The bully is running wild

The name of the entity has changed from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. The names of the leaders have changed from Abdul Hamid II to Talaat Pasha to Kemal Atatürk to Erdogan. What hasn’t changed is that what they have has been founded on the blood of others and is sustained by an aggressive and oppressive attitude towards their neighbors.

Turkey (and its predecessor) has earned a reputation as a nation with one of the worst human rights records of a major nation in the last 125 years. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Ottoman Turks focused their evil intentions on the Balkan Christians and then committed genocide against the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks. By the start of the “new” Turkish Republic in 1922, a land once indigenous to millions of Christians was reduced to the emptiness from atrocities. This enormous crime has remained unpunished as Turkey lives in its silo of denial. The Turkish Republic of Kemal was the result of infighting and unfulfilled promises by victorious yet ambivalent allies after World War I. This left the Armenians of Cilicia, who were urged to return by the French, and the Pontic Greeks at the mercy of marauding “Kemalists” intent on purging Anatolia of the remaining Christians. For the Armenians, it was a continuation of the Genocide that started in 1915. For the Pontic Greeks, most of the carnage took place after the World War as the cleansing began in the north. The western Greeks, the descendants of the earlier Byzantines, were abandoned by the Allies and left to deal with the Turkish nationalists. The Greek tragedy culminated with the destruction and slaughter at Smyrna (today’s Izmir) where the city was burned and thousands of Greeks and Armenians perished.

In one of the strongest examples of the hypocrisy of war, the defeated genocidal Turks were allowed to continue their murderous rampages and create the Turkish Republic. What is hailed as the “war of liberation” by Turks created a republic on the blood of thousands of Christians, their territory and personal wealth. It has been documented that the theft of the communal and personal wealth of the Christian victims became the financial basis for the new republic.

The “redistribution” of money and property is another layer of the crime. In the east, the Turkish nationalists, ignoring the official Turkish government’s signature on the Treaty of Sèvres, attacked the Armenian republic committing additional atrocities. The Allies, anxious to move on and ignore the victims of their deceit and Turkish aggression, created the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 to make peace with the Republic of Turkey. It ignored the victims of multiple genocides.