Treaty of Lausanne

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Lausanne Treaty)
Jump to: navigation, search
For the 1912 Treaty of Lausanne between Italy and the Ottoman Empire (signed on 18 October, 1912 in Ouchy), see the Italo-Turkish War.
Borders as shaped by the treaty
Borders as shaped by the treaty

The Treaty of Lausanne (July 24, 1923) was a peace treaty signed in Lausanne that settled the Anatolian part of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire by annulment of the Treaty of Sèvres signed by the Ottoman Empire as the consequences of the Turkish Independence War between Allies of World War I and Grand National Assembly of Turkey (Turkish national movement).

Contents

See also: Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Independence War

After the expulsion of the Greek forces by the Turkish army under the command of Mustafa Kemal (later Kemal Atatürk), the newly-founded Turkish government rejected the recently signed Treaty of Sèvres.

Negotiations performed during Conference of Lausanne which İsmet İnönü was the lead negotiator for Turkey and Eleftherios Venizelos was his Greek counterpart. Negotiations took many months. On October 20, 1922 the peace conference was reopened, and after strenuous debates, it was once again interrupted by Turkish protest on February 4, 1923. After reopening on April 23, and more protest by Kemal's government, the treaty was signed on July 24 after eight months of arduous negotiation by allies such as US Admiral Mark L. Bristol, who served as United States High Commissioner and championed Turkish efforts.

The treaty is composed of 141 articles with major sections;[1]

The treaty provided for the independence of the Republic of Turkey but also for the protection of the ethnic Greek minority in Turkey and the mainly ethnically Turkish Muslim minority in Greece. Much of the Greek population of Turkey was exchanged with the Turkish population of Greece. The Greeks of Istanbul, Imbros and Tenedos were excluded (about 270,000 in Istanbul alone at that time [1]), and so were the Muslim population of Western Thrace (about 86,000 [2] in 1922). Article 14 of the treaty granted the islands of Imbros and Tenedos "special administrative organisation", a right that was revoked by the Turkish government on 17 February 1926. The republic of Turkey also accepted the loss of Cyprus to the British Empire. The fate of the province of Mosul was left to be determined through the League of Nations.

The treaty delimited the boundaries of Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey, formally ceded all Turkish claims on Cyprus, Iraq and Syria, and (along with the Treaty of Ankara) settled the boundaries of the latter two nations. The treaty also led to international recognition of the sovereignty of the new Republic of Turkey as the successor state of the defunct Ottoman Empire.

Among many agreements, there was a separate agreement with the United States, Chester concession. US Senate refused to ratify the treaty and consequently Turkey annulled the concession.[1]

The Convention on the Turkish straits lasted only thirteen years and was replaced with Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Turkish Straits. The custom limitations in the treaty were shortly reworked. Political amnesty was applied. 150 persona non grata of Turkey slowly acquired citizenship (the last one was in 1974) to the descendants of the former dynasty.

Since signing the treaty, both Turkey and Greece have claimed that the other has violated its provisions. Greece has seen its ethnic minority population in Turkey diminish from several hundred thousand in 1923 to just a couple of thousand today, and claims that this was caused by the systematic enforcement of anti-minority measures.[2][unreliable source?] Turkey closed the Halki seminary, which is in direct contradiction to the treaty which stipulates religious freedom.

Ultimately, Winston Churchill who had a damaged career because of his failure at the Battle of Gallipoli, during which he had urged the Armenian population to rebel with vague promises to divert manpower that arena,[3] and his inability to enforce the Treaty of Sèvres, and managed to dismantle the Ottoman Empire with the occupation of Istanbul remarked: “In the Lausanne Treaty, which established a new peace between the allies and Turkey, history will search in vain for the name Armenia.”[4]

  1. ^ a b Andrew Mango Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey ISBN 158567334X page. 388
  2. ^ Measures claimed to have caused the decline of the Greek minority in Turkey
  3. ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/turkey/story/0,,1921272,00.html
  4. ^ Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. V, London, 1929, p. 408



Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.