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As the Ottoman Turkish Empire entered a permanent phase of decline in the late 17th century it was engaged in a protracted state of conflict loosing territories both in Europe and the Caucasus. The victors were the Christian States the old Habsburg and Romanov Empires and the new nation states of Greece, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria.Rival European powers encouraged the development of nationalist ideologies among the Ottoman subjects in which the Muslims were portrayed as an ethnic “fifth column” leftover from a previous era that could not be integrated into the planned future states. The struggle to rid them selves of Ottomans became an important element of the self-identification of the Balkan Christians.
According to Mark Levene, the Victorian public in the 1870s paid much more attention to the massacres and expulsions of Christians than to massacres and expulsions of Muslims, even if on a greater scale. He further suggests that such massacres were even favored by some circles.
Mark Levene also argues that the dominant powers, by supporting "nation-statism" at the Berlin congress legitimized what Levene calls "the primary instrument of Balkan nation-building: ethnic cleansing.
Background
Justin McCarty estimates that between 1821 and 1922 around five and a half million Muslims were driven out of Europe and five million more were killed or died of disease and starvation while fleeing. Cleansing occurred as a result of the Serbian and Greek independence in the 1820s and 1830s, the Russo-Turkish War 1877-1878, and culminating in the Balkan Wars 1912-1913. Mann describes these acts as “murderous ethnic cleansing on stupendous scale not previously seen in Europe” referring to the 1914 Carnegie Endowment report.It is estimated that at the turn of the 20th century there were 4,4 million Muslims living in the Balkan zone of Ottoman control.More than one million Muslims left the Balkans in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.Between 1912 and 1926 nearly 2,9 million Muslims were either killed or forced to emigrate to Turkey.It is estimated that in the course of the World War I and the Turkish War of Independence 2,5 million Muslims died in Anatolia while hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived from former Ottoman territories and Russia.
Atrocities
Between 10,000 and 30,000 Turks were killed in Tripolitsa by Greek rebels in the summer of 1821, including the entire Jewish population of the city.
“The Turk shall live no longer, neither in the Morea, nor in the whole earth”
During the Russo-Turkish War a significant number of Turks were either killed, perished or became refugees. There are different estimates about the casualties of the war. Crampton describes an exodus of 130,000-150,000 expelled of which approximately half returned for an intermediary period encouraged by the Treaty of Berlin. Hupchick and McCarthy point out that 260,000 perished and 500,000 became refugees.The Turkish scholars Karpat and Ipek argue that up to 300,000 were killed and 1 - 1,5 million were forced to emigrate.
Massacres against Turks and Muslims during the Balkan Wars in the hands of Bulgarians, Greeks and Armenians are described in detail in the 1912 Carnegie Endowment report.Hupchick estimates that nearly 1,5 million Muslims died and 400,000 became refugees as a result of the Balkan Wars.
On May 14th 1919 a fleet of British, American and French warships brought an entire Greek division into the harbour of Izmir. The landing was followed by a general slaughter of the Turkish population. Greek gangs roamed the streets looting and killing. As the Greek army pushed into Anatolia the local population was subjected to massacres, ravaging and raping.
Turkey
