by MR-from-NG » Wed Nov 08, 2006 5:32 pm
GREEK ATROCITIES COMMITTED DURING
THE 19th &20th CENTURIES
The Turks have well established reputation for ferocity and a notion of the “Terrible Turk” is deeply ingrained in the western mind. Unfortunately too little is known that during the 19 and 20 century the Turks have much more often been the victims of aggression than they have been aggressors .
They have been involved in two wars of aggression 2nd Balkan war of 1913 and the brief participation in the 1st world war which involved not allowing allied troops through the Dardenells of Gallipoli to help its enemy Russia. However Turkey has been invaded numerous times: once each by Italy, France, England, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro and Four times by Russia and Greece.
Greece was determined to exterminate as many Turks as possible.The Greek war of Independence set the tone for all that was to follow:
The orthodox Greeks at once fell upon their Turkish neighbours and slaughtered them indiscriminately.
To quote the distinguished historian
Mr William St.Clair:
"The Turks of Greece left few traces.They disappeared suddenly and finally in the spring of 1821 unmourned and unnoticed by the rest of the world.It is hard to believe then that Greece had once contained a large population of Turkish descent living in small communities all over the country, prosperous farmers, merchants, and officials,whose families had known no other home for hundreds of years. As the Greeks said "The moon devoured them." Upwards of Twenty thousand Turkish men, women, and children were murdered by their Greek neighbours in few weeks of slaughter. They were killed deliberately, without qualm or scruple, and there were no regrets either then or later..."
All over the Pelopponense roamed mobs of Greeks armed with clubs, scythes, and a few firearms, killing, plundering, and burning. They were often lead by Christian priests who exhorted them to greater efforts in their holy work...Within a few weeks the Turkish and Moslem Albanian population of Pelopponse previously about ninth of the whole , had ceased to exit
During this period the inhabitants of the important islands of Hydra, Spetsae, and Psara decided to join the revolutionaries.... They armed their ships and began to attack traders flying the Turkish flag. They ranged all over the Aegean and beyond.
Many Turkish merchant ships were captured, their crews killed, or thrown overboard, and the booty brought back to port. On several occasions ships crowded with Moslem pilgrims on their way to or from Mecca were seized and the crews and passengers put to death.... The crew of a Turkish corvette, fifty-seven men in all, were brought back to Hydra in triumph and individually roasted to death over fires on the beach.
Crete
When Greece invaded Crete, in February 1897, Greek Muslims and Turks were slaughtered by the thousands. In the district of Sitia alone, 851 Persons (including 374 children) were killed. The eighty Muslim villages of Central Crete were entirely destroyed. The massacre was stopped only by the timely arrival of British and French military units. An eye-witness to the slaughter, a woman from the village of Roukaka, in the district of Sitia, gave the following deposition to French officials:
"Christians threw Halime, the pregnant wife of Huseyin Mehmedakis, on the ground and slit open her belly, taking the foetus out. They also knifed Fatime, daughter of Mustafa Omer Efendakis, cutting her open from her breasts to the middle of her back. They pushed the men into the mosque and, as they killed them, hurled them from the minaret, which they then set ablaze with gasoline. Dogs were running all over the village carrying half-burnt hands and feet. The children were stabbed to death, and a few were crushed beneath the minaret when it collapsed."
izmir
When the Greeks occupied the izmir region in 1919 and later, as they penetrated into central Anatolia, they carried out a policy of genocide on a grand scale. Typical was the Aydin massacre of June 25, 1919. Greek troops at first subjected the Turkish quarter of the town to an intensive artillery bombardment. All Turks who tried to escape were shot down by Greek soldiers or civilian auxiliaries. Then the Greek Army entered the quarter and continued its orgy of destruction. Some Turkish families were burnt alive when their homes were set on fire. Others were gunned down in the streets. When four women who had barricaded themselves into a building were captured, they were impaled on wooden stakes. Altogether, an estimated 9,716 Turks were butchered that day.
H.J.Psomiades in "The Eastern Question" points out that since 1912 some 4 million muslims (most of Turkish origin)had left Greece or areas occupied by Greece.
Their butchery didn’t stop with the Turks !
Jews were also driven out of Turkish territories seized by the Greeks. The fate of the Jews of Salonika was typical. According to Jacov Benmayor, an authority on subject:
In 1917 a great fire destroyed most of the town, leaving some 50,000 Jews homeless. The Greek government, which followed a policy of Helenizing the town, was ready to compensate the Jews whose house were destroyed, but it refused to let the Jews return to certain parts of the town, causing many of them to leave the country. . . . In 1922 a law(no. 236) was enacted which forced all the inhabitants of Salonika to refrain from working on Sundays, thus causing another wave of emigration.... In 1932-34 the Campbell riots, which accompanied the elections and were anti-Semitic in tone, took place. An entire Jewish neighbourhood was burned to the ground by hooligans, and most of the Jews who lived in the Campbell neighbourhood emigrated after the riots
Hellenization and Genocide
Today their policy of Hellenization and Genocide continues large scale human rights violations in western thrace will lead to the extermination of Turks living there as they cease to exit, yet no one car, And while the world turns a blind eye no doubt in a few years people will say, were their any Turks in western Thrace .No doubt their answers will be the same .
"The moon devoured them"
