January, 1924

Here is the sequel to this episode which, though tempted, I cannot suppress. General Harbord and his associates made a very intelligent report upon the Armenian problem, but there was no perceptible reaction to it in America or anywhere else. A vague, face-saving clause was inserted in the Versailles Treaty, but it never became operative. It read: “An area to be delimited by the President of the United States is to be given to the Armenians,” doubtless for the purpose of “constituting their free State.”

The Treaty of Sèvres [1920], with a similar provision, was signed by the then puppet Sultan of the Turks, but Mustapha Kemal rebelled, the Sultan was forced into exile, and the treaty was never ratified. America washed, or tried to wash, her hands of the whole miserable business.

After their crushing defeat by the Turks at Marash early in 1920, the French contented themselves with merely holding on to Syria, which, however, proved to be quite a handful. Kemal, with his reorganized army, was soon in complete control of the situation as a direct result of secret alliances which flowed from the conference which was to put an end to all of them. The Turks attacked the Armenians from the west while the Soviets attacked from the east. Capturing Erivan, the Russians set up a government of Armenian Bolsheviki, and although Lenin had proclaimed the independence of the Armenian lands, Moscow came to terms with the new war lord by ceding to Turkey all the territory that had belonged to her in 1914, plus the district of Kars, which had been annexed by Russia in 1878. The Turks enlarged their frontiers on the east and Lloyd George’s and President Wilson’s Armenia vanished into thin air.

The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in July, 1923, consecrated the Turkish triumph, and the general cancellation of the peace treaties got under way. Lloyd George called this document “an abject, cowardly, and infamous surrender,” and while he himself was not without guilt, the little Welshman was quite right. It may be a redeeming feature of the situation to admit that but few of the Armenians were returned to Turkish slavery. For the most part they had died in battle, or more miserably in concentration camps and in enforced exile. Few indeed survived to realize how mistaken they had been to believe that the civilized world and the churches of Christ would not abandon them to destruction at the hands of their traditional oppressors.

All that remains of the Armenia that the British government promised in 1916 to establish and of which Mr. Wilson dreamed in 1918— the Armenian State extending from Batoum to Baku, from the Black Sea to the Caspian—is a small district around Erivan, and even that today is in the hands of a gang of Armenian Communists subsidized and under the control of Lenin. The high hopes with which the Armenians threw themselves into the war and with which they came to the Conference resulted in disaster, indeed in one of the outstanding failures of the Conference. There are some who take comfort in the thought that another little war was avoided by the complete abandonment of the fragment of the Armenian people who still survived. This is perhaps true, but what a price has been paid! In the future, who will place any reliance on the given word of the civilized nations or in their solemn covenant to save the weak from the criminal aggressor?