01.09.2022

Justifying a century of oppression

The centenary marking the end of the Greco-Turkish war in 1922 is part of the never-ending quest to establish a ‘viable’ nation. Esen Uslu recalls the horrific and continuing atrocities

With the imminent collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of the 19th century, the state - along with its most important component, the army - was enviously looking at the remaining dominant empires based in Europe. What they recognised was that they all had stable nations at their core.

This was actually an illusion, but it was sufficient to drive the Ottoman state and army, which had recently been reformed along European lines, to forge a viable nation based on the Muslim and Turkish population.

The first decade of the 20th century gave the reform movement a new impetus with the reorganisation of the Ottoman constitutional monarchy through the coup d’état engineered by young officers. However, immediately afterwards the debacle experienced in the Balkans wars and in the war in Ottoman Tripolitania (today part of Libya) increased their resolve and boldness to consolidate the Muslim and Turkish population into a nation. The resettlement of Muslim refugees from the Balkan wars as well as the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus driven from the Russian empire before World War I laid the foundation for this.

The next step that was undertaken during the extraordinary times in the early days of the war was the most brutal and bloody. The Greek Orthodox population was driven out of the Aegean coastal areas. Then the Armenian population was forcibly removed from their hometowns and villages - purportedly with the intention of deporting them to the Syrian desert - which ended with the first genocide of the 20th century.

At the end of the war the outlying lands of the Ottoman empire inhabited by the Muslim-Arab populations were lost. Istanbul was occupied by the Allies, and after a while the Greek army was persuaded to occupy the western seaboard of Anatolia. The lands occupied by the Russian empire in the north-east corner of present-day Turkey were taken back when the front was collapsed following the Russian Revolution. The Italian army occupied the south-west corner, while the French occupied the south-eastern ports.

The allies soon realised that their domestic circumstances were not conducive to maintaining further military operations in Turkey through continued occupation. The Greeks were pushed into the fray to overcome the Turkish resistance organised by the National Assembly convened in Ankara, bolstered by the Ottoman army corps that refused to surrender their weapons despite the armistice conditions.

The National Pact was adopted by the assembly with the stated aim of forming a national Turkish state within something very similar to present-day borders. The National Assembly administration, despite the tacit support of some sections of the Ottoman government, faced great difficulties in arming and maintaining an army. But Soviet Russia provided substantial financial and military support, which tipped the balance in Turkey’s favour.

The number of people absconding from compulsory military service and deserting the army were huge. The economy had practically collapsed, so tax revenue was very low. The regime opted for draconian powers and additional taxes were imposed. Properties that had belonged to the expelled and massacred Christians were confiscated and sold.

To curb desertion from the army, judiciary ‘independence tribunals’ were formed, which allegedly were responsible for killing more people than those who lost their lives in the military conflict. They were also used to bolster the position within the National Assembly of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (or Pasha, as he was known until 1921) by suppressing Islamist and liberal opposition groups. During these times rebellions against the National Assembly forces took place and were brutally suppressed.

Imperialist change

Eventually France and Italy ended their occupation and transferred much of their arms and material to the Turkish army. British support for the Greek army was cut when they realised that a nationalist-Islamist Turkish regime standing as an outpost against Soviet Russia was a far better option. Negotiations were going on to alter the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres that had been concluded with the Ottoman regime to accommodate the National Assembly government.

The deadlock was broken in August 1922, when the Turkish forces saw off the resistance of the Greek army, the remnants of which disembarked from the Aegean ports, and Turkish forces marched toward the Allied-occupied Dardanelles region. The so-called Chanak affair ended when British and Greek forces occupying eastern Thrace withdrew to the pre-war borders and an armistice was agreed.

The truce eventually led to the end of the occupation of Istanbul by the Allies and to the Lausanne Treaty, which introduced a compulsory ‘population exchange’ in 1923. The scope of this was huge - 1.2 million Greek Orthodox inhabitants were driven out of Turkey. That included Greek Orthodox Turks who did not even speak Greek. Approximately 400,000 Muslims were deported to Turkey, including Greek and Bulgarian-speaking Muslim minorities. This was considered at the time a positive step to end the ‘destabilisation’ between two nation-states.

The Greeks of Istanbul and the Imbros and Tenedos islands (present-day Gökçeada and Bozcaada) were exempt from the compulsory exchange. It took Turkey about 40 years (and several atrocities) to drive them out. In 1941 the conscription of soldiers from the non-Muslim population into labour battalions began. They were forced to work in construction and kept in camps akin to concentration camps. In 1942 a ‘wealth tax’ was imposed on non-Muslims and those unable to pay the large amount demanded were forced into labour camps.

After World War II the ‘Istanbul Pogrom’ of September 1955 ravaged Greek-owned property. This was organised clandestinely by the state to stir up nationalist sentiments among the Turkish population during the Cyprus crisis. In 1964 the residence agreement between Greece and Turkey was abruptly cancelled, and 12,000 Greek-speaking citizens permanently living in Istanbul were expelled. They were only allowed to take with them one suitcase not exceeding 20 kilos and cash not exceeding 20 US dollars.

The next year the National Security Council adopted a secret resolution establishing an open prison, a state-owned farm and a boarding school for teacher training in Gökçeada, and transferring the gendarmerie training facilities to that island. These were built on the confiscated olive orchards previously owned by the Greek population - the convicts were encouraged to harass the Greeks to drive them out. That was to be the blueprint in Cyprus after the Turkish invasion in 1974.

Back in 1934 a Resettlement Law had been adopted. The purpose of it was to “create a country speaking one language, thinking in the same way and sharing the same sentiment”. This draconian legislation, deriving from the experiences of the Ottoman regime, mapped out three zones. The first was to aim for increasing the “density” of the “culturally Turkish population”. The second zone was “to establish populations that had to be assimilated into Turkish culture”. The third was to be “evacuated for military, economic, political or public health reasons” and resettlement here was “prohibited”.

The Kurds, as well as Muslim minorities deemed not sufficiently Turkish, such as Circassians, Albanians and Abkhazians, bore the brunt of this law. Its immediate effect was felt by the Jewish population living in the cities of east Thrace. In 1934, in parallel with developments in Germany, the Jewish population faced a pogrom organised by the state following a period of agitation by Nazi-sympathising nationalists - 20,000 Jews were driven out.

The internal colonisation of Turkey’s eastern and south-eastern provinces and the destruction of a unified Kurdish territory were initiated on the basis of this law. The law was used to justify the subsequent massacre of Kurds and Alevis during the 1936-38 military campaigns, including the Dersim genocide of 1938. This legislation remained in force until 2006, when it was replaced by a new law, which defined a permitted “immigrant” as a person “of Turkish stock and attached to Turkish culture”.

The current dirty war going on in the Kurdish territories of Iraq and Syria is nothing but a continuation of the policies of the early republic. But it has entered a new stage, now that the state, with the bourgeoisie behind it, believes it is sufficiently powerful to suppress the Kurds and expand its territory through open invasion and occupation, taking advantage of the conflict between major powers jostling for redistribution of their spheres of influence.

The centenary of 1922 is being used to increase nationalist and Islamist fervour. And when this is not sufficient under the current depressed economic conditions, the Battle of Manzikert, which allegedly opened the way to the conquest of Anatolia by Turkish tribes in 1071, is also recalled to bolster the regime’s xenophobic world views.

Racism, narrow-minded hostility against anything western and misogyny are now the order of the day. Turkish prisons are now overflowing with political detainees, and there are continuous reports of Kurdish youth having been “rendered ineffective” (ie, killed) by drone strikes or artillery fire. All this is part of the weaponry used to distort the population’s outlook.