PARIS 1919 (63 page)

Several junior members of the American delegation resigned over the American position on Shantung. Lansing hung on as secretary of state in spite of his distaste. He had always felt that the United States should avoid a confrontation over China. As he had warned on an earlier occasion, “It would be quixotic in the extreme to allow the question of China's territorial integrity to involve the United States in international difficulties.” When Wilson fought unsuccessfully to persuade the American people to support the peace settlements, one of the issues that came up repeatedly at public meetings and in the Senate was the betrayal of China over Shantung. In the opinion of David Hunter Miller, the American legal expert at the Peace Conference, “most of the tears shed for the ‘Rape of Shantung' were wept by Republican crocodiles, who cared no more for China than for Hecuba.” In his last week in office, Wilson sent a note to buy tickets for a ball for the Chinese Famine Relief Fund. “I am very glad to be of any assistance,” he wrote, “however slight.”
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PART SEVEN

SETTING THE MIDDLE EAST ALIGHT

25

The Greatest Greek Statesman Since Pericles

IN DECEMBER 1918, when the Greek delegation to the Peace Conference left Athens, members of Parliament lined up to kiss the hand of its leader, the prime minister, Eleutherios Venizelos. A curious display for a man who was seen, in Western Europe at least, as a great democrat. The delegation stopped in Rome, where Venizelos talked with the Italian prime minister and foreign minister about the competing Italian and Greek claims for Albanian and Turkish territory. No agreement was reached. The Italian press, hostile at the start of the visit, became even more so when the train carrying the Greeks from Italy to France accidently killed two railway workers. In Paris, the delegates took possession of three floors of the Hôtel Mercedes, close to the British. Although they numbered only nineteen, they had taken rooms for eighty people.
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Greek demands at the Peace Conference demonstrated a similar optimism.

The Greek delegation included the foreign minister and a future president, but the only one who really counted was Venizelos. “A magnificent type of Greek,” said Frances Stevenson, “cast in the classical mould mentally and physically.” Energetic, persuasive, indefatigable, he won over the British, cajoled the French, reassured the Americans and almost neutralized the Italians. He worked fifteen-hour days in Paris; he wrote the memoranda and letters, gave the interviews and wooed the influential. Even the dour, self-important Hankey felt the spell at a lunch where Venizelos chatted “in abominable French” and was “deliciously indiscreet”; “a delightful old boy; a really big man.” Only a few wondered whether his influence over the peacemakers was a good thing; “he has most certainly the good will of all who know him,” said one American observer, “but is that really helpful? He enjoys the sympathy and the esteem of all the delegates and all the plenipotentiaries, but they also fear him because of his well-known and incontestable charm.” Venizelos was Greece's greatest asset and, in the long run, its greatest liability. Without him Greece would never have won what it did at the conference table; without him it would not have tried to swallow so much of Asia Minor.
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Venizelos was born into privilege, the son of a wealthy merchant on Crete, at a time when much of Greek territory (including Crete itself) was still under Turkish rule. He was christened Eleutherios, “Liberator”; his father had fought for Greece's independence and three of his uncles had died in the cause. When Venizelos was only two, in 1866, a ghastly incident occurred which he never forgot. A rebellion, one of a series that shook the island repeatedly, ended in disaster when beleaguered Cretan rebels blew themselves up in a monastery. The survivors were massacred by the Turks.
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His heritage, his history and his own character combined to produce a passionate Greek nationalist.

In 1881 Venizelos went to study law in Athens. Even then he was self-assured, haughty and a leader among his fellow students. He calmly contradicted his professors, refusing to back down even when it meant failing an examination. When a visiting British statesman, Joseph Chamberlain, was reported to have made a disparaging remark about Cretan nationalism, Venizelos demanded, and got, an interview. He informed Chamberlain that he was quite wrong and, in what was to become his style, showered him with facts and figures, all woven artfully together.
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The university of Athens, which had been founded just after Greece won its independence from the Ottomans, set out to revive classical culture; even the language of instruction was that of Socrates and Aristotle, not that of contemporary Greece. Many of its students, like Venizelos, saw themselves as missionaries of a Hellenic world to their fellows who still lived, unredeemed, under Turkish rule. One day, in his study, Venizelos gathered his friends around a large map. On it he drew the boundaries of the Greece he wanted: a good half of today's Albania and almost all of today's Turkey. Constantinople would be the capital.
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This was the
megali idea—
the “great idea.” “Nature,” said an early nationalist, “has set limits to the aspirations of other men, but not to those of the Greeks. The Greeks were not in the past and are not now subject to the laws of nature.” The
megali idea
(the word “megalomania” comes from the same root) was made up of dreams and fantasies, of a reborn empire reflecting the golden age when Greek had been spoken from Rome to the Crimea.
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At the end of the century, as Crete first freed itself from Turkish rule and then joined Greece, Venizelos was prominent in the struggle. By 1910 he was prime minister. In the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, he maneuvered on the international stage with such success that Greece emerged with a large swath of territory in the north, from Epirus in the west to Macedonia and part of Thrace in the east. The new territories more than doubled its size. As soon as Venizelos signed the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest, which confirmed Greece's gains, he said, “And now let us turn our eyes to the East.”
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The East meant Ottoman Turkey. So much of the Greek past lay there: Troy and the great city-states along the coast of Asia Minor—Pergamum, Ephesus, Halicarnassus. Herodotus, the father of history, was born there, and so was Hippocrates, the father of medicine. On Lesbos, Sappho had written her poetry, and at Sámos, Pythagoras had invented geometry. At the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles), Leander had drowned for love of Hero; Jason and his Argonauts had sailed to the eastern end of the Black Sea to retrieve the Golden Fleece from Colchis (in today's Georgia). The Byzantine empire and Christianity added another layer of memories and another basis for claims; for a thousand years, since Constantine became the first Christian emperor, his successors had sat in his city of Constantinople (today Istanbul), speaking Greek and keeping alive the great traditions. The Greek Orthodox patriarch still lived there, not in Athens. Santa Sophia, now a mosque, was the church built by the great Justinian in the sixth century. Centuries-old prophecies foretold that the city would be redeemed from the heathen Turks, who had taken it in 1453; generations of Greeks had longed for this.

Venizelos swore to the powers in Paris that Greece did not want Constantinople. Perhaps an American mandate might be desirable. Privately, he assured his intimates that Greece would soon achieve its dream; once the city was out of Turkish hands, the Greeks, with their natural industry and dynamism, would rapidly dominate it. “The Turks,” he told Lloyd George, “were incapable of administering properly such a great city and port.” During the Peace Conference Venizelos lost no opportunity to emphasize how very Greek the city was.
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For all that Greece, and Greek society, bore the imprint of the Ottoman past, Venizelos spoke for many Greeks when he insisted that his people were part of the modern, Western world. The Greeks would naturally civilize the backward Turks, just as the British or French were civilizing Africans and Asians. Why, he argued, one had only to look at the Greek birthrate (especially in Crete); the fact that it was the highest in the world demonstrated clearly the virility of the Greek nation. In 1919, he claimed, there were about two million Greeks living under Turkish rule.
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The correct figure was probably closer to one and a half million.
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Not all of that number, however, despite what Venizelos claimed, thought of themselves as part of a greater Greece. All through Ottoman Turkey there were Greek colonies; some, like those in Pontus around Trebizond on the south shore of the Black Sea, had been founded so long ago that their inhabitants spoke a barely recognizable Greek. In the interior there was little difference between Greek and Turk. Perhaps as many as 400,000 nominal Greeks were distinguished from their Turkish neighbors solely by their religion and by the fact that they used Greek characters to write Turkish words. It was mainly in the great ports, Smyrna (today's Izmir) and Constantinople, that Greek nationalism meant something.

In the decades before 1914, thousands of Greeks migrated to Turkey looking for work and opportunity. They brought with them the hopes of their countrymen that the Turkish Greeks could be redeemed.
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Changes in Turkey itself stimulated Greek nationalism. When the Young Turks seized power in 1908, the old easy tolerance the Ottomans had shown to minorities was doomed; in 1912 and 1913, when Muslim refugees fled from the Balkans back to Turkey, reprisals started there against Christian minorities. Even so, before the Great War Venizelos was cautious about talk of protecting the Turkish Greeks or of bringing them into union with Greece; his country had to recover from the Balkan wars and absorb its conquests. Indeed, in 1914 Venizelos was prepared to negotiate a peaceful exchange of populations, Greeks from Thrace and Asia Minor for Turks from Greece. The exchange, eight years later, was neither negotiated nor peaceful.

The First World War changed the picture completely. The Ottomans chose the losing side, Venizelos and Greece the winning one. By 1919 the Ottoman empire was in disarray and even Turkey seemed fated to disappear. The extent of the victory and the power of Greece's friends were intoxicating; Greek newspapers talked of “the realization of our dreams.” Only Constantinople was not mentioned, because the censors forbade it. In reality, Turkey was defeated but far from finished; Greece's friends were neither as powerful nor as steadfast as Venizelos assumed; and Greece itself was deeply divided between supporters and enemies of Venizelos.
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The divisions were a legacy of Greece's entry into the war. Although Venizelos had been outspokenly pro-Ally from the start, King Constantine, who was married to the German emperor's sister and, more important, was a realist, wanted to keep Greece neutral. The king and his supporters were immune to the heady vision of a greater country; “a small but honourable Greece” was their preference.
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A prolonged political crisis between 1915 and 1917 saw Venizelos driven from office; in 1916 he set up a provisional government in defiance of the king, which brought half of Greece into the war; and in 1917 Constantine was forced to leave Greece. A reunited Greece entered the war on the Allied side, but the unity was as thin as the excuses that Venizelos now used to round up his opponents. Government, judiciary, civil service, army, even the Orthodox church, were all purged, leaving a rift in Greek society that endured for a generation.

In the Allied camp these actions, if they were noticed at all, did little damage to Venizelos's reputation. He had bravely allowed British and French troops to land at Salonika (today Thessalon
ki) when Greece was still neutral; he had spent millions that Greece could not afford on the military; and Greek troops had not only fought in the war but had gone off to help Allied anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia. He was a loyal ally, completely in sympathy with the West and its values, and opposed to German militarism. Venizelos quoted Wilsonian principles whenever possible; he became an enthusiastic supporter of the League of Nations.
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Venizelos was a star of the Peace Conference, the “biggest man he met,” said Wilson with unwonted enthusiasm. He held dinner tables spellbound with stories of life as a guerrilla in the Cretan mountains, of how he had taught himself English by reading
The Times
with a rifle resting on his knees. And always the conversation included references to the glorious past and great future of Greece. “The whole,” reported Harold Nicolson, “gives us a strange medley of charm, brigandage, welt-politik, patriotism, courage, literature—and above all this large muscular smiling man, with his eyes glinting through spectacles, and on his head a square skull-cap of black silk.
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On February 3, 1919, Venizelos got his chance to present Greece's case to the Supreme Council. He came with his notes, his statistics, even photograph albums showing happy Greek fishermen on the islands he wanted. That morning and the following day he was so reasonable, so persuasive. History, language, religion and of course, with a nod to the Americans, self-determination—he used them all. It was quite simple, he argued; in Europe, Greece must have the southern part of Albania (North Epirus, as he preferred to call it) and, farther east, between the Aegean and the Black Sea, Thrace (at the very least the western part), a few islands and a huge piece of Asia Minor stretching from a point halfway along the south shore of the Sea of Marmara almost four hundred miles down to the southern coast of Asia Minor to Smyrna. He pointed out that Greece was not asking for Constantinople. He complimented the Italians and made flattering references to the work of American teachers in his part of the world. It was a masterly performance: “such amazing strength & tactfulness of argument combined,” in the opinion of a junior British diplomat. It was also dangerous—to Greece, to the Greeks and to the future peace of the Middle East. In that moment of triumph at the Peace Conference, Venizelos lit a fuse that led to the catastrophic destruction of ancient Greek communities in Turkey and to a hostility between Greece and Turkey that persists today.
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