Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/159

 *nople was a very useful supply base for Denikin, yet the terms of the Mudros armistice are down in black and white, with Admiral Calthorpe's signature attached to them, and they do not appear to make an Allied occupation of the capital a legal proceeding.

Rauf Bey had made it plain to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros that no Ottoman Government could submit to the re-imposition of the Capitulations. Under the occupation, the Allies re-imposed them. None of the Allied Governments had recognized their abrogation, but the Mudros armistice was a military and not a civil instrument. Under military law, occupying Armies are authorized to administer only the existing body of enemy civil law and usage, pending the permanent disposition of their occupied enemy territory in the terms of peace. The Mudros armistice contained no mention of the Capitulations or of any other civil matter at issue between the Allied Governments and the Ottoman Government, and their re-imposition during a state of armistice does not seem to have been a legal proceeding.

When Mustapha Kemal Pasha reached the capital, he discovered that the Parliament had been prorogued, the Izzet Government had fallen, and Damad Ferid Pasha had been sent for by the Sultan to form a new Government. The Sultan had left Dolma Bagtsche for Abdul Hamid's late home at Yildiz Kiosk, and such sound reforms as the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 had succeeded in making, the Allies had speedily unmade. In its golden age, the Ottoman Empire had been broadly tolerant, but during its last two centuries of agony