Lausanne Conference of 1922–1923
The Grand National Assembly of Turkey selected İsmet İnönü, Rıza Nur and Chief Rabbi Chaim Nahum as their representatives.
[2] France and Italy had assumed that the Chanak Crisis had caused British prestige with Turkey to be irrevocably damaged, but they were shocked to discover that Turkish respect for Britain was undiminished.
Already partially deaf, he would simply turn off his hearing aid when Curzon launched into lengthy speeches denouncing the Turkish position.
[5] The harsh Treaty of Sèvres imposed upon the government of the Ottoman Empire after World War I by the Allied Powers included provisions that demanded the partition of Anatolia.
The Ottoman state was to have a small army and navy without heavy artillery, aeroplanes or battleships, and its budget was to be placed under the supervisions of an Allied financial commission.
[9] Preliminary meetings, taking place in Paris between Curzon and French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré on 18 November 1922, lasted five hours.
İsmet Pasha delivered a long speech in which he demanded the cession of Karaagac, a suburb of Edirne, which had been retained by Greece as part of Western Thrace.
He was met with widespread support by the French and Italians and went on to state that the "exhibition of so firm an Allied front at this stage and on so important an issue took [the] Turks very much by surprise and will probably exercise a decisive influence in our future proceedings".
Curzon found the Turkish foreign minister "impervious to argument, warning or appeal, and can only go on repeating the same catchwords, indulging in the same futil quibbles, and making the same childish complaints".
[16] Curzon described an "unconditional surrender to the Turks",[17] adamantly refused to accept any of the "eleventh hour proposals" and went on to decide on a fixed date for the departure of the British delegation from the conference.
There were further meetings of the Allied delegations on the morning of 2 February during which Curzon reluctantly agreed to further modifications on capitulations and the tariffs, the abandonment of reparations due from Turkey and the removal of all restrictions on the size of the Turkish Army in Thrace.
Between 21 and 27 March 1923, British, French, Italian and Japanese experts met in London to discuss Allied criteria for the settlement of the still-unresolved issues of the conference.
The first dealt with the remaining territorial questions and the rights of foreigners and was chaired by Sir Horace Rumbold, the primary British delegate, since Curzon refused to return to Lausanne.
Finally, the Turkish insistence for the Greeks to pay reparations to Turkey for war damage in İzmir almost led to a renewal of Turkish-Greek hostilities.
Mustafa Kemal intervened, and his government agreed that İsmet could accept Karaagaç instead of reparations if it was coupled with a favourable settlement of the remaining questions.
On the afternoon of the 26th, after appeals from all the delegates at the conference, İsmet accepted the compromise, which was coupled with rather-vague assurances by the Allies that every effort would be made to satisfy Turkish requirements on other issues.
[24] However, after a further appeal to Poincaré by Crewe on 6 July, the former accepted a British proposal that a declaration about the debt interest should be omitted from the treaty, and the matter should be dealt with by a separate note from the Allies to Turkey.
On matters that did not touch the heart of Turkish independence, İsmet eventually accepted Allied wishes to secure Turkey's place in the future economy.
Since the First World War, the British had sought to contain the Bolshevik threat by expanding their presence in the Middle Eastern regions around Iraq, Iran, and Turkey.
Lord Curzon, however, addressed each of these claims individually claiming that most majority of the inhabitants were racially Kurds who were of Indo-European origin and fundamentally different from the Turks, most of the trade of Mosul was with Iraq but not Anatolia, the British government had been legally entrusted with the mandate over Iraq by the League of Nations and the frequent Kurdish revolts during the nineteenth century immediately before the war demonstrated that the Kurds were unwilling to be a part of Turkey.
Turkey, in a sense, achieved what the Ottoman Empire had set out to do prior to World War I: receive equal treatment by the Western powers and assert its place in the international political sphere.
The treaty restricted the boundaries of Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey and formally relinquished all Turkish claims on the Dodecanese Islands, Cyprus, Egypt and Sudan, Syria and Iraq.
In Article 3, Turkey had its southern border also become rigidly defined, and it officially ceded the territories of Yemen, Asir, and parts of Hejaz, including Medina.
[6] Aside from the redrawing of geographic borders, Robert Gerwarth stated that the conference sanctioned relocation of ethnic and religious populations had inauspicious consequences and "had a significance that went well beyond the Greek and Turkish context to which it ostensibly applied.
It fatally undermined cultural, ethnic and religious plurality as an ideal to which to aspire and a reality with which - for all their contestations - most people in the European land empires had dealt with fairly well for centuries".
