Sept. 29.
Tr is useless to pretend that the situation in the Near East is aught but very grave. The old saying that he who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind applies strikingly to the policy, or rather lack of policy, that the Entente Powers have practised in that region. Although Turkey was the first of the Central Powers to collapse in 1918, it was nearly two years before she learnt at Sévres the terms to be imposed on her. Light as those terms were—they included the handing back of Constantinople, notwithstanding the many wartime pledges that the Turk was never again to rule in Europe—she was enabled, through French sympathy, successfully to protest against them and another conference was held in London in March, 1921, where they were further whittled down. It is worth recalling that the Kemalists, though denounced as rebels by Constantinople and unrecognized by the Powers, were permitted to send delegates to the London conference, where their views were accorded all the respect due to an organized Government. Even thus bowdlerized, the Sévres Treaty has never been ratified. Alarmed by the concess-jons made in London, the Greeks re-opened hostilities on Turkey and marched into Asia Minor. In war the Turks are traditionally slow to exert their full strength, which may partly explain' the earlier Greek successed. But it is at least a curious coincidence that it was not until the beginning of August last, when the Entente Powers compelled the Greeks to desist from their intention of occupying Constantinople, in order to put pressure on the Turkish Government to stop the massacring of Christians in Turkey, that the Kemalist forces really began to move. The terrible success of their forward sweep, culminating in the horrid but truly Turkish outrages at Smyrna, is too fresh in memory to need recapitulation.
We have no desire to defend the Greeks and certainly no one, will waste any sympathy on the egregious Constantine, once again forced to abdicate. But this does not lessen the conviction that strong action was and is necessary against the Kemaglists and that anything less than real strength will reap the inevitable reward of weakness. The policy of trying to buy off a victorious enemy has never met with anything but failure and the greater loss. The offers with which the Entente Powers are endeavouring to tempt Mustapha. Kemal to a conference at Venice amount to a virtual rehabilitation of Turkey as she was before the war, with the sole exception that she must guarantee to keep the Dardanelles open and the League of Nations to see that she does so. It is hardly possible to imagine anything so fatuous. Seeing that their successes have already brought the Entente Powers so low, the Kemalists will naturally conclude that they have only to persist in vigorousness in order to get all they want without giving any promises at all. Even if they accept the Venice Con. ference, what reason is there to suppose that they would respect its pledges a moment longer: than was convenient? Certainly none that can be found in the records of any Turkish Government, Abdul Hamid's, Young Turk or Kemalist. We may see which way the wind is blowing from the Kemalists' ingenious excuses for not retiring from the neutral zone at Chanak and from Mus: tapha, Kemal's bland assertion that he has never heard of a neutral zone. Constantinople is his, the Dardanelles by a little determination may be his, and thence from south and east an advance through Rumelia and Thrace, with Adrianople and the old Turkey in Europe the prize and no inconvenient and wearisome conferences. Most ominous of all, Soviet Russia stands strongly behind him. The report from Helsingfors that Moscow will send him men and arms might be rumour. But of the meaning of the Soviet's Note to London, reported in to-day's telegrams, there can be no possible doubt.
And this alone makes the shortsightedness of French policy the more amazing. Of the sudden withdrawal of French troops from beside their British allies at Chanak we prefer not to speak. But whatever France may hope to gain by favouring the Kemalists, her very-support of them tends most effectually to frustrate. It is not to be forgotten that France holds a very large share of the Ottoman Debt: and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.