From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hellenism in Near East during and after the World War I, Showing the areas (Western Anatolia and Eastern Thrace) where the majority of the Greek population was concentrated.

The areas ceded to Greece after the World War I (in blue) according to the populations in Anatolia as this was imprinted in the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920.

During World War I and its aftermath (1914-1923), the government of the Ottoman Empire instigated a violent campaign against the Greek population of the Empire. The campaign included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, and summary expulsions. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Some of the survivors and expelled, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire. However, after the end of the 1919-22 Greco-Turkish War most of the Greeks migrated or were transferred to Greece under the terms of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

The government of Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire,^[1] maintains that the large-scale campaign was triggered by the perception that the Greek population was sympathetic to the enemies of the Ottoman state. The Allies of World War I took a different view, condemning the Ottoman government-sponsored massacres as crimes against humanity. More recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution in 2007 affirming that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire, including the Greeks, was genocide. Some other organisations have also passed resolutions recognising the campaign as a genocide, as have the parliaments of Greece, Cyprus and Sweden.

Background

1914 Ottoman Turkish Statistics record the Ottoman Greek population as numbering approx. 1.8 million

Smyrna burning during the Massacres of Smyrna

Smyrna citizens trying to reach the Allied ships during the Smyrna massacres, 1922. The photo had been taken from the launch boat of a US Battleship

Photo taken after the Smyrna massacres. The text inside indicates that the photo had been taken by repsesntatives of the Red Cross in Smyrna

Anatolia or Asia Minor is a peninsula that forms the westernmost region of Western Asia, comprising most of the modern Republic of Turkey. It is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus and the Iranian plateau to the east, Greater Syria (Upper Mesopotamia) to the southeast, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean Sea to the west and the Balkan peninsula to the northwest. At the outbreak of World War I, Anatolia was ethnically diverse, its population including Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, Jews, and Laz people.

Among the causes for the Turkish campaign against the Greek population was a fear that the population would aid the Ottoman Empire's enemies, and a belief among some Turks that to become a modern nation state it was necessary to purge from the territories of the state those national groups who could threaten the integrity of a modern Turkish nation state.^[2][3]

According to a German military attaché, the Ottoman Turkish minister of war Ismail Enver had declared in October 1915 that he wanted to "solve the Greek problem during the war... in the same way he believe[d] he solved the Armenian problem."^[4]

Events

In the summer of 1914 the Special Organization (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa), assisted by government and army officials, conscripted Greek men of military age from Thrace and western Anatolia into labor battalions in which hundreds of thousands died.^[5] Sent hundreds of miles into the Interior of Anatolia, these conscripts were employed in road-making, building, tunnel excavating and other field work but their numbers were heavily reduced through either privations and ill-treatment or by outright massacre by their Turkish guards.^[6] This program of forced conscription later expanded to other regions of the Empire including Pontus.

Conscription of Greek men was supplemented by massacres and by deportations involving death marches of the general population. Greek villages and towns would be surrounded by Turks and their inhabitants massacred. Such was the story in Phocaea (Greek: Φώκαια), a town in western Anatolia twenty-five miles northwest of Smyrna, on 12 June 1914 where the slain bodies of men, women and children were thrown down a well.^[7]

In July 1915 the Greek chargé d'affaires explained that the deportations "can not be any other issue than an annihilation war against the Greek nation in Turkey and as measures hereof they have been implementing forced conversions to Islam, in obvious aim to, that if after the end of the war there again would be a question of European intervention for the protection of the Christians, there will be as few of them left as possible."^[8] According to George W. Rendel of the British Foreign Office, by 1918 "... over 500,000 Greeks were deported of whom comparatively few survived."^[9] In his memoirs, the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1913 and 1916 wrote "Everywhere the Greeks were gathered in groups and, under the so-called protection of Turkish gendarmes, they were transported, the larger part on foot, into the interior. Just how many were scattered in this fashion is not definitely known, the estimates varying anywhere from 200,000 up to 1,000,000."^[10]

On 14 January 1917 Cosswa Anckarsvärd, Sweden’s Ambassador to Constantinople, sent a dispatch regarding the deportation decision of the Ottoman Greeks:

What above all appears as an unnecessary cruelty is that the deportation is not limited to the men alone, but is extended likewise to women and children. This is supposedly done in order to much easier be able to confiscate the property of the deported.^[11]

Methods of destruction which caused death indirectly - such as deportations involving death marches, starvation in labour camps, concentration camps etc. - were referred to as "white massacres".^[9]

The Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919-20 saw charges brought against a number of leading Turkish officials for their part in ordering massacres against both Greeks and Armenians.^[12].

In an October 1920 report a British officer describes the aftermath of the massacres at Iznik in north-western Anatolia in which he estimated that at least 100 decomposed mutilated bodies of men, women and children were present in and around a large cave about 300 yards outside the city walls.^[9]

The systematic massacre and deportation of Greeks in Asia Minor, a program which had come into effect in 1914, was a precursor to the atrocities perpetrated by both the Hellenic and Turkish armies during the Greco-Turkish War, a conflict which followed the Hellenic occupation of Smyrna^[13][14] in May 1919 and continued until the Great Fire of Smyrna in September 1922.^[15] Limited^[14] Massacres of Turks were also carried out by the Hellenic troops during their mandate over a region of western Anatolia in May 1919 through to September 1922.^[15]

For the massacres that occurred during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee wrote that it was the Greek landings that created the Turkish National Movement led by Mustafa Kemal:^[16] "...The Greeks of 'Pontus' and the Turks of the Greek occupied territories, were in some degree victims of Mr. Venizelos's and Mr. Lloyd George's original miscalculations at Paris."

Relief efforts

In 1917 a relief organization by the name of the Relief Committee for Greeks of Asia Minor was formed in response to the deportations and massacres of Greeks in Turkey. The committee worked in cooperation with the Near East Relief in distributing aid to Ottoman Greeks in Thrace and Asia Minor. The organisation disbanded in the summer of 1921 but Greek relief work was continued by other aid organisations.^[17]

Contemporary accounts

German and Austro-Hungarian diplomats, as well as the 1922 memorandum compiled by George W. Rendel on "Turkish Massacres and Persecutions", have provided evidence for series of systematic massacres of the Greeks in Asia Minor.^[9][18][19] The quotes have been attributed to various diplomats, notably the German ambassadors Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim and Richard von Kühlmann, the German vice-consul in Samsoun Kuchhoff, Austria's ambassador Pallavicini and Samsoun consul Ernst von Kwiatkowski, and the Italian unofficial agent in Angora Signor Tuozzi. Other quotes are from clergymen and activists, notably the German missionary Johannes Lepsius, and Stanley Hopkins of the Near East Relief. It must be noted that Germany and Austria-Hungary were allies of the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

The accounts describe systematic massacres, rapes and burnings of Greek villages, and attribute intent to Turkish officials, namely the Turkish Prime Minister Mahmud Sevket Pasha, Rafet Bey, Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha.^[9][18][19]

Additionally, The New York Times and its correspondents have made extensive references to the events, recording massacres, deportations, individual killings, rapes, burning of entire Greek villages, destruction of Greek Orthodox churches and monasteries, drafts for "Labor Brigades", looting, terrorism and other "atrocities" for Greek, Armenian and also for British and American citizens and government officials.^[20][21] The newspaper was awarded its first Pulitzer Prize in 1918 "for the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by an American newspaper—complete and accurate coverage of the war".^[22] More media of the time reported the events with similar titles.^[23]

Henry Morgenthau, the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916 accused the "Turkish government" of a campaign of "outrageous terrorizing, cruel torturing, driving of women into harems, debauchery of innocent girls, the sale of many of them at 80 cents each, the murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to and starvation in the desert of other hundreds of thousands, [and] the destruction of hundreds of villages and many cities", all part of "the willful execution" of a "scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian Christians of Turkey."^[24]

United States Consul-General George Horton reports that "[o]ne of the cleverest statements circulated by the Turkish propagandists is to the effect that the massacred Christians were as bad as their executioners, that it was '50-50.' " On this issue he clarifies that "[h]ad the Greeks, after the massacres in the Pontus and at Smyrna, massacred all the Turks in Greece, the record would have been 50-50—almost." As an eye-witness, he also praises Greeks for their "conduct [...] toward the thousands of Turks residing in Greece, while the ferocious massacres were going on...", which, according to his opinion, was "one of the most inspiring and beautiful chapters in all that country’s history."^[25][26]

Casualties

According to various sources the Greek death toll in the Pontus region of Anatolia ranges from 300,000 to 360,000. Estimates for the death toll of Anatolian Greeks as a whole are significantly higher.

According to the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, between 1916 and 1923, up to 350,000 Greek Pontians were reportedly killed in massacres, persecution and death marches.^[27] Merrill D. Peterson cites the death toll of 360,000 for the Greeks of Pontus.^[28] According to George K. Valavanis "The loss of human life among the Pontian Greeks, since the Great War (World War I) until March 1924, can be estimated at 353,000, as a result of murders, hangings, and from punishment, disease, and other hardships."^[29]

Constantine G Hatzidimitriou writes that "loss of life among Anatolian Greeks during the WWI period and its aftermath was approximately 735,370."^[30] Edward Hale Bierstadt states that "According to official testimony, the Turks since 1914 have slaughtered in cold blood 1,500,000 Armenians, and 500,000 Greeks, men women and children, without the slightest provocation."^[31]. At the Lausanne conference in late 1922 the British Foreign Minister Lord Curzon is recorded as saying "a million Greeks have been killed, deported or have died."^[32]

Aftermath

Article 142 of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, prepared after the first World War, called the Turkish regime "terrorist" and contained provisions "to repair so far as possible the wrongs inflicted on individuals in the course of the massacres perpetrated in Turkey during the war."^[33] The Treaty of Sèvres was never ratified by the Turkish government and ultimately was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne. That treaty was accompanied by a "Declaration of Amnesty", without containing any provision in respect to punishment of war crimes.^[34]

In 1923, a population exchange between Greece and Turkey resulted in a near-complete elimination of the Greek ethnic presence in Turkey and a similar elimination of the Turkish ethnic presence in much of Greece. According to the Greek census of 1928, 1,104,216 Ottoman Greeks had reached Greece.^[35] It is impossible to know exactly how many Greek inhabitants of Turkey died between 1914 and 1923, and how many ethnic Greeks of Anatolia were expelled to Greece or fled to the Soviet Union.^[36]. Some of the survivors and expelled took refuge in the neighboring Russian Empire (later, Soviet Union).

Genocide recognition

Terminology

The word genocide was coined in the early 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. In his writings on genocide, Lemkin is known to have detailed the fate of Greeks in Turkey.^[37] In August 1946 the New York Times reported:

Genocide is no new phenomenon, nor has it been utterly ignored in the past. ... The massacres of Greeks and Armenians by the Turks prompted diplomatic action without punishment. If Professor Lemkin has his way genocide will be established as an international crime ...^[38]

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 and came into force in January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms. There are a number of other genocide definitions used by historians and genocide scholars which some consider better suited for academic use.^[39]

Before the word genocide came to exist in the 1940s, the destruction of Ottoman Greeks was known, by Greeks, as 'the Massacre' (Greek: η Σφαγή) or 'the Great Catastrophe' (Greek: η Μεγάλη Καταστροφή) or "the Great Tragedy" (Greek: η Μεγάλη Τραγωδία).^[40] Primary source accounts would use improvised terms, such as "annihilation", "systematic extermination", "persistent campaign of massacre" and "wholesale massacre".^[25][41]

Academic

In December 2007 the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, passed a resolution affirming that the 1914-1923 campaign against Ottoman Greeks constituted genocide.^[42] Employing the term "Greek Genocide", it affirmed that Ottoman Greeks were subject to genocide alongside other groups, namely Armenians and Assyrians. The resolution was adopted on 1 December 2007 and the press release issued by the organization on 16 December.^[43] The IAGS resolution was passed with an "overwhelming" majority. However, a few members of the organisation argued that more scholarship should be completed before a genocide resolution was endorsed. They included scholars who had researched and published on the Armenian Genocide, namely Taner Akcam, Peter Balakian, Stephen Feinstein, Eric Weitz and Robert Melson.^[44]

Mark Levene has speculated that some historians avoid using the term genocide in order to prevent their magnification by comparison with the Armenian Genocide.^[3]. Historian Mark Mazower states that the deportation of Greeks by the Ottomans was on a "relatively small scale and do not appear to have been designed to end in their victims' deaths. What was to happen with the Armenians was of a different order."^[45]. On the other hand, and as per the IAGS resolution, Niall Ferguson, for instance, has drawn a comparison with the fate of the Armenians and believes the term genocide is fitting.^[46] Moreover, genocide scholars, such as Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, have stated that the "genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks" is "obvious".^[47]

Seminars and courses in several western universities examine the events. These include the University of New Mexico^[48] the College of Charleston^[49], the University of Michigan Dearborn ^[50] and the University of New South Wales ^[51] which has a dedicated research unit.

Political

The Greek Parliament has passed two laws on the fate of the Ottoman Greeks; the first in 1994 and the second in 1998. The decrees were published in the Greek Government Gazette on 8 March 1994 and 13 October 1998 respectively. The 1994 decree affirmed the genocide in the Pontus region of Asia Minor and designated 19 May a day of commemoration, while the 1998 decree affirmed the genocide of Greeks in Asia Minor as a whole and designated 14 September a day of commemoration.^[52].

The Republic of Cyprus also officially recognizes the events as genocide.^[53]

In response to the 1998 law, the Turkish government released a statement which claimed that describing the events as genocide was "without any historical basis". "We condemn and protest this resolution" a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement said. "With this resolution the Greek Parliament, which in fact has to apologize to the Turkish people for the large-scale destruction and massacres Greece perpetrated in Anatolia, not only sustains the traditional Greek policy of distorting history, but it also displays that the expansionist Greek mentality is still alive" the statement added.^[54] The law passed by the Greek government also met some opposition domestically. For example, incorrectly interpreting the decree as pertaining to the Smyrna 1922 events and believing it to be politically motivated, the late Greek historian Angelos Elefantis claimed the Greek parliament was acting "like an idiot".^[55]

On 11 March 2010, Sweden's Riksdag passed a motion recognising "as an act of genocide the killing of Armenians, Assyrians/Syriacs/Chaldeans and Pontiac (sic) Greeks in 1915".^[56]

In his book With Intent to Destroy: Reflections on Genocide, Colin Tatz argue that Turkey denies the genocide so not to jeopardize "its ninety-five-year-old dream of becoming the beacon of democracy in the Near East".^[57] In their book Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society, Elizabeth Burns Coleman and Kevin White present a list of reasons explaining Turkey's inability to admit the genocides committed by the Young Turks^[58]

International community

The incidents are also recognized as genocide in some states of the USA. The states of South Carolina,^[59] New Jersey,^[60] Florida,^[61] Massachusetts,^[62] Pennsylvania,^[63] and Illinois^[64] have passed resolutions recognizing it. In addition, George E. Pataki, governor of the New York State issued a proclamation designating 19 May 2002 as Pontian Greek Genocide Remembrance Day,^[65] although since states within the United States do not have foreign-policy authority those statements are not legally binding on a federal US level.

Armenia mentions the "Greek Genocide", its commemoration, and a death toll of 600,000 Greeks in Anatolia, in its first report to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of the Council of Europe.^[66] In addition, on 19 May 2004 an event commemorating the Pontian Greek victims of the Greek Genocide was held in Yerevan, Armenia and was attended by "Greek ambassador to Armenia, Antonios Vlavianos, other dignitaries, government officials and ordinary Armenians".^[67]

In Australia, the issue was raised in the Parliament of Victoria on 4 May 2006, by the Minister for Justice Jenny Mikakos.^[68] On 30 April 2009 the House of Assembly of the Parliament of South Australia passed a motion recognising "the genocide by the Ottoman state between 1915-1923" of Armenians, Greeks, Syrian and other minorities in Asia Minor.^[69]

On 7 June 2006 Stephen Pound, member of the British House of Commons linked the case of the Ottoman Greeks with the Armenians and Assyrians claiming that "3.5 million of the historic Christian population of Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks then living in the Ottoman empire had been murdered—starved to death or slaughtered—or exiled by 1923."^[70]

In Serbia, an event commemorating the Pontian Greek victims of the Greek Genocide was held in the Chapel of the Belgrade Theology School in 1998.^[71]

Nongovernmental organizations

In Germany, organizations such as Verein der Völkermordgegner e.V^[72] (i.e. "Union against Genocide") or the initiative Mit einer Stimme sprechen^[73] (i.e. "Speaking with One Voice") aim at the official recognition of the genocide of Christian minorities, such as Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in the late Ottoman Empire.

On 19 May 2007, the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) issued a press release stating that the organization "joins with Pontian Greeks - and all Hellenes around the world - in commemorating 19 May, the international day of remembrance for the genocide initiated by the Ottoman Empire and continued by Kemalist Turkey against the historic Greek population of Pontus" and reaffirms its "determination to work together with all the victims of Turkey's atrocities to secure full recognition and justice for these crimes".^[74]

Reasons for limited recognition

The United Nations, the European Parliament, and the Council of Europe have not made any related statements. According to Constantine Fotiadis, professor of Modern Greek History at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, some of the reasons for the lack of wider recognition and delay in seeking acknowledgment of these events are as follows:^[75]

• The Greek Genocide was overshadowed by a larger Armenian Genocide, a view also shared by the historian Mark Levene.^[3]
• In contrast to the Treaty of Sèvres, the superseding Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 dealt with these events by making no reference or mention, and thus sealed the end of the Asia Minor Catastrophe.
• A subsequent peace treaty (Greco-Turkish Treaty of Friendship in June 1930) between Greece and Turkey. Greece made several concessions to settle all open issues between the two countries in return for peace in the region.
• The Second World War, the Civil War, the Military junta and the political turmoil in Greece that followed, forced Greece to focus on its survival and other problems rather than seek recognition of these events.

Memorials

Memorials commemorating the plight of Ottoman Greeks have been erected throughout Greece, as well as in a number of other countries including Germany, Canada, the United States and, more recently, Australia.^[76] Greek Genocide memorials and the act of commemoration in Greece have been subject to study by Michel Bruneau. Memorials become a place of focus on days of commemoration.

See also

• Academic quotes on the Greek genocide
• Armenian Genocide
• Assyrian Genocide
• Genocide denial
• Greek refugees
• Istanbul Pogrom
• Human rights in Turkey
• Megali Idea
• Pan-Turkism
• Republic of Pontus

Notes

References

• Ascherson, Neal (1995). Black Sea, New York: Hill and Wang, ISBN 0-8090-3043-8.
• Avedian, Vahagn, The Armenian Genocide 1915: From a Neutral Small State's Perspective: Sweden, Unpublished Master Thesis Paper, Uppsala University, 2009 http://www.armenica.org/material/master_thesis_vahagn_avedian.pdf
• Bassioun, M. Cherif (1999). Crimes Against Humanity in International Criminal Law, The Hague: Kluwer Law International, ISBN 90-411-1222-7.
• Bierstadt, Edward Hale (1924). The Great Betrayal; A Survey of the Near East Problem, New York: R. M. McBride & Co.
• Bloxham, Donald (2005). The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ferguson, Niall (2006). The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, New York: Penguin Press, ISBN 1-5942-0100-5.
• Ferguson, Niall (2006). The War of the World: Twentieth-century Conflict And the Descent of the West, Penguin Press.
• Fotiadis, Constantinos Emm. (2004 ed.). The Genocide of the Pontus Greeks by the Turks: Volume 13, Thessaloniki: Herodotus.
• Horton, George (1926). The Blight of Asia. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company. http://www.hri.org/docs/Horton/. 
• Hull, Isabel V. (2005). Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Hulse, Carl (2007). U.S. and Turkey Thwart Armenian Genocide Bill, New York Times, 26 October 2007
• King, Charles (2005). The Black Sea: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• King, William C. (1922). King's Complete History of the World War: Visualizing the Great Conflict in all Theaters of Action 1914-1918, The History Associates, Massachusetts.
• Koromila, Marianna (2002). The Greeks and the Black Sea, Panorama Cultural Society.
• Levene, Mark (1998). Creating a Modern "Zone of Genocide": The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 12, Number 3 Winter 1998, pp. 393-433. (abstract).
• Lieberman, Benjamin (2006). Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe, Ivan R. Dee.
• Mildrasky, Manus I. (2005). The Killing Trap, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Morgenthau, Henry (1918). Morgenthau's Story, Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company.
• Naimark, Norman M. (2001). Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
• Peterson, Merrill D. (2004). Starving Armenians: America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1930 and After, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press
• Rendel, G. W. (20 March 1922). Foreign Office Memorandum on Turkish Massacres and Persecutions of Minorities since the Armistice
• Rummel, R. J.. "Statistics of Democide". Chapter 5, Statistics Of Turkey's Democide Estimates, Calculations, And Sources. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP5.HTM. Retrieved 4 October 2006. 
• Staff "Massacre of Greeks Charged to the Turks",The Atlanta Constitution, 17 June 1914.
• Stanford J. Shaw, Ezel Kural Shaw. "History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey", Cambridge University.
• Taner, Akcam (2006). A Shameful Act
• Tatz, Colin (2003). With Intent to Destroy: Reflections on Genocide. Essex: Verso. ISBN 1859845509. http://books.google.co.uk/books?vid=ISBN1859845509&id=khCffgX1NPIC&pg=PR13&lpg=PR13&vq=&sig=VgQBQ4-HVjDy2Kju1RpfDdy3N8E. 
• Halo, Thea (2001). Not Even My Name, New York: Picador USA.
• Totten, Samuel; Jacobs, Steven L (2002). Pioneers of Genocide Studies (Clt). New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0765801515. http://books.google.co.uk/books?vid=ISBN0765801515&id=g26NmNNWK1QC&pg=PA210&lpg=PA210&dq=pontian+isbn=0765801515&num=100&sig=D8lv0QCu9iCqIji5nfiYvhBRC_Q&hl=en. 
• Toynbee, Arnold J. (1922). The Western question in Greece and Turkey: a study in the contact of civilisations, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Valavanis, G.K. (1925). Contemporary General History of Pontus (Σύγχρονος Γενική Ιστορία του Πόντου), Athens.

Further reading

Books

• Akcam, Taner. From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide, New York: Zed Books, 2004.
• Andreadis, George, Tamama: The Missing Girl of Pontos, Athens: Gordios, 1993.
• Barton, James L. The Near East Relief, 1915-1930, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1943.
• Barton, James L., Ara Sarafian, "Turkish Atrocities": Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915–1917, December 1998
• Compton, Carl C. The Morning Cometh, New Rochelle, N.Y.: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1986.
• Karayinnides, Ioannis. Ο γολγοθάς του Πόντου (The Golgotha of Pontus), Salonica: 1978.
• Henry Morgenthau, Sr.. The Murder of a Nation, New York: Armenian General Benevolent Union of America, 1974, 1918.
• —. I Was Sent to Athens, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co, 1929.
• —. An International Drama, London: Jarrolds Ltd., 1930
• Hofmann, Tessa (ed.), Verfolgung, Vertreibung und Vernichtung der Christen im Osmanischen Reich 1912-1922, Münster: LIT, 2004. ISBN 3-8258-7823-6. (pp. 177-221 on Greeks)
• Housepian Dobkin, Marjorie. Smyrna 1922: the Destruction of a City, New York, NY: Newmark Press, 1998.
• Murat, Jean De. The Great Extirpation of Hellenism and Christianity in Asia Minor: the historic and systematic deception of world opinion concerning the hideous Christianity’s uprooting of 1922, Miami, Fla.: [s.n.], (Athens Greece: A. Triantafillis) 1999.
• Oeconomos, Lysimachos. The Martyrdom of Smyrna and Eastern Christendom; a file of overwhelming evidence, denouncing the misdeeds of the Turks in Asia Minor and showing their responsibility for the horrors of Smyrna, London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1922.
• Papadopoulos, Alexander. Persecutions of the Greeks in Turkey before the European War: on the basis of official documents, New York: Oxford University Press, American branch, 1919.
• Pavlides, Ioannis. Pages of History of Pontus and Asia Minor, Salonica, Greece, 1980.
• Tsirkinidis, Harry. At last we uprooted them…The Genocide of Greeks of Pontos, Thrace, and Asia Minor, through the French archives, Thessaloniki: Kyriakidis Bros, 1999.
• Ward, Mark H. The Deportations in Asia Minor 1921-1922, London: Anglo-Hellenic League, 1922.

Articles

• Bjornlund, Matthias, "The 1914 cleansing of Aegean Greeks as a case of violent Turkification", Journal of Genocide Research, Volume 10, Issue 1, March 2008, pp. 41-58.
• Hlamides, Nikolaos, "The Greek Relief Committee: America’s Response to the Greek Genocide", Genocide Studies and Prevention, Volume 3, Issue 3, December 2008, pp. 375-383.
• Vryonis, Speros, "Greek Labor Battalions in Asia Minor", The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies (ed. Hovannisian, Richard), New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers, 2007, pp. 275-290.

Internet Resources

• Greek Genocide 1914-23
• The Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
• The Greek Genocide:1914-1923: Pontus, Asia Minor, Thrace

From Wikiquote

The Greek genocide refers to a campaign of persecution perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against its Ottoman Greek minority during the years 1914-1923. What follows is an extensive list of quotations by genocide scholars, historians and other academics on the issue.

Sourced

Quotations arranged alphabetically by author

• While the death toll in the trenches of Western Europe were close to 2 million by the summer of 1915, the extermination of innocent civilians in Turkey (the Armenians, but also Syrian and Assyrian Christians and large portions of the Greek population, especially the Greeks of Pontos, or Black Sea region) was reaching 1 million.
  • Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris, p. 285-286

• The two present threats to Turkish territorial integrity—by the Greeks and the French—and the one potential threat—an Armenian state—reproduced the proximate CUP ‘rationale’ for the 1915—16 genocide, and the forthcoming violence was sometimes of the same order.
  • Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, p.150

• The nation, beginning with the areas of trade and language, was to be cleansed from “foreign elements” in order to establish a national culture and economy….As noted, the 1914 cleansing was initially attempted through a severe economic boycott and by other intimidating measures.
  • Bjørnlund, Matthias (2008) 'The 1914 cleansing of Aegean Greeks as a case of violent Turkification', Journal of Genocide Research, 10:1, 41-58

• Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, riven, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole purpose is to dilute, counter, minimise, trivialise and relativise every reference to the events which encompassed a genocide of Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Assyrian Christians in Asia Minor.
  • Elizabeth Burns Coleman, Kevin White, Negotiating the Sacred: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in a Multicultural Society, p.82

• It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized and state-sponsored campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide.
  • Dr. Israel Charney quote

• Most of the Armenians had already been massacred during the reign of the Sultan, in 1915—1916; Kemal attempted to continue the genocide of Armenians in Transcaucasia, and of Greeks on the coast of the Aegean. Especially heartrending and horribly bloody was the genocide of the Greeks in Smyrna (Turkish Izmir) where they had lived since the tenth century BC.
  • Igor M. Diakonov, The Paths of History, p.276 footnote 60

• The Armenian Genocide, the massacres of the Pontic Greeks, the forced "exchanges"...
  • Ferguson, Niall. The War of the Worlds Penguin 2007, p.182

• WHEREAS the denial of genocide is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides;

  WHEREAS the Ottoman genocide against minority populations during and following the First World War is usually depicted as a genocide against Armenians alone, with little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire;

  BE IT RESOLVED that it is the conviction of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks.

  BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Association calls upon the government of Turkey to acknowledge the genocides against these populations, to issue a formal apology, and to take prompt and meaningful steps toward restitution.

  • The International Association of Genocide Scholars adopted this resolution on 16 December 2007, formally recognizing the campaign of the Ottoman Empire and the Young Turks against the Greeks and Assyrians as genocide.

• One begins with (attempted) comprehension of the motives, intent, scale, implementation, and operation of the Holocaust. To understand it is necessary to look at similar phenomena, and so one attempts an unravelling of the Armenian, Pontian Greek, Rwandan, Burundian, and Aboriginal experiences
  • Steven L. Jacobs, Samuel Totten (2002). Pioneers of Genocide Studies (Clt), 213.

• The Turkish army entered Smyrna on September 9. 1922 and soon thereafter the city went up in flames. A fire razed most of the Armenian quarter. It is estimated that 50,000 Christians were killed in the city during this period. No indigenous Christians remained in Smyrna after this holocaust that had deeply stained relations between the two peoples.
  • David J. Jonsson, The Clash of Ideologies - The Making of the Christian and Islamic Worlds, The Genocide of the Eastern Christians of Smyrna (1922), p.248

• ... the massacre of Armenians and other Christians in eastern Anatolia in the 1890s; ...and then the organized killing and deportation of Armenians, Greeks, and others in the Ottoman empire from 1915 to the early 1920s.
  • Charles King, The Black Sea: A History

• …carefully planned atrocities aimed at the Greeks' complete destruction
  • Marianna Koromila, The Greeks and the Black Sea

• Historians, perhaps concerned not to magnify these events by comparison with those of 1915-16, tend to avoid the term genocide to describe them. In my formulation, however, these events would constitute partial genocide..."

"...In the last hundred years, four Eastern Anatolian groups—Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, and Greeks—have fallen victim to state-sponsored attempts by the Ottoman authorities or their Turkish or Iraqi successors to eradicate them" ... "By ridding themselves of the Armenians, Greeks, or any other group that stood in their way, Turkish nationalists were attempting to prove how they could clarify, purify, and ultimately unify a polity and society so that it could succeed on its own, albeit Western-orientated terms. This, of course, was the ultimate paradox: the CUP committed genocide in order to transform the residual empire into a streamlined, homogeneous nation-state on the European model..."

• Unlike the Armenian case, in each of these other instances the scope, scale and intensity of the killings was limited, though this does not rule out comparison...The persistence of genocide or near-genocidal incidents from the 1890s through the 1990s, committed by Ottoman and successor Turkish and Iraqi states against Armenian, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek communities in Eastern Anatolia, is striking.... I have concentrated here on the genocidal sequence affecting Armenians and Kurds only, though my approach would be pertinent to the Pontic Greek and Assyrian cases.
  • Creating a Modern "Zone of Genocide": The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923, by Mark Levene, University of Warwick, © 1998 by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

• In the genocide of various minority nationalities that followed, the Turks massacred over 350000 Greeks.
  • David Levinson, Encyclopaedia of World Cultures-Ethnology, p.141

• For CUP's leaders, attacking the country's Greeks was a means to purify the core regions of Turkey. Talaat Pasha made clear that this was his intent ... As the war continued, the Turkish campaign against the Greek civilians expanded to include the Pontic Greeks who lived on the Black Sea. The road to persecution here was quite similar to that elsewhere on the war's eastern fronts. Military threats and setbacks - in this case defeats by Russia - convinced Turkey's leaders to begin a campaign against a civilian population accused of treason ... Subject to state-sponsored terror despite their status as Ottoman subjects, during World War I Turkey's Greeks experienced persecution just short of full-scale ethnic cleansing
  • Benjamin David Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe ISBN 1566636469**David Levinson, Encyclopaedia of World Cultures-Ethnology, p.141

• Then, in a “Report on the preparation of a volume on genocide,” dated March–May 1948, a less ambitious project comprising ten chapters, two of which covered extra-European colonial cases: “2.The Indians in Latin America” and “10. The Indians in North America (in part).” The Holocaust, a term Lemkin never used, was not included, although the Armenians and Greeks in Turkey were, as well as the Early Christians, and the Jews of the Middle Ages and Tsarist Russia.14 To continue to deny, as many “founders of genocide studies” deny, that he regarded colonialism as an integral part of a world history of genocide is to ignore the written record.
  • MA Mcdonnell, AD Moses, Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the Americas, Journal of Genocide Research, Volume 7, Issue 4, December 2005 , pp. 501-529

• Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks. Massacres most likely did take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small number of Armenian survivors, the massacres were apparently restricted to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other "sensitive regions"
  • Manus I. Midlarsky, , p.343

• The Turkish state which emerged at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire contained several minorities within its interior, in an attempt to move towards a homogeneous population the Turkish state, which has passed through varying phases of dictatorship and democracy, has used any means possible, including genocide and deportation, to eliminate the Armenians, Greeks and Kurds remaining within Anatolia
  • Panikos Panayi, Outsiders: A History of European Minorities, p.111

• …had been its Greek populace, the Turks massacred as many Greeks there as possible, to so1ve that ethnological problem by genocide, a term a later and more delicate…
  • Clarence Pendleton Lee, Athenian Adventure: With Alarums & Excursions, p.110

• …the killing of the 275,000 Pontian souls who where slaughtered outright or were victims of the 'white death' of disease and starvation - a result of the routine process of deportations, slave labor, and the killings and death marches.
  • Harry Psomiades, professor emeritus of political science at Queens College the City University of New York

• These genocides not only involved the Holocaust and the killing of the Armenians, the best known of this century's genocides, but also the lesser known genocide of Gypsies by the Nazis and of Greeks by the Turks
  • R. J. Rummel, The Holocaust in Comparative and Historical Perspective, 1998, Idea Journal of Social Issues, Vol.3 no.2

• However, the Treaty of Sevres was never ratified, As Kay Holloway wrote, the failure of the signatories to bring the treaty into force ‘resulted in the abandonment of thousands of defenceless peoples Armenians and Greeks — to the fury of their persecutors, by engendering subsequent holocausts in which the few survivors of the 1915 Armenian massacres perished.” The Treaty of Sevres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923 that included a ‘Declaration of Amnesty’ for all offences committed between 1 August 1914 and 20 November 1922.
  • William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes, p.22

• The genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks and Assyrians is obvious. Historians who realize that the Young Turks’ population and extermination policies have to be analysed together and understood as an entity are therefore often tempted to speak of a “Christian genocide.” This approach, however, is insofar inadequate as it ignores the Young Turks’ massive violence against non-Christians.

• The Young Turks’ overall aim was a demographic reorganization of the Ottoman Empire. All deportations were planned and supervised by the “Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants” that belonged to the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior. A relatively small number of government administrators were thus chiefly involved in the coordination of the murder and expulsion of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other minority groups.29 Therefore, the isolated study and emphasis of a single group’s victimhood during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire fails to really understand Young Turks’ motives and aims or its grand design.
  • Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, Late Ottoman genocides: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish population and extermination policies - introduction, Journal of Genocide Research, 10:1, 7 - 14

• Hilmar Kaiser deepened this notion and demonstrated in purely historical yet extremely detailed research that the treatment of the Armenians and Syriacs, nothing short of genocide, and the deportation of Kurds and Greeks were integral parts of the CUP scheme of social engineering. Arguing that this scheme envisioned the cultural assimilation of Muslims and exclusion of non-Muslims, he drew a parallel with wartime Nazi policies in Eastern Europe by aptly characterizing the project as “Generalplan Ost 1915.
• During these meetings, the weaknesses of the Ottoman Empire were equated with the presence of clusters of non-Turkish people in strategic areas, such as in the Aegean area with its hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Greeks, or in the eastern provinces with its hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians and Kurds. CUP loyalists decided that these “internal tumours” had to be removed, once and for all.41 Party ideologue Ziyaˆ Go¨kalp wrote extensively about the necessity of “Turkifying” the empire by instilling Turkish nationalism into the Ottoman Muslims, who according to him were oblivious of their national identity.
• In 1914, most businesses on the Aegean littoral were owned by Ottoman Greeks. When persuasion didn’t cause the desired effect, the CUP took recourse to more violent methods of Turkification of the economy. It sent emissaries such as Special Organization agent Kara Kemal to assist Responsible Secretary Celal Bayar (1883–1986) in Turkifying the economy of Smyrna/I˙zmir.51 In the summer of 1914 this political and nationalist persecution gained momentum as boycotts and expropriations escalated into kidnappings and assassinations of Greek businessmen and community leaders, and even wholesale deportations of villages.52 The fact that after this terror campaign many Ottoman Greeks opted to emigrate to Chios or Greece, abandoning their territory to the benefit of Ottoman Muslims, was celebrated by the CUP as an administrative success. Turkification was beginning to yield its fruits at a time when the outbreak of the war foreshadowed bad times for the population of the eastern provinces.
  • üngör, Uur ümit(2008)'Seeing like a nation-state: Young Turk social engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913-50',Journal of Genocide Research,10:1,15 — 3, DOI:10.1080/14623520701850278, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623520701850278

• The Turks had used genocide against the Greeks and Armenians but did not have enough time to finish them off completely. The Kurds revolted in 1925, demanding independence or autonomy.
  • E. G. Vallianatos - The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul (review) - Mediterranean Quarterly 17:1 (2006) 133-140

• First of all, the Ottoman Empire itself, now ruled by the nationalist Young Turks Committee, began to implement a deadly policy, which aimed at wiping out the non-Turkish elements in the Empire and culminated in the genocide of the Armenians and Greeks, particularly those living in the Pontos region
  • A Xanthopoulou-Kyriakou The Diaspora of the Greeks of the Pontos: Historical Background Journal of Refugee Studies- Oxford Univ Press, 1991 4(4):357-363

• The Genocide Convention of 1948 and other United Nations Conventions strengthen the claims of genocide victims, including the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians of Asia Minor.
  • Alfred de Zayas, JD, PhD, Human Rights - International Law - and the Armenian Genocide, 2005

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Quotations arranged alphabetically by author

See also

Armenian Genocide

External links

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Greek Genocide

• Greek Genocide
• Hellenic Genocide
• Greek Genocide decree angers Turks