The Greek Genocide

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Rachel Tibbetts Claudia Gonzalez The Greek Genocide Who: The Ottoman Empire committed genocidal acts against all the Christian minorities, which included the Christian ottoman Greeks consisting of both the Pontiacs and the Anatolians. These Christian Greeks were all victims to a much broader Turkish genocidal project that was also against Armenians, and Assyrians. All of these minorities including the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians were killed under the regimes of the Young Turks, a Turkish nationalist reform party in the early 20th century, and of Mustafa Kemal, the second president of Turkey as of 1930. What: The Greek genocide, also know as the Pontiac genocide, was the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Christian Ottoman Greek…show more content…
Greek communities began to locate themselves in Anatolia otherwise referred to as the Asia Minor. They centered mostly along the Aegean littoral, although some Greeks, known as Pontiacs, went further east and colonized the southern shores of the Black Sea. Turkish peoples migrated into Anatolia and had established the Ottoman Empire. After awhile the geographic extent of the Ottoman Empire began to decline over the 19th century. When: The conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Christian minorities has dated back into the 17th and 18th century due to religious differences. Although the genocide officially started in 1914, talk of genocidal acts toward the Greeks started as early as 1908 when the Ottoman Empire felt threatened by the Greek people. Actual acts of genocide started to occur around 1914 when Turkey entered World War I. The genocidal acts started to end around 1922 when the retaking of Smyrna by the Turks and the Great Fire of Smyrna happened in September…show more content…
The first was that in the beginning of the 20th century Ottoman Government feared loosing their power to the highly educated Pontiac people. It aggravated them that a larger percentage of the Pontiac people in Turkey had a substantial influence on the Empires economy. The Greeks had also resisted the pressure of converting to Islam, ever since the 17th and 18th the Greeks were forced to convert to Islam. The Ottoman used both of these things to start their genocidal acts toward the Greek Catholic population. Deportation: The ways that the Ottoman Empire managed to deport the Greeks came in many forms. They had the Greeks transported, which was mostly on foot in the death marches. These death marches along with other methods of deportation led to over 500,000 Greeks being deported by 1918, which only held a few survivors. These acts were referred to as "white massacres". According to the official Ottoman documents, around January 1919 the Ottoman government allowed some of the Greeks who were deported to return. The Ottoman government also gave them financial aid and gave them back their
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