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Thursday 20 November 2008

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922

Through Levantine eyes

Philip Mansel reviews a pair of books on Turkey

Few Turks are cited. Would they, if they were unofficial sources, tell a different tale? Falih Rifki Atay, a journalist from Istanbul who visited Izmir that month, wrote:

Why were we burning down Izmir? Were we afraid that if waterfront mansions, hotels and restaurants stayed in place we would not be free of the minorities? …this did not derive from a simple urge to destroy. A feeling of inferiority had a part in it.

The destruction of the centre of Izmir was a result of failure: failure of different races to appreciate their mutual dependence; failure of the architects of the Greek invasion, Lloyd George (‘not a man of detail’) and the Greek Prime Minister Venizelos, to understand geopolitical realities; failure of naval commanders to react; failure of the Greek government to protect the Greeks it had been so keen to ‘liberate’. Not until very late indeed did a few ships sail from Greece and the nearby islands to rescue some of their compatriots. Greeks either refused to sail or preferred to organise a revolution. The only heroes on the Izmir corniche were some doctors, nurses and sailors.

Giles Milton also underlines Mustafa Kemal’s role — still a taboo subject in Turkey today. Kemal had entered Izmir in a car covered in olive branches. Thereafter he spent days up in a villa, courting his future wife Latife Hanim, daughter of one of the many Turkish businessmen who had profited from ‘infidel Izmir’. Down in the town three separate horrors were taking place: massacres; the fire (Milton quotes eye-witnesses who saw Turkish soldiers pouring oil); and the subsequent deportation of thousands of Greek and Armenian men of military age into the interior, in theory to rebuild villages destroyed by the retreating Greek army: few returned. There was no danger of Kemal being detested by Turks, as the Greek High Commissioner Aristides Sterghiades had been by Greeks, for being too kind to the other side, too harsh on his own.

Whereas the Ottoman government had profted from ‘the minorities’, Kemal wanted to be ‘free’ of those whom, even before the trauma of 1919, he regarded as Turkey’s ‘sworn enemies’. Kemal shows that, if nothing succeeds like success, it can also be true that nothing fails like success. The moderniser of Turkey, one of the most admired leaders of the 20th century, helped destroy its most modern city. Partly as a result of the elimination of Greek businesses, the economy of Izmir — therefore of Turkey — languished for many years. Re-Islamisation, Kemal’s nightmare, may have been facilitated. If Izmir had retained even a fraction of its cosmopolitan population, it might have helped Turkey’s entry into the European Union.

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