hellboy87 thanks for posting
Vote : USA should recognize the World War I-era killing of Armenians as genocideThe Extermination of the Christians of Turkey was an organized butchery, carried out on a great scale, and well under way before the Greeks were sent to Smyrna. We have seen it in operation in the days of Abdul Hamid, "the butcher," we have seen it more fully developed and better organized under Talaat and Enver, those statesmen of the "Constitution." We shall behold it carried out to its dire finish by Mustafa Kemal.
Greece didn't invade anything.Greece tried to save its own population of an ongoing GENOCIDE.
Greece was not defeated by Turkey but by France and Italy, which supported the massacre of a people to protect commercial interests.The Genocide of the Greeks was already underway many years before the BEGINNING of the World War I. Initially, the Turks had the support and encouragement of Germany to exterminate the Greeks (and also the Armenians and Assyrians) since the Greeks were in the way of the Germans for their plans to dominate the entire region.
"The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Assyrians.
Indeed the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea."
The Armenian Genocide (about 2.000.000 persons massacred)
The Hellenic (Greek) Genocide (about 1.750.000 persons massacred)
The Assyrian Genocide (at least 750.000 persons massacred)www.greek-genocide.org/video_the_exodus.htmlwww.greek-genocide.org/multimedia/photo/g_1.html The defeat of Greece allowed the Turkish government to
continue the Genocide not only of the Greeks but also of the
Armenians and Assyrians.
In 1919, Greece liberated a part of its own territory and a LARGE part of its own population that had not been liberated in the fight for freedom of 1821. For instance, the MAJORITY of the population of Smyrna (West of the present Turkish territory) and also Pontos (North) was Greek.
After liberating Smyrna and its surrounding area peacefully,
Greece had to attack Turkey because those
Greeks still under the misrule of the Turks were being systematically TORTURED and MASSACRED. Also were victims of the same extermination effort of the Turkish government the Armenians
and Assyrians, who were equally saved by the Greek Army. "This process of extermination was carried on over a considerable period of time, with fixed purpose, with system, and with painstaking minute details; and it was accomplished with unspeakable cruelties, causing the destruction of*greater number of human beings than have suffered in any similar persecution since the coming of Christ."
The Greek Genocide was INTENSIFIED during the World War I, which provided political excuses and a cover up to the Turkish government to torture with unimaginable cruelty and then kill several hundreds of thousands of Greek children, men and women of ALL AGES.
After the end of the World War I, in which the Germans and Turks were defeated with an important participation of the Greek Armed Forces, which fought along side the US Armed Forces, the Turks saw the extermination of the Greeks not only as a way to get rid of them and to STEAL all their belongings but also as a way to push Greece to a war against Turkey.
The Turks knew that these deportations would precipitate a war with Greece; in fact, they welcomed such a war and were preparing for it.
The Turkish government underestimated the capacity of Greece to fight to save their compatriots (and also the Armenians and Assyrians) and thought that with the war provoked by the ongoing Genocide of the Greeks
Turkey would recover territories liberated previously by Greece. The Greeks could fight much harder than than the Turks expected and were at about to win the war and finally put an end to the Greek Genocide.
The tragedy that befell those Hellenes living in Anatoliki Thraki (Eastern Thrace) and all of Anatolia can be divided into two separate phases. The first falling between 1914 and the closing days of the First World War, at the hands of the Ottoman Government , and the second from 1919 till the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 by Mustapha Kemal and his Kemalist followers, who were the old guard of the Young Turk movement, that had previously ruled the Ottoman Empire. It is during these years that [glow=red,2,300]
The rivers of Anatoliki Thraki (Eastern Thrace ,Asia Minor and Anatolia ran red with Hellenic blood.[/glow]
“The first step in the persecutions of the Greeks was the attack on the ecclesiastical, legal, and educational rights which had always been possessed within the Turkish Empire by the Greek ecclesiastical authorities and which had gone far toward mitigating the distress of the Turkish regime. The Turkish language was introduced into Greek schools; geography and history had to be taught in Turkish. Greek priests were arrested and imprisoned without warning or reason and without notification of the ecclesiastical authorities. Forcible conversions to Mohammedanism, long forbidden by law, began to appear again, particularly in the case of Greek girls carried off to Turkish harems without the usual right of intervention which the Greek Patriarch and Metropolitans had always possessed. “
The persecutions of old rightfully echoed loudly in the hearts and minds of the population with the return of those once forgotten practices and a new form of the janissary system, disguised in the form of charitable Orphan Asylums. The ingenious method of masking these charitable institutions for devious purposes was second nature for the Turkish Government. The Orphan asylums sprung up under the disguise of relief, and yet were used as tools of the Government’s planned extermination of the Hellenic population still living within the Empire.
“These orphan institutions have in appearance a charitable object, but if one considers that their inmates are Greek boys who became orphans because their parents were murdered, or who were snatched away from their mothers, or left in the streets for want of nourishment, (of which, they were deprived by the Turks.), and that these Greek children receive there a purely Turkish education, it will be at once seen that the cloak of charity there lurks the ‘child collecting’ system instituted in the past by the Turkish conquerors and a new effort to revive the janissary system. The Greek boys were treated in this manner. What happens to the Greek girls? If we review the Consular reports about the persecutions from the year 1916 to 1917 we shall find hardly one of them which does not speak of forcible abductions and conversions to Mohammedanism. And it could not have been otherwise, since it is well known that this action, as has been stated above, was decided upon in June 1915, in order to effect the Turkification of the Hellenic element. This plan was carried out methodically and in a diabolical manner, through the ‘mixed settlements’ of Greeks and Turks, always with a predominance of Mohammedan males and of Greek females in order to compel mixed marriages.”
Other methods used by the Turkish government during both phases were Work battalions, Concentration camps, death marches, and straight-out massacres to put an end to the Hellenic Question. The famous work battalions, known as ‘Ameles tabour’, were created “on the plea that the Christians could not be trusted to bear arms against their coreligionists they were drafted into labor battalions and set into the interior of Asia Minor to do work for the Turks.”
The conditions, in which, they were forced to live in were terrible. “A piece of unsuitable bread made from tare (animal food) and a watery soup daily, under the rain and snow, with insults, humiliations, and beatings, sicknesses of dysentery, diarrhea, typhus, did not leave much margin for survival. The number of those who survived these notorious ameles tabour, ‘the death battalions’ as called by Christians, was minimal.”
Anatoliki Thraki and the Genocide
One of the most overlooked regions, in which the Genocide accrued, is Anatoliki Thraki. A place, which suffered systematic plans of genocide, under both the Bulgarians and Turks, seeing double the carnage of other Hellenic lands during those years. During the years of persecution in Vorio Thraki (Northern Thrace) by the Bulgarians, the Turkish policy towards the Hellenes was one of friendship, because of the Slavic threat against the Ottoman Empire. Thus, generally speaking, the position of the Greeks of Thrace was a good one in this period. With the revolution of the Young Turks, the Greeks of Thrace, as all the Greeks of the Empire, hoped for the amelioration of their position believing in the declarations of equality and brotherhood. They were soon disillusioned, however, since the measures of the Young Turks against the Greek communities affected many of their privileges.
An eerie sense of doom must have been felt creeping in, with the Turkish reoccupation of Thraki, which would bring an era of brutality not soon forgotten with the return of atrocities, looting and massacres against the Hellenes. Whole villages being destroyed by the Turkish military in the most sadistic ways, at the time, a wireless dispatch to the Daily Chronicle from Constanza says: ‘Turkey has been running an ‘atrocious campaign’ most unscrupulously to cover her own misdeeds and distract attention from the appalling facts of the Thracian massacres by the Turkish army of reoccupation. (6) The death and destruction seen in Thraki during the Balkan Wars would be surpassed only with the coming First World War.
“When the European war broke out, the Turks, with German connivance, began a policy of extermination of the Greek population which parallels in almost every detail the terrible outrages against the Armenians.” The Turkish Government used the outbreak of the War to its full advantage to begin the removal of the Hellenic Population from their ancestral homeland, under the pretext of the 'military security' of the Turkish cities, a large part of the population of eastern Thrace was deported towards the hinterland of Asia Minor hinterland (as was the case with the population of western Asia Minor and Pontos). Many were forced to convert to Islam, and they were distanced from the Patriarchate and had no access to Greek schools. A large part of the male population was exterminated in amele taburu or labour battalions.
The Terror and destruction decimated the countryside, turning the once beautiful crossroads between Europe and Asia, into Hell on earth, with Turkish hordes descending upon the local peasantry leaving nothing in their wake. Life in the countryside changed from one of children playing and parents working, to silence, as Hellenes dared not to tend to their fields, while Turkish bands roamed freely in the open countryside.
Reports from the Ecumenical Patriarchate tell us of the anarchy and terror, which reigned over Anatoliki Thraki, where these Turkish bands were free to, committed the oldest crimes in the newest ways. Turkish civilians aided the Ottoman Government in their plans of extermination, in whatever manner they could. Turkish peasants would execute orders given to them by local officials mainly during the cover of darkness, to hide their identity from their neighbors. Individual incidents like that from the Diocese of Heracles, show the pure horror that Hellenes living in Thraki had to deal with on a daily bases, “At the end of May, 1919, three Albanian-Turks, guarding the Tsikili Farm, on the Tsads-Tyroloe road, killed two young Christian men from Tsads, whose clothes and ears they sent to this town, to frighten the peasantry and whose corpses they gave to the dogs of the farm for food”.
In the Diocese of Ganos and Chora, “The Turkish peasants’ fanaticism, provocations and threatening attitude toward the Greeks had grown so violent, that they openly declared, even in presence of Government officials, that they would quite soon annihilate them. This state of things paralyzed the will of the Greeks and prevented them from attending to their business” A perfect example of their fanaticism comes from one report in December of 1919. “Periclis Prodromou from Avdini, was slaughtered like a lamb, near Atelthini” as if the Hellenic people were livestock, this just goes to show the mentality held by the Turkish people at the time.
In the Diocese of Didymotechon, which lies on the border of Anatoliki Thraki and Western Thraki, we see, “On May 21st, a double murder of two Greeks took place in the village Tchanakli. These two farmers coming to Ouzoum Kioprou, were on the way attacked by four soldiers. The head of one victim, Athanassius, was cut off, while the other victim, though seriously wounded, was able to creep as far as Eski-keuyto. The wounded reported the crime to the authorities and after a few hours succumbed to his wounds.”
In the end Hellenism in Anatoliki Thraki would face the same fate as that of Anatolian and Pontian Hellenism. With the evacuation of the Hellenic Army in 1922, the surviving 300,000 Hellenes living in Anatoliki Thraki, excluding those living in Constantinople were forced to leave the homeland of their ancestors, which had been theirs for thousands of years.