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The Treaty of Sèvres of August 10, 1920, made peace between the Allied and Associated Powers1 and the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The treaty was signed by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed VI, who was trying to save his throne but was rejected by the independence movement in the rest of Turkey. That movement, under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk, used this conflict as an opportunity to declare themselves the rightful government, replacing the monarchy in Istanbul, with a republic in Ankara.
The Ottoman Empire lost a great deal of territory by the treaty, which followed the outlines of earlier agreements between the Allies at the Conference of San Remo in April 1920. Hejaz (now part of Saudi Arabia), Armenia and Assyria were to become independent. Kurdistan was to be given autonomy. In accordance with the wartime Sykes-Picot Agreement, Mesopotamia and Palestine were given as Mandates to the United Kingdom, Lebanon and an enlarged Syria to France. The Dodecanese, Rhodes, and portions of southern Anatolia (classically known as Cilicia) were to go to Italy, Thrace and Western Anatolia, including the key port of Smyrna (now Izmir), to Greece. The Bosphorus, Dardanelles and Sea of Marmara were to be demilitarized and internationalized, and Ottoman army was restricted to a strength of 50,000 men.
The government of Ankara refused the terms of the treaty and resisted the Greek army's invasion of western Turkey. Following the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and the disastrous defeat of the Greek forces, Ataturk signed a separate peace agreement with the Soviet Union. This forced the former wartime Allies to return to the negotiating table and the terms of Sèvres were revised in Turkey's favor by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
Footnotes
- The Allied and Associated Powers were the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan (Principal Allied Powers), Armenia, Belgium, Greece, the Hedjaz (Saudi Arabia), Poland, Portugal, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.
See also
External link
- Text of the Treaty of Sèvres (http://www.hri.org/docs/sevres/)
- Armenia and Turkey in Context of the Treaty of Sevres: Aug - Dec 1920 (http://www.atlas-of-conflicts.com/areas/armenia-and-karabakh/turk_arm_war-1-1920.php) - on "Atlas of Conflicts" by Andrew Andersende:Vertrag von Sèvres
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