May 19 Is the April 24 of Pontic Greeks
Mirror Spectator
EDITORIAL | JUNE 26, 2014 10:34 PM
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By Raffi Bedrosyan
The annihilation of non-Turk/non-Muslim peoples from Anatolia started
on April 24, 1915 with the arrest of Armenian intellectuals in
Istanbul. Within a few months, 1.5 million Armenians were wiped from
their historic homeland of 4,000 years in what is now eastern Turkey,
as well as from northern, southern, central and western Turkey.
About 250,000 Assyrian were also massacred in southeastern Turkey
during the same period.
Then, the turn came for the Pontic Greeks to be eliminated from
northern Turkey on the Black Sea coast, sporadically from 1916 onward.
The ethnic cleansing of the Pontic Greeks got interrupted when the
Ottomans ended up on the losing side of World War I, but their real
destruction resumed in a well-organized manner on May 19, 1919. This
article will summarize the tragic end of the Pontic Greek civilization
in northern Turkey, a series of events less researched and documented
than the Armenian Genocide, but equally denied and covered up by the
Turkish state.
Pontic Greeks continuously inhabited the southern coast of the Black
Sea in northern Anatolia from pre-Byzantine times. The ethnic
cleansing of the Pontic Greeks followed the same pattern as in the
Armenian deportations and massacres. Citing security threats and
suspicion of possible cooperation with the Russians, in the spring of
1916 the Ottoman government ordered all Pontic Greeks to be removed
from Black Sea coastal towns to 50 kilometers inland. Of course, in
the case of Armenians, the deportation orders were not only in the
eastern war zone but applied to every region in Turkey.
The Pontic Greek deportations were carried out by the Special
Organization (Teskilat-I Mahsusa), the same governmental organization
that carried out the Armenian massacres, manned by convicted killers
released from prisons. Documents show that the longer the prison term,
the higher the rank given by the government for these criminals in
carrying out their destructive tasks.
Naturally, the Greek deportations soon transformed from relocation to
robbery to mass murders. But because the Pontic Greeks had observed
the fate of the Armenians a year ago, they got their defenses
organized and resisted the deportations by taking to the mountains
wherever they could. As a result, the deportations and massacres in
this “First Phase Massacre” resulted in 150,000 deaths, eliminating a
third of the Pontic population until the end of the war.
The “Second and Real Phase of Massacre,” the organized destruction of
Pontic Greeks, started in earnest with the arrival of Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk in Samsun on May 19, 1919. He met with well-known mass
murderers of Armenians of the Black Sea region such as Topal (Lame)
Osman and Ipsiz Recep, and secured their cooperation in starting a
terror campaign to get rid of all Pontic Greeks from northern Turkey.
These two murderers, originally smugglers of illegal goods, had gained
fame in 1915 in rounding up Armenian men, women and children in large
boats, taking them out to sea and dumping them overboard to drown, and
then boasting that “smelt season will be bountiful this year with lots
of food for them.”
As the Pontic Greek men had taken to mountains, these two murderers
went after the Greek women and children left behind in the villages.
Various methods of mass murder were implemented. It was common to take
entire population of villages to caves nearby, seal the entrance of
the cave and burn them alive, or use gas to suffocate them inside. Any
male Greeks caught were thrown alive into the coal furnaces of
steamships through the funnels. Churches became incinerators to burn
alive as many Greeks as could be stuffed into the building. The extent
of tortures and massacres of Greeks even disturbed the local Moslem
population, who petitioned the Ankara government to remove these
murderers from the region. Eventually Ataturk brought them to Ankara,
where Osman became his personal bodyguard, but when Osman shot a
member of parliament for criticizing Ataturk, and then threatened
Ataturk himself, he was executed.
There were also so-called “Liberation courts” (Istiklal Mahkemeleri),
set up in the cities across the Black Sea region to try arrested Greek
rebels. These courts passed arbitrary decisions almost invariably
resulting in death sentences, no defense or appeals allowed, with
hangings carried out immediately. Among the victims of these courts
were hundreds of Greek teachers in American and Greek schools of the
region, prominent community leaders, clergymen, and tragically, entire
members of the Merzifon Greek high school football team, only because
the team was named ‘Pontus Club’, which was deemed sufficient reason
to label them as a rebel terroristic organization. Ataturk then
appointed Nurettin Pasha as commander of the Central Army to mop up
any resisting Greeks from the entire Black Sea region. This man, also
known for his sadistic tendencies, destroyed thousands of defenseless
Greek villages. Among his ‘accomplishments’, he arrested a Turkish
opposition journalist criticizing Ataturk and had his soldiers tear
him alive limb by limb. He was also at the head of the army units that
entered Izmir (Smyrna) in 1922, where he arranged for the lynching of
the Greek head of the clergymen in the same manner, and then started
the Great Fire which destroyed the entire city.
Between May 19, 1919 and end of 1922, The Pontic Greek population was
decimated by 353,000 in the following cities:
134,078 Amasya, Giresun, Samsun
64,582 Tokat
38,434 Trabzon
27,216 Niksar
21,448 Sebinkarahisar
17,479 Macka
There was also a violent campaign to Islamicize the Greeks and quite a
number of them first converted to Islam under threats and torture,
followed by Turkification. With the 1924 Lausanne Treaty, any few
remaining Pontic Greeks were included in the 1,250,000 Anatolian
Greeks ‘exchanged’ with Moslems in Greece, thereby totally emptying
the Black Sea region from its historic Greek civilization. All the
names of Greek villages and towns were changed into new Turkish names.
Turkish language was forced upon all the converted Greeks, Hamshen
Armenians, Laz and Georgian minorities.
And thus began a century long brainwashing campaign of single-state,
single-nation, single language, single-religion policy. The May 19,
1919 date of Ataturk’s arrival in Samsun as a national holiday
celebrating Youth and Sports Day was adopted in 1937, copying from the
German Nazis’ superior race policies, demonstrating the athleticism
and beauty of the Turkish race. The extent of racism is evident in the
statement of then Justice Minister Mahmut Esat Bozkurt who said:
“Turks are the masters in this country. The remaining peoples have
only one right in this country, to be the maids and slaves of the real
Turks.” As recently as in 2008, then Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul
echoed the same racist sentiments in Turkey: “If the Greeks were
allowed to exist in the Aegean and Black Sea regions, and the
Armenians all over Anatolia, would we be able to have a powerful
national state today?”
The chief murderer of Pontic Greeks, Topal (Lame) Osman is still
regarded as a hero by racist nationalist Turks. His statue was erected
in Giresun recently by one of the Eregenekon leaders, retired general
Veli Kucuk, himself responsible for the “mysterious disappearance”of
dozens of Kurds, and the assumed mastermind behind the organized
assassination of Hrant Dink. He was arrested and sentenced to life
imprisonment for plotting the overthrow of the Erdogan government as
part of the “deep state” trials, but released from prison recently by
Erdogan, after the falling out between Erdogan and the religious
leader Fethullah Gulen, whose followers were among the prosecutor team
and police forces which had arrested Kucuk.
It has now become obvious that the Turkish state policy to create a
single nationalist state with a single religion and language has
failed miserably. Within Turkey, Kurds could not be assimilated, and
the grandchildren of the hidden Islamicized Armenians and Pontic
Greeks are starting to ‘come out’ to find their roots. Outside Turkey,
the Armenians continue demanding justice and restitution for the 1915
Genocide. Assyrians have started to get organized in various European
states to demand their rights. In 1994 the Greek Parliament recognized
the Pontic Greek Genocide on the 75th anniversary of the 1919 events.
There is now a vast body of common knowledge regarding the true facts
of the genocidal events that took place in Turkey from 1915 to 1923,
which can no longer be covered up by the denialist policies of the
Turkish state.
(Raffi Bedrosyan is a civil engineer and concert pianist, living in
Toronto, Canada. He has donated concert and CD proceedings to
infrastructure projects in Armenia and Karabagh, in which he has also
participated as an engineer. He helped organize the reconstruction of
the Surp Giragos Diyarbakir/Dikranagerd Church and the first Armenian
reclaim of church properties in Anatolia after 1915. He gave the first
piano concert in the Surp Giragos Church since 1915.)
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