Legislative Provisions of the Ottoman / Turkish Governments Regarding Minorities and Their Properties

Legislative Provisions of the Ottoman/Turkish Governments Regarding Minorities and Their Properties

In this essay I explore the enactment of legislative measures by the Turkish or Ottoman authorities, which sought to regulate minority affairs in Turkey and to administer the minority properties. The huge number of Christians who lost their lives and, consequently, their property on the shores of the Ionian land (Asia Minor), as well as the vast number of refugees who left Turkey of their own free will or against it, became the subject of numerous conventions that sought to secure the repatriation of refugees and the recovery of their abandoned property. In this essay I seek to record and to analyze the legislative texts (treaties, laws, provisions, and presidential decrees) and their effects on the fate of minority populations that lived under Ottoman and/or Turkish rule.

Greeks of Asia Minor and the Law on Abandoned Property: Rehearsal for Ethnic Cleansing

The effort of Ottoman and, later, Turkish governments to transform the state from an ethnic and cultural mosaic into a monoethnic Muslim state was at the core of initiatives that led to the adoption of a comprehensive plan for the curtailment of minority rights, particularly those of the sizable Christian population. The implementation of what seems to be an ethnic cleansing program,¹ which reached its peak at the outbreak of the First World War, constituted a continuity of a series of measures initiated by the Young Turks prior to and during the Balkan Wars.²

Typically, the Ottoman/Turkish government did not officially pursue a modification of the prevailing legal regime governing the non-Muslim communities (Greeks, Armenians, and Jews) in its jurisdiction. On the contrary, actions taken were preceded by an incremental approach and public relations campaigns aimed at securing the sympathy of the Great Powers and not unduly alarming the Christian minorities of Turkey. This enabled the Ottoman and later the Turkish authorities to proceed undisturbed with the implementation of a nationalist plan under the guise of "social reform." The primary concern of this policy was economic development and the creation of conditions for the country's integration into the West and, since the 1950s, into the European Community. The Western orientation from Kemal Ataturk's days to the present constitutes a primary goal of twentieth-century Turkish foreign policy. Turkey's road to Europe was paved with the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians in 1914 followed by the expulsion of Greeks from their ancestral homes on the pretext of a need to settle Muslim immigrants in their homes in order to secure the eastern boundaries of Turkey.³

The antiminority measures set in motion a nationalistic policy that started in the early 1900s and continued until the outbreak of the First World War. During this war, Turkish strategic planners implemented with zeal Liman von Sanders' doctrine characterized by ruthlessness of a German-type, virulent nationalism.⁴ The German involvement in the indoctrination of the Young Turks' plans for a monoethnic state have been documented in numerous studies and official reports, among them official reports of Greek consular authorities. The German obsession with the Young Turks was on display during an exchange between the Greek chargé d'affaires in Berlin, Ion Dragoumis, and the German minister of foreign affairs, Von Jagow, in 1914. The German official, totally oblivious to required protocol, transformed himself into a passionate advocate of Ankara's actions against minorities.

At the start of the war, the Greeks were a thriving community in Asia Minor, a land they had inhabited since the time of Homer. But things deteriorated quickly. Before the Turkish implementation of a nationalist policy, the Greek population was estimated at around 2.5 million, with 2,300 community schools, 200,000 pupils, 5,000 teachers, 2,000 Greek Orthodox churches, and 3,000 Greek Orthodox priests. But three waves of expulsions decimated their numbers. The first occurred with the imposed exchange of populations in...