PARIS 1919 (76 page)

29

Atatürk and the Breaking of Sèvres

AT THE BEGINNING of May 1919, the fitful discussions about the Ottoman empire received an unwelcome jolt from Italian moves in Asia Minor. The Italians had landed forces in Turkey for brief periods during the winter, ostensibly to protect Italian nationals, or, on one occasion, a convent. Now their troops appeared to be settling in at the ports of Adalia (Antalya) in the south and at Marmaris, facing the island of Rhodes, both on territory that Italy was claiming under its wartime agreements. Reports came in of an Italian battleship at the port of Smyrna (Izmir) and on May 11 Eleutherios Venizelos told the Council of Four that Italian working parties were building jetties at Scala Nuova (Kuşadas1), slightly to the south. He also alleged that the Italians had done a secret deal with the Turks. The peacemakers were ready to believe the worst. “I am not inclined to let the Italians do what they want in that part of the world,” said Wilson. “I distrust their intentions. If I published in America all that we know about their activity and intrigues, it would cause their infernal machine to hang fire.”
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Lloyd George and Clemenceau shared Wilson's irritation but were constrained by their wartime commitments. In the Treaty of London of 1915, which had brought Italy into the war, they had promised that, if Turkey were divided up, Italy would get “a just share.” The language was dangerously vague, suggesting that Italy might get a large piece of the coast of Asia Minor, certainly the Turkish province of Adalia and territories around it, and perhaps as far north as Smyrna and south to Adana, just where the coast of Asia Minor curves south again. That is certainly what the Italians assumed. It was awkward that, under the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France, the French also had a claim to the area around Adana. The Italian government had not seen the agreement when it was made, but it had heard enough to make it uneasy. Sonnino had asked repeatedly for clarification; he finally got it at the little Alpine town of St.-Jean-de-Maurienne in April 1917. Lloyd George remembered the meetings as being as cool as the snow which still lay on the ground. Sonnino was “flushed with suppressed anger.” Britain and France grudgingly conceded a bigger share of the Turkish territories; Italy was to have direct control of a great rectangle in the south of Asia Minor which included the important port of Smyrna, and a large wedge to the north of Smyrna would be an Italian zone of influence. Lloyd George said sharply to Sonnino, “You want us to do the work and hand it over to you at the end of the war.” Although both Britain and France subsequently claimed that the agreement was invalid on the grounds that it depended on Russian consent (which did not come because of the revolution), the Italian government insisted that it was still owed its share of Asia Minor.
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Italian nationalists called on the memory of the great Roman empire to bolster their claims (although when the Greeks recalled their even older empire, Italians dismissed it as “empty Hellenic megalomania”). They pointed to Italy's need for raw materials (the coal mines at Erëgli, or Heracleum as the Italians preferred to call it, were a particular favorite) and for outlets for investment and goods. Italy would protect Christians generally and Italian settlers in particular, and would civilize the Turks. The chief of the general staff in 1918 painted a lyrical picture of the future Italian zone: “The climate there is suitable for our emigrants, the fertility is well known, as the corn bears fiftyfold; finally the existence of immense uncultivated areas is proved by the population density, which, including the towns is at present less than twenty-seven persons per square km; the population itself would then have everything to gain and nothing to lose by Italian colonization.” In reality, most Italians preferred to invest their money safely at home; and emigrants, as the experience of Italy's few colonies had shown, preferred the Americas. “Italians,” admitted Orlando, “generally did not care a bit about Asia Minor, nor about colonies in Africa.”
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Sonnino took the straightforward view that Asia Minor was part of the spoils of war and Italy would take its share. As he put it, either all the powers got something or no one did. He told the Italian high commissioner in Constantinople that Italy's rivals were cunningly using the doctrine of self-determination to deny Italian claims for annexation and spheres of influence. This must be countered by getting locals to demand Italian protection; Sonnino urged his high commissioner to do this carefully and quietly. His main concern, however, was the Adriatic, and he was prepared to bargain away far-off claims for solid gains closer to home.
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As the crisis with Italy over Fiume and the Adriatic worsened at the end of April, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were prepared to use Asia Minor as bait. As Lloyd George told Wilson, “What would perhaps bring M. Sonnino towards us would be a concession in Asia.” It was dangerous, murmured Balfour, but it was important to appease the Italians: “Unfortunately, this necessity haunts and hampers every step in our diplomacy.” Wilson resisted. “Italy,” he pointed out, “lacks experience in the administration of colonies.” Furthermore, the Turks would dislike Italian rule. Lloyd George fell back on history—“The Romans were very good governors of colonies”—and a surprising view of the Turks as “a docile people, who have never cut railroads, nor anything of the kind.” Wilson was unimpressed: “Unfortunately the modern Italians are not the Romans.” He also pointed out that the Greeks, who presumably would get some sort of mandate in Asia Minor, did not like the Italians: “The Patriarch of Constantinople, who came to see me the other day, expressed to me, with the reserve of an ecclesiastic, a very marked feeling against the possibility of seeing the Italians become his neighbours.”
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During the first week of May, by which time the Italians were boycotting the Peace Conference, the British and French cooled on the idea of tempting them back with morsels of the Ottoman empire. On May 2, when the Big Three met, more reports of Italian moves along the coast of Asia Minor were coming in. “Madness,” said Lloyd George. Clemenceau was for a tough line: “If we don't take precautions, they will hold us by the throat.” Wilson threatened to send an American battleship to either Fiume or Smyrna. Lloyd George said that Venizelos had offered to send a Greek warship.
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Venizelos was in his element, stirring up feeling against the Italians and offering help to the powers. He had been working hard from the start of the Peace Conference to press Greek claims, with mixed success; the crisis was, as he recognized, Greece's great opportunity. Although Venizelos tried to argue that the coast of Asia Minor was indisputably Greek in character, and the Turks in a minority, his statistics were highly dubious. For the inland territory he was claiming, where even he had to admit that the Turks were in a majority, Venizelos called in economic arguments. The whole area (the Turkish provinces of Aidin and Brusa [Bursa] and the areas around the Dardanelles and Ismid) was a geographic unit that belonged to the Mediterranean; it was warm, well watered, fertile, opening out to the world, unlike the dry, Asiatic plateau of the hinterland. “The Turks were good workers, honest in their relations, and a good people as subjects,” he told the Supreme Council at his first appearance in February. “But as rulers they were insupportable and a disgrace to civilisation, as was proved by their having exterminated over a million Armenians and 300,000 Greeks during the last four years.” To show how reasonable he was being, he renounced any claims to the ancient Greek settlements at Pontus on the eastern end of the Black Sea. He would not listen to petitions from the Pontine Greeks, he assured House's assistant, Bonsal: “I have told them that I cannot claim the south shore of the Black Sea, as my hands are quite full with Thrace and Anatolia.” There was a slight conflict with Italian claims, but he was confident the two countries could come to a friendly agreement. They had, in fact, already tried and it had been clear that neither was prepared to back down, especially on Smyrna.
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The thriving port of Smyrna lay at the heart of Greek claims. It had been Greek in the great Hellenic past, and in the nineteenth century had become predominantly Greek again as immigrants from the Greek mainland had flocked there to take advantage of the new railways which stretched into the hinterland and opportunities for trade and investment. The population was at least a quarter of a million before the war and more Greeks lived there than in Athens itself. They dominated the exports— from figs to opium to carpets—which coursed down from the Anatolian plateau in Asia Minor. Smyrna was a Greek city, a center of Greek learning and nationalism—but it was also a crucial part of the Turkish economy.

When Venizelos reached out for Smyrna and its hinterland, he was going well beyond what could be justified in terms of self-determination. He was also putting Greece into a dangerous position. Taking the fertile valleys of western Asia Minor as they sloped up toward the dry Anatolian highlands was perhaps necessary, as he argued, to protect the Greek colonies along the coast. From another perspective, though, it created a Greek province with a huge number of non-Greeks as well as a long line to defend against anyone who chose to attack from central Anatolia. His great rival General Ioannis Metaxas, later dictator of Greece, warned of this repeatedly: “The Greek state is not today ready for the government and exploitation of so extensive a territory.”
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Metaxas was right.

The Commission on Greek and Albanian Affairs, which was expected to come up with a rational solution to all the competing claims on Ottoman territory, not surprisingly failed to do so. The Italians opposed Greek claims outright and the British and French were sympathetic. The American experts, who were prepared to admit Greece's claims in Europe, felt they could not, in good conscience, do so in Asia Minor. The Turks were in the majority in the area as a whole and, even though Smyrna was Greek, it would be wrong on economic grounds to sever it from Turkey. As the American expert William Linn Westermann said, “Smyrna and its harbor are the eyes, the mouth, and the nostrils of the people of Anatolia.” Nor did the Americans accept the argument that the Turks were so backward that they needed outside rule. “It is the consensus of opinion,” said an American expert, “of American missionaries, who know him through and through, of American, British, and French archeologists who have worked for years beside and with him, of British merchants who have traded with him, of British soldiers who have fought against him, that the Anatolian Turk is as honest as any other people of the Near East, that he is a hard-working farmer, a brave and generous fighter, endowed fundamentally with chivalrous instincts.”
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The commission's report simply presented both views. Wilson might well have backed the position of his own experts if his exasperation with the Italians had not made him willing to listen to Venizelos, who was making sure that the Big Three, as they now were, received alarming reports of dubious veracity of Greeks being massacred by Turks and of the way in which the Italians were, so he said, working hand in glove with the Turks. To Nicolson, one of the British experts on the commission, Venizelos boasted happily, “I have received assurances of comfort and support from Lloyd George and Wilson.” Lloyd George had already agreed that a Greek cruiser should go to Smyrna, and Venizelos saw an opening to send Greek forces into Asia Minor as a counterbalance to the Italians. He and Venizelos had a private dinner in early May. Frances Stevenson, who was present, noted in her diary: “The two have a great admiration for each other, & D. is trying to get Smyrna for the Greeks, though he is having trouble with the Italians over it.” What Venizelos remembered from the evening was that Lloyd George was hopeful he could get Constantinople as well for the Greeks.
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On the morning of May 6, the Allies casually took the decision that set in train the events that destroyed, among many other things, Smyrna itself, Venizelos's great dream and Lloyd George's governing coalition. In the Council of Four, Lloyd George pressed for a decision on Smyrna. If they did not act, he said, the Italians would get away with grabbing a piece of Asia Minor. Greek troops were available; they could be told to land wherever there was a danger of disturbances or massacres. “Why not tell them to land now?” replied Wilson. “Do you have any objection?” “None,” said Lloyd George. Clemenceau put in: “I don't have any either. But must we notify the Italians?” “Not in my opinion,” said Lloyd George. The Italians, who returned to the Peace Conference the following day, were told that their allies had been obliged to take action in their absence to prevent imminent massacres. When Sonnino asked why the Great Powers had not sent their own contingents, Clemenceau claimed that it would be difficult to place them under a Greek general. He assured Sonnino that “today Smyrna belongs to no one; it is not a question of determining the fate of that city, but of carrying out a temporary operation with a well-defined objective.” Clemenceau had in fact temporarily fallen under Venizelos's spell: “Ulysses,” he told Mordacq, “is only a small man beside him. He is a diplomat of the first rank, very sensible, very well prepared, very shrewd, always knowing what he wants.”
¹¹

The afternoon after that fateful decision Lloyd George asked Venizelos for a quick interview before the Council of Four met. Venizelos wrote in his diary that Lloyd George started with a simple question:

LLOYD GEORGE: Do you have troops available?

VENIZELOS: We do. For what purpose?

LLOYD GEORGE: President Wilson, M. Clemenceau and I decided today that you should occupy Smyrna.

VENIZELOS: We are ready.

Venizelos was full of optimism as he met with the Big Three and their military advisers to arrange the details. His troops were ready, the Turks would offer no resistance and the Greek inhabitants of Smyrna would welcome them. Lloyd George and Venizelos agreed that it would be best if French and English troops occupied the forts at the entrance to the harbor and then turned them over to the Greeks. Clemenceau went along, with some reluctance; he was beginning to have cold feet, especially about antagonizing the Italians needlessly. Wilson was torn between his wish to act within the letter of the law and his distaste for the Italians. In the end he supported the occupation, which was scheduled for May 15. “The whole thing,” wrote Henry Wilson, the British military expert, “is mad and bad.”
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