A Peace to End all Peace (51 page)

The impression was created, too, that most of the interested parties, in the Middle East as elsewhere, were being excluded from the deliberations. Instead of all the Allied Powers, only five of them met in the first instance to plan the negotiations. They were then superseded by the Council of Four: the leaders of the United States, Britain, France, and Italy. Disagreements and difficulties at home led Italy to withdraw; domestic politics led the United States to withdraw. Discussing the Middle East a year after the armistice, the French Foreign Minister told the British Foreign Minister, who agreed, that “there remained only two parties whose interests had seriously to be considered and reconciled, namely, Great Britain and France”
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and together they went on to make the decisions about the Ottoman domains.

Yet there were dozens of other parties whose interests were at stake, and their numbers were swelled by the number of their spokesmen. In addition to two main rival delegations from Armenia, for example, there were some forty independent Armenian delegations at the Peace Conference. Ten thousand people came to Paris for the Peace Conference. The hordes of claimants in the background cast into bold relief the narrowness of the interests taken into account by the two governments that remained to make the decisions.

Moral claims and wartime promises were the stock-in-trade of those who came to plead a case. The texts of wartime pledges by Allied leaders, and especially by various British government officials, were scrutinized and compared, as indeed they still are by scholars, to see whether such pledges could be read in such a way as to be consistent with one another, and as though such pledges had given rise to rights that could be enforced in a court of law. The Constantinople Agreement (1915), the Treaty of London (1915), the Hussein-McMahon correspondence (1915–16), the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), the Agreement of St Jean de Maurienne (1917), the Balfour Declaration (1917), the Hogarth message (1918), the Declaration to the Seven (1918), and the Anglo-French Declaration (1918), as well as President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (8 January 1918), Four Principles (11 February 1918), Four Ends (4 July 1918), and Five Particulars (27 September 1918), were among the many statements that were presented by rival claimants to be honored as promissory notes or contracts at law.

David Lloyd George, who saw the negotiations as a bargaining rather than a judicial process, was proud of what he had been able to accomplish in the Middle Eastern settlement. He had made material gains for Britain. Referring to
assignats
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the Prime Minister told an intimate friend: “Well, Wilson has gone back home with a bundle of assignats. I have returned with a pocket full of sovereigns in the shape of the German Colonies, Mesopotamia, etc. Everyone to his taste.”
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In all the Prime Minister had succeeded in adding nearly a million square miles to the British Empire.

He was not blind to the moral considerations at issue, but his interpretations of them were fiercely partisan. Writing to defend the peace treaties more than a decade later, Lloyd George claimed that “The Treaties of Paris constitute the greatest measure of national liberation of subject nations ever achieved by any war settlement on record…no peace settlement has ever emancipated as many subject nationalities from the grip of foreign tyranny as did that of 1919.”
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He was particularly incensed by claims that he had not honored the pledges made to the Arabic-speaking peoples.

He added in particular that “The Palestinian Arabs fought for Turkish rule.”
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Perhaps he could have imposed his Middle Eastern settlement more effectively if he had arrived at it at the end of 1918. But the attempt to go back on Britain’s wartime pledges had taken an immense amount of time and so had lost him that chance. By the summer of 1920 it was too late for the Prime Minister to impose his terms upon his wartime Allies and upon an increasingly troublesome Middle East because—as Churchill had warned repeatedly—by then he no longer had the troops to do so.

I

“Diplomacy by Conference” was a phrase, attributed to Maurice Hankey, that described Lloyd George’s proceedings in the postwar years.
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It became the standard description of the unreal world in which the Prime Minister lived. Divorcing himself as best he could from the other responsibilities of his office, he spent more than three years in attending international meetings aimed at shaping the postwar world. The meetings among the Allies began almost as soon as the armistices were signed, and developed into a way of life. Lloyd George, between 1919 and 1922, attended no fewer than thirty-three international conferences; and, even before they began, had engaged in informal meetings, such as those with Clemenceau and with Wilson in London at the end of 1918. The formal preliminaries to the Peace Conference began in Paris in January 1919, and shifted to other locations from time to time. At issue were the terms to be imposed upon the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, and their ally, Bulgaria. The decisions about the Ottoman Empire were agreed upon for the most part at the First Conference of London (beginning in February 1920), were confirmed in the Italian Riviera resort town of San Remo (April 1920), and were embodied in a treaty signed at Sèvres, a residential suburb of Paris, on 10 August 1920.

With respect to the negotiation of the peace settlement in the Middle East, the decisive fact was that it took so much time. Of all the peace treaties, that with the Ottoman Empire was the last to be concluded. Beginning with the informal discussions between Lloyd George and Clemenceau after the armistice, it took sixteen months to reach agreement on substantive matters, and another four months to dispose of remaining issues and sign a treaty. In all, it took nearly two years to conclude the peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire; at the outset Lloyd George had predicted that it would take about a week.
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Because of the long delay, situations were allowed to develop, and decisions were required to be made, that in the end proved more important than the terms of the treaty itself. The Allied statesmen thought that they had determined the future of Arabic-speaking Asia by what they did at San Remo, and of the Turkish-speaking Ottoman Empire by what they did at Sèvres; but what they did
not
do in 1918 and 1919 proved to have more influence on the future of both.

At the outset Lloyd George had stated that it would be impossible for his country to support indefinitely its 1,084,000-man army of occupation in the Ottoman Empire.
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Churchill and the General Staff, it will be recalled, had impressed upon him the need to reach a settlement while he still had the troops to enforce it. By the summer of 1919, some six months later, the British Cabinet was told that the army of occupation was down by more than two-thirds to 320,000 men.
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As the army melted away, its commanders adhered to a timetable of withdrawal that imposed a series of deadlines upon the Prime Minister at the Peace Conference, as did the continuing drain of British financial resources.

In the north, along the Caucasus frontier with Russia, British troops had remained in place in the hope that the United States, Italy, or France could be persuaded to replace them and defend newly independent Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan if Russia or Turkey should revive sufficiently to attack them. But Britain lacked the men and money to undertake the job, and was eventually forced to abandon her charges to their fate.

In ordering British forces to leave these formerly Russian territories, the Prime Minister disregarded the strong objections of Winston Churchill. For all his recent enthusiasm for retrenchment, Churchill was a firebrand on the communist issue and was prepared to send men and money into Russia to overthrow the Soviet regime. Even Maurice Hankey, who believed that “in the coming years Bolshevism was the greatest danger to Europe,”
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described Churchill as “quite barmy in his enthusiasm for the anti-Bolsheviks”
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Churchill was obsessively determined to keep British troops north of the Turkish frontier to help the Whites fight the Reds in the Russian Civil War. Lloyd George’s political fears were of a different sort. The Prime Minister told Hankey that he was anxious to get all British troops out of all formerly Russian territories to keep them from becoming “restless” by which he presumably meant that he wanted to keep them from being infected with the revolutionary virus.
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Pursuant to his orders, British forces north of the Russian-Turkish frontier were evacuated in the summer of 1919.

To the south of the old Russian frontier, in mountain valleys where the present Turkish borders run with those of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, lay the area imprecisely known as Kurdistan, where British officials thought of sponsoring another of their protectorates. The area fell within the sphere promised to France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, so the British envisaged a series of autonomous Kurdish states, to be advised by British political officers, which the French were to be asked to concede in the Wilsonian spirit of self-determination for the Kurdish people. The Kurds are an ancient mountain people who have never known unity, and whose energies have been channeled into violent quarrels with neighbors, especially Arabs and Armenians. A British attempt to organize them in 1919 resulted in three uprisings, as the Kurds turned against the British newcomers; soon afterward, British troops pulled back from Kurdistan, too.

II

Within Turkey, the British position continued to disintegrate. The British authorities still relied on the Armistice of Mudros. The brief armistice document dealt almost entirely with naval and military matters, requiring the Turkish authorities to demobilize all their armed forces except those required to maintain internal order. Ottoman troops piled up their weapons and munitions in dumps. British officers supervised the surrender, riding through the countryside in twos and threes. The armistice terms permitted the Ottoman authorities to remain in control of the Turkish-speaking remnant of their empire, subject to the Allies’ right to occupy strategic points should a situation arise that threatened their security. In practice, British naval control of the seacoast, coupled with control of the communications and transportation systems, took the place of military occupation of Turkey.

The capital city, Constantinople, remained in theory unoccupied, although Allied forces were much in evidence. The British fleet was anchored there, and, in a triumphal ceremony, the French General Louis Franchet d’Esperey, the Allied commander in Ottoman Europe, rode into the city on a white charger.

The Ottoman government formed to negotiate the armistice was dismissed soon afterward by Mehmed VI, who had become Sultan in June 1918 and was chiefly concerned with retaining his throne. To this end, his policy was to seek favor with the Allies, and when Turkish politicians began to oppose Allied claims and proposals, the Sultan dissolved Parliament and ruled by decree. Soon afterward Mehmed appointed his brother-in-law to head the government as Grand Vizier, thus completing the change back from constitutional to personal rule.

The Sultan’s government was not, however, unchallenged. Civilian and military networks of the Young Turkey Party operated throughout Anatolia, and the War Office—Enver’s fiefdom—remained largely under their control.
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They plotted against the new Sultan and his ministers, and hoped to force the Allies to offer milder peace terms.

Outside the capital city, all authority was on the wane. In the interior there was an upsurge of brigandage and communal strife. This breakdown of order throughout Asia Minor was a cause of concern to the Allies, especially when it resulted in threats to the safety of Christians. When Greek villages behind the Black Sea port of Samsun were attacked by Turkish Moslems, the Allies demanded that the Grand Vizier take action. Alarmed, the Grand Vizier consulted the Acting Minister of the Interior, who advised that there was no way to bring the situation under control from Constantinople—an officer would have to be sent into the field to deal with matters on the spot. The Acting Minister suggested the name of his friend, General Mustapha Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, whose opposition to Enver had kept him from receiving the major command appointments during the war that were his due. The suggestion was adopted and Kemal succeeded in obtaining exceptionally broad civil and military powers as Inspector-General of the Ninth Army, covering most of Anatolia.

On the evening of 6 May 1919 he embarked for Samsun. It was the beginning of one of the great political voyages of the twentieth century. At midnight Wyndham Deedes—the British Intelligence expert on Ottoman affairs—sped to the Sublime Porte to warn the Grand Vizier not to let Kemal go, only to learn that he was too late.

Kemal had already set off for Samsun, and his purpose—as Wyndham Deedes seems to have divined—was to rally forces throughout Turkey to resist Allied peace terms if they proved too harsh. Those forces consisted in large part of Ottoman troops in the unoccupied center and east of Turkey, and—armed with the Sultan’s commission and his own formidable skills—Kemal planned to put himself at their head.

III

In 1918–19 Turkey was dark—and cold. Fuel was scarce, and the lights of Constantinople were kept dim. Elsewhere, too, the lands that at the outset of the war had formed the Ottoman domains entered into a sort of twilight existence, defined in terms of international law by the Regulations annexed to the 1907 Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land. As the occupying power in most of these domains, Britain’s obligation was essentially to keep things as they were under Ottoman law until some final determination as to their fate should be made.

Such a determination would take the form of a treaty of peace between the Ottoman Empire and its conquerors. On the Ottoman side, no difficulty suggested itself; the Sultan lived in the shadow of British warships and in fear of losing his throne, and presumably would sign almost any document the British naval commander placed in front of him. All that the Allies had to do was decide among themselves what terms they wanted to impose.

That situation changed fundamentally in May 1919 when President Wilson and Prime Minister Lloyd George decided to play the Greeks off against the Italians in Anatolia. The unintended effect of the decision was to arouse Greek hopes and Turkish fears that Greece had come back to Asia Minor to stay. Moslem Turkish hatred of the two large Christian populations in their midst—Greeks and Armenians—had always exerted a powerful force, and did so again even in Turkey’s exhausted state. While the Allied statesmen were looking the other way, Ottoman soldiers in the interior of Anatolia regrouped and returned to seize their weapons from the dumps where they were deposited.

Within days after the news of the Greek landing at Smyrna became known, Inspector-General Mustapha Kemal was ordered to return to Constantinople—and disobeyed. Instead he met with three colleagues, at the ancient provincial capital city of Amasya, to draft a declaration of independence. Disregarding the Sultan’s government as a captive of the Allies, Kemal attended a regional nationalist congress at Erzerum, in the east of Turkey, and then assembled a national congress at Sivas, in the interior of Anatolia, midway between Erzerum and Ankara. He won the allegiance of a number of army officers his own age and younger, many of whom, like himself, had been associated with the military wing of the C.U.P.; for the most part he carried with him the majors and colonels rather than the generals.
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He also seems to have taken over leadership of the military and civilian resistance networks organized by the Young Turks, although he prudently disclaimed any connection with the officially disbanded C.U.P. Despite Kemal’s strong secular bias, Moslem holy men proved to be his strongest adherents.

The Allied leaders knew little about Mustapha Kemal, the lean, tough-minded, hard-living officer in his late thirties who inspired and led the rebellion against them. Neither the British Foreign Office nor British Intelligence was even able to tell the Prime Minister whether Kemal was acting for or against the Sultan.

Unaware of what was happening in Turkey, the Allied leaders in Europe continued to meet in conferences that were intended to decide Turkey’s fate. At a conference in London on 28 February 1920, the Allied leaders were amazed by the news that an army of 30,000 Turkish troops under Kemal’s command had defeated a small French contingent at Marash in southern Anatolia. What surprised them—Lloyd George later claimed—was not so much the outcome of the battle (for the French were greatly outnumbered) but the revelation that Kemal’s army of regulars existed. According to Lloyd George, this was the first that he and his colleagues had heard of such an army. “Our military intelligence had never been more thoroughly unintelligent,” he later wrote in his memoirs, typically putting the blame on others.
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IV

As Kemal’s revolt spread through Anatolia, a parallel movement developed in the Arabic-speaking south of the Ottoman Empire, where the token French presence along the seacoast at Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, and Tyre presented a tempting target to Moslem militants in Damascus. The French intruders on the coast of Syria and Lebanon threatened to overthrow the delicate balance of Christian and Moslem religious communities, evoking a reaction not unlike that against the Greeks in Turkey.

Britain allowed inland Syria, like inland Anatolia, self-rule. In theory the Syrian administration was headed by Feisal, who was away at the Peace Conference. In practice it was administered by people over whom he had little control, and who feuded bitterly with one another. For more than a year after the Ottoman retreat, inland Syria—with its capital at Damascus—was administered, if somewhat chaotically, by Arabs, and the novel habit of independence, once contracted, was not one that they wished to surrender.