[13] The Ottoman government brutally persecuted the Pontic Greek community, but did not plan a full-scale extermination similar to the Armenian genocide due to multiple factors.

[23] German Consul M. Kuckhoff telegraphed on July 16, 1916 from Samsun: "The entire Greek population of Sinope and the coastal region of the district of Kastanomu has been exiled (...) In Turkish the terms deportation and extermination have the same meaning, because in most cases those who are not killed fall victim to disease or starvation.

"[24][25][26] In a special cable the New York Times of August 21, 1916 reported that Turkish authorities in the Black Sea regions "are rounding up civilians in a considerable number of villages and sending them off in batches to concentration camps in the interior.

An American naval officer noted that these deportees had been placed in hot baths for "cleaning" and then were marched with very little clothing and food, so they were dying from frost, hunger and exhaustion.

[30] American historian Ryan Gyngeras noted:[31] While the number of victims in Ankara's deportations remains elusive, evidence from other locations suggest that the Nationalists were as equally disposed to collective punishment and population politics as their Young Turk antecedents ... As in the First World War, the mass deportation of civilians was symptomatic of how precarious the Nationalists felt their prospects were.Swiss historian Hans-Lukas Kieser wrote:[32] Thus, from spring 1919, Kemal Pasha resumed, with ex-CUP forces, domestic war against Greek and Armenian rivals.

Once the CUP had started the process, the Kemalists, freed from any direct European pressure by the 1918 defeat and capitulation of Germany, went on to complete it, achieving what nobody believed possible: the reassertion of independence and sovereignty via an exterminatory war of national liberation.He also described the Turkish National Movement as such:[34] It was the hard men, self-styled saviours of the Ottoman-Turkish state, and – culminating in Kemal – unapologetic génocidaires, who were able to wrest its absolute control.According to Dutch-Turkish historian and sociologist Uğur Ümit Üngör:[35] When the CUP dissolved itself in 1918, it continued functioning under other names and succeeded in launching Mustafa Kemal to organize the Anatolian resistance it had planned since 1914.

The resurrection of Young Turk elites gave rise to the establishment of a modern dictatorship of repressive rule, driven by devotion to the tenets of a Gökalpist ideology ...

Hence, Kemalists continued Young Turk ethnic cleansing policy towards Pontic Greeks and other Christian minorities in order to create Turkish national homogeneous country.

[37][4] Probably for this reason Riza Nur, one of Turkish delegates at Lausanne, wrote that "disposing of people of different races, languages and religions in our country is the most ... vital issue".

[43] The Nationalists were worried about the permanent occupation and Hellenization of certain Anatolian regions, particularly with the prospect of Ionia coming under direct Athenian rule, because it might cause the separatism of other Ottoman Greeks.

[44] In late May 1919, Kemal, having recently arrived in Samsun, informed Constantinople that since the Armistice there were "forty guerrilla bands", engaged in an "organized program", and were killing Turks to "establish a Pontus state".

An American diplomat who visited major Pontic cities in the summer of 1919 noted that "many of the most influential and rational Greeks ... in Trebizond viewed this policy [of separatism] with disfavor".

The arrival of a Greek naval squadron in the Black Sea in the summer of 1921 was also cited by the Nationalists and their supporters as an excuse, as it stopped Turkish ships, captured passengers and lightly shelled Inebolu.

As Count Schmeccia of Lloyd Triestino in Samsun, who was formerly an Italian High Commission representative, noted, the Inebolu bombardment, which had brought no casualties, served only as a "Turkish excuse for the massacres".

American naval officers reported that the campaign was "under strict control of the military", "directed by high authority – probably Angora [Ankara]", and conducted, at least partially, by soldiers.

[58][59] In early August, the mutassarif of Bafra informed an American naval officer that the "deportation of all remaining Greeks, including women and children, had been ordered by Angora".

An American officer who regularly visited the Pontus ports wrote that he could understand the deportation of adult males "as an inevitable consequence of the war", but "to treat poor women and helpless children ... in such a cruel and inhumane manner is an ... unpardonable sin against civilization".

"[73] In December a missionary summed up his feelings about the authorities who sent Greeks of Samsun to their death, "packed into a barn and burned alive, men, women, and children".

[74][75][76] Soviet diplomat Semen Aralov, who had visited Samsun area in 1922, later wrote:[77] Now this rich, densely populated place in Turkey has undergone incredible devastation.

"The deportation was conducted in a quiet and orderly manner", according to a witness, but the wife of a Turkish officer later reported that Greeks had been "marched into the hills near Kavak and murdered".

At one point the Trabzon Turks had collected hundreds of Christian boys aged eleven to fourteen and imprisoned them "in a filthy dungeon underground" from which they were to be sent to an "internment camp" near Cevizlik.

[84] British Lieutenant Colonel A. Rawlinson had been sympathetic to the Turks, but when he traveled as a prisoner to Trebizond he saw that "the coast range and its fertile valleys, hitherto intensively cultivated by the Greeks, was at this time everywhere deserted, the villages being abandoned".

On its outskirts, these two women witnessed seventeen men beheaded and "four girls from fifteen to eighteen years of age taken by officers for immoral purposes" who then were "put to death".

"[89] From Aralov's memoirs:[90] Frunze had moved aside from the askeri (Turkish soldiers) who were accompanying him and with great indignation said that he had seen many corpses of brutally murdered Greeks lying on the road – old men, children, women.

Don't hide my great chagrin from Mustafa Kemal.An estimated 70,000 Pontus deportees passed through Sivas alone, the women and children "hungry, cold, sick, almost naked, vermin-covered".

[95] Having worked in Harput for a year, Ethel Thompson remarked: "The heaviest winter weather, when a howling blizzard was raging, during a blinding snowfall, was the favorite time chosen by the Turks to drive the Greeks on.

[79] The most detailed and comprehensive description of the convoys during August 1921 - February 1922 comes from two NER missionaries stationed in the Harput area, Major F. D. Yowell and Dr. Mark Ward.

The British High Commission in Constantinople described the two missionaries' reports as highlighting "deliberate attempt of the Angora Government to exterminate the Greek population of Anatolia".

"The Turkish authorities were frank in their statements that it was the intention to have all the Greeks die and all of their action – their failure to supply any food or clothing – their strong opposition to relief by N.E.R – their choice of routs [sic], weather, etc.

The methods were the same: massacres, atrocities, massive rapes, abduction of women and children, forcible conversions to Islam, death-marches into arid regions, in inhuman conditions of hunger, thirst and disease meant for full extinction.