Conference of London

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This article is about Conference of London. For other uses, see Conference of London (disambiguation).

The Conference of London (February 21 and March 12 1921 and March 1922, London, Great Britain) of the post-World War I Allied conference to push the conditions of the Treaty of Sèvres to Turkish Revolutionaries.

[edit] First stage

To salvage the Treaty of Sèvres, a diplomatic conference was held in London between February 21 and March 12 1921. Triple Entente forced the nationalists to agree with the Istanbul government. Bekir Sami, representative of Ankara, insisted that the delegate from Istanbul could not enter the negotiations, and rejected the use of Sêvres as the basis of the talks. Sêvres had been negotiated with the Ottoman Empire, not with the recently liberated Turkey.

[edit] Second stage

Another meeting in London was held in March 1922. The Allies, without considering the extent of Ankara's successes, hoped to impose modified Serves as a peace settlement on Ankara. The Entente foreign ministers proposed Ankara to establish an Armenian state in eastern Anatolia, removing Turkish troops from the Straits area. Also stipulated was the Turkish abandonment to the Greeks of Smyrna and eastern Thrace, including Adrianople. In return, the Allies offered to raise the Sèvres limits on the Turkish army to 85,000 men, eliminating the European financial controls over the Turkish government, but retaining the Capitulations and Public Debt Commission. These proposals were so incompatible with the National Pact that it was easy for the Ankara Assembly to reject them.

[edit] See also

• Turkish War of Independence