World One War: Greek Massacre
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During the First World War and its brutal aftermath, the Ottoman Empire carried out a violent campaign against the Greek populace of the empire.
This little known event of the Great War period saw massacres, forced deportations and summary execution of thousands. According to sources, which vary, thousands of Ottoman Greeks died between 1914 and 1922. Some of the survivors, especially those in the Eastern provinces, took refuge in the chaos of Russia. The incident was never fully resolved, even at the end of the Greco-Turkish War, whereby Greeks remaining in the Ottoman Empire were transferred back to Greece under the terms of the 1923 population exchange.
The event, nearly one hundred years later is still a controversial topic. The government of Turkey argues that the large scale campaign was triggered by the perception that the Greeks were helping the allies. The allies in turn, condemned the campaign as ‘crimes against humanity’. In recent years, the ‘International Association of Genocide Scholars’ passed a resolution in 2007 affirming that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities, including Greeks, was genocide.
Asia Minor is the crossroads of civilisation, wars and peoples. At the outbreak of World War One, Anatolia was ethnically diverse as its population included Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Circassians, Jews and Laz people. Amongst the causes for ethnic persecution in the Ottoman Empire was the fear that the populaces would aid the nation’s enemies. The belief fuelled the notion that to form a modern nation state, it was necessary to purge those who threatened national unity.
It is interesting to note that according to the German military attaché, the Turkish minister of war Ismail Enver declared in October 1915 that he wished ‘to solve the Greek problem during the war…in the same way he believed he solved the Armenian people’
In the heated summer of 1914, the ‘Special Organisation’ assisted by the government and army, conscripted Greeks of military age from Thrace into Ottoman labour battalions. Uncountable thousands died in these Labour Battalions. Stationed hundreds of miles into the interior of the Ottoman Empire, the conscripts were employed to build roads and a modern infrastructure. Despite the Ottoman’s forward thinking, thousands died either due to ill-treatment or by massacres by their Turkish guards.
The ill-treatment of Greek labourers was merely the beginning. The conscript of Greek men was supplemented by deportations involving ‘death marches’ of the general population. The inhabitants of Greek towns would be surrounded and summarily executed wholesale.
In 1915, the Greek Government explained that the deportations and killings
“cannot 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."
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.”
These ‘relocation campaigns’ were referred to as ‘White Massacres”
The systematic murder of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire was merely a pre-cursor to the atrocities committed by both Greece and Turkey during the Greco-Turkish War which raged between 1919 and 1922. In looking at the massacres of that conflict, British historian Arnold J. Toynbee argued that:
“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.”
There are numerous sources on the atrocities; the Greek death toll varies from 300,000 to 360,000. According to the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, between 1916 and 1923, in excess of 350,000 Greeks were reportedly massacred by the Ottoman Empire.
It was in the ‘great silence’ of the early 1920s in which Turkey’s crimes were laid bare and that horrendous word was first uttered, genocide.
Article 142 of the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, called the Turkish regime ‘terrorist’ and contained the provision:
“To repair so far as possible the wrongs inflicted on individuals in the course of the massacres perpetrated in Turkey during the war”
Ultimately the treaty of Sevres was never validated by the new Turkish republic and was in turn replaced by the treaty of Lausanne. It is interesting to note that at the Lausanne Conference in 1922, the British Foreign Minister Lord Curzon was recorded as stating that a million Greeks had been killed, deported or died due to the Turks.
The population exchange in 1923 resulted in the near-complete elimination of a Greek presence in Turkey. The Greek census of 1928 calculated that 1,104,216 Ottoman Greeks had reached Greece.
Since the armistice of 1918, the Massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic between 1914 and 1922 still cause controversy and fuel debate. The Greek parliament passed two laws on the fate of Ottoman Greeks. The laws were decreed in the Greek Government Gazette. The first, in 1994, affirmed the genocide in Asia Minor and designated the 19th May a day of commemoration. The second in 1998, affirmed the genocide as a whole and designated the 14th of September a day of commemoration.
The Turkish government responded to the 1998 law by stating that the so-called events were without any historical basis.
Further to this there has been little and limited recognition of the event. The reasons include the fact that the event was overshadowed by the Armenian Genocide, the Treaty of Lausanne made no reference to a ‘massacre’ and a ‘treaty’ between Greece and Turkey in 1930 was made to settle all open issues between the countries.
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