Today’s Zaman, Turkey
March 24 2007
Book recounts dramas behind the exchange of populations
What does history hang around the neck of a man who sanctioned the
deportation of some one-and-a-half million people because they
believed in the wrong God? The answer in the case of the Norwegian
diplomat, Fridtjof Nansen, was a Nobel prize for peace.
Nansen was a prototype of today’s international civil servant, a
behind-the-scenes arbiter of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty. This was the
document which confirmed the failure of the Great (Megalo) Hellenic
Idea to plant a new Byzantium in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire
after a Greek invasion into Asia Minor that was ill-conceived and
badly-led. Mustafa Kemal’s ragtag Turkish nationalist army thus
defined the borders of today’s Turkish Republic. The Lausanne
Conference attended by Curzon and Poincaré and the other the great
politicians of the day became bogged down by weighty issues: control
of the oilfields in Mosul and the future of the commercial
concessions that the Ottomans had once ceded to foreign powers. The
fate of refugees and whole populations caught on the wrong side of
the fighting exercised the Great Powers rather less. The treaty’s
very first clause called for the compulsory exchange of Muslims
living in Greece with the Greek Orthodox population in Turkey.
Many of the indigenous Greeks of Asia Minor had already fled their
homes, fearing Turkish retribution for the excesses committed by the
Hellenic invaders. Under Lausanne, they could not return. For others,
such as Greek-speaking Turks of Crete and Thessalonica or
Turkish-speaking Greeks in Cappadocia and Karaman, being uprooted
from ancestral homes was an inexplicable catastrophe and resettlement
not a return from diaspora but perpetual exile. Bruce Clark’s
absorbing study examines exactly how the frock-coated politicians in
far-away Switzerland came to embrace, organize and (quite
interestingly) finance a much praised solution which in different
circumstances might have landed them before an international tribunal
on charges of ethnic cleansing.
Mustafa Kemal, who led the Turkish victory, and Eleftherios
Venizelos, who resuscitated Greece from humiliation, were both
architects of secular states. Neither man questioned that nations
could more easily be built if those citizens were cast from the same
ethnic and sectarian mould. It is that principle, what Clark calls
the "spirit of Lausanne," which has set a cynical precedent in the
dark art of conflict resolution. It defined a problem that has
resurfaced in Cyprus and Northern Ireland, as well as in Serbia,
Darfur and Iraq. Can people of different persuasions live together in
the wake of violence, or must ethnic and religious boundaries match
political frontiers for war to end?
It is a question which at the time of Lausanne seemed rhetorical.
World War I followed by invasion and civil war in Anatolia cost,
cites Clark, some 20 percent of the population — 2.5 million
Muslims, some 800,000 Armenians and 300,000 Greeks. Facing the future
meant developing collective amnesia over the traumas of the past. The
need to bury shame, or to at least embalm it in silence, has been a
key component of the nationalism afflicting the region.
The Istanbul Orthodox population, like the Muslims of Eastern
(Grecian) Thrace, were exempted from the exchange, but over a million
Anatolian Greeks were settled in Greece. They became Venizelos’
instant political constituency, a buffer against Bulgarian expansion
and a workforce in the post-war reconstruction of the country. Turkey
was affected less by the influx of newcomers than by the sudden
hemorrhage of a Greek bourgeoisie.
Filling that void became a crucial event in the shaping of modern
Turkey. If Greeks were the first of the sultan’s subjects to
successfully rebel against Ottoman rule in 1821, the Turks were the
last. Lausanne was recognition of — what the Turks call their War of
Liberation — that bid to create their own nation state from the
heterogeneity of empire.
The exchange of populations is today remembered as an historical
necessity by the descendants of both parties to the conflict. It was
not totally heartless — there were attempts to allocate to the
refugees property equivalent to that they had left behind. Greece
threw itself on the mercy of the international community, drew
attention to the desperate plight of refugees and in an early model
of development finance, raised an international bond issue on the
productive potential of the new immigrants.
The Turks, in contrast, reveled in Lausanne as an opportunity to
exclude the Western allies, who in the previous, now voided, Treaty
of Sevres had wanted to emasculate their emerging state. They dealt
with the problem of resettlement themselves.
"Twice a Stranger" is, of course, an attempt to remember. It is a
history, an analysis of history’s impact on present politics but also
an endeavor to bring center stage the anonymous figurants whose fate
was dictated by their political betters. Clark has collected the
stories of remaining representatives of the generation of ordinary
people, Greek and Turk, whose lives were uprooted. There is little
sensation in these accounts. Clark is speaking to the survivors of an
event that took place over 60 years ago and he is gently respectful
of those he interviews, careful not to cross the line between
understanding the past and using history to attribute blame.
"We were living in the mountains. We were being killed and we
killed," he quotes one Greek who fled from the Black Sea, later to
find his sister adopted by a Turkish family.
It is an approach, however, that allows him to capture in the manner
of a patient wildlife photographer, that rare moment when an
individual’s own recollection is painfully at odds with official
history. Most of those he talks to have been taught to accept the
received wisdom that their resettlement was for the best. Yet a trip
in their final years to their birthplace or a sudden knock from an
elderly stranger from across the sea who recognized the front door as
the one they shut behind them all those years ago, suddenly yields a
different set of truths. It is a world of loyalties and empathies
more complex than the signatories of Lausanne could concede.
There are so many conflicts that still burn in the Balkans, in the
Caucasus, in Africa and the Middle East. A European audience, reared
on the psychoanalytic method or the logic of the confessional, wants
to believe in the causal relation between truth and reconciliation,
historical honesty and the process of repair. It is only when nations
face up to their past that the war can end, is something one senses
Clark would like to believe. But he remains troubled by the ghost of
Lausanne, hinting that things may work the other way around and that
it is only when the war is truly over, we can begin to look back.
`Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and
Turkey’ — By Bruce Clark, Published by Granta Books
24.03.2007
BOOK REVIEW ANDREW FINKEL