Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/324

 the Reparation Commission; compensation due the Turkish Government was to be assigned to the Allied Governments toward the costs of maintaining their armies of occupation on Turkish soil. German and Turkish property in ceded territories of the Ottoman Empire was to be similarly liquidated. The Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of Sèvres left hardly a vestige of German influence in the Near East.[37]

The Sèvres settlement, furthermore, destroyed the Ottoman Empire and sought to give the Allies a stranglehold upon the economic life of Turkey. Great Britain and France received essentially the same territorial privileges as they had laid out for themselves in the Sykes-Picot Treaty, with the vague restrictions that they should exercise in Mesopotamia and Palestine and in Syria and Cilicia respectively only the rights of mandatory powers. Great Britain was confirmed in her oil and navigation concessions in Mesopotamia, France in her railway rights in Syria; in addition, the Hedjaz Railway was turned over outright to their joint ownership and administration. Italy received only a "sphere of influence" in southern Anatolia, including the port of Adalia, but, as a consequence of one of the most sordid of the transactions of the Paris Conference, she was deprived of the bulk of the privileges guaranteed her under the Treaty of London and the St. Jean de Maurienne Agreement.[38] Greece was installed in Smyrna—the most important harbor in Asia Minor, a harbor the control of which was vital to the peasantry of Anatolia for the free export of their produce and for the unimpeded importation of farm machinery and other wares of western industry. Constantinople was put under the jurisdiction of an international commission for control of the Straits, and the balance of the former Russian sphere of interest was assigned to the ill-fated Armenian Republic. The Hedjaz was