Introduction

Pontic Greek author Harry Tsirkinides writes, “the genocidal policy of the Young Turks towards the Greeks was general, no region was exempted…” (η γενοκτόνος πολιτική των Νεότουρκων κατά των Ελλήνων ήταν γενική, χωρίς εξαιρέσεις περιοχών ...).  All documentation including archival material, newspaper reports and memoirs consistently affirm that Greek communities throughout the Ottoman Empire, in both the historic regions of Thrace and Asia Minor, were targeted during a violent campaign with the objective of bringing about an end to their collective existence as a group.  At the start of the twentieth century, sources indicate that Pontic Greeks made up only 20% of the Ottoman Greek population but today we often hear more about the Pontic Greeks than any other Ottoman Greek community. Greek historian Vlases Agtzides claims that this revisionist approach is highly offensive to the many other Greek communities who suffered exactly the same policies of Turkish nationalism (... αναθεωρητικά και προσβλητικά για τις άλλες ομάδες Ελλήνων της Μικρασιατικής γης που υπέστησαν την ίδια ακριβώς πολιτική του τουρκικού εθνικισμού). Agtzides continues, "In other words, reducing the genocide to only northern Asia Minor repeats an old error, that ultimately shrinks the actual number of Greek genocide victims throughout the whole of the Ottoman Empire, at the same time unrealistically increasing numbers in Pontus, thus giving easy counter arguments to the Turkish state and to anti-Pontian revisionists". (Δηλαδή, περιορίζοντας τη γενοκτονία μόνο στο Βορρά της Μικράς Ασίας επαναλαμβάνει ένα παλιό λάθος, που συρρικνώνει τελικά τον πραγματικό αριθμό των Ελλήνων θυμάτων της γενοκτονίας στο σύνολο της Οθωμανικής Αυτοκρατορίας, αυξάνοντας παράλληλα πλασματικά τους αριθμούς στον Πόντο, δίνοντας έτσι εύκολα επιχειρήματα προς το τουρκικό κράτος και τους αντι-πόντιους αναθεωρητές.)

Defining the Pontian experience as an exclusive, isolated and distinct event is a relatively modern thesis which first emerged in the late 1980s. It was the creation of Mihalis Charalambides (in Greek, Μιχάλης Χαραλαμπίδης), a Greek politician of Pontic Greek ancestry.  Charalambides joint forces with Konstantinos Fotiades (in Greek, Κωνσταντίνος Φωτιάδης), a postgraduate student of history, and together they worked tirelessly to change an established and more than sixty-year-old discourse in the historiography of the Greek Genocide.  It was an attempt to re-write history in order to ensure Pontian plight, the fate of their own people, would take precedence over all other Ottoman Greeks but it came at the cost of historical accuracy.

It is difficult to pinpoint when this movement began but on 17 and 18 September 1986 articles authored by Charalambides (b. 1951), then deputy chairman of KE.PO.ME or Center for Pontian Studies, under the title “Pontians: Right to Remembrance” (Πόντιοι: Δικαίωμα στη μνήμη) were published in the Eleftherotypia (Ελευθεροτυπία) newspaper introducing the concept of a so-called “Pontian Genocide”.  Fotiades (b. 1948), who at that time had just completed his doctorate at the University of Tübingen in Germany, was fascinated by Charalambidis’ writings.  In one publication Fotiades even reveals that the term “Genocide of the Pontians … was prompted to me by the wonderful articles of Michalis Haralambides”.  Soon after Fotiades and Charalambides forged a partnership and in 1987 they co-authored a book titled “Pontians: Right to Remembrance” (Πόντιοι: Δικαίωμα στη μνήμη), published by the KE.PO.ME, again advancing the idea that Pontic Greeks were sole victims in the genocide.  This series of events was the beginning of a new era where Pontian plight would take precedence over all other Ottoman Greeks or, at least, in certain circles.

 
Charalambidis & Fotiadis; drafters of the “Pontian Genocide”

Before this point, literature on the fate of Ottoman Greeks was inclusive – free from a hierarchy of victims and the ills of exclusivity of suffering – providing an accurate and complete historical narrative on the destruction of considerably more than two and a half thousand Greek communities across the Ottoman Empire.  Even accounts that dealt specifically with the region of Pontus as a case study never failed to acknowledge that the genocide was perpetrated throughout Turkey and affected every Greek community in the Empire, in Asia Minor and in Thrace.  For example, Savvas Aslanides in his book “Οι Πόντιοι ανά τους αιώνας” (1977) emphasizes that “the entire Greek population of Asia Minor” (ολοκλήρου του Ελληνικού πληθυσμού της Μικράς Ασίας) was targeted.  And organizations that lobbied on behalf of Pontic Greeks such as the Central Council of Pontus never shied away from the fact that the target group was the “Greeks of Asia Minor” (Έλληνες της Μικράς Ασίας) or "Turkey's Greeks" (εν Τουρκία Ελληνισμού).

Since the late 1980s Konstantinos Fotiades, now an academic at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, has produced a multitude of volumes on the fate of Greeks in the region of Pontus, most baring the dubious title The Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus (Η Γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων του Πόντου).  Unfortunately, all his contributions are tainted by a clear failure to maintain accepted scholarly standards, including the misrepresentation and distortion of historical documents, mistranslations, transparent cases of plagiarism, selective use of sources and widespread, gross inaccuracies.

It should be pointed out that this ahistorical approach to the fate of Ottoman Greeks has also misled a great number of western scholars. As a result, grave mistakes are widespread in the writings of those attempting to address the fate of Greeks during the genocide, with some even under the impression that Ottoman Greeks were all Pontians!  For example, in his entry on genocide assignments for students in Encyclopedia of Genocide (ed. Israel Charny) Colin Tatz mentions the “fate of the Pontian Greeks in Smyrna in 1923”; Merrill D. Peterson in "Starving Armenians" writes “Kemal's army had driven one and a half million Greeks from the Pontus, killing 360,000 in the process”; Mark Levene's paper Creating a Modern "Zone of Genocide" implies that the Greeks of Eastern Anatolia were all Pontic Greeks; Peter Balakian in The Burning Tigris is under the impression that by the summer of 1915 deaths among Ottoman Greeks were principally Pontians when in actual fact the deportations and massacres in the Pontus region began in earnest in 1916; and similar inaccuracies can be found in Samuel Totten and Paul R. Bartrop's Dictionary of Genocide. All these errors can be largely attributed to the vast amount of false information widely circulated by Pontian community organizations in the past few years.

It should also be noted that not all Pontic Greeks restrict themselves to this spurious and fallacious view. For example, Harry Tsirkinidis is one author of Pontic Greek ancestry who has demonstrated, relying heavily on archival material, that the Greek Genocide encompassed all the Greeks of Thrace and Asia Minor. See, for instance, his book At last we uprooted them... The genocide of Greeks of Pontus, Thrace and Asia Minor, through the French archives. Likewise, Polihronis Enepekides, a university professor in Vienna, has conducted lectures on the Greek Genocide such as The Holocaust of the Greek Asia Minor Civilization as described in the secret documents of Vienna, Berlin and Vern. Moreover, western historians that have examined the fate of the Ottoman Greek minorities have also concluded that the genocidal campaign encompassed Greeks throughout the Empire and was by no way restricted to Pontus. This is the view of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), an organization of the world’s foremost experts on genocide, as well as many other leading specialists in the field of genocide studies.

More importantly, archival documentation consistently details a program of extermination implemented throughout Ottoman Turkey and which commenced not in Pontus but first in Thrace and Western Anatolia and then later expanded to other regions. For example, Stanley E. Hopkins, an American relief worker and an eyewitness to the Greek Genocide, wrote:

"The deportation of the Greeks is not limited to the Black Sea Coast but is being carried out throughout the whole country governed by the Nationalists."

Sir Horace Rumbold, the British High Commissioner in Constantinople, informed the British Foreign Office by telegram of the widespread destruction of the Greeks:

"At present fresh deportations and outrages are starting in all parts of Asia Minor, from the Northern Seaports to South Eastern district."

In a 1918 article titled "Massacre of the Greeks in Turkey", the special correspondent of The London Morning Post in Constantinople wrote:

"The populations who were the first to suffer were the Greek colonies of Thrace, of the coast of the Sea of Marmora, and of the coast of Asia Minor."

It is not unknown for other chapters in the history of the Greek Genocide to be examined in isolation; for example, the September 1922 events in Smyrna. Examining aspects and regions of the Greek Genocide as case studies is a legitimate approach to scholarship but defining these events as distinct genocidal campaigns in their own right amounts to revisionism.

In their study, Late Ottoman genocides (2008), Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer claim:

"... the isolated study and emphasis of a single group’s victimhood during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire fails to really understand Young Turks’ motives and aims or its grand design. As part of memory politics, the diverse victim groups’ fates are still dealt with mainly in the context of their own national histories. And since Armenian, Assyrian, Greek and Kurdish national histories are mainly concerned with their own groups’ fate, the wider context is largely ignored, i.e. the interrelations and links between different murderous campaigns led by the Young Turks remain undiscovered. Moreover, the insights won from the concentration on particular groups are lost for a wider historical scholarship as most Kurds won’t study the Greek’s national history and vice versa, to name just one example."

Needless to say, to elevate the regional Pontian plight above and beyond that of all other Ottoman Greeks, contrary to archival material and the reports available, is tantamount to establishing a hierarchy of genocide victims, a practice which should arouse indignation and condemnation. The Greeks of Pontus were indeed subject to a ferocious murderous campaign of genocidal quality but throughout the Empire other Ottoman Greeks were subject to the same campaign and, as such, their plight should be duly acknowledged.

In 2009 a poll on PontosWorld.com, a leading website and online forum dedicated to Pontic Greek affairs and frequented by Pontians from around the world, found that approximately 90% of its visitors felt that the term "Greek Genocide" should always be used in place of "Pontian Genocide" since the latter term unjustifiably excludes hundreds of thousands of other Ottoman Greeks that died during exactly the same genocidal campaign. On 19 June 2009 the website released a statement: "The result sends a clear message to all Pontian organisations worldwide, that the use of the term 'Pontian Genocide' is not only insulting towards the other Greeks who were massacred during the same period, but also wrong in that it doesn't reflect historical fact" and added that "The use of the term 'Greek Genocide' is non-discriminatory and includes all Greeks affected".

This website, also compiled by several members of the Pontic Greek community, outlines the distasteful and grossly inaccurate approach to the genocide of Greeks in the Ottoman Empire by certain members of our community; in particular, re-writing history in order to elevate Pontic Greek suffering above all other Ottoman Greeks in what can only be described as an act of exclusivity of suffering. We should like to communicate the following:

(1) In recent years Pontic Greeks have been grossly misled on a wide range of historical particulars and, consequently, have done themselves a great disservice by approaching the genocide of Ottoman Greeks and other Christian minorities in an isolationist and exclusive manner.

(2) Dividing and subdividing Ottoman Greeks and defining the plight of each community in its individual right fails to accurately reflect the scale and magnitude of the genocidal program against the Ottoman Greeks.

(3) The suffering of our own community carries no less and no greater weight than the suffering of other Greeks in the Empire at the same time.

(4) Exclusivity of suffering should have no place in scholarship or commemoration. As the vast corpus of documentation testifies, Ottoman Greeks were targeted as a single entity.