No one doubts that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister
of Turkey since 2003, is a very tough man. He has demonstrated that in recent
years, in run-ins with Israel, Libya, Syria, the United States, and his own
citizens. In that sense, he epitomizes the Turkish character.
Historically a warrior people, the Turks are a proud nation.
And why shouldn’t they be? Since the “entered” medieval history, they are
virtually the only people in the entire world who have never been conquered and
subjugated for any length of time by others.
Think about it: in the Western Hemisphere, all aboriginal
peoples were overpowered by Europeans. The same holds true for all of Africa,
with Ethiopia the last to come under foreign rule when defeated by fascist
Italy in the 1930s.
With the exceptions of Great Britain, Sweden and
Switzerland, every country in Europe has at some time been vanquished and
occupied by another – particularly in the Second World War. The Russians may
only have been partially conquered by Napoleon and Hitler, but they fell under
Mongol rule for some 250 years during the 13-15th centuries.
In the Middle East, all the Arab peoples, from Morocco to
Iran, came under first Ottoman Turkish, and later western, rule, except for
Saudi Arabia. Central Asia fell to the Russians. The Jews of Israel are the
descendants of people who lived without sovereignty, at the mercy of others. Iran
remained nominally sovereign but effectively under British and Russian control;
this was also true of Afghanistan.
In Asia, only Japan held out, until occupied after 1945 by
the United States. China lost immense amounts of territory to Japanese, Russian
and western imperialists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course
the entire Indian subcontinent was gobbled up piecemeal by the British.
The Ottoman Turks, themselves an imperial power in large
parts of Europe and virtually the entire Middle East for many centuries, were
defeated in the First World War. They lost their Mideast Arab holdings.
But plans were afoot to partition the ethnic Turkish
heartland itself. The terms of the Treaty of Sèvres, signed by the defeated
Ottomans in 1920, were severe, and involved dismembering Anatolian Turkey
itself.
The Greeks were to obtain almost all that was left of
European Turkey, while the lands on either side of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus,
which link the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, would come under international
control. The great Ottoman capital city of Istanbul was included in this zone.
Greece was also awarded a substantial area of western
Anatolia facing the Aegean Sea, including the city of Smyrna (now Izmir). The
rest of western and southern Turkey, including the port of Antalya on the
Mediterranean, would become an Italian zone of influence.
France would take under its direct control a section of the
country north of Syria (which was becoming a French Mandate, or colony), plus a
very large zone of influence in the centre of Turkey. Britain would have a
smaller zone, north of what was becoming the British mandate of Iraq.
Finally, the Armenians were to acquire an independent state
that would consist of most of eastern Turkey, from the city of Trabzon on the
Black Sea in the north down to Lake Van. Only a rump Turkish state centred
around Ankara would retain its sovereignty. Some Kurds were also advocating an
independent state of their own in eastern Anatolia.
None of this came to pass. A nationalist movement led by
Mustapha Kemal, who became Kemal Ataturk (“Father of the Turks”), defied the
Allied powers and refused to accept the loss of ethnic Turkish lands.
His armies defeated Armenian, French and Greek forces,
reoccupying the entire Anatolian peninsula within a few years, and forcing the
Allied powers into signing the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. It led to the
international recognition of the sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey as
the successor state to the defunct Ottoman Empire.
The Greeks were forced out of all Turkish territories, and
the Armenians, too, saw their dream of a greater Armenia evaporate. A small
Armenian region that was already under Russian control before 1914 eventually
became part of the Soviet Union. The Kurds in Anatolia remained under Turkish
rule.
Since that difficult time 90 years ago, no one has tried to acquire
any territory at the expense of Turkey.
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