The Treaty of Lausanne still casts a long shadow

In November 1922, representatives of the World War I victors met with their Turkish counterparts in the Swiss lakeside city of Lausanne. They were tasked with negotiating a diplomatic settlement to replace the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), which had never been ratified. Australia, which had no independent foreign policy at the time, was party to the Treaty by virtue of its status as a member of the British Empire.

On July 24, 1923, the two sides signed the Treaty of Peace with Turkey, commonly known as the Treaty of Lausanne. This ratified the new boundaries of the Turkish state, granted amnesty for all crimes against humanity committed by the Ottoman state since 1914, and agreed to “mutual ethnic cleansing” between Greece and Turkey.

Significantly, it dropped Kurdish self-determination, as promised in the earlier Treaty of Sèvres. Although Turkey agreed to “assure full and complete protection of life and liberty to all inhabitants of Turkey without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion,” the promise proved hollow. Immediately after the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey, President Ataturk banned the Kurdish language and afterwards continued the Young Turk policies of forced assimilation, even to the point of genocide. The leaders of the West, Australia included, have been like the Three Wise Monkeys; seeing, hearing, and speaking no evil about the crimes of the Turkish state; indeed even branding legitimate Kurdish resistance as “terrorism”.

So, what were the origins of the brutal ideology of the new state and why did the Allies renege of their promises? To understand the first point, we must step back in time to developments in the declining years of the Ottoman Empire. The empire had once been powerful and dynamic. Following the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it expanded enormously, spreading through what is present day Iraq and Syria, down the Red Sea Coast to include Mecca, across Egypt and the North African littoral, and engulfing the Balkan Peninsula in southeastern Europe, including today’s Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Between 1541 and 1686, the Ottomans ruled Hungary and their further expansion was only halted by the lifting of the siege of Vienna in 1683.

Although the empire was a byword for barbarism in Christian Europe, we have to be careful of “orientalist” stereotypes. The Christian kingdoms of the time were no exemplars of what we call human rights today. Muslim Turks were dominant but the empire practised what, at risk of anachronism, we might call a rough form of multiculturalism. The empire was home to a bewildering patchwork of peoples, often living cheek-by-jowl, speaking many languages, and practising religions. Non-Turks, Jews, and Christians could and did rise to important administrative, business and military positions. In 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Spanish Jews from Iberia, they found a safe haven in the Ottoman city of Salonika, where they thrived until they were deported to the Nazi death camps in 1944.

It is a truism that empires rise, decline and fall. Thus it was with the Ottoman Empire, which in the 19th century was widely known as “the sick man of Europe.” In 1832, Greece won its independence and nationalist revolts followed throughout the Balkans, creating waves of Muslim refugees. In 1830, France annexed Algeria and in 1882 Egypt was lost to Britain. Naturally, educated Ottoman citizens resented the empire’s decay and wondered how it might be arrested. They turned to Western Europe for ideas of how the system might be reformed.

By the late years of the 19th century, Ottoman patriots came to see the autocratic rule of the Sultan as a barrier to progress and looked towards British-style constitutional monarchy as a check on absolutism. They were also drawn to European ideas of science, civic reform and political liberalism. One secretive group emerged as the Committee for Union and Progress. Although they became more widely known as the Young Turks, they were initially reflective of the empire’s ethnic diversity. Their ideas brought them into conflict with traditionalist supporters of the autocratic status quo.

In 1908, the Young Turks seized power under the battle cry of LIBERTY! They aimed to create a powerful, rationally organised state protected by a modern military, with guarantees of democratic rights. They soon forgot their promises and succumbed to the European idea of the “ethnically pure” nation state. Their Ottoman patriotism had degenerated into a narrow Turkish nationalism, accompanied by dictatorial intolerance and brutality. The heartlands of the empire in Anatolia and European Turkey would be “purified” of non-Turkish languages and cultures. Young Turk paranoia was increased by further loss of territory in the Balkan Wars of 1912.

Before the Young Turks went to war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914, they began an ambitious programme of “ethnic social engineering”. Non-Turks would be permitted to make up no more than 5–10% of any “Turkish” town or district. This would be achieved by population transfers: Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and others would be forced out and Turks would be moved in. Or Kurds would be forcibly assimilated. The Young Turks were also planning mass murder: “disloyal” elements would be exterminated.

The day after the Allied landings in Gallipoli, the Young Turks began the Armenian genocide. It was premeditated. Armenian units in the Ottoman army had been disarmed and dispersed. Armenian civilians who were not immediately killed were sent on death marches into the Syrian desert. It is likely that as many as 1.4 million Armenians and 500,000 Greeks, together with tens of thousands of Assyrians, were murdered in what was the first genocide of the 20th century. At the same time, the deportations and forced assimilation of Kurds proceeded apace.

Unfortunately for the Young Turks, they had chosen the losing side in World War I. They were forced to agree to Allied occupation of Istanbul and the Bosphorus, and their leaders either fled or were put on trial for their crimes. The Empire lost further vast territories. Under the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, much of the Ottoman’s Arab majority vilayets were handed over to Britain and France, and the Muslim holy cities of Medina and Mecca were lost forever.

The question remained of what would become of Anatolia and the rump European portions of the empire adjacent to Istanbul. The US President, Woodrow Wilson, proposed that,

The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured of 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… (Point 14 of Wilson’s Fourteen Point proposal for the post-war peace treaties.)

The other Allied powers had different ideas. Under the Treaty of London in 1915, Italy had been promised a share of the Turkish islands and the Anatolian mainland. They had no reasonable claim, but Greece could point to the large Greek majorities in significant areas of western Anatolia as justification for their claims in that region. For their own reasons, the Allies were also sympathetic at the time to Kurdish aspirations for their own state in eastern Anatolia, and for the expansion of an independent Armenia.

On August 10, 1920, the powerless Turkish government signed the Treaty of Sèvres. The Treaty triggered widespread anger in Turkey and across the colonial and Muslim world. It did not embody the Wilsonian principles of self-determination, except in the case of the Kurds. Kurdish representatives at Sèvres successfully argued for a separate Kurdish state. Article 64 spelled this out:

If within one year from the coming into force of the present Treaty the Kurdish peoples within the areas defined in Article 62 shall address themselves to the Council of the League of Nations in such a manner as to show that a majority of the population of these areas desires independence from Turkey, and if the Council then considers that these peoples are capable of such independence and recommends that it should be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation, and to renounce all rights and title over these areas.

The Treaty was never ratified. Turkish nationalists, led by Mustapha Kemal — later known as Ataturk, the Father of Turks — were determined to resist and carve out a Turkish ethno-state. War broke out between the Turks and the Greeks and their Allied supporters. The conflict, known to the Turks as the War of Independence, was fought with horrific brutality. For instance, the Aegean city of Smyrna, today’s Izmir, was burned to the ground and the Greek population put to the sword. Both sides committed appalling atrocities. Some Kurds fought alongside the Turks, but others stood aside or pushed for their own interests.

The Western Allies recognised the Turkish victory and Turkish claims by signing the Treaty of Lausanne. Three months later, the Ottoman parliament dissolved itself and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey. The Treaty gave Turkey most of what it wanted. The current boundaries of the new state were ratified. The Allies gave a blanket amnesty for all crimes committed by the Turkish state right back to 1914, including the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides.

Moreover, the Treaty approved the forced population transfers between Turkey and Greece, and Turkey and Bulgaria. In what we may fairly call mutual ethnic cleansing, some 1.5 million Greeks and 500,000 Turks were forced out of their homelands. Ironically, many expelled “Greeks” spoke Turkish, and many deported “Turks” spoke Greek. Indeed, cinemas in the Greek city of Thessaloniki — the former Ottoman Salonika — regularly showed Turkish films right up to the 1960s as a result of the deportations. (See Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey.)

Ataturk was determined that the new Republic would be a state ruled by and for ethnic Turks. Non-Turkish populations would be assimilated to the Turkish nation, forcibly if necessary, for despite the forced transfers and earlier exterminations, hundreds of thousands of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians remained within the Republic’s boundaries. Kurds made up as much as 20% of the population, but the new state denied their existence: they were “Mountain Turks,” and their language and customs were banned from the outset.

Incredibly, the Kurds have resisted Turkification to this day, often rising up to resist their oppressors. The state has responded with great brutality, as in the genocide at Dersim in 1937-38. Military operations and mass deportations have left much of eastern Anatolia depopulated and economically underdeveloped. The policy of cultural genocide even flouts the provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne, which explicitly bound Turkey to respect other languages and cultures.

Sadly, the world has ignored the history of criminal abuse that followed Lausanne.

Back at the time of the signing of the Treaty, Turkey was something of a pariah. It had fought on the side of the defeated Central Powers and there was some awareness that it had committed horrendous crimes against humanity. The Allies worried that the Republic might seek an alliance with the Soviet Union and were prepared to ignore the obvious flouting of the terms of Lausanne if it kept Turkey within the Western fold. Britain and France also wanted a secure boundary between Turkey and their new oil-rich possessions in Iraq and Syria. When Turkey joined NATO in 1952, the Allies were even more prepared to ignore the abuses.

Turkey has enjoyed a strangely sympathetic press here in Australia, and this is bound up with the myth that Australia “became a nation” in 1915 when the ANZACs landed at Gallipoli. In fact, they were part of a British invasion force and Australia was not consulted when Britain went to war.

Australian attitudes to its foes in the many wars it has fought have seldom been cordial or respectful. The Germans were bloodthirsty “Huns.” The Japanese were scarcely human “Nips” or worse, part of a dreaded “yellow peril.”

In contrast, the Turks are seen as “the gallant enemy” — “Johnny Turk” who fought the ANZACs so valiantly at Gallipoli. Thousands of Australians regularly make a pilgrimage to Gallipoli to mark the anniversary of the Allied landings 110 years ago, including Defence Minister Richard Marles, who went last year as a guest of the Turkish government. Ataturk, despite his crimes against humanity, is venerated as a super-hero worthy of the title of Father of Turks. Thus, many accept without evidence that Ataturk wrote the following words for his Interior Minister, Sukru Kaya, to use in a speech at Canakkale in 1934:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.

In primary school and regularly thereafter, Australian kids are drilled in the national myth, with Ataturk’s alleged words seen as holy writ. We were never told that the Armenian genocide began the day after the landing at Suvla Bay. Even less is said about Kaya’s involvement in the genocide and the subsequent crimes against the Kurds. It is worth remembering that John Howard, whose government first listed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a terrorist organisation, has been a key promoter of the ANZAC myth as part of the sanitisation of Australian colonial history. The two matters are closely intertwined and the Treaty of Lausanne continues to cast a long shadow.

This is an edited transcript of a speech given by John Tuly to the conference, “Treaty of Lausanne - Partition, Denial, Massacre, Kurdish Struggle & the Future of Kurdistan” on July 24. John Tully is honorary professor at the College of Arts and Education at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia.