TREATY OF SèVRES

The 'Treaty of Sèvres' was the peace treaty that the Allies of World War I, not including the United States, and the Ottoman Empire signed on 10 August 1920 after World War I. Representatives from the governments of the parties involved signed the treaty in Sèvres, France.The Treaty of Sèvres, 1920 Harold B. Library, Brigham Young University However, the Turkish War of Independence forced the former wartime Allies to return to the negotiating table prior to ratification. The parties signed and ratified the superseding Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
İstanbul and other parts of Turkey were occupied by several Allied powers. The treaty had four signatories on behalf of the Ottoman government. It was an unestablished agreement in the absence of the Ottoman Parliament, which was forced to adjourn after its last session on February 12 1920 (it was abolished on March 18 1920). In the absence of the Parliament, it was not sent to the sultan Mehmed VI Vahdeddin to be ratified, or published in ''Takvim-i Vakayi'', the official newspaper.

Contents

Conditions

Middle East

Anatolia

Kurdistan

Ottoman Empire

Nullification

See also

References

External links

Conditions

The treaty solidified the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, in accord with secret agreements among the Allied Powers. The partitioning followed the outlines of earlier agreements which had been negotiated between the Allies at the San Remo conference in April 1920.

Middle East

The Democratic Republic of Armenia (Wilsonian Armenia) and the Kingdom of Hejaz were to be granted independence. A Kurdistan region was scheduled to have a referendum to decide its fate, which, according to Section III Articles 62–64, was to include the Mosul Province.
The United Kingdom was to acquire the British Mandate of Iraq and the Mandate for Palestine, which were later assigned again under League of Nations Mandates.
France acquired Lebanon and an enlarged Syria, which were later assigned again under League of Nations Mandate.

Anatolia

'Greece:' The armistice of Mudros, followed by the occupation of Izmir, established Greek rule in those areas on May 21 1919. This was followed by the declaration of a protectorate on July 30 1922. The treaty assigned the key port of İzmir (Smyrna) to Greece, along with most of Eastern Thrace and a part of Western Anatolia.
'Italy:' The Dodecanese Islands (already under Italian occupation since the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912, despite the Treaty of Ouchy according to which Italy was obliged to return the islands back to the Ottoman Empire) were assigned to Italy, with large portions of Southern and West-Central Anatolia (the Mediterranean coast of Turkey and the inlands) including the port city of Antalya and the historic Seljuk capital, Konya.
'Armenia:' The Armenians, who had constituted the third largest ethnic group in Eastern Anatolia after the Turks and Kurds even before the Armenian Genocide, were given a large part of the region; including provinces which didn't have significant Armenian populations such as the Black Sea port city of Trabzon.
'France:' The regions of Cilicia including Adana, Southeastern Anatolia including Antep, Urfa, Mardin and Diyarbakır, and large portions of East-Central Anatolia all the way up north to Sivas and Tokat were given to French control.
'Great Britain:' Even though Britain formally didn't gain any new territories, the "internationalized" Turkish Straits and the Ottoman capital city, Istanbul, were effectively under British control.

Kurdistan

The breakup of the Empire following World War I and the emergence of the modern Turkish state led to attempts on the part of the Kurds to secure their own nation state. There was no general agreement among Kurds on what its borders should be, due to the disparity between the areas of Kurdish settlement and the political and administrative boundaries of the region. ^[1]
The outlines of a "Kurdistan" as an entity were proposed in 1919 by Şerif Pasha, who represented the Society for the Ascension of Kurdistan (''Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti'') at the Paris Peace Conference. He defined the region's boundaries as follows:
:"The frontiers of Turkish Kurdistan, from an ethnographical point of view, begin in the north at Ziven, on the Caucasian frontier, and continue westwards to Erzurum, Erzincan, Kemah, Arapgir, Besni and Divick (Divrik?) ; in the south they follow the line from Harran, the Sinjihar Hills, Tel Asfar, Erbil, Süleymaniye, Akk-el-man, Sinne; in the east, Ravandiz, Başkale, Vezirkale, that is to say the frontier of Persia as far as Mount Ararat."^[2]
This caused controversy among other Kurdish nationalists, as it excluded the Van region (possibly as a sop to Armenian claims to that region). Emin Ali Bedirhan proposed an alternative map which included Van and an outlet to the sea via Turkey's present Hatay Province. ^[3] Amid a joint declaration by Kurdish and Armenian delegations, Kurdish claims on Erzurum vilayet and Sassoun (Sason) were dropped but arguments for sovereignty over Ağrı and Muş remained.^[4]

Neither of these proposals was endorsed in the final territorial dispensation put forward in the abortive 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which outlined a truncated Kurdistan located almost entirely on what is now Turkish territory (leaving out the Kurds of Iran and Iraq, then under British control, and Syria, under French control). However, the treaty was never implemented. Following Turkey's win over Greece in the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), the proposed "Turkish Kurdistan" was fully rejected by Turkey under the terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. The current Iraq-Turkey border was agreed in July 1926.

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Army was to be restricted to 50,000 men; the Ottoman navy could only preserve seven sloops and six torpedo boats, and the Ottoman state was prohibited from obtaining an air force.
The Bosphorus, Dardanelles and Sea of Marmara were to be demilitarized and internationalized.

Nullification

Main articles: Turkish War of Independence, Treaty of Lausanne

The Treaty of Sèvres was vigorously rejected by the Turkish national movement. Turkish revolutionaries under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha split with the monarchy based in Istanbul (Constantinople). The rival Ankara government emerged as the legitimate representative for the Turkish nation.
The Turkish National Movement gathered around the Turkish Grand National Assembly through the course of the Turkish War of Independence and successfully resisted and assured the security of what they defined as their homeland in Misak-ı Milli, which was very close to the present-day territory of Turkey. In achieving this goal the Armenian (Turkish-Armenian War), French (Franco-Turkish War), and Greek (Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922)) forces were evacuated. The Turkish National Movement developed its own international relations by the Treaty of Moscow with the Soviet Union on 16 March 1921, the Accord of Ankara with France putting an end to the Franco-Turkish War, and the Treaty of Alexandropol and the Treaty of Kars fixing the eastern borders.
These events forced the former Allies of World War I to return back to the negotiating table with the Turks and recognize the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which replaced the Treaty of Sèvres and recovered important amounts of land in Anatolia and Thrace for the Turks. This was the only re-negotiation of a post-war treaty with one of the Central Powers of World War I.

See also

★ Caucasus Campaign of World War I, 1914-1918

★ First Republic of Armenia

★ Turkish-Armenian War

★ Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

★ Republic of Turkey

References

1. Hakan Özoğlu, ''Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries'' p. 38. SUNY Press, 2004
2. Şerif Pasha, ''Memorandum on the Claims of the Kurd People'', 1919
3. Hakan Özoğlu,''ibid'' p. 40
4. M. Kalman, ''Batı Ermenistan ve Jenosid'' p. 185, Istanbul, 1994

External links

★ Text of the Treaty of Sèvres

★ Armenia and Turkey in Context of the Treaty of Sevres: Aug - Dec 1920 - on "Atlas of Conflicts" by Andrew Andersen