Brits in Crete has come across a second book connected to Crete in as many days. it is more a Greek episode that specifically a Crete one. ‘Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey’ -- By Bruce Clark, Published by Granta Books.
The title says it all. Ethnic cleansing of an earlier period is a more apt description.
This is the book review by Andrew Finkel from Todays Zaman, Turkey edition of March 24, 2007.
Book recounts dramas behind the exchange of populations
What does history hang around the neck of a man who sanctioned the deportation of some one-and-a-half million people because they believed in the wrong God? The answer in the case of the Norwegian diplomat, Fridtjof Nansen, was a Nobel prize for peace.
Nansen was a prototype of today's international civil servant, a behind-the-scenes arbiter of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty. This was the document which confirmed the failure of the Great (Megalo) Hellenic Idea to plant a new Byzantium in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after a Greek invasion into Asia Minor that was ill-conceived and badly-led. Mustafa Kemal's ragtag Turkish nationalist army thus defined the borders of today's Turkish Republic. The Lausanne Conference attended by Curzon and Poincaré and the other the great politicians of the day became bogged down by weighty issues: control of the oilfields in Mosul and the future of the commercial concessions that the Ottomans had once ceded to foreign powers. The fate of refugees and whole populations caught on the wrong side of the fighting exercised the Great Powers rather less. The treaty's very first clause called for the compulsory exchange of Muslims living in Greece with the Greek Orthodox population in Turkey.
Many of the indigenous Greeks of Asia Minor had already fled their homes, fearing Turkish retribution for the excesses committed by the Hellenic invaders. Under Lausanne, they could not return. For others, such as Greek-speaking Turks of Crete and Thessalonica or Turkish-speaking Greeks in Cappadocia and Karaman, being uprooted from ancestral homes was an inexplicable catastrophe and resettlement not a return from diaspora but perpetual exile. Bruce Clark's absorbing study examines exactly how the frock-coated politicians in far-away Switzerland came to embrace, organize and (quite interestingly) finance a much praised solution which in different circumstances might have landed them before an international tribunal on charges of ethnic cleansing.
Mustafa Kemal, who led the Turkish victory, and Eleftherios Venizelos, who resuscitated Greece from humiliation, were both architects of secular states. Neither man questioned that nations could more easily be built if those citizens were cast from the same ethnic and sectarian mould. It is that principle, what Clark calls the "spirit of Lausanne," which has set a cynical precedent in the dark art of conflict resolution. It defined a problem that has resurfaced in Cyprus and Northern Ireland, as well as in Serbia, Darfur and Iraq. Can people of different persuasions live together in the wake of violence, or must ethnic and religious boundaries match political frontiers for war to end?
It is a question which at the time of Lausanne seemed rhetorical. World War I followed by invasion and civil war in Anatolia cost, cites Clark, some 20 percent of the population -- 2.5 million Muslims, some 800,000 Armenians and 300,000 Greeks. Facing the future meant developing collective amnesia over the traumas of the past. The need to bury shame, or to at least embalm it in silence, has been a key component of the nationalism afflicting the region.
The Istanbul Orthodox population, like the Muslims of Eastern (Grecian) Thrace, were exempted from the exchange, but over a million Anatolian Greeks were settled in Greece. They became Venizelos' instant political constituency, a buffer against Bulgarian expansion and a workforce in the post-war reconstruction of the country. Turkey was affected less by the influx of newcomers than by the sudden hemorrhage of a Greek bourgeoisie.
Filling that void became a crucial event in the shaping of modern Turkey. If Greeks were the first of the sultan's subjects to successfully rebel against Ottoman rule in 1821, the Turks were the last. Lausanne was recognition of -- what the Turks call their War of Liberation -- that bid to create their own nation state from the heterogeneity of empire.
The exchange of populations is today remembered as an historical necessity by the descendants of both parties to the conflict. It was not totally heartless -- there were attempts to allocate to the refugees property equivalent to that they had left behind. Greece threw itself on the mercy of the international community, drew attention to the desperate plight of refugees and in an early model of development finance, raised an international bond issue on the productive potential of the new immigrants.
The Turks, in contrast, reveled in Lausanne as an opportunity to exclude the Western allies, who in the previous, now voided, Treaty of Sevres had wanted to emasculate their emerging state. They dealt with the problem of resettlement themselves.
"Twice a Stranger" is, of course, an attempt to remember. It is a history, an analysis of history's impact on present politics but also an endeavor to bring center stage the anonymous figurants whose fate was dictated by their political betters. Clark has collected the stories of remaining representatives of the generation of ordinary people, Greek and Turk, whose lives were uprooted. There is little sensation in these accounts. Clark is speaking to the survivors of an event that took place over 60 years ago and he is gently respectful of those he interviews, careful not to cross the line between understanding the past and using history to attribute blame.
"We were living in the mountains. We were being killed and we killed," he quotes one Greek who fled from the Black Sea, later to find his sister adopted by a Turkish family.
It is an approach, however, that allows him to capture in the manner of a patient wildlife photographer, that rare moment when an individual's own recollection is painfully at odds with official history. Most of those he talks to have been taught to accept the received wisdom that their resettlement was for the best. Yet a trip in their final years to their birthplace or a sudden knock from an elderly stranger from across the sea who recognized the front door as the one they shut behind them all those years ago, suddenly yields a different set of truths. It is a world of loyalties and empathies more complex than the signatories of Lausanne could concede.
There are so many conflicts that still burn in the Balkans, in the Caucasus, in Africa and the Middle East. A European audience, reared on the psychoanalytic method or the logic of the confessional, wants to believe in the causal relation between truth and reconciliation, historical honesty and the process of repair. It is only when nations face up to their past that the war can end, is something one senses Clark would like to believe. But he remains troubled by the ghost of Lausanne, hinting that things may work the other way around and that it is only when the war is truly over, we can begin to look back.
‘Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey’ -- By Bruce Clark, Published by Granta Books
24.03.2007
BOOK REVIEW ANDREW FINKEL
Labels: Amazon, Books, Brits, Bruce Clark, Crete, Ethnic cleansing, Finkel, Granta, Greece, living, modern Twice a Stranger, Muslims, Mustafa Kemal, Nansen, Nobel, Orthodox, Thrace, Turkey, Venizelos
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