Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (18 page)

The four most important players were those who represented the victorious Allies: the American president, Woodrow Wilson; Britain’s Lloyd George; France’s Georges Clemenceau; and the prime minister and foreign secretary of Italy, Vittorio Orlando and Sidney Sonnino. For almost six months, this inner circle discussed proposals, listened to petitions and attempted to create a new world order that would secure a lasting peace.

They met twice a day, usually in Wilson’s study: four men from very different backgrounds and with strikingly different temperaments. Wilson was stiff and formal, ‘like a college professor criticising a thesis’. Several British diplomats found him physically disgusting. ‘One does not see the teeth except when he smiles,’ wrote one, ‘which is an awful gesture.’

Clemenceau was more passionate and irascible; he did not suffer fools gladly. At the official opening of the conference, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, wore a top hat whereas Clemenceau wore a bowler.

‘[Balfour] apologised for his top hat,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, one of those present at the ceremony.

‘I was told,’ Balfour said, ‘that it was obligatory to wear one.’

‘So,’ Clemenceau answered, ‘was I.’

Clemenceau was impatient with Wilson and his fourteen-point peace plan. ‘God himself was content with ten commandments,’ he said. ‘Wilson modestly inflicted fourteen points on us.’

The French president found Lloyd George no less infuriating, although he could not help but succumb to his charms. The two men occasionally took tea in Lloyd George’s private apartment where Britain’s prime minister was at his most congenial: ‘Wrapped in the utmost indifference to technical arguments, irresistibly attracted to unlooked-for solutions, but dazzling with eloquence and wit.’

Orlando, the fourth member of the inner circle, was highly strung and had a habit of shedding tears when decisions went against him. The stiff-upper-lipped British contingent found such displays of emotion distasteful. One said he would have spanked his son if he caught him weeping like Orlando.

President Wilson’s contribution to the peace conference was the principle of self-determination. This suggested that oppressed smaller nations would finally be allowed to rule themselves. It also brought the hope of self-government for minorities and the potential creation of many new states. Yet few attending the conference understood exactly what the president meant by the phrase ‘self-determination’. Did it mean that Armenia should be a nation state? That the Greeks of Anatolia should be allowed to rule themselves? And where did it leave Smyrna? If ever there was a case for self-government, then it was to be found in Turkey’s only majority-Christian city.

By the end of 1919, Wilson wearily admitted that his choice of phrase – which had brought hope to so many oppressed peoples – had been most unfortunate. ‘When I gave utterance to those words,’ he said, ‘I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed which are coming to us day after day.’

By the time he admitted his mistake, the damage had been done. His principle of self-determination had been seized on by many as the means to an end and none had used it more effectively than Eleftherios Venizelos, Greece’s prime minister.

Venizelos had come to Paris with the hope of at long last achieving a revived Greek empire carved out of the vanquished Ottoman state. He worked around the clock to this end, courting supporters with his customary charm and eloquence. He had long ago won the unstinting support of Lloyd George. Now, he wooed the rest of the conference, inviting the key players to restaurant lunches and hosting intimate soirées in his private quarters at the Hotel Mercedes. A great raconteur, he regaled his guests with stories of his escapades in the mountains of Crete.

Venizelos’s initial appearance before the Supreme Council was on 3 February 1919. This was his first opportunity to present Greek claims to Smyrna and the coastline of Anatolia. He had worked with indefatigable energy in the weeks prior to his primary performance and now had absolute mastery over his subject.

He fully exploited the underlying weakness of Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Urging his classically educated audience to cast their minds back to the noble age of antiquity, he argued that the Greeks of Asia Minor ‘have been established there uninterruptedly for three thousand years [and] constitute the purest part of the Hellenic race’.

Armed with facts and figures, he read excerpts from books by eminent geographers and historians. He even brought along photo albums, which showed happy Greek sponge fishermen on the islands that he now wished to claim for Greece. Nicolson was impressed by Venizelos’s panache; no other leader would have dared to bring along his holiday snaps. ‘He talks gaily and simply,’ he wrote, ‘and they look at his photograph albums which puts them in a good temper.’

In a letter to his father, Nicolson added: ‘I can’t tell you the position that Venizelos has here. He and Lenin are the only two really great men in Europe.’

Venizelos had a ready line in flattery, inverting his own argument if it gave him the chance to produce a compliment. He admitted that many Greeks in Turkey could not speak Greek, but said that this made them no less Greek. Indeed, he told his audience that some of his closest Greek friends spoke Albanian at home, ‘even as Mr Lloyd George would speak Welsh to his children’. Such flattery was pure Venizelos; Britain’s prime minister was deeply touched by this nod to his Welsh ancestry.

Venizelos was careful to compliment President Wilson in the very next breath. He explained that the reason so many Greek children were well educated was because they had been taught in American mission schools. ‘Wilson beams delight,’ wrote Nicolson in his diary.

The American delegation was beguiled by Venizelos’s charm. ‘I can see how he got his reputation for great statesmanship,’ wrote one. ‘[He] realised that his strongest asset would be our belief in his honesty . . . This policy was almost Bismarckian in its cleverness.’

Venizelos pitched his claims high. Smyrna was his principal goal, but he also wanted the Turkish islands in the Aegean, the Italian-controlled Dodecanese, northern Epirus and all of Thrace. He shrewdly dropped all claims to Constantinople, joking that he was ‘the only Greek in the world who could turn down Constantinople’. He made no mention of British-controlled Cyprus.

Yet his projected empire was on a grand scale. He hoped to gain a huge slice of land around Smyrna; 200 miles wide, it stretched from Kastellorizo in the south to Panderma in the north and included all of Turkey’s most fertile farmland.

Venizelos contended that the area around Smyrna contained 800,000 Greeks, who formed the economic and intellectual backbone of the country. There was much truth in this, but the Turks were nevertheless in the majority in three of the four
sandjaks
(districts) that Venizelos hoped to acquire. When the Americans raised this point, the Greek prime minister argued that they had neglected to include the 370,000-strong population of the coastal islands, which would fall under the same administration. In so doing, he managed to boost the Greek population sufficiently to make it constitute a slim majority.

Venizelos was helped in his claims by hundreds of petitions that arrived daily at the peace conference, sent by Greek towns and villages across Asia Minor. All of them demanded self-determination, aware that this would then enable them to seek union with Greece.

The hierarchs of the Orthodox Church played their hand with skill. Instead of reminding the conference of Anatolia’s Byzantine Orthodox heritage – which held little appeal to the classically minded peacemakers – they instead focused on Turkey’s pre-Christian Hellenic traditions.

‘It was in this region that Hellenism was born,’ they wrote. ‘All the towns which are to be found here, large or small, without a single exception, were founded by our ancestors some three thousand years ago.’

No mention whatsoever was made of the great patristic fathers of the Byzantine Church. Instead, the hierarchs told the peacemakers that ‘this is where the Hellenic civilisation flourished in all its splendour and where, for the first time, the idea of liberty was born.’

Venizelos urged the leaders in Paris to heed the call. ‘After the tragic experience of a whole century,’ he told them, ‘it is impossible to entrust the future of the Christian populations of the Ottoman Empire to fresh attempts at reform.’ He was the first to admire the Turks as ‘good workers [and] honest’, but as rulers ‘they were insupportable and a disgrace to civilisation’.

Venizelos presented his claims in two long hearings. At the end of the second day, he was warmly congratulated by all four of the leading peacemakers. Clemenceau, bowled over by his masterful performance, turned to his secretary, Jean Martet, and lectured him on the achievements of the classical world. ‘Immerse yourself in Greece, Martet,’ he said. ‘It is something which has kept me going. Whenever I was fed up with all the stupidities and emptiness of politics, I turned to Greece. Others go fishing. To each his own.’

The peacemakers were sympathetic to Venizelos’s vision and established a special committee to thrash out the details. It quickly became apparent that fixing a border between Greek and Turkish territories was fraught with difficulties. It made no sense to separate Smyrna from the rich hinterland that provided so much of its trade, yet the hinterland was overwhelmingly Turkish.

The committee’s work was further complicated by the fact that the Italians pressed ahead with their claim to Smyrna, based on a secret agreement that they had signed with the Allied leaders in 1917. They countered Venizelos’s claim that western Turkey had been the birthplace of classical Hellenism, arguing that it had also been an integral part of the Roman empire.

The Italian argument was not without logic, but neither Orlando nor Sonnino possessed Venizelos’s persuasive powers and their stance won them few friends at the conference. ‘I can’t understand the Italian attitude,’ wrote Nicolson. ‘They are behaving like children, and sulking children at that. They obstruct and delay everything – and evidently think that by making themselves disagreeable on every single point they will force the conference to give them fat plums to keep them quiet.’

The delicate negotiations were not helped by the ignorance of the principal players, whose grasp of detail was comically lamentable. Nicolson was present at a meeting between Lloyd George and the Italian delegation, all of whom were seated around a large map of western Turkey.

The British and French peace negotiators were prepared to overlook the serious problems that would be caused by awarding a great slice of Turkey to Greece. So too, after much persuasion, were the Americans. By March, it looked as if Venizelos was on the point of pulling off his cherished dream.

This news caused great anxiety among the Levantine merchants living in Smyrna. Many believed the Greeks to be incapable of administering a multinational city and argued that rule from Athens would create even greater tension between the different communities.

As the pleasure gardens of Bournabat began to bud and blossom, the Whittalls, the Girauds and the Allied officers stationed in Smyrna had regular meetings to discuss whether and how they could influence the policy being thrashed out in Paris.

‘Every Sunday, there was a line of cars outside our house,’ wrote Eldon Giraud, ‘and tea was served beside the tennis court, under the umbrella tree.’ He recalled that their discussions lasted from teatime until dusk. Then, ‘when it got dark, everyone used to come in and the gramophone would get going and dancing would ensue until late at night.’

By the end of February, Herbert Octavius was sufficiently alarmed to offer the peacemakers some advice. He wrote a seven-page report on the future of Smyrna, pleading with the politicians in Paris not to be hoodwinked by ‘the clever advocacy of that most eminent statesman, Mr Venizelos’. He argued that Venizelos’s facts and figures should be treated with extreme caution and he poured scorn on the notion that Smyrna was a Greek city. ‘The population . . . is very cosmopolitan [and] made up of about one third Greeks and two thirds Turks, Jews, Armenians and Europeans.’

He pointed out that all of these nationalities had lived side by side in peace and friendship for many decades. And although the policies of Turkey’s wartime government had done much to destroy the city’s unique spirit, this did not justify handing the reins of power to the Greeks. Many were hankering for revenge and ‘certain to trample on their Turkish neighbours’ if placed in a position of power.

Herbert Octavius believed that Turkey had forfeited the right to govern Smyrna, even though he acknowledged that Rahmi Bey had peacefully steered the city through the First World War. But Rahmi was an exception to the rule. ‘The Turks,’ he wrote, ‘. . . have proved themselves utterly incapable of governing Christians.’

In Herbert Octavius’s eyes, there was only one possible solution to this crisis. ‘[It] is the unanimous opinion of all – Armenians, Jews, Turks, Europeans and not a few unprejudiced and foresighted Greeks – that the province be administered under a system of local government.’