13 - Creating Resistance – Mustafa Kemal

Summary

In 1918, before the end of the war, Prime Minister Lloyd George had stated publicly that Britain was not fighting to deprive the Turks of Asia Minor or Thrace, with Constantinople continuing as the Ottoman capital. Armenia, Syria and Arabia would be detached from Ottoman rule, but Anatolia, Thrace and Constantinople would remain Ottoman. Lloyd George said there was general agreement on this among the British Government and officials such as Asquith and Grey. Later it was stated that this proclamation was only ‘intended to weaken the will of the enemy, and to induce them to make a separate peace, rather than a summary of our war aims’.

The private sentiments of the British Cabinet members, including Lloyd George, had been quite different to the prime minister's public statement that the Ottomans would retain their capital. Before the war ended, Foreign Secretary Balfour stated that he wanted the Turks out of Istanbul; he was ‘against leaving any power for evil to the Turks’. During the war, Lord Curzon, then a member of Lloyd George's War Cabinet, later foreign secretary, made plain his desire to see the Turks evicted from Istanbul. Accompanied by descriptions of the Ottoman Empire as having ‘been a source of distraction, intrigue, and corruption in European politics’ and ‘one of (the earth’s) most pestilent roots of evil’, he set forth his plan for the Ottoman capital: the sultan would retire to either Bursa or Konya, accompanied by most of the Turks resident in Istanbul. An international commission would rule the city, its immediate hinterlands and the Straits. Thrace would be divided between the Greeks and the Bulgarians. Hagia Sophia would once again become a Greek Orthodox church.

After World War I, in 1919, Curzon had not changed his mind: ‘Constantinople in his (the Turk’s) hands has been, and if left there will remain, a plague-spot of the Eastern world.’ Lloyd George added his agreement that the Turks should leave Istanbul. A cabinet interdepartmental committee recommended that there be no Ottoman sovereignty in Istanbul or the Straits, and that both were to be ruled by an international commission.