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Let me begin my speech somewhat differently tonight, by conveying a shocking testimony that captures one of the most tragic pages of the drama of the Greeks of Pontus: the massacre of the infants of Sanda.
Kostas Kourtidis, the brother of Captain Euclid Kourtidis, a legendary leader during the Pontian guerrilla war, writes in his diary about the night of September 10-11, 1921. Making makeshift bastions, we lined up for battle. Women and children (about three hundred) were gathered a short distance away in a cave, guarded by about one hundred and twenty young unarmed men. For nine hours we fought against the Turkish army. When daylight came and the Turks resumed the operation, they saw seven infants slaughtered! Then the general-in-chief himself gave an order to the Turkish army to go back to Santa, saying: people who killed their children are impossible to catch, it is unnecessary to stay here any longer." In order to save the older children and their families, the mothers of Sanda were forced to sacrifice their own entrails, since the infants were crying and could all be seen trying to escape from the Turks. This tragic story encapsulates the untold pain and suffering experienced by the Greeks of Pontus. Neither hardships, nor hunger or disease in the labour battalions, nor the unrelenting persecutions and mass massacres can describe the unimaginable suffering of the Pontians as vividly as the massacre of the infants of Sanda and the other infants who were sacrificed in the attempt to escape the Greek populations.
The Plenum of the Greek Parliament, on 24 February 1994, unanimously established 19 May as the day of commemoration of the victims of the Genocide of the Greeks of Pontus from 1914 to 1923.
Until the beginning of the persecution in 1914, the areas where the Greeks of Pontus lived experienced significant commercial, economic and cultural prosperity. Shortly before the Neo-Turks began their ethnic cleansing, the Pontians numbered 700,000 and had established some 1,400 schools and a plethora of theatres and cultural institutions. However, after the outbreak of World War I, the Young Turks, under the pretext of national security, put in place a coordinated plan to annihilate the non-Muslim inhabitants of the Empire by engaging in ruthless persecution against Christian populations. The reason for the deterioration of the situation was the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Sarikamish by the Russian Empire in 1915, for which the Greeks serving in the Ottoman army were held responsible. In 1917, the October Revolution broke out in Russia and Lenin recalled Russian troops, resulting in the reconquest of Pontus territories by the Turkish army. Relentless, vindictive measures were then taken against the Greeks of Pontus, who were forced to be deported from the coast and moved en masse to the interior of Asia Minor. Pontian Greeks, like other non-Muslims, were then conscripted into labour battalions, where conditions were so miserable that few survived. German diplomats reported in a document to Berlin dated 12 May 1918 that more than 200,000 Greeks aged 15-48 had joined the extermination battalions by the end of 1917. To avoid conscription, many fled to the mountains.
The Turks then began to burn entire villages to the ground. In the province of Kerasunda they burned dozens of Greek villages within three months. Tens of thousands of people were forced to march on foot to Ankara and a large number died of exhaustion on the way. Those who managed to escape fled to the Russian Empire as refugees, while the remaining Pontian Greeks still living in the Ottoman Empire were uprooted and transferred to Greece under the terms of the population exchange provided for in the Treaty of Lausanne between Greece and Turkey after the Asia Minor Catastrophe.
The recent statements of Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his election speech in Kerasunda are therefore shameful, to say the least. Erdogan specifically said that "the ancestral lands of Kerasunda had defeated the Pontian gangs" and expressed his belief that "today, too, Kerasunda will make a hell of a homeland for the clansmen of Mount Kadrill and the Gulenists." Instead of provoking with such statements, the Turkish President should apologize for the crimes against humanity committed by his ancestors. This has been pointed out to him since 2006 by the European Parliament, which, in its annual report on Turkey's progress towards accession to the European Union, explicitly states that Turkey should come to terms with its historical past and recognise that what happened against Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks of Pontus, first by the Young Turks and then by the Kemalists, constitutes acts of genocide.
In 1948, the UN General Assembly passed the "Convention on the Prevention and Suppression of the Crime of Genocide", which entered into force in 1951. In this convention, genocide is recognized as an international crime in either peacetime or wartime, justified neither by military necessity nor by the purposes of war. The commission of genocide is manifested by the collective and indiscriminate extermination of the members of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
In 1996, the eminent scholar Gregory Stanton defined the eight states of genocide. And although one would expect that "extermination" would be the final stage of committing genocide, Stanton defines the final stage as denial. Without recognition of the immeasurable violence and losses faced by genocide victims, the process of extermination continues in another form. This is also argued by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, which states that 'the denial of a genocide is universally recognised as the final stage of genocide, ensuring impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably preparing the ground for future genocides'. On 24 April, US President Biden acknowledged the 1915 Armenian genocide. Perhaps the greatest impact of this recognition is to acknowledge the immense suffering of the victims of the genocide and their descendants. The genocide - and I refer to the example of the Armenians to recall the same obligations for the genocide of the Pontians - bequeaths its imprint on the psyche of the victims from generation to generation. Recognition is a matter of moral justification, a matter of civilized humanity.
In Cyprus we have experienced and continue to experience the Turkish policy of altering the religious and cultural identity of our land. In violation of international Conventions, Turkey is promoting the Islamisation of the occupied territories by confiscating churches and other sacred sites and converting them into mosques and sub-structures for other uses. In addition to the 520 churches and monasteries, all cemeteries were looted and desecrated in the occupied territories "in a massive and systematic effort characterized as 'institutionalized eradication' aimed at the complete disappearance of the Greek Christian cultural identity. At the same time, we are experiencing Turkish revisionism, expansionist policies, illegal actions in Varosha, the colonization of our homeland. The pain and heartbreak of the Pontians is familiar to us, we recognise and share it.
The Cypriot House of Representatives by unanimous decision has established May 19, the day on which Kemal landed in Samsun, as a day of honour and remembrance of the Genocide of Pontian Hellenism. Today we honour the epic that the Hellenism of Pontus wrote with its blood, the heroic resistance of the Pontians against the horrendous persecution they suffered at the hands of the Turks.
All the Cypriot people condemn the Turkish barbarity against our brothers and sisters of the Pontian Hellenism. Against the land that gave birth to the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, the father of History Strabo, the leader of the Society of Friends Alexander Ypsilantis and his brother Dimitris, and so many other pioneers of Letters and Spirit, such as Harry Psomiadis whom I was blessed to meet from the first days I went to the USA in 1993 to study.
In closing, I would like to warmly congratulate the Institute of Greek Culture, the Association of Greek Pontian Greeks in Cyprus, with whose delegation we will meet soon to see all that you have mentioned, and the "Nikos Kapetanidis" Action Association, whose work, with today's event, ensures that the memories, history and traditions of Pontian Hellenism remain alive.
Allow me to make a special reference to the Nikos Kapetanidis Action Association and to welcome its representatives in Cyprus. I had the great honor to participate and be the main speaker at the event they organized in Thessaloniki on September 19, 2022, entitled: "The Resurrection on Anchoni", for the Martyrs of Pontus and Cyprus, Nikos Kapetanidis and Evagoras Pallikaridis, and I know very well the commendable efforts you are making.
Dimitris Psathas, the well-known Greek writer and journalist, in his shocking work "The Land of Pontus", in which he recounts the persecutions and resistance of the Hellenism of his homeland, wrote: "To cast the veil of oblivion over the past, but to know, not to hide..."
Building peace and reconciliation, then, will be possible and is possible if it is based on solid foundations, only if we put our finger on the type of sounds and accept the historical truth and acknowledge the crimes that have been committed.
(PM/EP)
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