Lausanne Treaty: politics of power
Part 1: Lausanne and Sèvres
Kurdishaspect.com - By Dr Kamal Mirawdeli
Part 1: Lausanne and Sèvres
Scratch the surface of the words and lines of Lausanne Treaty, and it oozes the blood of the Armenians and the Kurds
This is the part of the paper delivered by the author at the seminar commemorating 85th anniversary of the Lausanne Treaty at the House of Lords in London on 9th July 2008. The seminar was sponsored and chaired by Lord Rea.
When I was asked by my friends to talk about Lausanne treaty at this seminar today, the first thing that came to my mind was: why? Why should we always be referring back to the past instead of inferring from our present and conferring about our future? Yes, there is history. But, on the other hand, I do not believe in continuity of or in history, of that series of chains and rings that each leads to the other and intern us within their all-encompassing circle. The classic approach always is that we should learn lessons from history, but, for us the Kurds, often the lessons are no more than reiterated justifications for imprisoning our present within the confines of the past. This is true especially when the entrenched powers refuse to give way or open a window for change; all because this is our history and we need more time, that is more of the same history to change our history! And here is the point of dilemma that we often fail to deal with. We seem to accept that we have been predetermined by our pre-present context and we cannot escape our fate. That is why we are more interested in revisiting the past, study and re-study it, deconstruct and reconstruct it hoping that we will eventually stumble upon that prerequisite lesson that will save us from our predicament and spare us the preoccupation of planning for future.
Yes, these were the thoughts that came to my mind and stayed with me when I started to do a quick on-line research to brush up my information about Lausanne: What was it? Why should we still be talking about it? How does it pertain to our past, persist in our present and prefigure our future?
I hate details of historical narrative. Therefore I beg your pardon for not retelling any tales in detail that you may or may not have heard about the process of the birth of the treaty. I want to focus on its relevance to the present and whether it can still provide a reference for future? Of course the way I am putting the outline of my argument assumes that: yes, there is after all a line of continuity in history or at least I am trying to establish a notion of continuity in our and even Middle East history through just a single document called Lausanne Treaty? A document that is 85 years old this month?
It is not my purpose here to enter into a philosophical discussion about the issue of continuity and discontinuity of or in history. All our discourses are in one way or another language games and as words can assume lives of their own then it would be possible to create discursive contexts in which a system of interpretation or reconstruction can seem as a logical continuum. This may help to increase our understanding of the past or even the present but the danger is when we bestow upon the document itself the power of creating history and thus lose sights of the conditions of its possibility before, at the time of and after its coming to existence. In other words, accepting the illusion that the life of a document depends upon its intrinsic mode of existence rather than on the external political conditions that function to sustain or supersede it.
Lusanne Treaty as a material document
Let me start by agreeing that yes we can reconstruct history, however illusionary, as a sort of political continuum through, as Foucault says, “the questioning of the document”. And Foucault explains that like this: “Of course, it is obvious enough that ever since a discipline such as history has existed, documents have been used, questioned, and have given rise to questions; …..But each of these questions, and all this critical concern, pointed to one and the same end: the reconstitution, on the basis of what the documents say, and sometimes merely hint at, of the past from which they emanate and which has now disappeared far behind them.” [Michel Foucault, 1973, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London, p. 6] No doubt Lausanne Treaty is a dangerously important document. It is a statement, an event, a historical discourse with its own space, mode and function of existence. A statement, Foucault writes, “is always an event that neither the language nor the meaning can quite exhaust. It is certainly a strange event: first, because on the one hand it is linked to the gesture of writing or to the articulation of speech, and also on the other hand opens up to itself a residual existence in the filed of a memory, or in the materiality of manuscripts, books, or any other form of recording; secondly, because, like every event, it is unique, yet subject to repetition, transformation, and reactivation; thirdly, because it is linked not only to situations that provoke it, and to the consequences that it gives rise to, but at the same time, and in accordance with a quite different modality, to the statements that precede and follow it.” [Ibid, p 28]
We can apply all these criteria of statement/event identified by Foucault to the historical document of Lausanne Treaty. It is a written discourse that language and interpretation cannot exhaust. It resides in both memory and the materiality of hundreds of books, studies, dissertations, and related records. It is unique yet subject to repetition, transformation and reactivation. It is not only linked to the factors that created it and the factors that it created bust also to the statements that precede and follow it.
Let us start from the last characteristic. It is this relationship to the statements that precede and follow it that has given Lausanne discourse its unique modality that for different reasons has remained functional until this moment when we are here holding this seminar to reconstruct or re-interpret it by questioning its internal rules and structures.
Because of the limited available here I will concentrate only on some conclusions:
First: Lausanne versus Sèvres
t is not possible to talk about lausanne or at least to understand its unique historical modality without referring to another document that precedes it and this is the Treaty of Sèvres. The Treaty of Lausanne is the antagonist, antithesis, and annulment of the Treaty of Sèvres.
A typical basic definition of the Treaty of Lusanne is the one offered by Wikipedia:
The Treaty of Lausanne (July 24, 1923) a peace treaty signed in Lausanne that settled the Anatolian part of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire by annulment of the Treaty of Sèvres signed by the Ottoman Empire as the consequences of the Turkish Independence War between Allies of World War 1 and Grand National Assembly of Turkey (Turkish national movement).
So Lausanne is a statement of settlement by annulment. In other words it is a discourse that exists at the expense of silencing, omitting and trying to eliminate another totally different discourse, different set of statements/events, that exist, with a quite different modality, in Sèvres historical discourse. The Lausanne discourse can only exist as the antithesis of Severs discourse. It represents its condition of possibility and is in an ongoing political struggle with it. Lausanne is more than a mere historical event, an organic autonomous whole, closed in upon itself and capable of forming meaning of its own accord, but rather it is an element in a field of antithetical co-existence in which the diverse elements of Sèvres Treaty continue to be actively involved. Therefore, whenever Lausanne is mentioned, Sèvres exists as its unsaid, its silent interlocutor, its dialectical necessity, its historical annulment. Lausanne can only function by keeping Sèvres silent, dysfunctional, dead. But this is not a struggle that has been permanently settled. Lausanne in order to continue to function, cannot ever forget, ignore or remain unvigilant about the continuous persistence of Sèvres to restore its own brutally abrogated geopolitical existence. Scratch the surface of the words and lines of Lausanne Treaty, and it oozes the blood of the Armenians and the Kurds. The border lines cut deep into the physical, cultural and spiritual body of Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians and many other minorities.
Second: Power and discourse
It is this antithesis with Sèvres that constitutes the modality of Lausanne’s existence. Both discourses are product of historical events, or to be more precise of power relations and power functions. The dialectics of power/knowledge remains the effective function of existence of Lausanne discourse. For both discourses are political discourses created by violence, by the sheer function of force, military force which in turn had great impact on international diplomatic deals. They are defined by different set of power signatures in different circumstances of power relations. The Sèvres Treaty was signed on 10 August , 1920 in Sèvres, France. The signatories were France, Italy, Japan and United Kingdom, described in the Treaty as the Principal Allied Powers, and the defeated Ottoman Empire. [For the full text of the Treaty see: http://www.hri.org/docs/sevres/part1.html]
It was supposed to be the peace treaty of World War I between the Ottoman Empire and Allies. France, Italy and Great Britain, however, had secretly begun the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire as early as 1915.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in particular, had paved the way for the partitioning of the dying man's inheritance. This was a secret agreement between the governments of the UK and France, with the assent of Imperial Russia, defining their respective spheres of influence and control in west Asia after the expected downfall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916 by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot and Briton Mark Sykes. The delay in implementation was due to the fact that the rival imperialist powers could not come to an agreement which, in turn, hinged on the outcome of the Turkish national movement or what is called Turkish War of Independence.
The relation of Sèvres to the Sykes-Picot agreement is important. The latter was its substratum. The Sykes-Picot agreement did not materialise when its conditions of possibility were drastically changed first after the Communist Revolution in Russia in October 1917, which withdrew from the agreement and undermined it by revealing its secrets. And then when Turkish nationalist movement succeeded in changing military equations.
''Military action between Turks and Greeks in Anatolia in 1920 was inconclusive, but the nationalist cause was strengthened the next year by a series of important victories. Twice (in January and again in April) Ismet Pasha defeated the Greek army at Inönü, blocking its advance into the interior of Anatolia. In July, in the face of a third offensive, the Turkish forces fell back in good order to the Sakarya Nehri, eighty kilometers from Ankara, where Atatürk took personal command and decisively defeated the Greeks in a twenty day battle. An improvement in Turkey's diplomatic situation accompanied military success. Impressed by the viability of the nationalist forces, both France and Italy had withdrawn from Anatolia by October 1921. Treaties were signed that year with the Soviet Union, the first European power to recognize the nationalists, establishing the boundary between the two countries. In 1919 a war broke out between the Turkish nationalists and the newly proclaimed Armenian republic. Armenian resistance was broken by the summer of 1921, and the Kars region was occupied by the Turks. In 1922 the nationalists recognized the Soviet absorption of what remained of the Armenian state, and Armenian minority in Turkey went back to Armenia.
The final drive against the Greeks began in August 1922 with a battle called the Battle of the Commander in Chief. In September the Turks moved into Izmir, where thousands were killed during the fighting and capture of the city.” [Source of information from: http://www.allaboutturkey.com/kurtulus.htm]
In short in just two years after the Sèvres Treaty was signed in August 1920, Turkish national movement headed by Mustafa Kamal Pasha put up fierce resistance that changed realities on the ground and achieved decisive military and diplomatic victories. The support of the new ideologically energetic Soviet Union , on the other hand, was a vital factor in changing the fortunes of the Turks and convince the Allies to change their strategy in Lausanne.
At the end of October 1922, the Allies invited both the Ankara and the Istanbul governments to a conference at Lausanne, but Atatürk was determined that the nationalist government should be the only spokesman for Turkey. The action of the Allies prompted a resolution by the Grand National Assembly in November 1922 that separated the offices of sultan and caliph and abolished the former. The assembly further stated that the Istanbul government had ceased to be the government of Turkey when the Allies seized the capital. In essence, the assembly had abolished the Ottoman Empire and created the New Turkey.'' {Ibid]
Thus military power on the ground, supported by determined nationalist leadership, nationalist ideology and diplomatic acumen, reversed the conditions of the possibility of Sèvres Treaty which was never ratified by Grand National Assembly. Turkey was the only power defeated in World War I to negotiate with the Allies as an equal and to influence the provisions of the peace treaty. Ismet Pasha was the chief Turkish negotiator at the Lausanne Conference that opened in November 1922.
This short synopsis of the changing power relations within just two years explains the different modalities of the Sèvres and Lusanne treaties. Lausanne is Sèvres superseded. Sèvres remains it palimpsest. The discourse of Turkish nationalist power has overwritten the discourse of human rights and nations' rights to self-determination and even to existence.
Note:
We Kurds have never been able to write our modern history. Many writings are ideological rather than scientific and when they aim to be scientific they lack methodological rigour of in-depth research and objective analysis. The result is a number of myths perpetuated by ideological tools who are ignorant with historiography as a rigorous academic discipline. For example there is a myth that October Revolution was a great bless to the Kurds and Kurdish national movement. One of the reasons given for this is precisely that new Communist Soviet Union undermined and foiled Sykes-Picot (SP)agreement. If SP were implemented “ south-eastern Turkey (North Kurdistan), northern Iraq a round Mosul and Syria would have been under the control of France”. In other words most of Kurdistan would have become French colony with much more opportunity for both socil0-cultural and economic development and quick early independence. On the other hand, the new Soviet power and the agreement it signed with the genocidal Turkish nationalist government at the expense of the Armenians and the Kurds, was an important contributing factor in the success of Kamal Ataturk's military and diplomatic strategies and eventually annulment of Sèvres Treaty and with it the national future of the Armenians and the Kurds and human and cultural rights of all minorities in Turkey.
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