Pontic Greek genocide
The Pontic Greek genocide, or the Pontic genocide, was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the indigenous Greek community in the Pontus region in the Ottoman Empire during World War I and its aftermath.
The Pontic Greeks had a continuous presence in the Pontus region from at least 700 BC, over 2,500 years ago. Following the Ottoman conquest of the Empire of Trebizond in 1461, the area came under the control of the Ottoman Empire. The rise of Turkish nationalism at the beginning of 20th century dramatically increased anti-Greek sentiment within the Ottoman Empire. The genocide began in 1914 by the Young Turk regime, which was led by the Three Pashas, and, after a short interwar pause in 1918–1919, continued into 1923 by the Kemalist regime which was led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha. Both nationalist movements massacred the Pontians and deported them to the interior regions of Anatolia. This resulted in approximately 350,000 deathsabout half of the pre-genocide Pontic population.
The genocide ended with the deportation of the survivors to Greece during the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The Pontic genocide is part of the wider Greek genocide, but it is often covered separately because of the geographic isolation of Pontus and several political and historical features.
Background
From 700 BC, Pontic Greeks lived close to the southern coast of the Black Sea in the Pontus region. They had a strong culture with many important Greek philosophers and authors. In the 11th century, the Turks started moving to central Anatolia, which is now Turkey, and to the Pontus region. Under the Byzantine Empire, the two groups coexisted peacefully with each other.However, after the creation of the Ottoman Empire, the Pontic Greeks were treated unequally relative to other ethnic groups because they were a Christian minority. Many Christian Greeks had better education and higher economic positions in the empire, much to the dismay of Ottoman officials. Religion was viewed a sign of loyalty in the Ottoman Empire, but most Pontics refused to convert to Islam in spite of Ottoman pressure. Subsequently, they were consistently viewed as a threat to the nation.
The Young Turk Revolution greatly affected the Pontic Greeks living in Anatolia. One of the political goals of the Young Turk movement was to "Turkify" the Ottoman Empire. Their goal was to unite the Turkish people through religion, history and culture; this came to the expense of the non-Turkish, non-Muslim, non-Sunni minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman officials feared that Christian minorities, like the Pontic Greeks, would cause instability in the empire. As a result, a violent campaign of genocide began in an attempt to remove non-Muslim minorities from the future country, including Pontic Greeks.
In the time between 1914 and 1923, about 353,000 Pontic Greeks were killed and 1.5 million were expelled. Various methods of genocide were used and there were two main phases: Young Turk and Kemalist.
In their book, The Thirty-Year Genocide, Israeli historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi argue that the massacres were primarily religiously motivated, and allege that Mustafa Kemal himself incited these religious mobs against Christians, including the Pontic Greeks.
First phase (1914–1918)
The first repressions of Greeks in 1913–1914 barely reached the Pontus region, as they were mostly directed towards Western Anatolia. Mass deportations in the region began in 1915 in Western Pontus and part of Eastern, which Russian army had not captured yet.The Ottoman government brutally persecuted the Pontic Greek community, but did not plan a full-scale extermination similar to the Armenian genocide due to multiple factors. The Greeks had a nation-state, unlike the Armenians, so the Committee of Union and Progress did not want to provoke Athens into siding with the Entente. Greece also had a Muslim minority and could start a similar campaign toward it. Additionally, if it was possible to portray Armenians as "rebels", Greeks clearly did not rise up.
With this in mind, Young Turks followed the tactic of "white massacres": deportations and forced labor.
Pontic Greek men were forcibly conscripted into labor battalions and died in large numbers, sometimes over 90 percent. "The life of a Greek in a labor gang is generally about two months", a British intelligence officer held hostage by the Turks in the eastern vilayets estimated. In this way, the Young Turk regime solved two problems at once; they could move military material and do so by killing Pontic men by indirect means. The extermination of fighting-age males was central to the genocidal plans, as it eliminated a significant portion of the population capable of resistance.
Beginning in the countryside and later in urban areas, the Turks raided Pontic Greek homesteads and initiated the deportation process. Victims were marched in caravans, where they usually experienced death rates of 80–90 percent. These caravans were subjected to brutal treatment, well documented by a number of penetrating studies of the genocide. When the escorts desired, they abused victims, sometimes committing massacres through direct killings.
Deportations involved chiefly women and children as, by early 1915, most adult men had been mobilized in labor battalions.
In January 1916, the Russians launched a major offensive. As the result, they broke through the Ottoman defences and by April captured a huge area of Eastern Pontus, including Rize and Trabzon. During the retreat, Kamil Pasha ordered the deportation of Greek villagers. It was conducted in winter, when temperature was close to zero, so many froze on the road. During spring and summer, the authorities continued deportations, which affected dozens of villages in Trabzon vilayet. Some Greeks fled to surrounding forests and mountains. Many women were rounded up and taken to Vazelon Monastery, where Turks "first violated them, and then put them to death".
The government countered Western protests by claiming that the deportations were undertaken for "military reasons" and complaining about interference in its "internal affairs". However, in many regions that were very far from the frontline, Greeks were persecuted as well. For example, residents of the Ünye area were expelled in December 1915. The Greek population of Inebolu and its surrounding villagesCide, Patheri, Atsidono, Karaca, Askordassiwas deported in June 1916.
German Consul M. Kuckhoff telegraphed on July 16, 1916 from Samsun: "The entire Greek population of Sinope and the coastal region of the district of Kastanomu has been exiled In Turkish the terms deportation and extermination have the same meaning, because in most cases those who are not killed fall victim to disease or starvation."
In a special cable the New York Times of August 21, 1916 reported that Turkish authorities in the Black Sea regions "are rounding up civilians in a considerable number of villages and sending them off in batches to concentration camps in the interior. This means practically a sentence to death, for in large numbers they are forced to go afoot, absolutely without food. En route these pitiful caravans are attacked by Turks, who rob them of whatever they have in their possession, unhappy mothers being deprived of their children. The deportations are on a considerable scale".
During December 1916, the Turks deported notables from Samsun, Bafra, Ordu, Tirebolu, Amasya and Çarşamba, and reportedly hanged 200 Greeks for "desertion". The villagers of the Bafra hinterland were sent "to wander from one village to another". An American naval officer noted that these deportees had been placed in hot baths for "cleaning" and then were marched with very little clothing and food, so they were dying from frost, hunger and exhaustion. In Samsun, after the deportation of notables, mass expulsions were conducted on January 10–13, 1917. Houses of deportees were subsequently plundered and torched or occupied by muhacirs. Survivors of the march were dispersed in Turkish villages. A post-war investigation by an American consul estimates that about 5,000 Greeks were eliminated from the city by massacre, expulsion, and flight to the hills. There were also deportations from the Fatsa, Nikassar, and Çarşamba areas.
The interwar period (1918–1919)
After World War I, the Ottoman Empire and Great Britain signed the Armistice of Mudros. This agreement allowed Greek survivors of the War to go back to their homes in Anatolia. However, most of their homes were destroyed and it was not safe for them to stay there. The armistice also allowed Greece to invade in Turkey if they felt like they needed to protect the Greeks in Anatolia. This is why Greece came to the city of Smyrna on May 15, 1919, and started the Second Greco-Turkish War.Second phase (1919–1923)
The second phase of the Pontic Greek genocide took place during the Second Greco-Turkish War and resulted in almost complete disappearance of Greeks in area.Kemalist movement
American historian Ryan Gyngeras noted:While the number of victims in Ankara's deportations remains elusive, evidence from other locations suggest that the Nationalists were as equally disposed to collective punishment and population politics as their Young Turk antecedents... As in the First World War, the mass deportation of civilians was symptomatic of how precarious the Nationalists felt their prospects were.
Swiss historian Hans-Lukas Kieser wrote:
Thus, from spring 1919, Kemal Pasha resumed, with ex-CUP forces, domestic war against Greek and Armenian rivals. These were partly backed by victors of World War I who had, however, abstained from occupying Asia Minor. The war for Asia Minor – in national diction, again a war of salvation and independence, thus in line with what had begun in 1913 – accomplished Talaat's demographic Turkification on the beginning of World War I. Resuming Talaat's Pontus policy of 1916–17, this again involved collective physical annihilation, this time of the Rûm of Pontus at the Black Sea.
British historian Mark Levene argued:
The CUP committed genocide to transform the residual empire into a streamlined, homogeneous nation-state on the European model. Once the CUP had started the process, the Kemalists, freed from any direct European pressure by the 1918 defeat and capitulation of Germany, went on to complete it, achieving what nobody believed possible: the reassertion of independence and sovereignty via an exterminatory war of national liberation.
He also described the Turkish National Movement as such:
It was the hard men, self-styled saviours of the Ottoman-Turkish state, and – culminating in Kemal – unapologetic génocidaires, who were able to wrest its absolute control.
According to Dutch-Turkish historian and sociologist Uğur Ümit Üngör:
When the CUP dissolved itself in 1918, it continued functioning under other names and succeeded in launching Mustafa Kemal to organize the Anatolian resistance it had planned since 1914. After a transition process many of the CUP's most diligent social engineers ended up working for Mustafa Kemal's Republican People's Party. The resurrection of Young Turk elites gave rise to the establishment of a modern dictatorship of repressive rule, driven by devotion to the tenets of a Gökalpist ideology... The continuity of discourse and practice of the Kemalist regime in relation to the CUP regime did not take long to manifest itself. Well before Kemalist population politics became well articulated and programmatic, ad hoc and pre-emptive deportations were used to serve the purpose of preventing trouble.
American historian Benjamin Lieberman described the Nationalist attitude towards Pontic Greeks and compared it with CUP's towards Armenians:
The rise of the Nationalists gave the Turks hope, but placed Turkey's Greeks in peril. Ottoman Greeks had suffered persecution during World War 1 even before Greece entered the war. Now with Greece directly involved in war in Anatolia, they feared worse: a radical Turkish Nationalist campaign to purify Turkey... The most telling evidence of the deportation of the Pontic Greeks came from Turkish Nationalists as they responded to queries about treatment of Greeks from Allied commissioners at Constantinople. Their explanation echoed the Committee of Union and Progress during the Great War: Pontic Greeks were now labeled a traitor people, much as the Armenians had been in 1915. Yet at this point full-scale ethnic cleansing was not far off. The Pontic Greeks, Turkish Nationalists concluded, had stabbed them in the back, and there was no place for them in the new Turkey.
To sum up, despite some differences between these two movements, in terms of policy towards minorities they were very similar. Hence, Kemalists continued Young Turk ethnic cleansing policy towards Pontic Greeks and other Christian minorities in order to create Turkish national homogeneous country.
Probably for this reason Riza Nur, one of Turkish delegates at Lausanne, wrote that "disposing of people of different races, languages and religions in our country is the most... vital issue".