A final peace agreement was made under the Treaty of Lausanne (held in Lausanne, Switzerland), signed on July 24, 1923 and implemented on August 6, 1924, which replaced the defunct Treaty of Sevres and officially ended the state of war between Turkey and the Allied Powers. By the Treaty of Lausanne, the Allies recognized the Turkish state and the borders of that state. Turkey relinquished ownership of the Ottoman overseas possessions in Asia and northern Africa, as well as Cyprus and the Dodecanese Islands.
In October 1923, Allied forces left Constantinople, which then was occupied by Turkish Nationalist forces. On October 29, 1923, the Turkish people established the Republic of Turkey with Ankara as the nation’s capital and Mustafa Kemal* as first president. A year earlier, in November 1922, the Grand National Assembly (the Turkish nationalist parliament), abolished the Ottoman Sultanate, forcing the sultan to leave for exile abroad and ending 600 years of Ottoman dynastic rule. In March 1924, the Caliphate was abolished. Turkey then transitioned into a secular, democratic state, which it is to this day.
(Taken from Turkish War of Independence – Wars of the 20th Century: Vol. 3)
Background On October 30, 1918, the Ottoman Empire ended its involvement in World War I by signing the Armistice of Mudros. During the war, the Ottoman government had fought as one of the Central Powers (in alliance with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria), but in 1917 and 1918, it suffered many devastating defeats. Then with the failure of the Germans’ 1918 “Spring Offensive” in Western Europe, the Anatolian heartland of the Ottoman Empire became vulnerable to an invasion, forcing Ottoman capitulation.
The victorious Allied Powers in Europe (Britain, France, and Italy) took steps to carry out their many secret pre-war and war-time agreements regarding the disposition of the Ottoman Empire. Another Allied power, Russia, also was a party to some of these agreements, but it had been forced out of the war in 1914 and consequently was not involved in the post-war negotiations.
As a first measure and provided by the terms of surrender, the French and British naval fleets seized control of the Turkish Straits (Dardanelles and Bosporus) on November 12-13, 1913, and landed troops in Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire’s capital.
During World War I, British forces gained possession of much of the Ottoman Empire’s colonies in the Middle East, collectively called “Greater Syria”, a vast territory covering Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, and Palestine. When the war ended, most of the Arabian Peninsula gained independence under British sponsorship, including the Kingdom of Yemen and later the Kingdom of Nejd and Hejaz, the precursor of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The most significant war-time treaty to be implemented in the Middle East was the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (Map 7), where Britain and France drew up a plan to partition between them most of the remaining Ottoman possessions, i.e. Syria and Lebanon to France, and Mesopotamia and Palestine to Britain*. As a result, following war’s end, Britain and France took control of their respective previously agreed territories in the Middle East. These annexations subsequently were legitimized as mandates by the newly formed League of Nations: i.e. the 1923 French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, and the 1923 British Mandate for Palestine. British control of Mesopotamia was formalized by the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922, which also established the Kingdom of Iraq.
The Allies also had drawn up a partition plan for Anatolia, the Turkish heartland of the Ottoman Empire. In this plan, Constantinople and the Turkish Straits were designated as a neutral zone under joint Allied administrations, with separate British, French, and Italian zones of occupations. Southwest Anatolia was allocated to Italy, the southeast (centered on Cilicia) to France, and a section of the northeast to Armenia. Greece, a late-comer in World War I on the Allied side, was promised the historic Hellenic region around Smyrna, as well as Eastern Thrace.
With these proposed changes, a much smaller Ottoman state would consist of central Anatolia up to the Black Sea, but no coastal outlet in the Mediterranean Sea. The Allies subsequently incorporated these stipulations in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres (Map 8), an agreement aimed at legitimizing their annexations/occupations of Ottoman territories.
Sykes-Picot Agreement
The Allies wanted a breakup of the Ottomans’ centralized state, to be replaced by a decentralized federal form of government. In Constantinople, the national government led by the Sultan and Grand Vizier (Prime Minister) were resigned to these political and territorial changes. However, Turkish nationalists, representing a political and ideological movement that became powerful in the early twentieth century, opposed the Allied impositions on Anatolia, perceiving them to be a deliberate dismembering of the Turkish traditional homeland. As a result of the Allied occupation, many small Turkish nationalist armed resistance groups began to organize all across Anatolia.
Rise of the Turkish Independence Movement Under the armistice agreement, the Ottoman government was required to disarm and demobilize its armed forces. On April 30, 1919, Mustafa Kemal, a general in the Ottoman Army, was appointed as the Inspector-General of the Ottoman Ninth Army in Anatolia, with the task of demobilizing the remaining forces in the interior. Kemal was a nationalist who opposed the Allied occupation, and upon arriving in Samsun on May 19, 1919, he and other like-minded colleagues set up what became the Turkish Nationalist Movement.
Partition of Anatolia as stipulated in the Treaty of Sevres
Contact was made with other nationalist politicians and military officers, and alliances were formed with other nationalist organizations in Anatolia. Military units that were not yet demobilized, as well as the various armed bands and militias, were instructed to resist the occupation forces. These various nationalist groups ultimately would merge to form the nationalists’ “National Army” in the coming war. Weapons and ammunitions were stockpiled, and those previously surrendered were secretly taken back and turned over to the nationalists.
On June 21, 1919, Kemal issued the Amasya Circular, which declared among other things, that the unity and independence of the Turkish state were in danger, that the Ottoman government was incapable of defending the country, and that a national effort was needed to secure the state’s integrity. As a result of this circular, Turkish nationalists met twice: at the Erzerum Congress (July-August 1991) by regional leaders of the eastern provinces, and at the Sivas Congress (September 1919) of nationalist leaders from across Anatolia. Two important decisions emerged from these meetings: the National Pact and the “Representative Committee”.
The National Pact set forth the
guidelines for the Turkish state, including what constituted the “homeland of
the Turkish nation”, and that the “country should be independent and free, all
restrictions on political, judicial, and financial developments will be
removed”. The “Representative Committee”
was the precursor of a quasi-government that ultimately took shape on May 3, 1920
as the Turkish Provisional Government based in Ankara
(in central Anatolia), founded and led by
Kemal.
* In November 1934, Mustafa Kemal adopted “Ataturk” (Father of the Turks) as his surname, accorded to him by the Turkish Parliament that had ratified the Surname Law in June 1934.
* The agreement also allocated Constantinople, the Turkish Straits, and sections of the Ottoman Empire’s northeast region to the Russian Empire; the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in the 1917 “February Revolution” and the formation of the Soviet government later that year nullified this provision of the treaty