Treaty of Sevres
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The Treaty of Sèvres of August 10, 1920, was a peace treaty between the Entente and Associated PowersThe Entente and the Associated Powers were the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan (Principal Allied Powers), Greece, Belgium, Armenia, the Hedjaz (Saudi Arabia), Poland, Portugal, Romania, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) and Czechoslovakia and the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The treaty was signed by the Ottoman Government, but Sultan Mehmed VI never signed that treaty. However, it was rejected by the Turkish republican movement, and never came into effect. That movement, under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk, used the treaty as the occasion to declare itself the rightful government of Turkey, replacing the monarchy based in Istanbul (Constantinople) with a republic based in Ankara.
The Ottoman Empire would have lost a great deal of territory by the terms of this treaty, which followed the outlines of earlier agreements between the Allies at the Conference of Sanremo in April 1920. Hejaz (now part of Saudi Arabia) and Armenia were to become independent. Kurdistan was to be given independence, according to Section III Articles 62-64, the kurdish vilayet of Mosul would also be able to join the independent Kurdistan. In accordance with the wartime Sykes-Picot Agreement, Mesopotamia and Palestine were assigned under mandate to the tutelage of the United Kingdom, Lebanon and an enlarged Syria to that of France. The Dodecanese and Rhodes (already under Italian occupation since 1911), with portions of southern Anatolia, were to pass to Italy, while Thrace and Western Anatolia, including the key port of Smyrna (now Izmir), would become part of Greece. The Bosphorus, Dardanelles and Sea of Marmara were to be demilitarized and internationalized, and the Ottoman army was to be restricted to a strength of 50,000 men.
The nationalist government in Ankara rejected the terms of the treaty and resisted the Greek army's advance into the area assigned to Greece in Western Anatolia, and its further unilateral advance towards Ankara. A "Treaty on Friendship and Brotherhood" with the Bolshevik regime in Soviet Russia was signed by Kemalists in March 1921 (the so called Moscow Treaty of 16th March 1921, which was followed by identical Ankara and Kars treaties). Those enabled the nationalist government of Kemal to repel and defeat the Greek forces by September 1922. These events forced the former wartime Allies to return to the negotiating table, and the terms of Sèvres were cancelled in Turkey's favor by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
Footnotes
See also
- Caucasus Campaign of World War I, 1914-1918
- Aftermath of World War I
- Republic of Turkey
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
- Treaty of Versailles
- Treaty of Kars
- Treaty of Lausanne
- Turkish-Armenian War
- First Republic of Armenia
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
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