A propos the tragic Armenian Genocide which is a very popular item on international news, recently I wish to remind my friends and readers that this was not the only atrocity committed by the Ottoman Turks.
The Greek Genocide was the systematic killing of the Christian Greek of Anatolia in Turkey, which was carried out during World War I and its aftermath (1914-1922) on the basis of their religion and ethnicity. It was instigated by the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish National Movement against the Greek population of the Empire, including massacres, forced deportations, involvement in death marches, expulsions, executions, and destructions of Greek Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments.
Several hundreds of thousands of Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire were brutally murdered during this period. Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece. Some found refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire.
By late 1922, most of the Greeks of Asia Minor had either been murdered or fled. Those remaining were transferred to Greece under the terms of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey which formalized the exodus and barred the return of the refugees.
The Allies of World War I condemned the Ottoman-sponsored massacres. In 2007, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution recognizing the Ottoman campaign against the Christian minorities, including the Greeks as a genocide, Some other organizations have also recognized the Ottoman atrocities as genocide, as have the governments of Greece, Cyprus, the United States, Sweden, Armenia, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic.
Among the causes of the Ottoman campaign against the Greek Christian population was that they would welcome liberation by the enemies of the Ottoman Empire. The belief of certain Turks that in order to form a modern, nationalistic country they must purge their "enemies" in order to create an ethnically based Turkish Nation. Shame on these despicable criminals.
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