Tear up the 1920 Treaty of Sevres

[Eddie]

Thoughts for debate on the way to the 100th anniversary of the Genocide…

 

Thought No.1

 

Stop licking the corpse of the 1920 Treaty of Sevres

 

The 1920 post-World War One Treaty of Sevres between the defeated Ottoman Empire and the triumphant Allies must forever cease to be a reference point, an instrument of policy, negotiation or a platform of appeal in the Armenian people’s 21st century efforts to construct secure and viable nationhood.

 

Armenian-related clauses of this Treaty that shaped a substantial Armenian state over large portion of historical Armenia are, pathetically because of their stamp of Great Power approval, ceaselessly cited by Armenian commentators as a critical and irrefutable recognition of the Armenian people’s legitimate right to national self-determination on historic homelands to which the survivors of the Genocide now have no right to return. So the Treaty has become part of the package of Armenian presentations against the Turkish state that run together with the demand of Genocide recognition.

 

Armenians however must abandon to the historians a Treaty that even at its birth stank of the cynical imperialist gamble that it was – a scheme to carve up Asia Minor and the Middle East, not for Armenians, Kurds, Arabs, Greeks or even Turks, but for European imperial powers alone. The whole of Asia Minor and the Middle East, until then Ottoman colonies, was now to be divided into British, French and Italian spheres of influence with Greeks and Armenians acting as proxy within borders that, assigned to them, would be helpless protectorates.

 

The Allies however were neither able nor prepared to impose the Treaty, unwilling or unable to deploy the necessary militarily force required. They would rely instead on regional proxies and allies who only had a chance of triumph in the event of an utterly incapacitated, broken Turkish/Ottoman ruling class and an utterly passive Turkish nationalist ruling class that had been spawned within the Ottoman state.

 

Greek and Armenian armed forces would be used to measure the strength of a virtually defunct Ottoman Empire, shrunk essentially to its Asia Minor and Middle East colonies. If they managed to overwhelm the disorganised forces of the once mighty and savage Empire, Britain, France and Italy would be free, at no cost to them, to impose its new colonial order designed in the Treaty of Sevres with their allies employed as instrument of regional control.

 

The Treaty of Sevres was a gamble, a gamble that failed, rapidly undone by Kemal Ataturk’s virulent Turkish imperialist-chauvinist national movement.

 

Inheriting the legacy of the Ottoman militarism and sustained by a substantial Turkish social base Kemal Ataturk rapidly all opponents and moved to quickly establish Turkish hegemony over all of Asia Minor, including historic Armenia and Kurdistan. As Kemal’s mastery of the area became incontestable, Europe and the USA abandoned erstwhile Armenian and Greek allies and began parleying with Ataturk. Within three years the Treaty of Sevres was dead, unceremoniously cast onto the scrap heap of international law by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that recognised Turkish colonial rule over Asia Minor – including over the larger segment of historically colonised Armenia and Kurdistan.

 

The European gamble at Sevres was particularly cynical where Armenia and Armenians were concerned. The Armenian people had no prospect of driving Ataturk’s forces from their western historic homelands. The Genocide had destroyed the demographic foundation for their national development in western Armenia. The surviving Armenian elites, in the Caucuses, Istanbul and beyond had in addition proved utterly indifferent or unable to take up the challenge of reaffirming Armenian national rights in their historic homelands.

 

Between 1917 and 1920, Armenian forces had already been pushed back and out of western Armenia well before Ataturk’s own aggressive assaults. Even in the event of any early military success, a ramshackle Armenian state assembled in territory substantially denuded of Armenians would sooner or later fall before Kurdish and Turkish forces intervening to ostensibly support compatriots who would constitute a majority in a so-called Armenian state.

 

Despite all this Armenian political elites have never been reconciled to the demise of the Imperialist Gamble of Sevres and as in the Armenian legend they endlessly lick its rotting corpse hoping to bring it back to life, tiresomely demanding that its Armenian clauses, deemed one of the finest manifestations of international justice for Armenians, be if not enforced in whole, then, at least tabled as a framework for forcing Turkey into ceding land to Armenia or cited as evidence of the historical justice of Armenian claims.

 

But the Treaty is dead, a mere historical document testifying to European colonial appetites stirred by visions of a helpless Ottoman collapse.

 

Efforts to resurrect the lost Gamble serve as dead weight keeping us bent in beggary. Kneeling before Europe and America hoping that today they will enforce what they failed to when truly Global Masters of the World, is worse than pathetic political delusion. The Armenian appeal to Sevres that often runs along with the campaign for imperialist genocide recognition is just another weeping wound of what has now become a near terminal Armenian disease - dependence upon foreign powers for the future of their nation and state, the same dependence that in the past has produced nothing but tragedy and disaster.

 

It is time to stop licking.

 

Eddie Arnavoudian

15 September 2012

[Hellektor]

Wow... So the author of this piece of work claims his interests are “many including Armenian literature, history and culture” but doesn't have the slightest idea about the whole issue he is hallucinating about. Fallacy after fallacy that has been fed us over decades by our ignorant, illiterate or even worse, half-literate “leaders” is being gloriously regurgitated without an iota of attempt at understanding the issues.

 

For starters: it's not about the Treaty of Sèvres, it's about the Woodrow Wilson arbitration.

 

Indeed, you should forget Sèvres because it was not the treaty that delineated the borders between Turkey and Armenia, it's the Woodrow Wilson report, namely: FULL REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE UPON THE ARBITRATION OF THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN TURKEY AND ARMENIA.

 

The treaty of Sèvres only served the purpose of assigning the delineation of the border to Wilson. I copy/paste from my earlier posts that deal with the issue with eventual editing where necessary:

 

I. The Woodrow Wilson arbitration has nothing to do with the ratification or not of the treaty of Sèvres, according to the treaty, mainly the articles 89 and 90:

 

Article 89.

Turkey and Armenia, as well as the other High Contracting Parties agree to submit to the arbitration of the President of the United States of America the question of the frontier to be fixed between Turkey and Armenia in the Vilayets of Erzerum, Trebizond, Van and Bitlis, and to accept his decision thereupon, as well as any stipulations he may prescribe as to access for Armenia to the sea, and as to the demilitarization of any portion of Turkish territory adjacent to the said frontier. (all emphases are mine. Hell.)

 

This means THE MOMENT “Turkey and Armenia, as well as the other High Contracting Parties” AGREED on “submit[ting] to the arbitration of the President of the United States of America the question of the frontier to be fixed between Turkey and Armenia”, FROM THAT VERY MOMENT:

 

ARTICLE 90.

In the event of the determination of the frontier under Article 89 involving the transfer of the whole or any part of the territory of the said Vilayets to Armenia, Turkey hereby renounces as from the date of such decision (my emphasis, this renders the ratification or not of the treaty irrelevant to the decision of Wilson’s arbitration. Hell.) all rights and title over the territory so transferred. The provisions of the present Treaty applicable to territory detached from Turkey shall thereupon become applicable to the said territory…

 

This is the reason Wilson did not wait for the ratification of Sèvres (he did not have to) and went on with the job which he successfully carried out.

 

II. The Wilson Arbitration has nothing to do with the Armenian Genocide, therefore whether the puppets in the White House will utter the term “Armenian Genocide” or not does not change its value. I cannot care less for some head of state of a Western country giving lip service uttering the term Armenian Genocide, to hell with all of them. Our problem with Turks is TERRITORIAL.

 

III. Since Wilson signed the arbitration on November 20 1920 and only ten days later, the Abrahamic religion of Rabbi Mordecai Marx Levi was imposed on Armenia destroying the first republic, it stopped existing as a subject of international law, the only body that can raise the Wilson issue.

 

IV. Since for 70 years Armenia did not exist as an independent state, i.e. a subject of international law, Armenians had to do all they could to get the Armenian Genocide recognized.

 

Raising the Wilson issue by the Armenian state may not bring back any territory but it will give us priceless levers so vital for us countering Judeo-Anglo-Turkic distortions, it will:

 

I. Disarm Turkey of its “arguments” for constant manipulation of the “international” community to wail along the cacophonous chorus of the Armenian Genocide denial.

 

II. Shut up those who have fooled us into believing that we have to follow a certain procedure to get land from the perpetrator of the genocide.

 

III. Force these deniers to pass resolution after resolution, recognizing the Armenian Genocide and beg us on their knees, only if we would leave their Turks alone.

 

IV. This will drive the last nail into the stinking coffin of pan-Turkism, seeing that the “wedge” is too large for them to eliminate Armenia they'll give up the delusional ideology.

 

V. As a result, the Artsakh issue will be solved much faster. In response to the constant Turk jumping up and down and howling and sniveling about Artsakh: “Give me Qarabaq, give me region, give me village, yallah...” we will say, “evacuate the illegally held Armenian territory according to the Wilson arbitration first” and they'll put a sock in it.

 

We can actually get much more by raising the Wilson issue, I'll elaborate if needed. Just bear in mind this is the most important document of international law in our hands so, learn to appreciate it.

 

*****

 

Concerning the age long Lausanne fallacy parroted by the “interested” author:

 

Contrary to what most Armenians wrongly believe it is a very pro-Armenian treaty indeed if you take your time to read it. Here some facts:

 

I. There is no mention of Sèvres in the text of Lausanne, i.e. nowhere it is mentioned that Lausanne renders the treaty of Sèvres invalid. They couldn't either, because according to international law, all and only all the signatories of a treaty are eligible to sign a treaty, rendering a previous one void.

 

The signatories of Sèvres:

 

THE BRITISH EMPIRE, FRANCE, ITALY AND JAPAN,

...ARMENIA, BELGIUM, GREECE, THE HEDJAZ, POLAND, PORTUGAL, ROUMANIA, THE SERB-CROAT-SLOVENE STATE AND CZECHO-SLOVAKIA,

...of the one part;

...AND TURKEY,

of the other part;

 

The signatories of Lausanne:

 

THE BRITISH EMPIRE, FRANCE, ITALY, JAPAN, GREECE, ROUMANIA and the SERB-CROAT-SLOVENE STATE,

of the one part,

and TURKEY,

of the other part;

 

II. The treaty of Lausanne deals with the borders of Turkey with Bulgaria and Greece and there is not a single mention of borders with Soviet Armenia or the Soviet Union in general. This means it recognizes the borders drawn by another treaty and the only internationally legal document regarding that with Armenia is the Wilson arbitration.

 

III. The articles 37 through 45 of the Lausanne treaty (SECTION III. PROTECTION OF MINORITIES) prove how beneficial to Armenians, among other “minorities” of Turkey, this treaty actually is and to what extent Turkey's savage behavior in destroying Armenian monuments (among other monstrosities committed against “minorities”, since 1923) is in breach of this same Lausanne treaty Turks shove in our faces every time we demand justice.

 

IV. Since the drawing of the border between Turkey and Armenia was assigned by the signatories of Sèvres to the president of the United States of America, making the States an integral part of the treaty of Sèvres, the US has to this very day refused to recognize the Lausanne treaty, mainly because Turkey has not fulfilled its obligations regarding the Armenian border in breech of the law of the land of the United States of America.

Edited September 25, 2012 by Hellektor