An Issue of Greek Genocide

 The Turkish nationalist movement was a revolutionary reform group that centralized its existence on eradicating the regime of the infamous Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid ll. The Turk's movement premise was to inaugurate a government that was just and constitutional, and to dethrone Abdulhamid once and for all. The goal became more transparent as time progressed, and in 1889 a conspiracy towards Abdulhamid caught the attention of everybody in the city, and as a result, a revolution was being constructed by the minds of college students to overthrow Abdulhamid. The most notable mastermind behind this conspiracy was Ahmed Riza, who was apart of a Young Turkish movement known as the Committee of Union and Progress. This committee's ideology was one of a sturdy, collective government without the presence of foreign influences.

Moving along towards the actual genocide, the Ottoman Empire provoked the mass extermination of the Greeks. Within the time period between 1914 to 1923, the disruption and consequences of World War I, the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey's predecessor, was all subject to a systematic and organized annihilation according to an article written by the Institute on the Holocaust&Genocide in Jerusalem. This genocide in simple terms was orchestrated to assure the abrupt ending of Turkey's Greek population. This act was a joint collaboration of two governments; the perpetrators were the Young Turks and the nationalists of Kemalists. This mass extermination consisted of death marches and massacres all across Ottoman Turkey, as they were described. The total number of those who perished is close to one million Ottoman Greeks, and appalling number noted by historians. The very start of the genocide occurred back in 1915. In mid April, it was historically noted that approximately 250 Armenian natives were incarcerated from their homeland of Anatolia.

This number rose as time progressed and within the next few months a whopping 1.5 million Armenians had been stripped away from Anatolia indefinitely. The place were the massacred occurred is now present day Turkey, and killings also occurred in the central, northern, and western regions of the country. The untimely death of the Armenians also correlated with the extermination of the Assyrians. It was estimated that about 250,000 Assyrians also perished as a result of the genocide according to armenianweekly.  These onslaughts eventually led to the Greeks catching exposure from the rage and fury of the Ottoman Empire. As early as the spring of 1916, an order was placed by the Ottoman Empire to physically remove all Pontic Greeks from all of Turkey's regions, in particular, the Ottoman Empire targeted Greeks who were living in the coastal towns of the Black Sea. The main reason for this move was because the Ottoman Empire suspected that the Greeks were possibly security threats and spreading intel to Russia. Also with news of the recent killings, the Ottoman Empire was frightened that a revolt might take place in light of their recent actions towards their neighbors. This caused panic within the Ottoman Empire, and as a result, drastic measures took place and the beginning of an all out war was about to happen.

With news spreading about Greek cooperation with Russia, the Ottoman Empire imposed a deportation protocol carried out by a special ops force connected with the Ottoman Empire called the Teskilat-i Mahsusa. The founder, Enver Pasha, was a strong advocate of Western Imperialism and was actually the same guy who carried out the order to slay the Armenians. He orchestrated is organization by recruiting convicted murders who were freshly released from prison, and had nothing to live for. He manipulated and brainwashed these people and convinced them that, in what he described, an ethnic cleansing of the Greeks was purely justified in the fact that they were a threat to the Ottoman Empire.

Documents uncovered by historians reveal that Pasha would personally go to these prisons and seek out the most volatile, injurious inmates and reward them based off of the prison term they were facing. Moving along, the way they executed their plan to kill the Greeks was systematically masterminded by the Teskilat-i Mahsusa. First, they invaded the Turkey regions, rounding up all the greeks isolating them, then they tortured, robbed, and raped Greek Women, and lastly they executed them with no remorse. Luckily for the Greeks, with insight knowledge on the previous attacks on the Armenians, some were able to evade the deportations carried out by the Ottoman Empire by setting forth to the mountains. The Mountains provide them higher grounds and cover from the enemy.

Cite this page