Greek Deportations

The New York Times, October 8th 1917, page 10.

Greek Deportations.
The Needs of the Latest Victims of Turkish Cruelty.
To the editor of The New York Times:
The deportation and atrocious slaughter of the Greeks in Asia Minor, the deportations to the total number of 700,000, by the Turkish authorities have been overshadowed by massacres, larger and more appalling, of Armenians and Syrians.
No attention was attracted by the sack in June, 1914, of Phocee, a Greek city near Smyrna. The account of the destruction appeared in the Revne des Deux Mondes, December, 1914. The narrative by the French archaeologist, M.Felix Sartiaux, an eyewitness, showed that this massacre of the Greek inhabitants of this city of the Mohammedan neighbors and Turkish troops matched every Armenian massacre in its character, though there was less wanton murder.
A year later Greek deportation began on a scale second only to the great crime in Armenia. At least one-half of the Greek population has been deported from the cities and hamlets on the coast of Asia Minor from the Black Sea to the eastern end of Cilicia, or around three-fourths of the coast of this peninsula.
For these acts no excuse or pretext whatever existed in rebellion, resistance, conspiracy or agitation against the Ottoman Empire. This Greek population has always been free from opposition to the rule of the Turkish Government. The only reason for this atrocious crime was and is to take support from the claim of both Greece and Italy to the control of the littoral of Asia Minor on the ground that it has a large Christian population. The deportation of 700,000 Greeks from this section will not leave enough Christians to give body to this plea of Greece and Italy. But this is more than a mere diplomatic or strategic movement. Deportation means slavery and death to the deported. The victory of the Allies will undoubtedly take the Asia Minor littoral from the Ottoman Empire; but meanwhile the need of relief for these suffering Greeks is as urgent as for the Armenians and Syrians.
The Greeks were the first race to be slaughtered in the new development of the Ottoman Empire. The first of these outrages was a century ago in 1818, and this was followed by the Turkish massacre in Scio in which 25,000 were killed, 47,000 deported and only 5,000 left alive. It was this that aroused Europe to action, inspired Byron’s poems, and brought personal activity by many Americans on behalf of Greek independence and resulted in the production of our own American Powers’s familiar and typical sculpture, the “Greek Slave.”
All these suffering nationalities are being relieved by the Armenian Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief-and since it is most probable that Oct. 20 and 21 will be designated by the President as special days for the consideration of the needs of Western Asia. I venture to draw attention to these facts, and to urge contributions to the wants of the survivors of the Greek deportations. TALCOTT WILLIAMS.
New York, Oct. 7, 1917.