Menemen massacre

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Menemen massacre occurred on June 16-17, 1919, during the Greek occupation of the town of Menemen, in western Turkey near İzmir. In one of the darkest episodes of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), the Ottoman prefect of Menemen, Kemal Bey, and the six gendarmes accompanying him were assassinated by Greek soldiers in the evening of the first day. These assassinations became the opening act of an obviously planified butchery carried out on the civilian population of Menemen the next day by a Cretan Brigade aided by a number of accomplices from among the local Greek minority. The event was termed as a "massacre" by an inter-allied commission composed of four generals representing the Allied powers.

The number of casualties among the civilian Turkish population of the town during the single day of June 17 vary between two hundred, according to the October 1919 report drawn up by the Inter-Allied Commission; to one thousand, according to the delegation that arrived the next day (June 18, 1919) following the atrocity reports and that was composed of British officers and the medical delegates from British and Italian consulates in İzmir. The exact figure was re-confirmed as being closer to the latter. Captain Charns, the head of the delegation, noted, as against a thousand Turkish victims, the non-existence of Greeks wounded, either civilian or military. ^[1]

[edit] See also

• Turkish War of Independence
• Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922)
• Chronology of the Turkish War of Independence
• Occupation of İzmir
• Battle of Aydın

[edit] Footnotes