Greek genocide

"The two present threats to Turkish territorial integrity—by the Greeks and the French—and the one potential threat—an Armenian state—reproduced the proximate CUP ‘rationale’ for the 1915–16 genocide, and the forthcoming violence was sometimes of the same order."

"Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, riven, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole purpose is to dilute, counter, minimise, trivialise and relativise every reference to the events which encompassed a genocide of Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Assyrian Christians in Asia Minor."

"The Turkish army entered Smyrna on September 9. 1922 and soon thereafter the city went up in flames. A fire razed most of the Armenian quarter. It is estimated that 50,000 Christians were killed in the city during this period. No indigenous Christians remained in Smyrna after this holocaust that had deeply stained relations between the two peoples."

"The nation, beginning with the areas of trade and language, was to be cleansed from “foreign elements” in order to establish a national culture and economy….As noted, the 1914 cleansing was initially attempted through a severe economic boycott and by other intimidating measures."

"The period of transition from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the foundation of the Turkish Republic was characterized by a number of processes largely guided by a narrow elite that aimed to construct a modern, national state. One of these processes was the deliberate and planned elimination, indeed extermination, of the Christian (and certain other) minorities... Much less scholarly work has been done on the genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor and Thrace."

"The Turkish state which emerged at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire contained several minorities within its interior, in an attempt to move towards a homogeneous population the Turkish state, which has passed through varying phases of dictatorship and democracy, has used any means possible, including genocide and deportation, to eliminate the Armenians, Greeks and Kurds remaining within Anatolia"

"An estimate of the Pontian Greek death toll at all stages of the anti-Christian genocide is about 350,000; for all the Greeks of the Ottoman empire the toll exceeds half a million, and may approach the figure of 900,000 that a team of US researchers found in the postwar period."

"In the genocide of various minority nationalities that followed, the Turks massacred over 350,000 Greeks."

"… Given these political and cultural ties, wholesale attacks on the Ottoman Greeks would have profoundly angered not only the Entente Powers, but Germany and Austria-Hungary as well, the allies upon whom the Ottomans were deeply dependent. Under these conditions, genocide of the Ottoman Greeks simply was not a viable option. (...) Massacres most likely did take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small number of Armenian survivors, the massacres were apparently restricted to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other "sensitive" regions."

"These genocides not only involved the Holocaust and the killing of the Armenians, the best known of this centurys genocides, but also the lesser known genocide of Gypsies by the Nazis and of Greeks by the Turks"

"The forgotten genocide" is how many scholars, journalists, and filmmakers refer to the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides under the Ottoman Turks during and after World War I."

"The Young Turks’ overall aim was a demographic reorganization of the Ottoman Empire. All deportations were planned and supervised by the “Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants” that belonged to the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior. A relatively small number of government administrators were thus chiefly involved in the coordination of the murder and expulsion of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other minority groups.29 Therefore, the isolated study and emphasis of a single group’s victimhood during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire fails to really understand Young Turks’ motives and aims or its grand design."