1914 Greek deportations
[3] In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars the boycott continued to intensify and was directly organized by the ruling party, Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).
[19] When parts of Eastern Thrace were reoccupied by the Ottoman Empire during the Second Balkan War in mid-1913, local Greeks as well as Armenians were subjected to looting and intimidation especially in Malkara and Rodosto.
Beginning in March 1914, Special Organization units began to systematically attack Greek villages, conscripting the men into labor battalions and forcing other residents to leave; Greek-owned businesses were confiscated and given to Muslims.
[20][21] The aim was to persuade or, failing that, force Greeks to leave, by preventing them from accessing their farmland, levying disproportionately high taxation, confiscation, forcible conscription, and murders.
[23] Some Greeks still live in East Thrace in Turkey, descended from the people and families who converted to Islam in order to stay and avoid being deported to Greece.
[17] Attacks on Greeks began in March and April 1913, as attested by many complaints sent by the Ecumenical Patriarchate to the Ottoman authorities of looting, seizure of property, arbitrary arrest, and expulsion.
[28] The government ordered that empty villages be guarded to prevent looting so that the property of the Greeks could be allocated to the intended recipients, Muslim immigrants to be resettled there.
[30] This concentration of refugees, exceeding the capacity of the harbor, led to the village being surrounded and higher intensity violence occurring than elsewhere in Western Anatolia.
[32] In some cases the violent anti-Greek campaigns were directly coordinated with the landing of Muslim refugees, who were tasked with driving out the Greek population and taking over their properties.
[34] On 29 September 1913, 14 October 1913, and 14 November 1913, the Ottoman Empire concluded agreements on voluntary population exchange with Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece respectively.
[43] The Ottoman authorities tried to leverage the threat of ethnic cleansing to pressure Greece to renounce its claims to the islands that it seized during the Second Balkan War.
Historian Taner Akçam estimates it at "roughly three hundred thousand",[47] while Bjørnlund writes that "some 150–200,000 Ottoman Greeks" left either forcibly or after being threatened with violence.
[53] Bjørnlund states that the perceived "success" of the Greek deportation "meant that even more radical measures could be seen as not only possible, but as yet another extension of a policy of social engineering through Turkification".
[11] Bjørnlund states that "the official reactions to the 1914 events point toward aspects of" Armenian genocide denial as developed by the CUP and continuing into the present day: "the claim that the government, when it came to killings and persecution, had no control of local officials or of the designated killer gangs, and the attempts to apply damage control through cover-ups, shifting of blame, and propaganda".
[58] Major deportations of Anatolian Greeks from the coast to the interior occurred during World War I from 1915 due to belief that they were a fifth column, although they were not subjected to systematic killing as were the Armenians.
