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Is there any point to this following the IAGS recognition of the massacres as genocide? Genocide denialists and kemalist apologists should not be on an equal footing to an international body of scholars dedicated to the subject. It is removed.
I also amended the first sentence to reflect the definition of genocide as set out in Britannica
"the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race." (Britannica, 2007 ed.)
Xenovatis ( talk) 16:04, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 21:39, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 09:49, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 19:39, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 17:27, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree, that the map doesn't reflects real ethnic composition in Balkans around 1870-ies, in fact there are much larger areas inhabited by moslem in these areas. For example, all of Rhodope region is populated-and still is to a greater extend- with moslem (i.e pomaks and turks), not bulgarians, nor greek polulation. Map also presents wrong data about other parts of Bulgaria, this should be mentioned, that large proportion of northeastern Bulgaria was almost exclusively populated by muslims (turks), and half of central-northern Bulgaria too, so this map shows maybe the situation after the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign and genocide of turks in Bulgaria conducted by the russian army and local bulgarians. So, the situation is not significantly different for many parts of Macedonia (incl. present day Greek Macedonia), Western Serbia and Bosnia.-- Leventcik ( talk) 23:26, 21 January 2008 (UTC) The map by William R. Shepherd suggests that extent of the Albanian population extended across the majority of present-day southern Serbia up to the city-boundaries of Nis. The document is false (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Kosovo). Another source should be used for the map that is consistent with historical fact or the map should be removed altogether.
I've read through the article, and feel that it is written in a Greek POV tone. I suggest the lead mention that the International Association of Genocide Scholars hasn't recognized it, and that Turkey refuses to call this "genocide", as those things are quite important, and having them near the top (as well as where they are) would reduce the bias towards the Greek end considerably. Also, should the title not be "Pontic Greek genocide", with "genocide" lowercased? · AndonicO Talk 17:16, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
Just commenting on this [1]. I find it very rich comming from the land where admitting that the Armenian Genocide took place is a criminal offence but denying that an Algerian Genocide took place is also to be a criminal offence [2]. Turkish Foreign Minister speaks of a "traditional Greek policy of distorting history" ... is the pot calling the kettle black?-- Ploutarchos 18:22, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
I agree with the edit. I'd just remove "however", since it is argumentative. Niko Silver 23:04, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
The same sources youre using in the article says that there were organised atrocities between the years 1919-1922 on the part of greeks, what is has to do with "trivializing" the genocide? And the genocide nobody but greece recognize in the face of earth..Ah sorry ı forget to mention cyprus recognize it as well-- laertes d 20:02, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
İm really bored with all these silly games of reverting articles, there are enough and credible sources quite clearly stating organized greek massacres in western anatolia during the greek occupation of it, and there is nothing wrong to say thhat massacres in the period 1919-1922 was mutual..-- laertes d 22:30, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
Regardless of of who commits massacres, they are regretable. However, there is a big difference between massacres that constitute a genocide and a few isolated massacres/atrocities. The Turkish victims numbered several thousand ( see Rummel's accounts), the Greek victims hundreds of thousands. The Turkish atrocities were premeditated and centrallly planned (see Akcam's accounts). The Greek atrocities were spontaneous, isolated individual or group acts of violence. There was no premeditated and/or central Greek plan. Please provide a third party source which states that there was a premeditated and centrally directed Greek plan. - Rizos01 16:53, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
Rizos, both Arnold J. Toynbee and Taner akcam actually argues that Greek atrocities were organised in nature, they were not some isolated acts..And these opinions are shared by Inter allied commission reports and by the representative of red cross..-- laertes d 10:07, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Please provide book titles and page numbers, as well as report titles, page numbers, and date of reports. Otherwise your arguments are not credible.-- Rizos01 22:59, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
A millenium of Turkish inhabitance should be enough to secure the city's name as Izmir. I've deleted Smyrna in the parentheses. Anyone who wishes to find out the past names of the city can click its link. By the way, I didn't see Selanik in parentheses after Thessalonika...—Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.38.194.49 ( talk • contribs)
It's not a question of Greek vs Turkish names, but a question of accurate chronology. The fact of the matter is that the names Smyrna (and Constantinople, for that matter) were in common usage and were the internationally recognized names of the cities during the time period. Ataturk changed the names in 1930. Hence we should write Smyrna, perhaps with "modern-day Izmir" in parentheses, for any reference to the city in question that is pre-1930, in order to be historically accurate. After-all, no one would think in antiquity of substituting Tunis for Carthage, etc. and the same principle applies here. Cheers, 74.134.238.58 23:21, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
"The Greek name vs Turkish name for a Turkish city" is not a serious argument, as the city has been Greek much longer than it's been Turkish. I was simply noting the absurdity of the seemingly pathological aversion of many Turkish editors to the original Greek names of places in modern Turkey. However, I agree with the second anonymous editor that it is a matter of accurate chronology, so İZMİR is fine when discussing the Turkish mayor's rather amusing spitting of the dummy, as it occurred in 2006. Finally, please note the city's name in English is Izmir without the dotted I; this is en.wikipedia.org, after all. ·ΚέκρωΨ· 00:56, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
User:Laertes d has reverted my clarifications on the nature of the Genocide. He would like us to believe that the massacres in Pontus were somehow the direct result of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22, which took place in western Anatolia, several hundred kilometres away. There were no Greek forces in Pontus at the time and hence no war there. It is essential to distinguish between these two discrete historical events. ·ΚέκρωΨ· 10:21, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
Kekrops thats the problem they were not two discrete historical events, according to a multitude of historians, that includes Toynbee and Akcam as well, there wouldnt be such a thing as Turkish national Movement without Greeks occupying smyrna..There was a war between Greece and Turkey regardless of where the Greek army was..Btw, ı recently noticed that Rummel calls the masssacres greeks committed in western anatolia a "genocide" as he calls the Turkish massacres of greeks as such..-- laertes d 10:23, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
Then Kekrops Turks who were slaughtered in occupied lands were also not the victims of casualties of war, they were also massacred in areas where there was not an organized Turkish unit..What distinction are you referring to? And you keep changing source content the way you want, toynbee doesnt say "outside of Pontus" but he says "There were both spontaneous and organized atrocities on either side since the Greek occupation of Smyrna"..what's the point of having citations if youre going to change them according to your personal ideas?
Vonones what is that controversial material are you talking about? the article itself is controversial as Garnett said.Im making reference to absolutely non-pro turkish sources like Toynbee and Akcam, toynbee's book is perhaps the only book which is written exclusively about the atrocities of the greco-turkish war..Plus you are changing the source material to something the sources doesnt say..-- laertes d 09:20, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
The references of shameful act are all fine except for this, this is really irrelevant this has nothing to do with the text in the book and in the article, and throughout 1920-23, the period of the Turkish War of Independence. -- Vonones 00:25, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
how it is irrelevant can you explain it vonones? That is how it is written in the book and that is completely relevant with the article..The citations from Toynbee are also quite relevant..-- laertes d 09:03, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
I still cant see how it is irrelevant, obviously you dont like the naming of turkish war of independence..-- laertes d 07:54, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
Scenes of the
Pontic Greek Genocide are prominent in the initial chapters of
Middlesex, the
2003
Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel by
Jeffrey Eugenides. Under which heading would this best be added to the
page? As it's a work of fiction, Further reading seems inappropriate. For now I'll add a heading, In literature — though I'm unfamiliar with the
WP Style Guide on this point. -- Thanks,
Deborahjay 10:55, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Further to the above: other pages do use the heading Further reading; however the page is presently protected from editing. --
Deborahjay 11:17, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
"hellenicgenocide.org" and the likes of it are most emphatically not reliable sources by any standard. I will strongly object to the inclusion of just about anything sourced to nationalist hate sites like that. We've been through it before. These are completely unacceptable. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:04, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
"British historian Arnold J. Toynbee wrote that it was the Greek landings that created the Turkish National Movement led by Mustafa Kemal and it is almost certain that if the Greeks had never landed at Smyrna, the consequent atrocities on the Turkish side would not have occurred." Well i guess Toynbee was either a fortune teller or a retarded man as i can't remember Armenian army landing in Turkey before the Armenian genocide and i can't remember Greek army landing in Asia Minor in 1915 when "Amele Tamburu" (=forced labour aka work till you die in Lake Van etc) where at their prime.All in all i can't see how a totally personal view based on someone's "good wi$$" (to say at least) can be presented as a fact here. Eagle of Pontus 11:25, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Kekrops enough is enough we have been over this before, and now you turned back to do the same kind of editing again without trying to initiate a discussion over it..These two sources are relevant to the article, Akcam`s work perhaps the newest book written on the subject, Toynbee was an eyewitness to the whole series of massacres committed by Greeks and Turks, citing them is completely relevant for this article..
Kekrops, youre just pushing me to create an article, which i thought should exist anyway, that of the massacre committed against Turks by greek army of invasion, naming it Greek atrocities in Anatolia(as it would be the translation of Turkish expression of the atrocities committed by greek army `anadoluda Yunan mezalimi`)..There are enough sources to do this..I already have two neutral sources to begin with which uses the word genocide in relation of what greeks had done..Rummel and Cedric James uses the word genocide in describing these acts..-- laertes d 10:19, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
You may read the talk page of the greco turkish war article for similar extending discussions, but just to summarize my point:
-- laertes d 22:12, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
About the Muslims in Macedonia, youre right but there wasnt much a point of expelling or killing these people beacuse they were in the established Greek lands however that wasnt the case in much of the western anatolian coastlans, where there was a mixed population, and both sides were claiming it is their right to have their state upon that territory as they were constituting the majority..
Btw, Turkish nationalists used the excuse for forced marching Pontus people that Venizelos had already claimed right on black sea coastal areas in the Paris Peace conference and if Greeks would remain there, they would facilitate a possible greek invasion..I dont explain one massacre with another massacre, i am simply saying there were massacres committed against Turkish civilians by the greek army in that same period of time, and we need to mention of these acts in terms of some historical accuracy..-- laertes d 11:37, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Laertes, basically your discussion has made it clear that you are attempting to justify the Turkish massacres of Greek civilians. AlexiusComnenus 09:49, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
I ignore your comment, and i assume you either havent read what is written above or simply trying your best not to discuss the issue in hand..-- laertes d 07:31, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
Please stop your mindless reverting. The subject of this article is the Pontian Genocide; any complementary information on the casualties of the Greco-Turkish war in a geographically distant part of Anatolia belongs outside the lead. ·ΚέκρωΨ· 13:05, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
Unfortenetly i agree with Garnett when he said: `Its like talking to a brick wall.`..Regards..-- laertes d 10:22, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Laertes, there's a huge leap between the info being included below, and a separate article. We're not discussing whether the information should be included at all or not. We are discussing if it has such high relevance to the subject to warrant inclusion in the lead. And it hasn't. Niko Silver 12:23, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
And yet it has been there for over months, it gets truly pathetic of what you two have been doing in several articles..Youre supposed to make up your own minds, not to back each other in each and ever occasion no matter what the discussion topic is..
Dont worry you`ll get what you want..-- laertes d 22:24, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
It seemed to me quite relevant, we`re not talking about a background info, but about what happened in this period of time..i keep backing it up, as you may read from above, ( Personal attack removed) ..thts quite simple, the Turks being systematically massacred, just in the same period of time, is not a background info but the info itself..
laertes d 23:06, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
And thats your own private point of view that you keep repeating, which is unsupported by sources..You just keep repeat the same things, and call it a debate? In any case, there had been organised Greek atrocities in the same period of time(1919-1922), Toynbee and Akcam and several other sources make ıt quıte clear, what is your aim then Kekrops other than pushing your POV? -- laertes d 19:13, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
So? What despises me the most with your behavior is that youre acting like you dont understand, these specific citations are about the atrocities of the Greco-Turkish war, and that happened during the period of 1919-1922..
I'm wondering about another thing: "undue weight", how many Turks were killed by Greeks, do you have a number? I think this is relevant when we talk about hundereds of thousands of Greeks killed (I'm pretty sure that a Jew killed a German at some point in time, is that relevant in the discusion of Holocaust? OK, this is an exageration, but you see my point) -- AdrianTM 22:17, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
i meant for the numbers, he relies the `estimates` of this horton guy for the numbers..
Anyway, i think there is enough source that the Greek army had tried to build up homogenous or majority greek populations in western anatolia by expelling or massacring the Turkish civilian population there, as the Turkish forces were doing it elsewhere in the exact same period of time, so these informations has to be included in the intro of this article..There is nothing wrong with having cited neutral, respectable historians
Add this source to Toynbee and akcam, note that he uses that word genocide in relation with what the Greek army had done in the occupied zones:
`The short-sightedness of both Lloyd George and President Wilson seems incredible, explicable only in terms of the magic of Venizelos and an emotional, perhaps religious, aversion to the Turks. For Greek claims were at best debatable, perhaps a bare majority, more likely a large minority in the Smyrna Vilayet, which lay in an overwhelmingly Turkish Anatolia. The result was an attempt to alter the imbalance of populations by genocide, and the counter determination of Nationalists to erase the Greeks, a feeling which produced bitter warfare in Asia Minor for the next two years until the Kemalists took Smyrna in 1922 and settled the problem by burning down the Greek quater..` [3] By C. J. Lowe, M. L Dockrill Published 2002 Routledge ISBN 0415265975-- laertes d 23:04, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
Niko if you dont want to discuss and reply to the comments made in this article, then why are you so fanatically revert the article? I happen to wait for an answer from you..-- laertes d 10:52, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
Sigh.., as i keep saying i already quoted you enough sources, please stop your immature behavior of changing the sourced content to something that the sources actually dont say..Believe me I really dont want to waste more time in here, make sure you just dont change the sources the way you want..-- laertes d 10:11, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
Can editors tell me whether Tatz, Rummel, or Jacob specifically use the term "Pontic Greek Genocide" since they are being used to source this as a verifiable term? I know for a fact Rummel does not use term. If it is a case of these authors saying there was a "greek genocide" or "genocide of greeks" it still does not source the title of this article which the sources are apparently being used for. To me this is only one example of the OR running through this article. Other sections such as "Reasons for limited recognition" are purely original research, using a mish mash of sources to prove an editors own position. This is a problem I've highlighted from the very beginning, and something obvious to any editor with a basic knowledge of wiki policy. -- A.Garnet 10:26, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
What utter hypocrisy. You denounce the sources you dislike for not referring verbatim to a Pontic Greek Genocide, but happily parrot passages that don't refer specifically to the Pontians at all. I've had enough for one evening. Cheers. ·ΚέκρωΨ· 15:03, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
Actually Midlarsky later writes:
p.342
Here, a strong disjunction between intention and action is found. According to the Austrian consul at Arnisos, Kwiatkowski, in his November 30, 1916, report to the foreign minister Baron Bunan: on 26 November Rafet Bey told me: ‘we must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians ... ‘on 28 November Rafet Bey told me: today I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight.’ I fear for the elimination of the entire Greek population and a repeat of what occurred last year.”
And later still
p.343
Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks. Massacres most likely did take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small number of Armenian survivors, the massacres were apparently restricted to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other "sensitive regions"
So he specifically ascribes genocidal intent on the Turkish state, explicitly terms the events massacres and equates them to the Armenian Genocide but localized to Pontus, Smyrna and some other regions (I am guessing he is reffering to the Kydonies and other Anatolian massacres here). Xenovatis ( talk) 12:14, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
I will, i think that is the correct way doing it, many of these citations are not reliable..-- laertes d 12:39, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
If primay source is cming someone like George Horton, surely we have to mention qho is saying it..-- laertes d 12:39, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
A final comment: I am really tired with your repeated insults ( [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] ), and I am seeking the foreseen remedies. Niko Silver 12:28, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
i cant see any insult at all, if somebody just bother to read what you have been doing in several articles for a long period of time..And believe i am tired of people like you, and i still dont get how such a blatant, ugly nationalist POV pushing rhetoric demonstrated by you for such long period of time can still be tolerated...-- laertes d 12:36, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
I have again placed the distinct events of western Anatolia outside the lead and reworded the text to avoid some of Laertes's more inane repetition regarding the atrocities. As for the word "limited", my inclination is to avoid it if it isn't used in the source. ·ΚέκρωΨ· 14:56, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
Kekrops says see the talk page, but I can't seem to find the rationale for his edit. It might be time to archive. Also to avoid WP:SYN, Niko, we should maybe split that sentence, if you do not want to insist on violating WP:SYN and WP:NPOV Deniz T C 02:53, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
An attribution tag was requested on the "reasons of limited recognition" section. In my view, the attribution is right below, in the whole section. It is attributed to Constantine Fotiades, and one of the "excuses" he uses concurs with a (very descriptive IMO) comment by Levene. Denizz, can you please explain if there is an additional reason why the tag is needed? Niko Silver 13:09, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
Why is the following passage being used in this article?:
The Turks extended their policy of exterminating the Christians of the [Ottoman Empire] to the Armenians, Greeks, Syrians, and Lebanese.... According to an Associated Press report, of 500,000 Greeks deported from Thrace, in Asia Minor, an estimated 250,000, or half, died of disease and torture. Starting in 1910, the Ottoman Turks made about one million Greeks homeless and deported hundreds of thousands; as many as 300,000 Greeks died of hunger, disease, and the cold as a result. In the 1920s, the Turkish nationalists massacred about 200,000 more Christians, mostly Greeks, in cities such as Smyrna. Greek men became victims of murder, torture, and starvation; Greek women suffered all this and also became slaves in Muslim households; Greek children wandered the streets as orphans ‘‘half-naked and begging for bread’’; and millions of dollars’ worth of Greek property passed into Muslim hands
Can anyone tell me where it a)mentions Pontians or Pontus or b)a genocide of Pontian Greeks? Are we going to paste is any large passages which allude to a massacre of Greeks, even if they dont refer to Pontians? Just in case you forgot what the intro of the article says, it states "Pontic Greek Genocide[2][3][4][5][6][7] is a controversial term used to refer to the fate of Pontic Greeks during and in the aftermath of World War I." Can anyone give a justification for it? -- A.Garnet 12:40, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
I am astonished as to what is going on here- this is absolute editing chaos. You all need to calm down and get down off of your grandstands and stop this edit warring post haste. These are my points from what I have seen:
R.J. Rummel does not mention Pontic Greeks in his calculation chart, and does not differentiate between them and the rest of the Anatolian Greeks. Any mention of Turkish massacres are not to go beyond the scope of the region of Pontus- anything beyond that makes this a general article on Anatolian Greek genocide, which it is not. Please stick with Pontus only references. Monsieurdl ( talk) 20:49, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
If the term is controversial to begin with (as the first sentence suggests), then why is the controversial term used as the title, rather than as an alternative name? Why not change the title to something like:
...Or something else that is more suitable. I think I made my point. The title itself shouldn't be controversial. Is this internationally recognized as a genocide like the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust? I do not believe it is. When I type Pontic Greek Genocide into google, I only get Greek websites. It appears the Greeks are clearly the ones with the bias in this article. - 68.43.58.42 01:13, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
No international body accepts the term, including the United Nations. I think that makes the term genocide POV. The only nation that recognizes it is Greece (and Cyprus). Several of the academics quoted are Greeks themselves (since the nation of Greece is the only nation that accepts the term, one has to question the partisanship of Greek scholars). The term is not found in any major encyclopedia... Wikipedia is INTENDED to be an encyclopedia, and therefore one has to question the validity of this article as a whole. Calling the Pontic Greek Genocide a Genocide is intended to evoke sympathy for Greeks, who were perpetrating War Crimes against the Turks themselves. No one calls the extermination of entire Turkish cities during the Greco-Turkish War to be "genocidal," even though it had the same effect as this event. It is a blatant POV term and would be similar to declaring the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo to be "genocides." We all know that that would be nonsense, even if 2-3 million people were displaced and at least half a million were killed in those 4 bombings alone. The fact that this source is missing from encyclopedias, from textbooks, it is not acknowledged by the international community, and it has almost no representation online other than through Greek websites, one really has to question whether or not this article can legitimately be called a genocide. An unencyclopedic term has no place in an online encyclopedia (wiki). - 68.43.58.42 ( talk) 21:17, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Funny, because I'm not Turkish? I acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. This article seems like a silly way to elevate what occurred to the Greeks to the level of what occurred to the Armenians and that's nonsense. If the term is not located in any encyclopedia, then it's an unecyclopedic term. If the "genocide" really occurred, why does not a single major international body on PLANET EARTH acknowledge it? Even the EU doesn't acknowledge it! This is blatant POV and Greek chauvinism. It would be equivalent to Turks creating an article on cities that the Greek forces exterminated during the Greco-Turkish Wars and label those are "Genocides." Elevating such events to the level of things like the Holocaust or Armenian genocide in which millions were killed systematically is nonsense. - 68.43.58.42 ( talk) 05:11, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
More people died in the combined Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings. Was it genocidal? If something is not internationally recognized or included in any modern encyclopedia, then how can this possibly be encyclopedic? Finding sources is great, but you can't point to any international body or any encyclopedia that includes this, so the entire article is fundamentally questionable, hence why the it will never be neutral if a word like genocide is included. - 68.43.58.42 ( talk) 18:53, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
The entire premise of this article is suspect. However, before concluding either way, would one of the authors of this article please address the following questions.
Some of the citations also raise questions:
Thank you in advance for your responses. Pebblicious ( talk) 21:44, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
Eagle of Pontus ( talk) 14:08, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 17:37, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
The second image describing 800,000 Armenians being murdered by the Turks seems somewhat tangential to an article on this event. The Armenian Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide and this event are not universally acknowledged as pieces of one larger genocide. The image of Armenians being killed, however, reinforces that point of view. Shouldn't an image on Armenians being killed be kept in an article on the Armenian Genocide, not the Greek one? I thought I would come here before deleting anything. - Rosywounds ( talk) 20:54, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
The POV tag was removed without discussion. I re-added it, since this dispute has obviously not been resolved (nor was the removal ever discussed) and the article is susceptible to POV pushing. Moreover, the title of the article immediately pushes for a specific POV (that the event is worthy of being called a "genocide"). If the article refers to the event throughout as a "genocide" even though the event is not officially recognized internationally, then the article is clearly pushing for that POV. The Greeks themselves did not even refer to this event as a genocide until the 1990s. Moreover, this is a sensitive topic and it should be known that this page is and has been susceptible to bias. I'd be willing to discuss this more thoroughly.- Rosywounds ( talk) 06:27, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Major works of history does not call the events as a genocide, thats the the basic point which separates it from the armenian genocide article.Thus tag is necessary.-- 88.242.196.76 ( talk) 12:39, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Thank heaven, i dont waste my time in here anymore-at least not so often-, people often refer to the works of Arnold J. Toynbee as major hisotrical works, and he is a respected historian of the region as he had been in Turkey throughut this period..Then Taner Akcam also is considered to be a major historian of the region, the book that he wrote is the most recent work about these events.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.242.196.76 ( talk) 13:19, 4 January 2008 (UTC) Some many other historical works can be added to the list, like the book from `C.J. Lowe and M.L. Dockrill`..
Whatever the case and no matter who you are,
88.242.196.76, you are being disruptive and deliberately provoking a fight here with your highly controversial edits, particularly the one saying that if the Greeks had never landed there would have been no atrocities. That alone is ludicrous and points directly to your attempt. I am in full support of any revisions to counter these actions, be it by admins or not.
Monsieurdl
mon talk-
mon contribs 16:42, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Ok monsieur, you are probably right about being disruptive, however the source is legitimate, definitely not `highly controversial`..It basically says that there wasnt such a thing as `turkish national movement` following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire afterworld war I and the basic factor of its emergence was the Greek occupation of Smyrna..And actually it is not simpy the personal point of view of Toynbee, many other historians actually repeat the same thing..Plus, article for a very long time actually has been in this shape, just check the past records, only one day it occured to Niko to change it all of a sudden and rewrite it..-- 88.242.196.76 ( talk) 19:14, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Read wikipedia's file on POV tags/disputes. If the dispute has not been resolved between editors, then it is inappropriate to remove a POV tag. There was no thorough discussion in the talk page about this at the time of its removal (only two editors were involved, and one was a troll). That is a violation of wikipedia policy. Simply because one non-governmental organization recognizes this event does not mean this dispute was resolved between editors. Certainly there are scholars that recognize it, but there were scholars that recognized it before the POV tag had been added in the first place. Nikosilver, you do bring up a good point; this was discussed briefly. However, that discussion was initiated by a troll (Xenovatis) whose recent edits clearly show he is not editing in good-faith. The IAGS, as noble of an idea as it is, is a consensus studies organization akin to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. These organizations are notoriously politically correct and want to please everyone (e.g. Amnesty International is more critical of Israeli human rights or Guantanamo Bay than Saudi Arabian human rights). These organizations certainly deserve citation in this article in defense for the naming, but they are not the last word and they do not override Wikipedia consensus. The POV tag cannot be removed under such grounds, it is a violation of wikipedia policy. It should be included again. I do not oppose using the title, but unless this dispute is properly resolved, then the POV tag should also be included.-
Rosywounds (
talk) 19:08, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
The current sample of editors would not be enough to come to a logical decision on the POV tag (which I am more than willing to discuss). Three of the users that have posted in this thread are trolls/ bad faith editors (EliasAlucard, Xenovatis, 88.242.196.76). - Rosywounds ( talk) 19:25, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
I had to request an RfC- this has gotten to be far too much. Monsieurdl mon talk- mon contribs 21:31, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Well I don't see how a consensus can be reached when one side is defended by genocide denialists. I agree with mediation and second the RfC. ASAP.
Xenovatis ( talk) 16:59, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
It's been a month and a half and the RfC has only yielded one comment and that is against the genocide denialist position. There can be no further rationale for the inclusion of the tag. Xenovatis ( talk) 17:10, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Look Rosywouds this is getting silly. Please state clearly what if anything will it take to convince you. You have been shown a large number of refs that clearly label it as genocide. You have the opinion of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that calls it a genocide and I point out that this was previously used as the main argument against the use of the word. Please state clearly what exactly it will take to convince you. Xenovatis ( talk) 19:37, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Is the POV tag necessary for this article based upon its content and history?
I would therefore expect that a NPOV article which is nevertheless titled Genocide would give more weight to this view including expanding on it in the article introduction. Aatomic1 ( talk) 13:19, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
To recap:
Mark Mazower (eminent historian on Greece): "It [the Ottoman leadership] had already deported Greek civilians from the Anatolian shoreline into the interior (the Russians were doing much the same with Russian Jews in Tsarist Poland, the Habsburgs with their border Serbs). But these deportations were on a relatively small scale and do not appear to have been designed to end in their victims' deaths. What was to happen with the Armenians was of a different order." (Mark Mazower, The G-Word, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n03/mazo01_.html)."
Midlarsky: Midlarskys argues while there may have been statements made towards massacre of the Greeks (he uses the alleged statement of Rafet Bey) "there is a strong disjunction between intentions and actions" and that "Under these conditions, genocide of the Ottoman Greeks was simply not a viable option." (Midlarsky, Killing Trap, p.342).
Valentino: "Although many thousands died during the expulsions, particularly in years before the deportations came under international supervision, the Turks did not seek to exterminate the Greeks, as the previous regime had done to the Armenians. See Marrus, The Uwanted, pp 96-106." (B.A. Valentino, 2005. Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century., p.296)."
Peter Balakian (on the IAGS resolution): "The current resolution strikes me is an oversimplified statement that does not have the support of major scholars in our organization. It would seem to follow that IAGS would not want to put its name to such a statement and compromise its reputation and integrity."
Taner Akcam (again, on the Pontian resolution): "There is almost no single scholarly work done on the treatment of Greeks during the First World War. I worked extensively on this topic and collected an amount of Ottoman, German and American archival materials on this topic and haven’t published yet. My knowledge at this stage, based on the material that I have read from these three archival sources, what happened to the Greeks during the First World War cannot be correctly termed genocide."
Eric Weitz: By my reading, Pontic Greeks were subject to a forced deportation, which was, inevitably, accompanied by a large number of deaths and other atrocities. But it was not a genocide because the Young Turk regime was not intent on killing “in whole or in part” Pontic Greeks. It wanted them removed."
Three scholarly, western and reliable authors, where should their views be included? -- A.Garnet ( talk) 00:14, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Why only quote the minority view? In other words, the IAGS members that did not support the resolution. The resolution passed overwelmingly with 83% of the IAGS members voting in favor. Why not quote the members that voted in favor, as well. It is important to note here again that none of the individuals quoted above appears to have done any systematic or in depth research on the Pontic Greek Genocide. -
Rizos01 (
talk) 05:52, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
Perhaps to clear up the neutrality dispute, we could include a section on "Naming dispute" and include reasons for and against there? As of right now, the only portion that is represented is the pro-"genocide" title (the recognition section, for example). The article says that the name is controversial, but it never elaborates on why. It simply insinuates that Turkey is alone in that position like it is on the Armenian Genocide, which is not true at all with the Pontic Greek situation. Even under places like "Reasons for limited recognition," it still has a sympathetic tone towards why the Greeks themselves did not acknowledge this as a "genocide" until the 1990s. I wouldn't recommend placing it under "academic views of the genocide," since that entire page is based on synthesized information and should, if anything, be nominated for deletion (as should the the page with the laundry list of New York Times articles on this event) - Rosywounds ( talk) 00:26, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
According to the IAGS's own report [ here], there "has been little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides [whatever that means] against the other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire" in comparison to the Armenian genocide. In other words, almost no scholars outside of this organization acknowledges it and almost no literature has ever been generated on this topic that characterizes the events as a genocide - and they even admit that they are voting against what is commonly held. The current president of IAGS (Gregory Stanton) was loony enough to refer to the current Iraq War as bordering on genocide. This is why organizations like this do not represent the last word; organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are more critical of Israel and Guantanamo Bay than they are of human rights violations in countries like China and Saudi Arabia. FYI, consensus does not mean a lot of scholars. Consensus means scholars within this circle are in agreement. - Rosywounds ( talk) 05:11, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
The first sentence (the quote from the Turkish government) I deleted because it is already quoted verbatim in the Turkish stance on recognition; we don't need to be redundant. The second sentence was about Turkey's stance on the Assyrian and Armenian genocides, which is irrelevant to this article and pushes the POV that Turkey's denial of this event is genocide denial (which, thus, reinforces the stance that the term "genocide" is appropriate for this article). This event is much more debatable than the Armenian Genocide is, but the last sentence was using Turkey's denial of the Armenian genocide as a cheap way to try and invalidate the Turkish position on this event. Unnecessary and irrelevant. The Greek position and Turkish positions are (and should remain) further down in the article; the lead already provides a sufficient hint to an existing dispute or controversy over the name. I still think this dispute deserves its own section in the article (right now it is brushed off in the recognition section, and the rest of the article below that is synthesized original research). How would others feel about adding a section discussing the name's controversy on its own? That seems like the easiest way to get settle this dispute. - Rosywounds ( talk) 01:06, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Both sentences (the Turkish government stance and the IAGS position) are included under "recognition" (one of them is mentioned almost verbatim). The first sentence especially, because it's just a repeat of the same quote. You do bring up a point about how the second sentence gives one a picture of the "fate of Anatolia's Christians," but these genocides are interconnected according to the Greek POV. A Garnet already furnished sources by Mark Mazower that argue they were "of a different order." Bernard Lewis, another eminent scholar, actually has even stronger opinions. Considering that Lewis is an eminent scholar on the Ottoman Empire and Mazower is an eminent scholar on Greece and the Balkans, that position shouldn't be overshadowed. Insinuating that the events are all interconnected or a part of the same policy would thus be pushing for one POV over another in a lead paragraph. Moreover, by synthesizing the Armenian Genocide and the Pontic Greek Genocide together, you are trying to lend the academic verifiability of the Armenian genocide to the not-so-verifiable Pontic Greek Genocide. It's an insinuation and it's a synthesis of data ( see here). Synthesis has been a repeated villain in these Pontic Greek articles, and it needs to be tackled now.
Editors sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if A is published by a reliable source, and B is published by a reliable source, then A and B can be joined together in an article to advance position C. However, this would be an example of a new synthesis of published material serving to advance a position, and as such it would constitute original research. - Wikipedia's policies on OR/Synthesis
- Rosywounds ( talk) 20:17, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
It is important to note here that neither Toynbee, nor Mazower, Midrasky, Akcam or Lewis had or have sufficient knowledge or done any in depth research on the Pontic Greek experience. What they offer and express is simply their opinion on these events based on what they have read in the course of studying Greece, Turkey, the First World War, etc. One would consider Toynbee and Akcam as the only ones that could come close to have some weight in this matter. However, Toynbee's travels in Turkey, were limited to the west coast of Anatolia. He never set foot on the Pontus region before, during, or after the subject events. The Turkish regime's efforts to keep reports about these events from reaching other areas of Anatolia and the West are known and were quite effective. Similarly, Taner Akcam's research is limited to the Armenian Genocide in 1915-1916. He has not done any research on the Pontian Greek Genocide. This is obvious in his comments to the IAGS (see IAGS Blog). Therefore, none of the above mentioned sources should be considered authoritative or the last word on the Pontic Greek Genocide issue. - Rizos01 ( talk) 22:17, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Someone please be so kind to add all the references and all the text from this recognized internationall institution supported by the United Nations: http://www.genocidetext.net/iags_resolution_supporting_documentation.htm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.38.72.32 ( talk) 16:48, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Hi, I noticed there is an edit war here, so I have protected the article. Discuss, find consensus and ask an admin to either unprotect, or make agreed upon changes. Cheers, John Vandenberg ( talk) 14:17, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
As editors involved in this long running dispute will know, there is disagreement regarding both the title of this article and the manner in which the events are explained. Before I go over mine and others rationale for this dispute, any editor removing tags and making unilateral changes should know that I am not the only person disputing this article, others to voice their concerns include User:Rosywounds, User:Monsieurdl, User:Wandalstouring, User:Baristarim, User:Future Perfect at Sunrise among others. Firstly, just from the above list it is obvious those questioning this article are not simply "Genocide denialists and kemalist apologists " and if User:Xenovatis uses such language again I will report him to an administrator. Secondly, looking back from the talk page and comments made by myself and others it is obvious there is steady, long running and unresolved dispute, and as such unilateral attempts to remove the pov-title tag without a solution is unnaceptable.
As to the dispute itself my reasoning is as follows. Firstly the title "Pontic Greek Genocide" was based on resolutions passed by the Greek government and scraps of sentences found in various works which made various reference to a "genocide of Greeks", though not making in clear if in Pontus or Asia Minor, or "massacres" or "ethnic cleansing" etc. The article lacked even one major scholarly source which could be attributed to this event, it has zero coverage in journals, zero coverage in mainstream encylopedias, zero coverage in mainstream media i.e. BBC, Economist, TIME etc. Put simply, the whole categorisation of these events from top to bottom as a genocide is a pov and the efforts to maintain it is pov pushing.
Now the IAGS (association of genocide scholars) passed a resolution some months ago recognising these events as genocide, the same editors have taken this as confirming the "truth" and attempted to remove the tag. This despite me providing sources with eminent members of the IAGS opposing the resolution e.g. Peter Balakian states "The current resolution strikes me is an oversimplified statement that does not have the support of major scholars in our organization. It would seem to follow that IAGS would not want to put its name to such a statement and compromise its reputation and integrity" or Taner Akcam "There is almost no single scholarly work done on the treatment of Greeks during the First World War [funnily enough an argument I have made for over a year]...what happened to the Greeks during the First World War cannot be correctly termed genocide". These are just two major scholars who made clear their opposition to the resolution (more can be found on the IAGS blog). So it is clear from this even that the current position of the article lacks academic consensus, the most basic principle of establishing pov as fact.
Now add to this the complete absence from this article of scholars such as Mazower, Midlarsky and Valention who are explicit in saying Greeks did not suffer a genocide and you understand that this article is an exercise in pov pushing from top to bottom. There is almost no explanation of what the Pontians actually endured, instead most of the article is devoted to explaining why Greece is right to call it a genocide, why there are "reasons for limited recognition" of this alleged genocide, why it is similar to the Armenian Genocide, the only academic quotes provided are those which use the term genocide etc etc. Furthermore, consider the creation of three more articles, Academic quotes on the Pontic Greek Genocide, List of press headlines relevant to the Pontic Greek Genocide and List of eyewitness accounts related to the Pontic Greek Genocide, each one created to further a pov based without the existence of one single piece of scholarly research in its favour. This is frankly quite an incredible situation and the fact that it has existed for so long is a testament to efforts by almost exclusively Greek editors to force their view through reverts, meaningless straw polls, obstructing arbitration attempts and so forth.
Therefore, I will continue to oppose the state of this article, the manner in which it is portrayed and its title, not because I am Turkish or I have a grudge against Greeks, but because it so obviously and shamelessly violates basic Wiki policies. I accept there is a legitimate article to be made, just not in this way. In the coming days I will make a proposition on what I think is npov and I what I would accept without any problem. Thanks, -- A.Garnet ( talk) 13:33, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
For the record, those articles should be deleted per WP:SYN. Not a single New York Times article, for example, ever mentioned genocide. The word genocide was coined in the 1940s. - Rosywounds ( talk) 17:07, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
I will continue to oppose the state of this article,
That kind of attitude is why I think arbitration is needed. User AGarnet does not show himself a good faith discussant that will revise his opinions in the light of evidence. 17:12, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
I dont plan to get drawn into a long debate before I make suggestions to npov'ise this article, but I will address some of the accusations being made since Xenovatis is (deliberately imo) choosing to distort what I am saying. Firstly, I am not against the use of the word genocide as there are sources, including the IAGS and other less noteworthy authors who make use of that word. BUT and this is the big but, the article must be created in a way in which it accomodates
Now in its current form the article cannot accomodate these views since from the title its obvious Greek editors (who created and for the most part maintain this article) are framing the article on paltry few references which refer to the event as genocide and ommiting the larger issues which I raised above. For the above points to be integrated the whole article has to be changed, that means the title, content and structure. Ignoring my arguments, which are rational and in line with Wiki policies, by attacking my character, calling me a nationalist, denialist, apologist or that I am acting in bad faith carries no currency here. These points HAVE to be addressed and if your incapable of this then you have no grounds to oppose my argument. -- A.Garnet ( talk) 12:05, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
http://www.lawandpolitics.com/minnesota/Is-It-Still-Genocide-if-Your-Allies-Did-It/cef7381e-fe46-102a-aeb9-000e0c6dcf76.html Taner Akcam interview My central argument in A Shameful Act was that the Armenian Genocide was not an isolated act against Armenians but a part of a demographic policy enacted during World War I. It had two main components. One was against the Muslim non-Turkish population, who were redistributed, relocated and resettled among the Turkish population with the aim of assimilation. The second was against the Christian population, the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians. The goal was to get the Christians out of Anatolia, what we now know as Turkey-to forcibly move them to Greece or Iran. Or, in the case of the Armenians, to eliminate them altogether.
Xenovatis ( talk) 20:47, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
1. You have completely misrepresented my statements. Firstly, I never said the IAGS as a whole should be disqualified; in fact, I said clearly (and in bold) that they should be mentioned.
2. Wikipedia does have criteria for reliable sources; we do not simply pick someone because they have a degree. If their degree is irrelevant to this subject, does that make them a scholar here? A scholar on Ancient China is no more of a scholar on Ancient Greece than a U.S. lawyer is of the Young Turks. This is not my opinion; this is common sense.
3. The IAGS as an entity does have a vote that is worthy of mention; scholars on this topic, however, have produced almost no literature that suggests that this is a genocide. Moreover, scholars within the IAGS that are actually specialized in this area have spoken out against IAGS's politicized decision. This is something that is not addressed in this article. Is this position not worthy of mention? Is the fact that no major encyclopedia and no major scholarly work on the Young Turks or Ottoman empire ever addresses the Anatolian Catastrophe as such? Whether or not these facts are appealing to your POV does not change the fact that they exist. Had scholars considered this event to be genocidal in nature, then they would have characterized it as such a long time ago (the Armenian genocide has been recognized for years by scholars). The IAGS is a collection of scholars that all have a peripheral relationship to one another, but, as I had said, the organization is not the end-all be-all.
4. I have not produced original research; selecting reliable sources is something that all Wikipedians must be able to do. Wikipedia has its own criteria to do so, and it even has a RS board if there are instances in which people are not seen as credible sources. Please read Wikipedia's WP:OR before you accuse me of violating it. Also see WP:RS. It's also funny that people from the other POV would accuse me of OR, considering the shape of this, this, and this. - Rosywounds ( talk) 20:21, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
According to WP:RS:
I don't think I am necessarily in the wrong here, and the reason this is going no where is because you haven't properly addressed the points that I have brought up. The IAGS members, for the most part, only have peripheral knowledge on this subject. Lawyers on human rights are not "human rights scholars." That would be like saying ambulance chasers are medical doctors simply because they are familiarized with some medical terminology. - Rosywounds ( talk) 22:56, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 09:24, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
The loss of the unwieldy Arab lands was not only accepted by the Kemalists hut perhaps even welcomed as Islamism receded further with the advance of a secular Turkic nationalism. The loss of parts of Anatolia and the rest of Thrace was an entirely different matter. The two present threats to Turkish territorial integrity—by the Greeks and the French—and the one potential threat—an Armenian state—reproduced the proximate CUP ‘rationale’ for the 1915—16 genocide, and the forthcoming violence was sometimes of the same order
As mentioned, the Young Turks also committed genocide against the Greek in Turkey, but for fear of Greece they did so with much more restraint than they showed the Armenians.
The Armenian genocide, which coincided with Turkish massacres of Greeks, can be portrayed in part as an attempt to eliminate Christian non-Turks from a newly defined Turkish Muslim nation, but the racial element is significant.
After the Armenians it was the turn of the Greeks to be the victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
From 1840 on, the relatively tolerant pattern of inter-communal relations was disrupted with increasingly violent consequences, reaching a crescendo with the ethnic cleansing of Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia in 1915—23.
Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks. Massacres most likely did take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small number of Armenian survivors, the massacres were apparently restricted to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other "sensitive regions"
In the genocide of various minority nationalities that followed, the Turks massacred over 350000 Greeks.
At the end of the Greco-Turkish War of 1921-1922, Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) at the head of the infant Turkish Republic engaged in an ethnic cleansing campaign against the country’s Greeks. The Lausanne Treaty of 1923 completed the process of the forcible transfer of the Greeks.
That was the CUP’s goal—to build a nation-state around a homogenous Turkic-Islamic population, stripped of its Christians (Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians and some Syrians) and Jews. p.271 The Turkish interpretation of the treacherous Armenians and Greeks and of the requirements of “military necessity” became for many German officers simply facts that formed the basis of their own reckoning. p.276 The other three documented examples we have of German officers advising deportation all occurred after the genocide was well underway. Bronsart ordered Armenian males working in forced labour brigades to be removed on 25 July ii and he advised Liman (who refused) to deport Greeks from the coast in August 1916.
Thus the Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire, who had suffered persecution and massacres in the nineteenth century, were subjected to genocide under the cover of the First World War, culminating in the murder of some 1.5 million Armenians , and the ethnic cleansing of the Greek and Assyrian communities of Anatolia....The Genocide Convention of 1948 and other United Nations Conventions strengthen the claims of genocide victims, including the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians of Asia Minor,
Outsiders: A History of European Minorities, Panikos Panayi p.111 The Turkish state which emerged at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire contained several minorities within its interior, in an attempt to move towards a homogeneous population the Turkish state, which has passed through varying phases of dictatorship and democracy, has used any means possible, including genocide and deportation, to eliminate the Armenians, Greeks and Kurds remaining within Anatolia.
The Genocide of the Eastern Christians of Smyrna (1922) Turkish army entered Smyrna on September 9. 1922 and soon thereafter the city went up in flames. A fire razed most of the Armenian quarter. It is estimated that 50,000 Christians were killed in the city during this period. No indigenous Christians remained in Smyrna after this holocaust that had deeply stained relations between the two peoples. p.249 The burning of Smyrna and the massacring and scattering of its 300,000 Christian inhabitants is one of the greatest crimes of all times.
60. Most of the Armenians had already been massacred during the reign of the Sultan, in 1915—1916; Kemal attempted to continue the genocide of Armenians in Transcaucasia, and of Greeks on the coast of the Aegean. Especially heartrending and horribly bloody was the genocide of the Greeks in Smyrna (Turkish Izmir) where they had lived since the tenth century BC.
The French classical scholar, Pierre Vidal-Naguet, labelled denialists the assassins of memory’. In the case of the Jews, the denialists are not always the genocidaires. In the case of the Armenians, however, they are. Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, riven, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole purpose is to dilute, counter, minimise, trivialise and relativise every reference to the events which encompassed a genocide of Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Assyrian Christians in Asia Minor.
The term ‘auto-genocide’ (self- genocide) has hence been used to distinguish the extreme distortion of nationhood by dictators such as Pol Pot and Ataturk through a deep-reaching subversion of history. Exterminating one’s own people and culture apparently does not contrast with the restoration of ancient monuments like Angkor Vat (the largest temple in the world). The most problematic case was, of course, that of Kemal Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal Pasha), who could only conceive development as utter, remorseless and complete Westernization (Atahaki and Zürcher 2004). This led him to the extreme paroxysm of banning key elements of popular Turkish culture, such as the fez or tarboosh, a hat common to most Ottoman Mediterranean lands, which he replaced with Western, particularly British, hats and suits — to the great benefit of Western textile industries.’ Rummel (1997: 233—6) calculates that 264,000 Greeks, 440,000 Armenians, as well as other minorities and countless Turks perished under his “reign of terror”
*Reigns of Terror, Patricia Marchak p.31
One of the objections to including political victims in the definition for genocide was that every state has political opponents, some of whom are armed subversives. Assuming it is legitimate to attempt to capture and disarm such persons, any definition that treats all political acts as genocide would not be accepted even by the most liberal democratic states. However, liberal democratic states are obliged to bring such individuals to trial and to produce evidence of illegal acts; a definition of poliricide that clearly states the absence of such protections would he necessary.
Politicide includes what might otherwise he categorized as “class crimes or crimes committed against individuals because they are, or are perceived to he, members of a class. A class would consist of families who share a position in the economic and social spectrum of the society. The measurements of positions are generally rather crude, such as owning/not owning land or industrial and commercial establishments; living in rural or urban regions; or being employed in manual versus non-manual labour. Because ethnic groups are often discriminated against and ranked within multi-ethnic societies, persons who fall into crude class categories may also share ethnic origins. Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, Indians in Uganda, and Jews in much of Europe were disproportionately engaged in commerce: their ethnicity and occupational niches were so intertwined that crimes against the ethnic group and class were one and the same.
However, the Treaty of Sevres was never ratified, As Kay Holloway wrote, the failure of the signatories to bring the treaty into force ‘resulted in the abandonment of thousands of defenceless peoples Armenians and Greeks — to the fury of their persecutors, by engendering subsequent holocausts in which the few survivors of the 1915 Armenian massacres perished.” The Treaty of Sevres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1 Q23 that included a ‘Declaration of Amnesty’ for all offence’s commited between 1 August 1914 and 20 November 1922.
The Armenians and Greeks were not the only non-Turkish minority to suffer during World War 1 and their fates may not be divorced from the broader context. Assyrian (especially Nestorian) Christians in western Persia. Diarbekir, Van, and Bidis provinces (particularly in their strongholds in the Hakkiari highlands) were massacred alongside Armenians in 1915 although they were not subject to the same systematic destruction as the Armenian communities.
“To our amazement”, said the Orthodox Observer, the civilized world…looks on with indifference as the genocide of the Greeks in Turkey continues according to the preplanned schedule”.
p.2
The extermination of over 90 per cent of Poland’s Jews in early 1944, the Highland clearances in Scotland in the eighteenth century; the expulsion of ethnic Germans from post-war Czechoslovakia; the transportation of he Crimean Tartan in 1941; the slaughter of lzmir’s Greeks and Armenians in the early 1920s; and the exodus of Muslims from the Balkans after the mid-nineteenth century are only a few of the numerous instances of this kind of violence. Ethnic cleansing has become a broad term which covers all forms of ethnically inspired violence from murder, rape and torture to forceful removal of population.
“…had been its Greek populace, the Turks massacred as many Greeks there as possible, to so1ve that ethnological problem by genocide, a term a later and more delicate…”
These three don't explicitly mention genocide or ethnic cleansing but rather identify the fate of the Greeks with that of the Armenians, i.e. genocide.
The principal ideological outcome was the emergence of ethnically based nationalisms among the empire’s diverse peoples with calamitous results the fate of the Armenians and Greeks of Anatolia
In a letter to the president of the AIU, Nahum Effendi. Chief Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire, explains that his attitude, described anti-Zionist “saved the Jews of Turkey and Palestine from the fate of the Armenians and Greeks See Esther Benbassa, Un Grand Rabbine Sepharade en politique 1892-1923 (Paris 1990), 234
Even among contestants geographically interspersed there must he some sense of community or some even balance of forces that makes wholesale expulsion or genocide impossible. The Turks are beginning to develop a set of democratic practices among themselves, but fifty years ago they did not deal democratically with Armenians or Greeks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Xenovatis ( talk • contribs) 17:36, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
These four however also explicitly call the Greek Genocide as such.
"It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized and state-sponsored campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide."
"Turks admit that the Armenian persecution is the first step in a plan to get rid of Christians, and that Greeks would come next. ... Turkey henceforth is to be for Turks alone."
"While the death toll in the trenches of Western Europe were close to 2 million by the summer of 1915, the extermination of innocent civilians in Turkey (the Armenians, but also Syrian and Assyrian Christians and large portions of the Greek population, especially the Greeks of Pontos, or Black Sea region) was reaching 1 million."
"If members of the United Nations pass appropriate legislation such incidents such as pogroms of Czarist Russian and the massacres of Armenians and Greeks by Turkey would be punishable as genocide."
It was only in the nineteenth century that the complete destruction of an ethnic group manifested itself as the goal of a state, when Turkey began directing cleansing efforts against Greeks and Armenians.
I didn't see these in the quotes article so I thought we should discuss them here before inclusion. Additionaly there is a research unit dedicated to the study of the Pontic Greek Genocide in the University of New South Wales' Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. http://www.aihgs.com/pontintr.htm
Finally here is a teaching unit on the Pontic Greek Genocide. http://www.xeniteas.net/history/PontianGenocide.pdf
Xenovatis ( talk) 21:54, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 14:11, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
- Although I was receptive to the resolution from the start, as serious perspectives were offered by the major scholars in this field, I began to reconsider various aspects of the text.
....
- The following points also have been made: such a resolution needs to distinguish between what happened to the Assyrians and Pontic Greeks and what happened to the Greeks of western Turkey, where the role of the Greek state was present; such a resolution should clarify more carefully how in the final solution for the Armenians, other groups were dragged along into various forms of human rights atrocities.
Just now, March 2008, 2 articles were published on the prestigious Journal of Genocide Research that focus exclusively on the Greek (one on the Assyrian as wall) Genocide. This are highly relevant sources that should be looked at with care and attention. The first refers only to the 1914 ethnic cleansing phase and the second to the Genocide in its entirety.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623520701850286
p.42 The tendency to treat as separate phenomena various aspects of CUP policies of what I would dub “violent Turkification”—interconnected policies of, for example, ethnic cleansing and genocide aimed at the homogenization of the Ottoman Empire—is not new, nor can it merely be seen in the writings of Greek and Armenian scholars….According to Taner Akcam, the CUP had prior to WWI “formulated a policy that they began to execute in the Aegean region against the Greeks and, during the war years, expanded to include the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Syrians, and especially the Armenians, a policy that eventually became genocidal. [. . .]
p.42 Seen from the vantage point of observers in the major harbour city of Smyrna (Izmir), and in Constantinople (Istanbul), the Ottoman capital, CUP policies of group persecution began in earnest with the attempted ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Greeks living along the Aegean littoral.13 Attempts at removing non-Turkish influences from the economy had been initiated by the CUP after a radical faction of the Committee had gained power in 1913, and this policy was supplemented with the cleansing of more than 100,000 Greeks from the Aegean and Thrace in the spring and summer of 1914.14
p.43 But the islands dispute and security concerns were apparently not the only reasons, as economic, political, and ethno-religious concerns seem to have made the cleansing policy part of a larger project of Turkification.
p.45 The nation, beginning with the areas of trade and language, was to be cleansed from “foreign elements” in order to establish a national culture and economy…. As noted, the 1914 cleansing was initially attempted through a severe economic boycott and by other intimidating measures.
p.51 To the CUP, one of the major advantages of Turkification was that the European Powers would be presented with a fait accompli. The Christians would be gone who had served as an excuse for interference with what the CUP regarded as the internal matters of the empire. The 1914 cleansing policy therefore points toward the WWI policies of extermination, if not in the sense that these policies were planned to be parts of a “grand scheme” of what have been called partial and total genocides, then in the sense that they were connected in profound ways.
p.53 13 For uses of the phrase “ethnic cleansing” to describe these events, see Roger W. Smith, “Introduction,” in: Morgenthau, 2003, p xxxiv, and Halil Berktay, “A genocide, three constituencies, thoughts for the future (part I),” Armenian Weekly, Vol 73, No 16, 21 April 2007, available at http://www.hairenik.com/armenianweekly/ gin042107_03.htm (accessed August 2007). According to Smith, 1973, p 31, the 1914 events were “not a ‘massacre’ in the sense of the Armenian or Bulgarian massacres, though numerous incidents of murder, destruction and rape took place. It was what the Greeks call a diogmos—persecution.”
p.53 98 On “partial” and “total” genocide: Mark Levene, “Creating a modern ‘zone of genocide’: the impact of nation and state-formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923,” Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Vol 12, No 3, 1998, pp 395–401, makes the argument that although the Armenian genocide like the Holocaust was a rare instance of total genocide (basically meaning that the scope, scale, and intensity of the killing is, if not unlimited, then with few limitations and exceptions), other aspects of the CUP homogenization campaign can be characterized as partial genocide. See also Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp 2–4, 247–257.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623520801950820
p.10 The one-sided association of the Armenian genocide with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire is a relatively new phenomenon. In the postwar period, Western observers were well aware that the Young Turks’ policy of extermination was multifaceted. Henry Morgenthau, who served as US ambassador in Constantinople until 1916, for example, stated in his memoirs: “The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians. Indeed, the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea.”21 Morgenthau was right when he emphasized that the Young Turks leaders’ systematic policy of violent turkification was first targeted against the Greeks.
p.11 The genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks and Assyrians is obvious. Historians who realize that the Young Turks’ population and extermination policies have to be analysed together and understood as an entity are therefore often tempted to speak of a “Christian genocide.” This approach, however, is insofar inadequate as it ignores the Young Turks’ massive violence against non-Christians.
p.11 The Young Turks’ overall aim was a demographic reorganization of the Ottoman Empire. All deportations were planned and supervised by the “Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants” that belonged to the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior. A relatively small number of government administrators were thus chiefly involved in the coordination of the murder and expulsion of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other minority groups.29 Therefore, 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.
Additionaly I found mention of the Greek Genocide, described as such in several other academic Journals which are presented below.
http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/12/3/393
Abstract The persistence of genocide or near-genocidal incidents from the 1890s through the 1990s, committed by Ottoman and successor Turkish and Iraqi states against Armenian, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek communities in Eastern Anatolia, is striking.
First of all, the Ottoman Empire itself, now ruled by the nationalist Young Turks Committee, began to implement a deadly policy, which aimed at wiping out the non-Turkish elements in the Empire and culminated in the genocide of the Armenians and Greeks, particularly those living in the Pontos region.
These genocides not only involved the Holocaust and the killing of the Armenians, the best known of this century's genocides, but also the lesser known genocide of Gypsies by the Nazis and of Greeks by the Turks.
http://www.emz-berlin.de/projekte_e/pj41_pdf/psarrou.pdf
p.1-2 Since 1945 two main Greek Diaspora groups have existed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: the Pontian Greeks and Greek political refugees. The Pontians are Greek descendants who, during ancient times, created colonies on the coasts of Euxinous Pontos. After the genocide carried out by the Turks in 1918–22 and the Soviet government’s persecution which began in 1939, the Pontians found themselves in exile in Central Asia. p.5 During 1918 and 1920, the Turks implemented a genocide plan against the Greek populations on Turkish territory: 350,000 were executed, and the rest abandoned their goods and properties to save their lives. Some of them went to Greece, Persia, Europe or America, but the majority fled to the Soviet Union
The Turks had used genocide against the Greeks and Armenians but did not have enough time to finish them off completely. The Kurds revolted in 1925, demanding independence or autonomy.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/865v4835x83m3757/
Abstract In the historical context of a religion-driven eliminationist process accompanied by many pogroms before, during, and after World War I within the territories of the Ottoman Empire, including the destruction of the Greek communities of Pontos and Asia Minor and the atrocities against the Greeks of Smyrna in September 1922, the genocidal character of the Istanbul pogrom becomes apparent.
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/research_projects/nationempireglobe/research/McDonnellMosesFINAL.pdf p.502 Then, in a “Report on the preparation of a volume on genocide,” dated March–May 1948, a less ambitious project comprising ten chapters, two of which covered extra-European colonial cases: “2.The Indians in Latin America” and “10. The Indians in North America (in part).” The Holocaust, a term Lemkin never used, was not included, although the Armenians and Greeks in Turkey were, as well as the Early Christians, and the Jews of the Middle Ages and Tsarist Russia.14 To continue to deny, as many “founders of genocide studies” deny, that he regarded colonialism as an integral part of a world history of genocide is to ignore the written record.
I will be adding parts of these in the Academic quotes page. Also note that Raphael Lemkin termed the Greek Genocide as such, as seen in the last quote. Given his standing in the field this shouls be prominently mentioned.
Xenovatis ( talk) 23:13, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
The title of this article needs to be reviewed in the light of the ICJ court ruling last year. See Bosnian Genocide#European Court of Human Rights.
The lead of this article states that "It [the title] is used to refer to the determined persecutions, massacres, expulsions, and death marches of Pontian Greek populations in the historical region of Pontus, the southeastern Black Sea provinces of the Ottoman Empire, during the early 20th century by the Young Turk administration."
Under the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court "Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender" is a crime against humanity not genocide.
The ICJ specifically, in line with the majority of legal scholars, ruled out persecutions, massacres, expulsions, as acts of genocide unless there was an intent to kill a significant portion of the group and that a biological destruction took place. (ECHR Jorgic v. Germany Judgment, July 12 2007. §45 citing Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro ("Case concerning the application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide") the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found under the heading of "intent and 'ethnic cleansing'" § 190)
In the case of Prosecutor v. Krstic (2 August 2001), the ICTY ruled "customary international law limits the definition of genocide to those acts seeking the physical or biological destruction of all or part of the group. Hence, an enterprise attacking only the cultural or sociological characteristics of a human group in order to annihilate these elements which give to that group its own identity distinct from the rest of the community would not fall under the definition of genocide." and the ICTY ruled "On 14 January 2000, the ICTY ruled in the Prosecutor v. Kupreškić and Others case that the Lašva Valley ethnic cleansing campaign in order to expel the Bosnian Muslim population from the region was persecution, not genocide per se" (ECHR Jorgic v. Germany Judgment, July 12 2007. § 44 citing Prosecutor v. Kupreskic and Others (IT-95-16-T, judgment of 14 January 2000), § 751)
However there is a minority of legal scholars who (before the ICTY and ICJ rulings) supported the wider definition that the German judiciary upheld, that the ethnic cleansing carried out by Jorgić was a genocide because it was an intent to destroy the group as a social unit,(^ ECHR Jorgic v. Germany Judgment, July 12 2007. § 36 but also §§ 18,47,99,103,108) so this is not a clear cut issue. Also there are other none legal definitions of genocide which might be sited by scholars.
Given the Wikipedia policy of a neutral point of view, one has to question if the current title allows for a balanced article to be written given that the title asserts it was a genocide, despite evidence that the modern legal usage of the word might not support that description. It might be a good idea to move the article to a blander name to allow a more balanced article to be written. For example persecution of the Pontic Greeks or Pontus atrocities or human rights in Pontus or some similar descriptive name. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 14:39, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
The genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks and Assyrians is obvious. Historians who realize that the Young Turks’ population and extermination policies have to be analysed together and understood as an entity are therefore often tempted to speak of a “Christian genocide.” This approach, however, is insofar inadequate as it ignores the Young Turks’ massive violence against non-Christians.
98 On “partial” and “total” genocide: Mark Levene, “Creating a modern ‘zone of genocide’: the impact of nation and state-formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923,” Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Vol 12, No 3, 1998, pp 395–401, makes the argument that although the Armenian genocide like the Holocaust was a rare instance of total genocide (basically meaning that the scope, scale, and intensity of the killing is, if not unlimited, then with few limitations and exceptions), other aspects of the CUP homogenization campaign can be characterized as partial genocide. See also Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp 2–4, 247–257.
In the postwar period, Western observers were well aware that the Young Turks’ policy of extermination was multifaceted. Henry Morgenthau, who served as US ambassador in Constantinople until 1916, for example, stated in his memoirs: “The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians. Indeed, the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea.”21
I think you all are missing the point, it is not whether some (or even most) scholars think it was a genocide, no one but a fool would deny that. But the word genocide has several different scholarly meanings and that is not addressed in this article or in the citations given above. Until recently even the legal definition had two meanings, until the ICJ clarification, legal scholars were split over its interpretation. For example do the people just quoted mean a genocide as defined by the ICJ or a genocide as defined by the German courts, or some other meaning? Neither the citations given above or the citations in the article explain what they mean by the word "genocide".
The name "Pontic Greek Genocide" implies that it is a proper noun like The Holocaust, and that there is no doubt at all that it was a genocide and it is generally known by that title. but a search of Google scholar returns just two articles with that string one of those just happens to have the string in it and the other "Nation, narrative and commemoration: political ritual in divided Cyprus" by Yiannis Papadakis is not enough to show that the name is in common use. If the article was a descriptive name then it should be "Pontic Greek genocide" and not be bolded at the start of the article (See WP:MOS#First sentences). But "Pontic Greek genocide" is not a NPOV name for the events that took place. It is an assertion that a genocide took place -- and that genocide has a specific meaning -- It is far better that the article name is a neutral on and that the debate over what happened is presented with a neutral point of view. See for example the history wars and the redirect Australian genocide debate. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 18:33, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
(1) If scholars do not mean genocide as defined under international law then why does the first mention of Genocide link to the genocide article and not to genocide definitions? Further what definition for genocide are scholars using and are they all agreed on one definition? --Personally I think Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn (1990) is quite a elegant one, but that is besides the point -- The thing is that definitions for genocide change over time, and anyone in the late 90s who used the German courts broad definition would have been justified in not qualifying it as it was the latest legal definition, but now 10 years on the international legal definition had narrowed so a paper or book written in the last century needs qualifying as to which definition of genocide they are using.
For someone who is reading this as their first introduction to the subject of genocide -- not an unreasonable assumption as this is an encyclopaedia -- it is only fair to explain which definition of genocide is being used as the reader is unlikely to know that there are several different definitions and that if the legal interpretation is being used that it has been refined and its meaning narrowed through case law over the last 20 years.
(2) If the name is not a title then why does the word "genocide" appear in caps? If it is a title then where does it come from. Further why not use a name that does not have such an explicit POV as it does not seem to be a common use in reliable sources? -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 20:42, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
The discussion of the question whether the deportation and forced assimilation of Kurds by the Young Turks has to be labelled as genocide or ethnocide is, at least from a historian’s perspective, irrelevant since a clarification of this particularly legal and political issue depends on the definition of genocide one resorts to.
The "legal stuff" is not necessary in the article, besides it would probably be a breach of WP:SYN. I included it here to demonstrate to the people who read this talk page that the word genocide does not have one definition and that even the understand of the fixed legal definition is developing as more cases are heard. Now that I have done so I hope that other editors will be aware that there is no one clear meaning to genocide, something that is implicit in the wording of the article, because unless one defines what the historians mean by genocide, it is reasonable to assume they are using the most recent international definition. Any scholar who calls an event a genocide without describing what they mean by genocide is not a very good scholar. For example Rummel (who I do not think is a particularly notable scholar) does the courtesy of defining three meanings for genocide in his works. [23]
Dr.K. I am not sure where you are getting your "common use in reliable sources" from Google scholar returns "8 for "Greek genocide"" while Google books returns "6 on "Greek genocide"" This is not a common expression -- in comparison "Armenian genocide" returns 2,370 and 805. So we are not bound by common usage for the name of the article and ought to choose a name that has a neutral point of view ( WP:NPOV "NPOV is absolute and non-negotiable.". Do you still want to use a non neutral name even after I have demonstrated that it is not in common usage? If so why? Would it not be better to use a more neutral name along the lines I have suggested above?
Dr.K. As to your point "This section alone is chock-full of top of the line scholarly sources calling it genocide and we just finished the section above acknowledging that the majority of scholars call it a genocide." We are not talking whether the event was a genocide -- that is something to be presented in the content of the article as described in WP:NPOV including its warnings on undue weight to fringe views -- we are discussing the name of the article. BTW even if you think "the majority of scholars call it a genocide" please do not include it in the article unless you have a source for that ( Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Claims of consensus) -- the ECHR provides the source for majority (narrow view) and the minority (broad view) of legal scholars that I stated above. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 10:40, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
(unident)(bold so I can see my comments in this ocean of a discussion)Ok. Philip. Here we have a classic case of misunderstanding due to differing perspectives. You say that the term is not in common usage. Yet all the sources here refer to it as genocide. Maybe not Pontic genocide but the genocide of Pontus or similar to the armenian genocide etc. The google search engine is too dumb to pick up these nuances. That's why as humans we must do the rest of the job and connect the dots and not allow this job to be done by dumb Google robots. You also call the title non neutral or POV. I completely disagree with you. It is not non neutral and not POV. It is the verdict of the scholars based on research and intellect and the verdict of history based on historical facts. We cannot sanitize either the scholars or history. Dr.K. ( talk) 17:25, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
This whole debate is clearly in contravention of WP:TITLE and WP:NCON since (1) the name is stable and has stayed that way for years (2) the sole purpose of the discussion is changing the name (3) this was the name the articles creator gave it (4) the purpose of the article's title can only be fullfiled by a name that includes genocide since those that do reference the events and those that do know of them know and reference them as such.
Controversial names See also: Wikipedia:naming conflict The purpose of an article's title is to enable that article to be found by interested readers, and nothing more. In particular, the current title of a page does not imply either a preference for that name, or that any alternative name is discouraged in the text of articles. Generally, an article's title should not be used as a precedent for the naming of any other articles. Editors are strongly discouraged from editing for the sole purpose of changing one controversial name to another. If an article name has been stable for a long time, and there is no good reason to change it, it should remain. Especially when there is no other basis for a decision, the name given the article by its creator should prevail. Any proposal to change between names should be examined on a case-by-case basis, and discussed on talk pages before a name is changed. However, debating controversial names is often unproductive, and there are many other ways to help improve Wikipedia.
Xenovatis ( talk) 12:31, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
I am not suggesting any particular name just a name that allows an article to be constructed with a WP:NPOV I am confused how you can say "Additionaly calling it a debate would be a violation of WP:UNDUE since it would give equal weight to the minority opinion." Given that the state of Turkey does not consider it to be a genocide, I fail to see why you think it would be giving undue weight to say it is a debate as a states opinion (and presumably most of its population given how states influence schooling) is not a fringe view. There are definitely at least two points of view (and probably more) as I doubt that all scholars agree on all the details of the events, and as seems to be the case there is not even one definition of genocide in use. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 17:17, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
Xenovatis what POV do you think others are pushing? It would seem to me that "I have already wasted a lot of my time digging up sources that label it as genocide" is an indication of POV pushing as a disinterested editor would usually wish to dig up sources that give a balanced overview to the events (to comply with WP:NPOV and writing for the "enemy". -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 13:43, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
Dr.K.:I fail to see how pointing out the legal arguments in the judgements of latest international courts to try people and states for genocide can be considered "applying anachronistic definitions of genocide". I have only suggested that if a historian calls an event a genocide then the definition that the historian is using ought to be explained. Why are you so wedded to the word genocide in a descriptive name? -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 13:43, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
Given that:
I put here the IAGS resolution so that we can study it and refer to it as needed:
Press Release* GENOCIDE SCHOLARS ASSOCIATION OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZES ASSYRIAN, GREEK GENOCIDES Issuing Organization: International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) Date: December 16, 2007 The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) has voted overwhelmingly to recognize the genocides inflicted on Assyrian and Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1923. The resolution passed with the support of over eighty percent of IAGS members who voted. The resolution (full text below) declares that "it is the conviction of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks." It "calls upon the government of Turkey to acknowledge the genocides against these populations, to issue a formal apology, and to take prompt and meaningful steps toward restitution." "This resolution," stated IAGS President Gregory Stanton. "is one more repudiation by the world's leading genocide scholars of the Turkish government's ninety year denial of the Ottoman Empire's genocides against its Christian populations, including Assyrians, Greeks, and Armenians.
The history of these genocides is clear, and there is no more excuse for the current Turkish government, which did not itself commit the crimes, to deny the facts. The current German government has forthrightly ackowledged the facts of the Holocaust. The Turkish government should learn from the German government's exemplary acknowledgment of Germany's past, so that Turkey can move forward to reconciliation with its neighbors." The resolution noted that while activist and scholarly efforts have resulted in widespread acceptance of the Armenian genocide, there has been "little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire." Assyrians, along with Pontian and Anatolian Greeks, were killed on a scale equivalent in per capita terms to the catastrophe inflicted on the Armenian population of the empire -- and by much the same methods, including mass executions, death marches, and starvation. In 1997, the IAGS officially recognized the Armenian genocide. IAGS member Adam Jones drafted the resolution, and lobbied for it along with fellow member Thea Halo, whose mother Sano survived the Pontian Greek genocide. In an address to the membership at the IAGS conference in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in July 2007, Jones paid tribute to the efforts of "representatives of the Greek and Assyrian communities ... to publicize and call on the present Turkish government to acknowledge the genocides inflicted on their populations." "The overwhelming backing given to this resolution by the world's leading genocide scholars organization will help to raise consciousness about the Assyrian and Greek genocides," Jones said on December 10. "It will also act as a powerful counter to those, especially in present-day Turkey, who still ignore or deny the genocides of the Ottoman Christian minorities." The resolution stated that "the denial of genocide is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides." The Assyrian population of Iraq, for example, remains highly vulnerable to genocidal attack. Since 2003, Iraqi Assyrians have been exposed to severe persecution and "ethnic cleansing"; it is believed that up to half the Assyrian population has fled the country. Extensive supporting documentation for the Assyrian and Greek genocides was circulated to IAGS members ahead of the vote, and is available at http://www.genocidetext.net/iags_resolution_supporting_documentation.htm.
For further information, please contact: Gregory Stanton, IAGS President (iagspresident@aol.com) Adam Jones, IAGS Resolutions Committee (adam.jones@ubc.ca)
FULL TEXT OF THE IAGS RESOLUTION: WHEREAS the denial of genocide is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides; WHEREAS the Ottoman genocide against minority populations during and following the First World War is usually depicted as a genocide against Armenians alone, with little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire; BE IT RESOLVED that it is the conviction of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Association calls upon the government of Turkey to acknowledge the genocides against these populations, to issue a formal apology, and to take prompt and meaningful steps toward restitution. - end - —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tasoskessaris ( talk • contribs) 00:30, 9 March 2008 (UTC) Dr.K. ( talk) 00:36, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
Structure:
That is my proposal, no view is forced on the reader, the situation regarding academic and international recognition is taken into account and the reader may actually learn what happened to the Pontians. Thanks, -- A.Garnet ( talk) 10:56, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
(Unindent) I don't think anything resembling a consensus can be reached at this stage. Everyone is firing from all sides and in all directions. For instance what A. Garnet proposes is a general article about Pontian history in Turkey and the Soviet Union. This article is, however, about the Pontian genocide and not about the Russian expulsions. On the other hand we have the Anatolian genocide which can be included in a broader Greek genocide article. Therefore the renaming of the article could go toward Greek Genocide from the present Pontic Greek Genocide. Judging from the limited number of participants of this debate and the fact that the topic has stalled between a few well entrenched viewpoints I think mediation could be an option. How viable mediation would be in resolving this is another question. Dr.K. ( talk) 18:47, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Xenovatis you have been mislead by Google. If you put in a search for ["Greek Genocide"] Google returns "about 19,300 English pages for "Greek Genocide" " but it one then adds -wikipedia to the search Google returns " about 9,730 English pages for "Greek Genocide" -wikipedia." It should flag a warning when Google is reporting that nearly ten thousand of the pages have the word wikipedia in it! If on the 19,300 search one goes to page 40 then one sees that the numbers change to "396 of 396 English pages for "Greek Genocide"" with the comment "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 396 already displayed." Similarly go to page 37 of the 9,730 search the numbers change to "361 of 361 English pages for "Greek Genocide" -wikipedia. " a difference of 30 odd pages with the word Wikipedia on them is a far more credible number than one with around 10,000.
When a Wikipedia mention makes up 10% of the pages returned by a Google search on a subject, (and that is before one removes blog pages and advocacy pages) it becomes doubtful if the term is in common use. A Google search on the the domains edu and ac.uk returns "about 33 English pages for "Greek Genocide" -wikipedia site:edu OR site:ac.uk.". Google Books "6 on "Greek Genocide"" Google Scholar "8 for "Greek Genocide"" So "Greek genocide" is not a common term in academia. If we go with a descriptive term we do not have to use a common term and as such "Persecution of Pontians" of "Pontian persecutions" is just as descriptive as "Greek genocide" and does not have the problems of an embedded point of view.-- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 11:47, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
I did not think for one minute you were trying to deceive anyone, the problem is that Google is not as accurate as it could be -- as you can see the number of pages is not in the thousands but around 350 that mention "Greek genocide". I think the reason why the name "Pontians" was suggested is because the current name is "Pontic Greek Genocide" so such a name change would not alter the focus of the article. The disadvantage of persecution is that it does have a legal meaning, but it also has a common meaning as described by the OED. This can be footnoted in the introduction. The advantage of such an name alows for the construction of an introduction that is more balanced:
Pontic Greek population of the Ottoman Empire suffered persecution during and in the aftermath of World War I.[1] The number of deaths that occurred during the persecutions, massacres, expulsions, and death marches according to various sources ranges from 300,000 to 360,000 Anatolian Greeks. The survivors and the expelled took refuge mostly in the nearby Russian Empire (later, Soviet Union). The few Pontic Greeks who had remained in Pontus until the end of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) were exchanged in the frame of the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations in 1922–1923.
The Turkish Government maintains that there was a legal large scale pacification campaign carried out in the region because the Greek population was seen as sympathetic to the enemies of the Turkish state and a potential fifth column. The Allies at the time took a different view condemning the Ottoman governments actions against their minorities as crimes against humanity. More recently the International Association of Genocide Scholars have passed resolution that Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire, including the Pontian Greeks, was a genocide. Some other organisations have also passed resolutions recognising the campaign as a genocide including both the parliament of Greece and that of Cyprus.
or something similar: I have cut and pasted some of the text from the article and it needs polishing and the ordering of the Turkish government explanation could be placed after the genocide accusations or the numbers and what happened to the survivors could be placed in a paragraph after the genocide accusations. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 13:23, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Articles that compare views should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views
Undue weight applies to more than just viewpoints. Just as giving undue weight to a viewpoint is not neutral, so is giving undue weight to other verifiable and sourced statements.
Minority views can receive attention on pages specifically devoted to them—Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. But on such pages, though a view may be spelled out in great detail, it must make appropriate reference to the majority viewpoint, and must not reflect an attempt to rewrite majority-view content strictly from the perspective of the minority view.
No it is not a good idea to create a page like Denial of the Armenian Genocide for two reasons. The first is it is a pov fork and secondly it predisposes that a genocide took place which is a violation of WP:NPOV. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 16:59, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
I think this discussion can only continue if the initial point of contention is clarified. I propose that this is the use of the word genocide in the title. So could users please list, preferably enumerated, their reasons for disagreeing with the use of the word. Also the basis on which these reasons are grounded i.e. either it was not in fact genocide or it is not perceived as such by academics. Thanks. Xenovatis ( talk) 15:28, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
(1) Since WP is not a legal or politicla journal it should use a historical perspective when discussing historical events. So the definition best suited is the 1948 def that we can assume most authors are using unless stated otherwise. The alternative is to go around and ask them all. Obviously when Lemkin and Charny who both recognized the events as genocide did so they can be assumed to have been using their own definitions, both mentioned in the WP page you linked to. When Schaller and Zimmerer state that the exact legal and political definition is irrelevant from a historians perspective.
I don't have a clue if it was a genocide or not. But if an historian calls it a genocide, for it to be a meaning full observation, then the definition the scholar is using needs to be included, otherwise it is open to misunderstanding as there is more than one meaning of the word, and different scholars use genocide to mean different things. --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 13:27, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group
This discussion has degenerated, as I predicted, to the same arguments being recited over and over among a few users. On top of that, other users, who normally used to participate, are notably absent. This should tell us that the debate has stalled. Given this sorry state of affairs I propose that we end this debate and seek mediation. Dr.K. ( talk) 18:57, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
It would be better to put a RfC first. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 23:27, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks Garnet. Considering you never left this discussion for more that a few hours, I'm still glad to see you back. Dr.K. ( talk) 17:44, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
I thought we were in a process that was working towards a consensus. Lets salami slice it. Does anyone deny that the name of the article is disputed? Would any one object to {{ pov-title}} on the page and if so why? -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 09:42, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
Firstly, I am not the only person to have disputed this articles title, that is visible now and from the archives of these pages. So lets not portray this dispute as respectable requests from a group of editors on one side against a stubborn obstacle on the other. Simply because there are more of you (not uncommon considering this page has become a raison d'être among Greek editors) does not make you right, in fact its pretty good indicator of pov pushing.
Second, you are seriously misguided as to what constitutes a majority point of view. "Exceptional claims need exceptional sources" as WP:V states. One book on this event by a respectable historian is not an exceptional request, but that you cant even fulfill this shows this is not only a minority view, but it can be argued whether it should even be in Wikipedia at all. The same goes for the IAGS resolution, that major scholars of the organistion (those dealing in Ottoman history, i.e. Balakian, Melson, Akcam etc) dispute the resolution shows simply that respectable scholars do not claim this event as a genocide. Now based on this to ask me the question "what will it take to accept that it was a genocide" sounds ridicolously presumptuous.
Accept these facts, consider mine and Phillips proposal and then this dispute will move forward. -- A.Garnet ( talk) 14:38, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
In general, the most reliable sources are peer-reviewed journals and books published in university presses; university-level textbooks; magazines, journals, and books published by respected publishing houses; and mainstream newspapers.
This section is wandering away from the point (as I said at the start of the section "Lets salami slice it." (baby steps)). Does anyone dispute the the name of the article is in dispute? This is not a question about whether a genocide took place or not this is a specific question about the title and as far as I can tell the dispute over the template was the reason for the page protecting in the first place. If no one disputes that a dispute over the name is happening then I will re-add the template as a fist step to "unprotecting" the page. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 10:42, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
This link has a rather nice chronology which I'll be mining for newspaper quotes to include in the relevant page. They also seem to endorse the term genocide.
http://www.umd.umich.edu/dept/armenian/bts/index.html#b2
The Armenian[1] and Greek Genocides were widely reported in the world press at the time, and the public outcry in the U.S. led to a major relief effort.[2] However, the world soon returned to business as usual with the new Republic of Turkey and a silence fell over the world press concerning the destruction of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian communities in the Ottoman Empire.[3] In drawing attention this prior engagement by the world press the Armenian Research Center is pleased to present a series of news reports, from twenty different newspapers to date, as researched and compiled by Sofia Kontogeorge Kostos, an Advocate for Genocides Awareness of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks of Asia Minor. These news reports are organized chronologically, and require the Adobe Reader (click here to download the free reader). Highlighting and the use of color within in the news reports, unless otherwise indicated, represent emphasis by Sofia Kontogeorge Kostos and not by the original authors.
Xenovatis ( talk) 23:45, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
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An editor gaming the system is seeking to use policies with bad faith, by finding within their wording, apparent justification for disruptive actions and stances that policy is clearly not at all intended to support. In doing this, the gamester separates policies and guidelines from their rightful place as a means of documenting community consensus, and attempts to use them selectively for a personal agenda.
Just thought it'd make a handy reference that. Can't imagine why the thought occured. Xenovatis ( talk) 21:29, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | → | Archive 10 |
Is there any point to this following the IAGS recognition of the massacres as genocide? Genocide denialists and kemalist apologists should not be on an equal footing to an international body of scholars dedicated to the subject. It is removed.
I also amended the first sentence to reflect the definition of genocide as set out in Britannica
"the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race." (Britannica, 2007 ed.)
Xenovatis ( talk) 16:04, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 21:39, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 09:49, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 19:39, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 17:27, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
I agree, that the map doesn't reflects real ethnic composition in Balkans around 1870-ies, in fact there are much larger areas inhabited by moslem in these areas. For example, all of Rhodope region is populated-and still is to a greater extend- with moslem (i.e pomaks and turks), not bulgarians, nor greek polulation. Map also presents wrong data about other parts of Bulgaria, this should be mentioned, that large proportion of northeastern Bulgaria was almost exclusively populated by muslims (turks), and half of central-northern Bulgaria too, so this map shows maybe the situation after the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign and genocide of turks in Bulgaria conducted by the russian army and local bulgarians. So, the situation is not significantly different for many parts of Macedonia (incl. present day Greek Macedonia), Western Serbia and Bosnia.-- Leventcik ( talk) 23:26, 21 January 2008 (UTC) The map by William R. Shepherd suggests that extent of the Albanian population extended across the majority of present-day southern Serbia up to the city-boundaries of Nis. The document is false (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Kosovo). Another source should be used for the map that is consistent with historical fact or the map should be removed altogether.
I've read through the article, and feel that it is written in a Greek POV tone. I suggest the lead mention that the International Association of Genocide Scholars hasn't recognized it, and that Turkey refuses to call this "genocide", as those things are quite important, and having them near the top (as well as where they are) would reduce the bias towards the Greek end considerably. Also, should the title not be "Pontic Greek genocide", with "genocide" lowercased? · AndonicO Talk 17:16, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
Just commenting on this [1]. I find it very rich comming from the land where admitting that the Armenian Genocide took place is a criminal offence but denying that an Algerian Genocide took place is also to be a criminal offence [2]. Turkish Foreign Minister speaks of a "traditional Greek policy of distorting history" ... is the pot calling the kettle black?-- Ploutarchos 18:22, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
I agree with the edit. I'd just remove "however", since it is argumentative. Niko Silver 23:04, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
The same sources youre using in the article says that there were organised atrocities between the years 1919-1922 on the part of greeks, what is has to do with "trivializing" the genocide? And the genocide nobody but greece recognize in the face of earth..Ah sorry ı forget to mention cyprus recognize it as well-- laertes d 20:02, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
İm really bored with all these silly games of reverting articles, there are enough and credible sources quite clearly stating organized greek massacres in western anatolia during the greek occupation of it, and there is nothing wrong to say thhat massacres in the period 1919-1922 was mutual..-- laertes d 22:30, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
Regardless of of who commits massacres, they are regretable. However, there is a big difference between massacres that constitute a genocide and a few isolated massacres/atrocities. The Turkish victims numbered several thousand ( see Rummel's accounts), the Greek victims hundreds of thousands. The Turkish atrocities were premeditated and centrallly planned (see Akcam's accounts). The Greek atrocities were spontaneous, isolated individual or group acts of violence. There was no premeditated and/or central Greek plan. Please provide a third party source which states that there was a premeditated and centrally directed Greek plan. - Rizos01 16:53, 23 June 2007 (UTC)
Rizos, both Arnold J. Toynbee and Taner akcam actually argues that Greek atrocities were organised in nature, they were not some isolated acts..And these opinions are shared by Inter allied commission reports and by the representative of red cross..-- laertes d 10:07, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Please provide book titles and page numbers, as well as report titles, page numbers, and date of reports. Otherwise your arguments are not credible.-- Rizos01 22:59, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
A millenium of Turkish inhabitance should be enough to secure the city's name as Izmir. I've deleted Smyrna in the parentheses. Anyone who wishes to find out the past names of the city can click its link. By the way, I didn't see Selanik in parentheses after Thessalonika...—Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.38.194.49 ( talk • contribs)
It's not a question of Greek vs Turkish names, but a question of accurate chronology. The fact of the matter is that the names Smyrna (and Constantinople, for that matter) were in common usage and were the internationally recognized names of the cities during the time period. Ataturk changed the names in 1930. Hence we should write Smyrna, perhaps with "modern-day Izmir" in parentheses, for any reference to the city in question that is pre-1930, in order to be historically accurate. After-all, no one would think in antiquity of substituting Tunis for Carthage, etc. and the same principle applies here. Cheers, 74.134.238.58 23:21, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
"The Greek name vs Turkish name for a Turkish city" is not a serious argument, as the city has been Greek much longer than it's been Turkish. I was simply noting the absurdity of the seemingly pathological aversion of many Turkish editors to the original Greek names of places in modern Turkey. However, I agree with the second anonymous editor that it is a matter of accurate chronology, so İZMİR is fine when discussing the Turkish mayor's rather amusing spitting of the dummy, as it occurred in 2006. Finally, please note the city's name in English is Izmir without the dotted I; this is en.wikipedia.org, after all. ·ΚέκρωΨ· 00:56, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
User:Laertes d has reverted my clarifications on the nature of the Genocide. He would like us to believe that the massacres in Pontus were somehow the direct result of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22, which took place in western Anatolia, several hundred kilometres away. There were no Greek forces in Pontus at the time and hence no war there. It is essential to distinguish between these two discrete historical events. ·ΚέκρωΨ· 10:21, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
Kekrops thats the problem they were not two discrete historical events, according to a multitude of historians, that includes Toynbee and Akcam as well, there wouldnt be such a thing as Turkish national Movement without Greeks occupying smyrna..There was a war between Greece and Turkey regardless of where the Greek army was..Btw, ı recently noticed that Rummel calls the masssacres greeks committed in western anatolia a "genocide" as he calls the Turkish massacres of greeks as such..-- laertes d 10:23, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
Then Kekrops Turks who were slaughtered in occupied lands were also not the victims of casualties of war, they were also massacred in areas where there was not an organized Turkish unit..What distinction are you referring to? And you keep changing source content the way you want, toynbee doesnt say "outside of Pontus" but he says "There were both spontaneous and organized atrocities on either side since the Greek occupation of Smyrna"..what's the point of having citations if youre going to change them according to your personal ideas?
Vonones what is that controversial material are you talking about? the article itself is controversial as Garnett said.Im making reference to absolutely non-pro turkish sources like Toynbee and Akcam, toynbee's book is perhaps the only book which is written exclusively about the atrocities of the greco-turkish war..Plus you are changing the source material to something the sources doesnt say..-- laertes d 09:20, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
The references of shameful act are all fine except for this, this is really irrelevant this has nothing to do with the text in the book and in the article, and throughout 1920-23, the period of the Turkish War of Independence. -- Vonones 00:25, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
how it is irrelevant can you explain it vonones? That is how it is written in the book and that is completely relevant with the article..The citations from Toynbee are also quite relevant..-- laertes d 09:03, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
I still cant see how it is irrelevant, obviously you dont like the naming of turkish war of independence..-- laertes d 07:54, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
Scenes of the
Pontic Greek Genocide are prominent in the initial chapters of
Middlesex, the
2003
Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel by
Jeffrey Eugenides. Under which heading would this best be added to the
page? As it's a work of fiction, Further reading seems inappropriate. For now I'll add a heading, In literature — though I'm unfamiliar with the
WP Style Guide on this point. -- Thanks,
Deborahjay 10:55, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
Further to the above: other pages do use the heading Further reading; however the page is presently protected from editing. --
Deborahjay 11:17, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
"hellenicgenocide.org" and the likes of it are most emphatically not reliable sources by any standard. I will strongly object to the inclusion of just about anything sourced to nationalist hate sites like that. We've been through it before. These are completely unacceptable. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:04, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
"British historian Arnold J. Toynbee wrote that it was the Greek landings that created the Turkish National Movement led by Mustafa Kemal and it is almost certain that if the Greeks had never landed at Smyrna, the consequent atrocities on the Turkish side would not have occurred." Well i guess Toynbee was either a fortune teller or a retarded man as i can't remember Armenian army landing in Turkey before the Armenian genocide and i can't remember Greek army landing in Asia Minor in 1915 when "Amele Tamburu" (=forced labour aka work till you die in Lake Van etc) where at their prime.All in all i can't see how a totally personal view based on someone's "good wi$$" (to say at least) can be presented as a fact here. Eagle of Pontus 11:25, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Kekrops enough is enough we have been over this before, and now you turned back to do the same kind of editing again without trying to initiate a discussion over it..These two sources are relevant to the article, Akcam`s work perhaps the newest book written on the subject, Toynbee was an eyewitness to the whole series of massacres committed by Greeks and Turks, citing them is completely relevant for this article..
Kekrops, youre just pushing me to create an article, which i thought should exist anyway, that of the massacre committed against Turks by greek army of invasion, naming it Greek atrocities in Anatolia(as it would be the translation of Turkish expression of the atrocities committed by greek army `anadoluda Yunan mezalimi`)..There are enough sources to do this..I already have two neutral sources to begin with which uses the word genocide in relation of what greeks had done..Rummel and Cedric James uses the word genocide in describing these acts..-- laertes d 10:19, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
You may read the talk page of the greco turkish war article for similar extending discussions, but just to summarize my point:
-- laertes d 22:12, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
About the Muslims in Macedonia, youre right but there wasnt much a point of expelling or killing these people beacuse they were in the established Greek lands however that wasnt the case in much of the western anatolian coastlans, where there was a mixed population, and both sides were claiming it is their right to have their state upon that territory as they were constituting the majority..
Btw, Turkish nationalists used the excuse for forced marching Pontus people that Venizelos had already claimed right on black sea coastal areas in the Paris Peace conference and if Greeks would remain there, they would facilitate a possible greek invasion..I dont explain one massacre with another massacre, i am simply saying there were massacres committed against Turkish civilians by the greek army in that same period of time, and we need to mention of these acts in terms of some historical accuracy..-- laertes d 11:37, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Laertes, basically your discussion has made it clear that you are attempting to justify the Turkish massacres of Greek civilians. AlexiusComnenus 09:49, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
I ignore your comment, and i assume you either havent read what is written above or simply trying your best not to discuss the issue in hand..-- laertes d 07:31, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
Please stop your mindless reverting. The subject of this article is the Pontian Genocide; any complementary information on the casualties of the Greco-Turkish war in a geographically distant part of Anatolia belongs outside the lead. ·ΚέκρωΨ· 13:05, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
Unfortenetly i agree with Garnett when he said: `Its like talking to a brick wall.`..Regards..-- laertes d 10:22, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Laertes, there's a huge leap between the info being included below, and a separate article. We're not discussing whether the information should be included at all or not. We are discussing if it has such high relevance to the subject to warrant inclusion in the lead. And it hasn't. Niko Silver 12:23, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
And yet it has been there for over months, it gets truly pathetic of what you two have been doing in several articles..Youre supposed to make up your own minds, not to back each other in each and ever occasion no matter what the discussion topic is..
Dont worry you`ll get what you want..-- laertes d 22:24, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
It seemed to me quite relevant, we`re not talking about a background info, but about what happened in this period of time..i keep backing it up, as you may read from above, ( Personal attack removed) ..thts quite simple, the Turks being systematically massacred, just in the same period of time, is not a background info but the info itself..
laertes d 23:06, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
And thats your own private point of view that you keep repeating, which is unsupported by sources..You just keep repeat the same things, and call it a debate? In any case, there had been organised Greek atrocities in the same period of time(1919-1922), Toynbee and Akcam and several other sources make ıt quıte clear, what is your aim then Kekrops other than pushing your POV? -- laertes d 19:13, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
So? What despises me the most with your behavior is that youre acting like you dont understand, these specific citations are about the atrocities of the Greco-Turkish war, and that happened during the period of 1919-1922..
I'm wondering about another thing: "undue weight", how many Turks were killed by Greeks, do you have a number? I think this is relevant when we talk about hundereds of thousands of Greeks killed (I'm pretty sure that a Jew killed a German at some point in time, is that relevant in the discusion of Holocaust? OK, this is an exageration, but you see my point) -- AdrianTM 22:17, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
i meant for the numbers, he relies the `estimates` of this horton guy for the numbers..
Anyway, i think there is enough source that the Greek army had tried to build up homogenous or majority greek populations in western anatolia by expelling or massacring the Turkish civilian population there, as the Turkish forces were doing it elsewhere in the exact same period of time, so these informations has to be included in the intro of this article..There is nothing wrong with having cited neutral, respectable historians
Add this source to Toynbee and akcam, note that he uses that word genocide in relation with what the Greek army had done in the occupied zones:
`The short-sightedness of both Lloyd George and President Wilson seems incredible, explicable only in terms of the magic of Venizelos and an emotional, perhaps religious, aversion to the Turks. For Greek claims were at best debatable, perhaps a bare majority, more likely a large minority in the Smyrna Vilayet, which lay in an overwhelmingly Turkish Anatolia. The result was an attempt to alter the imbalance of populations by genocide, and the counter determination of Nationalists to erase the Greeks, a feeling which produced bitter warfare in Asia Minor for the next two years until the Kemalists took Smyrna in 1922 and settled the problem by burning down the Greek quater..` [3] By C. J. Lowe, M. L Dockrill Published 2002 Routledge ISBN 0415265975-- laertes d 23:04, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
Niko if you dont want to discuss and reply to the comments made in this article, then why are you so fanatically revert the article? I happen to wait for an answer from you..-- laertes d 10:52, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
Sigh.., as i keep saying i already quoted you enough sources, please stop your immature behavior of changing the sourced content to something that the sources actually dont say..Believe me I really dont want to waste more time in here, make sure you just dont change the sources the way you want..-- laertes d 10:11, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
Can editors tell me whether Tatz, Rummel, or Jacob specifically use the term "Pontic Greek Genocide" since they are being used to source this as a verifiable term? I know for a fact Rummel does not use term. If it is a case of these authors saying there was a "greek genocide" or "genocide of greeks" it still does not source the title of this article which the sources are apparently being used for. To me this is only one example of the OR running through this article. Other sections such as "Reasons for limited recognition" are purely original research, using a mish mash of sources to prove an editors own position. This is a problem I've highlighted from the very beginning, and something obvious to any editor with a basic knowledge of wiki policy. -- A.Garnet 10:26, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
What utter hypocrisy. You denounce the sources you dislike for not referring verbatim to a Pontic Greek Genocide, but happily parrot passages that don't refer specifically to the Pontians at all. I've had enough for one evening. Cheers. ·ΚέκρωΨ· 15:03, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
Actually Midlarsky later writes:
p.342
Here, a strong disjunction between intention and action is found. According to the Austrian consul at Arnisos, Kwiatkowski, in his November 30, 1916, report to the foreign minister Baron Bunan: on 26 November Rafet Bey told me: ‘we must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians ... ‘on 28 November Rafet Bey told me: today I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight.’ I fear for the elimination of the entire Greek population and a repeat of what occurred last year.”
And later still
p.343
Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks. Massacres most likely did take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small number of Armenian survivors, the massacres were apparently restricted to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other "sensitive regions"
So he specifically ascribes genocidal intent on the Turkish state, explicitly terms the events massacres and equates them to the Armenian Genocide but localized to Pontus, Smyrna and some other regions (I am guessing he is reffering to the Kydonies and other Anatolian massacres here). Xenovatis ( talk) 12:14, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
I will, i think that is the correct way doing it, many of these citations are not reliable..-- laertes d 12:39, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
If primay source is cming someone like George Horton, surely we have to mention qho is saying it..-- laertes d 12:39, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
A final comment: I am really tired with your repeated insults ( [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] ), and I am seeking the foreseen remedies. Niko Silver 12:28, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
i cant see any insult at all, if somebody just bother to read what you have been doing in several articles for a long period of time..And believe i am tired of people like you, and i still dont get how such a blatant, ugly nationalist POV pushing rhetoric demonstrated by you for such long period of time can still be tolerated...-- laertes d 12:36, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
I have again placed the distinct events of western Anatolia outside the lead and reworded the text to avoid some of Laertes's more inane repetition regarding the atrocities. As for the word "limited", my inclination is to avoid it if it isn't used in the source. ·ΚέκρωΨ· 14:56, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
Kekrops says see the talk page, but I can't seem to find the rationale for his edit. It might be time to archive. Also to avoid WP:SYN, Niko, we should maybe split that sentence, if you do not want to insist on violating WP:SYN and WP:NPOV Deniz T C 02:53, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
An attribution tag was requested on the "reasons of limited recognition" section. In my view, the attribution is right below, in the whole section. It is attributed to Constantine Fotiades, and one of the "excuses" he uses concurs with a (very descriptive IMO) comment by Levene. Denizz, can you please explain if there is an additional reason why the tag is needed? Niko Silver 13:09, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
Why is the following passage being used in this article?:
The Turks extended their policy of exterminating the Christians of the [Ottoman Empire] to the Armenians, Greeks, Syrians, and Lebanese.... According to an Associated Press report, of 500,000 Greeks deported from Thrace, in Asia Minor, an estimated 250,000, or half, died of disease and torture. Starting in 1910, the Ottoman Turks made about one million Greeks homeless and deported hundreds of thousands; as many as 300,000 Greeks died of hunger, disease, and the cold as a result. In the 1920s, the Turkish nationalists massacred about 200,000 more Christians, mostly Greeks, in cities such as Smyrna. Greek men became victims of murder, torture, and starvation; Greek women suffered all this and also became slaves in Muslim households; Greek children wandered the streets as orphans ‘‘half-naked and begging for bread’’; and millions of dollars’ worth of Greek property passed into Muslim hands
Can anyone tell me where it a)mentions Pontians or Pontus or b)a genocide of Pontian Greeks? Are we going to paste is any large passages which allude to a massacre of Greeks, even if they dont refer to Pontians? Just in case you forgot what the intro of the article says, it states "Pontic Greek Genocide[2][3][4][5][6][7] is a controversial term used to refer to the fate of Pontic Greeks during and in the aftermath of World War I." Can anyone give a justification for it? -- A.Garnet 12:40, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
I am astonished as to what is going on here- this is absolute editing chaos. You all need to calm down and get down off of your grandstands and stop this edit warring post haste. These are my points from what I have seen:
R.J. Rummel does not mention Pontic Greeks in his calculation chart, and does not differentiate between them and the rest of the Anatolian Greeks. Any mention of Turkish massacres are not to go beyond the scope of the region of Pontus- anything beyond that makes this a general article on Anatolian Greek genocide, which it is not. Please stick with Pontus only references. Monsieurdl ( talk) 20:49, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
If the term is controversial to begin with (as the first sentence suggests), then why is the controversial term used as the title, rather than as an alternative name? Why not change the title to something like:
...Or something else that is more suitable. I think I made my point. The title itself shouldn't be controversial. Is this internationally recognized as a genocide like the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust? I do not believe it is. When I type Pontic Greek Genocide into google, I only get Greek websites. It appears the Greeks are clearly the ones with the bias in this article. - 68.43.58.42 01:13, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
No international body accepts the term, including the United Nations. I think that makes the term genocide POV. The only nation that recognizes it is Greece (and Cyprus). Several of the academics quoted are Greeks themselves (since the nation of Greece is the only nation that accepts the term, one has to question the partisanship of Greek scholars). The term is not found in any major encyclopedia... Wikipedia is INTENDED to be an encyclopedia, and therefore one has to question the validity of this article as a whole. Calling the Pontic Greek Genocide a Genocide is intended to evoke sympathy for Greeks, who were perpetrating War Crimes against the Turks themselves. No one calls the extermination of entire Turkish cities during the Greco-Turkish War to be "genocidal," even though it had the same effect as this event. It is a blatant POV term and would be similar to declaring the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo to be "genocides." We all know that that would be nonsense, even if 2-3 million people were displaced and at least half a million were killed in those 4 bombings alone. The fact that this source is missing from encyclopedias, from textbooks, it is not acknowledged by the international community, and it has almost no representation online other than through Greek websites, one really has to question whether or not this article can legitimately be called a genocide. An unencyclopedic term has no place in an online encyclopedia (wiki). - 68.43.58.42 ( talk) 21:17, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
Funny, because I'm not Turkish? I acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. This article seems like a silly way to elevate what occurred to the Greeks to the level of what occurred to the Armenians and that's nonsense. If the term is not located in any encyclopedia, then it's an unecyclopedic term. If the "genocide" really occurred, why does not a single major international body on PLANET EARTH acknowledge it? Even the EU doesn't acknowledge it! This is blatant POV and Greek chauvinism. It would be equivalent to Turks creating an article on cities that the Greek forces exterminated during the Greco-Turkish Wars and label those are "Genocides." Elevating such events to the level of things like the Holocaust or Armenian genocide in which millions were killed systematically is nonsense. - 68.43.58.42 ( talk) 05:11, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
More people died in the combined Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings. Was it genocidal? If something is not internationally recognized or included in any modern encyclopedia, then how can this possibly be encyclopedic? Finding sources is great, but you can't point to any international body or any encyclopedia that includes this, so the entire article is fundamentally questionable, hence why the it will never be neutral if a word like genocide is included. - 68.43.58.42 ( talk) 18:53, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
The entire premise of this article is suspect. However, before concluding either way, would one of the authors of this article please address the following questions.
Some of the citations also raise questions:
Thank you in advance for your responses. Pebblicious ( talk) 21:44, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
Eagle of Pontus ( talk) 14:08, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 17:37, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
The second image describing 800,000 Armenians being murdered by the Turks seems somewhat tangential to an article on this event. The Armenian Genocide, the Assyrian Genocide and this event are not universally acknowledged as pieces of one larger genocide. The image of Armenians being killed, however, reinforces that point of view. Shouldn't an image on Armenians being killed be kept in an article on the Armenian Genocide, not the Greek one? I thought I would come here before deleting anything. - Rosywounds ( talk) 20:54, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
The POV tag was removed without discussion. I re-added it, since this dispute has obviously not been resolved (nor was the removal ever discussed) and the article is susceptible to POV pushing. Moreover, the title of the article immediately pushes for a specific POV (that the event is worthy of being called a "genocide"). If the article refers to the event throughout as a "genocide" even though the event is not officially recognized internationally, then the article is clearly pushing for that POV. The Greeks themselves did not even refer to this event as a genocide until the 1990s. Moreover, this is a sensitive topic and it should be known that this page is and has been susceptible to bias. I'd be willing to discuss this more thoroughly.- Rosywounds ( talk) 06:27, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Major works of history does not call the events as a genocide, thats the the basic point which separates it from the armenian genocide article.Thus tag is necessary.-- 88.242.196.76 ( talk) 12:39, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Thank heaven, i dont waste my time in here anymore-at least not so often-, people often refer to the works of Arnold J. Toynbee as major hisotrical works, and he is a respected historian of the region as he had been in Turkey throughut this period..Then Taner Akcam also is considered to be a major historian of the region, the book that he wrote is the most recent work about these events.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.242.196.76 ( talk) 13:19, 4 January 2008 (UTC) Some many other historical works can be added to the list, like the book from `C.J. Lowe and M.L. Dockrill`..
Whatever the case and no matter who you are,
88.242.196.76, you are being disruptive and deliberately provoking a fight here with your highly controversial edits, particularly the one saying that if the Greeks had never landed there would have been no atrocities. That alone is ludicrous and points directly to your attempt. I am in full support of any revisions to counter these actions, be it by admins or not.
Monsieurdl
mon talk-
mon contribs 16:42, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Ok monsieur, you are probably right about being disruptive, however the source is legitimate, definitely not `highly controversial`..It basically says that there wasnt such a thing as `turkish national movement` following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire afterworld war I and the basic factor of its emergence was the Greek occupation of Smyrna..And actually it is not simpy the personal point of view of Toynbee, many other historians actually repeat the same thing..Plus, article for a very long time actually has been in this shape, just check the past records, only one day it occured to Niko to change it all of a sudden and rewrite it..-- 88.242.196.76 ( talk) 19:14, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Read wikipedia's file on POV tags/disputes. If the dispute has not been resolved between editors, then it is inappropriate to remove a POV tag. There was no thorough discussion in the talk page about this at the time of its removal (only two editors were involved, and one was a troll). That is a violation of wikipedia policy. Simply because one non-governmental organization recognizes this event does not mean this dispute was resolved between editors. Certainly there are scholars that recognize it, but there were scholars that recognized it before the POV tag had been added in the first place. Nikosilver, you do bring up a good point; this was discussed briefly. However, that discussion was initiated by a troll (Xenovatis) whose recent edits clearly show he is not editing in good-faith. The IAGS, as noble of an idea as it is, is a consensus studies organization akin to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. These organizations are notoriously politically correct and want to please everyone (e.g. Amnesty International is more critical of Israeli human rights or Guantanamo Bay than Saudi Arabian human rights). These organizations certainly deserve citation in this article in defense for the naming, but they are not the last word and they do not override Wikipedia consensus. The POV tag cannot be removed under such grounds, it is a violation of wikipedia policy. It should be included again. I do not oppose using the title, but unless this dispute is properly resolved, then the POV tag should also be included.-
Rosywounds (
talk) 19:08, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
The current sample of editors would not be enough to come to a logical decision on the POV tag (which I am more than willing to discuss). Three of the users that have posted in this thread are trolls/ bad faith editors (EliasAlucard, Xenovatis, 88.242.196.76). - Rosywounds ( talk) 19:25, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
I had to request an RfC- this has gotten to be far too much. Monsieurdl mon talk- mon contribs 21:31, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Well I don't see how a consensus can be reached when one side is defended by genocide denialists. I agree with mediation and second the RfC. ASAP.
Xenovatis ( talk) 16:59, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
It's been a month and a half and the RfC has only yielded one comment and that is against the genocide denialist position. There can be no further rationale for the inclusion of the tag. Xenovatis ( talk) 17:10, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Look Rosywouds this is getting silly. Please state clearly what if anything will it take to convince you. You have been shown a large number of refs that clearly label it as genocide. You have the opinion of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that calls it a genocide and I point out that this was previously used as the main argument against the use of the word. Please state clearly what exactly it will take to convince you. Xenovatis ( talk) 19:37, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
Is the POV tag necessary for this article based upon its content and history?
I would therefore expect that a NPOV article which is nevertheless titled Genocide would give more weight to this view including expanding on it in the article introduction. Aatomic1 ( talk) 13:19, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
To recap:
Mark Mazower (eminent historian on Greece): "It [the Ottoman leadership] had already deported Greek civilians from the Anatolian shoreline into the interior (the Russians were doing much the same with Russian Jews in Tsarist Poland, the Habsburgs with their border Serbs). But these deportations were on a relatively small scale and do not appear to have been designed to end in their victims' deaths. What was to happen with the Armenians was of a different order." (Mark Mazower, The G-Word, London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n03/mazo01_.html)."
Midlarsky: Midlarskys argues while there may have been statements made towards massacre of the Greeks (he uses the alleged statement of Rafet Bey) "there is a strong disjunction between intentions and actions" and that "Under these conditions, genocide of the Ottoman Greeks was simply not a viable option." (Midlarsky, Killing Trap, p.342).
Valentino: "Although many thousands died during the expulsions, particularly in years before the deportations came under international supervision, the Turks did not seek to exterminate the Greeks, as the previous regime had done to the Armenians. See Marrus, The Uwanted, pp 96-106." (B.A. Valentino, 2005. Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century., p.296)."
Peter Balakian (on the IAGS resolution): "The current resolution strikes me is an oversimplified statement that does not have the support of major scholars in our organization. It would seem to follow that IAGS would not want to put its name to such a statement and compromise its reputation and integrity."
Taner Akcam (again, on the Pontian resolution): "There is almost no single scholarly work done on the treatment of Greeks during the First World War. I worked extensively on this topic and collected an amount of Ottoman, German and American archival materials on this topic and haven’t published yet. My knowledge at this stage, based on the material that I have read from these three archival sources, what happened to the Greeks during the First World War cannot be correctly termed genocide."
Eric Weitz: By my reading, Pontic Greeks were subject to a forced deportation, which was, inevitably, accompanied by a large number of deaths and other atrocities. But it was not a genocide because the Young Turk regime was not intent on killing “in whole or in part” Pontic Greeks. It wanted them removed."
Three scholarly, western and reliable authors, where should their views be included? -- A.Garnet ( talk) 00:14, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Why only quote the minority view? In other words, the IAGS members that did not support the resolution. The resolution passed overwelmingly with 83% of the IAGS members voting in favor. Why not quote the members that voted in favor, as well. It is important to note here again that none of the individuals quoted above appears to have done any systematic or in depth research on the Pontic Greek Genocide. -
Rizos01 (
talk) 05:52, 8 January 2008 (UTC)
Perhaps to clear up the neutrality dispute, we could include a section on "Naming dispute" and include reasons for and against there? As of right now, the only portion that is represented is the pro-"genocide" title (the recognition section, for example). The article says that the name is controversial, but it never elaborates on why. It simply insinuates that Turkey is alone in that position like it is on the Armenian Genocide, which is not true at all with the Pontic Greek situation. Even under places like "Reasons for limited recognition," it still has a sympathetic tone towards why the Greeks themselves did not acknowledge this as a "genocide" until the 1990s. I wouldn't recommend placing it under "academic views of the genocide," since that entire page is based on synthesized information and should, if anything, be nominated for deletion (as should the the page with the laundry list of New York Times articles on this event) - Rosywounds ( talk) 00:26, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
According to the IAGS's own report [ here], there "has been little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides [whatever that means] against the other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire" in comparison to the Armenian genocide. In other words, almost no scholars outside of this organization acknowledges it and almost no literature has ever been generated on this topic that characterizes the events as a genocide - and they even admit that they are voting against what is commonly held. The current president of IAGS (Gregory Stanton) was loony enough to refer to the current Iraq War as bordering on genocide. This is why organizations like this do not represent the last word; organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are more critical of Israel and Guantanamo Bay than they are of human rights violations in countries like China and Saudi Arabia. FYI, consensus does not mean a lot of scholars. Consensus means scholars within this circle are in agreement. - Rosywounds ( talk) 05:11, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
The first sentence (the quote from the Turkish government) I deleted because it is already quoted verbatim in the Turkish stance on recognition; we don't need to be redundant. The second sentence was about Turkey's stance on the Assyrian and Armenian genocides, which is irrelevant to this article and pushes the POV that Turkey's denial of this event is genocide denial (which, thus, reinforces the stance that the term "genocide" is appropriate for this article). This event is much more debatable than the Armenian Genocide is, but the last sentence was using Turkey's denial of the Armenian genocide as a cheap way to try and invalidate the Turkish position on this event. Unnecessary and irrelevant. The Greek position and Turkish positions are (and should remain) further down in the article; the lead already provides a sufficient hint to an existing dispute or controversy over the name. I still think this dispute deserves its own section in the article (right now it is brushed off in the recognition section, and the rest of the article below that is synthesized original research). How would others feel about adding a section discussing the name's controversy on its own? That seems like the easiest way to get settle this dispute. - Rosywounds ( talk) 01:06, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
Both sentences (the Turkish government stance and the IAGS position) are included under "recognition" (one of them is mentioned almost verbatim). The first sentence especially, because it's just a repeat of the same quote. You do bring up a point about how the second sentence gives one a picture of the "fate of Anatolia's Christians," but these genocides are interconnected according to the Greek POV. A Garnet already furnished sources by Mark Mazower that argue they were "of a different order." Bernard Lewis, another eminent scholar, actually has even stronger opinions. Considering that Lewis is an eminent scholar on the Ottoman Empire and Mazower is an eminent scholar on Greece and the Balkans, that position shouldn't be overshadowed. Insinuating that the events are all interconnected or a part of the same policy would thus be pushing for one POV over another in a lead paragraph. Moreover, by synthesizing the Armenian Genocide and the Pontic Greek Genocide together, you are trying to lend the academic verifiability of the Armenian genocide to the not-so-verifiable Pontic Greek Genocide. It's an insinuation and it's a synthesis of data ( see here). Synthesis has been a repeated villain in these Pontic Greek articles, and it needs to be tackled now.
Editors sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if A is published by a reliable source, and B is published by a reliable source, then A and B can be joined together in an article to advance position C. However, this would be an example of a new synthesis of published material serving to advance a position, and as such it would constitute original research. - Wikipedia's policies on OR/Synthesis
- Rosywounds ( talk) 20:17, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
It is important to note here that neither Toynbee, nor Mazower, Midrasky, Akcam or Lewis had or have sufficient knowledge or done any in depth research on the Pontic Greek experience. What they offer and express is simply their opinion on these events based on what they have read in the course of studying Greece, Turkey, the First World War, etc. One would consider Toynbee and Akcam as the only ones that could come close to have some weight in this matter. However, Toynbee's travels in Turkey, were limited to the west coast of Anatolia. He never set foot on the Pontus region before, during, or after the subject events. The Turkish regime's efforts to keep reports about these events from reaching other areas of Anatolia and the West are known and were quite effective. Similarly, Taner Akcam's research is limited to the Armenian Genocide in 1915-1916. He has not done any research on the Pontian Greek Genocide. This is obvious in his comments to the IAGS (see IAGS Blog). Therefore, none of the above mentioned sources should be considered authoritative or the last word on the Pontic Greek Genocide issue. - Rizos01 ( talk) 22:17, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Someone please be so kind to add all the references and all the text from this recognized internationall institution supported by the United Nations: http://www.genocidetext.net/iags_resolution_supporting_documentation.htm —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.38.72.32 ( talk) 16:48, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Hi, I noticed there is an edit war here, so I have protected the article. Discuss, find consensus and ask an admin to either unprotect, or make agreed upon changes. Cheers, John Vandenberg ( talk) 14:17, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
As editors involved in this long running dispute will know, there is disagreement regarding both the title of this article and the manner in which the events are explained. Before I go over mine and others rationale for this dispute, any editor removing tags and making unilateral changes should know that I am not the only person disputing this article, others to voice their concerns include User:Rosywounds, User:Monsieurdl, User:Wandalstouring, User:Baristarim, User:Future Perfect at Sunrise among others. Firstly, just from the above list it is obvious those questioning this article are not simply "Genocide denialists and kemalist apologists " and if User:Xenovatis uses such language again I will report him to an administrator. Secondly, looking back from the talk page and comments made by myself and others it is obvious there is steady, long running and unresolved dispute, and as such unilateral attempts to remove the pov-title tag without a solution is unnaceptable.
As to the dispute itself my reasoning is as follows. Firstly the title "Pontic Greek Genocide" was based on resolutions passed by the Greek government and scraps of sentences found in various works which made various reference to a "genocide of Greeks", though not making in clear if in Pontus or Asia Minor, or "massacres" or "ethnic cleansing" etc. The article lacked even one major scholarly source which could be attributed to this event, it has zero coverage in journals, zero coverage in mainstream encylopedias, zero coverage in mainstream media i.e. BBC, Economist, TIME etc. Put simply, the whole categorisation of these events from top to bottom as a genocide is a pov and the efforts to maintain it is pov pushing.
Now the IAGS (association of genocide scholars) passed a resolution some months ago recognising these events as genocide, the same editors have taken this as confirming the "truth" and attempted to remove the tag. This despite me providing sources with eminent members of the IAGS opposing the resolution e.g. Peter Balakian states "The current resolution strikes me is an oversimplified statement that does not have the support of major scholars in our organization. It would seem to follow that IAGS would not want to put its name to such a statement and compromise its reputation and integrity" or Taner Akcam "There is almost no single scholarly work done on the treatment of Greeks during the First World War [funnily enough an argument I have made for over a year]...what happened to the Greeks during the First World War cannot be correctly termed genocide". These are just two major scholars who made clear their opposition to the resolution (more can be found on the IAGS blog). So it is clear from this even that the current position of the article lacks academic consensus, the most basic principle of establishing pov as fact.
Now add to this the complete absence from this article of scholars such as Mazower, Midlarsky and Valention who are explicit in saying Greeks did not suffer a genocide and you understand that this article is an exercise in pov pushing from top to bottom. There is almost no explanation of what the Pontians actually endured, instead most of the article is devoted to explaining why Greece is right to call it a genocide, why there are "reasons for limited recognition" of this alleged genocide, why it is similar to the Armenian Genocide, the only academic quotes provided are those which use the term genocide etc etc. Furthermore, consider the creation of three more articles, Academic quotes on the Pontic Greek Genocide, List of press headlines relevant to the Pontic Greek Genocide and List of eyewitness accounts related to the Pontic Greek Genocide, each one created to further a pov based without the existence of one single piece of scholarly research in its favour. This is frankly quite an incredible situation and the fact that it has existed for so long is a testament to efforts by almost exclusively Greek editors to force their view through reverts, meaningless straw polls, obstructing arbitration attempts and so forth.
Therefore, I will continue to oppose the state of this article, the manner in which it is portrayed and its title, not because I am Turkish or I have a grudge against Greeks, but because it so obviously and shamelessly violates basic Wiki policies. I accept there is a legitimate article to be made, just not in this way. In the coming days I will make a proposition on what I think is npov and I what I would accept without any problem. Thanks, -- A.Garnet ( talk) 13:33, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
For the record, those articles should be deleted per WP:SYN. Not a single New York Times article, for example, ever mentioned genocide. The word genocide was coined in the 1940s. - Rosywounds ( talk) 17:07, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
I will continue to oppose the state of this article,
That kind of attitude is why I think arbitration is needed. User AGarnet does not show himself a good faith discussant that will revise his opinions in the light of evidence. 17:12, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
I dont plan to get drawn into a long debate before I make suggestions to npov'ise this article, but I will address some of the accusations being made since Xenovatis is (deliberately imo) choosing to distort what I am saying. Firstly, I am not against the use of the word genocide as there are sources, including the IAGS and other less noteworthy authors who make use of that word. BUT and this is the big but, the article must be created in a way in which it accomodates
Now in its current form the article cannot accomodate these views since from the title its obvious Greek editors (who created and for the most part maintain this article) are framing the article on paltry few references which refer to the event as genocide and ommiting the larger issues which I raised above. For the above points to be integrated the whole article has to be changed, that means the title, content and structure. Ignoring my arguments, which are rational and in line with Wiki policies, by attacking my character, calling me a nationalist, denialist, apologist or that I am acting in bad faith carries no currency here. These points HAVE to be addressed and if your incapable of this then you have no grounds to oppose my argument. -- A.Garnet ( talk) 12:05, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
http://www.lawandpolitics.com/minnesota/Is-It-Still-Genocide-if-Your-Allies-Did-It/cef7381e-fe46-102a-aeb9-000e0c6dcf76.html Taner Akcam interview My central argument in A Shameful Act was that the Armenian Genocide was not an isolated act against Armenians but a part of a demographic policy enacted during World War I. It had two main components. One was against the Muslim non-Turkish population, who were redistributed, relocated and resettled among the Turkish population with the aim of assimilation. The second was against the Christian population, the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians. The goal was to get the Christians out of Anatolia, what we now know as Turkey-to forcibly move them to Greece or Iran. Or, in the case of the Armenians, to eliminate them altogether.
Xenovatis ( talk) 20:47, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
1. You have completely misrepresented my statements. Firstly, I never said the IAGS as a whole should be disqualified; in fact, I said clearly (and in bold) that they should be mentioned.
2. Wikipedia does have criteria for reliable sources; we do not simply pick someone because they have a degree. If their degree is irrelevant to this subject, does that make them a scholar here? A scholar on Ancient China is no more of a scholar on Ancient Greece than a U.S. lawyer is of the Young Turks. This is not my opinion; this is common sense.
3. The IAGS as an entity does have a vote that is worthy of mention; scholars on this topic, however, have produced almost no literature that suggests that this is a genocide. Moreover, scholars within the IAGS that are actually specialized in this area have spoken out against IAGS's politicized decision. This is something that is not addressed in this article. Is this position not worthy of mention? Is the fact that no major encyclopedia and no major scholarly work on the Young Turks or Ottoman empire ever addresses the Anatolian Catastrophe as such? Whether or not these facts are appealing to your POV does not change the fact that they exist. Had scholars considered this event to be genocidal in nature, then they would have characterized it as such a long time ago (the Armenian genocide has been recognized for years by scholars). The IAGS is a collection of scholars that all have a peripheral relationship to one another, but, as I had said, the organization is not the end-all be-all.
4. I have not produced original research; selecting reliable sources is something that all Wikipedians must be able to do. Wikipedia has its own criteria to do so, and it even has a RS board if there are instances in which people are not seen as credible sources. Please read Wikipedia's WP:OR before you accuse me of violating it. Also see WP:RS. It's also funny that people from the other POV would accuse me of OR, considering the shape of this, this, and this. - Rosywounds ( talk) 20:21, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
According to WP:RS:
I don't think I am necessarily in the wrong here, and the reason this is going no where is because you haven't properly addressed the points that I have brought up. The IAGS members, for the most part, only have peripheral knowledge on this subject. Lawyers on human rights are not "human rights scholars." That would be like saying ambulance chasers are medical doctors simply because they are familiarized with some medical terminology. - Rosywounds ( talk) 22:56, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 09:24, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
The loss of the unwieldy Arab lands was not only accepted by the Kemalists hut perhaps even welcomed as Islamism receded further with the advance of a secular Turkic nationalism. The loss of parts of Anatolia and the rest of Thrace was an entirely different matter. The two present threats to Turkish territorial integrity—by the Greeks and the French—and the one potential threat—an Armenian state—reproduced the proximate CUP ‘rationale’ for the 1915—16 genocide, and the forthcoming violence was sometimes of the same order
As mentioned, the Young Turks also committed genocide against the Greek in Turkey, but for fear of Greece they did so with much more restraint than they showed the Armenians.
The Armenian genocide, which coincided with Turkish massacres of Greeks, can be portrayed in part as an attempt to eliminate Christian non-Turks from a newly defined Turkish Muslim nation, but the racial element is significant.
After the Armenians it was the turn of the Greeks to be the victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
From 1840 on, the relatively tolerant pattern of inter-communal relations was disrupted with increasingly violent consequences, reaching a crescendo with the ethnic cleansing of Armenians and Greeks from Anatolia in 1915—23.
Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks. Massacres most likely did take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small number of Armenian survivors, the massacres were apparently restricted to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other "sensitive regions"
In the genocide of various minority nationalities that followed, the Turks massacred over 350000 Greeks.
At the end of the Greco-Turkish War of 1921-1922, Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) at the head of the infant Turkish Republic engaged in an ethnic cleansing campaign against the country’s Greeks. The Lausanne Treaty of 1923 completed the process of the forcible transfer of the Greeks.
That was the CUP’s goal—to build a nation-state around a homogenous Turkic-Islamic population, stripped of its Christians (Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians and some Syrians) and Jews. p.271 The Turkish interpretation of the treacherous Armenians and Greeks and of the requirements of “military necessity” became for many German officers simply facts that formed the basis of their own reckoning. p.276 The other three documented examples we have of German officers advising deportation all occurred after the genocide was well underway. Bronsart ordered Armenian males working in forced labour brigades to be removed on 25 July ii and he advised Liman (who refused) to deport Greeks from the coast in August 1916.
Thus the Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire, who had suffered persecution and massacres in the nineteenth century, were subjected to genocide under the cover of the First World War, culminating in the murder of some 1.5 million Armenians , and the ethnic cleansing of the Greek and Assyrian communities of Anatolia....The Genocide Convention of 1948 and other United Nations Conventions strengthen the claims of genocide victims, including the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians of Asia Minor,
Outsiders: A History of European Minorities, Panikos Panayi p.111 The Turkish state which emerged at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire contained several minorities within its interior, in an attempt to move towards a homogeneous population the Turkish state, which has passed through varying phases of dictatorship and democracy, has used any means possible, including genocide and deportation, to eliminate the Armenians, Greeks and Kurds remaining within Anatolia.
The Genocide of the Eastern Christians of Smyrna (1922) Turkish army entered Smyrna on September 9. 1922 and soon thereafter the city went up in flames. A fire razed most of the Armenian quarter. It is estimated that 50,000 Christians were killed in the city during this period. No indigenous Christians remained in Smyrna after this holocaust that had deeply stained relations between the two peoples. p.249 The burning of Smyrna and the massacring and scattering of its 300,000 Christian inhabitants is one of the greatest crimes of all times.
60. Most of the Armenians had already been massacred during the reign of the Sultan, in 1915—1916; Kemal attempted to continue the genocide of Armenians in Transcaucasia, and of Greeks on the coast of the Aegean. Especially heartrending and horribly bloody was the genocide of the Greeks in Smyrna (Turkish Izmir) where they had lived since the tenth century BC.
The French classical scholar, Pierre Vidal-Naguet, labelled denialists the assassins of memory’. In the case of the Jews, the denialists are not always the genocidaires. In the case of the Armenians, however, they are. Turkish denialism of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians is official, riven, driven, constant, rampant and increasing each year since the events of 1915 to 1922. It is state-funded, with special departments and units in overseas missions whose sole purpose is to dilute, counter, minimise, trivialise and relativise every reference to the events which encompassed a genocide of Armenians, Pontian Greeks and Assyrian Christians in Asia Minor.
The term ‘auto-genocide’ (self- genocide) has hence been used to distinguish the extreme distortion of nationhood by dictators such as Pol Pot and Ataturk through a deep-reaching subversion of history. Exterminating one’s own people and culture apparently does not contrast with the restoration of ancient monuments like Angkor Vat (the largest temple in the world). The most problematic case was, of course, that of Kemal Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal Pasha), who could only conceive development as utter, remorseless and complete Westernization (Atahaki and Zürcher 2004). This led him to the extreme paroxysm of banning key elements of popular Turkish culture, such as the fez or tarboosh, a hat common to most Ottoman Mediterranean lands, which he replaced with Western, particularly British, hats and suits — to the great benefit of Western textile industries.’ Rummel (1997: 233—6) calculates that 264,000 Greeks, 440,000 Armenians, as well as other minorities and countless Turks perished under his “reign of terror”
*Reigns of Terror, Patricia Marchak p.31
One of the objections to including political victims in the definition for genocide was that every state has political opponents, some of whom are armed subversives. Assuming it is legitimate to attempt to capture and disarm such persons, any definition that treats all political acts as genocide would not be accepted even by the most liberal democratic states. However, liberal democratic states are obliged to bring such individuals to trial and to produce evidence of illegal acts; a definition of poliricide that clearly states the absence of such protections would he necessary.
Politicide includes what might otherwise he categorized as “class crimes or crimes committed against individuals because they are, or are perceived to he, members of a class. A class would consist of families who share a position in the economic and social spectrum of the society. The measurements of positions are generally rather crude, such as owning/not owning land or industrial and commercial establishments; living in rural or urban regions; or being employed in manual versus non-manual labour. Because ethnic groups are often discriminated against and ranked within multi-ethnic societies, persons who fall into crude class categories may also share ethnic origins. Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, Indians in Uganda, and Jews in much of Europe were disproportionately engaged in commerce: their ethnicity and occupational niches were so intertwined that crimes against the ethnic group and class were one and the same.
However, the Treaty of Sevres was never ratified, As Kay Holloway wrote, the failure of the signatories to bring the treaty into force ‘resulted in the abandonment of thousands of defenceless peoples Armenians and Greeks — to the fury of their persecutors, by engendering subsequent holocausts in which the few survivors of the 1915 Armenian massacres perished.” The Treaty of Sevres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1 Q23 that included a ‘Declaration of Amnesty’ for all offence’s commited between 1 August 1914 and 20 November 1922.
The Armenians and Greeks were not the only non-Turkish minority to suffer during World War 1 and their fates may not be divorced from the broader context. Assyrian (especially Nestorian) Christians in western Persia. Diarbekir, Van, and Bidis provinces (particularly in their strongholds in the Hakkiari highlands) were massacred alongside Armenians in 1915 although they were not subject to the same systematic destruction as the Armenian communities.
“To our amazement”, said the Orthodox Observer, the civilized world…looks on with indifference as the genocide of the Greeks in Turkey continues according to the preplanned schedule”.
p.2
The extermination of over 90 per cent of Poland’s Jews in early 1944, the Highland clearances in Scotland in the eighteenth century; the expulsion of ethnic Germans from post-war Czechoslovakia; the transportation of he Crimean Tartan in 1941; the slaughter of lzmir’s Greeks and Armenians in the early 1920s; and the exodus of Muslims from the Balkans after the mid-nineteenth century are only a few of the numerous instances of this kind of violence. Ethnic cleansing has become a broad term which covers all forms of ethnically inspired violence from murder, rape and torture to forceful removal of population.
“…had been its Greek populace, the Turks massacred as many Greeks there as possible, to so1ve that ethnological problem by genocide, a term a later and more delicate…”
These three don't explicitly mention genocide or ethnic cleansing but rather identify the fate of the Greeks with that of the Armenians, i.e. genocide.
The principal ideological outcome was the emergence of ethnically based nationalisms among the empire’s diverse peoples with calamitous results the fate of the Armenians and Greeks of Anatolia
In a letter to the president of the AIU, Nahum Effendi. Chief Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire, explains that his attitude, described anti-Zionist “saved the Jews of Turkey and Palestine from the fate of the Armenians and Greeks See Esther Benbassa, Un Grand Rabbine Sepharade en politique 1892-1923 (Paris 1990), 234
Even among contestants geographically interspersed there must he some sense of community or some even balance of forces that makes wholesale expulsion or genocide impossible. The Turks are beginning to develop a set of democratic practices among themselves, but fifty years ago they did not deal democratically with Armenians or Greeks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Xenovatis ( talk • contribs) 17:36, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
These four however also explicitly call the Greek Genocide as such.
"It is believed that in Turkey between 1913 and 1922, under the successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), more than 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized and state-sponsored campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out from the emerging Turkish Republic its native Christian populations. This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government ostensibly denies having committed this genocide."
"Turks admit that the Armenian persecution is the first step in a plan to get rid of Christians, and that Greeks would come next. ... Turkey henceforth is to be for Turks alone."
"While the death toll in the trenches of Western Europe were close to 2 million by the summer of 1915, the extermination of innocent civilians in Turkey (the Armenians, but also Syrian and Assyrian Christians and large portions of the Greek population, especially the Greeks of Pontos, or Black Sea region) was reaching 1 million."
"If members of the United Nations pass appropriate legislation such incidents such as pogroms of Czarist Russian and the massacres of Armenians and Greeks by Turkey would be punishable as genocide."
It was only in the nineteenth century that the complete destruction of an ethnic group manifested itself as the goal of a state, when Turkey began directing cleansing efforts against Greeks and Armenians.
I didn't see these in the quotes article so I thought we should discuss them here before inclusion. Additionaly there is a research unit dedicated to the study of the Pontic Greek Genocide in the University of New South Wales' Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. http://www.aihgs.com/pontintr.htm
Finally here is a teaching unit on the Pontic Greek Genocide. http://www.xeniteas.net/history/PontianGenocide.pdf
Xenovatis ( talk) 21:54, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Xenovatis ( talk) 14:11, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
- Although I was receptive to the resolution from the start, as serious perspectives were offered by the major scholars in this field, I began to reconsider various aspects of the text.
....
- The following points also have been made: such a resolution needs to distinguish between what happened to the Assyrians and Pontic Greeks and what happened to the Greeks of western Turkey, where the role of the Greek state was present; such a resolution should clarify more carefully how in the final solution for the Armenians, other groups were dragged along into various forms of human rights atrocities.
Just now, March 2008, 2 articles were published on the prestigious Journal of Genocide Research that focus exclusively on the Greek (one on the Assyrian as wall) Genocide. This are highly relevant sources that should be looked at with care and attention. The first refers only to the 1914 ethnic cleansing phase and the second to the Genocide in its entirety.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623520701850286
p.42 The tendency to treat as separate phenomena various aspects of CUP policies of what I would dub “violent Turkification”—interconnected policies of, for example, ethnic cleansing and genocide aimed at the homogenization of the Ottoman Empire—is not new, nor can it merely be seen in the writings of Greek and Armenian scholars….According to Taner Akcam, the CUP had prior to WWI “formulated a policy that they began to execute in the Aegean region against the Greeks and, during the war years, expanded to include the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Syrians, and especially the Armenians, a policy that eventually became genocidal. [. . .]
p.42 Seen from the vantage point of observers in the major harbour city of Smyrna (Izmir), and in Constantinople (Istanbul), the Ottoman capital, CUP policies of group persecution began in earnest with the attempted ethnic cleansing of Ottoman Greeks living along the Aegean littoral.13 Attempts at removing non-Turkish influences from the economy had been initiated by the CUP after a radical faction of the Committee had gained power in 1913, and this policy was supplemented with the cleansing of more than 100,000 Greeks from the Aegean and Thrace in the spring and summer of 1914.14
p.43 But the islands dispute and security concerns were apparently not the only reasons, as economic, political, and ethno-religious concerns seem to have made the cleansing policy part of a larger project of Turkification.
p.45 The nation, beginning with the areas of trade and language, was to be cleansed from “foreign elements” in order to establish a national culture and economy…. As noted, the 1914 cleansing was initially attempted through a severe economic boycott and by other intimidating measures.
p.51 To the CUP, one of the major advantages of Turkification was that the European Powers would be presented with a fait accompli. The Christians would be gone who had served as an excuse for interference with what the CUP regarded as the internal matters of the empire. The 1914 cleansing policy therefore points toward the WWI policies of extermination, if not in the sense that these policies were planned to be parts of a “grand scheme” of what have been called partial and total genocides, then in the sense that they were connected in profound ways.
p.53 13 For uses of the phrase “ethnic cleansing” to describe these events, see Roger W. Smith, “Introduction,” in: Morgenthau, 2003, p xxxiv, and Halil Berktay, “A genocide, three constituencies, thoughts for the future (part I),” Armenian Weekly, Vol 73, No 16, 21 April 2007, available at http://www.hairenik.com/armenianweekly/ gin042107_03.htm (accessed August 2007). According to Smith, 1973, p 31, the 1914 events were “not a ‘massacre’ in the sense of the Armenian or Bulgarian massacres, though numerous incidents of murder, destruction and rape took place. It was what the Greeks call a diogmos—persecution.”
p.53 98 On “partial” and “total” genocide: Mark Levene, “Creating a modern ‘zone of genocide’: the impact of nation and state-formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923,” Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Vol 12, No 3, 1998, pp 395–401, makes the argument that although the Armenian genocide like the Holocaust was a rare instance of total genocide (basically meaning that the scope, scale, and intensity of the killing is, if not unlimited, then with few limitations and exceptions), other aspects of the CUP homogenization campaign can be characterized as partial genocide. See also Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp 2–4, 247–257.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623520801950820
p.10 The one-sided association of the Armenian genocide with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire is a relatively new phenomenon. In the postwar period, Western observers were well aware that the Young Turks’ policy of extermination was multifaceted. Henry Morgenthau, who served as US ambassador in Constantinople until 1916, for example, stated in his memoirs: “The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians. Indeed, the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea.”21 Morgenthau was right when he emphasized that the Young Turks leaders’ systematic policy of violent turkification was first targeted against the Greeks.
p.11 The genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks and Assyrians is obvious. Historians who realize that the Young Turks’ population and extermination policies have to be analysed together and understood as an entity are therefore often tempted to speak of a “Christian genocide.” This approach, however, is insofar inadequate as it ignores the Young Turks’ massive violence against non-Christians.
p.11 The Young Turks’ overall aim was a demographic reorganization of the Ottoman Empire. All deportations were planned and supervised by the “Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants” that belonged to the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior. A relatively small number of government administrators were thus chiefly involved in the coordination of the murder and expulsion of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other minority groups.29 Therefore, 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.
Additionaly I found mention of the Greek Genocide, described as such in several other academic Journals which are presented below.
http://hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/12/3/393
Abstract The persistence of genocide or near-genocidal incidents from the 1890s through the 1990s, committed by Ottoman and successor Turkish and Iraqi states against Armenian, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek communities in Eastern Anatolia, is striking.
First of all, the Ottoman Empire itself, now ruled by the nationalist Young Turks Committee, began to implement a deadly policy, which aimed at wiping out the non-Turkish elements in the Empire and culminated in the genocide of the Armenians and Greeks, particularly those living in the Pontos region.
These genocides not only involved the Holocaust and the killing of the Armenians, the best known of this century's genocides, but also the lesser known genocide of Gypsies by the Nazis and of Greeks by the Turks.
http://www.emz-berlin.de/projekte_e/pj41_pdf/psarrou.pdf
p.1-2 Since 1945 two main Greek Diaspora groups have existed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: the Pontian Greeks and Greek political refugees. The Pontians are Greek descendants who, during ancient times, created colonies on the coasts of Euxinous Pontos. After the genocide carried out by the Turks in 1918–22 and the Soviet government’s persecution which began in 1939, the Pontians found themselves in exile in Central Asia. p.5 During 1918 and 1920, the Turks implemented a genocide plan against the Greek populations on Turkish territory: 350,000 were executed, and the rest abandoned their goods and properties to save their lives. Some of them went to Greece, Persia, Europe or America, but the majority fled to the Soviet Union
The Turks had used genocide against the Greeks and Armenians but did not have enough time to finish them off completely. The Kurds revolted in 1925, demanding independence or autonomy.
http://utpjournals.metapress.com/content/865v4835x83m3757/
Abstract In the historical context of a religion-driven eliminationist process accompanied by many pogroms before, during, and after World War I within the territories of the Ottoman Empire, including the destruction of the Greek communities of Pontos and Asia Minor and the atrocities against the Greeks of Smyrna in September 1922, the genocidal character of the Istanbul pogrom becomes apparent.
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/research_projects/nationempireglobe/research/McDonnellMosesFINAL.pdf p.502 Then, in a “Report on the preparation of a volume on genocide,” dated March–May 1948, a less ambitious project comprising ten chapters, two of which covered extra-European colonial cases: “2.The Indians in Latin America” and “10. The Indians in North America (in part).” The Holocaust, a term Lemkin never used, was not included, although the Armenians and Greeks in Turkey were, as well as the Early Christians, and the Jews of the Middle Ages and Tsarist Russia.14 To continue to deny, as many “founders of genocide studies” deny, that he regarded colonialism as an integral part of a world history of genocide is to ignore the written record.
I will be adding parts of these in the Academic quotes page. Also note that Raphael Lemkin termed the Greek Genocide as such, as seen in the last quote. Given his standing in the field this shouls be prominently mentioned.
Xenovatis ( talk) 23:13, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
The title of this article needs to be reviewed in the light of the ICJ court ruling last year. See Bosnian Genocide#European Court of Human Rights.
The lead of this article states that "It [the title] is used to refer to the determined persecutions, massacres, expulsions, and death marches of Pontian Greek populations in the historical region of Pontus, the southeastern Black Sea provinces of the Ottoman Empire, during the early 20th century by the Young Turk administration."
Under the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court "Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender" is a crime against humanity not genocide.
The ICJ specifically, in line with the majority of legal scholars, ruled out persecutions, massacres, expulsions, as acts of genocide unless there was an intent to kill a significant portion of the group and that a biological destruction took place. (ECHR Jorgic v. Germany Judgment, July 12 2007. §45 citing Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro ("Case concerning the application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide") the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found under the heading of "intent and 'ethnic cleansing'" § 190)
In the case of Prosecutor v. Krstic (2 August 2001), the ICTY ruled "customary international law limits the definition of genocide to those acts seeking the physical or biological destruction of all or part of the group. Hence, an enterprise attacking only the cultural or sociological characteristics of a human group in order to annihilate these elements which give to that group its own identity distinct from the rest of the community would not fall under the definition of genocide." and the ICTY ruled "On 14 January 2000, the ICTY ruled in the Prosecutor v. Kupreškić and Others case that the Lašva Valley ethnic cleansing campaign in order to expel the Bosnian Muslim population from the region was persecution, not genocide per se" (ECHR Jorgic v. Germany Judgment, July 12 2007. § 44 citing Prosecutor v. Kupreskic and Others (IT-95-16-T, judgment of 14 January 2000), § 751)
However there is a minority of legal scholars who (before the ICTY and ICJ rulings) supported the wider definition that the German judiciary upheld, that the ethnic cleansing carried out by Jorgić was a genocide because it was an intent to destroy the group as a social unit,(^ ECHR Jorgic v. Germany Judgment, July 12 2007. § 36 but also §§ 18,47,99,103,108) so this is not a clear cut issue. Also there are other none legal definitions of genocide which might be sited by scholars.
Given the Wikipedia policy of a neutral point of view, one has to question if the current title allows for a balanced article to be written given that the title asserts it was a genocide, despite evidence that the modern legal usage of the word might not support that description. It might be a good idea to move the article to a blander name to allow a more balanced article to be written. For example persecution of the Pontic Greeks or Pontus atrocities or human rights in Pontus or some similar descriptive name. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 14:39, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
The genocidal quality of the murderous campaigns against Greeks and Assyrians is obvious. Historians who realize that the Young Turks’ population and extermination policies have to be analysed together and understood as an entity are therefore often tempted to speak of a “Christian genocide.” This approach, however, is insofar inadequate as it ignores the Young Turks’ massive violence against non-Christians.
98 On “partial” and “total” genocide: Mark Levene, “Creating a modern ‘zone of genocide’: the impact of nation and state-formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923,” Holocaust & Genocide Studies, Vol 12, No 3, 1998, pp 395–401, makes the argument that although the Armenian genocide like the Holocaust was a rare instance of total genocide (basically meaning that the scope, scale, and intensity of the killing is, if not unlimited, then with few limitations and exceptions), other aspects of the CUP homogenization campaign can be characterized as partial genocide. See also Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp 2–4, 247–257.
In the postwar period, Western observers were well aware that the Young Turks’ policy of extermination was multifaceted. Henry Morgenthau, who served as US ambassador in Constantinople until 1916, for example, stated in his memoirs: “The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians. Indeed, the Greeks were the first victims of this nationalizing idea.”21
I think you all are missing the point, it is not whether some (or even most) scholars think it was a genocide, no one but a fool would deny that. But the word genocide has several different scholarly meanings and that is not addressed in this article or in the citations given above. Until recently even the legal definition had two meanings, until the ICJ clarification, legal scholars were split over its interpretation. For example do the people just quoted mean a genocide as defined by the ICJ or a genocide as defined by the German courts, or some other meaning? Neither the citations given above or the citations in the article explain what they mean by the word "genocide".
The name "Pontic Greek Genocide" implies that it is a proper noun like The Holocaust, and that there is no doubt at all that it was a genocide and it is generally known by that title. but a search of Google scholar returns just two articles with that string one of those just happens to have the string in it and the other "Nation, narrative and commemoration: political ritual in divided Cyprus" by Yiannis Papadakis is not enough to show that the name is in common use. If the article was a descriptive name then it should be "Pontic Greek genocide" and not be bolded at the start of the article (See WP:MOS#First sentences). But "Pontic Greek genocide" is not a NPOV name for the events that took place. It is an assertion that a genocide took place -- and that genocide has a specific meaning -- It is far better that the article name is a neutral on and that the debate over what happened is presented with a neutral point of view. See for example the history wars and the redirect Australian genocide debate. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 18:33, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
(1) If scholars do not mean genocide as defined under international law then why does the first mention of Genocide link to the genocide article and not to genocide definitions? Further what definition for genocide are scholars using and are they all agreed on one definition? --Personally I think Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn (1990) is quite a elegant one, but that is besides the point -- The thing is that definitions for genocide change over time, and anyone in the late 90s who used the German courts broad definition would have been justified in not qualifying it as it was the latest legal definition, but now 10 years on the international legal definition had narrowed so a paper or book written in the last century needs qualifying as to which definition of genocide they are using.
For someone who is reading this as their first introduction to the subject of genocide -- not an unreasonable assumption as this is an encyclopaedia -- it is only fair to explain which definition of genocide is being used as the reader is unlikely to know that there are several different definitions and that if the legal interpretation is being used that it has been refined and its meaning narrowed through case law over the last 20 years.
(2) If the name is not a title then why does the word "genocide" appear in caps? If it is a title then where does it come from. Further why not use a name that does not have such an explicit POV as it does not seem to be a common use in reliable sources? -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 20:42, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
The discussion of the question whether the deportation and forced assimilation of Kurds by the Young Turks has to be labelled as genocide or ethnocide is, at least from a historian’s perspective, irrelevant since a clarification of this particularly legal and political issue depends on the definition of genocide one resorts to.
The "legal stuff" is not necessary in the article, besides it would probably be a breach of WP:SYN. I included it here to demonstrate to the people who read this talk page that the word genocide does not have one definition and that even the understand of the fixed legal definition is developing as more cases are heard. Now that I have done so I hope that other editors will be aware that there is no one clear meaning to genocide, something that is implicit in the wording of the article, because unless one defines what the historians mean by genocide, it is reasonable to assume they are using the most recent international definition. Any scholar who calls an event a genocide without describing what they mean by genocide is not a very good scholar. For example Rummel (who I do not think is a particularly notable scholar) does the courtesy of defining three meanings for genocide in his works. [23]
Dr.K. I am not sure where you are getting your "common use in reliable sources" from Google scholar returns "8 for "Greek genocide"" while Google books returns "6 on "Greek genocide"" This is not a common expression -- in comparison "Armenian genocide" returns 2,370 and 805. So we are not bound by common usage for the name of the article and ought to choose a name that has a neutral point of view ( WP:NPOV "NPOV is absolute and non-negotiable.". Do you still want to use a non neutral name even after I have demonstrated that it is not in common usage? If so why? Would it not be better to use a more neutral name along the lines I have suggested above?
Dr.K. As to your point "This section alone is chock-full of top of the line scholarly sources calling it genocide and we just finished the section above acknowledging that the majority of scholars call it a genocide." We are not talking whether the event was a genocide -- that is something to be presented in the content of the article as described in WP:NPOV including its warnings on undue weight to fringe views -- we are discussing the name of the article. BTW even if you think "the majority of scholars call it a genocide" please do not include it in the article unless you have a source for that ( Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Claims of consensus) -- the ECHR provides the source for majority (narrow view) and the minority (broad view) of legal scholars that I stated above. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 10:40, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
(unident)(bold so I can see my comments in this ocean of a discussion)Ok. Philip. Here we have a classic case of misunderstanding due to differing perspectives. You say that the term is not in common usage. Yet all the sources here refer to it as genocide. Maybe not Pontic genocide but the genocide of Pontus or similar to the armenian genocide etc. The google search engine is too dumb to pick up these nuances. That's why as humans we must do the rest of the job and connect the dots and not allow this job to be done by dumb Google robots. You also call the title non neutral or POV. I completely disagree with you. It is not non neutral and not POV. It is the verdict of the scholars based on research and intellect and the verdict of history based on historical facts. We cannot sanitize either the scholars or history. Dr.K. ( talk) 17:25, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
This whole debate is clearly in contravention of WP:TITLE and WP:NCON since (1) the name is stable and has stayed that way for years (2) the sole purpose of the discussion is changing the name (3) this was the name the articles creator gave it (4) the purpose of the article's title can only be fullfiled by a name that includes genocide since those that do reference the events and those that do know of them know and reference them as such.
Controversial names See also: Wikipedia:naming conflict The purpose of an article's title is to enable that article to be found by interested readers, and nothing more. In particular, the current title of a page does not imply either a preference for that name, or that any alternative name is discouraged in the text of articles. Generally, an article's title should not be used as a precedent for the naming of any other articles. Editors are strongly discouraged from editing for the sole purpose of changing one controversial name to another. If an article name has been stable for a long time, and there is no good reason to change it, it should remain. Especially when there is no other basis for a decision, the name given the article by its creator should prevail. Any proposal to change between names should be examined on a case-by-case basis, and discussed on talk pages before a name is changed. However, debating controversial names is often unproductive, and there are many other ways to help improve Wikipedia.
Xenovatis ( talk) 12:31, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
I am not suggesting any particular name just a name that allows an article to be constructed with a WP:NPOV I am confused how you can say "Additionaly calling it a debate would be a violation of WP:UNDUE since it would give equal weight to the minority opinion." Given that the state of Turkey does not consider it to be a genocide, I fail to see why you think it would be giving undue weight to say it is a debate as a states opinion (and presumably most of its population given how states influence schooling) is not a fringe view. There are definitely at least two points of view (and probably more) as I doubt that all scholars agree on all the details of the events, and as seems to be the case there is not even one definition of genocide in use. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 17:17, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
Xenovatis what POV do you think others are pushing? It would seem to me that "I have already wasted a lot of my time digging up sources that label it as genocide" is an indication of POV pushing as a disinterested editor would usually wish to dig up sources that give a balanced overview to the events (to comply with WP:NPOV and writing for the "enemy". -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 13:43, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
Dr.K.:I fail to see how pointing out the legal arguments in the judgements of latest international courts to try people and states for genocide can be considered "applying anachronistic definitions of genocide". I have only suggested that if a historian calls an event a genocide then the definition that the historian is using ought to be explained. Why are you so wedded to the word genocide in a descriptive name? -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 13:43, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
Given that:
I put here the IAGS resolution so that we can study it and refer to it as needed:
Press Release* GENOCIDE SCHOLARS ASSOCIATION OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZES ASSYRIAN, GREEK GENOCIDES Issuing Organization: International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) Date: December 16, 2007 The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) has voted overwhelmingly to recognize the genocides inflicted on Assyrian and Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire between 1914 and 1923. The resolution passed with the support of over eighty percent of IAGS members who voted. The resolution (full text below) declares that "it is the conviction of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks." It "calls upon the government of Turkey to acknowledge the genocides against these populations, to issue a formal apology, and to take prompt and meaningful steps toward restitution." "This resolution," stated IAGS President Gregory Stanton. "is one more repudiation by the world's leading genocide scholars of the Turkish government's ninety year denial of the Ottoman Empire's genocides against its Christian populations, including Assyrians, Greeks, and Armenians.
The history of these genocides is clear, and there is no more excuse for the current Turkish government, which did not itself commit the crimes, to deny the facts. The current German government has forthrightly ackowledged the facts of the Holocaust. The Turkish government should learn from the German government's exemplary acknowledgment of Germany's past, so that Turkey can move forward to reconciliation with its neighbors." The resolution noted that while activist and scholarly efforts have resulted in widespread acceptance of the Armenian genocide, there has been "little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire." Assyrians, along with Pontian and Anatolian Greeks, were killed on a scale equivalent in per capita terms to the catastrophe inflicted on the Armenian population of the empire -- and by much the same methods, including mass executions, death marches, and starvation. In 1997, the IAGS officially recognized the Armenian genocide. IAGS member Adam Jones drafted the resolution, and lobbied for it along with fellow member Thea Halo, whose mother Sano survived the Pontian Greek genocide. In an address to the membership at the IAGS conference in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in July 2007, Jones paid tribute to the efforts of "representatives of the Greek and Assyrian communities ... to publicize and call on the present Turkish government to acknowledge the genocides inflicted on their populations." "The overwhelming backing given to this resolution by the world's leading genocide scholars organization will help to raise consciousness about the Assyrian and Greek genocides," Jones said on December 10. "It will also act as a powerful counter to those, especially in present-day Turkey, who still ignore or deny the genocides of the Ottoman Christian minorities." The resolution stated that "the denial of genocide is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides." The Assyrian population of Iraq, for example, remains highly vulnerable to genocidal attack. Since 2003, Iraqi Assyrians have been exposed to severe persecution and "ethnic cleansing"; it is believed that up to half the Assyrian population has fled the country. Extensive supporting documentation for the Assyrian and Greek genocides was circulated to IAGS members ahead of the vote, and is available at http://www.genocidetext.net/iags_resolution_supporting_documentation.htm.
For further information, please contact: Gregory Stanton, IAGS President (iagspresident@aol.com) Adam Jones, IAGS Resolutions Committee (adam.jones@ubc.ca)
FULL TEXT OF THE IAGS RESOLUTION: WHEREAS the denial of genocide is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides; WHEREAS the Ottoman genocide against minority populations during and following the First World War is usually depicted as a genocide against Armenians alone, with little recognition of the qualitatively similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire; BE IT RESOLVED that it is the conviction of the International Association of Genocide Scholars that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Association calls upon the government of Turkey to acknowledge the genocides against these populations, to issue a formal apology, and to take prompt and meaningful steps toward restitution. - end - —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tasoskessaris ( talk • contribs) 00:30, 9 March 2008 (UTC) Dr.K. ( talk) 00:36, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
Structure:
That is my proposal, no view is forced on the reader, the situation regarding academic and international recognition is taken into account and the reader may actually learn what happened to the Pontians. Thanks, -- A.Garnet ( talk) 10:56, 10 March 2008 (UTC)
(Unindent) I don't think anything resembling a consensus can be reached at this stage. Everyone is firing from all sides and in all directions. For instance what A. Garnet proposes is a general article about Pontian history in Turkey and the Soviet Union. This article is, however, about the Pontian genocide and not about the Russian expulsions. On the other hand we have the Anatolian genocide which can be included in a broader Greek genocide article. Therefore the renaming of the article could go toward Greek Genocide from the present Pontic Greek Genocide. Judging from the limited number of participants of this debate and the fact that the topic has stalled between a few well entrenched viewpoints I think mediation could be an option. How viable mediation would be in resolving this is another question. Dr.K. ( talk) 18:47, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Xenovatis you have been mislead by Google. If you put in a search for ["Greek Genocide"] Google returns "about 19,300 English pages for "Greek Genocide" " but it one then adds -wikipedia to the search Google returns " about 9,730 English pages for "Greek Genocide" -wikipedia." It should flag a warning when Google is reporting that nearly ten thousand of the pages have the word wikipedia in it! If on the 19,300 search one goes to page 40 then one sees that the numbers change to "396 of 396 English pages for "Greek Genocide"" with the comment "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 396 already displayed." Similarly go to page 37 of the 9,730 search the numbers change to "361 of 361 English pages for "Greek Genocide" -wikipedia. " a difference of 30 odd pages with the word Wikipedia on them is a far more credible number than one with around 10,000.
When a Wikipedia mention makes up 10% of the pages returned by a Google search on a subject, (and that is before one removes blog pages and advocacy pages) it becomes doubtful if the term is in common use. A Google search on the the domains edu and ac.uk returns "about 33 English pages for "Greek Genocide" -wikipedia site:edu OR site:ac.uk.". Google Books "6 on "Greek Genocide"" Google Scholar "8 for "Greek Genocide"" So "Greek genocide" is not a common term in academia. If we go with a descriptive term we do not have to use a common term and as such "Persecution of Pontians" of "Pontian persecutions" is just as descriptive as "Greek genocide" and does not have the problems of an embedded point of view.-- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 11:47, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
I did not think for one minute you were trying to deceive anyone, the problem is that Google is not as accurate as it could be -- as you can see the number of pages is not in the thousands but around 350 that mention "Greek genocide". I think the reason why the name "Pontians" was suggested is because the current name is "Pontic Greek Genocide" so such a name change would not alter the focus of the article. The disadvantage of persecution is that it does have a legal meaning, but it also has a common meaning as described by the OED. This can be footnoted in the introduction. The advantage of such an name alows for the construction of an introduction that is more balanced:
Pontic Greek population of the Ottoman Empire suffered persecution during and in the aftermath of World War I.[1] The number of deaths that occurred during the persecutions, massacres, expulsions, and death marches according to various sources ranges from 300,000 to 360,000 Anatolian Greeks. The survivors and the expelled took refuge mostly in the nearby Russian Empire (later, Soviet Union). The few Pontic Greeks who had remained in Pontus until the end of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) were exchanged in the frame of the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations in 1922–1923.
The Turkish Government maintains that there was a legal large scale pacification campaign carried out in the region because the Greek population was seen as sympathetic to the enemies of the Turkish state and a potential fifth column. The Allies at the time took a different view condemning the Ottoman governments actions against their minorities as crimes against humanity. More recently the International Association of Genocide Scholars have passed resolution that Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire, including the Pontian Greeks, was a genocide. Some other organisations have also passed resolutions recognising the campaign as a genocide including both the parliament of Greece and that of Cyprus.
or something similar: I have cut and pasted some of the text from the article and it needs polishing and the ordering of the Turkish government explanation could be placed after the genocide accusations or the numbers and what happened to the survivors could be placed in a paragraph after the genocide accusations. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 13:23, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
Articles that compare views should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views
Undue weight applies to more than just viewpoints. Just as giving undue weight to a viewpoint is not neutral, so is giving undue weight to other verifiable and sourced statements.
Minority views can receive attention on pages specifically devoted to them—Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. But on such pages, though a view may be spelled out in great detail, it must make appropriate reference to the majority viewpoint, and must not reflect an attempt to rewrite majority-view content strictly from the perspective of the minority view.
No it is not a good idea to create a page like Denial of the Armenian Genocide for two reasons. The first is it is a pov fork and secondly it predisposes that a genocide took place which is a violation of WP:NPOV. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 16:59, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
I think this discussion can only continue if the initial point of contention is clarified. I propose that this is the use of the word genocide in the title. So could users please list, preferably enumerated, their reasons for disagreeing with the use of the word. Also the basis on which these reasons are grounded i.e. either it was not in fact genocide or it is not perceived as such by academics. Thanks. Xenovatis ( talk) 15:28, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
(1) Since WP is not a legal or politicla journal it should use a historical perspective when discussing historical events. So the definition best suited is the 1948 def that we can assume most authors are using unless stated otherwise. The alternative is to go around and ask them all. Obviously when Lemkin and Charny who both recognized the events as genocide did so they can be assumed to have been using their own definitions, both mentioned in the WP page you linked to. When Schaller and Zimmerer state that the exact legal and political definition is irrelevant from a historians perspective.
I don't have a clue if it was a genocide or not. But if an historian calls it a genocide, for it to be a meaning full observation, then the definition the scholar is using needs to be included, otherwise it is open to misunderstanding as there is more than one meaning of the word, and different scholars use genocide to mean different things. --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 13:27, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group
This discussion has degenerated, as I predicted, to the same arguments being recited over and over among a few users. On top of that, other users, who normally used to participate, are notably absent. This should tell us that the debate has stalled. Given this sorry state of affairs I propose that we end this debate and seek mediation. Dr.K. ( talk) 18:57, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
It would be better to put a RfC first. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 23:27, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks Garnet. Considering you never left this discussion for more that a few hours, I'm still glad to see you back. Dr.K. ( talk) 17:44, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
I thought we were in a process that was working towards a consensus. Lets salami slice it. Does anyone deny that the name of the article is disputed? Would any one object to {{ pov-title}} on the page and if so why? -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 09:42, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
Firstly, I am not the only person to have disputed this articles title, that is visible now and from the archives of these pages. So lets not portray this dispute as respectable requests from a group of editors on one side against a stubborn obstacle on the other. Simply because there are more of you (not uncommon considering this page has become a raison d'être among Greek editors) does not make you right, in fact its pretty good indicator of pov pushing.
Second, you are seriously misguided as to what constitutes a majority point of view. "Exceptional claims need exceptional sources" as WP:V states. One book on this event by a respectable historian is not an exceptional request, but that you cant even fulfill this shows this is not only a minority view, but it can be argued whether it should even be in Wikipedia at all. The same goes for the IAGS resolution, that major scholars of the organistion (those dealing in Ottoman history, i.e. Balakian, Melson, Akcam etc) dispute the resolution shows simply that respectable scholars do not claim this event as a genocide. Now based on this to ask me the question "what will it take to accept that it was a genocide" sounds ridicolously presumptuous.
Accept these facts, consider mine and Phillips proposal and then this dispute will move forward. -- A.Garnet ( talk) 14:38, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
In general, the most reliable sources are peer-reviewed journals and books published in university presses; university-level textbooks; magazines, journals, and books published by respected publishing houses; and mainstream newspapers.
This section is wandering away from the point (as I said at the start of the section "Lets salami slice it." (baby steps)). Does anyone dispute the the name of the article is in dispute? This is not a question about whether a genocide took place or not this is a specific question about the title and as far as I can tell the dispute over the template was the reason for the page protecting in the first place. If no one disputes that a dispute over the name is happening then I will re-add the template as a fist step to "unprotecting" the page. -- Philip Baird Shearer ( talk) 10:42, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
This link has a rather nice chronology which I'll be mining for newspaper quotes to include in the relevant page. They also seem to endorse the term genocide.
http://www.umd.umich.edu/dept/armenian/bts/index.html#b2
The Armenian[1] and Greek Genocides were widely reported in the world press at the time, and the public outcry in the U.S. led to a major relief effort.[2] However, the world soon returned to business as usual with the new Republic of Turkey and a silence fell over the world press concerning the destruction of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian communities in the Ottoman Empire.[3] In drawing attention this prior engagement by the world press the Armenian Research Center is pleased to present a series of news reports, from twenty different newspapers to date, as researched and compiled by Sofia Kontogeorge Kostos, an Advocate for Genocides Awareness of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks of Asia Minor. These news reports are organized chronologically, and require the Adobe Reader (click here to download the free reader). Highlighting and the use of color within in the news reports, unless otherwise indicated, represent emphasis by Sofia Kontogeorge Kostos and not by the original authors.
Xenovatis ( talk) 23:45, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
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Just thought it'd make a handy reference that. Can't imagine why the thought occured. Xenovatis ( talk) 21:29, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
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