Treaty of Lausanne

Infobox Treaty
name = Treaty of Lausanne
long_name =


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date_drafted =
date_signed = 1923 July 24
location_signed = Lausanne, Switzerland
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date_effective =
condition_effective = Ratification by Turkey and three of United Kingdom, Italy, France or Japan.
date_expiration =
signatories = flagicon|United Kingdom United Kingdom
flagicon|France France
flagicon|Italy|1861 Italy
flagicon|Japan|alt Japan
flagicon|Greece|old Greece
flagicon|Romania Romania
flagicon|Yugoslavia|kingdom Yugoslavia
flagicon|Turkey Turkey
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depositor = French Republic
language =
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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).

Overview and negotiations

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 were undertaken during the Conference of Lausanne at which İsmet İnönü was the lead negotiator for Turkey and Eleftherios Venizelos was his Greek counterpart. The negotiations took many months. On November 20 1922, the peace conference was opened, and after strenuous debate, was interrupted by Turkish protest on February 4 1923. After reopening again on April 23, and after 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.

Treaty stipulations

The treaty was composed of 143 articles with major sections including:cite book |author=Mango, Andrew |title=Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey |isbn=158567334X |pages=388 |year=2002 |publisher=Overlook Press]
* Convention on the Turkish straits
* Trade (abolition of capitulations)
* Agreements
* Binding letters.

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. However, most of the Greek population of Turkey and the Turkish population of Greece had already been deported under the earlier Exchange of Populations between Greece and Turkey agreement signed by Greece and Turkey. Only the Greeks of Istanbul, Imbros and Tenedos were excluded (about 270,000 in Istanbul alone at that time), [ [http://www.hri.org/MFA/foreign/bilateral/minority.htm The Greek minority of Turkey] ] and the Muslim population of Western Thrace (about 86,000 [ [http://www.hri.org/MFA/foreign/musmingr.htm ΜΟΥΣΟΥΛΜΑΝΙΚΗ ΜΕΙΟΝΟΤΗΤΑ ΘΡΑΚΗΣ] ] 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 February 17, 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.

Borders

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.Fact|date=August 2008

Agreements

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

Aftermath

The Convention on the Turkish Straits lasted only thirteen years and was replaced with the Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Turkish Straits. The customs 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. The ethnic Greek minority population in Turkey diminished 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 (see Pontic Greek genocide, or Istanbul pogrom).Fact|date=March 2008Ultimately, 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 to that arena, [cite news |url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/oct/13/comment.france |title=This ignorant act will only fan the flames of division |first=Fiachra |last=Gibbons |section=Comment is free |work=The Guardian |date=2006-10-13 |accessdate=2008-08-05] along with his inability to enforce the Treaty of Sèvres and dismantling of 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.” [Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. V, London, 1929, p. 408]

ee also

* Aftermath of World War I
* Turks of Western Thrace
* Greeks of Turkey
* Greek refugees
* Minority Treaties
* Ismet Inönü
* Chaim Nahum

References

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