THE GREEK GENOCIDE BY THE OTTOMAN TURKS

The Smyrna Catastrostrophe and many other acts of the Greek genocide by the Ottoman Turks, that took place in the early 1920s by the Ottoman Turks were witnessed by foreigners, including US Navy officers, and these diaries documented the devastation wrought during those atrocities although very little was done to help the victims.        

A new book called “The Greek Genocide in American Naval War Diaries,” edited by Robert Shenk and Sam Koktzoglu outlines the reports made and the protests engaged in by the US Navy commander in the fateful years 1921-1922.

 

Although technical neutral during the conflict, American ships were allowed to be in the sea off Smyrna and other areas of Asia Minor after World War I and the events unfolding on shore in 1921 and 1922 were recorded by horrified naval officers.

As retired US Naval Admiral, James Stavridis says in the forward of the book, the Americans were in an exceptionally difficult position at the time.  “Shouldn’t you do something?  You are a representative of America after all.  And these are essentially slow killings of men and the heartless deportation of women and children, which will end with the death of many of them as well.”

American vessels were moored just outside the habour of Samsun Turkey from the spring of 1921 to September 1922 when the Smyrna the catastrophe took place.  The officers reported as well as they could to a  disbelieving world hoping that their accounts would have some impact on the devastation that they saw around them. 

A vessel from the Japanese navy, in contrast, took on some Greek refugees who were desperately trying to escape from flaming Smyrna that dark September day.

 

Stavridis asks “Could the US forces have done more?  Should they have taken bold and independent steps beyond what they did?   History would judge this and this volume of the primary source material would help.

In the spring and summer of 1922, the Nationalist Turks stated “that they were afraid that the Christian Greek population of Asia Minor would aid and abet an invading Greek force along the coast as well as join with their forces were already fighting in the western part of Anatolia.   Using this as a pretext the Turks rounded up tens of thousands of ethnic Greeks whose ancestors had lived in the area for 3.000 years, forcing them to take part in death marches, work incessantly which amounted to death.  Systematic rapes and sex slavery along with abductions and forced conventions, 

Similar brutal ethnic cleansing had been waged against the Armenians during World War I, with no repercussions levied on the perpetrators, unfortunately. And although aid workers from the American Near East Relief Society and others reported to the US Naval Commander and officers duly reported to their observations to their superiors, very little was done to help. 

In the end the American  Admiral in charge of Constantinople, Mark Bristol, actually obstructed any publications of the relief reports on the death of Greek deportees in the area  although the original mission of the trust force was to help teams of investigative and relief personnel in response to report the atrocities.

The rationale for this appears to be that he ended pressuring the Turks as they provided more commercial prospect for American interests in the region.

By 1921, reports were already filtering about deportations and other actions taken against the Greeks of Pontus in the Black Sea.

In a message sent by Captain Joyce of the vessel Fox, to the American Admiral  on May 24^th 1921, he states “There is definite policy here for the exterminations of Greek nationals. Everything indicates that hundreds of Greek villages have been completely devastated .”  Later that week on May 27^th he added in another message that the Turkish Military authorities had actually voted for the extermination of the Black Sea Greeks.

By late summer of that year, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal massacres, burning of entire villages deportation of Greeks into the arid interior of the country were commonplace.

Unlike Great Britain, France and Italy the Americans had not been invited to take part in the post-war occupation of Constantinople and therefore were obliged to be neutral. 

The admiral in charge in Constantinople was himself mainly a representative for the US’s commercial interest, which the authors of the book wrote bored ill for the Greeks as they considered the Turkish National Government as the most favourable for USA commercial interests.

Vary rarely did these naval officers who were reporting actions taken by Turks, with whom   Bristol was closely associated  succeed in helping the Greeks  of Asia Minor.

However the ethnic cleansing continued steadily and even after Sumsun itself.  Just after Kemal cause the hostilities against the Greeks, the US official diaries noted that Osman Aga and his Luz forces began four days of murder, rape and looting.

Later that year, the admiral himself reported to his wife  back home what women and children forced to endure in Sumsun what he called a “White Death”, death inflicted by winter cold, sometimes after taking Turkish baths exacerbated by starving

Terrible things were happening to people by the Turkish barbarians.  Why should they remain unpunished?  Does this remind you of modern Turkey?