Turanian or Aryan? Race, Demography and the Mapping of Kurdish Mosul at the Lausanne Peace Conference (1922-23)

Ariel Salzmann, Queens University

The centenary of the Treaty of Lausanne has, thanks to an impressive body of new historical research, renewed interest in the impact of one of the last Post-World War I settlements not only on present-day Middle East but also with respect to state formation and minority-majority relationships globally. Far more than a post-script to the Treaty of Versailles, Lausanne became a site of renewed negotiations between the Allies and the potent remnant of the only state among the Central Powers that resisted defeat. In the first round of negotiations, the minority question largely concerned the status of surviving communities of Jews and Christians within the future polity. However, the conference also raised important questions concerning ethnic and sectarian divisions among the post-War Muslim populations of Asia Minor. This paper begins with a review of the current literature on minority rights at the conference. It then examines the rhetorical strategies of how the ethnic rights question were used (and abused) by the Allies and the Ankara delegation in the final days of the first round of negotiations that ended abruptly in early February 1923. Against the background of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres clauses empowering Western intervention in the case of anti-minority violence (as well as earlier San Remo Conference and the French military intervention to crush the embryotic Damascus government between in the spring and summer of the same year) which contained a promise to facilitate the creation of a Kurdish state that would have straddle the British controlled Iraq Mandate and the future Turkish state in Anatolia, the 1922 discussion concerning the Kurds at Lausanne held particular significance: it underscored their geopolitical precariousness at the borderline between the nation-state and European empires and established the ethno-racial frames have continued to resonate in Turkish nationalist politics and beyond.

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 Presented in Session 22. Mapping Diversity from the Red Sea to the Gulf: Ethiopia, Turkey and Iran