AT THE END of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was devastated and most of its territory occupied. Anatolia’s population had been decimated and impoverished, and the countryside and many cities were in ruins as a result of war, genocide, migration, famine, and epidemics. Eight hundred thousand Ottoman soldiers—one out of every four enlisted men—had been killed or died from disease; an equal number had been wounded. As many as four million civilians had died or were killed, from a prewar population of twenty million. Civilians in the Ottoman Empire suffered a much higher mortality rate—calculated as proportion of the population rather than absolute numbers—than most other belligerents.1 In some eastern provinces, half the population had died or been killed. One quarter had been displaced.2
As the official occupation of Istanbul began in late 1918, the League of Nations awarded Britain a mandate—a commission to administer the government and affairs—of Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. France was given a mandate over Syria and Lebanon. The Allied powers partitioned Anatolia, placing the Aegean region including İzmir under Greek control and dividing the Mediterranean region (as far inland as the city of Konya in central Anatolia) between France and Italy. What remained independent Ottoman territory was central Anatolia and a small section of the Black Sea coast. To humiliate the Ottomans, the French general who was occupation commander rode into Istanbul on a white horse, imitating Mehmed II’s entry in the same city in 1453.3
It was in this postwar era that the last remaining subject peoples of the sultan, especially the Kurds and Armenians, had their best chance at obtaining autonomy or independence. Although instrumental in the carrying out of the Armenian genocide, the Kurds had also been subject to the CUP regime’s harsh policies of resettlement from 1913 to 1918. The regime had intended to assimilate Kurds among Turks by forcibly resettling hundreds of thousands of them in the west, so that they would not constitute a majority anywhere in the empire. The First World War devastated Kurdistan. Warfare, genocide, massacre, starvation, disease, and famine caused staggering losses to Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, and Turks.
The victorious Allies, especially the British and the Americans, led by President Woodrow Wilson—whose ‘Fourteen Points’ programme outlined what was hoped to be a long-lasting peace at the end of the First World War—promoted creating an Armenian and a Kurdish mandate in eastern Anatolia. These plans were never realised. Instead, defeat in war and the Europeanising impulses begun in the nineteenth century ultimately brought down the dynasty. The man who ensured its demise was an Ottoman First World War hero.
Blond and blue-eyed, the Salonican-born military officer Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), a Young Turk, CUP member, and veteran of the 1908 revolution, the 1909 Action Army, and the First World War, was sent by the Ottoman government to Samsun on the Black Sea coast as military inspector of the Third Army in May 1919. He began instead to organise all remaining Ottoman army units and guerrilla bands. Ordered to defend the empire, the sultan, and the caliphate, he would soon turn against all but the first. He began to lead the CUP’s regional resistance committee—the Defence of Popular Rights societies—whose interests differed from those of the government in Allied-occupied Istanbul.4 When the Ottoman government ordered his arrest, the army refused, choosing to follow Mustafa Kemal as leader. By April 1920, he had established a shadow parliament in Ankara. Defeat in war would lead to the overthrow of the dynasty by this Ottoman army officer.
From 1918 to 1922, the Young Turks were not guided by Ottomanism, Islamism, or Turkism. Their leading light was again Ottoman Muslim nationalism, as it had been a decade earlier. The CUP revamped the Special Organisation and other irregulars as armed guerrilla groups in Anatolia. The political organisation, the Defence of Popular Rights societies, was for the Muslim peoples of Anatolia alone, especially Turks and Kurds. The exclusion of Christians was made explicit at the congress of Erzurum in 1919, which gathered the resistance groups from the seven eastern provinces. It declared that its goal was ‘to defend the historic and national rights of the Muslim population’. Muslims ‘form one nation, consisting of Turks and Kurds’.5 That same year, the western Anatolian Defence of Popular Rights societies promoted Muslim nationalism and faced off against Ottoman Christians and European powers.
The Sivas Congress, convened by Mustafa Kemal in 1919 after the congress at Erzerum, dedicated itself to the battle to preserve ‘our state which belongs to the Muslims’. This was Ottoman Muslim nationalism and territorialism, explicitly excluding the Arabophone regions. Mustafa Kemal defined the fatherland as the area of Anatolia peopled by Kurds and Turks where the Ottoman army was in charge. This was a small area, as much of Anatolia was occupied by European powers.
There was no room in this new polity for the remaining Christians of Anatolia. In December 1919, Mustafa Kemal accused the Armenians of having a ‘genocidal policy’ against Muslims.6 He praised Ottoman tolerance and declared that what had happened to the Armenians and Greeks during the war was the consequence of their separatist nationalism, which ‘they pursued in a savage manner, when they allowed themselves to be made tools of foreign intrigues and abused their privileges’. Christian Europe, he argued, had committed far worse crimes than the massacres committed by the Ottomans. He blamed the victims, belittled the severity of the violence, and accused others of having committed far worse assaults.
Elections held in autumn 1919 brought a Muslim nationalist parliament to power in winter 1920. The parliament adopted the National Pact of January 1920, which articulated all the sentiments of the Erzurum and Sivas congresses. The National Pact supported the right of only Muslims to the land. It rejected the occupation and partition of the areas of Anatolia inhabited by an Ottoman Muslim majority. It gave up any claims to Arab-majority regions. The Ottoman Empire in this vision was to be an Anatolian, Turkish-Kurdish polity.
The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI (reigned 1918–1922)—who could see a flotilla of Allied warships from the windows of his residence, Dolmabahçe Palace—and the Ottoman government in Istanbul in 1918 and 1919, however, pursued an anti-CUP, pro-British policy and complied with the demands of the occupying Allied powers. In March 1920, when the official occupation of the city began, the British and their thirty thousand troops put an end to legal political activity.
The last Ottoman parliament prorogued itself in protest in April. On 23 April, parliamentarians who were able to escape arrest by the occupying powers along with delegates elected from among the Anatolian Defence of Popular Rights committees assembled in rebel-controlled Ankara at the first meeting of a shadow government, the Grand National Assembly, which still recognised the sultan caliph as supreme leader. Allied high commissioners administered the capital, which was beset by sky-high inflation, lack of basic food and fuel, a large refugee population, and a housing shortage.
In April, the Ottoman government charged Mustafa Kemal with treason and sentenced him to death in absentia. The sheikhulislam gave a fatwa, a legal opinion, that the resistance groups led by Mustafa Kemal were traitors, whom Muslims should kill. For his part, Mustafa Kemal had the mufti of Ankara, the leading specialist in Islamic law in the city, declare in a legal opinion that the members of the government were traitors. He emphasised that his struggle was for the sake of the empire, sultanate, and caliphate. It was a Muslim (Turkish and Kurdish) resistance movement supported by Sunni dignitaries, Alevis, and Bektaşi Sufis. Most Kurds believed Mustafa Kemal’s rhetoric that Turks and Kurds were brothers and supported his campaigns to save the presumably Muslim empire and caliphate from foreigners and local Christians.
On 10 August 1920, a delegation from the sultan’s government signed the Treaty of Sèvres with the Allied powers outside Paris. The treaty left very little territory in the hands of Ottoman Muslims. It created an independent Armenia in eastern Anatolia, gave Greece eastern Thrace and İzmir, internationalised the Bosporus, presented France with a sphere of influence in southern Anatolia, let Italy control southwestern Anatolia, and gave the Kurds autonomy in much of northern Kurdistan, with the right to vote for independence one year later and unite with southern Kurdistan in today’s Iraq (which was controlled by Britain). The Grand National Assembly in Ankara refused to accept these terms or comply with its orders.
The Allied powers, the British in particular, gave Greece the right to enforce the Treaty of Sèvres. Several years of warfare ensued, waged mainly between the Anatolian Muslim resistance and foreign occupying powers and their local Christian allies, but also between soldiers of the Istanbul government and Mustafa Kemal’s forces. Defeating the army of the short-lived independent Republic of Armenia—established in 1918 and led by members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation—in autumn 1919 and signing a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in early 1921 allowed the Anatolian fighters to focus on western and northwestern Anatolia. Greek armies, after having been given the green light by the British to occupy İzmir in 1919, conquered much territory in the region throughout 1920 and 1921. The Greeks were stopped by the forces under the command of Mustafa Kemal at the Battle of the Sakarya, only eighty kilometres southwest of Ankara, during a nearly three-week struggle in September 1921. Mustafa Kemal’s men had changed the situation on the ground and had become the de facto government of the Muslim rump state, driving foreign armies out of much of Anatolia, defeating the French in southern Anatolia, and threatening to take southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq) from the British.
In August and September 1922, in their last great offensive following the Battle of the Sakarya, Mustafa Kemal’s forces, the Ottoman Muslim nationalists, routed the Greek army south of Afyon-Karahisar, capturing its commander in chief and driving its surviving troops and the Greek population of western Anatolia all the way back to İzmir on the Aegean coast. The Muslim nationalists burned the city to the ground, targeting first the Armenian quarter and then the Greek Orthodox neighbourhoods, sparing only the Muslim and Jewish districts.7 Thousands of desperate Greeks fled to İzmir’s harbour and then onto waiting ships, which took them to Greece, never to return.
Mustafa Kemal crushed or outmanoeuvred left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist rivals, including Enver Pasha—who was based alternately in Berlin, Baku, and Moscow and tried unsuccessfully to rally former CUP and Special Organisation members to join his own Muslim army entering Anatolia from the east. He served as political leader and commander in chief of the political and military battles between 1919 and 1922, which were reframed afterward as Turkey’s successful war for independence.8 Brooking no resistance, Mustafa Kemal’s followers assassinated or lynched politicians and journalists who opposed them.9 The shadow-government Grand National Assembly in Ankara promoted Mustafa Kemal to field marshal, conferring upon him the messianic title of ‘saviour’ and the old Ottoman title of gazi, holy warrior.
Turning his back on Ottoman Muslim nationalism, as well as on his connection to the Ottoman past, Mustafa Kemal adopted the title of gazi, which harkened back to what the Ottomans had argued was the crucial factor in their rise. At the same time, he began to promote the ideology of secular Turkish nationalism in its place. On 1 November 1922, the Grand National Assembly separated the caliphate from the sultanate, named Mehmed VI’s cousin Abdülmecid II, the eldest Ottoman male heir, as caliph, and abolished the sultanate. The last Ottoman cabinet resigned. Only the Ankara government would represent the empire. Fearing for his life, a little over two weeks later the last sultan, Mehmed VI—escorted by the commander in chief of Allied forces occupying the Ottoman Empire, British general Charles Harington—left Yıldız Palace. Mehmed VI boarded the British warship Malaya and sailed to Malta. With British backing, he attempted to gain recognition as the caliph in Mecca. Failing in his efforts in the first half of 1923, he retired to the Italian Riviera.10
On 29 October 1923, the Turkish Republic was declared in Ankara. The Ottoman Empire was replaced by a constitutionalist republic that abrogated the caliphate. In 1924 the last caliph, Abdülmecid II, and the remaining members of the dynasty were expelled from Turkey and forbidden from returning. Abdülmecid II took refuge in Switzerland and then France.11 The last sultan, Mehmed VI, passed away on 16 May 1926 in San Remo. He was buried in Damascus a month and a half later. After more than six hundred years in power, the rule of the Ottoman family had ended.
The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne replaced the Treaty of Sèvres. It was negotiated between Britain, France, Italy, and Greece on one side, and Mustafa Kemal’s government in Ankara—where the Defence of Popular Rights committees had been reestablished as a single political party, the Republican People’s Party—on the other. The Treaty of Lausanne recognised the establishment of the independent Turkish Republic. All foreign troops were ordered to leave. But so were some religious minorities. Based on the principle that nation-states should have homogenous populations, the treaty mandated a compulsory, irreversible ‘population exchange’ of Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey and Muslims in Greece.12 The approximately 200,000 Greek Orthodox and 350,000 Muslims who were ‘exchanged’ were forbidden to return.13 Approximately one million Greek Orthodox had already fled from western Anatolia to Greece after Greek forces were routed in 1922. The Greek Orthodox in Istanbul and two islands in the Dardanelles were exempt, as were Muslims in western Thrace. Along with war, genocide, famine, epidemics, and forced migration, this internationally sanctioned ethnic cleansing contributed to Anatolia’s Christian population decreasing from one in five inhabitants (20 percent) in 1913 to one in forty (2 percent) in 1923.14
The Treaty of Lausanne gave neither Armenians nor Kurds autonomy. Both had been promised autonomy in the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, but neither Armenia nor Kurdistan was even mentioned in the new agreement. The Turkish Republic ceased mentioning Kurds and Kurdistan, and Turkish place names replaced Kurdish, Armenian, and Greek ones. Turning its back on a decade of Ottoman Muslim nationalism—when Islam was used to build loyalty to the leaders and especially to link Turks and Kurds in common cause to wage war against perceived enemies—the new republic would be one for the Turks alone.
Mustafa Kemal fashioned a new nation from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. To do so he chose to jettison the past, to obliterate any and all connections with what had come before. According to a Turkish scholar, the Turkish Republic ‘was originally based on forgetting’.15 Already in 1922, Mustafa Kemal—who would be given the name Atatürk, the father of the Turks, by the Grand National Assembly in 1934 and would lead the Turkish Republic from its founding until his death in 1938—declared, ‘The new Turkey has absolutely no relation with the old Turkey. The Ottoman state has gone down in history. Now, a new Turkey is born’.16