Turkish Occupation and Genocide

[admin]

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=66816

Turkish ocupation and genocide What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia, unto Ephesus and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira and unto Sardis and unto Philadelphia and unto Laodicea. (Apoc. I11).

The seven churches, tlie seven torches of light of the Greek-Christian civilisation are no longer burning. The land of Asia Minor, an area where for 3000 years Greek civilisation flourished is now being trampled by foreign invaders : the Turks.

The Turks invaded Asia Minor in two waves : The Seljuks were first at the end of the 11th century and the Ottomans came later, at the beginning of the l3th century.

Using indiscriminately force, murder, genocide, and turcification they managed to hold on to a foreign land expelling or exterminating its natural residents : Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, and Arabs.

In the 8th century, the Oguz Turks, a semi-savage nomadic people moved westward from their homeland in Mongolia, and settled in what is today West Turkestan.

The Seljuks, a sect of the Oguz Turks, moved further in the direction of Persia and today's Iraq, where they served as mercernaries for the caliphs of Baghdad.

From this encounter with the advanced Persian and Arab civilisations, they enriched their poor vocabulary, adopted the Arabic script and became muslims retaining simultaneously their warring nomad characteristics.

Their king, Alp Arslan (1063-1072), unified the various Seljuk factions, invaded Armenia, and sacked its capital of Ani in 1064. After that he and his armies invaded Byzantium and following the critical battle at Manzikert (1071) where the Byzantines were defeated, the Seljuks occupied a large part of the Asia Minor provinces of Byzantium. Previous to the invasion, there was not a single Turk living in these provinces.

In this foreign, for the Turks land there were thus established a number of Seljuk controlled emirates.

After a short period of time the Byzantines and the Crusaders dissolved nearly all of these emirates, except one whose capital was Iconium. This had been named as the Sultanate of Roum in other words the land of the Romans, as was the official title of the Greek Byzantine Empire, which was a continuation and succession of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The raids by Genghis Khan's (1167-1227) Mongols forced another Turkish tribe, led by Suleyman-Shah, to abandon Turkistan and to head towards the west. This group tried to settle in Eastern Asia Minor, but the Armenians and Kurds ousted them. In an attempt to cross the Euphrates river, their leader was drowned and buried there, which ever since has been known as <<Turk-mezari>>, or the <<tomb of the Turk>> A title which is indicative of how alien the Turks were in these areas.

The tribe then moved toward the Sultanate of Roum where it settled often assuming the role of border-guards. Suleyman's grandson, Osman, (1259-1326), took over the title of Sultan from the Seljuks and he gave his name to the Turkish people : The Ottomans.

The leaders of the Osmanlis quickly realized that since they comprised a minority of conquerors it would be difficult for them to control the occupied lands, and simultaneously to pursue further conquests without taking certain <<special measures>>.

Thus, they decided to adopt and apply harsh methods previously unknown to the whole world. Methods which were never repeated again by another nation on earth. The primary measures taken were as follows :

They declared their state a warrior or <<Gazi>> state. In other words, a state that was bound to declare holy war (Jihad) against the non-believers. This way, they were able to bring together all kinds of adventurers, who were willing to fight either for ideological reasons, or for just the spoils of the war.
They adopted the inhumane measure of forcibly recruiting young Christian children. In other words, they forcibly took male children of the enslaved Christian families (mainly Greeks. and later also Armenians Bulgarians, Albanians and Serbs), and brought them up in special camps They conditioned them to become fanatic Turks and relentless killers to their own people. These children would grow up to believe that their father was the Sultan and that if they were to die in battle they would go to heaven. Thus, because of this New Army, or Janissaries, (Yeni-ceri in turkish) the Turks continued to pursue their conquests.
They slaughtered systematically millions of Asia Minor's inhabitants, in order to change the ethnic character of the land. It has been estimated that during the seven centuries of Turkish presence in Asia Minor several millions of Greeks, at least two-three million Armenians and hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Syrians, but also Serbs, and Bulgarians in Europe, were systematically massacred. In the 20th century alone, it has been estimated that approximately 1,5 million Armenians and more than 1 million Greeks were extrerminated.

In this manner, the Turks managed to hold on to Asia Minor, a foreign land for them, where Greek civilisation had flourished for 2.000 years before the appearance of the Turks.

The Turks just destroyed this civilisation and unfortunately did not even try to take advantage of its accomplishments.

In two previous occassions the Greek people contributed in civilising their conquerors as was the case with the Romans and the Franks. One must possess a cultural identity to be able to absorb what is creative and good from other civilisations. Unfortunately, the conquering Turks lacked such an identity.

The Turks also failed to administer their subject peoples within the Ottoman Empire. There were no <<laws>> in the civilised sense of the word. The Sultan's word was the law in the capital and arbitrary rule of local representatives was the law in the provinces. The property, honor, and life of the conquered was completely at the mercy of the occasional Turkish official.

The only bond that kept the multiethnic empire together was the crude use of force-ultimately the butchery-of the rulers. Slaughter was the rule without concern for innocence or guilt.

Under these conditions the Turkish administration was truly detestable to all the subject people who suffered and patiently waited for each opportunity to throw off the Ottoman yoke.

The Turks failed to assimilate the various nationalities within their empire. They could not also administer them efficiently, not even control the economy because commerce and industry was left in the hands of the Greeks, Armenians and Jews, while the Turks kept busy with governing and simultaneously exploiting the profits while terrorizing the inhabitants.

For the enslaved people to be finally liberated from their rulers there took place a series of revolutions, which led to the establishment of independent states. In 1908 the Young Turk revolution forced the Sultan to grant a constitution to the remnants of the Ottoman Empire.

In spite of the apparent liberalism of the formally bourgeois revolution which was spearheaded by the military without the participation of the people, there continued to develop additional centrifugal tendencies as they did in the times of the Sultan's despotism. For those nations still within the Empire whose fellow nationals had established independent states, e. g. the Greeks- it was natural for them to seek union with their free compatriots. Those peoples still within the Empire that had not attained separate statehood, e.g. the Armenians, and the Kurds, focused all their energies towards the attainment of self-determination and the establishment of autonomous national homelands.

The Young Turks sought to rid themselves of troublesome non Turkish ethnic groups so that they could build a homogeneous Turkish state and so they could avoid iurther mutilation of Turkish controlled territorv in areas where non-Turks were in the majority, such as Eastern Thrace,

Western Asia Minor and Pontos, where the Greeks were in the majority, Eastern Asia Minor where the Armenians were in the majority and, Southeastern Asia Minor where the Kurds were in the majority.

Thus, the supposedly liberal and constitutionally oriented Young Turks returned to the usual Sultanic abrasiveness and brutality, which now became much more organised and sylstematic and assumed genocidal proportions.

The massacres were premeditated : It was decided that <<the Ottomanisation of all Turkish citizens, which never succeeded through persuasion, had to be done by the force of arms>>,

This was stated in the L o n d o n T i m e s on the 3rd of October 1911 summarizing the proceedings of the Council of Union and Progress (The Young Turks).

At first, the persecutions took place against the Greeks, made under the pretext of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). Persecution took the form of lootings, expulsions and murders. After the wars, persecution continued even more intensively, to the point where on the 25 of May 1914 the Ecumenical Patriarchate was forced to declare that the Orthodox Church was <<under attack>>.

The Patriarchate, further, in a show of protest and mourning, suspended the activities of Greek churches and Greek schools throughout Turkey.

After the declaration of World War I, the Turks found the perfect opportunity to organize more effectively the massacres against ethnic minorities, so that they could finally transform their empire into a homogeneous·nation-state.

Prominent officers of the Young Turks movement, while serving as members of the government, organized the expulsion of the inhabitants as well as the lootings and massacres that were perpetrated against them. Specifically, Talat Pasha, minister of the interior, was prominent as the master mind of the pogroms. However, the entire Turkish state administration participated in the organization and the execution of the extermination programme.

They began with the genocide of the Armenians, who did not possess a state which would rush to their aid and followed it up with mass expulsions and massacres of the Greeks. The victims of this period are over 2.5 million people of which 1.5 million were Armenians. In the chronological Index one can see detailed figures regarding the persecution of the Greeks of Asia Minor, Thrace and Pontos.

After the end of World War I, the Allies recognized that the property, honor and life of the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire could not be protected by the Turkish government.

They assigned to Greece the responsibility to administer Eastern Thrace and the Smyrna district. This arrangenment was contained in the Treaty of Sevres. Simultaneously, there was established a separate and independent Pontian state.

In 1920, Alexander Millerand, president of the Supreme Allied Council stated : <<The Turkish government not only failed in its duty to protect its non-Turkish citizens from the looting, violence and murders, but there are many indications that the Turkish government itself was responsible for directing and organizing the most cruel attacks against the populations, which it was supposed to protect. For these reasons, the Allied powers have decided to liberate from the Turkish yoke all the lands where the majority of the people were non-Turks>>.

The Treaty of Sevres was signed by the Turkish government but Mustafa Kemal refused to recognize it.

After 40 long months of war, duringiwhich Kemal's forces secured considerable foreign assistance, the Greek military front in Anatolia collapsed.

The Turks reoccupied Asia Minor and entered Smyrna on September 8, 1922. In Smyrna, in the meantime, there was an influx of refugees from various parts of Asia Minor. And the conquering Turks set the city on fire and unleashed the last phase of the genocide against the Greeks and Armenians.

These were moments of unbelievable horror. The pier turned red by the blood of tlhe victims. The bishop of Smyrna Chrysostomos was publicly ridiculed and then slaughtered. Events were too horrible to even describe. The American Consul in Smyrna, George Horton, gives a detailed and objective picture of the chilling Turkish crimes in his book T h e B l i g h t o f A s i a ( Indianapolis : Bobb and Merryl, 1925).

The Treaty of Lausanne ended the Greek-Turkish war and imposed the unjust and mandatory exchange of 300,000 Turks from Greece for the 1,400,000 Greeks that survived the holocaust.

The Greek refugees of Asia Minor, without being consulted had to give up their ancestral homes to the Turks, after almost 4,000 years of glorious and productive history.

Through the unjust actions of massacre and persecution of Greeks and Armenians, the contemporary Turkish state was thus created. It was a state founded on crime, the state about which French prime minister George Clemanceau said on the 25th of June, 1919 : <<We do not find even one example in Europe, Asia, or Africa, where the imposition of Turkislh sovereignty had not been followed by a decline in material prosperity, and by the impoverishment of its culture. Also there does not exist one example where liberation from Turkish control was not followed by the advancement of material prosperity and an improvement of the cultural level. Whether dealing with Christians or Muslims, the Turk has managed to bring destruction whereever he conquered. The Turk has never been able to develop in peace that which he won through conquest>>.

On the 26th of November 1979, the New York Times wrote quite characteristically : <<According to the most recent statistics, the Christian population in Turkey was diminished from ( 4.500.000 ) at the beginning of this century to just about 150,000. Of those, the Greeks are no more than 7,000 Yet, in 1923 they were as many as 1, 2 million>>. (After the massacres of many hundreds of thousands ).
Even though the Turks have not yet been punislied by human justice, we believe that there is a Divine Justice to which the Turks will sooner or later be answerable.

[akritas]

Background Paper on the Pontian Genocide

By Akis Haralabopoulos akis@pronet.net.au

Pontus means "sea" in Greek and is located in the south-eastern littoral of the Black Sea. Its connection with Hellenism stretches back to pre-historic times to the legends of Jason and the Argonauts quest for the Golden Fleece and to Heracles obtaining the Amazon Queen's girdle. The coastal region was colonised by the Ionians, especially the city of Miletus which founded Sinope (785 BC), Trapezunta (756 BC) and the numerous other cities along the coast from Heracleia to Discurias in the Caucasus. The Hinterland was gradually Hellenised and this was completed after Alexander's conquests. Its contribution to Hellenism in those 2800 years has been enormous: Diogenes hailed from Sinope and Strabo from Amaseia, it was here that Xenophon found a safe haven, that the great Comneni dynasty reigned, the home of Cardinal Bessarion and the Hypsilandis family; it was also the last Greek territory to fall to the Turks (in 1461). Many famous churches, monasteries and schools are a testament to the resilience of Hellenism. The Pontians are a distinct Greek people with their own dialect, dances, songs and theatre.

For the Pontian Greeks all ended in tragedy in the years 1914-22. Of the 700,000 Greeks living in Pontus in 1914, 300,000 were killed as a result of Turkish government policy and the remainder became refugees. Three millenia of the Greek presence was wiped out by a deliberate policy of creating a Turkey for the Turks. The Pontian people were denied the right to exist, the right of respect for their national and cultural identity, and the right to remain on land they had lived on for countless generations.

The turning point in the treatment of Greeks in Turkey was the alliance between Germany and the Sultan that commenced after the Treaty of Berlin 1878. Germany regarded Anglo French protection of Christians as an obstacle to its interests and convinced the Turkish authorities that the Greeks were working for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Germany opened the Berlin Academy to Turkish military officers and General Gotz was appointed to restructure the Ottoman armed forces. The successful national movements in the Balkans posed a threat that the same would occur in Asia Minor. After the Balkan Wars the Young Turks decided that Asia Minor would be a homeland for Turks alone and that the Greeks and Armenians had to be eliminated. The outbreak of World War I made this possible and Germany willingly sacrificed the Christian minorities to achieve its aim in the Middle East. However, it is the German and Austrian diplomats reports that confirm that what took place was a systematic and deliberate extermination of the Christian population. Genocide. Not security or defence measures, not relocations of population (why forcibly relocate populations?) not war, not retaliation in response to the activities of Pontian guerillas or Russian invasion but GENOCIDE.

Terrorism, labour battalions, exiles, forced marches, rapes, hangings, fires, murders, planned, directed and executed by the Turkish authorities. This can be corroborated by the German and Austrian archives now made public:

24 July 1909 German Ambassador in Athens Wangenheim to Chancellor Bulow quoting Turkish Prime Minister Sefker Pasha: "The Turks have decided upon a war of extermination against their Christian subjects."
26 July 1909 Sefker Pasha visited Patriarch Ioakeim III and tells him: "we will cut off your heads, we will make you disappear. It is either you or us who will survive."

14 May 1914 Official document from Talaat Bey Minister of the Interior to Prefect of Smyrna: The Greeks, who are Ottoman subjects, and form the majority of inhabitants in your district, take advantage of the circumstances in order to provoke a revolutionary current, favourable to the intervention of the Great Powers. Consequently, it is urgently necessary that the Greeks occupying the coast-line of Asia Minor be compelled to evacuate their villages and install themselves in the vilayets of Erzerum and Chaldea. If they should refuse to be transported to the appointed places, kindly give instructions to our Moslem brothers, so that they shall induce the Greeks, through excesses of all sorts, to leave their native places of their own accord. Do not forget to obtain, in such cases, from the emigrants certificates stating that they leave their homes on their own initiative, so that we shall not have political complications ensuing from their displacement.

31 July 1915 German priest J. Lepsius: "The anti-Greek and anti-Armenian persecutions are two phases of one programme - the extermination of the Christian element from Turkey.

16 July 1916 German Consul Kuchhoff from Amisos to Berlin: "The entire Greek population of Sinope and the coastal region of the county of Kastanome has been exiled. Exile and extermination in Turkish are the same, for whoever is not murdered, will die from hunger or illness."
30 November 1916 Austrian consul at Amisos Kwiatkowski to Austria Foreign Minister Baron Burian: "on 26 November Rafet Bey told me: "we must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians . . . on 28 November. Rafet Bey told me: "today I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight." I fear for the elimination of the entire Greek population and a repeat of what occurred last year" (meaning the Armenian genocide).

13 December 1916 German Ambassador Kuhlman to Chancellor Hollweg in Berlin: "Consuls Bergfeld in Samsun and Schede in Kerasun report of displacement of local population and murders. Prisoners are not kept. Villages reduced to ashes. Greek refugee families consisting mostly of women and children being marched from the coasts to Sebasteia. The need is great."

19 December 1916 Austrian Ambassador to Turkey Pallavicini to Vienna lists the villages in the region of Amisos that were being burnt to the ground and their inhabitants raped, murdered or dispersed.
20 January 1917 Austrian Ambassador Pallavicini: "the situation for the displaced is desperate. Death awaits them all. I spoke to the Grand Vizier and told him that it would be sad if the persecution of the Greek element took the same scope and dimension as the Armenia persecution. The Grand Vizier promised that he would influence Talaat Bey and Emver Pasha."

31 January 1917 Austrian Chancellor Hollweg's report: ". . . the indications are that the Turks plan to eliminate the Greek element as enemies of the state, as they did earlier with the Armenians. The strategy implemented by the Turks is of displacing people to the interior without taking measures for their survival by exposing them to death, hunger and illness. The abandoned homes are then looted and burnt or destroyed. Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks.

Thus, by government decree 1,500,000 Armenians and 300,000 Pontian Greeks were annihilated through exile, starvation, cold, illness, slaughter, murder, gallows, axe, and fire. Those who survived fled never to return. The Pontians now lie scattered all over the world as a result of the genocide and their unique history, language (the dialect is a valuable link between ancient and modern Greek), and culture are endangered and face extinction.
A double crime was committed - genocide and the uprooting of a people from their ancestral homelands of three millenia. The Christian nations were not only witnesses to this horrible and monstrous crime, which remains unpunished, but for reasons of political expediency and self interest have, by their silence, pardoned the criminal. The Ottoman and Kemalist Turks were responsible for the genocide of the Pontian people, the most heinous of all crimes according to international law. The international community must recognise this crime.

Produced by the Hellenic Council of New South Wales May 1996

[Ptolemy]

The poem "Hatred" by Ipekchi (Ironically they have given this folk name to...Greek-Turkish friendship prize )

HATRED

As long as the vulgar Greek exists in this world
By Allah, this hatred won't leave me
As long as I see him there like a dog
By Allah, this hatred won't leave me
A thousand heads of infidel Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

My only aim is revenge
When my turn comes to go to battle
In one day I'll butcher a thousand Giaours
By Allah, this hatred won't leave me
A thousand heads of infidel Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

Even if I crush thirty thousand of their heads with a stone
Even if I wrench out the teeth of ten thousand
And throw a hundred thousand of their corpses into the river
By Allah, this hatred won't leave me
A thousand heads of infidel Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

The whole world knows how superior the Turk is
Who crashed the Greek's @#%$ world over his head
Even if I burn in stokeholes the heads of five thousand of them
By Allah, this hatred won't leave me
A thousand heads of infidel Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

Even if I slash forty thousand of them with my bayonet
And send eighty thousand of them to the devil
And hang a hundred thousand of them
By Allah, this hatred won't leave me
A thousand heads of infidel Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

and


"MY CYPRUS BECAME TURKISH" by Musa Korkmaz

by Musa Korkmaz, published in Turkey's Police Gazette on 1st February, 1978 and later broadcast by radio stations in Turkey and the Turkish radio station in the occupied part of Cyprus:

"Cyprus is ours we know it, it's written in our history
we will next take all the Aegean islands.
Then go for Ataturk's homeland in Thessaloniki

[terastios]

Ok i will give you some numbers (and you can use them or not as you want!)

TURKISH MASSACRES



MOHAMMEDANISM has been propagated by the sword and by violence ever since it first appeared as the great enemy of Christianity, as I shall show in a later chapter of this book.

It has been left to the Turk, however, in more recent years, to carry on the ferocious traditions of his creed, and to distinguish himself by excesses which have never been equaled by any of the tribes enrolled under the banner of the Prophet, either in ancient or in modern times.

The following is a partial list of Turkish massacres from 1822 up till 1904:



1822 Chios, Greeks 50,000

1823 Missolongi, Greeks 8,750

1826 Constantinople, Jannisaries 25,000

1850 Mosul, Assyrians 10,000

1860 Lebanon, Maronites 12,000

1876 Bulgaria, Bulgarians 14,700

1877 Bayazid, Armenians 1,400

1879 Alashguerd, Armenians 1,250

1881 Alexandria, Christians 2,000

1892 Mosul, Yezidies 3,500

1894 Sassun, Armenians 12,000

1895-96 Armenia, Armenians 150,000

1896 Constantinople, Armenians 9,570

1896 Van, Armenians 8,000

1903-04 Macedonia, Macedonians 14,667

1904 Sassun, Armenians 5,640



Total 328,477(OF INNOCENT PEOPLE!)

[pankration]

Quoting the Stormfront, a white supremacist society, even when they use numbers or arguments that appear beneficial to our culture is fraught with problems. They appeal to the basest fears and feed off the insecurities of a "white" society. Don't make the mistake others have made. Their idea of "white" is NOT the Hellenic one.

[Orphic_Hymn]

pankration

While I will agree that we should show caution on the sources used, noone is quoting Stormfront nor is what they support an issue here.
The quote comes directly from George Horton's (Consul General of the United States in the Near East) "Blight of Asia", Chapter 1 titled "TURKISH MASSACRES, 1822-1909"

If interested you can read the whole book online, here

[Tsontos]

Originally Posted by terastios

1896 Constantinople, Armenians 9,570

1896 Van, Armenians 8,000

1903-04 Macedonia, Macedonians 14,667

1904 Sassun, Armenians 5,640

wtf???

[Amyntas]

http://hetq.am/eng/society/0610-mardin.html