Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
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certain nationalists to travel from Istanbul to Ankara on false French papers via Syria 
where the terms of a possible understanding with the nationalists were broached
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. 
And yet, despite all this and more, the most drastic terms were settled at San Remo 
in April 1920
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and no substantive concessions made to the protests of the Ottoman 
government. It is true that Venizelos’s territorial claims in Anatolia were cut down 
by about four fifths and that Greece was not awarded outright sovereignty over the 
remainder
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. But it was known that even this was unacceptable to the nationalists and 
no attempt was made to muster the military strength required according to the 
calculations of the experts to impose the treaty. Britain, at least, acted as if it 
believed, despite the disbelief of such as Sir Henry Wilson, the Chief of the Imperial 
General Staff and Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War, in Venizelos’s 
assurances that Greece alone was in a position to impose it
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. 
Venizelos may have been bluffing in the hope that the British interest in the Straits 
would eventually produce any required support; and in 1920 his illusion, sustained 
by the fact that on its western front nationalist strength was undeveloped, was 
sufficiently credible for Britain to prefer at least in the immediate term reliance on 
the Greek army to the alternatives of an enhanced military commitment of its own 
and withdrawal. The Greeks had up to that point largely faced irregulars, since a 
substantial part of the organised army loyal to the nationalists was in the east facing 
the French and the Armenians. Although the nationalists promptly proceeded to form 
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Mango, 273 
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Llewellyn Smith, 123 
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At Versailles in February 1919 Venizelos had sought the territory west of a line from Bandırma to Kastellorizo 
(Llewellyn Smith, 72). 
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Llewellyn Smith, 121 

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