The Making of the Greek Genocide

Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe

Erik Sjöberg

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785333262
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Völkermord & Kriegsverbrechen

During and after World War I, over one million Ottoman Greeks were expelled from Turkey, a watershed moment in Greek history that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And while few dispute the expulsion's tragic scope, it remains the subject of fierce controversy, as activists have fought for international recognition of an atrocity they consider comparable to the Armenian genocide. This book provides a much-needed analysis of the Greek genocide as cultural trauma. Neither taking the genocide narrative for granted nor dismissing it outright, Erik Sjöberg instead recounts how it emerged as a meaningful but contested collective memory with both nationalist and cosmopolitan dimensions.

CHAPTER 1

OTTOMAN TWILIGHT

THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA

“1922. The East was as sweet as ever—right for a sonnet, that sort of thing.”¹ Thus reads the opening paragraph of Greek author Ilias Venezis’ To noumero 31328 (Number 31,328) about his harrowing experience as a prisoner in a Turkish labor battalion. The late summer of 1922 saw the sudden collapse of the Greek army in Asia Minor at the onslaught of Mustafa Kemal’s Turkish nationalist forces. Within days of the military defeat, the westward roads of Ionia were crammed with fleeing Orthodox Christians, who, fearing the revenge of the victorious Turks, sought to make their way to safety across the Aegean Sea.² The year 1922 stands out as a fatal year in modern Greek history and has acquired the status of a lieu de memoire, a “realm of memory,” to use the terminology made famous by Pierre Nora, in popular historical imagination; epitomized by pictures and stories of the great fire that ravaged the port of Smyrna, as desperate civilians waited in the harbor to be evacuated by ship.

The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Smyrna fire, as these events came to be known as, spelled the doom of a Greek presence east of the Aegean that dated centuries back, creating a humanitarian tragedy that was to leave its imprint on the social fabric of the countries involved for years to come. For both Greece and Turkey, these events and the subsequent peace settlement at Lausanne in 1923 mark the end of the old dreams of empire, characterized by religious and linguistic diversity, and the emergence of the respective countries as modern nation-states, built on the notion of national homogeneity. Thus, the events of 1922 also mark the end of the Ottoman Empire’s long disintegration and a series of simultaneous processes that had been set in motion almost exactly a century before, by the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821.

This book is only indirectly about these events. Nevertheless, since its topic is the ways they are interpreted and made sense of in the present, it is necessary, indeed inevitable, to address them, if only in an incomplete fashion. Since the history of the region is not a matter of general knowledge, the events need to be put into a broader historical context. This entails a longer chronological perspective than the years of World War I and its aftermath, and attention to the interwoven processes of modernization, reform, revolution, and the emergence of rivaling national movements in the late Ottoman Empire.

Christians and Muslims in the Age of Ottoman Reform

As of old, the subjects of the Ottoman sultans were categorized according to religion. This order of things had been established even before the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and meant that the various religious communities of the Empire formed semiautonomous entities, whose leaders were held accountable before the sultan for the doings of their members. Such an entity was called a millet, an Arabic term that originally denoted a “flock of believers” but later in the nineteenth century acquired the meaning of “nation,” under the impact of the Western notion of national self-determination. Save for the dominant Sunni Muslim community, there were a number of such millets for the Jews and for each of the various Christian denominations, from the large Greek-Orthodox one, headed by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, to the Armenian Apostolic Church and the considerably smaller Catholic millet (and the one made up of Protestant converts). In 1914, the year the Empire entered the Great War, fourteen millets co-existed on Ottoman soil.

The millet system allowed for a certain degree of self-governance by the non-Muslim subject populations, as long as the sultan’s authority was not challenged or the legal disputes handled by religious judges did not involve Muslims, in which case Islamic law reigned supreme. The legacy of this premodern institution in historiography has varied greatly depending on the point of perspective. While historians writing about the Ottoman Empire in general terms have emphasized the positive aspects of the millet system, such as the centuries-long peaceful coexistence and religious tolerance, other historians describing imperial history from the viewpoint of one or several of the minorities tend to highlight the inequity inherent in the system, the arbitrary ways in which the Ottomans wielded power, and recurring persecutions. Without doubt the millet system fares well in a comparison with the religious bigotry of early modern Europe, but this harmony came with the price of systematic discrimination 18against non-Muslim subject populations. Eventually, this order would be challenged by external pressure as well as forces within the Empire.

By the early nineteenth century, the once mighty Ottoman Empire had entered a state of decline, which in due time would render it the infamous nickname “the sick man of Europe.” The reasons for this decline can be traced to a set of factors that had made their presence felt in the two preceding centuries; the loss of the Empire’s privileged position in world trade to the Europeans, the halt of Ottoman expansion, and the subsequent reversal of military fortunes, to name but a few. The emergence of Russia as a great power, in part at the expense of the Ottomans, raised expectations among Orthodox Christians of liberation from the sultan’s rule, or at least improvement of their lot. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were to have repercussions in the Ottoman Empire, as the notions of constitutionalism and national self-determination found fertile soil within the mostly Greek-speaking merchant class that had emerged there in the eighteenth century. Successive rebellions in the Balkans paved the way for Serbian autonomy and later independence in the early years of the nineteenth century. In 1821, the Greek-Orthodox subjects of present-day southern Greece rose up in arms against the Ottomans and eventually gained their independence after the intervention of the European great powers. In a similar way, Russian intervention on behalf of Bulgarian insurgents in the 1870s, who were able to establish a nation-state of their own, further undermined the Ottoman hold in the Balkans. At the same time, Russia’s advance in the Caucasus pushed back the Ottoman boundaries there and raised hopes in the emerging Armenian national movement for some kind of autonomy under Russian protection. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the gradual diminishment of the Empire was a fact and its final demise seemed only a matter of time to contemporary observers, if nothing was done to reverse the process.

A series of setbacks suffered in the 1830s, beginning with Greek independence and culminating in the de facto defection of Egypt, initiated an era of reform from above in the Ottoman Empire known as Tanzimat, the “Reorganization,”³ The Tanzimat proclaimed in 1839, followed by a second reform in 1856 at the request of the Empire’s European allies at the time, aimed to restore Ottoman strength and to modernize the armed forces. An important step in this process was to reorganize the tax system and the relations between the Muslim and Christian millets. Non-Muslims were traditionally exempt from military service and forbidden to carry weapons. Instead they had been subjected to a certain tax of exemption. The Tanzimat reforms meant to impose equal obligations on all, thus rendering the military power more effective and avoiding bankruptcy, but they also raised the issue of equal rights for all subjects; by extension also the issue of constitutional government. Many of the promises initially held out by the reform decrees were never implemented, but seeds of change had been sown. From that time onward, the sultans had to face not only the military threats posed by Russia and the European powers, but increasing domestic opposition as well.

The intellectual currents of Europe such as nationalism and constitutionalism not only spread to the Christian subject populations but also to members of the ruling Muslim millet. The independent press that emerged in the 1860s introduced the Turks to debates about these issues and the problems of the Ottoman state. Writers like Namik Kemal propagated the use of the Turkish language as a means of liberating education from the stifling grip of Arabic. He also advocated an Ottoman nationalism, known as Ottomanism, departing from the notion that all who lived in the Empire, regardless of tongue or creed, were Ottomans with equal rights and obligations toward their Ottoman fatherland. This notion of “the unity of nationalities” challenged the traditional understanding of Muslim-Christian relations and offered an alternative to the national aspirations of the various minorities. Namik Kemal’s writings were an important inspiration for the movement of the Young Ottomans, which called for constitutional monarchy as the only means to resolve the Empire’s problems. Muslim Turks were the core of the movement’s adherents, but the promises held out by Ottomanism at least initially attracted intellectuals and activists from the Christian populations. What united liberal Muslims and Christians alike was the discontent with the sultan’s autocracy and the demand for political representation.⁴

Hamidian Rule, Economic Growth, and the Rise of the Young Turks

Financial bankruptcy and a subsequent crisis in the succession to the throne in the 1870s paved the way for a brief political success for the Young Ottoman cause. In order to secure support for his claim to the throne, heir apparent Abdülhamit (later Abdul Hamid II) promised constitutional reform. A constitution was proclaimed in December 1876 and the following year an elected parliament, made up of both Muslim and Christian deputies, convened under the umbrella of Ottoman patriotism. This first experiment with constitutional government did not last long. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 proved to be disastrous for the Empire, which saw its dominion in the Balkans further diminished through the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the emergence of a Bulgarian state under Russian protection, although Great Power intervention restored Ottoman reign in Macedonia, Albania, and Thrace. Further to the east, Russia annexed the regions of Kars, Ardahan, and Batum. Having already secured the throne, Abdul Hamid II used the external threat as a pretext to suspend parliament in 1878, although acting under the pretense that constitutional government would one day be restored.⁵

During the three decades that the so-called Hamidian era lasted, the sultan’s regime evolved into an increasingly repressive and reactionary police state. Abdul Hamid turned his back on many of the reforms initiated by his predecessors and viewed with growing suspicion all calls for the restoration of the political liberties heralded by the 1876 constitution. Complaints advanced by religious minorities against ill-treatment and addresses to international opinion on the subject of civil rights for these groups were viewed as a direct challenge against his rule and the unity of the Empire. The Armenians, in particular, bore the brunt of Abdul Hamid’s wrath, as their political demands were met with a series of massacres in the years 1894–96, which in scholarship on the subject are viewed as the forerunner of the genocide carried out during World War I.⁶ The mass violence against the fellow Christian Armenians aroused a public outcry in the Western press of the time, which made Abdul Hamid even more determined to stamp out domestic opposition and end what he saw as foreign interference in Ottoman affairs. Politically, the language of Ottomanism was replaced with Pan-Islamism as the Empire’s unifying ideology, emphasizing the common creed of the Turkish- and Arabic-speaking peoples and the loyalty to the sultan as caliph of the faithful.

Although the Hamidian era represented a backlash against liberal reform, other aspects of modernization were embraced. The bankruptcy crisis of the 1870s was overcome and foreign capital became available for various projects, after the confidence in the financial stability of the Empire had been restored. German capital financed the railroad works crucial to economic modernization, which served to tie the Empire closer to the interests of Germany, forging an alliance that would survive the downfall of Abdul Hamid and later determine the fate of the Ottoman state in the Great War.

Rapid economic growth also paved way for an emerging Ottoman bourgeoisie, largely made up of elites within the Greek-Orthodox and Armenian millets. With trade as the venue traditionally left open to them and with international networks and know-how, they were able to take advantage of the generous capitulation agreements, which opened up the Ottoman economy to foreign investments, and to a large extent bypass the Ottoman state as middleman, by placing themselves directly under the protection of foreign consulates. A Greek-speaking merchant class had evolved already in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as a new force rivaling the old elite of the Greek-Orthodox Patriarchate’s higher echelons, which fearing the diminishment of the clergy’s traditional authority tended to side with the Sublime Porte in its effort to preserve status quo.⁷ Similar developments occurred within the Armenian millet, which among its ranks saw the emergence of a wealthy class of traders, bankers, bureaucrats and other white-collar professions within the public and private sector. Together, members of the two mentioned Christian groups owned more than half of the private banks in Constantinople in 1912, while none was owned by Muslims, as Charles Issawi has noted.⁸ That year, at the eve of the Balkan Wars and, later, World War I, Ottoman Greeks alone controlled around 49% of the Empire’s firms in industry and crafts, while Armenians accounted for roughly 30% and Muslim Turks for a mere 12%.⁹

This new commercial and administrative elite, with its acquired “Frankish” tastes and manners, was a driving force in the modernization of the Empire, sending their children to European-o...