LAUSANNE TREATY: POLITICS OF POWER

Kurdish Aspect
July 18 2008
CO

Part 1: Lausanne and Sèvres

Kurdishaspect.com – By Dr Kamal Mirawdeli

Part 1: Lausanne and Sèvres

Scratch the surface of the words and lines of Lausanne Treaty, and
it oozes the blood of the Armenians and the Kurds

This is the part of the paper delivered by the author at the seminar
commemorating 85th anniversary of the Lausanne Treaty at the House
of Lords in London on 9th July 2008. The seminar was sponsored and
chaired by Lord Rea.

When I was asked by my friends to talk about Lausanne treaty at this
seminar today, the first thing that came to my mind was: why? Why
should we always be referring back to the past instead of inferring
from our present and conferring about our future? Yes, there is
history. But, on the other hand, I do not believe in continuity of
or in history, of that series of chains and rings that each leads
to the other and intern us within their all-encompassing circle. The
classic approach always is that we should learn lessons from history,
but, for us the Kurds, often the lessons are no more than reiterated
justifications for imprisoning our present within the confines of
the past. This is true especially when the entrenched powers refuse
to give way or open a window for change; all because this is our
history and we need more time, that is more of the same history to
change our history! And here is the point of dilemma that we often
fail to deal with. We seem to accept that we have been predetermined
by our pre-present context and we cannot escape our fate. That is why
we are more interested in revisiting the past, study and re-study it,
deconstruct and reconstruct it hoping that we will eventually stumble
upon that prerequisite lesson that will save us from our predicament
and spare us the preoccupation of planning for future.

Yes, these were the thoughts that came to my mind and stayed with
me when I started to do a quick on-line research to brush up my
information about Lausanne: What was it? Why should we still be
talking about it? How does it pertain to our past, persist in our
present and prefigure our future?

I hate details of historical narrative. Therefore I beg your pardon
for not retelling any tales in detail that you may or may not have
heard about the process of the birth of the treaty. I want to focus
on its relevance to the present and whether it can still provide a
reference for future? Of course the way I am putting the outline of my
argument assumes that: yes, there is after all a line of continuity in
history or at least I am trying to establish a notion of continuity
in our and even Middle East history through just a single document
called Lausanne Treaty? A document that is 85 years old this month?

It is not my purpose here to enter into a philosophical discussion
about the issue of continuity and discontinuity of or in history. All
our discourses are in one way or another language games and as
words can assume lives of their own then it would be possible to
create discursive contexts in which a system of interpretation or
reconstruction can seem as a logical continuum. This may help to
increase our understanding of the past or even the present but the
danger is when we bestow upon the document itself the power of creating
history and thus lose sights of the conditions of its possibility
before, at the time of and after its coming to existence. In other
words, accepting the illusion that the life of a document depends
upon its intrinsic mode of existence rather than on the external
political conditions that function to sustain or supersede it.

Lusanne Treaty as a material document

Let me start by agreeing that yes we can reconstruct history,
however illusionary, as a sort of political continuum through,
as Foucault says, "the questioning of the document". And Foucault
explains that like this: "Of course, it is obvious enough that ever
since a discipline such as history has existed, documents have been
used, questioned, and have given rise to questions; …..But each of
these questions, and all this critical concern, pointed to one and the
same end: the reconstitution, on the basis of what the documents say,
and sometimes merely hint at, of the past from which they emanate
and which has now disappeared far behind them." [Michel Foucault,
1973, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London, p. 6] No doubt Lausanne
Treaty is a dangerously important document. It is a statement, an
event, a historical discourse with its own space, mode and function
of existence. A statement, Foucault writes, "is always an event
that neither the language nor the meaning can quite exhaust. It
is certainly a strange event: first, because on the one hand it is
linked to the gesture of writing or to the articulation of speech,
and also on the other hand opens up to itself a residual existence in
the filed of a memory, or in the materiality of manuscripts, books,
or any other form of recording; secondly, because, like every event, it
is unique, yet subject to repetition, transformation, and reactivation;
thirdly, because it is linked not only to situations that provoke it,
and to the consequences that it gives rise to, but at the same time,
and in accordance with a quite different modality, to the statements
that precede and follow it." [Ibid, p 28]

We can apply all these criteria of statement/event identified by
Foucault to the historical document of Lausanne Treaty. It is a written
discourse that language and interpretation cannot exhaust. It resides
in both memory and the materiality of hundreds of books, studies,
dissertations, and related records. It is unique yet subject to
repetition, transformation and reactivation. It is not only linked
to the factors that created it and the factors that it created bust
also to the statements that precede and follow it.

Let us start from the last characteristic. It is this relationship
to the statements that precede and follow it that has given Lausanne
discourse its unique modality that for different reasons has remained
functional until this moment when we are here holding this seminar
to reconstruct or re-interpret it by questioning its internal rules
and structures.

Because of the limited available here I will concentrate only on
some conclusions:

First: Lausanne versus Sèvres

t is not possible to talk about lausanne or at least to understand its
unique historical modality without referring to another document that
precedes it and this is the Treaty of Sèvres. The Treaty of Lausanne
is the antagonist, antithesis, and annulment of the Treaty of Sèvres.

A typical basic definition of the Treaty of Lusanne is the one offered
by Wikipedia:

The Treaty of Lausanne (July 24, 1923) a peace treaty signed in
Lausanne that settled the Anatolian part of the partitioning of the
Ottoman Empire by annulment of the Treaty of Sèvres signed by the
Ottoman Empire as the consequences of the Turkish Independence War
between Allies of World War 1 and Grand National Assembly of Turkey
(Turkish national movement).

[ f_Lausanne]

So Lausanne is a statement of settlement by annulment. In other
words it is a discourse that exists at the expense of silencing,
omitting and trying to eliminate another totally different discourse,
different set of statements/events, that exist, with a quite different
modality, in Sèvres historical discourse. The Lausanne discourse
can only exist as the antithesis of Severs discourse. It represents
its condition of possibility and is in an ongoing political struggle
with it. Lausanne is more than a mere historical event, an organic
autonomous whole, closed in upon itself and capable of forming
meaning of its own accord, but rather it is an element in a field of
antithetical co-existence in which the diverse elements of Sèvres
Treaty continue to be actively involved. Therefore, whenever Lausanne
is mentioned, Sèvres exists as its unsaid, its silent interlocutor,
its dialectical necessity, its historical annulment. Lausanne can
only function by keeping Sèvres silent, dysfunctional, dead. But
this is not a struggle that has been permanently settled. Lausanne in
order to continue to function, cannot ever forget, ignore or remain
unvigilant about the continuous persistence of Sèvres to restore its
own brutally abrogated geopolitical existence. Scratch the surface of
the words and lines of Lausanne Treaty, and it oozes the blood of the
Armenians and the Kurds. The border lines cut deep into the physical,
cultural and spiritual body of Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians and many
other minorities.

Second: Power and discourse

It is this antithesis with Sèvres that constitutes the modality of
Lausanne’s existence. Both discourses are product of historical events,
or to be more precise of power relations and power functions. The
dialectics of power/knowledge remains the effective function of
existence of Lausanne discourse. For both discourses are political
discourses created by violence, by the sheer function of force,
military force which in turn had great impact on international
diplomatic deals. They are defined by different set of power signatures
in different circumstances of power relations. The Sèvres Treaty was
signed on 10 August , 1920 in Sèvres, France. The signatories were
France, Italy, Japan and United Kingdom, described in the Treaty as
the Principal Allied Powers, and the defeated Ottoman Empire. [For the
full text of the Treaty see: ]

It was supposed to be the peace treaty of World War I between the
Ottoman Empire and Allies. France, Italy and Great Britain, however,
had secretly begun the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire as early
as 1915.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in particular, had paved the
way for the partitioning of the dying man’s inheritance. This was a
secret agreement between the governments of the UK and France, with
the assent of Imperial Russia, defining their respective spheres of
influence and control in west Asia after the expected downfall of the
Ottoman Empire during World War I. The agreement was concluded on 16
May 1916 by the French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot and Briton
Mark Sykes. The delay in implementation was due to the fact that
the rival imperialist powers could not come to an agreement which,
in turn, hinged on the outcome of the Turkish national movement or
what is called Turkish War of Independence.

The relation of Sèvres to the Sykes-Picot agreement is important. The
latter was its substratum. The Sykes-Picot agreement did not
materialise when its conditions of possibility were drastically
changed first after the Communist Revolution in Russia in October
1917, which withdrew from the agreement and undermined it by revealing
its secrets. And then when Turkish nationalist movement succeeded in
changing military equations.

"Military action between Turks and Greeks in Anatolia in 1920 was
inconclusive, but the nationalist cause was strengthened the next
year by a series of important victories. Twice (in January and again
in April) Ismet Pasha defeated the Greek army at Inönu, blocking its
advance into the interior of Anatolia. In July, in the face of a third
offensive, the Turkish forces fell back in good order to the Sakarya
Nehri, eighty kilometers from Ankara, where Ataturk took personal
command and decisively defeated the Greeks in a twenty day battle. An
improvement in Turkey’s diplomatic situation accompanied military
success. Impressed by the viability of the nationalist forces, both
France and Italy had withdrawn from Anatolia by October 1921. Treaties
were signed that year with the Soviet Union, the first European power
to recognize the nationalists, establishing the boundary between the
two countries. In 1919 a war broke out between the Turkish nationalists
and the newly proclaimed Armenian republic. Armenian resistance was
broken by the summer of 1921, and the Kars region was occupied by the
Turks. In 1922 the nationalists recognized the Soviet absorption of
what remained of the Armenian state, and Armenian minority in Turkey
went back to Armenia.

The final drive against the Greeks began in August 1922 with a
battle called the Battle of the Commander in Chief. In September
the Turks moved into Izmir, where thousands were killed during the
fighting and capture of the city." [Source of information from:
]

In short in just two years after the Sèvres Treaty was signed in
August 1920, Turkish national movement headed by Mustafa Kamal Pasha
put up fierce resistance that changed realities on the ground and
achieved decisive military and diplomatic victories. The support of
the new ideologically energetic Soviet Union , on the other hand,
was a vital factor in changing the fortunes of the Turks and convince
the Allies to change their strategy in Lausanne.

At the end of October 1922, the Allies invited both the Ankara and
the Istanbul governments to a conference at Lausanne, but Ataturk was
determined that the nationalist government should be the only spokesman
for Turkey. The action of the Allies prompted a resolution by the
Grand National Assembly in November 1922 that separated the offices
of sultan and caliph and abolished the former. The assembly further
stated that the Istanbul government had ceased to be the government
of Turkey when the Allies seized the capital. In essence, the assembly
had abolished the Ottoman Empire and created the New Turkey." {Ibid]

Thus military power on the ground, supported by determined nationalist
leadership, nationalist ideology and diplomatic acumen, reversed
the conditions of the possibility of Sèvres Treaty which was never
ratified by Grand National Assembly. Turkey was the only power
defeated in World War I to negotiate with the Allies as an equal and
to influence the provisions of the peace treaty. Ismet Pasha was the
chief Turkish negotiator at the Lausanne Conference that opened in
November 1922.

This short synopsis of the changing power relations within just
two years explains the different modalities of the Sèvres and
Lusanne treaties. Lausanne is Sèvres superseded. Sèvres remains it
palimpsest. The discourse of Turkish nationalist power has overwritten
the discourse of human rights and nations’ rights to self-determination
and even to existence.

Note:

We Kurds have never been able to write our modern history. Many
writings are ideological rather than scientific and when they aim to
be scientific they lack methodological rigour of in-depth research
and objective analysis. The result is a number of myths perpetuated
by ideological tools who are ignorant with historiography as a
rigorous academic discipline. For example there is a myth that
October Revolution was a great bless to the Kurds and Kurdish
national movement. One of the reasons given for this is precisely
that new Communist Soviet Union undermined and foiled Sykes-Picot
(SP)agreement. If SP were implemented " south-eastern Turkey
(North Kurdistan), northern Iraq a round Mosul and Syria would
have been under the control of France". In other words most of
Kurdistan would have become French colony with much more opportunity
for both socil0-cultural and economic development and quick early
independence. On the other hand, the new Soviet power and the agreement
it signed with the genocidal Turkish nationalist government at the
expense of the Armenians and the Kurds, was an important contributing
factor in the success of Kamal Ataturk’s military and diplomatic
strategies and eventually annulment of Sèvres Treaty and with it the
national future of the Armenians and the Kurds and human and cultural
rights of all minorities in Turkey.

–Boundary_(ID_jgTcbKjUpLiIshfb+2m7GQ)–