The Treaty of Sèvres

On 10 August 1920, in the showroom of the state porcelain manufactory at Sèvres near Paris, three envoys of the government of Sultan Mehmed VI signed a peace treaty with the powers that had defeated the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. It was the last of the five treaties prepared by the Paris Peace Conference, and the harshest. Turkey lost all its Arab lands, Eastern Thrace and the islands at the mouth of the Dardanelles; it handed over the administration of the Smyrna district to the Greeks, recognised an independent Armenia and agreed to Kurdish autonomy. The Straits were to come under the control of an international commission, the state’s finances under the supervision of the victors, and the army was to shrink to a police force. The Sultan was left with Constantinople and a truncated Anatolia, itself divided into French and Italian spheres of influence. The treaty never came into force. In Ankara power was already held by the Grand National Assembly of Mustafa Kemal, which declared the signatories traitors and within two years overturned the whole settlement by force of arms.

An empire to be carved up

The Ottoman Empire had lost the war together with Germany. On 30 October 1918 it signed the Armistice of Mudros, which allowed the victors to occupy any strategic point they chose, and in November the Allied fleet anchored off Constantinople. The fate of the Sultans’ state, however, had long since been decided by secret wartime agreements. In 1915 Britain and France promised Russia Constantinople and the Straits, and in the Treaty of London they promised Italy part of southern Anatolia. In 1916 the Sykes–Picot Agreement divided the Arab provinces between London and Paris, and in 1917 the Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne also promised Italy the region of Smyrna. After the revolution the Bolsheviks published these documents and renounced Russia’s share of the spoils, but the rest of the plans remained.

The peace with Turkey took longer to prepare than any other. The victors quarrelled over everything: Constantinople, the Straits, the mandates, how much to give Greece and how much Italy. They also waited to see whether the United States would accept a mandate over Armenia, but in 1920 the American Senate refused. On 15 May 1919, with the consent of the conference leaders, Greek troops landed at Smyrna, which kindled resistance in Anatolia under Mustafa Kemal. When in March 1920 the British formally occupied Constantinople, arrested nationalist deputies and deported many of them to Malta, and the Sultan dissolved parliament on 11 April, the national movement convened its own assembly in Ankara. It met on 23 April 1920 and declared itself the only legitimate authority.

A few days earlier, at the San Remo Conference (18–26 April 1920), the prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy had agreed the final peace terms and allocated the mandates: Syria and Lebanon to France, Mesopotamia and Palestine to Britain. On 11 May the draft treaty was handed to the Ottoman delegation in Paris. The government of the Grand Vizier Damat Ferid Pasha replied in June with a long list of objections, but the Allies accepted only minor amendments and demanded an answer within ten days. Their argument also included the Greek army, which on 22 June 1920, with David Lloyd George’s consent, advanced from the zone around Smyrna into the interior of Anatolia and in early July took Bursa, the former Ottoman capital. On 22 July the Sultan convened a council in Constantinople of ministers, senators, former grand viziers, generals and clerics, so as to spread the responsibility among many. Damat Ferid argued that ten years of Young Turk blunders had brought the country to this pass and that there was no other way out. The council backed signing the treaty, with a single abstention. Turkish historians still disagree as to whether the Sultan stood up to signal his assent, as Mustafa Kemal later claimed, or simply left the room.

The signing

At Sèvres the treaty was signed for the Ottoman Empire by the former Minister of Education Hadi Pasha; the president of the Council of State, the poet and philosopher Rıza Tevfik; and the second secretary of the legation in Bern, Reşad Halis. Damat Ferid himself, although he was in Paris, did not sign. On the victors’ side twelve states signed: the four “Principal Allied Powers” – the British Empire (which also signed separately on behalf of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India), France (whose signatories included the prime minister, Alexandre Millerand), Italy and Japan – and alongside them Armenia, Belgium, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Czechoslovakia. Greece was represented by its prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos. For Poland the treaty was signed by its envoy in Paris, Maurycy Zamoyski, and by Erazm Piltz (PL), in the very days when the Red Army stood before Warsaw and the Polish–Soviet War was nearing its decisive moment. Two states named in the preamble did not sign: the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and the Hejaz, whose king, Hussein, refused to recognise the French and British mandates over Arab lands.

The United States was not at Sèvres. Washington had broken off diplomatic relations with Constantinople in 1917 but had never declared war on Turkey, and so was not a party to the peace. On the same day Britain, France and Italy concluded a separate Tripartite Agreement that assigned them spheres of economic influence in Anatolia, and Greece signed two supplementary treaties with the Powers: one on Thrace and one on the protection of minorities in the lands it was to receive.

The terms

The treaty had 433 articles and, like the other Paris treaties, opened with the Covenant of the League of Nations. Its most important provisions concerned territory.

Constantinople and the Straits. The capital remained Turkish, but Article 36 stipulated that if Turkey failed to carry out the treaty faithfully, especially its provisions on the protection of minorities, the Powers could reverse that decision. The Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles, together with a strip of coast on either side, formed a Zone of the Straits administered by an international commission. Navigation was to be free in peace and war for merchant ships and warships of every flag, and only Allied troops could be stationed in the zone.

Greece. Turkey ceded to Greece Eastern Thrace with Adrianople (Edirne) up to the Çatalca line, a few dozen kilometres from Constantinople, as well as the islands of Imbros and Tenedos at the mouth of the Dardanelles. Smyrna and its district remained formally under the Sultan’s sovereignty, and the Turkish flag was to fly permanently over one of the city’s forts, but the exercise of authority passed to the Greek government. The district was to have its own parliament, elected with the participation of all nationalities, which after five years could ask the Council of the League of Nations for union with Greece. The Council could first order a plebiscite.

Armenia and Kurdistan. Turkey recognised an independent Armenia. Its border in the four eastern vilayets – Erzurum, Trabzon, Van and Bitlis – was to be fixed by the arbitration of the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, who could also give Armenia access to the sea. The Kurdish-inhabited areas east of the Euphrates were to receive autonomy, and if within a year the Kurds convinced the League of Nations that a majority of them wanted independence, Turkey was to renounce these lands as well.

The Arab lands and others. Turkey renounced Syria and Mesopotamia, which were to be administered by France and Britain as mandated states, and Palestine, where the mandatory power was to implement the Balfour Declaration on a “national home” for the Jews. It recognised an independent Hejaz, the British protectorate over Egypt and the annexation of Cyprus, and ceded the Dodecanese to Italy. The Tripartite Agreement gave France a sphere of influence in Cilicia and south-eastern Anatolia, and Italy one in the south-west, around Antalya and Konya.

Army, finances, responsibility. The Turkish army was to be turned into a gendarmerie and auxiliary units totalling no more than 50,000 men, plus a 700-strong bodyguard for the Sultan. The navy could keep seven sloops and six torpedo boats; an air force was forbidden altogether. The state’s finances, budget, taxes and customs passed under the control of a British–French–Italian commission, and foreigners regained the capitulations – exemption from Turkish jurisdiction – which the Young Turk government had abolished in 1914. Article 230 obliged Turkey to hand over to the Allies those responsible for the massacres committed during the war, above all the Armenian genocide. They were to be tried by judges appointed by the victors.

The terms were far harsher than those the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany, and even than those the Treaty of Trianon had imposed on Hungary two months earlier. A state that had been a great power for six centuries was left as a semi-colony with a truncated territory deep in Anatolia, deprived of control over its own capital, coastline and treasury.

Greece signed

It is often said that Greece did not accept the borders drawn at Sèvres and did not sign the treaty. This is not so. Venizelos signed the treaty together with the minister plenipotentiary Athanasios Romanos and regarded it as the greatest achievement of his life. A Greece “of two continents and five seas” seemed within reach. The only dispute concerns ratification. Some sources state that Greece was the only country to ratify the treaty; others that the government which came to power after the elections of November 1920 never did so. It hardly matters, since the treaty was to come into force only after ratification by Turkey and the three Principal Powers, and that never happened. It is true, however, that Greece was not satisfied with it: Venizelos had hoped that Smyrna would become Greek at once, whereas its future depended on a vote five years later.

Two days after the signing, on 12 August 1920, two royalist Greek officers shot and wounded Venizelos at the Gare de Lyon in Paris. In Athens the prime minister’s supporters retaliated by murdering the writer and politician Ion Dragoumis. Soon afterwards fortune turned against Venizelos. In October the young King Alexander died, and on 14 November 1920 the royalists won the election. King Constantine I, whom France and Italy regarded as a friend of Germany, returned to the country. From then on both powers sought an understanding with Ankara, and the treaty that Greece was supposed to guard began to lose its defenders.

Ankara’s answer

For the national movement, Sèvres was proof that the Sultan’s government was ready to sell the country to keep the throne. As early as 7 June 1920 the Grand National Assembly had resolved that all agreements concluded by Constantinople since 16 March 1920, the day of the formal occupation of the capital, were null and void. On 19 August it declared the three signatories, and the members of the council who had voted for signing, traitors to the fatherland. The last Ottoman parliament had been dissolved, so no one in Constantinople could ratify the treaty. When in October 1920 the new Grand Vizier, Ahmed Tevfik Pasha, announced that he would submit it for ratification if an understanding could be reached with Ankara, Kemal would not hear of it, and Constantinople had to inform the Powers that ratification was impossible for the time being.

The treaty began to crumble before the ink was dry. In the east, Turkish troops under General Kâzım Karabekir crushed Armenia in the autumn of 1920; in early December, as the Red Army was already entering Yerevan, Armenia signed the Treaty of Alexandropol and renounced everything Sèvres had given it. Wilson’s arbitral award, which on 22 November 1920 had drawn a generous border for Armenia with access to the Black Sea, was never implemented. In March 1921 Ankara concluded the Treaty of Moscow with Vladimir Lenin’s Soviet Russia, and in the autumn an agreement with France, which evacuated Cilicia. The Italians withdrew from Antalya. An attempt to soften the treaty at the London Conference in February and March 1921 came to nothing, because Kemal demanded all the lands listed in the National Pact. The war with Greece decided everything: the Turkish victory on the Sakarya in September 1921 and the great offensive of August 1922, which drove the Greeks out of Anatolia. On 24 July 1923 the Treaty of Sèvres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, concluded with a Turkey that had won its borders for itself.

Article 230 also remained a dead letter. The British, who were holding several dozen Ottoman dignitaries suspected of involvement in the crimes on Malta, exchanged them in 1921 for British prisoners held by Ankara. The organisers of the genocide escaped an international tribunal. The former Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha was shot dead in Berlin on 15 March 1921 by an Armenian assassin, Soghomon Tehlirian, whom a German court acquitted.

Significance

Sèvres was the first treaty of the Paris settlement to collapse, and the only one that the defeated party overturned by force. In Turkey its memory has survived as the so-called Sèvres syndrome, the conviction that the West is only waiting to partition the country again. Mustafa Kemal, who had begun as a rebel under sentence of death, built a new state on his victory over Sèvres. Under the Montreux Convention of 1936 Turkey regained full control of the Straits, and in 1939 it annexed the Sanjak of Alexandretta, detached from French Syria – Hatay. During the Second World War it remained neutral almost to the end, and access to the Straits, which in 1920 had been decided by foreign commissions, was courted by both sides.

Just as important for the road to the Second World War was how the collapse of Sèvres was read elsewhere. In Germany, where the Treaty of Versailles was called a Diktat, the nationalist press followed closely how a defeated nation under a determined leader tore up an imposed peace. The historian Stefan Ihrig has described how Ankara became a model for the German right and later for the Nazis, and Adolf Hitler was still speaking of Kemal with admiration in the 1930s. The mandates allocated at San Remo and confirmed at Sèvres became a battlefield in 1941, when the British put down a pro-German coup in Iraq and took Syria and Lebanon from the forces of Vichy France. The unenforced Article 230 left a bitter lesson. Tehlirian’s trial moved a law student in Lwów (Lviv), Raphael Lemkin, who began to wonder why killing one man was a crime but murdering a nation was not. In 1944, in the midst of the Second World War, he gave that crime a name: genocide.