Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [289]
After a series of Allied meetings, which culminated in April 1920 with the conference at San Remo (like “a second-class English watering-place,” in Curzon’s view37), a draft treaty was finally cobbled together and presented to representatives of the government in Constantinople. Turkey was to be small and subservient. The hodgepodge of outside financial controls from the nineteenth century was rationalized and indeed strengthened. Although the Turks were to remain in Constantinople, the straits were placed under an international regime. France and Italy each had a sphere of influence in Anatolia; Greece was to have Smyrna and Thrace. There would be an independent Armenia (although no provisions were made for ensuring this) and something called Kurdistan would be autonomous within Turkey.
By this point it was too late for Armenia. The collapse of tsarist Russia and then the withdrawal of Ottoman forces had opened a window that was starting to close. Armenia, Daghestan, Georgia and Azerbaijan had all declared their independence in the spring of 1918. The new states, shaky, poor, struggling to cope with refugees, might have survived the brigands, the deserters from the Turkish armies, the White Russian forces, disease and hunger. They might have settled the differences that led them to war with each other. They might have held off General Denikin, the White Russian, because he had to deal with the Bolsheviks as well. What they could not withstand was the combination of a determined Russian assault from the north and a resurgent Turkey in the south.
Even then, with some support from outside, they might have had a hope. Of all the powers, Britain was best placed to provide immediate aid. At the end of 1918, British forces from Mesopotamia had moved into the Caucasus on the Caspian side to occupy Baku and its oilfields. Three further divisions had been sent out from Constantinople across the Black Sea to take charge of its eastern end with the important port of Batum, in Georgia. By the start of 1919, British forces controlled the railway that ran across the Caucasus and linked the two cities. British intentions, though, even to the British themselves, were not clear. Access to Caspian Sea oil, protecting a possible route to India, keeping the French out, furthering self-determination: all were reasons for Britain to occupy the Caucasus. By 1919, the Bolshevik menace had been thrown into the mix; Curzon warned about putting the region “at the mercy of a horde of savages who know no restraint and are resolved to destroy all law.” But many of his colleagues were for staying out. What did it matter, Balfour asked, if the Caucasus were misgoverned? “That is the other alternative,” said Curzon sarcastically. “Let them cut each other’s throats.” Balfour replied, “I am all in favour of that.”38
Despite Curzon’s insistence, by the spring of 1919 the British government was finding its involvement in the area too onerous. “The sooner we get out of the Caucasus the better,” Henry Wilson told Lloyd George. In June the cabinet decided to withdraw all troops by the end of the year. Denikin was to be given weapons in return for a promise not to touch the independent republics. The Italians were meant to be taking over but, as Wilson advised Lloyd George, that was highly unlikely.
The decision troubled many. Hankey, secretary to the cabinet, wrote to Lloyd George that autumn about “the strong feeling which exists in many circles in the British Empire in favour of the Armenians and the natural repugnance to leave to their fate a nation