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George Horton's

TURKEY : THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

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EXCERPTS FROM TURKEY - THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

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Page 18

From THE REVEREND RALPH HARLOW ON THE LAUSANNE TREATY

    A FURTHER quotation from the same article [by Reverend Ralph Barlow, "Outlook" of October 25, 1922] indicates that the men on destroyers did not fully share the pro-Turk sentiments of their officers:

    "I have just listened to the contents of a letter sent by one of our boys on an American destroyer at Smyrna. He tells of having to stand by while the brutal Turkish soldiers seized beautiful Christian girls and tore them screaming from their mothers and outraged them right on the public quay of Smyrna. He saw these brutal soldiers shooting down helpless women with children in their arms, unarmed men beaten to death by the butts of these Turkish soldiery. And then he tells of the anguish that he felt because the orders of our government were such that he had to stand by, helpless, before such atrocities."

    I have been told that many such letters were written by our navy boys at Smyrna to relatives and friends in the United States. In a letter to me, Mr. Barlow says that he believes it to be his duty to tell the truth about affairs in the Near East, and he continues:

    "Doctor MacLachlan and Reed demanded my resignation and said that I endangered the college. I resigned. I have been made to feel that I ought to keep still, but justice seems to me greater than buildings and institutions. At the time of the Lausanne Conference and after, I claimed that our American Board (of Foreign Missions) ought to have stood four square against the wretched treaty. Dr. Barton did not like the openness of my criticisms and I lost a position as Board Secretary through his opposition to me." [...]

    "All the evidence goes to show that the men who went to Lausanne were influenced from the very first in all their decisions to protect the oil interests, which featured largely behind the scenes in the Conference discussions. That those interests were so strong as to overshadow the humanitarian and missionary interests I have accepted without question, until I read your paragraph." [...]

    I will be willing to defend the thesis that the entire course of events, which made the Lausanne Treaty possible, was determined by the ambitions of the commercial oil interests, and that, in this race for Turkish favors, the Americans led the way."

    Mr. Barlow quotes many editorials and articles in the American and British press, the general tenor of which can be gleaned from one or two examples:

    "Lausanne was all that an International Conference ought not to be. It was the sacrifice of all human and humanitarian questions to expediency." "New York Journal of Commerce", July, 1923.

    "Mosul and freedom to give us a chance in the scramble for oil has been the object of all the negotiations, but the United States might be better occupied to-day than looking after the interests of oil kings. Peace and civilization may be talked about in public, but in private there is talk of oil, because territories where the future concessionaires will be at pains to insure their rights, are at stake." New York Times

    "Although America would accept no humane responsibility in the Near East, saying that it must be free from troubles and depravities of the Old World, America’s blood boils over the burning question of oil. When the word ‘oil’ is mentioned, the recluse bursts from its retirement upon the instant. America has no concern with Asia Minor while the Turk butchers his Christian subjects by the hundreds of thousands." Pall Mall Gazettes

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