Statement
On around 15th September Greek television revived the
issue of the Asia Minor catastrophe; once again, the
leading players were stars of the patriotic PASOK party,
such as Mr. G. Kapsis. This is a politician whose record
includes the proposal which he laid before the Greek
Parliament on 12th May 1997, together with MPs G.
Haralambous and G. Diamantidis, that the 15th September be
made an official day of remembrance in commemoration of
the genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor.
Speaking on television Mr. Kapsis had much to say about
his own version of history, but forgot, of course, to
mention the crimes perpetrated by the Greek army before
the Turkish troops occupied Smyrna, where – it is true –
terrible crimes were committed (among the victims of these
crimes were members of the author’s family).
One might also mention the crime of genocide committed by
Greek troops against the civilian Turkish population of
Aydin on 28th and29th June 1919.
To quote from the author’s own work, Asia Minor and the
origins of the refugees, page 123: While the Turkish
forces counter-attacked against the Greeks, their
successful approach to the bridge over the River Maiandros
was the signal the Greeks had been awaiting. They first of
all set fire to the four corners of the Turkish quarter,
and then placed machine guns and armed soldiers and
civilians at street corners, in high buildings and on the
minarets. From these positions they opened fire on the
local people, who attempted in terror to flee their
burning houses. Injured people lying in the streets were
compelled to return to their homes, where many poor people
– old people, women and children – were burned alive.
In all 4400 people died – 4000 Muslims and only 400
non-Muslims. An act of genocide perpetrated by the Greek
army against the entire Turkish population of the city of
Aydin.
When it came to genocide and ethnic cleansing in the
Balkans, it was in fact the Greek army which led the way.
The first example was the slaying of 32,000 unarmed Turks
and Jews in Tripoli in 1821, and the ethnic cleansing of
the entire Slav-speaking population of Kilkis in 1913.
It is time Mr. Kapsis remembered the old proverb: People
in glass houses…
OPEN LETTER
(After receipt of this letter, and after certain articles
and letters in the newspaper Avyi Simitis withdrew from
the National Printing Office the decree, already signed,
and – having replaced the word ‘genocide’ with the word ‘
memory’, sent it to the Council of State for their
opinion.)
To:
The Right Honorable Kostas Simitis
Prime Minister of Greece
Athens
Dr. Georgios Nakratzas
Chest physician
Postbus 5159
3008AD Rotterdam
The Netherlands
E-Mail: g.nakratzas@wxs.nl info@nakratzas.com
Side: www.nakratzas.com
Rotterdam, 20th February 2001
Subject: Presidential Decree on the Genocide of the Greeks
of Asia Minor
I have followed with interest the reaction of the Greek
press to the proposal by Mr. Venizelos, Minister for
Culture in the Greek government, concerning the signing of
a Presidential Decree on making the 15th September an
official day of remembrance of the genocide of the Greeks
of Asia Minor by the Turks in 1922. The articles in the
newspaper Avyi on 18th February 2001 were particularly
impressive and informative.
As a writer and the descendant of refugees from Asia
Minor, I believe it is incumbent on me to comment on the
articles mentioned above, in order to fill in certain gaps
in historical memory, especially that of the younger
generation in Greece.
The draft law laid before Greek Parliament on 12th May
1997 by the Members of Parliament G. Haralambous, G.
Diamantidis and G.Kapsis, on the introduction of the
aforesaid official day of remembrance, contains the
following words: …in a geographical region which saw the
magnificent achievement of the idea of the multi-ethnic
state with Greek culture and consciousness, either at the
time of the heirs of Alexander, or during the Roman era,
the years of Byzantium or the age of the Ottomans…
This nationalistic text submitted by the three MPs
reflects a conscious or unwitting absence of historical
knowledge in respect of the issue of the ethnic
consciousness of the Greek-speaking people of Asia Minor
during the period of the Roman Empire of the East
(Byzantium) or the Ottoman Empire.
During the Byzantine era and the early part of the Ottoman
Empire the Greek-speaking but actually multiethnic
populations of Asia Minor did not regard themselves as
Greeks but Romaioi, a word later corrupted to Romioi.
National identities were invented by the theoretical
thinkers of the western Renaissance, and mainly used after
the French Revolution to combat theocracy and feudalism,
systems which characterized the social structure of the
various empires.
Concepts such as multinational state with Greek ethnic
consciousness are a stark contradiction, in themselves
contradicting the views of the MPs introducing this bill.
At another point in their text the 3 MPs claim that the
backbone of Greek civilization was uprooted, together with
all its traditions and a rich three-thousand year Greek
presence, with no attempt made to save them…
The text is an attempt to present the Greek presence in
western Asia Minor and Smyrna as continuing uninterrupted
over the last three thousand years. This is a notion quite
at odds with historical reality – a reality of which the
three MPs are probably ignorant.
It is well known from historical sources that in 1333
Smyrna was a city in ruins, while in 1390, the date of the
fall of the last Byzantine bastion in Asia Minor,
Philadelpheia (Alasehir) the whole region, both Smyrna and
its hinterland, was literally depopulated of Christians.
In 1402 the Han of Mongolia, Tamerlaine, slaughtered or
enslaved all the remaining Christian inhabitants of Smyrna
and its hinterland, who had fled there for refuge, in
order to punish the Sultan Vayazit. In a recent academic
study Ms. Anagnostopoulouinforms us that in 1520 in the
villayet of Aydin the Christian population amounted to
just 0.9% of the total population, increasing by the end
of the same century to 1.55%. Even as late as 1717 the
city of Smyrna had 19 mosques, 18 synagogues and just 2
Orthodox churches.
A wholesale migration of Orthodox Christians into the
villayet of Aydin took place after 1839, following the
publication of the Tanzimat– a decree promulgated by the
Sultan to the effect that both Christian and Muslim serfs
were now free to leave the feudal estates.
The Orthodox economic migrants of the villayet of Aydin
came from the islands or the Balkan lands of the empire,
settling there to seek work. It is for the descendants of
these migrants that the three Greek MPs are now claiming a
three-thousand year presence in the region!
In 1912, according to the statistics compiled by
Sotiriadis, and used officially by the government of
Eleftherios Venizelos, in the villayetof Aydin – a huge
region consisting of the sadzak of Magnesia, Smyrna, Aydin,
Denisli and Mendese – out of a total population of
1,659,529 the Orthodox Christians accounted for 622,810,
or 37.75% of the population, while Anagnostopoulou puts
the figure lower at 435,398 or 26.2%. Of the 622,810
Greeks cited by Sotiriadis as inhabitants of the villayet
of Aydin, 395,559, or 63.5%, lived in six coastal
districts of the sadzak of Ismir , i.e. in a relatively
small strip along the shore. The remaining Orthodox
Christians were submerged in the great sea of Muslim
populations.
The Presidential Decree also contains the following
statement:
…Thus more than 1.5 million Greeks of Asia Minor were
forced, mainly after the dramatic events of 1922, to
abandon the homes of their forebears in Asia Minor and
settle, as refugees, in Greece and in other regions…
Despite the fact that the text of the Presidential Decree
now awaiting signature is intended to make the 15th
September an official day of remembrance, as a physician –
even though my special area is the lungs, rather than the
mind - I have to point out that the authors of the text
are showing definite clinical symptoms of historical
amnesia!
How little the homes of the Greeks of Asia Minor were
really the ‘homes of their forefathers’ we have made clear
in the preceding paragraph.
What the authors of the text fail to mention is the
question of what the Greek army was doing in the regions
of Proussa, Kutahya, AfionKara-Hisar and the Sangari River
– regions where the Greek population was either an
insignificant minority or entirely non-existent.
Greeks were a minority only in the sadzak of Proussa,
where, according to Sotiriadis, of a total population of
353,976, Orthodox Christians numbered 85,505, or 23.3%,
mainly settled in the coastal areas.
According to Anagnostopoulou, the Romioi of the sadzak of
Proussa numbered not 85,505 but just 56,233, while in the
other regions mentioned above the number of Greeks was
negligible, if indeed there was a Greek presence at all.
In 1922 the Greek army in this region was no more than an
army of occupation, conducting an imperialist-expansionist
campaign within the heart of Turkish national territory.
The text of the Presidential Decree also states that the
Greeks were compelled – mainly after the dramatic events
of 1922 – to leave their homes, but it is silent on two
important details, i.e. what was the behaviour of the
Greek populations before the battle of Ankara in 1922, and
who imposed the compulsory exchange of populations.
To examine the first of these questions we might take as
an example the behaviour of the Greek population of
Proussa, who – according to Anagnostopoulou – amounted to
5100 individuals out of a population of 85,600.
The writer Adamantiadis, descended from a Proussa family,
describes how the occupation of Eski-Sehir by the Greek
army was celebrated by the Greeks of Proussa with a
torchlit procession, while the Greek inhabitants of
military age, although they were Ottoman subjects, joined
the ranks of the Greek army of occupation and fought
against the Turkish army of liberation, led by Kemal
Attaturk, on the nearby front.
To really appreciate the importance of the events narrated
by Adamantiadis, one needs to ask oneself how the Greek
authorities would have reacted after the Second World War
if – during the Bulgarian occupation of eastern Macedonia
– the Slav-speaking Macedonians of Serres and Drama had
welcomed with torchlit processions the Bulgarian troops,
and if some of them had donned Bulgarian uniform and
fought against the Greek army at some point of a
hypothetical battlefront.
We are well aware of the moral contempt felt by the Greek
people for those security squads wearing German uniforms
during the Occupation of our own country. That the people
of Proussa should have fled before the imminent onslaught
of the Turkish army is all too understandable.
It is well known that the Greeks in areas not close to the
battlefields were forced to flee as refugees, like, for
example, the people ofCappadocia and eastern Thrace.
In the study by Svolopoulos – published by the extreme
nationalist Society for Macedonian Studies in Thessaloniki
– it is explicitly stated that the compulsory exchange of
populations was not proposed, and insisted on, by the
Turkish government, but by the Greek government of
Eleftherios Venizelos. Svolopoulos states that since the
Turkish government was opposed to the exchange, there was
a widespread feeling within the Greek government that
500,000 Turks from northern Greece should be forcibly
removed from their homes and taken to somewhere on the
Turkish coastline. Svolopoulos writes that this idea was
abandoned because of the very poor impression it would
have made on the Europeans. In the end the Turkish
government was obliged to consent to the Greek proposal
for a compulsory exchange of populations.
It is not my purpose in writing this letter to hurl
allegations of crimes committed in other times, in
different social systems with different moral standards.
My purpose is instead to support the statement made by
Professor Antonis Bredimas of the University of Athens, in
an article he wrote for the Avyi newspaper on 18th
February 2001, as follows:
But if one wants to look ahead and not back into the past,
one must take to heart the recommendation made recently by
a fellow academic of mine: The two peoples should
recognize what they have suffered at each other’s hands,
and ask forgiveness for what they have done to one
another.
Dr. Georgios Nakratzas
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GEORGIOS NAKRATZAS
ASIA MINOR AND THE ORIGINS OF THE REFUGEES
The imperialist Greek policy of 1922 and the Asia Minor
catastrophe
BATAVIA PRESS, Thessaloniki, 2000
Central Distribution in Greece
Thessaloniki: tel. 031 237463 Athens: tel. 01 3639336
ISBN: 960-85800-6-4
GEORGIOS NAKRATZAS
Anadolu ve Rum Gocmenlerin Kokeni
The imperialist Greek policy of 1922 and the Asia Minor
catastrophe
Central Distribution in Turkey
KITABENI, Catalcesme No 54/a, Istanbul
Istanbul Tel : 212.5124328 212.5112143
Western
Intervention in the Balkans: Recurring History, Tragic
Results
by Christopher Deliso
balkanalysis.com
http://www.antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=10470
In December 1904, a disenchanted Norwegian peacekeeper in
the Balkans penned the following:
"[W]hen you have abandoned a position in your own country,
hoping to be able to use your capacity in helping a
suffering people, and you see yourself reduced to playing
the part of a fool in a pitiable comedy, then you cannot
feel at ease, and I am longing for the day when I can
return home."
The peacekeeper, Capt. Karl Ingvar Nandrup, had been
assigned to turbulent Macedonia to help oversee a human
rights reform package known as the Mürzsteg Reforms, after
the Austrian hunting lodge where Austrian and Russian
officials had negotiated it. The reforms were to be
implemented by the Ottoman Turks, whose centuries-old
control of the territory was weakening amid numerous local
insurrections. In response, the Turkish authorities
launched a bloody crackdown on the revolutionaries.
Macedonian civilians, however, were more often than not
targeted. Thousands were forced to flee their homes.
Unspeakable atrocities were carried out, and widely
reported in the European and American newspapers, leading
to increasing cries for the West to do something to stop
the mayhem.
A Look in the Mirror
Does this story sound familiar? The similarities with
modern Balkan events could indeed not be more striking.
Then as now, an established Balkan power, accused of
genocide and incompetent management of its own territory,
was targeted for foreign intervention. In 1902, it was the
Ottoman Turkish Empire, allegedly oppressing Christians,
whereas almost a century later, it was Serbia, allegedly
oppressing Muslims.
There are some differences, of course. The major one was
that unlike NATO’s bombing of the Serbs in Bosnia and
Kosovo, theMürzsteg Program was not a military
intervention. It was simply a good-will arrangement in
which Western observers, not armies, were installed in
Macedonia to verify whether Ottoman Turkey – "the sick man
of Europe" – was implementing agreed reforms.
The prevailing geopolitical situation was different as
well. Back then there was no United Nations or NATO, but
instead an array of colonialist European Great Powers
locked in a series of mutual defensive alliances. There
was also no Middle East question; the Turks still held
sway over large parts of the Arab world, there was no
state of Israel, and today’s "oil politics" hardly
existed. And the United States, while an emerging power,
did not yet rule the world.
For all these differences, there are uncanny resemblances
between the West’s Balkan intervention of a century ago
and its actions today, resemblances that indicate that we
have not learned from the region’s history.
As was the case at the turn of the 20th century, a large
Balkan country was splintering during a period of
institutional decay, economic deterioration, and
corruption, as well as armed nationalist movements backed
sometimes by outside powers. In both cases, the dominant
part (Serbia in Yugoslavia, the Turks in the Ottoman
Empire) fought a losing battle to maintain their country’s
territorial integrity. The Turks then, and the Serbs
today, were embittered by the perceived hostility of
Western media and governments to their attempts to
preserve the state. These attempts inevitably led to
foreign intervention, which, though in both cases
ultimately conducted with national self-interests in mind,
was depicted as altruistic and high-minded, motivated
merely by humanitarian concern.
Interests, Influence, and Intervention
The foreign intervention in Macedonia during the Mürzsteg
Reform period (1902-1909) was not military, nor did it
replace the Ottoman civil administration. It was only
meant to augment it and to ensure improved treatment of
the non-Turkish population, a mix of Greeks, Bulgarians,
Macedonians, Albanians, Vlachs, and Serbs, among others.
The modern Western interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were
of course more all-encompassing, leading to a strong
international role in governance in Bosnia and an outright
caretaker regime in Kosovo under the UN and NATO, since
1995 and 1999 respectively.
However, this difference does not mean that the modern
descendent of the Mürzsteg do-gooders have been much more
effective. We must remember that a century ago the
representatives, or "civil agents" as they were known, of
the Great Powers were national delegates working for their
own national interests, at a time when that world order
was of paramount importance.
Today’s foreign officials in Kosovo are instead
representatives of multinational organizations, such as
NATO and the UN. No one is prepared to die for these
groups, of course, and so, as with their unarmed
predecessors a century ago, the interventionists have all
too often just stood and watched as the atrocities
unfolded. Further compounding the endemic disinterest to
stand up for the proclaimed goal of creating a safer and
better Kosovo is the fact that many of the civil and
police officials have been hired through contracting
firms, meaning their allegiances lie ultimately with those
companies, not with their country, the mission, or the UN.
However, then as now the focus of world attention has been
skewed, directed more on the local actors than on the
foreign machinations going on behind the scenes. We are
constantly told that the Serbs, Albanians, and whoever
else are the ultimate masters of their destinies and just
need to make the "right" decisions to ensure peaceful
co-existence. However, digging under the surface to read
rarely-consulted primary sources such as Capt. Nandrup’s
1904 report, one clearly sees how little has changed in
the West’s behavior in the Balkans over the past century.
During the Mürzsteg years, the European Great Powers were
locked in a sordid battle for influence. The Ottoman
Empire was in its death throes, and the Europeans were
looking to gain from this. The process played out in the
exotic Balkans, where the "final status" ofMacedonia, like
Kosovo today, was being called into question. Different
powers favored different outcomes. Some sought to preserve
the status quo, others to make a fully independent country
of it, still others sought to divide the territory.
The international peacekeepers who were supposed to be
overseeing the reforms instead lobbied for their national
interests and spied on one another. Austria was fearful of
potential Italian closeness with the Albanians, Russia was
not to be allowed to let ally Serbia get a "warm-water
port" on the Adriatic, and so on. The Turkish-controlled
Bosporus Straits, connecting the Aegean and Black Seas,
captured everyone’s attention and figured into the
equation as well, especially in relation to Bulgarian and
Greek affairs. All of these states made a ring around the
disputed province of Macedonia.
Failure and Foreboding
Manipulating the simmering dispute during the Mürzsteg
years, which saw erratic, low-intensity warfare,
spontaneous crackdowns, and terrorist attacks, was part of
a larger struggle for influence and control over the major
communications and economic corridors in the Balkans.
Issues of self-determination, oppression, and national
sentiment were cynically used by outside powers to mask
their own ambitions. These issues meant a lot to the local
actors involved, but little or nothing to the Great
Powers.
In the end, the Mürzsteg Program observers proved
powerless to stop the violence and human rights
violations, much as today’s UN mission in Kosovo has
failed to do so in Kosovo since 1999. And so the Program
ended in failure in 1909, after facts on the ground – the
1908 "Young Turk" reformist revolution in Constantinople
and the resulting Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia –
ended the charade that peace and harmony could be made to
prevail.
Within four years, full-scale war would return to the
region when the combined armies of Serbia, Greece,
Bulgaria, and Montenegrodrove the Ottomans from Macedonia,
and almost from Europe itself. The First Balkan War was
followed by a second in 1913, in which the erstwhile
alliance broke over who should possess Macedonia. Greece
and Serbia fought off a weak but aggressive Bulgaria,
which then lost significant territory it had been
allotted. Macedonia was carved up between them. Ottoman
Turkey’s losses inspired other separatist movements
elsewhere in the empire, while Serbia’s great gains
alarmed the Hapsburgs in Vienna, who pushed for the
unprecedented creation of an Albanian state as a means of
denying Serbian expansion to the Adriatic.
On the eve of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in
1914, therefore, the stage was set for a much larger war.
A resentful Bulgariaand Turkey licked their wounds, while
an exuberant Serbia and Greece looked to improve on recent
successes. The European powers, whose interests were
intimately tied to control of the Balkan and Mediterranean
regions, plotted against one another with these factors in
mind.
"Learning from History" in the Balkans
The situation today is not much different to that of
1904-1908. Pressure in the West to wind up peacekeeping
missions in Bosnia and Kosovo has increased dramatically,
with a final solution to both countries’ problems being
demanded. Certain Western powers want to see a strongly
centralized federal republic in Bosnia, in which the
ethnically Serb half would have to concede many powers to
a Muslim half which it has little reason to trust, whereas
Albanian-majority Kosovo is meant to be independent from
Serbia. Allies of Serbia, most notably Russia, but several
other European countries as well, are not in favor of
Kosovo independence. Behind all the rhetoric of
self-determination and sovereignty, however, are economic
and political interests of today’s Great Powers.
That this has been ignored owes partially to the
conventional wisdom on what "history" means in the
Balkans. When any reference is made to "learning from
history" in the Balkans today, it has usually arisen in
the context of comparing the Yugoslav civil wars of the
1990s to World War II, and invariably expressed in highly
emotive language. The result is that supporters of modern
Western policy in the Balkans have successfully
characterized Milosevic-era Serbia’s treatment of Bosnian
and Albanian Muslim secessionists as analogous to the
Jewish Holocaust. If current EU president Germany gets its
way, it will become a criminal act to deny this.
Incredibly enough, it is implied that a contained civil
war to stop internal dissolution (4,000 war deaths in
Kosovo, just over 50,000 civilian deaths on all sides in
Bosnia) is supposed to be comparable to the deliberate
extermination of 6 million Jews by a fascist state with
plans for world domination.
How did this happen? Simple. The nature of war has changed
over the past century, with the control of information and
image-management now of equal or greater importance with
military results for deciding the final outcome of a
conflict – and, significantly, how it is remembered. In
the wars of the 1990s, the Muslim sides, as well as
Catholic Croatia paid millions for powerful
Washingtonpublic relations firms to champion their causes.
Serbia failed to do the same, and paid the price. War
crimes against Serbian civilians were thus not heard or
addressed in media and the halls of power with the same
frequency as were those against Bosniaks, Croats, or
Albanians.
While the modern Balkan civil wars cannot reasonably be
compared in any way to World War II, they do have a lot in
common with the volatile decade that preceded World War I,
the "Great War," the one that was supposed to be Europe’s
last. The aftermath of that war hastened the demise of the
colonial system, introduced the United States as a major
global player, and established a new international order
with the League of Nations, the direct ancestor of the
United Nations. This international order remains with us
today, though events in the same region that indirectly
led to its creation, the Balkans, may again transform it
today.
Forgotten Connections and Future Unrest
Nevertheless, the Mürzsteg Reform Program has been
obliterated from popular memory. Even World War I is
rarely remembered. Its intimate connection to the Balkans
has all but vanished as well. When it is, the popular
memory conjures up images of how one deranged Bosnian Serb
gunman, Gavrilo Princip, single-handedly started a world
conflagration by assassinating Austrian Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, bringing about the inevitable declarations and
counter-declarations of war by the European Great Powers.
But that is far too simplistic.
Some years before that conflict, the German chancellor
Otto Von Bismarck prophetically said that "if there is
ever another war inEurope, it will come out of some damned
silly thing in the Balkans." Popular history has linked
Bismarck’s prediction with the assassination of the heir
to the Austro-Hungarian throne.
Yet as we have seen, the Balkan connection to the Great
War is much deeper and less arbitrary than that. The whole
story is rarely told, but in light of the facts, it
becomes clear that the modern Balkan wars have much less
to do with World War II than with the decade or so of
turbulence, intervention, and intrigue which preceded
World War I, a conflict which fundamentally altered the
world order. Worryingly, because of another "damned silly
thing" in the Balkans – that is, another foolish and
self-defeating foreign intervention – a new period of
conflict is emerging in which the entire world order is
about to change once more.
Critics might scoff at this possibility, arguing that the
danger of renewed conflict in the Balkans over Kosovo’s
final status cannot drag the world into war, because the
old system of balanced inter-state alliances is no longer
in existence. However, the prospect that Kosovo
independence might serve as a precedent for violent
secessionist movements around the world, originally
pointed out by Russian President Vladimir Putin, is
increasingly being mentioned by commentators and officials
from around the world. Everywhere from Scotland and the
Basque country to the Caucasus republics, Taiwan, and
Tibetan are being mentioned as possible places where the
Kosovo Albanian argument validating secession by recourse
to self-determination could be put to the test. The
creation or reactivation of contained but volatile pockets
of violence in far-flung parts of the world would make an
already asymmetric and unpredictable world order
impossible to keep under control.
Nevertheless, the UN mission in Kosovo and its supporters,
in an attempt to expedite independence for the province,
have gone out of their way to deny this scenario, and have
generally tried to cover up their own incompetence with
vague but optimistic rhetoric about Kosovo’s bright
future.
Nevertheless, the reality today has a lot more in common
with that of 1904, when the disheartened Norwegian, Capt.
Nandrup, wrote this about his own peacekeeping mission in
the Balkans: "[I]n my opinion, the report of the civil
agents aims to deceive Europe and cover the deplorable
failure of the Mürzsteg program and the pitiable comedy
played by the Powers on the Balkan Peninsula." This
epitaph resonates still today, with another "pitiable
comedy" in the Balkans heading once again towards a tragic
end.
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