other nationalities, notably the Arabs, who for centuries had been under Ottoman rule
and at the time were succumbing to European domination.
In addition to renouncing Turkish claims to the Arabic-speaking regions of the
Ottoman Empire, the main points of the pact included maintaining the territorial
integrity of all areas with a majority of Turkish Muslim residents; respecting the rights
of minorities; restoring Istanbul and the region of the strategic straits (including East-
ern Thrace) to Turkish control; and rejecting the so-called capitulations, or special
legal and financial privileges for Europeans living in or doing business in Turkey.
Although the pact’s nationalist tenets stood at odds with the restraints imposed by the
Allies on the government in Istanbul, the Ottoman parliament adopted it on January
28, 1920. The pact remains a cornerstone of Turkish policy. The Allies reacted to the
adoption of the pact by imposing even tighter control on the weakened Ottoman
government.
The words of the National Pact would have meant nothing if not backed by
action. Kemal, a preeminent man of action, pieced together an army from former ele-
ments of the Ottoman military, and by June 1920 this new Turkish army had blocked
Greek advances into Anatolia. Two years later, after a brutal war, Kemal’s army pushed
the Greeks out of Smyrna and firmly established his nationalist regime as the de facto
successor to the Ottomans. The last act of the Greek-Turkish drama was the forced
transfer in 1922–1923 of some 1.3 million ethnic Greeks from Turkey to Greece and
of about 400,000 ethnic Turks from Greece back to Turkey.
Recognizing the new realities in Turkey, the Allies convened a peace conference
in Lausanne, Switzerland, to renegotiate the terms of the Sèvres treaty and award Tur-
key control over all the territories claimed in the National Pact with the exceptions of
the province of Mosul (which Britain had incorporated into the new country of Iraq)
and the Mediterranean port city of Alexandretta (present-day Iskenderun, which was
given to Syria but later returned to Turkey, in 1939). The Treaty of Lausanne was
signed on July 24, 1923, and three months later, on October 29, 1923, the national-
ist Grand National Assembly proclaimed the establishment of the Republic of Turkey,
with Kemal as its president. The Ottoman Empire, one of the world’s oldest political
institutions, officially ceased to exist.
Meanwhile, Kemal’s government joined with leaders of the recently formed Soviet
Union to crush the independent Armenia that had been proposed by the World War
I Allies. Moscow incorporated the bulk of Armenia into an “autonomous republic,”
while Turkey occupied the western portion around the city of Kars. The Kurds never
received the autonomous region the Allies had promised them, and most of the region
they called Kurdistan was split by the Allies between Iraq and Turkey.
Following are the declaration by Turkish nationalists at the Congress of Sivas on
September 8, 1919, and a summary of the key points of the Turkish National Pact,
adopted on January 28, 1920, by the last parliament of the Ottoman Empire.632 TURKEY