Minority Protection versus Population Exchange: The League of Nations Redefines Rights

The revised Peace Treaty that the Allies signed with Turkey at Lausanne in 1923 finally and officially ending World War hostilities came into direct conflict with the Minorities Treaty imposed on the defeated Ottoman Empire at Sèvres two years earlier.  While the never-ratified Sèvres Treaty demanded that the lives, livelihoods, property, and political rights of all minorities in remaining Ottoman territories be protected, the Lausanne Treaty incorporated the Convention for the Obligatory Exchange of Populations that stripped all rights from Greek-Orthodox Christians residing in Turkey, and from all Turks living in Greece.  Moreover, since Greece had signed its own Minorities Treaty at Sèvres in 1920, the League of Nations was committed to protecting minorities in Greece.  As the Spanish representative pointed out, it seemed that this Minorities Treaty directly contradicted the provisions of the compulsory population exchange: “We are therefore faced with two international instruments, the convention which imposed upon certain Greek nationals the obligation to be transferred to another State, and to renounce their Greek citizenship; on the other hand we have a treaty placed under our guarantee, in accordance with which we are bound to assure equal treatment to all Greek nationals.”[1]

This paper will argue that the coerced ethnic cleansing imagined and implemented by the League of Nations in the name of Minority Rights represented the dissonance between the League's ideals and longstanding Great Power notions about Turks, Ottomans, and Muslims.  Ironically, the League of Nations interventions to "protect" the unprotected and to imagine a post-Ottoman Middle East where all possessed equal rights, led to expulsions, disappropriation, exile, disenfranchisement, and division among local populations.

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[1] “Moslems of Albanian Origin in Greece, Report by the Spanish Representative,” undated, Geneva, League of Nations Archives, S 370

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