts of the defeat and the attendant humiliation of the officer class and po-
liti cal nation. But the chief immediate trigger of these surges was the Greek
occupation of Smyrna. Defeat at the hands of the Great Powers was one thing;
conquest and occupation by a formerly subject, contemned people, the Chris-
tian Greeks, auguring the permanent dismemberment of Turkey, was quite
another. Fuel was added to the fire when the French took over from the British
in Cilicia and northern Aleppo vilayet at the end of 1919. The French were
overbearing and more intrusive than the British and appeared to have a long-
term imperialist agenda vis- à- vis Turkey. The Turks were particularly fearful
of the establishment of a Western- and Russian- backed Armenian state com-
prehending the six eastern provinces and possibly also parts of Cilicia, and
of the emergence of a Greek mini- state in the Pontus, whether aligned with,
or in de pen dent of, Greece.24
Days after the Smyrna landing, Rear Admiral Mark Bristol— the com-
mander of American naval forces in Turkish waters who, from August 1919,
doubled as the U.S. high commissioner in Constantinople— pointed out the
danger of the Greek invasion. It “ will have a very bad effect,” he began. “Such
occupation without the complete military occupation of Turkey is very apt to
cause disorders in the interior.”25 “Disorders” was to prove a gross under-
statement. The gradual replacement, in terms of sway, of Constantinople by
a Nationalist government, and simultaneous wars by the Nationalists against
the clutch of foreign occupiers, accompanied by the destruction of the re-
maining Christian communities of Asia Minor, were to be the chief “disorders”
that ensued.
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
Turkish recovery from the shock of defeat and the rise of the militant na-
tionalist spirit were already apparent before the Greek landing. The recovery
was spearheaded mainly by the CUP- dominated officer corps. Already in
October– November 1918, CUP veterans were preparing for a protracted
guerrilla strug gle against pos si ble Allied occupation. They resurrected the
Special Organ ization, under the label of the General Revolutionary Organ-
ization of the Islamic World (Umum Alem- i Islam Ihtilal Teşkilatı), amassed weapons and ammunition around Anatolia, and reconstructed the armed
bands that had been active against the Armenian and Greek communities
during the war. Their ranks were filled by “men of bad character, released con-
victs, etc.”26 The budding Nationalist movement also set up a new organ-
ization, the Karakol, to protect and empower Unionist officials in the interior.27
Karakol— meaning ‘guard’ or, literally, ‘black arm’— was a direct continuation
of the Special Organ ization, and many of its founding members were SO
veterans.28
Nationalists set up regional organ izations— “national defense” or “national
rights” committees— comprising CUP branch secretaries, mutessarifs, gen-
darmes, army officers, and educators, among others. During the spring of
1919 these committees— The Erzurum Association for the Defense of the Fa-
therland, The Cilicia Association for the Defense of the National Rights, and
so on— loosely joined together under the banner of the Society for the De-
fense of National Rights. Kemal, appointed commander of the Yıldırım
Army Group on October 30, 1918, and enraged by the Mudros terms, began
clandestinely stockpiling arms and organ izing cadres for The Day, as did gen-
erals Nihat Pasha in Adana and Ali Ihsan north of Mosul.29
Already in March 1919, two months before the Greek landing, there was a
sense of impending insurrection, “to be accompanied by slaughter of Chris-
tians.” Anti- Christian and Nationalist revolutionary propaganda were ram-
pant, and CUP veterans mobilized manpower and amassed weapons.30 The
Allies were stymied in their efforts to collect guns and ammunition that the
Turks were obliged to surrender.31 A British control officer at Izmit reported
that CUP agitators “poison[ed] the minds of a considerable portion of the
common people.”32 “The country was full of combustible material, and it
needed only a torch to set it aflame,” Rumbold wrote later. The Greeks’ ar-
rival in Smyrna and their misbehavior during their first days ashore— including
several massacres of Turkish civilians— provided that torch.33
Historical Background, 1918–1924
Actual vio lence against Allied troops and local Christians was rare between
the signing of the armistice and the Smyrna landing.34 But Turkish intentions
were clear. The resurrected brigand “bands will do as they did during the war”
one British observer predicted. The Turks threatened “that the Greeks
and Armenians will, this time, be wiped out to a man.”35 The bands were led
by regular Turkish army officers: “practically the whole of the military seem
to be implicated,” as were the preachers in the mosques.36
Some historians see the Nationalist movement as a thinly veiled resurrec-
tion of the CUP. Indeed, the emergent strug gle against Turkey’s invaders is
sometimes considered merely a second, Anatolian stage of the Great War,
based on a secret plan drawn up by Enver and Talât as early as spring 1915,
when, between Sarıkamış and Gallipoli, the Ottoman Empire appeared to
face defeat.37 Indeed, many leaders of the budding Turkish nationalist move-
ment were former members and adherents of the CUP. During 1919–1920
Kemal made a point of publicly distancing himself from the CUP, but Tur-
key’s “alarmed” Christian communities, as well as some Muslim dissenters,
viewed Kemal’s movement as “a regeneration of the [CUP] spirit which tri-
umphed in 1908 . . . [and which bred] the Adana massacres of the year
1909, and which, again triumphing in January 1913, worked steadily u
p to
the ‘boycott’, deportations and massacres of the years 1914–1916.”38 Ideo-
logically the connection between the CUP and the Nationalists was clear.
After Talât was assassinated in 1922, Yeni Gün, an official publication of the Nationalist Ankara Government, declared: “Our great patriot has died for
his country. We salute his fresh tomb . . . Talaat was a po liti cal giant. Talaat was a genius. History will prove his im mense stature and will make of him a
martyr. . . . Talaat . . . was . . . the greatest man Turkey has produced.” On
another occasion, Yeni- Gun stated, “We, the heirs of the great patriots of 1908, shall continue their work.”39
The Nationalist movement came together around the figure of Mustafa
Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, who, as commander of the 19th Division, had
helped turn the tide against the Allied invaders in the grueling, protracted
battle. By May 1919 the government was sending him to Samsun as inspector
general. Ostensibly he was in charge of the military in eastern Anatolia and
was to report on the situation and on “Greek complaints of harassment.” 40 But
the purpose of his assignment may have been diff er ent: to thwart the emer-
gence of a Pontic Greek polity.41 His arrival could not have been more timely.
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
As the British high commissioner put it, the Smyrna landing had “stimulated
a Turkish patriotism prob ably more real than any which the [ Great] War was
able to evoke.” 42
Kemal had been an early CUP member, and, before leaving for Samsun,
had frequently visited party stalwarts incarcerated in Constantinople.43
But from 1919 through the early 1920s, he made a point of dissociating him-
self from the CUP old guard. Indeed, eventually he even tried and executed a
few.44 At times, Kemal distanced himself from the Armenian massacres as
well; occasionally, he condemned them. He was also critical, or at least am-
biguous in his appreciation of, the CUP’s expansionist tendencies, embodied
in both its pan- Turanian and pan- Islamic ideological strains. But during
1919–1923 he made use of both to mobilize the masses and to frighten the
British and French. This wasn’t just a utilitarian calculation. As Akçam puts
