Filed with 60.23 History · Related: 60.13 Wars · 60.14 Colonialism
TIMELINE
Perpetuator
- Ottoman Empire, Turkish National Movement
Target
- Greek Population
- Christians
Casualties and losses
- Deaths: 300,000 - 900-000
Location
Causes
- Among the causes of the Turkish campaign against the Greek-speaking Christian population was a fear that they would welcome liberation by the Ottoman Empire’s enemies, and a belief among some Turks that to form a modern country in the era of nationalism it was necessary to purge from their territories all minorities who could threaten the integrity of an ethnically based Turkish nation.
Events
- Massacres
- Forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert
- Expulsions
- Summary executions
- Destructions of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical and religious monuments
- 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”.
- Population exchange between Greece and Turkey - Wikipedia
- January 1923
- Some scholars have criticized the exchange, describing it as a legalized form of mutual ethnic cleansing, while others have defended it, stating that despite its negative aspects, the exchange had an overall positive outcome since it successfully prevented another potential genocide of Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey.
Outcome
- By late 1922, most of the Greeks of Asia Minor had either fled or had been killed. 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.
Important Notes
- 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. 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…
- Dror Ze’evi and Benny Morris, authors of The Thirty-Year Genocide, write that:
… the story of what happened in Turkey is much broader and deeper [than just the Armenian genocide]. It goes deeper, because it covers not just what occurred during World War I, but a series of giant ethno-religious massacres that lasted from the 1890s through the 1920s and beyond. It is broader, because it was not only Armenians who were persecuted and killed. Along with hundreds of thousands of Armenians … a similar number of Greeks and Assyrians (or adherents of the Assyrian or Syriac churches) were slaughtered … By our estimate, over the course of the 30-year period, between 1.5 and 2.5 million Christians from the three religious groups were either murdered or intentionally starved to death, or allowed to die of disease, and millions more were expelled from Turkey and lost everything. In addition, tens of thousands of Christians were forced to convert to Islam, and many thousands of Christian women and girls were raped, either by their Muslim neighbors or by members of the security forces. The Turks even opened markets where Christian girls were sold as sex slaves. These atrocities were committed by three very different, successive regimes: Sultan Abdülhamid II’s authoritarian-Islamist regime; the government of the Committee of Union and Progress (the Young Turks) during World War I, under the leadership of Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha; and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s post-war secular nationalist regime.