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The Greek genocide, part of which is known as the Pontic genocide, was the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Christian Ottoman Greek population from its historic homeland in Asia Minor, central Anatolia, Pontus, and the former Russian Caucasus province of Kars Oblast during World War I and its aftermath (1914–23). It was instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire against the Greek population of the Empire and it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary executions, and destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period.[3] Some of the survivors and refugees, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire. After the end of the 1919–22 Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks remaining in the Ottoman Empire were transferred to Greece under the terms of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination.[4][5][6][7][8]
The Greece, Cyprus and Sweden.
At the outbreak of World War I, Asia Minor was ethnically diverse, its population including Turks, Azeris, Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Zazas, Circassians, 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 form 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.[10][11]
According to a German military attaché, the Ottoman 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."[12]
The Greek presence in Asia Minor has been dated to at least the time of Homer around 800 BCE.[13] The geographer Strabo referred to Smyrna as the first Greek city in Asia Minor.[14] Greeks referred to the Black Sea as the "Euxinos Pontos" or "hospitable sea" and starting in the eighth century BCE they began navigating its shores and settling along its coast.[14] The most notable Greek cities of the Black Sea were Trebizond, Sampsounta, Sinope and Heraclea Pontica.[14]
During the Hellenistic period (334 BC - 1st century BC) that followed the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek culture and language began to dominate Asia Minor. The Hellenization of the region accelerated under Roman and early Byzantine rule, and by the early centuries AD the local Anatolian languages had become extinct, being replaced by the common Koine Greek language.[15][16][17] The resultant Greek culture in Asia Minor flourished during the following millennium under the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire. Until the Turkic peoples began their late medieval conquests of this empire, Byzantine Greek citizens were largest group of indigenous peoples living in Asia Minor.[14] Even after the Turkic conquests of the interior, the Black Sea coast and mountains of Asia Minor remained the heart of a vibrant Greek state, the Empire of Trebizond, until its eventual conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1461.
Following similar accords made with Bulgaria and Serbia, the Ottoman Empire signed a voluntary population exchange agreement with Greece in 14 November 1913.[21] Another agreement was signed 1 July 1914 for the exchange of "Turks" of Greece and Greeks of Aydin and Western Thrace, but was never implemented due to the eruption of WW I.[22]
Beginning in the spring of 1913, the Ottomans implemented a programme of expulsions and forcible migrations, focusing in Greeks of the Aegean region and eastern Thrace, whose presence in these areas was deemed a threat to national security.[23] While discussions for population exchanges were still conducted, [24] The Ottoman government adopted a "dual-track mechanism" allowing it to deny responsibility for and prior knowledge of this capaign of intimidation, emptying Christian villages.[25] Such an incident took place in Phocaea (Greek: Φώκαια), a town in western Anatolia twenty-five miles (40 km) northwest of Smyrna, on 12 June 1914 where 50 people were killed and the slain bodies of men, women and children were thrown down a well.[26][27] At the same time, spontaneous attacks of Muslim emigrants were committed against Christian villages without government supervision[28]
The involvement in certain cases of local military and civil functionaries in planning and executing anti-Greek violence and looting led ambassadors of Greece and the Great Powers and the Patriarchate to address complaints to the Porte.[29] In protest to government inaction in the face of these attacks and to the so called "Muslim boycott" of Greek products that had begun in 1913, the Patriarchate closed Greek churches and schools in June 1914.[29]
Responding to international and domestic pressure, Talat Pasha headed a visit in Thrace in April 1914 and later in the Aegean to investigate reports and try to sooth bilateral tension with Greece. While purporting that he had no involvement or knowledge of these events, Talat met with Kuşçubaşı Eşref, head of the "cleansing" operation in the Aegean littoral, during his tour and advised him to be cautious not to be "visible".[30]
In the summer of 1914 the Thrace and western Anatolia into Labour Battalions in which hundreds of thousands died.[31] 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 Ottoman guards.[32] The policy of persecution and ethnic cleansing was expanded to other regions of the Empire including Pontus, Cappadocia and Cilicia.[33]
The forceful expulsion of Christians of western Anatolia, especially Ottoman Greeks, bares many similarities with [34]
However, after November 1914 Ottoman policy towards the Greek population shifted; state policy was since restricted to the forceful immigration to the interior of Greeks living in coastal areas, particularly the Black Sea region, close to the Turkish-Russian front.[35] This change of policy was due to a German demand for the persecution of Ottoman Greeks to stop, after Eleftherios Venizelos had stated this as a condition of Greece's neutrality to the German ambassador in Athens. Venizelos also threatened to undertake a similar campaign against Muslims that were living in Greece in case that Ottoman policy wouldn't change.[36] While the Ottoman government tried to implement this change in policy, it wasn't successful and attacks, even murders, continued to occur unpunished by local officials in the provinces, despite repeated instructions in cables sent from the central administration.[37] Arbitrary violence and extortion of money intensified later, providing ammunition for the Venizelists arguing that Greece should join the Entente.[38]
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."[39] According to George W. Rendel of the British Foreign Office, by 1918 "...over 500,000 Greeks were deported of whom comparatively few survived."[40] 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."[41]
Despite the shift of policy, the policy of evacuating Greek settlements and relocating the inhabitants was continued, albeit in a limited scale. The policy was targeted to specific regions that were considered militarily vulnerable, not the whole of the Greek population. As a 1919 Patriarchate account records, the evacuation of many villages was accompanied with looting and murders, while many died as a result of not having been given the time to make the necessary provisions or of being relocated to uninhabitable places.[42]
State policy towards Ottoman Greeks changed again in the fall of 1916. With Entente forces occupying Lesbos, Chios and Samos since spring, the Russians advancing in Anatolia and Greece expected to enter the war siding with the Allies, preparations were made for the deportation of Greeks living in border areas.[43] Of particular concern for the Ottoman government were the Greeks of the central and eastern Pontus area, who were suspect of cooperating with the Russian army. In January 1917 Talat Pasha sent a cable for the deportation of Greeks from the Samsun district "thirty to fifty kilometres inland" taking care for "no assaults on any persons or property".[44] However, the execution of government decrees, which took a systematic form from December 1916, when Behaeddin Shakir came to the region, was not conducted as ordered: men were taken in labour battalions, women and children were attacked, villages were looted by Muslim neighbours.[45] Germanos Karavangelis, the bishop of Samsun, reported to the Patriarchate that thirty thousands had been deported to the Ankara region and the convoys of the deportees had been attacked, with many being killed. Talat Pasha ordered an investigation for the looting and destruction of Greek villages by bandits.[46] Later in 1917 instructions were sent to authorize military officials with the control of the operation and to broaden its scope, now including persons from cities in the coastal region. However, in certain areas Greek populations remained undeported.[47]
Greek deportees were sent to live in Greek villages in the inner provinces or, in some case, villages where Armenians were living before being deported. Greek villages evacuated during the war due to military concerns were then resettled with Muslim immigrants and refugees.[48] According to cables sent to the provinces during this time, abandoned moveable and non-movable Greek property was not to be liquidated, as that of the Armenians, but "preserved".[49]
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.[50]
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".[40] Ottoman official Rafet Bey was active in the Genocide of the Greeks and on November 1916 he stated "We must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians… today I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight…”.[51]
According to the official Ottoman documents, in January 1919, the Ottoman government allowed the return of some Greek who were deported, gave them financial aid and gave back their properties.[52]
The Turkish Courts-Martial of 1919–20 saw charges brought against a number of leading Ottoman officials for their part in ordering massacres against both Greeks and Armenians.[53]
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.[40]
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 Greek and Turkish armies during the [60] They killed an estimated 348,000 Anatolian Greeks.[61] There were also massacres of Turks carried out by the Hellenic troops during the occupation of western Anatolia from May 1919 to September 1922.[56]
For the massacres that occurred during the
In 1917 a relief organization by the name of the [63]
German and Austro-Hungarian diplomats, as well as the 1922 memorandum compiled by ethnic cleansing of the Greeks in Asia Minor.[60][64][65] 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. 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 Ottoman officials, namely the Ottoman Prime Minister Mahmud Sevket Pasha, Rafet Bey, Talat Pasha and Enver Pasha.[60][64][65]
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.[66][67] 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".[68] More media of the time reported the events with similar titles.[69]
[71]
US Consul-General [72][73]
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, a team of American researchers found in the early postwar period that the total number of Greeks killed may approach 900,000 people.[2]
According to the figures by the Greek government together with the Patriarchate, a total of one million people were estimated to be massacred.[75]
According to the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, between 1916 and 1923, up to 350,000 [78]
Constantine G Hatzidimitriou writes that "loss of life among Anatolian Greeks during the WWI period and its aftermath was approximately 735,370."[79] 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.".[80] 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."[81]
In 1916, Emanuel Efendi, a Ottoman deputy, said that "550,000 Greeks... were killed."[82]
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."[83] 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.[84]
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.[85] 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.[86] Some of the survivors and expelled took refuge in the neighboring Russian Empire (later, Soviet Union).
In 1955, the Istanbul Pogrom caused most of the Greek inhabitants remaining in Istanbul to flee and migrate from there. Historian Alfred-Maurice de Zayas identifies Istanbul Pogroms as a very serious crime against humanity and he states that, small Greek causality and especially the flight and big migration of Greeks after the pogrom corresponds to the "intent to destroy in whole or in part" criteria of the Genocide Convention.[87]
The word genocide was coined in the early 1940s, the era of the Holocaust, 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.[88] 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...[89]
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. Some historians and other scholars employ other definitions of genocide, which they consider better suited for academic use.[90]
Before creation of the word "genocide", the destruction of the Ottoman Greeks was known by Greeks as "the Massacre" (in Greek, η Σφαγή), "the Great Catastrophe" (η Μεγάλη Καταστροφή), or "the Great Tragedy" (η Μεγάλη Τραγωδία).[91] Contemporary accounts employed such terms as "annihilation", "systematic extermination", "persistent campaign of massacre", and "wholesale massacre".[72][92]
In December 2007 the [95] The IAGS resolution was passed with an "overwhelming" majority.[96][97] Several scholars researching the Armenian genocide, such as Peter Balakian, Taner Akçam, Richard Hovannisian and Robert Melson, stated that the issue had to be further researched before a resolution was passed."[98]
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".[99] Manus Midlarsky notes a disjunction between statements of genocidal intent against the Greeks by Ottoman officials and their actions, pointing to the containment of massacres in selected "sensitive" areas and the large numbers of Greek survivors at the end of the war. Because of cultural and political ties of the Ottoman Greeks with European powers, Midlarsky argues, genocide was "not a viable option for the Ottomans in their case."[100] Taner Akçam refers to contemporary accounts noting the difference in government treatment of Ottoman Greeks and Armenians during WW I and concludes that "despite the increasingly severe wartime policies, in particular for the period between late 1916 and the first months of 1917, the government's treatment of the Greeks -although comparable in some ways to the measures against the Armenians- differed in scope, intent, and motivation".[101] Niall Ferguson has drawn a comparison between sporadic massacres of Pontic Greek communities after 1922 and the fate of the Armenians.[102] As per the IAGS resolution, genocide scholars, such as Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, have stated that the "genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks" is "obvious".[103] Historian Angelos Elefantis "has expressed his shock at the use of the word "genocide" in relation only to the Smyrna massacres",[104] although not concerning the anti Greek atrocities in general.
Seminars and courses in several western universities examine the events. These include the College of Charleston,[105] the University of Michigan Dearborn[106] and the University of New South Wales[107] which has a dedicated research unit.
Following an initiative of MPs of the so-called "patriotic" wing of the ruling [111]
In the late 2000s the Communist Party of Greece adopted the term "Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus" (Γενοκτονία Ποντίων) in its official newspaper Rizospastis and participates in memorial events.[112][113][114]
The Republic of Cyprus also officially recognizes the events as genocide.[115]
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.[116]
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".[117]
On 14 May 2013, the government of New South Wales was submitted a genocide recognition motion by Fred Nile of the Christian Democratic Party, and was later passed making it the fourth political entity to recognise the genocide.[118]
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 acknowledgement of these events are as follows:[119]
In his book With Intent to Destroy: Reflections on Genocide, Colin Tatz argue that Turkey denies the genocide so as not to jeopardize "its ninety-five-year-old dream of becoming the beacon of democracy in the Near East".[120]
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.
A suppression of guilt and shame that a warrior nation, a ‘beacon of democracy’ as it saw itself in 1908 (and since), slaughtered several ethnic populations. Democracies, it is said, don’t commit genocide; ergo, Turkey couldn’t and didn’t do so. A cultural and social ethos of honour, a compelling and compulsive need to remove any blots on the national escutcheon. A chronic fear that admission will lead to massive claims for reparation and restitution. To overcome fears of social fragmentation in a society that is still very much a state in transition. A ‘logical’ belief that because the genocide was committed with impunity, so denial will also meet with neither opposition nor obloquy. An inner knowledge that the juggernaut denial industry has a momentum of its own and can’t be stopped even if they wanted it to stop.
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, most recently, Australia.[122]
In a groundbreaking move, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) has voted overwhelmingly to recognize the genocides inflicted on Assyrian and Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1923. and: "The overwhelming backing given to this resolution by the world's leading genocide scholars organization will help to raise consciousness about the Assyrian and Greek genocides," Jones said on December 15. "It will also act as a powerful counter to those, especially in present-day Turkey, who still ignore or deny outright the genocides of the Ottoman Christian minorities".
The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) has voted overwhelmingly to recognize the genocides inflicted on Assyrian and Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1923. and: "The overwhelming backing given to this resolution by the world's leading genocide scholars organization will help to raise consciousness about the Assyrian and Greek genocides," Jones said on December 10. "It will also act as a powerful counter to those, especially in present-day Turkey, who still ignore or deny the genocides of the Ottoman Christian minorities".
Και εάν η Κυβέρνηση για λόγους πολιτικής σκοπιμότητας θα αποσύρει το Π.Δ., η Αριστερά θα αναλάβει, όπως πάντα, να προσφέρει τα ιδεολογικά όπλα του πολέμου. Ο Άγγελος Ελεφάντης θα γράψει στο ίδιο τεύχος των Νέων πως δεν υπάρχει κανένας λόγος να αναγορεύσομε την 14 Σεπτεμβρίου του 1922 ούτε καν σε ημέρα εθνικής μνήμης. [And while the Government for the sake of political expediency withdraws the Presidential Decree, the Left undertakes, as always, to offer the ideological weapons for this war. Angelos Elefantis writes in the same page of the NEA newspaper (Feb. 24, 2001) that there is no reason to proclaim the 14th of September of 1922 not even to a day of national memory.]
The U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples requires states to provide an effective remedy to indigenous peoples deprived of their cultural, religious, or intellectual property (IP) without their free, prior and informed consent. The Declaration could prove to be an important safeguard for the indigenous peoples of Iraq and Turkey, the victims for centuries of massacres, assaults on their religious and cultural sites, theft and deterioration of their lands and cultural objects, and forced assimilation. These peoples, among them the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Yezidis of Turkey and Turkish-occupied Cyprus, and the Armenians, Assyrians, Yezidis, and Mandaeans of Iraq, have lost more than two-thirds of their peak populations, most of their cultural and religious sites, and thousands of priceless artifacts and specimens of visual art.
Armenia, Istanbul, Genocide, World War I, Committee of Union and Progress
Turkey, Byzantine Empire, World War I, Turkish language, Sultanate of Rum
Armenia, Hakkari, Armenian Genocide, Greek genocide, Australia
Ottoman Empire, World War I, British Empire, Peter the Great, Russia
Turkic peoples, Turkey, Ottoman Empire, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan
Cappadocia, Greece, Turkish language, Kayseri, Greek language
Greek language, Greek diaspora, Greece, Homer, Cyprus
Discrimination, Armenian Genocide, Ethnic cleansing, World War II, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia