I didn’t know Greeks were lumped in with this; Greece attacked Turkey in 1919 to take territory from the defeated Ottomans, and after a few years the Turks beat them back. Anything done after the 1919 attack, while it may have been reprehensible, should be viewed in that context.
“I didn’t know Greeks were lumped in with this; Greece attacked Turkey in 1919 to take territory from the defeated Ottomans, and after a few years the Turks beat them back. Anything done after the 1919 attack, while it may have been reprehensible, should be viewed in that context.”
O.K. But
Ottoman forced expulsions of Greeks in Anatolia began in 1912-1914, as did Ottoman attacks on and massacres in Greek villages in Anatolia in the same period.
Yes, following the end of WWI and in the period between that time and 1919 there were formal agreements of “exchanges of population” between Greece and Turkey, some of which were successful and some not.
But the Muslim attempts to reduce Anatolia’s populations of non-Turks began before all of it.
AND why should it be avoided, that Greeks occupying Anatolia goes back more than 1,000 years before the any Turks were ever there.
The Turks have a natural insecurity, from the start and from it has always arisen the need to either dominate, or eliminate the other peoples in Anatolia. They are totally the “new kids on the block”, with Greeks, Armenians, Kurds and Syrians ALL preceding them, all with villages preceding them, by MANY centuries, and the Kurds and Syrians most of all (the Kurds are a people known as such in what is now Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, back into time before Alexander the Great).
There is absolutely no excuse for Turkey’s genocide of the Armenians.
None.