In recent years, some strong research has begun to emerge on the genocides against Armenians and Assyrians. But there is scarcely any reliable information available on the Pontic Genocide, as both academia and opinion makers largely ignore the subject [...]
May 19, 1919 has different and even opposing meanings in Turkey and Greece, just as May 15, 1948, marks both the establishment of Israel and, for Palestinians, the start of the Nakba (“catastrophe”).
In Turkey, this date marks the first step that led to the establishment of the Turkish Republic, while for descendants of Ottoman Greeks and Greece it marks the end of the centuries-long Pontic Greek presence on the shores of the Black Sea. Whereas Turks celebrate May 19, Greeks mourn it.
Researcher Tamer Çilingir summarised the issue in a 2016 interview with the Turkish-Armenian daily Agos:
“The Pontic Genocide is the last phase of Great Christian Genocide that started in 1894 with Sultan Abdulhamid’s massacres against Armenians and continued with the Union and Progress Party’s 1915 slaughter that killed 1.5 million Armenians and almost 300,000 Assyrians. People that had lived for 600 years in Pontus were either forced to convert to Islam or massacred between 1914 and 1923 or were banished in 1923 during the Turkish-Greek population exchange.
Between 1914 and 1921, some 353,000 Pontic Greeks were killed in the region: 134,078 in Amasya, Samsun, and Giresun; 64,582 in Tokat; 17,479 in Maçka; and 21,448 in Şebinkarahisar, along with 50,000 who died during the population exchange.
With the arrival of Mustafa Kemal — the founder of Turkey, who was later given the surname Atatürk, meaning “father of the Turks” — to Samsun on May 19, 1919, the process transformed into total annihilation. The first thing Mustafa Kemal did was to have a meeting with Topal Osman, a Turkish militia leader known for his anti-Greek brutality.”
The target was not only the lives of the Greeks, but also their properties and wealth.
Studies conducted outside Turkey show that the Pontic Genocide was a multi-year conscious annihilation process. In Turkey, people are either or totally ignorant of these events or wrongly interpret them as in line with the official narrative that blames secessionist Pontic Greeks.
In recent years, some strong research has begun to emerge on the genocides against Armenians and Assyrians. But there is scarcely any reliable information available on the Pontic Genocide, as both academia and opinion makers largely ignore the subject.
In Turkey, talking about the past and present of Pontic Greeks in the Black Sea provinces is likely to result in curses, insults, and worse.
Even the word “Pontus” is unacceptable to Turkey’s government. This past Saturday, a modest gathering in Ankara meant to commemorate the Pontic Greek genocide was forbidden by the governor.
Despite a total denial within Turkey, the issue has been on the agenda abroad for some time now. I asked historian Taner Akçam, one of the leading authorities on the Armenian Genocide, what had been done so far.
Efforts to jointly research the massacres against Pontic Greeks and Assyrians together with the Armenian Genocide had been gathering pace since mid-2000s.
In 2011, George Mavropoulos, an engineer and a leader of the Pontic Greek community in the United States, founded the Asia Minor and Pontus Hellenic Research Center in Chicago, a milestone for the movement.
The Zoryan Institute and its director George Shrinian gave vital support to Mavropoulos and his initiative. Mavropoulos began by organising a series of conferences, with the first held in 2008. Research papers presented at the conferences were later published, and a book titled “The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ottoman Greek Genocide” was published in 2012. Another, published in 2017, was called “Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks”.
Regarding holistic Ottoman genocides studies, a first happened earlier this month. Aristotle University in Thessaloniki hosted an international conference called “The Genocide of the Christian Populations in the Ottoman Empire and its Aftermath”. This event highlights how advocates have since 2008 sought to draw the attention of academics. It is crucial that studies will now be conducted within academia.
Moreover, in the past, activists and researchers generally focused on their own genocide and reached out to their own communities. From now on, it seems, the Ottoman genocides against non-Muslim populations will be handled with an integrated scientific approach, as Israeli historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi’s do in their new book, “The Thirty Year Genocide,” which estimates that up to 2.5 million Armenian, Greek and Assyrian Christians were killed in Anatolia from 1894 to 1924.
Turkey has generally failed to use centenaries to remember, learn, understand, question, and come to terms with its past, in order to start healing. Yet our present has largely been shaped by the events that unfolded starting in 1908. Turkish society, opinion leaders and leading academics seem uninterested in the centenaries of the Second Constitutional Era, the Balkan Wars, the Raid on the Sublime Porte, World War One, the Ottoman Genocides, the Treaty of Sevres, and more still to come, excepting of course the centenary of Turkey’s founding.
Instead, everybody seems comfortable parroting official narratives on these troubling deeds and rejecting studies performed abroad as packs of lies. As a result, “diseases” keep relapsing!
One the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the 1919 Pontic Genocide, it is important to recognise that Turkey, where non-Muslim populations have been erased, has become the most religiously homogeneous yet sterile country in the region.
We will never find normality without reckoning with this great civilisational loss.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
During the early 1960s, apartheid South African diplomats were increasingly concerned their country’s plummeting reputation would affect relations with America. In one notorious incident, of March 1960, South African police shot dead 69 black protesters in Sharpeville, a township about 40 miles from Johannesburg.Such atrocities sparked protests against the racist regime on the streets of England, America’s great ally, which surely did not go unnoticed in Washington. Aware of the changing climate, South Africa’s dignitaries pleaded with their American counterparts for continued assistance. They need not have worried that the earth’s dominant power would desert them.As long as the United ...
The overthrow of the democratically elected President of Ukraine in February 2014 was one of the most important geostrategic occurrences during the past century, because it led to the breakaway from Ukraine of the two regions — Crimea and Donbass — that had been the most opposed to the overthrow, and that had voted over 75% for the President who had been overthrown. And those two breakaways from Ukraine were then presented in the U.S.-allied “The West” as having resulted from ‘Russian aggression’, which then became punished, first by economic sanctions against Russia, and then by massive NATO military buildups ...
The EU and NATO are evil institutions. These two institutions are mechanisms created by Washington in order to destroy the sovereignty of European peoples. These two institutions give Washington control over the Western world and serve both as cover and enabler of Washington’s aggression. Without the EU and NATO, Washington could not force Europe and the UK into conflict with Russia, and Washington could not have destroyed seven Muslim countries in 15 years without being isolated as a hated war criminal government, no member of whom could have travelled abroad without being arrested and put on trial.Clearly, the presstitute media ...
The ‘mainstream’ Western media is, almost by definition, the last place to consult for honest reporting of Western crimes. Consider the appalling case of Yemen which is consumed by war and an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.Since March 2015, a ‘coalition’ of Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the US, Britain and France, has been dropping bombs on neighbouring Yemen. The scale of the bombing is indicated in a recent article by Felicity Arbuthnot – in one year, 330,000 homes, 648 mosques, 630 schools and institutes, and 250 health facilities were destroyed or damaged. The stated aim of ...
"Evicted five centuries ago by crusading Christians, the Arabs are back in Spain, using their oil dollars to buy land that was seized from their ancestors by the sword". — James M. Markham, The New York Times, 1981. The Madrid daily ABC wrote that 800 mosques in Spain are out of control. The Spanish daily La Razon charged that Gulf donors, such as Qatar, were a source of Spain's Islamization. The Saudis also launched a new Spanish television channel, Córdoba TV, as did Iran. They dream of, and work to, regain the "lost Caliphate" of Spain. Some Islamists do ...
A few months ago I received a message from a professor at the Khomeini Institute for Education and Research in Tehran, Iran, informing me that my 2010 book “War and Empire: The American Way of Life” (London, Pluto Press) had been translated into Farsi. He requested that I write an Introduction for Iranian readers. What follows is that Introduction. Two years ago the Xinhua Peoples’ Press in Beijing, China also published a translation in Mandarin.In the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s 1991 attempt to annex Kuwait, the U.S. deliberately destroyed much of Iraq’s water and sewer infrastructure. The Pentagon even admitted ...
The following text by Michel Chossudovsky was presented in Seoul, South Korea in the context of the Korea Armistice Day Commemoration, 27 July 2013A Message for Peace. Towards a Peace Agreement and the Withdrawal of US Troops from KoreaIntroductionArmistice Day, 27 July 1953 is day of Remembrance for the People of Korea.It is a landmark date in the historical struggle for national reunification and sovereignty.I am privileged to have this opportunity of participating in the 60th anniversary commemoration of Armistice Day on July 27, 2013. I am much indebted to the “Anti-War, Peace Actualized, People Action” movement for this opportunity ...
Against the backdrop of US aggression against North Korea, NATO is intensifying its preparations for war with Russia, the world’s second largest nuclear power. A report in the German news magazine Der Spiegel (Issue 43/2017) based on a secret NATO document indicates how far plans for war have progressed. The news magazine concludes:“In plain language: NATO is preparing for a possible war with Russia.”In the document entitled “Progress report on the Alliance’s Enhanced Deterrence and Defence Disposition,” leading military figures call for a major boost to military capabilities in order to conduct a so-called “Major Joint Operation Plus.” The abstruse ...
In 2007 a Russian submersible planted a flag on the sea floor at the North Pole. This sparked a flurry of pearl-clutching in the West and idiotic concerns for Santa Claus’ safety (but keep calm, Canada will defend him!) drowning out the rational comment of Christopher Westdal, a former Canadian Ambassador to Russia:In the Arctic, for a start, Mr. Putin is playing by the same Law of the Sea rules we endorse. The truth is that if we could have, we would have, long ago done much the same thing the Russians have just done. We were not amused, but ...
Statistics from 2014Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
"If the American people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us" George H.W. Bush, 1992In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign ...
The Supreme Court’s acceptance of a case about the allocation of voting districts will have consequences far beyond the millions of U.S. taxpayers its ruling may deprive of representation. A decision that only counts voters, rather than all persons, will undermine the very foundation of the Republic.The American Revolution was fought over “taxation without representation,” and those who wrote the Constitution carefully apportioned taxation and representation among the states “according to their respective Numbers . . . of free Persons . . . and . . . three-fifths of all other Persons.” The authors clearly equated We, the People with ...
Author’s Introduction and UpdateFirst published by GR on June 14, 2014, updated in August 2014, this article reveals how the US and its allies facilitated the incursion of Islamic State (ISIS) convoys into Iraq in June 2014 prior to the onset of the counter-terrorism bombing campaign launched by Obama in August 2014. It is worth recalling the history of the initial incursion of ISIS forces (Summer 2014) and the timeline extending from the occupation of Mosul in Summer of 2014 which was covertly supported by the US, to the “Liberation” of Mosul three years later which was also supported by ...
Washington has never made any effort to conceal its contempt for North Korea. In the 64 years since the war ended, the US has done everything in its power to punish, humiliate and inflict pain on the Communist country. Washington has subjected the DPRK to starvation, prevented its government from accessing foreign capital and markets, strangled its economy with crippling economic sanctions, and installed lethal missile systems and military bases on their doorstep.Negotiations aren’t possible because Washington refuses to sit down with a country which it sees as its inferior. Instead, the US has strong-armed China to do its bidding by using their diplomats as interlocutors who are expected to convey Washington’s ultimatums as threateningly as possible. The ...
Recommended alternative reading list on the Yugoslav studies not used by mainstream corporative Western mass-media and top Western universities dealing with global security, world politics and international relations. Reading proposed readers below you can complete picture on the Yugoslav studies out of the official Western approach.March Pogrom 2004 Book and Photo EvidenceKOSOVSKA GOLGOTA Intervju 198820 Principal Misconceptions on Kosovo IssueThe Srebrenica Massacre Evidence Context Politics Edward S Herman Phillip CorwinLista Diane Budisavljevic 1941 Do 1945 by Владислав Б. Сотировић/Vladislav B. SotirovićJosip Broz Tito Bez Maske! by Владислав Б. Сотировић/Vladislav B. SotirovićHayden Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia by ...
Belarus is a land known also as Belorussia (White Russia, Weißrussland) in East Europe which was for centuries occupied by a Polish-Lithuanian common state until it became included in Tsarist Russia in the late 18th century.[1] Belarus is facing many identity problems but the most important is the ethnolinguistic challenge to a separate Belarussian[2] national feature.National identityA common national identity is a focal element for the creation of a national state as without a common identity that is based on a fundamental element of group’s identity a psychological sense of common solidarity cannot be developed. However, such solidarity is a ...
US-installed Ukrainian fascists commemorated Poroshenko’s established victory in Europe Day of Remembrance by vowing to “destroy Moscow,” free its people, and let them “shape their own future.”Ukrainian ultranationalists attending a May 8 commemoration included 14th SS Waffen Grenadier division veterans, Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) members, and Nazi-infested volunteer battalions involved in what they call “the Russian-Ukrainian war.”Svoboda party overt Nazis participated. Their slogan is “Ukraine for the Ukrainians” – meaning ethnically pure, free of Jews, Russians and others not wanted, by extermination or other means.Party member Yuri Sirotyuk called war on Russia Ukraine’s historic mission. “I believe that if we ...
Milo Djukanovic’s thirty-year-old authoritarian kleptocracy is killing Podgorica's Democratic efforts.Largely unnoticed in the wake of events in the Middle-East and the impeachment drama, another crisis is brewing in the Balkans. In Montenegro, thousands of people have been protesting a new law passed by the Montenegrin parliament and signed into effect by the country’s longtime strongman, Milo Djukanovic, which gives the government authority over properties that religious organizations in the country have been using for at least a century. Evidence of the problems the controversial new law creates can be seen in the widespread condemnation it has received from individuals such ...
This video is part of the Council on Foreign Relations’ InfoGuide Presentation, “The Time of the Kurds”: http://www.cfr.org/kurdsThe Kurds are one of the world’s largest peoples without a state, making up sizable minorities in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Their history is marked by marginalization and persecution. Yet some Kurds may be on the verge of achieving their century-old quest for independence in the Middle East undergoing the convulsions of Syria’s civil war, Iraq’s destabilization, and conflict with the self-proclaimed Islamic State.Watch the video here: THE TIME OF THE KURDSDuration: 10 min.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, ...
Since putschists usurping power in Ukraine launched war without mercy in April 2014 against freedom fighters in Donbass rejecting fascist rule, Washington provided political and military support.Under Obama, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) funding included hundreds of millions of dollars to Kiev for weapons and other material support, along with training by US special forces.Trump may increase support for escalated aggression. A Pentagon and State Department proposal calls for supplying Javelin missiles, possibly along with anti-aircraft weapons.Claiming these and other US-supplied weapons are only for defense, not offense, ignores where they’ll be deployed – along the contact line, separating armed ...
