ΜΙΑ ΕΠΙΣΤΟΛΗ-ΕΚΚΛΗΣΗ ΓΙΑ ΣΤΗΡΙΞΗ ΤΩΝ ΕΛΛΗΝΩΝ ΓΕΡΟΥΣΙΑΣΤΩΝ ΣΤΗ ΒΟΥΛΗ ΤΟΥ ΚΑΝΑΔΑ, ΠΡΟΚΕΙΜΕΝΟΥ ΝΑ ΑΝΑΓΝΩΡΙΣΤΕΙ ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΚΥΒΕΡΝΗΣΗ ΤΟΥ ΚΑΝΑΔΑ Η ΓΕΝΟΚΤΟΝΙΑ ΤΩΝ ΠΟΝΤΙΩΝ ΑΠΟ ΤΟΥΣ ΤΟΥΡΚΟΥΣ ΚΑΙ ΝΑ ΚΑΘΟΡΙΣΤΕΙ ΩΣ ΗΜΕΡΑ ΜΝΗΜΗΣ ΤΟΥΣ Η 1η ΜΑΪΟΥ
Dear friend.
There is currently a move to recognize the Pontian Greek
Genocide in the Canadian Senate.
I want to thank the two Canadian Senators of Hellenic
background for moving this matter forward.
This is the speech which
Pana Merchant delivered in the Senate yesterday.
Pana can be reached at merchp@sen.parl.gc.ca
Please read the speech in it entirety and then send a
message of thanks to Senator Merchant.
Senator Housakos is speaking next week.
Please pass this message along to others.
The Senate
Motion to Call
Upon the Government to Recognize the Genocide of the Pontic Greeks and
Designate May 19th as a Day of Remembrance—Debate Adjourned
Hon. Pana
Merchant,
pursuant to notice of December 14, 2016, moved:
That the Senate
call upon the government of Canada:
(a) to
recognize the genocide of the Pontic Greeks of 1916 to 1923 and to condemn any
attempt to deny or distort a historical truth as being anything less than
genocide, a crime against humanity; and
(b) to
designate May 19th of every year hereafter throughout Canada as a day of
remembrance of the over 353,000 Pontic Greeks who were killed or expelled from
their homes.
She said:
Honourable senators, 353,000 Pontian Greeks were reported killed in systematic
massacres, persecutions and death marches between 1916 and 1922. Together, the
Armenian, Assyrian, and Pontian genocide constituted the first massive genocide
of the 20th century.
The defeat of
the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 resulted in the sudden
yielding of Turkish-dominated European territories.
The Ottomans
implemented a program of deliberate and systematic expulsions and forcible
migrations, focusing on Greeks of the Pontian region — that is, the
Constantinople, Istanbul and Black Sea area, down the coast of Asia Minor; what
is today Turkey — and Anatolia, with special organization units referred
to as the Young Turks.
These units
attacked Greek villages and intimidated its Greek inhabitants to abandon their
ancestral homeland, to be replaced by Muslims.
The Greek presence
in the Pontus region has been dated to at least the time of Homer, around 800
BC.
The geographer
Strabo, born in 63 BC, referred to the city of Smyrna, today's Izmir, as the
first Greek city in Asia Minor.
As a consequence
of the policy of "Turkey for Turks," 3 million Armenians, Assyrians
and Greeks were murdered, or were victims of the "white death," a
term used to describe all deaths that resulted from lack of food, disease and
exposure to the elements during deportations and death marches. The massive
murders were followed by destruction of monuments, churches and homes, and the
renaming of regions.
Before the
creation of the word "genocide," the destruction of the Greeks was
known as "the Massacre," "the Great Catastrophe" or
"the Great Tragedy."
The term
"genocide," from the Greek word genos, which means race,
tribe, family, and the Latin word cida, to kill, was coined at the time
of the Holocaust by Professor Raphael Lemkin of Duke University, a Polish
lawyer of Jewish descent whose work became the base of the terminology the
United Nations used in 1948 to make the Convention on the Prosecution and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
In his writings
on genocide, Lemkin is known to have detailed the fate of the Greeks and
Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, their historic homeland, where their
ancestors had lived for thousands of years before the Turkish invasions.
The New York
Times of August 1946 informed:
The massacres of
Greeks and Armenians by the Turks prompted diplomatic action without
punishment. If Professor Lemkin has his way genocide will be established as an
international crime.
Article II of
the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
reads:
. . . any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing
members of the group;
(b) Causing
serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing
measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group.
Not one, but
every one of these acts applies to the wrongs committed against the Pontian
Greeks.
The Center for
the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University provides the
following overview:
They began
singling out all able-bodied Greek men, forcibly conscripting them into labor
battalions which performed slave labor for the Turkish . . . society. Greek
villages were brutally plundered and terrorized under the pretext of internal
security. Indeed, as with the Armenians, the Greeks were generally accused as a
disloyal and traitorous "fifth- column," and eventually most of the
population was rounded up and forcibly deported to the interior.
[Translation]
Honourable
senators, when the First World War broke out, Asia Minor was ethnically very
diverse, and large Armenian, Greek and Syrian populations settled there. This
led some Turks to believe that, in order to establish a modern nation-state,
the ethnic groups that could threaten the integrity of a future modern Turkish
state had to be eliminated.
For their part,
the Pontian Greeks had managed to resist for many centuries the overwhelming
pressure to convert to Islam. They had thus been able to keep alive their
traditions, which were deeply rooted in religion, as well as their distinctive
culture and language.
[English]
Professor Andre
Gerolymatos, from the Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University,
provides the following:
During the First
World War, the Ottoman government, embarked on a course of reprehensible acts
that led to the genocide of the Armenian and Pontic Greek Orthodox, conducted
sadistically, to instill terror in the minds of the surviving minorities in the
Ottoman Empire.
The genocide
included: mass rape, wonton destruction, torture for the sake of torture, regardless
of gender and age; children raped, often in front of their parents, before the
entire family was put to death.
IAGS, the
International Association of Genocide Scholars, voted overwhelmingly in 2007
for a resolution officially recognizing the Armenian genocide and ". . .
qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the
Ottoman Empire," including Pontian Greeks in the years between 1914 and
1923; and released supporting documentation detailing why they determined these
actions constituted "genocide." IAGS President Gregory Stanton
stated:
This resolution
is one more repudiation by the world's leading genocide scholars of the Turkish
government's ninety year denial of the Ottoman Empire's genocides against its
Christian populations, including Assyrians, Greeks, and Armenians. The history
of these genocides is clear, and there is no more excuse for the current
Turkish government, which did not itself commit the crimes, to deny the facts.
The current German government has forthrightly acknowledged the facts of the
Holocaust. The Turkish government should learn from the German government's
exemplary acknowledgment of Germany's past, so that Turkey can move forward to
reconciliation with its neighbours.
[Translation]
It was a Canadian,
IAGS member Adam Jones, who drafted the resolution. In a speech delivered to
members of that association during their conference in Sarajevo in July 2007,
Mr. Jones paid tribute to the efforts of representatives of the Greek and
Assyrian communities, efforts that sought to draw public attention to the
genocides inflicted on their respective populations and to call on the current
Turkish government to recognize those genocides.
(1720)
Mr. Jones said
that although the work of activists and scholars resulted in the widespread
acceptance of the Armenian genocide, qualitatively similar genocides against
other Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire were given very little
recognition. The per capita killing of Assyrians and Pontian Greeks was equivalent
in scale to the massacre of the Armenian population of the empire and involved
much the same methods, including mass executions, death marches and starvation.
According to Mr.
Jones:
The overwhelming
backing given to this resolution by the world's leading genocide scholars
organization will help to raise consciousness about the Assyrian and Greek
genocides. It will also act as a powerful counter to those, especially in
present-day Turkey, who still ignore or deny outright the genocides of the
Ottoman Christian minorities.
[English]
The IAGS
resolution decreed that "denial . . . is widely recognized as the final
stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators . . . and
demonstrably paving the way for future genocides."
Diplomatic
records and historical documents, such as those from German, Austrian and
American consuls, the American ambassador to Turkey, the British Foreign
Office, the Turkish Prime Minister, the Minister of the Interior of the Prefect
of Smyrna, the Austrian Chancellor Hollweg, all unequivocally confirm and
corroborate that what took place was a systematic and deliberate extermination
of the Pontic Hellenic population.
Terrorism,
labour battalions, exiles, forced marches, rapes, hangings, fires and murders
were planned, directed and executed by Turkish authorities.
Colleagues,
contemporary witness accounts of deliberate and systematic Greek deportations
and murders mandate action.
George Horton,
U.S. Consul General in the Near East, wrote:
. . . from the
Black Sea thousands fell by the wayside from exhaustion . . . walking for the
three days journey through the snow and mud of the winter weather . . . .
Others came in groups of fifty, one hundred and five hundred, always under
escort of Turkish gendarmes. . . . a treatment more radical than a straight
massacre such as the Armenians had suffered before.
The American
Ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morganthau, who named the
slaughter "murdering races" wrote:
The Armenians
are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy
of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. . . . Indeed the Greeks
were the first victims . . . .
A March 20,
1922, memorandum by George William Rendel of the British Foreign Office reads
of "serious persecutions . . . affecting 30,000 Christians . . . but the
worst atrocities undoubtedly took place in the Pontic region against the Greek
population of the coastal towns."
A quote from
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder and first President of the Republic of
Turkey, in the Los Angeles Examiner of August 1, 1926, reads:
Those . . . left
over from the former Young Turkish Party . . . should have been made to account
for the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven,
en masse, from their homes and massacred . . . .
Honourable
senators, a word that ignores the tragedies of the past is doomed to repeat
them. It is important to recognize and remember this tragic chapter in our
shared world history.
In reference to
the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler queried: "Who, after all, speaks today of the
. . . Armenians?"
The world chose
to ignore the genocide of Armenians and Pontians, and as a result we had to
confront the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews. We ignored Rwanda and now have to
deal with small genocides implemented by ISIS.
In April 2015,
on the anniversary of the Armenian genocide, the Austrian government issued a
statement recognizing "the victims of violence, murder and expulsion,
including tens of thousands of other Christian communities in the Ottoman
Empire, including Syrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Pontic Greeks."
Could I have
five more minutes, please?
The Hon. the
Speaker:
Is leave granted, honourable senators?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
Senator
Merchant:
Thank you, colleagues.
Some days later,
the Vienna City Council issued a resolution recognizing the "victims of
violence, slaughter and deportation, as well as the tens of thousands of
Ottoman nationals of other groups of Christian peoples, including the Arameans,
Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Pontic Greeks."
The Swedish,
Dutch and Armenian governments have also had the courage to acknowledge and
recognize the Greek Pontian genocide. Many state governments have passed
motions recognizing the killing of Pontic Greeks during this period as a
genocide: Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania
and South Carolina; and in Australia, New South Wales and South Australia. In
Canada, the cities of Ottawa and Toronto have proclaimed May 19 as Greek
Pontian Genocide Remembrance Day.
In September
1922, Turkish forces entered the ancient Greek city of Smyrna, instigating a
massive anti-Greek pogrom. On September 13, a fire mysteriously broke out
amidst the chaos, spreading without government control over the next two weeks.
The Smyrna catastrophe took the lives is somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000
Greeks and marked the symbolic end of the Greek genocide.
Honourable
senators, there are 600,000 Canadians of Greek ancestry living in Canada. Many,
like me, are the descendants of the survivors of the Pontian Greek genocide.
Governance is not personal but is typical of all the wronged.
My own father, a
six-year-old living in the Smyrna region, the ancient Greek city in Asia Minor,
saw his family ruthlessly up rooted in the panic of the Smyrna inferno. The
family became separated. He, along with his mother and two young sisters,
managed to board a vessel to become refugees. A third young daughter strayed
and disappeared in the sea of human horror. She was never found.
Had she managed
to escape? Had she drowned? Was she left behind?
Colleagues,
remembrance matters; recognition matters. The ghosts of those who suffered and
perished have the right to closure and condemnation of these wrongs. I
respectfully seek your support to join other nations and legislatively
recognize and acknowledge this genocide and crime against humanity.
(On motion of
Senator Housakos, debate adjourned.)
(1730)
Regards,
Hon.
Jim Karygiannis
Councillor
Ward 39
Scarborough-Agincourt
Scarborough-Agincourt
100 Queen Street West, Suite A1
Toronto, ON M5H 2N2
Phone: 416-392-1374
Fax.: (647) 723 0278
jim@karygiannis.net
www.karygiannis.net
Toronto, ON M5H 2N2
Phone: 416-392-1374
Fax.: (647) 723 0278
jim@karygiannis.net
www.karygiannis.net
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