The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe by Erik Sjöberg (review)

The end of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of WWI involved the uprooting of most of its ethnic Greek subjects through death, forced displacement and a diplomatically arranged exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, the Empire's successor state. Any type of social history of those events has to grapple with the ongoing controversy over their memorialization and meaning, which revolves around whether those events were a "genocide" according to the United Nations definition. Erik Sjoberg, who teaches history at Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall has taken on that difficult task and has produced a study of admirable scope and depth. This is an extremely thorough and thoughtful examination of the debate that involves Greek activists and scholars and reaches beyond Greece to its diaspora communities and goes beyond the Greek case and entails a consideration of the fate of the Ottoman Armenians, which is much more widely understood as a prototypical case of genocide.

Sjöberg's focuses on how an activist-driven movement designed to gain recognition of the destruction of the ethnic Greeks who lived on the shores of the Black Sea, called the Pontian Greeks, created its own ripple effect and amplified its claims from an initial nationalistic concern with shoring up ethnic and local memory, to demand its fate be considered in national terms and then on to claiming its memorialization entailed an international, universal significance. His findings can be summed up in his comment that "Paradoxical as it may seem, the preoccupation with a national or ethnic history of suffering may open an avenue toward cosmopolitan memory" (228).

This is indeed a paradoxical finding, but a persuasive one. Sjöberg has studied a vast quantity of secondary sources and created a detailed chronological account of the controversy over whether the ethnic Greeks suffered a genocide, framed within the parameters of the theoretical literature on definitions of the terms genocide, remembrance, and trauma. In the first chapter he presents an account of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the inter-ethnic violence that punctuated every turning point of that process (especially from the outbreak of WWI through the end of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922, the establishment of modern Turkey and the Greco-Turkish exchange of populations in 1923). The second chapter charts how the Pontian Greeks who were settled in Greece very gradually began to memorialize their past and the loss of their lands and co-ethnics, a process accelerated by a growing sense of identity politics among the refugee descendants after the restoration of democracy in 1974 which ended a seven-year military dictatorship and brought greater cultural pluralism and politics to Greece. The third chapter describes the campaign to have the end of the Greek presence in the Black Sea region, as well as the fate of the ethnic Greeks who had been living on the Aegean Coast of Anatolia, remembered as genocide. This entailed a great deal of opposition within Greece, not only by a significant group of mostly left-leaning academics but also many who saw no reason to rename the events surrounding the end of the Greek presence in western Anatolia, which for many decades were known as "the Asia Minor Disaster of 1922"—a term that accurately conveyed the watershed and complex nature of these events for Greece's modern history. The activists responded to those challenges by weighing the possibilities of drawing an analogy to the horrors suffered by their ancestors with those of the Armenians in 1915 and the Jews during the Holocaust and this is what the fourth chapter addresses. This brought internal dissention in the ranks of the advocates of calling the events "a genocide" and raised awkward questions about the sensitivity of Greek officials and public opinion to the fate of the Armenians and the Jews. The other two chapters explore the international dimensions of the Greek genocide controversy...