The birth of Turkey

Following the post at reference 1, I have now re-read most of the book at reference 2. What follows is a very short summary.

Modern Turkey is a middle sized country and at rather more than 80 million people rather larger than the UK. More or less the whole of what used to be called Asia Minor, what is now called Anatolia, plus a chunk of eastern Europe, including what used to be called Byzantium on the western shore of the Bosphorus.

We start with the massive defeats of the Ottoman Empire in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, causing the Ottoman withdrawal from the Balkans, leaving it with just Thrace in Europe. This left what is now Turkey with a Turkish majority, but with substantial minorities of Greeks, Armenians and Kurds, the first two of which were Christian, the last Moslem. To the north east was Russia, with more Armenians, to the south east Arabs, then still part of the Ottoman Empire, and Persians. Who had managed not be colonised by anyone. Bottom right in the map above.

The response to these defeats was a surge of Turkish nationalism, mostly Turkish and Moslem, to the exclusion of Christians and Arabs. The Kurds got into trouble later on. But in the short term the aim was to build a Greater Turkey for the Turks and to get rid of the infidel Christians, that is to say the Greeks and the Armenians. Maybe push into Turkic Asia.

The so-called great powers tried to intervene to protect these minorities, with some success. But then came the Great War, with Turkey joining in on the side of Germany and Austria, in part to give it a free hand in dealing with the minorities, starting with the Armenians. Of whom something under a million were eventually killed or left to die in deserts. Plus perhaps a quarter of a million Greeks.

On surrendering at the end of that war, Turkey was occupied by mainly British and French troops. But the balance of power gradually shifted from Istanbul to Ankara. The massacres continued. Turks and Kurds killed Greeks and Armenians. The Greeks and Armenians retaliated, although they killed far fewer people than the Turks and Kurds. With part of the mix being Greece and/or the Greeks making an unsuccessful grab for a chunk of western Anatolia.

The occupying powers tried to intervene, but their own agendas - not least for Syria and Iraq - rather got in the way. Plus there was the complication of the new Soviet regime to the north east. With the Caucasus having been a troublesome frontier zone, not to say buffer zone, for more than a thousand years. In the end the British and French pulled out, with the Turks getting most of what they wanted.

All very messy. A lot of people were killed, but Turkey survived to be the country it is now. While all this killing was not much more than a modern lifetime ago and I dare say there is still plenty of hate and anger.

With there being some parallel in the collapse and carve up of the Austrian Empire, also multi-national, at about the same time, at the end of the Great War. And of the Soviet Empire more recently. Nasty nationalisms lurking everywhere.

PS: for the avoidance of doubt, I should say that as a major colonial power, British hands were far from clean. And there were far more avoidable deaths, not to say killings, on our watch than there were here. Our record in Iraq since the Ottomans left has been bad. Nevertheless, on the whole, we did not go in for massacres, by way of ethnic cleansing or anything else.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/more-armenia.html.

Reference 2: A shameful act - Taner Akҫam - 2006.

Reference 3: Turkish History - Chambers Encyclopaedia - 1959. Volume 14. Not much talk of Armenians that I could see on a quick skim.