On March 12, 1920, the Supreme Council offered the mandate to the League of Nations. But the League, unsupported by men or money, promptly and with prudence declined. There remained the Treaty of Sèvres. On August 10 the Powers compelled the Constantinople Government to recognize an as yet undetermined Armenia as a free and independent State. Article 89 prescribed that Turkey must submit to 'the arbitration of the President of the United States of America the question of . . the frontier to be fixed between Turkey and Armenia in the vilayets of Erzeroum, Trebizond, Van and Bitlis, and to accept his decision thereupon, as well as any stipulation he may prescribe as to access of Armenia to the sea.' It was not until December 1920 that President Wilson completed the discharge of this high function. The frontier he defined gave Armenia virtually all the Turkish territory which had been occupied by Russian troops until they disbanded themselves under the influence of the Revolution; and era which, added to the Republic of Erivan, made an Armenian national homeland of nearly sixty thousand square miles.
So generous was the recognition in theory of Armenian claims that the Armenian and Greek population of the new State was actually outnumbered by Moslem inhabitants. Here was justice and much more. It existed however upon paper only. Already nearly a year before, in January 1920, the Turks had attacked the French in Cilicia, driven them out of the Marash district and massacred nearly fifty thousand Armenian inhabitants. In May Bolshevik troops invaded and subjugated the Republic of Erivan. In September, by collusion between the Bolsheviks and Turks, Erivan was delivered to the Turkish Nationalists; and as in Cilicia, another extensive massacre of Armenians accompanied the military operations. Even the hope that a small autonomous Armenian province might eventually be established in Cilicia under French protection was destroyed.
In October France, by the Agreement of Angora, undertook to evacuate Cilicia completely. In the Treaty of Lausanne, which registered the final peace between Turkey and the Great Powers, history will search in vain for the word « Armenia ». (Winston Churchill , The World Crisis, vol. 5, « The Aftermath » 1929).
MaviBoncuk
1 comments:
The « massacres » alleged by Churchill are, for the most important part, a big lie, a myth, as explained by Dr. Robert F. Zeidner and Prof. Stanford J. Shaw in their books :
« The Tricolor over the Taurus », New York, Peter Lang, 1996, 2nd edition, Ankara, TTK, 2005; « From Empire To Republic », Ankara, TTK, 2000.
On the contrary, the Armenian Legion committed many outrages against the Muslim population in Cilicia. There are evidences about it not only in Turkish archives, but also in French, English and American archives. Several thousands of Armenians were even expelled to Egypt by the French authorities, because they knew only kill and rape, not fight against soldiers.
But this kind of mistake are non unusual in Churchill's writings. His words about the Jews, for example, are often more than questionable.
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