Microsoft Word 1 Arif thesis cover final doc

particularly in those which were most contestable, such as Edirne and İzmir on 1 
December 1918, Erzurum on 4 December 1918 and Trabzon on 12 February 1919. 
Mustafa Kemal did not have to construct a resistance movement out of nothing in 
61
Mango, 187 
62
Zürcher 2004, 147-149 
63
Mango, 207-208 
64
Mango, 235-237, Zürcher 2004, 23-24 

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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
50 
May 1919
65
. But his timing was fortunate in that the attractions of nationalist 
resistance might not have been so obvious to a sufficiently large constituency earlier 
than this; the Greek landings in İzmir provoked protest on a scale (for example on 18 
May in Bursa and 23 May in Istanbul) which had not been seen earlier in response to 
the presence of British, French or Italian troops and, as Allied officers observed, a 
decisive turn against cooperation in the supposedly agreed process of disarmament 
and demobilisation
66
. 
Achieving the aim declared at Erzurum in August and at Sivas in September 1919 of 
a Muslim-Ottoman sovereignty extending to the 1918 armistice lines, as was largely 
fulfilled by 1922, depended on the nationalists’ mobilising resources sufficient to 
defeat the enemies who surrounded them. Such resources were smaller than they 
might otherwise have needed to be, because the enemies, disunited as they were and 
inadequately committed themselves, could be picked off one by one; the 
contemporary parallel with the eventual victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian 
civil war, who also operated with the benefit of interior lines against local opponents 
insufficiently supported by the western powers, suggests itself.
In the course of 1919 the alternatives to armed resistance in opposition to allied 
designs were evaporating. A policy of conciliating the allies and emphasising the 
rupture between the wartime and post-war governments in the hope of better terms 
was shown to be fruitless when in July 1919 the allies absolutely and patronisingly 
65
Zürcher 2004, 147-148 
66
Llewellyn Smith, 106-107 

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