TURKEY FOR THE TURKS.

Matamata Record, Volume VI, Issue 483, 25 October 1923, Page 1

TURKEY FOR THE TURKS.

"EXCHANGE OF POPULATIONS." The Cost of Interference. What happened in the following* three and a half years in Asia Minor, behind the veil of Allied censorship, is a wonderful story, not to be told here. The Turks came to unprecedented self-consciousness and solidarity. They constituted themselves an extreme democracy, and repudiated the Sultan. All this while Allied disunion and mutual antagonism in the Near East were on the increase. Only Britain backed the Greeks on their adventure's ebb and flow. An army of a quarter of a million men was kept in Anatolia, largely by European money, despite the swift changes of Greek home politics and the return of Constantino. Even the Greek nation protested against the absence of its man power in this futile enterprise. Red Russia helped Turkey; France helped Turkey; Italy supplied Turkey with munitions; Persia, Egypt, Afghanastan and India lent Turkey moral support.

Last September the bubble burst. The Greek Army was routed, almost without resistance. It fled to the coast and got away in good order from the port of Smyrna, heedless of the plight of the Greek civilians left behind, and all hope of a Greek conquest of Asia Minor disappeared for a century, at least. The dream of ages has been dissipated. Following hard upon the heels of the fleeing troops " came the Greek civilian population to Smyrna. They were, willy-nilly, part of the Greek adventure. As Greeks, they had been drawn into the war against Turkey. They were a * hostile rjopulatidn. Bitterness and blood had engendered such passions as made the living together of the Turks and the Greeks an impossibility for the future. Terror sent more than half a million Greeks in flight to Smyrna, where the victorious Turks seized multitudes of their men, between the ages of seventeen and forty-five, for their army. The civilians to the number of threequarters of a million were evacuated to Greece and. the islands ,of the, Aegean. ' Incidentally; Lloyd George "losfhis" fob as'British Prime Minister and King Cohstantine lost his throne. About the same time the group of responsible Greek officials were executed by their enraged country. Turkey had come back, and with a few simple items on her programme, which she has been able to enforce upon a divided Europe. She insisted that the Allied troops must get out of Turkey and Constantinople, bag and baggage, along with all the special privileges foreigners have enjoyed for more than a century. Also the Greeks must go. The Armenians were already out of the way so far as any considerable numbers went. " Turkey for the Turks," was the cry. A majority of the Greeks had left Turkey, following their army's departure. The others, even in Asia Minor, were warned to go also. The " Christian " population was to be eliminated; *c new Turkey had restricted her boundaries and had bidden the Arabs and Syrians depart in peace; what was left of Turkey was to be wholly Turkey. Right at this juncture the League of Nations stepped in and did Turkey the best service imaginable. Just as some of the more discerning leaders of the Nationalists, aware of Turkey's need of foreign capital, weregrowing nervous over the effect upon world opinion of this wholesale deportation of the Greek population, who had been inhabitants 'of the land more than a thousand years before ever a Turk set foot uponit, along came investigators and retainers representing the League of Nations. They looked into the complicated and , distressful situation. Their recommendation, made to the Lausanne Conference in the name of the League, was that the Christian population of Turkey should' be exchanged for the Moslem, population of Greece; so that there should., be no Christians left in Asia Minor, and ho Moslems left in Greece.

If ever dignified Turks jumped for joy it was when this report was made. The very measure the Turks themselves had desired and undertaken has been recommended. But the further .they had gone in the matter the less likely it seemed to prove pleasant to the world's susceptibilities. It was bound to be hailed as one more barbarity by the.terrible Turks. Lo, the .same good fortune that had attended them in battle was still theirs, for the cloak of the League of Nations was thrown over the whole business of tearing people from their ancestral homes and dumping them upon the shores of a land whose tongue they did not speak for Turkish is the language of the Anatolian Greek peasant, not Greek. The "exchange of populations" is now in progress,, under the supervision of a neutral commission. Turkey is out from under.

" Naturally, Jhe Christians did not wait for May—the appointed date—to arrive before beginning their trek to 'the ports of embarkation. Prodded by the local Turkish officials, and eager to go while the going was good, they sold or packed or were compelled to .abandon their portable possessions, arid started to the sea. That retreat has phases and chapters that no Xenophon will ever record. The journeys afoot through the snow and cold, the desolate waits for ships; the herding aboard these craft; the disease, hunger, death that attended the journeyings; then, at the end of January, the startling interruption of the migration, at Constantinople because Greece had refused , to receive any more of the refugees. Constantinople did not. want them to threaten her population with epidemics, and could not care for them because of the poverty of her own people. Room was yiven for them in Selamie Barracks, on Prinkipo and at San Stefano. "As already indicated, there has been much tossing to and fro of the ball of

responsibility for the plight of these products of imperialism, but that does not alter by one whit the suffering of the people. Nor docs it visualise the one grim reality of the whole business. That is the human facto';- in the deportations oi 1 , to use the more euphonious phrase, the " exchange of poulation." These are living men and women involved. Their old homes are infinitely dearer to them than the city dwelling house. Asia roots deeply in the. soil. Many of these Greeks who have been torn up from Asia Minor have dwelt there since long before the Christian era. All their traditions and ties arc intensely localised. Most of them have scant knowledge of or sympathy with the pan-Hell-enist programme of the Greek politicians. Still less do they know of Europe's " statesmanship." A detached incident may help make this plain. She was a peasant woman in a Turkish village in remote Anatolia. Her ignorance of the big world was incredible. Yet she said in a sentence mor© {truth about the, Near Eastern question than appears in many pretentious books. Two American women—one of whom told me the tale— found her, more than a year ago, sitting amid the ruins of her burned home and village. Miss Allen, a veteran American missionary with a sympathetic heart, who spoke and understood Turkish perfectly she later succumbed to typhus at Sivas—was talking with the survivors, and in the course of a conversation with this particular woman the latter asked: " Isn't there a man where you came from named 'Europe?' Yes; well, he is tha one. that has done all this. Kemal wants peace, but Europe won't let him have it. Europe sent the Greeks in here; and see what they have done!"

I saw one girl with a face of the pure Grecian type; but most of the refugees merge into a blur of sallow dark faces, begrimed and scared, and surrounded with the rags that are a peasant's clothes. Occasionally circumstances stab one into a consciousness that each of these families is as definitely individual a one's own. The waiter at my table here in Constantinople is a Greek from the interior. He had word a few weeks ago that his wife and four children were aboarcl a refugee ship. Frantic search found the mother child .in the Selamie Barracks;.,iflLthreo other children had.died- brib-..cry.-fcke—man''got, Ins surviving boy out; and all his money he spends on his wife for food and comforts, but \to has been unable to smuggle out his wife. She, poor.woman, who can see and speak to her husband only" through a window, in her frenzy of grief, thinks he does not want her, else he would surely secure her release. . j

That man's brother-in-law, who also works where I am sojourning, had a wife and three children in Selamie Barracks; but the wife and one child died, and the two remaining children are very small, with no one to care for them. The father is not allowed to cross the quarantine line or to bring them out—without large baksheesh, which ho. cannot raise. Every family of the twenty thousand refugees now in Constantinople, and the other hundreds of thousands of refugees in Greece and Anatolia and elsewhere, represents to some degree a similar domestic tragedy. Breaking this situation up into < its human units, and viewing it against the background of the state of civilisation which the world professes, it becomes one of the major calamities of our woe-ridden time. To administer relief is well and necessary, but it is not a cure. The only possible permanent remedy for this sort _of thing is the re-creation of the spirit in whifih the Allied soldiers fought in France a passionate purpose to overthrow imperialism, secret diplomacy, militarism and all the form of irresponsible autocracy, however they mav be named.