Υπάρχει σήμερα μια κίνηση για αναγνώριση της Ποντιακής Γενοκτονίας στην καναδική Γερουσία.
Δύο Καναδοί Γερουσιαστές με ελληνικό υπόβαθρο κινούν το θέμα: Ο Pana Merchant και ο Leo Housakos.
Παρακάτω η ομιλία του Pana Merchant στην Γερουσία:
Δύο Καναδοί Γερουσιαστές με ελληνικό υπόβαθρο κινούν το θέμα: Ο Pana Merchant και ο Leo Housakos.
Παρακάτω η ομιλία του Pana Merchant στην Γερουσία:
The Senate
Motion to Call Upon the Government
to Recognize the Genocide of
the Pontic Greeks
and Designate May 19th
as a Day of Remembrance - Debate
Adjourned
Hon. Pana Merchant, pursuant to notice of December 14, 2016, moved:
That the Senate call
upon the government of Canada:
(a) to recognize
the genocide of the Pontic Greeks of 1916 to 1923 and to condemn any attempt to
deny or distort a historical truth as being anything less than genocide, a
crime against humanity; and
(b) to designate
May 19th of every year hereafter throughout Canada as a day of remembrance of
the over 353,000 Pontic Greeks who were killed or expelled from their homes.
She said: Honourable
senators, 353,000 Pontian Greeks were reported killed in systematic massacres,
persecutions and death marches between 1916 and 1922. Together, the Armenian,
Assyrian, and Pontian genocide constituted the first massive genocide of the
20th century.
The defeat of the
Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 resulted in the sudden
yielding of Turkish-dominated European territories.
The Ottomans implemented
a program of deliberate and systematic expulsions and forcible migrations,
focusing on Greeks of the Pontian region — that is, the Constantinople,
Istanbul and Black Sea area, down the coast of Asia Minor; what is today Turkey
— and Anatolia, with special organization units referred to as the Young Turks.
These units attacked
Greek villages and intimidated its Greek inhabitants to abandon their ancestral
homeland, to be replaced by Muslims.
The Greek presence in
the Pontus region has been dated to at least the time of Homer, around 800 BC.
The geographer Strabo,
born in 63 BC, referred to the city of Smyrna, today's Izmir, as the first
Greek city in Asia Minor.
As a consequence of the
policy of "Turkey for Turks," 3 million Armenians, Assyrians and
Greeks were murdered, or were victims of the "white death," a term
used to describe all deaths that resulted from lack of food, disease and
exposure to the elements during deportations and death marches. The massive
murders were followed by destruction of monuments, churches and homes, and the
renaming of regions.
Before the creation of
the word "genocide," the destruction of the Greeks was known as
"the Massacre," "the Great Catastrophe" or "the Great
Tragedy."
The term
"genocide," from the Greek word genos, which means race,
tribe, family, and the Latin word cida, to kill, was coined at the time
of the Holocaust by Professor Raphael Lemkin of Duke University, a Polish
lawyer of Jewish descent whose work became the base of the terminology the
United Nations used in 1948 to make the Convention on the Prosecution and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
In his writings on
genocide, Lemkin is known to have detailed the fate of the Greeks and Armenians
living in the Ottoman Empire, their historic homeland, where their ancestors
had lived for thousands of years before the Turkish invasions.
The New York Times of
August 1946 informed:
The massacres of Greeks
and Armenians by the Turks prompted diplomatic action without punishment. If
Professor Lemkin has his way genocide will be established as an international
crime.
Article II of the UN
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide reads:
. . . any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of
the group;
(b) Causing serious
bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures
intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group.
Not one, but every one
of these acts applies to the wrongs committed against the Pontian Greeks.
The Center for the Study
of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University provides the following
overview:
They began singling out
all able-bodied Greek men, forcibly conscripting them into labor battalions
which performed slave labor for the Turkish . . . society. Greek villages were
brutally plundered and terrorized under the pretext of internal security.
Indeed, as with the Armenians, the Greeks were generally accused as a disloyal
and traitorous "fifth- column," and eventually most of the population
was rounded up and forcibly deported to the interior.
[Translation]
Honourable senators,
when the First World War broke out, Asia Minor was ethnically very diverse, and
large Armenian, Greek and Syrian populations settled there. This led some Turks
to believe that, in order to establish a modern nation-state, the ethnic groups
that could threaten the integrity of a future modern Turkish state had to be
eliminated.
For their part, the
Pontian Greeks had managed to resist for many centuries the overwhelming
pressure to convert to Islam. They had thus been able to keep alive their
traditions, which were deeply rooted in religion, as well as their distinctive
culture and language.
[English]
Professor Andre
Gerolymatos, from the Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University,
provides the following:
During the First World
War, the Ottoman government, embarked on a course of reprehensible acts that
led to the genocide of the Armenian and Pontic Greek Orthodox, conducted
sadistically, to instill terror in the minds of the surviving minorities in the
Ottoman Empire.
The genocide included:
mass rape, wonton destruction, torture for the sake of torture, regardless of
gender and age; children raped, often in front of their parents, before the
entire family was put to death.
IAGS, the International
Association of Genocide Scholars, voted overwhelmingly in 2007 for a resolution
officially recognizing the Armenian genocide and ". . . qualitatively
similar genocides against other Christian minorities of the Ottoman
Empire," including Pontian Greeks in the years between 1914 and 1923; and
released supporting documentation detailing why they determined these actions
constituted "genocide." IAGS President Gregory Stanton stated:
This resolution 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 acknowledged 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 neighbours.
[Translation]
It was a Canadian, IAGS
member Adam Jones, who drafted the resolution. In a speech delivered to members
of that association during their conference in Sarajevo in July 2007, Mr. Jones
paid tribute to the efforts of representatives of the Greek and Assyrian
communities, efforts that sought to draw public attention to the genocides
inflicted on their respective populations and to call on the current Turkish
government to recognize those genocides.
(1720)
Mr. Jones said that
although the work of activists and scholars resulted in the widespread
acceptance of the Armenian genocide, qualitatively similar genocides against
other Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire were given very little
recognition. The per capita killing of Assyrians and Pontian Greeks was
equivalent in scale to the massacre of the Armenian population of the empire
and involved much the same methods, including mass executions, death marches
and starvation.
According to Mr. Jones:
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. It
will also act as a powerful counter to those, especially in present-day Turkey,
who still ignore or deny outright the genocides of the Ottoman Christian
minorities.
[English]
The IAGS resolution
decreed that "denial . . . is widely recognized as the final stage of
genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators . . . and demonstrably
paving the way for future genocides."
Diplomatic records and
historical documents, such as those from German, Austrian and American consuls,
the American ambassador to Turkey, the British Foreign Office, the Turkish
Prime Minister, the Minister of the Interior of the Prefect of Smyrna, the
Austrian Chancellor Hollweg, all unequivocally confirm and corroborate that
what took place was a systematic and deliberate extermination of the Pontic
Hellenic population.
Terrorism, labour
battalions, exiles, forced marches, rapes, hangings, fires and murders were
planned, directed and executed by Turkish authorities.
Colleagues, contemporary
witness accounts of deliberate and systematic Greek deportations and murders
mandate action.
George Horton, U.S.
Consul General in the Near East, wrote:
. . . from the Black Sea
thousands fell by the wayside from exhaustion . . . walking for the three days
journey through the snow and mud of the winter weather . . . . Others came in
groups of fifty, one hundred and five hundred, always under escort of Turkish
gendarmes. . . . a treatment more radical than a straight massacre such as the
Armenians had suffered before.
The American Ambassador
to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morganthau, who named the slaughter
"murdering races" wrote:
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. . . . Indeed the Greeks were the
first victims . . . .
A March 20, 1922,
memorandum by George William Rendel of the British Foreign Office reads of
"serious persecutions . . . affecting 30,000 Christians . . . but the
worst atrocities undoubtedly took place in the Pontic region against the Greek
population of the coastal towns."
A quote from Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, the founder and first President of the Republic of Turkey, in
the Los Angeles Examiner of August 1, 1926, reads:
Those . . . left over
from the former Young Turkish Party . . . should have been made to account for
the lives of millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven, en
masse, from their homes and massacred . . . .
Honourable senators, a
word that ignores the tragedies of the past is doomed to repeat them. It is
important to recognize and remember this tragic chapter in our shared world
history.
In reference to the
Holocaust, Adolf Hitler queried: "Who, after all, speaks today of the . .
. Armenians?"
The world chose to
ignore the genocide of Armenians and Pontians, and as a result we had to
confront the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews. We ignored Rwanda and now have to
deal with small genocides implemented by ISIS.
In April 2015, on the
anniversary of the Armenian genocide, the Austrian government issued a
statement recognizing "the victims of violence, murder and expulsion,
including tens of thousands of other Christian communities in the Ottoman
Empire, including Syrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Pontic Greeks."
Could I have five more
minutes, please?
The Hon. the Speaker: Is leave granted, honourable senators?
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
Senator Merchant: Thank you, colleagues.
Some days later, the
Vienna City Council issued a resolution recognizing the "victims of
violence, slaughter and deportation, as well as the tens of thousands of
Ottoman nationals of other groups of Christian peoples, including the Arameans,
Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Pontic Greeks."
The Swedish, Dutch and
Armenian governments have also had the courage to acknowledge and recognize the
Greek Pontian genocide. Many state governments have passed motions recognizing
the killing of Pontic Greeks during this period as a genocide: Florida,
Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and South Carolina;
and in Australia, New South Wales and South Australia. In Canada, the cities of
Ottawa and Toronto have proclaimed May 19 as Greek Pontian Genocide Remembrance
Day.
In September 1922,
Turkish forces entered the ancient Greek city of Smyrna, instigating a massive
anti-Greek pogrom. On September 13, a fire mysteriously broke out amidst the
chaos, spreading without government control over the next two weeks. The Smyrna
catastrophe took the lives is somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 Greeks and
marked the symbolic end of the Greek genocide.
Honourable senators,
there are 600,000 Canadians of Greek ancestry living in Canada. Many, like me,
are the descendants of the survivors of the Pontian Greek genocide. Governance
is not personal but is typical of all the wronged.
My own father, a
six-year-old living in the Smyrna region, the ancient Greek city in Asia Minor,
saw his family ruthlessly up rooted in the panic of the Smyrna inferno. The
family became separated. He, along with his mother and two young sisters,
managed to board a vessel to become refugees. A third young daughter strayed
and disappeared in the sea of human horror. She was never found.
Had she managed to
escape? Had she drowned? Was she left behind?
Colleagues, remembrance
matters; recognition matters. The ghosts of those who suffered and perished
have the right to closure and condemnation of these wrongs. I respectfully seek
your support to join other nations and legislatively recognize and acknowledge
this genocide and crime against humanity.
(On motion of Senator
Housakos, debate adjourned.)
(1730)
Pana Merchant, merchp@sen,parl.gc.ca
ΣΧΟΛΙΑ
ΣΧΟΛΙΑ ΜΕΣΩ Facebook