The Thirty-Year Genocide
Page 42
least hinted at support for Armenian self- determination, as on January 5, 1918,
when Lloyd George stated, “Arabia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Pales-
tine are in our judgment entitled to a recognition of their separate national
conditions.”113 But there were two large prob lems: most of the Armenians had
been murdered and the Turks opposed the proposed national home.
A further prob lem was that the Americans, on an isolationist trajectory since
Versailles, were not a reliable patron. In September 1919 Washington had sent
The Turkish del e ga tion at Lausanne. The style of kalpak favored by Mustafa Kemal was newly in fashion.
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
a “military mission” under Major General James Harbord to “investigate” a
pos si ble postwar territorial reshuffling. After a month touring the region, the mission failed to recommend Armenian in de pen dence outside Yerevan. Instead it suggested that Constantinople, Anatolia, and Transcaucasia be placed
under a single mandatory power. Harbord was not especially taken with the
Turks— “never . . . has the Turk done other than destroy wherever he has
conquered”— but he also did not seem eager to help the Armenians. “The
Armenian does not generally endear himself to those of other races with whom
he comes in contact,” he wrote. “The Armenian stands among his neighbors
very much as the Jew stands in Rus sia and Poland. . . . He incurs the penalty
which attaches among backward races to the banker, the middleman and the
creditor.”114
Still, at San Remo in April 1920, the Allied Supreme Council asked the
United States to assume a mandate over Armenia, an option supported by
many of the American missionaries. The Council also asked President
Woodrow Wilson to set the borders for the expanded Armenian national
home. Wilson acted swiftly— and blunderingly. On May 24 he asked Con-
gress to approve the mandate; a week later the Senate turned him down.115
Nonetheless, in fulfilment of his commission, on November 22 Wilson
issued his territorial determination, allocating the bulk of Trabzon, Erzurum,
Bitlis, and Van vilayets to “Armenia.” But the determination was not only
superfluous— Sèvres had already demarcated Armenia’s borders—it was also
meaningless. By this point the Nationalists had occupied most of the region
Wilson had apportioned the Armenians, and Kemal was resolved to hold
on to it. The Americans, meanwhile, were unwilling to invest more than
words in the Armenian cause. As Kemal put it, “Poor Wilson did not under-
stand that a frontier which is not defended with bayonets, force and honor
cannot be secured by another princi ple.”116
Sèvres unraveled during late 1920 and 1921 under the Nationalist hammer
blows on the ground, and the life went out of foreign support for Armenian
sovereignty west of Yerevan. France showed the way: in March 1920, while
fighting Kemal in Cilicia, it was busy running guns to the Kemalists through
the Black Sea ports, and in April, France secretly offered to assist the Turks
in fighting the Greeks in Thrace.117 The French were partly driven by eco-
nomic considerations— the future of their business interests in Turkey— and
Historical Background, 1918–1924
by a fear that isolating the Nationalists might lead to a Bolshevik- Kemalist al-
liance which would subvert French interests far beyond Turkey. In June the
Bolsheviks began massively arming the Nationalists. But the Armenians’ main
prob lem was that the Allies were too busy demobilizing and licking their Great
War wounds to contemplate a new war, with a doubtful outcome, in the east.
Pretty soon, the Armenians themselves gave up hope of achieving self-
determination beyond the Yerevan Republic. Indeed, in April 1923, while
the Lausanne talks were ongoing, the Armenian Patriarch Kevork Arslanian
went so far as to say that “the Armenian nation has completely lost interest in
the ‘Armenian [National] Home’ . . . . Armenians living in Turkey have un-
derstood the truth. They are animated by the desire to live in brotherhood
with the Turkish ele ment.”118
For years, indeed de cades, the Turks were to remain ambivalent about the
Yerevan Republic. On the one hand, they feared that it would serve as a beacon
for Armenian irredentists. On the other hand, since the Armenians had a state,
there was less international pressure on Turkey to shed territory for Arme-
nian sovereignty, and the Armenians’ lost some of their motivation to carry
on the fight with Turkey. Yerevan also provided Turkey a resettlement venue, a
place it could settle Armenians it sought to expel or already had expelled.
Thus, prominent Nationalists, such as Ismet Bey, Kemal’s envoy to Turkestan,
affirmed that Turkey had no “desire to crush [the Republic of ] Armenia. On
the contrary, it very much desired to see the establishment of a free and in de-
pen dent Armenia as its neighbor. . . . Let Armenia keep to the territories she
controlled now . . . and Turkey would have no quarrel with her.”119
The outcome of the Turkish War of In de pen dence with re spect to the
Armenian question was formalized at Lausanne. Curzon and others indulged
in rhetorical flourishes in support of the Armenian cause, but that was all.
The Allies abandoned both the goal of a greater Armenia encompassing the
Yerevan republic and the eastern Anatolian vilayets and the hope of pro-
viding effective protection for Turkey’s remaining Christians.
What had happened to the Christians and what awaited those still in Turkey
was clear to all. Officially Ankara may have been cagey, but the chatter in
diplomatic salons made clear the thrust of Nationalist thinking. Bristol de-
scribed one such conversation, over lunch in 1922, with Sabiha Djennani
Hanoum, a recent gradu ate of Constantinople College and daughter of a
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
Turkish parliamentarian. “Like most Turks that one talks with nowadays,” he
said, she “is very much in favor of getting rid of the Christian races. They state that the Christian races have been the source of their misfortunes. . . . These
Christian races have for many years been absolutely disloyal. . . . The Turks
wanted to get rid of the Christian races once and for all.” Djennani granted that
Turkish be hav ior toward the Christians during World War I may have been
“wrong.” But, she added, “It was a pity all of them hadn’t been killed at that
time.”120
When discussions began at Lausanne, the Turks believed that “the only
party . . . that really counts is England . . . Italy can be bought and . . . France won’t fight.” Rumbold’s deputy, Nevile Henderson, thought “the Turks are
still afraid of us,” but London had a weak hand.121 The war time army had been
demobilized, the public was sick of fighting, and the country was in financial
straits even as the spoils of war had added substantially to British commit-
ments around the globe. The Turks, on the other hand, while sapped by a
de cade of continuous warfare, were confident and ready for further sacrifice
in a strug gle they saw as existential. They were in high spirits at Lausanne,
thanks to their r
ecent victories over the French and Greeks.
The Turkish representatives displayed inflexibility.122 Across the table,
the French were willing to “give way at every point,” as Curzon put it.123 The
French said they were simply being realistic. Britain’s position was under-
mined from within “by a combination of forces represented by Labour, the
Daily Mail and the politicians who imagine that the way to placate Islam is to yield on every point to a militant Turkey.”124 Again, these politicians were
mindful of how developments in Turkey might affect the Muslim- populated
regions of the empire. The attitude of the new British Prime Minister, Andrew
Bonar Law, was particularly concerning to officials wary of Turkey. Rumbold
wrote, “The mere thought of hostilities is repugnant to [his] mind.”125 The
British military was also keen on avoiding trou ble, though it insisted on re-
taining Mosul for the new British mandate of Iraq.126
The Turks, ever suspicious of Allied intentions, implicitly and sometimes
explic itly threatened war if their terms were not met. The British disdained
them. While Bristol complained that the British treated the Turkish delegates
“as if they were schoolboys” to be “scold[ed]” and “preach[ed] at,” Curzon
believed that Turkish truculence had a diff er ent source.127 The Turkish del-
egates received an “exorbitant entertainment allowance” and were interested
Historical Background, 1918–1924
in drawing out the talks because they “greatly prefer the fleshpots of Laus-
anne to the austerities of Angora,” he said.128
At the end of January 1923, the Allies handed the Turks a draft treaty.129
The Turks refused to sign. The conference adjourned with no agreement on
economic matters or the minorities question. Rumbold believed that Ankara
had been presented with “a wonderful treaty,” but the “fanatics,” “wildmen”
and “ignorant back- woodsmen” in Ankara didn’t see it that way.130 The Turks
argued that the January terms placed their country in “economic slavery.”131
The British suspected that the Americans, for commercial reasons, were
egging on Turkish obduracy.132
The conference reconvened three months later. By then the Turks were
“keen to get a settlement.” According to Rumbold, now head of the British
del e ga tion, their army had deteriorated, and they were “stony broke.”133 Still, several more months were to elapse before the Turks were ready to sign.
The Treaty of Lausanne, which was finalized on July 24, 1923, differed
radically from Sèvres. In almost all provisions, Turkey emerged triumphant.
There was to be no Western “tutelage” of the new republic and no Allied con-
trol of the Straits. The Armenians gained nothing, and the Turks enjoyed far
more territory than Sèvres had allowed.134 Lloyd George, the former British
Prime Minister, put it graphically, “The Turk may be a bad ruler, but he is the
prince of anglers. The cunning and the patience with which he lands the most
refractory fish once he has hooked it is beyond compare. . . . The wily ori-
ental was giving out plenty of line. . . . [But] at last the huge tarpon are all lying beached on the banks— Britain, France, Italy, the United States of Amer i ca—
high and dry, landed and helpless, without a swish left in their tails, glistening and gasping in the summer sun.”135
The Turks did make some concessions. The sanjak of Alexandretta went
to French- ruled Syria (it was transferred to Turkey in 1939), while the fate of
Mosul vilayet and the demarcation of the Turkish- Iraqi border was left to
future British- Turkish negotiations or, if unsuccessful, to the Council of the
League of Nations. Turkey also renounced claims to Cyprus, Libya, Egypt,
and Sudan, lands lost by the Ottomans in previous de cades. And Greece and
Italy retained almost all the Aegean islands. But Turkey received Eastern
Thrace and the eastern vilayets of Anatolia as well as Adana. The Straits were
formally internationalized but were to be governed by a Turkish- chaired
commission, and Turkey was allowed to garrison the zone with 12,000 troops.
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
The capitulations annulled by Turkey at the start of the war— extraterritorial
judicial and economic rights granted over the centuries to Western countries
and Rus sia and their citizens visiting or living in the Ottoman Empire—
remained a dead letter, but Turkey had to abide by existing foreign economic
concessions. Greece and Turkey agreed on bilateral peace and an exchange of
their remaining minority populations. There was no requirement that Turkey
pay war reparations. Turkey did commit to honoring the rights of all its citizens, but, as there was to be no foreign supervision, the commitment was meaningless. Indeed, even during the conference, Ankara ordered the expulsion of
the remaining Armenians from Maraş.136 Subsequently the Allies ruled that
Turkey had substantially violated its commitments regarding the minorities.137
Kemal hailed the agreement. It had, he said, “broken the judicial, po liti cal,
economic and financial chains which kept us behind other civilized nations.”138
Within weeks, the British evacuated the Straits and Constantinople. The last
soldiers departed the city on October 2, 1923, and Turkish troops marched
in four days later. An American intelligence officer was impressed by their
“ruggedness and hardened physiques.”139 Non- Turkish signs were immedi-
ately pulled down: “Chauvinism is rampant, and its object is to Turkify every-
thing,” a British observer commented. But there was almost no anti- Christian
vio lence, and the police maintained a tight grip. Anxious to show their alle-
giance to the new regime, Christians had started wearing fezzes a few days
before.140 Turkey was now “mistress in her own house.”141
World War I and the subsequent War of In de pen dence had ravaged Turkey
and radically changed its demography. Yet, despite the death of some 2.5 mil-
lion Muslims due to famine, war, and disease, the Muslim proportion of the
population rose from 80 to 98 percent, largely as a result of the deportation
and massacre of Christians during 1914–1924. The deportations and mas-
sacres of 1919–1924 are described in the next two chapters. By 1924 only
65,000 Armenians and 120,000 Greeks remained, almost all in Constanti-
nople.142 The country had lost most of its merchant class and a large per-
centage of its skilled workers and craftsmen. A great deal of housing had been
destroyed, especially in eastern Anatolia and Izmir. In other ways, too, the
economy had been ravaged, with international trade harmed dramatically. But
Turkey was free of foreign armies and Christians, and it was in de pen dent.
8
Turks and Armenians, 1919–1924
The chapter of Armenian history that is being enacted in Cilicia now is as tragic and pathetic as the great Deportation. Returning from that exile and beginning with energy to live once more and hope once more, they find themselves betrayed, and that by their allies, massacred by their conquered enemy, and stripped barer than they were in 1915. The Turks are warring against the French and make an excuse of that to annihilate the Armenians.
The French are toadying to the Turks . . . and are sacrificing the Armenians. .
. . The Armenians . . . are doomed.
William Dodd to Mark Bristol, 9 April 1920
According to the Armenians, the population of Cilicia in 1914 totaled 490,000,
of whom 286,000 were Christians, 205,000 of them Armenians. Official
Turkish figures for 1914, came to a similar total—442,000— but 366,000 of
them Muslim and 61,500 Armenian.1 What ever the truth, the war time mas-
sacres and deportations drastically reduced the Armenian population, though
tens of thousands remained, mostly in Muslim house holds or orphanages.
During 1918–1921, they were joined by over 100,000 more, most of them
returnees from the Syrian and Iraqis deserts who had somehow survived and
believed that they would benefit from Anglo- French protection. Yet two years
later, almost no Armenians remained in Cilicia, or in neighboring northern
Aleppo vilayet.
Britain’s Year
At the end of World War I, on paper, Allied control of Turkey appeared al-
most total and discretionary; in practice, a lack of Allied resources and will
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
resulted in gradual, then rapid, loss of dominion. The attenuation of Allied
power had already begun when the British were in the saddle. It sped up after
the French took over in Cilicia and northern Aleppo vilayet.
Over November 1918– February 1919, British troops of the Egyptian
Expeditionary Force, commanded by General Edmund Allenby, fanned
out across northern Syria and south- central Turkey.2 The British remained in
control there until November 1919, when governance passed to the French.
The British- occupied area initially had a small Armenian population—
survivors of deportation columns, converts, and privileged families and
workers. But the number swelled as tens of thousands of deportees made their
way home, many under British escort.
The British encountered Armenian deportees in the dying months of the
war. Perhaps the first group they met was in Wadi Musa in southern Trans-
jordan in November 1917. Hundreds more were found, in ill health and
sometimes stripped naked, in the ruins of Petra and in Tafile near the Dead