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TREATY OF LAUSANNE
- For the 1911 Treaty of Lausanne between Italy and the Ottoman Empire, see the Italo-Turkish War.
The Treaty of Lausanne was a peace treaty that was signed in Lausanne, Switzerland on July 24, 1923 by Turkey and Entente powers that fought in the First World War and in the Turkish Independence War. It 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.
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. On October 20, 1922 the peace conference was reopened, and after strenuous debates, it was once again interrupted by Turkish protest on February 4, 1923. After reopening on April 23, and 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.
İsmet İnönü was the lead negotiator for Turkey and Eleftherios Venizelos was his Greek counterpart. 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 religious Muslim minority in Greece. Much of the Greek population of Turkey was exchanged with the Turkish population of Greece. The Greeks of Istanbul, Imbros and Tenedos were excluded (about 400,000 at that time), but so were the Muslim population of Western Thrace (about 25,000 at that time). 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.
Since signing the treaty, both Turkey and Greece have claimed that the other has violated its provisions. Greece has seen its ethnic minority population in Turkey diminish 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.
The Armenian Revolutionary Federation and many other political parties in Armenia do not accept the treaty.
The Treaty of Lausanne was cited in the proclamation of the Palestinian State by the PLO in 1988.
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