In September 1919 a Congress of elected representatives was held at Sivas in Anatolia. This put the seal on the new resistance, and an executive committee with Kemal as president was formed. A “National Pact” containing the minimum peace terms with the Allies, amounting to complete independence, was also adopted. The Sultan in Constantinople was impressed and a little frightened. He promised to convene a new session of Parliament and ordered elections. In these elections the people of the Sivas Congress got a big majority. Kemal Pasha did not trust the people at Constantinople, and he advised the newly elected deputies not to go there. But they did not agree and, headed by Rauf Beg, they went to Istanbul (as I shall call Constantinople in future). One of the reasons for their doing so was a declaration of the Allies that they would recognize the new Parliament if it met in Istanbul under the Sultan’s presidentship. Kemal himself did not go, although he was a deputy.
The new Parliament met in Istanbul in January 1920, and immediately adopted the “National Pact” that had been drawn up at the Sivas Congress. The Allied representatives in Istanbul did not like this at all, nor did they like many other things that the Parliament did. So, six weeks later, they decided to apply their usual and rather coarse tactics which they have often applied in Egypt and elsewhere. The English General marched into Istanbul, took possession of the city, proclaimed martial law, arrested forty of the nationalist deputies, including Rauf Beg, and deported them to Malta! This gentle method of the British was merely meant to demonstrate that the “National Pact” was not approved of by the Allies.
Again Turkey was vastly excited. It was plain enough now that the Sultan was a puppet in British hands. Many Turkish deputies escaped to Angora, and the Parliament met there and called itself the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. It declared itself the government of the country and proclaimed that the Sultan and his government in Istanbul had ceased to function the day the British took possession of the city.
The Sultan retaliated by declaring Kemal Pasha and the others outlaws, and excommunicating them and condemning them to death. Further, he announced that any person murdering Kemal and the others would perform a sacred duty and would be rewarded here in this world as well as in the next. Remember that the Sultan was also the Caliph, the religious head, and this open invitation to murder, coming from him, was a terrible thing. Kemal Pasha was not only a hunted rebel but a backslider from the Faith whom any bigot or fanatic might assassinate. The Sultan did everything in his power to crush the nationalists. He proclaimed a Jihad or holy war against them, and organized a “Caliph’s Army” of irregulars to fight them. Men of religion were sent out to organize risings. There were risings everywhere, and for a while civil war raged all over Turkey. It was bitter warfare, between town and town, brother and brother, and there was merciless cruelty on both sides.
Meanwhile, the Greeks in Smyrna were behaving as if they were the permanent masters of the country, and very barbarous masters. They laid waste fertile valleys and drove away thousands of homeless Turks. They advanced with little effective resistance from the Turks.
It was not a pleasant situation for the nationalists to face—civil war at home with the sanction of religion against them, and a foreign invader marching on them, and behind both the Sultan and the Greeks the great Allied Powers who were dominating the world after their victory over Germany. But Kemal Pasha’s slogan to his people was “win or be wiped out”. Asked by an American what he would do if the nationalists failed, he replied: “A nation which makes the ultimate sacrifices for life and independence does not fail. Failure means the nation is dead.”
In August 1920 the treaty which the Allies had drawn up for unhappy Turkey was published; the Treaty of Sèvres it was called. It was the end of Turkish freedom; sentence of death was passed on Turkey as an independent nation. Not only was the country cut up into bits, but even in Istanbul itself an Allied commission was to sit and hold control. There was sorrow all over the country, and a day of national mourning was observed with prayers and a hartal—a stoppage of all work. The newspapers came out with black borders. Nonetheless the Sultan’s representatives had signed this treaty. The nationalists, of course, rejected it with scorn, and the result of the publication of the treaty was that their power grew, and more and more Turks turned to them to save their country from utter degradation.
But who was to enforce this treaty on a rebellious Turkey? The Allies were not prepared to do it themselves. They had demobilized their armies, and at home they had to face an ugly temper among the demobilized soldiers and workers. There was still a spirit of revolution in the air in the western European countries. Besides, the Allies were falling out among themselves and quarrelling about the division of the spoils of war. In the East, England, and to some extent France, had to face a dangerous situation. Syria, under a French mandate, was seething with dissatisfaction, and promised trouble. Egypt had already had a bloody insurrection which the English had crushed. In India, the first great movement of rebellion, peaceful though this was, since the Revolt of 1857, was taking shape. This was the non-co-operation movement under Gandhi’s leadership, and one of the main planks of this movement was the question of the Caliphate or Khilafat and the treatment given to Turkey.
So we see that the Allies were in no position to enforce their own treaty on Turkey; nor were they prepared to put up with an open flouting of it by the Turkish nationalists. They turned to their friends Venizelos and Zaharoff, and these two were perfectly prepared to undertake the job on behalf of Greece. No one expected the demoralized Turks to give much trouble, and the prize of Asia Minor was worth having. More Greek troops went over, and the Graeco-Turkish War began on a big scale. Right through the summer and autumn of 1920 victory sided with the Greeks, and they drove the Turks before them. Kemal Pasha and his colleagues worked feverishly to build up an effective army out of the broken remnants at their disposal. Help, and most opportune help, came to them when it was most needed. Soviet Russia supplied them with arms and money. The common enemy of both was England. As Kemal’s strength grew the Allies began to feel a little doubtful of the issue of the struggle, and they offered better terms. But still they were not good enough for the Kemalists, who refused them. Thereupon the Allies washed their hands of the Graeco-Turkish struggle and declared their neutrality. Having got the Greeks to entangle themselves, they left them in the lurch. Indeed, France, and to some extent even Italy, tried secretly to make friends with the Turks. The English still stood more or less, but unofficially, on the side of the Greeks.
In the summer of 1921 the Greeks made a great effort to capture the Turkish capital, Angora. They came near to it, taking possession of town after town, till at length they were stopped at the Saqariah river. Near this river for three weeks the two armies wrestled with each other, continuously fighting with all the racial bitterness of centuries, and giving no quarter to each other. It became a terrible test of endurance; the Turks just managed to hold on when the Greeks gave way and retired. As was their way, the Greek army went back burning and destroying everything and converting 200 miles of fertile country into a desert.
The battle of the Saqariah river had been just barely won. It was by no means a final victory, but still it is reckoned among the decisive battles of recent history. It meant the turn of the tide. It was yet another of the great conflicts between East and West which have covered every inch of the soil of Asia Minor with human blood during the past 2000 years and more.
Both armies were exhausted, and they sat down to recuperate and reorganize. But the star of Kemal Pasha was undoubtedly rising. The French Government made a treaty with Angora. There was also a treaty between Angora and the Soviet. Recognition by France was a great moral as well as physical gain to Mustafa Kemal. The Turkish troops on the Syrian frontier were thus released for service against Greece. The British Government was still supporting the puppet Sultan and the effete Istanbul Government, and so this French treaty was a blow to it.
In August 1922, suddenly, b
ut after the most careful preparation, the Turkish army attacked the Greeks and simply swept them into the sea. In eight days the Greeks retired 160 miles, but, even so, as they retired, they revenged themselves by killing every Turkish man, woman, and child they came across. The Turks were equally merciless, and few prisoners were taken. Among the prisoners, however, was the Greek Commander-in-Chief and his staff. The greater part of the Greek army escaped by sea from Smyrna, but the city of Smyrna itself was largely burnt down.
Kemal Pasha followed up this victory by marching his troops towards Istanbul. Not far from the city, at Chanak, British troops stopped him, and for some days in September 1922 there was talk of war between Turkey and Britain. But the British agreed to nearly all the Turkish demands, and an armistice was signed, in which the Allies actually promised to make all the Greek forces still in Thrace evacuate the country. Always, behind the new Turkey, was the spectre of Soviet Russia, and the Allies did not like to provoke a war in which Russia might help Turkey.
Mustafa Kemal had triumphed, and the handful of rebels of 1919 now spoke on equal terms with representatives of the great Powers. Many circumstances had gone to help this gallant band—the after-war reaction, dissensions among the Allies, the preoccupation of the English with trouble in India and Egypt, the help of Soviet Russia, the insults offered by the English—but above all they owed their triumph to their own iron determination and will to be free and to the truly wonderful fighting qualities of the Turkish peasant and soldier.
A peace conference was held in Lausanne, and it dragged on for many months. There was a curious duel between imperious, domineering Lord Curzon on behalf of England, and rather deaf and stodgy Ismet Pasha, who quietly went on smiling and refusing to hear what he did not want to hear, to the intense irritation of Curzon. Curzon, used to Indian viceregal ways, and otherwise also very pompous, tried blustering methods with no effect whatever on deaf and smiling Ismet. In disgust Curzon came away and the conference broke up. Later it met again, but instead of Curzon, another British representative came. All the Turkish demands, as embodied in the “National Pact”, except one, were agreed to, and the Treaty of Lausanne was signed in July 1923. Again the support of Soviet Russia and the mutual jealousies of the Allied Powers had helped Turkey.
Kemal Pasha, the Ghazi, the victorious, had got nearly all he had set out for. But from the first he had shown great wisdom in stating his minimum demands, and to these he stuck even in his hour of victory. He had given up all idea of Turkish dominion over non-Turkish lands like Arabia and Iraq and Palestine and Syria. He wanted Turkey proper, the land inhabited by the Turkish people, to be free. He did not want the Turks to interfere with other people, nor was he prepared to tolerate any foreign interference in Turkey. Turkey thus became a compact and homogeneous country. Some years later, at Greek suggestion, an extraordinary exchange of populations took place. The remaining Greeks in Anatolia were sent over to Greece, and in exchange Turks from Greece were brought over. About a million and a half Greeks were thus exchanged, and most of these families had lived for generations and centuries in Anatolia and Greece respectively. It was an amazing uprooting of peoples, and it completely upset the economic life of Turkey, especially as the Greeks had a great share in commerce. But this made Turkey even more homogeneous, and perhaps it is now one of the most homogeneous of countries in Asia or Europe.
I have said above that the Turks got all their demands by the Lausanne Treaty except one. This one exception was the vilayat or province of Mosul, near the Iraq frontier. As the parties could not agree over this, the matter was referred to the League of Nations. Mosul was important, partly because of its oil, but more so because of its strategic importance. To hold the mountains of Mosul meant to dominate, to some extent, Turkey and Iraq and Persia, and even the Caucasus in Russia. For Turkey this was obviously important. To Britain it was equally important, in order to protect the land and air routes to India and as a line of attack or defence against Soviet Russia. If you look at the map, you will see how important the situation of Mosul is. The League of Nations decided in favour of Britain on this question. The Turks refused to agree, and again there was talk of war. A new Russo-Turkish treaty was concluded just then in December 1925. But the Angora Government gave way in the end, and Mosul went to the new State of Iraq. Iraq is supposed to be independent, but so far it is practically a protectorate of the British, and it swarms with British officials and advisers.
I remember well how we rejoiced when we heard of Mustafa Kemal’s great victory over the Greeks, nearly eleven years ago. This was the battle of Afium Qarahisar in August 1922, when he broke the Greek front and drove the Greek army to Smyrna and the sea. Many of us were in the Lucknow District Gaol then, and we celebrated the Turkish triumph by decorating our prison barrack with such odds and ends as we could gather, and there was even an attempt, a feeble one, at illumination in the evening.
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Mustafa Kemal Breaks with the Past
May 8, 1933
We have followed the fortunes of the Turks from the dark period of their defeat to the day of their triumph, and we have seen that, strangely enough, the very steps that the Allies, and especially the British, took to suppress them and weaken them had the contrary effect on them, and actually strengthened the nationalists and steeled them to further resistance. The efforts of the Allies to dismember Turkey, the sending of the Greek troops to Smyrna, the British coup d’état of March 1920, when the nationalist leaders were arrested and deported, the British support of their puppet Sultan against the nationalists—all this went to fire the Turks with anger and enthusiasm. The attempt to humiliate and crush a brave people inevitably has that effect.
What did Mustafa Kemal and his colleagues do with the victory they had gained? Kemal Pasha was no believer in sticking to the old ruts; he wanted to change Turkey thoroughly. But immensely popular as he was after his victory, he had to proceed cautiously, for it is no easy matter to uproot a people from their ancient ways, founded on long tradition and religion. He wanted to put an end to the Sultanate as well as the Caliphate, but many of his colleagues did not agree with him, and the general Turkish sentiment was probably against such a change. No one wanted Wahid-ud-din, the puppet Sultan, to continue. He was hated as a traitor to the country who had tried to sell it to the foreigners. But many people wanted a kind of constitutional Sultanate and Caliphate with the real power resting in the National Assembly. Kemal Pasha would have no such compromise, and he waited for his chance.
As usual, the British provided this chance. When the Lausanne Peace Conference was being arranged, the British Government sent the invitation to it to the Sultan in Istanbul, asking him to send representatives to discuss peace terms, and further requested him to repeat this invitation to Angora. This casual treatment of the Nationalist Government at Angora which had won the war, and the deliberate attempt to push forward the puppet Sultan again, created a sensation in Turkey and angered the Turks. They suspected some further intrigue between the British and the treacherous Sultan. Mustafa Kemal took immediate advantage of this feeling and got the National Assembly to abolish the Sultanate in November 1922. But the Caliphate still remained by itself, and it was declared that it continued in the House of Othman. Soon after this a charge of high treason was brought against the ex-Sultan Wahid-ud-din. He preferred flight to a public trial, and escaped secretly in an English ambulance car which carried him to a British battleship. The National Assembly elected his cousin Abdul Majid Effendi as the new Caliph, who was merely the ceremonial religious head with no political power.
The next year, in 1923, there was a formal declaration of the Turkish Republic, with Angora for its capital. Mustafa Kemal was elected president, and he concentrated all power in himself, so that he became a dictator. The Assembly carried out his mandates. He began now to attack many other old customs, and was not very courteous in his treatment of religion. Many people grew dissatisfied with his ways and his dictatorship, especially the religious fo
lk, and these gathered round the new Caliph who was a quiet and inoffensive person. Kemal Pasha did not like this at all. He treated the Caliph rather shabbily and waited for a suitable opportunity to take the next big step.
Again he got his chance soon, and it came in a curious way. A joint letter was sent to him from London by the Aga Khan and an Indian ex-judge, Ameer Ali. They claimed to speak on behalf of the millions of Indian Muslims, and they protested against the treatment given to the Caliph, and requested that his dignity should be respected and better treatment given. They sent a copy of the letter to some Istanbul papers, and it was actually published there before the original reached Angora. There was nothing offensive in the letter, but Kemal Pasha seized hold of it and raised a tremendous outcry. He had got his chance at last, and he wanted to make the most of it. So it was announced that all this was another English intrigue to divide the Turks. The Aga Khan, it was said, was the special agent of the English; he lived in England, was chiefly interested in English horse-racing, and was always hobnobbing with English politicians. He was not even an orthodox Muslim, as he was the head of a special sect. It was further pointed out that during the World War the English had used him as a kind of counterpoise to the Sultan-Caliph in the East, and had increased his prestige by propaganda and otherwise and tried to make him the leader of the Indian Muslims, so that they might be kept in hand. If the Aga Khan was so solicitous about the Caliph, why had he not supported the Caliph in war-time when a jihad or holy war had been declared against the English? He had sided with the English then and against the Caliph.
Glimpses of World History Page 104
