Maknews.com
March 04, 2005
Paris Peace Talks of 1919
Part 2 – The End of the Ottomans
by Risto Stefov
rstefov@hotmail.com
February 2005
Read Part I

The following text (pages 366 to 380) was taken from the book “Paris 1919”
by Margaret MacMillan.
Part 2 (chapter 26 of MacMillan’s book) deals with the peace talks of 1919
with respect to the destruction of the Ottoman empire and the birth of
modern Turkeys.
Part 3, (the last part) will provide excerpts from the minutes of the
committee on new states and for the protection of minorities at the Paris
Peace Conference. Part 3 will also contain proposals that were tabled for
the formation of a Macedonian State.
Margaret MacMillan, the author of the book from which this article was
taken, is the great-great granddaughter of David Lloyd George. David Lloyd
George (1863-1945) was British Prime Minister of the Liberal party during
the 1919 peace talks and was responsible for drafting the Treaty of
Versailles.
Margaret MacMillan received her Ph.D. from Oxford University and is provost
of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto.
This is an important article for those who are interested in learning about
the wheeling and dealing that went on in the1919 peace talks as well as the
charismatic Mustafa Kemal better known as Ataturk. They say, Ataturk had
startling blue eyes and was born in Solun. He had a peasant mother who could
barely read and write and his father was an unsuccessful merchant. Show me a
Turk from Solun with blue eyes and I will show you a Macedonian. Enjoy
reading the article.
FAR AWAY FROM PARIS, at the southeast tip of Europe, another great city had
been lamenting the past and thinking uneasily about the future. Byzantium to
the Greeks and Romans, Constantinople to the peacemakers, Istanbul, as it
was to the Turks, had once been the capital of the glorious Byzantine empire
and then, after 1453, of the victorious Ottoman Turks. Now the Ottoman
empire in its turn was on a downward path. The city was crammed with
refugees and soldiers from the defeated armies, short of fuel, food and
hope. Their fate-indeed, that of the whole empire-appeared to depend on the
Peace Conference.
Layers of history had fallen over Constantinople, leaving churches, mosques,
frescoes, mosaics, palaces, covered markets and fishing villages. The
massive city walls had seen invaders from Europe and the East, Persians,
Crusaders, Arabs and finally the Turks. The last Byzantine emperor had
chosen death there in 1453, as the Ottoman Turks completed their conquest of
his empire. Underneath the streets of Istanbul lay the shards of antiquity;
walls, vaults, passageways, a great Byzantine cistern where Greek and Roman
columns held up the roof Above, the minarets of the mosques-some of them,
such as the massive Santa Sophia, converted from Christian churches-and the
great tower built by the Genoese brooded over the city’s hills. Across the
deep inlet of the Golden Horn, the old city of Stamboul, with its squalor
and its magnificence, faced the more spacious modern quarter where
foreigners lived. It was a city with many memories and many peoples.
All around was the water. To the northwest, the Bosphorus stretched up into
the Black Sea toward Russia and central Asia; southwest, the Sea of Marmara
led into the- Dardanelles and the Mediterranean. Geography had created the
city, and geography had kept it important through the centuries. From
antiquity, when Jason sailed through and Alexander the Great won a great
victory over the Persians nearby, to more modern times, when Catherine the
Great of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany both reached out to grasp it, the
city had always been a prize.
Much of the diplomacy of the nineteenth century had revolved around
controlling vital waterways such as this. Russia longed for warm-water ports
with access to the world’s seas. Britain in turn bolstered an ailing Ottoman
empire to keep the Russians safely bottled up in the Black Sea. (Only in the
most desperate moments of the war had the British conceded Russian control
over the straits; fortunately, owing to the revolutions of 1917, Russia
would not be collecting its prize.) The Ottoman Turks, who had once reached
the gates of Vienna, had little to say. Even the Young Turk revolt just
before the Great War did little to arrest their decline. Their empire
shrank, in the Balkans and across North Africa.
In 1914, the Ottoman leaders decided to confront Russia, now allied to their
old friend Britain: the empire joined the war on the side of Germany and
Austria-Hungary. It was a gamble that failed. The Ottoman empire fought
astonishingly bravely, given its relative weakness. In Mesopotamia and at
Gallipoli, Turkish soldiers humiliated the Allies, who had expected quick
victories. But by 1918, Ottoman luck had run out. The collapse of Bulgaria
in September opened the road to Constantinople from the west, while British
and Indian troops pushed in from the south and east. Out on the eastern end
of the Mediterranean, Allied warships gathered in ominous numbers. Only on
its northeastern borders, where the old Russian empire was disintegrating,
was there respite, but the Ottomans were too weak to benefit. Their empire
had gone piecemeal before the war; now it melted like snow. The Arab
territories had gone, from Mesopotamia to Palestine, from Syria down to the
Arabian peninsula. On the eastern end of the Black Sea, subject
peoples-Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Kurds-struggled to establish new
states in the borderlands with Russia. “General attitude among Turks,”
reported an American diplomat, “is one of hopelessness, waiting the outcome
of the Peace Conference.” Like so many other peoples, they hoped the
Americans would rescue them; self determination might salvage at least the
Turkish-speaking areas in eastern Thrace and Anatolia. In Constantinople,
intellectuals founded a “Wilsonian Principles Society.”
The men who had led the empire into the war resigned in the first week of
October and fled on a German warship, and a caretaker government sent word
to the British that it wanted peace. The British government agreed to open
talks promptly at the Aegean island of Mudros, partly to keep the French on
the sidelines. Although the British had consulted with the French on the
armistice terms, they made the dubious argument that since the Ottoman
empire had contacted them first, it was Britain’s responsibility to handle
negotiations. The French government and the senior French admiral at Mudros
both protested in vain. All negotiations were handled by the British
commander, Admiral Arthur Calthorpe.
The Ottoman delegates were led by Hussein Rauf; a young naval hero and the
new minister of the navy. On October 28 they arrived at Calthorpe’s
flagship, the Agamemnon. The negotiations were civil, even friendly. Rauf
found Calthorpe honest and straightforward-and reassuring when he promised
that Britain would treat Turkey, for that was all that remained of the
empire, gently. Constantinople probably would not be occupied; certainly no
Greek or Italian troops, particular bugbears of the Turks, would be allowed
to land. When Rauf arrived home, he told a reporter. “I assure you that not
a single enemy soldier will disembark at our Istanbul.” The British had
treated them extraordinarily well: “The armistice we have concluded is
beyond our hopes.” Even though they had accepted all the clauses put forward
by the British, Rauf trusted Calthorpe, who promised that the armistice
terms would not be used unfairly. The British were really only interested in
free passage through the straits; why would they want to occupy
Constantinople, or indeed anywhere else? Rauf told himself that, after all,
the British had already taken the Arab territories. “I could think of no
other area they would want from the point of view of their national
interests and so might try to seize.”
When the two men put their signatures to the armistice on October 30, they
cheerfully toasted each other in champagne. Rauf; the Agamemnon’s captain
wrote to his wife, “made me a very graceful little speech thanking me for my
hospitality and consideration to him as a technical enemy.” The photograph
of the captain’s young twin sons, said Rauf; had been a source of
inspiration to him. “Wasn’t that nice?”
In London, the British cabinet received the news of the armistice with
delight and fell to discussing how Constantinople ought to be occupied,
given “the mentality of the East.” The British and their allies had every
intention of enforcing the armistice rigorously. All Turkish garrisons were
to surrender; all the railways and telegraphs would be run by the Allies;
and Turkish ports were to be available for Allied warships. But the most
damaging clause was the seventh, which read simply “The Allies have the
right to occupy any strategic points in the event of a situation arising
which threatens the security of the Allies” Years later Rauf looked back.
“There was a general conviction in our country that England and France were
countries faithful not only to their written pacts, but also to their
promises. And I had this conviction too. What a shame that we were mistaken
in our beliefs and convictions!”
>From his post far away to the south, by the Syrian border, a friend of
Rauf’s who was also a war hero wrote to his government with dismay: “It is
my sincere and frank opinion that if we demobilize our troops and give in to
everything the British want, without taking steps to end misunderstandings
and false interpretations of the armistice, it will be impossible for us to
put any sort of brake on Britain’s covetous designs.” Mustafa Kemal-better
known today as Ataturk-dashed north to Constantinople and urged everyone he
could see, from leading politicians to the sultan himself to establish a
strong nationalist government to stand up to the foreigners. He found
sympathy in many quarters, but the sultan, Mehmed VI, preferred to placate
the Allies. In November 1918, Mehmed dissolved parliament and tried to
govern through his own men.
The great line of sultans that had produced Suleiman the Magnificent had
dwindled to Mehmed VI. His main achievement was to have survived the rule of
three brothers: one who was deposed when he went mad; his paranoid and cruel
successor, so fearful of enemies that he employed a eunuch to take the first
puff of every cigarette; and the timid old man who ruled until the summer of
1918. Mehmed VI was sane but it was difficult to gauge whether there were
many ideas in his bony head. He took over as sultan with deep misgivings. “I
am at a loss,” he told a religious leader. “Pray for me.”
The power of the throne, which had once made the world tremble, had slipped
away. Orders from the government, reported the American representative,
“often receive but scant consideration in the provinces and public safety is
very poor throughout Asia Minor.” Although Constantinople was not officially
occupied at first, Allied soldiers and diplomats “were everywhere-advising
and ordering and suggesting,” Allied warships packed the harbor so tightly
that they looked a solid mass. “I am ill,” murmured the sultan, “I can’t
look out the window. I hate to see them.” had a very different thought: “As
they have come, so they shall go.
Ataturk was a complicated, brave, determined and dangerous man whose
picture, with its startling blue eyes, is still everywhere in Turkey today:
In 1919 few foreigners had ever heard of him; four years later he had
humbled Britain and France and brought into existence the new nation-state
of Turkey. The tenth of November, the anniversary of his death, is a
national day of remembrance. He could be ruthless, as both his friends and
his enemies found; after his great victories, he tried some of his oldest
associates, including Rauf for treason. He could also be charming, as the
many women in his life discovered. Children loved him, and he loved them; he
always said, however, that it was just as well he was childless since the
sons of great men are usually degenerates. He had a rational and scientific
mind, but in later life grew fascinated by the esoteric. He refused to allow
Ankara radio to play traditional Turkish music; it was what he listened to
with his friends. He wanted to emancipate Turkish women, yet when he
divorced the only woman he ever married, he did so in the traditional Muslim
way; He was a dictator who tried to order democracy into existence. In 1930
he created an opposition party and chose its leaders; when it started to
challenge him, he closed it down. He was capricious, but in his own way
fair. His subordinates knew that any order he had given at night during one
of his frequent drinking bouts should be ignored.
The man who made Turkey was born on the fringes of the old Ottoman empire in
the Macedonian seaport of Salonika. His mother was a peasant who could
barely read and write, his father an unsuccessful merchant. Like the Ottoman
empire itself Salonika contained many nationalities. Even the laborers on
the docks spoke half a dozen languages. About half of Salonika’s people were
Jews; the rest ranged from Turks to Greeks, Armenians to Albanians. Western
Europeans dominated the trade and commerce, just as European nations
dominated the Ottoman empire.
Early on Ataturk developed a contempt for religion that never left him.
Islam-and its leaders and holy men-were “a poisonous dagger which is
directed at the heart of my people.” From the evening when, as a student, he
saw sheikhs and dervishes whipping a crowd into a frenzy, he loathed what he
saw as primitive fanaticism. “I flatly refuse to believe that today; in the
luminous presence of science, knowledge, and civilization in all its
aspects, there exist, in the civilized community of Turkey, men so primitive
as to seek their material and moral well-being from the guidance of one or
another sheikh.”
Over his mother’s objections, he insisted on being educated in military
schools. In those days these were not only training leaders of the future;
they were centers of the growing nationalist and revolutionary sentiment.
Ataturk’s particular aptitudes were for mathematics and politics. He learned
French so that he could read political philosophers such as Voltaire and
Montesquieu. When he was nineteen, Ataturk won a place in the infantry
college in Constantinople. He found a worldly, cosmopolitan capital. Less
than half its population was Muslim. The rest were a mix of Sephardic Jews
whose ancestors had escaped from Christian Spain centuries before, Polish
patriots fleeing tsarist rule, and Orthodox Armenians, Rumanians, Albanians
and Greeks. Despite four centuries of Ottoman rule, the Greeks still
dominated commerce. (Even after the Second World War, over half the members
of Istanbul’s chamber of commerce had Greek names.) Europeans ran the most
important industries, and Western lenders kept the government solvent and
supervised its finances. The Ottomans were now so weak that they were forced
to give Westerners even more of the special privileges, which first started
in the sixteenth century capitulations, which included freedom from Turkish
taxes and Turkish courts. As a Turkish journalist wrote sadly: “We have
remained mere spectators while our commerce, our trades and even our
broken-down huts have been given to the foreigners.”
The infantry college where Ataturk studied was on the north side of the
Golden Horn, in the newer part of the city, with its wide streets, gas
lighting, opera house, cafes, chamber of commerce, banks, shops with the
latest European fashions, even brothels with pink satin sofas just like
those in Paris. Ataturk explored it with enthusiasm, carousing and whoring
and reading widely, but he always remained ambivalent about Constantinople.
It was a place to be enjoyed but dangerous to governments. He later moved
the capital far inland to the obscure city of Ankara.
Like many young officers in the years before 1914, Ataturk dabbled in secret
societies which swore to give the empire a modern constitution. He shared
the hopes of the revolution of 1908, and the disappointments when it failed
to make the empire stronger. In 1908 Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina
and Bulgaria declared its independence. In 1911 Italy, the weakest of the
European powers, declared war and seized Libya. After the Balkan wars of
1912 and 1913, Albania, Macedonia and part of Thrace, including Salonika,
were gone. By 1914 the European part of the empire, which had once stretched
into Hungary, was reduced to a small enclave in Thrace tucked under
Bulgaria. In six years, 425,000 square miles had been lost.
When the Great War started, Ataturk was enjoying life as a diplomat in
Bulgaria. He went to his first opera in Sofia; fifteen years later, he put
an opera house into the plans for his new capital of Ankara. He took up
ballroom dancing; later, in his new republic, civil servants were made to
dance at official balls because “that was how they do it in the West.” At
the beginning of 1915, he was offered command of a new division which was
being thrown into the defense of the Gallipoli peninsula. Many Allied
reputations were destroyed at Gallipoli; his was made. As the author of the
official British history later wrote, “Seldom in history can the exertions
of a single divisional commander have exercised, on three separate
occasions, so profound an influence on the course of a battle, but perhaps
on the fate of a campaign and even the destiny of a nation.”
The Constantinople Ataturk found at the end of the war was very different
from the city he remembered. There was no coal and very little food. A Turk
who was a boy at the time remembered his mother struggling to feed the
family: “It seemed to us that we had lived forever on lentils and cabbage
soup and the dry, black apology for bread.” The government was bankrupt. On
street corners distinguished officers sold lemons because their pensions
were worthless. And more refugees were pouring in: Russians fleeing the
civil war, Armenians searching desperately for safety, and Turks abandoning
the Middle East and Europe. By the end of 1919 perhaps as many as 100,000
were sleeping on the streets of the city. The only Turks who prospered were
black marketeers and criminals. Crazy rumors swept through the city: one day
crowds rushed to Santa Sophia because it was whispered that Christian bells
were being hung again.
Local Greeks, intoxicated by the hope of restored Hellenic rule, hung out
the blue-and-white flag of Greece; a giant picture of Venizelos went up in
one of the main squares. The Greek patriarch sent aggressive demands to
Paris, denouncing the Turks and demanding that Constantinople be made Greek
again. His office told Greek Christians to stop cooperating with the Turkish
authorities. The Greeks were, said an English diplomat, “apt to be uppish.”
Some hotheads jostled Turks in the streets and made them take off their
fezzes.
Allied officers and bureaucrats arrived in increasing numbers to supervise
the armistice. “Life,” recalled a young Englishman, “was gay and wicked and
delightful. The cafes were full of drinking and dancing.” In the nightclubs,
White Russians sang melancholy songs and pretty young refugees sold
themselves for the price of a meal. You could race motorboats across the Sea
of Marmara, ride to hounds on the Asian side of the Bosphorus and pick up
wonderful antiques for pennies. The Allies unofficially divided up
Constantinople into spheres of influence and took over much of its
administration; they ran the local police and set up their own courts. When
the Turkish press was critical of their guests, the Allies took over press
censorship as well. When Constantinople was officially occupied in March
1920, it was hard to tell the difference.
Outside the city, in Thrace and Asia Minor, Allied officers fanned out to
monitor the surrender. The French occupied the important southern city of
Alexandretta (today Iskenderun) and by early 1919 were moving inland. On the
whole, the British were more popular; as one lady in the south commented,
“Les anglais ont envoyes les fils de leurs ‘Lords,’ mais les francais ont
envoyes leurs valets” (“The English sent the sons of their lords, but the
French sent their valets”). The sultan’s government, as weak and demoralized
as its figurehead, did nothing, seeking only to placate the Allies. The
Allies were not in a mood to be placated. Some, such as Curzon, who chaired
the cabinet committee responsible for British policy in the East, thought
the time had come to get rid of “this canker which has poisoned the life of
Europe.” Corruption, nameless vices and intrigue had spread out from
Constantinople to infect the innocent Europeans. The Peace Conference was
the chance to excise the source of such evil once and for all: “The presence
of the Turks in Europe has been a source of unmitigated evil to everybody
concerned. I am not aware of a single interest, Turkish or otherwise, that
during nearly 500 years has benefited by that presence.” Although as a
student of history he should have known better, Curzon argued: “Indeed, the
record is one of misrule, oppression, intrigue, and massacre, almost
unparalleled in the history of the Eastern world.” His prime minister shared
his sentiments; like many Liberals, Lloyd George had inherited his hostility
to the Turks from the great Gladstone.
For Curzon the question was, What would replace the Ottoman empire? Britain
still wanted to ensure that hostile warships did not use the straits. It
still needed to protect the route to India through the Suez Canal. There was
a new factor, too: the increasingly important supplies of oil from Mosul in
the Ottoman empire and from Persia. Britain did not want to take on the
whole responsibility itself and Greece certainly could not; on the other
hand, it did not want another major power moving in, such as its ally
France. After all, the two countries had fought for centuries, over Europe,
North America, India, Africa and the Middle East. Their friendship, by
comparison, was a recent affair. It had stood the test of the war but it was
not clear that it would stand the test of peace. There had already been
trouble over the Arab parts of the Ottoman empire. Did Britain really want
French ships at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, French bases up and
down the coast? Curzon was quite sure that it did not:
A good deal of my public life has been spent in connection with the
political ambitions of France, which I have come across in Tunis, in Siam,
and in almost every distant region where the French have sway. We have been
brought, for reasons of national safety, into an alliance with the French,
which I hope will last, but their national character is different from ours,
and their political interests collide with our own in many cases. I am
seriously afraid that the great Power from whom we have most to fear is
France.
It would be a great mistake, he went on, to allow the French to acquire
influence in the Middle East: “France is a highly organised State, has
boundless intrepidity, imagination, and a certain power of dealing with
Eastern peoples.”
The French did not trust the British any more than the British trusted them.
And France had considerable interests in the Ottoman empire, from the
protection of fellow Christians to the extensive French investments. For
France, though, what happened to the Ottoman empire or in the Balkans was
much less important than dealing with Germany. Clemenceau, whatever his
colonial lobby thought, would compromise with Britain because he needed its
support in Europe. While he did not want to see the Asian part of Turkey
disappear completely, Clemenceau did not, at least initially, have strong
views about Greek claims there. As far as Europe was concerned, he supported
Greek claims to Thrace. If Greece blocked Italian claims, so much the better
for France.
During the war, Britain, France and Russia had held a number of discussions
about the future of the Ottoman empire. In 1916, the British and French
representatives, Sir Mark Sykes and Georges Picot, had agreed that their two
countries would divide up the Arab-speaking areas and that, in the
Turkish-speaking parts, France would have a zone extending north into
Cilicia from Syria. The Russians, who had already extracted a promise that
they would annex Constantinople and the straits, gave their approval on
condition that they got the Turkish provinces adjacent to their borders in
the Caucasus. The decision of the new Bolshevik government to make peace
with the Central Powers effectively canceled that agreement. Britain and
France were now left as the major powers in the Middle East, and as the war
wound down, they circled suspiciously around each other.
In the Supreme Council on October 30, Lloyd George and Clemenceau quarreled
angrily over Britain’s insistence on negotiating the Turkish truce on their
own. “They bandied words like fish-wives,” House re- ported. Lloyd George
told Clemenceau:
Except for Great Britain no one had contributed anything more than a handful
of black troops to the expedition in Palestine, I was really surprised at
the lack of generosity on the part of the French Government. The British had
now some 500,000 men on Turkish soil. The British had captured three or four
Turkish Armies and had incurred hundreds of thousands of casualties in the
war with Turkey. The other Governments had only put in a few nigger
policemen to see that we did not steal the Holy Sepulchre! When, however, it
came to signing an armistice, all this fuss was made.
It was an unfair argument; as Clemenceau pointed out on a later occasion,
the British had sent correspondingly fewer troops to the Western Front.
“My opinion was and remains that if the white troops which you sent over
there had been thrown against the Germans, the war could have been ended
some months earlier.” The French nevertheless backed down on the armistice,
as Pichon said, “in the spirit of conciliation which the French government
always felt to apply in dealing with Britain.” There was not to be much of
that spirit when it came to dividing the spoils.
The peacemakers did not get around to the Ottoman empire until January 30,
1919, and then it was only in the course of that difficult discussion over
mandates for the former German colonies. Lloyd George, who had spent the
previous week bringing the Americans and his recalcitrant dominions to
agreement, mentioned the Ottoman empire briefly as an example of where
mandates were needed. Because the Turks had been so bad at governing their
subject peoples, they should lose control of all their Arab
territories-Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Arabia itself. Since the Arabs
were civilized but not yet organized, they would need outside guidance. The
Ottomans also ought to lose territory on their northeast frontier. They had
behaved appallingly to the Armenians, and clearly an Armenian state should
come into existence, probably as a mandate of an outside power. There might
have to be a Kurdistan, south of Armenia. That still left the predominantly
Turkish-speaking territories, the slice in Europe, the straits and Anatolia
in Asia Minor. Those, Lloyd George said airily, could be settled “on their
merits.” (He did not mention the parcels of land stretching inland from the
coast of Asia Minor that had been promised to the French, the Italians or
the Greeks.)
The other important thing, Lloyd George argued, was to keep all the various
groups within the empire from attacking each other. This was not a
responsibility Britain wanted. As Lloyd George pointed out, the Allies had
over a million troops scattered across the Ottoman empire and Britain was
paying for the lot. “If they kept them there until they had made peace with
Turkey, and until the League of Nations had been constituted and had started
business and until it was able to dispose of this question, the expense
would be something enormous, and they really could not face it.” He had to
answer to Parliament.
Lloyd George hoped that Wilson would take the hint and offer the United
States as the mandatory power at least for Armenia and the straits. Better
still, the Americans might decide to run the whole of the Turkish areas.
House certainly hinted at the possibility. However, the Americans had not
really established a clear position on the Ottoman empire beyond an
antipathy toward the Turks. American Protestant missionaries, who had been
active in Ottoman Turkey since the 1820s, had painted a dismal picture of a
bankrupt regime. Much of their work had been among the Armenians, so they
had reported at first hand the massacres during the war. Back in the United
States large sums of money had been raised for Armenian relief. House had
cheerfully chatted with the British about ways of carving up the Ottoman
empire, and Wilson had certainly considered its complete disappearance.
The United States had never declared war on the Ottoman empire, which put it
in a tricky position when it came to determining the empire’s fate. The only
one of Wilson’s Fourteen Points that dealt with it was ambiguous: “The
Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure
sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule
should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested
opportunity of autonomous development.” What were the Turkish portions? Who
should have autonomous development? The Arabs? The Armenians? The Kurds? The
scattered Greek communities?
When the Inquiry, that collection of American experts, produced its
memorandum in December 1918, it said both that Turkey proper (undefined)
must be justly treated and that subject races must be freed from oppression
and misrule, which in turn meant “autonomy” for Armenia and “protection” for
the Arab parts. Oddly contradicting this, the official commentary on the
Fourteen Points, which had come out in October 1918, talked about
international control of Constantinople and the straits, perhaps a Greek
mandate on the coast of Asia Minor, where it was incorrectly said that
Greeks predominated, and possibly American mandates for Constantinople,
Armenia, even Macedonia in the Balkans. Before the Peace Conference started,
it was generally assumed that, at the very least, the United States would
take a mandate for Armenia and the straits. Not everyone was pleased.
British admirals, having got rid of the Russian menace, did not want to see
a strong United States at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The India
Office was also concerned. Mehmed VI was not only the Ottoman sultan but
also the caliph, the nearest thing to a spiritual leader of all Muslims.
Turning him out of Constantinople, even putting him under the supervision of
an outside power, might enrage Indian Muslims. Lloyd George simply ignored
their objections.
As so often, the Peace Conference delayed difficult decisions. At that
January meeting, Wilson suggested that the military advisers look at how the
burden of occupying the Turkish territories could best be shared out. “This
would clarify the question,” said Lloyd George. Of course, it did not. The
report duly came in and was discussed briefly on February 10; it was put on
the agenda for the following day but in the event the boundaries of Belgium
proved to be much more interesting.
On February 26, the appearance of an Armenian delegation before the Supreme
Council briefly reminded the peacemakers that the Ottoman empire remained to
be settled. Boghos Nubar Pasha was smooth, rich and cultivated; his father
had been prime minister of Egypt. His partner, Avetis Aharonian, was a
tough, cynical poet from the Caucasus. Boghos spoke for the Armenian
diaspora, Aharonian for the homeland in the mountains where Russia, Persia
and Turkey met. In what was by now a familiar pattern they appealed to
history-the centuries that Armenians had lived there, the persistence of
Armenian Christianity-to their services to the Allies (some Armenians had
fought in Russia’s armies) and to Allied promises. And, like other
delegations, they staked out a claim for a huge area of land, stretching
south and west from the Caucasus down to the Mediterranean. Less typically,
they also asked for the protection of an outside power, a wise request for a
country with such neighbors and such a past. They placed their hopes on the
United States. “Scarcely a day passed,” said an American expert, “that
mournful Armenians, bearded and blackclad, did not besiege the American
delegation or, less frequently, the President, setting forth the really
terrible conditions in their own native land.”
The Armenians brought one of the saddest histories to the conference.
Between 1375, when the last independent Armenian state was conquered, and
the spring of 1918, when nationalist forces had proclaimed the republic of
Armenia on what had been Russian territory, they had lived under alien rule.
After the Russians had advanced down into the Caucasus at the start of the
nineteenth century, the Armenian lands were divided up among Russia itself;
Ottoman Turkey and Persia. The Armenians, many of them simple farmers, had
become Russian, Turkish or Persian, but as ideas of nationalism and
self-determination swept eastward, the vision of a reborn Armenian nation
took shape. It was not a coherent vision- Christian, secular, conservative,
radical, pro- Turkish or pro-Russian, there was no agreement as to what
Armenia might be-but it was increasingly powerful. Unfortunately, however,
Armenian nationalism was not the only nationalism growing in that part of
the world. “Who remembers the Armenians today?” Hitler asked cynically. At
the Paris Peace Conference, the horrors of what the Turks had done to the
Armenians were still fresh, and the world had not yet grown used to attempts
to exterminate peoples. The killings had started in the 1890s, when the old
regime turned savagely on any groups that opposed it. Ottoman troops and
local Kurds, themselves awakening as a nation, had rampaged through Armenian
villages. The Young Turks, who took over the government in 1908, promised a
new era with talk of a secular, multi-ethnic state, but they also dreamed of
linking up with other Turkish peoples in central Asia. In that Pan- Turanian
world, Armenians and other Christians had no place.
When the Ottoman empire entered the war, Enver Pasha, one of the triumvirate
of Young Turks who had ruled in Constantinople since 1913, sent the bulk of
its armies eastward, against Russia. The result, in 1915, was disaster; the
Russians destroyed a huge Ottoman force and looked set to advance into
Anatolia just when the Allies were landing at Gallipoli in the west. The
triumvirate gave the order to deport Armenians from eastern Anatolia on the
grounds that they were traitors, potential or actual. Many Armenians were
slaughtered before they could leave; others died of hunger and disease on
the forced marches southward. Whether the Ottoman government’s real goal was
genocide is still much disputed; so is the number of dead, anywhere from
300,000 to 1.5 million.
Western opinion was appalled. In Britain, Armenia’s cause attracted
supporters from the duke of Argyll to the young Arnold Toynbee. British
children were told to remember the starving Armenians when they failed to
clean their plates. In the United States, huge sums of money were raised for
relief. Clemenceau wrote the preface for a book detailing the atrocities:
“Is it true that at the dawn of the twentieth century, five days from Paris,
atrocities have been committed with impunity, covering a land with
horror-such that one cannot imagine worse in time of the deepest barbarity?”
The usually restrained Lansing wrote to Wilson, who was strongly
pro-Armenian, “It is one of the blackest pages in the history of this war.”
“Say to the Armenians,” exclaimed Orlando, “that I make their cause my
cause.” Lloyd George promised that Armenia would never be restored to “the
blasting tyranny” of the Turks. “There was not a British statesman of any
party,” he wrote in his memoirs, “who did not have it in mind that if we
succeeded in defeating this inhuman Empire, our essential condition of the
peace we should impose was the redemption of the Armenian valleys for ever
from the bloody misrule with which they had been stained by the infamies of
the Turks.”
Fine sentiments-but they amounted to little in the end. At the Peace
Conference, even heartfelt agreement on principle faltered in the face of
other considerations. Armenia was far away; it was surrounded by enemies and
the Allies had few forces in the area. Moving troops and aid in, at a time
when resources were stretched thin, was a major undertaking; what railways
there were had been badly damaged and the roads were primitive. Help was far
away, but Armenia’s enemies were close at hand. Russians, whether the armies
of the Whites or the Bolsheviks, who were advancing southward, would not
tolerate Armenia or any other independent state in the Caucasus. On
Armenia’s other flank, Turks deeply resented the loss of Turkish territory,
and the further losses implied in the Armenian claims.
In Paris, Armenia’s friends were lukewarm and hesitant. The British, it is
true, saw certain advantages for themselves in taking a mandate for Armenia:
the protection of oil supplies coming from Baku on the Caspian to the port
of Batum on the Black Sea, and the creation of a barrier between Bolshevism
and the British possessions in the Middle East. (In their worst nightmares,
the British imagined Bolshevism linking up with a resurgent Islam and
toppling the British empire.) On the other hand, as the War Office kept
repeating, British resources were already overstretched. The French Foreign
Office, for its part, toyed with ideas of a huge Armenia under French
protection which would provide a field for French investment and the spread
of French culture. Clemenceau, however, had little enthusiasm for the
notion. The Italians, like the French, preferred to concentrate their
efforts on gains on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey and in Europe. That
left the Americans.
On March 7, House assured Lloyd George and Clemenceau that the United States
would undoubtedly take on a mandate. Lloyd George was delighted at the
prospect of the Americans taking on the “noble duty,” and relieved that the
French were not taking on a mandate. House, as he often did, was
exaggerating. Wilson had warned the Supreme Council that “he could think of
nothing the people of the United States would be less inclined to accept
than military responsibility in Asia.” It is perhaps a measure of how far
Wilson’s judgment had deteriorated that, on May 14, when Armenia came up at
the Council of Four, he agreed to accept a mandate, subject, he added, to
the consent of the American Senate. This ruffled the French because the
proposed American mandate was to stretch from the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean, taking in the zone in Cilicia promised to France under the
Sykes-Picot Agreement. While Clemenceau, who took little interest in the
Turkish-speaking territories, did not raise an objection, his colleagues
were furious. From London, Paul Cambon complained: “They must be drunk the
way they are surrendering. .. a total capitulation, a mess, an unimaginable
shambles.” Although no one suspected it at the time, no arrangement made in
Paris was going to make the slightest difference to Armenia.
Many other schemes for the Ottoman empire were floating around the
conference rooms and dinner tables in Paris that spring. “Let it be a manda
[buffalo] ,” said one wit in Constantinople, “let it be an ox, let it be any
animal whatsoever; only let it come quickly.” If all the claims,
protectorates, independent states and mandates that were discussed actually
had come into existence, a very odd little Turkey in the interior of
Anatolia would have been left, with no straits, no Mediterranean coast, a
truncated Black Sea coast, and no Armenian or Kurdish territories in the
northeast. What was left out of the calculation in Paris, among other
things, was the inability of the powers to enforce their will. Henry Wilson,
chief of the British Imperial General Staff: thought the politicians
completely unrealistic: “They seem to think that their writ runs in Turkey
in Asia. We have never, even after the armistice, attempted to get into the
background parts.” Also overlooked were the Turks themselves. Almost
everyone in Paris assumed that they would simply do as they were told. When
Edwin Montagu, the British secretary of state for India, cried, “Let us not
for Heaven’s sake, tell the Moslem what he ought to think, let us recognize
what they do think, ” Balfour replied with chilling detachment, “I am quite
unable to see why Heaven or any other Power should object to our telling the
Moslem what he ought to think.” That went for the Arab subjects of the
Ottoman empire as well.