by Benny Morris
journalists, such as the New York Tribune’s John Dos Passos, to Izmit to find out the truth. “I pointed out to him how regrettable . . . it was that the true
picture of conditions out here was not before our people at home and instead
they were deceived by Greek and Armenian propaganda.”703 Bristol also ar-
gued that Greek atrocities had triggered Turkish “reprisals” in the Pontus.704
Arnold Toynbee implied the same when he wrote, “The Greek or ga nized
atrocities began about April 18, 1921, the Turkish about June 1, 1921.”705
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
The Greek army carried out a systematic scorched- earth policy when it
retreated from the Sakarya- Sivrihisar area in summer 1921. Some 250 vil-
lages were wholly or partly torched. In most, according to Turkish testimony,
there had been killings and rapes, and mosques were destroyed, despoiled,
or damaged. In one village, Gecek, soldiers “tore to pieces and burned.”
American missionaries visited several villages and confirmed a range of alle-
gations but reported no massacres.706 The British consul- general in Smyrna,
Harry Lamb, described Greek policy: “They are deci ded to leave a desert
behind them. . . . Every thing which they have time and means to move will
be carried off to Greece; the Turks will be plundered and burnt out of house
and home.”707
The Greek army again adopted a scorched- earth policy during its retreat
to the Ionian coast in August– September 1922. “Retreating Greek army
burned eighty percent of the smaller villages[,] nearly every chiftlik [farm] and partially burned almost all larger ones,” a missionary wrote. “We did not pass
a single inhabited place on the road from Broussa.”708 At Bandırma, two- thirds
of the houses were torched, according to a French consul.709 At Karacabey in
October Turks told an American officer that Greeks had murdered 300 people
and torched the town. To the south, the Turks said, Greeks burned the towns
of Manisa, Kasaba, Salihli, and Alaşehir; murdered Turks; and raped hundreds
of girls. In Manisa some of the raped girls were “compelled to drink petro-
leum and . . . were set on fire.” At Salihli, an American lieutenant named Perry
saw one or two disinterred bodies and was persuaded by Turkish eyewitnesses
of the veracity of at least some of the allegations.710 Rendel noted that “the
Greek [government] admit the destruction caused by the Greek army in its
retreat.”711
An indication of the difference in levels of atrocity committed by the two
sides is provided, by default, in a letter sent by Thracian Turkish notables to
Bristol in July 1922. The letter speaks generally of “misdeeds, the likes of
which do not exist in the annals of history” and then gives details: “A Greek
officer, two sergeants, two interpreters and a secretary have occupied the
building of the Mussulman Community of Eskidje.” Or “a society has been
formed with the pretext of finding clothing for poor children. This society
obliges the Moslems to give a minimum sum of 10 drachmas per person. [An]
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
officer’s wife, accompanied by two soldiers, penetrates into houses and her-
self gathers this tax.” Most of the alleged offences listed were similarly trivial.
The complaint also alleged beatings of Turkish peasants, sometimes resulting
in individual deaths, and occasional rapes. There is no mention of or ga nized
massacres or mass rape or mass torture.712
There were other differences. For one, the Greeks punished, or tried to
punish, perpetrators. For instance, after the Yalova- Gemlik incidents, the
10th Division commander, General Georgios Leonardopoulos, was removed
from his post, “severely censured,” and sent back to Athens. Two alleged
massacre perpetrators were arrested and faced court- martial.713 The Turks,
as far as is known, never punished perpetrators of anti- Christian atrocities.
For another, while Westerners were able to verify some relatively small- scale
instances of persecution, efforts to confirm the worst Turkish charges failed
repeatedly. General Harington, the British commander in Constantinople,
wrote that Turkish allegations of Greeks burning villages in Eastern Thrace
have “so far” not been “confirmed” by Allied air reconnaissance or the Al-
lied commissions. The British diplomat Eyre Crowe summarized all this un-
derstatedly: Turkish anti- Greek “allegations [regarding Thrace] . . . are
seldom confirmed.” Indeed, local Turks were generally so well treated that
they displayed “unwillingness” to leave Greek territory, “where they enjoy
considerable prosperity and privileges, and full po liti cal rights.”714 Hole
reported from Salonica that there is “but very slight foundation for the alle-
gations” of massacre, though there was “brigandage,” and Greek refugees
occasionally forcibly entered Turkish homes.715
An illustrative case is the Turks’ dramatically inflated story of the travails
of Cretan Muslims under Greek rule. According to the British consul general
in Crete, the Turks claimed that the Greeks were engaged in a “reign of terror”
with “armed bands proceed[ing] up and down about the country, killing and
wounding Mussulmans.” The diplomat called this “a great exaggeration.”716
He reported in March 1923 that, since September 1, there had been only four
murders in the Canea (Chania) district, one of which was “a vulgar ‘ crime pas-
sionnel.’ ” He wrote, “In view of the amount of bloodshed which goes on
normally in Crete between Christians, these figures really cannot be consid-
ered in any way out of the ordinary.”717
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
The British chargé d’affaires in Athens, Charles Bentinck, was astounded
by the chutzpah under lying Turkish allegations of Greek abuses. He had seen
the difference in Turkish and Greek be hav ior with his own eyes, embodied
by the prisoners of war at Piraeus. The Greek arrivals looked like “ human
wrecks.” The departing Turks, on their way to Constantinople, resembled
“nothing so much as fatted cattle.”718
Conclusion
Between 1894 and 1924 the Christian communities of Turkey and the
adjacent territories of eastern Thrace, Urmia, and parts of the Caucasus—
Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians— were destroyed, in staggered fashion, by
successive Ottoman and Turkish governments and their Muslim agents. The
pro cess of ethnic- religious cleansing was characterized by rounds of large-
scale massacre, alongside systematic expulsions, forced conversions, and
cultural annihilation that amounted to genocide. At the end of the nineteenth
century, Christians had constituted 20 percent of the population of Asia Minor.
By 1924 their proportion had fallen to 2 percent.1
The destruction of the Christian communities was the result of deliberate
government policy and the will of the country’s Muslim inhabitants. The mur-
ders, expulsions, and conversions were ordered by officials and carried out
by other officials, soldiers, gendarmes, policemen and, often, tribesmen and
the civilian inhabitants of towns and villages. All of this occurred with the ac-
press.
This is the inescapable conclusion that emerges from the massive
documentation— American, British, French, German and Austro- Hungarian—
that we have studied over the past de cade. The hundreds of thousands of
reports, letters, and diary entries produced by Western diplomats, officers,
missionaries, businessmen, and travelers who lived in Turkey or passed
through it— especially Anatolia— during 1894–1924 are clear and unchal-
lengeable. Moreover, the Ottoman- Turkish archives, which over the past
Conclusion
century have been purged of directly incriminating evidence, corroborate this
conclusion through a mass of indirectly supportive documentation.
The number of Christians slaughtered between 1894 and 1924 by the
Turks and their helpers— chiefly Kurds but also Circassians, Chechens and,
on occasion, Arabs— cannot be accurately tallied and remains a matter of dis-
pute. For de cades, Armenian spokesmen and historians have zoomed in on
World War I and have referred to 1-1.5 million Armenians murdered during
1915–1916, the core genocidal event during the 30- year period. Recent
works, including by Armenian historians, have revised that figure substan-
tially downwards. A major initial prob lem is that there are no agreed figures
for the number of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1914. Secondly, no
proper count was made of the number of Armenians who survived and
reached foreign lands. Most historians estimate that on the eve of WWI, there
were 1.5–2 million Armenians in the empire, mostly in Anatolia, and that be-
tween 800,000 and 1.2 million of them were deported. Raymond Kevorkian
has written that 850,000 were deported and that “the number of those who
had perished exceeded 600,000” by late 1916.2 Presumably he believes that
more died during the following years. Fuat Dündar maintains that about
800,000 were deported and that altogether 664,000— consisting of those
who were slaughtered in place, died during the deportation marches, or died
in their places of resettlement— were dead by war’s end.3 Taner Akçam has
estimated, mainly on the basis of Talât’s calculations in late 1917, that some
1.2 million Armenians were deported. Of these only 200,000 or so were alive
by late 1916, implying that one million were murdered in 1915–1916.4 None
of these estimates include the number of Armenians killed before and after
World War I.
There is general agreement that about a quarter of a million Armenians
fled the empire during the war, most of them to Rus sia, and that a similar
number survived the deportations. Moreover about 300,000 Armenians re-
mained in Turkey through the war, never deported. A hundred thousand of
them were in Constantinople and smaller numbers lived elsewhere, mainly
in Smyrna, Edirne, and Konya.5 Looking at the whole 1894–1924 period, to
those murdered during the Great War should be added at least 200,000 Ar-
menians who died during and as a result of the massacres of 1894–1896 and
their aftermath. Another 20,000–30,000 were slaughtered in 1909 during
Conclusion
the Adana pogroms. Many thousands more were slaughtered by the Turks
during 1919–1924. It is therefore probable that the number of Armenians
killed over the thirty- year period, 1894–1924, exceeded one million, per-
haps substantially. In this number we include not only those murdered out-
right but also those deliberately placed in circumstances of privation and
disease that resulted in death.
The number of Greeks murdered during 1894–1924 is also uncertain, for
many of the same reasons. The number of Greeks living in the Ottoman
Empire in 1913 is in dispute, though most historians speak of 1.5 to 2 mil-
lion. Few Greeks were killed in 1894–1896. But hundreds, and perhaps
thousands, died during the first half of 1914 as the Turks tried to ethnically
cleanse the Aegean coast and western Asia Minor. Many tens of thousands,
and perhaps hundreds of thousands, were murdered by the Turks during the
Great War, in the course of the brutal deportations inland of Greek coastal
communities and in the army’s labor battalions. Most significantly hundreds
of thousands were murdered during 1919–1924, when the Turks systemati-
cally massacred army- aged men and deported hundreds of thousands of
men, women, and children to the interior and then, in a second stage, to the
coasts, from which the survivors were shipped off to Greece. Prominent
among the victims in 1920–1922 were those deported from the Pontic coast
and Smyrna.
Tessa Hofmann, a historian of the ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Greeks,
has argued that there were 2.7 million Greeks in the Ottoman Empire before
1914, and 1.2 million reached Greece in 1922–1925; hence, 1.5 million were
murdered.6 But the figure 2.7 million is likely an exaggeration. Moreover, sev-
eral hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks fled to Rus sia and other countries
during 1914–1924, and several hundred thousand escaped deportation
altogether.
Most Greek historians accept the League of Nations’ estimate from 1926
that about half of Asia Minor’s estimated 2,000,000 Greeks died during 1914–
1924.7 At the opposite extreme, Justin McCarthy, a pro- Turkish demographer
and historian, has written that “between 1912 and 1922, approximately
300,000 Anatolian Greeks were lost . . . from starvation, disease and murder.” 8
This phrasing omits from the count Greeks murdered before 1912— admittedly,
a very small number— and those killed after 1922, a larger number. McCarthy
Conclusion
also omits altogether what befell Greeks in Thrace, Constantinople, and the
Caucasus.
The number of Assyrian Christians murdered during 1894–1924 is also
uncertain. Donald Bloxham has estimated that “perhaps 250,000” Anatolian
and borderlands Persian Assyrians, of a total population of 619,000, were mas-
sacred by the Turks and their helpers during World War I.9 But his estimate
does not appear to take account of Assyrians massacred before the war or
during 1919–1924.
The preceding assessments suggest that the Turks and their helpers mur-
dered, straightforwardly or indirectly, through privation and disease, between
1.5 and 2.5 million Christians between 1894 and 1924.10
In recent de cades historians have written well and persuasively about the
Armenian Genocide of 1915–1916. But what happened in Turkey over 1894–
1924 was the mass murder and expulsion of the country’s Christians—
Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians. All suffered massive loss of life, all were
equally shorn of their worldly goods, and nearly all who survived— save the
Christians of Constantinople— were expelled from the country. In the wake
of their demise, the ethnic- religious infrastructure and culture of all three
groups were erased, their homes, neighborhoods, towns and villages, churches,
schools and cemeteries demolished or appropriated and converted to Muslim
use. In the end, no denomination was shown “favoritism”; all suf
fered the
same fate.
It is true that the ruling Turkish elite was consistently most hostile to the
Armenians, who suffered the largest number of fatalities during the thirty- year
period. And the purge of the Christians kicked off in 1894–1896 with the mass
murder of Armenians, though some Assyrians also were killed. During the fol-
lowing de cades the Turks and their helpers intermittently killed and expelled
Armenians en masse, all the while designating them a disease that deserved
and necessitated extirpation. (The Turks’ language— “cancer,” “microbes”—
would be echoed years later in the Nazis’ description of the Jews.) Even in
1922, when few Armenians remained in the country and the Greek Army had
just massacred Muslims in its helter- skelter retreat to the Ionian coast, the
Turks initially and deliberately murdered thousands of Armenians and only
subsequently turned their guns and knives on Smyrna’s Greeks. Overall,
during 1894–1924, the Turks seem to have murdered most of the empire’s
Conclusion
Armenians while expelling rather than murdering most of its Greeks. Another
indication of the overriding animosity toward the Armenians is that, through
much of this period, they were barred from leaving the country— and marched
to destruction— whereas Greeks were generally encouraged to expatriate.
There are several reasons for this differential treatment. Some are rooted
in specific circumstances of time and place; others are more general. Most im-
portantly the Armenians posed the first nationalist challenge to the Ottoman
Empire and did so in its Asiatic core. Their intellectual elite took to na-
tionalism a de cade or two earlier than the Ottoman Greek elite (and, for that
matter, the intellectual fathers of Arab nationalism). Moreover, the Armenian
nationalist claim was for autonomy or even in de pen dence in the Turks’ Ana-
tolian heartland, not in its coastal peripheries. And the Armenians resorted
to terrorism. This terrorism was no doubt a consequence of the Armenians’
desperation, a desperation partly resulting from the blighting vassaldom of
their rural masses. Unlike the Ottoman Greeks— who, since 1830, had the
