The Great Fire (4 page)

D
ecades after the burning of Smyrna, a Jewish legal scholar would introduce the term “genocide” to describe the terrible events in Turkey in the slaughterhouse years between 1912 and 1922.

In its intent and methods, the genocide carried out in Turkey was a portent of even more terrible events in the fearsome century ahead. It was on the lips of Adolf Hitler weeks before his invasion of Poland. “The aim of war is not to reach definite lines but to annihilate the enemy physically,” he told his generals. “It is by this means that we shall obtain the vital living space that we need. Who today still speaks of the Armenians?”

Often known as the Armenian Genocide, the slaughter actually extended to all the indigenous Christians in Asia Minor. The Armenians, an ancient people who had inhabited eastern and central Anatolia since the sixth century BC, suffered the most deaths, about 1.5 million people. They were taken from their towns and villages, segregated by sex and age, and summarily executed (the men) or forced to march (the women and children) long distances to their deaths from starvation and exhaustion. The death trails, which led from Armenian settlements throughout Anatolia to the deserts of Syria or Iraq, were littered with the bones of hundreds of thousands Armenian women and children. The deportations
and executions of Greek and Assyrian Christians, which mostly came later, added about another 1.5 million deaths. The decade of mass killing, engineered by two successive Turkish governments, was the first religious and ethnic cleansing of modern times—and the end of Christianity, for all intents and purposes, in the place where it had first taken root, Asia Minor. It was there, in western Anatolia, that the first Christian churches had been established and St. Paul had journeyed to spread the message of Christianity.

The story of Smyrna today is mostly forgotten. It seems to have left no strong impression on the world’s collective memory. This is strange. Smyrna (with the attendant events that led to it and those that immediately followed) contains lessons about current-day conflicts between the West and Islam; about oil diplomacy; about the uneasy balance between national strategic interests and advocacy of human rights. Smyrna, for all that it represents, ought to appear in the same list of place names that carry the burdens of history: Sarajevo and Yalta, for their failures of diplomacy; and Treblinka, Bosnia, and Rwanda for the scale of the killing. Each is a place, and each a history lesson waiting to be unpacked.

The story of Smyrna also is a surprising tale of individual men and women—of ambition and brutality, bumbling statecraft, extraordinary military and political leadership, and unlikely heroism. In all of this, including the heroism, and perhaps most especially the heroism, the United States played a crucial role.

UP UNTIL THE EARLY
twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire embraced a vast swath of territory from the Arabian Peninsula to the border of Austria in southeastern Europe. Its perimeter more or less included most of what was called the Near East, and the empire’s hereditary leader, the sultan, was regarded by his Sunni Moslem subjects as the caliph of Islam, the successor to Mohammed on earth.

But by 1900, the once-great and feared empire was at the tail end of a centuries-long decline, fraught with inept leadership, corruption, and revolts by the peoples it had subjugated, including the Christian peoples of the Balkans. At the turn of the century, the Ottoman Empire was a
creaky machine ruled by a paranoid and ruthless leader, Sultan Abdul Hamid II. He was known in the West as Bloody Abdul for vicious attacks on his Christian subjects.

In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, the Ottoman Empire allied itself with Germany in a secret treaty, and a new sultan, Mehmed V, Abdul Hamid’s witless brother, declared a jihad against the European Allies. Counting on the might of German militarism to prevail in the great contest, the Ottoman leaders hoped to revive the empire, restore its old glory, and regain lost territory in Europe.

As the Great War raged, the Allied powers looked ahead to the eventual defeat of Germany and its partners and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, which they (and the United States) regarded as a cruel and despotic anachronism. In secret, and beginning with the Treaty of London in 1915 and then the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, Britain, France, Russia, and Italy had decided that the Ottoman capital, Constantinople, would go to Turkey’s old rival, Tsarist Russia, and, based on further agreements and the shifting contingencies of a war whose victory was not assured, other sections of the empire would go to Britain, France, Italy, and Greece. The Allies intended to preserve a small central section of Anatolia as the Turkish nation. They were applying the old formula of war—to the victor go the spoils. Britain and France thirsted especially for the empire’s immense reserves of oil.

After the war ended, the victors gathered in Paris in January 1919 to settle the terms of the defeat of Germany and its war partners, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. Each would require a separate treaty. But America’s entrance into World War I had shifted the terms of the future peace terms and the division of Turkey. On the Ottoman treaty, President Wilson refused to accept the colonial land grab laid down in secret by the Allies during the war years. Instead, Wilson proposed a system of mandates, which would amount to temporary supervision by the victors of new nations carved out of the Ottoman Empire. The mandate territories (in Wilson’s vision) would eventually become independent democratic countries.

Wilson wanted to maintain the territorial integrity of the Turkish homeland by assigning to postwar Turkey all of Anatolia. Yet, at the
same time, he wanted to provide the persecuted Christian minorities of Anatolia “an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” The president’s idealism hardly suited the complexity and violence in the religiously torn Ottoman Empire. In their effort to make a purely Moslem nation, the Turks had uprooted and killed millions of Christians before and during the war, and they would continue to do so after the war as the Allies sought to settle the terms of the Ottoman defeat. It was unclear how Wilson’s vision of both security and democracy could be made real unless some powerful Western nation—nearly everybody looked to the United States—accepted a mandate over all Anatolia and occupied it with tens of thousands of troops to protect the lives of Christian minorities as democracy took hold and a civil society emerged.

Four months into the Paris talks, in April 1919, a new crisis erupted that created a fiendish complication for the Allies in Turkey and changed the course of Turkish history. It began with Italy’s demand that it get Fiume, a Slavic-majority city on the Adriatic Sea that had been part of Austria-Hungary. Wilson objected. The Italian demand violated his principle of drawing national lines based on national identity. The Italian delegation was outraged. It walked out, and, sensing that Italy might also be denied western Anatolia, which Britain had secretly promised it during the war, the Italians took unilateral military action to gain Turkish territory. Italy had lost six hundred thousand soldiers in World War I, and it had resolved not to be cheated of its share of the war’s spoils. It landed troops on the southern coast of Turkey and sent warships to Smyrna. It would seize what it believed it had earned.

The Italian action infuriated Wilson and Lloyd George, the British prime minister. To prevent Italian seizure of Smyrna, but without any intention of committing their own nations’ troops, the two leaders invited Greece to occupy Smyrna ahead of the Italians. The Greeks, in the person of the charismatic and forceful Greek representative, Eleftherios Venizelos, had made a persuasive claim in Paris that it should get Smyrna based on an ethnic Greek majority in the region. He also argued that Ottoman Christians in western Anatolia (mostly ethnic Greek) needed protection against Turkish harassment and killing.
Greece was prepared to provide the protection. Venizelos, a former guerrilla fighter against the Turks on Crete, was a sophisticated and formidable diplomat, and he captivated Wilson and Lloyd George. In arguing for the Greek claim to Smyrna, Venizelos also pointed to the British promise that Greece should get the city as recompense for joining the Allies in the war against Germany. He prevailed. The Paris negotiators laid down terms for a Greek occupation of Smyrna: it would be limited and provisional, and a plebiscite would be held in five years to determine the city’s future. It remained technically under Ottoman sovereignty.

The decision to send in the Greeks was a disaster, and it accelerated the slaughter of Ottoman Christians. The Greeks and the Turks were old enemies. Their animosity had been so cultivated, nurtured, and refined over hundreds of years that the word “enemy” seemed hardly sufficient to capture the mutual loathing.

The Greeks hated the Turks for their four-hundred-year occupation of Greece and saw the millions of ethnic Greeks who lived inside the Ottoman Empire as their natural countrymen, oppressed and unredeemed citizens of a greater Greece. In the Greek mind, Constantinople, not Athens, was the center of the Hellenistic firmament, and the Turks were Asiatic barbarians whose sacking of Greek Constantinople in 1453, ending the thousand-year Byzantine Empire, remained a fresh wound. A symbolic artifact of the Turkish occupation of Greece was punishment by impalement: the insertion of a stake into a man’s anus, then running it through his body to exit between his shoulder and neck. It had been an Ottoman weapon of terror. Sometimes the impaled man was roasted over a fire. (The Greek word for such a stake is
souvla,
hence the mocking name for the skewered lamb dish, souvlaki.)

The Turks, for their part, saw the Greeks as disloyal and untrustworthy Ottoman subjects who had achieved national independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832 through treachery and interference from the West. The European nations that had helped Greece revolt were the same troublesome “Franks” that had sent armies to wrest Jerusalem from the Moslems a thousand years earlier. (The Crusades remained lodged in Moslem consciousness; memories were long in this
part of the world.) Greeks, in the Turkish view, wore their Hellenism with an air of superiority as if they had invented civilization, and making matters worse, they were Christians, a lesser people—
raya,
or sheep. In daily conversation, they were
givaours,
infidel dogs.

Sent to Smyrna by Britain and the United States, the Greeks bungled the landing. Poorly disciplined and led by a fiery local bishop carrying an Orthodox cross, Greek soldiers overreacted to shots fired from a Turkish army barracks, a provocation that most likely had been planned well in advance. There was mayhem on the city’s waterfront, and Turkish soldiers taken as prisoners were beaten in plain sight. So hostile was the local ethnic Greek population to the Turkish soldiers, after years of Turkish mistreatment, that a British officer recounted watching a Greek woman squat over a bayoneted Turkish soldier and piss in his mouth when he had begged for water.

The stiff Allied-imposed armistice ending World War I had already triggered a Turkish resistance. The Greek landing further insulted Turkish pride and inflamed the resistance. Soon a full-scale war broke out between Greece and the army of a revolutionary movement of Turkish nationalists inside the country led by a former Ottoman army officer named Mustapha Kemal. Turks throughout Anatolia flocked to his side to fight the Greeks and oppose the Allies. “Remember Smyrna in your heart,” read Turkish armbands. “Weep until it is avenged.”

The Greek army occupied Smyrna, but progress on drafting an Ottoman treaty stalled when Wilson, back home, failed to persuade the U.S. Senate to approve the German treaty package he had negotiated in Paris, which included establishment of a League of Nations. The country, and especially the Republicans in the Senate, wanted no part of Wilson’s League and internationalism. Quietly, the United States, which had not declared war on Turkey despite its being an ally of Germany, removed itself from discussions of an Ottoman treaty and left the task to Britain, France, and Italy.

The Europeans went ahead and drafted a treaty in Sevres, France, in 1920 that accommodated their colonial designs. The Sevres Treaty established mandates and zones of influence over Ottoman territories, and its logic was midwife to many elements of the Mideast that we know
today. It created three nation-states out of the non-Turkish sections of the Ottoman Empire: Iraq and Palestine under British mandate but Syria (including Lebanon) under French mandate. France also got a zone of influence in southeastern Anatolia. Italy got a zone of influence in southwestern Anatolia. The Palestine mandate incorporated Britain’s Balfour Declaration, which prepared the ground for a Jewish homeland though not necessarily a Jewish state.

The treaty also affirmed an independent Armenia, intended to be a secure homeland for the beleaguered Armenian people, and created a Kingdom of Hejaz, which later merged with a neighboring sultanate to form Saudi Arabia. The Sevres Treaty slashed the Ottoman military, declared the Dardanelles an international neutral zone, and demanded guarantees for the protections of Christian minorities, which had been among the Allies’ published goals of the war.

The Turkish nationalist movement rejected the Sevres Treaty, and Kemal declared a new jihad against the Allies. By then, Kemal was in open rebellion against the sultan’s government. It was as if a German general had rejected Berlin’s acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles, formed a populist army in Bavaria, and marched against French forces occupying the Rhineland. It was an astonishing turn of events brought on by the failure of France and Britain to back the Sevres Treaty with the resolve needed to enforce it. It was also a demonstration of Kemal’s stunning leadership and a fierce Turkish will not to give an inch of Anatolia to the infidels, the Greeks and Armenians.

The absence of an Allied force in Anatolia to support the Greek army or enforce the Sevres Treaty led to a resurgence of Turkish brutality against the Christian minorities. Executions and deportations of Greek and Armenian Christians resumed with new ferocity throughout Anatolia. “Two thirds of the Greek deportees are women and children,” reported an American aid officer who witnessed the marches. “All along the route where these deportees have travelled Turks are permitted to visit refugee groups and select women and girls whom they desire for any purpose.” The routes of the deported population, the aid worker observed, were “strewn with bodies of their dead, which are consumed by dogs, wolves, vultures. The Turks make no effort to bury these dead and
the deportees are not permitted to do so. The chief causes of death are starvation, dysentery, typhus. Turkish authorities frankly state that is their deliberate intention to exterminate the Greeks, and all their actions support this statements.”