Greek genocide

New York Times headlines which observes that the entire Christian population of Trabzon was "wiped out".

Pontian Greek Genocide (Greek: Γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων του Πόντου, Turkish: Pontus Rumları Soykırımı) is a controversial term used to refer to the persecutions, massacres, and other sufferings, including but not limited to the expulsions, deportations, and death marches, by the Young Turk administration of the Ottoman Empire and during the subsequent revolution of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk , of Pontian Greek populations in the historical region of Pontus, the Black Sea provinces of the Ottoman Empire.

Greece is the only country to have officially recognized it as genocide, and 19 May was set as the date of commemoration of the event (in 1994). The legislatures of several U.S. states have also passed resolutions commemorating the event; but such resolutions have no legal force.

Use of the term "Genocide" for these events is disputed and considered controversial by the Turkish side. The Turkish government maintains that this event was not of genocidal nature, and the selection of the date of May 19, which is a national holiday in Turkey, is considered by some Turkish politicians to be a provocation.

Background

According to the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, between 1916 and 1923, up to 350,000 Pontians disappeared through massacres, persecution and death marches. Merrill D. Peterson cites the death toll of 360,000 for the Greeks of Pontus. According to G.K. Valavanis , "The loss of human life among the Pontian Greeks, since the General War (World War I) until March of 1924, can be estimated at 353,238, as a result of murders, hangings, and from hunger, disease, and other hardships."

The survivors and the expelled took refuge mostly in the nearby Soviet Union. The Pontic Greeks who had remained in Pontus until the end of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) were exchanged in the frame of the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations in 1922-1923.

One of the alleged methods used in the systematic elimination of the Greek population was the Labour Battalions (Turkish: Amele Taburları, Greek: Τάγματα Εργασίας Tagmata Ergasias) , . In them, mostly young and healthy people were forced to work by the Ottoman Administration during the First World War and the Turkish Government after the creation of the Turkish Republic . The well-known writer-novelist Elias Venezis later described the situation in his work the Number 31328 (Το Νούμερο 31328). An academic research on Labour Battalions by Sabancı University Associate Professor Leyla Neyzi, based on the diaries of Yaşar Paker, a Turkish Jew who was enrolled in these battalions himself, does not point to nor hint at acts of a genocidal nature.

Another allegation is that genocide was carries out by forcing the weaker population, including women and children, to walk for hundreds of kilometres until they died.

All indirect ways of inflicting death (boycott, deportations, deaths by starvation in labour camps, etc.) were known as "white massacres" .

Aftermath

In 1923, a population exchange between Greece and Turkey resulted in a near-complete elimination of the Greek ethnic presence in Anatolia and a similar elimination of the Turkish ethnic presence in much of Greece. It is impossible to know exactly how many Greek inhabitants of Pontus, Smyrna and rest of Asia Minor died from 1916 to 1923, and how many ethnic Greeks of Anatolia were deported to Greece or fled to the Soviet Union. According to G.W. Rendel, " ... over 500,000 Greeks were deported of whom comparatively few survived." 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" . Based on the information provided by Manus I. Mildrasky, in his book "The Killing Trap", pages 342, and 377, it is estimated that approximately 480,000 Anatolian Greeks died during the aforementioned period.

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."

Recognition

The incidents which occurred during that period were officially described as genocide by the Greek Parliament in 1994, through an initiative centered largely around former PASOK Central Committee member, Michalis Charalambidis (described by one Greek source as the leader of the recognition of the genocide of Greeks of Pontos ), and the date of 19 May was instituted as the official date of commemoration. A letter was submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights by the "International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples" to request its recognition in 1998. The incidents are also recognized as genocide in some states of the USA, namely South Carolina , New Jersey , Florida and Massachusetts , Pennsylvania and Illinois . In addition, George E. Pataki, governor of the New York State issued a proclamation designating May 19, 2002 as Pontian Greek Genocide Remembrance Day.

In Australia, the issue has been raised in the Parliament of Victoria on May 4 2006, by the Minister for Justice Jenny Mikakos . On June 2006 Stephen Pound, member of the British House of Commons linked the case of the Pontian Greeks with the Armenian Genocide.

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

Neither the United Nations, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, nor any other country with the exception of Greece recognise the events as genocide. The events are also not recognised as genocide by the International Association of Genocide Scholars. The historian Mark Levene notes that many historians would, "tend to avoid the term genocide to describe them".

According to Constantine Fotiades, professor of Modern Greek History at the University of Western Macedonia, Greece, some of the reasons for the lack of wider recognition and delay in seeking acknowledgement of these events, are as follows:

• The Pontian Greek Genocide was overshadowed by the much larger Armenian Genocide which preceeded it.
• The 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 conssesions to settle all open issues between the two countries in return for peace in the region.
• The Second World War, the Civil War, and political turmoil in Greece, that followed, forced Greece to focus on its survival and other problems rather than seek recognition of these events.

One other reason for the lack of recognition of these events can be found in the following statement " It is necessary to refer to these Pre-Armistice persecutions, since there is now a strong tendency to minimize or overlook them, and to regard those who followed the armistice as isolated incidents provoked by the Greek Landing at Smyrna and the general Turkish Policy of the Allies."

Turkey's stance

Turkey maintains that the incidents referred to cannot be considered to be of a genocidal nature. The choice by Greece of 19 May as the date of commemoration, a national holiday in Turkey as the anniversary of 19 May 1919 when Mustafa Kemal Pasha set foot in Samsun to initiate the Turkish War of Independence, is viewed in Turkey as futile provocation by some Greek politicians. Upon the opening in May 2006 of two commemorative monuments in Thessaloniki, the social-democrat mayor of İzmir, Aziz Kocaoğlu, announced on 12 May 2006 that they were suspending the signing (expected in June 2006) of a sister city agreement between İzmir and Thessaloniki .

Colin Tatz and Cohn Jatz, argue that Turkey denies those incidents in an attempt to fulfill her national dreams:

Turkey, still struggling to achieve its ninety-five-year-old dream of becoming the beacon of democracy in the Near East, does everything possible to deny its genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian Greeks.

Academic views on the issue

Samuel Totten and Steven L. Jacobs, attempt to compare these "experiences" to the Holocaust:

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.

The Consul and Consul-General of the United States in the Near East for 30 years, George Horton, describes many massacres of Pontian Greeks by the Turkish troops, while he illustrates intention in the chain of command to the extent of fabricated propaganda of purely imaginary scenes of Greeks slaughtering innocent Turkish civilians. He does not use the word "genocide" to describe the horrible events, since the term had not been coined until 1943, while he wrote his book in 1926. However, he usually places the Greeks before the Armenians in his descriptions, while suggests that "[t]his part of the story would not be complete if I passed over in silence the systematic extermination, and the satiating of all the lowest passions of man or beast which characterize Turkish massacres of the Greeks and Armenians of the Pontus." He, therefore, chooses to describe the events as:

"systematic extermination" or "...annihilation... ...in a persistent campaign of massacre... ...of the flourishing communities of Greek civilization... ...in the Black Sea".

Horton also starts his book with an eschatological association to the events by quoting a part of the Revelation of John:

What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.

(Revelation 1:11, KJV)

Mark Levene suggests that:

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."

He avoids the direct use of the term "Pontian genocide" (referring to them as "series of massacres"), while he also states:

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 ... Historians, perhaps concerned not to magnify these events by comparison with those of 1915-16, tend to avoid the term genocide to describe them.

He clarifies:

... 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.

R. J. Rummel defines these incidents as genocide and democide (a term he himself coined for such events), while he includes extensive sources from many academicians and calculates the death toll to 347,000. It has been argued, however, that his broader use of the term to other irrelevant incidents constitutes an exaggeration.

Norman M. Naimark, describes the events as "ethnic cleansing" in his book Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe.

Harry Psomiades, professor emeritus of political science at Queens College the City University of New York, refers to these events as the genocide "of the 275,000 Pontian souls who where sloughtered outright or were victims of the the "white death" of desease and starvation - a result of the routine process of deportations, slave labor, and the killings and death marches."

Constantine Fotiades, professor of Modern Greek History at the University of Western Macedonia, Greece, author of a monumental work (16 volumes) on the "Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus" chronicles the events of the Genocide from 1916 to 1923. His research is based on documents from primary sources, e.g., international organizations, immigrant unions and newspapers, but most importantly from the government files of the former Soviet Union, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, the United Kingdon, the Vatican, the Society of Nations, and Greece, published both in translation and in their original languages.

Eyewitness accounts and quotes

Reports of German and Austro-Hungarian diplomats that provide evidence of the Genocide (from the German and Austrian Archives).

• “The Turks have decided upon a war of extermination against their Christian subjects.” German Ambassador Wangenheim to German Chancellor von Bulow, quoting Turkish Prime Minister Sefker Pasha, July 24, 1909.
• “The anti-Greek and anti-Armenian persecutions are two phases of one programme - the extermination of the Christian element from Turkey.” Father J. Lepsius, German clergyman, July 31, 1915.
• “...the entire Greek population of Sinope and the coastal region of the county of Kastanome has been exiled. Exile and extermination in Turkish are the same, for whoever is not murdered, will die from hunger or illness.” Herr Kuchhoff, German consul in Amissos in a despatch to Berlin, July 16, 1916.
• “On 26 November, Rafet Bey told me: ‘We must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians’...On 28 November, Rafet Bey told me: ‘Today, I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight.’ I fear for the elimination of the entire Greek population and a repeat of what occurred last year.” (referring to the Armenian Genocide) Herr Kwiatkowski, Austro-Hungarian consul in Amissos to Baron von Burian, Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, November 30, 1916
• “Consuls Bergfeld in Samsun and Schede in Kerasun report of displacement of local population and murders. Prisoners are not kept. Villages reduced to ashes. Greek refugee families consisting mostly of women and children being marched from the coasts to Sebasteia. The need is great.” German Ambassador Kuhlman to German Chancellor Hollweg, December 13, 1916.
• Herr Pallavicini, Ambassador of Austria-Hungary to Turkey, writes to Vienna, listing the villages in the region of Amissos that were being burnt to the ground, their inhabitants raped and either murdered or exiled, December 19, 1916:
• “The situation for the displaced is desperate. Death awaits them all. I spoke to the Grand Vizier and told him that it would be sad if the persecution of the Greek element took the same scope and dimension as the Armenian persecution. The Grand Vizier promised that he would influence Talaat Bey and Enver Pasha.” Austro-Hungarian Ambassador Pallavicini to Vienna, January 20, 1917
• “The time is near for Turkey to be finished with the Greeks as we were with the Armenians in 1915.” Talaat Bey as quoted by an Austro-Hungarian agent, January 31, 1917
• “...the indications are that the Turks plan to eliminate the Greek element as enemies of the state, as they did earlier with the Armenians. The strategy implemented by the Turks is of displacing people to the interior, without taking measures for their survival by exposing them to death, hunger and illness. The abandoned homes are then looted and burnt or destroyed. Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks.” Chancellor Hollweg of Germany, February 9, 1917.

Eyewitness accounts and quotes from The Memorandum by Mr. G.W. Rendel on Turkish Massacres and Persecutions of Minorities since the Armistice, that are providing additional evidence of the Genocide.

• "On the 1st September, Mr. Hopkins of the same organization ( American Near East Relief) met 12,000 (women and children) being driven southwards between Harpoot and Malatia.....Mr. Hopkins saw "many corpses of Greeks lying by the roadside where they had died from exposure. Many of them were corpses of women and girls." About 1st October he and two other relief workers passed about 10,000 Greeks. He says: "I remember one group of about 2,000, being women alone, most of them with no shoes, many carrying babies...A driving cold rain was falling... they had no protection whatsoever and their only place to sleep was the wet ground." Mr. Hopkins continues: ... Greek vilages are deported entirely, the few Turkish and Armenian inhabitants are forced to leave and the villages are burned.. The purpose is unquestionably to destroy all Greeks in that territory and to leave Turkey for the Turks".

• " The persecutions of 1921 were on a larger scale and more atrocious than those of 1920. The area affected is so great, and the atrocities so varied and continuous that it is difficult to select special cases to mention. Moreover the mass of documentary evidence at our disposal is now so enormous that any compression of the information contained in it into suitable limits has become well-nigh impossible."

• "Serious persecutions in the Mardin area, affecting about 30,000 Christians were also reported by Sir P. Cox. But the worst atrocities undoubtetly took place in the Pontine region against the Greek population of the coastal towns."

• "Signor Tuozzi ( an Italian unofficial agent in Angora) stated that the deportations were continuous and that he saw numerous gangs of christians formed into labour battalions going up into the interior. He regarded the outlook for these gangs utterly hopeless. In his opinion the Nationalist hold a perfectly simple view of the minorities question. They regard the minorities as having been the cause of unending trouble in the past, and decided that the best way to prevent the recurrence of this trouble is to put an end to the existence of the minorities. They want Anatolia for the Turks."

See also

• Anti-Hellenism
• Anti-Turkism
• Armenian Genocide
• Assyrian Genocide
• Genocide denial
• Kemalist ideology
• Human rights in Turkey
• Pan-Turkism
• Republic of Pontus

Bibliography

• Barton, James L. (James Levi). The Near East Relief, 1915-1930. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1943.
• Bierstadt, Edward Hale. The great betrayal; a survey of the near East problem. New York: R. M. McBride & company, 1924.
• Dobkin, Marjorie Housepian. Smyrna 1922: the destruction of a city. New York, NY: Newmark Press, 1998, c1988.
• Henry Morgenthau, Sr.. The murder of a nation. New York: Armenian General Benevolent Union of America, 1974, 1918.
• ---. Ambassador's Morgenthau story. Garden City, N.Y.: Page & Company, 1918
• ---. I was sent to Athens. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co, 1929.
• ---. An international drama. London: Jarrolds Ltd., 1930
• 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: Pub. by Oxford University Press, American branch, 1919.
• 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.
• Andreadis, George, Tamama, The Missing Girl of Pontos. Athens: Gordios, 1993.
• Fotiadis, Constantinos Emm. (editor), The Genocide of the Pontus Greeks by the Turks. Volume 13. Herodotus, 2004.
• Halo, Thea, Not Even My Name. New York: Picador USA, 2000.
• Horton, George, The blight of Asia: an account of the systematic extermination of Christian populations by Mohammedans and of the culpability of certain great powers; with a true story of the buring of Smyrna. Indianopolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926.
• Statistics of Democide, Chapter 5, Statistics of Turkey's Democide - Estimates, Calculations and Sources, by R. J. Rummel
• Akcam, Taner. From Empire to Republic : Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide, Zed Books, September 4, 2004, pages 144-149.
• Pavlides, Ioannis. Pages of History of Pontus and Asia Minor. Salonica, Greece, 1980.
• Karayinnides, Ioannis. The Golgotha of Pontos. Salonica, Greece, 1978.
• Mildarsky, Manus I. The Killing Trap. 2005, Cambridge University Press

Further reading

• 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 Pontian Greeks)

External links

• German and Austrian Ambassadors reports of that time starting from 1909
• State of New Jersey proclamation on 19th of May
• State of South Carolina proclamations of recognition
• Information about the genocide on The Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
• The Pontian issue
• Hellenic Genocide
• The Pontian Greek Genocide
• Video: Demonstration for the recognition of the Pontian Genocide, 26 May 2006 in Stuttgart, Germany. One of the speakers is Tessa Hofmann

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