The vanquished have returned to their spiritual home at Angora throwing their fezzes in the air. The victors have returned with their tails well between their legs. All tragedies have their scenes of comedy, and the Lausanne Conference is one of those amusing episodes interpolated by fate to relieve the poignancy of one of its greatest tragic pieces—the Turk and civilisation.
The Turk may be a bad ruler, but he is the prince of anglers. The cunning and the patience with which he lands the most refractory fish once he has hooked it is beyond compare. What inimitable play we have witnessed for six months on the shores of Lake Leman! Once the fish seemed to have broken the tackle—that was when the first conference came to an abrupt end. It[Pg 323] simply meant, however, that the wily Oriental was giving out plenty of line. Time never worries him, he can sit and wait. He knew the moment would come when they would return with the hook well in their gullets, and the play begin once more—the reeling in and the reeling out, the line sometimes taut and strained but never snapping. Time and patience rewarded him. At last the huge tarpon are all lying beached on the banks—Britain, France, Italy, and the United States of America—high and dry, landed and helpless, without a swish left in their tails, glistening and gasping in the summer sun.
It is little wonder that Ismet had a smile on his face when all was over. Reports from Angora state that the peace is hailed there as a great Turkish triumph; and so it is. The Turk is truly a great fisherman. If he could govern as well as he angles, his would be the most formidable Empire in the world. Unfortunately he is the worst of rulers, hence the trouble—his own and that of those who unhappily have drawn him as governor in the lottery of life.
The able correspondent of the Daily Telegraph at the Lausanne Conference has supplied us from[Pg 324] time to time with vivid pen pictures of the four greatest Powers of the world struggling in the toils of the squalid and broken remains of an Empire with an aggregate population equal to that of a couple of English counties that I could name. This is what he wrote about this conference, which constitutes one of the most humiliating incidents in the history of Western civilisation:—
"The records of the present Conference present an even more marvellous series of concessions and surrenders. What was frayed before is threadbare now. The Allies have whittled away their own rights with a lavish hand in the cause of peace. They have also—and this is a graver matter, for which it seems they will have to give an account in the not distant future—gone back on their promises to small races, which are none the less promises because the small races have not the power to enforce their performance. The figure that the European delegates are cutting in Lausanne, and the agents of the concessionnaires in Angora—all alike representatives of the West—has been rendered undignified as much by the manner as the matter of their worsting."
[Pg 325]
Since those distressing words were written the Powers have sunk yet deeper into the slough of humiliation.
The Times correspondent wiring after the agreement writes in a strain of deep indignation at the blow inflicted on the prestige of the West by this extraordinary Treaty. In order to gauge the extent of the disaster to civilisation which this Treaty implies it is only necessary to give a short summary of the war aims of the Allies in Turkey.
They were stated by Mr. Asquith with his usual succinctness and clarity in a speech which he delivered when Prime Minister at the Guildhall on November 9th, 1914:—
"It is not the Turkish people—it is the Ottoman Government that has drawn the sword, and which, I venture to predict, will perish by the sword. It is they and not we who have rung the death-knell of Ottoman dominion, not only in Europe but in Asia. With their disappearance will disappear as I, at least, hope and believe, the blight which for generations past has withered some of the fairest regions of the earth."
[Pg 326]
In pursuance of the policy thus declared by the British Premier on behalf of the Allies a series of Agreements was entered into in the early months of 1915 between France, Russia, and ourselves, by which the greater part of Turkey, with its conglomerate population, was to be partitioned at the end of the War. Cilicia and Syria were allocated to France; Mesopotamia to Britain; Armenia and Constantinople to Russia. Palestine was to be placed under the joint control of Britain and France. Arabia was to be declared independent and a territory carved largely out of the desert—but including some famous cities of the East, Damascus, Homs and Aleppo—was to be constituted into a new Arab State, partly under the protection of France and partly of Britain. Smyrna and its precincts were to be allotted to Greece if she joined her forces with those of the Allies in the war. The Straits were to be demilitarised and garrisoned. When Italy came into the war later on in 1915, it was stipulated that in the event of the partition of Turkey being carried out in pursuance of these agreements, territories in Southern Anatolia should be assigned to Italy for development.
[Pg 327]
What was the justification for breaking up the Turkish Empire? The portions to be cut out of Turkey have a population the majority of which is non-Turkish. Cilicia and Southern Anatolia might constitute a possible exception. In these territories massacres and misgovernment had perhaps succeeded at last in turning the balance in favour of the Turk. But in the main the distributed regions were being cultivated and developed before the war by a population which was Western and not Turanian in its origin and outlook. This population represented the original inhabitants of the soil.
The experiences, more especially of the past century, had demonstrated clearly that the Turk could no longer be entrusted with the property, the honour, or the lives of any Christian race within his dominions. Whole communities of Armenians had been massacred under circumstances of the most appalling cruelty in lands which their ancestors had occupied since the dawn of history. And even after the war began 700,000 of these wretched people had been done to death by these savages, to whom, it must be remembered, the Great Powers so ostentatiously proffered the hand of[Pg 328] friendship at the first Lausanne conference. Even while the conference was in session, and the handshaking was going on, the Turks were torturing to death scores of thousands of young Greeks whom they deported into the interior. As "a precautionary measure" 150,000 Greeks of military age, of whom 30,000 were military prisoners, were last year driven inland to the mountains of Anatolia. On the way they were stripped of their clothes, and in this condition were herded across the icy mountains. It is not surprising that when an agreement was arrived at for the exchange of military prisoners, the Turks found the greatest difficulty in producing 11,000, and of the total 150,000 it is estimated that two-thirds perished. The Allied Powers had every good reason for determining, as they hoped for all time, that this barbarian should cease to shock the world by repeated exhibitions of savagery against helpless and unarmed people committed to his charge by a cruel fate.
Apart from these atrocities the fact that great tracts of country, once the most fertile and populous in the world, have been reduced by Turkish misrule and neglect to a condition which is indistinguishable from the wilderness, alone proves that[Pg 329] the Turk is a blight and a curse wherever he pitches his tent, and that he ought in the interests of humanity to be treated as such. When a race, which has no title to its lands other than conquest, so mismanages the territories it holds by violence as to deprive the world of an essential contribution to its well-being, the nations have a right—nay, a duty—to intervene in order to restore these devastated areas to civilisation. This same duty constitutes the reason and justification for the white settlers of America overriding the prior claims of the Indian to the prairies and forests of the great West.
On the shores of the Mediterranean are two races with a surplus population of hard-working, intelligent cultivators, both of them belonging to countries which had themselves in the past been responsible for the government of the doomed lands covered by the Turkish Empire. Greece and Italy could claim that under their rule this vast territory throve and prospered mightily. They now pour their overflow of population into lands far away from the motherland. Yet they are essentially Mediterranean peoples. The history of the Mediterranean will for ever be associated with their[Pg 330] achievements on its shores and its waters. The derelict wastes of Asia Minor need them. Valleys formerly crowded with tillers are now practically abandoned to the desert weeds. Irrigation has been destroyed or neglected. The Italian engineers are amongst the best in the world, and once they were introduced into Asia Minor would make cultiva............