"For CUP's leaders, attacking the country's Greeks was a means to purify the core regions of Turkey. Talaat Pasha made clear that this was his intent … As the war continued, the Turkish campaign against the Greek civilians expanded to include the Pontic Greeks who lived on the Black Sea. The road to persecution here was quite similar to that elsewhere on the war's eastern fronts. Military threats and setbacks - in this case defeats by Russia - convinced Turkey's leaders to begin a campaign against a civilian population accused of treason … Subject to state-sponsored terror despite their status as Ottoman subjects, during World War I Turkey's Greeks experienced persecution just short of full-scale ethnic cleansing"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Benjamin David Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe **David Levinson, Encyclopaedia of World Cultures-Ethnology, p. 141
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Greek genocide
44 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Greek genocide →
Related Quotes
"The two present threats to Turkish territorial integrity—by the Greeks and the French—and the one potential threat—an…"
"The nation, beginning with the areas of trade and language, was to be cleansed from “foreign elements” in order to es…"
"Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, riven, driven, constant, rampant and increasi…"
"It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa K…"
"Most of the Armenians had already been massacred during the reign of the Sultan, in 1915—1916; Kemal attempted to con…"
"The period of transition from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to the foundation of the Turkish Republic was charac…"
"Yet this was only the beginning of a wave of ethnic conflict that would fundamentally transform the social structure …"
"To the appalled George Horton, who desperately tried to buy a few Greeks and Armenians safe passage with his own mone…"
"Kemal saw no need to massacre all the Greeks in Smyrna, though a substantial number of able-bodied men were marched i…"
"While the death toll in the trenches of Western Europe were close to 2 million by the summer of 1915, the exterminati…"