eastern provinces. Kemal's staff drove up to Erzerum along the crude mountain roads with the rest of the provincial delegates, but Kemal himself rode alone over back trails and through lonely villages. Here in the wrecked mountain town of Erzerum, the Party platform was drawn up, a document which was later to become famous under the name of the National Pact.
This document re-stated and amplified the Izzet Government's position, as Rauf Bey had conveyed it to Admiral Calthorpe at Mudros. Autonomy for the Arabs under the necessary suzerainty of the Caliph at Constantinople and Allied recognition of the Enver Government's abrogation of the Capitulations, were its principal planks. The break-up of the old Empire was accepted and in the new map of the Near and Middle East, the Caliphate of Islam was modified to permit the application of the Western tradition of nationalism to Turks and Arabs alike, an application to which the Turks claimed as complete a right as the West had long before acknowledged to Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians. From the Greeks, the West had never asked Capitulations. It would therefore not ask Capitulations from the Turks. As for the rights of minorities, such rights as the Greeks gave their Moslem minorities, the Turks would give their Christian minorities. The Straits would remain open to world commerce, subject only to the necessary military security of Constantinople, "the seat of the Caliphate of Islam, the capital of the Sultanate, and the headquarters of the Ottoman Government." In the delineation of the new Turkey's frontiers, certain border areas were under dispute. Two of these border
