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RECOGNISING GENOCIDE: PART THREE
Neos Kosmos, Hellenic Perspective, Australia
June 13 2014
13 Jun 2014
"It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the
successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk),
more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were
massacred in a state-organised and state-sponsored campaign of
destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging
Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian
Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII.
To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed
this genocide."
Dr Israel Charney
At the close of the First World War, Greece was a nation being torn
apart at the seams. Sundered politically and socially through the
'National Schism' between the Royalists, who wanted to stay out
of the war and were only forced to enter the war after the Allies
blockaded Piraeus, and the Venizelists, who, with a view to territorial
expansion, set up their own rival government in Thessaloniki, from
there to prosecute the war, across the Aegean, terrible stories were
being told of a mass genocide of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. Unlike
the West, which was largely innocent of the holocaust while it was
being carried out, Greece was well aware of the crime being perpetrated
against her own people. King Constantine himself accused the German
Kaiser, his brother-in-law, of Germany's complicity in the genocide,
a claim the Kaiser denied, though enough evidence now exists to
suggest that the organised removal of Greeks from coastal regions
such as Gallipoli and the forced death marches of the population were
suggested to the Ottomans by German military advisers. Nonetheless,
as Manus Midlarsky states in his book: The Killing Trap: Genocide in
the Twentieth Century, the Greek genocide was nuanced and calculated
to take place without attracting too much western opprobrium: "Given
these political and cultural ties, wholesale attacks on the Ottoman
Greeks would have profoundly angered not only the Entente Powers, but
Germany and Austria-Hungary as well, the allies upon whom the Ottomans
were deeply dependent. Under these conditions, genocide of the Ottoman
Greeks simply was not a viable option. (...) Massacres most likely did
take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the
large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small
number of Armenian survivors, the massacres were apparently restricted
to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other 'sensitive' regions."
Thus, in 1919, a politically fragmented Greece that was fraught with
domestic strife, exhausted by continuous war since 1912 and almost
bankrupt, had lost an extremely large portion of its eastern population
to genocide, was granted occupation of most of Eastern Thrace, to a
point forty kilometres from Constantinople. Prime Minister Venizelos,
in the face of serious Allied (and Greek military) misgivings,
asserted Greece's capacity to occupy and police a zone around the
city of Smyrna. Owing to the support of British Prime Minister David
Lloyd George, Greek troops finally landed in Smyrna in 1919, to the
consternation of the Turks.
The occupation and administration of Smyrna, which was supposed to be
of five years' duration, after which time, its inhabitants would hold
a plebiscite to determine which country they would like to belong to,
marks the departure point between the constituents of the Christian
genocides. Unlike the Armenians and the Assyrians, who did not have
a state at the time the Christian genocide was committed, the Greeks
not only had such a state but also found themselves embroiled in a
war against forces the like of which they had never before encountered.
While the vanquished Sultan in Entente-occupied Constantinople was
cajoled into accepting the Greek occupation and the cession of Eastern
Thrace, culminating in the Treaty of Sevres that formalised Greece's
gains at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, the occupation of parts
of Turkey by erstwhile Ottoman subjects was something that could
not be countenanced by nationalist Turkish forces. Coalescing around
Kemal Ataturk, the hero of the defence of Gallipoli, they landed in
Samsounta on 19 May 1919 and commenced a campaign to remove the last
vestiges of the Greek presence in Anatolia.
According to Igor Diakonov in The Paths of History, in the context
of the nationalist campaign, which was considered a battle for the
survival of Turkey, "Kemal attempted to continue the genocide of
Armenians in Transcaucasia, and of Greeks on the coast of the Aegean.
Especially heartrending and horribly bloody was the genocide of the
Greeks in Smyrna (Turkish Izmir) where they had lived since the tenth
century BC".
As a result of the Kemalist campaign, the Treaty of Sevres was never
ratified. As Kay Holloway wrote, the failure of the signatories to
bring the treaty into force "resulted in the abandonment of thousands
of defenceless peoples - Armenians and Greeks - to the fury of their
persecutors by engendering subsequent holocausts in which the few
survivors of the 1915 Armenian massacres perished".
Given the refusal of Turkish Nationalists to abide by the Treaty,
and the constant harassing of the Greek forces by Turkish guerrillas,
irregulars and nationalist forces, the already beleaguered Greek
army had no choice but to cross over from the Smyrna zone into Turkey
proper, in order to neutralise the aggression. While this is widely
considered, especially by Turkish forces, to have been tantamount
to an invasion, the strategic objective of these operations was to
defeat the Turkish Nationalists and force Kemal Ataturk into peace
negotiations. The advancing Greeks, still holding superiority in
numbers and modern equipment at this point, had hoped for an early
battle in which they were confident of breaking up ill-equipped Turkish
forces. Yet they met with little resistance, as the Turks managed to
retreat in an orderly fashion and avoid encirclement.
Winston Churchill, who was sympathetic to Greek aspirations but
was sceptical about their ability to fulfil these, said: "The Greek
columns trailed along the country roads passing safely through many
ugly defiles, and at their approach the Turks, under strong and
sagacious leadership, vanished into the recesses of Anatolia".
As the war continued, Turkish forces lured the Greek army further and
further way from its supply lines, the Greek army advanced as far
as the Sangarios River, near Ankara. Along the way, and during its
retreat, the Greek army committed several instances of brutalities
against the civilian Muslim population. These incidents are often
referred to by Turks when the issue of recognising the genocide of
the Assyrians, Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia is broached with
them, and in fact there exist in Turkey various museums dedicated
to exposing Greek army atrocities. As these atrocities are raised
as a counterpoint to the genocide, or by way of excusing Turkey's
liability for it, they are certainly worth examining, no less because
they feature hardly in the Greek discourse about the period. Not only
do they provide a context for Turkey's continued genocide denial,
but also suggest that frameworks other than the political and the
historical could be employed, in order to render the process by which
Turkey and Turkish society can accept the historicity of the genocide,
with the minimum of trauma and difficulty. Next week those facts will
be examined in detail.
* Dean Kalimniou is a Melbourne solicitor and freelance journalist.
Part 1: http://neoskosmos.com/news/en/recognising-genocide-part-one
Part 2: http://neoskosmos.com/news/en/recognising-genocide-part-two
Part 3: http://neoskosmos.com/news/en/recognising-genocide-part-three
Neos Kosmos, Hellenic Perspective, Australia
June 13 2014
13 Jun 2014
"It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the
successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk),
more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were
massacred in a state-organised and state-sponsored campaign of
destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging
Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian
Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII.
To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed
this genocide."
Dr Israel Charney
At the close of the First World War, Greece was a nation being torn
apart at the seams. Sundered politically and socially through the
'National Schism' between the Royalists, who wanted to stay out
of the war and were only forced to enter the war after the Allies
blockaded Piraeus, and the Venizelists, who, with a view to territorial
expansion, set up their own rival government in Thessaloniki, from
there to prosecute the war, across the Aegean, terrible stories were
being told of a mass genocide of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire. Unlike
the West, which was largely innocent of the holocaust while it was
being carried out, Greece was well aware of the crime being perpetrated
against her own people. King Constantine himself accused the German
Kaiser, his brother-in-law, of Germany's complicity in the genocide,
a claim the Kaiser denied, though enough evidence now exists to
suggest that the organised removal of Greeks from coastal regions
such as Gallipoli and the forced death marches of the population were
suggested to the Ottomans by German military advisers. Nonetheless,
as Manus Midlarsky states in his book: The Killing Trap: Genocide in
the Twentieth Century, the Greek genocide was nuanced and calculated
to take place without attracting too much western opprobrium: "Given
these political and cultural ties, wholesale attacks on the Ottoman
Greeks would have profoundly angered not only the Entente Powers, but
Germany and Austria-Hungary as well, the allies upon whom the Ottomans
were deeply dependent. Under these conditions, genocide of the Ottoman
Greeks simply was not a viable option. (...) Massacres most likely did
take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the
large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small
number of Armenian survivors, the massacres were apparently restricted
to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other 'sensitive' regions."
Thus, in 1919, a politically fragmented Greece that was fraught with
domestic strife, exhausted by continuous war since 1912 and almost
bankrupt, had lost an extremely large portion of its eastern population
to genocide, was granted occupation of most of Eastern Thrace, to a
point forty kilometres from Constantinople. Prime Minister Venizelos,
in the face of serious Allied (and Greek military) misgivings,
asserted Greece's capacity to occupy and police a zone around the
city of Smyrna. Owing to the support of British Prime Minister David
Lloyd George, Greek troops finally landed in Smyrna in 1919, to the
consternation of the Turks.
The occupation and administration of Smyrna, which was supposed to be
of five years' duration, after which time, its inhabitants would hold
a plebiscite to determine which country they would like to belong to,
marks the departure point between the constituents of the Christian
genocides. Unlike the Armenians and the Assyrians, who did not have
a state at the time the Christian genocide was committed, the Greeks
not only had such a state but also found themselves embroiled in a
war against forces the like of which they had never before encountered.
While the vanquished Sultan in Entente-occupied Constantinople was
cajoled into accepting the Greek occupation and the cession of Eastern
Thrace, culminating in the Treaty of Sevres that formalised Greece's
gains at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, the occupation of parts
of Turkey by erstwhile Ottoman subjects was something that could
not be countenanced by nationalist Turkish forces. Coalescing around
Kemal Ataturk, the hero of the defence of Gallipoli, they landed in
Samsounta on 19 May 1919 and commenced a campaign to remove the last
vestiges of the Greek presence in Anatolia.
According to Igor Diakonov in The Paths of History, in the context
of the nationalist campaign, which was considered a battle for the
survival of Turkey, "Kemal attempted to continue the genocide of
Armenians in Transcaucasia, and of Greeks on the coast of the Aegean.
Especially heartrending and horribly bloody was the genocide of the
Greeks in Smyrna (Turkish Izmir) where they had lived since the tenth
century BC".
As a result of the Kemalist campaign, the Treaty of Sevres was never
ratified. As Kay Holloway wrote, the failure of the signatories to
bring the treaty into force "resulted in the abandonment of thousands
of defenceless peoples - Armenians and Greeks - to the fury of their
persecutors by engendering subsequent holocausts in which the few
survivors of the 1915 Armenian massacres perished".
Given the refusal of Turkish Nationalists to abide by the Treaty,
and the constant harassing of the Greek forces by Turkish guerrillas,
irregulars and nationalist forces, the already beleaguered Greek
army had no choice but to cross over from the Smyrna zone into Turkey
proper, in order to neutralise the aggression. While this is widely
considered, especially by Turkish forces, to have been tantamount
to an invasion, the strategic objective of these operations was to
defeat the Turkish Nationalists and force Kemal Ataturk into peace
negotiations. The advancing Greeks, still holding superiority in
numbers and modern equipment at this point, had hoped for an early
battle in which they were confident of breaking up ill-equipped Turkish
forces. Yet they met with little resistance, as the Turks managed to
retreat in an orderly fashion and avoid encirclement.
Winston Churchill, who was sympathetic to Greek aspirations but
was sceptical about their ability to fulfil these, said: "The Greek
columns trailed along the country roads passing safely through many
ugly defiles, and at their approach the Turks, under strong and
sagacious leadership, vanished into the recesses of Anatolia".
As the war continued, Turkish forces lured the Greek army further and
further way from its supply lines, the Greek army advanced as far
as the Sangarios River, near Ankara. Along the way, and during its
retreat, the Greek army committed several instances of brutalities
against the civilian Muslim population. These incidents are often
referred to by Turks when the issue of recognising the genocide of
the Assyrians, Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia is broached with
them, and in fact there exist in Turkey various museums dedicated
to exposing Greek army atrocities. As these atrocities are raised
as a counterpoint to the genocide, or by way of excusing Turkey's
liability for it, they are certainly worth examining, no less because
they feature hardly in the Greek discourse about the period. Not only
do they provide a context for Turkey's continued genocide denial,
but also suggest that frameworks other than the political and the
historical could be employed, in order to render the process by which
Turkey and Turkish society can accept the historicity of the genocide,
with the minimum of trauma and difficulty. Next week those facts will
be examined in detail.
* Dean Kalimniou is a Melbourne solicitor and freelance journalist.
Part 1: http://neoskosmos.com/news/en/recognising-genocide-part-one
Part 2: http://neoskosmos.com/news/en/recognising-genocide-part-two
Part 3: http://neoskosmos.com/news/en/recognising-genocide-part-three