Front Page Magazine
May 24 2005

Turkey’s Forgotten Islamist Pogrom
By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 24, 2005

For 50 years, historians, diplomats and state department officials
have touted Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a great secular leader in a
predominantly Muslim region, whose policies modernized and
democratized Turkey, shaping it into a Western-style state. But
Ataturk was western only insofar as he implemented the Turkification
of Gobineau, wherein he substituted the Turks for the Aryans, whose
ideology had terrible results in the rise of European Nazism.
Regardless, in 1955, barely 17 years after the dictator’s death, a
little-known pogrom, driven primarily by Islamic fanaticism, targeted
the Greek population of Istanbul, with the intent of driving
non-Muslims from Turkey.

>From 1950 to 1960 Turkey experienced a profound reawakening of Islam,
which the government and Demokrat Parti (DP) of Prime Minister Adnan
Menderes both exploited and encouraged. Today, the policies Turkey
set in motion in that pogrom remain in sway.

According to Speros Vryonis Jr.’s landmark new study, The Mechanism
of Catastrophe, the September 1955 government-orchestrated pogrom
against the Greek Orthodox community `included the systematic
destruction of the majority of its churches,’ monasteries and
cemeteries. Published this month by Greekworks.com, the work
subtitled The Turkish Pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the
Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul shows that riots which
destroyed 4,500 Greek homes, 3,500 businesses, 90 religious
institutions and 36 schools in 45 distinct communities, resulted not
only from `fervid chauvinism, or even [from] the economic resentment
of many impoverished rioters, but [from] the profound religious
fanaticism in many segments of Turkish society.’

American, British and Greek diplomats all agreed that the violence
was `indicative of religious fanaticism,’ a fact with which even some
Turkish commentators concurred.

A towering intellect and scholar of the Byzantine and Ottoman
empires, as well as modern Turkey, Vryonis witnessed reactions to the
pogrom in 1955, after beginning his dissertation work at Harvard’s
Byzantine center at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C. Newspapers
reported violence targeting the Greek community of Istanbul and
suggested the state department was pleased at `how the Turkish
government had taken it in hand very quickly and restored order,’
Vryonis recalled at a recent New York City lecture to introduce the
book. He recoiled at the table talk of British and American scholars
at Dumbarton Oaks, expressing the view that the Greeks had gotten
what they deserved.

Vryonis questioned how riots could erupt so suddenly and violently as
to destroy a whole community. Furthermore, at nearby St. Sophia
Cathedral, the Greek archbishop described tens of thousands of people
with no homes, no clothes and no food. The diametrically opposite
perspectives concerned one and the same event. Vryonis, however,
trained in chemistry, physics and Greek and Latin classics, `put it
aside. I was not ready. [Studying this] demanded a knowledge of
Turkish. It demanded a good knowledge of Islam, it demanded a
familiarization with modern Greek history.’ Fifty years later, at 76,
he has written the definitive work on the events. The work has the
power to alter official U.S. positions on Turkey, if only
policymakers will read it.

Actually, the discrimination against the Greek, Jewish and Armenian
populations of Turkey had begun much earlier, during the First World
War. `The attitude towards the minorities was not something new in
1955,’ Vryonis says today. `It had a long tradition that was
inherited from the Young Turks [who] took over as the Ottoman Empire
was faltering, lost the Balkan wars, got in the losing side in the
First World War, [perpetrated] the genocide of the Armenians and
[moved] the Greeks … from the area of the Dardanelles at the urging
of the German general Otto Liman von Sanders….’ who unsuccessfully
assumed the Ottomans’ defense and ordered the Greeks to be swept away
from the Sea of Marmara.

In the 1930s, Ataturk developed racist theories that all history and
languages flow from Turkish history and language. Ever since, the
Turkish state has `believed that there should be one language, one
nation, one culture, one religion,’ says Vryonis.

Kemalism effectively established the “Turkification of Gobineau’s
theory of the racial, and therefore civilizational, superiority of
the Aryans.”[1] These ideas included the Turkish Historical Thesis
(Turk Tarih Tezi) and the Sun Theory of Languages (Gunes Dil
Teorisi). The former holds that the history of Turkey as known today
doesn’t consist merely of Ottoman history, but is much older and in
fact dispersed culture to all nations, including the Greek classical
nation, the Hittites, the Chinese, the Romans and all European
nations. The latter holds that Turkish was the first language ever
spoken by humans, and is the foundation for all other languages, be
they classical Greek and Latin, Romance languages or even Anglo-Saxon
tongues. (What is more astounding are those historians, including
Bernard Lewis, who apologize for this supremacist line.) [2]

Although Turkish scholars like Taner Akcam and Fatma Muge Gocek
reject these racist theories – still taught in Turkish schools – they
founded the basis for discriminatory laws passed against Greeks and
other non-Muslims during the 1930s and later. In 1932, for example,
law 2007 barred entry to a large number of professions of Greek
citizens of Istanbul (etablis).

Under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which provided boundaries for
modern Turkey and arranged population transfers between Greece and
Turkey, the Greek `settlers’ were allowed to stay in Istanbul without
prejudice. Nine years later, Turkey violated the treaty with
impunity, imposing a series of 31 crippling laws to reduce Greek
political, legal, economic and cultural strength. Some 10,000 Greek
citizens were deprived of their livelihoods as tailors, merchants,
photographers, carpenters, doormen, lawyers, doctors and realtors and
forced to emigrate, penniless, to Greece.

In 1941 and under Turkish Prime Minister Sukriu Saracoglu in 1942,
the Turkish government and minister of foreign affairs, figuring that
the Germans would emerge victorious from World War II, began the mass
deportation of minority men aged 18 to 38. The forced labor
battalions of the so-called 20 generations of Jews, Greeks and
Armenians were meant never again to see the light of day.

Modern Turkey also inherited the religious discrimination against
non-Muslims from the Ottoman empire. Thus in 1942, Saracoglu’s
government established the varlik vergesi, a capital tax so onerous
as to impose financial ruin on the community.

`Taxpayers who do not settle their debts within one month from the
date of posting of notice will be compelled to labor until they have
completely settled their debt, in any part of the country in public
services of an unmilitary character or in municipal services,
according to their physical ability,’ the law required, according to
a 1943 report in the New York Times by C. L. Sulzberger. [3]

`Not long after Varlik was applied small numbers of defaulters were
arrested and after a few days’ detention sent by train to Ashkale in
Eastern Anatolia [the Turkish `Siberia’] to work on the roads,’
Sulzberger’s report continued.

The first groups were those assessed more than 100,000 lira who had
paid little or nothing of their indebtedness. The government’s
position was that no one was taxed more than he could afford to pay,
that failure to do so was evidence of unwillingness to pay and that
the full penalties of the law must therefore be enforced.

To date not many more than a thousand persons are believed to have
been subjected to this drastic penalty. Many of them are wealthy and
prominent citizens. Almost entirely they come from the minority
Christian and Jewish populations. Their labor on the roads can hardly
have been much use, but some of them have managed to scrape up funds
and pay and have then been released while the example of the
remainder frightens the rest of the minority population as an
inducement to pay at all costs. [4]

The tax was set at confiscatory rates – Greek Orthodox at 156 percent
of annual income, Jewish at 179 percent, and Armenian at 232
percent – compared to the 4.96 percent annual income tax suffered by
Muslim Turks, according to a Times editorial, and applied to
everyone, including minority bell hopes and taxi drivers. At least
one Turkish newspaper spoke of `liquidation’ of the minority
mentality and their populations, by inducing them to leave Turkey.
[5]

Since these taxes were temporary, Vryonis sees no parallel with the
punitive jizya (poll) and karaj (land) taxes on legions of earlier
generations of non-Muslim dhimmis. To this observer, however, the
laws, their intent and result strongly resemble the ruinous jizya and
karaj taxes. Like them, the varlik vergesi effectively deprived the
community of its wealth, imposing severe penalties if Greek and other
non-Muslim citizens did not pay within fifteen days of its
promulgation. In the end, massive numbers of minority property and
businesses were transferred to Muslim hands, much as khalifs in
earlier eras had expropriated them, forcing non-Muslims often to
convert to Islam to survive.

Not surprisingly, between 1924 and 1934, Istanbul’s Greek population
fell by two thirds, from nearly 300,000 to 111,200, according to
Vryonis. By 1955, the number of Greeks had dropped another 24
percent, to 85,000. `This is by way of background, by way of
ideology, by way of the nature of the Turkish state, which we should
add remained military and dictatorial,’ he says.

In 1954, the matter of Cyprus became entwined with the fate of
Istanbul’s Greek minority. That year, Turkish foreign minister Mehmet
Fuat Koprulu declared that his government had no interest whatever in
the outcome of a Greek plea to the international community for
Cypriot independence. But within a matter of months, at the prompting
of the British government (which then controlled Cyprus), Prime
Minister Menderes ousted Koprulu, installed foreign minister Fatin
Rustu Zorlu in his place, and turned a 180 degree about-face on the
issue. The armed campaign against Britain by the Greek National
Organization of Cypriot Fighters elicited howls of indignation from
the Turkish press, which joined the battle cry of the Cyprus is
Turkish Association, known as KTC for its Turkish acronym.

Eventually, KTC and its press cohorts shifted public attention from
the Greek Cypriots to the Greeks of Istanbul. But it was up to the DP
and the government to organize the roughly 100,000 necessary
students, labor unionists and other rioters and transport them to
Istanbul to destroy, in a matter of nine hours, the homes and
businesses of 85,000 Greeks scattered through 45 hilly square
kilometers in areas hard to access from one another. The pogromists
came equipped with lists of Greek addresses to target, though the
Armenian and Jewish communities were also hit. Armenians lost 1,000
stores, 150 homes, three churches and four schools, while Jewish
residents lost 500 shops, 25 homes, and suffered damage to one
synagogue.

All the evidence is that the 1955 pogrom was well organized. `We have
independent accounts of Turkish newspapers, of the Greek consulate
official, and this is very important, of American[s], that there were
[three] systematic waves of destroyers,’ says Vryonis.

The first wave – identified by the Turkish newspaper Milliyet and
confirmed by the foreign press and Greek officials – destroyed metal
doors and barriers to all churches, houses and businesses. They
smashed all obstacles to entry. The second wave commenced pilfering
and the pillaging. Those who had foresight came with trucks so as to
systematically loot and carry off their booty. `But the basic job of
the second wave was to begin the destruction of the houses, the
apartments, the church, the stores, and then to move on, just as the
first wave moved on very quickly,’ says Vryonis, as did the second.
The third came some time later to finish off the marauding.

`Greek businesses were pilfered or destroyed,’ says Vryonis.
`Stealing of food stuffs and destruction of grocery stores and the
food industry was rife, and thereafter produced a food shortage in
Istanbul. The price of eggs rose 6 times, while tobacco rose 20
percent. Most bakeries were utterly destroyed. People had to wait in
line even for a piece of bread. In the houses, food was looted or
else destroyed by pouring gasoline. Houses were no longer habitable.
People had nothing to eat and no where to sleep. Mattresses were
literally cut into shreds.’

British and American officials, to the extent that they expressed
opinions, generally attributed the pogrom to two factors:
`simultaneous self-erupted nationalist and economic motivations.’
Certainly, notes Vryonis, there were elements of nationalism, a force
in Turkey since Ataturk. As to economic resentment, the living
standard of Asia Minor peasants compared to that of Istanbul
minorities like night to day. But pogromists came well-equipped with
pickaxes, shovels, wooden timbers to serve as battering rams,
acetylene torches, gasoline, dynamite and large trucks full of
stones. How could a spontaneous eruption occur when security people,
secret police, municipal police and the armed services were
everywhere?

The third factor (unmentioned by officials), and the genuine
underlying cause, Vryonis notes, was religious fanaticism. He
continues:

The churches suffered massive destruction…. Most of the reports
denied that there was any religious fanaticism. An interesting thing
about the American ambassador’s report, Mr. [Avra] Warren. It was
made up of disjointed reports of several other diplomatic servants in
Istanbul who saw what happened. [Warren was in Ankara.] In Ankara,
there were a few demonstrations, but there were no Greeks there. He
didn’t see it. And he said there was no evidence of religious
fanaticism – if you [except] 70 Greek churches that were destroyed.

…I couldn’t make heads or tales of that. So I decided that this was
a scissors and paste report, because earlier he talks about the
disgusting and beastly manner in which religious sanctuaries were
desecrated. Desecrated is a purely religious term. It involves the
violation of that which belongs to divinity, and pollution is a
refinement of it. It means despoiling that which is sacred, and the
soiling in this case was urination and defecation – defecation on the
alters, urination in the communion cups….. [We] had several
independent accounts of the destruction of the huge cemetery at
Sisli, where they not only took the time to destroy it, but took the
corpses out from mausoleums, and also desecrated them, and left in a
very large number [of cases], defecation on each of these remains.

So if you look at the church cannons, …you are violating God’s
property. Now what is God’s property? …That which has been
consecrated by religious ceremony. You can have a building that is
going to be a church, but until the liturgy is performed in it, until
it is consecrated, it is not sacred. Before an icon is consecrated in
any manner, it is just a picture, if you don’t like it you can rip it
up. The same with the sacred vestments, but once they enter into the
liturgical ritual, these things are forbidden, they belong to God.
And if you take in all these aspects, if you look at all the
photographs, the piercing and removing of the eyes of Christ, the
cutting and removing of His hands, by which He hangs on the crucifix
which is a constant in the Constantinoplitan church, if you look at
mockery, the mockery of putting priests’ sacred garb on their
donkeys, and the use of the metallic elements on their garbage
collectors, the fanaticism is very important, and it coincides
with the rise of Islam.

Of course, the government was involved, says Vryonis, as the 1960 and
1961 trials at Yassiada proved in their brief consideration of the
matter. Contemporary newspaper and eyewitness reports (which the book
provides) also describe government assistance given to pogromists
during the riots as their organizers shouted `Cleanse the fatherland
of the infidel!’ and `We do not want infidels’ merchandise in our
country.’ Official vehicles also transported the pogromists after
they had finished their grisly work.

But while Menderes and several of his ministers were hung, they lost
their lives for violating Turkey’s constitution, not the destruction
they wrought on its Greek and other non-Muslim citizens. For these
crimes, not a single man was punished, according to Vryonis.

The Islamization set in motion via discriminatory laws and violence,
before and during the pogrom, has continued ever since, with constant
pressure on the non-Muslim communities. Having lost everything, the
Greek community began to emigrate. In 1964, the Turkish junta forced
a very large number to leave or turn over their businesses to Turks
within a certain number of hours, says Vryonis. They were taxed,
though they were leaving, and their accounts were blocked.
Furthermore, intermarriage between Greek citizens and Turkish Greeks
was taxed when all marital property was decreed to belong to the
`settlers’ – making it easier to confiscate.

Today, the Greek residents of Turkey, mostly in Istanbul, number only
about 1,800, according to Vryonis, and property rights continue to be
so much a concern that the European Union is pressuring Turkey to
implement legal changes. Of course, these are cosmetic at best.

`The society has already declared that the identity of Turkey is
Islamic,’ explains Vryonis. M. Hakan Yavuz discusses the situation in
Islamic Political Identity in Turkey. The state apparatus tried to
enforce Kemalism, limiting the power of Islam, albeit not insofar as
minorities are concerned. `But the Turkish version of Islam is
undergoing a revitalization which has successfully challenged
[secularism],’ says Vryonis. `Most of the provincial universities,
for some time, have had major student organizations that are Islamic,
that are not recognized by the authorities, but the authorities in
the provinces are often Islamists.’

Indeed, the majority of Turks are believing Muslims, a factor that
emerged after the 1994 elections, when the Islamist Welfare Party won
landslides in the mayoral elections in Asia Minor. Vryonis questions
how the military can continue to bar Islamists from entering the
officer corps. `It may be that has already happened,’ he adds, `the
dam has already broken and we don’t know. Once that happens the show
is over.’

This matters, since the U.S. has armed Turkey so mightily. It has
`the largest military establishment in the Middle East, Africa and
Western and Northern Europe,’ Vryonis says. `They have a big
advantage when it comes to the buildup of tanks, jets, and this
involves updating the armaments in Cyprus. The question is into what
hands will all of this fall?’

The answer was perhaps previewed in 2003 when the Turkish government
refused to allow the disembarkment of 62,000 American troops to open
a front in northern Iraq. In Iran, Vryonis points out, U.S. weapons
fell into the hands of the Khomeiniites when the Shah fell.

As to whether Kemalists are inherently all Muslims, Vryonis cannot
assess the psychology of each person. `But if you look at the example
in Iran, they executed the chiefs of Savak, and told the other ones
to stay …and watch what they were doing.’ Within the Turkish
government, he says, groups are said to have split, some working
closely with Russia, others with China, and still others focusing on
the European Union.

A final issue concerns the Islamic army itself, Vryonis says. `[It]
is not a homogeneous entity. [Islamists] tend to win elections by
attracting people who are dissatisfied with this or that or the
other,’ says Vryonis. Even Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, `in
order to survive, wears about 4 or 5 or 6 masks. One is for the
European Union, one is for Greece, and that changes, another is over
the Israeli Palestinian issue another is for the military…. The
state department never solved these problems.’ But clearly, Vryonis
says, Islamists `want a powerful Turkey and they want it to be more
powerful than it is now.’

The lesson to be taken from the 1955 pogrom is that little, if
anything, has actually changed in Turkey.

NOTES

[1] Vryonis Jr., Speros, The Turkish State in History: Clio Meets the
Grey Wolf (1993 ed), p. 67.

[2] Vryonis Jr. Speros, The Turkish State in History, pp. 57-78.

[3] Sulzberger, C.L., `Ankara tax raises diplomatic issues,’ New York
Times, Sept. 12, 1943, p. 46.

[4] Ibid.

[5] `The Turkish minorities,’ New York Times, Sept. 17, 1943. p. 20.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress