Significant massacres of civilians took place
in the Yalova peninsula region. On 16 October 1920 for example, the Greek army
captured Orhangazi after resistance by Turkish militias. The next day there was
a massacre in the nearby Turkish village of Çakırlı. According to accounts, the
males of the village were locked in the local mosque by the Greek army, where
they were burned alive and/or shot. Two days later on 18 October 1920 the
nearby Turkish village of Üreğil was burnt. On 16 April, the some 1,000 Turkish
inhabitants of Orhangazi were deported to Gemlik by the Greek army while the
town was burned down. The next day, there was a massacre in the village of
Gedelek, because the population could not pay the amount of 4,000 Lira as
protection money.
Just as the incidences that comprise the
Genocide were widely reported by the western press, so too were the Greek
massacres of Muslim civilians. In May 1921, a Inter-Allied commission,
consisting of British, French, and Italian officers, and the representative of
the International Red Cross, Maurice Gehri, was set up to investigate claims of
massacres. In 13 May 1921 the commission started its proceedings by visiting
the burned villages of Çertekici, Çengiler and Gedik. There they listened to
accounts of massacre, robbery and rape and reported that the Turkish refugees
from the destroyed villages lived in very crowded conditions, most of them
sleeping in the courtyards of mosques and graveyards. In the following days,
the commission would investigate the destruction of numerous other villages,
accompanied with stories of arbitrary executions, rape and robbery, mostly by
members of the Greek army, but also by local Greeks and Armenians.
The Inter-Allied commission
prepared two separate collaborative reports on their investigations in the
Yalova Peninsula. These reports found that Greek forces committed systematic
atrocities against the Turkish inhabitants, including the "burning and
looting of Turkish villages", the "explosion of violence of Greeks
and Armenians against the Turks", and "a systematic plan of
destruction and extinction of the Moslem population". A section of the
report read as follows:
“A distinct and regular method appears to have
been followed in the destruction of villages, group by group, for the last two
months... there is a systematic plan of destruction of Turkish villages and
extinction of the Muslim population. This plan is being carried out by Greek
and Armenian bands, which appear to operate under Greek instructions and
sometimes even with the assistance of detachments of regular troops.”
The Inter-Allied
commission also stated that the destruction of villages and the disappearance
of the Muslim population might have as its objective to create in this region a
political situation favourable to the Greek Government.
Other eyewitnesses
corroborate the findings of the Commision. James Harbord, describing the first
months of the occupation to the American Senate, wrote that: "The Greek troops
and the local Greeks who had joined them in arms started a general massacre of
the Mussulmen population in which the officials and Ottoman officers and
soldiers as well as the peaceful inhabitants were indiscriminately put to
death." Harold Armstrong, a British officer who was a member of the
Inter-Allied Commission, reported that as the Greeks pushed out from Smynra,
they massacred and raped civilians, and burned and pillaged as they went.
Marjorie Housepian wrote that 4000 Smyrna Muslims were killed by Greek forces.
James Loder Park, the
U.S. Vice-Consul in Constantinople at the time, who toured much of the
devastated area immediately after the Greek evacuation, described the situation
in the surrounding cities and towns of İzmir he has seen, as follows:
“Manisa ... almost completely wiped out by
fire ... In Cassaba of 37,000 Turks only 6,000 could be accounted for… Ample
testimony was available to the effect that the city was systematically
destroyed by Greek soldiers, assisted by a number of Greek and Armenian
civilians.”
When confronted by this
information, most Greeks become indignant. Being a noble and high people, it
appears impossible that such crimes could have been committed. After all, we
are the victims are we not? They either deny its authenticity or seek to excuse
massacres by stating that they took place in the context of a bloody war, by an
army and a people seeking revenge for centuries of ill-treatment and Genocide
and that any rate, any atrocities that were committed by the Greeks pale in
comparison to the organized genocide of the Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks of
Asia Minor, which largely took place prior to the Greek Army’s occupation of
Smyrna after 1919 and which, certainly in the case of the Armenians and the
Assyrians, had nothing to do with any conflict with Greece.
Notwithstanding this
valid point, the largely unacknowledged massacres of Muslim civilians by the
Greek army inform Turkish responses to accusations of genocide by making them
to try to equate the Greek massacres with the crime of Genocide, resulting in
an impasse.
Genocide recognition
should not be about one-upmanship, politics or endeavouring to prove the
inherently superior characteristics of the victim race. Rather than engaging in
polemics, a more mature and respectful to the victims approach could be simple:
identifying brutality in all of its forms and condemning it without excuse or
justification. If, for example, the massacres perpetrated by the Greek army,
were to form the subject of public debate and analysis and were subsequently,
condemned by the Greek people, then the Turkish side would have removed, the
last major impediment to their self-examination and condemnation of the
Genocide perpetrated a century ago, for they could not then accuse us of
willfully glossing over our own shortcomings. At that stage, if the Turkish
state was still unwilling to recognize that the Genocide took place, the world
would know that continued genocide denial is untenable and ridiculous.
Taner Akcam is right in
stating that Genocide should be differentiated from war casualties and that
Turkey cannot shrink from its liability with regard to the Genocide by citing
other massacres by way of excuse. However, the urge to commit harm is not
restricted to one race alone. It lurks within all people and can be manipulated
with disastrous results, as was proved in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia and the
Ottoman Empire. The campaign for recognition of the Genocide of the Christian
peoples of Anatolia is but one of many righteous steps that need to be
undertaken so that brutality, in all its forms can be condemned and arrested.
It is in this context that we need to take the first step, mindful always that
we need to be true to the memories of the innocent victims who lost their lives
at the hands of the intolerant. Once we hold out our hand, recognizing our own
imperfections but resolving never to repeat them, we can only hope that it will
be clasped by those who finally understand that there is nothing to be lost but
everything to be gained in repentance.
DEAN KALIMNIOU
First published in NKEE on 14 June 2014
<< Home