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The forgotten genocide by Berkan Celebi - 18/12/2018 11:01

The in was the systemic genocidal campaign carried out by the but primarily by the militia movements, under the Turkish National Movement, which formed the Ottoman successor state; The Turkish Republic. The genocide occurred between the year 1914 to 1922 leading to the death of over 750,000 people. The genocide included campaigns of death marches, executions, massacres, the destruction of cultural and religious monuments, and ethnic displacement through means of destruction of homes and cities that were historically and demographically, Greek. An example would be the Catastrophe of Smyrna, today the city known as Izmir, which was the outbreak of a fire in the traditional Greek city begun by Turkish nationalist forces which led to the destruction of three-quarters of the city, its plunder and the death and rape of 10 to 100 thousand people. The remaining population had fled during the fire with an estimated 50 to 400 thousand people cramming into ports in order to flee as refugees whilst an estimated 100 thousand were killed in a subsequent from the city to Central . Campaigns also included forced deportation such as in where looting, burning of settlements, rape, crucifixions of religious leaders and massacres had led a final forced death march killing the remaining Greek community within the city and those who had sought refuge in the city fleeing from other atrocious acts across the nation. An American relief worker noted that ‘‘Bodies lay along the roadside and in the fields everywhere. There was no hope for the Greeks from Malatia to Samsun, and the most fortunate were those who perished at the start.’’. Another campaign: the massacre at Phoenicia had decreased the city populous from 23,000 to 4,000. And the trials in the last year of the campaign killed, en masse, the Greek representatives and religious leaders in the region with almost 450 killed. The campaigns were not limited to Greeks but also towards Assyrians, Kurds, Zazas, Jews, Armenians and other minorities in Turkey. As of so far, in late 2018 only 8 European nations have recognised the events perpetrated by the Turkish fascist organisations and Ottoman government as a genocide against the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian minorities of the late Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. The international body, the International Association of Genocide Scholars has also recognised it as a genocide. The picture is of Lebessos, where 6,500 people once lived but, during the Greco- Turkish war of 1919 its inhabitants were forcefully moved to neighbouring Livissi where later a massacre and a policy of forced deportation through death marches led to Lebessos being a ruined village with no hope of its people returning, few survived by boarding ships to Greece but the Turkish state barred their return to their homeland until 1990. I recently had the honours to meet a survivor of the genocide at the village whom was visiting to show her family their heritage and began to cry when reminded of the past atrocities committed by the Turkish state that they neither recognised as a genocide nor compensated its victims.

The Turkish government recently announced its intentions to bulldoze the ancient village (dating back to the 14th century) in order to construct a hotel.