Greek Genocide

Greek genocide
Greek civilians mourn their dead relatives, Great Fire of Smyrna, 1922
Location	Ottoman Empire
Date	1913–1922
Target	Greek population, particularly from Pontus, Cappadocia, Ionia and Eastern Thrace
Attack type	Deportation, mass murder, death march, others
Deaths	450,000–750,000 (see casualties section below)
Perpetrators	Ottoman Empire, Turkish National Movement

The Greek genocide, part of which is known as the Pontic genocide, was the systematic genocide of the Christian Ottoman Greek population from its historic homeland in Anatolia during World War I and its aftermath (1914–22). It was instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish national movement against the Greek population of the Empire and it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary execution, and the destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece (amounting to over a quarter of the prior population of Greece). Some, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire. Thus by the end of the 1919–22 Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks of Asia Minor had either fled or had been killed. Those remaining were transferred to Greece under the terms of the later 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which formalized the exodus and barred the return of the refugees. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, and some scholars and organizations have recognized these events as part of the same genocidal policy.

The Allies of World War I condemned the Ottoman government-sponsored massacres as crimes against humanity. More recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution in 2007 recognising the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire, including the Greeks, as genocide. Some other organisations have also passed resolutions recognising the campaign as a genocide, as have the parliaments of Greece, Cyprus, Sweden, Armenia, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.