Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (24 page)

A
s darkness enveloped Constantinople on the evening of 15 March 1920, just ten months after the landing of the Greek army in Smyrna, two figures could be seen flitting through the city’s unlit backstreets. They glanced over their shoulders nervously, fearful that they were being followed. There was good reason for their anxiety. Halide Edib and her husband, Dr Adivar Adnan, a prominent politician, had learned that the British were going to take control of Constantinople that very night. Parliament was to be disbanded, nationalist sympathisers arrested and the city placed under military occupation.

Halide Edib and Dr Adnan knew that there was no time to lose. They had to flee from Constantinople and join Mustafa Kemal in Anatolia before it was too late. Both of them were already known to be activists and would certainly be arrested – and quite possibly imprisoned – if caught. They disguised themselves as pious Muslims and crossed the Bosphorus to the Scutari district of the city, where nationalist sympathisers were running an underground safe house.

Dr Adnan and his wife soon found they were not alone. Four parliamentary deputies were also hiding here and another group had already set off to join Mustafa Kemal. It was imperative that all of the new arrivals should head east as soon as possible, for the British were redoubling their efforts to round up nationalist sympathisers. ‘That very day,’ wrote Edib, ‘posters had been put up all over the city in English and Turkish, threatening death to any one who gave refuge to a Nationalist. I remember one of the posters at the station, with “DEATH” in enormous letters.’

Their flight to eastern Anatolia came in the nick of time. The British formally occupied Constantinople on 16 March, a devastating blow to the nationalist cause. Ministers, city governors and officials were arrested and subsequently deported to Malta, where they were held without trial in a military prison. Among those seized by the British was Rahmi Bey, who was living in Constantinople at the time of the military occupation. He protested his innocence of any wrongdoing and found ready support from his Levantine friends in Smyrna, but the British military officials refused to listen to his pleas. In their eyes, Rahmi was tainted by his association with the old regime. He was incarcerated in Malta – prisoner number 2691 – and his only consolation was that his case would soon become a cause célèbre.

The British were anxious to prevent activists from joining Mustafa Kemal in Anatolia and began patrolling all the roads leading out of the capital. The first stage of Dr Adnan and Halide Edib’s flight took them to the village of Samandra, twenty miles from the capital. The area had just been occupied by the British military but the nationalists were able to keep ahead of the game by intercepting the British wires. They travelled at night, aided by nationalist sympathisers who were busily smuggling arms to Angora in defiance of the British-imposed armistice. ‘Cartloads of arms had to be hidden in sacks of coal or loads of hay, transported by night, and buried before dawn,’ wrote Edib. ‘Simple as it sounds, it really required bravery, intelligence and resourcefulness – and a minute knowledge of the country and the character of its inhabitants.’

For night after night, Edib and her husband travelled across mountain passes, pausing in villages where safe houses had been arranged. At each place they encountered nationalists like themselves, some of whom would soon assume senior roles in the drive to liberate Smyrna.

After more than a week on the road, they received a telegram from Mustafa Kemal, informing them that the English garrison in Eski Shehir had been driven out by nationalist soldiers. This meant that they could continue their journey to Angora by rail, since that stretch of line was now in the hands of Kemal’s supporters.

‘It was wonderful not to be hunted any more,’ wrote Edib, ‘to feel that here was a bit of our country really our own.’ The countryside was still dangerous, but the towns alongside the railway were relatively safe. Edib and her husband boarded a train at Eski Shehir and within a few hours arrived in Angora.

Edib found Mustafa Kemal in ebullient mood. A large number of nationalist supporters had made it safely to Angora and all were determined to prevent the Greeks and their allies from further carving up the remnants of the disintegrating Ottoman empire. However, they knew that before this could be accomplished, they needed to drive the Greek army out of Smyrna.

Although Mustafa Kemal was surrounded by an increasing number of nationalist supporters, his position remained far from secure. While Angora itself was safely under his control, great swathes of Anatolia were fast descending into civil war. Circassian and Abkhaze brigands infested many rural areas and each town seemed to have spawned bands of criminals who preyed on anyone, regardless of nationality. By the spring of 1920, there were few areas of the countryside that were not wracked with civil unrest.

The situation became even more precarious when the sultan – who was by now nothing more than a British puppet – appointed his brother-in-law, Damad Ferid, as grand vizier. Ferid was bitterly opposed to the nationalists and vowed, as he said, to place his trust in God and Great Britain. To this end, he leaned on the Seyhulislam, the body that governed religious affairs of state, to issue a fatwa against the most prominent nationalists in Angora. This stated that it was the duty of every Muslim to kill Mustafa Kemal and his senior advisors, including Halide Edib and her husband.

‘[I] was accused of inciting the Turkish people to revolt against the government of the sultan, and of stirring up civil strife and bloodshed throughout the whole country,’ wrote Edib. ‘For some reason, they honoured me with the longest and most picturesque description of misdeeds.’

A few days after the fatwa, Damad Ferid established a disciplinary force whose task was to hunt down and defeat nationalist forces. To Kemal’s supporters in Angora, it seemed as if their enemies were increasing with every week that passed: Greeks in the west, the British in Constantinople and now forces loyal to the sultan and his government.

‘Trouble and difficulty were gathering like an avalanche,’ wrote Edib, ‘and threatening to wreck the movement at its onset.’ Yet Mustafa Kemal functioned best under trying circumstances. He persuaded the nationalist mufti of Angora to publish a counter-fatwa – signed by hundreds of fellow muftis – declaring that the sultanate was being held hostage by the infidel British and that its fatwa was therefore invalid. Kemal then turned his attentions to the two most pressing problems that beset his nationalist movement: the lack of an effective army; and the need for some sort of political assembly that could be seen to be acting on behalf of the Turkish nation.

His inner circle of politicians, advisors and military commanders met daily in a sequestered farm school on the outskirts of the town. They spent much of their time planning a Grand National Assembly that was intended to represent the voice of the nation. This took effect at electrifying speed. Nationalist organisations across Anatolia were instructed to elect and send delegates to Angora with all possible haste. On 23 April, just five weeks after the British occupied Constantinople, the assembly met for its opening session. Kemal did not mince his words when he spoke to the delegates: ‘We call on the whole nation to come together in unity and rise against the Greeks in total determination. The jihad, once it is properly preached, will, with God’s help, result quickly in the rout of the Greeks.’

While the politicians got to work in the assembly, Halide Edib was busy setting up her news and propaganda agency. She knew that the effective dissemination of information would be a key to the future success of the nationalists. ‘Both the outside world and our own people knew very little about our movement,’ she wrote, ‘and all the people I had seen on the way [from Constantinople] seemed to be suffering from lack of news.’

Her idea was to wire news to every town and village that had a telegraph office; it could then be printed and pasted to the walls of the central mosque. She also began ordering English and French newspapers in order to monitor the prevailing wind of opinion. ‘We decided to take the Daily Chronicle,’ she wrote, ‘because it was said to be the mouthpiece of Mr Lloyd George.’

When she was not working at the agency, Edib was busily chronicling the historic events that were taking place around her. Like many of the new arrivals from Constantinople, she had never been to Angora and found herself in a small rural town that offered none of the bourgeois comforts of the capital. The low houses were roughly built and the streets were choked with dung. According to one American visitor, the few hotels were ‘as primitive in comfort as appearance, built of mud in which large holes can be seen and full of danger to the unwary on their rickety staircases’. The houses were not much better: ‘Weather-beaten mud and thatch dwellings [that] are mostly heated by mangals [braziers] of burning charcoal that give out poisonous fumes.’

Life among the nationalists was communal, with all the key members of Kemal’s team sharing lodgings and eating under the same roof. ‘We lived like members of a newly founded religious order in all the exaggerated puritanism of its inception,’ wrote Edib. ‘Mustafa Kemal Pasha shared our life and while among us was as strictly pure as a sincere Catholic priest. But some evenings he disappeared and we knew that some feast had been prepared in one of the summer-houses round about Angora . . .’

These were occasions when Kemal and a few of his closest friends would indulge in heavy drinking. He had a voracious liking for alcohol, although he was careful not to indulge in public. But he would admit to Halide Edib that he had spent the night drinking, often with the
hodjas
and holy men of Angora. ‘Don’t you believe in the holiness and purity of the hodjas,’ he told her. ‘In public they’re against drink, aren’t they? But they can outdrink anyone.’

At the two congresses organised by Kemal – at Erzurum and Sivas – delegates had agreed that the Greek occupation of Smyrna was to be resisted by force of arms. They now had to work out how to bring about the destruction of the Greek forces.

Kemal had already given this much thought. He intended to make use of the remnants of the Ottoman army, even though the soldiers were demoralised, poorly equipped and lacking leadership. He also intended to co-opt as many irregular forces as possible, aware that their lack of discipline was compensated by their bravado. Principal among the irregulars was Ethem the Circassian – a veritable giant of a man whose 2,000-strong cavalry column had repeatedly proved its mettle on the field of battle.

Edib penned a vivid portrait of Ethem at the height of his power, when he travelled to Angora to visit Kemal. ‘His figure was more like that of a powerful skeleton than like that of a body of flesh and blood,’ she wrote. ‘It was built on the best Circassian model – very wide shoulders, a slim waist, long arms and legs and a large fair head with a short nose and eyes whose gaze was even paler and colder than that of Mustafa Kemal Pasha.’

Ethem placed his forces at Kemal’s disposal, leading them into battle against Abkhaze rebels in north-western Anatolia. His cavalry drubbed these rebels and then went on to destroy several other bands of troublemakers. They were so effective as a fighting force that Colonel Ismet, Kemal’s chief of staff, grew seriously alarmed. ‘They are armed to the teeth, each one of them,’ he warned. ‘They look down on everyone else in their confident pride. Who controls the country today? They or us?’

‘We do,’ replied Kemal, ‘because we have the brains.’

Ethem nevertheless gave the appearance of being the dominant force. He returned to Angora after his triumphant campaign in order to enjoy the fruits of victory. ‘When he came, the streets were thronged with his men,’ recalled Edib, ‘all of them beautifully equipped in wild irregular fashion . . . Ethem himself was the most picturesque of all. He was received with great honours. Mustafa Kemal Pasha lent him his car, the only car we had in Angora then.’

It was not long before Ethem’s cavalry, with the support of Colonel Ismet’s regular forces, came into direct conflict with the British military. The catalyst was a clash between Kemal’s fighters and the sultan’s forces on the outskirts of Izmit, an important town that lay just a hundred miles from the capital. Kemal’s ragtag army attacked with such bravado that many of the sultan’s troops immediately switched sides. The nationalists, flushed with success, then ventured to attack a British battalion, which brought swift retribution. The British returned fire with all the weaponry at their disposal, including bombing the nationalists from the air. Kemal’s forces were eventually beaten back, but the British commander was so alarmed by the attack that he demanded more British troops to defend his forward positions. Yet herein lay a problem: there were none available. The only soldiers that could be deployed with immediate effect were Greek.

Britain’s senior military advisors were adamant that to call upon the Greeks for help would be courting disaster. Lloyd George saw matters rather differently. Believing that he had been presented with a unique opportunity to deal a knockout blow to the Turkish nationalists, he had no qualms about allowing Venizelos’s forces to deliver the
coup de grâce
.

‘[He] is persuaded that the Greeks are the coming power in the Mediterranean both on land and on the sea and wants to befriend them,’ wrote Britain’s senior field marshal, Sir Henry Wilson, in his diary. ‘The whole of Lloyd George’s foreign policy is chaotic and based on totally fallacious values of men and affairs.’