Mick Hartley

Continuing and combining what seem to be today's themes here of ethnic cleansing and of Turkish brutality, Seth Frantzman today in the Jerusalem Post remembers the 1955 pogrom against Greeks and Jews in Turkey:

Sixty years after mobs in Istanbul killed dozens, destroyed thousands of stores and homes and sought to eradicate the Greek minority in Turkey, commemorations are taking place. This was the often forgotten 1955 pogrom, one that conjures up memories of attacks on Jews across Eastern Europe in previous eras.

The attacks didn’t only target Greeks but also other minorities, including Jews and Armenians. It was part of the nationalist extremism that underpinned what was then an ostensibly secular Turkey. Sixty years later, Ankara’s far-right extremist governing party has once again used history to fan flames of tension with Greece, even as Turkish-backed extremists in Syria ethnically cleanse Kurds and Yazidis.

Aykan Erdemir at Politico writes that the attacks on Greeks in Turkey were planned by the Turkish government “to cleanse Istanbul of the approximately 100,000 Polites [Greeks].” These were some of the remaining Greek minority in Turkey after the conflict of 1915-1924 that saw most Greek and Christian minority communities ethnically cleansed from the country. This mass expulsion was part of a wider series of ethnic cleansing of minorities across Eastern Europe and the world in the first half of the 20th century.

However, the 1955 pogrom has generally been lost to memory. This may be because Ankara was needed as a Western NATO ally against the Soviets, and mentioning the crimes against minorities would tarnish its image. This was a time when in the US there was segregation, so Ankara’s abuses were not out of step with similar abuses by France and Algeria and the UK in suppressing the Mau Mau uprising during those years.

Erdemir links the attacks of 1955 to other incidents that were “swept under the carpet” in Turkey. For instance, he mentions the attacks on Jews in Thrace in 1934 and attacks on minority Alevis over the years in Turkey. “Turkey now has a plethora of organizations and initiatives dedicated to uncovering past atrocities and making amends with persecuted minorities, whether it’s the Armenians, the Greeks, the Syriacs, the Jews or the Alevis.”…

The attack on the Greek minority, which also impacted Jews, is now being commemorated and recognized more on social media as well. The 1955 looting and massacre also comes on the anniversary of the attack on the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul, where 22 were murdered by Palestinian terrorists in 1986, after gunmen entered the shul on Shabbat and opened fire.

Like the 1955 pogrom, the attacks of 1986 are generally ignored because they don’t fit the narrative that Palestinian terrorists target “Israeli” targets, when in fact the 1986 attack was a mass murder of Jews in Istanbul with no connection to Israel.

The Aykan Erdemir article at Politico that Frantzman refers to was published back in 2015 under the title The Turkish Kristallnacht. Which explains the puzzle – for mathematically minded readers – of that "Sixty years after…" at the start of this piece. 1955 is now, of course, 65 years ago.