Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/349



The Angora Treaty met with a distinctly heated reception from the British Government. During November and December, 1921, Lord Curzon carried on a lengthy correspondence with the French Embassy at London, in which he made it perfectly plain that the British Government considered the Franklin-Bouillon treaty a breach of good faith on the part of France, in the light of which Great Britain must possess greater freedom of action than would otherwise be the case.[25]

Lord Curzon called into question the moral right of the French Government to enter into separate understandings with Turkey or to recognize the Angora Assembly as the de jure government of the country. He insisted that a revision of the frontier of northern Syria "could not be regarded as the concern of France alone":

"It hands back to Turkey a large and fertile extent of territory which had been conquered from her by British forces and which constituted a common gage of allied victory, although by an arrangement between the Allies the mandate has been awarded to France. The mandate is now under consideration by the League of Nations, and this important and far-reaching modification of the territory to which it applies altogether ignores the League of Nations, while the return to Turkey of territory handed over to the Allies in common without previous notification to Great Britain and Italy is inconsistent with both the spirit and the letter of the treaties which all three have signed.

"Further, the revision provides for handing back to Turkey the localities of Nisibin and Jezirit-ibn-Omar, both of which are of great strategic importance in relation to Mosul and Mesopotamia; the same consideration applies to the handing back to Turkey of the track of the Bagdad Railway between Tchoban Bey and Nisibin His Majesty's Government cannot remain indifferent to the manifest strategic importance to their position in Irak of the return to Turkey of the Bagdad Railway or of the transfer to that power of the localities of Jezirit-ibn-Omar and Nisibin."