British reply on Lemnos

On 9 March 1915 the British government replied to the Greek inquiry about the occupation of the island of Lemnos. According to the British chronology of the war, London cited military necessity. The bay of Mudros was the best natural harbour near the Dardanelles, and the fleet, which for three weeks had been attacking the Turkish forts, could not do without it. That same day King Constantine I entrusted the premiership to Dimitrios Gounaris, and it was his government that had to take a position on the British explanations.

A half-Turkish island

The British did not stop at the argument from necessity. As George F. Abbott, author of a book on Greece and the Allies published in 1922, reported, London answered Greek objections by saying that Turkey had never accepted the decision of the powers of February 1914 that had awarded Greece the islands won in the First Balkan War. Britain, being at war with Turkey, therefore had the right to treat them as Turkish territory. At the same time it gave assurances that this implied no diminution of Greek sovereignty.

The Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, had reasoned in the same way as early as February, when the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, asked him whether using Lemnos would not violate Greek neutrality. According to Grey, Turkey could not accuse the Greeks of breaching neutrality by allowing it, because it would thereby acknowledge that the island belonged to Greece. Only a short time before, the British had firmly opposed the idea of handing Lemnos to Turkey. In August 1914 the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov, had been ready to offer it to the Turks in exchange for their neutrality, but Grey refused, because the island lay right at the entrance to the straits.

Criticism

Abbott, who sympathised with King Constantine, pointed out the inconsistency of this construction. As long as Turkey was neutral, London held that the islands did not belong to it. Once it became an enemy, London granted it a right to them, but only for the duration of the war and only as far as was convenient. An article published in 1918 in an American journal of international law likewise argued that the argument did not stand up to scrutiny, because occupying the territory of a neutral state is a violation of neutrality regardless of how one assesses its title to the land. The author admitted, however, that the Allies were justified by the tacit consent of the Venizelos government.

The new cabinet had no intention of provoking a dispute. Gounaris and his Foreign Minister, Georgios Zografos, gave assurances that Greece would maintain a friendly attitude towards the Entente, and no one tried to remove the British from the island. On the contrary, in the following weeks Mudros filled with warships, transports and camps. London, however, wanted to reassure Athens about the island’s future as well, and within a couple of weeks it prepared a more far-reaching assurance for the Greeks.