As negotiations for the Treaty of Lausanne started in late 1922, the goal was to hammer out one final worldwide settlement about territories and rights following the primary world conflict, this time between the victorious Allied powers and the Ankara authorities that had simply abolished the Ottoman sultanate and began governing what would quickly turn into the Republic of Turkey. These watching the convention intently included Armenian representatives who had survived the genocide led by Ottoman rulers in 1915-16, when tons of of hundreds of Armenians had been killed.
On the convention, the Armenian delegation had one main goal: that Armenians be granted an autonomous area inside Turkey, both in what’s now jap Turkey or northern Syria. They known as this an Armenian Nationwide Dwelling (ANH), an autonomous, demilitarized space inside Turkish territory the place Armenians may apply self-rule and categorical their tradition and faith safely.
The negotiations didn’t produce what the Armenians needed, nonetheless. Turkish leaders rebuffed Armenian calls for, whereas the Allies weren’t closely invested within the matter. The Treaty of Lausanne grew to become generally known as the “beginning certificates” of recent Turkey, whereas Turkey’s Armenian inhabitants grew to become a minority group with largely equal rights, however typically dealing with discrimination in apply.
“The Treaty of Lausanne doesn’t point out Armenians even as soon as,” says MIT historian Lerna Ekmekcioglu.
Now, in a newly printed analysis article, Ekmekcioglu contends that the Treaty of Lausanne is an often-overlooked occasion of nice historic significance for Armenians. As she writes, “the Treaty of Lausanne rendered the Armenian Genocide politically inconsequential.” There was no redress for Armenians, within the type of autonomy or any type of restorative justice, and no accountability for the perpetrators.
That article, “Debates over an Armenian Nationwide Dwelling on the Lausanne Convention and the Limits of Put up-Genocide Co-Existence,” makes use of new archival analysis to reconstruct the dynamics of the treaty negotiations. As such, the analysis illuminates each Armenians’ struggles in addition to the worldwide group’s struggles to ship constant help for multiethnic, multireligious states.
“The difficulty broadly is how states govern folks whose identities don’t match with the traditionally dominant group’s id,” says Ekmekcioglu, who’s the McMillan-Stewart Affiliate Professor of Historical past at MIT and director of MIT’s Program in Ladies’s and Gender Research. “It’s an ongoing query. This can be a excellent case research for considering these questions. It’s additionally very related to at the present time as a result of the Lausanne Treaty didn’t collapse.”
The paper seems as a chapter within the edited quantity, “They All Made Peace — What Is Peace?: The 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the New Imperial Order,” printed this month by the College of Chicago Press. It’s edited by Jonathan Conlin, a historian on the College of Southampton, and Ozan Ozavci, an assistant professor at Utrecht College. The amount marks the a centesimal anniversary of the treaty being signed, which occurred on July 24, 1923. The guide is a part of a collective scholarly effort in regards to the treaty, the “Lausanne Venture,” whose web site suggests the pact would be the “forgotten peace” of World Conflict I.
Ekmekcioglu’s previous work largely focuses on the lives of Armenians within the trendy Turkish state. In her 2016 guide, “Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Put up-Genocide Turkey,” printed by Stanford College Press, she notes that instantly after World Conflict I, Armenians had been optimistic about their political prospects; Ekmekcioglu calls the time from 1918 to 1922 an “distinctive interval,” as Armenians hoped to realize full rights they didn’t have beneath the Ottoman Empire.
Nevertheless, the Treaty of Lausanne negotiations — held in Lausanne, Switzerland — introduced an finish to Armenian optimism. Maybe that ought to have been predicted: Within the few years after World Conflict I ended, Turkish navy forces defeated Allied-backed troops in skirmishing for management over some Turkish territory. That made the Treaty of Lausanne discussions extremely uncommon: The putative victors, the Allies, had simply misplaced navy battles to the facet they had been negotiating towards.
“They’ve a lot negotiating energy that they get most of what they need,” Ekmekcioglu says, talking of the incipient Turkish authorities of the time.
In that sense, 1922 was in all probability already too late for negotiations to ship success for the Armenians. However as Ekmekcioglu particulars within the article, the Allies lacked not simply navy leverage, however maybe ethical standing. The Turkish press ran many tales about colonial misdeeds by the British and French, and even tales in regards to the Ku Klux Klan within the U.S., all geared toward exhibiting that the Allied powers had mistreated minority teams. To no matter extent there might have been Ottoman backing for a brand new Armenian settlement, that type of protection helped squelch it.
“One of many causes they [the Allied side] didn’t have a lot standing within the eyes of the Turkish public is that they confused humanitarianism with colonialism,” Ekmekcioglu says. “They claimed particularly to have by no means handled any minorities badly within the empire. However Turkish newspapers had been writing about that double commonplace of imperialism.”
The Treaty of Lausanne has maybe been finest identified for having ratified an enormous and obligatory inhabitants alternate within the Nineteen Twenties between orthodox Greeks in Asia Minor and surrounding areas, and Muslims in Greece. Maybe 2 million folks had been relocated, about three-quarters of them Greek. That alternate, which homogenized space populations, has typically been considered an antedecdent to the partitioning of India and Pakistan within the late Forties.
“This has necessary worldwide authorized legislation penalties as a result of inhabitants switch then turns into a doubtlessly acknowledged resolution to the existence of heterogeneity and inhabitants mixing,” Ekmekcioglu observes. “Different teams, sooner or later will take this for example. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
So, whereas the Treaty of Lausanne did assure sure rights for all populations, its incapacity to ship a extra thorough pluralism in political our bodies could also be a long-lasting a part of its legacy. To make certain, the Armenian representatives on the Lausanne convention additionally needed their very own largely homogenized territory, too — though, as Ekmekcioglu notes within the paper, their extraordinary circumstances makes that pretty comprehensible.
And so, after struggling by the hands of the Ottomans, the Armenians then felt let down by the worldwide group, one other blow briefly succession. Maybe there have been no simple solutions on the time, however, Ekmekcioglu observes, we will nonetheless suppose by what the perfect alternate options might need been. Particularly, she notes, in a world typically nonetheless struggling to realize stability and pluralism without delay.
“To grasp minorities in Turkey to at the present time, you must perceive the Treaty of Lausanne, and the way it got here to be,” Ekmekcioglu says. “It’s an excellent laboratory for evaluating, and ideally developing with a solution to, the difficulty of distinction.”
