THE GREEK BETRAYAL

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 50, 28 February 1923, Page 5

THE GREEK BETRAYAL

A PROTEST BY MR. W. P,

REEVES

"CHRISTIANI AD LEONES"

-'.'THERE IS A GOD.".

(FHOJI OUP. OWX CORRESPONDENT.}

LONDON, 20th December

"If I write with heat it is because I have brooded over the tragedy of the Near East for many years; because, when you are tackling murder and diplomacy there, it is no use mincing matters; most of all, because I am trying to plead for human sufferers hounded by their agony into crying that God has forsaken them."—This from Mr. W. Pember Reeves, who, living in comparative retirement, still uses his pen from time to time for a cause he has deeply at heart. As chairman of- the AngloHellenic League, he has now publijlied a booklet which is at once a protest against die policy of the greater nations of Europe with regard to the Near East, and a stern reproof of that policy. Taking as his text the Marquis Curzon's condemnation of the Turkish policy of extirpation in Anatolia and Armenia, Mr. Pember Reeves asks: "Why does this scathing expose only come now? Had it been uttered shree or even two years ago, and had our Foreign Office been guided accordingly— been guided, that is. by a steady purpose of ending a misrule hateful to God and man—then a great tragedy might have been averted. At any ralJ, the last and worst act of it might W.ve been averted, for the tragedy as a c'vunia began centuries ago. Why wait to denounce Turkish extirpation until the curtain has fallen on the doom of Near Eastern Christianity from the Taurus Ranges to the Maritza? Where—save in Constantinople—are the Asian Greeks, the Armenians, the Thracians? A million or so of miserable exilps have been added to the dispersed multitude who have fled north and west from time to time during the last thirty years. Some 150.000 mishandled captives* may be doing slave work waiting for release, chiefly by death. Any other remnants of the living are being steadily expelled. Large gangs are being marched down to the seaports, or, herded in hunger, awaiting shipment- there. Where are the rest? Their bones litter the highways of Anatolia or have been flung into Armenian pits. "Kemal's executioners, when not making away with the bodies of their victims in some slovenly fashion, leave their skeletons to lie where- they will. There they whiten, witnesses that the long struggle for Asia Minor, which Greek and Turk began when the Seljuks burst into Armenia nearly nine centuries ago, is over at last. Christianity and Hellenism have passed away; anything worth calling civilisation has gone with them. Greek, spoken in lonia since the age of Homer, became a dead language thero this autumn, and the last of the "Seven Churches of Asia has perished in fire and blood." NOT BUSINESS. Constantinople, Mr. Reeves acknowledges, still stands. "There are always some people left in the Near East whom the Turks have not yet exterminated. No man feels secure in Constantinople; trade and finance are paralysed; 175,000 persons, chiefly Eastern Christians, have fied from the city in three months. The Turcomaniac newspapers of Paris and London tell us that in the tallest of scare-lines. It is not business. But capitulations and Customs duties, bank loans and trade, consuls and navigation rights, these furnish reasons for which great nations may fight and pay. It is only a few of us who think that Great Powers standing up in defence of commorcial privileges, but doing so only after those inconvenient Christian multitudes have been put out of the way, provide more cause for silence than rejoicing. As'for the reconciliation of the Allies—really, to see politicians in England and Franco burying the hatchet in Mr. Lloyd George's political grave might have made Diogenes grin. ' The warning 'Put not your trust in Princes,' had it been given to-day, might it not have been enlarged by a few caustic words about allies and colleagues ? "Year after year Eastern Christianity, fallen among thieves, has lain by the roadside, stripped and wounded. England, America, and France were to come after the Armistice as Good Samaritans, binding up wounds, pouring in oil and wine. No Samaritans came. Financiers monopolised the oil and the Turks have prohibited the wine. The wounds still bleed." "NO BLACK AND NO WHITE." Mr. Reeves refutes the contention that the Greek atrocities were as bad as those of the Turks. "So far as the persons killed in Smyrna were Turks, they numbered, as I am told, seventysix, killed partly by Greek soldiers and partly by tile town mob. About of other nations were killed also. The ringleaders in the business were executed by the Greek authorities, and compensation paid to the families of victims. Lamentable and shameful as the affair was, it lasted but a few hours. Smyrna a week after the Greek landing was a peaceful, well-ordered city. What was Smyrna a week after the Kemal-" kts leturned to it? "M. Poincare must be that rare thing, a Frenchman with no sense of the ridiculous whatever. Speaking to the French Chamber he has just assured o his hearers that neither the Turks nor the Greeks can be charged with the conflagration of Smyrna; its origin is veiled in mystery ! Yes, such a mystery as the responsibility for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew or the murder of Sir Henry Wilson ! Does M. Poincars consider'the slaughter of some twelve thousand Greeks and Armenians in the streets and houses of Smyrna equally mysterious, or that it passes the wit of man to imagine the perpetrators of the countless outrages on women and the wholesale plunder of the city and suburbs? Does he consider that the postponement of the incendiarism till a change of wind had made the Turkish quarter safe was also a mystery? Or does he think the change of wind was a miracle? To such diplomatic nonsense must distinguished official personages descend when they dare not speak the truth." ATTACK ON FRENCH POLICY. While Mr. Reeves believes that most of the many millions making up the brave, kindly, patriotic French people have ' had little to do with ! French policy in the Near East, he has nothing but. chastisement 1,,:- t,l, e policy of the French authorities. "French policy," he writes, "be! rayed Ihe Christians in order to worry England into supporting an impossible policy on the Rhine. Only the other day France stood out stoutly for her dignity as protector of the Eastern Christians. A moment more and a concession-hunting French policy befriends Christian-hunting Kemal, makes secret compacts with him behind England's back, and begins the process

of supplying him with moral support and military equipment. It rumour does not lie, military advice, with military intelligence u( Greek forces and disposition?, ware secretly conveyed from unauthorised Fivridi . sources to Angora. Meanwhile, France from time to time professed to work with England, and blandly offered Greece her services as friendly mediator. French policy did all this, the policy of the country which had forced Greece into the war against Bulgaria and Turkey, had joined in sending her to Smyrna, and had made use of her army to save Constantinople from Ivemal! We tire told that the Angora Pad was a financial necessity ; that the Public Finance Committee of the French Chnmher would not find money for the defence of Cilicia. so that Franklin Bouillon had to be sent to sell the province. lie inado his bargain. Cilieia was sold for prompt delivery—arms, munitions, and Christians to go with the estate. How neatly it all fitted in—superfluous Armenians,, business-like Bouillon, opportunely exigeant public finance committee! All that the clique needed to do was to shut their eyes to the fact that had France loyally backed up Greece in Anatolia and had she made the blockade of Asia Minor effectual, she need not have had to fight for Cilicia —there would have been no Kemalist army to fight against." "I WILL REPAY." "Parisian newspapers jeer at men simple-minded enough to care whether the Near Eastern .Christians live or die. They call their sympathy 'Puerile Puritanism.' They say that it is sentimentalism, and that it does not pay. That may be so. I have nowhere read that Christ sells concessions. Yet it is my faith that the Power that makes ■ nations also watches their deeds, and in the end punishes their misdeeds. 'I will repay, saith the Lord'; and terribly has He repaid ( the long record of selfishness, deceit, greed, and deser-' tion by one or other great Power that make up so much of the story of European war and diplomacy in the Near East. One episode in this long catalogue of wrong became the direct cause of the Great War. Has it profited Kussia that she instigated unfortunate Greek peasants to rise against the Turks, and then abandoned them to massacre?' Look at Russia, to-day. Did it profit Austria, that after backing Turks against Greeks, and egging Servians on to assail Bulgaria, she seduced Bulgaria into attacking Servia and Greece without warning, and finally herself invaded and ravaged Servia? Where is Austria to-day? What has Germany gained by deserting Christendom to corrupt Turkey and enlist her in a war against civilisation and by afterwards doing the same with Bulgaria? Has it paid England to bolster up successive Abduls and Mahmouds, and enable them to prolong the worst government on earth? What has she got by sending the Greeks to Smyrna and then leaving them to be starved out there by inches? "What is France gaining by her betrayal of Greece and Armenia, or by the tricks she has played England? On the last day of the Reign of Terror, when Robespierre, his face shattered by a pistol shot, ..lay blood-stained and groaning, prostrate and bound, waiting to be borne to the guillotine, a certain man, it is recorded, stood over him, and, bending down, said : 'Yes, Robespierre! There is a God !' So now, looking round in Europe, remembering the war and its gigantic calamities, and seeing on all sides exhaustion, disappointment, grinding taxation, smouldering revolt, debt, hunger, hate, fear, grief for the dead, a. man, remembering the cause of it all. may think of the dread reminder to the doomed revolutionary, and say from his soul: 'Yes, Christian Nations, they is a God.'