Turkey: Phoenix from the Ashes ••• 229talks to get instructions from his government. When the Lausanne peace¬
makers finished replacing the Treaty of Sèvres, the Turks had freed their
country of the hated Capitulations, all forms of foreign occupation, and
any threat of an Armenian state or an autonomous Kurdistan. Most Greek
Orthodox Christians living in Anatolia were deported to Greece as part of a
population exchange that sent many Muslims from Bulgaria and Greek-
ruled parts of Macedonia to a Turkey they had never known. The only set¬
backs for Turkey in the Lausanne Treaty were an international commission
to supervise shipping through the Straits (which were demilitarized) and
the failure to obtain Mosul (which the League of Nations would later award
to Iraq).
Thanks to the 1923 Lausanne Conference, Turkey became the only coun¬
try defeated in World War I that could negotiate its own peace terms. Except
for the 1936 Montreux Convention, which gave Turkey the right to fortify
the Straits, and the annexation of Alexandretta in 1939, the Lausanne Treaty
is still the basis of Turkey's place among the nations of the world. By con¬
trast, the Versailles Treaty and all other postwar peace arrangements have
long since been scrapped. Well might the Arabs, who had rebelled against
the Turks to back the World War I victors, envy their erstwhile masters who
had tied their fate to that of the vanquished!
Kemal's Domestic Reforms
Mustafa Kemal devoted the last fifteen years of his life to changing Turkey
from the bastion of Islam into a secular nation-state. Islam, the lifestyle and
basis of government for the Turks since their conversion a thousand years
earlier, was now to be replaced by Western ways of behavior, administra¬
tion, and justice. If persuasion failed, then the changes would be imposed
by force. Twice opposition parties arose within the Grand National Assem¬
bly, but in both cases Kemal suppressed them. A Kurdish uprising in 1925
was severely suppressed, and an attempt on Kemal's life led to the public
hanging of most of his political opponents. As president of the republic,
Kemal was authoritarian; yet he also detested fascism, opposed Marxist
communism (although he accepted Soviet aid and was the first Middle
Eastern leader to adopt state economic planning), and allowed free debate
in the elected assembly. Kemal admired democracy in theory, but he ruled
as a stern father and teacher to his people, who he felt were not yet ready to
govern themselves.
Was Kemal a Muslim? He certainly flouted the Shari'a in his card play¬
ing, drinking, and sexual escapades. Yet he also relied on Islamic symbols