PARIS 1919 (67 page)

Like many young officers in the years before 1914, Atatürk 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.
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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, Atatürk 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.”
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The Constantinople Atatürk 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.
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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.”
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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 motor-boats 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.
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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 envoyés les fils de leurs ‘Lords,' mais les français ont envoyés leurs valets” (“The English sent the sons of their lords, but the French sent their valets”).
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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.
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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 may have most to fear in the future 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.”
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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.
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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 reported. 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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