Germany -- Foreign relations -- Turkey; Turkey -- Foreign relations -- Germany; World War, 1914-1918 -- Turkey
The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey who 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 Syrians.
Indeed, the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalising idea. I
have already described how, in the few months preceding the European
war, the Ottoman Government began deporting its Greek subjects along the
coast of Asia Minor. These outrages aroused little interest in Europe or
the United States, yet in the space of three or four months about
400,000 Greeks were taken from their age-long homes in the Mediterranean
littoral and removed to the Greek Islands in the Ægean Sea. 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 for the reason that the civilised
world did not protest against these deportations that the Turks
afterward decided to apply the same methods on a larger scale not only
to the Greeks but to the Armenians, Syrians, Nestorians, and others of
its subject peoples. In fact, Bedri Bey, the Prefect of Police at
Constantinople, himself told one of my secretaries that the Turks had
expelled the Greeks so successfully that they had decided to adopt the
same method to all the other races in the empire.
The martyrdom of the Greeks therefore comprised two periods, that
antedating the war, and that which began in the early part of 1915. The
first affected the Greeks living on the sea-coast of Asia Minor. The
second affected those living in Thrace and in the territories
surrounding the Sea of Marmora, the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, and the
coast of the Black Sea. These latter, to the extent of several hundred
thousand, were sent to the interior of Asia Minor. The Turks adopted
almost identically the same procedure against the Greeks as that which
they had adopted against the Armenians. They began by incorporating the
Greeks into the Ottoman Army and then transforming them into labour
battalions, using them to build roads in the Caucasus and other scenes
of action. These Greek soldiers, just like the Armenians, died by
thousands from cold, hunger, and other privations. The same
house-to-house searches for hidden weapons took place in the Greek
villages, and Greek men and women were beaten and tortured just as were
their fellow Armenians. The Greeks had to submit to the same forced
requisitions, which amounted in their case, as in the case of the
Armenians, merely to plundering on a wholesale scale. The Turks
attempted to force the Greek subjects to become Mohammedans; Greek
girls, just like Armenian girls, were stolen and taken to Turkish
harems, and Greek boys were kidnapped and placed in Moslem households.
The Greeks, just like the Armenians, were accused of disloyalty to the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account