A contentious birth

This week, Turks around the world are celebrating the 90^th anniversary of the inauguration of the secular Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal replacing the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate with his paternalistic dictatorship.  It is not hard to understand the reasons why Turks of many hues pull together – for progressives, it is the moment Turkey joined the modern world (such as adopting the Gregorian calendar); for nationalists, it drew a line under 300 years of decline and gave Turks their first military victories for 100 years; for constitutionalists, it marked a reduction in arbitrary law.  In 2013, the government announced the long-held dream of a tunnel under the Bosphorus, linking the two halves of water-bisected Istanbul for the first time (Constantinople to Chalcedon in old money).

For myself though it is not a time for festivities.  I have nothing against Turks or modern Turkey and I fervently believe Western European antagonism is counter-productive and it should be admitted to the EU after a few further reforms (having more journalists in prison than Russia is embarrassing and the law of ‘insulting Turkishness’ must be repealed, for example) and withdrawal from Northern Cyprus, rather than finding its path blocked repeatedly.  It is not perfect but no country is and it has a vitality and energy that Europe needs sorely.  Yet, with the exception of a reined-in military, it is very much the product of 1923.

Just as many Hungarians lament the Treaty of Trianon, which punished the Magyars more ferociously than any other defeated Central Power, despite being effectively yoked to Austria (what else could the Budapest parliament do but follow Vienna’s lead in 1914?) and stripped it of two-thirds of its territory and one-third of its population (whether justified is another issue, but it was harsh), I lament 1923.  Not through any personal connections, you must understand, but through my familiarity with Greece and Armenia in my casual and academic readings.

The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the Ottoman sultan to end the part of World War One between the Allies and the Ottomans, pared Turkey right back to its Anatolian core, where 850 years previous the Turks had migrated.  Britain and France took League of Nations mandates in Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Trans-Jordan; Thrace and the Ionian territory around Smyrna were awarded to Greece (under a Gibraltarian-style arrangement where Greece would administer Smyrna but the Sultan would retain sovereignty); fledgling Armenia, still reeling from the genocide committed against its peoples, was awarded a large slice of eastern Anatolia, including ancient Trabzon (formerly Trebizond and Trapezus) and Erzurum; the Bosphorus was to be demilitarised and placed under international control; there were plans for an independent Kurdistan; and much of remaining Anatolia was divided into zones of influence between Italy, France and Britain.

Now, the zones of influence were grotesquely unfair, as was the humiliation of demilitarising the Bosphorus (counter-productive too given the triumph of the communists in Russia and it territories); I have not much sympathy for Kurdistan at this particular juncture given the role of Kurdish irregulars in the Armenian genocide; and the less said about the betrayal of the Arabs the better, given the shabby behaviour that shamed T.E. Lawrence.  But the ejection of the Greeks from eastern Thrace and Smyrna, the Pearl of the Mediterranean, ended 2,500 years of continuous Greek culture.  Arguably, the Greeks kind of had it coming by appointing a commander-in-chief who was indolent and certifiably mad (at times, he believed his legs were made of glass and sugar and would shatter were he to leave his bed), though it is still sad, like the extinction of the Dodo or the all female language developed by rural women in southern-central China.  On a different level of tragic is the non-establishment of Kurdistan and re-establishment of Armenia, Turkish advances and American isolationism making the terms of Sèvres a dead letter before any of it could be formalised.  The Armenia that re-emerged in 1991 was just 10% of ancient Armenia and 25% of what Sèvres proposed.  This was part of the bitterness that made the region of Nagorno-Karabakh so intensely contested from 1988 to the present-day.   Given that Armenians are seen as subversive agents in Turkey today and suffer low-level persecution, the opportunity to provide a homeland seventy years before an impoverished corner of the Caucasus is where the cold tide of history leaves one numb.  I also have to admit a fascination with the Byzantine Empire, to which the Ottomans delivered the coup de grace, swiftly followed by the dispatch of the 250-year old Empire of the Trebizond.

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne superseded Sèvres leaving the Republic of Turkey essentially within its current borders (a subsequent treaty with the USSR formalised its north-eastern frontier).  Later, in 1939, Alexandretta (İskenderun) joined with Turkey and thereby avoided direct involvement in today’s Syrian bloodbath and Azerbaijan’s second-time independence in 1991 extended Turkish influence back to the Caspian Sea, but Lausanne gave the foundations on which modern Turkey is based, with the capital at Ankara.  For Turkey to rise, others had to suffer and so it is not unblemished like Finns celebrating their independence day on 6^th December.  For all the greatness of Turkey in 2013, I cannot be happy of the circumstances that gave birth to it.