Greek genocide

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 Anatolia during World War I and its aftermath (1914–23).^[1] 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 execution, and the destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period.^[2] Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece (amounting to over a quarter of the prior population of Greece).^[3] Some, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire. Thus by the end of the 1919–22 Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks of Asia Minor had fled or been killed.^[4] Those remaining were transferred to Greece under the terms of the later 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which formalized the exodus and barred the return of the refugees. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, and some scholars and organizations have recognized these events as part of the same genocidal policy.^{[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]}

The Allies of World War I condemned the Ottoman government-sponsored massacres as crimes against humanity. More recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution in 2007 recognising the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire, including the Greeks, as genocide.^[13] Some other organisations have also passed resolutions recognising the campaign as a genocide, as have the parliaments of Greece, Cyprus, Sweden, Armenia, the Netherlands, and Austria.

Background

Areas with the presence of Anatolian Greeks in 1910. Demotic Greek speakers in yellow. Pontic Greek in orange. Cappadocian Greek in green with individual towns indicated.^[14] Shaded regions do not indicate that Greek-speakers were a majority.

The Greek presence in Asia Minor has been dated to at least the time of Homer around 800 BCE.^[15] The geographer Strabo referred to Smyrna as the first Greek city in Asia Minor.^[16] 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.^[16] The most notable Greek cities of the Black Sea were Trebizond, Sampsounta, Sinope and Heraclea Pontica.^[16]

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.^[17][18][19] 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 the largest group of indigenous peoples living in Asia Minor.^[16] Even after the Turkic conquests of the interior, the Black Sea coast and mountains of Asia Minor remained the heart of a Greek state, the Empire of Trebizond, until its eventual conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1461.

At the outbreak of World War I, Asia Minor was ethnically diverse, its population including Turks, Azeris, Pontic Greeks (including Caucasus Greeks), Armenians, Kurds, Zazas, Georgians, 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.^[20][21]

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."^[22]

Events

Post-Balkan Wars

Following similar accords made with Bulgaria and Serbia, the Ottoman Empire signed a small voluntary population exchange agreement with Greece on 14 November 1913.^[25] Another such agreement was signed 1 July 1914 for the exchange of some Turks of Greece for some Greeks of Aydin and Western Thrace, after the Ottomans had forced these Greeks from their homes in response to the Greek annexation of several islands.^[3] The swap was never completed due to the eruption of World War One.^[26] This Ottoman pattern, using a population swap to permanently formalize a population removal that had already been conducted, would be repeated with the Population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which formalized and made permanent the preceding exodus of Asia Minor Greeks occasioned by the Greek genocide.^[4][27]

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.^[28] While discussions for population exchanges were still conducted, Special Organization units attacked Greek villages forcing their inhabitants to abandon their homes for Greece, being replaced with Muslim refugees.^[29] The Ottoman government adopted a "dual-track mechanism" allowing it to deny responsibility for and prior knowledge of this campaign of intimidation, emptying Christian villages.^[30] Such an incident took place in Phocaea (Greek: Φώκαια), on 12 June 1914, a town in western Anatolia twenty-five miles (40 km) northwest of Smyrna, where Turkish irregular troops massacred the population, while the ones that survived escaped to Greece.^[31]

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.^[32] 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.^[32]

Phocaea in flames, during the massacre perpetrated by Turkish irregulars in June 1914.

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".^[33]

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 Labour Battalions in which hundreds of thousands died.^[34] 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.^[35] The policy of persecution and ethnic cleansing was expanded to other regions of the Empire including Pontus, Cappadocia and Cilicia.^[36]

The forceful expulsion of Christians of western Anatolia, especially Ottoman Greeks, has many similarities with policy towards the Armenians, as observed by US ambassador Henry Morgenthau and historian Arnold Toynbee. Certain Ottoman officials, such as Şükrü Kaya, Nazım Bey and Mehmed Reshid, played a role in both, Special Organization units and labour battalions were involved in both campaigns and a dual plan combining unofficial violence and the cover of state population policy was in implementation in both cases.^[37]

World War I

Hellenism in Near East during and after the World War I, showing some of the areas (Western Anatolia and Eastern Thrace) where the Greek population was concentrated. The Pontic region is not shown.

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.^[38] 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.^[39] 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.^[40] Arbitrary violence and extortion of money intensified later, providing ammunition for the Venizelists arguing that Greece should join the Entente.^[41]

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."^[42] According to George W. Rendel of the British Foreign Office, by 1918 "...over 500,000 Greeks were deported of whom comparatively few survived."^[43] 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."^[44]

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.^[45]

"Turks Slaughter Christian Greeks", The Lincoln Daily Star (article), 19 October 1917 .

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.^[46] Of particular concern for the Ottoman government were the Pontic Greeks and Caucasus Greeks of northeast Anatolia and the region of Kars Oblast in the South Caucasus, who were accused of fighting in or collaborating with the Russian Caucasus Army that had defeated an Ottoman division at the Battle of Sarikamish.

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".^[47] 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.^[48] 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.^[49] 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.^[50]

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.^[51] 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".^[52]

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.^[53]

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".^[43] Ottoman official Rafet Bey was active in the Genocide of the Greeks and in 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…”.^[54]

Greco-Turkish War

According to the official Ottoman documents, in January 1919, the Ottoman government allowed the return of some Greeks who were deported, gave them financial aid and gave back their properties.^[55]

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.^[56]

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.^[43]

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 Greco-Turkish War, a conflict which followed the Greek landing at Smyrna^[57][58] in May 1919 and continued until the retaking of Smyrna by the Turks and the Great Fire of Smyrna in September 1922.^[59] An estimated 50,000^[60]-100,000^[61] Greeks and Armenians perished in the fire and accompanying massacres. According to Norman M. Naimark "more realistic estimates range between 10,000 to 15,000" for the casualties of the Great Fire of Smyrna. Some 150,000 to 200,000 Greeks were expelled after the fire, while about 30,000 able-bodied Greek and Armenian men were deported to the interior of Asia Minor, most of whom were executed on the way or died under brutal conditions.^[62] George W. Rendel of the British Foreign Office, among other diplomats, noted the massacres and deportations of Greeks during the Greco-Turkish War.^[63] They killed an estimated 348,000 Anatolian Greeks.^[64] There were also massacres of Turks carried out by the Hellenic troops during the occupation of western Anatolia from May 1919 to September 1922.^[59]

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:^[65] "...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

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

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 the Ottoman Empire. 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.^[66]

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 and ethnic cleansing of the Greeks in Asia Minor.^[63][67][68] 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.

Smyrna, 1922

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.^[63][67][68]

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.^[69][70] Australian press also had some coverage of the events.^[71]

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."^[72] However, months prior to the First World War, 100,000 Greeks were deported to Greek islands or the interior which Morgenthau stated, "for the larger part these were bona-fide deportations; that is, the Greek inhabitants were actually removed to new places and were not subjected to wholesale massacre. It was probably the reason that the civilized world did not protest against these deportations..."^[73]

US Consul-General George Horton reported, "One 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 comments: "Had 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."^[74][75]

Casualties

Smyrna burning during the Fire of Smyrna. According to different estimates some 10.000,^[76] to 50,000^[60] or 100,000^[61] Greeks and Armenians were killed in the fire and accompanying massacres.

Newspaper published by The Scotsman on July 20th 1915 entitled, "Greek Population of Turkey, A Crisis At Aivali"

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

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.^[77] Political scientist Adam Jones also suggests the figure of 750,000 casualties.^[78]

Scholar Rudolph Rummel compiled various figures from several studies to estimate lower and higher bounds for the death toll between 1914 and 1923. His estimates ranged from 289,000 to 459,000 deaths in the Greek genocide throughout this period.^[79]

According to the figures by the Greek government together with the Patriarchate, a total of one million people were estimated to be massacred.^[80]

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.^[81] Merrill D. Peterson cites the death toll of 360,000 for the Greeks of Pontus.^[82] 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."^[83]

Constantine G Hatzidimitriou writes that "loss of life among Anatolian Greeks during the WWI period and its aftermath was approximately 735,370."^[84] 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.".^[85] 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."^[86]

In 1916, Emanuel Efendi, a Ottoman deputy, said that "550,000 Greeks... were killed."^[87]

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."^[88] 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.^[89]

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.^[90] 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.^[91] 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.^[92]

Genocide recognition

Terminology

Among the victims of the atrocities committed by the Turkish nationalist Army (1922–23) were hundreds of Christian clergy in Anatolia, such as metropolitan bishops (from left): Chrysostomos of Smyrna (lynched) Gregory of Kydonies (executed), Ambrosios of Moschonisia (buried alive).

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.^[93] 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...^[94]

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. 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).^[95] Contemporary accounts employed such terms as "annihilation", "systematic extermination", "persistent campaign of massacre", and "wholesale massacre".^[74][96]

Academic discussion

Matthaios Kofidis, former member of the Ottoman Parliament, was among the several notables of Pontus, hanged by an "Ad hoc Court of Turkish Independence" in Amasya, in 1921.^[97]

In December 2007 the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution affirming that the 1914–23 campaign against Ottoman Greeks constituted genocide.^[98] 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.^[99] The IAGS resolution was passed with an "overwhelming" majority.^[100][101] 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."^[102]

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".^[103] 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."^[104] 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".^[105] Niall Ferguson has drawn a comparison between sporadic massacres of Pontic Greek communities after 1922 and the fate of the Armenians.^[106] 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".^[107] Historian Angelos Elefantis "has expressed his shock at the use of the word "genocide" in relation only to the Smyrna massacres",^[108] 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,^[109] the University of Michigan Dearborn^[110] and the University of New South Wales^[111] which has a dedicated research unit.

Political

Following an initiative of MPs of the so-called "patriotic" wing of the ruling PASOK party's parliamentary group and like-minded MPs of conservative New Democracy,^[112] the Greek Parliament 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 (the day Mustafa Kemal landed in Samsun in 1919) 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.^[113] These laws were signed by the President of Greece but were not immediately ratified after political interventions. The leftist newspaper "Avgi" (Αυγή, Dawn) had the initiative for freezing the application of this law. The subject became the center of a political debate between various Greek politicians, with the left being against it. The president of the left-ecologists coalition Synaspismos party Nikos Konstantopoulos and A. Elefantis, known for his books on the history of Greek communism, were some of the politicians who expressed their opposition to the decree. However, not all the left was unanimous on this. The non-parliamentary left-wing nationalist^[114] intellectual and author George Karabelias bitterly criticized Elefantis and others (mainly from the left) who opposed the recognition of genocide and called them "revisionist historians", accusing the Greek main-stream left of a "distorted ideological evolution". He said that for the Greek left 19 May is a "day of amnesia".^[115]

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.^{[116][117][118]}

The Republic of Cyprus also officially recognizes the events as genocide.^[119]

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.^[120]

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".^[121]

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.^[122]

In March 2015, the National Assembly of Armenia unanimously adopted a resolution recognizing both the Greek and Assyrian genocides.^[123]

In April 2015, the States General of the Netherlands and the Austrian Parliament passed resolutions recognizing the Greek and Assyrian genocides.^[124][125]

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 acknowledgement of these events are as follows:^[126]

• 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.
• The political environment of the Cold War, in which Turkey and Greece were supposed to be allies – facing one common Communist enemy – not adversaries or competitors.

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".^[127]

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, writing:^[128]

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.

and propose the following reasons for the denial of the genocides by Turkey, quote:^[128]

• 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

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.^[129]

See also

• Academic quotes on the Greek genocide
• Armenian Genocide
• Assyrian Genocide
• Genocide denial
• Greek refugees
• Istanbul Pogrom
• Human rights in Turkey
• The Twenty Classes
• Megali Idea
• Republic of Pontus
• Cappadocian Greeks
• Imbros

Notes

Bibliography

Contemporary accounts

• Halo, Thea (2001). Not Even My Name, New York: Picador.
• Horton, George (1926), The Blight of Asia, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 
• King, William C (1922), Complete History of the World War: Visualizing the Great Conflict in all Theaters of Action 1914–1918, MA, US: The History Associates .
• Morgenthau, Henry sr (1918), Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (PDF), = Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co .
• ——— (1919) [1918], Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co .
• Rendel, GW (20 March 1922), Memorandum by Mr. Rendel on Turkish Massacres and Persecutions of Minorities since the Armistice (memorandum), British Foreign Office .
• 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), Σύγχρονος Γενική Ιστορία του Πόντου [Contemporary General History of Pontus] (in Greek), Athens .

Secondary sources

• Akçam, Taner (2006). A Shameful Act. 
• Akçam, Taner (2012). The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. 
• Alexandris, Alexis (1999). "The Greek census of Anatolia and Thrace (1910-1912): a contribution to Ottoman Historical Demography". In Gondicas, Dimitri; Issawi, Charles. Ottoman Greeks in the age of nationalism: Politics, Economy and Society in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Darwin. pp. 45–76. 
• Ascherson, Neal (1995). Black Sea, New York: Hill and Wang, ISBN 0-8090-3043-8.
• Avedian, Vahagn (2009), The Armenian Genocide 1915: From a Neutral Small State's Perspective: Sweden (PDF) (unpublished master thesis paper), Uppsala University .
• Bassiouni, M. Cherif (1999). Crimes Against Humanity in International Criminal Law, The Hague: Kluwer, ISBN *Hulse, Carl (2007). U.S. and Turkey Thwart Armenian Genocide Bill, The New York Times, 26 October 2007
• Bierstadt, Edward Hale (1924), The Great Betrayal; A Survey of the Near East Problem, New York: RM 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, ISBN 1-59420-100-5 .
• Fotiadis, Constantinos Emm (2004), The Genocide of the Pontus Greeks by the Turks 13, Thessaloniki: Herodotus .
• Hull, Isabel V (2005), Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany, Ithaca: Cornell University Press .
• Jones, Adam (2006), Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, Routledge .
• ——— (2010) [2006], Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, Taylor & Francis, ISBN 978-0-415-48618-7 .
• Κωστόπουλος, Τάσος (2007). Πόλεμος και Εθνοκάθαρση: Η ξεχασμένη πλευρά μιας δεκαετούς εθνικής εξόρμησης (1912-1922). Athens: Βιβλιόραμα. 
• Levene, Mark (Winter 1998), "Creating a Modern "Zone of Genocide": The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923", Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12 (3): 393–433, doi:10.1093/hgs/12.3.393 .
• Midlarsky, Manus I. (2005). The Killing Trap, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• 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 .
• Rummel, RJ. "Statistics of Democide". Chapter 5, Statistics of Turkey's Democide Estimates, Calculations, and Sources. Retrieved 4 October 2006. 
• Tatz, Colin (2003), With Intent to Destroy: Reflections on Genocide, Essex: Verso, ISBN 1-85984-550-9 
• Travis, Hannibal (2009), "The Cultural and Intellectual Property Interests of the Indigenous Peoples of Turkey and Iraq", Texas Weleyan Law Review (Texas Wesleyan University School of Law) 15: 601–80, 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. 

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 (1943), The Near East Relief, 1915–1930, New York: Russell Sage Foundation .
• ———; Sarafian, Ara (December 1998), "Turkish Atrocities": Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915–1917 .
• Compton, Carl C. The Morning Cometh, New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1986.
• The Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry into the Greek Occupation of Smyrna and Adjoining Territories, Documents of the Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry into the Greek Occupation of Smyrna and Adjoining Territories (PDF) .
• Fotiadis, Konstantinos (2002–2004), Η γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων του Πόντου [The Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus] (in Greek), Thessaloniki: Herodotos . In fourteen volumes, including eleven volumes of materials (vols. 4-14).
• Karayinnides, Ioannis (1978), Ο γολγοθάς του Πόντου [The Golgotha of Pontus] (in Greek), Salonica .
• King, Charles (2005). The Black Sea: A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Koromila, Marianna (2002). The Greeks and the Black Sea, Panorama Cultural Society.
• Morgenthau, Henry sr (1974) [1918], The Murder of a Nation, New York: Armenian General Benevolent Union of America .
• ——— (1929), I Was Sent to Athens, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co .
• ——— (1930), An International Drama, London: Jarrolds .
• Hofmann, Tessa, ed. (2004), Verfolgung, Vertreibung und Vernichtung der Christen im Osmanischen Reich 1912–1922 (in German), Münster: LIT, pp. 177–221, ISBN 3-8258-7823-6 .
• Housepian Dobkin, Marjorie. Smyrna 1922: the Destruction of a City, New York, NY: Newmark Press, 1998.
• Lieberman, Benjamin (2006). Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe, Ivan R. Dee.
• de Murat, Jean. 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, FL (Athens, GR: A. Triantafillis) 1999.
• 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, GR, 1980.
• Shaw, Stanford J; Shaw, Ezel Kural, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Cambridge University .
• Shenk, Robert. "America's Black Sea Fleet - The U.S. Navy Amid War and Revolution,1919-1923",Naval Institute Press, Annapolis Maryland, 2012
• Totten, Samuel; Jacobs, Steven L (2002). Pioneers of Genocide Studies (Clt). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-7658-0151-5. 
• 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. 375–83.
• Vryonis, Speros, "Greek Labor Battalions in Asia Minor", The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies (ed. Hovannisian, Richard), New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007, pp. 275–90.
• Taner, Akcam (2009), "The Greek ‘Deportations’ and Massacres of 1913–1914, A Trial Run for the Armenian Genocide", The Academic Conference on the Asia Minor Catastrophe (paper), IL, USA .
• Sait, Çetinoğlu (17–19 September 2010), "The Pontus Independence Movement and the Greek Genocide", Three Genocides, One Strategy (international conference), Athens .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Greek Genocide.

• Bibliography at Greek Genocide Resource Center
• "Massacre of Greeks Charged to the Turks",The Atlanta Constitution. 17 June 1914.
• "REPORTS MASSACRES OF GREEKS IN PONTUS; Central Council Says They Attend Execution of Prominent Natives for Alleged Rebellion." The NY Times. Sunday 6 November 1921.