The Turkish-Greek Population Exchange and International Law

Leiden Journal of International Law, 2011

Supported by Athens and Ankara, and implemented largely by the League of Nations, the Greek-Turkish population exchange uprooted and resettled hundreds of thousands. The aim here was not to organize plebiscites, channel self-determination claims, or install protective mechanisms for minorities – all familiar features of the Allies’ management of imperial disintegration in Europe after 1919. Nor was it to restructure a given economy and society from top to bottom, generating an entirely new legal order in the process; this had often been the case with colonialism, and would characterize much of the Mandate System in the interbellum. Instead, the goal was to deploy a unique legal mechanism – not in conformity with European practice, but also distinct from most extra-European governance regimes – in order to resolve ethno-national conflict by redividing land, reshaping national identities, and unleashing new processes of capital accumulation.

2005

The Lausanne Convention, signed by the Greek and Turkish governments on 30 January 1923, after the defeat of the Greek army at the Asia Minor front in 1922, imposed the compulsory exchange of the Greek and Turkish populations. With a few exceptions, almost two million people were forced to leave their homeland and migrate to the other country. For many decades, these people were forbidden to travel to their homeland and visit the places where their families had lived for centuries, while in their new homeland they were treated with hostility. Within this context, education operated as a factor of cultural homogenization, which would ensure that the future generations of refugee families would forget their past and conceal their cultural heritage. Moreover, a typical choice made by the cultural and educational policies of the two relevant nation-states was the elimination of any element that could possibly undermine the dominant national narrative by demonstrating common characteristics and experiences of the two peoples. We should not forget that the division and enmity that were maintained by both sides were based on not only the long historical sequence of wars, but also on the deeply embedded stereotypical images, which racially and culturally demonized the other, thus excluding any possibility of reconciliation. Within this asphyxiating propagandistic environment, the refugees were the only ones who had lived on the other side, preserving memories of peaceful coexistence and who, therefore, could question the image of the detested other. Even so, despite the similarities in the attitudes of the two states towards their new citizens and their refugee memory, it does not appear that the refugees were as equally active in both countries. In Greece, for many reasons, the refugees quickly organized themselves into cultural associations, achieved political representation, established institutions and museums, and created archives of written and visual documents and oral testimonies. In Turkey, on the other hand, the descendants of refugees only started to be active collectively a little before 2000. Today, the most active foundation in Turkey is the NGO Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfi. The foundation holds cultural events and exhibitions in Turkey and Greece, collects oral testimonies and organizes trips to the places of origin of Turkish refugees in Greece. Furthermore, it has developed a remarkable publishing activity. This paper aims to place the Greek and Turkish memory communities of the refugees of the Lausanne Convention within the same framework of observation. In the first part, a brief outline of the historical context of the population exchange is given, how it was handled politically and the position it took in the two national historiographies. The second part reviews the history of refugee associations and foundations in both countries. The third part shows the differences and, mostly, similarities that arise from an analysis of the narratives of Greek and Turkish refugees, as these appear in the bilingual publication of the Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfi. An attempt is also made to interpret refugee trauma and its intergenerational evolution. In the fourth part, some thoughts are given on the question of whether it is possible to create a common lieu de mémoire for the refugees on both sides, and what its characteristics should be.

This article studies the application of laws regulating the settlement and compensation of migrants who came to Turkey from Greece in the course of the population exchange. By using petitions and administrative documents, it discusses the questions of legality and legitimacy with regard to two problems: First, the status of exchangees as a group privileged by law, and second, the bureaucratic procedure through which they were given temporary property rights (tefvīż ). The article shows that laws can by no means be taken to be identical with their application, and that various notions of legality and legitimacy were at play, both in different state administrations and among those affected by their policies. It thus makes an important contribution to a better understanding of the relationship between law, state and society in early Republican Turkey.

2003

Supported by Athens and Ankara, and implemented largely by the League of Nations, the Greek-Turkish population exchange uprooted and resettled hundreds of thousands. The aim here was not to organize plebiscites, channel self-determination claims, or install protective mechanisms for minorities -all familiar features of the Allies' management of imperial disintegration in Europe after 1919. Nor was it to restructure a given economy and society from top to bottom, generating an entirely new legal order in the process; this had often been the case with colonialism, and would characterize much of the Mandate System in the interbellum. Instead, the goal was to deploy a unique legal mechanism -not in conformity with European practice, but also distinct from most extra-European governance regimes -in order to resolve ethno-national conflict by redividing land, reshaping national identities, and unleashing new processes of capital accumulation.

2015

Large-scale population transfers are immensely disruptive. Interestingly, though, their legal status has shifted considerably over time. In this book, Umut Özsu situates population transfer within the broader history of international law by examining its emergence as a legally formalized mechanism of nation-building in the early twentieth century. The book's principal focus is the 1922-34 compulsory exchange of minorities between Greece and Turkey, a crucially important endeavour whose legal dimensions remain under-scrutinized. Drawing upon historical sociology and economic history in addition to positive international law, the book interrogates received assumptions about international law's history by exploring the "semi-peripheral" context within which legally formalized population transfers came to arise. Supported by the League of Nations, the 1922-34 population exchange reconfigured the demographic composition of Greece and Turkey with the aim of stabilizing a region that was regarded neither as European nor as non-European. The scope and ambition of the undertaking was staggering: over one million were expelled from Turkey, and over a quarter of a million were expelled from Greece. The book begins by assessing minority protection's development into an instrument of intra-European governance during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It then shows how population transfer emerged in the 1910s and 1920s as a radical alternative to minority protection in Anatolia and the Balkans, focusing in particular on the 1922-3 Conference of Lausanne, at which a peace settlement formalizing the compulsory Greek-Turkish exchange was concluded. Finally, it analyses the Permanent Court of International Justice's 1925 advisory opinion in Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, contextualizing it in the wide-ranging debates concerning humanitarianism and internationalism that pervaded much of the exchange process.

Migration Letters, 2023

In 1924, the League of Nations authorized a special commission to resettle the hundreds of thousands of refugees created by the Greco-Turkish War. The Refugee Settlement Commission (RSC) would be responsible for rehousing Greek refugees expelled from former Ottoman territories and resettling them in Greece. The RSC had a unique commission. In an attempt to effect a "permanent solution" to ethnic violence in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations had helped broker the Treaty of Lausanne between the warring nations of Greece and Turkey that ended the conflict and authorized each nation to denaturalize and expel any Greeks in Turkey and any Turks in Greece, over one and a half million civilians in total from both countries. With the League's approval, the RSC carried out the task of resettling hundreds of thousands of refugees who had been created by international accord, forced out of their ancestral homelands, and expelled to Greece with the vague promise of citizenship, housing, and welfare. This paper follows how the Refugee Settlement Commission, a supranational organization created and legitimized by the League of Nations, sought to enact their visions of modernity and civilization through the resettlement of these refugees.