October 1919

Background

The Ottoman Empire was a state that controlled much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia and North Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries. After 1354, the Ottomans crossed into Europe, and with the conquest of the Balkans, it was transformed into a transcontinental empire. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire; the last ruminates of the 1,600-year-old Roman Empire, in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, at the height of its power, the Ottoman Empire was a multinational, multilingual empire controlling most of Southeast Europe, parts of Central Europe, Western Asia, parts of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. At the beginning of the 17th century, the empire contained 32 provinces and numerous vassal states.

With Constantinople as its capital and control of lands around the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire was at the center of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds.

The empire maintained a flexible and strong economy, society and military throughout the 17th and much of the 18th century. However, the Ottoman military slowly fell behind that of their European rivals, the Austrian-Hungarian and Russian empires.

The Ottomans consequently suffered severe military defeats in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which at the time were styled as military campaigns to free Christian people from the yoke of Muslim rule. The military efforts of the Austrian-Hungarian and Russian empires, which at the time worked as allies, resulted in the freeing of the peoples in Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and the creation of their respective nation states. Meanwhile, the British Empire attacked it in the South, capturing Egypt, bringing that nation under its control.

The Ottoman Empire In WW1

In the early 20th century the Ottoman Empire allied itself with Germany, hoping to escape from the diplomatic isolation which had contributed to its territorial losses, and thus joined World War I on the side of the Central Powers. While the Empire was able to largely hold its own during the conflict, it was struggling with internal dissent, especially with the Arab Revolt in its Arabian holdings.

The history of the Ottoman Empire during World War I began with the Ottoman surprise attack on the Russian Black Sea coast on October 29, 1914. Following the attack, Russia and its allies, France and Britain, declared war on the Ottomans. There were several important Ottoman victories in the early years of the war, such as the Battle of Gallipoli and the Siege of Kut.

In 1915 the Ottoman government started the extermination of its ethnic Armenian population, resulting in the death of approximately 1.5 million Armenians in the Armenian Genocide. The genocide was carried out and implemented in two phases: the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labor, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian desert. Large-scale massacres were also committed against the Empire's Greek and Assyrian minorities as part of the same campaign of ethnic cleansing.

The Arab Revolt began in 1916 and turned the tide against the Ottomans on the Middle Eastern front. The Arab Revolt, which was in part orchestrated by T. E. Lawrence (aka: Lawrence of Arabia) and resulted in British forces under General Edmund Allenby defeating the Ottoman forces in 1917 in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and occupying Palestine and Syria.

By 1917, following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the attention of the Allies shifted away from defeating the Ottoman Empire to turning back the German offensive on the Western Front. With the defeat of the German offensive, the Ottoman Empire found itself without its key benefactor, and quickly became a ‘side show’ in the final months of the war. Like Germany and Austria-Hungary, the terms of its peace treaty were dictated to it.

The Sykes–Picot Agreement

The Sykes–Picot Agreement was a 1916 secret treaty between England and France, with assent from the Russian Empire and Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement was based on the premise that the Allies would succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire and formed part of a series of secret agreements outlining its partition. The primary negotiations leading to the agreement occurred during the winter of 1915-1916, which was ratified by their respective governments on 9 and 16 May 1916.

The agreement effectively divided the Ottoman provinces outside the Arabian Peninsula into areas of British and French control and influence. The agreement allocated to Britain control of what is today southern Israel and Palestine, Jordan and southern Iraq, and an additional small area that included the ports of Haifa and Acre to allow access to the Mediterranean. France got control of southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

As a result of the agreement, Russia was to get Western Armenia in addition to Constantinople and the Dardanelles. Italy assented to the agreement in 1917 via the Agreement and received southern Anatolia. The Palestine region, with smaller boundaries than the later Mandate of Palestine was to fall under an international administration.

The agreement was initially used as the basis for the 1918 Anglo–French Modus Vivendi, which was an agreement for a framework for the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration in the Levant. More broadly it was to lead, indirectly, to the subsequent partitioning of the Ottoman Empire following their surrender in 1918.

Shortly after the war, the French ceded Palestine and Mosul to the British. Mandates in the Levant and Mesopotamia were assigned at the April 1920 San Remo Conference following the Sykes-Picot framework; the British Mandate for Palestine ran until 1948, the British Mandate for Mesopotamia was to be replaced by a similar treaty with a mandate for Iraq, and the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon lasting until 1946.

The Ottoman Empire's possessions in the Arabian Peninsula became the Kingdom of Hejaz, which was annexed by the Sultanate of Nejd (today Saudi Arabia), and the Kingdom of Yemen. The Empire's possessions on the western shores of the Persian Gulf were variously annexed by Saudi Arabia, or remained British protectorates (Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar) and became the present Arab States of the Persian Gulf.

Mandates

Syria and Lebanon became a French protectorate (thinly disguised as a League of Nations Mandate). French control was met immediately with armed resistance, and, in order to combat Arab nationalism, France divided the Mandate area into Lebanon and four sub-states. Greater Lebanon was the name of a territory created by France. It was the precursor of modern Lebanon. It existed from 1920 to 1926. France carved its territory from the Levantine in order to create a "safe haven" for the Maronite Christian population. Marionettes gained self-rule and secured their position in the independent Lebanon in 1943.

The British were awarded three mandated territories by the League of Nations, with one of Sharif Hussein's sons, Faisal, installed as King of Iraq and Transjordan providing a throne for another of Hussein's sons, Abdullah. The mandate of Palestine was placed under direct British administration, and the Jewish population was allowed to increase, initially under British protection. Most of the Arabian peninsula fell to another British ally, Ibn Saud, who created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

Mosul, the capital of the old Turkish Kurdish population, was allocated to France under the Sykes-Picot Agreement but was subsequently given to Britain by the League of Nations. Great Britain and Turkey disputed control of the former Ottoman province of Mosul in the 1920s. In 1923 Mosul fell under the British Mandate of Mesopotamia, but the new Turkish republic claimed the province as part of its historic heartland. A three-person League of Nations committee went to the region in 1924 to study the case and in 1925 recommended the region remain connected to Iraq, and that the UK should hold the mandate for another 25 years, to assure the autonomous rights of the Kurdish population. Mosul stayed under the British Mandate of Mesopotamia until Iraq was granted independence in 1932.

Ramifications From The Partition

The secret agreements between England and France to divide up between themselves the spoils of the Ottoman Empire is seen by many as a turning point in Western and Arab relations. It negated England’s promises to the Arabs regarding a national Arab homeland in the area of Greater Syria in exchange for supporting the British against the Ottoman Empire.

The agreement, along with others, was exposed to the public by the Bolsheviks in Moscow in November 1917 such that "the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted". The agreement's legacy has continued to bolster mistrust among Arabs over present-day conflicts in the region.

The forcible carving out of nations like Iraq (from three disparate provinces of the Ottoman Empire), Palestine, and forcible division of Syria along communal lines is thought by many analysts to have been a part of the larger strategy of ensuring infighting in the Middle East, thus necessitating the role of Western colonial powers (at that time Britain, France and Italy) as peace brokers and arms suppliers.

Independence Movements

When the Ottomans departed, the Arabs proclaimed an independent state in Damascus, but were too weak, militarily and economically, to resist the European powers for long, and Britain and France soon established control.

During the 1920s and 1930s Iraq, Syria and Egypt moved towards independence, although the British and French did not formally depart the region until after World War II.

In Palestine, the conflicting forces of Arab nationalism and Zionism created a situation which the British could neither resolve nor extricate themselves from. The rise to power of Nazism in Germany created a new urgency in the Zionist quest to create a Jewish state in Palestine, leading to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

On the Arabian Peninsula, the Arabs were able to establish a number of independent states as the Ottomans withdrew. In 1916 Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, established the Kingdom of Hejaz, while the Emirate of Riyadh was transformed into the Sultanate of Nejd. In 1926 the Kingdom of Nejd and Hejaz was formed, which in 1932 became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom of Yemen became independent in 1918, while the Arab States of the Persian Gulf became de facto British protectorates, with some internal autonomy.

The British seeking control over the Dardanelles led to the occupation of Constantinople, with French assistance, from November 1918 to September 1923. After the Turkish War of Independence and the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, the British troops left the city.

The Allies, particularly British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, promised Greece territorial gains at the expense of the Ottoman Empire if Greece entered the war on the Allied side. The promised territories included eastern Thrace and parts of western Anatolia.

In May 1917, after the exile of King Constantine of Greece, Greek Prime Minister Eleuthérios Venizélos returned to Athens and renounced Constantine’s planned alliance with Germany and instead, allied Greece with the Allies. Greek military forces began to take part in military operations against the Bulgarian army, thereby turning the tide of the war in that part of the world, and eventually leading to the defeat of the Austrian Empire.

At the Paris Peace Conference, based on the wartime promises, Venizélos lobbied hard for expanded Greek control of the islands in the Aegean Sea as well as the small Greek speaking community in Southern Albania, the Orthodox Greek speaking community in Thrace (including Constantinople) and the Orthodox community in Asia Minor, as well as Greek control of Bulgarian land along the Aegean Sea. In 1919, despite Italian opposition, he obtained the permission of the Paris Peace Conference for Greece to obtain those areas.

At the Paris Peace Conference, the Armenians argued that historical Armenia, the region which had remained outside the control of the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1918, should be part of the Democratic Republic of Armenia. Arguing from the principles in Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" speech, the Armenians argued that Armenia had "the ability to control the region," based on the Armenian control established after the Russian Revolution.

The Armenians also argued that the dominant population of the region was becoming more Armenian as Turkish inhabitants were moving to the western provinces. The president of the Armenian National Delegation told the peace conference that: "In the Caucasus, where, without mentioning the 150,000 Armenians in the Imperial Russian Army, more than 40,000 of their volunteers contributed to the liberation of a portion of Armenia, and where, under the command of their leaders, they, alone among the peoples of the Caucasus, offered resistance to the Turkish armies, from the beginning of the Bolshevist withdrawal right up to the signing of an armistice."

President Wilson accepted the Armenian arguments for drawing the frontier and wrote: "The world expects of them (the Armenians), that they give every encouragement and help within their power to those Turkish refugees who may desire to return to their former homes … remembering that these peoples, too, have suffered greatly." The peace conference agreed with his suggestion that the Democratic Republic of Armenia should expand into present-day eastern Turkey.

Before being overrun and forced into the Soviet Union, the Democratic Republic of Armenia signed the Treaty of Alexandropol, on December 1920, agreeing to the current border between the two countries, though the Armenian government had already collapsed due to a concurrent Soviet invasion. Afterwards, Armenia became an integral part of the Soviet Union and only re-emerged as an independent country following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.

After the fall of the Russian Empire, the Christian population of Georgia became an independent republic and sought to maintain control of the areas with Muslim Georgian elements, which had been acquired by Russia from the Ottomans in 1878. Soviet Russia and Turkey launched a near-simultaneous attack on Georgia in February–March 1921, leading to new territorial rearrangements by divided Georgia between the two victors.

Like its neighbor Armenia, Georgia became an integral part of the Soviet Union and only re-emerged as an independent country following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. In 2008 it was invaded by Russia resulting in the occupation of two Russian-speaking provinces – the self-proclaimed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Formation Of The Republic Of Turkey

Between 1918 and 1923, Turkish resistance movements led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk forced the Greeks and Armenians out of Anatolia, The Turkish revolutionaries also suppressed Kurdish attempts to become independent in the 1920s.

Turkey and the newly formed Soviet Union, along with the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, ratified the Treaty of Kars in September 1922, establishing the north-eastern border of Turkey and bringing peace to the region, despite none of them being internationally recognized at the time. Finally, the Treaty of Lausanne, signed in 1923, formally ended all hostilities and led to the creation of the modern Turkish republic under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal.

Kemal would go on to become Turkey’s equivalent to America’s George Washington. He steered the country away from foreign entanglements, drew a sharp separation between church and state, thereby ending 500 years of Muslim rule, and provided for freedom of religion and the press. In short, he transitioned what at one time was a backward 3rd world country into a modern western republic. While technically a Republic, Kemal established a military as the guarantors of Turkeys new non-secular institutions.

Under these institutions, Turkey remained neutral in World War II, thereby blocking Nazi Germany’s ability to coordinate Rommel’s’ drive on the Suez Canal with a drive from the North, allowing the Allies to defeat Rommel, resulting in the first defeat of a German army, and eventually bringing about the capture of North Africa.

During the Cold War, Turkey allied itself with the western powers against the Soviet Union, joining NATO, and forming the eastern most front in the western power efforts to block the spread of Communism. With its control of the Dardanelles, Turkey, for all intents and purposes, controlled the passage of Soviet naval forces to and from the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, thereby assuring NATO dominance of this sea.

It 1962 NATO stationed medium range nuclear armed missiles in Turkey. The closeness of the missiles to the Soviet heartland led to the Soviet decision to attempt to station nuclear tipped missiles in Cuba, leading to the Cuban Missile Crises.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey continued on its western looking approach, with the ultimate goal of joining the European Union, turning its back on Asia and forever casting its lot with Europe. Turkey’s European Union aspirations, however, reached a roadblock in the past decade with the rise of an Islamic oriented government that challenged many of the principles required for entry into the Union.

Since that time, sadly, all of Kemal’s checks and balances to keep church and state separate, have been undone, leading to a on-going spiraling of Turkey into the religious and tribal wars that are consuming the present Middle East.

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