PARIS 1919 (68 page)

As so often, the Peace Conference delayed difficult decisions. At that January meeting, Wilson suggested that the military advisers look at how the burden of occupying the Turkish territories could best be shared out. “This would clarify the question,” said Lloyd George. Of course, it did not. The report duly came in and was discussed briefly on February 10; it was put on the agenda for the following day but in the event the boundaries of Belgium proved to be much more interesting.
²⁷

On February 26, the appearance of an Armenian delegation before the Supreme Council briefly reminded the peacemakers that the Ottoman empire remained to be settled. Boghos Nubar Pasha was smooth, rich and cultivated; his father had been prime minister of Egypt. His partner, Avetis Aharonian, was a tough, cynical poet from the Caucasus. Boghos spoke for the Armenian diaspora, Aharonian for the homeland in the mountains where Russia, Persia and Turkey met. In what was by now a familiar pattern they appealed to history—the centuries that Armenians had lived there, the persistence of Armenian Christianity—to their services to the Allies (some Armenians had fought in Russia's armies) and to Allied promises. And, like other delegations, they staked out a claim for a huge area of land, stretching south and west from the Caucasus down to the Mediterranean. Less typically, they also asked for the protection of an outside power, a wise request for a country with such neighbors and such a past. They placed their hopes on the United States. “Scarcely a day passed,” said an American expert, “that mournful Armenians, bearded and black-clad, did not besiege the American delegation or, less frequently, the President, setting forth the really terrible conditions in their own native land.”
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The Armenians brought one of the saddest histories to the conference. Between 1375, when the last independent Armenian state was conquered, and the spring of 1918, when nationalist forces had proclaimed the republic of Armenia on what had been Russian territory, they had lived under alien rule. After the Russians had advanced down into the Caucasus at the start of the nineteenth century, the Armenian lands were divided up among Russia itself, Ottoman Turkey and Persia. The Armenians, many of them simple farmers, had become Russian, Turkish or Persian, but as ideas of nationalism and self-determination swept eastward, the vision of a reborn Armenian nation took shape. It was not a coherent vision— Christian, secular, conservative, radical, pro-Turkish or pro-Russian, there was no agreement as to what Armenia might be—but it was increasingly powerful. Unfortunately, however, Armenian nationalism was not the only nationalism growing in that part of the world.

“Who remembers the Armenians today?” Hitler asked cynically. At the Paris Peace Conference, the horrors of what the Turks had done to the Armenians were still fresh, and the world had not yet grown used to attempts to exterminate peoples. The killings had started in the 1890s, when the old regime turned savagely on any groups that opposed it. Ottoman troops and local Kurds, themselves awakening as a nation, had rampaged through Armenian villages. The Young Turks, who took over the government in 1908, promised a new era with talk of a secular, multi-ethnic state, but they also dreamed of linking up with other Turkish peoples in central Asia. In that Pan-Turanian world, Armenians and other Christians had no place.

When the Ottoman empire entered the war, Enver Pasha, one of the triumvirate of Young Turks who had ruled in Constantinople since 1913, sent the bulk of its armies eastward, against Russia. The result, in 1915, was disaster; the Russians destroyed a huge Ottoman force and looked set to advance into Anatolia just when the Allies were landing at Gallipoli in the west. The triumvirate gave the order to deport Armenians from eastern Anatolia on the grounds that they were traitors, potential or actual. Many Armenians were slaughtered before they could leave; others died of hunger and disease on the forced marches southward. Whether the Ottoman government's real goal was genocide is still much disputed; so is the number of dead, anywhere from 300,000 to 1.5 million.
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Western opinion was appalled. In Britain, Armenia's cause attracted supporters from the duke of Argyll to the young Arnold Toynbee. British children were told to remember the starving Armenians when they failed to clean their plates. In the United States, huge sums of money were raised for relief. Clemenceau wrote the preface for a book detailing the atrocities: “Is it true that at the dawn of the twentieth century, five days from Paris, atrocities have been committed with impunity, covering a land with horror—such that one cannot imagine worse in time of the deepest barbarity?” The usually restrained Lansing wrote to Wilson, who was strongly pro-Armenian, “It is one of the blackest pages in the history of this war.” “Say to the Armenians,” exclaimed Orlando, “that I make their cause my cause.” Lloyd George promised that Armenia would never be restored to “the blasting tyranny” of the Turks. “There was not a British statesman of any party,” he wrote in his memoirs, “who did not have it in mind that if we succeeded in defeating this inhuman Empire, our essential condition of the peace we should impose was the redemption of the Armenian valleys for ever from the bloody misrule with which they had been stained by the infamies of the Turks.”
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Fine sentiments—but they amounted to little in the end. At the Peace Conference, even heartfelt agreement on principle faltered in the face of other considerations. Armenia was far away; it was surrounded by enemies and the Allies had few forces in the area. Moving troops and aid in, at a time when resources were stretched thin, was a major undertaking; what railways there were had been badly damaged and the roads were primitive. Help was far away, but Armenia's enemies were close at hand. Russians, whether the armies of the Whites or the Bolsheviks, who were advancing southward, would not tolerate Armenia or any other independent state in the Caucasus. On Armenia's other flank, Turks deeply resented the loss of Turkish territory, and the further losses implied in the Armenian claims.

In Paris, Armenia's friends were lukewarm and hesitant. The British, it is true, saw certain advantages for themselves in taking a mandate for Armenia: the protection of oil supplies coming from Baku on the Caspian to the port of Batum on the Black Sea, and the creation of a barrier between Bolshevism and the British possessions in the Middle East. (In their worst nightmares, the British imagined Bolshevism linking up with a resurgent Islam and toppling the British empire.) On the other hand, as the War Office kept repeating, British resources were already overstretched. The French Foreign Office, for its part, toyed with ideas of a huge Armenia under French protection which would provide a field for French investment and the spread of French culture. Clemenceau, however, had little enthusiasm for the notion. The Italians, like the French, preferred to concentrate their efforts on gains on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey and in Europe. That left the Americans.
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On March 7, House assured Lloyd George and Clemenceau that the United States would undoubtedly take on a mandate. Lloyd George was delighted at the prospect of the Americans taking on the “noble duty,” and relieved that the French were not taking on a mandate. House, as he often did, was exaggerating. Wilson had warned the Supreme Council that “he could think of nothing the people of the United States would be less inclined to accept than military responsibility in Asia.” It is perhaps a measure of how far Wilson's judgment had deteriorated that, on May 14, when Armenia came up at the Council of Four, he agreed to accept a mandate, subject, he added, to the consent of the American Senate. This ruffled the French because the proposed American mandate was to stretch from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, taking in the zone in Cilicia promised to France under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. While Clemenceau, who took little interest in the Turkish-speaking territories, did not raise an objection, his colleagues were furious. From London, Paul Cambon complained: “They must be drunk the way they are surrendering . . . a total capitulation, a mess, an unimaginable shambles.” Although no one suspected it at the time, no arrangement made in Paris was going to make the slightest difference to Armenia.
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Many other schemes for the Ottoman empire were floating around the conference rooms and dinner tables in Paris that spring. “Let it be a
manda
[buffalo],” said one wit in Constantinople, “let it be an ox, let it be any animal whatsoever; only let it come quickly.” If all the claims, protectorates, independent states and mandates that were discussed actually had come into existence, a very odd little Turkey in the interior of Anatolia would have been left, with no straits, no Mediterranean coast, a truncated Black Sea coast, and no Armenian or Kurdish territories in the northeast. What was left out of the calculation in Paris, among other things, was the inability of the powers to enforce their will. Henry Wilson, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, thought the politicians completely unrealistic: “They seem to think that their writ runs in Turkey in Asia. We have never, even after the armistice, attempted to get into the background parts.” Also overlooked were the Turks themselves. Almost everyone in Paris assumed that they would simply do as they were told. When Edwin Montagu, the British secretary of state for India, cried, “Let us not for Heaven's sake, tell the Moslem what he ought to think, let us recognize what they do think,” Balfour replied with chilling detachment, “I am quite unable to see why Heaven or any other Power should object to our telling the Moslem what he ought to think.” That went for the Arab subjects of the Ottoman empire as well.
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27

Arab Independence

ONE DAY DURING the Peace Conference, Arnold Toynbee, an adviser to the British delegation, had to deliver some papers to the prime minister. “Lloyd George, to my delight, had forgotten my presence and had begun to think aloud. ‘Mesopotamia . . . yes . . . oil . . . irrigation . . . we must have Mesopotamia; Palestine . . . yes . . . the Holy Land . . . Zionism . . . we must have Palestine; Syria . . . h'm . . . what is there in Syria? Let the French have that.'”
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Thus the lineaments of the peace settlement in the Middle East were exposed: Britain seizing its chance; the need to throw something to the French; a homeland for the Jews; oil; and the calm assumption that the peacemakers could dispose of the former Ottoman territories to suit themselves. For the Arab Middle East, the peace settlements were the old nineteenth-century imperialism again. Britain and France got away with it—temporarily—because the United States did not choose to involve itself and because Arab nationalism was not yet strong enough to challenge them.

At their meeting in London in December 1918, just before Wilson arrived in Europe, Lloyd George and Clemenceau found time to agree on a division of the Ottoman empire's vast Arab territories, stretching from Mesopotamia on the borders of the Persian empire to the Mediterranean. Both men were still buoyed up by their victory over Germany and by the novel but apparently warm friendship between their two nations. Clemenceau was delighted at his reception as the London crowds went mad, cheering, whistling and throwing hats and walking sticks into the air. “Really,” said Mordacq, Clemenceau's aide, “among such a phlegmatic and cold people, that spoke volumes.” The conversation on the Middle East was short and good-humored. “Well,” said Clemenceau, “what are we to discuss?” Lloyd George replied, “Mesopotamia and Palestine.” Clemenceau: “Tell me what you want.” Lloyd George: “I want Mosul.” Clemenceau: “You shall have it. Anything else?” Lloyd George: “Yes I want Jerusalem too.” Clemenceau: “You shall have it but Pichon will make difficulties about Mosul.”
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(Mosul was about to become important because of oil.)

Lloyd George apparently gave Clemenceau promises in return: that Britain would support France, even against the Americans, in its demand for control over the Lebanese coast and the interior of Syria, and that France would have a share of whatever oil turned up in Mosul. Clemenceau was so generous, the French later claimed, because Lloyd George had also assured him that he could count on British support for his demands in Europe, particularly along the Rhine. Lloyd George does not mention that part of the deal in his memoirs. Were the French wrong or the British being perfidious (again)? Unfortunately there was no official record of the conversation. It was an ill-omened start for an issue that was to poison French-British relations during the Peace Conference and for many years after.
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What came to be called the Syrian Question (although it really related to all the Ottoman Arab territories) need not have done so much damage. Britain and France had already made their deal on the Middle East with the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. The unexpected collapse of the Ottoman empire, however, stirred up old dreams and old rivalries. The bickering, which dragged on through 1919, was about more than territory. It was about Joan of Arc and William the Conqueror, the Heights of Abraham and Plassy, about the Crusades, about Napoleon in Egypt and Nelson's destruction of his fleet at the Battle of the Nile, about the scramble for Africa, which had so nearly led to war over Fashoda, Sudan, in 1898, and about the competition for influence between French and Anglo-Saxon civilization.

Lloyd George, a Liberal turned land-grabber, made it worse. Like Napoleon, he was intoxicated by the possibilities of the Middle East: a restored Hellenic world in Asia Minor; a new Jewish civilization in Palestine; Suez and all the links to India safe from threat; loyal and obedient Arab states along the Fertile Crescent and the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates; protection for British oil supplies from Persia and the possibility of new sources under direct British control; the Americans obligingly taking mandates here and there; the French doing what they were told. At a private dinner just before the end of the war his closest advisers found him “in a very
exalté
frame of mind,” “very intransigent.” He wanted to exclude France as much as possible from the Middle East, even at the cost of breaking previous promises. And that meant above all Sykes-Picot, “that unfortunate Agreement,” as Curzon put it, “which has been hanging like a millstone round our necks ever since.”
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Like so many of the other deals that haunted the Peace Conference as unwelcome guests, Sykes-Picot was made in the midst of the war, when promises were cheap and the prospect of defeat very real. In 1916, the war was going badly for the Allies. In the east the Gallipoli landings had failed and in Mesopotamia a large force from India had surrendered. The British wanted to start a new offensive against the Ottomans from Egypt but to divert resources from the Western Front they had to have French agreement. What they offered as bait was an agreement on the future disposition of the Ottoman empire.

The two negotiators were both Catholic, and both knew the Middle East at first hand. Picot had been consul-general in Beirut before the war, and Sykes had traveled widely from Cairo to Baghdad. Picot was born into that French upper middle class which produced so many of France's diplomats, colonial governors and high-ranking bureaucrats. Tall and pompous, conservative and devout, he cared equally for his own dignity and that of France. He was close to powerful colonial lobby groups in France; his brother was treasurer of the Comité de l'Asie Française, which in spite of its name was much concerned with the Middle East.
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Sykes, by contrast, was one of those wealthy, aristocratic dilettantes who fluttered around the fringes of British diplomacy. He never had much formal schooling—tutors on the great estate in Yorkshire, brief interludes at boarding schools and a couple of years at Cambridge, where he distinguished himself in amateur theatricals. He was enthusiastic, energetic and frequently impractical. T. E. Lawrence said of him: “He saw the odd in everything, and missed the even. He would sketch out in a few dashes a new world, all out of scale, but vivid as a vision of some sides of the thing we hoped.” He loved practical jokes, drawing caricatures, the Yorkshire countryside and the British empire. He hated cities, routine and pacifists. He was devoted to his wife and six children, perhaps because of his own unhappy childhood with a drunken and promiscuous mother and a neurasthenic and cold father. He adored the old, unspoiled Middle East of the desert and simple peasants; he blamed the French and international finance for modernizing and corrupting the old society. He admired French culture but thought France did not deserve its empire. “The French,” he said after visiting French North Africa, “are incapable of commanding respect, they are not sahibs, they have no gentlemen, the officers have no horses or guns or dogs.”
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Curiously, Picot and Sykes managed to work well together. Their plan, which was approved by their respective governments in May 1916, was reasonable enough, if you were a Western imperialist. The Syrian coast, much of today's Lebanon, was to go to France, while Britain would take direct control over central Mesopotamia, around Baghdad, and the southern part around Basra. Palestine, a thorny issue because of the intense interest of other Christian powers (Russia in particular), would have an international administration. What was left, a huge area that included what is now Syria, Mosul in the north of Iraq, and Jordan, would have local Arab chiefs under the supervision of the French in the north and the British in the south. (The Arabian peninsula was not mentioned, presumably because no one thought all those miles of sand worth worrying about.) The agreement appeased the French, who had considerable investments along the Syrian coast and who saw themselves as protectors of the area's large Christian communities, such as the Maronites around Mount Lebanon. It suited the British equally well, and they had cleverly placed the French between themselves and the Russian empire as it reached southward.
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Almost as soon as the deal was made, the British nevertheless began to regret it. Would it not be wiser to control Palestine, so close to the Suez Canal, directly? This was much urged by British officials in Egypt. Why should the French get Mosul? When Russia dropped out of the war in 1917, it suddenly seemed less essential to have France as a buffer. Sykes, reported a colleague as news of the Ottoman surrender came in, “has evolved a new and most ingenious scheme by which the French are to clear out of the whole Arab region except the Lebanon and in return take over the protectorate of the whole Kurdo-Armenian region from Adana to Persia and the Caucasus.”
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In France, a heterogeneous colonialist lobby—fabric manufacturers in Lyon, who wanted Syrian silk; the Chamber of Automobile Manufacturers, who noted that Mosul was wonderful country for driving; Jesuit priests, whose order ran a university in Beirut; the financiers, officials and intellectuals in the Comité de l'Asie Française—urged their government to stand firm. Syria, for this lobby, was invariably Greater Syria, stretching south to the Sinai and east into Mosul. Parliamentary groups pointed out the strategic imperatives. France already had Algeria and Tunisia along the south shore of the Mediterranean; now it must add Morocco. It was too late, alas, for Egypt, snaffled away by the British in a devious maneuver in 1882. But it was not too late for Lebanon and its Syrian hinterland and Palestine. The Quai d'Orsay sent memoranda to Clemenceau on “this heavy but glorious burden.” France's connection with Syria went back to the Crusades. It had already done much to protect Christians and bring civilization to all the Arabs. Now the locals were counting on France to repair the damage done by years of Turkish rule. France must not give up Syria. French public opinion would be rightly enraged if “after such a war and such a victory, which has consecrated the preeminent role of France in the world, its position [were] inferior to what it was before August 1914.”
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The British position hardened. The Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet, set up in 1918 to work out British policy in the Middle East, returned repeatedly to the need to contain their ally. If France got Palestine and Syria, Britain, according to Curzon, the committee's chairman and moving spirit, would be obliged to keep a large force in Egypt to protect the Suez Canal and the vital route to India. And there were other routes, overland or by air (a new possibility), from the eastern end of the Mediterranean through Syria and Mesopotamia, or farther north along the Black Sea and past the Caucasus. Balfour pointed out that this was a dangerous argument: “Every time I come to a discussion—at intervals of, say, five years—I find there is a new sphere which we have got to guard, which is supposed to protect the gateways of India. Those gateways are getting further and further from India, and I do not know how far west they are going to be brought by the General Staff.” His colleagues remained determined to destroy Sykes-Picot.
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Even before the French realized this, British actions aroused their suspicions. French Catholics had been dismayed when British forces under General Sir Edmund Allenby swept the Turks out of Jerusalem just before Christmas 1917. The “Protestant peril” was taking over the Holy Land. The French colonial lobby watched anxiously as the Egyptian pound became the currency first in Palestine and then in Syria, and trade flowed south. When Picot rushed to Palestine to try to protect French interests, he found Allenby and his staff uncooperative. In the summer of 1918, as the last great German offensive battered the Western Front and the British prepared another major offensive into Syria, the Quai d'Orsay warned that French public opinion would not accept that “France be deprived of benefits which were rightfully hers by those who diverted their troops at the crucial moment.” French anxiety was not allayed by the subsequent refusal of the British military authorities to hand over full powers to French representatives in the areas of Syria earmarked for France under Sykes-Picot. The British also kept an ominous silence about their long-term plans. Picot, less hard-line than many of his colleagues, tried to warn Sykes of the mood in France: “The spiteful see it as evidence of hidden intentions. Even the others are becoming anxious.” The British refused to take French concerns or Picot himself seriously: “rather a vain and weak man,” said one officer, “jealous of his own position and of the prestige of France.”
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Although the British and the French acted as though the Middle East was theirs to quarrel over, they did have to pay some attention to their allies. The vague promises that had been made to Italy during the war— promises of access to ports such as Haifa and Acre; of a say in the administration of Palestine; of equal treatment in the Arabian peninsula and the Red Sea—could be safely ignored and generally were. The United States was a different matter. While Wilson assumed that the Arabs would need guidance, presumably from Britain and France, he took seriously the idea of consulting the wishes of the locals. “Every territorial settlement involved in this war,” he had said to Congress in his “Four Principles” speech of February 11, 1918, “must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned.” Gaston Domergue, a former minister of colonies and vice chairman of the official French committee to formulate France's colonial aims, quite rightly exclaimed, “The obstacle is America!”
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With a smooth shift of gears, the Europeans began to talk the language of the Americans. It was quite clear, said Domergue, that “we need a colonial empire to exercise, in the interests of humanity, the civilizing vocation of France.” The British were equally adept at putting old imperial goals in appealing new clothes. It would not do to upset the Americans; as Smuts told his colleagues on the Eastern Committee: “You do not want to divide the loot; that would be a wrong policy for the future.” On the other hand, if the Americans could be persuaded that the British were respecting Arab wishes, they might put pressure on the French to give up some of what they had been promised under Sykes-Picot. Cecil, high-minded and devious, warned that “the Americans will only support us if they think we are going in for something in the nature of a native Government.” Curzon concurred: “If we cannot get out of our difficulties in any other way we ought to play self-determination for all it is worth, wherever we are involved in difficulties with the French, the Arabs, or anybody else, and leave the case to be settled by that final argument knowing in the bottom of our hearts that we are more likely to benefit from it than is anybody else.”
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