Persecution of Christians in Turkey: over 1,000,000 Greek Orthodox Christians were massacred in the Ottoman Empire during the early twentieth century. The Ottoman government also pursued the systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians, mostly Ottoman citizens within the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly converted to Islam. To this day, the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge this atrocity as a genocide, saying that it was simply a religious conflict between Christians and Muslims.
As we continue to see our own Mother Church of Constantinople suffering from religious persecution, we remember these horrifying events, note with sorrow the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and elsewhere today, and pray that such inhumanity will never again be seen anywhere in the world.
For previous ChristianPersecution.com coverage of the persecution of Christians in Turkey, see here.
“A Century Later World Finally Awakens to the Ottoman Genocide of Christians,” by Michael Goodyear, Greek Reporter, December 15, 2019:
In the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman government under the Committee of Union and Progress (“CUP”) orchestrated massacres of its Christian minorities, resulting in ethnic cleansing that would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and would later inspire the Holocaust.
Yet even after a century, the genocide of millions under the sword of the Ottoman Turk has been forgotten and unrecognized by most of the world. With the passage of Senate Resolution 150 on December 12, 2019, the United States Congress, over a hundred years after these atrocities, has finally recognized not only the Armenian Genocide, but the broader Ottoman extermination of its Christian minorities.
Ottoman Decline
The Ottoman Empire was centered on modern-day Turkey and included substantial numbers of Christian minorities that had lived in this land for millennia, dating back to the Byzantine and Roman Empires. While ethnic tensions were not infrequent in the diverse empire of the Ottomans, for the most part the history of the Ottoman Empire is one that is compared to the convivienca, or harmony between different religions in Moorish Spain.
This dynamic began to change as the Ottoman Empire’s steep decline began in earnest during the nineteenth century. Massacres on both sides took place during the wars of independence in the Balkan countries such as Greece and Serbia. By the end of the century, however, massacres began to take place not as part of war, but against the Ottoman Empire’s own Christian communities. Large scale Ottoman massacres of Armenian and Greek communities began during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with perhaps the most infamous being the Hamidian massacres of Armenians from 1894-1896, resulting in roughly 200,000 deaths. It was just a precursor of what was to come.
The Genocide
Prior to the First World War, the Ottoman Empire, in rapid decline, was headed by the Committee of Union and Progress (“CUP”). The CUP were, among other things, proponents of Turkish nationalism. When the Ottomans joined the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914, the stage was set for the first genocide of the twentieth century. Using Christian rebels colluding with the Russian army as a pretext, the Ottoman government announced a policy of property confiscation and deportations against the Christian minorities of the empire, first among them the Armenians.
Certainly no standard of international law would have allowed the Ottomans to justify the murder of millions on such a pretext.
The Ottomans began to deport and massacre Greek communities inside their borders as early as 1913, which expanded once World War I began. In 1915, the CUP launched ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Armenian and Chaldean communities under their rule. On April 24, 1915, the Ottomans rounded up leading Armenians in Istanbul and deported them eastward. In the following months, thousands of Armenians were slaughtered while others were forced from their homes and sent off to the Syrian Desert. Few actually made it. As Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the American Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time stated, “The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation.” Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, stated before the House of Commons that “ . . . tens of thousands of [Greek] men, women and Children were expelled and dying [in the Ottoman Empire]. It was clearly a deliberate extermination.”
Between 1914 and 1923, 1.5 million Armenians were brutally killed, along with hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Chaldeans. Nearly half of the Pontic Greeks on the Black Sea Coast were killed and the Christian population of Smyrna was massacred in 1922. The Armenians, Greeks, and Chaldeans were not armed soldiers. They were civilians whose ancestors had lived inside the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years. There is little question that this was in fact genocide.
The documentary evidence is clear. The American ambassador at the time, Henry Morgenthau, wrote to the United States with alarm about the exterminations. There are numerous first-hand memoirs, such as that of Grigoris Balakian, that recount the horrors of those years. In addition, the thousands of bleached skeletons tell no lies.
Ever since, Turkey has described the Christian deaths as casualties of war. The world knew genocide had happened, but there were no consequences. Unlike after World War II, there was no Nuremburg or other war tribunals. There was no retaliation and the wider world simply continued as if nothing had happened. Indeed, Adolf Hitler used the example of the Armenian Genocide’s lack of condemnation to support the Holocaust. When questioned about the policy of Nazi persecution of the Jews, Hitler responded, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”…
